by Neil Clarke
“I have kept mankind focused on its own advancement and prosperity and culled the weak and the distractions, and I accept relatively little in return—I take no more from my people than the barest life force necessary to remain alive and continue in my role. I have shepherded humanity through eons of history, and ensured that each new empire was built according to my design. The Cosmopolis was my greatest work. Only when it fell and the worlds were sundered from one another did humanity lose my guidance. And look what has become of you.”
Jemmi had never had a clear picture of life under the Cosmopolis, but she suddenly sensed that it must have been unimaginably finer than the way people lived now, and she felt ashamed.
“So you see, that is why I am here. To rescue mankind. I must rebuild the Cosmopolis.”
To Jemmi sitting in her tub that sounded so grand it was absurd. “From Sarasvati? She’s old and poor. How would she help, then?”
“As I told you, I am a man on a quest. I need only to reach an inhabited planet to raise humanity up again. But for that, I need a shuttle—one of the old machines. I have searched since the Great Fall, and none remain intact in any of the orbitals between here and the center. Perhaps there is one left in Sarasvati.”
“But, neh, the old machines don’t work.”
Yee smiled his half-smirk again. “I believe that if I can find a shuttle, I can render it operable.” His tone became more urgent. “Join with me, Jemmi. I will have need of your support in the days ahead. Add your power to mine, and there will be nothing we cannot do. We will save mankind from itself and bring order to the stars and lead an empire that spans the galaxy and can never be overthrown!”
“Okay.”
He stopped short as if he had prepared more to say. “Excellent,” he said.
“But I don’t know what help I can be.”
“People want to help you, Jemmi,” said Yee. “It’s in your nature. Roycer?”
Roycer stepped up behind her with a long-handled brush, and began to rub warm suds along her spine. Jemmi decided she enjoyed the sensation, and leaned forward to give him more surface to work with. He ran the brush up and down the same route, mechanically focused on the center of her back.
“If you’d like him to do something else, you may direct him,” said Yee. “I hand the reins over to you. Simply feel his mind and put the idea into it. You’ll find he will be avid to put it into action.”
“Don’t I need to touch him, then?”
“You shouldn’t—I don’t,” Yee told her.
Jemmi thought back to her earlier struggle with Yee, and reached out with her mind the way she imagined he had. She sensed nothing, so she pressed stronger and further. Suddenly she connected—and she was immense and floating in space, lost and engrossed in animal passion, tangled with Albiorix and straining mightily against his thrusts to receive him deeper and deeper within her. She had gone too far, and was now in Sarasvati’s mind.
Overwhelmed by the sensation and shocked by her transgression, Jemmi recoiled and shook herself free of Sara. As she went, she caught a final flash of Sara’s sight—stars wheeling around her, and much closer, a blue disk half covered with a whorl of white. Then she was back in the tub.
“Nothing, eh?” Yee said gently from his corner. “Well, try again. You’ll do it.”
She took a deep breath and reached out again, this time barely past her own skin. She felt Yee in the room with her—he nearly filled it—so she turned the other way and touched Roycer. She hesitated, then decided that people like Yee and herself were beyond bashfulness, and gave the boy the idea of her right shoulder.
The brush moved from her spine and made gentle circles around her right shoulder blade. This was nothing at all like how she was used to confounding minds. It was subtle and focused and efficient. She immediately saw it as a thing of beauty, as if she had been born to it.
“Excellent!” It sounded a little strained when Yee said it. “It seems you learn more quickly than I did. But always be aware that his enthusiasm may be diverted to other ideas.”
The brush was now circling her left shoulder.
Jemmi gently reminded Roycer of her right side, and the brush returned to make its circles there. Yee moved him away again—and it was more challenge than test. Jemmi pictured her right shoulder in detail and pressed the image into Roycer’s mind, and then pressed even harder in response to Yee’s redoubled pressure. Roycer stood frozen, torn between the two equal demands. After nearly a minute, the long-handled brush began to shudder silently.
