The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  “My First.” Katela bowed her head slightly in respect.

  “Katela, Laak has just told me she will be stepping down as Leader.”

  Katela looked perturbed at both the information and the fact that Sopharndi had decided to take her into her confidence. The First was a taciturn, self-contained female, who rarely spoke on important matters without long consideration.

  “A new Leader will be anointed.”

  Katela nodded.

  “Laak will choose Cochta.”

  Katela said nothing, but she knew her face had briefly betrayed her shock. She did not yet have the same control over her emotions as Sopharndi.

  “But—”

  Sopharndi stopped her with a look. “The Leader’s decision is final. I believe she may not have the complete support of the Elders, but it is not without precedent for a Leader to choose her successor unilaterally.”

  Katela’s breathing had become shallow. With a visible effort, she brought it back under control.

  “The People will not accept her,” she said. “It will split the tribe.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Sopharndi. Both fighters knew that despotic Leaders had been deposed—occasionally violently— in the past. “Leaders like Cochta rarely thrive in times of peace.”

  It wasn’t long before she remembered those words and wondered if she, too, had the gift of prophecy.

  “I am going to warn Cley. You have the settlement.”

  Sopharndi walked back through the dwellings, watching the usual routines being enacted, the children rounded up for bed, the hunters skinning their latest catch, the smell of cooking.

  She walked back past the fire pit, the meeting circle and into the forest.

  30

  Cley ate supper with his closest followers. The questions they asked were deeper, and more dangerous, than those asked at the public contemplation sessions. Cley knew, if his message were to spread, if a mystical tradition was to take root among the People, it would be this small group who would provide the flame to start the fire.

  They had been with him, living close by, for months.

  A few weeks after his return from the Parched Lands, curiosity had won over some of the young, and a group of them had followed him to find out where their teacher spent his nights. They returned with a story which spread among the People like wildfire, mostly because it was too outlandish not to be believed.

  The group of adolescents had followed Cley at a distance when he left the settlement, immediately after the dusk silent song. They had thought themselves discovered when, just as he entered the forest, Cley stopped suddenly, standing absolutely still. The group came to a sudden halt. They had chosen an evening when the breeze was a reliable southeasterly, so there was no danger of him picking up their scent. Still, they all held their breaths when he stopped walking, his arms by his sides, his body assuming an unnatural stiffness. For a count of ten, they watched him, beginning to fear he had suffered some sort of affliction, when he relaxed and began to move. Relieved, they followed.

  When asked, he had told them that he slept in a tree. Sleeping outside the settlement was considered dangerous, and would only normally be contemplated when on a long hunt. Always, of course, as part of a group. To sleep outside the safety of the tribe alone was unheard of. Then, much about Cley was beyond the experience of the People. Sleeping alone, in a tree, was perhaps only to be expected of the first prophet since Aleiteh to whom the Singer had spoken directly.

  When Cley had reached the tallest tree in sight—an evergreen akrarn, as were almost all of the mature trees on the hillside— the group had stopped, ducking behind bushes in case he looked behind him.

  They needn’t have worried. Without pausing, Cley had held out his hand. The lowest branch of the tree swept down toward him. At first, his pursuers assumed it was a trick of the light, but their hypothesis disintegrated within a few seconds. Looking exactly like the arm of a father scooping up a child, the branch lifted Cley about twenty feet into the air, handing him over to another branch which lifted him still higher. Another three handovers and Cley was a distant figure at the very top of the tree, where it looked as if a giant bird had constructed a nest. He jumped lightly over the side and disappeared.

  For a few minutes, the young group was reduced to fits of giggles, unable to stop themselves reacting to the impossible sight they had witnessed. None of them could pinpoint why it was so funny, but once one of them had succumbed to laughter, the others were quickly infected. As one of them later commented, it just seemed to fit in perfectly with what they knew of Cley, the prophet. He did the impossible, he said the impossible. And they couldn’t get enough of him.

  The group who followed him, and, soon afterward, began sleeping at the foot of the tree where Cley spent his nights, became the conduit through which his message spread to those of the People who hadn’t yet attended his talks and contemplation sessions. His closest followers found their emotions—emotions which were, traditionally, controlled or channeled—came alive and swung wildly when it came to Cley. Sometimes he confused them, occasionally they feared him, sometimes they feared for him. But mostly they loved him. They were constantly aware that they were in the presence of someone utterly unlike anyone else they had ever encountered. It wasn’t just the miracle of Cley acquiring a personality, and intelligence, it was the nature of that personality, the unique quality of that intelligence. They wanted to be with him all the time, despite the fact that he had taken the unquestioned, firm landscape of their lives and replaced it with a shifting, changing, moving world that he insisted they had to encounter personally.

  And so a community had sprung up around the base of the tree where he slept.

