The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  THIRTEEN

  In the Game, it is arbitrarily considered that the total number of operations on every cell in the pattern-area constitutes one unit of Gametime. How we do it is unimportant, serially or by parallel computation, or by scalar patterning; that is our limitation as finite creatures—but in reality it all occurs simultaneously, instantly, for that is the smallest unit into which time can be divided, an absolute. . . . And so across Gametime, we observe motion, as moving particles with varying degrees of coherence and self-identity; as ripples of unique wavelike patterns of presence and absence; as “invisible waves” that seem to transit empty cellular space and cause reactions in target portions of the developing pattern. There is no motion and there are no waves. Period. That is illusion. There is only the sequential and recursive interaction of the defined Surround with the associated Transition-rules and Paradigms. It is necessary to order our perceptions from the cellular unit outward, that we may fully comprehend higher-order phenomena of appearances, and thereby not be deceived, as one might easily be working from the macrocosm to the microcosm.

  —The Game Texts

  TO BE ATTACKED with malice in mind was, while relatively rare enough, at the least understandable under certain conditions, Morlenden and Fellirian alike could vividly recall the heyday of the Mask-Factory highwaymen of a span ago; likewise they could also recall several inter-Braid feuds and vendettas of greater or lesser importance. In particular, the Khlefen—Termazen—Trithen triangular vendetta of the generation past could come to mind, even though in the present it had been reduced in scale and severity to minor incidents of mild disrespect, or perhaps contemptible behavior within the precincts of neighborhood markets.

  At any rate, they, the Derens, had no feuds at present with anyone, and it was obvious that robbery was not the motive for the attack on Morlenden. But whatever the intent, it had come by arrow, certainly a weapon which could only be used leaving the hand. On this basis, and after studying the arrow itself, a deadly metal construction, they all reasoned that the assailant had to have been human. But this raised more questions than it answered, for who could it be among the forerunners who moved silently through the forest and brush, in the middle of the reservation, and then vanished without a trace? And then, more importantly, what human would wish to injure Morlenden? Only a handful even knew of his existence.

  Kaldherman, who was prone to eccentric ideas, had voiced a suspicion that the assassin had been one of the people, a concept which had disturbing overtones indeed. And to add influence to this position, Morlenden had commented that Sanjirmil had indeed expressed apprehension about his possible uncovering of Game secrets. But he did not tell all the reasons why he could not bring himself to accuse her, and the rest could see no reason why one elder Player would hire them, and another try to prevent them.

  Krisshantem was also suspected, if for no other reason than his uncanny silence in the woods. And his status as hifzer, who might be capable of anything; once the one set of traditions went, who could say what others might follow? But he had the least motive of all, and in fact later arrived to dispel the notion in person, a day behind Morlenden, and in the company of one Halyandhin, one of the elder Hulens, who completely verified his story and whereabouts. And the issue remained where it had been—unsolved. Krisshantem examined the place where the attack had come from, but he would say nothing of what he saw therein, if indeed anything. When pressed on the matter by Kaldherman to the edge of insult, he admitted ruefully that it seemed to him to be the work of a human of superior knowledge as a tracker, a notion he considered outrageous. There simply were none in the reservation at all.

  So it was that with great apprehensions the party had departed the Deren yos and journeyed down to the Institute on the mono, and spoken with Director Vance; Morlenden, Fellirian, and Krisshantem. These were the ones Vance gave directions to. There were two more whom Vance did not see, and whose directions came from Fellirian: Kaldherman and Cannialin, who were to travel with them, but keeping a discreet distance, as if unconnected. Tourists, a young couple, out on a holiday.

  Departing the tube-train at Region Central, the three ler appeared at some distinction from the humans who were using the underground terminal at that time of day. It was somewhat after the noon hour, so the terminal was relatively empty of the ebb and flow of shift changes; yet there was considerable traffic, incidental people on errands of unknown significance. Smaller in stature and lighter in build than the humans, they were also recognizable immediately by their clothing; the simple fall of overshirts, even heavy winter ones, was greatly different from the heavy folds, tucks, pleats, and stiff fabrics of their human co-travelers. They had thrown their hoods back; two had the long, single braid of hair that marked the adult and parent phase ler, while the third wore his in the anonymous bowl cut of the adolescent. To the casual eye, they suggested a family group on an outing, an air Fellirian had suggested that they cultivate, for the farther they were from the reservation, the less people would actually recall about ler Braid ordering, and would project their own images upon them. Kaldherman and Cannialin maintained contact, but also distance. They seemed to be only country yokels who gaped in astonishment at almost everything they saw. At least in part, for Kaldherman, this was not entirely playacting, for it was his first trip outside. He was astonished, in fact.

  Standing in the station, pausing before further onward motion, the tube-train waited, making soft mechanical noises, while along its length, doors opened and closed, and in the terminal itself, along the platform, echoes moved in the air, up and down, seeking a quiet corner among the dull concrete facings in which to spin out and die. The underground terminal was a broad hall of indeterminate length—a smoky bluish haze obscured the distant ends where the tunnel dipped down into the earth again. One could sense that the end walls were there, not so very far away, but still vague and unmarked; there was nothing for the eye to fasten to, and the prevailing dimness, lit by weak lamps spotted along the low ceilings, stretched the capacity of their eyes to the utmost.

