by Greg Bear
“Come here.”
I stepped up and the tall guard allowed a thin beam of light to play across my face from a slit in his lantern.
“I think he's the one,” the second guard said. “Go inside and find out if anybody wants him.”
29
Hyssha Chung stood in the vivarium, the early dawn casting a blue and indistinct light over her sister's garden. The smell was atrocious—ammonia and still, stale air. All around her, the garden lay in dark tatters. The two guards who escorted me covered their noses with cloths to filter the dust raised by our feet.
“Have you found your gate back to the Way yet?” Chung asked, her voice tired but still acid.
“No,” I said. “I've come back to see where my friends are. A woman named Shirla. And Randall, the scientist who worked with Salap.”
Hyssha said nothing for several seconds, then dismissed the guards with a wave, saying she knew me, and I was no risk.
The guards departed, and we were alone in the tainted stillness.
“You managed to get in here without being killed. That's a kind of magic,” she said.
“I acted stupid and innocent,” I said. “Lost.”
“You may be the only innocent person on this planet,” Chung said. “Innocence is a luxury for outsiders.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I don't want to watch the fighting.”
“Where's Brion?”
“In Naderville. Maybe Beys picked him up. Actually, I don't know where he is. Your woman and your friend Randall ... I think Beys took them with him on the ships.”
I felt sick. “Why?”
“I don't follow Beys closely. We don't like each other much.” She looked around her, staring at the dead garden with lips set in a rigid line. “A balloon transporter dropped a few larval seed-mothers here yesterday. All of Caitla's creations ... dead in hours. The food supply ... gone. Rotted. There's probably very little food anywhere in Naderville by now. The air is filled with instructions from the green seed-mothers ... orders to die and rot in place, to make nutrients for the new forms.”
“You know for sure that Shirla and Randall aren't here?”
“I don't care where they are. We're all going to die, unless Lenk wins and sends us food, or Brion wins and we all sail to Elizabeth's Land or Tasman. She did this to us.” Then, stepping closer and looking into my face, she said, “You hate Brion, don't you?”
“Yes,” I said. The emotions were not so clearly expressed, but to say anything else would have been lying.
“You'd kill him if you could?”
“No,” I said.
“And Beys?”
“I'm not here to kill,” I said.
“You think Brion's weak now, and Beys is going to return and take over completely.”
“He already has, hasn't he?”
Hyssha Chung bit her lip, her eyes filling with tears. “I feel what Caitla would feel,” she said. “Everything wasted, all the suffering and dying. She was devoted to Brion. He loved her very much. But love doesn't excuse us, does it?”
“No.”
“You have judged us, haven't you?”
“Not you,” I said. “I don't know much about you.”
“An accomplice,” she murmured. “Will Lenk take us back with him?”
“I don't know,” I said.
She touched her finger to her cheeks and smeared her tears. “You don't believe in drama, do you? Brion believes in drama, too much, I think. But Beys is like you ... He has your woman and your friend. Maybe he'll be expecting you. Go kill Beys.”
30
Dawn had turned the sky gray-green in the east. The guards stood by the main gate into the old palace, saying nothing, holding their rifles with barrels raised a few degrees above horizontal, as I walked away. I expected a bullet in my back at any moment. The path back through the buildings to the road was deserted. The troops from the Citadel had departed hours ago.
On the Godwin road, heading west, I found two bodies in the barren fields: Broch, lying face down in the dirt, had been shot in the chest and jaw. Youk, the fast young runner, lay on the other side of the road a few meters away, on her back, calm eyes staring at the dusty morning sky. Ahead and behind, the thicket silva made ugly groaning and rattling sounds, settling, throwing up billows of gray dust. The tunnel was a nightmare, dust falling all around in drifts like ash, sections half-collapsed, the air almost unbreathable. I thought I would suffocate before I stumbled out into daylight again. Behind me, the tunnel collapsed and I was surrounded by a thick cloud of acrid powder and ammonia. I closed my eyes and ran clear, then lay gasping on my knees by the road, eyes burning, covered with clinging grime. My skin itched furiously.
