The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “Silence!” I snapped; she looked at my face as I cocked an ear to the speaker, and evidently put off killing me. I cast her, Hogg-Smythe, and everything else out of my mind, sinking back into the consciousness of a seventeen-year-old student in the second largest library in the galaxy as he pored over ancient texts everyone else had forgotten—at first just burning for a way to distinguish himself, to outshine Domina Wintergrin’s snob boyfriends and catch her attention, but later motivated by a purer love for the secret world he’d discovered in them⁠…

  I could never have translated the old poetry—understood stress and elision, assonance and resonance, true rhyme and false—without learning to read it aloud first, practicing until I’d sounded like one of the old recordings. Whether I could still wrap my tongue around Ur-Linguish’s consonants or not, I could certainly hope to follow it by ear. Only the dialect was in my way. The occasional borrowings from Deutsch I could guess at—I’d worked through Voss’s Homer once—but the accent seemed to show the Svenska influence. I couldn’t be sure; old recordings of “Scottish” and “Swedish” accents, as different as chalk and cheese to our ancestors, sound much the same to us.

  “I think it’s asking us—no, it’s telling us that we haven’t supplied our, our ‘clans and home parishes.’ ” I barely noticed that our capsule had begun its deceleration phase as I continued to translate. “This will make the…‘partnering’ difficult. Now he’s reviewing other things you said, Helen. Other things. The water is safe to drink most places…unless we are issued canteens in the, uh, anteroom, in which case stick with that water. But the plants and animals are never nutritious, sometimes poisonous. The, uh, stored food is all—gone away?—gone bad, of course, but computers can synthesize enough for such a small group of, uh, seekers. Ration your food issues in a…no, lost that bit…If extra equipment is offered, you will need it…There are, uh, gefahre—dangers, but if you fail to find the correct, uh, waterways?—that’s not right—and disgrace—damage?—yourselves—remember the watchers, who will…do something to you.”

  The deceleration became more pronounced.

  “At the beginning of a test, always look for a…guidepost? and its…motto, maybe. And remember that you are on the path—against? Over? Through? One of those goddamn German prepositions that could mean anything—on the path somehow related to mastery. The path to overmastery? Something like that.”

  “Something like that,” Foyle repeated, grim-faced.

  “By ‘German’ you mean Deutsch, don’t you?” Hogg-Smythe asked with admiration. “You even think in Ur-Linguish, Commissioner.”

  The car came to a stop.

  A last sentence. Solemn tones.

  “We are being given a few minutes to compose our thoughts before our first…yeah, I think ‘test’ is right. And a sign to contemplate.”

  A luminous form began to coalesce in the air above the closed door, a hologram animated to take shape slowly.

  “I wish I’d got the exact words, because I think it was important,” I said. “ ‘Go forth under the sign of overmastery to come.’ ”

  We watched until the floating symbol became clear. Foyle was the first to understand it.

  And she swore. And she turned pale.

  “I told you so!” she said. “I told you what sort of people they were. ‘In this sign, conquer!’ Wasn’t that it, Commissioner? So this is where their ideals led them.”

  Hogg-Smythe peered up at the hologram.

  The sign of overmastery was the image of a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red strap. Protruding from the top was the head of an axe.

  “How you carry on, Foyle,” she said. “Hardly the swastika you would have predicted.”

  Foyle gave a bitter laugh. “It’s too perfect. The Roman equivalent! Denying the truth about themselves to the bitter end.”

  “The axe is a common symbol across many cultures,” Hogg-Smythe insisted. “The first human tool. Clearer of forests. The shape of a peace pipe. I believe the Old Rite Kanalists even used it as a symbol of liberty. The Green Church⁠—⁠”

  “You’re thinking of the labrys, Helen,” I said—again, not me speaking, but that same seventeen-year-old boy, something of a pedant. “The double axe was a prehistoric European holy sign, and yes, religious groups still make much of it.

  “But the emblem before us is something else, an ancient Roman symbol for the imperium, the power of the state. Ultimately, the power to punish. The single-blade axe is for beheading criminals and prisoners of war, the birch rods and strap are for whipping slaves and children. Bundled together, they are called the fasces.

