“Let’s hook the ropes on. They’ll give us a lift and we’ll shorten our journey by a day.”
From the repaired chronicles of Saxayé.
At dawn of the seventh day, beyond the Krill Fields, Aruna saw what must have been the beginnings of the fjords.
Later, half hidden by teeming underwater life, she saw an encouraging sight. The images in the mnemonic relics that Iguain had shown her matched those from her childhood. Drawings, paintings, and graffiti that portraying the Tower decorated the walls of the Aeromancer Academy and the Corolla of Solar Tree Major.
Her people’s dilemma consisted of having to make the terrible choice between sending its children out in search of the Tower or hoping that it was all a lie, in other words the choice was between weakening the Nest or else seeing it destroyed within a few generations.
As old Canderum had explained to her, the decision to continue with the Ceremony of Flight was linked to the fact that legends needed to be valued according to their capacity to generate “morale” in those who stayed behind, rather than on the basis of their truth.
Because of the Flight, the life expectancy of the Aeromancers was much shorter than that of their ancestors, though they had overcome part of this disadvantage by becoming sexually mature at an earlier age.
They generally reproduced during puberty, so the population had not shrunk as much as the elders had foreseen. The strongest individuals were excused from procreation, because of the risk they were to run. Canderum was known for saying “It is better to raise heroes than orphans.”
However, it was also plausible that the Second Ecopoiesis was hurrying along their natural selection, increasing the probability that the new generations would be born with a greater tolerance of radiation.
The Aeromancers knew that they were a transgenic form of life, which had evolved to face an extreme and continually mutating environment—a mutation that lay guarded within the Tower now before Aruna.
The squad was moving forward holding its formation when Tsai Chin realised that below them an intertwined mass of plants was rising rapidly. It was an enormous macrocyst of kelp.
“It will block the entrance if we don’t hurry.”
Iguain motioned the group to move swiftly so that they weren’t crushed by the mass threatening to engulf them.
“Swim up!” was the next sign he made to Tsai Chin, who vented his air valve as hard as he could.
“No, we’ll waste time.”
Tsai Chin pushed the capsule with Aruna in it to the head of the group to help the three Aquamancers shove their way through the columns of seaweed.
“It’s not common kelp Tsai Chin. It’s carnivorous and will rip us to shreds.” Iguain’s mouth was clamped shut.
“In these latitudes? That’s absurd...” Tsai Chin shook his head, he couldn’t believe that the seabed could rouse itself and grow before his very eyes.
As Iguain knew, courage didn’t always make up for inexperience.
Less than twenty metres from the Tower, a compact wall of lianas forced them to slow down.
“It’s been crossbred with something, and I don’t want to know what with...”
The lack of oxygen in the area around them, so quickly sucked out by the kelp, would cause them to suffocate within a few minutes.
Iguain distributed the breathing kits to gain a little time, but as soon as he did, a spongy tangle enveloped Tsai Chin and dragged him down with it.
Karia pushed Aruna ahead of her, while Iguain stopped and watched Tsai Chin, armed with a dagger, fighting the roots. If he went to help Tsai Chin, he would put the lives of the others at even greater risk.
Tsai Chin took out a bar of sodium, which on contact with the water burned incandescently amidst a cloud of bubbles. The kelp, alarmed by his resistance, called up even more tentacles.
At the sight of this, Iguain kicked his legs, beat his dorsal fins, and resisted the tenacity with which the kelp was trying desperately to survive. When he could no longer see Tsai Chin, Iguain filled his lungs, pushed with his pectorals, and swam away, helping his daughter and Aruna to safety in the narrow entrance of the Tower.
Mnemonic relic 7 (source: paper fragment)
The most alarming thing is that we have no idea about the mechanisms which enable a natural phenomenon to disrupt the Earth’s temperature with such speed. As Elizabeth Kolbert observed in a mnemonic relic from the New Yorker “No known external force, or even any that has been hypothesized, seems capable of yanking the temperature back and forth as violently, and as often, as these cores have shown to be the case. [It seems] like some kind of vast and terrible feedback loop.” We are a long way from understanding all of this.
From the repaired chronicles of Saxayé.
The metallic walls of the Tower had not been colonized. Partially stained by sponges and lichens, they reflected a small amount of light—even now, from twenty metres below the surface of the Ocean.
Shaken by the loss of Tsai Chin, Iguain pounded his fists on the Tower’s door to the disbelief of Karia and Aruna. It was madness to think someone would come and open the door—nonetheless a display lit up by its side.
“Welcome to Spitsbergen Island, I am the Custodian of the Vault, its security AI, how can I be of service?”
The girls came closer, intrigued. The supercomputer was still working, though it was not up-to-date with the situation on Modified Earth. The island no longer existed, covered by the Ocean.
“We have brought some seeds we would like to deposit.”
Aruna shook her feathers, a gesture typical of her race. She opened her beak angrily and pounded her hands against the capsule.
“You’ve got seeds?! And you didn’t tell me?”
As soon as the doors opened, the three were pushed in by the pressure of the water. When they stood up again, after the doors had closed, they found themselves in a corridor sloping twenty degrees upwards. Emergency lighting indicated which way to go.
