The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

by George Mann

  The history books said that the war had been fought perhaps ten thousand cycles ago, and that, after the devastation, strange beings had come among the people of Sunworld - beings that ecclesiastical scholars later claimed were angels - and brought about the formation of the Church, which in turn had brought lasting peace to the world and the eventual rebuilding of civilization.

  He hurried below, constructed a bunk from his extendable seat, and settled down to sleep as the sun dimmed quickly far above the hurtling train.

  He was awoken in the early hours, and at first he couldn’t make out what had brought him awake. It felt as though ice had invaded his veins; his body was rattling in a manner he had never experienced before. Instinctively he pulled the thin sheet over him, and then realized what had happened. He had read about this in books, but had never experienced the phenomenon of cold, the dead chill that enveloped him now.

  Teeth chattering in a way he might otherwise have found amusing, he sat up and peered through the window.

  The landscape surrounding the trundling train had changed alarmingly. Gone were the reassuring fields of yail, to be replaced by smaller fields of some stubby green plant, and over everything lay a coating of what he would later learn was called frost, a scintillating silver dusting like ground diamond.

  He noticed that other passengers were straining to peer ahead; he pressed his face to the icy glass and did likewise.

  What he saw sent a throb of surprise and fear through his being. Ahead, stretching for the extent of the horizon, was a range of gray mountains capped by what he knew was snow. The rearing phalanx was forbidding, austere and steel-like in its breadth, and total dearth of living color. This, then, was the Edge, and the range before him the fabled mountains that circumnavigated this plane of Sunworld. The thought that he was actually here, witnessing this sight, took his breath away.

  At the next station, vendors boarded the carriage selling mugs of hot broth. Yarrek gladly purchased one. Behind these vendors came others hawking thick clothing, serge pantaloons, padded jerkins, caps with ear flaps, and things called gloves which you fitted over your hands to protect the fingers - according to the spiel of the vendors - from something called frostbite.

  Yarrek outfitted himself from head to toe, pulling his new apparel over his old. He felt at once constricted but snug, and wondered if he would ever become accustomed to being so lagged.

  He settled down, more comfortable now, and stared in fascination through the window at the wonder of the passing world outside.

  Two hours later Yarrek caught his first glimpse of Icefast.

  If he had found the sight of the mountains a thing of wonder, then Icefast doubled his awe and sent his senses reeling. The engravings of his youth had done nothing to prepare him for either the scale of the city or the severity of its aspect.

  Like the mountains, Icefast was gray, and like the mountains it reared stark and abrupt from the land. The uniformity of the tall buildings, the fact that constructions of such enormity had been planned and undertaken by his fellow man, made the sight of the serried facades all the more daunting.

  Icefast filled the horizon between peaks as though the very mountains themselves had been found wanting and replaced. Yarrek made out ice-canals between the monolithic gray mansions, and on the canals the improbable sight of people skating back and forth, and others riding sleds drawn by teams of shaggy lox.

  In due course the train slowed and entered a canyon of buildings. On the station platform Yarrek made out a thousand souls muffled to their ears, their breaths pluming in the cold. Strange cries and shouts came from the throng, vendors selling everything from cold cures to water-heated boots, mulled yail to grilled lox.

  That morning, his father had given him instructions for his arrival in Icefast and directions to the House of the Inquisitors, where he would be given a bed in the apprentices’ dormitory. He would take a lox cart to the Avenue of Creation, and present himself to the porter at the House.

  As he gathered his belongings and stepped from the carriage, his breath robbed by the severity of the cold that wrapped around him and invaded his lungs, he realized that his heart was pounding with both excitement and dread.

