Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Druz operated the pilot’s board on the tiny bridge of the ship. To her right, Pizlo sat at second, eyes fixed upon screens that should have been unintelligible to him. Jorl stood behind him, and the way the boy nodded and switched his gaze from one display to another unnerved Jorl more than he wanted to admit.

  Under the terms of the Compact, only Lox and Eleph were permitted to set foot upon Barsk, nor could any other Alliance craft enter its atmosphere. Having inherited Bish’s ship, Jorl considered himself within the spirit of the law so long as only he and Pizlo disembarked. The ship followed the beanstalk down into the atmosphere. It leveled off high above the island of Zlorka and sped east into a storm.

  “Stop! You went past it!” Pizlo unstrapped from his seat and jumped down.

  Jorl nodded to the Sloth. “Can you drop us here?”

  “Here? I can, but there’s nothing here.” Druz studied her console and set her controls so that the ship began executing a low, wide circle. “The nearest land is far behind us, sir. Are you sure?”

  “Give us a bit to reach the boat and open the hold. Take us as low as you can, and try to ease us into the water. Once we’re underway, return to the station for your supplies. Then, as we discussed, take Lirlowil home. And when you’re ready, set a course for the technologically weakest of the far colonies and drop off their newest member.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Yes, well, no need to hurry. It’s going to take a while for me to figure out my new role. I don’t plan on leaving Barsk ever again, so I don’t know what I’d do with a vessel like this.”

  “I do,” said Pizlo. “There’re are all kinds of places I could go. Think of all the insects that they have on other planets!”

  Jorl smiled. “I don’t think your mother would be happy with me if I let her six-year-old son go traipsing around the galaxy.”

  “I won’t always be six. Plus, I have moons!” He slapped his bandaged hands against the designs on his chest.

  “We’ll talk about it. For now, let’s get you and your moons to the boat.” He turned back to Druz. “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Senator. I will see you when I return.”

  Jorl and Pizlo made their way to the hold and onto the boat that lay braced against a vast gate on the outer wall. Moments later, that gate opened and water began rushing into the hold. The boat slipped out and free, and the ship skipped along ahead of them before rising up again. Wind and rain struck at the Fant on the little boat, and as one they turned their faces up in pleasure and watched the ship rise. The ocean cascaded from the open hold like a waterfall and then stopped. Clouds swallowed the ship, and the man and boy were alone on the ocean.

  Pizlo stood in the front of the boat. It was late afternoon. Rain poured down upon him and he pointed the direction they had to go. Jorl set the controls. They sailed until dusk and slept beneath clouded skies caressed by light rain. The following morning, as the cloudy sky brightened, they saw the shore of a nearby island that appeared on no map. They paused to have breakfast and then made landfall. Before leaving the station, Jorl had instructed the Pandas to lash two plastic drums to the boat’s deck. He transferred them to the beach.

  Pizlo sat at the water’s edge, eyes closed as if communing with the waves that now and then knocked him over. He’d discarded his bandages and when the cool water wasn’t washing them clean he kept burying his hands in the sand.

  Further up shore, Jorl opened both drums, tilting them to pour out the coarse ash from inside. He rolled the empty containers back to the boat, already planning where he might keep them until Druz returned and could take them off Barsk for good. Then he went to sit with the boy, smiling as the water soaked his clothes that had only recently dried from the night before.

  Pizlo continued to roll with the waves a while, then opened his eyes and asked, “Can I watch?”

  Jorl hesitated. “We’re only here at all because of you. It’s not fair, but no. It would only upset them to see you, and they’ve been through so much. Honestly, many of them were never happy to see me, either. But this is something that has to be done. I won’t be long.”

  He closed his eyes and, unbidden, the memory of the burning Dying came to him. Jorl shoved it aside. He’d had too many nightmares in his life already and hoped to exorcise this one before it took root. Instead, he imagined the familiar scent of spiralmint. He fanned himself with his left ear. In his mind, he re-created the shore where he sat, editing out the details of Pizlo and the boat. In their place, he began summoning the many Dying Fant that had shared the internment camp. He knew their names, and even though his personal knowledge of many of them was slight, no other nefshons had the feel of the recent days he’d shared with them. The handful he’d shared tales with took form closest to him. The rest materialized just beyond them, until they filled the space around him in a line along the water’s edge.

