Doubly suspicious was the fact that Krashen would be dragged out of the cell, his legs and arms flailing wildly, but ineffectually, only for him to be returned to us in a short while looking none the worse for wear. He even seemed to be pretending injuries that neither Hask nor I could see. What we both failed to perceive at that point was precisely why the need for this subterfuge; we had our suspicions, centered on Khayyam, but we lacked the bigger picture.
If Khayyam had observed any of this, he acted otherwise and continued both with his tales and with his Terran cultural lessons. The planet had a more varied population than I had thought possible, with Khayyam’s desert people sharing a single atmosphere with the Inuit of the far north, where the snow never melted and the sun sometimes set for lunars on end. How they must have struggled to act as a unified species!
“That we never did learn,” Khayyam said with bitterness after one story. “My people discovered oil under their land, and this oil was sold and then burned. When it was burned, the atmosphere became clogged and the heat that came to us from the sun was trapped. The climate around the planet grew warmer and less predictable, and then the snow did melt in the north.”
He shook his head in sadness. I didn’t know what words of solace to offer him. Despite our problems, ours had always been a united civilization. We knew nothing of these difficulties.
Khayyam was passionate about his homeland, though he admitted he had elected not to engrave it on his map.
“I didn’t need any reminder of where it is, or what it represents for me,” he said. “You see, there are two kinds of people who go off to explore space. Those for whom curiosity rules their hearts, and those for whom the Earth has grown too small. Or you might equally say there are those who run towards something, and those who run away. Sadly, I was always more of the latter kind of person.”
Until my incarceration, I might have said I was quite unlike the Terran, but now I no longer knew for certain. I looked up at the unblinking lights of the stars and wondered if the time would soon arrive when I would set off into them. If I did, a visit to Khayyam’s Earth would be high up on my list.
Khayyam told us tales of wonder, of hiding under the rings of enormous planets whilst customs agents trawled the system, of fighting through the turbulence of a supernova, of threading the needle—the explanation was long-winded—that lay between the two suns of a binary system; his tales seemed never ending, and I could not believe that one person had managed to squeeze so much into a lifetime.
But there was one system scratched into a far corner of the wall, separated from the rest by several hand spans, that Khayyam never spoke about. We had gone almost half a lunar cycle with no interrogation at all, only Krashner suffering the guards’ attentions, and Khayyam was able to talk uninterrupted for much of the day. After a particularly thrilling tale of landing his craft on a swiftly moving comet, I asked Khayyam about the marks.
He smiled at me, but shook his head.
“Flipslow, Hask, I trust you both now with my life. I consider you my greatest friends, for all your little kindnesses to me, and for listening to my stories with such patience and interest. But I cannot divulge to you where that system is.”
I flicked my fingers, the Thosk way of saying not to worry. Khayyam missed my gesture, and sensing that he was disappointing his audience, he offered instead a short tale about the system.
“But you must promise to ask me no questions about it, nor to speculate on its location. If it helps, consider that I purposely drew the map there out of scale, to fool eavesdroppers.”
Did he glance in the direction of Krashen then? I wasn’t sure, but I picked up on his increased body heat. Khayyam was worried.
“I have told you about Uki, no?”
“Many lunars ago, but yes. I remember the tale well.”
“It was many years before I heard anything from her. I had not expected a communication, but when it arrived I could hardly claim to be surprised.
“I was working in a dark system with a small, weak sun whose light was more tepid than any I had come across. By its dimness, I led a crew whose sole task was to excavate a planetoid trapped in its gravity, and to transport whatever precious minerals we could find back to the factory planet of Mars in our own system.
“When the message arrived it had already been travelling in subspace for six months. After much deliberation Uki had finally decided to tell me that she had a child, that it was mine, and that I had her permission to come and see him.
“As soon as my contract finished, I raced to the system she had indicated in her communication. I made contact with Uki, who was then working as the head of a research lab in a quiet, dusty corner of a human settlement. She was part of the terraforming mission. That was so like her, who could not fix her own people’s problems and so sought a fresh start for them—for us.
