by Jerry
She fell asleep thinking how happy she was for old Sara, and she dreamed a wondrously clear vision of the two lovers floating clasped together with countless arms, surrounded by stars, auroras chasing along their skins. Jemmi accepted the image without question, notwithstanding she had never seen a sky before.
She awoke when she felt that Sara was about to make dawn, and she stood in her alley to watch it. Directly overhead, the coil of viscera that stretched along Sarasvati’s axis sparked and sputtered with flashes of bioluminescence, and then kindled down its entire length. As the light phased from gold to yellow to white, Jemmi was able to pick out the fields and woods and streets of her own village hanging high above and upside down along Sarasvati’s great inner vault. It was significant to her only as a starting point; she had come to town now, and her home would be here. She set out walking again, looking for breakfast and Opportunity.
Before she found either, she found the traveler. He was sitting on the veranda of a home in a wealthy neighborhood, drinking tea and reading. The street was busy with passers-by, but none of them seemed to take any notice of his odd looks, or his book, or the fact that he seemed to actually know how to read it. Jemmi stopped in the street in front of him and stared.
The pale man stirred in his seat and looked up from his book. Jemmi’s thoughts immediately shifted to other things—the kerchief on that woman walking past and how she would wear it if she had it, what plans the tradesman across the way might have for the bound lamb he carried, and wouldn’t a single gutter down the middle of the street make it easier to clean than one down each side?—as if there were a broad, gentle pressure in the center of her mind. This, the thought struck her, must be what she made the people in crowds around her feel. She held her ground and pushed back.
The man met her gaze with a small, amused smirk. “What can I do for you, daughter?” he called down.
The pressure in Jemmi’s mind immediately grew focused and became an urge to comply, practically dragging an answer from her. She refused, and met the force head-on. The compulsion increased, and she resisted.
She stood there frozen by the exertion, and suddenly the frontal assault on her mind dissipated, replaced by the barest sideways push that took her completely off balance.
“I had a boy,” she called back, and heard the anger in her voice in spite of herself. “A boy and a dry place to sleep.”
“Indeed?” the pale man answered. “Now, what would make you think—Oh my . . .” His little smirk wavered, and he said, mainly to himself, “Here, in this forsaken backwater? Can it be?” He considered his closed book for a moment, then put it aside and stepped to the veranda railing. “I think perhaps we should get to know each other. Won’t you come up?”
If there was any coercion now, it was too subtle for Jemmi to feel, and she was intrigued by his bearing, and warily flattered. She joined him, and he sat her beside him like a lady of substance.
“My name,” he said, “is Yee.”
“Neh, that’s a funny name, isn’t it?”
His half-smirk returned. “Possibly. It was originally much longer, and there was a string of titles that went after it at one time, but these days Yee is sufficient for my needs.” He had an old-fashioned accent that made her think of fancy dances attended by the lords of planets, and a way of speaking as if every word counted.
“I’m Jemmi, then.”
“Jemmi, it is an unexpected pleasure to meet you. You are what, eleven, twelve years old?” Up close, Yee’s eyes were nearly colorless, but Jemmi got the impression that if he looked too long at something, it would start to smolder—or maybe Yee would.
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen? Ah, yes, of course. Puberty would have begun. And I don’t suppose you eat particularly well. Forgive me—I’ve been a neglectful host. Would you join me in breakfast?”
She nodded.
“I suspected as much. Roycer!” Yee called, barely raising his voice.
The boy from the crowd at the quay stepped out of the door as if he had been waiting beside it. He had the look of someone who had been working feverishly all night.
“I believe our guest could do with a bit to eat,” said Yee.
“Breakfast! Of course!” said the boy, as if it were a stroke of genius. He disappeared back into the house.
“Tell me, Jemmi,” continued Yee. “Do you have any family?”
She shook her head.
“So I conjectured. They didn’t, by any chance, die under mysterious circumstances within the past few months, did they?”
The glance she shot him was all the answer he needed.
