Collected Short Fiction, page 158
His more hopeful mood lent more eloquence to his speeches and brief remarks; his improved disposition seemed to elicit more friendliness and warmth from the people he encountered. Hiram Marcus, the governor of New York, a figurehead of little power who still maintained an office in the decaying rococo splendor of the State Capitol Building, gave Karim an impromptu tour of the skyscrapers and marble expanse of the Empire State Plaza; soon the panhandlers and sellers of cheap goods who usually set up shop there were calling out greetings to the Mukhtar and the governor. The curators of the New York Museum guided him through their library and archives, and he found himself encouraging them to develop exhibits that would look forward as well as back in time.
During the second day of his visit, Karim was taken on a tour of a few of Albany’s historic mansions, and he soon collected a crowd of interested people who followed his driver and van from place to place. On the third day, more people were waiting for him on the pier when he left the Beverwyck. He offered a few lengthy remarks about the five-hundred-odd years of their city’s history, grateful for all the stories Greta had told him about her long lineage of Dutch, Irish, and South Asian ancestors who had settled here, while the city officials who had come to fetch him to a luncheon fidgeted and glanced at the timepieces on their fingers and wrists. “Too bad you aren’t running for mayor,” one of them said to him later. “You’d nail the election.”
Greta rejoined him that afternoon in Albany’s Washington Park, where they viewed tulips of various colors already in full bloom from an open trolley; the city was celebrating its annual Tulip Festival. “In the old days, long before my time, we held the festival in May,” the city council president explained to Karim and Greta, although they already knew that. “But of course the tulips bloom much earlier in the spring now.”
The day was warm, but not overly humid; a gentle and persistent breeze cooled Karim’s face. People strolled along the roads and walkways or sat on the grass near tulip beds; at the park’s small lake, children were feeding the ducks. Karim and Greta watched them from a small arched bridge, and he suddenly wished that he could remain here for a few more days.
They returned to the Beverwyck in the evening. The trolley carried them down the steep hill below the State Capitol, where men and women in Dutch costumes were sweeping the sidewalks, and let them off; they walked slowly along the riverfront toward the port, trailed at a discreet distance by three policemen. An old sailing ship was moored at one dock; another old vessel, a twentieth-century battleship, was tied up at another dock. The port was quiet, the day’s visitors gone. The Hudson River flowed past, dark gray in the evening light, and he imagined it becoming finally cleansed of the chemicals and wastes that had poisoned it for so long.
Lauren, Zack, and Roberto were waiting on the Beverwyck’s deck. Karim thanked them for their services and told them that a hovercraft would be there early in the morning to take him and Greta to the airship port.
“Glad to hear it, Mukhtar,” Lauren said. “We’ll have time to look at the tulips before we have to pick up our new passengers in Troy.”
“You’re free to wander around the city tonight if you like,” Karim said. “We won’t need anything this evening.”
“Thanks, sir.” Roberto offered a quick grin. “My brother’s still aboard. He says he’s finished with that job you gave him.”
The three left, hurrying down the dock; Karim and Greta went below. Pablo stood up as Karim reached the bottom of the stairs. “I think I’ve got something to show you, Mukhtar Karim,” Pablo said.
“I didn’t expect you to finish this soon,” Karim replied.
“Well, I’m not actually finished. There’s more I could do with the sound, and the details need more work. Plenty of detail adds to the verisimilitude, and I was very careful not to get caught in any contradictory assumptions. But I hope—” Pablo looked away for a moment. “The longer I worked on it, the more interested I got. I think—but maybe you should take part of my tour before I say any more.”
“I shall.” Karim sat down in an easy chair. Pablo made a few adjustments on the desk console, then handed Karim a band.
“Are you prepared, Mukhtar Karim?” the voice of the Beverwyck’s Al asked.
“Yes.” Karim slipped the band around his head.
Almost immediately he found himself gazing out at the expanse of a blue-gray ocean. Waves rolled toward him, lapping at the shore; he sniffed the air and smelled only a hint of salt and another, more acidic, odor he did not recognize. Large white-feathered birds wheeled overhead, with wingspans as wide as those of golden eagles; he watched as one dived toward the water, then flew up with a silvery fish in its beak.
The ocean, he remembered, had been seeded with algae and plankton centuries ago, and the lifeforms that lived in the Venusian seas now were bioengineered variants of many of Earth’s species that could survive in the shallower and more briny oceans of this world. But over time, they would evolve and find their own peculiar niches in this new biosphere. Karim still thought of Venus as new, even though people had been arriving here as settlers for a few centuries now, and there were generations of families who had known no other home.
He looked up at the overcast sky and knew that nearly two hours had passed since dawn. There was light behind the pale gray clouds in the west; sunlight had returned to Venus, but part of the parasol remained in place to prevent too much sunlight from reaching the planet. Night would come twelve hours from now and last for fourteen hours. Antigravitational pulse engines had increased the spin of the planet; Karim could remember hearing of the decades of work by artificial intelligences and machines in erecting those massive engines at Venus’s equator. There had been more quakes after Venus had begun to spin more rapidly, and its many volcanos had become even more active, but there had been no lasting damage, only the tectonic throes of a world at last coming to fife.
