by Greg Bear
A few hands rose, then others, taking encouragement in numbers.
“I've heard stories,” the woman continued, nodding to herself, her tone confessional, and then darkly mysterious. “Stories not to be believed. Terrifying, strange, but not... surprising. Does anything surprise us on this, our chosen world?” An edge of weary resentment in her words now, eyebrow raised, a flip of the long brown hair.
I sat with my hands gripping the sides of the seat of my chair. A fog of unreality stole over me, caused not by the rum, but by the sour animal smell of bodies in the close room, the rough lizboo between my fingers, the floor strewn with bits of dried parasol leaf to soak up spilled liquid. The cloying smell of mat drifted through the air, sweet and garlicky.
“When my husband vanished in Eastern Tasman, hunting curiosities in Baker's Zone, I took off to search for him. Long weeks and months by boat, then through thick swamp, over tall mountains—”
“Get on with it,” grumbled a bearded man near me, swaying slightly in his chair, jaw working a clump of mat.
“To find... something.”
“Something!” the crowd shouted in derision. “Show us!”
“Not pickled,” the woman said, leaning toward the crowd, hands sweeping out, fingers pointing, enjoying her own melodrama. “Not stuck in a bottle.”
“Not like us,” a man shouted, and the crowd laughed at itself, in a perverse humor.
“Not in a bottle. Alive. Alive and away from its land, and so very lonely,” she chanted.
“Like us,” several voices sang out. Nervous laughter now.
“Strange,” the woman said, “to stare into what it uses for its eyes, and wonder ... Does it think? Does it miss its home, thousands of kilometers away? Does it miss its queen, whom no one has ever seen? Was I cruel, to bring it here ... Was I seeking to avenge my husband?”
“Be cruel, be cruel,” a drunken man, not of our ship, shouted from the front.
This is the dream, Lenk’ s dream, I thought. Get his people away from Thistledown, from people no longer shaped like people, from the blasphemous Way...
The rum fogged and distorted and was no longer pleasant. I set my glass down, half empty, and drank no more.
Two brawny men in aprons rolled a large crate onto the stage. Liquid slopped from between the boards and ran thick and brown over the black tarry floor, lapping up against the raised edge, the fiddle I thought, testing out a nautical term, like old port spilled on a ship's table. Within the crate, a sigh, a clatter of sticks or branches.
“What possible use to its zone, to its queen?” the woman asked dreamily. “Such a monster, perhaps no use at all. A sport, a dream gone bad, a nightmare. The silva dreams and twitches in its sleep. We hear it, breathing its black breath across the land, over our heads, in our skin and hair. We cut its trees, harvest its leaves, fence its helpers and attendants ... Will it not someday know what we are, and hate us? What will it make next? Perhaps this is a test. Something that will eventually grow large, and attack ... Let's take a look, and perhaps see our future...”
“Naah,” a man sneered from the rear of the room, waving a hand. He stood and pushed through the thick xyla door. The woman on stage watched him leave with sad, tired eyes. The cool air settled again. The woman reached out for the crate, challenging the audience with a piercing stare...
Her hands fumbled at a corroded brass latch, opened the front of the crate wide with a groaning creak...
One of the burly men stood beside a stagelight and dropped a colored gel over the bulb. The stage became green, dark and cold.
“From the north,” the woman moaned, as if mourning. “It might have killed my husband. It wants to kill me and go home. A monster, a queen's own nightmare. Look upon it.”
The door swung all the way, and within, restrained by iron bars, a cage within the crate, long thin black legs, dozens of them, with red joints.
The round-faced woman leaned forward, eyes even wider. The audience fell silent. A chair leg racketed on the floor, several feet shuffled. “Fate and Pneuma,” said one voice.
“Hoping to kill us all,” the woman on stage suggested dreamily.
Lights switched on overhead, bathing the cage in brighter green and yellow. The form in the cage stirred, legs twitching. The woman pulled a large key on a brass ring from the folds of her dress, slipped it into a prominent lock on the cage within the crate, turned the key, and pulled open the cage door with a ghastly unoiled screech. The sailors in the first row of the theater pushed their chairs back with a clatter until outthrust arms and legs from the people behind would let them push no farther.
