Last Shadow (9781250252135)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “Then he is a miracle,” said the man.

  “Sprout,” said Royal Son, “this storyteller will speak his name, if he wants you to know his name.”

  “I am not so wise as to deserve a name,” said the man, “but I saw you looking at how long my arms are. You’ve never seen a man like me before, have you?”

  “No,” said Sprout, “and I also saw that you walk erect like a man, instead of stooping like a gorilla or a chimp.”

  “I take that as a compliment. You recognize that despite my unusual shape, I am still a man.”

  “Yes,” said Sprout. “Are you the only one with this shape, or are you part of a people who have all changed in this way from what humans were on Earth?”

  “So you believe in Earth,” said the man.

  “My mother was born there,” said Sprout, “and my grandparents, too.”

  There was a longish silence. Sprout figured the man was deciding whether to take Sprout’s words at face value. So Sprout explained. “Many centuries of relativistic space travel.”

  The man nodded sagely. “That seemed the only way it could be possible.”

  “I could tell you many things that sound strange, but I will not lie to you,” said Sprout.

  “I think he really doesn’t lie,” said Royal Son.

  “Shut up, playful idiot bird,” said the man. “I came, but don’t try my patience.”

  “Please don’t be angry with him,” said Sprout. “He’s been my only friend here on the planet Nest.”

  “I’m not angry with him,” said the man. “That’s how my people talk to his people. They are much more rude to us. Because you’re here, he has been shockingly respectful.”

  “Then I apologize for misunderstanding what was going on.”

  “We expect you to misunderstand,” said Royal Son.

  “Am I here to tell a story?” asked the man.

  “Give him a name to call you,” said Royal Son. “It makes these people anxious not to know your name.”

  The man looked searchingly into Sprout’s eyes. “What name are you already calling me in your mind?” he asked.

  Sprout told him without hesitation. “Sometimes I think of you as Long Arms, and sometimes Straight Walker, or Branch Swinger, or Clear Talker.”

  “Good names for me, every one of them. But all my people have long arms, and walk straight, and swing on branches. I came here today because I know I have unusually clear speech, and I thought a foreigner who speaks a different, more ancient version of Common would need my way of speech to be understood.”

  “So I should call you Clear Storyteller?”

  “Call me Ruqyaq,” said the man. “It becomes a powerful name when it’s spoken in Quechua.”

  Sprout tried to produce the same sounds as Ruqyaq, but had some trouble. Ruqyaq did not correct him, though.

  “Tell him your questions, Sprout,” said Royal Son.

  “I’m not sure I remember the whole list I said to you before,” said Sprout.

  “Whatever you don’t know, want to know,” said Ruqyaq.

  “Then may I start with a personal question?” asked Sprout.

  “Ask, and see if I answer.”

  “When did your people … change from the ancient norms of Homo sapiens? The arms, the shoulders that allow you to brachiate, the foot-hands?”

  “What do you think?” asked Ruqyaq.

  “I think you did not evolve such great changes here on the planet Nest. I think you have a genome that was deliberately redesigned to bring back some of the features of our tree-swinging ancestors, without giving up your brains and your ability to walk and perhaps run.”

  “I can run,” said Ruqyaq.

  “Someone had great knowledge of genetics,” said Sprout. “You are proof of that. As I also am.

  “Our parents and our grandfather,” Sprout went on, “had a genetic condition that caused them to grow slowly but to reach very high intelligence far earlier than other human babies. It was called Anton’s Key, and the cost of that was that our grandfather grew slowly, but he never stopped growing. When he died, he was a giant. In the weightlessness of space, his heart could keep him alive. But he did not want to die having never walked on level ground again. So his children helped him get into a large colony spaceship whose colonists had all died, but their gardens were lush and full of life. It was a beautiful place.

