Now We Paint Worlds Read online

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  She spent the rest of the day sitting in her open tent, making use of the working hubspace connection and trying to shake off her dread. On the private FTU feeds, there had been few new developments. Two scientists had published a paper hypothesizing a convoluted theory about random N-brane interactions, which they said might be responsible for the planets’ disappearance. Without evidence, however, their theories remained pure speculation. She doubted anything would come of it.

  She transmitted another report and her most recent conversation with Adair back to the Central Office, while keeping one eye on the stone house and his tracker. For the entire day Adair remained on his pedestal in his cold house, meditating. According to her tracker, he hadn’t eaten or urinated all day. This did not sit well with her.

  In the late afternoon, a man with long black hair and big green eyes hiked up to the house. She asked him about Adair, why he had come to Yasimir, and what he thought about the missing planets. Adair, the man said, was a “holy being,” who gave people spiritual peace. As for the missing planets, the man shrugged. “Who can say, really? Who can truly say?”

  The day waned, and right before the hubspace satellite dropped behind the mountains and the signal cut off, she received a priority message from the Court of Sents with an additional directive: Find out from Adair which planets are next and when, and transmit at the first opportunity.

  They believed him, she thought. And they were scared. Terrified. She was too. What could humanity do against powers like that? The winds shifted, and she put on a sweater to stay warm. With a steaming bowl of soup heated using the tent’s power cell, she watched the silver sun set. The first stars were up before she was done. This planet was beautiful, even peaceful, she thought. And in another time and place she might have enjoyed her stay here. Then night swept across the valley, and dread slipped back into her heart.

  Are we really vermin? she thought. A stain on the cosmos? What, she wondered, are we doing by spreading across the stars? We think we’re so mighty. But maybe, as Adair said, we’re less than nothing. How long before Hri comes to snatch this world away too? Her legs shaky and weak, she entered Adair’s house.

  A single candle flickered at his feet, and his face shifted in its yellow glow.

  “You don’t eat?” she said.

  He did not open his eyes. “Hri takes care of my physical needs. I haven’t eaten in forty-one days.”

  She wondered if perhaps he had a gene mod which let him go for days without eating or expelling waste, then remembered the local medscan had detected no such thing, and Yasimir, as far as she knew, didn’t have the tech.

  “Do you speak with Hri every night?” she said.

  “Once you speak with a god,” he said, “you are never not speaking with one.”

  “Did she tell you which planets she would take next?”

  “No. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you would evacuate the people, and they would live to infest another world.”

  “You’d let millions die to prove a point?”

  “All of us are dust already. Most don’t know it.”

  She wanted to strike him on his smug little jaw, to squeeze his neck until he gasped his last breath. But she was better than that. She would not tell him that her mother was on one of those planets. She would not let him know he had hurt her.

  “I want you to ask Hri a question,” she said.

  “A god does not care about our petty human concerns.”

  “Yet she talks to you.”

  “Talking is a human concept. We commune.”

  “Please,” Orna said, surprised at the desperation in her voice. “Ask her where she took the planets.”

  “I told you, they go to the same place a flower goes after it wilts and dies.”

  “Is that her answer, or yours?”

  He didn’t seem to like this, and his face contorted. “Fine,” he said. “I will ask her. Don’t expect a response.” Then, for a good long while, he sat with his eyes closed while she waited. Eventually, he opened them.

  “Well?” she said, eager.

  “I told you, human concerns are meaningless to her. She did not answer.”

  “Why does she even speak to you?” Orna spat. “Who are you to her?”

  “A novelty, perhaps. An exotic pet. Her kind underestimated us, what we are capable of. When I soar with her I feel as if she’s testing me, the limits of my consciousness, to see what I notice and what I miss.”

  Orna shook her head in disgust. “I’m going to stay with you tonight,” she said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

  “I don’t want to either. My people have asked me to watch over you.”

  “If I said no, would you leave?”

  “I’d wait outside.”

  “No,” he said. “Stay. It’s cold and windy out there. You can sleep in here if you wish. My mind will be elsewhere.” He closed his eyes again.

  She fetched her bedroll and thermal blanket from her tent, then returned to a dry spot in the corner. She sat on the bedroll, the blanket draped over her shoulders, and propped her back against the wall. She had traveled to hundreds of planets, orbitals, and stations, many with diurnal cycles far different from Terran Standard. Long ago, when she had joined the FTU, she’d received a gene mod that allowed her to adjust her circadian rhythm at will. If she wanted to sleep, her body would take the cue and rest. If she wanted to stay awake, she could do so for days without too many ill effects.

  She would stay awake then, her eyes and tracker on him, until the relief team arrived to make sense of this. She had once stayed awake for one hundred and nine hours. Compared to that, this would be easy. Which was why, when she awoke sometime later from a dreamless sleep, she gasped and jumped up.

  The house was dark. The candle had gone out.

  “Adair?” she called. She tried to blink up her eie; it didn’t respond. No eie meant no tracker. He could be anywhere. She stepped toward his pedestal and found her movements oddly slowed, as if she were walking through fluid and not air.

