by Geary Gravel
Thirty seconds later the fish had righted itself, moving its fins sluggishly. Gills opened and closed in a precise rhythm; large red-rimmed eyes regarded the world with mild reproach.
Amazed, Raille extended a tentative finger.
"Don't, please," Choss said. "You'd break the field. If the ambient charge is dissipated he can't breathe."
"I don't understand this," she said. "It was dead."
He shook his head. "Only slightly. A very long time ago, a similar technique kept people alive through Expansion, when they had to use Cold Ships to cross deep space. This variation, which uses the lifeskin membrane, was developed later on New World. It's become a very useful item, and lately Bluehorn's been producing such things in great quantity—we'll most likely be going back to a form of Cold Ship before very long, you know—so this wasn't too expensive."
He made an adjustment, and Symphysodon discus stiffened in its waterless pond, fluttered its gills once or twice, folded the fan-shaped fins, and drifted down to lie on its side a few centimeters above the grid.
Choss waited for the body to grow rigid and the eyes to dull and glaze. Raille noticed that a new envelope glistened around
the fish as Choss placed it back on the pile, choosing at the same time a much smaller fish to release above the grid.
"Betta splendens," he announced with pride when the new fish had begun to revive, directing Raille's attention to the jewel-bright fins and haughty, upturned mouth.
"Here." He produced a small hand mirror from somewhere and nodded toward the sleek little fish.
Raille held the glass close to the field, Choss helping her to position it with a hand at her elbow. The little betta stiffened instantly and began to drift toward its reflection. As it approached, its bright body grew rigid and the long fins and tail extended like trembling turquoise banners. It made a sudden dash at the mirror, gill covers distended, body shaking with rage. Halted by the edge of the field, it danced and circled in front of the glass, a miniature gladiator strutting before the adversary.
"This one is a fish that was originally bred for fighting, in a place called Eyzha on old Earth itself. Two males in the same territory will fight to the death. The ancients wagered on them for sport."
"How horrible," Raille said.
He shrugged. "That was six or seven thousand years ago. We've found different sport since then. Ask March when you meet him." He set aside the glass.
Raille had leaned forward, watching the tiny warrior glide gracefully around the field. "He's lovely, anyway," she said. She waved to the fish with her fingertips, and it wheeled toward her hand, pinpoint eyes staring. She frowned and dropped her hand to her side. Choss looked at her questioningly.
"How did I get here?" she asked.
"You can't remember? Nothing?"
"I remember—pieces of it." She closed her eyes for a few seconds, blinked them open.
"I can see the Darkjumper—inside it, I mean—huge, with its aviary and pinbal and the weightless palisades. I can feel parts of the trip through the Dark and Empty." She shivered. 'Then I can remember leaving the ship above Belthannis, a great green-and-white curve below me, and falling to earth for the first time in a lifeskin packet. You don't know how much nerve that took!
"I landed. I landed and I started walking. It was another
world—my first!—and everything was so beautiful, so many new things. They had shown me a map on the ship, yes? Yes. Red for the clearing where I'd come down, green dots for the path, a blue rectangle for the building, this Hut. It was all projected on the side of the packet, changing as I fell so I'd know where I was."
She paused uncertainly.
"I did start off in the right direction. But then I decided to explore. I didn't take the path. I wanted to feel the land, I couldn't help myself, and there was so much to see." She squinted at the empty wall.
"Then there was something—I was in the field, I think. Bright? Yes, bright all around me. In me. Like a silver ocean, like drowning in it. Like falling into that sky—" She raised a hand to her cheek as if to ward off something threatening, then shook her head slightly and turned back to Choss.
"That's when something important happened, I'm sure." She paused again, waiting for the memory, then shrugged helplessly. "It's gone. I can't make it out."
"Odd. What's the next thing you remember?"
"The room. I woke up in a room like this one, but dark and empty. Down the hall. I got up. I walked along the corridor and found your door and came in here."
