by Lavie Tidhar
“No,” I said. “No, it is not so bad. But my path leads elsewhere.”
He sighed. “I know,” he said. “It always has, Mai.”
We climbed out of the baths and dried and dressed under the stars and the broken moon. Holding hands, we wandered along the alleyways. It is a curious place, Suf, with its cubist homes and its rare flowers. There is a saying in Suf that their home belongs to orchids, and the people are merely their guests.
The streets thronged with conversation and laughter. Music played everywhere as people set up impromptu bands. Children ran laughing and screaming through the warm alleyways, playing salvagers and robots, and hide-and-seek, and dead man’s bluff. I saw people emerge from their homes, holding what looked like origami flowers in their hands. As we walked, more and more people emerged, all traveling in the same direction, until we became a stream of humanity flowing along the path, until we reached the end of the Convocation and the top of the hill and I saw, below us, the Great Solar Plain of Suf.
What the area had once been—homes? Industrial zones? A municipal park?—I never knew. The past had been erased from it, and in its stead, the residents of Suf had laid down miles of sun-sheeting composed of cross-linked layers of a solid-state polymer, able to absorb and retain sunlight. The Solar Plain was dark and silent now, in the night, but clearly illuminated by the silver light of the moon, which turned everything ethereal. Holding hands, we descended to the Plain with the others. Someone passed me one of the origami flowers. As we approached, I saw that there were narrow pathways between the orderly rows of sheeting. As each person passed, they swept their arm over the suncatchers. As they did so, the stored solar energy leaped from the charged molecules of the polymer and into the flowers themselves. The devices flared with bright, warmth-giving light. One by one the lights came on, and when it was my turn, I, too, swept my arm over the sheets and cupped the light of the sun between my fingers. The petals of the flowers opened with the light. When I looked up, dazzled, I saw that the entire Solar Plain was no longer dark but awash with sunlight, and I saw that each of us was an atom, and we were all bound together in one great, complex molecule. Beside me, Miguel’s face was rapt, raised upward, bathed in illumination.
I held his hand, and, in this fashion, we traversed the Great Solar Plain of Suf, in the time of the sun harvest.
The next day we said our good-byes. The path ahead was difficult and long, and New Atlantis beckoned from its mythical white cliffs and palm-tree-covered coves, as if to say, Hurry, Mai, hurry.
“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,” the old poet once wrote. And who was to say, who was to say—
And as I write this now, I think again of seagulls crying over foreign shores, a body facedown in the water, and the sound of barnacle-covered chains scraping slowly against each other…
But not yet, not now, and maybe never. Some memories I know I’d be happier to forget. Not everything the storyteller writes is true…
I’m sorry. I digress. The next day we left, Mowgai and I, and the road ahead was long, and there were ants, and shipwrecks, and there was treasure, of a sort. There always is, isn’t there, in such stories?
As for Miguel, he, too, is gone now, having passed of old age, but not before he lived and laughed and loved, and worked the Land, and fathered children. I remember him, fondly.
Stay. The nights grow long and light is precious, but the old hand that holds the pen still, in the act of writing, remembers.
And I was glad then, and I am glad now, that I got to see the famed sun harvest, and hold the light of a star in the palm of my hand; however briefly it lasted.
IV. The Tomb
“As we move, remember to stay within the rough zone of influence of the Caravanserai,” Iqbal said. “Don’t go wandering off, and never lose line of sight. This area’s been active recently. There’ve been reports of increased wild machine activity. Oh, and take this.”
He pushed a stubby, makeshift device into my hand. It looked like a tear-shaped bottle, of the sort they once used to feed babies with.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an EMP gun. If you see anything move, use it. It should scramble most Level Three and below entities, at least long enough for you to get away.”
“And if it’s a Level Four?”
He shrugged. “Run?”
“Would that do any good?”
“Might make you feel better, for the second or so before they catch you.”
