"You're very beautiful."
Leelson was standing behind her, staring at her, looking wistful. Leelson never looked wistful!
"You used to say so," she said, swallowing deeply as she grabbed up the sodden robes and draped them around her shoulders, trying to put revelation and seduction both aside. She didn't want to talk, not about the two of them, not about Leely, not about anything.
Fastigats paid no attention to that! With them, nothing could remain unsaid, undefined, unfulfilled. "You really think Bernesohn Famber designed … that?" He gestured toward the splashing child. "Why isn't he intelligent?"
His expression was very much like Limia's had been. Stubborn. Dismissive. Lutha swallowed again and said stubbornly, "We don't know that he isn't."
It rang false, even to her. Why not say it? Why not get it over with?
"It's because Bernesohn had the same expectations as your mother, Leelson! He expected you to beget with a woman from Fastiga, not some … outsider! If you'd had a Fastigat woman, Leely would have been all right." The bitterness boiled to the surface, shaming her. She couldn't control it. It wasn't fair. None of it.
He ignored her tone. "I wonder if Tospia knew? When she left here, when she had the twins, Tospiann and Paniwar, I wonder if she knew one or both of them had been designed by Bernesohn."
"If they were, he forgot to plan on redundancy. Twin children, one of whom—was it your great-grandmama?—had only one child. And your grandpa, and your father."
He nodded. "It's true Great-grandmother Tospiann had only one child, but Paniwar had an acknowledged son and a number of daughters, in addition to at least one … escapade."
"Improper fathering," she said, quoting the two dowagers in Fastiga.
He made a rueful face. "An early dalliance with a member of a traveling troupe. On one of the Nantask planets. He was little more than a boy at the time, and she was twice his age." He was watching Lutha closely, digging at her.
Deja vu. She herself had told this story, as Leelson had told it to her before. She wanted to change the subject, but he wouldn't let her.
"Her name was Dasalum," he said. "She was a celebrity, a superb actress. It was her fault Paniwar committed improper fathering. She went off in a temper and the Fambers never did find out what happened to the child." He watched me, waiting.
A long silence. She could feel him, probing, probing. He'd brought this up for a reason. She resisted, resisted, then cracked, letting in the light. Her revelation hadn't gone far enough. And she couldn't lie to him. He'd know if she did.
She said, "In Nantaskan, her name was D'ahslum T'bir, which means bonetree. Skeleton." She looked at her hand, surprised. All on its own it was drawing a lineage chart in the sand.
"And?" asked Leelson.
"She bore a daughter whose name was Nitha Bonetree."
"How do you know?"
"I didn't until just now. But it's the only thing that makes sense." Lutha looked away, willing him to let it alone, willing him to stop!
He wouldn't stop. "And why is that?"
"Because Nitha Bonetree was my great-grandmother."
He didn't change expressions. She had told him all about her family when they were together. In the last little while he'd figured everything out, everything she hadn't put together until now. She looked down at the chart she'd drawn:
She didn't add Leely's name. He was out there splashing, making bright fountains. The sun bulged on the sea, a fire blister, scarlet veins bleeding along the horizon. The shaggies reeled in fish, flapping silhouettes against the glow. She wanted to scream, yell, throw things, but the moment was too precarious. Not as she had thought. Not as she had thought at all.
"Now we know how Bernesohn managed to do it," Leelson said at last. "That's why he fathered twins. On that old chip we played, he didn't mean 'rejoinder' in a legal sense. He meant 'rejoindure.' Rejoindure of his lineage. Half the virus in one line, half in the other. A virus made from Kachis, from Ularian life. One it would have no antibodies against."
What could she say? What was there to say?
He stared at the dying sun. "Tospia must have known! She was supposed to tell the twins. 'Daddy invented a weapon, children. Daddy didn't want to lock it away in a laboratory somewhere, where it might be lost or forgotten or misused—' "
"Why lost or misused, necessarily?"
"In Bernesohn's time, the government was … "
"Mostly non-Fastigat," she supplied bitterly. "Your great-grand-pop didn't trust us ordinary people."
