The Ordinary

by Jim Grimsley

  “Part of the afternoon, yes. After she went to the consulate. She had taken note of you there, actually; she mentioned you.”

  “She’s really extraordinary.”

  He had no answer for this at all. After a moment, with a look of concern that let Jedda know he thought of Malin in a personal way, as a friend, or so it appeared, he said, “She’s almost heartbroken, tonight. So many more died than she meant.”

  “Over 120,000,” Jedda said.

  He shook his head. “No, not nearly. She sent all the hardware and military people back through the gate. But we are hearing that a number of soldiers died on the other side, the Enforcement rescue efforts were so clumsy.” He had a dazed look himself, now. “Maybe people we know, even.”

  “She did this, you said. She sank the ships.”

  “She and the Krii and Prin. She not only sank the fleet, she sent the whole lot across the gate to the Inokit Ocean. For us to deal with on that side.”

  “And in two days, Irion will close the gate. That’s what Malin told the Orminy delegate.”

  “That’s exactly what he will do.”

  “He?”

  Looking up at the ceiling again. “Irion.” He spoke simply and plainly. Jedda found herself suddenly afraid to ask more questions.

  Opit had run out of time, anyway. He would have to say good night to her; he had other meetings this evening, but would certainly see her in the morning.

  8

  She spent the rest of the evening in with Brun and her children, glad of the distraction. It had been years since she spent time around a family, and she found the ease of the play, the noise and confusion, brought her a sense of peace. Brun and Jedda talked quietly, and at bedtime Jedda told ghost stories good enough to frighten the oldest boy. When the children went to bed, Jedda and Brun ate a light supper of baked fowl and vegetables and drank a bottle of good light wine. Easy and pleasant. Though from the windows, all night Jedda watched the lights of hovercraft streaming across the bay, a fleet of cargo and passenger vessels, hundreds, lights converging toward the horizon, the gate. The Hormling going home, frightened.

  Finally she went to bed, and to her surprise slept soundly. When she woke next morning, she wanted to go for a walk. No one had told her she should restrict her movements, so descending the stairs to the forecourt, she drank a quick cup of the jaka and wandered into the open, feeling relief for the first time at the sense of space around her, as if the room had been too confining. She had never felt such a feeling before, in a genuine way, in all her years of travel here. Being outdoors always brought with it a sense of edginess, but this morning she was glad of the fresh air.

  She walked down the narrow garden that led away from Chanii House, beyond it finding a series of landscaped terraces that ended below in a sheer cliff edge. This part of Kemur Island sat high above the waves; the harbor was on the other side. She wandered in the gardens for a while, smelling the strange sweet fragrances drawn out of the blooms and foliage by morning sun. She had been told the names of many of these plants more than once but had no mind for lists, she never remembered. As far as she could tell, most of what was here looked like what would be grown in any horticultural or botanical park anywhere on Senal. But the smells came to her so thick and rich, intoxicating. Why did she open herself to this world, and close herself to her own?

  Delicious to do it, whatever the reason. To look up at the sky, to feel wind on her arms. To have no one at all in sight at times. To feel as though she might really be alone.

  In the outermost garden one of the lamp shrines stood beneath a tree that wept branches over it, and she climbed the steps and went inside. Last night’s lamp had been taken away, the lamp-stand vacant. She looked over it for the sign that Vitter had mentioned, the symbol that is God’s name, but she found only two of the letters of the Erejhen alphabet side by side. She touched the dulled edge of the carving.

  “Can you read it?” asked a voice in Erejhen.

  Prickles along her neck, Jedda turned, her heart in her throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was here.”

  “The shrine is open for anybody,” Malin said. She was seated against the back wall, on the floor, knees drawn up to her chin. Wearing a dark shift, the fabric changing color subtly, ripples of violet and indigo, as the breeze touched it. “A person is always welcome here.” She was trying to smile, though even when she did, there was something wary about her. “Can you read the letters?”

