by Nancy Kress
Also, there was a small, empty hole on the soft ugly extensions of her ears. What were the holes for? What were the extensions for? A deformity?
“Pek Brimmidin?” the Terran said gently.
“Forgive me, my foolish brain blinks,” Enli said, embarrassed. “Accept the flower of a visitor, Pek Sikorski.” She held out the palm of her hand, on which sat a white cloth. Carefully she unwrapped the blossom that Pek Nagredil had taken from his locked chest.
The flower was dried, not fresh, such as were used only in the most sacred of ceremonies by the most holy of priests. The drying had preserved the bloom perfectly: its tiny crimson petals and long, curving tongue. Casually Pek Sikorski reached for it. “The color is beau—”
Clearly she did not know what it was.
“Don’t touch it, please!” Enli commanded. Astonished, the Terran pulled her hand away. “The petals are poison.”
Pek Sikorski’s pale eyes sharpened.
“This is a camorif flower,” Enli explained. “It only grows on Kikily Island, far to the south. The servants of the First Flower make a powder of the tongue, unmixed with even a tiny taste of petal, and it takes them deeper into shared reality; so they may return and share their knowledge with the people. Camorifib are only used on holy feast days. This flower has belonged to my family for two generations. My grandfather was a priest.” Her headpain was sharp now, boring more deeply with each unreal sentence. But she must finish. “No one ever talks about giving camorif flowers, of course. It is not a hospitality flower, and no one talks about owning one. Never. I give this camorif flower to you, Pek Sikorski.”
This time the Terran took the bloom carefully, transferring it and its white cloth covering from Enli’s hand to hers. Then she looked levelly at Enli.
“Why do you give me this, Pek Brimmidin? It is a valuable gift.”
“I would ask something in return, Pek Sikorski. A piece of information. But if you do not wish to answer, the gift is still yours.”
Pek Sikorski nodded, apparently accepting the ritual formula. Perhaps she’d been told it by the other Terrans, the ones who came a halfyear ago. Or perhaps she’d already heard it herself in the Voratur household. Pek Voratur, after all, was a trader.
“I may ask my question?”
“You may ask your question.”
Enli said, “Are you Terrans here to learn about the headpain that comes when reality is unshared?”
For a long moment Pek Sikorski did not answer. So Pek Nagredil had been right. He had told Enli exactly what to say, the question put together from whatever information Reality and Atonement already had about the Terrans’ behavior. Finally the Terran said, “May I ask, Pek Brimmidin, why you think that?”
“I don’t know,” Enli said, and felt for a moment the blessed cool sweetness of shared reality. It was the truth. She did not know.
Pek Sikorski said, smiling now, “You are a sharp observer. We Terrans are very interested in shared reality. Tell me about the headpain, if you will.”
“I cannot. I must go back to clean now.”
Pek Sikorski nodded. She must know that the bargain was fulfilled: the camorif flower for an answered question. More information really could not be expected. But there was more, to Enli at least, in the quick way that Pek Sikorski said, “Of course, we are not interested only in shared reality. As we have said to everyone on World, all of World interests us.”
“Yes,” Enli said, smiling back. “Of course. May your flowers bloom in glorious profusion.”
“May your garden please your ancestors.”
Enli left. Yes. The first part of Pek Nagredil’s plan was accomplished.
She approached Pek Voratur after dark, after Pek Bazargan had strolled through the courtyards to the crelm house. The portly trader sat in his wonderful personal garden with his oldest son, Soshaf, talking business. Around them burned lamps of vegetable oil in beautifully curved iron holders. The perfumes of skillfully chosen night flowers blended on the air with the quiet hum of lifegivers’ wings. As Enli walked toward them, both men looked up, astonished to be approached by a servant in the tunic of a cleaner, although not as astonished as the servant Enli had passed leaving the garden with empty pel glasses.
“Pek Voratur,” Enli said, “I would share reality with you.”
“We share reality,” Pek Voratur said ritually. “Who are you?”
“Enli Pek Brimmidin, household cleaner. I wish to tell you something about our Terran guests, that reality may be fully shared.” Enli had taken a double dose of the government pills for this interview. She was violating reality more than at any time since she and Tabor …
She would not think of that now.
