Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle

14

STIPOCK WOKE early one morning, and because there was no wind he dressed and left his house and walked among the dying houses of the village. He went from door to door, and almost every one was hanging on its hinges, or blown off, and no one was there to make repairs. At last he came to Hoom's and Dilna's house, and knocked, and they let him come in and sit on one of the beds as they served the small breakfast they had to Cammar and Bessa and Dallat. The children looked gaunt and old, and no one seemed to have the energy to speak or make a sound.

Wix came a little later, and sat beside Stipock on the bed, and said. "We're the last."

Breakfast done, there was little to do worth doing. No one had worked the mine for a month or more, and it was doubtless completely blocked by sand. The pitiful amount of iron they had taken from the hill this year was not enough to encourage them to dig for more. And Hoom voiced all their thoughts when he said, "If only we could eat iron."

Wix patted his trouser leg and dust rose into the air. Outside there was only a small breeze. The sand lay undisturbed, but the dust rose into the air, seeped through the many cracks in the house. Cammar kept sneezing.

Finally Stipock leaned back on the bed and addressed the ceiling. "We might have done it, you know."

Yes, yes, of course, if only.

"But you can't organize rebels to do a damn thing," Stipock said. And again they agreed.

"Doesn't matter now," said Wix. "They're all gone to where fruits hang on the trees and fish leap up into your hands and the squirrels come over and lie down in the pan for you." And they managed to laugh.

Without a word they all began to move, taking all the food and putting it in bags. Hoom and Wix took empty waterbags and went to the brook to fill them. Stipock went back to his house and gathered up the record he had kept of the village and the small supply of food he had left.

At noon they were ready to go.

"Where?" asked Dilna as they hid from the sun in her house.

"Home," said Hoom, and Stipock wondered at the fact that for some reason — or many — none of them suggested going south, to Billin's group. Pride, because they had refused to take the easy escape route that would lead to savagery, and wouldn't give in now? Or a longing for Heaven City ? It didn't matter. Stipock was too tired to analyze. Jason had won every round of their duel, and had done it without breaking the bargain, Stipock couldn't deny it, and now he wanted to go back to Heaven City and surrender.

Satisfied? he could hear Jason saying.

Satisfied, he answered. Whatever the hell you're doing with this world, you do it better than I can. You know the people better than I do. And so, because it's the only game, I'll pay whatever price I have to in order to play. Your rules. But you can bet I'll play pretty damn well, whatever the rules might be.

"Stipock?" asked Dilna, and Stipock shook his head. "Sorry. Yes. Home. Heaven City ."

They slept in the afternoon, and began their journey just before dark. The sky was cloudless, as always, and the moon was high and full, and the trees looked cool and welcoming as they left the dying village and walked out into the sparse forest. Stipock, Hoom, and Wix carried heavy packs and water bags. Dilna carried Bessa in a sack on her back, and held Dallat in her arms. Cammar walked, his small legs forced to work hard to keep up with the slow pace the adults took.

They drank copiously from the stream before they left, and began rationing immediately. And as the night grew cool, and then cold, they hurried their pace in order to keep warm.

Stipock brought up the rear, following several paces behind Hoom, who now was carrying a weary Cammar, at least for a kilometer or so. The bodies of the three adults ahead of him were not adult bodies, Stipock remembered. Only Wix was twenty, the others still in their teens. In the Empire they'd be children still, none of them at their majority. Here the weight of the world was on them. And they seemed strong enough to bear it.

Hoom, burdened with Cammar's weight, slowed down enough that Stipock overtook him. "Let me carry the boy," Stipock said. And Hoom willingly handed the child to Stipock, who held him to his shoulder. Cammar barely noticed — he was sleepy, and he rested his head. Hoom looked at the boy as they walked, and then said, "A beautiful boy."

"Yes," said Stipock. "Like his parents."

Hoom's face grew a little sadder, and he said, "I wonder if Wix will ever marry, and have more children." Not children of his own, Stipock noticed. More children.

"You're a kinder man than I am," Stipock said, softly.

Hoom shook his head. "Love and faithfulness can only be given, not demanded. All the same, I would have liked to have them."

Stipock was surprised at the pain behind the whispered words. After all these years of silence, of pretending not to know, why was Hoom saying it now?

"Dilna loves you," Stipock said. "And so does Wix."

"And I forgive them because of that. Or in spite of that. Stipock?"

"Yes?"

"If I die before we return to Heaven City , would you tell them? That I know? And that I forgive them?"