  “Your time in life has since ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. Your journey here did not take the traditional form, and your arrival is decidedly tardy, but you have at last achieved your destination. I bid you welcome.”

  “This is it,” said Rüsul. “I’ve seen this beach in my dream.”

  “And those trees,” said Kembü.

  Phas turned to him, one hand reaching out. “Jorl? How is this possible? What you just said, it sounded like the words from a summoning … but we were all just in the camp. The Pandas, they were rounding us all up—”

  “What matters is you’re here, where you all intended to be. Let what happened at the camp go. None of that matters.”

  “I think we’ll hold on to one piece of it,” said Tarva, his trunk entwined with Abso’s, who nodded in response.

  “Thank you, Jorl. I’d compose a poem in your honor, but I’ve left that life behind.”

  “What happens next?” asked Jorl.

  Almost as one, the two hundred sixteen summoned Fant looked at him with surprise.

  “How can you not know?” said Rüsul. “It’s part of the dream.”

  Jorl shrugged. “I never had the dream. I … found this place by other means. Beyond bringing you here, I haven’t a clue.”

  “You oaf,” said Kembü, though not unkindly. “We walk up the beach and into the trees.”

  “That’s all?”

  Phas nodded. Others were already moving toward the trees. “You’re a good historian, Jorl, but this isn’t something for you to record or witness. You can’t go with us.”

  “I understand.”

  She turned away and took Rüsul’s hand in hers. “Walk with me?” The carver nodded, glancing once over his shoulder at Jorl, and then together they joined the rest of the Fant walking up the beach and into the trees.” As they reached the limits of the landscape he’d crafted, he released the constructs of each of the Dying, laying them to rest at last.

  Jorl let his awareness return to the real world where Pizlo still played at the ocean’s edge. He glanced up the beach to the tree line where in the other world the Fant had vanished. A trick of the light or perhaps his own wishful imagination made him think he saw movement there, several Fant watching him from the shadowy safety of the trees. He knew better.

  “Ready to go home, Pizlo?”

  EPILOGUE

  PROPER GOODBYES

  JORL had come back to Keslo four days earlier. That same afternoon he’d returned the borrowed boat, sent payment to Suliv’s shop for the goods Pizlo had acquired, and sent the boy off to let his mother know he was fine and his hands would heal. Only then did he return to his simple apartment where he carefully locked the doors and shuttered the windows against the outside world. He turned away callers and ignored requests from concerned friends and siblings. Instead, he hung in his study’s work hammock and brooded.

  Now and then he moved about the house to satisfy the intake and output needs of his body, but he always returned to his study. He neither read nor wrote, and the idea of doing any sort of Speaking lay further
from his mind than the outermost colonies.

  On the morning of his fifth day back, he noticed a crumpled scrap of brown paper on the floor. He stared at it, knowing he was not so far gone that he could have failed to mark its appearance earlier; the paper had not been there all along. He checked his doors, both the main entrance and the seldom used back door that led down to a community compost bin. Both remained locked from the inside.

  Returning to his study he discovered one of the windows’ shutters had been dislodged and lay open a crack. Nodding to himself he at last examined the brown page. The paper had once wrapped a parcel of some sort before being repurposed. It was quite worn, variously stained, and had been folded so often it appeared fractured and had become as supple as cloth. As he scanned the tight circles of the glyphs Jorl recognized Pizlo’s style. He found himself smiling, and in that simple act returned to himself from wherever he had been for the past days. The paper was an invitation.

  The pleasure of your company is requested next year, on the seventeenth day of the season of dark, at the westernmost edge of the island of Phran, just before dawn, when Wella will appear to share his wisdom.

  P.S. Bring lunch for us both.

  Shrugging off his melancholy, Jorl opened the windows of his study. He seated himself in his hammock again, but this time went to work. By late afternoon he had completed an overdue monograph. He sealed it in a large envelope and set it on the edge of his desk to remind him to drop it off the next morning. Then he pinned Pizlo’s invitation on the wall over his desk, and headed out the door toward Tolta’s home.

