Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

Defiantly she took up Joesai’s challenge on the eve of the great party. She was tired of his teasing her as if she were still a child believing in grumpmugs who lived in fei flowers and bit off thumbs. Thus she arrived at Kathein’s physics shop in party finery. Teenae, insisting on being her bodyguard, was dressed in trousers stitched together out of radiant saloptera bellies and wide belt of her grandfather’s hide, a linear crown of jewels paving the shaved streak through her black hair. Behind her, Joesai loomed in ebony and silver and leather.

  They entered. Joesai led them to a vaulted chamber of bulky magician’s mysteries, tended by three sweating sorcerers. Oelita peered at shelves of tiny red insect eyes caught in glass cages. A fan whirled like the wings of a beetle migration. Kathein, moving as if she dared not generate shock with her feet, took Oelita to the Frozen Voice of God held by metal fingers that sprouted tentacles of wire. There were lights and glass lenses and the crystal was mounted in front of the great bellows of the silvergraph image maker.

  Kathein hushed them while she fiddled with quick fingers. She waited and told them not to move, then pulled out a glass plate bound in black paper. “Parts of your crystal contain visions as well as words,” she said to Oelita. “Koienta!” she called to a servant, “develop this silvergraph. I’ll soon have to be leaving. I must dress for the party.”

  Koienta bowed to Oelita. “Our thanks for preserving the crystal,” he said as he passed her, squeezing by the shelves of bottled red eyes, his attention devoted to the black-wrapped glass. His was the ritual of one who has to believe every scrap of dogma he has been taught. It made her uncomfortable.

  While Kathein gestured and touched, preparing a new glass plate, she politely explained her obsecrations-to-God. Oelita listened without trying to understand something that could have no logic. Joesai grinned, thinking she was being impressed. It was the ignorant men who were always so sure they were right!

  Much later, when Koienta brought the printed silvergraph to Kathein, the physicist stared for long heartbeats, flickers of horror crossing her face from the reflected light of the paper. Silently she handed the silvergraph to Oelita, while Teenae craned her neck to see and Joesai watched faces.

  “What is it?” asked Teenae.

  “God has been speaking to us this day!” exclaimed Kathein.

  Oelita saw a still image of two rotting men hung up on thorned wire over mud. It was labeled at the bottom with readable numbers and almost readable words.

  Two of 150,000 who died at Vimy Ridge, 1916.

  Where could such a picture have come from? Oelita scanned her mind, her memories, her logic — and found nothing. It was like putting her foot on a familiar step in the darkness, ready for the pressure of the stone, and finding nothing. The fall was dizzying.

  “There are a quarter of a billion words in your crystal and thousands of pictures. All like this,” said Kathein, leading them away. They waited while she dressed. Oelita did not speak. Joesai, smug, did not need to know what she thought. Teenae remained terrified by that one single peek through the Eyes of God. The silence broke only when the rustle of Kathein’s gown descended the stairs. She appeared in brilliant silken blues, bare breasted, the platinum filigree of mask inlaid upon the noble cicatrice carved into her face.

  Together they went to the Palace. The ballroom was filled by excited Kaiel scarfaces who loved parties with themes. The Forge of War, what little was known of it, provided an awesome theme.

  Musicians were dressed in garb copied from the silvergraphs, resplendent in painted papier-mâché helmets, gaudy uniforms and breastplates of brass. Baron von Richthofen played oboe in red uniform, black cross full upon his chest, red goggles obscuring half his serrated face. Achilles, in great plumes of desert fire, tuned the strings of his ellipsoidal gourd. Hitler and Stalin, in black and yellow pinstriped pantaloons, thumped the organ drums.

  Through the main entrance, blazing green and red Vatican Guards protected the arrival of the whisky kegs with proud halberds. Then across the ballroom strode the armored and scowling samurai, Takeda Shingen, alias Aesoe, a dagger in his belt so comically long that its tip almost dragged upon the floor, carrying a yellow and pale blue banner atop a pole that read in vertical script: “fast as wind; quiet as forest; fierce as fire; firm as mountain.”

