Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It got worse yet when the mixed landscape of grassland and scattered copses gave way to a belt of forest, of fir and larch and pine, that gradually thickened until the road cut between towering green walls, and the Star, a little lower in the sky every watch, sent its light in long shafts between the slim forms of the trees. Tripp softly told them there was some element of danger here, from dogs, cats, even pigs long gone wild, and Brod kept a blade ready at his belt.

  Vala, though, seemed fascinated. “I never saw so many trees. But why are there so many just here?”

  “Because of the latitude,” Tripp said. She spoke carefully; in their early conversations it had become evident that Vala, a creature of the Palaces of the Navel, hadn't been entirely clear that the world she lived on was a sphere. “The Star is lower in the sky here, and gives us less heat. These trees are more suited to the cold than the shrubs and grasses of lower latitudes. This boreal forest stretches right across Seba, to east and west, between the grasslands to the south and the tundra to the north. And wherever there is land in the southern hemisphere, at the same distance from the Substellar, you'll see similar vegetation.

  “If you could see the world from space, it might look a bit like an archery target, with bands of vegetation all circling the Substellar point, broken only by stretches of ocean.” She sketched a sphere for Vala. “You see? From everywhere in this band around the face of the world, the Star would be seen to be at the same elevation in the sky. And so similar vegetation will grow.”

  “How strange,” Vala said. “How wonderful! And there's more to come? This tundra you spoke of ?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tripp said, smiling. “And wonders beyond that too.” And Vala smiled back.

  Brod was irritated. They seemed to be building a relationship, like that between an eager student and a patient teacher. A relationship that excluded him.

  It got even worse when it started to snow.

  * * * *

  IX

  The first serious resistance the holy army met was at the southern rim of the great forest belt.

  A few kilometers to the west of the main trunk road running north from Port Wilson, Khilli's scouts found a community of loggers. Over the generations they had cut their way into the world forest, and had built a veritable city, of wooden buildings roofed with grass turf or moss. This green town was surprisingly populous, and the people lived well, on the meat from the herds of semi-wild cattle they cultivated, and crops purchased from farms on the grasslands to the south, traded for their wood.

  Before this journey Elios had only been dimly aware of the place. Accompanying his son on this long military adventure was teaching him the sheer scale of the world—and he was gathering an uneasy sense of just how little of it was even nominally under the Speakerhood's control. Which, of course, was a justification for this long and expensive military adventure in the first place.

  Khilli followed his usual practice of sending in senior officers with demands for provisions for his army—horses, food, labor. The elders among the loggers seemed astounded to be asked, and politely refused. The loggers were a major power in their region; they were used to making demands, not meeting them, and to winning wars, not losing them.

  So Khilli burned the city.

  * * * *

  The holy army set up its camp a little way off the road, in a rare patch of open grassland in a country that was increasingly grown over by the forest blanket. Elios accompanied his son on a quick tour, Elios treading delicately on the raw, trampled earth, nodding to soldiers who as usual tended to their feet and complained about the weather and the food.

  Khilli had established a discipline in this as in all things relating to his mission. When the army paused, even for just a few watches, he had his sergeants organize squads to dig out a roughly circular compound with embankments, ditches, latrines, and open drains, while the holy Shuttle Banners fluttered over their heads. Then the men were allowed to set up their tents, build their fires and go hunting and foraging. Elios paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, casualties of the raid on the loggers’ town, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim.

  Then Khilli sat with his father on the porch of their own lavish tent, sharing a stolen flagon of the loggers’ rich, dark beer. The flames from the city burned high in a sky that was never bright, so low was the Star, and there was a thick resinous smell in the air.

  “I hope that the fire doesn't spread to the wider forest. We'll cook half the world.”

  Khilli took another slug of beer. “Your Designers surely won't allow their Sim to be wrecked by a bit of fire.”

