Over the side, by the lantern light, needle-thin fish with green fins shot through the water. More starfish. A couple of delicate red shrimp. It wasn’t very deep; he could see the silver-gold flash of the bottom. The unreal translucent light confounded him. A glimpse of a kind of peace. Fought against relaxing. Was still in danger.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “What does this have to do with Duncan Shriek?”
“Eat something,” she said. “Drink something.”
Sandwiches and a flask by his feet. He unwrapped a sandwich. Chicken and egg. Ordinary. Normal. Tasted good. The flask had a refreshing liquor in it. It warmed him as it spread through his body.
“And while you eat, listen to me. Don’t talk. Just listen…”
* * *
[She said:] For a moment, imagine everything from the gray caps’ point of view, John Finch. James Scott Crossley.
In the beginning. Once upon a time. A small group of you became separated from your world while on an expedition. In a word, lost. A problem or mistake in the doors between places. Suddenly there are hundreds or thousands of doors between you and home. Suddenly you’re adrift. You find yourselves washed up on an alien shore, along the banks of a strange and magnificent river. You can’t find your way back to where you came from, even though at first all you do is try. And try and try.
After a while of trying and failing, you decide to settle down where you are, establish a colony that we will later call “Cinsorium.” It’s a better place for you than other choices for exile. You live a long time but procreate slowly so the isolation is good. No competition. No real threats. You create buildings that remind you of home. No corners. All circles. You bend the local fungus to your will, because you’re spore-based and everything you do is based on this fact. Plenty of raw material to use in and around Cinsorium.
But, still, you’re always looking for a way back, a way out. You might even have been close at one point—right before Cappan Manzikert sails upriver with his brigands. Because as soon as Manzikert appears, it’s back to square one for you. Even less than square one. He destroys your colony, drives you underground. He burns your records, all of the information in your library. Not just the clues you’ve gathered of how to get home, but your whole knowledge base. Essential things.
Ironic, really, Finch. Because Manzikert’s a barbarian. Yet as far as I can tell, he saved us all with that one brutal act. Something even Duncan Shriek didn’t understand.
So you stay underground to rebuild. You’re cautious, you’re far from home, and there aren’t very many of you. Will never be very many of you, no matter what you do. You let the people above become comfortable. You lie low, so to speak.
Then you try again. At last. And because you’re cautious you build it underground. A door. A machine.
But the door doesn’t work. Something goes wrong. Who knows what? It could’ve been anything. Maybe it’s the wrong location. Maybe it was always a long shot. Many of your own people are killed. And everyone in Ambergris disappears, except the ones in the fishing fleet. Either dead or taken elsewhere. Scattered across worlds and time. Unable to get back. (Think about that, Finch—somewhere out there, there must be a colony or two of Ambergrisians who survived. Can you imagine what they might be like now, after so long? Stranded. Vague tales of another place, one crueler, kinder, more hospitable, less so.)
Maybe it’s then that you believe, this is the end. We’re doomed to die out here, in this backwater. We’ll never be found. But, still, you’re patient. You’re clever. You’re hard working. You spend a long time learning from your mistakes. Sometimes you venture out during Festival nights. You do experiments related to your goal. You even kidnap humans, use them as test subjects. Always trying to convey a sense of dread in those who live aboveground, always trying to make yourself larger in their minds—like a wild cat that puffs itself up in front of an enemy.
When the opportunity comes, it’s because Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe have exhausted themselves against each other—sometimes even using weapons you provided to them—and the city lies in ruins. You take a huge gamble. Why a gamble? Because there still aren’t enough of you, not compared to the human population.
You pour all of your resources into the Rising. You’re hard to kill, but you can’t possibly hold a whole city for long against an armed resistance, not if it means a true occupation. But you don’t need it to last for long. You just need to create the impression of overwhelming force.
And it works. You Rise. You use your reengineering skills and knowledge of the underground to flood the city. You use your spores like a kind of diversion, a magic show. Yes, you can kill people, but not all of them, and not as fast as the enemy thinks. Besides, fear is even more useful to you—it’s how your agents have worked throughout Ambergrisian history. Preying on the imaginations of a people raised to fear you. (Often for good reason.)
You force the combined Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe army arrayed against you to fight on your terms, on your turf. You even leave an escape route so that no one needs to fight to survive. They can just flee.
Again, it works. The resistance retreats—and when they’re far enough away, in one more spasm of energy and expertise, you cast the HFZ over your enemy, like a net, and you disperse them across the doors. Thus ending effective armed resistance, and creating more fear.
For the actual occupation, you are clever and resourceful. You enlist the remaining population to police itself, to govern itself—as much as it is able. When the situation is stable except for isolated pockets of unrest, you start to build your final attempt at a door. A way home. Two towers, which aren’t really towers but a kind of complex gateway. Situated precisely where you need them to be for success.
Meanwhile, you stall. You go through the motions. You provide electricity, food, drugs on the one hand. Camps, the Partials, and repression on the other. You don’t need to control territory in the normal way. You don’t see the city from the sky looking down, like humans. You see it from the underground looking up. And you control the underground. That’s your homeland away from home. You can choose what you hold on to aboveground and what you don’t. So long as you rule everything below. So long as you can block access to whatever you like.
You leave the burnt-out tanks on the streets, don’t clean up the HFZ not as a warning to the human population, but because you don’t have the personnel to do that and keep working on the towers, too. And because, on some level, you don’t really care about any of it. Not any of it. Especially not governing. All you care about are the two towers.
And do you know why? Because we might have called it a door all this time. “A window. A machine.” But it’s more complex than that. It’s not just a door. It’s a beacon. Because, you see, Finch, they don’t need a huge door if they’ve found a way home. Not according to our intelligence. No, they only need a door this big if they’re planning to use it to bring more over here. To Ambergris. To the world.
The Silence? All of what Duncan Shriek said in those old books—it’s true. Except he was wrong about this one thing. They’ve found they like it here. They want to stay. Permanently. In numbers.
Now, is that exactly what happened, and how it happened? No, probably not, because we can’t actually imagine how they think, or what they think about. And it might not even be a door yet. It might just be a beacon. If they haven’t found their home yet.