Rhythm of the Imperium (39 page)

Phutes grabbed for the stalk supporting the optical receptor array.

“What is sacred? That has no meaning! The bodies in Kail space are not objects, they are Kail!”

NR-111 emitted a long stream of gibberish words in human tongue from its secondary audio. The envoy stopped short.

“They are Kail? Do they live in those bodies?” she asked.

“They live. Those
are
their bodies. They are more mature than Kail my size. One day I will be one like they are. If these terrible humans do not mine
me
for ore!”

“This is remarkable,” NR-111 said. Phutes could tell that it had translated its words to the humans, because they stopped shouting at him and withdrew, surprised looks on their horrible faces. “I have never heard of such a thing before. Nor have my colleagues. Does that mean the term ‘motherworld’ is literal? Yesa is your progenitor? You were born of her soil?”

“Of course that is what it means! How else do you reproduce?” Phutes asked, outraged. He threw a fist in the envoy’s direction. “These monsters want to kill my mother? That is what those thieves were doing, trying to take stone from her breast? You soil our mother-worlds. You are
slime
.”

Melarides made squeaking and burbling noises, but the lines on her forehead had drawn down near the central protuberance.

“I assure you, Phutes, that the envoy had no idea that this was the case,” NR-111 said. “We did not understand. Please, come and sit down again. Let us continue with the discussion. Isn’t there room for negotiation? Surely there are bodies in Kail space that are not living beings. Please. Come back with me. Let’s talk.”

It rolled a meter or so toward the table, and beckoned. Phutes was tempted. The mechanical being had been honest with him so far. But the humans surrounding him looked avid, as though they wanted to absorb his body then and there, processing it into devices and purified powder. Who knew that they had such dire intents? Yesa would be horrified to discover that they were so evil.

“No,” he boomed. His voice echoed off the walls of the chamber. “This discussion is ended. No human or other slime is permitted to enter our territory. You will never land on our worlds ever again! Sofus! Mrdus! With me! Open the door!”

He stormed out of the room.

A flash of brilliant white light flooded the dome from above. The chamber continued to shake and roll, but Phutes braced his three legs and stalked toward the center wall of the platform.

“We must get to the Zang!” he shouted over the wild cheering and loud music. “Plan 10 will be put into operation! Are we certain as to the location?”

“Yes,” Mrdus said. “Fovrates confirmed it.”

“Then let the humans suffer as they wanted us to suffer!”

CHAPTER 39

Outside of the orbit of the single large moon, Gaia-the-ship dropped velocity like a tree shedding ripe fruit, and floated weightlessly and stately toward the snaking continental mass.

Alarms—I was beginning to learn to expect them—sounded loudly. In the screentank, a hexagonal grid of hot red lines sprang up, overlaying the planet. I had seen the same kind of defense system around Keinolt and others of the Core Worlds. It was good to know that such protection was afforded to Earth. As we passed closer, the visuals filled with codes and symbols. Uncle Laurence spoke a series of what sounded like nonsense words but must have been keys that persuaded the hidden armaments to let us through unscathed.

We descended gently through the brilliant blue skies toward the left edge of the northern reaches of the ribbon continent.
Gaia
set down in mountainous terrain within the long spine that streaked down that outer edge. I had time to spot a tidy little city before it disappeared behind forests and snowy peaks. The ship settled down in the precise center of a landing pad and promptly sank into neon-studded darkness.

“What is that city? Who lives there?”

“No one,” Uncle Laurence said.
Gaia
heaved a number of sighs, as if relieved to have arrived, though her gravity generator kept humming. Lights filled the cavern we were in, and the hatch lowered. Our couches lowered to the floor. “Thank you,
Gaia
! Wonderful trip!”

“Thank you, Lord Laurence,” the pleasant female voice said. “Welcome home.”

He smiled and patted the arm of the chair. “Glad to be back.”

I could not help but be wide-eyed as my uncle led me out through a tile-lined tunnel and up through a pair of heavy bronze doors. Gravity was heavier than it had been on the platform or in
Gaia
, but I became accustomed to it within a dozen or so meters.

The portals slid back as we approached, and I followed my uncle up into the light, and we stepped through onto crumbling dark soil.

I was, to my everlasting astonishment, on Earth.

Sunlight caressed my face like a pair of gentle hands. The sky was a different blue from Keinolt’s. I missed that faint hint of green in the atmosphere. Huge piles of white clouds scudded across the evening sky as though they had an appointment somewhere to my distant right. I fetched a deep breath of air. It was sweet and touched with rich moisture that was rare on our homeworld—I corrected myself hastily—on the world where I grew up because its climate tended to be arid. I smelled fresh, rich soil, the spice of evergreens, and the sweetness of flowers.

“Good, eh?” Uncle Laurence asked. He had been watching me closely since we had debarked.

