Wind From the Abyss

by Janet Morris

  M’tras came to me with a tray: yellow, birthed of the automated partition. Such food as was upon it was not unfamiliar to me. I had been a year in couchbond to the Liaison First when that one was named M’lennin. Often had I myself punched up similar meals in the Liaison’s automated keep. Jaundiced plate and cup and bowl held jeri, a fruited intoxicant drink; a synthetic meat-textured loaf, steaming; some round green vegetable the name of which escapes me; and a sweet dessert, siw-es-ar, which I abhorred. Next to me on the steel plating he set it, and took his own to the table. I looked at it, resting on that metal the color of Khys’s hair. The enormity of my difficulties rushed in upon me. Tears filled my eyes. I turned my body. The cost in pain was high, but worth it. I did not want M’tras to see my distress. With blurred vision I reached the tray close. I ate off it, bites often salted with the crying that would not stop. I thought of proton pumps and sodium ions and bit my lips, that my mouth not speak out upon his overvaluing of these minusculities, and his failure to see through them and comprehend the whole. And the weight of those thoughts dragged me deeper into tears, like some clandestine undertow. My shoulders, despite my best efforts, betrayed me to him with their shaking.

  I did not hear his approach, but only felt his hand rubbing my back. He bade me cease, but softly. It took a time for me to regain control. Dragging my hair from under his hand, I pulled it veil-like about my face. Sniffling. I took the absorbent fax he proffered and wiped my cheeks dry.

  “What brought that on?” he asked, still crouched by my side.

  “You,” I said miserably. “You and your machine. What need have you for it? Does it think for you? Surely no machine is more than the mind that conceived it. Are such beasts of metal and plastic the ruling species upon your planet, as they are on M’ksakka? It is said that the ruling species upon a planet proliferates a suitable environment to its needs. Upon M’ksakka, the Western Forest is vestigal, the last trace of a time when another race ruled there, one that breathed air and depended upon nature for its survival. No longer, I have heard, can M’ksakkans breathe their own air without aid from that planet’s ruling species: the machine. Is it so upon your world? Are you, also, in bondage to the artifact, crell to your creations? If so, I beg you, do not take me there. Of all things, I fear such constraint the most. I will surely die, without the sun and the grass and the wind and the company of those creatures that thrive upon nature.” My hand, when I had finished, went to my mouth, as if, after the fact, it could prevent those words’ escape.

  M’tras’ storm was no longer contained by his eyes. His whole face scudded dark, ominous. The rage that issued forth from his mouth snapped and roared like shifting earth, each indecipherable curse shaking me as gusts pummel yearling trees immured on a hill crest thunderstuck. But that thunder, still riding his alien tongue, brought no lightning trailing behind, but rather took up a plagel cadence; became righteous, spirit-speaking. M’tras, sure in his truths, found need to express them in Standard, most exact and somber of tongues. And I, knowing that there is no one truth, did not then mark (nor do I now recollect) the moment at which his speech became intelligible by virtue of words; for through my band of restraint and across the gulf of context his meaning had already leaped, that we two take up that ongoing battle between form and substance, between man artifactual and woman ineffable, between innovation and replication.

  Thus do I recall them, those words spoken in moments transformed, by some alchemy agreeable to us both, from the interrogation by captor of captive into that interchange (which never began and shows no sign of ending) between the proponents of physical and metaphysical:

  “My little primitivist, how is it that you set youself up to adjudge a culture of which you know nothing, a context about which you may be sure of only one thing: that it is other than your own? It is said of your people that they seek the law within. Where is it written, upon those books, that one idea is good and another evil, that an idea in seed, when nurtured by these five fingers and given spatial reality that it be numbered among the items of creation, becomes tainted, while another, swathed in numinosity and wraithlike for lack of palpable existence, does not?”

  “The ideas of our mechanists sent the remnants of a world scurrying into burrows, there to wait interminably for the fruits of their methodical poisoning of air and sea to disperse,” I pointed out.

  “And so you say to a man: this is too dangerous, this you must not do. But you allow the sword, and pharmacology, and all that suits you, though the dangers of each are as great as that of a hand communicator or a death cube. Is a man less dead when killed by a blade of stra?” His visage, jutting forward aggressively, drew from my mouth the admission that a man; killed, was as dead by aegis of knife or limb as by incineration; but I felt compelled to add that one man so armed could not destroy a city, nor a forest, nor a mountain.

  M’tras took a moment before he replied: “Then ban fire, for with it city and forest might fall by way of a single well-placed torch, and even a mountain be scoured bare of all life she hosts. It is held by you an ineluctable truth that technology destroys, and yet it is ideology, morality, and all the cogitations which you hold so dear and elevated that bent the metal of inventor’s alchemy to the desecration of nature you so loudly decry. It is not truth of which it is said: ‘Herein lies destruction,’ but man’s use of it. The world which spawned me, like all others, took the trial of fire: that of subjugation, by means mechanistic, of greed overwhelming and lust blind to tomorrow. It is said by us that the true test of spirit lies therein, that only when man waxes godlike, when he consigns into his brothers’ hands the means for elevation or destruction of his own civilization, does he learn the validity of the conglomerate of survival decisions called morality that his world has constructed.” His dark hands, whose fingers might within their own sum of days smite my beloved Astria from afar, twisted together, whitened, then released. Staring at those digits, it came to me that he was in a sense right, that it is not the product of their labor that destroys, but the intent of the mind that directs them.

