“Presumably. Though, from then on in, the trip to that moon was so bumpy I wouldn’t be surprised if the captain was navigating us in by hand.”
“Were the Xlv responsible? I mean, Cultural Fugue is one thing. But for another species from another world to destroy—?”
Clym’s shrug—and perhaps his expression—halted me. “A day later, I was holed up on a very hysterical moonside, with a very strange planet lighting up our sky—which is to say, it looked pretty normal again. Everybody who had been heading for her, of course, was held up in a kind of limbo-style detainment. Everyone had the same question you did. But when GI came back on, however long it was later, any request for information about the big round world up there—who named it, when it was settled, what its population was—or the Xlv, got you nothing but an ‘All information pertinent to your query is undergoing extensive revision.’”
“What do you think must have—?”
“In the Tyon-omega system, where Rhyonon was the one habitable planet among twelve ammonia-covered, super-large, super-hot, high-gee gas giants, all information as far as I know is still under ‘revision.’ And if you were to request any information, anyplace else in the known galaxy, about Rhyonon, you will get a really astonishing run-around of cross-references that, as you go pinning them down, will finally result in your question being declared nonsense.”
“You’re telling me all references to an entire world have been removed from all the General Information systems on six-thousand-plus others?”
“I can’t believe all six-thousand-plus have General Info. But on the twelve I’ve visited since Rhyonon that do—which are pretty widely flung worlds at that—it seems to be the case.”
“Amazing,” I said. “I’d be curious to see how they’ve set up the run-around circuit. I’ve seen some that were really quite clever.” They’re frowned on by the Web but sometimes are necessary with information the kind of commodity it’s become. “I think when we get back to the conference center, I’ll just casually put in a request for data about—”
“Don’t.” Clym gave me one of those strangely inappropriate grins that are the hallmark of his profession1. “I’ve been called in now more than once this month to dispense a couple of folk who, among other things, did. When you do, anywhere in the known galaxy, your security status automatically changes in your Web-dossier to one that, even if it doesn’t get you killed, will probably make your professional1 life difficult, to say the least.”
I frowned. “Clym, are you telling me something I don’t really want to know?”
Clym shrugged. “You brought it up.”
During the silence I wasn’t saying anything in, Clym squinted off into the indigo, took a few steps forward, shaded his eyes, and turned his head left and right, for all the world like some dragon hunter out of my childhood on Velm (radar bow on shoulder, scanning the dawn for the flights of the more beautiful beasts). He was probably checking out some satellite schedule. I watched him with nostalgia and distrust. Since I couldn’t say, But why are you telling me all this? I asked instead: “What about the survivors, Clym?”
His head swiveled back to lock my gaze with sapphire eyes.
“Clym, a world is a big place.” (Agents are carefully programmed psychotics—hyper-rational on all macrobe-havior, but, when push comes to shove, crazier than any number of coots.) “I mean, somewhere across Rhyonon’s entire surface some shuttle boat must have just been taking off with half a dozen passengers for a moon; someone must have been at the bottom of a mine shaft and sealed in, only to be clawed out by a Web rescue team in low-heat suits; someone must have been hauled up from the bottom of an ocean in a research bathosphere that happened to have its own air supply …?”
“Rhyonon had three extensive artificially maintained underground river networks—comparable to seas. Their coverings were blown away and their contents were boiled off in the conflagration; their basins are now craters of fused and bubbled slag … as is about thirty percent of the planetary surface.”
I lowered an eyebrow. “I thought you said General Info was dead on the subject …?”
“We are both—” Clym gave a little snort that sounded like my favorite younger sister’s nervous laugh, which still gets on my nerves—“in professions1 where information leaks. The survivors … Why don’t you tell me about a survivor?”
“Well …” I frowned, wondering what exactly he meant. “Like we said, worlds are big. You say moderately populated. But I have no idea what Rhyonon’s population was. A third of a billion, if it was an average industrial world around for more than eight or nine generations. A few hundred million, if it was still being explored. If it was just an experimental station, it could just be a few thousand—”
“It wasn’t an experimental station.”
