The Folded World (10 page)

“Captain,” O'Meara said as Kirk paused before yet another ladder between decks. “The tricorder's working again.”

Spock checked his own. “Indeed. The atmosphere is comparable to that inside the
McRaven
. We are not being slowly poisoned.”

“Good to know,” Kirk said. “If they're right this time.”

“Still no signs of life, outside our own party,” O'Meara reported. “But I am once again picking up those electrical impulses. They're all around us.”

“A ship of ghosts,” Kirk said softly.

“What's that, Jim?” McCoy asked.

“Oh, nothing, Bones. Nothing. Let's see what's upstairs.”

They came early in the morning, out of the rising sun. Aleshia heard the noise from her bed. She stumbled past the snoring form of her father and out of the house. Down the hill, she saw that others had emerged from their homes as well. Everyone looked toward the east, shielding their eyes with their hands and blinking against the brightness. She did the same.

She saw only vague shapes, at first, their outlines indistinct against the sun's brilliant orb. As they grew closer, they became more solid. First it appeared to be just one, then that one differentiated into several, then many. They might have been birds, an enormous flock of them, soaring in on outstretched wings, but for the buzz they made. When Aleshia had first heard it, the noise was unfamiliar, metallic and grating. As she stood watching them come ever closer, the noise magnified, intensified to the point that her teeth ached, then her bones. The earth beneath her feet was vibrating. She heard a pattering noise behind her; turning, she saw dust shaken from the eaves of her home and cascading to the ground. The morning air smelled brittle, somehow.

Father came outside, then, his pants unbuttoned, his shirt thrown on haphazardly. Whiskers sprouted from his chin and cheeks like the first shoots of grass coaxed from once-frozen earth by early spring rains. He blinked at the sunlight. “What is it?” he grumbled.

“I don't know, Father, look!”

“I asked you so I wouldn't have to look for myself, idiot!” She half expected a cuff, but she had gone too far from the door. He'd have to take several steps to reach her, and that appeared to be beyond his ability at the moment. Unsteadily, he reached for the doorjamb, then leaned back against it. “Noisy, though.”

“Yes,” Aleshia said. Already, the sound of the approaching . . . whatever they were, was loud enough to drown out normal conversation. She raised her voice. “Yes!” she said again. “They are noisy!”

Father cast a dismissive glance at the approaching objects, then went back inside, slamming the door behind him.
As if,
Aleshia thought,
mere doors and walls and windows could hold at bay such a din.

Some of the objects—not birds, she could see now; their wings were far too rigid, and they would have been many times larger than any bird she had ever seen—dropped suddenly, plummeting toward the ground. Others kept their altitude.

Kistral pointed toward the ones sailing to earth. “They're landing!” he said. “It's them, I know it is!”

He didn't have to define what he meant by
them
. Everyone knew.

The ones who stay away.

They had, for as long as anyone could remember, purchased any excess crops the villagers raised, and livestock, too. They never came in person, but sent wagons that rumbled fiercely and belched smoke and were drawn by no animals at all. In those wagons were folk from the cities of the Eastern Belt. The people were different each time; Aleshia could only remember seeing a familiar face once, and on his second trip, the young man stayed inside the wagon and let the other, the newcomer, do the talking.

Everybody knew the crops weren't meant for those cities, though legend had it that once those glittering places were the village's only customers. The men and women who came with the wagons made no secret of it. They had enough to eat, if only just. No, the crops were hauled away toward the cities, and somewhere along the way they were picked up by the ones who stay away, those who never deigned to show their faces in the villages.

•   •   •

Aleshia had gone to see Margyan, just a fortnight earlier. It had taken time to steel herself, to drum up the courage to walk into that house's front courtyard, with its dry fountain and paving stones shattered by the things thrown at Margyan over the years. She was
almost universally reviled; stories about her had petrified Aleshia since childhood. But when Aleshia had made herself knock, oh so timidly, on the wooden door, Margyan had opened it almost at once. The crone's face Aleshia saw occasionally at market or in the road, a mass of wrinkles and graying skin underneath her hood, seemed transformed in the daylight. Margyan wore no hood; she was smiling broadly and her smile smoothed the wrinkles, and late afternoon sunlight erased the gray and gave her flesh a warm glow. Her hair was mostly white with patches of silver, reminding Aleshia of snow flurries in the hills. “Come in, come in,” Margyan had said. “You're Aleshia, yes?”

