The Alchemists

by Geary Gravel

  Concern and doubt showed immediately in several faces.

  "Cut us off?" Choss said. "Why?"

  "There's an election coming. A great and important one. Less than three months from now, we'll have an Emperor again,

  after a quarter-century without. I think you can guess what the odds are that it will be an Expansionist who next sits in White Spire. Support is growing for this Ansalvage, this 'Ur-Lord,' as he calls himself. My friends on Commons tell me chances are high that a victory this year for the Parad will mean the scrapping of the entire Evaluation system, shortly after their assumption of power."

  "The Emperor can't do that, not legally," Choss said dubiously. "His actual power is severely limited."

  "Granted. But his influence is all-pervading. You know what they say about a strong Emperor: he wears Blue Shell for his finger-ring. And the Parad is orchestrating this whole election very carefully, to bring their candidate in on a wave of high feeling. No, If Ansalvage makes White Spire he'll have little trouble discarding these cumbersome Evaluations in favor of something a little more expedient. If this should come to pass, I'm afraid our only hope is to be out of touch when it's all happening—officially, at least. Then, should an order of recall be sent and it becomes obvious that we're off the Net, we still might have the time we need to complete our efforts.

  "Now, I don't mean to cut us off completely. I've installed an auxiliary link in the Hut—illegal, I needn't tell you—that should let us continue to dip into the datapools on Lekkole from time to time, as long as we're discreet. But all other offplanet contacts will have to be forgone. The Hut tells me there should be peak activity on the Net in about twenty hours local, a multichannel broadcast of some sort—more Darkjumper miracle cures, I believe, and then a political harangue from our friends the Expansionists. I won't mind missing that. This is our best opportunity to simulate a malfunction and break contact. They know we still have the one-way beacon, if we have to signal for assistance, and with luck they'll choose to forget about us till year's end. I'm sure the Colonial Commission will view this accident as an inconvenience, rather than an emergency.

  "So, before I give the final authorization to the Hut, do any of you have objections to this? I thought the screen could remain operable for the rest of the day and all night, if you have any last messages you can discreetly send out."

  "What about Cil?" Raille asked. "Shouldn't she be included?"

  "I spoke with her this morning through the droshky's com. She consented wholeheartedly." Emrys paused. "The rest of you?" he asked then. "Anything?"

  There were no objections.

  "Fine. Thank you all. I'll set it in motion.."

  Later that evening, Raille went back outside the Hut for some fresh air and a solitary stroll in the nearby woods, a prospect at once relaxing and flavored with the slightest tingle of fear. The sky was filled with clouds like heaped coal; only the smallest moon could be seen from time to time, riding high and managing to cast just enough light to make the thick shadows at the edge of the forest interesting. Raille allowed herself an hour of cautious wandering among the silent trees before she switched on her lamp and began to make her way back to the Hut, half-hoping to catch a glimpse of the tenant of this quiet land.

  As she drew near the Hut she was surprised to discover beneath her handlight what she had never seen by day: a row of small flowering plants had sprouted along the edge of the building, leaning slightly outward from the line where wall met ground. Walking slowly around the circumference of the habitat, she found that the flowers outlined it on all sides, a uniform border of small, dark shapes. She stooped by the doorway and with her fingers loosened the soil around one of the plants, then drew it carefully from the ground.

  In the corridor on the first floor she met Emrys. He examined the flower with mild interest, hands clasped behind his back. "Quite nice," he said. "I don't think I've seen them before."

  "I found it growing just outside the Hut. There are dozens of them in a neat row all around the building. I thought perhaps you'd planted them there."

  "Never." He smiled. "Even a meddler like me leaves some things to the wilderness."

  An extremely orderly wilderness! Raille thought as she made her way upstairs to her room.

  Under the sourceless white light the flower was a pretty

  thing, with wide, fan-shaped leaves in a moist cluster at its base and a golden puffball freckled with green crowning the delicate stem; it made her whole room smell of Belthannis: fresh, cool, sweet.

