Old Green World (13 page)

He found the place, he knew that it was the place, but no one was there. “Cas?” he shouted. “Cas, come back, buddy, please come back.” He waited, but heard no response and saw nothing. He shouted again, and then sat down in the middle of the smoldering tents, eyes burning from the smoke. Sister Clare found him, hours later, still calling for Cas.

+ + +

Clare led him back to the camp on the edge of town, to the medical tents. He walked his own body, but Clare took charge of his decisions for a while. He didn’t mind. She had found him ranting and immobile, burned from trying to put out tent fires.

He slept for several days. When he came to, he found himself in a hall with familiar faces. Aengus slept there, only a few cots away. Aengus seemed peaceful. When Clare arrived to visit Albert, she said, “I’ve turned off some parts of his mind that feel pain, just for a while. So that it won’t hurt as much.” Aengus had lost his left arm.

Albert watched Aengus sleep. Clare told him what had happened. A Baixan lumberjack with a wood axe had fought back and had struck off Aengus’s arm. Holden died defending Aengus. The lumberjack died, too. Albert kept imagining climbing into bed with Aengus, to hold and comfort him and help him heal. But he would have probably just upset the wound and made Aengus worse.

After a few days, Albert began spending less time at Aengus’s bedside and more walking through the Old City. The Adepts and troops began building as soon as the battle had ended. They had already built a couple of wooden structures. There was a house of government and a school. The Adepts had begun teaching Baixans how to sit in contemplation and how to resolve inner and interpersonal conflict. They had begun to build a bank, although he had heard an Adept say that they would take their time introducing banking. It was said while the Adept was supervising a group of Baixans who had been drafted into starting the clock tower.

Albert tried to avoid seeing too many people he knew; when he did, he walked the other way, quickly. He had lost his command by tacit agreement. He never showed up for any military activities again, and no one called him to task for that. No one tried to give him an order. One morning, he saw Heather training troops in a militia exercise. He wondered why he found them unfamiliar, then realized they were Baixans.

There were no more attacks of green-eyed savages. No one even mentioned the green attacks any more.

One morning, Clare walked with him. He watched her pained expression as she stared at the changes, at the burgeoning civilization. “You all had a plan for this, right?” he asked her. “Adepts. You knew exactly what would happen. You had a plan all along.”

Clare looked at him, incensed. “They . . .” But then she sighed. “No, I’m a part of it, too. I’m responsible, too. Yes, we did. Of course we did. I think it’s wrong.”

“You just followed Niall’s orders,” he said. “We all did.”

“Did you only follow Niall’s orders?” Clare asked. “We all share the guilt. Niall was following orders, too.” She walked off. Albert saw her a few more times after that, but she avoided his eyes, and he realized it was better to leave her alone.

After a few more days, Aengus awoke. Sister Clare had let go of his mind, but when he talked to Albert his voice and his manner were still peaceful.

“I don’t want you to be upset,” Aengus said. “Holden was really brave, and I was brave, too. And Sister Clare took good care of me.” He smiled.

The path they had cut through the forest, from the beach to the Old City, became a supply route. Baixans began streaming into the city. They began putting up houses, taverns, a market. They cleared out land on the edges of the city for farms. Albert would linger from time to time around the new farms, until he noticed the skittishness of the Baixans working them.

When he didn’t know where else to go, he would go out into the woods. He would lie flat there and listen to the forest. He never saw Niall or any of the Old People. He kept an eye out for Thomas, thinking that they might ship Administrators into the city now that everything was settling down. But Thomas did not arrive, either.

After a few weeks, the Adepts decided the supply road was finished and stable enough for open travel. They began to send back the wounded. They offered Aengus a spot on a wagon, but he refused. “I lost an arm, not a leg,” he said.

On the morning of his departure, Aengus whistled and cleaned the space around his cot, his small kit packed and sitting at the foot edge. He stopped whistling when he saw Albert. “Where’s your stuff?” he asked, but then he knew. “What are you doing? You’re not coming?”

