“Or so the theory goes,” said Megan dryly into her bowl of stew.
Susannah smiled at Stavros’s enthusiasm. “Hot and cold?” she joked.
Stavros frowned.
Megan chortled. “What do you think this is, the Ritz?”
Stavros looked away from Susannah’s smile and eyed Megan critically. “How can you stand to eat that stuff?”
Megan grunted. Her mouth was full of soybean stew. She lowered her spoon and swallowed. “Didn’t used to bother you before you went native on us.” She looked to Susannah. “Wait till he gets one of those expeditions where you have to wear a mask and analyze everything you touch.”
“I’ve never done one of those either,” said Susannah. She stirred the fire gingerly with a long metal spike she’d found lying on the mats. In the rekindled blaze, she recognized it as a piton scavenged from Clausen’s climbing gear. She set it aside guiltily. She assessed the diminishing fuel supply, counted three dung cakes off the stack and fed them into the fire. “Listen, about this weather. Is anybody besides me getting the impression that it’s worse than usual out there?”
Megan balanced her bowl on her knee, a mild gleam coming into her eye.
“We haven’t really been here long enough to tell,” Stavros muttered.
“But I mean, what do the Sawls have to say about it?” Susannah pursued.
Stavros glanced around the high-domed cave as if searching its unlit recesses for someone to call him away on urgent business. He specifically avoided Megan’s smirk. “They say it’s worse than usual,” he allowed finally.
“They’re worried because their predictions have been going wrong,” stated Megan with an assured wave of her spoon.
Stavros bridled. “They haven’t been making any.”
Megan turned to Susannah. “The priests gather regularly. I’ve timed them. Every twenty-nine and a quarter hours.”
“Once a cycle,” Stavros added sullenly.
“Each time it’s a different cave mouth—maybe they’re making sure the whole population knows they’re on the job—and they look out at the storm and confer at length, and then…”
“Then nothing.” Stavros was finally lured into the debate. “No prediction. If the weather were going to change, they’d make a prediction. What’s got them worried, Meg, is that it’s not changing.”
Megan gave a dubious snort. “Another chicken-or-the-egg dispute,” she said to Susannah. “I still say it’d give their folks more confidence in them if they presented a positive front.”
Stavros made a vehement gesture with his wrench and nearly lost his balance. “It’s not some kind of cover-up, Meg! The priests have a responsibility to let the population know what the weather’s going to do. The FoodGuild is getting worried about their supplies. Rationing procedures were announced last cycle.”
“All the more reason to eat the food we brought with us,” murmured Megan, dipping her spoon into her bowl.
Susannah frowned gently. “Is it really as bad as that? Even if the dry supplies run low, there’re still the dairy herds, and the fowl.”
“And the mushroom cellars,” Megan added with gloomy humor. “Think what Emil could have done with those! Rock-fungus quiche, the geologist’s dream meal!”
Susannah smiled patiently. “I was talking about a more general anxiety… that sort of manic energy that hides a desperation you’re trying to pretend you don’t feel?”
Stavros rose abruptly from his crouch. “You want psychology, try Dr. Levy here. She’s got lots of theories.” He brandished his pipe construction. “I deal with what the words mean. One by one. Period.”
Susannah flicked Megan a knowing eye. The anthropologist was chasing the last morsels of rehydrated bean curd across the bottom of her dish with utter concentration. Susannah sighed. “Okay, I get it. The disciplines are at war again, right?”
Her spoon halfway to her mouth, Megan looked up at Stavros. “If the priests aren’t making predictions, what’s keeping the gamblers so busy?”
The linguist drummed his foot against the matting. “That is a side issue, Megan.”
She shrugged. “So that’s where we disagree.”
“Gamblers?” asked Susannah.
Megan tossed a nod in Susannah’s direction and a sly grin at Stavros. “She’s hopelessly naive, but we love her anyway, eh?”
