Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

  ‘Negative. But we expected that.’

  ‘Sure. Contact me again if the situation changes.’

  She flipped the comlink case shut. One dark hand rested on it for a moment, as she stared blankly into the middle distance.

  I said acidly, ‘As for being “just in time” for a palace revolution – I doubt there would have been one at all if we hadn’t arrived. Whichever faction supports contact with Earth, we’ve made it worth their trying to take control here … I thought that was likely, when we were kept away from the Emperor-in-Exile.’

  The air was hot, stifling. The trap door that led down into the lower building was also locked. Claustrophobia ran a close second to hunger and thirst.

  ‘It’s like you said, Lynne, we’re a destabilizing factor,’ the Pacifican woman agreed, ‘but that’s inevitable.’

  ‘Is it? – No, is it? Molly, you tell me. PanOceania doesn’t need to be here –’

  She stood, rising to her full height, took a few steps and then swung round: ‘Tell me what you know about it. You were envoy here for eighteen months, and that was ten years ago! For God’s sake stop acting as if you owned the place. And if you’d like to get off my back for five minutes, I’d feel a whole lot better! I don’t hear anything from you except criticism. And if I want advice, which is what you’re here for, all I get is –’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘– is you acting like a sulky three-year-old. You’re paid to do a job here. For God’s sake, Lynne!’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  I thought, Dear God I’m too old for this, what am I doing here, I don’t have to take this –

  Midday silence is oppressive; the ear needs birdsong or human voices. There was not even alien sound. Two of us, in the heart of a violent city. Sometimes it’s safer for one to come alone, one is easily missed. With two … well, then, an example can be made of one of them, the least valuable. What price a Company representative here? I thought. What price a special advisor?

  ‘This place unsettles me,’ I said.

  The young woman still stood looking down at me, with fading anger. I felt ashamed of half-hearted apologies.

  I said, ‘You’re doing what I used to do here, as envoy. And maybe doing it rather better. So.’

  ‘So tell me something I don’t know.’ She gave me a brat’s grin, and sat down again, long legs folding under her.

  ‘Sorry. It’s because of having been First Contact with this world. I know that if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, but … there’s a responsibility. Maybe a guilt.’

  The white square of sunlight had moved on the dusty floor, falling now to illuminate the corner of a low stone table. Molly leaned back against the wall. She watched the narrow slot of sky. Then she turned her dark, dazzled face towards me.

  ‘Not guilt. A world’s too big for one person’s responsibility.’

  I’ve lost the ability to balance fear against result, and gamble. This angular young woman has it still.

  ‘It’s …’ I searched for words. ‘It’s as if I’d stepped back into the past, to my year on Orthe, and it was being repeated in a minor key. The same theme, but somehow darker.’

  ‘Ah, but those days, the Dispersal – it was a bit unreal. You could touch worlds and hardly change them. It isn’t like that now.’

  Her tone carried the conviction that her present time and “the real world” are identical.

  A shadow flicked across the falling sunlight, and another, and another; perhaps a dozen Ortheans passing the window-slot, unseen but for that. Voices on the roof above us were muffled.

  That accented voice sounded again in my mind: Do you know who put them there … No! I thought, we have to hear more from Pathrey Shanataru. Who is it wants the Company here that badly?

  Is it those people who are fighting now; is it that woman, the Voice, who’s in favour of Earth? Or was she bluffing? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re blind, here.

  I said, ‘I feel as if there’s something important that I ought to remember.’

  Molly’s expression changed, so that I recalled she was the Company representative of PanOceania; a thing I have difficulty always keeping in mind.

  ‘Something that could help us now?’

  I shrugged.

  She said, ‘There are gaps in your old reports.’

  ‘How do you mean, gaps?’

  ‘When they’ve been on alien worlds, there are always things that people don’t say. You don’t say more than most. I know you had a very bad reaction to hypno-tapes. I wondered if it affected your memory.’

  That directness hurt.

  For an unguarded moment, all the self-doubt and fear that made up that “bad reaction” hit me again. Memory is identity: lose the one and you lose the other.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Okay, no more three-year-old stuff. But I do find this world more disturbing than I thought I would, when I agreed to come back.’

