Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “Nor I, anyone who let me see things in such miraculous ways.”

  Phas made a rude noise with her trunk and everyone started. “So here we sit, two hundred-some Dying Fant, and these two act like it’s some deliberate act of the universe set in motion for no better reason than to bring them back together again. I’ve known other poets and fictionists with big egos, but who knew mathematicians thought so highly of themselves?”

  Rüsul stiffened, but from the reactions of the others it was quickly clear that this was old ground they covered and the remark in good fun. And almost without thought, he joined in and told a story of his own life, followed by Kembü telling one about herself when she was younger than Jorl—and judging by the expression on his face it was clear he’d never imagined his friend’s mother as ever having had any other life.

  When it was Tarva’s turn again he sighed and got a wistful look in his eye. “All of this reminds me of my gram. She had the most amazing adventures. Of course, it never occurred to us that any of it might not be true. But Gram wasn’t telling us tales for truth. She filled us with concepts and questions and amazement for the world. I like to think Gram was a born mathematician, only she never knew it.”

  Phas, Mlarma, and Abso chuckled, and Rüsul realized they’d heard this comment before. If Tarva noticed, he gave no sign.

  “I couldn’t have been more than four, and it was one of my sister’s birthday, though now I don’t recall which one. Our aunts had cooked her her favorite meal and barely two bites into it Gram asked her if it was good. My sis laughed and told her it was delicious, and Gram nodded and we all went back to eating. A bit later she asked her ‘does it taste like it did the first time you had it, and decided it was your favorite, or when you say it’s delicious are you tasting the memory of that first time, and making a comparison?’ That was my Gram.”

  Tarva paused, turned to gaze into Abso’s eyes for a moment, and then smiled sheepishly as he continued. “And just like that, she changed my life. I mean, wasn’t she really asking if the second time we do a thing are we forced to remember the previous time to understand it? That every time my sister ate that meal, at some level, she was eating all the other same meals? I tell you now with no shame that it gave me bad dreams for nights, the notion that so little in life is truly novel, that so much of what we do is connected to our previous experience of virtually the same thing.

  “One evening, about five nights after my sister’s birthday dinner, Gram found me sobbing in my sleep and woke me. She asked me why I was crying and I tried to explain it to her, how it seemed like life had become empty and hollow if most everything I was going to do was something I’d already done. And do you know what she said? She told me that if that was true, then I’d done something new by fretting and crying about it, and that now that was old stuff and if I was really that worried about all of it, then I shouldn’t bother doing either of those things again. Then she hugged me and wished me good dreams. And when I fell back to sleep everything was fine. Neatly tied up. And now here I am, telling that same story again, and when I think that it’s so like but still a bit different from the other times I’ve told it, instead of feeling the futility of things, I can almost feel my Gram hugging me and telling me to go back to sleep.”

  Abso sighed. “And I’m the one who’s supposed to be the poet, right?”

  Rüsul could only nod. He looked at Phas, thinking of a life he hadn’t known, and then glanced at Jorl. The young man looked to be pondering the story still, or perhaps pondering futility itself.

  EIGHTEEN

  ONE-SIDED CONVERSATION

  LIRLOWIL could not keep herself from sobbing. It had become an automatic response, as much a part of her as breathing, her body wracked by the stress of hosting the Fant Matriarch in her head. Her once-sleek pelt felt grimy, the fur matted and spiked. But far beyond any physical discomfort, the horrible presence that had penetrated so deeply into her mind would not leave her alone.

  The koph she’d consumed for the summoning had long since worn off, but Margda had stayed. Lirlowil had woken up slumped over her workstation, and dared to hope that her last summoning had been a dream. But when she closed her eyes, the old Fant was there. With frantic precision she’d performed the patterns and rituals for ending a summoning and dispersing the nefshons of her conversant, but to no effect. The particles of the discoverer of Speaking had taken on a life all their own, clinging to her brain. Lirlowil might as well have been in a dream.

  “Why won’t you leave me? Why are you here?” She hated the whining sound of her own pleas, but couldn’t help it. The Fant’s enduring presence violated her to her very core. Her mind, which had been the source of all her power, once sacrosanct, had been laid bare. “I’m sorry, I know, I know, I violated the Edict. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong. Beyond wrong. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to summon any Fant.”