“All right,” I said. “Your average survivor on your average world: she’d be about forty or forty-five years old, your normal fifth generation—” I stopped. “No …” (Clym’s eyes were bright, sharp.) “I have this sudden picture, this image: she’d be the lowest of the low, the person most people would think the least likely to survive such a catastrophe, perhaps some kind of mentally retarded idiot, who only came through because of some fluke that happened to …” Then I laughed—it may just have been embarrassment under Clym’s bright, narrowing gaze—because I realized another image was fighting my imagination. “Another possibility: she’s a great sage, a genius, a hermit, a woman who’s fled the coils and toils of her society, living alone in some burning valley, or on top of some freezing mountain—at any rate somewhere as far away from the population centers as possible, busily devoting herself to the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, who, long ago, because she saw through the sham of her society’s pretensions, sequestered herself. And now, all at once, flames on all sides, above her, below her, around her; and somehow, miraculously, she remains untouched …” I faltered, feeling the frown at work through my features.
Clym said: “None of us knows anything about the survivor.”
“The …?” I said. “There’s only one?” (Look. Listen …)
“If there’s one or a hundred, we don’t know anything about her—or them. And yet, notice how we go on talking as if there were, as if there had to be.”
“But to imagine the population of a world completely de—”
“Exciting, isn’t it?” Clym’s hand suddenly came forward to touch my neck. His voice dropped. “Within seventy-two hours, my friend, if we still know each other, I am going to take you by force, chain you in a special chamber I have already equipped for the purpose, and do some very painful things to your body that will possibly—the chances are four out of five—result in your death, and certainly in your permanent disfigurement, mental and physical.” (We live in a medically sophisticated age. You have to work very hard to permanently disfigure any body.) “I’ve done some checking on you and found that you are a strange human being—at least to me: your sexual predilections run toward only one gender, and only of a few species. You make distinctions between pain and pleasure that are baffling to me yet highly interesting to contemplate violating. You’ve informed me of the nature of your desire for me. It is only fair, I feel, to inform you of the nature of mine toward you. You are, of course, free to absent yourself from my company. But if you do not, what I speak of will happen … though another woman, male or female, or any of several species of plants will replace you if you decide to leave. These are distinctions you make in your desire and pursuit of the whole that I, fortunately, am not encumbered with. Do you understand?”
“Just tell me,” I said, my throat dry, suddenly and uncomfortably so, “is this part of your job1 or just your way of being friendly?”
“Though my sexuality is not part of my psychosis, they have been integrated carefully by some very clever people.” She moved one and another finger (and from then on, “she” was the only way I could think of her) against my carotid. “As of now, the distinction between work and pleasure is one I do
not make.”
“Oh,” I said.
5.
WE GOT BACK TO the conference with no further breach of politesse, at least as far as I could tell. I asked for an immediate transfer to another section of the seminar, meeting some sixty million kilometers away. Minutes later in my room, my callbox beeped approval.
As I was hurrying down the hall to catch my shuttle boat, a tall figure, suited from feet to face in scarlet, ran up to me. “Skri Marq …?” She made a few wriggling motions and scarlet fell away from her black cap, her silver-shot eyes (contact lenses? corneal tattoos?), her neck, her shoulders. Scarlet peeled from breasts, arms, sides, and belly, to float out about her waist like a bloody crenna. “Skri Marq, have you seen Skina Clym?” I didn’t recognize the particular honorifics. Worlds that have them, have them by the dozens. But whenever you come to an official Web function, there’s usually a note somewhere among the cards, tapes, and fiche-crystals they present you with as you arrive asking you, please, while in Web territory, not to employ them at all. “I really must find Skon Clym. She’s such a fascinating woman. I am totally fascinated by her, you know. I only hope she is as fascinated with me.” She dropped her head fondly—and a bit quizzically—to the side.
As red petals began to close about her, I suddenly touched her arm. “I’m sure you will. But you must ask her to be very clear about her intentions toward you. Remember that. It’s very important.”
“Oh, Skyla Marq!” (Apparently my status had changed; perhaps after one has answered a question …?) “Do you think … he really might … that someone like Skoi Clym might even …!” And the star-flung night alone (and maybe a population of sixty or seventy million) knows what a Skoi might be. “This whole experience here, in the Web, has been so thrilling, so expansive, so growth-provoking!” An open smile hung beneath her filigreed eyes widened above. “And, by ancient Eurd, to think that someone like Skyotchet Clym might even be interested in …” Red sealed in it and her cyhnk.
