by Neil Clarke
After a long while, I discover something.
My companions move unobtrusively away as I approach them, which means, of course, that they can sense my presence. Are they simply making room for me, or is it something else? However, what I’ve found through this experiment is that the Antarsa current, the central, fastest channel at least, has widened considerably. It took me much longer to find its edges, where there are dangerous eddies and rivulets. The speed of the current has not changed, however. Mystified, I continue on my way.
I send my offer of kinship out, but as yet there is no answer but silence.
Listening to the silence, I am reminded of a story my father, the trader, told me when I was small. Among our people the Kinships are fairly self-sufficient, but we do have need of small shipments at regular intervals: metals from the Himdhara mountains, cloth from Tura-Tura and so on. We send out our herbs and jewelry. There is constant flow of information between the Kinships (except for the People of the Ice, about whom my father told this story) and also with Ship University. Most things are transported where possible by boat, in a rare while by flyer or shuttle, but there are also wandering caravans that go overland, and my father has traveled with many of these. He is from a kinhouse of my own people further east of here, deeper in the forest and he met my mother during one of his journeys. Neither was interested in a permanent partnership but they remain cordial when they meet. And always he has tried to come see me, to bring me a shell from the Western Sea, or a particularly pretty pebble from Himdhara.
The People of the Ice stopped speaking to us from the time that the second generation of humans was grown. By that time the Kinships had each chosen their place, depending on where they felt most accepted and would do the least harm to the beings already present. My people of the Devtaru had genetically modified ourselves to digest certain local proteins; the Western sea folk had modified their bodies to be more agile in the water and to hold their breath longer than any other human. The People of the Himdhara could thrive in the thin mountain air. The People who settled in the Northern edge of the great continent, where there is ice even in the summer, adjusted themselves to live in that terrible cold. It was said that they grew hairy pelts like the beasts that dwelt there, but this could have been a joke. All the Kinships tell jokes about each other, and most are reasonably good-natured, but the People of the Ice got the worst of it because they were so remote, in both geography and temperament.
When I was little, my father said, his caravan was asked by the World Council to go into the North to find out what had happened to the People of the Ice. Was it that they did not answer radio calls because something terrible had befallen them, or were they being obstreperous as usual?
Take only a few people, said the Council, so that they don’t feel invaded. So my father and three others—a man and two women—went. They wandered for days and weeks through forest and scrubland, desert and plateau, until they came to the land of perpetual snow. Here the trees grew up into tall spires, and the wild creatures all had thick, luminous coats and some knew the use of fire. My father knows this because one night the party followed a flickering light through a snowfall, and found large, hairy creatures huddling before a fire, tossing twigs into it and grunting. As is our custom, the four travelers sat some distance away and waited, speaking softly the offering of kinship, until the creatures waved their paws at them and invited them, through expressive grunts, to join them. My father says these were shaggorns, and fortunately this group was full of meat and therefore amiable. They are very curious and they poked at the travelers with twigs to see what they would do (some of his companions laughed but my father only smiled and gently poked back) and one of them wanted to try on my father’s coat—my father allowed this, but had to give him his watch to get his coat back.
It was bitterly cold, but the four survived with the help of the shaggorns, and one late afternoon they found themselves at the edge of an icy plain, over which rose a city.
The city was made of ice. The buildings were constructed with ice blocks and had slit windows, and the streets were ice. People moved about them on skates, and the travelers could not tell whether they wore hairy pelts or if they had grown their own. The travelers set themselves down outside the city’s perimeter but in plain sight, in keeping with the tradition of waiting for an invitation.
But there was none. People skated across the ice, from building to building, and didn’t even look at the travelers. One little girl stared at them but was roughly pulled away by an adult. The four travelers sang the offering of kinship, but there was no response. This was a terrible thing to witness, my father said, because they had come so far and endured so much to make sure that their kin were safe. They were cold, hungry and tired, and the song was acquiring rather angry overtones. So they stopped their song, and set up camp there because the evening was setting in.
In the morning they found some supplies—meat, some cooked roots, all frozen by now, a pelt blanket. The meaning was clear: the People of the Ice did not desire kinship, but they meant no harm. There was no weapon left symbolically at the edge of the camp. They did not want a kinship of enmity—they simply wanted to be left alone.
So the travelers began their return journey, somewhat mollified. The next evening, before they were able to go very far (they were tired, as my father said), they saw a small dwelling in the forest. To their surprise they recognized the home of a farsister. Farsisters and farbrothers are people who wander away from their Kinships for a life of solitude, usually seeking some kind of spiritual solace. Some of them have done terrible things and seek to redress them or have suffered a loss and need to find a reason to live. Others simply wander in search of something they can’t identify, and when they find it, usually in a place that calls to them, they settle down there.
