The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “That’s hardly necessary, I’m right here. My loyalty has never swayed. Please. You have all my reports. In all the time I’ve been here, Jorl’s done nothing to warrant suspicion. Whatever reason the Matriarch had for marking him, he’s never threatened the Caudex’s purpose.”

  Klarce’s response lowered the temperature in the imagined office. “That’s not for a field agent to say. You have only a tiny piece of the entire picture. Jorl ben Tral may not be a threat, but he is far from harmless. That said, the council will likely reach an agreement with him and be content, for now. But we would be foolish not to keep him under surveillance. And, as you’ve demonstrated a lack of objectivity, that task is beyond you and will be assigned to another.”

  She swallowed, holding her body still. “I understand.”

  “You are not completely out of favor, Dabni, but the council is very disappointed with you. Consider it a sign of our regard for your previous work that I have reached out to warn you that your husband is aware of your double life. Goodbye.”

  Like the closing of a book, the conversation ended and Dabni was back in the warmth of her bed. She let out a great breath and shuddered, as her body reacted to the information. Had they also told Rina? And if so, how much had they told her about the Caudex? The child was bright but she couldn’t possibly fathom what it all meant. And somehow Jorl had learned of the final island, which meant if he hadn’t already known to find the Caudex there, he knew it now. But again, what else had they told him? About Ulmazh? About their long-range plans for saving the Fant? Even now his keen mind would be reviewing the time since they met, putting together any pieces that had seemed slightly out of place over the years. And again, how much had Klarce told him? That she had been assigned to watch him was certain, but what about the order to end his life?

  A sound at the foot of her bed pulled her attention from her thoughts. Pizlo stood there, red-rimmed eyes intent on her.

  “Who were you talking to?” he asked.

  “What? I—no one, of course, there’s no one else here.”

  The boy frowned and she felt a tug on her awareness much as when Klarce had summoned her. A duplicate bedroom formed in her mind, one in which Pizlo now sat at the end of the bed.

  “I saw you, in a park a while back. I saw you plucking people’s threads and doing something that Jorl never said Speakers could do. That got me wondering what other things you might be able to do. So now when I know I’m going to see you I take some koph first. In case you’re doing something special, I don’t want to miss it. And just now, you were talking to someone. Jorl taught me the trick of it, because he worries about me and wants to be able to check in. I don’t know if he does it with anyone else much though, because it’s against the edict. But that’s what you were doing, right? What I’m doing now. So it’s not just Jorl breaking that rule, and that’s another way you’re not like other Speakers. And I bet that’s probably so about whoever you were talking to.”

  Even after so many years, talking with Pizlo made her feel like someone had shoved her trunk in a vice. For Tolta’s sake she’d tried to see him as just another child. But it was one thing to steel herself for an encounter with him and quite another to be taken by surprise. Still, here he was asking questions that she’d never anticipated from him. She took a calming breath and her training reminded her that she needed to reframe the situation and establish her control.

  “It’s rude to spy on people and listen in on their conversations.”

  “I wasn’t listening in,” he said. “I might have, if I’d gotten here sooner. But by the time it occurred to me to try and grab some of your threads like I’d seen you do, you were done.”

  “Fine, then it’s rude to grab people’s nefshons.”

  “Is it more or less rude, if the nefshons being grabbed are those of someone you know—like my grabbing yours—or strangers like the people in that park?”

  “There are some things that simply aren’t any of your business, Pizlo. Just because you share everything you know does not mean everyone else does or must. Adults often have secrets.”

  “Like that you’re a Speaker? Does Jorl know?”

  “He … no, no he does not. There’s no reason he should know. I don’t use the ability to Speak to the dead.”

  “But you do use it, just in other ways. Like at the park. Will you tell me what you did?”

  Dabni glared at him and thought—not for the first time—that maybe the Caudex would be well served having an agent keeping an eye on the island’s wild child abomination. Perhaps she could convince Klarce to allow her to remain by offering to take on a task no one else would bear. “Have you grown up to be an extortionist, Pizlo? Are you demanding I show you this thing or you’ll tattle to my husband?”

