Méarana spoke up. “You told him only to keep strange men away. If you meant more than that, he is not responsible for your oversight.”
Ravn trembled for a moment, still angry at the fear that had possessed her. She made an abrupt motion with her head, and the shopkeeper scuttled to the back of the store. Deprived thus of one target, she turned to the other.
“And you!” she said to Méarana. “That might have been Ekadrina’s magpie! What were you thinking?”
“Is she all right?”
“Who, that woman? Why should you care?”
“Because, as far as I know, she was just a nice lady who stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. And then your friend threw a knife in her back.”
Ravn put her face close to Méarana’s. “And what did you two chat about?”
The harper waved a hand around the store’s displays. “What do strangers normally discuss in such places?”
“The woman was Jugurthan,” put in Domino Tight. “Maybe a quarter by blood. That gave her the wide-set body. Their ancestors were genetically modified for some high-gravity planet somewhere in ancient times. The point is: there are no Jugurthans in the Confederation. That ‘nice lady’ was at least a Pup, maybe even a Hound.”
Méarana gasped, but Ravn had the distinct impression that the surprise was feigned and the harper had either guessed or been told the woman’s nature. “What did she say to you, Méarana? Did she tell you her name?”
“It wouldn’t have been the real name,” suggested Domino Tight.
“She called herself Gwen.”
Ravn nodded and opened a file on her hand screen. Domino said, “It even sounds Peripheral. Ravn, did you search the body?”
Olafsdottr shook her head absently. “There were two of them. The other suggested a truce and took her away.”
Domino Tight grinned. “Walked into a trap. But you’re not dead,” he added.
“You are ever a keen observer of fact, my darling.”
The harper cocked her head in her mother’s manner. “And what did the other look like?”
“I never saw her. She remained ever in shadows.” Then she found a name in her file. Cŵn Annwn. Close enough, assuming the name was real.
“I’ve heard of this shadowy Hound,” said Domino. “She calls herself Matilda of the Night.”
Ravn closed up her hand screen. Then, because the ill-hidden smile of the harper irritated her, she touched Méarana gently on the arm. “I am so sorry, sweet.”
The harper withdrew a little. “Sorry? Why?”
“That your mother sent only these others in her place, and did not come herself.”
The harper flinched at the thought but then suggested, “Or else she has brought a Pack with her.”
Ravn exchanged glances with Domino Tight and both set their faces in grim lines. One more complication in the play. Best they heigh for Terra immediately and conclude their business with Gidula. But Ravn thought it highly likely that the voice that spoke in the dark would be waiting when they landed there.
X. AT THE CAPITAL OF ALL THE WORLDS
The far-lit dawn does night’s decay foretell
And in her pitiless glow do future hopes
Pile earth upon the hopes of elder days.
O merciful Night! That thou dost shroud
The ranks of tombs and gravestones proud
Whereunder aspiration now decays,
And clear of buried dreams and tropes
Draws skyward gazes, the which do dwell
Upon far better beacons, more lofty themes.
Today is the wreckage of yesterday’s dreams.
Donovan’s hajj had taken him halfway around the world and a little more, and what he found was what he didn’t find. Desiccated shrublands marched along novel ice-drained coasts, and borders, breeds, and births were all awry. The ancient languages, so carefully learned in Terran Schools around the Periphery, were nowhere evermore spoken, and their offspring sprouted in eccentric places. The great artifacts of the past had seen wind and storm and ice, poverty and neglect, armies and migrations, and—one by one—they had fallen. Even North was not where story had left it. The planetary core was undergoing a phase shift, and the Magnetic Pole had left its icy home to bask now in the golden seas off the isle of Teetee.
Only the oceans themselves and the interminable mountains remained where passed-down tales had placed them. But what of it? If the enclosed portrait is utterly altered, does it matter if the frame is still untouched?
