Redshift Part 5

When the village picks up and moves to a new gathering-ground or canebrake, these children leave their constructions behind without any sign of distress, and as soon as they are settled begin building again, often cannibalizing stones or bricks from the "houses" of a previous generation left on the site. Popular gathering sites are marked by dozens or hundreds of solidly built miniature ruins, populated only by the joint-legged gikoto of the marshes or the little ratlike hikiqi of the desert.

No such ruins have been found in areas where the Aq lived before the Adaqo conquest-an indication that their propensity to build was less strong, or didn't exist, before the conquest or before the crash.

Two or three years after their ceremonies of adolescence some of the young people, those who went on building "houses" until they reached p.u.b.erty, will go on their first stone faring.

A stone faring sets out once a year from the Aq territories. The complete journey takes from two to three years, after which the travelers return to their natal village for five or six years.

Some Aq never go stone faring, others go once, some go several or many times in their life.The route of the stone farings is to the coast of Riqim, on the northeast continent, and back to the Mediro, a rocky plateau far inland from the southernmost canebrakes of the great south continent.

The Aq stone farers gather in spring, coming overland or by cane-raft from their various villages to Gatbam, a small port near the equator on the west coast of the south continent. There a fleet of cane-and-canvas sailboats awaits them. The sailors and navigators are all Adaqo, most of them from towns of the northwest coast. They are professional sailors, mostly fishermen; some of them "sail the faring" every year for decades. The Aq pilgrims have nothing to pay them with, arriving with provisions for the journey but nothing else. While at Riqim, the Adaqo sailors will net and salt fish from those rich waters, a catch which makes their journey profitable. But they never go to fish off Riqim except with the stone-faring fleet.

The journey takes several weeks. The voyage north is the dangerous one, made early in the year so that the return voyage, carrying the cargo, may be made at the optimal time. Now and then boats or even whole fleets are lost in the wild tropical storms of that wide sea.

As soon as they disembark on the stony sh.o.r.es of Riqim, the Aq get to work. Under the direction of senior stone farers, the novices set up domed tents, store their spa.r.s.e provisions, take up the tools left there by the last pilgrimage, and climb the steep green cliffs to the quarries.

Riqimite is a l.u.s.trous, fine-textured, greenish stone with a tendency to cleave along a plane.

It can be sawed in blocks or split into stone "planks" or smaller "tiles" and even into sheets so thin they are translucent. Though relatively light, it is stone, and a ten-meter canvas sailboat can't carry great quant.i.ties of it; so the stone farers carefully gauge the amount they quarry.

They roughshape the blocks at Riqim and even do some of the fine cutting, so that the boats carry as little waste as possible. They work fast, since they want to start home in the calm season around the solstice. When their work is complete they run up a flag on a high pole on the cliffs to signal the fleet, which comes in boat by boat over the next few days. They load the stone aboard under the tubs of salted fish and set sail back south.

The boats put in at various Adaqo ports, usually the crew's home port, to unload and sell their fish; then they all sail on several hundred kilometers down the coast to Gazt, a long, shallow harbor in the hot marshlands south of the canebrake country. There the sailors help the Aq unload the stone. They receive no payment for or profit from this part of the trip. I asked a s.h.i.+pmaster who had "sailed the faring" many times why she and her sailors were willing to make the trip to Gazt. She shrugged. "It's part of the agreement," she said, evidently not having thought much about it, and after thinking, added, "Be an awful job to drag that stone overland through the marshes."

Before the boats have sailed halfway back to the harbor mouth, the Aq have begun loading the stone onto wheeled flatbed carts left on the docks of Gazt by the last stone faring.

Then they get into harness and haul these carts five hundred kilometers inland and three thousand meters upward.

They go at most three or four kilometers a day. They encamp before evening and fan out from the trails to forage and set snares for hiqiki, since by now their supplies are low. The cart train tends to follow the least recently used of the several winding trails, because the hunting and gathering will be better along it.

During the sea voyages and at Riqim the mood of the stone farers tends to be solemn andtense. They are not sailors, and the labor at the quarries is hard and driven. Hauling carts by shoulder-harness is certainly not light work either, but the pilgrims take it merrily; they talk and joke while hauling, share their food and sit talking around their campfires, and behave like any group of people engaged willingly in an arduous joint enterprise.

They discuss which path to take, and wheel-mending techniques, and so on. But when I went with them I never heard them talk in the larger sense about what they were doing, their journey's goal.