“I am, yes,” Aleshia had replied. Her knees, she remembered, would not stop trembling, threatening to dump her into the dirt outside Margyan's home. The old woman had invited her in, and made her comfortable in the nicest, softest chair Aleshia had ever felt. She almost sank into it, as if she were sitting on a cloud. Margyan brought her tea, surprisingly sweet and fruity, and made pleasant conversation until she was sitting opposite Aleshia, each with her own simmering mug.

“Your father,” Margyan said then. Her smile vanished. “He beats you, yes? He's a worthless lout, that one.”

“No, he's—” Something in Margyan's expression made her halt the lie, untold. “Yes,” she said. “He does beat me. And he won't do a lick of work.”

“Worthless,” Margyan said again. “But I'm sorry, you came for something in particular, not just to be enthralled by my insights and worldly ways.”

Aleshia's voice seemed to leave her. She opened her mouth and a squeak emerged, a sound a stepped-on baby toad might make. She cleared her throat and tried again. “My friend Gillayne,” she managed. “She says you know about the ones who stay away. She says they're really the giants, and the ones who sent the burning rains.”

“Ahh,” Margyan said. She rose from her chair and drew the curtain, plunging the room into twilight. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“I am,” Aleshia said. “I'm sure. I must know.”

“Once you've learned it, you can't unlearn it,” Margyan warned. “You won't be able to forget.”

Aleshia bunched her skirts in her fists and pounded on her own thighs. “I don't care! I want to know the truth!”

“If you insist,” Margyan said. “But always remember that I tried to discourage you. Curiosity is part of life, the sign of a superior intellect. But it has a way of demanding its own price, later on. When the time comes and the payment's due, I don't want you thinking ill of poor old Margyan”

“Never!”

Margyan chuckled. “That's as big as lie as I've heard all year,” she said. “But no matter. You want the truth, yes? Here it is. . . .”

•   •   •

Aleshia remembered that conversation as she watched the objects hurtling toward them. Kistral was right, they were landing. When they neared the ground, enormous clouds of dust billowed into the air, and when they actually came to rest, the racket was even worse than before. A roar like that of a hundred wagons seemed to emanate from each one, joined by clanking, mechanical sounds almost buried under the roar, and the grinding noise as they scraped over sand and rock and field.

By that time everyone in the village, or everyone who could walk or hobble or crawl outside, had come to watch. The more people crowded together, the more Aleshia heard theories and rumors about their visitors. “Monsters,” someone said. “They're not
inside
those things,” another warned. “They
are
those things, with skin of steel and sharp-edged wings!” One man started blubbering. “They've come for our children,” he said between sobs. “Our livestock's no longer good enough.”

Margyan had opened Aleshia's eyes, though. She looked at the villagers gathered there, fewer than half of what there would have been, not even a year earlier. A third, more like. She gathered her skirts and stepped down the slope to Gillayne's side. “That's not them,” she said quietly. “They are inside, and they're going to come out. And they aren't here for the children, but for all of us.”

Gillayne eyed her with surprise. “You've been to see Margyan?”

“I meant to tell you, but I haven't had the chance. I've been so busy.”

“Some of us have a welcoming gift for them,” Gillayne said. She drew Aleshia's gaze down with her eyes, until Aleshia saw what she held beneath her own skirts: a hatchet, its edge sharpened until it gleamed with wicked purpose. “Had I known you knew, I'd have told you sooner.”

“Who else?” Aleshia asked. Her heart had started to flutter; she did not want to believe Margyan's suspicions, but worse still was the idea that her friends might act upon them.

Gillayne made a point of not looking at anyone she named. “Kistral, Claen, Nakya, Virong. Some others.”

