Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 115

by Neil Clarke

  With a shock hse realizes that this is true. Hse had been outfitted with the means to send a continuous data stream back to the Gardens, plus—hse now guessed—mobile devices to record such data and maneuver to dispatch it should transmission be blocked. Had the kobolds detected and disabled these?

  This will require thinking, which Heimgarð is not now free to do. Hse ventures farther into the chamber, stepping between kobolds who turn their heads to regard hrm but do not otherwise move.

  “How do you suppose those of the Gardens propose to dispossess you of yours? How am I, unfamiliar with your world and even theirs, to accomplish this for them?”

  “Guile.”

  “Trickery.”

  “A stratagem, not yet apparent.”

  “Humans are deceitful, in thrall to the sexual strategies that drove their animal ancestors and drive them just as blindly. They jostle and kick for social supremacy and mating opportunities, fitfully aware of how this appears yet unable to transcend it. They injure their societies in the interest of those few with whom they share genes, and will injure them in pursuit of opportunities to breed further. They are suspicious, irrational, and destructive, eventually to all but most immediately to those unlike themselves.

  “They know we do not trust them, so they sent you.”

  “But I am human,” Heimgarð points out.

  And the space about him erupts in reverberating gales of eerie laughter.

  Heimgarð ranges through their realm, which they do not forbid. There are passageways too small for hrm to enter, their endpoints unknown. Kobolds bustle past, sometimes carrying implements. One turns to regard hrm as it passes, gaze fixed upon hrm as its head rotates through 180 degrees. A many-toned muttering, language (if that’s what it is) unfamiliar, rises as hse moves through crowds of greater density.

  If they have a leader, it is not coming forward. Kobolds once were people, Heimgarð was told, but that may not be the case for those now before hrm. Hse is not certain whether they are behaving like humans, for hse cannot tell what most of them are doing. Heimgarð sees one that it looking steadily at hrm, which hse takes as permission to address. “What is it you seek?” hse asks.

  “We seek to protect what is ours.”

  “You must aspire to be more than just watchdogs. What do you want?” But the kobold merely repeats itself, and Heimgarð moves on.

  “What do you want?” he asks another.

  “We want to be left alone.”

  “Have you not been left to your solitude? Only I have come, and you chose to admit me.” But to this there is no reply.

  One expresses itself clearly: “We don’t have to say what we want.”

  After that hse wanders without hindering nor suffering hindrance from the strange creatures hastening past hrm. Possibly they are extending their domain, although hse can detect neither the vibrations nor airborne dust that would suggest excavation anywhere nearby. How far does this netherworld reach? How numerous its denizens?

  Sometimes hse moves through great open plazas, sometimes down long colonnades or passageways narrow as tunnels. Hse ventures far enough that the curvature beneath hrm becomes measurable, and numbers collect in an unremarked register of hrs mind. Heimgarð is certain there is information they are not giving hrm, and studies the low ceilings and curving floors, the pressure and temperature of the air currents that brush past, the behavior of the kobolds hse speaks to or glimpses from afar. When the surmise materializes, it halts hrm with the abruptness of a hand against hrs chest. For a long moment hse simply stands motionless, running the figures repeatedly through hrs mind and wondering at the absurd implication.

  “All right,” hse announces. Hse does not address hrs words in any direction, for hse knows that all are listening. “Take me to the realm below. There is no point trying to hide it.”

  Perhaps they have been prepared for this moment. Certainly they do not feign incomprehension. Heimgarð is conducted to an elevator shaft, one that leads down rather than up. Hse enters the capsule and it drops through the floor, accelerating at a rate that hse studies closely. The capsule is transparent and is enveloped in darkness, but hse knows—and a beam from hrs helmet confirms—that hse is descending not down a tunnel but rather through a vast emptiness.

  There are faint sources of light, and massive structures—girders and struts—discernible to hrs instruments across hundreds of kilometers. By now hse knows what hse will find, so hse does not strain to look straight down. Within minutes hse has data enough to guess when deceleration will begin, and at what point hse will touch bottom.

