by Anthology
We moved through the little tourist settlement rapidly. None of the room-keepers had seen an Earthen woman. They told us the closest bar was another hour down the road.
I felt panic creeping in.
Ruk found a handlight and we walked the length of the beach, finding no one. After searching the rocks at one end, Ruk said, "Should we try to find the bar?"
My heart sped up with each passing moment. Every instinct screamed, "This is where she is!" But I couldn't find her. "I don't know. I don't—Let me calm down…because—"
"What? You think she's here?"
Then I remembered. "Oh gods, I can simply tell you." I almost hugged him, hesitated, and then did it anyway. "I'm getting greenblack…um, greenblack-…hollow? What would that mean to you?"
"Not good. That's for sure. I don't know the word. Darkness. Depth, but not good depth."
"Depression," I said. "No cherry red. No bright blue."
Sonjec didn't want to be abandoned, alone. I knew that for certain. She wanted me to come for her. Frustrated tears filled my eyes. She might have already walked into the waves. Sonjec could do that. That it would ruin Mother and me might not ever occur to her.
Ruk put an arm around my shoulders. "Let's go to the other end. We didn't search the rocks as carefully down there."
As we walked, I screamed her name and kept my eyes on the water, but saw only shimmering light on choppy waves. The dark green feeling wasn't out there. That's what was confusing me. Where was she?
Ruk tugged on my sleeve and said, "Look!" He pointed up and out toward the cliff that reached out over the sea.
I couldn't see anything but purple sky and dark rocks. I shook my head, tears spilling out of my eyes. "What?"
"On the end of that sharp jut. She's there." He brought me over in front of him, one hand on my shoulder, the other pointing.
"You're sure? You see her?" I brushed tears away.
"Yes. It has to be her. What do you want to do?"
"I want to kill her. SONJEC!" I screamed so hard it made me cough.
We reached the rocks and he shone the light as we searched for footholds. As we came onto a small plateau, the wind blew toward us.
I gasped and we turned to face each other. "Music!"
He took my hand. "This way."
We took mincing steps on a less steep route toward the water, but then had to climb again and could hear nothing but the waves. The rocks were wet and it took all my concentration not to slip.
"Do you swim?" I asked him after we both had negotiated a steep crack between boulders and were sitting atop them, resting. We could hear the music once again, which let me know that Sonjec was alive. I was able to catch my breath.
"A little".
"What if you slipped?"
"What if you slipped?"
"I'm a good swimmer!"
He looked down. "We'd hit rock here anyway. Let's just not fall."
"Deal." I stood and screamed, "Sonjec!"
"Why can't she hear us?"
I stopped yelling then, realizing why. She was playing the frequlet. Her implants activated, she wouldn't hear anything outside her music.
But the instrument had heard us.
As we topped the highest ledge, my voice arose within the composition—changed, re-patterned—but undeniably my harsh voice, screaming her name.
She, sitting near the edge, heard it too.
Sonjec stood, turned toward us and then rocked backward on one foot as if she wanted me to witness her fall.
I held my breath for a heartbeat and then rushed toward the cliff to get my ass-blast sister out of harm's way.
***
She was all cut up.
I wanted to get a room, but she refused to move from the beach. Ruk begged a couple of blankets from a roomkeeper. We wrapped her in them and Ruk built a fire. It wasn't that cold, but she was wet and her arms and legs were covered in wounds. Some were scrapes from climbing the rocks. Others were precise, self-inflicted cuts.
"How'd you get here?" I asked.
"Rowdies," she said. "Four boys who thought they'd picked up some fun."
"Did they hurt you?"
"No! I don't know what they expected, but I pulled out my knife and told them to fuck off."
"So you weren't a political hostage?" Ruk asked.
"Hardly. That would have at least been interesting. This was the same old tiresome shit that we women put up with almost any place in the universe."
