by Clay Gilbert
Liara was the first of the Circle to come forward, Annah was pleased to see, although a wave of sympathy rushed through her as she saw the younger seed-maiden fumbling with the sheaves of parchment she had been laboring over only a short measure before. In a moment, Liara began to speak-to read, Annah thought, knowing that this was a thing rarely done by her people anymore, and finding herself caught on the waves of Shaping, but also studying, observing the way Liara wove the currents of word and vision; wove them into a door that opened for everyone who heard, but led each along a path to the destination of their own desiring.
Shaping is not just one path, said the voice in Annah’s mind. Shaping is what happens when the tree lies down upon the earth and spreads her branches, that should stretch skyward, into roads and paths, for those to follow who desire to do so. Shaping is also what happens when we climb the tree, using its steady roots as a foundation, and its strong branches to lift ourselves into the heavens.
Annah watched the way Liara’s eyes darted over the parchment she held as she read, giving the sense that the words were stored in her memory, but that she did not want even the merest nuance of their meaning lost. Annah understood this well: there had been nights she lay awake in her beddings-both in the cycles she had spent on her own, and in the time since her parents awakened-when she had struggled to capture with her voice every echo, each tenuous tone of a song that had appeared in her mind, sometimes in her dreams, and sometimes in the deeper place she had called-she knew well the melody that named it in the Old Tongue of her people, but—oh, how would she say it in Holder’s and Goodman’s speech? Spirit-river. Yes, that was it.
Essei-khai, another voice whispered in her mind. It was Liara’s. Annah smiled. She should have known the Shaperbond would let her hear the words Liara spoke, even if the form of the language was beyond her own grasp. She was not surprised, really. We are one, after all. Although we are different, we are one. We are both females; we are seedmaidens of the same Grove. We are both of this world, and its people-and yet, we are both Shapers, and have the vision to see that all life-here on this world and beyond it-is one.
And I think we both sense that these are things that some do not want to know, or want others to know. Annah paused in her thought, listening intently now to the story Liara wove with her words. At first, Annah was struck not merely by the meaning of the words, but by the sound of them. Some of her earliest Memories had been of the way that, before the Breaking, her people had spoken in rich currents of song; in melodies whose sounds and rhythms would have been a deep mystery to any who heard them—and they had been, she thought, to the first humans who came here. We tried to calm their fears; even tried to learn their languagethe language with which they had nearly conquered the whole Sea of Stars. And still they feared us.
In time, the Old Tongue had become as broken as the world itself—cut off, not as one might trim back a branch to help it grow stronger and more whole, but stunted, as if the very bud of life had been sucked dry of its vitality. Only dimly did the clipped, truncated tones of song-speech on Evohe now reflect the deep well of sound that Annah’s memories told her the Old Tongue had once been. But it was barely remembered, now, and still less, ever sung. It was a fearedthing (shudda-hon, Liara whispered into Annah’s mind); lost now and locked away.
The way Liara spoke was something different, Annah noted; not the Old Tongue (Gerai-sei, Liara whispered), nor the half-speech it had become after the humans first came (Cura-sei, Liara echoed), but something new, possessing both melody and the more defined rhythms Annah admired about the language she knew the humans called Standard. And now, as Annah listened, she was swept up not merely by the sound of the words,but by their meanings—lost in the story they told. It was a story about a young seedmaidenlike Liara herself, or me, Annah thought-who liked to catch fish.
The seed-maiden, whose name was Selya, had gone to the stream-banks many times with her father from her bloomhood to the time of her first Becoming, and he had shown her how to catch the fish that swam there—first with nets that they lifted together and cast across the water; then, as she grew older and taller, with spears, which she found much easier to manage once she learned to time her aim to the fluid silver flash of the fish’s motion beneath the surface of the stream, and, finally, when she had seen sixteen cycles pass, and was both sure of foot and clear of vision-he had taught her how to catch them with her hands.
