The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Vance accepted the mug gratefully, for there was more than a grain of truth in the statement. He said, “I will take it; please take a chair, if you will. I asked them outside to call you because I needed my mind jogged.” He handed her the flex.

  Doctor Harkle looked at it momentarily, then back to Vance. He asked, “Isn’t that one of the girls who works down in your place?”

  “Yes. I remember her well, although my recollection of her is not the same as this image. What’s the matter with her? She looks lifeless in this; perhaps catto, except that you can be sure that a catto is hiding something, and this one seems to have nothing to hide. Relaxed. Wait, I know a better word. Uninhibited. As if there’s no personality here, not even a distorted one.”

  “I do not know the circumstances. What is her name?”

  “Maellenkleth, I recall. Yes, Maellenkleth. Srith Perklaren.”

  “That’s right! I remember. A First-player. What does she do for your people?”

  “Primarily math, tensors, astrogation. She’s quite gifted in the area, the whole thing, when you can get her attention. She goes at mathematics in an unorthodox way, but one can’t argue with the results she obtains . . . she seems to run everything through an odd sort of iterative internal program; I should call it a topology filter, the best I can visualize.”

  “Get her attention? Was she absentminded? I have never seen one of them so.”

  “Well, yes, in a way, I would say absentminded. Or preoccupied. I have no idea what her people would call it, if they even noticed it. This, by the way, had been on the increase in the last year. She appeared to be working under some kind of pressure. When she worked, that is. Toward the last, her visits began dropping off. As a fact, I don’t think I’ve seen her but once since we took the new kids up to the Museum on the field trip.”

  “Museum? Field trip? What is this?”

  “Every so often I round up the newcomers, the ados who are drifting into the Institute, and take them on several side trips out into the big, wide world. Actually, hardly farther than Region Central.”

  “Oh, a routine sort of thing.”

  “Well, not exactly routine, you know, but certainly recurring. I mean, when they do come down here to work steady, they will be dealing with essentially human problems, and I like them to get a look at the people they intend to go problem-solving for. . . . It was last spring. I had taken a group up to see the old Tech Museum at the old Research Triangle. They were all very excited, you know. I’m sure you recall the place—it’s where they keep all those old worthless artifacts, in the old Tech Center. There was a university there in the old days. But they see so little of a genuine technological civilization that these old things are wonders to them—real eye-openers. Puts things in proper perspective. But this girl, Maellenkleth, reacted oddly. She was skeptical or contemptuous to begin with—I could not say which. But when we returned, she was morose and moody, much more than usual. As if something she’d seen had really shaken her somehow. I thought it might have been more of the usual stuff, intrinsically hers, but the more I thought on it, the more I was sure that it was something she saw or realized in the Museum. Then she got fidgety, couldn’t wait to be gone. After that, I saw her only once, and then she wasn’t working, but was visiting some friends down here.”

  “It certainly sounds odd, not at all like the usual ado we get down here.” Vance was remembering Fellirian when he thought of the stereotype ler adolescent.

  “Definitely, Director. No doubt of it at all. Now let me ask you one or two: why the sudden interest in Maellenkleth?”

  “It would seem she’s got into some kind of trouble and has been detained. One of these Controllers was here this morning asking about her. And of course, there are some other things, too, that I know. They seem to think there’s some kind of plotting, conspiracy.”

  “Who suspects? Continental? Or Region? There’s a difference in methodology you can measure.”

  “There’s nothing I could pick that would tie him to Denver; on the other hand, he didn’t resemble any of the Regionals I’ve dealt with in the past, either. There was definitely something high-level about him.”

  “Hm.” Harkle snorted. Then she said, more reflectively, “You hardly ever see the Continentals stir themselves about anything, but just the same they seem to catch it all sooner or later. One thing for sure: if they’re on to something, it could well get brisk. Very brisk.”

  “That’s the trouble. I have no idea who he is after, beyond the girl herself.”

