The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  That evening, after the hour of supper, and after all his chores had been finished, Meure put on the cleanest overshirt he could find in the clothes locker and sought out the Liy Flerdistar. She was not within the suite; neither was Clellandol. He went out into the hallway; Ffstretsha was a small ship. There were only so many places where she could be.

  Up to now, the ship had been quiet. There were, however the Spsom ship propelled itself through space, no sound effects attendant to the process. Once out in the empty corridor, away from the rest of the people, though, he became conscious of a sound, a series of sounds, a family of sounds, he had not heard before. They were faint, hardly discernible; mostly unrecognizable, and coming, so it seemed, from the ship itself. Meure listened. He could not identify the sounds.

  He passed along the passageway toward the front of the ship, climbed the ladder to the second deck. The door to the control room was closed tight, and a dull red light shone above the doorframe. The wardroom door was open, though, and a light was coming out of it. As Meure moved toward it, Clellandol stepped out, looking back into the wardroom. When he saw Meure, he said something unintelligible back into the room, a phrase with the trilling, buzzy quality of Ler Multispeech. There was no answer from within. Clellandol passed along the passageway and disappeared down the ladder, saying nothing more.

  Inside the wardroom, the room was empty, save for one occupant: Flerdistar. There were two mugs on the center table, both still steaming.

  Meure had not thought the Ler girl attractive since he had seen her, and aboard the ship, she had not grown any more so. She was thin, almost bony, and unlike the slender human girl Ingraine, moved with no grace at all. Further, Meure had been put off by her imperious manners, and had avoided her as much as possible. Now, close, across the table, he could see her directly; her skin lacked tone, her mouth was thin and colorless, the eyes dull gray and slightly watery. What made the physical impression of her even stronger was the fact that she was wearing an unusual garment, such as he could see of it; it was a loose diaphanous blouse, open-necked and translucent, so that the body underneath was suggested. She sat with her elbows on the table, her body leant forward, as if weary. There was none of the usual precocious belligerence in her now.

  Meure asked, “Am I intruding . . . ?”

  Flerdistar answered, voice soft, controlled, but tired. Meure felt fatigued himself, just hearing the overtones in it. “No. Ask what you will of me.”

  Meure looked again. He could see through the cloth quite easily. There was little to see. Ler girls were nearly flat-chested as a rule, and Flerdistar was more so than most. The figure he saw was slight and boyish. Or rather childish. He began, “I do not know the forms to say this ...”

  She waved one hand, without removing it from the table, signifying that forms were inapplicable now, for some reason.

  “. . . One of the Spsom crewmen told me you could interpret dreams. I had one, on this ship, that lacks all meaning, and I wondered if you could help.”

  She smiled. “Interpreting dreams, now. There’s what we need . . . No. As such, that is not what I do. I am a pastreader. I listen to the present, which is full of the ringing echoes of the past. I sift words, tales, things which literalists say are distorted, not true, but which have once been true. And gradually, line by line, I can reach out . . . and touch it. See it, very much as it was in reality. I can, if given long enough to work on it, reconstruct things people think they have forgotten.”

  “Why are you here, bound for Monsalvat?” Meure asked of her.

  “There has always been a great mystery among my people. To you it may not have any meaning at all. Many Ler feel similarly. It is simple enough: once there was a Ler rebel. It had been assumed that she remained one, judging by subsequent events, but there was always the disturbing tale that she wasn’t. There is more to it than that, of course. If she wasn’t, why then did the rebellion occur, in her name. The rebel’s name was Sanjirmil, which in your speech signifies natural spontaneous combustion—will-o’ the wisp. Foxfire. But those Ler who were with her descended into the Warriors of Dawn, who later dwindled, and vanished. There were Humans, whom the Warriors captured, mistreated, enslaved, and bred into many pure types, and who lost. We are going to Monsalvat to talk with some Klesh, who are the only link with that past.”

