A Million Open Doors Read online

  "Are you still there?" I subvoked to Raimbaut.

  "Still here." His voice was more tired and mechanical than it had been, and my heart sank with what that portended, but he did say, "Burial was nice. You're all very kind. Thank you."

  "Raimbaut thanks you all," I said. Everyone turned and bowed gravely toward me, so he could see through my eyes.

  "Where am I? I must be dead!" his voice cried in my head. "Deu, deu, this is Montanha Valor, but I can't remember the funeral! Giraut, were we there?"

  "Ja, ja, yes, Raimbaut, we were there." I subvoked so hard that Garsenda, beside me, heard the grunts in my throat and stared at me until Bieris drew her away. "Reach for the emblok, try to feel it through me," I told him. "Your memory will be in the emblok."

  It was no use, then or any time later. Only a rare mind can continue after losing its body. Like most, he could not maintain contact with the emblok that would give him short-term memory, or the geeblok that would allow him his emotions, though each was a scant centimeter away from where he crouched in his psypyx at the base of my skull.

  Days passed and he forgot his death, and then that we had ever been at Pertz's Tavern, for he could not recover what he downloaded.

  And as my emotions separated again from his, and he was increasingly unable to reach his geeblok, he felt colder and colder in my mind. His liquid helium whisper raved on endlessly, trying to remember itself, trying to wake up from the bad dream it thought it was in.

  After two more weeks—about eleven and a half standays— they said there was no hope, and took the psypyx, emblok, and geeblok off me. Raimbaut sleeps now in Eternity Hall in Nou Occitan, like so many others, waiting for some advance of technology to bring his consciousness, memories, and emotions together again.

  The good-bye had taken so long, and so little of him was left at the end of it, that I felt nothing when they removed him.

  TWO

  Marcabru and Yseut had some appointment they were very secretive about, so only Aimeric, Bieris, Garsenda, and I went to the South Pole that day. Because it was so late in the summer, we made only a day trip of it, springing there right after breakfast to walk the six km to the observation point. At this season Arcturus was very low in the sky as it wheeled around the horizon, its red-orange light glinting off the huge pipelines that ran up to feed the distant mountain glaciers that in turn fed the Great Polar River.

  "Those must really be a nuisance to a painter," I said to Bieris. "You can't paint what the landscape really looks like because it's not done yet, and you can't even see what it looks like right now because all those pipes are in the way."

  She sighed. "I know. And they expect it to be at least another hundred stanyears before Totzmare is warm enough to make enough rain fall here. Not to mention that several of the bamboos and annual willows they'll be planting in the river bottom aren't out of the design stage yet, so all I have of those is 'artist's conceptions.' And since the 'artist' is an aintellect, their conceptions are really flat and dull. But all anyone wants to see is what Wilson will look like when it's done. By the time it really looks that way, people will be bored with it."

  That was a strange remark to make, especially for an artist, but this was a strange trip, anyway. My only strong reason to come had been so that Raimbaut could see this, but they had taken him off me two days before, and since he had no memory, why should he have seen it, even if he could?

  By then, though, Aimeric had gotten Garsenda and maybe even Bieris infected with the idea, so I had to go too. Bieris's bush-sense was as good as mine, we'd been on most of the same trips, but of course they would not listen to a donzelha, and it was too dangerous this time of year for them to be in Terraust without someone who could tell them what to do in an emergency.

  The tower at the observation point was made to look like a weathered old castle keep, with no mortar in the joints between its granite blocks. It must have had internal pinning, to have held together through several grassfires, freezes, burials in snow, floods, and thaws.

  Obviously I was in a sour mood if Bieris had infected me with that tendency of hers to wonder how things were made instead of just appreciating their beauty.

  As we climbed the stone steps, it surprised me how hot the tower was to the touch. Aimeric winced away when he brushed a shoulder against it. "Six stanyears of continuous sun will do that, I guess," he said. "Think what it must be like when the sun first comes up!"

  "You're welcome to find out for yourself," I said, "and then you can write and tell me about it."

