by Greg Egan
«I wish you hadn’t mentioned that,» Seth replied. The sense of gaining ever more precision, and ever surer knowledge of the migration’s future, had offered a comforting antidote to the sense of panic he felt when his mind turned to all the delays they still faced before they could convey the news to the people who needed to hear it. «Am I crazy to think that we should head back to the settlement on our own?»
«Yes. I said we might be able to fix a broken cart on our own, if we absolutely had to. That doesn’t mean we should risk going it alone just to get back a few days sooner.»
«All right.» Seth was still worried about the effect on Dahlia if they came across the bodies of the third group of migrants, but they couldn’t shield her from everything. She’d survived watching Martha almost kill him; she was probably more resilient than he imagined.
He watched her and Ada, mingling with the Southites beside their campfire; she was chatting away like one of the locals. Seth hadn’t asked her directly, but she had surely passed on the good news to them about the size of the chasm, and what it would mean to her people back home. The Southites could draw their own conclusions; he felt no need to belabor the point. By sending their guests home in a safe and timely manner, they would spare themselves the problem of any larger intrusion into their fragile community. Life here was hard enough already, without a horde of furless interlopers wasting their time over a question that had already been answered.
seth spotted the scouts in the distance, sprinting back across the icy plain. They usually stayed out in front until the main group set up camp, but that was hours away, and he’d never seen them returning with such haste before.
«Are they shouting something?» he asked Theo. He couldn’t hear the faintest squawk himself, but if they were in such a hurry to tell the others what they’d found, it was hard to believe that they’d approach in silence.
«Not that I can tell,» Theo replied. «Why don’t you ask Dahlia?»
«It’s Dahlia I want to distract, if this is going to upset her.» If the scouts were carrying news of a gruesome find, at least he could insist that the four foreigners hang back and respect the Southites’ privacy while they dealt with the dead.
Suddenly, Dahlia began yelling in the Southite language. Seth assumed that she’d heard something distressing from the scouts, and he waited for a chance to discover the details so he could try to comfort her, but then Theo interjected brusquely, «Do you fucking see that or not?»
Four or five long, thin objects were falling from the sky. For a moment, Seth could do no more than marvel that the emptiness to the south had been breached by what looked like a bundle of twigs. But as they dropped toward him, tilting wildly—revealing themselves to be stone, not wood—some part of his mind leaped ahead of his conscious reckoning, and he found himself turning the cart and pumping the crank with all his strength, moving toward the spot on the ground that his instinct told him would be farthest from any point of impact. The hyperbolas traced by the falling rods’ lower ends raced ahead of the arcs of their descent, and they scraped into the ice and rock around him with a succession of bone-shaking screeches, sending debris spraying across the plain.
In the silence, he looked around. Ada and Dahlia were unharmed, but Niall had been cut in two: his body was literally bisected, with four limbs on each side of a deep, narrow gash that stretched for more than a dozen paces across the ground. Everyone else had been lucky: this trench, and the four others, had somehow spared them.
«More!» Theo warned him. Seth saw a cluster of specks descending; from below, the narrow, vertical rods were almost unnoticeable until they began to tumble. A part of him wanted nothing more than to move as fast as he could in any direction, but he forced himself to wait until he had a chance to extrapolate the way the rods would fall. Dahlia was shouting again, and he knew she must be terrified, but he wasn’t going to try to second-guess the moves that would lead Ada to safety; all he could do was focus on his own fate. As the pattern above him became clear, he turned the cart, then turned it some more, and then at the last moment drove it backward into a gap between the falling blades.
The rods sliced into the ground, disintegrating as they struck. Seth stayed frozen until the sound of the last impact stopped ringing in his skull, then he turned his head to take in the latest damage. Furrows crisscrossed the plain, separating every member of the expedition from their companions. Two of the carts had been reduced to piles of firewood, and Niall’s corpse had been mutilated further, but incredibly, no one else appeared hurt.
«Are you sure these people don’t have pingers?» he asked. If the Southites were sky-blind, how could they have kept themselves safe?
Theo said, «Dahlia must be guiding them. She must be telling them where those things are going to fall.»
Seth had no time to take this in; a third cluster of rods was plummeting toward them. As he watched the weapons descend, not quite vertically, he realized that he’d noticed a glint in his own view, much lower down but from the same direction. As they were flung into the sky they must have caught the light before they’d crossed into his dark cone.
At some point he decided not to dodge the latest barrage: three rods were falling toward him on three sides, all closer than he’d wish, but it seemed more dangerous to try to get clear of all of them than to stay put. When they hit, none of them touched him directly, but the spray of dust and grit raised from their excavations pitted the side of the cart and punched through the blanket into his skin.
He looked to the Southites for some clue to their escape plans: he’d been expecting them to scatter across the plain, or to retreat at speed, to make for a more difficult set of targets. The scouts, wisely, had stayed away; Seth could no longer see where they were, but the attack had been focused tightly on the main party, so he had no reason to think that they’d been hit.
