Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘ Bombi agreed. “Which would give us time to get down to the settlements, which we haven’t even seen yet. I must say that my whole being longs for enormous quantities of hot water!” The flier they were using had a sonic cleanser, but the quality of the experience was in no sense comparable to the tumbling torrent Bombi envisioned.

  Shan exploded, “Hot water! Bombi, this has been a very easy trip. You don’t know what a hard trip is. You …”

  “Do not want to hear about the Porsa,” Bombi told his brother sternly. “Volsa and I have heard about the Porsa, and do not want to hear about them ever again.”

  “I was just going to make the point that …”

  “Don’t,” said Bombi. “What do you think, Volsa? Shan? I don’t want to shirk the job, but so far this has been a waste of man-days. We’ve done nothing a robot couldn’t have done as well. Our contract with Native Matters Advisory says we can use whatever method seems advisable.”

  “Two days,” said Volsa at last, looking dreamily at the verdure around her. Green wasn’t the usual thing on Thyker. Or on Phansure. She found green rather intriguing. “Give it two more days. Then, if there’s nothing distinctive, give it to the robots.”

  • • •

  • Gotoit’s mama cat, Lucky, had five half-grown kittens hunting in the tall grass at the side of the easternmost grainfield. It was the job of all the settlement cats to minimize the ferf population along the edge of the fields. From the various animals man had used as workmates in pre-Dispersion times and taken with him from planet to planet in the long reach outward, cats had been chosen to accompany these settlers because they did not form destructive packs, did not require constant attention, and could be depended upon to keep the vermin population in check. Lucky and her kits were a demonstration in point. There were several dozen dead ferfs laid out in a row along the footpath, and the nightwatch was only half over.

  None of the settlement cats ate ferfs. Something about them disagreed with cat stomachs, but this in no way lessened cat fondness for the chase. Only at dawn, when the count had been increased to over seventy, did the cat and kittens pause in their labors to engage in the lengthy face- and leg-washing all of them felt necessary. They had finished faces and front legs and were starting on the hind legs when Saturday and Gotoit arrived with a sack.

  Gotoit admired the line of bodies, conveyed her admiration with strokes and chirrups to Lucky and the kittens, and only then helped Saturday bag the night’s catch and walk with it around the eastern edge of the settlement to the temple.

  “What does Birribat Shum need all these for,” Gotoit wanted to know. “Usually he only wants one or two at a time.”

  “Birribat Shum is pushing the mycelium all the way to Settlement Three,” said Saturday with a slight air of self-importance. “You know, to join the one that’s growing there. He says it works better when all the parts are linked up. Ferfs have something in them that he needs. Something different from human waste. We could probably find out what it is and supply it directly if we had to. On the other hand, humans have something in them that was missing before. Once the Gods used up all they brought with them, they couldn’t go on any longer. That’s why the Departed died.”

  “The God didn’t die for a long time after humans got here, not the last one.”

  “It took a while. It had to get to know us before it could make the right kinds of spores for the next one.”

  Gotoit shook her head and jiggled the sack. “How do you know all that stuff?”

  Saturday looked uncertain. How did she know? “I just do,” she said at last. “I’m the One Who, so I guess that’s why.”

  “Well, it’s still a lot of ferfs.”

  “A lot of work for the cats.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Lucky doesn’t mind so long as she doesn’t have to carry each one over here individually.”

  “She told you that, did she,” Saturday laughed.

  Gotoit was not annoyed at the question, but neither did she disregard it. “Of course she told me I’d have to carry them over. Didn’t Birribat tell you he needed them? Didn’t I tell Lucky? Of course Lucky told me.”

  • By noon of the last day they had determined to spend upon their survey, Shan and Bombi and Volsa had reconciled themselves to turning the whole matter over to the machines. By dusk of that same day, they had changed their minds.

