A Million Open Doors Read online

  To my surprise, unlike Bieris or Aimeric, he seemed to understand at once. I warmed to him immediately—or at least I did until he added, "Yap, it was a long time ago, but I had something like that happen to me, with a girl that I had been planning to marry."

  Aimeric sat up as if he'd been goosed; Bieris was suddenly choking; I was left having to do the explaining.

  "Ah ... marriage isn't even legal in Nou Occitan till you're at least twenty-five stanyears old. It's not common before you're thirty," I said. "This was—well, finamor." I had the sudden embarrassing realization that I had never actually learned a Terstad word for it. Maybe there wasn't one.

  Bruce nodded emphatically. "You know, in all the reading I did about Nou Occitan, years ago, when I was trying to get to go on that ship, I never did really get a handle on the idea of finamor." We spun around another turn and I avoided looking out the window, knowing perfectly well that there was truly nothing to see below me. As he brought the cat around, Bruce added, "But I can surely understand that you felt like doing something big and sudden when something so important to you got wrecked." He hesitated. "Um—there is something I'm curious about though."

  I was so grateful to be getting any kind of understanding— even from someone who apparently didn't know what I was talking about—that I said, "Of course."

  "Well ... if you're not going to marry a girl, why do you get into an exclusive arrangement with her?"

  It seemed a very peculiar question to me, but Aimeric's friend clearly meant it sincerely, so I tried to answer, and I stammered out a lot of not-very-coherent things about inspiring my art, giving me a purpose to place my enseingnamen at the service of, helping me to the sweet sense of melancholy ... it sounded dumb to me.

  "Well," Bruce said, "actually that does sound like fun. I can see where spending a few years that way would be interesting, at least." It sounded as if I had confused him completely but he at least understood that I loved it, and again I was deeply grateful. "Uh—but what do the girls get out of it?"

  The question was so startling that I blurted out the truth. "I really don't know."

  Bieris broke in, to my annoyance since I seemed to be getting on so well with Bruce, and said, "Well, we get attention, and we get to feel proud of ourselves because we're doing things we've been encouraged to fantasize about ever since we were little, and every so often we get sex, which is fun."

  "That's awfully cold-blooded," Aimeric said.

  He had a gift for understatement; I was so angry I wanted to shout at her, but you don't do that to someone else's entendedora.

  Something about the way she flipped her hair and shrugged, for some reason, suggest the style of a couple of Sapphists I had known; since they tended to be very aggressive and often treacherous fighters, and delighted in scrapping with jovents over any possible issue at all, I avoided them. Not that Bieris was wearing man's clothing, as they did, or even that she had spoken in the dominating, quarrelsome way they did—but something about her manner reminded me of them, of how dangerous it was to fight with them. And after all, she was Aimeric's entendedora, not mine. I was still annoyed about her breaking into my serious discussion of finamor with Bruce, but I decided I would just sulk quietly.

  "Well," Bieris added, "it's also true that unless one has some special talent or study to pursue full-time, there just isn't a lot to do before you're twenty-five. So I suppose finamor also gives us something to do."

  Bruce nodded a couple of times, and I realized that for some reason he had believed her. I would have to find a chance to give him a better, less ugly, explanation, later.

  As soon as I thought of one.

  I noticed that Aimeric was slumped in his seat and realized that he must be dying of embarrassment, as I would have in the same situation.

  After a while, Bruce said, "Well, I don't imagine you'll find anyone here who will be interested in exactly that arrangement, Giraut, but we do have women, if it's any consolation." I think he meant it as a joke, but I couldn't think of any way to pick up on it, and neither Aimeric nor Bieris did, so it just lay there. The only sound was the hum and whine of the treads, and the faint sputtering of sleet against the windshield and cabin roof.

  The conversation was now thoroughly cold and dead. The rising moon, and perhaps the sun itself, were beginning to turn the fog a pale yellow around us, enough so that we could see the many little frozen waterfalls and the heavy rime on the rocks. The temperature gauge had still not quite touched freezing.

