The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  He felt a black, consuming rage rising, suffusing him, distorting his vision, altering his perceptions. He felt enlarged, he felt time slow, he expanded into something strange, fey, an evil released, clenching his hands convulsively, breathing in deep, steady breaths. Morlenden turned around, withdrawing his fish-knife from its baldric. He saw a confused blur of action.

  They were all there—Fellirian, Krisshantem, Cannialin, Kaldherman—moving about a perimeter enclosing a small group of five humans, one of whom was struggling with an unwieldy piece of elongated equipment, gunlike in shape, but not exactly a gun, either, in the traditional sense. The remaining four seemed to be protecting that one. It seemed that none of them noticed Morlenden, so intent were they on the flashing, whirling figures approaching from outside their group. Morlenden tightened his grip on the long, thin knife, walking like an invulnerable sleepwalker. They did not see him, the invisible one, and he would deal among them like the angel of death. He felt like Kris, more so, invulnerable and invisible, charmed. The rest skirmished to the rear, opening up the gunner for him. The one with the odd, bulky gun was open, in front of him, still struggling with some adjustment; perhaps the weapon was jammed, broken. Morlenden walked calmly, quietly to him, almost reaching him before the man became aware of him. The man looked up, startled, raising the weapon, and as he did, Morlenden casually stepped inside the reach of the gun and calmly, still calmly, pushed the knife into the man’s chest. There was a resistance, and blood flowed around the wound. He pushed harder, looking directly into the man’s shocked eyes with a lover’s intimacy. The weapon dropped from his hands and the man looked at Morlenden accusingly, incredulously, as if this could not be happening to him, him the weaponeer. And a darkness greater than the night passed over his vision, as he slumped to the cold ground.

  The others now saw that their weaponeer was down, and they menaced the five ler with hand-pistols, while one among them struggled, panic-stricken, with a small device, something similar to the communications unit Krisshantem had taken off the agent. They seemed confident now, slowed, sure that none of the group facing them would use any kind of released weapon. They had been briefed. Before he could set the controls the way he intended to, Fellirian menaced him, her own knife drawn, before any of the others could bring a weapon to bear. The man danced backward, holding it high, out of reach, as the others tried to get into position for a shot. One went down immediately, as he suddenly met a Kris who wasn’t supposed to be where he was, throat-chopped. Morlenden sliced at the hand holding the communicator, heard, as if under water, a harsh cry, and the communicator was on the ground. He stepped on it, breaking its delicate inner structure into a jumble of metal, now smoking and sparking as its power-pack shorted out. Cannialin dispatched that one, while he was trying to avoid Morlenden, with the crazed look in his eyes of a berserker, and Fellirian, who steadily advanced upon him, uttering terrible words in a language he did not understand. The last saw his position, and tried to run, but he met Kaldherman and Krisshantem and his journey, even in flight, was a short one.

  And there was silence in the forest, marked only by hard breathing, and a distant hum and throb of motors from the hovercraft, quartering the distance, far away. Morlenden felt the rage abating, saw what they had done, saw that the others saw it, too. They did not speak, but dumbly walked about the scene of the battle, numb, astonished. Morlenden could see clearly again, and looking at Fellirian, saw streams of tears down her cheeks, although there was no change in the expression on her face. They all knew they had avenged something here, they had defeated armed men, with no more than their hand weapons. But something had snapped, and would never be the same again. There was blood on the ground, that had not been spilled in such a way before.

  Krisshantem was the first to find his voice. He said slowly, “After a time, they began to realize what we were doing. They had tried a shot at us, to no good. While they shot at where they thought I was, Kal and Cannialin got one of them. But the rest saw, and knew we were not the ones they sought. So they retreated, turned back. They found your trail with that weapon, and followed it. They would not be diverted. We tried to intercept them, but they were then between us, and running hard. It was no good, no good, we couldn’t prevent it. . . .”

  Time was resuming its normal flow. Morlenden asked, distantly, “Eliya, what did they shoot her with?”

