Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  Absolutely no response or acknowledgment.

  “You do know that, Mr. Old Music.”

  “I assumed you had a natural wish to survive.”

  Rayaye shook his head as if bothered by an insect. “Since we joined the Ekumen—and long before we joined it, Mr. Old Music—we have loyally followed its policies and bowed to its theories. And so we lost Yeowe! And so we lost the West! Four million dead, Mr. Old Music. Four million in the first Uprising. Millions since. Millions. If we had contained it then, many fewer would have died. Assets as well as owners.”

  “Suicide,” Esdan said in a soft mild voice, the way assets spoke.

  “The pacifist sees all weapons as evil, disastrous, suicidal. For all the age-old wisdom of your people, Mr. Old Music, you have not the experiential perspective on matters of war we younger, cruder peoples are forced to have. Believe me, we are not suicidal. We want our people, our nation, to survive. We are determined that it shall. The bibo was fully tested, long before we joined the Ekumen. It is controllable, targetable, containable. It is an exact weapon, a precise tool of war. Rumor and fear have wildly exaggerated its capacities and nature. We know how to use it, how to limit its effects. Nothing but the response of the Stabiles through your ambassador prevented us from selective deployment in the first summer of the insurrection.”

  “I had the impression the high command of the Army of Voe Deo was also opposed to deploying that weapon.”

  “Some generals were. Many veots are rigid in their thinking, as you know.”

  “That decision has been changed?”

  “President Oyo has authorised deployment of the bibo against forces massing to invade this province from the west.”

  Such a cute word, “bibo.” Esdan closed his eyes for a moment.

  “The destruction will be appalling,” Rayaye said.

  Assent.

  “It is possible,” Rayaye said, leaning forward, black eyes in black face, intense as a hunting cat, “that if the insurgents were warned, they might withdraw. Be willing to discuss terms. If they withdraw, we will not attack. If they will talk, we will talk. A holocaust can be prevented. They respect the Ekumen. They respect you personally, Mr. Old Music. They trust you. If you were to speak to them on the net, or if their leaders will agree to a meeting, they will listen to you, not as their enemy, their oppressor, but as the voice of a benevolent, peace-loving neutrality, the voice of wisdom, urging them to save themselves while there is yet time. This is the opportunity I offer you, and the Ekumen. To spare your friends among the rebels, to spare this world untold suffering. To open the way to lasting peace.”

  “I am not authorised to speak for the Ekumen. The Ambassador—”

  “Will not. Cannot. Is not free to. You are. You are a free agent, Mr. Old Music. Your position on Werel is unique. Both sides respect you. Trust you. And your voice carries infinitely more weight among the whites than his. He came only a year before the insurrection. You are, I may say, one of us.”

  “I am not one of you. I neither own nor am owned. You must redefine yourselves to include me.”

  Rayaye, for a moment, had nothing to say. He was taken aback, and would be angry. Fool, Esdan said to himself, old fool, to take the moral high ground! But he did not know what ground to stand on.

  It was true that his word would carry more weight than the Ambassador’s. Nothing else Rayaye had said made sense. If President Oyo wanted the Ekumen’s blessing on his use of this weapon and seriously thought Esdan would give it, why was he working through Rayaye, and keeping Esdan hidden at Yaramera? Was Rayaye working with Oyo, or was he working for a faction that favored using the bibo, while Oyo still refused?

  Most likely the whole thing was a bluff. There was no weapon. Esdan’s pleading was to lend credibility to it, while leaving Oyo out of the loop if the bluff failed.

  The biobomb, the bibo, had been a curse on Voe Deo for decades, centuries. In panic fear of alien invasion after the Ekumen first contacted them almost four hundred years ago, the Werelians had put all their resources into developing space flight and weaponry. The scientists who invented this particular device repudiated it, informing their government that it could not be contained; it would destroy all human and animal life over an enormous area and cause profound and permanent genetic damage worldwide as it spread throughout the water and the atmosphere. The government never used the weapon but was never willing to destroy it, and its existence had kept Werel from membership in the Ekumen as long as the Embargo was in force. Voe Deo insisted it was their guarantee against extraterrestrial invasion and perhaps believed it would prevent revolution. Yet they had not used it when their slave-planet Yeowe rebelled. Then, after the Ekumen no longer observed the Embargo, they announced that they had destroyed the stockpiles. Werel joined the Ekumen. Voe Deo invited inspection of the weapon sites. The Ambassador politely declined, citing the Ekumenical policy of trust. Now the bibo existed again. In fact? In Rayaye’s mind? Was he desperate? A hoax, an attempt to use the Ekumen to back a bogey threat to scare off an invasion: the likeliest scenario, yet it was not quite convincing.