  “Worried? . . . Oh, I understand. Well, if the fellow who came to you is a Continental, you needn’t worry about double-blind setups and entrapments. They work direct. They suspect you, they call you in, ask you a few questions, and post you off to Rehab.” Here Harkle looked about, conspiratorially. “Or they Adminterm34, They don’t have to justify things the way the Regions do. They just do it.”

  “As a fact, Hark, now that you mention it, I would have to say he didn’t seem like the Regionals at all.”

  “Fine, then, You have nothing to worry about. We can tell them what we know. It’s little enough.”

  “Yes. Well, thank you for the information and the coffee. They were both welcome.”

  “And to you, Director. Call me any time. Now,” and here she arose, straightened her clothing, “back to the cobalt mines.”

  Vance nodded absentmindedly, reaching again for his paperwork. Doctor Harkle left the office, leaving Vance alone for his next appointments. Eventually, he did get back to work, but it was not immediately. For a long time after the conversation with the Chief of Research and Development, Vance did exactly what she had told him he had no need of doing—worrying. Because even if what she had said were true, he couldn’t avoid the feeling that a trap was closing slowly . . . and that its jaws were going to close on innocents as well. He knew from Fellirian and his conversation with the Regional Controller that essentially there was no plot, no conspiracy. Then he thought again: or was there?

  Simultaneously, some distance away, a person who had been passive up to this point moved from reflection into the domain of action, exemplifying, as the ler might have said, had they been aware of his presence or functions, the trait of Fire. He had been sitting in a smallish darkened room filled almost to the exclusion of everything else with racks of electronic devices, instruments, rows and banks of switches, indicator light panels, illuminated and darkened buttons (marked “press to test”). The only noticeable sound in the room was the whisper of cooling fluids through miles of heat sinks and the quiet movement of air through the ventilators. There were others in the room as well, seated in reclining chairs before the racks, all seriously intent upon matters at hand, oblivious to all the others.

  The person arose from his position at one of the consoles, stood up attentively, and paused. He seemed to be listening to a headset he was wearing, a light arc of silver metal terminating in a tiny plastic earpiece. Then he removed the appliance. After consulting some notes he had made on a plain ruled pad at the console, he walked a short distance to another panel, set high up in one of the racks. Thereon were two matrices, one 3 x 3, the other 5 x 5. One contained numbers, the other letters. A set of zeros of various denominations bridged the two. Machine functions were displayed to the sides. The person played over the numbers and letters, both matrices, with one hand, deftly, occasionally manipulating the machine functions with his free hand. Almost instantly, dim letters began forming on an electroluminescent panel directly above the buttons. The letters said:#330-12239 ANSWREP TO SUBKWERTASK A10/BT

  GINIA SENDS/BT

  SUB APPEL MAELLENKLETH SRITH PERKLAREN

  RMK 1 ARRANG NAMEWAY INDIC ADOLESCENT

  RMK 2 SURNAME NAMEWAY INDIC NH FAM GP

  & OCCUPT/VOCAT EXHIB OF RITUAL GAME

  & CF SUBJ/ACAD MATHEMATICS

  & HUMAN REF FOLLOW:1. VON NEUMANN

  2. CONWAY, J. H.

  3. GARDNER, M. ! 1950-2550 PERIOD/BT/BT

  The person r
ead the message, then depressed a button marked “INT-CL,” and returned to his position at the consoles. He replaced his headset, adjusted his larynx pickup, and began speaking quietly as if musing aloud into thin air. The persons at the other consoles paid no attention to him. They never did.

  He said, “For Plattsman, Ginia sends. Vance uncovered the name for us. Got a little more from Archives. Awaiting further query instructions. Taping relevants and forwarding. Acknowledge, now!”

  He depressed a small extended button on his own console. Above it a small light lit red, changed to green, flashed red again and went out. He smiled. He waited a moment.

  He pushed some more buttons, paused, said, “Operator, there was a break during the last transmission. Can you rebroadcast while I manual address?”