Stavros gave a dark growl of exasperation, snatched up Megan’s lantern and stalked away from the fire, wrench and faucet clenched tight in hand. He set the lantern down along the wall where the water pipes angled and dropped into a square stone trough. An impromptu sleeping platform filled the back of the cavern, constructed from disassembled crates. Damp blankets strung on lengths of climbing rope provided a minimum of privacy.
Over the ensuing grinding of the wrench against the hard ceramic, Susannah cocked her head at Megan. “Explain?”
Megan chewed for a moment, swallowed, then took a breath. “Well, it all started when I dared to suggest that the Sawls and their priests have no special gift for weather prediction beyond your usual rural body of empirical knowledge. As in, for instance, the farmer’s almanacs that are common to agricultural societies.”
Susannah considered. “Seems reasonable, so long as you’ll admit they have a stunning record of success so far.”
“Yes, until the past week. You see, what they do have a gift for is observation. They’re objective, they record assiduously, they apply the proper data when a known circumstance recurs. Those priests’d make great lab techs. But to listen to Stavros, you’d think there was magic involved!”
“Intuition!” Stavros roared from the far end of the cavern. The racket of the wrench increased.
“Get back here and present your case yourself, if you’re going to eavesdrop!” Megan leaned toward Susannah, shaking her head. “It’s weird,” she whispered. “The lad has become a total literalist. He’s so involved in his ‘absolute meaning’—like he said, each word, one by one—that he takes the whole sentence merely as the sum of its parts. He’s forgotten how to read between the lines.” Megan tucked her thick legs up under her as she hitched herself closer to the fire. “It’s like this: you ask a Sawl how come he knew it was going to rain. Well, he says, the priests said so. But then he says that it was obvious anyway because the hot winds—you recall we had hot winds for about an hour?—the hot winds are the battle fires of Lagri, and Valla Ired always responds with the same strategic defense, that is, by throwing an ocean at him.” She sat back to let the image sink in.
“Rather poetical, don’t you think?” Susannah ventured.
“Exactly! But Stavros, he says, right, and then what…? As if this made some kind of literal sense, like there were actual gods out there trying to brain each other with thunderbolts!” Megan threw her hands into the air. “He’s letting metaphor become reality!”
“And your interpretation?”
Megan spread her palms. “It’s what we’ve seen on a dozen different worlds, including our own. Lagri and Valla Ired are god constructs of the sort that primitives have always invented to explain natural phenomena. As for this business of predictions…” Megan cleared her throat, and Susannah knew she was about to be dealt a full-fledged lecture. “Look at the evidence. The RangerGuild has this remarkable system of lookouts and couriers to provide round-the-clock vigilance. Then there’s that Sawl ability to mobilize on the instant that so astounded us during the Lander evacuation. So. When the earliest signs of a change appear, too faint for our urban senses to detect, the rangers note them, relay them, report them to the priests, who base their prediction on their study of the collected lore of generations of devoted weather-watchers. It’s brilliant, but it’s not magic. Even the priests don’t pretend it’s magic. You should see them hot and heavy over their books out there in the cave mouths!” Megan dusted her hands together as if the issue was closed, then added, “They wouldn’t be such inveterate gamblers if they thought they were always going to be right… right?”
&
nbsp; “I guess,” replied Susannah neutrally, still in the dark about the gambling.
Stavros returned to the fire with a determined air, wiping his hands on his shirttail. He knelt to fish among Megan’s photographs, pulled one out and passed it across the firepit to Susannah. She held it up to the firelight. It was a detail of two frieze figures facing each other with great formality, as if in ritual preparation for hand-to-hand combat. One was thick and helmeted, with finlike protrusions curling up from rump and shoulders. It was terra-cotta-colored, with traces of polychrome on its squarish visor. The other figure was smoothly contoured, carved in a cool white stone shot with green and lavender.
Susannah traced a finger around the print. “Ferocious, aren’t they.”
