Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  Valka spared the Chantry priest beside her a passing glance. Indrassus was the only other man in the carriage not native to the planet. Not born here, Valka corrected herself. No human being was native. Neither were the birds she heard singing in the trees, nor the trees themselves. The whole green jungle was an assault on Sadal Suud’s native lifeforms: the fungal forests, flying polyps, and the various sponge-like creatures that inhabited the fleshy underbrush—and upon the native Giants most of all.

  Despite the heat of the day, the aging priest wore a black wool cassock slashed with white. A medallion fashioned in the form of a copper sun hung about his neck, and copper rings decorated his gnarled fingers. He smiled, turning from Coram to Valka. “Of course, you’re welcome to stay!” he said, voice nearly as deep as the keening of the alien marching alongside the covered wain. His dark eyes took in the half-dozen other men in the compartment: labourers meant for the construction of the wayshrine whose sanctum marked the start of the pilgrim road over the mountains. “You’re sure we can’t persuade you to stay a day or two with us, Doctor Onderra?”

  Valka could hardly believe the holy fool had asked the question. “’Tis better if I were gone in the morning, I think. Your slave disagrees with me.”

  “Dim?” Indrassus asked, bushy brows rising. “He keeps to himself, but I’ll see he leaves you alone if he frightens you.”

  “He does not frighten me,” Valka replied. “Forgive me, galactic standard is not my first language. I mean that slavery disagrees with me.” She turned away—giving the old fool her shoulder—and shut her eyes. Images of the Menhir Dur displayed themselves in her perfect memory. The locals and the idiot priests all said the native Giants had raised the towers, had set them in a chain along the Kalpeny Mountains to better reach the stars . . .

  Valka knew better.

  The towers of the Menhir Dur were far older, built by hands, shaped by minds the Empire and its Holy Terran Chantry pretended did not exist—the same hands that had raised similar ruins across the galaxy. Not for the first time, Valka wondered why Indrassus and his faith had not simply torn the towers down. It would be just like his kind to disappear an inconvenient truth: that mankind was not the first species to spread among the stars.

  She must have dozed in the heat, for the wagon had stopped without Valka’s ever being fully aware of it. The sound of bare feet came slapping from outside, along with the thudding of wood and plastic. Without warning, someone threw back the flaps to the rear compartment and admitted the waning sun—and there was a bright, smiling face beaming through the rear door.

  “We’re there!” said Malky, Coram’s boy.

  The men all started to move, and Indrassus said, “Let the lady go first.” He raised a hand to bar his labourers from disembarking. “She may not understand our ways, but she is our guest.” He flashed Valka a curious look, and for a moment, he seemed no more than an old man, smiling and grandfatherly.

  Valka forced down a scowl.

  Malky had folded the stepladder down and was standing with the canvas flap held fast in one brown hand. “Hope the ride wasn’t too bumpy, miss,” he said with a smile. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven standard years of age. Valka didn’t doubt that a life led at the bottom of this Imperial mud-hole would turn this happy child into a toothless, sun-spotted ruin like his father. The Empire cared so little for its people, its subjects.

  And yet, the boy was smiling up at her with eyes wide and shining. She supposed she was a foreigner, a Tavrosi witch. Probably the boy had never seen an offworlder before, not counting Chanter Indrassus.

  “’Twas lovely, thank you,” she said, remembering to smile back as she donned the white, wide-brimmed hat she’d bought in the starport. Unsure where to go next, she turned on the spot, taking in the out-of-place trees and the grey and red caps of the mighty fungi that towered over them. Up ahead, the half-finished wayshrine and the whitewashed walls of the caravansary beside it squatted on a horn overlooking the road. And beyond? Level upon level, terrace upon overgrown terrace rose the first foothills of the Kalpeny Mountains, green where the human jungle ended and red-grey where the fungal cloud forest began. When she craned her neck, Valka thought she could make out the black shape of the first tower of the Menhir Dur atop the nearest peak: a lonely finger thrust resolute against the sky.

