by M. A. Foster
Liszendir had thought that Pelki’s half-hopeful flirting at Han had been interesting and had so informed him, to his general discomfort. As for him and Liszendir, he felt a certain confusion about their relationship, as it seemed to be for the present; their intimacy had been dormant, secondary for a time. She, for her part, was not avoiding him, but on the contrary, had become closer, more confiding, more affectionate, relaxed. The haughty Liszendir he had met at Boomtown had entirely vanished, but the replacement Liszendir was still full of unknowns, perhaps more than before. All this was true, yet it was also true that she had withdrawn into herself in an odd way Han could not quite discern.
From the other side of the raft, she observed, in Common, “If all else fails, at the least you could probably marry Pelki.”
Han replied in the same tongue, “Well, I don’t want to, not now nor any other time I can imagine. Not that I would care to choose if driven to begging, but she can’t be the most exciting woman on Dawn, in looks, and besides that, she’s dumb.”
Liszendir laughed. “So I thought it would be. Really, Han, I agree also. I was just teasing you.” She shifted the subject. “You know they have a strange custom in these parts, for all I know, all over Dawn with the humans here: they do not have family names—just proper names and a patronymic for boys or a matronymic for girls. Boys are regarded as the yield of the father, girls of the mother.”
Han stayed on the subject of Pelki. “Why would you wish such a thing of me? If that is all the choice I have I may not want a mate.”
“No reason. You may as well have one, for if I stay here very long, I won’t be able to have one.”
“Well, do without, then,” he said, half-irritably.
“Oh, it’s not so simple as that,” she replied, rather impishly. “Besides the strength of the drive, unless I conceive within a certain time after the onset of fertility, which means even if you and I stay together, I have another problem. If I don’t conceive, my reproductive system will shut itself down.”
“You mean you will become sexless.”
“Yes. Permanently. Just like after-fertility. It is a modification performed upon us by the firstborn, before they destroyed all the means of how to engineer such genetic changes, and the records. Its purpose has been to prevent obvious failures and grotesques from passing bad genes on. Use it or lose it, you know? All it takes is about half a year.”
“Well, that shouldn’t worry you now. If I understood your standard age correctly at Boomtown, we’ve got years yet before we have to worry about that. I hope we can either get off this planet, or find you a partner of the ler, before then.”
“In normal circumstances that would be so. But here, the short day-cycle has been acting to speed me up, to fit its cycle. You, too. You and I have started sleeping Dawn hours the last few days. It doesn’t seem to have any effect on you, but it could very well bring my fertility sooner.”
Han looked away, at the dark water. He could not answer her unspoken question.
Now on the great river they slept and poled, poled and slept. There was, according to Narman, need for haste.
“Notice the sun! It is well to the north, now. Darkness incarnate rises out of the south. The days are short; soon will come the cold. The upper waters freeze, the lower ones dry up. Then the river is not passable. It is only now that it is in the whole year.”
The whole family agreed that there was more to it than simple failure to reach Leilas. The lower gorge, particularly where it had dug across the mountains, was infested with bandits and vagabonds of dubious origin. These feared the river and all moving water, so as long as the travelers were securely on the river and moving, all would be well. It was if they were to become stranded that they would have cause to worry. It had happened before. The goods were stolen, and the passengers eaten, so tales had it.
Han looked about suspiciously. He could see no evidence of habitation of any kind. The river whispered quietly with chilling power, moving swiftly through a vertical trench cut into solid rock, tormented layer upon layer of deeply metamorphosed basement rock. Distorted and tormented, crushed, folded and fused.
Pelki said, from the back of the raft, “They live high up. Above the cliffs. They lower themselves down on ropes, after the lookouts tell them someone is stranded.”
“Well, why don’t they bother you on the way back? Isn’t that just as dangerous?”
“They are inexplicable people. They disappear after the last boat.”
Han asked, “Where do they go?”
“Who knows? Never in memory have they molested a homeward trek. Perhaps they have taboos. Perhaps they are demons who fear the dark.”
The raft grated ominously along its bottom, lurching slightly, pausing, then freeing itself. Pelki’s eyes rolled in a sudden spasm of fear. She pointed ahead. Sure enough, there was a figure hanging down into the deep vertical part of the gorge in a flimsy contraption of ropes and slings. Han could not tell if it were human or ler, at the distance. Han drew his crossbow, cocked it, and waited as they drifted closer to the figure. As they came within range, he aimed carefully and shot at the figure. The first bolt missed, and the creature began screaming imprecations downwards to the raft, and instructions upwards to comrades out of sight behind the rim. The sling-and-rope contraption moved upwards fractionally. Han cocked and fired again. This time he hit the creature in the back, and he released his grip and fell backwards into the river with a wailing cry of despair. Faintly, from above, invisible, they heard answering calls of woe, hoots of disappointment. The echoes rang eerily down on the hard rocks and smooth river surfaces, bounding and rebounding. They saw them no more. The creature who had fallen had apparently vanished below the surface instantly.
