by Rich Horton
“Can people see your city from up there?” Inlesh asked, the drink and the weirdness of the night making him bold.
“From Hia’a? There’s no one left there to see. From elsewhere? With telescopes, probably, or when we signal.” They followed Inlesh’s gaze toward the glow of the city. “The greenhouses look bright from here, I know, but you’ve got to understand the distances involved. The places we can actually see are huge; Ifena’a is almost three lightseconds across. That’s more than a ship like yours could travel in—” They thought about it. “Actually, I have no idea. It’s huge, though. Imagine the sea, all lit up. They’d see that from Ifena’a, but as a spark.”
“The sea,” Inlesh repeated. “The whole sea?” It was a dizzying idea. He thought of the reflections of Aranthaw’s lanterns, of the glowing mats of algae or the blue night-blooming flowers he’d seen floating on the water, and tried to picture that light extended as far as they’d sailed, farther, as far as Taramura had gone, touching every port and every shore. The image was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And the people in the stars, looking down—
They nodded. “Even when we get the transit system running again, it’ll take hours to get from one side of Ifena’a to the other. And years to get there in the first place.”
This was more than Inlesh could take in. The person seemed to sense his confusion. “Come on,” they said kindly. “Let me take you back down to your ship.”
“No,” Inlesh said, shaking off their hand. “No, I’m all right. I want to know. I want to see. We don’t know anything, and we keep arguing about it, and you know all about the stars and we don’t ask—” Words failed him, and their uselessness was almost a physical pain. If he could just explain how much it mattered to him—
“There are rules,” the person said, a little sadly. “We’re not supposed to disturb you. I think it’s stupid too. We could have prevented Hia’a, if we’d been a little more willing to get involved.” They took a deep breath, with a slight hissing sound, and seemed to come to a decision. “All right. But you can’t go around just telling people. They probably won’t believe you, but promise anyway, all right?”
“I promise,” Inlesh said immediately. He’d have promised anything, at that point.
It was hard to read expression in the jade green eyes, but he thought the person looked relieved. “All right. Stars, then. The civilizations on the far side of the world, those aren’t stars. The sun is a star.”
“My aunt told me that!” Inlesh exclaimed. “The captain said it was stupid.”
“Some people remember,” the person said, “but they don’t remember properly. It’s been sixty generations for your kind since you came inside, and in all that time the sun is the only star you’ve seen, so how could you?”
“I don’t understand,” Inlesh admitted.
“I know,” they said. “I’m going to show you.”
The two of them walked across the ridge, down toward the glowing valley. The greenhouses were rows of crystal domes, shining with soft light. “We grow our fuels here,” the person said, “and some organic components of our bodies, and some food the locals can eat, so that we can trade it to them when there’s a drought. We make sure it’s not delicious, so that they don’t get dependent on us, but our rules at least don’t require us to watch them starve.” Their mouth twisted. “That was a result of Hia’a too.” Inlesh opened his mouth to ask, but was forestalled by the machine person coming to a sudden halt before what looked like a toolshed. “Here we are.” They slid the door open and pulled out a shining coverall with a helmet attached. “This is protective clothing. We won’t go far enough that you’ll actually need protection, but it’ll disguise you.”
Inlesh struggled into the clothing, which stretched to accommodate him, albeit barely; apparently machine people tended to be short. The person sealed the helmet and did something that tinted the world with a grayish haze. “No one can see you,” they assured him. “Breathe normally, it’s fine.” They patted his arm. “Really, it’s fine. Breathe. Don’t be afraid.”
Past the last of the identical greenhouses was a gentle slope, and then a further valley, silent and dark, full of unmoving machines. He recognized some of them for their function, if not their form: pumps labored to pull the water out of the dark valley, sending it down a long channel over the ridge. Digging machines bulked silent, equipped with great shovels and scoops, and at the center of the frozen tableau was a great excavated pit, stair-stepping down to some unguessable depth.
“You’re mining something?” Inlesh guessed. “This is what you wanted me to see? Why?”
“It’s the old transport system,” the person explained. “We knew there had to be one. We’ve spent centuries trying to find it. This is an exit port. Come on.”
Not understanding, Inlesh followed. The pair picked their way to the pit and settled themselves in a kind of soft-sided box perched on its edge. “Now don’t be afraid,” his guide said again, and then the box tipped forward and fell.
Inlesh didn’t scream; he might have been proud of that, but the truth was he was simply frozen, stiff with terror, his throat and lungs as much as the rest. The box seemed to be tumbling end over end, and yet somehow his body remained seated on its floor, and the person beside him seemed unperturbed.
“We’re passing through the gravity gradient,” they said, and patted his arm as they seemed to have a habit of doing. The words were meaningless to Inlesh, but somehow the fact that the dizzying not-tumble had a name was a little reassuring, so that he was able to take a breath, and another.
The walls of the box were a dimly glowing pink, like coral lit from below, and shadows seemed to move outside them. “This is the thinnest part of the hull,” the person said, and Inlesh realized with incongruous embarrassment that he’d never asked their name, and it was too far along in their conversation to politely ask now. “It takes a little while, even so. We’ll be outside—ah, there we are.” Nothing had discernibly changed to Inlesh’s eyes, and the falling, tumbling sensation continued, though he was still on the floor. “Now, this may be a bit startling, all right? Try to relax.”