Leelson went on as though she hadn't spoken. "Actually, what he did makes a certain kind of sense. There were still things he needed to find out on Dinadh. He knew he might be killed. He had to provide for that eventuality. He didn't know what the virus would do to its host. He had no way to test it. So he put half in one zygote, half in the other, depending on Tospia's pride in her posterity to keep the twins well guarded and protected. If he wasn't killed, he'd be back on Central long before the twins grew to reproductive age. If he didn't get back, he knew the twins wouldn't reproduce with one another! We don't even reproduce with first cousins very often, so it would be at least two generations before the virus could be reunited. Perhaps Bernesohn had learned enough about Tahs-uppi to know they'd be needed by then …
"Tospia must have known. I wonder who forgot to tell whom?"
Lutha buried her face in her hands. Had Tospia really known? Had Nitha Bonetree known? Had Lucca Pineapple, the religious nut, Lutha's grandma, had she known? Had Mama Jibia known? Unlikely in the extreme. Lutha's mother hadn't known, and neither had Lutha. Five generations back to Paniwar Famber, and nobody had known.
"How did the strain stay pure?" she asked from a dry throat. "It would have been diluted."
"Not if it were carried quiescent in the reproductive cells. A virus is just a machine for making more viruses. We're still carrying around viral fragments from prehistoric times. They merely inhabit, reproducing themselves from generation to generation but not … doing anything."
"Until it met up with its other half," she murmured. "But there's only two in my family, Yma and me. And there's only one of you. Surely that was depending a great deal upon fate."
This line of thought didn't delight him, obviously. He scowled. "Bernesohn assumed there'd be lots of descendants from both sides, well spread out among the rest of humanity. Bernesohn himself was prolific. He had half a dozen Fastigat mates and children by all of them; he'd have expected the twins to produce a horde."
"But that didn't happen. There was only you and me. Our meeting was accidental. No one planned it. Almost too neat, Leelson!"
"Too neat to be believed, Lutha. Bernesohn no doubt built in some kind of attractant. Something that would gain effectiveness in each generation." He frowned at the sea. Dirty. Unhappy.
"You're filthy," she suggested, wanting desperately to be let alone. "Why don't you at least wash yourself!"
He wandered off toward the water and began stripping off his clothes. She stared into the sunset, trying not to think of anything at all. Until now she'd regarded their affair, Leelson's and hers, as the summit of her life, the single most exciting and marvelous thing she had experienced. From the day he'd come to her door, she'd kept a journal, just to memorialize the wonder of it, so the episodes would never fade, never dwindle. Since he'd left, night after night, she'd reread it, reliving their time together. Certain expressions, certain words, certain actions. They'd been made for each other, she had told herself.
Yes. Well. So they had. Not quite as she had imagined. It had not been the inscrutable stars that had brought them together. Instead they'd responded to one another like any two moths or frogs or beetles. Leelson was right: Bernesohn had made sure of bringing his great-grandchildren together. He'd built in some attractant. Perhaps a pheromone, growing more potent with each generation, some chemical lure that wafted for great distances, bringing them both to that library. A time bomb in their reproductive cells, set to go off!
; How dared Bernesohn Famber do such a thing!
"Don't be angry with him," said Leelson, standing naked at the water's edge, following her thoughts as though she had spoken them aloud.
"Leave me alone, Leelson."
"Think of Saluez's face, Lutha. Look at your wrist. Bernesohn was trying to save the human race." He entered the water, scooping it over his shoulders and body in ruby showers, watching her all the while.
She looked at her wrist. Healed, of course, By Leely, her son, their son, no one's son. Leelson was right. Bernesohn's task, as he'd seen it, was to save the human race. To create a magic bullet that would ricochet around among humanity. One that would kill off the enemy and heal the afflicted at the same time. Or perhaps the healing power was simply a side effect. Serendipity.
Tospia probably had known. Maybe Paniwar and Tospiann had been told, as soon as they were old enough to understand it. Which was probably after Paniwar had fathered her great-grandma. "You can't screw around like this," his mother had no doubt said. "You're too important. You carry the secret weapon. You're the possessor of our heritage, our survival."
"Don't romanticize either," Leelson cautioned her, standing tall as he stripped the water from his golden head.