I had sent Broch to his death, I had guided Youk and perhaps the others into death, and I did not know if I had accomplished anything. The soldiers had passed through the roads and might be in Naderville even now, fighting Keo's unprepared young men and women. Lenk would lose; Beys would command.
I pictured Shirla already dead, and Randall with her. As I lurched along the road, rubbing the skin on my arms and chest and head, I stopped my scratching long enough to reach up to the skies and shout, “Come take me now! Where are you? Take me now!”
I think I was asking for a gate to open, but I might have been asking to die.
31
Yanosh and I have settled in a secluded district of the Wald. We are eating a midday meal and sharing a bottle of wine. I have paused from my story, trying to keep my composure, even after all these decades and into the full-grown infancy of a new life.
Yanosh fills in for a few minutes with tales of his months as assistant to the presiding minister. Then we drift in silence, and finally, as if to get me going again, he says, “I'm listening.”
This is a part I know I will have great difficulty describing. It has been sixty years and more since that day, by the time of my older body, now abandoned somewhere, all of its history so much useless tissue.
“The town wasn't pretty, was it?” Yanosh asks.
“The ships had destroyed about half of it. The soldiers from the old palace fought their way through the eastern part of town to go north. There was still fighting in the north. The battle between Lenk's troops and the soldiers from the old palace ... quick and bloody. I found Keo, dead, and two of his boys stumbling around through the bodies of their friends. Lenk had not sent reinforcements.”
Yanosh looks off across the green expanses of grass and spherical trees and huge thick vines and long, interwoven tree trunks that form a lacework around the perimeter of the weightless Wald. “Some would say that such destruction is trivial, compared to what's happened between us and the Jarts. There was a time two years ago when we thought they would capture Axis City—”
I shake my head in violent disagreement. “Nothing that fills an eye with horror is trivial. It was on a scale that I could almost get used to it. That horrified me.”
“Lenk had been building weapons for some time, then,” Yanosh says. “In secret.”
“He didn't think Beys or Brion would listen. He made cannons out of cathedral tree limbs, hardened by heating over fire and then steaming. They could only shoot four or five times, but he filled his ships with replacements...” I don't like talking tactics and logistics. That has all become vague and uninteresting to me. When humans set their minds on something, when we are forced into a corner, we can work miracles of destruction.
“Tell me what happened to Shirla. She must have been a fascinating woman.”
“She was simple. When I was with her, I was simple.”
“Tell me,” Yanosh says.
I am back at Naderville again. It is remarkably the same as my first hours in Moonrise. I am back where I began in Lamarckia.
Bodies lay in the streets, men and women, a few children. Brion had valued his citizens, and especially children, so much, needing them for a future on Lamarckia that he later abandoned, and here were so many, wasted, and the bod
ies of Keo and his young men and women lying with them. The fighting had been fierce and Keo had taken many with him.
I walked through the streets weeping, and finally I would not look at the dead. Medical teams—I did not know whether they were Brionists or civilians—had set up camps in the center of town, at the base of a low hill, and I carried a few injured people there from the blocks nearby that had been shelled into utter rubble. Nobody asked who I was or where my sympathies lay.
Naderville was finished. Brion's political movement was at an end. All around the city, the silva was turning gray and crumbling. The great dark thickets were collapsing, roads were being cut off by falling debris, balloons were dropping their cargo and some had even fallen in the rubble of the town.
I had to go where the fighting was. I heard shots and more cannon fire to the north, so after doing what little I could at the eastern end of town, I walked north.
Empty buildings, shattered houses and markets, warehouses, the ruins of the administration building, I passed them all, my thoughts clearing again. From the top of the western hill, I looked across the harbor and saw one steamship coming around the western headland, leaving a trail of gray smoke. Most of Lenk's ships had left the harbor. Only four remained, and they immediately fired broadsides on the steamship. Several shells made direct hits. The steamship's guns were still active, however, and it closed.