  Starlight trickled through the hole in the ceiling, a faint blue-gray beam that shone onto the flower bundle tied with a string. It lay in Adair’s spot on his pedestal. The man himself was gone. Something compelled her to touch the flowers, and as she lifted them they turned to ash, leaving a gray stain on her fingers.

  There came a great shifting roar, as if dozens of mammoth stones were being ground against each other. The walls of the house moved, aligning and realigning into new shapes. A corridor opened behind the pedestal, roofless and open to the stars. Adair stood at the far end, naked, with his back to her.

  “Adair?” she said. “What’s going on?” Her voice echoed as if she were standing inside a great marbled hall. He stepped to the left, vanishing from view, and she took off after him. As she ran down the corridor the far end moved further and further away, until it seemed to stretch on forever. Terrified, she stopped.

  A cold gray mist poured over the stone walls. The airy waterfalls pooled coolly at her feet, and the ground lay hidden beneath the fog. The walls shifted again, sliding left and right with a great grinding roar. For an instant, when the walls had momentarily lowered, she spotted an enormous labyrinth sprawling endlessly before her, expanding toward an infinite horizon. At its center shone a single brilliant white star.

  Then the walls grew taller again, obscuring the scene. “Adair?” she cried. “Hello?” She trembled as tears spilled down her face. She hadn’t been this scared since she was a child.

  A breeze blew, and the mists parted a few meters away to reveal a girl covered in dirt, as if she had been playing in mud. The girl had short dark hair, and strangely familiar eyes. When she saw Orna, the girl said, “Oh, hello!”

  “Who—” Orna said, her voice breaking. “Who are you?”

  “Ornalia! Ornalia!” called another voice. At the sound of it the gir
l said, “I have to go!”

  The girl dashed into a side corridor, and Orna leaped after her. The girl ran right, then left, always a few paces ahead. As they ran, the stars slid across the sky. They changed colors and size, a billion suns throbbing like hearts.

  The girl ran free of the maze onto a wide plain. A huge gibbous moon was cresting the horizon, casting the world in its crimson hue. Grassy hills rose under a twilit sky, their mounds covered with neat rows of grain. There were no mountains here.

  The girl ran toward a wooden cottage. A small garden grew on its southern wall. At the sight of it, Orna gasped. This was Varouna, where she had lived with Mother, decades ago.

  “Ornalia, there you are!” A woman in coveralls stood beside the garden, hands on her hips. “Hurry or you’ll miss it!”

  Mother? Orna thought. Is that really you?

  The girl ran to Mother, and Orna followed. “Where were you?” Mother said.

  Orna was about to speak when the girl spoke first. “I was playing in the fields, Mommy. Pretending the wheat rows were a maze with doors that led to other worlds. I saw a woman there.”

  “Who?” Mother said.

  “I never got her name,” said the girl.

  Orna blinked, and with a shock recalled this day, when she had seen a woman in the wheat.

  “Well, it’s this world I want to show you tonight,” Mother said. “I’ve been waiting all summer for this!” She pointed to several bulging flower buds at the peak of a bushy green stalk.

  “What flower is that?” the girl said.

  “Evening primrose,” said Mother. “An old-gene species dating back to Origin Earth. They open at dusk, and tonight is the night!” Mother looked up at the enormous ruddy moon. Its limb had barely crested the hill and still filled half the eastern horizon.

  “It’s moving!” the girl said, pointing to the stalk. “Mommy, I saw it move!” She was right. One of the green buds shook as if there were a worm inside.

  “Yes!” Mother said. “I see it!”

  They watched under the light of the enormous moon as the yellow evening primrose slowly opened its petals.

  “It’s magical!” the girl said.

  “It really is,” said Mother.

  “Look,” the girl said. “Another!” She pointed as a second bud began to unfurl. Then a third, and a fourth. They watched for many minutes, until seven flowers spread open to the sky.

  “How do they know when to bloom?” the girl said.

  “Same way our bodies know when to wake up. It’s built into their genes.”

  “They’ll be here all summer?”

  “No, dear. These flowers will wilt in tomorrow’s sun.”

  “They only bloom for one night?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Then what’s the point?” the girl said, pouting. “Why bloom at all?” As she spoke a huge white moth alighted on one of the flowers. “Oh!” she exclaimed.

  “Hush, or you’ll scare it off!” Mother whispered. “This is why they bloom, Ornalia. For the night moths, one of few species that can pollinate it.”

  “Why only for one night?”

  “Well, that’s what makes them precious, because they’re here for just a short while.”

  “Like us,” the girl said.

  “Yes,” Mother said, pulling the girl in close. “Like us.”

  Orna longed to join them. She reached out her hand and the vision dissolved into mist.

  Mother! Orna cried, though her voice made no sound. No! She would not let Mother go again! If only she could place a tracker on her, so she could keep Mother close forever, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not blink up her eie.

  The moon had risen fully above the hills, a crimson disc filling half the sky. All at once its mottled surface pulled back like a great lid opening. Underneath was an eye, larger than the solar system, larger than the galaxy, and maybe even larger than the universe. The eye stared down at her, through her, and Orna knew what—who—this was.