A boulder as bright and hard as a diamond sat near him on the reddish-brown sand and rock of the shore. Other shining stones were on the shore, some nearly as large as the boulders, others small, bright gems. He picked up one of the tiny stones and knew the jewel for what it was, a bit of calcium carbonate that had been precipitated out of the Venusian atmosphere.
He turned and saw the sheer escarpment of the Maxwell Mountains to the northeast. Patches of green covered the rock; through the mists that veiled the top of the scarp, he glimpsed more green. Forests, he thought, inhaling the cool air, and understood then that the self-replicating machines of the project, tiny devices no larger than molecules, were still at work on the high plateaus of Ishtar Terra turning the Venusian regolith into soil. The history of this terraformed planet was alive inside him, coherent and whole.
He saw then that he was not alone on the beach. A few meters to his right, a man, woman, and child were walking toward him. The woman had long fight brown hair, much like Greta’s in her youth, while the child clinging to her hand had the man’s black hair. The three were strangers, and yet he felt that he should know them.
“Greetings,” the woman said as she approached; the man smiled at Karim. “I see you’re out for an early walk, too.” She looked away to gaze out at the ocean. “We’re still not used to it here,” she continued, “but the others say it’s always like that for new settlers. One moment it’s our being awed by how much like Earth it is here, and the next being struck by the differences.”
“It’s new,” the man said. “That’s how it feels to me, entirely new.”
Karim was about to ask them where they lived, and then it came to him: they were from a community on the Lakshmi Plateau, one of the newer settlements that had been raised in the young forests near the old settlements that were still enclosed by protective domes. Some had remained in the old settlements, preferring their unchanging climate and managed environments, but more people were leaving them, while the newer arrivals embraced living in the unspoiled outside world. The family standing with him had come to the shore in a small flying craft, to acquaint themselves with this part of their new home.
“Come with us,” the child said to Karim, and suddenly he was inside their craft, flying south over the ocean. They sat in a half-circle, viewing the outside through the craft’s wide windows. The wrinkles of the tesserae that had marked this area of Venus were hidden under the grayish-blue ocean; the volcano of Tellus Regio was now a black mound, red at its center, surrounded by green. They left the island of Tellus behind and flew on.
There was another continent on Venus besides the highlands of Ishtar Terra, and that was Aphrodite Terra, a scorpion-shaped land mass on Venus’s equator. As that thought came to him, Karim caught a glimpse of green land to the south. Frost sometimes came to the highest parts of Ishtar, but Aphrodite was a tropical land of heat and jungle and the feral descendants of once-domesticated creatures. Aphrodite was a place for visitors and adventure seekers, not for settlers.
“Not yet, anyway,” the woman said, “but that will change. People will settle here, too.” Their craft descended—
—and he was standing on a hill, amid a profusion of flowers, surrounded by the engorged blossoms of orchids, by bright red peonies, by beds of pink, blue, and yellow roses and tulips. The air was filled with the fragrances of lilacs, roses, traces of cinnamon, and an elusive musky scent.
No, Karim thought, and his vision seemed to sharpen. These flowers were not the ones he had known on Earth, but only resembled those plants. The roses were much too large; the orchids were fading from purple to lavender and then darkening again.
The sky was growing dark, too; night was coming to Venus. The brown-haired woman who reminded him of his wife stood near him, near a vine-covered tree. “There’s nothing more for us to do here,” she said, “except to take root here with all the other life of this world, the life we’ve transplanted and the fife that has developed here, and to live out our lives as part of it all.”
“That was the hope long ago,” Karim said, “to make this a world that could ultimately sustain itself without our intervention. But we’re not there yet, not as long as the parasol is needed. That will require maintenance, and if it ever fails, the increase in sunlight may return Venus to her earlier self. The oceans might boil away again. The atmosphere—”
“The parasol won’t fail,” she said. “The artificial intelligences maintaining it will see to that.” She laughed. “And maybe a time will come when we won’t need the parasol, when we’ll have the power to move Venus into a new orbit farther from the sun. Our work would be completed then. Venus could truly become the sister of Earth and follow her in her orbit around the sun.”
Again he recalled all the centuries of effort that had brought him to this world, and to this garden. He lifted his head as the sky darkened and wondered if, when this side of Venus was turned away from the shield of the parasol, he would be able to glimpse the stars, if he would see Earth.
Then the garden vanished, and he was again in his chair.
Karim lifted his band from his head. Greta was murmuring a few words to Pablo; she fell silent as they both looked toward him.
“I hope that was enough,” Pablo said, “to give you an idea.”
“More than enough,” Karim replied. “You have exceeded my expectations, Pablo. It’s quite beautiful even in this form.”
“Beauty’s part of what’ll give this tour its punch. I’ll have to do more, of course, work in more of the history. That’s what will give it more of the sense of reality, being able to feel yourself in the future, but a worked-out future, looking back, remembering each part of the history, having it be more than just the passing illusion of reality. The mind-tourist becomes convinced it can be real, and maybe that can inspire others to work toward making it real.”