  Raille carefully examined the flower, using a small glittering device which Cil had shown her how to operate, a complex amalgamation of lenses and small, twittering nodes of light atop three slender legs.

  Raille positioned the tripod above the blossom and gingerly touched a fingertab. The lenses changed configuration with hypnotic slowness, rotating through the first analysis sequence as Raille began to recite notes into her wrist journal. Several of the lenses remained splayed at a time, while others would glide back to coalesce in shifting combinations as various elements of the plant's internal and external structure were projected into the air above the instrument. Fascinated, Raille leaned forward on her elbows and watched for several minutes as golden, hair-thin stamens gave way to a view of the central vascular tissue, a long gray-green chamber lined with alveoli, which was replaced in time by cross sections of the leaf surfaces, the stoma, the minute root fibers.

  A commentary hung in the air beside the images: words and numbers in flickering blue and yellow. Following Cil's instructions, she used the machine to perform basic age estimates. The results surprised her: this plant had apparently accomplished ninety percent of its total growth that very afternoon, breaking through the soil, putting forth the wide leaves, and developing the flower crown, all while the humans had sat at their work inside the Hut.

  She tapped out a sequence on the tabs which would effect measurement of the plant's photosynthetic capabilities and blinked when she read the figures. She repeated the procedure and frowned.

  "How very odd..."

  Further examination revealed that what she had been calling a flower was actually a specialized leaf cluster employed in gas exchange and food production. She consulted tables she had prepared earlier from information gathered in the Library. She flipped through the yellowed leaves of the Biota Exotica. Finally, she made a long and technical entry in her written journal, ending with a rather plaintive query:

  Why so large a conversion ratio? Check Library holofiles for specimens observed elsewhere on the planet. Why so precise an arrangement here at our doorstep? Possibility of communal root system should be investigated: perhaps they're one great plant. But why there, why now?

  She placed the plant in a keepcase and, frowning a moment, labeled hfaux-fleur. Then her gaze wandered to the Weldonese chronometer perched at the edge of her desk. She pursed her lips and looked uncertainly toward the ceiling.

  "Um, Hut? Excuse me."

  "Yes, Raille. How may I serve you?"

  "If you're not too busy right now, I'd like to make a call before you terminate the link with the Net. Do you think that would be possible?"

  "If I might trouble you for a bit more data before answering, Raille—am I correct in assuming that you wish to contact Weldon?"

  "Yes. My mother, my grandfather, they might worry."

  "Of course. There is one slight problem. Utilizing the Net from here to Weldon requires no less than three linkages: the substation on World Sipril, our nearest neighbor out here on the edge of things, the Vegan interlink, and of course the great Callisto masterlink near old Earth. For a normal two-way communication, verbal-visual, such a connection would take approximately five and one-half hours to establish—this figure by way of current estimates of Net usage and due partially, if you'll pardon my saying so, to the overly cautious attitude of the Weldonese authorities in regard to incoming calls. Now, while this would present no difficulty at all under more normal circumstances, in this case it
appears to exceed the time limit imposed by Emrys to take advantage of peak activity."

  Raille was gazing at the ceiling with her elbow propped on the desk, one cheek supported by her fist. "You mean I can't talk to them."

  "You cannot engage in conversation with them, just so. If you wish, however, you might record a message to your relatives, which I will gladly transmit directly to Sipril, whence it will be rerouted at the earliest occasion through the Net to your homeworld. Regrettably, there will be no opportunity for any reply to make1 its way back to us until Emrys orders reinstitution of the link."

  "I see. All right, I guess that will have to be enough. When can I make the recording?"

  "As soon as you wish. If you would care to join me in the Hearth Room..."

  Raille found herself chatting comfortably about summertime on Weldon with the musical machine-voice as she traversed the corridor outside her room. Descending the spiral stair, she was struck by a new thought. "Hut, is this expensive? How can I pay?"

  "World-to-world via the Net is quite expensive," the Hut replied. "However, Emrys has instructed me to bill all calls to his personal account on Lekkole, by way of making up for any inconvenience suffered by the members of the Group."