  As he walked through the dusk of the Civilized Wood, Jorl spun himself through the rituals of a summoning. He didn’t need to do so, but the familiarity set him at ease. He’d never tried to Speak while walking before, but the trick lay well within the range of his talents now, just as it was simplicity itself to hold the nefshons of his conversant in his mind, all but fully formed, like a word waiting to be spoken.

  Jorl let himself into the house and paused in the greeting room. It was one thing to presume to step over the threshold without an invitation, and quite another to breach the inner house unannounced.

  “Tolta? Are you at home?” He already knew the answer. An alluring aroma came from the kitchen where someone had prepared a fragrant vegetable stew and set it aside to cool. The sound of running water and the clunk of a pot suggested the post-cooking cleaning had begun. He called her name again. The sound of water stopped, an instant later Tolta bolted into the room.

  Jorl froze. Looking at her, he realized that she would surely have been among those who had come to his home in the days since his return and been turned away with silence. And he knew he must have hurt her.

  “Oh, Jorl, Pizlo told me—”

  “Tolta, I’m so sorry. I’ve not been myself these last few days. I’m … I’m sorry.”

  She rushed across the room and hugged him tighter than he’d ever been hugged. “Don’t you try leaving again. You’ve no cause for it. You belong here, among the friends who love you.”

  She embraced him for a long while, but then, too, he had to admit that he held onto her as well. He’d seen so much, and been altered by it, but that contact assured him he would be all right. When she stepped back, he held onto her hands and gazed deeply into her eyes. He saw the same face, the same Tolta, that he had seen when he stood Second at her and Arlo’s wedding. Nothing important had changed.

  “I’ve brought you a gift,” he whispered. “I hope you like it.”

  Jorl closed his eyes. He concentrated on the nefshons he’d already gathered and set to one side of his awareness, and then began anew with a second summoning. When he opened his eyes again it was to a mindscape of the same room in the house, and with barely a blink of effort he pulled enough of Tolta’s nefshons together to create a construct of her there.

  From her perspective, nothing would have changed. She stood in front of Jorl in the real world greeting room of her home, and her awareness occupied an identical place that existed only in his mind.

  He shifted his focus for an instant, pulled the other construct into existence in another corner of his mind, little more than an empty plane of light. Arlo took shape and stood before him there.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again. What happened—”

  “This is the last time I’ll call you, my friend. Everything worked out, but I thought you needed some closure. A chance to say a proper goodbye.”

  He gave a final push, and Arlo’s construct slipped from one venue to the other, materializing in the illusion of Tolta’s home in the very spot where he had been standing, his own construct fading away as his friend appeared. He heard Tolta gasp as she held her husband’s hands again.

  “Hello, Tol,” Arlo breathed, “I love you, you know.”

  As the living Tolta construct threw herself around the Arlo summoning in an embrace that was long overdue, Jorl discretely closed off his awareness of the created space. He slipped into the kitchen and helped himself to a bowl of stew and a wooden spoon. A moment later, he was crossing through the greeting room again on his way out the front door. He paused for just a moment to see the smile and tears on Tolta’s face, and went outside into the night.

  APPENDIX ONE: RACES OF THE ALLIANCE

  The astute reader will have noticed that the characters portrayed in this novel appear to represent a variety of anthropomorphic animals. In fact, at this point in time, there are some eighty-seven different species or “races” existing in the Alliance, more than a hundred billion sapient beings occupying approximately four thousand planets.

  These races are identified by the common names of the animals they resemble—rendered here as proper nouns—or by a clipped version of the applicable Latin genus. Of these races, all are mammals, and all but two are furred. This pair of exceptions, collectively known as “Fant,” appears to bear a connection to the two species on Earth known as African and Asian elephants. Thus Jorl is identified as an Elephant or Fant, but also as a Lox, from Loxodonta africana.

  The list below identifies the races of characters seen in this book, but is only a small portion of the raised mammals that comprise the Alliance.

