by John Brunner
Table of Contents
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VIII
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XXI
THE DRAMATURGES OF YAN
John Brunner
I
Across the night the Ring of Yan arched like a silver bow, shedding the small bright fire-arrows of meteors into the upper air. Tired, but with so much tension in his brain he knew he would not yet be able to sleep—and unwilling, unless he was driven to it, to resort to his repose-inducer—Dr Yigael Lem discarded his formal Earthsider clothes in favour of a Yannish webweave gown and reed sandals, and walked out on his verandah to contemplate the sight he customarily relied on to pacify his thoughts. Madame de Pompadour, the pet chubble who had accompanied him to seven systems, had expected him to retire and accordingly had settled down in the dormicle to await his arrival. On realising he had gone elsewhere she gave a brief squawk of complaint, but ultimately gathered the energy to come and join him. She moved stiffly. She, like her owner, was getting old.
The air was mild with the promise of spring, and the earliest of his famous i blossoms were starting to show. A few years ago he had decided to tinker with the faulty gene in the original species which sometimes caused it to revert to the wild state, its flowers mere balls of characterless green fluff, and achieved spectacular success—more by luck than skill, he always insisted when someone tried to compliment him on what he’d done, because although he had had to study physical medicine as a young man and graduated with distinction in gene-repair, he had not practised the technique for decades.
Now his garden was bordered by a hedge of unparalleled magnificence, from which even Speaker Kaydad had condescended to accept a cutting. Under the pale radiance of the Ring the buds on their tall segmented stalks looked like polished skulls, ready to open their jaws and utter indescribable statements of fragrance.
Convinced he wasn’t going anywhere else for the moment, Pompy lay down and began to croon contentedly to herself, a curling question-mark of fur on the smooth tiles of the verandah. Occasional sounds drifted from nearby houses: a child’s half-hearted cry for attention, laughter, the plaintive whistle of someone experimenting with a Yannish flute. But it was late now, and under these few surviving indices of wakefulness he could hear, quite plainly, the rushing of the great river Smor.
His home was on the crest of the highest rise in the neighbourhood. From opposite ends of this curved verandah he could look out over both the enclave of the Earthsiders—dominated by the go-board and by the dome of the informat—and also the native city Prell, spined by the black river running between the stone-paved ribs of its streets. Gloglobes bobbed on the bows of barges moored at the Isum Quay, like luminous fruit on branches stirred by the wind. One revealed to him the unmistakable outline of a kortch, the coffin-like case in which a Yannish baby born today or yesterday was to be transported away from its mother: upstream to Liganig, or along the coast to Frinth. There were good reasons why the Yanfolk were not deep-water sailor… or at least not nowadays. But they relied a great deal on river and coastal trade.
I ought to know whose child that is. A birth is an event among the Yanfolk.
But even as the words formed inside his head, they were driven aside by others, peculiarly sinister.
I wonder whose place it’s due to take.
Instantly he was angry with himself. That wasn’t a fair way to think—of shrimashey. Surely he, as a psychologist, should be detached, should refrain from making human value-judgments about alien customs. In any case, it wouldn’t be anybody he knew whose place was taken; the equation would be balanced elsewhere, at Liganig or Frinth or still further distant from Prell.
When they celebrate a birth, though, it’s so ironical to realise they’re also holding a wake, displaced in time—a wake for someone not yet dead, whom they haven’t met!
Determinedly, he sought to thrust notions of that sort to the back of his mind. It was in vain. They kept recurring, like a shadow cast over his thoughts. Indeed the impression of being overshadowed was so strong, he jerked around without intending to, as though there might actually be a silent menace trying to catch him unawares from behind, and his eyes were seized and held by the tall crystal pillars silhouetted against the lowest level of the Ring: the shafts of the Mutine Mandala.
The Yanfolk prefer to keep a hill or two between themselves and such enigmas; therefore they gladly gave us this stretch of ground to site our homes, from the crest of my rise to the far side of the valley. Once I thought: how wonderful to see that splendid monument to vanished greatness every morning with the new light striking it, fired every noontide by the famous Flash! Now, though…
“Pompy!” he said, irritated. The chubble, half asleep, had rolled over and licked his bare toes with her long bluish tongue. But he was, in fact, relieved that he had been distracted from staring at the Mandala, the nearest and probably the most impressive of the incredible relics scattered as randomly as confetti over the face of Yan—randomly by the principles of mankind, at any rate, though perhaps not in the opinion of their builders.
He dropped into a chair which faced neither the river and the city nor the coloured translucent roofs of the Earthsiders’ homes, darkening one by one in an irregular pattern as the occupants decided it was bedtime, but square towards the Northern Range. There the luminance of the Ring was caught by a patch of ice on the flank of Mount Fley, like a white jewel among the piled black hair of a queen. That was where, among eternal snows, the River Smor took its rise, the weeping of a glacier, as the Yanfolk said.
They did weep. And that was not the most extraordinary of their resemblances to mankind.
