The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  She paused, then continued, “It is a problem in synesthesia as well; we always assumed sight was sight, period. But it was not to be so: what the symbolizer depicts would be best described as being most like a sense of smell, whose operation we then see through the symbolizer. That is not good, but it will have to do.”

  Morlenden at first suppressed a smile, but then he laughed aloud. “So you sniff your way along, blind but for the memorized view, eh?” But he laughed uneasily, for he did not like the image that came to his mind—that of a hound blinded, nose to the earth, questing in the air, cautiously sniffing out a trail to a place he never knew before, but which had to smell right. And avoid a universe full of things, whose perceptions he could not verify by sight. Morlenden added, “That is the damndest thing I ever heard in my life.”

  Mevlannen smiled with him. “I laughed, too, Morlenden, when I was initiated, and so have we all. Except Sanjirmil. She never laughed. But the dangers are real, and there is much confusion. Naturally we do not desire to get lost—only to leave Earth and make planetfall on a world upon which we can live. And so thus was my part in it: to reconcile what we see with our eyes and what we perceive in the symbolizer. This I have done, and my task is finished.”

  She stopped speaking, her voice at the last becoming hoarse. Now she looked, and she saw that her cup was empty. Morlenden’s was as well. Adding his cup to hers in her hand, she arose, refilled them both, and returned to her place by the fire. She seemed dazed, abstracted.

  Morlenden also was abstracted, trying to integrate what he had heard here with what else he heard. Mevlannen had explained a lot, the whole background. But, astounding though it was, it did not explain what had happened to Maellenkleth. Or to him. He thought again; he thought he could see the answer on the horizon, but he did not care for the shape of it. There was much yet to comprehend.

  He began, “I have many questions, Mevlannen. The Shadow, Maellenkleth, Sanjirmil . . . I hardly know where to begin.”

  She answered tentatively, “I know the basics; I also know what I have done. But recently, I am out of touch. Remember, I have been out here five years; there is much you will know better than I.”

  “Well, then. The first part. I understand secrecy. But I feel cheated that a whole way of life was engineered as a deception, rather than a reality, however good it was for us all. . . . There are things we do out of that which do not come easy, after all. I know these things well. What will it all have been for?” he asked.

  “That we will be free, to have a world of our own. Is that not enough? And remember the means defining the tool . . . it was thus we were defined.”

  “Have you considered, you of the Shadow, that the people will become cynical?”

  “That was considered in the beginning, but it was hoped that they wouldn’t be, that they would graft on those values; ‘the grafted tree bears the sweetest fruit,’ say the Pomen Braidsmen. And it has been good for us, we have thrived under our increased family structure as we would have under no other model we had at the time. And now we are used to it; I should not wish any other way.”

  “So we say, here . . . but there is also the idea of the government. Ostensibly there were the Revens and the Derens, and that was it—cheerful, law-abiding light anarchy. But now you tell me that this has not been so, that we were ruled in reality all these years in secret by a government we didn’t even know existed, a council calling itself Kai Hrunon, ‘The Very Shadow.’ Was the Reven Braid the real ruler?”

  “In a word, yes. In another, no. You would, for example, never have been permitted to challenge an arbitration by Pellandrey or his insibling Devlathdar; that it was never done in the past is a measure of our tact, which is what civilization is.”

  “But it was always otherwise.”

  “Mostly. Outer: a Braid to settle disputes, and another to confer familial legitimacy; but inside, in the Shadow, it was a majority of elders, and at that, primarily of the Flyer Braid background. And there one rules. The Perwathwiy Srith. And the traditional rote is that the Reven arbitrates only aground. In space, the senior Flyer rules. In the name of the Shadow and the Plan.”

  “I see a danger here: if the Ship cannot be turned off and is always flying, then what now prevents the most ambitious Flyer from taking power and keeping it, using the argument that since the Ship is flying, his is the power. What prevents this?”

  “Necessity for discretion. Tradition. And the fact that as of now, most of the people are still outside the Ship, and would probably ignore orders from within it. Also there is always violence; we are not forbidden it.”

  “Who is senior Flyer now?”

  “When my Perklaren parents took the step to end Perklaren continuity, leadership automatically went to the Braid with continuity. That would of course be the Terklarens.”

  “Sanjirmil!”

  “No, at least, not when I left. She is not yet of age. Her parent generation, the Terklaren insiblings Daeliarnan and Monvargos; such were affairs when I left.”

  “But it would go to Sanjirmil?”

  “Yes, that is so.”

  “And you said that Maellenkleth was your soldier, your valiant one?”

  “Aye, just so. She always demanded to be in the front of everything, since she could not have the Game. She was brave, even foolhardy.”

  “Did she act alone, by her own will, or was she directed?”

  “In matters outside the reservation, Sanjirmil spoke for the Shadow, when she was not flying. A lot of exemptions were made for her. She was to be allowed to make up her Braid co-spouses early. They needed that, for the work of flying is too demanding for just two crews, and each crew must be four.”

  “This deception and its effects; one of them may have been the unnecessary death of your insibling. Do you understand this from what I have said?”