  She could feel Margda in her mind, as if the Fant sat biding her time in quiet meditation, ignoring the sobs and pleas of her summoner. She’d said nothing since Lirlowil had awakened, merely existing, like some hideous old woman napping in her brain.

  When she opened her eyes, she glared at the Lutr and spoke as if picking up the thread of a conversation. “I’ve told you, Child, your wants and wishes don’t interest me. Your sense of volition, or the lack of it, is an illusion. Everything you’ve done needed doing and was set in motion long ago. Let go of your self-pity. Your feelings in these events matter no more than a leaf’s desire to steer the wind!”

  The chill and brutal words caused Lirlowil to flee to her sleeping room. She leapt into the null field and threw herself upon her bed, gripping the bedclothes to keep from rebounding in the absence of gravity. Her sobbing shifted to shudders. The room was real, she knew it with certainty. Margda no longer bothered to maintain the nefshon construct of her long-vanished home from Barsk, nor of herself either. The Fant existed as a presence, a hideous creature Lirlowil alone saw when she sought respite from the external world, a voice sneering at her within her own head. But more, Lirlowil’s telepathic abilities had vanished. Whether it was a consequence of having Margda in her mind, or something the Fant was doing to her, she didn’t know.

  “But why won’t you leave?” Lirlowil wailed again, to herself, to the room, to the unseen Patrollers who presumably monitored everything in her suite of rooms, but mostly to the obscenity in her mind. “You’re not doing anything! If you’re going to punish me for violating your damn Edict, then just do it and go back to being dead!”

  Margda’s response began with an echoing chuckle. Lirlowil squirmed as she imagined the sound rippling up and down the Fant’s trunk.

  “I am doing something. I’m waiting. We’ve a couple days yet to go before all the players are in place. Besides, if I were to leave now, we both know you would not bring me back. Not at the correct moment, not ever.”

  Lirlowil sat up in bed. For lack of a better target, her eyes fixed upon the globule of lake water suspended in the center of her room. “The correct moment for what? What are you trying to do? And … what will happen to me, when you’ve finally done it?”

  “Ah, self-interest at last. Despite all of our differences, of race and time and distance, we achieve commonality. I understand self-interest.”

  All at once, Lirlowil could see Margda. It was as if she had suddenly appeared, leaning over her, helping her up, touching her with familiar gestures which both calmed and repulsed at the same time. None of it was real. Bits of her cortex fed her visual and tactile imaginings. The Fant only existed in her mind.

  “I am trying to set things right. Or what I believe to be right. To stop the foolishness that has you here in this room in space instead of where you belong. I am trying to save the Compact that I helped create. But foremost, I am trying to save Barsk from those who would destroy it.”

  The Lutr Speaker stood, head tilted as if listening to a voice in the room, trying to make sense of the words. Could the old woma
n really be trying to be nice? Had she reappeared just now as a kindness, despite the revulsion she evoked? None of it made any sense, and as she reached that conclusion, she knew Margda witnessed it as well.

  “You really are a bright girl, even that fool of a Bear could see that. But you’re not terribly introspective and your motivations have never extended beyond your immediate plans.”

  “What does any of that have to do with you?”

  “Let’s go back to self-interest,” said the Fant. “Child, do you want to return home? Do you wish to go back to the vapid life you loved so well? To return to that enchanting realm of fresh water and crisp, clean air and quit this place for good? Then tolerate me a while longer. Your liberation will come as a side effect of the larger changes I’ll achieve.”

  Margda dissolved again into nothingness, at least perceptually. But Lirlowil could feel her still in her mind. The Fant probed her somehow, desperate to turn the Lutr’s telepathy on herself. No, she had that wrong. The Matriarch hadn’t actually used Lirlowil’s telepathic abilities, she’d been poking at them, studying them. From inside, like the mental equivalent of picking up an unfamiliar object and rolling it around in your hands. Lirlowil gasped. The actions were reasonable in some ways, frighteningly intimate in others.

  “Good. Calm yourself, that’s the way. Now, explain to me how our telepathy works. I will need it for what comes ahead, if either of us are ever to be really free again.”

