What good would fear do him now? Or rage?
“No good at all,” he said with a stiff voice, turning his back to the sun.
The station was a strangely quiet place. The only other worms were small or plainly ill, and even those specimens were pointed west, aimed at the darkness, as if waiting for the order to flee. Besides caretakers, the only human workers were soldiers. Older men, mostly. Disciplined and probably without families—exactly the sort of people to be trusted in the worst of times. Two soldiers stood farther up the worm, guarding the sphincter leading into the stomach. Mockmen waited in the darkness. Each creature had its owner’s name tattooed on its forearms and back. Humans had to come forward to claim what was theirs, and even then, the soldiers questioned them with suspicious voices—as if somebody might try to steal one of these creatures now.
The mysterious young woman was standing with the other passengers, her book in one arm, eyes pointed in the general direction of the unloading.
“Which is yours?” Jopale asked.
She didn’t seem to hear the question. Then he realized that her gaze reached past the mockmen, bright tan eyes staring at the night lands, her mind probably traveling on to her destination.
“Good Mountain, is it?” Jopale asked.
“I’m sorry, no.” She was answering his first question, smiling in his general direction. “I don’t own any of these creatures.”
Jopale had brought a mockman from home, to help with his bags and his life, as well as giving him this ready excuse to stand where he was, chatting with this young woman.
With a quiet, gentlemanly voice, he offered his name.
She nodded and said, “Yes. Good Mountain.”
They had found a pattern. He would ask some little question, and she would answer his former question.
“The word ‘mountain’,” he said. “Do you know what it means?”
She smiled now, glancing at his face. “Do you?”
He allowed himself the pleasure of a wise nod. “It is an ancient word,” he answered. “The oldest texts employ it. But even by then, the word had fallen into a rotten disuse.”
“Really?”
“We have words for ridges and hills. With great clarity, we can describe the color and quality of any ground. But from what we can determine, using our oldest sources, ‘mountain’ implies a titanic uplifting of something much harder than any wood. Harder and more durable, and a true mountain rises high enough to puncture the sky. At least according to some expert interpretations.”
She laughed, very softly. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“That’s why they picked the name,” she explained.
Jopale didn’t understand, and his expression must have said as much.
“Of course, there’s no actual mountain there,” she admitted. “It’s just a flat plain shoved high by a set of faults and buoyant substrates. But there was a time, long ago, when the Continent pushed in from every side, and an entire island was buried. Buried and carried a long ways under the sea.”
The woman liked to explain things. Was she a teacher?
“Interesting,” Jopale offered, though he wasn’t convinced that it was.
“That island is like a mountain in reverse, you see. It extends a long ways below the waterline. Like a fist sticking out from the bottom of the Continent, reaching deeper into our ocean than any other feature we know of.”
“I see,” he muttered.
But why she would call it, “Our ocean”? How many oceans were there?
“That’s why the science station was built there,” she explained. “‘A good mountain to do research.’ That what my colleagues used to joke.”
“What kind of research?” he asked.
“Land distortions and water cycles, mostly. And various experts who work with that submerged ground.”
He said, “Really?” with a false enthusiasm.
The woman nodded, returning to her distant stare.
“Is that your specialty?” he asked, trying to read the binding of her book. “Prehistoric islands?”
“Oh, no.” She passed the heavy book to her other arm.
“Then what do you do?”
It was an exceptionally reasonable question, but she was a peculiar creature. Smiling as if nothing had ever been funnier, she said, “Do-ane.” She wasn’t quite looking at his face, telling him, “That is my name.”
He didn’t have a ready response.
“You told me yours. I assumed you wanted to know mine.”
“Thank you,” Jopale muttered.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t say anything else.”
He nodded and shrugged. And then his mockman emerged from the stomach: A mature female with big blue eyes riding high on her broad stoic face. Jopale had recently purchased her from a cousin, replacing the mockmen he had lost when the valley flooded. For her species, she was smart and adaptable. By any standard, she was loyal, and in countless domestic tasks, she was helpful. And like every passenger from the worm’s stomach, she smelled of acid and other unpleasant secretions. But at least this creature didn’t want to play word games, or dance silly secrets before his eyes.
Jopale spoke to one of the soldiers, proving his ownership to everyone’s satisfaction.
“My bags,” he ordered.
The creature snatched each by its rope handle.
“This way,” he said. Then with a minimal nod, he excused himself from Do-ane, pushing through the station, searching for some place where the noble refugee might eat a fit meal.
Dining halls next to worm stations were rarely elegant. World’s Edge was an exception: Using the local wood, artisans had carved long blocks into a series of omega-shaped beams, each a little different from the others, all linked like ribs to form a single long room. Woven gyre-tree branches created a porous roof. Heavy planks had been bleached white and laid out for a floor, each fastened to the foundation with solid pins made of dense black knot-wood. The tables and chairs were brightly colored, orange and gold predominating, everything made from slick new plastics—one of those expensive programs underwritten by some well-meaning government agency, public moneys helping lock away a few breaths of methane into this more permanent form. The usual indoor epiphytes clung to the overhead beams—vigorous plants with dark leaves that thrived in the artificial light, their finger-like roots drinking nothing but the travelers’ nervous breathing. Jopale noticed a familiar figure planted at one end of a busy table, accompanied by two mockmen that sat backwards on turned-around chairs, eating their rations off their laps—a common custom in many places.
“May I join you?” asked Jopale.
“Please.” The man was tall even when he was sitting, and unlike practically everyone else in the place, he wasn’t eating. His old map was opened up before him, and with long fingers and sharpened nails, he measured and remeasured the distances between here and Port of Krauss.
Jopale set down his platter and handed his mockman two fresh rations of syrup-and-roach. The big female settled on the floor, legs crossed, hands and mind focused on the screw-style lids on both wooden jars.
Unsure what to say, Jopale said nothing. But silence proved uncomfortable, which was why he eventually picked the most obvious topic. “So why are you going to Port of Krauss?”
The thin man glanced up for a moment, apparently startled.
“You are going there, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry then,” said Jopale. “I just assumed—”