Moon Flower (23 page)

“Is this what you people who have been here for a while keep telling us?” Shearer asked. “That you say people have to find out in their own time?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” Uberg replied. “As I told you before, I long ago developed a premonition that I should remain behind at the base, even though I was feeling the same things as those who were leaving — we talked about things like that of course. But I had no real idea why. Now, all of a sudden, I’m pretty sure it was to help you find Wade. Why should that should be so important? Once again I have no idea. I just know that it is. Not think —
know
. That’s the way it works.”

Shearer frowned. This went against everything he had been taught to think as a physicist. He was about to object, when Evassanie, evidently catching part of what they had been saying, told them, “You have to learn to listen to the flowers.”

It sounded like another crazy NIDA translation, but Jerri saved them from being diverted off into another lengthy round of explanation by observing, “Aren’t the flowers here gorgeous? Do you remember those ones I picked outside the base when we met Korsofal and the others, Marc? They were the same as those over there next to you.” She motioned with the vegetable knife that she was using to indicate the planter on the window sill by where Shearer was standing. He looked down at it.

“Were they?” It contained several kinds of blooms. “Which ones?”

“Guys,” Jerri sighed. “The pinky-lilac ones... with the white at the tips and the dark kind of collar at the base.... Yes, those. I’m pretty sure they were the same.”

Uberg got up from his chair and came across to inspect them. “Yes, I’m familiar with this type,” he informed them. “The collar, as you call it, is actually a secondary set of petals that open at night.”

“Yes, I saw that,” Jerri said. “The lilac ones close down into a bud inside.”

“It’s called the moon flower,” Evassanie said, following them. “It is one of those that speaks the most clearly. You listen to it at night.”

Shearer was about to say something, and then he remembered the sunken flower garden at Vattorix’s house, and what Sergelio had said about it being where Vattorix and his advisors debated issues of state and arrived at their decisions. At night. Sergelio had said that was when “long-sight” came: the time for people to ponder upon what choices would mean living good lives or bad lives. Shearer was still trying to make sense of it, when Nim stirred suddenly, opened his eyes, and sat up.

Moments later, they heard the door open on the far side of the hallway outside; footsteps crossed to the open doorway into the kitchen, and then Soliki appeared. He was lean and lined of face, with a pointed chin, thin, high-bridged nose, wispy graying hair, but with a jovial manner that showed itself in a tight mouth with natural upturns at the corners, and bright gray eyes twinkling behind a pair of oval-framed spectacles. He wore a splendid purple coat with breeches cut more tightly than the baggy Yocalan norm, and an orange shirt with frills and ruffs. He took the coat off and placed it carefully on a hanger near the door while exchanging some words with his wife and daughter. Evassanie’s replies came through Shearer’s NIDA as “Of course. Aren’t they our guests?” and, “No, he’s been wonderful, just lying by the stove. Do you think the Terrans could bring me one?... Oh, Daddy, what a thing to say!”

Soliki sat down in front of a dish that had been set at one end of the table containing a cold salad preparation with fruit and some bread on the side, and Antara came across to fill the cup next to it from an earthenware jug with a spout. His knowledge of English was nil. He had laughingly shown an interest in the NIDA system earlier, but declined to persevere with it. They would have to rely on Uberg’s limited Yocalan, plus whatever Evassanie’s NIDA could add. Soliki smiled at the three Terrans as he drank from his cup, and said something to them.

“He asks if we are refreshed now, and ready for whatever happens next,” Uberg told the other two.

“Does he know what happens next?” Shearer asked.

“He has no idea....” Uberg listened, checked something with Soliki, and nodded. “Whoever is in charge of the arrangements is not telling people more than they need to know. It seems strange to him, but it’s none of his business.” Uberg’s voice dropped to add his own aside. “I think he thinks it’s so nobody will say anything wrong if other Terrans come asking questions, but he’s too polite to say so. They think that in some ways we’re a strange lot.”

“Maybe we’ll hear more when Chev comes back,” Evassanie said.