Aleshia looked at the number of objects—she didn't know what to call them; flying wagons?—that had landed, and were even now sitting motionless as the dust clouds settled around them. They were big, she realized, far larger than the biggest wagon she had ever seen. Each could hold dozens of people, easily. Hundreds, perhaps.

“That's suicide,” she said. “You can't fight that.”

“That's what they want us to believe,” Gillayne countered. “Suicide or not, I don't go down without trying.”

“What about me?” Aleshia asked. “I have no weapon.”

“It's not too late. Get an ax or a bow or a knife from your house. A hammer. Anything.”

Aleshia glanced up the hill. Father stood by the door, hand inside his shirt, scratching his belly. His face was dull and mean. If that was what life had to offer, the chance to marry someone like that, to raise children who would become that in their turn . . .

“No,” she said aloud.

“What?”

“I won't accept that there's nothing else, nothing beyond what we've got here. I know there's more this world can offer.”

“You'd best hurry, if you hope to ever find out.”

“Right back,” she said. As she started up the hill, the flying wagons opened and people came out. They looked much like the villagers, just people after all, but their clothing was like nothing she had ever seen, and their weapons even less so.

Sixty or seventy of them emerged from the insides of the flying things, and they came toward the village. As they approached, one of them called out in an accent that was strange but understandable. “We aren't here to hurt you,” she said. “You must come with us now. It's time.”

Yignay strutted to the front of the pack of villagers. “Come with you where? In those things?”

“Just do as you're told, old man,” the woman said. “Don't make trouble.”

“This place is our home,” Yignay argued.

“Used to be, you mean.”

Aleshia reached her house. Her father shot her a vicious glare, as if the whole affair were somehow her fault, but he stepped aside and let her pass. She went to the kitchen and found the biggest knife they owned, with a blade she kept keen by scraping it on the sharpening stone every second new moon. She made no attempt to hide it, but ran from the house with it clutched in her fist.

She was just in time to see Yignay scoop a stone from the ground. It was smaller than his fist, but not by much. “Always
has
been, I mean,” he said. “Always
will
be.”

The woman had come several steps closer, but she was still well outside the distance that Yignay could hurl a stone. The rest came right behind her, bunched up together, carrying objects Aleshia could no more name than she could the things they wore. “Don't,” the woman said.

Yignay threw the rock.

The woman pressed something on the thing she carried. Purple light burst from the end of it and struck Yignay. He cried out and threw his arms to his side, and Aleshia could see blood spray from his chest and land on the ground around him with a sound like a sudden rain shower. He fell to his knees and kept falling, pitching forward onto his ruined chest.

The aroma of burned flesh wafted up the hill to Aleshia, and she realized her mouth was watering despite her horror. She had not realized how hungry she was. She swallowed it and clenched her fists until her nails dug into her palms.

Other villagers were screaming, some weeping. The woman had to raise her voice to be heard. “It doesn't have to be like that,” she said. “We haven't come to fight. It's just time for you to go.”

“Go where?” someone asked.

“You'll be told en route.”

“We don't go until we know where, and why, and we're given time to gather our possessions,” Kistral said. “What authority have you to demand anything of us?”

The woman hoisted her purple light machine. “All the authority we need. Come on, we haven't got all the time in the world.”

At that, one of the other newcomers broke into laughter. “Or maybe we do,” he said. “Maybe we do, at that.”

Kistral charged then, lifting a lead pipe from the ground by his feet and waving it menacingly as he ran toward them. Another of the party made a purple ray hit him, and his head exploded in a mist of blood and flesh.

Tears stung Aleshia's eyes. She saw Gillayne drop the hatchet, and Nakya toss aside a bow and four arrows. Aleshia's fingers relaxed on the knife, as if it
had become too hot to hold. “Put that down,” her father murmured. “Save yourself, anyway.” He brushed past her and lifted a shovel from behind the house. “It ain't much, against those,” he said as he started down the hill, shovel held in front of his chest. “But it's all I got.”