The Muse of Empires Lost
Paul Berger
A ship had come in, and now everything would change. Jemmi had recently become adept at crouching under windows and listening around corners, so when the village went abuzz with the news, she heard all the excitement. She was hungry and lonely, and she thought of Port-Town and the opportunities that would be found there now, and she left the village before light. She went with only the briefest pang of homesickness, and she went by the marsh trail rather than the main road, because if she had met any of her neighbors along the way, they would have stoned her.
The path was swallowed up by the murky water sooner than she expected, and the gray silt sucked at Jemmi's worn straw zori with each step. Poor old Sarasvati, always laboring to bestow ease and prosperity upon her people, and always falling a bit more behind. These were supposed to be fields, but the marshes stretched closer to their houses each year. She couldn't even get any decent fish to breed there. In the village they clucked their tongues and said that was old Sara's nanos going, as if anyone knew what that meant or could do anything about it. But sometimes you could melt handfuls of this silt down and chip it into very sharp little blades that would hold their edge for a shave or two and could be bartered for a bite to eat. Sometimes you could see it slowly writhe in your hand.
Now that the village had turned against her, Sara was Jemmi's closest and only chum. When Jemmi was at her most alone she would sit quietly and concentrate on a tiny still spot deep in her center and maybe think a few words in her heart, and a spark would answer, and a huge warm and beloved feeling would spread through her. She knew that was Sara speaking to her. Everyone wanted Sara to listen to them, but Sara barely ever spoke back to anyone.
By midday Jemmi struck a road, and the next morning she reached PortTown. Her parents had taken her there once when she was little, so she already knew to expect the tumult and smells and narrow streets packed with new faces, but the sheer activity spun her around as she tried to track everything that moved through her line of sight. Jewel-green quetzals squabbled and huddled together under the eaves of high-peaked shingled roofs, and peacocks dodged rickshaw wheels and pecked at the dust and refuse in the streets. There was plenty of food here if she could get it, and fine things to own, stacked in stalls and displayed in shop windows.
She was drawn most of all, though, to the mass of humanity that surrounded her—she could practically taste their thoughts and needs as they swirled by. The townsfolk were thronging towards the old wharf, and she let herself be swept up with them. Sometimes men or women brushed against her or jostled her without a glance or a second thought, and she grinned to herself at the rare physical contact.
An ambitious vendor had piled bread and fruit into a wooden cart at the edge of the street to catch the passers-by, and Jemmi stopped in front of him.
"Neh, what ship is it?" she asked above the din.
"Haven't you heard, then?" he replied. "It's Albiorix!"
Jemmi thought he was mocking her until she caught the man's exultant smile. Albiorix—no ship had stopped here for more than a generation, and now this! Albiorix was the stuff of legend, a proud giant among ships, braver and broader-ranging than any other. If Sarasvati was on Albiorix's route now, they would all be rich again.
"Who was on board, then?"
"No one's seen them yet. Looks like they'll be debarking any minute."
Jemmi checked her urge to race off towards the wharf. She put her hand on the vendor's forearm and smiled her warmest smile, and as he stood distracted and fuddled she swept an apple and two rolls into her pockets. She turned and ran before the man's head cleared.
The crowds along the quay were packed tight and jostling viciously, but Jemmi plunged in and no one noticed or resisted as she slipped right up to the barrier. A boy was standing near her. He was clear-eyed and honey-skinned and probably about two years older than she was. Judging from his clothes and the rich dagger that hung at his belt—the hilt bound with real wire—his family was quite well-to-do. With visions of regular meals and a roof over her head, she sidled towards him. The boy looked over her rags and begrimed face and straightaway disregarded her. Jemmi held firm and let the motion of the crowd press him close to her. The back of his hand brushed against her bare wrist, and he unconsciously jerked it away. She shifted her weight so that she was a fraction closer to him. The next time he moved he touched her again, and she imagined that he was not quite so quick to pull back.
The third time they touched she kept her hand against his, and the boy did not pull away. He turned shyly to Jemmi.
"Hello," he said. "My name's Roycer."
At that moment, the entire length of Sarasvati trembled with a gentle impact, and the crowd's cheer was deafening.
Outside, languid in the vacuum of space, Albiorix stroked Sarasvati's stony mantle with the fluid tip of a miles-long tentacle—an overture and an offering. Sarasvati recalled Albiorix of old, and his strength and boldness were more than she could have hoped for. She extended a multitude of soft arms from deep within the moonlet that served as her shelter and her home, and entwined them with his. She dwarfed him as she embraced him. Her tentacles brushed the length of his nacreous spiral shell, and in the silence dizzying patterns of light flashed across both their surfaces. The colors matched and melded, until they raced along his arms and up hers and back again. Sarasvati was receptive, and eager to welcome Albiorix after his lonely journey across the vastness. He disentangled himself and drifted down to the tip of her long axis, and they both spread their arms wide as he clasped his head to the orifice there. She released her great outer valve for him, and he gently discharged his passengers and all their cargo. Sarasvati accepted them gracefully, and in return, flooded his interior with fresh atmosphere from her reserves. Now duty and foreplay had been dispensed with, and they embraced again in earnest, spinning in the void.
The sphincter on Sarasvati's inner surface dilated open, and the passengers off Albiorix stepped through into Port-Town, armed and alert. The arrivals were well aware that half the inhabitants of any orbital would tear newcomers apart just to see what they carried in their packs, and they hustled down the quay in tight phalanxes that bristled with weapons. They no doubt came from richer lands—Jemmi noticed the glint of steel in the trappings of their spears and crossbows as they passed. One group brandished old-style plasma rifles, but Jemmi assumed that was a bluff; everyone knew the smart electronics hadn't worked since the day the Cosmopolis fell. The crowds parted grudgingly around this threat, and Roycer was pushed closer to Jemmi, his gaze never leaving her face.
