by Greg Bear
“You make everybody nervous,” I said softly. “Is that what you want?”
“I am a powerful man, Ser Olmy. But I'm not capricious. I've ruled this part of Lamarckia with a steady hand and done well, under the circumstances. Rough times make for rough decisions.”
“At the risk of displeasing you, I'd like to describe what I saw upriver from Calcutta.”
Brion turned away with a roll of his eyes. “No doubt some of General Beys's doings,” he said.
“Not one of his successes.”
“I haven't spoken about such things with General Beys,” Brion said.
“You gave him orders to look for resources, to gather children and equipment from undefended villages?”
“I know him well. He is not a monster. I appointed him after the worst famine, after he had lost his children and his wife ... He had no family at all then. He had a look in his eye that told me he would be useful. So little left to live for.”
“I arrived on Lamarckia near a village called Moonrise. Nearly everybody in the village had been killed. They would not agree to give Beys small deposits of ore. I presume Beys wanted to take the ore without working through Lenk ... and that the ore you get here was not sufficient.”
“Are you going to put me through some sort of inquisition? I gave up self-criticism after Caitla died.”
“I just want to pass on this bad memory.”
He blinked slowly. “If you have to.”
I told him about the bodies piled high within the buildings in Moonrise, the implacable soldiers on the flatboats on the Terra Nova, about the trap above Calcutta and the children spilling into the river. I described the expression on the face of the soldier as he methodically and dispassionately fired his rifle from the prow of the flatboat. “He was shooting at everybody. Even at the children in the river.”
“He was frightened out of his wits,” Brion said.
“He was your hand,” I said. “Your killing hand.” My anger had built so suddenly I heard a hissing in my ears, my heart pounded, and I bit my lip until I felt under control again.
Brion had been saying, almost unheard, “I don't understand what you mean. He was a soldier.”
“You made him,” I said, voice low. Salap came forward, concerned. I was putting us in danger. I was the one who should have stayed behind.
But Brion's face was bright, almost cheerful. “Tell me how you think I am responsible for everybody on Lamarckia,” he said. “That's a curious idea.”
“What good does it do your people when you set loose monsters and fools, who kill without need, who destroy what you can't use?”
“I expect better from the Hexamon. Are you sure you're not a pretender?” He chuckled and shook his head.
He was right, of course. I was not expressing myself clearly. “General Beys did nothing to help Naderville or you,” I said. “You have caused people to be killed for no reason. You've opened the gates to old, evil history. You won't be able to close them when Lenk is gone.”
Brion leaned forward, eyes wide and sharp, lips drawn back in a feral grin. “I have thought long and hard about these things, Ser Olmy. What you call ‘old, evil history’ is the growth and maturation of small groups of humans. If Lamarckia were ever populated to the density of Thistledown, we'd behave very differently. Lenk opened the doors to history when he brought us here, four thousand people alone on a huge world. If you want to find the father of that poor bastard on the flatboat, don't look to me ... Look to Lenk.”
He waved his hand then, and Frick hastened us back to the benches amidships, under the canopy, telling some inane story about how many celebrations there had been when the food on the flatboats first began arriving.
A light shower fell as evening set in. Brion stayed out in the wet, staring at the northern bank of the canal, now and then wiping the rain from his face with a measured and exactly duplicated swipe of his hand.
The steward, a man whose qualifications were efficiency, quiet reserve, and such a presence that he would fade from memory and pass unnoticed, served a dark sweet beer and cold cakes with a tangy syrup. He switched the lights on around the boat. We kept to the center of the canal, the motors humming and pushing us along at seven or eight knots, the boat a small spot of light in fixed and endless obscurity.
Brion came back to the seats beneath the canopy, dripping and soaked, his hair hanging dark and shiny, and accepted a towel from the steward.
“I'm no monster,” he said.
“I'm no monster,” he repeated after he sat, hoisting the glass of sweet beer. “I did not come here to impose a single mind's philosophy on strangeness and wonder. I did not convince four thousand people that my every word was truth and that the world they had grown up in, that had shaped their thought, was an evil place full of evil schemes that had to be escaped from.”