No one was scattering, though, or fleeing in any direction. Dahlia was still shouting to them in their own language—and now Lana was replying to her. He could tell that Dahlia was distressed, but the rhythms of the exchange struck Seth as equally urgent and purposeful on both sides; this was not the wailing of a terrified child seeking comfort, alternating with the soothing reassurances of an adult.
Lana moved toward one of the intact carts—the one carrying some kind of machine. A fourth group of rods was falling; Seth stopped worrying about the Southites’ plans and concentrated on surviving. But as he watched the stone knives twirling down through the air, he felt a stab of empathy at the realization of how much more terrifying the attack would be to someone who couldn’t even see the things approaching.
He swerved to safety, almost practiced at it now, but no less rattled as the rods carved a fresh set of furrows and another cart disintegrated.
“Are you all right?” he called to Ada, inanely, but he didn’t know what else he could say.
“We’ll be fine,” she called back shakily. “This can’t go on forever.”
Seth looked around for Lana; not only had she moved to avoid being hit, she’d dragged the cart with the machine along with her. She shouted something, and Dahlia replied, then she reached into the device, made an adjustment, and pulled a lever.
A cluster of stone rods shot out of the machine. Seth followed them from his own view into Theo’s and back as they arced into the sky, reached a high point and began to fall and tumble. He couldn’t see a trace of the presumed enemy, but the rods disappeared behind some low, rocky hills that might have concealed anything.
Lana remained at the machine. In the silence between her curt exchanges with Dahlia, Seth could hear things clattering, squeaking, and rattling as she made her urgent preparations.
He caught a glint from the fifth cluster rising up from behind the hills, just as Lana released her own second barrage. The two passed each other with room to spare, still hanging in the air almost vertically, then they tipped and spread like two unfolding nets, imperfectly mimicking each other.
Seth froze, confused. His se
nse of the approaching rods’ geometry had abandoned him; he had no idea how he should move.
«Forward!» Theo yelled. Seth pushed the crank; it made a quarter-turn, then jammed.
He brought his arm up from the crank to the top of the cart, raised himself out of the supporting couch, and slid down the front of the cart, thudding onto the ground. He felt the cart disintegrate behind him; he shielded Theo’s pinger with his hand as chips of wood and shards of stone rained down on them.
“Seth!” Dahlia called out in distress.
“We’re all right!” he yelled back. “Don’t worry, we’re not hurt!”
He cowered on the ground, waiting. How far and how fast would he be able to move, when the next attack came? Lana was loading the machine again, but the ambushers were ahead of her.
Someone ran toward him; Seth couldn’t recognize the blur of furred limbs, but whoever it was scooped him up in two arms and gripped him tightly. Seth kept still and muttered in inspeech, forcing himself not to make a sound lest he distract his rescuer from Dahlia’s instructions.
The sixth cluster fell as Lana’s reply ascended. Seth watched helplessly, but when he saw that the incoming rods hadn’t touched the outgoing cluster he felt a surge of hope: they weren’t defeated yet.
But a rod was sweeping down toward him, perfectly placed to take three limbs off his bearer and excise his own head. Dahlia was shouting and shouting, but she had five falling rods and six blind companions to coordinate.
Seth bent his leg then straightened it emphatically, over and over in quick succession. The Southite deciphered his tic just in time, and leaped sideways as the rod whistled into the rock.
Seth started bellowing in shock and anger. When he stopped, he heard a familiar voice speak quietly, ending with a mangled attempt at his name.
“Marco?” Seth composed himself. “Thanks for that.”
He could feel Marco tensed, ready for the next barrage. Lana sent off another cluster; Seth watched it rise then vanish behind the hills.
Nothing came back.
Silence descended; even Dahlia was quiet now. Seth called to her, “What’s happening?”
She said, “We’re waiting to see if we’ve broken their . . .”
“Catapult,” Seth replied, though the word sounded far too innocuous for anything that could slice people in half. “The same thing Lana’s using?”
“Yes.”
After a few minutes, there was a discussion among the Southites, then Ihsaq, Kate, and Reva set off toward the hills. Seth wished Marco would put him down and have a rest; he wasn’t certain that the danger had passed, but if Marco grew tired from the load it could be bad news for both of them.
From the top of the hills, Kate shouted something back before the three continued on their way. Marco walked over to Ada’s cart and placed Seth beside her, then he joined the others trying to clean up the aftermath of the attack. They left Niall’s body untouched, working around it, salvaging food and other items that had fallen on the ground and piling them up on the remaining carts. Seth watched them in silence, feeling numb and battered. He wanted to be sure that he understood what had happened, but it seemed disrespectful to ask Dahlia to start quizzing their hosts while one of them lay dead.
The three who had gone over the hill returned, dragging two new carts and some meager supplies that they must have acquired from the enemy. Shortly afterward, the scouts rejoined the group. Everyone spoke together at length, sometimes including Dahlia. Then they set about their usual tasks: putting up tents, lighting a campfire.
“Did Lana kill all the ambushers?” Ada asked Dahlia.
“No,” Dahlia replied. “One of them was trying to run away, but they caught her and she’s dead now.”
“Why were they attacking us?” Seth asked, though he believed he already knew the answer.