“What would we do if they freely walked among us?” the woman asked, spinning out her story, making herself a potential victim as the legs stretched reflexively across the stage toward her, flat cup-claw feet spatting into the leaking brown liquid. One sailor, a young fellow not from the Vigilant, bolted. Shankara looked after him and gave me a knowing smile.
The creature squeezed and squirmed slowly from its cage and stood in the sickly light, rising three meters in height, gangly, loose. I tried to discern its shape in the glare: thick trunk or abdomen dragging, thin upper body, disks half rotating at its shoulders, and emerging from the edges of the disks the long, half limp legs. It had no head, but a long stalk pushed up from the trunk and arched over the form, and from this hung two transparent globes—eyes, perhaps—that slowly rotated, black oblate pupils absorbing the sight of the crowd. It sighed, thorax expanding alarmingly, then shivered its legs together. The audience as one groaned and backed away, tables and chairs bunching, overturning.
The scion and the woman seemed to regard each other with equal detachment. “What is it you wish, monster?” the woman asked coldly.
The form lifted its legs as if beckoning.
“Me?” the woman asked, voice rising to a kind of cheery glee. “Me, as well as my husband?”
“Stop it!” shouted the man half seated in front of me. “For the love of God, it's just a scion! A silvan child! Let it be!”
The woman ignored him. The audience had come here for rough entertainment; she was determined to give it to them. The long pleats of her dress contained many things, apparently. She lowered one hand gracefully and brought out a machete. “Which is it to be?” she asked us. “Revenge ... or forgiveness? Respect, or anger given an edge?”
My own anger suddenly flared and I restrained myself with an effort. The woman's face fairly glowed with enthusiasm. She seemed half committed to chopping the form to bits; in the cloud of rum, I thought, No act, this. But the burly men emerged from the wings and restrained her, one grabbing the arm with the machete, both bodily lifting her, suddenly rigid as a board. The slow spidery creature, left alone on the stage, sighed, bunched its legs up and sidled back into its cage.
The stagehands returned without the woman and raised and locked the door of the crate, then lowered the curtains. The audience sat stunned for a moment; that was all? No exit music, no announcements?
Grumbling, disheartened, we passed through the glass doors to the bar. I stayed behind, stunned and heartsick, slumped in my chair. Somehow, this seemed almost as wrong and perverse as the slaughter at Moonrise.
The round-faced woman, Shift or Shirla, put aside her unfinished bowl of gruel and stood before the stage and curtains. She wore a kerchief around her head topped with a small black hat. Her face seemed childlike in the half light. She turned to Shankara. “What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing but a Tasman western scion,” Shankara said, half in contempt, half in pity. “Not eastern. Not from Baker. Probably from Kandinski's Zone. But I'm just guessing.”
“We'll see more like that?” the woman asked distantly.
Shankara gave a brief, hollow laugh and looked at me with dark brown eyes. “Shocking, eh? We live in the most boring zone on Lamarckia. We have to import our monsters.”
“It was wonderful,” the round-faced woman said, and seemed genuinely to mean it. “Poor thing. What does
it do?”
“A mulcher, I'd guess,” he said. “Something that cleans arborid roots and prepares soil. About as dangerous as a cricket. I've served on merchant ships going to Tasman and seen stranger than that.”
We walked toward the door past the small tables and overturned chairs. “Your name is Olmy, isn't it?” Shankara asked.
“Yes,” I said. I looked at the young-faced woman. Her eyes flicked to meet mine, like a bird's.
“This is Shirla,” Shankara said.
“Shirla Ap Nam,” the woman added. “Junior A.B.” She picked something from her teeth with one finger and shook her head as we pushed through the heavy doors. “You know,” she said, “if we had a zoo or something...”
“The captain has a zoo,” Shankara said. “A small one, in bottles.”
“Not what I mean,” Shirla said. “If we could go see all the parts, all the scions, we wouldn't act like such damn fools.”
