Asimov's SF, June 2010
Page 14
Whereas Tripp was just a Polar, a woman hailing from the edge of the endless shadow of Darkside. So she was stuck in some room deep inside the carcass of the Palace, a windowless, airless, lightless cell with a bathroom you had to share.
And, as the woman arrived and bustled into the room, there was something dark about Tripp herself, Maryam thought.
After a formal greeting the Polar unbuttoned her heavy coat, slumped in a chair, and accepted a glass of wine. Tripp was short, compact, muscular—it was said that it was better to be short and round if you had to withstand the insidious cold of the Pole—and she wore a heavy coat of tractor-fur lined with sheep's wool. Aged about forty, maybe ten Great Years younger than Maryam herself, she had a round, weather-beaten face, grey-black hair pulled back from a high forehead, and a customarily stern expression. Maryam didn't actually know much about her personally—she'd heard hints of husbands back home, of children. Tripp was too serious a person to make small talk with.
She had a leather packet that she opened, and spread documents of some kind over a small table expensively carved from solid basalt. She had to move a bowl of apples out of the way to make room. Maryam glanced at the papers, not very interested; they were clearly old—or looked old—torn, fragmented, yellowed, and stained with various fluids. Some were covered with close-printed text in an archaic language, and others bore enigmatic diagrams.
“You look as if you're having a bad watch,” Maryam essayed, as they sat together.
“Aren't you? The negotiations over the tithe levels get worse every Great Year . . .”
A Great Year was twenty-four small-years, each of which lasted for forty-five watches—the time it took Earth III to circle its Star. And as Maryam grew older, the interval between these Colloquies, at which tithe levels were set and reset, seemed to get shorter every time.
Tripp was evidently distracted by Khilli's continued bellowing. “Vala! Vala!""And the aggressive attitude of the Speakerhood is increasingly dismaying,” Tripp said. “The young man you hear in the streets below, calling for his sister, is himself a son of the Speaker of Speakers.”
“I know—”
“Khilli to me symbolizes the increasing dominance the Speakers are asserting, and not too subtly—the Speakers and their craven allies, who scuttle to obey in return for the waiving of a few tithes.”
“Wealth breeds power, which accrues more wealth.”
“Yes. And I suspect if we knew more about humanity's history, we'd recognize that as an old, old story.” Tripp grinned fiercely, showing browned teeth. “At least you in Wilson are now finding out what it's like to be at the mercy of the Speakers, as we at the Pole have been for generations. We rely for our very survival on the trade the Speakers control. The metals and other minerals we mine pay for our tithes, and for the food imports we need to survive—”
Maryam nodded curtly, and glanced around. “My staff relayed something of your proposals to me.” The Polars had been floating a suggestion to cut out the Speakerhood by negotiating a covert but direct trading deal between Wilson and the Pole. Aside from the direct benefit to the Polars, they argued that such openness would lead to a rapid growth in the planetary economy, after its strangling by the Speakers’ control. Maryam said softly, “I'm never sure who's listening, here in this palace. It's best not to go into details here. Plenty of my companions are fearful of the wrath of the Speakers, and of the Controllers.”
Tripp snorted. “More fool them. By indulging in such superstitions they are doing the Speakers’ work for them. As if they are forging the bars of their own cages.”
Maryam was irritated, as she often was, by the smug, strange Polars with their arrogance and certitude. “It may be a mere set of ‘beliefs’ to you, that we live in a Simulated reality. The fact is, it is the foundation of a religion of global reach and power. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting in this Palace dedicated to the Controllers’ worship, would we?” She riffled through the pages on the table between them. “And are these more pages of the Venus document you've been trying to buy up?”
“Those that aren't forgeries, good enough to fool me.”
“Aren't you being contradictory? It seems to me that by seeking out these things you're tacitly admitting the historical existence of Helen Gray, whose life story is a key part of the entire legend.”
Tripp looked irritated in her turn. “We don't deny all of the standard account of the past. You have to consider our myths and legends as source material, to be handled skeptically.
“We do believe that Helen Gray, and Wilson Argent, and Jeb Holden all existed. It's just that we don't believe they were created out of thin air, along with the Thirty-Seven Children, by any Sim Designers. They all came here in some kind of ship, from another world—from Earth I, maybe, or Earth II. A ship of space. Helen, Wilson, and Jeb were the only adults. We believe they fought—and my opinion is Wilson and Jeb fought over Helen, the only woman, as simple as that, and never mind more fanciful theories—and killed each other off a mere three Great Years after landing, and left the Thirty-Seven to grow up unsupervised, and fend for themselves as best they could. And we are all their children, a thousand Great Years later. That in itself is a remarkable story.”
“But if that's so, where does the legend of the Sim Controllers come from?”