  In agitation, Oelita swept over to a table where a neat pile of silvergraphs had accumulated, each pinned to a tentative translation. Painfully she began to read a page, referring to the translation when it became incomprehensible. Once she had to ask one of the hovering linguists to help her guess at meanings and odd grammatical structures.

  Thinking there was just one (killer clansman), he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same (ghoulish) state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. They must have had their faces upturned when (the sunfire lit); perhaps they were (suppressor of engined-sailplane) personnel.*

  * From Hiroshima by John Hersey.

  She picked up another of the sheets.

  They were ordered to lay down their (killing tools) and then were (butchered without intent to eat). Only the Caliph’s life was preserved as a gift for (killer priest) Hulagu who made his entrance to the city and palace on (fifteenth sleep cycle of second moon cycle of Riethe year). After the Caliph had revealed (by force of pain) to (the war game-winner) the hiding place of all his treasure, he too was put to death. Meanwhile (butchering without intent to eat) continued everywhere in the city. Those who surrendered quickly and those who fought on were alike (murdered). Women and children perished with their men. One Mongol found, in a side street, forty newborn babies whose mothers were dead. As an act of mercy he (killed) them, knowing that they would not survive without mothers to suckle them. In forty days some eighty thousand citizens of Baghdad were slain.

  What was this? this geyser of paper from some demon world come to spray and scald them? Oelita didn’t believe a word of it — but when she did, for just a moment, she was horror-struck by such unimaginable immorality.

  How could anyone eat eighty thousand people in forty days? The bodies would rot; the leather would go brittle in the sun, untanned. To murder a man was horrible enough, but to murder a man and his relatives, too, so that there could be no Funeral Feast, that was unthinkable!

  Her heart was pounding as she watched ten Chanters file into the room in mudbrown cloaks wearing their voice amplifier masks in strange goggled shapes with gross noses.

  “Chlorine masks from the Great War,” said the linguist who had been helping her.

  The Chants began, telling in thunderous sinusoidal rhythm of the God of the Sky delivering His Getans from some mystery too frightening to look upon. The wooden instruments faded in; the strings began to tell of warrior and fire while Hitler and Stalin beat upon their organ drums and the horns wailed. The Chants muted to moaning, one voice alone holding a delicate melody. Then out of nowhere three naked Liethe sprang through, their child-smooth bodies boneless in their leaps.

  They attacked each other, circling, lunging, stepping aside, flying over one another like bodies being juggled. Six daggers appeared magically in their hands while they stalked enemies, making alliance and betrayal in deft moves. The blows began to sound as screams. Each touch pulled forth a streamer of red silk like spurting blood that attached to wrist or shoulder or hip or ankle, proliferating. They fought among streamers, and now the streamers lurched and shuddered as the weaving motions boiled the blood that enveloped the dancing bodies.

  The crimson silk lost strength, fluttering, swirling, diving, dividing into three stained bodies now topped by silver skull-masks. A jerk. A lurch. A stagger. A final battle to wound the already dying, to use one’s fading strength for destruction, then death throes among the mourning musicians. Only a glance of flesh did the audience get of Liethe slipping away, shucking their costumes in a convulsion that slowed and flowed
down the steps into an empty red heap upon the floor.

  Aesoe was stamping his feet. The Kaiel began to shake the building with their collective stamping until the naked girls, still in their skulls of silver metal, ran out from where they had disappeared, bowed, and ran away again.

  Oelita turned from the spectacle. The pressure was building up within her to panic level. Her attempt to form an explanation for these impossible words was circling in failure. A hoax? Were the Kaiel building up a lie about Death to justify a coming bloody conquest of Geta?

  But it was her crystal.

  Who could write so small in visible-invisible ink? Who could conceive such stories where violence was the only means of transferring power? They could invent stories, but who could invent so many? Where was the Getan who would tell a story of mass murder without ending the story in a gluttonous Feast? Helplessly she moved through the crowd of feverish Kaiel, seeking Joesai. He was staring at silvergraph pictures.

