A Door Into Ocean

by Joan Slonczewski

  Malachite said, “Human numbers always grow.”

  “But nine hundred thousand are just enough for us. It’s been enough, for ten thousand years.”

  “You began with only one. You’ve grown since then.”

  Merwen felt an impasse. “Try your Valan language to explain.”

  “Valan is not my language, and Torran would mean nothing to you. Valan is irrelevant to this case.”

  “Then why did you use two Valan words a moment ago?”

  No frown appeared in his flat, unlined features. None ever did. “The ‘Patriarch,’” he said slowly, “is an All-knowing Mother. The ‘Envoy’ implements Her decisions.”

  “We have an All-knowing Mother, Shora, and we have more than enough decision-sharers.”

  “The All-knowing Mother of Torr will send an Envoy who can work with multiple decision-sharers and set up an appropriate program for your planet.”

  “What sort of program?”

  “Installation of a controlled atom-fusion energy source, to further your development. Regulation of its use. Regulation of other potentially harmful activities. Convenient birth control. Exchange of scientific and cultural achievements with other worlds.”

  Merwen was embarrassed. “Sorry, but I comprehend you less and less. You propose to make another sun?”

  “A small piece of sun, encased safely in stone.”

  “A starstone?”

  “No, much bigger. To make energy.”

  Bigger than a starstone, smaller than the sun. “But the First Door sends us more than enough energy.”

  “It will not, once your numbers increase.”

  “But we don’t.” Merwen was circling in a linguistic whirlpool.

  “You don’t think you will,” Malachite said. “You don’t think you will ever hasten death, either.”

  Merwen’s lips barely moved. “And what do you think?”

  “All peoples discover how to hasten death, sooner or later. Some start out like you, but they all learn.”

  Here was a riddle. “What are you trying to say? A few of us fall into sickness, of course.”

  “What becomes of them?”

  With a sick feeling, Merwen forced herself to share the one case she had known. “Virien of Umesh-el…had to be Unspoken. She did not cure, so for the safety of others she was helped away to a raft outside system Per-elion.”

  “And how long did she last there?”

  Merwen hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said, which was true but not the whole truth.

  “So her death was hastened, in effect.”

  The statement shocked her. Could this visitor not know what he was saying? “Virien might have cured, first. Some do. Life is not perfect.” She nearly added, Only death is, Perfect One.

  “But the All-knowing Mother of Torr is perfect.”

  At first Merwen made no response. Then she said, “I begin to see.” Her words drifted like fallen blossoms on a wave. “Valedon does have a sickness, and it reaches out to us.”

  “The Valan sickness is checked, for now. But Sharers, too, have the seeds of it, within their own doors. I must protect you from yourselves, as well as Valedon.”

  Sickness—yes, she felt it in him, an appalling icy sickness that threatened to draw her in. Her fingertips whitened, but she pulled herself back. “Sickness, yes. The sickness is yours, Perfect One, a cancer of fear. I would protect you, if I could.”

  “You know no fear then?”

  “I fear for you.”

  Among the raft branches, the ocean groaned and muttered to itself. Wormlets of foam crawled hungrily up the branch beside her. On Malachite’s immotile brow, a few silver wisps stirred with the wind. It reminded Merwen that, among Sharers, only infants had headfur, which the sea took back soon after birth.

  “You are innocent as children,” Malachite said. “You could learn on your own, as most do; but if you were to survive, as many do not, your abilities would threaten Valedon and all other inhabited worlds. I cannot allow this. Someone must share this lesson with you, if not your own ‘Envoy,’ then perhaps Valedon…But that will be painful.”

  He had it all inside out. No one could be more cruel and dangerous than a child, and no selfnamer could threaten her own world, much less many. But the sickness of this Perfect One was beyond reach of words.

  “I must leave tomorrow,” Malachite said. “Will you at least receive an Envoy from Torr, one perhaps with a program more appropriate than mine?”

