Vale of Stars

by Sean O'Brien

Fozzoli turned in his seat and looked off into a corner of the lab. “These discussions you have with the vix….” Fozzoli stopped. Sirra let him finish at his own pace. For a linguist, she noted with irony, he was having difficulty expressing himself. Fozzoli took a deep breath and blurted, “I think I’m sometimes on entirely the wrong tack.”

  Sirra’s gentle smile faded. “What do you mean?”

  “Well….” Fozzoli punched up a display that hung before them in mid-air. “Look here. This is a listing of all the names given to you or any other researcher by the vix. I’ve indexed them by frequency. Not Hertz, but how often they are used.”

  Sirra studied the list. She saw no surprises on it—all the names were variations of some kind of God-representative, ranging from the mildly religious to the profoundly sacred. There were even examples of names that carried tabu within themselves: “(S)he-who-must-not-be-named,” “(S)he-of-the-Unspeakable,” and so on.

  “We’ve been analyzing these names as if they contain semantic elements that relate to awe. Sort of a combination fear and respect,” Fozzoli continued. He must have been aware that Sirra understood all of this without explanation—she waited patiently for him to get to his point. Fozzoli continued, “But when I have correlated the phonemes used to name the swimmers with phonemes in more secular constructions, they didn’t match.”

  “Why not?”

  “Here,” Fozzoli said, and tapped in on his keyboard. Presently, a different screen hung in space before them. Fozzoli pointed to it. “This is a listing of the phonemes in religious and in secular constructions.”

  Sirra examined the table and frowned as well. “You’ve assigned most of them a fairly high negative index,” she noted. “Are the other settlements the same?”

  Fozzoli sighed mightily. “We’ve only really begun to get substantial readings on one other vent-settlement. Khadre’s there now. The vix there have a different language.”

  “They do? I suppose that’s to be expected. They have had no contact with one another. Could they have?” She asked the question half to herself, but Fozzoli answered.

  “Not a chance. The nearest vent to this one is about eight hundred kilometers away. A vix would have to make a journey on low oxygen for at least five hundred of those klicks. And even then, he or she would still have to find the vent by chance. No. I’m certain—each vix settlement is isolated at its particular vent.”

  Sirra nodded. She had reached the same conclusion years ago herself, but Vogel’s intrepid travels to the edges of the vix settlement had caused her to wonder. The volcanic fissures deep down in the ocean floor were easy enough to spot from the surface—the higher water temperature gave away a vent’s presence on infrared scans. Somewhere deep in the trench that bisected the vix settlement like a river was the volcano, Sirra knew. And in its violent, superheated state, it was spewing forth high concentrations of elements from the rock it melted. One of those elements was oxygen. The concentration of oxygen was fifty to sixty times higher near the vent than it was in the open sea, and although the oxygen diffused quickly into the water as it ascended, vix settlements were still very oxygen-rich. The vix were only able to survive near vents where their gills could take in the oxygen they needed to fuel their highly demanding brains.

  “So you only have this one settlement to draw language from?” Sirra said.

  “Sort of. What little I’m getting from Khadre’s settlement just confirms my findings here.”

  “Wait—you said the languages are completely different.”

  “That’s another thing. Different, I said. Not completely different.”

  “Like dialects?”

  “More than that. Rather like different languages with similar roots.”

  Sirra nodded slowly, then frowned. “But if these vix have no contact with each other, how can—?”

  “That’s a good question. What I suspect is happening is that I simply don’t have enough data from Khadre’s team. She doesn’t publish much.”

  Sirra looked back at the display. “You said you think we’re on a wrong tack.”

  Fozzoli turned back to the hologram. “That’s right. You said the words are negative? Well, one of two things is going on. Either they are able through grammatical placement to alter the meanings of a huge number of their words for what they consider “holy,” or we have grossly misanalysed their language.”

  Sirra scowled at him. “You mean to tell me that you think they are not in awe of us?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “I assigned a negative index to the terms I did despite your feelings. Could it be that…domeit, Sirra, couldn’t you be wrong?”

  Sirra stared at him for a full second, then threw her head back and laughed. “Foz, come on. I’ve been swimming with the vix for almost thirty years. I know them. I can understand their language almost better than our computers can. I’m the best expert on their language we have, and I’ve never felt or sensed anything but…well, love.”

  “What about fear?”

  Sirra shrugged. “Sure. But that’s understandable, right? I mean, we are coming from On High, literally, in a different form, and speaking to them. We appear from the void in which they cannot travel, visit them briefly, and are gone to our heavens. We’ve made miracles by curing their sick, increasing their crop production, and bringing peace to their world.”

  “I sometimes wonder if we should have left well enough alone,” Fozzoli grumbled.

  “Let’s not get into that debate again,” Sirra said. “We have improved their standard of living by a hundredfold in a single generation. How else could they see us but as angels?”

  Fozzoli shook his head slowly. “I know all of that. But when they use the sounds for us in other contexts, there is a definite trend towards negativity. I can’t explain it. Unless….”

  “What?”

  “Well, the terraforming project did quite a bit of damage to their environment. Not as much as it did to the land, but we are still seeing evidence of mass extinctions in just the past sixty years.”