  He hurried to a lox-cart stand, climbed aboard, and gave his destination to a muffled dwarf of a jockey. Seconds later he was gliding smoothly - no jolts on this ride - across the silvered canals of Icefast, and everything he beheld seemed new and wondrous. He saw nothing familiar, no fields of yail or timber buildings or kite-fish sailing around the sun. Instead all was drear and austere, the gaunt buildings hewn from great stone blocks, the thoroughfares filled with ice. It was the start of dimming. Back home the air would still be bright with sunlight; this far away from the Hub the sun was but a distant disk. A strange twilight filled the air, and the city was illuminated by naked flames in great sconces set atop pillars positioned along the middle of the ice-canals.

  The cart slowed at last and halted before the tall, pillared entrance of the House of Inquisitors. Yarrek paid the jockey and climbed down. Keeping his footing with difficulty as he negotiated paving stones slick with ice, he stepped towards the ancient timber doors and passed inside.

  He was met by the grim-faced porter, who escorted him without a word to a tiny cell furnished with a hard, narrow bed and a trunk for his clothing. He passed a fitful night, tossing, turning, and dreaming - when sleep came in the early hours - of home and sunlight and Yancy. At dawn, a loud rapping on the door of his cell awoke him and the porter led Yarrek, along with a dozen other would-be Inquisitors, to the lecture halls overlooking the Avenue of Creation.

  For the next ten brightening - though this near the Edge the word was something of a misnomer, for a brightening never achieved much more than a pewter half-light - Yarrek rose early and hurried from his spartan cell to the lecture halls.

  There, along with his fellow students, he pored over ancient manuscripts and studied more modern apologia. In the afternoons, after a short meal break during which he ate slabs of cold porridge and watered wine in a silent refectory, he returned to the lecture halls where he would listen, along with the other bored and nodding novices, to a different tutor every brightening who spoke at length on varying aspects of Church law and judiciary practice. At the end of the lessons he would sit a written exam on what he had learned so far, and he would have to dredge his memory for the arcane and abstruse tenets of ecclesiastical lore.

  At dimming, after a substantial meal of meat broth, he would retire to his cell and compose letters to Yancy and his family. To the latter he would paint a picture of diligence and interest, but to Yancy he would tell the truth: that he found his studies tedious and life in Icefast at best alienating. He missed the warmth of all that was familiar, he wrote, but most of all he missed Yancy.

  He made no friends among his fellow apprentices, for fraternisation was forbidden. Meals were taken in silence, and silence was the rule during study periods. At dimming, Church porters escorted the novices back to their cells. Though their doors were not locked, Yarrek suspected that guards were posted at the end of the corridor to discourage nocturnal wanderings.

  On his eleventh brightening in Icefast, the rules were relaxed. Nothing was stated overtly, but Yarrek noticed that whispers at mealtimes were not admonished, and the porters no longer escorted the novices from the lecture halls. He made friends with a fat youth from a city around the Edge of Sunworld who pined for the flat ice-fields of home just as Yarrek pined for the sun-parched plains of the Hub.

  Upon Yarrek’s fifteenth brightening as a novice, the lecturer announced that for the first time they would be allowed outside after lessons. That dimming Yarrek, along with his new-found friend, hired skates and for an hour attempted to remain upright along the Avenue of Creation before the cold became too much to bear.

  The following afternoon, in the great library, he consulted a gazetteer of the city, searching for the official building where he might find a listing of registered births. That evening a
fter lessons he slipped out and skated shakily along the Avenue towards the House of Public Records.

  He came to the building, like all the others in the metropolis a sheer, towering construction with high slit windows and a massive entrance. He removed his skates and passed inside, only to discover that he had just thirty minutes before the records office closed. He hurried, sweating in the furnace heat of the building, to the room which housed the rows of mouldering ledgers containing the names of all who had been born, lived, and died in Icefast for the past five hundred cycles.

  He knew, of course, that his name would not be among those listed, for he had been a third born, and thus an illegal issue. He hoped, however, to come across some clue that might help him in his search for his true parents. He reasoned that if he could find the names of all the families who had sired two children and their addresses (for he knew his parents to be high-born and assumed they would have lived in exclusive precincts), then he could furnish himself with a list of families who might possibly have birthed him against the law.