By midnight, beneath a cloudless sky filled with the double arc of stars and one small, lantern-bright moon, the crews wended their ways back to the docks and ships, neither wholly drunk nor satisfied. I walked a few meters behind Shankara and Shirla and the rest of the group from the Vigilant. Shirla kept glancing over her shoulder at me, as if I might be stalking her. With her last glance, she gave a little shiver and frowned in apparent disapproval. Somehow, this completed my sadness.
As they rounded a corner ahead of me, a man stepped from the shadows and held up an arm. I gave him a wide berth by instinct, but the man spoke my name. It was the disciplinary, Thomas. He wore a dull green overcoat and a small cloth cap with a tail that fell down his neck, into his collar.
“I had hoped you would stick around long enough to answer my questions. Now, you'll put out to sea ... On a research ship, no less.”
“Is that suspicious?” I asked. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “I'm interested in the zones. I always have been.”
Thomas looked at me with a bland, patient expression. “I've had time enough to run my checks. No birth records for an Olmy of the Datchetong. No Lenk school or residence records. Unless you come from Hsia, or some unregistered community, you don't exist.”
I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Then I took a chance. “Ser Thomas, nobody has complete records anymore.” I stood in the dark beside Thomas, and silence fell between us for several seconds. Finally, he looked away, then down at the stone paving. “I don't believe you're a Brionist. That doesn't make sense, judging from your behavior ... and how we met. You would have faded into the silva and taken a passenger boat later, or made your own. I've given a lot of thought to you. I think perhaps I will leave you alone and let you go where you wish.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“There was a small group of people, years ago, that kept a secret vigil. They called themselves Adventists. They were waiting for someone from the Hexamon to arrive.”
“Sounds Christian,” I said.
“'Advent’ means the coming of something big, something momentous. Nothing to do with Christians. Not all of them made their views known. One of them stole something and vanished. Nobody knows the details except perhaps Lenk himself. I had heard there was an Adventist in Moonrise. Was there?”
“I don't know,” I said.
“Is it a crazy idea?”
“Why didn't they come years ago?” I asked.
Thomas smiled. “Now that I don't know, either. Some say we erased the path to Lamarckia and we'll be here forever, alone.”
“Suits me,” I said.
Thomas's bland expression returned. “If they did come, they would try to take us all back to the Way. That's the general opinion. I'm not so sure, now that we've been here so long, and we've grown in numbers. We own this world as much as any human owns anything.”
“We don't own the zones,” I said, trying to reestablish some fragment of my role.
“No-o-o,” Thomas said thoughtfully. “Promise me this, will you? Someday, if there's time, and if you can, unravel a few mysteries for me.”
I shook my head, grinned, looked away, as if to say, Crazy notions.
Thomas raised his hands, clasped them, and rubbed his palms together. “The citizens rank made their decision earlier this evening. Brionists or their renegades killed the citizens at Moonrise. Naderville will claim it was renegades. It's for the rank at Athenai to decide what to do. No need for more testimony from you. You're free to go wherever you please.”
With a curt nod, Thomas turned and walked up the street, past a feeble streetlamp and into shadows.
Calcutta was a dull town indeed, I thought to myself as I walked up the gangway to the Vigilant; at least as far as its vices were concerned. Divaricates had no flair for debauchery.
I was eager to get to sea.
I stood sleepless by the taffrail, staring astern at the cold black waters and the night, half-clouded, the void between black clouds thick-studded with stars. I thought about Lamarckia's sun and her five sister planets, about which I found very little in Redhill other than what the original surveyors had recorded—a remarkable lapse on the immigrant's part, or an oversight on Redhill's, I thought.
What I could see between the clouds, by eye alone, was tantalizing. Just a few degrees east of the main skysail yard shone one very bright bluish point surrounded by smaller points just outside its concentrated light: Pacifica, a gas giant with many moons that seemed to move as the minutes passed. High above the western horizon gleamed a yellowish point that I was fairly sure must be another planet, probably Aurum. All around shimmered the volumes and volumes of stars, including the double oxbow—part of the encompassing galaxy, analogous to the Milky Way seen from Earth. Randall's few books on astronomy called this blurred twin loop by several names: the Hills, the Kraken, or the Tetons. No astronomical authorities had authorized a final name, apparently. I preferred the Tetons myself. I hoped to find out more by examining the ship's chartroom.
