Tepper,Sheri - Six Moon Dance

by Six Moon Dance(Lit)

  "Not really. In all humility, I assert that great peace of mind has been brought to the settled worlds by the mere fact of my existence! Divisive matters, the discussion of which had previously led to widespread civil disorder, are now referred to me for decision, and my decision is often so long postponed that people become accustomed to the status quo."

  "You delay on purpose?" asked Ellin.

  "I do." She nodded. "On matters which have no solution, I offer no solution, though I always claim to be on the verge of one whenever the matter comes up. Though Haraldson did not foresee that his Questioner would serve the function of conflict damper, perhaps it is as well that I do. Trouble is forestalled when both law and custom are required to await my decisions."

  She stared pensively at the two newcomers. "Do sit down. I'll deal. I picked up these cards on Fanancy. They are in all respects similar to Old Earthian, Western-style decks, except for the names and colors of the suits. Here the four suits are labor, management, love, and death, signified, by the shovel, the club, the heart, and the coffin, the colors silver, black, red, and brown." She dealt rapidly, four hands, the fourth to an empty chair.

  Ellin picked up her hand. She seemed to have an ace of labor and an ace of management, together with three face cards in love and death, and an assortment of minor management cards. "What game are we playing?" she asked.

  "Three-handed Whustee," said Questioner. "I bid one shovel." Then, without waiting to hear their bids, she continued on the prior topic. "I sometimes grow weary of delay, however, and at such times I am tempted to rule arbitrarily, as God is said to do, to put an end to matters."

  "It is possible, tempting you?" asked Bao, his jaw dropped. Catching her peremptory gaze he murmured, "Two ... ah, coffins."

  "It is not possible to tempt me," said Questioner. "It is possible only for me to imagine the consequences of temptation."

  "Pass," said Ellin.

  "How long have you been the Questioner?" Bao asked.

  "I bid three shovels." She folded her hand and tapped it significantly on the tabletop. "We are the second assembly to hold the office. Two hundred sixty years ago, Questioner I was melted down in the cataclysm known as the Flagian Miscalculation, somewhere out near the Bonfires of Hell. The Flagians' attempt to prove that matter was illusory succeeded only in redistributing that matter rather widely. We, Questioner II, took the place of our vaporized predecessor. Together, we have been questioning for over seven hundred standard years. We have learned a great deal about health and contentment, prosperity and pleasure, and we have found no reason to change Haraldson's edicts defining opinion and providing for justice, though there are races that think differently."

  "Pass," murmured Bao, into the momentary silence.

  "Are there really?" cried Ellin, eyes wide. "Pass."

  Questioner chuckled, a mechanical sound. "My hand to play, I think. Turn up the other hand, please, it gets to be the macarthy. Fah. I hoped it would have the ace.

  "To answer your question, yes. A century or so ago we encountered the Borash, no two of whom agree on anything, but who tell us it is their destiny to rule all other races. Luckily, they lack either the weapons or the will to enforce their doctrine. Before that it was the Korm, a hive race of absolutely uniform opinion. Only their worker class 'think,' and they can only think one thing at a time. The Korm believe they have been created to travel to another galaxy with a great message. They devote all their resources toward that eventuality, and they don't even talk to us unless we have something their engineers say they need for the ships they have been building for the last four millennia. The ships have yet to be tested, and the great message, so I understand, is still to be determined by the committee that has been working on it for several thousand years."

  She paused for a moment, scanning their play thus far. " ... three, four, and five are mine. Now I will regret that ace!" She smiled. "Then, of course, there are the Quaggi."

  Bao frowned in concentration. "May I be asking what is Quaggi?"

  "The Quaggi are an interstellar race of beings who, I infer, need the radiation in the vicinity of a star in order to reproduce. As a matter of fact, we may get to see the remains of one on this trip."

  "Remains?" faltered Ellin.

