Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Saturday sang as she dug. “Owee, owee, owee, janga, janga.” The words made no sense, but her voice was tuneful and happy sounding. Jeopardy contented himself with grunting occasionally. When Willum R., Deal, and Gotoit came up the slope to join them, each with spade, Deal and Gotoit joined Saturday’s psalmody, and Willum R. grunted along with Jeopardy. Neither of them had enough sense of music to notice that the grunts were rhythmic, that they punctuated the song the others sang, that the whole was greater than its parts.

  Six cats appeared out of the surrounding grasses and sat in a circle beyond the piled earth, waiting curiously. The trench slowly deepened. The deeper it became, the slower the children dug, until they were moving in a gesture ballet full of long pauses. First Willum R., then Deal, then Gotoit got out of the trench and watched while Jep and Saturday went on uncovering, quarter inch by quarter inch.

  “Here,” said Gotoit, bending forward to offer Saturday a paint brush. “You’ll need this.”

  Saturday did need it. Of course, Gotoit had brought it, because Gotoit’s mother was a hobby artist and the brush was right there where Gotoit could lay hands on it. Saturday leaned down and began to brush the soil away. She had come to a thick, felty mass, like a mattress. “Knife,” she said.

  Willum R. handed Jep his knife, a very sharp one. Willum R. had spent most of the previous evening sharpening it. Jep slipped the knife into the felty mass and began to cut it, a long cut, from the head of the trench to the bottom. Then he made cross cuts, from side to side, a dozen of them. Finally, he cut fifteen palm-sized pieces of the mat loose and handed them one-by-one to Saturday, who put each into a film bag, sealed the bag, and put it into her knapsack.

  “Now,” said Gotoit.

  Saturday and Jeopardy laid the fibrous mat back at either side. Beneath it was … something. Dark. Hard. Faintly sparkling. As big as a grown man, or bigger.

  “We can’t raise it,” said Gotoit.

  “Wait,” said Jep. “It’s all right.”

  “Anybody got anything to eat?” asked Saturday.

  “We do,” someone hollered. The diggers hadn’t noticed Sabby Quillow and the Tillan kids coming through the trees. Thash and Thurby had brought fried poultry-bird, salad, and fresh bread, and Sabby had brought fruit.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Thurby from his seat on the dirt pile, his mouth full of crisp bird.

  “We can’t raise it,” said Saturday. “We got it uncovered all right, but we can’t raise it.”

  “How much do you think it weighs?”

  “A lot,” said Jep. “As much as four men, maybe more.”

  They had almost finished eating when the men came through the willows: Sam Girat and Jebedo Quillow and the two other Quillow uncles, Quashel and Quambone, as well as Thash and Thurby’s uncle, Tharsh Titian. A little later, the three Wilm uncles showed up: Asia, Australia, and Madagascar. Eight of the strongest men in Settlement One, all nodding to the kids and looking into the hole to see what was lying there.

  “Where does it go?” asked Sam, totally unsurprised. Last night Theseus had told him about this. He couldn’t quite remember the conversation, but he recalled Theseus had mentioned he’d be needed to help.

  Saturday pointed. To the rebuilt temple, of course.

  The men had brought ropes and long bars. They levered the mass up, got ropes beneath it, then hauled it out. No one suggested using a machine. Instead, the men made loops of the rope and put the loops over their shoulders, then carried the heavy thing the short distance to the temple door, through that door, making a rhythmic grunt with each step as they went around the temple and through the door into the central room, where they stood their burden erect upon a network of crossed ropes before heaving it in one muscle-straining effort onto the plinth at the center of the room.

  “Raised,” they said, as they lifted, all at once, eight voices speaking together in the same pitch, like a growl, like distant thunder, deep. Then again, “Raised.”

