Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Rüsul strove to occupy as small a footprint of contact with the metal flooring as possible, equidistant from the box’s four walls. He kept his eyes squeezed shut against the painful light, and rocked in place, wishing he had a chock of wood in one hand and a familiar knife in the other, just to lapse into the ritual comfort of carving and calm the beating of his heart. Rüsul had spent his entire adult life shaping wood, setting up shop in the Civilized Wood of one island or another for a few years until the need to see newer faces sent him on his way again. It had been a good life, making art and making friends, and he had no regrets. But it was over and done. He was Dying now. Everything came back to that, and he could not wrap his head around it. Why would anyone interfere with it?

  He rubbed at his eyes, red and aching. His throat was sore and his trunk felt raw, but other than chasing his captors away, his wailing hadn’t accomplished anything. He didn’t want to stop, but he just couldn’t physically cry any longer. Worse, he couldn’t catch his breath. Rüsul knew he’d been hyperventilating for some while now. His heart hurtled toward exhaustion and a kind of escape. His feet hurt like he’d climbed down to the Shadow Dwell and back up, over and over. And he had the grandmother of all headaches pounding away with the kind of persistence only a grandmother could muster.

  This last discomfort began to overpower the others. It expanded down from his head, reaching throughout his neck, down into his shoulders and chest, a low, dull thrumming that was more than the sound of his blood rushing within him or the pumping of his own heart. The beat was rhythmic. It held a pattern, one that felt as old and familiar as the pain in his joints, or older still, hearkening back to a time long before the aches of age. And odder still, as he paid it more attention, he discovered the throbbing existed outside himself.

  Rüsul opened his eyes, blinking away tears. He moved his empty hands in the motions of carving, trying to center himself and halt or at least slow his rapid breathing. The stupid light of his box was just stupid light, and his hands knew his art well enough to do their work in dark and storm. He had no need to make the light mean anything more than a pesky circumstance, like a neighbor’s newborn testing out a healthy set of lungs while he tried to work. He shaped empty air with a nonexistent blade and calm settled upon him. His eyes closed of their own accord, his own lungs settled into a relaxed pace. The throbbing in his forehead continued even as the other complaints and outcries of his body began to fade into the background. It came into focus, not a headache at all, and not coming from his head but only resonating there in that space between his eyes and above the root of his trunk. It played in him like he was a living soundbox, a sensation both familiar and impossible to place.

  With his eyes still closed, Rüsul rose on unsteady knees. He turned from the waist, rotating his chest and shoulders back and forth in as wide an arc as he could. He leaned back, keeping his jaw pressed down against his chest, and presented the broad surface of his face to the walls of the box his captors had put him in. There. It was coming from that direction. He pushed up, onto his feet, dragging them in tiny steps toward one wall, stopping when his forehead touched the plastic surface. He recoiled half a step, arms lax at his side, letting the fullness of the thrumming beat enter his head and travel through his body.

  In that moment Rüsul forgot his own pains. He heard, he felt, a meaning in the faint but persistent pounding. It was a rhyme of changing pressure, a child’s game as universal as green leaves and falling rain. One would hide and the others would search and whosoever discovered the hidden child would in turn hide and the game continue, on and on. In the opening spaces of his skull, Rüsul felt the refrain he’d not made for almost ninety years, the faint pounding of infrasonic signals, where, oh where, play fair, be there, over and over again.

  He opened his eyes. A slight turn of his head, to first one side and then the other, assured him he had targeted correctly. He leaned in, pressing his head against the wall, no longer caring about its alien plastic or the light or the closeness of his box. Somewhere beyond this wall, close enough to be felt, another Fant called out in the wordless way that children had used to tease their playmates, or when lost to cry out for their missing parents. Rüsul was not alone.

  The decades of adult life dissolved in his mind. From dusty, untraveled corridors of memory he grasped after knowledge and skills untouched since childhood. The rules and rhythms of the games flittered on the edge of knowing, like a word dancing just out of reach on the tip of the tongue. After a few false starts, they came to him, each fragment trailing other memories and pieces until he had enough. His eyelids drifted down once more and with long forgotten ease he flexed and pulsed out the prescribed reply. Hiding … Abiding … Will you be confiding?

