by Geary Gravel
In her outstretched hands she held a dripping rainbow of cloth.
Hut, she practiced in her mind, have this dried for me at once. Hut! I must have this dried immediately. Hut—
"Hut," she said aloud, her voice shaking.
"May I help you?" The smooth voice made her jump.
"Have this—" She cleared her throat, eyes darting back and forth across the empty ceiling. "Could you please tell me where I could dry my clothes? I washed them, but there's no place to hang anything up in here and, uh—"
She felt inexpressibly foolish, explaining her domestic woes to an unseen voice in the ceiling.
"Of course, Raille. If you will allow me."
The heavy skirts stirred slightly in her arms; in an instant they felt lighter, looser. She shook them out wonderingly and found each item completely dry, unwrinkled, glowing with color.
"Thank you very much," she stammered. "I hope it wasn't too much trouble."
"None at all. In the future may I suggest that you place any items you wish refreshed on the red area of the counter in the habitual and they will be taken care of at once. Unless, of course, you prefer it done while you have them on."
"Oh, no—no, I don't want to trouble you. That will be fine. Thank you very much." She retreated backward into the habitual, tapping the doorsill as Choss had taught her, to make sure it would close behind her.
Raille was not the last to breakfast, as she had feared. After her embarrassed entry into the room—it seemed to
her as if a thousand conversations broke off abruptly, so that countless pairs of eyes could turn to measure her—but before she had finished her awkward meal of too-hot tea and crumbling bread, Emrys himself appeared, looking hollow-eyed and wan.
He approached Cil, ignoring the rest of them, and asked her to accompany him to the Library. When an hour later they passed back between the stone lions, Cil was flushed and distracted, gazing off into her own thoughts, not wanting to talk to anyone, not even Jefany.
A mood of tension was growing in the room. Soon everyone was speaking in whispers, without anyone quite knowing why. Emrys walked to the center of the room and used gestural shorttalk with the Hut to summon a low chair with a single curved arm that was dappled with instrumentation. He sat with his back to the Screen, facing the Group Resolvent. Raille began to feel gooseflesh along her arms: something was about to happen.
"It's time." Emrys wondered if his face betrayed the anxiety he was struggling to keep from his voice. He looked from face to face, and they were like alien creatures, staring at him with polite, distant expressions.
"I'm setting the Screen on Local, using the Hut's Eyes."
He touched one of the control strips.
Belthannis Autumn world appeared on the wall, silvered and brown-shaded, gray-green and blue, its somber beauty heightened by the patches of frosty dew that lingered in the shadows, softening edges and flowing lines.
The Hut's Eye was watching an area some distance away: a pocket meadow bordered in brush and forest, motionless, silent but for the piping, a thin lunatic lilt, high and irregular, of an isolated thimblewort still half in shadow. A beetle the color of a Weldonese lake flew lazily into the picture, swelled as it headed toward the Eye until it almost filled the Screen, then veered away.
The thimblewort ceased its chirping. There was no motion, no sound, behind the Screen or before it.
Finally something moved at the very edge of the picture: a blur of light brown against the greens and darker shades. It came slowly into range, half hidden by the waving silver grass. Emrys' finger hovered over the button marked zoom, then withdrew.
He watched their faces.
"Is that it?" Choss whispered, leaning forward on his chair. "It's a quadruped, isn't it?"
"Neyney, it's just bending over to look at something," Mary-su said, a frown quirking her mobile lips.
"Maybe it's feeding?" Raille suggested from the back of the cluster of seats, eyes wide, voice quiet.
Jefany glanced uncertainly at Emrys, questioning him with her eyes, but he made no response. The creature moved closer through the high grass. It was still for a moment. Then it raised its head suddenly and straightened up, standing silhouetted against the paie blue-gray horizon.
Emrys pressed zoom.
For a few seconds no one would say anything. Then they all tried to speak at once.
"Oh..."
"Look at—"
"For God's sake, Emrys!"
