by Greg Bear
Salap stirred on the bunk above me. He descended the ladder. “It feels like morning to me,” he said. “I feel like a damned soil tender, walled up in here.” At the bottom, he straightened his black robe and ran his hand through his hair, then went to the wash basin and splashed water on his face.
Randall swung his legs over the edge of his bottom bunk and stretched. “What do you think they're up to?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Salap said. “I refuse to be surprised.”
Randall turned his gaze to me. “Anything you can do that will surprise us?” he asked.
“I don't think so,” I said.
“How are you any different from Mansur or me?” he asked.
“I've never claimed to be different.”
“You were all they could send—a scout, to check out the territory? And nobody after you?”
“I assume that's what's happened.”
Salap stood with one hand braced against the brick wall.
Randall looked up at the wall, eyes moist. “All these decades we've been waiting like children for someone to rescue us from our own stupidity. And all the Hexamon sends is one man.”
“A mortal, like us,” Salap murmured.
“Both of you were Adventists?” I asked.
Salap nodded. Randall said, “I sympathized, but I knew which side to stick with.”
Salap smiled like a devil that understands human nature only too well. “Do you think Ser Shatro was listening, on the raft?”
“Apparently,” I said.
“It might have been better if you had just told the first person you met who you were,” Randall said.
“The first person I met was Larisa Strik-Cachemou,” I said. “It didn't seem a good idea at the time.”
22
The boat waited beside the ministerial dock on the canal, its two-man crew dressed in immaculate white. The boat was ten meters long, made of white-painted xyla with a single metal tree amidships, on which flew a gray flag with a central white spot. Two electric motors waited beneath a bare metal compartment at the rear. A white canopy ahead of the tree shaded a square of padded benches, sunken below deck level. Forward of the canopy, a small cabin and galley waited to serve Brion and his guests.
Salap and I walked down the dock and boarded the boat, escorted by our guards. Randall had not been invited.
What made Brion different—more like Lenk than like any leaders on Thistledown—was his apparent role as the figurehead in a cult of personality. Leaders on Thistledown generally ruled like bureaucratic administrators—hence the unglamorous titles of their higher offices. Brion was a tribal ruler, given unlimited discretion by his people, but with limited resources and limited numbers of people to rule. Understanding him, knowing what to say and to anticipate, could save our lives. I hoped Salap was thinking along similar lines, and I was glad Randall was not accompanying us. Randall had had enough of Naderville and Lenk and Fassid and the mess of Lamarckia's human world-lines. He might not care what would trigger Brion's anger.
Brion arrived several minutes later, with four armed soldiers and a lithe brown man with spiky, short-cut black hair. Brion seemed anxious. “This is Ser Frick,” Brion said. “He's been with me for many years, since I came to Godwin.”
We introduced ourselves as if we were going on a social cruise, then settled on the padded seats, and our guards and three of the armed men returned to the dock.
Brion wore gloves, khaki-colored pants, and a dark brown shirt. In one hand he carried a piece of string wrapped tightly around his index finger.
Frick wore a thin, loose black coat, faded rose-colored vest, and baggy dark brown pants. “The weather's going to be warm up the canal today,” Frick said, settling into the bench seat. “She's been keeping it warm for weeks.”
Brion nodded and stared across the canal at the opposite shore, one eyebrow raised. He wound and unwound his string.
“How long is this trip?” Salap asked.
“Two days up, two days back,” Frick said.
The pilot switched on the electric motors and the boat pushed out into the stream, which flowed west from the interior of Hsia.
“That woman is awful,” Brion said a few minutes later, lifting his chin from his hand and sitting straight on the seat.
“Which woman?” Salap asked.
“Fassid. We had a bad discussion this morning, very unfair. I explained my position yesterday very well, I think, telling them I could do little more even if we negotiated for months. They asked me again to keep General Beys and his soldiers here, and I told them I was unable to do that.”
