chapter 1
Running out under the big sky. Legs pumping and packed dirt keeping time under my feet. Sweat running down my bare back in the evening heat. No clouds between me and a million miles of nothingness above. I’d say it’s like heaven, or like sex, or like being on fire, but what would I know. Running is just running. It doesn’t need to be like anything.
I stop and lace my fingers behind my head and lean back. I don’t have to run long for the village to fade into a speck behind me. Everyone’s problems seem so life-sized when they’re smacking me and waving in my face for me to listen. But then they’re just these trails of smoke coming up from cooking fires in the distance.
I put my feet back to the dirt, one after the other. See if I can make it to the lip of the big canyon before the spindle-sun makes it to the lip of the sky.
No one else calls it the spindle-sun, but I do. Because that’s what it is: a spindle, or a spinning top, or a water jug with openings on top and underneath. When you look at it, the bloom of the light hides the spindle shape. But if you look for long enough, then look away, you’ll see it in the green afterimage in your vision. When I was a child drawing in the dirt with a stick, Father laughed and told me to draw the sun like a circle. And when I pointed at the sky and said “look,” I got my hand smacked with the stick.
My big sister Aula wrapped my fingers in special leaves for the pain. “You have to listen to your elders, Naran. When you don’t, bad things happen.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t explain it to her, that the bad things didn’t just “happen.” There was a man in our village who grew flowers on his land instead of food. Who lived off the gifts of others. Who never married. I saw him in passing every day, until one day I didn’t. His funeral rites were held. His brothers wept. His belongings were divided.
On the trail to the canyon I saw him again. Sleeping under a shelter, leaned against a tree. A plot of turned earth all around him, uneven with mounds of seeds. I pretended not to. I kept running. He hadn’t died. No one in the village had killed him. We had just made him into a ghost.
The canyon catches good long purple shadows from the sunset. The thin towers of rock leave misshapen streams flowing into the canyon below. The Two Lovers lean closer and closer in their shadows but never quite kiss. On nights with good clouds, the canyon looks like a blood-soaked battlefield full of fallen soldiers. Tonight it just looks solemn.
When I climb out of the canyon, only starlight reaches me. I stayed later than usual. I run back along the path of my own footsteps until the orange glow of the village watchfire crosses the horizon. Mother will curse me for worrying her. She’ll tell me all about how I broke my leg on a tree root and was lying in a creekbed in her mind’s eye. I run every day. I’ve never been more than a few hours distance from the village in my life. Every tree root and creekbed here is known to me. She won’t hear a word of it.
The cool slickness of my bedroll against the sweat of my back is a chilling relief. Like a zealot’s long-awaited death. Aula looks in on me with a flame cupped behind her hand. I keep my eyes closed. I don’t answer her when she calls my name.
My sister worries about me. About my prospects. She says no woman will sleep with a man who sleeps on the ground. I cannot tell her to mind her own business, because she believes that it is her business. I’m the first and only son. If I go running to the canyon every night, and never take a wife, and die childless, what will become of the family? Everything Father built, and everything his father built, will be pieced apart, divided among our jealous cousins.
“Everything” that they built. A hall of wood and stone with six small rooms. A single tilled field. A herd of goats whose count has never gone above a dozen heads. This is the dynasty that Aula and Mother scheme to protect, by giving flowers to the shaman’s daughter and saying they are from me.
Ah, who am I right now. I tense and relax the muscles of my shoulders, my back, my hamstrings and calves. Like patting down a horse so it can rest for the night. I hold the world of my mind loosely, so that it may slip away.
I shouldn’t wrong my family so in my thoughts.
It’s not their fault their world is so small.
I haven’t told them about the books.
At the bottom of the big canyon outside of the village, there is a cave. It’s tall enough for me to stand up straight, and wide enough for me to walk around. There’s space in the middle for me to build a small fire. I build a fire every night I go there. The stars are too dim to read by.
On the trail leading back up from the cave to the lip of the canyon, there is a god’s pock. A god’s pock, round and black, far enough across that if I laid down in the middle I wouldn’t reach either edge.
One night two years ago, I went running. I stood on the rim of the canyon, watching the stars. A bright light appeared in the sky. It grew, trailing fire, till the brightness dazzled my eyes. The falling star hit the stone of the canyon like thunder.
I sometimes wonder if that star was supposed to land in the village. If we were all meant to find it together. But that would mean the ones who sent it had missed.
I ran down the trail into the canyon. I hoped there would be something left of the falling star, something that I could show to Aula. Everyone hears that a god’s pock has a small strange rock in it sometimes, or a burnt blackened thing that crumbles to ash at your touch.
What I found was not that.
A hissing, shimmering boulder, glowing with heat in the night. Broad and square like a cord of firewood, as high as my ribs. Clear as water, but solid as stone. The answer to a riddle I couldn’t even imagine.
It scorched my fingertips like fire when I reached out to touch it. I walked around it, staring. I recalled all the myths I had grown up learning, but didn’t recall anything like this. It held its heat like a coal, so I piled dirt on it to help it cool.
On the top of the clear square boulder were three squares. Three images in relief that the dirt made clear. On the left, a figure with one large hand reaching into a hole the shape of a spindle. In the middle, the hand alone, fingers pinched together. On the right, a log, split open like a grin, revealing pots and knives and berries and leaves.
I noted, now, that on the front there was a hole the shape of a spindle.
I had never read before. Had never heard of reading. Had never thought about messages or meanings or writing or communication. All the stories and myths and songs and conversations around me in the village had been found objects. Stones from a river. Sticks broken off of trees. I had lived for sixteen years in darkness. A darkness that had blotted out even the idea of seeing.
When the clear square boulder had shed its heat, and the air above it went still and silent, I held up my hand like the figure in the first square. I reached into the hole and pinched my fingers. I felt resistance. Then the boulder opened its mouth wide, like it was opening a doorway. And where I looked to see the pots and knives and berries and leaves, I instead saw… something else.
Dyed textiles they seemed at first, in the starlight. Green and red and blue and black cloths. Neatly folded and arranged in stacks. Were these trade goods sent to one clan of spirits by another? Perhaps dropped by clumsy Albatross, acting the unlucky courier? The shaman might say so, to quiet the curious mind.
If I were Aula, I would close the doorway into the boulder. I would walk back to the village. In the morning, I would tell Father that I found something I didn’t understand. He would tell the shaman. The two of them would come to the canyon and do what they thought best with the mysterious goods in the water-clear, squared-off boulder that fell from the sky.
I reached in to touch them, to feel their fabric between my fingers. The boulder did not slam the doorway shut on my hand. The strange material of the objects held as much warmth as my skin. The texture was not like cloth, but like the hide of the young goat that had died in the spring. The fabric did not bunch up when I pinched. The stack did not give when I pressed.
I worked my fingers into a seam between the stacks. When I felt I had the grip to do so, I pulled up. The dyed hide was a covering, attached to the object beneath it. What I held in my hands was not a bolt of cloth, but a wooden block. Like a child’s plaything. They were stacks of over-large toy blocks.
I laughed. It was a toy-chest. A bizarre, impossible toy-chest.
I turned the green block over in my hands. Scratches on its surface flashed under the stars like rippling water. There were rows of the fine scratches, on the top face, and on one narrow side. The three sides of the block that weren’t covered with green hide were cream-colored. They rasped to the touch like dried grass or fallen bark. Nowhere on the block could I find another spindle-shaped hole.
I unloaded the grand toy-chest of block after block. Most varied only in color, and in the details of their scratches. But one block was not like the others. It was not a block at all. It was flexible and light to hold. Like a packet of flattened reeds, bound together to make a fan. Its face was smooth rather than grainy, and dyed in many colors. On its face was an image which I could just make out in the starlight: a crude but vivid drawing of three people, each holding up one of the strange blocks, with light sparkling all around them.
Covering the colorful fan with dirt did not bring the images into relief. The light of a low fire did. I sat on the ground and pored over each flattened reed. Studying the pictures, and the fine rows of scratches, by the unsteady light.
An hour passed, or more. I fed the fire with twigs and dead leaves. I inspected the fan of reeds from beginning to end, then turned it over and started again. I could not find the answer of what I was meant to do next.
The reeds wavered in the firelight. Sleep drew a sheet over my thoughts. The pictures danced, and swam, and became dreams. Became sound. The voice of the shaman, speaking in my ear. “A child carried a red block. Journeyed into the wilderness. Found food. Fought off monsters. Built a home. At every turn, the child opened the lid of the red block, looked closely, listened well, and drew upon the power inside.”
I snapped awake. The fire had burnt down to coals. In the starlight, I looked for the owner of the voice, so clear in my mind. I found no shaman. Saw no ghost. My eye fell upon the colorful fan of flattened reeds. Upon the child carrying a red block.
I looked through the pictures again, quickly, no longer without aim. Six pictures in total showed the child opening the red block and looking inside. In none of them did the block itself have pictures inside. Only scratches.
Suddenly, wordlessly, I knew. I saw. Awe and fear wrapped themselves around my heart. The fan had spoken a story into my dreams. That story, of the boy and his block, had made plain to me a message. That all of the blocks in the chest held stories of their own. But those blocks would not speak their stories through pictures. They would speak them through scratches.
