Bonus story -- Smooth As Glass

Heron Sandcomber was eleven when her pod first travelled to the Shore of Glass. Like any khemin child, she’d heard stories of it since she was a baby in her mother’s boatsling, but there was nothing like setting eyes on it herself. The sun rose behind the pod’s floating village as they all adjusted sails to pull ashore and the light glittered off thousands, millions of brilliant little nodules of glass worn smooth by the waves. The adults had seen the shore many times and focused on bringing the boats in, but they didn’t even try to pull the children’s attention to the work and Heron, like a dozen children in the boats around her, stood right up on the prow of her family home to gaze at the wonder before her.

She really should have been helping, given that the entire boat was in the hands of her mother and three older brothers. Her father, the watercaller, was currently on a board trying to make contact with the local dolphins. Her brother Taim’s mentor, usually a deft hand on the sails, was belowdecks on the town centre with a broken leg and a nasty infection, and her brother Joda’s helphand was tending him. And her own mentor, Hanari, the timecaller, was belowdecks with a chronic case of being over eighty years old and having no intention of hobbling about in rocky weather until they were firmly beached, thank you very much.

Around and ahead of her, little boats pulled up to the glittering shore, and soon Heron’s boat was hitting sand too and she did help, jumping out to drag the boat up and anchor it. Anyone who’d anchored their homes rushed to help with the town buildings; by the time they had the large town centre secured, everything else was anchored and the watercaller was pulling in on his board, looking concerned.

“They’re not here,” he told Heron’s mother as he helped her double-check the anchor lines. “Either the talkers have all died, or the whole pod is off-course.”

Heron knew that the second of those options was the worst. If all the dolphins intelligent enough to communicate with humans died in a pod, the pod would eventually pick up a couple of new ones from someone else. If the whole pod died, their territory would be populated by new dolphins, in time. If the whole pod was absent, then that meant that there was something going on in the environment that made them decide to leave. Something that Heron’s own pod hadn’t noticed or predicted.

The storms had been unpredictable, lately. All the khemin knew it.

Hanari emerged from below the town square with slow, painful steps, and Heron rushed up to help kem down onto the glass shore. The old timecaller scanned the expanse of glittering baubles with a scowl.

“Same as always. I suppose that missing the last drop didn’t have us missing much.”

“I suppose not, Caller.” Heron danced a little on the balls of her feet. The other children were running off across the beach, shrieking with delight at the sight and collecting particularly pretty nodules of smooth glass as souvenirs. They, unlike her, didn’t have a duty here.

Hanari glanced at the other children, at her, and scowled harder. “You have the jars?”

“Yes, Caller.”

“Well, put them away! I’m old, I can’t be rushed. We’ll visit the halls in the afternoon, when I’ve had time to warm up. Go and play with your friends, or something! Stop hovering.”

“Yes, Caller!” Heron dashed away, barely managing to catch Hanari’s order that she pay attention to the shape of the glass under her feet, and let Hanari know if there’s a lot of unusually pointy pieces.

It was a bit hard to determine if anything is ‘unusually’ anything. Like all khemin pods, Heron’s moved on a schedule, and were supposed to visit the Shore of Glass once every six years. This place shouldn’t be a new sight. But the storms had cut them off last cycle, and they’d had to skip this shore, and it was a new sight.

It was one of their rare stops where there was almost no work for most of the pod to do. There was the normal work, of course, of daily life and boat maintenance, and Hanari and Heron’s labours were in need here, but most of the pod could relax. There was little beachcombing to be done on the Shore of Glass; the glass was of negligible value or environmental danger and wasn’t worth collecting as anything more than pretty baubles, and while the tides that brought it in would bring in other rubbish just as easily, the place was so often frequented and well picked over by so many pods that there was rarely much to collect. That’s what they’d been told, and they’d been told right – Heron could see nothing but sand and glass.

It seemed too short a time before she did, reluctantly, have to collect two large glass jars with metal lids from her belongings and go and find Hanari again. The old timecaller was sitting on a glass-free patch of sand, just close enough to the water for the waves to come up and kiss kes toes. Ke was very careful to keep the old leather-wrapped book in kes hands dry.

Heron helped the timecaller to kes feet and the pair headed out across the beach.

“You have your journal?” Hanari asked. Heron nodded and tapped her satchel. “Good,” Hanari said. “We were robbed of the last cycle by the storm, and I might not survive until the next. So pay attention, girl. The next time we are here, you might very well be doing this job as the timecaller.”

“No, Hanari, you have plenty of time to – ”

“Lies are unbecoming on a timecaller’s tongue. I am old and tough and the sea is far older and far tougher. So pay attention, and move quickly, while we still have light.” Ke opened kes journal to one of the late pages, near the very end, and started reading numbers, and Heron, knowing her duty, started gathering nodules of glass in different shapes and sizes at Hanari’s direction.

