by Rich Horton
She seemed to be falling straight down, though part of her mind knew this to be wrong. The ground below was coming up faster, and she realized—the terror that flooded her consciousness was not entirely unreasoning—that a fall at this distance, even in reduced gravity, would accelerate her to deadly velocity. Instinctively she threw out her arms—
The glancing blow knocked her sideways, sending her into a slow roll that sent her surroundings whirling past. She had struck the side of a stack, a bruising blow to the shoulders that—
And she struck again, this time banging her back and butt. She was bouncing off the side of a tier, because—of course—its lower levels were rotating into her path. Her fall was not the straight plunge that a dropped cup seemed to follow, but a vector cutting through the sweep of—
This time she caromed off a tarp-covered expanse, which yielded slightly before sending her back into space. A few seconds later she struck again, and slid for a second along its smooth surface before a sharp corner beneath it sent her spinning.
After that the cliffside rose up repeatedly to smack her. She was not Hephaistos, flung from the heights, but a satyr tumbling down a rocky slope. The realization that she was not going to die had just taken form when she slammed into something hard. The impact drove every puff of air from her lungs, and it was several disoriented seconds before she realized that she had come to rest upon the “ground.”
Asia lay still, less out of pain (although there was that) than from a reeling vertigo that sent the world swirling about her. There were shouts somewhere overhead, but she could not tell whose. A second later a rush of self-consciousness flooded through her, and she rose unsteadily on her palms to look about.
Fatima, Li Wei, and Yukiko were dropping to the ground, concern on their faces. There was no sign of Justin. Of course, she thought wearily: he would not bother scrambling down to see if she were all right; he had known that the plummet would merely leave her dazed, humiliated, and angry.
• • •
She had expected repercussions for this—you didn’t have to be the miscreant to end up in trouble—but nobody mentioned it, or asked where they had been. This was a departure from the way things had been her entire life, but since the Reversals everything was different, and knowing that things are different offered no preparation for the next surprise.
None of her parents were showing much interest in where the children were spending their time. She told them about the stone chip that had fallen from the firmament, though even as she said it she realized this could not be true. An aunty explained that it must have come loose during orbital insertion when the Hull had whipped around Neptune and been, in the odd words of Granigran, “wrung like an old shoe.”
Meals were short and the adults would depart quickly, leaving the children bemused and sometimes hurt. Everyone was busy (“everyone” apparently did not include the children), and their docents were not giving extra assignments to make up for lost family time. The Pod was crowded (Castor was no doubt just as bad) with people whose living quarters had been in the Hull, and kids would slip through the narrowed corridors, hoping their docents would not track them as they headed for less crowded regions, such as the once-spacious Celestial Gardens or the Moon Pool. The fact that nobody had objected to their riding the elevator shafts down to the Hull and mingling with the workers showed how preoccupied everyone was. They wandered away, into areas where neither adult nor mech could be seen, realms of uncertain boundaries, products of an interim that had begun unannounced and would certainly not last.
What were the adults doing? It was not necessary to know, the children were told, because Things Were Different Now and once the settlement was established (they were assured), the children would be embarked upon entirely new projects, a lifetime of audacious endeavors.
“I can tell you what they are doing,” said Justin, who had come up behind them. Li Wei jumped, but Asia, who had expected something like this, did not move. The other children turned to look at her. Conversation, which had circled all afternoon around the grown-ups’ behavior, died instantly.
“Everyone has theories,” said Asia after a moment, as though responding to the previous speaker. “But without evidence, they are all of equal worth.”
Justin must have gestured to the others, because they all rose silently and moved away. Asia remained still, refusing to acknowledge him. After a moment he sat next to her, serene in his usual maddening presumption but free to be ignored.
“Do you know why I pushed you off the ledge?”
Asia glared at him, which he apparently took as permission to continue.
“It was a test, and it yielded two results. It confirmed that we are not being watched. Would I be here if any adult had seen that? The surveillance that we have spent our lives with does not extend to the Wilds, however many motes may be operating in the active construction zones.”
Asia had not thought of that. “And what is the second?” she asked.
“That you can be trusted. You didn’t turn me in.”
She glared again, but Justin’s expression was so disarming that curiosity began to adulterate her anger. “Trusted for what?”
“Trusted to be shown something I could never show unless I knew that no one was watching.”
Asia looked carefully around them. The other kids were gone, and she could not hear the faint buzz of tympani drifting through the air. “This is about the need for genuine gravity, right?”
“Not really. I mean that’s interesting, too, but I’ll tell you later.” He didn’t bother to glance around. “What do you think all the adults are doing these days?”
“Are you serious? They are all busy with the Arrival.”
Justin rolled his eyes, perhaps his most irritating habit. “Preparations for the Arrival are being made by the System.” He routinely affected a knowing tone when referring to those elements of the ship’s administration that were not people. “Do you think our parents are calculating trajectories or making resettlement plans? Have you seen any adults out in the work zones? None of that is being done by people. The adults are all engaged in something very different.”
Asia merely looked at him.
