by Exurb1a
He read his little book of Katarsinian history. There was a whole chapter on Kala. It was the kind of notion that books refuse to define. Then again most notions worth discovering are like this, Ushko decided.
One passage in particular caught his eye: All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. One is inseparable from the other. No system of knowledge can avoid this limitation. Numbers are not the true face of measure. Words are not the true description of things. The world is the explanation.
Back home he dumped his things on his bed and made back towards the pit. Evening was coming on now and the air was soft and smelled of soil.
The dark-haired girl was sat on the lip of the pit. “You're making good progress,” she said without turning around.
“No I'm not.”
“No you're not.”
“Don't you have a job to go to or something?” he said.
“No.”
Ushko jumped into the pit and took up his shovel and began to dig. A few moments later he heard a noise behind him and turned to see the girl had picked a shovel up too and was digging at the other end of the pit. He said nothing and let her work and thought of his father. God, if only he could talk to the old man—what a story this would all make.
A message from Ushko's mother had come a few days ago. She wished him well, said how wonderful it was that he had made it to the planet finally, and assured him that the whole family was proud. There was a passing line near the end about riots on Yeshua. That shook Ushko up a little. There wasn't crime on Yeshua, let alone riots.
“Come and look at this,” the girl said sombrely. Ushko joined her. She was bent down in the dirt, probing it with her fingers.
“What?”
“Look, here.” It was a mound and inside the mound were black insects, popping out of the mound then crawling back in. Some were skirting the surrounding dirt, bringing back sticks and pebbles. “They're called mitwicks. Do you like them?”
“I thought you'd found something,” Ushko muttered.
“I have. Look at them. Do you know what they do?”
“No.”
“They live for about four hundred days. They choose a queen. She doesn't have babies, but she can give orders. She orders them all about to pick things up and bring them back. They build a mound together and inside they fill it with the best sticks and pebbles they can find. And when it's perfect, when they've built the perfect home and everything's just right, do you know what they do?”
“No.”
“They die.”
“What?”
“All of them, they just die.”
Ushko peered at the mound. “Why?”
“I don't know. What should they do instead?”
Invent the wheel, Ushko thought. Do mathematics. Write novels. Conquer space.
“Isn't man a bit that way?” the girl said.
“I think man is a bit smarter than that…” Ushko scoffed.
“Smarter, yes. But the process seems very similar.”
He went to rebuke her but found he couldn't think of a decent argument.
“I'm called Perda,” she said. “It means wiseness in Katarsinian.”
“Your Galactic Standard is very good, Perda.”
“I studied it privately. I wanted to leave Katarsina.”
“Why didn't you?”
She shrugged. “We all go down roads we don't intend. Those are the best journeys. Besides, I like it here.”
I wish I could say the same, Ushko thought. Instead he said, “Would you like to eat together tonight, Perda the Wise?”
“All right.”
He found the last of the tortillas in his travel satchel and roasted packet chicken over the little electric stove. Then he added sauce he'd brought from Orb Ek and served it all up and the two of them ate in silence. When he was done eating Ushko said, “Do you live with your parents?”
“No, but they live nearby. Over there.” She pointed to Matthew and Marla's house.
“Those are your parents?” he said.
“Yes. Are you surprised?”
“They didn't mention you. You didn't mention them.”
She thought about this and frowned. “You didn't mention yours either.”
“Well…that's different.”
She let the thought go and continued eating in little bites like some graceful chinchilla. “Where were you today?” she said.
“I went to Amalga Town, to talk with the Archaeological Society.”
“Did it go well?”
“No. They were useless. They wouldn't even give me people to come down and help with the digging.”
“That's a shame,” she said.
Night came on properly and killed the last of the light. Ushko picked out the Swan Cluster and for the first time since his arrival on Katarsina he felt dreadfully alone. Mother was dying on Yeshua and when she was gone there would be no one in the galaxy he could talk to, not properly. What achievements could mask a thing like that?
He glanced at the pit, shallow and uneven and fruitless.
He turned back to Perda. She was staring up at the sky, chewing. Ushko noticed something shimmer from inside her pocket.
“What's that?” he said.
“What?”
“You've got something in your pocket. It's blue.”
“It's nothing, a stone,” she said.
“That's not a stone. You've got something. Tell me what it is.”
“It's nothing,” she said and put the tortilla down.
“God damn it, show me,” he said and approached her. She buttoned her coat and made a protesting noise, but he grabbed the tip of the thing and pulled it from her and held it up.
“God damn, it's proto,” he yelled. “Why were you hiding this?”
“It's nothing,” she said. “It's just a stone.”
He shook it in front of her, shouting now. “It's not just a stone and you damn well know so. It's a piece of a structure. Why were you hiding this from me? You know why I'm here. You know why this is so important.”
She sat in silence for a long time and stared at the ground and her lips were thin.
