IGMS Issue 23 Read online

  "This freed you from responsibility to your tribe?"

  Veritas shook his head. "My only responsibility was to the goats. Then that was taken from me too.

  "The Malawha boys attacked my cousin and me as we watched the herd. Twenty of them against two of us. The Malawha Tribe had declared war, and took my tribe by surprise. Everyone was dead or enslaved. All those fine princes who looked down on me. Next the Malawha came for the goats. They had swords, but no skill. I killed two young ones with a tree branch. My cousin killed three before someone stabbed him from behind. I did not enlist in the Emperor's army. The Malawha sold me to it.

  "What do you think of me now? A goatherd and a slave. Do you understand why I will not take back the name of Prince Keal?"

  "Tell me how Princess Duranni's poem changed you." Her voice was calm.

  He searched her face for pity, but found none in her penetrating eyes. "The poem was a divine gift," he said. "Her poem released me from my marital obligation. It broke my final tie to the tribe. I had no obligation to avenge my people; I had no obligation to escape enslavement; I had no obligations for the first time in my life. Prince Keal was left behind and I chose the name Veritas. I had no idea what it meant, it was written on a soldier's shield. Everything thereafter I earned."

  "The youth you brag of is all a lie."

  "Had you asked me about General Veritas, I could have told you a glorious tale. All true."

  She laughed and his fury ignited.

  "I have told you my poem!" he said. "Tell me yours."

  "That was our agreement," she said.

  Veritas nodded weakly. Something left him with his outburst; his strength waned further. He opened his scroll to the blank space and prayed her poem would save him. When he dipped his quill in the icy, thawing ink, his fingers trembled.

  "I stood amidst the bodies of supplicants," Theseda Ys said, "alone before the Emperor hoping to present a small poem about a flower. Perhaps its power would have been enough to save me, but the words took on a life of their own in my mouth and emerged changed. I was upset. We came hoping for mercy on a day when mercy is given."

  She stopped speaking. Veritas looked up from his scroll, quill poised, as her silence stretched.

  "Do you love the Emperor?" she asked suddenly.

  "He is God-on-earth."

  "That is not an answer."

  Veritas looked into the glowing embers of the fire. "I do not really care for the young Emperor."

  "I will tell you my poem."

  Veritas dipped his quill into his inkpot once more.

  She said:

  "Beside the high road from Porrin

  where mountains descend into canyons,

  a flower had sprung from the brambles

  that writhed and tried to consume it.

  A single white flower that promised

  of dreams without brambles or nettles.

  Its petals thrown up to the sun,

  calling and catching the rays.

  I sat in my carriage-seat thinking

  of flowers that grew here before this,

  while the horses drew up to the river

  that the dead are unable to cross.

  I had heard of those other white flowers

  that fought from the ashes and cinders,

  they were bent in the grip of the brambles,

  and lost to the sight of the sun.

  But the sunlight still touched on my flower,

  and the ferry was crossing the river.

  I pushed through the nettles and brambles,

  and carried the flower with me."

  Veritas lowered his quill. He tilted the scroll towards the fire to dry, and ruddy light shone through the thin vellum. The wind held its breath.

  "Emperor Teron heard you," he said. "He started his fight against the priesthood because of this poem. He forgave Porrin's debts and Edo cursed you to hang."

  "That was the first day of a terrible time. The Emperor took my poem as a sign and rose up against the old religion. He chose to live past his fortieth birthday. High Priest Edo shouted that Aztibel would rain down fire if Emperor Teron did not submit to the sacrifice. People fled the city."

  "It took the Emperor almost a decade to defeat the old religion," Veritas said. "You carried the flower across the river that no other Emperor had crossed. You made him a god. No wonder High Priest Edo hated you."

  "The poem was just a spark, inspiring him to do what he wanted to do anyway. He believed Aztibel's reign was over."

  "Did he fear?"