  "Of a Quaggida, or Quaggima. I think this one was killed during mating. Or perhaps only injured so badly that she died. Whichever, she should be lying on a moonlet of the outmost planet of the system we're about to visit. There's no atmosphere, and if it hasn't been blown apart by meteorites, it should still be there."

  "I don't think I've even heard of Quaggi," said Ellin.

  "I have heard it suggested that the Quaggi, a star-roving race, have succeeded in reinventing Euclidean geometry, and, since they have no actual experience of plane surfaces, consider it an arcane lore fraught with metaphysical significance."

  "But," murmured Ellin, "you're not suggesting we should change our ways to emulate any of those races, are you?" She placed her ace of management on the Questioner's CEO, took the trick and led with the queen of labor.

  "Clever girl. You had the ace all along. No, we should not emulate other people. We probably couldn't emulate the Korm. Any mankind person worth his salt can simultaneously incubate whole clutches of ideas that are either contradictory or mutually exclusive. For instance, mankind has persuaded itself that its race is perfectible, though it hasn't changed physically, mentally, or psychologically since the Cro-Magnon. Mankind has also persuaded itself that each individual is unique, though each person shares ninety-nine and ninety-nine one hundredths of his DNA and roughly the same percentage of his ideas with thousands or even millions of other persons."

  Bao, with a sidelong glance at Ellin, said with an ironic grin, "It is being true that persons want very much to be singular and individual."

  Ellen made a face at him. "I have complained about being a clone, that's all." She took the next trick, leading with the jack of labor, a union organizer.

  The Questioner nodded ponderously. "Individuality is more imagined than real. Persons are more alike than they care to admit. On Newholme, however, their social structure is based upon the theory that each family line is unique."

  "Is that what we'll ask about on Newholme?" asked Ellin. "Individuality?"

  The last few cards clicked down, with Ellin the undisputed winner of the hand.

  "Among other things." The Questioner rocked slowly in her chair, considering. "Very nicely played, my dear. You deal the next hand."

  Bao took a deep breath, shaking his head. "The briefing documents are also mentioning an indigenous race. Precolonization reports are saying no indigenes. This is most confusing."

  Questioner smiled grimly, with determination. "Confusing, yes. The entire surface of that planet had supposedly been examined up and down and sideways before any settlement was allowed. If there are now indigenes, someone falsified a report, or failed to file one, or the confusion is intentional, designed to mislead me. I always find the truth, however, no matter how many red herrings colonists drag across my path."

  She picked up her hand and smiled a tigerish smile. "It is likely there have been grave infractions of the edicts on Newholme. Every few years I do find a planet that must be punished for its infractions, with all its people."

  "Would you really punish a whole world?" Bao asked with some trepidation.

  "If it were indicated. It is too early to know what is indicated. We are going to Newholme to see what is true and what is false, and in either case, what can be done about it."

  "I've read every document, but I don't understand what any of them have to do with us," murmured Ellin as she picked up her own cards. "Why did you ask for dancers?"

  The Questioner nodded. "It wouldn't be in the documents because it was an informal report, but one of my spies has mentioned that the indigenes are dancers."

  Ellin drew in a deep breath. "So?"

  The Questioner said sagaciously, "Trust is strengthened by similarity of interest, eithe
r apparent or real. If they are dancers, they may talk to other dancers. If they dance for you, you will dance for them ... "

  Ellin frowned, unconvinced. "If nobody knows anything about this indigenous race, how does anyone know that they dance?"

  The Questioner shrugged, an unandroidish movement. "How did my spy find out? He probably sat in a tavern, listening to drunken conversation and putting two and two together. Or he bribed someone. Or, he planted a few mobile sensors. I didn't ask how, specifically. I do know he is a reliable source."

  They played out the game, which Questioner won, putting her in a good humor, after which Bao and Ellin were shown to their own quarters, where they huddled together in their salon, whispering.

  "You were dealing her a very good hand," said Bao.

  "I was dealing her from the bottom of the deck," mimicked Ellin, with a smirk. "I learned cheating from one of the actors. What do you think of her or it?"