For the rest of the journey, there was no more trouble. Han and Liszendir spent the days, when they were not poling, leaning against a bale, napping, watching scenery. There was not much to see; the gorge cut off all sight of the uplands whatsoever, as it wound through the complex, meandering trench it had cut through the mountains. All they could see were the various textures and colors of rocks, and patches of blue sky above, now flecked with clouds increasingly often. Sometimes it grew darker, independently of the time of day or apparent weather they suspected then they were passing through a particularly deep part. But down at the bottom of the gorge, on the great river the air was humid and mild. When they crossed infrequent patches of sunlight, it felt almost hot. And so the days passed.
Finally they emerged from the deep defile and floated on stiller waters. They still were in a deep canyon, but they inferred from the lightening of the air and the sky that they were on the lake above Leilas. The sky above their heads was no longer oppressed by deep blue shadows, except in morning. They were on the west side of the mountain barrier. The lake was shallow and very muddy, its bottom vague and sticky when found. They poled and rowed westwards, seemingly getting nowhere.
On the fourth day on the lake, with the air very light and noticeably cooler, they sighted an elaborate dock area on the water, slightly to the right of their course. Behind it, bare bluffs rose, capped by the rosy, smoky haze. Han asked Narrhan if that was Leilas.
“No. Leilas is up on the bluffs, out of sight. The fume exudes from their kitchens and shops. What you see below, here, on the water, are only the docks. We will sell everything there, on the water. Porterage costs too much! Let them haul it up the slope! That which you see is smoke from the great city—they cannot move it down on the water because of the floods when the sun comes back from his visit to the hell of the south.”
They began to pole towards the floating docks with more energy. Han watched Liszendir as she worked at her pole, setting it from the fore part of the raft, walking with it, leaning into it all the way to the back, and then deftly snatching it back out of the lake-bottom muck. He looked at the daughters, Uzar and Pelki. All three were female, yet there was some quality about Liszendir not shared by the other two. For the moment, it escaped him. Then, suddenly,
he had it. The image came into sharp focus. The difference was that Liszendir seemed, somehow, “more finished” than the other two. He blanked the image of the ler girl from his mind, and strained to see the other two girls as he might have seen them in a situation with only humans. Yes. Uzar became just plain, and Pelki became, with some work, almost attractive in a heavy, raw-boned way. Capable and competent. That fit very well with talk he had heard. More finished.
As he watched Liszendir, he saw something else as well he had suspected, but had half-feared to let surface. Now she was allowing her hair to grow longer, as the short style was a mark of adolescence. But he remembered how it had been a straight fall, parted in the middle, to the ears, styleless and sexless, just like any other adolescent. But he could not confuse her with a male figure by any stretch of the imagination. It was as if as the cultural differences between the sexes fell away, the innate differences that had been there all along came into full play; as if clothes and hair style keyed to sexes obscured the issue, rather than dramatizing it as he had always thought, as all of the humans he knew thought. People said that if boys and girls wore their hair alike and wore the same clothes, how could you tell them apart? But the boys and girls never seemed to have any trouble; they knew. And now Han knew, too. The quaint culturalisms of the ler now glared with harsh realities humans feared, knowing themselves almost as well as the ler knew themselves, but not quite as ready to admit it, or what they saw, within.
Liszendir now caught her hair up at the neck, with her characteristic nonchalance, with a piece of string borrowed from one of the bales, but it hung down her back with a grace that could not have been attained with the finest silk. She noticed he was watching her, and turned to him, easing off on the pole.
“I have a riddle for you, since you seem so thoughtful today. Are you ready? I want to know how running water of no greater depth than we have seen can cut a gorge across a range of mountains miles high.”
Han laughed. “You, a philosopher, ask me? Does not water conquer all by its humility that seeks out the low places, and does not elevate itself?”
“A mnathman, indeed! Dardenglir was right about you Han! You must cast off these delusions about riches and become a holy man. We cannot make you ler, but you are ready to learn secrets. Where did you find that?”
He laughed again. “I retire to certain caves in the required season, and by sheer mental effort, deduce the secrets of earth and water, of red and black, of man and woman.”
She laughed and corrected him. “Tlanman and srithman, do you not mean? Male-person and female-person?”
“No. Man and woman. I have to confine my efforts to us hyunmanon, the old people, lest I suffer a spasm, as if from eating too much roast drif. Ah, me! How I wish we had eaten the rascal before Hath’ingar caught up with us and carted us off to this vegetarian place. No, I will answer, Liszendir. I think the reason for the river cutting through the mountains lies in the floods they mentioned in the summer, when the sun returns from the south. When the sun is at the one pole, at the other pole an icecap develops, which melts all at once. The water has to go somewhere, and if the pole is high ground . . . I think the river is older than the mountains, and kept cutting down as they were raised up, slicing each summer through what had been built up the year before. All their water here comes at once. And as it ebbs, the smaller particles and silt get dropped here in the lake, renewed every year; that is why the lake is so muddy.”
