The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “No. But we don’t need trust. Mutual self-interest will suffice.”

  ***

  Days passed. Perhaps Quivera and Uncle Vanya grew to understand each other better during this time. Perhaps not. I was able to keep Quivera’s electrolyte balances stable and short-circuit his feedback processes so that he felt no extraordinary pain, but he was feeding off of his own body fat and that was beginning to run low. He was very comfortably starving to death—I gave him two weeks, tops—and he knew it. He’d have to be a fool not to, and I had to keep his thinking sharp if he was going to have any chance of survival.

  Their way was intersected by a long, low ridge and without comment Quivera and Uncle Vanya climbed up above the canopy of the steam forest and the cloud of moisture it held into clear air. Looking back, Quivera saw a gully in the slope behind them, its bottom washed free of soil by the boiling runoff and littered with square and rectangular stones, but not a trace of hexagonal beams. They had just climbed the tumulus of an ancient fallen city. It lay straight across the land, higher to the east and dwindling to the west. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” Quivera said. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “Another meteor strike—what were the odds of that?”

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “Of course, given enough time, it would be inevitable, it if predated the High Watch.”

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “What was the name of this city?”

  ::Very old/(name forgotten)/[First Trust]::

  Uncle Vanya moved, as if to start downward, but Quivera stopped him with a gesture. “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Let’s enjoy the view for a moment.” He swept an unhurried arm from horizon to horizon, indicating the flat and unvarying canopy of vegetation before them. “It’s a funny thing. You’d think that, this being one of the first cities your people built when they came to this planet, you’d be able to see the ruins of the cities of the original inhabitants from here.”

  The millipede’s speaking arms thrashed in alarm. Then he reared up into the air, and when he came down one foreleg glinted silver. Faster than human eye could follow, he had drawn a curving and deadly tarsi-sword from a camouflaged belly-sheath.

  Quivera’s suit flung him away from the descending weapon. He fell flat on his back and rolled to the side. The sword’s point missed him by inches. But then the suit flung out a hand and touched the sword with an electrical contact it had just extruded.

  A carefully calculated shock threw Uncle Vanya back, convulsing but still fully conscious.

  Quivera stood. “Remember the library!” he said. “Who will know of Babel’s greatness if it’s destroyed?”

  For a long time the millipede did nothing that either Quivera or his suit could detect. At last he signed ::How did you know?/(absolute shock)/[treacherous and without faith]::

  “Our survival depends on being allowed to live on Gehenna. Your people will not let us do so, no matter what we offer in trade. It was important that we understand why. So we found out. We took in your outlaws and apostates, all those who were cast out of your cities and had nowhere else to go. We gave them sanctuary. In gratitude, they told us what they knew.”

  By so saying, Quivera let Uncle Vanya know that he knew the most ancient tale of the Gehennans. By so hearing, Uncle Vanya knew that Quivera knew what he knew. And just so you know what they knew that each other knew and knew was known, here is the tale of…

  How the True People Came to Gehenna

  Long did our Ancestors burrow down through the dark between the stars, before emerging at last in the soil of Gehenna. From the True Home they had come. To Gehenna they descended, leaving a trail of sparks in the black and empty spaces through which they had traveled. The True People came from a world of unimaginable wonders. To it they could never return. Perhaps they were exiles. Perhaps it was destroyed. Nobody knows.

  Into the steam and sunlight of Gehenna they burst, and found it was already taken. The First Inhabitants looked like nothing our Ancestors had ever seen. But they welcomed the True People as the queen-mothers would a strayed niece-daughter. They gave us food. They gave us land. They gave us trust.

  For a time all was well.

  But evil crept into the thoracic ganglia of the True People. They repaid sisterhood with betrayal and trust with murder. Bright lights were called down from the sky to destroy the cities of their benefactors. Everything the First Inhabitants had made, all their books and statues and paintings, burned with the cities. No trace of them remains. We do not even know what they looked like.

