by Greg Bear
He stared at us with a wry smile. “I do not sleep the night through. That leaves me with far too much time to think. But Allrica, Ser Salap seems to have something he wants to tell us...”
“Can it wait?” Allrica asked Salap, eyes flashing a challenge.
“I would prefer to speak now,” Salap said calmly.
“So important?”
“We believe so.”
“What is it?” Lenk asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees, clasping his hands.
I glanced at Shirla and Shatro. Shatro seemed lost in his own thoughts, staring at the richly woven carpet on the floor. I wondered about his quiet concentration.
Shirla appeared out of her depth, frightened by the social altitude, yet fully alert.
Salap told them what we had found on Martha's Island, concluding with the loss of all our specimens in the storm. Allrica's lips pressed together until they formed a grim straight line. Lenk's shoulders hunched around his neck.
“Dear God,” Lenk said. He gave no sign of either believing or disbelieving.
“That doesn't make sense,” Fassid said, though without conviction. Keo and Ferrier stood in silence, as if absorbing news of the death of a loved one.
“It is true, whatever we wish to believe,” Salap said.
“Some misinterpretation ... Remains of humans, not scions,” Fassid murmured. “You said three vanished from the Jiddermeyer expedition ... and her husband's body was exhumed and carried off by ... scions.”
Salap shook his head, and Randall finally spoke. “The captain and I saw them. They were not the remains of humans, and they were real. Are real. There may still be specimens on Martha's Island.”
“We all saw them,” Shatro spoke up, still staring at the carpet.
“Another expedition,” Fassid huffed. “The captain pressed us hard for years ... Now after hearing this, we're to start all over again. This sounds much like Brion's idiocy.”
Salap let this pass without reacting. Randall edged forward on his seat, but Salap touched his arm and he remained silent.
“We'll be in Naderville in two days,” Lenk said softly. He stood and Ferrier and Fassid each took an arm, helping him toward the door to his sleeping quarters. Ferrier opened the door, and Lenk turned to Salap before passing through. “Was I mistaken to bring us here? Are we to be rejected like a plague by the entire world?”
No one spoke. Fassid saw him through the door, and Ferrier accompanied him. Then she turned to us and her eyes drilled into Salap. “How dare you,” she spat. “How dare you bring us such nonsense for your own political gain!”
Salap's eyes became hooded and dangerous and he gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles whitened.
“This wonderful man has the weight of the entire planet on his shoulders, and you bring him ghost stories! All to maintain your beloved scientific stature!”
Randall sat up, his voice harsh in the small cabin. “Ser Fassid, you're very mistaken—”
Fassid pushed her hands out in disgust and turned away. Keo seemed in an agony, caught between supporting Fassid and remaining a genial host.
Randall squared off with her in the middle of the cabin. “I have had enough of ships and the sea for a lifetime. I will gladly retire to Jakarta or Calcutta, or Naderville, if it comes to that ... But that will not stop the truth of what we saw.
“You opposed all our research out of ignorance and devotion to some faded philosophy that has served none of us well,” Randall continued, his words sharpening to hisses or dropping to growls. “Captain Keyser-Bach debated you over and over, hoping to find some shred of sense. You have poorly advised Good Lenk, Ser Fassid. And if you continue to play the fool, I will bring you low.”
The grim pronouncement carried an element of comic opera, but it was heartfelt.
Fassid's eyes seemed lost in shadow. “There's no time for this,” she said smoothly. “Whatever happens in the next few days may bring us all low. Compared to General Beys, your threats are small rain.” She walked around Keo and left through the port side door.
Randall took a deep breath and looked at Keo as if he had a little more anger to vent should anyone want to challenge him. Keo raised his hands. “I think we should all rest,” he said. “It's been very tense.”
“I'm sure it has,” Salap said, taking Randall's elbow. Randall took a deep breath, stared around the room, and lowered his head. “Let's go.”
