SIMURIA · FOUR MONTHS AFTER LANDFALL
The city of Khersa smelled of fried bread and hot stone. It was the sixth day of the festival.
Two million people had come in for it. Every street sang its own verse of the same hymn, and the verses tangled at the corners.
Aizen walked through the middle of it and nobody saw him.
His barrier did not make him invisible. It made the spot where he stood too boring to look at. A woman turning fried bread stepped past his elbow and never remembered doing it.
No priest or god could have found him either, and for a different reason. Nothing on this world hunted for power. Everything on it listened for wanting.
A man who wanted nothing was a man who was not there. Aizen kept his wants quiet. He was enjoying himself enormously.
He wanted a great deal, all the same. He wanted the price.
Nothing answered prayers for free, and six days of singing did not look like enough to feed a god. He had come to Khersa to find the bill.
Gin drifted at his shoulder under a veil of his own, eyes shut, content as a man on holiday.
"They started singing in the dark before first light," he said. "The old ones sit down when their knees go and carry on from the floor."
"And nobody has asked for anything," Aizen said.
"Four days I've listened. Not one request."
"There will not be one." Aizen stopped to watch an ore-lamp go past on a pole. Its grey-gold heart burned without fuel, warm as a held hand.
"The linguists told us the songs mean thanks. They were being modest. It is closer to a receipt."
"The singing is not how these people ask. It is how they pay."
"Pay for what, though," Gin said. "Nothing sells this cheap."
Ferreira had spent the four months since landfall mapping shrines. Thirty-one thousand so far. Every one stood where the god's body came near the surface.
The warmest ground on the planet lay under a temple called the Hundred Mouths.
A hundred alcoves cut into black stone. A hundred queues. A hundred versions of the same thank-you going down into the rock.
At the nearest mouth a man knelt, said his sentence to the warm stone, and gave his place to the woman behind him.
Aizen watched the traffic run both ways. Thanks went down. Warmth came back.
It did not come back where it had gone down. One man knelt, and all hundred mouths warmed in the same instant. If the instruments were honest, every shrine on the planet warmed with them.
Nothing here was returned to the person who gave it. Everything went into one pool, and came out everywhere at once.
"That's the bit you like," Gin said.
"It is very well made," Aizen said.
He stayed a moment longer than he meant to.
Thirty years of his own work lay asleep under that floor. For something under a second, he let himself want it.
He knew the instant it happened. Four months he had kept his wants quiet. This one had never been quiet in its life.
Underneath him something turned over and began, courteously, to come up.
It had heard him. That was the whole of its nature. On this world a want was a request, and a request was always granted.
That was the problem. An answer was on its way up to a mouth where nobody was kneeling.
The priests wrote down every answer and whose it was. An answer with no owner would go in the book as the one thing they could not explain, and they would spend a year hunting the man who left it.
So Aizen took the barrier off and stepped into the queue.
A man nobody can look at cannot own anything. A man standing in a line can. He needed the answer to have somewhere to land, and he made himself the place.
He knelt on stone worn into a dish, put his hand flat on it, and thanked it for the road.
The warmth came up under the whole plaza and went down again.
The priest marked a stroke on his slate. Then he looked at Aizen, and held the look.
Gin's veil was built to take the last half second off a stare. Eyes slid away before they finished arriving.
The priest gave him that half second anyway. Then he moved on.
"The crowd thinks the god did that on purpose," Gin said at his shoulder. "A blessing, on the sixth day. They've started the hymn again from the top."
"They will write down the hour."
"They will." The smile had gone thin. "How long have you wanted it, Aizen-san?"
"Longer than they have been singing." Aizen went down into the crowd. "It comes when it is called. Note the hour, and note that I was slow to stop calling."
* * *
The dry shelf lay eleven hundred kilometres south, past the last of the green.
The Deskunte ran this part of the world. The dry shelf was where they put the people they had decided were owed nothing.
Aizen came down at dusk with one question worth the trip. The temple had struck these people off its rolls. He wanted to know whether the god underneath had bothered to agree.
There were nine huts, built out of the ground they sat on. There was no shrine.
There was no well either. Only a cistern, a cart with a barrel lashed to it, and a chalked rota of who walked.
A thread of the grey-gold vein ran through the wall of the nearest hut. It was too thin and too dirty for any Deskunte survey to bother writing down.
That was why the family living against it was allowed to keep it.
The grandmother's name was Sabe Ael Tor, off a labour roll Gin had copied.
The middle name was the part worth having. Ael meant given freely. It was what they called a person no god had ever claimed.
The meal took a while, because there was not much of it and it was divided carefully.
Flatbread, a smear of grain paste, water from the barrel poured out by the cup. The boy spent most of it under the table.
Afterwards she sat him down in front of the wall.
It was not a request. Four months of listening, and some part of Aizen had still been waiting for one. There was none.
She thanked the wall for the warmth in it. She thanked the barrel for the water, and the road for the barrel, and her son's back for the road.
She said it the way a woman says a thing she has said every evening of her life. Unhurried, faintly bored, entirely sincere.
The boy repeated it after her in the wrong order, and she let him.
Then the seam came up a shade. The mud around it gave back the heat of a low fire, and the room went the colour of a held candle.
The boy laughed. He put both palms flat on the warm patch and laughed himself sideways, because he was four, and it was funny that the wall liked him.
There was no hearth in the room. There had never needed to be one.