  They tilted the mass to one side, then the other, as they removed the ropes, then rolled up the ropes and left, chatting to one another of inconsequentialities, Sam already offering suggestions to Team Leader Jebedo Quillow about one of the delicate vegetable houses. Outside, all the children except for Saturday and Jeopardy were filling in the hole, bringing spadefuls of soil from other areas to make it level and invisible. In the central room, the cousins were cleaning off the thing with the paintbrush Gotoit had brought, brushing away the remaining webs, which had clung to the mass but which were now shriveling into ash. When they had finished, they stood back and looked at it. It stood the height of a tall man upon the plinth: dark, rugged, and angular, like a surrealistic sculpture of an almost human form. It had nothing that could be identified as a head or limbs, and yet it gave the impression of personhood. A sound came from the pedestal, the slightest whisper, as though something were moving slowly inside the stone. After a time, dim lights gathered at the foot of the new thing, ascended very gradually to the top and disappeared.

  A black-and-white tabby cat came into the room with a live ferf in her jaws. She jumped onto the plinth and laid the animal against the base of the mass, then jumped down and left the room, purring loudly. Two other cats came in with similar burdens.

  “That was Gotoit’s cat,” Jep remarked after a time. “That stripey one. She calls it Lucky.”

  Saturday nodded and brushed the surface of the plinth with her bare palm, cleaning away the few scraps of scruffy ferf hair that remained on the stone. The bodies of the ferfs had disappeared silently into the mass before them.

  “The God was hungry,” said Jep. “We’re the Ones Who have to take care of that.”

  “I think the cats will take care of that,” returned Saturday.

  “How come the cats didn’t take care of it before? With Bondru Dharm?”

  “Bondru Dharm didn’t know about cats,” Saturday answered. “There weren’t any cats here when Bondru Dharm was raised. But we know about cats, and Birribat was one of us, so the cats will take care of that. We’re the Ones Who have to take care of all the rest of it.”

  FIVE

  • Scattered among the relentlessly cheerful and dedicated hosts of the High Baidee, who were so conscientious and hard-working they had little time to be introspective about their religion, there were a few whose natures demanded that they do more for the faith than merely dress and eat correctly, keep the four hundred positive ordinances, and engage in the conventional daily recitations of the words of the prophetess. They were the enthusiasts, the sectarian devotees, zealots of the Overmind, whose heads, unfooled-with by any outside force, urged them to stricter vigilance and more extreme effort.

  One such fanatic, though his family and friends did not know it, was Shan Damzel. Another such was his friend and mentor, Howdabeen Churry. Though there was almost no difference in their ages, Shan considered himself Churry’s disciple. He went so far as to call Churry teacher, though only when they were alone. He did it to be daring, to share a secret between them, like a small boy sharing a newly learned dirty word. The word teacher was, like the words evangelist, missionary, apologist, or advocate, a word to which implications of head-fooling stuck like glue. High Baidee preferred words like lecturer, expositor, or commentator, words without any imputation of coercion. When one said teacher, the hearer might infer that someone was being taught, a thing no right-minded Baidee would consent to. Explaining something was all right. Teaching it was not. With the exception of religious matters, of course. Or military ones.

  Howdabeen always demurred when Shan said teacher. “Perhaps I may clarify your own thoughts,” he was apt to say. “Perhaps my ideation throws your own conceptions into brighter light, but I make no effort to convince you of the correctness of my own mental processes or the position I take because of them.” Indeed, he had no reason to do so. Though Howdabeen was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors a
nd demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance. Though he was not particularly handsome, Howdabeen Churry was unsullied. He had that clarity of eye and clean sweetness of skin which spoke of a calm conscience housed in an uncorrupted body. Others might chant, “Stuff happens, not guilty,” responsively in the temple. Howdabeen intoned it, believing it utterly. He could not be guilty because his heart was pure. He was as assured of his purity as he was of his correctness, and he maintained his correctness by constant attention to himself and what he was doing and what he thought about things.

  He carried this tendency toward self-autopsy into his professional life. When young Baidee joined Churry’s brigade, even those with appropriate backgrounds and acceptable habits were examined microscopically, as Churry, so he said, would have wished to be examined himself. Churry wanted no mere time-servers. He believed that danger had come and would come, that the Overmind intended recurrent tests of the readiness and dedication of its parts. Churry was convinced of it. His own senses, of which the Overmind obviously approved, confirmed it. Danger lurked. It was out there, somewhere, getting ready.

