The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  “It’s dangerous,” she agreed. “Sometimes one of us disappears. No one says anything.”

  There was nothing she could tell him. He went into the hut with her and they unpacked their supplies: flatbread, desiccated fruits he did not recognize, some kind of cheese that he suspected might have begun as a barbarel’s glandular secretion, dried legumes, and a powder that Shan-Pei said would flavor the water. There were also several containers equipped for self-heating.

  “We should eat, then sleep,” he said. “If you will watch the trail for a little while, I will cook for us. Then I will stand watch while you sleep.”

  She went out and he prepared a simple meal: soup with bread to dip in it, cheese and fruit. He called her when it was ready and they ate standing up, outside the hut, their eyes on the back trail. They could still see, a long way off, the dust raised by the old man’s passage back to Pilger’s Corners. Nothing else stirred, save the shiny black creatures in the nearby patch of vein-plant. Imbry asked for the names of the crawlers and their plant world; from Shan-Pei’s wordless response he deduced that she had never felt enough curiosity to ask.

  After the meal, they cleaned and stacked the dishes, then the girl lay down on her side on the pallet. Imbry thought she was asleep by the time he left the hut. He had paused only to collect the children’s book he had taken from the town library. He meant to learn what he could while he stood sentry duty against the coming of Investigator Breeth.

  The volume was a textbook, a history primer for very young Fuldans. A long time ago, the text said, we lived on another world, with another sun, far, far away. The name of that world is not important. We call it The Pit. It was not a good place. The people who lived there were not good people.

  But there was one man who wanted to be good. His name was Haldeyn, and he was very wise. He thought very hard about important matters, alone in a room in the basement of a building where many bad people lived. One day, after a lot of thinking, he discovered a great truth: the reason so many people were so bad was that they had become too different from each other. They were all different sizes, shapes, and colors. Some had nice straight hair, some had hair that bent and twisted. Some had well-shaped round heads, but some had ugly long heads. Even their eyes were of different colors.

  Haldeyn realized that this was not how it was supposed to be. There was a right shape for people to be, a right size, and a right color. At first, he did not know what those right attributes were, but as he thought more deeply about it, he discovered a way to find out. He studied statistical variances and standard deviations from the norm (you’ll learn more about these things when you graduate to middle school). By comparing measurements made of many thousands and thousands of people, he worked out through arithmetic what he called the “golden mean.” This was the way people were supposed to look. It is the way you look.

  Haldeyn was not surprised to discover that he looked very much like the golden mean. He was not too tall, but not too short. His hair was not too dark or too light, and neither were his eyes. His hands and feet were exactly the sizes they should be. He realized that if everyone looked like him, there would be no more trouble in the world.

  But he knew he couldn’t make everyone look like him overnight. It would take a long time and would have to be the work of many good people. They would first have to get the people who didn’t look right to stop having so many babies, while getting people who looked almost right to have more (you’ll learn about having babies when you get to middle school). Eventually, the world would begin to look the way it was supposed to.

  Haldeyn started by gathering together people who looked right. His first convert was his twin brother, Holden. Then their cousin Illynus joined them. Besides looking right, Illynus was a very resourceful man who knew of a lot of ways to gain wealth quickly. He taught these ways to the twins, and together they formed an organization whose goal was to gain as much wealth from the bad people as they could, and quickly. It was very proper to gain wealth this way, because the bad people clearly did not deserve to have it.

  When other people who looked right saw that they too could gain wealth quickly by joining the new movement, they did so. After a few years, Haldeyn was the leader of a large and wealthy organization dedicated to making the world right. They looked for more right-looking people on other worlds and brought them into the movement. Many more years passed, and the movement—now known as the Congress of the Ideals—was in charge of several counties and some of the major cities on The Pit.