“What have you to tell of the Terrans?” Soshaf Pek Voratur demanded.
Enli made herself look troubled. “I heard Pek Bazargan in talk with Pek Sikorski. He said, ‘If we can only learn about the shared-reality headpain, this voyage will have been worthwhile.’”
“The shared-reality headpain?” the older Pek Voratur said. “What is there to learn? Headpain just is.” But then his eyes narrowed, and Enli saw the successful trader gleam in his lamplit eyes.
“Pek Brimmidin,” he said to me, “where did you hear Pek Bazargan say this?”
“In the garden by Pek Sikorski’s apartments.”
“And why were you there?”
Enli lowered her eyes. “I was there to look at the flowers, Pek Voratur. I used to have a noted garden.”
Pek Voratur hummed softly, thinking. Enli saw him exchange glances with his son. She said, eyes still lowered, “I am good with plants.”
“Yes. Pek Brimmidin, the Terran healer uses many plants in preparing her potions. Although not, of course, flowers.”
“Yes,” Enli said, as if she already knew this well. Which, of course, she did.
“It may be she could use someone who is good with plants to help her. Would you prefer that job to cleaner?”
“Oh, yes, Pek Voratur!”
“And it may further be,” the trader continued, “that Pek Sikorski will talk again, another time, about things she is interested in, or needs, or would like to have. It may happen you will overhear these things.”
“Yes,” Enli said, trying to sound as if this were a new idea to her.
“If you hear such things, Pek Brimmidin, you must share reality with me as head of this household, so I may know what my guests require.”
“Oh, yes!”
Pek Voratur leaned forward. “It may be that sometimes you overhear things when the Terrans do not know you hear them. This, too, is reality you should share with me.”
Enli nodded.
“But Pek Brimmidin—Enli—here is a very important point. You need not share reality about what you tell me with the Terrans themselves. No, don’t look shocked, girl. Remember, the Terrans are not of World. The servants of the First Flower have not yet declared them real … and that, you know, is a reality we do not share with them until we are sure they possess souls. So neither need you share with them that you report to me what they say to each other. There, now, does that help you understand?”
“I don’t—”
“Your head hurts. I can see it in your eyes. Poor Enli. But would you like to be a gardener, Enli, and share reality with me?”
“Yes, I—”
“Good. Then it is a bargain. May your flowers bloom in glorious profusion.”
“M-may your garden please your ancestors,” Enli stammered.
“You will begin as gardening assistant to Pek Sikorski tomorrow. I will tell her myself. Good night, Enli.”
“Good night,” echoed the trader’s son.
Enli could barely see as she made her way back to the servants’ court. Pain lanced the flesh between her eyes, the tissue behind her eyes. No headpain had been this bad since … What had she done? Promised to inform on the Terrans to Hadjil Pek Voratur. Pek Sikorski would then ask her questions about the Voratur household which Enli would answer, a kind of inf
orming on World. And every tenday she would report to Pek Nagredil and inform on her informing. How much could you twist shared reality until, like a wire of metal, it broke? And she, Enli, impaled on the sharp ends …
Oh, Tabor. Only for you.
Halfway through a deserted court, vertigo made her stomach heave. There were no lamps here. In the darkness she doubled over and puked. Oh, please, not on flowers, let there be no flowers below her please …
When the attack had passed, she stumbled to the personal room she shared with three other female servants. Sick with pain and nausea, Enli fumbled in her tunic for more of the government pills that would let her sleep.
FOUR
ORBITAL OBJECT #7
Another three hundred clicks, the pilot said, unnecessarily. Syree Johnson knew exactly where the object was, to the meter. But Captain Daniel Austen, whom she’d worked with before on Special Projects, was garrulous on the job. It made a strong contrast to his discretion off duty. He was a good soldier.
Not that any of them had had a Special Project like this before.
The planet called World had, the natives believed, seven moons, which they called by terse syllables: Ap, Lil, Cut, Obri, Ral, Sel, and Tas. Six were natural satellites. Tas was a captured artifact, almost as old as the planet itself.
