Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  “Where is Teenae?” asked the disheveled one-wife.

  “With Hoemei.”

  “Then you may stay with us tonight. You can teach him manners as well as I can, and I’m exhausted and need your tenderness.” She hugged Gaet with the kiss she had refused Joesai.

  “God’s Silence!” the big man roared. “This manners business is madness. I should be out with Raimin training my men to run diversionary attack right now!”

  Noe turned to him slowly. “Down on your knees.”

  Gaet was breaking into the great laugh. “Down on your knees, boy!” He had an arm so gently around Noe’s bare shoulders that his support felt like her own strength.

  She slept between them that night, happy with her marriage, sad that Joesai would vanish for so long. She held his hand while he slept. One day he would not come back to her. He would be dead — not like Gaet who never gambled with danger even in the temple games.

  At the dawn of this, the third high day of Ogre, Joesai rose with dream-created plans in which he had cleverly resolved outstanding problems. Good. He kissed the sleeping Noe with a self-conscious tenderness and then kissed his old comrade of the deadly creche, but not so tenderly. Cheating Fate the Gaet, Sanan had called him; Sanan their brother who had not been able to cheat fate and who had gone to the dinner table and tanner. Joesai broke fast on corn bread and honey, solidifying his plans in his mind, then tiptoed into Hoemei’s room where he whispered to a sleepy Teenae a list of provisions she would have to find that day while he gave his men their final briefing.

  “Got that?”

  “Ummm.” She rolled over and smiled, hugging the covers.

  “Ho. You haven’t got that. I’ll write it down.”

  “It’s all right,” said Hoemei who seemed to be asleep but was awake. “I’ll remember for her.”

  5

  Should we doubt because God is silent? Feel the ground beneath your feet. There is the touch of God. He brought us here. Listen to the voice of a baby learning his first word. That is God speaking again the language He gave us. When we have stilled the cacophonous noise of doubt and quarrel, then we will hear Him speak.

  Prime Predictor Njai ben-Kaiel from her Eighth Speech

  THE CONSTELLATION OF THE OGRE moved across the midnight zenith and was replaced by the Winner. Joesai sneaked himself through Kaiel-hontokae on the final day before the trek to the coast was to begin and, unannounced, appeared at Kathein’s instrument shop. It was an old building of stone, converted from some purpose which had once required its own aqueduct. He had never been here before. The tedious craftsmanship of experimental fail-and-seek-again asked more patience of him than he was willing to give. The shop’s primary purpose was to supply the priests with more and more accurate biological tools.

  If you needed a device to promote cross-over in chromosomes you could have it built. If you wanted an organic machine to synthesize gene chains, someone would build it for you. If you wanted an implement to record from a neuron there were craftsmen who knew the fabrication ritual.

  But, if you were like Joesai, and wanted a really large sky-eye for some theological investigation, forget it. Kathein had tried to fund the construction of a plate-sized lens for him but was refused the appropriation. She had wryly told her husband-to-be that she thought there was a fear in the Race of probing too deeply into the terrors of the World Above from whence God had rescued the Race. Joesai thought only that the obsession with biology was natural in an environment whose life forms would kill you whenever you failed to understand them.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Kathein said when she found him in the arched doorway.

  “The spittle of insects! You’re quick with my child. I love you. In any event, I’m here! May Aesoe give his guests diarrhea at his Feast of Ritual Suicide!”

  She pulled him inside, obviously glad to see him. “Getasun’s flame will die before he finds himself at the bottom of the kalothi list!” Which was where she wanted him because only then would he be eligible for Ritual Suicide.

  Joesai laughed at her venom. “Don’t be so sure. Someone will take his hide soon enough, may he roast slowly in an oven until he is too dry to eat!”

  “We’ll be caught here!”

  “Ho! Find us a place where we can be alone!”

  She hurried into one of the side rooms and closed the door. He found himself next to racks of bioluminous bulbs that cast an eerie pallor over bulky apparatus.