We retired to our own cabins.
Randall joined Shirla and me on the deck the next morning to survey the ships and the surrounding waters. The weather was calm, the ocean smooth. “Salap's asked for notebooks. He's preparing a full report for Lenk,” Randall said. He shook his head sadly. “I should have kept my mouth shut. I've just made us a stronger enemy.”
16
Hsia became a dark line on the horizon early in the morning, half obscured by thick patches of cloud heavy with rain. As the four ships drew closer to land, we were hit by several squalls, and with their passing, Khoragos and Cow took advantage of a fresh, vigorous wind, set their sails, and cast loose of the steamships.
Ten miles out, all four ships were met by three fast sloops. One carried two pilots for our schooners, and they boarded to guide us into the harbor. Our pilot took his post by the wheel and gave quick, precise orders.
I knew their type. Young, earnest, nervous, terribly afraid of making a mistake. They had been raised under harsh conditions, I guessed, in a society pushed to the very edge.
Shirla stayed by my side. “I don't like it,” she said. “The steamships, the crews, the pilots ... They all look stiff.”
The clouds blew south. Lenk's ships put on a glorious show, sails brilliant white in the morning sun, and even pulled ahead of the steamships for a time, until the pilots ordered us to furl our sails.
Us. Our. I had taken sides in this dispute. Perhaps from the moment I arrived and saw the slaughter at Moonrise, I could not be objective. The more I saw, the firmer my commitment became. Yet I could not simply dump all my objectivity. I owed nothing to anyone but the Hexamon, and all of these people were equally in violation...
The coast of Hsia was painted by bright sun. From the sea, the shore had appeared deep brown, spotted with red and dark purple. Now, from less than two miles, Hsia's zone showed itself as a forbidding hedgerow tangle fifty or sixty meters high, dark and uniform, its upper surface covered with leathery growths that screened all sun from the ground below. The dark thicket stretched back to far mountains topped by white clouds.
Baker had believed that Hsia was older than most other ecoi, and had developed early in the biosphere's history, before oxygen had reached current levels. The leathery covering on the hedgerow silva might have protected against ultraviolet light, which penetrated the atmosphere easily before the buildup of an ozone layer.
I thought of the immigrants surveying Lamarckia from the hastily opened gate, trying to pick the best place to settle, choosing Elizabeth's Land because it most resembled an Earth landscape, even though the colors were wrong.
Salap came on deck, notebook under his arm, and looked at the coastline, black hair tossed by the wind. He squinted and pointed a long finger. “It is like this everywhere on the continent,” he said. “Dreary. A terrible place to settle. Hoagland's followers had to hack their way in, do without sun for months at a time, live like beasts in a cave. Still, for all that, they founded a city.”
Naderville was smaller than Calcutta; even now, according to the best guesses, it contained less than four thousand citizens. I had to adjust my sense of scale to regard such a limited population as a military force to be reckoned with.
Shirla and I sat near the bow, a little awkward that there was no work for us to do. The habit of the sea had gotten into her more than into me, and the nervousness of being on a ship and not working made her open up as she never had before. She told me about her family in Jakarta—actually, in a little village called Resorna at the tip of a spit of land five miles south of Jakarta.
The past did not come out of her easily, and she frequently had to pause, eyebrows drawn in concentration, not because her memory was faulty, but because she had expended so much effort to forget the hard times.
During the fluxing, when she was a young girl, her family had taken her from Calcutta and traveled with a dozen other families to Jakarta, in Petain's Zone, where edible phytids grew in more abundance, and where some land had sufficient natural minerals and was easily cleared for farming. The winters in Jakarta were always mild, but there had still been hardship. Petain's Zone had prepared itself for some onslaught by the newly united zones, and most of its scions—arborids, phytids, and mobile types alike—had coated themselves with waxy armor and gone dormant for three months.