What skill, what mastery of vision and wisdom, would one need to even tell one row of scratches from another? Who could find the story in a pictureless block, spoken through scratches that outnumbered the stars in the sky? Who could put such a story there? What power beyond myth had created these blocks?
The questions were too vast. I did not know. Could not know.
But there were scratches in the colorful fan. Below the six pictures of the child opening the red block. Thick scratches, in different colors, which I could tease apart into simple strokes. Flipping between the flattened reeds, I found a sequence that the six pictures all had in common. Each time this sequence was colored in the same red as the boy’s block.
I scratched the sequence out myself with a finger in the dirt. My body was shot through with thrills. My scratches and those on the reeds were the same.
“BOOK”
I did not know how to dream this short row of scratches into speech. But I knew what it meant.
Loaded again with all its blocks, the chest was too heavy to lift. But not too heavy to push down the trail, deeper into the canyon. There were caves and tunnels bored into the canyon’s walls, and little reason to explore them. The canyon was too far from the village for true children to play their games here. And no one ever ran with me.
I shoved the chest into the far corner of a cave. I smudged away the too-regular track I had left in the dirt. I walked back to the village. I couldn’t summon the energy to run at that late an hour, with the first hints of dawn already in the sky.
Was it courage or cowardice? Was I taking a gift which could have been shared with many and hoarding it for myself? Or was I protecting a faint ember in a dark night, a mystery that the shaman or Father would have seen as a threat and snuffed out?
I don’t know. Both, maybe. Maybe neither.
But I know that in the fan of flattened reeds, the sun was drawn as a spindle.
chapter 2
Rope. Saltwater. Pirates. Treasure. In the dream that I’m in, I’m shackled in the brig of a sailing ship. I don’t remember what I’ve done to end up here. The rusty door opens and the faceless captain steps in, quiet as a storm. He says my name. Slaps a broken plank of wood against one hand.
Father is in my room when my eyes open. His calloused fingers grip tight the long thin cane he uses on the goats. He asks me if I have anything to say for myself. I don’t talk back.
He orders me to stand, facing away from him, hands against the wall. I do so. Before he begins, he tells me to ask how many strikes I’ve earned. I say nothing. After our ritual silence, he says that the number is one hundred. My face is hidden from him. I still control my surprise.
The cane whistles, like a bird in flight. Then cracks like a thrown rock as it strikes the back of my calf. Other sons count the strikes out loud, when their fathers cane them. I keep silent. The cane whistles and cracks again. Father never misses the number he calls, over or under. Whistle, crack. Whistle, crack. Whistle, crack.
I judge the spindle-sun by the light it casts on the wall. Close to noon. I slept through the morning again, through hours of milking and weeding and uprooting. Father tells me, in short sentences punctuated by strikes of the cane, that he toiled through the work on his own.
I was allowed to sleep through the morning. I was not woken. Later, Aula will wrap my legs with strips of cloth, and press a passel of boiled herbs against the places I am bleeding. She will tell me that she had come to my room to shake me awake at dawn, just after Father left for the field. She will tell me that Mother had stopped her.
I do not tense up against the strikes. I do not hiss in pain. I do not do anything to give Father the idea that his punishment is working. Sometimes he aims a blow at my back, or my shoulders. It’s a surprise each time. But less painful than the welts blossoming on the back of my legs.
Forty is the highest Father has gone before today. By fifty, he stops controlling the blows so carefully. The crack of the cane comes faster, wilder, my spine, my ribs, the back of my head. My body curls up against my instructions, my head tucking in, my knees going to the ground. He won’t kill me. He’s won’t beat me until I’m unconscious. He’ll stop at one hundred.
I hadn’t been close to my parents before the books. Not like the characters sometimes are in the stories that the blocks have spoken to me. I hadn’t been close to anyone, except maybe Aula. But they could tell that the distance in me was growing greater. That I wasn’t a cold outer planet, so much as an escaping comet. That my life had some new center, drawing me away from them. That they weren’t the reason I ran to the canyon anymore.
The whistle and crack of the cane stops. The pain across my body is all one thing now. I feel the same way as if I’d fallen down a cliff of rough scree. Or been trampled by our goats. The pain hurts, but that’s all. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It can be tolerated. It would be different if I thought Father loved me. But I know that he does not.
He stands at the door. I roll onto my side, wanting to see his face. There’s sweat in his hair. His eyes show either boredom, or cold anger.
Father waits until his breathing slows down. Then he speaks, slowly, solidly. “The shaman had a vision. Says nature’s course is changing. Says fate may will Aula to lead our family.” After another of our silences, he walks out.
Later, Father and Mother will shout at each other. Mother will tell him he went too far. Father will tell her that the boy’s childhood is over. He will say that if her son keeps running off to the middle of nowhere, one day soon it will be a ghost that comes back.
I grind the hulls of the seed grass into a thick yellow dust. I stir in a small jar of goat’s milk to make a paste. For the first several weeks after I left the village, I had only seeds and shoots and green berries to eat. I could feel my body getting weaker day by day, my breath leaving me faster when I went running outside the canyon.
Maybe I would have stayed. Starved to death rather than submit. Or maybe after the belly stabs of hunger twisted into something worse, I would have gone back to life in the village. If I obeyed them, if I left behind the canyon, I could have earned my parents’ peace.
Maybe. I didn’t have to find out. Aula stole a goat for me.
“You did this,” she told me at the rim of the canyon. “You were desperate. You knew where Father kept them on rainy nights. You were already a ghost.”
She had guessed where I had gone. She had found my cave. She’d been checking in on me in my sleep. But she hadn’t seen the chest. Or the books. Or the radio transceiver.
I spread the milk-and-seed paste onto a flat, smooth stone. There’s a fire heating it from below. The paste will take time to cook into a meal. I sit and wait for the spindle-sun to cross the lip of the canyon. Then I adjust the antenna on the transceiver, and tap the signaling needle in time to the message that I send, each day, unacknowledged into the void.
In one of the books, they called themselves the People of the Sun. Not gods, or figures of myth, or kings. Just people. More people than I could count, or imagine counting. More than all the villages of the world combined. All living on a spindle small enough that I could cross it in one day at a run. A spindle that circles around the world to make our day and night, our seasons and tides. Our world. What they call the Gray Earth.
The People of the Sun say that they cannot help the people of Gray Earth. Their food does not nourish. Their medicines do not heal. Their ships do not survive the journey. The chest full of books was not the first artifact the People of the Sun tried to slip through the net separating our world from theirs. Many subtle and powerful inventions were sent to aid us, only to blacken and turn to ash. They are hopeful that the strange barrier between us can be breached by witholding devices, and instead sending instructions.
Summer’s heat cooled to an autumn chill before I could construct the radio transceiver. With a black-covered book as my guide, I dug through caves for crystals. Refined stones into metal over fire. Trapped a rabbit for its fur, in more days of trying than it would take a slow child. Walked six days to the ocean to comb for beach glass, and six days back.
The day that my cobbled-together bundle of metal and crystal and wire played static as the antenna pointed at the sky, I went to sleep happy. That night there was rain. In the morning, the dead transceiver responded to me with silence.
Now, every morning, I drag the rebuilt transceiver out of the cave, piece by piece. Set each piece down on the trail at the bottom of the canyon, where no happenstance scout from the village could see. Reassemble the radio. And during the one hour every day when the spindle-sun makes itself visible from the bottom of the canyon, send signals to the People of the Sun.
I slide the crispy seed flat off the cooking stone. I tap out my brief message on the transceiver. Pause for a bite of food. Tap out the message again. The meal is almost filling. And less burnt than last time. Mother makes fried root cakes that are like this, only ten times better.
Autumn’s grey clouds gave way to winter’s black rains as I called my mantra into the sky. Like a shaman praying to spirits whose powers and duties are beyond my ken. Any word in this message, this same message I wrote sixty days ago, would be enough. If only I could know it had gotten through.
“Hi.” Here I am.
“I have read your books.” It’s just me. I’m done with the reading. They’re still yours. Thank you for letting me borrow them.
“I wish to meet.” It’s a wish. Somewhere between a request and a fantasy. To travel to the spindle-sun myself. Or receive the People of the Sun here, in a canyon outside a village on this Gray Earth.
“Hi. I have read your books. I wish to meet.”
Seventy-one taps, in the transmission code, counting short and long as the same. I’ve now sent it thousands of times.
I should not be disappointed that I have to be persistent. The book was thorough on this point. Life on the spindle-sun is chaotic. It is not easy or free to listen for a faint cry from the distant ground. The advice they gave was to try for thirty days. Then do a full rebuild of the radio. Then try for thirty more.
This is day sixty. If I find no success today, it will be time to change. Signal at different times of day. Get as many obstacles out of the way as possible. Move to higher ground.
The spindle-sun crosses the western rim of the canyon. There is no reply.
The most promising spot is a hill, twenty minutes away running. I haven’t gone running in many weeks. The rain feels less refreshing with no dry clothes to change into. The winter air and the stone of the cave have me cold all the time. My legs do not have the strength they did back in the village. I imagine dragging the transceiver piece by piece from the cave to the hill every day, and back every night. My body shivers.