  “It is for reading the crystal,” she said, touching the plastic casing of the Kaiel’s most advanced instrument.

  “You built it yourself?”

  “Joesai! I built it with the help of thirty craft clans and all the gold of the Dry Bone Mine. I’m not even sure I know how it does what it does!”

  “Was your hunch about the crystal right?”

  “No,” she said sadly.

  “It doesn’t hold the frozen Voice of the God of the Sky?”

  “Yes and no,” she said with puzzlement. “Do you want to see some silvergraphs of His writings?”

  “My nose in trade!”

  She showed Joesai the single intact crystal, shaped like a small tile but transparent. When he reached out to touch it she pulled away. It looked like glass but it didn’t refract like glass. The hand-size corroded machine which had originally read the crystals was nearby in its own protected case. An early Kaiel exploration had found it buried in the catacombs of the Graves of the Losers, holding this one crystal. For generations the discovery was a mystery known only to the Kaiel. Kathein was a student of the priest who had decoded the function of the machine.

  To duplicate its function, Kathein’s team had invented coherent light-beam generators and strange precision optical devices. She had made more advances in electron manipulation in the past 300 weeks than had been done since the electron was discovered. The resulting apparatus filled up half a room and sometimes even worked.

  “You can’t believe how hard it is to read from that crystal. There are about 4000 layers, alternately conducting and non-conducting. The conducting layers have elements in them that go opaque in the presence of electron flow. If the approach ritual doesn’t please God He responds only with blackness but if our obsecrations are sufficiently servile only one layer is sensitized. There are 1600 pages to a layer. Even then different pages fade in and out and sometimes whole layers of pages overlay an area so that our vision is obscured. We can go for days without getting through to God and then suddenly a patch of forty pages will appear for long enough to be silvergraphed.”

  “What do they say?”

  Kathein showed him a silvergraph of a single page, one of the clearer ones. She lit an oil lamp to increase the room’s brightness.

  “The God of the Sky mutters,” he said turning the page upside down and squinting at it.

  “You can read it.”

  “It’s beetle talk. It looks like a beetle danced the maedi with ink on his feet — an eight legger.”

  “No. You can read it.” She pointed with some excitement. “That’s the symbol for carbon and that’s the symbol for hydrogen.”

  “I’ll be low listed! It’s a genetic map. My God!”

  “They’re all plants, hundreds of them. Sacred Plants, Joesai. There’s nothing there characteristic of the coding of profane biology.”

  “My God! That means there are more than Eight Sacred Plants. What a strange thing for Him to tell us.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said with deep puzzlement.

  “Could He be telling us to make new Sacred Plants?”

  “Joesai! We couldn’t even make a wheat seed!”

  “Maybe. We made my mother.”

  “Your mother is half human, and the other half isn’t there.”

  “Don’t you insult my mother. She has seventy-four artificial genes. How complicated can a wheat seed be?”

  “God wouldn’t ask us to do the impossible!”

  “God could ask us to do anything. He could laugh at us.
He could sulk for a hundred generations if it pleased Him.”

  “Don’t say that! If He hears you, I’ll never get another picture out of that crystal!”

  “Let me try talking with Him.”

  “You won’t get anything. I have to use all kinds of supplications to get the fineness that the reading requires.”

  Kathein lit a small, quick-firing steam engine attached to a copper-wired wheel she called an electron pump. She waited for a short while until the steam pressure was up, and then waited again until the electron pressure stabilized. That done, she threw switches and began to electrify one of the mysterious machines that was taller than Joesai. Banks of hand-made electron jars began to glow red from tiny internal filaments. “We have to wait for them to soak up heat.” Then she inserted the crystal into the machine’s mouth and made delicate adjustments with little wheels.

  Time passed. The ritual reminded Joesai of a childhood toy called “volcano” which required the player to roll five tiny balls up the slope of a miniature volcano, one at a time, holding each at the peak while the next climbed. Impossible but absorbing.

