Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “It needs to set?”

  “To work right, yes. Like … like a pie you’ve just baked, you need to let it cool. Not the best analogy, but you understand, right?”

  She let go of his ear and eased her way to the exit. “Finish your work. I’ll inform the senator.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  UNWELCOME HOUSEGUESTS

  IT didn’t help Lirlowil at all, knowing that everything around her was just a mental construct. She hadn’t made it, and she couldn’t unmake it. Couldn’t so much as strike a light. Instead she’d been trapped in the dark for … days? She couldn’t tell; couldn’t sense her physical body at all. All she had was her mind, that magnificent mind that had always served her so well until that stupid Urs-major had upended her life. But no, even he hadn’t truly done more than inconvenience her. The real blame belonged to that horrible Fant!

  Margda had locked her up in a closet within her own mind. And not even a proper closet, more like a pantry with papered shelves and sealed, glazed pots of dried herbs and vegetables. And all of it bound in finished wood, floor and walls and ceiling. She’d smashed a few of the pots, testing the edges of her volition and marveling at the details the Fant had included in what would have been false props in her own constructions. Why include sensory specifics for the contents of sealed pots tucked away in a cupboard that was never intended to be opened—let alone occupied—in the first place? A grudging respect colored the edges of her hatred. Clearly she had failed to develop her Speaker’s skills to their fullest, relying on her telepathic talents instead. And yet Margda, no telepath herself and only a nefshon construct, had taken control over Lirlowil’s own talent and thrust her into this imaginary closet.

  And it was killing her.

  Her prison didn’t have to stay completely dark. Her telepathy had been co-opted, her control of nefshons overwhelmed by the Fant, but some perception remained. She could, if desired, perceive her own nefshons, that glowing, golden blanket that every Speaker learned to dismiss from awareness in her very first lesson. Except, she had no such blanket. The construct of the pantry in Margda’s nonexistent home overlay any image she might have had of her physical body. Instead she perceived only a single golden thread, one end connecting with the mental image she had of herself in this place. The thread ran a short distance in the darkness and then disappeared, right where Lirlowil could feel the pantry’s locked door. But if she touched the thread, she could sense the Fant on the other end. It connected them, mind to mind, and try as she might she could not sever it.

  But as she gripped it and tugged and twisted, Lirlowil could feel Margda on the other end, could taste both the fatigue of that evil mind and the weariness of the body she’d stolen. And that was her hope.

  Separated from her own body, her mind weakened. In time, she had no doubt that she would die. But the Fant, originally nothing more enduring than any other temporary nefshon construct, required both the Lutr’s mind and body to remain. Through the thread connecting them Lirlowil could feel her nemesis exhausting both. If Margda managed to hang on, walking around in the station as an Otter until such time as she wore out that body, then both minds would wink out of existence. But if she paused, relinquished control to rest her own mind even for a moment, Lirlowil believed she might have a faint chance to break free and at least co-habit her body again.

  If she could just get out of this damn pantry!

  Groping in the dark, she picked up another pot and hurled it against the floor where it shattered into many, many unseen pieces.

  THIRTY-TWO

  GHOST IN THE MACHINE

  IN the instant the Sloth turned her back, Jorl’s trunk quested across the workbench and found the phial Arlo had described. Then he surveyed the room and studied what he had to work with. He wasn’t totally useless in a lab; before entering the academy he and Arlo had spent several seasons producing spirits for sale to older students. He’d mastered the basic tenets of cleanliness required for consistent fermentation and enough lab technique to distill those results into beverages that were potent without being poison.

  The Brady had returned to her frozen stance in the outer room, a careful nonchalance that he assumed disguised vigilance. He was supposed to be hard at work re-creating a drug, so he did his best to put on a compelling show. He puttered, fiddling with this piece of apparatus, that work screen, moving back and forth in the transparent box of a room. While he dithered with his surroundings, Jorl’s mind raced. He agreed with Arlo’s assessment, he could not give the drug to the senator. If he did, and didn’t explain the outcome, assuming they’d recorded Arlo’s work and could re-create it, the backlash when the Alliance began to lose its Speakers would be terrible. But if he warned Bish, he wouldn’t be believed. The Yak would see it as a ploy and proceed ahead, perhaps more cautiously, but still Speakers would be lost.

