Six Moon Dance (50 page)

When they wakened much later there was light. Dimly glowing stones had been set here and there to cast a pale greenish light on the surroundings. When they sat up, they found their legs had been untied and they could make out the glowing forms of their captors, much brighter than before, sitting at some distance from them having, so Ellin muttered resentfully to herself, a picnic.

“I’m thirsty,” said Ellin plaintively, running her tongue around her dry mouth.

Immediately, one of the Timmys rose and brought them cups full of liquid. “Mir-juice,” said the Timmy. “Not too sweet.”

Ellin tasted it doubtfully. It was tart, cool, with a satisfying flavor somewhere between fruit and spice. By the time she had finished it, the Timmy was back with small loaves of bread. “We brought these for you,” it said. “We took them from the pantry at Mantelby Mansion.”

Ellin put one of the little loaves to her nose, then bit into it. It was one of the sweet breakfast breads Ellin had most enjoyed since being at the mansion. “Can’t we eat your food?” she asked, somewhat tremulously.

The Timmy smiled a three-cornered smile, its eyes crinkling, its lips open to display bright yellow mouth tissues. “Assuredly. But, we thought when people are snatched up and carried off, when they are tied up and put in the belly of a legger and then are in the belly of a swimmer, and it is dark and things are most unfamiliar, then it is probably comforting to have familiar food.”

Only then did Ellin and Bao realize they had indeed been moved into some new conveyance, though it felt and smelled exactly like the former one. The jogging motion had given way to a recurrent warping of their space, first to one side, then the other, like the swimming motion of a fish or snake.

Bao stood up and stretched, bracing himself against the sideways warping. “So, we are having familiar food. What are you bringing specially for me?”

Another Timmy handed over a neatly wrapped sandwich. Ham and cheese. “You are watching us,” said Bao. “All the time we are being here, you are watching.”

“That is true,” agreed the Timmy. “Mostly we watched the other ones, for they are most different. But then, we saw you dancing, and we said, oh, they are dancers, we must bring them, too, and we asked Bofusdiaga, and the word came, yes, bring them. So, we took some things to make you comfortable, and if you had not come in upon us when you did, we would have come for you very soon anyway.”

“That makes me feel so special,” said Ellin, only slightly sarcastically.

The Timmy was alert to the tone. “We will not hurt you. We do not hurt people. Oh, the Fauxi-dizalonz showed those other ones they were gau, but that was their own fault. Being gau is always the creature’s fault if it will not go through and through to get fixed.”

“What other ones?” asked Bao.

“Now they call themselves Wilderneers,” said the Timmy, with an exasperated little shake of its head. “They were the first mankind ones who came. But they were all … all one kind and all jong. Jong, that means … like something we sweep and throw away. We did not know they were jong until they went in the Fauxi-dizalonz. Then Bofusdiaga cried out, and we all came running to see. Fauxi-dizalonz turned an evil color, and they came out like evil monsters, and we told them, ‘Go back through, take up all the disguises you have left there and fix yourselves,’ but they would not.”

“Disguises?” asked Ellin. “You mean, masks?”

“Disguises,” said the Timmy, coming very close and looking her in the eye. “In your language, which is not always sensible. We say, what you wear out here,” he tapped her arm, her shoulder, her cheek, “is a guise (that is your word) for what is in there,” and he peered into her eyes, as though trying to see her brain. “If it does not match your insides, it is a dis-guise (that is your word, meaning a bad-guise), and you go through the Fauxi-dizalonz and get the outside to express the inside. Then back through to change the inside, perhaps, and sometimes back and forth several times, working it out.”

“Do your outsides look like your insides?” she asked.

The Timmy hunkered down and considered this. “Before mankind came, Timmys were shaped differently. When mankind came, Bofusdiaga thought we would be more … what is mankind words … acceptable, to look like you. So, some insides also shifted, to make it work.”

“Were your outsides looking like your insides before?” queried Bao.

“Always, pretty much. First came life without any insides, just moving, eating, excreting, moving some more, no thought about it, no worries, just live or get eaten, building bigger and bigger. Then, the big thing grows a little bit of insides, enough to say to itself, ‘Do not grow that way, the fire is too hot.’ So, once it says that, it must have outsides ready to grow where it says! You see?”

