The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Dardenglir had presided over the preparation and serving of supper, a performance which bothered Han a little until he recalled that they carried sexual equality to what even the most rabid partisans of equality of the human sexes would call extremes. And in direct reverse from human models, ler became more equal in sexual roles as they became more primitive. They believed it with conviction; Han already knew that one of their most solid beliefs was in the convergence of function through evolution. Not ler, nor their successors in a million years, but perhaps after three or four more evolutionary generations, it would arrive where both sexes would be completely undifferentiated, even as far as bearing children. Sex would then be a function purely of individualism, and not of gender.

  After everyone had eaten, they began talking. Dardenglir told Han a few anecdotes about ler. With his eye for minute expressional details, he had noted Han’s surprise at his nursing of the infant. His explanation was that from the appearance of mammals, males had carried vestigial nipples and glands to go with them. It had been suspected that adding function to those glands had been a subroutine of the basic DNA developmental program which occurred very late in the sequence, and that their structure worked very well for them because it shared the work of caring for the young child.

  From the far corner, Tanzernan, the girl who had given birth the night before, said something and giggled. Dardenglir translated it into “Man-milk makes the children mean!” From the opposite side came a taciturn remark from Bazh’ingil. It was translated, “But it makes the boys better lovers later on.” All of them, including Han, laughed at this exchange.

  Han began to notice another facet of them, besides their sense of humor; there was considerable difference between individuals, even though there was a great deal of cultural conformity. Bazh’ingil and Pethmirian were more alike, as might be expected, as they were the insibilings of the old braid. But even there there was difference: both were quiet and reserved, but Bazh’ingil kept just below the surface a rude sense of humor which Pethmirian lacked. She was small, dark, and hardly ever spoke. But for all that there was a lot of thought behind her eyes. Dardenglir was smooth as warm oil, crafty as a snake. Wise and alert. Back in civilization, Han could easily visualize him as a diplomat, and one to watch constantly. Tanzernan was bright and pretty, a kind of sprite, who was always, it seemed, laughing about something. During the day, he had discovered that she was something of a practical joker as well.

  So he told them his story, leaving nothing out, including the development of an odd attachment between himself and Liszendir. As they listened, they asked question after question, curious as children. When they had asked him everything they could think of, and resumed gazing at the fire with their large-pupiled eyes, then he began asking his questions. About the raids, the Warriors, and which was the best way to get to the mountain with two pinnacles north of the Capital.

  They knew nothing new. The raids had been nowhere near the remote community of Ghazh’in. They had heard tales, seen lights in the sky, noticed more meteors than was usual during the raids. But that was all they knew.

  They knew about the pinnacles Han had mentioned; indeed, it was a major landmark on a planet which had little variation of local relief from place to place. It was about two weeks, in their computation, to the southeast, which meant in his reference twenty-eight days. Han explained why he felt he needed to go there. They all scoffed it off, and Dardenglir explained why.

  “There is nothing there, no habited place, no town, no village. Nobody lives in those hills. How would you eat? And if the girl Liszendir succeeds, she will come in the ship—and not finding you will begin looking. She will eventually hear of the visitor at Ghazh’in; wanderers will have spread the tale. So she will come here for you. So you should stay here with us until she comes. At any rate it would be dangerous for you to return to the Capital.”

  Han did not like to admit the possibility, but nevertheless he asked the question anyway, feeling deep misgivings as he did. “And what if she failed?”

  Bazh’ingil answered, and it was translated. He spoke seriously and earnestly. “If she fails then you are no more than a colonist, like us. Ships call at Chalcedon”—which he pronounced as Chal-sedh-donn—“but seldom. Face truth and grow strong from it; you are stranded on the beach. If this is so, then we will go over to the nearest human village and find you a nice girl of weaving age, of your own sort, and you can move out here. There is plenty of room—raise children and beans! There are worse things.”

