On the Razor’s Edge

X. At the Capital of All the Worlds

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.

The other two static visuals portrayed the Beanstalk before its fall: an immense tower, rising out of sight, dimishing into the eastbound distance to little more than a scratch upon the sky. But it stood already in ruins: Rust had secured hard-won victories, cables dangled from far above, and doorways hung broken and open on a barren departure lounge. An obviously space-tight crawler—the “Jack”—sat out of plumb, jammed on the primary funicular. The tower struts were overgrown with creepers and vines. A monkey with an enormous nose perched on one and seemed to look into the viewer with knowing eyes.

None showed the Beanstalk in its heyday.

It did not seem right that such a colossus had vanished without a trace. It was Commonwealth tech, after all. But perhaps it had been cannibalized for precisely that reason, as folk robbed the battlefield dead.

The mobile image was old and had obviously been migrated onto newer media early on, which may be why it had escaped the Dao Chettian purge of all Late Commonwealth records. The coarse images rastered at times into pixels, and if there had ever been any sound it had not survived the migration. The sequence began with a smiling assembly of dark-skinned blonds. Alabastrines, Donovan thought; but the Pedant told him that Alabaster had not yet been settled at the time of the record, so the physical type had evidently been native to Old Earth! They wore jackets—the climate being already chillier than of yore—and Donovan captured a name on the jacket-backs when they turned. A variety of Old Brythonic but written in the Taņţamiž script: Strine Omnischool. So this was a university outing of some sort. Perhaps an archeological field trip.

The students explore the old Beanstalk, talking to one another and pointing.

(Donovan wondered if he could have understood them. Brythonic was one of the ancient lingos he had learned in Terran School. But the degraded quality of the images did not allow even lip-reading.)

One of the students strips off his jacket and reveals a bare torso decorated in an intricate pattern of white tattoos that twist down his arms. He beats his chest and laughs and Donovan needs no interpreter. Look at me! I’m one of our ancient ancestors! The others laugh with him, although some trade skeptical glances with a significant look at the Beanstalk.

(The builders of the Beanstalk had been no primitive tribesmen. The Commonwealth had not then entirely fallen and Terra never did lose its memory of what it once had been.)

Student laughter is cut short when something plunges into the earth not two feet from the aboriginal pretender. Tree branches whip, leaves dance in a flurry, smoke drifts from a crater wherein sits something white. A frozen moment of surprise, the realization that death has spoken a mere pace away, then heads turn skyward.

And they run.

The images grow chaotic at this point, as the individual with the recorder is running with it and if it has a stabilizer it is turned off. But then, thinking himself safe and perhaps realizing the historical moment, the cameraman stops and begins recording events once more. The sky is filled with tumbling trash. Somewhere far up its trunk, the Beanstalk has buckled and, torn apart by its stresses, has become a rain of metaloceramic confetti. The distant clouds are pierced with contrails, where more lofty segments smoke through the atmosphere farther toward the east. An enormous subassembly strikes the jungle east of the stump, and shattered fragments bounce in all directions. A face appears midscreen and, crappy image or no, the lips are not hard to read. Run, you asshole!

(Yes, Late Brythonic, said the Pedant. But the Silky Voice and the others made no reply and the Brute was even more silent than usual.)

But the cameraman holds his ground. He records another impact near the horizon while smaller parts and components strike all around like iron rain. Then the imager pans skyward again and captures a fireball streaking toward the east, breaking up into calves.

And then a mass of mud and vegetation spatters the imager input. Mixed in the slime are streaks of red that might be blood but perhaps only a deeper stratum of mud.

Whatever it was, that was the end of the mobile. Various parts of the scarred man wondered whether the heroic cameraman had been killed at the end by debris from the disintegrating Beanstalk or whether the close call had finally convinced him to join his fellows in flight.

Donovan questioned the appellation. “Heroic? He was a fool to stay.”

Maybe, said the Brute, but it was still a ballsy thing to do.

“What? To record images that no one would ever look at a hundred years later? Images of an event that most people have now forgotten ever took place?”

But the Fudir, who had been weeping unrestrainedly, wiped the scarred man’s eyes with his sleeve. “No,” he said. “But he was in at the end of an age and he knew it. He was there when the gates went down.”

When Donovan passed over the Roof of the World into the ancient land of the Vraddy, he found no trace of the Taj. Nor did the people of the vast rolling savannah remember that there had ever been such a beautiful thing. They were content to drive their herds from summer to winter pasture and sell the beef in the markets of Gawath. They knew there had been a people on their land before them, and another people before that, but the herdsmen—the rinnernecks—were descended from recolonists out of Old Eighty-two and bore names that would have startled the men who had raised the Taj. They had no interest in such things and could indeed tell Donovan more stories of Old Eighty-two passed down in their clans than they could of the prairie over which they now roamed. When Donovan told a group of herdsman at their evening “gaffgläsh” that their plains had once been a jungle and the abode of tigers, they laughed and declared him the greatest liar of them all and kissed him on both cheeks.

