by Geary Gravel
The mad vortex dissolved obediently. At once Emrys' face crumpled like a heartbroken child's. He reached toward the empty space above the kin's dark head, his lower lip trembling.
Oh, all right then. Make up your mind.
Pulsing, whirling near invisibility, the apparition flashed again above the silver coffin.
Sessept Emrys grinned happily, his arm remaining suspended in the air until Raille folded it gently down to his side.
Minutes passed as she moved from one to the other, kneeling, touching them with the medipal sensor, reading the results in a flicker of numerals and characters. The instrument began to report them all to be in the same deep, dreamless sleep. Their bodies lay still on the floor until she neared them, then they writhed and muttered beneath her touch. She spoke soothingly to them, smoothed hair back from sweating brows, tried to calm them.
In the center of the room, the empath was a black-and-white figurine, stiff, swaying slightly at the side of the coffin like a spinning top about to fall.
She sensed something in the room with them.
Someone's whispering at the other end of the dragon, Raille thought. She raised her arm to the side of her head. Someone's blowing in my hair.
Aloud she said. "I'm frightened."
"Grow up!"
Who—
With a shiver—like the surface of a pond beneath the wa-terbird's wing, her mind or someone else's interjected smoothly—she realized that her own voice had spoken both times, that she had answered herself.
Something was wrong. Raille's eyes darted around the room in sudden desperation.
There at the center were Emrys, Chassman, and the quiet figure of the kin. Along the curving wall were Marysu, Jack, Choss, March. Jefany, and Cil at her side. Raille tried to turn, but found she couldn't move her body. Something was holding her tight.
She examined the room again, raced through the inventory of people.
What am I looking for?
Her eyes snapped back to the area directly in front of her, searching, trying to keep everyone within her field of vision.
Who—
The constriction was easing. She felt her shoulders, throat, arms, chest, relaxing, beginning to throb with a dull ache which she welcomed as something real, something physical, a sensation that could be identified and dealt with. There was a sound from the other side of the room.
The dark-bearded man walks the Strand on Dunbar's World with her at his side, feeling the night wind in his hair. Solitary lovelights wink from the coquinade terraces, sea-gleam glows in fans and whorls, orange, pink, and white on the walls of merchant villas, high above them as they make their way down the Endless Beach.
Native children bearing cool phosphorescent torches run to them with gifts of shells, offer sips of the famous blue wine, their thin tunics embroidered with cloudfish and eels aflutter in the coolness from the water. The lovers laugh their gratitude to the darting children, emptying their pockets of the silver-gold coins used on this world.
At length the two pass to a less frequented stretch of beach, where they wander barefoot, arm in arm, through the shallows of a .sheltered cove. At the base of chalky cliffs, they stop to build a crackling driftwood fire. They kneel at the rim of a shallow tidal pool, watching by the light of the mounting flames the timeless interplay of sea and land.
Then he spreads a blanket on the sand by the fire, and they lie unspeaking for a time, pressed together side to side, her hand in his, until he brims so full of feeling that his dark eyes sparkle with tears when he turns to her,
"I love you," he says. "I always have. I always will."
She moves against him, clasping his hand in both of hers.
"And I love you," she says, while the wind sweeps in like a veil, mist-laden and full of strange scents from the dark ocean. "Dearest One, I shall love you for as long as 1 live."
There is rising music from somewhere as he leans toward her, his face stretched in an odd new way which he dares to hope is utter joy, but the hands that caressed his have begun to slip away, and as the music reaches its crescendo he sees in the firelight that she is quite old, that the years have passed for them in an eyeblink and left her withered, grayed, trembling at the edge of death.
"This isn't fair," he says calmly as her body slips lifeless from his grasp. Then it seizes him—
Sobbing, clutching his knees as he rocked back and forth, Choss somehow found himself able to lean back comfortably against the wall at the same time and watch the spectacle with amazement.
