by Joe Haldeman
Yr Fadrs nū
Dā sed. God didnt put us on dis
Wrld tū let us lēv.
Yr Fadrs nū.
—Godbuk 1, 4, 34-37
The small group who had opted for the starship ran out of luck very quickly. The engines quit at an altitude of less than a kilometer, and they fell into the sea. For many years the remains of the starship were visible in the shallow water, but eventually it became the nucleus of a long-lived organism resembling a coral reef. Its location was forgotten, and over the course of a few dozen generations the very fact of its existence evolved from memory into oral history and, finally, into myth.
The ones who had gone north didn’t have an easy time of it. Over half of them died, some from exposure during the rigorous crossing from the artic sea to the inland crater, but most were killed at the height of the twenty-day storm, whose effects were worse than had been predicted by the most pessimistic scientist. Perhaps it was just as well, since over half of the food and seed were also lost.
Having known the seas were going to rise, they’d moved what they couldn’t carry with them to the nearest high ground. Their livestock and seed and other absolute necessities went into the boats, along with a year’s worth of food, and they headed for the northern ice. There, they dismantled the boats and reformed them into sledges, and most of them made it to the crater. The inside of the crater wall was conveniently pocked with caves; the nomads walled themselves in and waited.
But the caves that were too close to the crater floor—including the ones that housed the livestock—filled up with boiling water at the height of the storm. They had started out with twelve hundred people and eight hundred head of livestock. When they came out of their caves after the water receded, there were five hundred people, two roosters, and a hen.
Without draft animals, returning to the sea was much slower than getting to the crater had been, even though the coast was less than a third the distance it had been before the storm. They bolted wheels to their sleds and pushed and pulled them across muck that was already beginning to freeze again. Then they dismantled the sleds and nailed them up into the shape of boats, and returned over warmed seas to the place they had called Primus.
Finding Primus underwater surprised nobody. Much more disconcerting was the fact that the mountains had been scoured clean, and there was no trace of their caches of goods, records and equipment. Much that had been irreplaceable was lost, including the ship’s library and the cloning equipment that would have replaced their herds of animals.
Lars Martin and his contemporaries didn’t know any of this. The only written records that had survived from “ancient times” were The Sonets of Wm. Shākspēr, twelve of which had been passed from father to son as one family’s tradition, and a thing variously called God’s Book, Godbuk, or God Buk; spelling having become more a matter of opinion than of authority. This volume was a mixture of mythologized history and moral guidance, most of it rendered in iambic-septameter doggerel.
The Shākspēr book was one that Lars had memorized word-for-word, although he kept a copy as part of his own meager weight allowance. And Godbuk he studied constantly. Not for moral guidance; he had his own, fairly conventional, ideas and was reasonably true to them.
Fred continued his gentle baiting. “Like that God’s Book you’re always reading. You can’t really think it’s worth a pound of seed.”
“Be serious, Fred.”
“I am being serious.” He opened a copy of the book and flipped through its accordian-style pages. “Half serious. I suppose it’s useful for scaring children and keeping them lined up properly. Not much else.”
“You’re dead wrong. It’s the closest thing we have to a historical record. Everything else is just what somebody told somebody.”
“You’re still dancing that jig?” He slapped the book shut. “Somebody sat down and made that up. Some priest.” No one in Samueltown had been a priest for more than three generations, and most of the townspeople shared Fred’s contempt for the profession.
“That’s not strictly true,” Lars began, but Fred cut him off with a laugh and an out-thrust palm. “Save it. Too much work for idle argument,” he said, which was true, and he jogged away.
Shaking his head, Lars slid Fred’s precious metals into a small fish-bladder bag, tied the mouth of it shut, and affixed an identifying label. He recorded the bag’s contents in his notebook, then set it on top of a pile of similar bags. He squinted at the low suns. About another hour; then he could carry the bags to the ship’s lockup hold and go home.
A few days later, they were under sail; eight ships that drew power from oars as well as sails, in case of calm. As closely as could be divided, each ship held one-eighth of Samueltown’s resources, human as well as material. Most of each ship’s cargo was made up of food and seed. They had to save food enough to last the town a year or more, until the waters receded enough for planting and the fish started biting again.
As long as the wind and currents were favorable, there was plenty of time for “idle argument.” Lars and Fred and the town’s mayor, called Samuel by way of title, were resting in the shade after an hour of cleaning fish. It had been a noisome job, since the offal was collected and kept in a trough at the stern, to use as chum for attracting other fish.
Samuel was in an especially bad mood. She had been a farmer all her life and had worked the same piece of land through thirty years and two husbands. In a few months now, her orchards and vines would be under fifty fathoms of steaming water. If she ever farmed again, it would mean starting from scratch on a sterile mountaintop.
She folded her arms on the railing and stared down at the inky blue water. “You’ve talked to a priest, haven’t you.”
“The one in Carroltown,” Lars said. “When I went down to copy the annotations in our Godbuk.”
“Did he have any answers?” Her voice was almost a snarl, though she was close to tears. “Why this happens? Why we just have time to get started and …”
“He had all the answers,” Fred said. “Right? They always have.”