  The land at the top of the escarpment was relatively flat, though it had been cut by river valleys over the millenia, and the resultant cuts had been worn into gentle slopes by wind and rain and the burrowing of creatures small and large. This terrain was forested with the distinctive escarpment trees, slender trunks which rose twenty feet or so into the air and then exploded into a spherical puff of foliage, from the top of which another trunk emerged, and another puff, and another trunk yet, and so on, to a height of eight or nine puffs at about two hundred feet. From a distance the trees resembled fuzzy green beads strung on thick vertical needles. Because of their resemblance to the ancient art of topiary, the trees were called Topes, as a class, though there were at least twenty different species easily distinguishable by the layman.

  The villages of the Departed had been set in clearings, which, remarkably, remained mostly clear of trees even after all the time that had passed since they were built. The temples of the Departed, however, were set among the trees. The new thing, which the Damzels found quite by accident, was in what they assumed to be a meteor crater, a raised lip of stone which made a ragged circle around the enclosed flattened space.

  Volsa, bored with villages and temples, had walked into the woods to admire the undulant surface above, where the foliage spheres interlocked to create a solid ceiling of feathery puffs. The land rose before her, culminating in a low rocky wall, which she climbed, bemused, thinking how different air smelted when there were many things growing in it. Beyond the wall, the area was only lightly wooded, the trunks so sparsely scattered that from where she was standing atop the stones she could see the entire circle which enclosed the radiating mounds at the center of the space.

  She walked their length, their circumference. The individual mounds were perhaps a hundred feet long, radiating from a common center. There were eleven. Her recording instrument, which had a detachable probe point, told her the mounds were not covering anything on the preset list of recognizable substances—though this bit of information seemed doubtful, with digital figures quivering and needles darting restlessly across the faces of dials.

  “Bombi,” she said urgently into her communicator. “Shan. Come here. I’ve found something.”

  When they came over the wall a few moment’s later, she was standing in the fifty-foot circle at the center of the radiating mounds, trying to make sense of the readings she was getting.

  Bombi stared. “Artifact?” he asked at last.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Artifact would be stone, or metal, wouldn’t it? The same kinds of materials they built their houses and temples out of? We’ve set these machines to recognize all those substances, in all their modest variations.”

  “Maybe your probe simply isn’t deep enough. There’s a longer one in the flier.”

  “Well, get it. We’ll try.”

  As they did, without success. Whatever the things were, buried there under the soil, they were not what the Damzels had expected to find. Nor did they have any idea whether these starburst mounds had anything at all to do with Ancient Monuments.

  • Samasnier Girat left a note on China’s door saying he was thinking of her. China knew what he meant. He wanted to try again.

  China surprised herself by considering it. Certainly she had sworn never to be with Sam in anything but an official capacity again. They got along all right as workmates. Certainly she had meant it, at the time. After all, he had made her miserable with his picky-picking at her all the time. Asking her strange questions. Demanding answers, when she didn’t even know what he was talking about. Saying things like “Well, think about i
t,” when she had no idea what “it” was.

  On the other hand, Sam had seemed more relaxed lately. Things had been going extraordinarily well. Even those small annoyances that used to plague him, as well as everyone else in the settlement—parts lost, equipment broken, necessary supplies not arriving on time—even those annoyances seemed to have taken temporary leave. Therefore, it was possible that Sam wouldn’t be so picky, possible they might just enjoy being together. Besides, she was curious. She wanted to know what this thing was he was playing at, and maybe … just maybe he would tell her.

  “Come for dinner,” she said, next time she saw him, not staying to watch his face light up.

  Red meat was raised over in Settlement Nine, almost entirely for export. The settlers’ allotment of it was miniscule. All the settlements had plentiful supplies of poultry-birds, however, for both meat and eggs, so China planned her dinner around fowl. Each settlement had plentiful grain supplies and vegetables, including the so-called fragile vegetables, grown in greenhouses. Fruits tended to be seasonal, but were dried and preserved for settler use. The people in the settlements where wine and cheese were made hadn’t seen fit to share their expertise yet, so their products stayed in short supply, but China had credits squirreled away for a special occasion.

  She asked Africa if Jeopardy and Peace could come to Africa’s sisterhouse for supper.