  Every evening, after the public contemplation session, but before any public meetings around the fire pit, Cley and his followers would wait before returning to the trees. Members of the tribe knew he could be found there, and, as darkness fell, those who needed healing would come to him. Even those who muttered against him in daylight would often have a temporary change of heart when a child ran a dangerous fever, or a hunter was half-killed trying to bring down a shuk - the most dangerous of all the animals, but most prized for its black and red fur.

  Cley’s customary answer was to fill their water bottles simply by resting his hand against it. When the sick drank from it, they would be healed. Those who made use of this did so circumspectly as time went on, careful not to be seen by their neighbors.

  Then, one night, Cley’s command of the miraculous failed him for the first time. He took the waterskin of an old woman whose male partner was lame. Placing it between his palms, he cleared his mind and…nothing. It was as if he was trying to finish a sentence and the word he was looking for—an obvious, everyday word, nothing obscure—simply dropped out of his memory. He sat there with the waterskin between his hands and realized he had forgotten what to do.

  Then he realized that he had forgotten something far more important.

  When had he last paused, when had he last summoned Home? He had been doing it every morning and evening until recently, then somehow he had allowed the morning routine to slip. To his shock, he thought it may have been three or four days since he had last called forth the door to Richmond Park.

  He stumbled away from the fire pit, apologizing to the old woman, suggesting she came back the following night.

  He acknowledged the confused looks from his followers with a nod and a forced smile.

  “I must be with the Singer. Alone. I will see you in the forest.”

  As soon as he entered the cover of the trees, he found a large akrarn and sat out of sight, leaning against the blue-black trunk.

  “Pause,” he said. His surroundings lost their vibrancy, colors and sounds muted in an instant.

  “Show Home.”

  The door slid up from the forest floor, and he crawled through it. He had got this far on instinct, but he could barely remember why or what was supposed to happen next.

  As he got
to his feet on the path in Richmond Park and looked around at the grass, the summer flowers, the blurred shapes of distant people and the impressive sight of the royal oak, he felt a confused flood of memories judder around the boundaries of consciousness.

  He half-closed his eyes against the onslaught of simultaneously comforting, yet jarringly alien, scenes flickering through his lashes. A jumble of images lit up his brain but vanished before he could fully grasp them.

  My hands on a piano

  A man in black, driving away from a building site in a shining city

  A tall, glowing, creature with huge, dark eyes, holding out its hands

  A woman, her face wreathed in smoke, saying, “of course I love you, you daft twat.”

  He stumbled along the path, walking toward the water.

  There was a sound in a tree to his left. He looked toward it and saw movement, something racing up the trunk in a streak of red-brown fur.

  He moved closer and looked up into the branches, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he saw the creature crawl along a high branch and squat there, eating something.

  It was a yoik.

  But it wasn’t eating a longfruit, it was eating some kind of nut.

  He tried to shake off the feeling of horror that seeing the yoik here gave him. His mind was rebelling at the juxtaposition, insisting that either the yoik didn’t belong, or the park didn’t belong.

  His sense of self felt slippery. He turned away from the tree and continued toward the water.

  He was Seb, a voice in his head insisted. He wasn’t really Cley.

  He was Cley. This was a dream.

  Cley was a dream of Seb was a dream of Cley.

  There was someone on the bench. Two figures. They looked…wrong. The proportions. Too tall. Long limbs.

  He sat down on the path and put his head in his hands.

  And remembered.

  I’m Seb Varden.

  Seb Varden.

  He sat there until he was calm, until he was confident he knew who he was. And why he was there with the People, in the Gyeuk Egg.

  To save Baiyaan. To stop the Rozzers messing with evolution. To find my way back to…

  For a second, it had gone.

  …Meera. Mee. Meera Patel.

  He knew her name. Of course he knew her name. He knew who she was.

  But, for a moment, it had gone.

  He felt as cold a stab of fear as he’d ever felt in his life.

  He vowed to pause, and come here, visit Home as often as possible. First thing in the morning, last thing at night.

  But he had a sudden, sick feeling he’d made that vow already.

  What was happening to him?

  He stumbled out of the park, back through the doorway. He was back in the clearing near the forest, the sounds and smells of the settlement drifting up to where he stood, blinking, his claws unsheathing automatically as if he was being attacked.

  Drawing a ragged, shaky breath, Seb said the one word that he hoped might stop this rising feeling of panic.

  “Show Exit.”

  The Exit was a doorway, but unlike the Home door leading to Richmond Park, there was no hint of what lay beyond the threshold. Seb looked into absolute darkness. It was more intense than the mere absence of light, it was as if the doorway actively sucked away all hint of anything other than blackness, so that what he was staring into would never be anything other than completely impenetrable.

  According to Bok, the moment he stepped through the Exit, he would trigger the live connection between his “real” body waiting next to the physical representation of the Gyeuk Egg, back in whatever corner of the universe it was where his fellow World Walkers waited. Not that they had waited long. A few minutes may have passed.

