by Neil Clarke
3
Welcome is traditional for even the strangest arrivals, and wayfarers are expected to rest upon journey’s end. Although Heimgarð is not accustomed to resting, hse recognizes the need for convalescence: hrs tissues bruised from weeks of braking and riddled from fusillades of ionized particles. Hse lies upon a bed in minimal gravity, undisturbed (though the bed was doubtless monitoring hrs well-being) while hse heals.
The welcome hse receives is more ambivalent. When after forty hours—this is a world of human time, which hse resumes measuring in those terms—Heimgarð stands, a door appears before hrm and hse passes through, to a space where others soon come to greet him. Perhaps they were not expecting hrm, but rather their envoy bearing Heimdallr in tow, or someone more like themselves.
“Our thanks for taking such trouble to come,” says one, evidently female. She speaks the language that Garðrofa had—the one Heimdallr spoke a century and more ago, which (hse now realizes) may well be now spoken nowhere. Courtesy and research: neither incompatible with coercion, which Heimgarð can find no reason to resent. Hse nods gravely.
“There is much that you must tell me,” hse answers. Right now the Garden-dwellers are seeking rather than offering information: hse can sense their attempts to access hrs memories, which hse is able to deflect, perhaps because their technology was used to create Garðrofa, whose being now suffuses hrs substance. What they seek to know, they will have to ask.
“Let us show you.” The section of floor they stood on descended into darkness. Heimgarð feels the pull of gravity increase and realizes that, of course, hse had lain in a gravity field—no bed functions otherwise. Hse seeks to shake off the fogginess of mind that is evidently afflicting hrm.
“It will be a few seconds,” another says. There is a faint shudder underfoot, and suddenly the blackness is spangled by stars. They are outside the habitat, moving through space, a clear bubble encasing them—does the Parasol block radiation so effectively?—and the great globe of Hesperos, dimmer than it appeared in the morning sky of Earth, hangs before their heads, three quarters full. Once more in free fall, Heimgarð orients hrmself to view it more easily. Is there a pinpoint of light showing on its night side? Hse isn’t sure.
“We are bound for Aris, where the gravity is more like your world’s,” says a third. Plouton’s gravity is but a fraction even of Hermaon’s, and of course it was Heimdallr who was accustomed to Plouton’s gravity. Hrs hosts see before them someone who is not Heimdallr nor Garðrofa, who has neither youth nor age, and balk at this troubling fact. Heimgarð, who calls no world hrs own, simply nods.
Aris is visible beyond Hesperos, a deeper shade of the red it has shown humanity since its earliest members gazed into the night sky. The closeness of the two recognizable disks is deeply unnatural: it is something done by man, a feat on a scale greater than that of Bifröst or even the Parasol. Though Heimgarð has always been able to visualize the binary accurately, hse is profoundly affected by the sight.
Aris and Hesperos circle each other in a calculated dance, at a distance that leaves each looming large in the other’s sky. Once there was talk of the worlds being aligned so that the greater would exert on the lesser an influence comparable to what Selene had once wrought upon Earth. Perhaps the engineers of this project—the greatest humankind has ever achieved, or now ever will—expected to seed the larger world with the Earth’s legacy of tide-sensitive creatures and plant life, most even then banished into digital limbo. There is certainly no talk of that now.
The Sheltered Gardens are, like the rest of the solar system, mostly empty space, but the cone within the Parasol’s umbra is several million times denser than the rest. A moment’s observation shows numerous apparent stars moving against the background of the heavens: spacecraft, habitats, and the glint of enormous engines that once displaced a planet, now parked in permanent orbits like abandoned ordnance in the aftermath of a vast war.
“We have cleared the orbital zone of debris,” one of them says. “No dangerous shards fly through.” A walled garden, Heimgarð thinks: any loose stones prised from where nature had cast them and diverted for use elsewhere. But no one planned to spend their life in a garden.
Hse does not say this, nor anything else. The voyage takes several hours, which hse employs to recalibrate hrs sense of time: everything is now taking place quickly.
Aris is brighter than hse remembers seeing it—the Parasol admits as much sunlight as the Earth and Selene receive—but the planet shows no sign of what atmosphere it has gained. Hse can see the long thread of gases swirling along the Potamegos, too faint for normal human vision, but the red surface remains cloudless. Data are available at hrs mind’s fingertips, numbers attesting to the enormous difficulties of pulling away the top of Hesperos’s atmosphere and tunneling it across space, the decades it will take, even if the harvest rate can be steadily increased as its planners intended. Somewhere in these numbers, or in others, lies the reason that hse has been brought here.
Aerobraking is impossible over a planet with no significant atmosphere, so the craft decelerates using another world’s: the compressed gases of Hesperos are fired like rocket exhaust toward the surface of Aris. As the craft slows, its passengers stand upon its forward bulkhead, the planet now invisible below them. Most of them are significantly smaller than unmodified humans, and Heimgarð has also reduced hrs dimensions, shedding much of the mass hse used to cross the solar system. A guest, hse has doffed hat, cloak, and boots, and stands unaccommodated before them: the thing itself, whatever that may be.
They look at each other quizzically; Heimgarð possesses no skills in reading others’ expressions, but knows that they cannot read hsr. They pass through an opening in the Koleos—the world-sheathing membrane, billowing gently in what winds can reach it, is invisible even as they slip through—and are soon within a few kilometers of Aris’s surface, although the sky is getting no brighter. A small world: the horizon appears only seconds before touchdown.
The landscape is stony plain, its shades of red and ocher spotted with sheets of verdant fuzz. Heimgarð knew of the Gardeners’ plans to pull water and minerals from the soil with tailored viridiplantae, hardy organisms that will eventually change the ecosphere into something in which they cannot survive.
“Pankor is just beyond that low ridge,” says one of them, pointing. “We will enter it from here.” And the craft drops into the ground, through a shaft that opens after they have descended thirty-four meters (Heimgarð’s sensors immediately told hrm this) onto a high-ceilinged tunnel, the first interior space Heimgarð has entered that does not feel cramped. The scent of vegetation wafts toward them—Heimgarð freezes at it touches hrs nostrils—and the others begin walking toward it, on ground that rings solid beneath their steps.
Heimgarð follows as they move toward sunlight at the corridors’ end. An enormous vista opens upon the city of Pankor, built upon the terraced walls of a narrow tract of Valles Marineris and covered by a clear dome. By now Heimgarð can smell fir needles, though the source of this memory lies beyond reach. Birds, wings flapping with unnatural languor, fly slowly past.
Across a distance of 3.2 kilometers, boughs sway on breezes dense as those that once swept Earth.
None of the guides announce the city’s population, plans for expansion, or the details of its physical plant, for they know that Heimgarð can access these data on the open skein. Instead they wait politely. Hse can offer praise, but allows hrs nature to find expression. “What is the problem you face?”
“Time,” one replies. “We cannot take centuries to move humanity into the new worlds. A civilization of refugees, huddling in scattered habitats, will weaken and fail over generations. The Potamegos can never be more than a trickle; the wind that blows from Hesperos to Aris must swell to a gale, that this endeavor may show results within our people’s lifetime.”
“So what do you seek?”
“We need to build Yggdrasil.”
There is a silence whi
le Heimgarð locates and assesses the data on this. “A daunting project,” hse says after a moment. “It would require a lot of mass.”
“Yes.”
Hse does not add that it would be difficult to operate, for the tendency of their remarks is clear. “Bifröst is nothing like what you propose. I can offer you neither knowledge nor skills.”
“Do not be too certain. You managed such a structure for a long period of time, and that is a perspective we require.”
Heimgarð ponders the dynamics that would act upon this world-spanning tree, its roots extracting gases from one as its branches disperse them over the other. There is a superficial resemblance to hrs creation, but this structure is hollow: not a bridge, but a sluice.
Heimgarð was never an engineer, but the sentinel of Bifröst was first its builder, and hse imagines the superheated gases being drawn up into the roots and then cooling rapidly as they expand. The long trunk would fill with moving vapor, whose density would decrease sharply across its length even as new gases pushed inward. Roots and branches would writhe like a living thing.
The master of such a venture would wield enormous responsibility, like the project manager for the Pyramids or the admiral of a starship fleet. Among those who understood the trials of command, such an overseer’s name would live forever.
Hse says, “I don’t believe you.”
They take hrm to the Sky Dragon, which sails upon the seas of Hesperos’s cloud cover like an enormous curled leaf. From there an airship lofts them to Estia, at this altitude a mere spire, light enough in its nanotube structure to bend in the terrible winds. Docking is interesting; the craft is relatively unwieldy and the buffeting provokes in hrm an involuntary tensing unfelt for centuries. In the event of catastrophic failure they would fall fifty kilometers to the ground. Although Heimgarð possessed the means to slow hrs descent, hse would not be able to survive the surface conditions, as hse easily had on Plouton. The thought is a novel one, and some part of hrm stirs uneasily.
The maneuver proceeds without incident, and they debark unmindful of the roaring about them. The platform takes them down swiftly, converting their kinetic potential into electricity as it brakes. The column widens from flue to hearth as they descend, for the growing pressure more than compensates for the weaker winds. At its bottom, enormous blocks of hewn stone have been laid: quarried from the foundations of the earth, they are stacked kilometers high, the cornerstones upon which nanotubes of exotic composition, interwoven like chain mail against the crushing world-dragon, rise through seething murk of slowly diminishing pressure toward the habitable skies.
It is an expressway to hell, but Heimgarð feels a faint relief in setting boots upon it. Perhaps hrs hosts realized that hse would be more comfortable with a structure that is anchored to the ground.
“The realm of the clouds is ours, but we must claim the surface. Volcanism and the ravaging atmosphere assail the land from below and above, yet it is our nature as humans to tread ground and look into the sky. Our thick-walled city is but a warren, its parks enlarged caverns lit by artifice. You, who know what it is to stand beneath the stars, can comprehend our need to make a home.”
Heimgarð looks down the kilometers of shaft, which exhales air warmed by the city below them. Lights may be shining at the bottom, although hrs eyesight is not presently enhanced to see more than an ordinary person’s.
The city is as they described it, and hse feels as uncomfortable in its teeming as they anticipated. As many people lived here as inhabited all the rest of Hesperos, each of them (it was worth recalling) used to such conditions. Why was this worse than living in an orbital habitat? Heimgarð could not say.
When they tell hrm what they want, hse knows they are not telling hrm everything. What they say is alarming enough.
“We want you to treat with them. They will heed you, as they do not us.”
Heimgarð protests that hse knows nothing of them, has no experience dealing with such beings. Hse also declares that the Gardeners will have to be more open with hrm about the nature of this mission. They nod and tell hrm more, though it is not the information hse needs.
“Is this why you brought me here?” Hse does not mean it resentfully, for those feelings seem distant from the person hse is.
And they show hrm images of Eridu, as vivid as though hse were gazing upon it in the cloud-cropped future of their dreams. The city stands ringed by a wall eight kilometers high, above which the now-skimmed cauldron of Hesperos’s atmosphere drifts over a dome that admits great slanting beams of sunlight. Twelve hundred square kilometers of flat and gently rolling land, Eridu bristled with structures—residential ziggurats, buildings shaped like warped planes, lifted wings, cylinders and prisms, all interlaced with tubes and ribbons of transport routes—and winding swathes of parkland, rumpled green or flat blue.
“We can tell you, for any given second, how many people are alive in the Gardens. But we cannot tell you what proportion of humanity this constitutes. Do the thermal signatures from Selene bespeak surviving settlements or merely the half-functioning life systems, still emitting heat long after those it once warmed are gone? Are there survivors sheltered within the moons circling Phaiton? Or are we behind the Parasol the sole redoubt of humanity? To reflect upon this is to understand why we must return to environments that maintain themselves. Planetary surfaces are not immune to disaster but they are safer than habitats and warrens beneath frozen moons.”
