Legacy (Eon, 1)

  “We understand,” the eldest woman said. “Do you recognize me, Larisa Strik-Cachemou?”

  “No,” Larisa said.

  “I married you to your husband ten years ago.”

  “Then I curse you,” Larisa said.

  The woman drew back in some surprise. “We should identify ourselves formally,” she said. One by one, the citizens rank gave their names and residences in the city. The youngest male, a broad-hipped, narrow-shouldered man with a pinched, nosy face and searching, deep-set eyes, said he was from Jakarta, servant in courtesy to Calcutta by rank exchange. His name was Terence Ry Pascal, and he seemed particularly interested in me.

  “Please tell your story to us,” said a tall, long-fingered man with thick black hair and large blue eyes, Kenneth Du Chamet of south city, a farmer. “And remember, under the creed of the Good Man and Lenk's law, every citizen speaks before a legally convened five as if sworn under sacred oath.”

  “The oath assumed that none should ever feel free to lie,” I remembered. That I would almost certainly violate this brought a sudden and unexpected pang.

  Larisa gave her testimony slowly, painfully. She drew herself upright in her chair several times as she told of her husband's meeting with the Brionists and of his leaving with them two seasons before. Then she spoke of the boats that returned and of the Brionist soldiers—she used the old term of disdain, soldaters, created just after the Death ten centuries before—and her words hissed forth like air from a deflating balloon. Weak, exhausted, she slumped in the chair, face twisted and wet with tears.

  “The mayor turned down the representative of General Beys. I hid when they came. I knew they would do bad things.”

  Drawing herself up again, she spoke of searching the village, finding no one alive, hiding again for a time, then wandering to the river to wait for boats. There she had found the last victims, Nkwanno, her cousin Gennadia, and the other two. Then she described my appearance on the dock. “He came out of nowhere. Everything he said was a lie.”

  She asked forcefully why the boats had not come earlier.

  Faye-Chinmoi said in reedy tones, “Because your village was not missed until radios went unanswered for a day and a half. Normally boats go there from Calcutta once every five days.”

  “We've explained this to her,” Thomas said in an undertone.

  “Don't condescend to me! I am a thinking human being!” Larisa erupted, rising. I looked away, feeling a quick flush on my cheeks—distress at her distress, at this whole proceeding. Why did these people affect me so? I felt as if I were looking back nine centuries in time, to the Recovery; falling into an older kind of history, the adolescence of humanity, with all its snares and barbs.

  “And your story, Ser Olmy?” Kenneth du Chamet asked. “Your name and location, please. And remember—”

  “The oath assumed,” I said. “My name is Olmy Ap Datchetong, of Jakarta by birth.”

  “And how did you come to Moonrise?”

  “I walked. I've been studying in the silva.”

  “Ser Thomas indicates in his report that you claim to have been in the silva for two years. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Under what grant or institution?”

  “On my own.”

  “And how were you qualified for such research?” asked Faye-Chinmoi.

  I looked puzzled. I certainly did not want to answer unnecessary questions.

  “Your education.”

  “I don't see how that's important,” I said.

  The woman leaned back, glanced at her colleagues, then leaned forward again. “You must have gone to an institution after Lenk schooling.”

  “No,” I said. “I'm an independent.” I walked on loose ground. How had divaricate society changed since Lenk brought them here? Were independents—those who chose to avoid formal schooling—still tolerated?

  “Did you witness the attack?” Faye-Chinmoi asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you hear it while it happened?”

  “I was several kilometers from the river.”

  Larisa stood again, a length of hair falling into her eyes. “He couldn't have been in the silva for more than a few hours. I saw a sampler bite him. And he called it a forest.”

  Du Chamet looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “We must focus on the village and incidents surrounding the attack,” he said.

  They questioned me for another hour. Thomas listened carefully to my answers, no doubt weighing them against what I had already told him.