  He laughed. "Don't forget I grew up in Caledony. I know all about cold—it's all they have on Nansen."

  It was just a passing remark, but it did startle me; Aimeric so rarely referred to his origins, and almost never spoke of his home culture. That and his age were the two topics he would never discuss.

  When we reached the top, the sun was almost directly behind us as we looked down into the river valley. Broken by irregular cliffs, the wide steps of the valley slope were brown with dry grass in the sunlight; Arcturus was a deep-maroon clot in the thin blood of the sky, for the fires were already burning in many parts of Terraust. To our right, the pipelines and glaciers sparkled; to our left, the plains reached into the valley, a flat intrusion that made a steep cliff facing us.

  We put on distance glasses and adjusted them. "There," Aimeric said, "by that sharp bend—"

  I focused in on it. Far below us, there were a few hundred aurocs-de-mer at the water's edge, wading in.

  As I watched them, they would suddenly drop into the water, heads almost submerging as their legs folded up, then swim strongly and smoothly as their flippers extended. With so many entering the water, the river rose almost to its normal midseason depth.

  But not quite far enough. "Look downstream," Garsenda breathed.

  In one wide, shallow place, they were floundering, at least a thousand of them. The more fortunate ones on the edges extended their legs and ran to deeper stretches downstream; those in the middle were mired hopelessly, some of them already drowned and forming an impassable barrier.

  "What will happen to them?" Garsenda whispered to me.

  "The lucky ones will drown. The weak ones will starve. And in a couple of weeks at most the fires will finish the rest." With the sky already red-brown with smoke, her question had been stupid.

  "I wish we hadn't seen this part of it."

  I did too, and put an arm around her, sorry I had spoken so cruelly. I noticed a couple of odd scars when her hair pulled back from her ear, and was going to ask about them, but then my attention was taken up with Aimeric and Bieris.

  They were also watching the doomed herd, still as statues behind the masks of their distance glasses. A fine film of soot covered their cheeks; it was streaked with pale tear-trails.

  I looked from them to the plains, and down into the valley again, and felt Garsenda's warm body against mine—our puny lives in the middle of the annual death of a continent— and was about to start making a song about the grandeur and horror of everything when suddenly we all jumped at loud hooting that erupted behind us.

  There on the level ground behind the observation tower was a retriever, just landing. Some aintellect somewhere in the bureaucracy had decided we were about to be in too much danger, and dispatched it.

  We hurried down from the tower—delaying your own rescue is very bad form, aside from being a misdemeanor—and as we ran to the retriever, we could see flames and smoke on the horizon behind it. The stranded aurocs-de-mer below us would burn, not starve.

  We stepped through the springer entrance on the side of the retriever and sprang into the huge, cold, echoing Reception Concourse of Central Rescue.

  To judge from the many people in hiking clothes, fire must have been spreading wildly all over Terraust that day. Some people in mountain gear, a shivering couple in bathing suits, and one extremely irritated-looking diver completed the crowd in the nearly empty concourse.

  "Amazing," I said sarcasticall
y. I really would have liked to have seen the fires, at least a little, before the aintellect yanked us out, and no doubt if I filed an appeal they'd give me cash compensation—but they couldn't give me back the sight of the fires. "This place was only built in the six stanyears since we got springers, and already it's the ugliest building on Wilson."

  Garsenda giggled and stopped to pick something up; it was a strange little object, a metal ball with pointed spikes of irregular sizes coming off it.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Just an earring." She dropped it in my hand; it pricked me, its little points needle-sharp.

  It seemed strange again, somehow. I'd never known anyone with pierced ears. Moreover it was odd she hadn't told me. Your entendedora is supposed to tell you everything. And the little thing gleaming in my hand looked more like a tiny weapon or instrument of torture, not like any of the recognized traditional styles. Primitive, even brutal—

  "Look," Aimeric said, "The springer is opening to the Main Station in the Quartier des Jovents in six minutes." He pointed at the board. "It says we spring from Entrance E-7. Where is that?"

  Bieris checked one of the maps and snorted. "Other end of the concourse, naturally. We'd better run."