  Her voice was flat, overcontrolled. “A filthy thing, a wire-guide. It launches a tiny rocket with an explosive head containing barbs. It’s connected by a wire to the gun itself, which follows the flight with a computer, guides it. All you have to do is keep the target in the sights. They like to use it against fugitives. . . . Do you see? Once hit with that thing, the target cannot escape, even if it didn’t have a mortal wound.”

  Morlenden said dryly, “Now I understand the weapon prohibition better. . . .”

  “Yes,” Fellirian said. “So do we all who were here. A weapon that leaves the hand magnifies the user too much, so much that often the original will that guided it is lost, expanded, diluted. Washed out. And that is why we fear much technology, why we labor to retain our innocence; other things magnify, too, just the same way, and we are not wise enough yet to know if we really do want to see that magnified image of ourselves . . . until we have a better control of ourselves. We are not restrained enough yet by half. Were it so with them, too.”

  Morlenden said, “Innocence . . . I do not feel so innocent. There is blood.”

  Cannialin interrupted. “Sh! Listen!”

  At her command, they all stopped, in a circle, facing each other, the five of them, and listened. Schaeszendur. The girl was not yet dead. They could hear her in the silence after the violence, by the fence, where she had fallen. She was talking aimlessly, now protected by shock from the pain that would have come. She was talking, but most of it was just babbling, nonsense, not even words. The mortal wound she had received, the fatigue, the unstable implant persona, they were all coming together now. They listened to the soft, hoarse voice, childishly high in tone. Just babbling. Morlenden felt a vast dull pain in his heart. And they turned from the place where they had made murder, where they had fought in heat with the men, the forerunners, and walked slowly to the fence, to her.

  They all knelt close around her. She was lying, partly propped against the fence, as they had left her. Morlenden cradled her head, feeling the soft, dark hair, the heated skin along the back of her neck. He wiped her mouth; there had been blood at one corner of it. And brushed the adolescent hair off her forehead, out of her eyes. An odd frown creased her forehead momentarily.

  Her eyes had been open, but had been moving aimlessly, sometimes independently of one another. She did not see, except some artificial ulterior scene Krisshantem had implanted in her . . . some memory. But without warning, the expression of dull shock and confusion in her face faded away quickly, changing radically into something else. The contours of her face began to shift, as if obeying instructions from a different set of muscles, a different personality. The childlike roundness of face faded, vanished, and was replaced by a harder, more adult set along the jaw, tense and concentrated around the eyes. The eyes cleared, became focused, calm, then intense. Without moving her head, she looked hard at them all, from face to face, pausing especially long when she came to Kris. Morlenden recognized that look in her eyes at once: it was the look of one who saw strangers and knew not how they came there. Only Kris was familiar. He knew. Maellenkleth knew only Kris among them, while Schaeszendur had known them all alike. This was Maellenkleth, how, he didn’t know, but Maellenkleth it undeniably was.

  She took a deep breath, breaking something deep inside. They heard a rattling in her throat. She grasped Morlenden, who was closest to her, and with a capable, terrifyingly strong grip, pulled him down close to her, so that his face was by hers. All of Morlenden’s senses were alive, tensed to ultimate receptivity, alert: he sensed all of her, how short her time-line was. She had only seconds to live. He smelled sweat,
fear-scent, the reek of adrenaline, blood, musky, salty, all overlying the sweet fragrance of a young girl.

  And he heard the harsh voice in his ear, ragged with shock and the leading edge of the wedge of pain. It was not the simplistic child’s voice he had heard before, when it was Schaeszendur; this was different. Hoarse and wounded and dying it may have been, but it was also the voice of one almost adult, filled with knowledge and desires and incredible will for one born in the sign of the Water elemental. The grip tightened. And the voice rasped, “Mevlannen . . . Mevlannen . . . to Sanjirmil.”

  “What?” he asked.

