Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  Why? Well, I could only guess.

  But one of the biggest factors in the human response to any artwork is what you happened to have been doing, thinking, feeling, and the place you’d been doing, thinking, and feeling it in, just before you encountered it. Art makes its entire effect by developing things from your landscape, denying other things in it, and replacing still others with the artists’ vision: that means the same text must be read differently on each different world, because you bring to it the experiences of the different landscape against which the artifact is constantly engaged in argument. And despite the little I knew of it, I could say for certain that Krome’s landscape (and 2417-Y’s origin) was not Inring’s. And though my [employer.sub.1] thought she remembered 2417-Y from her adolescence light-years away, what she really recalled was the experience of encountering that work fresh from—or rather, wholly entangled in—Krome. But whether 2417-Y would prove to be a rich and decentering and/or stabilizing experience here, or simply become a vastly expensive irrelevance off in a little room, visited less and less frequently, till the projector was shut down and the importation costs (and my fee) were written off, I could not tell; nor, indeed, could my [employer.sub.1] —at least not till she’d shaken that memory loose. For it was only as 2417-Y was absorbed by (as her disappointment had begun that absorption and transformation of) Inring’s ’scape could anyone, here, understand anything of 2417-Y, even unto its alien history on another world.

  “You don’t look comfortable,” my employer[sub.1] said, when, once we were through, she had strolled back with me to the cradle. She herself wore at least fifteen pounds of metal medallions at knees, elbows, and waist, as well as light plastic tubing about her neck, thighs, and armpits: glimmering rings hung by delicate coils to her sternum, navel, knees. Her beard, which had been red in the morning, was now (after an hour each of blue, yellow, and green) black. “It’s pretty rough out here. We get a lot of folks from all parts of the planet passing through. They don’t like it either.” She frowned. “Not many from off world, though.”

  “I’m comfortable,” I said. “In fact I like it here. Actually, I was thinking of staying.”

  “Nobody else would,” she said, sadly. “Folks come by from over in Qwik—you can tell them because they’re all hung around with those silver furs and big blocky whachamacallits on their elbows. We always say: ‘Take something off! Relax!’ Then the ones from down in Litimis, they come up here and just stride on through with nothing on at all. You’re always sitting around and saying to them, ‘You sure you don’t want to put something on, like everyone else? You’ll feel more at home.’” She sighed.

  At my neck I closed another fastening on what they still, there, actually called a space suit. Down in the bulky boots were these loops you were supposed to slip your toes through; in the right one, it had gone fine. In the left, however, two of my middle toes had missed; or the loops were broken; or something. And I was kind of wiggling my foot around to try and find out what exactly it was, and what I might do about it, and not making much headway.

  And that’s the kind of thing a primitive GI is no help with at all.

  “I think that 2417-Y,” my [employer.sub.1] said, “is the most important thing that’s ever happened on Inring. Certainly it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened on this part of it. It’s about the only piece of real culture we’ve got. It’ll stabilize a whole new breed of tourist, of thinking, of life, here at the complex. Don’t you agree?”

  I pulled down the head guard, whose airtight clasps went critter-click, critter-click, critter-click, all around my neck. “You may be right,” I said, not sure if my external speaker was on or not. Then I nodded at her with whatever smile I could mechanically muster and started toward the bronze circle, the bottom half of which was in the beige wall, the top half in the clear canopy.

  I cropped toward the energy sheet that, like rippling water over glass, served as the cradle’s airlock.

  Though I’d worked with her for most of Inring’s very nonstandard day, handing things, holding things, pointing and prodding with her, I realized I hadn’t even bothered to notice her hands—which for me was once about as automatic as the click-curses constantly expostulated in both laughter and rage, among the shale-farmers of the equatorial zones of Celluv IX or the leisurely pursing of the brows before answering just about any question at all among the polar butane workers of Hatatki VII.

