Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  “I see,” said Asach. “And who is that?”

  Orcutt frowned. “Well, really, that was my sister. Her mother who died.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Asach again. “I can see why she’d take this very seriously. With a lot of piety.”

  “Thank-you.” Collie pursed his lips. “But I think it’s worse than you realize. “ He pursed again. His lips moved in, then out, several times. He cocked his head and decided. “You know how a Seer is made?”

  “No. Are they?”

  “Good answer. They’re not. They’re born. At a Gathering. They are born at a Gathering, in the Sight of His Earthly Eye.” He sighed. “And you’ll find out just what that means soon enough. But just think on this. Laurel’s too much like her mother. Too serious. Takes it too serious, when it’s really just about being organized. Somebody born at the Second Gathering, they train to take Twos and Threes next time. Somebody born at the Third, they take Threes and Fours next time, And so on. You follow?”

  Asach nodded.

  “So, it’s not even meant to follow in any family line. It’s just a way to be sure the routes get passed on. But Laurel’s Mom was stubborn as they come. Came the Third Gathering, she was no spring bud any more, and she was carrying Laurel. But she just wouldn’t hear of reassigning her people to another island. And so she went up there, and He opened His Eye, and she bore Laurel, and on the way back she died.” He stared down at the table. “I know her mind. She thinks He took her Mom, to make her Seer. But it’s just a way to stay organized.” Tears welled in his eyes.

  Asach left him a moment with this remembered grief. “Perhaps it would be better if I sought another island?”

  Orcutt coughed. “Oh, hell, no.” He rubbed his eyes. Then he actually grinned. “See, this one’s gunna be special, and you’re already here, and she ain’t the only Seer in our island.” Now he had a twinkle in his eye. “How old you think I am?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say. You say your sister, so—” Asach paused. “Were you the oldest?”

  “Yep.”

  “And your sister—Laurel’s Mom—the youngest?”

  “Yep.”

  “Big family?”

  “Yep.”

  “Surely, not—”

  “Yep. Ones and twos, that’s me. So. I thought, when I saw you sittin’ in the dirt playin’ plink with the little ones: I thought, that one’s been around the block a few times. So, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get you prepped, get you up to speed, see you to the staging area, then hand you off to Laurel when she’s got herself organized. For a price.”

  He grinned again. “Because, I figure, if you came all this way, you can afford it. And if you can’t, well, it would do Laurel good to have somebody along more than a hand or two old. Somebody on her side.”

  Asach met his gaze evenly, did not waver, reached into the cloak. Did not even look down, just handed over the TCM tithe credit.

  Orcutt looked, though. He saw the color. His eyes went wide.

  Now, Asach grinned. “You’re right. I can. And I will.”

  From Asach’s perspective, it was preparations for a pack trip like any other. Asach picked a riding horse. Asach picked a pack mule. Asach packed light, but prepared for any weather. Asach picked a farrier, and had the animals shod with full plates and studs to cope with rocky ground. Asach overpaid for it all, and made clear that return favors for the custom were due Laurel.

  Orcutt was impressed. There was nothing flashy about the animals or the gear. They were of a piece: sensible, serviceable, sound. “Don’t much need me at all,” he said. “We should keep you around.”

  “Mis-spent youth,” Asach replied, but volunteered no more.

  Even the staging area was predictable: stones marked numbered campsites; picket lines were set up between stakes driven into the packed ground. Most animals were hobbled. Feed and water wagons made a circuit, so that rations could be saved for the trek to come. Asach drilled the catechism until The Hymn intruded into dreams, set to varying strains, including all the tunes the lads had hummed driving out from Bonneville. Asach hoped they’d returned unharmed.

  Actually, Asach was surprised. There were not that many people there. A lot of them were children. “Mostly Barrens islands, yet,” explained Orcutt. “We need to clear this lot out before we drown. Once that tramline opens, no tellin’ how many rounds she’ll have to make.”

  “You mean this is not the only Gathering?”

  Orcutt clearly thought the question mad. “There’s only one Gathering. And this’ll be the biggest yet.”

  Asach thought about this a moment, and tried again. “So, how long will it go on?”

