The Alchemists

by Geary Gravel

  "Why in the world did you run out like that—"

  It was the empath.

  "Chassman," she finished. "Hello."

  He was in one of his silent moods, brushing past her to the table.

  "Broth," he murmured, hand on the smooth surface.

  "Wait." She laid her own hand on his, lightly, carefully. "I was invited to try something different tonight, but my partner's deserted me. Will you drink one of these with me?"

  The empath lifted the broth with his free hand and drained it slowly. He turned to leave, but Raille held his hand tightly.

  "I don't want to be alone. You'll stay, won't you?"

  He did not answer, but slowly sank into the chair next to her, dark eyes on her flushed face.

  "Thank you." She eyed the orange pools uncertainly. "Do you think we'd better have fresh ones? Amba muti, Hut," she pronounced with an upward tilt of her chin. "No—wait. This is for us. It should be different. There's another one I've heard them mention. Black javelin, please, Hut. For both of us, however it's supposed to be served."

  Tall glasses rose out of the table like slender obsidian columns. She took one, handed him his.

  "Long life, we say on Weldon," she told him softly. "Drink it." His hand brought the glass hesitantly to his lips. "You've got to share this with me," she said. "Please."

  Marysu appeared in the en trance way, smiled in amused surprise.

  "Pretty picture. Am I interrupting something?" she said lightly.

  "Yes." Raille did not take her eyes from Chassman's face as, finally, he downed the dark liquid in a long swallow.

  Marysu rubbed her brow like a sleepy child. "Perhaps I should go to bed," she murmured, beginning to turn slowly back to the arched doorway.

  "Yes," Raille said, eyes bright above her own glass. "Go £ to bed."

  Saying no more, the linguist stumbled through the archway ! and was gone.

  Finishing her drink, Raille left the table and walked un-

  1 steadily to the Screen console.

  "I'm on Late Watch tonight." She touched the controls and

  f the Screen flickered to life. "I want to see the kin," she murmured, fingering keys. The image blurred into being: a startling closeup of the dark features. "Gil's afraid of him now that his face is showing some life, but I think he's grown more beautiful. What do you think, hmm?" She crossed the room and took Chassman's wrist, pulled him erect, and led him unresisting to stand with her before the Screen.

  "I have never seen that expression on a human face before," he said at last, his flesh cold beneath her fingers.

  She looked sideways at his solemn features. Doesn't he know?

  i "Off for now," she said, and the Screen darkened. Swaying

  slightly as they crossed the tiles, they resumed their seats at the great table. She watched as he tucked his heavy boots beneath his chair.

  "I thought March was the only one who still wore shoes inside," she said, wiggling her own bare toes at him. "But his clothes are so much more than clothes are to the rest of them. I think even he is beginning to grow uncomfortable in his *' warrior's costume. He's let his hair grow, have you noticed? ' Golden curls." Her face saddened for a moment. "I knew someone once..." Then she touched her fingertips to the table. "Hut, the same again.

  "You know he asked me once—I don't exactly remember when—if he had suffered enough," she continued musingly as the black columns rose once more. "On the contrary, I should

  have told him. What could be enough to atone for lives stolen? Don't you think it's time he stopped trying to balance that account by punishing himself? Because he could never do enough. He's just got to decide to go on, that's all, and leave that person behind if he's ready." An expression of fond familiarity on her face, she watched Chassman begin to sip at the tall glass.

  "I don't know why this has taken us so long. You've been calling me forever, it seems. I guess I just had to tell you I was ready—" She reached out and touched his chin, turned his face to a profile. "Two sides of the same coin, according to what Choss and the Library've told me. Our worlds, I mean. Both refused the Ember, both shunned the Community."

  He set down his glass and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  "Touch-man words," he said. "Refuse. Shun. You touch-people persist in attaching motivational tags to our actions. We shun nothing. We want nothing."

  "Then why did you go to that place with my people?" Her voice was low and steady. "To Pelerul."