  “This war must end,” Rayaye said.

  “I agree.”

  “We will never surrender. You must understand that.” Rayaye had dropped his blandishing, reasonable tone. “We will restore the holy order of the world,” he said, and now he was fully credible. His eyes, the dark Werelian eyes that had no whites, were fathomless in the dim light. He drank down his wine. “You think we fight for our property. To keep what we own. But I tell you, we fight to defend our Lady. In that fight is no surrender. And no compromise.”

  “Your Lady is merciful.”

  “The Law is her mercy.”

  Esdan was silent.

  “I must go again tomorrow to Bellen,” Rayaye said after a while, resuming his masterful, easy tone. “Our plans for moving on the southern front must be fully coordinated. When I come back, I’ll need to know if you will give us the help I’ve asked you for. Our response will depend largely on that. On your voice. It is known that you’re here in the East Provinces—known to the insurgents, I mean, as well as our people—though your exact location is of course kept hidden for your own safety. It is known that you may be preparing a statement of a change in the Ekumen’s attitude toward the conduct of the civil war. A change that could save millions of lives and bring a just peace to our land. I hope you’ll employ your time here in doing so.”

  He is a factionalist, Esdan thought. He’s not going to Bellen, or if he is, that’s not where Oyo’s government is. This is some scheme of his own. Crackbrained. It won’t work. He doesn’t have the bibo. But he has a gun. And he’ll shoot me.

  “Thank you for a pleasant dinner, Minister,” he said.

  Next morning he heard the flyer leave at dawn. He limped out into the morning sunshine after breakfast. One of his veot guards watched him from a window and then turned away. In a sheltered nook just under the balustrade of the south terrace, near a planting of great bushes with big, blowsy, sweet-smelling white flowers, he saw Kamsa and her baby and Heo. He made his way to them, dot-and-go-one. The distances at Yaramera, even inside the house, were daunting to a lamed man. When he finally got there, he said, “I am lonely. May I sit with you?”

  The women were afoot, of course, reverencing, though Kamsa’s reverence had become pretty sketchy. He sat on a curved bench splotched all over with fallen flowers. They sat back down on the flagstone path with the baby. They had unwrapped the little body to the mild sunshine. It was a very thin baby, Esdan thought. The joints in the bluish-dark arms and legs were like the joints in flower stems, translucent knobs. The baby was moving more than he had ever seen it move, stretching its arms and turning its head as if enjoying the feel of the air. The head was large for the neck, again like a flower, too large on too thin a stalk. Kamsa dangled one of the real flowers over the baby. His dark eyes gazed up at it. His eyelids and eyebrows were exquisitely delicate. The sunlight shone through his fingers. He smile
d. Esdan caught his breath. The baby’s smile at the flower was the beauty of the flower, the beauty of the world.

  “What is his name?”

  “Rekam.”

  Grandson of Kamye. Kamye the Lord and slave, huntsman and husbandman, warrior and peacemaker.

  “A beautiful name. How old is he?”

  In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age.

  He sat back on the bench. “I feel very old,” he said. “I haven’t seen a baby for a hundred years.”

  Heo sat hunched over, her back to him; he felt that she wanted to cover her ears. She was terrified of him, the alien. Life had not left much to Heo but fear, he guessed. Was she twenty, twenty-five? She looked forty. Maybe she was seventeen. Usewomen, ill-used, aged fast. Kamsa he guessed to be not much over twenty. She was thin and plain, but there was bloom and juice in her as there was not in Heo.

  “Master did have children?” Kamsa asked, lifting up her baby to her breast with a certain discreet pride, shyly flaunting.

