by Rich Horton
He heard small movements from up the hill. With these rounds, it was likely that if the boy was still alive, he was also unwounded. He began to slowly make his way through the trees, making sure he also wasn’t going to be where the boy had last placed him. As he walked, he started to wonder about his surroundings. There was indeed something very strange about this empty world. He’d sometimes heard, at parties, at Court, back when he’d been invited, the sort of people who had nothing better to do talking about the glories of nature, about some mysterious poetic energy that looking at the simplicity of it could inspire in them. Hamilton thought, and had once ill-advisedly said, that nature wasn’t simple at all, that the billions of edges and details and angled surfaces in any view of it were the essence of complexity, much more so than any of the artefacts of civilisation. To him, nature was cover, and all the better for its detail. Liz . . . her Royal Highness . . . had made some joke on that occasion to cover the fact that he’d just bluntly contradicted the French ambassador.
But here was some strange feeling of glory. The trees all around him, the undergrowth he was paying such attention to as he stepped through it, it all seemed to be shouting at him. The colours seemed too bright. Was this some flaw in his covers? No. This was too complete. But it wasn’t about simplicity. The objects he saw nearby, even the river glimpsed down there, they were all . . . there was more detail than he was used to. He recalled a time when he’d injured one of his corneas, the fuzziness of view in one eye, until they’d grown and fitted a new one. It was like he’d suffered from something like that all his life, and now he could see better. God, it would be good to be able to stay here. Such relief and rest would be his.
No. These were dangerous thoughts.
There was a noise ahead of him and he brought the gun up. But he swiftly saw what it was. A fox was staring at him from between two bushes. Of course, he’d been downwind of it, and it had turned to face him in that instant. Better luck than he’d ever had on the hunt. But the eyes on this thing, the sheen of its fur, the intensity of every strand, that he could see from here . . .
The fox broke the instant and ran.
Something in the world broke with it and Hamilton hit the ground hard, realising in that moment that his eardrums were resounding and being glad they were resounding because that meant he was still alive, and he threw himself aside as the soil and leaves still fell around him and were sucked suddenly sideways, and he was rolling down the hill, crashing into cover and grabbing the soil to stop himself before the noise had died.
The boy had nearly had him. The boy had the same gun. Of course he had.
He lay there, panting. Then he lay there some more. The boy couldn’t be sure he was here or he’d have fired by now. He wondered, ridiculously, for a moment, about the life of the fox. He killed the thought and started to push himself forward on his elbows. He realised, as he did so, that he wasn’t injured. This might come down to a lucky shot. It was a contest of blunderbusses and balloons.
He felt, oddly, that it was apt his life should come to this. Then he killed that thought too. It would be more bloody apt if his life came to this then continued after the death of the other fellow.
“You could just stay here.” That was the boy again, hard to trace where it was coming from beyond the general direction. He’d placed himself somewhere where the sound was broken, some trees close together, a rock wall.
Hamilton kept looking. “Why do you say that?”
‘Don’t you know where you are?”
“An optional Britain.”
“Hardly, old man.” The affectations he’d lost along the way. “It’s not a country at all if there’s nobody in it.”
“I presume His Majesty has been in it. And probably found good hunting.”
“As well he might. In heaven.”
Hamilton grinned at the oddness of that. “How do you make that out?” It felt like the boy wanted to debate with his father. Wanted to test the bars of his cage. Perhaps he’d felt like that, at that age, but his own father’s failure had meant he never felt able to, or perhaps had never felt the need. A place where there was no identity for him and no reason to do anything? More like the hell with no balance that the boy came from.
“It’s more . . . real . . . than where either of us are from. And I say it’s obviously heaven, because nobody got here.”
Hamilton had heard the smile in his voice. “Except us. Are you sure it’s not the other place?” A curious thought came to him. “Is that why you want me to stay?”
“I mean that if I went back, they wouldn’t search in here. You could wait a few days, go anywhere you want.”
Hamilton grimaced at that lack of meaning in the boy’s life. “You think I’d abandon my duty?” He had a vision for a moment of being replaced in his life by the younger man. It felt like an invasion of himself. But also there was the frightening feel of temptation to it.
“I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that, old man.” He meant it, too. “I mean you could take advantage of this game. They need one of us to die, so . . . ”
Where had he got that idea? Turpin would have liked to see the boy hauled back as a trophy, but the Palace was decidedly lukewarm on the matter, and Hamilton couldn’t see any way in which any of the interested parties would be satisfied with the boy, rather than himself, emerging from the forest. “Who told you that?”
A pause. “Are you trying to lie to me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it . . . old man. I’m just here to bring you back.” The boy might assume that Hamilton had been given covers he had not, lies that could fool ears that could detect lies. Or he might know that whatever he had in his head was in advance of anything Hamilton had as standard issue. But they knew each other’s voices too well.
