Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Jorl took the directions and moved back to his work desk and rummaged among the books there until he’d found one with a collection of holographic maps. Pizlo followed after, eyes wide and bright.

  “I like maps.”

  “Boys your age almost always do. So, here’s a map of the western archipelago.”

  “It looks like the map from my dream, only a lot smaller. Ha, I guess my map would be too big to fit in a book.”

  Jorl smiled. “Maybe in a dream book. But look, here’s Keslo, where we are, almost all the way to the east. And if you go a little further, past all this open water, you reach the eastern archipelago. All the Fant in the world live in one or the other of these chains of islands. All the islands you danced on in your dream.”

  “Have you been to them all?”

  “No, only about half a dozen. But a lot of men wander and see many more of them in their time. I guess I got that wanderlust out of my system when I left Barsk. But see here, in the middle of that empty water?” With one finger he traced a broad circle of ocean midway between the archipelagos.

  Pizlo poked with his own finger, stabbing a spot near the top of Jorl’s circle, closer to the equator than most of the islands. “That’s where the place in my dream was, but I just see the empty water,” said Pizlo.

  “Me, too. That’s because this place isn’t meant to be on any map. Every Fant gets this one vision, Pizlo, of a place to go and how to find it. But they get it with a message that tells them they should go, and when. You didn’t get that message, did you?”

  “Nope. I just got the place. And the idea about how it’s a place people go to but don’t come back from. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  “I can see why you’d think so. It’s knowledge that normally doesn’t come to someone so young. People learn how to go to this place when they’re very old. It’s where they go when it’s their time to die.”

  EIGHT

  VENUE AND VISION

  LIRLOWIL preferred to take her koph as a tea. She inhaled the welcome smell of spiralmint, closing her eyes as the warm, dermal calm spread throughout her. Properly prepared, koph tea always provided a relaxing effect, whether one was a Speaker or not. The expense of the koph kept most from experiencing the luxury. She had stumbled upon her secondary talent as a direct result of her hedonistic ways and the eagerness of Sharv’s government to fulfill her every whim.

  As she drank deeper, relaxation led to a familiar disorientation and she became sensitive to another level of perception. She regarded a nefshon self-construct of herself, afloat in the null-gravity of one corner of her bedroom on the station. Her four previous summonings of Fant had begun this same way, but she took no comfort in that. As she performed the mental exercises and crafted the patterns of summoning, Lirlowil could not dismiss the inherent wrongness of what she was attempting. In eight hundred years of Speaking, only three rules had ever been imposed, an edict created back at the very beginning by Margda herself, the Fant who’d discovered the process. If successful, she’d not only break the very first of the rules, she’d rub their creator’s face in the act at the same time!

  Lirlowil pictured the Fant Matriarch. She knew her from flims, from archival projections, from myths, and from songs. Lirlowil keyed the mnemonic locks from her research, releasing every speech and anecdote and rumor and opinion by and about her target. Without direct experience of her conversant, her mind cast a wide net in its quest, gathering relevant as well as erroneous particles. It was a slower process, but in the end the nefshons would sort themselves. As with most of her previous summonings of Fant, she had the advantage of being close to Barsk; a vast portion of her target’s nefshons lingered near and came at her summons.

  Committed now, unable to stop, memories and emotions from Margda’s subatomic particles buffeted her as they sought to resolve themselves under Lirlowil’s guiding mind. She opened herself to them, needing them all to build as full and recent a simulacrum as possible. The small, withered, wrinkled body of her last days … an undying fascination with political power … her first view of the sky … the butterfly scar on the lower inside of her left ear … the flavor of walnut paste … the shudder of prophecy … the love for her father … the reflected glow of the aleph … the searing helpless pain of seizure … the oppression by the Alliance … anger at her own failures … watching dust motes dance in the light of a chimney’s … allergic reaction to gnorb … welcome smell of spiralmint … delicate twining of trunks … the vision leading her to the creation of the Edict …

  “‘… these limits only I place upon you, that never shall a Speaker Summon a Speaker…’ was that so restrictive a law?”

