by Greg Bear
“If we wreck ourselves, swim for the castle flowers. There's fresh water in their insides,” Shankara called out across the deck as we leaned into halyards.
“There'll be no wrecking of this ship,” Soterio grumbled, but he stared overside nervously.
We cleared the vine reefs. The port watch rushed around the deck under the barking orders of the mate. The steady wind was finally fading into bursts of light breeze, leaving calm water. A sour scent began to fill the air; even the cat's-paws couldn't clear it. The water alongside seemed quieter, less effervescent. We half drifted, half sailed into the mountain's afternoon shadow.
With some respite from hauling on the braces, I gulped great lungfuls of the lightly tainted air. “Get it while you can,” the master advised from the puppis. “It's going to stink like a sour paste pot.”
It soon became obvious that the mountain was merely a little sister, a parasite on the flanks of the massive Sloveny Caldera. The caldera sat a kilometer lower than the mountain but spread over eight kilometers in diameter. Its eastern flank had collapsed centuries ago and ocean had rushed in.
We passed under the clouds streaming from the higher, smaller sister, Mount Pascal, and the sea took a purple tinge in the shadow. The farther we drifted into the outlines of the bowl, the redder the water became, and the stronger the smell of hydrogen sulfide, until I spotted a solid mass of what looked like flame lying ahead, filling the western curve of the natural harbor. The air did indeed stink now, and flakes of red bobbed in the waves like lost chips of paint. With the sloping western wall of the caldera less than a hundred meters off, Vigilant set a sea anchor; the depth here was at least three hundred meters.
I helped the crew furl sails, then all scrambled down to the deck at the mate's orders and stood in rows on the main deck. The captain and Randall came aft and stood before the crew. Shatro joined them. Randall stepped forward. “I'll need twelve hands for a shore party. The captain proposes to go ashore and make observations, put our time to practical use until we can get in to Jakarta. I doubt any other ships will follow us here—it's not easy to get in or out, and it smells bad. The captain's been here before, as have I; the dangers are minimal, so long as we exercise caution. Ser Shatro and I, of course, will go. Volunteers?”
I raised my hand. Ibert scowled at me from one side. “It is a most unpleasant region,” Shimchisko whispered from the opposite side. Shirla, three places down in the same line, volunteered as well, and Shankara. Grimacing at me out of the sight of the master and the captain, Shim-chisko stepped forward, followed quickly by Ibert. In a few seconds, the captain had his list. Kissbegh and Ridjel seemed relieved.
The two boats pulled through the red-speckled and odoriferous waters with all but the captain, Randall, and Shatro taking turns at the oars. Between strokes of my oar, I saw the red flakes as more than just patches of pigment. They floated atop the waves with the insouciance of jelly fish—but these blood-colored scions were flat, fringed with tiny cilia that somehow steadied them and separated them from their fellows.
The captain directed us to a defile opened in the western wall thousands of years ago, through which a thin trickle of water now flowed, leaving a white and yellow mark on the black and brown rock. The boats were secured to outcropping rocks near a rugged, small, rock-strewn beach, and all but the two who were left behind to guard—Shimchisko and Ibert—waded ashore.
The sea water here felt rough between my fingers and curled around my waist with an unpleasant tingle. Once on shore, Randall offered all of us a bulb filled with white powder to puff on our clothes and skin. “Sodium bicarbonate,” he explained. “The water here is mildly acid, and while you are still damp, it is best to neutralize.”
The job was performed in a few minutes. Clothes still fizzing slightly, we formed a line, led by the captain and master, and marched up the cleft.
On all sides, the rock was covered with clusters of sulfur flowers. No life was visible; the air reeked and breathing was not pleasant. “Bear up, fellows,” the captain said. “It's only for a few hours.”
His cheer was not infectious. I felt my eyes sting and my lungs burn. Coming up behind, Shirla favored me with a smile of encouragement. “No worse than the latrines on ship,” she offered.
The defile led gradually to the top of the massive main body of the old volcano. Here, a broad black lava plain of broken chunks mingled with smooth rivers of once-molten rock. Open pits blew forth steam and clouds of yellow vapor. The wind drove these clouds away from the defile, but I worried the wind would shift and we would asphyxiate.