  "She is being obdurate, I think. Very severe. And while you are being so free with the cards, she was winning from me five credits."

  "Poor thing. I'll owe it to you." She paused, looking at him thoughtfully. "Gandro Bao, will we have to do something dreadful? Like recommend the wiping out of all the mankind on the world?"

  Gandro Bao shook his head, though he was no less troubled than she. "We are not recommending, Ellin. She is doing that. All we are doing is finding things out."

  They stayed together a while longer, taking reassurance from one another's company, before seeking the equal comfort of real beds after shower baths in real water. Though the Questioner needed neither, she made sure that her assistants were well looked after.

  She in the meantime, had been left to her own devices. She frequently remarked as much to her attendants, intrigued by the phrase, for it was literally true. Her memory, her maintenance machines, her elaborately miniaturized equipment, her IDIOT SAVANT, the syncretic scanner she used in her attempt to find patterns where none were apparent, all were her own devices with whom she was frequently left.

  Just now, she needed her maintenance machines. She always put off maintenance until the need for it became what she thought of as painful. Though she was not designed to feel pain, the intense unease occasioned by delay in response, by inability to remember immediately, by mechanical parts that did not function precisely or systems that did not mesh, must, she felt, come close to what mankind meant by pain. It could be avoided by getting maintenance more frequently, and she could never remember between maintenance sessions why she did not do so. Nonetheless, she always put it off, without knowing why.

  This time, she took with her into the booth the data cube that the trader had sent. She inserted it into the feed mechanism, and directed that during maintenance it should be entered into permanent memory. Then everything went gray, as it always did during maintenance. Time stopped. All thought stopped as well. Only after her linkages had been disconnected, only after her memory as Questioner was off line, was the cause of her discomfort made manifest. Then, and for a brief time afterward, her mankind brains, those three with which she had been endowed, remembered who they were. Mathilla remembered, and M'Tafa, and Tiu. During that time, the separate entity that was the Questioner knew why she judged some societies as she did, and why she felt about them as she did, and how deep her prejudices went, even though they never showed.

  When her usual maintenance was complete, after the linkages were reestablished and the memory hooked up with all its shining achievements on display, Questioner did not move, did not utter, did not recollect, for she was still holding fast to Mathilla and M'Tafa and Tiu, unwilling to let them go and they, within her, were holding fast to life once more, unwilling to be gone. Then, usually, the booth door opened automatically, and the stimulant shock was provided, and she wakened, as one wakens terrified from dream, only to feel the terror fade, and shred, and become as gauze, as a thing forgotten, as it always had before.

  Not this time. This time she found the memory remained with her, firmly planted inside her files, their names and faces, the stories of their short lives, and how they had died.

  MathiUa. M'Tafa. And Tiu.

  32—Ornery Bastable Goes Upriver

  Ornery Bastable arrived in Gilesmarsh when the Waygood came in to unload a cargo of gold-ash and dried Purse fish. Since it would be some time before the Waygood had discharged its cargo and been loaded once more, Ornery had a whole tenday to herself.

  She intended to spend part of in Sendoph, where Pearla had recently achieved statistical normalcy by bearing a living daughter after a run of one stillborn daughter and two sons. First, however, she intended to spend a day or two in the Septopod's Eye in Naibah, seeing what she could find out about the thing she had seen, or almost seen, when she had been marooned in the wild. Though she was not imaginative enough to have frightened herself into a funk over the experience, she had resolved to ask some questions next time she had time in port, and now seemed as good a time as any.

  She had just received her pay, and she spent a good bit of it buying drinks for those who had stories to tell. When she had listened for several evenings, she had accounts of the setting of stone pillars and questioning sounds and shadows moving, all of them making a reasonably consistent catalogue. One talkative old type, who had at one time kept the library at the Fortress of Vanished Men, said the records described creatures seen in the wild by the second settlers, quite monstrous things that seemed to have disappeared for no one had seen them for several hundred years.