  Moving toward the buildings, she passed the mighty sledge the native had dragged up from the city behind the wagons. It was laden with new stone and construction equipment for the chapel dome, secured with bright-yellow bands. She almost missed it at first glance, so like the mushroom trees it was in colour and texture—and in height. But there it was, standing just clear of the sledge, swaying gently in the sun. One of the flying polyps drifted near its crown, a membranous, insubstantial thing . . . like a jellyfish.

  The Giant.

  Thirty feet tall it stood, its mottled hide more clay than flesh, spongy like the substance of the native flora. It stood upon legs vast as tree trunks, its two feet round and flat and fringed with countless toes like roots. Its great arms trailed the ground like an ape’s, though they terminated not in anything resembling hands, but in a fibrous tangle of feelers more vegetable than animal.

  Something deep in Valka—some animal instinct—urged her to stop ten yards from the creature, well outside the reach of those mighty arms. Nothing should be so big. Nothing. No land creature of Old Earth ever grew to such a size, and to be faced with one beneath the light of day put a horror and a wonder in her beyond words, for here was something really, truly alien, and the alienness of it sang in her.

  This was what she lived for. She was a xenologist, after all, and though she studied the ancient, extinct, and forbidden creatures who had built Sadal Suud’s black towers and sites like it across the galaxy, meeting any new, strange creature was her privilege and joy.

  They said the Giants were immortal, as old as the bones of the mountains in which they lived. Valka wondered how old this particular creature was, whether it had been born when mankind was yet in its grubby infancy in the forests of Old Earth. Had it watched across the light-years from beneath these silent trees as humanity grew and spread across the stars? Had it counted the drive glows of starships and the flares of repulsors and rocketry as man first arrived in-system, thinking them no more than falling stars? How many men were born and died while this alien walked the hills of its native mountains and lived its life free of man? How many kings and empires perished?

  And now, it pulled a sledge.

  “Anaryoch,” she swore in her native tongue, and glared at Indrassus from beneath the brim of her hat as he passed. Barbarians.

  “Dim!” Indrassus exclaimed. “Get these blocks unloaded and up to the chapel, double-quick!” He clapped his hands above his head, trying to attract the Giant’s attention. “Come along now! That’s enough lying about!”

  Slowly—as though it were just a tree bending in the wind—the Giant turned its too-small head to face the priest. Indrassus halted his advance, apparently afraid himself to come too near the native Giant. Valka felt a chill steal over her, even as hot as it was. The Giant’s face was no face at all. A single black hole—like a toothless, gaping mouth—stared down at them, filling the creature’s entire head like shadows beneath an empty hood. It had no features to speak of, no ears or nose or mouth. Valka was not even certain the thing had eyes.

  A low keening sound filled the air, so low and deep that Valka more felt than heard it.

  “I said move!” the chanter shouted, gesticulating at the sledge and the stones piled on it. Valka thought she saw a flash of silver in the man’s hand, and at once the Giant’s song became a cry, and the enormous xenobite tumbled to its knees like a mountain falling.

  “What did you do to it?” she demanded, dropping her bags on the spot. She started hurrying forward, pressing her hat down with one hand. “Stop!”

  Indrassus brushed her off, not taking his eyes from the Giant. “On your feet!” he said. The Giant,
Dim, made a low groaning noise as it stood. As it flexed, Valka saw cracks widen in the caked surface of its mighty thighs, as if its skin were dirt gone too long in want of rain. Then she saw the restraints. Metal shafts festooned the Giant’s back and legs and shoulders, studding the alien flesh like harpoons.

  Valka understood then, all too clearly, what the priest had done. The Giants had no bones, for no bones could support a creature of such mass and height in Sadal Suud’s heavy gravity. Their very flesh kept the Giants standing tall, each layer of cells stacked upon the next like the substance of the surrounding mushroom trees, like clay. And like clay, the priest had baked it. The harpoons were not harpoons at all, but heating elements thrust deep into the sponge-like flesh that baked that flesh to stone.

  Looking on, Valka could not even find words to curse the old man. She curled her shaking hands into fists, but if Indrassus felt her fury, he said nothing. The Giant took up its chains and began dragging the sledge up the last slope toward the half-finished dome. As it moved, bits of stony flesh chipped and flaked away from the scabrous patches the harpoons had made on shoulders and thighs.

