Raising The Stones (21 page)

“Archives?” he suggested.

“Archives! When I knew we were coming to Settlement One, I looked up everything there is in the Archives about the God and the Departed and the ruins. There was never an architectural study done of the Bondru Dharm temple. It was occupied when the first settlers arrived, so Native Matters instructed that it not be disturbed. All Archives had were a few pictures of the outside, a sketchy floor plan and the verbal description given by the xenologists. Nothing else. Either there’s an unsung genius among the children, or …”

“Or the settlers are lying,” he suggested.

“Or the settlers are lying,” she agreed. “Someone helped the kids. Someone used the kids.”

“Are you sharpening your claws?” he asked gently. “Who are you out to get, Zilia?”

She turned to him, hands out and open, mouth making a lopsided grin. “I know what you all think of me, Spiggy. Everyone at CM thinks I’m crazy. Hell, everyone back at Native Matters thinks I’m crazy. Well, everybody thinks you’re crazy, too, with your ups and downs. And most people think Jamice has the terminal nasties. About the only sane one among us is Horgy, and he has this little satyriasis problem he keeps asking his friends and acquaintances to help him with.”

“And Dern,” grinned Spiggy. “Don’t forget Dern.”

“And Dern. Who is usually out in the settlements, running around in disguise, thinking no one knows who he is. Tandle actually runs CM, and anybody who doesn’t know that is blind, deaf, and has no sensation left in his extremities. So, we’re all mad in one way or another.”

“My question was, who are you out to get?”

“I learned growing up that people always exploit others if they can get away with it! My father exploited my mother and me. My grandmother exploited her sons and daughters and grandchildren; the Voorstoders exploit the Gharm. I was born a child and a girl and therefore a victim, and I didn’t like it. I want to stop there being other victims. So I go around accusing people of genocide and corporate torture and child-eating, watching to see if anybody turns pale. And no, I don’t believe what people tell me! Grandma always had a ready answer. My father always had a ready answer. In Voorstod, they’ve got a whole catechism of answers. I’m not ready to accept what people say. Almost always there could be some other answer, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. What other answer?”

“maybe not all the Departed died. Hobbs Land has been surveyed, but nobody claims it’s been thoroughly explored. Maybe some of them have shown up here at Settlement One, and the first thing they did was restore a temple for one of their Gods.”

“Farfetched, but possible.”

“Maybe the Departed didn’t show up here. Maybe they’re back in the hills, and some of the settlers have restored the temple to bait them in.”

“Bait them in?”

“To use as forced labor.”

“Equally farfetched. Have you seen the Owlbrit? You might as well try to get labor out of a cabbage.”

“That may be true. But it seems to me that restoring a Departed temple for no special reason is also farfetched, especially when I’m told children did it! There’s something else going on here, Spiggy. Count on it!”

“So what are you going to do about it.”

She shrugged again, widely, both arms out as wide as she could reach, as though some solution lay just beyond her fingertips. “What can I do? Make recordings. Ask the Native Matters Advisory for an engineer to do a structural study, or maybe even ask for an Ancient Monuments survey. There’s never been a survey done here.” She became thoughtful. “Actually, that’s a pretty good idea. It would at least tell us what we’re dealing with. They can’t survey the monuments without getting around most of the planet. There are ruins of villages scattered all over the escarpment.”

He sighed, shaking his head. She was being fairly reasonable, for Zilia. “So, do it then, and consider you’ve done your duty! Come on, Zilia. Let’s not waste a pleasant evening. If you’re afraid to go out among the beasts, let’s take a walk around the settlement.”

•
The game was
a doubleheader, the Settlement One first- and second-level teams against the first- and second-level teams of Settlement Three. Settlement One, with several very young players—including Willum R., who had just turned fifteen—on its first-level team, did not expect to do very well and was pleasantly surprised at ending with a tie score.

“You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t cheated,” sneered a frustrated Settlement Three player to Willum R. in the changing room. Settlements didn’t lean toward frills, and there was only one changing room for each sex, share and share alike, visitors and the home team.

“We didn’t cheat!” cried Willum R., stung by the accusation. “That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“Vernor Soamses,” snapped the Settlement Three coach, “that’s not sportsmanlike. You owe the player an apology.”

