The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “But they work together!”

  “They have no choice. Sanjirmil is forbidden to leave the reservation as the Master-Player-to-be; yet there is much, so they say, to do outside. Sanjir is responsible for the work outside, and has only Maellen to send. And before Mael and I met, she had little else to do, anyway. And in that aspect, they do treat one another correctly, if somewhat coldly. Sanjir has now the power, the authority, Maellen has much valor. It has been so since Mevlannen determined to go out.”

  “Nevertheless, Maellenkleth sounds determined herself, to go so far against the will of so many.”

  “Determined? Yes, she was so. But she was also gentle of speech and manner in all things, save the subject of Sanjirmil, about which she could surpass a bargeman in vulgarity....” And here Krisshantem looked abstracted a moment, as if recalling something, setting a tangled web of data straight, things he had assembled piecemeal over the months. “They made the decision to let the Perklarens terminate and unravel when Mevlannen was born. She is younger-insibling. Sanjir was about ten, then. And later, something like five years, I don’t know exactly, something happened to Sanjirmil . . . something of the Inner Game that none will speak of save in whispers. Not an accident, but as if something happened too soon . . . there is something about timing of certain events in the Inner Game. At any rate, from then Sanjir became ever more ungovernable and wild. Fey, arrogant. And she became conscious of what she had won, and that she had won it not by valor or skill but default. The Terklarens had always been the underlings. Now time was helping her, and all she had to do was wait and her traditional enemies would be gone. But it wasn’t enough—she wanted to win it. She was hungry. Some of the elders became regretful of their earlier decision, but by the time enough had spoken for action, the years had passed and Mevlannen had determined to go out. And when Mael and I had become lovers, she was spending most of her time inside in meditation, trying to free herself of the hold of it . . . because once you play the Game, there is nothing else that will satisfy you. Truly it is a most dangerous and addictive poison, even though it illuminates.”

  Kris continued and Morlenden listened to every word now, trying to pick up the threads of this tale. “We toyed with it, and I surprised her with my response to it; we traded. I taught her how I learn in the forest, from weather-watching, from trying to see the wind . . . you can, you know. It is hard, but one can. It flowed both ways. And she began to have hope again, and began to act again. We met Pellandrey once in the woods north of the Mountain of Madness and she spoke plainly of what she was doing. Then came interminable interrogations by the Past Masters. They called Mael names, they insulted her. Never mind what they said to me. But some were intrigued, captivated by this new situation, Pellandrey, Perwathwiy, even though she is of Sanjirmil’s own line of the Terklaren Braid. Make no mistake: they are all afraid of Sanjirmil, even her supporters. Again the Inner Game and her strength and position in it.”

  For a moment, an inner fire, an enthusiasm, had risen in the boy’s eyes and voice. Now it wavered, at the last, flickered, and went out. He resumed his demeanor of quiet resignation. He sighed deeply, and said, “But we knew however much help we had, it was a lost cause. Less than a year, and Sanjir has everything.”

  “Aside from her approaching fertility and investiture as senior Player, how so? I don’t understand. Could Mael not challenge her later at her own fertility, with you as her shartoorh co-spouse.”

  “No. They let the Perklarens unravel—some say it was caused—because the Inner Game conceals something, and in the middle of Sanjirmil’s generation, they will no longer need to conceal it. Whatever the Inner Game is, Sanjirmil will manifest it openly, to the astonishment of all, ler and human alike, and there will be no more Game.”

  “No more Game, but one Braid of Players remains!”

  “Thus. And so that was why Maellen was desperate. It was her whole life, her special talent, and she could not bear to part with it; she would go against them all to keep it, even to seek”—here Kris paused delicately—sharhifzergan.38 She would declare herself so and stay here. We would rebuild it from scratch. Think: the only Player ever born with the inborn gift for it, and by long love of it, she is far and above any Player, living or dead, in skill, in knowledge of its range of subtleties. All that, then, to waste, perhaps spent in the pursuit of excellence in turnips. A Perklaren, who only held the Revens above them.”

