by Neil Clarke
“It’s climbing higher,” a woman answered in astonishment. “But what is it? Is it an aerostat?”
“Move away! Move away!” another woman yelled, an older woman. Yaphet recognized the stern voice of the temple keeper. “It’s gone too high. It’s going to ignite the silver.”
The balloon’s ascent slowed. A small white object in the blue, surrounded now by shimmers of silver.
“Yaphet.” Mishon gripped his arm. “What is happening to your device?”
Yaphet wasn’t sure. It looked as if luminous curls of silver fog were steaming from the fire balloon’s surface. In seconds the silver expanded, consuming the balloon. But that was not the end of it. The silver boiled, becoming a glinting, gleaming cloud that billowed outward, doubling and then doubling again.
Too heavy to remain aloft, the cloud broke apart and began to fall.
Silver was the name players gave to the fog of luminous particles that sometimes arose in the night. Silver seeped up out of the soil, flooding the land, forming a gleaming layer usually just a few inches deep, though in a great flood the silver might rise several feet.
Around the enclave of Vesarevi any appearance of silver was rare. But on those nights when the silver rose—no more than two or three times a year—Yaphet’s father would take him to look at it, holding tightly to his hand as they walked together on the enclave’s border wall. That wall stood twelve feet high. It existed to keep the silver out and the players safe within it.
“The goddess who created this world is not done yet in her task,” his father would explain. “Each time the silver rises, it is her thought remaking the world.”
At night, silver had the appearance of a dense fog, brightly luminous. If it arose on a slope, it would behave like a sluggish liquid and flow slowly downhill, but mostly it arose in low places and formed only a thin carpet that covered the meadows and the floor of the forest surrounding Vesarevi.
Only once had Yaphet seen a great flood. On that night, the silver rose halfway up the border wall. Yaphet came prepared to run a small experiment. He waited until his father’s gaze was turned away, then dropped a small figurine into the flood. Somehow, his father saw. But to Yaphet’s surprise he wasn’t angry. “Why did you do that, Yaphet? Do you hope the goddess will change it?”
“I only want to know if it’s true that she can.”
“So you are testing her.”
Yaphet had nodded, his serious gaze noting their precise location on the wall so that he could look for the figurine next morning when the sun had burned the silver away. But though he hunted for most of an hour he never found the figurine. It was not there, not in any form; but the face of the enclave’s wall had been re-made so that it was glazed with white crystal to the height of the flood.
“The goddess will do as she will,” his father explained that night over dinner. “Sometimes she touches objects but leaves them unchanged. Sometimes she changes their nature. Or she may take them away, like your figurine. Or she may restore them. But she never restores them as they were. They are always changed. And she will carry them far from their origin in both time and place.
“But no living thing can survive the touch of silver. No player or animal of any kind has ever returned from it. It is dangerous, Yaphet. Do not experiment with it. Too many players have died testing the ways of the goddess.”
No living thing can survive the touch of silver.
Yaphet remembered this as the silver cloud began to fall. He turned to Mishon. Her eyes were wide, her mouth round in shock. “Run away!” he shouted. “Hide under the eave. Don’t let it touch you!”
She ran, but in an awkward, mincing gait. Yaphet risked one more glance up—in time to see that the falling silver was fading away. In only a few seconds it was gone. The danger had passed.
“It’s all right,” he said, turning to Mishon, wanting to reassure her, but he cried out in alarm when he saw her lying on her side beneath the eave, curled against the wall. Eyes closed. Face slack. A glint of drool at the corner of her mouth.
“Mishon!”
He raced to her. He shook her shoulder. “Mishon,” he begged in a frantic whisper. “Mishon, wake up!”
Her eyelids fluttered. She looked at him, at first without recognition, but then awareness crept back into her gaze.
“Are you okay, are you okay?” he whispered. “You fell down. I don’t know why. Maybe you got scared, but you fell down.”
She did not try to get up, but she commanded him in an angry whisper, “Don’t you tell anyone.”
He would have complied, but it was too late. In through the courtyard gate came the temple keeper.
Mishon was taken home.
Yaphet was made to explain himself to the temple keeper as his father stood by, angry and ashamed. When he was done, the keeper looked him in the eye and in a stern voice she warned him, “Never do this again.”
She explained to him what his father never had: that a dormant form of silver floated as particles high in the atmosphere. These particles gathered around any flying device until there were enough to ignite a silver storm even in sunlight.
“If the falling silver had touched you, you would have been consumed. Mishon would have been consumed. And your deaths might have ignited a silver storm all around you, potent enough to destroy our homes, our families, all of us. That is why no enclave will allow flying machines. Do you understand?”
One phrase of the temple keeper’s lecture eclipsed all her other words. “Flying machines?” Yaphet asked. “Are there such things?”
“No,” the keeper told him firmly. “There are not. Because every player foolish enough to be misled by such things has become outcast and died on the road.”
Yaphet had questions. Always questions. “Have you ever seen a flying machine, Papa?”
“No, and I hope that I never will.”