Stavros edged minutely closer. “You know what ‘Lagri’ means?” he asked as if laying out some mystery for her. When she shook her head and looked encouragingly interested, he stood and came around the fire to crouch behind her. He reached gingerly over her arm to touch the head of the red figure. “It means ‘drought,’ as best as I can tell.” His fingertip slipped along the serrations of the brighter fins, a gesture so like a caress that Susannah felt suddenly distracted by his nearness. “Flames,” he said intensely. “See them?” His finger shifted. “The white one is Valla Ired, which means ‘the ocean bottom.’ ” He stood and looked down at her. “Interesting?”
Susannah kept her eyes on the photograph, lest they betray her distraction. “All the gods’ names have literal meanings, then?”
He moved away, into the shadows. “They’re actually goddesses, as it turns out, and there are only the two of them: Valla and Lagri. The Sisters, they call them.”
Susannah raised an eyebrow at the fiercely combatant figures. “Sisters? Some family.”
“Perhaps I should investigate the Sawls’ views on sibling rivalry,” Megan commented.
“I think. I’ve detected a third figure,” Stavros continued, beginning to pace. Susannah could feel his tension radiating like heat behind her. The deeper he got into his subject, the more defensive he would become, as if sure that no one could care to listen, but unable to stop himself from telling them anyway. He’s so used to people thinking he’s crazy, she decided.
“She shows up with some consistency,” he went on, “but only as a victim, never as a deity. Often she appears as a multitude, especially in the big friezes, like those in the Meeting Hall. But the Sawls seem to have no distinct name for her.”
“Two goddesses. Not much of a pantheon.”
“He is right about the number,” Megan offered. “That’s all I’ve come up with as well. The Sawls appear to be ditheistic, a first in my experience.”
Stavros paced out of the shadow and hunkered down across the firepit from Susannah. She saw the flames reflected in his eyes and for a moment wondered if Megan was right after all to worry about his sanity.
“We all have our own methods of getting at the truth,” he began with quiet assurance. “The only way I can approach a total understanding of a language is by setting aside all, and I mean all, personal or cultural preconceptions. I must try to see this world the way the Sawls see it. I must learn to think the way they do.” He paused, looked down, then fixed Susannah with a challenging stare. “If the Sawls say that the rains come out of Valla Ired’s arsenal, then so do I.”
Susannah leaned to the side on one elbow, backing off from his stare. “This is a methodological skirmish,” she decreed.
This time, Megan resisted. “Wrong! When you do things his way, you throw objective distance to the winds! And you know what happens? You wind up, as he has, selling the Sawls short with all this talk of magic and superstition. Because, you know, it’s all a kind of literary exercise for the Sawls, this speaking in poetry and metaphor, like most of the superstitions we still give lip service to. They know the weather is just the weather, but to personify it with names and histories promotes a richer understanding of their place in Nature. Mythologies impose order on Nature’s chaos.” She smiled and shook a finger at the young linguist as if he were one of her students. “They make damn good stories, too, and the Sawls adore telling stories. Did the ancient Greeks, your own ancestors, actually believe that the pictures they saw among the stars represented the physical bodies of the gods and heroes they named them for?”
Susannah chuckled, but Stavros remained unsmiling. “The ancient Greeks knew that gods walked the earth,” he asserted.
“Knew?”
He nodded with dark conviction.
Megan glanced at Susannah. “See what I mean?”
Susannah sat up, brushing her long hair behind her. “But aren’t you both saying the same thing in the long run? That the Sawls have developed a psychic defense to cope with the weather that goes hand in hand with their physical defense?”
“Maybe,” allowed Megan.
“No,” said Stavros. But behind his stubborn gaze, Susannah saw a young man pleading for her understanding. “Megan assumes the Sawls have the same relationship to superstition as she does,” he pursued. “But there’s a gulf of difference between believing and knowing.” He rose and stood for a moment as if daring them to continue the debate, then slouched back into the darkness to the more comfortable company of his pipes and sink. He moved the lantern to a shallow ledge above the stone trough and bent over to rub grease into the pipe threads. He fitted the faucet into place and rotated it cautiously. “Should have water any minute,” he called.