“Well they do something,” whined Vernor. “Settlement One always wins more than they ought to. They’ve always had that God-thing around, kind of a good luck charm. The rest of us don’t have one.” So his Uncle Jamel had always said, though nobody had seen Uncle Jamel for a good while now.

“The God died!” retorted Willum R. “It died a long time ago.”

“So you say,” sneered Vernor, almost silently.

“Vernor,” growled his coach.

“I apologize,” said Vernor, covertly displaying a bent index finger to turn around what he said, showing he didn’t mean the apology.

From the nearby toilets, Horgy heard the conversation and made mental note of it. So the other settlements thought Settlement One had an unfair advantage. Interesting. Perhaps Sam knew that. Undoubtedly, he knew that. Perhaps the pressure of being on top, and staying there, had cracked him. Thus far during the trip, Horgy had heard nothing but praise for Sam, but that could be loyalty talking. Now that Settlement One was doing no better than some of the other settlements, that loyalty might change.

And then, too, there was this odd business about this thing that had attacked Sam? Had anything really attacked him? Had he killed something, or seriously wounded something. Or someone. Horgy sat, ruminating. There was that man who had disappeared from Settlement Three. What had his name been?

Well, tomorrow they’d go look at the place the attack had taken place. They’d collect the bones. Then they’d go back to CM. Dern would be most interested. He’d keep it quiet, of course. Dern wouldn’t want biologists and zoologists from System flocking onto Hobbs Land to investigate this possible new life-form. It would upset production. No, Dern would keep it quiet. But Horgy himself intended to find out as much as he could.

•
Technically speaking, Authority
consisted of twenty-one members, appointed for life, who had final and irrevocable power over all the worlds and moons in System. Unofficially, however, the word
Authority
was used to mean the moon upon which these members were housed, as well as all the rest of its inhabitants, whether or not they were members of any official committee or Panel or Advisory. The official bodies included the Advisories of Defense, Intelligence, Science, Religion, and so forth, as well as the Native Matters Advisory with its four subordinate panels: Ancient Monuments, Linguistics, Interspecies Relations, and Advanced Studies. The latter was a catchall panel to which all matters were referred which pertained to indigenes and seemed to fit nowhere else.

The staff of the Native Matters Advisory was relatively small, inbred, almost incestuous. Great-great-grandchildren of early members now occupied offices their forebears had built and sat at desks their great-grandparents had ordered made by Phansuri craftsmen. Inbred though they were, Native Matters persons were sincere. When Phansure, Thyker, and Ahabar, worlds without native peoples, had filled up and spilled colonists into the Belt, where there were native peoples, the citizens of the sister worlds had reviewed their history, ancient and recent, and determined with rare unanimity that genocide and slavery, which had stained the skirts of humanity for millennia, would not take place in System. They had resolved that the prior inhabitants of the system were to be compensated for, or protected against, all human damages or harms which might already have taken place, which might be anticipated, or which might eventually and inadvertently occur.

The purity of mankind’s vision could be determined by the fact that included in the protectorate with the gentle Osmers and placid Glothees were the Ninfadelian Porsa, a race of raucous mucusoids so foul and unloveable that even graduate students in xenology, hardened by years of study among primitive and even disgusting societies, could seldom be found to live near the Porsa and study their ways.

Because Native Matters Advisory had real creatures to concern itself with, it met regularly, unlike certain other advisories, to discuss real issues and problems. Often these included personnel problems, a nuisance that knowledgable persons accepted as inseparable from any human institution.

“We have received a new complaint about Zilia Makepeace,” the current Chair of the Advisory told his members. The Chair was Rasiel Plum, a stout and elderly Phansuri gentleman of generally unruffled disposition, who happened, also, to be one of the twenty-one official Members of Authority.

“Zilia Makepeace?” murmured a new Advisory member to his neighbor.

“On Hobbs Land,” came the response.

“She’s still accusing the Hobbs Land people of killing off the Departed,” said Rasiel Plum.

“Who’s the complaint from, Rasiel? asked one of the younger members, a Thykerite. “Someone reliable?”

