"How do you mean?"
"If your heart's set on this venture I shouldn't try to dissuade you. I imagine that it's a brave thing to do—braver even than going to that vile place in the west. Besides, your guild is honouring you. But who has ever come back from the desert? Who?"
"Look, Mum, those earlier expeditions all failed because explorers tried to foot it over the sands. We'll float over fast, and in comfort. It'll be a picnic."
Besides, thought Yaleen, I’m in love. At last. Am I not?
I'm almost in love with love itself! And Tam is my emblem of love; just as surely as love's own emblem is the rose. So obviously I must help him (and the others too; don 7 forget the others!) to sail our rose of love through the sky to another land, somewheir or wherever.
Then back home again. Back home; goes without saying.
My love is a brave rose balloon. Let nothing blight it. Let no thorn prick it.
Yet why, oh why, should I feel this whelming need to love? This urge to surrender myself—not so much to a particular man (absurd idea!) as to love itself? This need to submerge myself (that's it, submerge!) in an ecstasy of the emotions?
Perhaps a Creator might have felt such an urge, once she had crafted her universe. This desire to submerge Herself in the stream of Being! To surrender Herself to the flow of feeling—so that thus her worlds should be truly alive, free to live as they choose.
(Supposing that there is a Creator! Or ever was. That’s an unsatisfactory proposition without much meat on it. A dry bone for Ajelobo savants to chew over.)
Let's look at this another way, hmm? I've spent years crafting my own self. I ve crafted my life. Now I must dive into that life headlong—to become who I really am.
Just so, does my mum become a mother again. She does so instinctively, irrationally, capriciously—whatever she says about reasons, after the event! Yet perhaps she does so wisely too, with the wisdom of the heart, not of the head.
Such strange heady thoughts are brewed by love! Such an intoxicating ferment!
All things outside of me—a ring, a rose, a gondola, the sky, those dunes which I have yet to glimpse—all of these connect up with the feelings which are inside me; expressing them, wiring them, illuminating them. That's why love matters: it makes the world bloom with new meaning.
Gently Yaleen embraced her mother. "Don't worry. I'll be back to play with my new sister!"
"Sister? It might be a brother. Or twins."
"Oh, I suppose so! Dunno why I said that. You'll come to the launching, won't you, to wave us on our way?"
"I imagine we will."
"Don't imagine. Do!"
Mother laughed. "Very well!" Only then did she spy the diamond ring on Yaleen's finger. "That's beautiful. If you fall among savages, you can buy food with it."
"Maybe we'll fall amongst aliens! Among natives of this world who were here before ever our people came. There they'll be on the other side of the sands, hiding in their burrows beneath ruined palaces. Harking to us with their huge ears, or in their dreams."
"And pigs might fly."
"If a rose can fly, a pig might fly too."
"Tonight's won't. We're having fried pork for dinner."
Dad came home late that evening; though not so late that the pork was spoilt. (Mother had commenced frying, irrespective.) Naturally, Dad was chagrined to be late on this day of days, of his daughter's surprise return. Mother appeared richly amused at his chagrin— though she was amused in a composed, controlled, almost artificial way which struck Yaleen as most peculiar. Mum obviously relished something, yet she wasn't going to split her sides laughing. In case she split the sprig of baby loose inside her? Yaleen was quite puzzled.
The truth came out over dinner.
Dad had just dished out an extra dollop of nutmeggy apple sauce on to Yaleen's plate, and he was quizzing her as to whether those Sons used spices much at Manhome South; and if so, what kinds, and how (which in itself was odd, since Dad had never been one to bring work home with him, save for the tang of it on his clothes); when Mum remarked casually, "By the way, your father's having a love affair."
"What?" Yaleen was flabbergasted. First a baby; now an affair? Had she heard aright? Had Mum really meant what she seemed to mean?
"We're also having a baby, your mother and I," said Dad. He didn't sound too discomposed, though perhaps he laid undue stress on the "we".
"I know you are. Mum said."
