The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  She looked away a moment. Then, “You must understand that in one way, the way most of the Shadow would have seen it, Maellenkleth was wrong. They would say that since the Braid in agenetic, talent doesn’t matter when it’s low, so it shouldn’t when it’s high. We all loved her dearly, but almost from the very beginning she read herself out of it. There was no accident with the Players; they took deliberate action. The accident was with Maellenkleth; she was too good, and what an irony that was, how cruel! And she never understood why she had to give up that which she did best of all things. You know she was a prodigy, but what does that mean? I will tell you: she was a full-Player, rated at level fourteen, when she was ten years old. The best we ever had prior to her was the Perwathwiy, and she only attained level eleven at her peak, and by the kind of discipline that breaks minds and bodies before their time. The average is around seven, and you must be a five to be admitted to the Inner Game.”

  “What is Sanjirmil?”

  “Her norm, which is set when one is a child, was always subentry, a three or four. But somehow she made it with a five when she had to. How, I don’t know. The numbers are not additive but exponential; there is no way a three could become a five and stay sane; it takes too much.”

  She stopped, then said, “Now come close to me, for I will give you the numbers. I have not made up my mind yet, and would sleep on it; yet I will give them to you so they will not be lost if I decide to stay here. . . . Now listen close, for these are matrix numbers and they are hard to catch just right.”

  Morlenden assented and moved closer to the girl, very close, so that their faces were almost touching. He became still, opening his mind and will to Mevlannen. All he could see of her were her eyes, whose exact color was now elusive in the firelight. The eyes were expressionless, but they were reddened in the whites and glittered with moisture. Her breath was heavily scented with the brandy she had been dosing the coffee with, and he could also detect the scent of the oil of her face. There was no preliminary warning, as there had been with Krisshantem, but rather like Sanjirmil, it started immediately, seizing his mind, blanking his vision, and inserting the coordinate matrix at once, easily. He did not understand what he was receiving, but he had no time to think of it, just retain the matrix the way he got it. It came at lightning speed, but, for all its speed, it seemed to go on for a long time, and soon Morlenden became aware of nothing but spatial numbers, sometimes broken into shorter or longer strings. Holistic, like a visual, but also something different. This did not build a picture that he could see. By the time it came to the end, which came without notice or warning, save a little twist that he did not catch, the fire was much dimmer, and he saw again, the sad eyes close before him.

  He said, “I have it. Are you sure Sanjir will understand?”

  Mevlannen unfolded her legs from beneath her and stood, stretching like a cat. She looked closely at Morlenden, as if seeking some reassurance, or looking for a sign, of something. What? She said, “Yes. She will understand, all that I gave, and more. . . . I add a caution; never speak of what you have from me to anyone, never recite it to anyone but Sanjirmil, even to yourself. You must do neither, or you will fail us all. Only Sanjirmil!”

  “Why can’t you tell her yourself?”

  “Because I was not to come back!” She almost wailed. And after a moment, added, “And anyway, knowing what I do now, I will not be permitted to get close to Sanjir. They will think of me, rightly or wrongly, that I carry a vendetta against her.”

  “I know. I see it, too. I do not know how it came to be, but she is my suspect.”

  An unpleasant grimace flashed across Mevlannen’s face. It creased her mouth upward at the corners for that moment, but it could not be called a smile. She said, “Indeed . . . so remember your oath, and my instructions. Only to her! Do you feel arightly? You look peculiar.”

  Morlenden did feel odd, and he could not locate the source, which seemed to be fading even as he tried to find the cause of the feeling. There was something . . . no, nothing seemed out of place. “Yes, of course, I’m fine. Very tired.”

  “Do not feel bad over that; you now have much of what we have carried all our lives. It is a weight. And for you, now, it is fresh.... You will pass through the stressies unmarked.”

  She turned away from him, allowing the loose overshirt to flow around the contours of her slender, almost fragile body after the manner of all ler girls since the beginning of their time, walking slowly around the room, putting out the lamps and candles that were still burning. She stooped and shook down the fire, at the last, covering the fireplace with a metal screen. The room sank into a deeper darkness, and in the soft, dimensionless dimness, Mevlannen took on an air of expectation, of longing. Morlenden remembered how it had been, and in his mind kicked himself for the circumstances that were. This was indeed a priceless gift, and he was powerless to do more with it than appreciate deeply.

  She picked up the last candle, and said softly, “Now you must sleep with me, for there is but one bed.”

  He started to protest, but she came quietly to him and laid a finger gently over his mouth. The hand was uncharacteristically hard and cool, for all its delicacy a hand of great strength. She said, “I understand all too well what you will say. I know its truth as I know my own. But though I would have that, I wish more.... We are sharers now of a great secret, and are comrades endangered by the world, more than you know. That makes us close, as close as poor Mael and I. The last of our kind who slept with me was her, Maellen who gave up nights with someone much more exciting, to come here and be with me. It was just like when we were little children and all we had to do was play games with what we thought was life, and when we were tired we would tumble into bed and sleep in a pile like cats around the hearthfire, making each other secure against the unknown we had both seen. I have never slept so soundly since.”