“When you say ‘insides,’ “ asked Ellin, “you mean brain?”

“We mean the thinkables. The person inside who talks with the person outside. The unbodied observer of that which acts. I suppose yes, brain, but you people, you have four brains, maybe five, all mixed up. You know?”

“I am not knowing this,” said Bao. “What five brains?”

“First very little brain for some little something swimming around that does not do much. This brain makes you jump if someone bites you. Then you have brain for some cold thing that moves better and thinks a tiny bit. This brain says run, hide, that thing is dangerous. Then you have brain for some warm thing that runs and leaps and thinks. This brain says, build nest here, not there, or eggs will drown. Then you have bigger brain that thinks much and is aware. This is ape brain. We know about ape brain because the Hags talk of it. This brain says: me powerful; oh, child, dead, I grieve; alas, I love, I want. Then comes mankind brain, brain that talks, brain that puts ape thoughts into words, brain that uses and misuses many words! Only the last brain is what you call human, which is what we call dosha, which means fullness, capable of self-judgment and correction.”

“All that!” exclaimed Ellin.

“Too much,” agreed the Timmy. “Because your brains are not a good fit. They are like some too small boxes in another too big box. They rattle. Outside, you look like one person, inside you are five things, not all persons. So, if you go in Fauxi-dizalonz, you come out like your insides, with lizard tail and ape arms and your inside minds say, oh, look, this is who I am, and you think about that with brain five, then you go back in Fauxi-dizalonz and put the pieces back, but put them back in good order, so they work together and do not rattle.”

Ellin had listened to this with increasing horror. “But, but,” she cried, “I know who I am already. I know who my grandfather and my mother were, or I would know, if I looked them up, but …”

“Pff,” said the Timmy. “You mankinds with your fathers and mothers. This is one of first things we thought strange, you all the time talking my father this, my mother that. What does fathers and mothers have to do with who you are? Your planet is your mother; time is your father. Your insides know this! All life outside you is your kin-folk. Even we dosha are your kin, born of another planet but with same father as you. Starflame makes your materials, and live-planet assembles them, and time designs what you are, not your fathers and mothers. Pff. You could be genetic assemblage; Bofusdiaga could make you without fathers or mothers; and you would still be persons! But you could not have material without stars, or life without planet, or intelligence without time and be any way at all. It is your stars and your world and long time gives you legs to dance and brains to plan and voices to sing.”

“My mother gave me my ability to dance,” said Ellin angrily.

“Pff,” said the Timmy. “And who gave her? Ah? Her mother passed it to her, and her mother passed it to her, and so back to the ooze. Planet and time gave dancing. Squirrels in trees dance. Horses dance in meadows. Birds dance in air. Snakes dance in the dust. Your mother did not invent it, she only inherited abilities to do it. So, she inherited well, but she did not do it herself.”

“You’re saying my mother gave me nothing?” Ellin was outraged, almost shrieking.

“What your mother can give you, maybe, is recipe for chicken soup. Apple pie. Maybe she invented that.”

“What are you meaning, chicken soup …” choked Bao.

The Timmy cocked his head far to the side, stretching his neck, a very unmankindlike gesture. “We hear Hags talk of chicken soup. Any kind of soup. This one recipe from this mother and that one from other mother, but even so, soups taste much alike. Timmy have recipes also. Many good things. You ask Mouche. We made great good smells and flavors for Mouche.”

“Mouche the gardener?” cried Bao.

“Mouchidi, the one the Corojum has sent for.”

After that, Ellin was too angry and Bao was too confused or bemused to ask any more questions, and very soon the swimmer began to swim much faster, with a great rushing-splashing noise along its sides, far too much noise to talk at all. Bao and Ellin settled into a comfortable hollow, stuffed bits of Ellin’s bread into their ears, and let the rocking movement slowly lull them back to sleep.

M
adame and the two Hags had chosen to sit in the rear of the inflatable boat. Simon and Calvy and the three remaining Haggers sat two on each side and one in front. They were so busy listening to the silence that they did not speak at all, and they floated on the small river for what seemed to them some considerable time before the tunnel narrowed, the water began to rush, and they found themselves plunging through the same narrow throat of stone the prior expedition had traversed, into the same larger river and across it, where the boat ricocheted violently off the tunnel wall.