The artifact, which the recon team had named Orbital Object #7, circled World in a lower orbit than the natural moons, averaging fewer than twenty-three hundred kilometers above the planet. To keep that low, it moved fast: six clicks per second, completing an orbit in 2.34 E-hours. From the planetary surface, its speed made it appear retrograde, moving from west to east. It also looked small. With a diameter of only four clicks, it barely subtended one-tenth degree of sky. Its orbit, fifty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, was roughly circular. The relative absence of micrometer impact craters suggested that the artifact had not been captured all that long ago, perhaps as recently as a hundred thousand E-years. It had a high albedo and matte finish, so there was no specular reflection. It did not rotate.
“One hundred fifty clicks,” Austen said.
Syree stood suited; now she put on her helmet. Orbital Object #7 grew larger on the display, although not yet large enough to see the markings that had sent the recon team scurrying home.
Only one other object in the human universe carried those markings, and it was not human. Discovered fifty-three years ago in orbit beyond Neptune, it had opened the stars to man. And it, too, had at first looked like a small moon. But it had been a space tunnel, a wormhole transport point to a vast mappable net of usable tunnels. When a spaceship got itself laboriously out to Neptune and maneuvered inside Space Tunnel #1, it emerged elsewhere in the galaxy, directly outside a planetary system—and very near yet another space tunnel.
The discovery of Space Tunnel #1 had rocked the struggling solar civilization. Humanity was not only not alone, it owned an instantaneous superhighway.
More precisely, Mars owned it. The first alien artifact had been discovered and claimed by a Martian military explorer, the Kettleman. By the infant space-salvage laws, modeled on much older marine laws, Mars owned Space Tunnel #1. Screams of protest did not stand up in court. Nor was any physical challenge feasible; the balance of power was too risky, and no one wanted to blow up the tunnel in order to save it, assuming that was possible. In fact, Mars happened to be politically positioned well to be a keeper of the tunnel—not too powerful, not too weak, not too allied, not too isolationist. In addition, Earth’s long series of ecological crises meant that she could not spare the resources to build the space cities which Mars already owned. The first legal, political, or belligerent challenges petered out. Mars owned Space Tunnel #1.
The first years were filled with triumphs and disasters. Experimentation proved that a ship—or any other object—put through a space tunnel for the first time went to wherever the directly previous ship had gone. A ship that had gone through a tunnel and then went through it from the other side was automatically returned to its starting point, no matter how many other ships had used the tunnel in the meantime. Somehow—that most operative word in human understanding of tunnel technology—the tunnel “remembered” where each individual ship had entered tunnel space. Since most (but not all) star systems had three or four tunnels clustered together, the result was an intricate, mappable network of visible nodes and invisible tunnels: an interstellar “Chutes and Ladders” comprised of all chutes.
All the tunnels led to planetary systems. Some were inhabited; most were not. New disciplines sprang up: xenobiology, interstellar treasure hunting, holomovies shot under pink or yellow skies. Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home. Nobody listened. The rich flourished on the new investments; the poor remained poor; Earth went on lurching from one ecological tragedy to another. The exterran solar settlements, their dangerous first years over, became the escape of choice for those who could afford it. The smart money moved itself into space. Space offered glamour, offered cachet, offered profit.
Mars, until then just one more space colony in Earth’s massive and dark penumbra, became the queen of interstellar travel. Any ship wanting to go to the stars had to go through her military and administrative checkpoints. Mars ruled the always-shaky Solar Alliance, which only existed because she said it did. Everybody else could either get down in the dust to her or stay home from the stars.
They got down in the dust, Luna and the Belt, the Confucian Hegemony and the Arab League, Io and Titan and even Syree’s own United Atlantic Federation, with its proud history of independence and freedom. The people who had caused Runnymede and Bunker Hill and the Place de la Concorde got down in the dust, and sometimes they choked on it. That was too bad, thought Syree the soldier. You had to have law, and rules, and a chain of command.