  “How is it now?”

  “Slowly returning to normal. We might be able to repopulate some of the extinctions if we can find organic material to clone from. But I wonder if the vix don’t know what we did, or almost did, to them.”

  “Come on, Foz.” Sirra laughed, but it sounded strangely hollow to her. “How could they conceive of such a thing? They don’t even have an awareness of other vix, let alone the land, let alone the terraforming process. “

  “But the language—”

  “Foz, we’re still learning the language. Unfortunately, there’s no Rosetta Stone of the deep to help us. We’ll just have to keep muddling through, making mistakes along the way, and gradually understanding the vix better. Meanwhile, I’m not worried. Besides, if they really did think we were hurting them and their planet, wouldn’t they have attacked us by now?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Fozzoli said, looking thoughtfully through the window into the unfathomable water beyond.

  * * *

  Kiv surveyed the latest reports from his representatives among the Tannites. How could such a small group—there couldn’t have been more than five thousand of them, about one percent of the total population of Newerth—cause so much trouble? Their demands had not changed: a voice in the government, to be secured with formal appointment of one of their number to the Assembly. Kiv noted that his agent, a capable young man named Wollam Jaymoskim, did not foresee any great danger.

  Jaymoskim operated in the open, his status as investigator fully known to the Tannites. The Kalhman Doctrine explicitly prohibited espionage. Kiv knew the reasons behind the twenty-year old edict, but it did make his job considerably more difficult. However capable Jaymoskin was, he could not possibly be privy to all the Tannite movements as long as his identity was fully known. Not for the first time, Kiv toyed with the notion of breaking the Kahlman Doctrine. After all, he reasoned, if his agents were succ
essful, no one would know of the transgression. With a slight shake of his head a moment later he dislodged the thought.

  Kiv put the report aside and watched a bright green finger of crepe paper flutter in the slight breeze from the ventilator. The paper was all that remained, physically, of the surprise birthday party his office staff had thrown him. He was thirty-six, and the “three dozen mark” still carried considerable cultural weight. He was an “elder statesman,” as his coworkers had called him several times today.

  The thoughts of his birthday led him to thoughts of his birth, and of his birthmother, and of his father. Khadre had told him of Viktur often enough, but she always seemed annoyed or disappointed at his anger at the Domers, as they had been called in her time, who had killed his father.

  “Mother, why aren’t you angry at them?” he had said the last time they had had this argument.

  Because they don’t exist anymore. There are no Domers.”

  “You know what I mean. And they do exist. Tannites still live in the Domes.”

  Khadre shrugged. “Not many of them anymore. And they only live in one Dome. The rest of them live among us.”

  “With implants. Or biogenetics.” Kiv said it with considerable disgust.

  Khadre shrugged again. “So? Are they less human because they were not born able to breathe the air?”

  “Less human,” Kiv repeated the phrase with derision. “That’s what we were to them.”

  “You were never persecuted by them, Kiv. Don’t assume the mantle of hatred like it’s an inheritance.” She reached out to touch his arm, but he withdrew it. Khadre’s voice grew stern. “So you’re saying we should return the favor, eh? The shoe is on the other foot? Should we do to them what they did to us? Treat them like animals, exiles?”

  Kiv turned on her and fixed her with a steely glare. “They killed my father. Shot him down in cold blood because they wanted to provoke us.”

  “He wasn’t your father then.”

  Kiv bristled. “Yes, he was. You just hadn’t conceived me, that’s all.” The seeming paradox did not bother either of them. Kiv went on, “You could show respect for him.”

  “How? By hating Carll Tann? He’s been dead for thirty-five years. He and I were only alive at the same time for a short while.”

  Kiv stared at his mother for a long moment. “Are you going to hide behind the conveniences of time?”

  Khadre’s patience had evidently run out. She almost shouted, “I’m not hiding, Kiv. You want me to hate a man who doesn’t exist for killing a man who died before you were conceived!”

  “I want you to respect my father. Carll Tann killed him. You knew Viktur was dead when you harvested his sperm and conceived me,” Kiv had said, and mother and son had stared at each other over the sudden revelation of Kiv’s true feelings.

  Khadre and Kiv hadn’t spoken to each other about anything even remotely related for the better part of a year. Her congratulatory birthday message (delivered by holo, as Khadre was still conducting her research two thousand kilometers away) had been loving, sweet, and superficial. Kiv had received it and had recorded a brief response in which he had mentioned coming out to see her if he could get away. He hadn’t meant to try very hard. But the constant repetition of “elder statesman,” however facetious, had made him feel just a bit more powerful.

  Kiv stared at the crepe paper for a moment, then activated his adjutant. “Display schedule for next two days,” he said. In the air before him hung a dizzying array of conferences, briefings, and reports in multicolored hues. None of them were urgent pink. Kiv smiled devilishly and said, “Reschedule all entries for today and tomorrow. Add new event: ‘Visit mother.’”

  The schedule changed appropriately, lines of text disappearing one by one as the computer placed them automatically in vacant slots in upcoming days. The men and women whom his choice affected would be informed of the changes and would have to adjust their schedules.

