by David Brin
– Sasha, this had better be –
I gestured for her to come forward, guiding with my hand on her arm, the first time that I had touched her in months. With a gesture, I insisted that we both cut off our radio transmitters, then touch helmet visors, to speak by conduction.
“I know what you’ve been looking for, Natalia Alexyevna Bushyeva. The reason that you chose this place, above all others, for our exile.”
Her eyes widened, then narrowed in practiced denial.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come, we both have work –”
“Do you think I am a fool?” I answered, with unexpected heat. “Or ignorant? Or that the generation after yours would somehow forget the old stories? What did you take me for? Do you think that I’m not Russian?”
She rocked back. And this time, after a moment’s indecision, she did me the honor of contemplating my words. Understanding them.
All over both planet Earth and the Solar System, humanity was coming to terms with harsh reality. With the way of the Coss, whose conquest swept aside such fragile things as “enlightenment,” or democracy, or the liberal way of viewing a gracious, benign universe.
That narrow age had flared so successfully, so brilliantly, it created a mass delusion. That all people might have worth, freedom and unlimited prospects. That competition might be so open, fair, individual and courteous, that it becomes indistinguishable from joyful cooperation. That anyone’s child might become as great as any other.
For a time, it seemed that Hawaii or California might be archetypes for a new, endlessly golden age – a sunny beach of prosperity, progress and opportunity. How few were those who pointed out the chief lesson of history – that ninety-nine percent of human generations had endured a far more classic, more archetypical human social structure.
First tribal chiefdoms... and then feudalism.
Mighty lords, applying total power over helpless vassals. During the Enlightenment Summer, some fools – Americans, especially – naively thought the long era of noble oppressors was over and done for good. In fact, they still, insanely, call feudalism an aberration, unstable and untenable, instead of the way that nature conspires with the strong.
And so, rebelling against the Coss time and again, Americans have died like wheat in the field.
But Russians never forgot. Amid the brightest days, even when others called us gloomy and dour, we knew. The tatars, the czars, the commissars and oligarchs... they murmured in our sleep, never letting us forget. And when the Coss came in overwhelming strength, re-establishing a feudal order – only with an alien caste on top – we Russians knew our options. There were... and are... and always will be just two.
To knuckle under, and survive.
Or to fight, but with the grinding, stoical patience of Pyotr Alexeyevich, or of Tolstoy. Or Lenin.
“We know the stories,” I told my mother, standing with her under vacuum-bright constellations. “How women used to plod for hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, following muddy roads... and then metal railroad tracks... slogging into far Siberia. Working to get by, doing laundry till their hands bled, moving from village to village in order to find the work camps. The gulags. Whereupon, each day when the train whistle blew –”
As if I had commanded it, a throbbing vibration shuddered underfoot and our audios picked up the throaty radio call – a five-minute warning from the Nicholas III.
“The women gathered by the village siding where the locomotive stopped for water. They would hurry to the flat cars, loaded high with timber cut by prisoners. And they searched, combing the logs with their eyes and groping in among them with their hands.
“What was it they were looking for, mother? Can you tell me, honestly, at long last, what you came out here to seek?”
I bent and caught her eyes with mine. Haggard from years of sleepless worry, hers glistened with defiant pride.
“Initials,” she said with little breath, then adding softly. “Carved into the raw wood... by prisoners.”
And then, straightening her back.
“Proof that they survived.”
And finally, barely whispered.
“That he survives.”
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So.
My suspicion was confirmed. Her added reason for all this – the one that had gone unspoken.
No single justification was sufficient for dragging us into the wilderness. Not the full release promised by Coss Law. Not the strength that Yelena and I would attain – if we survived. Nor practical experience, dealing with a new-harsh world. Not all of those, combined.
Only... might this new one, added to the others, tip the scale?
It did. Just barely. Enough for me to nod. To understand. To accept.
And to know.
The Yankees would never learn. Fooled by their brief, naive time of childishly unlimited dreams, they believed deep-down in happy endings and the triumph of good. They would keep rebelling till the Coss left no Americans alive.