  We made it, barely. After everything that had happened, I wanted Garsenda to come up to my place, but she said she had things to do. I watched her till she turned the corner, all that long dark hair swaying like a horse's tail, brushing the top of her full long skirts. It gave me an idea for a song, so I went upstairs to work on that.

  That night for some perverse reason the four of us, plus Marcabru and Yseut, all met at Pertz's to drink. It was thirty nights, just about twenty-five standays, since the night Raimbaut had died.

  "Forecast says the Dark will start within a week," Marcabru said. He raised his glass. "Raimbaut: que valor, que enseingnamen, que merce." We all drank to him, and I wished again I was still wearing his psypyx, so that this could be in his emblok whenever the technology to bring him back arrived.

  The amber glow of the artificial lights made all the colors painfully vivid, like a travel-vu from a G-star system. Most Occitans kept the lights in their homes tuned far toward red, the way the outside light was, but old Pertz was red-green color-blind and would never have seen any color at all if he did, or so he said.

  "May every Interstellar die," Marcabru said. "After all those centuries of isolation—with the greatest adventure of all time beginning, and the Thousand Cultures suddenly linked again —the only thing it occurs to the youth of Occitan to do is to dress like petty clerks from Earth, forget every bit of their own culture and history, imitate the lowest forms that come from Earth—did you know that kid you killed was the leading artist in his crowd, Giraut?"

  "At what?"

  "He's made a couple of hundred pornographic vus and a dozen or so short subjects. All featuring him beating up and degrading young girls. That's the hot thing among them right now—Interstellar boys walk girls on leashes, or have them wear jewelry that makes them bleed. All clear-cut imitations of Earth sadoporn, completely outside the Charter—as are those stupid jackboot swagger-suits, if you ask me. But when people file charges that it violates the Nou Occitan Cultural Charter, the Interstellars claim it's a legitimate protest against the tradition of finamor, and go running to the Embassy to have their rights protected."

  "Why do the girls do it?" I asked.

  "Who knows? It's fashionable. And since when has a true Occitan ever claimed to understand a donzelha? We just worship them—as we're meant to do." He swallowed the rest of his glass at a gulp. "Anyway, they murdered Raimbaut. Reason enough to hate them."

  I glanced around the table. Aimeric was coolly nodding agreement. Yseut was just leaning on Marc's arm, smiling dreamily as she thought about whatever it is a beautiful trobadora thinks about Bieris seemed very sad, even upset, but I didn't see any more reason for that than for Yseut's smile. But then, who ever claimed to understand a donzelha, as Marcabru had said?

  Garsenda was slowly stroking my leg under the table; I certainly understood that.

  I hated Interstellars too, but I didn't feel like making a speech just then, and besides it was beginning to feel irrelevant. Garsenda was about as young as you ever saw an Oldstyle (to use the ugly Interstellar word for jovents who respected tradition) anymore. All the younger people were going Interstellar; in a few years, when people my age were no longer jovents, all of jovent society, the whole Quartier, would be Interstellar. It seemed such a crime, but there was clearly no holding it back.

  My heart stopped for a moment. I was looking into Raimbaut's eyes, and he was smiling.

  Then I realized. Old Pertz had added a vu of Raimbaut to the Wall of Honor, along with all the other permanently dead regulars. The Wall itself was real wood—still very rare and expensive, though our culture had been designed to live on the heavily forested island that Nou Occitan would eventually be, and to exploit the forests still being designed for Wilson's polar continents. "Guilhem-Arnaut never saw a mature forest. Maybe not any forest, ever," I said.

  Marcabru started to make some joke, but Aimeric had followed my gaze and stopped him with a touch of the hand.

  They all turned and looked, then, seeing Raimbaut and the whole Wall of Honor. It was about a fifteen-second vu of him; I don't know where Pertz got it from. Raimbaut stared forward seriously, broke into a smile, looked off to the side, seemed to hear something that troubled him, and stared forward seriously, over and over again.

  I realized they were all waiting for me to explain what I had said. Garsenda was smiling, arching an eyebrow at me in the expectation that I would honor our finamor with some clever saying.

