by Neil Clarke
The ice bottom buoyancy-pinned ecosystem described here has some Earthly analogs in polar regions, but here, it is the dominant one with the local sense of up and down reversed from our gravity-dominated environment. This was more difficult to write than one might think, as conventional ideas of up and down were difficult to suppress. One really has to imagine oneself in the environment.
Are these aliens “too human” in character if not in form? At some point, one has to admit that one is writing a story for human beings to read and to whom they will be able to relate. But I think there is an argument for a certain universality in the underlying motivational programming of intelligent beings; we see much of ourselves in the behavior of life around us, even that whose last common ancestor lived hundreds of millions of years ago. One might expect to see reciprocity, hierarchies, collective aggression, and even sacrifice for the sake of the greater gene pool. Such traits have survival value here and may have survival value elsewhere as well.
—GDN, Jan. 2014
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, 2002.
About the Author
G. David Nordley is the pen name of Gerald David Nordley, an author and consulting astronautical engineer. He lives in Sunnyvale, CA. A retired Air Force officer, he has been involved in spacecraft orbital operations, engineering, and testing as well as research in advanced spacecraft propulsion. As a writer of fiction and nonfiction, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focuses on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. Gerald is a past Hugo and nebula award nominee as well as a four-time winner of the Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact annual “AnLab” reader’s poll. His latest novel is To Climb a Flat Mountain, and the latest book is a collection, Among the Stars, available from Brief Candle Press in print or ebook through Amazon.com. The latest new publication at this writing is “Last Call” in How Beer Saved the World 2, due from Skywarrior Press, 2015.
The Peacock Cloak
Chris Beckett
Grasshoppers creaked, bees hummed, a stream played peacefully by itself as it meandered in its stony bed through the quiet mountain valley. And then Tawus was there in his famous cloak, its bright fabric still fizzing and sparking from the prodigious leap, its hundred eyes, black, green, and gold, restlessly assaying the scene. Tawus had arrived, and, as always, everything else was dimmed and diminished by his presence.
“This world was well made,” Tawus said to himself with his accustomed mixture of jealousy and pride.
He savored the scents of lavender and thyme, the creakings and buzzings of insects, the gurgling of the stream.
“Every detail works,” he said, noticing a fat bumblebee, spattered with yellow pollen, launching herself into flight from a pink cistus flower. Passing the object he carried in his left hand to his right, Tawus stooped to take the flower stem between his left forefinger and thumb. “Every molecule, every speck of dust.”
Painfully and vividly, and in a way that had not happened for some time, he was reminded of the early days, the beginning, when, on the far side of this universe, he and the Six had awoken to find themselves in another garden wilderness like this one, ringed about by mountains.
Back then things had felt very different. Tawus had known what Fabbro knew, had felt what Fabbro felt. His purposes had been Fabbro’s purposes, and all his memories were from Fabbro’s world, a world within which the created universe of Esperine was like a child’s plaything, a scene carved into an ivory ball (albeit carved so exquisitely that its trees could sway in the wind and lose their leaves in autumn, its creatures live and die). Of course he had known quite well he was a copy of Fabbro and not Fabbro himself, but he was an exact copy, down to the smallest particle, the smallest thought, identical in every way except that he had been rendered in the stuff of Esperine, so that he could inhabit Fabbro’s creation on Fabbro’s behalf. He was a creation as Esperine was, but he could remember creating himself, just as he could remember creating Esperine, inside the device that Fabbro called Constructive Thought. Back then, Tawus had thought of Fabbro not as “he” and “him” but as “I” and “me.”
And how beautiful this world had seemed then, how simple, how unsullied, how full of opportunities, how free of the ties and regrets and complications that had so hemmed in the life of Fabbro in the world outside.
Tawus released the pink flower, let it spring back among its hundred bright fellows, and stood up straight, returning the small object from his right hand to his dominant left. Then, with his quick gray eyes, he glanced back down the path, and up at the rocky ridges on either side. The peacock eyes looked with him, sampling every part of the visible and invisible spectrum.
“No, Tawus, you are not observed,” whispered the cloak, using the silent code with which it spoke to him through his skin.
“Not observed, perhaps,” said Tawus, “but certainly expected.”
Now he turned southwards, towards the head of the valley, and began to walk. His strides were quick and determined but his thoughts less so. The gentle scents and sounds of the mountain valley continued to stir up vivid and troubling memories from the other end of time. He recalled watching the Six wake up, his three brothers and three sisters. They were also made in the likeness of Fabbro but they were, so to speak, reflections of him in mirrors with curved surfaces or colored glass, so that they were different from the original and from each other. Tawus remembered their eyes opening, his brother Balthazar first and then his sister Cassandra, and he remembered their spreading smiles as they looked around and simultaneously saw and remembered where they were, in this exquisite, benign and yet to be explored world, released forever from the cares and complications of Fabbro’s life and from the baleful history of the vast and vacant universe in which Fabbro had been born.