  “I don't feel as if we've gotten the whole truth here,” Faye-Chinmoi said after the end of testimony. “However, there is no evidence linking anyone other than boatloads of renegades who may or may not be Brionists, and the only immediate witness to that effect is Ser Larisa Strik-Cachemou, and perhaps this Kimon Giorgios, if he can be found. I understand that Ser Olmy took part in the skirmish with the Brionist flatboats, and helped to save most of the children from the boat that sank. We express our gratitude to you, Ser Olmy. You are free to go, but we request you stay in Calcutta and make yourself available for further testimony, until we release you of that obligation. We have to report to Athenai and Jakarta by radio. We are damnably spread out on this planet, as a bureaucracy.” She sniffed.

  Larisa had fixed her gaze on me for some minutes now.

  “I think,” du Chamet said, “that we're going to have to become much more efficient soon. This is the ninth such raid on Elizabeth's Land, and by far the worst, although the first in our district. The north coast towns have been taking the brunt. They are more accessible than towns and villages along the Terra Nova.”

  Sulamit Faye-Chinmoi concluded: “For the first time, we have a number of prisoners to use in negotiations. I don't know what good they'll do us, but if Brion's General Beys is in desperate need of children, how much more desperate will he be for trained soldiers?”

  “Who will protest to the Brionists?” Thomas asked.

  The citizens rank glanced at each other, then du Chamet said, “I'll report to the district administer through the mayor's radio. We'll ship the prisoners to Athenai tomorrow.”

  Thomas followed me to the bottom of the steps and the main street leading from the river to west Calcutta. I saw tall poles in the direction of the river, rising between a gap in a row of shops. Yards and rigging crossed the poles—masts, I realized. Sailing ships in the main harbor. A fair number of them, judging by the number of masts. That was where I would meet Randall. For some reason not clear to me—a kind of instinct—I did not want to explain all this to Thomas.

  “Where to now, Ser Olmy?” he asked.

  “I'm supposed to stay here,” I said. “That was my impression...”

  Thomas closed one eye and smoothed his crown's short-cut stubble with a thick, strong hand. “But what will you do here?”

  “When I'm free, continue with my studies.”

  “You will wait?” Thomas seemed doubtful. “You won't just vanish back into the silva?”

  “I don't seem to satisfy you, Ser Thomas. Not that you're alone. My poor mother had higher hopes for me.”

  Thomas acknowledged the shadow wit with a nod and a small smile. “My mother wanted me to be a farmer. I preferred keeping an eye on people, making sure they were all right. Well, I haven't done much of that recently. In truth, Ser Olmy, you've shown more courage than I have.” Thomas straightened and clasped his hands in front of him, stretched his arms and shrugged his shoulders. “Cause no harm, eh, Ser Olmy? That's what I ask of you while you're here.”

  I smiled and held out my hand. Perhaps because of his suspicions, I liked Thomas. He reminded me of instructors I had had in Defense School. He took my hand and shook it firmly.

  “No harm,” I said.

  Thomas stared after me as I walked away. When I had gone half a dozen meters, he said, voice raised only slightly, “You are not what you say you are, Ser Olmy. I don't know what your purpose is, but I hope to,”

  I wanted
to see more of Calcutta before I met up again with Randall. I doubted that I would get lost in bright daylight. I strode down the stone-paved streets, walking north between shops and the blank fronts of houses painted white and light gray and yellow, smelling the dust and pervasive odor of lizboo like dry dusty ginger. I walked beside a long straight road flanked by freestanding houses, well-maintained frame structures whose porches and decks had been allowed to weather to a natural wheaten color, the black edges and stoma-marks of lizboo exterior layers inlaid in simple floral patterns.

  No street signs were evident, and no maps; Calcutta was not built for strangers. I ate lunch in a small, dark restaurant at the end of the main north-south street. The cook and waiter, a thin young woman who kept her gaze on the brightness of the single small window, described the menu to me: three kinds of grain bread they had baked that morning, Liz cherries and hookvine paste—both from epidendrids, forms aclenophora and ampelopsis—and fried flockweed patties. I ordered patties and bread and a single Liz cherry. She looked at my ticket for a long moment, frowned, and walked off to get my food.