  The door slides silently open and hse steps out onto level ground. The air is cool, but significantly thicker than in the chambers above. The ground is smooth but slightly yielding, and after a few steps hse feels it crunch like sand beneath hrs soles.

  The gravitational pull is 1.00.

  The lights overhead are dim as stars, but illuminated globes atop poles, like streetlamps from the early Industrial Era, dot the landscape, casting long intersecting shadows. Kobolds are everywhere, most of them much smaller than what hse has earlier seen. They enter and exit ornate structures that line thoroughfares, walking alone or in groups. A wheeled vehicle passes hrm.

  The horizon is close, so Heimgarð does not have to venture far before features appear over it: a great coliseum, a range of hills, a large lake or perhaps a small sea. Hse approaches its shore and continues forward, wondering, until hse stands in its shallows: liquid water. Ships ply its surface, some under sail, and vibrations tell hrm of submarine vessels moving beneath, negotiating an environment populated (dissolved organics tell hrm) by marine life swimming or floating within its almost lightless depths.

  Were hse to circle the shore and continue walking, hse would eventually circumnavigate this ornament, perfectly positioned around the center of its hollowed planet. It is a world of small compass, but a world.

  There are other elevators, paired shafts that ferry a constant stream of kobolds up and down. None of them look at Heimgarð, although they clearly perceive hrm. Hrs own shaft stands ready upon hrs return; perhaps it was assembled expressly for hrm.

  Hse rides it back up and looks out upon the Kobolds who await him as the door slides open. To address those present is, hse understands, to address them all.

  Hse says, “I won’t ask what you have done; I can see that much. Nor will I ask why you did it. Instead I will ask once more: What is it you want?”

  “We want a world. We want to feel the ground beneath our feet. The weightlessness of space is not for people, and the sensation of being flung against a rotating surface is not true gravity.”

  “And so you have constructed that . . . eggshell sphere around a kernel of degenerate matter? A black hole? Contracting upon itself like an infinite arch, at exactly the distance you wished?”

  “As you infer. It gave us a World, though small, on—or in—a planet too scant to provide it otherwise.”

  “And the technology to wreak such upheavals: Has this anything to do with what befell the Earth?”

  “No. Yet the Gardeners would never believe that: In their too-human fearfulness and imprudence they would draw an irresistible conclusion. Knowledge of our works they could not handle, so cannot ever learn.”

  “Yet you admitted me into your midst, and now I know.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence follows this. Neither Heimgarð nor the kobolds cross their arms, square their stance: they consider themselves human, but are not so bound to their primate biology as to ape such bellicose posturing.

  Heimgarð betrays nothing, but in fact harbors little to betray. I did not ask for this, hse wants to say. I do not wish to wield this club, yet now it rests in my hand.

  “You must,” hse says, “have thought of this. So what would you have me do?”

  And after more silence, they tell hrm.

  5

  The voyage out is not a return; nothing ever is.

  Plouton-Charon lies more than a hu
ndred degrees off Heimgarð’s course; each second takes hrm farther from it. The Gardens are also swinging behind the Sun; hse will attend no ceremonies celebrating hrs success. The kobolds would in any case likely forbid it: their concern for the safety of their secret would preclude giving the Gardeners any chance to lay hold of hrm.

  Heimgarð will not see the effects of the deal hse hammered out, and in hrs fatigue—a surprisingly organic response—hse does not much care. The hammer, hse dully reflects, feels the impact as much as the substance it works.

  The kobolds will keep their “gold”: none of Hermaion’s remaining metals will be sent to the Gardeners, who will never know why. Within weeks, however, kobolds by the hundreds will depart for Hesperos—not for any of the tall cities, but to the raging planet itself—and begin quarrying its own resources. Iron, copper, and more run in veins through its crust, waiting to be mined by anything willing to labor in darkness and gravity. Perhaps they will even enjoy it.

  In return they have exacted their own price: the broker’s eternal exile. Heimgarð is to leave the inner system, never to return. But as recompense—and perhaps to speed hrm on hrs way—hse has been rebuilt, by techs whose skills even the Gardeners likely cannot match: outfitted with greater fuel capacity, energy storage, stress tolerance, resistance to temperature extremes. And given a destination.

