A Million Open Doors Read online

  Nowadays there were no more ships. For most people, that left suicide—but not for me, I realized. I commed Aimeric. I had walked just six blocks from Entrepot.

  He said I was welcome to come, and even seemed grateful. He gave me another code to com.

  At that number, I arranged to have everything in my apartment shipped, my accounts liquidated to pay my bills, and that sort of thing. They told me I wouldn't need to do anything—I could just walk out of my apartment, go to the Embassy, and depart the next day. They would even pick up my laundry. They reminded me it would be at seventeen o'clock.

  I thanked them, set the alarm on my wrist unit for sixteen o'clock (enough time for an anti-alcohol tab to straighten me back out), went to the tavern nearest the Embassy, and worked hard on getting drunk all that morning and afternoon. I swallowed the pill on time, and got to the Embassy okay. Apparently to make sure, they gave me a huge anti-alcohol injection—whatever it had against alcohol, it had no quarrel with hangovers—scrubbed me up, and generally made me feel like a dirty kitten pinned down by its mother.

  Along the way I babbled out a confession to Aimeric and Bieris about what had happened. Bieris kept telling me Garsenda was just a kid having fun, and Aimeric kept telling me I could still get out of this if I wanted to, that all I had to do was say I didn't really want to go.

  I shook them off. My head was pounding, the blinding yellow glare of the Embassy lights was making it worse, and now that I was sober I was painfully aware that I hadn't eaten all day. "So I might throw away two stanyears of my life. So what? I was just going to kill myself. And at least this will be completely different from Nou Occitan."

  "Oh, it will be that," Aimeric agreed.

  Bieris bit her lower lip. "Giraut, we've known each other since we were children. Tell me the truth. Is it really between this and killing yourself?"

  I was more offended than I'd ever been before. "Enseingnamen demands. This is the gravest sort of violation of finamor—"

  She turned to Aimeric, shaking her head; I noticed that somehow she seemed much older, though she was still the same laughing brown-haired beauty who had been my friend so long. "I think he means it."

  Aimeric nodded. "I'm sure he does. We've both known him a long time. So we let him do it?"

  "You're not letting me do anything," I said. "You issued the invitation honorably, and I want to take it up."

  Aimeric sighed and fluffed out his shoulder-length hair. "And I certainly don't want to fight you about it. All right, men, come. You're a bright enough toszet, Giraut, when a donzelha isn't involved, and I can certainly use you. But I'm warning you one more time—if Caledony is anything like I remember, there are going to be a lot of times when you will wish you had stayed home and killed yourself."

  Maybe something in his tone finally got through to me. "How bad can it be? What's discomfort in the face of shattered love?"

  He didn't answer, just turned away. I think he was a little disgusted. Bieris gave me one worried, pitying glance and followed Aimeric.

  When the time came, we just stepped into the springer as if it were any other springer, this time going from one group of boring Embassy people to another. There was a solid shove on the soles of my feet, and a downward tug on the rest of my body, as the gravity increased about eight percent from Wilson to Nansen, but otherwise I might only have stepped into the next room.

  Aimeric staggered as if he'd been punched in the stomach. I actually had to catch Bieris, who retched a couple of times before regaining her composure. From the way they looked at my apparent immunity to springer sickness, I think they were wishing I had stayed home and killed myself.

  "Welcome to Caledony," a tall, older man said. "I'm Ambassador Shan. Which of you is Ambrose Carruthers?"

  "If anyone were, it would be me, but I use my Occitan name of Aimeric de Sanha Marsao. This is Bieris Real, and Giraut Leones, my personal assistants."

  Shan nodded. "I'm delighted to meet you. I'm afraid staff and space are in very short supply here—we just grew this building in the last forty-eight hours and there's much, much more left to do, so we're sending you directly to your new homes, and we'll send your baggage after you as soon as it arrives. I'm sorry we've nothing to offer in the way of hospitality, but our talks with the government of Caledony regarding the supply of the Embassy have stymied completely."

  "Meaning either they want to charge you for it, or they want you to work for it," Aimeric said.

