Foreigner

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The lifeboat began to move up the tower. Looking down through the floor, Novato could see Garios and Karshirl rapidly diminishing from view—father and daughter, although they probably didn’t know that. It was only because of the difference in their sizes, Garios being twice Karshirl’s age, that Novato could tell them apart.

  After just a few moments, the lifeboat had passed through the apex of the blue pyramid and was now rising up in the open air. The pyramid was sitting in a hollow scooped out of the cliff. The strip of beach on either side of the pyramid’s base looked like a beige line.

  The coastline of Fra’toolar was enjoying a rare day of reasonably clear skies. Novato’s view continued undiminished, except for the parts blocked by the four ladder-like sides of the tower. She could soon see huge tracts of Fra’toolar province and, stretching off to the south and east, the vast world-spanning body of water, each wave cap an actinic point reflecting back the fierce white sun.

  The lifeboat had accelerated briefly, but now seemed to be moving at a steady rate: equal intervals elapsed between the passing of each rung of the ladders. Novato had seen ground from the air before, when flying aboard her glider, the Tak-Saleed, and its successor, the Lub-Kaden. But she’d never been this high up. Looking straight out, she could see that she was passing the levels of distant clouds. Looking up, the four sides of the tower converged infinitely far above her head.

  Novato had worked with charcoal and graphite to capture images of planets and moons observed through her far-seers. But those illustrations had been made over daytenths, with objects crawling across her field of view. She wanted to sketch what she was seeing now, but with each moment the ground receded further and previously invisible parts of the landscape appeared at the edges.

  Rivers and streams cut across Fra’toolar like arteries and veins. Tracts of forest and open fields were visible. And what was that? A series of rounded brown hills—hills that were moving! A thunderbeast stampede!

  Novato felt dizzy as the heights grew greater. She could now see well into the interior of Fra’toolar, although clouds obscured much of it to the north, their tops fiercely bright with reflected sun.

  A flock of wingfingers was moving by the tower: imperial jacks, judging by the colors. She hadn’t realized they flew this high up. But already they were disappearing below, although she could easily make out the flock’s distinctive tri-pronged flying pattern as it passed by, heading east.

  Novato was high enough now that the blue tower itself vanished into nothingness before it reached the ground. Although she assumed the tower was of equal width all the way to the top, it was as though she were in the middle of an incredibly elongated blue diamond, a diamond that tapered to infinitely fine points above and below.

  The sun had moved visibly toward the western horizon now. Looking down, Novato could see a thick black shadow at the eastern end of the forest tracts. The whole interior of the lifeboat darkened and brightened in turns as it passed the blue rungs of the ladders. Occasionally, she saw a puff of white gas erupt from one of the cones projecting from some of the ladders’ rungs.

  Novato let her eyes wander out to the horizon line—which, she realized with a start, was no longer a line at all. Instead, it was bowing up. Her heart pounded. She was seeing—actually seeing—the curvature of the world she lived on. She’d long known that the Quintaglio moon was a sphere, but she’d known it indirectly—from seeing ship’s masts poke above the horizon before the ships themselves became visible, from seeing the circular shadow her world cast on the Face of God, from experiments done measuring the angles of shadows cast at different latitudes. But to actually see the curvature, to see the world’s roundness—that was spectacular.

  And then, a short time later, she became aware of something even more spectacular. It was late afternoon, the sun still well above the horizon. Nonetheless, the sky was growing darker. It had started as lavender and, without Novato really noticing it, had deepened to violet. Now it was well on its way to black. What could make the sky black while the sun was still out? A flaw in the optical properties of the lifeboat’s metal hull, perhaps? Unlikely.

  Novato mulled it over while the lifeboat continued its steady climb, Fra’toolar’s coastline now visible all the way to Shoveler’s Inlet. She knew that water droplets could refract sunlight, splitting it into a rainbow of colors, and she’d long suspected that the sky was purple because myriad droplets in the air scattered light. But if no such scattering was going on, then there was no humidity in the air this high up. Well, water was heavy, of course, so moisture would tend to settle toward the ground. She was well above the clouds now—perhaps they marked the highest level at which water vapor was a constituent of air.

