The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Han interjected, “May I not appear so argumentative, but my people think that higher-order forms do not necessarily exhibit more complex features in all things.”

  Liszendir said quickly, before Hatha could answer, “I don’t understand. Triads?”

  “Thus. On Dawn, all society is divided into classes. The several types of humans, wild and otherwise, occupy the lower order. For the ler, there is a further division. The lower ler who are not Warriors continue to arrange their families in human fashion. The upper classes, in adolescent years, arrange themselves into threes, more or less randomly, although we ensure that all types of triads have equal numbers according to whom they will mate with. We call the threesomes oversexes.”

  “Oversexes?”

  “There are three persons in each triad-oversex. They may not have sex with each other. Only with an oversex group of opposite gender. With three individuals, and two base sexes, there are eight possible arrangements of order, which divide into four types—three of one, three of the other, or two which are two-thirds male or female. Of course, the pure triads form the highest classes.”

  “I see. Khmadh!” The word Liszendir used appeared to be an obscenity, but if it was, it had no effect on either Hatha or Aving. It was equally meaningless to Han, who had no idea what it referred to. He had never heard it before. But he could see one effect of the triads right away: it would reintroduce and keep reinforced sex-specific behavior. He could also make a reasonable guess that the predominantly female oversexes would be the ones which would raise the children. Probably in isolation from the adults, in a subculture world of their own. But it made a sort of sense: a punished child grows up into a punisher, and one who is pushed into seeing his own age group as a special category of people will be a separator as an adult. With the main population of ler, of which Liszendir was a part, they obliterated cultural differences between the sexes to bring each sex up to its full contribution; they would apply similar processes to the difference between child and adult, with the seemingly contradictory result that the child would be more child, the adult more truly adult, than if imposed differences, with commercial origins, were grafted on them. But the Warriors had carried the other extreme further than anyone else. They probably would show a corresponding degree of aberrations. Han did not reason this out in linear fashion; it came to him all at once, as he thought of it, “sideways.” He felt proud of it—he had learned more than just language, or even the expressions of love, from Liszendir.

  Hatha added, “Such oversexes, once formed, last until the members die. For example, I now stand alone because the other two members of my triad have been killed in battles.”

  “Let me guess,” she said. “Your triad was all male.”

  “Indeed.”

  “It figures.” She looked at Aving. “And him?”

  Aving replied, “Of the highest of the lower ler. But have no fears—our order is flexible. My offspring have joined the Warriors as good triadists.”

  “Please tell me no more. I must digest this new order, to see what sort of place I might have in it.”

  Hatha said, “Good enough. You will see more on the morrow.”

  Han felt impatient, anxious to get going. “Why tomorrow? Why not now?”

  “Nothing mysterious. It simply is late and I have been flying all day. I will need to be alert, with both of you aboard tomorrow. So, then. Liszendir’s choice: do you desire to be apart this night, or together?”

  “Together.” Again Han thought; the old decisiveness. No hesitation, no second thoughts.

  “So be it, then,” said Aving, and made a gesture to the musicians, who stopped abruptly, in midstatement, as it were. The majordomo came forward, from an alcove to the rear of the hall, waited respectfully. Aving and Hatha arose and departed immediately. The servant motioned to Han and Liszendir. Without words, they followed him back through the winding, confused halls, back to the room where they had rested before. The only change was a welcome one; the room was warm and comfortable, where before it had been cold. The door closed behind them, clicked shut, snapped locked with a heavy, definitive sound. They were locked in.

  Han realized as he became acclimated to the warm room that he was tired. He began undressing as Liszendir was turning out the lights, small lamps that used some aromatic oil. With darkness in the room, they could see a high, tiny window they had not noticed before; through it, dim, frosty starlight came into the room. His eyes recovered before hers, but not before he heard a rustling sound, and then felt the warm, smooth body beside him on the small bed.

  He half-turned away from her, and asked, “Can you really see anything we can do? Or do you hope to join these creatures? I can’t bring myself to call them people.”