They had been strangely shy of each other at first, even though they shared the same memories, the same history and the same sole parent. The three sisters in particular, in spite of Fabbro’s androgynous and protean nature, felt exposed and uneasy in their unfamiliar bodies. But even the men were uncomfortable in their new skins. All seven were trying to decide who they were. It had been a kind of adolescence. All had felt awkward, all had been absurdly optimistic about what they could achieve. They had even made a pact with each other that they would always work together and always make decisions as a group.
“That didn’t last long,” Tawus now wryly observed, and then he remembered, with a momentary excruciating pang, the fate of Cassandra, his proud and stubborn sister.
But they’d believed in their agreement at the time and, having made it, all Seven had stridden out, laughing and talking all at once, under a warm sun not unlike this one, and on a path not unlike the one he was walking now, dressed so splendidly in his Peacock Cloak. He had no such cloak back then. They had been naked gods. They had begun to wrap themselves up only as they moved apart from one another: Cassandra in her Mirror Mantle, Jabreel in his Armor of Light, Balthazar in his Coat of Dreams . . . But the Peacock Cloak had been finest of all.
“I hear music,” the cloak now whispered to him.
Tawus stopped and listened. He could only hear the stream, the grasshoppers, and the bees. He shrugged.
“Hospitable of him, to lay on music to greet us.”
“Just a peasant flute. A flute and goat bells.”
“Probably shepherds up in the hills somewhere,” said Tawus, resuming his stride.
He remembered how the seven of them came to their first human village, a village whose hundred inhabitants imagined that they had always lived there, tending their cattle and their sheep, and had no inkling that only a few hours before, they and their memories had been brought into being all at once by their creator Fabbro within the circuits of Constructive Thought, along with a thousand similar groups scattered over the planets of Esperine: the final touch, the final detail, in the world builder’s ivory ball.
“T
he surprise on their faces!” Tawus murmured to himself, and smiled. “To see these seven tall naked figures striding down through their pastures.”
“You are tense,” observed his cloak. “You are distracting yourself with thoughts of things elsewhere and long ago.”
“So I am,” agreed Tawus, in the same silent code. “I am not keen to think about my destination.”
He looked down at the object he carried in his hand, smooth and white and intricate, like a polished shell. It was a gun of sorts, a weapon of his own devising. It did not fire mere bullets. It destroyed its targets by unraveling, within a chosen area, the laws that defined Esperine itself, and so reducing form to pure chaos.
“Give me a pocket to put this in,” Tawus said.
At once the cloak made an opening to receive the gun, sealing itself up again when Tawus had withdrawn his hand.
“The cloak can aim and shoot for me, if need be,” Tawus muttered to himself.
And the cloak’s eyes winked, green and gold and black.
The valley turned a corner. There was an outcrop of harder rock. As he came round it, Tawus heard the music that his cloak, with its finely tuned senses, had detected some way back: a fluted melody, inexpertly played, and an arrhythmic jangling of crudely made bells.
Up ahead of him three young children were minding a flock of sheep and goats, sheltering by a little patch of trees at a spot where a tributary brook cascaded into the main stream. A girl of nine or ten was playing panpipes. In front of her on a large stone, as if it were the two-seat auditorium of a miniature theater, two smaller children sat side by side: a boy of five or so and a little girl of three, cradling a lamb that lay across both their laps. The jangling bells hung from the necks of the grazing beasts.
Seeing Tawus, the girl laid down her pipes and the two smaller children hastily set their lamb on the ground, stood up, and moved quickly to stand on either side of their sister with their hands in hers. All three stared at Tawus with wide unsmiling eyes. As he drew near, they ran forward and kissed his hand, first the older girl, then the boy, and finally the little three-year-old whose baby lips left a cool patch of moistness on his skin.
“Your face is familiar to them,” the cloak silently observed. “They think they know you from before.”
“As we might predict,” said Tawus. “But you they have never seen.”
The children were astounded by a fabric on which the patterns were in constant motion, and by the animated peacock eyes. The boy reached out a grubby finger to touch the magical cloth.
“No, Thomas!” her sister scolded, slapping the child’s hand away. “Leave the gentleman’s coat alone.”
“No harm,” Tawus said gruffly, patting the girl on the head.
And the cloak shook off the fragments of snot and dust that the child’s fingers had left behind.
Ten minutes later Tawus turned and looked back at them. They were little more than dots in the mountain landscape but they were still watching him, still holding hands. Around them, unheeded, the sheep grazed with the goats.
Suddenly, Tawus was vividly reminded of three other children he had once seen, of about the same ages. He had hardly given them a thought at the time, but now he clearly saw them in his mind: the younger two huddled against their sister, all three staring with white faces as Tawus and his army rolled through their burning village, their home in ruins behind them. It had been in a flat watery country called Meadow Lee. From his vantage point in the turret of a tank, Tawus could see its verdant water meadows stretching away for miles. Across the whole expanse of it buildings were burning and columns of dirty smoke were slowly staining the whole of the wide blue sky a glowering oily yellow.
