by Greg Bear
“Hidden. No one can get to them wherever they are,” Shimchisko said gloomily. “That means they're ugly, dead or alive.” He would not be persuaded otherwise. “And what killed them?”
I kept my ideas to myself.
In the grove of orphans, the captain inquired whether Ser Nimzhian would prefer sleeping on the Vigilant.
“Fates and breath, no, thank you,” she said. “I'm an old woman of deep habit. I came here with Lenk when I was a grown woman, and I married Yeshova when I was in my middle years, and now I am old and I have all my remaining family here.”
“Tomorrow, we'll return and conduct a full survey,” the captain said. “We'll set up a base camp and examine the other palaces. To be sure, we're beginning a long journey, but you'd be safer if you came with us...”
“No,” Nimzhian said. “I have no taste for another expedition.”
“We can provide comfortable accommodations...”
“Captain, I've spent the best years of my life here,” Nimzhian said sharply. “Baker and Shulago did us a favor. From what you've told me, we've made our world even more confused and contentious. I'm sure you know the profound peace of devotion to research—to seeing and measuring. I've been present at the end of an ecos—something no other has seen. But the story is not over yet. Why the orphans remain—how they manage to stay alive—why the palaces chose to dismantle themselves and die rather than move ... so many questions. Enough to fill the rest of my life.”
The captain smiled. “I am envious. But there are larger puzzles to solve.”
“This is a puzzle on my scale,” she said. “Do what you must, take our drawings and results with you. But I am content.”
Randall ordered Shatro, Cham, and Kissbegh to stay. The rest of us hiked back to the beach in the last of the twilight and returned to the Vigilant.
In the longboat, I took a spot on the thwart beside Shirla, who sat with head in hands, pensive. “Sad?” I asked.
She half frowned, drawing up her cheek and wrinkling one eye shut, then lifted her head and said, “A little lost.”
“Why?”
“Queens can die.”
“Yes?”
“It's not something I wanted to know, or ever wanted to see.”
“Everything dies eventually,” I said.
“Back on Thistledown—my father told me—people could choose to live forever. They had machines for inside the head, machines for the body. New bodies. Extra brains. I suppose I'd always hoped...” She threw up her hands. “Forget it. I can't even think straight.”
“You wanted the queens, the ecoi, to be stronger and better than anything human and to last forever.”
She shook her head, though a glint in her eye, a slight nod before denial, indicated my guess was close to the mark. “I wanted to visit a queen someday. I joined this expedition—went to Lenk school and specialized in ecology—and even though I didn't get on as a researcher, I shipped on as a sailor, an apprentice, just to meet a real queen. I suppose I wanted to sit down and talk with her.”
“One woman to another?”
“Of course. Mother Nature herself.” She grimaced, daring me to laugh.
“It's a lovely myth,” I said.
“Myth.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wanted her to tell me what was wrong with being alive.”
Uneasy myself now, I looked out across the water. The lights on the Vigilant sat on the border between the black sea and the starry night. I had never been comfortable around vague dreams and poetic associations. I had abandoned the Naderites in hopes I'd find a philosophy not fogged by uncertain wishes and self-enlarging dreams.
“But whatever they are, the queens here are just dead,” Shirla went on. “I still think we killed them. A disease or maybe just disgust.”
“What did Nimzhian or her husband or anybody else do to disgust Martha?” I asked in a jocular tone, hoping to break her mood.
“I heard what the old woman told the captain,” Shirla said. “Baker and Shulago left them here. Abandoned them.”
“Even if they were betrayed, what would that mean to a queen?” I asked.
“I don't know,” she said quietly.
“A queen has to fight off other ecoi and protect a territory and make her scions. She brings them back when they're worn out and she makes new ones. She has to think about things differently. She couldn't have human concerns. I doubt she's a female at all.”
“I don't care about that,” Shirla said stubbornly.
