Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

He was surprised at having awoken at all. Last night, the cold had settled down upon the land like a shroud, and Enneas had finally given into despair. Huddling by this boulder, he’d bleakly assessed his life. There would be no fine tomb for him, as he’d once imagined he deserved. He wouldn’t even leave behind a crying widow or squabbling family. After a lifetime of struggling to assert his existence—decades of stubbornly continuing to live despite the disappointments and trials life had thrown at him—he had nothing to show for it; his only memorial would be whichever of his bones poked up above the sand here.

As he lay curled around himself, shuddering from cold, he’d imagined he heard music coming from the sky. Enneas was past hope; he must be delirious.

Now, as he came to himself and knew he had survived the night, he felt no emotion. So he’d lived through the night—it hardly mattered, because the freezing drizzle descending now was bound to do him in anyway.

Although… Enneas lifted his head, blinking. His face wasn’t wet, nor his hands; but he heard the rain, clear as anything. He sat up.

The rain was falling, all right, steady and almost musical in its soft sound. Yet Enneas, the rock he lay against, and the sand for a good two meters around were dry. It was as though an invisible parasol hovered overhead.

Or as though the raindrops themselves were parting around him.

Heart pounding, Enneas put his back to the rock and huddled under the coat. “What is this? What is this?” he mumbled; then, realizing he was talking to himself and that there was no one who would or could hear him, he lowered his head in shame and despair. It was then that he noticed how warm the material of his coat was.

He stuck a tentative hand out from under the cloth, and felt heat as from a summer sun on his palm. It was as though he sat in his own private, invisible beam of sunlight.

His hand trembled as he drew it back under the coat. This was impossible. That the whole world was quickened with life, invisible owlish eyes staring from every object, he had no doubt. But what did Enneas matter to the spirits of this world? He was just another bug crawling on the face of Ventus. How could he be visited now by a Grace that had denied him all his life? The Winds strode like kings through the sky and earth; they would never turn their attention to one such as him. At the end of all things, alone and starving in the desert, he finally had to admit he was beneath their notice—or anyone’s notice.

And yet… the warmth remained, and the dryness.

Something moved out among the scrub_grass and scattered stones. Enneas made himself go completely still, peering as though his gaze could open another avenue through the rain to better see what was there.

A bedraggled head poked up from behind a rock, and he let out a sigh of relief. It was only a fox. The little fellow emerged from hiding; the soaking rain had reduced his coat to a tangled mat, making him appear impossibly skinny. Enneas’ heart went out to him.

The fox reached his head down and lifted something. Carrying the speckled brownish object in his jaws, he trotted a few meters towards Enneas, then stopped.

He was carrying a dead quail, Enneas realized. Thinking about that quail roasting over a fire made him suddenly realize how ravenous he was. He sat up.

The fox jumped in surprise and ran back a ways. Then it stopped, cocked its head as though listening to something, and returned. It picked up the quail and came a little closer. Then it paused, watching again.

Enneas cleared his throat. “What… what do you want, little one?”

The fox cocked its head again. Then, very slowly, it walked up to Enneas. When it was no more than a body_length away, it dropped the quail. It put a paw on the bird, then turned and pranced away.

He watched it go, mouth open. When it was ten meters away, the fox paused, and looked back. It met Enneas’ eyes.

And it seemed then to Enneas that a voice spoke to him—a very quiet voice, almost like the whisper of the rain itself; not human, but somehow like he would imagine a fox’s voice to sound, if foxes could speak. It was a voice as faint as imagination’s, yet Enneas knew he was not dreaming it; that it really had said:

hello.

He couldn’t breathe. For a moment Enneas held his trembling hands together, then he began to weep—it seemed as if decades of loneliness and disappointment released themselves in this one torrent of relief and wonder. He hugged his knees and cried like a little boy, while the fox sat with its tail wrapped around its paws and watched.

Enneas wept at hearing what he had never expected to hear—never even known he was missing: a voice that should have been as close as his own pulse, but which had seemed as forever unattainable as the gates of Heaven itself.

Hello.

____45

“The Winds say she’s alive, Axel.” Marya touched his shoulder. “You’ll just have to accept that she doesn’t want to contact us.”

He shook his head. “I just wish I knew.”

They stood on the ramp of a military transport that was grounded outside the ruins of Rhiene. Above them the once-green escarpment was smothered in grey mud, and where a city had once been now there were only the jagged stumps of buildings. The lake had moved in to claim much of the lower valley. Long lines of refugees stood waiting for medical assistance and food; military doctors from the fleet moved up and down the line, supplemented by morphs. Rhiene had been the first city the swans visited their wrath upon when they began to attack Mediation. Luckily it was also the last.

