by Geary Gravel
The old Scholar turned from his pacing and stared at him.
"Do we, Choss?" he said very softly. "Where? Why? By what right?"
"Well, it's going to happen sooner or later, that's all. People are curious, if nothing else—especially people like us, Scholars. They have to classify things and give them names, so that they can be better understood."
"You mean they have to slaughter things and put them in fetters, don't you?"
"Oh, now—"
"Question: what makes blue-green good and green-blue bad, dry important and wet trivial, smooth right and rough wrong?"
Choss shook his head, mystified at the other man's vehemence. "I'm afraid I'm not following."
"What in Isis' name makes humanity worth preserving at the expense of everything else? Do you follow that?"
"Yes, of course. And while I agree in principle that it's not fair to condemn an alien life form because its development in one or more areas may be inferior to our own—"
"Inferior!" Emrys cried in astonishment. "How dare we say
that any form of life is inferior or superior, when the only judgment we can possibly make is one of degrees of difference, and even that is hopelessly culture-biased and probably useless. A recognition and acceptance of difference in the universe— that should satisfy your classifiers. It's absurd to go any further, like a man who's lying on his back deciding that everyone else is too tall!"
Choss frowned uncomfortably;'he knew Raille was watching him. "Again I say I understand your feelings. Believe me, I have the same emotive reaction to this situation." He sounded weary. "But this is the Law we're talking about, this is real, and we should be able to discuss it on a—a pragmatic level. These decisions are made far from here, by people with different sources of information, for the good of the Community as a whole. We can't wish them away. We can't ignore them by talking about trees or cultural biases. We must ultimately face the political realities—"
"Are you by any chance an Expansionist, dear Choddy?" Marysu asked suddenly.
Surprised, he turned to face her. "I'm a student of history. Because of that I must try very hard to avoid any such affiliations. I am pledged to observe, and I take that pledge seriously. All subjective tendencies are an impediment at this point in my career and must be accounted for in the fulfillment of the Major."
"That's a nice, safe, cowardly way to avoid answering," she said in a diamond-edged purr. "I hear the Parad Mir is strong on Hinderlond—"
"I am not an Expansionist!" Choss struck the table with his palm, his face burning. "I say to Emrys only what the Weighers will say, and what you all must think about. But you—you must learn right now that people are not accountable to you, and that it's none of your affair what I believe, or how I choose to express it."
She leaned forward, a smile coiling onto her lips.
"Hey!" Jack stretched up his arms and pushed two circling wanderlights together. They collided in a lazy explosion of amber and silver. "Do we really have to talk about these things now? I mean, couldn't we finish the holiday—some more music, a little blue, maybe some kephel?"
"It's about the fate of the kin, Jack. Very important." Cil tugged at her ring. "And it ought to be decided one way or the other as soon as possible."
March took a long, noisy swallow of the red liquid in his glass. "The mindpick's coming." He wiped his lips on his gray sleeve. "You have it all settled before that gleet drops?"
Looking across the room, Jack saw Raille Weldon's frown of puzzlement and remembered that she had been asleep in the bain-sense when the call had come from Maribon.
"Yes," Emrys said. "It has to be decided before he arrives. You see now, I hope, why I dare not protest his visit. We can't risk publicity at this stage." He turned and bowed slightly. "Choss, please accept my apology. I bring old anger to a new discussion. Argument is always useful. The Coben will be overflowing with it, and no one's opinions will be discarded here."
Jack looked down at the tabletop again, surprised to find a solemn expression on his face. Forget it, flea! Not your problem. He tried on a grin, closed one eye in a cheerful wink.
He opened it slowly. Memory swarmed over him, confronted him like a crystal with a thousand facets:
A flower unfolded, ghosted by counterparts from a score of worlds he'd visited via Darkjumper or Screen.
He saw again the gemmed fissure in the forest outside the Hut.