“I believe we have much in common, you and I . . . and I honestly can’t recall ever saying that to anyone else.”
Roycer hurried out of the house with a tray piled with a random assortment of cold meats and vegetables and cups and loaves and cheeses. He set it down before them and stepped away. Yee made a graceful gesture with an open palm, and Jemmi tore into it.
“Perhaps you could also prepare a bath for our guest,” Yee suggested while she ate.
“Hot water!” the boy muttered to himself. “Cool water! And soap!” and raced back inside.
Yee watched Jemmi bolt down the food. “You would not be reduced to this if you were on a true world,” he reflected. “A planet holds more riches than one person could ever grasp, and you would just be discovering you could take anything you desired right now. How ironic that you and I should both be trapped out in space, at the mercy of the vagaries of a forgotten fad.”
Jemmi looked up. “What’s that, then?”
“A fad?” said Yee. “A trend of fashion. A novelty. I’m sure you must take it for granted, but please believe me when I tell you that it is not at all an intuitive choice for a human to live in the belly of a mollusk adrift in the ether. When I commissioned the first orbitals, they were intended merely as pleasure palaces to keep my associates content and distracted. We gave the males mobility only to ensure that the species bred strong and true, not because we planned to ride them.”
“You did? Like Sara? Like Albiorix?”
“Yes. Your Sarasvati is one of the oldest, one of my first. Through a twist of fate, I happened to be visiting one of her sisters the day the Cosmopolis fell. There wasn’t time to return groundside before the machines stopped working of course, and not even a big ship like Albiorix is strong enough to make planetfall.
“Without the smart machines, you and I may ride ships from one impoverished orbital to the next, while the planets are rich and savage, but utterly isolated. The resources to rebuild civilization are there, but always just beyond my reach.”
Jemmi had no clear idea of how long ago the Cosmopolis had fallen, but if Yee had been there her original impression was correct, and he was quite old. She was still hungry, but she was smart enough to stop eating before she got sick or sleepy. She pushed the tray away from her, half its contents untouched. Yee seemed to note this with the barest hint of an approving nod. Jemmi thought back to Sara’s joy at the unexpected arrival of a suitor, and connected it to this unexpected man.
“Neh, why did Albiorix come back to Sara?”
“Ah, truth be told, it was not his intention at all. Albiorix prefers his route through his regular harem, and he likely planned to call on Demeter, and then Freya. It was time for me, however, to move rimward. It was a considerable struggle to make him accept my lead.”
No one had ever taken such pains to answer Jemmi’s questions before. She composed another one. “Why rimward, then?”
His smirk this time was a bit indulgent. “I have been to the galactic core, and I no longer believe I will find what I seek there. I am a man on a quest, you see.”
The boy appeared in the doorway. “The bath is ready,” he announced to the veranda in general.
“Roycer serves with excellent enthusiasm,” Yee confided with a lowered voice. “Do you find everyone in Sarasvati so?”
Jemmi shrugged, nonplussed. “No one ever serv
es me,” she admitted.
“Indeed? Well that must change. That must change immediately.” He stood and offered his hand. “Would you care to join us inside?”
Roycer and Yee led her into the house, which was very old. Parts of it must have been built before the Fall, because they were made of textureless materials Jemmi had no words for, while other rooms were made of wood and stone. They passed through a side parlor, where the rest of Roycer’s family lolled in chairs or sprawled across the rug. Jemmi counted two parents, a brother, and three sisters, all with sunken, husk-like faces. They were all dead. She was very surprised—her parents had looked the same way when they died.
“A pity, I know,” said Yee, gesturing towards the corpses with an upraised chin, “but I needed to simplify the household, and the boy is strong enough for my needs for the time being.” Roycer didn’t seem to see them at all.
Roycer’s family was so rich they had a room just for baths, at the back of the house. It was floored with rough flagstones and had a hearth for heating the water, and a high-backed earthenware tub right in the middle. Jemmi thought it was very odd to take a bath in someone else’s house in the middle of the day, and momentarily froze with the apprehension that she was being entrapped, but Yee dismissed it with a shake of his head.
