Teah kissed the boy and tenderly eased his body back down on the bed. As she stood, swaying, Briena whispered hoarsely, “How could you do it, Teah? How could you lie to me?”
“I never lied to you, Briena.”
“You did! Every time you hugged him, played with him, as if he had all the time in the world, without ever letting me know that he wouldn’t even live to grow up.” Briena’s voice broke in a sob as she collapsed on the bed and gathered up her son’s body in her arms. She hugged him fiercely as she rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I knew. That was enough. You know I couldn’t tell.”
“It was cruel!”
“No. No, Briena. It was kind. His time was short, yes. But neither you nor Rano had to know that. He lived out his days as happily as any boy could.” She stepped forward and placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “And that was because you were able to love him wholeheartedly, without any cloud of knowledge poisoning whatever time you had together.”
Briena twisted away from Teah’s touch. “Who are you to keep such a secret from me, his own mother?”
“Death keeps the secret from all of us,” Teah said coldly.
“Except you?” Briena’s voice rose hysterically. “Aren’t you my sister? Or are you only Death’s servant, bringing in the Shadow Cloak to steal my boy from me?” The last words ended with a wail, and she bent over the boy again, rocking, twisting the thin nightshirt until it tore. “Oh, my Rano, my baby…”
White-faced, Teah reached out her hand. Briena kept her face buried in Rano’s shoulders to muffle her racking sobs, and after a moment, Teah let her arm fall again. She rushed from the room without stopping to pick up her cloak, and they heard the door slam after her. Slowly, Matthew picked up his cloak and kit. He let himself out.
* * * *
Matthew didn’t catch up with her until the very end of Fish Hook Street. The rain was still falling in a steady, drizzling stream. He fell into step with her silently as they climbed the path that led to her house.
Once inside, he paused to pull off his shoes as usual, but she walked to the center of the room to stand there, still dripping, as if she had intended to go someplace else but couldn’t remember where.
“Teah?”
“I broke my vow,” she said flatly.
“How, Teah?”
There was a pause, as if she was too numb to think of the reason. He could see the sharp profile of her cheekbones etched by the distant flickers of lightning, flashing through the window. “I didn’t stay to comfort the bereaved,” she said finally.
“You’re the bereaved,” he told her gently. “You loved him, too.”
“That doesn’t change my responsibility!” She began to shake.
“You’re shivering.” He went to fetch a towel and came over to press it to her hair and dry her shoulders. He felt the chill of her wet skin through the thin, soaked fabric of her dress. Wrapping the towel around her upper body, he pulled her close and put his arms around her.
She stiffened and tried to pull away. “Don’t.”
“Teah, let me—”
“No!” She wrenched herself free. “That’s not very professional behavior, Doctor,” she said through her teeth, using, to his astonishment, the Terran word.
He reddened. “Teah, I—”
“Don’t you understand?” she cried. “Don’t you know that I have never —I have never—” She turned blindly away from him.
“Never what?” He reached out to touch her shoulder. “Never what, Teah?”
“The oath promises the respect of all men and women if I follow its teachings. And oh, the Calypsans are so polite. They are all so grateful for the art and the rhyena’v’rae’s arms at death, but who would want to touch a rhyena‘v’rae? Who would want to be held by a woman in whose arms so many have died?” She stopped abruptly and took deep breaths, trying to control herself.
His heart ached in pity for her. “And that is why you have no children.”
“That’s only part of it. Briena was right. Every time I saw Rano, every time I touched him or heard his laugh, I knew when he would die. It was terrible enough as it was, but if he had been my own son, I couldn’t have borne it. I couldn’t!” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Once again, he took her in his arms and held her, and this time she let him. When they grew tired of standing, they eased themselves down onto the floor and lay there together with her head on his chest as she cried herself out.
They weren’t so very different after all, he decided, stroking her soft, damp hair. Teah had said it herself: both of them truly did want to help the people who came to them, trusting in their ability to ease the hurt. They both had made sacrifices: he had left his home world, and she had relinquished her hopes for a family. And it was the fact that they both took their responsibilities as seriously as they did that made their failures cut so deeply.
The only remedy is to keep learning, keep trying, he thought. I know that Teah tries, and as for me—. His thoughts hesitated. If what she does truly pushes back the boundaries of medicine, and I made a promise to do everything I can to benefit my patients, shouldn’t I learn this? Doesn’t my oath, in fact, require it?
“Teah?” he said finally.
She wiped her eyes. “What, Mateo?”
“Teah, teach me to be a lethe.”