  Morlenden asked, “The other, Mevlannen. What is she to this?”

  “They were insiblings without the sexual bond; yet they have always been close, deep into one another. They always met whenever they could, even after Mevlan’s work took her to the far places, space itself. There was more to it than two standing together in the storm of troubles; Mevlan was a part of it as well, what they were all doing, in the Inner Game, and in the outside operation.”

  “I thought Mevlannen was with the humans, working on a telescope in space.”

  “True. But she also spends a lot of time on the ground. Now when Maellenkleth went out this last time, it was to be her last trip out; and after it there was to be a trip to meet with Mevlan openly, to get something from her. They were all elated, anticipating . . . things were to change. That is all I know of it. I asked, and they all said, Hvaszan, Inner Game. I had hoped to learn more. . . .”

  Morlenden interrupted. “And so you may yet. Now listen and attend: if Maellen is yet alive, we can get her back. Fellirian is working that end of it. But if she was as deep in secrets as you say she was, and it is as touchy as her own Braid acts, then there must be the possibility that what we will find, if we find her, isn’t Maellenkleth anymore.”

  “You suggest she autoforgot? Sharhifzergan she considered, but auto-forgetting . . .”

  “I consider it possible, on the basis of what you have told me, and what else I have seen with my own eyes. This last errand outside—if she was taken alive, she would have to protect what she knew . . . and if she would not tell it to you who were her only hope of getting back, then autoforgetting cannot be ruled out. It is distinct.”

  “Then it would be a task indeed to bring her back, and in the end, nothing in it for me . . . for if she autoforgot, then she is a stranger, an alien. Not Maellenkleth. Her body was sweet and full of life, but that which I loved has gone forever.”

  “Painful as that is, so it is truth. And now I must ask, who can do a reconstruction in Multispeech, if we bring her? Neither Fellirian nor I have the skill.”

  Kris mused over the question, pondering imponderables. “A reconstruction? I don’t know who does them . . . I can do it, although I never did it before. You can’t practice it, you know—it’s too dangerous. But I do know how, if only now in theory; it’s rather like the Game, in fact it’s related. But it’s tricky . . . you need two others at minimum to do it. Mael told me how before she left. It was her last gift to me.”

  “As if she knew she might need it. But why that? She would have known if she autoforgot she wouldn’t return. Just the body.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you agree that we have to try to look, and if we find her, bring her back and try to reconstruct something; we owe that to her.”

  “I owe her more than that.”

  “So then, the reconstructors you need. How skilled must they be?”

  “Only one need be skilled, and the other two only obey . . . are you volunteering?”

  “Fellirian and I, yes. She will agree to it. And perhaps she can devise some way that we do it there, so we don’t have to carry her back, if we find her. It will solve many problems if she can walk back under her own power. And you have invaded my mind once already; I suppose I can live with it again.”

  Krisshantem asked, tentatively, “Do you think there is a chance we could regain her?”

  “I think that we must be prepared for that, so that we shall if we can. And there is no other place to look. Fellirian is looking into this, even now as we talk, perhaps walking into a trap now set fo
r whoever comes looking for Maellenkleth. But it’s worth trying—at least talking with Fellirian.”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “Can you come now?”

  “Yes. I will. Not with you, but I can meet you at your yos on the next day. I had contracted with the Hulens and I must tell them I am not going to deliver.”

  “And afterward you will meet with us there.”

  “Yes, I will come. And along the way I will practice, as I walk alone in the forest where no one will hear the spells I cast in Multispeech.”

  “Are you sure the very rocks will not respond?”

  “No, they will not.”

  “Good!” Morlenden reached across the low table and patted Krisshantem’s suddenly tensed hand. “And perhaps we can find out what was going to or coming from Mevlannen Srith Perklaren. But first we find Mael; then bring her back. Then we find out.”

  “But from whom, Ser Deren? The Perwathwiy?”

  “I doubt from her,” said Morlenden.