“Probably from half-memories of a space mission the Children grew up barely remembering, and never understood! There are pages in the Venus document that hint at a kind of madness among the crew of that ship—locked up for decades, whole generations living and dying in a metal prison. Some of them came to believe that it was all a hoax and they were being watched, the way you might watch a mirror-bird in a cage.” She waved a hand. “And so this tremendous layered theology, this edifice of power and wealth—all of it came out of a child's bad dream! We're lucky that before she died Helen Gray managed to set down a kind of story of her world, and the trip she'd taken. She called it the Venus Legacy—we think Venus was a companion on the ship. The document was seen as heretical from the age of the first Speakers. It was locked away, copied, broken up so its imagery could be used as fine art, burned, forged . . . We suspect only fragments remain. But those fragments, when sifted, are enough to prove—”
“To the satisfaction of you Polars, at least—”
“—that this world is real. It's no Simulation. And that humans came here, somehow, from somewhere else.”
“I thought you Polars were rationalists.”
“Well, we have to be. We think the fact that we have to mine for a living has made us deeper natural philosophers than you farmers. We're favored for astronomy, too; from here you rarely even see the lesser stars beyond the Star. We like to believe we rediscovered science.”
“Yet you accept the authority of a long-dead and semi-mythical figure like Helen Gray!”
Tripp pushed away the pages crossly. “Not just that, woman! Anybody who looks around at this world we live in—really looks—will see that humans don't belong here. There are whole layers of life here, Maryam, one laid atop another, as immiscible as oil and water! We humans and our trees and grass and cows and sheep are latecomers. Before we came you had the tractors and the tunnel-moles and the mirror-birds, animals that seem to have been engineered to do specific jobs, engineered and then abandoned. The Slime seems to be a bacterial life form that may be a true native of this planet. And under all that you have the Substrate, as it's called, relics that may be older than life itself, or anyhow the kinds of life we see now. The tractors and even the Slime are like our kind of life, relying on carbon and water and nitrogen—if we hadn't forgotten everything Helen knew, we could probably say how alike. But we can't eat the tractors, and the tractors can't eat the Slime—that fact alone proves we're different!—even if we're from the same wider family, and we have some interesting ideas about that.”
Maryam tried to provoke her. “The Speakers say the Substrate buildings are elements of the vast Sim chamber that generates the world.”
Maryam felt faintly uneasy, wondering what was coming.
Tripp picked an apple out of the bowl on the table. “Earth III orbits close to its Star, which is small and cool—according to Helen—compared to most stars in the sky.” She made the apple orbit her fist, turning it steadily. “The world is locked, and turns so that a single hemisphere always faces the Star.”
“That's elementary—”
“Yes. But because of that elementary fact, our world is blessed with a certain number of unique locations. The Substellar point—right here. The Poles, for our world does have an axis about which it turns, even if the rotation is locked—or at least our north Pole, for there is only ocean at the south Pole. The Equator—especially those points on the Terminator, east and west, standing between dark and light. All these places the builders of the Substrate visited, for surely they were as attracted by their geometric significance as we are. There are hints in Helen's document of structures the ship's crew observed at geometric points off the planet as well as on it—places of orbital stability . . . And they built all this a long, long time ago. You can tell that by the rock layers that have formed over some of the structures. As much as a billion Great Years ago, perhaps.”
In an effort to regain control of the conversation, Maryam took the apple from her and bit into it. “Fascinating. So what is your proposal?”
Tripp smiled. “From my list of significant points, here in this static little system of ours, I omitted one.”
“Where?”
“The Antistellar. The point that is precisely opposite the Navel, the Substellar, on the other side of the world—the point at the heart of Darkside.”
“There's nothing there but ice.”
“Maybe. We know nothing about it save mentions in Helen's record—a record whose authenticy many dispute.” She leaned forward. “But what is surely true is that the Substrate builders must have gone there. And surely they built something there. Perhaps we Polars, we burrowing miners, will be able to understand it. Perhaps we'll be able to use it. And there's the matter of scientific curiosity, which Helen Gray counsels us to cultivate. Who knows what we might learn, about the world and ourselves? And anyhow it's surely better we get to it before the Speakers—”
Maryam sat back. “So this is what you're planning? Some kind of trek to the Antistellar? Surely it's impossible. The bitter cold of Darkside—”
“There has been a significant volcanic eruption this Great Year, far to the south.”
“We know. We heard it! Half the dust and ash on the planet seemed to wash out on top of Port Wilson.”
“That will have helped heat the air, globally . . . It may be that an expedition soon would have the best chance of succeeding in many Great Years.”
“And you want us to help? How? With funding, manpower, ships?”
“All of those things. And you understand why we want to cut the Speakers out of this? If we do find something at the Antistellar—”
“You would possess a sacred site—grounds to challenge their hegemony.” She glanced around, uneasily remembering that they might be overheard.
“There you have it. It's only the bare bones of a scheme for now, but . . . you Wilsonians are adventurers.”
“We're often called worse than that.”
“You often behave worse than that. If anybody can do this, you could—with us.”
“Flattery won't help.”
“Then what will?”
“Time.” Maryam dropped her apple core on the table, and stood. “Time to think.”
