The Ordinary (12 page)

He shook his head. “Not with the war but with the enemy.” The sound of Jedda's bath water filled his moment's hesitation. “People were happier when the place was completely closed. Do you know what enemy I mean?”

She met his gaze. “No.”

“A person like Malin, or like one of the very powerful Prin, but a malevolent person.” He had stopped working, looking at her somberly. “Can you imagine what those times must have been like? The Prin are dangerous enough when they're trying to do good.” He glanced at Jedda, who had laughed softly. “You think that's funny?”

“I think it's funny how easy it is for best of intentions to turn out to be wrong.”

“There's another reason, too,” Arvith said, and stopped and watched her for a moment. His eyes looked almost gray, softened in the lamplight. “The Drune are taught at Cunevadrim. Kethen's people. The Prin don't trust them.”

“What's a Drune?”

“A person who does the same thing as a Prin, but in another language. That's the short answer. The long answer would make you miss your bath.”

Later, at dinner, she repeated what she'd heard about Cunevadrim, and Brun agreed, adding, “No place Malin could have named would have surprised people more.”

“Is there some danger?” Vitter asked, nibbling at a piece of bread with the edges of his lips.

“Places like Cunevadrim are always dangerous.”

“Why?”

Brun lay down her eating sticks, poured herself wine, and added to Vitter's glass as well. “Because of the thing we call magic, that your world lacks. The presence of people like Malin, or like Irion, who have the kind of power required to sink your ships and humiliate your army. Magic lingers in a place, especially foul magic, like the radiation from one of your bombs. Cunevadrim has that kind of reputation.”

“Who was Irion's enemy?”

“A wizard called Drudaen. He and Irion fought a war that lasted nearly a century. Cunevadrim was his principal residence.”

“Where does this power come from?” Jedda asked. “What do you know about it?”

Brun and Opit glanced at each other, and one could see this was an old topic between them, a topic that had become, judging from the set of Opit's jaw, uncomfortable. Brun answered, “This is where we will see the differences among us once again.” For the sake of Himmer, everyone was speaking Alenke; Brun had to pause a bit, fuddled by the dinner wine, seeking words. “For me, for most people here, there's no need to explain it. Some would say it comes from God. But the ability to shape magic comes from languages.”

“Meaning that the shaping of what they call magic is a function of consciousness in some way,” Opit added.

Brun agreed to that, though something about the phrase “what they call magic” appeared to disturb her. “The magician masters one of the known languages, usually Malei, which is what most of the Prin speak. Some of the Prin study another language, Eldrune, which is what Irion's enemy spoke. Irion taught it to himself and then to others, and now Cunevadrim is a school for teaching Eldrune.”

“Are you a student of history?” Vitter asked.

“I'm daughter of a mother with a big family library, to which she and my father added. Irion himself wrote a book, you know.”

“Did he?”

“He completed it in the centuries after the King left the world. Its subject is his own training as a magician and the war with Drudaen.”

“I've puzzled at it,” Opit said. “The language has changed a bit since then.”

“It's called
Kirith Kirin,
after the King,” Brun added.

“Can you remember what he says about his training?” Jedda asked.

“Yes, some. A magician studies to produce a type of consciousness called a kei, a state in which thought is compressed into smaller and smaller time frames. In fact, other writers describe this as learning to think closer and closer to the present moment. From this state of consciousness he or she uses one or another of these languages to make things happen.”

“Events.”

“Yes.”

“What sort?” Jedda asked.

Brun shrugged, looking as if she wished someone would change the subject. “What you've already seen, for one thing. In our history, no army ever stood up to a magician and lived to tell about it, unless the mage was feeling merciful.”

“But are there limits?”

“Certainly. Most of the magicians before Irion were somewhat limited, in that they could only kill two or three thousand people at a swipe. If the history books are true, of course; you have to pretend I'm saying that over and over again, because even here we haven't seen such conflicts in a very long time.”

“But Irion has fewer limits? I don't understand.”

“If you read about the Prin or study their writings, which I can get for you, you'll see that the levels of magic are quite systematically defined, increasingly so as modern magicians study the subject. Opit tells me you would say that magic is a quantum process, that a magician advances in rank not gradually but in sudden leaps, from one state of energy to the next. Irion has gone beyond all his predecessors, and since he defeated Drudaen there has been no one to challenge him. This has meant a great stability, no more conflict between magicians, no more war.” She took a breath. She had the look of someone reciting history, slightly dulled by it. Like a Hormling, talking about our own war, Jedda thought, that perfectly comfortable war with machines that had been pushed so far away by Hanson.

“But what does this language do?” Vitter asked.

“The words bring events into being. They focus consciousness. According to the texts, all around us are infinite numbers of possible events. You would call them probability waves, perhaps, according to my dear husband. The magician replaces the present moment with a moment more to his liking by causing these waves to collapse. Apparently this is not at all difficult to do; the trick is to learn to call for the event that you want. The magician continues to collapse these waves until she reaches a present moment that does what she wants.”