  From somewhere above came a scream, choked-off; and footsteps that ran into silence.

  Molly laughed, wryly. ‘I don’t find it all that reassuring myself.’

  White light hardly shifted on the dusty floor. Orthe’s day is 27 hours, E-standard; a slow time passing – but even fear rests. Not so long after that, I looked across and saw that the Pacifican woman had slumped into the obtuse angle of two walls, and was soundly asleep.

  They won’t take one of us, I thought.

  But it’s been done before.

  Sudden light, the grating of stone: the trap door flung back. Many harsh voices resolved into one: ‘Shan’tai – come from there.’

  Molly started up. The pattern of the fibre-mat had imprinted on her arm, and she blinked and rubbed at cramped shoulders and neck. To give her time to collect her thoughts, I climbed with some difficulty up the rope-web, and stepped out on to the roof.

  White fire dazzled. I fumbled shields over my eyes and the world turned sepia. Voices were loud. I blinked away after-images, and at last began to see through blood-haze to the afternoon light of Carrick’s Star.

  Molly appeared beside me. ‘Shan’tai, you owe us an explanation.’

  Five or six young Ortheans jostled us. All were armed – spear or winchbow or curved hand-blade – and tension was plain in every glance over the shoulder, every sudden movement. Is that residual? I thought. Or is fighting still going on?

  One male had an arm bandaged, and the blood that seeped through was black.

  ‘Come with us, shan’tai,’ he ordered.

  ‘But the Voice of –’

  ‘Move!’

  I stumbled after the Pacifican woman, herded across that roof. We were enclosed in the group. The male followed. His face was masked against the glare, and I thought, Yes, I’ve seen those masks on another part of the Coast; north, in Kasabaarde –

  Molly gripped my elbow. ‘Problem?’

  ‘No, I – it’s the heat, I think. I’m okay.’

  I barely noticed as they escorted us across the fibre-rope bridges to the main city. Like the vibration from a bell struck long ago, the name repeated in my mind: Kasabaarde, Kasabaarde.

  And I wasn’t even there that long, though God knows they helped me when I needed it – Kasabaarde: that city that is toll-gatherer of all trade between the two continents (standing far to the west, where the Archipelago meets the last habitable strip of the Desert Coast); that has, besides, an inner city of mystics and madmen; that has also, at its heart, the Brown Tower of the Hexenmeister …

  Molly sucked in her breath. I followed her gaze.

  This wider roof was bleached by the alien sun. A scent came off it. Not unpleasant, a little sour; but I suddenly realized it came from liquid that soaked the rough plaster surface, two great stains that were dark, dark-red, black.

  ‘Is ship-contact a possibility for us now?’ Molly said.

  ‘I’d give it a fifty-fifty chance.’

  ‘Okay. If that’s as good as it gets.’ She unconsciously str
aightened, towering over the Harantish Ortheans.

  They took us into the warm shadow of a larger roof-house, and we descended through another trap door, down into a twilight that smelted of dust and herb-arniac. Without pause, they took us down steps; one flight, two; down into lower levels, three and four and more, and the mirror-directed light brightened. I tried consciously to deepen shallow breathing. My legs were beginning to ache badly.

  On the next floor down, the pale sandstone gave way to blue-grey walls. A semi-translucent substance as cold to the touch as metal or stone.

  ‘In the northern continent there’s a wasteland called the Barrens –’ Momentarily I was far from these silver-dim warrens, in winter air and desolate tundra. ‘There are ruins of ancient Witchbreed cities. They’re built of this, chiruzeth.’

  ‘I’ve read the same reports you have,’ Molly echoed, smiling without malice.

  ‘They were my reports,’ I said; and then, ‘Jesus Christ!’

  This level was spacious, one vast subterranean hall that stretched out in perspective, lit with the sheen of reflectors from the roofs high above. To me, the ceiling felt low; Molly actually had to stoop. Water-channels ran beside the nearer wall, and the air was cool and sweet.

  ‘This place is a junk-heap,’ Molly whispered, sounding momentarily closer to thirteen than thirty.

