Quintessence Sky

by David Walton

  Catherine covered the mouth of the bottle and upended it briefly, leaving a small drop behind on her finger, which she smeared into her left eye. Pain seared her eye. That always happened, but once it passed, the world would come alive with light and color. Tiny networks of light would cross through the air, connecting trees and rocks, some stretching out of sight or into the sky. It was like clearing a film from your eyes that you never knew had been there.

  The threads of light were quintessence, the foundation of the miracles they did every day: turning sand into food, building homes of diamond and gold, communicating across miles. The threads were everywhere, connecting every living thing, reaching even beyond the grave. There was some disagreement among members of the Quintessence Society about just what quintessence was. Was it really the light itself? Was it something behind the light, something intrinsic to the way the atoms of the material world were stitched together? Or was it spiritual, a matter for prayer and meditation rather than experimentation?

  Regardless, it was closer and more powerful here on Horizon. Some said it was because here, at the edge of the world, the sun and stars dipped down close to the Earth. Some said the quintessence came from the animals; some that the animals simply benefitted from it. Sinclair had even suggested that the animals used to be ordinary, and only became extraordinary when their island had floated to the edge of the world. Whatever was true, quintessence was everywhere you looked.

  Except here. As the pain subsided, Catherine looked around and saw nothing. No light. No quintessence. That explained all the death, at least. She could picture the opteryx, drifting close, then suddenly reverting to its true weight and plunging to earth. Every living thing on Horizon, from the grass to the insects to the giant bovine herds, relied on quintessence for survival. Including her.

  Catherine reached inside herself for the familiar flow of quintessence that would allow her to run quickly for safety or leap to the top of one of these trees, but it was gone. She turned and ran, stumbling over roots. She felt clumsy running without the help of quintessence. But no, it was worse than that. Her feet felt heavy and her ankles didn't bend the way they should. She knew what was happening. Without quintessence, the food and water she had consumed over the last year was transforming back into salt and sand.

  She tripped again, and fell on her face. Her legs were stiffening fast. She clambered up again, but she could barely move her knees. It was like walking on stilts. Her legs were turning to stone.

  An image flashed into her mind, of Mad Admiral Chelsey and the original explorers, their bodies stiff with stone and encrusted salt. Their bodies had changed more slowly than this on their return voyage, but they had only gradually moved away from the source of quintessence, too.

  She screamed for help, but with little hope. Thomas and Paul must have already succumbed, dying before they could alert her. They were, after all, native Horizon creatures, even more dependent on quintessence than she was.

  She fell into the mud again, and this time she couldn't get up again. She couldn't bend her knees or get any traction against the swampy ground. Her legs burned with pain. A vine creeper next to her was still green and laced with purple flowers. She knew the variety — an innocent-looking bloom with sweet smelling nectar, safe for insects that would spread its pollen, but bearing invisible poisoned barbs to kill any larger animal (or human) inclined to touch it. Catherine had no intention of touching it. The point was, it was still alive. It must be outside the range of the blight. She was close!

  She grabbed an exposed root and pulled herself through the muck, trying to get her legs out of the dead zone. As she pulled, however, she saw the creeper turn brown and its bright flowers wither. Whatever was causing the circle of death, one thing was clear. It was spreading.

  She saw it spread past her to other plants, too fast for her to escape. The stiffness crept up her torso, and she cried out from the pain of it. Then, helped by her skink tears, she saw a single quintessence thread burning, leading from her pack back toward the settlement. Her bell-box. She pulled it out. At least she could tell Matthew what was happening. She worked the handle, beginning a message, but before she could say anything, the bright thread snapped, and she was left with a useless wooden box of bones. She cried out in frustration and flung the box aside.

  The rain clouds above blocked the sun, leaving her in near-darkness. She made one last, desperate attempt to pull herself forward, but the ground was slick with mud, and there was nothing to hold on to. The circle of death was spreading too fast. It seemed that Matthew's fears for her safety would prove warranted after all.

  The dark clouds broke open, and it started to rain.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE RAIN pelted down, drumming against the invisible canopy overhead. Matthew bent and examined the broad, white petals of the flowers arrayed around him like a field of snow. These salt lilies were crucial to the Horizon colony's continued survival, but their yield had been steadily decreasing. He had hoped it was just the recent rainstorms dissolving the salt crystals off of the flowers. He had devised the canopy overhead to keep them dry without blocking the sunlight, but from what he could see, it hadn't helped.

  Salt was to quintessence like fuel was to a flame, and every living thing on Horizon needed it, including them. Animals used quintessence in a hundred different ways to hunt prey, hide from predators, attract mates, and protect their young, while plants used it to germinate, gather sunlight, and spread their seeds. Plants like these salt lilies formed salt crystals on their blooms to attract insect pollinators. All of the inventions that kept humans alive on this island required salt, and planting and harvesting these lilies had become their main source of it.

  "They're completely dry," Matthew said.

  The man in charge of tending the lilies, a tall Scotsman named Ferguson, rolled his eyes. "Of course, they're dry. I told you, didn't I? I watered the soil, just like you said, but the blooms are dry as a desert."