  Morlenden said, “I understand. I will hold you, too.”

  She said, “There is one thing more . . . I should have thought of it.”

  “What is it?”

  “That in the Outer Game, we always allowed the Terklarens a certain latitude for cheating when they were in the adversary role, the role that equates to the real universe in the Inner Game.”

  “Cheating? What for?”

  “So we prepare for the real thing. That is what the real universe seems to do: cheat. Perhaps it does cheat, although that is a conscious process and that leads to speculations I do not care to make about the nature of things. . . . But it has its own rules and our job as Players is to understand those rules as best we can. We can manipulate the microcosm and the macrocosm through the Game, but we cannot impose our conception of order upon it; we have to play its way. So there are degrees of subtlety, and then further subtleties, and just when we think we’ve got it fixed and secure for all time, it makes a change on us, some little change, some exception.... We all know that this means we must learn more, but it feels like cheating. Not fair! So we had allowed the adversary Player team to cheat a little in the Outer Game, to prepare us for those little shifts in the Inner, which is not a Game at all, but basic life and death.”

  Morlenden asked, “Wouldn’t this tend to make the adversary Players a little dishonest?”

  “There is no doubt of this side effect. All things have consequences, paraconsequences. Sometimes we look too hard at the effect we want, and forget that there are others, some of which may be of greater strength.”

  “Why do you tell me this?”

  “So that you may know what you have walked into. We know it and compensate for it. It is so automatic that we do not even think of it, normally. They did not tell you, and I did not until this moment. An oversight. But one that could have crucial ends.”

  “All of you?”

  “Around other Players, we allow for it, but around others we sometimes lose sight of the fact that others do not play by our rules.”

  “So now that I have at last contacted the Players, I risk being trick
ed and gulled at every stage of the Game.”

  There was only a little light by which to see, but in that light he could see that at his last question Mevlannen had turned away from him slightly, an expression of pain on her face. “No,” she said. “Not so much that. Or perhaps yes, you may.” She straightened. “Be on your guard now, even with me. But especially with Sanjirmil.”

  Morlenden was tempted, but he did not speak of what else he knew and suspected. “Sanjirmil?”

  “Yes. Because she never learned the counterprogram to the cheating. It is an ethical exercise. Somehow, she never got it. They tried to catch up, but you know how those things are. Once out of sequence, and it’s gone forever. They tried, but no one knows if it took. . . . She can be dangerous.”

  Morlenden nodded, an idea forming in his mind. He saw that it was not lack of data which had prevented it from coming earlier, but that he had been suppressing the obvious conclusion all the time. And the knowledge did not cheer him; it told him of a blind side he had carried unknowing, a dirty little secret about almost-forbidden fruits, of sweaty, hard supple bodies and salty kisses, and an image which would never have mattered save for intervening circumstances and an accident. Yes. Now he knew. It remained only to verify it.

  He followed Mevlannen into the rear of the cabin. There, in a separate little room, was a hard, Spartan bed, after the human style, piled high with crude but homey quilts.

  She blew out the candle she had been carrying to light the way, making a fragile little puff of breath as she did so. Afterward, in the darkness, over the sounds of wind and rain and storm fretting at the cabin walls, and the stunted, slanting jumpers sliding against it, he heard the silky sounds of her overshirt, slipping off her body over her head, and falling to the floor. He sensed, rather than seeing or hearing directly, the girl Mevlannen moving across the floor, and then heard the quilts rustling as she slipped her bare body into the bed.

  He removed his own overshirt, not without hesitation, and then, feeling the chill of the room, slid into bed beside her, feeling first the hard, rough fabrics against him; she moved close, flowing into a space he had made with his arm, stretching full length against him. Although the intent she had was not particularly erotic, nevertheless it was, and as such was maddening. The change in Morlenden had been years ago; he and Fellirian had lost both the will and the way after Fellirian had completed and delivered her third pregnancy. But they still retained their memories and they never forgot, and the senses still performed their functions. So he knew fully the desirability of this smooth, supple young girl, eager for love; yet at the same time the thing he felt would not proceed further than a thought, a memory. If it had any body-response at all, he felt it only vaguely somewhere in the vicinity of the heart, perhaps the diaphragm, where it diffused into a something for which there was no word Morlenden knew: something ludicrous and incapable of response, feeling like some unnamed intermediate sensation, between extreme tenderness and indigestion.

  She lay quietly, breathing evenly, deeply. After a time, the breathing became softer, shallower, and once or twice, her body trembled slightly. Now the combination of fatigue and Mevlannen’s amazing revelation began to tell on him, and the warmth of the body next to him relaxed him further, into semiconsciousness. It was in this half-sleep that he thought he heard her say something, but he could not be sure she had said anything at all. It had sounded like, “Forgive me for that which I have done.” But when he listened again, there was nothing, and she never repeated it. And so, with a head full of rushing visions and dire suspicions, Morlenden dropped into sleep like a round pebble falling into a quiet pond.

