Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  Halfway to the balon she stopped and faced Treet. “I haven’t come to say good-bye, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Why have you come, Yarden?” He ached to take her in his arms and hold her, to bridge the distance yawning between them.

  “I came to give you one more chance to call off this asinine scheme of yours. Stay here, Orion. Stay with me. I…” Her cool, matter-of-fact manner faltered. The next words were spoken from her heart. “I need you. Don’t go … please.” She searched his face for a sign that he would amend his plans, but found only resolution. “That’s it then. You won’t change your mind.”

  Treet looked away. “I… Yarden, I can’t.”

  “Then I won’t either!” she snapped. “When you leave, it’s good-bye.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “I won’t live like that. No, it’s forever. I never want to see you again.” She stepped away from him, and he felt as if he had been jettisoned into deep space without a suit.

  “Yarden, don’t go! Please!”

  She turned away slowly and began to walk across the field, spine straight, shoulders squared.

  “I love you, Yarden!” Treet called. Her step halted, and her shoulders slumped; her head dropped momentarily. Treet saw a hand rise to her face, but she did not turn back. In a moment she continued on as before, but more quickly.

  Treet stumbled toward the waiting balon. When he reached the ramp, Yarden was a small white figure against the green of the field. He watched until she passed behind a pylon and disappeared, then blindly pulled himself up the ramp and into the airship.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Treet spent most of the flight cloistered in his quarters aboard the balon, emerging only occasionally to check with the navigator on their progress. The first time he went down to the bridge, they were high over deep folds of thickly forested mountains whose creases sparkled with freshets and silver cascades. Only a few hours later they reached the outer fringes of Daraq, the great desert shield.

  Leaning with his elbows on the rail at the curving observation window, he gazed down on the glistening humps of white sand, watching the tiny round shadow of the balon dip and glide as it rippled over the wrinkled dunescape. Calin crept catlike up beside him and stood with eyes fixed on the spreading whiteness far below. Treet wondered if she knew how the desert had been made by her own people long ago. No, the Fieri would not have told her; they would have spared her that.

  Still, something in the way Calin stared at the endless waste sliding away beneath them told Treet that she grasped part of the truth. “It is so dead,” she whispered after a long while. “So dead and sad. I feel a sorrow I did not feel before.”

  “We were busy before,” offered Treet, “just trying to stay alive.”

  Calin did not say anything, but Treet knew she did not accept his explanation.

  He left her at the rail and returned to his quarters, threw himself down on his flight couch, and pulled the folded card from his pocket for the sixtieth time, opened it, and read the fair, handwritten script.

  Traveler Treet, you stand at the center of events beyond your knowing. I ask the Infinite Presence in your behalf, not for strength, but to give you wisdom, that you may know what to do when the time comes for you to act. You suppose your arrival upon our world to have been chance; yet, though the designs of the Creator are most complex, every thread is woven in its place with His full intent. As you have said, you come from a world beyond our sun—a world we remember only as the shadow of a dream of long ago. Your presence reminds us that we cannot forget the lessons of the past. We are our past. I ask you to remember this. And also to remember for us who we were, for this we are beyond remembering. Know that you are the perfect agent for the task before you. Mathiax has told you, but still you doubt. Put your unbelief aside, and do not be afraid. You are well chosen.

  The Preceptor

  The trip lasted four days, and most of that time Treet spent thinking about what the Preceptor was trying to tell him in her enigmatic way. There was encouragement, yes, but something else less easily defined. At heart, her message seemed to be hinting that the key to succeeding in his task lay in understanding Empyrion. This understanding, she seemed to be suggesting, was to be found in his knowledge of his own world. Perhaps that’s what she meant by making reference to his world beyond their sun. As for the part about remembering, he didn’t get that at all. And what did she mean, “we are our past?” Maybe she simply meant that the Fieri were shaped by their past. Isn’t everybody? Yes, but the Fieri were products of a past they could not remember. Their memory had been effectively wiped out in the holocaust.

