The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

“Let it be so, then. But in this is neither fame nor glory. Just hard strokes.”

  “But we will change it all. I understand. Forever. The rest does not matter. I see that much I have known and loved will pass from sight—and for others, too. But I also know that all we have done before has been the illusion of change, that in our hearts we were still beasts, no matter that some lived in the bellies of machines . . .”

  He looked out the window now and saw the Thlecsne Ishcht settling onto a place not far away, still clearing the ramshackle buildings under it with what seemed to be swift strokes of light. At each stroke, there was no fire, only dust and debris. The people had long since cleared that part of the city. He made a gesture curiously like a shrug, and said, “Come along, then. It’s time.”

  15

  “The art of progress is to keep intact the Eternal.”

  “Complete mystery surrounds the question of the origin of this system; any theory which satisfies the facts demands assumptions which are completely absurd.”

  —A.C.

  THEY MADE THEIR way to the ship in silence, not because they each had nothing to say, but that they each had too much to say; or that what was there would not fit the words they had to say it.

  By the time they had reached the place where the Thlecsne Ishcht was to ground itself, it had completed its clearing process and was resting lightly on the bare ground. The ship was not shut down now as the Meure Schasny of long ago had first seen it resting on the field by Kundre, on Tancred. Here, it rested lightly, its bulk not quite touching the earth. It did not move, but they could sense that there was little holding its power leashed. And along the lengths of the tubes that surrounded its basic shape, infinitesimally remote colored sparks crawled spiral paths, like burning fuses.

  It had been night; but now, far away across the flats and the river steamings, the eastern sky was beginning to color slightly. He thought, There, over the hills of Intance or Nasp, the sky will be pale over the black seas, clearer than here. And now the shimmer you always caught out of the corner of your eye will be gone. Forever. We saw it so long, not knowing what it was, that we managed to forget it. Only offworlders were troubled by it, and thought things were watching them. Something was there, that we suppressed. And like a man, leaning on a wall, we’ll fall now that the wall is gone, unless we build another one—or recover our proper balance. And in his mind, before thought, he knew which one was the only acceptable choice.

  Ferocious-appearing Spsom, dressed in what passed for uniforms among them, swarmed down the boarding-ladder, to retrieve Vdhitz, and take the still form of the Vfzyekhr from Tanguft, who had carried it to the ship, back to its own kind. Clellendol hesitated for a moment, but a moment only. He glanced at Flerdistar, at the rest of them, and climbed the ladder into the ship. The part he had come for was over. He was merely a passenger now.

  Flerdistar stepped onto the first rung, steadying herself with a thin hand on the safety rail, pausing uncertainly. She said, “I came to study the past—instead I received an answer about the future, which I neither knew existed, nor wanted to know.”

  Cretus said, “Once you learn to hear answers, you hear all kinds of answers to questions you have not yet asked; this is as it should be, but it is hard to live with at first.”

  “I did not learn the answer to my project query.”

  “You haven’t asked it plainly enough.”

  “Written history says Sanjirmil led the Warriors, as did the legends of the Warriors themselves. But through Monsalvat we suspected that this was not the truth. What was the truth, and why did it come through here?”

  “As the Cretus of old, I spent much time with the Skazenache, learning the mastery of it. Once I saw a thing I did not understand, not at all. It was so odd I memorized the settings so I could come back to it—something extremely difficult, even for a master of the instrument. Later, when I had learned to interpret what I was seeing, I turned the Skazenache to those settings again . . . and the scene was replayed.

  “. . . it was odd because after I had learned all the major part of the legends about the Warriors and the Klesh, I found that I was looking at Sanjirmil herself, at great age. But listen: she was on another world—not Dawn. And she was acting, in this scene, as if she expected that someone would be able to see her—somehow.”

  Flerdistar asked, “What . . . ?” but Cretus held up a hand, gently, to hold her question.

  “She spoke aloud, in simple Singlespeech, as if reciting. Now you will hear it from me as I-Cretus saw and heard it. When the First Ship was to have left home, Sanjirmil was the leader of a minority faction of your people who wished to exercise domination over the Humans. She was one of the elite—the flying crew, and so was not seen on the first part of the voyage. And when the mutiny occurred, and that faction stole the ship, those Ler who were left behind assumed it was she who had led them.

  “Not so. She had changed. Her views were part of a mental dysfunction caused by an overload she received as a child; and after her actions had set everything in motion beyond the point of no return, she was cured, by one who loved her greatly. The cure set her mind right again, and removed the radical view she had cultivated from her, but it also removed her ability to fly the ship. She kept to her quarters and secluded herself, doing some minor astrogating, some teaching, and trying to undermine the very thing she herself had started.

  “As she was at the age of the onset of fertility, she entered into family relationships after the manner of your people. She had her two children on the first world your people landed on. And raised them there. She led a gentle, retiring life, indeed, almost a secretive one, practicing all the virtues of the Ler and trying quietly to obviate the evil she had done so much to invent in an earlier part of her life.”

