My eyes travelled. My mind wandered. High up though I was in my throne of imprisonment, there was a mechanism that seemed capable of raising it higher still. It ascended beyond the dome of the main hall, and long left me puzzled until one evening when I had returned to my cell. Winter was waning, and the Sun lingered over the rim of the mountains long enough for me to be able to gaze across the snowbound city of Dhiol. I saw that on the outside of the main dome of the halls of my trial had been constructed some ultimate spire that rose high above every other spire and tower in the entire city, and that on top of that spire was a platform, and on that platform glinted an extraordinary machine. I'd seen such devices used to punish hobs, but this was far more extravagant. Poised and exquisite as some huge golden insect, the machine of my planned excruciation flashed its many pincers and blades in the last of the evening Sun.
* * * *
Spring attempted to arrive in Dhiol. Some of the snow and ice melted, and much did not. The priests who traversed with me to and from my cell now chatted freely amongst themselves, and I learned of the frozen bodies of deceased representatives that had been stored in the catacombs. I even heard it said that the great glaciers of the Roof of the World were expanding so mightily that the great tombs and their wrecked contents would soon be pushed into the streets of Dhiol.
Although I'd learned the language of the priests through the scrolls Kinbel had brought me, I'd long reached the point where all the prayer and debate of my trial passed me by. So it came as a surprise when it was suddenly announced that the vote on my verdict would commence the following day, and that I would be given a chance to speak beforehand. My heart gave a small kick. That night, I barely slept.
* * * *
The priests came with the dawn. I was led through the morning mud to my usual spot high above the vast hall. But today, I was released from my shackles to stand within the cage of my throne, and the crowd I looked down on seemed almost as big and expectant as it had been at the start of my trial. I thanked the Gods for this extraordinary chance.
I'm not sure how clearly I explained things, and there were times when many of my audience seemed lost or confused. After all, they'd come today expecting either a denial or a confession. What they received instead was a different way of understanding the world.
Living creatures, I began, amid gasps that subsided into incredulous silence, are not the work of the Gods. They come about through natural laws. Everything that lives, lives to survive long enough to reproduce, and those that thrive will have more offspring than those that do not. And each living thing is different. Each plant is as different in its own small way as one human is from another; it's just that, as we are not plants, we are not so good at telling them apart. (At that moment, there was laughter, and I knew that my audience was not yet lost.) But these small differences can be crucial—a fleeter foot, a broader wing, a stronger scent from a blossom—and they can combine and multiply over many generations to form a creature which is no longer the same as its ancestors. As different, indeed, as one type of flower is from another, or all the varied species of fish or bat. (There were murmuring nods at this suggestion; I think I had already taken people further than they realized).
This process of change and development, I told them, is slow but extraordinarily powerful. It explains not only the different plumages of different birds, but why there are birds at all. (A few of the murmurs here sounded hostile, but they were shushed by others who remained interested to hear what else I had to say.) For the earth is almost as old as the Gods themselves (I hadn't intended to put that sop in, but it seemed to help) and it has been changed through frost and fire and inundation and flood. If living things were not able to adapt, nothing would have survived at all.
I paused for a moment there. I felt light-headed and breathless. I'd said much of what I'd wanted to say, yet people were still nodding, and looking up at me as if half-persuaded by what I'd said. Even many of the priests seemed content. Perhaps they'd feared I'd accuse them of all the venery and corruption of which they were most probably guilty, but instead I'd produced this odd lecture. But I could see as I took my breath that some representatives had already lost track of the concept I'd set before them, while others, perhaps the quicker ones, were growing puzzled or restless. A few were even starting to look angry. The noise below me increased. But the designers of these halls had paid great attention to how well an individual voice might carry, and my position in my caged throne was unassailable. Even as people began to scream and block their ears, my words still carried.
It follows, I explained, that all living things must stem from one primitive organism, and life in all its specialization and variety has developed in simple response to the demands of competition and survival through the mechanism of selection and random change. Thus the pig and the boar are related (I glanced over at Kinbel; I even think that she nodded, for I was using her words) and the tree is cousin to the bush. The evidence is written everywhere in the way in which different animals share similar but differently used organs. You can see it in the bones of a leg, the arrangements of a flower....
I think I could have stopped there. In many ways, there was little more to be said. The few in my audience who were able to grasp my theory had already grasped it. As for the rest—they had come to these halls for spectacle and superstition, and still cared for nothing else. So perhaps it was a kind of malice that made me then go on, or it might even have been Kinbel herself. As I looked across at her once more through all the light and fume, I remembered how quickly and elegantly she had grasped my meaning, and seen that it applied not only to trees and fishes and birds.
We humans, I told the gathering, are as much a product of chance and survival as any other species on this earth. Indeed (and now I did have to shout, for the gasps were growing to a roar) the evidence of our origins abounds in the natural world. Look at the monkeys and the great apes of the jungle. Look, above all, at our closest of relatives—the hob. So closely are we related, in fact, that we can mate and interbreed, just as the horse can with the donkey, and the lion with the tiger, and (and here the uproar grew even wilder) different breeds of dog. Look at the color of your own skin, and the features of your face, and then at the flesh of your retinue....