“Okay, I will tell you. They are training their brains to make them the kind of people who will spend their lives doing what the times ahead require.”
“You’re saying they are spending more time in the Dream.”
“It’s more than that. The Dream is nothing—you have been in the Dream, although they limit our time there. This is much more powerful.”
“And how do you know?”
“Well . . . ” And at this Justin’s voice dropped slightly. “I know someone in Implementation. We’re . . . friendly, you know?” Asia stared. “He tells me stuff.”
“Stuff he shouldn’t be telling you.”
“Well, yes.” Justin’s voice sounded defensive. “So I certainly shouldn’t be telling you, but I am. Because I know you won’t tell, and I know that no one is watching.”
“Watching?”
“Would you believe me if I didn’t have something to show you as well?”
Asia thought about that. She didn’t like Justin’s logical puzzle boxes, which you had to tap carefully on every side before proceeding to open, but she was used to them. “So you have it with you now,” she said.
Justin reached behind him and pulled something from his pocket. “Each unit is supposed to hold enough charge, or whatever is in it, for only one experience, and then it gets discarded. But there is always a bit left over, enough for a child. And I can tell you that it works.”
He held up a small object. It was black, flat, and rounded, and it rested easily in his hand.
“How would you like to be a centaur?”
• • •
The world was full of things the children did not know about, which they were told didn’t matter because a new world lay ahead of them. The world they grew up in was not the world their parents had left, so they knew
little of that one as well.
No children were aboard when the ship departed from Earth orbit, though many were born the following year. The divide between children and grown-ups was stark; there were no youthful adults. Certainly someone had worried about this, to what end no child knew.
Perhaps it was because the children knew no stories of their homeland, or tales (aside from that of their parents’ embarkation) of their people, that the stories of Earth they had studied seemed equally vivid whether historical or imaginary. Asia knew that there had never been a winged horse, though she had never seen a real one, either. No soldiers had sprung up from dragon’s teeth, although self-replicating machines had done something like that, which was the reason (one of them) why there weren’t more people on Earth these days.
The children knew about history’s great revolutions, the invasion of continents and subjugation of millions, and they also knew that the verse epics about the Drowning of Bengal were based on real events but that the characters were mostly fictitious, and that the games that Justin had been thrilled to play, of battling one’s way through the chaos of the inundated cities to distant highlands, were (even he knew) lurid inventions. Asia had once imagined being a dryad but she had never thought them real, and when she figured out why they were always being pursued by satyrs or gods (and how often they ended up being transformed into animals or plants), she decided that she liked nereids. Later she developed a fascination with Arion, the immortal and swift-running horse, and then with other horses, especially those that flew through space, such as Lampus and Phaethon.
But people, even girls, are crafters and technites, so hands were necessary, as were (she soon decided) properly human features. She knew from a thousand images the Attic physiognomy, and imagined its windswept lineaments—resolute countenance, splendid hair streaming—upon a nobly galloping creature, horse and rider as one. Great was her shock when she learned that such mythical beasts already filled the tales she was exploring, and that the word for them was the name of their ship and home, a trochee so familiar that she had never imagined a separate meaning.
And their stories were unvaryingly sad. Asia was older now, and her life—everyone’s lives—shook with disruptions. She was still reading her way through Greek and Roman literature, mostly in English (on the perhaps dubious grounds that it was closer than Mandarin to the original languages), and now wondered how she had ever thought that mythology celebrated virtue rewarded and evil struck down. Why, then, was she still drawn to its jagged contours? It certainly did not offer veracity. Nothing in actual history was like it, and certainly nothing in the long unfraught voyage that that had filled her and her playmates’ lives.
But no one compelled her to justify her love, which remained unknown to the grown-ups unless her docents had told them. No child knew what their immaterial instructors reported to their parents, but what Asia’s knew of her reading and viewing—and they obviously knew everything—had proved no cause for concern. She pursued her studies every day, watched new shows from Earth when they became available, played in the Dream with her classmates when permitted, and read about gods and goddesses, monsters and heroes, creatures that could change shape or find theirs cruelly changed.
The shaggy and incontinent kentauroi were unlikely creatures to engage even her uncertain sympathies, but whom was she supposed to enjoy imagining in their agones and their destinies—Arachne, Niobe, Cassandra?
• • •
“It doesn’t alter your mind,” said Justin, who was doing something to the back of her head. Asia was slightly alarmed that Justin would even offer that assurance, so great was her society’s horror of incursions into the physical integrity of the brain. “It allows you to focus.”
“I can focus already,” Asia replied. “So can the grown-ups.”
“Not like this.” She felt something sticky adhere to her scalp and resisted the impulse to pull away. “And I’m not just repeating what I heard; I have experienced it.”
“So why is this important now? People have carried out tasks requiring intense concentration throughout history, and most of the planning that lies ahead of us is being made by cognitive systems.”
“Good question. I was hoping you would help me answer it.”
Asia turned to look him in the eye. “So that’s why you are offering me this?”
