Greg Bear - Hegira

by Hegira (lit)

  The trio moved rapidly and efficiently, never so fast as to wear their horses down. They were in generally unpopulated countryside. Replacing good mounts would be difficult.

  Because they frequently took cuts across rivers and over fields of smoothed rock and sand, they threw off their searchers for hours at a stretch, and thus moved faster. The border of Mundus Lucifa grew close - a hundred kilome-ters, fifty, ten. Then they crossed it - a low barbed wire strand posted with wood and stone markers.

  As they prepared to stop and hide for the night, Barthel's horse went lame. He examined the beast's foreleg and found a splintered river stone had wedged into the hoof, splitting it to the quick. Left alone, the beast could hobble about and feed off the grassland well enough - but it couldn't be ridden. And it wouldn't be able to move fast enough to keep up with them.

  Their supplies were low. There was little to transfer from horse to horse. They buried the saddle in a wadi as the sky was graying. Rain would fall before darkness came - and the wadi would fill with water, likely to cover their traces.

  They found a pile of rocks firmly mounted against the floods and higher than the water was likely to rise. After checking it out for vermin, they rigged a hidden shelter and rested, waiting for the storm to break.

  The front of rain hit with the impact of a spilled bucket. Rivers grew in minutes, carried away whole landscapes as mud and scum, and rushed into the wadi. The search party below faced serious danger of drowning unless they could find high ground and wait out the storm.

  When daylight came the land was still as death. The grass had been pounded, into a thick yellow mud. Water dripped from the rocks. No wind blew, no animals called, nothing moved.

  The land dropped away ahead of them. Kiril had a dizzying premonition - where night was a river? - and looked into the canyon. It was a sheer drop of at least a kilometer to a series of declines and gorges running helter-skelter into the grandest chasm he had ever seen. It seemed to plunge forever into a murky, mist-filled shadow that complained from far away with a tinny grumble. This was the natural border of Mundus Lucifa. But Kiril had heard of a way across. They rode and walked gingerly along the canyon's rim for the rest of the day trying to spot the formation he described. Night gloomed up again, and with it came mists and fogs which filled the canyon and wafted at the brim like a ghost ocean.

  It was well into the afternoon of the next day before the vapors burned off. Then they saw what Kiril had told them to look for - a monumental rock bridge. It was at least three days away, but they could see its four arches in the distance like the doors to a Mediwevan church. Bar-Woten nodded grimly, satisfied he was seeing a true wonder. Barthel took it in stride. "Allah never surprises me," he said tersely.

  Bar-Woten declared they had thrown their pursuers off. "The flood probably convinced them we weren't worth the effort. Either that or it killed them."

  "Did you kill any?" Kiril asked. Barthel looked at him sharply, sensing trouble.

  "No," Bar-Woten said. "I didn't. I doubt if Barthel did - he was too busy keeping his horse quiet. Did you?"

  "No," Kiril said. "I'm not sure I could have."

  "The Bey is ashamed that I didn't kill?" Barthel asked grudgingly.

  "Not at all. It accomplishes nothing. A skillful hunter kills only for food - and we weren't in the circumstances to enjoy tall pig."

  Kiril trudged across the hard-baked stone and mud of the canyon edge. Barthel took his turn on the horse.

  "The Ibisians must have thought differently about killing at one time," Kiril said.

  "They did," Bar-Woten said. "I did, too."

  They switched, and Bar-Woten walked in silence. Birds wheeled over the canyon, wings wide and dark. Their cries counterpointed grumbling from the chasm. To the south the white line of Obelisk Tara still gave a point of reference. It would be thousands of kilometers away before they lost sight of it, and by that time they'd have another Obelisk to follow. There would be the usual region where the sky was darker and the air cooler, then another land with its own spire. But they'd have to cross Mundus Lucifa first, and it had no Obelisk. Bar-Woten asked Kiril what he knew about Mundus Lucifa.

  "There are two parts, north and south. I only know about the south. It's a monarchy, fairly backward. A series of fortresses, usually with towns inside, with high mountains and many bridges. They're friendly with Mediweva, but not too friendly. Reluctant to advance their thought. They won't allow anyone to read Obelisk texts, so any knowledge they have is from the past - over two thousand years ago - or rediscovered independently. I've only met a few, none from this far east. They're a handsome, stubborn people."

  "Momad?" Barthel asked.

  "No. Not Kristian, either. They worship a pantheon not mentioned on the Obelisk - not so far as we've read, anyway."

  "Well and good," Bar-Woten said. "Perhaps we can learn something from them - how much the Obelisks make us what we are. Sulay would have enjoyed the opportunity to investigate that. All the lands we passed through believed in the Obelisks. We had to make our own atlases as we traveled. No books were allowed that did not faithfully reprint the Obelisk texts or conservatively comment on what they said. And there are no maps of Hegira on the Obelisks."

  "Can I see a map?" Kiril asked. "And an atlas?" He snapped his fingers. "I once read a book that mentions them. Atlas was a god - he held up Earth on his shoulders before Newton and Kopernick destroyed him."