  As for stone pillars, they had been often seen on beaches and plateaus, always in groups of three or more, always in the clear where the shadow pattern could be seen under sun or moon, the nighttime patterns depending upon which moons were where. The pillars sometimes appeared at dawn in places where they had not been at dusk, and therefore were assumed to have been set up by creatures, people, things, or beings who worked at night and intended to remain unseen. Two informants had used the word "Joggiwagga," and Ornery recognized the word from her infancy.

  Joggiwagga, whatever they were, were busier at certain lunar configurations than others, and these were also the times when the loud questioning or challenging sounds were most likely to be heard. Because she was a sailor, Ornery recognized the times as coincident with exceptionally high or low tides. Six sizeable moons, leaving aside the two orbiting rocks, could produce quite a complicated schedule of tides. A two big-moon neap, full or dark, was low, but a three big-moon neap was lower, and an all-moon low sucked the water out of the bays to leave mud flats extending to the horizon. A rare five dark-moon high, on the other hand, would bring water over the piers in Gilesmarsh, high up the levees of Naibah, and send the River Giles over its banks all the way to Sendoph.

  Six big-moon highs came about every seven or eight centuries. Though the more extreme lunar configurations were rare, they were the ones during which stones were set.

  Once Ornery had satisfied herself that she wasn't crazy, that she could assume the things or beings or creatures were real, she put her notebook in her pocket, finished her ale, bade her friends and associates farewell for the nonce, and went out to confirm arrangements for the trip to Sendoph. There was a steam-powered mail launch headed upstream within the hour, and it was owned by Ornery's brother-in-law. By the gift of a bottle and a little banter with the captain, Ornery had earned an invitation to ride to Sendoph in style. Travel by engine was still rare and might get rarer, considering the firemountain had buried most of the mines and about half the railroad. There was still more reliance on horses than on horsepower, and riding in a launch was, therefore, a treat.

  Ornery regarded it as such, sitting at her ease on the rear deck, watching the paddles of the stern wheel fall toward her as the reed bed and marshes and watermills went by. Low in the eastern sky the misty bulk of the scarp seemed to float upon the lower clouds as it blew ominous bars of smoke across the higher ones. Ornery turned her back to it, not wanting to be reminded of the tremors that were coming closer
and closer together. People were beginning to get really jumpy about it and would have been more so if they could have seen the damage. Though there had been a good many more disasters like the one that took Ornery's family, all the destruction thus far was behind and among the Ratbacks, invisible from the cities. Most everyone in the more populated areas believed or wanted to believe that they were not in danger.

  Ornery thought everyone was in danger, whether they believed it or not. Anyone could see that the summit was blacker than it had been, meaning either that ashes were falling atop the snows, or the snows had melted, revealing the dark rock below.

  "There's been shakings and shiverings for a time now. She's goin' to blow," said the captain, around the splinter of chaff he was chewing. "Been a long while accordin' to the wise folk. I say it doesn't matter how long, it's still alive and it'll blow again." He laughed a phlegmy laugh, hawked and spat over the side. "Warm up all them Haggers in Sendoph, won't it?"

  His tone angered Ornery, but she kept a neutral tone as she said, "You're cheerful about it, considering you may be there when it goes."

  "If I am, I'll be in company, and if I'm not, I'll rejoice. Whatever the inscrutable Hagions provide."

  Ornery made a noncommittal noise. If the scarp decided to blow, it really wouldn't matter what had been said about it either way. Either it would reach all the way to the Giles or it wouldn't. She turned the conversation in another direction, and the hours went by more comfortably until, along about evening, they were in sight of the city, the domes of the Temple district shining in the rose-amber light.

  "Where do you tie up?" Ornery wanted to know.

  "We'll stop at the post pier to pick up and drop off mail and valuables. Then we'll go on up to the old wharf just the other side of Brewer's Bridge, and we'll tie there for tonight. I've half the forward hold full of stuff for House Genevois, and the other half grain for the brewers. We'll unload in the morning, then go farther upstream to the market district to pick up special orders for Naibah. Will you leave us tonight or tomorrow?"