The People of the Sun have generations of built-up knowledge. Passed down through books like the ones they passed down to me. That is their chief power over those of us on the Gray Earth. But they have a cleverness as well. A sight that sees things not as they are, but as they could be. When they wanted to send a package of books through a sky that would set them aflame, they crafted a novel thing, a chest out of crystal, to bear them to their destination.
A chest which is, I note, large enough to hold all the pieces of the radio transceiver.
My lungs heave. My legs burn. Rain soaks my clothes and disturbs the dirt. I step back from the chest and rub the ache in my shoulder. My goat grazes idly nearby.
The hill is steeper than I remembered. Steeper than the canyon trail. When I drove the chest bearing the radio out of the canyon, I was fresh. Now my strength is spent. But I can see the concealing brush at the top of the hill, where the chest will not be spotted from below. I will myself to push on.
The books I buried in the cave. They had been hiding there already the last two and a half years. I hope they’ve grown fond of it.
The chest is latched. Its seal holds well against the rain and the mud. I struggle to keep traction under my feet. To get leverage enough that my effort moves the chest up the hill, rather than into it. There is nothing to ease my path. No chance of rest. I slip, and I get up, and I slip again. I struggle on.
The storm passes after I reach the summit. The chest I hide away in the hilltop’s brush. The stars witness me as I am taken by sleep.
I chew on grass seeds. Drink rainwater from a small jar. Finish limping up the hill. Unpack the transceiver, assemble it, point its antenna at the dawning spindle-sun, signal my seventy-one-tap message. Listen to the faint static that always follows.
A week more spent calling my mantra into the sky. Every hour that the spindle-sun is in the sky. Breaking down the radio whenever the rains come. Telling myself to go back to the cave in the canyon, build a fire, try to get dry. But not wanting to suffer more distance on my swollen ankle. Not wanting to miss the spindle-sun’s return at the end of the rain.
I tap out my message again. I think of Aula. I wonder how she is. Wonder whether, if I came back, she would protect me. I imagine what Mother would want from me. What Father would do to me. I imagine them learning that I’d died out here. They would be sad, I think. But only Aula would grieve.
The faint static of the radio receiver goes silent. Returns. Goes silent again. My heart jumps. It jumps at every blip. Every faulty connection in the wiring that tricks me into hope.
I take out the workbook and the sharpened charcoal I keep in the chest. I write down the silences in the static, trying to match the length of the silence and the stroke. They don’t look random. They’re regular, and crisp, and a good match for the notation from the books. I fill a sheet of workpaper with rows and rows of quick shorts and longs. When my cramping hand demands a rest, I look back at what I’ve written. The pattern leaps off the page. With heavy lines I draw a box around one repeat of the message. It’s not much longer than mine.
The People of the Sun have said so much already.
(My heart is shouting like I’m running downhill to the village with a wild wind behind me.)
Hundreds of books, each with hundreds of pages.
(I decode the marks from dashes to letters so rapidly that the charcoal snaps in my grip.)
But this is the first thing they’ve said to me.
(I feel the wetness on my cheeks before I know that I’m crying.)
“Hi. We wish to help. Not easy, but we believe in you.”
chapter 3
My feet leave sure tracks in the brown-gray loam. My mouth and nose take in the pine needles and sea salt on the wind. My back drips with sweat, and cools off like menthol, like sleep, as I pass from the gaze of the spindle-sun into the shade of the forest.
I have lost track of how many seasons it’s been since I left the village. Since I first made contact with the People of the Sun. On my own in the wilderness, going where I will, doing as I please, I have felt no call to count the days and months of my living.
The People of the Sun who responded to my mantra call themselves Outreach. They are a small team, they say, operating with little backing, under many constraints. Their stated goal is to foster a relationship of learning between the spindle-sun and Gray Earth. Their approach toward this goal was for many years limited to observation and analysis. Their first intervention in two decades was a crystal chest full of books.
There is much that Outreach does not tell me. I do not know their names, or how many they number. But they ask good questions, and learn more from my answers than I would have thought possible.
I told them about my hunger, and my chills, and my body weakness. They asked me what loose roots grew wild nearby. I wondered if people from the village, when I made conversation with them, felt the same disorientation I felt then.
Outreach had me find one plant that I described, and boil it in a pot along with a metal plate taken from the radio. They assured me the plate would be functional afterward. That broth of weedy yellow roots gave me the energy I’d lost since leaving the village. Invigorated, I put together a shelter on the hill and made camp next to the chest and the radio. Spared from the strain of hiking up and down the hill each day, my ankle healed on its own.
Before contacting Outreach, I had believed that the books contained all the knowledge I would ever need, if only I were clever enough to apply it. I can’t say that I was wrong. But I am only as clever as I am. No library can ease the path from ignorance to mastery the way a teacher can.
With their input, I have redesigned my radio three times. Purifying metals, seeking clearer crystals, miniaturizing the components, adding protection against the elements. Outreach seemed cheerfully surprised that their transmissions arrived in my device as silence amid static, and not the reverse. The latest transceiver renders the spindle-sun’s invisible waves as a bird’s clear chirp.
I have never been a hunter, but they taught me to trap and prepare game. They led me to the best herbiage for my goat to eat, and her milk is much improved. I wear cloaks of hide and sleep under blankets of spun fiber. I have all that I need to survive.
But my dearest-held boon is the time. The ease. I have no fields to till or plant or weed or harvest. No chores or errands or favors or duties. I still wish to meet the People of the Sun, but I find myself content to wait. My discussions with Outreach range widely, on topics of every kind. I run every day, sometimes for hours. I have traveled far from the canyon and the hilltop, for weeks at a time, and seen new rivers, coasts, forests, and plateaus.
And I have reread all of the books. Coming to the same story again, years later, I find myself a different reader. Flourishes and complications once hidden present themselves unabashed. I have conversations with Outreach making sense of each book’s story. They teach me things that I didn’t know could be taught.
What must their lives be like? To me they are unnamed strangers, writing messages on the other side of the radio. They do not detail their circumstances. But I imagine them happy. Living in relationship, in community. Each day devoted the self-directed passions of their souls. Each night given over to dancing and drums, singing and laughter, talking about all existence until the stars fade from vision beneath the warm light of dawn. A village of sovereigns. Perhaps one day I will join them.
“Stop.”
In the forest. Between two stands of trees. A chokepoint. Four men, leaning on walking sticks topped by spearheads. We are several days from the village, far from the cave and the canyon and the hill. But I know their faces as they know mine. And with them, my big sister. Aula.
“Heed my call, oh spirit, oh goat thief, oh shirker of duty. Fate bade me fetch you from the between-lands and bear you back to the hearth of your birth. It is willed that no harm should come to you, should you show restraint and fair sense.”
A tension overtakes my muscles as I listen to this stranger who was my sister, reciting forms and making demands. She is no warrior, for she holds no weapon. She is no shaman, for her words are not spoken with power; they are like clothing that does not fit. But her face is hard, and her hair is shorn to above her ears.
I do not hurry to catch my breath. I lace my hands behind my head and stare up at the canopy of green-gray needles. One of the men from the village shifts his weight away from his walking stick.
“You speak of restraint. Yet you bring weapons. You speak of fair sense. But you choose to intimidate rather than persuade. You speak of fate…” I stop myself. Why am I always drawn to explain to those who have chosen not to understand? “Tell me why you have come.”
Aula converses quietly with her armed companions. One of them nods, and she turns back to me. “Father is dead, Naran. You are being summoned to attend his funeral. And to do your duty for your family. Come home.”
Surprise. Confusion. He was healthy enough when he caned me bloody before I left. So anger, then. And a missing place where the pain should be.
“How?”
One of the men speaks up. “Accident. Fell tending the goats, cut his leg open on a rock. It went bad. The shaman couldn’t help.”
If I were a good son, I would be swept under by waves of guilt and grief. Would he still be alive if I hadn’t left? Could Outreach have found a way to stop the infection? What would become of Aula and Mother if I didn’t come back?
The questions come to me, but with little force. My parents’ fault, I want to say. I want to say that they abandoned me years before I opened the chest of books. That if they had ever really cared for me, I would never have grown so distant. But I don’t say it. I don’t think it’s true.
“You say it is my duty to come home. For the funeral. For you and Mother.” I let out a breath. “I decline this duty.”
The men with her are less impressive to me now than when I was younger. They ride no mounts, wear no armor, whisper no secrets of reason or magic. They’re just people. Their feet are buried deep in the clay of Gray Earth, from which they do not think to escape. I will not struggle to outrun them.
Pain in my sister’s eyes. And something like love, or like hatred. “You are not Naran. You are a ghost. A nowhere man. For nothing, you have killed Mother’s only son, and my — only brother.”
Aula stops. She will not cry, in front of the men of the village. If we talked in private, away from the ears of the village, she would say more. So would I. Maybe I would say something of what I have found, what I am continuing to find. Maybe with Father gone, we could find a middle ground.
But we have no radio between us. The men make no move to leave. She does not ask them to. Our trust has died.