  When he awoke in the morning, the rosy light from the east was pressing at the curtains of the tiny window, which he had not seen the night before; he noted immediately that the warm presence that had been next to him was not there, that she was gone, and that the cabin now carried the silence of emptiness. He arose, donned his old clothes. There was no note, nothing. He rummaged around, and eventually found some biscuits in the cupboard which apparently had been left for him to find. He slipped his cloak over the overshirt and left, trying to find a way to lock the door behind him. There was none. Apparently, it could only be barred from inside. He gave up, and started down the path, back the way he had come, along the saddle which would take him down to the cliffs above the blue sea, now smooth and glassy, except for perfect swells breaking in precise patterns along the shore, rippling their crests from left to right, leaving a faint rooster’s-tail trailing above and behind them. Old Sun painted a clear, golden light over the ocean, the grassy clifftops.

  He negotiated the saddle, and turned through two sharp switchbacks to a lower level, where he found Mevlannen sitting on an ancient jumper stump, dressed in a heavy winter overshirt and cloak that looked as if they had not been worn for some time. She was looking silently down at the sea; now and again a stray puff of breeze would ripple a loose strand of hair that had escaped the hood of the cloak.

  He greeted the girl, “Daystar light your way as mine! Are you waiting to say farewell?”

  She turned and looked at him blandly, as if he should have already known what her answer would be. “Here is a place I love dearly, and here I gave my part to the plan; but here I will not stay and offer a barren fertility to the forerunners while my kin journey to the stars. I will come with you if you offer me the new family of Taskellan.”

  Morlenden nodded. “Just so and no more; but you will have to call me now Kadh’olede, not Ser Deren.”

  “So much will I do gladly. It has been a long time. Will your own Braidschildren not resent us?”

  “No. I think not, although our Nerh, Pethmirvin, will not approve of your stealing boyfriends from her.”

  “Oh. I don’t know yet if I can.”

  “Never mind. I have something in mind to keep you busy for a time.”

  “You will keep secrets?”

  “Indeed I will.”

  “Very well.” She stood, shaking herself off. “Can we get back, do you think?”

  “I had no difficulty coming here. Their attention seems elsewhere, now. We will ride, and then we will walk a space; what can we do but try? Tell them you have been on the Salt Pilgrimage, if they ask. And of course, use a name other than your own, just as I will do.”

  Mevlannen nodded. She looked back, up the mountain, just once, at the summit of Pico Tranquillon. She could not see the cabin from where she stood. Then she turned and started down the narrow path to the sea, rippling far below them in the morning light. Morlenden joined her and together they walked down to the sea, and back into the world.

  EIGHTEEN

  The pathology of the poet says that the undevout astronomer is mad.

  —A.E. Waite

  EYKOR , CARRYING A sheaf of papers, untidily arranged into a cumbersome bundle, greeted Parleau in the hallway outside the chairman’s office. “Chairman, a moment; may I have a word?”

  “Certainly, Eykor. It’s free, now. Come along.” Parleau led the way past the shiftsman administrator who sat impassively and said nothing.

  Eykor followed, carrying the unwieldy sheaf of paperwork as if it concealed a very touchy bomb. Once inside the private office, he carefully placed the bundle on the conference end of Parleau’s desk, and turned to the chairman. He began, excitedly, “Chairman, over in the department we have been pursuing several aspects of this series of incidents centered on the girl-vandal. We have found more loose ends. Too many. We are now in the embarrassing position of having more clues than crimes or criminals.”

  “Go on.” Parleau knew very well that to one such as Eykor crime flourished everywhere, even in the mind. He would never root them all out, but all the same he would never stop trying, either, heedless of the misery he caused along the way, and the mistakes he made. It was not hatred of crime that made him that way, but rather an excess of zeal to duty, and too narrow a view. Such types were ultimately dangerous to all unless kept under strict supervision; and of cours
e, well-supplied with a variety of real criminal activities to keep them to task, preoccupy their attention; everything was evidence, otherwise.

  Eykor said, “We found Errat.”

  “More specifically, please.”

  “Errat was discovered in a terminated condition, in a rundown rooming house near the warehouse quarter. Here, in Region Central. It was handled routinely by neighborhood Security, until an alert watchman noted the reports. Then we got the department into it.”

  “Aha. Continue.”

  “By the time we got there, of course the body had been removed, but the room had not been too disturbed, so we were able to have the forensic pathologist go over the room microscopically. We did the same with Errat, when we caught up with the body. Errat had been dispatched with a single penetration of a sharp, pointed object in the upper left back; he terminated virtually instantly; there was not a sign of struggle, anywhere. We believe he was taken by surprise.”

  “Knifing’s a common enough cause of murder.”

  “This was different; it was done without slashing, no side movement at all. We were able to reconstruct the shape of the weapon.”

  “Errat seemed to be a free agent for persons unknown. This would indicate that one of them got close to him and had time to aim carefully.”

  “Exactly. And it was an unusual weapon; it was straight, two-edged, about two hands long, but rather thick, for the kinds of knife we are familiar with. It was not metal, but wood, a very hard wood sealed with a coating that was once volatile and which contained many impurities.”