  “No tellin.’ Year, two three. At least, if it’s the same as always. Only, this one won’t be.”

  “The Revelation.”

  He winked. “The Revelation.”

  “But if I only have supplies for—”

  “Oh, you don’t worry about that. You can trust Laurel. His Eye will open by the time you get up there. You will stand in awe before his Gaze.” His voice quavered reverentially, and then, quite matter-of-factly, he continued. “Then Laurel will See you back down, and See the next batch up. Unless, of course, you See and don’t believe. In that case, you’re on your own.”

  The next morning, Asach discovered why this could be a problem.

  They mounted up. Asach saw at once why the appellation pilgrim had so often been presumed: everyone mounted, except Laurel and other Seers, wore long, split-backed, hooded cloaks not unlike Asach’s own. Laurel proceeded down the line from back to front, handing each rider a lead line for the horse behind. Asach began to protest: “that’s really not nec—” but trailed off at Laurel’s glower.

  “Just mind your mule,” she said, moving up the line.

  And then she was mounted herself. She made a flapping motion past her ear, as if waving off a bug. “Hoods up!” She shouted. “Hoods Up!...Hoods Up!...Hoods Up!” echoed down the line.

  Confused, Asach fumbled to pull the cloak hood from the collar with one hand without dropping the pack mule’s lead line. Another Seer trudged up from behind, checking something. It was difficult to see exactly what was going on. Asach jumped at a slap on the thigh.

  “Hoods UP!”

  Confused, Asach looked down. The Seer signaled furiously, as at a child. “Over the eyes! Pull your hood down over your eyes!”

  Asach groaned. Seers. Clairvoyants? Shamans? Oracles? Prognosticators? No. Himmists has to be the most bloody-minded literal people ever imagined, apart from accountants. Seers were, quite literally, guides to the blind. Or, in this case, blinded. Mindful of the consequences of being abandoned in the middle of nowhere, Asach complied. It was going to be a bloody boring ride.

  Asach wasn’t completely blind. A patch of the horse’s mane was visible. A patch of Asach’s own chest was visible. A patch of the mule’s pack was visible, wobbling off to the side. Occasionally, the mule’s nose hove into view, as it slobbered on its new buddy’s withers. The horse did not seem to mind. Asach became intensely aware of the need for clippers and a nail buffer. Asach began daydreaming of coffee and pie. The train trundled on.

  Other senses became more acute. The smell of the dust changed. Less—clayey. Then, simply, less. Before the end of the first day, they had moved onto rocky ground. Asach had lost all sense of direction; tried to picture in what direction rocky ground might lie. Then noted the warmth beaming from the—back. Definitely back. And surely, it was late in the day now? Surely the warmth had—passed overhead? So, they were heading east?

  Asach listened. There was nothing to hear, except the scrabbling sound of hooves on gravel. Sometimes a clop, more often a crunch, or a slither, or a scrape. And the squeaking of tack. And the clinking of harness. And the crickety bit rollers in nervous horses’ mouths. And their breathing, and snorting, and snotty-nose-blowing sounds. The occasional squeal as one or another objected to the attentions of a pack-mule. Asach’s feet, then knees, then butt grew numb. Asach
’s stomach made rumbling sounds. The horses trudged on.

  It was the mules who announced camp time. As if on cue, braying began at one end of the train, then whipped along with ear-splitting fervor. As if on a cue of their own, the horses all pulled up. Asach reflected. None of these could have made this trip before. The last Gathering would have been twenty years earlier. But clearly, at least some knew what was going on.

  “Dismount!” echoed down the line as the sun winked out. They made camp in the dark, on the rock-hard ground. The Seers encircled the camp with watch fires. They could pull their hoods off now. It was impossible to see where they were.

  After three days, the air changed. It smelled of high, cold mountains. The ground was uneven now, rising and falling, the trail twisting across the fall lines. If it could be called a trail. It was as if Laurel was seeking the worst possible ground. Rocky, unlevel, horses lurching and scrambling to find purchase in spots. At one bend, Asach nearly pitched over from vertigo, as the fist-sized view from under the hood revealed a sloping granite face, plunging down, down, down, but no clear trail at all beneath the mule’s feet. The animals seemed unperturbed. At camp that night, Asach sidled up to another fire, populated by what looked like a ten-year old. “How do they do this?” Asach asked.