  The rasping whisper repeated again, “. . . Matrix . . . from Mev . . . from Elane . . . get the matrix from Mev-Elane . . . take to Sanjirmil. . . .”

  “What matrix, what for?”

  “Get the matrix from Mevlannen . . .” and then the voice trailed off into another series of nonsense words, drifting back into the childish intonations of the forgetty, Schaeszendur. Or was it? The face did not change, though the grip was now relaxing. The voice trailed off. She was yet breathing, but it was obvious that she had but a few instants left to live. Krisshantem stepped forward, and it was as if she was seeing him for the first time. Morlenden felt the hand holding his over-shirt clench hard, almost as if she were going to try to rise to her feet. Then he saw her lips moving, trying to form words, and she found her voice, her eyes cleared completely, and she spoke, and

  Now an immense Will suddenly grasped their minds and clamped down, hard, so intense it was painful. All five of them immediately lost the sensory input of the world around them. This was Maellenkleth, Maellenkleth the master Player, and she was sending an image in Multispeech. In visual Command-override, so powerful they could not move, or block it out of their minds. They all saw the same thing, and it would remain impressed on their minds, reverberating, forever. It was not a message, an instruction, a command, but a picture. A picture of Maellenkleth, not quite as any of them had ever seen her before, her face shining with rapture, turning slightly to her right side, turned a little away from the viewer, her arms outstretched from her torso. All around her, surrounding her, outlined in faint, glowing blue, were the outlines of a tessaract, encompassing her, protecting her. It was clear that here, in the vision, she had truly come into her own. She floated in space, inside a translucent tessaract, wearing the ritual robes of a high Perklaren contestant of the Game, the Inner Game, intricate and arcane Game patterns and emblems embroidered vertically down a panel of linen on the front of her robe, and also along the hem of the robe about her pretty, delicate feet, and on the borders of the wide sleeves of the garment. Behind her, almost in the direction she was facing, as if looking over her shoulder, was a background of the patterns of some Game projected upward onto a spherical ceiling and part of a wall, an immense multicolored Game diagram, stopped in mid-flight.

  They felt the Will fading, the image fading with it, not changing, but dimming, losing color contrast, becoming pastelled, becoming empty outlines, fading, fading, graying, darkening, and out. Their optic nerves resumed transmitting the images of a nighttime forest, by a fence, to their visual centers. And Maellenkleth lay relaxed against the fence, as if asleep, the face relaxed, peaceful. Morlenden, his hand still under her slender neck, could feel her cooling. Life had departed this body.

  Fellirian hiccupped nervously. “What was she sending?”

  Kris answered, “Something about a matrix Mevlannen has. Take it to Sanjirmil. . . . She’s dead now.”

  “I know,” said Morlenden. “Had you ever seen her send an image like that before?” He knew very well that somehow she had imposed an image of herself upon a background of the Inner Game. He also knew that none of the rest of the Derens had seen that before.

  Krisshantem answered, “No, nothing like that. I could recognize a Game display, but it is in a strange form. Was that Inner Game?”

  “Yes. And I don’t know what the significance of it is.”

  The boy said, “I never saw her do anything like that before. I didn’t realize she could override like that, even though she taught me override. . . . That pattern on the display she did show me once, but plain and flat, not like that curved screen-ceiling. . . . It is something very special, I know that, something very secret.” He sat back on his heels, shaking his head. “That was the old Maellen, there, in the end, the old Maellen and something more. She was sending Truth, then, not playing or concealing, though she had not the time to tell us what it means. I know it not. But it must have been a powerful thing, to have endured through autoforgetting and restructuring; she believed something powerfully.”

  Fellirian said slowly, ‘Truth is what we believe; and of course we become what we believe ourselves to be. Unlimited things. Only the lesser are provable. She sent to us what she was to herself.”

  Morlenden asked, “Do you know what she meant?”

  “No.”

  “Must we, then, do as she asked?”