  A hardening cynicism about his father's religion was an unwelcome aspect of the remarkable transformation of Khilli in the watches since his sister's abduction. Elios murmured, “You'd better not let your men hear remarks like that. It's only the flag of the Speakers that unites this bunch of soldiers of many nations under your command, remember.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “And—was it entirely necessary to burn the city? We're looking for worshippers, remember. The dead don't pay tithes, son.”

  “We killed very few. Those woodcutters put up a surprisingly good fight, but they were no match for us, when they dared venture out onto the open field. It was the usual one-two, with cavalry and infantry. When the army was broken the city fell quickly . . .”

  Since leaving Wilson, Khilli had forged an effective army out of the disparate corps provided by the Speakers’ tithe-paying allies. It had been a remarkable sight for Elios to watch as his son the hero, through some forging in the frustration of the long siege of Wilson and the fire of his own anger, had mutated into a general. He had resolved the Wilson siege with a swiftly concluded, if punitive, treaty. Then, listening to the advice provided by his more experienced soldiers, he had spent a whole fifty watches preparing for this expedition: gathering supplies, planning the route from the maps available, forming up his troops into a unified command structure, and training them in battlefield and siege tactics.

  And so they had marched, roughly following the trail of Vala and Brod. This was no hasty expedition but a planned, provisioned and thought-out invasion of the interior of Seba, intended to consolidate the Speakers’ power across the continent. Even the way the army advanced was designed to awe populations into fearful submission. The troops were solely provisioned by what they could scavenge and seize, and they stripped the landscape they crossed like a swarm of voracious ants. Any who resisted this “liberation tithe” were punished.

  Elios believed that Khilli had relished the resistance put up by the loggers; it had been the nearest thing to a full-scale battle he had been able to throw his troops into since they'd left Wilson. And the by-now well-practiced combination of rapid marching, artillery bombardments, cavalry strikes, and advances by determined infantry blocks had proved much too effective for the loggers.

  “There was actually more resistance when we entered the city—some of those fires were started by the citizens themselves—but my men were under orders to kill only if unavoidable. So we drove a whole herd of them, women and kids too, off into the forest.”

  “All save those your men kept back for themselves, I suppose.”

  Khilli shrugged. “You have to be punitive, father.”

  “But the butchery of children, the rapes—we can't condone such savagery and you know it.”

  “Savagery? In fact I make sure that those I spare see enough to tell their neighbors, and their children in the future when they build this place again, how much more savage I could have been. After all, it's in all our interests to protect the Integrity of the Sim, isn't it?”

  “Don't quote theology at me, boy.”

  But Khilli showed no remorse at the rebuke, no reaction save a sip of his beer.

  Elios often wondered if this transformation of his son had been entirely for the good. His mother, and Vala's, had died
young, and Elios, then a mere Scribe, had taken his children with him into the embrace of his church. It was a safe environment, if a restricted one, he supposed, as if you sat on a mountaintop looking down with faint disdain on the rest of mankind. And there were only a restricted number of careers available, all essentially academic—you could become a theologian or an administrator, or if you aspired to Speakerhood you could combine the two.

  Neither of Elios's children, both clever in their own ways, had turned out to have the patience for study, which blocked off many options. At least Elios had found a role for Vala; beautiful and vain, she had seemed an ideal candidate for the pampered virginal life of a Sapphire, meant to embody the idealized perfection of humanity that resided in the heads of the Designers. With Khilli it had been more difficult. Physically powerful and headstrong, he had been coached by his father in a cut-down and simplified version of the faith—and he had been trained to use his muscle and his aggressive instincts to protect his father, and most especially his delicate sister.

  Well, Elios admitted ruefully, it had all gone wrong in the end. Even Vala, wily and manipulative, had evidently rejected the career her father had selected for her; Elios was sure she wouldn't have let herself be taken anywhere she didn't want to go, although he wouldn't have expressed this to his son. And Khilli, as soon as he had got a taste of true combat, had discovered the soldier inside himself, and had set off on this global rampage. Perhaps if their mother had survived, she might have developed a gentleness in Vala, a more controlled temper in Khilli . . . But she had not. And all that was now unfolding, Elios supposed, was his responsibility. Or his fault, if it went badly enough wrong.

