The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  She continued, “Look at your own kind. You have the comfort of ignorance about your origins. You have the option of following evolution, and the unknowable part of science, or otherwise believing in creation myths that aren’t scientific, but at least they cover everything. The first is a process only, in which no instant of time is more significant than the other, the latter significance without process. Either way, you arise of primal chaos. Ah, but we cannot delude ourselves with either. We were made. A product, like a new kind of screwdriver. To bring a race into the universe with no more thought than designing bathroom fixtures! Your scientists were playing with truly cosmic laws, more lunatic than a child playing with a nuclear weapon trigger. Pragmatism! Experimentation! And in almost total ignorance!” She grew agitated, angry.

  “So, Han, we know they wanted to see if they could breed the supermen they had always dreamed of. So they played with human DNA, they arranged matings. They raised whole generations in laboratories under accelerated growth, creatures who never saw consciousness, may the One blight them with eternal senility. Now I tell you that evolution is both multiplex and multifarious. Common is awkward here, but I know an ancient Russian word that fits perfectly: raznoöbrazny—of various features. But nobody knows all its laws, all its realities. Not humans, not ler. So when finally the coherent form appeared, it was just like magic to them—actions and incantations. They had reached the next stage of self-resonance. Like music. The next halftone. Without knowing anything about chromatic scales. Better, the next chord. Or like physics—the next stable element. Magic, magic. I shudder at what they played with in their arrogance. But they were happy and so made many. They knew how. And they raised us in little camps. But the Firstborn knew what was going on—they could see with intuition better, so they knew. So they isolated themselves in tribalism, studied primitivity. They were primitive. You had ten thousand years to design a culture to fit you—we had to leap from creation into the second century atomic without so much as a wiggle. Out of nothing, they made a culture for us.

  “Then humans found out that they could not crossbreed with us. They had attained the superman very well, but it could never do them any good! Supreme irony! They reached for the impossible, and got it—but they couldn’t use it! And they realized one truth, that it was like Homo sapiens and its relatives in the far past. Different. Maybe not higher or better. Just different. Six thousand of us, with a low birthrate, so low that if we weeded ourselves in the interest of stability of our genetic line, it took us generations to recover our numbers. And on a planet of fifteen billion humans. So they used us, until many years later we escaped.

  “So it is true we have abilities you do not: you make much of eidetic memory, but with retaining everything comes the problem of what to do with it—so we also have the ability to forget. And it is not like what you call forgetting. With you it is misplacement, not loss. With us, it is loss, completely. And when we edit, we have to be so careful, because one slip and you have lost everything. Of course, there can be no torture—because you cannot scare a secret out of someone who can forget everything, even that he exists. We have better vision, because light has the broadest bandwidth of all natural sensors; two extra colors at each end of your spectum and eight wavelength receivers instead of three.

  “But liabilities, Han. We have no special night vision. That is why we turn in with the end of day—we have only color vision at night, and it’s less sensitive at low levels. And what about the low birthrate and short fertility, timed like one of the animals in the field? It is said that this is one of the laws of evolution—that the higher the form, the more consciousness it has and the less instinct, the lower the birthrate . . . and everything else, too, our size, our hands. Or the appearance of youth you envy us for. Yes, we know about that. It is only neoteny, the retention and expansion of youthful characteristics, supplanting more mature ones. And the sex of adolescence. They gave it to us on purpose and not for our pleasure—it was so we would be so obsessed with it that we would have little time for anything else. And so it is sweet, body-love, but we never can confuse it with anything else, anything more than that. It is casual, everyday, mildly affectionate. Love is rare.

  “You want to know how it is? I will tell you: it is twenty years of fun, pleasure, intense feelings, but fruitless, fruitless. But we fear fertility, because it is more than fun then, we almost have no choice. That is why all the elaboration with structure—it is too powerful to be treated any other way. Why do you think we would make something as complicated as a braid if we did not have good reason? It is to retain some vestige of control over who shall be born and what we shall look like after instinct has run its course. And that is why it does not last for life, too. We would not design such a thing for the exercise of curiosity.

  “You did not see this with the ones you visited with. The insiblings of that braid, Bazh’ingil and Pethmirian, were already becoming infertile. For the others, they were waiting for it to start up again—it would be a year or two before Tanzernan becomes fertile again. She and Dardenglir—they may like each other, as people, they may hate each other; it will make no difference, none whatsoever. The desire overcomes everything. The insiblings will not envy them, they will pity them, for they had all their lives to get used to one another; those outsiblings are relative strangers, and what they will do is beyond their control. Have you not wondered that our elders live alone, when they can? They do so out of choice, not necessity, and they are grateful for it.”

  “But, Liszendir, what about one’s loves before weaving? Why not weave with them? And what happens after the weaving is done? What then? Glad to be alone or not, do they wander in the woods and wrestle with desires like fasting anchorites?”

  She laughed, shortly, an unpleasant sound. It was a laugh, but there no humor in it. “Were it so. But it is not. Each step forward in evolution, however halting, however sidewards, means that each process becomes fractionally more finished. For us this means that when fertility is over, all of us undergo something related to menopause, like human females. But all of us. Males alike. And ours is more finished: when it is done, we do not want sex, nor do we have the ability to have it.”

