“Master Tem, I'm so sorry,” she stammered. I waved for her to be quiet.
“What deep thoughts are you pondering?” I asked.
Cres looked at me like this was a trick question and she'd be smacked for a wrong answer. “The ships,” she said with hesitation.
I nodded. “When I was your age, I spent all my free time watching ships pass in the sky, and praying I was special enough to attract their attention. I didn't care what ship it was. Massive universe jumper. Slim star hopper. Dimension slider. I wanted to leave this mudball of a world and see the universe.”
From the way Cres's eyes lit up, I knew I spoke for her own feelings.
“There's nothing for us here,” she said. “I mean, humans are exploring the universe, all the universes, and we're stuck in a pre-industrial cesspool. It's not right.”
I sighed because Cres was saying the very things I'd said at her age. Above us, a large ship, of a style I'd never seen before, puffed lazily across the sky while a gentle drizzle of rain fell from its body. I knew that Cres wouldn't stay here much longer. She had so much potential. All that had saved me was my sister's death. I'd been so determined to keep others from dying like my sister that the ships avoided me. Cres, though, wasn't determined to stay. Eventually one of the countless ships passing by would descend and take her, leaving our world for sights I couldn't begin to conceive.
Still, I owed it to Cres's parents to at least try and keep her here.
“Give me a month,” I said. “There are things I want to teach you about our world. If after that you still want to leave, I'll give you my blessing.”
Cres hugged me and muttered her thanks, no doubt knowing – just as I knew – that nothing I could say would keep her here.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, Cres and I traveled by horse around the country side, visiting several towns with libraries. I showed her numerous histories on our world, including restricted volumes speculating on how our world stayed the same size despite the constant mass being added, and why everything continually sank toward the world's core. I also showed her ten thousand years' worth of observations about the ships which continually visited our planet and kept us alive with their offerings.
In one library, I pulled out a worn leather tome detailing three ship crashes over the last few millennia. In each case, our people had rescued humans from the downed ships. While strange differences had been noted – alterations to the head, bizarre tints and luminescence around their bodies – they had been able to speak with us. One account even briefly described the interior of a ship, which had been merely empty space. That account also swore the crash's two survivors had somehow formed out of the ship's very skin. Unfortunately, all of these accounts were frustratingly vague and sparse. In each case, rescuing ships had quickly arrived and taken away the survivors.
“See,” Cres said as we rode back to our town. “They're keeping us in the dark. Anyone who knows anything is removed from our world.”
“Only one way to find out,” I said, nodding at several hoppers passing above us dropping large, wet drops of fermented material from their bellies. “Unfortunately, once you go that route you can never come back.”
As we rode our horses over the speckled green and brown hills and through the thin, straggly forests, I explained to Cres that we had a duty to each other. No matter how much technology the rest of humanity possessed, we were all human. Unless we worked for each other, there was nothing worth living for. Just as the trees and grass around us survived by growing to the sky faster than they were buried, so too did we survive because we helped each other.
However, my heart wasn't in my words. I thought of my little sister, Llin, who'd died when she was six. As children we'd played endless ship games – imagining the worlds we'd visit; searching the sky for the ship we'd eventually travel on. Our mom should have punished us for saying such things, but she'd merely smiled and pointed out her own favorite ships when they passed by.
But Llin died before she could find her ship. We'd been walking home from the park – where we'd spent the morning throwing folded paper ships into the wind – when a massive cumulus passed over the town, sending floods raging through the streets. As the waters tore at our bodies, I'd grabbed Llin's hand and struggled to hold her above the current. She'd screamed and cried and begged me to hold on, but the flood snatched her away.
My mother held me all that night, telling me I'd done the best I could and that Llin would still find her ship. But I no longer cared about the ships. If the people who flew the damn things could so easily kill my little sister, I'd never join them.
As if knowing my desire, the ships left me alone.
* * *
The day after we returned from our trip, Cres disappeared. At first I assumed she'd gone to market, or to check our instruments. But when she missed dinner, then supper, my gut climbed to my throat. I stopped by her parent's house and discreetly inquired about her, but they hadn't seen her. In fact, she hadn't spoken to them since we'd returned from our trip, but if Cres was going to try and attract a ship I strongly doubted she'd tell her parents.
When Cres didn't return that night, I knew she was gone. I prayed she'd found a good ship and enjoyed her life.
The next morning I was cooking breakfast when I discovered the jar of strawberry preserves was empty. I walked into the root cellar to get a new jar, only to be confronted by loud curses. In the cellar's far corner, I found a large hole in the wooden floor.
“About time you heard me,” Cres said from the hole. “I've been yelling since yesterday.”
I quickly lowered a rope and Cres climbed out. She explained that she'd gone into the root cellar for supplies and fell through the floor. Evidently the storm several months ago had washed away a lot of the ground under the house.
I was extremely irritated, imagining the house I'd built upon my mother's house, and her mother's before that, in danger of collapse. Cres, though, was ecstatic. “You don't understand,” she said. “The water didn't just wash the ground away. It exposed a number of underground tunnels. And there's a faint glow coming from somewhere down there.”
