Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  The Epoch needed to get underway as soon as possible. They wouldn’t wait until morning; it would have to be tonight. The Smollic Dar was a fast ship, but the Epoch was faster.

  “I wish I could tell you more,” Deshi spoke tentatively. “But that’s all Brijola had.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “Well, as long as I’m confessing things . . .” She sighed before continuing. “I was wondering if there wasn’t some way I could use this information against you when we set sail.” Saeliko frowned, but she could only get so angry with Deshi for telling the truth.

  “Let me go,” Deshi said softly.

  Saeliko squatted down so that she could look the older woman straight in the eye. “Deshi, you never did me right, but you always did the Epoch right. I owe you for that much. So yes, I will let you go. But before I go, listen to me very carefully. I’m only going to say this once, and then I’ll leave you be. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. No broken legs or warnings. I will end your life. When you talk to others, you will never mention that we had this conversation. You will never tell anyone that I forced you to leave the Epoch. You will tell them that it was your choice. If I ever hear different, or if I hear you disrespect me or the Epoch in any way, I will find you and slit your throat. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Good.” Saeliko stood up, slid her scimitar back into its sheath on her back and then offered a hand to hoist the shipwarden back to her feet. Once they were both standing, Saeliko looked her over one last time. “Be well, Deshi. Best of luck to you.” Saeliko held out her hand. Deshi took it, and for a brief moment they were companions again.

  The Saffisheen nodded one last time, released her grip, turned her back and walked back toward Myffa’s Cove.

  3.5 JANX

  The Darree Corgavas was the largest ship Janx had ever stepped foot on. It was fast, too. She was still coming to grips with the build by the end of her first day aboard the reacher. Lavic shipbuilders were clever, she had to give them that. What she couldn’t quite figure out was how the reacher sat so high in the water despite the weight it was carrying. The mainmast was enormous. Cannons of varying size were positioned on the main deck as well as on the two decks immediately below. There were twenty-five cannons on each side of the ship, plus two at the rear. Everything was bigger. The swivel guns on the rails were bigger. The pulley wheels were bigger. Even the tidy piles of chains and ropes were bigger. The weight of the ammunition alone was startling to think about. Added on top of that were the supplies needed to keep the crew of two hundred and twenty going for months at a time.

  How in the Five did it ride so high? If only she could see the Darree Corgavas in dry dock and have a look at its underbelly.

  “Harker Janx?” asked a voice in heavily accented Maelian. She turned and saw a young Lavic sailor, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old.

  “Just Janx.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon. I was told you were a harker.”

  “I was, but not anymore.” There was no point in pretending she was something that she wasn’t.

  “All right . . . Janx,” the girl began, obviously uncomfortable with the lack of a title. She was also quite obviously goggling at the intricate tattoos on Janx’s copper-skinned face. “Harker Rell will see you now,” she stated once she regained her ability to speak. She gestured toward the rear of the ship where the harker’s cabin was situated beneath the quarterdeck.

  “Fine.” Janx began striding toward the cabin, only to see the girl dart ahead of her. At first, Janx thought the girl only meant to open the door for her, but by the time the Saffisheen had arrived at the door, the girl had already disappeared inside.

  Janx wrapped her knuckles on the door a couple of times and then let herself in before waiting for a more formal invitation. In all honesty, she was curious to see how the harker’s cabin looked. As she expected, the furnishings were relatively luxurious. The space was appointed with tapestries on two of the walls with detailed depictions of sea battles. There was a large, polished grey-green sablewood table in the middle of the room that was very reminiscent of the table in Governess Teverin’s office back in New Dagos. Janx noted the gracefully carved table legs that ended in talon-like features where the legs met the floor.

  There was also a bookshelf in the corner near the windows at the back of the room. Books of all sizes and shapes, as well as a few scrolls and other scraps of paper, could be seen packed into the shelves. At the base of the bookshelf, a narrow open-topped barrel was affixed to the floor. The tops of a dozen rolled-up maps poked out of the top of the barrel. A few more maps were laid out on the big sablewood table.

  A painting hanging in a wooden frame next to the bookshelf caught her interest. In the foreground on the canvas, a woman sat in a small boat that was being buffeted by a violent, raging sea. She was visibly straining against the oars trying to keep the little craft from turning sideways against a wave and capsizing. Amidst the stormy clouds above the sea, two figures were suspended in the air. They were looking at one another, but each of them had a hand pointing down toward the woman in the boat.

  “Cathvenic mal torichin?” a voice asked from the opposite side of the room from the painting. Janx turned and looked to find a woman sitting in a large wooden chair with oddly elongated armrests that curled into talons holding a ball at the end. Her fine clothing marked her as Harker Rell. She wore a well looked-after green turncoat with the Lavic emblem sewn into the left shoulder – a Jerris hawk in front of two crossed longswords.