  The Ambassador nodded. "I was hoping that what they were saying was just a polite form, and whatever they really wanted would emerge from the discussion. But they really do mean that?"

  "They sure do. Try not to be surprised if they tip you when the deal is done, either. Anything more than two hundred utils is excessive and might be a bribe."

  "I can see you'll be invaluable here."

  "In Caledony, nothing is invaluable. It's the one place in the Thousand Cultures where everything, absolutely everything, has a known value." Aimeric smiled when he said it. Shan laughed and nodded. That left Bieris and me completely mystified.

  We went into the next room, where some Embassy flunkies gave us knee-length, insulated parkas with transparent face-masks. That was some warning, I suppose, but nothing could really prepare anyone for what was outside.

  It was like walking into a dark cryogenic windtunnel. Water sprayed my beard and mustache and froze instantly.

  I realized what the mask must be for, and pulled it down, but not before getting two searing-cold chlorine-reeking lungfuls of air. The wind shoved on my chest like the end of a post.

  "Don't worry, companho," Aimeric shouted to us over the moaning booms of the wind. "It's just we've arrived during Morning Storm. It gets much nicer toward afternoon!"

  I didn't see how it could get any worse, and I had done a lot of skiing back home in the Norm Polar Range.

  "How much chlorine is in the air?" I shouted.

  "Plenty, right now. The Morning Storm is salty from what blows off the bay. This must be our ride coming up now on the cat."

  A "cat" had to be the big treaded tractor now approaching, its cab lights reflecting off the low dark buildings. "Where is everyone?" Bieris shouted. I could barely hear her.

  "Inside! They aren't crazy! They'll come out when this lifts, in another half-hour of so."

  She shouted something, and then repeated it in a near-scream. "I meant why are there no lights in the middle of a city?"

  "Why turn on a light when nobody's out? And why have windows when there's nothing to see?" Aimeric was shouting but he didn't sound interested; it must be one of those things that would be obvious later.

  The cat came up then, and I thought I knew why it had that name; all the little maglev lifters that kept its treads moving were humming and whining at different pitches, and the wind was whistling through the centimeters between the treads and the lifters. The total effect was like the wail of a gigantic cat hurled into the deepest pit of hell.

  We climbed up the steps that extended down from the cab, and the outer door swung open. (I was quickly to learn that every entrance on Nansen had two doors, and that the local epitome of ne gens was to hold both open. It was almost the only thing Caledons and St. Michaelians agreed on.) We crowded into the cat's little heatlock. Aimeric closed the door behind us. The inner door opened.

  Aimeric paid the driver. I was startled by that, and Bieris was too—she glanced at me as we shucked off the heavy coats.

  Then Aimeric roared with laughter and threw his arms around the driver. "By god, Bruce!"

  "Yap. Really afraid you wouldn't remember me."

  "Hah! You're the first good piece of news in a while." He introduced us to the older man, who it turned out he'd been a student with.

  It took me a moment to realize that Bruce hadn't been one of Aimeric's teachers. Aimeric's six-and-a-half years in suspended animation weren't all of it, by any means—Brace's skin had a strange, leathery quality and was spotted with brown flecks, and his
hair, where not grayed, seemed to have been erratically bleached to a pale flatness. I wondered if the chlorine in the air had done that.

  For a long time, they talked about all the things people do when they haven't seen each other for a long time—and since they had many stanyears' catching up to do (it sounded as if their last letters had been before Aimeric had arrived on Wilson), the conversation stretched on for the full hour it took us to get out of Utilitopia. There's no city that big in Nou Occitan—by design, we build new cities after old ones reach a particular size, so that with the slow changes of architectural style, each city will have its distinctive look. Here, they just kept expanding Utilitopia.

  As we drove and they talked, the storm dwindled to a freezing rain, and the outside temperature gauge climbed to almost the freezing point. The streetlights came on, revealing that most of the buildings looked like simple concrete boxes with forward-pitched roofs; all churches seemed to be identical, with a very low narthex and very high double-peaked transept, so that they seemed to be about to plunge down into the street like birds of prey.