“The CEO. Dern Blass. He says she makes accusations at most Central Management meetings, but he’s recently picked up on the fact that she makes accusations out in the settlements, as well.

“So?”

“So he was in a settlement, in disguise, pretending to be a drifter while selling spice graters or System world cheeses or something, and someone told him Zilia Makepeace is still accusing the settlers of killing off the Departed.”

“What has the Makepeace woman said recently?”

Rasiel fumbled with the keys of the information stage, refreshing his memory. “She says the children of Settlement One have reconstructed a ruined temple, and she finds that highly suspicious.”

General sighs and one, quickly stifled, giggle. At the far end of the table, someone began to whistle recognizably though almost tunelessly, a bawdy song, “The Beheading of Sarafin Crowr.” Sarafin had been a notable witch on Phansure, disposed of in remote though historic times by her fellow villagers, and the tune was often used, particularly at sporting events, to suggest imminent eradication of the opposing side.

“Back on Ahabar, my kids and some others in the neighborhood built a first-century fortification out of insublocks once,” said a member who had not, like many others, spent his whole life at Authority. “It cost me half a year’s pay to get the thing disassembled and the blocks taken back to the site they’d swiped them from. Kids do things like that.”

“We could send the Makepeace woman to Ninfadel. The Porsa don’t build anything.” A Moon and Belt representative made this tentative suggestion, which was greeted with ribald cheers.

“We could simply fire her,” said someone else in a grumpy tone. High Baidee, probably.

“Retrain her,” suggested a third, more mildly.

“Knock her off,” growled a fourth, the whistler.

“We could deal with the problem by recommending to Ancient Monuments Panel that they send a monuments survey team to Hobb’s Land,” Rasiel Plum replied, “which is what the Makepeace woman asks for. The easy way out is to recommend just that. We haven’t sent a survey team to Hobb’s Land in …” He punched up
Advisory involvement
and
Hobb’s Land
on the desktop stage, asking for coincident files and referring to the sequence number attached to the account of the most recent team. Another quick punch gave him the elapsed time in lifeyears. “Not in thirty-three lifeyears, and even then it was only an aerial mapping of sites,” he concluded.

“We’ve always kept a staff member there,” complained an elderly Ahabarian woman. “Since Settlement. Since the last Departed died. Even though there was nothing to look after. None of the staff has ever done anything at all on Hobbs Land. Why does this one have to
do
anything?”

“Maybe that’s Zilia’s problem,” Rasiel Plum smiled. “That she has nothing to do or look after. But before we remove her, reprove her, or replace her, shouldn’t we be absolutely sure she’s wrong?”

The members looked around for guidance, for expression, for some indication by smile or frown or nod that their colleagues felt one way or another about the question. No one seemed to feel strongly; no one seemed to be even slightly doubtful that there was nothing-at-all on Hobb’s Land to be concerned about.

“Since she’s asked for a survey of the villages and temples,” Rasiel added, helpfully, “referring the matter to Ancient Monuments Panel with our recommendation will be responsive.”

The members shifted and muttered. Being responsive was a Good Thing. Sending a team was not that Big a Deal. If a survey of the monuments hadn’t been done yet, now was as good a time as any. The AM Panel’s budget for the year was not yet spent. By all means, they muttered. Recommend a survey team.

“May I have a formal utterance to that effect?” Rasiel Plum suggested, promptly receiving several.

The Ancient Monuments Panel received the recommendation with general disinterest. After arguing about it in desultory fashion, the Panel decided to implement the recommendation with a three-man Baidee team from Thyker, mostly because there was a three-man team on Thyker which was immediately available. They also decided not to tell Zilia Makepeace the team was coming until it was on the way.

“The last thing we need,” the Panel leader agreed, “is manufactured evidence.”

•
When blight had
struck Thyker a lifetime ago, there had been enormous loss of both human and animal life, as well as the loss of many native species. Even after the disease had been controlled, no one had been sure the Blight would not strike again, and there had been wave after wave of emigration to the other habitable words. In the Belt, Bounce and Pedaria particularly had received numerous non-Baidee immigrants from Thyker, and there had been considerable thought given by some groups to looking far out, outside the orbit of Phansure, for homes, though there wasn’t much out there of interest.