Molly Fyde and the Land of Light tbs-2

by Hugh Howey

  Dani took another long pull from his stone cup, studying Cole over the lip. When he was done, he made a popping noise with his mouth, jerked his head to the side, and formed in Cole’s head what he assumed were the same words:

  “Come with me,” Dani thought.

  Cole stood, the surge of fear draining away, and followed Dani into the hallway. Two armed guards framed the door, but Dani acted as if they weren’t there. He turned left, away from Cole’s room and further down the long passage. Cole hurried to keep up, having to nearly jog in order to match the alien’s long strides.

  As they hurried past room after room, Cole noticed more than half had gold bars lowered in front of the door. He read them as “occupied” signs, wondering which one Molly was being kept behind.

  He wondered it too loudly.

  “She’s not on this hall,” said the voice in his head. “Males only. Women have an extremely important status in our culture, unlike your own. Ah, so many answers that I feel like giving you now. Even if Anlyn pulls through and confirms our worst suspicions about you, I will always respect you for that single insight.” Dani looked down at the carpet. “And the laughter,” he added.

  Cole glanced up at his walking companion, his head just above the Drenard’s elbow. It felt strange to be having a conversation without eye contact and in the near-silence of their bare feet shuffling through the lush pile of the runner.

  “You have yet to answer the question,” Cole reminded his unusual captor, “nor have you asked me what you want from us. We just came to drop off a friend and get some supplies—”

  “We will sort that out when and if Anlyn recovers—and all of my hopes are that she will—but you will not be leaving Drenard anytime soon. We cannot allow that. Anlyn should know this, which is why we find the story you and your friends are giving us a bit hard to believe. Especially since there are… inconsistencies.”

  Cole wondered what this meant as they reached the end of the hallway. Dani paused in front of the massive door that spanned the width of the passage; he turned and addressed the consternation on Cole’s face and in his thoughts. “Forget these things for now.” The alien waved one hand and reached for the door with the other. “You will have many years to dwell on them here. But first, let me show you where here is,” he thought.

  With that, Dani pushed the large door open and entered the next room. Cole followed—and stepped into a prism, a carpeted cube of dancing lights. The wall across from them was identical to the one they had just passed through, yellowish marble bisected by a closed door. Cole scanned for the source of the spectacle. It was the wall to his left, revealed as Dani allowed the door to swing shut. The entire face was transparent glass, or crystal even. His human brain had a difficult time absorbing the view beyond.

  It was a sunrise—or sunset—that defied his own understanding of what potential beauty that meteorological event could possess. The colors banded gradually through every hue imaginable. Between neighboring buildings, he spotted a horizon gilded with gold; it turned through the oranges and reds, but there were colors between that Cole’s boy-brain simply had no vocabulary for.

  His feet took him closer to the sight, as if of their own accord. He craned his neck up as he neared the glass, watching the last of the deep violets as they were absorbed into the black of space. What made the sight truly unique was the way the colors moved. It was a sunrise or sunset in action. Waves rippled up now and then to make the rainbow shimmer, like the Northern Lights of Earth, but brighter and with more color, all of it sqeezing between towering buildings to all sides.

  “Wow.”

  It was all he could think. He wondered how it translated in Dani’s head, if it came across as a soothing coo or a baby’s babble.

  “The view is better from the roof,” Dani thought.

  Cole didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t until he saw it for himself.

  Dani strode across to the wall opposite the glass and called for a lift. Cole followed. He walked backwards, still riveted by the sight. The elevator arrived just as he did and Dani guided him in, thinking bemused thoughts at the mesmerizing effect his planet had on another human.

  Cole grunted as the elevator doors squeezed the colors away. The lift moved—and fast. He could feel it in his legs, still weary from the exercise. Despite the obvious speed with which they were traveling, the ride was a long one, and both men rode in silence, mental and otherwise.

  When Cole felt himself lighten several kilos, he knew the ride was almost over. The doors opened, and he followed Dani into the morning, or twilight, air. Not knowing which time of day it was irked Cole; he needed a label for what he was seeing, as if the word might bottle some of the splendor. As they walked toward the side of the building facing the glorious sight, Cole asked Dani in his head: “What time of day is it?”

  “There are no days here,” Dani replied.

  Cole barely heard his own voice give him the answer. It was more beautiful on the roof.

  All around them stood a transparent barrier shielding out what sounded like a powerful wind. Cole could hear it race through holes in the enclosure above, a crisp zephyr descending to swirl around them. The walls held back the air, but there was nothing obstructing the view all the way to the horizon; he saw none of the other buildings that had been crowding the view from the room below. Here, Cole could gaze from one edge of the horizon to the other, and in no two places could he find the visual feast repeated.

  He pressed his head to the glass and peered down, spotting the rooftops below. Observation platforms dotted most of the structures, which got progressively shorter as they went toward the horizon, stepping down so each building behind had a view. The city didn’t go very far into the distance, he saw. No more than a dozen kilometers, possibly less—the height made it impossible to gauge.

