The Tatja Grimm's World

by Vinge, Vernor

  The signalman stepped back into the room. “Captain,” said Jolle, “the enemy has broken our art’ry direction code. The following FAO positions—” he rattled off some map coordinates “—are enemy men pretending to be ours.” He paused and watched the messages flickering up from below. “They are directing shells toward our own men. Have those positions shelled.”

  “Yes sir.” The signalman started for the curtain. “We’ll throw an acknowledge test at them just to make sure.”

  “You’ll destroy them immediately, mister.”

  “But sir, if they have the main code, how can you tell who the impostors are? And you’re just estimating their position. You at least need a—”

  Jolle’s voice seemed quiet next to the art’ry fire below, but it cut through all the random noises with a cool deadliness. “Captain, I gave you an order. Obey it, or join the enemy.”

  For a moment the captain struggled to find his voice. “Y-yessir. They’ll be destroyed immediately.” He disappeared.

  “That was a clever move,” continued Jolle, “though I’m sure Profirio knew it would be obvious to me. But then, what he really wants is confusion, so he can escape from his own forces—which are sure to lose—and insinuate himself into the Doomsday group.” Why did the alien trouble to explain these intrigues to mere playing pieces? Did he really think such apparent frankness would convince them of his sincerity?

  More enemy forces had cleared the drop-off; now shells were landing on the terraces in sight of the bunker. They lit the battlefield with stop-action flashes. Red, orange, even blue glimmered in the bursting shells—and there seemed to be a fiery structure inside the explosion. The shrap’ bombs were less impressive, but from the screams and turmoil, Svir guessed they were doing more damage. A third flare arched across the valley. Several thousand more enemy soldiers had passed the road. They were close! Somehow they had made it to the lip of the drop-off. But this was no unstoppable horde: these men were in the open now. They ran across the terrace, their only cover an occasional tree. Fire fell, burning the fields, torching the trees. The gunmen didn’t need any directions to bring their fire directly in on the enemy troops, though many guns were too near to be effective.

  And only two men knew what the soldiers were dying for—knew whether they were dying to save the world or to destroy it.

  The army that was now a mob swept past them, and the art’ry fire followed. The shell bursts still cast light across the fields, but they were not directly visible. The noise was muted, coming through the dirt behind them. There was a strange sound he hadn’t noticed before. It was a snapping, popping, like the clatter of a broken printer. The sound came from the left side of the front. He leaned forward, and saw a white flashing. It was something like a signaler, but faster and without the dots, dashes, and intermeds of a signaling pattern. Jolle saw the white flickering too. “He’s bringing on his secret weapon, but it won’t help him.”

  “Yes, but what is it?” To Svir, the flashing light seemed innocuous.

  “It’s, uh, a handheld gun. Pröfe looted the warehouses in Kotta-svo-Picchiu. He got something like a thousand ounces of iron there. Apparently he used some of it to make a repeating gun that’s small enough to be carried. I don’t think he’s actually built a nonmetallic repeater—I tried that, couldn’t do it. He has at least five men down there—” He stopped as art’ry shells blossomed over the twinkling lights, outshining them. When the orange faded, the white sparkling was gone too.

  The battle sounds were sporadic now. Guns still fired and men still fought, but it was the tempo of grease sputtering in a pan rather than fire running before a strong wind.

  “See that?” Jolle pointed to one of the signal lights. “We’ve destroyed the enemy’s main force. The engagement lasted only thirty minutes, and we’ve achieved complete victory. We’ll capture most of the survivors. Things moved so fast, we may have actually caught Pröfe, too.” He turned to the signalman, who had just returned. “Captain, go back to the map room and ask Stark to assemble the staff.”

  Svir looked at Jolle. The shelling had set fire to a nearby tree, and the alien’s face was visible in the light. He seemed to be smiling. What if the engagement had destroyed Profirio? Then the whole matter was decided, no matter who was the monster.

  “I’ll be leaving you in a few minutes,” said Jolle. “I want to inspect the prisoners. Marget handled that during the battle, but she would have big trouble if Pröfe were captured.