  Merwen herself would receive anyone, but the Gathering would not, once they shared what she had heard. Lightly, Merwen touched Malachite’s hand. It was warm; strangely, she had expected it to be cold. “Dissolve your fear. Stay and share healing with us.”

  She could not have said how long they sat, until all at once the Perfect One had gone away, and the cloth shell of his back was receding down the long coldstone ramp to his vessel.

  7

  IT WAS THE time of waterfire. In the wake of the seaswallowers, with lesser predators as sparse as raft seedlings, tiny “firelets” multiplied unchecked. By day these protozoans went unseen, but by night they glowed pale orange and lined the waves with flame. It was a spectacular time for night dipping, to bathe oneself all over in the waterfire, to swallow the “flames” and spit them out again. One’s teeth glowed for hours afterward. Spinel and Lystra and other young fun-lovers, and some not so young, spent such late nights at the game that they dragged at their tasks the next day. It was fortunate for the health of the raft that waterfire receded within a few days, consumed by a myriad other “sisters” of the sea. Legfish, too, were returning slowly. And a few raft seedlings had survived to grow over the next decades into floating islands large enough to support Sharer colonies.

  Several sisters chose to conceive children in order to provide new homes for the lost souls of Kiri-el. And Elonwy’s child was born, underwater of course, into the arms of her sisters, whose ears were quick to catch her seaname. The experience impressed Spinel, who remembered the birth of Beryl’s Oolite with the door closed upon secrecy and pain.

  But what struck Spinel oddly was Shaalrim’s attitude toward her unborn daughter. Shaalrim let Spinel feel the swift fluttering within, and her belly actually shifted from side to side at the kicks of the little one. “She’ll make a good swimmer,” said Spinel.

  “Yes,” said Shaalrim. “Strong little beast, isn’t she?”

  Spinel looked up. “Why…beast?”

  “Because she is. She keeps me awake at night with kicking at my liver, and if I were at the Last Door she would still suck the last life from me.”

  “She can’t know any better,” said Spinel, vaguely disquieted.

  “No, no more than an octopus. Or a shockwraith.” Shaalrim sighed and smiled hopefully. “But she’ll learn. And I love her, all the same.”

  He was perplexed still, and a sudden longing came over him, for Beryl and her second child, who must be born by now, and whose name he did not even know. Was it a boy or a girl, his nephew or niece? How could he just sit and wait for Dak to find out?

  The sun had dipped below the sea. Behind him Lystra was fidgeting, and she leaned her chin into his neck. “Spinel, I have only two hours tonight before my starworm duty.”

  “Oh, all right.” They swam off together to an unsettled raftling, one that would grow large enough for tunneling within a generation. As usual, Lystra had thought up some new and delicious ways of sharing pleasure that Spinel was sure would have astounded his Chrysolite friends. In fact, Lystra seemed to come up with every possible way there could be, except for the one regular way, which she still avoided. This had rarely bothered him, but tonight for some reason he felt that something was missing.

  Spinel stretched back upon the weeds and let the night flow over him. For once he tried to think carefully, to frame a tactful approach. The more he thought, though, the more his nerve slipped away: that was the trouble with thinking things through.

  “Lystra?” He ran his finger down the
track of her spine. Lystra rolled over, her eyes half open, her breasts sloping languidly. “Lystra, I know you don’t want to get pregnant, but I could take pills for that. Could we try it the normal way some time?”

  She blinked at him. “For a Sharer, you still come out with gibberish once in a while. I won’t start a child before we build a silkhouse. What is ‘normal,’ and how are the two related?”

  “I’m just saying, I want to share love the way I’m made to, that’s all.”

  “You mean the octopus arm? Don’t I stroke it enough?”

  “Oh, yes, your fingers are good, excruciatingly beautiful.” He took her hand and dipped his finger into the scallops, aroused just by the memory of her touch. “And your lips too and—every part of you is beautiful. But couldn’t we try it the other way, just once?”

  Lystra considered for a bit. “Usha says it will make me sick.”

  Spinel frowned. “Mothers and mothersisters always say that.”