  But if he took the drug himself …

  The aleph he bore would keep him safe from having his ability burnt out, Arlo had been certain about that. He’d been less confident about the range of other effects that his simulations suggested. Jorl could see that his friend had left something out, something he’d told Margda but which she in turn had only hinted at to him. Jorl feared how it would affect him, but he had to weigh that unknown against the collected certainties that awaited him. In that light, there did not seem much choice.

  Arlo had requested a vast number of ingredients, obviously far more than he’d used. Jorl systematically sampled from one substance after the other, pouring them into various beakers and flasks, measuring and mixing them with no purpose, setting some to cook and placing others in a cooling tray. Eventually, his actions produced a reaction volatile enough to shatter one of the lab’s instruments and start a small fire. Ceiling nozzles he hadn’t noticed showered suppressing foam down onto everything in the box, causing at least one other piece of equipment to sputter, spark, and shut down.

  Jorl slipped on some foam and crashed to the floor, bringing Arlo’s phial to his mouth in the process, hoping the confusion of the moment would mask his drinking its contents. He cast the empty container aside, shattering it against the base of the work bench where foam and other spilled chemicals contaminated the remains. Meanwhile, the Sloth had reached the door and flung it wide. She pointed at him.

  “Move! Procedure requires me to purge the clean room’s atmosphere, and I can’t do that with you inside. Quickly now!”

  A three-pronged metal claw embedded itself in the table above his head. Jorl reached up and pulled it free with his nubs, curling his trunk around its cable. Druz stepped back from the door, retracting the cable as she went, and he slid across the floor on a frictionless carpet of suppression foam. As soon as he reached the outer room, the clean room’s door slammed shut and a shudder vibrated through the glass box. Jorl turned as he stood, watching a cyclone appear where he’d been. The fires had gone out, replaced by a mixture of foam and wind and smoke. The wind gathered up everything that hadn’t been bolted to the floor, not just the sopping foam, but chemicals, hardware, glassware, and tools. The mix of them whirled around and around, picking up speed, and then abruptly and soundlessly vanished. A hatch in the ceiling had blown and the inner room been laid open to a conduit that led to the outside edge of the senator’s ship and the vacuum beyond.

  Another pair—or possibly one or more of those he’d seen before, he really couldn’t tell—of the Ailuros guards arrived. The Brady didn’t look at him or utter a word but must have issued a directive somehow. The Panda pair latched on and escorted him back through the ship, out the boarding corridor to the station, returning to the cabin where he’d last seen the Matriarch’s Lutr. They left him there, locking the door on their way out.

  Since taking Arlo’s drug, Jorl had felt nothing. No effect at all. Perhaps it didn’t work. The pharmer had never actually tested the thing. What if his simulations held some flaw that failed to capture the difference between theory and practice? He stood in the center of the room for a time, feeling yo
unger and more foolish than he had ever felt in his youth, performing a mental inventory, searching for some sign of the drug he’d taken. Nothing.

  He settled into a corner of the room, not bothering with either bench or bed, but choosing to curl up on the floor, his back cradled by the intersection of two walls. It had all been for nothing. Margda’s prophecies and resurrection. His aleph. The abduction and slaughter of the Dying Fant. Arlo’s death. He’d been struggling to give meaning to all of it, and failed. Just as he had with that artifact when he’d been in the Patrol. Useless all over again. With a sigh, he stopped fighting and accepted it.

  He slumped in his corner, allowing his thoughts to jump randomly through a sequence of associations and half-remembered ideas that produced apparent non sequiturs but nothing worth lingering on. In his mind, he smelled spiralmint. It was a memory of olfaction, not actually sensed, existing only in his thoughts. It was enough though, so long associated in his experience with the use of koph and the beginnings of a Speaking state. His left ear tingled.

  Jorl thought about sight and smiled, seeing himself afloat in a lightless void, and knowing he also still sat in a corner of the station cabin with his eyes fast shut. He’d taken no koph and yet he was manipulating nefshons. It intrigued him, but to what good?