  She was near tears, as close as he had ever seen her. Not anger, not hurt, but realizations of finality. “We call it the sadness. Why? Because we can remember so well, the exact degree. Eidetic memory can also be a curse. We have no subconscious. So we remember it all, not impressions and composites and special significances. Exact scenes, just as they occurred. This is how I have kept myself from you. I simply remember others. You see only the sex. The fun. The irresponsibility. But how we pay later. Think of how it must be: you have a lover, with whom you have shared body-love for many years, you feel the deep kindness for each other. Then you are woven and you are separated. Insiblings pick you—you do not say no to them without good reason. And when you see your lover again, years after, you are free but the two of you can do nothing except remember how it was. It is painful.

  “But for insiblings it is worse. Nerh and thes are encouraged to roam, to wander, to sleep around. After all, they have to weave with strangers. But insiblings cannot; they grow into one another. We do not forbid sex at home, no taboos, but come what may, they have to stay together. And since they are the same age, they compete and fight constantly.”

  “You didn’t answer why not just do like we do, two by two?”

  “Because our genes are unstable. We cannot risk ever developing even a recognizable family trait. It could lead to races, subraces, special populations. Each species has a unique rate of mutation. Artificially developed breeds have very high rates. And we have such a one.”

  “I didn’t know . . .”

  “It is a marvel that all do not autoforget into oblivion. Some do. But it is rare. But not unknown.”

  She fell into silence. Outside, it had become quite dark, and Han could see her face dimly lit, in the darkness. He knew, now, he could see more of her than she could of him, althou
gh she could probably track him accurately enough by scent and sound. Far away, in the trees and rocks, some unknown animal bayed at the stars. Liszendir sighed, once, very deeply.

  “And so we come to us. You have spoken of desire to me but your acts have spoken deeper. And I am adolescent, hungry for love. In my eyes you are too close to the wild, too angular, but not unlovely. And you have been kind, knowing. All that has passed makes me feel something deep I know I cannot handle so easily. But nothing can come of it. We have no future. Do you not see it?”

  He could not answer, immediately. It was far too close to his very thoughts at that moment. He knew a deep secret about himself—he had changed from the “easy come, easy go” attitude he had held about love. Fun, play. Not so. It was deadly serious. And for them, there was another difficulty.

  He said, “Is it also true that your love-acts last longer than ours?”

  “You needn’t be tactful. It is true. Longer and more often. Both ler sexes have multiple capacity. So it is cruel for you and me to be around each other. What could we do, save that you burn out my heart, and I burn out your interest in love-play.”

  It expressed what he felt perfectly. And it was a dilemma he could not answer. He felt a tension in the small cabin, a need for some kind of action; it was as close as they had ever come to what had always lain between them, so close that it fit the old saying perfectly: “If it had been a snake it would have bitten them.” Both. But he got up, and began to gather the pots and bowls up from supper. As he busied himself around the cabin, Liszendir vanished outside; shortly, he could hear her splashing in the stream.

  By the time he had finished, she was returning, wearing a fresh robe, to hang the old one out to dry on the porch. Han left then to go to the stream and wash. There, the icy water chilled him, but only the skin. The old wives’ tales were no more true here than they were about anything else. It did nothing to a deeper fire that was burning inside him. The night was unusually cool. Scrubbed, Han climbed to the top of the broken rock of the nearer pinnacle and looked out on the plains to the south. Far in the distance, a thunderstorm was being born, moving invisibly, already rivaling the weak lights of the Capital, glory without effort, rearing above the dark, silent, enduring plains. In the low winds of Chalcedon it might stay in that place for hours. Han watched it flicker for a while, too far away for the thunder to reach him, and then, with a deep sigh, climbed down and returned to the cabin.

  He entered the cabin, catching a trace of the odor of clean female, a warm, grassy scent that was intoxicating. He did not hesitate nor edit what he felt.

  “Liszendir? . . .” He waited a moment, then asked, softly, “Liszen . . .” Her love name sounded strange as he said it.

  A bundle of quilts in the corner opened itself, to reveal a pale form in the darkness.

  She said only, “I have been waiting for you to say that.” There was a softness in the voice he had never heard before.

  “Liszen, let us take what happiness we can as we have it.”

  He touched the still form, the smooth pale skin. It was cool, like the night air, but underneath there was fire. She said something softly, breathing the words; they were words he did not understand at all: Multispeech. He didn’t understand the words, as he knelt beside her, his knee touching her thigh, but he knew their message; they were sad, tender, loving, passionate—all at once.

  He felt the desire take him, loosing his grips on reality. Her face, close and pale, gleamed in the dark like a lantern, all afire. How could he ever have seen her as plain, tomboyish? She was lovely, utterly feminine. Before he went completely under, he had time for one last sane question, which he remembered asking, idiotically, like the popular song tunes you can’t get out of your head, for the rest of his life.

  “Do you kiss?” He still wondered if they had taboos.