  Perhaps it might still turn out well. He knew from communication through runners that his subordinate Speakers were delighted with the progress of the force so far, and with the slowly increasing streams of tithes that were already flowing into the Navel. But as he watched the city burn, a city whose existence he had been barely aware of a few watches ago, Elios wondered how long this march of destruction and submission would continue, and what would become of them all, and the world, when it was done.

  And he wondered about the hardening of Khilli's heart.

  * * * *

  X

  With time Tripp's small party passed beyond the northern boundary of the forest strip, and the carts trundled over a new, open landscape of sparse grasses, mosses, lichens, and small, windblown trees. Tripp called this a tundra, another belt of flora and fauna types that stretched around the world's landmasses. Here and there you saw Slime, puddles of it in dips and hollows and on rock faces, like darkness poking through the world's wearing-away skin. There were few people to be seen here, only an occasional collection of dome-like huts of animal skin. Tripp said the people hunted a kind of wild sheep, grown large and long-legged with long horns and a thick wiry coat. But Brod never saw one of these exotic animals, as he peered into a horizon that was more often than not laced by grey mist.

  Now more than two hundred watches into the march north since they had left Wilson, they had all changed, Brod thought—all save Astiv Pellt, who was as stolid, silent, and cheerfully grinning as ever. Even Tripp seemed more withdrawn, more inwardly reflective.

  Vala had gone through phases of adjustment. Her early quick interest in the unfolding world around her had dissipated in irritation at her inability to keep her skin clean, her hair coiffured, her nails shaped as she was used to, and she got bored with “Tripp's endless lecturing, Astiv's stupid silences, and Brod's adolescent sniffing around me,” as she brutally put it one watch. For a time none of them dared speak for fear of setting off another tantrum. In an odd way, Brod came to see, though Tripp was the nominal leader of the expedition, Vala was always in control—of their emotions, of their smiles and frowns.

  She had come out of that phase too, and now rode steadily and silently with the rest, and did her share of the chores and sometimes more, and she started to ask Tripp questions again. She was growing up, Brod thought.

  But that wasn't a comfortable thought, for it meant she might be growing away from him, after he had given up his whole world for this girl. And he increasingly wondered how much of the decision to flee Wilson had actually been his to make.

  On the tundra stretched, for watch after watch, and in one gloomy village after another children in grimy skins with big dark pupils came out to see them go by.

  “You know,” Brod ventured, “I don't think I've seen anybody crack a smile since we came north of that forest. Nobody except Astiv, and he's an idiot.”

  Tripp said, “It's not surprising. Look how low the Star is, how murky the light. It's rarely brighter than this—and it's not bright enough for people, despite the big wide pupils of the children.”

  “It makes you gloomy,” Vala said.

  “Exactly. Some of these huts and tents are brightly lit inside, which helps a little. It gets worse at the Pole; with the dark forever at our backs, we get more than our share of suicides.”

  “But you were never tempted,” Brod said dryly.

  Tripp smiled. “Oh, for the thinking person the world is much too rich to leave early. And besides, there are always the lesser stars, treasures forever hidden from you at the Equator—just wait and see. The problem is that our world is changeless, Brod. A diorama studded with obvious significant points, like the Substellar and the Antistellar and the Poles. A world where the conditions for living things, including people, are fixed forever by one single parameter, the angular distance from the Substellar point. A world where your fate is forever determined by where you happened to be born.”

  “You could always travel,” Vala said sensibly. “You could always move, as we are.”

  “Very few do,” Tripp said. “The teaching of your church, that you are created just where the Sim Designers intended you to be, has something to do with that, no doubt. But I think that feeds on a certain lassitude in the spirit of humanity here. A feeling of helplessness in the face of the vast celestial machinery we inhabit.”