  “Yes. This is a double yeth.”

  “In older forms of our language, the double yeth recurs in many words. It was given to us as the name of God the Mother.”

  “How would you say it?”

  Malin said the word, a long e sound with a light high note at the beginning. “That’s actually how my mother would have said it. These days the sound is shorter,” and she made the new pronunciation. Jedda heard the difference. An aspirate at the beginning, no note.

  “What do you do to worship her?”

  Malin was watching Jedda intently, but the question made her give a short, dry laugh. “I do my whole life to worship her.”

  “I don’t understand. Maybe my Erejhen is not so good.”

  Malin shook her head. She had seemed so odd and awkward when Jedda had seen her before, taller than anyone around her, her looks so different than anyone else. But now, seated on the stone floor in her loose dress, white hair spilling on her shoulders, she had a different air. She was beautiful, Jedda thought. And tried to stop herself from going any further with the thought.

  “Your Erejhen is fine,” Malin said. “I like to hear you speak. But you’ve asked your question of the wrong person. The answer is, we light the lamps at sunset and put them out at sunrise, so that there will be a light in the darkness.”

  “The moon and stars don’t count?”

  “The moon and stars weren’t always here,” Malin said. “Sometimes there was nothing in the night sky at all.” She cocked her head. “Now the sky has changed and we have a consistency of stars and planets and moons. We have your people for neighbors. Until tomorrow, when we close the gate again.”

  “When Irion closes it.”

  “Exactly.” She gave a graceful nod. “Our language is difficult, it’s flattering that you’ve learned to speak it so well.”

  “You speak Alenke equally well.” Uncomfortable standing, Jedda sat, crossed her legs, near enough to Malin that she could smell the woman’s skin, a sweet scent like the moonflower in the consulate garden. “Who is Irion?” she asked.

  The question made Malin laugh and throw back her head. She sat up, took Jedda’s hand in hers, and something passed between them.

  “Even Opit has never asked me that question. He’s afraid of the answer, I think.”

  “I’m not.”

  Her face went suddenly inscrutable. “He is the one who will stand here until there is no more here,” Malin said. “That is who he is.” That is his fate. His destiny is that way. The one phrase echoed all those ways, and Jedda caught the resonance perfectly. Malin’s gaze played over Jedda’s face. “You have many, many more questions, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman’s face softened. She let go Jedda’s hand; Jedda had forgotten she was holding it. They were very still together.

  “You may ask one more,” Malin said.

  Jedda looked her in the eye. She had no hesitation at all. “What do you plan to do with us after you open the gate again? With the Hormling?”

  Malin’s gaze sharpened to a point. At the same time she receded from Jedda. She stood, abruptly but still gracefully, and Jedda stood, too, but still Malin looked down at her. “That all depends. You’ll be there. You’ll see.”

  A sound in the air, a moment of dizziness, then the empty shrine. Jedda went to the door. No one was crossing the garden. No one was to be seen.

  Jedda stared behind her. She touched the floor where Malin had been sitting. Was that warmth, fading from the stone? It was, wasn’t it?


  She went to the lamp-stand, stared at the double yeth. “She was real,” Jedda said. “She was here. We talked.”

  But she was not here now. Jedda lingered only a little while longer before finding her way through the gardens to the guesthouse.

  She contemplated the name of God the Mother, the double yeth, and modulated it using all the prefix sounds she knew, all the notes of music that could change a word here, and she began to understand: Permuted through only some of its forms, it could mean the first land, the first breath, the first space-time, the instant before the first moment, what underlies the rest. Eternity. It was the root of many of the words she already knew, or part of the compound that formed them. The sounds danced in her head. The first wind, the first wave, the first photon, the first child. There was a way to write all this but it was clumsy; the language was designed to be spoken, to be sung, to be remembered that way. To write the root word in the alphabet was simple, but the script to represent the prefix sounds was as complex as musical notation, and as variable, for it had to be exactly as precise in order to be useful. But the language, when spoken, flowed, and the mind, when able to assimilate prefix with word and to intuit the change that the sound made to the word, expanded.