  "Well," I began slowly, "I guess it was just the thought that the terraforming robots didn't start working this planet till 2355 or so, thirty years ahead of the culture getting here, and theoretically full terraformation won't be complete until about 3200, so we're only a little past halfway through, right? That means all this time, while we've tried to preserve the Occitan tradition that was created by the culture's authors and shipped along in the ship's libraries, the planet's actually been growing and changing. A lot of what we've done has been in anticipation of things that didn't exist yet. Outside of a botanical garden, Guilhem-Arnaut probably never saw a tree as tall as himself. So when the Canso de Fis de Jovent talks about the spring leaves arching over the Riba Lyones—"

  "He never actually saw it!" Marcabru seemed more struck with the idea than I was. "But, m'es vis, his description of it is so perfect it never occurred to me he hadn't seen it."

  Aimeric spoke softly. "I think Giraut means that we have all learned to see it the way we do from Guilhem-Arnaut's poem. The world is the way it is only because we've learned to see it that way. 'Terraust's ancient plain' was still under permanent ice less than five hundred years ago, and the 'waves, waves, waves/Ceaselessly beating time/Even as grandfather's little boat—' probably thawed out only a couple of Wilson-years before Guilhem-Arnaut's grandfather's grandfather got here."

  I nodded. "We still do it. I've written ballads set in the forests of the Serras Verz—and I was on the first tree-planting crew there when I was seventeen. Right now there's probably not one waist-high conifer, and they probably won't plant the oak and ash that I talk about in the song for another hundred years."

  It all seemed very strange. Raimbaut, of course, went right on looking at us very seriously, then smiling, then growing serious again, as he would forever in the vu.

  We all poured another glass and drank some more, and agreed the vu didn't do Raimbaut justice—but none of us had a vu of him, so we couldn't offer to replace it. We drank steadily, not yet drunk but meaning to get there, and we were just about to get up and go to some place that would not drown us in melancholy, when the King walked in and headed for our table.

  That stanyear it was Bertran VIII, a quietly fussy little professor of esthetics whom I knew slightly through my father. The Prime Minister, who looked much better tha
n the King, but just as out of place in the ancient-style suit-biz, came right behind him.

  This was stranger than anything I had seen in a long time —nobility, and a high official, walking into Pertz's, dressed as if for a Court function.

  "Aimeric de Sanha Marsao?" the King asked.

  "That's me." Aimeric rose and bowed. The rest of us, suddenly recovering our manners, leapt to our feet, along with practically everyone else in Pertz's. The King nodded gravely, all around, and then came forward to speak to Aimeric, gesturing for everyone to sit.

  "I would have sent a messenger with this semosta, but with the Dark coming on they're all at home. I'm afraid I'm here to tell you you're drafted, into Special Services, and we have to talk tonight."

  I was beginning to wonder when this hallucination had started. Aimeric was what we called a tostemz-jovent: puer aeturnus or a Peter Pan. Normally after the first couple of times the Lottery summons you into public service, which will be by the time you're twenty-five or so stanyears old, you're ready to move out of the Quartier de Jovents and up into the main part of the city, to marry, settle down, take up some serious course of study or life-project. I was twenty-two and had already been half-consciously shopping for a small house up there. But Aimeric had been through four bouts of service, one just sub-Cabinet, and had always come back to the Quartier. He was about thirty-five physically, in his forties if you counted the years he'd spent in suspended animation on his way here, and he had never shown the slightest interest in growing up; he had been my crazy jovent uncle when I was a child and now he was just one more of my jovent companions.

  Furthermore, Special Services are emergency non-peerage appointments, not chosen by lot but by qualification—crisis appointments when no one else will do—not exactly a job you offer to an overage jovent.

  But despite all the excellent reasons that this could not be happening, it was anyway.

  Oddly, the only part that made any sense was the King having to hand-deliver his own semosta. When the Dark blew in from the South Pole, and the skies went black with smoke for two to three weeks, everyone preferred to be at home in his own digs—and the Dark was due within a few days.