Wandering Star 13: Smon's Earth

Well, there’s one way to get more details on Smon – ask Smon. Smon had certainly wanted some time alone when she’d left, so rushing over to her egg (not egg… cart?) immediately is probably not a great idea. She returns to the hive to pass the time doing some work instead, heading underground to help reinforce the newly repaired tunnels. Once she gets done chewing mortar, she heads to the trade shed to consult the map there.

The trade shed is not connected to the main hive. There are many secondary hive entrances, smaller tunnels that lead out of the hive to other locations in case the main entrance is inconvenient for some reason, but the trade shed is not one of these – it’s a completely separate little burrow, entirely supported by a tunnel lined with fired mortar bricks like the main entrance tunnel, and large enough to fit several standards carts. There are no carts in there right now, though it’s likely that there will be, soon – proper trade carts built for long journeys will need to be constructed for the journey to Starspire, and they’ll need to be stored somewhere.

Usually, this burrow is for visiting traders to store their supplies, and to stay themselves, if they choose that instead of staying in the hive. It occasionally acts as temporary storage for local goods or work carts that are inconvenient to haul to the hive for some reason or another.

It’s also where the map is.

Plastered over the fired mortar blocks of the walls and ceiling of the room is a layer of unfired mortar, the chewed and dried kind that the workers use to shore up most of the underground tunnels. It’s strong enough to do its job, but also strong enough to chip away with enough effort, and replace. Carved into this layer is the map, with the Redstone River Hive at its centre. The Redstone River flows from the North, meandering about until it eventually crosses just to the West of the centre of the map, just a little way from the hive, and then a ways further South of the hive it veers sharply West and runs down the wall of the shed until it touches the sea all the way down near the floor. There are a couple more hives downriver of Redstone, although none touching the river itself (there is only one Redstone River Hive), and then more to the South and East – to the West of the Redstone River Hive, on the other side of the river, it’s sleeplands most of the way to the ocean, with a couple of scattered coastal hives on the other side.

If they’re going to Starspire, none of that particularly matters for her. Other outsiders, other people like Smon, are there, and the hives that found them will need to arrange to get them North, but all that matters for the Redstone River Hive’s purposes is that short journey North-ish to the Green Hills Hive and then Northwest, through a patch of sleepland, to the Glittergem Hive at the base of the mountains that ring the Northern edge of the continent. The Glittergem Hive is very close to the Starspire, so the only truly dangerous part of their journey will be the march through a small patch of sleeplands, where a lack of resources, a lack of communication with other hives, and the violent marauding Hiveless will be constant dangers. Still, though, Glittergem’s trade route runs through there. So it can’t be that dangerous – or at least, it might be incredibly dangerous, but it’s not as dangerous as most areas of sleepland. The traders make it.

That’s the important part of the map.

If they go to the Starspire.

But if Smon isn’t a star, is there a need to go there? The sky people could just as easily be gathered somewhere more central to where they’d all landed, somewhere that doesn’t require traversing any dangerous terrain. If Starspire isn’t necessary, everything becomes a lot simpler.

And a simple journey across well-travelled territory to a neighbouring hive… that is not the kind of journey that somebody gets marked by a Wandering Star for. That is not the kind of journey that will convince the hive that Tyk has fulfilled her destiny. That’s not the kind of journey that will free everyone of their expectation that she will abandon them.

But this isn’t about her. She could keep this suspicion about Smon to herself, let everyone plan the journey to Starspire anyway, go there and call it her destiny, be freed of such expectations, but… no. It’s a lot of risk for no reason.

Besides, she can’t be the only person to suspect that their assumption about the nature of the sky people is wrong. At some other hive, some other interpreter is probably developing enough shared language for one of their sky people to communicate who they are. If Tyk’s suspicions are right, if the eggs are not eggs and the star larvae are not star larvae, then that’s not the sort of misconception that’s likely to persist for too many more days. (They could be adult stars, but Tyk doubts it. Smon’s confusion over being called the same thing as the stars in the sky, as well as her general lack of knowledge about the earth that the stars oversee, suggest that something else is going on.)

Tyk doesn’t know a huge amount about the specific location and movements of the other sky people. She does know that two of them, Myn and Haidn, hatched together somewhat closer to the Green Hills Hive, and that her hive is supposed to bring Smon to meet up with them so that they can all tackle the sleeplands together. There’s something of a give-and-take when it comes to caravan sizes; large caravans are safer, but also slower and more resource intensive. She’s pretty sure that there’s nobody else closer to Green Hills than Smon, which means that a central location for all the recovered sky people is probably to the Southeast, not the North. If there’s no need to go to the Starspire, that’s probably the direction they’ll end up heading.

Well. Something for the logistics people to figure out. Tyk heads out to see Smon.

She’s in her tent, probably tinkering with her star farms, but comes out as Tyk approaches. “Hello, Smon,” Tyk says. “Are you well?”

“I’m well,” Smon says. “Are you well?”

“Yes.”

They stare at each other awkwardly for a moment.

Smon says, “The farms – ”

“You’re not a baby, are you?”

Smon hesitates. Uncertain? Wary? Confused, perhaps? Tyk wishes she knew Smon’s body language better. Maybe Tyk’s wrong; maybe Smon is a baby star, and she just didn’t know, and –

“No. Not baby.”

“What are you?”