  “No.”

  “A yera yera,” she murmured, another slave word he had often heard in the urban compounds: O pity, pity.

  “How you get to the center of things, Kamsa,” he said. She glanced his way and smiled. Her teeth were bad, but it was a good smile. He thought the baby was not sucking. It lay peacefully in the crook of her arm. Heo remained tense and jumped whenever he spoke, so he said no more. He looked away from them, past the bushes, out over the wonderful view that arranged itself, whenever you walked or sat, into a perfect balance: the levels of flagstone, of dun grass and blue water, the curves of the avenues, the masses and lines of shrubbery, the great old tree, the misty river and its green far bank. Presently the women began talking softly again. He did not listen to what they said. He was aware of their voices, aware of sunlight, aware of peace.

  Old Gana came stumping across the upper terrace towards them, bobbed to him, said to Kamsa and Heo, “Choyo does want you. Leave me that baby.” Kamsa set the baby down on the warm stone again. She and Heo sprang up and went off, thin, light women moving with easy haste. The old woman settled down piece by piece and with groans and grimaces onto the path beside Rekam. She immediately covered him up with a fold of his swaddling cloth, frowning and muttering at the foolishness of his mother. Esdan watched her careful movements, her gentleness when she picked the child up, supporting that heavy head and tiny limbs, her tenderness cradling him, rocking her body to rock him.

  She looked up at Esdan. She smiled, her face wrinkling up into a thousand wrinkles. “He is my great gift,” she said.

  He whispered, “Your grandson?”

  The backward nod. She kept rocking gently. The baby’s eyes were closed, his head lay softly on her thin, dry beast. “I think now he’ll die not long now.”

  After a while Esdan said, “Die?”

  The nod. She still smiled. Gently, gently rocking. “He is two years of age, master.”

  “I thought he was born this summer,” Esdan said in a whisper.

  The old woman said, “He did come to stay a little while with us.”

  “What is wrong?”

  “The wasting.”

  Esdan had heard the term. He said, “Avo?” the name he knew for it, a systemic viral infection common among Werelian children, frequently epidemic in the asset compounds of the cities.

  She nodded.

  “But it’s curable!”

  The old woman said nothing.

  Avo was completely curable. Where there were doctors. Where there was medicine. Avo was curable in the city not the country. In the great house not the asset quarters. In peacetime not in wartime. Fool!

  Maybe she knew it was curable, maybe she did not, maybe she did not know what the word meant. She rocked the baby, crooning in a whisper, paying no attention to the fool. But she had heard him, and answered him at last, not looking at him, watching the baby’s sleeping face.

  “I was born owned,” she said, “and my daughters. But he was not. He is the gift. To us. Nobody can own him. The gift of the Lord Kamye of himself. Who could keep that gift?”

  Esdan bowed his head down.

  He had said to the mother, “He will be free.” And she had said, “Yes.”

  He said at last, “May I hold him?”

  The grandmother stopped rocking and held still a while. “Yes,” she said. She raised herself up and very carefully transferred the sleeping baby into Esdan’s arms, onto his lap.

  “You do hold my joy,” she said.

  The child weighed nothing—six or seven pounds. It was like holding a warm flower, a tiny animal, a bird. The swaddling cloth trailed down across the stones. Gana gathered it up and laid it softly around the baby, hiding his face. Tense and nervous, jealous, full of pride, she knelt there. Before long she took the baby back against her heart. “There,” she said, and her face softened into happiness.

  That night Esdan, sleeping in the room that looked out over the terraces of Yaramera, dreamed that he had lost a little round, flat stone that he always carried with him in a pouch. The stone was from the pueblo. When he held it in his palm and warmed it, it was able to speak, to talk with him. But he had not talked with it for a long time. Now he realised he did not have it. He had lost it, left it somewhere. He thought it was in the basement of the Embassy. He tried to get into the basement, but the door was locked, and he could not find the other door.