  He turned to his interrogator-turned-tour guide.

  “No days?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to turn away from this sight at first. I know. It takes many years to become used to it, to take it for granted, even. However, to understand, you need to walk with me and look at the other two views.”

  Staggering backwards again, his eyes locked on the dancing lights, Cole slowly moved with Dani—reluctant, yet curious.

  “Drenard is like the moon of your Earth. One face is gravitationally locked with our two stars, just as only one side of your moon ever looks down on your planet.”

  They stood in front of the glass that ran down one of the building’s sides. Dani fell silent for a moment and looked down at his feet. “You are the second human I’ve had this conversation with. On this very rooftop.” He looked at Cole and continued to think aloud. “It was an accident then. My being up here nothing more than mere chance. And now—” He stopped and made the coughing sound from his fit of laughter. “I am considered a human expert, sent to deal with you and the girl.”

  “Molly—?”

  Dani raised his hand, his thoughts overpowering Cole’s. It wasn’t pleasant to be shouted down with one’s own voice, Cole decided.

  “I’m sorry to drift off like that. The similarities to that old conversation took me back to better times. My people are extremely sensitive to symmetry. Look at why.”

  He pointed out the glass at the line of buildings stretching off in the distance, converging like the train tracks in Portugal Cole grew up near. Both men thought back to ten years ago, but their memories were a galaxy apart.

  “Drenards live on a line. A border between light and dark. That way,” he pointed back to the colors, “is a boiling land where even shadows can turn to ash. And over there,” he nodded to the darkness opposite, “you have a frigid wasteland where your breath will freeze in your lungs.” He paused and looked back over the city stretched out toward forever. “Most of our people choose to live on better planets now, but this is where we evolved. Along a thin halo—a temperate respite—crushed between two extremes.

  “There’s another significance inherent in the shape of o
ur habitat. It isn’t just a line, it’s a circle. It’s the root of our fondness for symmetry. For things that repeat themselves.” He turned and faced Cole. “The universe is like this. Our lives are like this. I’ve been here before, just like this. And if you look hard, you will see the same story playing out in your life. Things beginning and ending the same way. The same conflicts with the same resolutions. It keeps going, but not on its own. Each cycle requires work.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cole responded. “Why are you showing me this? What’s the question I should’ve asked?”

  Dani turned away from him and peered through the glass. “You remind me of him,” he thought. “The only other human I have spoken with like this. He brought so much hope. But that’s not why I think of him, it’s that neither of you seem anything like the… humans our war department deals with every day.”

  Cole tried to force another question through, but the Drenard’s thoughts were too powerful.

  “I cannot speak of the war, so do not ask. Come and look at what I love about the rooftops.”

  Dani led them to the next side of the building, the one opposite the shimmering rainbow. Some of the colors bled around the elevator structure, stray bands of subdued prettiness that rode the glass overhead. But once they reached the far side, the spectacular view was just a throbbing memory. Now they were overlooking the dark side of Drenard, the sky bursting with stars and fuzzy galaxies.

  A thick swath of unbelievable density let Cole know they were looking toward the center of the Milky Way, right along the width of the galaxy. Billions of pricks of light stood out; he could even see the glow of a pink nebula, the color of planets forming. The sight made him feel a long way from home and choked him up inside. One hand went to the cool glass while his thoughts warped back to Earth.

  The two men fell quiet again, Dani giving Cole a minute to absorb it all—or perhaps the Drenard was taking a moment for himself.

  It was the human that broke the mental silence:

  “Beautiful,” he thought, unable to know the soothing purr this word translated to in Dani’s head.

  “Beautiful, yes. And even more dangerous, my friend. Nothing lives on the surface. Well, almost nothing. The fire on the other side fuels the life of our planet and drives many of our customs with its ancient and inhospitable landscape. Over here, we find the absence of everything. Just powerful winds which are nothing more than the air being sucked from the cool low pressure to rush toward the rising heat.

  “I brought you up here so you could look at yourself, Cole. And to give you an honest answer to your sage question. Up here, my boss will not hear and there is no guard to trust with a secret.” He turned to face Cole. “You are very much like a Drenard,” he thought. “You have a hot side and a cold side and you use them to balance one another. I feel your anger, mostly when you dwell on the well-being of your friends. And I also feel your patience, which you use to temper yourself. I believe you are one of the few of your kind that is trying to live on a line, just as a Drenard must.”

  Dani turned from Cole to gaze at the stars, then his eyes drifted down to the planet’s surface. Cole looked as well, out over the shadowed land as black as ruined Glemot. His own voice was clear in his head as Dani thought: “The question you should have asked, Cole, and that I would not have been allowed to answer, is this: what is fusion fuel made of?”

  Cole rolled this around in his mind for a moment. “You’ve gotta be kidding,” he thought to Dani.

  The alien nodded slowly. “It’s the start of a path, young friend, and one that leads far over the horizon. You can’t see the end from here because of the long walk. Now let’s get below before my superiors become suspicious.”