  Han could not answer him. It was a future he had neither considered nor had he wanted to consider. Now it was late, and there was quiet throughout the yos. One by one, they drifted off to sleep, cleaning up after supper as they went, casually but thoroughly. There seemed to be great liberty about who slept with whom, and they appeared to be unconcerned. Bed had no sexual connotation to them, not when lovemaking was condoned even in public. And here in the yos, they certainly knew who could mate with whom. It would be Dardenglir’s and Tanzernan’s turn next. Han wound up with the little girl, Himverlin, curled up in his arms. She liked his beard, and was soft and warm, but she kicked and poked mercilessly in her sleep.

  So Han entered the cycle of daily life among an isolated farm community of ler. Remote, steeped in what they called wise ignorance, they gently but firmly taught him, unceasingly and patiently. The days went slow and hard at first, but then one began to merge into another. The umbilical cord which still bound Tanzernan and her child finally became nonfunctional and separated; that was one of their peculiar adaptations, too. And Han waited for the coming of Liszendir and the ship, but with each day, it receded a little further off, like a lake drying up, desiccating in a desert.

  They were especially insistent on his learning ler Singlespeech, and constantly worked on him. Han found that very hard at first, but it soon began to start coming through for him, in short bursts and flashes. It was a strange language; it was completely regular, without any form of special expressions, but that was not so surprising, considering that it was, in origin, an artificial language.

  The grammar was complex—involving a case declension system for nouns and adjectives, and a highly elaborate system of interacting voices, moods and tenses in the verbs, but its regularity helped greatly. But something else about it troubled Han as he was learning it, and continued to for a long time thereafter. Each word root had one syllable, and was composed of one or two consonants, plus a vowel, plus an end-consonant. There were about fourteen thousand of these roots, each pronounceable combination being used. But each root carried at least four meanings, and there was no way to distinguish which of the four was being used—it all depended on context, which was maddening until you could follow the context. That gave them a one-syllable basic vocabulary of somewhere in the vicinity of 55,000 basic words. When you started figuring in two-syllable and three-syllable words, the numbers of possible words became astronomical in a hurry. He could sense a system behind the allocation of meanings, how each of the four was related to the others and the root itself, but he could not grasp the concept, and they seemed curiously reticent to explain that. They told him he didn’t need to know that.

  All he could figure out of this hidden order was that Liszendir’s name, as she had translated it when he had asked, was related to fire in some curious way, and hanh, meaning “last,” was related somehow to water. He told them of this conversation, and they called him, from then on, Sanhan, like a nickname. Water-last. And there were four words which did not have four meanings, but only one each, about which there seemed to revolve some deep secret which they would not share: Panh, fire; Tanh, earth; Kahn, air; and Sanh, water. It sounded vaguely like some type of alchemy, but Han knew little enough about that, so he did not pursue it further.

  In Ghazh’in, there was little need for written material, so Han saw little of the way Singlespeech was written. After one glance at a book Dardenglir had brought with him, he wanted nothing to do with it; it seemed each root wa
s written with only one basic character, to which were attached diacritical marks above, for the vowel, and below, for the end-consonant. Han had seen samples of ancient Chinese—it looked like a simplified form of that, even though it was not ideograms, but a true spelling script.

  As he learned, he worked with them, doing the thousand chores and tasks that life on a farm required. And except for his concern for Liszendir, he found that he rather liked the life: it was natural, spontaneous, unhurried and unconcerned. But with all the good points it had, he knew very well that he was an alien among them and could not stay forever. And he missed his own kind. And love and sex. Each night, the flashing bare bodies at the water trough did not help.

  He did not know how many days had passed, but it was a large number. He had reached the point where he needed almost no help from Dardenglir to talk with them. But Liszendir had not appeared. So he told them that he felt that it was time to leave, much as he hated it. He would go with Dardenglir and Bazh’ingil to the regional market and there try to make his way back to his own world and time. Despite what they had said earlier about finding him a “nice girl for weaving,” they were honest. They congratulated him for a wise decision, good for him and themselves as well. But they offered him a share of the profits from the sale of their produce, in which he had helped greatly. At first he refused, but after a time, he gave in, and they began making preparations to leave.