  He woke. Early morning. No need to get up. He should think about what to do, what to say, when Rayaye came back. He could not. He thought about the dream, the stone that talked. He wished he had heard what it said. He thought about the pueblo. His father’s brother’s family had lived in Arkanan Pueblo in the Far South Highlands. In his boyhood, every year in the heart of the northern winter, Esi had flown down there for forty days of summer. With his parents at first, later on alone. His uncle and aunt had grown up in Darranda and were not pueblo people. Their children were. They had grown up in Arkanan and belonged to it entirely. The eldest, Suhan, fourteen years older than Esdan, had been born with irreparable brain and neural defects, and it was for his sake that his parents had settled in a pueblo. There was a place for him there. He became a herdsman. He went up on the mountains with the yama, animals the South Hainish had brought over from O a millennium or so ago. He looked after the animals. He came back to live in the pueblo only in winter. Esi saw him seldom, and was glad of it, finding Suhan a fearful figure—big, shambling, foul-smelling, with a loud braying voice, mouthing incomprehensible words. Esi could not understand why Suhan’s parents and sisters loved him. He thought they pretended to. No one could love him.

  To adolescent Esdan it was still a problem. His cousin Noy, Suhan’s sister, who had become the Water Chief of Arkanan, told him it was not a problem but a mystery. “You see how Suhan is our guide?” she said. “Look at it. He led my parents here to live. So my sister and I were born here. So you come to stay with us here. So you’ve learned to live in the pueblo. You’ll never be just a city man. Because Suhan guided you here. Guided us all. Into the mountains.”

  “He didn’t really guide us,” the fourteen-year-old argued.

  “Yes, he did. We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.” Then she had gone off to arbitrate a dispute over the usage rights to an irrigation system outside town, for the east side of the mountains was very dry country, and the people of Arkanan were contentious, though hospitable, and the Water Chief stayed busy.

  But Suhan’s condition had been irreparable, his weakness inaccessible even to the wondrous medical skills of Hain. This baby was dying of a disease that could be cured by a mere series of injections. It was wrong to accept his illness, his death. It was wrong to
let him be cheated out of his life by circumstance, bad luck, an unjust society, a fatalistic religion. A religion that fostered and encouraged the terrible passivity of the slaves, that told these women to do nothing, to let the child waste away and die.

  He should interfere, he should do something, what could be done?

  “How long has he lived?”

  “As long as his life.”

  There was nothing they could do. Nowhere to go. No one to turn to. A cure for avo existed, in some places, for some children. Not in this place, not for this child. Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.

  This was a strange place to come to learn the quality of joy. Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the light weight, the brief warmth.

  He was out on the terrace late the next morning, waiting for Kamsa and the baby to come out as they usually did, but the older veot came instead. “Mr. Old Music, I must ask you to stay indoors for a time,” he said.

  “Zadyo, I’m not going to run away,” Esdan said, sticking out his swathed lump of a foot.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  He stumped crossly indoors after the veot and was locked into a downstairs room, a windowless storage space behind the kitchens. They had fixed it up with a cot, a table and chair, a pisspot, and a battery lamp for when the generator failed, as it did for a while most days. “Are you expecting an attack, then?” he said when he saw these preparations, but the veot replied only by locking the door. Esdan sat on the cot and meditated, as he had learned to do in Arkanan Pueblo. He cleared distress and anger from his mind by going through the long repetitions: health and good work, courage, patience, peace, for himself, health and good work, courage, patience, peace for the zadyo…for Kamsa, for baby Rekam, for Rayaye, for Heo, for Taulenem, for the oga, for Nemeo who had put him in the crouchcage, for Alatual who had put him in the crouchcage, for Gana who had bound his foot and blessed him, for people he knew in the Embassy, in the city, health and good work, courage, patience, peace…That went well, but the meditation itself was a failure. He could not stop thinking. So he thought. He thought about what he could do. He found nothing. He was weak as water, helpless as the baby. He imagined himself speaking on a holonet with a script saying that the Ekumen reluctantly approved the limited use of biological weapons in order to end the civil war. He imagined himself on the holonet dropping the script and saying that the Ekumen would never approve the use of biological weapons for any reason. Both imaginings were fantasies. Rayaye’s schemes were fantasies. Seeing that his hostage was useless, Rayaye would have him shot. How long has he lived? As long as sixty-two years. A much fairer share of time than Rekam was getting. His mind went on past thinking.