  This was how the True People brought war to Gehenna. There had never been war before, and now we will have it with us always, until our trust-debt is repaid. But it can never be repaid.

  ***

  It suffers in translation, of course. The original is told in thirteen exquisitely beautiful ergoglyphs, each grounded on a primal faith-motion. But Quivera was talking, with care and passion:

  “Vanya, listen to me carefully. We have studied your civilization and your planet in far greater detail than you realize. You did not come from another world. Your people evolved here. There was no aboriginal civilization. You ancestors did not eradicate an intelligent species. These things are all a myth.”

  ::No!/Why?!/[shock]:: Uncle Vanya rattled with emotion. Ripples of muscle spasms ran down his segmented body.

  “Don’t go catatonic on me. Your ancestors didn’t lie. Myths are not lies. They are simply an efficient way of encoding truths. We have a similar myth in my religion which we call Original Sin. Man is born sinful. Well…who can doubt that? Saying that we are born into a fallen state means simply that we are not perfect, that we are inherently capable of evil.

  “Your myth is very similar to ours, but it also encodes what we call the Malthusian dilemma. Population increases geometrically, while food resources increase arithmetically. So universal starvation is inevitable unless the population is periodically reduced by wars, plagues, and famines. Which means that wars, plagues, and famine cannot be eradicated because they are all that keep a population from extinction.

  “But—and this is essential—all that assumes a population that isn’t aware of the dilemma. When you understand the fix you’re in, you can do something about it. That’s why information is so important. Do you understand?”

  Uncle Vanya lay down flat upon the ground and did not move for hours. When he finally arose again, he refused to speak at all.

  ***

  The trail the next day led down into a long meteor valley that had been carved by a ground-grazer long enough ago that its gentle slopes were covered with soil and the bottomland was rich and fertile. An orchard of grenade trees had been planted in interlocking hexagons for as far in either direction as the eye could see. We were still on Babel’s territory, but any arbiculturalists had been swept away by whatever military forces from Ziggurat had passed through the area.

  The grenades were still green [footnote: not literally, of course—they were orange!], their thick husks taut but not yet trembling with the steam-hot pulp that would eventually, in the absence of harvesters, cause them to explode, scattering their arrowhead-shaped seeds or spores [footnote: like seeds, the flechettes carried within them surplus nourishment; like spores they would grow into a prothalli which would produce the sex organs responsible for what will become the gamete of the eventual plant; all botanical terms of course being metaphors for xenobiological bodies and processes] with such force as to make them a deadly hazard when ripe.

  Not, however, today.

  A sudden gust of wind parted the steam, briefly brightening the valley-orchard and showing a slim and graceful trail through the orchard. We followed it down into the valley.

  We were midway through the orchard when Quivera bent down to examine a crystal-shelled creature unlike anything in his suit’s database. It rested atop the long stalk of a weed [footnote: “weed” is not a metaphor; the concep
t of “an undesired plant growing in cultivated ground” is a cultural universal] in the direct sunlight, its abdomen pulsing slightly as it superheated a minuscule drop of black ichor. A puff of steam, a sharp crack, and it was gone. Entranced, Quivera asked, “What’s that called?”

  Uncle Vanya stiffened. ::A jet!/danger!/[absolute certainty]::

  Then (crack! crack! crack!) the air was filled with thin lines of steam, laid down with the precision of a draftsman’s ruler, tracing flights so fleet (crack! crack!) that it was impossible to tell what in what direction they flew. Nor did it ultimately (crack!) matter.

  Quivera fell.

  Worse, because the thread of steam the jet had stitched through his leg severed an organizational node in his suit, I ceased all upper cognitive functions. Which is as good as to say that I fell unconscious.

  Here’s what the suit did in my (Rosamund’s) absence:

  1. Slowly rebuilt the damaged organizational node.

  2. Quickly mended the holes that the jet had left in its fabric.

  3. Dropped Quivera into a therapeutic coma.

  4. Applied restoratives to his injuries, and began the slow and painstaking process of repairing the damage to his flesh, with particular emphasis on distributed traumatic shock.

