by Vernor Vinge
“Phooey. There have been stories with this theme before: Ti Liso’s Hidden Empire series. He had houses made of iron, streets paved with copper.”
“Anyone who owns jewelry could imagine a world like that. This is different. Alecque is a chemist; he uses metals in realistic ways—like in gun barrels and heavy machinery. But even that isn’t the beauty of this story. Three hundred years ago, Ti Liso was writing fantasy; Ivam Alecque is talking about something that could really be.” Rey covered the glowpots and threw open a window. Chillness oozed into the office, ocean breeze further cooled by the eclipse. The stars spread in their thousands across the sky, blocked only by the Barge’s rigging, dimmed only by mists rising from the pulper rooms below decks. Even if they had been standing outside, and could look straight up, Seraph would have been nothing more than a dim reddish ring. For the next hour, the stars ruled. “Look at that, Cor. Thousands of stars, millions beyond those we can see. They’re suns like ours, and—”
“—and we buy plenty of stories with that premise.”
“Not like this one. Ivam Alecque knows astronomers at Krirsarque who are hanging spectro gear on telescopes. They’ve drawn line spectra for lots of stars. The ones with color and absolute magnitude similar to our sun show incredibly intense lines for iron and copper and the other metals. This is the first time in history anyone has had direct insight about how things must be on planets of other stars. Houses built of iron are actually possible there.”
Ascuasenya was silent for a moment. The idea was neat; in fact, it was kind of scary. Finally she said, “We’re all alone in being so ‘metal poor’?”
“Yes! At least among the sun-like stars these guys have looked at.”
“Hmm…It’s almost like the gods, they play a big joke on us.” Cor’s great love was polytheistic fantasy, stories where the fate of mortals was the whim of supernatural beings. That sort of thing had been popular in Fantasie’s early centuries. She knew Rey considered it out of step with what the magazine should be doing now. Sometimes she brought it up just to bug him. “Okay. I see why you want the story. Too bad it’s such an ugly little thing.”
She saw that her point had struck home. A bit grumpily, Rey unmasked the lamps, then sat down and picked up “Pride of Iron.” It really was plotless. And—on this leg of the voyage, anyway—he was the only one capable of pumping it up…She could almost see the wheels going around in his head: But it would be worth rewriting! He could have the story published before these ideas were even in the scientific literature. He looked up, grinned belligerently at her. “Well, I’m going to buy it, Cor. Assume ‘anonymous collaboration’ makes it twice as long: what can we do for illustrations?”
It took about fifteen minutes to decide which crew-artists would work the job; the Osterlai issue would use slightly modified stock illos. Hopefully, they could commission some truly striking pictures as they passed through that island chain.
The rest of the Osterlai issue was easy to lay out; several of the stories were already in the Osterlai language. The issue would be mostly fantasy, the new art work from artists of Crownesse and the Chainpearls. The cover story was a rather nice Hrala adventure.
“Speaking of Hrala,” said Rey, “how is your project coming? Will your girl be able to give a show when we start peddling this issue?”
“Sure she will. We get about an hour of rehearsal every wake period. Once she understands about stage performance, things will go just fine. So far, we work on sword and shield stuff. She can memorize things as fast as we can show her. She’s awful impressive, screaming around the stage with Death in her hand.” In the stories, the Hrala Sword was magical, edged with metal, and so heavy that an ordinary warrior could not lift it. The Tarulle version of Death was made of wood painted silver.
“What about her costume?” Or lack of one.
“Great. We still gotta do changes—ribbon armor is hard to fit—but she looks tremendous. Svektr Ramsey thinks so too.”
“He saw her?” Guille looked stricken.
“Don’t worry, Boss. The Overeditor was amused. He told me to congratulate you for hiring her.”
“Oh…Well, let’s hope we’re all still amused when you put her on stage with other actors.”