  "Then why aren't they producing?" Matthew said.

  Ferguson was oddly proportioned, with huge feet, but a tiny head and sunken chin. He glared at Matthew. "Don't look at me. I was a lawyer before we came here. I don't know anything about farming."

  Matthew wanted to tell him that it didn't matter what he had been in England, he was a salt farmer now, but that would only antagonize the man. Ferguson thought the work was beneath him—in fact, he had been dropping hints that he would make a better governor than Matthew's father—but he did the job properly. It wasn't his fault there was no salt.

  "You'd better tell your father to start paying attention," Ferguson said. "It's just getting worse, and he doesn't seem to care."

  Matthew fought back another irritated reply. "First I'll need to test the soil," he said.

  The problem was, they didn't know where the salt came from. The animals got it from the plants they ate, and the plants seemed to pull it from the soil, but how did the soil get replenished?

  The water in the ocean around Horizon was fresh, despite the fact that it continually flowed over the edge and new water flowed in from the east. That implied that the salt from the ocean was somehow captured by the island and used to feed the local ecology, but how that actually happened, Matthew had no idea. It was hard to solve a problem when you didn't know how it worked in the first place.

  "It's the manticores doing it," Ferguson said.

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. "How do you figure that?"

  He made a snorting noise. "Are you as blind as your father? They don't want us here. They know we need the salt, so they're getting rid of it."

  "And how are they doing that?"

  Ferguson shrugged eloquently, his shoulders nearly reaching his ears. "You're the smart one," he said.

  Matthew ignored him and bent to collect some soil. As he did so, he felt a stabbing pain in his thigh. He frowned and rubbed at the spot. His leg had been hurting him on and off for a week now, and it worried him. Quintessence didn't prevent pain—if he pricked h
is finger, he would still feel the jab—but it quickly healed all wounds and diseases, even many that would have meant death back in England. What could be causing this pain in his leg to continue, day after day?

  He poured the soil into a glass flask filled with fresh, glowing water from the ocean. The outside of the flask was covered with black scales from an opteryx, whose wings and body scales changed color in response to a flow of quintessence. It was part of a mating display, a way the male opteryx had of showing females its strength and prowess. The scales changed from black through a range of colors, sometimes to a pure white, depending on how much quintessence the male had collected in its body. Males with the brightest color attracted the most females.

  For the inventors and philosophers of the Quintessence Society, this provided a means to measure and compare a quintessence potential. The salt in the soil would fuel the quintessence in the water, causing it to glow brighter. The quintessence glow would suffuse the scales, which would change color in relation to how much salt had been added.

  Matthew stirred the water, and the scales turned a dull red. That meant about 20 Q, which corresponded to less than an ounce of salt. He did the figures in his head. Forty percent less than last week. Not only was the salt concentration still decreasing; it was decreasing at a faster rate.

  The numbers didn't lie. Matthew tried to keep the dismay off of his face. Ferguson could be a troublemaker, quick to complain about problems and get people riled up. Matthew wanted to let his father know first, before Ferguson started a panic.

  And there would be panic. At this rate, if they couldn't figure out what was happening, all the humans on Horizon would be dead inside a month, with the animal and plant population following soon after. The next expedition to discover the island would find only a colony of statues, petrified like the corpses on Admiral Chelsey's ship.

  Catherine had been right to go on her expedition. He worried at the thought of her out in the wilderness, alone, but they had to solve this before it was too late. It went against all his protective instincts for her to be in danger while he stayed safe at home. He had made the mistake of voicing that to her, and they had parted on bad terms. The memory ate at him; he couldn't stand being unreconciled.

  Matthew headed back home, bracing himself for a meeting with his father. He walked through the invisible barrier, feeling nothing more than a slight buzz, and on into the settlement. It was more like a city than a village, its buildings tall and beautiful, constructed out of diamond, silver, and various types of wood. Nearly all the homes had running hot and cold water pumped from the river. Most of them were heated without the need for a fireplace, and even cooled by a heat substitution device. It was a tiny city of wonders, with daily comforts London had never dreamed of, but all of those wonders used salt at a tremendous rate. No one would be eager to give up their comforts, but something would have to be done, and soon, if they were going to survive.

  The governor's mansion was not cooled by quintessence, nor did it have running water. It could hardly be called a mansion anymore, for that matter, since so many of the newer houses exceeded it in size and grandeur. It was drab and square, a emblem of the Protestant ideal of unadorned piety. Exactly like the governor himself.

  Matthew walked in without knocking. This wasn't his home. He hadn't lived with his father since they first arrived on Horizon, when his father had lived in the forest, evangelizing the manticores. But his news was urgent, and he wasn't going to wait to take it through proper channels. He made his way through corridors to the room where he expected to find his father.

  It was the largest room in the house, and Matthew found his father there with six manticores, a trusted cadre of Christian converts whom his father was educating. He ran the house like a seminary, housing as many as a dozen, to whom he taught daily classes on Hebrew, Greek, and Biblical theology. In fact, he devoted a lot more attention and passion to this work than he did to the running of the colony, one of the many reasons Matthew considered him ill-suited to the governorship. Matthew had to admit, however, that his father had done a remarkable job of forging a kind of peace with their manticore neighbors after the fighting last year, far more successfully than anyone else could have done.