Saw again forty years of other people's eyes, opening through ' endless variations of shape, color, and design, to be caught by his hunting ones and pinned inside with the rest of the collection.
Again a bright edge of honed metal slipped along a ruddy wrist, trailing a widening crescent of scarlet and awakening a wound that remained behind his eyes even when he had closed them.
He ground the heels of his hands against his eyelids in sudden panic. He was always frightened when this happened: when a picture got stuck and he couldn't pry it loose. Closing his eyes actually accomplished nothing. The image was in the brain, not the retina. He shook his head once, violently, but the image lingered.
Emrys' words came through again, penetrating the ghastly picture and stinging all around him, flowing with the blood.
"I should have told you at the beginning. A lie is not enough. It won't work by itself any more than the truth would. Jefany and I were together on an Evaluation once before, and we meant it when we told the Weighers that the natives of Chwoi Dai were human by the Code. We thought it was so obvious— until our Decision was discarded. They're getting ready to settle Chwoi Dai now. I can't imagine it: all the empty hivehomes, the sky channels deserted, the stillness of the place. And I had spoken to them. Not in Inter, not with words, but we had begun to understand one another."
There was a silence that lengthened. Then Marysu leaned forward.
"But, marse'qua, Emrys, I saw the holos! I remember them! They weren't people—not like the kin—they were small and hard and spined like insects. No wonder the Coben wasn't convinced!"
"They were insects and the kin are empty shells!"
Jack felt the heat of Emrys' reply. In his mind the wound drew wider, blood seeping outward.
"They have no more intellect than blades of grass—keep that in mind, Marysu, when you call them people—no more relation to human beings than animated dolls. They look like us. Is that why you think I want to save them? Because they look like us? It's the very kind of reasoning I'm struggling against, child! Things should be what they are—without your permission, without mine."
"I only meant that it should make it easier. To convince the Weighers." Her voice was surprisingly subdued.
"Again, because they look like human beings? I tell you that after the initial shock that will matter not a bit to them. 'What significance there?' they'll say. A raindrop resembles a tear. A mirror can look like whatever stands before it. Are they the same?"
He spoke on. At some point Jack realized that the image was gone. He opened his eyes and sat up as a wanderlight bloomed deep azure against the wall. Waves of color lapped briefly at Emrys' profile.
Jack straightened in his seat, still concentrating on the voice which could make him feel angry, sad, and hopeful all at once. Something deep inside him continued to open, and, listening, he began to hear.
Later someone asked in a troubled voice. "All right. Assuming you'd convinced us to go along with it. What is your plan? What would we do? Where would we start? We sit here talking morals and meanings, but I see no plan, nothing solid to build upon."
Emrys had sat down a few minutes earlier, trying to control his restless pacing; he rose again.
"Well, then? What is a man? You know well enough what the Sauf Coben believes. Past Decisions have made their opinions clear." He looked around the room. "We must use their own Code as our blueprint."
He crossed to the other side of the table and stood looking down at March, who ignored him, busy dissecting a plate of fried crustaceans mixed with sea vegetables.
"
He has to walk, March, where and when we tell him to. And more: he has to bow and nod and yawn on cue. He needs to move in a Dance so complex it will take you months to fabricate it."
The soldier set down his knife, chewing slowly. He raised his real eye to Emrys and shook his head.
"No frame here. No template, no patterning tools."
Emrys pointed to the ceiling. "The Hut will provide. Months ago I began to requisition things. I hope I've managed to gain access to most of what you'll need."
"Months ago. God's geek!" Marysu swore. "This begins to seem like more than a four-day fancy. Tsum Ma Yee Hwei Tze? What's really going on here? What else did you requisition?"
"Ah." He moved to the bald linguist's side. "Marysu. Communication. The kin must speak to his examiners. Through the Dance. Is it possible?"
He saw the startled lizard-blink of crystal-blue eyes. "Well...."
Jack whispered to Cil: "She could teach a stone to speak."