The rest of the townsfolk watched the arrivals' every move as they sought shelter in the winding streets. Those that could strike deals with families or inns to harbor them were likely to survive. This must have been an especially long voyage, Jemmi thought, or else star travel must be harder than anyone remembered. These arrivals all looked sunken-cheeked and worn down as if drained, or haunted by something they could not name.
One last traveler stepped through into Sarasvati, alone. He was the oddest thing Jemmi had ever seen. He was tall and slightly stooped and unnaturally pale—both his skin and his sparse hair were the same shade of thin gruel— and although at a distance Jemmi assumed he was very old, as he approached Jemmi realized she could not guess his age at all. His only luggage was a canister that hung from his shoulder on a strap. He walked unarmed along the barrier and Jemmi was certain he would be snatched up, yet no one in the throng made a move towards him or particularly noted his presence. He took his time, scanning the faces and garments as if looking for something. He stopped in front of Jemmi and her boy, and smiled. His teeth were the same color as his skin, and were all broad and very large in his gums.
"You'll do," he told the boy. "Shouldn't we be getting home now?"
Wordlessly, the boy nodded and released Jemmi's hand. He slipped under the barrier and joined the traveler, and led him down the quay into town.
Jemmi, stunned with amazement and impotent wrath, stood there slackjawed until long after they left her sight.
With the excitement over, the crowd melted away, and Jemmi saw no chances to get close to anyone else. She spent the rest of the day sidestepping traffic and looking into windows, and she was able to grab a bit more to eat in the same manner she had acquired breakfast. After dusk one or two men on the darkened streets spoke to her, but they didn't look useful and she didn't like what their voices implied, so after that she took to helping people ignore her. That meant she couldn't get indoors to sleep, but luckily Sara was still too distracted with her beau to make a proper rain. Jemmi spent the night curled at the foot of a weather-beaten neighborhood shrine at the end of a narrow alley. It was certainly not what she had hoped for when she had decided to make the journey to town, but it was not too different from what she had left behind. Amongst the incense ash and candle-stubs and tentacled figurines, some housewife had left a rag doll dressed in a new set of toddler's clothes, a supplication to Sara for an easy birth and a healthy baby. The offering of a portion of a family meal that sat alongside it had barely gone cold, but some things were sacred, and Jemmi was not tempted to take it.
She fell asleep thinking how happy she was for old Sara, and she dreamed a wondrously clear vision of the two lovers floating clasped together with countless arms, surrounded by stars, auroras chasing along their skins. Jemmi accepted the image without question, notwithstanding she had never seen a sky before.
She awoke when she felt that Sara was about to make dawn, and she stood in her alley to watch it. Directly overhead, the coil of viscera that stretched along Sarasvati's axis sparked and sputtered with flashes of bioluminescence, and then kindled down its entire length. As the light phased from gold to yellow to white, Jemmi was able to pick out the fields and woods and streets of her own village hanging high above and upside down along Sarasvati's great inner vault. It was significant to her only as a starting point; she had come to town now, and her home would be here. She set out walking again, looking for breakfast and Opportunity.
Before she found either, she found the traveler. He was sitting on the veranda of a home in a wealthy neighborhood, drinking tea and reading. The street was busy with passers-by, but none of them seemed to take any notice of his odd looks, or his book, or the fact that he seemed to actually know how to read it. Jemmi stopped in the street in front of him and stared.
The pale man stirred in his seat and looked up from his book. Jemmi's thoughts immediately shifted to other things—the kerchief on that woman walking past and how she would wear it if she had it, what plans the tradesman across the way might have for the bound lamb he carried, and wouldn't a single gutter down the middle of the street make it easier to clean than one down each side?—as if there were a broad, gentle pressure in the center of her mind. This, the thought struck her, must be what she made the people in crowds around her feel. She held her ground and pushed back.
The man met her gaze with a small, amused smirk. "What can I do for you, daughter?" he called down.
The pressure in Jemmi's mind immediately grew focused and became an urge to comply, practically dragging an answer from her. She refused, and met the force head-on. The compulsion increased, and she resisted.
She stood there frozen by the exertion, and suddenly the frontal assault on her mind dissipated, replaced by the barest sideways push that took her completely off balance.
"I had a boy," she called back, and heard the anger in her voice in spite of herself. "A boy and a dry place to sleep."
"Indeed?" the pale man answered. "Now, what would make you think— Oh my . . . " His little smirk wavered, and he said, mainly to himself, "Here, in this forsaken backwater? Can it be?" He considered his closed book for a moment, then put it aside and stepped to the veranda railing. "I think perhaps we should get to know each other. Won't you come up?"
If there was any coercion now, it was too subtle for Jemmi to feel, and she was intrigued by his bearing, and warily flattered. She joined him, and he sat her beside him like a lady of substance.
"My name," he said, "is Yee."
"Neh, that's a funny name, isn't it?"
His half-smirk returned. "Possibly. It was originally much longer, and there was a string of titles that went after it at one time, but these days Yee is sufficient for my needs." He had an old-fashioned accent that made her think of fancy dances attended by the lords of planets, and a way of speaking as if every word counted.
"I'm Jemmi, then."
"Jemmi, it is an unexpected pleasure to meet you. You are what, eleven, twelve years old?" Up close, Yee's eyes were nearly colorless, but Jemmi got the impression that if he looked too long at something, it would start to smolder—or maybe Yee would.
"Fourteen."
"Fourteen? Ah, yes, of course. Puberty would have begun. And I don't suppose you eat particularly well. Forgive me—I've been a neglectful host. Would you join me in breakfast?"
She nodded.
"I suspected as much. Roycer!" Yee called, barely raising his voice.
The boy from the crowd at the quay stepped out of the door as if he had been waiting beside it. He had the look of someone who had been working feverishly all night.
"I believe our guest could do with a bit to eat," said Yee.
"Breakfast! Of course!" said the boy, as if it were a stroke of genius. He disappeared back into the house.