What is the matter with him! he thought. He tried to calm the weeping figure, the slightly ridiculous Scholar who had hidden his face under clasped arms.
Come on, stop it, it's all gone now. He realized with a start that whatever had so terrified this poor creature was gone after all. Then it occurred to him that everyone in the room must be watching.
Raille turned her attention to the center of the room once more. Something definitely was not right here.
She squinted at the flashing whirlwind and understood at last what it was that spun there: whirling near invisibility above the coffin were pieces of the others, fragments of their selves orbiting the formless thing which had been extended pseudo-pod-fashion from the noumenon in Chassman's mind.
There was an unyielding resistance.
"The brain of the kin does not admit the matrix," Chassman said softly.
His eyes drifted shut.
At once, the faces of Marysu, Jack, Cil, Jefany, Choss, March, and Emrys came to life. Chassman swayed and the seven Group members writhed, muscles and tendons taut, faces stretched with exertion.
Raille stood in confusion. The room was filled with a straining agony.
Help them!
The vortex wobbled alarmingly, dipped, righted itself. A "strange hissing sound escaped from Chassman's lips.
Help them!
Suddenly the whirlpool dropped straight down, spinning madly into the bain-sense. A column of flickering shadows followed it, rushing endlessly downward, pouring from the empty air in front of Chassman down into the silver coffin.
At the focus of the mad whirl-fall, the kin lay twitching on pearl-gray silk, his dark eyes wide, while at its source the empath shuddered and swayed like a candle flame near extinction.
"Is it over? What's happened? Gods, I feel sore!" Jack stretched his arms gingerly and looked from Raille to the medipal sensor bobbing at her side.
"Yes, it's over. Try not to move around for a few minutes." Her face was pale, her manner abstracted.
"Did it work? Raille?"
She turned to him. "I don't know—I have to get out of here. I'm very tired. You can all manage without me now, I'm sure." She smiled in weary apology, rose with effort, and started across the room. Before she reached the archway,-she staggered against the wall on her left, clung there for a moment, then slid noiselessly to the floor.
She was conscious when Emrys bent over her seconds later.
"Not enough time," she whispered.
"Shhh. Just relax. We'll bring you to your room in a minute. You can rest there."
"No." She struggled feebly against him. "I have to stay. Just tired. Let me stay."
He considered for a moment, then nodded his head. "Right. You've earned it. We'll give you a prodrug to keep you going for an hour or so, but after that it's up to bed." He raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Hut, give me something for Raille. Lords, it's been hours—no wonder she's exhausted."
"Pardon me, Emrys, but the entire process lasted less than seven minutes from start to finish," the calm voice replied from above.
March crouched with Emrys at the head of the bain-sense, massaging his calf muscles and smiling his wolf's grin of approval.
"Look at that!" Emrys traced a pulse of green light along the information strip. "There's something in there now!"
The two huddled around the grafted sensor equipment like eager boys. Along the edge of the wall, sitting or reclining, the other members of the Group rubbed the
ir own aching muscles as they watched their jubilant colleagues.
But the empath sat cross-legged, a little removed from the others, dark eyes closed in concentration.
For the third time he searched deep within his own brain, for the third time constructed with care the motes which would allow linkage with the Other. As before, he found nothing. He opened his eyes and stared at the sleeping kin.
"There has been a miscalculation," he said in his soft, rough voice.
"What did you say?" Emrys turned, triumph in his copper-dark face. "Did you say something?"
The empath's pale hand rose like something dead drifting upward through the sea, touched his damp brow.
"I am alone now," he said.
7
The kin rose slowly to its knees, swayed awkwardly to its feet. The arms and legs were trembling.
"We must be very careful from now on—" Emrys paused, fascinated, as the kin shook its head violently in the wind. Dark hair whipped away from the face.
"Vraiment." Marysu came up to stand at the old man's side before the Screen. " 'And all should cry. Beware! Beware!'" she whispered in an Antique language.