“Delicious,” I said. I looked around. It was indeed spring. Nearly all the plants nearby were studded with blossoms. Clusters of low wood irises lay tucked among knobby roots. I followed the line of the trees nearest me, and realized how very tall they were. At first, they made me think of the forest at the Whispering Ravines, then I realized those were sad, pale imitations of the Real Thing. The trees around me were darker and redder in color, lofty enough to scratch the perfect sky. Some of them, including a massive specimen immediately outside the door of the tunnel, were as large around as a building.

“Let’s get you a real shower and a change of clothes,” Uncle Laurence said. “Then I’ll take you on a tour. Will that suit you?”

I nodded. Words seemed to have failed me utterly. I trailed along in his footsteps, or as closely as I could, considering that I was swiveling my head around like a gyroscope, trying to see everything at once. My foot caught, and I went sprawling headlong. Uncle Laurence came to hoist me to my feet, but not before I had caught sight of another pair of eyes, in a budding bush that huddled very low to the ground.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Where?”

I pointed. My uncle strode over and plunged his arm deep into the brush. It emerged with a mass of thick, dark gray and brown fur. The animal, about a quarter the size of my torso, struggled in his grip. It acted as though it was more inconvenienced than frightened.

“You mean this?” Uncle Laurence held the creature to his shoulder. It huddled against him and stared at me. Its face was masked, as if going to a costume party, and its lushly furred tail was decorated in a series of rings. “This is a raccoon. This one’s name is Elena. She’s the grandmother of my own family group. Here, you can hold her. She is a snuggler.”

He thrust her into my arms. Elena grappled onto me with tiny sharp claws and began to examine my hair and clothing.

“Let me give you a piece of advice before we go inside,” Uncle Laurence said. “Never do anything in front of her or any of the other raccoons that you don’t want them to duplicate. They are phenomenally intelligent and curious. They are the next masters of this planet.”

“So,” I said, holding his pet as we traversed a narrow but well-worn path through the immense forest, “you do live here all alone?”

“Not at all. I have billions of micronbots at my beck and call, and all the animals native to this planet.” He smiled, a trifle wryly. “Since no one ever came back, there are no alien species mixed in. Apart from a few meteor-strewn microbes, that is.”

“The animals survived the Great Abandonment?” I asked, fighting against the memories of legends that I had read since my childhood.

“Survived?” my uncle echoed. “The animals left behind have prospered, all the more so
because
humankind left. Without us here to cull some to extinction or overbreed others beyond reason, nature has taken over and set things into the proportion that it would have had without our rise. You’ll see in a while, but I need to check in before we indulge in a flyover.”

The departure of humanity from Earth had over ten thousand years achieved the status of legends, not all of which agreed with one another. They all had at their heart an onrushing disaster that threatened to destroy all of life on this planet. Some of the stories said it was a plague, some said a flood, others a massive volcano that would poison the atmosphere and kill every living thing, still other tales described an extraterrestrial menace, a comet or asteroid large enough to rip the atmosphere away. In all of them, the heroes of the story, including some of my ancestors, mustered all of Earth’s resources to build ships that would take all the billions of humans to new worlds. What records survived disagreed with one another, including as to who was responsible for rescuing the population and where it went immediately after leaving. They did all agree that no one ever tried to come back, believing that there was nothing to which to return. And, if my uncle was to be believed, and I had no reason to doubt anything he said, ever again, the trail was deliberately muddied. I knew of at least six “true Earths,” including Counterweight, who claimed to be humankind’s birthplace. None of them was this lovely sphere.

That was why the ground felt so right under my feet. So many planets on which humanity had set its stamp over the last ten millennia dragged us down or did not anchor us sufficiently with its gravity. The air nourished my lungs, without attempting to introduce any unwelcome chemical compounds. I fancied the water, which I could see twinkling in the sunshine in the far distance between the immense tree boles, would taste sweet on my tongue.

I was so full of joy, I broke into a grand and sweeping waltz, with Elena as my partner. As I glided into a clearing in my uncle’s wake, I found myself facing an audience consisting of more raccoons, a doe and her small spotted fawn, and several squirrels.

“And who are these?” I asked. Laurence chuckled.

“Elena’s family. You can put her down, now. She’ll want to tell them all about you.” I bent to release the raccoon. She kicked away from me as though launching herself and waddled into the midst of the crowd of masked creatures. They surrounded her, sniffing and gabbling. The deer regarded us as shyly as I did them. “Come in.”

He gestured toward a door. I almost had to blink. The dark red-brown house to which it was attached blended so well into the undergrowth that it was almost invisible. I followed him into a cozy domicile that I would not have been ashamed to own. A complex console with a number of screens and scopes was set into a nook in between a huge stone fireplace with an entire log for a mantel and a multi-paned glass window with black-and-white-checked woolen curtains.