She could barely keep from screaming at him. "Please, Leelson. We've done our genetic duty. Now can't we at least leave one another alone." It took all her willpower not to weep hysterically.
"I don't think he invented a way to turn it off," he said helplessly, returning to her with arms open.
She tried not to respond. Oh, she tried, but it didn't work. Leelson was right, of course. Bernesohn had made them for one another, and he hadn't included a way to shut it off.
They had only just lain down that night, all too weary to extend the evening beyond the bare necessities of food and shaking out the blankets, when they came up off the floor as though alerted by some bone-deep klaxon.
Lutha felt a surge of adrenaline, then that stopped-up-ears feeling she sometimes got when swimming, that muffled, gurgling-in-one's-head effect. She yawned widely, momentarily surprised to see the others yawning too. Obviously, it had affected them all. Snark had her fingers in her ears; Mitigan was gaping like a fish; they all looked apologetically at one another as they tried to clear a way for sound that should be there but was not. The sea was a shush, and the wind a hush, and the birds a shrill tee-tee-tee, all flat, muffled, without resonance.
"It's happening again," mouthed Snark, grasping Lutha by the shoulder. "Like the night you first came!"
Flinching at the strength of her grip, Lutha nodded. It was very much like what had happened before, only more so. There was a panicky breathlessness along with the soundlessness. They gathered around Saluez's recumbent form while the effect went on, still with no discernible cause. Mitigan's hands were busy with his weapons, which rather increased their apprehension.
Far off, a muted thunder. Though Lutha considered it an odd-sounding thunder, it was more like thunder than it was like an avalanche or a volcano. She shared significant looks with the others, looks meaning more or less, "Did you hear what I heard?" mouthing the word "Thunder?" following this with agreeable nods. Yes. Thunder.
None of them really believed it. First Leelson grimaced, then the others, for it hadn't been thunder and they all knew it. Through the cracks among the stones the stars shone clearly in an unclouded sky.
Again the stones around them shuddered, the soil beneath them trembled. This pulse repeated at long intervals, two, three, four, five times. Then nothing. Still the flat sound, the muted uncanniness, the breathlessness. Saluez gasped, her eyes still closed. Lutha felt as she had at the Nodders: terrified of something without knowing what. As the Nodders had been unnatural, so this was unnatural.
"At his feet the mountains skip," whispered Saluez. "At his step the worlds tremble. See him treading down the star trails, the Gracious One, potent and victorious." Tears were running beside her nose, at the corners of her mouth, dripping from her jaw. Lutha apprehended her words clearly, though she had no sensation of hearing her.
"What?" breathed the ex-king, falling to his knees beside Saluez.
"A songfather hymn," whispered Snark, her hand on Jiacare's shoulder, her eyes fixed on the stone above them. "From Dinadh."
Songfather hymn or not, Lutha couldn't stop the words from repeating in her mind, over and over. At his feet the mountains skip. As on a screen, the letters moved right to left, then started over as her body tensed in rhythm with the thudding of those feet. As her lungs gasped for air, so her ears gasped for something to hear, inventing sounds where there were none, creating them, labeling them, recognizing them though she had never sensed them before:
Touch of hooved feet upon mountains, crack of horn upon horn, rasp of battle breath, slow drumbeat of heart and sinew, final bellow of supremacy. Pad of soft toes through jungles, herb scent slipping between parted jaws to flow across the tongue, night-tasting, prey-finding, huff of soft nostrils flared, whisker tips tracing the night, spotted hide sleeking like silk among the grasses, low rumble in the throat like a bass string bowed, ominous, peremptory. Shuffle of nailed feet below mighty legs, thewed as a tree grown up with vines, billowed dust blown over hides thick as boards, ears wide as doors, massive movers, a trumpet call across tree-bowered stone-speckled savannas. Water surging along slick hides, flick of fins, eyes in the depth turned upward toward liquid-trembling gray light. Beaks cleaving air, chill along the quills, knife edge of wind-buffeting wing, steel grip of talons, amber-slitted horizon-compassing eye.