  Finally they got one clear picture, another chain of genes. “Are they all like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like your devotion to God, Kathein. It’s an inspiration.”

  She turned off the machine, and stopped the wheel of the electron pump, and doused the steam engine’s fire. In the room, now quieter, she held him. “What will we do? You inspire me, too, Joesai. When Gaet thinks big he thinks of the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves. When Hoemei thinks big he thinks of administering a united Geta. When you think big you want to face the God of the Sky.”

  “Where do you think He came from?”

  “A very dangerous place, if Geta is truly a refuge as the Chants say.”

  He squeezed her. Then he ran a finger fondly but roughly along the lines of her facial cicatrice. “You’re the only person I can talk to about these things. I cherish you.”

  “Oh you can talk to Teenae,” she said pushing him away, “and you know it!”

  “Only if I formulate my fantasies as mathematical problems.”

  “That’s good exercise for your mind!”

  “And another reason I love you is because you make me laugh.”

  “Did I tell you,” she added excitedly, “that we just heard that a team of o’Tghalie from the north have completed a parallax measurement of the star Stgi and found it to be at least one million times as far away as the distance between Geta and Getasun! That’s what you should be doing if they’d let you! Do you realize what that means? The universe could be so big that it would take a man’s lifetime for light to cross from one end to the other. The God of the Sky could have come from anywhere!”

  “We have to get to Him and talk to Him!”

  “Can you express yourself in polynucleic acids?” Kathein laughed.

  “You know about these things. How would we get to Him?”

  “Energy, Joesai. More energy than you can possibly imagine.”

  “We’ll discuss it when I get back. I love you, Kathein. I’d murder to keep you.”

  “Don’t say that! Joesai! Be quiet! If you ever violate the Code once, even once, you’ll be destroyed by the storm you will have created within yourself!”

  “Ho! The Code was made by man. Different priest clans have different moralities. God stopped speaking to us to let us learn our own way.”

  “Joesai, listen to me! I believe in tradition. It is there for a reason. It is the accumulation of more wisdom than one man can ever hope to master in one lifetime. I can’t understand its purpose. You can’t understand it. I have faith. Don’t test it, Joesai! Please!”

  “If this heretic has kalothi, she’ll live. That’s what kalothi means.”

  “Fecal Fool! That is the justification for every sin that has ever been committed on Geta! You know that kalothi can be overwhelmed!”

  He sighed. “I promise you I’ll be hard — but I’ll break no rules.”

  “Thank you.” She held him and cried. “You’re breaking one now by being here with me.”

  “I’ll go.” His face was wet.

  “Be careful. Take care of Teenae. And watch out for that coastal witch!”

  6

  Men are the seeds from whom a new crop shall be grown. No matter that the land is barren. No matter that the rains do not come, or the irrigation ditches blow dust. No matter that famine dries the skin to our bones. Men, like seed, are too precious to be used as food.

  Oelita the Gentle Heretic in Sayings of a Rule Breaker

  THE DAY WAS BEAUTIFUL for herb-hunting. Getasun, as usual, rose quickly through the sky, carrying its forge orange bulk out to sea where it would set beside the stationary Scowlmoon before Oelita could reach home. She kept to the ridges along the shore and whenever she walked over a sandy crest, she stopped to drop her packsack so that she could look down upon the sea she loved. She saw a sleek Mnankrei trader blooming with sails and a small fleet of local craft dredging for rope fibers and iron-reed. Scowlmoon held steady two diameters above the waves, half full, telling her that it was noon.

  The vegetation rose waist high, thick and spiny, taller here than in the interior. She wore thick leggings to protect herself from poisonous scratches. It was a striped flower she hunted, good for stimulating babies who had the sleeping sickness.

