by Liz Williams
I stopped abruptly. “Shu? Mevennen?” I said. My voice echoed through the high walls into the cold air. “Where are we going?”Mevennen glanced back over her shoulder. “Down.”
“And what lies there?”
Mevennen gave me a half-smile, and all at once I was afraid of her, my own sister. I wondered for the thousandth time of the wisdom of what I was doing. She said, “I told you. It is where I was healed. Where I became human. Where I will become human again.”
The determination in her voice was something new. I still did not know whether to believe her, and I was afraid, but despite my fear and my affliction I was also ravenous for knowledge. Ever since my return from the world, years before, I had been hearing stories about lost Outreven, and now I was here. All at once I was desperate to see what might lie below its ruins and it was a feverish impatience, like that of someone waiting for death, afraid and yearning. Mevennen was close beside me, pointing out the way, and Shu walked warily ahead. I could detect my sister's own faint scent on the walls as she passed, and it was this that really brought it home to me that she had been here before.
Mevennen pointed to a door.
“Well,” Shu said. “This is it.”
“ 'It' “?
“The heart of Outreven. Open the door, Eleres.”
“How?” I asked.
“Put your hand to the panel by the side of the door,” Shu said. “It won't respond to me; Bel's sealed it off from scanner interference. But it may recognize you or Mevennen. Your genes.” I understood perhaps half of what she said. Shu gave a sigh of evident frustration. “Mevennen and I could probably have done it together but she insisted on finding you. Anyway, we're here now.”
I paused. Then I put my palm against the panel. It felt warm, like flesh; it seemed to move beneath my hand. For a moment, I thought nothing was happening. Then the door began to open.
I don't really know what I was expecting. The chamber seemed to go on forever, refracting into infinity like a labyrinth of air and shadows. Within the endless maze of the chamber, something was moving.
Mevennen reached out a hand. “What's wrong?”
My voice seemed to come from very far away. “The dead are here. Can't you see them?”
Shu came to stand beside me. “The dead?” I heard her say, questioningly.
“What is this place?”
“Eleres, I don't know whether this will make any sense to you, but I'll try to explain. This is the 'magic book'that is supposed to lie at the heart of Outreven. It's part of a machine, a chamber into which images are projected and information is stored. The main device is switched off now, but I think a secondary interface might still be active. The images are not real; they were collected here a very long time ago, when your kind first came to Monde D'Isle. It's a kind of living history.”
I turned to her and said, “Forgive me, ghost, but are you in any position to tell me what is real and what is not?”
That won me a reluctant smile. “From your point of view, probably not. That room is a book you can walk into and out of.”
“How dangerous is it?” I was speaking to Mevennen, and I'm not sure that I really cared. Better to be dead than land-blind, I thought, and at that moment it struck me that Luta and I might have been the cruel ones after all, in insisting that Mevennen should be left to live.
Shu answered after a pause. “I don't know. Eleres, thank you. Now that I can finally get at that damned machine, I can—”
But at that point I gathered my courage and stepped forward into the chamber. I heard Shu's voice raised in sudden protest. “Eleres, wait …”
Faces swam from the coiling air, ghosts, and humans, and half between. And finally a thing that was neither mur nor human but somehow both, gazing at me from wise, indifferent eyes. And I again remembered Mevennen speaking of the Jhuran, the First Ancestor that is said to haunt Outreven and the wastes. It padded out of the shadows, walking upright. I looked up, at the dark fall of its mane and its unhu-man gaze. I could see stars in the depths of its eyes. Its face seemed to be overlain by all the faces I had loved: Sereth and Morrac and Jheru, and the mother whom I did not remember and had never really known. It reached out a long clawed hand that passed through my shoulder. I looked back frantically for Mevennen, but I could no longer see her or the ghost. The doorway was filled with moving lights. The Ancestor said, deep inside my mind, “Who are you?”
I had to glance down at the name on my own hand to remind me. I said, “My name is Eleres ai Mordha.”
A voice said, serenely, “Recording …” It did not come from the Jhuran, which stood still, shimmering in the air as though it lay beneath water.
I looked around wildly, but I could not see who might be speaking. It seemed to come from overhead. Then it spoke again.
“Please specify nature of request.” It spoke in Khalti, but it was as though there were words behind the words, as when the ghosts spoke through the charms on their wrists.
“Request?” I said.
“Please specify nature of request,” it said again, serenely. This sign that it might be a little patient with me gave me heart. The Jhuran was waiting, watching and still. So I thought to question it.
“What is this place?” I asked, thinking I knew the answer. But its reply was cryptic. It spoke on several levels and I am reproducing it here as best I can.
“This is [collection] of [information] /databank/ for Colony, Monde D'Isle.”
“And what are you?” I said to the Jhuran. I found myself becoming irritated. Not much of an oracle, I thought, if it can't even answer a simple question.
The Jhuran said,” This image represents Experiment : / crossbreed/.”
“Crossbreed?”
