by Ian Stewart
“Could you have stopped anybody hurting it if they were stronger than you?” the child asked, appearing interested in the conversation for the first time since it had started. “I could not help my grenvil. They burned it with a blowtorch.” The tears increased their flow; her whole body was shaking. “They . . . they tied me to a chair. I could do nothing. And if I could have tried to help my pet, they would have burned me.”
“No!” cried Sam, discovering that his self-control was more brittle than he had thought. “That’s impossible! You must be mistaken!” Oh, Cherisher help her. Now he saw the extent of the child’s lifesoul damage in all its spiritual deformity. It was far, far worse than it had first seemed. Far, far worse than he had feared.
The Neanderthal girl, a child of seven, was lying. And it was a wicked lie. He made a mental note to find out from the querist just what had really happened to trigger such a malicious accusation. But now he had to put the session back on course. How could he explain? Ah . . .
“What you tell me was done is contrary to the Memeplex, Leaves. The most important things in the world are tolerance, love, peace, unity, and harmony among all sentient races.”
The child was unimpressed by the logic. “But a grenvil is only an animal. The Memeplex does not apply to animals.”
“That’s true . . . but although a grenvil is not sentient, Leaves, any harm done to your pet would also be harm done to you. There is no way that a true servant of Unity could torture a harmless animal, but even if they could, they would never do so in front of someone who loved it.”
“Then . . . those priests were not true servants of Unity,” said the child, wiping her streaming eyes on her arm.
“You must have misunderstood what they were doing,” said Sam. “I’m sure of it. I promise you that I will find out the truth, and reveal it to you when next we meet.”
The girl sniffed and hung her head. “I am a child. I was there when my pet was killed, but I am merely a child, so I count for nothing. You did not even know it had happened. But you are a priest. So . . . I must be wrong.”
Sam observed wryly that for a seven-year-old she had a cutting sense of sarcasm. “Leaves, believe me, I will ask my superiors, and find out the truth, and explain it to you.”
“And will you . . . will you also find out the truth about my . . . my mother? And my father?” she asked, now sobbing openly. “I do not know how they died, or where, but I know that they did. A priest told me.” The tawny eyes opened wide; the mouth curled in a snarl. “I saw the priests take my parents away. . . . I think the priests killed them, just like they . . . they killed my grenvil.”
It was a reasonable enough conclusion, given the girl’s twisted logic. If the priests could torture her pet before her eyes—not to mention the effect on her empathic sense—they were capable of anything. So, if her parents had disappeared, then of course a priest had killed them. Probably by a similar method. It was a child’s logic, based on circumstance, not facts. But it was terribly seductive.
At least he now knew where to start. The session had not, after all, been a dead loss. He would ask permission to consult the archives and find out what had really happened to the girl’s parents. Perhaps they were still alive but had been sent elsewhere and she had not been told. Or, if they truly were dead, he could find out how and where and when. And finally, he could also see a point of leverage, a way to get inside that ugly-beautiful leonine head of hers.
He would have to find out the truth about the grenvil and convince her that it was the truth. Then, by extension, she would be more likely to believe what he told her about her parents. And then the healing could begin.
Dry Leaves Fall Slowly was going to be a very difficult client. Every time she had opened her mouth, the lies (call them ‘confusions’; euphemisms sometimes help) had gotten worse. But she was young, and something terrible had surely happened. He wondered what it had been. His outrage at her lies disappeared beneath a wave of affection. Fall had lost her parents, so he, Sam, would become a substitute. A poor substitute, he knew, but better than none.
He had found his true calling.
He reached for her hand again, and this time she did not pull back. He felt terrible, but above all he felt sympathy. And the child was a Neanderthal, with that spooky sense of empathy that they all seemed to have, and she knew exactly how he felt—and responded.
He held her, and her tears renewed. But she clung to him as if he were all that existed in the whole world. And, after a time, she drifted off into an undisturbed sleep.
Let the querists make of that what they wished.
As they had done for a hundred thousand generations, the Huphun broodmothers lined up at starset to welcome home their young, spreading their wings to display their homing symbols in a riot of color. But after the arrival of the aliens, the happy event inspired only mind-numbing fear.
When will it stop? When?
Each evening, the strangers randomly chose one section of spittle nests, the Huphun equivalent of a city block, and walled it off from its neighbors using opaque, impenetrable fields of force. Within the protection of the field, they went about their evil work.
The forcewalls stretched a hundred feet outward from the cliff and stopped. They did not prevent the young from seeing their mothers, displaying beside the home nest. The walled-off section was open to anything that flew.
As long as it was a returning fledgling. When the first force fields went up, several adult Huphun had flown out into the canyon to find out what was happening inside the walls. But as they crossed the line of the wall, something plucked them from the sky and dashed them against the rocks. By the strange way that the light nearby was bent, forming a momentary streak like faint, curdled smoke, the Huphun deduced that the aliens were in possession of tractor beams as well as forcewalls.