Emrys smiled without turning from the image. " 'His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' " he answered in the same tongue.
"What's next, then? Let him run wild like this? Or finish the poem and weave a circle round him, for his own protection?"
"No circles," Emrys said. "He can't be caged now—don't you feel it? He's not an animal anymore. We'll just have to watch him more closely—" He broke off and moved closer to the Screen. "Look at him!" he hissed. "He knows, he knows!"
Together they watched the strange new creature stretch and twitch on the wall. Before, Marysu realized as she tried to read the kin, its movements had been smooth, spare, inhumanly graceful. Now it seemed jerky and uncoordinated, the body all angles and electricity.
While she watched, mesmerized, Jefany entered the room behind her and came to stand by Emrys. Marysu moved away after a moment's hesitation, allowing them to speak privately if they so wished.
"I don't think it's working out, Jon." Jefany spoke rapidly, in a husky whisper. "I think you should stop."
"Not working?" His eyes remained on the Screen. "What are you talking about? He'll be a man, Jefany, a real one. Let them try to take him then!"
"Cil is very worried. We know less than nothing of this world or of the patterns we may be disturbing. Besides that, the empath told you that something went wrong. This isn't the result he was looking for."
"So Chassman isn't infallible. I always knew that. He's just a man. It should comfort the rest of you to learn it. And we can profit from his mistake, if we can figure it out. Somehow he's left a piece of himself lodged in that empty brain, and it's started something in there, or ended it. Look there—see him gesture suddenly with his hands? That's new, new! Perhaps— perhaps there'll be time after all, and we can wake up another one, one of the women, if Chassman's able to manage it. A pair of them to take before the Coben, think of that!"
"Emrys, the original purpose: to save the kin, to allow them to live as they are, undisturbed—"
"I know, I know, we'll still be doing that—but, Jefany, this one will be a man! A true man where there had been an empty space, not even an animal, before. And we'll have done it."
Marysu drifted farther away, beyond the range of their urgent voices. She looked back at the Screen, and for a second the kin seemed to stare at her directly from the wall. The wind was in its eyes, and streaks of moisture glistened on the unlined cheeks.
Oh no, she thought, too obvious, much too obvious. He can't have learned to weep this quickly. More of the Antique
poem tumbled into her head as she flinched under the dark
gaze:
Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise....
Raille moved slowly through the rain-dark forest, treading carefully down slopes and past moss-edged pools, descending among the great silent trees where once she had run for the joy of movement, her heart racing, the strong scent of green life filling her lungs.
Her movements were quiet and deliberate. She picked her way through beds of waist-high mushrooms, past sprawling bushes nodding under masses of sparkling crystalline flowers, dimly prismatic in the rain.
The raindrops themselves did not touch her, slanting down and away from her skin and clothes. When she moved more swiftly they blurred into a faint mist in front of her. About her slim waist was a plain belt with a flat, jeweled buckle. The jewel glowed pale gold in the dusklight, winking like a will-o'-the-wisp as she passed in and out of shadow.
A shallow stream wound near the foot of the hillock, gleaming like shards of dark glass through the heavy twilight.
She found the empath sitting not far from the stream, almost hidden by tall, trembling ferns, on a half-rotted log at the side of a great stone hump, cold, gray and leprous with pale-green lichen. He took no notice of her approach, staring fixedly into the black forest. She stood before him until he shifted position and moved his head restlessly, as if trying to see past her. Then she turned and saw that the kin was also there, curled up in a nest of leaves and grass stems beneath the arching, moss-shrouded roots of a fallen forest giant, whose trunk stretched off like a vast black bridge until it was lost in the leaves and shadow.
He was soaked to the skin under his heavy cloak, and his dark boots sat in a little puddle of their own making at the base of the log.