There came a morning when Selya did not feel well, and lay late in her beddings while her father went to the stream to fish. The sun had climbed high in the sky by the time she first opened her eyes, but still there was no sign of her father. She drifted to sleep again, only to be awakened what seemed an instant later by the sound of her mother whispering her name against her ear. The streaks of tears on her mother’s cheeks brought Selya awake as surely as the slap of cold stream-water against her skin on an alreadycool Evenfall morning. “Your father is gone, child,” Selya’s mother said. “He slipped on a stone in the stream while he was fishing. It seems that his head struck the stones, and he did not rise.”
Selya was silent for a moment. The tears trickling from her eyes, and the sobs that came a moment later, seemed like something happening far away, to someone else. “I want to go down to the stream,” Selya said, some time later, when the first wave of the storm had let her go. Her mother flashed her a frightened look.
“No, Mother,” Selya said, “I do not want to go by myself. But I want to go.”
Selya’s mother smiled. “Very well, my daughter-but you do know that he is gone.”
“I know that I will see his body, and that he will no longer be in it. Please, Mother, let us go.” Annah listened to the words Liara spoke, letting the tale unfold behind her eyes at the sound of the other girl’s voice.
Selya had seen her father’s body almost as soon as she and her mother reached the stream-bed’s rocky border. He was on his side, as though he had been eyeing a big catch; readying for a lunge. The red gash across the opal flash of his forehead seemed strangely out of place, a false stroke some unseen painter had forgotten to correct. She fell to her knees in the water, tugging at his waterlogged body until he lay across her lap, his brown eyes as empty as an unseeded plot of earth. “It is as I thought, Mother. There are no more fish here for him to catch, and he has gone on to deeper streams. He did not wake me, for he knew I could not yet follow where he was going.”
Annah wiped tears from her eyes at the sound of Liara’s words, and at the answering voices of her own memories. But the flow of words, and the story that carried her on its current, did not cease. The next night and the night afterward, Selya found her sleep disturbed by dreams. She found herself at the stream-bed again, alone this time. Again she cradled her father’s lifeless body in her arms; again she looked into his eyes, as dark now as the skies above her, and knew that he was walking where he had told her; where the stream flowed deeper than she could follow. But I will learn, Father. And I will follow.
And one night, she did. Selya learned to leave the confines of her body behind, slipping from it the way she slipped from her sleep-beddings in the morning. In time, she learned to pass between the borders of the waking-world— the living world—into the world that lay beyond it. Selya walked between the worlds at night, as she rested, and by day, when she had time away from the learning-circles and the duties of hearth and family, she went to the stream where she had once caught fish with her father and began to capture in language all she had seen in the lands beyond, putting her Vision into a language both of words and song-a language at first only she knew, but which she later taught to others-in dreams, in whispers down the sleeping ears of an entire race-into creations drawn from what she had seen, and shaped from the soil of the stream-bed itself. Selya was the first Shaper, and her gifts flow in the blood of all of us.”
Annah waited until she was certain Liara was done with her story. “What happened to her, Liara? I have never even heard of her.” Annah thought to herself that
that was not terribly surprising, as she did not come from a family of Shapers, and her parents at times seemed skeptical of her wishes to be one.
“It is probably just a story,” Chelries said. “Shaping had to be said to come from somewhere, after all.”
“It is not just a story,” Liara said. “At least, I do not believe so. My mother says that she is one of our ancestors.” “My mother has said that Selya is an ancestor of all Shapers,” said Keleth, the seed-youth who Annah remembered had said his parents were Greenworkers from the High Country.
“So what happened?” Annah asked again. Liara smiled. “It was so long ago, but it is said that she left her parents’ homeground and traveled every part of the world, teaching all she knew, and learning new things from the voices of both the living and those who had passed beyond.”
Liara took a deep breath, and went on. “Some were frightened by the things Selya said and did, but some heard, listened, and learned. In time, there were Shapers everywhere: some who learned the Paths from Selya and those she had taught, and some who were born with the Talents already in their blood. It was even said that Selya mated with some of those she gathered to her as student-to spread the Paths through their Joining. As many as there were who loved her-it is said that many more came to hate her.”