“If it is a machine, does that mean it’s a mechanic?”
Mechanics were machine creatures. They existed in great variety. Tiny mechanics lived in the vats in his father’s atelier and did the work of assemblage, but there were wild mechanics too, as large as rabbits or small dogs.
“There are no flying mechanics, Yaphet.”
“Well, if flying machines are not mechanics, then they must be made by human hands.”
“No. No longer. Not in our turn of history. Flying machines are wicked. Deadly dangerous. Stories are told of whole enclaves disappeared within a silver storm brought on by a rogue player who thought to fly.”
This was another concept Yaphet had not yet considered. His eyes grew round, his heart raced with excitement. “Papa, can a flying machine really be made large enough to carry a player into the sky?”
His father’s gaze grew harsh. Anger clipped his voice. “Such a machine would only carry a player to their death. Do not think on it. Now go do your chores.”
Yaphet was only a child, but already it was clear to him that people believed many things without understanding. In contrast, Yaphet always strove to understand why.
Alone in his room, he held the glass tablet of his savant and asked it to search its library for anything at all about flying machines.
It answered in sad apology, using a young man’s voice. “Your father has asked me not to discuss this subject.” Then, in a hopeful tone, “Shall we return to mathematics instead? I have compiled an overview of airflow and pressure that I believe will interest you. And when we are done with that, we might make a study of dragonflies and birds.”
The intelligence housed within the glass tablet was based on the persona of a genial young scholar who had lived a brief but influential life in some ancient turn of history.
Yaphet had been a scholar too, in his past lives. No one who met him could doubt it. He learned swiftly, so that the savant was not so much his teacher as his guide, helping him to find order in a maze of knowledge. With each new subject they explored, a key turned in Yaphet’s mind, unlocking memories of what he’d once known—not the per
sonal memories, but the skills and knowledge he had accumulated over many, many lifetimes.
The savant would sometimes tease him, “You are such a prodigious scholar, I think sometimes you must be me!”
This was a joke, because in personality they were nothing alike. Yaphet was so often somber and serious that the lighthearted persona of the savant delighted in the challenge of drawing a smile from him.
Mishon had been so frightened by the incident of the fire balloon that she never returned to the house, but Yaphet did not miss her. There were many children in the enclave happy to run and play and explore with him.
As he grew older he spent more time working with his father in the atelier, designing truck parts and hunting rifles and furniture and other things ordered by the players of Vesarevi or by passing truckers.
He designed the specifications of engines, too. This work he based on traditional designs, but he did not just copy. Instead, he taught himself the function of each part and worked the math behind it, making modifications when he thought it might improve efficiency.
He also made plans and drawings that he kept hidden from his father.
At sixteen, Yaphet took a job as an errand rider even though he knew his father would object.
“An errand rider! That is an occupation for a player with no education. You are a scholar bound for University and you should spend your time preparing for that.”
Yaphet had already designed his argument. “The more I see of the world, the more I learn of the world—and of myself.”
He was more stubborn than his father, and soon he was riding a battered old motorbike on a trail that wound through the forested hills around Vesarevi before zigzagging down a steep cliff face to the enclave of Miamey—a precarious route, but faster by a day than the highway the truckers used, which skirted the hills and passed another enclave on the way.
Yaphet liked to stay overnight in Miamey, returning late the next day—or so he told his father. In truth, he would start the ride back as soon as his errand was done, but part way through the hills he’d leave the main trail, following a faint track to a remote valley where no one ever came.
In some past time a silver flood had washed over that valley, leaving scattered follies. On the valley floor where there must have once been a meadow, a sloped pavilion of white stone ran for a quarter mile alongside the stream, smooth but for the weeds that grew in the cracks. And in the surrounding forest there were nine tiny buildings made of black stone that might have been tombs in another turn of history, though they were empty now.
Yaphet used one of the tombs to store paper and frames and rosin, and he slept in it overnight, risking the silver so that he could run his experiments without harm to Vesarevi—and without incurring the wrath of his father and other players who lived there.
He built a fleet of fire balloons, sending them aloft only in the evenings and the early mornings when he was sure no one would be on the trail. These experiments taught him the height at which an object would ignite the particulates of silver—and he concluded it should be possible for a flying machine to survive if it stayed below that elevation.
One night when he was camped in the valley the silver came. He smelled the fresh cold scent of it seconds before it appeared—time enough that he was able to climb to the roof of the tomb.
His breath was ragged with fear as he watched the rise of the luminous fog. It carpeted the forest floor, hiding it beneath a flood that swirled and flowed with slow currents. He imagined he could hear in it whispers of an ancient language unknown to him.
Yaphet knew that if the silver rose high enough there would be no escape for him—but after an hour it was only knee high. Fear became fascination, and he stayed awake all night to watch.
Yaphet’s father explained the silver as the thoughts of the goddess—many players believed the same—but Yaphet had begun to wonder if it was something less ethereal, a mechanism, a machine devised in some ancient turn of history when phenomena were explained by structure and mathematics, and not through stories.