The farm town of New Bramburg was an Old Terran settlement, her inhabitants decended of folk who had never left the planet. Donovan decided to spend an evening there, for he was desirous of one night at least among his own people.

It was not a very big town, but then Terra was no longer a very big world. Estimates he had seen in Gidula’s library had put the number at just under seven hundred million, planetwide. More than that, there was insufficient arable land to feed. The great farmlands of Terra’s past were desiccated steppes or polar deserts now and, while cross-stellar transport of food was not unknown, they would have needed daily armadas to replace their ancient harvests with the bounty of other worlds.

“Zãddigah-of-the-infidels,” said the bartender in the town’s only tavern, “is dying. Her primary export is young men and women of twenty.”

Another patron of the bar held up a glass. “May they all speedily depart.”

Aye, ran the unspoken subtext, and leave the Earth to those who had always nursed on her breasts. To these people, even the Terrans of the Periphery were just another sort of outlander, less obnoxious in some ways but more dangerous in others. Such folk attracted the notice of the Names and, by their dreams of resettlement, unsettled the minds of their neighbors. Three generations earlier, there had been a series of pogroms carried out by the hysterical descendants of Eighty-seconds and Bhaitrians on the mere rumor that they were to be expelled and the dispersed Terrans brought back. Thus does one generation’s conquest become another generation’s birthright. The age when their ancestors had come as conquerors had passed below the horizon of folk memory. Only the Old Terrans remembered, and habitually referred to their neighbors, with some politesse, as “guests,” however uninvited the guesting may have been.

The scarred man sat at the bar, feeling unnaturally exposed. He disliked putting his back to an open room, but there was a mirror behind the bar into which was etched the recumbent blue body of Sleeping Bisna, who was here called “Vishnu.” It gave him a view of his six. There were few townsmen in the bar. The farmers, the bartender promised him, would return at sunset, and then the joint would get “jumpy.”

“Though I wouldn’t let on you be from the Diaspora,” he was advised; and the others nodded in chorus, offering grave assent. “Most of the clodhoppers are tolerant, but there are a few in every crowd. You know how it goes.”

Donovan agreed that he knew how it went. The Terrans of New Bramburg spoke not the Tongue. A few words and phrases of the old Taņţamiž peppered their talk but seemed more decorative than substantive. For the most part, the Folk had acquired the clothing and the accents of Old Eighty-two. Blue eyes and fair skin were common among them, and while they were conscious of having lived in this place longer than death, they were less aware that matters now were very different from when their ancestors had flourished.

Donovan bought a round for the house. That custom, at least, had not changed, and for a time he basked in a companionable silence. The shopkeepers and service techs who comprised the daytime population asked him desultory questions. How fare the Terrans of the Periphery? They were not really interested. The Periphery might as well be in the Andromeda Galaxy for all it mattered to them. But they sighed to hear of worlds where Terrans were merely snubbed and not subject to periodic murderous spasms. Life, they thought, must be wonderful in the Terran Corners of Jehovah and Die Bold and Dancing Vrouw.

“Not that we’d speak unfaithfulness to the Names,” the bartender reminded everyone, eliciting a chorus of grunts and “of course not.”

“Although,” the Fudir said, “it was the Names who cleansed Old Terra.”

“Mighty are the Names,” agreed the bartender. But one or two patrons twisted their lips in skepticism.

“One hears,” ventured the Vendor of Approved Pesticides, “other tales.”

“That the prehumans—the People of Sand and Iron—wrought the deed?” suggested the Fudir.

“There are stories.” The Vendor agreed without actually agreeing.

“Though to say so,” added the bartender, “were to disparage the might of the Names.”

The Terrans of New Bramburg all looked at Donovan without turning their heads. Who knew how long a tongue a stranger might have that it could lick the ears of others?

“I have seen a mobile, a khinyo, of the fall of the Borneo Beanstalk,” the Fudir told them. “And it fell of itself.”

“Nonsense,” said the bartender. “The Names scythed them down.” The Old Terrans, at least, had not forgotten the old lore.

The Vendor shrugged. “Or the People of Sand and Iron did so and the Names reaped where the prehumans had sown. What matter to such as us?”

The others sucked in their breaths. But the Vendor was undeterred.

“Will you inform on me, O Khenrik Jal? Or you?” He turned to the next stool over. “Or you, Jemdar Smidt, my cradle-companion? What do these sword cuts mean…” He fingered the scar on his cheek. “… if they do not mean we may trust one another? As for this man…” He tossed his head at the Fudir. “… he has the accents of the Periphery in his breath. He might more fear our tattling than we his.”

