Six Moon Dance (63 page)

“No,” said D’Jevier angrily. “They made the right choice. It just doesn’t happen to fit into Haraldson’s edicts.”

“What?” demanded Calvy. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s going to sterilize mankind on Newholme,” murmured D’Jevier.

“Because of the Timmys?” Calvy cried, not waiting for an answer. “She’s going to sterilize the people?” He turned to confront Questioner, saying accusingly, “Sterilize my children? That’s a rotten way to repay Mouche and Ornery for their efforts on your behalf, Questioner. Or all the people on this planet who never killed a single Timmy. No future for them, either?”

“What are you talking about?” cried Ornery. “She’s going to do what?”

“The innocent suffer with the guilty,” said Questioner, with a significant glance at the Hags. “And it is not because of the Timmys! Let them explain it to you.” She moved ponderously up the hill away from them.

Behind her, D’Jevier burst into tears, to be comforted by Ellin, who stared after Questioner, wondering if she and Bao should stay or go after her. Bao put a hand on her shoulder, holding her in place. Well then, they would stay. They did not yet understand what exactly was happening, but they understood well enough that Mouche and Ornery along with the rest of Newholmian people were condemned to a fate that had sunk the others of their group deep in grief.

Away toward the chasm, Mouche looked up, noticed the unhappy group by the Fauxi-dizalonz and came slowly toward them.

“How can I tell him?” wept Madame. “Everything he’s done for us, for us all, and now this. I can’t tell him.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference to him, would it?” asked Ornery. “He never had any future, anyhow. Not in the way of children and a family.”

“But this is different,” Madame cried. “Different … when it’s the whole world.”

Ornery, watching Mouche’s slow approach, was not at all sure that the difference was worth mentioning.

O
ver the succeeding days, the Quaggi egg was tunneled away from the body of Kaorugi and also out of the body of Quaggima—a job for which Kaorugi created two large creatures with geo-surgical aptitudes. The blast capsules beneath the egg were also carefully disassembled and Questioner’s ship—whose captain had claimed “parts failure” as an excuse for failing to respond during the gathering of the moons—proved capable under the Gablian commander of lifting Quaggima and the egg and the dangerous hatching mechanism from the planet’s surface. Quaggima was deposited on one of the tiny moonlets orbiting Newholme, for a time of rehabilitation, but the egg was taken farther out, to be cracked when Quaggima was ready. According to Bofusdiaga, Quaggima intended to take his children under his wing, male and female both, to start a Quaggian rights movement, a movement that might seek an allegiance with the Council of Worlds, who would be asked to lend certain ships to the task of rescuing abused and dying Quaggi. During the enlightening intercourse that had taken place in the chasm, the Quaggima had acquired strong feelings about Quaggian sexuality.

These effort were still underway when Mouche paid a visit to House Genevois, where he found both Madame and D’Jevier, pale and shadow-faced, grieving the future loss of their people upon Newholme. Mouche hugged them both and told them to keep up their spirits, use their heads, the game wasn’t over, there might be a card or two to play yet, burying them in so many hope-inducing cliches that they both laughed.

“Are you coming back to House Genevois, Mouche?” Madame asked. “I will understand if you choose not to do so.”

“Questioner has offered to pay off my contract. As for what I will do, I am uncertain at the moment, but I think we would all agree, Madame, that I am an unlikely Consort.” He shook out his shock of green hair, letting it flow like seagrass, grinning at her in a devilishly intimate manner.

“You are unlikely, Mouche. You’re also unusually impertinent.” She gave him a tearful smile.

The smile undid him. He had sworn to himself to say nothing, but these women needed a hint of hope. “Madame, I have set myself the task of changing Questioner’s mind. If I fail, keep in your minds that Kaorugi does not want mankind departed from its world, and Kaorugi is capable of much we do not understand.”

He dropped a kiss on each forehead and took himself off.

“You’ll miss him,” said D’Jevier.

“We both will,” said Madame. “And I’m so glad the Fauxi-dizalonz fixed his face. But think, Jevvy, what he said!”

“About Kaorugi?”