She had been born the year the first ship went through Space Tunnel #1. She was three years old when the first alien civilization was discovered, stone-age hominids on a planet someone too-whimsically named Sally’s Cupboard. Even as a child, Syree had not approved of whimsy, nor of slackers. She grew up in a UAF military family, the fifth generation of soldiers.
James L. Johnson, born in 1974, had died as an enlisted man in Bosnia, two weeks after the birth of the son he never saw. That son, Brian James Johnson, made an idol of his unknown father and got himself into West Point, graduating in 2021. Of his four daughters, two followed. Catherine died in combat. Emily James Johnson, Syree’s formidable grandmother, rose to two-star general. Her son, Tam Johnson, also attended West Point, but by the time Syree was eighteen, things had changed. West Point had become the heavy-gravity training branch of the Solar Alliance Military Academy on Mars.
Mars had long recognized that since the space tunnels worked two ways, not all the alien civilizations that humans found would have to be preatomic.
They found the Fallers the year Syree received her doctorate in physics and her second-lieutenant’s bars. The Fallers, too, had space travel within their own system. They had not known about their own space tunnel, that high-albedo, matte-finish artifact orbiting around their most distant planet, until humans arrived through it.
As the humans had twenty-five years earlier, the Fallers were thrust into becoming a starfaring race. They acted, however, as if they were still alone. They did not trade, they did not negotiate, they did not communicate. They settled a few other planets, and no humans were permitted on any of them.
- Syree was a captain when the Fallers attacked Edge, a human settlement four tunnels away from the Faller home system. No one knew why they attacked. Attempts to establish dialogue with the Fallers had failed. Although they were carbon-based hominids, the enemy did not seem to spring from the same seed as the rest of the galaxy’s sentient species. The product of an independent evolution, they appeared to humanity deeply strange, and deeply dangerous. Mars led the formation of the Solar Alliance Defense Council, with its broad military-la
w powers that many regarded as more dangerous than the Fallers themselves.
Syree was not concerned with the political or sociological shifts that the Fallers brought to human power bases. She was a soldier. What interested her was that the Fallers did not establish cooperative communication with humans because the Fallers chose instead to establish war.
The Solar Alliance Defense Council retaliated with an attack on the Faller home system itself, on the second moon of their fourth planet.
Syree Johnson distinguished herself in the skirmishes that followed, both for her brilliant analysis of captured alien weapons and, once when she was the ranking line officer left alive, for bravery. When the Fallers attacked Bolivar, a fledgling human mining colony on the high-gravity world of Vista Linda, Syree fought for the last time. She lost her left leg at the knee to a lasersweep, and the robomeds barely got her out before she bled to death.
They grew her a new leg, of course, from her own cells shaped over a dissolvable polymer scaffolding, with digital nerve-connection assistance. The leg took only a few weeks to grow, nourished on the skinless back of a permanently immobilized dog bred without an immune system. The dog was the problem. After her new leg was attached, Syree could not get the image of that dog out of her mind. She found she could not—could not—put her full weight on her left leg. No amount of rehab, physical or behavioral or verbal or neuro-pharmaceutical, helped. She could not make herself fully use her left leg.
Syree was deeply mortified by this failure of nerve, which was how she saw it. With every halting step, she heard Grandmother Emily’s stern dictum: A Johnson masters herself! Syree reentered rehab, failed again, and retired from the army with twenty-one years active service.
She hated retirement. She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself. So she diligently read physics journals, making a hobby of the history of space-tunnel theory, such as it was.
It wasn’t much.
After fifty years, science still knew almost nothing about how space tunnels actually worked. The physical objects, panels floating in space in the general shape of a doughnut, were completely impenetrable. The science was too alien. The best guess was that the panels created a field of macro-level object entanglement, analogous to the quantum entanglement that permitted one particle to affect its paired counterpart regardless of distance, thus eliminating any spatial dimension to the universe by treating it as a single point. But this was merely a guess. Achieving entanglement for an object the size of a warship—let alone controlling the phenomenon—violated so many cherished principles that the feuding in physics journals resembled gang warfare. Syree spent days studying the fulminations, doing the calculations, extending the premises behind the speculations.