To his left and right lay the habitable lands: the fertile plains of Rhee cross-hatched with fields and orchards whose pattern had not altered in millennia, the pleasant rolling downlands of Hom dotted with thickets of nut-trees and traversed by herds of shy creatures like deer with long thick silver-grey tails, and the sloping plateau of Blaw where plants corresponding to fungi grew in fat succulent slabs from time-cracked rocks. The Yanfolk collected and dried their spores to make a coffee-like drink named morning-brew.
At his back, and to the south, was Kralgak, or as one might say “Dangerland”—that zone marked at night by stabbing white lances, on which the Ring continually hurled portions of its substance deflected from orbit by the never-ceasing clashes between its particles. That was a fearful region, pocked like the skin of a loathsomely diseased face, into which neither humans nor Yanfolk dared venture for fear of being smashed by heavenly hammers. Southward again, in the corresponding subtropical zone, were the lands of the wilders, cousins of the northern Yanfolk but degenerate; their language had pared down to a few crude syllables and their only tools were sticks to grub for roots.
And beneath his feet, at the antipodes of Prell, was the water-hemisphere: the Ocean of Scand. There too, under the equatorial girdle of the Ring, the débris of the skies came slamming down and made the waves boil.
It was best not to think of Kralgak or the wilders at night, which was why all the houses of the Earthsiders’ enclave standing high enough on the hillside to afford a view in that direction were arranged like Dr Lem’s—with their main outlook to the north. Trying not to remember what it had cost this planet to enjoy the lovely shining arch spanning its sky, he gazed up towards the few stars which shimmered through the blurring dust of the stratosphere, like singl
e raindrops caught on fur. Each was surrounded by a tiny rainbow halo, immatures of the one which framed the sun by day in a polychrome haze less predictable than a kaleidoscope.
Why did I decide to come here?
The question sprang from his subconscious and took him by surprise. He had been asked it, often and often, because almost every year strangers—typically very young—wandered across the go-board to Yan looking for goodness knew what… and, with increasing frequency, it was Dr Lem among all the long-term residents that these birds of passage wanted to talk to. It was a curious sensation to be—well-known? Not exactly. Notorious? That wasn’t the word, either. But, anyhow: to have been heard of, elsewhere in the galaxy.
The visitors always took to Pompy, and overfed her disgracefully.
Hmm! Where was I? Oh, yes.
There were convincing superficial reasons for his decision to settle on Yan. He could say, honestly enough, that he had almost reached the limit of his opportunities to travel; it was a strain on both body and mind to use the go-board, and he had begun his voyaging too late to acquire the adaptive flexibility some people rejoiced in. He had already been middle-aged. Moreover he was no longer so mentally resilient that he enjoyed coping with the crazy-seeming shifts of life-style found on planets wholly dominated by humans, which could oblige the population to change centuries overnight… so to speak.
He had therefore been looking for something stable—something, however, which would offer more than simply a chance to reflect and vegetate. The placid, quasi-pastoral existence of Yan would have appealed to him anyhow, he admitted. As a sort of bonus, though, it was shot through and through with enigmas which better minds than his had chip-chip-chipped at for almost a century. One could at least hope, he had said in a self-deprecating tone to so many of those youthful visitors, that constant exposure to them might help towards an eventual solution. And they would nod, distantly aware of the mystery of the wats and mandalas and menhirs dotted around the planet, all far beyond the capacities of modern Yanfolk and some—like the Mullom Wat—even exceeding the abilities of mankind.
So here he had been for thirty-odd years, wrestling with the riddle of shrimashey… and hunting desperately for meaningful equivalents to those Yannish concepts which performed the same function in linguistic terms as “science”, “technology”, “natural law”, but which absolutely and incontestably could not be translated by those words… and, of course, butting his head against that conundrum above all which the Yanfolk posed: the question of how a species so astonishingly like mankind, equally intelligent, equally varied as regards temperament, could have done what they seemed to have managed millennia ago—decided that there was a proper way to live, and adhered to it for thousands of years with no discernible alterations.
Now and then he had fancied himself within grasping distance of a key to all these problems together, as though he had been rattling the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle back and forth in a box for years on end, and suddenly glanced down to see… Well, not the complete pattern, but enough to indicate how the remaining pieces should be added.
And somehow, every time, he had found he was wrong.
Yet he had never really hoped that that achievement would crown the time he had spent on Yan. He knew that.
No, in the last analysis I came here because…
Because Yan was at once a beautiful and a terrible world, everything about it seeming fined down to the barest essentials. Its range of contrasts, from the horrors of Kralgak to the idyllic paradise of Hom, was as great as might be found on any habitable planet; yet there was a grand simplicity about it. Each element composing the overall variety was unique: there was one great ocean, one harsh desert, one delightful garden-like prairie…
I felt—drawn.
The other meaning of that term provoked him to raise his fingertips and pass them across his face, knowing what a mirror would have shown him. Beneath his shock of grizzled hair his forehead was furrowed, while his cheeks were shrunken and his neck-tendons stood out like stretched cords. Under his gown the mildness of the spring night turned to the stone chill of approaching age.
I’ve grown old, Dr Lem admitted to himself. I ought to start thinking about where I want to die. Here? But it’s one thing to pick a planet to live on; to die on it is something else.
