by Greg Bear
I stepped from behind the trunk and stood on the dock. The men and women regarded us both warily. All wore uniforms, but of varying colors, some ill-cut; homemade, I thought, hand-sewn.
The balding, bearded man climbed from the first boat. “We didn't get any radio calls for a day and a half. We saw unknown boats going upriver ... raiders, Brionists, we presumed. The citizens rank thought maybe a disciplinary should have a look.” He approached, squinting at her. “Larisa, aren't you? Larisa ... Strik-Cachemou? What happened here?”
“They killed us,” she answered. “Then he came.” She pointed to me. I stepped forward and pulled the pistol from my waistband, holding it by the barrel. “It's hers,” I said. The balding man took the pistol and handed it to one of his officers, who placed it in a cloth bag. “My name is Olmy Ap Datchetong.”
“Elevi Yar Thomas. Disciplinary at Calcutta.” He did not offer to shake my hand. “I don't recognize you. Where are you from?” he asked.
“I've been in the silva, traveling and studying,” I said. “I just arrived.”
“He's a liar,” Larisa confided, as if it might ingratiate her with the older man. He gave her a wary glance, sensing something was not quite right.
“Did you see what happened?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
All but three of the men and women in gray marched along the trail toward the village. One man with a heavy, long-barreled rifle stood guard over the boats. The disciplinary examined the bodies on the dock. One woman, short and powerfully built, with auburn hair cut short beneath a loose gray cap, pulled tarps from the boat lockers and spread them beside the corpses. “We didn't bring a doctor,” she reminded Thomas.
He could not take his eyes from the bodies. His broad, fleshy face showed taut pale lines. “In the name of the Good Man, why?”
“Passion,” Larisa said, lips curling with hate. “They have a lot of passion.”
In the empty village refectory, where all the inhabitants of Moonrise would have sat in communion for lunch and dinner, the disciplinary spun a chair around and sat on it front to back. I sat across from him, on the opposite side of a round table.
“You're lucky you weren't involved, aren't you?” Thomas didn't wait for my answer. “The whole village had maybe three guns. They've lived peacefully here for thirty-nine years. They had twenty-seven children. All gone. We haven't found a one of them.” Thomas scratched his nose reflectively. “I've heard Beys is taking all the children, that the Brionists want to raise them to think as they do. I hope that's true. They wouldn't just kill them, would they? Take them away and then kill them?”
I shook my head, ignorant.
“You can't tell me anything?” he asked in an undertone.
I summed Thomas up quickly: chosen by the citizens rank and heads of triad families of his district to act as chief disciplinary, a kind of constable. The disciplinary would choose new citizen deputies every three years, a tradition in divaricate communes. He had arrived late, I judged, because there would have been nothing he could have done. He had seen the boats, known them for what they were, and...
Or perhaps I misjudged.
“I've only been in the village since yesterday evening,” I said. “Larisa says they had a dispute over minerals.”
“What do they lack in their zone? An innocuous village, no reason for it to be slaughtered. One hundred twenty-four dead.” Thomas's face wrinkled into an ugly scowl and he seemed ready to spit. “Not much high-grade ore on Lamarckia, not out in the open. A little here ... Ten kilometers through the silva. Just beginning to think about mining it. Brion lusts for metal, enough to kill for it. What can we do? We have few weapons. Just bury the bodies.” Thomas leaned forward. “The woman calls you a liar. Something's taken a chunk out of your cheek. A sampler?”
I had hoped to have more time to blend in. I could only stick with my story, however thin—and hope to get away in Calcutta.
“It wasn't the first time I've been sampled,” I said. “I discovered a sub-zone and spent some time in it. Looking for signs of a new flux.” Sub-zones, Redhill's encyclopedia said, were regions of peculiar specialization within an ecos, where scions of unfamiliar characteristics sometimes emerged. Some scholars speculated that changes in sub-zones could be harbingers of fluxes. Others maintained sub-zones were actually small ecoi in themselves, serving specific needs for the larger zones in a symbiotic relationship.