  "Of course. He lay terrified in bed the night before his birthday, waiting for fire to rain down. But he refused to give in and there was no divine retribution. The flower had crossed the river. He was the first emperor in seventeen generations to live past forty and it was this that really gave him the courage to defy Edo through the coming years."

  "And you loved him."

  "I did not. I thought I spoke a love poem to him. He never saw it that way. To him, it was an inspiration. You are the same. Princess Duranni sent you a poem of sadness. It was a love poem to you, grieving your loss. You didn't understand it that way. It was your inspiration to freedom, and you never mourned her. When you introduced her to me earlier, you said you had been engaged before you were born. She was an obligation. That is why you never loved her."

  Veritas closed his eyes, thinking back. She had long, black hair. Unless that was someone else. He couldn't remember. "Did the Emperor love you?"

  "No. Within a year he was consumed with his fight. His bed grew cold to me. He left me exposed, and Edo captured me."

  "Why did he bring you out here to die? Why not make a public spectacle of you to challenge the Emperor?"

  "He wanted to at first, but my death wouldn't have mattered in the end. He knew I hadn't spoken my poem from malice. It had been divinely influenced, and he desperately wanted to know why. We spoke for a long time. He asked me what I had seen and felt as the poem passed my lips. I couldn't tell him much, and he despaired.

  "I thought his struggle with the Emperor was about power, but it wasn't. Not to him. It was about love. He loved Aztibel and feared the Emperor's turning away."

  "You loved Edo," Veritas said with final understanding.

  "Yes, I do. I remained with him for years in the temple complex. I had always been a believer, but I grew to love Aztibel as he did. I was horrified by what I had caused."

  "You were a spark. A spark never knows if it will light a candle or a forest."

  "Nevertheless, Aztibel's priests were being killed, their knowledge and passion lost. The end was coming."

  "How did you come to be here, alive and not alive?"

  "Edo was desperate. He sent priests away to foreign lands, carrying copies of precious texts. The Emperor caught as many as he could, and began invading other countries to catch more.

  "Then came the day when Emperor Teron moved openly on the temple complex. The people still loved Aztibel, and they blocked the streets with their bodies. The temple soldiers went out to meet the imperial soldiers, to make their stand. Edo asked me to speak my poem once more. Then he chose to trust in his faith.

  "'Maybe,' he said, 'your poem is not about the Emperor at all. Maybe the Emperor's defiance was inevitable. If so, your poem is about Aztibel.'

  "We escaped the city, along with many others, through secret tunnels. Edo brought me here and built that stone hut to stay with me. I miss him so much. We were together every day for ten years, until the morning he did not wake."

  Veritas felt cold flush across his body, deeper than the night. Theseda Ys had carried something across the river that the dead cannot cross. "Are you Aztibel?" he whispered.

  "I am waiting."

  "For what?"

  "The priests-in-exile memorize my poem and sustain me, but they never write it down. They are waiting for a sign. Until they come for me, I am safe here. Who bothers a corpse, except a man who does not fear the dead?"

  "You want me to take your
poem to them."

  "I do."

  "That would be a terrible thing. I would be a spark."

  "I give you a purpose again."

  He had not been seeking a new purpose. He had wanted things back the way they were. "I spent forty years building the empire, crafting a time when I would no longer be needed. Should I spend my twilight years unbuilding it? It is not a shoe to be tied and untied."

  "You were not the craftsman, you were his tool. But you could be the craftsman."

  "This is not the change I wanted."

  "Read back through your poems. How many of those changes did you welcome? I offer you strength."

  Veritas gazed toward the horizon. In a few hours the sun would rise.

  He carefully returned the scroll to his pack and capped the inkbottle. He lifted the pack onto his horse. "I will go to my estate in the south. Such decisions are not made in an instant." He felt excited. His thoughts had been so focused on the capital that he found it hard to direct them elsewhere. But elsewhere was the only place he could go from here. "I will keep your poem safe. I will add no others to my scroll. Princess Duranni's is the first, and yours shall be the last."