  In the slow swirl beyond sight, Lirlowil gasped as Margda took on visible form more rapidly, more solidly, than she had anticipated. She wore a shapeless gray toga that stopped just short of her feet, belted beneath her considerable breasts, but otherwise unadorned. As if wearing anything even remotely more artful was out of the question for someone like her. As if her clothing were a statement not only about herself, but about the vacuous priorities of the Speaker who had summoned her. More, the elderly Fant stared back with an icy gaze, fully aware of her circumstances and showing none of the confusion the recently summoned always showed. She’d asked a question even before she’d arrived, and from the look on her strange, hairless face she awaited an answer.

  Startled out of her intentions, Lirlowil fell back on established ritual. “You are Margda, first of the Speakers. Your time in life has long since ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I bid you welcome.”

  The Fant snorted, whipping her trunk around abruptly and causing the Lutr to lean away. “So you’re not the complete renegade, are you? Some of the teachings you still follow.”

  Indignation caused Lirlowil to narrow her eyes and protest. “I’ve been fully vested and certified by the Alliance’s Speakers’ Bureau.” Her conversant only snorted again.

  “Don’t start in with me about your precious bureau, Child. They only know to teach what I taught them. I endured endless days shut away with their best people in a boardroom on a spacecraft bobbing on the ocean because they couldn’t be troubled to come to my home and possibly encounter other Fant. And I wouldn’t leave the planet. Oh how they squirmed, torn between their hunger to understand the techniques and capabilities of Speaking and their loathing for a member of a race they’d gone to such lengths to hide away.”

  Lirlowil swallowed hard. Truth enough, she found this Fant—all Fant—beyond disgusting; it had never occurred to her how the objects of that revulsion might feel about it. But the flicker of compassion didn’t last. Her own discomfort at being lectured to by a conversant, especially a Fant conversant, pushed her back on the offensive. “You should feel honored that they’ve respected your teachings.”

  “Which is more than you did, eh, edict-breaker? Congratulations! Of the tens of thousands of Speakers in the centuries since I wrote those rules, you’re the first to violate any of them. I knew you would, but it feels very good to be vindicated.”

  “How could you know?”

  Her conversant’s face contorted into what might have been a smile, though with that hideous trunk of hers it was hard to be sure. She brought a hand up and tapped a thick finger against the side of her head. “I know you know my life’s story. You summoned me here, after all. Surely you didn’t discount my long history of mental illness. Imagine what I might have accomplished in my time if I hadn’t been held back by madness and seizures. Though, to be fair, they also provided me glimpses of the future. Glimpses of you, my dear. I only instructed those fools so they in turn would create their little bureau and train you. I only created the rules of the Edict because I needed you to come along and break the first one.”

  “Wait, you’re saying you knew I would do this? Hundreds of years before I was even born?”

  “I knew someone or some thing would precipitate a crisis. Are you responsible for
the Silence? No, of course you’re not. You’re just a piece on the board, not the game’s player.”

  “What game? You’re nothing but a crazy old woman who died ages ago. You didn’t foresee any of this. That’s just a side effect of the same paranoia you had when you were alive.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? And it’s not paranoia when every other living being off your homeworld who knows your name would be happier if you’d never existed.” Margda turned away then, stepping around the room on her enormous feet. Her head pivoted back and forth as if she were examining everything in careful detail. With a start Lirlowil realized that her conversant walked, not bounced or floated, but walked, despite the absence of gravity.

  “What a strange place you’ve brought me to,” the Matriarch said softly. “Do you know, I have never been in space before. I wouldn’t let them lift their ship when I was aboard. Made them leave it just offshore. Everything here feels just like that ship. It’s all … made. And too small. Lifeless. Not at all like a world. Not like my world.”