There was a sound from a direction Hamilton didn’t expect. He turned, but he made himself do it with his gun lowered. There stood the boy. He had his gun lowered too. Hamilton stepped towards him. He allowed himself to make the first honest eye contact he’d had with his younger self. To see that face looking open to him was truly extraordinary, a joy that needed to be held down, a kindness worth crossing the waves that held worlds apart. He took a deep breath of an air that was indeed better than any he’d tasted. Whether or not this was heaven, he could imagine His Majesty walking in it and it giving him ideas of what should belong to him, of hunting endlessly here, with new youth for himself whenever he wished, and younger versions of every courtier and courtesan at his command. There would be, thanks to this boy, if some sort of misunderstanding could be proved, new manners forever. But that was hardly the boy’s fault. And in that moment, Hamilton decided to lead him back to the clearing, and to another thing often denied to their kind: explanations.
“I was told,” began the boy, “that I could only secure my place in society, in your world, by killing you. That that was why we had been brought together in . . . different contests.”
Hamilton realised that this was exactly what he had once himself imagined. “Who—?”
A shot exactly like his or the boy’s rang out across the absolute clarity of the sky. The boy’s face bloated, in a moment, his body deformed by the impact, blood and the elements of a name bursting from his mouth. The collapsar shell sucked in again and the body dropped to the ground, emptied.
She stepped forward, lowering her gun. At least she had the grace to look sad. “Miss Nothing,” she said.
She was still wearing that bloody dress. She slipped her gun back inside it, hiding it again. She and Hamilton stood looking at each other for a while, until Hamilton understood that if he wanted to shoot her she was going to let him, and angrily holstered his gun.
She immediately started back towards the house. He considered the idea of burying the boy. The absurdity of it made something catch in his throat. He marched after her and caught up. “Damn you. Damn both of us for not seeing you coming.” He grabbed her by the arm to stop her. “I take it you were never truly out of favour with the College?�
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She looked calmly at him. “We don’t mind the idea of raiding optional worlds. We don’t mind stealing new bodies for old minds. Up to a point. But we draw the line at them replacing us. We’re the bloody College of Heralds, Major. Without family trees, we’d be out of business.”
“And by setting up the boy to look like he was capable of theft, kidnapping and treachery, to the point of even being a threat to His Majesty—”
“We’ve proven such replacements to be unreliable. They never had the balance, you see.”
“And you’re telling me this because—?”
She looked truly sad for him in that moment. She understood him. “Because you’re going to let me get away with it.”
They emerged into the clearing. As they did so, Precious immediately became the model of a trembling, rescued victim. “He was a monster!” she cried out, supporting herself on Hamilton’s arm.
“Was?” asked the voice of Turpin from the trees.
Hamilton kept his expression calm. “The boy is dead now,” he said.
The Instructive Tale of the Archeologist and His Wife
Alexander Jablokov
Surface Intrusions
Not even forgotten things are immune from change.
No archeological layer remains pristine. Each successive present affects every past. Later settlers dig to make latrines or to hide valuables from raiders, and insert their remains into levels belonging to earlier eras. Freezing and thawing cycles cause ancient objects to rise into their future. Rodents dig through and mix the soil. Deforestation upstream leads to increased water flow and the tumbling together of deposits. What an archeologist initially thinks lies deep in the past may well be from some later era, or even from one much earlier.
So the archeologist wasn’t too disturbed at the battery that turned up in the burial in Level C2, the one belonging to the high era of the Akaskid kings. This mercury/selenium disk, from some technological era gadget, was clearly not the possession of any of the three skeletons in the burial, whose long-bone growth patterns and generous dentition identified them as merchants, wealthy from the cross-Indian-Ocean trade.
The archeologist was much more interested in the way the site seemed to support a story in the Bruniad, the one where Parvar and Krim travel to the court of the Shoreholder and plead for access to the shallow waters, to recover the things they had lost through shipwreck. Level C2 was perhaps too late to be connected to that story, as would be pointed out by academic opponents, but the archeologist didn’t think that the arrangement of the shallow bay, the graves on the headland, and, most importantly, the uncovered knife with the ceremonial procession on the goat-bone handle were just coincidence. And it had long been accepted that “Shoreholder,” or perhaps “Disposer of the Littoral,” had been one of the minor functional titles of at least some of the Akaskids.
Sure, according to the final chapter of the Bruniad, Parvar and Krim had survived that particular encounter with the Shoreholder, dying only later, during the siege of Murgyl, but all stories are made up of both the false and the true. If Parvar and Krim, or, rather, the real traders that had been their initial inspirations, had actually died here, on the rocky coast of the Beak, it clarified some other issues in the old epic. The two men ceased to play a role in the narrative after this visit, despite its seeming success, until they popped out of nowhere, cheery and joking as always, at the walls of Murgyl, only to sicken and die during the plague visited on the besieging forces by the goddess Imimi. It had always seemed like a gap in the poet’s art that these two characters had worked so hard, only to be forgotten at the moment they seemed to have accomplished something, then to be perfunctorily trotted on and killed off, as if some child in back had noticed their absence during a reading and called the poet’s attention to it. It reeked of the quick fix.
A lot of good papers came out of this particular excavation, and made the archeologist a force to be reckoned with. But the end of the technological era was largely the domain of obsessives and crackpots. Even now his reputation wouldn’t survive contact with it. He set the battery aside for later study.