  Resigned, Lirlowil had barely begun repeating to herself the exercises from her first tutors in the powers of her mind, when the entrance to her suite opened to admit a black-clad Panda. She leaped to her feet and sailed out of her room and landed in the gravity of the reception area, none of her anxiety and fear apparent in the lithe grace of her movement.

  “Save me, please! One of these despicable Fant has invaded my mind. You’re security, do something. Secure me!”

  “None of your pretend madness. Your request was sent on to Urs-Major Krasnoi and he sees value in it. You’re to come with me immediately and take a shuttle downwell.”

  “Request? I didn’t make any request.”

  The Ailuros frowned at her. She waved one massive black and white hand at Lirlowil’s workstation. “You wrote it there, not two hours past. What are you playing at now?”

  The Matriarch’s voice sounded as if it came from the sleeping chamber, though only the Lutr could hear it. “I knew I forgot to mention something. You wanted to get out of this prison, didn’t you? Well, while you were unconscious, I sent a note to your keeper worded to accomplish just that. You see? We don’t have to be at cross purposes, Child.”

  Lirlowil shook her head. “The Major? He wants me planetside? But…” She paused. Ignoring the put-upon expression of the Ailuros, she stood taller, her mind racing already for some advantage. By habit she reached out with her mind to the security guard in front of her, eager to pull more information from her thoughts, explanations, interpretations, hunches. Anything at all, anything more than to depend upon the hideous creature in her mind. The power came at her call but ebbed before she could glean anything more than a sliver of hidden fear that she instilled in the security woman.

  “Oh my, yes, that’s very interesting,” whispered Margda, in a voice that now hung just behind Lirlowil’s shoulder. “Let’s try that again.”

  Her mind filled with the memory of the scent of fresh rain and the power surged through and poured out, clumsy and blunt. It struck the Ailuros, like a hammer pounding on the thin shell of a delicate nut, sending shards in all directions but miraculously sparing the tasty meat inside. The Panda screamed once and slumped unconscious to the floor, blood trickling from her nose and eyes and ears. The Otter dropped as well, onto her knees as both hands clutched at her temples.

  “No! No! Not like that.”

  The Lutr’s reaction elicited only petulance from Margda. “No? Then how?”

  “Like … picking thistles with tweezers,” whined Lirlowil, as she braced for the storm the Matriarch had unleashed.

  Old memories and new flooded through their shared awareness, what the guard had eaten for breakfast, what she’d sent home to a trio of cubs for their last birthday, the hope that assignment to this mission had originally brought and the subsequent realization that its clandestine nature would mean a blank in her record rather than promotion, the morning her gran had taken her fishing for the first time. And more, always more. A lifetime of detail, blurs of black and white fur, cultural references that made no sense and felt odd, if not outright wrong. Noise and noise and more noise with barely a hint of worthwhile signal. And somewhere under it all, her own thought, a faint worry that she’d incapacitated and possibly killed a member of the security detail assigned to her, and Krasnoi’s repercussions when he found out.

  “Teach me, then,” insisted the Matriarch.

  “I can’t,” hissed the Lutr, struggling back up on her feet, head bent and clutched in both delicate hands. “I can’t hold an idea of my own. You’ve filled me with a lifetime of this Panda’s thoughts. They’re crushing me. And on top of that, you’ve roused the major’s interest in me. Why?”

  Her body moved on its own, awkwardly stomping across the room to pull out a chair and collapse at her workstation, like a broken puppet manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. Unintentionally, her fingers danced upon keys and the text of a recently sent message floated before her eyes:

  I’M WASTING DAYS AND DAYS RESEARCHING FANT TO GAIN ENOUGH INFORMATION TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK TO THEM, AND THEN LEARNING NOTHING USEFUL. IF YOU HAVE LIVING RESOURCES, LET ME MEET THEM, SKIM THEM, AND EITHER FIND WHAT YOU WANT OR ELIMINATE THEM FROM CONSIDERATION.

  She shoved the keyboard away, her gorge rising with disgust. “Oh no, no! I couldn’t bear to meet more of your kind. Not in the flesh. Please!”

  “You little fool! You can reach into people’s minds, see them as they are and not as the flesh they wear, and still you let bigotry rule you.”