Cor gathered up the manuscripts they had chosen. She would take them, together with the production notes, over to the art deck. “No problem. You were right, she understands some Spräk. She can even speak it a little. I think she was just shy that first day. On stage she’ll mainly scream gibberish—we won’t need a new script for each archipelagate.” Cor carried the papers to the door. “Besides, we get the chance to put it all together before we reach the Osterlais. We arrive at the Village of the Termite People in three days; I’ll have things ready by then.”
Guille chuckled. The Termite People were scarcely your typical fans, “Okay. I look forward to it.”
Cor stepped into the darkness, shut the hatch behind her. In fact, she was at least half as confident as she sounded. Things ought to work out, if she could just find time to coach Tatja Grimm. The giant little girl was stranger than Cor had admitted. She wasn’t really dumb, just totally deprived. She’d been born in some very primitive tribe. She’d been five years old before she ever saw a tree. Everything she saw now was novelty. Cor remembered how the girl’s eyes had widened when Cor showed her a copy of Fantasie, and explained how spoken words could be saved with paper and ink. She had held the magazine upside down, paged back and forth through it, fascinated by both pictures and text.
Worst of all, Tatja Grimm had no concept of polemic; she must have been an outsider even in her own tribe. She simply did not accept that dramatic skits could persuade. If Grimm could be convinced of that single point, Cor was sure the Hrala campaign would be a spectacular success. If not, they might all end up with bat dreck on their faces.
THE DAY THEY WERE TO LAND at the Village of the Termite People, Rey took the morning off. He walked around the top editorial deck, looking for a place sheltered from the wind and passersby. This would be his first chance to play with his telescope since Fair Haven.
The marvelous weather still held. The sky was washed clean; widely spaced cumulus spread away forever. A Tarulle hydrofoil loitered about a mile ahead of the Barge, its planes raised and sails mostly reefed. Guille knew there were others out there; most of the Barge’s ’foil bays were empty. The fastboats had many uses. In civilized seas, they ranged before and behind the Barge—making landfall arrangements, carrying job orders, picking up finished illustrations and manuscripts. In the wilderness east of Fair Haven, they had a different role: security. No pirates were going to sneak up on the Barge. The catapults and petroleum bombs would be ready long before any hostile vessel broke the horizon.
So far, all the traffic was friendly. Several times a day they met ships and barges coming from the east. Most were merchantmen. Only a few publishing companies had Tarulle’s worldwide scope. The hydrofoils reported that the Science was docked at the Village of the Termite People. That ship was much smaller than the Tarulle Barge, but it published its own journal. It was sponsored by universities in the Tsanarts as a sort of mobile research station. Rey looked forward to spending a few hours on the other vessel. It would mean some sales, and would give him a chance to make contacts; these were people who appreciated the new things he was doing with Fantasie. Notwithstanding Cor’s Hrala project, seeing the Science would be high point of this landfall.
Guille rolled the telescope cart into an open area at the rear of the editorial deck. Here the breeze was blocked by Old Jespen’s penthouse, yet there was still a reasonable view. He clamped the cart’s wheels and leveled its platform. Back in the Chainpearls—just after he bought the scope—this operation would have attracted a small crowd and begun an impromptu star- or Seraph-party. Now, passersby said hello, but few stopped for long. Rey had his toy all to himself.
He flipped the tube down and took a scan across the northern horizon. They were about fifteen miles off the coast.
To the naked eye, The Continent was a dark line at the bottom of the sky. The telescope brought detail: Guille could see individual rocks on the dun cliffs. Trees growing in the lee of the hills were clearly visible. Here and there were rounded lumps he recognized as wild termite towers. The Village was hidden beyond a small cape.
Not a very impressive coast for the greatest landmass in the world. Beyond those cliffs, the land stretched more than ten thousand miles—over the north pole and part way down the other side of the planet. There was a hundred times more land there than in all the island chains put together. It was an ocean of land, and beyond its coastal fringe, mostly unknown. No wonder it had been the source of so many stories. Rey sighed. He didn’t begrudge those stories. In past centuries, speculation about the Interior was a decent story base. The island civilizations weren’t more than a couple of thousand years old—the human race must have originated on The Continent. It was reasonable that older, wiser civilizations lay in the Interior. Whole races of monsters and godlings might flourish in those reaches.