  Blue Neptune, smaller and denser than tilted Ouranos, was once inhabited by humans. The Tritonides are gone, the moon’s surface too cold for anything to be operating beneath its surface, and the few structures orbiting the planet can be confirmed, even from this distance, as lifeless hulks. Yet the kobolds wonder: they have calculated the distance from the planetary core at which the gravity is identical to Earth’s, and pondered the stratum’s dynamics: the great heat below, the great cold above, the tremendous winds and pressure. They believe it possible that humans, the remnants of the Triton settlement, may live down there.

  Certainly they do not imagine that a spherical shell such as their own, but immensely larger, could have been constructed with the resources of a faltering colony. But a ribbon circling Neptune’s equator, perhaps only a kilometer wide, would be three orders of magnitude simpler. “Think of it as a bridge,” they told him. “Suspended over an icy hell, a bridge attached not to abutments but arching round to join itself, floating freely in the depths.” Such a construct would be wildly unstable, but if it were joined by two more rings, all at right angle to each other . . . the kobolds’ models said it could be possible.

  Heimgarð imagined such a folly—a frail gyroscope forever steadying itself under incredible stresses—and doubted greatly that it ever existed. But the underground creatures had their price, and Heimgarð was a part of it. The frenetic makeshifts of the Gardens—the forges of Hesperos; the coming construction of Yggdrasil—were not destined for hrm.

  Although the kobolds insist that a society surviving deep within Neptune’s atmosphere would possess sufficient insulation to prevent measurable heat from reaching the surface, the planet is as cold as it has always been. Their touching hopes are sign enough of their essential humanity; hrs bleak certainty suggests something different.

  Hse rises from Hermaion on tongues of flame, accelerating steadily. Gravity, or its simulacrum, presses up against hrs soles. Does the sensation afford comfort to the human creature?

  The voyage out will last significantly longer, for the climb out of the Sun’s deep gravity well reduces velocity. And there will be less to occupy hrs thoughts: no radio signals to listen for, no curiosity at a summons.

  Will hse be lonely? It is a strange thought. If hrs two precursor minds could separate and occupy opposite sides of hrs helmet, perhaps they would soon tire of each other. Perhaps it was the fact that hse clearly is not quite human that allowed hrm to mediate between two mistrustful populations.

  And perhaps solitude will someday grow burdensome. Hse will certainly have time to find out.

  Heimgarð accelerates away from the grasping Sun, hrs straight course bent by its presence. Eventually the engines will cut off and the illusion of gravity vanish. Hrs trajectory will become an orbit—one of cometary magnitude, a centuries-long ellipse, were it not someday to intersect a world.

  Like a rising spark, the sentinel departs the circle of light, into a wider darkness.

  About the Author

  Gregory Feeley is the author of two novels (The Oxygen Barons and Arabian Wine), many novellas, and a raft of short stories, articles, and book reviews. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, the Sturgeon, and the Philip K. Dick Awards.

  The Cedar Grid

  Sara Saab

  Jassim is giving chase and he shouldn’t be.

  Beneath the flapping robes of Jassim’s running target, a deadly corset bristling with titanium circuitry flashes into view. He catches an unmistakable mineral scent with its nose of vanilla sponge coming off the attacker—not a human odor, nowhere near the vinegar of his condemned-man’s sweat.

  Sprinting footfalls judder in his knees. His panicked brain has yet to quell this bodily compulsion to pursue, to defend. Out-of-place thoughts burst to salience: his mother’s proud profile on a poster, conversations with his elder brother Majd late into the night.

  “It’s an attack! Catch them! Stop them!” Jassim shouts, frightened by his own voice, but he sees that everyone is moving away, swiftly away.

  He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be chasing off an attacker who’s wearing a bomb.

  Doctor, Professor, Shaikh, mender of hearts, cobbler of souls: these are the titles Jassim would choose. Martyr was never one of them, never a word he imagined huddled against his forename, his tribesname, his planetsname. In the dry-mouthed beating of this moment, other moments rising towards it like waves coaxed by a tidal force, Jassim knows hotly and darkly that Martyr will be his title.