We Russians are different. Our expertise? We persist. Resist! But with measured, cynical care. And each defeat is simply preparation.
That truth, I had already known. Only now it filled my soul.
We are the people who know how. To outlast the Coss.
And so I took my mother by the hand, leading her to the place that I had found, where Cyrillic letters lay deep-incised along the bared trunk of a crystal tree. And I watched her face bloom with sudden hope, with sunlit joy. And I knew, at last, what lesson this place taught.
To endure.
Story Notes
The preceding tale leads off our section on “endurance.” A theme that I go back to often, belying the canard that “David Brin is an optimist.” What malarkey!
Indeed, I do publicly disdain the wave of obsessively repetitive and unimaginative dystopias and apocalypses that offer so many directors and authors a cheating-lazy way to plot. Their relentless campaign against the can-do spirit is toxic for all of us. I despise reflex cynicism and pessimism that simply repeats a mantra that “nothing works.”
Still, things might go horribly wrong, as I portrayed in The Postman. Dire warnings serve a great purpose, if they pose a failure mode that’s a bit original! If they get people talking, thinking, pondering ways to avoid the pitfalls and quicksand pits that lie ahead. We may owe our lives and freedom to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Soylent Green, and Dr. Strangelove, legends that weren’t lazy cheats, but gave us fresh ideas about tomorrows to avoid.
In “The Logs” I explore the dark possibility that our narrow enlightenment civilization – the font of science fiction – might have been a fluke. It’s a terrifying possibility. Though hope will always find places to settle and seed and grow, even in the darkest moments and places.
This story is part of a fictional cosmos that I’ve been poking at for a while – the Epic of the Coss Invasion – based on a few paragraphs scribbled by our daughter, Ari, when she was five or six years old. I owe her the “elepents” and those daunting new lords, the Coss.
Our next story – “The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss” – only mentions the Coss briefly, as a far-off threat. It was chosen for Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year volume for 2015.
The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss
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Today’s thump was overdue. Jonah wondered if it might not come at all.
Just like last Thorday when – at the Old Clock’s mid-morning chime – farmers all across the bubble-habitat clambered up pinyon vines or crouched low in expectation of the regular, daily throb – a pulse and quake that hammered up your foot-soles and made all the bubble boundaries shake. Only Thorday’s thump never came. The chime was followed by silence and a creepy let-down feeling. And Jonah’s mother lit a candle, hoping to avert bad luck.
Early last spring, there had been almost a whole week without any thumps. Five days in a row, with no rain of detritus, shaken loose from the Upper World, tumbling down here to the ocean bottom. And two, smaller gaps t
he previous year.
Apparently, today would be yet another hiatus…
Whomp!
Delayed, the thump came hard, shaking the moist ground beneath Jonah’s feet. He glanced with concern toward the bubble boundary, more than two hundred meters away – a membrane of ancient, translucent volcanic stone, separating the paddies and pinyon forest from black, crushing waters just outside. The barrier vibrated, an unpleasant, scraping sound.
This time, especially, it caused Jonah’s teeth to grind.
“They used to sing, you know,” commented the complacent old woman who worked at a nearby freeboard loom, nodding as gnarled fingers sent her shuttle flying among the strands, weaving ropy cloth. Her hands did not shake, though the nearby grove of thick vines did, quivering much worse than after any normal thump.
“I’m sorry grandmother.” Jonah reached out to a nearby bole of twisted cables that dangled from the bubble-habitat’s high-arching roof, where shining glowleaves provided the settlement’s light.
“Who used to sing?”
“The walls, silly boy. The bubble walls. Thumps used to come exactly on time, according to the Old Clock. Though every year we would shorten the main wheel by the same amount, taking thirteen seconds off the length of a day. After-shakes always arrived from the same direction, you could depend on it! And the bubble sang to us.”
“It sang… you mean like that awful groan?” Jonah poked a finger in one ear, as if to pry out the fading reverberation. He peered into the nearby forest of thick trunks and vines, listening for signs of breakage. Of disaster.