“We had enough food from our own crops, by then,” Shirla said. “But I was scared. My brothers and I kept a pet scion, a dipper, and I found it sealed up on the porch in front of our house one morning. The next day it was gone. It had broken its rope somehow ... It had never done that before. Then, Petain returned to normal. I guess it decided Elizabeth wasn't going to attack.”
She told about her family: uncles and aunts, first father and first mother—her biological parents—and her second father, and second mother, who had no children of their own and treated her and her brothers with doting kindness. She remembered no third set of parents. That made sense; triad families, designed by a society where children seldom numbered more than two to a set of parents, became unwieldy when there were six or seven children to each mother and father. She was lucky, she said, to have had a second set, though she felt sorry for them, not having biological children.
She talked about several women in her village coming down with an odd malfunction, not exactly a disease; some sort of immune challenge that caused their ovaries to become inflamed. Several had had to have their ovaries removed. “The rest were fortunate,” she said. “They kept their ovaries.” That seemed to her more important in a way than their survival.
Something had changed in the divaricates on their arrival in Lamarckia. Lenk had encouraged new births, of course. But divaricates had generally had no more children on Thistledown than other Naderites, no more even than most Geshels. On Lamarckia, having children had become a ruling passion, as if some hidden drive had been awakened, and the human race—isolated as this weak little seed on a huge world—had needed to spread its limbs and foliage far and wide once more.
The ships were guided into Naderville's harbor in the early afternoon. The city perched on a headland on the northern side of the harbor, its back to a wall of thoroughly tunneled hedgerow thicket; to the south was a natural spit of rock and sand that served as a breakwater.
Naderville looked remarkably like Calcutta, golden and beige and white buildings rising on low hills facing the harbor. On the eastern extension of the headland, however, in the crater of a small extinct volcano, a military encampment had been established some five years before. The Khoragos's physician, Julia Sand, had been to Naderville some years before as part of an abortive diplomatic effort, and explained these features to Shirla and me. Farther inland, the harbor connected with a wide canal, which may have once been a natural river, but had been adapted by the ecos to its own needs.
Sturdy little tugs took us in tow, then pulled us to the western extent of the harbor, and the mouth of the great Hsian canal. I watched the steamships as we drew apart, wondering if I might ever meet General Beys in person.
A sharp, buttery scent mixed with something herbaceous, like oregano, and an undercurrent of tar, blew with the wind from inland. It was not unpleasant, but I thought in time such a smell might grow irritating.
We cruised with great dignity behind the tugs for several miles, then were taken north through a narrow brickwork gate into a small lake. Hills rose on all sides, covered with dark, ancient thicket; on the higher hills, a few small white and sky-blue buildings seemed to clamber up the thickets and perch on top. I could make out holes hacked through the thickets like tunnels where roads might pass; on a bluff at the northern end of the harbor, the thicket had been cleared completely, leaving chalky barren soil and buildings, a watchtower and storage sheds.
Julia Sand had not seen this part of Naderville in her last visit. “It's all new to me,” she said. On one side of the lake, ramps and large drydocks stood, a shipbuilding and repair site now idle.
Randall and Salap came forward to join us. Shatro was still belowdecks. He seemed to be depressed and we had not seen much of him for a day.
“It's a dreary land,” Randall commented.
Salap scanned the small lake and announced, “Three ships. I was expecting many more.”
The three ships in the lake were not even steamships; two were sloops, and one was a catamaran with tattered fore and aft rigged sails hanging on two masts. It was not much of a navy.
“They're all out raiding or keeping a blockade on Jakarta,” Shirla said.
“Perhaps,” Salap said, but he seemed dubious.
The pilots guided us past the empty drydocks, toward a small pier at the northern end of the lake. I estimated there was room for perhaps five or six ships the size of the steamships, no more. That would be a substantial navy on Lamarckia, but there was no way of telling how many steamships had been built. I looked for fuel bunkers—whatever the fuel might be—but could not find any. A few dozen men and women stood on the docks, watching us, but the pier was empty. No formal reception committee awaited Lenk's arrival.
