“Yes, Protector,” said Ahroe, a bit nonplussed.
“I am arranging for you to become a guardcaptain soon, Ahroe. And Oet is near retirement. It may not be long before you command the entire guard.”
“But why—I don’t understand.”
“You received your mother, who had disowned you, Ahroe. You held her in your arms and gave her comfort in her last hours. Do not think that will be lost on the north quadrant. You have traveled farther than any Pelbar woman in our known history. You have returned, proved loyal, stuck when sticking was the thing to do. You relate easily to the Shumai and Sentani. Now, do you see?”
“No, Protector. All this feels like a weight, as you put it.”
“Being Protector is a much greater weight. I have borne it for some years now. I feel it slipping. Do you realize that the Dahmena spent her very first night outside the city at your house? Do you realize that I have visited Northwall once, many years ago, and save for that one trip, I too have remained in this city all the nights of my life? How am I to make decisions for the new world opening up?”
A distant lamp flared in Ahroe’s mind. No. Could the Protector mean that? It was too much. Could she bear the weight?
Eventually the Protector said, “You are quiet. It may well be, you know, that you will indeed be a Protector in the future. I am glad you feel it to be a burden. If you were proud, then you would do it badly. Of course, you can refuse. Or the council may never elect you. But I feel it. You need to think about it. You must remember, we are still Pelbar. We are still servants to Aven. When there is right to be done, we must do it, despite the cost to ourselves. Now, Ahroe, you must go and help Stel prepare his expedition.”
“Yes, Protector. Thank you. This is all bewildering. I will need to sort it out.”
“One more thing. This worries me about you. You will need to know more of Aven than you believe possible. I have not observed you among the devout. You will need to become so. I don’t mean empty piety. I mean a probing of the rolls of Pell, of the fragments of ancient scripture, such as we have. I see your friend Tor looks into them. You will not make clear decisions without that underpinning. Decisions are not made by the head only. If they are, they are often bad and stupid. Now, you may go.”
Ahroe bowed at the Protector’s back, for she had never turned. “Yes. Thank you, Protector,” she said, and left. After a time, the Protector did turn. Her face remained grave and tense as she walked from the window to summon Druk for some tea.
Ahroe found Stel in the front room, arranging small piles of things to take along. He seemed more pensive than eager and shot her a look that showed her he would miss her. He was tossing something lightly in his hand.
“What is that?”
“It is the box that Tristal found. It was Celeste’s. We never gave it back. He thought it was some kind of weapon that hurt his dog, but I don’t see it. Look. If you press here, a small rod protrudes from the end.”
Ahroe seemed uninterested. Stel set it down on a small table, looked at it, and touched another square cut in the surface. Then he turned to his piles, moving them from the center of the room. He felt odd. His head suddenly hurt. He turned to Ahroe, who fell, clutching her ears. Suddenly, the sound grew, and a small hole was blasted through the stone wall of the cottage, as if it had been struck with a great hammer. Stel leaped at the box and slammed the button. The rod withdrew.
Ahroe ran into the other room retching, and Stel stood sheepishly until she came back. She was wiping sweat from her forehead. She looked angry, but then she began to laugh and cry at the same time as they came together and held each other.
“I guess it was a weapon. Some kind of weapon.”
“Awful. I will put it away. Too bad we didn’t have it when Cyklo came.”
“Just as well, Ahroe. It all worked out. Unless Hagen had it.”
Once more Ahroe sobbed against his shoulder. “Be careful. I have a terrible feeling about this. Be careful down there.”
Stel didn’t reply. He could still feel a sharp singing in his head.
Two mornings after, Stel and Dailith departed, with three other guardsmen, Egar, Aybray, and Nuva. The north quadrant sent no one. In two large, fabric-covered canoes, the party pushed off the crowded bank in the early-morning glare, amid laughter, dipping their paddles rhythmically in the muddy water, leaning their backs into it, surging out into the channel. Ahroe watched them go, straight-mouthed. As earlier that spring, the guardsmen blew the horn notes of departure at the proper time, followed by the ascending notes of the guardsmen’s salute, and the Pelbar lifted their paddles in response. Ahroe watched them out of sight, Garet with her, again still and sulking. Raran put her nose in his hand and butted him lightly with her head, wagging her tail, for Tristal had returned. Garet went to push the dog away, but stroked her broad head instead, with its short, velvet fur.