Shimchisko, sitting on the thwart behind us, had listened without comment until now. “She may not be a female, but she's certainly a mother. That's the way I see her.”
Shirla stared at the bottom of the boat. In the light of the lantern on the longboat's bow, I saw tears in her eyes, and I was filled with a sudden urge to comfort her. I put my arm around her shoulder but she shrugged it off.
As we climbed up the rope ladder onto the main deck of the Vigilant, I took Shirla aside for a moment and said something that made little sense to either of us, but especially not to me.
“When we go into a live, lush silva,” I said, “and you ask me to go with you—if you ask me to go with you—I will go.”
She seemed about ready to snap back with some angry reply, and her face flushed in the deck's electric light. Then she pulled away from my touch and walked across the deck toward the forecastle. After a few paces, she stopped and came back, with a deliberate swing in her step. She put her hand on my forearm, looked up at me with stern eyes, and said, “Ser Olmy, I was joking.”
She swung around again and walked to the forecastle without looking back. But after helping the captain and Salap store the day's specimens in the cabinets outside the captain's cabin, I went to my bunk in the forecastle, and there I found two paper-wrapped sweets sitting on my pillow, given without clue or comment.
It was simply not in my nature to stay aloof and isolate myself. I had to blend in; Shirla would provide a kind of cover. That could be my excuse, at least. In fact, the gift of candy had brought back the hormonal heat. Her sadness, her graceful sway as she returned to give me my comeuppance, put her round face and dark eyes in a new light. By comparison, the women I had known on Thistledown all seemed deliberate and calculating. The comparison was unfair, of course, because my mood was determined by the setting, and the setting was dreamily exotic and more than a little eerie.
I, too, had stared at the ribs and remains of the palace and felt something I could not express. I, too, had secretly hoped that perhaps the ecoi represented something higher and better. But the death of Martha, made even more poignant by the sad grove of orphans, proved to me, as it might not yet have proven to Shirla, that Lamarckia was no heaven spoiled by the presence of humans.
Life here followed the same round of nature as on any other world. Things lived, competed, succeeded for a time or failed, and died.
We had sullied nothing.
Still, some of Shimchisko's mysticism had communicated itself to me. What was eerie, even frightening, as I lay back in my bunk and chewed the first sweet, was the inevitability of conflict, not just between humans, but between the ecoi and humans. The ecoi were curious. Perhaps we irritated them.
Perhaps they had a plan.
I awoke the next morning early with the starboard watch bell ringing. Those not on watch slept through the clamor. I rose and dressed and chewed the second sweet, back to thinking about my mission.
Without reason, these thoughts carried me back around to Shirla, and our flirtation on Martha's Island seemed absurd and not productive. Virtually all of my relations with women had taken on aspects of the absurd; especially my abortive attempt at bonding.
Naderite women—particularly divaricates—seemed a different breed from Geshel women. Somehow, when I had been younger, before and even a little after shifting my attitudes toward the Geshels, the characteristics of Naderite women stacked up in a different way, different results from the same general blend. I had taken up with Geshel women, and f
ound them charming, but somehow less attractive, more deliberate, even harder. All women, I thought, were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. Naderite women, however—especially those born to the families and not converted—took on a gentler, more innocent approach to this calculation. They did not make you feel inferior when you did not measure up. They simply did not encourage you, or they let the press of social protections discourage you, all the while convincing you it was not their doing or actual opinion that you were unsuitable.
Uleysa had shown me how ignorant I was. In her gentleness, in her shy reticence and quiet style, I had found all I thought I needed. What I learned from her past lovers—for bonding among Voyager Naderites did not require eschewing all others—was that she presented very different faces to different men. She gave us what she thought we most wanted, and she was usually correct.
But knowing who Uleysa really was ... that I saw would never be possible. Her attempts to please hid something that disturbed me: a kind of underground disapproval, as if I might be a small boy who needed her, but whom she did not truly respect.
I knew of better places to search for uncertainty and mystery—and disapproval, hidden or overt.