  "Something must have really gone wrong with the terra-forming," Bieris said. "You must be way behind schedule for reaching planned temperature."

  As we whirled around another high, hairpin turn, Bruce and Aimeric looked at each other, obviously trying to settle who would explain it. The cat slipped a centimeter or so sideways toward the edge. The gray down below seemed to be lightening and getting a little farther away; I wondered, in the higher gravity, how long it would take to plunge all the way to the sea below.

  It was beginning to penetrate my hung-over, sleep-starved brain that Noupeitau had been the home of many great-looking, traditional donzelhas who were not Garsenda, and that I was now going to be in this icy waste for a stanyear or two. The great advantage of suicide is that no matter how stupid and short-sighted the action is, you don't have to be aware of your stupidity afterwards.

  I was working up from that thought into a full-fledged depression when Aimeric cleared his throat and said, "I did try to talk both of you out of this, you know, but now that you're both here, maybe I should just—well, all right. I guess the way to say it is ... urn, I mean—"

  "What Ambrose—sorry, Aimeric, I mean—is trying to tell you," Bruce said quietly, "is that most people here want it to be like this. And this planet was not terraformed. It came this way."

  FOUR

  They had time to tell us the whole story before we reached the Gap.

  Nansen was bizarre in many ways, but the strangest feature was that it should have been a prime candidate for terra-forming—potentially it could have been within one percent of the so-called Tahiti-Standard Climate, far better than Wilson was.

  But a simple loophole had made it possible for the two cultures here, Caledony and St. Michael, to enjoy the wretched climate that both preferred for ideological reasons.

  Technically Nansen could avoid terraforming because it had already been a living world when the probes got here. The explanation, as far as it went, was that around our stanyear of 1750, the asteroid that created the Gouge had torn a great hole in the crust of Nansen. The impact and the vulcanism it spawned had blackened the glaciers and ice sheets, and immense eruptions of greenhouse gases had further warmed the planet. In addition, the large releases of sulfuric acid had started the calcium sulfate—sulfide cycle in the oceans, turning them over and beginning the circulation life would need.

  And that was where the mystery started; it was understandable, though very improbable, that Nansen had accidentally started its own terraformation without human intervention— but where had the life that continued the process come from? Exobiologists fought over the issue with great passion and little in the way of conclusions.

  When Nansen's star, Mufrid, had swelled into a giant, as in practically all such cases, the Faju-Fakutoru Effect had stripped its gas giants of volatiles, leaving their habitable-sized cores in the process, and the very wide habitable zone of a giant star had virtually insured at least one world would fall within it.

  But normally, after liquefying, recooling, and forming their new atmospheres, such worlds either froze, as Wilson and Nansen had, boiled like Venus, or became lifeless hell-holes with many small briny seas and an inorganic nitrogen-CO2 cycle atmosphere. In their short lifetimes of a few hundred million years at best, they did not usually begin life—instead they waited, inert, until someone came along to seed them with organisms and begin generating the series of ecologies that would move them to human habitability.

  Nansen had not waited. In the late
2100s, the first human probes to reach the planet had found a flourishing, photosynthesis-based microbiological ecology. A complete absence of any fossil forms, and cores later drilled into the remaining primordial glaciers, had shown that life must have arrived very recently, or been almost absent until the asteroid strike created the opportunity.

  The theories about where the life had come from boiled down to four:

  First, Mufrid's now-destroyed inner worlds had harbored a civilization, a few members of which had made it to the stripped gas-giant, where their efforts at terraforming had failed, leaving low populations of a few simple organisms in the never-quite-frozen oceans—populations that exploded when the asteroid gave them the chance. This was clearly impossible because by the time the volatiles were gone, the inner worlds would have been engulfed by the expanding star for at least two million stanyears.

  Or, since that was impossible, the second theory was that an unacknowledged probe from one of many defunct Terran governments had contaminated Nansen. This was impossible because to produce the results observed by the first known probes, such a probe could not have left much later than 1825.