Finally she broke the silence, the words sounding strange and almost meaningless in the soft soughing of rain through the leaves. "I've brought an extra weathershield. I'm going to put it on you."
He sat as before, hunched forward on the rotten wood, eyes staring into the gloom at the figure that lay unmoving beneath the roots and the thick cloak of dead leaves.
"I'm setting it to medium. They say not to set it too high; you have to be careful. A partial weathershield keeps out rain and most of the cold, but a full one keeps out everything. Light. Air."
He did not argue. He leaned back when she nudged him, then forward so she could clasp the belt around his waist beneath the sodden cloak. Her fingers shook as she tried to fasten the ends together against his flat stomach. "It's getting chill," she murmured.
At last the golden jewel glowed above his black breeches.
She stood back, watching him. Black hair was plastered on the pale forehead above the young face.
She stood for as long as she was able. Finally she leaned against him with a small whisper. He glanced up and she was swaying there, looking down at the crumbled length of log. Wordlessly, he moved to one side, and she sat down next to him, not touching him, shivering slightly.
At length her eyelids drooped and her head relaxed gradually against his shoulder. She slept, her breath a whisper lost among the rain's thousand soft voices.
They sat huddled in the rain that would not touch them, one sleeping, one watching through the misty gloom to where a third still figure shared the night from its nest of leaves. At last the watcher's eyes closed and, resting his head lightly against hers in the darkness, he also slept.
CHAPTER 13
. . .In similar fashion, when Folded Flower was
angry or troubled in mind, she would furrow her
brow and frown on all her neighbors.
Now an ugly woman of the village, seeing and
admiring Folded Flower's beauty, went home and
also proceeded to knit her brows and frown darkly on
all around her.
When the wealthy people of her neighborhood saw
her, they locked tight their doors of iron and would
not go out: when the poor people saw her, they took
up their children and their grainpots and ran away
from her.
This the ugly woman could not understand. She
knew how to admire the frowning beauty, but she did
/> not know why she, though also frowning, was not
beautiful. ...
FROM THE ENC BARATA. STROPHE IV. LUX VII
I
Three months passed rapidly while Emrys and the Group continued their strange work amid the fields and forests of Belthannis, severed by choice from the rest of the Human Community. The kin had become fully obedient to March and
his templates, and its repertoire of programmed movements expanded daily with the addition of increasingly sophisticated maneuvers. The Belthannis Worldspeech continued to unfold in Marysu's fertile mind, while Choss' imagination ranged far and wide as he committed more details of "a most ancient and exquisitely balanced" civilization to his recording chips. Sometimes on foot, sometimes borne by the gleaming droshky, Cil went forth often from the Hut to explore uncharted areas of the Autumnworld.
From The Belthannis Workbook:
By day we travel through the territories of Continent Tu. Estates, Jack calls them, saying they are like the owned land on his birthworld, large and mostly unused, with a person or two at the center. Chettiki, he named them once in the slumworld slang: spite land. The term has little meaning for me* On Siu/Melkior, where the earth is owned by no one, by everyone, we have not yet figured out how to use it for spite.
We pause when we find the occupant, make our tests, observe for a day, move on again. One full day of observation per kin seems to be plenty: they are all alike, at least on any level my instruments and eyes can measure. We have visited seven inhabited estates so far, in about forty-two days on this continent. An average of five days to move from occupant to occupant—but the time spent crossing the land is not the significant factor. It took us three days to go from the woman in territory One-Winter to the man in Two-Winter-Fall. We spent a day watching, resting, then were eight days traveling before we reached the male in Six-Fall. It was only last week, when we arrived in Three-Summer, that I thought to check the distances from kin to kin toted up so far on the droshky. After analysis, it turned out that the time differential was based exclusively on the type of terrain we encountered en route. From the first kin to the second was smooth, flat meadowland for most of the trip; between the second and third we crossed a low range of mountains and had to contend with two difficult river crossings; third to fourth was clear going again, and so forth.