FSF, July 2008 Read online

  * * * *

  Hobey's had little to say about Far Grommsgrik. After the usual statistical data on size, orbit and spin characteristics, and the composition of the world's atmosphere, the flow of information tailed off sharply. Under the heading of population, the listing confined itself to the single word: “sparse.” The notation on the world's economy was even slimmer: “nil."

  Heeding the paragraph on climate, I chose appropriate clothing, filling the pockets with several species of coinage, some emergency rations, and a compact weapon that could emit two types of focused energy or spit tiny darts that exploded once they decided they had penetrated deeply enough. I also put Fullbrim's research materials into a satchel. Finally, I draped my assistant over my neck and shoulders and said, “Gallivant, open the hatch."

  Far Grommsgrik's axial tilt being almost nonexistent, the climate of the region in which I had touched down could not much worsen—which was a relief—but neither would it much improve, which would have been a depressing prospect had I intended to stay. I stepped down into a chill desert of dark rock and gray grit, flat in all directions except west, where an unimpressive sawtooth of naked peaks and crags interrupted the horizon. Between my ship and the mountains lay one of the planet's few settlements, a huddle of flat-roofed huts fashioned from the same rock that surrounded them. Apparently, on far Grommsgrik, any other building material must be brought from offworld.

  I trudged toward the hamlet, my boots kicking up low clouds of dust that rapidly returned to the ground. Though small, the planet was dense; its gravity exhibited an unmistakable spirit of determination. Its day was also short and, as I had made planetfall after the pale sun that this barren rock orbited had already reached the zenith, night would soon descend.

  I had been prepared to bargain for accommodation in whichever hut was the largest, but I was surprised to find that the settlement featured a rudimentary hostelry, identifiable by the words “The Inn” daubed in black paint above its low-linteled doorway. I pushed aside a curtain of heavy felt weighted with stones sewn into its lower edge and found myself in a bare room, its only furnishings a few chairs and tables made from piled-up flat stones, the seats softened by layers of the same felt that covered the doorway. By the light of a few dim lumens—there were no windows—I saw on the far side of the room a slab of waist-high stone, with just enough room behind it for a lean and sinewy man, narrow of shoulder and bald of crown. He regarded me impassively from eyes whose expression advertised that they had already seen as much of life as they cared to, and probably more than was good for their owner.

  As I crossed to him he drained the contents of a small beaker that had been halfway to his lips when I pushed aside the felt. He shook slightly from the impact of whatever was in the cup, then set it down and picked up a large stoneware crock. Cradling it under one arm, he began to ladle a thick, cold gruel into a row of bowls that stood on the countertop. The receptacles appeared to have been ground from the same material that formed the walls, floor, and furniture. I performed a respectful salute, named myself, and asked if he was the proprietor of the establishment.

  He replied, without pausing in his work, that he was the keeper and that his name was Froust. Then he said, “You'll be wanting to go up to the Epiphany. It's too late today, but you may stay here for the night."

  "I presume,” I said, “that there will be a modest charge for a room with sanitary facilities.” I looked at the gruel, pale and lumpy. “Is a decent dinner at all possible?"

  "No,” he said, filling the last thick-sided bowl. “We all eat the same here.” He reached beneath the counter and brought up another bowl, blew dust out of it, then ladled out another portion of pottage and pushed it toward me.

  "As for charges,” he continued, “most folk just turn over whatever they have brought with them, in return for being provided for in perpetuity."

  I let my face show a natural alarm. “You strip your customers of all that they possess? How do they afford passage off the planet?"

  "They no longer require passage,” he said, “and have no further need for anything else that wealth can buy."

  The words should have been said in a sinister tone, betokening that here was one of those madmen sometimes to be found running far-out-of-the-way hostelries, conscripting their hapless guests as unwilling players in disturbed dramas that invariably climaxed in spurting blood and carved flesh. But the only emotion I could detect in the fellow was a bottomless sadness.