"Well, I can fill in a few of the gaps," he said. "We—the other members of the Group and I—we found you outside on our doorstep. So you must have gotten back to the path eventually, else how could you have found us?"
His tone and smile reassured her. He spoke like the kindly Scholars in her lectures from Lekkole, absently stroking his neat beard.
"Walking a new world is bound to be an unsettling experience, you know, and I suppose the small changes in air and gravity didn't help matters. You were asleep, exhausted, when we brought you in. We—they—thought you'd been startled or frightened by something out in the forest. They put you in the bain-sense."
There was a flurry of sound in the corridor, swiftly approaching footsteps behind Raille. Choss moved slightly away from her, a certain wariness coming into his face. He looked past her shoulder to the open door.
"Venga, pedant! II neige dehn venarden."
Raille saw a fantastic creature appear in the doorway, wild colors flashing from her scanty garments. Bald, yet obviously female; sapphire-eyed; clothed quite indecently, if indeed that was clothing, for it seemed to Raille to be moving slowly over the mahogany skin—she halted and stared at Raille, painted-on eyebrows tilting comically in surprise. Her eyes flicked back to Choss.
"It's snowing," she said. "When did you wake up?"
Raille realized after a blank moment that the latter half of the utterance had been directed at her.
"She's been up for almost half an hour," Choss answered, pressing his left thumb against the curve of his forefinger to activate the tiny chronometer on the nail. "We've been looking at my fish. She's a Natural, you know, a biologist."
"Oh?" The sharp blue gaze returned to Raille. "You do speak Inter, don't you? You are the Weldonese?"
"Yes." Raille found her voice. "Raille Weldon of Weldon."
A smile flickered on the brown woman's lips. She seemed to notice Choss again. "Go out and see the snow. That's what I came to tell you. Little Cil was right." She indicated the hallway with a motion of her painted head. "Avaunt! I'll stay with your Natural. We'll have a talk."
Choss hesitated for an instant under the sardonic gaze. He threw Raille a quick glance she could hot interpret, lowered his eyes, and left the room.
"Adjo" Marysu said when he had gone. "And good riddance. What an incredibly dull person." She arched her back and moved her neck sinuously. "So. Little fishes. Bellisima." Raille watched the bald woman approach the desk. Abruptly the blue eyes flew up like flung sapphires to meet her own.
"Chial diy! Am I that grotesque?"
"Forgive me," Raille said. "I didn't mean to stare. It's just—"
"Not what you'd see in the village square on Weldon. You do have villages, I suppose?" The mocking stare held a faint challenge.
"Yes. Yes, of course we do."
"Ja? Bien," Marysu said, then added in smooth, accent-perfect Weldonese: "Vyu se borel tuvyu. Sar proviken mehne,
ne'cert." You're quite comely yourself, she had said. In a provincial way, of course.
Raille was beginning to feel totally lost. How should she respond to this strange performance of insult and mockery? Could she possibly be misinterpreting the whole thing, imposing Weldonese standards on behavior another offworlder might consider completely innocuous?
"How old are you, Raille Weldon?" The bald woman had turned back to the grid, teasing the little fighting fish with a flick of long fingernails.
The question would be considered unp
ardonably rude on Weldon. Courtesy and understanding, Raille recited to herself. She could not help but remember her grandfather's words: They don't have a great affection for the dear folk of Weldon.
She summoned her most impersonal voice. "I will have twenty years in a few months. Twenty of the years of my world, that is. By your Old Basic I would be almost a year younger."
"Tack, tack remmen. And how soon do you expect to die? Non. 'Emigrate,' I should have said. Emgreten. That is the term they use on Weldon, yes?" She was watching the little fish as it circled its world, spreading and shaking its fins at her from time to time in futile rage.
Raille was profoundly shocked. This she could not have misunderstood.
"What do you mean?" she said after a long pause, finding no way to respond to such a monstrous breach of civility.
"Why, I was wondering if it was true." The other lifted her face from the grid, all innocent curiosity. "That they die 'naturally' on Weldon. Sans Ember. Like animals."