  Over and over again he sent out the rhythms, more a well-learned pattern than actual words. He repeated it twelve times in all, as required by the game, lest he be forfeit. The idea struck him as so absurd he almost giggled and had to start again. Almost.

  With his first pulse, the other Fant’s infrasound had stopped. As Rüsul completed his cycle he felt a probing, meaningless pulses pushed out by the other in a rush of echolocation. A flush of relief and comfort washed over him like he hadn’t felt since he’d wandered away from his mother as an infant and found her questing pulse before he had a chance to wallow in his own panic. And then, clearer, no doubt aimed directly at him as he had locked onto the position of the other Fant, as welcome and rare as sunshine upon his face, the classic reply:

  Free … Free … Tree and me … Free …

  Rüsul slipped to his knees in silence. The enormity and horror of his capture fell away. He thrummed back a reply of Free … even as he allowed the shock and fatigue to claim him. As he plunged into unconsciousness his face relaxed into a smile. He was not alone.

  TEN

  MOONLIGHT

  LIKE some over-ripened piece of fruit dragging down the branch of its birth, Pizlo hung from the penultimate level of the forest canopy, dangling in the emptiness that was Arlo’s Chimney. Slimmer and straighter than any of Keslo’s other open air monuments, the shaft that bore Arlo’s name also commemorated the path he’d taken as he’d fallen from a tiny platform above the canopy. Wreathed in fire, his plunge had burned a passage all the way through the Civilized Wood and into the Shadow Dwell. The shape of that trajectory had been smoothed in the transformation to art. The width of the shaft now averaged twice the height of a Fant. The inner surface had been planed into six evenly sized walls that turned like a lazy hexagonal helix, completing ten rotations as it ran from top to bottom.

  Pizlo had come not out of sentimentality, but rather at the beckoning of his personal oracle. The sense of it had begun days ago, a gentle urging of where and when that had grown in insistence even as he prepared himself. Night had fallen before his arrival, smothering the limited, diffused glow that reached the spot at the height of day. And despite the direct route of the shaft, he was too far up for any illumination spilling from homes in the Civilized Wood below. But darkness suited him. He knew his surroundings, every plant, every branch, every vine, with a surety that did not depend on traditional senses.

  He had rigged a sling to hold himself precisely where he needed to be, equidistant from the six green walls, not quite supine, gazing up to the top of the shaft at an opening as black as everything else. Long before morning, Pizlo would be gone, leaving no indication that he’d ever been here.

  He waited. Swayed. His trunk grasped a supporting vine of the sling and leveraged his angle a few degrees, easing an unfelt strain on his neck as he stared up into darkness. Rain had fallen down the shaft when he’d first arrived and set up, but it had since stopped as he knew it would.

  A buzzing cloud of winged insects took advantage of the break in weather and rose from below, attacking a colony of flightless bugs that had emerged from a hollowed knot of a kalatma tree on one face of the shaft just above Pizlo’s height. The defenders beat back most of the invaders, shredding their wings with brutal
swipes of barbed and edged forelimbs. Bodies hurtled downward as a warning against future attacks. But some few of the fliers, maybe one in twenty, profited from their comrades’ sacrifice and swept past the other bugs to bite into the tap of the kalatma. They drank deep of the sap. As their abdomens swelled with fluid, each began to give off a pinprick-sized vermillion glow, taunting the defenders who turned to repulse them too late. The bloated, surviving fliers pushed off, formed a small, glowing cloud, and began to drift back down the shaft. They paid no attention to the young Fant hanging in their midst.

  Pizlo lurched in his sling. He thrust both arms into the cloud, hands curled into two cups that he brought together, capturing some of the insects. Squirming, he unstopped a gourd that hung from his waist, curling his trunk around the neck to hold it steady as he transferred most of his prize. His collection had twenty-seven varieties of insects that glowed under one or another circumstance. He’d study this latest addition after he crept into Tolta’s house for breakfast. He kept a few of the fliers, coaxing them into a single closed fist as he restoppered the gourd with the newly freed hand.