  “Before I go, let me tell you what I want from you. Later this morning, the command group is going to O’rmouth. The Doomsday people think this is all some sort of victory celebration, and we won’t say otherwise till we’re in conference with the Archobservers. I don’t think I’ve convinced you that Pröfe is the monster … but I need you. If you have any questions or tests to put to me, think them over tonight and maybe I can give you some proof before we go up there. When we’re actually in conference, I want—”

  “Sir?” It was Imar Stark at the curtain. Jolle walked across the room to talk to the general.

  Svir stifled a curse, and Cor squeezed his hand. Patience. He looked outside, at the burning tree. Its twisted limbs gave it a horrible, manlike appearance. It was a terrible symbol of all this night’s suffering. Cor must have thought the same. Ancho stirred nervously on her shoulder, and she pulled at Svir’s hand, urging him away from the window slit.

  Then the tree spoke. It was a human voice: ponderous, deep, and menacing. The words weren’t Spräk or Sfierro. To his Island mind they sounded something like, “Ter äshe gaul, Jolle.” And he never forgot those words, for simultaneously two other things happened which bent his life out of time.

  Jolle’s hand jerked Svir back from the slit window. “Prö—”

  The world ripped open and the light of hell itself shone through. With that bloody light came a painfully loud explosion just inches from his face. Then the rent was mended. He was lying on the ground, and everything was dark except for the painful afterimages floating in his eyes. He felt Cor beside him. Jolle was pulling him to a sitting position. He allowed himself to be raised, then reached for his wife. “C’mon Cor, get up.” No answer. Then he was back on the ground, feeling for wounds … trying to wake her … burning fur … Ancho … .

  That stroke of artificial lightning had come through the slit near his left side—where Cor had been standing. And the explosion had been … . He still couldn’t see anything, but he could hear someone screaming her name over and over. Strong hands pulled him up and someone was slapping his face. The tiny room was filled with people. Or rather he had been moved into the map room. The streak afterimage of Pröfe’s weapon still hung before his eyes, but now there was another, fainter light. He was lying on his back, and the room’s lamp was shining above him like a broad blue cloud. It seemed so much fainter than before. Everything was dark and blurred.

  He rolled over in the dirt. People stood or knelt by something on the ground. Others ran back and forth, but they were irrelevant. The kneeling one was a medic, he could see now. And beside him on the ground—his sight was very blurred, and the impression was vague, but—The explosion at the end of the red thunderbolt had been—Cor’s face.

  The tired medic muttered, “It was quick at least.” The platitude sent Svir into a flat dive hat ended at the medic’s throat. He was on top of him, then under, and the noise around him seemed bright with surprise and anger. Then everything became dark again.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The colonization of the West Coast had begun a thousand years before. Llerenito farm settlements were scattered from the twentieth to the fortieth parallel—the seeds whence grew Sfierro and Picchiu. About the same time, people of the Chainpearls founded a major colony at Bayfast. Much later, Chainpearl fishermen began living on the rocky coast north of the fortieth.

  In the beginning, these northerners had the same language, the same heritage as the Bayfastlings. The names they laid on their grim land were meaningful to Bayfast ears
: Doomsday, Heaven-gate, Overmouth. But the years passed; hardship and distance brought a parting. After five hundred years, though they still spoke a language understandable to Bayfastlings, their view of the world was utterly alien. These “Doomsdaymen” raised their own religion—which would probably have become Seraph worship if only the Doomsday Range had lain beneath the sky that held Seraph. Instead, the cult’s central belief was that the sky of night is the physical manifestation of the most powerful spirit, and that by studying its countenance, all problems can be solved. In the hills near Kotta-svo-Picchiu there were ruins of the astrological temples of the cult’s early Observers.