  In the fullness of his years, Haldeyn passed away. His brother Holden also died and Illynus became the leader of the Ideals, as the members of the movement were called. Illynus tried even harder to get the bad, wrong-looking people to stop having children, especially by gaining wealth from them and giving that wealth to Ideals who had plenty of right-looking boys and girls.

  But the wrong-looking people made trouble for the Ideals, especially when Illynus ordered a new program called “The Scouring.” The bad people tried to destroy all that Haldeyn, Holden, and Illynus had built. They tried to steal the Ideals’ wealth. They brought in weapons and fighters from other worlds to make an unfair war on the Congress of the Ideals. For a while, things were very bad.

  Then Illynus found a message that Haldeyn had wisely left hidden in a secret place. It said that time would prove to the Ideals that their world and its bad people were not worthy of all that the movement had tried to do for them. They should take spaceships and go to another world, where they could live the way good people were meant to live.

  The Ideals gathered up their children and the small amount of wealth that the bad people had not stolen from them and came to this world. It had another name then, but Illynus renamed it Fulda, after his fourth spouse, who was young and comely. There were some bad, wrong-looking people living on Fulda when the Ideals arrived, but they soon went away.

  The Ideals saw that Fulda could not be a world of big cities, nor could there be a lot of wealth-gaining here. A long, long, long time ago, when people lived on only one world—it was called Home, and everybody on it looked right—a race of very wrong-looking creatures called indigenes had lived on Fulda. In those days, this was a wet world, but the indigenes did something to the water so that some of it went into the air and stayed there, while most of it went under the ground. From there it bubbles up in places to make the oases where we all live.

  No one knows how the indigenes made the water go up and down and stay there. But they must have been bad creatures, and probably very wrong-looking, because by the time the first people came to Fulda, they were all as gone-away as the seas. It was good that they went away, because they left us a planet where we can all live good, right-looking lives under the wise guidance of the Congress of the Ideals.

  The text also contained colored pictures depicting Haldeyn and Illynus in heroic fashion. The bad people of The Pit from which the defeated Idealist fanatics had fled were shown as shadowy, subhuman forms, with glowing eyes and prominent fangs. There was also a fanciful rendering of an indigene as a multilimbed, insectoid creature standing about the height of an Idealist’s knee. It had faceted eyes and a segmented tail with a barbed stinger. For some reason, the artist had equipped the imaginary creature with a spear taller than itself, tipped by a serrated blade.

  There was more text, concerning the social organization the Ideals had built on Fulda. Even from a children’s book, Imbry could deduce that theirs was a world of top-down authority, in which those at the top appointed their underlings. Arbiters and provost’s men were admitted on merit, but advancement beyond the rank and file was probably acquired through subservience. Those at the apex of the pyramid—“the best and greatest” was how the book named them—appeared to hold their places for life, though how they gained superlative rank was not revealed to the children. From Imbry’s reading between the lines of the text, he suspected that the top-level leadership changed infrequently—and that the process probably involved sudden, though intric
ately planned, violence.

  He read the book in portions, looking up after every few paragraphs to scan the landscape to the east. Sometime after the sun had passed its highest point, he saw a suggestion of movement on the horizon. He stared at the spot, wishing for a long-distance viewer, but could not be sure if he had seen actual motion or just the ripple of heated air. He read a little more then looked again, and saw a very tiny, very distant swirl of dust.

  He returned to the hut and woke Shan-Pei. “It may be that Shvarden, as promised,” he said. “But it also might be Breeth. I certainly will not chance another encounter with the investigator.”

  He gathered up some food and water, put them in one of the cloths that their supplies had come bundled in, and tied it up with twine. As an afterthought, he slipped the schoolbook under the string then hefted the package. He could carry the weight a long distance.

  “You will not tell Breeth?” he said to the girl.

  “The arbiter told me what I am to say if he comes.”

  “He will not harm you?”

  “It is you who calls him, not me.”