“Where did you find this? Where was it?”
“In the pit,” she whispered.
“Where in the pit? Show me damn it.”
She pointed to the eastern edge of the pit. He jumped in and took up a shovel and began digging. Within seconds he saw more blueness shimmering from beneath the surface of the soil. He reached in, his heart in his temples, his stomach in his mouth. It was a spherical structure, cracked in places. Lifting it out gently now, ever so gently, he saw it was a skull, extraterr, no doubt about it. He set it on the soil and allowed himself to breathe. About the crown was more of the blue metal, a helmet. Digging back into the soil he could feel the tip of a spine and below that a cage of bone, perhaps to protect the heart or the internal organs.
“Perda…” he breathed but Perda was gone.
Ushko worked with a passion he hadn't felt in years. He forged into the night digging deeper and deeper into the soil, and the soil rewarded his work with skeletons, three of them, and artifacts. There were more helmets and smooth bluish tools also and he laid the skeletons and the tools out on the ground by the pit and went digging back into the soil. The skeletons bore no signs of trauma. Unless the weapon had been biological, these soldiers had not died in a war.
His mind looked down corridors he had not visited in years, tested hypotheses.
He had always considered the standard explanations for extraterr absence in the galaxy to be stupid and short-sighted. The leading theory held that some kind of invader had come from within the galaxy or another galaxy perhaps and wiped out the population with advanced weaponry. This was possible of course, but most of the extraterr civilisations were extremely advanced at the point of their extinction. At the very least they could have left their planets and escaped the inva
ders.
Other theories held that some kind of galactic plague had swept across whole worlds, laying the populations to waste. Again a fine theory, but there was an obvious hole. Why wouldn't at least one world have told the others, and ensured they could make an escape?
There was no real pattern to the ruins found on the many extraterr worlds. Sonistai had ruins intact, and the technology buried there was clearly military. The weapons had not even been activated. No war had occurred.
Mord was a graveyard and the seven-legged inhabitants had died of nothing more exotic than famine.
Martha Prime's ruins told a story of a society that had fallen into religious worship and abandoned toolmaking and industry in favour of puritanism.
There wasn't a pattern to any of it.
Now laid out on the ground was a new story, of a race more advanced than any that had come after it. And they too had gone into the night.
By morning Ushko was still working and folk from all about Inica had come to watch and they stood silently around the pit as he pulled more artifacts from the dirt. Sent a little mad with lack of sleep, Ushko announced each artifact as he produced it, the way a doctor might proclaim the gender of a baby. “A magnification instrument!” he cried. Or: “A container for water!” Or: “A shoe!”
How many millions of years had these things slept in the ground, just waiting for human hands to rescue them from time?
Around early afternoon Matthew and Marla came to the pit. “You've been busy, Ushko,” Marla called.
“Isn't it wonderful?” Ushko called back and nodded to his treasures.
“What is all that?” Matthew said.
“Some of them are instruments, I think. Some are just clothes. But all of it is proto. I'm sure.”
“Aren't you tired Ushko?”
“No.”
“Why don't you come and have lunch with us?”
“I'm not tired.”
“Perda says you've been working for ages without sleeping properly.”
Ushko ignored this and kept digging. What was just below? A ship perhaps, a preserved ship. Onboard might be data, history, an explanation.
“There's a message for you at the house,” Marla said.
“I'll take it later.”
“I think you should take it now. It's from Yeshua.”
The way she said Yeshua sent a shiver through him and he looked up. “Is it from my mother?”
“No.”
He raced back to the house, found the scroll.
Civil unrest. Governance has declared a state of emergency. Trade routes cut off. Archaeological mission terminated. Return to any of the Core Worlds immediately. Voidskipper has been dispatched to Amalga Town, estimated arrival three Standard Days.
He read the message again with shaking hands.
“What is it?” Perda said, behind him. “Is it bad?”
“I think so.”
“What is it then?”
He said the words slowly, hardly believing them himself. “The Core Worlds are collapsing.”
“What does that mean?”
“They hold the empire together, Yeshua especially.” Then quietly: “Millions of people will die.” Very quietly: “Billions.”
“You should go back,” she said. He turned around to her with red eyes and said nothing. “You should go back,” she said again.
He thought of his mother on her deathbed. Did she even have water now?
He said, “I don't think it makes any difference.”
Perda shrugged. “Your people need you.”
He went to reply but caught something over her shoulder, folk moving about by the pit. He pushed past Perda and set off running.
Katarsinians were dragging the artifacts from the pit on tarpaulins. He grabbed one of the tarpaulins and tried to pull it from a man's grip. “What are you doing?”
The man only looked at him with tired eyes and pushed him to the ground and resumed carrying the tarpaulin.
“What are you doing?” Ushko yelled and ran at another man. The man raised a club from behind him and beat Ushko around the head.