“If you want to pass as townsfolk,” he told her, “you really shouldn’t be noticeably filthier than they are. Besides, I am too old to take advantage of you, and I promise Roycer will be a perfect gentleman. He will scrub your back if you like.”
Yee graciously turned to face the wall, and on her other side, Roycer did the same. Perhaps this was what the high-born did during morning visits. Jemmi let her ragged tunic and leggings fall to the floor, and stepped in. The water was hotter than any water she had ever touched, but she was committed, so she gasped and puffed and slid herself down the side of the tub in tender increments. Her knees immediately disappeared behind swirls of brown. It was scalding, but she discovered that if she kept her legs pressed together and moved only when absolutely necessary, it was nearly relaxing. When she was settled, Yee sat himself on a stool in a corner, looking for all the world like a pale long-legged spider. Roycer remained where he was.
Jemmi picked up a cloth and swiped experimentally at dark patches on her skin. Yee suggested she try the soap, and she had more luck that way. Underneath, she was rather fair, and turning pink in the hot water.
“Neh, Yee,” she said, comparing a pink-scrubbed arm to a besmudged one. “Where are you from?”
“Ah,” he said. “I was born in the chief city of the greatest dominion the world had ever known.”
“The Cosmopolis Core?”
He shook his head. “Long before that. This was so long ago that it was little more than a legend to the builders of the Cosmopolis. In those days our god walked apart from us as a formless creature of faith and awe, quite unlike the beings who have given us their bodies to be our homes and our worlds in this age. He failed us in the end, I suppose, because that empire fell. It was not the first empire to fall, and it certainly was not the last, but it fell badly when it went. And I was a young boy, trapped on a narrow and crowded island of towers when the chaos descended.”
Jemmi was silent. Anyone raised among the half-buried reminders of the abrupt and terrible failure of the Cosmopolis had a visceral understanding of that type of chaos.
“This was all so far back that I can recall only the memories of recalling it centuries later. But I know the instrument of our downfall was a plague, that our enemies brought among us. Death tore through us so quickly that we who considered ourselves the capital of the world and the heart of its hope were no longer a city, but brutal pockets of marauders running through a steel-and-glass wasteland. I was thirteen then, and the sickness seized me suddenly. It was clear that I would die, but I did not. When I fought to live, I was somehow able to reach out and find strength in the people closest to me. When I recovered, I found they had wasted away in proportion to the vigor I gained. My parents and siblings were dead and empty around me, and I was utterly alone.
“Then the savages who had been our neighbors found our home and ransacked it. I cowered and sought to make myself invisible to their eyes, and they walked past me without seeing me, though I could have put out a hand and touched them. At that point I realized I was now something different, but there was no one to explain it to me.”
Jemmi knew exactly what he meant.
“Many dark years followed, but I survived, and my people worked diligently to rebuild something of their society, and I always amassed the best of everything. Gradually I realized this industriousness was my own doing—I could not force a man to do a thing he did not wish to do, but I could place an idea in that man’s head and give him the drive to realize it at any cost. The same way, I believe, that you are now learning to do, Jemmi. I felt your mind as you stood out on the street. A power has begun to emerge in you, though you do not know how to use it. This is a rare and precious gift. In all the history of the world, it may be only we two who have had it. And you are the first I have ever told.
“While the rest of our planet squabbled in the dust, my people strove in lockstep and regained their learning and power. They had been close to the secret of star travel when I was a child, though this knowledge was lost for generations during the dark ages. Eventually, though, I saw that mankind’s future lay in its ability to spread across worlds, and I gave them the urge to create that technology. When they finally left to cross space in the first great wormhole-drive craft, I went with them, always as a counselor, never as a ruler. That is the proper role for you and me.”
Jemmi nodded, wide-eyed.