Mum smiled. "Quite ingenious of your dad, I'd say. He can have an affair and a baby. An affair with one woman, a baby with another." She didn't sound sarcastic; but maybe she was playing a deeper game than simple sarcasm, "Usually it's the other way about, isn't it? You should know that, Yaleen. A riverwoman has her affairs —and her husband stays home with baby. How the world's changing since the war! All that marching by, and the distant clash of weapons, must have fired ambitions in your dad/'
"Oh." Yaleen examined the grain of the wood in the kitchen table —a black knot seemed to be coming loose.
"How was she this evening, then?" enquired Mum.
"Fine, thanks. Fine," said Dad.
"I'm glad to hear it. I'd say we owe her a debt of gratitude. Perhaps we should even ask her to be guidemother to our baby when it's bom! You'd imagine that a love affair would, well, dilute the passion of the loins. Divert the seed; water it down. But no. Provenly not." Mum patted her tummy. "A lover has to make bigger, fiercer efforts; and this spills over, doesn't it? The lover has to prove how he's big enough for two women. And prove it he does."
Dad grinned lopsidedly. "I certainly seem to have done."
They didn't seem to mind discussing this business; though for sure a strand of tension twanged beneath the amiable veneer.
"Do describe your friend, hmm? Tell Yaleen what she looks like."
"Oh, who cares what she looks like?" said Dad, sounding ever so reasonable. "Looks, indeed! It's her person that's important. It's what she is, that counts."
"To be sure! And she's strong. Independent. Assertive. And subtle; but then all women are subtle."
"Er, what's her name?" Yaleen asked cautiously.
"Her name's Chanoose," replied Mum. "She's the quaynustress."
"Her!"
"Oh yes, I was forgetting you must know her."
"Well, not intimately."
"Unlike your father. And despite her strength and independence, this same Chanoose has fallen under your father's spell—as if enchanted. It quite makes me proud."
Yaleen turned to her dad. "Was that why you were asking me about the spice-trading prospects over in the west?"
"I don't follow."
"Has your Chanoose set her eye on exporting best Pecawar spices to the west bank? Those Sons don't need hotting up, you know. They need cooling down. They need blanding, not peppering."
"No, no, I just asked out of curiosity."
And so the meal continued, in amiable enough vein, with bluepears in syrup for afters followed by cups of cinnamon coffee.
Later on, when she was in her room, Yaleen tried to assess more calmly her mother's attitude to the recently conceived foetus. Of whose love was it really the product? Why, of Mum's and Dad's, obviously! But wasn't the enigmatic Chanoose in a sense the mother too, even though she didn't bear the child? Didn't Chanoose provide the catalyst, as they said of chemicals in Guineamoy? Barren herself, presumably "safe" from conception, hadn't she nevertheless caused the event to occur? So had Dad given Mum the baby to prove his continuing fidelity, despite the affair? Had Mum insisted upon this, as her price for condoning it? Or had the affair itself transformed Dad in his middle years, compelling him to create new life like a fountain bursting forth in a desert?
And how had he captivated and besotted Chanoose, who had always seemed—from a distance—so aloof and powerful? How had the 'mistress become a mistress, in this strange triple relationship?
Yaleen found herself feeling deeply glad and thankful on her dad's behalf. But what preoccupied her most was the quee
r way that this affair of her dad's, coupled with his role as sire of a new baby, seemed to reflect her own love-dilemma. What a peculiar model of her own experience! Might she also manage to maintain a similar balance—between herself and Hasso and Tam? Could she? Ought she to try?
Somehow she suspected that the situation involving Mum and Dad and Chanoose was inherently unstable. It was indeed unlike the rompings of a riverwoman in a distant port, reaping wild oats far from her shore-husband's ken. Yet with taboos perhaps about to fray under the pressure of a certain fungus-drug and cross-river intercourse—and with balloons in the offing—might not everyone's current way of life become unstable presently? Might not drug chemistry and balloon technology cause changes which the war itself had failed to cause (though the war might have been the initial catalyst)?
Maybe, maybe not. The river guild and river temples were subtle, old, and unlikely to spring leaks too large to caulk.