  When Jedda was a scholar of the three hundred spoken and written dialects of Alenke, she had tried to learn to think in the various dialects that were her specialty, to be fluent in the shift of thinking that was involved in a shift of speech. To speak one of the dialects properly was to think like a person who had spoken that way from birth. She had learned to think in Anin, but Erejhen remained closed to her, sentences that she had to construct in her mind, to rehearse before she spoke the words aloud, and yet, now and then, she would see through to a space in which the meaning of an Erejhen word and the word itself became inseparable and instinctive, and she would see for a moment the kind of thought that would be possible in it. Like today, hearing the name of God and realizing that the sound formed a part of so many other words she already knew.

  She kept to herself that morning, not wishing to share her thoughts with anyone, curled in the down comforter feeling the cool breeze move through the open windows. Knowing that sooner or later a knock would sound on the door to end her peace, and so it did.

  Opit stood smiling with a pot of something hot and a basket of warm bread. “Am I too early?” he asked. “I wanted to surprise you but I didn’t want to catch you asleep.”

  “No, it’s fine, I’ve been awake for a while.”

  “Keeping to yourself.”

  “Enjoying the luxury of it. Yes.”

  He set the pot and cups on a table by the window and she sat in the chair inhaling the scent of the fresh baked stuff in the basket. “Brun felt like baking this morning.” Opit offered Jedda a cup. “So we reap the benefits.”

  “This is wonderful.”

  An awkwardness followed, momentary but distinct. She looked at him and wondered what to say.

  But he had come with an agenda and soon opened with his leading item. “There’s a meeting this morning, and I want you to attend, if you’re willing. If you decide to do it, you’ll be there to help me translate, but you can only attend if you understand what we’re here to do.”

  She waited, feeling suddenly uncurious. The impulse to withdraw from such a direct statement was instinctive.

  “This world has something we lack in ours,” Opit said.

  “Our world has something that this one lacks, as well,” Jedda added, feeling a bit belligerent.

  “You’re referring to our technology, of course.”

  She nodded.

  He echoed the movement, gravely. “The same technology that’s very nearly outsmarted us, that rebelled against us and started a war against us that we can’t win.” He gave her a blank, emotionless look. “If the Prin have power over our war machines, they might have power over the ones we’re fighting, too. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “The two worlds can’t be brought together.” She gave him a dull-eyed look. For the first time, she found herself wishing for the stat, which would have calmed the fear that she suddenly felt. “You can’t be dreaming of something like that.”

  “Why not?” His smile was serene, and unsettled her further.

  She could no longer face him. He was not the person she had known, he was a stranger. She turned to the window. “These people will never accept being controlled by us.”

  “I agree. The question is, will we accept control by them?”

  She felt a tingle along her scalp, turned to his voice. He was simply standing there with one hand folded into another. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Can’t I?” He stepped to the window himself now, looked down at the park. “We have everything to gain.”

  “But how on Earth—Opit, tell me what’s in your head, stop being cryptic. What can these people offer us? How would you possibly manage it?”

  He shook his head. “You’re acting as though this is my agenda.” Returning to his cup, he said, “It isn’t. It’s theirs.”

  “Explain, please.”

  He looked her in the eye, wryly smiling. “You know this country as well as any of our people, but even you, knowing what you know, continue to think of the place as primitive, as backward, in some way. But the truth’s very different. The gate has been open a lot longer than we suspected, Jedda. These people have been watching us a long time.” He shook his head, took her hand, stroked the skin along the top. “They’re way ahead of us.”

  “Opit, my dear, I have deep respect for you, but I have to say, at the moment, that you sound as if you’re losing your mind.”

