Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance (Part III)

Editor’s Note: Readers of The Abstract are generally interested in research, science and technology. People that fall into that camp are often also devotees of science fiction. So, in a throw back to the serialized storytelling of the golden age of sci-fi, we decided to serialize some science fiction by one of our favorite authors – John Kessel. Kessel is a two-time Nebula award winner and a professor of English at NC State. New installments will come out every week for five weeks. The first installment can be found here. “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance” is copyright 2009 by John Kessel. Enjoy!

I was woken by Nahid rubbing snow into my face. My piezosuit had been turned off, and the fabric was flexible again. Nahid leaned over me, supporting my head. “Can you move your feet?” she asked.

My thigh still was numb from the stunner. I tried moving my right foot. Though I could not feel any response, I saw the boot twitch. “So it would seem.”

Done with me, she let my head drop. “So, do you have some plan?”

I pulled up my knees and sat up. My head ached. We were surrounded by the boles of the tall firs; above our heads the wind swayed the trees, but down here the air was calm, and sunlight filtered down in patches, moving over the packed fine brown needles of the forest floor. Nahid had pulled down my chute to keep it from advertising our position. She crouched on one knee and examined the charge indicator on her blaster.

I got up and inventoried the few supplies we had—my suit’s water reservoir, holding maybe a liter, three packs of gichy crackers in the belt. Hers would have no more than that. “We should get moving; the Caslonians will send a landing party, or notify the colonial government in Guliston to send a security squad.”

“And why should I care?”

“You fought for the republic against the Caslonians. When the war was lost and the protectorate established, you had yourself folded. Didn’t you expect to take up arms again when called back to life?”

“You tell me that was sixty years ago. What happened to the rest of the Republican Guard?”

“The Guard was wiped out in the final Caslonian assaults.”

“And our folded battalion?”

The blistering roar of a flyer tore through the clear air above the trees. Nahid squinted up, eyes following the glittering ship. “They’re heading for where the pod hit.” She pulled me to my feet, taking us downhill, perhaps in the hope of finding better cover in the denser forest near one of the mountain freshets.

“No,” I said. “Up the slope.”

“That’s where they’ll be.”

“It can’t be helped. We need to get to the monastery. We’re on the wrong side of the mountains.” I turned up the incline. After a moment, she followed.

We stayed beneath the trees for as long as possible. The slope was not too steep at this altitude; the air was chilly, with dying patches of old snow in the shadows. Out in the direct sunlight, it would be hot until evening came. I had climbed these mountains fifteen years before, an adolescent trying to find a way to live away from the world. As we moved, following the path of a small stream, the aches in my joints eased.

We did not talk. I had not thought about what it would mean to wake this soldier, other than how she would help me in a time of extremity. There are no women in our order, and though we take no vow of celibacy and some commerce takes place between brothers in their cells late at night, there is little opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. Nahid, despite her forbidding nature, was beautiful: dark skin, black eyes, lustrous black hair cut short, the three parallel scars of her rank marking her left cheek. As a boy in Urushana, I had tormented my sleepless nights with visions of women as beautiful as she; in my short career as a constable I had avidly pursued women far less so. One of them had provoked the fight that had gotten me cashiered.

The forest thinned as we climbed higher. Large folds of granite lay exposed to the open air, creased with fractures and holding pockets of earth where trees sprouted in groups. We had to circle around to avoid coming into the open, and even that would be impossible when the forest ended completely. I pointed us south, where Dundrahad Pass, dipping below 3,000 meters, cut through the mountains. We were without snowshoes or trekking gear, but I hoped that, given the summer temperatures, the pass would be clear enough to traverse in the night without getting ourselves killed. The skinsuits we wore would be proof against the nighttime cold.

We saw no signs of the Caslonians, but when we reached the tree line, we stopped to wait for darkness anyway. The air had turned colder, and a sharp wind blew down the pass from the other side of the mountains. We settled in a hollow beneath a patch of twisted scrub trees and waited out the declining sun. At the zenith, the first moon Mahsheed rode, waning gibbous. In the notch of the pass above and ahead of us, the second moon Roshanak rose.  Small, glowing green, it moved perceptibly as it raced around the planet. I nibbled at some gichy, sipping water from my suit’s reservoir. Nahid’s eyes were shadowed; she scanned the slope.