  Imbry left, heading toward the rise at the back of the broad terrace, keeping the hut between him and the distant puff of dust. It was not at all unthinkable that Breeth would have a viewer that could spot him, and that he would be coming in a sun-powered, multiwheeled vehicle that would soon run the fat man down, nimble though he might be.

  He watched where he trod. The ground was too hard to take a footprint, but Imbry had been tracked in rough country before and knew that the long-buried underside of an overturned pebble looked different to a trained eye. Breeth’s eye might be educated enough to see a trail if Imbry was fool enough to leave one.

  By the time he had walked far enough that the hut was difficult to distinguish from the surrounding rock, the land had begun to slope upward again. The incline was steeper than the one that had led to the terrace, but the light gravity assisted Imbry and he went up quickly even though he moved carefully. The indigene ruins were not easy to find at first; they were built not on the top of the ridge, but in a broad hollow on its far side where the ground met the base of a middling-high cliff.

  Imbry’s first impression was of a tall heap of darker stone, the roundedness of its component shapes contrasting with the vertical and horizontal planes of the natural landscape. Then his eye adjusted to the proportions and he saw something like a combination miniature fortress and multiunit dwelling, rising several times his own height. Like the earlier ruin he had passed on the way to Pilger’s Corners, this one resembled a cluster of circular fruit or a conglomeration of bubbles piled one atop another, pierced by round, glassless windows. At its base and also farther up the structure, the dark stone had been broken into, leaving gaping holes and a scattering of rubble on the ground outside.

  Imbry approached and peered into the lower breach. He saw a smallish chamber, roughly globular and apparently plastered in a lighter shade than the dark outer rock, with round holes in the ceiling, floor, and walls as well as another human-made breach. He entered the space and looked through some of the openings, saw more chambers and what looked to be narrower, spiral passageways leading deeper into the building and down into the subsurface. What he did not see was any sign of the structure having been shaped or assembled from smaller parts. There was an organic unity to the walls and floors, as if they had been grown—or, conceivably, blown—into existence. He was reminded of a reef he had once seen on the secondary world, where myriad undersea animalcules cohered together to create great hollow domes in which they sheltered species of larger creatures off whose wastes the tiny builders fed.

  But there was more complexity here than on As. Imbry sensed that the proportions of the rooms and their relationships to each other and the structure as a whole answered to some mathematical framework that eluded his human brain. He would have been interested to ask an integrator to probe and measure the building to see what subtle algorithm underlie the arrangement of its parts.

  But, more to the point, he saw no artifacts he could scoop up. If there had ever been any, the long-gone miners who had broken in would have taken them away. He was interested to note, though, that what he had taken for plaster on the inner surfaces was apparently not an applied substance. It did not flake when he scratched at it with a fingernail, nor was it cracked at the edges of the holes the miners had hacked through the walls. Instead, the dark of the outside gradually lightened to become the pale interior surface.

  An interesting trick, Imbry thought, and one he had not seen anywhere else. He could imagine that a vogue for the architectural technique might spring up if it could be introduced to Olkney, where nothing genuinely new had appeared in aeons. But all Imbry saw here was the effect; how it was achieved, through what ultraterrene technology or what alien control of powerful energies, he had no idea. And he was unlikely ever to know the secret. The indigenes of Fulda had been gone far too long, taking all of their mysterious powers with them.

  He went back out and approached the second unnatural feature of the site. This was a wide, circular depression, like a shallow, inverted cone lined in some pale stone and rimmed with a raised lip. It put Imbry in mind of a setting for a giant gemstone, now prized out and stolen away. As he came closer, he could see that its surface was marked by a pattern graven into the creamy stone. The overall impression was that of a spiral winding in toward an oval lozenge in the center of the declivity, though there seemed to be subtle discontinuities in the design. Imbry could somehow not keep the whole of the pattern in view, and the proportions of its parts seemed to shift if he focused on this or that feature of it. He found that prolonged gazing at the spiral brought the onset of a mild dizziness, and supposed it was meant to be seen through a different kind of eye.

