The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (96 page)

“You think he could not do it?”

“With what army? With what tools? This place is very different from the plains, as you yourself also know. Horses cannot ride the oceans between the worlds. Sabers cannot defeat…” But there he halted. “It is true that in everything I have read, all the images I have scrolled through, that you know very little about the Chapalii army.”

“We’re not sure they
have
an army, as we know of one. Only that when they use force, they use it sparingly and ruthlessly, and that their weapons are more powerful than those we brought to bear on them.”

Anatoly looked at Branwen. “Note that down. That is something else we will have to investigate.” He stood up and walked to the wall, splaying his hands on the cool glass, slightly moist inside from the humidity of their breathing.

“Papa?” Portia appeared from behind the stairwell wall, sleepy-eyed, and padded over to him. He gathered her up into his arms and turned to survey the people seated at the table. Soerensen still stood. “You are right,” he said finally, reluctantly. “I can’t go to Rhui yet. I have to consolidate my position here first. I have to understand what I have, what I don’t have, and what I can do with it. So I leave you, Charles Soerensen, with your lands and your authority intact, and I trust you will continue to advise me without concern for whether I care to hear what you have to say. As for the rest of you, I mean that as well.” Portia tucked her head into the crook of his neck and stuck two fingers in her mouth to suck on, eyes open, watchful. She was warm and solid. He wrapped her a little closer into his embrace. Be damned to jaran tradition, he thought suddenly, where the child always stayed with its mother. He would keep her beside him and raise her—let her see her mother, of course, that was only fair—but he would not give her up.

Branwen and the barrister closed their slates. They all rose, made small talk, and one by one left the room, bodies and then heads receding down the curved staircase. Soerensen lingered, staying beside the table.

“There is one other question I’d like to ask,” he said.

“What is that?” Anatoly shifted Portia on his hip.

She turned her head to look out over the tule flats. “Look, Papa. Look. There’s a boat.”

“Why did the emperor make you a prince?”

“And you only a duke?” Anatoly smiled, to take the sting out of the words. “I don’t know. Wasn’t it after you became a duke that the tenth princely house was… what do they call it? It was erased?”

“Made extinct.”

“Yes. But in any case, you weren’t brought before the emperor.”

“But I was. I was brought into a great hall, lined with columns and floored with white tile. There were many Chapalii there, nobles, I supposed at the time, and I believed I supposed rightly. At one end of the hall rested a gilded throne, and when the emperor appeared on this throne, they knelt, and so I followed suit. After that, I was named a duke.”

“Ah.” Anatoly walked around the curve of the room toward the stairwell, and Soerensen turned slowly to keep facing him. “That is why you are only a duke. Women and princes need bow before no man, nor Singers before anyone but the gods.”

“When is Mama coming back?” asked Portia while they were eating dinner, and he didn’t know what to say to her. Nothing in his life had trained him for this.
She is never coming back.
That was what he wanted to say, spitefully, but he could not say it to Portia, who would not understand.

He tucked her into the bed next to which he had set up a cot for himself and told her a story about the jaran, how a hawk had warned a little girl and boy, a brother and sister, of an avalanche, and so saved their tribe.

“Can birds talk? Birds can’t talk.”

“Singers can understand the speech of birds because they are touched by the gods. That little girl and boy became Singers, and birds became sacred to the jaran.”

“Mama taught me how to sing,” she said brightly.

He had to turn away, so she wouldn’t see the tears that came to his eyes. “Yes. Would you like to hear another story?” Knowing she would. “A long time ago, when I was a boy, my sister Shura was just the same age as you are now. One morning she wanted to go riding with me and the older boys, but we didn’t want her along with us. So she—” So she had somehow gotten up onto a pony and ridden out after them, and when it had been discovered that she was missing, there had been such a wild clamor and he and his friends had gotten into such trouble for not watching over her and the whole tribe had searched frantically for the whole day only to find her at sunset sitting by a stream contentedly eating from a berry patch while her pony grazed faithfully beside her….

But Portia was asleep.