  The Doomsday religion would have remained a crackpot cult dominating some minor fishing villages, except for two things. The first was the invention of the telescope, a divine endorsement of the cult’s technique. The second was the discovery of copper and iron in the Doomsday Mountains. In one century the fishermen became miners, and very rich ones. Their coastal villages disappeared, except for Kotta-svo-Picchiu, which ballooned into a large port. Scores of mining towns grew in the highlands, and some became cities. The Archobservers found themselves the absolute rulers of one of the wealthiest and most inaccessible countries in the world. Now they had the resources to watch the face of God as befitted that sacred undertaking. As the search for iron carried the ex-fishermen higher into the mountains, the priests noticed that the nights were clearer, the stars brighter.

  Thus was born the notion of a cathedral at the top of the world. They would find the highest point in the Doomsday Mountains and construct there the largest telescope possible. The priests guessed the job would take a century and empty their treasure houses; if they had known the truth, even they might have quailed.

  It took them fifty years to reach a point ten thousand feet below the peak they judged the highest in the world, and fifty more to build a town there. Overmouth, that “resting spot” was called, since it stood above the largest glacier in the range. In the years that followed, the priests nearly gave up the idea of proceeding higher. Perhaps the heights above were meant for angels, and mere humans should construct their observatory at O’rmouth. Even there, the unacclimated lived less than ten quarters, and most children died in their cradles.

  It was only in the last forty years that this terrible thinness of air had been conquered and a means of reaching the top of the world discovered. By then O’rmouth had a population of thirty thousand and rich ore fields had been found in the area, so the city was both the religious and economic center of the region. The drive to the top of the world could be undertaken. It cost thirty more years, and five thousand lives, to set the sixty-inch Eye in its shrine.

  “So? We are grateful. We are so grateful that we will not ask Your Most Sacred Majesty to pay for the damage her armies did to the Riverside Road, to Kotta-svo-Picchiu, to the Kotta Eye, and to our farmlands below O’rmouth.” Mikach the Perceptive, First Archobserver, spoke with unconcealed sarcasm, but with all the dignity of his station. He wore a powder-blue robe, indicating he spoke as a temporal power. A necklace of copper and rubies was draped across his chest. The hair on his face and head was braided into two thick tails, one going down his back, the other down his front. Beside him at the iron-topped table sat other Ar chobservers. Behind them stood unbearded Observers.

  “Yes, and for our part, we are grateful for your help in defeating the Insurrectionists.” Tatja spoke quickly but without apparent effort. While the priests had their rubies and copper, her dress was constructed of thousands of tiny gems, each glittering with its own color. Over this were strewn larger gems and curved plates of the principal metals. Spider silk floated about the ensemble. Her shining red hair flowed smoothly from beneath a silver circlet. There must be no doubt who had the greatest wealth here.

  Beside her sat the highest advisors to the crown. First on the right was Jolle, still in the uniform of a Provincial militia. Behind them sat military commanders and cabinet officers. No lowlander was standing—at these altitudes, it took some effort just to walk. Except for the Doomsdaymen, the only people who seemed at ease were Jolle and Tatja. All the others struggled with the dizziness and nausea. Just minutes before, Imar Stark had been carried from the room with bloody vomit on his lips.

  Tatja continued, “But we do believe that your debt to us is greater than ours to you. We have only a small request of you. You grant me—at least claim to grant to me—the ultimate temporal sovereignty over your lands. I wish to visit the High Eye, and to perform there a simple experiment.”

  Mikach the Perceptive stiffened, and there was angry muttering among his peers. When the Doomsdayman spoke, it was with deep and frank indignation. “Marget, you know us well, well enough to know your request is entirely beyond the limits of hospitality. Only the trained and faithful may approach that sacred instrument. You are at O’rmouth because of your—titular—sovereignty. If you insist, we will permit you to use the ten-inch instrument here—and you must know what a concession this is. But if you continue to blaspheme, you will be cast down from our heights—by my temporal power.”

  As he spoke, Tatja glanced at Jolle, who shook his head slightly. The others in her party came full alert at this threat, reaching for the crossbows and daggers they did not have.

