Now We Paint Worlds

by Matthew Kressel

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  By the time Orna reached the stone house high up the mountain, Yasimir’s sun had begun to set, and only the tallest peaks still shone in its silvery light. The climb had been difficult, and Orna had stopped often to catch her breath and take in the majestic views. Fields of grass and wildflowers lined the valley, and hundreds of waterfalls, fed by furiously melting glaciers, stirred up huge clouds of rainbow-filled mist. For a station-hopping jeek like her, it was breathtaking. The climb had left her soaked, and the sun was dropping fast; Yasimir’s day was only fourteen hours long. She thought about setting up a tent and heater and changing into something dry. But the mists lingered like smoke, and the leaves steadily dripped with moisture. Changing, she knew, would be an exercise in futility, like her mission here. She dragged herself up the last few meters toward the stone house and sighed.

  A doorless opening led into its shadows. “Hello?” she called. “My name is Orna Liat Obote Manashampo,” she said in the local dialect of Mandreen. “I’m Acting Representative of the Free Trade Union, Outer Deep Region 59. Is anyone home?”

  When there was no response, she sighed again. She should have been home, enjoying some well-earned time off, and now she had hauled herself across hundreds of light-years for nothing more than a rumor. Well, almost nothing more. It had been years since she had set foot on a planet, and Yasimir was truly beautiful. There was no other word for it. It was hard to believe that a few decades ago this world had been a frozen, lifeless rock, and likely to reach the heat death of the universe without a single microbe gracing its surface. Now its valleys blossomed with alp grass and coneflower, pollinator bees skipped gleefully across the plains, and the air smelled sweetly of pine and humus.

  What a marvel, she thought, inhaling deeply, savoring the fertile smell, so different from the recycled air of orbitals and stations. Eventually, she crept through the arched doorway of the house and called out once more. “Hello? Is anyone home?”

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, a man came into focus. He sat on a stone pedestal, naked except for a dun cloth around his waist. He sat in a meditative pose with his eyes closed, while a blue-gray beam of the day’s quickly fading light shone onto him from a hole in the ceiling. In its light his skin looked as pale as bone. His ribs poked from his chest, and his mop of greasy gray hair and beard hung past his shoulders. Orna wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. It definitely wasn’t this.

  There were a few containers and urns on the stone floor. Two or three ratty carpets more dirt than fabric. Arranged in neat piles around the pedestal were bouquets of flowers, bundles of food and incense, piles of polished stones, and other unidentifiable things. No tech that she could see. Or, for that matter, a toilet.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said. “I’ve come a long way, and it’s a long trip back to town.”

  “Distance is meaningless,” he said, eyes still closed.

  “Okay …,” she said. “Anyway, I’m here because—”

  “Because you have heard I am responsible for the missing planets,” he said. His voice rasped, as if his vocal cords had been modded or injured. He opened his eyes and stared at her with pupils so dilated his irises were mere thin white rings around hollow dark spheres, like the double eclipse of two dying suns.

  She suppressed a shiver. “There are people down in—” She blinked up her eie to help recall the name. “—in Melisianda who say that you’re responsible for the missing planets.”

  “I am.”

  His pupils flickered oddly, as if reflecting lights not in the room. Unnerved, she looked away. This ascetic waif, responsible for the missing planets? She swept her eyes over the many items around his pedestal. Tributes? From supplicants come up the mountain to see the “holy” man? She wondered if one of them had told him something about who or what was responsible.

  She glanced out the door, surprised that the stars already glimmered. Out here, on the galaxy’s Outer Arm, there was a small chain of planets like Yasimir, newly terraformed, brimming with nascent life. And nine days ago, suddenly and inexplicably, three of them had gone missing: Ecruga, Oxwei, Charlotte’s World—all vanished from the universe. Like water rushing to fill a hole, their absence sent gravitational waves rippling across space-time. Ships emerged from slipstream to find empty space where there had once been worlds. And, Orna thought with a painful tightening of her chest, people.

  She swallowed the knot in her throat before it could turn into a sob. Mother had been on Charlotte’s World when it vanished, doing Shiva-knew-what. Besides a few token messages on birthdays and whatnot, Orna hadn’t spoken with her in years. It couldn’t be true. Mother wasn’t dead. She was just far away, as she’d always been, and one day soon a message would arrive wishing Orna a happy whatever and asking if she’d produced any grandchildren.

  “How could you possibly be responsible for the missing planets?” Orna said.

  He grinned wickedly. “I knew someone like you would come, that it would take time for my message to propagate across the human sphere, for you to exhaust all your paths of inquiry. Tell me, what is your working theory?”

  “For why the planets went missing?”

  “Yes!”

  “Right now,” she said wearily, “we have none.”

  “You have people working on it?”

  “Yes. Hundreds, maybe thousands. From all across the galaxy. Some of the brightest minds in the universe.”

