Hot Sleep (30 page)

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.

PERHAPS THE
greatest 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.

Jason's Ascent to Heaven. This is easily the most confusing account. It seems that Jason (whom we must now suspect of having really lived) not only took his wife Arran into the sky, but also took the Star
Tower
with him! This is the explanation for the fact that this immense object, supposedly kilometers in height and length, cannot be found anywhere on this planet. Yet this so–called ascent may indeed be based on some kind of fact — Jason may indeed have taken his departure, but not into the heavens; rather, he probably wandered into the Heaven Mountains, either living out the rest of his life in Hively or beyond, in the Forest of Waters. Perhaps this is why the freeholders in the Forest of Waters have the seemingly arrogant habit of calling their native land "Jason's Country" and even "the Land That Jason Chose."

Jason's Son. And here we have the wish fulfillment of every people that remember a Golden Age. Just as the people of Wien look for the return of Hardon Hapwee, the great minstrel who led their armies to victory on the plains of Eastway, so the legend persists, primarily among the common folk, in many different parts of the world, that Jason's Son will someday come, blue of eye as Jason was, and bearing Jason's "hidden name" (this primarily from Stipock), and possessing many magical gifts, chiefest among them being the power to see into people's hearts and read their most secret thoughts. Quite an expectation, that! But here again, archaeologists can no longer dismiss the legend. It must have some meaning hidden back in the events of the time, and it is even possible that the real Jason, if there was such a man, made that very promise to the people of his day.

The Dispersal, however, probably did not involve nearly half a million people, as the no doubt–inflated legends claim. Rather these great national heroes probably left with rather small groups, taking their high–level civilization to more benighted peoples in different areas of the world. This would indeed, at least in one sense of the word, be bringing man — civilized man — to places where he had never lived before. And careful study of the Aven Map will undoubtedly bring us a greater understanding of the religion, the government, and the culture of people much farther into our past than archaeologists had ever dared to dream of going...

The Aven Map: The First Translation, 1204, University of Darkwater, pp. 22–25.