“We’ll have to wait until Mahsheed sets before we move,” Nahid said. “I don’t want to be caught in the pass in its light.”

“It will be hard for us to see where we’re going.”

She didn’t reply. The air grew colder. After a while, without looking at me, she spoke. “So what happened to my compatriots?”

I saw no point in keeping anything from her. “As the Caslonians consolidated their conquest, an underground of Republicans pursued a guerilla war. Two years later, they mounted an assault on the provincial capital in Kofarnihon. They unfolded your battalion to aid them, and managed to seize the armory. But the Caslonians sent reinforcements and set up a siege. When the rebels refused to surrender, the Caslonians vaporized the entire city, hostages, citizens, and rebels alike. That was the end of the Republican Guard.” Nahid’s dark eyes watched me as I told her all this. The tightness of her lips held grim skepticism.

“Yet here I am,” she said.

“I don’t know how you came to be the possession of the order. Some refugee, perhaps. The masters, sixty years ago, debated what to do with you. Given the temperament of the typical guardsman, it was assumed that, had you been restored to life, you would immediately get yourself killed in assaulting the Caslonians, putting the order at risk. It was decided to keep you in reserve, in the expectation that, at some future date, your services would be useful.”

“You monks were always fair-weather democrats. Ever your order over the welfare of the people, or even their freedom. So you betrayed the republic.”

“You do us an injustice.”

“It was probably Javeed who brought me—the lying monk attached to our unit.”

I recognized the name. Brother Javeed, a bent, bald man of great age, had run the monastery kitchen. I had never thought twice about him. He had died a year after I joined the order.

“Why do you think I was sent on this mission?” I told her. “We mean to set Helvetica free. And we shall do so, if we reach Sharishabz.”

“How do you propose to accomplish that? Do you want to see your monastery vaporized?”

“They will not dare. I have something of theirs that they will give up the planet for. That’s why they tried to board my ship rather than destroy it; that’s why they didn’t bother to disintegrate the escape pod when they might easily have shot us out of the sky.”

“And this inestimably valuable item that you carry? It must be very small.”

“It’s in my head. I have stolen the only copies of the Foundational Dramas.”

She looked at me. “So?”

Her skepticism was predictable, but it still angered me. “So—they will gladly trade Helvetica’s freedom for the return of the plays.”

She lowered her head, rubbed her brow with her hand. I could not read her. She made a sound, an intake of breath. For a moment, I thought she wept. Then she raised her head and laughed in my face.

I fought an impulse to strike her. “Quiet!”

She laughed louder. Her shoulders shook, and tears came to her eyes. I felt my face turn red. “You should have let me die with the others, in battle. You crazy priest!”

“Why do you laugh?” I asked her. “Do you think they would send ships to embargo Helvetican orbital space, dispatch squads of soldiers and police, if what I carry were not valuable to them?”

“I don’t believe in your fool’s religion.”

“Have you ever seen the plays performed?”

“Once, when I was a girl. I saw The Archer’s Fall during the year-end festival in Tienkash. I fell asleep.”

“They are the axis of human culture. The sacred stories of our race. We are human because of them. Through them the gods speak to us.”

“I thought you monks heard the gods talking to you directly. Didn’t they tell you to run us directly into the face of the guards securing the escape pod? It’s lucky you had me along to cut our way out of that umbilical, or we’d be dead up there now.”

“You might be dead. I would be in a sleep tank having my brain taken apart—to retrieve these dramas.”

“There are no gods! Just voices in your head. They tell you to do what you already want to do.”

“If you think the commands of the gods are easy, then just try to follow them for a single day.”

We settled into an uncomfortable silence. The sun set, and the rings became visible in the sky, turned pink by the sunset in the west, rising silvery toward the zenith, where they were eclipsed by the planet’s shadow. The light of the big moon still illuminated the open rock face before us. We would have a steep 300 meter climb above the tree line to the pass, then another couple of kilometers between the peaks in the darkness.

