(eng) Michael Flynn - Spiral Arm 04 by On the Razor's Edge

Author:On the Razor's Edge [Edge, On the Razor's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

X. AT THE CAPITAL OF ALL THE WORLDS

The far-lit dawn does night’s decay foretell

And in her pitiless glow do future hopes

Pile earth upon the hopes of elder days.

O merciful Night! That thou dost shroud

The ranks of tombs and gravestones proud

Whereunder aspiration now decays,

And clear of buried dreams and tropes

Draws skyward gazes, the which do dwell

Upon far better beacons, more lofty themes.

Today is the wreckage of yesterday’s dreams.

Donovan’s hajj had taken him halfway around the world and a little more, and what he found was what he didn’t find. Desiccated shrublands marched along novel ice-drained coasts, and borders, breeds, and births were all awry. The ancient languages, so carefully learned in Terran Schools around the Periphery, were nowhere evermore spoken, and their offspring sprouted in eccentric places. The great artifacts of the past had seen wind and storm and ice, poverty and neglect, armies and migrations, and—one by one—they had fallen. Even North was not where story had left it. The planetary core was undergoing a phase shift, and the Magnetic Pole had left its icy home to bask now in the golden seas off the isle of Teetee.

Only the oceans themselves and the interminable mountains remained where passed-down tales had placed them. But what of it? If the enclosed portrait is utterly altered, does it matter if the frame is still untouched?

The Wall had been bulldozed by scree pushed down from the northlands in the fore of the Sborski glaciers. Her bastions were stumps, her facades pierced by tumbling rubble. The Pass of Jelep La, where the Allies under Marshal Kumar had held off the Cinakar, was choked with mountain glaciers, and the famous Monument of the Lions lay buried beneath centuries of snows. “Twelve-gated Terra” had possessed a dozen Beanstalks planted around her girth, but no traces remained of those great sky elevators—at least of those whose locations he passed over. There was no trace even of the Great Fall: wind and rain and jungle and the scavenging of gleaners had eaten them up.

Locals he questioned blinked blank faces—“Marshal Kumar? The Borneo Beanstalk? O snor, you speak in riddles.”

Only the Wall, in its fragmentary survival, had spawned tales of its origin. It had been built, one old man assured him over a plate of schnitzel in a restaurant in Vayshink, to keep the Ice at bay. Donovan, who knew something of the immense age of the thing, marveled at how legends could supplant even other legends.

In the Archives in Old Jösing, in a close room with a dim monitor, he skimmed through the detritus of records as old as time. A brief video of a sports contest among strangely garbed players. A simulation, experienceable only in part, of something called the Long March. The passenger list of Krunipak Loy, outbound for Megranome, containing tens of thousands of names. In such a swarm, even identity could be anonymous. She may have been one of the Ships of Exile—the time frame was right—but there was nothing in the record that signified desperate flight or banishment, and he found no other like manifests.

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