He sat beside her for a long while, a hand resting lightly on her hair, watching the rise and fall of her breathing, studying the curve of her face, her lashes, the simple beauty of a child peacefully sleeping.

A child needs a mother. A man needs a wife or a sister or a mother or aunt, to whose tent he returns. Now he had nothing, only borrowed rooms, no tent, no home. Repose deserted him. He stood up, stroked up a faint illumination from the door panel, in case she woke up, and left the room. At the outer edge of the palace, a promenade overlooked the tule flats. Clouds covered the stars. The barest mist spattered the deck, and he held onto a railing and stared out into the last remains of daylight, the gray flats receding on and on until they were lost in sea and horizon and the gathering darkness.

It had been a mistake to marry a khaja woman. His grandmother had told him that all along. But she had wanted him to marry Baron Santer’s daughter, in Jeds, so perhaps it was only Diana she had disliked. It was true that it was dangerous to marry a Singer. They had their own ways, their own calling, and the gods might lure them away at any moment.

I’ve fallen in love with another man whose life and interests…
That was not a calling from the gods. That was just selfishness.

The wind turned and hit him in the face, bringing with it the smell of salt and of things left rotting, untended among the reeds.

But Diana had already left him once. She had told him plainly enough that she had her world, and he his. He had written to her, finally, unable to endure without her company—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that although he did truly miss her he wanted to prove to his grandmother, to the tribes, that it had not been a mistake for him to marry her. He had written, asking her to make a final judgment, that if she wanted him to, he would willingly leave the tribes, the army, to come to her.

But he had left the tribes, he had left Rhui, before he had received her answer. Now, finally, staring into the lowering night, he wondered what that answer would have been.

A door soughed open, blending with the murmur of gentle waves on the pilings below. He turned to see Branwen come out onto the promenade.

“Want company?” she asked.

He regarded her for a few moments, silent. She was an attractive woman, competent, smart, and a good companion. But she was not Diana. He respected her, but he could not love her. Nor did she expect him to. “No, thank you,” he replied politely.

She smiled slightly, lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and retreated back through the door.

Ah, gods, how he wanted a family. He liked the crew of the
Gray Raven
, but they were his jahar, not his family; they might in time become friends, comrades, but that was not the same. If only Shura was here….

Why not? He had not yet heard, in the twice-yearly letter she sent him through convoluted channels, that she had married. She had stayed with the army all this time, as a scribe and interpreter. Why shouldn’t she leave Rhui and come to him? One person would make no difference.

But Charles Soerensen was right, too. Shura would be alone out here, with a brother but no sisters or female cousins or aunts. Was that fair to her?

Then, like a flare in the heavens, a sudden, piercing image of Ilyana Arkhanov burned before him and vanished. A jaran girl. Sixteen, or perhaps she was seventeen by now. That was a proper age for a girl to get married. She loved Portia already, and she could bring Evdokia with her, to be Portia’s companion. Diana had abandoned him. It would serve her right if he turned around and took a new wife. A beautiful wife. Young, one who would want children.

“Damn it,” he muttered, knowing it was unfair, and just plain mean, to marry Ilyana only to spite Diana. But he could travel to Naroshi’s planet, to see her. Who would stop him?

He could send a message to Rhui, asking Shura to come to him. He could do anything he damned well pleased.

Fortified by this thought, he went back inside, stopped beside a wall panel, and called up a route to the communications center. It lay in the south wing, perpendicular to the massive greenhouse wing, buried under an astonishingly ugly rococo hall that Soerensen used for receptions of his least favored guests.

Maggie O’Neill and three techs sat in stylish chairs, scattered around the room like islands in a sea of muted gray consoles and several tables which displayed above their flat black surfaces rotating three-dimensional images of Rhui, of Odys, and of the Delta Pavonis solar system. Two long screens on opposite walls displayed two-dee images of landscapes, one from Earth that Anatoly recognized, a mountain-scape of the Alps, and another from the sand pillar swamp of Tao Ceti Tierce. On a third wall a stellar chart glittered, seeming to sink three dimensionally into the emptiness beyond, even though Anatoly knew it was a trick of the projection itself.