“Dig two graves,” I tell her. My throat tightens. I do not say anything else. Neither does she.
chapter 4
I pull the metal from the smelting fire with the tongs, and place it upon the anvil. I hammer it flat, to start with. Then transfer the plate onto the cylindrical stone form, and hammer the edges down. Half the outer plating of the fuselage. If it takes, this time. I walk away and leave it to cool. I drop the hammer on the ground behind me as I go.
Summer has once again left me. The insults of rain, and the necessary defenses of roofs and walls, have returned. My third winter living on the broad plateau I have chosen as my base of operations. Outreach found it for me, of course. Well away from the eyes and spears of the village. Atop steep cliffs of scree. One narrow path up, with many switchbacks.
After Father died, I grew restless with my life of ease. The pleasure of aimlessness turned sour in my mouth. The lingering effects of Father’s life — a house, a family, a herd of goats — were like ripples in rainwater. If one of Aula’s spearmen had killed me that day, I would have left no ripple at all.
From the canyon I retrieved the books with black covers, the technical manuals. The rest I saw buried again. Fewer distractions. I left the chest behind, in the brush at the top of the hill. If the vegetation dies there or if the hill is ever climbed, someone may stumble across it. It would be hard not to. Emptied of its payload, it is a relic of mystery. Let them find it, and wonder.
The goat I brought to where she could see the village. She ambled back toward the watchfire in the night, unslowed by any affection. My diet of small game, roots, and seeds would be sufficient. I wasn’t going to live off Aula’s charity.
For three seasons I labored alone on the plateau, following the schematics in the black manuals. I consulted Outreach, but only as needed. The many devices in those books seemed complex beyond understanding, when I first traced my finger over their diagrams. But so had seemed reading itself, that first night in the canyon.
I built prototypes. I tried, and erred. I made progress. The designs would ask me, sometimes, for a material which I did not possess, and which I had no way to acquire. Gray Earth did not have the same natural resources as the spindle-sun. I worked around these gaps as best I could, altering the design, or finding a substitute. Often this worked. Sometimes it did not.
I grew impatient. Irritated that I could not devote my full attention to my craft. I had no other goals, and no one else’s demands upon my time. But daily I was distracted by chores from which I had nothing to learn. Cooking meals. Trapping game. Foraging for food. Digging for ore and glass and shale and quartz. Mending my clothes, and maintaining my sleeping hut and the sheds against the weather.
There are other peoples upon this Gray Earth. Just as there are other peoples on the spindle-sun. There are other villages where I am not a ghost. Villages where I might trade for the goods I need at a price less dear than my time.
When spring had sent all of its rain, I set out from the plateau with a sample of my recent works. Piezoelectric discs which glow when squeezed. Glass lenses which reveal things invisibly small or distant. Pots of refined oil which burn hotter and brighter than any fuel I had heard of outside of myth. I left behind the more intricate or dangerous creations, so as to avoid frightening those I met.
I found that the people of the new village and I did not share a language. I could not ask Outreach to aid with translation — I had not brought my radio. I learned some words of theirs, and taught them some of mine. But words were not the primary gap between us.
I slept in the head woman’s house. She was unmarried, and not unattractive. I was mysterious and self-possessed. I’d had no previous experience with rituals of the body, beyond dancing slowly under the stars at fourteen with the shaman’s daughter. But I had read all of the books which were sent to me by the People of the Sun.
With my techniques, it did not take long to satisfy her. After a short respite, she showed an interest in making the satisfaction mutual. But I was weary from travel. Distracted in my mind by questions of metallurgy, and aerodynamics, and fuel efficiency. She arranged her body against mine in bed and fell into a deeply relaxed sleep. Next to her, I lay awake.
I left the new village the next day. I had traded away all my samples. I brought back six packmules, laden with foodstuffs, textiles, minerals, and tools.
Those from the new village traded my samples to their neighbors. The neighbors asked where the strange goods had come from. Word spread, about the nowhere man on the broad plateau. After that, I made no more journeys. The people from other villages have made their journeys to me.
The days are long but the seasons are short. On any given day, I do not cook, or gather food, or materials. I work. I spend hours refining raw materials. Honing the edges and points of finer and finer tools. Practicing build steps on scrap objects when some material for the final device is too scarce to waste.
But progress grinds to a halt. Since the success of the radio transceiver, there is one piece of technology upon which my eyes have been firmly fixed. Other breakthroughs and devices are forthcoming. A functional rocket is not.
The first prototype didn’t ignite. The second one exploded. The third corkscrewed off the plateau and into the valley. The fourth shot straight up, carrying my heart with it. It fell back to the Gray Earth ten seconds later, its fuel reserves burnt out.
Small things, these failed rockets. No larger than a bird of prey. Designed to reach the spindle-sun, one hour’s space flight away, bearing the payload of a rolled-up page. A message in a bottle.
There is a black manual I have read in great detail which contains the schematics for a rocket. Many rockets, in fact. Ships designed to carry one person, or ten, or a thousand. Designed to escape any world’s pull, to withstand any atmosphere’s friction.
But the components and assemblage of even the simplest rockets in the manual are complex to the point of impossibility. Rare alloys combine extremes of lightness and strength. Exotic fuels burn hot as lightning, hot as the stars. Layers of circuitry and wiring, rods and tubing, precisely machined parts, control each rocket’s operations.
I do not have to build a rocket. I have to invent one.
I spend weeks after each launch investigating the causes of failure, throughout the chain of theory, design, material, and workmanship. There are always many causes, in every stage. With each prototype I am forced to take a new approach. Start from scratch.
There is not enough space on the plateau to lose myself in running. And when I would run in the valley below, I was like a hunted deer. The sightlines are broken by buttes and tall cairns. Behind each one in my mind’s eye, Aula waited for me. I pace from one project to another instead.
I dialogue with Outreach. They have grown unhelpful. They ask their leading questions still, on the subject of rockets, and the materials available for my use. Is there any avenue, however unusual, for refining the rare alloys, the exotic fuel? No, I reply, again and again, there is not.
I press them to answer me directly. Why can they not send a new schematic? A simplified design, for a rocket that I could build with such materials as are present on Gray Earth. Is designing and building such a rocket truly impossible? Is this all a test of my will? Their response is to quote back a proverb, about navigating with no map, from one of their useless books. It takes me most of the next day to put the radio back together.
On a dark clear morning before dawn, with the clouds absent and the winds still, I launch my seventh attempted rocket. I watch through a lens from the other end of the plateau. Smoke and fire pour forth and cover the ground beneath the rocket for a dozen feet in every direction, like a bank of fog. After several seconds’ uncertainty, the rocket rises skyward on a slender tower of fire. Too late. Failure. The weight of the fuel itself was too much to lift. The fuselage breach and rapid total combustion a half minute later is an afterthought.
My eyes adjust back to the deep blue-black of the early morning. I catch sight of faint floating lights in the valley. They do not seem to be afterimages. With my lens I identify the source as a small caravan. My own glowing crystals hang from their wagons, as lanterns.
A trading party from a foreign village, then. Who would know me by reputation as a crafter of odd, useful trinkets. Who have just watched a creature of flame claw its way screaming into the sky above my plateau, and burst like thunder into potshards and torn metal and ash.
I hear their shouting. In their native tongue, not the trade pidgin I’ve grown familiar with. They are shouting to each other. They are reckoning with what the nowhere man has created.
I am not in danger. There is only one point of entry onto this plateau. At each switchback in the narrow path there are defenses. Sharpened pikes, thorned wire, buckets of oil set to spill and catch fire. If they assault the plateau against my warnings, to kill me and take what is mine, they will do so slowly, and in full view. I can take up the crossbow that I’ve constructed and pull the trigger as needed. I am not in danger.
They leave their wagons and packmules and approach. Eight traders stop at the base of the scree cliff, away from the narrow path, and wait, kneeling, heads bowed. Upon my urging, one rises to his feet and calls up through the crisp, still air. He does not appear to be the leader. He is too young, for one. In his prime. But he speaks the language of my village with a certain confidence, and in this he may be alone. Of the six men, I note that he is the only one who is clean-shaven.
“Heed our prayers, oh shaman of flames, oh sky watcher, oh craftsman. By creation and destruction you have driven the innocence from our hearts; your sign has revealed you, Telonacht. We will follow your edict and enact your command, should you accept our submission.”
Telonacht. Bringer of Ends. A figure of myth among the people of my village. Among the people of other villages as well, it would seem.
I bid them go so that I may consider. None of them stand. The one who spoke returns to his knees. He says they will not be moved until I accept their allegiance or forsake them. Perhaps they fear that I am testing their intentions, as demigods in stories so often do. Perhaps they are right.
I pace about my scorched, scrap-littered camp. It is strange. That the loyalty of men seems such a dangerous possession to claim. I have split a shooting star. Trained my mind to understand voices distant and past. Eaten the accumulated knowledge of a culture at its zenith. Built tools animated by forces unimagined even in myth. All this has felt clean. Aligned with my personhood. Aligned with reaching the People of the Sun.
But to control the will of another. To wield power over them that they cannot match or understand. This, my soul tells me, would be corrosive. Safer to ask for a promise of secrecy and send them on their way.