“Neither was it the prehumans,” insisted the Fudir. “The towers were derelict long before they fell, and they fell because they were no longer maintained. The world had grown too poor and too sparsely filled to support them. I know that two fell in this wise—at Kenya and at Borneo—and I think the other ten as well.”

“Perhaps the Names knocked down the remnants,” said the bartender, salvaging some puissance for the rulers of the Central Worlds. But it occurred suddenly to Donovan buigh that the Old Names may have done so from mercy, dismantling the surviving Beanstalks before they too could topple uncontrolled. It might not be wise to judge the early Names by the decadence of their epigones. If he had learned anything during his hajj, it was that the end of an age might differ vastly from its birth.

“The Commonwealth,” said the Keener of Blades, dropping his voice to a habitual whisper when naming the old regime, “would never have permitted such decay.”

“Maybe not,” the Fudir agreed. “But permission was not in it. The Ice had begun by then, and the farmlands dried up and the growing season shrank. And ‘many young men of twenty went away.’”

“There is a song,” admitted the Keener.

The Vendor’s cradle-companion scratched his cheek. “That one?”

“How runs the lay?” asked the Fudir.

The Keener looked about the room quickly, then lowered his head as the others crowded close to hear. It was a lively, bouncy tune for a matter so poignant.

The others joined in on the chorus.

The bar patrons tittered nervously among themselves when they had finished and two of them glanced once more behind them in case anyone had entered the bar and heard. But it was what the Fudir had not heard that interested him. He had heard no hint of coercion in the song. No indication that the departure had been anything but voluntary. Yet the legends on the Old Planets were that the Dao Chettians had defeated Terra, scythed the Beanstalks, and herded her people onto the Ships of Exile—to be dumped ill prepared on the barely terraformed worlds of the Periphery.

“What if,” he said, as much to himself as the others. “What if the Cleansing took centuries? What if ships began to leave as the world dried out, and it was only at the very end that the Names—or the prehumans—forcibly removed the excess.” An excess that the world could no longer support?

“They sent them to the Periphery to die,” said the Vendor.

“But if the arable land was shrinking, so was Terra’s carrying capacity. To leave them here would leave them to die.”

“Then at least they would have died at home,” said the bartender, surprising the Fudir with unlooked-for outspokenness.

Jemdar Smidt shook his head. “What matter? Others came, and now they too are leaving. We will not see again Terra as she was: bountiful with green, warmed by hot breaths of zephyrs, when only ‘mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun.’”

“I’ve always wondered,” the bartender, Khenrik Jal, mused, “what was an Englishman?”

“A native of the Brythonic Isles,” the Fudir told them. “Islands now swallowed by the Ice. This land of yours was called Vraddy.”

“I have heard this said,” the bartender commented as he began washing glasses. “Men from hereabouts went out and settled New Vraddy.”

“They were the old Taņţamiž, who held the Mandate of Heaven after the Zhõgwó—those you once called the Cinakar.”

The others looked uncomfortable. “I’ve never called anyone Cinakar,” said the bartender, and his careful eye assured the others that they had never done so, either.

The Keener of Blades laughed. “It was the Cinakar who filled Dao Chetty. My friends here fear that if they mention certain things too often, the Names will hear and cause them to vanish.” He turned on his stool and called out into the empty bar, “Cinakar! Names! Commonwealth!” The others flinched.

The Keener laughed again and faced the bar. The bartender smiled and said in a whisper, “I note that you did not call upon Ulakaratcakan, the Savior of the World.”

But the Keener had an answer ready. “So, why push my luck?”

The Fudir said, “Who is Ulaka—” But he was cut off.

“He Who is Not Named is the One Who is to come at the end of days and restore the Commonwealth. But it will be the heavenly Commonwealth, not the earthly one. The Names do not understand that the Nameless One is not a rival Name. He is not even of their aetherial plane. His regency is not of this world. Meanwhile…” And the bartender reared back and spoke in a normal voice, “The clack dancers will come through tonight and entertain us. You will stay, of course, O Fudir?”

Of course he would. If only to learn what a clack dancer was.

They arrived just before sundown in a train of booger-vans with enormous tracked wheels, the sides of which were painted with colorful pictures of men like trees: smiling dancers with skin the texture of bark against a background of bright yellow and red. The folk who emerged from the vans wore veiled, ankle-length gowns that concealed even their feet. And they clacked when they walked.

“Clackers cannot wear ordinary shoes, you see,” the Keener explained to the Fudir, who did not see at all. Everyone filed into the theater, where the troupe’s grounds-crew had already set up the light and sound systems. These were a bad-skinned lot with warts on their faces and hands. “They came from Old Eighty-two,” the Keener said, leading the scarred man to a seat front and center of the stage, “along with the klattriya and all the other itarar.”