  Flerdistar said, “This modest person you are speaking of, this paragon of Ler virtues, is credited in Ler history with the invention of our own sort of evil, as a force. She is an historical character whose shadow casts itself longer than any other. She made us what we are now. And you say she recited that she retired?”

  “Did you think I would not verify all that she said? Or that I could not? It was as astounding to me as to you. And afterwards, I did verify it. I studied Sanjirmil off and on for almost ten years. I know more about her life, almost, than she did herself.

  “But of course, things do not always go as we want them to; where before she had been a Power, a shaper, in her affliction, cured she was a simple woman of the people, and the Mana was gone. She could no longer steer history. The conspiracy simmered underground, was passed from mouth to mouth, in secret covens . . . and almost a generation later, a band of desperate amateurs stole the ship and took off into space, marooning the majority faction, now colonists.

  “They took her with them, since she was the prophetess of their whole movement, the one who started it—before any of them had been born. They only knew that she was Sanjirmil the Great. But it was against her will that she went; they kidnapped her when she resisted, knowing in their hearts they could not leave without their own legendary source, knowing that they could not endure the shame of having their own prophet denounce them, perhaps even seek revenge upon them.

  “But her cure had been too complete; she proved no more able to justify the Sanjirmil of old aboard the ship again, then she had while raising her family. They had their talisman, well enough—but it was a talisman that would not accept anything short of complete surrender, and the return of the ship. They were at an impasse of the worst sort: she wouldn’t cooperate, and they couldn’t take her back, and to have killed her outright would have made them totally depraved, and to their credit, they at least saw that in that future.

  “So, on their way away outward from their place, in their rush to the darkness of the Rim, they passed a curious planetary system, with a choice of habitable worlds within it. One proved to be a gentle and pleasant world, more or less, and so they landed there, and labored for a time, to build her a house by the shore,
and left her tools, and seeds, and some animals. This world had no intelligent life, and was bare and lonely; here they could honor her with a small castle, but they could also abandon her there in good conscience, knowing she would never betray them. This world was so far out they knew it would never be found while any artifact of hers existed—they didn’t know where it was for sure, themselves. Besides, she was then Elder phase, and couldn’t have all that much time left, anyway. And so, after doing her honors, they departed, and left Sanjirmil on an uninhabited planet, whose location was not known and soon forgotten—mislaid—by its discoverers.

  “But when she had been cured, it had been complete. Sanjirmil was then, I think, probably the sanest Human or near-Human, or Ler that has ever been. Alone in a stone castle by an empty sea, caught at last by the thing she had created and then abandoned, and at last fought, she did not despair, but called on strengths she had possessed all her life. She survived. First, the first year. Then a second. Then it got a little easier; she was falling into the rhythm of the planet.

  “She expanded her little country, began exploring the land about her. She learned about certain dangerous forms of life, and how to avoid them. She took long excursions along the seashore, explored the interior. She had been overstressed, for the ship. But as a generalist, as a survivor, she was superb; she recreated a community, and all its necessary handicrafts, totally within herself. Hope she had none, but she would not give up, even where there was none to see it.

  “She lost count of the years, for she could not know what they were in the years of the home planet. It no longer mattered. Her hair was streaked with gray when they left her; it went all gray, then white. She became careful of her strength, and stayed closer to her castle. It was then that she thought something was stirring, something aware, but unseen, unknowable, something evil, something had had been, for all practical purposes, dead. At first she dismissed it as hallucination, or simple old age and loneliness. But it continued, and the impressions became stronger. It began to leave traces she could objectively measure. Even doubting herself, she devised subtle little test-traps for it. It became the major objective of what remained of her life—to prove this suspicion a real, although subtle thing, or a figment of her own failing mind and body.

  “She finally decided that whatever it was, it was real, not a phantom, and that somehow it was intelligent, powerful, and awakening. She feared it, but in a very limited way, she communicated with it; enough to hope that a day would come when someone would be able to look across time and space and see her who had set the events in motion that would lead to that person’s vision. And so she set a particular scene, when she told this whole story, so that someone would know it, no matter whether the Warriors, as they had called themselves, continued or ended. And in the end she had the victory over them, for the Warriors are indeed gone, them and their line alike, and the lie they told of her, that she was their prophet, their leader, their ideal. She told me, and I. . . .”

  Flerdistar said. “You as Cretus alone, long ago, spread the tale over Monsalvat....”

  “Edited, changed a little, embroidered to fit the people it served. . . .”

  “. . . That Sanjirmil. . . .”

  “St. Zermille, our Lady of Monsalvat.”

  ... though a Ler, had hated the Warriors and would love the victims of their persecutions.”

  “Just so.”

  “A fine tale, that, Cretus. Good for your people, and the answer I came for. All is well! But why here? What makes her important to Monsalvat?” And even as she said it, she knew. Her face shouted it. She knew.

  “They left her here, on Monsalvat. She lived in the west by the Great Ocean, in the land we call now Warvard. Not so far from the Ombur. And she awoke the Entity who still lived on Catharge . . . and told me how to recognize it, and escape its influences. It could distort space and time, but somehow it couldn’t deflect that message she arranged as one of her last acts, nor could it perceive it except dimly . . . it was through her that I disengaged, knowing that my dream could go no further as long as it was awake and alive, and that I could not reach it. . . .”