"It's a manl That's a fnan out there!"
Emrys clapped his hands together twice, sharply, for silence. He seemed calm, very much in control.
"And now you have seen the thing we are to judge." He spoke crisply.
"Thing—" Jefany found it impossible to take her eyes from the distant shape wandering peacefully through the grass. "Jon, it was a human man we saw."
"No. It was an animal." He turned from her briskly, like someone following carefully rehearsed stage directions. "Cil?"
The planalyst stirred in her seat, head lowered, image of the forgotten goddess Freya in a warm-colored gown ribbed with black, rose blush creeping toward the luminous hair, glimpse of a blue tulip.
"He is correct," Cil said. 'They are not human."
"What, then?" Jefany looked from Emrys' excitement to Cil's unease. "What is he?"
"Emrys calls them the kin."
Marysu turned from the Screen, fingers twining restlessly. "From the ancient Anglic, I would think," she breathed. "Relatives, it means, slaktingar, members of the same family."
"Whose family?" Jefany said from beneath a tnree-thousand-year-old portrait. "Ours? The kin of humanity?"
"Listen to me," Emrys said. "I say it again: this thing— these creatures—are not human. They could not fit the Code, they would never convince the Weighers."
"No, Emrys." Choss stammered a little, watching the Screen from the corner of his eye. "First we must study the evidence · for ourselves. Then we make our own decisions. There are rules to this, there is a procedure to be followed."
"There is only one decision possible." The older man was unyielding. "Alien. Animal. They will not be granted Humanity by the Coben. There will be no [closed] status"—he made the brackets sharply with his hands—"no decree of interdict for soon-to-be World Belthannis." He smiled grimly as he spoke, and Jefany straightened in her chair,- thinking: It's the old Jon Emirsson again, I'd swear, whatever else has happened. Confident, self-possessed, in charge. But what is he up to?
Emrys took a step backward, gestured from the Group to the Screen. "I am saying this now, you see, because I want you to lie. All of you! I want a completely false Resolution for the Weighers."
For a second time the room was filled with a confused, shocked silence. Raille Weldon sat with her hands at her temples, willing herself away from this nightmare.
March threw back his head and gave a bellow of laughter that crashed through the silence like a hurled weapon. "Great wise Scholar," he said. "Emrys the Sessept! Chot! It's Emrys the un-sane, Emrys the mad! It's a crazy breck, you, but a sly or a brave one, offering us a stroll down Deepside with a smile on the face."
Emrys bore the mismatched stare with ease. "And what better way to offer such a thing, eh, March? With a smile, with a shout: I may be mad, but 1 mean to win!"
Raille giggled nervously. "To win," she said. "You make it sound like—like—" She paused in sudden embarrassment and looked at the floor.
"Like a war," Choss finished curiously. "It does indeed sound like war."
"Very good." Emrys nodded. "What I am about to propose does involve a battle plan of sorts."
"Had enough war," March said quietly, his face a sandy
stone again. He flicked the false green eye with his fingernail, and the others started at the sound.
"A war without bloodshed, I promise you, March." Emrys matched the soldier's grave expression. "A campaign against injustice, nothing more."
He looked over his shoulder at the Screen and rubbed his
hands together briskly.
"Well. You have something to think about now, at any rate. And Choss was quite right about the evidence—you must see for yourselves. Shall I take you to it?" He pointed to the blurred figure. "Shall we go now?"
They all nodded assent, seven heads dipping forward, seven pairs of eyes looking numbly around. The air still tingled with the obscenity of madness, die strange thought of death.
CHAPTER 4
There once was a Drifter named Cable
Who Darkjumped nine stars beyond Babel
Said she: "It's my home
And I don't mean to roam
—But soon we won't even be able!"
ANONYMOUS UMERICK 1C A, CY391I
I
They moved along the gentle incline of the Hill, as Emrys had named it, past rocks and vegetation in endless variety, unnamed and beautiful. When they spoke it was in hushed tones, Emrys murmuring threads of description, some member of the party responding in whispered appreciation; but for the most part they walked in introspective silence, thoughts turned inward by the stillness of the world.