  Not so many days later, at sunrise, Han, Dardenglir and Bazh’ingil loaded and boarded a long, heavy wagon, and after many goodbyes, departed the village of Ghazh’in. The wagon was hitched to a team of four animals who resembled overweight alpacas. They called them drif, but Han understood that this was a purely local name—the beasts were common on most agricultural worlds and had been spread because of their adaptability. They followed a narrow, pale road winding over the rolling landscape. It was the only road into or out of Ghazh’in.

  The three of them took turns driving, while one slept, and one kept the watch as a lookout. This perplexed Han until Bazh’ingil told him stories about miscellaneous ghosts, bandits and ravenous predators which could be encountered. But during the trip, they saw no more than Han had seen on his walk to Ghazh’in from the place where his life raft had landed. Furtive suggestions of movement in the dark—an occasional wailing cry. Nothing more. The land was empty. Whatever one could say about Chalcedon, it certainly had plenty of room, room enough for many people.

  Finally, on the fifth day, they arrived at the market town, a place which the ler of Ghazh’in called Hovzhar, but which Dardenglir told Han was actually an old human town which had been called Hobb’s Bazaar. It was now mostly ler. They named places with two syllables with the same persistence they named themselves with three. He asked if it had ever had a ler name. It had not. They were content to call it by a worn-down form of the old human name, which they had all along.

  Hobb’s Bazaar was a sizable community of both peoples, now mostly ler, which served an extensive hinterland as a trade center and depot for farm produce. Dardenglir was animated and excited. “Back to civilization,” he cried, pounding the plank seat of the wagon with the palm of his hand. Bazh’ingil, taciturn as ever, expected to be cheated and pronounced anathemas on all, indiscriminately, of the region. “A vile lot of rascals and thieves,” was all Han could get out of him. Bazh’ingil, rather short and stocky for a ler, contrived to look as short and belligerent and uncouth as he could as they were driving through the streets of the town.

  To Han’s eyes, Hobb’s Bazaar was quaint and old-fashioned. It was a wooden town with high, angular buildings, most of which had high, peaked roofs, apparently for decoration, since the region had no snow or heavy rains. The streets were made of cobblestones, mostly poorly laid, and everything was painted in bright and clashing colors.

  But inhabited by thieves or not, they were able to dispose of their goods with a tidy profit, Han helping, haggling in his new found gift of Singlespeech, even if it was still shaky and accented. He had made mincemeat of a couple of merchants, who were very uncomfortable, being accustomed to fleecing the farmers of the local area. By the evening, they had cleared out the wagon and partially filled it again with supplies to go back, and all three of them were feeling expansive and generous.

  Dividing up the profits, of which there was a considerable sum left over, they offered Han half, to his surprise. At first he refused, arguing in fairness for fifths, but they reminded him that in ler usage, the braid was a single entity, a “person,” and its share could not be divided. Moreover, their half was much larger than they had expected to get. So, in the end, Han agreed, and they repaired to an outdoor restaurant where something was being roasted whole over a sumptuous smoky wood fire, which filled the whole town with the odor of woodsmoke and roast mingled. Meat! Han could not remember the last time he had eaten a nice greasy roast. Ler farmers did not eat much meat, not because they were vegetarians, but because square foot for square foot, they could develop and raise vegetable protein more efficiently. But it seemed years, although a logical part of his mind said that he had been on Chalcedon only a few months, perhaps half a standard year.

  The three of them loaded up plates, took tankards of fresh ale, and sat down at a rickety table to eat and enlarge upon the day’s profits. The evening went through its slow blue and purple evolutions, at the measured pace of Chalcedon, and they ate on, refilling their tankards from time to time. They were in the latter stages of the last bits of roast when Han noticed a motion, a figure, out of the corner of his eye. He looked, through the dust and gathering darkness. It was Liszendir.

