SIMURIA · THE MORNING AFTER
Varek Sol Nayen was drawing water when the world stopped talking.
He had the rope in both hands and thirty metres still to come. Behind him the queue ran eleven households deep, thanking the ground for the morning.
You thanked the grey-gold ore in the rock and it woke up. The whole dry shelf came on warm and humming at dawn.
It always had.
Then it did not.
The woman in front of him stopped in the middle of a word about her sister. The jar went into the dust and she did not go after it.
Sabe Ael Tor, whose well it was, kept her palm on the warm seam and thanked it in her usual order.
There was nothing left in there to thank.
Varek watched the light in the seam stop being light. It did not flicker and it did not fade.
That ore had warmed them and lit them for longer than anyone could count. Now it was the colour of something you would step over.
A boy of five put both palms flat on the house, took them off, put them back.
"It's gone cold," he said. Nobody answered, so he said it again at his grandmother, louder. "Why has it gone cold?"
"Say it with me," she said. "You've got the order wrong again."
So the two of them thanked a cold wall in front of eleven households.
"Now it will be warm," the boy said.
"Yes," she said.
Nothing happened to Varek at all.
His hands went on hauling. He stood with two hundred people on a shelf as quiet as the inside of a stone, waiting to feel it go.
Nearly every child on Simuria carried a god's name in the middle of his own, and the god answered to it all his life. Varek's middle name was Sol, which meant answered by none.
He had been born without a god, so there was nothing in him to lose.
He would go on waiting. The grey-gold on the backs of his hands was exactly as much as the day before.
Eight months ago he had stopped on this road and turned round and looked up at a fold of rock two kilometres above the shelf.
There had been nothing in it at all. That was how he found it, the way a man finds the one cold spot in a warm room.
He had looked at the nothing until he was finished, and then he had picked the yoke up and gone on.
Every person at that well had lost something before breakfast. He had not.
It was the worst thought he had ever had. It arrived whole, with nothing in it to argue with.
Then somebody began making the noise, and after that everybody did.
Kelu Ael Tor got up off his knees at the seam as Varek went past.
"You," he said.
"Forty years this shelf has said the gods went round you. Born with nothing, given nothing." Kelu's mouth was not working properly. "What did you do?"
"Nothing."
"Then why are you the only man here who's the same as he was yesterday?"
Nobody had ever asked Varek an honest question before. He had no answer for it.
He wanted one. That was new, and it did not go away afterwards.
Then he picked up the yoke and carried the water round the eleven doors, because it was still owed.
* * *
He went north on the ninth day to find somebody who knew what had been done to them.
In the north the evening bells did not start. The gods had always told the ringers when, and now nothing told anybody anything.
The Deskunte were the ruling tribe. They had held this country two thousand years with gods, and now they held it with rope and spears.
The extra labour came out of the Rumelians, who had been here first and lost. Varek was one.
The rooms where sick children were kept breathing on a warm stone went quiet by the third week.
A world that had never needed to invent a lamp went looking for tallow.
Two billion people carried the name of a god who no longer answered.
Varek's name had not changed. Sol. Answered by none. An insult for forty-one years, and now the only accurate name on the planet.
In the eleventh week a man in Khersa whose trade was weighing ore counted all of it. Above ground, in the workings, in the lamps, on people's fingers.
He published the number anyway.
The temple tried to stop him and failed, which was how everybody learned it had wanted to.
The ore had always come back. You took it and the ground made more.
Now the number was the number, and there would not be another.
The temple language had no word for a thing that runs out. He borrowed one off the dry shelf, where they had always needed such a word for water.
Varek heard it said out loud in a market, by a man selling nothing.
"There is a number," he told anybody who came near. "Say it back. There will not be another."
Somebody told him to go home.
"I'm from Aden Sarrow," he said pleasantly. "They burned it. There isn't one."
Three weeks of asking, and that was the best the north had. Nobody up there knew who had done it, or why.
Varek started for home.
* * *
The old mine lay two days east, cut a century ago and left tidy when the seam turned poor.
He went down alone with a tallow candle.
Everyone else lit their work with an ore-lamp, a chip of grey-gold in a cup that shone as long as you thanked it and never wanted filling. Those had died in Varek's hands all his life.
So he had made candles for forty years, and been laughed at for it.
He was the one man on the shelf who had not needed to invent anything that autumn.
Four hours down, the vein came in thick as his arm, and at the eighth level it ended.
It had not broken. Stone that breaks leaves a mess, and there was no mess.
The vein stopped at a flat face with a bevel a finger wide, the way a joiner finishes an edge. Every vein on that level ended the same way.
He had seen men opened, and had opened one or two himself. Nothing here had been torn.
Somebody had come down, taken out exactly what he wanted to the hair, and gone out without knocking anything over.
That was the part Varek could not put down. Everyone he had ever known held that anything enormous done to the world was done in a rage.
He put his palm flat on the bevel. Whoever had done this had been polite about it.
He got a splinter off in two strikes with the bone knife. It was the size of a finger joint, and as dead as temple plate.
He set it on his palm to look at it, and it turned.
He closed his hand and opened it. It turned again, unhurried, and lay leaning at the north wall, the way a man leans into a doorway to see who is in.
Nothing on this world had ever answered him. Ore went dull. Lamps died.
Priests took their hands off his forehead with nothing in them, and their faces said whose fault that was.
He was forty-one. The first thing that ever answered him was a chip off a corpse that had had to die first to manage it.
He carried it west a day and it leaned.
He carried it north two more, and the angle barely moved. Walk three days away from a hill and the hill sits at a different angle behind you. This did not shift at all.