“Not at all! It was musical. Comforting. Especially after a miscarriage. Back then, a woman would lose over half of her quickenings. Not like today, when more babies are born alive than warped or misshapen or dead. Your generation has it lucky! And it’s said things were even worse in olden days. The Founders were fortunate to get any living replacements at all! Several times, our population dropped dangerously.” She shook her head, then smiled. “Oh… but the music! After every mid-morning thump you could face the bubble walls and relish it. That music helped us women bear our heavy burden.”
‘“Yes, grandmother, I’m sure it was lovely,” Jonah replied, keeping a respectful voice as he tugged on the nearest pinyon to test its strength, then clambered upward, hooking long, unwebbed toes into the braided vines, rising high enough to look around. None of the other men or boys could climb as well.
Several nearby boles appeared to have torn loose their mooring suckers from the domelike roof. Five… no six of them… teetered, lost their final grip-holds, then tumbled, their luminous tops crashing into the rice lagoon, setting off eruptions of sparks… or else onto the work sheds where Panalina and her mechanics could be heard, shouting in dismay. It’s a bad one, Jonah thought. Already the hab-bubble seemed dimmer. If many more pinyons fell, the clan might dwell in semi-darkness, or even go hungry.
“Oh, it was beautiful, all right,” the old woman continued, blithely ignoring any ruckus. “Of course in my grandmother’s day, the thumps weren’t just regular and perfectly timed. They came in pairs! And it is said that long before – in her grandmother’s grandmother’s time, when a day lasted so long that it spanned several sleep periods – thumps used to arrive in clusters of four or five! How things must’ve shook, back then! But always from the same direction, and exactly at the mid-morning chime.”
She sighed, implying that Jonah and all the younger folk were making too much fuss. You call this a thump shock?
“Of course,” she admitted, “the bubbles were younger then. More flexible, I suppose. Eventually, some misplaced thump is gonna end us all.”
Jonah took a chance – he was in enough trouble already without offending the Oldest Female, who had undergone thirty-four pregnancies and still had six living womb-fruit – four of them precious females.
But grandmother seemed in a good mood, distracted by memories….
Jonah took off, clambering higher till he could reach with his left hand for one of the independent dangle vines that sometimes laced the gaps between pinyons. With his right hand he flicked with his belt knife, severing the dangler a meter or so below his knees. Sheathing the blade and taking a deep breath – he launched off, swinging across an open space in the forest… and finally alighting along a second giant bole. It shook from his impact and Jonah worried. If this one was weakened, and I’m the reason that it falls, I could be in for real punishment. Not just grandma-tending duty!
A “rascal’s” reputation might have been harmless, when Jonah was younger. But now, the mothers were pondering what amount Tairee Dome might have to pay, in dowry, for some other bubble colony to take him. A boy known to be unruly might not get any offers, at any marriage price… and a man without a wife-sponsor led a marginal existence.
But honestly, this last time wasn’t my fault! How am I supposed to make an improved pump without filling something with high pressure water? All right, the kitchen rice cooker was a poor choice. But it has a gauge and everything… or, it used to.
After quivering far too long, the great vine held. With a brief sense of relief, he scrambled around to the other side. There was no convenient dangler this time, but another pinyon towered fairly close. Jonah flexed his legs, prepared, and launched himself across the gap, hurtling with open arms, alighting with shock and painful clumsiness. He didn’t wait though, scurrying to the other side – where there was another dangle vine, well-positioned for a wide-spanning swing.
This time he couldn’t help himself while hurtling across open space, giving vent to a yell of exhilaration.
Two swings and four leaps later, he was right next to the bubble’s edge, reaching out to stroke the nearest patch of ancient, vitrified stone in a place where no one would see him break taboo. Pushing at the transparent barrier, Jonah felt deep ocean pressure shoving back. The texture felt rough-ribbed, uneven. Sliver-flakes rubbed off, dusting his hand.
“Of course, bubbles were younger then,” the old woman said. “More flexible.”
