Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  “Brightglass,” the Headman explained. “It stores daylight when the sun or the planet is bright in the sky, and then releases it at night to illuminate the interiors of houses.”

  “We have something like this on our world,” Morgan said.

  “The Inner Prefectures possess a few pieces, left over from when the world was made. Very precious. Very costly. A few years ago, we discovered a way to make Brightglass. Soon, we were able to make it better than the source material. We export it to the Inner Prefectures through Third Parties. If the Scion’s knew we had this skill, they would send Guardsmen to take it from us.”

  Cuthbertson hesitated, as though he had said too much. “We are artisans. It is how we survive. Some in the Prefectures call themselves artisans. They make furniture, perform carpentry, plumbing, and so forth, but they are rude mechanicals. All true Artisans are here, in my Village of Blackwood.”

  He pointed to a thin and nervous man hovering near the buffet. “That man, over there, his name is Landsman Ihnatko. He is a weapons builder. He is working on devices that will ensure our protection from the Inner Prefectures, by which one ordinary man could defeat a dozen Low Guardsmen. That woman over there, Mistress Thell, has developed techniques in metal polishing that reduce friction to almost nothing. We believe we may soon use these to develop modes of transport swifter than any possessed by the Scions. Those two there, who look alike, the Woundspeck twins, they have developed a means of casting fire from devices you could hold in your hand. It may all seem rather primitive to you who walk among the stars.”

  “On the contrary, it amazes me,” Morgan said. “It took a thousand years for my people to recover when the Commonwealth collapsed. At the rate you’re going, you could catch up within a century or two. I don’t think any community on our world ever contained so much genius at one time.”

  “It is said that a true Artisan carries within him, or her, a spark from the Builders themselves. I have spent my life seeking out such people, gathering them here in this one place...” Cuthbertson hesitated. Morgan sensed he was trying to convey something great to them, but something secret at the same time.

  “Let us drink,” he said, and offered Morgan a goblet of the liquid. He saw that the goblet was also made of brightglass, and lent to the liquid inside a dappling inner light. Morgan sensed that this use of the material was a rare extravagance. They, and Kayliegh also, raised their glasses and drank together. The liquid inside was like wine, and although Morgan had never much cared for wine, he found the drink curiously good.

  After he drank, Cuthbertson continued. “Your people have managed to transfer the greater part of your labor to machines, and in so doing have freed yourself of want.”

  “Not entirely, but it has given us the opportunity to focus on pursuits of the intellect, of the soul,” Morgan told him.

  Cuthbertson had no interest in soul-talk. “It also seems to me that if enough machines could be made, turning out useful things like brightglass and other useful goods, a man would become more powerful than an army of guardsmen.”

  Morgan was beginning to wonder why the Headman was telling him all this. The Headman explained. “The Artisans in my village have another boon to ask of you.”

  “Your people have been extremely helpful. I am sure any request will be treated favorably.”

  “When your people build things, do they keep records of how they are made?”

  “We do.”

  “We should like access to such records. Leave us copies of the books that explain how your clothing, your tools, and your space vehicles are made. Not your weapons. You may have proscriptions against sharing weapons, and we respect that, but we are curious about the other things.”

  Morgan found himself suddenly in mind of an old Republicker aphorism. When a politician pours you wine, an awkward situation will follow. “I will speak with my command, but I don’t see any reason your request can not be accommodated.” Honestly, he did not see how much good it would do. Producing the materials for those things was a level of technology unto itself. Cuthbertson smiled. “Good. Good. Excellent good. Now, let me introduce you to our buffet. Hopefully, you will find our food satifactory.”