So it was not pointing at anything on this world, and no walking would ever get him nearer.
On the fourth night he laid it on a stone out on the salt pan, and by the small hours it was leaning at the sky.
* * *
The lamp on the priest's table was dead and nobody had carried it out.
Ilun Ael Vesk had served the temple thirty years. She sat with her hands flat on the wood, as she had every evening since.
"I can still say it," she said. "Nobody warns you about that. All the words are still in my mouth."
"Do you say them?"
"Every morning. Then I sit here like a woman knocking at her own front door." She moved the dead lamp and left it. "Thirty years I told this district it was listening. I was not lying."
"I know."
"They have settled on a story. That we turned our backs on the gods, so the gods went."
She laughed, one syllable, with nothing in it.
"Four hundred priests in this district, and not one has said the obvious thing."
"Which is what?"
"That nothing on this world could have done it."
Varek set the splinter down between them. It turned, patiently, and faced the place it always faced.
"Every one of you had something taken that morning," he said. "I did not. There was nothing in me to take. That is why it has to be me."
She watched it a long moment.
"It isn't asking you for anything," she said.
"No."
"A gate asks. A lamp asks. Every road on this world was laid by asking."
She put a finger near it, and it took no notice of her at all.
"Then we shall have to make you something that does not ask."
* * *
FIVE MONTHS LATER
The yard on the salt pan was the loudest place on the dry shelf, which a year earlier would not have meant anything.
Simuria had never built a machine that pushed. Carts, gates, lifts and boats had all moved because somebody asked the ground and the ground helped.
Nobody there had ever had to find out what a thing weighs when nothing is helping you lift it. They were finding out now, with rope and levers and swearing.
Dovek Kel Ras was the best engineer the Deskunte had, and the Deskunte were the tribe holding the rope.
He worked fourteen hours a day at the frame with his god's name still through the middle of his own. He ate alone, two hundred paces out on the pan, because nobody would have him.
"Why do you keep him?" the priest asked.
"He'll come with us."
"He won't eat with us."
"He'll come with us."
Ilun Ael Vesk had settled her own case in the third week, over the same dead lamp.
The splinter answered nobody and could not be asked for anything. A ship steered by a thing like that wanted a navigator who had stopped asking, and she had stopped in the first hour.
She went to learn the sky.
* * *
Four settlements had burned two provinces north in those five months. Two by the temple's riders and two by their own neighbours, all four over ore.
The people of Aden Sarrow walked nine days to the yard, because it was the only lit thing between the pan and the hills.
Three hundred of them stood at the edge of the tallow light. Their headwoman came in alone and put her hands on the frame.
"What is it?"
"A house that goes," said Dovek, who had been at that joint since four. "This one goes a long way."
Hessa Tul Marn walked the length of it, then looked at the sheds, which was what she had come for.
"You have grain in there. And tallow. And ore. Say the number."
"Six hundred and forty kilos in the frame," Dovek said. "Ninety in the shed."
"Ninety." She was not shouting, and that was the frightening part. "Three hundred of us are carrying nine between us. Rings, mostly."
"That is what a town with a name comes to. There will never be any more of it anywhere, and you are putting yours in the sky."
"Yes," said Dovek.
"Say that with your middle name in your mouth."
She was telling him to swear it on his god, the heaviest thing anyone there could ask.
Dovek stood up and said his whole name, slowly, and defended no part of it.
Somebody threw a cup and missed.
Varek came in between them because he was the biggest man there, which was the only reason he had.
"Nobody here owes you anything," he said.
He heard it while it was still in the air. It was the sentence the Deskunte had put on him at every gate of his life, and he had just used it on people with no houses.
"There he is," Hessa said. "There's a shelf man. Full shed, and the same mouth they have."
Ilun came out of the dark behind the frame.
"How many of you are children?"
"Ninety-one."
"Then ask us."
"I've not asked anybody for anything since the morning." Hessa's jaw was tight. "I came to take it."
"I know. Ask anyway."
So Hessa Tul Marn asked, out loud, in the grammar you use at a shrine, because it was the only grammar there was.
Nobody on that world had ever had to ask a person for anything. The ground had always given.
She got two thirds through before her voice went.
Varek gave her the grain, the tallow and the ninety kilos in the shed. He did it in four words, without looking at anyone.
Then he walked out onto the pan until the light was behind him.
Ninety of them stayed and worked. He never did find out how to thank any of them.
* * *
Dovek found him the next afternoon with a slate.
"Two hundred and sixty kilos short," he said. "Ninety of that is the shed you gave away."
"And the rest?"
"There is none left in the district. What there is, is in walls and on people's hands."
"How long have you known?"
"I did the arithmetic while you were talking. I have never once been sorry about a number."
Out past the north road two columns of dust had stood in the evening for four days, and nobody in the yard said anything about them. Riders.
The temple had stopped riding at people and started reading.
Six months ago one of their inquisitors sat still with a pencil and nine lines on a map, and worked out where a thing was that nobody had seen. She had been right.
A yard that burns tallow all night is not hard to find on a dark continent.
Ilun gave him eight weeks.
He went up the ridge at dusk, the way he had all his life. The pan ran away east under a sky with nothing in it. Below him the yard hammered on into the dark by tallow light.
He opened his hand. The splinter turned in it, the way it had turned every time for five months. It leaned out past the ridge and up.
Somebody had reached into his world, taken what he came for, and gone home without ever finding out that anyone lived here.
Varek wanted to stand in front of him. Not to hit him. To be looked at once, by the only thing that had ever answered.
"You should have taken me too," he said, to a stranger four light-years away.
Then he went down to tell the engineers what he needed.