Night Songs at Um Read online

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  Night Songs at Um

  by John T. Cullen

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  Science Fiction

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  Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine)

  www.farsector.com

  Copyright ©2006 by John T. Cullen

  First published in Far Sector SFFH, 2006

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  The terraformer stood at a row of picture windows with his hands idly clasped behind his back, and stared out over the world he had nearly finished creating.

  He had forgotten he was not alone, so still was it in the nearly dark bunker. He felt strangely troubled at the very pinnacle of his life's success.

  A hard, bronzed man with the first few white hairs sprinkled in his otherwise dark, short hair, Pontin wore a khaki tunic, blue denim trousers, and tan boots. Massive concrete walls, thick plate glass windows, and multi-filter climate mixers in the building attested to bygone days just a few years ago in a poison atmosphere.

  This was a very special private moment. He had already removed the Master Engineer I shoulder boards. His tunic hung half open, revealing a lean, sculpted body used to demanding physical work as well as daunting intellectual and leadership powers. His tuxedo for the evening's ceremonial dinner lay on the bed nearby, put there by Menet.

  Menet, his femgyne companion of the past five years, hustled about in the background preparing his new uniform and dinner and checking on their pets and a hundred other things. Her time with him was coming to an end, and he was surprised that she seemed a bit sad, as he was too, though for different reasons.

  “Are you ready to see the Chorearch?” Menet said in her quiet, patient voice.

  “I'm trying to put it off."

  “I can see that.” She wasn't looking at him, he saw with amusement, but she knew him well enough to know his thoughts, and he supposed he knew her well enough to know that she knew. Last night had been their last together. She kept busy. Her robust, shapely body launched in a dozen directions at once, so it seemed, in the sunny, airy kitchen overlooking the sea through glass and shining metal counters, and in the lower, darker rooms oppressed by tons of dark concrete and joined by small, disjointed stairways.

  “You are wanted at the Team Lodge,” Menet called from above.

  “Right away!” he said. That was different. He'd been a well liked leader and he never turned his back or said no to a legitimate request from his engineers or their roughhousers. He spoke to the appropriate buttons on a brass panel. After a momentary blurring, a holographic exchange with a remote location filled the sunken living room. The Team were having their closing out party.

  “There's the boss!” someone cheered. The air filled with aluminum bottles and grins—the men's in bearded faces, the women's under shaggy hair. “Hey Boss!” someone yelled. “You gonna invite us to the palace when you're governor?"

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, telling them his first lie. “Next time you're in the area, drop on by and we'll check out the ponds together. Pop a beer open over the beach, and watch our fish come up to say hello."

  They all knew it was blarn, but with their fat bonuses tucked under their belts, and first-class transit passes taped to their luggage blocks, nobody was feeling any pain.

  In the final weeks of his stature as the Engineer I, Pontin had supervised the installation of the last great steam scrubbers on Fotal, the northern continent of this largely water world. The huge white machines, made of ceramic and alloys, and shaped like a pile of 1000 foot tall broken eggs, would humidify the atmosphere of this arid region and inject enough biospores to start a rainforest. The biospores carried the seeds of a million species of plants from dozens of worlds. As the first plumes of steam shot silently into the powder-blue sky, Yvold and his roughhousers had cheered. With his powerful bronzed arms, his tanned face, his blazing eyes, and white grin, he was one of them. Hands clapped him on the back as he turned from his last great accomplishment on Mirabel IV. Now he must either move on—become Engineer II or I of some other world being built, move out—retire, which he had no taste to do—or move up—become Governor. At that moment the State Bureaucrat in Place had stopped clapping, stepped forward to shake Pontin's hand, and handed him the Letter of Intent to elevate him to the Governorship. He had felt giddy, weak-kneed, and he could only nod.

  Now, in this holo, his closest officers stopped by to wish him well, and he promised them he'd visit in person before leaving his bunker for his new palace in First City.

  * * * *

  He'd hardly rewinked the living room to default when Menet called from the kitchen: “The Chorearch needs to see you."