"They didn't hurt you, so you hurt yourself?" I said, nodding at her arms and legs. There was a long silence. Finally, I spoke again. "Do you know what's happening in the capital?"
She nodded, looking into the fire. "I've been following the news feeds. But, Car, I don't understand what I did."
"Ruk?"
He gently explained why the P'twuans had gotten so riled up. Sonjec asked lots of questions, getting less depressive and more energized the more she found out.
"It's fascinating. I mean, it backfired this time, but the idea that I can communicate on another level using my music is pretty awe-inspiring. I had no idea that was possible."
"Nor did we," Ruk said.
"But, I've fucked up everything for Mother."
"If you fucked up everything for Mother, then you have to fix everything for her."
She snorted and kicked sand into the fire causing a small shower of pearly sparks.
"I've been thinking about how you can do that," I said."Thinking always was your thing."
I bashed her on the shoulder, knocking her backwards.
This startled Ruk, but Sonjec picked herself up and said, "It's okay. It's the way we've always related."
"Do not put me down for trying to repair the damage."
"I'm all ears," she said, in a softer tone.
"You have to face the music…so to speak. You're going into the city and you're going to change the message. I'm going to help, and even though he doesn’t know it yet, so is Ruk."
***
For some reason, I was certain we could pull this off. That is, right up until the moment—three days later—when we walked toward the large oval plaza where the protests continued.
Sonjec was somewhere between panicked and turned-on. Consummate performer that she was, the thought of playing her instrument to such a large assemblage excited her, even as she knew there were attendees who hated her.
I looked over at Ruk.
He was already watching me. He reached out and took my hand in his large, flattened, soft fingers. He exuded yellowpinkpale-smooth: serenity. I took a breath, remembering that I would be a conduit for emotions and had to stay calm. His touch helped settle me as we waded into the milling crowd. Someone was making a speech at the other side of the plaza, but the words didn't reach this far.
Our plan was to start on the fringe where people were more likely to be only curious—not involved. If this worked, we'd move closer to the core group as we won them over.
But the activists would do whatever they could to turn this to their advantage. Angry, rude noises would come from that crowd and, somehow, Ruk, Sonjec and I had to turn those sounds into a message that would send most of these people back to their homes with forgiveness in their hearts.
Sonjec was wired for this. She hopped up on a decorative railing that bordered a small splashing pool and smiled at those nearest her.
A man jeered, "Hey, it's the foreign devil who started this!"
I climbed up next to her and placed my hand on the small of her back. Ruk was at my other side.
She began, as we'd discussed, with the amazing composition she'd recorded on the beach. Sounds of waves crashing on the rocks woven with the calls of sea birds and the susurration of water being pulled back out to sea over tiny pearlescent sea animals and stones.
She sang with the music and her voice rang with confidence.
"Go home, bitch!" the same man yelled.
Several people glared or shushed him. Either they didn't know Sonjec or they didn't care
. Two other P'twuas came up and talked to the man who'd shouted.
I held my breath as Sonjec set the frequlet to input and allowed the crowd to become a part of her music. So far, about ninety percent of the people were rapt, but the others were either not paying attention, or in case of the group of three, actively trying to drown out the music by yelling.
"Go home, go home, go home!"
Sonjec's concentration faltered. I put pressure on her back and said out loud so that the frequlet would pick it up, "Peace. Calm. Peace."
Ruk and I had used the last three days to work out our part of this. Now he, with an intensity that I can feel to this day, began to pour out the color-attribute combinations that would communicate what we wanted the crowd to pick up and understand. As he communicated to his people, I said it out loud and placed my intention on it as hard as I was able. I did this with a newfound belief in the ability to communicate my perceptions.
To go with the water-laced composition, we used a lilac-fading: tidal calm frequency. Then boldly, Ruk broadcast magenta-deep: sincere sorry. He dropped in green-muddy: stupid error, followed shortly by yellow-pale: open, easy.
