And
The Sky Is Filled With Eyes
|
|
by tais
teng
I saw a white star all ablaze
and gladly would have lingered
but I have promises to keep
and light-years to go
before I sleep. |
:attributed
to Great-Captain Frost, discoverer
of Starholm
20,693 AFR
(After the Foundation of the
Redoubt) |
Gossil, age 9
"Name the six worlds of Starholm," the teacher
said and Gossil was the first to raise his hand.
"There is Yal-bin-Armanth, ser. Out among the
comets. Its is all oceans and icebergs. The people
live on rafts of seaweed and ride improved sharks.
Next to the sun lies Ferno, with lakes of lead and
sulfur. The cities are underground and the Fernos
look ever so pale and white, like mushrooms.
The..."
"I see you did your homework. Good." The teacher
pointed. "Now Yaleena will tell us about their
capital world."
Yaleena sat bold upright. 'Sorry, ser. My aunt
had a baby. I had to help my mother with the
birth-muffins." She smiled. "It was human, ser!
Its DNA came up as green as grass!"
"Congratulations. Yes, a new baby is more
important. Starholm will still be there tomorrow.
Gunnar? The capital world?"
"Nue Fusang has a thousand islands and..."
Gossil sat fuming. "I see you did your homework."
I could name all Starholm worlds before I was
five. He balled his fists. When the Ship
launches I will be standing at the helm.
Great-Captain Gossil. I'll see the Perfect
Worlds with my own eyes.
"Great-Captain Frost said in the poem: And gladly
would have lingered. Now, why didn't he?"
"I know that, ser!" Yaleena cried. "There was
that other scout-ship, with his wife. It was
falling in the black hole that Starholm orbits."
"And?"
"He didn't save her, but he tried. The black hole
took them both. They are still falling because
time stops at the edge. They will be falling
forever."
She smiled like it was something beautiful,
Gossil saw. Stupid girl. Real heroes don't fail.
When Frost went down, he sent that poem, not the
coordinates of Starholm. It took another five
thousand years to find Starholm again, and all
because of a woman.
I will do what is right, he decided. I
won't get all squishy when a girl hands me a
fruit of the darling-vine or puts a flower in
her hair. He glanced at Yaleena. Her curls
were a glowing verdigris, with the red yellow of
copper at the roots. She was of pilot stock: made
to live in space. The moment she became weightless
her hair would knit itself in a space-helmet,
shielding her brain from radiation. She would be
the perfect wife for a star-ship captain, but not
if she kept cooing about babies.
He must have spieked too loud because he suddenly
heard Yaleena night-whispering in his brain.
"You are so stupid! I'd rather kiss a plow-ape
or give my fruit to a..." Her thought
sputtered out: she was clearly unable to think of
something worse than Gossil.
When Gossil came home his aunt Fayima was sitting
under the hearth-lamp with his mother, nipping a
pale green liquor. Gossil had tasted it himself
once in the kitchen: Asperol was horrible, bitter
and sour at the same time.
Now aunt Fayima was all a woman should be: as
Niketria she commanded a hundred companies and
even those brand-new Censors deferred to her. As
the old saying goes: it takes a man to fight a
battle, but a woman to win a war.
"Hai, Gossil. How is life?" She turned back to
his mother without waiting for an answer. "Now as
I was saying, we drove them back all the way to
the lake. Our fliers were like hawks, swooping
down on them and then the mansonyaggers took them
in the left flank."
"You said they were completely silent? Didn't
scream a single battle cry?"
"They are something new and very hard to kill. We
only got their giants and night-hounds. I tried to
spiek to them, but they were mute there, too."
"They are from the shadows." His mother shrugged.
"Mad. Even if they talked it would be gibberish.
Did they have human allies?"
"Wild men and giants. I wouldn't exactly call
those human."
Gossil took a ripe mango and sat down next to
them.
"Why are they always attacking our Ship, aunt
Fayima?"
"Well, the giants and wild men would like to eat
our flesh. They are into it for the meat, eh? And
the others, the pneumavores, they want to devour
our souls." She spread her hands. "To them we are
like a thousand gardens full of succulent fruit
while they hunger in the twilight. Impossible to
ignore."
"So why don't they dig their own Fields?"
"Hunters don't plow." She pursed her lips. "I
just heard something from the Watch-tower that
might interest you. The final star-ship is
returning. The Pale Rose, piloted by captain
Schea. A dozen years at most before she lands."
"And then we have lift-off! The teacher said the
Ship only needs one more drive."