Narman had been following this closely, despite the language barrier, which was as hard for him as for Han and Liszendir. But he caught the particulars, and nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. The river scours out the gorge every year, just like that. But the mountains are cut by it for punishment, because they aspired to be sky, therefore they are cut and tormented by water, which multiplies into a terrible force. It is like women.”
Han and Liszendir respectfully agreed. They had accepted Narman’s orthodoxy without comment.
They were appreciably closer to the docks, now, and were able to ease up on the poling somewhat. Han found himself anticipating the city, however it was. He had not seen one since they had departed Boomtown. He did not count Hobb’s Bazaar as a city by any stretch of the imagination. To hear Narman describe Leilas, it must be the veritable navel of the world, a wonder to equal the storied ancient cities of old Earth. Cosmopolitan, fleshpot, center of commerce and culture; he waited for the experience. But Liszendir only looked suspiciously at the haze above the bluffs, and an occasional visible chimney-pot, or tower, and shook her head. She had been skeptical all along about Leilas, and the few remarks she had made were not enthusiastic.
They moored the raft to a floating pier, and immediately were set upon, boarded, hounded and invaded, by as rascally a gang of hagglers and potential cutthroats as Han had ever set eyes on. The selling of the crop commenced immediately, with no introductions or formalities; and no quarter asked—or given. He was hard put even to keep the shirt on his back, and in fact got a substantial offer for Liszendir’s shift, if she would be so good as to step behind yon bale and remove it. It ended late at night, and began again the next day, before the east had become decently light. By the end of the second day, everything was sold, a few items stolen, and they had a bit of money to split up between them. If you could call it money; it was currency only in Leilas.
They went up the bluffs to the town, with only the pack animals left, and some clothes. There, before the walls of Leilas, they made their farewells, and they were short ones. Narman was in a hurry, and they had caught sight of some other gorge farmers getting ready to be outfitted for the trip back upriver. The long walk. It was all understandable, since they saw each other once a year. Han and Liszendir took their share, and after watching the group for a moment, entered the city.
In its own terms, Leilas probably was a very great city, with no rivals within traveling distance. And to the locals, it very likely seemed to be the very center of the planet Dawn. They knew of no other city at all. But to Han it was a living text out of the far past, long before spaceflight. As they wandered through the narrow, dusty streets, they saw no weapons more advanced than crossbows, and at that inferior to the one he carried, now disassembled. The sewage disposal system was nothing more than a series of noisome ditches and stone channels, some covered with boards which might be rotten or not, as determined by whether they would support weight or not, which ran through the streets in the general direction of the lake. This was fairly intelligent, as the lake got flushed out yearly, but if it ever missed a year, this city on the north shore would change, or move. It would have to, for even in its prosperity, it was a place of incredible density of smells, odors, gusts, and miscellaneous stenches.
No street was straight, nor long, nor did there seem to be any organization to it at all. Houses, inns, shops, villas behind walls, and slums all lay tooth and jowl together. But it did seem to be the center of a flourishing trade, which was natural enough, considering the size of the hinterland it must serve. The river upstream, the broad trough valleys north and south, and some large territory westwards, down on the flats, around the salt pits. But however prosperous it was, it was not the metropolis Han had expected; rather, he guessed that Leilas had a population of perhaps thirty thousand, if that many.
Liszendir’s only comment during their first day was, “They have fallen far, here.” And she said it with genuine sadness in her voice. They saw a few ler about, on the streets, in shops, but they did not attempt to contact them. Han saw that Liszendir did not want to, and even he could detect some difference, but exactly what it was could not be discerned. He only knew that they were not the same as Liszendir. To her, the difference must be glaring, especially since ler were not, as a rule, strange no matter where they came from. For the first time in her life, she was seeing strangers, citizens of another country, and it disturbed her.
After much looking, inspection, and searches which ended, as often as not, in some blind alley, they finally located an inn, w
hich was surprisingly comfortable inside, in contrast with its outside, which resembled a dungeon, complete with stained and streaked walls, and heavy bars on the windows, “For security from burglars and footpads!” exclaimed the owner. The inn was called the Haze of the West, and was an eccentric, stucco, blocky, rambling structure which seemed to have grown together out of several buildings over the course of many years. Han and Liszendir secured a set of small rooms overlooking a pleasant courtyard, with balcony, for which they paid extra, and, wonder of wonders, not running water but a wood-fired bath, which cost nothing. The rooms were plain, but late in the day, the evening lights and shadows played along the undecorated whitewashed walls with great charm.
Liszendir was most excited about a real bath, so they arranged to have water put in the tank on the roof by the potboy, and a load of fire-wood brought up. While she busied herself with making the fire up, Han told her to take her time and use all the water, and he would go out to the public baths down the alley. He wanted to look around some, anyway, he said. Then they could go out and try to find something decent to eat.
When he returned a few hours later, he found Liszendir fast asleep on the small bed, a fresh shift on, her face scrubbed and rosy. The only light in the room came from a candle, still burning beside the window. Outside, it was quiet. Leilas went to bed early, however its reputation was. If they went to fleshpots, they did not go late at night. She woke up as he came in, awake instantly.