The Huphun quickly found out what was happening in the walled-off section, and it terrified them. They had to listen for hours to the cries of the trapped mothers. They could not cover their hearing buds; they could not remove themselves from the vicinity, because their own brood were making their evening return to the warmth of the nest. They had to stay and listen, however distressing the sounds might be.
And at starrise, the mothers removed the spittle plugs from their nest openings and looked out to greet the new day, knowing the scene that would await them. The forcewalls had vanished. All that remained were mothers, flattened against the cliff, solidified by the cold of the deep night. And pathetic corpses of fledglings, scattered obscenely at the base of the cliff.
The Huphun knew what was happening inside the forcewalls. Oh, yes. What they still did not know was why this was being done to them.
And now it was happening again. The carnage had resumed every evening since the aliens arrived. Eleven consecutive starsets of unparalleled horror.
Why are they torturing us?
When broodmother PinkStripedLozenge saw the forcewall forming around her, she knew she was going to die a terrible death—but that was not her greatest fear. Over and over again, until her vocal organs were torn and inflamed and her voice was hoarse, she screeched warnings to her approaching young.
“Not here! Not me! To the nest! To the nest!”
The noise of panic-stricken mothers was the worst thing she had ever heard. And through it all, the same questions beat in her head: Why, why, why? What have we done to suffer such pain? Whom have we ever harmed? Why have the Wings of the World exposed us to this atrocity?
She knew that even if her fledglings had obeyed her commands, it would have been useless. The young did not know how to close the nest opening, and in any case their spit glands were not yet functional. There was no chance that they would obey. The fledglings were operating on instinct, and they ignored the desperate cries of the mothers. They lacked the mental powers to understand the danger they were in, or to escape it.
Like all the mothers inside the forcewall, PinkStripedLozenge had been glued to the cliff. The alien invader
s had tried to force her wings open, and she had fought against them like a maddened bant-eagle until the struggle broke several of her wing bones and dislocated one of her trailing struts, so that the pain became unbearable. Then, ignoring her screams of anguish, they pulled her wings wide apart, tearing skin and snapping skeletal struts. They sprayed the backs of the wings with a sticky chemical, whose very smell nauseated her, and then they held her against the cliff next to her nest.
A puff of gas from a stubby cylinder set the glue like rock. At that moment she finally accepted that she was going to die, as thousands of others had on each of the previous starsets. She hung from the cliff in a haze of pain, knowing that the true horror was yet to come.
The fledglings were too young to reason. Their instinct knew no better than to seek out the symbols of their own nest, flagrantly displayed upon her inner wings. PinkStripedLozenge knew that when her young reached her and clung with their mouth-tusks, she would be unable to fold her wings around them. And even when the whole brood had attached itself to her calluses, she would not be able to step into the nest to escape the bitter cold of the night.
The fledglings’ approach was hesitant. They knew something was terribly wrong, but they did not know what. Their panic-stricken mewling drove the mothers frantic, and they renewed their struggles to get free. One, whose bone structure had been severely damaged, ripped away from the cliff and fell to her death, leaving her wings still attached to the rock, dripping body fluids.
“Stay away! Stay away!” PinkStripedLozenge could not tilt her head far enough to see her brood as they attached themselves to her torso, but she could feel their mouth-tusks gripping the toughened calluses that ran across the front of her upper body, and the weight of the youngsters against her breathing cavity. And she knew that they could not hold on for long. Time and again one of the fledglings would fall off, clatter down the cliff until it bounced into open air, spread its ever-more-tired wings, and reattach itself to her.
After a time, they no longer returned.
Barely conscious, awash with pain, and half-insane from the loss of her brood and her own helplessness to prevent it, PinkStripedLozenge watched the last arc of the Evenstar disappear below the canyon rim. At once she began to freeze.
And still she did not know why.
Although he had sounded confident when he’d made his promise to the Neanderthal child, Sam wouldn’t have been surprised if his request to consult the archives had been turned down. The regimen at the monastery was very restrictive, and he didn’t need to find out about Fall’s parents to heal her lifesoul. In fact, it was conceivable that she would be more likely to develop spiritually if she just accepted that whatever had happened to them had been a necessary contribution to the pursuit of a united cosmos. But when he made a diffident approach to his instructor, he was immediately granted an hour’s access to all unrestricted personnel records and given the necessary qubit crystal to activate it.
It took him a few minutes to find the right section of the archive; after that it was relatively easy to select the glyphics for a primary search procedure to locate the girl’s father and mother, and a secondary one to inquire into the fate of her pet. The archive quickly gave him access to Fall’s parents’ files. What he read there shocked him.
The early part of the record was pretty ordinary stuff. Fall’s father, Alert Ears Hear Silence, had been born on board a Neanderthal spacecraft. So had her mother, but on a different vessel. They had met when both ships overlapped on a trade venture, paired up, and jumped ship. This left them trying to make a living in a very ordinary town on an insignificant planet that had not at that time enjoyed the benefit of Cosmic Unity’s ministrations.