  "Did it change you then? Maybe it wasn't meant for you. Maybe it's all a lie."

  He smiled. "There is much truth in it. I have rivers to cross, too." He looked for some sign of the wild dogs.

  "Will we will meet again, General Veritas?"

  "Don't call me that. Prince Keal has been dead for a long time, but General Veritas is dead too, isn't he?"

  "Sometimes the dead speak, and remind us of things past."

  "Then they and I will speak again, on another dark night. I will return to you in the spring, when it is warmer."

  Into the West

  by Eric James Stone

  Artwork by Scott Altmann

  * * *

  According to Jorge, sometime after we pass through Denver the California Zephyr will run out of diesel. Jorge's already decided that when the train stops, he will, too -- like a captain going down with the ship. He's got a wife and a passel of kids back in Chicago who he'll probably never see again, so I guess I understand.

  Me, I plan to keep heading west with as many of the other passengers as care to go. Just keep on going till we drop dead of exhaustion or hit the Pacific or the darkness catches us.

  We don't know for a fact that anyone back east is dead. Or alive, either. Some of the passengers just sit up in the dome car and watch the landscape behind us stretch like salt-water taffy as it reddens and finally fades into the blackness that follows us. Others are so freaked out they just sit in the dining car finishing off the liquor, free of charge. The rest of us sit in our regular seats, like everything's normal.

  "Those scientists at CERN overdid it," says Varney. His t-shirt's a couple of Xs too small, but people listen to him because he's loud and confident. "They probably created the black hole."

  I've already told him you don't escape a world-devouring black hole on Amtrak, but he's fixated on the idea because it's something he understands.

  Me, I'm fixated on what I don't understand: when we pass through a town, everyone we see is frozen in place.

  "Gravitationally induced time dilation" is Varney's answer. Makes no sense, 'cause we're just as close to the event horizon, so our time would be dilated, too.

  A spindly woman with wiry red hair and librarian glasses sits down in the seat opposite me. "You think he's full of it."

  I shake my head. "Not 'think.' I know he is."

  "So, what's your theory?" Her voice is casual, like she's asking about tomorrow's weather, not the end of the world.

  I shrug. "I thought the speed of light had slowed to 50 miles an hour or so. Fit with the red-shift out back and the time dilation as we passed things at a high fraction of the speed of light. Was a pleasant theory."

  "Pleasant?" she asks.

  "It would mean the rest of the world was still there behind us, if it was true. But it's not."

  "Why not?"

  "There's no blue shift ahead of us."

  She nods as if she understands. Maybe she does -- she's smart enough to know Varney's wrong. She extends her right hand. "Dawn Rigby."

  We shake hands as I say, "Carmichael Paxon. Friends call me Carpy."

  "So what's your new theory, Carpy?"

  "Don't have one that fits the data," I say. "Have a plan that fits the data, though: keep heading west, away from whatever's going on back there." I jerk a thumb over my shoulder.

  Her eyes flicker to the window, then widen. I turn and see a dusty red pickup speeding along the highway running parallel to the tracks on our left. A man leans half out of the passenger side, waving a battered cowboy hat as if to flag us down. He's yelling something, but I can't hear him through the glass.

  "So the rest of the world isn't frozen," says Dawn.

  Some of Varney's audience notice the pickup, too, and pretty soon they're all at the windows, gawking at two men in a pickup like they're a couple of movie stars.

  "We've got to stop for them," says Dawn.

  Varney snorts. "You're crazy. The black hole will get us if we stop."

  A murmur of agreement ripples through the other passengers.

  I decide I've had enough, so I stand. "Look, folks, I don't know what that is back there, but it is definitely not a black hole."

  "Why should they believe you and not me?" asks Varney, jutting his chin toward me. He's got three inches on me in height and he's close to double my weight, but most of that is fat. He can't really be looking for a fight -- he's probably just as scared as any of us.