All the paths finally have to surmount the cliffs at the edge of the plateau. As they come up onto the level after that terrible last grade, the stone farers stop and gaze to the southeast. One after another the long, flat carts laden with dusty stone buck and jerk up over the rim and stop.

The haulers stand in harness, gazing silent at the Building.

After a thousand years or so of the long, slow recovery of the shattered ecosystem, enough Aq began to have enough food to have enough energy for activities beyond forage and storage.

It was then, when bare survival was still chancy, that they began the stone faring. So few, in such an inimical world, the atmosphere damaged, the great cycles of life not yet reestablished in the poisoned and despoiled oceans, the lands full of bones, ghosts, ruins, dead forests, deserts of salt, of sand, of chemical waste-how did the inhabitants of such a world think of undertaking such a task? How did they know the stone they wanted was at Riqim?

How did they know where Riqim was? Did they originally make their way there somehow without Adaqo boats and navigators? The origins of the stone faring are absolutely mysterious, but no more mysterious than its object. All we know is that every stone in the Building comes from the quarries of Riqim, and that the Aq have been building it for over three thousand, perhaps four thousand years.

It is immense, of course. It covers many acres and contains thousands of rooms, pa.s.sages, and courts. It is certainly one of the largest edifices, perhaps the largest single one, on any world. And yet declarations of size, counts and measures, comparisons and superlatives, are meaningless, the fact being that a technology such as that of contemporary Earth, or the ancient Adaqo, could have built a building ten times bigger in ten years.

It is possible that the ever-increasing vastness of the Building is a metaphor or ill.u.s.tration of precisely such a moral enormity.

Or its size may be purely, simply, a result of its age. The oldest sections, far inside its outermost walls, show no indication that they were- or were not-seen as the beginning of something immense. They are exactly like the Aq children's "houses" on a larger scale. All the rest of the Building has been added on, year by year, to this modest beginning, in much the same style. After perhaps some centuries the builders began to add stories onto the flat roofs of the early Building, but have never gone above four stories, except for towers and pinnacles and the airy barrel-domes that reach a height of perhaps sixty meters. The great bulk of the Building is no more than five to six meters high. Inevitably it has kept growing outward laterally, by way of ells and wings and joining arcades and courtyards, until it covers so vast an area that from a distance it looks like a fantastic terrain, a low mountain landscape all in silvery green stone.

Although not dwarfed like the children's structures, curiously enough the Building is not quite full scale, taking the average height of an Aq as measure. The ceilings are barely high enough to allow them to stand straight, and they must stoop to pa.s.s through the doors.

No part of the Building is ruined or in disrepair, though occasional earthquakes shake theMediro plateau. Damaged areas are repaired annually, or furnished stone to rebuild with.

The work is fine, careful, sure, and delicate. No material is used but riqimite, mortised and tenoned like wood, or set in exquisitely fitted blocks and courses. The indoor surfaces are mostly finished satin smooth, the outer faces left in contrasting degrees of roughness and smoothness. There is no carving or ornamentation other than thin moldings or incised lines repeating and outlining the architectural shapes.

Windows are unglazed stone lattices or pierced stone sheets cut so thin as to be translucent.

The repet.i.tive rectangular designs of the latticework are elegantly proportioned; a ratio of four to five runs through many though not all of the Building's rooms and apertures. Doors are thin stone slabs so well balanced and pivoted that they swing lightly and smoothly open and shut.

There are no furnis.h.i.+ngs.

Empty rooms, empty corridors, miles of corridors, endlessly similar, stairways, ramps, courtyards, roof terraces, delicate towers, vistas over the roofs of roof beyond roof, tower beyond tower, dome beyond dome to the far distance; high rooms lighted by great lacework windows or only by the dim, greenish, mottled translucency of windowpanes of stone; corridors that lead to other corridors, other rooms, stairs, ramps, courtyards, corridors. ... Is it a maze, a labyrinth? Yes, inevitably; but is that what it was built to be?

Is it beautiful? Yes, in a way, wonderfully beautiful; but is that what it was built to be?

The Aq are a rational species. Answers to these questions must come from them. The troubling thing is that they have many different answers, none of which seems quite satisfying to them or anyone else.

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. This is not really satisfying to the reasonable mind. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey our deity's orders to crush the heinous sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom.