  As the night wavered a moment in my eyes, and sparks struck silently from my hip and head as I went through the shield, I realized again that I was a repository of a vast womanly experience of cultural relativity (so much vaster than man’s could ever be—which was the way we humans once characterized ourselves when we’d been confined largely to a single world), from the hundreds of worlds I had visited in my [job.sub.1] (and among the thousands more I had not visited, or even, perhaps, heard named): yet that relativity was precisely what I’d come here to lose, to leave behind, to forget. I wanted only something simple, absolute, monumentally upshifting, and still.

  I stepped over the threshold, onto the outside terrace, leaving the artificial gravity for the far less intense “down” of the natural world. I swayed under those few distantly spaced stars. We were well out along the thinner part of the galactic arm that, almost since the beginning of colonizing, put us extremely far away from anywhere. (The cluttered night above those worlds lost in the hub is equally a sign that one is far away from anyplace else, on the edge of the unknown: most of our exploration and colonization has been along the mid-arms. But that was not where I was; and again I tried to shake out of mind that urge that always made me see everywhere in terms of somewhere else.) I made my way forward, aware, as I strode over the dusty flags, that a few rocks had been kicked or thrown or even, presumably, set there by others suited against the near-vacuum as bulkily as I.

  I moved forward, a woman in a dusty, airless ’scape where woman was just not meant to go.

  To my left were towering, blobbed filigrees of the space ships that, as usual this far out, followed some design either so alien or so primitive I hadn’t seen it before. To my right was the place that a mountainous black nebula we were quite close to (eight light-years?) cut out even the few stars that should have been visible in that direction, joining the land with night.

  Those small, cold worlds are notoriously empty of visual variety; nor had I bothered to learn what little that variety might mean about the structure of the planetary ball I waddled over, so that the no-color between brown and gray, lit largely by my shoulder lights and the haze from the station complex behind me, was as void of information for me as a landscape could be.

  I walked through it, refusing to think about myself or it.

  I walked a long time.

  After perhaps forty minutes, or an hour-forty minutes, I stopped.

  A rock slab had freed itself from the dust, to rise, over the next twenty feet, perhaps a meter; as I reached its edge I realized this was the best this world could do toward a crag.

  I looked up into the blackness, most of whose dim stars you could only see out of your eye’s corner.

  Then I shouted: “Rat Korga…!”

  In the tiny helmet space, the sound hurt my ears.

  I shouted again: “Korga…!”

  And again: “Rat…!”

  And: “Rat Korga!” I reeled on rock as his name filled up my ears, my mouth, my eyes, along with the perpetual stutterings from my speaker, the burblings from my air regulator. “Korga! Rat Korga!” I looked up at a darkness that might as well have been a ceiling ten feet overhead, though it was made up of thousands on thousands of light-years of nothing. “Korga! Rat…!”

  I shouted and shouted. I tore my throat and battered my ears. In that air globe where his name roared no farther away from my face than a few thicknesses of my hand, on that nightbound rock hardly heavy enough to warrant the word world, with each shout I announced some appalling fact to a blackness that would show no wonder from i
ts presence, no horror at its absence—that hung, vast and ignorant, before each iteration my raw tongue rasped from under a burning pallet, as though each shriek were my first vocable.

  For moments the darkness was an infirm ear bent toward me; to each scream the universe mumbled, Pardon…? What was that…? I didn’t quite catch you…? Come again?, while for the fortieth, forty-seventh, and fiftieth time I shouted, shaking, at night.

  For a while I stopped.

  Then I shouted some more.

  I was sitting, now, on the stone, leaning on one thick mitten. My throat was too sore to go on. So I just muttered it, hoarsely, as though his name were the access code that, repeated enough, would change the universe, would make this most marginal rock a center of labor, art, and community.

  I looked up to rasp, near voiceless again: “Rat…!”

  I couldn’t tell you how far away the light was. But it wobbled and drew closer; and grew bigger.

  “…Korga,” which came with no voice at all, a movement of muscle and bone in my chest and jaw, making no sound in the soundless dark.

  At first I didn’t look. Then, because here and there in it were such bright lights, I couldn’t look.