  “It’s true enough. It would cause toxic shock to my internal organs.”

  “Your ancestors did it, all right.”

  “So I’ve heard. And a billion years before that, our ancestors were all one-celled and budded off like yeast.”

  “Well, how does Usha know? She never tried it.”

  “Traders used to try with us, a long time ago. Nisi calls it ‘rape.’”

  “Well I’m not trying to ‘rape’ you.” He was highly indignant. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  There must be some way out of the predicament, Spinel thought. “Couldn’t you get an operation or something to…?”

  “But I’m perfectly healthy. Why don’t you be lifeshaped to be like me?”

  “What! I’m a man, you trollhead,” he exclaimed in Valan. The very idea gave him goosebumps all over.

  “I know, stoneshaper. I love you anyway.” Surreptitiously she eased her fingers around his thigh, but he pushed her away. Lystra shrugged. “Go ahead, sulk if you want.”

  Spinel was thinking, he should have known from the start it would never work out. They were a race of man-haters, after all. No wonder the traders cheated them.

  Lystra added, “The traders soon learned not to share ‘rape.’ We applied ointment that stung on contact, so they shared the pain.”

  Spinel replied, “We don’t put up with rapists on Valedon. We put them away, or even hasten death for the worst ones.”

  Her look was stricken. “Hasten death? You could to that?”

  “Not me. You need a ruby, for that job.”

  Lystra stared pensively beyond him. “Merwen says that many Valans are…sick in this way.”

  “Well, she has nerve. Is it sick just to save yourself? Were you sick when you left Rilwen at her Last Door?”

  Her face glazed over. Without a word more, she got up and walked away.

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Spinel scrambled to his feet and hurried after her. “Look, I didn’t mean it, I just—” He caught her arm, but she did not break stride; he had forgotten Lystra’s strength. At the water’s edge she jackknifed into the sea and swam straight back to Raia-el.

  8

  ONCE THE ENVOY had departed, Berenice sensed a strangeness, a gulf between Merwen and herself that she had never felt before. She was at a loss to cope with it. It was unthinkable for Merwen to hold back her concerns.

  “Nisi, this Perfect One,” Merwen began, one morning after breakfast when most sisters had left the silkhouse for the day. “He puzzles me.”

  “How is that?” Berenice moved herself closer on the silk mat.

  “He shared fear with us, not wisdom.”

  “Both, Merwen, always both.”

  “That cannot be.”

  A wave of cold swept Berenice. “Why not? Even you do.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Everyone shares fear with you: Yinevra, Lystra, even Usha at times. They fear your wisdom most of all.”

  “You fear, that is certain. And those who fear fight me. That hardly helps my wisdom, such as it is, to prevail.”

  Berenice was indeed terrified that Merwen would see into her and know her heart better than she knew herself. But she saw that the Sharer was not angry now, only immensely sad. This Berenice understood. “Power is always feared. The ‘Patriarch’ has incomparable power, and wisdom as well. Malachite can only share that wisdom. He is like a…a ‘servo.’”

  “Power fears its loss,” said Merwen. “But your ‘servos’ are not human, they can’t share fear.”

  “Oh, but Malachite is as close to human as an Envoy can be. Even though his brain contains circuits of coldstone.”

  Merwen’s lips parted, loose; her eyes stared at some unseen horror. “Then…he…”

  A shock jolted Berenice through every muscle. She had said something terribly wrong and could not call it back.

  “…is…dead.” Merwen absorbed the impact of what she had just heard. Coldstone—she had shared speech with a coldstone “brain,” a soulless thing that had never known birth, never passed even the First Door, let alone the Door of Self, a mind perfectly empty, living yet dead.

  “A living dead. And all the while you knew, Nisi, you knew.” Her voice wavered. Nisi’s lovesharer and the others, they could not possibly have been cured, they were worse off than ghosts. And as for Nisi…

  “What are you saying? Merwen! Come back!” Already Nisi’s voice came from far away, as Merwen’s senses hurtled outward from her whitened body, beyond the ocean, beyond even the stars, into the Door of Death itself.