“I’m sorry, the Council forbade me to talk about it. And anyway it was the best way of getting us in.”
“You lied to me...”
“No, I do have some seeds, but they are as old as fossils.”
Iguain opened a bag and showed Aruna the contents. A strong smell of rot hit her—a slightly sweeter version of the same stench was already present in the corridor.
The internal surfaces of the Tower were covered by a film of dust, and as the AI led them closer to the top of the vault, the smell became the stink of mould.
When they reached the Seed Room, they could not hold back their disgust and horror: their hopes lay there rotting in an unending series of carefully labeled containers.
“They’re all rotten! The seeds are useless... we got here too late.”
Karia put her arm around the visibly upset Aeromancer. To return to the Nest only to tell her people that the seeds had turned to dust would throw everyone into deep despair.
“That is not exact. Some have survived.”
The AI opened a door at the end of the Room, and inside a few of the cases, some names lit up: Himalayan Cedar, Caucasian Elm, and Whitebeam, and then Rhododendrons, Azaleas, and Magnolias.
“The Barley seeds decomposed after 2,000 years, the Wheat seeds after 1,700, but the Whitebeam will last for another 10,000. You can leave your seeds here; I will take care to preserve them until the time is right for a new planting.”
Aruna ran to see, drying her tears as she did so. Iguain laid down his package and was about to move away when she grabbed him by the arm.
“Where are you going? We have to get the seeds. We haven’t come all this way to leave empty handed.”
Iguain’s eyelids lowered from the tops of his eyes until the eyes were completely covered. The absence of eyelashes made him look strange to the Aeromancer.
“The aim of the mission was to verify the existence of the Tower and identify its position. Someone else will decide what to do with the seeds. We will report back to the Council and tell them
what we have discovered.”
“But my people need these seeds. We must take them back with us!”
“The Council will use its judgment to decide what to do with them. If it were not for them, we would not even be here.”
“I know... but the seeds don’t belong to anyone. The seeds belong to the Earth, and they must be returned to the Earth. The seeds are like the force of gravity and the sunlight; they existed before the human race came along and continued after its disappearance. No-one can own them.”
“This is a decision the Council must make.”
Aruna let her beak hang open, then tilted it to one side and unfolded her wings threateningly.
“No Iguain, this decision belongs to you too! We are alone here, and I don’t think that you came all this way, at your age, just to satisfy your curiosity and to put a cross on a nautical map.”
The Aquamancer vented his air valve. It was difficult to carry on doing his duty, now that he knew. The existence of the Seeds was a truth that could put his dream of repopulating the Risen Lands into motion.
When he was a boy, Iguain had loved to swim to the surface and gaze at the sky. The starfish were nothing compared to the stars that floated high above. During the night, under the spinning constellations, hypnotized by their mysterious movement, he would ask himself what was up there.
On the edge of the outside world, he had never plucked up the courage to take the last step, the step that would have taken him out of the Ocean.
In the years that followed, his mind was often filled with thoughts of the Risen Lands. It was as if his memories held, in the folds of genetic memory, the panoramas and terrestrial landscapes that persisted with a certain melancholy within him.
This convinced him that his race should leave the Ocean, and that sooner or later the Aquamancers would return to dry land. It was a circle that would be closed.
He had taught Karia that the Risen Lands had been the cradle of civilization, from which all the animate races had originated, and that that civilization had walked, with its feet firmly on the ground.
Iguain couldn’t get the mosaic of his thoughts in order.
As an Aquamancer he knew that the Risen Land Cultures had all ended badly, and that every land-based civilization was but a fragment in a distributed memory. They, on the contrary, were alive and would remain so until the Sun imploded.
For the Council, the Risen Lands were a fearsome environment, dry, exposed to intense radiation, and above all they offered none of that support provided by water that made moving around in the sea so much more pleasant and less tiring than on land.
It was bizarre that a planet almost completely covered by the Ocean should be called Earth. Sooner or later it would have to be renamed “Aqua”.
“I’m going to take the seeds anyway Iguain, with or without your permission. Even though you saved my life, you cannot expect me to sacrifice my people for a question of politics.”
Aruna addressed the display in a pleading tone.
“Custodian, I beg you. The seeds must leave this place... I came here to take some samples. Allow my people to be able to plant them again.”
“I have awaited a Planter for centuries. Preservation is a means unto planting. You may take two seeds of each type left in the vault.”
Aruna was overjoyed, but did not know exactly what to do, nor did she have any idea how to transport the seeds. She was scared of ruining them, of accidentally destroying her own future in an instant.
Then Iguain had a change of heart, turning back with shuffling steps.
“Aruna, I have not told you everything. I did come here for another reason. I want to take us all back to a point when nothing had yet been compromised. I want to put evolution back on the right track.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that any child born today inherits genes and learns from experience, but she also has the use of words, thoughts, and tools that were invented by others in other places and other eras. The animate beings exist because, unlike other species, they know how to accumulate culture and pass on information, not only across the Ocean, but also across time, from generation to generation. I think though, that this progress is cyclic, not linear. The human civilization was a disaster for the biosphere. The next one will be able to value the environment and read its signs.”