"You won't die. You're the strongest of us all, don't let the darkness and the sand get to you already, or you'll never stay sane through the desert."

Hoom only laughed. "Just taking precautions, old man."

And then they walked in silence for another hour, before Wix called out that they should stop and drink. They drank, a swallow each from one waterbag, and sat and rested for a few minutes. And then they were on their way again, until dawn.

They followed the pattern for days, walking among the trees at night, sleeping in the best shade they could find by day. They refilled the canteens at every stream, and in this area there were many.

But after a week, the trees began to thin, and the ground began to rise, and Stipock told them it was time to move due north. They reached a large river, and followed its course northward, but the water was brackish, and they only filled their bags at the sluggish streams that joined the river. Later, the streams became more rare, and they began to drink the river's water in order to keep their waterbags full.

They reached the crest of the mountains and left the river behind, descending to a dry plain of rock and sand. A few plants grew, and an occasional small animal moved at the edge of their vision. But no water at all.

And no rest from the heat. There was no shade, except behind rocks, and at noon even the rocks were no shelter, for the sun was directly overhead, and rocks had no shadows at noon. On the eighth day they ran out of water. On the ninth day they piled rocks over Bessa's corpse and went on, no one shedding tears because they were too tired, and their eyes were too dry.

They found an oasis of sorts on the tenth day in the desert, and drank the foul–tasting water, and filled their waterbags. An hour later all were vomiting, and Dallat died of it. They buried him by the poisoned pool, and weakly walked on, emptying their waterbags before they left to forestall the possibility of their forgetting and drinking again.

They were lucky. The next day they found a clear spring in the side of a hill, and the water was good, and they drank and didn't get sick. They stayed at the spring for several days, building back their strength. But now their food was getting low, and with full waterbags they set out again.

Two days later they reached the top of a rocky rise, and stopped at the end of a cliff that plunged nearly a kilometer, almost straight down. To the west they saw the sea, and to the east another sea, the water winking blue in the sunlight of early morning. And at the bottom of the cliff, the land funneled into a narrow isthmus between the seas. The isthmus was green with grass, and Stipock wasn't the only one, he knew, who breathed a great sigh of relief.

"Do you see the green down there, Cammar?" asked Dilna. The boy nodded gravely. "That's grass, and it means that we'll find water."

"Can I have a drink?" Cammar asked.

They found a way down the cliff before noon, and as they descended they realized that it wasn't nearly as sheer as it seemed. The slope was broken, but there were many possible paths. And that night, exhausted, they spread their blankets in the tall grass. When they woke in the morning, the grass was damp with dew, and their blankets were cold and wet.

At first they laughed, and plucked up grass and threw it at each other, getting soaked in the process. And then Dilna began weeping, and the others also grieved for the two children who had been granted no tears at their burial.

From then on the journey seemed easy enough, and they were hardened and ready to walk many kilometers every day. Even Cammar seemed to thrive on it, and often would run ahead of the others, calling back, "Too slow! Hurry up!"

The farther north they went, the thicker the grass and the larger the bushes became. Soon they were passing many groves of trees, and tiny streams became brooks that they had to take their shoes off for. Eventually the shoes were put in the packs, and they hiked on bare feet, which were already toughened and hard as leather.

Six weeks after they had left the village to the sand and drought, they saw the snow–capped mountains rise ahead of them. "The headwaters of half the rivers in the world rise in these mountains," Stipock said, and they marched on. A week later they could no longer see the peaks because of the high, steep foothills they were traveling through. They followed the banks of a large river northward, and as it narrowed into a canyon they often had to walk in the river itself. They climbed cliffs to pass waterfalls, and often had to backtrack when seemingly easy paths ended in precipices and narrow defiles. And always the rivers flowed south and east, back in the direction they had come, and always the path ahead was uphill. They passed the last trees, and food became scarce, and they rationed again; but hunger was better then thirst, and it was summer, so that although they were cold, they were in little danger of freezing to death.

And then they noticed that the rivers seemed to flow in the other direction, northwest, and some of their routes were downhill. And one morning as they reached the top of a windswept, grassy hill, they saw what they had hoped to see: between two lower peaks in the distance, a green blanket of dense forest that went on and on, stretching forever into the distance.

"It's the largest forest in the world," said Stipock, "according to Jason's map. But nothing ahead should be as hard as what's gone on before." They sat down to rest and look at the hopeful view, and Cammar caught the mood of relief and happiness, and he ran back and forth around the crown of the hill.