  She took control of her movements again, but only to bang her head against the workstation. Memories full of visceral pain flooded her, triggered by the physical pain she’d barely begun to inflict. Complications during the birth of her cubs, corporal discipline administered upon her as a child by a stern grandfather, a friendly tavern fight that had gotten out of hand and gone from brawl to riot leaving seven dead and her with a torn ear and shattered collarbone. None of it her. None of it her.

  Lirlowil screamed at the Fant, “Don’t lecture me. You don’t know how it is. Flesh shapes mind. Mind shapes flesh. It’s not so different than Speaking.”

  “It should be. If you worked to make it so. But you’re weak. Lazy.”

  Lazy? Her? She flashed on going through training, endless days of running obstacle courses, agility exercises, hand-to-hand combat. She could field-strip nine different weapons, survive in a desert with only a blade, make love nonstop for two days until her partner collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. But no, she’d done none of that; that was someone else.

  “I’d hoped you could be my partner in this, that we could both gain from such extraordinary circumstances.” The Matriarch’s tone dripped with contempt. “I dislike being wrong. You don’t have the discipline to seize the opportunity I offer you. You can’t even see how to dam this torrent of foreign recollections you’re drowning in.”

  “I can’t help you. I won’t help you.”

  “Oh, Child, you so underestimate yourself. You can, and you will. Willingly and actively, or not. But for now, just sleep!”

  A fat-fingered gray hand seemed to close around her mind, squeezing consciousness out of her. Lirlowil struggled against it, sliding from her chair and collapsing alongside the fallen security guard. And then the world went away.

  * * *

  A short time passed. Lirlowil’s body responded more readily with the Lutr unconscious. Margda knelt, head bowed, and heard the arrival of three more Pandas. She raised her head, noted their drawn weapons but gave no outward acknowledgment. W
ithout a word, an Ailuros lifted his fallen comrade into his arms and backed out of the converted warehouse. Another stepped forward, careful not to block the line of fire of the remaining Panda; when he stood in front of the Otter, he backhanded her with enough force to make her body rise off the floor before she crumpled to a heap.

  “When this is done, when the major has no more need of you, we will remember what you did today.”

  Margda struggled to sit up, one delicate hand gingerly touching the side of her new face where the Ailuros had struck. She spoke, her voice strong with none of the fear or cajoling or self-importance that she imagined always marked Lirlowil’s conversation with the security detail. Margda’s words, as the Eleph moved inside the Lutr’s body.

  “When this is done, if any of you still matter to me, I will choose what you remember. Now, take me down to Barsk and where I need to be. I’ve waited far too long to reach this point.”

  She got to her feet and walked out into the corridor, empty now. The Panda lowered his weapon and led the way. “There’s a shuttle waiting. This way.” The one who’d struck her, followed behind. They didn’t matter. They meant nothing to her.

  Gaining more control over her borrowed body with every step, Margda allowed herself to be escorted from Lirlowil’s prison of so many days, moving with determination but none of the Lutr’s natural grace, plodding instead like an old woman several times her size. If the Pandas noticed, they wisely gave no indication. Margda assumed that a trip downwell would have little novelty or interest to her host and did her best not to gape at the viewport, though it was difficult. In her life, she’d never been off Barsk, and the view of her homeworld from low orbit brought an unexpected joy. Riding the Lutr’s body felt little different than commanding her own, save for the annoying ghost proprioception she kept experiencing of a trunk that this body lacked. Suppressing Lirlowil herself had been easy enough; any defenses the Otter might have possessed had vanished in the onslaught of unwanted Panda memories. From her vantage point, Margda had simply stepped out of the way of the mnemonic flood, and instead of throwing Lirlowil a rope to haul her to safety, she’d shoved a metaphorical weight into her hands. It wouldn’t be so easy taking dominance over this mind next time, but she had no intention of relinquishing control until she completed her task. She had waited, dead, for the better part of eight centuries, she could damn well endure the mewling whimpers of a spoiled Lutr for a few days. In the meantime, she needed to acquire precision, and for that she’d have to allow the Otter to wake up again and teach her to use the power with more delicacy. Thistles indeed!