  Eden – The Dayside – Altama Prefecture

  The Scion Altama stood at the top of the tallest tower of his palace, the highest point in the citadel. From here, he could see great stretches of his realm, the whole of the citadel, the nearby villages, the fields and wooded lands surrounding them, almost down to the banks of the river Ai. He required instrumentality to see beyond, and that was also here. He stood at the controls of a rather amazing apparatus, a set of brass and gold-plated tubes and horns, like some enormous and incredibly complex musical instrument. This was suspended above a huge, white, marble bowl. It had been built and hauled to the top of this tower at an expense that had taxed his subjects almost to starvation The Scion twisted a small handle one way, and the device projected a view of one corner of his city onto the hollow of the bowl. His small, elegant hands adjusted a set of large screws, and the machine showed him an empty field to the west of his citadel. He squinted at the scene and pursed his lips, as though trying to remember exactly how to work the accursed contraption. He reached toward another control, twisted it, and the image in the bowl showed a distant hillside. He twisted the first control another way and pulled three levers. Now, the machine showed the view of a distant tower.

  The Scion frowned. There should have been a lantern on the tower. This was disappointing. He twisted a few more knobs and brought the tower into more focus. No one was on it or near it. He turned a wheel, flipped another lever and projected a long stretch of the Goldstone Highway onto the bowl, distorted into a fan shape at the edges.

  A high guardsman stood nearby. When the Scion finished manipulating the machine, he spoke. “Most Exalted One, may I presume that the low guardsmen have failed.”

  The Scion only needed to look at him and squint his eyes. The high guardsman took his meaning properly. “It seems our visitors may have more mettle than we gave them credit for. Pray, who was the Lord of that detachment?”

  The Scion glared at him, knowing the question was meant solely to remind him who to blame for the failure. “Lord Havebone,” he answered in a dry, flinty voice. The guardsman took a careful step forward, his wings twitching crisply in the cool breeze of the ecliptic twilight, like ancient, dry pieces of paper. “Shall a detachment be sent to ascertain what happened?”

  “Yes,” said the Scion, “and another detachment to finish the job properly.”

  The High Guardsman’s expression betrayed nothing. “Then, it shall be done. Does your eminence have any suggestion to assure our success in this endeavor?”

  The Scion sighed. “If I send twice as many high guardsman as low, will that be sufficient to ensure that my orders have been carried out?”

  “Half as many of the high guard will succeed where the low guard has failed. As I have maintained all along, your prominence, air power is the key to military success.”

  “Your conceits and petty inter-service rivalries notwithstanding, I will send twenty high guardsman. You are to strike at the time when the sun emerges from our planet’s shadow. When you have sufficient light, you will kill our visitors, and recover as much of their equipment as you can.”

  “Shall we alter our dress, to make it appear as if Chiban…?”

  “Why, do you lack confidence that you can carry out the assignment?”

  “By no means, Excellency.”

  “When you have killed them, you will remove their bodies and place them among those of the low guard who failed.”

  “The High Guard will not fail.”

  “Do not say it, finish it. I have no interest in assurance, only in victory.”

  The Guardsman bowed. He climbed up onto the parapet. His wings spread out, unfolding like reverse origami. He let himself fall forward, then the wings lifted him up into the air. He swooped downward, then upwards on a course for the barracks
of the high guard, a large structure exceeded only in size by the granaries at the western wall of the citadel. The Scion looked up into the sky, toward the eclipted sun. The large moon they called the Riverstone was visible, glowing pale blue between the sun and the horizon.

  “As it is written,” the Scion sighed, “so shall it be.”

  Eden – The Dayside – The Goldstone Highway

  Beyond the reach of the Scion’s telescopes, the Alpha Landing party was licking its wounds, making its way northward. The trail had become steeper and rocky. Two Marines walked ahead of the group and two trailed behind, each carrying a large sword and wishing they had better armament.

  It was a silent party. Their sleep broken by the attack, they were fatigued, but what weighed more heavily on them were memories of the all too brief obsequies held in the Memory of Frodo Cleveland and Tiberian Goodyear. They had constructed cairns from the rocks around the campsite to protect the bodies. It had been a somber task made worse by the fear of attack that made them jump every time anything rustled in the trees. The boy wasn’t badly injured but he had not regained consciousness. He weighed so very little, it was a small matter to bundle him into a carrying travois. They did not know what else to do with him. Captain Keeler did the honors, concerned, despite Skinner’s assurances, that he had struck the boy too hard.