  Meure objected, “Well enough. Everyone has heard of the Warriors, and their Klesh. But time! There is a long time between the Klesh brought to Monsalvat and the time of Sanjirmil. They would not remember her; she was gone, having lived her life probably before the Klesh-breeding started. And by all accounts, even more has happened since they have been on Monsalvat. Ferocious events, to them, at any rate. You may be fortunate to get anything coherent out of them at all, much less a memory thousands of years old.”

  She looked blankly back at Meure. “No, it’s not like that. What I weave into a coherent whole seems to the untrained to be random noise. But we know two things: we know them. Not speculation. Sanjirmil set forces in motion that made the Warriors and the Klesh, and separated them both from both of us. And the other is that all of the counterstories—that Sanjirmil was victim, not perpetrator, have been traced back to one common source—Monsalvat and the Klesh. I have tried to pastread elsewhere, and all I have gotten, I and all the other pastreaders that have gone before me of the House of Historians, is a radiant point from Monsalvat. Beyond that is a curtain we cannot pierce. So the answer is there, buried in the collective memory of the legends of the people.”

  Maure looked askance at her. “Why not ask Ler who were the wardens of the Warriors after their resettlement? After all, you do have a recall we do not.”

  Flerdistar shook her head. “Not so easy. We did that first. All we got from that was that there was a secret about the origin of the Warriors which was known only to certain of their number. This cult was never divulged to any Ler who guarded the remainder of the Warriors. We are prone to keep secrets. It is our nature, and I can tell you that there were Warriors who autoforgot to preserve their secret, even though by then, it was largely gibberish to them. Another problem was the Warriors themselves; they were not really Ler any more, but something else. Not Human, either. The radiation of Dawn was slowly loading them with lethal mutations. We are rather sensitive to that, you know. So that much of what we could get to by relay-memory was lost, even more so than among Humans, who would at least retain traces of the events, built into the fabric of their legends, unknown to them. No. The Warriors were a dead end. And they never revealed their cult internals. So we switched to Humans. And there, it is as I have said—either we get the official account, which we suspect, or we get Monsalvat.”

  “Why is it important, after all these years, centuries?” Meure asked, genuinely perplexed. “What difference does it make whether she was really a rebel or not? It was done, that’s all.”

  Flerdistar looked directly at Meure. “It involves a very basic question about the nature of . . . being itself. Something more than Humanity, than Lerdom, than intelligence. Something Basic. Long, long ago, in your own history, a struggle to define it took place. You have forgotten it, so I will not burden you with it. But therein was no victory, for one side apparently was uninterested in defining the issue, and let the others have their say. Everything we are, you and I, goes back to that. Everything. And yet every time anyone even tentatively feels around this, there is a nagging suspicion that the other side was right.”

  Meure said, “What difference does it make? So they were right: then we’ll change.”

  “It goes beyond that. If they who lost were really correct, and theirs was the more accurate view of reality, then all of us, in their terms, are insane, and have been, and will always be. But I have said much here that is far beyond you; indeed, most of it is beyond me, too. I am only repeating much of what I have heard. I am an investigative vehicle who searches for one kind of truth. And I will try to read your dream if I may. Speak of it.”

  Meure felt off balanc
e, distracted by the abrupt turns of mind; he had felt a trace of the same feeling when talking with Clellandol. Almost as if, in the cases of both, their, attention was . . . somewhere else. But where? He decided it didn’t really make too much difference. He almost was glad her attention was divided; that he was not getting the full benefit of her attention. He began, “Everyone has dreams, but most are nothing out of the ordinary; an occasional nightmare, and we are purged. But this was . . . clear, like it was really me, but at the same time, not me, either. Someone else; I was in a castle, or a fortress—it was all made of dark stone. It was very confusing—I was the master of that place, but I feared it, or someone in it. Almost as if it had become my master. Then there was a shift, and I was in a deeper chamber, underground. It was damp, in the air, but the stone was dry. I was going to do something I feared very much, but that I knew was necessary. There was something in my hand but I can’t tell you what it was; it . . . it was sharp, but it was not a knife. I don’t think it was solid. I saw myself in a mirror, and I wasn’t me, I mean not the real me in front of you now. The person I saw was red-haired and had a beard. He was like the laborers who drift in and out of the Fair at Kundre. A rowdy, a roustabout, a roughneck. I was in great fear and a sense of wrong, but what dread thing we would do was to be anyway. Then I woke up.”

  Flerdistar looked away from Meure, her eyes focused on something very distant, something probably beyond the walls and doors of the wardroom. She said, without shifting her attention, “Understanding proceeds fastest when phenomena are sorted into related groupings; even if one’s initial array is partially incorrect, the order inherent in the system suggests corrections until an approximation is reached. Dreams are also phenomena, and can be grouped. If you are not a student of this branch of knowledge, I will not bore you with the classification system currently in use; it will be sufficient to say that your dream does not arise from unsatisfied yearnings, unresolved conflicts in you; nor can it be deja-vu: the anticipation of the future, for you are obviously not red-haired and show no inclination toward that coloration.”

  “How do you know . . . ?”

  “A rather simple deduction: I am a stranger, of an alien race, female—if your dream were wish, you would already have forgotten it—you would certainly not tell it to me, nor would you seek interpretation, for you know the meaning already.”

  “True, I suppose . . . but when I say the ‘I’ of the dream was red-haired, I do not mean of the red hair of the Humans of today, but of old: Bright red, not the auburn-brown, say, of Audiart. That was significant to me, why I could remember it.”

  Flerdistar turned her full attention onto Meure now. If there had ever been any distractions in her mind’s eye, they were wiped away without effort. Meure felt exposed and naked, because of the sudden attention, the full weight of it, made even more noticeable by the childishness of the girl, the watery eyes, the thin figure. Many of the old terrors of the strangeness of the Ler returned to haunt Meure then; they were adults who grew old and gray and seemed to retain the values and appearance of children; and they were also apparent children who possessed an eerie adulthood far beyond real adults.

  She said, carefully, “It’s that it’s you, not that it has red hair.”

  Meure said, “But that’s what I’m trying to tell you: it’s not me. I didn’t think anything was wrong with the dream until I saw the mirror—and I knew it wasn’t me.”

  She replied, still focusing her full attention on him, “But you didn’t know it until you looked in the mirror, eh?”

  “Well, yes . . . it was—wait—too clear for a dream, like any I’ve had before. It was as if I were remembering it. Yes. A memory.”

  “What was your name?” she asked without warning.

  “I can’t remember it. It’s just on the tip of my tongue, I know it, but I don’t. I ought to know it, because I can feel it even now, hanging over me, like a threat. . . . It’s a simple name, with one meaning. I can sense that. I just don’t understand it; we never had barbarians on Tancred. . . .”

  Flerdistar interrupted Meure, “It didn’t come from Tancred, your dream. I know Tancred’s history probably better than you. In fact, it was because of that history that we recruited there, rather than, say, on Lickrepent, or Ocalinda.” She sighed, and some, not all, of the intense regard departed. She reflected, “Humans have become bland and normal in the last few thousand yearlings; I mean that you seem to have become as immune to history as we are. People lead ordinary lives, accomplish their ends without causing vast miseries, griefs. Gone are the great wars, the mass movements, the prophets. Tancred happens to be a product of this period, and is blander than most worlds.”

  Meure said, “Well, isn’t that what people have been striving for all these centuries? Ler used to complain that Humans were too erratic; now that we’re orderly, is that a fault, too?”

  He expected a hot retort, perhaps a reprimand. Instead, Flerdistar said gently, more than he imagined she had in her, “I meant no offense . . . Ler history, such as there is of it, is smoothly contoured largely because we wish it that way. We are a cautious people. History less history is our nature; it is manifestly not yours, and when Human history becomes as smooth and uneventful as ours, then we expect to see other things in connection with it. You are . . . unbalanced, somehow. Peace and contentment you have attained and kept; but your total population is declining, and you are no longer opening colonial space.”

  “I know these things; it’s no secret, either. But no one would trade his heart’s-desire for a maybe-glory . . . particularly on someone else’s concern.”

  “Well, enough, then.”

  “What can you tell me about the dream?”

  “As I told you, this is not my specialty. I know about some of it, as one might say, by fortuitous accident. There are certain parallels . . . let me say that if I were a witch of the ancient times, and you were of my tribe, I should tell you that you had been possessed, that you should perform the appropriate rites in the secret places known to the wise men of the tribe. But of course I am not a witch, and you and I are not Stone-age tribesmen squatting before the fire.”

  “I don’t understand what you are trying to say.”

  “I don’t know, myself. I can put it in one context, and it comes out coherent, but when I try to put it into contemporary reference, I see a recursive pattern of contradictions.”

  “Explain, Liy Flerdistar; I am completely lost.”

  “Just so: possession. To the savage, that covers a lot of things which we classify another way and come up with a family of ills, we civilized creatures. But even if we admit such a thing, after all our civilizing, we now have to admit that we no longer have the mechanisms to cope with the .001 percent real thing. I read your event as contact with someone else, and that you should protect yourself from that influence; contact increases susceptibility.”

  Meure thought a moment, and said, “It would seem there is little enough I can do; as you say, I no longer have the refuges of the savage, and in addition, I am on a spacecraft bound for a destination I did not choose. Shall I apply to Shchifr to turn about and avoid Monsalvat?”

  The glittering attention returned, burning. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s where we’re bound.”

  “You should hope it’s not from there.”

  “I was reading about Monsalvat, before I had the dream. Are there red-haired Klesh?”

  “There once were, long ago ... There is much here that I like not . . .” She broke off, suddenly, as if she wished to say no more.

  Meure pressed the Ler girl, daring just once. “What else?”

  “Monsalvat is a planet of chaos, compared with the rest of inhabited worlds. Little better than anarchy reigns there. But other than its unusual history, there is much more—the whole region of space about it has a bad name: communications devices, fool-proof, don’t work there, or rather here. Ships are stressed, broken up, never seen again. We fly aboard a Spsom ship because no
Ler ship can approach it—here is one of several places where our Matrix Drive doesn’t work.”

  “Somebody got in, once. They brought the Klesh to Monsalvat.”

  “We don’t know about that period. Only since. What we know now is that it’s a region of unusual turbulence, unusually strong. Like a region of storms on a planet’s ocean. We are in such a storm now, and we are in great danger. The only reason we have survived so long is that Ffstretsha is small. Thlecsne had to break off days ago; it was being severely overstressed, and was near being disabled. Their Captain disengaged.”

  “Ours didn’t?”

  “Not that Shchifr wouldn’t, if he could. No. It’s that he can’t. Spsom ships, of course, use a different system from Ler ships’, but they are like ours in that they have no contained power source, but rather tap forces of space to generate momentum. Like sailing ships.”

  Meure said, “Like sailing ships . . . No power?”

  “They have drive systems to land and take off in a planetary system. Nothing more. For distance work, they tap outside forces, just as a sailing ship uses its sails. And we are now in a situation analogous to a sailing ship in a great storm: we cannot turn, and we cannot stop. To turn would stress the sails, dismast us, and roll us out under the waves. To take in sail will allow the following seas to catch us and swamp us from behind.”

  “But you said Thlecsne disengaged . . .”

  “Our last communication with Thlecsne was to the effect that soon after she disengaged and hove-to, the storm driving us abated in their region and they were able to proceed normally. They were damaged and had to turn to the nearest port. Believe me! Shchifr has tried. In fact, they have worked at nothing else.”

  “Do you know where we are headed?”

  “Where else? Monsalvat, more or less, the last fix we got, at about twice the normal top speed of a Spsom ship. Can you not hear the ship groan with the stress? Can you not see in the screens the tossing and rolling? Look! Listen!”