  Later that day, Novato watched the most spectacular sunset of her life: the brilliant point of light touched the curving limb of the world, the world-spanning body of water stained purple for hundreds of kilopaces along its edge. The sun’s setting was protracted by the lifeboat’s continual upward movement, and Novato savored every moment of it.

  With the sun gone, moons blazed forth in full nocturnal glory. Myriad stars became visible, too. Soon, in fact, there were more stars than Novato had ever seen before. The great sky river was thick and bright, instead of the pale ghost she was used to, and the stars were so numerous that to count them all would be the work of a lifetime. She thought of Afsan, dear Afsan, who had enjoyed no sight more than the night sky. How he would have been moved to see stars in such profusion!

  But once again Novato was puzzled. Why should so many more stars be visible? And suddenly she realized something else: the stars, all those glorious stars, were rock-steady, untwinkling. From the ground, stars flickered like distant lamp flames, but these stars burned steadily. With so many visible, it was hard to get her bearings; the normal patterns of constellations were all but lost amongst the countless points of light. But at last she found bright Kevpel, the next closest planet to the sun after the Face of God. She got out her far-seer and, steadying herself by leaning back on her tail, brought it to bear on that distant world.

  Spectacular. Kevpel’s rings were visible with a clarity Novato had never before experienced. The planet’s disk was clearly striped, its latitudinal cloud bands more distinct than she’d ever seen, even with bigger far-seers. And Kevpel’s own coterie of moons—why, she could count six of them, two more than she’d ever glimpsed with an instrument this size.

  Had this first day of her trip up the tower taken her that much closer to Kevpel? Nonsense. Indeed, the angle between the tower’s shaft and Kevpel’s position along the ecliptic was obtuse: she was in fact slightly farther away from that planet than if she’d observed it from the ground.

  But, why, then, did the heavens blaze forth with such clarity?

  And then it hit her: the black daytime sky, the incredible sharpness of the stars, the lack of distortion when viewing the planets.

  No air.

  This high above the world there was no air.

  No air!

  She felt her chest constricting, her breathing becoming ragged. But that was madness: she could hear the gentle hiss of the air in the lifeboat being recirculated and replenished. She was sure that at least some of the opaque equipment she could see in the transparent hull was somehow maintaining breathable air. She tried to calm down, but it was terrifying to think that only the clear walls around her separated her from, from…emptiness.

  But Novato did manage to steady herself, and as she did so her heart grew heavy. The Tak-Saleed. The Lub-Kaden. Wasted effort. Gliders couldn’t help get her people off their doomed moon. An airship was of no more use for traversing the volume between worlds than was a sailing ship. A whole new approach would be needed.

  A whole new approach.

  The lifeboat continued its ascent.

  Chapter 17

  “Angle the sails!” shouted Keenir. “Slow the ship!”

  Crewmembers ran to do the captain’s bidding. Toroca was up in the Dasheter’s loo
kout’s bucket, the far-seer Afsan had given him in his hands. He scanned the waters to the stern. There still seemed to be some forty ships in pursuit. By letting them approach more closely, Toroca and Keenir hoped to be able to get a count of how many Others might be aboard each of them. It took a while for the ships to draw visibly nearer. There, on that ship—decks crawling with Others. And on that one, a line of perhaps fifty Others leaning against the ship’s wooden gunwale. And on the lead ship, Others furiously scrambling to one side and struggling now with a piece of heavy equipment.

  As he scanned ship after ship, Toroca’s heart leapt as he saw one Other who looked a bit like Jawn.

  Suddenly, thunder split the air. The view in Toroca’s eyepiece shook wildly. The mast tipped way over. Toroca was slammed against the sides of the lookout’s bucket. He lowered the far-seer.

  Another thunderclap. Smoke and flame erupted from a large black cylinder on the foredeck of the lead Other ship. For an instant, Toroca saw something large flying—flying!—through the air, then the water just astern of the Dasheter went up in a great splash. Something round and heavy had fallen short of hitting the ship by a matter of paces.

