Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 109

by Neil Clarke

  I moved the door back and forth, thinking about how strong and heavy it was. “If we have this, what do we need of lightstone weapons?”

  Crushpincers clicked with good humor. “Not as much, certainly. But we need lightstone for much more than for weapons; we need the lightstone to fly over the enemy. A lightstone-levitated gondola with four archers could neutralize an eight of eights of infantry, if even a quarter of their load of poisoned daggershells found the target.”

  The instinct of a daggershell was to seek the ice at as high a velocity as its water jets would take it, its hard, notched shell penetrating deep enough to hold it until its next molting. They could stab completely through a thorax and still stick in the ice below. Many cycles ago, I had come close to being under one, and the wonder and fear at hearing its bright landing so close to me was one of my strongest youthful memories. To us such a thing as a weapon spoke of our desperation. To actually swim above the ice levitated by lightstone fired my imagination.

  “What a project! Are you coming along?”

  “No, someone must mind the windlass, I fear. Now you’re the last, so on your way.”

  I nodded and entered the sphere. My companions were on benches against the side around the equator of the sphere, each with a portal that had been invisible from outside. Cabinets, no doubt filled with the equipment we would need, lay under the benches. I took the remaining free bench and looked around.

  I felt I had entered some new and strange universe. The inner wall was smooth to even the highest frequencies, like an egg. Apart from the benches, the cabinets, and a cylinder covered by what sounded to be a taut drumhead at the very bottom, it all seemed very stark and featureless.

  “We ascend,” Sharpfronds said. Only the slightest motion betrayed the truth of what he said.

  “Loudpincers,” Goodmother Quickfronds said. “I have prepared something for us all to take that will ameliorate the effects of the rising pressure. I assure you, despite what it tastes like, that it will not harm you—I have taken it several times myself in pressure chamber tests.”

  “Pressure chamber?” I had never heard of such a thing.

  Quickfronds raised her fronds in pleasure. “It lies beneath the north side of the University. We carved a cylindrical room, then froze a plug that, after some grinding, matches the opening almost exactly. The ‘almost’ we take care of with a caulking paste of crushed iceweed. A great screw can push the plug down, compressing the water beneath it.”

  I made postures of admiration. “This must have been in work for some time.”

  Sharpfronds clicked his spiracles. “It has. Fortunately. Dr. Quickfronds is our greatest expert on this, and we trust her to keep us alive. Now let me show you another wonder. Crushpincers?”

  “Yes, General?” The voice had a tinny quality, missing some of its lower register glow, but it was clear and understandable. But where was Crushpincers?

  “How far?” Sharpfronds asked, directing his voice to the drum.

  “Two eight cubed and six bodies of line out,” the voice answered, lighting up the drumhead.

  Crushpincers must be outside the sphere, I thought. Observing the play out of the tether line. But, I remembered, the reel was on the ice, and we’d been rising for some time. We’d have gone through the reflecting layer beyond which unaided acoustic senses could not see. So how?

  Sharpfronds leg hair vibrated in excitement. “Good show. Loudpincers and everyone, there is enough tension in the line to carry the sounds we make, as amplified by the big drum head you see in the center. Another drum is attached to the line by small lightstone rollers, so that Crushpincers’ voice can vibrate the line and carry up to us. The same works in reverse.”

  “Crushpincers is still on the ice?” I said, half asking, half stating.

  “Yes,” Sharpfronds said.

  I could think of nothing to say. The implications of being far, far above the ice and still being able to talk to those below ran riot in my mind. Speaking tubes ran only a few eights of body lengths before the voice faded to inaudibility. Beyond that, messengers had been needed.

  We rose and rose. There was no way to keep track of cycles, save through the voice of Crushpincers or one of his students from the drum below; but they told us that two had passed. Dr. Threeclickson said, based on his geometrical analysis, that we had ascended a hundredth of the distance to the mathematical center. Sharpfronds said we should reach something soon; occasional holes in the reflecting layer had revealed another reflecting layer at about this distance.

