The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Han stared at the tangle, dumbfounded. “No. I can’t see it. I don’t know how. How many stories does that thing have stored in it?” Han began to imagine that it was a symbolic kind of memory bank.

  He was wrong. Usteyin said, “There is no end to stories you can tell on a story-block. I made it well. I know. I may be only a fourth, in my first show, but my story-block is the best one the Zlats have ever made. You see wires, beads, how they are in relation to one another. There are the motions, the way you hold it, the way light strikes it. I can always invent more motions. No end. It is all me when it speaks, hands, motions, eyes, me, the story-block. I see in it, all at once, when it does the change.” Usteyin stumbled for words, hesitating, growing suddenly shy again. They obviously did not understand story-blocks. She took a deep breath and began again. “All at once, no-time. Then I remember it as it happens, afterwards. In there, there is no time, so I have to put that in myself, afterwards. After it changes. It comes . . . sideways. I string it out in my head, put the story in the way that we see things as we live. Time is an illusion to us, not real. Everything is instant. But we do not live instantly, so I make it fit my rate, how I move. Do you see, now?”

  They did. All of them stared at the shining tangle in Usteyin’s left hand. Han felt superstitions crawling about the control room, ghosts out of the far past, oracles, magi, bearded gurus walking out of the forest, yogin who could move from one place to another. Milarepa, on old earth, the Tarot, the Cabala, the I Ching. Witches. This copper-haired girl who had no clothes, who could not read and write, who had not known how to make love, who did not even consider herself a person. Liszendir’s matter-of-factness broke the spell.

  “What can you put into it to make a story?” Liszendir understood what a story-block was.

  Usteyin saw the expression on the other girl’s face and recognized understanding. “Anything. I make up stories, I retell the old ones I know. There are many-many. I do not know them all. The Zlats have more stories than one can know in one’s whole life. They are about love, excitement, lands, people, heroes. Things-that-are-not. But we cannot use it so often. It is dangerous, perilous. Too much story-telling, and reaching too far, and it catches your mind, it captures your spirit, and you are trapped there, in the wires.”

  She paused, looking at all of them, seeing more comprehension now on their faces. And Han, too. Now he saw. That was good, she wanted him to see it, desperately. He had to. She continued, “Now, Han, love, why won’t yours work? It is broken? Has he,” she gestured with her bright eyes at Hatha, “tried to use it?” Hatha was lost. He saw, but it was far beyond him.

  Han answered her, “No, it works well enough, but it can’t tell me what I want to know.” How could he tell her that the threshold level was too low, and that the detection equipment could not locate it out of the noise of the background? Or that the data was insufficient? He said, “I can’t get the settings just right. It is too subtle for the equipment.”

  “I will fix it later,” she said, pleased that she could see what the problem was. “I am a Zlat. I can do such things. Yours is strange, but a story-block is a story-block. I will move some time, and you will be able to do with yours as I do with mine, although I wish there was some way I could make yours easy to carry around, like mine. But why is this story so important? I could see part of it; I watched, I knew. But it was about . . . things, where they are. Rocks or things in different places.”

  “Can you run that story on your story-block?”

  “Oh, yes. That is an easy one. Wait.” She took it up again, shaking it. Han winced; he knew what she was doing: clearing the memory. “One more thing,” she added. “Show me your starts again.”

  “The whats?”

  “Starts. The things you begin with. The pretty lights, and the pictures.”

  Han silently complied, running through the detection sequence again for her. As he saw it, the results were neither different nor better than the first time he had run through it. Usteyin watched the instruments intently, singlemindedly, ignoring everything else in the control room. He stood back. Finally, she looked back to him.