  He got up quickly, and excusing himself, walked quickly towards her. She seemed disoriented, and as he came closer to her he could see that she was bedraggled, dusty and thin. She also carried her arms in a peculiar way, gingerly, as if she were carrying hot coals, or hot potatoes, or perhaps very delicate flowers. She did not see Han at all until he was almost upon her. Ignoring the stares of the crowd and the amazement on the faces of Dardenglir and Bazh’ingil, he touched her shoulder and opened his arms to her. She fell into them, grasping Han with a strong, steady grip which did not relax for a long time. She buried her face in his chest and clung to him like a child. After a long time, she released her grip and stood back. Her eyes were red, but there were no tears in them. They did not speak.

  Han led her to the table, where they immediately made a place for her, sending the potboy off for another platter of roast. While she ate, Han performed the introductions; she started slow, as if she had never seen food before, but as the long evening wore into night, she progressed slowly but steadily through three servings of roast, two plates of vegetables, and three tankards of ale. She did not talk, but only nodded politely at an occasional remark, and now and then raised an eyebrow at Han’s use of her language.

  At last she finished. The four of them made some small talk for a little while, but not too long thereafter the two from Ghazh’in admitted that they had to leave for bed, so they could get an early start back tomorrow. After all, with only two driving, it was a longer way back. So in the end, Han and Liszendir were alone again. She sat very still, staring into nothing, immersed deep within her own thoughts. Her eyes drooped, and finally closed; she relaxed in the crude chair. Han paid the bill, picked her up, and carried her to the inn. She was as light as a feather.

  Liszendir slept for three days, in a deep sleep which displayed no hint at all of any struggles or remembrances she might be replaying. While she slept, Han cleaned her up and doctored her scratches and bruises as well as he was able, with the advice and guidance of a cranky herbalist who operated a nostrum shop next to the inn. Slowly, the color came back to her skin, and the tone to her muscles. On the evening of the third day she woke up. She said nothing for a long time, staring out the window which ran narrowly from floor to ceiling, watching the square below under an overcast sky, where human and ler haggled and strove for advantage just as they had days, years before. It was a scene ten thousand y
ears old. Finally she spoke.

  “You can see for yourself that I failed, and cost us the ship.”

  “To tell the truth, I was more concerned with you than I was with the ship. I had given up hope.”

  “You are kind. But it is so, nevertheless. And he will be back. If so, then we are captured; if not, we remain stranded. And I have lost some of myself, as well.”

  She held her hands up. The wrists were still swollen, out of alignment. Han felt something bitter worming its corrosive way through his emotions; both wrists had been broken.

  “Yes. As you see.”

  She was silent again for a time. But she began to talk, slowly, hesitantly, and so gradually the tale unfolded. She was reluctant to tell it all, but it all came out anyway. After she had ejected Han, she had gone hunting for Hath’ingar; he had been elusive, and had kept his distance well, apparently trying to set up an ambush. But she had caught him, and for a time gotten the gun away from him, but in doing so, she would not use it, and it was then that he had caught her and broken her wrists. By superhuman effort, she had gotten away from him, but she knew she was as good as finished. With all her abilities, she had just barely had the edge on Hath’ingar—now the advantage had fallen to him. The first chance she got, she made her escape the same way Han had left, using the life raft. He let her get away. He didn’t care. He knew she could not survive.

  But she did survive. She had landed somewhere far to the west, in completely uninhabited lands, wide prairies. The food concentrate in the raft made her ill, from some trace element present or not present. So she started hunting. It had been a problem at first, with two useless hands, but somehow she managed. Worms. Grubs. Small animals. Berries. Leaves. Finally, she had come to an isolated settlement, where, surprisingly enough, word had drifted in that a spaceman had crashed and taken up living in a tiny village called Ghazh’in. She had not waited, but started out immediately, moving cross-country to cut time down to size. By the time she had gotten as far as Hobb’s Bazaar, she had just about reached the end of her endurance. She estimated that she had walked sixteen hundred miles across the planet. The wild food had made her sick, too, but she had kept it down. She had to.