Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

by James Alan Gardner

  The group is attempting to locate evidence of volcanic hot springs in the riverbed. The senior planetologists, up in orbit with the colonists, hypothesized the fog bank was created by near-boiling water from springs mixing with near-freezing water running down from the Upward Potential mountains. No one found the hypothesis persuasive, but it offered a foundation for conducting tests until new data suggested something better.

  MolanDif is on the far right of the picture, paddling an inflatable dinghy out of the upstream mists. The dinghy is filled with testing equipment. He holds the paddle awkwardly.

  When he caught sight of me watching, he hailed me and pulled into shore. As I helped him out of the dinghy, he said, "Officer BarlDan, I'd like to consult with you."

  "In my official capacity?" I asked.

  "Of course," he said—seemingly surprised I might have an unofficial one. "When would be suitable?"

  "I'm free now."

  "Oh," he said. "Oh." He looked at the ground as if there might be something there needing his attention. "All right, then." He paused again. "This is a private matter."

  "We'll walk along the river," I said.

  The Mutans had paved a wide promenade along the top of the bank, running completely across the city. Potholes had developed in the asphalt here and there, and tough fungal growth was working up from below, cracking the surface into patterns like the glass in a smashed mirror; but walking was easy if you watched your step, and it provided a route away from the others without getting lost in the fog. We walked for some time in a silence overlaid with the background mutter of the river. I waited for MolanDif to begin.

  "I have reached the age of twenty-five," he said at last.

  I knew that; his birthday had passed while we were in stasis on the way to Muta, but Harmony Team had danced in his honor shortly after we woke up. MolanDif continued, "The social adjustment manual says twenty-five is the optimal age for marriage."

  "To be precise," I said, "the manual says twenty-five is the median age at which a human being has reached a level of maturity consistent with the obligations of intimate social partnership. Not the same thing."

  "Still," he said, "I believe I am ready for marriage. I…I'm not fulfilled being alone. I think it would be better to be married."

  "Are you unhappy?" I asked.

  "Oh no," he said quickly. "I'm quite well adjusted. To the situation. But I think…life could be fuller, you know? There's something…" He reached out with his hand and clutched an empty fist. "Life could be fuller," he repeated.

  "Have you chosen a partner?"

  "Chiala, of course," he answered, in a tone of surprise that I could consider any other alternative. "She's of equal rank. She's twenty-five."

  "And she's beautiful," I said.

  "Well, yes. But beauty…the manual says it's too shallow a reason for seeking marriage. Isn't it?"

  "Yes," I said. "Yes, it is."

  "Sexual attraction is an inadequate basis for dedicated partnership actualization. That's right in the manual. The manual stresses that feelings—you know, love…" His voice fell to near inaudibility on the word and he went on quickly. "Whatever you think you feel, it's only infatuation if you don't have a deeper basis for…for what you want. I'm not just infatuated with her, BarlDan. I have good deep reasons."

  "She's of equal rank and she's twenty-five."

  "Yes. You see how it makes sense?"

  "Does it make sense to Chiala?" I asked.

  "I couldn't possibly discuss it with her until you've cross-matched our personality profiles," he said. "If we aren't compatible in the eyes of the Unity…well, I couldn't pursue it, could I? I'd just…I couldn't pursue it. And if we are compatible, I'd have something to talk about with her. I could say the Unity officially thought we had a marriageability coefficient of ninety percent. Or whatever it turns out to be. You understand?"

  "Yes," I said. "I understand. I'll do the calculations for you."

  He thanked me hastily and headed back to the investigation site almost at a run.

  I should have told him I wanted her for myself, that she was a dancing flame which could never burn bright enough fueled by his soggy wood. But how was I any different?

  Picture 4—The interior of my hut, evening, first day within the fog:

  The picture is taken from the doorway. All the usual amenities are present: cot, sink, desk, two chairs, chemical toilet, mask shrine. On the desk, a lamp glows at minimum brightness; there are plenty of shadows here. The only other light comes from the candles on the shrine and their reflections in the shrine's mirror.