  She looked away from Morlenden, uneasily, her eyes fixed elsewhere, on nothing, anything. After a time she spoke, but it was with a voice quiet and subdued. “We always knew that there was peril in the way we had chosen. Risk and reward, you know. They who risk not, receive not. But we always had to balance those dangers against what would happen if the humans derived the secret of the Ship. We knew that we could not build such a Ship openly, for they would simply take it. How could they not want it? Starships? And once we considered sharing it with them, but that was voted down. Studies and tests indicated that if they ever discovered the Inner Game, the matrix overdrive, they would integrate autopilot devices into it; and therein is horror. What we deal with in the Game no machine can handle, because what we do, every second, is decide, and no machine can do that for us. And we use hunch to make those guesses and decisions. We are using resources we do not entirely understand. But under an autopilot, things would start to slip and the corrections would pile up and the machine would just lock up. It is extremely dangerous to manipulate underlying forces in the universe, and one must always do it consciously, never automatically. . . . To observe is to manipulate and once you start you must continue or destroy the device that allows you to do it. But you can’t play span-of-attention with it, play with it and then forget it. And robots would get tied up in the nature of transcendental numbers and become bemused by the algorithm, which is endless.”

  She added, “We were all told, in the most graphic terms imaginable, what the risks were at each stage of the Game, both to the people, and the ones in individual situations. I know Maellenkleth knew the risks, and she took them freely; I cannot question that further. That she paid it is to the honor of her memory.”

  Morlenden answered, “I cannot find fault with your loyalty, nor with Maellenkleth’s. She stood up to the heaviest of responsibilities, and performed as she said she would; she was no oath-breaker. But there has been the suspicion in my mind that such a sacrifice need not have been made, and that there was more to her capture and death than meets the eye. That there are forces at work, right now, in your carefully cultured system that could be destructive to the people an
d the Ship as well.”

  “But I cannot imagine . . .”

  “Of course you cannot. You have been out of touch for five years. But there is evil afoot in out garden, and I am now trying to find the source of it. What you have told me is valuable, but it does not yet bridge the gap. So let me ask you: why was Maellen sent out to destroy instruments?”

  “It must be that she was sent, Morlenden. She was not willful in that way. Only in regard to the Game. But destroy instruments? Unusual, that. The outriders were supposed only to observe. What instruments?”

  “As I was told, a device to measure magnetism, feel the field strength of the area in which it was. Another measured the field strength of gravity from point to point. Small, portable things, but accurate and discriminatory. Also not presently in use, which we all found curious.”

  “As I do also. . . . You could detect the Ship with those instruments, but since they were not in use . . .”

  “You could detect it? How?”

  “If you have a large mass of ferric ore or metal, it distorts the local magnetic field, concentrates the lines, makes the field more intense. The Ship, operating, causes the reverse of this—it weakens the local magnetic field. As for the other, the gravity meter, that could also be used in similar fashion: in essence, the mass of the Ship shows much less than you would expect. This is because the inertia is constantly damped by the matrix overdrive. Surveying a mountain with such an instrument, one would expect a higher reading due to the increased mass, but instead, what you see when the Ship is inside is as if there were a massless hole in the mountain. If the instrument was tuned for fine-detail resolution, you could see that the ‘hole’ was spherical. . . . If they were going to use them, or could conceivably be expected to, then I could understand destroying them. But of that I cannot speak; I know nothing.”

  “So we cannot determine if they were to be used or not, here.”

  “No. Like so much of the wide world, Morlenden, you and I can talk all night, share what we imagine, what we know, but all the same there is much else which we cannot know, of what we share and meld together. Truth takes many, and even then we err. Both true things and provable things as well.”

  Morlenden said, “Well, then, true or not, I will have to return much as I came . . . but at the least you can return with me, rejoin your family and friends.”

  “No. I can never come back. That was one of the prices for this. I have a short tether. I will continue my work.”

  “We may have taken on the values of the macrodeception, but that does not mean that you have to do the same in your part of it. And we need your skill, Engineer. And if nothing else, we still require the services of a resident star-gazer, if only to remember the lore of the skies of Old Earth for those who will have left it forever, and to search out the skies of the new world, wherever it will be, though I find it strange and awesome even to speak of it. Or is it that you fear to return?”

  “Perceptive and cruel you are, even as you extend your hand. It is true I fear it. I have lived here long. . . . We here have become accustomed to one another’s strangeness. But after the manner of the people, I have been contaminated by many of the concepts I have worked with.”

  She stopped, fatigue showing along the lines of her face, her straight, delicate jawline. Fatigue and repressed grief were beginning to penetrate her defenses, break down the fortress of her solitude. The pale eyes softened, looked inward. Morlenden could not read the sense of her thoughts: perhaps she was thinking about space; or of past childhood days with her insibling, now vanished into the dust and the past. He could imagine her as a child of the people, but harder it was to picture her in his mind in a spacesuit, the tender, pale adolescent body encased, indistinguishable from the others, forerunners one and all. It disturbed him, following the idea to its hermetic conclusion, that only in gentler environments did creatures allow themselves the differentiation in form between male and female. The harsher the environment, the less difference showed. Space . . . even that was not the ultimate yet. There were worse things, he sensed.

