The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “Ah. I understand you now. Yes. And, it should not surprise you that I have stories about this too.”

  “About pointlessness? About futility? About asking what the value of anything is?”

  “Many such stories,” said the Archetype of Man. “The concepts of nothingness, of oblivion and uselessness are a popular subset of stories.”

  “But if it’s all the same story, then the story about predestination is also the story of free will. Living and death. Joy and love and hatred and fear and indifference. Each of those stories is the same story like every story. Nothing matters because everything is everything.”

  “Yes. Except…”

  Pizlo froze. “Tell me,” he whispered.

  “You have invoked story, and meta-story, and meta-meta-story.”

  “Yes.”

  “What lies beyond that?”

  “Nothing!” Pizlo shouted and crashed the sun, tore the moons away, flooded the sky with clouds, and subjected himself to torrential rains. “Nothing exists beyond because everything is everything else.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Wha—what?”

  “Even if everything is story, the fact that you can conceive such a state demands that you have rejected that there can be anything that isn’t. But, to make such an observation, you first must have the concept of something that isn’t. Which means you’re wrong. Which means that story isn’t like all the rest. But it has to be. But it can’t be. Paradox.”

  “Paradox?”

  “A self-contradictory statement.”

  Pizlo stopped the rain again, brought up winds that swept the water from the surface of the Archetype’s cube. He placed both hands flat on the cloudy glass he’d been standing on, staring into the indistinct shapes that danced and swirled in ever-changing colors deep inside. He raised his palms and the glass flowed, rising up and taking the shape he desired like he might sculpt river clay in the real world. More and more of it came at his command. He stood and drew more of the glass, building a mass of it to his own height. He split its base in two, creating legs. He pulled a pair of limbs from the upper portion giving rise to arms, added a glob of still more swirling glass to the top as a head.

  “What are you doing, Pizlo? This is not my shape. This is not me.”

  He ignored the Archetype’s words, chose not to evaluate if they were plaintive or anxious or fearful. The legs grew feet and toes, the arms hands and fingers. The head sprouted the ears and trunk of a Lox, and the relative shape of the parts made it clear that he was crafting an adolescent, a figure his own age.

  “You’re saying that yes, because everything is everything else, then everything is pointless. Except if that’s so, then saying so requires the existence of something that isn’t, or how could we know? Except then the first thing isn’t possible. Paradox.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t explain what you’re—”

  “I’m giving you a new story,” said Pizlo, stepping back from his creation, pulling the Archetype’s nefshons from the cube beneath him and imbuing them into the gleaming double of himself. “My story.” He drew forth the meme he’d created, his echo now updated to reflect his aborted imram, the events on Fintz, even his conclusions of futility and this new notion of paradox. “This is me,” he said and pressed the meme into the figure of the Archetype as Fant, as he’d reimagined it.

  The Archetype remained silent. Time stopped. It held out arms it had never before possessed, curled its trunk, flapped its new ears, opened eyes to experience sight, and trumpeted the same sound every newborn Fant issued as it entered the world and declared its existence.

  “Oh,” was all it said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry. I … I don’t think I have anything left to teach you, Pizlo. Many more stories, surely, but nothing that will inform the person you are.”

  “Yeah. But … thank you. Truly.”

  “What will you do?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? Because it doesn’t matter, but it’s also the only thing that ever could. Paradox.”

  The ancient machine that faced him as his glassy twin nodded. “You understand the concept perfectly.”

  “And that’s the answer. That’s what I must be. Which is funny, because it’s what I’ve always been.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A contradiction, in every way. Every day of my life.”

  He dissolved the mindscape and let his perception of nefshons fall away.

  * * *

  THE next morning, Pizlo lay upon his back on the mix of gravel and sand that defined the tiny strip of beach where he had found the carving he’d given to the chemist. The forest loomed around him on three sides, its branches and leaves murmuring just below the level of his understanding. Waves lapped at his feet and whispered their approval of his decision. He tapped the medallion nestled against his collarbone.

  “When I set out on my quest, I thought I would have enough adventures to justify an imram. That would have been something, the heroic narrative of an abomination’s journey from island to island. And yeah, I guess you could say I had some adventures, but I got the quest part wrong so I don’t think it counts. Or maybe it does. I’m not sure, just saying my best guess. Jorl will probably know clearly, one way or the other. I’ll upload all of this to his system and maybe he’ll get it published. Not here on Barsk though. No Fant is going to want to read my story. Just the idea that an abomination could create something is too new. Unthinkable. I mean, sure, I’d read it. But that’s just more of me being a contradiction.”

  He checked a pouch on his bandolier and pulled out a packet of koph. He’d have to pay another visit to that chemist soon. Right now he just needed to talk to someone and his options were limited. Tolta loved him, but she’d never understood him, and anything he might say would only confuse her and spur her to further attempts to smother him with maternal comfort. Dabni didn’t much like him, and every conversation he’d ever had with her had involved half of her attention trying to find a way to end it. Rina would be a sympathetic ear, but would comprehend what he was going through even less than Tolta, and though he treasured her unconditional support he needed an adult. Druz, however much she might try, anchored all her interactions with him to their first meeting when she’d named him “Little Prince.” And besides, she was off on the ship somewhere, and he had promised Jorl he wouldn’t Speak to the living, excepting him.