But I still had a weakness for Naderite women.
An old story, I thought as I prepared the equipment and longboat for the third journey to Martha's Island. I saw Shirla, who would not go ashore this time. She regarded me wistfully. She could not know my thoughts. Fortunately, we would not be together enough, or alone often enough, for my attitude to make much difference. And I had my mission. Memories and sense of duty could quell the hormonal heat.
Over the next three days, we tramped the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer, and I accompanied a team to the summit, where William French surveyed the island, took elevations and compared them with measures made by Baker and Shulago. Nimzhian observed our comings and goings from her porch, accompanied teams on some hikes, and looked over our results. Her critical eye and experience was invaluable.
Working from the maps she and Yeshova had made, we walked the denuded mountain valleys flanking Mount Tauregh and examined the five other palaces, all in ruins, even more decrepit than the first. As Nimzhian had told us, there was very little difference between the debris-filled bowls. The captain took this information with a disappointed persistence I found irritating. If the evidence contradicted theory, I thought, then the theory should be discarded. Keyser-Bach was unwilling to discard his pet theory yet. He even came up with one of those smokescreen revelations that hide a weak theory in clouds of unverifiability.
“The additional palaces may be decoys,” he suggested blithely on the quarter deck of the Vigilant one evening. “Only one may be the real queen's domicile ... shell ... whatever.”
Salap seemed constantly irritated as the days passed. He barked his instructions to the junior researchers, and received their results with a nod and a scowl. Randall talked with him infrequently, and walked away grumbling that the island was not good for us. “Too damned bleak,” he said. “I'd just as soon leave.”
Shirla came ashore with Ibert and Kissbegh, but there was little contact between us. I was inland, measuring palace two; and by the time I returned, a day and a half later, she had been sent in a boat to accompany Thornwheel as he surveyed the western wing of the island and its bulbous headland.
In late afternoon, with the junior researchers and Randall off to the eastern wing of the island and the captain on the ship studying the results, Salap came to find me in the grove of orphans, where I was resting and eating a spare lunch.
“I think we should go dip our feet in the spring and talk,” he said.
Puzzled about what he was up to, I followed the head researcher through the arborids to the pond, which lay pale and still in the afternoon shadow of Mount Tauregh. “Erwin insists there is little for us here, and he may be right,” Salap said, removing his shoes and sitting on the edge of the pond.
The gravelly basin of the pool was empty, visited only by the roots of the scions. Nowhere on Martha's Island would we find any of the profusion of life that Earth's ecosystem would have quickly provided, given such a broad opportunity: no seeds, no microbes, no birds.
“I am afraid the palace chambers will be clueless, as sterile as the rest of this island. I do not enjoy being here, even among these orphans.” He gestured at the arborids. “She still has her place,” he continued, waving his hand around to the house, where Nimzhian sat alone, dozing on the porch. “She will happily die here. But...”
His voice trailed off. He splashed his feet in the water for a moment. “This place makes me feel my mortality like a knife in my ribs. And you?”
I shook my head. “It affects us all differently,” I said. The island did not disturb me as much as it did others. Salap had never before confided in me—or to my knowledge, anyone else. I was intrigued. The head researcher never did anything—even engage in casual conversation—without having some goal in mind.
“If this can die, then other ecoi can die as well—and perhaps they do. Can you imagine the effect on Calcutta or Jakarta if the zones were to die?”
“Disastrous,” I said.
“French tells me you are the best with the surveying instruments. Better even than my researchers.”
“I enjoy the work,” I said. “My privilege to help.”
“Yes, yes.” Salap dismissed that as so much camouflage. “Randall believes you should join the researchers. I have not been satisfied with them in all respects. You have only tagged along so far. Perhaps we should make it formal?”
“I wouldn't want to cause friction,” I said.
