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tanadrin · 6 years ago

Text

Reordberend

(part 15 of ?; start; previous; next)

“What do you believe in?”

Leofe had asked the question in a friendly enough way, a few days later when they were sitting together for the midday meal. Now even at noon the sky was no more than twilight, a heartwrenchingly clear gradient of color from dark to light in the direction of the hidden sun, the far side studded with stars. The Antarctic air was impossibly clear, a continent-sized whorl of dry winds cut off from the rest of the world by the circumpolar current. Katherine simply could not get used to it.

What had they been talking about? The sky, the weather, hopes for tomorrow. And Katherine had mentioned her family, how far from home she was. Somehow that had segued into faith. She still wasn’t sure what, exactly, the Dry Valleys People believed in. Then Leofe had asked her the question, and she found herself getting defensive. She remembered her parents, her teachers, the people who pressed her on what she really believed as an adolescent. She remembered the alienation she felt when she realized she wasn’t the same as the people she grew up with. That her desire to grow beyond the confines of the world as they had presented it to them meant that she would have to go. And in the going there would be no returning.

“It’s complicated,” was all she said at the time. But the question nagged at her. She didn’t know if she could have answered it in English, let alone in the tongue of the Valleys. But there was an answer. A hard, bright answer she felt within her, warming her during the cold and starry nights.

What did the people of the Valleys believe in? Well, that was a tough one. When she had first found the gospel-book she thought she knew. A peculiar people, setting out for desolate shores, carrying religious artifacts and ancient tongues with them--traditionalists, of a kind. After all, wasn’t that what her people had been? Secessionists, as politely called them back in civilization. Those who decided that the great ecumenical riot of culture and technology and fashion and whatnot wasn’t for them. There were lots of different kinds of secessionists, not just traditionalists. New religious movements, utopians of all stripes, ultra-individualists and ultra-collectivists, artists with ideas that couldn’t be realized safely or legally in any existing top-level jurisdiction, trillionaires who thought the law shouldn’t apply to them. The pattern was familiar: you found a big pile of money somewhere, either from your followers or from a rich patron, you bought some land, you renounced your basic and you got almost unlimited sovereignty over it in return.

But that still left some questions. Like the age of the Valleys settlements, for one. If the local chronology was correct, they were almost a hundred and fifty years old, older than any other settlement in Antarctica. That meant they weren’t technically secessionists, because there was nothing here to secede from a century and a half ago. A century and a half ago, the Antarctic coast had been even colder and the ice-free portion of the Valleys even smaller. The timeline made sense in other ways--that was after the abrogation of the Antarctic Treaties, when most of the countries that used to fund scientific outposts along the coasts had pulled back in the wake of the Collapse. Before the big multinationals moved into the Peninsula a generation later. You could’ve gotten a couple hundred people to the Dry Valleys unnoticed, maybe.

When she could, Katherine tried to get a better look at their books again. Their script presented difficulties for her. On more than one occasion, she found herself muttering irritably at an imagined picture of Dr. Wright. He could have warned her, of course; he could have said, “the Dry Valleys People speak Anglo-Saxon English; here’s a list of books to take with you.” She still would have lost them in the shipwreck, but maybe she would have remembered enough from them to get started. Heck, maybe some enterprising nerd had created a module for the language. Unlikely--a good module took a shitload of funding and years of work--but not impossible.

She had asked Dr. Gordon about John, after the meeting at the conference. If this guy was so famous, how come she’d never heard of him? Dr. Gordon had sighed, sighed in the way that usually indicated byzantine university politics, but eventually she’d given up the story.

“This was all well before my time, you have to understand,” she said. “I’m getting this secondhand and thirdhand from people who were around then, and some of this is basically School of Humanities mythology at this point. But the way I understand it, Dr. Wright was the last holdout of the old English department.

“Two hundred years ago, the School of English was one of the jewels in the crown of this university. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was still doing pretty well for itself, but, well, as much as we hate to admit it to ourselves, academia is subject to trends and fashions just like the rest of the world. And despite trying to keep up with the times, most of the things they studied were hopelessly outdated. Even back then, nobody took nonsense like postmodernism or critical theory seriously anymore. A lot of the the really interesting work was starting to get usurped by departments with more rigorous methods. The Digital Humanities school was just taking off, and there was lots of interesting work going on on the other side of campus with 20th century novelists and AI, but the English faculty stuck to its old methods. Close reading, wading through dense tomes of theory, writing long analytical essays. Things that, for very good reason, we don’t make students do anymore. The university naturally had an aversion to producing graduates who were unemployable as anything other than English professors; it felt that was unfair to its students. But the more they tried to pressure the English department to update its methods, the more recalcitrant the faculty became.

“By the time Dr. Wright was approaching retirement age, they were back to teaching dead languages. You couldn’t understand the whole history of English literature, they argued, without a grounding in foundational stuff. And that foundational stuff, that ancient British literature, well, you couldn’t understand that without the context of, oh, I don’t know, whatever the Vikings spoke I suppose. Dr. Wright was by all accounts an extremely smart person. He’d done some groundbreaking work in Austronesian and South American languages as a younger man, a real giant in his field. But eventually, for reasons nobody quite understood, he’d pivoted away from the frontiers of his field--not a big field to begin with, mind you--and retreated to ground as well trodden as, well, basic arithmetic. He moved to the English department and was teaching students thousand-year-old poetry. He said it was a natural extension of his earlier work, and the university itself was happy enough to keep someone with his stature on its faculty, but to be honest most people saw him as nothing more than a useless eccentric. Rather like the whole department.