  Bar-Woten pulled a square of parchment from his shoulder bag and handed it to Kiril. "Careful with it. It may be the only surviving record of what our geometers and geographers learned. It's a map of what we saw on our March from Ibis."

  Kiril unfolded it gingerly, trying to stay balanced on the horse. It was a network of lines and fields of color with shading and odd marks. He could read the names well enough - Obelisk script was universal, so people who believed in Obelisks could always read each other's alpha-bets - but their positions and other signs meant nothing to him. He had never bothered to read the Obelisk texts that discussed cartography - they seemed useless intellectual exercises, since no such maps existed on Hegira, and Earth was something of a myth.

  "Pretty," he said. He folded it and handed it to Bar-Woten, who patiently refolded it and put it in his bag.

  "There's something in the canyon," Barthel said. He pointed. Kilometers below lay a crumpled mass which at one time could have been a cylinder. The area around it was too rugged to allow easy access. It looked undisturbed.

  "Two or three hundred meters long," Bar-Woten said. "Made of metal. Look how the sun glints off it. Do you know what it is?"

  Kiril shook his head, no. He was frowning.

  "Could be... like the rockets of Khem," Barthel said. "Same shape, only bigger."

  "Gun powder would never lift that monster," Bar-Woten said. "It must be a building. Someone put it together and it was destroyed by a rock slide."

  But Kiril saw the gouged scar that trailed behind the wreck. He had read a text on missiles and other terrestrial weapons of war - the things on which the First-born had planned to ride away from Earth. "It's a rocket of a kind," he said. He explained what he knew about them, and Bar-Woten raised his eyebrows appreciatively.

  "I'd like to know who could build something like that," he said.

  "Not the Lucifans." Kiril threw a small pebble into the canyon and rose from his knees. "It must have come from very far away. And it was no weapon - it didn't explode."

  "That doesn't mean it wasn't a weapon. I understand the Obelisks say not all things explode by fire."

  "True," Kiril agreed. "But we have yet to run into explanations for those passages. We accept by faith."

  "I think someone else needs no faith. They have proof."

  They were some twenty kilometers from the rock bridge when they made camp and bedded down for the night. Dark, heavy clouds roiled above the gray mountains beyond the canyon. Rain splattered on them as they ate their dinner of dried fish and fruit, and later as they slept. When morning cas
t a pale orange light on their faces the air had chilled considerably, and light specks of snow drifted down. They could not see across the canyon. The river in the chasm bellowed distantly as they mounted. Barthel walked first.

  They reached the rock bridge by midafternoon. Few people traveled this route, Kiril said. Commerce was carried on much farther west, where the canyon was swallowed up by a lush rain forest and the river went underground.

  Like ants on a highway, the three began the trek across the bridge. The slope to either side was imperceptible, but it eventually rounded smoothly into the sheer walls. At least four holes had been scoured into the sides of the bridge to emerge near the middle. Wind whistled through them with a fierce, mournful tone. When Kiril peered into one, the draft lifted the neck of his cloak up and batted it like a sail.

  "Wind and water did this," Bar-Woten said. "Hegira has to have been here for millions of years."

  "Been here?" Kiril asked. "Ah, if you're going to be profound, where is here?"

  "Wherever, it is not the land of the First-born. It has no stars, no sun, and no moons. Scrittori, can your learning explain that?"

  "Of course not."

  "That's what I'd like to explain."

  Barthel said nothing, but looked down the length of the canyon into gray shadow. Light never reached down there. The shadows were always the same. That seemed important, but he didn't mention it.

  By dark they were across the bridge. They camped again, ate, and slept until morning.

  Five

  Kiril pondered Bar-Woten's quest as the nearest mountains of Mundus Lucifa lowered like black giants through their clouds. Whatever the Ibisian learned, the Obelisks wouldn't help him - that Kiril knew as certainly as he knew he had two arms.

  The Obelisks were an enigma unchanged across the history of the Second-born. They were about a thousand kilometers tall, a kilometer across each side and as perfectly square as anyone could* measure. They vanished in the endless blue during the daytime and dimly reflected the light of the fire doves at night, rising until the eye couldn't trace them. Entire civilizations were indelibly etched on their faces: histories and philosophies and literatures, records of the home of the First-born called Earth. The arrangement of the texts by subject and date was seemingly random, but a rough progression existed - the higher one read, the more advanced in time and technology the records were. The highest the readers had ever gone in Ibis had been ten kilometers, using balloons like the readers in Mediweva and Khem.

  "From each you shall choose the flavor of your birth," the first text on each Obelisk read, "the time of your time, the words you will speak and things you adore. All other things will be as nothing to you."

  All Obelisks were the same. The civilizations of Hegira were not. That, Kiril's teachers had told him, was what the Obelisks meant. All shall choose differently from the texts, climb high or low depending on their technology, to pick what they need from the immortal needles.

  They were the only things on Hegira that could be relied upon. All else - penitents, armies, generals, and servants alike - were inconsiderable. Humans twinkled brief as candles. Obelisks stayed.