Safer… yet no less disregarding of their will. If my prayer to Outreach had been met with dismissal, out of some striving of theirs to avoid the misuse of their power, would my fate have been improved? Would I have even survived the winter?
I descend the narrow path from the plateau. As I reach each switchback, each defense, I move it aside. I walk around the base of the cliffs to speak to the traders on the valley floor. Their eyes do not flicker toward me as I come into view, but their muscles and their breathing become taut. I feel the same tension as I begin to speak.
“I will not have you as slaves, lacking will. I will not have you as children, lacking strength. I will have you as allies, if you have heart enough to walk the path that has brought me to this place.”
The one who spoke translates my words. I tell them of the hill, and the canyon. The god’s pock. The cave. “Go there, without goods and without weapons. Unearth the blocks, marked by fine scratches of wisdom and power. Take one each. Rebury the rest. Then return to me. You will learn what edict I would have you follow, and what command I would have you enact.”
At this, they assent, and make for their caravan. The young, clean-shaven man turns back and catches my eye. There is an assuredness in his gaze, a knowing confidence. He nods*.*
chapter 5
The patter of rhythmic footfalls on the rough pebbles of the valley floor. The in and out of other chests rising and falling in time with mine. The stone towers arising and passing away on my sides while my companions stay constant. The movement of our bodies through the land empties my mind.
I wipe the sweat from over my eyes, and the motion breaks the group’s focus. Tsasha gives a quick laugh between breaths. Enoke addresses me in his joking tone, gasping out two words at a time through labored breathing, not quite finishing a thought. Demeron calls all of us to a halt, telling Enoke to catch his breath so he can share with everyone his critical observation.
“I was saying, Tsasha must have gotten on Telonacht’s bad side. Or else why would he try to smite her in the face with his elbow?”
Of the eight traders who witnessed the sign of Telonacht, five returned the next month carrying books. Of those, two went back to their village with every intention of learning the art of the story-telling block. Three elected to make camp together at the foot of the plateau. Those three became my disciples.
They were all three unmarried, with no responsibility for household or livestock or field. The only three young enough that to risk everything sounded an adventure, rather than a kind of betrayal. The two smallholders could afford to journey to the cave, but not to uproot their entire life. The three senior men had expected a block to be brought back for them.
The disciples learned quickly. Demeron, the young man who had spoken for the traders, taught the other two my language. I taught them all the language of the books. Within three months, they had each mastered the stories of their first book and begun tutoring the others. Within the first year, they had retrieved the greater fraction of the library buried in the cave, and gained a fair understanding of the technology I had built. By the end of the second summer, they had learned that which I knew how to teach, and begun on their own courses of research.
Their new energies and perspectives do not solve the problem of the rocket. But they do open up other avenues of progress. Tsasha investigates the effect of various plants and extracts upon health and disease, often using herself as a test subject. Enoke works through texts concerning sociology, politics, and governance, creating schemes to promote inter-village cooperation. Demeron is more general in his interests, learning many things about engineering, mathematics, and the sciences, with no single focus that I can discern. He spends more time with me than the others, asking about my process as I build and rebuild devices, deepening his understanding of my techniques.
One afternoon, Tsasha and Enoke go on a foraging trip beyond the valley. I work on shaping and attaching the fins of another prototype. Several times in recent years I have set aside the project of building a rocket, but never have I given up. While the shaped metal fins are cooling, Demeron approaches carrying two plates of food. Over our meal, he asks me why I have maintained such strict silence about the esis.
I take a bite of the gray-green fried vegetables he prepared for me and think. “I do not recall what you might mean by ‘esis.’”
Demeron looks suspicious. Then sly. “The sensations surrounding your artifacts, Naran. The energy that you put into their creation. The bird of paradise rainbow that blooms from your radio and cascades down from the spindle-sun.” He pauses. “Esis.”
He retrieves a red-covered book from his tent, the first book he brought back from the cave. It is a tale about, among other things, a warrior with no weapons, who navigates with no map, and kills an immortal chieftain with no violence. It is said at times that he accomplishes these things through “esis.” Demeron shows me several pages where the word appears, each time circled in fine charcoal. The term, like many used in the story, is never explained or defined.
“The Sword of Kings is fictional,” I tell Demeron. “No, more than that. Some fiction is near enough to truth that only happenstance turns it false. But the races of the slender and the stout, the world of castles and crowns, the Sword of Kings itself. This ‘esis’ you speak of. They are not, and never could be.”
“So you said before,” Demeron says without pause. He smiles knowingly, with the self-assurance that I often find endearing. He believes he is onto my game. “And so I believed. But as it is written in Cortex, many things come to be in the deep ocean of time which no one bobbing on the surface could fathom. Outreach and the People of the Sun are proof of that.”
I attempt to keep the conversation grounded without condescending to him. “Demeron. You shouldn’t apply fictional reasoning to the real things we’ve experienced —”
“Esis is real,” he interrupts. His smile is now one of frustration. “It is limited, and subtle, yes, yet it can be shaped like fabric or worked like metal, and it exists all around us!” Demeron lowers his voice. “I know the other two have not recognized it. That for whatever reason, they are not ready for your lessons. But I have. And I am.”
Demeron closes his eyes. I am still, and silent. Perhaps this is what has occupied his time these last months. What would Outreach call it. A hallucination? A delusion? An intense belief in a web of secret forces, which leave no trace in the outer world and so cannot be disproved. There had been a book which addressed in great detail the diseases of the mind, which I read years ago with little comprehension. It might be necessary to read it again.
But I must face the other possibility Demeron points to. A decade ago, I knew nothing of the basic facts of my present life. The written word. Electricity. Radio. The People of the Sun. I would have dismissed such things as madness or disturbed dreaming. Could there not be further mysteries, beyond those that Outreach has already revealed? But if so, why reference such a mystery only in guise of fiction, when so much else has already been plainly spoken?
I think, and take another bite of fried vegetables. They are cold. Colder than the mild autumn air around us. Those vegetables still on my plate bead with condensation. What’s more, as the seconds pass, their color shifts, from gray-green to bright blue.
Demeron opens his eyes and rubs the creases from his forehead.
I am a boy standing at the rim of a canyon, staring up at the night sky, transfixed by a streaking tail of fire, which crashes to the ground with a clap of thunder at my feet.
“Thank you. My friend. For the demonstration.”
He smiles, and does not speak. I know him. I have seen him after winning an argument before. So I know that he is terribly pleased with himself.
We radio the obvious questions to Outreach, and talk excitedly while we wait. Demeron and I both feel an electric, conspiratorial joy. After a long and unusual delay, the transceiver chirps out their reply. I read it aloud to Demeron as I mark it down. Their words are stilted, and cryptic.
“If there is such a thing as you describe. A phenomenon which defies rational accounting. And if we had knowledge of same. Yet have not imparted it to you. Then one might conclude that aught else may defy rational accounting. And that such knowledge cannot be imparted by us, to you. Any more than we could send you a rocket.”
A sudden fury overtakes my disciple. “Why? By the spindle-sun, why? What binds their tongues here and their hands there? We are children starving on an island, and they are lords of the seen and unseen feasting in a castle in the sky! What purpose of theirs could be served by their riddles and their toying, aside from rank sadism? What crimes did our people commit beyond ancestral memory that we should be shackled to this planet and abused like prisoners in chains?”
I turn off the radio without sending a reply. I lay my hands on Demeron’s shoulders. I tell him that he is right. That it is unjust. That it is horrible. That the people of Outreach, or the People of the Sun, have marked our lives as being lesser.
“But their decisions we cannot control.”
The sheen in Demeron’s eyes does not form into tears. He nods in agreement, or acceptance.
“We will research esis ourselves. Work out its implications. Whatever Outreach hides from us, we will find. You are not a helpless child, Demeron. You are the chosen disciple of Telonacht.”
Demeron takes hold of my hands. He thanks me for my kind words. There is something more he wants to say, I think, but he swallows his words. I do not press. Demeron goes back to his tent, to think and to plan, alone. I attach the hardened fins to the body of the rocket. Tsasha and Enoke return with their baskets of herbs and roots.
Soldiers. Secrets. Creeping forward. The cover of darkness. In the dream that I’m in, I am a spy in enemy camp. The grip of a guard turns me around, and a revolver leaps up to rest against my jaw. Sudden and hot and loud, it goes off.
I wake up to the silence following an explosion. I am not in my childhood room, not in the village. I am in my cabin, on the plateau. And someone has launched a rocket.
Bits of shrapnel are scattered across the entire plateau. Enoke looks out from his tent, disoriented. Tsasha is running somewhere with the bundle of medical supplies, but freezes when she sees me. Her eyes flick to Demeron, lying on the ground. Bloodied. Not moving.
I shout and wave for her to come. I run to kneel over him. What have you done, what have you done. Dull red blood flows from over one eye, down into his ear, his hair. I cradle the back of his head with my hand. It is sticky, tacky with blood. His clothes aren’t blackened with soot, his limbs aren’t askew at strange angles. But if the explosion threw him from his feet, then his fatal wounds would lie within him. Out of our reach. And if Demeron dies, then I know that I have killed him.