"Tell me, Jemmi," continued Yee. "Do you have any family?"
She shook her head.
"So I conjectured. They didn't, by any chance, die under mysterious circumstances within the past few months, did they?"
The glance she shot him was all the answer he needed.
"I believe we have much in common, you and I . . . and I honestly can't recall ever saying that to anyone else."
Roycer hurried out of the house with a tray piled with a random assortment of cold meats and vegetables and cups and loaves and cheeses. He set it down before them and stepped away. Yee made a graceful gesture with an open palm, and Jemmi tore into it.
"Perhaps you could also prepare a bath for our guest," Yee suggested while she ate.
"Hot water!" the boy muttered to himself. "Cool water! And soap!" and raced back inside.
Yee watched Jemmi bolt down the food. "You would not be reduced to this if you were on a true world," he reflected. "A planet holds more riches than one person could ever grasp, and you would just be discovering you could take anything you desired right now. How ironic that you and I should both be trapped out in space, at the mercy of the vagaries of a forgotten fad."
Jemmi looked up. "What's that, then?"
"A fad?" said Yee. "A trend of fashion. A novelty. I'm sure you must take it for granted, but please believe me when I tell you that it is not at all an intuitive choice for a human to live in the belly of a mollusk adrift in the ether. When I commissioned the first orbitals, they were intended merely as pleasure palaces to keep my associates content and distracted. We gave the males mobility only to ensure that the species bred strong and true, not because we planned to ride them."
"You did? Like Sara? Like Albiorix?"
"Yes. Your Sarasvati is one of the oldest, one of my first. Through a twist of fate, I happened to be visiting one of her sisters the day the Cosmopolis fell. There wasn't time to return groundside before the machines stopped working of course, and not even a big ship like Albiorix is strong enough to make planetfall.
"Without the smart machines, you and I may ride ships from one impoverished orbital to the next, while the planets are rich and savage, but utterly isolated. The resources to rebuild civilization are there, but always just beyond my reach."
Jemmi had no clear idea of how long ago the Cosmopolis had fallen, but if Yee had been there her original impression was correct, and he was quite old. She was still hungry, but she was smart enough to stop eating before she got sick or sleepy. She pushed the tray away from her, half its contents untouched. Yee seemed to note this with the barest hint of an approving nod. Jemmi thought back to Sara's joy at the unexpected arrival of a suitor, and connected it to this unexpected man.
"Neh, why did Albiorix come back to Sara?"
"Ah, truth be told, it was not his intention at all. Albiorix prefers his route through his regular harem, and he likely planned to call on Demeter, and then Freya. It was time for me, however, to move rimward. It was a considerable struggle to make him accept my lead."
No one had ever taken such pains to answer Jemmi's questions before. She composed another one. "Why rimward, then?"
His smirk this time was a bit indulgent. "I have been to the galactic core, and I no longer believe I will find what I seek there. I am a man on a quest, you see."
The boy appeared in the doorway. "The bath is ready," he announced to the veranda in general.
"Roycer serves with excellent enthusiasm," Yee confided with a lowered voice. "Do you find everyone in Sarasvati so?"
Jemmi shrugged, nonplussed. "No one ever serves me," she admitted.
"Indeed? Well that must change. That must change immediately." He stood and offered his hand. "Would you care to join us inside?"
Roycer and Yee led her into the house, which was very old. Parts of it must have been built before the Fall, because they were made of textureless materials Jemmi had no words for, while other rooms were made of wood and stone. They passed through a side parlor, where the rest of Roycer's family lolled in chairs or sprawled across the rug. Jemmi counted two parents, a brother, and three sisters, all with sunken, husk-like faces. They were all dead. She was very surprised—her parents had looked the same way when they died.
"A pity, I know," said Yee, gesturing towards the corpses with an upraised chin, "but I needed to simplify the household, and the boy is strong enough for my needs for the time being." Roycer didn't seem to see them at all.
Roycer's family was so rich they had a room just for baths, at the back of the house. It was floored with rough flagstones and had a hearth for heating the water, and a high-backed earthenware tub right in the middle. Jemmi thought it was very odd to take a bath in someone else's house in the middle of the day, and momentarily froze with the apprehension that she was being entrapped, but Yee dismissed it with a shake of his head.
"If you want to pass as townsfolk," he told her, "you really shouldn't be noticeably filthier than they are. Besides, I am too old to take advantage of you, and I promise Roycer will be a perfect gentleman. He will scrub your back if you like."
Yee graciously turned to face the wall, and on her other side, Roycer did the same. Perhaps this was what the high-born did during morning visits. Jemmi let her ragged tunic and leggings fall to the floor, and stepped in. The water was hotter than any water she had ever touched, but she was committed, so she gasped and puffed and slid herself down the side of the tub in tender increments. Her knees immediately disappeared behind swirls of brown. It was scalding, but she discovered that if she kept her legs pressed together and moved only when absolutely necessary, it was nearly relaxing. When she was settled, Yee sat himself on a stool in a corner, looking for all the world like a pale long-legged spider. Roycer remained where he was.
Jemmi picked up a cloth and swiped experimentally at dark patches on her skin. Yee suggested she try the soap, and she had more luck that way. Underneath, she was rather fair, and turning pink in the hot water.
"Neh, Yee," she said, comparing a pink-scrubbed arm to a besmudged one. "Where are you from?"
"Ah," he said. "I was born in the chief city of the greatest dominion the world had ever known."
"The Cosmopolis Core?"
He shook his head. "Long before that. This was so long ago that it was little more than a legend to the builders of the Cosmopolis. In those days our god walked apart from us as a formless creature of faith and awe, quite unlike the beings who have given us their bodies to be our homes and our worlds in this age. He failed us in the end, I suppose, because that empire fell. It was not the first empire to fall, and it certainly was not the last, but it fell badly when it went. And I was a young boy, trapped on a narrow and crowded island of towers when the chaos descended."