“You blame all this on Lenk,” I said. “Even what you do, or order done.” Frick sank back into a shadowy corner. Salap murmured that this discussion was useless.
But Brion flared. “Do you know how this all began, Ser Olmy? Has anyone discovered my little personal bit of history in Lenk's private domain? Caitla and I loved each other from a very young age. We went to Athenai as Lenk school teachers, and were privileged enough to meet with Lenk himself, Good Lenk, Able Lenk. Lenk became enamored of Caitla and her sister—”
“Ser Brion—” Frick attempted to interrupt. He seemed ready once again to leap overboard.
“This is my story, damn us all,” Brion said, reaching out and pushing against Frick's outstretched hand. “If Ser Olmy is from the Hexamon, then he plays a judge—he must! he cannot do otherwise—for the people I would most like to emulate. I was very young when my parents brought me here—seven years old. I had no choice. Neither did Caitla.”
He leaned back against the rear pad of the bench and glared at me, then cursed under his breath and leaned forward, folding his hands as if in prayer, touching his nose to his thumbs. “Lenk became enamored of Caitla. He paid formal suit to her. He was already married, of course, and she refused him. He would not take her refusal. He was an old and revered man, to us. Hyssha knew we were in love and went to him. He took her ... But that was not enough. He wanted Caitla. Finally, Caitla and I had no choice but to leave Athenai. We could not go anywhere in Lenk's domain without being found and brought back. He would not kill us, no, he was not that kind of monster. But he considered certain things his privilege, his payment for being who he was, what he was to all of his people. He would take a few choice tidbits now and then, to make up for the misery of being a leader, a prophet, almost a god. So we stole a boat and crossed to Hsia, to Godwin. That's how it began, Ser Olmy. Ten years ago.”
Frick closed his eyes and sat across from Brion, trembling as if with his own grief.
“We grew up in Lamarckia. To me when I was young it seemed a rich and wonderful world that did not actively fight us, but did not accept us, either. I learned early that we are not part of the flesh of this living place. We have suffered and died because we stood between two philosophies—to make this place ours, and make it fit our rules, and to let it develop as if we never existed. Lenk ... could not decide.” He stared at me, the whites of his eyes prominent.
“What have you decided?” I asked.
“I am all for Lamarckia,” Brion said. “Yet I have fought against it, ordered its tissue ripped away and the land exposed for human farms making human food—and when the crops died, tried to harness the ecos, to fit my people in to what was available ... And still we starved. Because I loved my people, I profaned this continent, as others had before me. Until I learned another way.
“I did not bow down to Lenk, would not surrender my wife to him, so he let my people die without lifting a finger.”
“He claims you did not ask for help,” Salap said.
This finally drew out Brion's full fury. He turned to Salap, face twisted, cheeks red, with red spots and a vein standing out on his forehead. “Dear Fate and Breath, I told him all that was h
appening! I had responsibilities. I asked for his help despite my hatred. There were no secrets between us about how my people suffered!”
Salap remained cool as ice. His thin black mustache barely twitched at one corner. “Whether Ser Olmy is here to judge us or not, I expressly do not judge, and I have been sequestered from politics for so long I am clearly out of touch.”
Brion stared between us with a wild, despairing expression for long, painful seconds. Then his expression returned to alert calm with a speed that could be explained only by great skill, or the presence of a deep chasm in his emotions, a kind of fault-line through his being. I had seen the ability in other leaders, to assume masks so often and with such conviction even they could not know their true feelings. Self-truth is a luxury leaders can seldom afford, or perhaps tolerate. But in Brion, the talent had become something more, even an illness.
I had Brion's measure now. He was not a great man, not even in the impure sense of prompting or guiding great events. He was a man of small, specific talents. And he had been badly scarred. Whether he told us the truth, I could not judge, but the pain was real.
“Lamarckia is about to flower,” he said softly. “Caitla and I did that, at least. And when it does, what place will she give us, what place can we have?”