  “Wink her in."

  The living room flickered and changed into a dark, rambling palace audience chamber—the hall would be his own, after the Chorearch, or Mistress of Ceremony, left for the next opening world. She was a tall, severe woman with blue-gray skin in a face whose very wrinkles had smoothed themselves out with their own age and severity. Her eyewhites were pink-rimmed, her lids gilded. She was a highfym, he could see, though gynefym nonetheless. She and several advisors, all local women of the same farmed stock and dress, stood near his empty audience throne. In the background, workers were still busy drilling and hammering and raising clouds of dust. “Lord,” the Chorearch said in a reedy, mannish voice. “Preparations are moving in good order, and we must confer twice a day now so that the visiting dignitaries will speak your praise in other parts of the galaxy."

  “Of course, Mother,” he addressed her formally. She was no more his mother than those rocks outside, but one had run with the formalities. From here on, he'd have a live of the utmost luxury, with as many as three of the most beautiful young wives if he wished, but the price would be this endless doubletalk and posturing.

  “Your Lordship is not used to Vyzant ceremonies and diplomacies,” the Chorearch said drily.

  Is she reading my mind? he wondered. “I am a bit stiff and rustic. I'm used to eating on the run, usually from the same bowl as my roughhousers and without much ceremony."

  “We understand,” she said with veiled patience. “We help men and women like yourself frequently. It is our mission in life, and we try to serve His Vyzantine Majesty the Cosmarch with passion for our work."

  She'd said that to push him against the wall a bit, and take her seriously while starting to let go of his roughhouse ways. “I understand, Mother. Your services are most needed and welcome."

  “Your Lordship will come to First City today, we are told."

  “You have ordered it, and I serve,” he said in a tone bordering on sarcasm, accompanied by a sharp bow of the head.

  For the first time, the faintest of combative smiles flickered on her dour countenance. Her blood-rimmed eyes lit up as she recognized a capable sparring partner, though their relative statuses would never permit her to tangle with him. Not unless she wanted to end her days waist-deep in some distant outflow pond, cutting rice sheaves with a hand scythe, or sampling raw water with a glass tube. Two of her attendants raised gloved hands before their mistress as if in warning or protection, while regarding Pontin with cold, wary eyes.

  Pontin felt a chill of his own. These courtiers had a dance all their own, and he'd have to learn its steps quickly if he hoped to be their master. And it occurred to him to wonder what the mortality rate of Vyz
antine planetary governors might be.

  He was reminded of days at the boxing gym, when a roughhouser beat him—and had to take a technical point-out so there would be no actual defeat registered against the future governor. He'd later shake the man's hand and buy him a beer to quietly acknowledge his black eye—that was how things were done behind the scenes in a successful terraform enterprise. He wouldn't be buying this old lady a beer, even if she could give him a black eye.

  “The opening of Mirabel IV will be a great event,” the old highfym cawed, “and Our Lord Yvold Pontin will be a hero flashed on pixscreens across a hundred worlds."

  “I thank you, Mother, and I look forward to our meeting in person. I rely on you to shield me from any unpleasantries, and to make sure our important guests are well fed and housed and happy here on Mirabel."

  She raised her chin. “Lordship, it will be our sacred mission. They will love this paradise you have created for mankind. Now what of this religious structure you have requested we use for your investiture ceremony?"

  He glanced aside to see if Menet were listening, but couldn't tell because of the holoair surrounding him. “There were creatures on this world, eons ago, long vanished. They left thousands of curious structures, and all but one are now buried in the seas.” He'd agonized about it, but his superiors at Markep and higher up in the hierarchy had ignored his requests for special gravity dredges, each the size of a city, to raise the abandoned shells. His surveys had counted at least a thousand of these oval structures. Most were little more than tumbled walls on wind-blown hillsides. Some had been just lines in the newly terraformed grass. A few dozen still had the magic of the unnamed species. A few of the structures had still played their music and displayed their lights, even as the rising sea waters bubbled around them. Pontin and his officers and grizzled old roughhouse chiefs had watched silently with roiling emotions as seas rose and the enigmatic structures disappeared under dirty boiling waters at night in full song and glory. The lights that flew up amid their mossy and battered arches were like flickering stained glass. Several dropped probes sailing about under a mile of water had found no more songs or lights on the barnacled reefs that remained.