Emrys had turned away, and his voice was softer, as if he spoke to a young animal he was wary of frightening.
"Raille, you must keep him alive for us. We want to find out what makes him the way he is, and how to go about changing his appearance without harming him. That brings up something we must all remember." He raised his voice to include the others. "Our aim will be camouflage, not mutilation.
What the kin is must be left intact or we betray our own beliefs."
Raille was nodding, alert and nervous. "I'll-—"
But Emrys had gone on to the next.
"Choss, if you join us I'll want an artificial culture of some sort. Something credible with roots and a future. The content I leave completely up to you: pull it right out of the air if that feels right, or dredge up something forgotten from the back-before and rework it to fit Belthannis."
He swung back toward his seat, again avoiding a direct reply. He touched Cil lightly on the shoulder as he passed.
"You know what we need from you, Cil. Of course, the Sauf Coben will be suspicious in the extreme. You must build us a web of possibility, strands of cause and effect stretching back so far that even the Weighers will be discouraged." He moved on, reseating himself. "We're going to make him a man. I want you to prove that Belthannis made him one long ago."
Cil measured him with dark eyes. "Emrys, I've given much thought to this recently. I do not believe our masquerade could successfully deceive the Weighers. For a while, yes, of course. But what if they demand to see more kin? Or if they desire negotiations regarding, I don't know, treaties, trade agreements? No matter how sophisticated your Dance and your language, if there's nothing inside the kin, it'll show sooner or later."
"Of course it will. Shortly after the Decision, I plan to reveal the truth to them."
"What?" Jefany stared at him in astonishment. "You plan what?"
"I told you before that I wanted to set things right. Not just for Belthannis, not just for the kin. For Chwoi Dai, for all the others. The only way to do that is to let them see what we've done. Make our kin so convincing that they have to judge him human. Then turn around and show them that they've erred. Show the whole Community: I have contacts in the Net, and word will spread fast when the time comes. But we need something to catch the interest of the people, something to make them listen when we go before the Blue Shell Council and demand justice for the Judged of the past. Do you see?"
Jefany nodded slowly. "It could work, with a lot of luck..."
"And skill. Which brings me to you. Humanist. Your certificates were taken in the study of what we are."
She looked uncomfortable. "Mine was a comtemplative Major-"
"Then I ask you now to put it into practice for the first time. All the puppetry and fables we can produce won't make him believable. You must teach us how to give him that spark of humanity."
He looked around the table, eyes halting briefly at each face.
"If you decide to join me, those will be your challenges."
There was silence.
"Do you want our answers now?" Choss asked in a shadow voice.
"Soon," Emrys said. "The empath is coming, the year is draining away. If Isis smiles, perhaps our visitor won't be making an extended stay here. At any rate, make it three days. Divide up among you three of these long days, and go out once more to the kin—each one of you alone. Spend some time observing, thinking. Evaluating, in all senses of the word. Then I will have your answers."
I
In a glade loosely held in the embrace of two dark arms of forest, in a grove of leafless trees that was floored with patches of green bryophyte as thick and lush as winter fur, spotted with flowering thimblewort, and misted with minute insects of various hue and structure, two beings of more than passing similarity passed time without words.
The insects flecked the air until it resembled a precious stone. Rising and dipping among the tiny yellow blossoms, they made sounds like the peal of distant bells, chiming softly each time they brushed corolla, leaf, or fellow seeker. Whisk-wing, Raille had named them already, and shiverer, dew-drinker, petal-gem, poly hue...
On one side of the grove the kin lay motionless, or nearly so, the head on a vine-wrapped rock, the body laid out like clothing on the yielding moss. Dark-brown eyes were open,
light-brown face lay bare and blank, barred with shadows by the clear sky and high branches. The beautiful chest rose and fell gently, an animated candlewood carving neither precisely in time nor conspicuously out of step with the rest of the clearing's somnolent symmetry.
