Later, once the council was gathered, as the Protector had expected, opposition arose. The new Northcounsel, Rickor, spoke at length to the point, opening, “Protector, it was, I believe, a concession on our parts to allow the pursuit of contact with these dome people in the first place. It was undertaken on humanitarian pretenses. It has involved considerable resources. It cannot, we feel, be construed as a prelude to creating an academy dominated by an alien group, a group so far as we know without theology, let alone the true worship of Aven, without a body of law, without a system of marriage, without the common skills needed to survive in the world as we live in it today.
“Furthermore, as we have just heard, the ancients developed a world which did not work, a world full of horrible devices of destruction, a world at odds with itself to such a degree that the purported arrival of these meteors touched off a destruction such as we cannot imagine.
“For these reasons, the north quadrant asks that the dome people, except Celeste, who is very young, and Susan, who is very old, be given whatever supplies they may desire and be asked to remove, with our aid of course, in spite of the fact that this is the harvest season, to whatever location they may find to their best advantage.”
“May we hear any other opinions on the matter?” asked the Protector. “Eastcounsel. We recognize you.”
Sagan, the Eastcounsel, arose, smoothed down her robe, and began. “I would like to speak in opposition to what has just been said. I have several points. The dome people are us. We must never forget that. We are all the same people. The fact that we can talk together is proof of this—after so many centuries of separation. If we cast them out, we cast out our own sisters. And brothers.
“The dome people represent no threat not already present. If we assume that they come from a world of terrible weapons, while ours is peaceful, we ignore our own history, which belies that notion. None of us pretends that we would harm the dome people. Hence if we exile them from us, as is suggested, we simply hand all their technology over to others, perhaps to the Sentani, who would probably share it with us. Perhaps to the wandering and marauding Peshtak we have been hearing of this past summer. Perhaps even to the eastern cities, if by some miracle they got that far. If that technology is helpful, we are robbed of it. If it is dangerous, then others have it and we do not.
“As to theology, we are already aware that a number of theological systems exist. Ours is not the only one. We are aware that most of them seem to spring from one root. Ours has the beauties that others lack, depths that others ignore. For that reason, we ought to spread it. Already Celeste sings with our choir. Tor reads our rolls more incessantly than almost anyone not in the ministry. He is a Shumai, but he quotes the writings of Pell and refers to Aven with reverence. We should invite others in, not shut them out.”
At this point in Sagan’s narrative, Tor was wandering up to the new structure the comps and Pelbar masons were erecting on the hill. He caught sight of Eolyn’s back on the hillside above, and ran up to her so lightly that she never heard him. She was listening to her wrist cube. Tor heard Sagan’s voice.
Close by her ear, Tor said, “I thought the council meeting was a private one.”
Eolyn whirled around with a light scream. “You. What? You’ve no right eavesdropping on me like that. Now get out of here.”
Tor laughed. “We should sit down together, Eo, until the council is over, so I can be sure that you will allow them their privacy. How can you manage this, anyhow?”
Eolyn shut off the receiver. “There is no use of their building up here, is there? When you tell the Pelbar, that wretch from the north quadrant will have her way. I knew we should have left here earlier for the eastern cities.”
“I will never tell. I want you people here. If you knew the country the way I do, you would know well enough that this is by far the best place for you—unless it is Northwall. Here is far better for the Pelbar, though. This city needs a new function. Northwall has found one. Here you would be honored and cared for.”
“And opposed. I heard the things that old ratskin said about us. Here, you listen.” Eolyn played the council meeting back for Tor, from her microtape.
“Now what do you say? See? I feel entirely exposed. I don’t know what I expected from such primitives. And you are the worst, sneaking around like a . . . a . . .”
“A mouse?”
“No. Like one of those long things.”
“A weasel.” Tor stood up and laughed. “Now that you are out of the dome, your analogies, at least, will improve. Now don’t leave just yet. Listen. What I just heard from the Northcounsel was little more than a concession. They all know that anyone could answer all their arguments. They are in bad odor now because of some recent events. They know this venture to help you has gone well. All they can do is to present an array of arguments against it so that if anything goes wrong, then they can gain in influence. That should be obvious. Even in Shumai councils, scant as they are, we do the same thing. Our ancestors did the same thing. Ours, Eo, because yours and mine came from the same society. I lost the technology, and you lost the poetry, the family, the free air, the—”
“Stop.”
“All right. I’ll stop. I won’t tell them, either.” He looked up at her, higher on the hill, grinning. “You look nice in that Pelbar outfit. But then you’d look nice in anything. Or even—”
“Stop. Go away. I have to reason this out.”
“Soon. You haven’t told me how you managed to work this miracle.”
“Why should I tell you?”
“I’m curious. I won’t tell. I won’t even tell what you overheard.”
“It doesn’t matter. I put a small transmitter in the hem of Ahroe’s tunic. The cloth is thick. She would never find it.”
“Amazing. I would like to contribute to your reasoning, if I may.”
“I suppose you must.”
“Just a few things. Celeste has found a home here. I doubt that she will leave. Butto would leave with you. Even though you see little use in him, he is loyal to you—and loves you.”
