John Barnes - A Million Open Doors

A

MILLION

OPEN

DOORS

JOHN BARNES

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this

book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and

neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

any form.

Cover art by John Harris

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-51633-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-24132

First edition: October 1992

First mass market printing: November 1993

Printed in the United States of America 098765 43

A MILLION OPEN DOORS

PART ONE

CANSO DE FIS

DE JOVENT

ONE

We were in Pertz's Tavern, up in the hills above Noupeitau, with the usual people,

ostensibly planning to go backpacking in Terraust and actually drinking on Aimeric's

tab. With fires due in a few weeks, we thought we might see the first herds of

auroc-de-mer migrating to the banks of the Great Polar River, beginning their 1700 km

swim to the sea. Aimeric had never seen it and was wild to go. For the rest of us, the

pleasure was in watching his excitement—like his bald spot, it was always there to be

made fun of—and in the red wine that flowed freely while he bought.

"Perhaps on the last day we can spring to Bo Merce Bay and see the first ones head

out to sea. They say that's really a sight. Last chance for twelve stanyears, we shouldn't

miss it, m'es vis, companho." Aimeric laughed, looking down into his wine. The bald spot

was bigger than ever. I enjoyed pitying him.

Aimeric slid his arm around Bieris, his entendedora of the time, and pulled her closer

to him. She raised an eyebrow at me, asking me not to encourage him.

Garsenda, who was my entendedora, squeezed my arm and whispered in my ear, "I

think he really means to go. Are you going to?"

"If you wish, midons. My father took me when I was nine. I wouldn't mind seeing it

again."

"Giraut's seen it," Garsenda said, very loudly. "Giraut can tell you all about it."

Everyone stopped talking and looked at us. If Garsenda had not had long, thick

blue-black hair, bright blue eyes, and big heavy soft breasts over a taut belly, she'd

never have been my entendedora—I surely hadn't chosen her on her personality.

Sometimes I thought of getting rid of her, but she so impressed my companho that it was

worth tolerating her many lapses. I only wished that the laws of finamor did not demand

that I think of her as perfect.

She giggled when she realized they were staring, and rubbed my thigh in a long

stroke under the table. "I thought we were talking about going backpacking to the South

Pole," she said. "You know, to see the aurocs-de-mer turn their legs to flippers or

whatever it is they do."

"Yes, we were," Raimbaut said. He was grinning, enjoying watching my entendedora

embarrass me.

I grinned back. Since he had none of his own, if he wanted to get insulting, I held

trump.

"Have you actually seen it?" Aimeric asked.

Bieris hit him on the shoulder, giving him her don't-en-courage-Garsenda glare.

"Ja, my father took me the year before you got here, Aimeric." I took the carafe and

helped myself to another glass of wine; Aimeric flagged old Pertz, behind the bar, who

started to pour another. I had lost count of glasses, and didn't care. "And what actually

happens is that they have these pockets that their legs and flippers fold into. They just

disjoint whatever they're not using and tuck it up into the pocket is all. The toszet who

designed them must have been a real genius—not just having the organs, but having the

instinct to do that, is really something." I sipped the wine again, and noticed I had

everyone's attention—maybe they really did want to go. "But let's just go and see them

get into the river. The going out to sea doesn't look like much—just a lot of big

gray-brown backs in the water. Not nearly as impressive as the levithi you can see from

Bisbat Head."

Aimeric said, "Giraut, you could make a dance on the clouds on gossamer wings

sound like going down the hall to spring your laundry to the cleaners." Raimbaut and

Marcabru both laughed a lot more than it was worth—they were as drunk as I was.

Marcabru, who rarely went out of the city if he could help it, said "But I'd like to see

the whole thing—as Aimeric says, not for another twelve stanyears..."

Raimbaut nodded vigorously and refilled his glass.

Aimeric beamed at them. "Consensus is against you, Olde Woodes Hande," That was

the nickname he had given me when I was twelve and he was new to the planet, on the

many family trips my father had taken him on. "I think we should stay the extra days."