  We were all feeling somewhat ill. The pressure, Goodmother Quickfronds said, was compressing the heavy fluid cavities in our bodies, interfering with our ability to produce energy. We would be able to tolerate it based on the pressure chamber experiments, for quite some additional distance. But it would be uncomfortable until we got used to it.

  I felt tired, a little woozy, and lighter and lighter. I began holding onto my shelf instinctively, as if to keep from floating off it like I was made of lightstone. The very physics of my body was changing; it was as if I was being drawn to the land of the dead. Should we really be doing this, I wondered.

  To keep my mind off my innards, I tried discussing cosmology with Quickfronds, explaining to her my idea that the universe was like an egg with multiple shells.

  “Egg, universe—it’s an interesting analogy,” she said. “Shells exist to keep out parasites, but allow water and dissolved heavyfluid to enter and nourish the embryonic larva. The larvae exist between the shell and the center, which has nourishment, but is not alive. An idea is a bit like an egg, too, I think. It should stay in the shell of one’s mind until it is ready to emerge, no sooner, no longer. A real egg has only one shell, Loudpincers, and hatches only once. And before crèches and culling, most larvae were eaten when hatched. If our universe is like an egg, are we really ready to crack its shell?”

  War, ice, egg, universe—individuals were laid, hatched, lived and died. But everything else seemed to stay the same. “For how long have nations rose and fell, for how long has knowledge been won and lost, how many generations of soldiers have died fighting over the same ice?”

  Quickfronds nodded. “For longer than we know. Sometimes a warmfall will expose relics; Steadylegs of Crossvalleys has looked at the distribution and frequency of such finds and thinks warmfalls are less frequent now than when they were deposited, and the ice is on average a few body lengths thicker. But there is no discernible change in these rates for the five and three-eighths great greatcycles for which we have records.”

  I imagined all my research lost to the Westerian invasion and then, greats of greatcycles later, being duplicated by someone else, only to be lost again.

  “What happens to a larva that stays too long in its shell?”

  “The worms come, in time. An eggshell is not forever.” Quickfronds waved an arm around her, “Our present shell only seems like it. Your analogy of the egg seems to repeat itself on several scales, and both in abstract and concrete. There may be some wisdom in it on how the universe does things.”

  “Thank you, Goodmother.”

  She nodded and turned away, signaling the end of conversation. I, too, was having trouble concentrating as what the pressure of the ascent was doing to my body distracted me. On and on we went, and we grew quieter and more unsure. How much cable did Crushpincers have on the reel? I couldn’t remember.

  If we did not find something soon, I thought, we might be in no shape to do anything with it.

  “Comrades,” Professor Lieutenant Farfronds called. “Something lies . . .

  The impact came as a surprise, throwing us off our shelves.

  “ . . . ahead of us.”

  We floated together into a jumble on one side of the sphere. Or the bottom, now, for, pulled however gently, we stayed there. It felt as if up had become down and down, up.

  Then, before anyone could even groan in astonishment, the sphere began tilting back and forth, and we slowly rolled as a mass to th
e top. After much embarrassed and apologetic moving of limbs, we sorted ourselves out into a rough circle around the top.

  General Sharpfronds gathered himself, jumped and swam up to the drumhead, and latched on. “Crushpincers!” he bellowed.

  There was no response. The sound transmittal system depended on tension, I realized. And now there was none. We rocked slowly, feeling upside down and helpless.

  Finally, there was some more rocking and a kind of sucking sound. The motion of the sphere changed, now feeling like it was tethered again as opposed to sitting on something.

  “General? Anyone?” Crushpincers’ tinny voice sounded.

  “Thank goodness,” Mr. Longtail sighed.

  “We’re here, Crushpincers. We’re seemingly, uh, upside down, but everyone seems okay. Ah, Goodmother?”

  “It was a gentle crash, we should all be undamaged.”

  “I’m undamaged,” Sharpfronds echoed. Others followed his lead.

  “Good.” Crushpincers voice came after a discernible delay. “We noted when the line went slack, but there is some lag since you are so far up. I have had to reel you back a little to restore tension to the tether, but you should still be close to what stopped you. Can you open the top hatch?”