Jonah had to wrap a length of dangle vine around his left wrist and clutch the pinyon with his toes, in order to lean far out and bring his face right up against the bubble – it sucked heat into bottomless cold – using his right hand and arm to cup around his face and peer into the blackness outside. Adapting vision gradually revealed the stony walls of Cleopatra Crevice, the narrow-deep canyon where humanity had come to take shelter so very long ago. Fleeing the Coss invaders. Before many lifespans of grandmothers.
Several strings of globe-like habitats lay parallel along the canyon bottom, like pearls on a necklace, each of them surrounded by a froth of smaller bubbles… though fewer of the little ones than there were in olden times, and none anymore in the most useful sizes. It was said that, way back at the time of the Founding, there used to be faint illumination overhead, filtering downward from the surface and demarking night from day: light that came from the mythological god-thing that old books called the sun, so fierce that it could penetrate both dense, poisonous clouds and the ever-growing ocean.
But that was way back in a long-ago past, when the sea had not yet burgeoned so, filling canyons, becoming a dark and mighty deep. Now, the only gifts that fell from above were clots of detritus that men gathered to feed algae ponds. Debris that got stranger, every year.
These days, the canyon walls could only be seen by light from the bubbles themselves, by their pinyon glow within. Jonah turned slowly left to right, counting and naming those farm-enclaves he could see. Amtor… Leininger… Chown… Kuttner… Okumo… each one a clan with traditions and styles all their own. Each one possibly the place where Tairee tribe might sell him in a marriage pact. A mere boy and good riddance. Good at numbers and letters. A bit skilled with his hands, but notoriously absent-minded, prone to staring at nothing, and occasionally putting action to rascally thoughts.
He kept tallying: Brakutt… Lewis… Atari… Napeer… Aldrin… what?
Jonah blinked. What was happenin
g to Aldrin? And the bubble just beyond it. Both Aldrin and Bezo were still quivering. He could make out few details at this range, through the milky, pitted membrane. But one of the two was rippling and convulsing, the glimmer of its pinyon forest shaking back and forth as the giant boles swayed… then collapsed!
The other distant habitat seemed to be inflating. Or so Jonah thought at first. Rubbing his eyes and pressing even closer, as Bezo habitat grew bigger…
…or else it was rising! Jonah could not believe what he saw. Torn loose, somehow, from the ocean floor, the entire bubble was moving. Upward. And as Bezo ascended, its flattened bottom now re-shaped itself as farms and homes and lagoons tumbled together into the base of the accelerating globe. With its pinyons still mostly in place, Bezo colony continued glowing as it climbed upward.
Aghast, and yet compelled to look, Jonah watched until the glimmer that had been Bezo finally vanished in blackness, accelerating toward the poison surface of Venus.
Then, without warning or mercy, habitat Aldrin imploded.
2.
“I was born in Bezo, you know.”
Jonah turned to see Enoch leaning on his rake, staring south along the canyon wall, toward a gaping crater where that ill-fated settlement bubble used to squat. Distant glimmers of glow-lamps flickered over there as crews prowled along the Aldrin debris field, sifting for salvage. But that was a job for mechanics and senior workers. Meanwhile, the algae ponds and pinyons must be fed, so Jonah also found himself outside, in coveralls that stank and fogged from his own breath and many generations of previous wearers, helping to gather the week’s harvest of organic detritus.
Jonah responded in the same dialect Enoch had used. Click-Talk. The only way to converse, when both of you are deep underwater.
“Come on,” he urged his older friend, a recent, marriage-price immigrant to Tairee Bubble. “All of that is behind you. A male should never look back. We do as we are told.”
Enoch shrugged – broad shoulders making his stiff coveralls scrunch around the helmet, fashioned from an old foam bubble of a size no longer found in these parts. Enoch’s phlegmatic resignation was an adaptive skill that served him well, as he was married to Jonah’s cousin, Jezzy, an especially strong-willed young woman, bent on exerting authority and not above threatening her new husband with casting-out.