  He turned and walked back across the roof, leaving behind a confused and disappointed human.

  And not for the first time in his life, nor in that same spot, Dani thought.

  Quietly.

  9

  On the long ride back down, Dani explained the circumstance of their captivity. They would not be allowed to leave Drenard. Ever. But their stay would be made as pleasant as possible until they died of old age. If Anlyn woke and verified their story—or other evidence came to light that absolved Parsona’s crew of her disappearance from Drenard and the condition in which she returned—the friends would be allowed to visit with one another. Until then, they were to be kept apart to prevent collusion of any sort.

  Cole took this as well as he could. The idea of not leaving Drenard didn’t sting as much as it might have. It would be disastrous for Molly, who was now on a quest to find her father and do her ship’s bidding, but all Cole wanted was for his friends to be safe, to find a place where they could stop running long enough to catch their breath. Perhaps they had found just such a spot there on Drenard, the home of their enemy.

  He knew this feeling would waver over the years to come. It would not be easy to convince Molly to stay put and remain safe, rather than rush off and get killed in another wild adventure, searching for her lost past. In a way, the Drenards would be doing him a favor by forcing her to remain there. It would probably take an entire race of powerful beings to buttress Cole’s will if she asked him to leave, to break out of another prison and go on the run once again.

  Cole glanced over at Dani and hoped he wasn’t thinking too loud.

  They stepped out of the lift and turned to the long, carpeted hallway. Cole forced safer thoughts to the surface: “I have to ask about the red band,” he thought to Dani.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to assist you in their duplication. There are few secrets my people guard more closely than their operation. And that’s saying a lot.”

  “Of course,” Cole conceded, “I’m actually more interested in the philosophical underpinnings. Theories of universal language acquisition were long ago crushed on Earth. Linguists found—”

  “Your linguists know less than nothing,” Dani interrupted. “Besides, the answer you are looking for has more to do with biology—with the reason all forms in this galaxy are almost identical.”

  Cole saw an opening for more answers and pressed the point. “You said something about this before—”

  Dani made a gruff coughing sound. “Excellent attempt, but I was merely deducing what you didn’t know.”

  They arrived at Cole’s room; the bars were still up. Dani opened the door and held out his hand, his eyes focused on Cole’s forehead.

  He didn’t want to give it up, the band or the line of questioning. “Why are we so similar?” Cole thought.

  He watched the fingers in the outstretched hand curl into a blue fist. Dani fell silent for a moment, looked up and down the hall, then relayed a cryptic answer: “I have become an expert, as much as a Drenard can, on your planet Earth. What fascinated me the most was the way its plates move, how they shift continents over time. Where once, they were bunched up, now they are far apart.” Dani paused and scanned the hallway. “Our galaxy—even our universe is like this. It wasn’t long ago that things were much closer—in a strange sense of the word.

  “Information used to flow back and forth between worlds, even between galaxies. Sometimes it still does. Take the pouched mammals on your Southern continent: they are unique, but similar to the other fur-covered animals elsewhere. Information was shared, but eventually those plates grew apart. For the same reasons, our galaxy is dominated by common forms.”

  Cole looked at Dani’s fist, then met his gaze. “You’re talking about homology. Divergent evolution. But how is that possible? How, over such vast distances—?”

  Dani peered down the hall and thought to Cole without looking at him. The words came soft, like a mental whisper: “Are you familiar with extremophiles?”

  “Yeah,” Cole answered, “small organisms that live in acid, or deep in the crust, or around thermal vents.”

  “Keep your thoughts soft. Yes, but you have it backwards, friend. We are the extremophiles. We live between the cold and hot, up in the wild weather and unde
r an assault of radiation. A thermal vent is safe by comparison, a stagnant niche. Our planet, like your own, is dominated by invisible creatures, smaller than one of our own cells. They rule the universe, much as your genes rule your own behavior.”

  The fist blossomed into a palm, insisting. “There, I’ve thought too much.”

  Cole reached up, but before he could peel the red band from his head, he heard one last compliment.

  “You’ve taken the next step down that path,” Dani thought.

  ••••

  The “days” that followed were marked by the window in his room. The pane would glow to full strength, then fade to black in what Cole quickly recognized as artificial aesthetics. They fed him twice a day on an exacting schedule; Dani joined him for every morning meal. During one of these sessions, he asked Cole if the twenty-four hour cycle pleased him. Cole had to explain to his friend and captor how very little sunlight he and most humans got back home, which turned into an interesting conversation about the universality of youth.

  Amazing topics such as these were welcomed. It dawned on Cole one day that he was furthering Dani’s research, and wondered what his instructors at the Academy would say about his inability to withstand such a pleasant interrogation. They would likely point out what a dupe he’d been to fall for the comfortable bed, the lavish meals, the blatant good-cop/bad-cop routine.

  The prison bars, gilded with gold, would undoubtedly become official Navy policy for softening up detainees. Cole had no doubt they would’ve mocked him for his performance, right before they airlocked him for committing treason.