She raised her head and strained to see his face in the darkness. “Do you mean it? Even after all I’ve said?”
“Yes. I want to stay on Calypso. What you do—I want to do it, too.”
“But you’re a hev’rae, Mateo. Your business is saving lives.”
“You said it yourself: all lives come to an end. Don’t you see? This way, I’d be working as both a hev’rae and rhyena’v’rae, and that way dying would be a natural part of living. On Earth, there are hospices where the people go when they wish to die in peace under a doctor’s care. I think that’s the closest thing that we have to what you do.”
“There’s so much to learn.”
“I know. But my question is, could I?”
“There’s something you’d have to understand,” she said slowly.
“What is it?”
“The way a rhyena’v’rae passes on the art. Much is learned in the way you learned to be a hev’rae: the master teaches the disciple the laws governing testaments and ways to counsel the kin. But passing on the art is something different.”
“How is it done?”
“The disciple holds the rhyena’v’rae and takes the Oath as the rhyena’v’rae dies, and the power of the art awakens in the disciple.”
“Is that how you got it?”
“Yes. Death is the catalyst that gives the disciple the power to understand the master’s perception—a perception passed down to us from our first master, Stivan.”
He was silent for a long time, thinking. “So it’s the same as when a client comes,” he said. “The disciple asks the master whether he or she can learn the art. And if the master says no, no questions are asked. But if the master says yes, then both know that the master will die first.”
“Yes.”
“Then—will you teach me the art, Teah?”
She said nothing for a long time. The rain stopped, and the light of the waning moon shone through a ragged hole in the clouds, falling softly through the window onto their faces. “I will say nothing tonight,” she said finally. “I must decide. Sleep now, Mateo.” He slept.
* * * *
At the first glimmer of dawn, he stirred and reached for her. It took him a moment to realize that the space next to him was empty. Opening his eyes, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked around in the growing brightness. She stood at the window, a shawl drawn over her shoulders, looking out to sea.
“Teah?”
Her head tilted a fraction, but she didn’t turn toward him. “I’ve been thinking, Mateo.”
“Yes?”
“Ab
out the art, and whether I can give it to you,” she said slowly. “I have been wondering whether perhaps it is too much for me. Too much for any human to endure, really. It could be that I am the last, you know, and perhaps there should be no others to bear it.” Her hand dropped to trace the smooth edge of a shell on the windowsill which glinted in the first rays of the sun. He remembered she had said the night before that Rano had given it to her. “And then I think of how Death is a—presence for me,” she continued, her voice low and hesitant. “It always waits, with a calmness that has become almost a part of myself. I can try to ignore it, but I can never forget.”
She turned toward him and studied his face. “Do you truly want this, then?”
“I do. I want it more than anything.”
She nodded. Quietly, she went over to the wall, picked up three ghotos, and laid them on the floor in a triangle. She knelt down on one and held out her hand to him. “Come, then.”
Puzzled, he got up and came over to kneel beside her. “Who is the third ghoto for?”
“Shh. Take my hand.” As he covered her fingers with his, she went on gently, “The third ghoto is for Death, our mutual master, and the master of all mortal beings. If Death accepts you as my apprentice, then there is one death, and one death only that you will see now: mine. And when I am gone, and you take the Oath, you will then see your own death, as well as those of all other people.” She took a deep breath. “As your teacher, I must promise to teach you faithfully as I have been taught, how to counsel and comfort the dying and their kin. Will you promise in return to be a willing student, to listen and to open your heart to what I have to teach you?”
“I will.”
“Are you willing to be my rhyena’v’rae, to ease and comfort me when my time of death draws near?”
“I am willing.”
“And when my passage into shadows awakens the art of the rhyena’v’raien in you,” she said, her voice low, “will you then be willing to take the Oath—and bear the certain knowledge of the time of your own death?”
He drew a deep breath and held her gaze steadily. “I am willing.”
She turned to the third ghoto. “Take him then as Your own. Let him see my mortality.”
They waited in silence. As he listened to her quiet breathing beside him, he felt something else, hovering on the edges of his perception. Holding his breath, he tried to concentrate as waves of dizziness slowly washed into darkness. It felt like a tangible cool twilight, like an impossibly fine veil eddying toward him on unseen currents. He recoiled, but at the last instant it swerved, dropping weightlessly over Teah instead.