  “He stood by himself for the first time in centuries, and he took two steps, and he smiled at his children. Then his heart gave out and he sank to the ground and died. His body is still there, in that self-contained ecosystem. It has probably been taken apart and its elements incorporated into the life of the place. It’s what he wanted.

  “But before he died, he saw his brilliant children come up with a genetic change that would preserve the intelligence and early development of Anton’s Key, but remove the giantism curse. He knew that his children would not die as he did, with a body whose heart could not sustain it.

  “I and the other cousins are proof that the genetic change our parents made in themselves passes on to the next generation. Our other parents were very bright normal humans, but the Giant’s Gift bred true in us. I am nine years old, we calculate, but I do genetic science at a very advanced level. So do we all, and any other field of study we turn our minds to, we excel at.”

  Ruqyaq and Royal Son were silent.

  “I came to tell you stories,” Ruqyaq finally said. “But you have told me of a wonder that I cannot help but believe, because of the small size of the young boy who told it to me.”

  “I thought you might be more willing to tell me how you became as you are, if I first told you how I became as I am,” said Sprout.

  “Not only truth,” said Royal Son, “but fairness.”

  “Do you believe in fairness?” asked Ruqyaq.

  “I believe that fairness is always worth striving for,” said Sprout, “even though it can’t always be achieved.”

  “And why can’t it always be achieved?” asked Ruqyaq.

  “Because sometimes there is no fair course of action,” said Sprout, “and sometimes because no one can think of a fair course. But most often because one side or the other, or both, have no desire for fairness. They seek only their own advantage, no matter what it costs the other, and so fairness remains out of reach for them, because they are not reaching for it.”

  “Are you quoting someone?” asked Ruqyaq.

  “Maybe,” said Sprout. “If I am, I don’t know who.”

  “I will make sure your words are written down then,” said Ruqyaq, “because I think many people will want to quote you.”

  Sprout was baffled by this. He talked this way to his mother all the time, and sometimes to Thulium. They never thought his way of saying things or the ideas he said were anything special.

  “Here is my story. Our ship and crew were part of a great trading clan, the Quispe. We were Andean natives, speakers of Quechua and Aymara, though of course we all spoke Stark as well, since we needed to be understood when we traded with strangers. Our own ship and crew were of the family called Huapaya, though only a few were actually of Huapaya blood. The crew were all considered family, and not mere cousins. If we did our job on the ship faithfully, then we were brothers and sisters, and we called the head of the family Mother or Father. The head of the whole Quispe clan was Grandfather.”

  Ruqyaq seemed to want a response. “I understand,” said Sprout.

  “It happened that our Mother loved birds, and studied birds. She had been a scientist on Earth, before she followed her husband into space. So she brought with her two populations of birds that she knew well.”

  “Keas and ravens,” said Sprout.

  Ruqyaq smiled. “Because they were the smartest birds of all. She also brought with her the frozen embryos of thousands of other species. And she named our ship the Ark, because she said, What if some alien invader destroys Earth? I will be ready for us to find another world and bring to life the plants and animals, the
fish and the birds that made Earth such a lovely place.

  “They mined asteroids and sent the metals and rare earths back toward Earth, and the clan prospered, and so did the family, even though they never came closer to Earth than the Kuiper Belt. And Mother spoke to her birds, and taught many of her children to love them and care for them, so that when she died the birds would not be abandoned.”

  “The righteous children,” said Royal Son. Clearly he already knew this story; but Sprout understood that it wasn’t his to tell, though his own people figured into it.

  “Then a race of aliens called Formics entered the solar system and attacked Earth. Heroes managed to destroy their ship and fight them off, but it was only the beginning. We saw a vast fleet forming up and Mother and Father knew that we could not fight them off. We knew that their armaments were superior to ours and if we went back to help in the war, we would die along with the rest of humanity.

