The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  A voice issued from the thing, that echoed as if coming from a great distance, but also as if very close by from a tiny mechanism: “Where is Cretus?”

  Tenguft raised her spear. “Cretus is not here! Begone! We are pilgrims driven by the oracle of Dossolem; I cast it, I read, I know! There is no place for you in it!”

  It said, “Not so, Haydar. I give the reading. Cretus casts a shadow I can sense. For cycles he eludes me, and I do not know a way to that place. But his shadow moves in this time. I know the commotion at Cucany and the Invigilator speaks of it. They fear me much there. But Cretus is gone, casting his shadow. I seek the presence.”

  Meure said, “Cretus is not here. There is no such person!”

  The thing seemed to regard Meure for the first time, although there was no perceptible change in its shifting mutability. It was a long moment shifting its attention, but Meure felt a great mass behind the object, a great momentum, a pressure. It said, “You I perceive, who move to Monsalvat. But the shadow you cast, it is of the cast of Cretus.”

  “Cretus attempted to possess me but I cast him forth! You must look elsewhere!”

  “Can there be error? Not so, I review the course, and I follow the shadow of Cretus. There is a mistake but he is here; he must mingle his shadow in the I-ness—yes, it is so; he is all shadow now, a unit!” The thing moved slowly, closer to the barge. It was coming for Meure and Cretus.

  Meure wanted desperately to be free of Cretus, but he felt a greater fear of this anomalous thing that he did of Cretus; what could it do to him extricating Cretus from him? Without particular thought he brought forth the knife Tenguft had given him, and threw it at the center of the object. The knife went truly and impacted point-first on the object, but it came back exactly along the same course to the hand that had thrown it, while Meure made the exact motions of throwing it, but in reverse order. He threw it again; this time it was off a bit, the blade moving as it came near the thing.

  The knife was deflected off the surface, and was propelled violently into the river below the object, making a powerful splash which splashed water back up upon the object. A great gout of steam appeared and began to whirl rapidly about the object, making a hissing sound that grew in volume rapidly, reached a peak, and faded out rather suddenly, as if moving away. The whirling cloud dissipated, and there was nothing behind it. Whatever the apparition had been, it was gone.

  Meure did not know if his act had been responsible; he thought that he had contributed to some instability in the thing; and thus it had withdrawn. But it would probably come again. He looked at the river surface, when the knife had entered the water. That was gone, forever; he hoped Tenguft thought it had been to good use. At the spot there was a swirling, as if something massive was moving just below the surface, and then, that, too, was gone.

  It was afternoon, but the sunlight was waning under a high, filmy layer, through some illusion of the light and the reflections off the river, the light altered from its normal tangerine color to a greasy beige, a color, Meure thought, of repulsive substances. The mood was clearly one of apprehension and foreboding, and after the visit of the apparition, all fell silent. By shared impulses, each drifted off to maintain watch over the river, should it appear again.

  The twilight deepened into a melancholy, depthless gray-blue tone, an oily, poisonous color, and the distant shorelines faded into first indistinguishability, then invisibility. Morgin and Tenguft distributed hard crusts and flasks of water, and as night fell, all found a shelter from the dampness that had come to the air, and slept a fitful sleep.

  It was not yet light when something moved beside Meure, or a noise awoke him, and he awakened; a warm presence was beside him, one of the girls. He could not tell who it was, exactly, for she was wrapped up in a section of coarse cloth found on the barge. He thought it was probably not Tenguft; that one had a bony angularity about her that even heavy cloth would not obscure. Half asleep, he opened his eyes warily, suspiciously sniffed the damp air.

  There was dense fog, not rising from the river, but pressing down upon it from above. There was no motion, either of the boat or of the fog; every surface was covered with a fine film of dew. There was also a different scent to the air, something laid over the persistent miasma of the dank water. It was weak, yet, hidden by the river’s ripe odor, but it was there—smoke, and a pungent, toasty odor, but a stale one. They were nearing some kind of settled place. Meure looked for lights, but saw none; still, the darkness wasn’t total. Something was illuminating the fog, although faintly.

  He listened; the girl was breathing regularly, but he sensed she was not asleep. Waiting. Far away, muffled by the fog and distorted by the overripe airs over the greasy water, came a suggestion of sound, a rhythmic tapping that proceeded for a time, and then was silent. He could also hear, at slightly less volume, the girl’s breathing. The suggestion of body warmth. The tapping began again, sounding fractionally nearer, and continued.

  Meure breathed deeply, and leaned against the warm bundle to his left, feeling his heartbeat increase; who was it? Where on the barge was Halander? The tapping became irregular and slow, as if deliberating each stroke, then picked up its old pattern again, now a little faster. He moved his arm, to enfold the warm body. The girl moved suddenly, rolling over and straddling Meure, at the same time moving the coarse cloth around behind her so that it fell over them and covered them. Good, he thought; that she knew the necessity for concealment. But the folds and heavy weight of it made motion difficult and distorted perception. He felt a hot wetness on his neck, moving, on his collarbone, a sharp bite; he felt cool skin where his hands moved, and the clumsy long tails of the borrowed overshirts sliding upwards almost without effort, making him realize, curiously, that it was because they had been designed to do just that.

  She spoke no words, no endearments; neither did he. Somehow, he thought words would shatter what was happening, deflect it into a mere entertainment. He searched with his mouth, found an ear, a neck, a finely-boned shoulder, which he kissed lightly, feeling hot breath and cool legs, and their first shy contacts, delicate pressures, and their bodies slid together easily. They seemed to rest together at an odd position, but this seemed to have no effect; the little motions they could make seem magnified a hundredfold. There was no sensation of weight or force, just instincts which happened of themselves, sensations, wet, light skin-kisses, things he did without thinking of them, and a sudden, unanticipated hot relief matched in her an instant later by a timeless moment in which she pressed her body against his and held her breath; he listened, and he could not recall when the tapping had stopped.

  They did not move for a long time, feeling their heartbeats and breathing falling back to their normal rates. He could feel hers distinctly. Meure savored the sensations of the girl’s body, the slender wiriness of her, the warm spots, where they had touched the longest; cool spots they revealed by their shiftings. A sharp, flowery tone to her scent, the way her hands moved, one under him, the other holding the ball of his shoulder . . . but he thought there was an odd pressure to that hand, as she steadied herself to move, still adjusting, still moving her body against his, as the hand pressed on his shoulder at three points instead of two. He experimentally flexed his own right hand, resting lightly on the girl’s buttocks; it was difficult to set his own hand that way, because he couldn’t rotate his little finger far enough outward. A sudden suspicion nagged him, and with his other hand he reached for the girl’s hair, feeling his way around the cloth that covered them, feeling. The hair was short, straight, and silky-fine. Flerdistar.

  Meure struggled with the cloth, finally managing to pull away enough of it to expose their faces, to a light which had now taken on a faint bluish tone not there before. He looked directly into a thin, intense pale face whose lips were now curved, slightly open, in a faint smile that held absolutely no affection whatsoever.

  11

  “The proof of a man’s prowess lies in the invisible influence which he has had
on generations of men.”

  —A.C.

  MEURE HARDLY DARED to move, or to make any sound whatsoever. Not even to look around; he listened, trying to pierce the predawn bluish murk. All around him, but faraway and delicately faint, so as to vanish at the slightest rustle, lay a texture of noises, not at all like the silences and windsongs of the wilderness. He listened for the tapping he had heard earlier; at first he could not hear it, but after a time it returned, now much weaker, almost one with the background. The river slapped the sides of the barge with small wavelets like hands, irregularly. He could not escape the impression that he was in the midst of a large settlement, isolated from it by the colossal flood of the river. And aboard the barge there was no sound whatsoever. This did not comfort him; he suspected that Clellendol could move soundlessly in the dark if he so desired. But on the ship he had denied having an interest in Flerdistar, and Meure had seen him ignore or deny her more than once since then.

  Flerdistar seemed to read his worries. She leaned close, and said, in his ear, “No one has seen. I know; I can move in the nightside almost as quietly as Clellen. We have trained together for some time, and I have learned much of him.”

  Meure said, quietly, “And him, of you?”

  “Thus, and thus. But he knows not the ways I have learned to reconstruct the past out of the noise of the present; there’s a finer trick than slipping through the night and stealing. Have no apprehensions on that score. There is only one past-reader here.”

  “What about Cretus?”

  “Cretus is one no longer, whatever he has seen in his own past. But of him I will be able to see the truth, that we have searched for so long . . . And of the here and now,” and here she moved her hips suggestively, “you need not fear. Within my age cycle there is no jealousy to speak of for such events as these, and the circumstances of Clellendol and I . . .” She paused, either searching for a word, or reluctant to utter one. She straightened a little, and said, with some of the old authority he had seen her use, “He does not care what I do, or with whom. Surely you can perceive that as well.”

  “I do.”

  “And consider that Morgin is past his prime, and that Halander is a mooncalf . . .”

  Meure interjected, “... And that I have Cretus.”

  “True. But not the sole reason, never fear. And also you must learn that I can rid you of Cretus, if you allow me to.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “There are ways to manipulate states of existence like his. It is part of my training; we theorized that there was an entity here like him, so that we tried to reconstruct its characteristics from what we could learn of the planet and the trail of rumors which have come from here over the years ... And having done so, we also developed certain practices to isolate and contain the entity.”

  Meure felt a spasm of humor, but his position would not permit him to laugh. He moved, shifted her weight, and chuckled. “And all that work for Cretus. . . . and you can’t even get to him. Nor can he get to you.”

  Flerdistar leaned close to him again, and said, coldly, “We erred in that we missed the identity-persona in its exact state. We did not know Cretus; nevertheless, I can do so.”

  Meure shook his head. “You have erred further. Cretus is powerless—a creature of his times, no more. A man of the past. I admit to having become a victim of a singular misfortune, but he is nowhere near the elemental you seem to think he is. There is another entity here that has kept the whole planet at bay for thousands of years . . .”

  “I know.” She cut him off. “I saw the thing over the water. Although I don’t think I saw the same thing you did. And I tell you—as a pastreader, what I am, that I can feel Cretus inside you, however well he hides, generating the kind of waves he makes right now. So much of the past vanishes into the backscatter, so soon. If you could but understand how insignificant most of your lives are! The whole of millions of existences adds up to nothing but a contributory tone in the background. But there are some you can read across time. Some of these identities can be resolved to personae known in recorded history, although their effects are different from what we imagined they were. Others . . . there is no trace of them, no name, no record, nothing, only the fact that they existed and that they changed the flow of time. At the beginning of the Ler, when we were created, there was a Human, just before that, who has deflected the entire course of Human history—a major turn in the long run. We know he existed, I have sensed his influence myself—finding him is one of our exercises. In a sense, he is more real to me than you are, now. But not once have our best been able to inrelate who he was in the real world, what his name was, where he lived, who were his descendants . . . he possessed the great mana, the power . . . and we think that he didn’t even know it. We think that he didn’t even care . . . He is one of the strongest in the pre-space period, although there are some further back who are very hard to read but who are as strong. But that one: he was obscure and unknown in his own time. Cretus, on the other hand, burns across my perceptions like some flaming comet! I must desensitize my perceptions in order to register him properly!”

  “What is it that Cretus does that makes him so . . . visible to you?”

  “It is difficult to explain; you are of necessity not knowledgeable of the correct terminology or concepts; there is essentially not enough time to construct them in you. Nevertheless . . . what makes a life-form sentient, thinking, intelligent, as we say, is the way in which it stores the information necessary for it to act and endure. Many creatures store a program internally; thus is instinct; more advanced types reduced the instinctual preprogramming and rely on coding and evaluation and storage from the environment to the individual. At a higher level yet comes the ability to communicate pertinent segments of this data—this is the first great leap forward, and it is a major effort. Finally we reach the highest level, at which vast amounts of data are not stored in the individual, but in an abstract body of information accessible to all. We call this culture—our basic instructions, values, habits, standards of judgments, knowledge.

  “The whole system here is based upon information and how it is stored and used, how one accesses it. To change behavior, it is only a matter of changing the informational base. You can see that to change the course of a people is a very great task—we find that these cultural entities follow courses of their own, according to laws pertinent to them. But in Human history we find . . . deviations along the sometimes abrupt changes in course. It is as if one were following the course of a star in space, and then it veers, for no reason you can see . . . some phenomenon perturbs its course. In the case of the star, the anomaly is resolved to an heretofore-invisible object; in the culture, the culture itself produces the disturbances.”

  Meure softly disengaged himself and said, “So far, I see; but could not the theory be unfinished? It would seem that a more finished version would also predict these . . . changes.”

  “We have followed that line of development; it leads nowhere. In fact, it leads to severe logical contradictions that render the entire concept meaningless. Instead, what we find is that certain individuals gain, at random intervals, the ability to change key sections of the overall assumptions, apparently by means of a process we do not understand.”

  “Are such people born to this? Genetics? Or is it that they learn to do it.”

  “The research we have done so far indicates both: the ability is inborn, but the facility to use it, consciously or unconsciously, is learned. Moreover, they act for no foreseeable reason. For example, as a Human culture approaches a hazard, a savior does not automatically arise, necessarily. Sometimes there is none; other times, one appears, too early. Some appear too late.”

  “You know early Human history . . . was Hitler one of these people?”

  “Wrong. That one is an example of another phenomenon, even more complex . . . currents on the flow of assumptions lead to what we call nodes, which attract and capture exemplars. Apparently the node governs
behavior to a fine degree. If we could go back in time and remove the physical person Hitler before his rise to power, we would find that another would snap into his place. That would be very dangerous, indeed, could it be done, for the next victim of the node might stand up to it better than the original. Hitler lost his great chance because he was flawed for the use of the node . . . it is a truism that political types tend to be node-fillers, rather than changers, magi, powers, whatever you should call them. Of course, there are exceptions . . .”

  “Cretus, for example?”

  “So much would seem to be the case.”

  “And what of the Lerfolk? What do you see in your history?”

  “. . . We work with an even larger component of culture than you, a picture of finer resolution. That would suggest that our stream would be more difficult to change, but in fact, according to this system, it means that for us, we have no random event, or happenstance; with us, it is simply Will and Idea. Anyone can alter the course whenever they please. The result is that . . .”

  “. . . You change constantly?”

  “Wrong again! That we don’t deflect the course at all. We are terrified of that act, because we cannot foresee to what it would lead. Only once in our history has one so seized the balance of the pendulum, and at that, the deflection was infinitesimal. Even so, the shock of it echoes through us yet. It is a contradiction implicit in that event that I am here to investigate, to resolve.” She lay on her side with one bare thigh extended across Meure’s knees. Now she moved her leg over his, slowly, softly. “I and this trip, here to Monsalvat, are the culmination of generations of work . . .”