With some newly awakened sense, he felt it coil and tighten languorously around her like the arms of a lover, sinking into her flesh. His hand shook in hers as he looked at her and knew. From this day forward, every time he saw her, he would see her death, hovering before him. Even as he felt her fingers pulsing with warm blood, he could anticipate the feeling of her spirit slipping away. He could see himself holding her, weeping, struggling to ease the pain and smooth her passage into shadows. He knew then how dear she would become to him, and that there would be nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing he could do to turn it away. For the first time, he understood the exquisite pain of the rhyena’v’raien—and with it, all their power.
Teah’s gaze met his with an expression of pity, and he saw his own pain mirrored there. “I know. Believe me, Mateo, I know. I saw it, too, the day I bound myself to my own master.” She pressed his fingers with hers. “Do you understand how much I need you now? You see, without you as my apprentice, I would be alone when my time comes, with no one to ease me. Will you do that for me?”
“Yes.” He took a ragged breath and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Yes, Teah, I will.”
She smiled. “It is best to begin at once, then. You will have much to learn.”
<
* * * *
Lake Agassiz
JACK McDEVITT
T
HERE WAS A GHOST in Fort Moxie.
Lasker stood beneath a quarter moon, atop the western ridge of the Turtle Mountains, and stared east across the black prairie. Two rings of light, a lesser and a greater, almost touching, floated in the dark, like distant galaxies. The border station and the town.
He seldom went there. A retirement party maybe, for a close friend. Or a funeral. And that was about it.
After all these years, he still feared the place.
The night smelled of oncoming winter. A cold wind chopped across the ridge and bit down on him. Lasker turned back toward the electric lights he’d strung over the work area.
“If that ain’t strange,” said Will, wiping his nose. Midautumn was a bad time for him.
Lasker had held this land out through the last planting season and intended to put wheat in this spring. “What’s that, Will?” he asked, Fort Moxie fading.
“We got some grass growing here. Look at this.” He pointed at a few stalks. Summer green.
“It’s always been good right here,” Lasker said, remembering the potatoes of the last few seasons. “For some reason—”
The wind shook the light bulbs. Down at the bottom of the slope he could see movement in the kitchen. Ginny. She knew how he felt about Fort Moxie, didn’t know why. God knew what she thought. She’d asked questions for a while, sensed the gulf that lay between them, and let it go.
“Deep enough, Dad?”
Lasker peered into the ditch. “A little more,” he said. “Got to get the pipes far enough down where the cold doesn’t affect ‘em.”
They were putting in a system to allow them to pump water uphill from the well. “Be a lot easier next year,” said Will, pushing his spade into the ground. He sneezed, and reached for a handkerchief. Sneezed again.
“Maybe you should go back to the house,” said Lasker.
The boy grinned. “I’m fine.”
Lasker admired the kid. He refused to give in to the allergies that afflicted him every October. Wouldn’t admit there was a problem.
Five minutes later, down about a foot, Will’s spade struck something solid.
It wasn’t a rock. The thing looked like a shark’s fin caught in the act of diving into the rich black North Dakota loam.
“What is it?” Will asked, kneeling, brushing the soil away with gloved fingers. It was bright red, smooth. Hard.
Lasker grunted. “Looks like plastic,” he said, grabbing hold and pulling. It didn’t give.
He stood back, and Will hit it with the spade.
They tried digging around it, under it. The thing was a flared triangle, roughly ten inches on a side, paper thin. “It’s attached to something,” said Will, trying to widen the ditch. “A post, I think.”
Lasker saw the house door open. A small shadow skipped out and started up the hill. Jerry. “That’ll be dinner,” he told Will.
His son was working under the fin now. The post was also red, and angled down at about fifty degrees. It appeared to be made of the same material. He wedged his spade under it, and lifted. Lasker lent his weight. It showed some give, but didn’t come loose. They fell over one another, gave it up for the night, and stumbled laughing down the hill.
* * * *
The Turtle Mountains, behind which Lasker’s sun set each evening, were really little more than a line of low hills. They constituted the only high ground as far as one could see in any direction. Ten thousand years ago, they had formed the western shore of Lake Agassiz, a vast inland sea, larger than the modern Great Lakes combined. Substantial portions of the eastern Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan had been beneath blue water then. The lake had lasted only a thousand years, an eyeblink by geological standards, draining off when the glacier blocking its northern side retreated.
Occasionally, when he was a boy, Lasker’s father had flown with him over the Red River Valley, pointing out the ancient coastline. The idea of a lost sea fascinated them both. Long gone, his father was fond of saying
, but it influences everything we are. Lasker wondered about the remark at the time, but he came to understand that Dakota wealth grew out of former lake bottom, that the texture of the Red River Valley itself had been dictated by Agassiz.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 20