  Rejecting those theories, a few scientists contended that the gas giant whose core had formed Nansen had been warm enough to harbor life of its own—which had then somehow survived the sudden removal of ninety percent of the planet's mass, made its way to the core, and survived in the molten iron soup for decades as the gas giant's former moons, now in eccentric orbits, socked into the new molten planet every few hundred stanyears.

  Since that also couldn't be true, there was a notion that the nonhuman civilization we still had yet to find had discovered an easily terraformed planet at the enormous expense of an interstellar probe, started the process of terraformation at even greater expense, and then not bothered to move in, perhaps on a whim.

  "Every one of those ideas is ludicrous," Bruce said, "but there you have it—Nansen was alive when we got here." He shrugged. "Which meant the cultures that bought land on it could invoke the Preservation Regulations—no additional terraformation, just species addition."

  Aimeric sighed. "And just to make sure you both understand how grim that is—if you check the historical documents, you'll find out that a variance was theirs for the asking. Nobody who designed or founded St. Michael, or Caledony, wanted it to be any other way."

  Mufrid had risen behind us by now, a bright yellow smear in the dingy gray, and there was much more light. Little pellets of brown sleet bounced off the windshield, and I could see a couple of hundred meters down into the Gouge, and even dimly make out the far side as a dark spiky shadow. Colors were starting to appear in the rocks.

  "But—maybe I'm slow," Bieris said, "Why didn't they want it to have decent weather?"

  "Oh, two different reasons, one for each culture," Aimeric said. "St. Michael needed a bleak, gray place for human beings to do hard, pointless physical work, so that they could properly contemplate the essential sadness and futility of life, and therefore appreciate Christ's glorious generosity in releasing them from it."

  Bruce suddenly pointed. "Hey—look. The Gap Bow." All of us leaned forward to look through the windshield. There in front of and above us was the biggest double rainbow I had ever seen, and unlike the simple red-to-green ones of Wilson, this one extended all the way to deepest violet. "You'd have to ask a meterologist how it works," Bruce said. "Something about the way clouds form in the Gouge. It only happens at this time of morning, up at this altitude, maybe one out of every twenty Lights or so."

  "Deu, it rips my heart," Bieris said. "Surely someone here has made a symphony or a hymn of it—that would be wonderful to hear!"

  There was an embarrassed cough from Aimeric. "Um, perhaps some hymn would allude to it in passing."

  Bruce sighed. "I don't think they'd even allow that. Concern with appearances is the first of the Nine Indicators of Misplaced Values. And the Gap Bow is pure appearance."

  I didn't ask who thought so; probably I would not be able to avoid finding out, later.

  Besides, there was the Gap Bow itself to see. After the black dirty saltstorm from which we had started, and the drizzling gray climb along the bare rock walls, here in the glorious amber light under the turquoise sky was that brilliant blazing stripe like an immense, graceful bridge across Sodom Gap in front of us.

  It lasted for several minutes as we climbed; meanwhile, the cabin actually began to be a bit warm from the sunlight. My eyes had adjusted—though the colors of the rock layers still seemed garish to me, the pain I felt in looking at them was only esthetic.

  When the Gap Bow had at last disappeared, all of us sighing to see it go, Bruce said, "Not far now." He brought the cat around the outside of a small draw that entered the Gouge there.

  The last fifteen km of road winding up into the Gap was along bare, scoured rock ledges, some natural and some blasted. At their widest they were about eighty meters, and at their narrowest only thirty, about twice as wide as the cat. By now the sun was halfway up to noon, and the clouds in the Gouge were so far down that I had to press myself against the windows to see them. Opposite us, four kilometers away, Black Glacier Fall plunged into the Gouge—"It falls only during sunlight," Aimeric said, "and it all freezes into hail on the way down. From one of the outcrops on the other side, you can look all the way down to the green sea through the hole the hail makes in the clouds."

  To protect the ledges of Sodom Gap Road, great needled vines had been engineered and planted on the cliff faces, so on our side the vertical slopes were covered with tangled wood as thick as the trunks of mature trees, forming a latticework several meters deep.