Susannah smiled, mostly to herself, and stretched her legs in front of her, brushing straw splinters from her therm-suit. “So what’s all this about gambling, Meg?” She fed another dung cake into the fire.
Megan’s gesture would have been familiar to her Jewish grandmother. “Haven’t you noticed? These people will gamble over anything!” She tossed a covert glance into the shadows, then leaned forward. “But their real passion is gambling over the weather. Sure, they hold ceremonies and they carve their gods—that is, goddesses-into every surface available, but they don’t pray. What do they do instead? Invoke their luck. The traditional greeting, ‘Rhe khem,’ means ‘Your luck.’ The appropriate response, ‘Khem rhe,’ means ‘Luck to you.’ ”
“Luck can also mean fortune, as in ‘Be fortunate,’ ‘Be well,’ perhaps asking the goddesses for good fortune. That’s a kind of prayer.”
Megan shook her head. “It’s the element of chance, of the random occurrence, that’s important here. I ask you, how devout can they be? They’ve got pools, odds, the whole setup, a mini-Vegas without the glitz.”
Susannah laughed. “Farmers have been gambling on the weather for eons!”
“Not so formally,” said Megan. “You see, the wagers are laid whenever the priests promise an official prediction. I mean, goods change hands at the drop of a hat around here!”
“The drop of a priest’s hat.” Susannah’s grin was fond. “You sound a little shocked, Meg. I thought I was the innocent one.”
“Well, I suppose I am a little shocked, though not half as much as Stav is. He’s got the Sawls so romanticized he can’t even deal with the notion of a nation of gamesters. And listen to this.” She paused dramatically. “Guess who holds the bets.”
“Do tell.”
“Now this is no idle gossip,” Megan reproved. “This is serious.”
“I’m listening… seriously.”
“The priests’ apprentices.”
“Hold the bets?”
Meg nodded significantly. “They take note of the stakes when the bets are laid, then settle with the winners when the priests send them around to announce the predictions. Not only is this gambling officially sanctioned by the priesthood, it’s administered by them as well.”
“I’m confused. They bet on the prediction or on the actual weather?”
“Both! All Sawls know enough weather lore to make educated guesses based on the reported signs. So they bet on what the prediction will be, then there’s another round of betting on the final outcome, how the weather
actually turns out.”
“Whew!” Susannah was starting to giggle. “Do the ’prentices take commission?”
Stavros let out a yell from the sink. “We’ve got a trickle here!”
“Tips,” confided Megan, frowning.
The giggle burst into a belly laugh. “Liphar!” Susannah choked out.
Megan’s nod was insistently severe.
“Our good friend Liphar,” Susannah repeated between gasps, “is a numbers runner!”
“I fail to see what’s so funny,” Megan replied stuffily.
“Water!” Stavros exulted, as a coughing gurgle echoed from the dark end of the cavern. “Water! It works!”
“You guys leave me any supper?” called McPherson from the entrance. She limped stiffly to the firepit, kicked a blanket closer to the flame and dropped onto it carelessly. Her therm-suit dripped wet ocher mud onto the matting. Her round face was drawn but for the high color of exertion spotting her cheeks. “Who’s a numbers runner?”
The mood of manic cheer died like a bad joke, but Susannah obligingly explained.
The pilot gave an offhand shrug. “Oh yeah? Glad someone’s clearing a profit around here.”
Stavros shut down the faucet and brought the lantern over to the fire. With unusual gentleness, he said, “Never mind, Ron. Just keep thinking of the fortune CONPLEX is paying into your account back home.”
“Won’t do me no good if I’m stuck here forever and ever.” She ran her fingers through her sodden curls, fluffed them a little, then slumped down listlessly.
“Did you spot Weng on your way in?” asked Megan.
McPherson shook her head.
“Where does she go when she’s not here?” Susannah marveled.
Megan waved a hand. “The realm of the abstract. She’ll be here soon enough. The Commander always comes up for meals.”
“She just never eats anything,” McPherson muttered.
The Wave and the Flame Page 13