Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

‘You mean, will it function for s’aranthi?’ Jaharien was leaning against the door-arch, idly keeping watch. ‘I do believe it might – you have a persuasive manner, you offworlders.’

  That casual tone held black irony. I expected it: still it made me uncomfortable.

  Barris Rakviri, oblivious to what Jaharien implied, said, ‘It holds images of the time of the Empire.’

  I thought, I’m not afraid of what it could show me. Witchbreed cities: cyclopean architecture that, for all the myriad sphere-lights, was never more than one-tenth illuminated; sky-flyers, scent-fountains, metalmesh cloth. Nor do I fear the sight of the Witchbreed, those long-dead faces with coin-gold eyes. Ten years ago I looked on the millennially-old image of Santhendor’lin-sandru, called Phoenix Emperor and Last Emperor …

  But I am afraid of what unshielded exposure to alien technology might do to me.

  ‘We’ll trade for it as it stands,’ Molly Rachel said. She tucked her hands under the belt of her coveralls. In Sino-Anglic she added, ‘I’m having nothing to do with that outside laboratory conditions.’

  ‘That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since we came here.’

  It was the alteration in her expression that warned me, an instant before all else was utterly changed.

  Instead of light, the chiruzeth device radiated blindness; a blindness as brilliant as forked lightning. Where it fell on my skin, it had a velvet touch. A scent filled the air: nothing ever known before.

  ‘Stop this –’

  As if I could perceive with some sense that was not sight, I saw Molly Rachel, Jaharien, Barris Rakviri. We moved through a vast chamber. No knowing how great: only the age of it was a weight, a pressure. Walked at a slow pace, bearing a burden …

  Metalcloth robes slide with a dull hiss over a chiruzeth floor. The air is burningly chill. Sphere lights illumine only the base of cyclopean pillars, carved with patterns that are intricate, stylized or naturalistic variations on one theme only: the death’s-head …

  ‘———————————’

  Molly’s voice, chanting. Language incomprehensible. She walks on bare high-arched feet. Her mane is a pale cloud of flame. All the dimensions of bone and muscle subtly wrong: wrong as the skin that has the sheen and depth of gold. Her robe is patchwork enamel, black-and-white. She paces slowly. In her arms she cradles a cup, a globe, a ragged staff.

  Her eyes are yellow gold.

  Nightmare, this movement that cannot be stopped, as we pace towards the darkness ahead. A greater darkness, visible negation, anti-light.

  ‘—————————’

  ‘—————————’

  Jaharien paces in hooded robes all the colours of sunset. His gold-skinned hands outstretched: in one a twin-bladed sword, in the other some deadly construct of chiruzeth and onyx and gold.

  Behind him, Barris moves at a slow processional pace, his arms raised to carry a bier. Whitefire mane, yellow eyes. My shoulder aches to the same burden. My mouth moves to the same incomprehensible chant.

  ‘—————————’

  ‘————————’

  The burden set down where a circle of thrones stand on a dais. Our chant in many voices passes from throne to throne. Over, in, around us: that brilliant blackness.

  The burden set down: a slender alien body, pale as ice against the dark: a woman of the Witchbreed. Gold skin blotched with pus-yellow, blue-green: the colours of corruption. Lowering that burden, soft and heavy in my hands, to a raised slab of chiruzeth.

  ‘————————’

  ‘—————————’

  ‘————————’

  The chant continues. Celebrants, we stand. There is a knife on the chiruzeth, at the feet of the corpse. I see on alien lineaments the stirrings of ritual appetites. Whose hand will lift the knife; whose hand will cut and divide the flesh?

  Surrounded by these faces: faces of the imperial Golden bloodline: she who stands beside me, they who flank the body; even (discernible yet in corruption) the dead face: gold skin, white mane, and coin-gold yellow eyes.

  That radiant shadow working on me, like a splinter of metal working inward to the heart: what realization might come when it pierces? Death’s bright shadow –

  – gone from that pale octagonal room. Sunlight shone on the human face of Molly Rachel, on the two Rakviri males. The masonry of the wall was cold under my hands, where I leaned back for support. And the most banal scent possible brought the world back to me: the pepperspice odour of siir-wine.