  But he, Treet, could remember. He knew, probably better than anyone else alive on Empyrion at the moment, the origins and history of their race. The Preceptor was asking him to remember for them the things they could not remember themselves—their past.

  Was this so important? Ultimately, what did it matter? They could not change the past. Even if they all remembered perfectly the events which had led their ancestors out from Dome, or before that their colonizing journey from their original home, Earth, what could they do about it but accept it?

  Adopting his familiar role as historian, Treet settled himself for some serious thought on the problem and finally came to the conclusion that for the Fieri, being shaped by a past beyond memory meant that they could never be certain about their future. As odd as that might seem on the surface, there was ample precedent in history for such a notion. Many ancient Earth cultures believed that the past actively influenced the present and future. Nothing extraordinary there.

  But what if one was cut off entirely from the past? That, perhaps, would mean a fairly one-dimensional future, a flat future, devoid of the richness and texture of the informing past. Also, the multiplied chance that the past, in some way, because it was unknown, could repeat itself and they would be powerless to stop it.

  The more he thought about it, the more unhappy Treet became with this line of reasoning. It did not account for much that he had seen in his too-brief stay there. There was something else that it did not account for: the curious reception given the travelers.

  This had bothered him from the first.

  If the Fieri were really as ignorant of the past as he supposed, why didn’t they pump him for information day and night? They had in Treet a mobile data bank packed full of just the sort of fascinating tidbits they—according to his theory—ought to want to know: details of their home planet, their colonist patriarchs, what the colony must have been like in the early days, what caused the tragic split with Dome.

  Inexplicably, the Fieri (and Dome, too, for that matter) appeared manifestly uninterested in any details of that sort. This perplexed Treet utterly—until he tried to put himself in their place. How would he react if a strange humanoid showed up on his doorstep one morning saying, “Hi there, I’m from another world and time, and I was just passing through the universe and thought I’d drop in. By the way, I can solve the riddles of the ages. Want to know the origins of life on your planet, huh? Go ahead, ask me anything.”

  All things considered, the Fieri reacted quite intelligently. Back home on Earth the supposed visitor would have been enrolled in the nearest noodle nursery before you could say DNA. Everyone he’d met on Empyrion so far seemed to consider him just an ordinary tourist and this, Treet decided, was what bothered him the most. Treet and his companions were from Earth! Yet the inhabitants of Empyrion seemed universally unimpressed.

  Perhaps, he concluded, they simply had no way of comprehending it any more than he would have of comprehending the time traveler who appeared on his doorstep. Yet, the canny Preceptor had put her long, well-manicured finger on it—Treet’s veracity was of crucial importance to the survival of Empyrion. If indeed he was who he said he was, then somehow, some way it was up to Treet to do what only he could do.

  But what?

  Orion Treet, now on his way to confront his peculiar destiny, had absolutely no id
ea.

  Late in the afternoon of the fourth day, the balon began its descent. Treet joined an excited Crocker at the railing and watched the airship gently lower itself from an opal sky. Below them, stretching northward to the broad, unvarying horizon, lay a heavy carpet of forest so dense and deep and dark it looked blue.

  Emerging from the leading edge of the Blue Forest was the shining course Pizzle had dubbed Ugly Eel River. Along that river to the south, Treet knew, lay the glittering, multipeaked monstrosity of Dome, sparkling beneath the white sun of Empyrion like a diamond mountain. Treet glanced at Crocker and saw that the pilot stared into the southern distance as if hypnotized.

  “I don’t see it, do you?” asked Treet.

  Crocker pulled himself back and replied, “No … still too far away. It’s down there though.”

  “You don’t have to go. Calin and I can find it. You can stay on board—”

  “No!” Crocker’s face distorted in genuine anguish. Treet noted the reaction with alarm.