Annah could see Liara’s fear of her own Memories, and her family’s history, in the younger seed-maiden’s eyes. She reached out and stroked Liara’s face. Her friend sighed, and smiled. Annah leaned close to Liara, touched the younger girl’s forehead with her own. “Go on,” she whispered to Liara. “If you want to.” Annah stepped away from Liara, and her friend turned back toward the others, and began to speak again.
“Our people-our people became split in two; those who were Shapers, and those who were not.” “Serra told me of that,” Annah said. “Terrible.” Annah looked at the Elder Shaper, who was still sitting, silent, in the shade of a tree, as she had been since the Circle began.
“I have heard that it was even worse in Selya’s time than just before the Breaking,” Liara said. “Because not only did non-Shapers fear and hate us, but as time went on, there were those born with Shaper talents who held themselves higher than those who learned the Paths through study and practice. Shapers were no longer welcomed in the Groves as mediators of disputes, or givers of counsel, as we once had been. They were no longer seen as ministers of the First Ones. Theywe-were feared by those who did not have our Talents, and even those who did know the Paths argued amongst themselves over whose way was closer to the truth.”
Annah shook her head. “I am sure that is not what Selya would have wanted.” “ No,” Liara said, her eyes dark with sadness. “It was not. She tried to make the peopleall of them, anyone who would listen-understand that. Many listened. Some did not. But it does not take many to cause-to cause what happened to her.”
“They killed her,” Annah said, seized by a sudden flash of Vision. “Yes,” Liara said. “After that, Shaping itself began to be shunned and silenced among our people. And among most, Selya’s name, what she taught, her whole existence began to be not only a feared-thing—shudda-honbut neda-hon as well. A not-thing. Something to be treated as if it had never been.”
Annah slipped beneath another wave of Vision. “And when seed-maidens showed signs of any Shaper talents, they were silenced, as Selya had been. They were ended. First Ones, Liara, is that true?” Annah was shaking, both from fear and anger.
“Yes,” Liara said, the gravity in her voice making her seem much older than twelve cycles. “My parents say so, in any case. They were cut from our people, so that they could not bear and bloom more of us—the way a diseased branch is pruned from a tree, so that its poison may not spread to the whole. That was the idea, in any case—and it worked. It took time—first the female line of Shapers began to fade, and then gradually the male as well. And those who might have learned the Paths from studying were to afraid to do so, mostly.”
“So, by the time of the Breaking, there were just the Elders?” Annah asked. “Yes,” Serra said. She had been listening nearby while Annah and Liara talked. “That is how it was here, in any case. There may have been younger Shapers in other Groves-and indeed, I think it must have been so. But here, we old ones were the only ones left, and all of us past the age to bear and bloom new Shapers. So we taught the Paths to those few who did not fear to learn-and we did it in shadow and secrecy, hoping to keep a small spark of what we knew alive. And then the Breaking came, and the sickness-“
“The one that took Lilliane,” Annah said. “Yes. And we began to lose hope. Many of us went to our rest in the newly-regrown groves in the hopes of waking to a better world. And now all of you have been bloomed and born, and we hope that time is here. Now,” Serra said, turning her gaze to the others, “who will be next to share their Talent with us?”
* * * “Kale, wake up.” Goodman had fallen asleep listening to a radio broadcast on the ‘com in his ship. He’d tried to wait for Annah to get back, but sometime in the early morning, he had no longer been able to keep his eyes open. She’s back. Good. Now we can both get some sleep. I’ll ask her about the meeting in the morning-Shit. It is morning.
“Kale.” Goodman sat up slowly; shifted a bit as Annah crawled into the cockpit beside him. “Well, good morning, yourself,” he said to her, in a sleep-gravelled voice. “Last time I came home from anywhere this late, I had a hangover.”