  I thrust images out of my mind, and, determined to take some initiative, managed to say, ‘Give you greeting, t’an Earthspeaker,’ to the Orthean woman standing in the doorway. She held back the coin-curtain with one hand; in the other she carried a jug and bowls. Scarlet mane, green slit-backed robe.

  ‘Trouble?’ asked Cassirur Almadhera, letting the curtain fall behind her as she entered. She was encumbered by the jug and bowls, and put them down on a low table by the door. ‘Hal thought he or I could find you, and I thought you might need siir-wine –’

  Without more than a glance, she gestured with one claw-nailed hand. The chiruzeth device lost energy. In moments, it was inert, blue-grey; could have been nothing more than some eye-twisting nightmare sculpture.

  Earthspeaker, part of me thought; and another sceptic voice, barely recovering wit to think, said, Showmanship. She waited outside until it had – what? – finished its cycle, gone quiescent? And then she made an entrance.

  ‘S’an Jaharien,’ she acknowledged. ‘I’ve just met with Mezidon, she’s looking for you. Some problem with loading the food-ships, I believe.’

  The burly male looked across the room at me. Traces of shock and revulsion remained in his expression, but what I chiefly saw was an odd kind of satisfaction. That offworlders had been shown Witchbreed technology? That the experience had left one of us, at least, shit-scared? That experience of trauma –

  Whose hand will take the knife, under that bright shadow?

  When he saw me then, what did he see?

  ‘Thank you, t’an Earthspeaker.’ Jaharien turned and left the room, his footsteps echoing. Barris looked as though he wanted to speak, but only grasped his hanelys cane and limped after the s’an.

  Cassirur said quietly, ‘Look to your friend, Christie.’

  Molly Rachel still stood balanced lightly on the balls of her feet, eyes fixed on a non-existent horizon. The flat, dark features were distorted, as though she squinted against some light.

  ‘Is that siir? If you give –’ Finding that an insistent gentle pressure induced her to move, I steered her to the low table, and took the bowl that Cassirur held up. ‘Molly, can you drink? Try.’

  She drank quite naturally, wiped that long-angled wrist across her mouth and put the bowl down, and then caught at the edge of the table.

  ‘Lynne –’

  Cassirur, having almost to stand on tiptoe, brushed black curls aside to touch the woman’s brow. Molly pushed her hand away. The Earthspeaker nodded. ‘You’ll manage. T’an Christie …’ Both her hands gripped my shoulders, fingers covering too wide a span for human body-instincts. Then the nictitating membrane slid back from her eyes.

  ‘I see an old tale’s true,’ she said wryly. ‘You have been in Her Wellhouses, and marked for Her, and She has received your name. Count yourself lucky, S’aranth. It could have been much worse.’

  Molly Rachel rubbed her hands across her face. Then she let her hands fall and I saw the quite unconscious check: comlink, CAS-IV, wristlink-medicall. ‘I don’t like mysticism.’

  ‘I say only that Christie’s been marked with the water of the Well of the Goddess.’

  In Sino-Anglic, the Pacifican woman said, ‘Superstitious barbarians!’

  The Almadhera shook back the sleeves of her robe, and began to pour more siir-wine. I saw those whiteless brown eyes were full of laughter.

  ‘Not barbarians, t’an Rachel, surely? We’ve treated
you with all hospitality. As for superstitions …’

  ‘Please.’ Molly Rachel shook her head. ‘T’an Cassirur, forgive me; I don’t think I know what I’m saying.’

  ‘As for superstitions to be marked for the Goddess means only that we meet, and part, and meet again; and do not forget.’

  Molly ignored that. ‘It’s all mysticism. It’s technology I’m concerned with.’

  ‘T’an Rachel, when I speak of the Goddess it embarrasses you.’

  ‘Oh, I …’ Molly shifted her stance. ‘The way it is on our reports, your Kerys Founder set up the church after the Empire fell, so that no technology would ever be allowed into the telestres.’

  ‘And you will find it reported also, I think, how the mystic, Beth’ru-elen Ashirenin, came to find that lie a truth?’

  I recall that Hal’s telestre is said to have been founded by that remarkable Beth’ru-elen, who made a genuine religion from what began as a politic philosophy.