Ruk got immediate feedback. When it was good, he told me, I told Sonjec and the message became a feedback loop of the kind of perceptions we needed to communicate. As we collaborated, Sonjec caught the spirit, even while not knowing the meaning of the colors or attributes. Her frequlet recorded the frequencies of this unspoken language in musical form for the first time.
Well, for the first time intentionally.
Ivorypink: sincerity; Magenta-smooth: sorry; Green-spikey: unintentional mistakes; Bluesoft-transparent: trustworthy calm; Magenta, Magenta, Magenta-waves: unrestrained sorry; Ivorypink, Yellow-pale, Greenmedium-even: equality.
As the music reached those around us, we stepped down and walked deeper into the crowd, across the plaza. Brownlight/ grayblue-vertical stripes: respect, respect, respect, respect, respect, respect. Browngreen-red-yellow-ivory-round: non-judgement, understanding.
They listened.
It was all we could ask.
Burnishedbrass-deep: forgiveness. Pinkorchid-light: friendship.
Over and over the message wove into Sonjec's amazing improvisation. I felt the crowd becoming attuned to our simple message, "Please forgive this mistake. Let us be friends once more."
We went up on stage. There, the audio devices picked up the frequlet onto the feed and broadcast it all over Pas. We made music every P'twua in Pas could understand. Every P'twua, and me.
The song came to be known as "Understanding Worlds" and became a classic.
***
That evening, at Mom's apartment, Sonjec came to me emitting yellowbeige-pale: humble thanks. She didn't know that was what she projected, but I had a new respect for my own perceptions.
We stood in the kitchen pulling this and that out of the cooler, making tea, stuffing our faces.
"I have always looked up to you," she said.
"You have a strange way of showing that."
"I know. That's my pride. Seems to be built into us."
Pride. Straight-up blue.
"What have we got to be proud of?" I said. "Oh well—silly me—you have your invention. But let's face it, if your dad hadn't encouraged you and helped you so much, you wouldn't have refined the frequlet."
"Your dad was never there for you in the same way."
"My dad was never there for me at all." It didn't hurt because I missed having a dad. It hurt because she got one and I didn't.
"Carinth, Mom chose our fathers."
"Well, of course."
"I don't mean that she chose to have sex with them. She
picked them for the traits she wanted in her children. Not that reliable maybe, but she told me that, as far as she's concerned, it worked perfectly."
"She told you that because you got something good. I got
nothing."
"You can say that? Today of all days?"
"I'm pretty good at languages, I guess."
Mother walked in. "You're a synesthete, like your father."
I stared.
She walked over and put her hands on my upper arms.
"Carinth, you're everything and more than I imagined you might be. Both of you got your confidence from me. Oh, I know, you girls aren't fully mature yet, but it shows up sure and strong like today in the plaza. You knew. And you knew to bully the rest of us into listening to you. You got that from me and, I like to think, your openness to other peoples and cultures. But your gift? That's from your father."
"I never even thought you understood my synesthesia, much less would want it—choose it—for me."
"I had a feeling it was a trait that would be significant somewhere, sometime. As usual, I was right." She grinned widely and then enveloped me in a hug.
Periwinkle-striped with white: pride in one's children.
***
"Probably that same Kellen pride made me want you to know the story," I say to my rapt great-granddaughter.
"I can't wait to tell my professor."
"Don't be surprised if it's not well-received. Who wants truth? So what if Sonjec never mentioned me? I'm just her older half-sister who stayed on Pas."
"You and Grandp'twua accomplished a lot, including making our big family."
"Yes, doll, we made our own kind of music. Grandp'twua Ruk tells me I'm laverty much of the time now. Unfortunately, all Sonjec's achievements couldn't give her that."
***
From the "Common Lexicon of Perceptual Communication"
by Ruk Tur*ki'tua and Carinth Kellen
Laverty—lavendersilver-velvety: satisfied old-age.