Eolyn snorted.
“Thornton and the Protector are already so struck with each other that I am sure he will never leave.”
“No loss.”
“Royal would leave if you said to, but he would very likely not manage to make the whole journey to the eastern cities. He is too old and frail. Bill will stay. The other comps would likely go with you, though some might not agree. It is hard to say.”
“And Ruthan? She would stay because of you, you think.”
“No. I will not be here that long. But she will stay. Probably because of Blu.”
“Blu? The wild man? The other axeman? What are you talking about?”
“Here is a secret for you so you won’t think I have an advantage over you. Will you keep it?”
Eolyn hesitated, then shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t tell. Who would I tell?”
“Of course it’s only a surmise. I think Ruthan will become the resident botanist, or . . . what do you call it?”
“Taxonomist, geneticist, horticulturist?”
“Yes. One of those. I think Blu will marry her within a year. Don’t sneer. Just watch. Please? I want you to see something.”
“What?”
“That there are other ways of knowing than your equipment. Dusk told me.”
“The dog? You’re making fun of me again. Dogs pick the people you marry?”
Tor laughed again, though the melancholy never left his eyes. “You will see. You have your radios. We have our dogs.”
“Ruthan is so in love with you she looks cross-eyed.”
“No. I inherited the pity she would have poured out on Dexter. You, Eolyn, you and I share a common problem. We are extremes. They’re the people in the middle. Do you understand?” Tor looked at her almost like a child looking at his grandmother. She recoiled inside.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean,” she said.
�
��So, another secret, then. That will reveal itself more slowly. Good-bye, Eo.” Tor turned and walked down the steep hill, waving his arm and his ruined stump for balance. She could hear him joking with the comps below. An extreme? Surely he was one. Eolyn could see nothing extreme about herself. Perhaps intellect was extremity, though, in this bizarre society.
That afternoon Tristal knocked on the door of Celeste’s workroom.
“Come in,” she said. Her back was to him. She sat at a bench crowded with pieces of glass, sandboard, fragile tubing.
“Hello, Celeste. What are you doing?”
“Tristal? Is that you? I’m glad you came. I need Stepan. Get him for me. He should have my new calipers ready by now.” She continued to rub something slowly and carefully. Tristal could see only the top of her head as she hunched over, her elbows working. Then he turned to get Stepan. Raran followed him out.
By evening, the assembled dome people were told that the council had recommended the founding of a Pelbarigan Academy, to focus their presence, Eolyn’s project on the hill, and whatever other sources of knowledge they could gather. By spring invitations would be sent throughout the Heart River, as far east as the Long Lake Sentani, if possible as far west as the Commuters, even including the ambiguously inclined Emeri. Pelbarigan, it would seem, was committed to a new course as an educational center. Yet the day ended without ceremony, as evening came, announced by the tower horns, accompanied by the pouring of the radiance of a cirrus-rich sunset across the river waters.
Less than two weeks later Celeste triumphantly showed off her microscope, set in a southern window, horrifying whomever looked at the microorganisms bumping like aimless boats in a drop of swamp water. Royal was especially pleased, and anxious to establish species, habits, dangers, anatomies. For him it was the first step on a long road to sound genetics, medicine, microbiology. He began to train Celeste to succeed him, though she showed little aptitude for teaching.
As Eolyn’s building progressed, in the cooling fall weather, Stel questioned her often about its strange design, with its spaced triple walls, its raking, south-facing roofs, and its large south windows painstakingly glazed with small panes of Pelbar glass. Her answers were revelations to him. The Pelbar, who for so many centuries had to conserve heat energy and live close to necessities, still had little idea of the basic principles of insulation, heat distribution, humidity control, solar absorption, and energy usage that she brought to the project.
Blu’s hunting band had departed south at the beginning of Colormonth, but Stel was surprised one day, while working on the building, to hear the Rive Tower horn. Shading his eyes, he saw the same six canoes returning upriver. Tor saw them, too, from his now habitual reading place at Hagen’s grave. He met them at the river bank with the guardsmen. They palmed, then embraced.
Blu stole a glance at the axeman, but saw no change in his troubled face. “We went south,” he said, “into Sentani country below the Oh. We found an entire band, Sentani, with women and children, all slaughtered and left on the ground.”
“How many?”
“Forty-nine, including all. Sark and Krush have gone to Koorb. We have warned Threerivers, though they seemed not to believe us, the louts.”
“The Peshtak, then? So far west?”
“We think so. Three of them were there, dead. They didn’t even bury their own. Swarthy men, with some horrible disease.”
“Disease?”
“Their bodies were all eruptions. Of course they had been there awhile.” Blu shuddered.
“Come. We will need to tell Oet.”
Soon a hasty council was called. A message bird flew off toward Northwall. Guard parties were sent to the rush-gatherers, eastward toward the country of the Tall Grass Sentani, who had already suffered from the Peshtak marauders. Blu sent two men across to the Isso, to warn the new farmsteads as far as Black Bull Island. A river patrol was set up, using the largest Tantal ship.
Two evenings later, the Protector summoned Eolyn to her quarters. The young woman was ushered in by Ahroe, who was invited to remain.