  Mevlannen began speaking again, now reflective rather than assertive. It was gentle speech, and her eyes were unfocused, undirected. She spoke of the stars; and Morlenden let her go uninterruptedly, for she needed this.

  As she spoke of the stars and her work, a gentle glow animated her face, a something-inside which had not shown before. Morlenden thought that he knew the stars well enough; he could see the brighter ones as well as any ler47, but the night sky was no spangled glory to him—it was a furry black emptiness, broken by a number of scattered points. How could he comprehend what Mevlannen Srith Perklaren saw in space, sidereal day after sidereal day in the endless lidless night of space, perched like a bird in her instrument’s prime focus, struck dumb, he was sure, by the incredible, unimaginable sight before her, and awed into insignificance by the three-dimensional image she was building up, line by painful line, position by position, via eidetic recall comparison. And she pronounced the resounding four-syllable names of the stars, in itself a wild, haunting poetry of unknown places and distant journeys, that curdled unknown longings in himself as he heard the names for the first time.

  Thondalrhenvir, Alpha Crucis; Lothpaellufkresh, Betelgeuse; Norrimveldrith, Great Rigel. On and on went the multisyllabic list, mixed with ancient Latin and Greek and Arabic names and numbers and letters, the recitation, points of light in a sky of darkness, reference points and possible future havens for astrogators and pilots who were going to step off the fixed and safe shore and swim in that ever-moving stream. There were names of distant galaxies, which Morlenden did not know at all: Lethlinverdaerlan, M31 in Andromeda; Vardaindralmerran, Maffei I; Klaflanpurliendor, the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Some equated only to numbers on obscure surveys, most by human sky-watchers, a few numbered by Mevlannen and her predecessor, Thalvillai, a Perklaren of another generation: Avila 3125, Elane 10110. Morlenden wished to be able to visualize it, desperately, but he felt that he was falling short of that inner image that illuminated the eyes and face of the girl, places she would never be closer to than right now, no matter she stayed on Earth or left it. And there were the nearer stars, the neighbor-lights that Man and ler alike had looked at with longing and burning curiosity: Yallov-yardir, Tau Ceti, twelve lights; Diylarmendar, Epsilon Eridani; Thifserminlen, Epsilon Indi; Holdurfarlof, 61 Cygni A; Dharhamnerlaz, Lalande 21185; Melforshamdan, Proxima Centauri; Tandelkvanlin, Barnard’s Star; Partherlondrin and Khaliannindos, Alpha Centauri A and B.

  And Morlenden thought of his own life, the routines of it, of log-books and Braid diagrams, of visits and ceremonies and parties, of the security of position and identity in a stable and fixed hereditary society. He thought of foot journeys in the changing forest, all the familiar things he and Fellirian knew. And however restricted the reservation had been, he knew that it had been a good life there and he did not wish to leave it. And which now to lose—the place or the role? He was sure it would be place-lost, for one could always change role; the outsiblings did it every year.

  When she stopped for a moment, he gently interrupted her. “Mevlannen? There is another thing I should have told you. Do you know anything about a boy named Krisshantem?”

  She looked at him blankly. “Nothing.”

  “He was Maellen’s last lover. I understand that she was planning and working toward petitioning the Revens to allow her, with this Krisshantem, to form a Third-player Braid. They would be shartoorh. She taught him the Outer Game, and in fact was apparently receiving some covert support for her plan from Pellandrey Reven, and I think, the Perwathwiy also. Was it possible that this would have any effect on the Ship?”

  “I don’t know. We could not predict when the Ship would activate, so we could not better predict when it would be ready for flight. When I left, it was felt that the Ship would fly before Mael and I would come of age. Just before. That would have been ten years from now. But as you have doubtless found out, Maellenkleth was always dissatisfied
with her change of role, and who could blame her? She was an authentic genius in the Game, and therefore also in the Ship. But of course that plan of hers would be against the decision of the Shadow and the beneficiaries of that decision, the Terklarens, and of course Sanjirmil. Against Maellenkleth at the height of her powers in the Game, Sanjirmil would have been ridiculous as master of the Game, and could not have survived open competition for it. And fear not, Maellenkleth would have forced it. No doubt the intent was resented, especially her bringing an outsider into the Game. The Shadow always carefully selected the outsiblings we wove with.”

  “So it would have hurt Sanjirmil.”

  “Indeed, oh, without doubt. Oh, and I see what you think! Hm . . . no, she is capable of it. They feared each other greatly, Mael and Sanjir. And we all knew that the way things turned out was largely a matter of accidental timing. But when you are dealing with generational turnover periods of two fourteens and seven years, you have to have the bearing that considers a lot can happen in those years. So it fell to Sanjir, and many of us did not like it, but what could we replace her with? When I left home, nothing. Any way we moved, we were distorting our own canon, which we had always obeyed in our advantage. It would have been cynical indeed to go against it because things did not turn out as some of us might have wanted.”