“It’s my fellow Mukhtars that I’ll have to convince,” Karim said.
Greta shook her head. “No, my dear, not only them. Your project would have to be something in which everyone can share.”
His wife was right, as she so often was. That was also part of what he had sensed at the edges of Pablo’s tour, that sense of a new world open to everyone, in which people were finally free of the old boundaries.
“I’d like you to continue working on this,” he said to Pablo.
Pablo looked pleased. “I’d be honored,” he said.
“I can’t offer you any official position, at least not yet, so you’ll have to work on it in your own time. But I’ll see that you get everything you require, God willing, along with enough credit to make it worth your while.”
“That might be better for me,” Pablo said. “I might be able to find a way to make it part of a museum exhibit eventually, so that others can share it. That’s what you want—to build a constituency, so to speak.”
“Yes,” Karim said.
“They might make a mind-tour about you some day,” Greta said. “Karim al-Anwar, master planner in a ruined world, reaching out to encompass his dream of progress in the terraforming of Venus. We see his heroic and creative journey reviving his world as his people win a new world and use that knowledge to resurrect the old.”
“That sounds most farfetched, Greta,” Karim said, but allowed himself to feel his pride and hope fully. He would fight for his dream, and if he failed, others would reach out for it, younger Mukhtars and all of the people who would experience the realized world of Pablo’s completed mind-tour and look beyond it. “And now,” he went on, “if you don’t mind, I think I would like to return to the gardens of Venus for a few moments.”
He slipped on his band. For a few seconds, he was lost in the darkness, and then he saw the flowers again, their colors faded but still visible, as night came to Venus and swallowed the light.
Only for a while, he thought; the dawn would come again.
Spirit Brother
Much of what we know about Genghis Khan has come down to us through histories written largely by those who were enemies of the Mongols or who were conquered by them. This isn’t to say that his reputation as one of history’s villains is completely undeserved, only that one gains a more complex image of him from other sources. One primary source about his life is The Secret History of the Mongols (translated by Francis W. Cleaves, Harvard University Press, 1982), a history of his childhood and early years apparently written down during the reign of his son Ogedei. What makes this document especially valuable is that it contains stories related by several people who knew him as the young chieftain Temujin, before he became Genghis Khan. Even allowing for faulty memories, the Secret History offers a more nuanced portrait of the man.
One of the more poignant and tragic aspects of his life is the tale of Temujin and his boyhood friend Jamukha, who later became Temujin’s deadly enemy.
That conflict ended with Jamukha’s death, but I found myself imagining how their story might have continued after death. All of the characters here—Jamukha, Temujin, the shaman Teb-Tenggeri, and the rest—are actual historical figures, and the events depicted actually happened. What lay behind those events is my invention.
The flat land below him was white, the color of purity and luck. Jamukha flew in the form of an eagle, feeling the wind under his wings. The steppe and mountains had also been covered by snow on the day he had first met Temujin, the companion and comrade in arms who had later become his greatest enemy.
But all of that had happened when he was a boy, years ago, in the world of the living.
“My spirit will watch over you,” Jamukha had said at the end, knowing even as he spoke that Temujin would not let him live, that he would have to punish Jamukha for turning against him. Temujin had granted him an honorable death by strangulation, so that his blood would not be shed, but Jamukha could not recall the moment when the silken cord had tightened around his neck. Temujin’s shamans had chanted over Jamukha’s body, and buried him with a horse, some dried meat, a skin of kumiss, and his weapons on a mountain overlooking the Onon River.
Jamukha had lingered near his grave after his death, unheeding of the days and nights that passed. He had feared that the world of the spirits might be as empty as the steppe, and usually it was, for the bravest of the dead had flown to Koko Mongke Tengri, the Eternal Blue Sky that covered all of Etugen, the earth. But at other times, as Jamukha flew over the land, he would see other lost spirits camped near a grave, pale wraiths feeding on the smoke of the offerings being burned by mourners for the dead.
He glimpsed one such spirit now, hovering in the form of a black bird over the ashes of a sacrificial fire near the mountain gravesite of a chief. Jamukha watched the bird avidly gulp the last of the tendrils of smoke and knew then that the creature was the ghost of Toghril, the Kereit Khan, as greedy in death as Toghril had been in life.
“I greet you, former ally and enemy,” the ghost of Toghril Khan said. The spirit-bird’s eyes were sly and crafty, its talons ready to clutch at whatever was near.
“I greet you, Toghril Ong-Khan.” Jamukha alighted near the small yurt that had been raised near the grave. “How many times did you betray me in life?”
“No more often than you betrayed me,” Toghril replied. “No more often than Temujin betrayed both of us, after claiming to be our comrade and brother. Yet you swore before your death that your ghost would watch over Temujin.”
“That is true.” The few spirits Jamukha had encountered had been able to glimpse his inner thoughts and to remember all the events of his life; Toghril was no different.
“Why would you want to protect the man who sentenced you to death?” Toghril asked.
“Because he was my anda, my sworn brother,” Jamukha said, “before he became my enemy. I made my last promise to him for the sake of our old oath.” That was part of the truth, but not all of it.
