The Alchemists

by Geary Gravel

  "A reading," she said. "If you're determined to go, you'll at least let me do a reading. There are so many things that might happen—ah!" She placed a small silk-wrapped package on the blotter, pushing the message slip from Gammelstad to one side with a tsk of disapproval. "These cards," she murmured, untying a small cord and folding back the cloth with great care, "these very cards belonged to your several-times-over great grandmother, who was a blood cousin of the Founder himself and spent a quarter of her life on the First World before the Settling." She caressed the top card with a reverent fingertip.

  Raille looked with distaste at the stack of yellowed rectangles resting on the keepweave. A tiny muscle tugged at the corner of her mouth and she said softly, "Please, Mother, I'd rather you didn't."

  Her mother had begun to shuffle the deck slowly, deliberately. "Nonsense," she said coldly. She dealt the cards swiftly, and Raille shivered as the pattern completed itself. The Alchemist. Queen of the Cups. Queen of the Staves. Death. She looked away. Her mother leaned forward expectantly, wetting her lips. "The cards never lie, you know."

  / know, Raille thought, / know, I know. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed the flock of golden-winged birds as they lifted from the orchard and wheeled gracefully toward the east. She watched them intently.

  "How very odd," her mother murmured.

  Half an hour later Raille was walking through the great front door and down the wide marble steps. "Come to me before you leave," her mother had called from the half-completed reading, still seated at the desk as if trapped there by the unfinished future. "Come to me and we'll talk."

  She found her grandfather in the lemon orchard, working with his hoe at the base of one of the larger trees. The soil was rich and dark where he had already dug; she felt it cool and solid beneath her bare feet. After watching the slow, patient patterns of his work for several moments she leaned forward and tapped his arm. A bright gold tooth gleamed in the smile above his white beard. He set aside the hoe to free his hands for conversation, leaning it against the trunk of the tree.

  "Good morning, my-Raille," he said with a flick of calloused hands. Raille thought of her mother's soft white fingers making meaningless patterns in the bittersweet and firestem. "Have you seen your mother?" he continued, the signs flowing clear and liquid from his hands in concert with the soft, roughened voice.

  She nodded, calmed as always by the gentle movements of his speech. "In the library," she signed. "She wanted to read the cards, but I wouldn't let her finish."

  Her grandfather shook his head, smiling. "Obstinate child," he signed with a click of his tongue. "Are you going?"

  "Yes, yes, yes!" Her fingers swept the air like moths. "And I'll bring you back a plant, a strange one from Belthannis!"

  He smiled again, and the light sparkled in the gold tooth. "Just you come back. Just bring yourself back."

  "Oh, I will, I will! I'll be back before next Coldmonth.

  You'll never even notice I've been gone." She stretched up on her toes in delight. "Grandfather," she asked suddenly, dropping down on her heels, "what is it like out there? You were Out once."

  "A long time ago, that was. Before my hearing had gone completely. Hard to communicate if I went out now. Hasn't been much deafness since the Others came and went."

  "Do they all speak Inter? I'm halfway fluent in that. Or will I have to learn more new languages? I don't have the time!"

  He inclined his head toward the base of the tree and tugged at his beard. "You'll be working with scientists, I imagine, educated people, and all those from the Centermost worlds speak Inter anyway," he told her. "The children, they learn it from a machine in most places now."

  "What about the people themselves?" Raille asked. "What are they like when you're among them?"

  "Like a million different things. The Community is large, large." The old man shrugged. "One thing is: they don't have a great affection for the dear folk of Weldon."

  Raille's enthusiasm sagged abruptly. "What do you mean? Why? What have we ever done to—"

  His hands interrupted her. "It's more what we haven't done. Do you know how many of the other human-settled worlds don't belong to the Community? Two, maybe three? Our blue jewel has been a private world since the earliest days of the Wave of Expansion."

  "But surely that's no reason to hate us."