Klattriya must derive from kalatiyayttiriya, which meant “to lead a wandering life.” And itarar was a disparaging term for outlanders. Donovan wondered why his host was using fragments of the old Taņţamiž. To show solidarity? To hint that even here there was a clot of the Terran Brotherhood? Donovan leaned toward him.

“Knowest thou aught of the Shadow War?” he whispered in the Tongue.

The Keener smiled. “May each side slay the other, and the de’il eat the last.”

“Hast the Brotherhood chosen sides?”

“Brotherhood? Sahb! What Brotherhood be that?”

Donovan grunted. The Brotherhood was banned across the Confederation and it would be death to admit to membership. But if the Brotherhood had agreed to join the rebellion, as Oschous Dee had claimed, Donovan had yet to find a footprint of that agreement in the words of the Terrans he had bespoken on Zãddigah.

The dancers filed onto the stage and, in unison, dropped their concealing robes.

The farmers clapped with delight, for it is always cheering to look on people more unfortunate than oneself. The clack dancers were naked, though not that one could readily tell. Most of them were covered with warts, but such warts as the scarred man had never seen. They grew in massive clusters—on hands, ankles, torsos, arms, even faces—and indeed endowed the men with the appearance of tree bark. Some of the warts were long and sticklike, others were wide and flat, and all had the appearance of having been carefully shaped and cultured.

Cutaneous horns, said the Pedant, eager as ever to reveal his fund of knowledge. They were discovered by a man named Pappy Loma. An immune system deficiency allows Pappy Loma’s virus to take over the machinery of the skin to produce the horny growths.

The Silky Voice wondered what purpose the old Commonwealth engineers had had in creating a race of such people. Or had they viewed people only as objects, to be experimented upon, and done this simply because they could? The young man in the chlamys winced in pain. How heavy their hands and feet must be!

Then they began to dance. A percussionist used the rodlike growths on his fingers to work a variegated set of drums and cymbals. The dancers picked up the rhythm and began to shake their hands, feet, and bodies. The wide, flat horns on their torsos clapped in tempo; the rodlike horns rattled and rustled, as of shaking a whisk broom. The different timbres and tempos gave the clacking something like a harmony and a counterpoint. It was a wild clattering, a symphony of rhythm. Some dancers wore metallic clips on their horny extrusions, others wore bells, and for variety they would beat on various objects scattered about the stage. Now and then, feet would stomp the stage in unison, and the Sleuth noticed that none of the growths occurred on their soles or palms.

Some of the dancers had only the rods on their hands and ankles and their torsos were otherwise bare, save of moles. When the dance-line parted and let these through for a solo, the farmers in the audience whooped, for these dancers included women.

Donovan was not a man for cringing, and he blamed his discomfort on the young man in the chlamys. He “felt” for the dancers, their discomfort, their embarrassment, their shame at being reduced to making a spectacle of their infirmity.

And yet, said another part of him, they are no more abnormal than sharpies or foxies or Jugurthans. And who are we to tell them they must not make a living as dancers? What other sort of work might they perform, whose hands are as encumbered as these?

And I suppose, said the Silky Voice, that a colony of lepers might form a bell choir for the entertainment of strangers.

But there was something familiar about the rattling of the “drumsticks,” something that reminded him of …

… an old sugar-processing plant gone to seed. The cane has taken root and the wind blowing downriver rattles them like drumsticks. He staggers up on the western bank of the river, and throws himself to the ground among the cane. It is marshy here. He wants nothing more than to lie there and sleep undisturbed until morning. But there is a safe house in the O’erfluss District, if he can reach it.

He looks back the way he has swum and marvels that he had the reserves to cross the river. Flames light the sky over the Secret City, and the hissing of the fires blends with the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects. He hears the distant crackle of bolt tanks and thud of buildings.

Not much left of the Revolution, he thinks.

But whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.

Motion through the riverside growth! He recedes into the shadows and slips a knife from his belt. A voice whispers his name.

His true name.

It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.

In relief, he rises from the shadows and whispers urgently, “Over here.” He waits to see if he has made one last mistake but recognizes the other when he steps forth. “You made it out of the Chancellery, then.”

The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, chief. Are there any more with you?”

“No. I … I thought for a while there were, but…”

“I understand.” He kisses him once on each cheek. “I hope you do, too.”

And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of them punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend, and asks him, “Why?”

And that man shrugs and will not look at him. “Close fits my shirt,” he answers, “but closer far my skin.”

Donovan gasped and sat bolt upright in his seat in the theater. The Keener turned to him in solicitude. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. No.” He rose and hurried up the aisle to the exit. The dancers did not falter at his apparent rudeness. Their rhythmic clacking followed him until cut off by the theater doors. In the lobby, Donovan bent over, hands on knees, huffing.