  John Marcheford was dressed exactly as he would have been in London: an austere, black doublet and gray hose, sober attire with a formality completely out of place in a remote island colony. There had been a time, long ago, when Matthew had revered his father as a god. Back home, he had been important and respected, his knowledge vast and his morals above reproach, and Matthew had wanted to grow up to be just like him. In those days, Catherine used to say he was a miniature version of his father, a mannequin who dressed the same and repeated the same phrases.

  Now, Matthew had to keep his mouth shut in his father's presence if he didn't want to start a fight. His father's distinguished manner, so suited to London, seemed out-of-place and preposterous here. His clothing was impractical and ridiculous, and worst of all, he denounced quintessence and its use in everyday life as a corrupting and atheistic influence.

  "I have to talk with you," Matthew said.

  His father lifted a finger and continued his lesson. He was aging, Matthew noticed. The lines of his face had grown deeper, and his hands, which Matthew remembered for their strength and purposefulness, had grown knotted and spidery.

  "Please read from verse fourteen," his father said.

  A manticore stood awkwardly cradling an English Bible in its pincers. "He causeth grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the use of man, that he may bring forth bread out of the earth."

  Matthew recognized it as Psalm 104, a chapter about God's sovereignty over the natural world.

  "God causeth the grass to grow," his father boomed in his preaching voice. "It is not the rain or sun which causeth it, however God might please to use them in his service. Therefore, if the grass fail, should we beseech the rain and the sun for help?"

  "Nay!" the manticores chorused.

  "Should we measure the rain and calculate the angle of the sun to understand why it will not grow?"

  "Nay!"

  "What then?"

  One manticore raised a pincer in a ridiculous parody of a English schoolboy raising his hand. Marcheford called on him.

  "We should seek the Lord in prayer," the manticore said.

  "Very good," Marcheford replied, his eyes boring into Matthew's. "Only the Lord can make the plants grow."

  Matthew sighed. He wondered if they had been studying this passage before he arrived, or if his father had brought it up simply to make his point to Matthew. There was so little they agreed on anymore, and Matthew found it unsettling. Everything he thought and believed came originally from his father. Once, he would have taken every word from his father's mouth as gospel truth.

  His father was wrong about quintessence, wrong about the experimental study of the natural world being an atheistic philosophy. But that meant his father could be wrong, and if so, what if he was wrong about everything? Matthew still believed his Protestant faith: that salvation was by faith alone; that the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was a symbol, not the actual flesh and blood of Christ; that God alone was to be worshipped. But he wasn't certain why he believed them. Was it just because his father had always said so? It was only in the last year that it had really occurred to him that his father could be wrong. It was as if the pillar supporting everything Matthew believed had suddenly been swept away, and he wasn't sure if anything he thought he knew would stand anymore.

  "We need to talk right now," Matthew said.

  His father nodded. "Lessons are adjourned until tomorrow," he said.

  He led Matthew to his study, a room which, when Christopher Sinclair was governor, had been strewn with flasks, powders, jars of animal organs, dried insects and bones—all tools in the service of the natural philosophy. Now, the room was filled with rolls of paper, the manuscript of his father's ongoing attempt to translate the Bible for the manticores. T
he manticores had no written language, but his father had created one, using a combination of Latin letters and pictographs to represent the tail motions that were so important a part of their communication. It had been his father's lifelong wish to bring the gospel to a group of people unreached by the gospel, and no group was more unreached than the manticore tribes. He was living his dream.

  "You know we're running out of salt," Matthew said. "I just came from the lily fields. We have a month at most. We need to start compulsory rationing."

  His father shrugged. "Why come to me with this? I have nothing to do with your atheist Quintessence Society."

  "We're not atheists. And I come to you because you're the governor. You're supposed to be leading."

  His father had been offered the governorship with little discussion or objection after Christopher Sinclair died. As a bishop, he had the highest rank and social class of anyone in the colony, so most people accepted his leadership as natural. To Matthew, it seemed ridiculous. His father was the opposite of all Horizon stood for, a man who looked backward instead of forward, who clung to the ideals of London society, who thought young men should respect their elders, women should stay home and be quiet in public, and people should accept their God-given place in life instead of striving to make themselves a new one. What was he doing as their leader?

  This was Horizon. They could heal any disease, manipulate invisible powers, run for miles without tiring, and practically fly. They were gods. Why should the old rules apply? In this new world, it was Matthew whose knowledge and skill exceeded his father's, not the other way around. His father had been revered by many in London for his religious zeal and his rank in the English church. But Matthew, at only nineteen years old, was the one revered here. Not for his connections or place in society, but for what he could do.

  "I warned you about this," his father said. "You think you can replace God with no consequences. You think that because you understand how bread is made, you don't need God to provide it. Now God is withdrawing his hand, and what are you left with, after all your wisdom? No bread."