  “And so far they’ve come up blank?”

  “So far,” she said. “Yes.” Then for a terrible moment she felt as if she were adrift in deep space, a thousand light-years from nowhere, with no hope of rescue or even death.

  “So here you are,” he said, “Orna Liat Obote Manashampo, Acting Representative of the Free Trade Union, Outer Deep Region 59, sent to me because your people are out of ideas, because you are desperate for answers, and though you think you’ve been sent on a fool’s errand, that I am a madman living alone on this ever-dripping mountain, the truth is your search is over. I am the answer you seek. I alone know the truth of why those worlds were taken.”

  “Taken?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Taken by whom?”

  “Her name is Hri.”

  A chill rolled down her spine, though she had never heard the name before. “Who is that?”

  He laughed, and while Orna prided herself on her composure under pressure, she had never met a person who laughed at the death of half a million people, Mother among them. A fire kindled in her belly, and she balled her fists. Diplomacy was the sworn FTU way, though she had made the occasional exception.

  Suddenly the man leaped up from his pedesta
l and bolted out the door.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted.

  “To see!”

  She followed him out. Night had fallen, and a million stars shone down from an unfamiliar sky. He stopped beside the dripping forest, his body a thin silhouette almost invisible against the pines. He turned his gaze up, and as she stepped beside him she looked up too, wondering which star was Pnei, her home, if it were even visible in the sky.

  “We thought we deserved them,” he said. “We thought they were ours to do with as we pleased.”

  “They?” she said.

  “The stars,” he said. “And the worlds that spin around them. We assumed that because we could, we should.”

  She was cold and tired and had no patience for riddles. “What the hell are you going on about?”

  “The First Diaspora!” he snapped, his voice echoing across a million folds of rock. “The waves of humanity spreading out to the stars! How long before Yasimir swarms with people? Now, there are a few thousand in scattered villages. In a decade, there will be millions. In a century, this world will be yet another human sewer, home to billions.”

  “A sewer?” she said.

  “How else do you describe the self-replicating mass of vermin that is humankind?”

  Not that way, she thought. She had seen heaps of human ugliness; in her job, it was unavoidable. She had seen its opposite too, astounding beauty in the most unexpected places. If Mother were here, she’d quip some pithy response to put this man in his place. But Orna couldn’t find the words, so she stayed silent.

  A brisk wind rolled down the mountain, hissing and shaking the pines. Orna shuddered with them, hugging herself against the cold. She longed to change into dry clothes and curl into a warm bed, but she couldn’t. Not yet. Because even if he was regurgitating some baseless rumor, she had to find out everything he knew. If not, the FTU would send her back here with any unanswered questions.

  “Who is Hri?” she said, bracing herself against the wind.

  “She is a god.”

  Orna cocked her head. “A god?”

  “There is no other name for them.”

  “Them?”

  “Her sisters, who dwell in the heavens, whom you thought were mere clouds of gas and dust.”

  “Your gods took the planets?”

  “They are not my gods! They do not belong to anyone! They dwell alone, masters of space and time.”

  Down in the valley, Melisianda glimmered with artificial light, and Orna stared longingly at it. Down there were restaurants and people and warm beds. Civilization, she thought, and sanity.

  It was too dark to hike back now. She might stumble over a stone or get bitten by a viper. She had planned to call a flyer to come pick her up, but her eie was reporting a loss of signal. Yasimir was too young, its hubspace network still in its infancy. People came out here to get away from the hubbub of humanity, and they were in no hurry to connect back to it. She would have to wait until morning for a signal. So she could either risk grave injury, or she could spend the night here, on this mountain, with this stranger.

  “Soon,” he said softly, “they will come for this planet too. They will work their way across the human sphere until, like roaches swept from a house, the human stain is purged from the universe. All our works will be forgotten. In a few tens of millennia, a blink of an eye to them, it will be as if we never were. As it should be.”

  Then he abruptly turned and strode back toward his house, leaving her alone under the stars.

  * * *

  Her tent was self-assembling, and as soon as it was pitched she leaped inside and turned on the heater. Trembling, she slipped out of her wet clothes and slid into a dry jumpsuit from her pack. Then, for a good long hour, she basked in the heater’s glow, savoring its orange warmth. Crickets and other insects chirped loudly from the forest. Larger animals skittered on the rocks, and she knew there were black-bellied chamois, hop lynx, and cliff vultures skulking about. Humanity had built this world. That didn’t mean humans were safe from it. Natural habitats required balance, and balance meant predators and prey. She activated the tent’s shield so that nothing, not even a stray photon, could get through while its power held. There were still six hours of darkness left.

  Feeling more relaxed in the warmth, she prepared her daily report for the Central Office. When she’d first arrived on Yasimir, she had downloaded a copy of the local dataspace records to her eie. She used it to facerec the man she’d spoken to as Adair Joshua Ohanko, born on Mars, in Solsys.