The Wall had been bulldozed by scree pushed down from the northlands in the fore of the Sborski glaciers. Her bastions were stumps, her facades pierced by tumbling rubble. The Pass of Jelep La, where the Allies under Marshal Kumar had held off the Cinakar, was choked with mountain glaciers, and the famous Monument of the Lions lay buried beneath centuries of snows. “Twelve-gated Terra” had possessed a dozen Beanstalks planted around her girth, but no traces remained of those great sky elevators—at least of those whose locations he passed over. There was no trace even of the Great Fall: wind and rain and jungle and the scavenging of gleaners had eaten them up.
Locals he questioned blinked blank faces—“Marshal Kumar? The Borneo Beanstalk? O snor, you speak in riddles.”
Only the Wall, in its fragmentary survival, had spawned tales of its origin. It had been built, one old man assured him over a plate of schnitzel in a restaurant in Vayshink, to keep the Ice at bay. Donovan, who knew something of the immense age of the thing, marveled at how legends could supplant even other legends.
In the Archives in Old Jösing, in a close room with a dim monitor, he skimmed through the detritus of records as old as time. A brief video of a sports contest among strangely garbed players. A simulation, experienceable only in part, of something called the Long March. The passenger list of Krunipak Loy, outbound for Megranome, containing tens of thousands of names. In such a swarm, even identity could be anonymous. She may have been one of the Ships of Exile—the time frame was right—but there was nothing in the record that signified desperate flight or banishment, and he found no other like manifests. The proscription list of the Emperor Philip Qang-po—longer even than the passenger list: Emperor Phil had evidently had a lot of enemies. (And had surely missed one in the sweep: he was assassinated after a six-month reign.)
The Pedant soaked up essays, novels, treatises with lightning speed, and heard in their musings “men lonely in a meaningless world.” All of their old certainties had been swept away, their gods lost, their philosophies emptied; and they had treasured what remained as a man might shelter from the winds in his cupped hands a small tuft of burning tow rescued from a now-cold fire. They regarded the beauties and great deeds of their past—and the mere technologies were the least among them—as “the last fragile even-glow of a long-set sun.” In their mournful and weary cadences he could detect the very themes that had later developed in the Old Planets, on Old ’Saken, on Die Bold, on Kàuntusulfalúghy: the sense that they had been orphaned by forgotten parents.
Is every age, Donovan wondered, built on the afterglow of another? What then could history be but the successive devolution of society? Each fire would burn less brightly than the one before. Or was he himself becoming infected with the twilight melancholy of the rotting Commonwealth?
But then he thought: The building was burning, and they ran back in to save what they could. That ought to count for something.
* * *
Of those individuals the Fudir had bespoken during his stopover in the Regency of Swak, only five had ever heard of the Borneo Beanstalk and none recalled that Borneo had been an ancient name for the Greater Swakland Peninsula. Greatly irritated at this amnesia—how could anything so large be so largely forgotten?—the scarred man scoured the Archive for files on the Beanstalk and unearthed a set of five visuals, one of them mobile. Two displayed the Stalk a few years after its fall: the Great Stump, ragged fragments strewn toward the horizon, a then more extensive jungle swallowing up the distance
. The topmost pieces, the Pedant told everyone, would have burned up in the atmosphere or splashed far out into the ocean.
The other two static visuals portrayed the Beanstalk before its fall: an immense tower, rising out of sight, dimishing into the eastbound distance to little more than a scratch upon the sky. But it stood already in ruins: Rust had secured hard-won victories, cables dangled from far above, and doorways hung broken and open on a barren departure lounge. An obviously space-tight crawler—the “Jack”—sat out of plumb, jammed on the primary funicular. The tower struts were overgrown with creepers and vines. A monkey with an enormous nose perched on one and seemed to look into the viewer with knowing eyes.
None showed the Beanstalk in its heyday.
It did not seem right that such a colossus had vanished without a trace. It was Commonwealth tech, after all. But perhaps it had been cannibalized for precisely that reason, as folk robbed the battlefield dead.