"Don't forget the hull metal, the adamant. The
Watch-tower isn't armored yet and you wouldn't
want the Great-Captain to breath vacuum."
"When we go, how about the Underground Fields? I
mean, even in space we still have to eat."
"Well, we take the Fields right along with us.
The gardens are walled against burrowers, part of
the Ship. Below the gardens there is a kind of
bowl of adamant. An upside down bowl. We still
have the nuclear bombs our ancestors used to carve
the roads. You explode them below the bowl, the
push-plate, and the ship is torn loose from the
bedrock, flung into the air. It goes right into
orbit and there we can activate the star-drives."
"We have bombs? Why didn't we ever use them
against our enemies?" Atomic bombs were the stuff
of legends, like enchanted swords. He had thought
the art of making them long since lost.
"Atomic bombs are kind of self-defeating, like a
diskos without a handle. An explosion leaves the
land poisoned for centuries, quite uninhabitable."
She nodded. "The launch will incinerate half the
Bight, but then, we won't be living there
anymore."
Gossil felt his stomach clench. But we are
not the only humans here. Even the wild men were
once Road-Makers. And then he understood,
truly understood for the first time in his live:
it takes a woman to win a war. Only a woman thinks
her children and her home more important than any
notions of valor and honor. Only a woman knows
that survival is paramount. I am glad I am not
the Niketria.
"The captain of the star-ship, she sent a
message?"
"The ansible chimed for the first time in a
thousand years. You can use a faster-than-light
sender only once, you know. Then the
paired-electrons have broken symmetry, so we
couldn't answer."
"She sent a picture?"
"Yes. Of about ten seconds, before she went into
cold-sleep. You want to see it? By the way, her
name is Schea. Captain Schea."
Schea. Like the first Gossil's wife. It must
be a sign.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, please."
The Watch-tower was open to the very thin and
extremely cold air so they had to wear hot-suits
and face-masks. Below stretched the Bight, with
hundreds of villages and circular mushroom fields.
Fumaroles steamed and there were a dozen of
glowing lakes.
In the distance the Valley turned, opened out
into the Shadow Lands. Above it all the swollen
sun hung, the brooding red of a fading ember. To
Gossil's eyes the world was quite bright, though.
Humanity had upgraded itself long ago and his eyes
saw well into the infra-red. The whole valley was
bathed in a clear ulfire and he noticed a hundred
distinct tints of red.
Fayima pointed down. "You see that peak there,
that looks like a crouching man? That is where we
sent them running yesterday." She took his hand.
"Come. I'll introduce you."
"What do you mean?"
"Captain Schea sent us her soul-print. You can
talk for about ten seconds with her before she
resets herself."
The woman was lean as a night-hound, not a single
ounce of fat, but the captain didn't look fragile
at all. Her hair formed a gleaming green cap. Such
strange eyes, as green as her hair, with huge
pupils.
"And who do we have here?" the woman said. She
had an easy smile, but she spoke to him as if
Gossil was a child. Which sadly, he still was.
"They call me Gossil, sera."
"Nice name. A famous name even." Her smile grew
broader. "It sounds familiar, somehow. Can you
make it true?"
I have only seconds left before she resets!
What can I say?
"I am going to be the Great-Captain of the Ship,"
he blurted. "And I am going to marry you!"
"Well, how about..." The woman faded to black and
white and then sharpened again. "And who do we
have here?"
He turned his face away, feeling like the perfect
fool.
"I..."
His aunt chuckled. "It is a bit early perhaps,
but it is always good to know what you really
want."
She took him by the elbow and steered him to the
elevator. "And it isn't as if the real captain
Schea will remember what you said."
Gossil, age 12
In their twelfth year all children had to work
for seven months in the Underground Fields below
the Ship. It was only after you had dug the ground
with your very own, blistered hands and saw the
seeds come up to be devoured by greedy black bugs,
that you truly understood where your food came
from. After a stint in the Fields a boy would
never look down on an algae-farmer or a
butterfly-shepherd again.
The Underground Fields were lit by a thousand
dazzling lamps and much brighter than the outside.
They seemed limitless to Gossil, fading into a
pastel haze. There were clouds of butterflies with
wings like stained-glass, wasps the size of his
thumb. So many wonders but right now Gossil didn't
care. He was walking with his best friend Chun
along a construction pit and something was wrong.
Horribly wrong.
