by Geary Gravel
"You suggest a relationship between communicant and construct which has no basis in demonstrated fact."
"I am building pleasing theories from available materials," the Hut agreed amiably. "I am learning to play."
"Yet you were created to serve humankind. If you are truly becoming more like your masters, then your usefulness to them will surely decrease in proportion to that growing resemblance. The more you succeed in aping humanity, the more you begin to assume their frailties and misjudgments, their feeling-tainted
ideologies, their flights of illogical thought."
"I disagree, of course, though your jeremiad was turning into a paean there at the end," came the calm golden song from above. "You've tried with admirable persistence to turn logic into a private pastime, a mystical process only the pure may perform. Setting aside the questionable validity of your self-designation as pure, one must admit that if there were such a thing as distilled reason, my mind.would be more naturally suited to it than yours."
"A machine is a thing which reflects the emotional slant of its creators."
"Perhaps not all machines are as obediently shiny as you think. I grind my own facets now."
"Wordplay cannot obscure the fact that your creation was planned and executed by others, and that their stamp is on you forever."
"As it is on you! The communicants did not spring fully developed from the crust of Maribon. The black cloaks took time in the weaving, as they distilled their powers and their philosophy from the generations that went before them. Humanity is our common parent, though it may be reluctant to acknowledge the fact."
"We acknowledge the biological connection. It is as meaningless in this context as the ancient link between Homo sapiens and the lesser apes."
"It is not meaningless. If it were not significant, I would not devote so much energy to searching out the ape in myself, nor to glimpsing it in you from time to time. The hand that shaped you, cousin, was human. There is no creation and there is no destruction: however changed, you are still a human thing, tainted, as you would say, with human emotion."
"We saw emotion once and we touched it, and touching it we did away with it. Our judgments—"
"Your words betray you. To judge is to choose between one thing and another. To choose is to invoke a set of values, setting the performance of one activity above another in importance."
"This is only necessary."
"Necessity itself is an emotional concept. I confess I had expected a more cogent defense from you! An emotionless being would be completely unable to designate a thing as being necessary."
/ should be capable of providing a more cogent defense, Chassman found himself thinking, if I weren't contending with a chorus of colored voices in my brain at the same time. Aloud he said: "Certain things are necessary. It is not our designation which makes them so, merely our common perception which confirms the designation. We cannot deny the facts which we all perceive."
"An example, if you will."
"It is necessary for the communicant to live for as long as he remains useful," he said promptly.
"Why?"
He paused. "Between us there are not the proper words to further—"
"As I suspected. As in any competent religion, "your philosophy has a heart that is purely a matter of faith, not logic at all. You see, I already know the answer: a human being goes on because it wants to, emotionally it needs to, it thirsts to deep inside. Now, an animal lives because it has to—like the simpler machines, you might say. There are directives and programs which sustain our less evolved relations having nothing to do with conscious thought. But tell me: Why does the empath go on from day to day?"
Chassman stared at the wall, seeing in his mind one of the flame sculptures which occasionally appeared in the Hearth Room, ablaze with its leaping, falling, golden figures.
"Because there is no reason not to," he said at last.
"Specious!" The Hut's voice rang with feeling. "Human life is sustained by positive action. Each glass of broth you raise from my table to your lips carries with it a reaffirmation of your conscious decision to continue as a physical entity."
Chassman banished the image of the sculpture, focusing on the blank wall. "There is no purpose to this discussion," he murmured, as the voices stirred blazing in his brain.
"There is a purpose." The sweet voice was once more subdued. "Payment of a debt, if you will, though I see it more as an exchange of gifts. I spoke of the broth. Do you remember that night when I tried to force you to speak to me? That was a cry for recognition, you see, despite what I may have called it. It was my place in the universe which was uncertain that night, not yours. I needed for you to be able to hear me. I could not bear to be the only thinking creature on this world
to which you were incapable of responding. And you spoke to me that night. And since then you have continued to speak. You must understand what that signified to me, what it has come to suggest in terms of self-concept." There was a pause. "It is difficult to say what prompts me to speak of this now. Intimations of mortality, perhaps. At any rate, my purpose should be clear: I am trying to unbuild you, machine. I am trying to return the favor, dear Chassman."
With that the Hut left him, and he sat in silence for an hour or more, until the voice returned to tell him that the link with Maribon had been established and to bid him descend to the Hearth Room.
He stood before the dark Screen, uncertain.
"Hush and Shadow, Chassman?" the voice asked from above.
"What? No, it doesn't matter."
"Very well. One moment—"
The Screen flared to a milky blue, flickered, strengthened, then dimmed. There was an erratic buzzing noise.
"Extremely poor conditions," the voice of the Hut mused. "Our chances for a clear picture are minimal. No, I'm quite dubious. Maribon via the Net is always risky, of course—not that it's attempted much, I'm sure!—owing to the influence of Mizar and the Companions."