  “Khys,” I offered, taken aback with sudden enlightenment, “must have considered these things, else why did he allow commerce with the star worlds to commence, and bring to us once again the temptations of such power?”

  M’tras smiled. “Temptations, are they? I think, instead, a road to growth upon which man either becomes wise or perishes by his own folly. Unlike M’ksakka, we chose not to befoul the nest of our descendants that the progenitors’ coffers overflow with wealth. Nor did we, as upon Silistra, raze to the ground those who believed differently than we, deeming even the obliteration of plant and beast meet price, that an idea offensive to our minds be no longer promulgated by men who, more by their samenesses than their differences, loomed iniquitous in our judges’ sight. Upon my world it is said that we have three billion religions, and of philosophies an equal number, that of the total sum of men living thereupon. And to those of us most insightful it remains an eternal source of wonder that two may speak together from out of each one’s singular reality, and that from out of these cross-indexed similitudes of meaning, understanding is birthed and communion upon ideas achieved. Against all odds of logic and reason, man speaks with his brother, and that brother hears.” Those hands that might at their whim reduce every hide upon Silistra to poisoned ash stroked his jaw, awaiting my rejoinder.

  But I was struck cold and cautious, asudden aware of the dangerous ground upon which I trod. How wholeheartedly might anyone, in my place, have debated with his jailer? I shook my head, my eyes lowered. I would not chance speaking to him of relevance, nor of the low esteem in which I held logic and what preferences one man will label “reason,” and another “irrationality.”

  And so, he chose to continue: “My home is magnificent. You will not see it. You have no more place there than one of your mutated carnivores in the void, nor would you survive even as long. But know you: there is no sphere I have seen among the M’ksakkan worlds as green, no ran
ge of climate as exulting to flesh and spirit, no world anywhere among the civilized stars that boasts the fecundity of Yhrillia. Is is said of her that He practiced upon the firmament, and perfected upon her bosom. But notwithstanding, none of yours will ever discern that truth; we open not our doors to this universal rabble of which you are a part. With you and these M’ksakkans in my company, even I would not be allowed to land.” And this last was finally spoken in M’ksakkan: the converse was ended, that temporary immunity he had bestowed upon me perceptibly revoked. And as he pulled about him yet another alien tongue, he seemed to cast away his righteousness, or to secrete it again in that pocket we all construct to keep our selves sacrosanct, lest they be tarnished by the diverse oils come from a multitude of fingering strangers.

  But I had seen; even banded, I did not fail to mark him.

  “Then why,” I injected into that demanding silence, “approach Yhrillia at all?”

  “I want to let the A consult with a cohort,” he informed me brusquely. “I want also to make sure that I live through this. The ship can negotiate for M’ksakka from wherever I choose. I can make this journey and be back orbiting Silistra in quicker time than you might suppose, with the ship on an A-systems slave basis.”

  “I did not know machines took slaves,” I said, moving my left leg, which now only ached. Experimentally I stretched it out in front of me, straight, pointing my toes. “Could you not just call this other machine?”

  “I can’t use their communications systems for A to A. It’s too complex to explain. And it would be too dangerous to prematurely update their system so that I could use it.”

  I nodded. Once we had sent a message to M’ksakka, Sereth, Chayin and I, or rather we had caused such a message to be sent. The delay time from planet to planet was three Silistran days, dependably. It had been important to us at that time. We had needed the lengthy delay. Silistra is far from the nearest congruence, so far that it was a B.F. light-day and a half that signal traveled, upon a lasered beam, before entering the congruence. Exiting immediately at the M’ksakkan equivalent, it had then traveled a light-day and a quarter to M’ksakka.

  “So we’re just going,” added M’tras. “We’ll have our orbit before morning.”

  “How can you have morning in a place like this?” I stretched out my other leg slowly.

  “We observe M’ksakkan days and nights.” He shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to it.” His smile was grim, like dawn burst upon the northern sea. “You’re making it hard for me to be pleasant to you,” he observed, bouncing in his squat to loosen his own calves. His belt, quiet, seemed only ornamented black leather.

  “Such was not my intention,” I said. He was stretching a point, I reflected, to call his treatment of me pleasant. I looked at my hardly touched food, took the jeri, for something to hold in my hands. I thought, any moment, he would sit. He sat himself down, cross-legged. Upon my tray still lay most of my meal. I remembered my resolve to gain back some weight. I shrugged. M’tras, misunderstanding, grinned, a curling back of lips. I decided I cared not if I was too thin, sipping the jeri, which was, blessedly, not synthetic, but clear and tangy. And it would, I knew, relax me, and blur the ache in my body from enths of kneeling.

  “What do you think of Dellin?” he asked.