“Beys kidnapped children and slaughtered villagers,” I said.
“I do not defend all of his actions, but he is much too useful for me to just recall him. He's a thorn in Lenk's side.” Brion would not meet my eye, but his face went through a spectrum of twitches and half frowns as he gazed across the river. “I doubt I would defend my own actions, if you decided to challenge me in a Hexamon court,” he continued.
Salap sat like a patient cat, face relaxed but eyes alert. We both knew these men could order the crew to kill us and throw us into the canal at any moment, and there would be few if any repercussions.
Clouds moved in above the canal and surrounding thicket-silva. The dark cliffs of arborid growth declined to heights of less than a dozen meters as the boat pushed up the canal, and broad areas had been burned and cleared for farms. The open fields of chalky rubble beneath the thickets had apparently yielded little in the way of crops, however, and the land seemed to have been abandoned, leaving sad, naked scars along the canal.
A white-jacketed steward stooped out of the forward cabin and served us glasses of water and slices of sweet green melonlike fruit. Frick persisted in asking for details on Thistledown as we ate.
“What's it like there now? I've tried to grasp the possibility of time lags in the geometry stacks ... How many years have passed there, since we left?”
I saw no reason to dissemble. “About five years, Way time.”
Frick's face fell. “That's all? I've spent my whole life here and I'm less than five years old...”
“No one understood what we would be facing, least of all Lenk,” Brion said.
“I think Able Lenk recognizes his mistakes,” Salap said softly. “It is too late to wallow in accusations and recriminations.”
“If we judge who will lead, and who will prevail when major decisions have to be made,” Brion said, “surely we must judge. Mistakes matter.”
“Lenk regrets not sending more help to you,” Salap said.
Brion's eyes narrowed to slits and his lips curled with contempt. “It was a policy, not an oversight. First Godwin, and then Naderville, was an affront to his legitimacy, to his record.”
“I am concerned with what you are going to show us,” Salap said. “I am less concerned with how you and Lenk disagree, or who is going to overcome whom.”
“I appreciate your bluntness,” Brion said. “It's what I expected of you, Ser Salap. So few people care to speak directly to me. I'm treated like a willful child. I'm not all that temperamental.” He seemed to relax. “I don't worry about my mistakes with Lenk, or the mistakes of my predecessors. Though they truly established our isolation before I ever arrived ... But perhaps you're right. There's no end to that kind of recrimination. Lenk is no saint. No saint at all.”
I quelled the urge to ask about the orders given to General Beys, and whether there would ever be an accounting and reckoning for him. However well Brion took Salap's words, he might react quite differently to mine.
The steward laid out breads and small, bluish grapelike fruit on a tray.
“We have fundamentally misunderstood this planet,” Brion said. “I'm as much to blame as anyone. We looked at it with blinkered eyes, expecting simple relationships between simple organisms, however large. We thought in terms of central authorities, self-aware intelligence or personality. There has been neither self-awareness nor personali
ty on Lamarckia. There has been vital direction, order, and of course change. Sometimes frantic change. But not what we could call a self.”
“What were your mistakes?” Salap asked after a moment of silence. I wondered if perhaps Salap had not been such a fortunate choice after all. Randall might have shown more discretion. I hoped he knew what he was after, and what it might cost us.
“I was grieving,” Brion said. “I was not rational. I felt I had no friends on this world, except for the land, the ecos. I felt very close to it. I still do. My greatest mistake.”
“Why grieving?” I asked.
“Caitla died,” Brion said. “My wife. Hyssha's sister. We were born in the same triad family on Elizabeth's Land, grew up together, lived together practically all our lives. We were the first to travel to the head of the canal. I depended on her.”
Frick, out of Brion's view, lifted his fingers to his lips and shook his head slowly, warning us away from these topics for now.
I suddenly cared little for Lamarckia's secrets, as if Brion's interest and passion had tainted them.