  “Hey, it’s okay—either way. I only wanted you to know that I’m not forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.”

  “You don’t get rid of me that easy.” Crocker forced a smile that looked like a death rictus. Treet felt a chill creep up into the pit of his stomach from the soles of his feet.

  “I don’t want to get rid of you, Crocker,” he replied.

  They watched the landscape drift closer, gaining definition with their descent. The river widened as they approached and eventually slipped beneath them and out of view. The pale turquoise hills that formed their landing field were as uniformly desolate as he remembered them, the turf just as wiry and tough. The balon dropped vertically the last thousand meters and bounced like a bubble on a forlorn hilltop. The wide hatchway opened, and the ramp descended to the ground.

  The travelers watched the balon float away silently, rising straight up in the air. Then, when sufficient altitude had been reached, the engines cut in, pushing the spherical craft onto its northwestern course. There had been no fanfare for the travelers’ leaving. They had said good-bye to the Fieri and climbed down the ramp, followed by a small, three-wheeled cargo carrier. The carrier was self-guided, programmed to follow the trailing member of their party at a distance of four meters.

  Treet glanced at the map in his hands and oriented himself to the river, which he could see as a dark line curving away to his left a kilometer or so distant, “It’s straight ahead, friends. We can walk a couple of hours and make camp for the night. With any luck, I figure we’ll reach Dome sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Suits me,” said Crocker, staring off into the distance. Without another word he started walking.

  Treet watched him, then said to Calin, “I’m a little worried about him. He’s not himself.”

  The magician’s eyes flicked from Treet to Crocker and back again. “I sense fear … and—I don’t know …” She bent her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I’m a little scared myself. How about you?”

  Calin nodded and hugged herself. Standing there among the featureless hills, small, vulnerable, it was the gesture of a lost child. Treet gathered her into his arms. “It’s going to be all right. Believe me. Nothing’s going to happen to us.”

  They held each other for a moment, and Treet remembered how she had put her childish trust in him at the beginning of their odyssey. Now here they were again, about to reenter a strange, forbidding world. Her world. He would need her there just as much as she needed him outside it. Treet pulled her close and then, quite without premeditation, put his lips to hers.

  The kiss was brief, but it lingered in his mind for a long time after. He took her hand and they followed Crocker, who had disappeared momentarily into a fold in the hill line. At their movement, the robocarrier whirred. Its lenses swiveled in its sensor panel, fixing the proper distance and when four meters stretched between them, its wheels rolled forward and it came tagging along behind.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Crocker unrolled his sleeping pallet as soon as he’d finished eating. They had hunched together over the small pellet-fuel fire they’d made to warm their food. The Fieri had provided them with all they could think of to ease the rigors of the hike. Even though it was only twenty kilometers, they were outfitted for a journey across the entire continent. Treet wished they had been so provisioned on their first trip.

  Their meal had been simple, filling, and eaten in almost total silence. Calin nestled close to Treet, and they sat together across from Crocker, who ate with his head down, dipping his hand mechanically into his bowl. It seemed to Treet that the pilot was avoiding eye contact with him, but he put it down as fatigue and jitters about what lay ahead of them. The times Treet attempted conversation evoked no response. Crocker sat with his long frame bent over the bowl balanced on his knees, staring alternately into the fire and then into the darkening sky.

  By the time they finished eating, night covered them with its blanket of stars. Treet and Calin followed Crocker’s example and fished their pallets from the robocarrier and unrolled them next to the fire. The pallets were made of a soft foam bottom layer bonded to double layers of a heat-reflective blanket material. Weary travelers would slip between these blankets and sleep comfortably all night.

  But Treet did not sleep well. He lay for a long time listening to the enormous silence of the hill country, watching the impossibly bright stars glaring down at him from a firmament that shone like the inside of a burnished iron bowl.