In the same way the efforts of the Aq to explain or justify their building and their Building all invoke a necessity which doesn't seem all that necessary and use reasons which meet themselves coming round. We go stone faring because we have always done it. We go to Riqim because the best stone is there. The Building is on the Mediro because the ground's good and there's room for it there. The Building is a great undertaking, which our children can look forward to and our finest men and women can work together on. The stone faring brings people from all our villages together. We were only a poor scattered people in the old days, but now the Building shows that there is a great vision in us. -All these reasons make sense but don't quite convince, don't satisfy.

Perhaps the questions should be asked of those Aq who never have gone stone faring. They don't themselves question the stone faring. They speak of the stone farers as people doing something brave, difficult, worthy, perhaps sacred. So why have you never gone yourself?- Well, I never felt the need to. People who go, they have to go, they're called to it.What about the other people, the Adaqo? What do they think about this immense structure, certainly the greatest enterprise and achievement on their world at this time? Very little, evidently. Even the sailors of the stone faring never go up onto the Mediro and know nothing about the Building except that it is there and is very large. Adaqo of the northwest continent know it only as rumor, fable, travelers' tales-the Palace of the Mediro on the Great South Continent. Some tales say the King of the Aq lives there in unimaginable splendor; others that it is a tower taller than the mountains, in which eyeless monsters dwell; others that it is a maze where the unwary traveler is lost in endless corridors full of bones and ghosts; others say that the winds blowing through it moan in huge chords like a vast aeolian harp, which can be heard for hundreds of miles; and so on. To the Adaqo it is a legend, like their own legends of the Ancient Times when their mighty ancestors flew in the air and drank rivers dry and turned forests into stone and built towers taller than the sky, and so on. Fairy tales.

Now and then an Aq who has been stone faring will say something different about the Building. If asked about it, some of them reply: "It is for the Adaqo."

And indeed the Building is better proportioned to the short stature of the Adaqo than to the tall Aq. The Adaqo, if they ever went there, could walk through the corridors and doorways upright.

An old woman of Katas, who had been five times a stone farer, was the first who gave me that answer.

"For the Adaqo?" I said, taken aback. "But why?"

"Because of the old days."

"But they never go there."

"It isn't finished," she said.

"A retribution?" I asked, puzzling at it. "A recompense?"

"They need it," she said.

"The Adaqo need it, but you don't?"

"No," the old woman said with a smile. "We build it. We don't need it."

There's a heck of a story behind this one. Seems Laura Whitton was attending Jeanne Cavelos's Odyssey fiction writers workshop in New Hamps.h.i.+re in the summer of 2000, when Dan Simmons was writer in residence. At the same time, I was bugging the h.e.l.l out of Dan to do a story for this book. When Dan read what Laura was working on he got in touch with me and asked if I'd be willing to look at it. Sure! I said, not knowing what to expect. What I didn't quite expect, especially from an unpublished writer, was something this good.

What became "Froggies" needed a little work, but Laura Whitton was more than up to the task. I'm proud to share this "discovery" with Dan-and if Whitton goes on to do more great things, there's only one person who can take any kind of credit, and it ain't me or Dan.

Froggies.

Laura Whitton.

Jo-ann paced the length of the courtroom, vast with its marble pillars and flags of state. She knew she should sit down, next to Amanda. Sit calmly, professionally, to hear the verdict. But it was all she could do to keep quiet, not to rush up to the man across the aisle and yell in his face. She heard it in her mind, saw herself pounding his shoulder for emphasis, saw fear in his eyes.She twitched when she felt a hand on her sleeve. Amanda tugged her down. "Jo-ann, there's nothing you can do at this point. We've given them everything we've got."

At that moment, the deep gong sounded, and a quiet rustling filled the room as people shuffled their papers, switched on recording devices, and made last-minute notes. Jo-ann couldn't help glaring at the man on the other side of the aisle. She realized he was focused on a door at the back of the room. Turning, she saw the justices enter. Five people, solemn in black robes, filed into the courtroom. They took their seats before the a.s.sembled crowd. Jo-ann could read nothing in their expressions. A second ringing of the gong, and the chief justice stood.

