by Vernor Vinge
Rey expected the threatened body searches would come next. Instead, the Tarulle people were gestured to sit before the altar. There was a moment of near silence after Guille was asked to open the crate. Now he could hear a faint buzzing that came from all around, the sound of the real termites. They were, after all, inside an enormous hive. He pulled up the lid of the crate, and the insect sound was lost behind the Villagers’ soft chanting.
The high priests lifted the top sheets from the crates. These were color illustrations that would be inside/outside covers on normally bound editions. The color didn’t show well in the candlelight, but the Termiters didn’t seem to mind; the best pictures from previous issues were mounted in the walls behind the altar. The priests poured over the illos, just like ordinary fans thrilled with the latest issue of their favorite magazine. Before, Rey would have smiled at their enthusiasm. Now he held his breath. At least one of those pictures showed Hrala carrying a spring-gun; could that be blasphemy?
Then the tall priest looked up, and Rey saw that he was smiling. “Wonderful, friend Guille. There is new Insight here. We will pay double.” The others were lifting manuscript galleys out of the crate and solemnly laying them on velvet reading stands. There couldn’t be more than a handful of locals who knew Spräk, did they preach from the stories? Rey let out a carefully controlled breath. It didn’t matter now. The Tarulle people had passed the test and—
—outside the Hall, someone was shouting. The words were indistinct, but Hurdic. The priests straightened, listening. The shouts came louder; people were rushing up the steps to the Hall’s entrance. The barricades slid aside and Seraph’s light shone on the arrivals: they were spear carriers from the pier. They rushed down the aisle, still shouting. Their leader was waving something over his head. Everyone was shouting now. Rey saw that Brailly’s men had slipped into a circle formation. Some of them were reaching into their jackets.
Then the newcomer reached the altar, and one of the priests—the old one with the gimp leg—gave an incredible warbling scream. In an instant, all other cries ceased. He took two objects from the guard and held them close to the candles. Strange reflections shifted across his face and the ceiling…He was holding the main mirror and the diagonal bracket from Rey’s telescope.
How can he know what these are, much less think them blasphemous? The thought hung for an instant in Rey’s mind, and then everything went crazy. The old man threw the mirror to the floor, then turned on the Tarulle visitors and shouted in Hurdic. No translation was needed; his face was contorted with hatred. Spearmen ran forward, weapons leveled. Brailly tossed something onto the altar; there was an explosion and swirling gouts of chokesmoke. Rey dived to the floor, tried to belly crawl out from under the choke. He heard Brailly’s men fighting their way toward the entrance. By the sound of it, they had some sort of weapons—strip knives probably. There were screams and ugly ripping sounds, all against a background of coughing and nausea. It sounded like all the Villagers had thrown themselves into the fight. They could never get past such a mob!
He had underestimated the Printmaster. From out of the smoke and shouting came Brailly’s voice. “Down! We’re gonna blast!” Rey tucked his head in his arms. A second later there was a flash of light and invisible hands crashed upon both sides of his head. He looked up. There was blue light ahead! Tounse had knocked the barricade over.
Rey came to his knees. If he could move while the locals lay stunned…
His poor ears couldn’t hear the rumbling; it came through his knees and palms. All around them, the hive was shaking. He saw now that the pillars near the entrance had been smashed. Avalanches of moundstuff—first small, then engulfing, spilled down from above.
With that, the tower collapsed on the Great Hall, and Rey saw no more.
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED IN PATCHES. There were unpleasant dreams. Something was banging his head; it wasn’t the knock of his alarm clock. They were dragging him feet first, and his head was bouncing off uneven ground. The dream faded to pleasant grayness, then came back in a new form: he was rolling down a hillside, the rocks cutting into his body.
Rey came to rest in foul-tasting water, and wondered if he would drown before he woke up. Strong hands pulled him from the water. Through the ringing in his ears he heard someone say, “There. A moment of sitting to catch the breath.”
He coughed weakly, and looked around. No more dreams: the nightmare was reality. He was sitting by a shallow pond, near the bottom of a pit. The edge of the pit was ten yards above his head, except on one side, where it broke low and gave a view of the harbor. He was not alone. There were dozens of people here—all that remained of the Science crew. They clustered around the newly fallen. Looking up at their faces, Rey saw hope in some, fear and despair in others.
