The Infinity Concerto

by Greg Bear

  “I’ve been there,” Michael said.

  “See!” Her excitement doubled. “Wonderful! You could tell Savarin what it’s like, what we’ll find when we break out!”

  “I’m not sure it’s wise to even think about crossing the Blasted Plain,” Michael said. “Even the Sidhe have to dust themselves with sani and use their horses for protection. It’s dangerous.”

  “We know a little about the powder. Can you get some for us?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know where it is, or even if the Crane Women have any—”

  “But if you could get into their hut, look for it…They must have some.”

  “I wouldn’t even want to try,” he said.

  “Why not? They’re half human.”

  He chuckled. “The forgotten half. You should see their windows at night. Like they have a blast furnace inside. Orange light, flickering. You’d think it was on fire.”

  “Can’t you even look?” The goad in her voice was not particularly sharp, but surrounded by the silkiness, the hint of doubt, it hurt.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said after a pause.

  “We’ll need it soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Within a fortnight. Two weeks. Sorry—I start to talk like the old folks here.” She gave him a questioning look, lifting her eyebrows. She was practically begging.

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  “Marvelous!”

  “I better be going back now.” He wanted to be alone, to think things over and subdue the buzz of confusion and disappointment.

  “Don’t cause any trouble,” she said. “Don’t try to run away again. Just work with us… help us. You heard what Ishmael said.”

  “I heard.” They stood and she kissed him on the cheek, gripping his arms tightly.

  For the next week, he hardly had time to think. The Crane Women suddenly integrated him into Biri’s training, without explanation—and without reprieve.

  The day after he’d spoken with Helena, they took Michael and Biri to a barren mound about two miles south. Coom supervised Biri and Spart kept watch on Michael as they tried higher and higher levels of hyloka.

  The Crane Women were positively grim. Spart barked out her instructions, her voice growing hoarse as the hours passed. Before the day was out, Nare was instructing Michael on how to block his aura of memory—which, among other things, would prevent a Sidhe or Breed adversary from in-speaking. “Occult the knowledge,” she told him. “Occult the knowledge, not just your immediate knowings, but the knowings of your mother and father, your forefathers… memories of your kind. No eyes will see, no minds will use what you do not wish them to have.”

  Snow fell more frequently during that week. The season was indeed going over to winter, in fits and starts, as if the air itself were undecided. But more days were cold than were not. Michael’s hyloka kept him warm under the coldest conditions.

  Spart schooled Michael on how to throw a shadow while asleep, and how to sleep like the dead, his heart barely beating, while at the same time his mind was alert. He controlled his breath until he seemed not to breathe at all. He explored his inner thoughts, paring them down to the ones most essential to his exercises.

  For a time, he forgot about Helena and Eleuth. What little spare time he had, Michael spent exercising these new abilities, reveling in the potential that was being unlocked without resort to Sidhe magic.

  He could not locate the inner voice that had briefly conversed with him in poetry. He did find, however, a good many other unexpected things in his mind. Some edified him, some astonished him, and others made him wilt with shame. When he complained he couldn’t stand any more introspection and asked if this was just incidental to the other disciplines, whether it could be foregone, Spart told him that a warrior must know all there was to hate in himself, or his enemy would use it against him.

  “Blackmail?” Michael asked.

  “Worse. Your own shadows can be thrown against you.”

  Biri’s training seemed similar, but at a higher level. There was no repeat of the torturing circle-formation the Crane Women had exercised against him. Nevertheless, Biri became thinner. He was less talkative and seemed more resentful of Michael’s presence. Michael stayed away from him.

  In and around all the other exercises, there was running with and without sticks, physical training from a taciturn and frowning Coom, verbal harangues from Spart when he didn’t pay attention.

  He hated it, yet the training exhilarated him. He missed Earth even more but he began to feel as if he could survive in the Realm.

  There was no training on the eighth day. Biri and the Crane Women left the mound before sunrise. Michael was asleep and had no idea where they went.

  He walked around the mound in the early dawn, calling out their names, looking at the fresh footprints heading south, wondering if now was the time to look for the sani in the Crane Women’s hut. He lingered near the hut, frowning, feeling he was about to betray them. Still, they were not exactly friends—taskmasters, tyrants, not friends.

  Then why did he feel beholden to them?

  He began to sweat and ran away from the mound, going to Eleuth’s new quarters in Halftown. She was cleaning clothes and preparing for more of her own exercises; he half-listened as she described the Sidhe magic she now knew.

  “If I brought a beetle back now, it would be alive,” she said proudly, smiling at him.

  “No need,” he said gloomily.

  “You are bothered.”

  He walked around the small single-room apartment, one of four units in a single-story wood building. The room was barely fifteen feet on a side, divided in half by a curtain; clean, neatly arranged, but somehow oppressive. Eleuth didn’t seem to find it so.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  ‘I’ll be assigned another task soon,” she said, looking down at the floor, eyebrows raised.

  “Like what?” he pursued.

  “The decision hasn’t been made yet.”

  He was about to say something that might make her feel miserable but he caught himself. He was upset. He couldn’t stand her calmness but that was no excuse to pass on his gloom. “The Crane Women are gone today,” he said. “I don’t want to stay on the mound. Would it bother you if I stayed here?”