"Before us today stand two claimants to the exploitation rights of the planet Minerva. The Hugonaut Corporation argues right of first discovery, while the Department of Xenoanthropology argues prior right of indigenous population. This board of inquiry has met to review the arguments of both parties and to determine the status of the planet. The facts are not in dispute. Stars.h.i.+p Minerva, registry Port Juno, entered orbit around the third planet of Epsilon 37 on the sixty-first day of Year 652. Upon her return to human-controlled s.p.a.ce, the captain reported the discovery of a life-inhabiting planet as required by the Department of Biological Resources. She submitted the name of the planet as Minerva. On behalf of her employer, the Hugonaut Corporation, she registered a claim for the exploitation rights of the planet. Upon reviewing this claim, BioResources referred the matter to the Department of Xenoanthropology.

"Based upon the possibility of sentience among the native life-forms, Xenoanthro determined to send its own expedition to the planet. That expedition arrived on the fifth day of Year 654, established a base upon the planet, and spent the remainder of the year studying the local life-forms. Attention was focused on the largest terrestrial species, and based upon evidence of rudimentary tool use, Xenoanthro now argues the sentience of the species.

However, the Hugonaut Corporation notes that said tool use exhibits less complexity than the doc.u.mented use by terran nonhuman primates. Further, the Hugonaut Corporation notes that of all the efforts to establish communication with the species, none have generated conclusive results."

Jo-ann looked across the aisle and saw the smug smile on the Hugonaut lawyer's face. She gripped the table edge harder.

"This board has carefully reviewed the evidence. While we concede that members of the local species do utilize stone tools in a limited way, we are troubled by the failure to establish communications. The individuals studied by Xenoanthro did not, in our opinion, respond in any clear way to the communication efforts of the team. This board cannot impute intelligence to a race whose members refuse to interact with, or even acknowledge the communication efforts of, another intelligent species. Therefore, the claim of the Department of Xenoanthropology to administer the planet in behalf of the indigenous population is rejected. We grant the claim of the Hugonaut Corporation to the planet. All exploitation rights of the natural resources of planet Minerva are reserved to the Hugonaut Corporation, with the following exception."

She refused to look at him. She held her breath. Please, at least give us this much. . . .

"In light of the strong concerns of the Department of Xenoanthropology with respect to the possible future sentience of the local species, we establish a reserve on the largest continent, which shall remain outside the claim of the Hugonaut Corporation. Xenoanthro will monitorthis reserve to ensure the compliance of the Hugonaut Corporation. This board has ruled. All parties are dismissed."

Jo-ann walked out of the courthouse unsteadily. She felt as though her head were both too big, wobbling slightly on her neck, and too small, the skin stretched tight across her face. She rubbed her forehead, trying to dispel the ache. I wonder why I'm even surprised, she thought.

No way the feds were going to let prime mineral deposits like those go to waste, languis.h.i.+ng under the surface while the Froggies went about their incomprehensible business. d.a.m.n!

"This sucks," she said to Amanda. "They railroaded us. Another six months and we-"

"I wish that were true. But be honest, Jo-ann, was there a day-even one-in these last few months, when you thought you were getting anywhere with them?"

Jo-ann shrugged. She remembered how her hands shook when she stepped out of the base camp, part of the first team chosen to meet with the local group of Froggies. Having watched them for months, she had been convinced of their sentience. The first time humans would talk to other intelligent beings! At last, after all those years of studying Earth primates, wondering if Planetary Expeditions would ever find an alien species for her to talk to. She had begun to wonder why she'd sought a degree in Xenoanthropology when there were no live xenos for her to anthropomorphize.

The old joke suddenly lacked humor. That d.a.m.ned judge, applying his anthropocentric standards to the Froggies. "No response to another intelligent species" indeed! For all they knew, by Froggie standards, the humans didn't qualify as intelligent. Not worthy of their attention, at any rate. She sighed with old frustration. She just couldn't understand why they'd failed.

Amanda stopped. "Want to get a drink?"

"No."

"Okay. Later."

Jo-ann called home.

"Dave here."

"It's me. Guess what."

"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. But you knew it was a long shot. . . ."

"Yeah, I guess. At least they've agreed to put in the reserve in the Thompson Forest for the Froggies. We'll be monitoring the situation, and you'll be able to keep working on those magic plants of yours. I suppose we can even keep trying to talk to them. ..."

"You never know, maybe you'll come up with a way to get through to them."

"But it'll be too late. The Hugonauts already got the rest of the planet. Who knows what will be left for the Froggies in another hundred years?"

Five years later "Tommy, come in and do your homework. You know your mother will be upset if it's not done before dinner."