“I met my son. He looked so much like me. I was never that young, I thought when I looked at him. Uki said I could stay, that we could work things out, but the boy was already nearly ten years old and he had never needed me as a father. He treated me like the stranger I was, and I could discover no route to his heart.
“I told Uki that there would be no work for me if I stayed, but I promised to return one day to visit, and to teach my son the lessons I felt he might need in his adulthood. Now was not the time. My presence confused and angered him.
“Now, when I am at my most hopeless, when I feel that I must submit to the forces acting upon me, or when I want to let my body crumble and die, I look at that spot on the map and think of my son. I think of all that I want to tell him. And that keeps me alive.”
“We will keep your secret,” I said to Khayyam.
“Thank you,” he said. He offered his hand first to me and then to Hask, and we held it in our own, not quite sure what else to do with it.
“I do have a question,” Hask said. “I’d been meaning to ask you for lunars now, but I always chose not to, I don’t know why.”
“Ask away,” Khayyam said.
“Well, we’ve always thought that you knew only the one language, Arabic. But Uki was from a different people, a different tribe you might say. Did they also speak Arabic?”
Khayyam laughed, his first in our company. It was a formidable sound which soon decayed into a spluttering cough.
“Sometimes it pays to keep your bottles close to your abdomen, as you might say,” he told us. In fluent Thosk. “I speak thirteen languages, though not all quite as well as I do yours. I’m a natural linguist. Uki even taught me some expressions from her own language, and could never get over how well I was able to recall them. I greeted her and her son that way too.”
“Unbelievable,” Hask said.
I glanced over at Krashen. I’d been keeping a close eye on him for much of the revolution; his growing attentiveness worried me. He was sitting up on his haunches now, devouring every word we said. I whispered to Khayyam and Hask to keep quiet, but I reckoned the damage was done.
Later, when Krashen was taken for his interrogation, he left the cell without a struggle, greeting the guards almost as if they were old friends. I felt the heat rising in me. I spoke to Hask and Khayyam about this as soon as he was gone.
“Of course he’s a rat,” Khayyam said. “I knew it the moment the other guy was killed. But it doesn’t mean anything. I’ve done all the talking, and the two of you have only listened. You’ve not said a single thing that could be considered an act of treason or sedition. What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” I explained, “has more to do with your safety than with ours.”
“My safety matters not. I have my map. Whatever happens will happen. As my people might say, it is Allah’s will.”
I did not sleep that revolution, nor the one that followed. Khayyam kept his own council, staring at the wall, his eyes closing as tiredness overtook him. It felt colder in the cell. Hask took up a position between Khayyam and Krashen, sitting so that the latter would have to go through him
to get to the Terran.
We overlooked the possibility of being called for interrogation.
Only Hask and myself were taken from the cell. The beating we took, the last as it happened, was sublime in its artistry. I had never experienced such pain and torment; I did not think it lay in the minds of our species to concoct such misery. Three times I was brought to a point close to death, and three times I was pulled back.
They dumped our broken bodies back in the cell. Of course, Krashen was gone. He’d done his dirty work. I still didn’t know what it was precisely that he had learned, or why it was important; these were secrets destined to remain shrouded.
However, the result of his last action was there for us to see.
Khayyam sat rigid against the wall, his eyes still open as if in the middle of surveying his map. The eyes were open, but they saw nothing. His skull steamed, the bone and brain melted and dripping down to the surface below. Acid, clearly, but in such a great quantity that it only followed that the guards had contributed too.
I looked one last time at my friend, and then I looked at the wall.
The map was gone.
During our interrogation—there was no way to know how long that must have lasted—somebody had entered the cell and repaired the wall. It gleamed freshly in the pale light. I wondered how it had happened, deciding that the cruellest approach would have been the one they took. First the wall—stripping Khayyam of his only consolation would have hurt more than anything they could do to him physically. Then the execution. Not the other way around.