  She did not answer immediately, but to his surprise, curled around him, over his body, sensuously, erotically, with a sinuous motion he knew well now. Only this time there was something extra in it, an extra component. It definitely had an effect, and it was more unbearable, feeling her so close, smelling the scent of her hair. She brushed her face close to Han’s ear, began murmuring something in a soft, lascivious voice he could hardly make out; who ever listened to those exact words, anyway. But then he did listen.

  “Listen to me closely. We can talk no other way now, and I must be sure you know what I do, now. So listen. I am sure, by instinct, that we will be watched as long as we are together.” It was clashing, discord; the tone of the words, their rhythm, volume, all carried the timeless messages of lovers since the beginning of time. But the words themselves, they came across to him like spears of ice out of a warm, wet fog. They glittered like diamonds. He couldn’t tell if this effect was subjective, imagined, or an intended one. But it confused and chilled him. The soft voice with the hard words continued, ignoring his vague motions of escape.

  “Do not suspect me now of race loyalty! I owe you more, body-love, than to any of these apes, despite any likeness which may be in reality or illusion between our hands. A hand is only as good as what it holds, and the use to which it is put, two thumbs or one. Or none, if there are such. But there is no other way—we must go with him! You acted perfectly, there. In Leilas there is only futility, filth and superstition. I will tell you about us, first. So you will understand all that I do. Completely. Consider that in Common your people still have only two words to cover what happened to us—love and sex. And the word ‘love’ only rhymes with two or three other words, neither of which can be a noun. In Singlespeech, we have almost four hundred words to cover various kinds of love and desire. And every word in Singlespeech has over a hundred rhymes! Love, hate—they are of no more significance than white and black, and the universe is filled with shades of grey and a full spectrum of color. So. Somehow, we have made between us, for my part, what we call hodh. It does not translate. But of it come deep emotions, and choices far beyond sex and loneliness. I did not give you my body out of weakness or lust. Fool! I am trained to deny the first, and the second I can banish by nothing more complex than full-remembering. It is just like before.”

  The tone of voice was amorous, hypnotic, lascivious. But the words! Han felt as if he was in the grip of some master witch, who could distort reality at will, with just words! They were savage, burning like fire, like swords and daggers. He groaned.

  “I understand. Your percepive field will not take the contradiction, the strain; you hear what my skin says, the tone of voice, and the words. You cannot take much of it, for it will tear your mind apart. You are fortunate I do not use Multispeech on you, it would be faster, if you could under stand it. Even for us, this is hard, and this is where multi channel speech had its roots. This is perdeskris, Doublespeech. Now listen.

  “I suspected that Hatha from the beginning, but I hesitated, did not act, and so much of all this is my fault. You already know why we keep a wide gene pool through the klanh, the braid. To abandon that system is to open the door to chaos. Mutations, freaks, who knows—all of which much faster than with you. Remember, we
were made. So that beast in there will finish by destroying both humans and ler—the former through conquest, the latter by accident and negligence. We have to stop him. Quarantine Dawn. And to do that we have to act loyal, get close.

  “There is more. Hatha did not know Aving had been off-planet. Keep that to ourselves; he already has an excuse ready, and Hatha will believe Aving, for the present. And you know as well as I do that Aving is not ler. He only looks like one. That may be cosmetics. He was listening, most carelessly, to the music he said neither human nor ler could follow. You saw too! And he has been careless with his name—it is probably his real one. It ends in -ing, like no word of anybody’s Singlespeech. And we must look into this higher-than-expected rate of race-forming he spoke about. If it was enough to pass into folklore, then there is something here on Dawn causing it. Something perilous to ler, perhaps to humans.