“So, have you changed your mind?”
“Partially. Karia will return to the Council, whereas I will come with you, if you have nothing against the idea.”
Iguain’s daughter accepted the decision, perhaps she had already known in her heart that her father would not forgo this opportunity to finally leave the Ocean.
“I’ll tell them that I got separated from you. And you dad, you can come back to Saxayé when you have finished.”
As she said it, Karia feared that that day would not come any time soon.
From the repaired chronicles of Kilimanjaro.
The altitude caused Iguain some days of nausea and spells of dizziness. Born to resist the pressure of the water, his body was vulnerable to the rarefied air. However, when he saw the great size of the Giant Sequoias he forgot any suffering he was going through. These beings were the most incredible thing he had ever seen.
Aruna introduced him to her family and old Canderum of the Purple Feathers.
In the days that followed, the young woman was frequently away from the Nest, intent on coordinating the teams of planters that had started to work along the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
Returning in the evenings, tired but happy, Aruna told Iguain how in time every Aeromancer would inherit a mixture of seeds, a precious legacy to manage and make “yield.” She imagined flights of Aeromancers flying around to pollinate plants and flowers. She imagined spreading the seeds to the other tribes. She imagined descending from the peaks, as the legend foretold.
Iguain, for his part, never went too far from the Nest, where the Aeromancers had prepared him a pool for his ablutions. He learned the local customs, and he sat on the edge of the Solar Corolla contemplating the marine horizon, which in his mind would pull back and give way to a new unexplored Land, where people could return to walking.
He was not anxious to return to Saxayé, it did not worry him: he had initiated a process of transformation, and even though the consequences of his decision would take a very long time to reach their conclusion, he was at peace with himself.
Canderum glided down next to him. Standing on thin legs, he relied on the support of a stick.
“Look over there... on the left.”
The Aeromancer pointed with a finger, and Iguain, focusing, saw what the other was looking at: whole swarms of spores floating in the air.
“Our races will meet again, this time on the shores of the Ocean, Canderum.” “And from there we will go on together.”
“As has already happened, but differently.”
The two elderly men did not have much else to ask of life, except to observe it continue and recreate itself.
Francesco Verso was born in Bologna in 1973. He is the author of Antidoti Umani (short-listed for the 2004 Urania Mondadori Award), e-Doll (2008 Urania Mondadori Award) and Livido (2013 Odyssey Award).
In 2012 he completed BloodBusters, a grotesque thriller about taxes literally paid in blood. In 2013 he wrote The Walkers, a novel in two volumes featuring a group of rebels, the Pulldogs, who inhabit a world where Western civilisation—indeed, humanity—are in decline, in part due to the spread of nanobots, capable of assembling molecules to synthesize matter, with the subsequent birth of a new kind of culture: a nomadic society, solar and creative.
His stories have appeared in genre magazines, including Robot, iComics, NeXT and Fantasy Magazine, and have been sold abroad (Song Story 2). One has been adapted for the theatre (The Milky Way) and another is being made into a web series (Flush for Grapevine Studio). He lives in Rome with his wife Elena and daughter Sofia.
Atomic Heart
Manuel Alves
Momo was able to spend all day looking through the big laboratory window, directly into the Sun, without going blind. He saw things that were very far away as if they were very close. He saw the Sun as a heart in the sky, pulsing with bursts of heat rather than just beating. He didn’t see just a flat shiny disc—he saw a sphere in all three dimensions, rich with extraordinary details no one else could see with the naked eye. Except Nini—she had eyes likes his.
“We don’t belong here,” said Momo. “We should be able to touch the Sun.”
“We don’t need to dream about prodigies,” said Nini. “We are the prodigy.”
“No. We are just the proof Man longs to step away from God’s shadow.”
Momo focused on a dark sunspot and watched the changes in luminosity on the Sun’s surface.
“Our very existence is absurd,” he said. “The very concept of God is absurd. Especially for us.”
“And don’t you suppose that touching the Sun defies everything we know to be possible?”
Momo kept looking at the sky. Nini was right. Still, touching the Sun was a dream that was closer to reality than shaking God’s hand.
“Don’t you ever wonder, Nini? Don’t you wonder how it would be if were possible?”
“I wonder about other things.”
“Things I will have to guess?”
Nini smiled. Suspense was always an effective way to get Momo’s attention.
“Momo, what if we could touch each other?”
Momo looked at Nini’s half body. They both existed only from the waist up, set on two laboratory workbenches ten feet apart. They were attached to a machine by tubes that supplied them with pressurized steam from the foundry on the floor below. The Creator worked down there during the day. Some people called him doctor, others called him engineer, and a few called him scientist. At the end of the work day, when all the workers went home, he always came upstairs to the laboratory. Sometimes he would fine tune their gears and check the steam pressure on the instrument panel. Other times he would spend hours just leaning over the thick book he kept, along with his personal journal, in the wall safe. At times he would stay there—in absolute silence—writing in his journal. On those occasions he always seemed terribly worried. The day before he had told Momo and Nini that they would finally become complete. Tiny valves propelled facial joints, according to movements predetermined by mechanical design—Momo smiled.
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