  5. Filed the jet footage under Xenobiology, subheading: Insect Analogues with links to Survival and Steam Locomotion.

  6. Told Uncle Vanya that if he tried to abandon Quivera, the suit would run him down, catch him, twist his head from his body like the foul least-cousin that he was and then piss on his corpse.

  Two more days passed before the suit returned to full consciousness, during which Uncle Vanya took conscientiously good care of him. Under what motivation, it does not matter. Another day passed after that. The suit had planned to keep Quivera comatose for a week but not long after regaining awareness, circumstances changed. It slammed him back to full consciousness, heart pounding and eyes wide open.

  “I blacked out for a second!” he gasped. Then, realizing that the landscape about him did not look familiar, “How long was I unconscious?”

  ::Three days//[casual certainty]::

  “Oh.”

  Then, almost without pausing. ::Your suit/mechanism/[alarm] talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertainty and doubt]::

  “Yes, well, that’s because—”

  Quivera was fully aware and alert now. So I said: “Incoming.”

  Two millies erupted out of the black soil directly before us. They both had Ziggurat insignia painted on their flanks and harness. By good luck Uncle Vanya did the best thing possible under the circumstances—he reared into the air in fright. Millipoid sapiens anatomy being what it was, this instantly demonstrated to them that he was a gelding and in that instant he was almost reflexively dismissed by the enemy soldiers as being both contemptible and harmless.

  Quivera, however, was not.

  Perhaps they were brood-traitors who had deserted the war with a fantasy of starting their own nest. Perhaps they were a single unit among thousands scattered along a temporary border, much as land mines were employed in ancient modern times. The soldiers had clearly been almost as surprised by us as we were by them. They had no weapons ready. So they fell upon Quivera with their dagger-tarsi.

  His suit (still me) threw him to one side and then to the other as the millies slashed down at him. Then one of them reared up into the air—looking astonished if you knew the interspecies decodes—and fell heavily to the ground.

  Uncle Vanya stood over the steaming corpse, one foreleg glinting silver. The second Ziggurat soldier twisted to confront him. Leaving his underside briefly exposed.

  Quivera (or rather his suit) joined both hands in a fist and punched upward, through the weak skin of the third sternite behind the head. That was the one which held its sex organs. [Disclaimer: All anatomical terms, including “sternite,” “sex organs,” and “head,” are analogues only; unless and until Gehennan life is found to have some direct relationship to Terran life, however tenuous, such descriptors are purely metaphoric.] So it was particularly vulnerable there. And since the suit had muscle-multiplying exoskeletal functions…

  Ichor gushed all over the suit.

  The fight was over almost as soon as it had begun. Quivera was breathing heavily, as much from the shock as the exertion. Uncle Vanya slid the tarsi-sword back into its belly-sheath. As he did so, he made an involuntary grimace of discomfort. ::There were times when I thought of discarding this:: he signed.

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  Little puffs of steam shot up from the bodies of the dead millipedes as carrion-flies drove their seeds/sperm/eggs (analogues and metaphors—remember?) deep into the flesh.

  They started away again.

  After a time, Uncle Vanya repeated ::Your suit/(mechanism)/[alarm] talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertainty and doubt]::

  “Yes.”

  Uncle Vanya folded tight all his speaking arms in a manner which meant that he had not yet heard enough, and kept them so folded until Quivera had explained the entirety of what follows:

  Treachery and betrayal were natural consequences of Europa’s superheated economy, followed closely by a perfectly rational paranoia. Those who rose to positions of responsibility were therefore sharp, suspicious, intuitive, and bold. The delegation to Babel was made up of the best Europa had to offer. So when two of them fell in love, it was inevitable that they would act on it. That one was married would deter neither. That physical intimacy in such close and suspicious quarters, where everybody routinely spied on everybody else, required almost superhuman discipline and ingenuity only made it all the hotter for them.

