The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Muzzy with sleep, moments passed before he recognized one of the gleaming figures in the maze, not just as a resident of Keslo that he’d passively watched for years. Some familiar movement beneath the glowing gold identified her as Dabni. Pizlo dismissed his awareness of the active nefshons blanketing everyone around him, now seeing the men and women in the maze with normal eyes. Was Dabni taking a break from work? But why? Why would anyone want a break from working in a bookstore. That seemed as alien as growing tired of the taste of air or wistful for the ability to fan someone else’s ears.

  Almost he left his spot, knowing that while Rina’s mother didn’t like him much, she had been working hard at it for years now. At her daughter’s urging, she and Rina had prepared treats for him, and more substantial meals besides, leaving them on the sill of an open window of his own mother’s house. Dabni would even chat with him now, albeit grudgingly, and almost always about books he’d read. She sometimes set aside books for him where he might snatch them up when no one was looking. He always took care of them, handling them more delicately than the volumes from Jorl’s collection—which were meant to show that they’d been read—and returned them within a tenday, nearly pristine and fit to be sold in her shop without anyone knowing they’d been touched, let alone read, by the island’s abomination.

  It would be easy to scramble to another branch, use a bit of rope to swing into position and drop into her path within the maze. It would surprise her, but there had always been that about Dabni that caused her to recover quickly. If he encountered her in the maze she’d probably make some clever remark or joke about it. That was when he liked her most. He stretched and grinned, shrugging off sleepiness to do this thing when he followed the thought to its end and stopped himself. As fine as it might be to startle Dabni, once in the maze he’d have to run its course to reach an exit. From his vantage point he knew it would require him to startle several other Fant, and in their panic they could well tear through a panel, injuring the maze and possibly themselves. And where was the integrity in that? Right. Instead, he watched Dabni, much as he had been watching the other people enjoying the maze this day, each in their own way, whether or not it all served some larger purpose.

  He tracked her progress, around the grand arc that defined the outermost edge to the left of where she’d entered. He watched as she passed four separate chances to slip through openings in the screens and delve deeper into the maze. Instead she stayed her course, completing the arc to where it branched off in three directions, two of which branched again twice more to wend further into the maze. She ignored both of these and instead took the third route. It progressed in an ever narrowing spiral that culminated in a quiet alcove outfitted with a broad cushion. At the precise center of the spiral the maze’s designer had placed a simple glass art installation that invited contemplation. It was the nature of the spiral’s end that one could see the shadowy forms of other travelers in the maze coming their way through several layers of screens well before they reached them.

  The scene caused Pizlo’s thoughts to turn again to the Archetype of Man and the shadow shapes that existed beneath its own translucent panes, vague and indistinct, as if the men and women of its stories constantly rose and fell inside its cubical body. Comparing the two images in his mind, he wondered what role mazes played in the hero’s journey. There’d been the one about the man with the ball of string that the Archetype had told him years ago. He’d liked that one because the hero had traveled from island to island, like a Fant on Barsk might. The other details, especially the ending, escaped him though.

  He had sufficient koph left in his system that he toyed with the idea of summoning his dead tutor again just to rehear the tale’s end. That notion fled his mind in an instant as a very different thought caught his attention.

  Dabni had settled herself on the waiting cushion. She held one hand up in front of her face, brought the tip of her trunk a short distance from it, and all at once held aloft a span of golden thread. It ran from her grasp through the walls of the maze some distance to connect with a young Eleph, one of a pair girls, both clad in the fashion of another island. They looked little older than him, teenage sweethearts stealing kisses from one another as they strolled hand in hand.

  But though he’d set aside his awareness of either Eleph’s nefshon swaddling, there could be no doubt about the thread that ran straight as a trumpet cry from the one Eleph girl to Dabni, piercing the intervening maze panels without effect. The thread was all of nefshons! He could see it.