She considered recent events again: the mooting of the desert expedition, preparations for this, Chanoose's affair with her father, the pregnancy, her own mission ex Pecawar to Guineamoy thence to Manhome South culminating in her official secondment as guild representative aboard the Rose.
Wasn't there something odd about the sequence? Something more than coincidental? Chanoose must have become intimate with her dad at about the time the guild must have seriously started to consider the advantages, and the possible threat, posed by the expedition. . . .
No, no, this was nonsense. The day had been long. Yaleen was tired out—by delight at the balloon; by the energy she had poured into her love for Tam, and into the decision to prefer him; and finally by her astonishment at her parents' capers.
Chanoose had fallen in love irrationally. "Enchanted" had been the word Mum used. Even if Chanoose was also "subtle", she surely hadn't chosen to fall in love—or pretend she was in love. What possible advantage could she gain? Some form of leverage over Yaleen, through her father? Hardly!—unless Chanoose was thinking in terms of when the balloon returned; and even so, she carried more clout in her official capacity than she could bring to bear as a sort of erotic "stepmother". . . .
There remained the possibility that Chanoose was deliberately presenting a pattern—an unstable one—which she knew would find an echo in Yaleen's behaviour. . .
No. Chanoose must have been emotionally snared at about the time that Yaleen landed on the west bank; when the world shook slightly and all hearts paused, as though in tribute to the peace mission.
Yaleen climbed into bed; and slept too deep for dreams, or for dreams to survive the dawn undrowned.
Just three weeks later, of a Tauday morning, a crowd gathered out at the big workyard at the eastern end of Capiz Street.
The majority of people present were sightseers pure and simple, for the Pecawar Publicizer had done as its name implied in honour of the launch. Others were more directly involved, including men of the aquaguild. One of the duties of the aquaguild was, of course, to douse any serious fires which accident might spark off in Pecawar, fires too fierce for neighbours to quench; and the aquaguild boss— having done some homework—was dubious of the wisdom of lighting a hot-air breeder anywhere near three bags full of watergas.
"If your Rose does conflagrate on take-off," the aquaboss was saying to Hasso, "it'll drag a torch right across those houses there."
The trio of gasbags already bobbed slackly overhead, straining slightly southward in a gentle breeze. The day was sunny, almost cloudless. The Gavotte rose which Tam had painted on the first stage —the hot-air globe—was the height of a tall man. Gavotte was a high-centred bloom of warm pink, renowned for keeping its shape for ages. Might the balloon likewise keep in shape.
'Mistress Chanoose intervened. "Don't worry about it, Aquaboss. I doubt if these adventurers would intentionally fly a bonfire through the sky! And if that happens—which it won't—I'm sure your fellows are up to soaking any wreckage; even out here where your 'ducts drip the last drops of river-juice."
A sly put-down, this, implying a contrast between the authentic river, plied by women, and this model river running tamely around town in brick courses. The aquaboss shrugged and turned away.
Yes, Chanoose was present. How could she fail to be, when Yaleen represented her guild? This was the first occasion since Yaleen's return to Pecawar that she had been in close proximity to her dad's mistress; and Yaleen really scrutinized the woman, limning her in her mind.
Undoubtedly Chanoose was a handsome woman. She was tall, with short curly flaxen hair, an oval face of clear skin, and sapphire eyes of the first water. Her nose was slender, though her lips were large and fleshy in sensual counterpoint. Her fingernails were long and well-manicured, as if to emphasize that whenever she worked at something physical, she never worked clumsily; nor need anyone else. Yaleen tried to imagine those nails teasing her father's buttocks, urging him; but she couldn't quite succeed.
Chanoose stared clear over other heads, to where Mum and Dad were lurking near the back of the crowd. Mum, hiding in her belly the jewel of a new life, wouldn't stray any closer to the Rose, whose dangerous gasbags even now towered high as a hoganny.
"Excuse me," Chanoose said, "I should pay my respects to friends." She departed, Dad-wards.