Seven years ago they had produced their one and only child, Fall.
Four years and five months later, a mission of Unity had arrived on that world and converted its inhabitants to the cause of universal tolerance and love. Alert Ears Hear Silence had been among the last to convert, but it was well known that Neanderthals lacked the common spiritual graces and were difficult in this respect. His wife, Golden Mane Floats Softly, had proved less awkward and had volunteered to take on the task of bringing spiritual luminance to those members of her species that were finding its concepts confusing. She had enjoyed modest success, but none whatsoever with her husband, Hear—a failure that grew to haunt her. And so she tried harder and argued with him constantly about his indifference to the realm of the lifesoul, the omnipotence of its Giver, and the immanence of its Cherisher.
All of which, Hear told his wife, was superstitious claptrap.
As time passed, the relationship became ever more strained by this spiritual incompatibility, and they separated. Fall remained with her mother, Floats, and the authorities moved her father to a distant city, where suitable counseling was available.
Just over a year later, Hear returned, to be reunited with his wife, but he was a shadow of his former self. He had finally embraced the tenets of Cosmic Unity, but he had also contracted a rare disease, which had left him with a physical deformity to his hands and feet—and, it turned out, a serious but undiagnosed mental instability. One day, when Fall was at school, Hear and Floats had begun arguing. Neighbors heard the shouting, then silence. When one of them became concerned, she found the door open and went in. She found Floats lying dead on the floor, and Hear in another room in a pool of blood, with a knife in his chest.
The neighbor alerted the authorities, who took over Fall’s upbringing. She did not return to the house; instead, an order of female monks took her under their wing. She was told that a terrible accident had happened to her parents. The truth—that Alert Ears Hear Silence had killed his wife in a violent argument and then committed suicide—was deemed unsuitable for such a young child. So was the autopsy report, which had found anomalies in Hear’s brain, attributed by the coroner to his previous disease.
Sam was greatly distressed by this discovery. He now knew the truth, but he had no idea how much of it he would be able to tell Fall. He would have to ask the advice of his instructor. A mistake could prove very damaging to the child.
In his state of shock, he nearly forgot his secondary objective, but the machine had been hunting through its memory banks, and it had come to a disturbing conclusion.
Of the incident with the grenvil, there was no record. In fact, there was no record that Fall or her parents had possessed any pets. The girl must have imagined the whole thing—maybe dreamed it, then confused dream with reality. He tried to find out whether she was known to suffer from sleep paralysis, which could cause dreams to be confused with reality, but found no record of it.
Several hours after quitting the archives, a nagging thought finally surfaced. Sam reviewed the session in his mind. Hadn’t Fall said that she had seen the priests take her parents away? He could review the records, but it would be simpler to ask her again at the next session, which was scheduled for tomorrow. Anyway, he was sure that was what she’d told him.
The archives flatly contradicted her statement. They said that she had left her parents in the normal manner and never returned home from school. Had she dreamed about the priests taking them away, too?
This was a very disturbed child, but he was sure he could heal her. His love was great enough. He simply needed to keep trying. But in their next sessions, she was immovable. Sam began to realize that it would take a huge effort to correct her misconceptions and bring her to the truth. His slowly building confidence began to drain away again.
Still he stuck to his task. There had to be a way to get inside her shell of obstinacy. But Fall simply could not be convinced that her memories were false. No matter how Sam tried, in session after long, frustrating session, she would not be shaken from her story. It infuriated him that she could sense his sincerity but took no notice of it. Then he would realize that she could sense his fury, too, and that made him ashamed of his inadequacies as a lifesoul-healer . . . and, of course, she could sense those feelings, too. . . .
She didn’t. She was convinced that the records were wrong.
He knew they were right. His upbringing and his training left him no choice. All his life he had obeyed the priests, accepted their advice, studied their teachings, and striven to make himself like them.
The contradictions were driving him crazy. And it wasn’t only Fall who could sense that.
6
NO BAR BAY
The soul is the life, and life shall cherish life. Thus, life shall cherish the soul of life, and strive always to enhance its becoming. There can be no limits to the love of the lifesoul, no restraint on the ways of its preservation.
The Book of Biogenesis
Second-Best Sailor emitted a wild whoop of joy from his speech-siphons and spouted a fountain of seawater into the air in a looping parabola. Gusts of wind ripped it to pieces as it reached the apex. He whooped again. It was so good to be out of the belly of the ’Thal ship and back in a real ocean.
Well, a small bay, really. But that was just temporary. The ocean might be off limits for the moment, but it was out there. He could taste it. One day, he and his kind would make it their own. He contracted his ring muscles to squeeze water out through his rearward siphons, and shot across the bay in a cloud of bubbles, stirring up sand from the shallow seabed. His chromophore skin turned yellow and turquoise in slowly drifting chevrons, a sign of overexcited happiness. He sensed the color change, which normally would have been embarrassingly juvenile.