  "Does anything live in that? Squirrel or monkey analogs?" Bieris asked.

  "Escaped chickens," Bruce said. "We'll probably see a couple before the drive is over. They were bred to have huge breast muscles and wings like condors, and to feed on the lichen that grows all over the planet. The idea was to raise them as sort of a free-range meat animal. Well, they do eat lichen, plus anything else they can get into their beaks, but they really prefer the needles on those vines—and up here they're hard to get at."

  We came around the bend and two visibility-orange chickens, at least two meters in wingspan, swooped past us. "That's them," Bruce said. "We bred them to be easy to spot Still doesn't help when you're hunting them. Fifteen kilos of meat on them, dressed out, but it's work to get them— nothing in their genes to make them go into a trap, and if you shoot one up here he tends to drop straight down into the Gouge. Only use we get out of them is the guano."

  When we finally climbed up the last slope to the top of the Gap—still between mountains that towered a kilometer above us on either side—Bieris and I gasped audibly and Aimeric seemed to get a little water in his eyes.

  The last bit of the Gouge had broken into a saddle between two mighty iceclad peaks. From where our cat whirred along the rocky surface, at the top of the Gap, bare rock stretched forward a full kilometer before plunging out of sight. Beyond that rim, a broad plain of deep blue-green, broken by tawny-gold grain fields and the paler green shimmer of orchards, reached to the jagged peaks of another mountain range far beyond. I guessed that perhaps the other mountains might be two hundred km away.

  "Anc nul vis bellazor!" I exclaimed, drinking in all that color after the barrenness of the journey.

  "Ver, pensi tropa zenza," Bruce said.

  Bieris and I giggled; Aimeric burst out laughing. "You realize you just lost your best chance to spy on our Occitans, Bruce."

  "Avetz vos Occitan?" Bieris asked.

  "Ja, tropa mal." Bruce sighed. "Nowadays I'm way out of practice. But I thought it was only fair to let you know I could understand your language."

  "The three of us spent a lot of time practicing it," Aimeric said.

  "Yap, you and me and Charlie. In fact we even practiced it up here a lot."

  Aimeric sighed. "I had almost forgotten."

  I had known Aimeric for almost a full Wilson-year—jus
t a bit less than twelve stanyears—since my family had been his host family after his arrival in Nou Occitan. And in all that time, I had never heard him speak of this Charlie, who had apparently been one of those who died in the tank on the way. Yet clearly they had been very close friends, together with Bruce ... I wasn't sure I liked knowing that Aimeric had been able to forget his friend so completely.

  Bruce was nodding. "I guess I'm still pretty amazed that we got away with it."

  Bieris looked from one to the other. "It's illegal to take a hike?"

  "Not illegal, but irrational. After you do it you have to prove you're not out of harmony with God's plan for your life," Bruce explained, making it completely confusing.

  "Why is it irrational?" I asked. "Anyone who got up here ought to be able to see why you would do it."

  "Mere esthetics are beyond reason," Aimeric said. His voice had a cold, ugly edge to it and a deep flatness that sounded like some peculiar accent. Without knowing who it was, I knew he was imitating someone's voice.

  "Since you can't prove it's good, it's got to be a matter of individual taste. And matters of individual taste are not supposed to be your first priority," Bruce said. "But we did manage to get around it. Once we thought of doing this, we spent almost a year establishing a walking fetish."

  Aimeric laughed. "Walked to everywhere we could, every chance we got. We had them convinced that the whole culture would double its aggregate utility total if only we could get to walk more."

  "The last three trips or so we made, we spoke Occitan exclusively," Bruce said. "It really is a better language for dealing with beauty. Of course, those were long trips, and harder to get permission for—it's a good five days, or ten Lights, really, to get over into Sodom Basin—so that was later on. Just as well since we were about the only people who had ever done any hiking or camping in Caledony, and we had to teach ourselves everything by trial and error. Sodom Gap would not have been the right place to try to learn—it isn't what you'd call a low pass."