“I will take messages for you,” said Tristal. “Don’t worry, Ahroe. They will be all right.” She said nothing but turned away from him to mount the hill to Hagen’s grave, where she could see the small boats far down the river.
Dexter saw his communicator light up. “Dex,” came Eolyn’s voice. “I am sorry. You will need to explain some things to me. All of this is so irrational. I am afraid of what has awakened inside me.”
Dexter sighed. “We have been over it all before, Eo. Meet me in central conference. We will study the life-systems reports there. But I have only until 7210.”
“Ruthan?”
Dexter switched off. Before leaving, he glanced at the rodentry monitor, slammed his hand against the outside wall, and left the room rubbing his palm.
X
IT was a hard summer, both inside and outside the dome. In the heat and the repeated thunderstorms, Stel and the guardsmen toiled to break and trim rock, dragging it from the outcrop they now called Tor’s Ledge through the woods and up to the rim of the empty place. Slowly the stone causeway grew down the hill toward the dome. But it had to be built without touching the poison soil the stones were set into. Thick, glassy surfaces had to be pounded and broken. As much as possible, they kept the dust of the place off them, bathing twice a day in the stream below the ledge. When the wind blew, they masked their faces with cloth, sweating in the sun.
Dailith proved an able worker, willing and supremely dutiful. Egar and Nuva worked more and more unwillingly. Being far from Pelbarigan weighed on them. Nights under the ledge frightened them, and the preparing of food, often wild food killed by Stel or Aybray, seemed irregular and uncivilized to them. Eventually it was clear they longed to return to the city, though they manfully tried to continue. Stel grew peremptory with them, seeing that they were used to taking orders. They did, gritting their teeth.
The problem with Aybray was the opposite. Freedom from the city gave a new world to him, and he was so overwhelmed that he took on the job of most of the hunting and fishing needed to support the work. But often he simply wandered the woods, or pushed out through the tall prairie grass drinking in the size and silence of his surroundings. “He has a Shumai soul,” Stel remarked to Dailith one evening.
Nonetheless, the causeway slowly progressed down the hill. Tristal came from Pelbarigan, carrying messages and supplies, and staying three days to haul rock. He was rapidly maturing, his whole body deepening and hardening. Already he stood taller than Stel. A new confidence seemed to radiate from him, though a shadow of trouble as well.
One evening he told Stel of it. “Am I as wholly uncivilized as Celeste seems to think?” he asked.
“Of course not. You mustn’t mind her. She knows very little about people. She is happiest with her mathematics. What is she doing now?”
“Working out a system of lenses so the Pelbar can see the tiny things she talks of—the microorganisms. She calls it a microscope.”
“Is she progressing?”
“She seems to be. She works at it long hours, with two helpers to grind and polish glass. She is trying to find ways of measuring the th
ings. That seems very important and difficult.”
“Well, I’m glad she is happy.”
“Stel.”
“Yes?”
“It is all very strange. I think I love her. I want to be with her. What do you think? Am I old enough to love somebody?”
Stel squinted up at him. “It’s hard to say. Sometimes these things pass like mist from the river. Other times they stand like stone. That’s the way it was with Ahroe and me, though we had our troubles.” He chuckled.
“She looks through me as if I wasn’t there. She even loves Raran, but she seems to discount me entirely. I’m glad to be here. It is hard for me to stand it when I’m there. She looks at Tor as if he were Sertine himself—but even him she is beginning to forget with all this glass grinding.”