Randall and Keyser-Bach climbed to the crest of a pressure ridge and surveyed the terrain beyond with field glasses. The rest of the crew and I sat, catching our breath between the wafts of sulfurous gas. Shirla coughed into her fist and wiped her eyes with a small cloth.
Shankara, always calm, folded his leg, braced his foot against the rock on which he sat, and wrapped his fingers around his knee. “Don't rub your eyes,” he told Shirla. “It won't help; it could hurt.”
“You've been here before?” she asked.
“I've been near volcanoes before, in the west. Interesting places. Where I lived, the only mobile scions that survived around volcanoes were fume dogs,” he offered blandly.
“What did they look like?” one of the younger apprentices, a blocky, bright-faced fellow named Cham, asked. He kept his face covered with a noserag.
“The size of a young child. Bright red, like everything else alive around there. Long, six or seven legs—the last legs large, for jumping—covered with fur, with three or four eyes on the back or on the ‘head.’ They harvest fume fruit—florid scions clustered around fumaroles. Very sparse—just the dogs and the fruit.”
“Why is everything called a ‘dog'?” Shimchisko asked. “I've never even seen a dog.”
Shankara turned his attention to me, seated across from him on another black rock sloppily daubed with yellow and white.
We all held our breath as a cloud of sulfur stench wafted uncomfortably close. “My people were all intellectuals,” he said. “Not enough call for thinkers here, let alone researchers. So we work where we can. The same for you, I'd judge.”
“Um,” I said, adopting the best nonchalant nasal tone of Shimchisko or Kissbegh.
“You have the air of a man who wanders free from his family. I make it a study also to learn the people around me. By the end of the voyage, I'll know the crew as well as they know themselves.” His tear-streaked cheek, constant winking and stoic forbearance gave him an odd, Lewis Carroll aspect. He said, “I wish the captain would return.”
Randall, Shatro, and Keyser-Bach had dropped out of sight on the other side of the ridge. The master's head appeared first, and he quickly climbed to the crest, waving to attract our attention. “Up here!” he shouted. “Bring the equipment.”
We got to our feet with little enthusiasm, shouldered the bags, and hefted the boxes. I followed Shirla and Cham; Shankara followed me, and Shimchisko and Ibert trailed. We wound between chunks of lava and vents oozing viscous yellow smoke to join Randall. Beyond Randall, the captain and Shatro stood in a small depression that widened to the east into a larger valley.
“It's still here!” the captain shouted. “Just as I remember!”
The valley beyond was filled with large, bright red jug-shaped scions, the largest eight to ten meters across and twenty high. They protruded from the ground, mostly upright, like squat bowling pins stuck in the black sand.
We followed Randall, Shatro, and the captain between the red pins, deeper into the shallow valley. A smelly yellow ooze dripped from gashes in the side of the pins like sulfurous honey and gathered in pools to suck at our feet.
“It's the simplest sub-zone on record,” Keyser-Bach explained, forging ahead, pushing and slapping the red bulks as he passed them, like a lighthearted Samson. “This is where Jiddermeyer worked out his final theory. He reported his theory to Lenk twenty-four years ago today. It's worth celebrating.�
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Randall struggled to pull his boot from a particularly obstinate patch of muck.
The pins grew higher toward the middle of the valley, and now cast considerable shade. Yellow mists drifted between the looming red scions. “Can you reason it, Ser Shatro?” the captain called over his shoulder.
“I've read about it in your books, sir.”
“Of course. But my books don't explain the mystery. Anybody care to reason it? Ser Randall ... Shankara...” The captain stopped and surveyed us with a devilish, almost leering grin. “Ser Olmy?”
“Ah, Olmy,” Shatro murmured, sticking hands in pockets and turning as if bored at this masque. “So good at theory.”
“I haven't seen enough yet, sir,” I replied. The question unanswered, we pushed over the thick, slowly sweeping scimitar-shaped roots, the yellow fluid swept along by their motion spilling over our boots and staining them.