  Her packsack was already bulging. Once across the river bed, she planned to circle around to Nonoep’s farm. He was a renegade Stgal who lived alone, a marvelous soul, and one of her favorite lovers. Having been trained as a priest he knew a great deal of biochemistry and was always willing to use his skill to extract from his boiling bottles any medicine she might need. Sometimes he gave her seeds for the farmers.

  In return she would cook for him one of her special meals, or bake bread, and later enjoy love with him on his mat. He liked to hear her gossip about the village and he liked to argue with her about religion. He told her that she was the most sensual woman he knew. Whether his artful teasing was flattery or not, she enjoyed the soft warmth of the words.

  Nonoep was a breeder of plants. He didn’t breed varieties of the Sacred Eight but concentrated on wild plants. Many of the profane plants were known to yield edible fractions if they were crushed and dissolved and treated and filtered — but were often too expensive to treat. Nonoep grew different varieties and tested them for nourishment and poison content, and bred the varieties that were easiest to process.

  When Getasun had floated three quarters of the way toward the sea’s horizon Oelita came across a small hill farm hidden below a wind-sheltering ridge — Nolar clan for sure once she noticed how they cleared their land and built their hut. Spread below wasn’t enough cultivated land for five, though there would be at least fifteen of them. She put down her packsack, securing it against children’s fingers. The hut was tall — thick baked clay walls supporting a superstructure of woven rushes.

  Oelita entered their home without being invited. The family was seated, pounding the stringy branches of a plant that provided fibers of cloth. She sat crosslegged with them and took a stone and began to pound her share of the fibers, emptying them into the vat for soaking. They stared at her shyly while she chatted.

  The women were all pregnant and old of the poison. They lived barely long enough to reproduce themselves. The family didn’t clear enough land to raise an adequate crop of the Sacred Eight and insisted on eating too much of the palatable wild vegetation that surrounded their farm.

  Oelita never tried to change these people’s diet. Religion was too strong. They knew their diet killed them but the Nolar clan had an extraordinarily high kalothi rating only because of their high tolerance of the natural poisons of Geta. Without that they would be nothing — so they clung to the foods that killed them. All priest clans encouraged them and bought their women for breeding purposes. It disgusted Oelita.

  In this region the Nolar clan had a peculiar social structure. They weren’t
content with normal group marriage. At puberty the children were either traded to another family or were ceremoniously married into their own family. All the male adults were co-husbands and all the female adults were co-wives. The eldest, and most poison-immune male, had first choice of the newly menstruating female. Inbreeding was thought to be desirable because it was quick to bring out lethal recessives. The children who died were eaten.

  These Nolar chanted while they pounded, the old Chants of Knowledge as simple as a baby’s mind. Oelita did not believe the myth that spoke of an Age of Innocence when only the children had kalothi — but certainly the oldest songs were childlike.

  The Chants told how to clear the land and how to plant the Sacred Eight and how to breed for kalothi to keep the Race alive. Some were simply counting rituals. The most famous was a mnemonic that related the shapes of the alphabet’s letters to their sounds. Some told of duty and honor. Some praised kalothi. The Outpacing Chant, so lengthy it was known in countless versions, told of the journey of the God of the Sky. Some Chants were as meaningless as the Chant to the Horse Piece of the chess game. Its monotonous inanity was good for pounding rocks against fiber.

  “A Horse has feet, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse eats wheat, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse is meat, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse can snort, oh one, oh…”

  Only after Oelita had smashed out enough fiber for a shirt and had made them laugh with her stories did she examine the children. Three out of four Nolar children died before puberty. One baby girl, who had forgotten how to walk from feebleness, was dying. Oelita tenderly breast fed the girl.

  She kept her breasts full and productive. There was always a child to feed or a lover or a friend. It made her happy to be able to provide such a luxury. If she had no one to ease the ache she milked herself and made a delicate cheese.

  Then she took a bag of medicinal food from her packsack and gave it to the mother with instructions for saving the life of the child. Someday she would come back to talk a disturbing form of religion.