  The operator apparently answered yes, for the person then set some switches on his panel. He also depressed some additional buttons, apparently another address group. These were not the same letters as the first. The acknowledge-light went red, then green, then a quick flicker of red again, and out. The person said, “Thank you. Seems to be working properly now. There will not be a requirement for further service or write-up of discrepancy.”

  Then, and only then, did the person settle back deeply in his chair, releasing a long, controlled sigh. He looked about quietly, but nobody was observing him. He sighed again. And after a moment he returned to his work, consulting some other logs. These were routine matters, for he went at their accomplishment with none of the vigor or decisiveness he had displayed earlier.

  Plattsman was not in his office to receive this message. He was instead in the office of the chairman, Klaneth Parleau. Several subjects of general interest had already been discussed, and after those Parleau asked, “Well, what about those Comparator studies? Did they ever lead anywhere?”

  “I have been waiting for you to ask! Indeed they did—to more of the same. Finally we were able to program the damn machine to discriminate, but the chemtrace of the emotion-sets still have us baffled. According to the medicos, that second girl shouldn’t be able to walk about rationally, much less organize herself enough to carry out any program, but Klyten says to disregard that. Apparently they have an internal system for overriding chemical insanity, whatever the original cause. Very little is known about it, except that some selected higher functions of discrimination are temporarily lost, while the subject experiences the effect of heightened perceptions. I am told it is rather like alcohol intoxication minus the visual effects and the loss of motor coordination. Klyten is researching it now, and at our next meeting hopes to explore this further. This stuff is all buried, lost, mislaid. We know the original data exists, but it’s hard to find.”

  “The second one is insane, then?”

  “From the readings we have, yes. No other condition is possible. It’s just too far out of balance with the rest. But we have to understand that ler insanity is unlike human . . . you know that it’s said that if you think you’re going crazy, it’s the surest sign you aren’t.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Chairman, it’s this way: if humans go crazy, they don’t know it. Crazy people think they are sane. And contrarily, if you’re sure you’re going over the edge, that’s the peak of your rationality. But with ler, it’s the other way around: they know when they’re insane, and they can compensate for it until someone else can effect a cure.”

  “In other words, functionally, insanity doesn’t exist.”

  “Correct.”

  “So why is this one walking around loose unchanged? How long have we traced her now?”

  “There are indications that some of the traces are four years old. We’re digging.”

  “Four years?”

  “Right. At about the same level, too. But mind, we still see much less of the second one than we do the first. But there’s yet more, and the best yet.”

  Parleau groaned aloud, “Oh, no! Tell me no tales of a third!”

  “There’s a third, it’s a fact, but the third one is a human, leaves no traces whatsoever on the chems, and in fact was only caught by accident. All the images are bad and we can’t identify.”

  “Who is he following?”

  “Crowd-scans so far have associated ‘Human X’ only with the first girl, but we are suspicious about some incidents . . . the trouble is that the only way we see the third man, so to speak, is through criteria that are worthless for addressing the crowd-scans for him alone. The data don’t discriminate enough to pick him out alone.”

  “So, Plattsman, what you’re telling me is that we have two ler girls who are agents and a human who is in league with them?”

  “Such was my first impression, Chairman. We Controllers are prone to assemble things that way. But evidence suggests that is a wrongful vector; we are now exploring the possibility that we may be dealing with a whole family of plots, which may or may not be connected. But one thing we know for sure.”

  “And that is?”

  “We ran some tests on the enlarged faces from the crowd-scans. To volunteers over at the medical school. Now you know that facial expressions are part of our infant programming and that we retain these residues all our lives, adding layers of subtlety as we go. So when we ran these images, with suitable controls, against the volunteers, we were able to statistically match the facial expressions on the three against known categories. . . . The first one is afraid and worried. The second is blank, and the third . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . is violently hostile.”

  “You can do this, and not identify them?”

  “Recognition is one thing, of basic emotional sets. Picking individuals out of a hat quite another.”

  “Good work, Plattsman. Good work, indeed! This is better than I expected.”

  “I’m not so sure, Chairman.”