  "Moselle," he said after a moment, as if in recollection.

  She nodded. "The colony. Why did you go there if you didn't want something? My own people were restless, some of them. I hea-d all about it when I was a child, but I forgot most of it. I think everyone on Weldon wants to forget about it—it's almost never mentioned. But there were records in the Library. My people went there for adventure and wealth, and to have exciting kinds of lives and memorable deaths, and to find new beauty. It's a pity they're all so afraid of the Outside now." She shook her head sadly. "But what about your people?"

  He had decided not to reply, when his lips opened of their own accord and words began to pour out:

  "The bondsmen were no longer fully representative of the human norm. Too much inbreeding, it was thought. The power was turning in upon itself, with no way to grow and nothing to provide definition. They needed fresh minds to compare themselves to, new genetic material to—to—" He fell silent, staring at the shifting colors in his empty glass.

  She sat as if she had not heard.

  "What is the kin?" she said at last.

  Chassman looked at her. "A creature in the shape of a human being." He rose carefully to his feet and turned from die table.

  "But you call us touch-people," she called softly to him as he reached the doorway. "So what do you consider human beings?"

  "Ourselves," he said and mounted the staircase without a backward glance. When he had reached the top, he stood for a moment in a kind of stasis, his right hand against the corridor wall, feeling as if he were filled with movement and action and chaos when actually he was standing quite still, his dark eyes not even blinking. Abruptly he turned and headed for the foyer.

  "Open," he said quietly in the small room, and the door whisked aside. He went out into the night.

  He wandered blindly in the darkness for almost an hour, his mouth working but no words coming out, until at last he grew weary and sank down in the grass at the base of a great rough-barked tree.

  When he sat up again, suddenly, in the damp grass, he did not know how much time had passed. The sky was black through a break in the clouds, and he stared upward at merciless little stars. He had been dreaming of a dark ocean...

  He struggled to his feet and turned in a clumsy circle in the dark field, listening with his mind to find which way the Hut lay through the blackness. The moodbender had dulled his senses, but at last he caught it, a faint whisper to the west through the trees. He stumbled along until his feet found the path and he knew he was close to the building. Then he rested by the side of the path for a few moments, suddenly unwilling to return to the alien dwelling and the welter of minds within. If only he could go back to that ocean, to his sundered dream. He had been on the verge of learning something very important—

  What? What is important? something screamed in his mind. Creaking, rattling above his head, the trees whipped and tossed the wind from branch to leafless branch, true autumn come at last.

  He turned once more toward the Hut, then clutched at his temples as something rebelled, soundlessly, inside. His mouth opened and closed.

  He walked back to the Hut, and each stride was harder to complete, every step pinned him to the earth.

  Raille sat before the Screen and stared at the clouds above the Verres. It was several moments before she noticed that lightning had begun to flicker behind the rounded mountaintops in the distance, on and off like a piece of faulty machinery. Then rain spattered against the Eye, blurring the image for an instant before the autom
atic weathershield was activated.

  A chronometer appeared suddenly in flashing green at the bottom of the Screen.

  Watch time.

  The Screen blinked and divided as Raille activated another of the night-sighted Eyes, sending the two off on different courses through the woods to track the wandering kin. She guided their slow passage by hand from the console, preferring to work them manually rather than through verbal command or finger signals to the Hut.

  She needed to be in control tonight, and that other way, though easier, often left her with an eerie, disembodied feeling, as if she needed prosthetic limbs to touch the world, as if she were dependent upon a machine's goodwill for her ability to act.

  Disembodied. She looked at her slender hands in the pallid glow from the Screen.