  “So Mother spoke to all her family in the great cargo hold and said, We call this ship the Ark, and so it is, because as long as space is cold, the embryos of life on Earth will remain fresh and viable. Let us go off and find a world where we can form a colony, and there we will be good stewards of the land and sea. We will not defile it, we will not destroy it. We will plant crops that we can eat, and we will release all the animals we can that will not threaten our own lives. We have two lifeboats. We will need one as a landing craft when we arrive, but the other we can fill with everyone who wants to stay here and fight for Earth. That, too, is a noble cause, even if it is doomed. But those who do not go into that lifeboat must promise to be obedient through all the long years of our voyage, for it will surely take several lifetimes at least to reach a viable planet.”

  “Did anyone go into the lifeboat?” asked Sprout.

  “You know that they didn’t, because faint hope is better than heroic despair.”

  “But why would it take lifetimes to reach another world?” asked Sprout. “Relativistic travel allows—”

  “When the Formics invaded, humans had no spaceships capable of approaching the speed of light. There are no measurable relativistic effects at five percent of lightspeed. Besides, at lightspeed you had better know where you’re going, since there can be no observations on the way. Our ship was capable of this voyage, especially after we took possession of a habitat module from an abandoned trading post in the Belt. It was already growing enough food crops to sustain ten times our population, and it had plenty of room for us to set our birds free to soar and fly, to nest and breed.”

  “You could not return to Earth, so you carried Earth with you,” said Sprout.

  “We did,” said Ruqyaq. “That is how we started out. We had no plan to become geneticists. We had no plan to alter ourselves or the birds. But within the first ten years of the Flight, a certain group of people called themselves the Engineers, because they were the ones who made repairs and invented new machinery on the inside and outside of the ship. They were constantly leaving the parts of the ship that rotated to create gravity, and spent most of their time in weightless space, inside or out.”

  Sprout thought of what Outside and Inside meant to those who traveled instantly, but kept himself from interrupting with a useless digression.

  “The Engineers could see how dangerous it was to have regular human shape, because we had only two grasping limbs, and our feet merely got caught on things. So we asked Mother—Father had died by then—we asked her if we could explore ways to modify our genes so that our children would be better suited to the labor we did. I am now what they planned then. Mother said yes, and the Engineers joined with two who called themselves Scientists, and while they could still access communications with Earth, they learned all they could about genes and how to modify them.”

  “So you were still in contact with Earth when the war ended,” said Sprout.

  “Yes. We knew of the miraculous victory of Mazer Rackham. We also had enough friends in the International Fleet that we knew that the public story was a lie. Mazer Rackham had figured out that all the Formic ships acted from one point of view, and which ship contained that point of view. He violated his orders and launched a missile and it destroyed that smallish ship. And the war was over, because when the Hive Queen died, so did all her workers and soldiers.”

  “Were you tempted to come back to Earth?” asked Sprout.

  “Mother gave us all a choice,” said Ruqyaq. “And all of us decided that two things were true. First, it was obvious that the Formics would come again to avenge their dead Queen. The war was not over. Second, the mission we were already embarked on was the salvation of the human race, because until we had a viable, self-sustaining, open-air colony on a habitable planet, the human race was vulnerable to utter destruction. But if we were on two worlds, then if one was destroyed, the other might live on.”

  “There are hundreds of such colonies now,” said Sprout.

  “And it took us so long to arrive that I’m sure many of them are older than ours,” said Ruqyaq. “But no such colony missions had set out when we left. As far as we knew, we were the only one. And here is the thing that still makes us the potential salvation of the human species: We are not on any of their charts or maps. Our name is not known. Our existence is unsuspected. We did not announce our plan even to Grandfather and Grandmother. No one knew what happened to us. So if some enemy seeks to destroy all the human worlds, and finds every one of them that is mapped, every one that is on the trade routes, they will not find us.”

  “Except now my people know you’re here,” said Sprout.

  “But you haven’t told anyone else,” said Ruqyaq.

  “We have not,” said Sprout.