“You’re looking bad. Can you talk?” It was the woman who had pulled him from the pond. She was in her late fifties, an Osterlai by her accent. Her clothes were neat but stained. There was a matter-of-fact friendliness in her voice. In a moment he would remember who she was.
“Y-yes,” he croaked. “What happened?”
The woman gave a short laugh. “You tell us. Five minutes ago it just started raining people. Looks like the Termite Folk have found new blasphemers.”
Rey swallowed. “You’re right.” And it was his fault.
Most of his companions were in worse shape than he. The Science prisoners were trying to help, but two of the Tarulle people looked freshly dead. Nowhere did he see Brailly Tounse. He glanced at the Osterlai woman and made a wan smile. “We came to rescue you.” He gave his captive audience a brief account of the sales landing. “Everything was going fine. I was beginning to think they might listen to us, that we’d at least learn more about your situation. Then they found the mirror from my telescope. How could they know what it was, much less—” He noticed the look on the woman’s face.
“And how do you think we got in trouble, my sir? We thought to do some observing from the peaks Inland. We had a twenty-inch mirror; the Seraph-seeing should be better here than—” She broke off in surprise. “Why, you’re Rey Guille!”
Rey nodded, and she continued, “So I don’t have to tell you the details; you’ve written enough about the idea…I’m Janna Kats, Seraphist at Bergenton; we met once a couple years back.” She waved a hand as recognition slowly dawned on Rey. “Anyway. We dragged that mirror ashore, gave the Termiters a look. They thought it was great stuff—till they learned what we wanted to look at.” She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Lots of religions worship Seraph. You know: home o’ the gods and such garbage. Turns out the Termiters think Seraph is something like the gods’ bedroom—and mortals mustn’t peep!”
So that was how they learned what the parts of a telescope look like. “It still doesn’t make sense,” Rey said. “In everything else, they seem to be ancestor worshippers; I’ve sold them dozens of Interior fantasies. How did Seraphidolatry get mixed in?”
The question brought a fit of coughing from the little man silting beside Kats. “I can answer that.” The words were broken by more rasping coughs. The fellow’s face seemed shrunken, collapsed; Rey wondered that he could talk at all. “The Termite Folk are intellectual pack rats. For three hundred years they’ve been here, picking up a little of this, a little of that—from whoever was passing through.” More coughing. “I should have seen through ’em right off…I’ve spent my whole life studying coastal barbarians, learning Hurdic. But these folks are so secretive, I didn’t understand what was driving them…till it was too late.” A smile twisted his thin face. “I could get a nice research paper out of what we’ve learned here. Too bad we gotta die first.”
Rey Guille had years of experience finding loopholes in impossible situations—on paper. “Maybe we don’t have to die. I never thought the Termiters were killers. If their religion is such a hodgepodge, they can’t take the taboos too seriously. You’ve been here for several days. Maybe they just want a graceful way out.” It really made sense.
Then he remembered Brailly’s bomb, and continued more quietly, “If there’s anything they’d kill for, I think it would be what my people did to the Village Hall.”
“You don’t understand, fellow,” a third Science person spoke, a sharp edge in his voice. “Knocking over a termite mound is a peccadillo in their eyes—compared to invading the gods’ privacy. They’ve kept us alive this long because they’re having trouble devising a torture-death appropriate to our crime!”
“How can you know that for sure—”
“We know, Master Guille.” Janna Kats’s tough exterior broke for an instant, and she looked just as frightened as the others. “In the last two days they’ve taken three of us from the pit. W-we could hear the screams; one we could see. Each took longer to die than the last.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the cougher said, “I think the Termiters are scared, too—of their Seraph gods. If they can’t come up with the proper death for us, they think the gods will apply that death to them. The three they killed were…little experiments.”
“But there will be no more.” The toughness was back in Janna’s voice. “The next time they come, one big surprise we’ll show them. We won’t be skoats waiting for the slaughter.”