  Lirlowil sneezed. There was a fragrance in the air, faint but undeniable, woody and green, and no part of the recycled air the station provided. Wrinkling her nose, she watched agog as Margda moved through the room, held down by a gravity that shouldn’t have been there. Having satisfied herself with her inspection of the various shelves and objects on the walls, she approached the large sphere of pond water occupying the room’s center.

  The Otter followed, organizing her questions and marshaling her telepathic powers. The Fant completed a circuit around the watery globe. She turned back to her Speaker and smiled. Lirlowil hesitated, breathing in deeply through her mouth. This wasn’t proceeding like any summoning she’d ever performed. The odor in the room had increased, and now included the scent of impending rain. Margda meanwhile had raised one wrinkled hand and reached out to touch the glistening surface of the water. As her fingertips made contact, gravity returned to the globe and its shape collapsed. Water crashed to the floor and rushed outward in a great wave that swept Lirlowil beneath it.

  * * *

  AS she opened her eyes to darkness, Lirlowil knew she’d been unconscious. Something had gone very wrong. A traditional summoning would have ended, the efficacy of the koph long since passed from her physical body and normal consciousness returned whether she willed it or not. That hadn’t happened. In the reality of the station, she floated in the null field of her room, her body in a vaguely seated position, though her limbs hung lax, her muscles flaccid. Her eyes gazed languidly at nothing and her jaw had fallen open. She bumped from one wall to another, driven by the faint jets of the room’s air system. She moved with excruciating slowness, but as she was completely unaware of it, it hardly mattered. Eventually, after many rebounds and continued drifting, she would pass into the globule of water in the middle of the room, and either recover or drown.

  “You still don’t understand, do you?” hissed Margda. “Silly child, haven’t you ever thought it through?” The voice moved around her and Lirlowil tried to orient upon it. It seemed at once to be near and far, above, below, within, beyond. She paddled against the water, far more water than should have been around her. Her head broke the surface but still all she saw was darkness. Nothing of her bedroom remained.

  “Only those with intelligence, with souls, emit nefshons. What then, my fuzzy little Speaker, is the stuff of the setting created for yourself and your conversant?” Lirlowil trembled. Margda’s voice seemed to be whispering to her from inside herself, as if the faint exhalation of her words could be felt upon her skin.

  “It comes from your mind, dear Otter, from your desperate need for order and structure. It is the Speaker who imposes reality upon this realm, forcing her own perceptions of dimension and texture into the summoning. It is all an illusion that you provide, because mortal minds find comfort in the familiar, concrete settings.”

  “Then … where…” stammered Lirlowil.

  “Where are we? Or, where did your room go?” Margda sounded like she was smiling.

  “Both. Either. I don’t understand … I summoned you! How can this be happening?”

  And there was light. It came into existence as though it had always been there, Lirlowil’s eyes already adapted to the level. A breeze laden with a faint resinous aroma and heavy humidity made her whiskers twitch. And gravity. Lirlowil found herself standing now, her feet flat against a broad wooden floor which in turn was part of a larger wooden room. Wall hangings composed of an impossible number of shades of green surrounded her. The Matriarch of Barsk sat on a large polished knob of wood that seemed to grow out of the floor.

  “Welcome to my home, little Otter. I don’t suppose it exists any more, but I remember it well enough.” The Lutr gawked, even as she realized she was acting like a newly summoned conversant herself. If the Fant noticed she gave no indication and instead continued her oration. “But, to answer your question, it happened because I wanted it to. And it is my desire, not yours, that shapes things here.”

  “But you said it was the Speaker who controlled the environment.”

  “Yes, and so it is, when the Speakers’ laws are followed. But you broke the first rule of our Edict and summoned another Speaker. There are consequences that you must deal with.”

  “So … if someone, another Speaker, were to summon me, I’d be able to do … this?” Lirlowil’s thoughts tumbled over themselves, rearranging her understanding of her profession.