Shirla passed by and muttered, “You'll soon help the captain peel scions and Randall pickle their guts. We'll miss you when you graduate, Olmy, sir!” She gave me a cheeky salute.
Ahead, I saw a clearing between the pins, a pool of standing water in the middle of the valley. We climbed on a platform of layered lava, above the sweep and slop of the yellow fluid.
Around the pool, built-up deposits formed an irregular wall that kept out most of the flow from the scimitar roots. In three places around the pool perimeter, purple and black valves laced with ornate red bands filled gaps in the wall, allowing dribbles of the yellow fluid into the pool.
I stared at the pool's glassy surface. Beneath the surface, layers of red and yellow minerals formed broad fans. Where the water intercepted the dribbles of yellow muck passed by the valves, oily sheens spread, casting rainbows where the sun struck them between the shadows of the surrounding pins. I felt uncomfortable here, and not just because of the smell.
“The puzzle isn't complete, by any means,” the captain admitted. “Harsh conditions force simplicity on an ecos. It hasn't the evolutionary versatility, the immense runs of time, the lack of concern for its offspring, that describe our evolutionary upbringing. There's energy here, nutrients to be had, but specialization is the key. And here's the miracle—these scions, the pins, belong to no ecos. They form a sub-zone of their very own, adjacent to and dependent on both Petain and Elizabeth ... And in a moment, if we're lucky, we'll see what Jiddermeyer saw. It happens every day, even in the worst weather.”
The captain told us to place our bags and boxes on the platform, above the yellow muck. “So human,” the captain mused, pulling glass jars and a metal tube from one box. “They are truly social, the zones. But they are also individuals. We are concerned for our arms and legs, as well as for our children—concerned for our friends and neighbors. The ecoi feel similar concerns for their scions. Now we wait for a few minutes. Something interesting will come by.”
I was struck by the similarity between the way Keyser-Bach and the gate opener Ry Ornis uttered that word, interesting. For the captain—even more so than for Randall—life was a steady succession of puzzles to be solved and eventually linked together.
A muffling quiet surrounded us, nothing but the sighs of wind through the bizarre colonnades, my breath harsh in an irritated throat, shufflings and whispers and grunts as we helped the captain take samples from the muck and the pool.
The captain had filled two jars and was examining them with immense satisfaction when a buzzing sound became audible at the far end of the valley. The captain and Shatro immediately pulled out box cameras and tripods, setting them up in the black sand and muck. “Bees, you'd think, coming to suck up the honey of these immense flowers,” the captain said, face glowing with enthusiasm. “Perhaps not so far wrong.”
I listened to the buzzing apprehensively. If they were bees, they sounded like very large bees. We all stared up at the sky above the tops of the huge red pins. The plume of cloud from the higher crater had shifted and now streamed over us, its contorted rolls of moisture arrayed in cross-currents of higher winds like fibers in the muscle of a fish. The plume blocked the sun, casting the valley and its scions in a cool half-light.
The stench was almost unbearable now. Shatro bent over the pool, inserted a thick metal pipette, and drew up a sample of the minerals beneath the glassy slick.
“Here they come,” the captain said. “Harvesters. Damnedest things you ever saw.”
The buzzing rose to a high, slapping drone, as if a hundred children were whacking long sticks together. Three furry black saucers like flattened beetles flew into view above the pool and hovered. Each was about a meter wide and sported two long thin limbs at the front, and a kind of tail at the rear, which flicked a few centimeters side to side with every adjustment in their hovering. One descended to the tallest squat pin-shaped scion on the edge of the pool and raised itself, limbs uppermost, tail drawn back delicately. The red surface of the pin abruptly split and formed five deep horizontal gashes—stomata. The saucer inserted its two limbs into the highest stoma and settled in, its buzzing subsiding to intermittent clacking.
The remaining two saucer beetles did the same with other pins around the pool. Piston noises surrounded us, and fine drops of yellow, stinking sulfurous dew sprayed over us, sticking to our faces and arms, our clothing.