When was that, Tawus wondered? On which of the several different occasions when fighting had come to Meadow Lee? He thought it had been during one of his early wars against his brother Balthazar. But then he wondered whether perhaps it had been at a later stage when he was in an alliance with Balthazar against Jabreel.
“Neither,” said the Peacock Cloak. “It was in the war all six of you waged against Cassandra, that time she banned chrome extraction in her lands.”
“Don’t needlessly interfere. Offer guidance where necessary, head off obvious problems, but otherwise allow things to take their own course.”
It would be wrong to say these were Fabbro’s instructions to the Seven because he had never spoken to them. They were simply his intentions which they all knew because his memories were replicated in their own minds. When they encountered those first villagers, the Seven had greeted them, requested food and a place to rest that night, and asked if they were any matters they could assist with. They did not try and impose their views, or change the villager’s minds about how the world worked or how to live their lives. That had all come later, along with the wars and the empires.
“But did he really think we could go on like that forever?” Tawus now angrily asked. “What were we supposed to do all this time? Just wander around indefinitely, advising on a sore throat here, suggesting crop rotation there, but otherwise doing nothing with this world at all?”
The Seven had begun to be different from Fabbro from the moment they awoke. And paradoxically it was Tawus, the one made most completely in Fabbro’s likeness, who had moved most quickly away from Fabbro’s wishes.
“We can’t just be gardeners of this world,” he had told his brothers and sisters, after they had visited a dozen sleepy villages, “we can’t just be shepherds of its people, watching them while they graze. We will go mad. We will turn into imbeciles. We need to be able to build things, play with technology, unlock the possibilities that we know exist within this particular frame. We will need metals and fuels, and a society complex enough to extract and refine them. We will need ways of storing and transmitting information. There will need to be cities. On at least one planet, in at least one continent, we will have to organize a state. ”
The Six had all had reservations at first, to different degrees, and for slightly different reasons.
“Just give me a small territory then,” Tawus had said, “a patch of land with some people in it, to experiment and develop my ideas.”
In his own little fiefdom he had adopted a new approach, not simply advising, but tempting and cajoling. He had made little labor-saving devices for his people and then spoken to them of machines that would do all their work for them. He had helped them make boats and then described spaceships that would make them masters of the stars. He had sown dissatisfaction in their minds and, within two years, he had achieved government, schools, metallurgy, sea-faring, and a militia. Seeing what he had achieved, the Six had fallen over one another to catch up.
“How come they all followed me, if my path was so wrong?” Tawus now asked.
“They had no choice but to follow you,” observed the Peacock Cloak, “if they didn’t wish to be altogether eclipsed.”
“Which is another way of saying that my way was in the end inevitable, because once it is chosen, all other ways become obsolete. To have obeyed Fabbro would simply have been to postpone what was sooner or later going to happen, if not led by me, then by one of the others, or even by some leader rising up from the Esperine people themselves.”
He thought briefly again of the children in front of the ruined house, but then he turned another corner, and there was his destination ahead of him. It was a little island of domesticity amidst the benign wilderness of the valley, a small cottage with a garden and an orchard and a front gate, standing beside a lake.
“He is outside,” said the Peacock Cloak, whose hundred eyes could see through many different kinds of obstacles. “He is down beside the water.”
Tawus came to the cottage gate. It was very quiet. He could hear the bees going back and forth from the wild thyme flowers, the splash of a duck alighting on the lake, the clopping of a wooden wind chime in an almond tree.
He raised his hand to the latch, then lowered it again.
“What’s the matter
with me? Why hesitate?”
Clop clop went the wind chimes.
“It is always better to act,” whispered the cloak through his skin, “that’s what you asked me to remind you.”
Tawus nodded. It was always better to act than to waste time agonizing. It was by acting that he had built a civilization, summoned great cities into being, driven through the technological changes that had taken this world from sleepy rural Arcadia to an age of interplanetary empires. It was by acting that he had prevailed over his six siblings, even when all six were ranged against him, for each one of them had been encumbered by Fabbro with gifts or traits of character more specialized than his own pure strength of will: mercy, imagination, doubt, ambivalence, detachment, humility.
True, he had caused much destruction and misery but, after all, to act at all it was necessary to be willing to destroy. If he ever had a moment of doubt, he simply reminded himself that you couldn’t take a single step without running the risk of crushing some small creeping thing, too small to be seen, going about its blameless life. You couldn’t even breathe without the possibility of sucking in some tiny innocent from the air.
“The city of X is refusing to accept our authority,” his generals would say.
“Then raze it to the ground as we warned we would,” he would answer without a moment’s hesitation. And the hundred eyes would dart this way and that, like a scouting party sent out ahead of the battalions that were his own thoughts, looking for opportunities in the new situation that he had created, scooping out his next move and the move after that.
There had been times when his generals had stood there open-mouthed, astounded by his ruthlessness. But they did not question him. They knew it was the strength of his will that made him great, made him something more than they were.
“But now,” he said to himself bitterly, “I seem to be having difficulty making up my mind about a garden gate.”
“Just act,” said the cloak, rippling against his skin in a way that was almost like laughter.