The big guns boomed once, and the direct hit on the southernmost of Lenk's vessels broke the ship in half.
The remaining three ships had reloaded and fired again. The steamship took two more hits and for a few minutes, it slowed and followed a gentle curve to the middle of the harbor. My heart rose; I hoped it was disabled. But again the guns fired, fore and aft, and two more ships took large shells, one in the middle, one forward, blowing the bow off.
One ship remained. I did not want to see any more, but I could not leave. There was an even chance that Shirla and Randall were aboard the steamship, that they had already been injured or killed by the cannon shells.
The last of the sailing ships in the harbor fired two more cannon shots. The first raised a tower of spray fifty meters in front of the steamship. The second blew the bridge to pieces. The steamship drifted first left, then right, leaving a frothing wake, and then settled against a sand bar and rolled on its side. The stern sank below water.
The remaining sailing ship stood out in the harbor, triumphant, but only for a moment. Fire had started on her deck and was spreading swiftly. The trees and furled sails caught and flared, and smoke drifted across the harbor, to the south. I had had enough.
I walked another block along Sun Street, to where I could see the northern edge of the peninsula on which Naderville sat. A thick fog covered the ocean there, but through the fog I heard more cannon fire, and saw a bright orange flash. A mushroom puff of smoke and flying debris rose above the ceiling of fog, about three kilometers from the shore.
A deafening thud went off, seemingly at my feet. I swiveled and looked to my left, along the northwestern extent of the peninsula. A lazy curl of smoke and the residue of flame still hung from where a large gun had been fired. It had been dragged on a wheeled carriage along a dirt road and was now mounted under camouflage, backed up against thick, low-lying arborids at the top of the hill west of where I stood. I wondered who commanded the gun, and quickly decided it must be Beys's forces.
The fog would soon be lifting. Somewhere out there, very likely, was the second steamship, wreaking havoc on Lenk's sailing ships. The gun was useless for now, firing once just for practice, but when the fog lifted, it would quickly finish the job.
I ran down a street to the east, past bewildered civilians returning to this part of the town now that the shelling and fighting had subsided.
I encountered the first pickets for Lenk's troops on the outskirts of the low hills. I knew they belonged to Lenk because they wore no uniforms, as Beys's troops did, and because their discipline had broken completely.
They saw I was unarmed, and were too exhausted to pay me much attention. The fighting here had also been vicious, and bodies littered the thin scrub of phytids and arborids in the fields around the hills. A few shacks had been reduced to rubble, and men and women—mostly men—rested while others went among them with water and medicine. Moans and shrieks broke out from the wounded, laid out in rows on the ground, watched over by exhausted medical attendants.
It looked like any ancient battle, any fragment of war long past, something I had once thought would never be possible for humans again, and certainly not humans born in Thistledown.
I came upon four men standing together beside a lone stone wall, passing a bottle. They eyed me suspiciously as I approached.
“Who's in charge?” I asked.
“Nobody, now,” one of the men said. “The ranks are back on the cape, or dead. We're waiting to be called back ... to wherever. Who are you?”
I told them my name and pointed out that a gun was in place and would soon be firing on the fleet. I was about to lay out a plan for taking the gun, knowing I had to begin somewhere, when a fleshy man with a patchy beard and thick eyebrows lifted a thick fist and poked his finger at me.
“You're the Hexamon agent, aren't you?” he asked. “You're going to bring a gate down and take us back to Thistledown.”
I stared at him for a moment, taken by surprise, not sure what to say or do.
“We're sick of this,” the fleshy man said. “I killed four people today. I killed a woman. That's mortal error.” He backed away, head dropping. “I killed a woman.”