  Pizlo’s ears fanned out in surprise. She’d guessed wrong.

  “I’m just trying to understand what I saw. It looked like you were taking nefshons from people and building something. Will you show me how you did that?”

  She shook her head. “Honestly, I cannot.”

  “But you had it in your hands. I saw it grow.”

  “You misunderstood. I don’t know how to build such things. I was given the thing you saw me holding. I only know how to add to it, I can’t create such a thing from scratch.”

  “Oh.” Pizlo regarded her silently and moved closer up her bed. “If you show it to me maybe I can help you figure it out.”

  Dabni almost dismissed the absurdity of Pizlo’s offer out of hand. She was Caudex trained. What could a wildling teach her? And yet … until he’d asked the question, she’d never considered the implications behind the index, had never thought or realized that though she could modify the structure, she wouldn’t know where to begin if she wanted to craft such a thing herself. Perhaps his unique perspective could show her something new, which in turn she might use to stay in favor with Klarce and the council. She doubted the Caudex would have any compunction of moving her to another island and not letting Rina to come with. Or, even if they allowed her to come, Dabni hardly liked the notion of taking the girl away from ready access to her father. For her child’s sake, if she could learn something valuable from Pizlo she had to try.

  “We call it the index,” she said, bringing her hands together and summoning the complex structure into being whole from memory. Its shining shape hovered above her open palms.”

  “We who?” asked Pizlo.

  “Myself and another Speaker who gave it to me.”

  “Oh. That’s not the same Speaker as the one you haven’t told?”

  “Told? Told who? Told what? What are you talking about?”

  He shrugged, all of his attention still on the index. “There’s a Speaker who gave you this, and there’s at least one other who gave you something else. You were supposed to give that other thing to Jorl, but you never did.”

  “I … how do you know anything about that? Who told you about Klarce?”

  Pizlo sighed, sounding much like her daughter did when she’d exasperated Rina by treating her like a child at a moment where she felt herself the epitome of adulthood. “Nobody tells me, not like you mean. Sometimes I just know things. But I don’t have all the details. Like, I didn’t know her name until you just said it or what the other thing was—”

  “Fine. That’s as it should be. It’s private and none of your business.”

  “Well, can I at least see it? You’re letting me see this one.”

  “What? No, absolutely not! Tolta would never forgive me!”

  “What does Tolta have to do with it? She’s not a Speaker, not like you and me and Jorl.”

  “Because it’s a bad thing, Pizlo. It’s a meme designed to hurt people.”

  He frowned. “Oh. Is that why you didn’t give it to Jorl?”

  “I … well, yes.”

  “But this Klarce, she wanted you to? To hurt him?”

  She wanted to cry. The innocence of the boy’s perspective unnerved her, cut through the rationalizations s
he’d told herself, the lies. With a sob, she confessed, amazing herself as she did. “They didn’t just want him hurt, Pizlo. They wanted me to kill him. They didn’t give me a choice. They rescinded the order or he’d be dead by now. Do you understand? They asked me to murder my husband, the father of my child.”

  “But … you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But I might have.”

  “No. Not for a long time. You just haven’t realized that. Not yet.” And just that quickly, he let it go. No judgment, no guilt. He’d gone back to studying the index in her hands. “How do you make it work?”

  Dabni shook her head, sorting her thoughts, shunting aside the strange sense of absolution and focusing on the need to pluck something of success out her failure. “Look more closely and tell me what you see.”

  He settled next to her on the bed and pressed his face as near to the index as he could without actually touching it. “It’s big and small at the same time. It’s like … it’s like a map!” His ears lifted up and he grinned. “Like a map of the archipelagos, but instead of islands and their locations it’s made up of people.”

  “You’re right. Mmm. I never looked at it that way. I’ve always thought of it more like a complicated jumble of connections.”