“Well, there’s no point in breaking him,” Yee said a bit too lightly. “I still have some plans for the boy.”
Behind her Roycer emitted a sigh, and the brush resumed its gentle circles on her right shoulder blade.
Afterwards, when Yee suggested that the bath had done as much for her as could reasonably be expected, she stood up into a large towel Roycer held for her. She pressed the water out of her hair, and tossed the towel over her shoulder like a gown.
“Neh, am I beautiful now?” she asked.
Yee looked her over with an eye that had appraised queens.
“Why would you ask such a thing?” he said at last. “For you, that will never matter.”
So Jemmi moved in with Yee and Roycer, and got her warm dry bed and a boy to serve her after all. The bedroom was filled with magnificent girl-things that had been Roycer’s sisters’ and Yee said were now all hers. She dressed herself in a frock of a crisp, shiny fabric that would be ruined forever if it were even in the same room with a speck of grease, and put ribbon after ribbon into her hair until the whole mass could practically stand on its own. Yee saw it and muttered a vague comment that restraint was often the better part of elegance, so she kicked the dress into a corner and changed into a more practical working skirt.
The next day, as they finished breakfast and sat looking over the jumbled heap of everything Roycer had pulled out of the larder, Yee slid his chair back and observed, “We seem to have exhausted this house’s stores. Come—it’s time we went to the market.” Jemmi and Roycer followed him out.
Jemmi loved crowds, and to her mind the market was the best part of Port-Town. Yee led them to the busiest, most densely-packed street, where folk shoved to get by them and hawkers vied to drown out each others’ voices. He turned to Jemmi, and his voice carried perfectly without raising at all. “Roycer and I have some business to attend to and will leave you to do the shopping,” he told her coolly. “Please do not return until you have acquired everything you think the household needs. And do try not to get yourself killed while you’re about it. I have noticed subtlety is not your strong suit.”
He steered Roycer into the crowd, and they disappeared in a few steps. Jemmi didn’t even have a basket. Was Yee kicking her out already? Had she failed somehow? Or did it just mean he wanted her to practice putting ideas in peoples’ heads? She couldn’t tell, and she felt alone again, and very exposed. She fought to stay in one place for a long while until the buffeting from the shoppers became unbearable, and then, near tears, she fled to a quiet corner at the edge of the square.
She forced herself to breathe deeply until she was nearly calm again, and then reached out for the comfort of feeling Sara.
There was a brief, dizzying sensation of stretching through free-fall and then she was back in Sara’s mind, gargantuan but still less than a mote in the immeasurable space that surrounded her. The Herculean coupling with Albiorix showed no sign of slowing, but those sensations were too strong for Jemmi and she turned to other aspects of Sara’s awareness.
Sara, she saw, floated in a barren void but carried her ecosystem entire within her, as if someone had taken an empty house set in a garden, then turned all of it inside-out. She gloried in the living beings she harbored, both because they were the foundation of her own survival, and because they had sprung from her own body. Designed into the core of her awareness was the drive to shore up that precarious balance by any means possible. She could win over al
lies and choose favorites, and smite the enemies growing inside her as if they were incipient contagions.
Jemmi saw the spindle-shaped world inside Sara through Sara’s own mind, and she felt the angst and darkness that had been taking hold as her facility to orchestrate that environment slipped away. Sara was old and proud and secretly ashamed to be failing in her duty. Her wordless hopes were focused on the great egg she had prepared for Albiorix. If it quickened, she would have a glorious new life within her for a time, and then the lives she sheltered would have a new home.
Jemmi showed herself to Sara and guilelessly let the fact of her budding talent flow through. For a moment she felt Sara freeze the link between them, as if assessing the best way to react to some startling threat. But when Sara came back, her response was to engulf Jemmi with the sensation that she knew her and cherished her and reveled in her. It overwhelmed Jemmi and flooded through her, and she was powerless against it. Sara had unlimited reserves of love to draw on, and she used them mercilessly.