  The juniors who put up the hut for me have placed my shrine so the mask points toward the door. The face that was my second self looks almost directly into the camera. The eyes are not empty in this picture; they're filled with shadow. It's dusk and the mask is once again inhabited.

  The mask belongs to the Hanged Prophet house. It is an adult male who calls himself ToPu. ToPu the Seer. ToPu the Abiding Observer. His umber papier-mâché face is runneled with crags that have been deepened using paint of blue and green. This shows age and therefore (so the theory goes) wisdom. But when the spirit of ToPu guided me to fashion his mask-home during my time of initiation, his hands were clumsy in affixing the garnet. The gem is centered properly on the forehead, but its setting is tipped to the left. Instead of facing outward, the capital facet looks ashamedly to one side.

  For thirty-five years, this was what ToPu saw when he looked at himself in the mirror of my shrine: he saw he was flawed. His little gem, his humble soul, was forever set akilter. He felt this was the kind of seer he was—one who never looked in quite the right direction.

  And, of course, ToPu's sadness infected my own life. However much I, BarlDan, progressed through victories or defeats, ToPu always shadowed me. I would sit before the mirror to don the mask (its interior smelling of paint, sweat, and resin) and in the moments that both BarlDan and ToPu shared my body, I would feel him tumbling down into heartsick shame at the sight of his face. Whenever I regained consciousness at the end of the Dance of the Arcana, I would find that ToPu had been standing apart from the others, simply watching.

  All these feelings return when I look at this picture and see ToPu's imperfect face staring sadly back. If I had set up my room myself, I would have angled the shrine away from the door—I had no need to remind myself of the awkward, earnest sharer of my soul. But I couldn't rearrange the furniture now: the juniors who set up the hut had seemed so proud of their work, I couldn't hurt their feelings.

  Whenever I view this picture, I look at ToPu first, in order to save the most important detail for last. In the foreground, two chairs are turned to face each other. Draped over the back of the closer one is a white linen neckerchief printed with orange chrysanthemums.

  Chiala left it behind after proposing marriage to me. It was her betrothal token. If I accepted her offer, I was to wear it so all the camp would know of our engagement. Otherwise, I was to return it discreetly to her hut and leave it lying across her pillow.

  I planned to give back the neckerchief the next night. Sooner would insult her, as if I thought her easy to reject. But I had already rejected her in my own mind more than a dozen times since she joined Harmony Team, even while I talked with her, watched her with hungry eyes, touched her with feigned casualness and felt her touch me.

  She told me she loved me because I was gentle, kind, and vulnerable; but analysis of her personality profile revealed she wanted a father figure who would absolve her from the responsibility of growing up. (I once dyed the gray in my hair, hoping she would be dazzled by a younger man. She was appalled I would want to look like some unseasoned junior.)

  I felt I loved her because she was intelligent, beautiful, and so very alive; but in fact, I was immaturely hoping she would rescue me from a self-centered loneliness from which I was too weak to extricate myself. (On our nights of quiet sociability, it was always she who sought me out. I could never bring myself to believe she'd be happy
to see me at her door.)

  If we married, I thought, we would cling to each other too tightly, feeding on our weaknesses. We might be happy, but we would fold inward too much, dedicating ourselves to each other instead of the good of the Unity. In solitude, I had calculated our social coefficients many times before: love high, but social desirability just inside the bounds of legality. As Orthodoxy Officer, I could not give my approval.

  Instead, I savored an aging coward's self-indulgent melancholy as I oh so carefully calculated the social coefficients for MolanDif and Chiala. The ratings were no worse with him than with me; better on some scales. The two would never love each other, but they would make it work, without letting it interfere in their pursuit of the greater good.

  I told myself my duty was clear.

  Still, I took this picture of the neckerchief so I could always remind myself that Chiala had once asked.