The farsister’s courtyard was snowy and bare, and furnished with only two low flat-topped rocks that my father assumed were intended to be chairs. This meant that the farsister did not like company, but one person would be tolerated. There was an intricately carved block of ice near the door, which indicated the occupation of the person within. That she was female was indicated by a red plume of feathers that hung from her door.
My father sat outside the courtyard and waited. She made him wait for several hours, by which time it was night and getting very cold. Then she came out and ushered him in. She turned out to be a grim, dour woman who seemed to be made of ice as well. The inside of her little hut was just as cold as the outside and this didn’t seem to bother her.
She told him that she was not of the People of the Ice, and that there was not anything to be done about them, they kept to themselves. She gave him a cold tea to drink that made my father feel dizzy. He felt himself falling into deep sleep, and the icy fingers of the farsister easing him down into a cold bed.
When he woke up he found that the hut was empty. Moreover, there was no sign that it had ever been inhabited. The hearth was cold, and filled with ashes, and a wind blew through the open window. My father felt frozen to the marrow. He got himself up slowly and painfully and emerged into a snowy dawn. The courtyard of the hut was bare—no sitting rocks, no ice carvings, no evidence that anyone had ever lived here. His companions were waiting anxiously for him at camp.
It was a long journey home, my father said, and they were glad to come back to the warm lands and make their report to the Council.
When he used to tell us children this story in the sunny garden in front of the kinhouse, with the warm sun at our back, we would shiver in the imagined snowfall. We were trapped in the hut of the ghostly farsister, or lost in the enchanted forest with the People of the Ice in their hairy pelts, wandering around to scare us, to take us away. Later we would come up with games and stories of our own, in which the Ice folk were the principal villains.
When I was older, my birth-mother would take some of us to Council meetings. Council meetings rotated from Kinship to Kinship, and when we were the hosts, my mother would let us
come. We would see our sea-kin, with their scale-like skin and their webbed hands, and the tall mountain folk with their elaborate head-dresses, or the cave kin with their sunshades over huge, dark eyes, and our own eyes would go round with wonder. In the evenings various kinfolk would gather round a fire or two and tell jokes. We would joke about the people of the Ice, and why they didn’t ever come to Council (“they were afraid they’d melt” or “it would be too hot in their fur coats”). During one of these occasions my father was also present—he pulled some of us older ones aside.
“You all talk a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Listen, I never told you one part of my story about the People of the Ice. What I dreamed about while I slept in the hut of the farsister.”
We were all eyes and ears.
“Listen. I dreamed that the farsister took me to the city of ice. Some of the Ice people met me and took me in, saying I could stay the night. I was put in an ice-cold room on a bed of ice, and it was so cold that I couldn’t sleep. In the night I heard my hosts talking about me, arguing. Some said I should never have been brought here, and another voice said that maybe I could be made to substitute for some relative, an old man whose time had come. The executioners would not know the difference if I was wrapped in furs and made unconscious, and that way the old man could live a little longer in secret. This went on for a long time, until the people moved away. I was so scared that I fled from there. My captors chased me some of the way but without much enthusiasm. Then I woke up in my cold bed.”
My father paused.
“I may have simply dreamed the whole thing. But the dream was so vivid that I sometimes wonder if it didn’t actually happen. Since that time I have wondered whether the reason for the silence of our Ice kin is something more sinister than mere bad manners. What if their genetic manipulations to adapt to the cold resulted in something they did not expect—something that prevents them from dying when they are old? Since they cannot die, they must put to death the old ones. And they are terrified that by mingling with us they will let loose an epidemic of deathlessness. So in their shame and misfortune they keep themselves separate from all other humans.”
We were appalled. To cheat death, even to wish to live longer than one’s natural span, is to show so much disrespect to all living beings, including one’s own offspring and generations yet to come, that it is unthinkable. It is natural to fear death, and so it takes courage to make kinship with death when one’s time has come. How terrible to have death itself refuse kinship! To have to kill one’s own kin! It was an honorable thing to isolate this curse in a city of ice, rather than let it loose among the rest of the Kinships. After my father’s revelation we found ourselves unable to joke about the People of the Ice with the same carelessness.
I am thinking about them today because I wonder about the silence of the spacecraft around me, and the deeper, longer silence of the Ashtans. Did they settle on their planet, or did they find it unsuitable and move on? Did some misfortune befall them? Or did they simply turn away from us, for some reason?
I don’t know if I’ll ever find out.
So much has happened that I have not had time to speak my story until now. Dear, kind darkness, dear kin on Dhara, I have made such a discovery! My companions, whose flickering images on the radar screen have so mystified me, have revealed their true nature. It is hard to say whether there are simply more of them—they are so clear on the radar now—or whether I have gained their trust and they have moved closer.
They are not spaceships. They are beings. Creatures of deep space, made of altmatter, riding the Antarsa current like me.