Lars shrugged. “You know how I feel.”
“Yeah, but you’re crazy.” Fred picked at a splinter in the decking. “You only get half a vote.”
“Nice if we could settle it with a vote,” Samuel said. “‘The suns should stay dim. Vote yes or no.’”
“You can’t just dismiss what the priests say. Just because they’re priests. They know things—”
“The problem with most people,” Samuel cut in, “isn’t that they don’t know a lot of things. Just that most of what they know is wrong.”
“You wouldn’t have applied that to this man,” Lars said. “He was pretty impressive. Spent all of his life, eighty years, just learning.”
“That’s Carroltown for you,” Fred said. “Learning what? Anything but an honest profession.”
“He had what he said was a calling.”
“So do I. God told me in a dream, ‘Fred, you just sit back and take it easy. Working at that damned forge is giving you blisters on your blisters.’ Nobody believes me, but it’s true.”
“People like that are useless,” Samuel said. “They’re like the sucker things you sometimes find on a grayfish. Taking without giving.”
“You class me that way, Samuel?”
“No. You work hard, I know it. One time I had six children in the house, all at once. How you handle ten times that number is beyond me.”
“I make them want to learn. So they keep quiet and pay attention, most of them.”
“That’s in the nature of children,” Fred said, “indulging their curiosity. Most of us grow out of it. Your priest friend was just a child with a long beard.”
“Maybe so, in a sense. But meeting him was … about the most important thing that ever happened to me. He started me thinking about the Godbuk.”
Fred laughed. “Then he should have been taken out and drowned.”
“Something he said?” Samuel asked.
>
“Something he showed me.” Lars leaned forward, intense. “I never told you about this?”
“You’ve told me,” Fred said.
Samuel shot him a look. “I don’t think so,” she said. Best to keep him on familiar ground.
“Wake me up when it’s over.”
“He didn’t show me himself,” Lars said. “He was too old to make the journey. But he drew me a map and sent a guide along with me.”
“To where?”
“A place well south of Carroltown. A cave in the mountains. How well do you know chapter four of the first Testament?”
“Not well. It’s about the first Burning, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” He ignored Fred’s snort. “It tells how one group tried to escape the Burning by getting back in the ship that brought them here. They got it back up into the sky again, but it fell and killed them all.”
“I remember.”
“Well, Godbuk says there were fifty-one of them, and it says the ship’s captain was named Chu.” He started to get up. “I’ll show you; let me get—”
Samuel waved him down. “I’ll take your word for it. Go on.”
“Ships in the sky,” Fred muttered.
“There were words in that cave, carved into the rock. They were hard to read—so old that the very rock was crumbling with age, even though it was inside, protected from wind and water. The writing was very strange, in a style I’d never seen before.
“It said, ‘In memory of the nova’s first victims’—I don’t know what that word means, obviously something about the Burning—and it’s followed by a list of fifty-one names. The name at the top is Chu.”
“Doesn’t prove anything.” Fred opened one eye. “It might be old, sure. But even if it was written by the same crowd of priests who wrote God’s Book, it’s still just a children’s tale.”
“But Fred … even you, Fred, you have to admit there is at least a small possibility that the inscription is real; that it commemorates an actual happening.”
Fred smiled at him and closed his eyes again. “Ships in the sky.”
“—and if that part of Godbuk is true, maybe other parts are as well. Certainly other parts are.”
“Like coming here from another world?” Samuel said. “Spending twenty-eight years on a ship that flew through the air?”
“Through the sky, not ‘air.’ It says there wasn’t any air.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to believe,” she said.
“Well, maybe that part’s not strictly true,” Lars conceded. “It might just be the result of some copying error ages ago.”
“That’s the first sensible idea you’ve had in several minutes,” Fred said, yawning.
“I’ll tell you what, though. You could even make a case for that. For there not being any air.”
“I couldn’t,” Fred said. “Wouldn’t.”
“The higher up you go on a mountain, the harder it is to breathe. It seems logical that if you went high enough, you’d run out of air altogether.”
“But—”
“And they were so high it took them twenty-eight years to come down!”
“But if there isn’t any air … what is there?”
Lars shrugged. “Sky. Just sky.”
“Don’t forget the stars,” Fred said. “They’d be all around you, like lightbugs.”
“Maybe they would. Maybe they’re too far away; you’d never get close to them.”
“Maybe, maybe. Maybe you ought to try it—get up in that thin air and it might clear your head.”
“Some of us are a little worried, Lars,” Samuel said. “All the time you spend studying that Godbuk. All the charts and outlines and such.”
“I get my work done.”
“I know you do. It just seems like a regretful waste of time and talent.” Among other things, Lars had reinvented the water pump and devised an oil-flotation bearing for compasses. “We’ll be needing all of your cleverness for the rebuilding.”
“I’ll get my work done then, too.” He settled back against the railing. “Don’t you see, though … that we condemn ourselves and our descendants to … that we guarantee life will never be any different. Not unless some people waste their time and talent thinking about why things happen.”