Heimgarð’s memories of breathing the air of a sun-warmed planet are too distant to be brought into focus, but hse nods. They take this for general assent, and after further thanks hse is given a spacecraft, again one that wraps around hrs back and chest, and bade farewell. When the propitious moment arrives, hse is launched—on boosters that drop away like husks once they have attained the proper velocity—and sails out from behind the Parasol and into brilliant sunlight. Carefully timed thrusts produce immediate deceleration and hse drops toward the Sun, into a transfer orbit that will take hrm around and into an encounter with Hermaon, the iron planet, and its underworld.
4
In distance and time, it is Heimgarð’s shortest journey, but the weeks of travel are disconcerting in a way hse has never felt before. There is no radio transmission demanding an explanation for hrs approach, for it is clear what Heimgarð intends. No decisions confront hrm: three landing platforms lie flush upon the surface of Hermaon, equally spaced along the equator, and the calculus of ballistics makes clear which one hse shall use.
In some realms, choice is superfluous. Beyond the limits of logic and mathematics, however, certainty dissolves: what steps hse must afterward take seem not just unsure but unfathomable.
Certainly the kobolds offer nothing: even a challenge would give hrm some information, but they are silent. Heimgarð takes the trouble to brake no harder than an unmodified human could bear; it is hrs message to them, which is received without comment. Hrs boots touch down upon the flat surface and gravity reaches once more through hrs soles. Carefully hse unstraps hrs spacecraft and sets it beside hrm. The nightside landscape, visible only by the infrared emissions of its cooling surface, allows hrm the pleasure of a familiarly close horizon.
To look about for sensors would only show foolishness; of course hse is being watched. What do they expect from their uninvited visitor, whose identity they have doubtless inferred? Perhaps the traveler who crossed the planetary spheres, gaze fixed and hair streaming, shall now stride puissant to the door and rap upon it. There is no door, although a featureless structure rises three meters above the platform at its eastern edge. Hse turns to face it and its near side slides open, disclosing darkness within. Six steps—hse savors the act of walking again upon a small cold world—take hrm to the threshold and into the space. The floor drops swiftly away, and hse descends.
Heimgarð counts the meters as hse plummets—the accelerometer nestled in some equivalent of hrs inner ear allows this almost without effort—and notes the slowly rising temperatur
e. The interior of Hermaon is molten, the silicates of its crust slow to conduct heat: the temperature is still well below the freezing point of carbon dioxide, but if the capsule falls far enough, it will open upon tremendous heat. Heimgarð is calculating how long hrs systems can keep hrs organic tissues from cooking when it begins slowing to a stop. With a hiss—there is air beyond—the panel slides open, upon a space radiating neither heat nor light.
Hse steps forward into the darkness. Hrs boots ring on the floor beneath hrm, and hrs mind builds a picture from the returning echoes. The chamber is low-ceilinged, large, and filled with kobolds. They stand facing hrm, unmoving.
Most of their bodies are insulated by thick skin or clothing, but their eyes emit heat enough to glow infraredly in the gloom. How many are there? Although Heimgarð’s greater height affords a vantage, their serried ranks soon disappear behind the small planet’s curvature.
“Tell us what you want,” they say.
There is air enough in the chamber for Heimgarð to speak aloud. “The government of the Sheltered Gardens seeks your assistance in a project of great importance to them. They have authorized me to negotiate with you for this.”
“Untrue.” The voices now come not in unison but as a ragged chorus, rebounding off the low ceiling like scattered particles. “They want our gold.”
It is a moment before Heimgarð is able to comprehend this. “This project will indeed require large amounts of various heavy metals, but the combined masses of Hesperos and Aris are more than—”
“The Gardeners want our gold, which we will not surrender. So they have thrown you to us in propitiation.”
“Why would those of the Sheltered Gardens seek the resources of Hermaon? Both worlds—”
“They wish to hoard their own.”
“They know not how to mine it at such pressures.”
“They dropped you down the shaft to spy on us. They care not if you never return.”