“You can take us back now, can't you?” The youngest in the group reached out to grab my arm. Battle shock and hope gave his face a pallid glow. “We need to go home. Something awful is happening here. Can't you smell it?”
“Are you what they say?” the tallest and oldest of them asked. He was about my age, and he had bandages wrapped around his arm and leg. “I don't know what we'd do if you turned out to be a lie.”
I heard a commotion behind us. A few men with rifles ran to confront an approaching group of uniformed Brionists, ten or twelve in all. They held several white flags and carried no weapons. They were quickly surrounded, and the shouting died down into tense discussion, gun barrels pushed against hands held up, palms out, heads leaning, subdued words passing quickly.
“They can't be surrendering,” the bandaged man growled. “They're just resting before they push us back out to the headland.”
I heard wind-blown scraps of the conversation and walked toward the group. Again I felt the queasy excitement, the tingling sense that something significant was happening.
“That's him,” one of the Brionists said, pointing at me as I approached the crowd. I recognized the officer who had addressed the ships’ crews at the Citadel and tried to remember his name: Pitt, I thought. His uniform was torn and covered with mud. He approached me with hands outstretched. “I know who you are. Word has been passing everywhere that you're here.” He stared at me with wolflike intensity. “Your name is Olmy. You know what's happening. The silva is dying. You know.”
My hands seemed to pulse. “I do know,” I said, letting some deeper instinct, deeper personality take over. “You came with the troops from the Citadel?”
Pitt nodded. “We fought west of here.” He glanced at the encircling men and women, eyes jerking back and forth between stiff, unsympathetic faces. “The thicket is dying. We can smell it. Scions are crawling out everywhere and dying. The food is rotting in the storage houses.”
“Are you in charge?” I asked.
“I am a captain, rank second over my company.”
“Are you done fighting?”
“What good is it? What can we do?” he asked plaintively. “The food is going bad. The food in our kits is turning into dust. Since last night ... All the food from the silva, all of it. We rely on it. There is so little of anything else...”
Most of the able-bodied men and women on the hill, about a hundred and fifty of
them, had gathered around, looking to me for explanations. Voices clamored for answers. I saw the gray Brionist uniforms absorbed in the motley of Lenk's soldiers, exhaustion and battle and common fear removing the last barriers.
I felt a roaring in my ears and my vision tunneled for a moment as blood pumped into head. I found a low broken wall and climbed precariously on top of the ragged stones. “Listen,” I shouted, raising my hands. “Ser Brion has let loose something new on Hsia. I spoke with him; I saw it. The ecos is in a major fluxing. In a few days or weeks there isn't going to be any food from the ecos, and very few are going to be able to survive here. The battle is over.”
“It's dying,” voices cried out.
“We have to let everybody know so the fighting will stop.”
“We don't have any more radios,” the bandaged man shouted at me. “The ranks have them.”
I looked down at Pitt. “Do you have radios?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They're controlled by General Beys's attachés,” he said.
“Where is Beys?” I asked.
“On the 15,” Pitt said, pointing north. “They're going to sink the rest of Lenk's fleet. They hope to catch Lenk and kill him, as well.”
“Able Lenk,” a woman muttered. I could not tell whether she was correcting Pitt's disrespect or expressing her own.
I bent over on the wall and put my hand on Pitt's shoulder. I had managed to lose all sense of my limitations. A small rational voice told me, Now you really are like Lenk and Brion.
But there was nothing else I could do, nothing else to be done, but follow the inner pressure. I had fleshed out a legend, once half-dreaded, a bogeyman of another place and time. I could feel a coalescing, upturned faces, despair and hope and weariness all around me, weaknesses and passions into which I could fit like a plug in a socket and where no one else could fit so well.
“How many soldiers will follow you?” I asked Pitt.
“Fifty,” he said. “They're waiting for me to come back. I remembered you when the word started spreading. There was a message from the Citadel, telling about you. Some others saw you walking through the town.”