  “Is that all? What a curious story. I could almost do it without this. Now . . .” She paused, looked deeply into the glittering tangle of wires, and made a few quick adjustments. It moved, sprung, a few wires shifted position. She manipulated it again, and it responded again for her. She looked off into the viewscreen, into space, reflecting. Then back at the story-block. Then she looked up, and laughed, lightly. “How strange! You are a very curious person, Han. You must teach me these stories you know. They are like nothing I ever knew from the Zlats. They are short and easy to set, but they are full of odd jumps and shifts. And I do not understand all that I see, there . . .”

  “Tell me what you see, just as you see it.”

  “There are three things, they have light of their own. One is that.” She pointed at the star, filtered by the compensations of the screen. She apparently did not recognize it as the swift sun of the planet Dawn. “That one. It is very bright. Then there is another. We can’t see it now. It was where we were, but it has moved, far away. It starts and stops. And there is one more. It is . . . ahh, what? Wait. It is big, but not big. I see it both ways. Hazy. I can see through it. It looks big one way, small the other.”

  “That is the one I want. Where is it?”

  “Show me the world. I will show you where it is.”

  Han moved some switches, changed the display to read out a map of the planet Dawn. A globe appeared, then a picture of a map projection, then stabilized. It was Dawn. She pointed to the south pole, after looking at the map for a second. She said, “You want to find this one very much. Go to this place.” She suddenly giggled, a very little-girl sound. Then she recovered. “I am sorry. But it is a very silly story.”

  Hatha interrupted, “What is this mad klesh saying?”

  Han answered, “She’s telling you where Aving’s ship is. At the south pole.”

  Hatha looked at them as if they were all insane.

  Usteyin was excited. She had pleased them! She looked sidelong at Hatha. “He wants to go to it, to break it. But he must not go! There is more!”

  Liszendir was staring at the story-block, and Usteyin, open-mouthed. “Can you see the now with that thing?”

  “Oh, yes. No story has end or beginning, like the all. We just start and end where it suits us; after all, we do not want to see everything—our minds are too small. I stopped it, but wait: I will finish the sequence.” She had not yet cleared it. She turned her attention to the story-block, tensed it once more, and looked at it for a long time. She stopped, then looked back, as if she had made an error. Then she exclaimed, “Oh!” and hastily cleared it.

  She started speaking, rapidly, shaken by what she had seen within the tangles of wires. “There is evil there. Bad things. I stopped it. I do not want to see them. They are like worms in a manure pile. Moving. Angry. They are watching . . . us. They can see us in some way I do not know. If we go near them they will hurt us, with white fire. It is very strange. They look like people but they are not people. Not any kind of people; they are something else. They can see me and my story-block, but they cannot reach me.” She looked around, wide-eyed. She moved close to Han, huddling against him.

  “Do not let them take me to that place!” She began babbling uncontrollably. But Han noticed that whatever was the degree of fear, or even mild hysteria, that she felt, it did not break the grip with which she held the device, nor the angle at which she held it. She grasped him tightly with her free hand.

  Han stroked her hair, comforting her, calming her down. Reassuring her. Then, as she subsided, he turned to Hatha.

  “They have weapons, Hatha. Beam radiation weapons. They’ll fire on us, if we get within range.”

  Hatha said back, “I care not. Let us go to my ship, where it gathers meteors. I will go back and punish them with something even their fire cannot stop.”

  Liszendir came cl
oser, watching Usteyin, the story-block. She sighed, in resignation. She said, slowly and sadly, “I finally see what she is and what she can do. But I cannot do it myself; no ler would ever be able to use that thing. There is no mystery to it, no occultism. She has a feedback loop in that tangle. Human minds are structured to use it. It multiplies your consciousness through an odd sort of motional symbolism.”

  Han looked at Liszendir as if she had suddenly become a stranger, a most completely alien being. “What do you mean, Liszendir?” He had never seen such an expression of sadness in her face.

  “Can’t you see it? That thing, plus hand, eye, mind, and probably different kinds of light as well.” Usteyin nodded, agreeing. “It’s not electronic, it’s not magic. It isn’t even mechanical in the strictest sense. It’s like the thing you count with; primitive people use them. Beads on rods. An abacus. But that thing doesn’t stop with numbers: it symbolizes whole realities. It’s a macroscope and a computer all in one. Don’t you see what you have brought to yourself, what you have loved and won, at my insistence? You can hide nothing from her, in time or space.”

  Usteyin collapsed the story-block. She released her grip on Han, and moved close to Liszendir, looking into the other girl’s eyes deeply. “You know, so then you know that I have seen the thing that you and my Han made together, before-time.” Liszendir flinched, but Usteyin was not angry with her. She put her free arm around the ler girl, spoke in an affectionate tone. “But you are a good person, you are innocent. You thought that your life had not been passionate enough, that you had not had a great love. Yes, I looked. All the way back, you and Han alike. I know. But we do not do that often. It is not good to look at your own life from outside. But I had to know.”

  Liszendir asked her, in a tiny voice, “Did you see this, before?”

  “No. How could I know? We do not look at our own futures, for we do not want to know. It is the only story we have. And one must have the starts. But then he came, he bought me, he made me his own. It was so strange that I had to look. I did not dare for a long time. But yesterday I did. Your life is so different from mine. To me, we are none of us yet the real people, we are just all poor creatures acting out what has been preplanned for us, flowing in current, but to you, you are a kind of ultimate. I see that I was wrong, you too. Creatures fade into the other, and there is no ultimate. We are all related. And you have known many loves, many ways, your body is a fine instrument to you. And you will mate with two more, in an odd ritual I do not understand. But I have only one. And I will have an even stranger life than yours, and now I understand it less than I do yours. But it will be far more than the Zlats could imagine—maybe not so adventuresome, but much sweeter. There is much peace there, and I fall into it, pretending I am flying. You will not change, but I will. This is fixed, like rocks, like the old stories of the Zlats. But you should not fear me, Liszendir Srith-Karen of a many-many generations of Karens. You prepared him for me, and it is a gift for which I will be forever in your debt.”

  12

  “All religions originate in discredited sciences.”

  —Holden Czepelewski, Cahiers

  “Truth, such as we find it, appears in mythic stories, while recited facts fall into mere opinions. And the more facts are enumerated, the more opinionated and erroneous the matter becomes. At the level of pure facts, there is nothing but chaos. Ah, to be sure, facts are real, one should respect them, but one should beware of them greatly, for it is the feel of the flow that makes the dancer beautiful.

  —Brunsimber Frazhen

  HAN TURNED AWAY for a moment, and began programming a course that would bring them to a rendezvous with the larger ship. When he turned back, one of them was smiling affectionately, and the other was still staring off into some personal noplace, blankly. He wanted to break the stasis of this scene, somehow get things back into some framework of motion, at least of the illusion that they were moving, but he could not bring himself to it; he sensed that the slightest tap from him might prove to be a blow which shattered.

  Hatha broke the silence by asking, “If what my eyes and ears tell me is true, then I take it that she, or any Zlat for the matter, or even any human, if trained, can see through that tangle, that wad, into anywhere?” He stopped, searching for a word which didn’t exist. “Anywhen? And how did they get them?”

  Usteyin answered, “It is just as you say—anywhere and anywhen. But where we were, on the plain, as what I was, I did not know many things, and those things of the outer world I knew, I did not care about. If I do not know you because you live in some far place, I would not ever have a reason to see to that place, to see you, how you are. No. We did not use them for that; we used them to tell stories on, to make us proud, to give us identity. We made them ourselves, from the first. That is one of the stories—how the Zlats made story-blocks. It was our specialty—in the old days—but the things we made fell into disuse and we had no work, no place. So we made something for ourselves—I call them story-blocks to you, but to another Zlat I should say ‘the last gift.’ We used to make big ones—like this one on this ship. We had no power, no machines—so we made one that needed no power but that of the spirit, and no machine but the hand.”

  She smiled, as if to herself. “I used to think that all these things were just make-believe. But now? Perhaps all the time we were looking across time, across distance—to the long ago or to the yet-to-be. That the story of Koren and Jolise, remember that?—is perhaps real, somewhere, some when. I do not know that. I do not want to know whether it is real or not, for just as this can show beautiful things, it can show things of terror and evil.”

  Han asked, “Could I learn to use one?”

  She reflected for a moment, then said, “No. I do not think so. Not because of what you are, but because you are too old, you know words too well. You have to start before you become too tied up in words. Very young. Not yet walking well, that young. And them, the ler? Not at all, never. They do not have the mind for it—they cannot let go. Now you are changing me to your life, you have told me, shown me, and so as I learn, then I lose this. After a few years I will no longer be able to use it at all, it will be just a tangle of wire. Do not be sad! I want this or I would not have come with you. Since I am with you I no longer need stories, I live one, ever so much more than what you see in here.”

  She looked at Hatha. “So under them, we just had time, time, which we called an illusion. It had to be so, to use the story-blocks. No time or it won’t work. That is another reason why you can’t use one—you see too much time, and they see nothing but time. You, Han, see that everything has a connection, one thing makes another. She, Liszendir, thinks that things happen on their own. Both are wrong.”

  Han felt out of his depth. This girl who had been a pet a few weeks ago was calmly discussing the dimensional continuum of time and space—and dismissing it, in the speech of an eight-year-old.

  Liszendir said, “I don’t agree, and I will not change, but she means that ‘causality is an illusion of time, chance is an illusion of ignorance, and time itself is an illusion of . . . ah . . . length, perhaps, is the best word.’ ”

  “Yes, yes, you see it!” she exclaimed. “That is how it is. It does not move. I lack the words. We move, in here, in our minds.”

  Hatha scoffed, “You may believe in fortunetellers all you wish, but I have always run them off whenever I found them skulking about the camp. This is nonsense! She is a klesh. She knows nothing.”

  The girl turned on him with a voice that carried venom. “It is because I know what you call nothing in your vanity that I can use this and see through all your schemes. A higher people keeping pets. What foolishness! Your pets are higher than you, keeper. And what you think you know is less than nothing. Trash in a pit. Broken bits, shards of a jar you will never see as a whole nor use for water. This is not magic, fortunes, divinations. This is a tool which helps me to see—what is, what was—and what is to be. Do you wish to know what else I have seen in here? T
hat you will never see the sun rise over Dawn again, that is what I have seen.”

  Hatha retreated from her, illogically, in view of what he had said before. “Stay away from me, Zlat witch!”

  “I do nothing to you! You will do it to yourself!” She was angry now, and despite her small size, and lack of obvious weapons, she had suddenly become a figure of danger and malice, something not entirely controlled. Han reached for her, touched the soft girl skin of her shoulder. At his touch, she began calming, returning to her earlier state.

  He said, “Wait. Do not waste this on him. Let him go his way. If you must use it again, then use it to tell me one more story. He will want to see it, too.”

  She turned, calmed. “What is it?”

  “The bright one, the star. Tell me its story, and where we are in it. I will show you the starts.”

  “Once more, no more. I cannot use it again, after this. I have already used it too much this day. I fear it now. Let me tell you something about it, how it is used. Now if I wish to make a story about just such a place, exactly such a person, at a special time, it takes many starts, many motions, many settings before I move it. The more detail, the more I have to put in, and the less it gives me back. To watch one grain of sand fall, in one place, at one time, it would take me a year to set it just right, maybe longer. And who would wish to see it? But at the other end, if I wish to ask it, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ then there are no starts. Just tense it and look. Many starts, short story; few starts, long story. And the last one is the longest of all: it never ends, it lasts forever. And since there is no time, that means you are trapped in that, where the illusion won’t work. So we never ask that; that is the one answer that traps you for ever. Your spirit is lost. You can’t get back yourself, and no one can get you out of it.”