“All this time,” I said, throwing myself into one of the deeply upholstered chairs before the soot-stained hearth. “All this time we thought that Father was imagining it when he told us you had come to see him from Earth.”

“Yes, his reputation has been very convenient,” Laurence said. He touched the control console, and the scopes burst into life. Image after image, some of buildings, some of natural sites, flashed in rapid sequence. “But you know yourself that sometimes what he says is true.” He gestured to his left. “The bath’s through there. Take any of my clothes. They’ll fit you.”

When I emerged, clean, shaved and clad in a pair of sturdy trousers of soft fiber and a long-sleeved shirt of moss green, he looked up and grinned at me.

“We are very alike, aren’t we? Those are some of my favorites. Not fashionable in the least, but comfortable. Just a few minutes more.”

While he worked at his console, I found it impossible to sit still. With a glance for permission, I went outside. The raccoons dined on a mix of seeds in a tub set against one side of the small house. Except for that one species, that had either never been transported off Earth or had not survived on the worlds to which it had traveled, I could have been on any one of a million planets that my ancestors had settled. But it was different. It was the first.

We all came from here
, I mused. I tried to absorb the wonder of it all.

I heard the door open and close behind me. My uncle emerged from the house.

“Come on, then,” Uncle Laurence said. “Let’s take a look around, shall we?”

In my uncle’s personal skimmer, a pale gray four-passenger vehicle, we zipped high into the blue sky and angled toward the west, traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour. We crossed a vast, tossing blue ocean, with my uncle pointing out the very occasional island, until we reached the eastern shores of the massive continent on the other side of the world.

“What does it mean that you are the guardian of Earth?” I asked. “What do you do?”

“For the last few thousand years, I and my predecessors have been maintaining and restoring places around the globe that are of historical interest,” he said.

“You’ve become an architect?” I asked.

“Not I,” my uncle said, with a laugh. “A few of Earth’s guardians have been. I think that’s how the project got started. The micronbots have been the architects, as well as gardeners, miners, masons, carpenters, painters, welders, archaeologists, maintenance engineers, sign painters and road crew. We set them a task, and they work endlessly until a project is complete.”

“How do they know what to do?” I asked.

“Look and see,” Uncle Laurence said. He tilted the skimmer down and around. As we came in over a vast forest, I could see the edge of a crenelated gray stone wall. I frowned, trying to see the end, but it snaked off into the distance farther than the eye could follow. “The micronbots have rebuilt monuments, homes, statues, buildings, public places, gardens and all from plans, models and photographs taken from the days before the Abandonment. Over the years, we have taken the best from any era, rebuilt them, and left them as they are. This wall is a marvel of an early age of human civilization. If you’d known where to look, you could have seen it from space. Though it stretches over four thousand kilometers, it was never completed. Until now. It is perfect from end to end, every stone in place.” He brought the small craft in for a landing on the broad walkway beside one of the high square towers, and walked beside me as I gawked and exclaimed in wonder.

“But this must have taken centuries to complete!” I said.

“It has. We guardians plant trees that won’t mature for hundreds of years. We start to rebuild monuments that we will not live to see completed. We restore habitat.”

“Is it one of your projects?” I asked, greedily taking in the sights.

“No, I’ll take you to one of my local projects in a moment. Take a look.” I leaped out and stamped, feeling the heavy granite beneath my boots.

The battlements were high enough for defense, but not so high I couldn’t see the land near us. I ran up to the next tower, where Uncle Laurence beckoned me back into the seat. We zipped off to see a vast city not far away. One section had been set aside from the rest with red walls. The buildings within had steeply raked, yellow-tiled roofs surmounted by the shapes of beasts more fantastic than raccoons. I saw dragons that looked like horses with colored streamers flying from their ears and nostrils, gigantic fish and tortoises, carved tigers and dogs with fearsome faces, all in blisteringly bright colors. It was enchanting, like a child’s playground.

“I restored this place. It took years to research,” he said, patting a statue of a tortoise with a tall tablet balanced on its back. “I’m very pleased with the results. This is the home of an imperial dynasty of the past. I can’t imagine Shojan being comfortable here, can you?”

I shook my head. “It’s a bit gaudy for his tastes.”

We lifted off again. Uncle Laurence flew from place to place, telling me about each of the sites as we passed overhead. I did my best to absorb it, while my eyes filled with wonders. To the south of the highest mountains I had yet seen was a hot and colorful land. Palaces of white, red or gold dotted the landscape. We set down briefly in a long and beautiful garden, alive with tossing plumes from fountains, to admire the aspect of three immense temples in a row. The two on either side were red sandstone, but the center was a glorious giant pearl of white marble. Each of the buildings had been incised with images and words, all inlaid with tiny tiles of semi-precious stones and agates. I ran from corner to corner, admiring the near perfection of its construction. This was poetry set in stone. I willed myself to recall every detail.