  The hole of that Door was a perfect white circle, more perfect than any silkhouse door. The Door stretched out into a tunnel of all those moments of her life which had already died. Some parts of the tunnel expanded wide, those rich times of her life, when the raft had prospered and her daughters were growing. Other sections pinched nearly shut, such as when the shockwraith’s arm had touched her. Along the surface of the tunnel were door-points closed to branching corridors where her life might have turned—where she might have twinned with Yinevra, or might have begun to learn lifeshaping, or might have fallen into stonesickness; even before she left the womb, she might have developed a stunted limb or might never have developed at all. Before that…but that was back far enough.

  Where in all her lifetime was there a clue to the terrible paradox of the people of stone?

  Merwen had been barely five years old when the first skyboat fell to the sea. Mother Ama had lifted Merwen onto her shoulders to get a better look. Everyone gaped at the creatures that stepped out, these fanwings of flat nondescript plumage, until her mother had gasped, “I think they’re our sisters.”

  Ama had not called them Sharers, the stronger term. Even then, Merwen had been wordwise enough to notice. Had her mother’s instinct foreseen what was to come?

  At first there had been nothing but excitement for the strangers, who were eager to share learning and gifts as exotic then as those of the Dead One seemed now. The greatest miracle was the camera, which produced images full-depth in light, recording life and memory in a way never imagined before. There must be some greatness in a people who could fashion such a thing, even out of coldstone. Merwen remembered this miracle at times when the Stone Moon seemed most hopeless.

  As Merwen watched, the time-ghost of Ama changed, broken, shriveled. Ama was one of the few for whom lifeshaping came too late or was fated to fail. Yet the light of her soul stretched whole and sound throughout Merwen’s tunnel. There were others for whom this could not be said. There was Rilwen…

  And there was Virien of Umesh-el. If Merwen could not understand Virien, how could she ever hope to know Valedon?

  Merwen had tried to help Virien. That was soon after Merwen had named herself. Virien was Unspoken by then, but had just hastened another death. So Merwen had asked the Gathering to send herself to share with Virien what healing she could. Hours, then days, she passed with that twisted soul, always remembering that healing had to flow in both directions.
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  “What do you want of me?” Virien spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. She was small, and her physical strength, like Merwen’s, was mainly in her hands. “What do you want of me, Impatient One? To show the world you can outgrow your name?”

  “Every Sharer wishes that,” Merwen said, swallowing the sting. “I want peace with myself, just as you do.”

  “But I have peace.”

  “You think you do, but there are doors you fear to open.”

  Virien closed her eyes, then opened them with a start. “How do you know what peace means to me? Do you share my mind?”

  “Of course not. But I have eyes to see. I know what a Sharer is. How long will you swim away from us?”

  Virien smiled slyly. “Why were you sent here, if not because I keep swimming back?” To that she got no answer, so she shrugged, saying, “Look to your own doors. I hasten death because it suits me, that’s all. I like it.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  The words drew out from her tongue. “I like to feel the life’s-breath stream away beneath my fingers…”

  And so it went, day after day. One day Virien seemed more agitated than usual, and she paced back and forth inside her little silkhouse. “Look, this can’t go on, Impatient One. I really can’t share another word.”

  “Then share my parting.” Though incapable of whitetrance, Virien had only to Unspeak Merwen, and she would depart.

  “No, no. I won’t give you the satisfaction of that.” Her path wound across the floor in a figure-eight. “Once you’d gone, they all would say, ‘Even the Impatient One tried her best.’”

  “I would give anything I have to see you healed.”

  “Even your life?”

  “My life is a small thing.”

  Virien stopped in her tracks. “Ha! If a life is so small, why should I not hasten death?”

  Merwen smiled. “You caught me there. I suppose that after so much sharing with you, my life has come to seem small indeed.”

  “Would you share your life with me? Would you share my love and raise my children?”

  Then Merwen’s heart beat faster. “Yes,” she said levelly. “If it would cure you, I would.”