Intertribal Marriage Arrangements
The archeologist had first made his name with an excavation near a provincial town farther south down the coast at Lamu. He had settled on the unpopular period of the pre-Tiorman kingdoms, despite pleas from his dissertation advisor. The Tiorman high priests always had a hold on the popular imagination, and specialists in them were always in demand for lectures and articles, but the period preceding their glorious reigns, with its complex wars and melancholy religious massacres, was of interest to no one.
No one, that is, but the archeologist. Among the partially flooded townsites he found signs of a previously unsuspected trading network, and, particularly, one enameled mask from a god that the Tiorman thearchs had later turned into a demon, buried upside down underneath the hearth of a burned-out farmstead. That snarling visage, with its shattered teeth, one eye gleaming onyx, the other gouged out, either by a treasure hunter or a theological commentator, became a popular image, reproduced on magazine covers and eventually on materials promoting a popular show of pre-Tiorman art and an associated set of lectures by the archeologist himself.
The second winter of his excavation found him dining frequently at the home of the provincial governor. As the presence of fish bones in a midden far inland indicates the existence of a trading route across the desert, so the presence of the archeologist at the somewhat overbearing governor’s table indicated the existence of treasure, in the form of the governor’s daughter.
The family came from the highlands near the lakes, but she had been raised in the coastal region, largely by local nursemaids and tutors. Her childhood friends had come from the families of local nut-harvesters and hydraulic engineers.
As she had grown to adulthood, most of her local friends had fallen away. Though she still visited their families at times of mourning or joy, the old intimacy was gone. When the archeologist first saw her, she was returning from a visit to the sickbed of an old friend’s mother, head down and lonely, dressed in a dark gown that differed from local garb only by the addition of gold embroidery along the hem. He watched her vanish through the back gate of the governor’s villa, and finally decided to accept the dinner invitation he had been dodging.
Though she was willing to accept his courting, she was subtly resistant to it. He’d thought that a man with a promising career from a much larger city would be instantly interesting. When that proved not to be the case, he found himself working hard to please her. That was something he’d never done.
Finally, she agreed to go on a trip with him, to see what they were like with each other away from her family, from his dig. He did manage to spin the situation in his direction, by choosing the dramatic ruins of the Gardens of Nor, an old excavation a day’s journey away. He used his connections to get them a guesthouse with a view across the hills.
And, in fact, the mysterious frescos and the romantic gardens that had been grown in the old banqueting halls had their effect, and she warmed to him. But before she did, she felt compelled to confess to him her encounters with other lovers, both travelers and men from the towns around hers. It was a startling number.
For a couple of days, he found himself withdrawn, even hostile. It was always annoying when an uncovered artifact destroys a cherished hypothesis. He hadn’t even known he had a hypothesis. She didn’t try to comfort him, or reassure him in any way. Nothing about the way she brushed her hair changed. The revelation should have made him turn away from her. Instead, he found that he was caught. Once he found a way not to think about it, he found himself wanting to please her. Eventually, somehow, he did.
On their return, she accepted his suit, negotiations were completed, and they were married according to the rites of her family, with a late-night celebration with those who had watched her grow up. It would be the last time she would see most of her childhood companions. The next year, the archeologis
t transferred his area of interest north up the coast, to the territories where the Akaskid kings had once ruled, and she went with him.
Horizon Layer
For the next few years, the archeologist continued his excavation of Akaskid Level C2. It was a rich deposit, though he found nothing as photogenic as snarling god/demon masks. His team uncovered everything from cosmetics kits to goat hobbles, revealing a rich daily life among these villagers who lived unconcerned near the seat of power, and providing clues as to what kind of life was worth living. From what the archeologist could see, these people had lived in harmony with their environment for centuries, never asking of the local resources more than they could sustainably give. Then an arrogant aristocrat class with more ambition than taste arose, demanded flashy decorations, and burned up centuries of accumulated wealth in a vain attempt to conquer their neighbors. The Akaskid kings raised armies, and, for a while, even ruled the remnants of the Tiorman cities, long past their glory days. Then the Akaskids themselves had inevitably collapsed, their overfed bodies crackling and spitting under the smoldering ruins of their cities. Most archeological digs revealed a lesson, and this one was no exception.
But there were two features of the site that did puzzle the archeologist. Neither of them had anything to do with the Akaskids specifically, so they did not enter into the various articles he wrote on the site.
The first was an almost complete absence of a carbon/organometal layer. That horizon, packed with combustion byproducts, halogenated organics, mercury, lead, cadmium, and plutonium, was to be found pretty much everywhere on Earth, and represented the termination of the old technological civilization. But at the Akaskid dig there was little more than a few traces, one reason he had trouble figuring out where that battery had come from. Presumably, the area had undergone some erosion between the fall of civilization and the present, but he could not account for it.
Second was the fact that there was no sign of any excavation prior to his. The site seemed to have remained completely undisturbed since the fall of the Akaskids, which had been at least two thousand years before technological civilization ended. At one point someone had dug through the northern corner of the site to bury a waste pipe, but they had ignored a few ancient coins they could easily have picked up.