Orson Card - Hot Sleep - The Worthing Chronicle

"You'll name it Hoom?" Stipock asked.

She shook her head. "Hoom told me he wanted a son named Aven." And there was little talk that day, though the snow confined them all indoors; they were thinking of death as the infant sucked pap from Dilna's breasts.

As night came, and they laid the logs for the night's fire, Dilna spoke from the bed where she lay, recovering from the birth. "I've been pregnant," she said, "six times. Six times, and Aven is all that I have now." As if in answer, the baby stirred and cried weakly. No one could think of anything to say to her.

And in the spring they set out again, following streams and rivers northward, trying to find a pass through the northern mountains that Stipock warned them of. And they found it soon — there was still snow on the ground as they hiked through the vast gap in the mountains, the peaks rising to the right and the left as they walked northward on the gentle hills.

It was nearing summer when they came to the Heaven River, the kilometers–wide torrent rushing westward to Heaven City . They stopped to build a small, crude boat, and two days after they launched it, they saw the shining metal of the Star Tower rise above the trees. Soon they saw boats ahead, plying back and forth across the river.

"Left bank? Or right?" asked Stipock, who was at the tiller.

"Left," Wix answered quickly.

"Left," Dilna agreed. They wouldn't try to hide among the people of Stipock's Bay, who would probably accept them more readily. They'd go to the Main Town . They'd find the Warden and take whatever answer he gave them.

They were greeted with amazement and open pleasure by the people in Linkeree's Bay, and a crowd followed them up Noyock's Road, over the hill where the ashes of Noyock's house had been cleared and a four–story house erected on the site, and down the other side to Main Town .

The new Warden was Jobbin, a great–grandson of Hux, a man younger than Wix. He embraced them, and showed them a paper left by Jason when he had come to take Noyock into the Star Tower .

"Stipock," said the letter, "are you ready now?"

Yes, thought Stipock.

"You and all who returned with you — welcome home. Be happy here in Heaven City . And at least make an effort to avoid causing trouble," and Jason had signed his name at the bottom.

Having read the letter, Wix and Dilna and Stipock smiled at each other, and then settled down to tell their story. Stipock gave the records of his colony to Jobbin, who read them carefully. Several people also took turns writing the account of their journey as they told it. The travelers, in turn, read the History of the last few years. It was an unbroken story of peace, plenty, growth, happiness. When it was done, Dilna looked at Wix and then at Stipock, and said, "It's good to be home again, isn't it?"

And then the three of them went to live in different parts of Heaven City , and had as little to do with each other as possible. Someone once asked Stipock why — after all they had been through together, shouldn't they be close friends?

"We all died in a chasm in the mountains," Stipock answered. "And these new people you see are strangers, with unpleasant memories of someone who looked very much like us. When those memories are gone, perhaps we'll be friends." That was the most he ever said on the subject. Wix and Dilna never said a thing.

But it was Wix who led the expedition that mapped the Heaven River clear to its delta. And it was Stipock who first minted money, and who taught them to make charcoal, and who built the first windmill, and who taught them to make glass.

And Dilna's son Aven became Warden — many said the best Warden of all — and when Jason brought Arran from the Star Tower and married her, it was Aven who performed the ceremony.

Jason eventually took both Wix and Stipock and their wives into the Star Tower . But when he asked Dilna to come and sleep so she could live forever, she refused. "I don't see anything wrong with dying," she said, "and I'd rather do it among friends than strangers, years from now, who never knew me." At her instructions, after she died her body was burned, and the ashes were scattered across Heaven River .

People kept having babies and the babies kept growing up, and three hundred years after the starship first landed beside the Star River, half a million people were spread along the Heaven River, and it was time for the next step in Jason's plan.

PERHAPS THEgreatest benefit of the discovery of the so–called Aven Map is that it has caused archaeologists to rethink many of their most basic assumptions. For years it was a canon of the professional archaeologist that all the legends of the Dispersal were merely after–the–fact rationalizations of the dominance of the Heaven King over the counts of the low and high plains, and eventually over the more distant dukes as well. It was too tempting for researchers to assume that the legendary Wardens, like Linkeree, Hux, Ciel, Noyock, Kapock, and so on, were invented to "prove" that all the great cities and nations of the world had their start in Heaven City .

Even now, the legends that ascribe to the Star Tower the power to keep its residents from aging while within its walls must be rejected by serious scientists. But the fact that a map, carved in stone, that could date from no later than 1800 B.A. [Before the Accession], clearly shows that residents of Heaven City at that incredibly early date already had a full knowledge not only of the exact outlines of the major land masses of the world, but also of the names of the principal cities long before they ever reached any appreciable size, gives definite support to the idea of some kind of Dispersal. And if the Wardens actually do have some basis in historical fact, one begins to speculate that even Jason Himself may have had a historical analog.

Enough of idle speculation, however. The Aven Map has forced archaeologists to look to Heaven City for the source of world culture–and now that archaeologists have done so, many of the puzzles of history are simplified:

1. The wide dispersal of the basic Jason legends through every nation of the world.

2. The recurrence of the so–called "Songs of Dilna" in various forms in both Stipock and Wien.

3. The universal worldwide dating system, that has for too long been taken for granted. After all, why should the Stipock Calendar, when meshed with the Heaven King's Calendar, show exactly the same date for the Dispersal and the Creation, though Stipock was isolated from the Heaven Plain for more than a thousand years?

Before examining the actual inscriptions on the Aven Map, let us first review the legendary — but now proved to be at least somewhat reliable accounts of the Dispersal.

The Council of Lords. Not to be confused with the present–day Council of Nobles, the Council of Lords was a great meeting at which, according to most versions, Jason brought all the Wardens and their husbands and wives out of the Star Tower and divided the people of Heaven City among them. According to many versions, there were no other people in the world at that time.

The First Leaving. After a year's preparation, the Lords of the South departed overland — Kapock, Alss [Usset], Del, Poritil, Hux, Fane, and Torne. The next year, the Lords of the North departed–Wien, Merrion, Stoon, and practically every County of the High Heaven Plain. And the next year, the great fleets of the Lords of the Sea set sail, Noyock and Aven to the west, and Stipock, Jobbin, Linkeree, and Captil to the south. This order of departure is reinforced by the fact that in many cases, there is no tradition in the nations that left first about the departure of the nations that left later: Kapock, for instance, has no legend to account for the founding of Wien, though Wien accounts very well for the founding of Kapock.