  "Those that dislike us—I did not say 'hate'—do so because we are different, in a way that is outside their own differences. Partly because we refused to be poured into their Community stewpot. Partly because we never worshiped the Others, nor took much notice of them at all. And because we sent back their longevity drugs and chose death over life, as did few others, chance over security. Although"—he leaned back, pressing his shoulder against the tree trunk—"some say death was the easier choice, the greater security, and immortality the frightening prospect."

  "But the Darkjumpers still come, from time to time." Her fingers stumbled over a new thought. "I have to take passage on a Darkjumper to Belthannis," she said wonderingly. "I have

  to pass through the Dark and Empty."

  "That would seem to be the best way to get there. Did you have them send your yes-note to Lekkole?"

  "Yes, this morning." Her signs were clumsy; she was trying to picture the voyage through space and nonspace.

  Her grandfather shook his head, watching her with a smile.

  "No chance to back out now, then. They've probably already rerouted a passenger ship or two to come pick you up."

  "Back out?" Her vision faded. "I don't want to back out— oh, Paba, can you imagine it? A ship coming here, for me?" She squeezed the dirt between her toes and closed her eyes, watching the great starship settle ponderously, delicately, on the single landing stage at Gammelstad. "I wonder if I'll be the first one there."

  Her grandfather shook his head and picked up his hoe, returning to work at the base of the tree. Above them, a second flock of birds, rust-colored with brown-barred wings, had appeared out of the west and begun to circle lazily over the orchard.

  In the sixth year of his life, somewhat later than was common for a novice of his classification, he had stopped using his audible voice.

  He had taken up residence at this time in the central barracks at Delphys, largest of the three Cities of Maribon. There were gathered the five levels of communicants: the novices, beginners like himself, just embarking on the mastery of shellscan and self-delineation, or already venturing into the twin realms of delve and affect; the rarely glimpsed anchorites, living in their careful seclusion, coded each to his bondsman and shuttered from outside contacts; the adepts, perfected and certain, walking the dim corridors wrapped in stet like a cloak of cold flame; the imagoes, less numerous than the rest, oblique of bearing and unmistakable in their garments of deepest jet and purest white; and the noumena, mind-patterns of deceased communicants carried in the brain of adept or imago, no less

  real for their incorporeality than the other four strata.

  He had been inquisitive for a short time, midway through his fifth year at Delphys, undertaking lengthy journeys of exploration and indulging in periods of solitary pondering deemed unsuitable for a rising communicant. On one such excursion, while prowling through a long, shadowed corridor not meant for those of his slight attainment, he had encountered a tall, striding imago, oblivious of the boy's presence and cloaked in protective motes, the broad white forehead emblazoned with the irresistible symbols of the rorshock,

  He had sunk to his knees as the other passed .and remained there in the dim hallway for several days in a barely living state, his thin body twitching, his mind wheeling obediently about the commanding pattern.

  They found him before he starved and took him to a lesser adept who removed the image of the symbol and performed a series of adjustments upon his young mind to rid him of his lingering handicap. The adjustments involved illustrating the ways of gaining mastery over those motes within him which were responsible for initiating the inquisitive impulse.
Once he could understand the urge, it was believed, he could also manipulate it.

  The power to engender an emotion in his own mind or in the mind of another, and the concomitant ability to banish it with a twist of his will, shattered utterly emotion's dominion over him. Thereafter he progressed through the novitiate stages at an accelerated rate, attaining anchorite status at the age of sixteen and entering seclusion with his bondsman, a slight young touch-woman from the eastern settlements, for a period of eighteen months.

  He emerged an adept of the first reach, well acquainted with stet, his days devoted to exercises of perception and control, his evenings given to meditation upon selections from the ancient book of wisdom known as the Eng Barata.

  Six months of training and contemplation of the Eng were ended for the young man by a summons from an adept. He was informed that he would shortly be implanted with a noumenon, the mental configuration of a deceased communicant, with which his own mind would thenceforth share the habitation

  of his brain. Then there had been a brief meeting with an aged imago who told him of his upcoming journey to another world.

