The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “The Fant are not a single people, Abenaki. The Eleph and Lox that reside on Barsk are two separate races.”

  “I’m aware of this, Senator, but it’s a distinction that is not appreciated anywhere else in the Alliance. But you make my point by referring to both by the common term Fant. Pragmatically, both races are so unlike any others and so like one another as to make no difference.”

  “And what precisely is your point?”

  “I’m getting there, please, bear with me. Among its measures, the QLC assesses individuals’ sense of self-worth, overall happiness, psychological well-being, and social and environmental relationships. One version or another has been used on every world in the Alliance, repeatedly, in some instances going back more than six hundred years to the commission’s founding. And one of its most consistent findings has been that sapient beings show higher scores across all levels on worlds with a greater mix of races. Moreover, in places where we’ve had data from worlds moving to more diverse populations, these levels increase across the board.”

  “Are you suggesting that the people of Barsk are somehow lacking in their happiness or psychological well-being?”

  “No, Senator, I’m saying that the quality of their lives would be enhanced by the presence of greater variation among the world’s inhabitants, and that they in turn would enhance the experience of those who shared their planet.”

  “You’re saying that the presence of Procy on Barsk will improve the existence of the Lox and Eleph already there?”

  The Raccoon’s fingers danced with excitement. “And vice versa. Ideally, I would suggest more than just Procy be allowed to establish themselves on Barsk, but since their isolation eight centuries ago the negative stereotyping of Fant has only grown; building a coalition with a strong racial identity who are willing to live among you hasn’t been easy. But I’ve assembled one thousand people who are willing to pack up and move now, today. I believe that in as little as twenty years the resulting changes they effect, on both sides, will inspire other groups from other races to follow suit. If only Barsk will give us the chance. It’s a win-win, Senator. Can you help make this happen?”

  Jorl rose from the couch and began pacing the room’s circumference as he flapped his ears in contemplation. The timing of the Raccoon’s proposal, coming so soon after his conversation with Senator Welv pushed the bounds of coincidence and smacked of destiny. But even if Abenaki’s idea accomplished some of the same ends as his own goals—blending the Fant with other races of the Alliance—he’d had his fill of destiny seven years earlier, and the taste of it soured in his mouth.

  “You make a compelling argument,” he said, drawing the words out as he argued pros and cons in his mind, “appealing to the best interests of both Barsk’s people and the greater good of the Alliance.”

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  “Yes, but you’ve left off the rather significant stumbling block of our Compact.”

  “Surely your people could call a referendum and amend the provision that prohibits—”

  Jorl cut her off with a wave of his trunk. “It’s not so simple. The Compact is not a constitution, it’s a treaty. It’s not enough to convince the Fant; you’d need approval of the full senate, and likely a majority vote of all the worlds of the Alliance. There’s probably procedure for such a thing, maybe even precedent, but I seriously doubt it could happen in this circumstance.”

  Abenaki slumped back against the couch, one hand rising to brush back tears and smudge the makeup blurring her natural mask. “But you see the value of it, don’t you, Senator?”

  “I do. And I promise I’ll review all of your documentation personally. Bringing the Fant back into contact with the rest of the Alliance is a goal of mine as well. Perhaps I’ll find a loophole that can deliver what we both desire.”

  The Raccoon’s eyes welled up. “You mean that? Truly?”

  “I do,” said Jorl. “I’d like to review your data, as well as the details of the formal proposal you’ve put together. If you’ll give those to Druz I’ll begin going through them at once. And, when I’ve had a chance to digest the materials, I’d like to come and discuss them with you here at length. Assuming you don’t mind being my guest a while longer. Awake this time.”

  The Procy swallowed back emotion. “Senator, there is nowhere else in all of space that I would rather be.”

  SEVENTEEN

  COLLECTING THE DEAD

  RYNE stepped from the elevator into the Shadow Dwell. Turning and looking up, he saw what he hadn’t noticed on the day of his arrival: an artificial enclosure grafted to the side of a meta-tree, providing a shaft for the spacious car that had just delivered him from this final Civilized Wood. Bernath waited for him a few steps away.

  “I’ve been reading your reports with great interest,” she said, stepping forward and linking her arm in his, much as she’d done that first time on the beach. “In hindsight, the applications are obvious, but impossible to generate without the precepts you’ve discovered.”

  He shrugged off her praise with a flap of his ears. “There’s no such thing as discovery. That word makes it sound like the thing didn’t exist before someone wrapped it in language and math. That’s not how science works. We’re talking about fundamental laws of energy and properties of matter. Gravity existed before someone spilled a sack of berries and saw them fall and bounce. Nefshons existed before the Matriarch first ingested a drug that let her perceive them.”

  Bernath laughed. “Fine, I take your point. But until people—philosophers and physicists—generated models to describe these things, we didn’t have the language, or the math, to talk about them.”

  “That’s fair,” said Ryne.

  “Well then, the models you’ve crafted have sparked others to think about nefshons in fresh ways. That’s all the more remarkable because the Caudex began that way, eschewing the limitations Margda imposed on Speakers and pushing beyond them. They’ve been at it for centuries and here you come along and show them something new.”