Stel quietly stirred the fire. “I can’t help you, Tris. No man can. These things are never easy. It goes with being a person. Who can say what she will notice? She is strange. This may well be just a phase of your life. Keep it all in perspective. In the long run, you will have to be true to your own best self and let everything else go. You will have to stand whatever comes along.”
“Is that what you did?”
Stel laughed. “I tried to. I failed miserably, then learned slowly. I think I did learn, though we all fail now and then, and I often. What I did discover, though, was that you should be the best Tristal you know how to be, and if this leads Celeste to you, good. If not, you will have to bear it.”
“I can’t bear it. I can’t get her out of my head, even here.”
“Will you be able to give up Tor, and the free running out on the plains?”
“I think Tor himself is worrying about that, Stel. There are fewer running bands all the time. Everyone is settling down.”
“Yes. They find life is easier that way. But Tor never will settle.”
“He can’t see himself doing it. Right now he is trying to wean Celeste away from him. He feels the need to look in on her.”
“He would have made a good Pelbar. He is a mother.”
Tristal looked annoyed at this, but then saw Stel was serious, and so thought it over. He rose and dusted himself off.
“One thing more,” Stel said. “Don’t expect it to be easy. Loving is the chief source of most of our personal anguish. You must see that by now. Pray. And try to be your best self. Say to yourself that if you are to attract what you love, and to you, you yourself, then you have to be a wholehearted self. I know that sounds stupid, but that is what character involves.”
Tristal didn’t look convinced. Stel watched him walk away, wishing he could have said what he meant, or known what he meant—thinking that Celeste was not Ahroe, that so much of a man’s happiness depended on being close to a woman who had somewhere in the river of her life a deep channel of outflowing love, still and slow. Even though Ahroe was in Pelbarigan, he felt that union of endeavors, that strong line of connected hopes. He felt the resilience of her loyalty, which would not snap, and knew, to himself, that the meagerness of Celeste’s machine-companioned childhood would never encourage any such development.
Not far away, inside the dome, Dexter and Eolyn again were together in the conference room, ostensibly discussing modifications to the rodentry cages to prevent further killing of the young. It seemed to happen so quickly. The mothers were now turning on their newborns in the first moments of their lives. The problem was not an easy one. Already the meat component of the protein supply had decreased.
Partly they were discussing this. But Eolyn was miserable. Her theory of being a mechanism in need of adjustment had not worked, as Dexter had predicted. She had insisted they try again, but again she felt shriveled by the whole event. After that he had refused. Begging him, she had threatened, even threatened to tell Ruthan, but she never would, and he knew it. Dexter tried to steer her toward Butto, who still bubbled with his newfound normality and overflowed with emotion. He often gazed at Eolyn. She was revolted by him, though.
“It would seem that as the feelings die, disgust and anger are the last,” said Dexter.
“Don’t rub it in,” she replied.
“I’m not. Merely thinking it out. If I could help, I would.”
“I think you could if you really tried.”
“We’ve been through that. Ice runs in the arteries of both of us.”
“What is it like, Dex? What is it like when it is real?”
He looked at her, startled. “I’m not sure I know. If I can judge by Ruthan, it suffuses the whole being with a radiance, not so much the mere sensation but the aura of loving. All I catch of that is reflected heat, really.”
The panel slid. Ruthan entered, seemed to catch a look from the other two, hesitated, and sat down. What was this? Dexter with Eolyn? Something more hovered in the air beside the diagrams on the lightboard. “Am I interrupting?” she asked.
“No, Ruthy. We are trying to determine how to modify the cages so the mothers won’t kill the young. It is happening with alarming frequency. Here, look at the chart.”
Dexter commanded a series of touch buttons, and brought on the screen a graph with a steeply rising line. She looked at it, almost dreamily, then leaned back.
“Do you think plants have emotions?” she said. The others looked surprised. “I am not being merely silly—I hope. I seem to sense a response from them. But the point is that the rodents must have emotions. Why would the mothers want to kill their young? They have always done some of that, I suppose, but if the rate is increasing, the place to look for a solution is not in cages, but in happy rats. Dex, do you love them?”