Jemmi was silent. Anyone raised among the half-buried reminders of the abrupt and terrible failure of the Cosmopolis had a visceral understanding of that type of chaos.
"This was all so far back that I can recall only the memories of recalling it centuries later. But I know the instrument of our downfall was a plague, that our enemies brought among us. Death tore through us so quickly that we who considered ourselves the capital of the world and the heart of its hope were no longer a city, but brutal pockets of marauders running through a steel-and-glass wasteland. I was thirteen then, and the sickness seized me suddenly. It was clear that I would die, but I did not. When I fought to live, I was somehow able to reach out and find strength in the people closest to me. When I recovered, I found they had wasted away in proportion to the vigor I gained. My parents and siblings were dead and empty around me, and I was utterly alone.
"Then the savages who had been our neighbors found our home and ransacked it. I cowered and sought to make myself invisible to their eyes, and they walked past me without seeing me, though I could have put out a hand and touched them. At that point I realized I was now something different, but there was no one to explain it to me."
Jemmi knew exactly what he meant.
"Many dark years followed, but I survived, and my people worked diligently to rebuild something of their society, and I always amassed the best of everything. Gradually I realized this industriousness was my own doing—I could not force a man to do a thing he did not wish to do, but I could place an idea in that man's head and give him the drive to realize it at any cost. The same way, I believe, that you are now learning to do, Jemmi. I felt your mind as you stood out on the street. A power has begun to emerge in you, though you do not know how to use it. This is a rare and precious gift. In all the history of the world, it may be only we two who have had it. And you are the first I have ever told.
"While the rest of our planet squabbled in the dust, my people strove in lockstep and regained their learning and power. They had been close to the secret of star travel when I was a child, though this knowledge was lost for generations during the dark ages. Eventually, though, I saw that mankind's future lay in its ability to spread across worlds, and I gave them the urge to create that technology. When they finally left to cross space in the first great wormhole-drive craft, I went with them, always as a counselor, never as a ruler. That is the proper role for you and me."
Jemmi nodded, wide-eyed.
"I have kept mankind focused on its own advancement and prosperity and culled the weak and the distractions, and I accept relatively little in return—I take no more from my people than the barest life force necessary to remain alive and continue in my role. I have shepherded humanity through eons of history, and ensured that each new empire was built according to my design. The Cosmopolis was my greatest work. Only when it fell and the worlds were sundered from one another did humanity lose my guidance. And look what has become of you."
Jemmi had never had a clear picture of life under the Cosmopolis, but she suddenly sensed that it must have been unimaginably finer than the way people lived now, and she felt ashamed.
"So you see, that is why I am here. To rescue mankind. I must rebuild the Cosmopolis."
To Jemmi sitting in her tub that sounded so grand it was absurd. "From Sarasvati? She's old and poor. How would she help, then?"
"As I told you, I am a man on a quest. I need only to reach an inhabited planet to raise humanity up again. But for that, I need a shuttle—one of the old machines. I have searched since the Great Fall, and none remain intact in any of the orbitals between here and the center. Perhaps there is one left in Sarasvati."
"But, neh, the old machines don't work."
Yee smiled his half-smirk again. "I believe that if I can find a shuttle, I can render it operable." His tone became more urgent. "Join with me, Jemmi. I will have need of your support in the days ahead. Add your power to mine, and there will be nothing we cannot do. We will save mankind from itself and bring order to the stars and lead an empire that spans the galaxy and can never be overthrown!"
"Okay."
He stopped short as if he had prepared more to say. "Excellent," he said.
"But I don't know what help I can be."
"People want to help you, Jemmi," said Yee. "It's in your nature. Roycer?"
Roycer stepped up behind her with a long-handled brush, and began to rub warm suds along her spine. Jemmi decided she enjoyed the sensation, and leaned forward to give him more surface to work with. He ran the brush up and down the same route, mechanically focused on the center of her back.
"If you'd like him to do something else, you may direct him," said Yee. "I hand the reins over to you. Simply feel his mind and put the idea into it. You'll find he will be avid to put it into action."
"Don't I need to touch him, then?"
"You shouldn't—I don't," Yee told her.
Jemmi thought back to her earlier struggle with Yee, and reached out with her mind the way she imagined he had. She sensed nothing, so she pressed stronger and further. Suddenly she connected—and she was immense and floating in space, lost and engrossed in animal passion, tangled with Albiorix and straining mightily against his thrusts to receive him deeper and deeper within her. She had gone too far, and was now in Sarasvati's mind.
Overwhelmed by the sensation and shocked by her transgression, Jemmi recoiled and shook herself free of Sara. As she went, she caught a final flash of Sara's sight—stars wheeling around her, and much closer, a blue disk half covered with a whorl of white. Then she was back in the tub.
"Nothing, eh?" Yee said gently from his corner. "Well, try again. You'll do it."
She took a deep breath and reached out again, this time barely past her own skin. She felt Yee in the room with her—he nearly filled it—so she turned the other way and touched Roycer. She hesitated, then decided that people like Yee and herself were beyond bashfulness, and gave the boy the idea of her right shoulder.
The brush moved from her spine and made gentle circles around her right shoulder blade. This was nothing at all like how she was used to confounding minds. It was subtle and focused and efficient. She immediately saw it as a thing of beauty, as if she had been born to it.
"Excellent!" It sounded a little strained when Yee said it. "It seems you learn more quickly than I did. But always be aware that his enthusiasm may be diverted to other ideas."
The brush was now circling her left shoulder.
Jemmi gently reminded Roycer of her right side, and the brush returned to make its circles there. Yee moved him away again—and it was more challenge than test. Jemmi pictured her right shoulder in detail and pressed the image into Roycer's mind, and then pressed even harder in response to Yee's redoubled pressure. Roycer stood frozen, torn between the two equal demands. After nearly a minute, the long-handled brush began to shudder silently.