  It came toward me. There was someone inside it. Her vacuum suit was far more compact and streamlined than mine. Her shoulder-plates glimmered; rings of lights around her calves blinked. My own lights reflected in her face plate.

  For whatever reason, any number of Web officials might have chosen just then to look me up: Halleck, Fenz, Marta, Japril, Sarena, Ynn… Any number of Inring locals I’d met in the course of delivering and setting up 2417-Y might have decided to come after me just then, from the rather jovial library assistant of that morning’s installation, to my [employer.sub.1] herself, or even that fellow debarkee with whom I had brief and listless sex shortly after I’d landed earlier in Inring’s long, long day and who I’d thought had gone off afterward to other geosectors.

  The figure climbed the rock. Her face plate cleared of glare.

  I frowned. “You are not…” (It was a painful whisper.) “…whom I expected to see.” I took a breath. “Here.”

  “Ah, Skynosh Marq, but I did expect to see you. Here. Well, one takes what one can get,” JoBonnot said. “But then, I have been looking for you. While you have not been looking for me. Isn’t that right? Very logical, yes?” She looked up at blackness, around at darkness. “You have really managed to get quite far away. One would almost think you were running off. You have come so far. But then, as I was following you, I heard your call over my earphones.” Behind the plate she scowled, and one hand went up to rub at where her ear would have been on the head mask. “Very loud. As if you were calling, perhaps, for something—someone. Some Rat Korga. And yet”—she scowled harder, looking around once more—“I do not think here, by any means, is the most reasonable place to find her.”

  “JoBonnot,” I said, “lust is not logical.”

  “Lust is what you have,” she said. “Love is what you want. Ah, the intricacies of desire!”

  “I don’t know how you got here,” I said. “I don’t know why you’ve come. But right now, I only know what I don’t want. And I don’t want anything to do with life.”

  “That is wanting to die.” JoBonnot nodded.

  “I don’t want to die,” I said. “I just don’t want to live.”

  Inside her mask, JoBonnot looked at me strangely. She reached toward me. “That is dreadful,” she said. Her hand came toward, and did not quite touch, mine—like my little white sister, light-years away.

  I took another breath.

  The effort was painful.

  Not only to my throat.

  “Dreadful,” she repeated. “But we can change all that. Yes?” She spoke bluntly, brightly. “That’s all you have to say?”

  There on the dark rock I shook my head.

  “That’s no in one language, yes in another,” she commented.

  “JoBonnot, no…”

  “Yes,” she said, like some childhood GI instruction series, correcting a wrong answer. “Marq Dyeth, what do you know of the XIv?”

  I looked up, frowning.

  “Do not worry,” she said, briskly. “In some ways, you have picked a very good place to come. We’re well outside Web security. Ah, yes, I can see that you’ve heard of them before—the XIv. But then, we’ve mentioned them within each other’s hearing, haven’t we: I to you. You to me. Back home. At your home. On Velm.”

  “I know the XIv are something the Web says I’m not supposed to know about—an alien race with interstellar travel that woman has not yet established true communication with. And I know the XIv in their mysterious ships were circling Rhyonon when Korga’s world was destroyed… you said they were circling mine when he was taken away.”

  “You never struck me as a woman who liked to be told what she could or couldn’t know, Marq Dyeth.”

  “I hate it,” I said; and began to cry.

  “Left in lust and denied the possibility of love,” JoBonnot said, “do you think you can go on hating?”

  “I…” Searching out energy even for that, I felt I’d expended the last of it in my futile howl against night. “I don’t know, JoBonnot.” I went on crying. “I don’t… know anything anymore.”

  “I can give you Rat Korga back. I can give you two a world of your own—if you will help me save mine. It only takes a little hate.”

  I frowned.

  “I can give you information. Tell me again what you know of the XIv. And Rhyonon. Tell me about the XIv and your own home world of Velm.”