The Keener of Blades had followed behind him. “You are ill,” he said. “I would take you to the doctor, but he’s in there.” He waggled a thumb at the theater.

Donovan sucked in a deep breath and stood upright. “Is the bartender in there, too?”

Nowhere in the official accounts Donovan had read or resimulated on Oschous’s Black Horse or Gidula’s White Comet had there been any mention of the internal organization of the Rising. But he remembered now. Padaborn had had four section chiefs for the assault on the Secret City. Rajasekaran had died in the first rush. Lai Showan had been lost trying to hold the Security Police Center. O’Farrell had gone down with the Chancellery Building. And from the ruins of the Education Ministry—from the Lion’s Mouth itself—the fourth chief had escaped unseen: Tomas Krishna Murphy.

Only to be betrayed on the far side of the river by Geshler Padaborn himself, who, having been captured earlier, had broken under duxing kaoda.

He was a great man, said the Sleuth. But it is not given even to great men to endure the third degree of torture.

He seemed hale enough when last we saw him, the Pedant retorted

“Not all scars show,” said Donovan.

“What?” said the Keener, who had accompanied him to the tavern.

The scarred man shook his head. He thought that Padaborn had buckled under the Threat and not the Tools. Before the Shadows of the Names employed the Tools, they would first tell you in great detail about them. Then the Shadows would show them to you. Then they would demonstrate the Tools on another prisoner. It often saved considerable time.

I wonder what became of him?

Who cares? He turned traitor!

Consider what Those did to us, said the young man, and he was the greater threat. He had the charism that O’Farrell and we lacked. He could inspire men to die. He may have been harvested, or pithed, or—

“Or they did to him what they did to us.”

That might explain why the rebel Shadows confused the two of us. The simulations and reports named no other rebels but Padaborn. Part of a deliberate strategy, Donovan supposed, to minimize the Rising by minimizing the participants.

“Something still does not feel right.”

“I knew it,” said the Keener. “You stay here. Take care of our guest, Khenrik Jal, and I will fetch the Dispenser of Efficacious Medicines.” The Keener then ran off, leaving Donovan in the tavern.

Donovan turned to the bartender. “You heard him. Give me some of that ‘efficacious medicine.’”

And so, following a night of sleepless turmoil, Tomas Krishna Murphy came at last to the last site of all: Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds. If the Commonwealth had had a center, if it could have been said to be in any one place, that place was here, in this great sprawling metropolis, in the Hall of Suns.

“She’s a creeping place,” the earnest Terrans of New Bramburg had warned him before he had departed. “There are ghosts among the ruins.”

From the air, the site of Antapak had shown clearly. As the rain forest had dried out and withered, it had stripped the cloak from the Capital of All the Worlds and exposed her bones to the eyes of strangers. Donovan parked his rented hopper in a broad plaza near the center of town. Perhaps it had once been an outdoor theater, or a sporting venue, or perhaps it had actually been a hopper-park. Now, it was simply an open space littered with a spill of white blocks.

More remained of Antapak than of any of the other sites he had visited, but that is not to say that very much remained. Layered upon the neglect and decay of years was evidence of more deliberate destruction. Those portions of the capital that had sat on the shoreline bluffs had been tumbled into the waters below, where the proud towers of other days could yet be spied gleaming through the crystalline sea. The Names of Dao Chetty had vented a certain measure of spleen on this place, Donovan decided, because it was a reminder to them that they had merely built on the bones of others. Yet by reducing Antapak to ruins they may only have underscored that very fact.

Perhaps they had given up. Some parts of the sprawling city seemed untouched. The old Commonwealth had built for the ages; and, though an age had come and gone, a portion of their work remained. Donovan remembered how parts of the Commonwealth Ark that he and Méarana had found scant years before had remained in working condition.

After an hour or so of wandering, Donovan stopped for a drink of water and a bit of a mustard-and-cheese combination known locally as “music.” He sat upon one of the overturned blocks that had once foundationed a building, and tried to imagine what the street before him had been like when this had been a lively capital and crowds of people had thronged its busy avenues.

In the silence, though, he heard a faint sound—a skritch-skratch, a chattering as if by gravel upon stone. He turned and looked behind him and saw nothing. An insect? But it was like no insect-sound he had ever heard before.

The block was uncomfortable. A crack as wide as his little finger ran diagonally across its top surface. He stood and wrapped the remainder of his snack in a kerchief, stuffed it in his scrip. Inner Child had a sudden desire to run from this place. «Something is following us.»

The Brute sniffed the air, listened, took both eyes and searched carefully in all directions. The onetime streets were choked with grass and formed yellow-green rivers around the islands of broken buildings. Bundles of tumbleweed rolled along them. He watched for ripples that disobeyed the wind, a sign that something moved through the grass. Nuthin’, he decided. But …

But you feel it, too…, said the Silky Voice.