“That’s a nice coat,” Shearer commented, noting the care that Soliki had taken with it and wanting to be sociable.

“Marc is admiring your coat, Father,” Evassanie told Soliki.

Soliki looked pleased and beamed as he prepared to attack his salad and answered with evident pride.

“Father is pleased that you think so,” Evassanie said. “He made it himself. A daring voyage over unknown oceans.” Presumably some Cyrenean metaphor that didn’t quite tie with anything, but the meaning was clear enough. Antara added something that sounded complimentary.

“I didn’t know he was a tailor. It looks more of a drapery shop,” Jerri commented.

Evassanie passed it on with a little help from Uberg. Soliki looked a little bashful, replied at some length, and pulled a face. “Yes it’s true, Father says. We are only running a business here. It has provided for us, and we have a large staff and pay them well. But he has been studying and learning, and one day he will be a qualified tailor and make suits that become famous.” Evassanie sounded proud as she spoke. Antara came back to refill Soliki’s cup and patted him encouragingly on the shoulder.

Shearer and Jerri looked at each other with mildly puzzled expressions. Uberg seemed to be expecting it, and explained, “Things here aren’t the way we’re used to. The artisans and the craftsmen are the ones who are valued and respected — those who can create things of quality and beauty. Commerce is considered an activity of secondary importance.” He shrugged and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “It does make a certain kind of sense, I suppose. I mean, you can get by without the buyers and sellers. Producers will always have a market. People have to eat, dress in something, and have somewhere to live.”

Shearer cocked his head curiously as he remembered something else.” Did you talk to a character called Sergelio at the dinner last night, by any chance?” he asked Uberg.

“No — I was rather busy behind the scenes from the moment we arrived. But I’ve met him before. He’s what we’d call a master carpenter.”

“That was what I meant. He showed me some of the work he’d done on the house. I thought it was odd for a carpenter to be at an event like that. Now, I think, maybe you’ve explained it.”

“Exactly. People like that are the nobility here.”

A lot more was suddenly falling into place. Shearer recalled the question he had overheard Vattorix putting to Gloria Bufort as they went into the banquet room: “Very nice, but what do you
do
?”

Since Uberg was wearing a NIDA, Evassanie had been following and relaying his meaning to Soliki and Antara. Soliki seemed intrigued, but at the same time puzzled. Evassanie translated: “Father has met other Terrans who left your...” — there seemed to be a hiatus as Shearer’s NIDA sought for a word, and then he had a momentary vision of a sheep pen. “He says they told him that on Earth it is different. The people who make everything enjoy very little because people who do nothing take it away from them and sell it for much more than they have to pay. Is that so?” Antara, who had moved to the dresser to take down a container of something, clicked her tongue and shook her head as she listened.

Uberg shot a quick, baffled glance at Shearer before answering. “Well, I’ve never heard it said quite that way before, but yes...” He nodded. “I suppose that about sums up the way things are.”

Now Evassanie looked puzzled as well. “But why do the people who make the things do it? Why do they let the people who do nothing take away what they have produced?”

Jerri had been catching Shearer’s eye and nodding emphatically as if to say,
Listen
! It was exactly the point she herself had made several times in their conversations during the voyage. She turned her head toward Evassanie and answered, “Because the ones who do nothing worthwhile have accumulated enough money to pay people with weapons to take it for them.”

Evassanie looked shocked. “Your king allows this?” she asked, speaking for herself now.

“It’s the basis of our system of law,” Jerri said. “The king enforces it. He has the weapons.”

For a few seconds Evassanie just stared at her incredulously. Antara had to intervene with a question that obviously meant
What did he say
? Evassanie told them.

Antara turned her face toward Soliki, who had stopped eating and was looking speechless. She muttered something and went back to the stove to set the container down on a work top to one side.

“Their king is a criminal,” Evassanie translated.

Soliki continued regarding the Terrans with something close to an astonished expression, then said something in a dismissive tone and returned to his eating. They looked at Evassanie inquiringly.