“It’s cold,” I said after a while.

Without saying anything, she reached out and tugged my arm. It took me a moment to realize that she wanted me to move next to her. I slid over, and we ducked our heads to keep below the wind. I could feel the taut muscles of her body beneath the skinsuit. The paradox of our alienation hit me. We were both the products of the gods. She did not believe this truth, but truth does not need to be believed to prevail.

Still, she was right that we had not escaped the orbiting commandos in the way I had expected.

The great clockwork of the universe turned. Green Roshanak sped past Mahsheed, for a moment in transit looking like the pupil of a god’s observing eye, then set, and an hour later, Mahsheed followed her below the western horizon. The stars shone in all their glory, but it was as dark as it would get before Roshanak rose for the second time that night. It was time for us to take our chance and go.

We came out of our hiding place and moved to the edge of the scrub. The broken granite of the peak rose before us, faint gray in starlight. We set out across the rock, climbing in places, striding across rubble fields, circling areas of ice and melting snow. In a couple of places, we had to boost each other up, scrambling over boulders, finding hand and footholds in the vertical face where we were blocked. It was farther than I had estimated before the ground leveled and we were in the pass.

We were just cresting the last ridge when glaring white light shone down on us, and an amplified voice called from above. “Do not move! Drop your weapons and lie flat on the ground!”

I tongued my body into acceleration. In slow motion, Nahid crouched, raised her blaster, arm extended, sighted on the flyer and fired. I hurled my body into hers and threw her aside just as the return fire of projectile weapons splattered the rock where she had been into fragments. In my head, kind Eurynome insisted: Back. We will show you the way.

“This way!” I dragged Nahid over the edge of the rock face we had just climbed. It was a three-meter drop to the granite below; I landed hard, and she fell on my chest, knocking the wind from me. Around us burst a hail of sleep gas pellets. In trying to catch my breath I caught a whiff of the gas, and my head whirled. Nahid slid her helmet down over her face, and did the same for me.

From above us came the sound of the flyer touching down. Nahid started for the tree line, limping. She must have been hit or injured in our fall. I pulled her to our left, along the face of the rock. “Where—” she began.

“Shut up!” I grunted.

The commandos hit the ledge behind us, but the flyer had its searchlight aimed at the trees, and the soldiers followed the light. The fog of sleep gas gave us some cover.

We scuttled along the granite shelf until we were beyond the entrance to the pass. By this time, I had used whatever reserves of energy my body could muster, and passed into normal speed. I was exhausted.

“Over the mountain?” Nahid asked. “We can’t.”

“Under it,” I said. I forced my body into motion, searching in the darkness for the cleft in the rock which, in the moment of the flyer attack, the gods had shown me. And there it was, two dark pits above a vertical fissure in the granite, like an impassive face. We climbed up the few meters to the brink of the cleft. Nahid followed, slower now, dragging her right leg. “Are you badly hurt?” I asked her.

“Keep going.”

I levered my shoulder under her arm, and helped her along the ledge. Down in the forest, the lights of the commandos flickered, while a flyer hovered above, beaming bright white radiance down between the trees.

Once inside the cleft, I let her lean against the wall. Beyond the narrow entrance the way widened. I used my suit flash, and, moving forward, found an oval chamber of three meters with a sandy floor. Some small bones give proof that a predator had once used this cave for a lair. But at the back, a small passage gaped. I crouched and followed it deeper.

“Where are you going?” Nahid asked.

“Come with me.”

The passage descended for a space, then rose. I emerged into a larger space. My flash showed not a natural cave, but a chamber of dressed rock, and opposite us, a metal door. It was just as my vision had said.

“What is this?” Nahid asked in wonder.

“A tunnel under the mountain.” I took off my helmet and spoke the words that would open the door. The ancient mechanism began to hum. With a fall of dust, a gap appeared at the side of the door, and it slid open.

(To be continued…)