  "What do you want to know?" Kiril asked Bar-Woten.

  "Anything concrete. I'll feast on crumbs if I have to."

  "The Bey knows about its name, Hegira," Barthel said. "It refers to the flight of Momad from Mecca, among the First-born. The Qur'an tells many such wonderful tales. Not Yesu, not the Lotus Contemplative, nor any other can claim that namesake - not even, pardon my obstinance, Bey - Eloshim."

  "I'd never heard of Ibis before your armies came. How far did you travel to get here?"

  "Fifty thousand kilometers."

  "How did you measure it?"

  "The angle of the Obelisks to each other, triangulating and assuming five thousand kilometers between each Obelisk. We would pick a point on the Obelisk line and set that as our triangle apex - "

  Kiril interrupted. "So you crossed how many degrees... say, between the Obelisk in Ibis and the Obelisk Tara?"

  "You mean?"

  "How many degrees would they be apart if they could make an angle?"

  "Ah," Bar-Woten understood. "Twenty-three degrees."

  "Did your geometers decide that Hegira was round?"

  "It was round as far as they could measure. Of course there was no way of knowing if we were merely going up a gigantic hill fifty thousand kilometers across. But we couldn't see distant lands by looking at the sky, no matter where we were. So we assumed Hegira was round."

  "Then there's a way of figuring out how big across it is."

  "Two hundred and forty-nine thousand kilometers."

  Kiril looked down at the Ibisian, his mouth working to repeat the figure. He could hardly grasp it. He sighed and shook his head. "It's imponderable. Earth was nowhere near that large. Some stars were that size. They were supposed to be the fiercest things imaginable."

  "Then Hegira may be a star."

  "I don't think so," Kiril said. "I didn't study the texts too heavily when I copied them, but an object the size of a star would hold us to the ground like ghosts to a funeral stone."

  "Gravity."

  "Even if it isn't a star, though, Hegira must be very light, or it would hold us as strongly. Perhaps it's hollow."

  "And we are on the outside."

  "If the Obelisks lean away from each other, that would seem to be true. And as you say, we don't see distant lands when we look at the sky."

  "Perhaps Allah meant it to be imponderable," Barthel offered.

  "Allah, as you say, gave us brains to think and solve," Bar-Woten said.

  Another question bothered Kiril. If the armies of Ibis had discovered so many wondrous things, why did they leave a bloody swath wherever they went? He couldn't put the concepts of barbarians and scholars in one package. He opened his mouth to talk about it, then shut it grimly. He knew so little about the men he was traveling with. Better to keep his peace and see what they offered to tell first.

  A shiver made his hands falter. "Why?" he asked himself

  silently. "Why have I delivered myself to wolves?" Then, glancing upward covertly, "Why have You?"

  Because he loved. His love would not stop clawing the inside of his chest and burning fires beneath his brain. Move, it demanded. And he moved.

  Six

  "It's called the Uhuru Massif," Kiril said. "There should be a few small towns and forts here, but I don't see any."

  "They could be hidden in the ridges and valleys," Bar-Woten said. "I don't see any roads. No trails."

  "No commerce comes this way from Mediweva. There may not be any."

  "Have you ever talked with Lucifans?" the Ibisian asked.

  "Not often. I was very young when we went to the western end. They don't trust Obelisk nations very much."

  "They feel deprived, hm?"

  Barthel countered strongly. "Perhaps they feel we are misled. There is much that is doubtful on the Obelisks."

  Bar-Woten nodded and pursed his lips. "We'll probably meet any greeting parties where the two plateaus divide, in the cleft between. If you say they're not usually hostile, we shouldn't greet them with drawn weapons. But no polite society will resent our hands on the hilts."

  Kiril walked beside the Ibisian's horse as they approached the cleft. A small stream trickled muddily down the middle of the wadi, but grotesque ridges and rills running parallel to it suggested this was a powerful watercourse when rains cascaded from the mountain slopes. The horses picked their way cautiously over the rugged ground. Bar-Woten kept his eyes on the pillars of scoured soft stone walling the gorge on both sides. They were near the bluff below the plateau flats when voices called out. Their owners couldn't be seen.

  "Ua hight thee?" one asked.

  Kiril frowned, trying to understand the dialect from his studies of Obelisk English. He knew the word hight. From that he pieced together the rest. "We are three from Mediweva," he answered. "Trithi de Mediweva!"

  They continu
ed climbing until they were level with the plateau. Behind a ridge of rocks ahead three faces peered at them. "Your purpose!" one demanded.

  "To travel through Mundus Lucifa. We are scholars."

  "Your studies?"

  "Folklore," Bar-Woten undertoned, looking down at his saddlebags and rearranging them nonchalantly.

  "Folklore and myth!" Kiril answered.

  "What would Obeliskers want with an ignorant land?"

  "Natural truth," he answered, hoping to guess the correct response to the formula. They weren't dealing with simple barbarians. The border guards to Mundus Lucifa were specially trained and erudite.