Tsasha shifts his arm and puts her fingers on the inside of his wrist. A few moments of tension. Then her body dips slightly with relief. She unrolls the medical bundle and pulls out the herbal disinfectant, and a cloth, and the bandages.
Demeron is still unconscious when we lay him down on my bed. Tsasha witnessed the explosion. The attempted launch. She was awake before dawn, and heard Demeron’s movements. She looked out to see him standing just outside his own tent, facing a rocket poised on the launch area some two hundred feet away. But upon ignition, the rocket didn’t achieve lift off. It was pierced from within by a sudden column of light, blue-white, painful to behold. Tsasha averted her eyes, and wondered at the orange starburst afterimage in her vision. Then she heard the explosion. Then the thump of Demeron hitting the ground.
Tsasha asks me if this accident is a result of Demeron’s esis. I tell her that I do not know.
I am there at his bedside an hour later when he stirs. Demeron’s hand comes up and touches the bandages wrapped around half of his face. I take his wrist so that he does not pull them off. My palm is still stained with his blood.
“Naran. I’m… sorry.” Demeron looks up at me. His gaze does not meet mine. “I expected that to work.”
Under his bandages, one large gash stretches across half of his forehead, from his eyebrow to his temple. The back of his head is scraped raw from the dirt. After our conversation ends, Tsasha will return and apply pressure to Demeron’s various internal organs. When he does not react with pain, and not until then, will an anxiety in my chest unknot.
I stand up from my chair. “You could have died.”
Demeron stares at the floor. As if there is defiance in his features that he wishes to hide from me. “I wanted to surprise you.”
In another mood, I might have pointed out that he did. Instead, I ask him, my voice controlled and quiet, to explain himself.
He directs me to a thin stack of workpaper in his tent, concealed between two books. They are notes in Demeron’s hand, but concern information I never shared with him. Fault analysis of each rocket launch, going back three years. Calculations of fuel weight, energy density, escape velocity. Diagrams from the black manual of rockets, detailing the moldable, gel-like fusion fuel used by the spacecraft of the People of the Sun.
I throw the notes aside. They splay on the floor of my cabin. “You’ve violated my trust. Whatever your reasons. Whatever the outcome. How can I let you work by my side — how can I protect you — when I cannot know what new secret you’re hiding, or what reckless risk you might next take?”
Demeron looks up at me, a tightness in his jaw, a shimmer of wetness in his unbandaged eye. He says nothing to defend himself. He awaits my judgment. Awaits my wrath.
I am wrathful. I want to tell Demeron, in restrained tones, barely holding back my rage, to leave this plateau and to never return. I would not strike him in anger. Because I’m a better person than Father. I would never beat someone I’m responsible for. So I have to cover my violence in a cloak of caring.
I am hurt. I want to hurt him back. Want him to feel how I felt when I knelt with his body on the ground and imagined him dead. That is the truth. Truer than my talk of violations and recklessness.
How deeply had I hurt Father, that he would beat me as he did? I held his heart in my hands all those years and never knew.
“Demeron…” I have no words for what I mean to say to him. No examples. No experience. No techniques. “I care about you. I would… hate myself, if you were to die. None of this could be worth that. And… with your power, and your cleverness… I don’t know how to keep all of this from… consuming you.”
Demeron’s mouth is just open, but not forming words. The air between us hangs still with the threat of thunder. I wait. If I have done anything at all with my words, it is to put myself in the path of the storm.
Tears form and fall on Demeron’s face. He clenches his jaw, holding onto his composure, putting words to his agitation. “You have to let me. Take risks. Use my power. If you’re behind me, we can be smart. Do things right. If you put anything off-limits… I will go around those limits. Because that’s what I do. Because I am absolutely crazy about helping you achieve your dreams, Telonacht. Whether you want me to or not.”
There is a fierceness to him I missed before. Something untameable. “Ferothal,” I say, with a catch in my throat. “The Wild One.” Telonacht’s companion from myth.
He smiles at the title, at the implication. “Is that a yes?”
I nod. And give him my word.
I address Tsasha and Enoke, soon after, with Demeron sitting up in bed at my side. This morning’s failed launch, I inform them, was a successful application of Demeron’s esis. He has converted our strongest oil into Outreach’s own fusion fuel, increasing its energy density astronomically. With this fuel, we believe the last great barrier has fallen. Together, we will do what on my own I could not: land a rocket on the spindle-sun.
chapter 6
We raise simple imperfect glasses of sparkling clear wine. Around a grand, warm bonfire, we take turns, the four of us, giving overwrought speeches, proclaiming each other’s virtues and attainments, cheering and drinking often. Enoke is the best at this game, but complains repeatedly and loudly that his drink is too bitter and sharp upon his tongue. Demeron takes pity on him and esifies his champagne into grape juice.
Our test launch this morning was a success. After three years of attempts, after eighteen failures, a success. The sheer power of Demeron’s fusion fuel meant that lift was no longer an issue. Crafting an engine and body which withstood the intense heat was a simple matter. Outreach had already specified the composition of the rare alloy they used. Demeron supplied it by the sheet.
A mysterious relic of my own making. Disappearing into the sky on a pillar of light. My three disciples standing beside me.
Favorable conditions meant that the rocket sailed true. No cosmic winds. No orbital storms. Eighty-seven minutes after launch, our radio receivers all chirped out the report from Outreach. They had caught our rocket, slowed to a stop undamaged. They had received its payload, the rolled-up title page of The Sword of Kings. Our message in a bottle. “Hi. We have read your books. We still wish to meet.”
Outreach will throw a party in our honor, three days after our own firelit celebration. It will be more decadent than they can describe. A feast with more food than could be grown in a year, with more guests than the population of the world, with great machines of music and light filling everyone present with the wild energy of dance and abandon.
The spindle-sun is a place of inexhaustible abundance. No resource which they can imagine is scarce to find. It is clear to me now, despite their empty replies, that they too possess the gift of esis. Or else have the means to replicate its effects a thousandfold. Hunger, poverty, illness, toil, all have been overcome. Every living soul has, if they so choose, the same freedom and ease that I tasted in my early years in the wilderness. Even death, it has been hinted, is not such a final door.
“Telonacht!” Enoke shouts. Across the bonfire he leaps to his feet, juice spilling over the rim of his glass. “Prophet of the silent word! Speaker to the sun! Bowman that pierced the sky! What new feat of technology gleams in the distance of your deific eye?”
The wine is working upon my tongue, or else I might have kept my silence. “A bigger rocket.”
Enoke and Tsasha laugh. Demeron does not.
“Was getting one page back not enough for them? Are you going to send them the whole library?”
“He’s going to send them Telonacht,” Demeron says, staring into the fire.
Lying on my back. Staring up into one of four exhaust ports on the base of the rocket. In one week, the main thruster will pour forth a stream of blue-white flame. The intensity will rival that of the spindle-sun. Tonight, the ports are cool and dark. Waiting.
My hand finds what it’s been seeking. A white ceramic ring. It’s cracked, from the forces and the heat of today’s operations test. I hand it out to Demeron. In a moment he gives it back to me, now new, unblemished. I fit the ring back into its place, joining the secondary thruster and the combustion line. Many components of this rocket only survive one use.
“Telonacht, I’ve been meaning to give you an update on the Esis Circle. There have been some developments — which are exciting, they’re not bad — they just might be a little tricky to handle, and —”
I tell him to wait until we finish the repairs.
Our message in a bottle reached the spindle-sun in mid-autumn. In a matter of weeks, Demeron and I built a scaled-up rocket capable of safely carrying a pilot. Pressurized cabin. Nine anchor-point seat. Acceleration controlled enough to prevent loss of consciousness.
A living rabbit was the first being to escape this Gray Earth. High above where clouds dwell, the rocket was sent off course by a stream of wind, or by unseen debris. It had no secondary thrusters. There would have been no means to operate them if it did. And for reasons Outreach was unable to explain to my satisfaction, there are limits to the rocket-retrieving powers of the People of the Sun. The note carried by the rabbit went unread.
I began work on the next rocket immediately. On the vessel that would carry me to the spindle-sun. I expected to complete the build by mid-winter. In my seeing of things, little innovation was needed. Adding secondary thrusters, adding their required steering. Nothing more.
Outreach counseled me, unprompted, to alter my plans. They advised me to improve the rocket’s safety and resilience, taking the functionality of their space ships as a model. Onboard radio. Telemetry data, and the means to display it. A container suit. Emergency alarms. All of which meant wiring. And circuitry. And insulation. And failsafes.
I informed them that their advice was overcautious and ill-considered. My rocket was built for a single, one-hour flight. The pressurized cabin meant a container suit was purely redundant. Alarms were not needed, since I would certainly note any deviation in midflight, and move to correct the rocket’s aim. To design and fabricate everything required for Outreach’s perfect rocket, esis notwithstanding, would take months upon months. It was not a delay I was inclined to accept.
But Demeron confronted me, with surprising passion. “Do not pretend you are a god, Naran! Disregarding the People of the Sun will not disperse this flight’s dangers. I have sworn to follow your command, not to seal you into an early coffin.”
Demeron alone could create the materials of the rocket, its bones and its blood. I gave up my resistance, and submitted to his greater wisdom.