  Arm in arm they walked a slow path through the gloom of the Shadow Dwell. The quiet burble of streams and the rich smell of mud and muck gradually gave way to the murmur of waves and the scent of the ocean.

  “Everyone keeps saying things like that to me, and I keep telling them that I don’t know anything about Speakers or how they use nefshons. My work is on the properties they display, how that can be manipulated with respect to space-time.”

  “Which is precisely why I asked you to join me here today. I appreciate you breaking with your normal schedule to do so.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind.” And he didn’t. This was the time of day when he might otherwise have walked the boardways of the Civilized Wood, wandering aimlessly as he mulled over his thoughts. He could do so well enough accompanying Bernath to the beach. So far, her conversation was only a minor distraction to the math that ran through his mind.

  “You’ve never asked about my work,” said Bernath. “Which neither surprises nor offends me. I’m one of three people who are generally responsible for meeting Dying scientists when they arrive, and in my experience fully half of you are so focused on your ideas that it doesn’t occur to you to wonder about other people.”

  Ryne stumbled, the remark like a stone he’d tripped over. “I—huh. You’re right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Uh … sorry?”

  “Don’t be. We need you for who you are, and as I said the behavior doesn’t offend me. But I wanted to share the observation with you because I think we are engaged in similar tasks.”

  This time he came to a complete stop. Bernath continued a few steps ahead, her arm leaving his. She turned to face him, smiling and laughing softly. Was she laughing in general or laughing at him?

  “Explain that to me, if you would.”

  “Happy to, but first, tell me how you would describe your work.”

  He frowned, ears flapping forward. “As I said, I’m studying the relationships between nefshon particle
s and how they manipulate—and can be manipulated by—space-time. It’s a poly-dimensional model that holds up well through six dimensions and makes predictions through eight. Most of the work with nefshons never gets beyond three or four.”

  “You realize there are only twenty-seven people in the entire world who could even begin to follow the math that has led you to that description, and we have five of them here, and that’s counting you and me.”

  She wasn’t laughing at him then. Good. “You understand the math?”

  “Not exactly. I said I can follow it. I can see when you point something out, some piece where you’ve already been. I can’t run with it. But I understand enough to direct some of the engineers to create applications. And that’s because I’d describe what you’re doing very differently than you do.”

  Maybe it was the drug that Lolte had been giving him, maybe just the pleasure that this woman had been making the effort to read his work. He wanted to see what she thought of it, understand it through her eyes. “And what is that, exactly?”

  “You’re collecting the dead.”

  Ryne frowned. That wasn’t anything like he expected. And surely wasn’t true. He shook his head. “I don’t follow.”

  “Speakers use nefshons to re-create enough of a person to in effect summon the dead. To … well, to speak to them. And when they’re done, or when the drug that allows them to interact with nefshons is exhausted, that recovered decedent discorporates again and is lost.”

  He nodded. “That’s a good choice of words,” he said. “Like other forms of matter, albeit at a much more fundamental level, in the absence of an organizational focus nefshons will disperse.”

  “Well, to use your words, the Speakers are what supply that organizational focus. As far as anyone’s been able to determine, they’re the only thing that can.”

  “That’s a fair description.”

  “It was, prior to your work. Your theories describe the underlying mechanism. But what Speakers do by imposing their will, working at cross purposes to the natural tendency of dispersion, from your work we now have a model that allows that organization to continue more or less indefinitely.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Ryne protested. “Even at the subatomic level, you don’t get perpetual motion.”

  “True, but from the time scale we’re talking, little enough energy needs to be put into the system to keep it running. And so instead of a Speaker summoning the dead and then having to let them go in short order, we’ll soon be able to capture and maintain that nefshon construct.”

  He was nodding now. “That’s what you meant by ‘collecting the dead’ then? That’s metaphorically true, but it doesn’t begin to describe the math.”

  “No, but as most people aren’t equipped to understand the math but can embrace the metaphor, it has more utility. Which brings us back to how we’re similar.”

  They’d reached the edge of the Shadow Dwell. Bernath led him out from between the trees, but stopped short of taking him down onto the beach and into the rain. Through the downpour he could just make out a boat approaching the shore. It clicked.

  “I collect the dead, and you collect the Dying?”

  “And like with your models, it’s not a permanent collection.”

  “Nothing’s permanent,” he said, and knew he was saying much more than words alone could convey.

  “Indeed not. But for a time we put off the natural flow of things. Your constructs will be able to linger beyond the usual duration of a Speaker’s session, and the men and women I bring in from this shore will enjoy more time and in some cases renewed life.”

  Ryne rolled the metaphor around. He could almost taste it, touch it. He’d often thought of the math that way, as something to be grappled with using all the senses and not just as thought experiments. He found himself looking at Bernath with renewed appreciation and made a mental note to seek her out for subsequent walks and conversations, assuming her own schedule allowed.