  Instructions concerning the performance of his mission there were spare and enigmatic: Follow the guidance of the Eng Barata. Allow necessary actions to reveal themselves in their own time, and fulfill the stet of each moment.

  When he sensed the interview was at an end and turned to leave the room, the imago halted him with a small gesture.

  A sheet of micapaper lay squarely on the basalt table. At the old one's nod, he stepped forward and took it up into his hands, gazing at the row of precise phonetic characters that divided the paper like a column of marching insects.

  "Chaaasssmaaannn," he said in a voice thick and grating from twelve years' disuse. "Chassman."

  The imago signified acceptance, an end to the audience. By the time he had moved to the door her eyes were closed and she had retreated into meditation upon stet.

  Chassman returned to his bare cell and began to practice speaking. For two-thirds of his life he had used his voice less than a dozen times, at the infrequent drills, when with the others he said Aaaaaaa and Ooooooo and Rrrrrrr so that his vocal cords would not atrophy.

  He never asked whether the word Chassman had been his own original name when he was a child in a touch-man village before his selection as a proto-communicant, or whether it was the name of the noumenon he now bore, or whether it was a new word altogether, manufactured moments earlier, perhaps, because the sounds had impressed some adept as being particularly stet.

  4

  It was a traditional Hut: candle wood and sculplate, white stone, battleglass and plax, all blurred and bent at the edges by a high-effect weathershield. Lights were beginning to glow dimly through the tinted windows as Emrys and his followers grouped around the doorway. When Emrys touched his thumb to a bit of ornamental scrollwork they heard a faint chime,

  then the thickly paneled door slid open with a muted hiss. When they were all inside, a voice spoke from the shadows above their heads.

  "Welcome back, Emrys. I trust your companions arrived with a minimum of discomfort. Did you have a pleasant walk in the night air?"

  Emrys glanced at the ceiling with a wry smile. "Yes, thank you, Hut, quite pleasant. I must go to my room for a minute. Would you show my friends around?" He nodded to the others, then disappeared behind a room divider in the guise of a continuous veil of cool rain that evaporated centimeters above the carpeted floor. The walls of the foyer were of natural stoneling, the so-called living rock of World Obun, terraced with ivy and niched with clumps of pterodendron.

  "Certainly, Emrys." The voice was calm and beautiful, an androgynous mixture of crystal whisper, golden hum, and high silver flute. "Welcome, travelers! Allow me to introduce myself: I am your habitable University terminal, identification code available upon request, a machine intelligence placed here to provide and to serve for the duration of your stay."

  "You're one of the new volitional units, aren't you?" The dark-bearded man was inspecting the pterodendron, which trembled and flexed slightly as he touched it. "I'd heard that was a prototype model, not yet in use."

  "Semivolitional," the voice corrected gently. "But you are quite right. I am one of only six of my level currently in operation.

  "You must excuse Emrys," it added after a moment. "He sometimes suffers from frightful headaches. Nervous tension, mainly—he worries too much. And now, if you would walk up the ramp to your immediate right, please."

  The interior of the Hut was furnished much like the main salons of a Community Darkjumper: in the Grand Eclectic mode, incorporating influences from many cultures, with heavy ornate sofas clustered around shifting erotic flame sculptures and a pearl-gray bain-sense in the Library. The rooms seemed open and sprawling to the untrained eye; persons versed in the architechnical sciences would have become gradually aware of a scrupulous conservation of space. Outside, the Hut was a hazy-edged dwelling reminiscent of the pre-Commingling pe-

  nod on New World, executed in great blocks of beige, black, and earth-color. Inside, it was a comfortable retreat, a museum, a laboratory, and a self-sustaining life-support system, all under the meticulous guidance of a sophisticated machine mind linked via Screen to the great datapools on University.