  But thirty minutes was no time at all in which to accomplish this mammoth task. No sooner had he found the relevant ledger and scanned the first page, than a dour, cloaked official appeared at the door and announced that the House of Public Records was closing in five minutes.

  Skating back to the House of the Inquisitors, the sun a tiny disk on the horizon, Yarrek told himself that on his next free brightening he would search the ledgers from first light to closing time.

  There was a surprise in store for the novices the following brightening. At the end of the afternoon’s lessons the lecturer, a wizened old vulture known as Dr Kellaway, rapped on his lectern and called for silence. His rheumy, censorious gaze raked the thirteen pale faces of his pupils as he announced, “For sixteen brightenings you have studied hard and completed a series of testing examinations. That phase of your education has now ceased. Your papers have been assessed, your ability established, and it is my duty to announce that just three of you have attained the standards required to be admitted to the Office of the High Inquisitor. The ten of you who have failed will be found posts in the Inquisitor’s halls of administration, which I might add is no disgrace.”

  He paused, his gaze moving from face to expectant face. Yarrek knew that his name would not be among the three who had passed. He could expect to pass his brightenings in dull administration; the thought of such work in the half-light and chill of Icefast filled him with despair.

  Dr Kellaway consulted a list upon his lectern and read out three names. “The successful novices are Burce Madders, Kareen Holgen, and Yarrek Merwell. You will report at first brightening to the porter’s lodge, and an official will escort you to your new study rooms.”

  Yarrek hurried to his cell as class was dismissed, wanting neither the congratulations of the failed candidates nor their recriminations. His only friend was not among the three. Yarrek knew that his commiserations would be met with stony resentment.

  The truth was that Yarrek was amazed at his success, for in his own estimation he had failed miserably to reproduce in the exams even half of what he had retained of the information supplied in the lessons. Could the failed ten have done even worse, he wondered with incredulity?

  Thus began a new phase of study for Yarrek.

  The three successful novices attended seminars given by the eminent Dr Bellair in his private suite at the very summit of the House of Inquisitors. Their presence was required only in the mornings, while the afternoons were left free to fill as they desired.

  In the mornings, Yarrek absorbed as much information as he thought possible on the abstruse subject of Church edicts. Every third brightening, the novices were expected to read out essays, to which Dr Bellair listened with an air of studious absorption, and then commented upon with clinical acuity. Yarrek came to understand the extent of the revolution that had shaken the Church. The old guard had been replaced, swept aside by Prelate Zeremy and his followers; traditional, Draconian ways had ceded to more liberal codes of practice. Beliefs that had held sway for cycles were now considered legitimate subjects for discussion and even for reasoned dissent. Yarrek found the sessions with Dr Bellair heady stuff indeed, after the dull lessons of ancient history, and for the first time thought he might find work in the Office of the Inquisitor to be ultimately rewarding.

  In the afternoons, after a period of private study, Yarrek made his way to the House of Public Records and pored laboriously over one dusty ledger after another. Over a period of a dozen brightenings he succeeded in compiling a list of fifty names of families of high standing who had sired two children in the cycle of his birth. He stared at the names and wondered if one of them might bear his rightful title.

  The following brightening, as he sat in Dr Bellair’s fire-lit study with his fellow novices, listening to the Doctor describe in detail the Prelate’s position on Church infallibility, a sharp rapping upon the door startled them all.

  Dr Bellair, ruffled at having his monologue interrupted, issued a testy summons and a poker-faced porter slid into the room and passed the Doctor a folded note.

  Dr Bellair read it once, and then again, and then looked up and across the room to Yarrek, who started in surprise.

  “Merwell,” the Doctor said, “you will accompany the Church Guard from this building forthwith.”

  Dry of throat, Yarrek climbed unsteadily to his feet. Watched by the incredulous students and a puzzled Dr Bellair, he followed the porter from the room.