  “Who?”

  “The horses. The mules. How do they know these trails?”

  The boy wrinkled his nose and forehead. “They train them, of course!”

  Asach said a silent prayer for Orcutt, who clearly had done more of the choosing than Asach had realized, and another for Laurel, out of new respect for a Seer’s multifaceted responsibilities.

  Another day of this, and they had passed the foothills, into the mountains themselves. Asach could not identify the smells, beyond something like leaf mold; something like earth. They had to unrope the horses now, so that the mules could drop back to single file. Then, even that became impossible, and they had to dismount, tying the mule to the horse and leading the horse on foot. Asach felt physically ill as they clambered across a scree slope one by one, the very trail, if it could be called that, cascading from beneath their feet, but miraculously, all made it safely, and not a single animal was lost.

  Finally, toward day’s end, they topped a rise, and slithered into a saddle of level ground. Asach leaned against the horse, exhausted, soaking in the snuffly warmth of its breath. It turned and nibbled hopefully at the mule’s pack, then jumped as a raucous cheer swept the line. Unbalanced, Asach nearly hit the ground, and in sheer reflex swept back the hood—only to see everyone else do the same.

  “Hoods off! Hoods off from here on!”

  This time, they made camp in daylight. The animals were fed and rubbed down. As dusk fell Asach dozed, leaning on the mule’s pack, trying to stir the energy to cook a meal, mind drifting to an eerie, half-heard sound. It echoed softly between the rock walls of the saddle; oozed down from higher on the mountain. Like a roundelay, of childhood. Like a desert wind. Like a—Asach stirred. Like a medieval chant. Asach sat up. Like a hymn. Asach stood. Which is what is was. For the first time, Asach was hearing The Gathering Hymn sung aloud. It was unbelievably alien. It was unbelievably beautiful. Picked up and carried beyond fatigue; carried away by the moment, Asach joined in. Surely, they were not far now.

  Fog lay so heavily in the valley that morning was marked only by a lessening of darkness. People; shelters; animals, loomed suddenly from the grey, then sank back into the mist whence they arose. There was a shallow, rocky lake somewhere beyond their picket line. Asach led the stock to water.

  “Not too much,” cautioned Laurel’s disembodied voice. Asach started. “This water’s OK for them, but not too much at once. Don’t let them wade in and muddy up the bottom. It’ll make them sick.”

  The mule was fussy. It sipped, then raised its head to swivel its great, long, fuzzy ears, spooking at every noise. Eventually it was done, and Asach returned them both to the picket line.

  “They rest today,” said Laurel, materializing again. “Come on with me. We’ll lead the others up. I don’t want to lose you. “

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”

  Laurel rolled her eyes. “No, you won’t. Come on.”

  Asach worried briefly that the hoods were about to go back on; that they’d spend the day teetering on precipices, blind. But not so: it was trail craft that concerned Laurel, not visibility. “Stay off the dirt. Stay off the sand. See there? Stay on the rock.” She pointed to an option off the obvious path; it required hopping across polished boulders, as if fording a stream. A light came on in Asach’s head.

  “Is that what we’ve been doing all along? Avoiding seeing the trail? Avoiding making a trail?

  Again, Laurel rolled her eyes. “What else?”

  I don’t know, thought Asach. Initiation rites. Secret orders. Dark mystery. And so on.

  Laurel trudged upward. “We share His gaze. We don’t hide it. But we’re not stupid. If they found this place, what do you think TCM would do?”

  “I’m surprised they haven’t already.”

  Laurel stopped and turned around. Her eyes were piercing aquamarine. They seemed to focus the dreary light. “A few have tried.”

  She turned, and continued on.

  Eventually, the path became—a path, worn into dark granite. Asach did some mental calculations. The Himmists had been on New Utah less than a century. Either there were a lot more of them than anyone thought, which was unlikely, or the path predated them by a very long time.

  “Who made this?”

  Laurel’s answer was matter-of-fact, as if Asach had asked the time. “The Angels.” She did not look back.

