The Femmedarme Magister allowed herself a rueful smile. "Let me point out that we have discovered it. We've just discovered it late. Shall I name you four factors that contributed to our ignorance?" Hardly pausing for permission, she continued.
"First, we haven't been looking for declines in population or even in birth rates. And we've been busy focusing on the Testing and the Protocols to the exclusion of almost everything else. Second, Lin-ci is right. Even if we had noted the declines, we wouldn't be worried. We've had more extreme global dips before, several times, and no serious consequences. Third, like you've started to understand just this evening, the most marked decline is within a discrete population, with no corollaries that I can find with any other group.
"Finally, and most important," said Magister Lutu, "there was a shake-up three years ago in the programming of the education sector of the Size Bureau. If you'll remember, half-trap web decisions in at least seven satrapies drove statistical teams crazy and put whole blocks of information in limbo for months. The dispute was, I believe, over the definition of the word, 'student.' It's clarified now and the bureaucracy has resumed its intrepid operation. But I suspect that the figures we presently see attached to schooling citizens may not until recently have been made official. Over the years we may well have been looking at other figures entirely, figures that did not reflect a decline. We can probably make a more accurate assessment if we measure specific age-groups instead of 'schooling citizens.' That's a calculation that, believe it or not, has never been a part of Size Center's population program. I've got my staff at work on that now."
Lin-ci Win was leaning forward. "Harriet," she said, "let us see the global figures for population since the year 2000 of the Common Era." She pushed back her cowl to reveal close-shaven ebony hair, then looked at her Kanshoumates. "We need to determine if any particular decrease occurred among school children over those years. As opposed to overall population."
They studied the turn-of-the-millennium figures from large cities and small hamlets, for pre-adolescents and trade-school enrollees, all cross-referenced and compared internally by sex, ethnic background, age, and Nurturance Quotient. Set against the decline of overall population during those years, the school figures were boringly consistent. Inquiries into manner-of-death statistics for the present decline yielded no reported increase, much less any pattern, in the incidence of illness, accident, or suicide among children or youth. The Magisters worked on -- digging, speculating, searching for some key to a nagging puzzle. An hour later, Yotoma closed down the flatfields and Zude lit another cigarillo.
"We need more information," Lin-ci Win muttered, rubbing the stubble on her head. "Flossie, your analysis team there in Tripoli needs to lead the way with what it's already uncovered. Then we can model your paths. I'll send you the best we've got in systems design to help spark the process."
Zude risked an earlier familiarity. "Lin-ci," she said, "we could also use some of your trained clairsentients, operators who can read others' feelings. I'll bet my pension that our best leads will come from school children themselves -- that is, if some significant number of such children are curling up to die."
"Curling up to -- that's not what's happening, Zella,"
Lin-ci began. Then, in an uncharacteristic display of doubt, she looked at Yotoma and back to Zude. "That's not what's happening. Is it?"
Zude prematurely smothered her cigarillo. "What else can it be? Do three million school kids just disappear from the face of the Earth? Or, allowing for older schoolers and normal deaths among our youngest age group, even two million? Or a million?"
Yotoma maintained an enigmatic silence. Lin-ci Win stared at Zude. "You're right, of course. Whatever is happening, children and adolescents themselves will be best able to identify it." She scratched her head and then drew her neck cowl up, resuming her nun-like appearance. "I am unfortunately distant from any small ones except the three in our household. They seem fine . . . ." The Magister subsided into a reverie. Then suddenly she uttered an oath from an obscure language and leaned toward Flossie. "My chosen grandaughter. She's six. She told me the other day of a little friend who had died. When I asked her how that had happened she said, 'I don't know. She just decided to die.'"
The three Magisters looked at each other. Then Zude stood up in her holopocket. She stretched her arms above her head. "Well, we may be making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Like as not, we'll discover tomorrow some rational explanation for it all." She looked at the other two and they looked back at her in silence.
Zude sank into her chair again. "It's no good, is it?" she admitted. "I can't talk myself out of this. Can't shake this feeling, this crazy feeling. . . ."
Yotoma did not speak. She shook her head.
As if by common consent, and without another word, all three women nodded in courteous farewell to one another. Then their respective Peace Rooms redeemed their holo-images from the ether and each was left alone, staring at the emptiness that had held her colleagues.
* * * * * * *
As each Magister returned to the duties of her own tri-satrapy, Jezebel Stronglaces in Bombay had just learned of the bailiwick outbreaks. In the dying sunlight of Dhamni's courtyard she sat, in open trance.
"Jez!" Dicken's voice prodded her gently. "Are you back?"
Jezebel moved her body in small but deliberate stretches. "Just visiting," she sighed, "with some snakes and eagles. And," she added with a slight frown, "with . . . a calico cat, I think . . . ." Her eyes were fixed on the garden wall beyond the boontree root, even as she spoke to the woman on the bench beside her. "Can you hear the singing, Dicken?"
"Singing?"
"Yes." Jez's eyes were soft. "Lots of children . . . singing."