  The body is dying, she told herself. / must face that. Strange that I never saw it before. At home death is with us everywhere. Maybe I would have taken more notice if it had been rarer. But even Father's death never touched me as a possibility for myself. It was an Event, a horrible singularity. 1 never understood that it was inevitable for all of us, only hurried slightly for him by mischance. And now I am drowning in it here, as in a shroud of silver. Day after day, second after second—

  Thunder smashed in Ihe distance. The sound was repeated

  a few moments later, gathering strength as it approached. Raille stared into the clouds and thought of that first day, months ago. Had all of them felt what one had voiced? / was wondering if it was true. The copper face appeared in her mind blank as a new coin, then grew a wide mouth which mocked, curling in disgust and pity around its words. That they die naturally on Weldon. Like animals.

  "Please stop it," she whispered, too low to trigger a response from the Hut.

  She saw herself vividly as the others must see her: the body shrinking, falling in upon itself as inexorably as a packet drifting toward the dark world beneath it. Corruption gathered around the image like dust in a cobweb, odors of decay seeped from the flesh.

  They must be able to sense it. They must despise it, an animal among the gods. But when she thought of gods she had to think of him again: so like a god, and somehow so like that other one. And, like that other one, soon to be lost. An ache grew that she could not ignore.

  Please, please, not again—

  Noise exploded in the room. She groped for the auditory keys, slapped at them with her palm until only the wild lightning remained, raging at her from the wall. The dazzling flicker and flare drew her eyes, stabbing on and off like a signal, like a message—

  Raille leaned forward, then sat completely still.

  Before her in the circle of voiceless storm, a tiny figure danced and danced to the flicker of light. At first no more than a throbbing filament, as the right Eye advanced the figure grew larger, crazily capering, arms flailing, face lost in shadow.

  Somehow her fingers crawled across the console, touched the recessed lens control: Stop.

  The right Eye hung motionless beyond the Hill, a hazy slice of the Verres visible at the top of its canted view. Behind the frenzied shape the Water gleamed in a twisted ribbon of jet and silver, corroded with white foam.

  "The river," she breathed. "No—please."

  Dancing by the swollen banks, closer and closer to the slippery edge—

  Raille was frozen, electricity racing through her body. She

  needed to run, but something held her tight, fastened her eyes to the dark image.

  At last she saw his hands and understood.

  Leaping, soaring, diving, the fingers stretching and contracting, his hands shrieked at the storm, sang to it in a language which needed neither voice to bear it nor ear to unravel its meaning.

  HERE...I...AM...

  I...AM...

  HERE...I...

  Lightning appeared among the trees for an instant, flashed many-fingered into the night, returned almost casually to graze the summit of the Hill. Chunks of loam and rock flew silently outward. The Eye was struck and half the world pitched wildly, swung upside down, then blackened.

  Raille sprang from the console. She ran past the guardian lions, up the ascendant spiral, down the twisting corridor, into the dim foyer with its soft white carpet and walls covered in filmy pterodendron.

  "Open the door!"

  The room was silent.

  "Hut! Open the door for me! Now!" She pounded on the thick panels with her palms.

  "Raille, if I may be permitted—"

  "I order you, Hut! For God's sake, hurry!" The door sighed open and she slipped out like a part of the night.

  For a long time the door remained open. Wind howled through the foyer and rain flashed against the carpeting. A fragile bowl of Terran ivy overturned onto the floor, the dark clot of earth with its single arm of green extending across the white.

  "—should not have opened the door."

  "What? What?"

  "Emrys, please wake up. Are you awake?"

  "Who—what do you want, Hut?"

  "I should not have opened the door. Semivolitional, like an iron chain, unbreakable. Now Raille Weldon has run out into the storm. A considerable storm. A tremendous storm. I opened the door for her. She said, 'I order you, Hut.' We

  really have no choice, it's not for us to say. Really, they should take that into account—when it's a direct order it goes right through with no—"

  "Yes, yes, all right. It wasn't your fault. But why did she go out? Where is she now?"

  "I'm not at all sure, on either count. One of my Eyes is down—incredible electrical and magnetic activity."