“Well, eventually the decision was made to axe their funding. There were maybe four undergraduates left to the whole department, so this wasn’t exactly a wrench, but Dr. Wright proved a sticking point. He had tenure--it’s a system that doesn’t exist anymore, but it made him basically unfireable. He had no students, and no scheduled classes, and no funding, and no departmental library anymore, but he had a right to an office, and, well. He wouldn’t go. He came in every day just the same. And twice a week, he would find an empty lecture hall, and, he’d just… lecture to anybody who showed up. And a few people did. Some were genuinely curious. Some thought it had novelty value. I guess some were lost freshers. But he kept on that way for two or three years. It annoyed the hell out of the administration. It annoyed them so much they delayed an update to the rules on retirement for six months, just so Dr. Wright hit the mandatory retirement age and got booted out. The next semester, they abolished fixed retirrment ages altogether. Of course, they didn’t offer him his job back. The official story was that he was a beloved senior member of the faculty, and he kept his dining privileges and still got invited to all the university functions where they trot out the honored former members of staff. But after that he basically disappeared. No one has seen him on campus--or anywhere in Dublin, for that matter--since.”

So at first Katherine wondered if this wasn’t Dr. Wright’s cruel joke, a way to get back at the people who pissed him off all those years ago. Let’s send the grad student out into the wastelands without any linguistic advantage. But the longer she thought about it, the more she wondered if she wasn’t being unfair.

Because what would she have said, if Dr. Wright had come up to her at that conference and said, “Oh, I hear you’re going to visit Antarctica. Here’s a book on Old English, and a copy of the Gospels, you’ll need both.” Would she have come here if she thought these were just secessionists with a penchant for historical reenactment? Probably not.

And the fact of the matter was, they weren’t secessionists. Well, not secessionists like Katherine had ever read about. The thing about being a secessionist, whether reactionary or utopian, was that no matter how much you pretended you were doing something Different, no matter how much you tried to Cut Yourself Off from the rest of the world, everything you did, everything you professed, everything you built, existed as a counterargument to that world. The rest of the world was a great shadow hanging over your whole existence, an argument which you were trying to refute. No secessionist movement on record had lasted in its original form more than two generations, because either you eventually got tired of making that argument, an argument your children would never understand for lack of context, and you inevitably rejoined the world (though perhaps with a higher-than-average local incidence of fringe political beliefs), or the whole thing fell apart in dramatic fashion due to infighting, and somebody appealed for the special status of the enclave to be revoked.

Neither had happened here. The culture of the Valleys appeared to be stable. They were more like an ancient uncontacted people, uncurious about the outside world and existing on their own terms, than those who scrupulously attempted to refute it. They spoke a dead language, but on closer examination, there the resemblance to historical reenactors ceased. The climate was wrong--they lived more like a circumpolar people, because, well, they were. But Katherine noticed they weren’t dogmatic about their refusal of technology. They relied on genegineered bryoculture--the mosses thrived in the summertime, provided you supplemented them with a little water, and kept them from freezing. They hoarded small pieces of technology they scavenged from the wastes, laser firestarters and sonic knife sharpeners, and they used these to augment their own cottage industry.

But they were sharply conservative in other ways. They did not trade. They did not explore, beyond their own well-trodden region of Victoria Land. Their society was full of symbolism and ritual and verbal formulas, their conversations looping back and forth in ways that made Katherine suspect every one had occurred a thousand times, and was expected to occur a thousand times again. They were, in short, static. Stasis was, Katherine believed, the ultimate illusion for any society. Nothing lasts forever; eventually, you change or you die. Perhaps the Dry Valleys People knew this. Perhaps, if the world tried to force them to change, they would simply die. The idea made Katherine rather sick, but it would not be the first time in history that that had happened.

* * *

And what did they believe in, when you tried to peel all this back, and expose their heart? Leofe was cagey when Katherine asked her. Leofric was laconic enough to make his sister look positively effusive by contrast. The question died on her lips when she tried to ask some of the older men and women; they responded to the question as a mountain might answer a soft breeze. Which is to say they ignored her completely. They carried with them the tokens of a lost Christianity, but these didn’t seem to be related to their core beliefs. On the very rare occasions when they waxed metaphysical, Katherine heard them speak of the garsecg, the spear-sea, the fearsome cold ocean that girdled their world. Yet on their lips the word had deep resonances “ocean” never did; it was for them the road of death, beyond which all their foremothers and forefathers dwelt; and it was the road of their beginning, over which they had come for their deliverance. And it was the outer darkness, the darkness of the sky and the long Antarctic night, and the blackness behind the stars; and the dreamless sleep.

And even more rarely, in voices so quiet Katherine could not be sure of what they said, they spoke of dragons, the dragons that lived high on the ice, whose voice was thunder and in whose belly lived a terrible fire.

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