Salap gave me a piercing look. “Randall also says you seem to have some goal in mind, and it is not necessarily with the ship ... or with us. But I would like to speed up our work on this island before we all succumb to the bleakness. It is like conducting a huge autopsy. Will you agree?”
Salap looked away from me and stared across the pond, his toe making ripples in the clear water.
“I would be honored,” I said.
“Good. Do not worry about crew resentment. The captain will query you about your background again. He is ever proud of his own education. But I believe in native talent as well, as valuable as native ore. I will convince him.”
I nodded as humbly as possible. Salap dismissed my act with a wave of his fingers. “Sit here and tell me about this pond. I have my suspicions.”
“About the pond?”
“The spring and the pond. The orphans. Every so often, sitting here, I smell the faintest traces of hydrogen sulfide. The pool is mildly acidic.”
“I've tried not to advance opinions ahead of time...” I said.
“Yes?” Salap encouraged.
“We know so little about what an ecos needs to survive.”
“I suspect we think along the same lines, Ser Olmy,” Salap said, using the respectful form with me for the first time. He waggled his fingers, encouraging more.
“Vulcanism has died here. Mount Jiddermeyer was the last volcano to die. In time, the ecos would leach out whatever trace elements it needs—”
“Chromium, selenium, cobalt, zinc, manganese,” Salap suggested. “All found in scion tissues in stable concentrations, whatever the ecos, but seldom found in native soils.”
“And for an isolated ecos like Martha, there's no place else to go.”
“She withers,” Salap said. “But this spring...” He dipped his toe again.
“The last source of trace elements. A small fissure below ground, still warm.”
“She leaves her orphans here,” Salap said. “Perhaps for Nimzhian? A last gift between friends?” He sighed, the closest to sentiment I had seen him come.
I matched Salap's pensive silence for a while.
He looked up,
dark eyes steady. “My greatest regret, living on Lamarckia, is the poverty of intellectual variety. It might take us several more generations to build a base of intellect sufficient to understand Lamarckia, to solve the biggest puzzles. When intellect is found, we cannot afford to ignore it.” He turned away and pulled his feet from the pond. “I will convince the captain.”
The captain had for the past two days been spending most of his time on the ship, taking advantage of unusual radio conditions and listening with some concern to messages between Hsia and Elizabeth's Land. He hadn't revealed the content of these messages to anyone but Randall, but Randall seemed twitchy and drawn as well. It did not take much foresight to recognize signs of growing tension in the small but extended political world of the immigrants.
The pools in the palace chambers had turned dark and opaque with debris from the leaking, brittle walls. One apprentice, Scop, had fallen into the pool when a wall collapsed, giving Randall the idea of cutting holes in the chamber walls to drain them, creating a kind of canal across the bottom of the palace.
I helped set filters to catch solid debris, and Salap took samples of the liquid in all the chambers before the breaching began. The water smelled of mud, coldly musty.
I spent half my time the next week ashore, and half on the boat, where my new status caused some ribbing among the crew, good-natured and otherwise. Shirla was polite, but little more. Was I above her, or still equal to her, in rank? Would I shun a mere A.B., even one with scientific pretensions?
For my part, I was much too busy to do more than sleep and eat on ship, and make preparations for the next trip to the island.
Around a cold camp dinner on the island one evening, we named the palaces after ancient royalty: Cleopatra, Hatshepsut, Catherine, Semiramis, and Isabel. On our twelfth day on the island, Salap and I presided over the draining of Palace One, Cleopatra. At the same time, Randall, Shatro, Cassir, and Thornwheel began to drain the other palaces.
The water from Cleopatra cascaded down the dry, rocky slopes for twenty minutes. A few centimeters of liquid remained in the chamber cells. Rising from the water, surrounded by watery reflections of the sky, lay the remains of the last scions of Martha. Salap climbed along the top of a chamber wall, beneath the curve of a dark ivory roof-beam, snapping pictures of the decrepit, half dissolved remains. We then brought up ropes and climbed into the chambers.