Raille's face was burning. "Stop it! You have no right to say such things!"
"Tcha! Pardonnez-moi, dier wun!" The brown face mimed amazement. "Have I violated some tribal taboo, some primitive—"
"Marysu."
Choss stood in the doorway, his brown eyes expressionless, his hair and beard flecked with shrinking snowflakes. Something in his appearance reminded Raille fleetingly of her grandfather.
"The others are coming in now," he said quietly. "They'd
like to meet Raille Weldon. Would you show her to the Hearth Room, please?"
Then he was gone again, silently.
After a moment the bald woman bowed ironically in the direction of the doorway. "Such timing." She fixed Raille with the blue crystal stare again. "Well. Kemfels. I could say I was only teasing—to make you feel at ease here. Or I could blame it on the gielh I've had this evening. In moodbender veritas, da? It does seem to bring out my natural viciousness.
"But truth to tell, I've behaved reprehensibly." She had begun to pace beside the desk, catlike. "Like a child. C'etait— it's a poor welcome to this magnificent world." She stopped pacing with a shrug of bare shoulders. "So. Forlat mig. Je le regrette. There's my apology. Resivali. Perhaps we'll talk again when situations have made themselves clearer."
Raille remained silent, following Marysu through corridors and down a twisting circle of stairs that hung in the air without visible support, to a circular room where she was greeted with an almost tangible atmosphere of concern and warmth.
She was conducted through a flurry of introductions, offered glazed fruit from a platter, warm tea, a wine the color of blue ink, and finally presented ceremoniously with a tiny ball of dripping snow by the curly-headed boy with the beautiful face.
Chak? Imris? Sill? Raille concentrated on affixing each new name to its owner while trying to follow the friendly, sub-stanceless chatter that flowed around her.
Several hours later the historian volunteered to escort her upstairs if she wished, and she assented gratefully. He guided her back up to the darkened room she had left an age ago and summoned furnishings for her from the walls and floor. Before he wished her goodsleep, he introduced her to the Hut—apparently some sort of talking machine residing in the ceiling of her room—an event which she managed to take in stride owing only to her extreme fatigue. Machines that aped the speech or actions of human beings were not popular on Weldon, but this one seemed nice enough, judging from its voice.
Raille prepared for bed after Choss departed, thinking of the hours stolen from her memory by the bain-sense, experiences she might never recapture. She pondered the bald woman's strange attack and stranger repentance, wondered briefly
at the current of tension and unease she had sensed—or imagined—beneath the smiles and conversation downstairs.
But the bain-sense had taken things from her before: there were other empty hours in her past.
The woman called Marysu was perhaps troubled by some inner torment, and at any rate was not to be judged so quickly by the polity of Weldon.
The tension and unease...
Surrendering gradually to the weight of her exhaustion, she lifted slim shoulders in a shrug and settled beneath the covers of her pallet.
2
Two mornings after her arrival, Raille Weldon was awakened by the delicate chime of the breakfast bell. Reluctant to open her eyes, she stretched languorously, thinking of full blue sails twinned on the rippling mirror of a Newmonth lake.
She lay motionless.
One bell for breakfast, she remarked to herself. I'm living on another world now, a place called Belthannis Autumnworld with plants that chirp and men that— She pushed the thought frantically out of her mind.
They eat three meals here instead of two. How does one get used to that? She thought of midmeal down by the lake, with the sailboats skimming like sapphire butterflies in the distance and a solidly blue sky above her head.
Wait, wait! There were no lakes on the map they showed me, she thought, and the thought made her tremble, struck for the first time with the utter strangeness of being more than a few kilometers from a lake. How can they stand it! she wondered briefly.
Someone's careful footsteps passed by her door in the hall, and she lay very still, hoping no one had been delegated to come wake her personally.
Kiri! Am I late already? Are they angry with me already?
