Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Following a thread of curiosity provoked by the Polars’ maps, he had ordered the elders to show him any more documents they had relating to the earliest times. The elders had been reluctant, but in the end they produced pages that seemed to complement the scraps Elios had seen of the document that had come to be known as Helen Gray's “Venus legacy.” Despite Khilli's ever-present aggression the elders would not let these fragments out of their sight, but they did allow Elios's clerks to transcribe copies hurriedly.

  Now Khilli, with his mouth stuffed full of horsemeat pie, snatched a page from his father's hand, and read slowly, his voice muffled by the food. “ ‘So you have this zone of intense activity in the center of the Galaxy, and a wave of starmaking washing outward, with metals and other heavy elements borne on the shock front. That starbirth wave finally broke over the sun's region maybe five billion years ago. But Sol is out in the boondocks, and we were born late . . .’ “ He glared at his father. “What is this garbage?”

  Elios took the page back delicately. “It's supposedly a record, written down by Helen Gray, of a conversation she remembered with a woman called Venus who used her voyage through space to study the worlds and the stars.”

  “And what's a ‘year'?”

  “The same as a Great Year—I think.”

  Khilli scoffed. “Doesn't matter anyhow. All fairy stories.”

  “Maybe. Just listen . . . ‘The Galaxy's starmaking peak was billions of years earlier. Most stars capable of bearing planets with complex life are older than Sol, an average of two billion years older. That's maybe four times as long as it has been since multicellular life emerged on Earth. Perhaps this is why we see no signs of extant intelligence. They were most likely to emerge billions of years before us.’ “

  Khilli frowned. “What's a billion?”

  “A lot. ‘Whatever, after a billion years, they're nothing like us, and they're not here. If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain't going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard . . .’ “

  Khilli twisted his face. “What difference does any of this make to us?”

  Elios put down the pages. “It's clear we forgot, as a people, almost everything we once knew about this world, and any others that might exist. Maybe Tripp and the rest of the Polars are right to try to preserve this stuff.” He returned his son's glare. “Knowledge is power. If we let the knowledge that's hinted at in these scraps fall into somebody else's hands, we might regret it.”

  Khilli sneered, took a knife from a sheath at his waist, and ostentatiously began to polish it. “This is power.”

  “But that blade was made by some Polar metal-worker! I think you're proving my point, in your thuggish way.”

  “Oh, am I? Here's another point to make, then. You are the Speaker of Speakers, indulging in heresy by going on about Helen Gray and journeys into space. None of this is real, remember? Everything we see is an artifact of the Designers’ plans. We understand only what they need us to understand. Isn't that what you're supposed to believe?”

  Elios frowned, facing him. “Listen, son—nobody intelligent enough to observe the world around them, and educated enough to interpret it, can fail to have doubts about our creed, or at least our understanding of it—and there's the paradox, that the most educated and intelligent of all are to be found among the Speakers, at the heart of the faith. In my position it's perfectly reasonable to believe two things at once. I can firmly believe in the validity of my religion, while at the same time opening my eyes to the reality of its contradictions. That may seem cynical to you, but I could scarcely wield the power I do without seeing the limits of the faith I administer—or, you could say more respectably, those aspects of it we have yet to understand. And power is what it's all about, isn't it? If you observe me, you'll find there's plenty for you to learn.”

  Somewhat to Elios's surprise, Khilli nodded. “Oh, I know, father. I listen to you, and I learn, believe me. After all, I have to learn from you if I'm eventually to take your place, haven't I? Now if you'll excuse me, I've had my eye on one of the whores we brought from the Pole . . .”

  He pushed his way out of the carriage, and the cold air ruffled the sheets of Helen's journal, and his father was left open-mouthed with shock.

  * * * *

  XIV

  The ice cap that straddled the Antistellar point was smooth and all but featureless—an abstraction, a perfect plain under the wheeling stars.