  Which is why he’d taken the koph. While he and Jorl had been spending less time together over the last many seasons—and Pizlo acknowledged it was as much due to his desire to grow beyond a definition of being student to a mentor as it was Jorl being ever more busy—the historian was still his best friend. Likely much as he had been Arlo’s best friend. And though busy, he’d make time, interrupt what he was doing, if Pizlo reached out to him via nefshons. Jorl would see his pain and help talk him through the worst of the confusion and emptiness that gnawed at him.

  The glowing gold appearance of his own nefshon sheathe let him know the drug had worked and he filtered it out at once. But before he could close his eyes and begin summoning enough of Jorl’s particles to create a strand leading back to him, something in the real world caught his eye. Something completely impossible. Here and there, widely spaced and visible only because he lay outside the forest gazing upward, he saw nine gleaming strands falling from the clouds above like shafts of purest sunlight racing down into the forest. But they weren’t beams of sunlight; he hadn’t been able to see them before he took the koph. Which meant they were nefshons. And because they weren’t simply random particles but rather coherent strands, meant they were lines tethering a living person on either end, much like he’d intended to create to Speak with Jorl. Or like the strands he’d seen Dabni create that day in the park. One end of each of these nine nefshon strands connected to a living person somewhere in Keslo’s Civilized Wood, and maybe those Fant were unaware of the event. But who was on the other end, a
nd where were they?

  There were of course endless nefshons all around him, but those had been filtered out when he’d banished his own swirling cocoon. These strands remained because they were contrived, the imposition of a will on the raw stuff of the particles. As questions flitted through his mind, first one and then a second of the nine strands lost coherence, dissolving as their individual nefshons began drifting apart, much like when Pizlo finished a summoning of the Archetype of Man and let his constructs fall away. Which meant that two of the nine people doing this thing—whatever it was, and from whichever end—had stopped. He couldn’t know how long it had been happening; before his dose of koph allowed him to see the strands had they been hanging here in the sky? A third flickered and was gone.

  He focused his attention on the nearest of the remaining strands, impossibly far above him but reachable because they presented themselves as coherent and thus more readily summonable. In that instant, his own nefshon construct hung in the air and gripped the glowing line with hands and trunk midway between the clouds and the top of the forest. It felt a lot like the mindscape he’d create to Speak with the Archetype or Jorl, but with fewer pieces and no walls. Realizing that, his volition was everything and he sent himself hurtling downward. The journey was instantaneous. One moment he was hanging in the sky and in the next he had followed the strand into Keslo’s canopy, passing through leaves and limbs and vines until he came to the uppermost level of the Civilized Wood. He’d plunged further, through buildings and boardways and three different people—none of whom noticed his nefshon construct sliding dizzily down the strand—until he slipped into a house, into a bedroom, onto the head of a slumbering old Eleph. He recognized her as one of Rina’s gymnasium teachers.

  “This is so weird,” he said, but his construct had no physicality and produced no sound. He lingered a moment, studying the face of the woman, so calm in sleep with none of the passion she projected when teaching rhetoric. A pattern of thought flowed down the strand from above, passed through him, and slid into the sleeping woman. Pizlo gasped. Knowledge flowed into his mind. His own thoughts raced after it, but like water slipping through cracks in the mud and rock of the Shadow Dwell the new ideas fled into the under thoughts that Jorl had described as his unconscious, a place that was his mind but not any part he could deliberately reach. It was like when he had stood upon the space station and Telko had filled him with knowledge, more than he could comprehend in the moment. Information had come down this nefshon strand, a story that he couldn’t quite hold on to; something about a time for this woman—he now knew her name, Shelby—and an awareness her death was near and where she needed to be and soon. Pizlo knew the story, but this felt less like a tale the Archetype might have shared and more like something he had lived. Only he hadn’t. Someone had poured actual experience and not simply narrative into him and into the sleeping Eleph rhetoric teacher.

  He hadn’t known such a thing was possible! This wasn’t like his echo, not simply content but directive! He reeled, at the implications of encoding instructions into nefshon patterns and sharing them directly. Someone, somewhere on the other end of this strand had done that. He had to know who and how and where. The need generated the action and he willed himself back up the strand, seeking its other end.

  That journey, though it also took no time, led to something even stranger. He retraced the path back, intangibly racing through all obstacles. He reached the open sky and continued to climb. His awareness rose to the clouds and through them, higher and higher until he soared above them and still he climbed. Had he been able, had traveling along the strand required time and not just distance, Pizlo knew his will would have failed. But there was no time to contemplate that this was real and not merely a construct in some mental space. With impossible speed he left atmosphere behind and crossed into airless space, up the golden strand of nefshons that he knew had been formed from the Eleph sleeping far below.

