Kali glanced down the valley. “No. That was my decision.”
“It was?”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” she said.
“But he is Shinigami, isn’t he?”
Kali stood facing Toran with her feet apart, the wind whipping at her open jacket, a grin spreading from one side of her mouth to the other.
“You want the truth? Then go ahead—push me off this cliff and I’ll give you my answer on the way down.”
Toran imagined reaching to push her, only to have her—the ship’s unarmed combat instructor—slip aside and twist him over the edge by the arm. Or, best case, falling with her to the rocks below.
“Whoever shouted ‘yes’ on a two hundred meter death fall?”
Kali laughed.
“If you throw a holy man and a sinner off a tall building, who lands first?” Toran asked.
“Does it matter?”
“No. My point.”
“I have more important things to do,” she said, striding past him. “I need to do an ‘encapsulated movement,’ or whatever Planetary Protection calls a shit.”
Toran watched her go. The black peak at the center of the island towered behind her as she walked away, the full form of its volcanic cone visible.
Kali could lie until she died; he didn’t need to hear the truth from her to know it.
∞
Toran divided his attention between Kali’s backpack ahead, the loose plates of rock under his feet, and the fall-off into the valley to his left. They were on the top of the ridge between what Kali had labeled “Helicopter Valley” on the map and what she’d called “River Valley.” The ridge peaked on Toran’s right, and he could see an arc of green ocean beyond the mouth of the valley. The bottom of River Valley was a narrow channel cutting its way to the sea; its southern cliff looked deceptively near in the clear afternoon air.
“I hear that, in Senta, they pray before the ballgame,” Kali shouted over her shoulder. “Any god who gives a shit about the ballgame is too small-bore for me to pray to.”
“It’s a meditation, not a solicitation,” Toran said.
“I’m sure I could do a study that shows prayer doesn’t work. Wouldn’t that prove you wrong about your god?”
“No—only that God is subtle.”
“Worship me and I’ll win the damn game for you,” Kali said.
“I’m not a pagan; I only have one God.”
“‘Pagan’? That’s an old word—do I need to look it up?”
At the waterfall, Kali had studied the way ahead on the map. Toran had argued for climbing the mountain, perhaps three or four thousand meters up, going around the valleys and descending to the lander. But, putting her trust in The Child’s radar map, Kali had argued for the low road—following the ridge partway to the sea, descending into River Valley, then following the shoreline south. The route down the valley wall would require a short rappel, but the thread gun would make it easy. At least the route along the shoreline looked direct.
Toran’s boot slipped on the gravel on the ridge; he landed on one hand and knee. The stones he’d dislodged fell into the valley and clattered off the walls below. The way in front looked faintly defined, as if they weren’t the first to walk it. He knew, from Senta and Curie, that many apparently natural features of the landscape are created by humans. The paths they take, the rocks they move, the plants they select, the middens they leave—it’s easy to overlook the changes people make.
Had the First walked this way to the sea three thousand years ago? Had their feet walked this path? And, if so, were they grown or children?
“Sliding off on me already, are you?” Kali asked.
Toran looked down into the valley. He had the overwhelming feeling the Universe wasn’t done with him yet; there were things still to discover. “Maybe soon…not now,” he said. “God isn’t finished with me.”
“She doesn’t give a shit about you. Gravity, traction—that’s what She cares about. You said as much on the other side of the hill.”
Kali was grinning ear to ear. Toran was used to North Athenians attacking his expressions of belief—he wasn’t going to let her rattle him. “If I fall, suffer, and die,” he said, “the Universe suffers with me. It is everything; it feels with us.”
“Sure, but does it do any damn thing about it? You’re still dying at the bottom.”
“It knows, it understands, it remembers.”
“Tautological. In your philosophy, what’s the difference between God and the Universe? Or is that undefined?”
He didn’t answer, deciding to let the conversation end. She wasn’t ready for the answer.
“The best thing you can say about The Great Mother,” Kali continued, “is that She doesn’t come around much anymore to fuck with your life.”
Farther along the ridge, they reached a gentler slope and followed it down, making a faint new path of their own, zigzagging across the talus. Above a twenty-five meter cliff, Kali anchored lines from the thread-gun and rappelled down. Strapping on his climbing harness and waiting for the gun to return, Toran thought that this was at least a part of the mission he had trained for.
The dry river bed led to the sea like the broken pavement of an old road. In an hour, they were at the water’s edge. Toran stood a few meters behind Kali, watching the green foam washing over her boots, smelling the air, and feeling the spray on his cheeks. The air was fresh; there was no seaweed. The shore of Athena smelled of salt and weed. It was the little things that told him he was on another world—the air, the quality of the light, and the weight of a stone in his hand.
“What is his mission?” he asked. “If you won’t tell me who Alon is, tell me that.”
“Same as ours: do science and make sure we all go home.” The wind from the sea blew Kali’s hair into a black tangle.
“What would your mother say? The Shinigami and the Astrocorps—they both work for the Ministry of Unification. They both work for Kaera.”
“I haven’t talked to her in years.”
“Perhaps you should have.”
Kali looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Does she want you back?”
Kali walked down the beach, her boots leaving prints in the black sand.
“You think I should watch my back?” she asked. “What about you? Or Zansai? Aren’t we all trouble-makers for the Ministry of Unification?”
“Would it help to watch? If you’re on Alon’s list….”
“We’ll find out.”
“Or we’ll die too quickly to know.”
Toran increased his pace to catch up with her. He glanced over his shoulder at the line of footprints they’d left in the sand; the sea was already washing them away. He kept one eye on the ocean, not for the effects of a storm but for unusually high waves. Alon had warned them never to turn their backs on the water—the seabed was riddled with faults that could trigger tsunamis. Or was Alon playing a mind game with them?
“Do you realize that everything we think we know could be false?” he said. “Not just about Alon or the mission we’re on, but our whole history, everything we’re taught based on a false premise?”
“You’re going all Chon Dō on me now? Been reading his Denialist Manifesto?”
Toran hesitated—it wasn’t a comparison he liked. Chon was evil, but even someone evil could be right about details. The seeds had finite capacity, their information content varied, and no seed world had ever received a signal from Earth. The reason for Earth's silence was unknown; perhaps it had self-terminated, or perhaps it had simply lost interest in the seed project. The high-speed links of the Network had been created for the seed worlds to exchange the information they each had to complete the set on every world. Even so, there were gaps—the information on seeds that never arrived, or that was never sent on any seed.
“Everything we know about human history before Athena came from the seeds,” Toran said. “We know that the information was selected, much less than all
human knowledge. But how do we know any of it, beyond the physics we can test, is true or complete? There could be an omission, a lacuna, we don’t see. Or an outright lie.”
“The wars? The exterminations? No one would make that up.”
“What if there’s nothing here on Keto? What if we never find a base?”
“Then we didn’t find it,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not here, or that it wasn’t. It just means we didn’t find it.”
“Athena never received a direct transmission from Keto.”
“You don’t trust Avia?” she asked. “That’s an ever expanding conspiracy. We’re the only ones not in on it.”
“I trust Avia more than Mineral.” The First on Avia had decided the planet’s complex native life was too valuable to allow full development. But they’d chosen a third-way between development and self-termination, maintaining a small but constant population dedicated to science. Both Avia and Mineral had received direct signals from Keto.
The sand under Toran’s feet had turned dark olive green. He searched the layers in the headland of the ridge in front. Green ash was bleeding out of a layer near the top, staining the cliff below and drifting across the shoreline in small dunes. Behind him, the surf had erased the history of their footsteps in the black sand, destroying any record of their passing.
He followed Kali as the shore narrowed around the end of the southern ridge. A formation of rock pillars loomed from the seaward face of the ridge, its size hard to judge in the clear air without trees or bushes to give it scale. As he thought they had come within striking range, the pillars appeared to recede, and their height grew, until he craned his neck to see the tops. Then he was among them—more than a dozen standing sentinels fifty or more meters high. They encircled him, like ancient giants assembled in an amphitheater in silence.
It was as if the hand of God had scooped out the end of the ridge and the gaps between His fingers had left these figures behind. If there was a final monument to the First on Keto, this was it.
Kali laid a hand on a boulder at the base of a sentinel and turned to him. “Perhaps we can compromise between the extremes—between those who believe in all the facts of history, and those who believe in none…”
“You believe in something, then—you believe in the seeds?”
“I could be like Chon: I could believe in the facts that are convenient, that make me feel like one of the chosen. Would that be better?”
“If we can find a base here, it proves something,” Toran said. “There’s no other ship that could’ve come here. If there is a base, the seeds created it. We can prove our history back to year zero.”
Keto was a window on the past—unadulterated evidence of a history preserved on Athena but almost tended out of existence in its temples of science. A seed base on Keto would prove Athena wasn’t special and Chon Dō was wrong; that if Athena appeared special, it was only because of a winning roll of the dice—dice the seeds had thrown many times.
“And your lacuna?” Kali asked.
“No, it says nothing about that.”
“Then it’s too late for you—you’ll go insane. You’ll never prove it or get rid of it.”
She was right. As long as Earth was silent, or until The Child went to Earth, there would always be doubt about what happened in the time before year zero.
Part II — Athena: The Divided World
The Shore of the Sea of Athena
Year 5307
S-Second Minus Twelve Days
Kali stood on the shore of the North Sea of Athena, listening for the roar of blades on the other side of the early morning fog.
The white sand of the beach—the crushed remains of native coral—slipped under her boots. She leaned forward into the spray from the sea and, unafraid, tasted it on her lips.
The sound, when it arrived, was a whisper in her ears.
Thirty days ago, she’d landed on this shore as part of an invasion force sent to counter Chon Dō’s occupation of Haffay. It was a place called Piety by the people who lived nearby, but labeled Vision Bay on the maps the North Athenians used. It was the sub-arctic tip of the chain of islands that formed Haffay, and the last and most out-of-the-way piece of land on the way to Senta, the great second continent of Athena. The North Athenian forces had stopped here, taking it as a staging point on the way to the islands in the south and Haffay’s capital, Bruno—and then they’d waited.
Kali watched long lines of breakers, driven by the wind, roll across the beach at an angle and crash on the cliffs on each side of the bay. The whisper in the distance had grown to a roar, the sound of something powerful not far away.
Vision Bay, she thought, and laughed. The only thing she could see was an impenetrable bank of fog a kilometer out.
The Northern forces had moved quickly in the beginning: storming the beach, offloading Vertels and AGVs, and installing missiles sites in the hills above. A few Halfies had been rounded up and held to prevent them leaving; none of them wore the burning five-spoke Wheel of Syncwar. But the momentum had been lost quickly. General Nagoshi had ordered the Vertels dispersed into revetments up and down the coast. The ground units had taken positions on either side of the mountain. Kali had watched in frustration as the forces took up defensive positions—as if Chon could have counter-attacked even if he’d known their exact location. Where had the spirit of attack gone?
The center of the fog boiled and split open. A lumbering gray shape emerged, skimming meters above the water on stubby wings, like a whale flying on a cushion of air under its fins. The vehicle dragged a spiral trail of mist behind it, thrashed out by the scimitars of huge propellers mounted on a high swallow tail, and shot arcs of spray into the air from its wingtips. The maw of its bow doors could have swallowed ships whole, and the belly of its fuselage digest a fleet. Its roar preceded it over water, announcing its imminent landing.
It was an ekranoplane. Kali recognized the markings on its nose: it was the Darwinian, one of three of the Sea Monster series still in military service. Two hundred cycles ago, in the Age of Risk, a fleet of a hundred had been built as war threatened between North Athena and rising powers in Senta. Even in war, the North Athenians had followed an amendment to the global constitution written by the First Generation of Athena—the land belonged to life from Earth, but the sea to Athena’s native life. Ekranoplanes, instead of ships, had always ferried cargos between the two continents; the Sea Monsters were just the largest and fastest. Ships could become an interface between Earth and Athena—dumping wastes and sinking in storms, and mixing up the planet’s ecosystems. The ekranoplanes were clean and fast—they could launch from land and go back to it, never touching water in normal operation. They could haul larger loads than any aircraft and go ten times faster than any boat.
The Newtonian, the Einsteinian, and the Darwinian were still in military service. Of the other Sea Monsters, a few hulls had been written off, but the rest were in active civilian service, even the oldest. Diacom never rusts or fatigues. Kali had grown up with stories of the ekranoplanes and the war that never happened a lifetime ago, and she knew they would still be circling Athena long after she died. The Monsters were like the over-manicured museum bases and overgrown temples of science—a permanent part of life on Athena, one in which people were as insignificant as bacteria in the gut of an elephant.
She watched with her arms folded as the Darwinian approached. It banked above the water and swung its nose until it aimed directly at the shore. She wondered what it would be like to sit on its bridge and watch the waves go by at five hundred kilometers an hour. But that could get boring quickly, and there’d be no time to look at the shore as the Monster nailed its one-shot landing.
Kali wondered if the bridge crews of the One Hundred had ever seen the coast of Senta. The fleet had turned around at the last moment, the Uniwar invasion permanently delayed. Historians disagreed why. Some said the logistics were never sufficient to take the entire continent, and reality had sunk in.
Others claimed assassinations by the Shinigami had made the invasion unnecessary. Kali blamed a simple lack of will—the politicians had never had the guts to do what was necessary. They’d had the means and the opportunity, and they’d blown it. The ekranos were a monument to their failure.
In the final seconds before it reached the strip, the Darwinian regarded her with a look of disdain, squinting at her from the narrow line of windows over its nose. Then it rushed over the beach and planted its fat balloon tires on the landing strip with a flurry of water and dirt. The last blast of its wingtip vortices showered her in pulverized coral dust, and she shut her eyes to keep it out.
By the time she caught up with the Darwinian at the end of the strip, it had opened its bow doors and dropped its ramp. People and vehicles streamed out, heading east and west. She waited.
It had only been ten days since Setona left the theater on emergency leave. Kali hadn’t expected to see her back on Haffay; she’d made peace with the exec and worked on keeping bored Vertel pilots out of trouble. She’d been surprised to get the order to pick up Setona at the ekrano landing zone.
Kali watched the last ground vehicle drive down the ramp and steer away from a line of boxes wrapped in the blue and gold Athenian flag. On the inside of the open mouth of the ekranoplane, a mesh-enclosed elevator descended from the bridge to the cargo deck.
Setona appeared and strode down the ramp, holding her field bag in one hand and a black short-assault rifle in the other. She paused to survey the base—the hills in the distance, the Vertels parked beyond the strip, and the line of cargo waiting to board. Setona had fine, blond hair, pale green eyes, and bigger shoulders than the elegant shape of her face suggested. She didn’t look any different from when she’d left: her uniform as creased and her bearing as strong.
It was over, then? A false alarm—a distraction at the wrong time?
Setona reached the bottom of the ramp and nodded briefly at Kali without smiling.
White Seed Page 7