“No one likes advice. Still, remember mine. Please.” I suppose I had been overcome with an image of the naive worldling, lost among such intrigues as bloom and blossom in the Web. Clearly she’d been displaying every emblem she could think of to impress the spiders at their spinning, while understanding none of those emblems’ import. “Take care of yourself now. Take very serious care. But now you must excuse me.” Then I went sixty million kilometers away.
And wished it were sixty million light years and in another sun system.
The weeks passed. The seminar ended. Then light years, finally, obliterated mere interplanetary distance.
What can I say?
Things like that happen in my profession1. I don’t mean worlds getting destroyed. I mean encounters with the odd creations of our epoch, like Clym. I know about security reclassifications, if I couldn’t check out General Info about Rhyonon, then there was nothing to do but put it out of my mind—sort of.
THREE
Visitors on Velm
1.
WHICH IS WHAT—SORT of—I did.
Until I got home.
Home?
It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become “home,” you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.) My home?
Star-system: Iiriani/Iiriani-prime. (Yes, a double.)
World: Velm. (No, we never have two solar blobs high in the sky. Iiriani is our sun, and sometimes Iiriani-prime is a blazing star that blues a few degrees of the night or, during some of our days, puts a nova-point in the greenish blue. Iiriani has two more worlds beside Velm, a large one and a small one, neither good for much. Iiriani-prime has a single ball of iron and ice swinging around it called Micha, into whose interior have been sunk a few research stations. And Velm’s got two small moons … like Rhyonon.)
Geosector: M-81. (What else? Well, we call it the Fayne-Vyalou, locally, after the two large plains, one raised, one not, which makes up most of it. It lies surrounded by Velm’s southeastern mountains and mineral oil swamps.)
Urban complex: Morgre. (The seven levels of the city—four of them underground—are sunk between a hot-wr and a valley in the Myaluth Range. The upper levels, irregularly spaced at different heights, with their great pylons supporting one atop the other atop the other, are recreation areas, spacious parks …)
Morgre?
Let me tell you about Morgre.
2.
AMONG URBAN COMPLEXES IT’S the third largest in our geosector, which, in world terms, makes it an astonishingly unflamboyant place. If you come expecting one of the great cities of the north—Melchazidor, Ahrun, Katour (with its Grand Triple Run), Eblevelma, or even more southernly Farkit or Hanra’a’sh—you’ll be disappointed.
I don’t know where the basic design for our world’s urban complexes came from. Still, the notion was that, given a certain amount of successful planoforming, the complexes themselves should be ecologically more or less self-contained, which means they could be sunk just about anywhere—and, over most of our world, they are.
But Morgre’s site was chosen with some care.
Where the red rock drape-forms of the Myaluth Range end, a ribbon of hot-swamp—the Hyte-wr—winds out onto the pitted Vyalou Plain. Dozens of species of indigenous gnats, gold, black, and red, swarm above the Hyte’s brackish sludge. During the day the blue erupting fumes are visible for kilometers.
Years before Morgre proper was sunk, several furniture and tool-making collectives organized themselves along the Hyte-wr’s oestern bank, then called Morgre. (Oh, yes: for reasons no doubt lost in colonial archives, our world has five points on its compass: north, east, south, oest, and west—instead of four or six like most others.) The industrial collectives used the swamp’s natural heat to run their machines, while the tolgoth trees (closer to a kind of cactus) foresting the Hyte-wr’s north shore provided their almost unworkably hard pith for lumber. Processed by an ore-smelting co-op ten kilometers up the narrow Myaluth Pass, sponge-copper and heavier metals were worked into blades, wires, switches, and chips. Chained to their slip-pads with the old-fashioned, black, flat-sided links, the orange ingots had been hauled in along a monoline running part of the three hundred kilometers in from Helk’um Port, where the space shuttles still come in on the lavid plains that hold the circular ridges of ancient craters, eroded away over most of the rest of the world.