Hour after hour, kilometer after kilometer, the canal threaded due east into Hsia's interior with a series of barely perceptible bends and jogs, faint curves on its steady journey. The waters, Brion said, had been flowing here for at least ten million years; the canal and the hundreds of branch canals that drew from these waters, suffusing them into the inland reaches like blood into tissue, had once been parts of a natural river system, but had been adapted by the ecos to its own purposes.
“Until recently, these waters carried replacement scions in floating clusters, like rafts,” Brion said. “The canal was thick with them.”
The waters flowed clear and empty.
“What happened to them?” Salap asked.
“They stopped coming down about a month ago. Something's going on, perhaps a fluxing. I haven't been up the canal to the Valley of Dawn in several months ... I left Caitla there, and ... I suppose I didn't have the courage to return. Besides, preparing for Lenk's visit has distracted me. Now that he's here, I wonder why I've worked so hard.”
Frick tried to change the subject, to steer him back to affairs in Thistledown, anything to keep Brion occupied and his mind off this subject, but the small man gravitated back to it.
“I've become lonely without my wife.” His face went blank as he stared in my direction. “Being with her is a different kind of loneliness.”
“Your wife?” Salap asked, puzzled.
Frick's face went pale.
“No,” Brion said distantly. “Caitla died.”
“I'm most curious about the current Nexus's attitude toward Lamarckia,” Frick said, fidgeting on the bench. Brion turned to him, his large liquid green eyes filled with hurt as if Frick had somehow insulted him. Frick's jitters became serious. For a moment I thought he might suddenly spring out of the boat.
Brion looked away from Frick, and his eyes focused on mine.
“I get very dark, thinking about it,” he said. “It makes me feel so inferior. And I've worked hard to earn this pride. I've taken the wreck I found in Godwin, and patched it, and steered it through bad storms. It's a miracle any of us are alive—and no thanks to Lenk.
“I should be free to have my pride, but she's taken it from me. I'm sure she has. The canal's been empty for weeks now.”
Salap gave me a lidded, dubious look. Conversation lapsed, much to Frick's relief.
The sun emerged from behind clouds and the air became thick and humid. We had passed the barren gaps of old farmland. Along the shore, the black cliffs of the thickets towered thirty and forty meters above the canal, and the water echoed and splashed as it raced down side tunnels like so many swallowing throats.
The steward laid out padded sleeping mats on the deck and we slept under the double arc of stars. I stared up at the stars through a thin night haze over the canal, wondering if I would dream again when I slept.
My mother would recognize me now. Helpless, mortal, sleeping, and with dreams.
The canal water lapped at the hull of the boat, lulling me. Toward the bow, Brion and Frick slept, one of them snoring faintly. Salap lay on top of the cabin. If he slept, he did not snore.
“Unless you know where you are, you don't know who you are.”
I began to know where I was.
We awoke in a golden fog. The mist-thick morning air burned gold over the canal. The steward brought a hot, yeasty decoction in a silver pot and poured it into cups, then served warm, crisp cakes for breakfast. We sat beneath the canopy as the fog burned off, all but Brion, who kept to himself near the bow.
Frick chatted lightly about incidentals, filling the time with stories of trivial social events surrounding Brion. I did not find his stories amusing, but what he said filled the time and offended no one.
My butt became sore with sitting. I stood and walked aft, standing near the stern to watch our wake in the empty water.
On the shores of the canal, the thickets became gnarled, their black clipped edges turning light purple and irregular, lumpy. Only once did I see something moving through the branches, like a huge brown earthworm. Salap came aft to sit beside me as the hours passed into evening.
“The captain and I studied this coast years ago,” he said. “Though we never went up this canal, or even as far as the lake. Within the thickets, there are many dozens of types of scions. That was back when Lenk was trying to romance the women who ran things in Godwin. Bring them back into the fold ... But I don't see much scion activity now. Perhaps Brion is right, and some sort of fluxing is imminent.”