Maggie jumped up and hurried over to him. “Heyo. What can I do for you? Are you here to start through that backlog of messages? If you turned each one into scroll and stacked them up around you, you’d have to wade hip-deep to get out of here. But you’ll get used to it.” She grinned.

He nodded politely. “No. That can wait. I want to put a call through to Jeds and Sarai. I want Tess Soerensen to locate my sister Shura.”

She raised her eyebrows but did not respond. Instead, she negotiated the maze of consoles and came to a halt before one that looked exactly like all the others except for a saffron-colored jacket thrown carelessly over the chair wheeled up in front of it. Maggie hitched it out of the way. “Suzanne may have the complexion to wear this color. I sure as hell don’t. I get jaundiced just standing near enough to squint at it. Here, put it over there.”

Dutifully, he did as he was told, draping the jacket carefully over a nearby chair. Maggie sat down and began keying numbers into the console, interspersed with terse vocal commands.

“No one’s home at Jeds,” she said. “Odd. I’ll leave a callback for when Cara catches up to us. Or wait, I think she was headed for Sarai last I heard. We can almost always at least get the ke at Sarai. Let me see…”

Anatoly leaned on the edge of the console. The thin line scored itself into the gray surface, forming a large square.

Mist coalesced up from that square, pulsing to an unheard heartbeat.

“Ah! I’ve got an acknowledge. On screen.” The mist dissipated to reveal a woman’s head and shoulders, peering keenly and with a somewhat perplexed expression at them. She narrowed her eyes, registered Maggie, and twined a finger through one of her braids and shifted her vision to the left. Seeing Anatoly, her eyes widened. “Anatoly Sakhalin! What are you doing there?” For an instant he could not reply, he was so surprised to see a jaran woman using interdicted equipment. Finally he found his voice.

“I give you greetings, Sonia Orzhekov,” he said.

Daiga transmissions are like a form of blindness to the ke’s eyes, which are not like daiga eyes, seeing only in the spectrum of visible light. The daiga whose appearance startles
Sonia
, the name which classifies the daiga of flowers, is simply a primitive collection of impulses, not the complex ever-flowing pattern that informs the person of a biologically-present daiga. The ke cannot even tell if the daiga is male or female, the identifying marker by which the daiga put greatest store.

The two daiga speak in a daiga language. The ke does not know this language, it is not the language named
Rhuian
by the daiga Tess, but all daiga languages have primitive characteristics in common, in the way their structure has grown up as time and generations of daiga have passed. The ke shifts to the intermediate brain, seeking correspondences, similarities, alliances. Meaning emerges.

“But of course you’re a prince of the Sakhalin,” Sonia says, labeling this daiga. “Why shouldn’t you go before the khepelli emperor? Except that Dr. Hierakis told me that Charles Soerensen does not want the khepelli to know where his people are hiding. That is why they have this…what is it they call it?…this
interdiction
.”

Prince of the Sakhalin
replies. “I am now a prince in the Chapalii Empire. That means that the jaran have a place within the Empire, one without recourse to the khaja who have come down to Rhui and made their own rules for us. That means that we are now the guardians of all khaja space.”

“I am new to this. I don’t really understand what you are saying.”

The ke sees that, without patterns to read, without the ability to read patterns, names might prove useful to daiga. Otherwise, needing to order the universe so that they can grow out of their half animal state, they could only see the universe as an undifferentiated mass of light and dark and color, edged with borders. To cross those borders, the daiga name
things.
By naming the universe, they bring it into existence.

“Who is that with you?” asks the prince of the Sakhalin.

Sonia says: “This is
the ke
.” Thus does the daiga of flowers make namelessness into a name, bringing the ke into existence.

Able to see and sense in limited spectra, the daiga struggle to expand their sight and thus their interaction with the universe. Naming becomes both their prison and their key.

“How do I use this tool to speak to Tess?” asks Sonia after the daiga transmission ends.

“On this world,” explains the ke, “daiga can only speak through tools, through
consoles.
Such are the rules of the interdiction. A call may be placed to
Jeds.
The daiga Tess journeys toward Jeds. The message will wait there until it is answered.”