  “You and Sam playing winkies again?” asked Africa with a leer. “Or is it someone else?”

  China shrugged. “No one else.” She didn’t know. Not really.

  “I thought it wouldn’t be long,” Africa murmured. “A changed man, our Sam. All full of human kindness.”

  “Africa …” China murmured. “Don’t tease.”

  “Well, why not? The two of you are a scandal and an amusement to the rest of us. Be nice if you could get along instead of you walking on eggs here in settlement, trying to avoid him, and Sam out there fighting monsters on the hills for his fair lady …”

  “That’s not what he’s doing!”

  “Well, what is he doing?”

  “I don’t know, Africa. Except it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s something inside Sam. He wants to be somebody else. Somewhere else.”

  “Topman isn’t enough, huh?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with enough. It’s … there’s something inside him, like a hole. A vacancy. A question. He keeps trying to fill it up. All that playacting, that’s just part of it.” She had surprised herself considerably by saying this. She considered it to be true, but if anyone had simply asked her to explain Sam, she would have said she couldn’t explain him at all. Maybe as she got older, her understanding was increasing.

  “Fighting ghost-beasts with his bare hands? That’s part of it?”

  China shook her head. No one had ever learned exactly what it was that Sam had fought, but ghosts didn’t have bones. Even though the bones told no tales. For a while China had worried about that, worried quite a lot, afraid some visitor or intelligent being would come up missing, but except for that Soames man from Settlement Three, no one had, and the bones weren’t human. Quite. China thought CM should have done a quick survey, looking for an Out-System ship maybe, but she hadn’t suggested it. The skull was at CM, and everybody had looked at it. It had long teeth and big bony ridges over the eyes, and no one knew what it was. If they hadn’t thought it might be something from Outside, why should she?

  Africa shook her head and laughed. “Send Peace and Jeopardy over. They can spend the night with their cousins.”

  China seasoned her bird with Hobbs Land spices and fried it in grain oil. She made a vegetable-noodle dish that had been invented locally and was called a hobbspudding. There was fresh bread and fruit, plus the wine and cheese. They ate at the small table near the window which looked west, away from the fields, toward the wooded land.

  Sam ate and smiled and smiled and ate, without picking at her and, when he had finished everything but the bones, suggested they take the last of their wine into the bedroom.

  She started to say no, but then said yes instead, without really meaning to.

  They lay on the wide bed, her head on his shoulder.

  “We need legends here,” he said.

  Oh, hang him by his heels, she thought, her entire body stiffening. Here he goes again.

  “Legends of lovers,” he said. “Who are the great lovers, China Wilm?” He sounded merely interested, not picky.

  This was a new question. “Great lovers?” she asked, relaxing a little.

  “I asked that question of the Archives, and they gave me names. Names as empty and dry as dust. They meant nothing to me. Who was Abelard? Who was Romeo? Who was Gercord Thrust or Standfast Murgus and the Lady Vees? I did not know.”

  “Nor I,” she murmured into his neck, feeling his arm tighten around her, his hand slide downward on her skin.

  “Samasnier Girat and China Wilm,” he whispered to her. “Why shouldn’t they be legendary?”

  “A legend in our time?” she giggled.

  “For all time,” he whispered, kissing her before going on to other things. “For all time.”

  For all time, she thought, wondering why the words echoed so fatefully. For all time. “Do that again,” she commanded. “Oh, do that again.”

  He did it again, and then something else, and then time went away entirely. There was thunder, which they did not hear, and then a downpour of rain, lashing against the window with whispering whips.

  A long time later they heard the rain and wondered at it.

  “Early,” said Sam in a puzzled voice. “Early this year.”

  Thus far he had not picky-picked at her once.

  She was not content to leave it alone. She had to test it.

  “What did you mean about legendary lovers?” she asked.

  “I have decided legends are like spiders,” he said, unaccountably.

  “Yes,” she urged, doubtful of the direction he was taking.