«Pedant, do you know where we left the hopper?»

“I came here,” said the Fudir, “to find the Hall of Suns, and I will not leave until I have set my eyes upon it.”

The natural sound of his footfalls and his own breathing covered the faint cracklings, and so he began to walk more briskly. He pushed his way through the grass, hunting for one of the five broad avenues that tradition claimed led to the Hall. From the air, he had marked three likely locations; but landscapes looked different on the weed-grown ground.

He had expected the crackling to fade behind him, but he soon learned that they whispered from all directions. «They’re surrounding us.»

“Who is?” demanded the Fudir. “There is nothing out there. Step up to any vantage point and you can see for leagues across the savannahs.”

«Oh, surely. But we can’t see around the next corner. The genemasters in their heyday did not hesitate to alter men. What might they have done with tigers or other beasts?»

Made tasty and docile meat animals of them, suggested the Pedant.

«That would be the sensible thing to do—sable tiger is delicious—but might they have prepared beasts to await the arrival of the Dao Chettians? Might that not be the reason the Names abandoned the demolition of this place? Perhaps something stands guard here … »

Donovan came to one of the five grand concourses and turned right toward the city center. From left and from right he heard the buzzing like cicadas on a hot summer’s day. He kept one hand on the butt of his teaser.

It’s not following us, the Sleuth decided. It’s in situ. We’re only walking through their midst.

«Through whose midst?»

Before him, though the savannah grasses that partially skirted it, Donovan saw a broad, low building in white marble. It sat on a stone platform, through the blocks of which grasses struggled toward the sun. The platform was reached by a series of shallow ramps alternating with short stairways, and the building façade was lined by pillars in a variety of styles: plain, fluted, intricately decorated, with capitals scrolled, palmate, or historiate. The array ought to have clashed, but it did not. The stylistic cacophony somehow achieved harmony.

In the entablature was in inscription in the old Taņţamiž: Here Are All At Home.

“Do you think it is…?” the Fudir asked himself.

I’m sure it is, sang the young girl in the chiton.

As he rushed up the stair to the patio, Inner Child wondered. «Why was this building, of all buildings, not reduced to rubble by the Names?»

It woulda made more sense, the Brute agreed, to demolish this ’un and leave the rest of the city be.

The snap-crackle-pop seemed louder as he entered the Hall of Suns and found himself on the top tier of a semicircular amphitheater dug into the farther hillside. Seats and desks lined the concentric tiers facing a dais on the floor below. Columns rimmed the theater, and between them stood bases for statues. Above, a dome extended toward the center, where a gaping hole spoiled its wholeness.

So there had been an attack, but one that had succeeded in no more than smashing through the dome.

Where is the rubble from the dome? the Sleuth asked. It should litter the floor below the hole.

“Scavanged, most likely,” said the Fudir. “There may be villages nearby with hovels built of stone.”

Most of the niches lining the walls were empty, but a few held the stubs of statues and one held a statue entire. Drawn to it, Donovan looked into the smiling and delighted countenance of a man wearing a bulky environment suit. He cradled his helmet in his arm and seemed to have just taken a very deep breath. On the base beneath, Donovan read: Tau Ceti Two: Yang huang-ti, and below that a single line: “We have a second home!”

No other statues were intact, but most of the bases were. A nearby plinth read: New Mumbai: Chettiwan Mahadevan. “Then we have never been alone!”

Donovan hastened to the far left of the semicircle.

Cevvay: Jacinta Rosario. “So this is Barsoom!”

Donovan had always thought Rosario a figure out of myth; but the Commonwealth would have known—unless she had become myth even by then. The first two plinths bore names he did not recognize, even from myth.

Cantiran: Neil Armstrong. “One Small Step for Man!”

And the first plinth …

Akalitamko_ṭṭu: Yuri Gagarin. “I see Earth! It is so beautiful!”

These niches, Donovan decided, had once borne the statues of the great captains of old, the first to set foot on the various and sundry worlds of the Commonwealth. Cantiran was the old name of Terra’s moon, Luna. Akalitamko_ṭṭu he had never heard of and its root meaning seemed to be “globe running-around.” Earth-orbit, thought the Pedant. The first man to pilot a spaceship, the Sleuth deduced. But Donovan still wondered how many of the older names were true and how many the crust of legend. You could make a statue of a myth as easily as of a man.

He made his way through the crescent tiers. Each seat had a small white-stone podium and on the fronts of the podia were inscribed the weathered names of worlds. In the back row, he found Henrietta on one podium. Farther down, Ashbanal graced another; and about midway to the floor Yuts’ga was inscribed on two adjacent podia.

But he ignored the rest and hurried toward the cluster of seats on the dais, set behind tiers of long benches and facing out toward the rest of the room.