I hoped the encyclopedia was not hopelessly out of date.
Thomas considered this answer, then shrugged. “I try to stay out of zone studies. People interest me.” Thomas raised his own slate. “I have no track on you. Census of five years ago. Twenty-two thousand of us on Lamarckia, ten thousand on Elizabeth's Land. I have no birth records for a man named Olmy of the Datchetong. I do have a record for a Darrow Jan Fima, of the Datchetong extended triad ... He stole something pretty important—it doesn't say what—thirty-seven years ago. He was never caught. Case not pursued.”
My respect for the disciplinary jumped several notches. Darrow Jan Fima was the informer who had returned to the Way. I suddenly connected his theft of a clavicle with Larisa's comment that the Datchetong had been disenfranchised. Wrong name, I told myself. They proscribed the whole triad.
Thomas rocked on his chair, then stood and pocketed his slate. “I knew Nkwanno well. An intelligent, kind man. He came to lecture every few months downriver in Calcutta. We found the body of the encyclopedist, Redhill himself. Did you know he lived here? He put Moonrise on the map, so to speak. They shot him in the head.” Thomas raised his eyes and met mine squarely. He stood. “Quite a few distinguished citizens, for so small a village.”
I watched him closely, saying nothing.
“Time to finish. Bury the bodies and leave. We've recorded the scene. Nothing more I can do now.”
“The silva will take over inside a week,” said Thomas's second, the tough-faced, stocky woman, Bruni. She stood by the tower and scrutinized the lizboo trunks and one foot of a cathedral tree beyond the pipes. One of her eyelids twitched reflexively. She turned and regarded me curiously, but was leaving all questions to Thomas.
I accompanied Thomas and four others down to the river. I took one end of a stretcher, Thomas the other, and we carried Nkwanno's body, the last, from the dock. Larisa watched as we approached the other bodies lined up in the quadrangle. “Thank Logos I have no children,” she murmured, falling in step behind.
We all dug four long trench-graves in the hard-packed soil of the quadrangle, very different from the rich chunky loam in the silva. The spades bit into the dead and chalky dirt with short singing barks.
Until arriving in Moonrise, I had never had human mortality shoved in my face with such visceral force, and so often. I had never buried anyone before. Conflicts with the Jarts in the Way were altogether swifter and more deadly, leaving few traces...
The sharp intakes of breath and heavy panting of the men and women working around me, the stamps of defiant individuality on their faces, awoke a hazy, difficult emotion, horror and pride commingled.
I dug with a will.
One women stopped to wipe away tears. A man joined her, shovel in hand, arm around her shoulder, and offered her a handkerchief.
We finished a trench intended for thirty of the dead. The first was a small thin body. The tarp was removed and I saw a woman of perhaps sixty or seventy years. Natural years, lived without extraordinary medical assistance or rejuvenation. She had been shot in the neck and chest by a projectile weapon. The wounds looked ugly, purple and puffy like old meat. That was what they had made of her: old meat. The woman's swollen brown and purple face seemed rudely, disdainfully peaceful.
I looked at my fellow diggers: a strong young man with broad bull-shoulders and fat cheeks, the auburn-haired strong-bodied woman Bruni, slender middle-aged man with a permanently worried expression, a young woman whose face stayed flushed all the time we dug. Individual. No acquiescence to artificial beauty; no reconstruction. The bu
ll-shouldered young man put down his shovel and stared at the dead woman. He seemed reluctant to do what had to be done.
I bent and closed the old woman's eyes with two fingers. I had once seen that in an entertainment about times long past, on distant Earth. The touch of her skin, cold and moist, and the sticky push of her eyelids against sunken eyeballs made my flesh crawl. The young man nodded gratitude and approval. We put the woman into the shroud again, making a sling, and lowered her into the grave. Others arranged more bodies—young men, old men, two more older women. They lowered the other bodies into the hole. Working in synch, we filled in the grave. I observed the faces around me, grim, eyes a little wild; some dream dying inside.