  He looked instead at the central oval. Scratched in it was a character that he thought he recognized from one of the ceramic tablets in the private booths behind the Hedevan Players’ stage. He stepped over the lip of the depression and went to take a closer look. Immediately, he experienced an odd sensation, a prickling of the hairs all over his body, as if he had stepped into an electrically charged field. He stopped and waited to see if it would intensify, but instead it quieted. The hairs on his arms and legs lay down again and Imbry proceeded, though cautiously, to the oval center.

  He stood on the oval, looking down at the character graved in the pale stone. It resembled a cross-hatched fence and he was sure it was one of those that he had seen on the ceramic tablets he had handled in the back of the show tent. Did that mean that the tablets were of indigene manufacture? If so, they could be of genuine value if properly presented to the right kind of collector. Perhaps he would see if he could pocket—well, pouch—a few of them before he left the planet. The glazes made the objects works of art in their own right; for some reason, he was reminded of some of the Nineteenth-Aeon ceramics, although the colors were quite different.

  As he contemplated the cross-hatched design, he noticed that one edge of the oval had developed a dark shadowing. So unexpected was the sight, or perhaps it was the effect on his vision of examining an alien design, that it took Imbry a moment to grasp the significance. When he did, he immediately stepped off the oval—stepped off and stepped up, because the shadow’s appearance had been caused by the silent sinking of the design’s central lozenge into the ground.

  Relieved of Imbry’s weight, the oval did not cease to sink from view. Imbry knelt and peered into the hole. Now he could hear, coming up from below, a faint sifting, hissing sound. When he looked for its source he saw, issuing from beneath the descending oval, thin rivulets of sand running away into the dimness below.

  The first thought that came to Imbry was: trap, but then he considered that it would be a poor trap indeed that was sprung so slowly. The second thought was: secret passage, and that naturally led to a consideration of one of the reasons passages were made secretively: because they lead to treasure.

  The fat man turned around and e
ased himself down and over the rim of what he was now thinking of as a shaft. His ribs complained a little, but he overruled them. He supported his weight on his arms, which rested on the graved floor of the depression, while gingerly lowering himself until his feet again touched the sinking oval. Imbry transferred more of his weight onto his feet, but felt no increase in the rate of descent. He let go of the upper surface and crouched to see what was under the patterned hollow.

  He saw a space, not very large, whose ceiling curved down seamlessly to become walls that just as seamlessly met the floor. When he looked in the direction of the ruin, he saw nothing of note. When he looked in the opposite direction, he saw a short column of the dark stone, standing like a plinth, and flat on top. Atop the column was an object, though the light from the shaft did not extend far enough to illuminate it.

  Imbry remained where he was, standing on the still slowly sinking oval. He had a strong urge to go and see what stood atop the plinth, but he had had enough surprises of late; he would not care to return to the oval to find that while he had been treasure-hunting it had kept on sinking until it was deep below the surface of the chamber floor, leaving him with a hole above and a hole below, through neither of which he could exit.

  Restraining his curiosity, he waited until he was sure that the stone beneath him had ceased to descend. It stopped, its upper surface level with the floor, and with the hole in the ceiling not far above Imbry’s head. Despite his great strength, his heroic girth would make climbing out an ungraceful enterprise, but the fat man knew he could do it. He went to see what chance had delivered to him.

  It was too dim to see clearly, but touch told him that he had found a squarish object about the width of his head and as deep as the distance from his wrist to his fingertips. It was a flattened cube, round cornered, with a smooth though irregular surface. When he nudged it, it moved, scraping across the flat stone top of the column. When he lifted it, it came free of the column and proved not too heavy to carry. He was about to take it back to where the light of Fulda’s sun played down through the hole in the chamber’s ceiling, but paused. His eyes had become better used to the darkness and now he saw that what he had taken for a pool of shadow behind the column was in fact a wide, circular hole in the floor.