I found this out a few days ago, when the radar screen presented an unusually clear image. A long, sinuous, undulating shape, broadest in the middle and tapered at each end moved parallel to us. Something waved like a banner from the far end—a tail. It was huge. I held my breath. The visual image showed a barely visible shape, lit only by starlight and the external lights of my ship, but it reminded me just a little of the seagu, that massive, benevolent ocean mammal of the Western Sea.
It was clearly made of altmatter. Its flattened limbs—fins?—moved in resistance to the Antarsa current, which propelled it forward. There was a purposefulness, an ease with which it swam that was delightful to see. Here was a creature in its element, apparently evolved to travel between the stars on the great Antarsa ocean. I closed my eyes, opened them, and the image was still there. My fingers were shaking.
How to describe what it meant to me, the company of another living creature, be it one so removed from myself! I had lived with other living beings all my life before this journey. I had played with chatterlings in the great forest near my home, swum with ocean mammals—walroos and seagus, and schools of silverbellies. Even in the high, bare mountains of Himdhara, where life is hardy, scarce and without extravagance, I had made kinship with a mog-bear, with whom I shared a cave for several days during a storm. Nearly always I had traveled with other humans. This was my first journey into the dark, alone. Parin’s biosphere had much to do with maintaining my sanity, but how I had missed the company of other life! I blinked back tears. I took a deep breath and thanked the universe that I had lived to see such a marvel.
It was an exhilarating moment. It reminded me of my time with Raim, learning to use the sails on his boat on the Western Sea. Wind and current carried us far from the shore, and that wind was in my hair, whipping it about my face, and chapping my lips. Raim was beside me, laughing, rejoicing that I was finally moving the boat like an extension of my own body. Just then a school of seagu surfaced, and leaped up into the air as though to observe us. Crashing down into the water, raising a spray that drenched us, they traveled with us, sometimes surging ahead, sometimes matching our speed, their eyes glinting with humor.
This creature did not seem to have eyes. It must sense the world around it in a different way. I wondered whether it detected my little craft, and what it thought of it. But close on that thought came a new surprise. A fleet, a school of smaller shapes tumbled past between my ship and the behemoth. They were like small, flattened wheels, perhaps a meter in diameter as far as I could tell, trailing long cords through the current. They moved not in straight, parallel lines, but much more chaotically, like a crowd of excited children moving about every which way as they went toward a common destination.
As though this spectacle was not wonderful enough, I saw that around me, on either side and above and below, there was life. There were fish shapes, and round shapes, and long, tubular shapes, all moving with some kind of propulsion or undulation. They shimmered the way that altmatter does to the human eye, and some had their own lights, like the fish of the deep sea. These latter ones also had enormous dark spots on their bow end, like eyes. What worlds had birthed these creatures? Had they evolved in a gas cloud, or in the outer atmosphere of some star? They were so fantastic, and yet familiar. Our universe is, we know, mostly made from other kinds of matter than ourselves, but I hadn’t imagined that altmatter could be the basis for life. It occurred to me now that altmatter life might be much more common in the universe than our kind. Space is so big, so empty. We have always assumed it hostile to life, but perhaps that is true only of our kind of life, made of ordinary matter.
For the next two days I prepared radar clips and visual clips to send home, and watched the play of life around me. I have seen what seem to be feeding frenzies—the behemoth feasted on those wheeled creatures—and I might have witnessed a birth.
Today I saw a new creature, twice as long as the behemoth I had first set my eyes upon. It had armor plating with fissures between the plates, and apparent signs of erosion (how?), as though it was very old. It trailed a cloud of smaller creatures behind it, evidently attendant upon it. Its round hole of a mouth was fringed with a starburst of tentacles. I was musing on the problem of the radar imaging system’s resolving capacity, wondering what I was missing in terms of smaller-scale life in the life-rich current—when I saw the leviathan’s mouth widen.
It was at this point ahead of me and to one side of the ship, so I couldn’t see the mouth, but I inferred it from the way the tentacles fringing the orifice spread out. To my astonishment a great, umbrella-shaped net was flung out from the fringes of the mouth, barely visible to my radar. This net then spread out in front of the creature like a parachute; the creature back-finned vigorously, slowing down so abruptly that a number of other swimmers were caught in the web. Had I not swerved violently, my craft and I would have been among them. The acceleration might have flung me across the chamber and broken some bones, had it not been for the inertial net, which thickened astonishingly fast. (That the ship suffered no great damage is a testament to the engineering skills of the great generation-ship builders of old, my craft being a modified version of one of their shuttles).
Now that the Ashtan system is nearly upon us, I have a new worry. I don’t know whether the Antarsa current flows through any celestial objects, such as the sun, or a planet, or a moon. If it does, I must manipulate the altmatter sails in time to escape a violent crash. I am afraid something like this might have happened to the altmatter probes that were first launched from Dhara, that stopped sending back radio signals. Or perhaps they were swallowed by some creature.