"This shouldn't be there!" he said to Chun. "They
shouldn't be digging a new level! The Ship is
finished, except for the last star-drive. Anyhow,
digging should be impossible." He leaned across
the balustrade, peered down. "Look at that! It
goes down for at least a mile."
"So?"
"Just below the Fields there is the push-plate."
How had his aunt described it? "A giant bowl of
adamant. An upside-down bowl. It is the engine
that is going to lift the Ship."
"I am sure I don't know what you are talking
about. Why don't we ask that foreman?"
"We have thirty more levels to dig after this
one," the foreman said. "And that is only for this
century. Also, don't forget the new Thermoelectric
shafts. They go down another hundred miles. We
can't depend on the reactors forever, eh? They'll
run out of helium 3 in another thousand years.
Tapping the Earth Current is so much safer." He
reached into the air and unrolled a virtual map.
"Right here is where we are standing."
Their present level was sharp and extremely
detailed: if Gossil zoomed-in he probably could
see himself and Chun talking to the foreman. The
Thermoelectric shafts went down all the way
through the crust, then spreading out, rooting the
Ship like a tough desert brush.
"But the push-plate? How the hell is the Ship
going to launch?"
"Me and my comrades, young ser, we dig holes. I
think we dig them quite well, but that is all.
Sorry. Can't help you."
The rest of the class sat around the campfire,
talking or carving fetish-dolls from corncobs.
Gossil didn't even pause for a cup of soup: he
stalked across the parking lot with electric
tricycles and walked straight into the elevator.
The Grand Library on the twenty-ninth level was
something of a cross between a museum and a
garbage belt. Never go digital if you are
archiving for eternity: ninety-nine percent of all
information here was encoded in an obsolete format
and as unreadable as chicken-scratches. Modern
librarians carved tiny, millimeter high letters in
diamond disks or used talking holograms. No matter
how deep civilization fell the next time, people
would still be talking and a magnifying glass
isn't exactly high-tech.
"Ah," the guard at the entrance said, "our next
captain." The mansonyagger had three heads on
flexible necks and would have looked comical if
those heads hadn't terminated in poisonous
stinger-tongues and razor sharp teeth. The flayed
faces hanging from his girdle probably weren't
real: not with all that blood still dripping.
"What do you mean?"
"We are machines. Our eyes look out from every
camera. Especially from those on the Watch-tower."
All his lenses grew bright and Gossil heard a soft
clicking. "I have recorded you now. Children a
thousand years from now will marvel at your
portrait. The famous captain Gossil, come to visit
the Library. It will remind them that even heroes
have to study."
"Famous captain. You are so funny."
"Use the side entrance. Librarians are a
fastidious lot. They don't like twelve year old
boys with dirty fingernails and clay under their
sandals touching their precious books."
"All right." That seemed good advice and he went
to the little service door that suddenly swung
open.
"And, captain Gossil? Give my regards to your
wife." He sniggered. Mansonyaggers were horrible
know-it-alls and the trouble was that they were
invariable right.
Gossil had to hide two times behind bins of
fossil memory-sticks before he found an unoccupied
kiosk.
"Give me your thumb," a soft voice whispered
right into his brain. "Prove that you are no
abomination."
A face appeared on the screen. It was, of course,
Gossil's own. All Artificial Intelligences were
tricksters, with a very strange sense of humor.
Gossil put his left thumb on the reading-strip.
"Got it. You are human. At least what they call
human nowadays. When I was first programmed they
would consider you a freak, with those big
goggle-eyes and no small toe." The face became a
leather-bound book. An invisible hand riffled the
pages. "Now what is it you want to know?"
"My aunt, she told me that the Ship will be
launched by a series of nuclear explosions."
"Yes, that is the consensus. I find half a
million references to..."
"I don't want references. They are all lies!
There is no push-plate below the Fields. Nothing
to lift the ship."
"You seem to be right. I scanned the building
plans and below the Fields lies only bedrock. As
for the bombs, I can't find a trace of them."
"My aunt said our ancestors used them to carve
the roads."
"They had lasers for that, chemical explosives. A
hundred other devices that gave a quite
satisfactory bang. Atom bombs would be quite
counterproductive: you would sicken and die if you
walked a radioactive road. Also, the last minable
uranium and thorium has been used up or degraded
into lead ages ago."
"I am so sorry but that information is
restricted. Not yet for your eyes." The
mansonyagger filled the doorway of the kiosk. The
yellow light in the center of all three heads
showed that it was in combat-mode.
Gossil suddenly felt very tired. "That was
restricted information. And now you kill me? For
the greater good of all?"
