Barsk (10 page)

“I know. You're not going to leave because you want to, but that doesn't matter. You're going to leave. But I don't know if you come back. I've been trying to find out, or figure it out, but I don't know yet.” At this last, the boy's face had screwed up with emotion and he looked on the edge of tears.

Jorl slipped his trunk around one of Pizlo's ears and drew him closer. “Okay. Well, I can see that that was a big secret for you to carry around all by yourself. Now that you've told me, the weight of it isn't so much, right? But it's still a secret, so I'll keep it to myself. And if you're right, if it happens, I'll let you know that it came to pass. Sound good?”

Pizlo shrugged and pulled free of Jorl's trunk. He turned away, his face already cleared of sorrow. He began poking through a collection of jars on a shelf that in other days had sometimes held cookies. “Okay. Are you hungry? Because if you are, I could have a snack with you. So you don't have to eat alone, I mean.”

Nodding, Jorl stood and headed to the pantry in his small kitchen. “It seems to me that one of the things you always happen to know is when I've replenished the larder.” Pizlo had followed him in and seated himself on a stool at the breakfast counter. Jorl opened a container piled high with sweet leaves and put a generous couple handfuls in a bowl for the boy. He took a smaller handful for himself and absently stuffed it into his mouth. He chewed as he watched Pizlo devour the snack.

“These are my favorite!”

“That's what you say about everything you eat here.”

“I know. And it's true each time. A person can have his favorite change, can't he?”

“I suppose, but doesn't that take some of the meaning of ‘favorite' away?”

“Oh. Maybe. Or … maybe I mean it in a different way.”

He laughed. “That's the same problem I have making sense of the Matriarch's prophecies. I think sometimes she uses words to mean different things than everyone else thinks they mean.”

Pizlo swallowed the last of his leaves and held himself very still. “Yeah … that's how it feels. Sometimes. Oh! I forgot. I wrote one down for you.”

He jumped to his feet and shoved a hand deep into the pocket of the daypouch strapped across his chest. He took out a ball of crumpled brown scrap paper, all the thick stiffness of it worn malleable as cloth. Holding it by the edges with both hands, he used his trunk to carefully smooth out the page on the counter. It was covered over with the immaculate tight characters that Jorl had begun teaching him from his very first lesson.

“This is one of the things you just woke up knowing?”

“Yep! I was having a dream where I was walking on a big map and counting all the islands of both archipelagos. The islands were the size of my feet! I made up a dance, back and forth over all of them. When the dance was over I had both feet on Keslo and I noticed a new spot, a tiny island that hadn't been on the map before. Except it always was. Except it wasn't. And when I woke up, I knew how to get there.”

“And no one else knows this tiny island?”

“Not exactly.”

“Which is it? People know it, or they don't?”

“Some people do. Only, they're all gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“Gone there.” Pizlo pointed at the paper and pushed it toward Jorl. “It's the place where nearly everyone goes, but no one ever comes back.”

Jorl parsed the riddle at once. He stared down at the scrap, not daring to believe, his eyes tracking the words that described leaving Keslo with precise directions for a destination several days away from the last islands of their archipelago. “When did you happen to know this, Pizlo?”

“I had the dream days ago. I didn't know what it was, and I forgot about it. But it kept coming back, and I kept forgetting it. I only wrote it down this morning because I had this other thing come to me.”

“Other thing?”

“Yeah. I knew that you'd want to know about what came out of that dream. So I wrote it down because I didn't want to forget it again. It's a gift.”

Jorl took the directions and moved back to his work desk and rummaged among the books there until he'd found one with a collection of holographic maps. Pizlo followed after, eyes wide and bright.

“I like maps.”

“Boys your age almost always do. So, here's a map of the western archipelago.”

“It looks like the map from my dream, only a lot smaller. Ha, I guess my map would be too big to fit in a book.”

Jorl smiled. “Maybe in a dream book. But look, here's Keslo, where we are, almost all the way to the east. And if you go a little further, past all this open water, you reach the eastern archipelago. All the Fant in the world live in one or the other of these chains of islands. All the islands you danced on in your dream.”