  That’s when he tries it on his lips: The Young Martyr Jassim Kawakby Auroron-Hexler, he of the planets, he of the stratosphere, and the taste of it is salt and tang and the burn of lye.

  Majd steps out, achy, onto streets yellow with artificial light on wet paving. The rainshower was artificial too, of course, cloud puffed out of a craft and seeded. He ups the heat inside his Skin and his mouth quirks with some ancestral nostalgia. It’s not bad, the duplicity, the made weather. It evokes hand-me-down memories of Earth.

  Flask in hand, he trundles towards the ka’ak lady’s cube, rolling his gait to shake out his lower back. She’ll fill the flask with spiced lentil soup, delicious and cheap. The tip he received from the Noni for the back massage will cover it. The Noni always tips, but Majd isn’t sure it’s worth the trouble. His fingertips smart with splinters from the frills of their carapace despite the handling gloves.

  “Hi, Auntie,” he says and seals the door of the modest cube behind him. Inside it’s bright and warm. He takes the breathing visor off.

  “Majd Kawakby, how’s your mother?” The old lady is watching an Earth serial, staticy against one of the active walls of the cube. It’s dubbed in Hexler pidgin. He’s sure she would prefer it in Arabic.

  “She’s fine, Auntie. She’s running as an independent in the Planetary Commune elections in a few months. So, busy-busy.”

  At the talk of politics, the ka’ak lady wills the channel over to the news. The newscaster’s perfect posture alerts Majd to the bow of his own spent shoulders. He straightens up.

  “The Commune should be ashamed to put someone like your mother through that process. Like a nobody!” she admonishes him, lifting a loop of fresh ka’ak bread from the hook they’re stacked on. “The Kawakby tribe ruled across the Auroron network for two generations—”

  “—Actually, just soup today,” Majd interrupts. “And there’s nothing wrong with running as an independent. The Kawakby politicos have always believed in the democratic process.” He puts the flask on the counter.

  “Kawakby politicos,” says the old lady. “What a clever mouth on you.” She gives him a genuine smile, full of restored te
eth.

  “Not as clever as my hands when it comes to unraveling knotty problems, luckily.”

  She ladles and the smells of cumin and lemon zest make Majd’s mouth water. He watches the news. The program cuts to a home planet segment; there’s a stock photo of Baalbek in northeast Lebanon on Earth. Majd recognizes it instantly for the Roman pillars and the fact that Jassim is stationed there on Earth-exchange. It’s the Kawakby ancestral city.

  “Can you turn the volume up, Auntie?” Majd asks. “My brother’s out there.”

  “Jassim’s in Baalbek?” she asks. Sound rises from the cube.

  Majd nods, but his neck clenches rigid. He’s watching a video now, the aftermath of an explosion,

  “ . . . at least two Amoya revolutionaries participated in the coordinated attack, which is thought to have targeted a satellite office of the Planetary Comrades, the Commune’s cadet division. Four have been confirmed dead by the local ministry. Witnesses say one human victim may have died pursuing the attackers . . . ”

  A rose of worry blooms in the pit of Majd’s gut. Stop. There are 200,000 humans in Baalbek.

  “God protect the boy,” says the ka’ak lady, and Majd wishes she hadn’t.

  “One second.”

  He wills on his Device, contacts his mother, splinter-studded fingers rapping testily on the counter.

  The sound transitions from the soft murmur of the connecting signal to his mother’s wail—a wail so long and loud and animal that something breaks in Majd then, maybe his bones, maybe his ligaments, because he turns to jelly and drops to his knees in the cube.

  The keening words are worse to hear than the wail: “They killed him. They killed my son.”

  “No,” says Majd. “No.”

  Because how could the truth hurt more than being speared in the chest? How could words bash into his brain, concussive?

  And Jassim’s face, why can’t he call to mind Jassim’s face? Instead, Majd remembers the face of the sweet-smelling Amoya he massaged that morning, their forced propriety, their awkward politeness.