  “Though the closest thing we have to spiders here upon Hobbs Land has ten detachable legs, we all know about spiders.” He thought for a time. “Actually, legends are more like spider webs. You see, the spider attaches a bit of web and then swings out into space and attaches the other end somewhere else. And then does it again, and again. And finally, when all the spokes are fastened, it goes around and around, knitting them all together, until the pattern is made. You understand.”

  She did, of course, though she had no idea what he meant. Spiders were part of the human heritage. Even though there were none here, children learned of them in school as they learned of tigers and elephants and bears, almost mythical creatures of Manhome.

  Sam went on. “The pattern links all the points it’s connected to. So we men go back in history and come up with a great hero, and we attach our memory there. Or maybe we just go back in time and come up with a fa … an uncle, and we attach our memory there. Then we swing forward and attach the other end of that idea to someone or something else. That’s what legends are for, to give us anchoring places in time. Else we live such little lives, China Wilm, like a bit of fluff adrift upon a great wind. We need anchors. If we have them, here and there we go in our minds, knowing this story and that, putting our web to this and that, spinning and spinning. Until, when we are done, we are all bound together in the same pattern. Without them, we are strangers to one another. With them, we know one another. We are spiders of the same ilk.” He laughed. “Silk. Spiders of the same silk.”

  “But you said we had no legends on Hobbs Land.”

  “We don’t. We have no common ground to tie us together. So, when I want to say to you, China Wilm, that I love you as the greatest lovers ever loved, I have no names to put to them. What are Heloise and Hero to us? I read their stories, and it means nothing to me. Who are Gercord Thrust and his fair Madain? Do the words make any picture in your mind?”

  She shook her head, beginning to comprehend what he was saying. “So when my son Jeopard
y seeks to tell Saturday Wilm how he feels, kissing her, he has no words.”

  “Ah,” he said, something wicked and sharp-toothed rearing inside him at hearing her say, “my son.” Abruptly, all his easy way with her was aground upon that particular stone in his craw. “Perhaps he will say, ‘Saturday, I love you as my mother loves my father.’”

  She flushed, not speaking, balking at the word he insisted upon using, finally agreeing, “Perhaps he will.”

  “And do you?”

  She became very quiet. Now his voice was as it used to be, harshly demanding. Now it was like those other times, when he had wanted something from her and she hadn’t known what. “Would you be here, Sam, if I didn’t love you?”

  “How would I know? I don’t know who’s been here since I was here last.” He gestured at the room, her room, into which she could invite anyone she chose.

  She could have told him, no one. Perhaps she should have told him, no one, letting him lapse again into that peacefulness he had shown earlier, but it wasn’t something he should have asked. It wasn’t the way things were done among the Wilms. If she said, no one, then he would say no one until now, how about tomorrow? And if she said, no one tomorrow, he would say, what about next year? And before she knew it, she would be eaten up for all time, pledging herself where no one should have to pledge herself. “Time spins, people change,” so ran one saying in an old language. “Vota errod, Erot vode.” Or that Gharm poet Maire was always quoting. “A vow of forever stands like grass/against the scythes of change.” People did change. Even she might.

  “You are here now, Sam,” she said, knowing it would not satisfy him. Knowing nothing would satisfy him.

  “You will not say,” he muttered, getting out of the bed and standing at the window to see the rain. “Well, I have no better Hobbs Land words to use than these: I love you, China Wilm, as a creely loves its legs.” And he burst into harsh laughter. “The words do not satisfy me, China Wilm. I need others. Perhaps, someday, I will find them.”

  She did not laugh with him. He was, perhaps, not the same man she had known before, but he was not a new man either. Something dwelt in Samasnier Girat that dwelt in no one else left on Hobbs Land. Wandering around at night was not enough. Fighting monsters was not enough. Exploring the miraculous new lakes and forests—even the brand new ones over near Settlement Three that no one had ever seen before—was not enough. He wanted something she could not give him, something no one could give him, and for a moment she wondered why he was still here, why he had not gone away with the other malcontents, wishing he would go.