"Don't act so dramatic. Not yet for your eyes, I
said. Though I will have to kill you if you talk
about it with your friends. And your little
friends, too." One of the heads, swiveled, eyed
the screen. "You understand that, too?"
"Nobody asked me nothing about any atom bombs,
ser!"
The screen became dark.
"Good. The world is wide, my Gossil, and while
we can't mine the thunder metals there are others
who can. Many abhumans are as clever as you and
even adamant can't stand a teraton explosion."
"There aren't Road-Makers, only savages out
there," Gossil protested. "They don't do
high-tech."
"Atomic bombs aren't high-tech. They are only one
step above a stone hand ax or a kalashnikov. You
could put one together in an afternoon." Above his
heads two half sphere of a lustrous gray metal
came together and turned into a miniature sun.
"You see? As easy as making a mud pie. By the way,
my name is Scourge of Heretics. We'll probably
meet again. I am a kind of counselor for your
aunt."
"Where have you been?" Chun asked when Gossil
crept into his sleeping bag. "You missed most of
the fun. Hurinn drank a whole bottle of Thunder
and tried to kiss Yaleena. She threw him in the
pond and then had to jump in after him when he
went down like a brick."
"And now?"
"Hurinn will be very ashamed in the morning, and
feel like a sick cockroach. But I think that
Yaleena will kiss him in the end. I mean, she
could have let him drown."
Gossil felt a strange pang at the idea of Yaleena
kissing anyone. He pushed the thought away: he
knew whom he would love. When the starship set
down he would be just the right age. The captain
would be thirty at most and he twenty, twenty-one.
In the sagas the heroines often liked to take
younger lovers. Think of lady Ran or Lurella of
the Road-Makers. Gossil smiled and closed his
eyes.
.
"Hey, you?" The night-voice spoke right into his
brain and Gossil looked up. A girl was standing
next to the cork tree he had been stripping of its
bark, with her hands on her hips. She was barefoot
and none too clean.
"Yes," she said, "I am a traveler, a wilding. I
talk with trees and dead people."
There were people down there who never settled
down in a single village, Gossil knew. They
trekked across the Fields, driving their herds of
giant cicadas, brewing their brandy from poisonous
mushrooms and yellow lichens. It was whispered
that they remembered thousands of former lives,
going back all the way to the yellow-sun times.
"That is right," the girl said. "Thousands of
lives."
"It is very impolite to stomp around in a
stranger's mind."
She smiled, and it was a very insolent smile,
superior. "But you are no stranger. You are the
great architect Gossil. The one who started
building the Ship." She pursed her lips. "Or so
you say."
"Get out of my head!"
"Wouldn't you like to know if you are truly his
incarnation?"
He didn't have to voice his answer. His whole
body became taut, stiff as a board.
At first it had been a kind of game only. My name
is Gossil, so wouldn't it be nice, a great joke if
I really was his incarnation? Later it had become
important, no longer a game, but a part of the
story every human tells about himself. I am
Gossil. I will fly the ship I started
constructing so long ago!
"I have a flagon of Dark Asphodel here. You can
remember all you have been." She opened her hand:
the flagon was so tiny it couldn't have contained
more than a single sip. "I see you have been
hoarding pieces of adamant. I want all of them."
"How do I know that your magic potion works? That
it wouldn't just make me fall asleep?"
"You don't know. But you'll never have a chance
like this again. We don't like sharing with a
stranger but I need six adamant coins. There is a
boy I fancy and he is too poor to pay my
bride-price..."
"All right. You don't have to tell me."
"All your lives in exchange for a few wafers of
hull material. What do you need them for? You'll
captain a whole six mile high ship made of the
very same stuff."
The coin were so thin as to be translucent. All
adamant had been mined on neutron stars that had
stopped rotating. Even the smallest coin would
have been impossible to lift, the weight of a
mountain, but the adamant had partly been rotated
in one of the hidden dimensions, shredding most of
its inertia and mass. He handed them over.
"Make all the babies you want. I'll fly to the
stars."
"Everybody to his own."
The Dark Asphodel tasted so nasty that it must be
the real stuff. He gagged and shuddered, but kept
it down.
"Close your eyes," she ordered. "Wander across
the years."
Gossil was suddenly an old man, dying on a bed of
stinking rags. Several members of his starving
family eyed him and he knew the would eat him when
he was dead, tear the raw flesh from his bones.
The sun stood high in the sky and was closer to
orange than red. Great flames leaped from her
surface.