For some time, I had been aware of activity below me. Now, the last of my proclamation was muffled by an ungainly scuffle as my guardian priests scurried up the final steps and then heavy bodies fell across my own.
* * * *
It was almost nightfall by the time I was returned to my cell. The Sun glittered on the arms and spindles of the terrible machine on Dhiol's topmost spire, then sank. I, too, slumped down in the gloom. All sense of elation was gone. Then I heard a sound just outside my window; a sound that was at once so strange and yet familiar that I felt an odd displacement of time. I was back in the days before my trial; free to explore my thoughts and the evidence of the scrolls Kinbel brought me—without, it now seemed, a care in the world. But the sound was unmistakable. A few swallows had made their habitual journey to this unwelcoming northern clime. I smiled, although I knew that their chances of raising another batch of chicks in this savage land were probably as doomed as my life was.
I was still sitting and wondering what I had accomplished when the lizard hobs began to come and go about their nightly tasks. This would be their last night. It was hard to imagine that the process of my excruciation would be delayed. As always, I ignored the hobs as they shifted and stirred. Then one of their number came closer that I was accustomed, and removed the hood that had covered its head, and straightened up. I was telling myself that I had never seen a hob so tall, or so fine-looking, or with skin so dark, before I realized who it was.
“They told me I couldn't see you,” Kinbel said.
I was so happily astonished that I almost laughed, but her face remained stern.
“You know what will happen tomorrow?” she asked.
“Some kind of judgment will be announced. And then I s
uppose I will be slowly killed on that machine....” All sense of happiness and surprise drained from me. “I just hope it isn't as awful as I imagine.”
“There's something else first. Why else do you think they've made me sit in those halls for all these interminable Moons? You've seen the way the delegates stare at me, and how my fellow priests chant and respond. I'm your wife, and they still want to hear about all the terrible things you did to me ... Things...” She made a gesture. “Even worse than they can imagine, although I can't believe that that amounts to very much.”
“If you're called to denounce me and make up stories, Kinbel, then you should do so.”
“Even if that means I have to lie?”
“Things are so bad for me now, there's little you can do to make them worse.”
“But it wouldn't be true. And I'm standing witness before our—or at least my—Gods.”
“You don't still accept all that nonsense?”
“If you mean that the Sun will stop in his movement across the skies if the ziggurats of Thris do not run red each day with fresh hob blood—no, I do not. I think the Gods are far less eager for hob slaughter than most of the priestly spheres imagine. I'm tired of its stench. Even as a child, I used to hate the way my father would come home each evening with his vestments stained—like, I would say, a butcher's apron, although no self-respecting human butcher ever gets that close to the work his hobs do for him. I'm sick of slaughter. But, yes, I do still believe that there is more to this world than what we experience with our senses. That life's not just the product of struggle and vicious chance—”
“That's never what I meant.”
“Perhaps it isn't. But this is hardly the time to debate niceties. I've watched over you these long Moons. I've listened to you. I sometimes think I could almost say I've known you, and that I've seen you for what you are, which is a good man. I'm a priestess and I know what that machine out there will do to you, and I don't believe you've done anything to deserve such agonies, nor that it's what the Gods would want of us—if, that is, the Gods want anything at all. Perhaps this world is being ruined by a coming age of ice, and perhaps we all are being punished, but if there has to be a sacrifice, let it not be you. Let it be someone else. Now...”
Kinbel unbundled something from around her waist. It was a grey livery much like the hobs were wearing, and her own.
“...put this on.”
“How did you manage all of this? How did you persuade—”
She gave a laugh; the sound was half-happy, half-sad. “Even now, you have nothing but questions! You can't accept anything without trying to have it explained.... I think, may the Gods help me, that's what I most hate and admire about you, you wilful, stupid man. But, since you ask, do you seriously imagine that you're the only human who has ever taken an interest in the welfare of hobs? And, in all your schemes and thoughts, did it never occur to you to find a way of communicating with these creatures who have cared for you for so long and so kindly in this cell?”
Kinbel was surrounded by them now. The mute grey creatures shifted about her in the dim light like shadows thrown from the edges of her robe. Their movement reminded me of the priestesses who had surrounded Kinbel during my trial, but the sense of true reverence and worship was much more strong.
“If you'd only taken the time,” she said, “to learn to communicate with your hobs about something other than ditches and crops, you might have learned far more. Every living creature has its own story, and my friends here have been through such times and sufferings as you would not believe, even were you to ascend into that terrible machine tomorrow. All you ever had to do was to reach out with an open heart...”
I watched as her fine dark fingers traced shapes in the pale flowers of the hobs’ open palms, and then how the fingers of the hobs dipped into hers. It was a dance of touch and shade, a mingling of different lives, and the strange thought came upon me that perhaps Kinbel was right—perhaps there was more to this world than could ever be proved by clever minds like my own. Then, at some signal from her that I did not see or understand, the hobs drew back.
“We all must go,” she muttered.