We were traveling across the Blasted Plains that lie between Suf and the ea. There were no roads of the ancients here, nothing to mark the landscape. Just miles and miles of blasted grey dust, where nothing lived and nothing moved.
The Green Caravanserai was all around us. It was an ever-rolling assemblage of people, wagons, trucks, and elephants, with sheets of suncatchers fixed to everything, and big, colorful tents rolled up in the back of the slow-moving vehicles. Children ran in between, playing, human and elephant both. It was a never-silent procession, and at any given time, someone was cooking, someone else sleeping, and on the perimeter armed lookouts kept a constant watch.
We had joined the Caravanserai outside Suf. They were headed to the seaports beyond the Plains, and we were glad for the safety they offered. The Green Caravanserais were not like other human communities on the Land. They were tightly knit clans of people and elephants both, assimilated into a single tribe. It was the old philosopher, Aristotle, who said that the elephant was the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. After the time of the great excess, and the destruction it had wrought, we had come to see our place on this Land differently from our ancestors. We enslaved no animal, and seldom killed even for food. It was not that we denied our nature. But when we killed, we did so reluctantly and with need, and when we had to do so, it was nakedly, without tools. We coexisted, but we no longer ruled, for our rule before had brought disaster with it.
The Green Caravanserais never stood still for long. They wandered the Land, between sea and interior, across highlands and valleys and the bad, forgotten places of the world. Crossing the Blasted Plains back and forth made them hardy and practical. They were not salvagers, but they used salvage when they needed to. They were not killers, yet they knew death. No one knows death like an elephant.
Iqbal and Mowgai moved side by side, easy in each other’s company. I envied them that easy camaraderie. I saw the backs of their hands often touched as they walked.
At night we made camp, the tents going up and fires burning as food cooked. Goats wandered around the encampment. There were always goats, traveling with the Caravanserais. They were tireless explorers, sure-footed and strong, with an excellent memory even in the changeless geography of the Plains, and often went ahead of the Caravanserai as scouts.
I sat by the fire, exchanging stories with Amir, one of the men. He had curls of black hair and a quick smile, and in the firelight I saw the long scar that ran from his index finger and all the way up his arm. He saw me look and smiled again. Like I said, the expression came to him easily.
“Tank repair drone,” he said. “At least, I think that’s what the thing was. This happened a long way from here, near Esh. Clawed me right up the arm, opened the skin to the bone.” He shrugged. “I feel sorry for the old machines,” he said. “We made so many of them, in the old age, and made them strong, and self-repairing, and intelligent. And then we made them serve. When the world changed… all they knew was war.”
“How did you get out?” I said.
“It was a unit with distributed brains,” he said. “I snapped off one arm, and then the other, and the other after that… It was old, it broke easy. It’s only the claws were still sharp.” He stared into the fire. “It itches, sometimes,” he said. Then, “Do you go to Tyr?”
“To Tyr, at first. I hope to find a ship there that will take me past the Pillars of Hercules, if they still stand.”
“You wish to go beyond them?” He sounded horrified.
I took out t
he old memory trinket Gaw had sent me and showed it to him. “Have you seen one of these before?”
“There are many, littering the old places,” he said. “Some like to use them, to experience the old age. But many of the memories have been corrupted, and when they do work it can be like a drug. I have seen people succumb to it, forget their life, the Land… All for what? A memory of shopping?”
I looked at the flames. A goat came and nudged my shoulder until I gave her a chunk of my flatbread. “They made beautiful things, too,” I said, quietly. “Music and art and magic. They had so much power… too much of it.”
He gestured at the Plains beyond our encampment. “And this is what it brought us,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So what memory does your trinket hold?” he said.
“A request for help. For me.”
“From faraway.”
“From the New Atlantis.” It was my turn to shrug. “I dream of it, sometimes,” I said. “Seagulls cry over white chalk cliffs, and the air is humid and warm, scented with vegetation. I see a figure walk along the shore, but I cannot make out its face. The sunlight is behind it, and everything’s so bright…”
“It sounds nice,” he said.