“Have you been to them all?”

“No, only about half a dozen. But a lot of men wander and see many more of them in their time. I guess I got that wanderlust out of my system when I left Barsk. But see here, in the middle of that empty water?” With one finger he traced a broad circle of ocean midway between the archipelagos.

Pizlo poked with his own finger, stabbing a spot near the top of Jorl's circle, closer to the equator than most of the islands. “That's where the place in my dream was, but I just see the empty water,” said Pizlo.

“Me, too. That's because this place isn't meant to be on any map. Every Fant gets this one vision, Pizlo, of a place to go and how to find it. But they get it with a message that tells them they should go, and when. You didn't get that message, did you?”

“Nope. I just got the place. And the idea about how it's a place people go to but don't come back from. That's kind of weird, isn't it?”

“I can see why you'd think so. It's knowledge that normally doesn't come to someone so young. People learn how to go to this place when they're very old. It's where they go when it's their time to die.”

 

EIGHT

VENUE AND VISION

LIRLOWIL
preferred to take her koph as a tea. She inhaled the welcome smell of spiralmint, closing her eyes as the warm, dermal calm spread throughout her. Properly prepared, koph tea always provided a relaxing effect, whether one was a Speaker or not. The expense of the koph kept most from experiencing the luxury. She had stumbled upon her secondary talent as a direct result of her hedonistic ways and the eagerness of Sharv's government to fulfill her every whim.

As she drank deeper, relaxation led to a familiar disorientation and she became sensitive to another level of perception. She regarded a nefshon self-construct of herself, afloat in the null-gravity of one corner of her bedroom on the station. Her four previous summonings of Fant had begun this same way, but she took no comfort in that. As she performed the mental exercises and crafted the patterns of summoning, Lirlowil could not dismiss the inherent wrongness of what she was attempting. In eight hundred years of Speaking, only three rules had ever been imposed, an edict created back at the very beginning by Margda herself, the Fant who'd discovered the process. If successful, she'd not only break the very first of the rules, she'd rub their creator's face in the act at the same time!

Lirlowil pictured the Fant Matriarch. She knew her from flims, from archival projections, from myths, and from songs. Lirlowil keyed the mnemonic locks from her research, releasing every speech and anecdote and rumor and opinion by and about her target. Without direct experience of her conversant, her mind cast a wide net in its quest, gathering relevant as well as erroneous particles. It was a slower process, but in the end the nefshons would sort themselves. As with most of her previous summonings of Fant, she had the advantage of being close to Barsk; a vast portion of her target's nefshons lingered near and came at her summons.

Committed now, unable to stop, memories and emotions from Margda's subatomic particles buffeted her as they sought to resolve themselves under Lirlowil's guiding mind. She opened herself to them, needing them all to build as full and recent a simulacrum as possible. The small, withered, wrinkled body of her last days … an undying fascination with political power … her first view of the sky … the butterfly scar on the lower inside of her left ear … the flavor of walnut paste … the shudder of prophecy … the love for her father … the reflected glow of the aleph … the searing helpless pain of seizure … the oppression by the Alliance … anger at her own failures … watching dust motes dance in the light of a chimney's … allergic reaction to gnorb … welcome smell of spiralmint … delicate twining of trunks … the vision leading her to the creation of the Edict …

“‘… these limits only I place upon you, that never shall a Speaker Summon a Speaker…' was that so restrictive a law?”

In the slow swirl beyond sight, Lirlowil gasped as Margda took on visible form more rapidly, more solidly, than she had anticipated. She wore a shapeless gray toga that stopped just short of her feet, belted beneath her considerable breasts, but otherwise unadorned. As if wearing anything even remotely more artful was out of the question for someone like her. As if her clothing were a statement not only about herself, but about the vacuous priorities of the Speaker who had summoned her. More, the elderly Fant stared back with an icy gaze, fully aware of her circumstances and showing none of the confusion the recently summoned always showed. She'd asked a question even before she'd arrived, and from the look on her strange, hairless face she awaited an answer.

