David Brin - Glory Season

The doors were still thirty meters distant when the big sailor collapsed again. “Gowon!” he cried hoarsely. “Get ’er outta here!” he urged the other males. But already bullets were striking the metal doors. Maia pointed. “Over there!”

They towed the wounded man toward what appeared to be a junk pile. A midden of boxes, crates, broken and discarded machines. Detritus of whatever project had created this incredible, mysterious edifice. As they, were about to dive behind the nearest hulking mound of debris, Maia cried out. A searing stroke of pain had brushed the back of her right calf, like a hot poker.

The doctor dragged her the rest of the way. A bullet had grazed her skin, plowing a long red trail. “Never mind that!” she urged the physician. “Take care of him!” The sailor was clearly much worse off.

Ignoring her own bleeding, Maia cast around for anything to use as a weapon. There were bits of metal, but none in any useful shape. For lack of an alternative, she drew from her jacket pocket the small paring knife she had found aboard the Manitou. The cabin boy helped her rise, and they both crouched behind the pile of debris. They heard shouts. Approaching footsteps.

Suddenly, the keening noise halted. The growling had stopped moments before, as the roof-iris finished opening.

The abrupt silence felt pregnant with expectation. Then, as if Maia had known it all along, there came a combination of sound and sight and every other sensation that felt like the clarion of Judgment Day. The world shook, while powers akin to, but violently more potent than she had experienced near the coil, tried to fill all space. That included space she had formerly occupied alone, forcing each of her molecules to fight for right of tenancy. Air needed for breath blew out as a presence passed nearby at terrible speed, streaking toward the sky.

From her back, Maia blearily watched as a sleek object tore through the heavens, leaving a blaze of riven, flaming air in its wake.

A fire arrow … she thought, blankly. Then, with but a little more coherence, she cast after it a silent call.

Renna!

Air returned, accompanied by a sound like thunder clapping. The debris mound shook, and then collapsed, tumbling rough, heavy shards over her battered legs. Yet she was left able to continue staring upward. Undistracted by distant pain, Maia had a clear view of the streaking, diminishing sparkle in the sky, wishing with all her heart that she was part of it… that he had waited only a little while longer, and taken her with him.

But he did it! she thought, switching over to exultation. They won’t have him. He’s out of their reach now. Gone back to—

Her rejoicing cut short. Overhead, almost at the limits of vision, the sparkling pinpoint abruptly veered left, brightened, and exploded in radiance, splitting apart amid an orgy of chaos, scattering fiery, ionic embers across the dark blue firmament of the stratosphere.

Is ambition poison? Is Phylum society’s headlong rush to power and accomplishment synonymous with damnation?

Ancient cultures warned their people against hubris, that innate drive within human beings to seek God’s own puissance, whatever the cost. Wisely, early tribal folk restrained such fervid quests, save via spirit and art, adventure and song. They did not endlessly bend and bully Nature to their whim.

True, those ancestors lived just above the animals, in primeval forests of Old Earth. Life was hard, especially for women, yet they reaped rewards—harmony, stability, secure knowledge of who you were, where you fit in the world’s design. Those treasures were lost when we embarked on “progress.”

Is there an inverse relation between knowledge and wisdom? At times it seems the more we know, the less we understand.

I am not the first to note this quandary. One scholar recently wrote, “Lysos and her followers chase the siren call of pastoralism, like countless romantics before them, idealizing a past Golden Age that never was, pursuing a serenity possible only in the imagination.”

His point is well-taken. Yet, should we not try?

The paradox does not escape me—that we mean to use advanced technical tools to shape conditions for a stable world… one which, from then onward, should little need those tools again.

So we return to the question at hand. Are human beings truly cursed to discontent? Caught between conflicting yearnings, we strive to become gods even as we long to remain nature’s beloved children.

Let the former pursuit be the chaotic doom of frantic, driven Phylum Civitas. We who depart on this quest have chosen a warmer, less adversarial relationship with the Cosmos.

Loss of consciousness was not the result of her injuries, or even the gassy, pungent odor of anesthesia. What made her let go this time was a morale sapped beyond exhaustion. Distant sensations told her that the world went on. There were noises—anxious shouts and booming echoes of gunfire. When these ceased, they were followed by loud cries of both triumph and despair. Sounds intruded, swarming over her, prying at windows and doors, but none succeeded in making her take notice.

Footsteps clattered. Hands touched her body, lifting objects away so that a hurt of ministration replaced that of crushing injury. Maia remained indifferent. Voices rustled around her, tense and argumentative. She could tell, without caring, that more than two factions engaged in fierce debate, each too weak or uncertain to impose its will, none of them trusting enough to let others act alone.

There was no tenor of vindictiveness in the manner she was lifted and carried away from the bright, ozone-drenched chamber within a hollow mountain-fang. Rocked on a stretcher, moaning at each jostling shock to her stretched-thin system, she knew in abstract that her bearers meant her well. They were being gentle. That ought to signify something.

She only wished they would go away and let her die.

Death did not come. Instead, she was handled, prodded, drugged, cut, and sewn. In time, it was the simplest of sensations that brought back a partial will to live.

Flapjacks.

A redolence of fresh pancakes filled her nostrils. Injury and anomie weren’t enough to hold back the flood that faint aroma unleashed within her mouth. Maia opened her eyes.

The room was white. An ivory-colored ceiling met finely carved white moldings, which joined to walls the color of pale snow. Through a muzzy languor left over from chemical soporifics, Maia had difficulty fixing clearly on the plain, smooth surfaces. Without conscious choice, her mind begin toying with one blank expanse—imagining a laying thereon of grainy, abstract, rhythmic patterns. Maia groaned and closed her eyes.

She could not shut her nose. Alluring smells pursued her. So did growls from her stomach. And the sound of speech.

“Well now, ready to join the livin’ at last?”

Maia turned her head to the left, and cracked an eyelid. A petite, dark-haired figure swam into focus, wearing a wry grin. “Now didn’t I say to stop gettin’ conked, varling? At least this time you weren’t drowned.”

After several tries, Maia found her voice. “Should’ve… known… you’d make it.”

Naroin nodded. “Mm. That’s me. Born survivor. You, too, lass. Though you love provin’ it the hard way.”

An involuntary sigh escaped Maia. The bosun-policewoman’s presence wrested feelings that hurt, despite her body’s drugged immobility. “I guess you… got through to your boss.”

Naroin shook her head. “When we got picked up, I decided to take some initiative. Called in favors, swung deals. Too bad we couldn’t arrive sooner, though.”