“This image has become known as Experiment 995,” the voice above me said, as if in instruction. “Does subject request [face to talk] /personal interface/?”
“Yes, very well,” I said, not knowing what it meant. The image of the Jhuran before me stirred and flowed and once more seemed to live. “Are you my ancestor?” I asked it, doubtfully. Mention of the number had confused me.
“I am the first successful result.”
“Result? Of what?”
“Of experimental program : genetic hatch between human material and that of the dominant predator.”
“Please,” I asked it. “Please use words that I can understand.”
“The crossbreed program combined genes taken from the colonists with those taken from Species One: the animals that you call 'mur.'
“Who were the colonists?”
“The colonists were in species human, from the world known as Irie St Syre.”
“Can you show me a human?” I said, and before me stepped a ghost out of thin air: naked and male. “Show me a female,” I asked, and the next figure was, indeed, very similar to Shu as far as I could tell.
“These humans represent the original colonists,” the voice from the ceiling said. I took a moment to digest this information. “And these people were—bred? With mur?” I could not imagine how such a thing would be possible; it was not a thought I had ever entertained.
The voice said, “Not bred, but matched. The match produced some genetic change, but was unsuccessful in creat-ing a stable link between humans and the environment. Other means were used to complete the experiment.”
“What are we, then?” I asked, after a long pause. “What are my kind? Human or animal? Or both?”
“You are human, with minor genetic alteration. And you are a mistake,” the voice said, in its remote, serene tones.
“A mistake?”
“Abomination. The crossbreed is not real. It is only an image, of something that was created and died not long after. It is not your ancestor. Its kind were short-lived, and left no descendants. Your ancestors were the ones who came after, who were less dramatically transformed.”
“And what are you?” I could not see where the voice was coming from.
“I am the voice of Teilu Zharan
, colonist, who defied Elshonu Shikiriye and later programmed this interface into the generator, that others may know of his heresy. I can tell you this. Your people should not have been as they are.”
“Perhaps that's so,” I said. The knowledge was making my head swim, or perhaps it was the chamber itself. “But what I want to ask you is this: do we have a choice? Can we be more than a mistake?”
The image swam before me. “Termination of program. Activate next program?”
But I did not understand the question. The image of the Jhuran was trembling before my eyes, and I stumbled backward through the door, which closed behind me.
11. Shu Gho
He was badly shaken by what he had seen in the chamber, but Eleres lost no time in trying to make sense of it, a pragmatism of which Shu approved.
“That—that being,” he said, gesturing toward the doorway. “The Jhuran. I thought it was our ancestor, but it said it was not. And there was another voice, too. I don't understand.”
“When the colonists came to Monde D'Isle,” Shu said, “their leader tried to make them fit their new home rather than the other way around. First of all, he tried genetic engineering, but the results didn't work very well. They resulted first in botched experiments, and then later trials produced your people—it shows in your teeth, your nails, your eyes, but it didn't produce the connection with the environment that Shikiriye was looking for. So he devised another method. He took what he knew of the species of this world and distilled the knowledge into a set of—of instructions, if you like. And then he used a kind of device to disseminate those instructions. The device set up a grid across the planet—you call the grid “earthlines” or “energy lines,” I believe—and we think it has been sending out information along them ever since. That information changes your brain-wave patterns—affects your minds and your behavior, basically.” Shu spoke on, trying to find different words of explanation, and eventually Eleres seemed to understand.
“So,” he said, frowning. “This magic book—this device—has been controlling us?”
“Well, effectively, yes,” Shu admitted.
He looked outraged, and she couldn't blame him. He said, “Do you mean to tell me that everything we are— everything we were—is nothing more than the workings of some device?”
“Apparently.”
Eleres turned his head and stared blankly into the shadows. “And now it's been destroyed.”
“Yes. Well, not destroyed. The mainframe's been switched off.”
“The voice in the chamber told me that you are not spirits, but people from another world. People who are the same kind as my own ancestors. And yet …” He paused, and looked away. “I don't mean to offend you, but you cannot know how little substance you had to me, before I was blinded. I am not sure that I want to be such a being as you.”
“Yet you can't live with what you are,” Shu said sadly. “Your people seem to be in such anguish because of a nature that isn't even yours, but has been imposed upon you.”
Eleres was silent for a moment. Then he said, “So are you telling me that—if this machine could be made to work again—we would have to choose? Either keep the device working and ourselves as we are, with the two-edged sword of our own natures, or destroy it and become sane and safe and—and landblind? Without our connection to the world? The two are linked, are they not? The light and the dark?”
“So it seems.”
“And can this machine be made to work again?”
“I think so. I hope so.”
“If it can, maybe there's a way we can alter the balance.”
“I'm glad you made that suggestion,” Shu said wryly, “and not me. I think we've interfered in your lives enough. I don't know whether I can get it working again. I'll need to try and access the ship, and my—my friend's shut me out, because she doesn't want me making any more changes. But I can try.”
“Then try. I need to think about what I've learned.”