“Are you sure there's no other ecoi on Hsia?” I asked.
“None that have been discovered. This one is old, old, perhaps older than any other on Lamarckia. Baker thought it might be the ancestor of all ecoi. I believe it covers the entire continent.”
That afternoon, we passed a large flatboat loaded with mounds of dark, fine dirt—some sort of ore. Brion sat on the bow with knees drawn up and watched it pass down the canal. Several bare-chested men on the flatboat waved cheerfully, and Brion waved back once. He said to Frick, “A lighter haul again. She's not piling it up like she used to.”
Salap squatted beside me and frowned. “Who is this ‘she’ he keeps talking about?” he whispered. “What does ‘she’ have to do with piles of dirt? I'm sick of mystery.”
“It's his show,” I said, and thought of the Fishless Sea and its mystery attraction.
As evening came, we passed another flatboat, half loaded with piles of brown and red logs like stacked sausages.
“Food,” Frick said. “More than we could ever hope to grow ourselves.” But something bothered him about the boat, and he went forward to stoop beside Brion. They talked in whispers for a while, and Brion became agitated, finally waving Frick away.
Ahead, the canal broadened into a small lake. All around the lake shore, long dark structures like huge cocoons, with fibrous gray walls, protruded halfway into the water. Between the cocoons lay flat open spaces, and offshore from one of these spaces, a floating crane with a shovel attachment was busily clearing four mounds of ore and loading them into a third flatboat. The ore lay in diminishing piles in a clearing that might have once held a dozen or more mounds of similar size.
“Are you curious?” Brion called back to us.
“Very curious,” Salap answered.
“Let it build, let it build,” Brion said. “It's seldom I have so many intelligent witnesses. Allow me a little drama.”
Salap tapped his fingertips on the rear gunwale, head lowered. “Pity us, Ser Olmy. Lenk has always behaved like one kind of child. Brion is another.”
There had been a maxim in Thistledown political science classes: that the governed shaped their governors. This was not quite the same as saying that the people got the government they deserved, but it pointed in that direction. What galled me was the pain and suffering of the innocent, those too young to make a choice, those born on Lamarckia.
But Brion had been one of those, too.
“If I had been a scientist on the Thistledown, or in the Way,” Salap said, “how many more intelligent, more capable men and women would stand ahead of me, occupying the finest positions, making the greatest discoveries?”
“So?” I asked, puzzled.
“I know myself, Ser Olmy. I am one of the most intelligent people on this planet.”
“And that worries you,” I said.
“It terrifies me. I long for my superiors.” He peered across the calm waters at the shores of this strange lake. “Who mines the ore? Where does it come from?”
“She does,” I suggested. “His dead wife, Caitla.”
Salap mused, “We are in a land of dreams, Ser Olmy.”
The lake passed behind, the canal narrowed and deepened, and we saw no more flatboats, or any other boats at all. The pilot pushed us against the slow steady waters, the electric motors humming, the screws leaving a shimmering wake behind, set with jewels of fire from the westering sun. The sunset light made Salap a gilded pirate. We said little to each other.
I think both of us expected to die soon; either Brion's premonitions of change would be true, and the change, whatever it was, would kill us, or Brion himself would change and kill us...
Our chances seemed slim.
I thought often of Shirla, and hoped she was being treated well, but in truth, all the people we had left behind—dead or alive—seemed to retreat in memory as well as time. My universe narrowed to the boat, the canal, Salap, and Brion. All others—even Frick and the boat's crew—were supernumeraries.
Frick crept aft often enough and spoke to us. He seemed even more acutely aware of his mortality. His nervous chatter became an irritation, and was seldom informative. He would not answer direct questions, deferring instead to Brion, who sat near the bow like a sad, unappeasable monkey.
Before our dinner was served, I walked forward and stood beside him. I was catching some of Salap's attitude and feeling impatient, even reckless. He peered up at me expectantly.