  “Mussolini revived the symbol two thousand years later, to represent his own party. The Fascists.

  “I’m afraid Foyle is right. Be prepared for anything. When people like this say they’ll ‘test’ you—you can’t afford to fail.”

  A moment later the door opened, but the fasces did not go away. Beneath the whips, and under the axe, we walked out to face the Hellway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I looked through an arch of stone at a vast prairie and a swatch of blue sky that might almost be that of the surface, only a little dimmer. We continued to hang back in what the robot voice had called an anteroom, a cave connecting the transport with the prairie. Provision racks lined the stone walls to either side of the exit.

  We discovered food in plastic containers. Three backpacks had been laid out; Helen and I donned two, but Foyle just went through the contents of the third, adding a few bits of camping gear—matches, a roll of toilet paper—to the rig she already wore.

  “I see nine canteens,” Hogg-Smythe said. “Now, didn’t the voice say something about that?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “If water is provided here, we take it, and shouldn’t drink anything we find outdoors—not this leg of the trip.”

  “Besides, we were told to take everything,” Foyle pointed out. “But what do you make of all this cord?”

  A dozen coils of fine black cord lay side by side, ready to pack. Picking up the first one, I exposed a small plaque, which advertised the line’s lightness, amazing tensile strength, and convenience.

  “Supercord,” I said. “Useful stuff, I guess, and lighter to carry than rope. But why should we need so much?”

  “We could make quite a large fishnet with it, I suppose,” Hogg-Smythe suggested as we each packed our share. “But we’re not supposed to eat the fish!”

  We stepped into the artificial daylight. The t-station proved to be the only major outcropping, with flat land all around. A few paces from the exit, a fin of granite jutted waist-high from the beige grass. A weathered metal plaque was bolted to its face.

  It bore a bas-relief executed in the same style as the heroic bronze cable-couplers I’d hidden between in the statue chamber. Here some Roman demigod on the order of Hercules wrestled a large bag sewn from skins, with stylized puffs of air escaping from the seams. No relation whatsoever to the heading just below:

  ENDURANCE OR INGENUITY

  There followed some directions in smaller type, not so cryptic:

  WEATHERVANES WILL POINT YOU NORTH.

  CROSS THE WATER VIA BRIDGES, DO NOT WADE.

  THERE ARE GEFAHRE TO THE WEST,

  DO NOT BE DIVERTED THAT WAY.

  THE HORNVIEH ARE HARMLESS.

  “They seem to be looking after our safety,” Hogg-Smythe pointed out to Foyle.

  “We don’t know what we’ve supposed to ‘endure’ yet,” Foyle observed. “Or how mobile the ‘dangers to the west’ are. But meanwhile—that must be north.” She pointed at the weathervane on an openwork metal tower a few hundred meters away. With the t-station and a southern breeze at our backs, the single arrow pointed away, and the long grass bowed before us as we began our hike.

  ◆◆◆

  Hour after hour, we plodded the flat grassland. The prairie was interrupted only by occasional muddy water holes. Although the sky grew lighter for a while—a series of panels flaring white
in slow succession, to simulate the progress of morning—it never got as bright or warm as on the true surface of Newcount Two.

  Unreal, unreal. The illusion kept flickering out, every time I raised my eyes. On any horizon the sky looked a genuine blue, but directly overhead the ceiling was closer, less tinted and blurred by the atmosphere, and we could see the tracery of square panels in a grayer, darker circle. And that remained true no matter how far we walked; the ceiling’s underbelly seemed to be gliding like a manta ray to exactly match our pace.

  Something else was looming over the landscape, too, shadowing it in other ways. But I couldn’t quite tell what. Aside from the sky, it was a plausible enough scene. The grass had a dusty-sweet smell and insects crawled through it. We saw a few animals like rabbits with raccoon arms, and once we flushed a covey of heavy flightless birds, who gave a series of haunting low whistles in the first moment of panic. But we heard no other animal noise, I finally realized—that was part of the strangeness, no sound but the wind in the tall grass. And no storm clouds to account for the heavy feeling of expectation in the air.