  It was at our feet now; top had become bottom.

  “We shall attempt that presently. Thank you, Crushpincers.” Sharpfronds waved a limb at us. “It seems we have arrived.”

  “We should gather the lightstone quickly,” Goodmother Quickfronds said. “I don’t know how long our physiology will hold up under this pressure.”

  Actually, I felt somewhat better than I had earlier. Perhaps my body was adapting to the new conditions. I was conscious of, well, slowness, in my thought and movements. But quality seemed unaffected.

  Sharpfronds nodded. “Loudpincers, Farfronds, unscrew the latches. Longtail, wind up the beacon.”

  We all jumped to our tasks, though I wanted a look at the beacon. Wind-up implied a spring of some sort; I had never heard of a spring driving a beacon before. The threat of the Empire had made the University busy indeed, and I found myself very curious about things that, apparently, no longer were to be hidden from me.

  But first things first. I went to work on my latches. As I did so, the sphere began to develop a slight monotonic glow; the beacon, I presumed. Soon the hatch swung aside, and revealed “below” us a vast, smooth, featureless plain starkly lit by the tone of the beacon. I didn’t see anything at all that looked like lightstone.

  “So that is the land of the dead. Not quite what we were told before molting, is it?” General Sharpfronds said. “No eater of souls, no pleasure gardens, and no piles of lightstone, either.”

  “No, sir,” said Farfronds. “It looks like another layer of ice, though darker, less reflective.”

  “The multishell cosmology,” Professor Colonel Threeclickson said. “When the lightstone hits it, it must work its way through to another layer of water, perhaps one that is inhabited. As for the darkness, we have no idea what our layer looks like on the other side. It could be a debris field.”

  My leg hair wilted. That was my idea and Threeclickson had stolen it. I felt vindicated but disappointed that I had not gotten any recognition.

  “And what happens to the dead?” Longtail asked. “I have a bad feeling about this. It is not what we expected. If we cannot see any lightstone, perhaps we should go home.”

  Silence greeted that remark. Not finding the lightstone made the expedition a failure and could have grave consequences for our nation.

  “The area of this land must be over eighty percent of the area of our land.” Professor Threeclickson said. “We can only see a small portion. Where do the warmfalls come from? We should take more of a look.”

  “You are welcome to stick your head in the crack,” said Longtail.

  “I volunteer,” said Lieutenant Farfronds.

  “Thank you,” General Sharpfronds said. “But I would like one experienced soldier to remain aboard the sphere at all time. Since I shall have to make the decision of what to do, I shall get the information first hand. Your orders, Farfronds, are that if anything happens to me, have Crushpincers pull you all back. You hear that, Crushpincers?”

  “I hear, General. May I suggest that, in that event, we pull back a little way and reevaluate. We would not want to lose you.”

  “Oh, bother that. Very well. Pull back a little and, Farfronds, you do as you think best. But should I meet my end up or down there, whatever it is, honor me by making sure that nobody else meets a similar end.”

  “Sir!” Farfronds replied.

  “Enough discussion. Ware above, as below!”

  Sharpfronds let go of the communications drum and dropped slowly through the hatch and onto the plain. So far, so good. But then he kept going into it, though very slowly.

  “Soft!” he said. “Like so much rotten tissue. Slime. I’m sinking into it! Totally unexpected! Throw me a line, quickly.”

  Farfronds leaped up to the cabinets below our benches and clinging with three arms managed to open a cabinet with one, extract a coil of rope, and toss it down to me. “Loudpincers! Tie an end to the latch and throw the coil down at Sharpfronds.”

  A glance down at Sharpfronds showed only his head and fronds still echoing above the surface. His voice holes were beneath it, but he had two of his arms just on the surface, waving slowly back and forth, trying to swim in it, it seemed. He could keep that up only so long, I realized. He was suffocating.

  I glanced up in time to catch the coil of rope, but instead of just throwing it down to Sharpfronds, I followed the coil and lowered myself claw by claw toward the surface. The exertion made me incredibly tired.