  One of the largest such structures had been the highest, on a hillside called Um, and it was the only one still above sea level. He'd saved it for special purposes. “Mother, I have sent images.” He wanted to deed the place to the Cosmarch himself, to have it declared a galactic sacred place nobody could touch.

  “We have studied them,” she said, “as have the Admins and the Execs. We understand you wish to include this structure in your investiture ceremonies.” She made a severe face. “We strongly advise against it."

  “I ask you why, Mother."

  “We cannot always speak openly."

  “I understand. We can speak privately this evening when I am in First City.'

  She seemed relieved. “I thank your Lordship for understanding.” With a small bow of the head, she ended the holovisitation.

  * * * *

  Pontin was a person, a trumensh. He had left his wealthy family as a young man, not to join the warriors or the merchants of the galaxy, but to be a bringer of geomode life, a shaper of worlds in the image of lost Earth. Now his twelfth such mission was complete. Mirabel was at the stage where billions of settlers anxious for blue skies and green hills could come from the hostile void to settle in a place much like the ancient human home world.

  It was customary to make a successful master terraformer governor on his twelfth planet. It was his right to accept from the sponsoring governments and corporations the earthlike world he had fashioned from an airless cinder orbiting an orphan yellow star.

  He was used to roving from world to world. He relished a quick departure the minute blue water started flowing under fresh air and the first fleet of colonists was just arriving in orbit. That sharp reddish wink between dusk light and starlight, that arrow of fine silver light, would be his ship and crew shooting away to the next job. Somewhere out there, a Temporale portal waited to take him vast distances in mere hours through the underverse. Now, as he resigned his mind and soul to settling down, there would be no more of that.

  His mother had deepvoxed from Heliut, the family's home world in the Sea of Ivory, Third Galactic Arm, to congratulate him and say that she and his sister would accompany the Viceroy of the 9th Horn in the splendid investment of Yvold Pontin as Governor. It was a ceremony similar to a coronation, and it would make him a fourth-tier noble. He would be heralded and recorded in Cosmarch History as Lord Governor Sir Yvold Pontin of Mirabel the Fourth, and the System ensured that there would be lots of officious events at which sonorous titles could be bandied about. His mother, a regal white-haired woman, loved ceremonies. In her voluminous black dresses, she cut an imposing figure among the other black-robed, pale-necked courtly women. “You must stand tall, Yvold, and make your family even prouder of you than we are now."

  “I assure you, mother, I look forward to seeing all of you again after these years away.'

  “What a lonely business you drive,” she said in an absent-minded fluster from her distant porch overlooking the rolling mauve torkp near their family estate. He could almost imagine the farmed people singing down in the fields as they harvested the fragrant herbs for sale throughout the galaxy.

  “Thank you for calling, Mother, and I look forward to seeing you and the rest of the family."

  He said his greetings to cousins he didn't know very well, and praised small children who stood respectfully in a row as their esteemed uncle appeared in their living room. He was glad to switch back to default mode, and soft sunlight filtered down into the bunker.

  * * * *

  “Menet!"

  “What?"

  “Kava tea!"

  “I can't hear you because the bell on the toaster is ringing."

  Pontin waved a wand to flick on the news. A floor to ceiling cube of song-laden, dizzyingly spiraling holography replaced the quiet, sunken square at the bottom of the walls sloping in from all sides with their peacefully dangling green plants. “What the heavens am I doing?” he asked himself as double-then-life 3-D images of himself and his chief engineers rotated through the holovid. He waved the wand and returned the hall of his living room to sullen silence.

  Menet's soft hands and wide, pretty face appeared over the banister. “What were you hollering about?"