  "You have leaped too far,” I said, “and landed on a conclusion that will not bear the weight. I have no plans to go up to the Epiphany, whatever that may be, and I do not propose to remain here any longer than my duties require."

  Confusion spread across his unanimated face, then slowly gave way to a dawning comprehension. “You're not a seeker after substance,” he said.

  "No, though I am a seeker after one such, a man named Doldan Fullbrim. Have you seen him?"

  "We find no great need for names here. Would he have been dropped off by a Graz packet a few days back?"

  "He was last known to be on his way here on a Graz ship.” I gave a brief description.

  "He's the one, then,” Froust said.

  "Where is he now?"

  The man consulted some inner timetable. “Well,” he said, after a moment's thought, “he arrived, like you, late in the day. That would have been three days ago. The next morning, he set off for the Epiphany. He looked fit enough to have reached it before night, so he would have had his encounter then or early in the following morning, depending on what he felt he had to do before confronting the experience. It usually takes them longer to find their way down. Thus he may reappear sometime tomorrow. If he does not come before noon, I will go out and find him."

  I looked toward the doorway. Despite the heavy weights sewn into the hem of the curtain, the thick fabric was being rippled by a brisk wind that had sprung up with the fall of dark. “I am minded to go look for him now,” I said.

  "You must not do that now. The path is dangerous in the dark."

  "I have a compact spaceship."

  "You will find nowhere to land it. The slope is sleep."

  "You do not recommend going on foot?"

  "No, the night air is chill. Ice forms after sunset."

  "But Fullbrim is exposed to the elements."

  "He will not notice."

  I waited for him to add some further remark that would dilute the cryptic pall that obscured large parts of our conversation but he said no more on the subject of my quarry. Instead he declared a need to distribute the gruel and, lining his forearms with several bowls, he set off for an inner archway that led into an unlit space.

  I followed and watched. As he stepped through the opening, another dim lumen activated itself in a low-ceilinged corridor beyond. To either side of the short hallway were more dark doorways, low and narrow, as if the unseen rooms behind them were little larger than the kind of cells that would have gratified the most ascetic of contemplatives. I heard a faint sound of sobbing. Before each of the openings, the innkeeper set a bowl of gruel, then returned toward the common room. Before he exited the hallway, causing the lumen to extinguish its cheerless light, I saw an emaciated hand emerge from one of the little cells, then draw the bowl before it into the deeper darkness.

  Back behind his slab of a counter, Froust arrayed more bowls and filled them as he had the first round. Then he brought up from beneath the slab a pair of wide and shallow baskets suspended from a wooden yoke. He filled the baskets with the bowls, lifted the yoke to his shoulders and went out the front door. As he pushed aside the felt curtain, a stark wind took brief possession of the common room. The warming function of my clothing immediately activated, but the tips of my ungloved fingers stung from the cold. I wondered how Doldan Fullbrim was faring, somewhere out among the crags.

  The innkeeper came back with his panniers empty save for one bowl. “You seem to have miscounted,” I said, though I doubted he had done so.

 
; He tipped the bowl's contents back into the crock and said, “A man in one of the far cabins has completed his experience.” His eyes lost focus as he regarded some inner vision.

  I sought to question him as to the nature of the experience Fullbrim had apparently come seeking. I also wanted to know what the Epiphany was. But my host was in no mood for talk. He pushed the bowl of gruel in my direction again, and indicated that I was welcome to pile the chair felts on a table and take my repose. Then, after feeding himself a few mouthfuls from the crock, he went through another curtained doorway behind the counter. Before I had finished the tasteless mush, I heard the sounds of a troubled sleep.

  * * * *

  By midmorning, Fullbrim had not appeared. Froust said, “Some do not make it all the way back before lethargy overtakes them completely. I will go and look for him. You are welcome to come."

  I indicated the integrator draped over my shoulders. “My assistant can perform long-distance scans,” I said.