A finger curled; one leg stretched out slowly and relaxed, resting against a small grouping of thimblewort. Those plants that bore blossoms were silent, but the ones that had not yet bloomed chirped petulantly once or twice when touched. The insects wove methodical patterns above the deep green.
Three and one quarter meters from the reclining figure, March was engaged in stillnessxif a different sort, sitting upright with knees bent at sharp right angles, shoulders tense and expectant, spine rigid as a spear driven into the ground.
At times one of the small flying things would pause against a golden cheek or settle, wings flexing an eyeblink of color, on the stiff gray worksuit, Then the man would stir and flick the thing away.
Time was measured out in heartbeats—steady, alert, thudding forward—and it was measured not at all. With the threads of sameness between them growing more tenuous with each small parcel cut and shaped by time, the silent man sat stiffly on his guard near the wordless kin, as incongruous there and then as human-given names in the forest of that world.
Jefany sat on a slab of sunwarmed rock overhanging a lively riverlet, an offshoot of the Water. Her restless hair was motionless for once, pulled back from nape and forehead and loosely coiled, the static charge that gave it life nullified by the tiny pins that held it in place. She was wearing sandals and a pair of functional shorts: their vertical stickstrips held stylus, spongepad, holocube and scent collectors. The sun was beginning to bring out light freckles on her back and arms.
Her feet were blurred to the ankles in the stream, pleasantly cold. Something thrashed in the grass not far from her. There was a moment's silence, then two little animals with reddish
fur burst forth in a mad game of pursuit and capture that brought them within centimeters of her arm. She sat very still until they tired of the sport and darted off together through the grass. A light wind made a path of swaying stems through the meadow, and she added her sigh of pleasure to its passage as the cool air skimmed across her shoulders and face. Tilting her head back, she scanned the sky, a half pearl of blues and grays and shifting highlights the eye could not quite capture. At her back was the forest, a cool presence like a memory at the border of her thoughts, waiting to be reexplored. She reached for her stylus and pad.
Our true judgment begins. Choss went out yesterday morning, then March in the afternoon.
This morning was my turn.
It was moving when I found it. I walked along the ridge behind it. We went
through silver valleys, across the Verres, into the forest, out of it. Once he stopped and ate a piece of the redfruit. I finished off this morning's melon, my own hunger triggered as automatically as his seemed to be. Once he knelt by the Water and drank, in a motion so smooth and sudden I thought he had fallen and rushed forward like a fool to save him.
But he never falls and he never stumbles, moving without hesitation through areas where a moment later I will trip over a root or scratch my leg on a branch, having misjudged the ground beneath its cloak of furze. 1 have not felt clumsy in this way since I was a little child sixteen tens of years ago, but watching him is like watching human grace perfected to something beyond human capability.
It is strange to spend the morning within speaking distance of a man and to spend it utterly alone.
Once he lay down in the shadow of a great tree and seemed to sleep, though his eyes were sometimes closed and sometimes open and who could tell the difference from his face? I sat next to him and counted grass stems until—click—he was on his feet again and we were off, threading deftly through a pattern i am blind to.
Jefany lifted the stylus and read through what she had written. Then with a little smile she added a single line:
Kindly note that I always manage to start off very conscientiously, remembering to call him "it" for at least two full sentences.
She blanked the writing surface, played with the frame until she had summoned the record of a previous entry.
Local Day 14, very late.
Let me check the time.
Correction: Day 15, very early.
I am really quite composed sitting here at the edge of the pallet, admiring how the amber glow from this section of the wall falls on arms and back and thigh and legs, making us one color and melding light to flesh to hair to empty air.
Where do "I" end in this room, at this time?
0 peace, never mind. This is no hour for such questions.
Cil hides from her own fatigue tonight, too deep for dreams of death on World Vesper to follow.
It is so—what do I want to say?
Late? Lonely? Futile?