  Nearly time. Whatever event had required him to be in this place at this moment sang in him. Pizlo wanted to mark it somehow and tightened his fist, bringing it up to beat once against his chest. Then he flung his hand away, fingers wide. The crushed bug bodies disappeared into the night. Their passing left an amorphous glow on his outstretched hand, enough light to mark the return of vision amidst the darkness. He stared at this palm, eerie and orange in the emptiness of Arlo’s Chimney.

  As if signaled by his light, the clouds above parted. A moon shone down from directly overhead, small enough that the edges of the shaft framed it. Its light poured in, filling the shaft. Pizlo cried out, his weak eyes the only source of pain in his world. He held his stained hand high, part offering, part protestation, as he understood what had brought him here. The moon itself had called out, not specifically to him, but to any who could hear it. And he had heeded the call. He forced his eyes open, desperate to see the moon despite his tears. Its radiance flooded him and he grinned with satisfaction.

  This was Pemma, the second smallest of Bark’s seven moons. It was the third moon whose light he had bathed in, one more than most adult Fant ever saw in a long life. Pizlo was only six and knew he’d live to witness the other four as well. He didn’t know when the next one would come his way, but he felt certain that the one after the one after that was one he would share. He strained to keep his eyes open, joyful tears washing away the pain. He could hear the moon, its voice brilliant and clear. It had called to him and he had listened and all was right with the world.

  The clouds closed again, cutting off the light and leaving Arlo’s Chimney dark once more, save for the faint glow from the boy’s palm.

  Still smiling, he pulled himself up from his sling, using only his unstained hand and his trunk. This moon, like the previous two, had spoken of very different things than the rest of Barsk did. Pemma had said many things at once, bits of wisdom, smatterings of gossip, tangents of possibilities. Listening to a moon was like eavesdropping on dozens of separate conversations at once and contributing to none. It had lasted only a few moments, but days would pass before Pizlo understood anything that had been said. He climbed up the vine to the knot of crossed strands that had let him hang there and transferred his weight to them, pulling the sling up after. He paused, standing in the middle of the shaft and reached into a pocket of his daypouch, withdrawing a small wooden object. He’d found it that morning on the edge of the Shadow Dwell, stained and battered from the ocean. He’d plucked it from the surf.

  It was his favorite of Keslo’s beaches. More gravel than sand, it had the most turbulent waves, and he’d found no better place to go to talk with the ocean. He would walk out into the water until it recognized him, until a wave lifted him up in greeting. The conversation would continue as the ocean pulled him away from shore and hurled him back, over and over until there was nothing left to say. He wished he could share it with Jorl. But Jorl couldn’t hear the ocean that way and would only be frightened to see him dragged across the gravel time and again. Jorl would worry about Pizlo being injured and hurt and completely miss what really took place. Besides, the ocean wouldn’t hurt him. Nothing could.

  Pizlo gazed at the gift the water had given him that morning, a carved figurine that had been indistinct by morning light. He studied it now by the glow of his stained hand and marveled that it had so many emotions in the worn face. Certainty and pain, confusion and confidence. Pizlo did not believe in coincidence, but wondered why an image of the Matriarch had come to him today of all days. Jorl had said she had visions and seizures; he hadn’t had seizures, but maybe that was because he didn’t talk to many other Fant, and Margda had talked and talked to them all. He was pretty sure she was still talking now.

  “Shhh, it will be okay,” he told the wooden figure. “He’ll be big soon. Bigger than anyone.” He closed his fist, restoring the darkness, and ran the nubs of his trunk over the wood one last time before letting it drop. Perhaps tomorrow someone else would find it. Perhaps not.

  Untying the last of the vines, Pizlo let them fall away. He rode one of them to a wall of the chimney and pulled himself through the foliage and deeper into the canopy, disappearing, not unlike the moon.