  “Nothing to say?” Keeler asked Alkema, walking in his customary position at the Commander’s right hand.

  Alkema spoke quietly, his voice heavy with weariness, “I never even spoke to Hastings or Goodyear. They were on Yorick. When we prayed over them, it just struck me that I was saying prayers over people I barely knew. It made me sad.”

  “They were a part of our crew,” Keeler said gravely, betraying perhaps a thousandth of the weight he was carrying over their deaths.

  Alkema sighed, and his next words seemed to come with even greater effort. “And then I think, there I was. I killed someone by crushing his head with a rock.”

  “Under entirely different circumstances,” Keeler interrupted. “I owe you my life.”

  He lifted his bandaged hand. “That little kid you’re carrying on your back, he tried to kill me, too. Why? Why did they try to kill us? We aren’t a threat to anyone.”

  “The boy was trying to defend his crop against poachers, I think, that was his job. It was the only thing he knew to do, like an animal defending its burrow. The others wanted to kill us because someone ordered them to. That was their job.”

  Alkema kicked against the dirt. “No one should kill because they ordered to.”

  Keeler took this in silently. He found himself thinking of the Flight Crews left behind at the Citadel Altama. They were most likely dead as well. He wondered if Alkema had thought of this, but decided there was no reason to bring it up. That would make six people who had lost their lives on this mission. Six people with families, and friends, and colleagues on Pegasus and back on the home worlds, who would mourn for them, and perhaps curse the name of the man who had led them on this fatal journey.

  He thought of Flight Lieutenant Toto. Damb, but he had really liked that kid. He suddenly felt worse, which a moment earlier he would not have judged possible. Alkema went on. “This whole planet… it’s like one of those horror houses they put up to celebrate The Night of The Living Dead.”

  “Hallowe’en, you mean. We still use the ancient name in Oz for it.” Keeler looked up toward the stars. It caught him by surprise, seeing the constellations all jumbled up and out of position. “We, the people of Sapphire, and to a lesser extent Republic, are beneficiaries of millennia of human spiritual evolution. Humans have always possessed a unique duality of nature. We can go either way, and sometimes both simultaneously. From the dawn of creation, we have struggled with the questions of good and evil, order and chaos, right and wrong, creation and destruction. The ancients pondered this. For a time, they thought the mind was the source of evil, and they tried to fight it with psychology. Then, they thought the body was the source of evil, and they fought it with genetics and eugenics. They even tried economic and political coercion to try and modify human behavior, which led to some of the most horrific tragedies of the Ancient World. It wasn’t until they recognized that good and evil resided in the spirit that they were able to make real progress toward perfection.”

  “The Great Awakening,” Alkema put in.

  “Actually, I was thinking of the Crusades.”

  Alkema looked at him in shock. “The Crusades?”

  “The Awakening would have meant nothing without the Crusades. True, the Crusades were a time of horrendous violence. True, the human species was nearly extinguished more than once. However, they did succeed in driving out most of the evil from the human race. Each Crusade was fought world by world, driving the darkness and chaos further and further out into the Galaxy, until light and order reigned over every human world. It ushered in a Golden Era, during which our world was founded.”

  Alkema argued, the first time Keeler ever remembered him disagreeing. “But even if … it’s obvious not every human world was cleansed. Look at this world, commander. Evil was surely not driven from this world.”

  “Or the darkness returned,” Keeler replied. “It only takes one surviving virus to infect a living host.”

  “Do you think this is what the rest of the galaxy is like? The people on Meridian transformed into aliens, and this world…”

  “This is why we sent out large, heavily armed ships on this mission, against the advice of a lot of people. That the first two worlds we encountered were miserable armpits could just be sampling error. We won’t know until we see some more worlds. We are, after all, the explorers, the bold adventurers, blazing a trail across the trackless expanse of the galaxy, facing unknown perils at every ... ”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Alkema pushed away, holding a hand on his mouth and another on his stomach, he began heading toward the side of the path.

