Oberheim (Voices): A Chronicle of War by Christopher Leadem (to read list txt) 📗

The words ended and the glow receded. It lived no more. Again himself, alone, Simin lowered his head, so deeply moved that the water flowed freely from his eyes. The ruling queen approached him.

"Simin-that-was. Do you take this Quest?"

"I will take it, though I fear to falter."

"You will not."

The queen stepped back, and all proclaimed him.

"Si-mai, ungol, misch-naik!" AGAINST THE EVIL THAT WAS AND IS, WE SEND
YOU. The joining was ended, and the gathering dispersed.

He had flown for many days into the growing cold. The sun was gone and the wind was rising as he searched the ground below him for a place to pass the night. It must be sheltered, not so much from the elements (though this too was important) as from the marauding bands of ground wasps that lived in these northern regions. There was still far to go and much danger ahead. He had no strength for useless battles.

At last as all light faded he came upon a towering pillar of stone in the midst of a vast wasteland, split at the top as if cloven by a giant axe. Reaching its heights, he descended slowly into its broad embrasure. Detecting some deeper shadow in the blackness of the eastern wall, he flew toward a narrow fissure in the rock. Landing silently on the lip of it, he tested the air for vibrations. All was still. He moved inside and huddled close together. He was empty and cold and weary to the point of exhaustion. He remained in quiet thought for many hours.

When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue the labors of Shannon's life—-find some way to avenge the death of it. He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He only knew that he must find it.

The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing. They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary; but the knowledge did not make it easier.

WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE
AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT,
AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.

It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not know who he was or where he was going.

This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss. To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still, such a hard and lonely fate…..

When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him. The first of their number touched the spire. He took one last taste of the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.

He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan. For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it gave him strength. Then he set out again.

His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it were real.

Three days more he journeyed toward it, till on the fading edge of the third the wind forced him to land. It had been gathering strength since the morning of the spire, and now carried with it a bitter and biting cold that would not rest. His strength beginning at last to fail him, he determined to go on on foot, until he found some shelter, or a reason to stop. He felt the presence of no other creature, yet still he was uneasy. He had reached the edge of the mighty tundra that formed the cap of Newman's world.

Now more and more he reached into Shannon's past, trying to find the thing that had kept him going. Genuine physical weakness, other than simple hunger, thirst and fatigue, was something he had never known, and dealing with it frustrated all the lessons he had learned as a mai. Being alien to his experience, he had assumed that it did not exist—-that there was only weakness of will, and that so long as his desire held, no barrier of the flesh would ever stop him. This lesson in perspective he accepted, though grudgingly. It seemed that everything he had known in three seasons of life must be relearned, altered to fit this new reality. But his will remained undaunted.

He traveled many hours into the darkness of night, until he found a small hollow of earth and root of stone at the base of a pummeled and wind torn boulder. A thin lacing of ground-snow, carried by the wind, swirled around him and whistled in its cracks, making a melancholy sound that he felt still deeper for the lassitude of his body. Here he rested, and tried not to think, until the coming of morning.

The morning was much the same as the night, with only a patchy gray light to tell him when the day had come. He moved out of the shelter and walked, across shallow hills, rising in monotonous rhythm through a bleak and barren landscape. The earth was a dull and frozen brown, broken now and again by rock, or gnarled scrub, or nothing. The thin snow blew over all, trailing and whirling about in long wisps like the twisting hands of witches. He continued on for many hours, until the wind relented just long enough for him to exhaust himself in flight. He landed again, and found the earth covered intermittently with thin patches of ice, sometimes deepening and joining together into shrunken, unmoving streams, or withered oak leaves of many fingers.

He continued and night came again but he did not stop. He had eaten what hard and knotted brush he could find, and there was now no lack of moisture; and though it was his mind he feared, denying it had not yet become unbearable. He rested a short time, went on the next day. And the next, walking because he could not fly, into the growing cold, and thicker snow, and ice that began to dominate the ground. Until he was alone.

Time passed.

*

He had reached the farthest North. The world was ice, layered with snow. The wind blew the white softness above into dunes, sometimes foaming against islands of rock, huddled together in groups or branching straight like disjointed coral reefs, while its gusting blasts wrapped veils over all, swirling and howling in relentless defiance. The day lasted but four short hours, then all was swathed in darkness, so that the swirling sheets were blind and crashed over him like spray of drowning surf on the deck of a floundering ship. He was utterly alone.

Simin's strength was gone; he did not know what kept him going.
Perhaps because he had never known defeat….. But surely it was more.
 Through the numb slowness of his near-frozen body a heart beat that
carried no blood. He was dangerously crippled by the cold.

He had passed wide cracks in the ice, chasms and fissures that he knew must lead down: sometimes he could almost see, or sense, uncovered earth or the edges of rock far below. And this was what he sought. But always the feel of them was cold. He sought an entrance, which led to a passage. He must find it soon or perish.

On the seventh day since entering the tundra, an hour after the disappearing of light, a vast abyss opened before him, wider and emptier and deeper than any he had yet come across. Like a crushed cylinder of otherworldly proportions, it yawned directly in front of him, dropping deep into the earth. His forelegs hovered trembling above the void.

This must be the passage, or he would die. He no longer trusted his judgment; it had fallen in the snow many miles behind him. It could well be madness, but he felt a presence far below, some wild hope….. No. He must find shelter. Perhaps it was there. A shelter. If he could find it. MUST CONTINUE ON. NO, HERE. IT MUST BE HERE, OR I AM DYING. SO. . .EASY TO SURRENDER. LIKE FALLING ASLEEP. LETTING GO. NO!

He turned his sinking body around, and forced it to descend: hooking and digging, scraping into ice, forelegs stretched to the limit, trying not to slip. To slip was death. Down. Down farther. A little farther. THE WIND IS LESS HERE. Here. KEEP MOVING. MUST KEEP MOVING. NO STRENGTH. . .BUT WARMTH COMING BACK. YES, WARMTH. MOVE. FARTHER.

DON'T SLIP! DON'T SLIP. An overhang. CAREFUL. MUST STRUGGLE PAST
SOMEHOW. SOME WAY. PAST. WARMTH. IT MUST BE WARMER. KEEP MOVING.
IT WILL BE WARMER, OR I AM DYING. I AM DYING. IT IS WARMER.

After the long and grueling climb, stopping many times to marshal strength, he found himself at the bottom. The cylinder had narrowed, so that now it was scarcely thirty meters broad, a sharp cleft of stone, rising sheer into ice that overtook it for perhaps a thousand meters more. He rested there, his body pulsing, spent. The cold was not as intense, and the wind was less, and the movement had warmed his limbs.

But he was weak and near dead from hunger and exhaustion. He needed sustenance badly, soon. Or it was over. He moved to a tiny pool of snow that had formed from a trickle of the torrent above, and with his trembling foreclaw worked small bits of it into his mouth. All done in pitch darkness, and very little feeling left. Then moved to examine the corners of the cleft.

The first was blocked, solid stone. He turned about. He did not know he had reached the opposite wall until he passed through it, was inside. A cave had opened blindly and taken him in, narrow and not high, but a cave nonetheless. A passage. After a