Now We Paint Worlds Read online

  “Mommy?”

  She wore dusty overalls, the same clothes she’d worn back on Varouna, when Orna was a child, when they had lived in the small wooden cottage, where she and Mother had planted a garden, and where they had watched evening primrose slowly open under Varouna’s enormous red moon.

  Mother opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead of sound, out came stars. Inside Mother’s mouth was another universe, orders of magnitude larger than the one they presently occupied. This new sky expanded from Mother’s mouth in a dark cloud that glimmered with a billion jeweled suns. The cloud obscured Mother completely and, inflating like a universe, rushed for Orna.

  She backed away from it, slipping on a root. She fell backward, over the cliff’s edge. She screamed as she stared up at the endless sky. Instead of stars, a gargantuan eye, larger than the planet, larger than the galaxy, stared down at her—through her, and in that vastness she knew she was less than dust.

  * * *

  A beeping woke her, and she sat up with a start. She was in her tent, and it was morning, according to her eie, and there was an urgent message waiting.

  She examined herself for wounds or bruises, and found none. A dream? No—there was grass and mud on her shoes, and her jumpsuit was soaked. If not a dream, then how did she fall from that cliff without a single bruise? The message beeped for her attention and she reluctantly opened it.

  Text only, it was marked urgent, with two attached files. With a start, she saw it was from the Court of Sents themselves.

  “You are hereby directed to remain with Adair Joshua Ohanko until a relief team arrives, estimated forty-one standard hours earliest arrival. Do not—emphasize—do not let Adair out of your sight. Place a tracker on him. Most urgently, you are to have him explicate his statement of the following: Her sisters, who dwell in the heavens, whom you thought were mere clouds of gas and dust.”

  She sat back, awestruck. In her nineteen years of service for the FTU, the Court of Sents had directly contacted her twice. The first was to congratulate her on her promotion to field agent, which they did with all new field officers. The second was during her investigation of the deadly starship accidents near Abedabun, where she had infiltrated a group of mercenaries destroying ships for salvage. Their message to her had ended up saving thousands of lives.

  The Court of Sents didn’t bother with minutiae. They were too busy regulating the value of the galaxy’s material exchanges, making sure the myriad trade routes between worlds remained stable, and tracking the huge number of ships navigating the slipstream, all of which had the positive effect of keeping a centuries-long peace between worlds. Gods stealing planets? She had thought Adair’s story preposterous and had assumed the Court of Sents would too. Perhaps they were just being thorough. Or, she thought with an uncomfortable shift in her stomach, maybe they had found some truth in Adair’s story. Either way, she needed to know more. She barely remembered him mentioning these clouds of gas and dust.

  She blinked open the first attached file, a scientific paper describing an uncrewed probe’s encounter with a huge cloud of hydrogen gas in Outer Deep Region 59/1004.b. The cloud exhibited what the scientists hypothesized might be intelligent behavior, but the probe and cloud mysteriously vanished, and all further investigations found no evidence of either.

  Astonished, Orna blinked the paper away. Microbial life was common throughout the galaxy, and in a few rare pockets, simple multicellular life had arisen on its own. But animals and sentience—they were unique to Origin Earth. She had read about the strange cloud a few months back in the FTU’s private feeds. There’d been a lot of speculation about what it might have been, but like everything else in the universe, the talk faded, and Orna had forgotten all about it until now. Maybe the Court of Sents knew more than they were letting on. Maybe Adair was describing a wholly natural phenomenon that, filtered through his religious lens, he interpreted as coming from “gods.”

  She opened the next attachment, a background file on Adair. It confirmed he was born on Mars, and added that he had lived in more than thirty systems and visited more than two hundred, spanning more than two decades. From the bustling and crowded Inner Terra worlds all the way out to the sparsely populated and newly terraformed planets of the Outer Deep, the jeek really got around. To her surprise, he had lived on Chadeisson Station in Eriksdatter Ring, a short distance from where she lived now. For all she knew, they might have passed each other on the street.

  She looked for something in his history, a tragedy or circumstance that might have spawned his hatred for humankind, and found nothing. In fact, as far as she could tell, he had lived a comfortable life. Then why the misanthropy? Was his hate, she wondered, a simple choice?

  Disturbed and restless, she closed the files, turned off the tent’s shield, and stepped out into the morning light. Tahira, Yasimir’s silver-white sun, was bright and warm, and she tried to let it soothe her chilled bones. A huge rainbow arced across the glacial mist, though most of the valley still lay in shadow. The grasses, laden with dew, twinkled as they rippled in the wind. It was breathtaking. To think that humanity, which had once succumbed to beasts and weather, could now create worlds. Truly, Yasimir was a work of art. How could Adair look at this and see only ugliness?

  She wanted to put on dry clothes, but the steady drip of the forest changed her mind. The pines shivered in the morning breeze where last night Mother had walked in the trees. A fever dream, Orna thought, from standing under the light of too many suns. But dreams did not leave mud and grass on her shoes. Answers, she knew, lay with Adair.