Their settlement was not on Ferreira's map. It had nothing worth mapping.
So he had his answer. The temple had struck these people off, and nobody had told the thing under the ground.
It warmed a wall for a woman nobody counted, because she had asked nicely.
Aizen noted that, and noted nothing else, and stayed until the lamp went out. That was rather longer than the work required.
* * *
"Doctor," he said. "The signature."
Okonjo had it on the laboratory wall before he finished asking.
Three columns of readings. A Simurian farmer. A Kalyan, which was this world's word for a god. And a chip off the grey-gold vein.
One line ran through all three in the same place. She had carried that line around for a week and was still not steady on it.
"It's cursed energy," she said. "All of it. The people, the gods, the rock. It's the same stuff we are made of."
"It is." Aizen turned from the wall. Ferreira had her arms folded, and Sawicki, who ran the numbers for all of them, had gone very still.
"At home, a curse is fear a man swallows. It goes into the ground with everything he never said, and it comes back up carrying a grudge."
"We call the result a special grade and send a child to kill it."
"Here, they say the fear out loud, and they say it kindly." He tapped the middle column. "They have said it kindly for two thousand years."
"And it has come back with a warm body and a habit of saying yes."
"We were never studying a different substance. We were studying a worse upbringing."
"You're describing a culture," Ferreira said.
"I am describing a manufacturing process. The raw material is fear on both worlds. Only the manners differ."
"Curses are prayers. Ours are said through clenched teeth."
Okonjo laughed. She was the only one who did, and halfway through it she heard herself, and stopped.
* * *
The archive under the Hundred Mouths went down five floors. It was not a library of scripture. It was a library of ledgers.
Aizen read for nine hours by a stolen ore-lamp, the fourth night running. The priests slept overhead, and Gin passed volumes down.
"Two thousand years," Gin said, handing him the next one, "and they wrote all of it down. You'd think somebody would have read it."
Eleven hundred years back, the ledgers stopped being calm.
They called it the Century of the Open Eye, and the temple wrote about it the way a family writes about a fire.
A province asked for rain and received a sea. A woman asked for her brother back and got him, in the condition he had gone into the ground in.
There was no malice in the account. Something enormous had been listening, and everything it heard, it granted.
It ended because the priests learned to sing it back down.
Ninety years of hymns written like medicine, verse by verse, tested on a continent. Every hymn since had been tuned the same way. Soothing, constant, and just nourishing enough.
The dusk bells Aizen had taken for grace on the night of landfall were nothing of the kind. They were a lullaby with two thousand years of revisions, and their whole job was to keep the god asleep.
The bill was further down, in the service rolls.
Two columns, on facing pages, that nobody had ever thought to lay beside one another. The day a man was first answered by his god. The day he stopped getting stronger.
The gap between them was twelve years. It was twelve years for all of them.
A tithe is a fixed cut off the top of what a man makes, taken every year, for as long as he lives.
Aizen wrote the word in his own notes. Nobody on this world had ever needed a name for it.
"Their champions stop," he said. "Every one of them."
"A man is answered at twenty. He grows stronger for twelve years. Then he never grows again."
"And nobody finds this strange, because it has happened to every man they have ever admired."
"The temple calls it humility and pins a medal on him." He set the ledger down.
"It is not humility. The strength that should have kept coming is being taken. Skimmed off him a little at a time, and carried down to the sleeping god."
Gin's eyes opened a careful millimetre.
"That is why this world has never produced a tyrant," Aizen said. "It cannot."
"A room with no air cannot hold a fire. Anything here that begins to grow large is skimmed before it can finish. The larger the man, the more is taken, and the taking never stops."
The small courteous smile arrived.
"They have built a world that cannot make a monster, and they did it by accident, out of good manners. It is the most peaceful engineering I have ever seen."
He put the ledger back and squared it with the others.
Then he took it down again and went back to the first column.
The sixth day of the festival. The ninth hour. A stroke on a slate in the temple over his head.
Nobody here was ever told they had been entered. The first answer was the enrolment, and the enrolment was silent.
He did not know whether the book counted him. He had knelt. He had been answered.
He knew that a boy on the dry shelf had put both palms on a warm wall and laughed. That counted too, and the boy would never be told.
Then he was thinking about Earth.
If one world could be built to skim its people, another might already be doing it quietly. Something patient enough to take a little every year and call it protection.
He wanted very much to know where Earth's surplus went, and for how long, and to whom.
He noticed the wanting, and put it down.
"Aizen-san." Gin had stopped on the stair, one hand on the door frame, eyes shut, smiling. "Nine hours down there. You've not called it a specimen once."
Aizen came up past him into the cold and out onto the gallery. Below, the hundred mouths were still going.
Away in the dark the bells began. One, then a thousand, in no rhythm a human throat would have chosen.
"On this world," Aizen said, "I could not have happened."
Below them a queue moved up a step and took the sentence again from the top.
"Something would have come every year and taken the top off me while I slept, and called it grace. I would have thanked it in the morning and meant it."
"There would be no Almighty. Nothing I have ever become would have been allowed to finish. There would be a farmer with a very good memory."
He had been answered once already, on the sixth day.
The book downstairs had a column for the hour and a column for the name. It had no column for what a man had meant by it.
The god had not asked. It had simply said yes.
He looked out over the hundred singing mouths of Khersa with something very close to tenderness.
"How fortunate for them that I was born somewhere else."