Jemmi was pinned there like an enraptured butterfly for a long, timeless instant. She was unable to move or think, and she wouldn’t have given it up for anything. Finally, when the effect was deep enough, Sara bid her farewell and gently withdrew.
Finding herself squatting by herself on muck-covered cobblestones, Jemmi hugged herself and sobbed quietly. She would have clawed her way back into Sara’s mind, but the connection had ended with a note of finality that she would not overstep. Gradually, she realized she was not empty, but filled with warmth and strength, and she could think of nothing but the great heart that had given her that. She now knew down through her bones that she would never have any use for Yee’s old empires or for planets where there was nothing at the other side of the sky but more sky, because Sarasvati was her world. Jemmi belonged here, where she could reach out with her hand or mind and touch her god, and if there was anything beyond Sara, it did not interest her.
But for the time being at least, Yee was helping her learn her own strength. She remembered the task he had given her and half-heartedly stepped to the edge of the crowd. She extended her mind just the slightest bit beyond her own skin, and the maelstrom of thoughts and words and desires that hit her was like ducking her head under a waterfall. She drew back and focused on the thoughts of the woman closest to her.
The invasion of privacy was thrilling. The woman was picking vegetables from big baskets, and Jemmi found herself swimming through twisting currents of intentions and half-ignored impressions and the occasional diamond-clear string of words. She wondered if she might become lost in the woman’s mind if she got any closer.
Ever so gently—not at all like guiding Roycer’s hand—she tossed in the notion that a vendor across the square might be willing to negotiate his price, and watched the ripples spread out across the woman’s other thoughts. Her eyes lit, and she hurried away from the table.
Start at the beginning, Jemmi decided. She strode up to the vegetable seller, and graciously allowed him to place his hastily emptied wicker basket on her arm. Then she moved on to a baker, who placed two loaves into it with a flourish as if it was the wittiest thing in the world, and strolled on into the heart of the square.
Jemmi returned home at the head of a small, heavily-laden parade. She directed the string of young men carrying her parcels to line them up along the veranda, and then sent them off. Yee stepped out of the house to observe this, then turned back inside with an audible sniff. Jemmi ran up after him.
“Neh, I can do it!” she told him. “I did it!”
“I daresay you did,” he said. “And made quite a scene, by the looks of it. It’s a wonder they didn’t have you burned at the stake. Have Roycer move your booty inside.” He turned away again.
Jemmi was crestfallen.
“Neh, Yee,” she blurted. He stopped. “How come Sara—Why don’t things work like they did in the olden days?” she asked.
That must have been the right question to ask him, because he immediately warmed to her again. “Ah,” he said. “It was the machines. Few people remember that it was the destruction of the machines that caused the fall of the Cosmopolis, and not the other way around. In the days of its greatest strength, the Cosmopolis had enemies who preferred utter anarchy to the order and prosperity it gave them. They were fools and fanatics. They introduced a machine pandemic that spread from one end of inhabited space to the other.”
“And all the machines got sick?”
“Not at first. It slept quietly for years, and then at a pre-ordained signal it struck everywhere, simultaneously. All the smart electronics died at that moment, and the Cosmopolis was shattered. To re-create the technology that humans or Sarasvati relied on, we will have to build from the beginning again: steam and iron. It is a long road, but I have walked it before.”
Jemmi did not trust Yee, and she didn’t think she liked him, but she would follow him anywhere if it would save Sara.
“In fact, Roycer and I were able to uncover some information towards that end while you were out,” he told her. “We learned that Sarasvati originally had a shuttle port at either extremity. These were large and busy, so they likely contained several shuttles at the time of the Fall, but they were quite prominent and I expect they were plundered generations ago. There were also several emergency evacuation portals scattered throughout her. These have been lost, and there is a chance that one may be untouched. They will have to be searched out.”
That seemed like a lot of work to Jemmi. “Why don’t you just ask Sara?”