  “I have guessed what is coming for you and me when we get to the place where the country of the Warriors lies. Now I must ask you: if what has passed between us had happened back in civilization, with ler planets close by, or we had stayed on Chalcedon, at my fertility, would you have helped me to weave into a nice braid? Would you?” He nodded. “And so would I for you. So will we both, if we get the chance. But from now on it will be hard for us, for there are things I must do, and things you must do as well if we are to survive. This is more dangerous than when we were up on the plains. So perhaps tomorrow, perhaps even tonight, I will do and say cruel things. You must act and commit yourself as if I were no more. And soon it will be so anyway, because of fertility. So. You must do as I tell you. A test is coming. And tonight, you must reject me. Yes! You will do it! Now!”

  He felt numbed, befogged, incapable of action. How long had she had him in that net of words? He looked to the small window. The same stars were visible in it, he remembered them well. Not more than a few minutes. But he remembered her instructions. Resisting her was hard at first, but slowly, he began to master, to override what his emotions and body were telling him. He pushed Liszendir away.

  “No.”

  “But this is the last night for us.”

  “No. Do your worst. But I will not be a toy for you, while I see my own kind sold into slavery or worse.”

  Liszendir moved away, a motion of rejection, but in the faint starlight leaking into the room through the high, tiny window, he could see that she was winking at him. He ached. In the weak light he could also see her shoulders gleaming in the starlight. She pushed him over to one side.

  “Very well. But I will sleep here. I am cold. Move over.”

  Han moved over and made room for her, and she settled into the small bed beside him. They did not speak again.

  Han could not sleep, although soon he noticed that Liszendir’s breathing had become deep and regular. He had not had time to reflect, time to foresee, since before Chalcedon; actions had been required, and actions were taken. Decisions had been necessary, and were made, to the best which could be expected under the circumstances. The method she had used to pass on this last bit of mutual planning had stirred all that up, brought it all to the surface, and moreover brought their relationship into sharp focus. Sleep was impossible; his mind was humming, busy, remembering, projecting.

  All that she had said since they had been together had been so close to what he had been thinking himself that he had accepted it as they went along, putting the categorizations she outlined into the framework about such relations as he knew, his past. Now he saw that such a system had been totally inadequate to the task. Perhaps if he had been more experienced in affairs, instead of occasional encounters, which, for all their fun and sensual enjoyment, did not involve the participants very deeply, it might have worked, with some adjustments. But it was not so. Liszendir had been a completely new level of experience for him, and it would have been so even if she had been a human girl, and utterly conventional. But of course the first did not apply, and hence the second also went out the window, however conventional she might have been strictly within her own ler reference. But even after allowing all that, and recognizing the change in attitudes within himself, he could see still another problem area, and its secondary position in time could not obscure its primal position in importance. For a long time, he had been immersed in an alien surround, notwithstanding the fact that so much of ler ideas was seemingly familiar, as if the shapes were the same, but the colors different. That was not so, either. They had been in a survival relationship, in which they had had to learn to support and depend upon each other; they had become lovers. Was that because of the needs of their survival, or was it additional to it? He could not resolve that one, lying here in a strange room of an alien castle on the planet Dawn.

  He felt deeply towards Liszendir still, undiminished. But at this point, the human and the ler view were coming into contradiction. His basic ideas told him that he should stick with her, whatever happened. Semper fidelis! But hers told her, and he was becoming increasingly aware of the ler idea that what they had made had reached a level from which there could be no denial. Circumstances might require other commitments, other liaisons, perhaps forever, but those things could not change the uniqueness they had known. As she saw it, then, necessity was necessity, and one had to weave. Liszendir would not take on the human outlook here, so hers would have to apply to him as well: because of what she had called their hodh, they would now make the supreme effort, the final gift, and find weaving partners for each other. If they could get back to civilization, even Chalcedon, then she would expect him to assume this role, which in other circumstances would be done partly by her, partly by the old braid generation. And what was more significant, she would take it on herself to do the same for him. It was a difficult attitude to accept, but it was clearly coming, at the greatest time they could hope for, within a few years, two or three, perhaps four. He had seen this coming, for Liszendir, since Chalcedon; what was difficult for him to absorb was that she saw the same thing clearly on the way ahead for him as well. The import of Aving’s remarks, added to her words of a few moments ago, now became clearer; he would be exposed to human girls again, of unknown shapes and sizes, and there was a high probability that he would be offered one, to keep, as an enticement. If he could think like Hatha and the Warriors, that would be easy—take it, and use it. But through his deep experience with Liszendir, such an act would be untenable—he would assume even more responsibility for the enticement than he had for Liszendir.