  So I play the authority card. "Because I used to be Marine Corps astronaut with the Shuttle program, that's why. I've forgotten more about space than you've ever learned, and I tell you, that's no black hole."

  What I don't tell him is that I washed out of the space program. Kinda tough being an astronaut after you develop an irrational aversion to flying.

  He stares at me for a moment, then heaves his shoulders in a massive shrug. "So it's not a black hole. Whatever it is, it's coming up behind us and we can't afford to stop."

  "You don't know that," says Dawn. "We slowed down going through that town in Nebraska, and it didn't catch us."

  Before Varney can respond, I say, "In the Marines, they taught me never leave a man behind." I jab a finger toward the pickup. "If they need a ride to escape what's coming, we'll give it to them. We clear?"

  Varney swallows, then nods his head.

  Jorge agrees to slow the train. I still can't hear the men in the pickup over the clatter of the train wheels, but I think I convey the plan to them well enough through gestures. They speed on ahead of us. Jorge says they should find a crossing in a few miles, and we'll have slowed down enough by then that they can climb aboard.

  Dawn meets me before I get back to the rest of the passengers.

  "Thank you," she says.

  "Getting people focused on rescuing someone else was a good idea," I say. "Keeps them from panicking."

  Her glasses have slid down her nose a bit, and she pushes them back up. "I didn't suggest it to keep people from panicking -- those men were in trouble and I wanted to help."

  "There's that, too," I say, and I feel like I'm talking to Miriam again. She was always going out of her way to help people, right up to the end. After the plane crash she helped me to safety, and then went back to get someone else. I was too concussed to stop her.

  Not wanting to think about Miriam any more, I push past Dawn and say over my shoulder, "We need to get people to open doors all along the train, just in case those guys miss the first one."

  From my post at the last door on the train, I look back at the blackness to the east. Jorge has slowed the train down to about five miles an hour, but it seems the darkness has slowed as well. If anything, it looks farther behind us than it used to be.

  A shout from the front of the train turns my attention forward. I spot the red pickup: they've turned off the highwa
y onto a road that crosses the railway. For some reason, though, they're just sitting in the cab, still a good thirty yards away from the tracks. A cloud of dust kicked up by their tires still hangs in the air behind them, and it looks wrong.

  Ahead of me on the train, people start calling out to the men, but I realize it won't do any good. We pass by the men, who are frozen in place.

  "How terrible," says Dawn, as I meet up with her near the middle of the train. "They were so close to being safe with us."

  "Safe is a relative term," I say.

  She smiles. "You sure know how to comfort a lady. But I'm pretty sure the darkness is slowing, so I'm hopeful we'll outrun it and find a safe place."

  I'm only half paying attention to her words, because the word relative is sparking connections in my brain. I had already discarded the idea of time dilation due to relativity, but relative motion did seem to matter.

  Varney stands up from his seat. "It was a good try, man," he says. "Not your fault they froze."

  "They weren't frozen when they were cruising down the highway parallel to us," I say, mostly to hear myself think. "But when they turned off the highway --"

  The metal-on-metal screech of the brakes sounds again, and I realize Jorge is still slowing us, maybe even planning to stop.

  "No!" I yell. I squeeze between a surprised Dawn and a protesting Varney, and sprint forward through the train cars. "Jorge, don't stop the train!"

  I keep repeating that at the top of my lungs as I pass by the other passengers. Some are a little too slow to move out of my way and I shove them aside, not caring if I cause a few bruises on the way. I've got to get to the engine before we stop completely. No matter what, Jorge has to keep us going.

  Because if I'm right, the moment we stop moving west it's all over.

  I reach the engine compartment. "Keep going!"

  Jorge looks back at me over his shoulder. "But those guys --"

  "We can't help them," I say. "If we stop, we'll end up frozen like them."

  After a moment's hesitation, he nods. "How fast should I go?"