The Hearthlands

SURVEY The Hearthlands

GG-D6 opens onto a temperate wilderness of forest, river, and grassland under an ordinary, breathable sky — the first destination a soldier has stepped into and simply been able to breathe. It is peopled, and the people are the reason the analysts no longer sleep.

The inhabitants are unmistakably hominin but not human: broad, heavy-browed, deep-chested, in hide and woven fibre, with the patient faces our own line lost in the Pleistocene. They live in three tribes our team came to know by the names the people gave, rendered as best we could — the Aun, hearth-keepers and holders of the lore; the Sevri, who follow the herds and read the stars; and the Karro, who work stone, bone, and a little cold-hammered copper. Their engineering stops there. Their knowledge does not.

They are aware of the gate network — not dimly or mythically, but operationally. They call the apertures the Hollow Ways, speak of them as a plain feature of the world, like rivers or seasons, name doors we have never found, and warned our team off the Underhold by its true character — "the iron country, the hungry door" — before we had said a word about the Drûl. An Aun loremother the team came to call Bural drew the bearing-and-lock of GG-1 from memory, correctly, and asked, gently, why we had come through "the soldiers' door" and not "the quiet one."

What stopped the survey cold was the wall. In a deep, dry cave the Aun keep as a record, generations of ochre and charcoal have built one enormous diagram: nodes — the doors — joined by lines into a web. At arm's length it reads as a star-chart. Read whole, it is not one sky. The nodes cluster, and the clusters cluster, and the clusters of clusters drift apart in the unmistakable shape of galaxies — many of them, threaded together by the Hollow Ways, with our own door a single mark near one trailing edge. These people, with fire and ochre, hold a map of a gate network that spans galaxies, and have kept it, by the soot-layers, for a very long time.

We did not discover the gates. On the evidence of that wall we are the latest to arrive — through the soldiers' door, at the edge of someone else's map.