  I sighed to myself behind the cup. It was beginning again, if on a lower key.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “I’m curious.” He raised his arms away from his body, showing his sleeping symbiote, curled around him like some somnolent slitsa. “Why did you think he would hurt you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said quietly, “with Dellin, one forgets he is not Silistran. I did, I suppose, nothing for which he would hold me to account.” I ran my tongue along the cup’s yellow rim, catching an escaped amber drop. I could see him only above the shoulders, over the rim. He waited. I could not imagine that M’tras did not know what the Ebvrasea, the cahndor of Nemar, and I had done to Dellin, in his own keep, before we went to take Celendra out of Astria. “It has been years since he and I had converse,” I added. “When last I saw him, he bore no birthing strand, nor the strand of threxman at his waist.”

  “Birthing strand?” prompted M’tras.

  “He has gotten, I would venture, a Silistran woman with child. The gold strand is not easily acquired. Dellin has built a good start for a chald.”

  M’tras rose fluidly from his cross-legged seat. As he approached the slab before the partition, he touched his belt. By the time he stood there, the screen glared bluely, out from hiding.

  “I thought you had nothing to say to me.” It was Dellin’s voice, truculent.

  “Did you get some local woman pregant?” M’tras demanded, lounging sprawled across the velveted slab.

  “No.” Dellin’s surprise was evident. I imagined him: touching his chald somewhere upon three deck. I stayed where I was beside my tray. “It was a political move I made.” Condescending, was Dellin. “I took up the chald of another, with respect to one child only. It is a complicated chaldric matter, nothing you could understand. The fitness was debated for four passes by Silistran authorities before any decision was made. It’s very delicate, this whole thing. Or was.”

  I thought his words oddly tinged with pride for one who fled his chaldric commitments. And with regret. M’tras, also, marked it strange.

  “Whose child is in your care?” he snapped viciously. “Or was?”

  “That of Tyith bast Sereth, out of a coin girl,” Dellin said with gravity. One never names such a woman in giving parentage. It is bad taste. Sereth, I thought, would not have been pleased if such knowledge had come to him. No, he would not have been pleased to know that his grandson had been in the hands of Celendra; and passed by her to Dellin, doubtless as part of their extended couchbond. The decision, I realized, must have been pending while Dellin was in our hands. Pending and ratified when Celendra was accounted dead or crell. Yet might she live, in the Parset Lands. Perhaps Jaheil had found her pleasing. But I could not know it. I did not know if she even survived the wounds she had sustained when Jaheil used her as shield before him in the battle upon the plain of Astria. “It is a son,” Dellin added, doubtless for my ears, “and healthy, favoring his grand-sire.”

  “Can’t you speak your own language?” M’tras growled at the miniature Dellin I could not see.

  “Surely,” came the answer. “I hear you’re going to counterthreaten Khys. You’re a fool. There’s nothing in the hides but old books and older philosophers. One-quarter of that planet’s population lives within a hundred B.F. miles of one hide or another. You’re talking about direct hitting a quarter of the human life on the planet. They don’t have any buried secret weapons.”

  “And what’s he doing? There are plenty of lives involved in his threat to the moon Niania.”

  “This is like a nightmare,” said Dellin, and an absence of light play upon M’tras’ body let me know that Khaf-Re Dellin had broken the connection.

  M’tras grunted, lying back upon the slab, one hand rubbing his eyes. “Come here,” he advised, fingers at his belt. Regretfully I did so.

  “Lie there.” He indicated the slab near the wall. I obeyed him. “Take this, I want to sleep.” A small round tablet, white, nestled in his palm. I looked at him in horror. “It won’t hurt you. Take it.” His palm was closer. I took it, lest he force it down my throat. It melted, sweet and soft upon my tongue, taking the world of the senses with it. The last thing that concerned me was urgent, and I fought for time to deal with it. But even for the hides, the drug would give me no time.

  From that heavy sleep I gained no insight. Awakening was a gradual rising through less-dark clouds. There was the press of no-sound upon the ears, then a rhyming of thuds, which became blood and pulse, red as the clouds that were then eyelids. Lastly, I felt the vibration beneath me, and named it. Remembrance of my whereabouts caused my direction sense to tilt crazily. I was not at the Lake of Horns. I opened my eyes, saw the mechanic M’tras a
wake. He was propped against the wall, brooding, his face abstracted, fully dressed, with the remains of his first meal about him—crushed clear containers, yellow tray, yellow eggs of machine-bird.

  I knuckled my eyes, stretching. He had, at least, thrown a cover over me, I thought. “Has your machine spoken to its brother?” I said, turning over to face him, on my belly. The velvet slid soft and slick along my skin. And he had undressed me. Considerate, was M’tras.

  “Yes,” he said, not raising his head. “It has. We have broken orbit. We make our way back to Silistra. If he wants to talk, he’ll go to his local liaison, who’ll call us.”

  “Do you not fear to get too close to our ancient weapons?” I asked, yawning.

  His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “That’s a small chance, but a good excuse. If he can hit something as far away as Niania, where could we hide? We’re small. We’re moving, fast and random. I told you, I don’t believe most of this, really.” His actions, I thought, belied his confidence. I shrugged.