  Rell was a large woman. She wasn’t fat, nor was she overly muscular. She was tall and broad in the shoulders, and her face was set by a strong jaw and a wide mouth. Her skin was darker than most Lavics. Her eyes were a deep brown, too, suggesting that she wasn’t pure stock. She did, however, wear her hair in the latest Lavic fashion. Her brown hair grew long out of the top and one side, while on the other side, it was shaved to a stubble.

  “Harker Rell asks if you like the painting,” said the young girl, who was now standing beside her harker. That’s why the girl had come into the cabin.

  “I do.”

  Rell began speaking again, and the girl quickly translated at the end of each sentence. “My mother gave it to me when I was a young girl. Do you know what this painting means?”

  Janx did. She had seen this painting before. Sova the Silent had shown it to her in a book in the Temple of Pedagogues.

  The Saffisheen moved closer to the painting and pointed up to the two women in the sky. “Deshala and Mysha, the Judge and the Reaper. They are deciding whether or not this woman deserves to be in Karramoor after she dies.”

  “Movees,” Rell said. Janx recognized the Lavic word for correct before the girl had a chance to translate it.

  “Mysha asserts that the woman has lived in constant sin; she often forsook the goddesses, she took to the bottle to drown her sorrows, she stole from other women, she was a liar and a schemer both in her own country and abroad. She even murdered several people. Deshala admits that this is the truth, but she counters that the woman still deserves to be in Karramoor because she has the just sight. This confuses Mysha, who then asks what Deshala means by the just sight. Deshala explains that while this woman sinned countless times, she never committed the sin of judging people by their race. The woman saw people as people, not as a member of a group bound by color or language or tribal affiliation.”

  “I’m impressed,” Rell said through the translator.

  “I had a good teacher.”

  “Indeed.”

  Janx turned away from the painting and moved closer to the seated harker. “Thank you again for taking me aboard your ship. And thank you for altering your course. I know you had to deviate on my account.”

  “About that,” Rell started while at the same time gesturing to a broad map of the Sollian that lay flat on the table between her and Janx. “Governess Teverin wouldn’t tell me why you wanted
to go to the Skag. Would you care to elaborate on the matter?”

  “No.”

  Rell smiled. “Let me explain the conditions of my agreement with the good Governess Teverin so that we can avoid any misunderstandings. I will take you to the Skag, though your companion must remain downstairs in my brig. He is a distraction for my crew, and I won’t have any unnecessary distractions on this ship. I will also ask you very kindly to keep to yourself on this trip. If I learn that you are having a negative effect on this vessel in any way whatsoever, I will change my course and you will have to find some other method of arriving at your destination.” Rell then waited patiently for the end of the translation before adding, “Is that clear?”

  “I understand completely.”

  “Very good then. Do you have any questions before you go?”

  “Why did you agree to Teverin’s request?”

  Harker Rell paused a moment, seemingly considering how to respond. She eventually pointed toward the painting. “Teverin and I have a similar appreciation for the just sight. We both see the benefits of Lavics and Maelians working together rather than against one another. This is not something that either of us can talk about openly without a measure of caution.

  “In the end, she persuaded me in two ways. First, she promised to take my youngest daughter under her tutelage in New Dagos. My daughter will learn the Maelian ways of politics and culture. I think this is a good educational opportunity. And second, Teverin told me a little bit about you.”

  “About me?”

  “She told me that you had two Lavics aboard your ship. She said that you treated them fairly, even before the peace agreement between Mael and Laventhene.”

  “They were good sailors,” Janx said. “Didn’t make much sense to kill them because they had pale skin.”

  Rell pointed back to the painting. “Deshala would agree with you.”

  “I have one last question.”

  The Lavic harker just nodded and waited.

  “May I talk with my companion while he’s in the brig? There are many things I would like to discuss with him before we get to the Skag.”

  “By all means.”

  “Thank you, Harker. You’ve been most accommodating.”

  After giving a slight bow of her head, Janx made her way back out of the cabin and waited until the young girl came out, which didn’t take long. She asked the girl to show her where the brig was. Actually, Janx was fairly certain she could have found it herself, but it might look as if she were snooping around if she went unaccompanied.

  The girl obliged. While they walked down a set of narrow stairs into the bowels of the Darr’s Grief, Janx inquired into the girl’s name. It was Ba. Janx thought it a rather simple name for a linguistically talented girl.

  Ba led her down to the lowest deck, which stunk of animal droppings, bile and rot. It seemed Maelian and Lavic ships shared that in common. Near the aft, Janx had to stoop down as she walked to get under the crossbeams. The brig was in the very back of the boat in cramped quarters.

  Seventy-two didn’t seem at all put out by his dour surroundings. Janx was certain that he was a madman for denying the Five and Twenty-four, but she was impressed by his level of devotion. He obviously gained sufficient strength from his faith.

  “Leave us,” Janx told Ba, who merely nodded and walked back the way she had come. When Janx was sure they were alone, she sat down on a dry spot in front of the iron bars that segregated the brig from the rest of the lower deck. “Are you well?” she asked.

  “Well enough.”

  “Have they brought you enough food and water?”