The tugs let us loose. The light breeze was sufficient for our schooners to moor at the pier.
Ferrier and Keo came up on deck dressed in dark gray pants and long black coats, formal wear for a solemn occasion. They surveyed the pier with wounded expressions, like dogs who half expected to be struck. Both shook their heads at the indignity. “This is no way to treat the Good Lenk,” Keo said. “I wonder why we came at all, if they're going to rub our noses in it.”
“It's weakness,” Ferrier said with an edge of anger he had not revealed before.
Keo took his arm and they assumed their positions by the gangway. Lenk came up from below on the stairs, aided by Fassid, who blinked at the bright sunshine. Lenk wore sunglasses. He seemed for a moment to have gone blind, stumbling slightly, smiling, reaching for Fassid. But he removed his sunglasses after a moment and stared at us owlishly, then studied the drydocks south of us, the western shore of the lake, the pier.
Five men and three women stepped out of a gray shed and waited for our ships to maneuver close. Three young men near the bow tossed lines to them, and our ship was pulled in and tied up. All sails were furled.
We waited several minutes. The lake was still and quiet; the silva had not made a sound since our arrival. A single road stretched from the harbor through the hills to a tunnel in the high thicket beyond. It did not look promising.
“Are they expecting us to walk?” Ferrier asked in disgust.
“Intolerable,” Fassid said, but Lenk raised his hand.
“He's feeling his power,” Lenk said. He pressed his teeth together and drew his shoulders up. I thought I saw a brief spark of anger, but it might have been some internal twinge, a sore joint or other infirmity of age. “Let him have that much.”
A reception committee, of sorts, was just now coming down the road. An electric truck passed through the main gate to the harbor and pier, followed by four small electric cars and a wavering line of men and women on bicycles.
Shirla whistled at all the vehicles. “There aren't that many in all of Calcutta,” she said. “Except for tractors.”
What had seemed at first glance, then, to be a paltry show of ceremony, was sufficient to impress the people around me. The gangway was pushed across to the dock and secured. The dockhands arranged along Khoragos's moorage craned their necks curiously, looking for Lenk. Whatever Brion's social changes and political pressures, the citizens of Naderville still expressed an interest in the Good Lenk who had brought them here.
The truck and cars and bicycles
rolled out onto the pier. The truck whined to a stop. The cars parked behind, and the bicyclists, all dressed in gray and brown, braked to a halt around and between them. Everybody paused for several seconds, waiting, and then the doors of the truck opened and a man and a woman got out. The cars’ drivers opened their doors and got out as well. They all wore black, with little round hats pulled tight on their heads like swimming caps.
The man and woman from the truck were dressed in white formal suits. They resembled socialites at an early first-century Thistledown full-dress occasion. Producing a walking stick, the man stood beside the woman, and they advanced together toward the gangway, where they paused. Clearly, they expected our party to disembark now. Up to this point, however, not a word was said on either side. The only voices were those of the crew, arranging the sails and rigging, and even they spoke in hushed tones.
Ferrier and Keo crossed the gangway first and bowed to the man and woman in white, who returned their greetings with slightly reduced bows. Allrica Fassid came next, advancing her hands along the rope guards in nervous arcs, gripping the ropes carefully, as if someone might tip the platform and make her fall into the water between the dock and the ship.
After them came Lenk, marching across to the dock by himself with a good show of assurance and vigor. Five men and four women followed, all wearing green and tan, the colors of Lenk's personal guard. Last of all, three men we had not met—elderly enough to have served Lenk since the immigration—joined the party on the dock, giving and receiving brief bows.
We were not going ashore, apparently. Salap smiled his most philosophical smile and turned back to go below. Randall watched the crew reclaim the gangway and close the gate in the bulwark. “I'll be damned,” he said.