But during the last thirty years, there had been serious exploration. Betrog Hedrigs had reached Continent’s center. In the last ten years, three separate expeditions had trekked across the Interior. The unknown remained, but it was cut into small chunks. The myths were dead and the new reality was a dismal thing: an “ocean” of land is necessarily a very dry place. Beyond the coastal fringe the explorers found desert. In that, there was variety. There were deserts of sand and heat, deserts of rock, and—in the north—deserts of ice and cold. There was no hidden paradise. The nearest things to the “Great Lakes” of legend were saline ponds near Continent’s Center. The explorers found that the Interior was inhabited, but not by an Elder Race. There were isolated tribes in the mid-latitude deserts. These folk lived naked, almost like animals. Their only tools were spears and hand axes. They seemed peaceful, too poor even for warfare. The lowest barbarians of the Fringe were high civilization compared to them. And all these years, the story writers had assumed that the Hurdic tribes were degenerate relatives of Interior races!
Yet Interior fantasies were still written. Guille saw hundreds of them a year—and worse, had to buy dozens. Ah well. It was a living, and it gave him a chance to show people more important things. Rey stepped back from the telescope, and turned its tube almost straight up. It was Seraph he really wanted to look at.
“Hel-lo?”
Rey looked up, startled. He had an audience. It was the Fair Haven waif. She stood almost behind him and about ten feet away. He had the feeling she’d been watching for several minutes. “Hello indeed. And how are you today, Mistress Grimm?”
“Well.” She smiled shyly and took a step forward. She certainly looked better than when he first saw her. Her face was scrubbed clean. In place of rancid leather, she wore tripulation fatigues. If she had been five feet tall instead of six, she would have seemed a pretty pre-teener.
“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing with Cor?”
“I, uh, that is la-ter.”
“I see. You’re off duty.”
She bobbed her head, seeming to understand the term. Somehow, Rey had imagined that Cor or the publicity people would be looking after Tatja all the time. In fact, no matter how incompetent she was, there simply were not enough people to baby-sit her. The girl must have many hours to herself; no doubt she wandered all over the Barge. By the Light, the trouble she could get into!
They stared at each other for a moment. The girl seemed so attentive, almost in awe of him. He realized she wouldn’t leave unless he explicitly told her to get lost. He tried to think of an appropriate dismissal, but nothing came. Damn. Finally he said, “Well, how do you like my new telescope?”
“Good. Good.” The girl stepped almost close enough to touch the scope, and Rey went through the usual explanations: He showed her how the wheels could be fastened to the deck. The oil bath in the cart’s base damped the sea motion and kept the optics steady. The cart itself was an old drafting rig from the art deck. Rey had removed the drawing table and substituted clamps that attached to the base of his twelve-inch scope.
Tatja Grimm didn’t say much, but her enthusiasm was obvious. She leaned close to the equipment to see the details Rey pointed out. When he explained something, she would pause for an instant and then bob her head and say, “Yes. So nice.”
Guille wondered if he could have been wrong about her. In some ways, she seemed a more thoughtful and enthusiastic audience than crew people he had shown the gear to. But then he noticed the uniformity of her responses. Everything seemed to impress her equally. Every explanation took the same brief moment for her to absorb. Guille had a retarded cousin, mental age around five years, physical age thirty after so much living, a retarded person learns to mimic the head movements and nonsense sounds that normal people make in conversation. Rey could imagine the blank look he would get if he asked Tatja something related to his explanations.
He didn’t try such an experiment. What point was there in hurting the girl’s feelings? Besides, she seemed to enjoy the conversation as much as a normal person. He aimed the scope at Seraph as he continued his spiel. The planet was in quarter phase, and the mountains of its southern continent stood in stark relief near the terminator. Wind and ship vibration jostled the image a bit. On the other hand, the line of sight was straight up, without lots of dirty air to smudge things. This was the clearest day-view he’d ever had. “…so my telescope makes objects seem much closer. Would you like to look?” Even a retard should be thrilled by the sight.