  Wearing their spiked shoes, the horses made good time over this surface, huffing, panting, and snorting, their breath steaming in the still, frigid air. There was little loose snow. Tripp said she thought precipitation must be low here, and that the ice was very old. And, near the center of the cap, the ice was stable, intact and worn smooth by the wind, unlike the broken and crumpled landscape they had seen at the rim of the cap, where glaciers calved and shattered. But it was a numbing, empty landscape to cross. It was almost a relief for Brod when his gaze was caught by a crevasse, and he was able to shout a warning and change their course—to do something.

  As they approached the Antistellar, Tripp had to refine her navigation. She had instruments of wood, steel, and glass that she used to measure the stars’ trajectories, and so work out precisely where she was.

  Soon they came upon the mountain range she had promised, blocky lumps of granite that protruded roughly from the ice, their grey flanks carved by glaciers and streaked white with ice. This range itself spanned hundreds of kilometers, but Tripp was growing confident with her stellar navigation, and she led them through passes in search of her goal. When they paused for sleep watches, Brod found it comforting to be surrounded by the mountains’ silent, brooding flanks, rather than to be sat out exposed on the tabletop-smooth ice plain. At least there was cover if—when—Khilli came calling.

  And at last, a full fifteen watches after entering the mountain range, Tripp led them through one last pass, and they all knew, unmistakably, that they had reached the Substellar point. Cradled by the mountains that stood tall and silent around it, the monument, clear of ice, was mounted on a stubby hillock that looked as if it had been deliberately shaved off to provide a platform.

  Tripp could not bear to wait a moment, to have a single hour's rest, before hurrying ahead to inspect her discovery. Astiv Pellt insisted on coming with her, much to Tripp's annoyance. “Don't fuss, man!” And Vala was just as eager as Tripp was. Astiv made her promise to proceed with proper care; it would be absurd to fall and break her neck a dozen paces short of the discovery of the age.

  And if Vala, Tripp, and Astiv were all going ahead, that left only Brod to tend the horses. That suited him; he wasn't much interested in monuments, and was more concerned with watching their backs.

  But Tripp approached him with some embarrassment. “You've come all this way,” she said. “I do know what young men are like—the bragging they do—how they like to be first to the target. In at the kill, so to speak.”

  “I can wait. The monument's been there a long time. It will still be there next watch.”

  She grinned. “Of course it will.” That duty done, she gave in to her own eagerness and hurried off.

  * * * *

  The hillock's walls were steep and glinted with ice in the starlight. Vala had already begun her ascent.

  And before Tripp reached the slope she passed Astiv, coming the other way. “Ladder,” he said shortly.

  Once Tripp had begun the climb, only maybe thirty meters to the broad summit of the hillock, she found the slopes were slick with ice and eroded, but they were rough enough that climbing them wasn't too difficult, as long as she took care where she placed her feet and hands.

  At last she stood on the hillock's flattened top—and it was flat, she saw immediately, dead level, more like a frozen pool than anything made of rock. Obviously artificial. Vala was waiting for her here, smiling from ear to ear. The girl held out
a mittened hand to Tripp.

  Then, hand in hand, they approached the Antistellar monument. It was a cylinder, set on the hillock and tapering slightly as it rose over their heads.

  Vala breathed, “So what do you think?”

  “I—” Tripp waved her hands. “It's wonderful. It's magnificent. We found it! Yet it's just like the structure at the Substellar, if you stripped away all the human clutter there, and indeed at the Pole. Maybe I was hoping for something a bit more spectacular.” Which would have seemed a fitting reward for undertaking such a journey, a full half-circumference of the whole world since the Navel—but that was a petty thought, and unscientific.

  “Do you think there might be another Eye in the top? Another mirror, like on the Navel?”

  “I don't know. As soon as Astiv shows up with the ladder we can go see.”

  “I suppose it really is the same size as the others.” Vala strode forward to the column, touched its surface reverently with one mittened hand, and began to pace around it boldly. “One, two, three . . .”