  The bread was chewy, like sponge, but tasted good. The Liz cherry was extremely tart with the characteristic bitter undertaste of all phytid fruit. Some phytids created nutritional packets for mobile scions on long journeys, and these were generally what passed as fruit in Elizabeth's zone. Liz cherries were one of the most common. They were not highly nutritious, but contained usable sugars, some vitamins, and few allergens or toxins.

  After eating, I stopped by a small park overlooking the river and sat on a stone bench. I took out Nkwanno's slate and returned to a history of the years just after the Crossing.

  “Among some who came with Lenk to Lamarckia,” the history continued,

  a substantial conspiracy arose. Where it began, and how large it was when it began, is not known; but it is assumed it began in Thistledown, and there were eventually several hundred of the conspirators who joined Lenk's secret expedition. They regarded Lamarckia as an opportunity all their own. They would follow Lenk, they would pretend fealty, but they had their own plans and goals.

  Upon arriving in Lamarckia, this conspiracy had no strength. Its parts and individuals could not agree on specific goals. Lamarckia, they thought, would be theirs, but which of the splinters would grow the new tree, none could decide. What was decided almost from the beginning, apparently, was Lenk's unsuitability to rule.

  Yet within a few years of the Crossing, most of the splinters gave up their grand plans, discouraged by the extreme difficulty of maintaining conspiracies within a grander and much-divided conspiracy.

  The last of the splinters, and the most persistent, was the most hidden and thoroughly disguised. For there soon arose a faction that had no Naderite leanings whatsoever. Technophilic, aristocratic, the Urbanists followed a persuasive woman named Hezebia Hoagland, who quickly professed Geshel teachings. Hoagland believed in the necessity of female control of technology. “Only through knowledge can women rise above patriarchy,” she proclaimed. “Naderites, and particularly Lenk's divaricates, have tried to return us to patriarchal servitude: to keep us constantly pregnant, in order to populate a new world with babies in the most primitive conditions imaginable; quite against the teachings of their supposed mentor, the Good Man Nader. Who was, of course, a man...”

  Hoagland took seventy-seven followers—twenty men and fifty-seven women—and crossed the Darwin Sea to Hsia. There, on a rugged coastline, they found a relatively sheltered harbor and began a settlement in conditions far cruder and more primitive than those at Jakarta or the newly founded Calcutta. Initially, the settlement was called Godwin.

  At Godwin, conditions improved very quickly, and population grew at a rate double that of the settlements on Elizabeth's Land. Some have said that the Godwinians took charge of secretly smuggled advanced medical equipment—or the resources for making such equipment—allowing ex utero births.

  Soon, the hopes of many of the discouraged turned to Godwin, a golden land across the sea, where conditions—so it was said—were ideal, where no one starved, and where technological harmony with the zones of Hsia had been achieved without predation upon scions. Here, it was claimed, vast tracts of land left open by the ecoi, unused, were “ceded” to human farming, and “seeded” with fast-growing grains.

  By this time, grainlands had been cleared in Tasman, and Able Lenk had moved his government to the newly founded port of Athenai to oversee food production. But the attractions of Hsia and Godwin were immense. Four hundred and five women and ninety-three men shipped across the Darwin, causing crises in Calcutta and Jakarta.

  The remaining splinter groups finally united behind a strong and able leader, born on Lamarckia, named Emile Brion. A quondam ecologist with some training in agriculture, Brion early in life showed a remarkable talent to convince and organize. This attracted the attention of Lenk's assistants, who could not, however, recruit him to Able Lenk's cause. Some say pressure was applied that Brion deeply resented.

  At age twenty (Lamarckian years), Brion traveled in secret (some say in female disguise) to Godwin.

  I looked up from the slate and watched part of a triad family walk through the park: two fathers with their respective wives; three girls and two boys in late infancy; and two adolescents, one boy and one girl. Most adults dressed in dull clothes with bright sashes or scarves, and most children in happy tatters of play clothes.

  I felt a wave of homesickness for the parks of Thistledown, and wondered if I would ever serve as father in a triad, or have any children at all.