  Molly Rachel crossed the room to look at the chiruzeth artifact: the congeries of globes, solids, lines, curves, angles. ‘Technology isn’t good or evil. Only what it’s used for can be that. And if the Witchbreed were insane enough to make a technological society into some barbaric, disgusting, cult-ridden –’

  She broke off, nodded abruptly to Cassirur, and said, ‘I must talk to Barris and Jaharien. Excuse me.’

  In the silence after the curtain clashed behind her, Cassirur Almadhera said, ‘One forgets. At her age … yes, it would frighten her. We, on the other hand –’

  Image: figures filled with light too bright to look on, phosphorus-brilliant; that vulture-feast and then a transformation …

  ‘It frightened me. It still does. I don’t comprehend it.’

  In repose, her features began to show their age. The Orthean woman said, ‘Don’t you recognize it? Or is it too strange? They fell in love with that bright shadow, Death.’

  ‘Cassirur –’

  ‘And it frightens me, Christie, because it is so akin to Her realm; Her fire that permeates this world like breath, Her fire made flesh in we who meet, and part, and meet again; and do not forget. But for the Golden there was nothing but this world. And so, imagining some final cessation, they worshipped it. To be out of the world, to be nothing –’

  In her voice, I heard the beat of that litany of death; those untranslatable words echoed in the cadences of her speech. I took a bowl of siir-wine and drank, and fumbled as I set it down, spilling the green liquid as the ceramic crashed to splinters on the stone floor.

  ‘I’m sorry; I feel – I’m not well –’

  She was businesslike, abruptly all Earthspeaker. ‘Is it with you still? Speak it aloud, then. You need to. Those of us who remember such things, we need to speak of them.’

  A solid truth: might not that language, left unrecognized, control; like a dream forgotten but never resolved?

  ‘To be out of the world …’

  I picked up the litany, straining for words, knowing how far I failed: ‘To go into that bright shadow, to seize on nothingness; willing to leap into the abyss – to love it more than life. Not to reject Her, but to love the bright annihilation more than Her. To be hollow with the longing fork. And burn all up in one final self-consummation …’

  ‘More,’ Cassirur demanded.

  ‘The highest achievement: to reach after it, the only voice made incarnate flesh; to praise annihilation – pain that becomes joy, as cold can seem to burn. Holding it all for one instant within mortal compass, a glory of annihilation … Go willingly, joyfully, to meet it; consumed in that brilliance – to choose that bright shadow Death and die, and go into utter nothing …’

  And it was true, to voice it was to divest it of its splendour. If only because I’m so bad at it, I thought, and then I could relax, even laugh with the Orthean woman.

  ‘I don’t have the words – I’m an empath, you need a poet.’

  She put back tendrils of mane from her angled brown face, the wisps scarlet against her claw-nails. Her smile faded. ‘That’s the mere image of the Golden Witchbreed. What would you do if you had our living memory? The slavery of millennia, to that.’ Passion roughened her voice on the last word.

  And strangely enough, it was that that restored the human perspective to me. There are enough problems in the present, now I know for certain there is technology here that the Company will want. I stretched, fingers in the small of my back; and then shrugged. ‘It’s in the past, Cassirur. It is only an image. Will it hurt Rakviri to be rid of it? Trade with PanOceania won’t make the Hundred Thousand into another Golden Empire, I know that as well as you do.’

  ‘Do you want me to reassure you, Christie?’

  ‘I wish somebody would.’

  She chuckled at that, some release of tension visible in the line of arm and shoulder and high-arched ribs. ‘Ah … It’s bad that these matters divide us. We could have been friends, you and I.’

  ‘Are we enemies, then?’

  In the Freeport, in that room crowded with the takshiriye, she had seemed an Earthspeaker; here, she seemed all politician. One of those who have always to yearn towards the different parts of their divided natures.

  ‘I fear the Golden Witchbreed. That Rachel-ashiren may be right; I’m nothing but superstitious. Christie, I fear them, whatever name they come under.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you again,’ I offered. ‘If you’ll speak with me. Cassirur, we need goodwill on either side. Whatever happens.’