But the silver did not reveal its mysteries to him that night.
In the morning, after the last trace of the flood had dissolved in sunlight, he climbed down from the tomb to find his cache of fire balloons turned to multicolored stone.
No matter. He had the data he needed. It was time to move on to the next phase of his plan.
He built a small flying machine, a working model, with a wingspan only as wide as his outstretched arms—just big enough to let him test his theories of flight. The frame was made of flexible, honeycombed ceramic, each rod and strut custom-grown in his father’s atelier. For the surface of the wing he used a white metallic cloth, light and strong, that he stretched and clipped in place.
Suspended beneath the wing was a small electric engine of his own design that would propel the flying machine through the air. He had no means to steer the model—steering would come later—so to ensure he couldn’t lose it, he set the engine to run for only twenty seconds at a time.
On a windless morning under a bright blue sky he carried the little flying machine to the top of the pavilion for its first test flight. If it worked, it could fly as far as a quarter mile above the white stone before it encountered the trees—though he didn’t expect it to fly that far.
He held the model waist high. Switched on the silent engine. Air rushed past him, and the flying machine bucked as it strove to escape his grip. He positioned it so that its nose was slightly up, and he let it go.
It shot away, wobbling a bit from side to side, but climbing steadily, five feet, ten feet, fifteen feet above the pavilion. He ran hard, trying to keep up with it, leaping over the weeds. He began to fear it would go too high and ignite the silver, or go too far and crash into the trees.
But near the lower end of the pavilion the engine switched off. The flying machine stalled and began to fall. It struck the stone floor before he could catch it.
It didn’t matter. The experiment was a success. He jumped in elation, punched his fist in the air. It had worked! He wanted to shout, but he stayed silent. Silent and secret, always. No one else could ever know.
He retrieved the little flying machine, checked it for damage, found none, and launched it again. After many test flights he felt confident in his design. He would scale it up and build a new flying machine, one big enough to carry his weight and more.
But not right away.
Yaphet had built devices all his life, so his father hadn’t questioned him about the small rods and struts he’d grown for this first small flying machine. But the large parts required by his new machine would certainly generate questions. So Yaphet waited. Each year his father traveled to a weeklong conference held in the enclave of Jodel. It took a day to get there and a day to get back, so he would be gone nine days.
Yaphet planned carefully, and as soon as his father left through the enclave’s gate, he set to work growing the parts he needed and carrying them at night into the hills, risking the silver to keep his secret.
After his father’s return there was work to catch up on and then three days of festival. An excruciating wait! But at last the time was right. Yaphet told his father, “I’m going to go to Miamey—not for work, but to spend a few days with friends.”
Nonexistent friends. But his father agreed, and at last he was free.
Alone among the tombs, he worked quickly but with great care, assembling the flying machine on a wooden platform five feet above the ground—high enough to keep it above most silver floods.
Still, he did not feel safe.
He thought that if what he was doing was truly wrong the goddess would act, flooding this valley with silver, erasing both him and his work.
But each night passed without a gleam of silver.
Perhaps the goddess had not noticed what he was up to, or maybe she did not object?
He assembled the frame—this time including a cradle beneath the wing where he would lie, and steering mechanism
s in easy reach of his hands. He stretched white cloth across the frame and clipped it in place. Then, lying prone in the cradle, he tested the mechanisms, imagining himself rising, descending, banking right and left, until the motions came easily.
By late afternoon on his third day alone in the hills, he was ready, but the weather was not. Heavy clouds lay over the hills and he had not seen the sun all day. As eager as he was, he did not quite dare to fly without strong sunlight to burn off any silver that might begin to form on the flying machine’s long wing.
As he pondered these things, a breeze soughed down the valley. It caught against the cloth wings, lifting the flying machine three inches off the platform. Yaphet shouted in alarm and dove to catch it.
He was working frantically to tie it down when his cousin Mishon found him out.
“Yaphet!” she cried.
He whirled around, wild-eyed.
Fate was closing in.
Ever since that day in the courtyard Mishon had treated Yaphet like a stranger, avoiding him when she could, speaking to him only when duty required. Since Yaphet had never liked her, he did not miss her.
But here she was again, seventeen now, though she was scrawny and small and looked much younger. She straddled a motorbike. A cap on her head, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Her lips turned in a cold, triumphant smile.
“Did I scare you?” she asked. She cocked her head. “I saw the track of a bike leaving the trail.”
“Did you?” He always took care to disguise the start of his secret trail. Not care enough, it seemed. “So you thought to follow? It could have been anyone.”
She shrugged. “I thought it might be you. I heard my sister say you were gone to Miamey, but my friends there have not seen you.”
“I have other business,” he said.
“That I can see.”
“You should go now. It’s late. It’ll be night soon.”
“Do you think I’m afraid of the silver?” she asked. “I’m not, and I don’t think you are either, which makes us both fools.” She eyed the flying machine, returned her gaze to him. “This is something wicked, isn’t it?”