  "That's very nice of him."

  "Isn't it?" the Hut said.

  When Raille entered the Hearth Room, she was dismayed to see Marysu sitting at the table, a bowl of iced tea by her hand and half a dozen recording chips lined up before her.

  "I didn't know anyone would be here this late," Raille said, approaching the table cautiously.

  "You didn't?" Marysu arched a tricolor brow.

  "I'm going to record a message for my—for home. The Hut said it was all right. I have to do it before the link with the Net is broken."

  Marysu lifted the tea and took a slow sip. "You won't disturb me as long as you don't shout," she said.

  "Oh. Good." Raille sighed and turned toward the Screen. "Where should I be standing, Hut? Should I come closer?"

  "Right there is fine. Do you wish privacy for your recording?"

  "Urn, no. That's all right." She glanced back at Marysu, who was toying idly with the chips, her eyes on Raille. "When do I start?"

  "Whenever you wish."

  She began to think about her house on Weldon, with its cool, white spaces and the pool of lazy goldfish, and soon she was speaking to her grandfather and her mother with hands and voice, seeing them in her mind as she watched the empty Screen, all thought of the room's other occupant forgotten. Minutes passed.

  "I guess that's all," she said at last. "I shouldn't talk any

  more; it's probably cost a fortune to Emrys already. I'm safe, I'm well, I'll see you both before Coldmonth. Oh, and—" She lifted her hands and signed quickly a flow of thoughts and feelings she could not trust to her lips. It was easier with the hands, more like singing than speech, and it gave her a small distance from the words which enabled her to finish the message with eyes still dry.

  When she turned from the Screen, Marysu was standing close behind her.

  "Can I have it?" she said.

  "What?" Raille took a step backward. "Have what?"

  "The language of hand symbols, the movements, the finger-speech—I haven't seen it before, will you give it to me? I'll have Jack paint you something beautiful, or I could transfer scree—work credit on the Block. Do you have a number? How much would you want?"

  Raille watched the other woman warily, always alert since that first meeting for signs of mockery or contempt. Marysu's face was intense, imploring.

  "I'll show you, Raille said. "You don't have to give me anything."

  "I thank you then, Raille na Weldon. I thank you very much." Relief danced in the other woman's eyes, and hunger, anticipation, life—it was a new face entirely. "Will you show me now? Please?"

  "Yes. All right." Raille lifted her hand, and Marysu's leaped shadow-perfect to the same position at her breast.

  "This is the way my grandfather taught me. You have to watch my face as well as my hands—the expression is very important. Actually, it's a language of the whole body. All right—" Her hands assumed the first sign, held it, changed. "This is the sky. This is earth, Water, Fire."

  Brown fingers spun the air. "Sky. Earth. Water. Fire. Yes, I have them. Go on, go on as quickly as you can; I'll remember."

  Two hours later they still sat at the table, face to face. Marysu had caught the language: their fingers and hands shuttied back and forth in the narrow space between them, weaving patterns which only the Hut's thermal receptors could perceive, where they hung like webs of fire in the air.

  For Marysu it was like the exhilaration that came from rising

  to a ship in a packet, or like the aftermath of lovemaking. Physically weary, but beyond sleep, her senses afire, she spun bits of syntax, swatches of vocabulary, idioms, quirks of structure from Raille's patient voice and hands, giving them back minutes later without error, warp and weft transferred intact from loom to loom.

  And Raille Weldon had seen a new person come together before her eyes, a joyous stranger bom with the language that had always signified peace and wisdom to her. It was as if Marysu used the fabric of the silent speech to weave herself another identity, a new skin into which she slipped farther and farther as her mastery of the language deepened.

  Now we must understand each other, Raille told herself as the night wore on. Now there will be something of me speaking in her.

  March looked as though he might begin growling at any moment to protect the large platter he had carried out into the meadow, a deep turquoise oval laden with fried dough-twists and greasy-looking meat.