  He had let it trail off, but now he continued again, “She walked into the sea and went for a swim, and the Great Ocean took her. And the seasons and the waves and the years slowly undid what she had done there by the sea, and the traces of it grew dim, and then invisible to untrained eyes. And then they came, the Warriors and their former slaves, who built, and tore down, and built again. And governors, and colonists, and all traces of her were erased. And why should anyone have thought to look for her here? They all thought she had gone with the Warriors—but when they were taken off Dawn, no Warrior mentioned her grave, nor any memorial to her, or indeed anything of her. No—it was here she lived her last days. And so we made her a saint, and I suppose in a way, that it’s true, after all . . . in the end, a long way around, she did save us, and show us the way. For what I now reveal is not Cretus, nor Meure, but what she told me long ago—what we all must do. I have known it all this time, but could not transmit the idea of it. Now, after these final strokes—I can. And through me, she will at last expiate her crimes of centuries ago. She thought it all out—she had nothing else to do, and she was the only Ler at that time who was totally mind-clean—purged and humble. She had the clear sight that I lacked, even though I had a great dream. I was dreamer enough to recognize hers was the greater.”

  Flerdistar took an uncertain step on the ladder, words beyond her.

  He said, as if in parting, “Say these things that you have heard and seen here to your sponsors, to your people . . . that you no longer will have to probe subtle concepts and study dusty manuscripts to travel to her who was your greatest seer, but that we will bring her to you, after a time, and that our lives will change, and we all will grow strange and wonderful and we’ll look at all that went before this, here, as the initiation we had to have accomplished. Good-bye.”

  Flerdistar obeyed without thinking about it, walking up the inclined ladder into the belly of the Thlecsne Ishcht, without looking back.

  And the ladder folded back into the ship, and it was covered and the hull became smooth and without seam. It lifted, moving hardly at all at first, then faster, rotating to a different heading, orienting itself according to the unseen Captain and astrogator, rising into a sky gone rosy-fingered with the approach of dawn, yet also with that tincture of tangerine that was the mark of Monsalvat and its double star—Bitirme. Noiselessly, and the sparkles along the tubing faded, and the ship rose, and diminished, and moved away, becoming a dark smudge, a spot, and then nothing.

  It was said of the three remaining behind, by those who made it their business to watch all events in Yastian, that they remained in the cleared area for a short time, but then left. And that in the day that followed, made their way to the great docks along the south end of the foreign quarter, where they spoke with several captains, and at last went aboard a ship rigged with flowing triangular sails, and crewed by slender men who wore striped, form-fitting shirts and turbans, and whose faces were thin and skins shiny brown, identifying them as of the Radah Horisande, the dreaded pirate-mariners of Glordune.

  There were those who averred that the three were welcomed there, with the grim reserve characteristic of that Klesh Radah, and that afterwards, the Glordune ship dropped its mooring lines and began drifting down the estuary, toward the sea. And as it faded into the growing dark of evening over the marshes, that they could be seen by the rail for a long time, as if relaxing, and that strange songs floated back over the water, not the usual bloodthirsty chants attributed to the Horisande by their few survivors. These things were noted, and put away in the press of daily events, but not forgotten; they were remembered as proper portents when after many passages of the double suns across the floor of the Inner Sea, many sums of such passages, Cretus the Scribe returned to Kepture, last of all the continents. But that is another tale, which may be summarized by the saying, there came a great chang
e from the East. Which finished its course in Kepture, where it started, and passed onward, to all men and salamanders and gnomes.

  1 One times fourteen to the second power. Ler use a fourteen-base number system.

  2 The drama referred to was a ler adaptation of the tale of David and Bathsheba, with the names changed to ler names. Hurthayyan was Uriah the Hittite. She could from this identification find the equal of David/ Damvidhlan, but in her case, Bathsheba was not a person but rather a sense of regard or admiration.

  3 Literally, “illegitimate trash”; loonh is an intensifier.

  4 An “overshirt.” This was an ankle-length garment superficially resembling a long shirt, but whose neck opening never extended down past the navel. A garment of general use.

  5 Span is a period of twenty-four years. Spans (age, pure time) and phases (body development) were not synchronized, but their interplay determined key events in one’s life. Adolescents twenty-four to thirty were considered “provisional adults,” even though yet adolescent in body, infertile.

  6 This would have the same significance as ten to a decimal user.

  7 Ler names in this story will be given untranslated, except for special cases.

  8 Difficult to translate. Hanh means last, and dhain (pronounced “thine”) is a word describing the sex act, but utterly without the connotations of vulgarity or hostility common to such terminology in English. It is purely descriptive. “Fun” might be closer to its real meaning than any other word we might use here.

  9 Literally, “wise person,” but in actuality a hermit.

  10 Current political subdivision, equivalent to a large province. Regions might be geographic or ethnic in organizational basis.