With that, he rose and prowled to the entrance, to vanish into the night. Mevennen stared after him.
“Well,” said Shu, not quite sure what she might be referring to. “That's that cat out of the bag, then.”
12. Eleres
I walked aimlessly for a while, deep into the maze that wound between the cliffs. Outreven was as silent as the mountain heights, and I found that I welcomed the solitude. I climbed to the very top of the city, to the cliffs that looked out across the vast reach of the steppes, and sat down on a rock. The night wore on, but I did not sleep. Up there on the heights above the ancient ruins, I remembered my past. I thought of Mevennen lying vulnerable before my predator's instincts on the ground, my own sister and nothing more than prey to me. I thought of the child that Sereth had killed. I remembered my time with Jheru and the mehed, how I had always feared and pitied the people of the wilds. The voice in the chamber echoed through my head.
A mistake, it had said. Abomination. A face swam before imagination's sight: the huntress of the ai Staren, a woman who was more honest than I, for at least she faced her own desires. I had never liked to confront facts. I did not want to look at the truth, or the things that made me afraid—even my own dark and double nature. I recalled how I had longed for Mevennen's death under my own hands, there on the hillside that day of the hunt. I remembered Jheru, who had abandoned humanity for a time, and Sereth, who was dead, and Morrac, who, it seemed, had been choosing the slow road to suicide.
And then I thought about how it had been before I was landblind. With a rush of loss, I recalled how I was able to sense every wind that passed, each breath of air, the pull of the tide under the earth and the currents of the elements. I had sensed the storms that tormented the eastern seas from the way in which the clouds drifted over the mesa. I had felt the blaze at the heart of the planet, and knew every mineral that lay underneath my feet. I could have drawn a map of every spring and runnel that lay beneath the wastes. The world and I were the same creature, unthinking, self-organizing, untroubled by the death and destruction that took place every day: rains, storms, the onset of winter. The wonder of that world, and the loss of my connection with it, took my breath away.
I blinked. I was once more sitting on the cliff above the old deserted city, and before me stood the Jhuran. It was nothing more than a shadow; I could see the stars through its mane and the first light of dawn breaking. I do not know whether I spoke aloud; I do not know if it was even there. I said, “If Shu succeeds in repairing that thing, the book, then I won't know what to do. If the book is destroyed, then we may be healed, but we will be separated from the world itself. And if it is not, then we will live out our lives as slaves.”
I did not feel up to making a decision, and behind it all I was aware of a vast and encompassing fury, that my people had been made nothing more than puppets to dance to the strings of something old and dead. And yet … and yet we were more than it had made us, after all was said and done.
TheJhuran said only, “I cannot tell you what to do. Trust in the world, and in yourself, and neither will fail you.”
And then the vision was gone, and I was blinking with the knowledge that I had made my decision, not within the rational mind, marshaled by conflicting arguments, but in my heart, the most treacherous place of all.
13. Shu Gho
Wearily, Shu rubbed her eyes. Her vision swam with fatigue; she had never felt so tired. She had spent the last few hours constructing a labyrinthine route through the main system of the aircar to the ship, a way around Bel's blockades. She did not yet know if it would work. She leaned back in her chair, to offer up a brief prayer to whoever might be listening, then patched the coordinates through. The console of the aircar emitted a faint whine like a wounded animal as the data began gliding across its screen. Shu stared at it, trying to make sense of the configurations. This was not her field, and she now regretted not paying more attention to computation. If she'd been more skilled, she chided herself, the whole process might have taken half the time.
She tried not to think about where Eleres might be, nor of what kind of state he was in. Everything he was, his own innate nature, had been torn from him—the ontological rug ripped from beneath his feet—and Shu couldn't help but blame herself. His sister had gone in search of him; at least Mevennen, by means of her long illness, had the resources to cope.
Shu sat up straighter as the data stopped, and shimmered. She waited for a breathless moment, then gasped in relief as the configuration scrolled through. She had reached the ship. But before she could patch through the link, there was a tiny sound from the open hatch of the aircar. Shu turned. Sudden movement came from behind her, and a cold bolt of agony struck the length of her body. Her knees buckled. She fell to the floor, and lay there, unable to move. Bel's face loomed over her, and in Bel's hand, through her watering vision, she saw her own homemade stun gun.
Shu's mouth worked, but no sound emerged.
“I'm sorry, Shu,” Bel said firmly, sounding exactly like Dia. “But it really is for your own good, you know. The generator's down at last, and it's staying that way. I've turned off the interface, too.”
Incapable of speech or movement, Shu lay helplessly on the floor as the young woman marched to the controls. The aircar surged upward, leaving Outreven behind.
14. Eleres
It was close to dawn. I felt cold and stiff, and light-headed. There was a band of sky as pale as a bird's wing above the rim of the caldera. Hearing the sound of a footstep, I turned, to see Mevennen coming along the path.
“Eleres?” she called. “I didn't know where you were. I couldn't find you.”