I shrugged. "It's a little more dangerous. While we're there, I'll show you some of the

graveyards. The auroc-de-mer only usually beat the fires to the river. Each year some of

them—sometimes a lot of them—burn to death, piled up in box canyons or at the foot of

bluffs. Then after the snowfields form and melt, the charred aurocs-de-mer get swept

into streams and piled up along some of the river beaches in meters-thick banks of white

bone and black carbon. You shouldn't miss the sight—but I don't want any of us to

become a permanent part of it."

Marcabru smiled at me. "Very prudent of you, Giraut. You're getting old. Hey,

Garsenda, you want a fresh young toszet when Grandpa Giraut gets tired?"

It was nothing of course—mere banter between old friends —but then a big brawny

Interstellar, sixteen or seventeen and far-gone drunk, bellowed from the next table,

"You're a coward."

Every table in Pertz's went instantly quiet.

Ragging among friends is one thing, but in Nou Occitan enseingnamen is everything. I

slid sideways away from Garsenda. "This won't take long, midons."

"You're a coward, Redsleeves," the young lout repeated. From his voice, I guessed he

had stood up. I glanced at Marcabru to make sure the young turd wasn't about to

rabbit-punch me as I stood, a trick that was very popular among the Interstellars, as

anything low, dirty, or ne gens tended to be.

Marcabru raised and slowly lowered an index finger, so I kicked the bench backward

hard and spun into the space where it had been. Beside me, Marcabru's epee uncoiled

into rigidity with a sharp pop, its neuroducer tip almost in the face of that young clown.

Between the flickering glow of the neuroducer in his face, and the slam of the bench

against his shins, he took a big leap back, giving us a moment to assess the situation.

It didn't look good. Five young Interstellars, all dressed in the navy-and-black style

patterned on Earth bureaucratic uniforms, sneered at the four of us. All of them were big

and muscular, and none were hanging back. Probably they were all dosed on a

berserker drug.

The smart thing, if possible, would be to avoid a fight.

On the other hand, I detested Interstellars—traitors to their culture, imitators of the

worst that came out from the Inner Worlds, bad copies of Earth throwing away all the

wealth of their Occitan heritage; their art was sadoporn, their music raw noise, and their

courtesy nonexistent—and spirit and style were everything. Anyone could be graceful

with nothing at stake. Here was a real test of enseingnamen.

Everyone speaks Terstad everywhere you go in the Thousand Cultures, but it doesn't

offer the powerful, compressed imagery of Occitan, so it was that in which I insulted

him; a few musical, rolling syllables sufficed to point out that his father had dribbled the

best part of him onto the bathroom floor and he needed to wash his face of the stench of

his cheap-whore sister. It was a fine calling-out for spur of the moment and half-drunk.

Aimeric and Raimbaut rose to their feet, applauding with harsh, ugly laughs to make

it clear that it was everyone's fight.

"Talk Terstad. I don't understand school talk."

He was not telling the truth, since all instruction is in Occitan after the fourth year, but

it was a point of pride with Interstellars to speak only Terstad, because they were

determined to reject everything about their own culture and tradition.

"I should have expected that," I said. "You look stupid. All right, I'll translate—please

let me know if I'm going too fast. Your father (that's one of those drunks your mother

called 'customers,' though god only knows which one) dribbled the best part of you—"

"I don't give a shit what the Octalk meant. I just want to fight you."

His epee banged out into a straight line pointed at me. Mine replied. There was a fast

flurry of pops as all those involved extended epees, and crashing and scrambling

sounds as everyone else in Pertz's tried to get out of the way.

He grinned at me and glanced at Garsenda. "After we get done with all of you, me

and my underboys will share your slut."

It was a dumb adolescent trick, which probably worked pretty well on dumb

adolescents. I drew a sharp breath and dropped my point a hairsbreadth, as if he had

actually broken my focus. He lunged—straight onto the point of my epee, which tapped

his exposed larynx, bending like a flyrod under the force of the collision.

He fell to the floor, bubbling and grasping his throat. The neuroducer had made solid

contact, and it would require sedation and several days' slow revival to convince him

that he did not have blood gushing from a hole in his throat. We all stood watching him

as he quickly hallucinated himself dead and went into a coma.

I sort of hoped I had actually bruised him with the force of the blow, but they'd be

able to fix that too. On the other hand, a really good zap with a neuroducer is almost

impossible to erase with anything but time, so probably a decade from now his throat

would spasm hard enough to choke him every now and then.

