Robert Silverberg - We Are for the Dark

“A waste, your grace. An absolute shameful waste.”

“Please.”

He fills my glass for the fourth or fifth time. A crafty look has come into his eyes. “You would accept any assignment I give you?”

“Yes. Anything.”

“Anything?” he says.

I see myself sweeping the chapel house stairs, polishing sinks and tables, working in the garden on my knees.

“Even if there is risk?” he says. “Discomfort?”

“Anything.”

He says, “You will be our Plenipotentiary, then.”

There are two suns in the sky here, but they are not at all like Cuchulain’s two, and the frosty air has a sharp sweet sting to it that is like nothing I have ever tasted before, and everything I see is haloed by a double shadow, a rim of pale red shading into deep, mysterious azure. It is very cold in this place. I am fourteen light-years from Earth.

A woman is watching me from just a few meters away. She says something I am unable to understand.

“Can you speak Anglic?” I reply.

“Anglic. All right.” She gives me a chilly, appraising look. “What are you? Some kind of priest?”

“I was Lord Magistrate of the House of Senders, yes.”

“Where?”

“Earth.”

“On Earth ? Really?”

I nod. “What is the name of this world?”

“Let me ask the questions,” she says. Her speech is odd, not so much a foreign accent as a foreign intonation, a curious singsong, vaguely menacing. Standing face to face just outside the Velde station, we look each other over. She is thick-shouldered, deep-chested, with a flat-featured face, close-cropped yellow hair, green eyes, a dusting of light red freckles across her heavy cheekbones. She wears a heavy blue jacket, fringed brown leggings, blue leather boots, and she is armed. Behind her I see a muddy road cut through a flat snowy field, some low rambling metal buildings with snow piled high on their roofs, and a landscape of distant jagged towering mountains whose sharp black spires are festooned with double-shadowed glaciers. An icy wind rips across the flat land. We are a long way from those two suns, the fierce blue-white one and its cooler crimson companion. Her eyes narrow and she says, “Lord Magistrate, eh? The House of Senders. Really?”

“This was my cloak of office. This medallion signified my rank in the Order.”

“I don’t see them.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“You have no rank here. You hold no office here.”

“Of course,” I say. “I realize that. Except such power as Darklaw confers on me.”

“Darklaw?”

I stare at her in some dismay. “Am I beyond the reach of Darklaw so soon?”

“It’s not a word I hear very often. Shivering, are you? You come from a warmer place?”

“Earth,” I say. “South Australia. It’s warm there, yes.”

“Earth. South Australia.” She repeats the words as though they are mere noises to her. “We have some Earthborn here, still. Not many. They’ll be glad to see you, I suppose. The name of this world is Zima.”

“Zima.” A good strong sound. “What does that mean?”

“Mean?”

“The name must mean something. This planet wasn’t named Zima just because someone liked the way it sounded.”

“Can’t you see why?” she asks, gesturing toward the far-off ice-shrouded mountains.

“I don’t understand.”

“Anglic is the only language you speak?”

“I know some Espanol and some Deutsch.”

She shrugs. “Zima is Russkiye. It means Winter.”

“And this is wintertime on Winter?”

“It is like this all the year round. And so we call the world Zima.”

“Zima,” I say. “Yes.”

“We speak Russkiye here, mostly, though we know Anglic too. Everybody knows Anglic, everywhere in the Dark. It is necessary. You really speak no Russkiye?”

“Sorry.”

“Ty shto, s pizdy sarvalsa?” she says, staring at me.

I shrug and am silent.

“Bros’ dumat’ zhopay!”

I shake my head sadly.

“Idi v zhopu!”

“No,” I say. “Not a word.”

She smiles, for the first time. “I believe you.”

“What were you saying to me in Russkiye?”

“Very abusive things. I will not tell you what they were. If you understood, you would have become very angry. They were filthy things, mockery. At least you would have laughed, hearing such vile words. I am named Marfa Ivanovna. You must talk with the boyars. If they think you are a spy, they will kill you.”

I try to hide my astonishment, but I doubt that I succeed. Kill? What sort of world have we built here? Have these Zimans reinvented the middle ages?

“You are frightened?” she asks.

“Surprised,” I say.”

“You should lie to them, if you are a spy. Tell them you come to bring the Word of God, only. Or something else that is harmless. I like you. I would not want them to kill you.”

A spy? No. As Guardiano would say, I am a teacher, a guide, a prophet, if you will. Or as I myself would say, I am a pilgrim, one who seeks atonement, one who seeks forgiveness.

“I’m not a spy, Marfa Ivanovna,” I say.

“Good. Good. Tell them that.” She puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles piercingly, and three burly bearded men in fur jackets appear as though rising out of the snowbanks. She speaks with them a long while in Russkiye. Then she turns to me. “These are the boyars Ivan Dimitrovich, Pyotr Pyotrovich, and Ivan Pyotrovich. They will conduct you to the voivode Ilya Alexandrovich, who will examine you. You should tell the voivode the truth.”

“Yes,” I say. “What else is there to tell?”

Guardiano had told me before I left Cuchulain, of course, that the world I was going to had been settled by emigrants from Russia. It was one of the first to be colonized, in the early years of the Mission. One would expect our Earthly ways to begin dropping away, and something like an indigenous culture to have begun evolving, in that much time. But I am startled, all the same, by how far they have drifted. At least Marfa Ivanova—who is, I imagine, a third-generation Ziman—knows what Darklaw is. But is it observed? They have named their world Winter, at any rate, and not New Russia or New Moscow or something like that, which Darklaw would have forbidden. The new worlds in the stars must not carry such Earthly baggage with them. But whether they follow any of the other laws, I cannot say. They have reverted to their ancient language here, but they know Anglic as well, as they should. The robe of the Order means something to her, but not, it would seem, a great deal. She speaks of spies, of killing. Here at the outset of my journey I can see already that there will be many surprises for me as I make my way through the Dark.

The voivode Ilya Alexandrovich is a small, agile-looking man, brown-faced, weatherbeaten, with penetrating blue eyes and a great shock of thick, coarse white hair. He could be any age at all, but from his vigor and seeming reserves of power I guess that he is about forty. In a harsh climate the face is quickly etched with the signs of age, but this man is probably younger than he looks.

Voivode, he tells me, means something like “mayor,” or “district chief.” His office, brightly lit and stark, is a large ground-floor room in an unassuming two-story aluminum shack that is, I assume, the town hall. There is no place for me to sit. I stand before him, and the three husky boyars, who do not remove their fur jackets, stand behind me, arms folded ominously across their breasts.

I see a desk, a faded wall map, a terminal. The only other thing in the room is the immense bleached skull of some alien beast on the floor beside his desk. It is an astounding sight, two meters long and a meter high, with two huge eye-sockets in the usual places and a third set high between them, and a pair of colossal yellow tusks that rise straight from the lower jaw almost to the ceiling. One tusk is chipped at the tip, perhaps six centimeters broken off. He sees me staring at it. “You ever see anything like that?” he asks, almost belligerently.