Tommy heard his father and dug harder, faster, trying to get the hole deep enough, soon enough. The dirt was wrong-rocky, crumbly, thick with roots and little grubs. Actually, he didn't mind the grubs so much. They were quite tasty, in fact, although Mommy got mad whenever she caught him. But Mommy wouldn't be home for another hour, and Daddy didn't.w.a.tch him closely. Daddy was very busy, that's what Mommy said. Doing important work.

Which meant that Tommy could eat as many grubs as he could find, making his nest. Rounder, the rim needed to be rounder on that side, then this wall made smoother. Oh, what's this, he thought. A grub, uncovered by his left midhand. A juicy one, and not very fast either. Gulp.

Making the floor even was always the easiest part, unless he got too picky about it. Maybe Daddy would let him use the level. Tommy poked his head up, called "Daddy, Daddy, can I go in the tool shed?"

Daddy came around the corner of the house-Tommy could hear the hum of the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g shears. Sat.u.r.day was garden day. "Oh, Tommy, you didn't! Not another one of those d.a.m.n holes. Just look what you're doing to the azalea bushes. I only planted them last spring. Why are you always digging? I just don't get it."

Tommy felt his ears pressing flat against his nose, and he whimpered, in his low range where he knew Daddy couldn't hear. Subsonic, his mother said was the word. He didn't know what that meant. She said it meant "under sound" but how could there be sounds "under" sound?

Mommy said he'd understand when he was older. He'd understand a lot of things when he was older. But right now, here, his father was yelling at him, and he didn't understand.

"But, Daddy, I just want to nest, won't you show me how to use the level to get the floor right?"

"No, stop that digging right now. I said stop it! Can't you see what you're doing to the azalea?"

Tommy hesitated, rocking, not sure how to get out of the hole without touching any of the bushes around the rim. He hadn't really noticed them before, but now that he thought about it, he remembered that the ground around his nest was surrounded by little bushes, p.r.i.c.kly, not tasty at all, not worth any bother. But now it seemed that Daddy liked them, that he was really mad.

Tommy had never heard his father so mad before. He poked his left upperhand over the rim, trying to find a spot safe for climbing out of the hole. Feeling flat gra.s.s under his palm, he dug into the wall with his feet and midhands, scrambling up and over, landing in a heap on the gra.s.s. One foot snagged on a p.r.i.c.kly bush, and he cringed, ears flat, waiting for another yell from his father.

"Oh, Tommy, how could you? Just look at them, you've exposed their roots. I don't know what you were thinking. Well, come on, help me get this dirt back where it belongs, cover up these poor roots. Hurry, maybe we can repair the damage if we're quick."

Tommy wanted to know why they needed to hurry, what was so special about these little bushes, but he guessed he'd better ask later. Right now, he gathered up the scattered dirt, careful not to further disturb the bushes, and pushed it back into the hole. He sighed. It had promised to be such a nice, comfortable little nest, but it was clearly not to be. Was there some other place he would be allowed to dig? He kept on moving dirt, circling until he ran into his father.

"There, kiddo, we've got the hole filled in. It's not too bad, eh?"

"Daddy, can I make a hole somewhere else?"

"Why? What makes you want to dig like a-ah, skip it. But stop with the digging, just stay out of the yard, all right? I'll be in, in a bit, after I finish fixing up this mess. Go on and do your homework."

Tommy slunk back to the house, rumbling to himself. At least Daddy wasn't so madanymore, but Tommy still didn't know why he wanted the bushes instead of a nice deep round smooth hole. And Daddy never could explain things properly anyway. Maybe Mommy could help. He perked up, wiggling his ears, rubbing them along the edges of his nose. His mother always found the right thing to say, and would give his back a nice rub, too. He'd go inside and wait for Mommy.

But when his mother finally got home, she didn't come upstairs to Tommy's room. He could hear her downstairs, talking to his father. It must be about me, Tommy thought, I bet they're talking about me. He sneaked out to the landing, careful to allow only his ear to round the corner of the wall. Because his hearing wasn't as good as theirs, sometimes his parents forgot to be careful about their "private" conversations. His father's rumble was easier to make out than his mother's lighter voice.

"But why does he have to be so, you know, so strange." Tommy imagined his father pacing up and down, making that tangy frustration-scent. His mother's laugh surprised him, it was sharper and higher than the laugh she made during their tickle-fights.

"Honestly, Dave, do you hear yourself? What in the world were you expecting out of this little adventure? What were any of us expecting?"