Dicken closed her eyes. "I'm not hearing them." Then she whispered, "Love, Dhamni and I are on flatfone with some women in Hanoi. Do you want to join us?"
Jez shook her head. "Later," she said. "There's something here, something I must do . . . . " She felt Dicken slip away from her, back into the house.
The song called to her, its cadences distant and strange but, like the chantings of her ancestors, also hauntingly familiar. She sank again into her expanded awareness.
She could not explain to Dicken just yet the summons of the sounds and images that flooded her mind . . . the tiny flashes of incandescent light, this song, the calico cat, and the image half a world away of the figure in a Vigilante uniform who could only be one woman . . . .
* * * * * * *
Later that night in her darkened office, Zude stood with her hand on the back of the taxidermed calico cat. "If you were here," she said softly, "I'd ask you to sleep on my bed tonight, and walk with me in my dreams." The yellow eyes flickered, and Zude cocked her head, urging her ears toward words just a shiver beyond their grasp. She listened in vain.
Reluctantly, she withdrew her hand from the crouching cat's body and stepped to the depaqued window that framed her city. Below her, the lights lay like jewels strewn by a bountiful god, each sparkling its separate story, each rich with life. She followed the illuminated paths of cushcars and the city's Rolling Beltway. In the urban glow she could make out a Vigilante gert descending from the Shrievalty's roof, dipping lightly toward the streets. Were the two women called to some small crisis, some domestic strife, perhaps? At least the Los Angeles Bailiwick had not erupted into violence today . . . the gert was not headed for clean-up or incident inquiry. Maybe, she thought, the two Kanshou were simply going off-duty, home to their private lives.
Zude remembered painfully her first assignment as a newly graduated Kanshou: Amah Lieutenant Adverb and two companion Foot-Shrieves of Calcutta's Maiden Precinct were dispatched to a rapidly escalating barroom brawl in which several of the combatants slashed at each other with switchblades. The Kanshou quelled the row but could not save the life of one of the men. Zude had almost disarmed one assailant only to feel him break free of her hold at the last moment. She watched helplessly as he drove hi
s knife deep into his adversary's solar plexus. She was a full-fledged peacekeeper; but what peace, she asked herself now, had she brought to those two men who so fiercely wanted to kill each other? Would their lives have been different if they had had some magical surgery, some medical protocols that might have divested them of their violence?
She leaned against the window's edge. What if all those sordid human urges could be physiologically controlled? If the protofiles were right, and if they had their way, men like those in the bar might never strike at each other in the first place.
"It's still too big a price to pay," she muttered aloud. "Let them die in their own blood if necessary, but let them die untampered with and free.
At that moment, a ripple of light caught her eye. The crystal ballbakers lying uncovered on her desk were pulsing, perhaps stirred to life by the ambient light of the city -- or perhaps roused by a sinister resistance to her own thoughts. She moved toward them and bent close in order to observe their palpitation. "You beauties," she told them with reluctant admiration, "between you and the Protocols, men are righteously scared these days."
Carefully, she picked up the crystals by their tiny wooden handles and held them high at arm's length. They continued to quiver, forming a glowing vortex that encased her hands and drew her seductively toward a less substantial realm. She stood fascinated, watching their rhythm. "Somewhere on Little Blue," she murmured hazily, "there's a boy who sooner or later could turn your power to a far better use than burning off men's balls." She spoke as in a dream. "But we may never see his genius because we'll cripple him before he's able to grow up.
He may be out there right now," she added, looking toward the sprawling city, "somewhere in Los Angeles--"
"He's out there, all right," came a familiar voice, as if from her gleaming hands, "but not in Los Angeles. He's in Arabia."
"Jezebel!" Zude called frantically, "Where are you?" She responded not so much to the strange words as to the voice that spoke them.
"I just found him day before yesterday," the voice continued, calmly, "and I must still believe, Zude, that he will discover his creative genius only because he will no longer be violent. He will have had the surgery."
Zude was speechless. Unwittingly, she dropped the crystals onto her desk -- and broke their thrall.
"Jezebel!" she whispered. When Jez's voice spoke no more, Zude snatched up the crystals again, willing the return of her past lover's presence. Yet the ballbakers too were dark and inert. Ruefully, she thought of Bosca -- if she had some of the training that Bosca promised her, she might be able to reignite the ballbakers and retrieve the sound of Jezebel's voice.
Zude lowered herself into her chair, pushing the crystals aside, trying hard to recall the words that Jezebel had said in those surreal moments. "Where are you tonight," she cried, "Jezebel, my witch?"
Still no answer.
Zude's fingers clasped the unpartnered unicorn earring. Unbidden tears rolled down her cheeks. The love and anger, the kinship and the betrayal -- all the buried memories welled up from years past and rained their desolation upon her.
In that moment she opened the gates to more than her longing for Jezebel, letting a sea of conflicts and crises flood into her awareness. She burned with rage against habitantes willing to take worshipping citizens hostage in a shul, raged equally against protofiles who would deliberately cripple such habitantes. She despised any women who would use the ballbakers to wreak vengeance upon men. She despaired anew of any answer to the violence from both sexes that assailed her world.