  Mirror-light is deceptive, distances blur. The hall’s long perspectives were tenebrous with glints of silver. Bright tapestries hung against the chiruzeth, between the great low arches groining the walls; tapestries that hung four and five layers deep, but still showed great rents and patches of decay. Threadbare embroidered cloths were scattered underfoot. Metal gleamed in the shadows.

  The spaces between the arches were so cluttered that one could only walk down the centre of the hall. The guards escorted us there, between two rows of iron candletrees, sparsely furnished with tallow candles. Junk had spilled from the arch-spaces. Carved stone chairs, swords; great bales of metal-cloth, the links now frail with rust; broken fountains, crystal tanks starred with shatter-lines, and mirrors set in chiruzeth frames, and old discarded implements of crafts and warfare … I had a sudden image, totally incongruous, of a child’s rocking horse abandoned in some dusty attic; the children long since dead and turned to dust.

  ‘There could be anything in here …’

  I said, ‘You expect to reconstruct Golden technology from this?’

  Molly looked at the Ortheans at the further end of the hall. ‘At the moment, that’s the last thing I’m worried about.’

  The guards pushed a way through the crowd. Ortheans: lithe, quick-limbed, ophidian-eyed. Their close scent surrounded me. We drew stares and whispered comments. A female half turned, hand on knife; a male spoke softly over the shoulder of another; one pulled bright robes aside as we passed. With sudden memories of the north, I thought, But there are no children present.

  With the presence of children there is, sometimes, more safety.

  ‘Can you see Pathrey Shanataru or that woman, the Voice?’ Molly asked quietly. Even Sino-Anglic might not be a refuge here.

  ‘Not a sign of either.’ That made me certain: whichever faction they were, the opposition is in power now.

  We found ourselves isolated in the space between the crowd and the arched end of the hall. The guards took up station behind us. The great archway-space made a frame, deliberately dramatic, for the Orthean who sat there in a tall carved chiruzeth chair.

  ‘Give you greeting, shan’tai,’ Molly Rachel said.

  Above the Orthean male’s head, spheres of light clung to the chiruzeth. As I watched, one drifted a few inches lower. It glowed … a shadowless light, the colour of lilac and lightning.

  Dannor bel-Kurick. Something in the light keyed memory. When this thin, tense-looking male had a child’s face, hardly more than a boy, I did see him – but not in person. I saw him through a viewscreen.

  ‘I did not command s’aranthi-offworlders into my city,’ he said.

  For a moment, metal-gilt and gems confused the eye; then it became clear that the jewels were polished pebbles; the gilt, green verdigris. There was an underlying scent of decay. Molly’s gaze went continually to the one genuine treasure in that heap of trash, the light-spheres, globes no larger than a child’s fist. I recalled one, identical and soon dysfunctional, in the research labs of PanOceania.

  She said, ‘My people will demand explanations, shan’tai. The imprisonment of Earth personnel –’

  He blinked, a slow veiling of citrine eyes. They were so pale they seemed to have a light behind them. There was little of that boy-Emperor in this haggard man.

  An elderly male, standing beside the carved chair, spoke smoothly: ‘Shan’tai Rachel, what else could we do? You were in danger from the fighting. Not intentionally – but accidents happen. This was for your protection.’

  ‘We would have been equally well protected on our ship.’

  ‘You could have stayed with your ship and not entered the city,’ Dannor bel-Kurick snapped. Then he said, ‘What other Coast cities have you been to?’

  ‘None as yet, K’Ai Kezrian-kezriakor.’ She stumbled, giving him his title.

  ‘Not to Quarth or Reshebet or Maherwa?’ His tone, that had been hectoring, became quiet. ‘Or Kasabaarde?’

  A pulse of adrenalin hit me. To recall Kasabaarde now is to recall shelter, the Brown Tower there a refuge from a hostile world – and to recall that Kel Harantish is Kasabaarde’s traditional enemy. I must have had some expression intelligible to alien eyes, because Dannor bel-Kurick looked straight past Molly Rachel to me.

  ‘You are not a stranger to Kasabaarde, shan’tai.’