Rey looked up, at the rim of the pit. There were Termite Folk all around. Most carried spears, but that wasn’t the most deadly thing; spears kill one at a time, make a slow thing of a massacre. Much more ominous were the priests carrying torches. They stood near the three petroleum vats Brailly had spotted earlier. Each tank was mounted on a crude swivel. Should they choose, the torch bearers could drown their prisoners in flame. A few hours before, that prospect had filled him with sympathetic dread. For Janna and the others, it had come to be the only imaginable out.
THE HOURS PASSED. At the top of the sky, Seraph widened toward full, its western ocean turning dark and reddish with the start of the midnight eclipse. The Villagers marched steady patrols around the edge of the pit. Mostly they were silent. The Science’s anthropologist said they had long ago stopped responding to his shouted questions.
There were no more “experiments,” but Rey gradually realized the pit was in itself a killing place. The only water was in the shallow pool at the bottom of the pit—and that became steadily more foul. The only food was what the Villagers threw into the pit: slabs of skoat cheese and balls of what turned out to be pressed termite larva. Rey had eaten some exotic things in his years with Tarulle, but the larva patties were half rotted. Hungry as they were, only a few of the prisoners could keep them down. Three of the Tarulle prisoners were dead, their bodies broken by the explosion. Two of the survivors had compound fractures; their moans came less frequently with each passing hour.
The prisoners were not alone in the pit. The true builders of the Village were here, too. In the silence that dragged between conversations and occasional screaming, Rey heard a scritching sound coming from all directions. At the corner of his vision, a pebble would move, something would scuttle from one hole to another. The termites were no bigger than a man’s thumb, but there must be millions of them in the sides of the pit. They avoided the humans, but their activity was ceaseless. The sides of the pit were not ordinary earth. All the way down to the pool, this was moundstuff. It must be old, the detritus of thousands of years of towers, but it was still used by the tiny creatures. The stones in this “soil” must have washed down from the hills to the north. The coming of humans was a recent event in the hives’ history.
The towers of the Village crowded around three sides of the pit, but beyond the broken southern lip, they could see the harbor. The Tarulle Barge was less than a quarter mile out. Deck piled on deck, loading cranes sticking out in all directions, masts rising slim into the reddish-blue sky—the Barge had never seemed so beautiful to Rey as now. Safety was just twelve hundred feet away; it might as well be the other side of Seraph. An hour earlier, a hydrofoil had arrived from the ocean and docked in a starboard slip. There was no other boat activity, though Rey fancied he saw motion on the bridge: another meeting? And this time, a final decision to leave?
Most of the prisoners huddled on the north slope of the depression; the corpses were carried to the other side of the pit. The prisoners were bright people. They’d had plenty of time to try to figure a way out, and no success in doing so. The arrival of Rey’s group brought new hope, even though the rescue had been a failure. For an hour or two, there was renewed scheming. When it became clear that nothing had really changed, the talk gradually petered out. Many of the prisoners drifted back to inward looking silence.
There were exceptions. One thing Rey loved about scientists was their love for speculation. Take Tredi Bekjer, the little guy who spent the hours coughing his lungs out. Tredi was a sickly fellow who should never have been on the Science expedition in the first place. He was an anthropologist, and the only captive who spoke fluent Hurdic. He might be dying, but between spasms of coughing he argued about the origin and future of their captors. He predicted that, no matter what the prisoners’ fate, the ambush had doomed the Termiter culture. Now, outsiders knew there was petroleum nearby. When that news got to the archipelagates, the Termiter Folk would have lots of visitors. Even if the locals were not booted off their land, they would be forced to make big changes. In thirty years, there would be a real city here.
There were others like Tredi, folks who could walk through the gates of death, still arguing about ideas. When the planning and the scheming was done, these few still had something to talk about. Rey found himself drawn in.
Janna Kats was the most interesting. Before specializing in Seraphy, she’d had lots of experience with other branches of astronomy. And U Bergenton had the best astronomers in the world—if you excepted the Doo’d’en fanatics on the other side of the world. Kats was just the sort of person he’d been hoping to talk to—back when he thought they’d find the Science in one piece. For minutes at time Rey could forget where he was and what his fate must be. Kats had had great plans for the Seraph observatory. There should be good seeing from the mountains behind the harbor. Ground resolutions better than one hundred yards would have been possible with the twenty-inch mirror. The issue of intelligent life on Seraph might finally be resolved…Instead, the project had brought them all to this pit.