“Then why do I feel as though something terrible is going to happen?”
He laughed as he turned to me and took my hands in his. “The terrible thing’s the past,” he said. “And that, that’s already happened.”
We spent the night together. We rose early, with the sun. The camp was already in motion, tents struck, breakfast cooking, solar sheeting spread out to catch every drop of sunlight. I noticed Mowgai’s cot was empty and had not been slept in. A short while later, I saw him return with Iqbal, and they were holding hands, and I smiled to myself. I’d thought I remembered they had a history.
Days into nights we traveled in this way across the never-changing Plains, with the calls of the elephants and the bleating of goats, the chatter of humans, the smell of smoke and dung and sweat, and the sun beating down, and I longed for the sea.
The Plains stretched in all directions. It was like traveling on the surface of the moon and, like on the moon, we began to discern the remnants of old war machines scattered across the landscape. Ancient tanks, sticking out of the gray dust at odd angles. The remains of rocket batteries strewn around, with ancient warheads pointing in all directions. A field of crashed airplanes, the rotting debris of jet engine turbines glaring like baleful eyes. For a time, too, the lookouts felt an increased presence of live machines. They stalked us in the night, and once, from a great distance, I thought or imagined I saw a manshonyagger, a walking man-shaped figure so tall that, had it but lifted its arm, it could have swept aside the clouds.
Then the presences of all the wild machines ceased, abruptly, and all signs of the old war were erased from the part of the Plains we traversed as though they had never existed. I thought nothing of it, at first; until we found the anthill.
The call came for me out of the night. I was sitting by the fire when Iqbal materialized by my side and motioned for me to follow him. I rose and he led me between the elephants to the perimeter of the camp. “We found something,” he said.
I followed him wordlessly away from the camp. It felt odd, after so many days and nights, to be out of the Caravanserai. The darkness suddenly felt very large and the night sky endlessly wide. The moonlight made everything stand out in stark relief, and our shadows walked by our sides. Iqbal moved with silent confidence, leading me across the plain until we came abruptly upon Mowgai and Amir and three others, who were all armed.
“What is it?” I said, whispering. At first, no one answered. Then they stirred, and I followed again until we came upon a large shape looming out of the ground ahead.
“It’s a hill,” I said.
“We’ve been this way before,” Iqbal said.
“So?”
“There was no hill here then.”
I looked at it. It was illuminated clearly enough by the moonlight, roughly conical in shape and as tall as ten men. As I looked I saw that it had many openings, some as small as a finger, others as wide as an arm. It was silent and still and nothing came in or out of the openings.
“What is it?”
“We hoped you might know. You’re the chronicler, Mai.”
“Is it artificial?” Iqbal asked.
“If so, it’s not human-made,” I said, and felt uneasy.
“Some remnant of the war?”
“It could be nothing,” I said. “Just a natural formation in the land.”
“This is no Land, Mai. You know that. Nature has no foothold here.”
“What is it made of?”
“I came close enough to take a sample,” Amir said. “As far as I can tell, it’s made of the same material as the Plains, but that material has been broken down and re-formed by some unknown process.”
“Is that possible?”
Beside me, Iqbal shrugged. “It must be.”
“Leave it be,” I said. “There are enough mysteries in the world. What’s one more, among them?”
Mowgai nodded. He looked uneasy. “I agree with Mai,” he said.
“It’s just a hill,” Amir said. He turned to me and flashed me a grin and, before any of us could stop him, he ran toward it, his gait smooth and easy as his long legs covered the distance. We could only watch as he reached it, stopped. He rested his hands on the incline of the structure and then began to climb it, finding foothold and purchase in the openings I’d noticed. He scrambled up it easily, illuminated by the moonlight, until he reached the top and crouched there, suspended.