  "No need. There is but one path up and back.” He dressed himself in several layers of mismatched garments, chose a stout staff from a few that were stacked in a corner, and offered another to me, saying, “The way is steep in places,” and then we set off.

  A chill breeze rolled down the slopes, though it lacked the bite of last night's wind. After a few dozen steps my calf muscles began to complain of the effects of the higher gravity, but I ignored the discomfort. We traveled in silence a fair distance, while I waited to see if Froust would volunteer any more information as to where Fullbrim had been making for and what he would have found there. But the man's perspective was turned inward, even as he trod the rough path. Finally I said, “What do the seekers find up there?"

  He glanced my way only a moment before averting his eyes, but I thought to see a look of guilt and shame in his aspect. “I don't know,” he said. “I have never ascended all the way to the Epiphany."

  "You do not question those who have?"

  "I tried, in the early days, but got nothing from them. You'll see."

  I was alarmed. “They are struck dumb?"

  Again, a brief culpable look came my way. “They can speak. Mostly, they do not. And never about what they encountered above."

  I taxed him with being unduly mysterious and warned him that if this continuing parsimony with information was part of some scheme to cadge funds from me, I was not easily gulled. He stopped then and turned to me, and I heard a faint and pained laughter behind his voice when he replied, “You read me wrong. Far wrong."

  "Then out with the whole of it,” I said. To underscore my determination, I drew the weapon from my pocket and held it within view, though I did not direct any of its dangerous orifices at him. He seemed unimpressed, but leaning on his staff and in a monotone, he told me his tale.

  The Epiphany—that was what it was called when he first arrived, some years back, though he did not know exactly what the name signified—was to be found in a subterranean gallery whose mouth opened near the base of one of the tallest crags. Froust did not know how long it had been there.

  "What do you know of it?” I said.

  "Its effect,” he said, and again a mournful inward look possessed him until I bucked him on with a gesture of my weapon-bearing hand.

  "I was on my way up, having spent my first night at the inn, eager to encounter that which I had searched for all my young life,” he said.

  "And that was?"

  "What all who come here seek: the substance behind the form. The real reality that underlies—” he gestured inclusively but dismissively at the crags, the plain, and the pale sky that overhung us “—all this."

  "But you found something else?"

  His eyes beheld some haunted vista seen only by them. Then he looked upslope and said, “I found such as that."

  I followed his gaze and saw a dark object beside the path above us. As we climbed toward it, it resolved itself into a bundle of clothing, and when we stood over it, it became clear that the bundle contained the recumbent form of Doldan Fullbrim, curled around himself like a toppled parenthesis.

  He was not dead, as Froust soon ascertained. The innkeeper took out a flask that he carried within his outer garment, turned the fallen man on his back and poured into the slack mouth a tawny liquid that I suspected was the same stuff Froust had been drinking when I first saw him at the inn. Fullbrim coughed and spluttered; his eyes opened but did not focus. His rescuer slapped him twice, forehand and backhand, across the cheeks, and now the empty eyes blinked, came back to an awareness of their surroundings, and immediately filled with tears.

  "Come,” said Froust, not unkindly. He put an arm beneath Fullbrim's shoulders and helped him to rise. “I have a place for you."

  The substance-seeker made no response but allowed himself to be led down the path. I went after the pair.

  "Wait,” I said, and when they stopped I got in front of the man I had come to find. “What did you find up there?” I said.

  He turned to me a gaze so forlorn that it sent a pang of sympathy through me and, I had to admit, a frisson of fear. His throat worked and for a moment, I thought he would speak, but then all that came was a croak and a sob.

  Froust bid me let them pass, and I stood aside. But as they made their slow descent, the innkeeper looked back at me and said, “Climb the slope and find the answer, if you have the courage. Mine faltered, when I encountered my first of these. Yours may not.” He tightened his arm protectively around Fullbrim's collapsed shoulders and led him away.