  This conversation of predestination, despair, and suicide soon fizzled out, leaving Brod rather relieved, and he retreated into dreams of raids across Star-bright seas.

  Still they ploughed further north, watch after watch, across an increasingly empty and desolate terrain.

  And then the landscape began to change again. There was more snow, for one thing, which they'd suffered on and off since the boreal forest. Now it pooled and drifted in a landscape of sandstone bluffs carved by wind and shattered by frost. There was less green to be seen now, and what there was amounted to no more than mosses or lichens, mostly gathering around clumps of photomoss, evidently feeding off its light.

  Tripp pointed to this as a rare example of symbiosis between species from entirely different biospheres. “They can't eat each other, but they can cooperate, in their unthinking way; the photomoss feeds the green things with light, and they in turn break up the rock to give the moss a place to grow . . .” Brod barely understood any of this, and cared less.

  And, above all, there was the Slime, a black slick that coated swathes of the bare rock face. There came a rest stop when Brod became aware that there was nothing around him but rock and snow and ice and Slime—nothing associated with humanity save the four people themselves, and their carts and animals.

  “I've never been a deep thinker,” he admitted.

  Vala guffawed, but Tripp touched her arm, and she quieted.

  Brod went on hesitantly, “I suppose I've always grown up believing in the Sim and the Designers and the Controllers. It was an easy story to understand, and it was what everybody else seemed to believe. But I can't see why any Sim would have all this deadness in it. What's the point? Let alone them.” And he pointed up to an increasingly star-cluttered sky.

  Tripp nodded sagely. “We'll make a scientist of you yet.”

  “By the Controllers’ mercy, I hope not!”

  The Polar punched his arm playfully; he barely felt it through his thick pad
ded coat. “Oh, come on! With the eyes of a scientist, you see so much more. What do you think, Vala?”

  “I think,” said Vala, “that I see a light.” She pointed north.

  They all turned to see. There indeed was a light, right at the northern horizon, a flickering spark.

  Tripp took out a small pocket telescope and snapped it open. “That's photomoss light, backed up by a bonfire. It's the Pole! We're there! Come on . . .”

  And they encouraged the horses to take a few more weary steps over the frozen ground.

  * * * *

  XI

  They halted a couple of kilometers short of the Polar citadel. Brod, Vala, and Astiv huddled for warmth in their covered cart, stinking of icy fur and the grease they smeared on their faces to keep out the cold, while Tripp went ahead to negotiate entry. She'd said, “We came fast, but I'll bet the news of Khilli's campaign will have moved faster yet. I'll make sure they know who we are, and let us in.”

  So Brod and Vala had time to consider the enigmatic Substrate structure Tripp had called the Pivot.

  It was like the Eye on the Navel, said Vala, in that it was a cylindrical pillar, though this one tapered inwards at the top, and appeared to contain no structure like the Eye mirror, according to Astiv. But unlike the Eye, which was surrounded by a human-built basalt wall on a mound crusted over with temples, this Pivot stood proud and alone, towering over the shabby human structures at its feet. Some of these hut-like buildings were actually igloos, said Astiv Pellt, built of blocks of old ice. Humans here didn't have the energy to challenge the ancient architecture.

  “Look,” Vala whispered to Brod, pointing. “They look like birds. In those trees.”

  The “trees,” they learned from Astiv, were related to the photomoss and other engineered forms. You could find them in a thin belt all along the Terminator, the unmoving boundary between light and dark. Some of them were even rooted in the perpetual shadow; just so long as their uppermost branches saw the Starlight, that was enough. Their trunks were coated with photomoss—and their “leaves” were actually mirror-birds, who gathered the light with their wings to feed the trees, on which they fed in turn. Every so often something would disturb the birds, and they fluttered up, their wings sparkling with pink-white light, before finding a fresh branch to land on. It was an entrancing sight against the black star-strewn sky behind them.