The world returned in swimming lights and Ushko sat up and nothing was painful. He was in a Katarsinian house he didn't recognise and it was night. The man from the Archaeological Society was sat across from him, packing up an instrument.
“What happened?” Ushko said.
“Violence really isn't our way. I'm sorry about all this.”
“My head doesn't hurt. How long has it been?”
“A day. We took care of the pain.” He tapped the device fondly.
“I thought technology doesn't work here?”
“Just your technology, Ushko.” He left that in the air and put the device back in his pocket.
His faculties returning properly, Ushko said, “Why are you in Inica?”
“Because I am responsible for the fiasco you caused, in a sense. I should have kept closer watch. You got very lucky digging where you did.”
“For the love of God tell me what's going on.”
The man squinted. “That is such a very large question I don't know where to start. Please just know that we're sorry about the violence, but you were getting out of hand.”
“Why don't you want me digging on Katarsina?”
“Because you're very close to a thing you won't understand when you find it.”
Ushko stood and went to start shouting but the man said, “Please sit down or I'll ask the fellow with the weapon to come in here.” Ushko sat. “I admire your determination. You have so very much of it. You're like a child edging ever closer and closer to a bomb. You haven't a clue what havoc you're about to wreak, Ushko.”
“My mother…” Ushko murmured.
“You'll need to let her go, along with whichever world she was on. It's started already, I'm afraid.”
“What is this all about?”
The man sighed and looked up through the house skylight to the stars. “You were supposed to be a deterrent. We had to let you come after your little threat about the Marquis, lest we draw more attention to ourselves. You'd come here, do a little digging, find nothing, then go on your way. Fate was in your favour, however.”
“Please, just tell me what this is all about.”
“Goodbye Ushko. I'm sorry it all turned out like this. We won't meet again. I promise everyone will do their best to make you comfortable.”
“Wait, please wait.” But the man exited and Ushko sat alone for a long time in the candlelight. After a while Matthew and Marla entered. “Can we get you anything?”
“Water.”
Marla brought water and Ushko drank. Then he said, “What's going on?”
“Are you hungry?”
“No. Didn't you hear me? Does someone want me dead?”
They exchanged a sad glance. “No one wants you dead.”
“Then what's going on? What will happen to me?”
“We're not sure yet,” Matthew said wistfully. “We'll keep you here for a little while, then maybe move you on to some other place.”
“What will happen to the artifacts and the skeletons?”
“They'll go back in the ground where they belong,” Marla said.
“I don't understand…”
“There's a man just outside the house. He'll stay here all night. If you need something you can shout to him. He knows you'll have to urinate at some point and possibly void your bowels. Don't be uncomfortable.”
Ushko grabbed Matthew's arm. “Matthew, please. Tell me what's going on here. I don't understand.”
Matthew gently removed his grip and the two of them smiled to Ushko politely and left the house.
He noticed the books from his satchel on the bookshelf. His shaving kit and toilet bag were here also. He searched the little circular house and found nothing much of interest. He peeked out of the canvas flap and the man with the club was staring right back at him and he closed the flap again. At some point he finally slept and he woke the next morning to b
irdsong, though he'd never heard that kind before. He peeked out of the flap again and there was the man with the club, still standing, apparently just as alert as the night before.
“I need to piss,” Ushko said.
“Out you come then.” The man led him to a tree.
“I'd like to do it in private.”
“No.”
Ushko pissed and looked about. There was no one nearby. The town was dead. “Where is everyone?” he said. The man with the club said nothing and led him back to the house and sealed the canvas flap. Ushko sat alone again and thought of his mother. When that got unbearable he took up his book of Katarsinian history and turned once more to the Kala section.
In even asking a question one affects the world. The safest course is to ask no questions that must not be asked and change nothing that does not have to be changed. The true lifeforce is inaction. The true deathforce is the will to conquer. The world is the explanation.
Afternoon. Then evening.
There was a muffled shout from outside and the canvas flap opened and Perda peeked in.
“Are you ready to go?” she said.
“Go where?”
“Yes. That's a good question.”
She vanished again and Ushko stepped out and there was the man with the club lying unconscious. At Perda's side floated one of Ushko's spherical helpers.
“What's going on?” Ushko said.
“I thought your little friends might be able to lend a hand. They seemed very clever. Cleverness is violent sometimes.” She patted the sphere.
“Helpers don't hurt people…” Ushko said.
“They do if you ask them nicely.” She grabbed his hand. “Come on.”
She led him away from the house and towards the forest. The evening was warm and she wore no coat, just a white summer dress and everything had the feel of a garden party to it. Ushko looked about but saw no one following. “Did you kill that man?” he said quietly.
“Oh no, he'll be fine in an hour or so. Your little friend electrocuted him, I think.”
The sphere blinked once in the affirmative.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because you don't deserve any of this.”
They entered the forest. “Light the way,” Ushko said to the sphere.