The work was delicate, and slow, and tense. It cannot be said that I enjoyed it. Winter came and went. Then spring. Despite stops and starts, the rocket, together with its many embellishments, was nearing completion.
Tsasha, on her own initiative, organized a multi-day hiking trip. Enoke convinced me it would be good rest, of a sort. Demeron esified certain consumable supplies which could not be obtained elsewhere. The experience was, for the most part, beyond description.
When we had reached the summit of the peak, the four of us, we looked out upon the land. The day was clear and bright, like a diamond lit from within. Forests of thriving sprang up along swift white rivers, and vibrating vegetation filled the valleys. The ocean rippled powerful and ceaseless and wine-dark against the shore. Six villages could be seen, including mine and the disciples’, beige and brown blurs against the earth, their fractal complexity obscured by distance and atmosphere.
It was by far the most beautiful view of Gray Earth I had ever seen. But when I held it up in my mind against my vision of the spindle-sun, all of it looked muted. Lacking vividness. Dimmed, muddied, by some film, some stain.
My disciples prevailed upon me, there at the summit. Tsasha had begun spreading knowledge of health and hygiene to the nearby villages. Herbs, cleaning practices, sanitation. Trust was beginning to grow. Demeron had identified an attunement to esis in some young people from the villages, perhaps one in six. Carefully, he’d been helping a few to develop their potential. Enoke had taken a diplomatic tack, speaking with key persons in each village, learning about their hopes and fears. Though jealousy and terror lived in their hearts, he was adamant that we could find a way to share our bounty without inviting either dependency or attack.
They just needed more time for their programs to bear fruit and grow strong. More time in which I was available to them, to offer support and stability. More time before I left Gray Earth.
Now it is a hot, sticky evening in the last days of summer. Demeron and I finish replacing damaged parts on the rocket. Everything is in place. My work garb and his are both stained with sweat and grease. I walk to my cabin to change clothes and go out running. Alone.
Demeron follows me away from the rocket. “Telonacht, I need to talk to you about the Esis Circle. Two of the apprentices have a rite of passage next week, and the entire village is going to be there, and one of them had the idea that —”
“I will not move the launch.” I face Demeron on the plateau. After putting up with complication after complication for nearly a year, I have set a date that I will not let pass. I confirmed my calculations with Outreach. It is ten years to the day after the chest of books landed in the canyon outside my village.
Demeron understands my position. So he says. But to go forward with the launch now would disrupt our plans to help the people of Gray Earth. It is not the right time.
I reply that no time will ever be right. Always new responsibilities and duties will grow like weeds. Always it will be in our power to help someone new, and we will be bound to do so. Unless we are willing to leave them to suffer their life’s problems.
Tsasha and Enoke, from their seats at the meal table, pretend they are not listening. But they do not speak, or move to go.
“I built a radio transceiver alone in the wilderness. You three must face your own challenges. Tethering me to this plateau will not allow you to escape them.”
I leave them. Enter my cabin. And close the door behind me.
“Naran.” Demeron has caught the door with his hand. I do not show my surprise. “You’re right. I’ll always find a new reason. A new reason for you to stay here, instead of chasing your death in the sky.”
“Every safeguard ordained by the People of the Sun I have seen fit to include. Still you are not satisfied?”
His eyes are hard beneath the scar over his brow. “You’re damn right I’m not.”
I do not shove him out the door. I do not shout for him to leave. I do not whisper threats or disapproval. I sit on my bed. Take off my stained clothing. Pull on my running shorts.
“My death stalks me like a lion. No bed is safe. No amulet offers security. My father’s death found him in his village, tending his goats. xa0No rocket was needed.”
My disciple, The Wild One turned mother hen, crosses his arms, there in the doorway.
“It is my life to risk, Demeron. I was born on this gray world of dull aches and small minds. But I was given the opportunity to rise above it. I will not forsake that chance. I will not bury myself in the dirt of my father.”
“Because you are so alone,” he says, venomous as a snake. “With no one at your side. No one who understands your pains and your joys, your fear and your love.” Demeron’s face is tight. His whole body is tense, unmoving, immovable. If there were another door, I would leave through it, and tomorrow have whatever conversation still needed to be had. There is not.
“My disciple. My friend. The flight is short. The rocket is safe. I will land on the spindle-sun. I will send you messages each day, as I am able. And when you will it, you have the material and skill to craft the next rocket. You can join me.”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. They deserve better than to be discarded. My parents. My cousins. The apprentices in the Esis Circle, and the rest of the villagers, and everyone on this damn, sun-forsaken planet. They deserve my help. My gift.”
I feel it. The break between us. The steep, cracked place where all roads end. I stand, and walk toward where he stands still, framed in the door. He does not move. I do not want to force him aside.
“My father bid me choose obedience. My sister bid me choose duty. You bid me choose our friendship.” I look into Demeron’s eyes. “Once again, I choose my journey.”
His features soften. Transmute. Into teary eyes, and a warm smile. “I see that I have hurt you, Naran. I’m sorry. But you misunderstand me. You give yourself a false choice. No matter how far away you go, no matter how much I may hate it, you will always have the best of my heart. You think you can push me away, so you can make it easy on yourself. So leaving won’t hurt. But you can’t. You will choose what you will choose, but I have already chosen you.”
I feel the warmth of Demeron’s body across the space between us. Comfortable, and welcoming, like a hearthfire. Promising safety, and acceptance. Everything is alright. Nothing needs to be done. No goals beckon, no problems cry out to be fixed. There is a place where the Bringer of Ends can relax, free of burdens.
“Oh.” My hand finds Demeron’s chin, still clean-shaven. Traces the line of his face, up his cheek, over his faint scar. “Oh.” Rests lightly in his hair behind his head. I lean in and kiss him. We stand in the doorway for a time, in the warmth of the invisible hearthfire. Swaying slowly back and forth to the inaudible song of simple happiness.
Demeron sleeps in my cabin tonight. I do not work to satisfy him. I do not apply any techniques that I learned from the books of the People of the Sun. I let go. I listen to what his body tells me. Nothing is demanded of me. Nothing is pushed away. We learn and we wander, and we sleep and we wake. We find joy in each other.
It is daybreak. Our bodies have said everything they needed to say. Demeron shudders in bed next to me, his face buried in a pillow. I gently turn him toward me. I am present for his sobbing, his tears.
He wipes his face. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I know.” I hold him in my arms. My eyes form tears of their own. “I know.”
chapter 7
I am sitting in a new cave. A cave of my own creation. No windows or cracks under the door. No hint of sunlight, no hint of the faces of those I’ve left behind. In this cave I am twice enclosed, once by pressurized walls and again by a suit of thick, stiff fabric. It is my container suit, designed to withstand sudden acceleration, temperature extremes, pressure loss, the vacuum of space. For a one-hour flight to a friendly destination with superior technology, it should prove about as necessary as a security blanket.
I am sitting, but tilted ninety degrees. My back faces the earth. My eyes face the sky. I lock the suit into nine anchor points on the pilot seat. Confirm the trajectory on the display. Flip the right toggle switches. Tap my go-ahead message into the radio. Begin the sixty-second countdown to ignition.
Demeron was rarely out of my sight these last six days. I answered his questions. He tested me on in-flight emergency protocols. We brainstormed, daydreamed about the future of Gray Earth. I combed my fingers through his hair. He kissed every part of my body. We ran through the valley to catch the sunset and leap into the fast cold river.
Hundreds of people from villages nearby and distant gathered in the cool of the morning. Tsasha talked with girls and women whose illnesses she had cured. Enoke showed new technologies and devices to the heads of villages and men of influence. Demeron had met the night before with his several esic apprentices. For the morning of the launch he asked to be alone.
“Telonacht, I am called. The Bringer of Ends.”
I stood at the top of the narrow path, before I climbed into this cave. Clad in my container suit. Helmet in one hand. Addressing the assembled people of Gray Earth below.
“I am not a legend or a myth. I am a man. A boy, who never knew how to be normal. A boy who couldn’t obey his parents, or return the love of his sister. In my heart there lives a wound. There live matching wounds in the hearts of all those who ever cared for me.”
I saw Aula’s face, in the crowd. She looked older. Sadder. I did not see Mother’s.
“I learned the power of the story-telling blocks. Mastered the crafts needed to create wonders, speak to the sun, fly up to reach it. But the territory of being human is yet unmapped by me. In every village, in every home, someone is unhappy. Unfulfilled. Unlistened to. Unloved. How will this malaise be remedied? I do not know.”
Tsasha and Enoke listened tensely, it seemed. Demeron looked up at me, torn and sad and proud.
“I believe in my disciples. I believe they will bring health and technology and magic and peace to this Gray Earth. But private sorrows are resilient things. The wounds in our hearts must be healed by each of us. On our own; in relationship; in community. Knowledge and abundance cannot bring us happiness if we do not have love. So love those who are given to you to love. That is your end.”
No applause or cheering met my silence. I turned. Fastened my helmet. Climbed into my cave. It does not matter much whether my words were received as presumption or accusation, seeds of wisdom or empty ceremony. I simply said what I myself needed to hear.