“I have not been hanging over anything,” Annah said, frowning. “Never mind,” Goodman said. “How was the meeting?” He pulled the synthwool blanket around Annah now, too, although he knew she wouldn’t be cold. He felt the answering warmth of her skin and the tingling sensation that was always there, like the barely-perceptible trace vibration of artificial gravity. Only there’s nothing artificial about this. He didn’t know if he’d ever get used to it. And he didn’t know if he wanted to.
“Long, I said,” Annah was telling him, apparently not for the first time. “I did not mean to be away for so long. Kale, are you listening to me?”
“I’m sorry.” He hadn’t been, but it hadn’t been on purpose. There was something hanging on the edges of his mind—a voice from a dream. God, I’ve been hanging around with Annah too long. Now I’m starting to have weird dreams like one of her and Holder’s-what did they call ‘emShapers. But this was about Holder. His voice. I heard his voice. “I’m sorry,Annah,” he said again.
“Tell me about the meeting? Did everything go all rightwith your song?” Annah smiled at him. “Yes. But I do not want to talk about that now. You are troubled. There is something that you do not want to tell me.”
“Are you reading my mind now, the way you do Holder’s?” Goodman realized he had spoken of Holder in the present tense for the first time since he’d come back to Evohe, and he wondered if it was because of the dream.
“No,” Annah said, laughing. “I cannot. I can ‘read Holder’s mind,’ as you say, and speak to him there, because we are both Shapersnot because I am some kind of what your people call a ‘psychic.’ Her expression grew serious. “If you do not tell me what is wrong, Kale, I cannot help.”
“It’s probably just stupid; some kind of wish-fulfillment— because I want him to be alive, too—but I had this dream last night-I fell asleep waiting for you-and I dreamed I heard his voice. It was so real, Annah.”
“You know that I have dreamed of him, too, many times.”
“I know how much you still miss him,” Goodman said. Annah snuggled close to him. “He is my heart’s mate, Kale. He is the one I dreamed of, as a bloomling playing in the Grove, and as a young seed-maiden wishing for what others told me I would never have. Even if I never see him againeven if he is dead, and I grow old here, alone, or go with you to the place called Holdfast-out in the Sea of Starseven then, I would always miss him. I would always love him.”
Annah saw the expression on Goodman’s face, and reached up to stroke his cheek. “It does not mean that I do not love you, Kale.” She sighed.
“Although I sometimes feel it hurts you when I say it.” She thought for a moment of Ardan, and a day by the stream that seemed a lifetime ago now. “It is still strange to me, how expressing love can cause both joy and pain. I do not think that is how the First Ones meant it to be.”
“I just don’t want to interfere,” Goodman said. “I don’t want to mess things up for you guys. I wouldn’t even be here right now, if he was here.”
“It is likely that neither of you would be here,” Annah said, “and that I would still be alone, waiting for Holder to come home from the war.”
“I know that, but I am here, and-Annah, what if I’d gotten you pregnant the other night? I know it’s possible.” Annah nodded. “It could be, if it were not my blood-time. It is one of the First Ones’ kindnesses, perhaps, that no buds can take root at such a time. There will be no bloomlings from our Joining, Kale. You do not have to worry. I think that if Holder does not return, the only bloomlings I will see grow up will be the ones here in Laughing Waters Grove.”
The military band ‘com transmissions had begun again, and the sound of the music made a comforting drone against the backdrop of their conversation. Goodman thought that if he’d been out in the black, it might have put him to sleep. But here, it seemed unimportant. Here, all that mattered was Annah, and the nagging feeling he’d stolen his best friend’s life without meaning to. “I’m sure that’s not so, Annah,” he said.
“Well, I am not. And I am not sure my bloomlings would be safe in this world, after what I learned at the circle today. It is not a safe world for Shapers, Kale.”
“It’s not a safe world for anyone who wants things to change,” Goodman said. “Or anyone who’s different.” “I know,” Annah said, looking up at him. “And though I am afraid to think of it, sometimes, I believe we must do what we can to make it a safer one. Those of us who can.”