  ‘I’ve been there. Many years ago.’

  ‘Those who have been there bear always a mark.’

  A certain tension was plain among those in earshot. The Emperor-in-Exile made an irritable gesture, and the men and women round him drew back instantly.

  To my surprise, he turned back to Molly. ‘What do you know of Kasabaarde, shan’tai Rachel?’

  The Pacifican woman shifted her stance, still slouched down to avoid hitting her head on the archways. I caught a quizzical expression on her face.

  ‘I know it’s a small settlement with a reputation for being a centre of religion and trade.’

  ‘And otherwise?’ He looked at me.

  ‘A centre of – news.’ I chose the word carefully. ‘The Archives of the Brown Tower there are said to go back over many years. I always understood them to be equally interested in present-day history. Which they collect from many sources.’

  ‘S’aranthi, I think you have forgotten much. The Tower has a hand in all conspiracy, plot, and cabal on the Coast; and in the barbarian north, also. Now I wonder if they draw offworlders into their plans? I wonder, shan’tai, if you have not come from them to us.’

  Tension stopped breath. That’s the only question he wants answered, that’s the reason nothing’s been done to us –

  ‘We haven’t been to Kasabaarde; we don’t have plans to, at the moment,’ Molly said. ‘All our business has been with this settlement, shan’tai; I’d hoped to continue that.’

  She was young enough for the truth to be plainly discernible in her voice, and I was glad of it; I’ve dealt with too many equivocations ever to be that honest in appearance.

  Dannor bel-Kurick leaned back in the carved chair. That strange lilac-blue light fell on his face, casting violet shadows on his pale mane. His thin six-fingered hands picked at the folds of his tunic. When he spoke, he sounded infinitely weary.

  ‘You know we have long had Kasabaarde for our enemy. I do not know you, shan’tai. But if you know that city, you will have heard the Tower disseminate lies about us. If you have only heard of Kel Harantish from them, you have heard little truth.’

  The Pacifican woman said, ‘Our business is with you.’

  Her face was guarded, but she couldn’t keep from looking at that treasure-junkheap that cluttered the length and breadth
of the hall. I think she looked right past the faces of the Ortheans who watched us.

  ‘You have no business here now.’ He smiled, sudden and unwilling, and for a moment I saw Dannor bel-Kurick young again: mercurial, cruel, unpredictable.

  ‘Shan’tai –’

  ‘I have ordered a guard to take you to your ship,’ he said. I went cold. Caution and hatred contended in his voice: I couldn’t tell which would win. Then he said, ‘I will give you a message to take to the rest of your people. Kel Harantish is closed to you now. If one of you s’aranthi-offworlders enters the city, now or ever, I will have you instantly killed.’

  3

  An Echo of the Lightning

  ‘I call it fucking incompetent!’ David Osaka shouted. ‘The stuff’s in there, and you get us banned from the settlement –!’

  ‘If I hadn’t got in, you wouldn’t know for sure that it was there!’ Molly Rachel slapped the palmlock as she passed, and the port irised shut. ‘There are still the canals. And the northern continent.’

  Inside the shuttle, light was a soothing green. There was the subliminal hum of systems on stand-by. I dropped into a reclining seat beside David Osaka, feeling the padded comfort enwomb me.

  He stood, now coldly angry. ‘That stuff is the only reason we’re here. The Company –’

  Molly Rachel rubbed her temples. ‘You didn’t expect to walk out of there today with it, I hope? There have to be preliminaries. Remember, this is a technophobic culture.’

  David Osaka leaned over to adjust a scan-screen, kneeling on a seat. His fair hair had grown long enough to fall into his eyes, and now he tucked it back behind an ear with a characteristic gesture. Then he looked over his shoulder at her.

  ‘Molly, it was a stupid thing to do, going in under those conditions. The risk … You think the Company’s name is enough to protect you? This is some backwater world that’s hardly heard of Earth, never mind the multi-corporates.’

  I said, ‘That’s something of an exaggeration, David,’ and they both ignored me.

  ‘It’s going on report,’ he said. ‘It’s not just yourself you’re risking, it’s the Company’s future here.’