"Jason never told us he had a map of the world," Wix said. "And yet you follow your memory of it as if you trusted it completely."

"I should," Stipock said. "I invented the machine that took the geological survey. It's pretty accurate. The only inaccuracies are in detail — and in my memory."

Hoom was pulling up grass and letting the breezes catch it. "You know, Stipock, you kept telling us, again and again, that Jason wasn't God. And yet every time it comes to one of the miracles that Jason performs, you say, ‘Of course he can do that.' And I think I understand it now. To you, what Jason does is commonplace. To you, God would have to be far more extraordinary. But to us, Jason's abilities are far out of reach. And that's enough to make him not at all ordinary, not a common man at all. To us, God. And why not?"

Stipock only leaned back. "I suppose that if a man sets out to manipulate the world in certain ways, and has the wit and the power to do it, then why not play God? I would have stopped Jason if I could. I couldn't. But does that —"

A piercing scream interrupted the conversation, and they all jumped to their feet. "Cammar!" Dilna shouted, and they quickly saw that he wasn't on the crown of the hill. They ran in different directions, and Stipock called, "Here! Come here!" He was at the northwest slope, the area they hadn't yet seen, and when they arrived in a group at the edge, they saw that the gentle hill they had climbed gave way to a jagged precipice on the other side. A torn patch in the grass at the edge showed where Cammar had fallen.

Dilna was frantic. "Cammar!" she cried out again and again. And then his answer came from surprisingly close. "Mama, I'm hurt!"

"Don't move, Cammar!" Hoom called, and Stipock shouted, "Where are you?"

"Here!" Cammar answered.

Hoom ran along the edge of the cliff a little way. "I can see him from here!" he called. "He's just over the crest of that little cliff, on a ledge!" Then Hoom waved and smiled, and the others knew then that Cammar must be all right — just out of sight over the edge. Hoom ran back to the others.

"Can we reach him?" Stipock asked.

"He's not very far," Hoom answered. "You'll lower me over the edge — I'm the lightest one who isn't pregnant," and he smiled at Dilna. She smiled back, reassured about Cammar's safety by Hoom's obvious confidence. "Just hold onto my legs."

In a few moments Stipock was gripping Hoom's left leg, and Wix his right, as the young man inched his way out over the edge, his arms reaching downward, out of the others' sight. "Lower!" Hoom called, and Stipock and Wix slid carefully down a little farther. "Lower!" Hoom called again, and Stipock answered, "We can't —"

But he was cut off by Hoom's urgent cry, "Don't jump for me, Cammar! Just stay there — don't jump!" and then a high–pitched child's scream, and Hoom lunged downward, desperately, tearing his foot out of Stipock's grasp. Hoom slid out of control, and only stopped with Wix gripping his right foot, with Wix himself in clear danger of being pulled over the edge. Hoom's left foot was over the edge and out of sight. Stipock didn't try for it, just clung to Wix to keep the two younger men from flying off into the chasm. Wix was panting, his fingers slipping on Hoom's leg. "I can't hold him," Wix said. "I can't hold him alone!"

"Let me help!" Dilna shouted, nearly hysterical with the terror of knowing that her son had fallen, that her husband was about to fall. She threw herself to the ground and slid forward, face down, toward the edge, out of control. "Dilna!" Stipock cried, and she was only stopped by grabbing at Wix, which jolted him enough that he lost his grip on Hoom's foot. Wix cried out in the agony of trying to force his fingers to grasp, but Hoom slid away, struck the ledge Cammar had been standing on, bounced limply out into midair, and for a moment it seemed that he'd fly into the abyss — and then he was out of sight.

Dilna was hysterical, screaming Hoom's name and beating at Wix. Both of them were in a precarious position, and Stipock was afraid that anything he did might break the equilibrium. But he decided, and acted quickly, pulling Dilna by force backward toward safer, more level ground. When she was well clear of the edge, still weeping uncontrollably, Stipock went carefully back and pulled Wix clear. It only took a meter's pulling to get the young man in a position where he could get himself back up to safe ground.

"I tried to hold him," Wix kept saying. "I really tried." And Stipock said yes, I know, yes, of course you did.

Then they heard Hoom's voice from below — not loud, but loud enough to be heard. Immediately they fell silent, and listened.

"Don't come down!" Hoom shouted. His voice echoed from the walls of the canyon.

"Where are you!" Stipock shouted.