“Wonderful!” the captain cried. Shatro snapped pictures quickly, adjusting the tripods. I held up a bag of instruments to protect my face from the spray. Peering from under the bag, trying to see how they flew without visible wings, I observed the leading edge of one saucer beetle. Eight or nine white rectangular apertures opened and shut rapidly, producing the buzzing, slapping noise. Somewhere within the flat carapaces, the saucer beetles pumped the air and ejected it from the rear.
“They're dirigibles,” I said, revelation coming upon me.
“Very good!” the captain said. “Any one of us could lift them like feathers. And they're not just here to suck out what they need—they feed the pins. Mutual needs met, from a sub-zone to each of at least two zones!”
Dozens more saucer beetles came blowing over the valley with a steady westerly breeze. As they hovered, darting back and forth with considerable dexterity, their companions, mounted on the pins, suddenly leaped back, leveled off in flight, and buzzed away. With a sidling motion, the pins whose production had been harvested pulled back slowly, a stately retreat that allowed other pins to come forward and take their places by the pool.
“We presume they fly back to some interior region, perhaps around a seed-mother, and drop their cargoes,” the captain shouted over the buzzing. “We've never traced their paths. I've always longed for a good airplane or helicopter to follow them. Perhaps we'd find our first queen!”
A fog of vapor now filled the valley with an almost unbearable smell. Everyone began to cough uncontrollably. Shatro grabbed his camera and retreated.
“All right, enough,” Randall cried, swiping his hands at the smoke.
The captain hesitated, said something about waiting for the next flight, but the vapor became unbearably thick. Coughing, he agreed. We picked up the bags and walked as fast as we could back to the caldera and the sea.
7
Unable to sleep, head resting on folded hands, I lay on my side in my bunk aboard the Vigilant, listening to an incessant spectral hooting from the mainland. A deep booming sound underscored the hooting and was itself topped by fluting trills.
We had weighed anchor in the early evening and sailed several miles southeast, out of the tricky waters in the shadow of Mount Pascal. We had then dropped anchor once more in a calm patch of ocean a mile outside the boundary of the sunken caldera.
The captain had been too tired that evening to give his customary lamplight lecture. If his lungs were feeling as tight and reluctant as mine, I didn't see how he could lecture. Here, the air at least was sweeter.
I took up Nkwanno's slate and scrolled to the last section I had read in his journals. The soft glow of the slate screen filled my curtained bunk with
false moonlight.
Crossing 29, 125
We have survived this long, so many disasters, and have just begun to feel confident, and now the rules are changing and all that we have learned may become useless.
For weeks there have been rumors from trekkers and small villages in south Liz and at the head of the Terra Nova that something is happening in the truce between Liz and Calder's zone, where few of us live. Thief activity has increased across the truce, according to harvesters at Lake Mareotis, and the lake itself changed color from blue to orange along the east shore.
Yesterday, a delegation of Lenk's ministers—two men and one woman—returned from Mareotis and stopped here for the evening to rest. I went down to the docks with Johanna Ry Presby and met them walking up the path. They appeared tired and downcast and refused to answer questions at first. Johanna invited them to the refectory and we fed them a late cold meal. Their gloom seemed to deepen as they ate.
I tried to pry information from them. They were adamant about saying nothing, which angered us. “We should know, if it's something important, to give us time to prepare,” I insisted. “Keeping secrets will do no good.” The woman had tears in her eyes but no one would talk. “It will come out soon,” she said. They thanked us for our food and left early the next morning.
Radio messages from Athenai and Jakarta have been received, most in Lenk's code, but some have been open. The crisis has gradually been unveiled. From here and there, we are putting together rough pictures of a disaster—not truly a disaster, but momentous change, disastrous perhaps for us—but in truth we have no words yet to describe what is happening.
Crossing 29, 128
I have been invited to accompany Redhill and Shevkoti to Mareotis. Shevkoti became the village agro upon Ser Mural's death last winter. With Mayor Presby's blessing, we will go upriver and examine the truce near Mareotis, in hopes of learning for ourselves what the problems may be. We have become discouraged about learning from Athenai in time to prepare Moonrise for whatever may be happening.