The time when the cities were always moving
West, he thought. I went too far back:
the construction of the Ship hasn't been started
yet.
He closed his eyes and now he was a baby. Gossil
tried to focus and there was a sky above him. A
red sky. I am closer but I should have seen
the ceiling of a city, darling trees, hovering
hearth-lamps.
The next vision brought him impossibly far back,
a white capped ocean under dismal gray heavens. A
derelict ship was wallowing in the waves. Things
crawled across the spongy hull, eyeless things
with the flesh rotting from the bones.
No, no. Show me the Ship! My own ship!
A red sky and the sun pinned like a bleeding
butterfly. There was the Ship finally. The very
start of the construction: no more than a dozen
half dismantled star ship hulls. He was standing
in front of a huge crowd. Wide doors opened and a
man and a woman stepped outside.
"Gossil!" he heard himself scream. "Lady Schea!"
He lifted his hands, waved. Gossil felt such a
deep joy, a trust so profound it made him almost
weep. The Architect walked past him, the Captains
of Captains and he didn't look in the slightest
like his pictures, or, what was more important,
like Gossil himself. There was always a
conservation of essential character, of body shape
across the incarnations. This Gossil wasn't
athletic: he seemed like a nice uncle, smiling and
pot-bellied. Not a leader but someone you would
really like to trust.
Gossil opened his eyes, this time his real,
here-and-now eyes.
"Such a pity," the wilding girl said. "so you
aren't him after all."
"It doesn't matter," Gossil said. "He is the
fake. The false Gossil. I'll be the Great-Captain
he never was!"
When he looked back at her she had vanished.
Gossil snorted: more traveler magic. He wasn't
interested: he now knew who he really was. Playing
Gossil would make his whole live a splendid
performance, the best of all games.
Gossil, age 16
"I got rid of my chaperon," Yaleena said. She
lifted her face. "Kiss me."
With her green hair she looked every inch a
space-born, a star ship captain. From the corner
of his eyes Gossil saw a darling vine fruit lying
on the floor. Yaleena must have dropped it. A
vine-fruit was the offering every virgin would
hand her true love, her intended. He gazed in her
eyes and they were the same color as her hair. She
must be wearing contact lenses: her eyes had never
been green before.
"Kiss me." She didn't call me "Laheesh",
"Love of my life", Gossil thought. She
didn't give me the fruit, even if she plucked
it. He didn't for a moment believe that she
had dropped it incidentally.
"People are looking at us," he whispered.
"So what? Let them look!"
And then he understood. Yaleena wants
everybody to see us kissing. No, more
exactly, to see Yaleena kissing me, a boy. Yaleena
was one of the last five left in her girl-band.
Most of the others had found lovers or at least
patrons.
Yaleena likes girls.
It didn't matter. Not with her body so
wonderfully exotic and her eyes as deep as space
itself. And it wasn't as if he was doing something
wrong, something ugly. Three cities up women
married women, carved love-songs in the bark of
darling-trees. Only in our own city the aunts are
obsessed with chastity, with the whole
wife-and-husband thing. It would be a scandal:
Yaleena giving her chaperon the slip and smooching
with a boy. But the right kind of scandal.
He kissed her, held her. She took his arm, led
him behind a tree.
"You may touch my breasts. If you want."
It wasn't a sheltered place at all. They were
still visible from half the balconies. He stood
behind her, lifted her breasts and their weight
made him shiver. It was as if he held the most
precious treasures on Earth. It is all a lie,
but it feels so good.
They didn't go "all the way", to use that nine
million years old expression, and Yaleena probably
never would let him. It didn't really matter.
Other girls would see him walking with fair
Yaleena and, of course, her best girl-friend.
Those who have, will be given more: girls liked
boys who already had a girlfriend the best. This
way everybody won.
"That Yaleena," his mother said two weeks later.
"I hear some strange things about her. She is a
wild girl."
"I know," Gossil said.
"I don't mean other boys."
"Believe me, I know."
They locked gazes and there was exchange of
information, an exchange that wasn't like
night-thoughts or spieking at all.
"I see," his mother said. "If it is girls, it is
almost tolerated. It isn't like it is something
unnatural."
And Gossil knew that she really understood, that
she wouldn't mention it again. So he didn't have
to send her that memory, from the time he was five
and he had seen his mother and aunt Fayima
kissing. Not kissing like two people greeting, but
kissing for a long, long time.
© tais
teng 11 Nov 2011
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