  I wondered if the others felt it, too.

  Despite her heavy pack, Foyle tended to get ahead of Hogg-Smythe and me. Then she’d stop and survey the horizon through field glasses as we caught up. “She is quick, isn’t she?” Hogg-Smythe said once. “I hope I’m not holding you up. I do walk fifteen k a day, usually.”

  “That’s, that’s all right,” I panted. “Just as well to pace yourself.” We reached Foyle. “See anything interesting yet?”

  “You can make out the top of the next weathervane,” she said. “Notice that the wind is always from the south. Don’t ask me why…Nothing new to the west except those shapes in the distance. Not animals, I think. And too many of them to be the watchers.”

  “Watchers?” said Hogg-Smythe.

  Foyle’s eyes were slits. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, Helen, but I haven’t. The voice said that ‘watchers’ would do something to us if we failed our test. Monitor robots, presumably. But I don’t expect great numbers of them.”

  She looked back at the distant, motionless shapes. “Through the binoculars they might be topiary bushes. But we can’t take a closer look. That would mean diverting to the west, and we’ve been warned against that.”

  We kept trudging north.

  Nothing broke the monotony for an hour, although Foyle continued to note new mystery bushes in the distance, northwest as well as due west now. And then an irregular rank of slender trees rose across the horizon dead ahead; in less than two hours, we would overtake them.

  Meanwhile, we discovered the confetti.

  There’d always been a sprinkling of them, but too few to attract interest: large colored petals, sometimes blowing free in the wind, but usually clinging on grass blades. But we saw no trees or flowers that could have shed them, and in time realized that they were creatures in their own right, like insects. Most of the time they were passive—motionless flecks of white, pale blue, or pink. But every now and then, as the constant breeze stirred the stalks, a few of them would rise up and fly around.

  At first, an old butterfly aficionado, I was interested in them, and extended a hand to one. It landed and plastered itself flat against my skin. The “confetto,” as Foyle called it, was an oval strip as long as my forefinger and thinner than paper. It flew by folding itself to create various airfoils, flapping them as wings or gliding on the wind. It had no other visible features, no head or limbs. Whatever sensors it had must have been microscopic.

  Where it had landed on the back of my hand, it clung, as if by static electricity. I felt that sort of tingling, but also an unpleasant coolness. I scraped up one edge with a fingernail and the confetto seemed to resist for a second, then curled up into a little tube and dropped off, to unfold and catch the wind and glide off again.

  “I don’t like these butterflies, somehow,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said after a similar experience. “They should be fun and interesting, but they’re not alive enough.”

  “Barely alive at all,” Foyle said. “Adapted to this low-energy environment.” She waved one hand at the dim sky. “They rarely expend energy, just collect it.”

  “Living off light, you think?” Hogg-Smythe sounded dubious.

  “That, or pollens in the air, or something else as ubiquitous. You can see they don’t search for food like regular butterflies would.”

  “Call them moths,” I suggested. Foyle looked at me askance. “I’d rate them lower if I could, but I consider moth the bottom rank.” I scratched my hand where the thing had landed; it was red and irritated.

  “Confetti-moths, then,” Helen said.

  A handful would collect on our clothing as we moved through the waves of grass, but on rest breaks we’d scrape them off. Sometimes, when a lull in the wind was followed by a strong puff, we’d see large clusters of confetti-moths rise and swirl aimlessly for a few minutes here and there in the distance. But not in a live way. More like the dust devils you see in the blind alleys of cities, dwarf tornadoes of wastepaper and detritus⁠…

  We reached the trees. They turned out to mark the edge of a waterway, a straight line not quite perpendicular to our course. The water was some twenty meters across, but we couldn’t guess the depth; it was nearly opaque with algae. We followed the bank east to a nearby stone bridge, inspecting a few of the slender trees on the way.