  “Through vales and dells of famine and drought, His glory shall fill my stomach, just as it does my soul.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “He watches you too, you know.”

  “He doesn’t exist.” She looked to see if this provoked a reaction, but his face was passive.

  She had come down here to talk to him, but now she wasn’t as certain as before that this was a good idea. She took a long breath and pushed herself to begin talking. She reminded herself that she would be better off knowing a little more about what was going on in this man’s head. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” she told him. “Specifically, I want you to ask you some non-religious questions. You have your faith; I have mine. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  With his good hand, he brushed his hands through his mop of silly hair and looked at her. “I’ll answer your questions,” he said.

  “When we first spoke on Butterfly Island, you told me that you came from a different world. How did the airplane cross from your world to my world?”

  “It didn’t.”

  “You mean you lied to me?”

  “No. I mean that the airplane did not come from my world.” He took a long, slow breath and looked at her. His eyes pierced her. Judged her. “I will try to explain it to you.”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you know what the cosmos is?”

  “Cosmos? You mean the sky at night?”

  “When you look into the sky at night, you see stars and the moon in the sky, and you can even see some of the other planets that are close by. You can also see lots of black space. There is actually much more beyond what you can see, but such is the way with us; our sight is necessarily limited. Our Lord blinds us from too much wisdom, for we hath not the minds to shelter it.”

  She ignored the last bit. “Then yes, I know what the cosmos is.”

  “Imagine that the cosmos is a painting on a canvas. All of the stars and planets and everything else fits on that one canvas. You are on that canvas, on this little planet of yours.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now imagine seventeen more canvases next to yours.”

  “And you came from one of these other canvases?”

  He nodded. “The scriptures of my Church had long told us that eighteen canvases made up the mural of our existence. The true believers knew this as fact. Non-believers doubted. They refused to believe without proof.

  And then the Lord gave them proof. About eighty-five years ago, a gate was found. At first, the people of my world didn’t know what it was. All they could see was a transparent rectangle of space in the sky.

  “Experiments were done on the gate. It was one-directional. An object hitting it from one side would just continue along its trajectory. However, when an object hit it from the other side, the object simply vanished.” Seventy-two put his remaining hand into a fist and then suddenly unfurled the fingers to mimic something poofing into nothingness. “The next step was to send in a . . . Well, you don’t have a word for it. Let’s just say they sent in a type of airplane that doesn’t require a pilot. This airplane was . . . trained . . . to fly into the gate and then return back out of it again. This never happened. Once the plane went in, it disappeared forever. It was concluded that any object flying into the gate could not return through the gate. Just a one-way trip.

  “It took twelve years for the problem to be solved. More intelligent unmanned planes were designed and built. While this was going on, more gates – all exactly the same size – were discovered in various locations around our planet. The locations were always similar; they were at relatively high altitudes, and they were positioned in remote areas, usually over water. Once we knew what to look for, finding them was not that difficult.

  “It was reasoned that if the gates only facilitated one-way travel, then the planes would have to use a different gate to return home again. Thus, the more advanced planes, once built, were instructed to travel through the gate and then search for new gates once they arrived. A large number of planes were sent through, and then mankind waited.

  “Twelve years after the very first gate was discovered, one of the planes actually made it back to our planet via one of the other gates. It also brought back all sorts of information that we used to start putting all of the puzzle pieces together. Six years after that, now with manned flights, the people of my world di
scovered and charted the entire network.

  “As we uncovered each planet, we numbered them in the order that we found them. My planet is designated as One. Yours is Eleven. The last one we found is Seventeen. It was confirmed that every single planet was painted on a different cosmos.

  “Does this make sense to you so far? Are you able to understand what I’m telling you?”

  Janx didn’t answer at first. Eventually, she pointed out “You said there were eighteen canvases.”

  “There are. The eighteenth planet was dead when we found it; people had lived there once, but no longer. We found some artifacts that told us about the inhabitants. The more we studied the artifacts, the more it came to be understood that the people who had existed on this dead planet had used the gates for more than two hundred years. We designated their world with the number Zero.

  “Some people on my world believe the people on Planet Zero created the gates. The scriptures show this to be false. They were divinely created.”

  “Did you come here from Zero?”

  “No. No one goes there now. It’s quarantined; it’s cut off from the rest of the worlds. I was on the planet we designated as Seven. But I am getting ahead of myself. This is easier if I stick to the order of things as they happened.”

  “By all means,” she said, urging him on with a nod and a gesture.

  “My planet has had access to the gates for the past sixty-five years. From the very beginning, there were great debates about what to do with this knowledge. You should know that my world is a vile place. It is filled with corruption. There are limitless sinners that think only of themselves. Wars break out all the time, diseases run rampant, the air is sickly and hard to breathe, and there is precious little food to feed our people. It has been this way for a very long time.”

  “Was that in your scriptures, too?”

  “Of course. The six generations of darkness and malevolence shall spread through every land; His good men and women shall suffer great hardships; for this is the path before righteousness shall come from His hand.”