Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

Ravn trembled for a moment, still angry at the fear that had possessed her. She made an abrupt motion with her head, and the shopkeeper scuttled to the back of the store. Deprived thus of one target, she turned to the other.

“And you!” she said to Méarana. “That might have been Ekadrina’s magpie! What were you thinking?”

“Is she all right?”

“Who, that woman? Why should you care?”

“Because, as far as I know, she was just a nice lady who stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. And then your friend threw a knife in her back.”

Ravn put her face close to Méarana’s. “And what did you two chat about?”

The harper waved a hand around the store’s displays. “What do strangers normally discuss in such places?”

“The woman was Jugurthan,” put in Domino Tight. “Maybe a quarter by blood. That gave her the wide-set body. Their ancestors were genetically modified for some high-gravity planet somewhere in ancient times. The point is: there are no Jugurthans in the Confederation. That ‘nice lady’ was at least a Pup, maybe even a Hound.”

Méarana gasped, but Ravn had the distinct impression that the surprise was feigned and the harper had either guessed or been told the woman’s nature. “What did she say to you, Méarana? Did she tell you her name?”

“It wouldn’t have been the real name,” suggested Domino Tight.

“She called herself Gwen.”

Ravn nodded and opened a file on her hand screen. Domino said, “It even sounds Peripheral. Ravn, did you search the body?”

Olafsdottr shook her head absently. “There were two of them. The other suggested a truce and took her away.”

Domino Tight grinned. “Walked into a trap. But you’re not dead,” he added.

“You are ever a keen observer of fact, my darling.”

The harper cocked her head in her mother’s manner. “And what did the other look like?”

“I never saw her. She remained ever in shadows.” Then she found a name in her file. Cŵn Annwn. Close enough, assuming the name was real.

“I’ve heard of this shadowy Hound,” said Domino. “She calls herself Matilda of the Night.”

Ravn closed up her hand screen. Then, because the ill-hidden smile of the harper irritated her, she touched Méarana gently on the arm. “I am so sorry, sweet.”

The harper withdrew a little. “Sorry? Why?”

“That your mother sent only these others in her place, and did not come herself.”

The harper flinched at the thought but then suggested, “Or else she has brought a Pack with her.”

Ravn exchanged glances with Domino Tight and both set their faces in grim lines. One more complication in the play. Best they heigh for Terra immediately and conclude their business with Gidula. But Ravn thought it highly likely that the voice that spoke in the dark would be waiting when they landed there.

Donovan’s hajj had taken him halfway around the world and a little more, and what he found was what he didn’t find. Desiccated shrublands marched along novel ice-drained coasts, and borders, breeds, and births were all awry. The ancient languages, so carefully learned in Terran Schools around the Periphery, were nowhere evermore spoken, and their offspring sprouted in eccentric places. The great artifacts of the past had seen wind and storm and ice, poverty and neglect, armies and migrations, and—one by one—they had fallen. Even North was not where story had left it. The planetary core was undergoing a phase shift, and the Magnetic Pole had left its icy home to bask now in the golden seas off the isle of Teetee.

Only the oceans themselves and the interminable mountains remained where passed-down tales had placed them. But what of it? If the enclosed portrait is utterly altered, does it matter if the frame is still untouched?

The Wall had been bulldozed by scree pushed down from the northlands in the fore of the Sborski glaciers. Her bastions were stumps, her facades pierced by tumbling rubble. The Pass of Jelep La, where the Allies under Marshal Kumar had held off the Cinakar, was choked with mountain glaciers, and the famous Monument of the Lions lay buried beneath centuries of snows. “Twelve-gated Terra” had possessed a dozen Beanstalks planted around her girth, but no traces remained of those great sky elevators—at least of those whose locations he passed over. There was no trace even of the Great Fall: wind and rain and jungle and the scavenging of gleaners had eaten them up.

Locals he questioned blinked blank faces—“Marshal Kumar? The Borneo Beanstalk? O snor, you speak in riddles.”

Only the Wall, in its fragmentary survival, had spawned tales of its origin. It had been built, one old man assured him over a plate of schnitzel in a restaurant in Vayshink, to keep the Ice at bay. Donovan, who knew something of the immense age of the thing, marveled at how legends could supplant even other legends.

In the Archives in Old Jösing, in a close room with a dim monitor, he skimmed through the detritus of records as old as time. A brief video of a sports contest among strangely garbed players. A simulation, experienceable only in part, of something called the Long March. The passenger list of Krunipak Loy, outbound for Megranome, containing tens of thousands of names. In such a swarm, even identity could be anonymous. She may have been one of the Ships of Exile—the time frame was right—but there was nothing in the record that signified desperate flight or banishment, and he found no other like manifests. The proscription list of the Emperor Philip Qang-po—longer even than the passenger list: Emperor Phil had evidently had a lot of enemies. (And had surely missed one in the sweep: he was assassinated after a six-month reign.)

The Pedant soaked up essays, novels, treatises with lightning speed, and heard in their musings “men lonely in a meaningless world.” All of their old certainties had been swept away, their gods lost, their philosophies emptied; and they had treasured what remained as a man might shelter from the winds in his cupped hands a small tuft of burning tow rescued from a now-cold fire. They regarded the beauties and great deeds of their past—and the mere technologies were the least among them—as “the last fragile even-glow of a long-set sun.” In their mournful and weary cadences he could detect the very themes that had later developed in the Old Planets, on Old ’Saken, on Die Bold, on Kàuntusulfalúghy: the sense that they had been orphaned by forgotten parents.

Is every age, Donovan wondered, built on the afterglow of another? What then could history be but the successive devolution of society? Each fire would burn less brightly than the one before. Or was he himself becoming infected with the twilight melancholy of the rotting Commonwealth?

But then he thought: The building was burning, and they ran back in to save what they could. That ought to count for something.

Of those individuals the Fudir had bespoken during his stopover in the Regency of Swak, only five had ever heard of the Borneo Beanstalk and none recalled that Borneo had been an ancient name for the Greater Swakland Peninsula. Greatly irritated at this amnesia—how could anything so large be so largely forgotten?—the scarred man scoured the Archive for files on the Beanstalk and unearthed a set of five visuals, one of them mobile. Two displayed the Stalk a few years after its fall: the Great Stump, ragged fragments strewn toward the horizon, a then more extensive jungle swallowing up the distance. The topmost pieces, the Pedant told everyone, would have burned up in the atmosphere or splashed far out into the ocean.