“Very well.” Tripp stood, brushing down her cloak. “I'll take my leave. I will see you at the Opening of the Eye at the end of the Colloquy. Perhaps we can talk further . . .”
“We'll see.”
As her visitor left, Maryam turned away and looked out on the city. The light had closed in a little; the clouds were thickening, and there was a grey haze of volcanic dust in the air. Yet the Star hung as still as ever, directly over her head. Looking up at its mighty face, glimpsed through the clouds, she saw how it was pocked with spots like disease scars, and its flesh crawled with electrical storms, like lightning.
Tripp's ideas swirled in her head. The thought of crossing the Terminator and traveling all the way through the dark to the precise antipode of this place was an intriguing one—yet scary, for how would it be to have the whole thickness of the planet between her and this sole source of warmth and light?
But from the city there rose up distant shouting, a pealing bell, and the crack of what sounded like a gunshot—fuelled, no doubt, by powder from the Pole. Her thoughts returned to the grubbier plane of politics, trade, power, and influence. There was another watch of talks to get through before the Opening of the Eye, the ceremony that would end the formal part of this Tithe Colloquy.
And Brod was still missing, she reminded herself, her son and the Sapphire girl. She hoped beyond hope that was just a coincidence.
She shook herself, turned, and went to wash and change and ready herself for the final sessions.
* * * *
III
The watch bells sounded. The Tithe Colloquy was over for another Great Year.
Elios, Speaker of Speakers, led his attendants and the Colloquy's senior delegates out of the Tenth Temple where they had been meeting and up wide ceremonial staircases, every step carved laboriously out of pink basalt, toward the roof of this building where, like most of the island's grander structures, it abutted the great Substrate pillar that contained the Eye. The rest followed in silence, or speaking only quietly.
Maryam, with growing unease, walking with the others, hoped that none of them had spotted, as she had, the bright red handkerchief dropped beside the stair, for it belonged to her son Brod, who had now been missing for more than a whole watch—as had the Speaker's daughter Vala.
They emerged onto the roof, and crossed a carved platform toward the central tower—a structure several times a person's height, a human-built shell of basalt blocks that cradled the enigmatic Substrate tower known as the Eye. Smoke curled above it, evidently coming from several fires.
At the tower, the dignitaries in their cloaks and robes and other finery had to line up to climb the ladders of rungs set into the wall. Few had any difficulty with the climb.
“Good strong Polar steel,” Tripp murmured to Maryam. “And good strong folk too. We're a robust breed, you know, Maryam. Helen Gray says we all weigh more here than we would where she came from, and so over the generations we've all grown stocky as a result . . .”
Maryam found this sort of talk irritating. “How can a person weigh more or less, in one place or another? I sometimes wonder if you really can discriminate children's stories from any semblance of reality.”
Tripp just laughed.
When it was her turn Maryam climbed easily up the ladder, and followed dignitaries from halfway across the world along the walkway at the top of the wall. It turned out that the smoke came from fires burning in pots of oil, attended by black-robed acolytes, and it hung over the Eye like a cloud, shading it from the Star above.
And the Eye itself was now revealed to her for the first time. Cleaned of greasy Slime, it gleamed, a curved bowl of a mirror, shining and perfect—and, if Tripp was right, perhaps of tremendous age.
Elios, tall, his head clean-shaven, climbed a podium to a small stage set up at one point of the circular wall. His aides stood along the wall at intervals beside him, acolytes and lay servants of the Speakerhood. Among these stood the Sapphires, the dedicated virgins of the temple—beautiful, almost shining in their white robes, and each standing beside a cage filled with birds whose wings glistened as they stirred.
“Mirror-bird
s,” Tripp murmured to Maryam. “Another gift from the Pole . . .”
But Maryam was busy counting the Sapphires. There were eleven of them—and there should have been twelve, and she saw an unattended birdcage, and uneasy-looking officials glancing nervously around. Well they might have been nervous, for the missing girl was Vala, and gone as long as her own son had been gone, and Maryam was starting to feel very worried indeed.
Elios spoke now, his voice carrying across the Eye's gleaming surface. “I, Elios son of Elios, Speaker of Speakers and forty-first occupant of the Left Hand Seat, welcome you all to this place. As you know, we hold our Tithe Colloquy every Great Year, which is twenty-four of the years of Earth III as measured by the astronomers, and which matches the Duty Cycles of the Controllers who watch over the Simulation which envelops and sustains us all. And now, with another Great Year of Simulated life having been granted to us all, let us give thanks—and let the Controllers’ Eye open!” He brought his hand down with a sharp chop.
The acolytes doused their fires with buckets of water, and the smoke began to clear. The Sapphire girls, the eleven who were present, opened their cages, and mirror-birds rattled into the air, their wings gleaming; confused by the smoke, they wheeled and darted, cawing softly.
But there was a murmur, and a disturbance worked its way along the circular wall. “Out of my way—out of my way, you cretin!”
“Khilli,” murmured Tripp. “And he doesn't look happy.”