"And excuse me!" said a gnome of a man. "I'm from the Publicizer. "
Yaleen wasn't inclined to give any more dumb interviews; and besides—"All aboard!" shouted Tam from the gondola door—the balloon was about to depart.
The hot-air breeder was lit; which made the crew swelter somewhat and long for the cool of the sky-heights. The gasbags were swollen full of watergas, straining erect. Tethers were cast off—and the Rose climbed swiftly away from the eastern suburb.
Since the south-by-south-east drift was gradual by comparison, the crew had many minutes to admire the spread of the whole town.
"Oh this is the way to make maps!" crowed Hasso. "If only there was some means of fixing quickly what we're seeing." But there wasn't any such way. He dug Tam in the ribs. "If only you could glaze this spectacle on to the window-glass."
"Then we shouldn't be able to see where we're going, the rest of the time," Tam pointed out.
Yaleen mainly had eyes for the thin red veins of the aqueduct system. These seemed to print upon the town a single complicated, curlicued letter from some unknown alphabet of signs. Or maybe it was a whole word in such a sign system. A name. A signature, which she wasn't able to decipher. The higher they ascended, the less visible this word became. It soon disappeared into the shrinking tapestry of the town, one set of threads lost in a bigger pattern which diminished quickly. Spice farms below were tiny patchworks. Away to the west, the river was but a glossy road.
"How does it feel to be a heroine?" Tam asked Yaleen.
"I think," she said, "I already was one."
"Uh?"
"I feel as if I already did something splendid and awesome! But I've no idea what! I can't ever know what it is—because, because it surrounds me on all sides. It's the air I breathe. It's everything. There's nothing else apart from it."
"That's a psychological condition known as day jar view, " remarked the woman Melza from Jangali. "When you tipple too much in the heat of the day, suddenly it seems as if things that are taking place, have already taken place before. This can occur in your dreams, too. You're convinced you're revisiting the dream—not viewing it for the first time. It happens to everyone at least once in their lives. Dayjar view."
"Oh," said Yaleen.
Presently they were high enough to enter the airstream blowing from the west. With a lurch and a bump and a twist about, the Rose changed course and picked up speed.
A panic breathlessness assailed Yaleen. However, she stood still and breathed slowly and pretended to herself that the Rose was merely afloat upon pretematurally clear water—and that a solitary cauliflower cloud down below was only a reflection of itself.
Before long they were crossing a featureless light brown plain. Beyond that
plain long ridges of dunes, toothed with arrow-heads of sand, webbed the surface.
The invisible living current of air swept them onward, eastward.
Afterwards
Thus it was in the time of Yaleen of Pecawar—perhaps!
Nowadays, of course, the whole of our planet has long since been thoroughly explored and thoroughly settled. We have launched machines and a handful of people into orbit around our world. There's serious talk of sending ships of space out to visit the moons of great distant gaseous Hepseba which shares this sun-space with us; though such a voyage would last for many years. Hepseba is so far away that it went unheeded by our ancestors. Some day in the distant future we might even go further, inconceivably further, to the stars to plumb the mystery of our origins.
Meanwhile we confront the mystery of these three texts discovered inside a fallen obelisk—twin to the so-called Obelisk of the Ship, buried by sand near the eastern edge of the Oriental Erg.
The Book of the River is an ancient printed volume. The Book of the Stars is a roll of antique newsprint tied with twine. The Book of Being is a bundle of manuscript papers written in three distinct and separate hands. Whereas most other ancient paper has perished over the centuries, down the millennia, these three examples were preserved by the dryness of the desert—and by their hiding place within mortared stones, which themselves were hidden inside a dune.
To say that we question the veracity of these texts is the wildest understatement. We well know that our ancestors were great romancers. (Admittedly, so are we; though nowadays we at least strive to be self-consistent in our flights of fancy!) And we know how they lived in an age of taboo and superstition—not forgetting the fungus-spore amnesiplague, which we have eradicated.
Yet why should these three documents in particular have been considered valuable enough to pack inside that obelisk? And considered so, by whom?
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