  Margda stiffened on her seat. Her pallor darkened, her wrinkled skin grew drier and older. All semblance of life drained away. As Lirlowil watched, the Fant transformed into a withered husk as the centuries since her death caught up. Moments later, speckles of green appeared on the remains of her skin and quickly spread. A coating of moss, as fine as an infant’s fur covered her. It thickened. Tiny leaves emerged here and there, followed quickly by stems, which in turn unfurled and blossomed with flowers. The limbs of the Matriarch’s aged corpse cracked, revealing bare wood. Twigs emerged, swelled, and grew into tree limbs. The gray toga tore as the Matriarch-turned-tree stretched it beyond the shapes of a mortal body, removing the last vestige or hint that a person had ever sat there.

  Lirlowil could only gape in silence. This wasn’t possible. Even in the construct-space of a summoning, it could not be.

  “Do you really imagine it likely that anyone would ever have interest in summoning you?” Lirlowil whirled as Margda’s voice came from behind her. “Besides, there’s a part of you that insists reality follow the same parameters it always has, even here. That attachment to the way things work in the living world precludes this kind of manipulation. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of spending a good portion of time, when I was alive, in the paroxysms of my own insanity. Rather liberating, in its own way.”

  Lirlowil reeled around, then back again, glancing from flowering tree to long dead conversant, and back. And then she fainted.

  “Damn,” Margda sighed. With a mental gesture she unmade the tree that had so unnerved her summoner. With another she caused the Lutr’s body to float once more, move across the room, and settle on the cushions of the window seat that looked out on the warm green of a time long past. “Poor child. I didn’t think to shock you quite so much. Ah, but it’s nice to know that even dead I can still learn new things. Who would have thought a nefshon construction could lose consciousness?”

  NINE

  A VOICE OF SILENCE

  EVEN while he’d been wailing, a part of Rüsul had heard every word the Cans had spoken. They’d called it a cell but it felt more like a box, like a giant version of a plastic cube that he had seen as a child when his island’s mayor had received a mis-addressed shipment from the Alliance’s Committee for Cultural Exchange. He could no longer recall what it had held, but the plastic container had captured his imagination like some inanimate monster that lived in a child’s night terrors.

  His cell wasn’t all that larger than the near-forgotten shipping crate of his youth. It was tiny,
not quite as small as the water closet in most bachelor homes, but it felt like it was, lacking either purpose or window or anything that might be reassuring or familiar. What kind of people would put the Dying in a box? What kind of people would keep the Dying from their appointment with death? Rüsul couldn’t tell how long he’d been held captive. Without weather, how could there be time? Without the thrum of life in wood and rain, how could existence continue? The light from the box’s ceiling and walls was constant, and though dim its harsh white stung his eyes. The walls stank of plastic. The flooring stank of metal. A container of slop had appeared soon after his incarceration. They might have meant him to believe it to be food, but it had a similar chemical odor as the walls and just as easily could have been intended as paint to cover the plastic. Rüsul was more inclined to use it for the latter, but he lacked a proper tool for its application and couldn’t bring himself to touch the stuff with fingers or nubs. He certainly wasn’t going to eat it until hunger drove him to desperate measures. Fortunately, the oppressive plastic stench all around him suppressed his appetite.

  He huddled in the middle of the box, succumbing to a claustrophobia he hadn’t known he possessed. His heart raced like it wanted to lunge from his clammy chest. He couldn’t still the wild trembling of his ears or the shivering of his trunk. It wasn’t just the unnatural substance of the walls, or even the dry air that tasted like nothing at all. The panic coursing through him came from the shattered promise his world had made with him, that once he had launched his raft and set out to die he would never after be enclosed by anything but the walls of the world itself. The horrific setting exacerbated the anxiety, but he would probably have felt a lesser kin of it had he been forced to stay back home in his studio, or anywhere in any island’s Civilized Wood. The time for such things had passed, but he had been pulled outside of time.