  She briefly gripped my hands, her skin warm and dry. ‘You have that … I must go. It’s not in my interests to let your Rachel talk too long alone with Barris and the s’an Rakviri, is it?’ And she gave me a grin that dropped ten years off her age, and strode out. Earthspeaker, s’an, Wellkeeper, takshiriye …

  The chiruzeth artifact gleamed in the depths of the alcove, and for a moment I couldn’t think of the manipulations of influence, or of what assistance PanOceania might need; how near or far we might be from a trade agreement. That pale octagonal room was cold, and the alcove held the only shadow.

  A coldness: a bright burning shadow …

  And Cassirur Almadhera doesn’t fear it because it’s repugnant to her. She fears it for the same reason that momentarily overpowered me: that the bright shadow is so easy to look upon and love.

  PART TWO

  8

  War Damage

  Carrick’s Star was setting in all the colours of frost and fire when I at last brought Barris Rakviri, alone, to the great terrace. Molly Rachel turned from staring out through the curved shells of glass. Some disquiet showed in her expression. She put it from her.

  ‘Do we have an agreement?’

  ‘We’ve got a price,’ I said. ‘Knowledge.’

  The Pacifican woman looked at Barris, his pale skin warm in the citrine light. Her brows raised. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ Barris Rakviri said.

  There was an intensity in his tone that shocked me. I am not used to hearing such need in any Orthean voice; it belongs to races who have no assurance of reincarnation.

  Molly said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘He wants access to the data-nets. Unrestricted access.’

  The terrace was all but deserted now. A temporary, hard-won privacy. Somewhere towards the far end, a musician fingered some intricate, cold song. Molly Rachel’s gaze returned to Barris, that small and dark-maned male, whose chemical-stained hands were clasped atop the hanelys stick on which he leaned.

  ‘Good God, the things these people hear about …’ She went from Sino-Anglic to Morvrenni: ‘T’an, if you want to learn about the inhabited worlds, you could apply to leave Orthe.’

  A tone of condescension came into her voice. ‘Yours is one of the species that suffers offworld syndrome, I know; but you could have a short time –’

  ‘Be fair,’ I said, ‘I’ve known humans have offworld syndrome too.’

  She looked at me thoughtfully. I put it down, th
en, to my being defensive about Ortheans.

  The dark male said, ‘Does it matter what you call it, t’an? We live, under Her sky. We are part of Her, and we cannot live away from Her.’

  According to records, there have been eighty-seven Ortheans who, unofficially, and at one time or another over the past ten years, have been offworld. Of those eighty-seven, sixty-eight returned to Orthe within a half-year – the unanimity is almost frightening. But then the other nineteen … the other nineteen died. Not by illness, or accident. Not even by their own hand. But died like feral animals that can’t live out of the wild.

  The Pacifican woman said, ‘Some of your people have lived offworld.’

  ‘For a short time, t’an Rachel. I need to know more than I could learn that way.’

  ‘I’d like a word,’ Molly said, with an apologetic glance, drawing me a few paces from Barris. Cold radiated from the glass of the terrace now, glass that darkened and distorted our reflections.

  In Sino-Anglic I said, ‘This is a Restricted world; how can you open access to the data-bank network?’

  ‘Is that all we can offer?’

  ‘It’s all he’s interested in.’

  She frowned. ‘It’s a Restricted world, it’s not a Closed world.’

  And now we’re on dubious territory. As simple as the stone that triggers an avalanche: if Rakviri is successful then other telestres –

  ‘Don’t do it. Irrespective of the law, or Company policy; don’t let Barris Rakviri loose on unrestricted datanetworks. I don’t say one person can make a great difference to anything here, but all the same …’ And I wonder: when the customs of Orventa demand that reinvented technology be destroyed – does Barris Rakviri regret it?

  ‘We have to take some risks.’ Molly raised her voice, drawing Barris into the conversation. ‘T’an Barris, this is going to take some negotiation with my Company, but in principle it doesn’t seem an impossible request.’

  Principles? I wondered. Maybe this is my first opportunity. If I leak the news to home office in advance, and maybe to the government, through Douggie, they’ll protest – I hope. How else do I put a hold on culture shock, except by delay?