“I also think you will find it interesting. And whom else would I choose to share this with?”
Perhaps Justin was feeling uneasy about the subject, for he added, “So tell me more about centaurs. Where did they come from?”
This was something no one ever asked her about. “Accounts vary, but all agree that they are descended from an encounter between a human and a cloud creature, a pseudos created in the image of Hera as a trap for someone who sought to seduce her. Because the child of this union mated with horses, the resulting centaurs were called ‘nubigena,’ or cloud-born.”
Justin laughed. “So the centaurs came from a matrix of clouds, while our Centaur is bound for another. That’s called an irony, something I am said to cultivate to excess. The English word for irony is actually Greek, eironeia, did you know that?”
Asia was too nervous to attend to his chatter, which she anyway knew was intended to distract her. The device was resting snugly against her skull, and he reached around to attach something to each temple. “How is this supposed to work?” she asked.
“You imagine what you want and make it as vivid as possible. If you envision something sexual or violent, those parts of your brain will light up and the device will shut down.” Justin laughed. “So don’t do that!”
Asia imagined the hills of Thessaly, where centaurs had roamed freely in their early years. They both fought and rutted when they encountered humans, but Asia had no interest in that. Why make yourself into a fabulous creature and then meet up with people? It was an escape from the human, the deeply familiar, that she sought.
“Okay, that’s good . . . ” Justin must have been reading a display. “Now,” and he came around to face her, holding two wires that trailed back behind her. “You need to put these—”
“You’re not going to put those in my nose?” she cried.
“No, of course not. I place them underneath—” he positioned just below each nostril—“and when you are ready, you inhale deeply. They are hollow tubes, which release a substance that will help you relax.”
Asia knew she was not relaxed. “All right,” she said. She closed her eyes, paused for a long second, and then drew a slow breath. Within seconds she was unconscious.
• • •
As in a dream, there is no beginning: she has always been here. Sunlight beats upon the skin, and the warm breeze is rich with six or eight scents, some (she knows) from far away while others are so near they sting. If she stands still for a second—steadying herself so that her legs are not shifting on the uneven ground requires a moment—she can hear birdsong, branches rustle, the faint whistle of wind blowing over a crest. A long, deep breath fills her rib cage, fresher than any she has drawn.
Standing still is not possible; she is trotting ahead before she decides to. The afternoon sun falls upon a crumbling limestone escarpment tufted with scraggly trees contorted by mountain winds, while the landscape to the west descends in bluffs and patches of scrub to a broad plain. A crescent of reflected sunlight glistens from a river below, and she turns toward it.
Every child has scrambled on all fours and imagined herself a courser, but to possess six limbs—to pick your way briskly downslope while stripping leaves from a bough you find in your hands—is to feel your mind racing in ways never felt by humans, nor mayhap even by gods. She leaps effortlessly over a small stream, and the tetragonismos of the act, the parabolic beauty achieved by the slight lift of the shoulders at the right instant, sings like the blast of a horn. With a cry she throws up her arms and breaks into a gallop.
How could they think us mere beasts? Her fine mind can reach for an answer, but the question
is torn loose by the winds of her passage and disappears somewhere behind her. Their loins are stallions’ but their psyches are human, and their unrecalled grandam was something greater than either. Hubris to declare ourselves greater than the twofoots; but centaurs lack the vanity of satyrs or women, and never shall we boast to gods or men. What we are we don’t vaunt; we be.
She follows the stream downhill, three times leaping over tributaries as they merge, but finally splashing through its now broader expanse for the mere joy of it. We take up more room in the world. The land is nearly level, greener and less stony. Her senses are no greater than any human’s; if there is a goat-man lurking behind the trees, she cannot smell him, nor hear the whispers of any daphnaie growing along the banks. She looks alertly about and reverses her olive bough so that she is gripping its narrow end.
Crossing a clearing, she sees a kite hovering high overhead, its wings almost motionless. Hopeful that such vigilance would keep smaller birds at bay, she searches for fig trees but finds only unripe fruit. A grapevine’s yield proves small and sour, and her thoughts turn naturally to meat.
Her people are adept with a bow, and even the twofoots acknowledge their skill with stones (although they tend to portray the six-limbed folk as hurling boulders down upon helpless humans). But she has neither bow nor arrows, nor skinning knife nor flint to start a fire. The palm-sized piece of dolomite she tossed idly up and down finds its target the second time she flings it—dropping the bough from her left hand as she drew back her right and letting fly before it struck the ground—but the hare she now holds limp will have to be borne to a spit, and she can neither secure it round her waist nor run a cord through its ears to sling over her shoulder. She drapes the carcass across her back and carefully stoops—one of the few actions her people cannot execute gracefully—to pick up more stones. An hour later she has two more hares, enough to hold in her hand without feeling foolish.
She hears them before they hear her, for their pounding hooves are many and hers are single and still. Yet this advantage is cancelled by some other factor—perhaps they scented her before she them, though they are, if anything, more pungent. A stronger sense of smell would accord with their broad nostrils and (as events prove) bestial natures.