“Help us,” Remontoire said. “Please.”
It took 3,000 years to reach them.
For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver which fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.
Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the 2,000 years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.
“Hope would make an excellent shield,” Markarian mused, as they approached it, “if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other.”
“Don’t think I wouldn’t.”
They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.
“Then why don’t you?” Markarian said.
For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. “Because they need us more than I need revenge.”
“A higher cause?”
“Redemption,” she said.
HOPE, GALACTIC PLANE – AD CIRCA 40,000
They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock which mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving toward them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.
Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into the Hope: The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long ago.
Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rockpool filmed in grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.
“You came,” he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner: almost fully human.
“You’re not him, are you? You look like him – sound like him – but the image you sent us was of someone much older.”
“I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire . . . but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.”
“What was his name?”
“Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.”
She had to ask. “Did he make it back to a commune?”
“Yes, of course,” the man said, as if her question was foolish. “How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?”
“And did he forgive me?”
“I forgive you now,” he said. “It amounts to the same thing.”
She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.
The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change – no matter how slight – would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it – but other than that, all they had done was wait.
They were very good at waiting.
“How many refugees did you bring?”
“One hundred thousand.” Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. “I know; too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.”
She thought back to her own sleepers. “I know. Still, we might be able to take more . . . I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but –”
He cut her off, gently. “I think you’d better come with me,” said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.
“How much of it did you explore?”
“Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere in this ship,” Remontoire said. “If there are 200 cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.”
“No sleepers?”
“Just this one.”
What they’d arrived at was a plinth, supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary; spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.
“Is he dead?” Irravel asked.
“Depends what you mean by dead.” The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. “His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.”
“Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?”
“No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs – deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.”
Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. “Is his personality still running the ship?”
“We detected only caretaker programs; capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.”
“Is that all there was?”
“No.” Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prising something from Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. “We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into 190 areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.”
She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. “He burned the sleepers onto this?”
“Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.”
“Can you retrieve them?”
“It would not be trivial,” the Conjoiner said. “But given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.”
She thought of the infected Galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. “Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,” she said. “Re-create Yellowstone, and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”
“Is that what you’re advocating?”
“No,” she said, after toying with the idea in all seriousness. “We need all the genetic diversity we can get, if we’re going to establish a new branch of humanity outside the Galaxy.”
She thought about it. Soon they would witness Hope’s destruction, as the wave of machines tore through it with the mindlessness of stampeding animals. Some of them might try and follow the Hirondelle, but so far the machines moved too slowly to catch the ship, even if they forced it back towards Galactic North.
Where was there to go?
There were globular clusters high above the Galaxy – tightly packed shoals of old stars where the wave hadn’t reached, but where fragments of humanity might have already sought refuge. If the clusters proved unwelcoming, there were high-latitude stars, flung from the Galaxy a billion years ago, and some might have dragged their planetary systems with them. If those failed – and it would be tens of thousands of years before the possibilities were exhausted – the Hirondelle could always loop around towards Galactic South and search there, striking out for the Clouds of Magellan. Ultimately, of course – if any part or fragment of Irravel’s children still clung to humanity, and
remembered where they’d come from, and what had become of it, they would want to return to the Galaxy, even if that meant confronting the wave.
But they would return.
“That’s the plan then?” Remontoire said.
Irravel shrugged, turning away from the plinth where Markarian lay. “Unless you’ve got a better one.”
DAPPLE: A HWARHATH HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Eleanor Arnason
Critically acclaimed author Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Ring of Swords, set in the same evocative fictional universe as is the bulk of her short fiction, including the story that follows.
In this story she takes us to a distant planet inhabited by the alien hwarhath, and along with a brave and determined young girl who defies her family and sets off on a perilous adventure that takes her into uncharted territory of several sorts – into wild, lawless country inhabited by bandits and remorseless killers, and, perhaps even more dangerously, into a new social territory as well, as she assumes roles Forbidden to Women since time immemorial . . .
THERE WAS A GIRL named Helwar Ahl. Her family lived on an island north and east of the Second Continent, which was known in those days as the Great Southern Continent. (Now, of course, we know that an even larger expanse of land lies farther south, touching the pole. In Ahl’s time, however, no one knew about this land except its inhabitants.)
A polar current ran up the continent’s east coast and curled around Helwar Island, so its climate was cool and rainy. Thick forests covered the mountains. The Helwar built ships from the wood. They were famous shipwrights, prosperous enough to have a good-sized harbour town.
Ahl grew up in this town. Her home was the kind of great house typical of the region: a series of two-storey buildings linked together. The outer walls were mostly blank. Inside were courtyards, balconies, and large windows provided with the modern wonder, glass. Granted, the panes were small and flawed. But some ingenious artificer had found a way to fit many panes together, using strips of lead. Now the women of the house had light, even in the coldest weather.
As a child, Ahl played with her cousins in the courtyards and common rooms, all of them naked except for their fog-grey fur. Later, in a kilt, she ran in the town streets and visited the harbour. Her favourite uncle was a fisherman, who went out in morning darkness, before most people woke. In the late afternoon, he returned. If he’d been lucky, he tied up and cleaned his catch, while Ahl sat watching on the dock.
“I want to be a fisherman,” she said one day.
“You can’t, darling. Fishing is men’s work.”
“Why?”
He was busy gutting fish. He stopped for a moment, frowning, a bloody knife still in his hand. “Look at this situation! Do you want to stand like me, knee deep in dead fish? It’s hard, nasty work and can be dangerous. The things that women do well – negotiation, for example, and the forming of alliances – are no use at all, when dealing with fish. What’s need here,” he waved the knife, “is violence. Also, it helps if you can piss off the side of a boat.”