  He shook his head and moved around the bed, trying to look at the index from the side. “That can’t be right,” he said. “If it were then it couldn’t have a shape. There’d be no starting point to hook the first things together.” He reached for it.

  “Don’t touch it!”

  But her warning came too late and though the construct of the boy’s hand didn’t actually touch the index, he made contact with it. He gasped as he drew his hand back, holding a copy he’d somehow made. That was further than she’d been prepared to allow, but no matter. She would snatch it back as the onrush of information dropped him and then disrupt his memory of it before he could recover.

  “Wow! That’s incredible.” Pizlo tossed his copy of the index back and forth from hand to trunk to other hand like a ball.

  Dabni gaped. “How are you doing that?”

  “I kinda have to. It tickles. No, itches. Well, no that’s not exactly right either. It’s prickly. All those people trying to talk to me at once. They’re settling down now, a little.” He continued to juggle it.

  “You’re not feeling overwhelmed?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I mean, a little, maybe. It’s a lot like when I see one of the moons through the clouds and it pours a lot of knowledge and facts into me. It’s like drinking the rain; you don’t have to swallow all the time, you can just let it flow into your open mouth and down your throat. You don’t need to taste it all.”

  “That’s … okay. I have to think about that. No one has ever described it that way.” She let the index fade from her grasp. And Pizlo did the same with his. A moment later he manifested it again in his other hand.

  “How did you take a copy from me? You shouldn’t take things that aren’t yours.”

  “I didn’t mean to, and like you said, it’s a copy, so you still have yours. As soon as I touched one thread in it the whole thing came rushing into me. First the structure and then all the people.”

  “You saw the underlying structure?”

  He grinned, still not overwhelmed as she had been that first time, but looking a little drunk. “Oh yeah.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about it? How it was made?”

  He nodded. “Oh sure. Kind of like rain, too. Well, like a drop.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A raindrop. You know, it’s not just water, right? The water forms around a particle of dust. This is like that. Only instead of dust, they used an idea.”

  “A particle of an idea?”

  “Uh huh. Because nefshons are particles, too, just smaller. That’s what’s at the heart of your index. Somebody’s nefshon of an idea.”

  “Can you tell what that idea is?”

  “You don’t know? The whole thing resonates with it. It’s what’s holding all the pieces together.”

  “Humor me. What’s the idea?”

  “Everyone. Every bit you add tells every other bit that together they’re everyone.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well sure. The best ideas are big but simple. Because everyone is in it, it always wants to include everyone. I think that’s why it jumped into me. Your copy doesn’t know me. Why is that?”

  Dabni sighed and, not for the first time, wondered what the child of Tolta and Arlo might have accomplished if he had been conceived after they’d properly bonded. “You already know the answer to that, Pizlo.”

  His face dropped and he let the index fade from him again. “Oh. Yeah.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  SPEAKING BEYOND SILENCE

  PIZLO left the house in search of breakfast. He could have raided his mother’s larder, but he wanted to get some distance from Dabni and think about what she’d shown him, what she’d said, and what she hadn’t said. Adults were odd that way, breaking the world into the parts they talked about and the parts they kept secret, as if anything could really be hidden away for long. He burrowed into the green framework of the Civilized Wood and began to climb.

  He liked to think that Arlo hadn’t been that way, that he inherited his father’s philosophy that all the world existed to be discovered. It was really the only way they were alike, although they took that view in different directions. Far from finding comfort in the physical world or the study of sciences that Tolta insisted were a legacy of his father, the knowledge that everything around him consisted of ever smaller pieces that he couldn’t see or touch nagged at Pizlo. Reality, as he understood the physicality of it, had weight, took up space, possessed color. But what color was a chemical bond? How many molecules could he hold in his cupped hands? What was the weight of all the chromosomes in one of the bugs in his collection? Science, as Arlo had understood it, had obeyed very strict rules. There were constants that brooked no variation and which in turn allowed practitioners to build grand theories and design elaborate experiments, all to lock down still more rules. Like they thought the only way to understand a thing was to define it in relation to every other tangible thing that they already understood.