When his thoughts took this morbid a turn, he realised, it was high time to put himself to sleep. He half-turned in his chair, stretching out a hand to prod Pompy, and froze in mid-motion. Over the distant silhouette of the Mutine Mandala the white disc of the moon was rising.
But there was no moon on Yan, and had not been for nearly ten thousand years.
II
When the impossible moon rose, Marc Simon was trudging gloomily homeward from what should have been a soirée at Goydel’s house, a few paces behind his Yannish mistress Shyalee who was completely out of patience with him.
Tonight he had wound himself up to a climactic step, the most important since his decision four years ago to quit the Earthside enclave and settle in the upstream quarter of Prell among the artists, minstrels and fine artificers. Acquiring Shyalee had been as nothing compared to the simple act of moving to a small house with three rooms and a pool full of nenuphars; it had seemed like the natural extension of a single process.
Continued too long? After all, among the Yanfolk a woman never lived with a man for more than a year at a time… He was tempted for an instant to think that a change might cure his trouble. Then, catching sight of Shyalee ahead of him on the slanting street as she passed in and out of the gleam of a gloglobe over a house-door—boy-slim, heart-stoppingly beautiful—he knew it was only his current mood of frustration that had made him consider dismissing her. There would be plenty of others willing to take her place. But the likelihood of finding somebody pleasanter to live with would be nil.
Although…
Briefly, he found himself wondering what it would be like to make love again with a girl having breasts and a skin all of one colour, who needed sometimes to break off from a kiss because she had to breathe in through her mouth. But that had nothing to do with his problem. Nothing at all. It was irrelevant.
Moreover he’d had the chance, now and then, and ignored it.
No, what I’m concerned about is—
Well, if only Shyalee had been able to understand what it had cost him to decide that tonight, at Goydel’s soirée, he would move on from the translations in which he had so long specialised, and whose raw material he knew to be good because it was borrowed from talents greater than his own, to the presentation of an original composition in Yannish.
And then to find shrimashey in progress, the whole company lost in that mindless weaving pseudo-dance, forcibly regressed who could tell how many steps down the evolutionary ladder…!
Perhaps it had saved him from hideous embarrassment. Perhaps what he had proposed to offer his friends was no more than crude doggerel. Most likely he would have had no way of telling. The Yanfolk were always polite, and they were particularly polite to poets. When it came to an Earthsider poet, the politeness was redoubled; while the older Yanfolk did not share the unquestioning adulation which had turned so many of their young people into what the Earthsiders insultingly called “apes”—imitating Earthside clothing, manners and habits, salting their speech with human words—Earth and all things Earthly enjoyed indescribable cachet everywhere on this planet. So even the lousiest rubbish would have been assured of a warm reception.
And it would have been useless asking Shyalee’s opinion in advance. She was fantastically beautiful, having delicate bones, huge dark eyes, slender limbs like wands, and of course that organ, the caverna veneris, which made its counterpart in a human girl seem like a spur-of-the-moment mechanical imitation. He had sometimes thought of it as being independently alive, and that was almost true, for it was controlled from that specialised ganglion near the base of the spine.
But he had had to argue and argue with her, before they left for Goydel�
��s, to make her put on his favourite among her costumes, a webweave cloak of misty blue, finer than gossamer. She herself had wanted to wear Earthside dress—adapted by being slit under the arms, naturally, so that there was a free flow of air to her spiracles. She would never have become his mistress had she not practically worshipped Earth and Earthmen. Deaf to the grandeur of the Mutine Epics, scorning their subject as stale and of interest only to reactionary oldsters, she had long ago resigned herself to putting up with Marc’s interest in Yannish poetry as one of the penalties she had to pay for being envied by her own generation of Yanfolk.
Paradox, Marc thought. I could never have enjoyed Shyalee without that fault in her which I most detest!
He had been so furious—so grief-stricken—when he found shrimashey at Goydel’s, he had caught up one of the bowls of the sheyashrim drug and fully intended to gulp it down… even though he knew it didn’t have the same effect on humans as on Yanfolk, didn’t turn over the control of the body to the lower ganglion, but merely wiped out the cortex for a while, making the limbs twitch randomly and releasing the sphincters. It would have been a symbolic act. Only she had knocked the bowl out of his hand and told him, in detail, what a fool he was.
Right. I could have been staggering shamefacedly back this way, reeking of the content of my bowel.
Only…
Here was a question which Marc ordinarily avoided, but tonight could not. Had she saved him from his own stupidity for his personal sake, or merely because he was that walking wonder of the world, an Earthman?
He pictured himself as though he had been able to float out of his body and roost on the eaves of the house he was passing, to watch go by this lean, almost gaunt young man, his black hair and swarthy skin testifying to the intrusion of North Africans among the French who had bequeathed him both his name and his taste for patterns of words so strained and disciplined that one could hear them cry out under the concentrated load of meaning focused into every syllable. He could have been wearing Earth-style shirt and breechlets, but was not; having chosen to make his home among the Yanfolk, he had adopted their garb, the toga-like heyk and welwa cape.