  But … how could Dabni do that? Isolate a thread, from a living person? And did that mean she was a Speaker like he was? Like Jorl? He’d never mentioned it, not once. And why would she work in a bookstore if she could summon the dead? Except … that wasn’t what she was doing, or he’d have seen her conversant, just as anyone receptive to the effects of koph could see the working of another Speaker. And if she wasn’t Speaking, then … what was she doing?

  While he watched, Dabni raised her other hand and a glittering spherical lattice of gold appeared. Pizlo gasped at the sight of it. He knew it didn’t exist in the real world because the brightness of it didn’t hurt his eyes. The thing—like a gleaming fractal puzzle ball—was made of nefshons, and yet even from this distance he could tell its pieces didn’t belong together, not like the summoned bits of a conversant’s construct all were of a kind. Every piece of this thing felt different from every other. As he watched, Dabni added the thread she’d drawn from one of those girls, somehow both breaking it off from its source and tying it into the structure she held. The thread winked out of existence. It happened so fast that almost, almost Pizlo believed it a trick of the light. Nefshon threads? Constructs made from many different people’s particles? Such things couldn’t be. But then another thread winked into existence. Again Dabni held one end in her hand, the other stretching through the maze to the other of the pair of girls. Moments later, this too vanished while the construct in her hand gained a minute bit of complexity. Dabni’s trunk kept moving, the tip dancing near the hand that had held the threads. And that quickly, she held a third one, this time the other end connected to an elderly Lox a bit further in the maze who sat by a gaming table, pieces arrayed in a complex game that he seemed to be playing both sides of. Then that thread vanished and in the next instant another appeared, running from Dabni to yet another person. And each time she added something of the thread to the object in her hand.

  It didn’t make any sense, not to be able to do that to nefshons, nor to tie herself, however briefly, to living Fant, nor to do so without their knowledge, and least of all to build something from the collection of them. But judging by the construct, she’d been doing it for a long time. Too long. It hurt to think of it, but whatever she held contained particles from millions and millions of different people, many times the population of the entire planet. Whatever any of it meant, Pizlo knew of no other Speaker on Keslo who did such things. Nor in all of Jorl’s books had he read about anyone anywhere else on Barsk that could. And how long had she been able to do it?

  It didn’t appear to have any effect on the Fant on the other end of the threads. Pizlo rolled his confusion around in his head a while. This wasn’t like a new piece of learning that he’d not quite mastered yet, but rather the realization that someone he believed to be solid and constant in his life was not the person he thought he knew. Dabni, who shared his mother’s house, who had married his mentor and birthed the first person in the world who had never thought “abomination” when seeing him, that woman had transformed into someone else. As he watched, she dropped her hands and smiled. The fractal ball vanished, like it had never been.

  But it had, all of it was real, and that changed everything, didn’t it?

  TWELVE

  IMAGININGS

  IN the reality that contained his physical being, Jorl slumped in a favorite chair with face slack, hands folded loosely in his lap, and trunk hanging limp. Anyone familiar with Speakers would recognize the
signs and conclude that his awareness occupied a very different reality, one of his own making. In a venue crafted of his imagination he had left Barsk far behind and instead stood on the planet Dawn, in a replica of Senator Welv’s office, a space of rounded stone walls painted in shades of umber and rust and sand. He wore the same clothing as back on Barsk, an open vest of blue-green atop loose-fitting, black slacks. He’d clothed Welv in the grab he’d found in his colleague’s memory, the typical Prairie Dog sleeveless robe he had donned that morning. The robe flowed down to mid-calf, decorated with innumerable pleats as befit both his age and status as senior member of the Committee of Information, its color the same light grey as the senator’s fur. Jorl’s own wrinkled skin shared the same color, albeit several shades darker.

  They had been talking since mid-morning and both were growing hungry for lunch. Much had been discussed, but little resolved, and they’d come around again to the heart of the matter.

  Welv held up a hand. “You have a scholar’s imagination, my friend, and I value it at least as much as the unique cultural perspective you have brought to our committee. But what you propose goes beyond the possibilities of creativity.”