  “Are you insane?” Valka asked, voice barely more than a whisper. Checking herself, she took in a deep breath and said, more forcefully, “You’re torturing it!”

  The priest turned to look back at her, his heavy brows furrowed. “I thought you’d gone inside, doctor.” Incredibly, he smiled, as if she’d caught him at little more than an afternoon stroll. “Don’t worry about Dim. He’s a hardy sort. His kind regenerate with remarkable speed, you’ll see. In an hour or so, he’ll be right as rain. It’s no worse than striking a dog, I assure you.”

  “Why would you ever strike a dog?” Valka’s voice had gone almost shrill, twanging with the strain of her Tavrosi accent. She could hardly believe what she was hearing.

  The barbarian blinked. Valka could tell that he had failed to comprehend her question. In a voice utterly befuddled, he answered her, saying, “To teach it not to bite.” Before she could respond, one of the priest’s labourers called from up the hill, and Indrassus said, “Forgive me, I must go. The drover’s boy can show you to your room. Malky!”

  The boy appeared as if from nowhere. “Here, sir!”

  “Fetch the doctor’s bags and show her to her room, there’s a good lad!” Smiling, he ruffled the boy’s dark hair and prodded him in the direction of the caravansary. He left without another word, trudging up the slope toward the unfinished sanctum as if nothing at all had happened.

  Night was hardly cooler than day, and after little more than an hour, the linens the novices had given Valka for her pallet in the caravan house were soaked with sweat. Why had she even bothered to wash? An electric fan whirred overhead, its power drawn from the unsightly solar cells the barbarians had clear-cut three acres of jungle to install. How was anyone to sleep in such a climate, or among such people?

  Not knowing what to do after the incident in the yard, Valka had taken the evening meal in her room, citing a desire to review her notes. That had not been a lie, she had reviewed what small literature she had on the Menhir Dur and the excavations previous xenologists had carried out about the so-called Marching Towers. There wasn’t much. So little had been smuggled out from behind the Imperial curtain. The Sollan Empire forbade recordings of the ruins—phototypes and holographs and so on—and anyone leaving the planet was subject to search and seizure by customs. Those caught with contraband were handed over to the Orbital Defense Force or—worse—to the Terran Chantry and their Inquisition.

  Lying in her bed, Valka massaged the bony nodule at the base of her skull where the implant jack lay capped beneath her red-black hair. It appeared no more than a mole, even to deep scans, for the machinery in her head was subtle and as organic as the rest of her body. Valka was of Tavros, and in Tavros it was neither crime nor sin to mingle flesh and machine. She could access and interface with other machines, even the comparably simple ones permitted within Imperial borders . . . and her memory was perfect. She forgot nothing, and so could carry away images and impressions—everything she saw and experienced on Sadal Suud—and share it with the scholars at home, and there was nothing the Chantry could do to stop her.

  Except to kill her, of course. And they would kill her . . . if they discovered what she was.

  But she was leaving in the morning. Indrassus and his ilk were staying behind to oversee construction on the wayshrine, and she, Coram, and Malky would continue on to the first of the Menhir Dur on the slopes of the mountain above. She would not have to speak with the chanter again . . . which was just as well. She wanted to strangle the man.

  Long she lay awake, watching her reflection in the window glass. She disliked the look in her narrow, golden eyes, the anger and tiredness of them, and the way her sharp jaw clenched, thinking of the way the Giant cried out when it was burned. She massaged her left arm—the one that bore the fractal tattoo of her clan, striped and spiralling like the rippling pattern of good steel.

  It wasn’t right that she should leave without helping the native . . . but what could she do? She could hardly rip the harpoons out of the Giant with her bare hands, nor could she hope to get close enough to Indrassus as he slept to smash his evil remote. Besides, for all she knew, the priest had a spare squirrelled away in his luggage. And whatever she did, suspicion would surely fall upon her shoulders. She was the outsider, the witch from Tavros, and though the Imperials would have no proof, they would not need it.