  Picture 5—Harmony Team singing around a campfire, first evening of the mission:

  The campfire roars high. It is a volcanic island of light, ringed by a lagoon of fog, enclosed in an ocean of blackness. The fire has been built inside a cracked concrete dish in the same park as the sundial; an archeologist conjectured the dish was a reflecting pool in the days of Mutan civilization. It is surrounded by what seem to be low marble benches, but benches built for Mutan anatomy. Their tops resemble narrow U-shaped troughs.

  The members of Harmony Team lounge on the benches in a variety of postures. Only Chiala looks comfortable. She sits with both legs tucked beneath her, hands in her lap. Her mouth is open wide and her head is tilted back for greater singing volume.

  She was a terrible singer. She was, in fact, tone-deaf. The notes she bawled so lustily bore no relationship to the tune the others sang. Chiala didn't care. Perhaps she didn't know—who would tell her? In an odd way, her handicap endeared her to the team, bringing her down from the heights of perfection and making her just a bit pitiable.

  MolanDif sits awkwardly beside Chiala, his rump at the bottom of the trough, his legs dangling over the edge. The flames tint his face a jaundiced shade of orange. He is not singing; as I remember that night, he was barely breathing, hovering at Chiala's side all evening but struck speechless by the enormity of what he wanted to say.

  From the angle I took this picture, I cannot tell if his thigh is touching her knee. Some nights I think yes, some nights I think no.

  A number of team members appear to be in the Arcana trance already. The youth who beats the drum is clearly there. His glassy eyes stare blindly into the fire; his body is slack, though his arms continue to pound out the rhythms of attuning. The harpist too straddles the boundary between our world and the spirits'. Her shirt hangs open to bare the perspiration-slick boniness of her chest. A reflection of flame dances on her moist skin.

  Picture 6—Dance of the Arcana, first night of the mission:

  The picture shows a bare patch of dirt, not far from the campfire site. Candles are laid out on the ground in a spoked wheel around a silvery mirror-ball at the hub. The candles do not dispel the mist as the campfire did, though they force back the darkness a few paces. Fog wraps and obscures the dancers, in lieu of the clothing they have shed.

  Chiala's mask-self dances proud and beautiful in the foreground. When she proposed, Chiala gave me the name of her mask: Lilijel. Lilijel the Sun-Child. Lilijel the Jewel. Her face is beaten gold, a mask of the Laughing Sun, lacquered black except for the rims of the eyes and a burnished band around the outer edge. The gem in Lilijel's forehead is a topaz, and it is set perfectly straight.

  Lilijel dances, prances, alone. The picture captures her mid-leap, front leg bent, back leg straight. Her jump has such strength that her muscles stand out with sharp definition even in the fog. She throws her arms straining wide above her head. There is something about her that frightens me, a potential for cruelty in her self-absorption. She is always exultant, always alone. It is inconceivable she would deign to dance with an ungainly old man.

  Behind Lilijel, MolanDif stands wearing his mask. The mask belongs to the house of the Worldly Cleric, black cloth embellished with spiraling traceries of silver thread. His gem, of course, is a diamond. In the picture, MolanDif prepares to leap in imitation of Lilijel.

  It is clear MolanDif is himself…not in trance, not possessed by the mask. The fact is evident in the way he stands—self-conscious, a wary, soul-cluttered man attempting to imitate masks who are as simple as children. Lilijel jumps and he follows like a shadow.

  The doctrines of the Unity accept such people as they are. It is simply another sort of disability, like being unable to sing. Men and women who cannot lose themselves are as much a part of the orthodoxy as those who fall into trance effortlessly; they just don't know it. They torment themselves each night at the dance, watching the spontaneity of the others and guiltily going through the motions.

  Not so different from ToPu, though ToPu was a true mask—less a wooden adult and more a sober child.

  ToPu took this picture. He often played with my camera while the other masks danced. Only a few of his concrete memories ever leaked into my mind; one is the image of him standing apart from the dance, using the camera to click shot after shot of the other dancers.

  In some way, ToPu believed his watching protected the other mask-spirits—that they would wisp away to nothingness if someone didn't remove himself from the revelries and look on from the sidelines. If no one watched, the dance was random capering, dissipative frenzy…a meaningless hell. Someone had to see how a mask drew pictures in the dirt, someone had to hear it sing nonsense syllables to a stone. Being watched made it all real; taking pictures kept them safe.