  ELEVEN

  PROBLEMATIC PROBABILITY

  SENATOR Bish paused as his private elevator opened outside the entrance to what he’d come to think of as his psychic bullpen. The door was actually a heavy security airlock that opened on to the top floor of a luxury hotel on the main continent of Gripta. His maternal grandfather had been born on Gripta, and owned a wide range of real property there, this hotel among many others. It had led the old Bos to hide his private team of precognitivists there, far from potential prying eyes back in the capital on Dawn. The irony that before being forcibly relocated to Barsk, several hundred Fant had once called Gripta home was not wasted on Bish.

  His aide, a faithful Brady, accessed the airlock controls. Passive sensors in the wall compared the signals radiated by devices sewn into her kaftan and compared these to the pattern of keys she tapped on a pad. Many of his colleagues in the senate would have flinched at having a Sloth on staff, let alone as personal assistant, but the well-known lethargy was an inaccurate stereotype. Druz moved more slowly than he did, true enough, but the delay created a pause in which he could gather his thoughts as he moved from task to task, and that had proved a boon. He had his own stereotypes to beat back. People assumed a Yak would be headstrong, and every time he presented a reasoned and reflective argument he cut through half his opposition. Far from being a liability, Druz provided an opportunity for him to excel.

  “Sir, whenever you’re ready.”

  “Open it up,” he replied. “Let’s get this over with. I’m sure their excuses will be inventive. They usually are.”

  The Sloth gave the wall a final tap and the airlock’s outer door opened. They stepped through and repeated the sequence at the inner door. Bish had inherited the hotel and its special occupants when he’d secured his grandfather’s senate seat. The precognitivists themselves had requested the independent environment and airlock, presumably based on some possible future they had seen.

  He slipped a hand into his robe and removed his senatorial ring from an inner pocket. A pretty collection of fossilized wood and platinum, every member of the Committee of Information had a similar, albeit unique, ring. Their wearers changed with the committee’s composition, and the artist who’d designed them had intended them to accommodate the full range of Alliance races. But Bish’s hands were big even for a Yak, and the ring fit uncomfortably on his littlest finger. On those rare occasions he needed to invoke its sigil he simply displayed it for a moment and then tucked it away again. Visits to his oracular menagerie were an exception. He held his arm out at length and slid the ring over the tip of his left horn and a short way down the length until it stuck snuggly, the face of the si
gil aimed forward where it would catch the eye and remind the viewer of his status and power as head of the Senate’s most powerful committee. Precogs, he’d found, could too easily get to feeling full of themselves.

  The other side of the lock opened onto a wide vestibule which, in turn, had three hallways flowing from its far end, the center providing access to common spaces such as workrooms, kitchens, and dining areas, and the two side corridors leading to private apartments. Bish’s current complement of psychic employees numbered fifty-four, a full third of them being Prairie Dogs. One such stood waiting for him now.

  “Welcome, Senator. Your office did not notify us that you would be coming today.” The Cynomy fidgeted and refrained from eye contact.

  Bish replied with his best beneficent smile. “A small test, Tekki,” he said, “which you passed with ease by being here to greet me.”

  A twitch, followed by a moment’s silence, and then. “I’m Brekki. Tekki is my uncle. And one of us is always here. Always.”

  It was an indication of the Bos’s good humor that he tolerated the correction. Projecting the aura of a tolerant and friendly elder relative, he continued. “That being so, you knew I was coming.”

  “Yes,” said the Prairie Dog, finally raising its head and tilting back far enough to meet the Yak’s gaze. “We saw the likelihood of it. Just as we saw the likelihood that you would not leave happy.”

  Druz rushed ahead with a response. “Do not presume to tell the senator what he will be feeling. It is impertinent and you yourself acknowledge you can be mistaken.”

  “I’m just saying. Don’t take it out on us when we do the work you give us and you don’t like the outcome. It’s like blaming the desert for being dry.”

  Bish took a deep breath and centered himself. Clairvoyants always acted this way, mistaking vision for power. The little shit in front of him wouldn’t know what to do with actual power if the senator put it in his tiny hands.