  You took her! Orna screamed to the sky. You stole my mother from me!

  Who are you? a thundering voice replied in thoughts and not words.

  She trembled under its vastness, struggling to speak. I am Orna! she cried. I am my mother’s daughter!

  Who are you? it said again, and Orna split apart. Her atoms collapsed into quarks, and her quarks dissolved into pure energy that stretched across infinites so vast that time lost its meaning.

  Time and space opened up before her in an unending landscape, each vertex a moment of her history. She fell into a point and was a girl on Varouna, laughing joyously as she played in mazes of wheat. She leaped up, away from this scene on a long parabolic arc, and came down again on Chadeisson Station, in the Central Office, while Mother was introducing her to the people and workings of the FTU; Orna stared, then as now, in utter fascination. Then she leaped up again and came down in the rainforests of Origin Earth, walking in religious awe, and marveling at this one place in the galaxy, as far as humanity knew, where intelligent life had arisen. Another leap and she was on Jackson Station, on her first field assignment, full of youthful excitement for her future as the twin moons rose above the gleaming skyscrapers. Another hop and she was on Torem Pali, administering the old FTU salvage yards under the planet’s hot sun; she stared out at the derelict starships laid across the dunes, knowing each ship had a story that spanned thousands of light-years. She leaped up again and came down in Akina Machi, officiating the wedding of two of her colleagues and dancing drunkenly through the night with their family and friends. Another hop and she was twirling with joy on Chadeisson Station, when she received her notice of promotion to field agent. For hours, which took no time at all, she stared out her apartment’s big window at the hundreds of ships coming and going to destinations across the galaxy, and felt so utterly proud to be a part of all that.

  Like a stone across a pond, she skipped across time and space. She visited a thousand worlds and twice as many stations. Many more than Adair. In all of that, she did not see ugliness. Yes, she thought, humanity has its flaws. We have many. But we have done astounding things too. Once, she thought, we painted the walls of caves. Now we paint worlds. We climbed down from the trees and leaped out to the stars. Some of that growth was painful, even horrible. But in the end it was, like Yasimir, beautiful.

  She was adrift in deep space again, floating in silence. This time, though, she was not alone. Perhaps she never had been.

  We made a grave mistake, the voice told her. Your kind are too different from us. We did not understand. We do now. We will not interfere again. This is our promise.

  Mother! Orna cried. Where is she?

  Gone, the voice said. But never forgotten.

  Then Orna was back in the stone house, sitting on her bedroll, and the light of dawn was leaking through the open ceiling. On the pedestal, Adair lay on his back, moaning.

  She climbed to her feet, and as she approached him, he opened his eyes. The strange light in them was gone.

  It took her a long time before she spoke. “They didn’t judge humanity,” she said, her voice hoarse. “They judged you. You have only hate in your heart, and they saw us through your eyes. Now they’ve seen humanity through mine, and their eyes have been opened.”

  “You … you spoke to Hri?” he rasped.

  Orna blinked. It didn’t seem real. “I did, and—” She let the tears come. “She told me they made a grave mistake.”

  “No, we are the mistake! We deserve annihilation!”

  What a pitiful creature that squirmed before her, she thought. “You are so convinced of your own importance,” she said, “even as you diminish the importance of others. Nihilism is not just intellectually lazy, it’s a failure of imagination. It’s grotesque. And most of all, it’s cowardly. If we had listened to people like you, we would have died out on a ruined Origin Earth centuries ago. But here we are, on a once-dead rock we brought to life. Transient life, yes. And that’s what makes it beautiful. This
is what you could never see.”

  “I can’t hear her anymore!” he said. “She’s stopped talking to me!”

  “Because she knows what you are. A coward. And what you feel is nothing compared to what my colleagues will do to you when they arrive. They’ll be here soon.” With this, Orna turned, picked up her things, and stepped out into the morning light.

  The silver sun crested the mountain peaks, warming her face, and with it came a hubspace connection and a dozen urgent messages in her eie. She would deal with them later. The relief team would come and she would explain everything. They would ask her a thousand questions, and then another ten thousand more. That would have to wait.

  She took off into the forest, toward the meadow Adair had shown her. A mist hovered over the ground, rippling like slow-moving ocean waves. Most of the meadow still lay in shadow, and the crickets were still singing their nightly song. The first bees, awakening with the dawn, began to forage among the many flowers. Weeks from now, Orna would learn that Adair’s tracker had gone dead sometime in the night, and moments later that same tracker had pinged a hubspace repeater, not far from where Charlotte’s World used to be, once before going silent.

  Gone, Hri had said. But never forgotten.

  Now, as the sun rose over the pines and the mists slowly burned off, Orna leaned over a flower, and to the bee crawling upon it she said, “Hello.”

  About the Author

  Matthew Kressel is the author of King of Shards and Queen of Static, and is a World Fantasy Award finalist and multiple Nebula Award finalist. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Interzone, the anthologies Cyber World, Naked City, After, and many other markets. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. By day he codes websites, and by night he recites Blade Runner in its entirety from memory. He lives in New York City. Sign up for email updates here.

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