Blood on the stone. Whether from the deep or the height, whether from mountain or jungle, whether from claw or talon, beak or fang, blood on the stone, rising up to live again. The very soundlessness was their sound—its sound—and all the other senses as well. They stretched, reaching for being. In silence, sound. In darkness, sight. In nothingness, touch.
The sacrifice, it says. All living is by sacrifice. For one creature to live, another one must die. What will you give me? Where is mine?
It speaks to her! It says: Oh, feel how you have unvoiced us. See how you have cut us down. Hear our silent cries! Our worlds were full of the murmur and clatter of being, now listen to the silence we inhabit, all our spirits, still!
"Lutha?" Leelson, holding out his hand.
"Nothing," she said in a voice she didn't recognize as her own. "It's nothing."
What was it? Not nothing. What were these visions? Things she had seen as a child in sensurround? Fairy tales? Stories of olden times? Creatures out of dream? Creatures come out of time?
Silence, silence, silence, even while the voice spoke, saying: So you may remember, we give you silence. Where we should be, but are not, there is silence.
What was this listening? Attenuated, the sense stretching itself outward, begging for something to fill it? Feeling one's own eyes rattling in their sockets, twitching every way, seeking an out, an escape. Why were they here, shielded from the sky? Why was this stone all around them? Why were they not there, at the sea's edge, crawling out of that salty womb onto the shore in company with the creatures of their common birth?
"Lutha!"
"Nothing," she cried again.
He shook her. "Lutha."
Lutha saw him then. Felt his violence transmitted to her own body as he ragged her to and fro, not gently.
"Leelson!" Urgently she called him, from great distance.
"Shhh," he replied, eyes suddenly aware of some outside presence as he leaned against her, pressing her equally into himself and into the stone.
All of them were pressed into the stones, clinging to them, even Saluez, edging toward the crevices and cracks they'd made their own. A stupid place to choose when skies came down. As in a dream, they saw all the great stone slabs falling, obdurate shadows piercing reverie to become horrible reality, crushing them before they knew they were in danger. Little nutkins in the mighty vise of what? And yet, what other choice? They could be beneath the stone or beneath the sky, the
vengeful sky, hearing that quiet!
"Listen," Lutha whispered.
"No," said Mitigan in a horrified voice.
"Don't," cried Saluez. "Don't listen."
They were children afraid of ghosts, pulling up the blanket to cover their eyes, pulling themselves into the stone and huddling there. Even Leelson! Even Mitigan! Where is your courage, Fastigat? Where is your honor, Asenagi? Why are you huddled with the rest while this silence goes on and on and on.
Slither of scales upon stone; scutter of hairy legs, silk filament trailing the wind; hear in the silence what is not there. Cry, cry, cry, a bird who hungers; cry, cry, cry, a bird seeking her young, who will never be again. All is desert, all is dry, all is dead and gone, not even a memory. All that is left is a set of symbols, a list of bases, a pattern stored away. The machine knows them as the machine knows everything, dryly, without blood or breath, but humans do not know them at all!
Leely came drowsily naked out of some crack or crevice where he'd been sleeping, cast them a sidelong look, and went past them toward a tilted arch of starlit stone, a window onto the night, where he stood waving his hands.
Lutha didn't move. Lutha was lost among the animals. Oh, the colors of them. Oh, the sounds they make. The eyes of them, bright and quick and full of accusation. Who was Leely in the face of this … this!
Too battered by sensation even to be curious, she watched open-mouthed as he turned, again, again, wearing his Leely face, swaying and waving, a familiar and aimless activity. Then his face took on a new expression. Not his usual quiet satisfaction. Not his hungry look or his chilly look or his sleepy look. Not any expression she had seen before. This was something else. A kind of wakefulness.
He opened his mouth very wide, his tongue quivering in the midst of that round, red hole, deep as an abyss his throat. He screamed a sound that went endlessly out into the world. Not any sound they had ever heard him make before. Not a sound any child should be capable of making, a sound that fled unmuted across the moorlands like the shadow of a cloud, sweeping across the world, south, away: a trumpet, a roar, a shriek, a cry, a whistle, a bellow, a blast … They could almost watch it go!
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