  “This isn’t some idle fancy that I found in a dream,” said Jorl. “If the committee will just—”

  The senior senator cut him off. “I have not discussed this matter with the other members of our Committee.” He skittered from from one side of the nefshon construct of his office to the other, pausing to run his fingers along the frames of various medical diplomas and certificates from his time as a physician before joining the senate, as if testing the accuracy of Jorl’s mindscape. Seemingly satisfied, Welv eventually arrived back in front of the Fant and continued as if he hadn’t paused at all. “Doing so would only stir up pointless speculation and debate. We have no precedent and no policy for what you propose.” He paused, glanced up at the junior senator, and scowled. “Do sit down, Jorl. Or would you give me a stiff neck to go with the indigestion your words have already brought?”

  Jorl obliged, making use of his replica of a large wooden chair the Cynomy maintained in his real office for visitors of races as large as Fant. He received an appreciative nod from Welv and lifted his trunk to signal the elderly senator to refrain from further comment.

  “There is precedent,” he said. “Or, more accurately, anti-precedent.”

  Welv waved the objection away. “Irrelevant, the details of the Compact your people formed with the rest of the Alliance explicitly prevents any non-Fant from setting foot on Barsk.”

  “And I’m not suggesting that any do so. Rather that Fant set foot upon other worlds. With only a handful of exceptions, we’ve been absent from the experience of the rest of the Alliance. After eight hundred years we’ve ceased to be real people and instead become folklore—hideous, hairless monsters used to frighten children. ‘Eat your sprouts or a Lox will come for you while you sleep and spirit you away. Behave or a pair of Elephs will run their trunks over your fur every time your eyes close.’ We’ve gone over this before and we both agree that it’s past time to reintegrate Fant into the day-to-day events of the Alliance, but that can’t happen when the other races barely have any awareness of our existence.”

  “I don’t disagree but—”

  Jorl ignored him and plunged on. “A thousand years ago, Fant lived and worked upon dozens of mixed worlds, right alongside everyone else. It was only by action of the senate that they were transported to Barsk. It took two hundred years to build up the political will to banish an entire race, but it was done. That’s your precedent, Welv. I’m not suggesting anything quite so drastic, rather—”

  The aged Prairie Dog again interrupted his colleague. “All you’re suggesting is to create entire neighborhoods upon dozens of worlds where Fant can emigrate, their relocation at the expense of Alliance citizens, taking jobs from non-Fant, their children occupying desks in the same schools as whatever Urs or Nonyx or Lam children attend already, frequent the same restaurants as Brady and Bos, work side by side with Ailuros and Lutr.”

  “You have a clear grasp on the concept of equality.”

  Welv replied with a high-pitched chirp and a disapproving glare from old to young that transcended race. Jorl sighed, inclining his head at the rebuke, his ears dipping forward. Neither spoke for a long moment, and then the Cynomy continued on as if the Lox had never resorted to sarcasm.

  “I’m right there with you, Jorl, at least in theory. And if I could envision the means to transform such a vision into accepted policies and viable procedures, I would personally argue the merits with every member of the committee. But it remains—what did you deny naming it? An idle fancy? Tell me how we can accomplish this without inciting civil unrest, riots, even acts of violence? For that matter, where do you expect to acquire the hundreds of Fant you would have emigrate?”

  Jorl waved his trunk in confusion. “Where else,” he said. “Barsk, obviously.”

  “And have you asked any of your fellow Eleph and Lox if they wish to leave?”

  “I left,” said Jorl. “I joined the Patrol, lived in close quarters amongst many other races.”

  “Yes, and other Fant have before you. But no more than a handful in all the years your people have been on Barsk. And have you forgotten what you endured from your comrades? You have a wife now. You have a daughter. Would you subject them to such abuse?”