Startled out of her intentions, Lirlowil fell back on established ritual. “You are Margda, first of the Speakers. Your time in life has long since ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I bid you welcome.”

The Fant snorted, whipping her trunk around abruptly and causing the Lutr to lean away. “So you're not the complete renegade, are you? Some of the teachings you still follow.”

Indignation caused Lirlowil to narrow her eyes and protest. “I've been fully vested and certified by the Alliance's Speakers' Bureau.” Her conversant only snorted again.

“Don't start in with me about your precious bureau, Child. They only know to teach what I taught them. I endured endless days shut away with their best people in a boardroom on a spacecraft bobbing on the ocean because they couldn't be troubled to come to my home and possibly encounter other Fant. And I wouldn't leave the planet. Oh how they squirmed, torn between their hunger to understand the techniques and capabilities of Speaking and their loathing for a member of a race they'd gone to such lengths to hide away.”

Lirlowil swallowed hard. Truth enough, she found this Fant—all Fant—beyond disgusting; it had never occurred to her how the objects of that revulsion might feel about it. But the flicker of compassion didn't last. Her own discomfort at being lectured to by a conversant, especially a Fant conversant, pushed her back on the offensive. “You should feel honored that they've respected your teachings.”

“Which is more than you did, eh, edict-breaker? Congratulations! Of the tens of thousands of Speakers in the centuries since I wrote those rules, you're the first to violate any of them. I knew you would, but it feels very good to be vindicated.”

“How could you know?”

Her conversant's face contorted into what might have been a smile, though with that hideous trunk of hers it was hard to be sure. She brought a hand up and tapped a thick finger against the side of her head. “I know you know my life's story. You summoned me here, after all. Surely you didn't discount my long history of mental illness. Imagine what I might have accomplished in my time if I hadn't been held back by madness and seizures. Though, to be fair, they also provided me glimpses of the future. Glimpses of you, my dear. I only instructed those fools so they in turn would create their little bureau and train you. I only created the rules of the Edict because I needed you to come along and break the first one.”

“Wait, you're saying you
knew
I would do this? Hundreds of years before I was even born?”

“I knew someone or some thing would precipitate a crisis. Are you responsible for the Silence? No, of course you're not. You're just a piece on the board, not the game's player.”

“What game? You're nothing but a crazy old woman who died ages ago. You didn't foresee any of this. That's just a side effect of the same paranoia you had when you were alive.”

“I'm here, aren't I? And it's not paranoia when every other living being off your homeworld who knows your name would be happier if you'd never existed.” Margda turned away then, stepping around the room on her enormous feet. Her head pivoted back and forth as if she were examining everything in careful detail. With a start Lirlowil realized that her conversant walked, not bounced or floated, but walked, despite the absence of gravity.

“What a strange place you've brought me to,” the Matriarch said softly. “Do you know, I have never been in space before. I wouldn't let them lift their ship when I was aboard. Made them leave it just offshore. Everything here feels just like that ship. It's all … made. And too small. Lifeless. Not at all like a world. Not like my world.”

Lirlowil sneezed. There was a fragrance in the air, faint but undeniable, woody and green, and no part of the recycled air the station provided. Wrinkling her nose, she watched agog as Margda moved through the room, held down by a gravity that shouldn't have been there. Having satisfied herself with her inspection of the various shelves and objects on the walls, she approached the large sphere of pond water occupying the room's center.

The Otter followed, organizing her questions and marshaling her telepathic powers. The Fant completed a circuit around the watery globe. She turned back to her Speaker and smiled. Lirlowil hesitated, breathing in deeply through her mouth. This wasn't proceeding like any summoning she'd ever performed. The odor in the room had increased, and now included the scent of impending rain. Margda meanwhile had raised one wrinkled hand and reached out to touch the glistening surface of the water. As her fingertips made contact, gravity returned to the globe and its shape collapsed. Water crashed to the floor and rushed outward in a great wave that swept Lirlowil beneath it.