Sunset. The quadrangle bathed in orange light from a passing cloud, glorious in the sun.
Dusk loomed when we finished.
Thomas spoke a few words from the Prayer of Common Place over the rows of long graves. Others finished their lists and maps of what remained of the village. A female officer conferred with Thomas about a list of missing children taken from records in the mayor's office.
Then Thomas took me back to the tower. He pulled a bar of sweetened gum from his coat pocket, broke it in half, offered half to me, and I took it, interested in maintaining a friendly connection with this man.
We climbed the tower and looked down on the darkening silva and village, the empty buildings and houses, the pale tan scars of fresh graves in the grayish-brown quadrangle, the small greenhouse farm and large tanks, paddles motionless inside brown sewage, no longer converting waste directly to food. I could not see the dock, but the far bank of the river was visible. Parasols and fans folded and furled, withdrawing for the night. A cloud of black dust shot up from the silva a hundred meters off, drifted. I smelled citrus and spice.
“Tell me more about why you're here,” Thomas said.
“I came here to catch a riverboat. I've spent much of my life the last few years alone in the silva. I'm not used to violence. I don't know what more I can do or say.”
Thomas rubbed his balding head with a chalky hand. “I said years ago citizens should be forced to carry papers.” He lifted his eyebrows and glared at the horizon. “'Oh, no, not that,'” he mimicked. “'This is a place where we can all be free.’ We'll take you to Calcutta. You'll tell what you know to the committee of citizens rank. If you're one of the Brionists and they left you here by accident—or left you here to spy—I'll personally see you to a full citizen trial in Athenai.”
There was nothing I could say.
I still did not need to sleep. No one wanted to sleep in the buildings. I lay with the others in one corner of the quadrangle, where no bodies had fallen and the soil was not stained with blood, under the broad clear sky, tracing patterns in the stars. The double oxbow was not visible. Now, the sky was marked by tiny puffs of dim color—purples and pinks. The shrouds of dead suns. I felt a dizzying moment of complete disorientation. These stars probably occupied the same universe, but not necessarily the same galaxy, or even the same period of time. In the Way's geometry stacks, distance and time could become as tangled as an infinity of threads tossed into a box.
I was among humans, but that gave little comfort. If I died here, who would know me well enough to connect the thread of my pneuma to any comprehensible past?
The burial and service had moved me more profoundly than I thought possible. I had largely abandoned my spiritual beliefs since joining Way Defense, concentrating on a different kind of personal development: devotion to concept, to large-scale social and not metaphysical issues. Devotion to fighting off the menace of the Jarts, devils beyond the conception of any human before the opening of the Way.
Now I faced a much smaller problem, but more personal, and challenging to the point of almost certain defeat. What I saw in the stars now were the faces of my mother and father, and all they stood for, suddenly become diseased, wrong.
Not many slept that night, however tired.
The boats prepared to depart at dawn. They would move much more quickly with the river current, but it would still take a day to get back to Calcutta. I listened to the officers talking among themselves; they had segregated me at the stern of the last boat, leaving me two meters of space, as if I were a pariah. No family, no known origin, rumors passing quickly; monkeys shying from a stranger to the communal tree. I felt a brief flash of anger at their stupidity, then wondered what I would do in their place.
Before Thomas could give the order to leave, however, we all heard the distant sound of another small engine. Larisa, in the cabin of the largest boat, let out a sharp wail and struggled, pushing aside the startled men and women around her. She leaped ashore with surprising dexterity and ran up the road to the village.
The few deputies who had rifles lifted them, aiming them upriver where the sounds came. A single eight-meter launch was drifting downriver with the current, its internal combustion engine idling, bow cutting through swaths of morning fog. In the launch, two men squatted at stern and prow, both staring at the four boats arranged around the dock and shore. Neither of them appeared to be armed.
The disciplinary came aft and stood beside me to get a better view of the boat. “It's Randall,” he said. “Erwin Randall and someone else—Matthew Shatro, I think.” Thomas seemed to know everyone on the river. He ordered the rifles lowered. “They're not Brionists. They're researchers.” He shouted to the crew of his second boat, “Go get that woman, damn her.”