  The house’s interior still lay in shadow. Adair sat on his pedestal with his eyes closed. A bundle of fresh flowers tied with a red string lay at his feet. A new addition.

  “You had a visitor?” she said. She didn’t like that someone had been here while she slept.

  “I always have visitors.”

  She looked around, afraid someone was hiding in the shadows. As far as she could see, they were alone. “Who came?” she said.

  “Someone from the village.”

  “A woman?” she said. Someone, Orna thought, who looked like Mother?

  “A tired old man.”

  “You’re certain it was a man?”

  “Yes.”

  She stepped closer to him. “Why do they come to see you?” It was an accusation as much as a question.

  “Because I tell them the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About our existence. That our lives are mere infinitesimal drops in the totality of consciousness. That we ascribe ourselves with exaggerated importance when we are ultimately extremely insignificant creatures.”

  “That gives them comfort?”

  “Truth is seldom comfortable.”

  “That doesn’t explain why they come.”

  “They come because they find relief knowing that, as far as the universe is concerned, all their problems are small, and all their troubles will soon be forgotten.”

  “Some of us might want to be remembered,” she said.

  “By whom?” he said. “Those who remember us will soon be dust too. Look around. Everything you see will eventually be dust.”

  “In a billion years, perhaps.”

  “A blink of an eye in eternity.”

  She felt as if his words were squeezing her chest, and she gasped. Was it possible, she thought, that he was responsible for half a million deaths? For murdering Mother? She had to consider the possibility, as far-fetched as it seemed, that he was. Seething with rage, she paused her recording of their conversation with her eie.

  “Where were you last night?” she said.

  “Here.”

  “All night?”

  “Where else would I go?”

  “You didn’t leave this house? You didn’t walk in the woods?”

  “Why would I? Hri takes care of all my needs.”

  She glanced down at the bundle of flowers tied with the red string. “How many visitors did you have
last night?”

  “Besides you, none.”

  “And these?” she said, pointing to the flowers. “Who brought them?”

  “That tired old man from Melisianda.”

  “When?”

  “I have no instruments to measure time besides the sun. He came with the dawn, and he left before you arrived.”

  “Someone was here last night,” she said, and for a moment she was falling off that cliff again, staring up at that enormous eye. She pushed through her fear and continued. “A woman. In the woods.”

  He looked at her oddly for a moment. “It was someone from the village. People are always wandering up here.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “She looked like … someone I know.”

  He gave her another strange look, then shook his head dismissively.

  She had caught a flash of fear in him. “What is it?” she said. “What were you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “An impossibility.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “No.”

  Orna ground her teeth. Perhaps he had drugged her or used some kind of tech to manipulate her. She scanned the place with her eie, and it came up empty. Nothing here but stone and dust.

  Frustrated, she turned on her recording again, and this time she also activated a tracker. Too small to be seen with an unaided eye, the nano-scale spider climbed down her leg, leaped across the floor, climbed up the pedestal, and with a tiny dose of anesthetic nested itself securely into Adair’s thigh. He’d need a scalpel to remove it now. If he tried anything tonight, she would know.

  “You said we mistook these gods for clouds of gas and dust,” she said. “Explain what you meant by that.”

  He smiled to reveal long gray teeth. “Better if I show you.”

  He hopped off his pedestal and headed for the door, and she followed him out. Then he dashed into the pines, away from the path, and she sped after him. Dripping branches brushed against her body, their millions of little fingers sliding wetly across her skin. He laughed as they went.

  “Where are we going?” she said, struggling to see him through a tangle of branches.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  They soon emerged into a clearing nestled between two sharp ridges of lichen-covered rock, and at the sight of it Orna gasped. Silver light, dappled by a wall of pines, slanted down into this mist-filled meadow, lush with grasses and wildflowers. Insects swarmed the air, buzzing in her ears. Floating balls of pollen, picked out by sunbeams, drifted by in delicate clumps. She felt as if she had stepped into a fairy tale, a scene taken straight from one of the books Mother might have read to her as a child, and her heart suddenly ached for a place and time forever lost to her.

  Adair sidled up to a patch of purple blossoms that leaned heavily on long green stems. Bees, laden with pollen, crawled all over them.

  “Do you like this place?” he said.

  Surprised by his question, she answered honestly. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s … astounding.”

  “It’ll be gone in a year.”

  “Gone?” she said, feeling an unexpected pang of dread. “Why?”

  “This is a microclimate. This meadow exists only because of a chance confluence of events. The melting glaciers provide moisture, and its location between the rocks moderates the temperature. The glacier feeding this meadow is almost fully melted. No more water means no more meadow.”

  “It will still rain,” she said. “The planetary engineers weren’t that clumsy.”

  “Yes, but this microclimate will be gone, and the riot of life with it.”

  If he had a meaning behind all this, she couldn’t quite grasp it. “Tell me about those clouds of gas and dust, Adair,” she said.

  “I am,” he said. He leaned over a bee crawling across the petals of a flower. “Humanity is like this insect, blithely unaware that it lives on a cliff’s edge, skirting death.”

  “There are other flowers. Other meadows.”

  “None quite like this.”

