The Armies of Memory by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2006-03-21T05:00:00+00:00

“Of course this isn’t exactly like the light of the original Occitan on Earth, but it’s more like it than Nou Occitan ever was,” Ebles said, as we all reached for sunglasses. Laprada got to hers first; a moment later Raimbaut and I put ours on, and we all looked around. We appeared to have stepped through the springer into some virgin forest, a mix of oak, elm, and ash; but on Earth those had never grown under an equatorial sun, not even a very mild one like this. Still, giving credit where it was due, “You must have had some very fine terraforming designers here,” I said.

He shrugged. “Oc-e-non. They were interested only in producing a suitable environment for the true Occitan, so they were more single-minded than the ones who designed Wilson. There is nothing on land as creative as the levithi or the aurocs-de-mer or the sea-skunks of Wilson. But if you brought a trobador of 1150 A.D. onto one of our islands, he would probably recognize—or think he recognized—every living thing he saw. Even though sometimes what is inside them is drastically different from what is inside their earthly equivalents, and even though some of the things he would see are extinct on Earth. But yes, we did try to make this a beautiful place, and thank you for the compliment.”

We had arrived at a portable springer, sitting all by itself at a wide spot on what was clearly a prepared hiking trail. The moment that we stepped through, Ebles turned off the springer, folded it down, and tossed it into another springer, which, as he explained, went straight to a dump. “Furthermore,” he said, “the one we just used was brought here from Wilson.”

Since a springer’s address depended only on where it was created, not where it was currently, this meant that nothing had been given away of Aurenga’s position, and now that that springer had been converted to slag, anyone stealing the address would have a three-thousand-digit address for a place that didn’t exist at all. Behind the gray mist of any springer that tried to transmit to the one we had just used would lie a pseudosurface harder to penetrate than cryonic neutronium. Aurenga was safe from invasion, for the moment, and we had no backup, forever.

The trail wound along the side of a high, steep ridge that plunged down to a narrow black-sand beach, in a small cove blocked by a sandbar, over which surf broke and pounded.

The sky was a surprisingly deep, almost Prussian, blue, and the sun, not far above the water, was larger and I thought more orange than Earth’s. The ridge on which we stood, and the surrounding hills, blazed with the color of leaves just turning. Down near the water, the trees were still mostly green. “I thought you said we were on the equator,” I commented. “But this is fall if ever there was fall.”

“Oh, we have seasons. Very fast ones, in fact.” He pointed to the sun.

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