  “How so?”

  “We are very uneasy about these multiplying coincidences. They are drawing our attention away from the original question. And as you may recall from the Control Functional briefing we give to all chairmen, the more diffused the question, the more useless the answer. None of these programs seem to be leading us to the questions we originally asked. We are not getting our vector of Karma.”

  “I understand muddy water hides many things. Still, you Controllers have information theory to help you extract data from noise.”

  “True, Chairman. But these things take time to run properly, and after that come the interpretations and the decisions. I want to return to the original penetration; pursue the first girl. We propose bringing Klyten more into it.”

  “Very well. Until the next meeting, then?”

  “Yes. And I hope we shall all have more to say than we did the last time. All we did there was allow ourselves to recognize that we had a problem.”

  “True enough . . . and so far we don’t know yet exactly what that problem is, do we?”

  “I am happy that you agree with our interpretation!”

  Plattsman turned and departed Parleau’s office.

  NINE

  The finest tragedies are always on the story of some few houses that may have been involved as either agents or sufferers in some deed of horror.

  —Aristotle, Poetics

  THE PLACE WHERE Maellenkleth and Krisshantem had established their workroom and ad hoc dwelling remained to Morlenden curiously vague in specific location, even though the boy Taskellan hardly talked of anything else during their long walk eastward through the naked winter forests of the wild northern provinces of the reservation. And during their walk together, Morlenden also learned the boy was something more than the simple rowdy he had first appeared. While it could not be denied that Taskellan was deficient in most of the approved social graces, it was also apparent that he held his two insiblings in almost worshipful regard, sharing, as it seemed, most of Maellenkleth’s likes and dislikes. There were many: Maellenkleth was perilously decisive in her opinions. But it was through such second-order reflections that Morlend
en was able to begin to get to know the girl he was searching for. What impressed him far more, however, was the even greater regard the younger boy held for the hifzer Krisshantem. Morlenden half expected any minute to be informed that this Krisshantem was also proficient in faith-healing and dead-raising, among his other skills.

  Morlenden was neither surprised nor amazed, even considering the exaggeration which Tas would have to be adding; a hifzer would learn fast to be quick or he would simply not survive. And this one did, apparently, survive rather well. He lived alone in the woods, far from any habitation, and seemingly prospered. But beyond the location of the treehouse, there seemed to be no way to determine in advance exactly where Kris was likely to be. It was as if the hifzer boy obeyed some internal variant of Heisenberg’s principle—that one simply could not predict where he would be.

  Krisshantem, so the story went, unraveling as they walked, was and had been a nomadic sort of hunter and gatherer, tied loosely by association to Braid Hulen, the potters. Kris ranged far and wide, uncovering various small deposits of clay and trading these locations with the Hulens for the few things he could not make for himself. By and large, the kinds of clays the Hulens used were few to begin with, spread all over in tiny nodes. But even they could not cover them all, and so Kris had moved in on the periphery. And there he remained, silent as the shadows of a wintered branch upon the new fallen snow. He wandered, seeking just the right beds of clay and mineral colorings, meeting rarely with one or another of the Hulens to exchange information.

  Taskellan said, “The Hulens themselves are closemouthed, secretive. They are something of wanderers, themselves, and they drift in and out, saying very little. They go off in the woods to their special places and bring back loads of clays. They all might get together once a week, and they don’t say much even then, or not so I could tell. They’re all deep in Multispeech and use it among themselves more than anyone I ever saw, except perhaps the elders of Dragonfly Lodge. That is, when they talk at all. Mael got to know them well, through Kris, and came to like them after a bit. She was put off at first by their silences; she always did like to talk, argue, expound. But she told me that they listened a lot. Like this: that Kris could locate a good creek-bed for clay just by listening to the water flowing and tinkling, the way it sounded, the way the sound filled the places around its origin. ‘Clay comes from peace in the water,’ he said. ‘Rest-peace, not stagnation. Once you learn to listen, water-wording is just like Multispeech.’ ”