At the bottom of the Hill they found a fissure in the earth the width of a man's two hands placed side by side. It was the scar of some ancient shifting of the ground, its sharp rim gentled by borders of pink and amber lichen.
72
Emrys had them kneel at the edge of the opening, where they could see a miniature cavern whose walls were the planes of a huge fractured outcropping of bluish quartz, coruscating here and there with veins of green and silver. Emrys often came to this spot to sit and ponder, staring into the crystal depths, and he had begun to think of it, after the fashion of his people, as the hwynta, or "soul place," of Belthannis—but this he told no one.
The party left the fissure, proceeding west through the trees and coming at length to the sky-colored ribbon of the Water, where the river flowed with such transparency that it made their eyes ache to try to catch it as it paused in whirls and eddies above a bed of smooth pebbles shimmering with the fire of opals in the morning sun.
There they halted once again, to gaze out over the deep vales of meadowland which Emrys called the Verres, from an old word in the language of Green Asylum meaning "the eye delights." Before them lay a grand sweep of color and texture: a hundred shades of green worked with brown and silver extended to the foot of distant mountains, great heights which lay framed in blue-fading-to-pale, softly contoured, like reclining human figures. The closest slopes displayed an almost tended look; they were furry with dark brush strokes of foliage, reminding Emrys of the meticulously planned timed gardens perfected by the vwelynto—literally "green-wise ones"—of his home world.
They passed next through a glen carpeted with heavy moss, where the spell of silence was partially broken by the bell-notes of a mist of tiny insects rising from the blossoms that lay against the moss.
The subtle alchemy of colors, shapes, and scents exhilarated them, and laughter and conversation bloomed as they followed the course of an energetic brook; song fragments took wing and were pursued vigorously by Jack and Cil until the words ran out.
Emrys held up his hand. "Over this next rise," he announced in a gentle, hollow voice, the way a polite assassin would say: I'm afraid it's time to die.
They were mounting the last of several low, rounded hills,
a knuckled ridge of land thick with feathery groundstems and tall retiform bushes. Flowerets covered the crisscrossing branches, transparent blue complexities resembling twists of crystal, that exuded a pleasant, peppery fragrance.
"Wait here." He walked ahead a few paces to peer at something out of sight. Traces of golden dust shone on his dark robe where he had knelt on it at the cleft of blue quartz.
He returned and beckoned them on.
The other side of the hill held the beginnings of a new landscape: sunbeams crowded into a wood-ringed clearing twice the size of the Hut's Hearth Room. Here the ground was hidden by the familiar silver grass; trees of various heights and persuasions mingled harmoniously. As the party approached, a small quadruped with fur the color of cinnamon paused midway up a knotty trunk to stare at the chaotic mass of noise and color flowing toward it.
Beyond a thin band of blackbarks on the far side of the clearing, the land fell away rapidly. As they descended the hillside they caught glimpses of the bowl of a broad valley. What they could see of it was forested in green-gold and copper, and lay glinting in the sun like the eye of a hunting bird.
They reached the entrance to the clearing.
A few steps into the silver grass someone gasped. Then silence fell on them like a seal no one dared to break.
There were two objects before them.
There was a weathered log, half its length wreathed in ferns and ophidian vines.
Something stood next to it, a thing slightly taller than the log was long, of a lighter shade of brown, of a smoother texture, free of vines and moss.
Or it was a man.
The man stood by the log, and he was naked and unmoving, his back to the Group, his hands loose at his sides.
Or it was...
The moment persisted, the nine beings trapped in it— eight grouped tightly at the clearing's entrance, one alone at the center—forming a tableau which artists would pursue for centuries to come in stone and pigment, shadow, light and sound.
Or...