  “Because you also haven’t told the other worlds about your instantaneous travel,” said Ruqyaq.

  “We have not, though on several worlds there are people who have enough evidence to guess,” said Sprout.

  “A guess is not knowledge and a rumor of such a miracle will not be believed.”

  “We’re counting on that,” said Sprout.

  “The children of the Engineers were born to look like us. The plan was a good one. With specially designed space suits they could work outside the ship with far greater safety, for they could hold on tightly with one hand, glove locked in place, while three other hands could do the work. Inside the ship, normal children would gather to watch that first generation of long-armed, four-handed Engineers as they brachiated easily throughout the ship, regardless of whether this or that part was weightless or had some kind of centrifugal gravity. The Runa, the Folk, the normal people—they had to watch their children to try to keep them from imitating us, because they could get injured or die, imitating the way we lived and worked.”

  “So you call your people Engineers?” asked Sprout.

  “We call ourselves the Yachachiyruna, and each of us is a Yachachi. We hardly use Quechua anymore, except in holy ceremonies, but in those days it was simply the Quechua word for engineer or technician, and now it is our name.”

  “And you live here among the trees.”

  “During spring, summer, and autumn,” said Ruqyaq. “In winter, we go underground with the Runa. It can be bitterly cold up here, ice and snow make the branches slippery, and we would rather live underground for part of each year than try to live our lives with clothing. There is no clothing that gives us the freedom of movement that we need.”

  “Thank you for answering my question,” said Sprout.

  “I was glad to tell you. It is the short version, of course. There are hundreds of stories on the same theme, dealing with particular events during the Journey and when we first arrived at the Nest. Someday you may hear those stories.”

  “Have you written them down?” asked Sprout.

  “Writing is not telling,” said Ruqyaq. “I’m sure that down below, they have written everything true and everything else as well. What is that to us? Only through the ears can a story be well told and be well heard.”

  Sprout wa
sn’t sure this was true, considering that most of his knowledge of everything outside his own family’s dynamics had come from reading. But then, maybe it was true, and he was woefully undereducated.

  “Was that your only question?” asked Ruqyaq. “I think not, because you had questions before you ever knew that people like the Yachachiyruna even existed.”

  “In telling me the story of the Yachachiyruna,” said Sprout, “you also answered my questions about the Ark, and the reason why no one knew of this colony world. But I am just as interested in the story of how ravens and keas acquired human speech and human knowledge. In the science I was taught, corvids and parrots are the most intelligent of birds, but their intelligence is rated as being somewhere between that of horses and of dogs.”

  Royal Son gave a squawk.

  “Shut up, parrot,” said Ruqyaq.

  “I don’t even know what that would mean,” said Sprout. “I’ve never seen a horse or a dog, except in vids. But the brains of birds are nowhere near the size of mammal brains, and certainly not primate brains. How can they contain so much knowledge?”

  “While Royal Son preens and otherwise shows his resentment, I will tell you: We did not modify the genomes of the birds. During the voyage, the birds bred intelligence into themselves. They have many more generations per century than humans have, and the ravens began determining which birds should pair up and breed. Ruthlessly they killed those that they determined should not breed at all. By the time we arrived at the Nest, all the living ravens understood human speech. As we formed our colony, the ravens scouted for us and reported to us about the flora and fauna of this world.”

  Sprout vaguely remembered that there was something about a raven in the story of Noah and his Ark, but he kept that thought to himself, because this story was apparently true.

  “The ravens continue to breed themselves into ever greater intelligence,” said Ruqyaq. “The keas saw how closely the ravens communicated with the humans, and the great advantages they gained, and so the keas began, in their playful way, to encourage the most intelligent birds to mate. But they don’t kill anybody. Stupid keas are just as useful to the flock as smart ones. I think you’ll understand, Sprout, that the ability to aim poop at a target and to choose whether to include uric acid with the poop can be learned and strengthened with practice, without requiring deep intellect.”