The old monoline’s pentalons have been down for fifty years, but their star-form supports are still clamped, in clusters of five, to the pebble-pocked rocksheets. As children, we used to scooter out over the sarb-grass and silvagorse mortaring the porous stones that footed the Myaluths and, wandering among them, guess at what those meter-wide claws grasping the ground could possibly have been, while the black and green coaches of the present monoline whistled above us on humming cables down into the city.
The nematode farm on the southern edge of present Morgre claims an unbroken line in their service cooperative going back well before the sinking of Morgre itself. Its founding year is proclaimed in silver letters over its gates: 2521 Web Standard. Silver is common on Velm—about as common as calcium was supposed to be (according to Family historians) on Earth. For years, 2521 was the most repeatedly mentioned date in Morgre’s local facribbons, which, after the six o’clock, two o’clock, and ten o’clock shift-breaks, twisted and blew along the edge of the ground-level alleys where the workers2 discarded them—wafting toward the gulping grills of the quietly bellowing cleaners, for all the world like the blue smokes curling over the Hyte.
When I was ten (proportionately more stocky, substantially less hairy), I joined a chemistry study-group in which two of my older groupies worked on the wormfarm with their parents. Soon, half the kids in the group had trial jobs2 there. For me, it was sorting spawn samples into glass vials on a dusty plank table, while the shadow of the window pole, from Velm’s larger moon, swung across the floor to give way to the dawning light of, first, our larger,
then our minuscule, sun. I thought then that the huge cooling pits outside, the racks of ten- and fifteen-meter strainers casting checkered shadows over the broken fields, and especially the dirt clotting the underground support beams holding up the roofs of the kilometers on kilometers of catacombs where most of the adults worked, must all go back to the founding. Everything, including you, stays so dirty on a nematode farm—which, to a kid like me from Dyethshome, was half the fun. Later, as a teenager, I saw some pictures of the original farm co-op, c. 2,521: a bunch of grinning, grimy women, some human, some evelm, in odd-looking work outfits (bare chests; oddly paneled skirts), toiling on land a fiftieth the size it is now, using hand-strainers and pick-axes on a bit of yield-soil the size of the skene in the Dyethshome amphitheater.
Such violence to the known turns home into history.
What actually brought Morgre here, however, was the Retreat of the Arvin. I’ve never thought of my world as one where the Family had real influence, yet I know (human) Family adherents from the north first came to the sparsely populated south and built their retreat on the site where a few local evelmi vaguely thought an ancient temple may once have stood. (Which is the Family in a dyllhull for you.) Its glacine cases housed the gold inch, the silver meter, the platinum centimeter bars, the vibrating quartz crystals measuring out nanoseconds and Standard Years, the plastic molecular models of human DNA, all lovingly imported (supposedly) from world to world, their origin supposed to be the original Old Eyrth. Completing a swing that had already finished in the north and that had no doubt driven those settlers here, the religious revolution which made the Sygn the official dogma of this world arrived in the south; but it was carried out in our area fairly peacefully, well before anyone thought to construct a city. A bunch of locals—some concerned evelmi, some enlightened humans—came round, so goes the tale, and said with lots of tongues at once: “Get this tasteless garbage out of here!” and unlike some places throughout the six thousand worlds I could name, there were no staunch objections. (The riots in the polar caves of Minjin-IX; the burnings, the mass slayings among the floating labyrinths on the magma fields of Nok Hardrada …) Of course the Sygn wanted to find the name of the deity or dedicatee of the “temple” on the original site: Arvin is Velm’s smaller moon, which by night looks no larger than Iiriani-prime by day. And Arvin was the best they could come up with, since concepts like “temple,” “deities,” “ancient,” “dedicatees,” and even “name” just didn’t fit into the local evelmi culture at the time the way humans might have expected. What replaced the imported holy objects in the newly-renamed-with-its-more-or-less-old-name “Retreat of the Arvin” was, among other things, the earliest vaurine library in the area—where, two hundred fifty years later, I went to see the old projections of the wormfarm, actually. Indeed, some of the original measurement standards—in their original cases, say the little cards under them—were eventually returned to the museum. Since the Sygn is concerned with preserving the local history of local spaces, the Family occupation of the retreat was now part of that history.