The walls began to darken, and to change, and after a moment Inlesh realized they were growing transparent, and that it was dark outside. Instead of the sheer sides of some unfathomably deep pit, as he had half expected, there was a flat dark plain lit by occasional nearby spotlights, which cast sharp-edged shadows from the shapes of unmoving machines. And overhead—the box’s ceiling had gone invisible too—there were lights. Not the variously shaped stars he was familiar with, the cloud of Ifenwa and the river of Omond Halaw and the rest, but harsh points that burned with a steady light, some stronger or fainter, some more red or more blue, but all clearer than anything he had ever seen.
“Those are the stars,” the person said. “The real ones. Like the sun.”
“Are there—” Inlesh didn’t know how to ask the question, realizing dimly that anything he asked would reveal how little he understood. “Are there people there?” he managed plaintively.
“Oh, yes. Well, not on the stars. Circling them. On planets, or swarm habitats, or rings—you don’t know planets, of course, but they’re—well, different ways people can live, that’s all. Not very many stars are completely enclosed like ours, but you can put just as many people in a well-constructed swarm as we have in our shell. And of course there are other shells. They tend not to communicate much, though, after a few millennia. Well, you can imagine.”
Inlesh tried. Ifenwa, he thought, is the size of the great sea. And the world has—thousands of places the size of Ifenwa. Millions. And out there—
He fixed his eyes on one star, red and dim. That star, he tried to tell himself, could have a whole world, as huge and various and strange as his own, with seas and ships and jungles and books and cats yawning in cages and people trying to find God. And that one, next to it. And that one—
It was too much. He couldn’t encompass it. No wonder his ance
stors had hidden them. No wonder they had turned away from that infinite openness and concealed its existence; no wonder they had buried the very words under new strata of language, calling the lights of the far cities within the world “stars” to obscure the truth.
“Take me home,” he managed. “Please. Take me home.”
The machine person looked at him, their flat green eyes showing nothing, and Inlesh felt the unbridgeable gap between them: that here was someone who could encompass it, for whom such numbers and distances had meaning. Here was someone who could use words like always.
“It’s all right,” they said, but Inlesh, knowing for the first time his own smallness and knowing even so that the perception he had of it could only be a shadow of the truth, had gone past speech now, and only stared mutely outward. After a while, the machine person made a sad little gesture. Had Inlesh been able to read it, he would have known the person to be admitting failure: perhaps it was best after all, they admitted, not to share this knowledge with the other peoples of the sphere. It was too much for them, who had been inside too long.
They communicated this, regretfully, to others, who had noted the activation of the transport module and wondered idly at its purpose. There was a certain amount of weary scolding, and Hia’a was mentioned several times, and the reasons for rules. There were apologies, and arguments, and consultations, all in the seconds during which a hand was raised to touch Inlesh’s shoulder.
At length, a decision was made. No one would know; memories need not be permanent. They would blur this one’s recollections so that he would take no permanent damage from his experience, and adjust him so that he would not follow the same path of inquiry again, and send him home.
• • •
Inlesh woke at the base of the tower. It was morning, the segments of the night-shell folded back to thin lines barely visible on the surface of the sun. He felt fuzzy-headed, and vague.
He remembered walking away from the revel, and climbing the ridge, and after that—dreams, he thought. Something dizzying and terrible, but he couldn’t catch hold of it. He felt strange, oddly incurious, as though he ought to be wondering about something but couldn’t be bothered to.
Aranthaw, he thought. I should get back. They would be leaving on the ebb tide for Treynou Bay, and then back to Gwylleridge, and then out on the circuit again. He’d planned, a hundred days ago, that once he had some ship experience he’d sign up for a different crew, a voyage further out. See the world in all its glorious strangeness. He’d wanted that, hadn’t he? Only now there didn’t seem much point.
He poked at the lack of curiosity as at a missing tooth, as he made his way back down the path toward the shore. Something had happened. He’d fallen asleep up there, maybe, and had a nightmare? He wasn’t usually so unsettled by dreams.
Anyway, Aranthaw and her circuit was enough. He didn’t need anything more. He was, the thought came strongly, as though imprinted in him like a mark in solidified wax, satisfied with what he knew and did not need to seek out anything more. Somehow he knew he would never go looking for anything again.
He rejoined the crew before all of them had even woken up. They assumed he’d gone off with some local, as no few of the sailors had, and he was chided for it, but with good humor. Aranthaw set out at midmorning, hugging the coastline, on the way to her next port of call. Inlesh worked his shift quietly, and anyone who noticed the change in him put it down to the sleepless night, and made the usual jokes, and thought nothing of it.
Later that night, he burned his maps.
A Catalog of Storms
by Fran Wilde
The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud.
“Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder.
Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at the dark shadows on the cliffs.