END
Thomas M. Waldroon
http://www.tmwaldroon.com/blog
Sinseerly A Friend & Yr. Obed't(Novelette)
by Thomas M. Waldroon
Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, no. 117, April 16, 2015
I.
Mr. Stutley Northup is not a magistrate. Why, he's not even a lawyer. But if people are free to come to him with their controversies, he is just as free to offer his opinion; and if they choose to act on it, well, that's their own lookout. Little Hope, Pennsylvania, is not the sort of place to go about your business expecting not to have it talked about. If someone goes to see “Old Stuck-Up,” it must be because that business is a stubborn one. And urgent, too.
Mr. James E. (for Ezeziel, although he believes that only his parents and perhaps some nameless county clerk know that) Chambers rides the Freeport Road south from the lake, on past the jog it takes at the shingle mill at the creekside, way on past Enoch Parmenter's place, past the Bemiss farm, over fields and hills and wooded slopes, to just over the township line into Greenfield.
He follows the road that Judah Colt cut forty-some years ago towards the end of the previous century, said to be the first road since the French army abandoned the region. From the cabin he built with his own hands—abandoned in 1804 but still called Colt's Station whether a church, store, tavern, or even, in the winter of 1821, a schoolhouse—it runs due north to the lake at Freeport. Winters, some folks still log the ridge, skid their haul to Little Hope, and, come the spring floods, lash together a raft and float it down French Creek past Amity and on into the Allegheny River, and past the confluences of the Clarion and Kiskaminentas, all the way to Pittsburgh, or farther, even (…Saint Louis!…New Orleans!).
Old Northup's place, now: isolated, sure, but his own. No, he tells anyone who asks, he's not lonely, he's got his books to lend him human warmth; a few cows, a hired man or two as they might be needed; he does well enough for himself nowadays. Niece of his stops by to look after him, good girl too, not like—well, there's no call to name names.
Once he's all properly seated and settled and served with refreshment, Chambers asks: What think you of the Canadian Republic and its likely fate? I hear tell that MacKenzie has lately fled to Navy Island, in the Niagara, and the British have seized and fired an Amer
ican ship conveying supplies to them there.
Northup says: Don't let's beat around the bush, Chambers, tell me what you come here for.
Not to be hurried along, as befits the inherent dignity of the new Justice of the Peace for Harbor Creek Township, just this year appointed by Governor Ritner himself, and so young, too—J. E. Chambers takes his time with a few more sips of Northup's locally famous boiled milk coffee. He suspects Northup ekes it out with roasted acorns. The old man watches him amiably enough, despite his tone.
Chambers, when he's good and ready, says: You remember the Dusseau brothers.
Course I do. Pair of fools. French, too.
And their great sea serpent…?
Northup laughs bitterly.
You know of it then, Chambers presses.
Know of it? I saw it! Mind you don't be smashing the crockery, Chambers.
James Chambers has set his cup down so abruptly that it threatens to shatter the saucer.
Northup says, Can't afford to be replacing it all the time. Come from England, you know.
Chambers says, So sorry.
He mops up the spilled coffee with his spare handkerchief.
He goes on: But how could you have seen it? They said it must have died.
They lied. French, you know.
Well, then, what did they see there?
Probably it was just like they said.
Chambers regards the old man gravely. He slips his fingers into a pocket of his tobacco-brown coat and withdraws a paper packet. This he unfolds slowly and studies carefully. He looks up at Northup again, then back at his papers. He clears his throat.
He reads out: There is great excitement among the French inhabitants along the lake shore in North East Township over the reported discovery of a marine monster by two French fishermen named Dusseau. It was between twenty and thirty feet long and shaped like a sturgeon, but it had arms which it tossed wildly in the air.
He looks up: That was the Phoenix and Reflector. Last May. Local paper, you know. Gossip fills a column up as well as truth does.
Northup shrugs.
Chambers places this scrap of paper on the table and studies the next one.
He says: Now this is one of the New York papers. Last June, I believe.