  He thought, for a moment, about something she had said to him, on Chalcedon, as they were having a mild argument about comparative philosophy: “Han, you humans build your systems of categorization of reality, your sand-sifters, as we call them, praldwar, upon assumptions which you provisionally say are rock-hard, and then you stagger up onto them, blinking and gasping, like some lungfish on a flat rock. But in the ways of looking at reality, we are chaoticists, we return to the water. There is nothing stable, except the striving of life to impress its will upon the universe contrary to the direction of the flow of entropy.”

  To her, all living things, and many nonliving things, were individuals and deserving of respect. This was revealed by the language; symbols had one or two syllables, but names had three or four. She had said, “It is not practical, of course, to name them all, but when we are learning this principle, we are always instructed to look out upon the waves of the sea. ‘See those waves?’ says the teacher. ‘Every one of them has a name, all that you can see, and all of them, all the way around the world, that you cannot see, will never see, can never see. We lump them all together, we say these are waves, but you should never let the convenience of that act of categorization blind you to the greater fact of the individuality of each one of them.’ ” So, he thought of girls’ bodies—sweet things, delightful. But there was nothing casual, nothing light whatsoever, in the things that passed between male and female, and that was the reality of it—not the excuses one told oneself to hide the early blunders one made upon others.

>   He saw the result of all these things coming. And, oddly enough, his new appreciation of how they fit together gave him a sense of complete relaxation, and he went to sleep immediately. His last thought was not verbal, but imagic: he felt an odd sense of accomplishment, but whether it was from a long-term change in himself, or what he had seen this night, he could not tell. It wasn’t important, anyway.

  They were awakened before dawn the next morning by the same leering head servant, who escorted them back to the large hall where they had dined the night before. There Hatha met them in great good humor, speaking in a most friendly manner, especially to Liszendir, and even offering her a place at the table. Han watched his actions closely, and after a few moments, was sure that she had been basically right; by some method, they had indeed been observed last night. There was subtle knowledge showing in Hatha’s behavior. That was good for them, for it meant that he was starting to read things wrong. For a very short moment it flashed through Han’s mind that perhaps it was he who was reading Liszendir wrong, that here was subtle double game-playing. But no, it blew away, vanished. She was not that subtle, but rather the opposite, direct and uncomplicated; and if she had wanted to dispense with Han, she could do it easily enough by a virtually unlimited number of methods. Now, if only Hatha would continue to read things wrongly, and if he and Liszendir could continue to play the charade out until they got close enough to move. If. If.

  For his part, Han did not join in the breakfast discussion, but attempted to appear sullen, uncooperative, broken and resigned. Hatha spent scant attention on him, and apparently satisfied any suspicions he might have had early; thereafter he paid only cursory attention, if any at all. Hatha and Liszendir made a lot of inconsequential small talk, which underneath its bland exterior was really quite transparently interrogation. And of a high order, as well, skillfully professional. Hatha seemed to be trying to gather information primarily about Union ler attitudes and weapons, using a peculiar indirect approach as subtle as the music had been the night before. But she gave nothing away, avoiding the interrogation easily enough, sidestepping the cautious, fencing approaches. Liszendir was a slippery fish who could make herself smaller than the meshes of the net being used to catch her. As he watched this performance, Han could not avoid evaluating the girl in a new light, much as he had been doing since they had met; a continuous process of re-evaluation. Hatha was obviously capable and alert, sharpened by decades of experience gained in the exercise of power, and in the effort to climb to those heights; Liszendir was, in her terms, not yet adult, but through an accumulated and passed-on store of wisdom, and training, she was, on the whole, almost a match for the leader of the Dawn expeditionary forces, by herself.