  Keenir’s gravelly shout, from below: “Full speed! Increase the gap!”

  Footsteps pounding on the decks.

  The snap of the two unfurled leather sails.

  Another explosion from the tube on the lead ship, but this time the object—something round—smashed into the waves perhaps twenty paces astern. Toroca carefully placed the far-seer in its padded shoulder bag and made his way down the web of ropes to the deck below. Keenir was waiting.

  “What was that?” shouted the captain.

  Toroca, still rattled, held on to the mast for support. “They’re like those handheld fire tubes I told you about, but much bigger.”

  “Did you see the smoke?”

  Toroca nodded. “Thick and dark, like from the blackpowder we use for rock blasting. But they…they channel the force of the explosion, and use it to hurtle metal balls.”

  “Aye. If they’d connected, the Dasheter would have been halfway to the bottom by now. We’ll have to be careful not to let them get that close again.”

  “Eventually,” said Toroca, “they’ll be close to Land itself. Are you sure we’re not setting up our own people for slaughter?”

  “There will be a slaughter,” said Keenir, “but not of Quintaglios.”

  “I wish,” said Toroca, his voice barely audible above the snapping of the sails, “that there didn’t have to be any slaughter at all.” He took his leave of Keenir and went back to his lab to put the far-seer safely away.

  As he opened the door, he saw cracked eggshells.

  Had the ship been rocked that badly? Were the eggs broken?

  And then he saw the little yellow head of a baby Other who had tumbled out onto the leather blankets the eggs were resting on. A second egg had a hole in it, and Toroca could see a little birthing horn occasionally poking through. The third egg hadn’t cracked yet, but it was rocking back and forth.

  Toroca crouched down beside the blankets and watched, his eyes wide in wonder.

  It was pouring in Capital City. All trace of purple was gone from the leaden sky. Fat drops pounded the ground, and the sun, normally a brilliant point in the heavens, was completely invisible behind the clouds. Mokleb and Afsan held their session today in Afsan’s office, the sound of driving rain punctuated by cracks of thunder and jagged bolts of lightning visible through the windows.

  “When we first started our sessions, you told me you’d been having bad dreams for some time,” said Mokleb, who was lying on the visitor’s dayslab, located as far across the room as possible from Afsan’s own. It was by the window; a cold breeze kept Mokleb’s pheromones from washing over him. He doubtless could smell the ozone in the air, but would catch only an occasional whiff of her. “Can you be more precise about when the bad dreams began?”

  Afsan was prone on his own dayslab, which was angled over the worktable. His tail, sticking up in the air, moved slowly back and forth. “I’m not sure,” he said. “They’ve gotten more frequent as time has passed. I suppose the first bad dream was two kilodays ago. But it was so long before the second that I’d assumed the first was an isolated event.”

  Mokleb examined Afsan’s office. It was the kind of place one might expect a blind person to have: the walls were free of art, there weren’t enough oil lamps to properly illuminate the room, and there were no lamps at all over the worktable, which was devoid of writing material and had no ink or solvent pots in the little wells designed for them. Two brass figuring rods with raised numerals sat on the marble desktop.

  “And what significant things,” said Mokleb, “were happening in your life two kilodays ago?”

  Afsan clicked his teeth. “It’d be a shorter list to tell you what wasn’t happening then.” He rubbed the underside of his throat. “Let’s see. There were the murders, of course.”

  “The murders committed by your son Drawtood.”

  “Yes. Certainly they were dominant in my thoughts.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, of course, everyone was on edge: the bloodpriests had been in disrepute for some time by then.”

  “They were shunned because they’d not dispatched seven of the eight imperial egglings.”

  “That’s right. People felt it unfair that The Family didn’t have to undergo the culling of the bloodpriests, when all other clutches of eggs were subjected to it. But banishing the bloodpriests caused the population to swell enormously.”

  “And how did that affect you?”

  “Well,” said Afsan slowly, “I went into dagamant for the second time in my life.”