“What about the watchers? What about the human guards?”
“You forget how used they are to having everything done for them. The people who guard this tower are as lazy as...” She paused. The phrase was as lazy as a hob. “As lazy as humans. Quick.” Her hand moved to her neck. A key dangled on a piece of string. “We have to leave.”
* * * *
Through corridors and beneath arches. The hobs led. Kinbel and I followed. I stooped and scurried. I was a hob myself, a shadow, but weaker, and clumsier, and lost. It was night, and pitch dark, yet I sensed that we passed through places with which I had once been familiar, back in the days of my youth—those far corners of my lost homestead, where every new turn and experience had been a lesson and a surprise. Great subterranean halls filled with the lost lumber of other ages and styles. Vast, vaulted kitchens echoing to footsteps amid the dangling metal of thousands of hooked pans. White ghosts of laundry rooms. Reeking lakes of wine and beer. Potting sheds, even, filled with the extra dark of waiting earth. We seemed to pass through all of these places, but now they were chill and empty and distant as they waited for a summer that would never come.
The journey seemed even more endless than the darkness. I was bruised and tired and exhausted, but part of me was elated. It was as if the prayers that I'd never offered had been answered in the shape of these quiet and subtle creatures, and of Kinbel. We were, I reasoned, moving through these halls and passages not only beyond the chapels of the priesthood that had imprisoned me, but the entire city of Dhiol. Sometimes, I thought I caught voices, or glimmers of light shed along the cold, wet passageways. I was certain that I smelled human effluent, and worse. But we pushed on without pause. After all, what human would ever think to notice the passage of a few anemic hobs?
Then we reached a final opening in which the darkness changed texture, and the breath of a cold night came rushing to touch my face. The archway was set in a hillside beyond the confines of the city, and my exploring hands as I levered myself out to stand on the cold earth told me that, like almost everything that is hob-made in our world, it was cleverly and finely wrought.
The hobs gathered around me, touching hands with Kinbel, yet avoiding my own. Some kind of message seemed to be passed between them as we stood beneath a thin Moon and a few cloud-chased stars. I sensed a change in their posture. They even seemed to glance toward me with their ravaged eye sockets for a moment before they turned back toward Kinbel.
“From here,” she said, “you and they have a chance of being free.”
My teeth were starting to chatter. Iron air was pressing down from the dark shoulders of the Roof of the World. It took me a moment to understand.
“What do you mean? ‘You and they'?”
“I have to go back to Dhiol. Look, the Sun will soon be rising. If I beat on those gates down there for long enough, I'm sure I'll manage to wake someone, be it human or hob.”
“Kinbel, you can't!” My head was rushing. I felt as the priests claim to feel when they feel the spirit of the Moon within them, or the turn of the stars.
“If I go back, I'll be able to answer for myself in those halls. I'll have my chance to speak what I see as the truth just as you did yesterday. I'm a priestess. I still owe that much to the Gods.”
“Don't you realize what they'll—”
She stopped me by taking my hand. “You realized, and yet you did what seemed right. You've got to give me that same chance.”
“I just said what I thought. I could even be wrong. Especially what I said about humans and hobs—our mixed offspring and characteristics, the idea that we interbreed. That's just supposition. I have no proper evidence. What it needs is more study. What I have to do is—”
Kinbel stopped me by leaning forward and pressing her fingers to my lips. “There. Human touch. That's the only way I
've ever found of shutting you up. But look, the Sun is rising. I have to go.”
“You can't...”
“You've said that already. I must.”
She stepped back, and briefly touched the ravaged faces of each of the hobs, which shone with edges of fire in the first flush of the rising Sun. Dhiol stretched below us, ashy shadow in a valley lit as yet only by the glittering ember of its highest tower. She turned and walked down the slope toward the city walls. And as I watched her go and did nothing to stop her, I knew that everything that had been said about me in the long days of my trial was true.
I'm a monster.
An aberration.
I'm less than human, and far less than hob.
* * * *
Of all the things that I've described to you, reader, it seems strangest of all to have written of the old seasons: of hot summers, migrating birds, budding flowers, and misty autumns. Not that the weather doesn't change up here in these mountains, but we treasure the cold hard darkness of winter, and see spring as the harshest of times, fraught with avalanches, rockslides, and dangerous torrents of meltwater, instead of as the most blessed. I say Blessed—as if blessings really existed! But, more and more, I find myself thinking in these ridiculous priestly terms. I smile up at the cold white Sun, ask questions of the wind or the Moon.
My mind must be weakening, or I'm getting old. Otherwise, why am I wasting my precious supply of papyrus and ink on writing this tale? I would once have filled these same scrolls with notes, descriptions, questions, calculations, theories. But the truth is that the part of my mind that once worked in that way—as hard as a well-whipped hob, as the saying used to go—feels worn out. And time is no longer precious to me. I have plenty of it. My colleagues or captors have little use for me. I sometimes feel that I have little use for myself. But it's pleasant to recall those old times—or many of them. And I enjoy the process of writing, even if, in doing so, I feel that very little has been explained, even to myself.
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 20