  He was escorted down the switchback staircase from the twelfth floor to the spartan foyer where two tall guardsmen, outfitted in the resplendent golden uniforms of the Prelate’s office, awaited him.

  “Yarrek Merwell?” asked the taller of the two. “Please, this way.”

  Yarrek passed from the building between the two guards. In the ice-canal, a liveried coach-sled awaited them. He climbed into the lavishly upholstered cab and sank deep into a cushioned seat. The lox jockey yelled a command and the sled sped off, the guards standing on running-boards to either side of the careering vehicle.

  Minutes later they turned from the Avenue of Creation onto the Avenue of the Prelate, and shortly after that the sled halted in the shadow of a rearing edifice which stood at the very end of the boulevard, almost enclosed by an impressive backdrop of snow-capped peaks.

  Yarrek knew the identity of the building, but did not believe that he might ever be requested to step within its hallowed entrance.

  And yet this was precisely what the guards now suggested. On watery legs he climbed from the sled and the guards escorted him up a flight of steps and into the private residence of Prelate Zeremy.

  They climbed a winding staircase and paused before a double-door inlaid with lacquered frost-wood. Suddenly Yarrek knew then that his identity as an illegal third child had been discovered, though quite why that should entail an audience with the Prelate himself he could not guess.

  The doors swung open, revealing a prosaic room filled with shelves of books, and an armchair illuminated by a gas reading lamp.

  A small man, seated in the armchair, lowered his book and gazed the length of the room.

  Yarrek felt a sharp prod in his lower back, and a second later he was in the room and cowering beneath the gaze of the most powerful person in Sunworld.

  “Tisane, or would you prefer something stronger? Yail wine, perhaps?”

  The face was avuncular, kindly, and the enquiring tone of voice not one Yarrek would associate with the agency of punishment.

  “Tisane, thank you,” he said in a small voice. He perched on the edge of a chair opposite the Prelate, and could only stare at the old man in wonder. He was familiar with Prelate Zeremy’s features from portraits, but oils failed to do justice to the man’s warmth. The prelate wore the scarlet robes of his office, and his hair was long and silver-gray. His eyes, as he stared across at the awe-struck boy, twinkled with what Yarrek chose to interpret as kindliness.

  A footman poured two sm
all cups of perfumed tisane, then quietly withdrew.

  The Prelate laid his book on a small table beside the guttering gas lamp. “My informants report that you are excelling at your studies, Yarrek Merwell.”

  Yarrek stared into his tisane, at a loss for words. At last he said, “I… I try to do my best, sir.”

  “We live in an age when the certainties of the past have been stripped away, Yarrek. Study, in such times, is more problematic than usual. Who to believe; indeed, what to believe? The solid shibboleths of past times, or the fashionable mores of the present?”

  “We have been taught both,” Yarrek began, and cursed himself for stating something that the Prelate must obviously know. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “we could not appreciate the Church’s present enlightened position if we knew nothing of its more conservative stance in the past.”

  Prelate Zeremy smiled. “Well put, my friend. My informants were not wrong in their assessment of you.”

  Yarrek colored and turned his attention to his tisane.

  Zeremy watched Yarrek closely. “You are by all accounts open-minded.”

  Uncomfortable, Yarrek made a non-committal gesture.

  “You will consider improbable notions and not dismiss them out of hand.”

  He felt his heart begin a laboured thudding. What was the Prelate trying to say?

  “Five cycles ago, Yarrek, we discovered certain facts pertaining to our place in the nature of existence, facts which threw into doubt the very sanctity and dominion of the Church’s teachings.” He smiled and shook his head. “I, personally, found the revelation shocking. Like you, like everyone in Sunworld, I knew with absolute certainty the provenance of our world… We lived within the shell of an embolism embedded in the substance of rock and earth which went on forever without let or termination.”

  Yarrek found himself whispering, “And five cycles ago?”