  There were a lot of churches.

  Every now and then, a trakcar would glide by on the maglev strips in the streets, its headlight tearing through the fog and suddenly bringing up the color of the buildings— which seemed to be either blue-gray or brownish-red. Though I had grown up riding trakcars, they seemed quaint and old-fashioned to me now; it made me a little sad to think that here too they would no doubt disappear within a year, replaced by springers.

  I wondered if they would take out the trakcar strips, or leave them in place; in Noupeitau we had made them into pathways for bicycles, skateboards, and row cars, with brick planters to control access surrounding them—but that did not seem in the spirit of things here.

  I had thought that we had been passing through an industrial district, like those in pictures from other cultures who didn't have the common sense to leave that all to robots and put the operations somewhat uninhabited, but when we topped a rise and the fog was briefly up, I could see clearly that the whole city seemed to be made of these concrete blocks.

  At last we were out of the city and driving along a road; to my surprise, it was simply scraped rock, the thin soil cut away and the rock smoothed to form a roadbed.

  I was about to ask about the primitive look of the road, but then Bruce said, "I guess I ought to ask. Your first letter said Charlie had died."

  "Yap." Aimeric said, without volunteering more.

  Bruce nodded slowly, just as if Aimeric had told him a great deal. "I haven't been to church in ten years," he said, which seemed to have nothing to do with the subject. "And since you didn't come in as Ambrose—"

  Aimeric interrupted. "Wait a second. You haven't been to church—?"

  Bruce shrugged. "I—well, you know how it went. You and Charlie got to go, but I lost out—there were only two slots on the starship for preachers. And so for a while there I got to resenting God for calling me, and then giving myself the scourge for resenting God. Made me into one of those bone-mean fanatics that always seem to get hired for the backwoods. That was when I wrote the last letters you got from me..."

  "Yap."

  We came to a fork in the road; with a slight rise in the pitch and volume of the hum, a sharp pull to one side, and a wild spray of dust and gravel, the cat turned upward, beginning to climb switchbacks. In the fog, I had no idea what we were headed toward, and without the city lights, it was terribly dark again—visibility couldn't have been more than thirty meters, even in the cat's headlights.

  Bruce went on. "Well, after that I got worse for a while. It felt right at the time, of course, because if you really think all this stuff is true, then obviously there's no excuse for compromise or even compassion. I had a congregation up by Bentham, and I spent about three years causing all kinds of misery by enforcing every jot and tittle.

  "Then one morning ... I guess it would have been around the time your ship reached Utilitopia ... something happened. Just one of those things where I had to realize that I was causing, not curing, unhappiness. I went back to my quarters. I prayed for a while—well, a month, actually. And when that didn't work, I quit the job, bought a farm over in Sodom Basin, and I've been there since." We came around a tight turn, and gravel sprayed from Under the spinning tracks, making a distant chatter against the bottom of the cat's cabin. There didn't seem to be anything at all, except dark fog far below, under my window. "I had to really lowball the bid to get to pick you up—they wanted someone more doctrinally correct."

  "Sodom Basin is a long way away," Aimeric said. "You came a long way out of your way—that must have made it hard to justify your bid."

  "Nop. I rationalized it by packaging the contract. I'm your landlord."

  Aimeric seemed struck dumb for a moment, then burst into a delighted crow. "Brilliant, Bruce, you haven't lost the touch!"

  We came over a rise and down a short, steep drop in the road. For a bowel-yanking instant the headlights pointed down into a seemingly bottomless gorge; then gravel sprayed again and we were running up a ledge on the canyon wall.

  Since neither Aimeric nor Bruce was acting like anything unusual was going on, I wasn't going to. I looked away from the window to see how Bieris was taking it, and found her almost on my lap trying to see out the window.

  "How far down do you suppose it is?" she whispered.

  "Non sai. It's a long way though."

  "That's the Gouge you're looking into," Bruce said. "It's a long fjord—the bottom is sea water, almost eighty meters deep. We're probably three thousand meters above that right now, and we're going up to seventy-three hundred to get through Sodom Gap. This whole thing is a big crack in the crust from an asteroid strike."