  By the stairwell leading upward, a sweeperman absentmindedly poked with his pushbroom at an insignificant pile of trash, coughing randomly with no great urgency. At dimly lighted kiosks along the stained walls, patrons discussed apparently the prices of fares and the configurations of schedules. The answers, like the questions, were tentative, hedged, rationalized, qualified to a degree no ler could hope to understand, holding a melancholy air of perpetual indecision. As if, having nowhere to go, the indefinite wranglings over schedules and fares had become a peculiar free entertainment, a substitute for more meaningful communication and relationships. Over all hung an odor, extremely peculiar and noticeable to the ler sense of smell. It filled the clotted damp air: ozone, lubricating oils and greases, metals and metallic compounds, metalloceramic and plastic hybrids, stale clothing, cigarette smoke, humans of several degrees of hygiene.

  Climbing the stairwell to the surface, Morlenden asked Fellirian if the humans, with all their vast technology, could not perhaps have installed a moving stairway, better lighting, as they were reputed to have done in some of their great cities.

  Fellirian answered, smiling faintly as she climbed the stairwell to the upper world, “They have a phrase that describes that perfectly: they call it somewhere-else-ism. If you ask why anything isn’t as it should be—social inequities, shift disparities, mechanical malfunctions, nonexistent conveniences, and loaded benefits—the responsible parties always cite some location, preferably rather far away, where things are just right. To your question about slideways, the local engineer would most likely say, ‘Oh, they have just installed that system this very week in Tashkent Center.’ And in Tashkent, or Zinder, or Coquilhatville, they are saying at the same time to their complainants, ‘In Old North America they have all that stuff, and low taxes41 as well.’ And there’s a time variation of it, too, not just of place: either they had it, and it broke, or it’s coming next summer. And they repair the hot-water pipes
in, you guessed it, the dead of winter, too. No, Olede, I fear that very little of the technology leaks down to the street level. In fact, these,”—and here Fellirian gestured at random passersby with a slight motion of her head—“have rather less, on the whole, than their foreparents did. Thus is the way of all things like this, and why we pursue them with greater caution.”

  They reached the top of the stairwell and emerged into the more open air of a plaza, about which low, subtly-colored buildings clustered. Before the stairwell opening, a painted sign mounted on posts listed significantly organizations nearby, presumably of interest to the arriving traveler, identifying their locations according to building numbers of the structures in which they were housed. Morlenden, not as familiar with Modanglic as Fellirian, thought there was something odd about the sign, something he couldn’t exactly place, until he realized that several of the words on it were apparently misspelled, or so it seemed. One word was misspelled twice, in two different ways. The errors cast a singular air of bland incompetence about the sign, and by inference, those who had erected it, an impression reinforced by the shoddy repainting the sign had received many times.

  The air of the city was translucent, an effect compounded of a light fog, overcast, steam from underground vents, and various fumes; and as in the station platform belowground, there was a similar vagueness, an indeterminacy, to the distances. A few forlorn trees filled elevated planters of concrete sited at random intervals along the main plaza walkway, the inhabitants now mostly bare of leaves and foliage and dripping with condensate.

  Of the buildings they could see, as they paused to allow Fellirian to orient herself, none appeared to be larger than three or four stories, and none bore any indication relating to their occupants or their functions; but they did, each building, bear enormous placards at their corners, which in turn displayed numbers, none of which seemed to have any relationship to any other displayed number. One announced, “3754.” Another, immediately adjacent, said, just as definitively, “2071.” The streets moved off in a square grid pattern, with regular ninety-degree corners, but it was the pattern of a maze, rather than thoroughfares; none of the streets appeared to go through to anywhere. Morlenden vulgarly observed aside to Krisshantem that it seemed the humans laid out their streets after the tile-joints on the floors of the public toilets at the Institute: the neat, ninety-degree lines went nowhere.

  They knew where they needed to go—to Building 8905, as Vance had told them—but this building was not listed on the directory sign, nor could any of them locate it from their viewpoint on the plaza. Fellirian, more at home with humans than either Morlenden or Krisshantem, accosted a passerby and asked the location of Building 8905.

  The man responded somewhat furtively, and hurried on his way, into the terminal, down the steps. Fellirian returned, and said, “That one said that eight-nine-oh-five is to our left, a few blocks over. Head left from the plaza, right at the first street beyond the end of three-seven-five-four over there, skip an alley, and then left and left at the very next streets. Left, right, skip, left and left.”

  Kris exclaimed under his breath, “Insane! None of these blocks is numbered in any order. Why number them in the first place?”