The countryside covered by thicket, the black or purplish edges of which rose along the sides of the canal like topiary walls, came to an end as the boat pushed into morning. I awoke having dreamed of a hall and the unpleasant door again, to the smell of cakes sizzling in a pan, and something else pungent and herbal, like fresh hot tar mixed with black tea, molasses with roses, spruce gum with the scent of new-mown grass—a perfume I have not since been able to replicate either in life or memory: the smell of the living palaces of the great seed-mothers of all Hsia.
We had come into a huge fresh-water inland sea or lake, the southern and eastern shores lost beyond the horizon, the northern close by, perhaps two kilometers off. The waves lapped crystal blue around the boat, and from the shore—a brilliant green shore, low and flat, covered with immense tapering green stalks like the shoots of young plants but without leaves—came a windy, shooshing, trilling sound, as alien as anything I ever heard on Lamarckia.
“Earth was a green world,” Nimzhian had said on Martha's Island. Nowhere on Lamarckia had there ever been this immensity of green.
Brion stood on the bow, caught half-dressed and transfixed by the sight. Salap calmly washed his face in the lake water, glancing up at me as I put on my shirt and accepted a cup of yeasty broth from the steward.
“Look at all she's done!” Brion called out. “It's been only three months, and how many thousands of hectares she's changed!”
Salap stood beside me forward of the single metal tree and stared at the shore, eyes narrowed. The steward brought a tray of cakes forward and offered them. Frick leaned on the canopy. A light wind blew through his hair, his white shirt hung open beneath his faded rose-colored vest, and he grinned as if drunk.
“How do you claim to have done this?” Salap asked Brion.
“I don't just claim it,” Brion said. “I know the truth, because after she made the ones in our own shape, and we showed her where she had gone wrong ... After she made the food we could eat and filtered from her ground the ores and placed them where we could gather them, I paid her back. I have studied her for years, and I knew her weakness, her inefficiency.” He stared at Salap, eyes blinking rapidly.
“What did you give her?” Salap asked.
“What is she?” I asked simultaneously.
Brion shook his head, plainly awed and even a little frightened by what he saw on the shore. He scrambled aft and grabbed a cake from Frick's tray, gobbling it like a hungry child.
“More than I could have imagined,” he said. “Forget trying to replace our dead children. Forget trying to teach her scions to speak. None of that meant anything to her. She did not understand. She could imitate, but she could not understand. It was our bottle that she took and gloried in.”
“We don't understand,” Salap said patiently.
“I distilled it and purified it from weeds in a pond outside our sleeping quarters. Decorative weeds Lenk brought from Thistledown, lovely simple things. Easy to isolate what she needed and present it to her in a bottle, concentrated, unmistakable.”
“Chlorophyll,” Salap said.
Brion smiled. “Lamarckia's weakness,” he said, crumbs falling from his mouth. “Not just chlorophyll, but the chloroplasts, the whole intricate photosynthetic structures of our plants, isolated and in context. Starches and sugars and the entire cycle, all in a bottle. And she understood. She gave us the experiments you saw in Naderville. Caitla's garden. The cleansing airborne phytids. More food. I could have signaled Beys to return home, because I knew then that we had won. We would be able to feed our people and make machines and create our little enclave ... We did not need anybody else.”
“But you didn't call him back,” I said.
“No. Caitla said we had to be true to our promise. We had to look for you, Ser Olmy, the agent or agents of the Hexamon, and we had to bring Lenk low, to make it clear that humans could not survive here. And then we would leave Lamarckia with the gift we had given her.”
“You keep mentioning a she. Who or what is she?” I asked again. “The seed-mother, the queen?”
Brion pointed to the east. Above a blue horizon haze, we saw seven huge black trunks or towers rising inland. Each was at least four or five hundred meters tall, and seventy to a hundred meters across at the base. “I don't know what she is, exactly. What part she is, with a new shape, I mean ... Or whether she's something completely new. She may not have even been created yet. But we will know her when we see her.”
Brion turned toward Salap and me. His eyes wavered between us, then fixed on me with a look of both determination and desperation. “The Hexamon must come and take us back. She has what she needs. No other ecos can challenge her now.”