  "An asteroid strike?" Bieris leaned forward, toward Bruce.

  Alarmingly, he looked away from where the headlights bounced and danced up the narrow road in front of us, and turned to talk to her. "Yap. But don't worry—we're not expecting another one soon. Though this one is recent. Probably less than a thousand stanyears ago. I guess you people didn't come here with much warning about what all you'd find?"

  "None at all," I said. "Does it all look like this?"

  Bruce roared with laughter, and Aimeric joined him. "A very polite way to voice your concerns, um—Grot?"

  "Close. Two syllables—like gear-out."

  "Giraut." He got it right that time. "Anyway, it's no wonder you've been so quiet. No, the Council of Rationalizers wants to keep people in Utilitopia, for greater efficiency, so they have a high tax on any activity that could be there and isn't. I wasn't really enthusiastic about farming when I started, but it was the only job that would let me live on the warm side of the Optimal Range. It'll be another two hours till we get across the mountains, but I think after that you'll be pleased with what you see."

  "Why do they name it 'Sodom Basin,' if it's pleasant?"

  "So those of us who insist on living there will know we're showing an irrational attachment to incorrect values," Bruce said. "We've put ourselves on the road to spiritual destruction." He sounded more tired than angry.

  "For those of us with no patience," Bieris said, "just what is this place we're going to?"

  Aimeric nodded at her, as if thanking her for the change of subject. "The mountain range that the Gouge cuts into, and Sodom Gap goes through, runs along the eastern coast of Caledony. On the other side is Sodom Basin, a salt-lake basin. It's one of the warmest places on this crazy planet—I'm sure you'll be appalled to know that you're less than half a degree off the equator at the moment.

  "What happens is that the Sodom Sea creates a huge heat sink, and because the mountains are high enough to block most of the clouds from blowing in, it gets lots of sun. Keeps the whole valley warm—normally it only goes to freezing for a couple of hours out of each Dark."

  "How do you get Darks here? Surely there isn't enough vegetation to burn—"

  "Means something different locally," Aimeric explained. "Nans
en only has a fourteen-hour day. It's easier to put two of them together than to live on a fourteen-hour schedule. So the day divides into First Light, First Dark, Second Light, and Second Dark. Right now we're about twenty minutes from First Light."

  I looked at the dim, glowing fog outside and said "It looks very close to dawn—so where's all the light coming from?"

  "The moon just rose," Bruce said.

  There was a long awkward silence. I felt stupid, for not having remembered that Nansen had a big, ice-covered close-in moon.

  After a while, Bruce asked, "So what prompted either of you to come to Caledony with this old reprobate? Isn't there enough fog and sleet for you anywhere on Wilson?"

  Bieris laughed softly. "You could almost say that Aimeric talked me into it."

  "I was trying to talk you out of it! I said it wouldn't be anything like what you were used to, and you wouldn't be able to do even half of the things we did for amusement in the Quartier." Aimeric sounded really distressed. "There really aren't a lot of people here who are anything like your friends back home."

  She was nodding her head vigorously. "Ja, ja, donz de mon cor. After all the strong reasons you gave me for coming, how could I be expected to resist?"

  I had a sense that she was teasing or needling him, somehow, but I didn't get the joke either.

  "You're not going to meet anyone here who understands that you're a donzelha!" Aimeric said.

  "Oh, I don't know. Bruce, what gender would you say I am, just offhand and from surface indications? Just give me your best guess."

  Bruce laughed, sounding very nervous, and suddenly seemed to need a little more of his attention for the road. "I never get into arguments between people of opposite gender," he said. "Part of why I'm still healthy and vigorous at my age."

  Aimeric chuckled a little, and said, "We really did need you along on the ship, Bruce. A diplomat like you was wasted as a preacher."

  That seemed to lead a very long silence, before Bruce asked what had brought me to Caledony. Without too much detail—I had an idea that describing what I had found at Entrepot with any precision would probably have upset him—I sketched out how I had ended up in the springer to Caledony.