“Things happen,” Fred said sleepily. “That’s all.”
Sumtīms tū hot dē ī uv Hevn shīns,
An ofn is its gōld cumplekshn dimd,
An evry fār from fār sumtīm dēclīns …
The Twenty-fourth Burning was no more or less severe than the twenty-three that had preceded it. The people were better prepared than they had been in the first couple of Burnings, and rarely lost more than one out of five able-bodied men and women, though small children and old people had a higher mortality rate.
The world had prepared itself the same way it had for millions of years. Before the nova suddenly waxed bright, fish headed for cool deep water, to estivate. Insects spun themselves silver chrysalides, and that season’s plant seeds wore protective garments of tough fiber.
And at the appointed time, within a single day, one sun’s brightness increased a hundredfold, kindling a universal forest fire from pole to pole that marched around the world with the dawn. As the fires consumed themselves, the sea began to steam, then to boil. The ashes of the world were scattered by a fierce wind of ozone and superheated steam. The sea rose and spilled boiling over the sterile plains. And as the nova faded, it began to rain.
In the fragile safety of their caves, men and women crouched around flickering lamps, unable to sleep or even to speak for the manic wail of the wind outside; a wind that would corrode away the polar ice in a couple of days; a wind that tossed large rocks around like pellets of sleet; a wind that would strip the flesh from bone and then scatter the bones across half a world.
The first rain fell boiling and rose back into the sky. (The planet that had looked so green and blue and hospitable glowed an even baleful white.) After a while some of the water stayed out of the air, and the planetwide storm gentled to mere hurricane force. It rained, hard and long.
When they came out of their holes, the rain was only a warm mist. By the time their caravan was spiked together, deep blue sky sometimes showed through the clouds, and the suns revealed themselves several times a day as they rolled along the horizon. The mud began to congeal and they left the polar crater the day of the first snow.
They made it back to the islands that had been hills overlooking Samueltown. Only 178 people had been lost, and fully half that number had survived the storm, but were on a boat that had one night mysteriously disappeared.
Lars found the hill where he had buried deep a chest full of books and other valuables. He had marked it by attaching a long chain to one handle and allowing a length of chain to protrude above the ground.
They never located it.
They raked compost into the side of the hill and planted rice and barley; then rowed to the other hills and did the same, waiting for the shallow water to recede from their fields.
It would be fifteen years before the first full crop came in.
Samuel and Lars remained friends over the years; for a short awkward time they were even lovers. But Fred grew progressively bitter in his jibes as Lars became more convinced of his theory that Godbuk was veiled, literal truth. Most people in Samueltown thought Lars was a valuable man, if slightly dotty, but Fred was the leader of a vocal minority that withdrew their children from his school, rather than have them be taught lies. Which amused the rest of the town. Lars’ stories were fantastic, but it was the sort of thing that would hold a child’s attention and give him something to prattle about. Life was joyless enough; why deprive children of a little spark of wonder, no matter how silly?
Lars had finished grading the arithmetic slates and was putting the children’s names on the board, in order of accomplishment. Maybe Johnny would work harder tomorrow, to get his name off the bottom of the list. He turned at the soun
d of a polite cough.
A stranger was standing diffidently in the doorway, which sight almost made Lars drop the slate he was holding. It had been years since he had seen anyone he hadn’t known all his life.
“Uh … what can I do for you?”
“You’re the town book-keeper.” The man was doubly a stranger for being blond, a feature so rare in Samueltown’s genetic pool that not a single individual in Lars generation had it.
“That’s true.”
“Well, so am I. My own town, that is. Fredrik, south and east of here.”
Lars had heard of it. “Come in, sit down.” He walked over to the desks where the larger children sat. “Are you just traveling?”
“Mostly copying. We lost too many books last Burning.”
“Didn’t we all. Can you pay?”
He shook his head. “No. But I can barter … if any of the thirty-some books I have interest you.” He opened up a tanned-hide bag and Lars sorted through the books, while the stranger looked over Samueltown’s small library. Lars decided he wanted to copy “Sewing” and “Mill Construction,” for which he traded the copy-right to “Metal Work” and “Computation.”
The man, whose name was Brian, stayed with Lars for a month of copying. They became good friends, taking their meals together (with most of the other bachelor men and women in town) at Samuel’s; sitting by her fireside with cups of sweet wine, exchanging ideas until the late hours. When Lars was drafted to help flense a huge fish, Brian took over his school for a day, teaching the children rhyme and song.
After the month was done, though, Brian had to move on to the next town. He asked Lars to walk him down to the river.
There was nobody else at the riverbank that time of morning, the fishing boats having put out to sea at first light. It was a cool, breezy day, the new forest on the other side of the river making soft music as the wind pushed through the tall hollow stalks of young bamboo-like trees.
It was a pleasant way to start out a journey, and as good a setting for good-byes as one might desire. But Brian set his things on the pulley-driven raft-bridge and then silently stepped onto it, as if he were going to leave without a word, without a handclasp. He turned to Lars looking more sad than the occasion should have warranted, and said abruptly: