by M. A. Foster
She abruptly rose and came over to sit beside Meure. She began speaking immediately, as if voicing something that had long been on her mind. “I had not wished to face this before . . . but it seems that someone must. Another expedition to Monsalvat has failed, and the remnants will have to decide what they are to do next; whether to wait upon a dubious rescue, or embark upon a hazardous future.”
Meure said, “You cannot be said to have failed until you fail to get the information you have sought off Monsalvat.”
“We have no ship, so I cannot go in person; we have no communications off-planet, so I cannot send it. Moreoever, I don’t have the answer to take or send, and our party of people—so well equipped and intentioned at the first, is now reduced to three, and one of those—you—is steadily growing more alien under my eyes, more frightening.”
Meure laughed in a low tone, relaxed. “So you think Cretus is taking over? I can put you at rest on that account: Cretus is not me, and you would spot the difference immediately.”
“Not Cretus. Something . . . worse I don’t know . . . the present, the past, the future; they’re all mixed up on this planet, and I’m finding it difficult to untangle the traces. I sense them, but I can’t tell if they are from the past or the future. Shadowy powers moving, manipulating, in the background, point sources, which are people or people-like entities. Diffuse sources, or rather, one diffuse source, which I imagine is the entity; it is not coherent, but turbulent, sometimes many, sometimes one.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. I have feared to tell you, for the consequences.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I . . . can’t tell you how it works, but I know it: something I do initiates a major change here. I do something, and immediately there’s a shift . . . in the world-lines. It’s as if I create a character in History, but I can’t see past that character into what it does; it masks the consequences, or blocks them.”
Meure said, “Like an eclipse, where a smaller close body can obscure a larger distant one?”
“Like that, yes.”
“How do you know you cause it?”
“This will be even harder to explain . . . but when I set out on this path, many years ago, I felt it weakly, even then. It became stronger with every step I took nearer here. It has now become so strong I can’t see around it . . . the past and the future reverberate with echoes here, and somehow I myself am a momentary flicker in the time-line of this planet, and then unimaginable things happen; or I could deliberately thwart that by removing myself from life, because I don’t know what it is that I do that sets it off. I can’t see acts so well—only Powers.”
“Having glimpsed Time, you now fear consequences of every act? That is no way to go forward, surely you know that, and do not need me to tell you. You could ultimately wind up a catatonic in a corner, fearing every act, and still be had by time, for that might be the thing that set it off. Nay! You must act as you would!”
“What I set off here makes Monsalvat different. All these barbarian cultures, preserved here as if in amber, they all vanish. What replaces them I don’t understand at all.”
“Surely not immediately, as if by Magic.”
“No. It takes years, generations.”
“Monsalvat could stand change; it is long overdue for it.”
“You speak with more than an echo of Cretus.”
“There are things Cretus desires, with which I agree, and would work with him to attain, without shame . . . what replaces the state of Monsalvat as it is now?”
“I think a civilization which is opaque to history-readers such as I . . .”
“So you fear to act, for fear of removing by improvement values of intolerance and hatred, because those acts perpetuate quaint barbarians for you to study at your leisure? Or that your profession be eliminated, while the rest of us slowly become relics of a former skill in adaptibility and survival? Now you are something less than lacking in courage.”
She replied, with equal heat to match his, “It is not those selfish things, but the fear for my whole people that stays me! We become enclosed, limited, curiosities . . . obscure, forgotten. We go on, but our stream is lessened. I will be remembered for this.”
“In a sense, if you can read it, then you already are.”
“Hmph. Time-paradoxes are idle play of every schoolchild!”
“And I will remind you once that a paradox exists solely because of incomplete perception, and for no other reason.” And Meure stopped himself suddenly, afraid to say more, because of what it was revealing to him as the words unfolded. Because never in his life had he explored a paradox, created one, or thought about them. What he had just said, while no less true for that, was as uncharacteristic of him as it was possible to be. And it didn’t feel like Cretus, either. That was the worst part.
A shadow detached itself from the other shadows in the dim room and floated silently to where they sat. The shadow approached, moved suddenly, and lapsed into an angular shape; Tenguft. She whispered, harshly, “On the stairs. Two come!”
Meure listened but for a moment he heard nothing. He had not expected to. Then he heard scuffling, steps. Whoever was coming was neither slinking nor skulking, but coming openly, and he said as much to Tenguft. Nevertheless she drifted away from them to take up a position by the door, silent and invisible and deadly.
The steps came to the door, and there was a rattling at the latch, which opened the door, and in came Clellendol, assisting someone or something, they couldn’t make out who in the light.
Clellendol said, whispering over his shoulder as he half-dragged his companion in, “Light, give us light, a little.”
Tenguft secured and lit the reeking oil lamp, and by its flickering yellow light they saw whom Clellendol had brought: the Spsom Vdhitz, apparently none the better for his travels.
Vdhitz was not, apparently, fatally injured, but for the moment he was beyond speaking a Human language coherently. They made him comfortable, all the same, while he made half-hearted attempts to form Human speech formants. Flerdistar leaned close, and sputtered something in Vdhitz’s ear in his own tongue. Afterwards, he returned to his own language, which Fleridstar translated in pauses as Vdhitz spoke, haltingly.
It was a tale that unfolded as a descending series of disasters and misfortunes. Things went bad, and then worse. The Bagman and the servant had started for Medlight, as they and Morgin had agreed, assuming Morgin would catch up with them later, there, or farther on, at Utter Semerend, with the Ler elders in tow. Then Jemasmy returned, to report the Prote gone—who knew where? The disappearance of a Prote being a serious matter, they applied to Afanasy for a reading, using his Prote, upon which circumstances Jemasmy found his also departed—again, who could say where. The party departed for the west with foreboding, and Benne-the-Clone mounted and assembled upon its place on the wagon the powerful ballista with which he had such deadly expertise. Afanasy went with them, along with a buck called Tallou.
Mallam had studiously ignored these proceedings, but after they had left, he sent a small party to follow at a distance, sensing something on the wind. Mallam proved correct, if somewhat tardy. The following party returned with a tale of woe and heroic striving against great odds: Jemasmy’s group had been jumped by the same Meor pack which had followed them up from the Delta, apparently circling far around the south. The Haydar had arrived at the end, too late to help, but they told a hair-raising tale, seen from a distance, of two Haydar covering Benne, while he dealt out deaths to the Meor with a speed and a resolve they had not seen before in one not of the blood of the hunt. Like lightning-bolts his darts flew among the Meor, and he did not miss, swinging the clumsy weapon to aim and loading and cocking simultaneously. But in the end, there were enough Meors, and not enough Bennes, Afanasys, Tallous ... The relief party, led by Zermo Lafma, extracted a certain revenge upon the Meor band, but of course it was too late.
Lafma had allowed some of the Meors to escape, so as to s
pread the tale, and Mallam had them set out in the Hunt for these remainders, so as to leave the number to one witness. In the ensuing fray, somewhat south of the Yastian-Medlight track, Shchifr took a Meor dart and was killed. Perhaps it was the presence of aliens among them that stiffened the Meors, but they fought and stood their ground. Mallam had his revenge, but it cost him an amount he thought dear. Too dear; he had lost almost half his band, the Prote had abandoned Afanasy, and their spirit-woman had gone off into Incana on the word of the oracle. Segedine called down the Eratzenasters, to depart for the northwest, and the band they had left. They would have taken Vdhitz, for he had accounted himself competent in the fray with the Meors, despite his relative light weight and fragile build, but the Eratzenasters would have none of him, bucking and snorting and making odd blowing sounds from a concealed orifice along their undersides that made the Haydar warriors nervous and jumpy.
It was clearly an impossible situation: Rhardous N’hodos was called upon to make divination, and the portents were bad. They had a thousand kilometers to fly, perhaps farther, and to walk was clearly not advised. They were not convinced, further, that they could gain acceptance of Vdhitz by the other Haydar. Some muttered that the alien was bad fortune to them.
So Vdhitz left, and shortly afterward saw the band airborne upon the gruesome Eratzenasters . . . some stragglers circled back for a time, to keep him in sight, but in the end they turned back to the northwest and faded from sight.
Vdhitz hid by day and traveled by night across the wastes of Ombur, moving east toward the only place he knew anything about, Yastian. It was a city, and should there be a rescue attempt, it would be an obvious place to start for the rescuers. But in Ombur, night was no less hazardous than day: Korsors prowled the wastes, and other things as well, things that could be heard, but not seen. He became acquainted with fear. He saw things that were transitory and mutable, but emitted no sound, nor scent. It was puzzling. Vdhitz felt watched. But he could also feel the Vfzyekhr drawing him to that place, for the small furry creatures were not entirely slaves of the Spsom, but partners in a complex relationship for which no Human or Ler concept existed. Part of this relationship involved odd forms of telepathy, but only where certain combinations of Spsom and Vfzyekhr were assembled . . . he had wondered that the Vfyzekhr had gone to Incana with the Haydar girl, for Humans were not known to have exploitable telepathic ability, and the Ler were known to have none at all, save through their unique, and non-telepathic Multichannel Language, which acted like telepathy, but wasn’t, being propagated by ordinary sound waves.
He starved and suffered; Ombur was Dry Steppe, with little open water, and little game. The Korsors and other nameless things that cohabited in the wastes haunted his wakefulness and his dreams alike. Men, stranger men than he had ever heard of, hunted him by day and by night, drawn by his alienness, his un-belonging to the land. And the adventure had passed—and what was left was a slender hope that in the mongrel diversity of the docks of Yastian he could remain alive, until a Spsom ship came again. One would come—the alternative was unthinkable.
In the marshes he left his pursuers behind, and came to the city, and made his way by night to the foreign quarter. That journey was worth ten across Ombur; the city was deadlier than the wastes. Still he continued, trading something of himself for survival, and wondering every moment when his supply of tradable Vdhitzness was going to run out, for no creature ever knowns his own resources until the moment, the exact moment, of unchangeable failure. Test to destruction.
A trace element vital to the Spsom metabolism was lacking, or at best in insufficient concentration. That problem had begun immediately upon their landing, but it became more apparent in Ombur, more so in Yastian. He had finally allowed himself to be exhibited with a traveling circus that was now passing through this part of the Delta, representing a type of Klesh never before seen in this part of the world. Clellendol had picked up his rumor-trail on the street, immediately, and run the rumor to earth. How he had secured Vdhitz was not said.
Meure listened to this story and heard hopelessness in it, and mounting pressure on him. Things were coming together fast now, and he hardly could imagine what to do . . . Then he laughed to himself. Of course I know what to do. The only question is, do I dare do it?
He stepped off into space, as it were, with a sense of abandon to the flow of time, and somewhere offstage, on the periphery of his imagination, or perceptions, something shuddered at the necessity of what it now had to do. Meure said, “Ask him what it is exactly that the Vfzyekhr does, Flerdistar.”
She looked oddly into Meure’s eyes, and the sudden authority that had come into his voice. But she turned without comment and put the question to Vdhitz, in his own sputtering speech. After a time, the answer came, marked by faltering and hesitations, first on the part of the Spsom, and then with Flerdistar’s translation.
But the answer went: “They are not animals, as they seem, but rather the other extreme, the relicts of a race which was once both sapient and great, long ago, before Spsom, before man. Perhaps before everything . . . (Not before everything, went off a silent alarm in the back of Meure’s head, but he already suspected that answer.) . . . No one knows how they came to be the way they are . . . the way the Spsom found them. They themselves had forgotten, and did not wish to remember. They had had everything, so the Spsom scientists deduced. Telepathy was only the foundation of what they had become; they were on the edge of becoming totally free of material life-support whatsoever. Then, they . . . changed themselves, and declined, voluntarily. But they retained some things, or shadows of former abilities, as they never attained complete control.”
She continued, haltingly, “... This is difficult for me to understand . . . it seems that they can still communicate, telepathically, but not their own thoughts . . . they are not aware of what passes . . . like a part of an assembly of communcations equipment, but only when the proper stimulus is present, which is, in Vdhitz’s concept, at least two Spsom at each end . . . they don’t know how it works, they never discovered the propagation medium, but it proved to be instantaneous, as far as they could detect, and unlimited in distance.
“They became, not so much oppressors, but guardians, preserving the Vfzyekhr carefully, for they were few. There were hints to the Spsom Vfzyekhr-students that their former power had been great indeed, and they feared greatly any reawakening of that, as oppression might cause, so they invited them along, as it were, and gave them the piping to clean to give the bored creatures something to do, something within the bounds they had set for themselves. . . . The Spsom told other races they met that the Vfzyekhr were their slaves, but the relationship’s not like that at all; they maintain a spacefaring culture solely because of the Vfzyekhr, and in actual fact have no way to coerce them, should it come to that . . . and now with only one Spsom on the planet, the communications ability is gone . . . It’s too late, that we know this. If we had known, we could have preserved Shchifr for a complete circuit . . . we could have brought an army in here, if needed . . . all for nothing, now.”
Meure ventured, “There are two Klesh here; there are two Ler; why not them?”
“Vdhitz has said that between the ‘components’ there must be a certain empathy, a sense of sharing . . . at a threshold level. Use of the Vfzyekhr capability then increases this radically. We saw no sexual relationships suggested among the Spsom because . . . transmission so empathizes the participants that they become a social unit similar to a family . . . they tune to each other. There’s no sex in it—it occurs several steps up the hierarchy of needs, and pre-empts that, along with several other drives . . . sexual experience among the ‘components’ distorts and prohibits use of the Vfzyekhr, because sex itself is multiplex and includes negative factors that upset the resonances . . . apparently this explains the Klesh end of it, and us as well . . . the use magnifies things among the group, so that Morgin’s fear of Tenguft would no longer be rationalized away, but would dominate Morgin’s
personality. Like that. I would not attempt it with Clellendol after what I have heard . . .”
Meure nodded. “But I am twofold, unsexual, and our conflicts have been resolved, more or less . . .”
Flerdistar started violently, and said, “No!”
Vdhitz apparently understood some of what was going on, and he began making a series of gestures. Flerdistar said, “See? He says no as well. You do not know the consequences of such an act. At the least, if it worked, you would be put in direct communication with a Spsom Crew-entity. No! The potential for loss is too great. The experience could make both of you raving madmen. You and Cretus have to get along—you’ve been forced to it.”
“What is any relationship but that it’s forced to it by one circumstance or another, whatever we say. You institute selfishness into the core of your social order, Flerdistar, and the Klesh set up a racial selfishness in place of it, similarly. But Cretus was a mixed-blood, a remnant of a departed Klesh Rada. No . . . I think it’s the only course. Now ask Vdhitz how it’s done.”
Vdhitz said a few words, and then turned away. Flerdistar translated, “He says it’s just Will and Idea, and physical proximity. The Spsom unit holds hands with the Vfzyekhr in a circle . . . sometimes they just sit close together.”
Meure looked for the creature, momentarily, and found that it had not moved from where it had settled for the night: by his hip. He looked down at the ball of off-white fur. Was it sleeping? He did not, he realized, know anything about its temperament. He felt, gently, along the body, curled up in rest; it was not so different from the basic physical shape of a Human, or a Spsom: two arms, two legs, a head, a body . . . By Meure’s prodding, the Vfzyekhr stirred restlessly, and turned under Meure’s touch. Then, as if realizing something, or sensing something, it turned to face Meure, although there was not much of a face to look at. Just fur, and suggestions. Deep within the thick fur that covered the face Meure thought he caught a suggestion of something dark and shiny, like eyes, reflecting the light from deep in sockets protected by bone, flesh, fur. Something disturbing looking at him. The Vfzyekhr moved, to stand on Meure’s knees, and faced him directly; he felt a disturbing sensation of being under acute observation. What was it Vdhitz had said? Will and Idea? Will and Idea.