  “From the Revens?” asked Kris hopefully.

  “Perhaps yet from Maellenkleth herself.” And Morlenden added, “She may have left something for us after all. I refuse to believe that a plot so intricate and impervious as this one seems to be would end in a nothing forgetty, a blank tablet.”

  ELEVEN

  The things that really stand out in your memory of the past were, at the time you recorded them, so ordinary and unprepossessing that they were truly unmemorable. Yet the things which you imagined to be stunning and ever-memorable cannot be recalled save as vague blurs, phantoms, mergings, and rubbings. We admit to a problem here: we fail to learn what is significant until its significance and immanence serves no purpose save to haunt us.

  —The Game Texts

  MORLENDEN AWOKE AS the sunlight was streaming in the window on the east-facing side of the treehouse, into an alcove in which a large and roomy bed-shelf had been fitted into the erratic, form-following structure. A patchwork counterpane, a soft and downy bottom bag. Him between them. Coherence returned slowly. This was the treehouse in the woods, of two adolescents, Krisshantem and Maellenkleth, who had been lovers. And something more . . . allies in a war against an opponent who shifted from day to day and seemed to refuse to be defined. Morlenden blinked and rubbed his eyes, as if that would clear the fog in the inside. Perhaps the lack of definition was in him, not in the boy and girl. Better, perhaps they were all suffering from perceptual problems. The human of Chinese military history, a man whom the people studied often, Sun-tzu, had averred that if one knew his enemy and knew himself, he could not lose. Maellenkleth appeared to have lost; therefore . . . the ler mind, strong in intuition, made the jump for him: she had not known her enemy. And this made his scalp prickle, for he did not know her enemy either, and he himself seemed to be well-committed to a course of making that enemy his enemy.

  Their house, their bed. Not like a yos at all, with its sense of being above the individual. The yos belonged to the standing wave of the Braid, belonged to time. When their time came, they left it, never to set foot in it, or any other, again. Objects were the artifacts left behind by forms of life. This treehouse was another life-form’s artifact . . . something powerful and vital. Different. Alien. It gave him an eerie feeling, like wearing someone else’s clothing: they were clean and of the proper size, more or less, but somehow they weren’t right, they weren’t of a piece with one’s self.

  He and Kris had continued talking long into the night, long past the time either of them usually went to bed. But what they had said between them had added little to what he had already discovered, reasoned, put together. Just details, color, the living texture of two lives which had somehow been tangled together, and which had come undone, for reasons neither of them knew. Details. Morlenden knew that he was the only person Kris had spoken with about Maellenkleth, since she had departed on her last errand, two months ago now. His deep hifzer self-sufficiency had not served him well in this at all; his silence and reticence had salved not at all the loss of that which he prized above all things.

  Morlenden pushed the counterpane down, stretched, groaning, and allowed the chill air to bite at him, nudging him more awake, his hands behind his head, collecting thoughts. Somewhere outside was a thirsty evil that drank the lives of innocents whose only crime was an excess of zeal. Something outside, in the human world of 2550, which had roots everywhere, within, around them. She was a natural Player, he thought, and their only genuine prodigy born to it, reputed the best they had ever seen in the history of the Game. But she was also playing in another Game, several games, and in those she was just a novice, an amateur, a loser from the start. A Water-aspectual playing in the area of will and discipline. Playing in an area in which unknown persons bent others to their wills. She went out, she was a spy for someone, perhaps an operative, for Sanjirmil surely, but for who else behind that one? But she didn’t like it, she was terrified of it, and on this last mission she even suspected trouble, judging from the preparations she had made, the things she had told Kris. And still she went! Fools! Morlenden rolled over to one side, leaning on his elbow disgustedly, pondering innocence. Their innocence, his innocence.