  "And a pleasant morning to you as well," Marysu replied with a sardonic smile. She lowered herself to the grass near the log on which the soldier hunched, platter balanced on one knee, sheaf of fragile Dance templates fluttering on the other.

  "Our mechanical know-it-all was kind enough to inform me that you were breakfasting, as it were, out here with the local fauna." She nodded in the direction of the kin, which wandered placidly some yards away, golden wires and strands of blinking lights trailing unnoticed from its arms and legs.

  "And?" March wiped his chin on the back of his golden forearm and belched loudly.

  "And I thought I might join you. Given that I have something of mutual interest to discuss. I'll wait till you finish with— whatever that is."

  March eyed the object dripping at the end of his knife.

  "It's a sausage. Want one?"

  "God-Lord, no! I've already eaten, thank you. Three ex—

  cellent blue-black plums from a Bablar template, each the size of your fist, with sweet, blood-colored interiors and barely a stone at the heart. Then some blue and two of our small, tart apples, pale as unlit candles." Her eyes narrowed in remembered enjoyment. "No, you go ahead and wallow, and when you've cleaned your trough we can talk."

  'Talk now. Then I eat." March scowled, sensing an insult behind the unfamiliar words.

  "As you like. Emrys left me a note. He said there's been some problem with the language. I've come to see what it is."

  "No problem. Just can't talk," March said, riffling through a pile of translucencies pinned by a flat stone beside him on the log. "Look here." He pointed to a dark area. "Picture from inside him. Throat. No voicebox."

  "Oh, this is marvelous," Marysu said. "Let me see that." A minute later she leaned back and stared at the kin. "He must speak," she whispered to herself, one slender hand rubbing her brow. "Esh. Suten. He must."

  _ 8

  "Back, over, flex, turn, mouth open, stretch, relax, chin lift, pause-two-three, eyes—damn your dead eyes!"

  March repositioned the creature's dark head in its halo of pinpoint contacts. In this particular incarnation, the mutable Dance frame had sprouted spidery tendrils of plax and metalmock, wreathing the kin's body like an outgrowth of the nearby underbrush, silver gleaming starkly against smooth brown.

  The soldier worked rapidly, impati
ently, his left hand punching and tapping amid a maze of fingerplates on the hovering calibration board, his right hand impersonally gentle as it coaxed and prodded the unresponsive flesh.

  His voice came again in whispered staccato: "Filthy eyes still won't focus. Why? Won't track. Pattern germination faulty in motor nerves. Why? Jaws work: up, down. Tongue works: in, out, around. Throat, lips—face muscle control almost complete. Eyes like lumps of glass. Why?"

  He held open an unresisting lid, punched savagely at the fingerboard as it swayed near his shoulder.

  "Look at me," he growled, releasing the eyelid.

  The dark eye trembled slightly but remained unfixed.

  March shoved the panel away with an oath and snatched his hand from the frame without disturbing a single hair-thin tendril. While the kin stood motionless in its fragile cage, he bent and attacked the patterning nodes at the base of the device with his blunt fingers and a whirring, bulb-shaped tool. Minuscule points of light twinkled on and off in groups.

  "Is it good to keep him standing there in the sun like that, hour after hour?" Raille asked, emerging from the forest through a natural archway of bushes, a clear bag of leaf samples folded over her arm.

  "Sun just out last half-hour." He glanced once at the blue-bright sky. "High clouds all morning."

  "Even so—"

  "Frame holds him." March rotated the calibration device a half turn and grunted with satisfaction as a quiver traveled up the kin's left thigh and corded muscles spasmed briefly in its neck. "Interrupts. No effort. He's Dancing right now, the lazy chot-son."

  Raille looked at the still form besieged by a host of mechanical vines and creepers. "It's the Dance of Statues, then," she said dubiously, "without theme or movement."

  "Movement from it soon enough," March retorted. "Show you after these small things are finished. Already struts and bows like a well-trained Worker. But each cessemin muscle needs its own lesson." Narrowing his eyes, he concentrated on gauging the precision of his adjustments.