The mobile image was old and had obviously been migrated onto newer media early on, which may be why it had escaped the Dao Chettian purge of all Late Commonwealth records. The coarse images rastered at times into pixels, and if there had ever been any sound it had not survived the migration. The sequence began with a smiling assembly of dark-skinned blonds. Alabastrines, Donovan thought; but the Pedant told him that Alabaster had not yet been settled at the time of the record, so the physical type had evidently been native to Old Earth! They wore jackets—the climate being already chillier than of yore—and Donovan captured a name on the jacket-backs when they turned. A variety of Old Brythonic but written in the Taņţamiž script: Strine Omnischool. So this was a university outing of some sort. Perhaps an archeological field trip.
The students explore the old Beanstalk, talking to one another and pointing.
(Donovan wondered if he could have understood them. Brythonic was one of the ancient lingos he had learned in Terran School. But the degraded quality of the images did not allow even lip-reading.)
One of the students strips off his jacket and reveals a bare torso decorated in an intricate pattern of white tattoos that twist down his arms. He beats his chest and laughs and Donovan needs no interpreter. Look at me! I’m one of our ancient ancestors! The others laugh with him, although some trade skeptical glances with a significant look at the Beanstalk.
(The builders of the Beanstalk had been no primitive tribesmen. The Commonwealth had not then entirely fallen and Terra never did lose its memory of what it once had been.)
Student laughter is cut short when something plunges into the earth not two feet from the aboriginal pretender. Tree branches whip, leaves dance in a flurry, smoke drifts from a crater wherein sits something white. A frozen moment of surprise, the realization that death has spoken a mere pace away, then heads turn skyward.
And they run.
The images grow chaotic at this point, as the individual with the recorder is running with it and if it has a stabilizer it is turned off. But then, thinking himself safe and perhaps realizing the historical moment, the cameraman stops and begins recording events once more. The sky is filled with tumbling trash. Somewhere far up its trunk, the Beanstalk has buckled and, torn apart by its stresses, has become a rain of metaloceramic confetti. The distant clouds are pierced with contrails, where more lofty segments smoke through the atmosphere farther toward the east. An enormous subassembly strikes the jungle east of the stump, and shattered fragments bounce in all directions. A face appears midscreen and, crappy image or no, the lips are not hard to read. Run, you asshole!
(Yes, Late Brythonic, said the Pedant. But the Silky Voice and the others made no reply and the Brute was even more silent than usual.)
But the cameraman holds his ground. He records another impact near the horizon while smaller parts and components strike all around like iron rain. Then the imager pans skyward again and captures a fireball streaking toward the east, breaking up into calves.
And then a mass of mud and vegetation spatters the imager input. Mixed in the slime are streaks of red that might be blood but perhaps only a deeper stratum of mud.
Whatever it was, that was the end of the mobile. Various parts of the scarred man wondered whether the heroic cameraman had been killed at the end by debris from the disintegrating Beanstalk or whether the close call had finally convinced him to join his fellows in flight.
Donovan questioned the appellation. “Heroic? He was a fool to stay.”
Maybe, said the Brute, but it was still a ballsy thing to do.
“What? To record images that no one would ever look at a hundred years later? Images of an event that most people have now forgotten ever took place?”
But the Fudir, who had been weeping unrestrainedly, wiped the scarred man’s eyes with his sleeve. “No,” he said. “But he was in at the end of an age and he knew it. He was there when the gates went down.”
* * *
When Donovan passed over the Roof of the World into the ancient land of the Vraddy, he found no trace of the Taj. Nor did the people of the vast rolling savannah remember that there had ever been such a beautiful thing. They were content to drive their herds from summer to winter pasture and sell the beef in the markets of Gawath. They knew there had been a people on their land before them, and another people before that, but the herdsmen—the rinnernecks—were descended from recolonists out of Old Eighty-two and bore names that would have startled the men who had raised the Taj. They had no interest in such things and could indeed tell Donovan more stories of Old Eighty-two passed down in their clans than they could of the prairie over which they now roamed. When Donovan told a group of herdsman at their evening “gaffgläsh” that their plains had once been a jungle and the abode of tigers, they laughed and declared him the greatest liar of them all and kissed him on both cheeks.