I left my mates in their bunks in the forecastle when all seemed to sleep soundly. William French the navigator was snoring in his pupcastle cabin. The contents of the deserted chartroom, books and maps opened or drawn down quietly, lighted only by a single dim lantern, added much to what I needed to know about the immigrants’ present state of knowledge.
There were no complete and accurate charts of Lamarckia. No one had ever seen the planet from space; no satellites had ever been put into orbit, and the immigrants had much left to explore, including the entire hemisphere opposite Elizabeth's Land, called the Deep West by some cartographers, the Far East by others.
The star charts were fairly thorough, and some improvements had been made by the immigrants on the surveyor's originals. Ephemeris data was kept in several thick volumes in the chartroom, much amended by French's hand, and probably on the captain's slate as well. (Nkwanno's had no such data.) The sailors on Lamarckia did not lack knowledge of how to find their way around, and how to calculate latitudes and longitudes. Working with the planet's magnetic field was relatively simple: there were few compass deviations in this hemisphere, and those well understood.
Still, any sailor on Earth at the time of Thistledown's launch—or even by the close of the twentieth century—would have been appalled at the prospect of using such limited and inaccurate means. What little of Lamarckia had been charted in detail, had been explored by brave men and women indeed.
Lenk's first Captain of Voyages, Alphonse Jiddermeyer, with two sailing ships, had set off from new-founded Calcutta five years after the immigrants’ arrival. His two-year journey took him along the Sumner Coast, named after his first mate, to the northeast point of Elizabeth's Land, then south, discovering the violently volcanic Agni Islands that lay four hundred miles from the continent's eastern coast. (Those islands did not figure on later charts. Some of the histories mentioned enormous blasts heard fifteen years ago, and clouds of ash settling across southeastern Elizabeth's Land, the Darwin Sea, and even Hsia. Enormous waves had struck the eastern Cheng Ho Coast and Jakarta, cau
sing considerable damage to the human settlement, and the islands were not seen again by merchant ships or later explorers. Penciled on the Vigilant's charts were specks in that general region, and question marks.)
After leaving these islands, Jiddermeyer's ships were relentlessly blown south by southwest, back to the southern extremities of Elizabeth's Land. Jiddermeyer and his researchers charted the visible boundaries of what later became known as zones five and six, Petain and Magellan. They sailed around Cape Magellan, depending in a drawn-up curve from the main body of Elizabeth like a giant fang in the upper jaw of a sabertooth cat, and found the Kupe Islands. Here, a storm sank one boat, and the second—with Jiddermeyer and two thirds of both crews—continued south. They found two long strips of land, named them the Alicias after the sailor who first sighted them, and then were blown swiftly west to the environs of the southern polar continent, La Pèrouse Land, seen only as a distant blue coast backed by huge mountains and glaciers.
Here, they had encountered vicious westerly winds they called the Ice Knives. The winds blew them east along La Pèrouse Land, the cold, stormy bottom of the world. This ended Jiddermeyer's plans of circumnavigating Lamarckia. Exhausted, Jiddermeyer slipped free of the Ice Knives, repaired his ship on Southern Alicia, and sailed due north, close-hauled against the seasonal northerlies. Their last discovery, all by chance, was Martha's Island, with its sterile surrounding sea and fertile, varied lone ecos. Thereafter, they turned southwest and put into port at Jakarta.
Jiddermeyer had taken an awful chance. No one knew whether edible scions existed in any of the zones away from Tasman or Elizabeth's Land. Indeed, no one was quite sure that the basic biology of these two continents would also be replicated in other territories. Jiddermeyer's head researcher, Kia Ry Lenk—Jaime Carr Lenk's sister—believed they would find only ecoi on Lamarckia. Others disagreed.