Behind the first bench he found Beta Hydri, 82 Eridani, and Delta Pavonis. Behind the higher bench sat Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, 61 Cygni, and Epsilon Indi. Each of them had three seats. The third bench, adorned on its façade with the great starburst of the Commonwealth of Suns, held the five seats of Terra herself, one set higher and in the center. The presider, he assumed.

Sleuth examined the ancient names. Delta Pavonis was obviously Delpaff and 82 Eridani was Old 82. At the second bench, Tau Ceti must be Dao Chetty. The others puzzled him a while longer, but he decided that Alpha Centauri must be one of the Century Suns and Beta Hydri must be Bhaitry. So one of the other two was undoubtedly New Vraddy and the other New Mumbai, although as to which was which he was unsure.

Everything seemed arranged in order of precedence. The Century Suns had lain nearest to Terra, and so had been settled first, and so her seats stood in the center of the upper bench. That would mean that the two flanking her—“Dao Chetty and Epsilon Indi”—were next settled. The next bench down, a little later; and then the mass of suns in the facing rows all the way up to Henrietta-by-the-Rift in the last row.

Donovan could not resist the lure. He could not come all this distance and fail to climb those last few steps.

He found the stairs behind the dais that went to the highest seat, the presider; and there he eased himself onto the hard quasi-marble chair and gazed over the assembled amphitheater. His first thought was not some grand remembrance of the Commonwealth, not some thrill of ancient spectacle. His first thought was that these hard stone seats must have once had cushions.

Only then did he pick up an imaginary gavel and strike the desktop. Will the Assembly of the Suns please to be coming to order. He imagined a cacophony of voices slowly diminishing and the—what had they called them? Grand Senators? Delegates? Representatives?—drifting toward their seats.

What had this assembly done? he wondered. In those days, when communication had been only as swift as the fastest packet ship, disparate stars tended toward self-government. If this assembly passed a law, it would be weeks or even months before other worlds would hear of it. Perhaps it had adjudicated disputes, settled trade agreements, orchestrated the exploration and terraformation of new worlds, directed the struggle against the prehumans.

He remembered what Peacharoo, that fortuitously surviving automaton on the old terraforming Ark, had said: Tau Ceti is a valued and important member of the Commonwealth. They stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades against the People of Sand and Iron.

Symbolism, he decided. This gathering had been mostly symbolic. The rituals of unity mattered. Hence, the array of statues and very likely other more perishable regalia. Banners, medallions, standards, ballads, all now forgotten, all of it geared to say: We Are One. A hundred worlds or more, from the old home-planet to the newest hardscrabble colony, were one in mind and resolve and brothers and sisters each to the other.

Patriotism meant love of a place, of the patria, and this of a place no larger than one could embrace as whole. But in the new world of the Commonwealth, men had gone from world to world, weakening ties, forging new fortunes, forming a new allegiance to a broader empire, while the stay-at-homes would have preserved their own particularities and celebrated their own festivals. And this would have been most true on the longest-settled worlds, and in particular on Terra herself. Was that why the Exiles, scattered to the Periphery, had so diligently re-created lost particularities?

He looked again at the worlds arrayed before him. Most of them with one seat—one vote? A few—more populous?—with two. The Old Home-Stars with three and Terra alone with five. Had that been in rough proportion to population? Or had the Home-Stars been loathe to dilute their power? He recalled also that Peacharoo had sounded slightly condescending: This dormitory is reserved for Terrans. Colonists from the Lesser Worlds are housed elsewhere.

So as Terra cooled and dried and its population grew sparser, Dao Chetty must have asked why Terra retained five votes when her now-more-populous colonies held but three.

The breeze outside the colonnade freshened and a ball of tumbleweed rolled through the amphitheater, caught on one of the seats, broke loose, and rolled out the other side.

Maybe Gidula was right, Donovan thought. Maybe at the end a desperate Terra had tried to use the Commonwealth to sustain itself, tithing the wealth of the colonies to replace what she could no longer produce, even while her own sons and daughters fled for more prosperous worlds. What had been the blackmail? You owe it to your Mother World? But one day a generation arose who knew no such debt of sentiment, who did not keep St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo, Navratri or Lunar New Year, and for whom Terra was just another planet.

Donovan stood and made his way down the dais and when he left the Hall of Suns he did not look back.

Quite by instinct, he took a different route back to where he had left the hopper, but the geometry of the ruins forced him through the same intersection where he had earlier stopped for lunch. The sun was lower in the sky and the mysterious crackling had subsided a little, though he could still hear it distantly from across the entire city.

But Inner Child was constantly alert to alterations in his environment and the Brute was keen to all his senses, and between the two of them they brought the scarred man to a halt by the block upon which they had earlier sat.

«The crack is gone.»

The Brute remembered that the crack had made the block uncomfortable to sit on. Donovan went to his knees and the Sleuth studied the stone closely. He ran their fingers across it.