  There was nothing she could do.

  Unless . . .

  All was still beneath the fungal trees. Not even the air moved, though the jungle sang, and the native forest, too: battling choruses of birds and bugs and things that were like neither, but belonged. Sadal Suud was a world at war, and those night sounds were the sounds of battle as the invading jungle crushed the native flora and mankind crushed the Giants.

  Valka thought she could hear the Giant’s breathing, and she crouched behind the sledge to brush the hair from her eyes. If the xenobite slept at all, it did so standing, and swayed with its arms at its side. How long Valka crouched there, she could not guess—though her implants might have told her. They were alone, human and Giant.

  The chanter’s remote had to communicate via radio with the harpoons, which meant Valka should be able to detect the receivers and interfere with them. Maybe she could lock Indrassus out, just long enough to give the creature time to escape into the mountains, to find its own kind and remove the horrific restraints from its body. Maybe she could make it look like an error—a simple glitch.

  She could hear the receivers in the probes studding the Giant’s flesh. Or . . . not hear, precisely, but it was like hearing. The implants in her head bled into her sensory cortex in such a way that using her neural lace felt only like an extension of her senses as she interacted with the planet’s limited datasphere. The ice layers securing the probes were surprisingly amateur—but then, she supposed that with so many machines banned across the Imperium the few that remained needed little security. There wasn’t much to secure, and less to secure it from.

  To a Tavrosi like Valka, it was a small matter to access the receivers and reset the permissions that tethered them to the chanter’s remote.

  She felt the success like a tingling in the tips of her fingers.

  Quietly and with painstaking slowness, she moved out from the shadow of the sledge, hands extended like those of someone trying to placate a crouching tiger. “Hey!” she hissed, speaking Standard, since it seemed the creature understood a measure of the Imperial tongue. “Hey!” She waved her hands, desperate to attract the creature’s attention.

  It turned only slowly, the black hole of its face peering down at her like the mouth of some terrible, bottomless pit. Though it loomed above her, she was gripped by the sudden terror that she might fall upwards into those hideous depths. Valka suppressed a shudder.

  A low, warbling cry filled all the air. No louder than the murmurous haunt of flies at first,
but it mounted until Valka felt as though she stood beneath the head of some mighty drum. What alien words might lay hid in that inhuman song, Valka never learned.

  “You’re free!” she said, and pointed at one of the spears protruding from the Giant’s leg, just above the knee. When the xenobite did not move, she repeated herself, gesturing more emphatically. She had to make it understand! Realizing the creature might understand but that it might not believe, she added, “I can remove them, if you’ll let me.” She mimed the action. “Take them out!” Still the Giant did not move. Valka glanced back at the lime-washed walls of the caravansary, half-expecting to see Indrassus storming across the yard with his men in tow. “Please,” she hissed, and took a brave step forward. “Let me help you!”

  Like a mountain falling, the Giant knelt. It braced itself with one overlong arm, its fibrous fingers spreading like the roots of a tree. Her own fingers trembling, Valka reached up and touched the Giant’s leg. She’d imagined the alien would feel rough and stony, but the flesh gave beneath her fingers like wet plaster, and she left depressions—fingerprints—on its soft hide. Nearly a foot of damp metal emerged from the flesh above her head. She seized the spike in both hands and pulled.

  The Giant twitched beneath her ministrations and flinched away, but the shaft came free with only minimal resistance, leaving a hole about half as wide as her forearm. Even as she watched, the waxy flesh flowed shut,ntil it seemed there had never been a wound at all. She grimaced, remembering what Indrassus had said about the Giants’ regenerative powers. Thinking of Indrassus set her teeth on edge, and she said, “You try it.”

  The Giant reached up with cord-like fingers, fronds coiling about half a dozen of the shafts in its left shoulder. With a low bellow, it yanked on the probes and tugged them free before crushing the lot of them in its fist. It found another. Then another. With each success the Giant moved more quickly, and at last it stood again. It seemed to grow taller and flexed its mighty arms. Imagining the look on Indrassus’s face when he discovered the ruined probes in the morning, Valka might have laughed for joy.