The sounds stopped, and she held her breath, imagining the walker standing in the center of the hallway, looking thoughtfully over his shoulder at her room. Would it upset them if 1
missed their breakfast again? The footsteps went on after a moment, and she relaxed, trying to decide who it had been, standing there boldly, staring at her doorway. She was sure it had been a man—the footsteps had felt like a man's. But they had been slow, almost tentative. That eliminated Per Emrys, she thought: his walk was forceful, deliberate. Nor could it have been March, who did just that when he walked. And the one with the curly hair, the bald woman's Chak—Jack, she corrected herself—he always seemed to be running or leaping, or scuffing his feet on the floor like a child.
Choss? The name swam into her head, and she struggled to identify it with a face. Dark beard, dark eyes, quiet manner.
Choss, she thought triumphantly, and repeated the word aloud after a moment: "Choss."
She grinned at the sound of an unpromised man's chosen name in her own private sleeproom in the very early morning.
"Choss, Choss the Scholar, Per Choss." She opened her eyes a crack, half expecting to see the words glowing like marsh fog above her nose.
His nose was a touch too sharp for her standards, she decided, closing her eyes again, and his hair and beard were an unfortunate in-between color, with neither the charm of brown nor the sternness of black. Still, she conceded, he was quite well-favored on the whole. She thought of him pausing in the hallway, tugging thoughtfully on his beard as he looked back at her door....
Choss had been the second to descend the spiral stairs this morning; when he reached the Hearth Room he found Jefany there before him, drinking tea and eating melon at the great table. She nodded good morning, dividing her attention between a NewsNet information program and a small spongepad in a figured frame. Smiling to himself, Choss took a seat next to her and ordered tea from the table, waiting for the right moment to speak. There was a lull in the action on-Screen.
"You've worked with Person Emrys before," he said.
She jotted a few words onto the pad, then turned, brow creasing. "How did you know that?"
He tilted his head to show her the blue wafer that clung to his jaw below his left ear. A recording chip from the Library, it spoke to him in delicate bone-conduction whispers. At the moment it was busily reciting data from selected Special Evaluations of the recent past.
"The Judgment of Chwoi Dai," Choss echoed. "GY 377-378. A Group Resolution of Humanity—·" He paused, listening. "Subsequently overturned by the Sauf Coben. Reason: insufficient proof of a persuasive nature....<
br />
"The subjects of the Evaluation, officially classified 3 Mediant 378 as herbivorous insectiles of the Damla type, were evacuated to the xenobiological facilities on Stone's Throw, with a representative sample dispatched to Mauve Terrace on Commons for suitable display. Analysis for ReForm of Chwoi Dai was completed in Augent of 378....
"Members of the Special Evaluation Team included: Han Sangallo, calligrapher; Kedda Liu, ekistician; Si-mu-li-Pen, symmetrist; Jonathan Emerson Tate, Sessept of University; Group Leader Moriah Bellmaple, powermeister; Jefany Or, humanist—"
Choss had begun his recitation feeling clever and resourceful. But his spark of secret glee was obliterated by the ghosts of painful memory that moved across the woman's face.
She was staring at him without seeing him, and she had ceased to listen to his voice, her narrowed eyes looking into the past, to a world of cobalt cliffs crowned with russet vegetation beneath high, ocherous clouds. She was remembering the night she had stood with the members of that other Group on a hill above the little settlement, looking down for the last time on the enameled dwellings and the maze of airy walkways. Emrys, her lover, was sitting on the rusty vetch at her feet, cursing softly in the language of Green Asylum, a language she did not understand. Her fingers on his cheek had found tears.
4
Raille stood uncertainly in the doorway between her room and the small annexed chamber.called the habitual. She was
wrapped throat to ankle in the furmock coverlet from her pallet.
Raille had decided to believe that the habitual was truly a private area, the only place in the building shielded from the senses of the ubiquitous computer-thing whose constant presence seemed to trouble no one else. Forcing herself to posit this theory for the sake of modesty, she nonetheless acknowledged deep in her thoughts that there was no reason to believe it.