  She smiled; of course not.

  She fixed a simple dinner for them. In perverse exchange, he briefly put up his wall against in-speaking, leaving her fumbling for words, without ready access to his memory of English. She was chastened, but remained outwardly cheerful.

  After dinner was cleared, he asked her whether she could transfer someone between the Realm and Earth. He thought the question innocent enough; he just wanted to know how capable she was.

  “Why are you angry?” she asked.

  “I’m not angry.” He shrugged and admitted perhaps he was. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I feel that it is.”

  “Damned females, always so sensitive!’ ”

  She backed away and he flung up his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You wish to return to Earth?”

  “Of course. I always have.”

  “You would consider it love if I returned you to Earth?”

  The question took him aback. “Can you?”

  “Would you consider it love?”

  “What do you mean, love? It would be wonderful, yes.”

  “I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to fail you.”

  He paced around the room, scowling and mumbling. “Jesus, Eleuth, I’m just confused. Very, very confused. And angry. Yes.”

  “With whom are you angry?”

  “Not at you. You’ve never done me anything but good.”

  She smiled radiantly and took his hand. “I would want everything I do to be good for you, to be love for you.”

  He felt even more miserable. What if he never did go home, would it matter much? Could he make a life here in t
he Realm, even in the Pact Lands? Others had lived in worse conditions and been happy, or at least not miserable. Eleuth sensed some of his mental peregrinations and gripped his hand all the tighter.

  “It could be a good life here,” she said. Her hopeful tone was like a dart in his temple.

  “How?” he asked, shaking her hand loose. “I don’t belong here! I’m human, and you’re—” He pounded his hand against the wall. “And she’s human, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  “The woman in Euterpe?” Eleuth asked, staring at the back of his head.

  “Helena,” he said. He imagined it to be the most vicious thing he could say: the name of the woman toward whom he felt as Eleuth deserved to have Mm feel toward her. As Eleuth wanted him to feel.

  “Humans have many more troubles than Breeds, actually,” Eleuth said. She didn’t sound upset or jealous. He turned toward her. Her face was composed, half-caught in the afternoon light from a high window, eyes large and deep and calm.

  “Please,” Michael said.

  “You could love her, and be with me,” Eleuth said.

  Tears began to flow down his cheeks. He was furious, every thought part of a turbulent, rising whirl. “Don’t say any more. Please, no more.”

  “No,” Eleuth said, standing and reaching for his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. I cannot be…jealous. Sidhe women are not jealous. Who can be jealous of males who cannot love, cannot attach?”

  Michael sat on a bench and rubbed his eyes with his palms. None of the calmness exercises would work now. He couldn’t bring down his level of misery, or control its effects on his body, the tension in his neck and arms.

  “I could love you while you loved her,” Eleuth said. Michael didn’t seem to hear. She sat beside him and put her head on his shoulder. “I could do many things for love, and what I cannot do, I will learn.” She stroked his back with one hand. “It is all a Sidhe women ever expects.”

  He stayed with her that night and the next morning returned to the Crane Women’s mound. The huts were still empty. He entered his own hut and stashed the book in the rafters, then sat on the mats and tried to think of a poem. Not even an opening line would come. His head was empty of words. Full of turmoil; empty of expression.

  By late morning, he made his resolution. He would search for the sani. He didn’t know right from wrong himself; perhaps Helena and Savarin did.

  In Biri’s empty hut, the plaited mats were neatly folded in one corner. He looked everywhere in the hut and found no sign of the powder.

  He crossed to the Crane Women’s hut and stood by the door. Peering through the windows, he saw only darkness within. He tried to pry the door open with his fingers, but it seemed latched. He pushed, hoping it would open. It didn’t. Then he pushed harder and something wooden clicked within. The door swung outward slowly.

  The Crane Women obviously didn’t feel the need of locks. So what—if anything, or anyone—did they have guarding the hut? The thought didn’t give him much pause; he was beyond practical concerns.

  The sunward window cast a shaft across the room, illuminating shelves stacked with bottles. The contents of one of the bottles wriggled pinkly in the beam. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloomy corners. In the center of the room was a cylindrical brick oven, reaching almost to the roof, with four mouths opening around its circumference. A ceramic platform surrounded the oven, shiny white and indented with a regular series of pestles. A few mortars lay on the table, and small piles of powder of differing colors and roughness. The fire was out, but the oven still retained heat; he could feel it on his face and outstretched palm.

  Across the room from each other were two sets of shelves, both packed tight with bottles full of teeth and small fragments of bones. Other bottles contained roots and vegetable matter. A bottle with a forked root had been the first to catch his eye; even now, the root squirmed.

  Yet another shelf was devoted to bottles of dusts. None of the containers were labeled. If they had discernible uses, only the Crane Women knew what they were.

  Beyond the closest set of shelves was a partition made of wooden boards, on which thin sheets of tough, pearly tissue had been stretched between pegs to dry. Below the sheets hung the skeletal forearm of a small clawed animal. The claws appeared to be made of gold.