  “Do not leave the path,” Keeler was thinking as Alkema ran into the brush. The young man had taken in too much of this world, and now it was coming out of him. He made it off the path and into a ditch before he began heaving. Keeler wished for a moment that he could join him, but that would not have been commanding.

  “Save a rock for me when you’re done,” Keeler called out. The rest of the group had come to a wary halt. He took advantage of the pause to let Skinner check out his passenger.

  “He’s awake,” Skinner told him.

  “For how long?”

  “His eyes opened up about half a klick back.”

  “Almost ten minutes and he hasn’t tried to kill me. I believe we’re making progress.”

  “He is still wearing a sedative patch. He would have to have the strength of a Borealan wrestler to cause you any harm.”

  “Take him off my back. Let me see him.” Skinner helped remove the pack and the two of them regarded the boy.

  His eyes were opened and wide, but there was no longer a crazed look to them. He was not quite calm, but seemed instead to be taking in that which surrounded him. Slowly his jaw began to move and grunts began to work their way out of his throat.

  “I believe he’s trying to speak” Skinner declared.

  “Lingotron,” said Keeler, pulling the device from his pack. Was the boy capable of language, or was this just an impression of the gibbering around him? Did he speak the same language as the villagers? Would the lingotron recognize a pattern if he did not?

  The boy grunted again, and this time there seemed to be some form to it. Keeler put his fingertips against the boy’s temple and fixed him in the eyes, tried to reach whatever form of mind lay behind them. The boy gazed back at him. Keeler felt no sense of connection, but the boy continued to struggle to speak.

  The lingotron hummed and finally chirped out “Where going?”

  “I think he wants to know our destination,” Keeler was speaking slowly. “We are going …

  to the Temple of the Z’batsu… in Chiban Prefecture.”
r />   The boy betrayed no comprehension. He gabbled again, and the lingotron hummed.

  “Going to Farside?”

  “Farside?” Keeler repeated.

  “Farside. Going to Farside.”

  “What is he saying?” Bihari was now also standing over them.

  “He wants to know if we are going to a place called ‘Farside.” A pause. “I don’t know what he means.”

  Alkema finished retching, wiped himself off and stood, leaning against a tall pile of rocks to steady himself. He almost jumped from his skin when he saw that what he was retching on was not a random assortment of rocks, but a humanoid form, smooth and metallic. “Captain!”

  he yelled, wiping his mouth. “Captain, come quickly.”

  Keeler and Honeywell were at his side in a flash. “What is ...” Keeler began, stopping in mid-sentence to ponder the object. “... it,” he finished.

  Alkema was scanning the object. It was like an abstract sculpture of the human form. It was cast in metal, dented in many places. “What is it?” Keeler asked. “A statue?”

  “I think it’s a mechanoid,” Alkema said. He turned toward the path. “Scout, get over here. Take a look at this.”

  Technician First Class Scout approached with a mixture of curiosity and caution. Honeywell cocked his head slightly to let her know it was all right to proceed. She set her technical kit on the ground and withdrew a high-intensity scanning instrument. She brushed her dark bangs out of her face, clipped the eyepiece to her temple, and began scanning.

  “It’s a mechanoid, all right,” she reported. “More sophisticated than our automechs, not at the level of our and/oroid. Its AI systems appear to be mnemonic.”

  “Mnemonic,” Keeler mumbled.

  The technician flipped open a plate on what appeared to be the mechanoid’s chest. A faint orange light was flashing, weakly. “Its power source is still functioning.”

  “Commander...” said Alkema, steadily but frightened. They looked up to see the mechanoid’s eyes had begun to glow faintly. Keeler and Honeywell leaped backwards. Honeywell brandished his sword.