  Tripp smiled, pleased. She'd been trying to imbue scientific instincts into the girl since they had met, and she had perceived a raw intellect under all the vanity and silliness. Measure—always measure! She walked up to the monument herself, and began to count out her own paces, moving clockwise while Vala went anticlockwise. The silent stars watched as they walked and counted. By the time they had done, they found their counts differed by only a couple of paces, easily explained by their differing lengths of stride, and they promised to measure it properly later.

  “But, yes,” Vala concluded, “it has the same dimensions as the Eye tower, and the Pivot.”

  “Here comes Astiv with his ladder.”

  It took only a moment for them to set up the fold-out wooden ladder and prop it against the tower's side. Without asking permission Vala immediately leapt onto it and began to clamber up, a bundle of dark fur, her legs working vigorously. Tripp glanced at Astiv and shrugged. More cautiously, the two of them followed the girl.

  Vala was standing at the lip of a bowl of darkness. “Take it easy,” she said. “The edge here is rough, but it's not as secure as the wooden path we laid around our Eye.”

  Tripp stepped off the ladder and stood with Astiv, their breaths steaming as they panted after the climb in their heavy coats. Astiv dug a roll of photomoss out of his coat and draped it over the wall, and its soft glow enhanced the starlight. And they peered into the bowl of darkness contained within the tower's cylindrical wall.

  Tripp said, “It does look like another Eye, doesn't it?” She knelt down. The bowl was coated with a black substance that crumbled as she touched it. “Slime—long dead and freeze-dried. Quite a thickness of it, though.”

  Vala jumped down into the bowl, her lack of caution making Tripp's heart pound a little harder, and she began to rip up the Slime enthusiastically. The surface beneath was smooth and full of stars, a mirrored surface that looked at first glance as flawless as the one on the Navel.

  “Another mystery,” Tripp murmured to Astiv. “Evidently Slime grew over the mirror. How? Where did it get the light to grow?”

  Astiv shrugged. “Why ask me? I just mind the horses. Seems to me you came all this way for answers—”

  “And all I found was more questions. All right, all right.”

  Vala was tearing up great swathes of the dead Slime. “Come on, you two, help me. This stuff's easy to shift. We could get the mirror clear quickly, if we all work at it.”

  “Why?” Astiv asked practically.

  “Well, why not?”

  Astiv grinned. “I do like that girl.” He jumped down into the bowl, landed on his backside and slid in a great shower of black flakes. He got to his feet and began pulling away the Slime methodically, rolling it up like carpet and throwing it over the lip of the tower.

  With a sigh, Tripp herself stepped down, more cautiously, and joined in. The Slime was so old and desiccated it came away easily.

  “Tell me about the Slime,” Vala said. “The fact that it lies on top of the tower means it came after the tower was built. Isn't that right?”

  “Yes. But the Slime itself has been here a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I'll give you the answer we worked out from Helen Gray's writings. Four hundred and fifty million Great Years. That's when the Slime first appeared on this world. Before that there were only simple single-celled life forms of its kind.”

  “Its kind. Which is carbon and water and nitrogen—”

  “Life more or less like us, yes.” Tripp was already tiring, and she sat on a bank of the Slime. But Astiv and Vala, more vigorous, were quickly clearing a wide area of this Antistellar Eye. “I'll tell you two other strange things. Helen says that that date, four hundred and fifty million Great Years ago, is about the same time multicellular life of our kind appeared on Earth I—which may be the world she came from. And the time it appeared on Earth II—which may be a world she visited.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “All these forms are different in detail, you understand. But the basic reality of that uplift, from single-celled to multicellular forms, happened on all three worlds about the same time—and to the same sort of life forms, carbon and water and nitrogen. And I'll tell you something else. We have spectroscopes—devices that split up the starlight, and let you see what remote stars and worlds are made of . . .” She kicked the Slime. “We have detected photosynthesis of this sort, of our carbon-water sort, on other worlds, orbiting other stars, in that direction.” She pointed at the starry sky. “But none in the other direction.” She pointed that way. “Now, what does all that suggest to you?”