“Yes.” She stepped forward, and he showed her how to use the eyepiece. She bent to it…and gave a squeal, a wonderful mixture of pleasure and surprise. Her head jerked back from the eyepiece. She stared upwards at the twin planet, as if to assure herself that it hadn’t moved. Just as quickly she took another look through the lense, and then backed off again. “So big. So big!” Her smile all but split her face. “How can te-le-scope—” she reached up, as if to jerk the tube’s end down to eye level.
Guille caught her hands. “Oops. Be gentle. Turn it around this pivot.” She wasn’t listening, but she let him rotate the tube so she could look in. Her eyes went wide as she saw the expanded image of her face in the main mirror. Rey found himself explaining about “curved mirrors” and how the diagonal directed the image from the twelve-inch through the eyepiece. The girl hesitated the same fraction of a second she had after his other explanations. Then, just as before, her head bobbed with an enthusiastic imitation of total understanding. “Yes. Yes. So nice.”
Abruptly, she grabbed Rey’s hand. “And you think this thing? You make it?”
Tatja’s grip was almost painful; her hands were slender but as outsized as the rest of her. “You mean, did I invent the telescope?” He chuckled. “No, Miss Grimm. The basic idea is two hundred years old. People don’t invent telescopes just to pass the time on a dull morning. Things like this are the work of scattered geniuses. Part of an invention may exist for decades, useless, before another genius makes the idea successful.”
The girl’s expression collapsed. It might have been laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. She had no concept of what was difficult and what was trivial, and so her attempt at bright conversation had foundered. Rey turned her gently back to the telescope and showed her how to adjust the focus. Her former enthusiasm did not completely return, but she seemed sincerely taken by the close-up view of Seraph. Rey gave her his usual spiel, pointing out the brown smudges across part of the southern continent. “Brush fires, we think. That land must be a lot like the grassy plains north of Bayfast. The religions have all sorts of visions of Seraph, but we now know it’s a world much like ours.” And the stories of hidden civilizations there might still be true. Rey had written more than one editorial about plans for detecting and communicating with Seraph’s hypothetical inhabitants. One of the first steps would be to build an observatory in this part of the world, where Seraph could be observed with a minimum of atmospheric distortion.
>
A couple of people from Printing had stopped nearby, were watching intently. They were not the sort Rey would think attracted by skygazing; one was Brailly Tounse’s bombwright. Rey glanced at her questioningly.
“Sir, we’ve got a line of sight into the harbor now,” the bombwright waved to the north. “We were wondering if you’d lake a quick look at Termite Town through your scope.”
Rey hid a sigh, and gave up any hope of having the device to himself this morning. The bombwright must have noticed his irritation. She hurried on to say, “Something strange is happening with the Termite People, sir. So far the officer types ain’t talking, but—take a look, will you?”
Guille eased Tatja Grimm away from the scope and tilted it toward the horizon. He made a quick adjustment with the spotter scope and then looked through the main eyepiece. “Looks about like I remember it.” There were dozens of towers, from water’s edge back up the hills around the harbor. The smallest ones were bigger than a house. The largest were over a hundred feet tall. The spaces between were like streets at the bottom of shadowed canyons. Even knowing the truth, one’s first reaction was awe: this must be a city, the greatest one in the world. Krirsarque and Bayfast were insignificant, low-storey affairs compared to this. In fact, there were only a few thousand humans in this whole “city.” They dug their burrows and staircases through the termite mounds; they poked air holes through the walls, holes that also served as windows. “Hmm. There’s something different. One of the towers by the moorage…it looks like it was burned, or stained with soot. The dark goes as high as the windows overhanging the water,”
“Yes, sir. That’s what got our attention, but we couldn’t see what made the stain. And there’s something strange in the water, too.”
Rey tilted the scope a fraction. A twisted pile of spikes and filaments stuck through the water, directly in front of the scorch-marked tower. Rey sucked in a breath. “It looks like ship’s rigging, the fiberglass part.”