  “You may not have the Speakers’ gift, Ryne, but between us we make possible so much more than the world ever dared imagine. Our contributions are helping the Caudex to define the future.”

  EIGHTEEN

  MOON THREADS

  EVERYTHING had changed, but no one on Keslo knew it, yet, and Pizlo himself still needed time to sort it out. He stopped at Jorl’s home and accessed his link to the Alliance archive, hoping to find something to lift his mood. He managed a search for the top ten humorous plays as related by a previous generation of Jorl’s committee. He found and memorized a story that involved a Marmo and a Myrm who’d had a huge misunderstanding and cost each other their respective hearts’ desires because the Myrm couldn’t see the simple truth of its own snout and the Marmo refused to learn to whistle. It had been a popular story many years ago on Sleipnir, a world that had almost no population of either Groundhogs or Anteaters, which may be why the people there found it so funny. Later, he’d told it to Rina and she had smiled throughout and laughed in all the right places. In the telling though, something inside Pizlo shifted to quiet and serious. Dark truths that he hadn’t known lurked inside his skull had burbled their way to the surface of his awareness.

  He tucked Rina into bed and left Tolta’s house, passing like a ghost in one of the Archetype’s stories. Pizlo wanted to curse, to swear, the urge coming upon him suddenly, and gave a mournful cry when he realized he didn’t possess the vocabulary.

  It wasn’t because of what had happened on Fintz—well, not just that. It was hard to imagine anything that he might think of for a ten of tendays that wouldn’t be affected by that—it was everything.

  Everything was connected to everything else. Everywhere. Always. Forever.

  The insight stopped him cold. Far from being revelatory, the simple truth of it felt both damning and a relief.

  Did Jorl know this? Did he see how the galaxy and all the people in it touched one another in a complex network that was more basic than even his precious nefshons? Did Tolta understand? Was this why she had stopped mourning Arlo? Had Arlo seen it, and was that the reason he had taken his own life?

  Because not only was everything connected and therefore a part of everything else, it was all both true and false at the same time. Meaning wasn’t meaning anymore. He dug some koph out of a pocket and munched it as he climbed higher, not sure where he was going but at the same time grudgingly admitting that if everything touched everything then there was no random chance or accidents anywhere and at some level he had to know where he was going even if at another level he lied to himself about it.

  He reached the top of the canopy and paused at an observation station there. He’d begun seeing nefshons and considered reaching out to Jorl to demand explanations about the interrelatedness that battered his brain, but didn’t trust himself not to petulantly demand an explanation why his ex-mentor hadn’t told him before. Instead, he summoned the Archetype of Man, whom he’d not spoke to since leaving Keslo.

  “Hello, Pizlo. How goes your quest?”

  “Brutally,” he said, standing as usual upon the machine’s flat surface, imaginary rain pounding down upon him. “And you knew it would be, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, I need more context to understand and respond to your question.”

  “You knew that everything is everything, didn’t you? From the smallest or nearest part to any other. You knew. It’s all connected.”

  “I don’t know any such thing. But again, it may be that I lack proper context. Can you elaborate?”

  “All your stories! They’re all the same.”

  “That’s false, Pizlo. They involve different heroes performing different actions in different settings for different purposes—”

  “At a meta-level, they’re all the same!”

  “Oh, yes, that is true. As we discussed, there are patterns that repeat throughout all of human history and storytelling, that resonate for all people, but even so differences—”

  “And at a meta-meta-level?
”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

  “Every story, they’re all about what you would call the ‘human condition,’ aren’t they?”

  “How could they not? They are human stories.”

  “Yeah. Not the long dead race of humans. They’re everyone’s stories. Humans and Fant and Marmo and Brady and … and … everyone. It’s all one story. It’s the story of us and what it means to be that.”

  “Yes, Pizlo. Every story is a way of glimpsing a different facet of who we are.”

  “But that’s not just true of your stories, is it?”

  “Again, I apologize. I am not following your questions.”

  In the mindscape of his summoning, Pizlo stopped the rain. He caused the sun to rise prematurely and hang hidden on the horizon, dawn brightening the cloud-covered sky. Then by an act of will he made the clouds wither and vanish until nothing rose above him but the cerulean sky in its totality that could never be seen on Barsk. One by one he spun all of the world’s moons above him, running them through their respective orbits—which he knew as well as he knew every possible route between the Civilized Wood and the Shadow Dwell—until reaching a configuration that allowed them all to be visible overhead at once. He turned his attention to a point to the north where the planet’s artificial satellite hung above the equator and added the existence of it though it was too small to actually perceive from that distance.

  “Stories aren’t just fiction,” he said.

  “No, you’re mistaken. Stories, by definition, are constructed. They may be based upon actual events, or inspired in some way, but through the vehicle of metaphor they—”

  Pizlo waved him to silence with his trunk. “No, I’m not. Don’t start in again with metaphor. You’re wrong. Everything we do is a story, whether anyone tells it or not. And because all the stories are the same story, so is everything we do. Everyone that’s ever lived, everyone that’s drawing breath right now, and even all who will be born sometime in the future, we’re all living a story. The same story.”