“They did the same to the people coming from the old home,” Dahlia replied. “The scouts found what was left from the attack. The ground was cut up in a hundred places, and everyone was dead.” She spoke with a kind of reverent grief, as if she was not merely horrified by the idea of such a slaughter, but felt an intimate connection with the victims.
“But why?” Seth prompted her gently. “Why kill anyone?”
“Because they want the new home for themselves. They didn’t reach it first, so they’ve sent people to hide along the route from the old home to the new one, trying to stop anyone else from joining us. They want to keep the settlement as small as they can, so in the end they can come and take everything away from us.”
19
Despite ada’s offer to share her cart with Seth and keep on cranking it with double the load, Marco put him on one of the carts pilfered from the attackers, and then took turns with Ihsaq, Julia, and Kate dragging him back toward the settlement. Seth felt a twinge of humiliation at being helpless again, but he decided that petitioning Ada and his hosts to let him swap places with her and drive her cart for half the journey would seem petty. And the truth was, he’d badly bruised his left arm when he’d dropped from his own cart onto the ground; he believed he could still have worked the crank, but he would have been in pain all the way.
There were things he wanted to discuss with Ada, but although he was never out of shouting distance from her as the group made their way back across the plain, he was wary of attracting too much attention to their conversations. If one of the Southites asked Dahlia to translate what they’d said, Seth wasn’t sure that he and Ada could rely on her to keep anything private.
«If only there’d been some kind of jumping predator here,» Theo lamented. «Some spring-toed lacerater that leaped right into its victims’ dark cone before it struck. If these idiots had had to keep watch for dangers from above for a long enough time, they might have grown pingers of their own.»
«Wouldn’t that mean that Walkers would have no need for Siders, either?» Seth replied. «I thought you believed that some ancient Southite fell through a hole and gave birth to my ancestors.»
«Do you really expect my counterfactual longings to be consistent with my merely hypothetical speculations?»
«No, you’re right,» Seth conceded. «That’s too much to ask.» He stared at the dark ellipse of the chasm ahead of them, with counterfactual longings of his own: if they’d left the search party and headed back to the settlement as soon as they’d made their measurements, everything might have turned out differently. «But un-counterfactually, how are we going to make ourselves less fucking useful?»
«Let’s be precise here: you and Ada still aren’t much use at all.»
«That’s true. You haven’t seen any puffballs around, have you?» Seth was half serious. «Maybe in the orchards?»
«No. But that would just switch the whole burden to the Walkers anyway. The Southites don’t know a thing about Sider biology; if we feign a disease, we can make the symptoms worse than the effects of puffballs, and pretend the whole pair has ended up side-blind.»
Seth had been thinking of the puffballs more as a way of taking Dahlia out of the equation. «They’ll know we’re faking,» he said. «It’s too convenient. We might as well be honest and just admit that we’re not willing to do the job.»
Theo said, «At which point I expect they’ll start threatening us. No weapon spotting, no food—or worse.»
«So what if we just agree to help them?» So far, none of the Southites had actually made any request—unless Dahlia was keeping that to herself—but it wasn’t hard to anticipate what they’d want. «We escort as many tranches of migrants from the old home to the new as it takes to make the settlement unassailable. The Southites are grateful beyond measure, and offer to shower us with wealth, but we settle for a boat and wish them a fond farewell.»
«All of which takes . . . how long?»
«Too long,» Seth admitted. «Probably thousands of days.»
«And there’d be no guarantee that they’d set us free in the end,» Theo added. «If we never make it home with the measurements, maybe som
eone else will come after us—whether it’s just a few more surveyors, or a whole horde of migrants taking shelter. The Southites aren’t going to be afraid of an invasion; they’d welcome the chance to grab more sky-seers and make themselves permanently invulnerable against their enemies. This chasm is the only place in the world where they have a chance to get hold of an entire breeding population of magical slaves; once they leave it, the opportunity will vanish for however many thousand generations it takes for the migration on our hyperboloid to run into another hole. Why wouldn’t they want to exploit that?»
Seth couldn’t fault his logic, but he wondered if Theo was slandering these people. No one had actually treated them like slaves. Like animals, yes, but only when they’d known no better. As far as he could tell, Iqbal loved Dahlia as if she were his sister, and Marco had probably saved Seth’s life—albeit at a time when Theo’s potential utility was already apparent, but surely he deserved the benefit of the doubt.
when they reached the settlement, dozens of people ran out to meet the search party. Seth still had no talent for reading the Southites’ emotions directly, but he could only assume that their vocalizations were suffused with grief and anger once they learned of the travelers’ fate.
Marco took Seth and Theo straight to the enclosure, refilled the water trough, and brought some food. Ada and Dahlia had fallen behind, but then Seth saw Lana carrying them in, in her arms. At first he was afraid that she intended to take them to a different place, but once Lana had finished talking to someone who’d intercepted her as she crossed the open space between the buildings, she continued on to the enclosure and delivered her passengers to their home.
“Lana said she’d tell Iqbal about his cousins,” Dahlia informed Seth, as Lana departed.