The launch came alongside and a tall, loose-limbed man with a thin face and long nose and somber brown eyes waved to Thomas, adding a half-hearted flick of the hand to the others. “What happened here?” he asked.
“Dead,” Thomas said.
“Fate and breath,” Randall said. Shatro, at the rear, frowned and drew up his jacket collar. “All of them?”
“All but the missing,” Thomas said.
“There are seven boats upriver,” Randall said, pointing. “They must be the ones. Three flatboats. They didn't even bother shooting us.”
“Good to see you're healthy,” Thomas said without irony.
“I passed a radio message down to Calcutta,” Randall said. He ran his hand through thick, straw-colored hair. “You know Matthew Shatro, my assistant. We've been surveying Liz up to Lake Mareotis.”
Thomas seemed in a quandary and not happy to see these men. He stood with foot on the lead boat's gunwale, glanced at me with a puzzled expression, and then looked to his boats and deputies. “They came past Calcutta at night. They must have a base somewhere ... We should go after them.”
“We passed a camp on the way down. They're about thirty kilometers upriver by now, and the camp's empty. Everything cleared out. I think they'll make a run downriver in the next few days.”
“If I know where they are ... then we must respond.” Thomas sounded regretful.
Randall sympathized. “They're all armed—over fifty men and women. We'll go with you...” He held out his empty arms. “But without guns we're not much use.”
“No need for that,” Thomas said. “I have two people who need to get downriver. This man here, his name is Olmy Ap Datchetong, and a woman from the village. She's been through a lot and she's easily frightened. Her name is Larisa Strik-Cachemou.”
“I know of her,” Randall said. He nodded to me and fixed me with a curious stare. Everybody knew everybody and I did not fit in.
“Can you take them to Calcutta and deliver them to the citizens rank for depositions?”
Randall's eyes, it seemed, would permanently record all that was important. “Of course,” he said. Shatro, a well-muscled, short fellow with pale skin and cropped blond hair, began to rearrange boxes and bags in the launch.
Randall and Thomas stood awkwardly in their boats, both realizing that the news had put Thomas and his deputies into a quandary. As disciplinary, Thomas had a duty to confront the attackers. Yet a small party such as this, armed with only eight rifles and a few pistols, would not do well against such opposition. Randa
ll's face grew red, and he stammered, “I don't think it would be a good idea for you to take them on—”
Thomas coughed and waved a hand. “That's my decision,” he said. “We'll call downriver and ask for more boats, and for citizens to be on the lookout. Nobody wants them to get away after all they've done on the north coast. They can't sneak so many boats past us if we're watching night and day.”
“They may divide their forces and send their stolen goods down first,” Randall said. “One of the flatboats was heavy in the water.”
“Loaded with tractors and scrap metal,” Thomas surmised. He shook his head sharply, not wanting to hear news that would make him angrier, or fix him more firmly in his duty. “Pull your launch in and take these people, and we'll be on our way.”
Larisa returned to the dock in the firm arms of two women. Thomas explained the situation to her, and she listened with little birdlike nods, eyes wide. We climbed into Randall's boat and I thanked Thomas for all he had done.
“I've done nothing for you,” Thomas said, a little coldly. “When you get to Calcutta, tell the truth, and tell them what I'm doing here. If nobody sends help, or even if they do, we may not come back. I'm not asking for pity. It's just the damned truth.”
The deputies in the boats stared at us owlishly as we pulled away and headed downriver. Shatro unfolded a rough blanket for Larisa, and Randall took the tiller, pushing us out to the middle, avoiding a few river vine humps. The bottom of the boat was filled with boxes packed with glass jars. The jars contained chunks of mottled tissue: specimens.
“You weren't in Moonrise when it happened, then?” Randall asked. I shook my head. Larisa began to chatter nervously, telling the two men all she had told Thomas and me, and adding her suspicions that I was a liar. Randall listened intently but did not seem to share her concern or disapproval.