  She answered with a sudden fluid movement. Han was unable to speak coherently for a very long time. Darkness closed over him, removing every reality except one. Darkness and fire.

  From that night on, they entered a totally new dimension in their relationship. Within their new framework, they had no guideposts, no knowledge of how to act with one another. Only emotion and appetites; so they pursued the deep needs they felt, mingling them well with a growing deeper emotion. Time ceased. Han saw the sun of Chalcedon, AVILA 1381, rise and set. It meant nothing. They ate. They slept. They made love. Liszendir was inexhaustible. Han was not; he kept going as long as he could, but at last, he could do no more. He collapsed in a state of complete exhaustion.

  He did not know how long his final sleep was; he only knew that it was morning when he awoke. Or was it? Perhaps it was evening. Han had heard of people who could tell the difference in a strange place just by the tone of the air, but he had never been able to do it. Dazed, he tried to remember which side of the cabin got the morning sunlight. He couldn’t. After a time that seemed like centuries, the shadows fractionally lengthened. The light dimmed ever so slightly. He felt warmth beside him. Liszendir was curled in his arms, breathing deeply. Sensing his movements, she awoke also. Her eyes were clear and bright. She stretched, smiling; Han ached, feeling her muscles move under her skin. It seemed she had voluntary control of muscles he didn’t even know people had. They did not speak: what was there that could be said now between them in words?

  So it endured for a time that never seemed to have an end. They spoke little, they explained no more, they recited no histories, they explored no speculations. They lost count of the days. They dismissed them with a laugh. They were, as Liszendir put it, “locked into the present. There is no more past, no more future; no more me and thee.” They took a full measure of delight in the smallest, most ordinary things they did, and she took to going about during the warmth of the day completely bare. Han grew to appreciate deeply the firm, compact, pale body; everything about her was subtle, economical, graceful. To his eyes, she resembled in build more a human of oriental race, but the face and hair were different, and in the cool air of early morning, her skin was pale ivory, shadowed and flushed with pink.

  She did not demand. They both knew she could easily outendure Han in what they were doing; so she conserved him, saved him. And teased, provoked, and tormented him.

  They ran out of food. Han collected a few things together, loaded the drif, and journeyed over the plains to the outskirts of the city and traded what in Boomtown would have been a fortune in gold dust for a few more weeks. He returned to the pinnacles without learning any more about the Warriors, and he and Liszendir resumed again where they left off.

  Very gradually, they began to talk again; at first it was just short anecdotes out of the past, shallow remembrances, but soon they began to flesh out the problem they shared again.

  It was a warm night, with a thinning overcast which had served to keep the heat of the day in longer than usual. They sat by the stream, close together, arms around each other, and talked. Liszendir spoke first.

  “Now it is different with us, you call me by my love-name, Liszen, or by my body-name, Izedi. That is good: it is your right and my pleasure. This has been a lovely time in my life. But there is no sign that any ship will ever come, so you know that this must end as we have foretold.”

  “I had hoped to forget, Izedi.” He used the body-name more and more, now. It was a special thing, certain letters extracted in order out of her full-name, which could only be used according to ler custom by someone who had deep body-ties to the one so named.

  “And I also, dear Han. But my body does not. Will not. With it I cannot pretend. Already I can sense the beginning of some changes; small things, true, but changes. Now time remains to us, good years, if we wish. And I do wish it—with all my heart.”

  “I know nothing else we can do but stay here and pass the days as we have done, as long as we can.”

  She spoke hesitantly, shyly. “The closer in time we come to my fertility, the less I will want you—what we do will not be enough to fill the emptiness, do you know
that? But never mind. Listen: sometimes in late adolescence this very thing that we know happens to ler couples, too. So they make a vow, a promise, to return to each other, after weaving, bearing and raising, knowing that when it does come, it will be unlike it was before to them. Some promise, many fail. But will you consider this thing?”

  “What?”

  “That wherever you are, I will come to you again after everything is done. Would you accept me then as I will be? We will not be able to do it, then. No more dhainaz.”

  “What about your people, your ways, your own plans? You would give all that up for the hope of something forty years away?”

  “Indeed I would. What is our living for except to be happy? Only fools think life is all duty. For the body, I can do nothing about that, but all the rest, the culture, the special things . . . they are just mannerisms. I can learn more.” She took a deep breath, looked at Han closely. “There is much you do not know yet, much I want to tell you, but I can’t, yet. But I can tell you this, now. Each of us has a sign. Mine is Fire, and and it is associated with the will. With will comes the ease to make mistakes, to go against. I do it, thus.”

  He thought long about this. It was one thing to promise for a love that could be fulfilled now; another to say, one part now, another part in forty years. Who could know what the future could bring? But he remembered the things they had said and done, the still white form in the dark of the cabin, the graceful figure walking bare in the stream, shining with water, the soft, short, silky hair.

  “Yes. It is strange to me, stranger than all we have done. But I will see it in the end, if I can.”

  “Good. Then I will come to you. You will be traveling among the stars, trading, but I will know when it is finished for me, on whatever planet I live on then, Kenten or Chalcedon.” The stream before them rambled on in its unending discourse, as they fell into silence again.