  Such was Rosamund’s and Quivera’s affair.

  But it was not all they had to worry about.

  There were factions within the delegation, some mirroring fault lines in the larger society and others merely personal. Alliances shifted, and when they did nobody was foolish enough to inform their old allies. Urbano, Rosamund’s husband, was a full consul, Quivera’s mentor, and a true believer in a minority economic philosophy. Rosamund was an economic agnostic but a staunch Consensus Liberal. Quivera could sail with the wind politically but he tracked the indebtedness indices obsessively. He knew that Rosamund considered him ideologically unsound, and that her husband was growing impatient with his lukewarm support in certain areas of policy. Everybody was keeping an eye out for the main chance.

  So of course Quivera ran an emulation of his lover at all times. He knew that Rosamund was perfectly capable of betraying him—he could neither have loved nor respected a woman who wasn’t—and he suspected she believed the same of him. If her behavior ever seriously diverged from that of her emulation (and the sex was always best at times he thought it might), he would know she was preparing an attack, and could strike first.

  Quivera spread his hands. “That’s all.”

  Uncle Vanya did not make the sign for absolute horror. Nor did hehave to.

  After a moment, Quivera laughed, low and mirthlessly. “You’ re right,” he said. “Our entire system is totally fucked.” He stood. “Come on. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”

  ***

  They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc., etc. Perhaps they bonded, though I’d need blood samples and a smidgeon of brain tissue from each of them to be sure of that. You know the way this sort of narrative goes. Having taught his Gehennan counterpart the usefulness of information, Quivera will learn from Vanya the necessity of trust. An imperfect merger of their two value systems will ensue in which for the first time a symbolic common ground will be found. Small and transient though the beginning may be, it will auger well for the long-term relations between their relative species.

  That’s a nice story.

  It’s not what happened.

  On the last day of their common
journey, Quivera and Uncle Vanya had the misfortune to be hit by a TLMG.

  A TLMG, or Transient Localized Mud Geyser, begins with an uncommonly solid surface (bolide-glazed porcelain earth, usually) trapping a small (the radius of a typical TLMG is on the order of fifty meters) bubble of superheated mud beneath it. Nobody knows what causes the excess heat responsible for the bubble. Gehennans aren’t curious and Europans haven’t the budget or the ground access to do the in situ investigations they’d like. (The most common guesses are fire worms, thermobacilli, a nesting ground phoenix, and various geophysical forces.) Nevertheless, the defining characteristic of TLMGs is their instability. Either the heat slowly bleeds away and they cease to be, or it continues to grow until its force dictates a hyper rapid explosive release. As did the one our two heroes were not aware they were skirting.

  It erupted.

  Quivera was as safe as houses, of course. His suit was designed to protect him from far worse. But Uncle Vanya was scalded badly along one side of his body. All the legs on that side were shriveled to little black nubs. A clear viscous jelly oozed between his segment plates.

  Quivera knelt by him and wept. Drugged as he was, he wept. In his weakened state, I did not dare to increase his dosages. So I had to tell him three times that there was analgesic paste in the saddlebags before he could be made to understand that he should apply it to his dying companion.

  The paste worked fast. It was an old Gehennan medicine which Europan biochemists had analyzed and improved upon and then given to Babel as a demonstration of the desirability of Europan technology. Though the queen-mothers had not responded with the hoped-for trade treaties, it had immediately replaced the earlier version.

  Uncle Vanya made a creaking-groaning noise as the painkillers kicked in. One at a time he opened all his functioning eyes. ::Is the case safe?::

  It was a measure of Quivera’s diminished state that he hadn’t yet checked on it. He did now. “Yes,” he said with heartfelt relief. “The telltales all say that the library is intact and undamaged.”

  ::No:: Vanya signed feebly. ::I lied to you, Quivera:: Then, rousing himself: