Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  “Of course, of course,” Adrah said, unembarrassed. “And perhaps it’s the same kind of thing; the events that synchronize have power over the Earth. The ones that don’t…”

  They arrived at the top of the tower, under a nearly cloudless sky of deepest purple, where stars faded into view one by one, with almost visible speed. Each moment both darker and brighter than the moment before it, the purple sky dividing itself into black and white.

  Adrah finished: “The ones that don’t, aren’t helping. They might even be hurting.”

  “You sound like a wise old man,” Manuah said, not entirely without respect.

  “Not wise enough. Predicting the motions is difficult. The dance of Kalishiva.” He laughed. “The one with the arms. All right, well, Kalishiva is both creator and destroyer, both male and female. The name means Darkness and also Destroyer of Darkness, which is as good a description of the sky as I’ve ever heard. So why should her dance be simple?”

  Still impatient, Manuah said, “You wanted to show me something?”

  “Indeed. Look over here at your comet.”

  With a sky-blue sleeve now as black as the sky itself, he pointed toward the constellation of the hand, where the “comet” hung. The smudge was a little bit larger and brighter than it had been last night, and its position and orientation had changed slightly as well.

  “It moved!”

  “Yes. They do that. They come from very far away, and approach, and then dance away again. Usually over a period of weeks.”

  “You’ve seen one before?”

  “I’ve seen two, although neither one could be made out this clearly without a pair of burning crystals.”

  He produced two clear discs from a pocket in his robe, and held them up in a line between his face and the sky.

  “This is secret magic, Manuah. I’m trusting you with it. It brings the sky closer to me, so I can observe it better. Still very far away, but closer.”

  “I don’t see anything changing.”

  “No, you have to be behind the crystals, looking through. It’s strange, I know.”

  “I don’t like this,” Manuah said, and was unhappy with the way his voice sounded—like a frightened boy. But when exactly had his brother become a wizard?

  “Relax. It’s not harmful.” Adrah moved the crystals back and forth a bit, grunting and harrumphing, and finally said, “All right, there. I see it clearly. It has a bright head and a fuzzy tail. The tail of a comet always points away from the sun, presumably so the head can look at it.”

  “It’s alive?” Manuah asked, his voice still quavering with superstitious dread.

  “Possibly. Or some kind of spirit—a visiting god, from some other celestial realm. Personally, I think it’s something like a boat, moving fast enough to leave a wake behind it in the empty air. Manuah, relax. What’s the farthest you’ve ever sailed?”

  “Twenty-five days out, thirty days back.”

  “All right, so about four sixties of yojana. That’s a good, long distance. But this comet is probably sixty of sixty of thirty yojana away. Maybe more. It’s not going to reach out and grab you.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Adrah sighed. “Can you keep a lid on more secret magic?” When Manuah didn’t answer, he went on anyway: “Sound and light are physical substances, like wind, except that wind can travel at any speed, slow or fast or anything in between. Sound and light can’t do this. They’re a different sort of substance, and they travel at fixed speeds.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true. Clap your hands.”

  Reluctantly, Manuah did so, half afraid this would trigger some new, even more disturbing revelation. But no, just a clapping sound.

  Adrah said, “Did that sound occur in a single instant of no duration?”

  “Um, no?”

  “No, of course not. You couldn’t hear it if it did. Now clap twice, as quickly as you can.”

  Manuah did as he was asked. Clapclap!

  “That sound, that pair of sounds, from the silence at one end to the silence at the other, lasted about a nimisha.”

  “All right,” Manuah allowed. These were words he’d heard, words people used sometimes to describe very long distances and very short times.

  “Well, now here’s where it gets interesting, because from the method of drums and mirrors, we know that sound—the physical substance of sound—traverses half a yojana in two sixties of nimisha. Measurements like ‘kos’ and ‘foot’ and ‘moment’ and ‘khyama’ are subjective. They never mean the same thing twice. A month is at least a real measurement of time, but it doesn’t synchronize, so it doesn’t help. But the yojana and nimisha are precise, and repeatable. They mean what they mean, because they relate to the cosmos itself.”

  “Um, all right,” Manuah said, his head spinning. “What’s that got to do with a comet?”

  “Comets don’t make sound, but they do make light, and by the method of eclipses we know that in the span of one nimisha, light travels a distance of sixty of sixty yojanas, or exactly one spakta, which is a new unit created by the venerable Goxgatar for this purpose. And Goxgatar has assured me that the moon is twelve spakta above the ground—quite a distance!—while the sun is much higher, at sixty of sixty spakta. And the stars are higher still—so high that even Goxgatar can’t figure the distance. If it will ease your mind, I’ll ask him if he can learn the range to this comet. It might not be possible; he might need months of observations, by which time the comet will likely be gone anyway. But I’ll ask, all right?”

  Manuah sat silent for a long while. He’d had no idea the world was this complex. Why would it need to be? It didn’t make any sense. He’d also had no idea just how smart his half-brother was, or how much he knew that Manuah himself did not. Manuah had noticed, more than once, that from a boat on the water, he could sometimes see men waving and shouting on the shore, and that their waving and shouting didn’t…synchronize. It seemed at times that the sound lagged behind. He’d never known what to make of that, and he hadn’t really thought about it all that much. He certainly hadn’t seen it as a doorway into to these vast numbers and distances, these bewildering movements and visitations.

  * * *

  Here, Harv Leonel’s consciousness broke through for a moment, and he had time to marvel at this sort of gobbledygook science—wrong in so many particulars, and yet right (or rightish) in so many others. These cave men knew the speed of light! Whoever this Goxgatar was, he had managed to uncover secrets that had eluded even the Greeks. And without any sort of sensible mathematics! Math savants often reported “seeing” numbers and figures without having to calculate them directly, and he supposed Goxgatar must be one of these, or else he really was in contact with some sort of divinity. Was there even a difference?

  And telescopes? Galileo had insisted the idea was not original to him, that he was merely reinventing something well known to “the ancients.” But what had he meant by that? Where had he gotten that information? Harv had to wonder just how many times secrets like these had been discovered, or at least hypothesized and approximated, only to be forgotten later on? And that thought filled him with apprehension, because if these people’s knowledge had been lost, surely that didn’t say anything good about the fate of the people themselves. Manuah was right to worry!

  And suddenly it hit him: this was the Ice Age. This was the end of the last great glaciation, when millions of gigatons of ice had melted off in rapid bursts—sometimes only a few hundred years each. And this thought filled him with superstitious dread, because if these visions were real at all, then Kingdom and The City had existed more than twelve thousand years ago. As remote from the ancient Sumerians as Sumer was from modern America. The Romans maintained continuity longer than any other civilization—eleven centuries long—and yet they could have risen and fallen ten times over since Manuah walked upon the Earth.

  Was Harv just dreaming after all? Could civilization possibly be that old?

&nb
sp; * * *

  Finally, Manuah told Adrah, “I want to ask what all this means, but you’ve already said you don’t know. You say these things aren’t harmful, but that’s just wishful thinking, isn’t it? The truth is, you don’t know.” And when Adrah didn’t answer right away, he pressed on: “The water is rising here, and in Surapp, and all up and down the Great River. Can you honestly tell me that’s not harmful?”

  With obvious reluctance, Adrah answered: “No.”

  “I’ve seen storm surges raise the water ten feet, for a day or more. If high tide were to strike in the middle of something like that, what do you think would happen?”

  Again, reluctantly, “I suppose the water would come all the way up into the streets of The City. But then it would retreat again, yes?”

  “Perhaps,” Manuah said. “And perhaps building the seawalls a little higher will help, although it’s going to take time. And money, whether or not His Majesty cares to admit it. But if the water keeps on rising, all on its own, then how are we to stop it?”

  The two of them were silent for a time, and then Manuah added, “Plus, there’s this greatfish, appearing at the same time as the comet, and following around the very person who’s warning you about rising water. Perhaps, as you say, the fish didn’t create the star, but even if that’s true, they still happened at the same time. Are you seriously going to tell me that isn’t an omen of some sort?”

  “I don’t believe in omens,” Adrah said, clearly trying to sound reassuring.

  “Here’s hoping the Cleric Portenters never hear you say that.”

  “Hmm. Yes, well, doesn’t it sound a bit arrogant, to think these grand events have been staged, somehow, for your own benefit? To help you make your point?”

  Manuah answered the question with another question: “Have you ever known the gods to lean down from the sky and speak directly to human beings? In a voice we can all understand? If they exist at all, and care about human beings at all, then how would they get our attention? What would that look like?”

  Adrah didn’t have an answer to that.

  After another long pause, Manuah asked, “Is there anything you can do to help me?”

  “I don’t know, brother. I really don’t. I can talk with the other clerics, but the problem is, nobody knows what these things mean, including you. It won’t be easy to persuade people.”

  “Hmm. Assuming you even believe me.”

  “You have raised some interesting points.” Another pause, and then: “There is some indication that the moon synchronizes with the tides in some way. Some complicated way. Perhaps the Cleric Astrologers could take that on as a task. That would be less controversial, I think, and it would help you know when the greatest flood risks would occur. Is that helpful?”

  One of Manuah’s hereditary titles was “Counter of Tides,” but other than a very loose sense that high tide and low tide each came approximately twice per day, he’d never really lived up to that name. The problem was, sometimes the tides came early or late. Sometimes they were higher than expected, or lower, and he had been to some places where the tides came in and out only once each day. It didn’t make sense, and so he had never wasted much thought on it. Instead he just stood on the decks of his boats, feeling the water surging under him, telling him whether it was headed in or out.

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s a start.”

  * * *

  In another moment of lucidity, Harv Leonel—more as an act of whimsy than anything else—thought very hard at Manuah: THE DANGER IS REAL. In response to which, to Harv’s great surprise and distress, Manuah screamed.

  * * *

  “Aah! Aah! Did you hear that?”

  In the darkness, Adrah looked more concerned than he had all evening. “Hear what?”

  “A voice,” Manuah insisted. Then, even more certainly, “A voice. Telling me the danger is real.”

  Adrah laughed sourly. “Well, that’s a bit convenient. The gods speak after all? Brother, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Don’t spoil it.”

  And Manuah realized that Adrah merely thought he was kidding. Which was bad enough. But if he pressed the point any further, Adrah would think he was crazy, and that would be much worse.

  Rattled to his core, Manuah told his brother, “Look, you can ask my men about the fish. And yes, if you could predict the tides it would help a little.”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. But he knew that strange, otherworldly voice was right: the danger was real, and Manuah was the only one who seemed to know it.

  * * *

  Over the next several weeks, Sraddah completed his invasion of Surapp. To Manuah’s relief, the Surappi offered minimal resistance, losing only about two sixties of men before throwing down their spears and capitulating unconditionally. Their “president,” a woman named Penelebab, relinquished her office, agreed to marry her daughter to Prince Raddiah when he came of age in seven years’ time, and meanwhile promised to seek employment among the byssa cloth weavers—that being one of Surapp’s most lucrative industries, and therefore perhaps the one that would allow her the greatest continued influence in a conquered nation.

  Surprisingly, Sraddah also demanded a tribute of stone blocks, which Manuah was free to go pick up—not entirely at his own expense, but with a slight reimbursement from Kingdom’s own debt logs. It would take him a year to transport all that stone, and even so it wasn’t enough—Manuah wasn’t sure any amount of stone could ever be enough!—but it was a concession. Clearly, Manuah wasn’t the only one concerned about the coincidence of the greatfish which continued to dwell in City Harbor, and the comet which continued to grow larger and larger in the sky. First it was the size of the full moon (though not nearly as bright), and then the size of a whole constellation, and then large enough to stretch from one horizon to the other.

  “You said it would approach and go away,” Manuah told Adrah. “It isn’t going away.”

  “It’s a big one,” Adrah agreed, trying to brush off his brother’s concerns. “But it can’t stay indefinitely. That’s not in its nature. Also, we’ve determined that it’s not affecting the tides. So you can rest easy on that score as well.”

  That was a relief of sorts, but even Adrah was starting to look a bit concerned. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and of course nobody knew what it meant. Was it good luck? Was it bad luck? Was it any sort of luck at all? The greatfish was something that had never happened either, but it was less of a concern to most people, except in the purely practical sense that it was eating up all the fish in the harbor, and fouling nets and buoys as it churned restlessly from one bank to the other. Was it lost? Unable to find its way back out? Or was it indeed trying to communicate, or was the greatfish itself a communication from one of the gods? In any case, its antics were forcing timid fishermen out into the much rougher water beyond the sea walls. Manuah dared to hope this would get more people talking about how high the water was getting, but alas he was developing a reputation in The City as a bit of a cracked pot.

  “Here comes the Lecturemaster,” people would say. “Quick, cover your ears!”

  And so he learned that the more he talked about the danger, and the more urgently he talked about it, the less people believed him. He wasn’t sure what to do about this, because not talking about it also didn’t result in people believing him. At times, it seemed the best he could do was wrap it into a trio of concerns, in order of their perceived importance: the comet, the greatfish, and the rising water. That, at least, kept the concept alive without actively turning people away. But how could that be enough?

  While Sharama stayed behind to work on the sea walls, Manuah and Hamurma took another voyage to Surapp, along with all five of his other boats, to retrieve stone blocks. To his relief, things were not all that different in Surapp Great Town, at least along the docks and warehouses. People still did business in the same way, and while they didn’t seem particularly happy about
suddenly being subjects of Kingdom, they didn’t seem to be directing any of this ire toward Manuah and his crews.

  Of course, they didn’t want to hear about the rising water, either. For them, the three big concerns were: the invasion and its attendant tributes and taxes, the war casualties and their attendant funerals, and the comet presiding above it all like an enemy banner. Here, there was no doubt that the message in the sky was an unlucky one, although perhaps not that unlucky, since they were all mostly still alive, and their businesses still mostly unaffected.

  “You’re a cousin of our new king,” said one laborer as he loaded stone blocks onto the deck of a boat.

  “Not a first cousin, but yes.”

  “Are you here to inspect us? Make sure we’re up to standard?”

  “What? No. I’m here to receive a shipment, same as always.”

  “Hmm.” The laborer wasn’t sure about that one.

  The voyage back was slow, and the boats rode so low in the water that Manuah told all the crews to keep them close to shore, and beach them at the first sign of a rough sea. But luckily they had smooth water and adequate wind.

  Once back in The City, he tasked all his crews and boats with sea wall work, gently lowering and stacking the new blocks, making sure they fit together as durably and seamlessly as possible. For nearly a week they labored, and when all the new blocks were gone, they used rubble, and when it seemed all the rubble in Kingdom was exhausted, they used Sraddah’s meager stipends to buy several boatloads of gravel. This meant, of course, that Manuah’s hardworking sailors were going without pay. Which meant that about half of them didn’t show up for work the next day, which was their prerogative, of course. But the other half did show up, and Manuah was grateful for it. They, at least, believed in this cause, in the seriousness of it. They had been at sea with him, during storms, during rip currents when they had to paddle for their lives to avoid smashing onto a reef, and when they were menaced by giant squid beneath the water, and that one time when eagles swooped down from the sky and attacked them for no apparent reason. At all times, their own safety was Manuah’s primary concern, and they knew it.