“There’s a hole here!” he shouted back. “A circular opening, large enough to fit a person. I can’t see inside—”
It was then that I saw the ants.
They began to emerge from the hill’s openings, rapidly. There was nothing to distinguish them from other ant species, but they moved with speed, and in a sort of coordinated, military fashion. Tiny bodies advancing under the light of the moon…
“Amir, run!”
He laughed. Then he saw them, but he did not appear unduly worried at first. Nevertheless, he began to climb down. The ants swarmed from the entrance at the top now, and from what I began to think were defensive encampments around it. Amir lost his footing and began to fall, but he never made it down. The ants swarmed him from all directions at once. In moments, they had covered him entirely. We could only watch in horrified silence as Amir’s body began to move upward, dragged along the hill’s incline, until he once more reached the top. For one moment longer he lingered there, suspended. Then he was simply gone, pulled down into the hole, and all the while he never uttered another sound.
We stood there, numb. The ants disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, and the hill stood, silent and empty under the moonlight, until we turned away.
We left him there.
We had to. Inadvertently, we had invaded another species’ home.
That night there was mourning in the Caravanserai, and the elephants gathered around Iqbal, touching him with their trunks, expressing puzzlement and sorrow. There was not even a body for them to bury, and anyway there were no leaves on the Plains with which to cover a body.
A small expedition set out again to the hill. They stayed at a respectful distance, and there they left an offering, by way of an apology: some food, and parts of old machines, and flowers.
That night, by the fire, I mourned Amir, and thought of my mother. She traversed these selfsame lawless lands each year, in search of salvage. She had seen friends and colleagues die, and sometimes people simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a hard life, for a hardy people: but I had never experienced this myself, nor have I ever heard of life returning to the Plains, and I was troubled by the way in which it happened. What it meant, I didn’t know.
The next morning we left at first light, the elephants calling mournfully to each other and the humans subdued.
/> “I thought nothing lived on the Blasted Plains,” I said.
Iqbal said, “So did we.”
We reached Tyr several hard weeks later, and my heart was lifted by the smell of the sea. I had missed it, and the cry of the gulls and the sharp scent of salt and tar in the air made me long for the journey still ahead. The radiance of the sun reflected in the calm blue water, inscribing a message written in sparkles of light, in a language I wished I could decipher. I could have easily lingered longer in Tyr, waiting for a coast-hugger.
But I remembered the night it happened, and the one that followed. For as we made camp that second night, I called to Mowgai, quietly, and he agreed to come. We sneaked out of the camp, against protocol, and doubled back, crossing the miles in silence, with only the broken moon to light our way.
And when we got there, I could see that there were lights burning in that anthill. The beams burst out of the openings in all directions, though nothing moved, and nothing stirred, and no sound emerged from the place that was, that must have been, Amir’s tomb. We watched it for a long moment before we turned away. It felt as though, for just a moment, we were witnessing events on an alien planet.
There was only one more stop after that: the place where we had left the offering. I knelt down by the colorful plaited mat, and looked.
The food, and the flowers, had been left unclaimed.
“What are they?” Mowgai said.
“Ants.”
“But—”
I felt awfully tired, then. “I don’t know.”
The food and the flowers remained untouched, just like I said. But all of the machine parts—those the ants had taken.
V. The Ceremony Of Innocence
The Academy of Tyr rests on the highest point of the old town, overlooking the port below. Tyr had once been deep inland. Now the sea rose up to its foundations, and waves whispered between half-drowned arches, and some of the old town could still be seen, beneath the waves. Fish now swam where once there had been streets and homes. The Cathedral of Tyr is the largest structure of the old town, and its dome rises out of the water at low tide, and some say its bells can still be heard on moonlit nights, tolling when all in the town are sleeping. It is a restless city, some say. Filled with ghosts, say others. I do not know the truth of it but that Tyr is a city still engaged with the past, a city in which the present and the future are dim and tenebrous things.