  That’s the problem with her, me, Kris, he thought, with us all; we lermen have not known evil. We have always had the luxury of attributing that to the humans. Aye, evil, vice, stupidity. Not for us! We were the New People, the mutants, the ler, we were as innocent as newly fallen snow, trackless and blameless. And what were your sins, Morlenden Deren? That once in your adolescence you refused a plain or homely girl’s desire and injured her sensibilities? That you sometimes overcharged for your services as clerk and registrar? That you were sometimes overly fond of your tipple? You are stupid and know almost nothing of that which you have fallen into; into which you will assuredly fall more deeply if you pursue this Maellenkleth to the end.

  He felt apprehensions; yet he also was aware of a powerful current of wrongness, injustice, malice, something even more strange to him—that a person could be brought to nothing, by something no more involved than an idle procedure, or perhaps the blind machinations of a plot that didn’t concern her at all. She was just in the way of others, who would not see what she was offering them. No, not that, either. There was malice in it. But from where? Whom? Morlenden looked for the manifestation of a power, an elemental, deep in his intuitive sense, but down there, there was only a sense of shimmering contradiction, a dichotomy. Wrong, wrong. He lacked data. He sat up on the bed-shelf. He had decided something. He felt uneasy about it, for an instant dizzy with fear, but he stuck to it, and presently the queasy feeling faded. It did not vanish, and he suspected that it would be with him for the rest of his life, but still it had subsided to a bearable level of intensity.

  Kris had slept on the floor by the stove, offering Morlenden the bed-shelf. Obviously the boy could not have slept very soundly under that counterpane, full-remembering the emotions that had motivated the acts and encounters performed there, himself and Maellenkleth. Morlenden got up, pulling on his overshirt, and climbed down to the lower level of the treehouse where were the stove and the hearthroom, the room they had talked in. The treehouse was silent, empty. There was no sense of presence. Morlenden knew well enough that Krisshantem was a silent one, but not that silent. He looked about. Kris was gone. By the stove there were some hard-boiled eggs, some bread and cheese, and a note. He picked up the note and read what was written therein, lettered in a neat and precise hand.

  Ser Deren, I kept you up far too late last night, still I had to be on my way. There are provisions for your return trip home. I will be there to meet you in a day or so. I did not tell you this last night, for I would not speak aloud of it, but be warned and full of care. Someone has been about, shadowing us, more likely you, although I do not know why this should be as it seems. I thought to hear traces of them in the night, but they know me, whoever they are, and they know my range and will not approach close enough for me to identify. At dawn I found a part
ial trace in the forest. But I still do not know who. I sense danger here, and know you have not the wood-sense of those of us who live here. So go straight to your own holding and do not tarry. I will catch you as fast as I can. Guard yourself as best as you are able.

  Morlenden read it through, and read it through again, wondering at the message and pondering over the odd, abrupt choppiness of style, so unlike the speech of Kris in person. Perhaps he really was apprehensive. So there were eavesdroppers in the night by the Perklarens, or rather what was left of them; and a watcher out of range by the treehouse in the woods, someone who by Kris’s own admission was able to move with skill enough to neutralize his formidable perceptions. Indeed, it did appear as if someone were following him, watching him. Morlenden did not seriously consider that the two events were unconnected. Such skill was rare. He went to the window and looked through it into the forest, not really knowing what he expected to see. He saw nothing but the trees, the leaf-strewn forest floor, the bare boles and branches, the shadows of the morning, the sky filming over, hazy, vague. The light held a pearly, graying, fading quality.

  He turned to the food, and, gathering it up into a bundle, arranged his clothing for the outside air and began to leave the treehouse, opening the trapdoor to let in the air. The air had warmed during the night; it was not nearly so cold as the day before. Rain coming, the kind that would go on for days—start as drizzle and end in a mud sticky from the slow soaking. He thought that he could make it back to the Deren yos before the rain started in earnest, though. He thought, somewhat ominously, that such would be the case, assuming that he didn’t meet anyone along the way. On an impulse, he looked about for a weapon, something he could use, a knife, a bludgeon. There was nothing visible; and Morlenden had at this point much too great a respect for the inhabitants of this house to rifle through it, looking for a weapon. Which probably didn’t exist in here anyway.