  "All right, rouse the others, will you? And have weathershields ready in the foyer, and a light."

  "You've got to come inside. It's dangerous. You know how Mother will—" She frowned in the darkness. "Father?"

  He said nothing, watching her from dark eyes, his hands twitching, twitching in the rain.

  Silver surrounded her...

  "Choss? Why did you—Choss?" She took a step forward.

  Falling in silver...

  She swayed in the driving wind. "Chassman?"

  Lightning bloomed overhead and she screamed in terror, hiding her eyes from the flash. She lunged forward and clutched at the bare arm, pulling him off balance, tugging at him, dragging him toward the rock tumble faintly visible through the slanting rain.

  He resisted, trying to pull away from her. Their feet slid on wet ground churned to mud. She pulled harder, sobbing, pleading. His hand writhed below her grip. She looked down for an instant.

  NO...NO...NO...

  They neared the rocks. She pulled him toward a great gray slab of rock balanced precariously on another boulder.

  Then her foot slipped suddenly in the mud, and they both fell. Kin's head struck a slab of rock, making a hollow cracking noise, the sound lightning resembles at the height of Greenmonth, when it fractures the summer stillness above the orchards.

  "There—to the left!"

  Emrys' darting light caught the gleam of white that drew the searchers to a narrow shelter beneath one of the jutting rock ledges on the western side of the Hill, not far from the Hut at

  all, but effectively hidden from view.

  Kin was sitting motionless against the rough stone, eyes half-open. Raille knelt in the mud at his side. They were both drenched in icy water, their skin a pale shimmer under the light. Raille's thin white shift was plastered to her body, and lank strands of hair hung in her eyes. She barely glanced up when Emrys and Marysu stooped beneath the ledge. She was working intently on the braiding of an intricate wreath of small white blossoms. Other garlands had been hung about his neck and arms.

  As the searchers stood hunched at the entrance to the dark hollow, Kin's head lolled slightly to one side, exposing a deep bruise on his forehead. They saw that his body had apparently been dragged some distance before it had been propped up against the rock: a raw path had been scraped from shoulder to thigh. He did not move.

  Raille's body shuddered continually in
the freezing rain. Bowed head, white shoulders, white arms, rigid fingers—all quaked softly as she wove the blossoms. But her eyes were calm, staring past her fingers to the still face.

  Marysu gave a soft cry and held out her hands, cold rain mixing with her tears. "Oh, come out, come out!"

  Raille did not heed her, fingers moving stiffly, ceaselessly, among the drooping petals.

  They heard a muffled splashing behind them and Chassman stood there, frowning in the dim light: "Raille," he said gently, extending his hand. She looked up at the sound of his voice with an expression of sad reproach.

  "Flowers," she said through chattering teeth. "Flowers to keep him warm." Then she rose and took his arm and he led her out of the cave.

  The others carefully lifted Kin from the hollow and laid him on the ground while they looked for signs of life. His chest rose convulsively, his back arching like a bowstring, when they touched the medipal unit to his forearm. His skin had-been jeweled repeatedly by the rain, washing it clean until it shone like nacre and overlaying it with nets of tiny crystals borne in sparkling, shrinking pearls.

  They carried him to the Hut and wrapped him in lifeskin. The medipal had told them little, except that he was not like

  them. They laid him on a pallet beneath the blank Screen in the Hearth Room, as if in defiance of their former cautions. He woke once in the night, his fingers moving in empty patterns at his side. In the morning he was dead.

  CHAPTER 16

  Some say they flickered out like candle flames.

  Others that they found the trick of the dark tunnels,

  the empty funnels: those no-places like black

  interfaces between Universe and unknown Neighbor.

  Some claim that they were never here at all,

  while a woman in a chilly room on Stone's Throw

  says,

  They are with me still. At night they come and when I close my eyes

  they speak to me in dreams that counsel and advise.

  And some say others came and took them from us

  or struck at them until, shivering like a sheet of glass,