  He’d destroyed the lab, and likely prevented the senator from being able to re-create Arlo’s drug. Even if the entire process had been recorded, he hoped no one would be able to tell where the real work ended and his cacophony began. And he’d consumed the sample himself, with no real plan in mind other than to keep it out of Bish’s hands. Which put things back pretty much where they’d been before.

  Margda had mirrored the Senator’s ruthlessness, one politician to another, but despite her machinations which had shaped his own life, in the end she’d had no solutions. Arlo had killed himself, following the cold logic of a researcher. He’d been temporarily moved by an emotional appeal, but in the end had only been able to put the problem squarely in Jorl’s hands. But Jorl was just a historian; what did his friend expect him to be able to do? He had no frame of reference, no precedent to draw upon. In all the thousands of years of Alliance history, nothing like this had ever happened. And yet … the nefshons danced before him now. He had to try something.

  Being a historian, what if he looked back further, to a time before the Alliance. The idea was bizarre. Likely, the attempt would fail as soon as he began and he’d awaken on the station with nothing more than a trail of drool down his chin to show for the effort. But he had to at least try.

  What did he know about those ancient times? What did anyone know? Now and then an artifact from Before was found on some dead planet or lifeless moon. One such had haunted his dreams. What had it said? Something about being the past sent forward.

  Jorl focused on what he remembered: a cube of metal and glass, the whirls of color rising like smoke within it, taking on a living shape. Random dust motes swam in his vision, less than a flicker. Nothing. Despite Arlo’s assurance the drug would increase his abilities, there was nothing to find. The device that had spoken, its alleged sapience notwithstanding, had apparently left behind no nefshons.

  Back in the waking world, he became aware of a crick in his back. The cabin’s temperature was cooler than he liked, and sweat beaded on his skin. This latest physical effort had been enough to push his own odor through to his awareness. The guards had locked him in. Bish had no further use for him and might simply leave him there to die of thirst or hunger. It annoyed him, not the idea of dying, but that he might do so while stinking so far above the cleansing rains of home.

  No one would ever use koph to summon him, the prohibition applying to Speakers would ensure that. No one would learn his story. All that would be left of him would be the work he’d published before setting off to identify the Silence, an assortment of films and books, nothing but words. His words …

  Jorl stiffened. Was he completely awake? He wasn’t sure. Words. How many times in the past had he used the words, the writings or speeches, the messages written by an individual to summon and Speak with him? So many countless beings, all long dead, who had spoken the same strings of words, made it difficult. But when the phrases were something unique that the conversant identified with, a slogan or credo, they bound something of themselves to those words. Doing so imbued the words with their own identities, which in turn meant their nefshons were locked there as well. If the device from Before had had even the merest hint of a nefshon, perhaps it could be found in its own distinct speech. And he recalled it, a string of phrases that sounded like total gibberish but which would not have been used by another sapient. He spoke them in his mind, reaching out, straining.

  “Gilgamesh. The Pendragon. Kal-El. I am these and more. I am the Archetype of Man, and from slumber such as you have never known have I awoken. Speak, friend, and I shall hear you.”

  Walls formed in the darkness within his mind as long habit once again created his workroom back home. The chill and odor of the real world slipped away from his awareness, replaced by warm humidity and a hint of sartha coming from the window of another room. And all around him words echoed, like a child’s infrasonic call but richer. “Kal-El…” Over and over, the words tumbled from his lips, the phrase uttered dozens of times, each occurrence spoken with a stronger conviction than Jorl had managed before. “I am these and more…” Something approached. Across time and space, nefshons converged on him from all directions, hurtling with impossible speed from a provenance inexpressibly vast. “I am the Archetype of Man…”

  “… and from slumber such as you have never known have I awoken. Speak, friend, and I shall hear you.”

  It was there. Right in front of him. Far larger than could be contained in the confines of his workroom. Summoning it had wiped away the walls of his imagined venue and had this been the real world his neighbors would surely be gaping at the sudden appearance of a giant cube that had ruined his house. Jorl smiled.