"Well, there's no point in breaking him," Yee said a bit too lightly. "I still have some plans for the boy."
Behind her Roycer emitted a sigh, and the brush resumed its gentle circles on her right shoulder blade.
Afterwards, when Yee suggested that the bath had done as much for her as could reasonably be expected, she stood up into a large towel Roycer held for her. She pressed the water out of her hair, and tossed the towel over her shoulder like a gown.
"Neh, am I beautiful now?" she asked.
Yee looked her over with an eye that had appraised queens.
"Why would you ask such a thing?" he said at last. "For you, that will never matter."
So Jemmi moved in with Yee and Roycer, and got her warm dry bed and a boy to serve her after all. The bedroom was filled with magnificent girl-things that had been Roycer's sisters' and Yee said were now all hers. She dressed herself in a frock of a crisp, shiny fabric that would be ruined forever if it were even in the same room with a speck of grease, and put ribbon after ribbon into her hair until the whole mass could practically stand on its own. Yee saw it and muttered a vague comment that restraint was often the better part of elegance, so she kicked the dress into a corner and changed into a more practical working skirt.
The next day, as they finished breakfast and sat looking over the jumbled heap of everything Roycer had pulled out of the larder, Yee slid his chair back and observed, "We seem to have exhausted this house's stores. Come—it's time we went to the market." Jemmi and Roycer followed him out.
Jemmi loved crowds, and to her mind the market was the best part of PortTown. Yee led them to the busiest, most densely-packed street, where folk shoved to get by them and hawkers vied to drown out each others' voices. He turned to Jemmi, and his voice carried perfectly without raising at all. "Roycer and I have some business to attend to and will leave you to do the shopping," he told her coolly. "Please do not return until you have acquired everything you think the household needs. And do try not to get yourself killed while you're about it. I have noticed subtlety is not your strong suit."
He steered Roycer into the crowd, and they disappeared in a few steps. Jemmi didn't even have a basket. Was Yee kicking her out already? Had she failed somehow? Or did it just mean he wanted her to practice putting ideas in peoples' heads? She couldn't tell, and she felt alone again, and very exposed. She fought to stay in one place for a long while until the buffeting from the shoppers became unbearable, and then, near tears, she fled to a quiet corner at the edge of the square.
She forced herself to breathe deeply until she was nearly calm again, and then reached out for the comfort of feeling Sara.
There was a brief, dizzying sensation of stretching through free-fall and then she was back in Sara's mind, gargantuan but still less than a mote in the immeasurable space that surrounded her. The Herculean coupling with Albiorix showed no sign of slowing, but those sensations were too strong for Jemmi and she turned to other aspects of Sara's awareness.
Sara, she saw, floated in a barren void but carried her ecosystem entire within her, as if someone had taken an empty house set in a garden, then turned all of it inside-out. She gloried in the living beings she harbored, both because they were the foundation of her own survival, and because they had sprung from her own body. Designed into the core of her awareness was the drive to shore up that precarious balance by any means possible. She could win over allies and choose favorites, and smite the enemies growing inside her as if they were incipient contagions.
Jemmi saw the spindle-shaped world inside Sara through Sara's own mind, and she felt the angst and darkness that had been taking hold as her facility to orchestrate that environment slipped away. Sara was old and proud and secretly ashamed to be failing in her duty. Her wordless hopes were focused on the great egg she had prepared for Albiorix. If it quickened, she would have a glorious new life within her for a time, and then the lives she sheltered would have a new home.
Jemmi showed herself to Sara and guilelessly let the fact of her budding talent flow through. For a moment she felt Sara freeze the link between them, as if assessing the best way to react to some startling threat. But when Sara came back, her response was to engulf Jemmi with the sensation that she knew her and cherished her and reveled in her. It overwhelmed Jemmi and flooded through her, and she was powerless against it. Sara had unlimited reserves of love to draw on, and she used them mercilessly.
Jemmi was pinned there like an enraptured butterfly for a long, timeless instant. She was unable to move or think, and she wouldn't have given it up for anything. Finally, when the effect was deep enough, Sara bid her farewell and gently withdrew.
Finding herself squatting by herself on muck-covered cobblestones, Jemmi hugged herself and sobbed quietly. She would have clawed her way back into Sara's mind, but the connection had ended with a note of finality that she would not overstep. Gradually, she realized she was not empty, but filled with warmth and strength, and she could think of nothing but the great heart that had given her that. She now knew down through her bones that she would never have any use for Yee's old empires or for planets where there was nothing at the other side of the sky but more sky, because Sarasvati was her world. Jemmi belonged here, where she could reach out with her hand or mind and touch her god, and if there was anything beyond Sara, it did not interest her.
But for the time being at least, Yee was helping her learn her own strength. She remembered the task he had given her and half-heartedly stepped to the edge of the crowd. She extended her mind just the slightest bit beyond her own skin, and the maelstrom of thoughts and words and desires that hit her was like ducking her head under a waterfall. She drew back and focused on the thoughts of the woman closest to her.
The invasion of privacy was thrilling. The woman was picking vegetables from big baskets, and Jemmi found herself swimming through twisting currents of intentions and half-ignored impressions and the occasional diamond-clear string of words. She wondered if she might become lost in the woman's mind if she got any closer.
Ever so gently—not at all like guiding Roycer's hand—she tossed in the notion that a vendor across the square might be willing to negotiate his price, and watched the ripples spread out across the woman's other thoughts. Her eyes lit, and she hurried away from the table.
Start at the beginning, Jemmi decided. She strode up to the vegetable seller, and graciously allowed him to place his hastily emptied wicker basket on her arm. Then she moved on to a baker, who placed two loaves into it with a flourish as if it was the wittiest thing in the world, and strolled on into the heart of the square.
Jemmi returned home at the head of a small, heavily-laden parade. She directed the string of young men carrying her parcels to line them up along the veranda, and then sent them off. Yee stepped out of the house to observe this, then turned back inside with an audible sniff. Jemmi ran up after him.