The situation was satisfactory as far as I was concerned. "An apology, on behalf of

your friend, would settle this," I said.

"I wish we could," the biggest of them said, "but then we'd all have to fight him as

soon as he got out of the hospital—with fists, too. Gwim is strict with his underboys."

Two more things I hated about Interstellars—they liked to give and take orders from

each other, and they contracted fine old Occitan names like Guilhem down to ugly

grunts like Gwim. "Then let's get on with it," I said. "The odds are honorable now."

The two in, the back gulped hard, but to give them credit, they all nodded. Maybe

there was a little enseingnamen left in them despite the clothes.

"Let's do this in the street," I added. "Pertz doesn't need any more furniture broken

up, and a stray hit with a neuroducer can wipe a vu."

I glanced at the Wall of Honor, memorializing Pertz's dead patrons, and all the vus

were smiling and nodding as if they'd heard me. It was an eerie effect, but in a moment

they were all out of unison again.

When I looked back, the Interstellars were nodding, and so were my seconds. Aimeric

had that lazy, bored look he got just before some intense pleasure. Marcabru, best of our

fighters after me, was solidly ready and balanced, his face almost blank—he was already

in that state where thought and action are identical, a state I could feel myself settling

comfortably into with each breath.

Raimbaut had a crazy gleam in his eye and was rocking back and forth on his feet,

almost bouncing—I never knew anyone who loved a brawl or a wild adventure better.

His face was distorted in a dozen places, and his left shoulder and right ankle were stiff,

where muscles could not be convinced they weren't scarred, and there must have been

internal effects as well.

If I had been thinking I might not have let things go the way they did, but of course he

and I were both twenty-two stanyears old. Everyone seems immortal then. Besides,

Raimbaut would tell me later that he wasn't unhappy about how he died, only about

when.

With a fierce little nod, he signaled for me to get on with it. I said, "Well, then,

gentlemen, the street. Will it be to first yield, to first death, or without limit?"

"First death?" one of the ones behind squeaked, and the brawny blond boy who now

seemed to be their leader nodded.

"I think we'll have to, to satisfy Gwim."

"All right then, to the street, atz dos," I said.

We walked out to the street in side-by-side pairs, one of them with each of us—it's the

position for honorable people, and given that they were Interstellars it might have been

some risk, but they had shown real enseingnamen since their vulgarian leader's dispatch,

and so I extended them the courtesy.

The street was empty—everyone was down at Festival Night in Noupeitau. From far

below, we could hear the clash of a dozen brass bands playing in different parts of the

city, mixed together by distance.

The redbrick villas up here were the color of heartsblood in the warm glow of the

sunset; the little red dot of Arcturus, a bloody period, was sinking into Totzmare in the

west, and the surf was running fast and big. The skimmers riding them in (on the

western coast of Nou Occitan, waves are rideable as much as two hundred km out to

sea) were just putting on running lights, and a few were tacking and putting on sail to

work their way back out to sea so that they could start another run next morning. Those

last few weeks before a Dark, when the sky was still deep purple and the long evenings

still warm, always seemed to hurry by too fast.

It was a good night to be alive, and a fine setting for a brawl.

"Let's get on with it." It was my responsibility to say that, for though I had challenged

originally, the boys' taking up their friend's quarrel had made me the challenged, so

timing and protocol were mine to decide. I might have chosen the issue fought to as

well, but, under an imputation of cowardice, I preferred to defy them by letting them

choose. When I saw how young and scared their faces looked in the sharp black-edged

shadows of the red street, I thought of softening it to first yield—but no, their ne gens

behavior had begun it.

Let them bear the consequences.

I spoke the traditional words then: "Atz fis prim. Non que malvolensa, que per ilh tensa

sola." It meant "to the first death"—that to remind everyone when we were to stop—and

"not from rancor, but merely for the sake of the quarrel"—to remind us that this was not

a blood feud and would not become one, that this fight would settle whatever question

there was for good and forever.

Then I flicked my epee upward in salute, the boy facing me did the same, and all the

seconds saluted in unison. Their epees had barely returned to ready when the boy was

on me.

Our epees had clashed no more than ten times—I had not yet formed any impression

of him—when Aimeric cried "Patz marves!" to end the fight.