* * *
The farm town of New Bramburg was an Old Terran settlement, her inhabitants decended of folk who had never left the planet. Donovan decided to spend an evening there, for he was desirous of one night at least among his own people.
It was not a very big town, but then Terra was no longer a very big world. Estimates he had seen in Gidula’s library had put the number at just under seven hundred million, planetwide. More than that, there was insufficient arable land to feed. The great farmlands of Terra’s past were desiccated steppes or polar deserts now and, while cross-stellar transport of food was not unknown, they would have needed daily armadas to replace their ancient harvests with the bounty of other worlds.
“Zãddigah-of-the-infidels,” said the bartender in the town’s only tavern, “is dying. Her primary export is young men and women of twenty.”
Another patron of the bar held up a glass. “May they all speedily depart.”
Aye, ran the unspoken subtext, and leave the Earth to those who had always nursed on her breasts. To these people, even the Terrans of the Periphery were just another sort of outlander, less obnoxious in some ways but more dangerous in others. Such folk attracted the notice of the Names and, by their dreams of resettlement, unsettled the minds of their neighbors. Three generations earlier, there had been a series of pogroms carried out by the hysterical descendants of Eighty-seconds and Bhaitrians on the mere rumor that they were to be expelled and the dispersed Terrans brought back. Thus does one generation’s conquest become another generation’s birthright. The age when their ancestors had come as conquerors had passed below the horizon of folk memory. Only the Old Terrans remembered, and habitually referred to their neighbors, with some politesse, as “guests,” however uninvited the guesting may have been.
The scarred man sat at the bar, feeling unnaturally exposed. He disliked putting his back to an open room, but there was a mirror behind the bar into which was etched the recumbent blue body of Sleeping Bisna, who was here called “Vishnu.” It gave him a view of his six. There were few townsmen in the bar. The farmers, the bartender promised him, would return at sunset, and then the joint would get “jumpy.”
“Though I wouldn’t let
on you be from the Diaspora,” he was advised; and the others nodded in chorus, offering grave assent. “Most of the clodhoppers are tolerant, but there are a few in every crowd. You know how it goes.”
Donovan agreed that he knew how it went. The Terrans of New Bramburg spoke not the Tongue. A few words and phrases of the old Taņţamiž peppered their talk but seemed more decorative than substantive. For the most part, the Folk had acquired the clothing and the accents of Old Eighty-two. Blue eyes and fair skin were common among them, and while they were conscious of having lived in this place longer than death, they were less aware that matters now were very different from when their ancestors had flourished.
Donovan bought a round for the house. That custom, at least, had not changed, and for a time he basked in a companionable silence. The shopkeepers and service techs who comprised the daytime population asked him desultory questions. How fare the Terrans of the Periphery? They were not really interested. The Periphery might as well be in the Andromeda Galaxy for all it mattered to them. But they sighed to hear of worlds where Terrans were merely snubbed and not subject to periodic murderous spasms. Life, they thought, must be wonderful in the Terran Corners of Jehovah and Die Bold and Dancing Vrouw.
“Not that we’d speak unfaithfulness to the Names,” the bartender reminded everyone, eliciting a chorus of grunts and “of course not.”
“Although,” the Fudir said, “it was the Names who cleansed Old Terra.”
“Mighty are the Names,” agreed the bartender. But one or two patrons twisted their lips in skepticism.
“One hears,” ventured the Vendor of Approved Pesticides, “other tales.”
“That the prehumans—the People of Sand and Iron—wrought the deed?” suggested the Fudir.
“There are stories.” The Vendor agreed without actually agreeing.
“Though to say so,” added the bartender, “were to disparage the might of the Names.”
The Terrans of New Bramburg all looked at Donovan without turning their heads. Who knew how long a tongue a stranger might have that it could lick the ears of others?
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