  He chuckled. “I suppose I do. But that’s fine. If I’m right, you’ll see, soon enough,” he said, scratching his pate where the hair was thin. He was looking old, could have used a session of antiaging with a tissue regression specialist. When he looked at her this time, she felt as if she still knew him a bit. Was the person still real when most of what she knew about him turned out to be lies? “Come to the meeting,” he said. “That’s the first step.”

  Part Two

  Disbeliever

  9

  Jedda followed Opit’s guide on what should have been a leisurely walk, doing her best to keep up with the rest when her impulse was to linger over every detail of her surroundings. The party headed through the chapel garden, Jedda studying the stone chapel again, and the gardens between the chapel and the main house. The guide led them into a side entrance decorated with more of the marvelous stonework, leaves and vines intertwined with calm faces emerging as if from the veil of a forest. Jedda had only time to get an impression before the small party—Opit, Brun, and Jedda—was sweeping up a broad flight of stairs and through a succession of smaller and smaller corridors. Jedda noted the expressions of wonder on Opit’s and Brun’s faces as well, as the group passed paintings, tapestries, wooden furniture of marvelous design, and finally, hurried as they were, Jedda said, “You seem to be enjoying the sights as much as I am. You haven’t been here long?”

  Opit smiled and Brun shook her head. “No, we came down from Montajhena with Malin. We’ve never been here before.”

  They were speaking Erejhen, and the guide, a sharp-eyed, stocky man of mature years, added, “It’s a new place for many of us, hardly ever used, except as part of the College. And I fear I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.” Looking around, making a decision, he gestured to them to follow, a crisp movement of the hand that carried with it a brusque arrogance.

  “No reason to fret, Kethen, I’m sure we’ll find the place sooner or later,” Opit said.

  “As long as we’re there before Malin.” This time when Kethen turned, Jedda saw a scar that crossed his brow and cheek, a deep gash on a dark-eyed face. He said something else, looking at Jedda, something about wanting to be a good host to his guests, with a phrase in it that she failed to catch as it flew past.

  “I’m sure all will be well,” she said, the blandest of phrases she could think of, her
pronunciation precise, to a degree that startled Kethen, who lifted his scarred eyebrow to a point and smiled.

  Kethen found the place on the second attempt, at the end of a wide corridor, carpeted, open at the end to breezes from the bay. The group slid into place neatly, many other faces turning to note their presence. Opit leaned to Jedda’s ear and whispered, in Alenke, “Kethen is one of Malin’s chief people. One of two rivals, in fact. His bringing us here was a sign of respect. Now,” and he gestured, very small, toward a slim woman, “with everyone here, that young woman, Karsa, will fetch Malin. She’s the other of the two rivals. She stays closest to Malin and has a peculiar title, Minister of the Ordinary, or something like that. While Malin doesn’t call herself a queen, you may assure yourself she is treated like one.”

  After only a moment, Karsa gestured to one of the soldiers present, who opened a panel that had seemed a part of the wall; Karsa slid through it, and a few moments later, with some straightening of clothing and patting of hair, Malin herself with her retinue, including Karsa, swept into the room.

  She passed very close to Jedda, a scent of that same flower as Jedda remembered from this morning. Malin stood by the windows for a moment, then turned very deliberately to Jedda, to all of the Hormling, of course, but her attention went first to Jedda, who found herself shy, a wash of feeling most unwelcome in the ornate meeting room overlooking the eastern bay. Jedda smoothed the front of her one-piece, the gesture self-conscious but small. Something in the moment made Opit glance at Jedda himself, and Jedda flushed more deeply and took her seat beside him with all the rest. Oh for the stat, she thought, that could make such a blush less likely.

  Himmer and Vitter had been invited as well, Vitter with a portable flatscreen, the first piece of technology Jedda had seen in a while. Karsa spoke first, a raspy voice, oddly colored. “We wish to welcome you all, but particularly the newcomers, those whom we have compelled to remain behind as the Eseveren Gate closes.” She was speaking in Erejhen, and paused as Jedda translated for her friends.