“The last few nights, I’ve found myself dreaming about him—not sexually—and in the dream he was pointing into the distance and calling, ‘There, there it is, Madame.’ I was sure he was pointing to the Fauxi-dizalonz. And what he said just now…. Do you think Bofusdiaga would let us? Some of us? Even … all of us?”

“If we are to have no mankind future, you mean? Oh, yes, Madame. I’ve thought of that, too. Could we become? As Mouche has become? Do you suppose the Corojum would ask on our behalf?”

They thought about this, with emotions that ranged moment to moment from revulsion and apprehension to wonderment and hope.

Corojum, speaking, so he said, for Bofusdiaga, had suggested that Questioner transport a quantity of previously unknown Newholme botanicals to test the market among the populated worlds. One or another entity of Dosha seemed to be determined to maintain contact with the outside worlds, though whether this was Bofusdiaga or Kaorugi itself or some new, commercial subentity, Questioner wasn’t sure.

Whichever, rather than attempting to deal with the cargo, the captain of
The Quest
ran true to form by tendering his resignation. “My aunt is the delegate from Caphalonia!” he said. “She wouldn’t have obtained an office for me on a
cargo
ship!”

“Quite right,” Questioner had said. “Beneath your dignity. There’s a freighter arriving tomorrow. I’ll send you home with my entourage.”

“But,” said the captain.

“Not at all, not at all,” Questioner boomed. “Don’t thank me. Glad to do it.”

The Gablian commander was immediately promoted to captain. Ornery had learned a good deal about cargo in her years as a sailor, and she offered to help the Gablian crew stow the bales and cartons.

Calvy had been so deeply depressed by the Questioner’s decision to sterilize mankind upon Newholme that he went into a funk every time he saw his children. Trying to raise his spirits, his wife suggested a visit to the extraordinary caves west of Naibah, and Ellin and Bao were invited to go along.

Thus for a time everyone was busy and occupied except Questioner and Mouche. Mouche wasted no time in asking Questioner to dine with him. He had an agenda, a very specific agenda, which he and Flowing Green had arrived at.

The two met in the side room of a cafe in Sendoph, where they enjoyed a very good early dinner, sipped a little not bad Newholmian wine, and agreed to spend the early evening playing a few hands of Gablian poker. As Mouche had arranged, the room was empty except for themselves, though the walls were no doubt full of eyes and ears, a hundred tattletales ready to run to Bofusdiaga at a moment’s notice.

When Questioner arrived she was in a state, as she confessed to Mouche. A mood, Mouche thought of it. Despite the fact that all concerned had managed to avert a tragic outcome of the Quaggian Dilemma (thus far), Questioner had not come away from the episode feeling either satisfied or relieved. Indeed, if anything, she was more irritable and exasperated than before.

Mouche did not let it pass. “It is clear to me you are sad and irritable,” he said, dealing them each five cards, the last one face up, “because the beings from whom you were made are in great pain and terror, and you know this even if you do not feel it.”

“How do you know?” she demanded, regarding her exposed king of shovels with a scowl. “Did Ornery tell you?”

Mouche had a ten of love showing, and he made a face as he picked up the facedown cards and arranged them in his hand. “Not until later, but Flowing Green knew all about it. She saw you in your maintenance booth. She heard you talking to your inward persons. You have a deep pain there, but it need not remain.”

“Is your Timmy recommending a cerebrectomy?” Questioner sneered.

Mouche gave her a look so patient as to be almost patronizing. “No, Flowing Green and I recommend only the removal of unpleasant memories and the substitution of some happy feelings. We can be at the Fauxi-dizalonz in an hour in your shuttle, and Bofusdiaga has already agreed that the parts of you needing surcease are organic parts that it can work with.”

“Why should I do that?” she asked, astonished by this suggestion. “I’ve done well enough so far.”

“You have,” he agreed. “But until just recently, you were unaware of the tragedy you carry inside you. Mathi-lla, M’Tafa, and Tiu cannot be freed of pain until you help them. Bofusdiaga can not only free them, he can also grant them happiness.”

