Singer from the Sea (70 page)

D
ONOVAN
C
ARROLL SAT UNDER THE STRIPED AWNING OF A
sidewalk cafe and watched the rain. It drummed the taut canvas overhead, and a fine, cool mist settled on his face and hands. Dangling from the awning, a whirling wind chime emitted a high melodic clatter. He took a deep breath. The rain smell left a tang at the back of his throat and made him feel a little high.

Every year some misguided senator introduced a bill to control the weather, arguing, as required for any innovation, that it was both scientifically possible and socially desirable. Donovan didn’t know about the possible part. He was no scientist. But any random occurrence was desirable as far as he was concerned. It was bad enough contemplating eternity without the prospect of an endless succession of sunny days. Apparently, most people agreed with him: The rain was still falling when and where it liked.

Donovan checked his watch. He was waiting to meet Freddie—late as usual, like most people. Donovan’s anarchronistic devotion to timeliness—including his affectation of carrying a watch, for goodness’ sake—was a sure sign of his eccentricity. An image he sometimes cursed and sometimes nurtured. He caught the waiter’s attendon and pointed at his coffee cup. He watched the waiter pour.

When he was a kid, there hadn’t been any waiters. You pushed a button or a glowing icon. The world was a huge free-of-charge vending machine. But these days jobs were making a comeback. Anything to fill the time. With Donovan’s coffee poured, the waiter tidied up the other tables, none of which needed any tidying. Then he stood by the door, a towel draped over his arm, a crisp white apron from his waist to his shins, staring past Donovan at the rain-swept streets, looking, Donovan decided, vaguely military.

Donovan wondered how old the waiter might be, wondered whether he’d been a waiter in the real world, whether he’d ever lived in the real world at all, for that matter. Maybe he was a newbie like Donovan himself, a virtual life formed from the dance of his parents’ genetic uploads, choreographed by the strictest laws of biological science, pure life without the muss and fuss of flesh and blood.

He wondered all those things, but he couldn’t ask the waiter. It was rude to ask questions about the life before the Bin, especially if, like Donovan, you didn’t have one. “Born in the Bin with no body to burn” was the phrase that Donovan had grown up hearing, just as, he imagined, the young of a couple of centuries earlier had gritted their teeth to “footloose and fancy-free.” Both were licenses for a certain eccentricity tinged with misplaced envy.

Donovan was about to turn forty, an age when men used to start feeling old, calculating their lives were half over, lamenting they were halfway to nowhere, crying out, “Is this all there is?” Donovan envied them. It’d taken him only forty years to decide his life was pointless. Now he had eternity to figure out what to do about it.

He sipped on his coffee and opened up the newspaper he’d brought with him. He usually didn’t read newspapers, though they were all the rage. A nice fat paper could last you all day. The lead story was about the upcoming centennial of the Bin, still months away. There were numerous expert opinions as to “what this incredible milestone might have to say to the human race.” Donovan read that part over. The writer had indeed created a talking milestone.
And no matter which expert made it talk, it seemed to say pretty much the same thing as far as Donovan could tell:
It’s only been a hundred years, and already immortality is getting old.

G
IVING WAY TO A SMALL DESIRE TO CELEBRATE
, I
FOUND
my way—“outward”
I
guess you’d call it—through a small, perpetually misty and twilit region of mountains calculated to resemble a Taoist painting. For me, this is a kind of Faerie, where a man could hide himself and beautifully sleep the sleep of a Rip Van Winkle, where a lady could become a Sleeping Beauty in a rose-tangled castle and cave grown into a jade mountainside.

I heard a hearty howl from my left and another from my right.
I
walked on. Always good to let the boss know you’re on the job.

After a time, an orange fu dog the size of a Shetland pony appeared to the left, a green one to the right. They seated themselves close to me, their great, fluffy tails curved over their backs.

“Hello,” I said softly. “How’s the frontier?”

“Nothing unnatural,” growled Shiriki, the green one. “We passed The O’Keefe recently on his way out, but that is all.”

Chamballa merely studied me with those great round eyes set in a flat face above a wide mouth. I have said that she was orange in color, but her coat was no garish citrus hue. It was closer to the ruddy glow of a coal that has not yet become fringed with ash.

I nodded.

“Good.”

I had found them some nine and three-quarter centuries ago, half-starved, dying of thirst—for even some more and less than natural creatures have their needs. Their forgotten temple had fallen apart, and they were a pair of unemployed temple dogs nobody wanted, roaming the Gobi. I gave them water and food and permitted them to come back to my bottle with me, though I was a creature such as they had been cautioned about. I had always avoided contact with temple dogs if I possibly could. Me and my like, they’d been trained to rend into tiny pieces, to be carried off to a variety of uncomfortable places, with a mess of dog-magic for company and security.

So we never talked employment. I just told them that if they cared to live in the abandoned dragon’s cave in my Twilight Lands, there was fresh water nearby, and I would see that there was food. And I would like if they would keep an eye on things for me. And if there was anybody nearby that they needed, simply to howl.

After a few centuries details were forgotten and only the fact of their residency remains. They call me Lord Kai and I call them Shiriki and Chamballa.

I walked on. Where I’d no need whatsoever to go outside what with O’Keefe tending to everything, there was that small desire to celebrate, to walk and to breathe the night air.