"There's no way down here! Don't try!"

"Are you all right?"

"I think my back is broken! I can't move my legs at all!"

"How far down are you?"

"Don't come!" Hoom shouted, sounding more frantic. "It's too sheer! And the rocks are giving way under me — I won't be here long!" To Stipock's horror the boy began to laugh. "There's nothing under me from here! Five hundred meters, right down to the river!"

Dilna called out to him. "Hoom! Hang on! Please!"

"I already thought of that!" Hoom called back, and then they heard a distant scraping noise, and a cry from far below. Dilna gasped, but Hoom immediately called again, "I'm all right! I have hold of a rock! It seems stable!"

Stipock wracked his brain for an idea, a way of getting down to Hoom. But there was no rope any nearer than Heaven City , and to try to scale the cliff and bring up a man with a broken back without rope was inviting more deaths.

"I'm going down," Wix said softly.

"No you're not," Stipock answered.

"I'm going down, Stipock," Wix said. "I've got to help him!"

"Stay there, dammit!" Hoom shouted. "I don't want you to die with me!"

Wix was frantic. "I can't let him die!"

"Don't kill yourself for guilt," Stipock said coldly, and Wix turned to Dilna for support. "I tried to hold onto him," Wix insisted.

"I know it," she answered. "We all did."

And then they fell silent. They stood several meters from the edge. Waiting. For what? Stipock realized that the situation was impossible. They were waiting for Hoom to fall asleep, or lose his grip, or die of his injuries. At best they were waiting for him to die of thirst. If they had to stay there waiting, they'd all go crazy.

Hoom realized all that, too, and said so. "I'm going to let go!" he called out.

"No!" Dilna wailed, and the canyon shouted it back at her. "No! No!"

"I can't hold on forever! What should I wait for? Jason's flying ship?"

"Is Cammar anywhere near you?" Wix called, trying to keep Hoom from talking himself into dying.

"He's dead!" came the answer.

"Can you see him?" Wix called. There was a long wait before Hoom answered. "There's a lot of blood on this rock," Hoom said. "It isn't mine. There's nothing between here and the river." Hoom's voice quavered as he spoke.

Dilna began to vomit, retching loudly. The sound was terrible, and Stipock wanted to scream in his helplessness. Wix was crying, more in frustration than grief.

"Stipock!" Hoom called.

"Yes!"

"Tell them for me!"

"I will!" Stipock called back.

"Tell us what?" Wix asked, looking up in dread. "What?"

"That he knew. And that he forgives you both."

Wix and Dilna were silent now. Hoom called from below, "But you, Stipock! I'll never forgive you!"

Stipock felt a terrible pain, a wrenching of his bowels, and he breathed heavily. The boy couldn't mean it.

"I'll never forgive you for not teaching me more before I died!"

And, relieved, Stipock slowly sat down. But the feeling of guilt was still there. Because it was Stipock who had brought Hoom to this.

Hoom didn't say anymore. There was a sliding of rock. No scream, no cry. No sound of the body landing below. And in the deep silence after the sound of Hoom letting go, the gurgle of the river far below seemed remarkably loud.

Wix and Dilna just sat there, saying nothing, not touching. After a while Stipock went farther up the hill and looked for bushes he could use to make a fire. When he got it going, he came back to the two young people and led them up the hill to the fire. They came passively enough, but they didn't look him in the eye. Stipock could guess what they were thinking. Years of betrayal, and the fact that they hadn't stopped, had never stopped. Knowing that he knew that they had betrayed him. No wonder, Stipock thought, that they sit on opposite sides of the fire. Guilt couldn't keep them apart when Hoom was alive; but now that he's dead, it will, for a time at least, separate them more thoroughly than marriage had ever done.

Dilna and Wix both cried out in the night, at different times. Stipock also slept badly. The next day they backtracked, and found another way down the northwest slope of the mountains. They never found the river that had taken Dilna's husband and son, and were just as glad of that.

The forest swallowed them, and the going was slow, and at last Dilna was too pregnant to travel. They built a house, then, and hunted in the forest, trapping small animals and birds and laying in food for the winter, Wix and Stipock both leaving the house for days at a time, to make sure the winter would not catch them unprepared.

The snows in the forest here fell deep, deeper than they ever had in Heaven City. The trees were taller, too, and denser, and the darkness at noon in the middle of winter, even though the leaves had fallen from the trees, was dismal and depressing. But that winter Dilna's child was born. A son.

"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.