“I’m not coming home yet,” Albert said. “I don’t know what’s back there for me. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

“What is
it
? What don’t you believe in?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe in any of it. I need . . . I don’t know what I need.”

“I know what I need, I need you. And you need me, and you’re being an idiot.”

“You need your home, too, more than you need me. I need the opposite of home right now. I’m sorry, Aengus. I really am.”

“You’re always sorry,” Aengus said. “But you never do anything about it.” Albert tried to say more, but Aengus wouldn’t look at him.

When they departed, Albert saw Clare gave Aengus a strong hug and a kiss on the cheek. Albert had never seen affection like that from an Adept. Clare whispered something into Aengus’s ear, something Albert couldn’t hear. Aengus wiped his eyes and nodded.

When Albert got back to his quarters, a book sat on his cot, a thick one with a strong binding. He picked it up and flipped it open. An inscription, a picture, lay just inside the cover. An Adept had drawn it, in the way only Adepts knew how to draw: so precise and detailed that it looked real, like a window into another real world.

It was a picture of Aengus and him. It must have been early in the campaign. They sat next to one another, talking, before a fire. Aengus had his hand on Albert’s shoulder, his eyes closed in a bright laugh. Albert smiled and gazed at Aengus. Albert thought to himself,
those boys were happy
, then realized he had thought that instead of
we were happy
.

Underneath the picture was inscribed the words:

If you plan to survive, you will have to learn how to forgive yourself.

The next page also had a picture: Thomas and Albert studying at their desks, at the school. The Albert in the picture quietly focused on the book before him, and Thomas pointed to a page, explaining something to Albert. Sister Clare watched them in the background. The book was from Clare. Beneath the picture, the words:

Don’t forget who you are. I hope to see you again.

He flipped through the book. He saw some familiar sutras, and some new stories. Nothing military, and nothing about physics. Albert put the book in his pack, along with a few small items and the provisions he had prepared, enough to last a week or two. He didn’t worry; he figured hunting would be good. He had a knife and an axe and his sword and his bow.

He walked across the city and started heading the opposite direction from the road and the coast. He walked out of town, farther into the forest. After more than a mile of new clearings and farmland, he finally reached a point where the forest opened ahead of him. The field and rubble of the Old City began to thicken into low brush, then the reach of saplings, ever thicker and thicker. He pulled out his knife to cut a trail. He started walking. It called to him. It was the only place left.

The new trip into Baixa began exactly where Niall had started the first trip into Baixa. He faced the same entry into the continent: a continuation of sand beyond the shore into a space between two brushy dunes. The tents to either side of it were peopled differently, but they were the same tents. He tried to picture it all—the coast, the dunes, the entry into the forest—as it had been then, and then he tried to picture it as it had been thousands of years ago. Perhaps some small houses at the shore, he thought, and perhaps a wall where eroded old stones stood now. Perhaps it would look like that again, he thought. Or perhaps not: perhaps it would look like this in a hundred years, except for the memory of the tents.

The road cut a swath through the forest now, twenty feet wide. Regular patrols of Adepts and troops kept it clear and free of the worst of the forest. It had become a civilization in itself: it bustled constantly with traffic, and merchants had started to live along the road, particularly at the point where the road opened up to the ruins of the Old City. It felt to him like a long, strange city of its own.
 

When he started the road at the coast of Baixa, he waved to the merchants liberally as he passed them. To a one, they fell to their faces in supplication at his wave. He stopped waving after the third prostration.
 

The first march into Baixa had taken months: this trip took just over three weeks. Niall arrived at the city outskirts on a sunny morning, with the mist beginning to burn off and the ground beginning to warm.

He approached the river. The main square had risen up on the near bank. There were dozens of new wood buildings: houses, taverns, a hall of government. Not far away, Baixans cleared out fields of ruins and tilled the ground to farm. Niall liked the farms; they had a point.