  • Ailuros, Ailuropoda, Giant Panda. Jorl’s only friend during his time in the Patrol was an Ailuros named Dund. Krasnoi’s security team aboard the orbital station are all Pandas.

  • Aplodon, Aplodontia, Mountain Beaver. A lieutenant sitting at navigation on the bridge of the Resolute Purpose was a Beaver.

  • Bos, Bos, Yak. Senator Bish, chairman of the Committee of Information is a Yak. Jorl once wrote the foreword to a book by a Bos historian named Fenna. The most well-known Bos is probably Thelos, a mass murderer said to have been possessed by a demon.

  • Brady, Bradypus, Three-toed Sloth. Druz, the personal assistant to the chair of the Senate’s Committee of Information is a Brady. So are Hrum and Morth, the captain and a lieutenant (respectively) of Jorl’s Patrol ship.

  • Cans, Canis, Domestic Dog. Most of the rank and file members of Major Krasnoi’s crew are Cans.

  • Cynomy, Cynomys, Prairie Dog. One of the “junior stature” races of the Alliance, the Cynomy include the civil parson who oversaw Lirlowil’s reclassification from citizen to resource. Senator Welv of the Committee of Information is also a Prairie Dog, as are a third of Senator Bish’s precognitivists (e.g., Tekki).

  • Eleph, Elephas, Asian Elephant. Margda, the Matriarch of Barsk, was an Eleph, as was the legendary Pholo, the only Fant who could fly. Other Eleph include Emil, Phas, Grummel, Mickl, Rüsul, Shtev, and Yeft. Along with the Lox, Eleph make up the other half of the pair of races referred to as “Fant.”

  • Feln, Felis, Cat. Several Feln worked at Krasnoi’s polar base, processing the Dying. There is also at least one Feln among the senators who comprise the Committee of Information.

  • Geom, Geomys, Gopher. The secondary and tertiary navigation boards on the Resolute Purpose are manned by Geoms. Senator T’Minah of the Committee
of Information is also a Geom. These are another of the “junior stature” races.

  • Lep, Lepus, Hare. One of the senators on the Committee of Information is a Lep.

  • Lox, Loxodonta, African Elephant. Jorl is a Lox, as was his friend Arlo, Arlo’s mother Kembü, Arlo’s wife Tolta, and their son, Pizlo (it should be noted that soulless children can also be born among the Eleph, the other race that together with the Lox comprise the “Fant”). Other Lox mentioned include Adri, Golub, Belti, Tral, and Yarva.

  • Lutr, Lutra, Eurasian Otter. Lirlowil, the telepathic Speaker from Sharv, is a Lutr.

  • Marmo, Marmot, Groundhog. This is another of the “junior stature” races. Two members of the Committee of Information are Marmos.

  • Myrm, Myrmecophaga, Giant Anteater. Kengi, the communications officer on Jorl’s vessel during his time in the Patrol, was a Myrm.

  • Nonyx, Acinonyx, Cheetah. Selishta is the Nonyx-Captain of the vessel Krasnoi used to abduct Dying Fant (and Jorl) while on Barsk.

  • Taxi, Taxidea, Badger. The squad of six interrogators that questioned the Dying Fant at Krasnoi’s polar base were all Badgers.

  • Theraonca, Panthera onca, Jaguar. Rismas, the ensign assigned to keep watch on Jorl while aboard the Resolute Purpose, is a Theraonca.

  • Vulp, Vulpes, Fox. Another of the “junior stature” races of the Alliance. Shtev had a Vulp penpal on an Alliance medical station.

  • Urs, Ursus, Bear. Krasnoi the Alliance Major is an Urs. As is a senator from the Committee of Information. Jorl recounts having met several Urs during his time in the Patrol.

  APPENDIX TWO: THE ISLANDS OF BARSK

  Barsk is a watery world with only a single, uninhabitable continent located at its south pole and two chains of islands. These archipelagos lay just south of the equator and stretch east and west to span nearly a fifth of their hemisphere. The planet’s ubiquitous cloud cover ensures none of this is visible from orbit.