  “You are the Archetype of Man,” said Jorl, improvising the establishing ritual to the circumstances. “Your time before, unique and protracted, has ended; you are now much as you were in, um, life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I bid you welcome.”

  There was silence. If the device had heard him it did not respond. And still the intensity of its self-awareness blazed in its words. Machine or not, it possessed nefshons. He’d already pulled together enough to manifest a conversant, and more continued to arrive, more impressions of words, but nothing else. No feelings or emotions or reveries like he’d typically feel when he summoned someone. There was no quality of essence or personality, only that overpowering statement of self. The device had been alive and sapient, but not in any way that Jorl could understand.

  In that, he wasn’t alone.

  Behind the glassy portion of the cube, swirls of color coalesced in a humanoid shape. “Speak, friend, and I hear you. And I will answer, but I do not understand.”

  * * *

  THE pair of Panda guards returned with a meal tray, a shallow bowl of the same processed vegetable clusters as had been served down in the internment camp. One came in with the tray and set it on the desk while the other stayed by the door, weapon at the ready. At some unconscious level, Jorl noted these things, but he didn’t move. To the Ailuros he doubtless appeared to be asleep, slumped in the corner nearest the sleeping platform. His ears hung limp, his trunk lay looped in his lap, and his head lolled to one side with a trail of drool running from the corner of his mouth. Whether they looked upon him with disgust, pity, or some other emotion he’d never know. The events in his station cabin didn’t matter just now. With greater focus and concentration than he had ever known, he existed in a mental landscape more vivid than any Speaker had ever achieved.

  Jorl let the shattered walls of his house on Keslo fade, along with all the other structures of the Civilized Wood. Instead he constructed a clearing, much like the meeting place where they held public dances or speeches, b
ut several times larger. Hand-cut planks of polished hardwood lay underfoot, each perfectly fit with the ones to either side. At the far ends of the floored space leafy branches created a solid wall all the way around, sealing them in a circle of green. More branches arched overhead, wooden ribs that had been woven together to create a ceiling three times the height of any Fant. Lamps hung from the arches, though Jorl could have just as easily included light without bothering to provide a source for it.

  The great cube of the Archetype of Man rested in the precise middle of the clearing. Jorl stood less than an arm’s reach from one face. He paced back and forth, toward one edge or the other, enough to catch a glimpse of a second or third side of the thing, but never quite crossing over, no more than he would have walked behind a traditional conversant. At some level he’d decided to think of the side in front of him as the thing’s “face.” The silhouette that had formed on the other side of the glass helped.

  As he paced, he Spoke. They traded questions and answers, both seeking insight, both eking out the parameters of the other’s world. It—Jorl couldn’t quite call the device a “he”—had accepted the explanation of Speaking and nefshon constructs. There’d been none of the confusion associated with a first summoning. The Archetype of Man had not leaped to any false conclusions, had not mistaken Jorl for a deity. Rather, it withheld judgment until it had compiled sufficient explanation. All in all, it presented itself as a very rational creature, but more so than in the simply logical processes of the machines Jorl had used while in the Patrol. There was more to it, something which had made it alive at one time.

  “What is the last thing you remember?” he asked.

  It did not pause like a person might. It had no eyes to glance up and to the side as it pondered and searched for a memory.

  “I was in a narrow space. A cave of ice and rock. The automata that had taken me to that solar system had determined that moon would be an ideal location. They created the cave and placed me within. My systems went dormant and my beacon announced my presence at regular intervals and in response to any incursions in the space around that moon. I recorded significant geologic upheaval several millennia later but did not awaken. After an even greater span, passive receptors reacted to the energy signature of tool-using beings, activating my beacon. My boot cycle initiated and I awakened. My gross sensors indicated several beings standing in front of me, but most of my processing was still engaged in the restart cycle and self-check, and I cannot tell you more about the individuals who had ended my sleep. Before the cycle ran to completion, the beings retreated. I recorded the presence of vast energies being expended in my vicinity, in excess of the capacity of my protective shields. The cave in which I had been housed lost structural integrity and my own physicality became compromised. That is all I recall; something must have disrupted my memory consolidation at that point.”