  General Sharpfronds had vanished entirely just as I reached the surface; there was nothing to show that he’d caught the coil. I began to lower myself into the surface, head first, to keep my spiracles above for as long as possible. Voices called to me to stop, but there was no time to argue.

  The material was viscous, clinging, and dense. I tried chirping to see, but the viscous mass seemed to absorb every sound I made; it was as black as deafness.

  I reached as far down as I could with my upper arm, feeling my energy wane as the substance began to block my spiracles. I felt something, and grabbed and held. It could be Sharpfronds’ limb. Or something else entirely. Something long dead.

  Shuddering, I held on and began to back. Slowly at first, as the holding and the motion took every available bit of energy I had. But as more of my spiracles emerged into clean water above, I felt a little more strength.

  Then the rope started to move up. My comrades must have seen me try to back out, I thought, and helped by pulling the line in.

  My head broke into the water and I started rising faster. I shook myself back and forth to try to clean my fronds and vision returned. What I had in my hand was definitely someone’s wrist, just inward of his pincers.

  I looked around for a moment as my flapping spiracles desperately tried to restore my energy. In the monotonic glow of our beacon, every bump in the surface cast long, exaggerated shadows. One of the shadows moved, undulating toward me. I had to stare for seconds to be sure of what I was seeing; the rise in the surface was huge.

  Suddenly, the slime fell away and a great round hole slowly broached above the slime, then waved right and left before descending again. The hole appeared to be a mouth with six huge triangular teeth around its rim, pointing inward. The Eater of Souls, I thought—mythology come real.

  Clinging with both hind arms, I reached down into the slime with my other arm, grabbed my prize, and pulled. With the group above pulling as well, an entire arm emerged: pincer, wrist, and up to the second joint.

  The huge surface undulations moved nearer. Not enough time, I thought, not nearly enough time. But I continued to pull. Suddenly, the strain on my arms seemed to double and I had to cling, both to rope and the arm, with all my remaining strength. The eater? One slice of those teeth and I would be le
ft holding only an arm, if that.

  But before I let go, I saw that the arm I held was emerging rapidly now; we were being pulled faster from above. The winch, I thought. They must have told Crushpincers to reel us in. The General—for it was he—began to emerge. He came clear; thorax, head, abdomen, and his limbs trailing limply, but still in one piece, the muck streaming away from his body.

  The slime swelled up next to us and a great arch, the upper part of the eater’s mouth, broke the surface and rose inexorably up beside us. Slime fell away from two, then three huge triangular teeth.

  This would be very close, but the general’s body was free now and we were rising even more rapidly than the eater’s mouth. Maybe it would miss. I freed one hand from the General’s arm and got ready to try to bat or push us away. Hopeless, perhaps, but I would not give up.

  Then something large and bright fell rapidly from above—incredibly quickly, the speed of its passage creating a brilliant wake behind it. I recognized it; it was our bag of lightstone, the one on top of the sphere that suspended us up/down from the ice. What a thing to see lightstone as falling, but that was the current perspective.

  It struck the mouth just a body length from me and cracked it, caving it in between two huge triangular teeth. The mouth tore open, its parts waving uselessly. Dense material began to flow from the wound toward the center. Then we were above it, and rising (falling?) rapidly with the sphere.

  I was pulled into the hatch, still holding the unconscious General Sharpfronds by his arm.

  I released him to Goodmother Quickfronds and collapsed near the hatch with my limbs tucked under me, chrysalis style, shaking uncontrollably. My hands, my head, my body had plunged into the remains of others, accumulated over the ages. Even as I lay there, pieces of the dead clung to me. I had sought treasure in their land and they had guarded it well. I had seen the eater of souls itself. I abandoned myself to my shudders, and lost conscious thought.

  When I woke, I had been cleaned. Also, I floated; down had become ambiguous again. There was no need to chirp for vision; the hull glowed with many sounds—a sign of a robust slipstream. Were they reeling us back so rapidly? Crushpincers must have an eight of helpers turning the wheel!