  Jorl paused. Somehow, all his thinking and planning to date had been in the abstract. Welv had just swept that all away. Jorl loved Dabni and she loved him. If he asked her to follow him to another world and live among other races she would come. She would endure anything for him, and he for her. Their bond was that strong. But Rina, little Rina. How could he possibly put his daughter in a situation that would bring her pain, subject her to teasing and insults, fear and loathing, all for just being an innocent child?”

  Welv mistook his silence for stubbornness. “Do you truly believe you can gather up enough others who would be willing to expose themselves and their families to the daily intolerance of other races? What is their motivation, Jorl? What possible reason could they have to deliberately embrace that kind of abuse?”

  Jorl flapped his ears, switching from thoughts of his family back to the abstract and theoretical, and his doubts faded. “They have to, if we’re ever to resolve the situation.”

  “Again, I don’t disagree, but it’s one thing to accept the greater good as a thought experiment and something else entirely to ask men and women to throw away everything they know, everything they hold dear, because it will bring about a better galaxy for their children’s children.”

  “Funny,” said Jorl, “that argument didn’t stop the senate eight hundred years ago from exiling every Fant from the rest of the Alliance.”

  The Prairie Dog grew silent, lowering his eyes while absently fingering the pleats of his robe. “And it was shameful, but would you have us perform a similar act as correction? And even if you could find sufficient Fant who wished to emigrate, where would they go? How do you propose we convince even a single Alliance world to welcome them, let alone the many you would seed with your people?”

  “With small steps,” he said, and he willed the addition of a report folder into existence in the illusion of their meeting. “This is a proposal to fund a minor artists traveling consortium. Talented and creative people from several different worlds will travel around to three cities on each of thirty planets and serve as the kernel of a local art festival. Painters, sculptors, musicians, singers. The core group will give lectures and classes while they’re there and then the lot of them will move on to the next city or planet. And once one such group is up and running, another one will be created and sent off to visit a different cluster of worlds, and on and on.”

  Welv quirked an eyebrow. “And how does this proposal serve the Fant?”

  Jorl didn’t even try to hide his grin. “Barsk is one of the worlds that will contribute artists to the program. One member of each traveling con
sortium will be an Eleph or Lox.”

  “You intend to sneak your people onto Alliance worlds under cover of an arts and culture program? Huh. It might work at that, particularly if we pick the initial cities with care, and put the right public relations spin on it so that other worlds begin to feel like they’re missing out—as opposed to being spared the visit of Fant. Yes, that has promise. But … how will you get your own people, artists from Barsk, to leave their world behind? You have your own eight hundred years of history of isolationism. You’ve spun the imposition of your population on a world none of you asked for into a virtue of being left alone. They’re not going to want to leave, let along bring the fruit of their creative gifts to people they’ve never imagined visiting. Even if this proposal of yours gains momentum, you still need a plan for convincing even a small handful of talented Fant to leave their home. Do you have such a thing?”

  “Not yet. But I’ll come up with something. But you’re correct, right now I don’t know how to do it. I only know it has to happen or it’s only a matter of time before we’re on the brink of another crisis where the Alliance wants what only Barsk can provide, where you shatter the Compact because it suits your needs. Actions like these become possible when the people on the other side don’t matter. The other races of the Alliance don’t see Fant as being entitled to rights, or value our feelings, or even see us as people at all.”

  Welv crossed to Jorl’s chair and placed a hand upon the seated Fant’s shoulder. “Jorl, we agree in theory. Do not despair. You’ve served in the senate for barely seven years. It takes time to figure out how to go from theory to practice. Just because I cannot see a way to make this happen does not mean I am abandoning the desire. Let us both reflect on our discussion and meet again in a few days. Perhaps one of us will have gained some new insight that offers fresh possibilities.”

  Jorl bowed his head. The fact that a Cynomy would speak to him with such candor, would place a hand upon his shoulder, even here in a seeming born of his own mind, promised that his dream of reuniting Fant with the rest of the galaxy was not impossible. “You’re right. Thank you, Senator. I will look forward to that conversation. Farewell.”