  Manufactured by the skilled crafters and master architechs of a planet called Bluehorn, the Hut came as a completely preseeded unit, its intellect in place from the early stages of composition to ensure proper integration and to encourage the development of an ambience. Most Huts could adapt themselves to a wide range of environments, with a standard month the usual span from installation to optimum performance. When Emrys had witnessed the initial implantation of the Hut on his second visit to Belthannis, he had found it to be a four-room shelter far too preoccupied with its own growth to engage in more than perfunctory conversation. In the months that followed he had watched it mature as both the habitation and the companion-servant it was designed to be.

  "And this is our Music Nook. Yes, you certainly may touch that: it's a genuine baby grand, a very ancient kind of musical instrument now reproduced exclusively on Alba Mundus. I do hope some of you like to create or experience music. There are flame-sculpting materials in that cabinet, and the wall with the mural becomes an old-fashioned kinetic-image screen when you tap the elbow of the largest nude. No, the purple one. That's it.

  "We have an extensive library of reconstructed sound-and-visual presentations from the back-before, including the Antique Belle et la Bete and several versions of the highly influential pre-Expansionist Cielo Argenta. There is also a set of military training films from the Collapse on Melkior if anyone is really interested in classics.

  "The Orrery is at the end of this corridor—it's marked with a blue glass oval on the floor—and the Garden of Earth is just beyond that silk hanging. I'm quite pleased with the way it's turned out; you can smell the pine from here, I believe."

  Through irised doorways and up and down tightly spiraled staircases, over shadowed colorplays dancing in panels of transparent flooring that chimed intricate melodies when trod upon, and along halls hung with textures, clouded with mists, and

  scented with aromas from a dozen different worlds, the voice of the Hut led them through its chambered complexity, seeming always to emanate from a point slightly above and in front of them.

  "And this is the very center, our Hearth Room," it said at last, leading them through an archway flanked by fierce stone lions. The chamber was large and circular, domed, so that it resembled half a sphere. A golden dragon in the Vegan style curled in rich mosaic menace on the floor, and portraits in oil and brass peered down from the incurving wall, each one precisely placed so that all appeared to gaze at the immense, round table set in the center of the golden dragon's tiled lair. The rest of the room had been artfully organized through the use of furniture and decorative objects to form sequestered areas of various shapes and sizes, some large and open enough to encourage social interaction, ot
hers of a more solitary, contemplative design.

  The men and women wandered about the room with languid interest, pressing a grim statuette here, caressing a length of polished wood there, until, as if by common consent, all began to drift inward along the dragon's glittering spine, and they found themselves face to face around the massive table.

  "There's no hearth," a dark, slender woman said with a shake of her hairless skull. "There never is."

  "What's hearth?" murmured the young man with his arm around her shoulders.

  "It's a pity, I know," the Hut commented. "An incongruity, a definite flaw in the basic concept." There was a pause where a person might have sighed. "I've tried my best to give it a sense of warmth, nonetheless, albeit only spiritual. That table is real oke from Prinnetwar, and fully automatic. And the blue circle just to the left of the Picasso hosts the Screen which is our link to civilization. It may be employed for local observations, and is also capable of bringing in the Net clear as a bell."

  "Oh please," said the woman with the white-gold hair and butterfly dress, "couldn't we limit its use to planetary observations? I was hoping the Net wouldn't have to follow us this far out."

  There was a trace of bitterness in her voice, a childlike

  . quality to her movements. The woman had a serene and fragile beauty that was highlighted by the pale blue tulip embossed on one cheek. Her true age was impossible to determine, though careful noia, the analysis of gestures and expressions to determine chronological age, would have argued for considerably more than the nineteen or twenty years immediately evident in the delicate features. The upper limits of Ember, the Elyin longevity drug, had yet to be established.

  "Unofficially, my dear Person Scholar, I'm in total agreement," the Hut said in a confidential tone. "However, the Laws are quite specific in requiring that the avenues of communication be kept open for those who wish to utilize them."

  "So the old Laws operate on Belthannis Autumnworld, aussiT' the bald woman remarked. "Comforting. With Laws and the Net, this might as well be home. Nicht wahr, machine?"