  One of the fathers, the younger of the two, limped. He walked on one leg with a hip-swing motion that showed it was a centimeter shorter. He had been injured and the injury had been imperfectly repaired.

  The family passed, self-absorbed. The man with the limp had survived his injury and adapted to it. Perhaps they simply took these last few peaceful years as relaxation between challenges, a time to walk in parks and raise children. Life was made of challenges and distortions.

  What Brion and his acolytes found in the secret and largely closed society of Godwin was chaos. By fiat of Hoagland, more females than males had been born. Hoagland believed that a society consisting of nine women to every man would be ideal. She wrote that women who lived together in harmony could do quite well with many fewer men. Oddly, most of the men in Godwin did not object.

  After five years of comparative peace, the plan went awry when several hundred young women, led by a young engineer named Caitla Chung, formed their own political group, calling themselves the True Sisters. The True Sisters disapproved of what they referred to as the Matriarchy, claiming it reduced all women to workers, giving them no say in the character of the children they raised, not to mention no way to exercise natural urges and desires.

  A kind of religious rebellion occurred, instigated by the True Sisters—none of them older than eighteen—perhaps with Brion's help. Hoagland committed suicide, though some claim she was murdered. Both men and women dismantled—some say destroyed—the advanced machines, and perhaps also the miniature factories that could be used to make more machines.

  The fields went unharvested, and starvation became widespread in the land of alleged plenty.

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose and eyes, then went to a stone fountain and dipped water to drink. The water I drank tasted sweet and pure; even if there was contamination from human sewage, it wouldn't matter. All remaining human disease had been eradicated on the Thistledown during the first years of the journey, long before my birth. Mutation of microorganisms into potential disease-causing forms had been eliminated by supplements implanted in all children—even divaricate children—during infancy. The Good Man had never disapproved of immunization, and these supplements were, so orthodox Naderites ruled, merely elaborate forms of immunization.

  What mutation of bacteria and viruses that occurred in such a small population as inhabited Lamarckia would easily be handled by these supplements and by natural d
efenses. The reservoirs of disease were simply not there. Whether Lamarckia's living things could produce disease—or could be infected by human pathogens—was still an open question, but most experts thought it unlikely.

  The human pathogens of Lamarckia were cultural and philosophical, not biological.

  I searched the slate, trying to find updates of the last ten years, but there was nothing more about Brion and Hsia. Apparently Brion had renamed Godwin, calling it Naderville.

  My ignorance felt like a deadly itch I could not scratch fast enough.

  I walked to a bare stretch of dirt surrounding a half-dead elm tree. Digging my fingers through the tough, hard-packed soil, peering at the grains in my palm, I found bits of fiber, grains of black sand, a dry dark powder—but none of the living vibrancy of the dirt in the silva.

  Clearly, this was human ground.

  The sky grayed again in the afternoon and a gentle rain fell.

  The showers stopped and the clouds passed, blowing slowly eastward. I walked along the waterfront, past long covered docks and warehouses, stone and concrete steps.

  I shouldered my rucksack and walked beside the brick and stone wall, through which steps broke every fifty meters to lead down to the water. In a small building near the main warehouses, adolescent boys and girls in ill-fitting black uniforms stood in rows, listening to a large man with beefy arms and fists like gnarled tree roots explain riverboat handling and sailing skills. Seven small boats and a ten-meter single-masted yacht were moored near the building alongside short floating piers. I stopped to listen for a moment, until the large man noticed my presence, then moved on.

  A riverside market was just closing for the day. A few men with a wagon traded the last of their terrestrial produce to a vendor cleaning out a stall.

  I saw river catch in the buckets and on tables covered with mostly melted ice: small silvery “smelty piscids” from zone five; river celery, purple tubes as thick as my arm; piles of apple-sized shining balls the color of unbaked bread, called, reasonably enough, lumpfruit. From my reading I knew that these came from dashers, scions that crossed large tracts of Liz for purposes unknown, but which supplied themselves with lumpfruit along the way. Where the lumpfruit originated, or whether the dashers actually made them, was not known.