  There was seldom any logic in the pictures he took. When I put the diskette into the viewer on the morning after a dance, I might see a close-up of someone's hand, or a badly framed tangle of copulating bodies. I don't know if ToPu even understood what the camera did, for he never learned how to advance the diskette from shot to shot—each new shot overwrote the previous one, so only the last shot of the night was preserved.

  But ToPu didn't care about preserving pictures; he only cared about watching. The camera was a watching machine, and watching was ToPu's duty.

  Picture 7—The death of Junior Planetologist DiDeel, during the Dance of the Arcana:

  I took this picture moments after waking from the trance. I believe ToPu saw the horror begin and surrendered the body to me prematurely, in the hope BarlDan could cope with something ToPu could not.

  I did not understand. I awoke sluggish, my mask beside me, my camera in hand. When I saw what was happening to DiDeel, my first reaction was to snap a picture, thinking I was seeing some remarkable atmospheric phenomenon.

  The picture shows DiDeel frozen in the moment of transition from mask-self back to man. His mask belongs to the house of the Blind Priestess, an eyeless shell of pearly plastic with a wig of blended human hair reaching the ground in a blond-brown-red-black tumble. The mask is pushed far enough back on DiDeel's forehead that the man's mouth is uncovered. The mouth is open wide. He appears to be screaming.

  That is what the camera recorded; but what my eyes saw was a stream of creamy mist pouring from his mouth like smoke belched by a fire-eater. The mist pierced the surrounding fog and sent it billowing outward in ripple after ripple. DiDeel made no sound but a choked crooning in his throat, like a heartsick child humming itself a lullaby.

  All this…and my first reaction was merely to snap a picture. I found the sight odd but not disturbing, as if I were a four-year-old watching a favorite uncle do a magic trick. Accepting it all; almost absorbed. But when I look again at the picture, I cannot blind myself to DiDeel's agony. His body is bent backward as if some invisible assailant has wrapped one arm around his waist and is pressing the other hand on his sternum, pushing with full strength in an attempt to snap DiDeel's spine. The man is held impossibly off balance, screaming without noise, the hair of his mask dragging in the dirt.

  Yet in the momen
ts after waking, I had a lingering feeling this was very right: that I should want the same for myself.

  DiDeel's body wavered in that pose for one second, two seconds, three, then jerked twice with the force of whipcracks. He heeled backward, striking the ground hard enough to scuff up a cloud of dust, and lay there as limp as his hair.

  It was only then I put down the camera. I started shaking and couldn't stop.

  A few of the masks came to look at the fallen body. Lilijel poked it with her finger once, then a second time much harder. I had to shout at her to go away and leave DiDeel alone.

  Mask spirits almost never understand death.

  Picture 8—Campfire, second night of the mission:

  A jump forward in time…but I was too busy to take pictures during the day after DiDeel's death. There were reports to file. There were morale restoration activities to run: a group contact experience in the morning, a unification dialogue at lunch, grief counseling sessions all afternoon. My hardest duty was calling my superiors in orbit, formally asking them to quarantine Muta until we determined the cause of DiDeel's death. If this was some kind of disease, we could not risk infecting the main body of the task force. The mother ship offered to send us robots, medicines, any equipment we might need; but what could I ask for?

  The picture around the campfire shows the team at the end of the day: haggard, subdued. Our Senior Medical Officer leans against the shoulder of the man beside her; her eyes are half closed. She has not slept except for a three-hour nap I ordered her to take before supper. For the rest of the time, she and her junior have tried to determine why DiDeel died. No success.

  Many of the other team members also show signs of exhaustion. No one slept well. DiDeel was popular, respected for his exceptional openness and generosity to all; his death struck hard. The majority of those around the fire simply stare into the flames, their expressions somber. The camera has caught one junior in the process of glancing over his shoulder into the fog.