  “I still shake from the force of it; of course we must, we cannot choose at this point, but follow it through to the very end. That is why she sent that image in the end, the very end. She said, there, ‘Do this for me, it is my very life.’ To have retained it through all she endured, it must have been the central immanent fact of her life, something she lived with daily, ingrained in her at the cellular level, beyond the reach of even autoforgetting. It was that which lent meaning to her life.”

  Kris added, “It was truly her, this I know. There was much that she did not tell me, but I could sense that we were close to it; she took me as far as she could. And if you will not pursue this, Morlenden, then I will.”

  “Rest in ease, Krisshantem. I will take it. I think not to the ends of the Earth, either, for Mevlannen I can find.”

  Fellirian added, “And it must be quickly, too, Olede. There was an urgency in her, something that must be done quickly. And we should do this without informing the Perwathwiy or Sanjirmil. It will be difficult and perilous, a risk, that trip all the way across the continent. They will be watchful, wary, after what was done here tonight. I know some tricks yet, though, and with the watchfulness there may also be much confusion, enough to slip through. . . .” She stopped now, thinking. “And now let us act in reverence toward this poor body that has endured so much, and for what? Yes, let us do it, for they will come, looking for their shock troops.”

  Kris said, as Fellirian got to her feet, “She said once to me that she did that which she performed outside because she enjoyed it, the shadow-play, the feints, the skill of passing unseen on many errands; but that overriding all personal likes and dislikes was a higher reason, that we would all know of it, within her lifetime. She thought, before fertility, which was why she was working so hard to instruct me in the Game basics, and gather support for her proposal to have us declared shartoorh Dirklarens. I do not know why, but I know the meaning of her words and her deeds: this was for us. The people.”

  Morlenden said, also getting to his feet, “Then may it have been a worthy price, for she paid with two lives for it: not many would go so far as to risk even one.”

  Kaldherman had been silent through the whole adventure. Now he spoke. “I have an unraveled thread of my own, you thinkers and worriers and ponderers; I wish to know how it is the five of us, with no more than knives, best armed and trained forerunners?”

  Cannialin also asked, “Indeed. Where are the wild-eyed, merciless humans, who are reputed to shoot and burn without stint? These were willing enough to shoot one in the back, but when the scars would be in the front side, they milled about like geese in the slaughteryard. I admit to no cowardice, but I had not thought myself so fearsome before. Kalder, perhaps: he had a look about him just now that would have wormed a dog, but me?”

  Fellirian said, “Ayali, you do not know how strange you look with knife in hand . . . indeed, I fear you myself sometimes at home, when you are slicing a fowl’s throat. The only thing I can say is that they must not be accustomed to resistance, much l
ess attack upon themselves; but that raises many questions in my mind, and an answer that makes questions isn’t such a good one, is it?”

  Morlenden said, “You mean they just have to threaten, not actually do anything?”

  “So it seems. They respond quickly enough. That I have seen with my own eyes, and the targets always run, and are gathered. No one resists.”

  “And what if someone did?”

  “Unthinkable.”

  “Do they have any idea what a foundation they have built upon, that a dozen determined men could take over the whole planet?”

  No one answered Morlenden’s question. And now they all stood about Maellenkleth, and bent to pick her up. In the background they could still hear the humming and throbbing of the hovercraft, now somewhat nearer. Morlenden was still somewhat stunned, and he felt light-headed, still not quite himself. It had been unthinkable that he had been shot at by an unknown assassin; but to do as he had done here, this night: that was an even more remote conception. Yet he had done it, and as he thought back on it, he felt convinced that it was right, proper. Revenge, and self-survival. And something, some unknown quantity in the unseen underworld, had shifted, changed, and now he was being borne along on the main current of an uncharted stream, flowing to an unknown destination. He shrugged, a gesture that the others missed.

  And he said, half to himself, which they also did not notice, lifting the girl up to Kaldherman and Krisshantem, who had climbed the fence, “Watching? Confused? Yes, they will be all those things . . . and maybe they will not be watching half so well as they imagine they do. This one moved among them unseen. Now I . . . ?”