  Only the astronomer royal seemed unaffected by the threat. In fact, he was not listening. His gaze moved idly around the low room. To the right, tall windows showed O’rmouth and the glacier. He looked without interest across the narrow streets. The entire city was crammed into two hundred acres to take advantage of the avalanche shade. Nowhere in that low mass of carved stone and dirty snow was there a bit of green. Every building, even the lowliest residential cooperative, was built of stone. The granite walls were decorated with gargoyles, and the corners of larger buildings were studded with dovetailed stone cylinders. In some ways the Doomsdaymen had no imagination: The false-log effect was taken as a sign of ancient nobility. Even now, the roofs were under several feet of snow. During winter, the snow covered everything, arching between the buildings, turning the city’s streets into tunnels.

  But today, children ran and played in the sun, unaware that such exertions were impossible for any but them. The Doomsdaymen believed in large families. Mortality was high and there was a chronic manpower shortage. One day soon those children would find that arduous labor was the fate of all but a few Doomsdaymen, and they would wear the dull brown uniforms of adult commoners.

  Cor. For an instant, the screaming pain drove through his armor. Cor with the smooth black hair. Cor with the brown eyes, the creamy skin. Cor with the strength to support him through all problems, the mind of bright ideas. Cor with the face that—his mind veered from the horror.

  It was still impossible to believe that she had gone away and would never come back. Life was like a tree limb growing smoothly in an anticipated direction. Last night the branch was snapped across. Reddish sap oozed out, but the end was dead. Life took a new unrecognized turn, leaving the branch bruised and torn. It would be a time before the new reality seemed inescapable. Until then, he could retreat into the world that was not, and forget what things had become.

  And so Jolle’s quiet plea of that morning had gone uncomprehended. The words were from a nightmare, perhaps-not world, and he could ignore them. But time passed, and the screaming broke through more often. Eventually he would be pushed into the new reality. Then apathy would become hate. He would destroy the creature who had killed the only girl foolish enough to love Svir Hedrigs. Profirio had tricked many people, but he had here an enemy whose hate could turn back any persuasion. This last thought brought him close to the new reality: His friends, after all, were making plans that would result in the destruction of Profirio.

  Tatja, using her most imperial manner, was still working on Mikach. “Very well, Archobserver, if we may not visit the Eye in person, I would like you to conduct an experiment there at our direction.”

  The Perceptive One didn’t answer at once. Perhaps this appr
oach might work. “What is the experiment?”

  “A limited sky search.”

  “How limited?”

  “Between one and twenty hours of observation time.” In fact, it could take up to three hundred hours if Jolle’s intuition were in error by even a small amount.

  “And what do you expect to find?”

  In this case the truth was the perfect answer. Tatja smiled. as she said, “My astronomer believes that the Tu-Seraph system has an external satellite.”

  “Ridiculous. You’ve seen our reports. Don’t you read them? There is no satellite more than ten yards across nearer than one million miles. I certainly won’t allow such redundant use of the High Eye. We have done some experiments for you in the past, but in this request, you go too far.”

  The Queen sat straight in her portable throne, touched her crown, and spoke flatly to Mikach. This was the last verbal weapon she had. “Subject, I demand your cooperation. Am I not sovereign?”

  The other’s voice was just as grim. There was no hint of sarcasm, but the tone was unyielding and deadly. “You are sovereign as long as you remain in Bayfast and mind your own affairs. But here you are out of your element. Your forces outnumber ours, but each of us is worth five of you in combat, as you discovered last night. If you give up your demands, we will allow you to depart in peace, friendship, and lealty; we realize that you have the power to control Kotta-svo-Picchiu and the Riverside Road, and to choke our commerce. But if you persist in this imperialist heresy, we will destroy you.” He half-rose from his seat, then sat down abruptly. Standing in an enemy’s presence was bad luck, and Mikach was an Orthodox cultist. Now, the Reformist Observers were more interested in scientific research than past wisdom. They might have been more susceptible to Marget’s request; unfortunately, the Reformists were out of power in this decade.