The display shows twenty. Nineteen. Outreach sends their final message, their words appearing all at once on the display. “Modspeed, Telonacht. We’re all rooting for you.” Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. More words appear. They are from Demeron. “You are my end. And always will be.”
Ten. Nine. For a single heartbeat, I want to climb down from this rocket and run into Demeron’s arms.
Eight. Seven. Six. But I want this more. To discover, to explore, to experience this unimaginable, undeniable place.
Five. Four. To show the little boy who got his hand smacked with a stick that he wasn’t wrong.
Three. I breathe high-oxygen, esified air into my racing heart and shaking hands and tight belly.
Two. I wrap my fingers around the red tag at the end of the yellow-black cable.
One. I pull.
I am plunged into a thundering waterfall. My legs and back and gut and shoulders are bound by ropes, pulled tug-of-war against the thrust of the rocket. Gray Earth refusing to let me go. I clench my eyes shut against the pressure and the endless roar. Would that my container suit did more to dull this intensity. Bile from my empty stomach burns, but cannot rise past my throat. My body is panicked with surprise at the obvious: at every previous launch, the force and the noise were lesser, and rapidly faded away.
Waves of panic alternate with waves of submission. An oscillating trance. I have to do something. Nothing needs to be done. I’m being crushed by my father against the wall of my bedroom. I’m being embraced by Demeron against the hard rock of the plateau.
I know ten minutes have passed when the explosion fades to ringing and the ropes hauling me down become buoyancy. The display shows simple green circles. Oxygen level healthy. Trajectory on course.
In this rocket, I am mid-stride. One foot has left the ground. The other has not yet landed.
Anchored into the pilot seat, I do not levitate to the nose of the rocket. Stationary, I float in the intangible ocean of space. No muscle in my body does not relax. I feel within me a cool, soft peace that I do not understand. My body is without burden.
A blaring buzzing honking disturbs the silence and opens my eyes. The display shows orange, a question mark, a message from Outreach. “Space debris collision incoming — trigger thruster C now.” I do not reply. I do not probe, do not express confusion, do not argue. I reach for the tag marked ‘C’ at the end of another yellow-black cable, and —
Sudden sharp pain. Two gunshot hammer strokes, bang bang. A cloud of metal fragments in the air like disturbed sand in a lake, instantly suctioned and flushed out of sight. A rush of wind. The blaring buzzing honking grows louder, then becomes a vibration more felt than heard. The display shows exclamation points, bright and red.
Arm bleeding. Container suit torn. I can just stretch to press a hand onto the gash. I twist to look up. Toward the nose, a shredded hole a foot across. A god’s pock. The alarm buzzes through my seat. The display flashes. Oxygen level zero. All the air left to me is in my suit. Trajectory ten degrees off. I’m set to miss the spindle-sun by two thousand miles.
With my injured arm I pull at the steering yoke. It sticks, stiff. Mechanism jammed. I twist to look down. Another god’s pock, pierced through the floor of the rocket. Where the steering cables run between inner and outer wall. The shredded metal is curled over, pinning the cables in place.
Awkwardly I unclip my suit from its nine anchor points. Float loose, bump into one wall, turn myself upside down. Propel myself down with my legs, like pushing off a cliff face underwater. I am nauseous, disoriented. My shoulder connects with the floor, jarring and painful. Blood and air hiss from my suit until I get back my grip. I press a hand into the hole punched through my rocket, and pry the flayed fringes of metal off the cables.
I pull my hand away. I see a circular cutout of a blue and white and gray expanse. Gray Earth through a keyhole.
Woozy. Grainy texture in periphery. I crawl back into the pilot seat. Strap in three anchor points. Red blue green static instead of vision. Haul on yoke. Too far. I close my teeth on my tongue to gain presence of mind. Adjust yoke to proper angle.
Rockets can’t tack sails, or bank on wings. No air in space. Yoke repositions the secondary thrusters. Still need to trigger another ignition.
I wrap fingers around a blue tag, marked “ALL.” I breathe through the dizziness, calm the panic. Rocket already radioed an SOS when it alarmed. Demeron’s idea. Outreach caught our bottle rocket. They can catch a missile.
A moment disappears into blackout. I startle awake. I’m still holding the blue tag. I pull.
Loudness. Deafening loudness. Father screaming inside my ears. And violent this time, crushing me, shaking me against the seat, the wrath of an angry god, Telonacht is not amused — ropes bind me, nets drag against me, rip my grip from my gashed arm — stones pile up on my chest, my belly, can’t get a breath, it’s a grave cairn, burying me alive — pinning me under a crystal chest, confusing the light, stacks of talking blocks, towers of books, the weight of them flattening me into nothing — red blue green turns to gray gray gray, static contracts to a point, the roar fades to silence, the cave goes dark, I’m like nothing at all — I’m sorry daddy, I’m sorry, sorry sorry sorry —
chapter 8
Silence. Darkness. Numbness. Parched dryness in my throat. I am awake. I can’t move my body. There is a pressure all around me. My container suit. I am trapped. But I am alive.
Gradually my senses adjust. I hear movement above me, and voices, as if on the other side of a thick wall of bricks. After several attempts, I make a shout. The voices grow louder. They speak the language of the books. I have landed on the spindle-sun.
“On our way!” one voice shouts. “Sit tight!”
I do so. I focus on my breath, and imagine Demeron holding me. Minutes pass, with no detectable progress. With the vastly superior technology at Outreach’s disposal, I wonder if there is not a faster way to effect my rescue. Slowly, with what must be strangely accented speech, I ask this question aloud.
Murmured conversation. I am told that the situation is delicate. That they will explain later. That I should, as best as I am able, sit tight.
They do, in fact, explain later. After another half hour of waiting. After I am carefully pulled from the entangled wreckage of my rocket and a collapsed building. After they wrap my bruised joints with simple bandages and apply mundane ointment to my many cuts. After I press them for why, in an advanced civilization such as theirs, their plan is for us to sleep overnight, at the crash site, in camping tents.
Amongst the People of the Sun, I am informed, there was made, many years ago, an agreement. An agreement that the world of Gray Earth and its people should be left to develop on their own. Observed, but not influenced. Outreach consists of those few who believed otherwise, and chose to act on their conviction despite the risks. Should they be discovered, captured, shown to be in violation of the agreement… it would cost them dearly. And their work to help my world would be ended.
What acts draw attention, what can be cloaked, they do not say. But they do tell me directly what I had begun to suspect: my welcome on the spindle-sun is tenuous. The people of Outreach will support me, to the greatest extent they can. The remaining People of the Sun will have to be avoided for now. And perhaps, in time, convinced to allow a nowhere man to live among them.
On the edge of the crash site on the outskirts of the spindle-sun, there is a tent. It’s wide enough for me to stretch out, but not tall enough for me to stand up straight.
I am sitting on a synthetic sleeping bag, eating a medium-rare steak with a fork and knife, and drinking cold beer from a glass mug. I am conversing with a junior member of Outreach, who was just bringing me a tray of food. I asked her to stay if she wanted, that I could use the company.
I have sent messages back to Demeron. I have received his replies in kind. He is overjoyed, and is proud, and is lonely. There is much I am advised not to say concerning my situation. But he knows I am safe, and in good spirits, and lonely as well.
The Outreach member’s balanced posture, cascading hair, mellifluous voice, and sharply angular ears mark her out as one of the slender race from The Sword of Kings. As we speak, she runs her elegant fingers over a locket that hangs from a chain around her neck. Such things are real, and present in abundance. Lockets, and fine clothing, and jeweled rings, yes. And the races of the stout and the slender, and other forms of life as exotic as anything portrayed in the stories I was given.
“I wish we could have more adequately prepared you for the realities of our situation,” she says. Everyone I’ve talked to, in the day and a half since landing, has been very apologetic. They would understand, they have said, if I felt disoriented, or somehow wronged. I wonder if there is something in my demeanor that draws this from them.
“When I was a young boy… I believed that life had denied me happiness. Because I was born in the wrong family. The wrong village. The wrong world. I believed that if I could just get to the right… situation… then things would be easy.”
She is quiet. Thoughtful. Interested in what I have to say. I chew a bite of steak in mutual silence.
“It sounds as if this belief is one you no longer hold.”
I shake my head, no. She asks me what changed my mind.
I go to speak, but the answer that surfaces inside me is too large. Too large for this tent, for this conversation. Too large to be put into words, and yet too large for me to contain. Like its an answer that fills my whole body, fills up my lungs, presses out on my ribs with each breath, drives me to move, to be alive.
I rise, somewhat gingerly, and get out of the tent to look around. “The whole area around the camp and the crash site is… secure? Low-risk?”
“Cloaked,” she confirms.
We are on the outskirts of the great city that covers the spindle-sun. In a neighborhood that was abandoned years ago as a ruin. There are cleverly constructed buildings I have not yet touched or understood. Great stands of trees whose branches scrape the sky. Sculptures and statuary of tinged metal and eroded stone. There’s still daylight left… whatever “daylight” could mean when one is standing on the spindle-sun itself. Maybe something I could learn about from my host.
I ask for her name. Anastasia, she says.
“Nice to meet you, Anastasia.” I gesture behind me at the unfamiliar landscape, a terrain for which I have no map. “Want to go running?”