I now have a terrible admission to make.
When I discovered the dead body of Omar Khayyam, my first thoughts were not for him and his suffering, but for my own. I expected my death to swiftly follow his, and I began to daydream about the form it would take.
However, that would not be my fate.
As soon as my wounds had healed, a few silent lunar periods which passed without molestation, I was released. Of course, the Imperial Police had the last laugh: they stripped me of all my identification papers and money and dumped me on the far side of the planet. But they overlooked the magnanimous spirit of our repressed society. While nobody had stood up for me on the day of my arrest, now I was received with generosity by all who came into contact with me. Soon, I was home.
I was eager to take up work again. In my absence, the literary journal had struggled. Too many weak pieces had been allowed in and our reputation was beginning to suffer. I couldn’t blame my underlings; there were costs involved in publication and the best way to meet them was to allow those who paid a premium to have their stories fast-tracked. Now that I was back, I was determined to change all of that.
Two lunars later, I received a surprise guest in my office, Talin Hask.
“Hask, my good friend,” I said, holding out my hand to him as Khayyam had once done to me. “What brings you to my world after so long?”
Hask did not smile as he talked to me. He limped awkwardly, the multiple fractures in his legs never having been set properly. No doctor would take a former political prisoner, the story went.
“I’ve come to show you these.” He handed me a loose-leafed collection of poetry, all hand-written, and all on a single topic: Omar Khayyam.
I read through them while Hask stood gazing out of the window, scanning the crowded streets as if expecting trouble.
“They’re excellent,” I said at last. “You’ve captured his voice perfectly, and there’s barely a tale that you’ve missed.”
“Khayyam was a master storyteller,” Hask said, avoiding my look. “We owe him this.”
“We do,” I agreed. “But Hask, honestly, you know that I cannot publish these. They are good, but they will never pass the board of censors. I do not want to end up back there…”
I trailed off, wincing at the thought of another grand interrogation.
“I know, my friend, I know. I did not bring them to you for publication. I brought them to you for translation.”
“Translation? Into what?”
“Do you remember what Khayyam said that time, when he told us about the history of his people? He said that for many centuries they had acted as the guardians of ancient knowledge. The greatest discoveries of early civilization had been lost to those who made them, but translated into Arabic they survived until the world was once again ready to receive them.”
“So you want me to translate your poems into Arabic?”
“That’s right. So that they will survive. And through my poems, so too will Omar Khayyam’s map, his memories, his life.”
I threw Hask a key.
“Lock the door. We’ll do it right away.”
“It’ll take a long time,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter. You’re here now, I’m here now. We don’t know for how long that will be the case. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it immediately and then destroy the originals. It’s the only way to be safe.”
“We’ll never be safe,” Hask said in a low voice.
“No, but we can put our hope in the next generation.”
“I hope you’re right.”
My good heart started thumping as I sat down, pen in hand, and began my work.
* * *
Christopher Walker
Christopher Walker is a writer and English teacher based in the south of Poland. His work appears in the anthologies 'Circuits & Slippers' and 'In Medias Res', as well as the literary magazines WOLVES and Spinebind. His website is www.closelyobserved.com.
THE FINAL ATLAS
Robert A. Francis
Upon reaching the door of his house on the Via Mistruzzi, Alberto di Mels was not surprised to find the young woman from the piazza waiting for him. He had observed her studying him through the early morning while he drank his jentacular coffee and read La Stampa at his usual table outside Baldini’s. Sitting on a dew-spotted bench outside the Carnia Hotel, smoking and leafing through a glossy guidebook to the Friuli region, she had looked every bit the tourist. But a lifetime of holding secrets close to himself had taught Alberto when he was a subject of interest, and he had sensed it acutely this morning. She hardly ever seemed to turn a page.
