A Deepness in the Sky

There comes a time when a hundred stars can be seen in the same sky as the noonday sun. And then a thousand stars, and finally the sun gets no dimmer...and the Dark has truly arrived. The larger plants have long since died, the powder of their spores is hidden deep beneath the snows. The lower animals have passed the same way. Scum mottles the lee of snowbanks, and an occasional glow flows around exposed carcasses: the spirits of the dead, classical observers wrote; a last bacterial scavenging, scientists of later eras discovered. Yet there are still living people on the surface. Some are the massacred, prevented by stronger tribes (or stronger nations) from entering deep sanctuary. Others are the victims of floods or earthquakes, whose ancestral deepnesses have been destroyed. In olden times, there was only one way to learn what the Dark might really be: stranded topside, you might attain tenuous immortality by writing what you saw and saving the story so securely that it survived the fires of the New Sun. And occasionally one of these topsiders survived more than a year or two into the Dark, either by extraordinary circumstance or by clever planning and the desire to see into the heart of the Dark. One philosopher survived so long that his last scrawl was taken for insanity or metaphor by those who found his words cut into stone above their deepness: "and the dry air is turning to frost."

On one thing the propagandists of both Crown and Tiefstadt agreed. This Dark would be different from all that had gone before. This Dark was the first to be directly assaulted by science in the service of war. While their millions of citizens retreated to the still pools of a thousand deepnesses, the armies of both sides continued to fight. Often the fighting was in open trenches, warmed by steamer fires. But the great differences were underground, in the digging of tunnels that swept deep beneath the front lines of either side. Where these intersected, fierce battles of machine guns and poison gas were fought. Where intersection did not occur, the tunnels continued through the chalky rock of the Eastern Front, yard by yard, days on days, long after all fighting on the surface had ended.

Five years after the Dark began, only a technical elite, perhaps ten thousand on the Crown side, still prosecuted the campaign below the East. Even at their depths, the temperatures were far below freezing. Fresh air was circulated through the occupied tunnels, by foram-burning fans. The last of the air holes would ice over soon.

"We haven't heard any Tiefstadter activity for nearly ten days. Digger Command hasn't stopped congratulating itself." General Greenval popped an aromatique into his maw and crunched loudly; the chief of Accord Intelligence had never been known for great diplomacy, and he had become perceptibly more crotchety over the last days. He was an old cobber, and though the conditions at Lands Command might be the most benign left anywhere in the world, even they were entering an extreme phase. In the bunkers next to the Royal Deepness, perhaps fifty people were still conscious. Every hour, the air seemed to become a little more stale. Greenval had given up his stately library more than a year ago. Now his office consisted of a twenty-by-ten-by-four-foot slot in the dead space above the dormitory. The walls of the little room were covered with maps, the table with reams of teletype reports from landlines. Wireless communication had reached final failure some seventy days earlier. During the year before that the Crown's radiomen had experimented with more and more powerful transmitters, and there had been some hope that they would have wireless right up to the end. But no, all that was left was telegraphy and line-of-sight radio. Greenval looked at his visitor, certainly the last to Lands Command for more than two hundred years. "So, Colonel Smith, you just got back from the East. Why don't I hear any huzzahs from yourself? We've outlasted the enemy."

Victory Smith's attention had been caught by the General's periscope. It was the reason Greenval had stuck his cubbyhole up here—a last view upon the world. Royal Falls had stilled more than two years ago. She could see all the way up the valley. A dark land, covered now with an eldritch frost that formed endlessly on rock and ice alike. Carbon dioxide, leaching out of the atmosphere.But Sherkaner will see a world far colder than this.

"Colonel?"

Smith stepped back from the periscope. "Sorry, sir....I admire the Diggers with all my heart."At least the troops who are actually doing thedigging. She had been in their field deepnesses. "But it's been days since they could reach any enemy positions. Less than half will be in fighting form after the Dark. I'm afraid that Digger Command guessed the stand-down point wrong."