The ancient metal tower stood across the river, near the square, but opposite it. There was a wide clearance around the tower. The Adepts had begun teaching that it was consecrated ground, to be set apart.

Niall visited the school first. Two Adepts presided there, teaching a large group of adults and children alike. Everyone sat on the ground, silently, their eyes closed. They were trying a new technique, developed just before the attack: wordless programming and instruction, to save time.

It seems to be going well
, Niall thought, and one of the instructors thought back to him:
Yes.

Why have you come? We weren’t expecting you
, one of the others thought.

No plan, just to see our progress
, he responded.
Just to admire.

He sat down with them, connected with them. He listened to the learning for a while. The adult students learned about agriculture. The younger students were learning about market economics.

Niall relaxed in the murmur of the shared mind until a voice emerged from it. Esther, one of his fellow Adepts.
Brian is getting closer. He’ll be there soon.

Will he?
Niall replied.
I’ve stopped listening.

The casualness, the apathy you perform
, Esther said.
It’s sad.

Everything is sad
, Niall said.

Disconnected, disaffected, snide
, Esther said.
You know why they went silent? Because of attitudes like yours. They gave up on us because Adepts like you were too petty to commit to an ontology of boundlessness.

For someone who is committed to an ontology of boundlessness, you use a lot of pronouns
, Niall replied.

Another voice came up to consciousness.
Brian is close to the castle, now
, it said breathlessly.
He’s close to the Old People.

They had always been able to hear the Old People. When Richard died, they all knew right away. Then Susan and Lucy came to Baixa and became so quiet then. It was disconcerting, but they understood. They knew she was in mourning, and they could feel her there, still. It was the feeling of being in a room with someone silent, a soundless presence. They took comfort in that, in feeling her there, even though she was quiet for a long time.

Susan never spoke to them again. One morning, months later, they felt her leave altogether. They chattered about it for a long time, speculating, worrying, trying to understand how to make it right, how to restore sense to the world-mind. They weren’t used to acting without explicit instruction from them. They didn’t know what to do.

Brian was an Adept in London with Niall. After days of silence, Brian decided to head across the sea to the Green Island, to the home of the Old People.

“They lost their brother,” Niall said to Brian. “Give them some time to mourn.”

“We’re their family, too,” Brian said, as if it were simple. Brian was big and charming and stupid and always said things as if they were simple. He had headed out with a great fanfare from the Old City, broadcasting everything he experienced to everyone. That same day, Niall decided to return to Baixa.

Pay attention
, Esther said to Niall.
Brian is there, now. This is important.
Niall scanned the world-mind and found Brian. He connected to him and was transported to the Green Island.

Brian was approaching the ancient castle that was etched in every Adept’s mind: the crumbling stone, the cloudless sky, the treeless green crags. He was moving quickly, flying.
I can sense them, I think
, Brian said.
I believe they are here.
He rushed toward one of the towers. There were two figures standing upon it, still too far away to be distinguishable.
I see them
, Brian said.
I see them.

Niall then felt a sick dropping away as Brian suddenly went silent, disconnected. He heard Esther moan in nausea and pain across the schoolroom, then tremors of disturbance as the connections with the Baixans in the room began to quaver.

Get a hold of yourself
, Niall said to Esther, and lent his focus to the connections. The crops and their seasons. Supply and demand.

+ + +

Once they were able to close out the lessons, they sat weary in the back of the schoolhouse.

“What do we do now?” Esther said. “What do we do?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Niall said. “We’re enlightened creatures. We didn’t spend all this time and effort just to act like children when they aren’t available.”

“It hurts,” Esther said. “It hurts when we aren’t in concert. It hurts when we are alone. We have been hurting for months now.”

“We deserve to hurt,” Niall said. “The things we’ve done.”

“Spare me,” Esther said. “You were at the forefront of the bloodshed, and now you’re at the forefront of the self-torture. No one believes in war any more, Niall. You aren’t saying anything interesting.”