And now here she was, smiling in the morning sun and running a hand through her short brown hair. She wore trousers and a jacket both of the same deep blue, which together with her sunglasses highlighted her pale complexion and the cerise of her lipstick. Alberto supposed she would be considered beautiful, if one were occupied with such concerns. He never had been much, even as a young man, and now that he was almost eighty his main concern was the limited time he had left to live, and what was going to come after. It was something he knew more than a little about.
“Mister di Mels? My name is Anya Vattaya.” The woman’s smile was bright but somehow false, like the harsh glow of a lamp compared to the comforting flicker of a candle.
Alberto nodded, sighing into his hand. “Miss Vattaya. I suppose you have come to see the map?” He fumbled a loop of keys from his pocket, slid the largest into the lock of the metal grille that covered his front door. “We used to only get a few people coming all the way to see it, back when old documents and rumours were all that collectors had to go on. Now they tell me there is something on the internet about the map, if one knows where to look. Mentions my family name, this town.”
The woman remained silent, but inclined her head in a way that could have charitably been considered a nod.
“Not so hard to track me down anymore. Venzone is not such a big place, after all.” Alberto took out another key and unlocked the heavy front door itself. He turned back. “But before we go in, may I ask why you wish to see it? Are you a collector, versed in the occult and the mythology of the dead? Or are you a voyeur who came across mention of the map on the internet? You look rather young. I won’t stop you looking at the map either way, but I would like to know. It might affect your reaction to it.”
The woman removed her glasses, revealing cold gray eyes that gave
the lie to her smile. “I am a collector, of sorts. I work for a consortium of antiquarians who have some knowledge of the map. I am sent here to examine it and attest to its authenticity.” Her accent was harsh, perhaps east European or Russian. Alberto doubted that Vattaya was her real name, but he thought she would not have stretched the lie too far. He pushed open the door and stepped aside to let her pass.
“Then please,” he said, “follow me.”
*
Alberto stood before the alcove in his study, hand on the velvet curtain that screened its contents from view. Miss Vattaya leaned against his desk, hands flat on the desktop, propping herself up. A stance of feigned nonchalance. She had politely declined an offer of coffee or wine, preferring to get straight to the map, which told Alberto that she was keen to get her evaluation done and be gone as soon as possible. The map held no personal interest for her. To understand it, she would need to learn a little about it.
“You are familiar, I trust, with Dante’s Comedy, later termed the Divine Comedy?”
Miss Vattaya smiled and waved her hand in the air in an impatient gesture. Alberto took the opportunity to pour himself a little pastis before continuing.
“Dante Aligheiri is the superlative poet, standing above all others, and his work remains formidable as a treatise on human morality. But it is a reimagining of true events, filtered through generations of rumours. Centuries before Dante, a nobleman called Giovanni Canossa passed from this world into what the great poet later called the Inferno, a Christian Hell that tells of sin and the punishments that sinners receive upon their death. You have read the Divine Comedy, or at least the first part?”
Vattaya shrugged, her red lips parting to reveal bright white teeth. “Never managed to get round to it.”
“It is beautiful, and harrowing.” Alberto sipped the pastis. “But inaccurate. Canossa entered Hell—or as he termed it, the Desolation, through a riverbed. He was riding, crossing a shallow ford on his estate when his horse threw him into a deep bankside pool, under the overhanging roots of a white willow. He sank, dragged down—so he is reported to have said—by a clutch of serpentine shadows with fearsome strength. Just as he resigned himself to death, he was plunged into a great chasm of shadow, a place of nothingness and empty form. The landscape was at once both colourless and iridescent, dazzlingly black. Shapeless mountains rose about him, while translucent lakes formed and reformed themselves above and below him as he watched. And all around, the snakelike things writhed, seemingly fixed in time and space, but never in the same place twice. Beneath his feet was a road formed of human faces, their expressions suggesting great suffering, leading into the far distance. Behind him was simply nothing, a wall of darkness that had no form or substance, and which could not be touched.”
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