I started to remind Cres that it was forbidden to explore underground; that if the ships didn't kill us, the mayor definitely would. Tunnels on our world were also dangerous because of the potential for the loose soil to collapse. But as I stared into Cres's excited eyes, I realized that if I said no to exploring beneath the house she would give up any remaining desire to stay on our world. Once that happened, she would be gone on the first interested ship.
I sighed and grabbed a jar of strawberry preserves. If I was going to risk my neck, it would at least be on a full stomach.
* * *
The red glow Cres had seen came from a ship. Gleaming like new and wedged in the foundations of my house thirty meters below the ground.
The ship appeared to be a dimension slider, although that was merely a name from a book and didn't tell much about what it could actually do. To access the ship, Cres and I climbed and dug through the ruins of my ancestor's houses, past ancient rooms half filled with dirt and walls ruptured and split by pressure and water.
Even though it was nerve-wracking seeing how much of my house's foundation had washed away in the recent flood, it was also fascinating to climb through my family's history. My grandmother had often talked about the bright red kitchen of her childhood and sure enough, the walls of that room two levels down still showed a faint red ocher beneath the dirt and grime. Four levels down, I ran my fingers along a cracked ceramic oven and wondered about the meals my ancestors had cooked here.
But the ship was the centerpiece of the ruins. A perfect sphere ten meters across, with the lowest timbers of my house merging into the ship's skin as if they'd always been one.
“How old is this ship?” Cres asked.
I calculated how many levels of the house reached down to this point. “Maybe 300 years. Give or take a generation or two.”
Cres sh
ook her head. “That can't be right. The history of the town goes back a thousand years. There's no record of a ship crashing here.”
That was indeed a puzzle.
* * *
Over the next week we cleared away more dirt and debris around the ship. To make our work easier, I built a simple pulley system to lower ourselves into the hole. We also took care to only work on days when the passing ships indicated good weather, and only after locking the front door against visitors. After all, if the mayor or town constables discovered that we were exploring an underground ship, not even my hero status would save us from a quick drop and a sudden stop.
One strange thing we discovered was that the waters which had surged through my house's foundation appeared to have drained into the ship, with the runoff tunnels radiating out from the ship like spokes on a wheel. Cres and I debated whether the ship had somehow called the water to itself.
When Cres and I weren't clearing around the ship, we attended to our regular duties. We also explored my volumes of weather history.
“The histories are wrong,” Cres said one morning when I climbed up the weather tower to check on her. In her lap sat my oldest volume of histories, dating back a millennium to the town's first weatherman. “This volume says your family has been building this house for nine hundred years. But there's no way the ship had been around that long.”
I sighed, knowing Cres was right, but also not having an answer. As we'd cleared away the dirt from the ship, we hadn't found any evidence of older houses under it. The ship appeared to support my home's entire foundation. “Maybe my ancestors' houses disappeared into the ship like the water did?”
Cres considered this for a moment before discounting it with a snort. “That would mean there's a ship supporting every house in town. I find that hard to believe.”
While I was glad that Cres had given up thoughts of leaving our world – even if the reason she wanted to stay risked our very lives – I refused to let her disrespect me. I yanked the book from her hands and told her not to borrow any more of my histories without asking.
* * *
The next day the weather changed and, much to Cres's irritation, we had no time for the ship. Mares' tails blew in from the west, always followed by the cumulus ships which endlessly chased them. While none of these ships were anywhere near as large as the cumulus which flooded our town earlier in the year, they still dropped enough water to issue warnings. Because of the danger, either Cres or myself stayed in the tower at all times. While Cres hated being torn from her examinations of the ship – she was frustrated that we still hadn't found a way inside – she understood our duty. In addition, the runoff from the storms now ran through the underground tunnels beneath my house. Being caught down there during a downpour would mean certain death.
A few days into the storm cycle I woke around midnight to wind and rain howling outside my window. I grabbed my robe and ran to the top floor, irritated that I'd slept through the warning bell. I could just make out the glow of a large cumulus above the town as it pelted us with rain. This was the biggest storm to hit since the blow months before. I opened the roof hatch and tried to climb the tower, but the wind was too strong. I yelled for Cres to stay where she was, then closed the hatch and waited out the storm.
The cumulus passed in ten minutes. I opened the front door to survey the damage and was almost run over by the mayor.
“What happened to the warning?” he yelled. “I was walking back from the pub and nearly got washed away.”
I glanced up at the weather tower, which I could now see was empty. I frowned. “The storm wasn't that bad,” I said. “Stop complaining.” Before the mayor could protest, I slammed the door in his face and ran to the basement. Below the hole I could hear the sound of rushing water. Worse, the pulley's ropes descended into the maelstrom. I'd always detached the rope and pulley when we weren't using it so there'd be no evidence we were going underground. That meant Cres had gone down there before the storm hit.
Unable to do anything until the water drained away, I made a cup of tea and tried to relax. But I couldn't stop thinking of all the potential Cres had. I cried for Cres and for myself, the memory of my sister being washed away mixing with the certainty that Cres was dead.
By morning, the water was gone. I lowered myself on the rope and pulley and lit my light stick. The going was slower than before since the path we'd cleared through the old foundations had been washed away.
When I finally reached the bottom level, I found Cres lying beside the ship, which glowed a darker red than I remembered. To my shock, Cres was alive and breathed in labored gasps, which seemed impossible considering how much water had flowed through here. Once again, the wash patterns indicated the water had rushed into the ship. Cres shouldn't have survived.
But any thoughts on Cres's miraculous survival vanished when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned – fearing that the mayor or constables had caught us – and stared with shock into the face of my six-year-old sister. Llin looked as she had fifty years ago, when that massive cumulus sent floods raging through the town.
As if nothing had changed between us, Llin reached out and held my hand. I tried to jerk away, but she held on tight and wouldn't let go.
“I've missed you, Tem,” she said.
I nodded, tears falling from my eyes. I wanted to tell Llin how sorry I was for not holding on to her, but she merely smiled and pulled me over to Cres.
“She's not ready,” Llin said, leaning over and smoothing Cres's wet hair. Before I could ask what Llin meant, she stood and walked to the ship. But instead of the ship opening for her, Llin's body stretched across the ship itself. Blood exploded out and merged with the ship's red glow. Her skin and muscles and bones flattened and bent and became the ship. The last thing to go was her face, which smiled at me and said “I love you” as her mouth turned into an impossibly long line before finally disappearing.
Panicked, feeling as if my sister had just died a second time, I grabbed Cres's arms and pulled her as fast as I could back up the tunnel.
It took me hours to drag Cres to the top level. I tied the rope around her shoulders and prepared to use the pulley to raise her through the hole. But before I could lift Cres I heard the roar of water rushing through the drainage tunnels. Images of Llin being yanked from my grasp shot through me as new flood waters grabbed Cres's unconscious body. I tried to lift Cres, but I couldn't fight the water and also pull the rope.
Just as my grip began to slip, I suddenly found myself being pulled into the air. Someone also pulled Cres's half of the rope up. I emerged from the hole and collapsed onto the wooden floor of the root cellar, coughing up water and bile.
Only when I finally stopped gagging did I look into the angry eyes of the mayor and several burly town constables.
* * *
The mayor and constables had come to my house when I failed to give a warning about a second storm in a row. I expected them to drag Cres and myself immediately to town hall, where a drumhead court would sentence us to death for violating our world's only absolute law. Instead, the mayor ordered the constables to carry Cres to her bed. He then summoned a doctor to examine my apprentice.
Once we were alone, the mayor demanded to know what Cres and I were doing underground.
“The water washed away the foundation and the floor collapsed under Cres,” I explained, grateful that Cres was still unconscious so she couldn't mess up my lie. “I was trying to save her.”
The mayor wasn't a fool. He'd seen the pulley system in the root cellar and knew that wasn't something I'd thrown together for a quick rescue. However, instead of punishing me, he muttered something about all the storms hitting the town in recent days and how frightened the townsfolk were. I suddenly realized he couldn't afford to kill his only weatherman at this point. So he warned me not to miss another storm and left the house with the constables.
I walked to Cres's room, where the doctor was still attending to her. Seeing nothing I could do t
o help, I climbed the weather tower. The skies appeared settled – the only ships in sight were the high altitude mackerel ships which usually indicated decent weather. That was good, because the town showed the damage from days of endless storms. Silt rose a meter high along some houses and buildings, while other houses listed at awkward angles, testimony to how water-logged the ground was becoming.
I looked down the street toward the park, where Llin and I had played that fateful day so long ago. While I knew that wasn't the same ground we'd walked on then – the soil having risen five meters in the last fifty years – I tried not to cry as I remembered yet again the feeling of Llin being yanked from my grasp. I also wondered if I'd hallucinated Llin's appearance down below, or if the ship had really brought her back. Either way, the feeling of her hand in mine refused to leave.
By the time I climbed down from the tower, Cres was awake, screaming about ships and the sky and the far side of the universe. The doctor gave her a shot, which relaxed her. Cres stared at me for a moment with a strange smile on her face before falling asleep.
The doctor asked what had happened to Cres. I told him the same lie I'd given the mayor, but the doctor didn't buy it. He told me to let him know when she woke up, then he packed his medical bag and left. I climbed back up the weather tower and wasn't surprised to see that instead of walking back to his clinic, the doctor went straight to the mayor's office.
I had a bad feeling that the reprieve the mayor had just given Cres and I would only last as long as the town's spell of bad weather.
* * *
Fortunately for Cres and I, the weather grew increasingly worse over the next three days as increasing numbers of ships passed over our town. Their shadows darkened the sky for hours at a time, their water flooded our streets, and their organics buried us in a continual orange haze. A few of the ships even passed a dozen meters above my watch tower, so low that I should have seen the people inside. However, through the ships' translucent screens I only saw emptiness. I wondered if the ships were reacting to Cres and I disturbing the underground ship, a thought I didn't dare speak out loud.
Never Never Stories Page 2