  Vala kept on clearing the dead slime, breathing harder. “That somebody set this off deliberately. Four hundred and fifty million Great Years ago, somebody came sweeping through the star systems, and, where they found traces of carbon-water life, uplifted it to multicellular forms. They did it on Earth I and Earth II and Earth III. Maybe it was an expedition, like Helen's. Or maybe it was a war of conquest, an invasion, like Khilli's. But this was as far as they got.”

  “Yes,” Tripp said. “Wonderful thought, isn't it? A war of the life architectures. But there was somebody here already. Whoever built the Substrate, the monuments like this.”

  Vala said, “So maybe they got displaced by the carbon-water creatures. They lost the war. Who knows? It's all such a long time ago.”

  We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard . . . Or a battlefield. Humans built their lives amid the relics of monumental wars long ago fought to a conclusion—wars that had left bubbles of inimical life forms scattered through the Galaxy.

  “Look, we've got more than half clear now,” Vala said. “I think it's reflecting the starlight!” She raised a handful of Slime dust in the air, and let it drift around her; it caught a sparking, misty beam, barely visible. “Come on, help me clear the rest. . . .”

  Tripp heard a shout. Perhaps Astiv Pellt heard it, too; he turned, frowning. But Tripp's head was too full of marvelous, strange ideas to be concerned about that. With renewed eagerness, hungry to know what would happen next, she ripped into the remaining Slime with new determination.

  And she thought she saw a shadow beneath her, vaguely defined, as if cast by a source of diffuse light far above.

  * * * *

  XV

  A single carriage came rolling through the final pass to the monument, covered in canvas and grander than either of Tripp's carts, and pulled by four weary-looking horses. It had a single driver, bundled in furs, and the way was lit by a strip of photomoss fixed to an arched frontage. It stopped some way short of Tripp's carts, which weren't even unpacked properly, such had been the haste of the others to climb the monument.

  Brod considered calling Tripp and the others, giving them some warning.

  Instead he walked forward, checking his weapons, the blade in one deep pocket, the musket in t
he other. His blood was pumping, his attention focused, his spirits as high as they had been for many long watches. The challenge had come, and he relished it. Meeting challenges was what he was for; that was what he had inherited from the brave pioneers who had crossed space to come to this world—or had had programmed into him by the Sim Designers in Holy Vegas, depending on what you believed, and right now he didn't care—and this was his moment.

  As he approached the wagon the driver didn't dismount. Brod couldn't even see his face, and the man, or woman, seemed determined not to react to his presence. Even the horses, breathing steam, showed more interest. But it was obvious he wasn't to be challenged from that quarter.

  He walked around the wagon. It was sealed tight, the canvas pinned firmly in place, and he thought he could feel the warmth leaking from it. His enemy traveled in comfort, then.

  He was ready.

  He stood back from the wagon and bellowed. “Khilli! Khilli son of Elios! I am Brod son of Maryam! Come out here and meet me—or skulk in your cart like the coward you are. . . !”

  A flap pushed open at the back of the wagon, and two men clambered out. One was stocky, dark-clad, a blade already in his hand, his head covered by a hood. The other was taller, slimmer, moved more stiffly, and, though clad in a heavy cloak, he shivered at the stab of the Antistellar cold.

  Brod drew his musket and his blade, a stabbing-sword that was shorter than his opponent's, and stepped forward. “Khilli. I'm flattered you came all this way.”

  Khilli pushed his hood back to expose a shaven head, and a scar on his cheek that was livid even by the light of the stars. “Don't be. I came to clean the world of a stain, kidnapper, rapist. Since you wouldn't stand and fight before.”

  “I fled from your army, not from you—and I saved your sister from you, animal. And besides—here I am now, standing alone. Or have you brought your daddy to back you up?”

  The other man slipped his own hood back from his shaven head. It was Elios, Speaker of Speakers, as Brod had suspected. “I have come only to observe.” Elios sounded tired, almost wistful.