Rey grunted. “Other things are happening in astronomy. Things that aren’t so dangerous. There have been some fantastic discoveries at Krirsarque.” He described “Pride of Iron” and the spectroscopic observations it was based on. “Can you imagine! With spectroscopy, we can know what things are like on planets around other stars.” He sat back, waiting for Janna’s reaction to this news. It was one of the occasional pleasures of his job, to be the first person in an entire archipelagate to report a breakthrough.
Janna grinned back at him, but there was no surprise in her expression. “Ha! That’s one of the results the U Tsanart people sent west with Science, During the last year, they’ve got good spectra on twenty stars in our sun’s class. Every damn one of ’em is metal rich. And we have other results too. We can measure radial motions with this spectra stuff—” She laughed at the expression on his face. “You’ve written a lot of high-flown editorials about ‘Spectroscopy, Key to the Universe.’ Well, you may have understated the case. Combine the spectral shift data with proper motion studies, and it’s obvious our solar system is an interloper, just passing through the local star stream.”
Outcast Star. The title flashed through Rey’s mind. There were writers who could run away with that idea—and surely would, if he got out of this alive. “You know, it’s almost as if someone were picking on the human race,” he mused. “Out of all the solar systems, that we should be the on the low metal one, the outsider.” He didn’t like the idea. It smacked of the theistic fantasy Cor Ascuasenya so loved: humanity as doormat to the gods.
“You’ve got it backward, my sir. Ever hear of the anthropic principle? Most likely, intelligent life exists on Tu exactly because we are different from
the others. Think what an abundance of metals would mean. It’s not just a matter of wealth, millions of ounces of iron available for large scale construction. My guess is such concentrations of metals would change the surface chemistry so much that life would never develop.”
Janna’s middle-aged features were filled with a happy smugness, but Rey did not feel put down. He was imagining deadly, treasure-house worlds. “Or life might develop, but different than here. Why, there might be—”
Janna abruptly grabbed his arm. She was looking past him, her expression intent; his speculations were suddenly of zero interest. There were scattered gasps from the prisoners. He turned and looked into the harbor. The Barge had lowered a boat to the water. It glowed with white light, a jewel in the reddening dimness. Then he realized that Tarulle had lit a flare at the focus of the bridge’s signal mirror. Its light fell dazzling on the boat—which was nothing more than a freight lander painted silver and white. Before the flare guttered out, two more were lit at other mirrors. They tracked the boat as it started toward shore.
The Termiter priests were suddenly shouting. One group of spear carriers ran to the south side of the pit, while others moved to the pet’ vats and slid the covers aside. Priests dipped their torches into the vats—and the night exploded. The thunder went on and on, drowning the shouts of prisoners and Villagers alike. Flame and smoke rose from the petroleum, swirls of red and black across the mid-night eclipse. Hundreds of bats swarmed drunkenly in the superheated air, burning, falling. The stench of pet’ was everywhere. The Termiters cowered back from the pyres they had created, but Rey saw a few priests near each, setting long poles against the sides of the vats. A few good pushes, and the prison pit would be wall-to-wall fire.
Some of the prisoners collapsed, their mouths open, eyes wide. They must be screaming. Beside him, Janna Kats had caught his arm in both her hands. Her eyes were clenched shut, her face averted from the fires. Something in Rey’s mind retreated and suddenly he wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t brave; he simply couldn’t grasp the reality of his imminent torch-hood. He looked back to the harbor. The firing of the vats hadn’t stopped the boat. It floated serenely toward them, still lit by the Barge’s flares. He strained to see what it was carrying. The oarsmen wore black robes, their faces hidden within deep cowls. Those weren’t Tarulle uniforms, yet they were somehow familiar. There was only one other person on the boat. She stood at the bow, scorning all support. Her clothes were white and silver, gleaming in the faraway spotlights. Black hair cascaded around her face and shoulders.