The pilot pulled the boat into a narrow inlet that curved east and then north from the shore of the lake. We motored quietly between dense walls of intense blue-green growth, broad fernlike leaves with water glistening on the myriad tips, thin helical stalks corkscrewing through the growth and rising dozens of meters above this moving, shuddering mass, the immense green stalks or shoots we had seen from the distance, sprouts the size of giant sequoias. Salap wore an expression I had not seen on him even when we found the homunculi on Martha's Island: baffled wonderment. “It is a new silva,” he said. “Everything is different.”
The late-morning light reflected from this new ebullience of green made us all look like creatures swimming in ocean shallows. Brion's pale skin in particular took on a greenish cast. He crouched on the bow, elbows on his knees, fingers straightening and folding like spider's legs, and licked his lips constantly.
“I hope we can find the landing,” he called back. “It's not far now ... I hope she hasn't knocked it down in her enthusiasm.”
The scions in the vivarium had imitated specific varieties of terrestrial plant life. Here, the imitation was superficial or parallel. Clearly, whatever controlled the new growth was starting from simple beginnings and creating new plans and schemes at a prodigious rate.
Shadows passed overhead: immense balloons trailing long black cables passed over the new silva, their undersides festooned with lacework baskets filled with green balls the size of my fist. The cables curled and danced over the silva, touching down, contracting, pulling the balloon in one direction, and then another cable jerking it at a thirty or forty degree angle in another direction. The balloons traveled at five or six knots, and three passed over us before we reached the landing Brion was searching for.
The pilot worked the boat carefully back and forth to bump against the tip of the xyla dock, which had almost been overgrown. Brion jumped onto the dock and lifted his arms. A thick tangle of fernlike leaves and yellow-green stalks curled up and parted at his feet like grass rolled in a ma
n's palm.
“She remembers?” Brion said. “Come on. It's a brisk walk from here—three kilometers to the towers.”
The crew of the boat and Brion's guards would not be coming with us. They seemed relieved.
Frick took several bags of food and four canteens from the steward, who looked at the teeming silva nervously. Before we stepped off the boat, Frick pulled a slate from his pocket and unfolded it, then gestured for Salap and me to look at the screen. A dark-haired woman, somber and coldly beautiful, with a distinct resemblance to Hyssha, looked back at us with skeptical eyes. “This was Caitla,” he said softly. Then he nodded for us to proceed.
Brion plunged through the parting growth with manic energy, like a boat plowing its own wake in reversed time. After several minutes we could not see him, but followed on his path through the new silva. Salap asked Frick, “How does he know which direction to go?”
“It's making a trail. It shows us where to go,” Frick said, sweating in the humid heat. I caught a faint whiff of sulfur—more volcanic activity. Every few dozen meters, we passed through a kind of clearing where the new green scions clung low to the ground, and we could see the towers. They were hung with a thick pelt of creepers and growths not green, but purple or black. We made steady if not beeline progress toward them.
Another dark balloon jerked and glided overhead, bearing its cargo to the west.
“It experiments with the new green forms,” Salap said, “but keeps its central parts unchanged.” He pointed to the towers. “Is he taking us there?” he asked Frick.
Frick nodded. “I've been here with them five times,” he said. “It's never looked like this.”
After fifteen minutes of steady walking, we caught sight of Brion. He stood facing north at the top of a hill rising ten meters above the level ground, covered with a knee-deep tangle of long green creepers little thicker than strings. He turned to call down the slope to us, “You can see what she's up to. You can see the whole plan from here.”
We climbed the hill and stood beside him. The smell of the creepers, pressed against our shoes, was intensely fruity, and tiny puffs of red dust shot up above our knees. On a level now with most of the new silva—only the immense green shoots rose higher than the hill—we saw a spreading carpet of intense blue-green, banded with concentric loops of lighter yellow-green. We could see the edge of the growth to the north, and a boundary between old silva and new—green supplanting brown, black, and purple thicket. Across the ecoscape, emerging from between the seven pillars, an effervescence of hundreds of black and purple and red transporter balloons tugged and drifted to the outer perimeters, replacing dying scions from the air with new green growths.