All the safety locks clicked, and the epees coiled back into their hilts, the guards

folding in last. I dropped mine unconsciously into my pocket, looking to see who had

died. Raimbaut was on the ground, not moving.

At first it was nothing we hadn't seen before—we were getting ready to move him to

the back room at Pertz's with the young clown who had started all the trouble, for

pickup the next morning. And it even made sense that it was Raimbaut; much as he

loved a fight, he was slow and easily fooled. I had seen him dead three times before, and

there had been other times as well, when I hadn't been there.

Then the banshee cry of the ambulance froze our blood. Raimbaut's medsponder had

triggered.

We set him down in the street, backed away, and got no more than a dozen paces

before the ambulance dove in from directly overhead in a thunder of reversed impellers,

lowered the springer box over him, and sprang him to the emergency room. The

impellers flipped to forward with a click and a whine, and the little robot, for all the

world like a cylindrical tank on top of a coffin, lifted slowly and flew away. In the

pavement where it had been there was a rectangular depression, two meters long by one

wide, a centimeter deep.

By the time we got inside and commed the hospital's infocess, they knew. At the

bottom of the report, beneath all the aintellect's terse notes about liver and kidney

damage, and hysterical distortion of the heart, someone human had noted "one shock

too many."

The burial took forever. His parents didn't show for it, and that was the best thing that

happened.

Raimbaut babbled all the way through his funeral, too. His will named me as

recipient, so I had struggled through carrying his body up the mountain, along with

Marcabru, Aimeric, David, Johanne, and Rufeu, with the added difficulty of pain from

the fresh scar where his psypyx had been implanted in the back of my neck.

Raimbaut watched through my eyes as we lowered his naked corpse onto its bed of

roses at the bottom of the grave the nanos had shaped in the raw granite of Montanha

Valor.

Each donzelha present climbed down and kissed the corpse, rubbing her face on his to

anoint him with their tears. There were a lot of donzelhas—which surprised Raimbaut so

much that he couldn't stop talking about it in my head.

Garsenda made a truly spectacular show of her grief, though she'd known Raimbaut

only through me, and not well. Raimbaut appreciated it, but I was embarrassed.

Bieris, who had known him longest of any donzelha, was oddly quiet and restrained in

the grave, but when she climbed out her face was drenched with weeping.

Then, as each of the jovents nicked a thumb to drop blood on Raimbaut's body,

Aimeric sang the Canso de Fis de Jovent, perhaps the great masterpiece of Nou Occitan

verse. Written by Guilhem-Arnaud Montanier in 2611, first sung at his funeral a year

later, for two centuries it has been what we buried our young, brave, and beautiful

to—under normal circumstances it brought tears to my eyes, and now it tore my heart

like a claw.

Guilhem-Arnaut himself had said that all four possible meanings (fis means either

death or end, and jovent either a young man or the time of first manhood) were equally

intended, and there is nothing in the song to make one choose between them; my mind

skipped wildly from one idea to the next, while Raimbaut marveled at the quantities of

roses and girls.

At last, when it was over, we walked the six kilometers back in silence. Even

Raimbaut was quiet.

It had been hard and heavy going up with the body, but this was worse.

"Are you still there?" I subvoked to Raimbaut.

"Still here." His voice was more tired and mechanical than it had been, and my heart

sank with what that portended, but he did say, "Burial was nice. You're all very kind.

Thank you."

"Raimbaut thanks you all," I said. Everyone turned and bowed gravely toward me, so

he could see through my eyes.

"Where am I? I must be dead!" his voice cried in my head. "Deu, deu, this is Montanha

Valor, but I can't remember the funeral! Giraut, were we there?"

"Ja, ja, yes, Raimbaut, we were there." I subvoked so hard that Garsenda, beside me,

heard the grunts in my throat and stared at me until Bieris drew her away. "Reach for the

emblok, try to feel it through me," I told him. "Your memory will be in the emblok."

It was no use, then or any time later. Only a rare mind can continue after losing its

body. Like most, he could not maintain contact with the emblok that would give him

short-term memory, or the geeblok that would allow him his emotions, though each was

a scant centimeter away from where he crouched in his psypyx at the base of my skull.