Coming to the edge of the worlds, I considered my appearance. Within my bottle I wore my natural shape: humanlike in that it possessed two arms, two legs, a recognizable torso and head, the usual number of eyes and suchlike. However, I stood eight feet tall on my taloned feet (these possessed of five toes) and my skin was a deep blue without a trace of purple. Around my eyes were angular segments of black. Some have supposed these are cosmetic (indeed, at one point a thousand years ago there was a fashion for such), but they are natural. They make my pupil-less dark eyes seem to glow and give my countenance a forbidding cast, even when I might not wish it.

Yes, this would not do for the world of humans. Quickly, I slipped into the human guise I use for my
infrequent journeys without: a Chinese male of mature years, glossy black hair untouched by gray, average tall, but with an aura of command. I shaped my clothes into the dull fashions of the American city in which we now dwelled, sighing inwardly for the elegant robes of bygone China.

These preparations a matter of desire, I manifested outside the bottle with barely a pause in my stride. As I had wished, I was in a garage belonging to the son of the late lady who’d formerly kept the bottle on a parlor table. Either location was an easy one for our comings and goings. The son has not yet decided whether to give the bottle to his wife or to keep it on the table, where he enjoys looking at it. I had no opinion at the moment, and so stayed out of the matter.

Letting myself out of the garage’s side door, I strolled off in the direction—several blocks away—of Tony’s Pizza Heaven.

It was a starry but moonless night, crisp and breezy. I knew that something was wrong when, as I passed one of the town’s small parks, I scented blood and pizza on the air. And demon.

I faded. I moved with absolute silence. All of the ways I have learned to inflict death and pain over the years rose up and came with me. At that moment, I was one of the most dangerous things on the planet.

… And I saw the tree and them.

I
N
G
ENEVIEVE’S DREAM, THE OLD WOMAN LUNGED UP THE
stairs, hands clutching like claws from beneath her ragtag robe. “Lady. They’re coming to kill you, now!”

She dreamed herself responding, too slowly at first, for she was startled and confused by the old woman’s agitation. “Who? Awhero, what are you talking about.”

“Your father’s taken. The Shah has him. Now his men come for your blood! Yours and the child’s. They’re coming.”

The smell of blood was all around her, choking her. So much blood. Her husband, gone; now her father, taken! Dovidi, only a baby, and never outside these walls!

Genevieve dreamed herself crying, “They’re coming after Dovidi? How did the Shah know about the baby?”

“Your father tell him.”

Endanger his grandson in that way? Surely not. Oh, surely, surely not. “I’ll get him. We’ll go …”

“If you take baby; you both be killed.” The old woman reached forward and shook her by the shoulders, so vehement as to forget the prohibitions of caste. “I take him. I smutch his face and say he one of us. They scared to look and they never doubt …”

“Take me, too …”

“No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!”

“Where? Where shall I go?”

“I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man’s cloak with his sunhelmet, with his needfuls still there, in pockets.” She pulled at the rags that hung from her shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. “Take this! You tall for woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!”

In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went, thrust hard by Awhero’s arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!

Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes. She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door she had barred.

She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was where the untouchables carried out the city’s filth. The strained and tattered rags marked her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as she filled the bottle, slung it over her shoulder
and walked away on the northern road, still slowly, as any malghaste might go. She did not run until she was out of sight of the town.

In her dream she was being hunted by dogs.

She woke to hear them baying, closer than before.

T
HE
S
INGER’S BENTHIC HYMN WAS GLORIOUSLY BEAUTIFUL
, with melodies and tonalities alien to Chinese ears … or to Western, for that matter. There could be no possibility that the music, or the message it carried, had’ anything to do with Earth or Humankind. The ocean within which Zhao was now virtually adrift was over six hundred million kilometers removed from any of Earth’s abyssal depths. The sounds filling the black depths around him were being generated by … by
something
deep beneath the surface of Europa’s global, ice-sheathed ocean.

It was the nature of that something that he was testing now.

“Give me a countdown to the start of the next ping,” Zhao said.

“Twenty-two seconds.”

“And take me lower. I want to see it.”

To Zhao’s senses, he seemed to be descending rapidly, though he still felt only the synthleather of the chair pressing at his back, not the cold, wet rush of the sea streaming past his face. That was just as well; the ambient water temperature was slightly below zero; its freezing point had been lowered slightly by its witch’s brew of sulfur compounds and salts. Even with Europa’s scant gravity, .13 of Earth’s, the pressure at this depth amounted to over a
thousand atmospheres … something like 1058 kilos pressing down on every square centimeter of his body, if his body had actually been plunging through the Europan depths.

The light seemed to be growing brighter, and he was beginning to make out the fuzzy forms of walls, towers, domes …

The image was not being transferred by light in this lightless abyss, of course, but by sound. The Song itself, echoing repeatedly from the surface ice around and around the Jovian satellite, reflected from those curiously shaped alien architectures. Microphones at the surface retrieved those reflections, and advanced imaging Als created a rough and low-resolution image of what human eyes might have seen, if in fact they were suspended a mere few hundred meters above the object and not nearly 78 kilometers. The object was twelve kilometers across, roughly disk shaped, but with myriad swellings, blisters, domes, and towers that gave it the look of a small city. Experts were still divided over whether it was an underwater city, built for some inscrutable purpose deep within the Europan ocean, or a titanic spacecraft, a vessel from Outside that had crashed and sunk here thousands of years ago … or more. So far, the evidence seemed to support the spacecraft hypothesis. The thing couldn’t be native; Europa was a small world of ice and water over a shriveled, stony core, incapable of supporting any sort of technic civilization. The Singer had to be a visitor from somewhere else.