  He showed her one. A pair. To the right was a burning child running along a road beside a burning village with the title Vietnam. To the left was a burning child leaping off a road with a rocky mountain village in the background titled Afghanistan. The collective title was The Superpowers and The Third World. She remembered her twins roasting upon the spit.

  “Have you found no love among all this?” she asked.

  Silently he showed her another silvergraph. A woman was being stretched apart by a machine. The Dominicans Save the Soul of a Heretic. “Or would you prefer a tale of the Christian clan exterminating the clan of Albigensians in the name of love?” He laughed and handed her some dried bees to munch on. “While you are putting it all together think about why you can eat raw bees and why eating any other insect will sicken you unto death.”

  “You think the only explanation for this is God, don’t you?”

  “I’ll listen to a better one.”

  She changed the subject. “What’s that?”

  “The script underneath says it is a steel beetle big enough to carry five men in its belly across the desert. Its duty is to throw metal rocks at men.”

  “How horrible!”

  “I’m getting ideas.”

  “Joesai!”

  “This one I like especially. It is a giant intelligent candle that rides on the strength of its flame from one city to the other side of a world where it is cunning enough to find another city which it extinguishes in one blow by conjuring a bowl of sunfire.”

  “Joesai!”

  He smiled at her, glad to share his own horror with someone he knew could understand. “I don’t always think Death thoughts. Anything with jumping legs that strong could jump up to God and talk to Him. I have some questions to ask.”

  “Would you ever descend upon a city and kill more people than you could eat?” she asked.

  “What a stink that would make. Kalothi can be overwhelmed. What is the point?”

  “I’m confused. I don’t know what anything means anymore.”

  “It’s obvious what it means.”

  “For a simpleton like you, everything is obvious. You invoke God. God can be used to explain everything!” She was livid.

  “Can’t you tell what it means?” he asked gently. “This Riethe is the world from whence we came! Don’t the Chants say that God brought us across His Sky to save us? This is what He was saving us from.”

  “You don’t even know your Chants.” She was scornful. “The Chants mention Riethe but they say we fell from the Star Yarieun.”

  “There is no agreement on that. The same Chants vary from clan to clan and land to land. The Outpacing Chant that I am most familiar with mentions Yarieun, which we call Yarmieu, as the last resting place.”

  “How can the Race be saved from itself by moving across a sky?” She was full of scorn. “If I am poisoned and live in Sorrow, will moving myself to Kaiel-hontokae leave my poison behind? If I am afraid of my navel, will changing houses change that? If I chew my nails, will moving to the dark side of Geta give me long nails? You can’t run from here because here is always where you are!”

  Without letting Joesai reply, she lost herself in the crowd and left the Palace. She stood beneath the nested ovoids, her mind in chaos. Who were the Riethe and their Cult of Death? Her maelot theory of human evolution no longer made sense.

  There was a God.

  Her world reeled. It was madness. There was no God but God had revealed Himself. She turned back to the great door of the Palace, insanity striking her senses. Joesai was standing there. Joesai was God, and God was Death, and Death had found her, grinning.

  She backed away. “Don’t come near me!” He took a step closer and she shifted two steps into the street. She was pregnant by Hoemei, and had been on the verge of creating the blood that would wash the child away, and now Joesai was coming after it with death, and she wasn’t going to give anyone that child. Not again. Not ever again. “Go away,” she said. He came closer and there was no one else about. “I’ll kill you!” she cried with deadly intent.

  He paused. She was confused. How could she kill God? When God fell into the sea like a lost glowsting, He merely rose out of the mountains again to reclaim His Sky. Her fists were clenched in front of her. “Go away!” He left and she turned and ran, stumbling in the mud somewhere, to lie against the cobblestones of a filthy gutter.

  She thought of her defiance; she thought of the people she had turned from God, fomenting rebellion, and the honors she had just seen that God had taken them from, that she had carried around with her all her life since she had been a child.