  He could not stop thinking about what lay ahead, could not help but think that he was hopelessly unequal to the task and foolish for even considering that what he might do could make any difference. He had no plan, no weapons, no help that he could count on. Visions of futility shimmered in the flames beside him as he lay on his arm, gazing into the fire.

  The fire had burned itself out when he awoke again. The night was bright with stars, and he sat up. Calin kneeled over him; her touch had awakened him—that and an odd sound: someone moaning pitifully.

  “What?” he asked. “Crocker?”

  The pilot groaned again, this time a deep, guttural sound like that of a wild animal—a wolf perhaps, readying itself to attack. Treet pulled his feet from the pallet’s envelope and went to Crocker, put his hand on his shoulder, and jostled him gently. “Crocker, wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Crocker?”

  The man growled again, savagely, and came up, muscles tense and rigid, teeth flashing in the cold starlight. “No!” he shouted. “No! Ahh!” His eyes bulged. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “Take it easy, Crocker,” said Treet. “You’re having a nightmare. It’s over now. You’re here with us. You’re safe.”

  In a moment Crocker relaxed, the tension leaving his muscles all at once. “I—don’t know what came over me,” he said, shaking his head and rubbing his neck. “It was like a—I don’t know—like I was frozen inside a block of ice, or fire, or something. I couldn’t break out. I was dying.”

  “It was only a dream. You’re okay now. Take a deep breath.”

  He lay back down and was asleep seconds later. Treet was not so lucky. He lay awake waiting for Crocker to dream again, but heard only the heavy, rhythmic breathing of deep sleep. After a while he felt a light touch on his arm and glanced up to see Calin’s face above his. “No, I’m not asleep,” he said softly.

  The magician came around and bent close to him. Treet lifted the blanket and let her slide in beside him. He wrapped his arms around her and held her body close. The comfort in that simple act sent waves of pleasure washing through his soul. Entwined together, they slept until morning.

  Crocker sat watching them when Treet awoke. The sun was barely touching a pearl-gray eastern sky, and a light wind stirred the longer blades of grass on the hilltops. Treet came fully awake the second he saw Crocker’s face—half of it was smeared down, as if someone had run a torch over the left side of a wax mannequin’s face. His eyes were
lusterless, dead. His mouth pulled down on one side and up on the other in a ridiculous, ghoulish grimace.

  “Crocker!” Treet cried. Calin started from sleep and looked up, cowering.

  Treet disentangled himself from his bedroll and got to his feet. The pilot looked at him dully and then began to laugh. It was a ghastly sound—hollow, disembodied, half mocking, half pitying. He stopped abruptly, like a recording switched off.

  “What’s wrong with you? What’s so funny?” asked Treet, shaken. Calin cringed.

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.” His voice was soft. Too soft. “I was just thinking … what a shame to waste it… eh?”

  “Waste what? What are you talking about?” Treet took a step closer. Crocker threw up a hand to stop him.

  “Your girlfriends—I don’t see what they see in you.”

  Jealousy? Was that it? Crocker had never shown anything like that before. “Look,” Treet said, “you had us worried last night. You had a nightmare—remember?”

  Crocker rose, yawned, stretched his arms out wide. Treet noticed the tremendous reach of those long arms. “I slept like a baby.” His lips twitched into a wolfish grin. “So did you, it looks like.”

  “She was scared,” said Treet, then wondered why he was explaining. “So was I. You really had us going.”

  “Speaking of going …” Crocker stooped, rolled up his pallet, and stuffed it into the carrier. “Let’s get it over with.”

  He watched while Treet and Calin put away their bedrolls, then turned and headed off. When he had passed from earshot, Treet whispered to Calin, “We’ve got to keep an eye on him. Something’s wrong.”

  She nodded, but said nothing, and they started off once more.

  By midmorning they had reached the halfway point, Treet estimated. They sat down on a hilltop to eat some dried fruit. “We ought to be able to see it soon,” he said.

  Crocker nodded, chewed silently, and swallowed.