  Thus, when Shan Damzel showed up in some excitement, announcing that he had been picked as part of a family team to go to Hobbs Land, ostensibly to do a survey, but really because of some unspecified danger that a probably paranoid woman had almost certainly invented, Churry eliminated all the qualifiers as he heard them and rubbed his mental hands together over the opportunity that remained. Of all the words Shan Damzel uttered, Howdabeen Churry heard fully only Hobbs Land and danger as the operative syllables.

  Churry had a personal interest in possible dangers. Over the past two years he had been organizing a secret strike force, an association of several hundred like-minded Baidee brigadeers too young for the regular army and too zealous to sit on their hands. Older, perhaps wiser Baidee, if they had known of this covert corps, might have called it a punch of foolhardy young hotheads. Churry called it The Arm of the Prophetess. The Arm had been formed to protect everything the Baidee stood for. It was designed to move so swiftly that it would have struck and withdrawn before anyone knew it was there.

  “Be careful,” said Churry to Shan in the voice of one devoted, though superior, friend to another. “When you get there, be exceptionally careful. Don’t take anything on faith. Don’t accept anyone’s word for anything.”

  “Actually, we’re only supposed to keep our eyes open while we’re doing an Ancient Monuments Survey,” Shan demurred, a bit taken aback at Churry’s unqualified enthusiasm. “There won’t even be people where we’ll spend most of our time.”

  “When there are people, note exactly what they say and what they do, Shan. Look for signs of mental control. Oh, well, you know. We’ve discussed it at brigade conference time and again. The last time, when the invaders came, the threat was overt and easy to see. Next time, I feel it will be more subtle. The Overmind is testing us, Shan.”

  “Yes, teacher,” said Shan, greatly daring.

  Churry smiled and preened inwardly. He relished this and other attentions from the handsome Damzel scion, though in his most private heart Churry thought Shan a bit of a fool. All that quivering frailty about his studies on Ninfadel!

  “How have the dreams been?” he asked, rather daring in his turn. One did not lightly mention dreams to Shan Damzel.

  “Controllable,” said Shan, offhandedly. “The doctors are really very good. They’ve taught me some excellent techniques.” He ignored the drops of cold sweat which had sprung from his hairline immediately on hearing the word dreams.

  “I’ve never asked you,” said the other, curiously. “While you were on Ninfadel, did you ever have any feeling at all that the Porsa might be a threat to us?”

  Words stuck in Shan’s throat. His eyes bulged slightly. He shut them and nodded, as though reciting something to himself, some kind of rhythmic chant. At length he opened his eyes again and managed to say, “No. Not in the way you mean. No.”

  The barely controlled terror in Shan’s eyes shamed Churry. He hadn’t meant to set the boy off that way. He turned away, pretending he had not seen Shan’s reaction. “Well, be careful,” he said lamely. “Come see me the moment you get back.”

  By the time a day or two had passed, he forgot Shan’s discomfiture while keeping clearly in mind that there might be something dangerous on Hobbs Land. The Arm of the Prophetess had been doing push-ups for a very long time. Now he dared hope, more than a little, that on Hobbs Land there might be something dangerous for that well-muscled Arm to strike at.

  • On Hobbs Land, unconcerned with possible dangers, Sam Girat slept and dreamed. He was deep in the canyon of caves, exploring each cave as he came to it, finding strange and remarkable creatures living there.

  China Wilm dreamed of a sapphire lake where bubbles rose from vents in the depths to float like balloons above the gentle water, where beaches of diamond sand gleamed in every direction, coruscant and marvelous. She had seen that lake, or invented it, in a fantasy when she was a child. She came back to it now and then, for comfort and peace.

  Maire Girat dreamed of the Voorstod of her childhood, of precipices from which bridges of stone reached into low hanging clouds, of small creatures singing among the leaves, of fruit-laden vines, dangling over sunwarmed walls. It was an idealized Voorstod, without shadows. The land she had thought was there, when she was young.

  Others dreamed: children, old people, men and women. Even the cats dreamed, curled in their dens, and the kittens, warm at their mothers’ teats. Saturday dreamed. And Jep. And, shallow beneath the soil, Birribat Shum dreamed with them.