“I suppose we’re sure everyone went this way,” murmured D’Jevier, as the Haggers and Calvy g’Valdet tried to paddle the boat back into the center of the stream.

“We saw their tracks on the sand. We saw the impressions made by at least two boats,” muttered Calvy, fighting his desire to curse at the Haggers, who persisted in paddling against one another’s efforts so that the clumsy boat spun lazily around as the current caught it.

“Let me,” said Madame, moving to the place across the boat from Calvy and taking the oar from the Hagger there. “Watch me,” she said to him. “It is necessary to coordinate the strokes or we go nowhere.”

“Now where did you pick that up?” said Calvy in an interested tone.

“My friends and I do a bit of wilderness walking,” said Madame, concentrating on her paddling. “And canoeing.”

Among Simon, Madame, and Calvy, they managed to turn the boat so that it faced downstream and keep it there with only occasional dips of the paddles. When Madame thought the Haggers had the idea, she gave up her paddle and returned to the company of the Hags.

“Have you met the Questioner?” Calvy asked over his shoulder.

“We have,” said Onsofruct. “A very civil contraption.”

“Civil on the outside, but she wasn’t fooled,” said D’Jevier. “She knew something. Maybe everything. I thought we might sidetrack her onto the threat posed by the volcanoes, but she made it clear she knew what we were up to.”

“You mean the Timmys?” Calvy asked.

“Oh, definitely the Timmys,” D’Jevier acknowledged. “She had these two young Earthers with her, very open-faced and so milky-lipped that one might think them moments from mama’s breast, but they turned out to be quite perceptive. I should have expected that. She’d scarcely have brought them, otherwise.”

“How do you read all this, Madame?” Calvy asked over his shoulder. “This current journey of ours?”

Madame said, “How can we read it? The Timmys took the Questioner’s people, her Earther aides went after them, then Questioner and two pressed men became third in line. Why the Timmys took the first ones …” She shrugged invisibly. “Who knows?”

“I’ve been doing some research,” Calvy persisted. “Our records since we’ve been on Newholme show that episodes of vulcanism increase during lunar conjunctions. Multiple conjunctions are usually accompanied by some very big quakes. If the Timmys were here before we were (and I think we have to accept that they were), then they’ve evolved under conditions of periodic vulcanism and presumably would know how to deal with it … unless this time is really different from any former time.”

“As to that,” said Onsofruct, “we don’t know about all possible former times. We’ve only been here a few hundred years.”

Calvy said, “We don’t know, but the planet does. There’s a gravelly cliff west of Naibah that sheds a few feet of itself every time we have a quake. Each of the falls has time to weather and change color before it gets covered by the next layer. When you drill into the deposit, you get a nicely striped core, one you can read like tree rings. So, I had a few of my supernumes take some really deep core samples, as deep as we can get with the equipment we have.”

“And?” queried D’Jevier. “What did you find?”

“We got back about five thousand years. If we had better equipment, we could go deeper and probably read up to hundreds of thousands, but during those five thousand years, at least, we find thick deposits every seven or eight hundred years, but the gravel that’s falling now is already thicker than the thickest previous layer.”

“You didn’t tell us that?” said D’Jevier. “You didn’t say a word about it.”

“My people finished up the report last night,” Calvy responded mildly. “I’ve not had a chance to tell anyone. It does make me wonder whether we colonists have destroyed or weakened some vital link in this planet’s ecology.”

“But we haven’t!” Onsofruct objected.

Calvy gave her a grin over his shoulder, saying, “Well, that’s true to form. If we have, we could hardly admit it to ourselves if we had, could we? Or to anyone else?”

“But to allege such a thing …” Her voice trailed away.

“It’s only an inference, Ma’am.” He paused in his paddling, then said firmly, “Still, it can’t be discounted without some proof to the contrary. How do we know what the first settlers did? Why were they wiped out, as we presume they were? Was it because they had committed some grave offense?”

Onsofruct opened her mouth to retort, more out of habitual response to any male criticism than from real conviction of the innocence of the first settlers. Her words were stopped by a sound they all heard in the same instant: a grating sound, quite distant, but coming nearer and growing louder.