“Love the rats?” he shouted, screwing up his face. “They amuse me, but good God I am so sick of them sometimes. I wish we could put them back on tranquilizers.”
“But the food. It was getting to us as well.”
“There must be a way of processing it that will remove any residues.”
“Our supplies are limited—much more so now with the loss of the oil.”
“Well, Ruthan,” said Eolyn. “If you were to love them, what would you do? You must know you would be faking it. You would intend to kill them eventually, wouldn’t you?”
A slow smile spread on Ruthan’s face. “I would play with them, and talk to them, and project my love at them. I do it to the plants, and because I really feel it. Here they are, valiantly growing, all for us. I know they can’t help it, but it is a lovely thing for them to do. I tell them. Now. I know you think I’m crazy, but here are some of my graphs.” Reaching out, she commanded a new set of lines on the lightboard. “The upward movement of these lines shows tomato production by my favorite plants. See? It is all calculated by weight of fruit. That other set, the dashes, is production on thirty vines tended solely by comps.” The broken line wavered slightly, but remained level.
“How do you account for the sudden recent rise in production?” Eolyn asked. “Is this a new experiment?”
Ruthan smiled slowly. Dexter covertly frowned at her. “I don’t know,” she said. A tension entered the air, and with it, Susan Ward slid the panel back and entered the room, slowly, carrying her dulcimer, moving to sit down.
“Susan. You are out of your room. What is it? Bored?”
“Bored. Yes. Bored. But something has happened. I feel it. What is different now? I don’t know that I like it.”
“What has happened? Can you give us more specific information?”
“Undoubtedly there must be information somewhere, buried in my enfeebled cortexes. I have lived a long time, and I have detected a shift in the atmosphere of the dome and levels.”
“The comps are not drugged now. Zeller is gone. Celeste, too. We are having trouble with the Brat Shack. The rats are killing their young. And Ruthan has increased tomato production. Other than that all is normal. Even Butto is back to himself. In fact he is more himself than he has ever been. Oh yes, and we have lost the oil.”
Susan looked at Eolyn. “That is not it.” She glanced around the room. “So you won
’t tell me. Well, I will return to my own proper cell, then.”
She turned to go. Dexter felt an increase in tension. “I will go, too. Go down and love my rats. A good place to start.” He gave a strange laugh as he and Susan left the room.
Ruthan looked over at Eolyn, who, unaccountably, suddenly, looked at her level and straight, seeming to transmit a pulse of hatred like a force. Ruthan reeled slightly and stood, looking puzzled. Understanding began to grow. Eolyn knew about Dexter. Ruthan started to rush out, then went to Eolyn, kneeling by her chair, putting her head against the older woman’s side and crying. Eolyn remained rigid.
“I’m sorry,” Ruthan said softly. “I really am.”
“For what? What is the matter with you?”
Ruthan stood, brushing her hair from her face. What was this? Had she made a mistake? No, there was no mistake. Eolyn’s face betrayed her knowledge. So she was choosing to ignore it. Ruthan leaned down and kissed her. Then she fled. Eolyn sat rigid, growing slowly more angry and frustrated. Finally she rubbed away the kiss furiously and left.
Susan stood in her room, musing. It was time to go, she thought. She had toyed with the idea of leaving the dome, even if it killed her. Something was wrong here. She couldn’t pin it down, but it seemed to hang like an evil atmosphere. She would use Celeste’s door. It would take careful planning. She would nullify the alarm system as Celeste had done. She would take supplies and a pointer. She was willing to die out there. She would even take along a euthanasia pill. She smiled to herself, thinking that Royal would not get to recycle her, nor to dissect her for information. Sitting down at her lightboard, she began to plan.
Late in Heatmonth, Stel and his crew finally lowered the last blocks of stone next to the dome. Dailith reached out and slapped the concrete surface with a boyish laugh. They stood right below Celeste’s door. Sweat ran down all their faces, and each took a turn at touching the dome, even Egar and Nuva.
The Dome in the Forest Page 15