She rose and paced, clutching fistsful of her hair tight against her scalp, attempting to relieve the growing pressures there. She tried to invoke a thing that would lift her heart, her chosen family: "Ria, Kayita, Regina, Enrique!" but their names as she spoke them fell lifeless upon the air. Her pride in the Kanshoubu, her respect for her Kanshoumates -- all burst into fleeting flame and fell to Earth in ashes. Her anguish drained the joy from every corner of her life.
And now, she noted wryly, even the lights of her city's homes were going out . . . steadily . . . one-by-one, leaving dark places especially deep and ominous tonight.
Zella Terremoto Adverb stood, cynical and immobile, inwardly spiralling down into a place she had rarely allowed to overtake her sensibilities, into deepening desolation, into barren plains devoid of meaning where no hope could dawn. She sank again into her chair. She had never before uttered the words that crossed her lips.
"I give up," she whispered, and stared into space.
The ballbakers began pulsing again. Listlessly, Zude picked them up, then held them as before. She wondered, wretchedly, if those tiny crystals could kill. Her hands began glowing again, in that vortex of flickering brightness. She swallowed hard.
"That's good," she heard in the light that enfolded her hands. The voice was high and lilting, almost frivolous. This was not Jezebel.
Zude's fingers, holding the ballbakers tightly, began to tremble. "Who are you?" she rasped, belligerently.
"You will name me 'Swallower.'"
"Swallower?"
"Bosca will explain."
The voice had a tinkle to it. Groping for some assurance of control, Zude raised the crystals higher.
"Magister Adverb," the Swallower lilted, "I am here to guide you in your coming changes. Or am I too early? Do you prefer to wallow further in your pain?"
Zude's whole body broke into a prickly sweat. "Whoever you are, I don’t want—"
"What do you want? That's the only question."
Zude let the sudden tears fall without inhibition. "I want . . . I want so much," she whispered helplessly. "I want to see animals every day . . . horses and dogs and snakes and birds and mosquitos! I want a solution to the Protocols, one that won't trample anybody's rights, but . . ." her voice broke, " . . . but one that does give us a more peaceful world!" She rested her elbows on the desk, balancing the glowing crystals. "And," she added softly, "I want to see her again . . . Jezebel."
The illumination around her hands intensified.
"Then your work," said the Swallower, "is to move toward joy. Your work is to visualize more peace with no one's rights denied. Your work is to live as if any day now you will see all the animals again . . . and Jezebel, too."
"My work, you genie," Zude snapped, trying to hold the ballbakers steady, "or whatever you are . . . my work is to protect this planet and its people, my work is to put my body in harm's way if necessary to stop anything that could hurt them! My work is to fight for justice and freedom—"
"Your work is far more difficult than fighting," interrupted the Swallower.
Zude felt on the verge of throwing the ballbakers to the floor. "I'm too busy," she roared, "to spend time in fantasies!"
"Then you are too busy to learn your true destiny!"
Zude froze.
The sphere of light that encased her hands burned with a low incandescent heat. "Here is your path of change, Zella Terremoto Adverb!" the Swallower announced. "You have been a woman of action. Now you will become a woman of vision."
Barely breathing, Zude waited for the Swallower to say more. Instead, she heard again from the dimming light of the crystals the one voice that would always lift her heart.
Jezebel's words were filled with truth and adoration. Zude took them with her into the night: "To this, my love," Jez commanded, "you must surrender."
EARTHKEEP CHRONOLOGY
Common Era Date
2003
World Health Organization announces that alternative and complementary health practices lend hope for long life to persons of HIV-positive status. Deaths from Virus I (HIV) balloon in Indonesia, Bengal Bay, and Hong Kong as a result of contaminated blood supplies from the 1990's.
2004
Pan-European medical establishment announces first truly effective vaccine (Vaccine I) against Virus I, to be available immediately.
2005
Flossie YotomaLutu is born in the Sudan, fifty miles from the White N
ile River.
2006
Precipitous emergence of mutant virus (Virus II) from the Virus I vaccine.
2007
Beginning of decade of escalating natural cataclysms, such as spikes in global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, famine, malaria, rivers poisoned by acid rain. China, India, and southeast Asia are especially stricken.
2008
Effective vaccine (Vaccine II) against Virus II is announced.
2010
Emergence from Vaccine II of a new strain of drug-resistant virus (Virus III).
2012
Vaccine III against Virus III is announced.
2014
Emergence of new viral mutation (Virus IV) from Vaccine III.
2015
Global riots against medical establishment take hundreds of lives.
2018
Global crusade to inoculate every citizen against Virus IV with Vaccine IV, the "vaccine to end all vaccines," which has been tested extensively on cloned animals.
2019
Widespread drought resulting from ecocide and global warming sends masses of starving people northward from Central and South America into southwestern United States. The defensive response of the U.S. military includes releasing upon the invading people swarms of Culex tarsalis mosquitoes carrying an influenza virus against which its own troops are inoculated. Tens of thousands die.
2020
The Kanshou (Earthkeep) Page 21