"Neh, I can do it!" she told him. "I did it!"
"I daresay you did," he said. "And made quite a scene, by the looks of it. It's a wonder they didn't have you burned at the stake. Have Roycer move your booty inside." He turned away again.
Jemmi was crestfallen.
"Neh, Yee," she blurted. He stopped. "How come Sara—Why don't things work like they did in the olden days?" she asked.
That must have been the right question to ask him, because he immediately warmed to her again. "Ah," he said. "It was the machines. Few people remember that it was the destruction of the machines that caused the fall of the Cosmopolis, and not the other way around. In the days of its greatest strength, the Cosmopolis had enemies who preferred utter anarchy to the order and prosperity it gave them. They were fools and fanatics. They introduced a machine pandemic that spread from one end of inhabited space to the other."
"And all the machines got sick?"
"Not at first. It slept quietly for years, and then at a pre-ordained signal it struck everywhere, simultaneously. All the smart electronics died at that moment, and the Cosmopolis was shattered. To re-create the technology that humans or Sarasvati relied on, we will have to build from the beginning again: steam and iron. It is a long road, but I have walked it before."
Jemmi did not trust Yee, and she didn't think she liked him, but she would follow him anywhere if it would save Sara.
"In fact, Roycer and I were able to uncover some information towards that end while you were out," he told her. "We learned that Sarasvati originally had a shuttle port at either extremity. These were large and busy, so they likely contained several shuttles at the time of the Fall, but they were quite prominent and I expect they were plundered generations ago. There were also several emergency evacuation portals scattered throughout her. These have been lost, and there is a chance that one may be untouched. They will have to be searched out."
That seemed like a lot of work to Jemmi. "Why don't you just ask Sara?"
Yee scoffed. "And what would the question be? The ships and orbitals are very simple beasts, and even if they understood, they couldn't form an answer. But come, I will show you how it's done." He stepped over her groceries and led her back down into the street.
"What we need is people who seem persistent and resourceful, and whose absence will not be noted overly much," said Yee. "People like you and me— but expendable, of course."
Yee approached a laborer in a floppy, grease-stained cap pulling a heavy cart, and smiling and clasping his long pale hands together, asked him if he knew anything about the old-days shuttle port at the end of Sarasvati's long axis. The man, obviously annoyed, shook his head and looked at Yee as if he were cracked. Yee appeared disappointed, and observed it was a pity, since it wouldn't do to go spreading this around, but he was eager for news of any undamaged shuttles, and was more than willing to reimburse the man who brought that news quite handsomely. A fortune, really. At any rate, if he heard of anything, Yee lived right over there—the house with the veranda, can you see?—and would be delighted to receive any news. The man moved on as if he was glad to be rid of Yee. His steps became increasingly more hesitant though, as if something was unfolding in his mind. Finally, about a hundred paces down the street he abandoned his cart completely with a furtive look back, and sprinted away along the quickest route out of Port-Town.
The next man Yee spoke to developed a frantic urge to make the grueling trek to the ruins of the shuttle port at Sarasvati's far end and return to report on his findings. After that, four others became fascinated with the pressing need to locate one of the lost evacuation ports scattered along her length. It seemed to Jemmi that before they hurried off, each of them had been struck by the sudden inspiration for a scheme that simultaneously delighted them and tortured them.
"If a man sees it as a struggle to express an idea from within, he'll exhaust everything he has to bring it to fruition," Yee explained, as the last one began to run. "Well, after your success in the market this morning, I believe I can leave the rest to you. You'll need to send out about another dozen or so." He turned to go.
"Neh, why so many?"
"One of the first things you must learn, Jemmi, is that one man acting alone will change nothing. To have progress, you must mobilize a society. Once we are on a world, you will see how quickly entire kingdoms move forward when they embrace the goals we give them."
Yee returned to the house and stepped over the groceries on the veranda as he went in. Jemmi stalked the street recruiting searchers for the rest of the afternoon, and the food sat out there until evening, when she reckoned she had snared enough.
There was no dawn the next morning. Jemmi jumped out of her big bed with a sense of foreboding and a gut feeling that it was later than it looked. She ran down the wooden stairs and out onto the road in her bare feet. Shock and woe were palpable in the air and the soil, and Sara was lamenting with all her heart. Then it hit Jemmi—Albiorix was dead. He had weakened and gone still and fallen slack in Sara's embrace, and she was nearly paralyzed by loneliness and the weight of this new failure.
People in the villages high overhead began to wake and light lamps and fires as they tentatively started their day. The scattering of weak sparks in the darkness was a pale imitation of the stars Jemmi had seen through Sara's eyes. Yee stepped out onto the veranda and silently leaned over the rail to look upwards and sniff, as if he were tasting the weather.
"Yee—Do you know? Albiorix is dead," Jemmi said.
"I'm not surprised," answered Yee. "He was stubbornly fixed on his old route, and I had to relieve him of much of his strength before he would accept my course. We're lucky I made it this far."
Jemmi's hands were fists. "How could you do that?"
"I know what you're thinking—and it's not a problem. Albiorix has always been trailed by younger males as he makes his rounds. I'm sure Horus or Xolotl will be here by the time we are ready to move on."
"But she was going to have his baby!" Jemmi managed.
"Not likely. The orbitals and ships are improbable beings, so they must be part animal, part machine," Yee told her. "I'm certain you've noticed Sarasvati is no longer the paradise she was intended to be. Since the Fall, they have been unable to replenish the nanomachines that they need to grow and heal themselves. I doubt there would have been any offspring." He shrugged.
Jemmi tried to say something, but her grief and rage were like a solid mass that seared through her throat and chest. She had no words to express the depth of his sin and blasphemy. She knew that to strike at Yee would be suicide, so instead, she forced herself to turn from him and raced down the darkened street. When her legs tired, she walked through Port-Town as she had on her first night, staying to the shadows and peeking in windows.