I can feel where it was. Like a scar.

“It’s been spackled,” said the Fudir.

«Someone is in the city with us!»

He turned suddenly and looked down the empty avenue behind him. The freshening evening wind stirred the grasses.

“Who?” scoffed Donovan. “A stealthy stonemason who creeps through the ruins patching up the cracks?”

The wind drove pebbles and grit before it, stinging Donovan’s cheek. They rolled across the surface of the foundation block like a miniature barchan. A grain found the slight groove where the crack had been and nestled within it.

There’s your answer. Windblown grit has simply filled in the crack. He reached out to dislodge the grain—to free it, as he thought—and found that it was fused with the stone. When he put pressure on it, he experienced a sudden wave of foreboding, as if the entire city would tumble itself upon him and bury him.

He pulled his hand away, stood, withdrew a pace from the wall.

Certain materials of the Commonwealth, called metamaterials, were said to be self-repairing. Like the self-sealing hulls and pressure suits we have.

“But,” said Donovan, “self-repairing stone?”

It is not true stone, said the Pedant, but some sort of Commonwealth material.

Donovan looked out over the ruins. The Capital of All the Worlds has been rebuilding itself all these centuries, the Sleuth decided. Listen to that sound, that unending rustle.

The young man in the chlamys thought it sounded like the rustle of leaves on the ground of autumn, and thought how lonely the stones must have been over the ages.

“And after all this time,” the Fudir said, “this is as far as it’s gotten?”

After all this time, the Sleuth agreed. One pebble at a time. Starting from rubble. You remarked how well preserved the city is. Imagine what it looked like after the Dao Chettians had finished with it! Do you imagine for a moment that they left the Hall of Suns so nearly intact? No, the whole complex is rebuilding itself, but the Hall came first.

And when it is finished, said the Silky Voice, when it stands once more the Capital of All the Worlds, then will the Ulakaratcakan appear.

“No, Silky,” said Donovan buigh. “Then will the fleets of Dao Chetty appear, and flatten the place once more.”

“If they know this is happening,” said the Fudir. “Terra is a backwater now, and even the Terran natives avoid this place. How much might this place change in the span of a life? If the grandchildren see a city less ruined than their grandparents saw, would they realize it?”

The city will rebuild itself, said the young woman in the chiton, but there will be no one to come live in it.

For Pollyanna, of all of the Donovans, to say a thing like that filled them all with deep sorrow.

Imagine, said the young man, waiting for wind and chance to bring materials to it. Ah, the patience of a stone …

A shiver ran through Donovan. Once before, he had dealt with a stone of surpassing patience, and the stone had very nearly won. He stared into the gathering dusk, listened to the busy dust and grit. Had any of them changed their shape? Were they twisting stones? It was too dark to tell, nor did he linger to learn.

He hastened through the deserted streets, guided by the Brute’s instinct for directions, haunted by the rustling sounds of the restless ruins, until he came at last to the open field where he had landed with his hopper.

Naturally, Gidula was waiting for him—with five magpies and Khembold Darling.

“Time to come home, Gesh,” said the Old One.

The Silky Voice stilled the inchoate fear that had driven Donovan from the city, gathered it, and with a proper mix of enzymes put it aside. He drew a breath. “You always knew I would come here.”

Gidula shrugged, as if not to belabor the obvious. “You needed a vacation. I had people at each of the villages hereabouts to tell me when you arrived.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was on my way back.”

Gidula nodded. “Ah. Then you have remembered? You hoped the trip would clear your mind.”

Inner Child grew suddenly cautious. “Some things have become clear, but other matters remain obscure. But I am this close to it. I can feel it.”

Gidula nodded as if he had expected such an answer. “I believe that when we return to the Forks, your last hesitations will vanish. Two,” he called, “run ahead of us in Gesh’s hopper and send the packet drones off to Dawshoo and the others. Tell them it is time to gather.” He turned with the other magpies to his own coaster, but Donovan called out.

“Two?”

The short woman in the black shenmat did not turn, as she needed but a portion of her attention for Donovan. “What?” that part of her replied.

“Don’t forget to turn the hopper in to the State rental consortium. I don’t want to pay late charges.”

This time, the head did turn to look at him, but the blank, flickering goggles revealed nothing.

When he boarded the coaster with Gidula and Khembold, after a secret wink, had taken the pilot’s saddle, Donovan said, “Have you ever come here, Old One?”

The aged Shadow grimaced. “To these old ruins? Of course not. What interest do they hold for me?” He frowned over the grass-grown remnants. “Ancient history, Gesh. What does it matter anymore?” He turned his back on the Capital of All the Worlds and repeated more quietly, “What does it matter anymore?” Then, brusquely, “She must have been lush and verdant once, this world, to support the population she did. But that was a long time ago, and it will not be again.”