  “I know… well, someone told me…” My throat ached. My eyes stung. “I mean, when Rat’s world went into what may or may not have been Cultural Fugue and destroyed itself, XIv ships were observed circling his world. Many of them. Three hundred and sixty of them; or three hundred and sixty thousand—I’m not sure which. Below them, the first fireball started…” I blinked. “And someone—you, JoBonnot—told me that when the Web took Rat away from my home, away from Velm, away from me, again there were many XIv ships circling my world. Circling Velm. And when he left, in the Web shuttle, you said they left…”

  “And that seems like meaningful information, doesn’t it?” JoBonnot nodded. “It suggests all sorts of correlations, alignments, possibilities. Oh, yes! A little knowledge? Often a very, very, very dangerous thing. We human-style women have known that since before we left our own world, wherever that was. Well, listen to me, Marq Dyeth. I have something more to tell. See what it does to that information you feel, now, you are just on the brink of possessing—the constellation of facts that the Web, you are sure, does not want you to know more of. Look. Listen. Attend carefully: so far you know what the Web wants you to know. Now I will tell you some of the things they don’t want you to know at all. Oh, how clever of you to come out here beyond Web security. One would almost think we had it planned. Well, no matter. Listen to me now, Skynit Marq. It is true, three weeks before Rhyonon was destroyed, three hundred sixty thousand XIv ships gathered in a cloud about Rhyonon and began to circle it; and approximately two standard, twenty-four-hour days after the holocaust was over, they left it. But for the last twenty-nine years fleets of XIv ships of comparable size, some slightly larger, some indeed notably smaller, have been gathering at Rhyonon approximately every other month standard, to circle the planet for a little over three weeks before leaving. And the time they stay has always been the same. Also, consider this: in the little over a standard year since the Rhyonon catastrophe, XIv have continued to gather there, circle it, and leave—”

  “But… but what are they doing?” I asked. “Are they just observing? Does that mean that they didn’t have anything to do with the holocaust?”

  “Consider this also, Marq Dyeth. As far as Velm is concerned, there has been similar behavior from XIv ships for almost eighty-nine years standard now: many fewer ships in that case—only a hundred and seven thousand. They stay perhaps seven standard weeks, then leave for betwe
en eight and nine. The pattern has been quite consistent for getting on to a century now. Now I bet you didn’t know that, Snu Marq.”

  “But why my world? Why Rat’s?”

  “Oh, and there are still other pieces of information that must be considered before we get to that question: of the six thousand inhabited worlds in the Web’s range and jurisdiction,” JoBonnot went on, “there are a hundred-two for which this XIv behavior has also been noted. For at least six of these worlds, there is indication that this periodic visitation, circling, and leaving has been going on for well over two standard centuries. But those six include neither Velm nor Rhyonon.”

  “And how many of those hundred and two worlds have gone into Cultural Fugue and wiped themselves out?” I asked.

  “One,” JoBonnot said. “Rhyonon.”

  “Then, you mean, the XIv were just observing: and they weren’t really responsible for what happened on…?”

  “Do not overread the data I gave you: that is as bad as underreading what you’ve already read. Consider this too: the Web has logged over four thousand other worlds, uninhabited and uninhabitable by humans (and most of the alien species we’ve made contact with), which are also the object of these periodic visitations by the XIv. One notes it’s a number of the same order of magnitude as that of the number of habitable worlds. There’s one barren planet where the number of XIv ships reported to converge is slightly above eight hundred thousand and the period itself is eight hours there, and fifteen hours away; and it goes on constantly. I hear it’s quite spectacular—though no human has witnessed it.”

  I frowned: “Then we don’t even know if what they’re interested in on the human worlds is even the human population or not!”

  “Are their visitations a form of art? Theology? Scientific research? A biological necessity? A cultural jape? Are they all there, circling their myriad worlds, for a single purpose? Or are there as many different explanations as there are XIv ships, or XIv aboard them?” JoBonnot shrugged. “The XIv are alien. We do not know their language; or languages; or even if they have a language. We cannot communicate with them. They have not communicated with us. We cannot know them—and can only guess at what, about them, we can never know. Again, do not overread.” She reached out toward me again. (I raised my bulbous mitten, I think to push her away.) “But do not underread either. Would you like to see a XIv, Skina Marq?”