Now We Paint Worlds by Matthew Kressel

Author:Matthew Kressel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

She spent the rest of the day sitting in her open tent, making use of the working hubspace connection and trying to shake off her dread. On the private FTU feeds, there had been few new developments. Two scientists had published a paper hypothesizing a convoluted theory about random N-brane interactions, which they said might be responsible for the planets’ disappearance. Without evidence, however, their theories remained pure speculation. She doubted anything would come of it.

She transmitted another report and her most recent conversation with Adair back to the Central Office, while keeping one eye on the stone house and his tracker. For the entire day Adair remained on his pedestal in his cold house, meditating. According to her tracker, he hadn’t eaten or urinated all day. This did not sit well with her.

In the late afternoon, a man with long black hair and big green eyes hiked up to the house. She asked him about Adair, why he had come to Yasimir, and what he thought about the missing planets. Adair, the man said, was a “holy being,” who gave people spiritual peace. As for the missing planets, the man shrugged. “Who can say, really? Who can truly say?”

The day waned, and right before the hubspace satellite dropped behind the mountains and the signal cut off, she received a priority message from the Court of Sents with an additional directive: Find out from Adair which planets are next and when, and transmit at the first opportunity.

They believed him, she thought. And they were scared. Terrified. She was too. What could humanity do against powers like that? The winds shifted, and she put on a sweater to stay warm. With a steaming bowl of soup heated using the tent’s power cell, she watched the silver sun set. The first stars were up before she was done. This planet was beautiful, even peaceful, she thought. And in another time and place she might have enjoyed her stay here. Then night swept across the valley, and dread slipped back into her heart.

Are we really vermin? she thought. A stain on the cosmos? What, she wondered, are we doing by spreading across the stars? We think we’re so mighty. But maybe, as Adair said, we’re less than nothing. How long before Hri comes to snatch this world away too? Her legs shaky and weak, she entered Adair’s house.

A single candle flickered at his feet, and his face shifted in its yellow glow.

“You don’t eat?” she said.

He did not open his eyes. “Hri takes care of my physical needs. I haven’t eaten in forty-one days.”

She wondered if perhaps he had a gene mod which let him go for days without eating or expelling waste, then remembered the local medscan had detected no such thing, and Yasimir, as far as she knew, didn’t have the tech.

“Do you speak with Hri every night?” she said.

“Once you speak with a god,” he said, “you are never not speaking with one.”

“Did she tell you which planets she would take next?”

“No.

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