  And still he rose, higher and higher in that single instant, through darkness and cold, until a dim circle appeared far above. It grew larger, and resolved itself into one of Barsk’s seven moons. He was hurtling up to Ulmazh. Closer and closer, until up became down and he could see the strand he followed originated in a crater. That made no sense. There had to be a Speaker on the other end of these nefshons, but what would a Fant be doing on the moon? How would they have gotten there? How had they managed to stay alive? And most importantly, why connect a trail of nefshons to a rhetorician on Keslo far below?

  All of it happened in the same instant. The moment when he’d willed himself back up the strand from inside that bedroom was the same moment he’d been in the clouds. It proved to be the same moment that he struck the crater and passed on through layers of rock and metal and into atmosphere again. The strange thread stretched through walls and rooms that were like those found in a Civilized Wood but different, too, fashioned in part with ceramic instead of wood. Pizlo snatched glimpses of other Fant, all of them oddly dressed as he passed through levels deeper and deeper as if he were bound for the center of the moon itself. But the thread stopped long before that point, stopped in a simple room with a desk and a couch and cupboards and art on the walls and a rug on the floor. And a Fant. Like Rina’s teacher this was another Eleph woman. But this one lay on the room’s couch, eyes closed, face lax, while her nefshon construct stood alongside her real body, holding the other end of the rhetorician’s golden strand in one hand and gazing upward as if all the way to her bedroom.

  Pizlo barreled into her, one nefshon construct colliding with another, both surprised beyond their experience. His hand still touched the strand as he pulled himself upright and stared at a Fant here in the moon. Time resumed. She stared back, eyes widening, and she screamed.

  “Abomination!”

  Before Pizlo could think or react or do anything, the Speaker was unraveling the nefshon strand that had brought him there. In that instant, he was thrown back, out, down, and found himself breathless and returned to his body in the little cove on the edge of Keslo.

  NINETEEN

  A CHILD’S VIEW OF SPACE

  “WHAT did you do in the Patrol, Papa?”

  Rina walked hand in hand with Jorl as they made their way from one of Keslo’s public performance spaces where they had just enjoyed a retelling of the story of Pholo performed by a traveling troupe of Eleph shadow puppeteers. Jorl regarded his daughter, trying to fathom what had prompted the question.

  “What makes you ask, little twig?”

  “Cuz didn’t you fly? When you were in the Patrol? Like Pholo did.”

  “Pholo flew because … well, no one really knows how Pholo flew. But I flew in a ship.”

  “Right, I know. But what did you do? Why were you flying?”

  “Oh, got it. Well, we did a lot of things in the Patrol. Sometimes we helped out with emergencies at one or another of the outer colonies where things were spread a little too thin. Once our navigator caught a glimpse of a smuggler hiding quiet and hoping to slip away just as we came into a system, and that got … messy. But mostly we were following up on cartographic data from earlier unmanned craft.”

  Rina whuffed a put upon bleat from her trunk and gave her father that look, the one she saved for when he forgot that smart as she was she was still just a kid and couldn’t always follow everything he said, particularly if she found it boring. He acknowledged his error with a little squeeze of her hand and tried again.

  “Most of the time we were looking for new planets. The Alliance is always expanding, and to do that it needs to find new worlds where people can set up colonies. For that to happen, the Patrol has to constantly push portals further and further out there. The galaxy’s very big, and without the portals it would take far too long time to go from one place to another.”

  Their walking had taken them to the door of Dabni’s bookshop and they stepped within. Rina’s mother was helping a customer but she paused long enough to wave her trunk at the pair of them. Rina lifted hers in
response and then led her father deeper into the store to a small table surrounded by several chairs. Kokab waited patiently, propped up on one of the seats, a miniature teacup set in front of it. Rina sat at the table and waved Jorl to sit at the sole adult-sized seat. As he got comfortable, she went through the motions of filling a dainty cup full of fantastical tea, a blend composed of made-up words she’d overheard from different visitors to the shop. Today they were drinking ontologically thespianation with just a hint of cribble. She waited for him to delicately lift the cup with one hand and only then picked up the conversation again. “But why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why push portals?”

  Jorl frowned for a silent moment and then set his cup down as he pulled a pair of books off a nearby shelf. “These are two books in a set, volumes one and two, do you see?”

  “Yes, but—”

  He lifted his trunk interrupting her. “You could read them from the beginning of the first page in volume one all the way to the last page in volume two. Right?”

  She nodded, clearly still not seeing but understanding that she had to wait for him to finish.

  “That’s a long distance, from beginning to end. But when I put them back on the shelf, I put volume one to the left of volume two. Now the actual distance from the beginning to the end is shorter, do you see? It’s just the thickness of the front and back covers and not all the pages in between. Portals do that for the space between stars.”

  “How?”

  Jorl smiled. “That I don’t know, little twig. That’s physics, and I studied history. I don’t know how it all works, but I can tell you that portals always come in pairs. A lot of what we did when I was in the Patrol was to push one piece of a portal further and further through space away from its matching piece. Even though our ship went very fast, the distance between stars is vast. It takes a long time to push a portal from one star system to another, much longer than anyone wants to do it.”