  “Oh God, forgive me. I’ve blasphemed. I knew You and I rejected You, and my heart is full of sorrow.” She rubbed her face in the dirt. “Oh God of Sky and Stars and Wandering, thank You for bringing us here from whatever misery You saved us from. I thank You again and again.” She rubbed her tears into the mud, her fingers clutching stone. “Forgive me.”

  38

  No man can live in the future, but those who are not caught up by the struggle for some future find deadly surprises in their now!

  Inscription on the arch of the Kaiel Archives

  A HARD-EARNED gold coin can slip through a hole in a pocket. In this fashion Oelita vanished.

  Aesoe, wearing only sandals with bath towel draped about his shoulders, raged and paced in his den, his genitals swinging to his wrath like gongs. He gestured quick motions that seemed to skin an invisible adversary. His Liethe, whichever one he had kept for the pillows — Hoemei remained unable to discriminate between them — lay sprawled on the cushions of the bed, a sheet between her legs, head buried from the ranting, tortured by a whisky hangover. She wore a tiny amulet on a single fine chain of gold about her neck.

  Hoemei, unshaven and unslept and still in party dress, moved not a muscle. He carried a note from the Gentle Heretic, all they had been able to find of her. It said: “Forgive me for being wrong. Please, please take good care of my people.” Nothing more.

  Aesoe raved. “See that Joesai banishes himself from Kaiel-hontokae by the first sunset of the Reaper or I will personally conduct services for his Ritual Suicide at the Temple of Human Destiny! He is a meddling nuisance, fouling the best plans of genius to soothe his woman-hating heart! And you meddle, too! Your sly hand is creeping everywhere. I told you and I tell you; that woman is vital. Find her! Will I graft the skin of you, still alive, to the wheels of wagons? Will I use your wired jawbone as a paper holder?”

  The maran-Kaiel had already searched for her, of course, all during the remainder of the night, but had not found her. How does one find a woman who, as a youth, had wandered the desert plains with a shrewd father-teacher who lived to walk in the open world beneath the sky? Teenae was still out asking questions among the Ivieth. The task was hopeless.

  Events disgruntled Hoemei. He had grown fond of Oelita. Her energy and intelligence pleased him, even to the point where he had been seriously dreaming of taking her as a replacement for Kathein. The family was far less sure o
f her suitability but he saw them beginning to meld with her, even Joesai in his churlish way. Gaet warmed to a woman easily, without agonizing debate. Teenae was outwardly friendly from the start, but was secretly threatened by another woman until she had a chance to know her well. Noe merely demanded that another woman be kind, affectionate, and easy to live with — and unquestioningly loyal to the family.

  Now Hoemei was left with a breach in his plans. It was like having a route set to ascend a craggy mountain and finding the chosen path suddenly rendered impassable by landslide. He would have to send Gaet into Sorrow sooner than he had anticipated. Who else could convince Oelita’s people that she had not been murdered in some treacherous deal? A delicate mission.

  Shifts, shifts. Quickly he would have to find others to do Gaet’s work here in the city. The inconvenience annoyed him. He cursed Joesai for the stubborn pressure he had kept on Oelita, then sighed. That was the price a Predictor paid. The future did not happen. People created the future with moment-to-moment action and decision, always adjusting to the unexpected. More than one route led to the same peak.

  Hoemei bowed, dropping all the way to one knee. He had delivered his dreadful message. The Liethe creature stirred and stretched, smiling gaily at him behind Aesoe’s naked haunches. Instantly he recognized Honey’s special sweetness. She was here!

  The unnatural smoothness of her back launching itself into the summer hills of her buttocks sent a shiver through him more fearsome than Aesoe’s anger.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He did not dare move lest he further provoke Aesoe. Nor could he find words.

  Lazily she brought herself upright, amused at the silence, aware that her movements suspended even the Prime Predictor in mid-emotion. The chain with its tiny amulet swung between her breasts. “My lover is afraid of my lover.” She was watching them both so that neither knew whom she meant. “Come here.”

  Hoemei remained frozen.