  “No,” she said. She used to dream about places like this as a girl, wishing with all her heart they were real. Now she stood in one. Such a waste, she thought, that it would soon perish and be forgotten.

  “Do you think this bee knows we’re here?” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He shook the stem, and the insect buzzed off. “And now?”

  “Of course. You scared it away.”

  “From its point of view, a large creature came between it and its work. It had a choice: should it keep foraging, or fly off? It decided fleeing was wiser. Humanity, unfortunately, is not so wise.”

  “I’ll be honest, Adair. You’ve lost me.”

  “We are like insects to them, small and insignificant. They are aware of us in the same way we are aware of insects. We ignore them, until they become a nuisance. Then they must be exterminated.”

  A hawk, silhouetted by the sun, leaped from one of the pines and flew away. Orna felt adrift, as if she were tumbling in deep space again.

  “So we are like bees to your gods?” she said.

  “They are no more my gods than we are these bees’ humans! And they are as inscrutable to us as we are to insects.”

  “Do you speak to your—to these gods?”

  “So far, only to Hri.”

  “How do you speak with her?” In dreams? she wondered. Visions?

  He smiled. “I’ve traveled to hundreds of worlds, seeking to know humanity in all its colors. I lived high and low, with the rich and with the destitute. And everywhere I went, I saw the same thing. Slothful, indolent, self-indulgent vermin. We breed and multiply, and our filth spreads across the stars. I came to Yasimir to escape all that. I built my house to be alone and contemplate all I’ve seen. I spent hundreds of days meditating, hoping to find a purpose behind the madness. And in that stillness and silence, Hri reached out to me. She opened her mammoth eye and looked down upon me.”

  Orna remembered falling backward, screaming and terrified, as an impossibly large eye stared down at her. Was that Hri, she wondered, looking down at me too? She reeled at the possibility as he went on.

  “It was terrifying,” he said. “To be seen by something so vast and ineffable. It made me feel utterly small and insignificant. It was also liberating, because I finally knew the truth. All our lives are nothing. We are just insects in a field.” He flicked at a bee, and it buzzed away.

  “Insects serve a valuable purpose,” she said, struggling against her fear. “Each species fills an ecological niche, especially here.”

  “What niche does humanity fill as it multiplies across the stars, devouring planets like termites in wood?”

  Mother would know, Orna thought. Mother would have the perfect answer for this hateful man. But dizzy and unmoored, Orna could not think of one.

  He seemed to sense her discomfort and smiled. “We serve no meaningful purpose,” he said. “We exist, like this meadow, as a cosmic fluke. We were never meant to be, and this mistake must be corrected.”

  Orna shook her head, but the dread would not leave her. Was he right? she wondered. Were we a cosmic accident?

  “I surprised her, you see,” he said, grinning, “as you would be surprised if this insect suddenly spoke to you. Hri and her sisters have been aware of Origin Earth since the first multicellular creatures swam in its oceans. And they did not pay us much heed, even as we spread across the stars, because our works were so small and transient compared to theirs. They did not think it was possible for us to develop the states of consciousness necessary to commune with them.

  “Yet my mind, out here at the galaxy’s edge, unpolluted by the noise of humanity, refined by meditation, sharpened by fasting, touched their realm. I swam in cosmic seas you could not comprehend. I saw all time and space spread before me like an ocean, past and future intermingling in universe-sized waves. “This”—he waved at the meadow—“is nothing compared to that.”

  More non
sense, she thought. The ramblings of a diseased mind trying to spread poison! She would not accept that the man who murdered Mother and half a million others was smiling gleefully before her. “Why did Hri take the planets, Adair?” she said, trembling.

  “Because she looked down at me and saw my soul as clearly as the bottom of a placid lake. She knew all I had seen and felt. She saw the sordid worlds of Terra Diaspora, humanity spreading our infestation across the stars. She saw through my eyes what would happen if we continue. We will infest the galaxy, and one day we might even expand into their domain. So Hri did what we have been unable to do for millennia. She stopped us from growing. The rest, as you say, is history.”

  Humanity is not vermin, Orna thought. We do not mindlessly spread across the universe like termites. But a part of her, small and growing, had begun to doubt.

  “Hri took the planets?” Orna said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?” she said, her voice breaking. Where, she wondered, was Mother now?

  He shook his head. “Where does a flower go after it blooms and dies? Nature converts it into other forms.”

  “And Hri plans to take more planets?”

  “Her and her sisters, yes. If we don’t stop growing. The first three were meant as a warning, to see how wise we are.”

  “Why did they have to kill half a million people?” she said, holding back tears. “Couldn’t they have sent us a goddamned message?”

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “The planets are the message.”

  The sun had risen above the trees, and she was soaked in sweat. She hadn’t eaten in forever, and her stomach rumbled. She was tired and emotionally spent. She desperately wished to believe that Adair wasn’t responsible for Mother’s death, no matter how much he longed to be, that planet-eating gods didn’t exist, that this was all one man’s insanity. But she had already accepted the possibility that everything he had said was true.

  Inches from her hand, a bee alighted on a flower, and she wondered if it even knew she was there.