Days passed and he forgot his death, and then that we had ever been at Pertz's

Tavern, for he could not recover what he downloaded.

And as my emotions separated again from his, and he was increasingly unable to

reach his geeblok, he felt colder and colder in my mind. His liquid helium whisper

raved on endlessly, trying to remember itself, trying to wake up from the bad dream it

thought it was in.

After two more weeks—about eleven and a half standays— they said there was no

hope, and took the psypyx, emblok, and geeblok off me. Raimbaut sleeps now in

Eternity Hall in Nou Occitan, like so many others, waiting for some advance of

technology to bring his consciousness, memories, and emotions together again.

The good-bye had taken so long, and so little of him was left at the end of it, that I felt

nothing when they removed him.

TWO

Marcabru and Yseut had some appointment they were very secretive about, so only

Aimeric, Bieris, Garsenda, and I went to the South Pole that day. Because it was so late

in the summer, we made only a day trip of it, springing there right after breakfast to

walk the six km to the observation point. At this season Arcturus was very low in the

sky as it wheeled around the horizon, its red-orange light glinting off the huge pipelines

that ran up to feed the distant mountain glaciers that in turn fed the Great Polar River.

"Those must really be a nuisance to a painter," I said to Bieris. "You can't paint what

the landscape really looks like because it's not done yet, and you can't even see what it

looks like right now because all those pipes are in the way."

She sighed. "I know. And they expect it to be at least another hundred stanyears

before Totzmare is warm enough to make enough rain fall here. Not to mention that

several of the bamboos and annual willows they'll be planting in the river bottom aren't

out of the design stage yet, so all I have of those is 'artist's conceptions.' And since the

'artist' is an aintellect, their conceptions are really flat and dull. But all anyone wants to

see is what Wilson will look like when it's done. By the time it really looks that way,

people will be bored with it."

That was a strange remark to make, especially for an artist, but this was a strange trip,

anyway. My only strong reason to come had been so that Raimbaut could see this, but

they had taken him off me two days before, and since he had no memory, why should he

have seen it, even if he could?

By then, though, Aimeric had gotten Garsenda and maybe even Bieris infected with

the idea, so I had to go too. Bieris's bush-sense was as good as mine, we'd been on most

of the same trips, but of course they would not listen to a donzelha, and it was too

dangerous this time of year for them to be in Terraust without someone who could tell

them what to do in an emergency.

The tower at the observation point was made to look like a weathered old castle keep,

with no mortar in the joints between its granite blocks. It must have had internal

pinning, to have held together through several grassfires, freezes, burials in snow,

floods, and thaws.

Obviously I was in a sour mood if Bieris had infected me with that tendency of hers to

wonder how things were made instead of just appreciating their beauty.

As we climbed the stone steps, it surprised me how hot the tower was to the touch.

Aimeric winced away when he brushed a shoulder against it. "Six stanyears of

continuous sun will do that, I guess," he said. "Think what it must be like when the sun

first comes up!"

"You're welcome to find out for yourself," I said, "and then you can write and tell me

about it."

He laughed. "Don't forget I grew up in Caledony. I know all about cold—it's all they

have on Nansen."

It was just a passing remark, but it did startle me; Aimeric so rarely referred to his

origins, and almost never spoke of his home culture. That and his age were the two

topics he would never discuss.

When we reached the top, the sun was almost directly behind us as we looked down

into the river valley. Broken by irregular cliffs, the wide steps of the valley slope were

brown with dry grass in the sunlight; Arcturus was a deep-maroon clot in the thin blood

of the sky, for the fires were already burning in many parts of Terraust. To our right, the

pipelines and glaciers sparkled; to our left, the plains reached into the valley, a flat

intrusion that made a steep cliff facing us.

We put on distance glasses and adjusted them. "There," Aimeric said, "by that sharp

bend—"

I focused in on it. Far below us, there were a few hundred aurocs-de-mer at the

water's edge, wading in.

As I watched them, they would suddenly drop into the water, heads almost

submerging as their legs folded up, then swim strongly and smoothly as their flippers

extended. With so many entering the water, the river rose almost to its normal

midseason depth.

But not quite far enough. "Look downstream," Garsenda breathed.

In one wide, shallow place, they were floundering, at least a thousand of them. The

John Barnes - A Million Open Doors

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