“My father says, it’s no wonder that the Terrans all want to leave the” — flash of a sheep pen again —” and come to live with us instead,” she told them.

***

Chev returned shortly afterward. His news was that they would be spending a little time with some Cyreneans who were very eager to meet the Terran “scientist,” and that he thought they would find interesting: people like themselves, who were curious about how the world worked and what it was made of. The ones he had talked to would be riding ahead today to tell the others. The three Terrans would leave first thing next morning, and he would be traveling with them.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Chev had taken the apartment’s spare room, which could sleep only one person. For Shearer and Uberg, Antara had swept out an attic and cleared enough space between the boxes and bales of cloth that had been stored there to lay two mattresses on the floor. Jerri had done a little better, taking a spare bed in Evassanie’s room. This arrangement delighted Evassanie, for besides having the Terran lady to herself to interrogate with endless questions about Earth and its peculiar ways after the household had finished supper and retired for bed, it meant that she had Nim in there with them too.

The room was rich with life and color, testifying to a busy mind with many interests and expressing the emerging individuality of young teenagers’ personalized pads just about anywhere. Embroidered cushions with tassels and fringes lay scattered on the beds, lined the window seat, and filled a small armchair standing by a worktable beneath a wall covered with shelves and cabinets. A tailor’s dummy stood in one corner, draped with a partly made garment; a narrow table beside it carried a litter of bowls, implements, and pieces of what looked like sculpture or pottery; and the walls were covered in tapestries and paintings, some framed, others just attached with pins, amid a miscellany of notes, ribbons, a couple of hats, and other ornaments. The shelves bore numerous books, along with an assortment of pots and vases, decorated boxes, and several dolls evidently carried over from childhood.

Evassanie’s fascination with the NIDA hadn’t abated, and she insisted on showing Jerri her collections of jewelry and spice bottles, favorite dresses in the hanging closet, selected books, contents of her needlework basket, and other treasures. Her ambition, she confided, was to paint landscapes and outdoor scenes, which offered endless scope in all kinds of decorative fields, making it an “honored” profession. Jerri would have liked to let her see some scenes of Earth from the ship’s library through broad-field phone spectacles, but they had left all their trackable electronic devices behind. Then came the inevitable question of, “What do you do?”

Jerri did her best to describe the functions of an anthropologist. Evassanie listened with evident interest. A profession devoted to the study of people’s origins and how different societies behaved and lived was a new concept to her. Earlier Terran researchers had reported on the conspicuous absence of much in the way of religious conviction among the Cyreneans, contrasting sharply with its universality on Earth. Evassanie didn’t appear to find it a subject of great importance when Jerri asked her about it. The general Cyrenean view seemed to be that life and the universe were expressions of a powerful creative principle that was echoed in individual vision and inventive abilities, but what and why were not matters that they felt equipped to furnish answers on — and so didn’t try to.

It was the same disinclination to bind themselves to chains of reasoning derived from assumptions that might be questionable, that Uberg had described. The Cyreneans trusted their intuition, and if it drew them in a particular direction, they followed it confidently. If it didn’t, they made no attempt to second-guess the issue. Were it not for the results, everything that Jerri had learned and practiced as a scientist would have led her to expect the Cyrenean way to be inferior — a reliance on the kind of superstition and belief in dreams and “signs” that Earth had been outgrowing for centuries. It was galling — not to say more than a little humbling. Evassanie didn’t help matters either by observing, when they had been discussing the subject for a while, “I suppose you need to study how different people live to see if you can find a better way than the one you’ve got.” After a second of further reflection she added, “Is that why Terrans send ships out and build bases on all those other worlds at other stars?”

The suggestion was preposterous, but Jerri couldn’t argue. By the standards that she herself had been defending for years, the Cyreneans were getting a lot of things right that cultures on Earth had sometimes aspired to and now were all but forgotten. It reminded her of something that Evassanie had said earlier.

“When you were talking about your father’s shop downstairs, you said that he has a large staff of helpers and pays them well,” she said.