  “Solsys,” she said. “Huh.” It was not unusual, she knew, for jeeks from Solsys, conditioned as they were by the collapse and rebirth of Origin Earth, to have extreme views on terraforming and the human presence in the galaxy. A return to an earlier age, a slowing or ceasing of the human diaspora—these were common themes. Less common was the desire for human extinction. In fact, Orna couldn’t recall ever meeting anyone before Adair who had felt this way.

  Local records said he had come to Yasimir on a small ship from Tarphonsys two standard years back without cargo or suitcase. A medscan found him free of pathogens and with minimal gene mods. The records said little else, and she’d need to wait for a hubspace connection to conduct a deeper query.

  She was in the middle of dictating her report when she stopped short, because there it was again, that knot in her throat. This time, she couldn’t push it down, and she gasped.

  Was Mother really gone, forever? No more surprise messages? No more birthday wishes? Did her story really end like a period at the end of a sentence? Orna couldn’t grasp the finality of it. Death had always been an intangible thing. She wondered for a moment if there was something she wished she had said or done, if she had any regrets. She surprised herself by finding none. Mother had chosen a path far from Orna, and there was nothing she could do except live her own life. Orna had often wished that she and Mother were closer, that they could share in each other’s daily joys and disappointments. And after a long while she’d realized that Mother preferred to stay aloof. You cannot get hurt if you never let yourself become vulnerable. But, Orna knew, neither could you love.

  She composed herself and continued her report: “Adair is a misanthrope who believes humanity is vermin and whom his gods will wipe out. I’m attaching a recording of our conversation. I’ll follow up with additional questions tomorrow; however, I’m leaning toward the hypothesis that Adair is suffering from grandiosity related to religious delusion.”

  She ended with a report on local trade, which had dropped precipitously since the planets vanished, though it had increased by a few percentage points in the last two standard days. “A positive sign,” she noted, “that trade may soon return to normal levels.”

  She paused, thinking of Mother.

  Eventually, she made the finger-knotted FTU bondsign with her hands and said, “I swear to Time, Space, and Eternity all I’ve said is true. May your bonds stay firm. May your paths lie open.”

  She ended the recording and told her eie to transmit the report as soon as the hubspace connection resumed. Her supervisor and her supervisor’s supervisor would need to review her data. And, because it dealt with the event, it would likely reach the Court of Sents themselves before she got a reply. She hoped it would come soon. She had never missed home this much in her life.

  * * *

  She was falling into a dreamless sleep when she heard the voice.

  “Ornalia … Ornalia … !”

  She sat up, thinking she had dreamt it. Then it came again, a whisper above the sigh of the trees in the wind.

  “Ornalia!”

  No one had called her that in decades, not since she was a girl. She switched on the light, and the tent’s interior glowed bright yellow, hurting her eyes. She checked the power cell. It still had a full charge. The shield was up, or so it said, which meant no sound, let alone a damn quark, should have gotten through. It came again.

  “Ornalia …!”

  A woman’s voice. Ho
w could that be?

  She powered off the shield and stepped outside. The stars spread above her like twinkling crystalline dust. The mountains were tall black hands reaching into the sky. Yasimir had no moon, and Melisianda, once a constellation of light, had gone dark.

  “Ornalia!”

  She spun toward the voice, peering into the forest, and saw only shadows. She tried to amplify the light, but her eie would not respond. She could not even blink up a basic display.

  “Who’s there?” she called. “Adair, is that you? I don’t like games!”

  “Ornalia…”

  As her eyes adjusted, a faint blue-gray figure a few shades lighter than the forest appeared in the trees. No—it couldn’t be. It was dark, and she was tired, and the shadows were playing tricks on her eyes. But the figure standing there was unmistakable.

  “Mother?” Orna said.

  The figure backed into the forest, and Orna followed. A thick mist lit by the stars hovered at her waist, and as the figure ran through it she left behind a dark, swirling wake. Orna rushed after her, growing colder and wetter the farther she went.

  The figure climbed rocks and leaped over trickling streams, and Orna struggled to keep up. “Stop!” she cried. “Wait!”

  The figure kept climbing. Soon the path was so steep that Orna had to grasp onto slippery roots and stones to keep herself from falling. She knew this was foolish. If the fall didn’t kill her, exposure would. It might be days before someone found her. But unable to stop, she kept climbing.

  “Mother?” she called. “Is that you?”

  The woman climbed a nearly vertical rock wall as easily as if it were stairs. Orna found it impossibly treacherous. Her instincts told her to turn back, that if she continued she would fall to her death. But she had only to go a little more before the mountain leveled out, so she forced herself to climb higher.

  Soaked and gasping, she pulled herself onto the ledge. She stood on a circular plateau a few meters wide. At the opposite end the forest continued its steep ascent into the sky. Before this—there was no doubt about it now—stood Mother.