She gritted her teeth. Learning of the three from an outside source had brought them into her memory banks by a route HoTA had never intended. All her baffles and wards had been outflanked and the lives and deaths of the three indwelling minds had been resurrected in herself.

“They are no longer severed from your consciousness,” said Mouche, accurately reading her face. “It is their anger and agony you feel on a daily basis, hour by hour.”

“I can bear it,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Of course you can bear it,” he said. “The question is, why should anyone bear it? Bearing it does no one any good, least of all you. Like the jongau, you’ll come to survive on hatred, and like the jongau, you’ll disintegrate. I remember what Corojum said about living in the past. And I remember that when we spoke with Timmys who had themselves been killed by men and later resurrected in the Fauxi-dizalonz, none of them remembered the terror or horror. They knew about it, yes, but they did not feel it. So, when you have been in the Fauxi-dizalonz, you will know about your indwellers, but you will not feel their pain.”

She stared at him, examining him with all her senses. Nothing there now of the quivering boy who had accompanied her on the underground river. And the green hair was certainly unusual, as was his hybrid facial appearance. Slightly lofty. Like a minor angel. Though he sounded very little different from before, he thought quite differently, she could tell.

“It’s not the same,” she murmured.

“It
is
the same,” he asserted. “In recent time I have come to understand that, Questioner. Flowing Green has observed that the true story of any living thing has pain in it, and life has to be that way. Curiosity is a good goad, but pain is a better one. It is pain that moves us, that makes us learn how to cure, how to mend, how to improve, how to re-create. Inside all of us, even the happiest, are memories of pain. Ellin, Bao, Ornery … they all had hurt children inside them. We came to know one another’s pain during our adventure in the chasm. Each of us cries that we are lost. We ask the darkened room, who are we? And we demand easy answers: I am my father’s son. My mother’s daughter. A child of this family, or that.”

“That’s the nature of mankind,” she agreed.

“True, but Corojum had an answer that is equally true, and I like his better! We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance.

“The minds inside you suffer, Questioner. Let them have joy.”

She frowned, turning her glass in her hands, not replying. Tactfully, Mouche turned his attention elsewhere, feeling movement behind the walls, a scurry, a coming and going. Every word he said was reported. Every motion he made. Still, thus far in his game he was content. He had played a card, and she would think about it. She would construct a dozen reasons why not, but before she left Newholme (if Bofusdiaga let anyone leave Newholme) she would go into the Fauxi-dizalonz. For the sake of those children, if not her own.

Now the next play. He laid his cards face down on the table before him, saying: “See how empty the streets are. The Timmys now have no need to hover over people, and many of them have gone back to doing whatever they did before mankind came. Do you include the fact that mankind killed many of them in your decisions about Newholme? Are their deaths one of the reasons that the mankind population will be sterilized?”

Questioner shook her head slowly, still mulling the matter of the suffering children inside herself. “It wasn’t for that, Mouche. I could argue it, but the question of individuality would arise. The Timmys are, after all, only quasi-independent beings. They were made to look like people by Bofusdiaga, but in the past they were otherwise, and maybe in the future they will be stranger yet. If they are malleable beings, made as Bofusdiaga wills, then what was actually killed? They were distinctive only in the information they carried, but not even information was lost, for the dance has been regained. In any case, it won’t be needed in the future.”

“This is so,” Mouche agreed.

“However,” she went on relentlessly, “the killers didn’t know the Timmys weren’t individuals when they killed them. Their intent was genocidal. That’s a point against mankind on Newholme.”

Mouche nodded sympathetically. “True, Questioner. Though not all the people were involved even then, and none now living were. How about the culture, the dower laws, the supernumes, the men having to wear veils? Does that figure in your decision?”

She shook her head. “Blue-bodying is against the edicts, I should say, but corrective action would have been easy enough without extreme measures. On that ground alone I would have recommended that in order to comply strictly with Haraldson’s edicts, the people here should establish another colony where their dissidents could go. The system is actually no more coercive than many other systems that are supposed to be voluntary. The men give up a little to get most of what they want, the women give up a little to get most of what they want. Neither sex is completely satisfied, but neither is completely dissatisfied.”