  Feather trees, we would call them. Their wine-purple foliage reminded us more of feathers than of leaves, veining off the branches with no stretches of bare twig, stirring almost noiselessly in the breeze. Even the black bark was soft, with a rubbery feel. Foyle proved we could climb them for a better view, but found nothing new to see.

  The sideless stone bridge was solid enough to last for another thousand years. Halfway across it, Helen Hogg-Smythe pointed out one of the raccoon-rabbits on the bank we were approaching.

  First the creature drank, in an odd, craning way. Then it cleaned itself. Using its unrabbitlike arms rather than step into the river, it washed a confetti-moth from its back with a thimble-fistful of water.

  Suddenly, it caught sight of us. Instead of bolting into the grass at its back, it shuddered as if cornered, with no way out. Then something rippled in the water nearby, and at this the creature forced itself to retreat—creeping, not running, into some reeds.

  “What extraordinary behavior,” Helen said. “That disturbance in the water—I wonder…Perhaps there’s more than one reason why they gave us canteens.”

  And soon, looking straight down, we saw the eels.

  They were three meters long each, and as thick around as my arm, a darker green than the water they snaked through. Their heads were hideous, the mouths a mass of complicated prongs and suckers, the eyes like those of humans, but larger. They moved freely up- and down-stream in great numbers, leaving transient trails of clear water behind them—evidently straining out algae wherever they went.

  “Would they have eaten that rabbit, do you think?” Helen asked. “Look at that fat one! It’s huge compared to the others—but it doesn’t look like it’s swallowed something. Its skin is all loose and bloated.”

  “Shedding?” I said. “Or pregnant? Look how many follow it, like they’re protecting it.”

  “I don’t think they could eat rabbits,” Helen said quickly, reversing herself before Foyle could do it. “Those strainer mouths of theirs wouldn’t permit it. But the rabbit feared them. Are they electric eels?”

  “Probably not,” Foyle told her. “Electric fish tend to be blind—they sense prey with their electromagnetic field instead of their eyes.”

  “You’ve studied electric fish?”

  Foyle looked uncomfortable. “Not exactly. Before my husband died, we lived on Vesper.”

  “The nature preserve?”

  “It was then, yes. We helped manage the place. Roger and I were fire wardens, but the zoologists were always showing us the more exotic animals.”

  “What a lovely life that must
have been!” Hogg-Smythe exclaimed. “I remember when everyone in academia was trying to join one of the research teams there. But the place was turned over to colonists after all, wasn’t it?”

  “After a period of resistance,” Foyle said. “Yes.”

  Her tone slammed that door.

  But I had other things to think about. The rabbitoid had finally let me see what was shadowing the whole landscape. It wasn’t just the artificial sky—it was fear. It was quiet terror.

  Not just of the eels in the water, but of something on land.

  Why should a rabbit be afraid of running into the grass? And the cries of the flightless birds fit, too: just occasional low warning calls, no showing off, no song. Even the passive, mindless confetti-moths showed those occasional bursts of swirling panic, when irregularities in the breeze made it seem as though something were pushing through the thick sward near them. Some predator.

  I told the others my suspicions, but somehow they didn’t sound like much out loud. I suggested we avoid the taller grass, but we’d been doing that anyway. Foyle seemed amused at my apprehension. “You’ve never spent much time in wilderness, have you, Commissioner?” asked the ex-warden of Vesper—and I couldn’t say what I might have, about Wayback, the planet where Evan Larkspur was born. But I did notice the women sticking a little closer together after that.

  ◆◆◆

  On a bridge over the third waterway we had to cross, Foyle said, “It’s really all just one river, isn’t it?”

  “I think you’re right,” I replied. “This time it flows east to west again. Or rather⁠—⁠”

  “Northeast to southwest. Less of an angle than that, but an angle.”

  “Right. One river, flowing south, that crisscrosses back and forth in front of us.”

  “I wonder why they cut it that way. The bends must be tricky.”

  “Cut it?”

  “Robots probably have to dredge it periodically, to keep the part we see so neat and geometrical.” She looked sharply at Helen and me. “Remember that this is all artificial, and a test. Think of everything the landscape provides us with as either a problem or as part of a solution.”