The Realms of Water by Robert Reed

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) is one of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words. Story link.