“Eolyn, I am afraid that your project on the hill may have to wait awhile. This new crisis has strained our resources to the limit. We are a rather small community, and this incursion has come during our most pressing season. It is a new thing, and we have no system for dealing with it.”
Eolyn sat silently for a time, then said, “I thought you would come to that in one way or another. We had an agreement. Now you are violating it.”
“We intend to maintain our agreement, but it will have to be put off. You seem not to understand the severity of the emergency.”
Eolyn stood. “I’m not sure of your motives. I have been thinking about all this, knowing some such thing would come, and I have decided to go to the eastern cities after all.”
“How? We can’t spare any transport now, and even if we could, it is a journey of incredible length and danger.”
“I’ve seen your maps. I can go downriver with the patrol, then head eastward until I strike the Oh. With the help of the pulsers, and the comps, I should make out all right.”
“It is nearly Buckmonth. You have no idea what you are suggesting.”
“Of course I know it is difficult. But we have the resources.”
“You would pass directly through Peshtak country.”
“Of course, and yet unharmed. You forget the pulsers. They are equipped with heat sensors. They can sense a presence in total darkness, aim, and destroy it without human aiming. We will be left alone.”
“It would be dead winter before you got there.”
“No matter. Here I feel stultified by all your rules and your dictations. I am a free being. I wish to live reasonably.”
“What you suggest is not at all reasonable.”
“Nonetheless, it is what I intend,” said Eolyn. Then she turned and left.
The Protector looked at Ahroe. “What is the cause of this? What has happened?”
“I don’t precisely know, Protector. Perhaps it is just what she has said. Clearly she feels we are backward. She feels she will be better off elsewhere. She has some myth about the east, as if she will be made a queen when she arrives there. I think she is vain about her looks and troubled by the fact that few seem deeply struck by them here.”
“Did Stel tell you that?”
“Yes, and since I’ve noticed. But she is also used to ordering everyone, the way she did in the dome. Royal seems always to have deferred to her. She isn’t used to working in a larger community, and compromise. She arrives at a conclusion, declares it reasonable, and then proceeds. Let’s hope she will change her mind.”
But Eolyn did not change her mind, though only the previous morning, Blu and his remaining men had happily begun a long run downstream in search of the Peshtak. They wanted Tor to lead them, but he had simply refused, looking supremely indifferent. Blu was angry. Some of the men looked at Tor in disapproving silence.
He had raised his arms, the whole and the truncated, and said, “Think what you wish. It seems right for me not to go now. I can’t give you a reason.”
Blu had turned and left without a reply, the other men following. Tor watched them go in gloom. Stel was coming up the hill, panting, standing aside for the Shumai, joking with them and receiving little response. But Tor could see them glance with interest at something he was carrying. When Stel came up, and they palmed, he held out the new axe sheath he had promised, and with it a new axe.
“Here. This is a new design. I think you might like it. It has a longer handle, which might make it a little more difficult on your hip. We can always shorten it. See? The handle has whip in it, and the blade design is not for chopping wood. It is mainly for fighting. Look. The wide arc of the blade is unsupported at the tips. But that makes it lighter and gives it more reach.” He extended the handle to Tor, who took it in his unaccustomed left hand and gave it some tentative swings. It seemed new and strange. He wasn’t sure he liked it.
“I
think you will find it has some of the virtues of our long swords,” said Stel. “At arm’s length, swinging in quick arcs, the way you have seen our guards train, it ought to combine the purposes of both.”
“I’m not sure I can throw it at game, Stel. It certainly is a handsome axe, though, and I thank you for it,” Tor finally said. He flicked out an arm and took the branch off a dogwood sapling, then whistled. “It seems to leap out. It has an incredible reach.” He turned and grinned.
Late in the day, when he heard that Eolyn intended to leave, Tor was not surprised. Ahroe told him at her house, where Tor was practicing with his new axe, splitting kindling, seeking for the quick, exact stroke he would need if the axe were to be of use. Garet sat on a stump, watching.
Tor’s reply to Ahroe was to reach out to the hem of her tunic and feel the material until he noticed a tiny bulge. Then he removed a small, metal button.
“What is it?”
“Something of Eolyn’s. She left it there so she could listen to the council through her radio.”
“You didn’t tell. Why, Tor? You should have.”
“I caught her at it. I’m almost sure she didn’t use it again. I promised not to tell because I thought that might make her leave then. She was ready to. She has been looking for a reason. She’s restless here. I think she wants to simplify things again, with herself as the chief person. I know how she feels. Pelbar society is complicated. You mustn’t tell anyone about this device. But you should ask her if she wants it back. See what she does.”
Ahroe did that and found Eolyn matter-of-fact and unrepentant. At that moment, Eolyn had been trying to convince Ruthan to go, but after Ahroe gave her the transmitter, Ruthan would not even listen to her dome fellow any further.
Ahroe tried once more to point out the danger of the Peshtak, but Eolyn remained curt. “How do you expect them to find us in that vast expanse. They have no radar. If I spend my life here, I will get nowhere. We didn’t store all that knowledge through so many centuries just to waste it.”
The Dome in the Forest Page 21