  But that only applied to stuff. Not everything was stuff. Ideas weren’t tangible. You couldn’t assess their weight or volume. Ideas were never meant to be grasped in one’s trunk. They lacked physicality, had no need of it, wouldn’t know what to do with it in the first place. To imagine a thing was to give life to it, without the need for genetics or physics or any of those things that other boys and girls his age studied in the gymnasium. He’d hidden outside the windows of classrooms enough to be sure of it. Nor had any of the moons contradicted this understanding.

  Maybe that’s why Dabni was surprised that he could hold the index he accidentally copied. He’d embraced a different metaphor than she had. Years before, when he had stood upon the space station high above the grip of Barsk’s atmosphere, Telko, the greatest of the planet’s moons, had poured its wisdom into him. Pizlo knew that “wisdom” was an abstract thing and the “pouring” was a metaphor. It didn’t have to make any sense, even if Telko had filled him beyond measure and kept on pouring insight and possibilities into him. Even if really, it had all been him anyway. You couldn’t fill up because knowledge didn’t have volume.

  He’d been just a kid back then, not even seven years old.

  Tell that to most people and they’d think it the most incredible thing they’d heard in their lives, doubly so because it had happened to an abomination. But barely a day later, Jorl had created a new kind of abomination than had ever been before and a man had ceased to exist. That Yak—a once prominent senator named Bish—lived still. Pizlo was fairly certain of it. Jorl had somehow made it so that every memory of him, every thought, every memory association, vanished. Only Jorl recalled him, because he’d made the thing
happen and somehow existed outside the awfulness he’d wrought.

  Pizlo had met the senator that day but couldn’t recall it. But he remembered what Telko had told him, the particulars of that encounter before it happened and all the horror of what was coming. Only the two of them, he and Jorl, knew there had ever been such a senator—leader of the Committee of Information and the architect of the plot that could have killed everyone on Barsk. The man who had nearly slain Jorl! One day he had commanded powerful forces, directed the flight and purpose of space ships, dictated the policies of hundreds of worlds, possessed the ability to end or enhance the careers of thousands of politicians and industrialists and artists, and wielded the largest collection of precognitivists ever assembled. Pizlo knew that because Telko had told him so. Just as he knew that Jorl had ripped that away in a moment, leaving only silence where before there had been unchecked power.

  Pizlo took another dose of koph from his pocket, pressing it up inside his left cheek to let it dissolve. The wistful scent of spiralmint filled his sinuses. He burrowed in deeper amidst the foliage that defined the back wall of this hideaway, the empty space of the chimney that bore his father’s name lying far on the other side. It seemed an appropriate spot for what he planned.

  As his perception of nefshons began he built a different space than he used for his summoning of the Archetype of Man, drawing from earlier memories. The details weren’t as sharp as he could do now, working with nefshons had caused him to become a better observer of surroundings, the shape and texture of things. But his recollection of the past served well enough. He didn’t have to make it perfect, just familiar enough that his conversant recognized it.

  He started with the room, defining its size as he recalled viewing it from just within the door. Walls took shape, flowed up and down and suddenly the room had a floor and ceiling, the whole of the space dimly lit. The walls on either side sprouted boxes of white plastic that resolved into cabinets. At the back of the room he added a polished desk, all of green stone that reflected back the little light in the room. More furniture then, a table of the same stone, and around the table on three sides a massive sofa covered over in a brown fabric that he recalled had been so very soft. Beneath the table, and both behind and in front of the desk, Pizlo conjured thick rugs of sweet smelling grass. As an afterthought, he conjured two mugs of vanilla cocoa for the table, wisps of their flavor painting the air with a faint sweetness. He stepped into the room, walked behind the desk, and sat in a chair whose size threatened to swallow him, a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before. He tried to lean on the desk, found himself too low, and managed it in his second attempt after creating a stack of books under him on the chair. It was as good as his memory could make it. That was the easy part.