  I stood, irresolute. My assignment had been Fullbrim's finding, and that was accomplished. I could return to Old Earth and report his whereabouts to his anxious spouse, and leave it to her to decide whether or not to bring him, or what was left of him, home. But I did not know what had happened to him up above; it seemed, at the very least, unprofessional to return without an explanation. It would also be an affront to my sense of who I was to leave it to Caddice Fullbrim to climb this path and face whatever had so undone her man.

  On the other hand, I was not a seeker after substance. Reality, as I engaged it regularly, was usually enough for me. If I required a more profound and penetrating perspective on the universe's hows and how-comes, I was adept at the mathematical discipline of consistencies, which revealed the hidden structures behind apparent chaos.

  I turned to my assistant, which I had designed and built to be my interlocutor and partner in debate. I set before it the issues I had already considered and said, “What more should I put in the pot?"

  "The fact,” it said, “that consistencies eventually round themselves back to where one started."

  "Yes,” I said, “there is that. As the great Balmerion put it, ‘It is either an elegant completion or a cruel trick.'” I had always leaned toward the former, but in Fullbrim's face I had seen that there might be evidence for the latter judgment.

  "And,” my assistant added, “the fact that you are a discriminator. It is your function to unravel any veil of mystery that obscures your view."

  "Whatever the cost?” I said. “Something up there drives those who find it into helpless despair."

  "Look at it this way: if you have ever wondered at the absolute limits of your courage, here is an opportunity to put a scale to it."

  I sighed and faced into the down-rolling breeze. “Then up we go."

  * * * *

  The cave mouth was not flanked by baleful idols, nor were there any portentous warnings carved in the living rock. It was merely the adit of a nondescript cavern which turned out, when I entered it, to be level of floor and high enough of ceiling that there was no need to stoop, nor yet to approach the mystery on supplicating hands and knees.

  I stood in the mouth, letting my eyes adjust to the murk within, and said to my assistant, “What do you detect?"

  "Nothing inimical,” it said. “No lurking beasts, no subtly triggered deadfalls, no fissures emitting noxious gases, nor any devices to project missiles, energies, psychotropic drugs, or holographic i
llusions."

  I stepped farther within. A wide crack split the cave's rear wall, opening onto the gallery in which waited whatever had caused such dismay to Doldan Fullbrim and his predecessors. I paused before it. “Scan again,” I said.

  "Still nothing."

  Was that it? I wondered. Do they come expecting so much, only to find nothing? Is that enough to break their hearts?

  "Of course not,” said a mellow baritone in the accents of Olkney's better-bred citizens. I could not quite place the voice, though it seemed intimately familiar. I stepped into the gallery and realized that the voice I had not recognized at first was identical to my own in tenor, the voice I heard in my own head when I spoke aloud or silently in my own thoughts. Yet there was an indescribable resonance, an intensity, behind its well-rounded cadences that told me that someone else was speaking.

  "Did you hear that?” I asked my assistant.

  "What?” it said. “I hear only the wind across the cave mouth."

  "Never mind,” I said and stepped toward the rift in the rear wall. As I entered the gallery beyond, lit clearly by some sourceless glow, I saw that not only was the voice I had heard mine own, but so were the face and figure of the man who sat on a rough boulder at the far end of the passage.

  Or not actually on, I saw as I approached. Rather, he was partially sunk into the rock, and unable to move. “Ahah,” I said, “an illusion."

  "Oh, no,” came his reply. “All else is the illusion. I am the reality."

  "May I?” I said, extending a hand.

  "If you like,” said the man on the rock, bearing with good grace my tactile examination of his form. He felt as substantial as he looked.

  "Integrator,” I said, “what do you see and hear?"

  "I see and hear you talking to a rock and patting the air above it as if something solid met your hand. It is not an encouraging sight."

  I returned my attention to the simulacrum of me, but my assistant said, “Hypothesis: your recent experiences have culminated in an episode of insanity. I should immediately assume direction of your affairs and return you to Olkney, where you may be confined for treatment."