  On the other side of the room, partly hidden behind a drape of gray cloth, a glass box sat on a table. In the box were pieces of frosty crystal finely carved into abstract shapes. Each crystal had a single clear facet like a peephole. Michael pulled the drape aside with forefinger and thumb and opened the lid of the box.

  The temptation was too great; he removed a crystal and held it up to his eye. Like a slide viewer, the crystal contained an image. Green rolling hills and a wonderfully vivid sky appeared to Michael. He was about to put it down and pick up another when a woman walked over the hills. With a shock, he realized she was a much younger Coom. Her name, the crystal informed him in no obvious way, was Ecooma. She smiled and swung her arms, her long, shapely legs outlined beneath a wind-blown red dress. Her face resembled Eleuth’s, but was even more comely. She passed out of range of the crystal eye, prompting him to turn with it to follow her, but to no result. The crystal maintained one steady point of view.

  A second crystal showed a high mountain pass. Swift clouds threw shadows on a snow-covered slope beyond. The naked female standing on a rock, undaunted by the obvious cold, was called Elanare. She stretched her arms out to the wind, long red hair trailing behind her. In her youth, Nare had been even more lovely than Ecooma,

  He picked up a third crystal. Spart—Esparta—stood among a group of young human women, seated on marble benches in a small stone amphitheater. The women wore short white dresses tied around the waist; Spart wore a long black gown and her hair was tied up in a bun with sparkling gold thread. She was speaking to the women, and they laughed now and then as if surprised and delighted. Though her beauty was more subtle than that of Ecooma or Elanare, to Michael she seemed the most beautiful of all.

  Gone were their distortions of face and frame, rolled back by time. He gently laid the third crystal in the box and reached for a fourth. The one he picked revealed a man and a Sidhe female from the waist up, arms around each other. The man was ruddy-skinned, with a thick brown-black beard, wry intelligent eyes and a sharp short nose. The Sidhe’s facial features were so evocative and familiar that Michael was sure he must have seen her before, however impossible that was.

  They were Aske and Elme, the crystal informed him, and there was good reason for their portrait to reside in the glass box. They were the mother and father of the Crane Women, and of seven other Breed children whose pictures resided in other crystals.

  He put the crystal down quickly, his arm hairs tingling with premonition. He quickly searched the rest of the hut for sani and spotted a pouch resting on a small wooden table near the door. He hastily sprinkled some of the contents into his palm and saw the unmistakable golden flakes he needed. He poured the flakes back into the pouch and re-tied the knot.

  Now that he had found what he needed, Michael felt a sudden tingle of panic. He looked around to see if he had disturbed anything, knowing there was no way to conceal his invasion from the Crane Women. Hopeless. They would catch him, and what would they do?

  He fumbled at the door latch and pulled it open sharply to leave—

  And jumped back with a yell. There stood Biri, covered with mud and blood, his eyes wild and mouth gaping wide as if in agony. Black blood oozed from the corner of his mouth and dripped from his hands, spotting his sepia. He made small whining noises deep in his chest like a hunted animal.

  Michael retreated into the hut, horrified, his throat constricting. Biri rolled his eyes back and twisted his head horribly.

  “Michael, oh, Michael,” he groaned. “What have I done?”

  His body contorted and he raised his hands in supplication. Then he straightened and ran. Michael went to the door and looked after him as he leaped t
he stream and ran past the limits of Halftown.

  Nare, Spart and Coom walked onto the mound from the opposite direction, skirting the piles of rock and bone and staring at Michael in the doorway of their hut. He slipped the pouch into his pocket surreptitiously.

  Spart motioned for him to leave. She put her arm around his shoulder and walked him to his own hut, then stopped and turned him to face her.

  “Was he hurt?” Michael asked, swallowing. “What happened to him?”

  “You have witnessed Biri’s shame,” she said. “You must tell no one. He has survived his test.”

  “What test? For the priesthood?”

  “Yes,” Spart said, her expression unusually grim. “Tarax sent Biri’s favorite horse across the border. Biri hunted it down and slaughtered it. When he recovers, he will be ready to serve Adonna.” She focused her eyes on his and frowned, releasing his shoulders. “What you have, what you know… you will use it wisely?”

  “I will,” he finally said after swallowing hard twice.

  The Crane Women entered their hut and shut the door behind them. Michael stared across the grasslands, tears on his cheeks, wondering if he would ever again feel like a whole person.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The snow fell quickly, leaving behind a blank white page on which was lightly sketched the horizon, Halftown, the huts and a few gray gaps in the clouds. The stream was dark and shiny gray, with a thin layer of ice projecting from each bank. Little ice-blades sliced the smoothly rushing water.

  Michael stood on the bank and watched the stream. The falling snow seemed to calm him. His discipline isolated him from the cold. His mind felt just as isolated from reality, aloof. If he had done wrong, he thought, it was through no fault of his own. He was involved in a situation for which he was totally unprepared, in the face of which he was of necessity immature.

  The pouch of sani rested in his pocket.

  Biri sat outside his own hut, head bowed. The Sidhe hadn’t spoken once, hadn’t eaten. Coom had washed his hands and face and wrapped a reed blanket around him.