  “The second time? You’d felt the territorial madness once before?”

  “Yes. Aboard the Dasheter during my pilgrimage voyage.”

  “We shall explore that later. What else was happening two kilodays ago?”

  “The challenge, of course.”

  “Challenge?”

  “You know: by Governor Rodlox of Edz’toolar. The challenge to Dybo’s leadership.”

  “Ah, yes. You had a role in that?”

  “Yes. In fact, I suggested the way to resolve the challenge.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. Secretly, all eight hatchlings from Empress Len-Lends’s of eggs had been allowed to live. Seven of the hatchlings apprentice provincial governors, and the eighth was Dybo. Dybo became Emperor upon the death of his mother.”

  “I remember that,” said Mokleb. “Rodlox claimed that Dybo, who he thought was the weakest child, had been put on the throne as part of a plot to have a malleable emperor, and that he, Rodlox, was the strongest, and therefore the rightful ruler.”

  “Exactly. I simply suggested the logical test: that Dybo, Rodlox, and their siblings replay the culling of the bloodpriest, with an appropriately scaled-up carnivore acting in the role of the priest.”

  “Ah, I remember that, too. I wasn’t living in Capital City then, but the newsriders were full of the story. A blackdeath was used, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “And seven members of The Family died in that replaying.”

  Afsan raised a hand. “Only six. Spenress from Chu’toolar was still alive when Dybo finally forced the blackdeath to retreat; she lives here in the Capital now.”

  “Still, six deaths…”

  Afsan’s tone was defensive. “There are many who said that only one of them should have been alive in the first place.”

  “Of course,” said Mokleb. “Of course.” Then, a moment later, “Nonetheless…six deaths.” She tilted her head to one side and looked at Afsan. His forehead was high, his muzzle strong and firm. Perhaps this was it…“Do you,” she said casually, “feel guilt over the death of those six people?”

  A lightning bolt illuminated the room, throwing everything into stark relief. Mokleb felt her heart skip, but Afsan, of course, did not react at all. “It’s an interesting question. Certain
ly, I dislike seeing anyone die—even someone as nasty as Rodlox.” And then the thunderclap came, loud and long, shaking the adobe walls of the building. Afsan waited for the reverberations to fade before he spoke again. “But it was necessary for the good of our people that both Dybo’s authority and the credibility of the bloodpriests be restored.”

  Mokleb shook her head. She felt she was getting closer, but still, maddeningly, the answer was out of reach.

  At first Novato thought she’d been imagining it, thought it had been a by-product of her excitement.

  But it wasn’t. It was really happening.

  She stood firmly on the lifeboat’s transparent floor and dropped a small metal tool she was holding in her left hand.

  It fell.

  But it fell slowly.

  A day and a half had elapsed since her journey up the tower began. If she was right about the lifeboat’s speed, she was now some two thousand paces above the ground, a distance equal to one-third of the east-west length of Land.

  There could be no doubt. The apparent gravity was less. Much less. The tool had seemed to fall with only half its normal speed. She stooped over and picked it up. It felt light in her hand.

  Lower gravity, thought Novato. Incredible.

  The tower continued up.

  Novato decided she liked this lightness. It made her feel kilodays younger.

  Chapter 18

  The eggling Others presented a problem.

  Traditionally, shortly after a clutch of Quintaglio babies had opened their eyes, a bloodpriest would be summoned to visit the creche. The priest would meditate for daytenths, drink a sacred potion, don the purple halpataars robe, and enter the creche chamber. And then, by the flickering light of the heating fires, he’d let loose a loud roar and break into a run, sending the hatchlings scurrying to get away. One by one, he’d pounce on the egglings, slurping them down his gullet, devouring them until only one, the fastest, was left.

  But in kiloday 7126, the bloodpriests had been banished from most Packs for collusion in allowing The Family’s hatchlings to forego the culling. The bloodpriests had eventually been reinstated, but Dybo had decreed that a new selection criterion—something other than physical strength—would be used in future. Toroca, originator of the theory of evolution, was charged with finding an appropriate criterion.