Smon doesn’t respond in her usual, eager way. She thinks to herself for a moment, then bobs her head in a yes (more to herself than to Tyk, Tyk thinks), and then starts to collect some rocks.

She sits on the ground, putting her head at about equal height to Tyk’s, and smooths out a patch of dirt. The ground here is worn mostly bare from previous finger sketches and rock piles, so this isn’t hard. Smon puts a large rock, the largest she’s ever used for one of these, on the ground, and then scatters four smaller rocks in a line leading away from it, with plenty of space between.

She prods the large rock. “Sun.” She hesitates a moment. Thinks. Then with a little roll of her shoulders, prods the third rock, the second small one out from the ‘sun’ rock. “Earth.”

It’s a model of the sky. Makes sense so far. “Yes.”

Smon looks at her closely. “Yes, question?”

“Sun. Earth.” Tyk pokes the rock between the two. “Sentinel Hakkat.” Then the two on the other side of Earth. “Sentinels Brokk, Hatar. Model of sky. Yes?”

Smon stares at her in shock. “You know?”

Does Smon think that she’s a baby now? Obviously, Tyk knows what the sky looks like. “Yes! Sky! Stargazers see!” People have been watching the patrols of the sentinel stars for longer than there have been hives; of course they know where they are. “Sentinel stars go around sun, like Earth.”

“Yes. Yes.” Smon looks at her strangely for a moment, then turns back to the model. She points at Hakkat. “Word sentinel star. Question?”

“Yes. Sentinel stars. Hakkat, Brokk, Hatar.”

“And Earth. Group.”

Huh? “Earth also go around sun, yes.”

“No, Earth group. Earth sentinel star. Same.”

“Sentinel stars small.” Aren’t they? She should ask the stargazers. They certainly look –

“No. Big. Far away. Very very far.”

Big? As in, big as Earth? If Earth is a sentinel star, then the distance involved – how far away must they be, to look that small? That can’t possibly be right. No.

How big is the sky?

More importantly, if Earth is a sentinel star, and Earth is like this, then that means…

“You are from sentinel. Different sentinel.”

“Yes.”

Wait. Is the Earth itself a god? Does it oversee the other sentinels, as they oversee it? “Which sentinel are you from?” Tyk asks. Hakkat; it’s got to be Hakkat. Smon arrived in the daytime, which means that she came from closer to the sun, right? No; not necessarily; for most of the year, Earth isn’t really between the sun and the other sentinels, because they circle it at different speeds. Where are Brokk and Hatar right now? Ugh, this is stargazer knowledge. The stargazers should be having this conversation, not Tyk.

She wasn’t expecting to face a cosmological crisis today. The Earth, a sentinel. The entire Earth.

Smon doesn’t point to one of the rocks in the model. Instead, she says, “Far away sentinel. Very, very far.”

Far away? That… makes sense. If Hakkat, Brok and Hatar are so far away that they’re Earth-sized and yet look so tiny, then it’s entirely possible that there are more sentinels, so far away that they’re too small to see at all.

But Smon finds another large rock, and scatters a longer line of smaller rocks from it. She prods the first large rock. “Tyk sun.” She prods the second large rock. “Smon sun.” Then she points at the third little rock from Smon’s sun. “Smon Earth.”

“Another sun?” Tyk has never seen a second sun.

“Many, many sun. Star is bright sun, far away sun.”

Far away suns, like the sentinel stars are far away earths. Those kinds of distances… “No. Wandering stars close sometimes, burn up in sky. Sometimes fall down, like your egg. Too small to be suns.”

“Rocks. Sky rocks. Far away stars different. Suns.”

She means the sentinel stars. Tyk isn’t sure how to take this. Sentinels, wandering stars and sedentary stars do behave differently, but she’d never suspected them to be this different from each other, as different from each other as they are from the clouds and the lightning. More different, much more different, if one kind is like the Earth and another like the sun.

But Smon sounds very confident, and she is from the sky, so she would know. She has no reason to lie. Tyk will have to see what the stargazers think about all this.

But the distances involved… “Sedentary stars are suns, very far away?”

“Yes.”

“And they have more sentinel stars?”

“Some yes. Some no.”

“How far away?”

“Very very far. More far than all thing here. Earth size many many many many far.”

Smon is from impossibly far away. Not a star, but from a sedentary star, or at least a sentinel patrolling around a sedentary star. Tyk is tempted to ask which one, but there’s no way they’d have the same names for the stars. She’ll have to ask Smon to point it out later, or something.

“Smon kind see many star, many earth. Try go to many earth. But, go in sky is difficult. Is…” she glances back at her egg and touches the strip of silk on her head, the one covering her injury.

Dangerous. Travelling in the sky is dangerous. Tyk glances up and envisions the sky not as Smon’s natural home, but as an incalculably vast eternal sleepland. Or an ocean, perhaps, many times bigger than the Earth.

“You go in egg?” Tyk asks. The egg is sturdy and safe looking, for all that Smon’s two companions died in it, but there is simply no way that it has the space for enough stores for that kind of journey.

Smon rocks her head ‘no’. “Not egg. Smon people make other thing. Far bigger thing. Make forty three bigger thing, put many eggs inside.” She picks up a twig, presumably to represent her ‘bigger thing’, and places it near her own Earth. The echo stone doesn’t have a word for it – Tyk suspects that her language might not have a word for it – so Smon gives it the word in her own language, her strange language of names.

“Javlyn,” she calls it.