“I have kept mankind focused on its own advancement and prosperity and culled the weak and the distractions, and I accept relatively little in return—I take no more from my people than the barest life force necessary to remain alive and continue in my role. I have shepherded humanity through eons of history, and ensured that each new empire was built according to my design. The Cosmopolis was my greatest work. Only when it fell and the worlds were sundered from one another did humanity lose my guidance. And look what has become of you.”
Jemmi had never had a clear picture of life under the Cosmopolis, but she suddenly sensed that it must have been unimaginably finer than the way people lived now, and she felt ashamed.
“So you see, that is why I am here. To rescue mankind. I must rebuild the Cosmopolis.”
To Jemmi sitting in her tub that sounded so grand it was absurd. “From Sarasvati? She’s old and poor. How would she help, then?”
“As I told you, I am a man on a quest. I need only to reach an inhabited planet to raise humanity up again. But for that, I need a shuttle—one of the old machines. I have searched since the Great Fall, and none remain intact in any of the orbitals between here and the center. Perhaps there is one left in Sarasvati.”
“But, neh, the old machines don’t work.”
Yee smiled his half-smirk again. “I believe that if I can find a shuttle, I can render it operable.” His tone became more urgent. “Join with me, Jemmi. I will have need of your support in the days ahead. Add your power to mine, and there will be nothing we cannot do. We will save mankind from itself and bring order to the stars and lead an empire that spans the galaxy and can never be overthrown!”
“Okay.”
He stopped short as if he had prepared more to say. “Excellent,” he said.
“But I don’t know what help I can be.”
“People want to help you, Jemmi,” said Yee. “It’s in your nature. Roycer?”
Roycer stepped up behind her with a long-handled brush, and began to rub warm suds along her spine. Jemmi decided she enjoyed the sensation, and leaned forward to give him more surface to work with. He ran the brush up and down the same route, mechanically focused on the center of her back.
“If you’d like him to do something else, you may direct him,” said Yee. “I hand the reins over to you. Simply fee
l his mind and put the idea into it. You’ll find he will be avid to put it into action.”
“Don’t I need to touch him, then?”
“You shouldn’t—I don’t,” Yee told her.
Jemmi thought back to her earlier struggle with Yee, and reached out with her mind the way she imagined he had. She sensed nothing, so she pressed stronger and further. Suddenly she connected—and she was immense and floating in space, lost and engrossed in animal passion, tangled with Albiorix and straining mightily against his thrusts to receive him deeper and deeper within her. She had gone too far, and was now in Sarasvati’s mind.
Overwhelmed by the sensation and shocked by her transgression, Jemmi recoiled and shook herself free of Sara. As she went, she caught a final flash of Sara’s sight—stars wheeling around her, and much closer, a blue disk half covered with a whorl of white. Then she was back in the tub.
“Nothing, eh?” Yee said gently from his corner. “Well, try again. You’ll do it.”
She took a deep breath and reached out again, this time barely past her own skin. She felt Yee in the room with her—he nearly filled it—so she turned the other way and touched Roycer. She hesitated, then decided that people like Yee and herself were beyond bashfulness, and gave the boy the idea of her right shoulder.
The brush moved from her spine and made gentle circles around her right shoulder blade. This was nothing at all like how she was used to confounding minds. It was subtle and focused and efficient. She immediately saw it as a thing of beauty, as if she had been born to it.
“Excellent!” It sounded a little strained when Yee said it. “It seems you learn more quickly than I did. But always be aware that his enthusiasm may be diverted to other ideas.”
The brush was now circling her left shoulder.
Jemmi gently reminded Roycer of her right side, and the brush returned to make its circles there. Yee moved him away again—and it was more challenge than test. Jemmi pictured her right shoulder in detail and pressed the image into Roycer’s mind, and then pressed even harder in response to Yee’s redoubled pressure. Roycer stood frozen, torn between the two equal demands. After nearly a minute, the long-handled brush began to shudder silently.