  If he used the Exit, it was all over. He would be back with the T’hn’uuth. Cley would either revert to being a Blank, or die. His followers among the People would be leaderless, either way.

  He had already dropped some ambiguous hints to his followers, in the hope that they would be remembered after he’d gone, lending some authority to his message. He had told them he would not be with them long. They just didn’t know what that meant. Yet.

  The truth was, he still hadn’t decided how best to prepare them for the fact that, once he had gone, they might be left with a messiah who hummed all the time, and dribbled. Such an outcome would give Davvi and Cochta more ammunition for their demonic possession theory, which already had traction among some of the People. Seb was aware of the danger, but not yet sure how best to deal with it. He was making it up as he went along, and nothing in his career as a session musician in twenty-first century Los Angeles had prepared him for dealing with political machinations against a nascent religious movement on a simulated alien planet.

  He laughed, weakly.

  His success so far, he attributed to the fact that he had been able to detach himself from any firm plans, and allow words, and action, to arise naturally, passively. If he got out of his own way, things tended to fall into place.

  He looked at the door again.

  If he left now, he imagined his youthful, enthusiastic group of immediate followers wouldn’t be able to hold on to their new worldview in the teeth of resolute opposition from most of the tribe, which would almost certainly be the general reaction to Cley’s reversion to Blank status.

  Seb, Cley.

  Seb.

  He struggled, whether with his conscience, his “true self,” Cley’s memories, loyalty to Baiyaan - he couldn’t say.

  He knew he couldn’t risk staying much longer. The risk of losing himself was real. Far more real than he had thought when agreeing to Fypp’s proposal.

  He would have to bring things to a head. And soon.

  “Cancel Exit.”

  The door slid away into nothingness.

  Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

  Life, death, rebirth.

  Act one, act two, act three.

  Headline, set up, punchline.

  Father, son, holy ghost.

  Say what you’re gonna say, say it, say what you said.

  Seb walked back to the foot of the tree. His followers fell silent as he approached. They could sense an unnatural tension in him. Something different.

  Seb knew about the rule of three. It even worked in songwriting.

  Intro, verse, chorus.

  He stopped in front of the group and paused before speaking. He felt his Seb-ness begin to slide away again, the reality of the world around him insinuating itself back into his consciousness. Cley’s memories reinforced everything around him. The human being who had become a T’hn’uuth shrank, becoming a tiny presence in his brain, like a slight, nagging headache that wouldn’t go away.

  He wouldn’t let it go away. He would keep it there, call up Home as often as it took, until he had finished what he had started, as best he could.

  His followers waited, knowing something important was coming.

  “My words may have helped you, but even I cannot take that final step with you. The Singer will always be singing, but you must let go of what you think you know if you want to become aware that you are already part of her song.”

  He stepped forward and smiled at them, raising his hands, claws sheathed, in the People’s traditional greeting, the gesture which began every naming ceremony, and every burial.

  “You can find her with your will. You can hear her with your being. But you must listen with your heart.”

  They waited in silence, knowing there was more.

  “I will not be with you much longer. It is nearly time for me to join the song.”

  It sounded pretty portentous, and Cley felt sure his followers were reeling from the import of what he had said. He was still feeling fairly self-congratulatory when he practically walked head-on into Sopharndi.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  31

  Cley and Sopharndi sat at the foot of one of the few blacktrees in the forest. The blacktrees were the
only trees capable of growing in the Parched Lands, their dark, hard limbs reaching out toward the sky in defiance of the dusty, lifeless ground which tried to deny them sustenance. The few that flourished beyond the Parched Lands were superstitiously avoided by the people, who associated them, with death. Other than when taking their Journeys, members of the tribe avoided the lifeless landscape to the south of the settlement.

  Cley had chosen the blacktree to prevent them being interrupted. He watched his mother pace around the area for a few minutes, checking for danger, looking for signs of animal activity. She had been First for a long time, and her habitual caution had saved lives on more than one occasion.

  Finally, she sat down and was silent for a few minutes. The People were not encouraged to rush to speak, and Sopharndi was more taciturn than most. As Cley waited for her to initiate the conversation, he fell into the same attitude of stillness and listening that he was teaching the tribe. Rather than pre-empt what she might say, or speculate about how he might respond, he simply began to pay attention to everything around, and inside, him.

  Listening started with the ears. He heard the far off calls of a pair of lekstrall, hunting nuffles to the north. He heard the fainter sounds of murmuring voices in the settlement as they prepared to sleep. There was no gathering of the People tonight, so the crackle of the fire pit was quiet in comparison to the nights when the tribe met, and the flames rose into the night air, crackling and spitting sparks. Closer, he heard the sounds of his followers, fidgeting as they attempted to be still, igniting their own session of contemplation, their own period of listening. Closer still, the slight breeze moving the leaves of the forest around him, the constant tiny sounds of nature - things growing, things unfurling into existence. Things dying.