  • Topman Harribon Kruss took two days leave from Settlement Three in order to make his visit to Settlement One. Topmen were encouraged to share experiences: he could have made the trip on Hobbs time, but he wanted no picky-picking at his schedule or second-guessing as to his motives by Spiggy’s minions in the finance department. Before he left, he sat by his mother’s bed for an hour or two, but she woke only briefly to smile her haggard smile and murmur something indistinguishable. He made the trip alone, leaving Dracun in Settlement Three to bite her fingernails in frustration. Though she had been content to have Jamel gone, ever since he had disappeared, Dracun had acted like a smudged copy of Zilia Makepeace, all too ready to make incoherent accusations. Harribon didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the Settlement One Topman, about whom he had heard interesting, or perhaps disturbing, things.

  Topman Samasnier, however, was all charm and pleasantries as he welcomed Harribon, gave him the pick of the guest rooms, bought him a drink at the canteen, and invited him to dine with him and Saluniel that evening.

  Harribon demurred appropriately. “Ah, Sam, that’s too much work for Sal. She’s got, what? Two little ones?”

  “Three. Sandemon, Sahkehla, and Sahdereh.” He laughed. “Nine, seven, and five. They’re a handful all right, but it’s no problem. Some of the older folks are fixing dinner at the brotherhouse for us. We’ve got a handful of retireds now, Harri. Doesn’t seem it could be that long, does it? I remember first day we stepped through the Door. I was six, and the oldest settler here at the settlement was what? Fifty lifeyears? And we’ve got great-great-grandmas now! Of course, they were grandmas or mommas when they came, but it won’t be long before people have enough land credits to get their land rights.”

  Harribon, who was somewhat younger, merely nodded and smiled, wondering a little at how relaxed Sam seemed, Samasnier Girat who was known for being tight as a guy wire. Sam Girat who was supposed to be so hyper he wandered around half the night, fighting monsters. It couldn’t be the drink; they’d only had this one. Unless Sam was on something, which was possible. Maybe the med-techs had come out and settled him down.

  “What brings you over, Harri?”

  The question took Harribon almost by surprise; he choked on his drink. He’d thought Sam knew why he’d come. “I came over, Sam, to find out how in hell Sett
lement One manages to keep its people so peaceable.”

  “Ah well,” Sam made a deprecatory gesture, as though it was nothing much.

  “Don’t ah well me, Sam. I’ve heard all the rumors; I’ve scotched a few of them. I don’t think you’ve hexed the rest of us, which some few of the younger workers seem to believe. I don’t think you’re getting favored treatment from CM. But get rid of all that nonsense and the fact remains, Sam, Settlement One does it somehow. It was true even before your time as Topman, according to the Archives, so I’m not blaming you personally.” He laughed, cocking his head to show he’d intended no offense.

  Sam stared at him, almost incomprehendingly. “I’ve always thought that was … just stories,” he said at last. “We had a while during peak season, you know, when everything went to hell. It was after our God died, old Bondru Dharm.” He laughed, shrugging. “We had a hell of a ten days there. I figured all the meanness that happened afterward was because of that. That’s what I told them at CM. But once we quit fretting over it, we got back to normal pretty soon.”

  “Normal for you,” said Harribon, squeezing the words out between his teeth. “Sam, what’s normal for you isn’t normal for the rest of us, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. By my grandma’s left tit, you know what I’m saying. We need to know why. Thirty-some odd years, that’s long enough to say it isn’t chance! Not an accident! Something’s at work here, Sam, for shish sake.”

  Sam shrugged again, still uncomprehending or giving every appearance of it. “Well, if you think so, maybe so. I don’t know what it is, Harri. Maybe it’s just because the way we are is the way we are. I’ve lived here all my life, almost. I don’t know how we’re different from anyone else. People come from CM now and then, look us over, sort of stamp around, make a fuss, and then go away again. You’d think if there were anything, they’d see it, wouldn’t you? They’ve been looking at us for all that time. Wouldn’t they have seen it?”