  The path wore deeper into the rock, and widened. The route became more boulder-strewn. They were old, and weathered, and lichen-encrusted. Lichen-like encrusted. Who knew what grew here of its own. Then suddenly they stepped through the veil of fog into the open sun. Asach was momentarily dazzled. Before them lay a barren, until the path rounded up over a lip and disappeared. Behind them lay a carpet of cloud, sparkling in the sunshine.

  Finally they reached the rim. Asach gasped as their heads cleared the rise. They looked out over the edge of a tabletop; the truncated remains of an ancient cone. It dipped gently away from the eye, like a concave lens seen edge-on. Windswept, bare, it seemed paved with diamonds. As they climbed up over the edge and stood to full height, the reason became clear. The ground was littered with foamy shards, brilliant white in the morning sun. Asach picked one up in a hand heated by the climb, and saw the ghost of blue iridescence. It was opal meerschaum.

  “His tears,” smiled Laurel. “It makes me happy to be so near.”

  As they walked on, the scattered chunks consolidated; some streaked edgewise in exposed veins, crystallized in an ancient volcanic layer-cake. Their boots crunched in the gravel. Then, behind them, floated the eerie thread of the Hymn as the others joined them on the plateau. It came from all directions, as other parties also cleared the edge, converging toward the unseen center, obscured by the slope of the land. Asach looked up at the aquamarine sky, clear as Laurel’s eyes. The day was crisp, clean; the sun warm. They walked on awhile. As the voices of one group joined the next, the singing became less a roundelay, but kept that exquisite polyphonic harmony. Then, as they approached a dip, Laurel held up a hand and turned, shouting back, “We stop here.”

  Asach looked about, confused as others crowded past and pushed forward, singing in full voice. Joining hands; turning to look one another full in the eyes, then turning to do the same to each neighbor; they waved Asach to join in; belting out the final stanzas:

  Arise! And leave no stone unturned!

  Arise! And plow each field!

  Arise! Believe! That all who yearn

  Will see His Face revealed!

  We fled in fear His awful Gaze

  But with His Earthly Eye

  He sees, He knows, He sends His Grace

  Across all starry skies.

  So shoulder all your burden
s!

  For when your time is done

  Revealed at last! His angels

  Will make all Churches one!

  And as they ringed the rim and the final words echoed below, all looked down, and gasped again as one: even those who had been there before. Centered within a mile-wide bowl stretched a polished dome of white: a stratum of perfect opal meerschaum, nearly half a mile across, its overlying layers worn away by wind and time. It bulged upward slightly, perhaps due to pressures within the mountain core. At its center intruded—an old lava tube?—that radiated with crystalline depths in the sun, like a ruby set in gold. Or more likely, thought Asach, like a garnet set in mica, but why spoil the magic of it all?

  Whatever the structure was that twinkled in the heart of the dead volcano, the effect was unmistakable: it did indeed, for all the world, look like an enormous red eye, complete with mica-speckled iris and a dark pupil staring up from deep within the mountain.

  Unthinking, Asach stepped forward.

  “No! No further! You could be consumed by His Gaze!” Laurel pointed to something at her feet.

  Exasperated—it was, after all, only rocks—Asach followed the line of Laurel’s finger. There was something carved there, in the stone. Peering, it was difficult to make out. Fist-sized, old, scuffed, weathered, it looked like—eyes, maybe, over a lopsided mouth, but highly stylized.

  “Watch for the Angels,” Laurel instructed. “Do not pass His Angels. Wait here. I must bring others.”

  So, it seemed there was to be more to the show. Asach sank down cross-legged next to the carving, and settled in for the duration. Another round-trip would take a fair stretch of time. Doodling aimlessly with one finger on the rock, picking away stray bits of mossy, lichenish gunk, Asach studied the amazing panorama. The crystalline structure was hauntingly flawless. It drew the eye into its depths, like staring into infinity. Like staring into space—the eyes played tricks, and it even seemed to twinkle from time to time. On careful study, the mica seemed to be under, or behind, or—well, Asach really couldn’t decide, but anyway somehow layered with the gemstone, as if looking through it to the reflecting rock.