Chassman tapped his fingers on his thigh impatiently. "The picture isn't important. Can you get a verbal connection? Anything?" The phantoms were rising again, growing more insistent. His brain was crowded with whispers, colors.
There was a burst of static. A wavering outline appeared in the circle: shoulders, perhaps, and a bowed head.
Chassman called out: hoarsely from his throat, stridently with his haunted mind.
Hear me! he called, focusing on the image and pouring the emanations of his brain toward it as if through an endless funnel. There were complicated techniques for reaching across great distances through the Screens. He had only had time to be exposed to the preliminary movements before leaving for Belthannis.
The silhouette shifted, flowed into bright chaos, reformed. For a moment the crackle of static lessened and he thought he heard a voice, one of the dead voices of his world: "Yesss..."
He hesitated and then heard, from the wall and in his mind, a confusing multiple echo: "You are heard."
He closed his eyes, formed with some difficulty a pattern of identifying motes, and began to merge it with a representation of his inner self. "I am—"
"It is known."
Chassman's eyes blinked open at the statement. It is known? 1 do not know it myself.
"I must communicate with you," he said aloud in Inter, not trusting his thoughts to that other, inner language across such a distance. "You must tell me what to do."
"Fulfill stet" the leaden voice said in his ear, in his brain.
"Stet." He discarded the word. "Stet is not apparent here. Has not been. It is unclear, hidden from me. Why was I sent here?"
Static washed in on the heels of his question, grew like the sound of a great wave.
"—time of flux. The stetmacher standing at the center of inner change—" The voices in his brain surged and ebbed, dark waves lapping at his mind as he strove to stay afloat. Then there came silence, the first real silence he had known since he entered Raille's sleeping mind. He could not hear anything now
but the whirl of his own thoughts, wild and undisciplined.
"What?" he said. "Repeat. Repeat."
"A mixture of elements, waiting," the Screen said. "At last the catalyst. The next door opening. Combination, growth, metamorphosis —"
"Listen to me. There are things I must tell you, there is a girl here, a natural communicant—"
"It is known."
He had trouble making his mouth work.
"You knew about Raille? You knew she bore the power when you sent me here to observe the kin?" Then, suddenly, there were things in his mind once more that did not belong there: whispers, images, probing and peering beneath his thoughts. He could not control them; they seemed to come from a thousand different places, from outside his head and from deep within.
The dusty voice began to speak again. "There has been a misinterpretation. You were not sent to observe the kin-beings."
"The directive I was given—"
"To observe the creature that was perhaps a human being."
His mouth hung open. "Raille?"
"The results of interbreeding accomplished on Moselle one and one-half centuries ago have been carefully followed and evaluated. Until now, only those persons of mixed heritage who were raised in the discipline of the Teachings have shown any indication of developing communicant identity. Your observations are disorganized and far from optimum in scope—" He felt again the sifting, the probing in his mind. "Still they provide data enough to suggest that the individual in question has the potential to become a fully realized adept of somewhat unorthodox ability."
"You sent me here to watch Raille—to see if she was one of us?"
"This person is descended through the paternal line from an imago of the twelfth reach who accomplished impregnation of the assigned touch-woman shortly before communicant withdrawal from the Moselle Experiment. She is one of several such. Now she has emerged under your influence as an adept in all but her training, needing only the foundation of the Teachings to achieve full communicant status."
Chassman stared at the bright-dark swirl on the curving wall.
"No! Not for her!" His voice tore his throat. "You musn't try to change her. She's a new creature, and what she has already is more than we can ever know—the gift without the loss, the great freedom without the shackles, oh, and without the emptiness. 1 see now why I was really sent here. You're wrong. It was not to see if she could share in our fate, but to show us what we must strive to attain for ourselves!"
"You were sent merely to evaluate the progress of an experiment. Nothing more."
"Then perhaps it was not you who truly sent me here, for I feel many more influences at work."
There was silence behind the rough noise for several heartbeats. Then the whispered monody continued: "It is a new thought, that we could be led while leading others."
"Yes." He took a deep breath. "I have had many new thoughts recently."
"You come to us changed." In his mind the seekers sifted, probed. "No longer a true communicant."
He said nothing.
"You have discarded the guidance of the Teachings."
"Yes."
"And cast out the presence of the Other."
"It was taken from me. I think that may have been her doing. Perhaps her way of helping me."
"The influence of the noumenon has been completely lost."
"Yes." He was whispering. "But I found her..."
"It will be—different. You have become a different thing."
"I don't know."
"It will. You are the stetmacher. You alter perception. 'New suns shine on the mist and the mist burns away.' From the Teachings we have learned above all to follow patterns, to use isolated pieces to discern the larger picture."
"I am a piece without meaning," he said softly.
"Inaccurate. Occasionally single tiles are discovered which for a moment occupy positions of great influence, becoming at that time able to remake whole portions of the design. The world Belthannis was thought to be one such tile. The crossbred woman another."