  Kiv leaned back in his chair and sang softly, “Philosophers may sing of the troubles of a king, but the duties are delightful and the privileges great.…”

  * * *

  Iede finished the Ritual of Contact and opened her eyes. The communications equipment lay in front of her, and, as always, she felt a slight distaste at the necessity of its existence. She should be able to make contact without such…devices, she thought. Her annoyance was almost immediately suppressed by doctrine: if Those Above wanted to make contact through the communications gear, then who was she to question Their motives?

  She rose smoothly despite her thirty-five years and glided toward the machinery. Iede had not built the machine—such was far beyond her capabilities. It was enough that she knew how to use it. She was alone in the small chamber, of course—while it was not yet forbidden for others to enter, her parishioners had taken it upon themselves to restrict entry to herself alone. Those Above would not speak to any but Iede, and she felt pride, then shame at feeling pride, at the fact. She was their servant—she was not a God.

  Iede touched the gleaming controls on the communications gear and drew a breath before speaking. “Those Above, Who watch over us with benign grace, I humbly beg audience with You.”

  An answer came through the speaker almost immediately. “Iede. Speak.”

  “Lords of the Above, I ask humbly for Your guidance. As You have guided me in the past and protected me from the beginning of my existence, I beg Your wisdom now.” Iede paused, collected herself, and made her request. “I ask for an audience in Your august presence.”

  This time, there was hesitation. Iede was fully aware that the pantheon to which she prayed was not made up of a single God but a collection of personalities. She heard only one voice whenever she spoke to Those Above, but she had nevertheless deduced long ago that They were not a single mind.

  “Why do you ask this?”

  “I…My Lords, I do not feel…adequate to the tasks You have set me. I beg an audience so that I might learn Your will more directly.”

  “We have not set you any tasks, Iede.”

  Iede did not dare argue. Instead, she fought with herself to interpret this comment. Her understanding was, of course, imperfect compared with her gods’: Those Above could not possibly be wrong, so it must have been her flawed understanding that caused the miscommunication.

  “I beg forgiveness, Lords of the Above. I am but a planetbound creature. I do not always understand Your words. Did You not command me to spread Your word among my people?”

  Again, hesitation from the communications gear. Iede watched nervously—had she angered Them?

  “We have been watching you and your people, Iede. For a long time. Longer than you realize. Sometimes, it is a frustrating existence.”

  Iede did not comment, but amazement flashed through her brain. Those Above could feel frustration? Why?

  The voice continued. “Perhaps you should come see us. It will require some…adaptations, both for you and for us. But we can arrange it.”

  Iede fought to control her elation. “Lords Above, I thank You for Your grace. I do not deserve the honor You bestow upon me, Your most vile servant.”

  “That is something we must discuss. In order to minimize the…disruption to your people your visit would inevitably cause, we caution you to tell no one in advance of your departure.”

  Iede felt a fleeting pang of regret that she could not tell her parish of her assumption to the Above Place, but it was overridden instantly by joy and awe. She would stand in the presence of the Lords!

  “We will send a…vehicle to bring you to us. Here is the location and time,” the voice said, and Iede saw the specifics in an image on the communications gear.

  “I thank you, Lords.”

  “Prepare yourself, Iede. You have only the faintest glimmer of an idea what you will experience here.”

  “I shall, My Lords.”

  “Ship out,” the voice said, and the communications gear went dead.

  And Iede, daughter of the Prime
Original and he whom the Family had called Desdichado—the disinherited one—turned her eyes reverentially ceilingward.

  Chapter 21

  Sirra crept through the dark corridor between her quarters and the dive pool, feeling like a little girl again. For a moment, she was in the past, eavesdropping on her mother and the Session of Originals those thirty-five years ago. She could see Franc Kahlman’s startled look as he had turned to face her. She smiled at the memory. Then she thought of Yallia.

  That thought was enough to sober her. Time had dulled the severity of the pain she felt recalling her mother’s death three years ago, but the pain was there nevertheless. The whole Family had mourned for her, but Sirra felt the loss especially.

  She shrugged it off and continued her mission. The dive pool was just beyond the observation bubble in the main lab. Sirra entered the lab and looked around. Faint, blue-green light from the few active control panels shed enough of a glow for her to make out the dim outlines of dive equipment. She half-felt her way towards the suit rack and stopped when her hand touched the sleeve of her still-damp gear.

  Sirra frowned. Familiar as she was with diving, she was not completely confident in her ability to dress for the water in darkness. After only a moment’s hesitation, she decided to risk turning on the lights. The lab complex was understaffed right now with only six scientists, not including Sirra herself, in it.

  Sirra whispered, “Lights on.” Nothing happened. She tried again in a stage whisper, but the room computer was either asleep or could not hear her. She rolled her eyes and took a breath preparatory to speaking normally.

  “Lights on.” The voice was not hers. Sirra jumped, then squinted as the dive room lit up to reveal Fozzoli, clad in only a one-piece sleeper, standing near the dive room entrance.

  “Hi, Foz,” Sirra said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I was going for a quick swim.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Since you’re here, you can help me with the check.” This, with as much cheer as she could muster. Sirra looked at him expectantly.