It was hours before she got bored with wandering and returned home. Yee was out.
"Roycer!" Jemmi said. "Where's the jar, then?"
"Which jar, Jemmi?" he asked.
"The one he brought with him off Albiorix. Where does he hide it?"
He paused, and she flicked the boy's mind to give him just a bit of encouragement. "In the tub room. Underneath the floor stones."
"Show me."
Roycer led her to the room with the tub and lifted a flat stone away. In the space beneath was the gray canister Yee had carried when they had first seen him. Jemmi pulled it out. It was obviously very old, because it was made of a single piece of something very smooth and very strong. She grasped the cap, but it would not turn. It had an indentation the shape of a palm on top, but nothing happened when she pressed her hand against it. She handed it back to Roycer and told him to return it just as they found it. He could demonstrate astounding attention to detail when prompted.
As he moved the stone back into place, Sarasvati stirred herself to remember her duty, and her sky sullenly flickered and kindled with morning light, half a day late.
Jemmi and Yee and Roycer continued to live together over the next dozen or so days, but Jemmi saw Yee as little as possible. She also began to avoid looking directly at Roycer. The boy seemed brittle and stretched thin, and he was getting weak and clumsy. He was no longer pretty. Jemmi suspected he would be replaced shortly.
The laborer in the floppy hat returned after a few days, limping and exhausted as if he had run all the way up to the old shuttle port and back. It had been picked clean, he reported, and nothing bigger than a wagon-wheel was left. Several nights after that, the searcher that had been sent to the far end of Sarasvati crawled across the veranda and scratched weakly at the door. He could not speak, but he had just enough strength left to convey that he had also found nothing. Roycer dragged the body inside before the neighbors noticed.
Jemmi approached Yee the next morning. "Neh, Yee, how long will the other searchers be gone?"
Yee snorted. "Were you expecting them back? The task you gave them was to return only when they could report something of value, and to continue searching until then. I'd be surprised if many of them are still standing. Your old Sarasvati is worthless to us, as I expected." He seated himself and picked up his book.
"You and I should begin planning our departure. One of the younger orbitals further rimward is more likely to have what we need."
Jemmi slipped outside and sat in a corner of the veranda. She stretched her mind out across the emptiness, and touched Sara.
All of Sara that was not dedicated to the physics of regulating her inner environment was still in mourning for Albiorix, and she was in no mood to notice Jemmi.
Please, Sara! I'm going to have to leave if you don't . . . We're all going to have to leave! She visualized Sarasvati's interior deserted and bare, and prodded her with the image. Resentful, Sara turned part of her attention to Jemmi, and sluggishly recognized her as one marked as her own.
You have to help us find a shuttle, or else he's going to take me far away. There was no reaction to the words, of course. Jemmi tried to make an image of a shuttle, but she had no idea what a spacecraft would look like. Instead, she imagined people flying in and out of Sarasvati.
Sara responded with a picture of a flawless white fish, smoother than an egg and shaped like a teardrop, with stubby fins. The fish dove out of a hole in the side of Sarasvati's asteroid and swam across empty space.
That must be it, then! Where?
But Sara did not have a mind that could answer a question like that.
Jemmi leapt onto the veranda railing and caught hold of the edge of the roof, then scrambled on top of the house. From its peak she could look down along Sarasvati's entire inner length as it curved over her head in lieu of a sky.
Is it there? she asked, looking at a spot directly across, and kept the interrogative at the front of her mind as she moved her eyes across Sarasvati's interior. When Jemmi reached a point that was far off—90° around and two-thirds of the way towards her other end—Sara stirred, and Jemmi's vision of the spot came into clear focus. She had a sudden image of the white shuttle in a smooth white cavern, clasped by metal arms that held it suspended over the floor.
Thank you, Sara! Thank you! Now I'll never have to leave you.
Jemmi gently withdrew and left Sara to her grief. She remained on the veranda until she had collected herself, and went inside.
"Neh, Yee," she said as if she was discussing the weather. "I've found a shuttle."
Yee looked up from his book, as cold as ice. "Do not even think of toying with me, child—you would die before you hit the ground. Run along."
"It's smooth and white, in a big white room. One of my searchers made it back."
Yee was out of his seat and gripping her collar as if propelled by lightning. "Where?" he demanded. "Let me talk to him!"
She shook her head. "Can't. He's dead now. But I know where it is." She took him to the mullioned window and pointed out the spot to him.
"There? Where the river makes the bend around the tip of the cloud forest?" He calculated. "That's a three-day journey. Roycer—the packs!" Jemmi heard heavy footsteps running frenetically through the house, and Roycer burst into the room carrying two loaded rucksacks and an enormous backpack.
"We leave now," said Yee said to her. "Prepare anything you need to take."
He left the room. Jemmi could think of nothing, so she sat and waited. When Yee passed through again, he had the gray canister slung over his shoulder, and he didn't pause to see if they followed him.
Three days later, Jemmi was farther from home than she had ever been. They had had men pull them in carts day and night for most of the way, but the last one had dropped from exhaustion just as they decided to leave the road, and they had hiked through the brush on their own.
They stood in a clearing in a jungle. Humid air, blown erratically out of an obstructed duct from one of Sarasvati's lungs, met the cool currents overhead and sent a thick perpetual cloud rolling through the trees. Moisture dripped from the leaves like rain. In front of them was a symmetrical grassy mound, like a small hill standing alone.
"This is assuredly an evacuation portal," said Yee, pacing around it. "That's the entrance, and it is overgrown and partially buried, so the space beyond certainly could have remained intact. But how did your source know what was inside?"
He shot Jemmi a glance. She shrugged.
"No matter. We are very close, and our day is at hand." He removed two packets from his rucksack and tucked them in the tumbled stones that filled a door-shaped indentation. "Roycer, light this string here and here, please, then join me quickly." He strode away. "Jemmi, you might care to accompany me."