  “Is there kava tea?” he repeated as he stepped toward the bunker-like windows.

  “I can make you some,” Menet's languid voice echoed from a closet somewhere. “Right now I am freshening your white shirt."

  “I would like some,” he said, adding “please.” She was a femgyne, but they'd come to various understandings together. She was supposedly a truecloid of Gloyis Hoyer, a Nannis-4 advertising executive, from a very wealthy and connected family, whom Pontin's family had pressured him to marry. It was not unheard of to send one's son off into field service with a farmed woman taken from one's betrothed, in the theory that it prepared the marriage in absentia. Pontin had wiggled out of the Hoyer betrothal, even while keeping the gift, who had provided him with loving companionship. Menet had a generally calm and long-suffering disposition. She was shapely and athletic, and her muscles were firmly larded over without yielding to fat or softness. By contrast, Gloyis Hoyer herself was a sharply-angled, blonde, predatory money-mensh as opposed to honey-wench (as the joke in the popular song went

  ...didn't ask for a money mensh/that's why I'm leaving on the night train/I'm looking for my true love, a honey-wench/gonna wake up on some new world/with money in my pocket and honey in my locket/I'm gonna find that honeymensh to make my heart sing...

  Outside the row of great windows, green plant life abounded. There were still deserts, but it was all part of the needed balance. Pontin looked past the forest, at bread-colored silica sand that stretched down to the horizon shore.

  In a minute or two the smell of hot roasting kava stim filled the air as Menet Flaun
made him a cup of hot kava tea.

  On the horizon, where the sea curled like dark blue ink, the reflections of several moons danced in the waves. The room's air exchange sighed almost inaudibly as it poured in the scents of flowers and sea air as well as the cries and warbling of a hundred species of birds. Geomode insects had been set to work spreading life. Geotype worms were burrowing in the ground, creating soil to nurture plants which in turn fed the animals that already roamed a thousand square miles of finished land. Another million square miles of territory stood ready to pass over to inhabited status.

  “I put honey and soy cream in it,” Menet announced as she walked down the bluish stone stairs from the bright kitchen above.

  “That's fine,” he said quickly.

  She rushed toward him, stirring it as she walked, with her broad face with its almond shaped blue eyes frowning in the effort to please. Today she was her serious self.

  He accepted the hot drink as one would a sacramental cup. It was almost a ceremony, given what was about to happen between them.

  Menet Flaun walked up to his dark marble seat, covered in cushions, in the slanted wall facing the bunker windows from fifty feet across the room, and plopped on the many pillows. She'd been his temporary consort, his gogyrl, his contract fym—whatever ancient words described her function, and he was deeply fond of her, more so than was proper—recently he'd become increasingly hard pressed to keep the odds and ends of his personal life making sense to himself. She had welcomed his tired body to her warmth many a night, caressing him, stroking his hair with a firm, heavy hand—for she was a big, robust woman with solid limbs and firm curves, a diver, a swimmer, an athlete—even humming to quiet him so he would rest, and then rise to her welcoming darkness like the tide booming in a beach cavern.

  From her high seat, Menet stared gravely across the sea. She was barefoot, and wore her favorite long, soft caramel-leather skirt over tanned bare legs. He'd never seen her looking this regal, he thought. For the first time, he thought it a shame there was no chance she could become First Lady. It was against the law for a farmed woman to rise to First Status (truly human, untampered genes). They'd shared the past five years in considerable harmony, though she had a habit of interrupting him at work, stealing his pencils and erasers with which he hated working anyway since he was an outdoorsman and disdained desk work like writing (low engineer or high formal State). In fact she, highly schooled and skilled in the Arts, had become his ghost writer, even in letters to the State detailing the annual budget and so forth. Only in shape prints did he do better. He had an engineer's passion for combing through two dimensional slices of picture elements and visioning the final 3-di engine or building or dam or hydroponics canal. Menet would laugh and run off when she saw him working at his giant holostat in the drawing rooms downstairs.