  “I know,” she answered. “It’s an awful system. The original intent was a good one, I suppose; then there was order. But with rebuilding and changes, it got all mixed up. Now and again, some administrator tries to reorder his district, but when you change the number of a building, you also have to change all of the references to it, all of the records. All the directories. And people get confused. You should try to make a call through the public commnet as it is! Much worse! It takes, on the average, five or six calls to get the office or the person you need. Why, I know of one case where I called one number, and a person answered. It was not the man I was calling, so he gave me another number. I called it, and it rang; the same man answered the same instrument, and told me my party wasn’t in! And the directory entries make no sense at all: supplies are carried under the section ‘Logistics,’ while the Logistics-Plans Offices are listed under ‘Plans.’ At first I thought that it was just me, that I was at fault for not learning the key to it all, but Vance told me it was the same with everybody; all of them carry around little personal directories, compiled over the years, listing the real numbers and offices and people. Some people actually have a side job on the sly as professional listers. Others sell personal directories for astounding sums.”

  Morlenden shook his head. “It certainly would seem that these numbers lend the appearance of greater order.”

  Krisshantem added, “I am surprised that they can have a working society at all on such a basis.”

  She answered, “Vance has a theory, to which I also subscribe, that there is a good reason for such tangles and why society chooses to work through them. He thinks that bureaucratic systems and number messes like this arise, not through carelessness, but through specific, if half-conscious, attempts to put distance between people, because the civilization has somehow compressed them closer to one another than they are capable of being naturally. They build a time delay into all their transactions, because, crowded in personal space, they must expand into time.”

  “They have traded frustration for satisfaction, no doubt,” finished Morlenden as they started off to the left across the plaza toward 8905.

  She said, “True! But that frustration with the time delay is a forebrain problem: one can rationalize it, which adds to its effectiveness. But body-space contact aggression is at a deeper level, more instinctual, and thus more difficult to control. No, trading time for space works.”

  He laughed. “And so we’re building the very same thing! Look at us, you and I, Eliya; with all our records of births and deaths and transfers to elder lodges. Braid-line diagrams, Braidbooks, collations of names. Aren’t we now preparing the groundbreaking for the same thing to come? I mean, in miel years, we could all come back and visit and see scores of little Perderens, Terderens, Zhanderens, all busy, scribbling away in their little offices, just like this, and instead of us visiting them, they will all be required to call us upon every minor little event.”

  Fellirian did not answer him, Krisshantem added, most cryptically, “Too, it is a way to slow or stop time. All events leave ripples, and these methods are sad attempts to make standing waves of those ripples. It gives the illusion of permanence and eminence to those who feel swept along in the general rate. But the events themselves are never prolonged beyond their time; they aren’t even touched, for these things avoid them.”

  For some unaccountable reason, this remark left Morlenden with a dire sense of moody foreboding, some unspecified menace. Krisshantem was prone on occasion to utter oracular parables, statements whose true import even he did not understand completely on the conscious level. Nor did Morlenden. . . .

  Now off the plaza, they had made their first turn and were proceeding along a narrow street between two buildings which seemed smaller than the general rule. The pastel, stained, or unpainted surfaces, the low cloud cover, the suggestion of winter fog, the pervasive mechanical smells, odors, tinctures, distillations, all combined in an alien gestalt to lend a sly, just-out-of-range-of-recognition melancholy to their journey. There was danger in this, indeed, so they all knew, great danger. But however near it might very well be, it also seemed remote, miniature, disinterested, accidental or blind policy if at all. All that remained was not excitement, but an odd sadness, a peculiar emotion they could not recall feeling before, though they had all known painful circumstances in their lives. It impelled one to lassitude and blind, wheel-spinning action for the sake of action at the same time. And passing humans seemed also to share it.

  To ease the tension rising among them, they began to talk among themselves. The basic gray, the basic color behind the overcast gray day, changed and shifted, clotting suddenly, and then clearing again, only to close in again. Now it was yellowish, now blue and violet, and now again, pinkish. The cloud deck was
thin, and as the clouds moved overhead in the spaces of sky between the buildings, above the faceless and nameless buildings, they changed the quality of light passing through their vague, unformed layers.

  Krisshantem was the first to speak openly of it. “Why do we feel as we do? Is this city so alien to us?”

  This time it was Morlenden who did not speak. Fellirian glanced about her once, muttering something uncatchable under her breath, adding, “They used to call it sienon . . . the blues. But few know the term anymore. They feel it, all the same. There is no natural law that says that men can’t live in cities, or us, either. It’s just that this kind of city isn’t right for them. Or us. We feel the wrongness.”

  Krisshantem digested this in silence. Then he asked, “And so you are sure that we will find Maellen here, in this pile, in this eight-nine-oh-five?”

  She said, “So much Vance averred. But he also added that according to his informants there was something wrong with her. I have adjudged it was a good thing that we spent those extra days practicing recovering and reprogramming a forgetty.”

  “Now that we are here,” Kris said, “I like that not at all. We should not even discuss such a thing in this place, much less assay to perform it here.”

  Morlenden agreed in part. “I’d also prefer to do it in a safer environment, but then there’s the problem of carrying her back. . . . I also didn’t want Kal to see us do it; he’ll probably think it the vilest sort of black magic.” Then he added, “But rathers don’t count so much, do they?”