For a while after that Ahl worked at aiming her urine. She could do it, if she spread her legs and tilted her pelvis in just the right fashion. But would she be able to manage on a pitching boat? Or in a wind? In addition, there was the problem of violence. Did she really want to be a killer of many small animals?
One of the courtyards in her house had a basin, which held ornamental fish. Ahl caught one and cut off its head. A senior female cousin caught her before she was finished, though the fish was past help.
“What are you doing?” the matron asked.
Ahl explained.
“These are fish to feed, not fish to eat,” her cousin said and demonstrated this by throwing a graincake into the basin.
Fish surged to the surface in a swirl of red fins, green backs, and blue-green tails. A moment later, the cake was gone. The fish returned to their usual behaviour: a slow swimming back and forth.
“It’s hardly fair to kill something this tame – in your own house, too. Guests should be treated with respect. In addition, these fish have an uninteresting flavour and are full of tiny bones. If you ate one, it would be like eating a cloth full of needles.”
Ahl lost interest in fishing after that. Her uncle was right about killing. It was a nasty activity. All that quickness and grace, gone in a moment. The bright colours faded. She was left with nothing except a feeling of disgust.
Maybe she’d be a weaver, like her mother, Leweli. Or the captain of a far-travelling ocean-trader, like her aunt Ki. Then she could bring treasures home: transparent glass, soft and durable lead.
When she was ten, she saw her first play. She knew the actors, of course. They were old friends of her family and came to Helwar often, usually staying in Ahl’s house. The older one – Perig – was quiet and friendly, always courteous to the household children, but not a favourite with them. The favorite was Cholkwa, who juggled and pulled candy out of ears. He knew lots of funny stories, mostly about animals such as the tli, a famous troublemaker and trickster. According to the house’s adults, he was a comedian, who performed in plays too rude for children to see. Perig acted in hero plays, though it was hard to imagine him as a hero. The two men were lovers, but didn’t usually work together. This was due to the difference in their styles and to their habit of quarrelling. They had, the women of Ahl’s house said, a difficult relationship.
This time they came together, and Perig brought his company. They put on a play in the main square, both of them acting, though Cholkwa almost never did dark work.
The play was about two lovers – both of them warriors – whose families quarrelled. How could they turn against one another? How could they refuse their relatives’ pleas for help? Each was the best warrior in his family.
Though she hadn’t seen a play before, Ahl knew how this was going to end. The two men met in battle. It was more like a dance than anything else, both of them splendidly costumed and moving with slow reluctant grace. Finally, after several speeches, Perig tricked Cholkwa into striking. The blow was fatal. Perig went down in a gold and scarlet heap. Casting his sword away, Cholkwa knelt beside him. A minor player in drab armour crept up and killed Cholkwa as he mourned.
Ahl was transfixed, though also puzzled. “Wasn’t there any way out?” she asked the actors later, when they were back in her house, drinking halin and listening to her family’s compliments.
“In a comedy, yes,” said Cholkwa. “Which is why I do bright plays. But Perig likes plays that end with everyone dead, and always over some ethical problem that’s hardly ever encountered in real life.”
The older man was lying on a bench, holding his halin cup on his chest. He glanced at Cholkwa briefly, then looked back at the ceiling. “Is what you do more true to reality? Rude plays about animals? I’d rather be a hero in red and gold armour than a man in a tli costume.”
“I’d rather be a clever tli than someone who kills his lover.”
“What else could they do?” asked Perig, referring to the characters in the play.
“Run off,” said Cholkwa. “Become actors. Leave their stupid relatives to fight their stupid war unaided.”
It was one of those adult conversations where everything really important was left unspoken. Ahl could tell that. Bored, she said, “I’d like to be an actor.”
They both looked at her.
“You can’t,” said Perig.
This sounded familiar. “Why not?”
“In part, it’s custom,” Cholkwa said. “But there’s at least one good
reason. Actors travel and live among unkin; and often the places we visit are not safe. I go south a lot. The people there love comedy, but in every other way they’re louts and savages. At times I’ve wondered if I’d make it back alive, or would someone have to bring my ashes in an urn to Perig?”
“Better to stay here,” said Perig. “Or travel the way your aunt Ki does, in a ship full of relatives.”
No point in arguing. When adults started to give advice, they were never reasonable. But the play stayed with her. She imagined stories about people in fine clothing, faced with impossible choices; and she acted them out, going so far as to make a wooden sword, which she kept hidden in a hayloft. Her female relatives had an entire kitchen full of knives and cleavers and axes, all sharp and dangerous. But the noise they would have made, if they’d seen her weapon!
Sometimes she was male and a warrior. At other times, she was a sailor like Ki, fighting the kinds of monsters found at the edges of maps. Surely, Ahl thought, it was permissible for women to use swords when attacked by monsters, rising out of the water with fangs that dripped poison and long curving claws?
Below her in the barn, her family’s tsina ate and excreted. Their animal aroma rose to her, combining with the scent of hay. Later she said this was the scent of drama: dry, ageing hay and new-dropped excrement.
The next year Cholkwa came alone and brought his company. They did a decent comedy, suitable for children, about a noble sul who was tricked and humiliated by a tli. The trickster was exposed at the play’s end. The sul’s honour was restored. The good animals did a dance of triumph, while the tli cowered and begged.
Cholkwa was the tli. Strange that a man so handsome and friendly could portray a sly coward.
Ahl asked about this. Cholkwa said, “I can’t talk about other men, but I have that kind of person inside me: a cheat and liar, who would like to run away from everything. I don’t run, of course. Perig would disapprove, and I’d rather be admired than despised.”
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