Normally they’d only have one jar to fill, but they’d missed their port six years ago and needed to catch up. So Heron first filled last cycle’s jar and then this cycle’s, the two jars distinguished from each other by the pattern of holes hammered into the lid of each, indicating the date span of the record and the pod that made it. The colours and sizes of the glass fragments filling them indicating the weather severity, the hazards and windfalls, the encounters with other people and wildlife that the pod had encountered on their long route, twelve years of records in two glass jars. Some of these stones recorded things that had happened before Heron was born, all noted down in the timecaller’s journal and kept safe from wind and water and the dangers of the sea all that time, in preparation for recording them here. Her hands trembled as she added them to the jar.

It was late afternoon when Hanari closed kes journal with a sharp snap and barked. “Alright! Let’s get to the Halls while there’s still light.”

The Shore of Glass was about as isolated as a little beach could be, made as it was of a large bank of sand at the base of a high cliff. The only access to the Shore was from the ocean, in boats that knew how to navigate the rocks and currents specific to the region; the land people didn’t wander casually here, it was too dangerous and difficult to reach. So the Halls of Record, tunnelled into the cliffs themselves, were protected more from weather and wildlife than any human intrusion. The security features were basic, and it was simple for Hanari to show Heron how to open the big vault door into the dry tunnel.

Hanari pulled a lever and electric lights strung across the roof came to life. Like most lighting the khemin used, the light was inconsistent, pouring from bulbs and strips of dozens of different designs and all in different states of preservation and repair. Most of them were light sources that were scrounged wholesale, but a few were home repaired or put together from scratch with salvaged materials. Two different kinds of tribute – a sacrifice of wealth, or a sacrifice of labour – to maintain this shared space.

Heron knew her duty, and kept an eye out for broken light sources in case her pod would need to replace them. But it was a little hard to pay too much attention to such things in this place, as she and her mentor strode down a passage lined with thousands of jars full of coloured fragments of glass.

The tunnels here had been carved into the rock by generations past, and built for the purpose of accommodating the jars, to the shelves that held them were stone, part of the cave itself. They were built like stairs, each shelf a bit higher and a bit further back in the rock than the last, so no jar sat above another jar and all of their lids, carefully marked with patterned holes, were visible. Actual stairs, clear of jars, were carved into the rock here and there to allow a closer look at the jars.

Most of them were very old, and so dusty that their contents were barely visible. Some looked like they’d been cleaned off at some point, presumably by a timecaller wanting to reference the information inside. One or two had been too damaged to do their job, and were replaced and clearly marked as such, so that anybody checking them would be aware of the potential for error and double-check anything with a timecaller’s journal to verify the contents if they had the chance.

The tunnel was long, very long, and Heron knew that it wasn’t the only one of its kind here. The Halls of Record grew regularly as new space was needed for new records. Heron wondered, but didn’t dare ask, what would happen when they ran out of cliffside. Would they keep digging new tunnels until there wasn’t enough rock to stay stable and they began to collapse, like an animal that grows too large and dies under its own weight? Would they start destroying old records, digesting them for space and raw materials to build the new? Would they simply move somewhere else? Perhaps they would run out of glass before running out of tunnelling space. How quickly did new glass collect on the shore and wear down? It couldn’t be too quickly, or there would be more wreckage coming in with it. They must be using the glass faster than it was arriving, between all the pods that came here, all the records they made. Right?

These questions all had answers, Heron knew. She felt stupid for never considering them until now.

“The scholars come, sometimes, from the dirt people,” Hanari said, as if reading Heron’s thoughts, “and copy our records into theirs and put them in their big computers, in case anybody else in the world needs to know the things we see. And our records are here in the Shore of Glass and in Ironspire, where you helped me last year, and also in the Bonefield and in the Library at the Maw, and on the tongues and in the notebooks of timecallers in khemin pods the world over and in the records of the Arboreans, our cousins of the weed, who get them from the pods that move into deeper ocean, and use them for deciding how to grow their forests. There is nothing fragile in these jars, nothing that can die while those other places exist.” Ke brushed a knobbly finger across a jar, indicating a coin buried in the glass. “See here? Two years ago, this pod brought a scholar from the land with them, to update their records. In case our eyes saw what their machines cannot, I suppose.”

Two years ago. They’d reached the end of the records. They’d gone past the point six years ago, where Heron should deposit the first jar, and Hanari hadn’t said anything. Ke wanted to see, she realised, whether Heron knew what she was doing. Whether she could do it without kem.

Cheeks burning, Heron dashed back to put the first jar in its proper place. A piece of history standing amongst history. Her first contribution to this record. Not the last. She looked up to see Hanari watching her with a sort of gentle pride, a tiny smile on the old timecaller’s lips. Hanari immediately scowled again and realising ke was being watched.

Heron put the second jar in place, not looking at Hanari this time. She knew the jars were in the right place when Hanari didn’t correct her.

Then Heron pulled out her journal, and looked at Hanari, and Hanari nodded expectantly, and Heron began to record.