She followed Yee back into the trees. Roycer came running up, and then there was an explosion that sent earth and spinning shards of timber flying past them. The cloud amongst them jumped, and Sarasvati flinched violently under their feet.
A third of the mound was blasted away. The explosion had removed the layer of soil and stone covering it, and laid bare several yards of a deep purplepink gash that oozed and glistened wetly. Jemmi wondered if the wound was as bad for Sara as it looked, or if on her miles-long body it was less than a scratch. Of the doorway only smoke and rubble remained, but beyond it was a steep shaft that led down through Sarasvati.
Yee tossed aside his pack and hurried in. Roycer and then Jemmi followed him down a long spiral staircase, smooth flowing steps formed by Sarasvati's living body. When daylight could no longer reach them, the steps above and below them glowed to light their way. They descended so far that Jemmi could feel herself becoming heavier.
A chitinous membrane blocked the passage and drew them up short. Yee placed his hand in its center, and it dilated open. They stepped through, and it silently closed behind them. Another blocked their way, and the air pressure changed and Jemmi's ears popped before it opened for them.
The stairs here were no longer alive. They were mathematically perfect, with precise lines and right angles that had never existed in Jemmi's world. They were a sterile white, against which Yee and Roycer seemed both more vivid and less whole. Jemmi had left Sarasvati, and was standing in the bare asteroid that protected her soft flesh from the harsh vacuum.
The white staircase was short, and it opened up into a cavernous chamber walled and floored in featureless white. The vaulted ceiling was a warm silky gray, chased with flickers of colored lights—Sarasvati's outer surface, pressed tight across the top of the space. At the center, as big as a house, a pristine fish-shaped shuttle was suspended over the floor by a set of jointed steel arms.
Yee rushed forward with a sound that was part gasp and part sob. He circled the shuttle, reaching out a hand and pulling it back to his mouth as if he were afraid to touch it. Jemmi ran her palm along its side. It was smoother than an egg, and cool.
"It's whole, and perfect!" Yee crowed. "At long last, I've done it!"
Jemmi nudged at it. "But, neh, Yee," she said. "It's dead. It doesn't go."
"Ah, but it will now." He caressed the canister he carried.
"What's in that thing, then?"
"Today, it is the greatest treasure in all the galaxy. I have carried it with me since before the Fall, when I first began to suspect that my enemies might take extreme measures to divest humanity of my direction."
"I thought you said they were the enemies of Cosmopolis."
"I may have—did you think there was any difference?"
Near the tail of the shuttle, Yee gingerly pried open a tiny drawer in the craft's skin and inspected its interior with one eye. Then he placed his palm on the lid of the canister and twisted. It came off with a chuff of air. He handed the lid to Roycer, and reverently held the container out towards Jemmi.
"Behold—one and a half liters of breeder nanos, sealed away long prior to the Fall." Inside was a gritty paste. It smelled like hot sand and rising bread dough. "This is quite possibly the last batch in existence untouched by the machine plague. Each speck can replicate thousands of the same nanomachines that built and ran the technology of the Cosmopolis. What I hold here is enough to raise an entire planet from the dark ages back to enlightenment. It is the key to our next empire."
He lifted the canister to the intake panel. "It would not do to waste it— would half a spoonful be too much?" He tilted a drop in. "The nanos will find the diagnostic system, and it will activate them to begin whatever repairs it needs."
He pushed the little drawer closed and bore those eyes of his into the surface of the spacecraft as if willing it to let him see its inner workings. Nothing happened for as long as Jemmi could hold her breath, and then a faint ticking and hissing sound emerged. Yee cackled with delight. "It will be no time at all now," he told Jemmi. "In a few hours you'll have had your first taste of fresh air. You will have seen your first sunset."
"But then we'll come back to Sara, neh?"
Still preoccupied, he answered, "What's that? Don't be absurd. Once you're on a real planet, you won't spare another thought for this rat-hole."
Jemmi turned her back on him. Near the entrance stood a heavy hand crank and a podium topped with switches and levers. She ran her hands over the alien textures and idly toyed with the switches to hear them click.
She closed a simple circuit that had remained alive across the centuries, and the floor beneath them disappeared, phasing into transparency. Her heart lurched and she groped for balance. She stood atop a star-spattered bottomless void, and looked between her feet far out into nothing. Suddenly, an edge of the emptiness was occluded by a shape that swung past her. For a moment, staring up into the chamber was a golden-green, slit-pupilled, lidless eye—flat, dead, and far broader than the entire launch bay. It was Albiorix.
Sara was unable to bring herself to release him, and he wafted like marshgrass in her embrace.
Jemmi stood transfixed until he swept beyond her range of vision, and said carefully, "Neh, Yee. I don't think I want to go with you."
Yee faced her, and his voice was cold with threat. "That is unacceptable, Jemmi. You have a great responsibility to humanity, and I need you by my side for the great works I will do. You will be my empress. One way or another you will accompany me, and I assure you that you will rejoice in the opportunity."
Jemmi averted her eyes from his. She reached out and placed a thought in Roycer's mind: Roycer, kill Yee. It's important.
Roycer sized up Yee with a stony glance, and quietly shucked his heavy pack. He took a few wary steps, and then rushed him. Suddenly startled, Yee snapped his head around, and Roycer froze in mid-stride. His muscles shuddered horribly as Jemmi leaned the force of her mind against Yee's. Blood trickled down Roycer's chin from where his jaw had clenched on his tongue.
"Is this the best you can do, child?" Yee sneered. "Use the last gasp of an exhausted puppet against me? Countless others with real weapons have made the attempt, and they have all failed." His stoop disappeared, and he became a towering presence in the white chamber. "I am the immortal Andrew Constantin Fujiwara Borsanyi, founder of the Cosmopolis, eternal First Lord of the League of Man, and architect of all mankind's history. Who are you?"