Jordan Mason had told the two factions of the Winds, Mediation and Thalience, that their world would be destroyed by the Archipelagic fleet if they did not reconcile. Axel didn’t understand all the details—he knew pure thalience was a mode of thought alien to humanity, and that Mediation had been the bridge Jordan used to finally permit the swans and the other greatest Winds to communicate with humanity. In the long minutes while Jordan, Armiger and the Desert Voice had huddled silently on the mountainside, the Winds had met, reached some treaty, then opened communications directly to the fleet. 3340 was dead, they told the admirals. The Flaw was finally understood, and would be healed. But Ventus was not now, nor would it ever be an Archipelagic world.

Axel had spent his last week on Ventus searching for Calandria May. The Winds had been happy to let him sleep in any Manse he came across, but they refused to help him find her. They insisted that Calandria was free and able to make her own decisions about her life; but they would not put Axel in touch with her.

It was frustrating, but he could not bring himself to hate the Winds. He was sure they were not being malicious. The part that hurt, to which he could not reconcile himself, was the idea that Calandria did not want to speak to him. After all they had been through, it was a painful parting.

“We have to go,” said Marya. The crowd that had been watching the ship for days was backing away as the engines whined into life. Some morphs shambled past the bottom of the ship’s ramp, slobbering happily to one another. They had itched to tend humans for centuries, and now they were finally getting their chance. Those touched by them rarely died, no matter how advanced their illness or injuries. It was ironic that the gibbering, misshapen Winds most used by mothers to frighten children were now being treated like royalty everywhere they went.

He sighed, and turned away from the sight. As the doors closed, Marya said, “Is it back to the mercenary’s life for you now?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you about that. I hear you’ve got a new job.”

She smiled. Marya had been invited to become a member of the new diplomatic staff the Archipelago wanted to send to Ventus. He knew she must have leaped at the opportunity.

“The Diadem Winds are making delegates for us,” she said as they walked into the warm, softly lit passenger area of the ship. “They’ll be humanoid, apparently. Some will be going to Earth, and I might accompany them. On the other hand, there’s a post here on Ventus… I can’t decide.”

“I know how I’d decide,” he said. The thought of going back to Earth—or anywhere in the Archipelago—left him cold. Surrounded as he might be there by artificial intelligences, humanity and ancient culture, Axel knew he would feel alone. The air he breathed there, and the ground he touched, would feel dead and valueless compared to this place. Even though only those humans with the archaic Ventus DNA could command the mecha and speak to the Winds, Axel had felt their presence all around him in the past days. It made all the difference to know they were watching over him.

Maybe he was just feeling lonely because of the loss of Calandria. On the other hand, maybe he had found a part of himself here that he’d never known he was missing. It hurt to think that, as an offworlder, he no longer had a right to be here. The Winds would tolerate no tourists on Ventus.

“It’s too bad there’s these two positions,” said Marya with a sigh. “If one of them were to be taken, my decision would be so much easier to make.”

“Hmm?” Axel looked up. What was she getting at?

“I’ve been speaking to the diplomatic corps,” she said. “Apparently you have a criminal record as long as my arm, and there’s a thousand laws prohibiting people like you from holding a diplomatic position.”

“Yeah,” he said with a shake of his head. “I always did have a problem with big government.”

“On the other hand,” continued Marya with a wicked smile, “the Winds trust you. So does Choronzon, who has considerable pull with the Archipelago now that 3340’s been defeated.”

“What are you getting at?”

She sighed. “Axel, I’d love to take the Ventus posting. But I’d love to spend some time on Earth more. And I just can’t think of anyone from my Institute who’s got the experience or… streetwise nature, to take the post here.”

“Are you offering me a job?” he asked incredulously.

“Me?” She pointed at herself. “Gods no, I don’t have the authority. No, the Winds have asked for you. The diplomats are turning blue in the face over this, but they want to make the Winds happy…”

The ship shook slightly with takeoff. They had come to a lounge, and Axel found he needed to sit down.

Until this moment he had believed he would never set foot on Ventus again. He stared at Marya, stunned. “Well,” he managed at last, “I guess it was a good idea to save you from the swans after all.”

She laughed. “Then you accept?”

He rose and went to a viewscreen that was tuned to an outside view.

Ventus lay below, a vessel of light. Axel gazed down at the amber, green and white of Iapysian desert as it became one with the curve of the planet.

Calandria was gone; so, it seemed, was the rest of his past.

“I accept,” he said.

*

The White Wind squinted at the glare and noise as the starship rose and vanished behind the clouds. Well, the moment had