The oldest records, she had already copied from Hanari’s journal; Heron was only expected to read and record the past century of records from the jars. Proof that she could read them accurately. Hanari would check them against kes own records later, and know that kes duty would be in safe hands once ke went to the waves. As Heron worked, she built the map in her head, cross-referencing dates and following the different pod routes and seeing where they had encountered the same conditions and the same places, mapping the rates of change of things, seeing where pods had made good time or bad time between their destinations. The information was more detailed in the Library at the Maw, but a really good timecaller could map the ocean from just these Halls, and Heron was determined to be a really good timecaller.

She picked up some things. Another pod had found some aluminium wreckage that hers had missed when they’d salvaged that satellite dropped near the Maw. That had been a good satellite; part of its casing had repaired her own home’s hull and some particularly decorative wires from it were in gather-rings in her brother’s hair. A few other pods had recorded some kind of radioactive runoff from a Chinese river system into the ocean, probably a result of the latest war; that fed into the currents that might affect the local dolphins, if their territory was large enough, so that might be why they were absent; not death, not a storm, just avoiding a pollutant. Her father would be pleased to hear that. The area was off her pod’s route; one of the deeper ocean pods that moved through there would pick up an algae or coral or something from the Arboreans to deal with it. Not their problem.

She finished, and Hanari got up, stretched, and headed for the exit without a word. They’d almost left the Hall when ke said, apropos of nothing, “Be wary in putting too much value in your records, girl. Records are a tool to inform the future, not a shackle to shape it, you understand? Permanence is for the dirt scholars and their archives.  We can’t let the past stop us from growing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the khemin have a duty to keep the world healthy, not to chain her to a set shape. That’s the mistake the pre-Neocambrians made. Do you know about the pre-Neocambrians?”

Heron cocked her head. She knew the word, of course. “The people who came before the khemin existed.”

“Before a lot of things existed. Before us, before the Arboreae or the space elevators, before the – well, not before the Maw, they knew about the Maw, but nobody lived there. Before we had any real presence in the ocean or in space. Most pre-Neocambrians lived on land, and all of them, even the ones who didn’t live there, were dirt people. Their world was dying around them, so they thought.”

Heron nodded, although not with much understanding. The world, after all, hadn’t died.

“They were married to a past that defined change as death. The earth was heating, the waters rising, plants and animals dying off at a truly alarming rate, and they were too stubborn to do anything but stand in the way and hope to reverse it. Change was death, new species were contamination of a perfect past; can you imagine what such people would think of the Arboreae? Or of the dolphins?”

“They didn’t have dolphins back then?”

“Oh, they had dolphins. Stupid dolphins. Barely able to communicate with people, certainly no aptitude for environmental protection. It’s engineering that allows your father to talk to our dolphins, a few extra genes of human creation dropped into their pool. Before the Neocambrian age, nobody would stand for that. You understand? Your world is a death of theirs. Theirs is a death of one before. And things move on and on, and these records tell us what happened to guide us to a good tomorrow, but it doesn’t always have to be the same tomorrow. You understand? The world will change around you, girl. And your job is to honour the future, not the past. The past is merely your servant. The future is your master. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“Good girl.” Hanari led the way back outside, into the fading light. The cliff behind them blocked the sunset, leaving the beach somewhat dark and not completely safe to navigate for the old timecaller, Heron worried, but Hanari’s feet were sure and ke picked up a specific piece of glass from the ground without faltering, so clearly ke could see just fine. Ke handed it to Heron. “What does this tell you?”

She turned it over in her fingers. “It’s a piece of glass. Green… feels like it’s probably bottle glass. But it’s not very smooth. It’s more uneven than a lot of pieces. With pointy bits.”

“Which means?”

“It hasn’t been tossed by the waves as much as the other pieces. It’s new.”

The pair walked forward, onto a part of the beach still in sunlight, where children were still trying to enjoy themselves before it got cold and dark enough to force them back onto the boats. Hanari indicated the sand at large. “Tell me what you see.”

Heron frowned and walked along the beach, looking for glass like the piece she was holding. After several minutes, the went back to Hanari. “There are some pieces like this, here and there. But most of the glass is smooth. Really smooth. There’s not much glass in between the two states.”

“Which tells you?”

“A lot of very old glass, a little bit of pretty new glass, and no glass from the time between.” She turned the piece over in her hands. “Something changed, to bring more glass in. Something in the currents, or maybe in the availability of glass. The storm that cut us off six years ago was unexpected, too. And the dolphins… I thought it might be the thing in China that sent them away, but is there a big change? The currents we use are the same; the dolphins would have said otherwise, right? What’s happening, timecaller?”

“Things are changing,” Hanari confirmed. “On this beach, and elsewhere. I will be very interested to see the condition of the Maw next year, if I live to make it there. And I will be interested in your conclusions about it, too.” Ke ruffled Heron’s dreadlocks, setting her gather-rings clinking. “And then we will know what the future will be, and what we can do about it. Little timecaller.” And ke marched off towards the boats, glaring at the sand.

Heron pocketed the piece of glass. It would make a good souvenir. A moment later, she pocketed a second, smooth piece, for comparison.

Change, huh?

Well, the world had changed before. The ocean was a place of constant flux. If change came, her pod would weather it.

They always had before.