"You all feel it now, don't you? Oh, it's very strong the first few times, very strong. I remember, it was three full days before I could walk up and look it in the—the—"
An uneasy ripple passed through the others; he felt his words gutter and go out like flames deprived of air. Noise was clearly a sacrilege, the voice intruding into some carefully plotted arrangement, a moment being frozen into an icon.
Emrys tried to keep their attention on him, watching as expressions fled along the line of faces. The silence held.
He touched the bare arm nearest him, grasped it, shook it.
"Wake up, now. D'you think if I tickled your sides it would break the spell?"
Jefany tore her eyes from the still figure, gave him a stricken look. "It's a man, it's a man," she whispered.
He stroked her arm. "No."
"Not real, then." Gray eyes darted away like arrowheads. "An image, a trick, a holo," she said.
"Quite real." He raised his voice for the others. "Go out to it, colleagues, it'll do you no harm. Examine it. Evaluate."
There was silence, flat and unmoving as water in a heavy-world pond. But at the edges was a growing flicker, a little licking tongue of hysteria. Emrys recalled the feeling: like standing on one side of a boundary that wasn't there, one's mind saying nothing was wrong, while the senses screamed for retreat. Sweet Risen Isis, he thought, don't let them break and run
He released Jefany's arm and walked deliberately into the open area. Their eyes followed him like hot beams trained on his back.
When he reached the silent figure, he raised his left arm high.
"Here!" he cried, bringing his palm down with a loud clap on the naked shoulder.
"Here," he repeated more softly, pressing the unresisting flesh with his hand until the whole body began to pivot slowly.
"Face to face," he murmured, searching through the band of eyes that fronted him, seeking some reaction, a spark that he could nurture. Icy blue, sky-colored gray, pale untroubled green, cold chade like a false note in the interplay of deep,
dark, light and hazel brown—he could have been scanning a row of shields, inviolate, a display of gems, beautiful and lifeless.
"Jefany?"
Seven faces stamped with the seal, hers lost among them. He frowned, narrowed his search until he found the lucent gray, then widened his gaze to include face, restless hair, awkward fists.
The shared terror in their faces was becoming too much for him to bear. At last he shook his head, stepped out over the matted log. "Perhaps another day..." He moved away from it.
"Jon!" Her voice was raw. He moved back, winc
ed at her expression, willed strength to her.
"It—" she began, then fell silent again, gnawing her lower lip. She took a deep breath and three quick steps toward him. Her long legs swung stiffly, her face pinching tight as clenched fingers.
"Hai, it almost hurts." .
"Fight it, Jefany. Try!"
She approached along a wavering line, shoulders hunched, fists full of dark-blue fabric.
In his mind he stretched a cord between them, tried to draw her down it like a bead on a wire. Then she was there, huddled against his right side, looking resolutely away from that which stood on his left.
"What's happening?" Her face was waxen, her skin clammy with sweat. "What's it doing to us?"
He shrugged with his free shoulder, held her tighter.
"I don't know, maybe a protective mechanism of some sort. But it goes away, it gets easier. The Hut never noticed it at all, only saw the changes in me: heart, respiration, nerve cells, motor control, adrenal flow—everything saying stay back! But it does get easier. You have to fight it, hard."
She was clutching his hands, pressing her cheek tightly against his until his fingers and jaw had begun to ache.
"No. It's almost gone now," she said. "Isis."
Emrys could feel her muscles relax, the rhythm of her breathing even. He looked from their twined fingers to the rest of the Group still rooted to the edge of the clearing.
"Try touching hands!" he called to them. "Put flesh against flesh. It seems to help."
It was Cil who finally grasped March's blunt fingers and struggled out into the open, her exquisite features clamped in grim determination. The soldier hung back for a heartbeat, then ·stalked forth at her side, groping with his free hand for Marysu's bangled wrist.
The linking continued down the line and they were all moving now, swaying, lurching like drunkards toward those who waited in the center of the meadow.
The chain stumbled into a ring when it reached Jefany and Emrys. Soon the fear was gone.
CHAPTER 5
It would be very singular that all nature, all the