“You can see those two, just there. Almost gone. The weather wouldn’t take them if they weren’t wayward already, though.” She tsks. “Varyl, Lillit, pay attention. Don’t let that be any of you girls.”
Her voice sounds proud and sad because she’s thinking of her aunt, who turned to lightning.
The town’s first weatherman.
The three of us kids stare across the bay to where the setting sun’s turned the cliff dark. On the edge of the cliff sits an old mansion that didn’t fall into the sea with the others: the Cliffwatch. Its turrets and cupolas are wrapped with steel cables from the broken bridge. Looks like metal vines grabbed and tethered the building to the solid part of the jutting cliff.
All the weathermen live there, until they don’t anymore.
“They’re leaned too far out and too still to be people.” Varyl waves Mumma’s hand down.
Varyl always says stuff like that because . . .
“They used to be people. They’re weathermen now,” Lillit answers.
. . . Lillit always rises to the bait.
“”You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Varyl whispers, and her eyes dance because she knows she’s got her twin in knots, wishing to be first and best at something. Lillit is always second at everything.
Mumma sighs, but I wait, ears perked, for whatever’s coming next because it’s always something wicked. Lillit has a fast temper.
But none of us are prepared this time.
“I do too know. I talked to one, once,” Lillit yells and then her hand goes up over her mouth, just for a moment, and her eyes look like she’d cut Varyl if she thought she’d get away with it.
And Mumma’s already turned and got Lillit by the ear. “You did what.” Her voice shudders. “Varyl, keep an eye out.”
Some weathermen visit relatives in town, when the weather is calm. They look for others like them, or who might be. When they do that, mothers hide their children.
Mumma starts to drag Lillit on home. And just then a passing weatherman starts to scream by the fountain as if he’d read Mumma’s weather, not the sky’s.
When weathermen warn about a squall, it always comes. Storms aren’t their fault, and they’ll come anyway. The key is to know what kind of storm’s coming and what to do when it does. Weathermen can do that.
For a time.
I grab our basket of washing. Mumma and Varyl grab Lillit. We run as far from the fountain as fast as we can, before the sky turns ash-grey and the searing clouds—the really bad kind—begin to fall.
And that’s how Lillit is saved from a thrashing, but is still lost to us in the end.
• • •
An Incomplete Catalog of Storms
A Felrag: the summer wind that turns the water green first, then churns up dark clouds into fists. Not deadly, usually, but good to warn the boats.
A Browtic: rising heat from below that drives the rats and snakes from underground before they roast there. The streets swirl with them, they bite and bite until the browtic cools. Make sure all babies are well and high.
A Neap-Change: the forgotten tide that’s neither low nor high, the calmest of waters, when what rests in the deeps slowly slither forth. A silent storm that looks nothing like a storm. It looks like calm and moonlight on water, but then people go missing.
A Glare: a storm of silence and retribution, with no forgiveness, a terror of it, that takes over a whole community until the person causing it is removed. It looks like a dry wind, but it’s always some person that’s behind it.
A Vivid: that bright sunlit rainbow-edged storm that seduces young women out into the early morning before they’ve been properly wrapped in cloaks. The one that gets in their lungs and makes them sing until they cry, until they can only taste food made of honey and milk and they grow pale and glass-eyed. Beware vivids in spring for the bride’s sake.
A Searcloud: heated air so thick it blinds as it wraps charred arms around those it catches, then billows in the lungs, scorching words from their so
unds, memories from their bearers. Often followed by sorrow, searclouds are best avoided, run through at top speed, or never named.
An Ashpale: thick, gathering clouds from the heights, where the ice forms. When it leaves, everything in its path is slick and frozen. Scream it away if you can, before your breath freezes too.
• • •
The Cliffwatch is broken now, its far wall tumbled half down to the ocean so that every room ends in water.
We go up there a lot to poke around now that we’re older.
After that Searcloud passed, Mumma searched through our house until she found Lillit’s notes—her name wasn’t on them, but we’d know her penmanship anywhere. Since she’s left-handed and it smears, whether chalk or ink. My handwriting doesn’t smear. Nor Varyl’’s.
The paper—a whole sheet!—was crammed into a crack in the wall behind our bed. I rubbed the thick handmade weave of it between my fingers, counting until Mumma snatched it away again.
Lillit had been making up storms, five of them already, mixing them in with known weather. She’d been practicing.
Mumma shrieked at her, as you could imagine. “You don’t want this. You don’t want it.”
I ducked behind Varyl, who was watching, wide-eyed. Everyone’s needed for battle against the storms, but no one wants someone they love to go.
And Lillit, for the first time, didn’t talk back. She stood as still as a weatherman. She did want it.
While we ran to her room to help her pack, Mumma wept.
The Mayor knocked when it was time to take Lillit up the cliff. “Twice in your family! Do you think Sila too? Or Varyl?” He looked eagerly around Mumma’s wide frame at us. “A great honor!”
“Sila and Varyl don’t have enough sense to come out of the rain, much less call storms,” Mumma said. She bustled the Mayor from the threshold and they flanked Lillit, who stepped forward without a word, her face already saying “up,” even as her feet crunched the gravel down.