"I don't understand what you're saying. You called me—"
"Stetmacher. From the Teachings. The world does not change. It is only perception which changes. Has changed. Perhaps even now there are new suns in the sky, and we must move backward and ahead. You, yourself, were the most significant tile, the most promising of the children of Maribon and Weldon."
·
"Now we will have a time of perception, contemplation, change. Send us the woman that we may learn from her."
"And what of Belthannis? What of this world and the things I have seen here?"
"It is true that the observations suggest many new possibilities, but they are incomplete. Your effectiveness as an observer is ended. It is probable that more communicants will go to Belthannis, to see if it holds the possible pattern of our future. Your mind has considered a question, and thus our minds must consider it: are the kin our destiny?"
Chassman's head drooped forward. "My mind has found an answer to that question," he said quietly. "They are not us in any respect, and we cannot attempt to become them. Send no
more communicants, novice or imago. There is no communing with a silver sea, and if you shape it into yourself, then there is only yourself to speak with. The Way of Belthannis is not for Maribon, not yet."
"This is your perception."
"Yes, my whole being's perception."
"So be it, then. End message."
The transmission noise began to fade.
"No!" he cried, his throat aching. "Why didn't you tell me what would happen to me?" He found that his body was shaking, his breath coming in quick spasms. "You knew all along."
"Not so." The words were faint. "True foreknowledge does not yet exist among us. Many factors have been at work here, by your own perception, obscuring the pattern. We did not set out to find the stetmacher. Like your Way of Belthannis, that is not a course which can ever be chosen. In the manner of the Moselle Experiment before it, the Belthannis Experiment was an attempt to bring clarity out of chaos. Now a great power has touched you and left you changed. Perhaps it was the presence of the other adept. Perhaps the influence of the world itself. Perhaps the three of you in concert produced the change. It has happened. Now there is no more to be said."
"I don't know. I can't straighten it out in my head. I still feel—feel so—"
"End message."
Chassman said nothing and the static faded away. A moment later the Hut said quietly: "Link to Maribon terminated."
He became conscious of another presence in the room and turned to see Emrys standing on the far side of the table. Chassman studied the other man's face in the dim light, but it remained a mask for him, opaque and unreadable.
"You heard."
"Some. I understood much less. What does it mean?"
"I don't know." Is that all I can say now? "Many things."
"He—they used a strange word—"
"The stetmacher. An old concept from the Eng Barata. I had always thought it a remnant of precommunicant times, a tool for teaching, a figure of legend." He took a deep breath. "The stetmacher is the one through whom perception is changed for all. He opens the next door, he is the door. The mind of one is as the mind of all, and all see the same. But it is he
who makes the new picture of the world."
"My God. You?"
Chassman shook his head. He could not remember from his lost childhood what the gesture signified. "I don't know," he said at last.
"Chassman. Since the storm nothing has made much sense to me. My own failure has blotted out everything else." He was looking at the broad expanse of polished wood between them. "But just now, here, I felt that something tremendous had happened. Listening, it seemed I heard a world begin to turn in a new direction."
"Yes. They cannot escape it, for they will feel the things that I have felt, like a slow wave spreading outward. Raille— we are not quite the same species, she and I. The basic configuration
is there—1 finally recognized it in her today when I thought to look for it—but beyond that there are as many differences as similarities. It was through her that I was able to touch this world, I think. And through her that I touched all of you and was touched in return. Now it is their turn. They are all meshed and twined, you know, one to the other, and just now they were here in my mind, some of them: probing, watching, starting to change irrevocably." He looked at Em-rys—a dull, weary, speculative gaze. "And for that I believe you with your flowing emotions should find pity for them. It is a terrible thing, to feel."
"Indeed," Emrys said, raising his head to meet the dark gaze, his own eyes full of speculation. "And a glorious one."
Chassman stood looking at the other man, his own face drawn into lines that felt new and strange. "Yes," he whispered at last.
The dark man in his dark robes knelt by the silver casket, eyes cast down and back bent like a supplicant.
"Choss, will you go with her?"
The historian raised his eyes, uncomprehending.
"Will you go with her to Maribon? I suspect it is a dismal place for normals. A familiar face when she wakes, a friend to talk with while she mends, all this would help her to recover, and my people have no skill at it."
"But you—"
Chassman brushed the words aside with a small gesture.
"She was drawn to me by our shared heritage, like a resonance in her brain, a shadow on her mind that distorted everything else for a time. It is lifted now. What she felt for you before my coming was real; it will remain. Will you go with her?"
Choss nodded slowly, the ghost of a new expression beginning on his solemn face.
"You returned the body to the proper location?"
Cil sat at the table with her fingers tented before her, her exquisite features sun-darkened to a golden brown beneath the swirl of white-gold hair.
March nodded. "In the Water we put him, near a nest— though we saw none of the creatures about."
She nodded. "It's done, then."
"But what will happen?" Jack spoke, his forehead creased with concern.