Yee scoffed. “And what would the question be? The ships and orbitals are very simple beasts, and even if they understood, they couldn’t form an answer. But come, I will show you how it’s done.” He stepped over her groceries and led her back down into the street.
“What we need is people who seem persistent and resourceful, and whose absence will not be noted overly much,” said Yee. “People like you and me—but expendable, of course.”
Yee approached a laborer in a floppy, grease-stained cap pulling a heavy cart, and smiling and clasping his long pale hands together, asked him if he knew anything about the old-days shuttle port at the end of Sarasvati’s long axis. The man, obviously annoyed, shook his head and looked at Yee as if he were cracked. Yee appeared disappointed, and observed it was a pity, since it wouldn’t do to go spreading this around, but he was eager for news of any undamaged shuttles, and was more than willing to reimburse the man who brought that news quite handsomely. A fortune, really. At any rate, if he heard of anything, Yee lived right over there—the house with the veranda, can you see?—and would be delighted to receive any news. The man moved on as if he was glad to be rid of Yee. His steps became increasingly more hesitant though, as if something was unfolding in his mind. Finally, about a hundred paces down the street he abandoned his cart completely with a furtive look back, and sprinted away along the quickest route out of Port-Town.
The next man Yee spoke to developed a frantic urge to make the grueling trek to the ruins of the shuttle port at Sarasvati’s far end and return to report on his findings. After that, four others became fascinated with the pressing need to locate one of the lost evacuation ports scattered along her length. It seemed to Jemmi that before they hurried off, each of them had been struck by the sudden inspiration for a scheme that simultaneously delighted them and tortured them.
“If a man sees it as a struggle to express an idea from within, he’ll exhaust everything he has to bring it to fruition,” Yee explained, as the last one began to run. “Well, after your success in the market this morning, I believe I can leave the rest to you. You’ll need to send out about another dozen or so.” He turned to go.
“Neh, why so many?”
“One of the first things you must learn, Jemmi, is that one man acting alone will change nothing. To have progress, you must mobilize a society. Once we are on a world, you will see how quickly entire kingdoms move forward when they embrace the goals we give them.”
&n
bsp; Yee returned to the house and stepped over the groceries on the veranda as he went in. Jemmi stalked the street recruiting searchers for the rest of the afternoon, and the food sat out there until evening, when she reckoned she had snared enough.
There was no dawn the next morning. Jemmi jumped out of her big bed with a sense of foreboding and a gut feeling that it was later than it looked. She ran down the wooden stairs and out onto the road in her bare feet. Shock and woe were palpable in the air and the soil, and Sara was lamenting with all her heart. Then it hit Jemmi—Albiorix was dead. He had weakened and gone still and fallen slack in Sara’s embrace, and she was nearly paralyzed by loneliness and the weight of this new failure.
People in the villages high overhead began to wake and light lamps and fires as they tentatively started their day. The scattering of weak sparks in the darkness was a pale imitation of the stars Jemmi had seen through Sara’s eyes. Yee stepped out onto the veranda and silently leaned over the rail to look upwards and sniff, as if he were tasting the weather.
“Yee—Do you know? Albiorix is dead,” Jemmi said.
“I’m not surprised,” answered Yee. “He was stubbornly fixed on his old route, and I had to relieve him of much of his strength before he would accept my course. We’re lucky I made it this far.”
Jemmi’s hands were fists. “How could you do that?”
“I know what you’re thinking—and it’s not a problem. Albiorix has always been trailed by younger males as he makes his rounds. I’m sure Horus or Xolotl will be here by the time we are ready to move on.”
“But she was going to have his baby!” Jemmi managed.
“Not likely. The orbitals and ships are improbable beings, so they must be part animal, part machine,” Yee told her. “I’m certain you’ve noticed Sarasvati is no longer the paradise she was intended to be. Since the Fall, they have been unable to replenish the nanomachines that they need to grow and heal themselves. I doubt there would have been any offspring.” He shrugged.