“You've studied this,” Himmer said, touching the lip of his wineglass. His face was flushed.

“That's nearly all we've done for the past ten years.” She reached for Opit's hand. Her skin was fairer than his coffee color. “I often wish I'd joined the Prin myself. My uncle was one of them.”

Himmer leaned close to the glass lamp at the center of the table, the flame floating on oil, light colored amber by the flue. He touched his palm to the heat. “So you're convinced that this is real, Opit?”

“Completely.”

“And? More?”

Opit blew out breath, assembled his thoughts. The dim light softened his wrinkles so that he looked younger again, almost like Jedda remembered. “You've seen the results. We have to admit there's something there, even if we can't explain it. There's no hidden technology, no trick. I've seen Prin magic work countless times, consistently. I've seen people enter Prin college knowing nothing and begin to learn. It is a mental discipline. Until we're allowed to study the mind of one of these practitioners with all the facilities we have on the other side of the gate, I don't think we're going to know what this force is.” Admitting ignorance brought a new crease to his brow. “To a degree, this kind of visualization comes to the Erejhen very naturally; they sing their mathematics, you know.”

“Pardon?”

“Mathematical problems are music problems, they're identical, as far as the Erejhen are concerned. Math is a mode of music here. It's their only way of handling numbers.”

“This is all very surprising,” Vitter said, shaking his head. “To sit here in a land like this, discussing the nature of magic.” He looked from one face to the other, paused on Brun. “You have no notion how alien this seems to us. What's called magic in our world is no more than superstition. So will this be, unless we can define it in some way we can understand.”

Brun assented with a bow of the head. “Actually, you're all doing quite well, I think, in taking us in. As well as can be expected, from a people as limited as you are.” Smiling across the table at Jedda, she drew a general laugh from the Hormling guests.

“We have been rather arrogant,” Vitter agreed. “We could hardly have approached our relations with you in a more self-aggrandizing way.”

“You'll find the Erejhen haven't really noticed, their own arrogance having acted as a buffer. As far as they're concerned, you're a struggling people and you've done a great deal to overcome your handicaps. They think you've accomplished a lot for a race denied the use of magic. The only question, really, is whether you deserve their help now that you've met.”

More laughter at that line. Jedda had a feeling of complete ease, settled against the cushions of her chair, the table disarranged comfortably now that the meal was moving into its final phase. Opit's householder brought after-dinner liquors, along with the sharp, bitter fruit, infith, that left such a pleasant aftertaste in the mouth.

“What an irony,” Vitter mused, “that what's ordinary in one world is so extraordinary in the other.”

“It's the kind of irony that requires an author,” Opit said.

“Meaning?” Vitter asked.

“There are times when I think this whole place, Irion, is nothing but an incubator. Maybe designed to produce exactly this force that we're talking about.”

Himmer leaned forward, suddenly full of interest. He had hardly glanced at Jedda all evening, except when the conversation turned to her; she was feeling the same indifference. “Explain, please.”

Opit took a moment, studied Himmer's face. “Have the researchers on the other side made any progress in figuring out what kind of space Irion occupies? Do we have any idea where this place is?”

Himmer shook his head slowly, in a dreamy way. “We've never been allowed to study very much, of course.”

“They're very strict about technology, your Prin,” Vitter agreed. “We haven't been able to get anything past them, in terms of real instrumentation.”

“A simple telescope will tell you what you need to know,” Himmer said. “This is flat space. We knew that much immediately. Objects don't fall out of sight beyond the horizon, they simply dwindle. We think this space is bounded, but we haven't been able to explore to the limits of the ocean or fly over the mountains, as we'd need to do to find out where and how they end.”

“What about the stars, the sky?” Jedda asked.

“They're our stars and our sky. Exactly as you'd seen them if Irion were a continent in the Inokit Ocean.”

“So Irion is here, on Senal, but hidden, in some way?” she asked.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “But there are some problems with that idea. Since this planet was completely unoccupied except by wildlife when our ancestors found it. This planet meaning Senal, of course.”

“I don't understand the problem.”

“Who made this space and hid it here?” Himmer asked. “There was never any civilization on Senal, not the first hint of one. So, if this space was constructed in some way and hidden here, who did it?”

“Irion?”

Brun laughed. “He's old, but he's not that old. And he's powerful, but he's not that powerful.”

“You think this place was constructed in some way?” Jedda asked. “Is that what scientists are thinking?”

“Scientists are doing what they always do, chewing on the information they have and speculating. Even the ones who agree that it's possible to create some kind of extradimensional space, which we've never managed to do with all our tech; even the ones who think it is possible have no idea how it would be done. We have no control over time and space at the level we would need. We had come to believe that kind of technology was not possible. It's certainly not part of the science that came with us.”

“Came with you?” Brun asked.

“Our own world, Senal, is not our original home. Our own people came here from another world, a long way off.”

She looked skeptical. “You're serious?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds like a fairy tale,” Brun said. “Flew here from somewhere else.” She looked at Opit, who touched her hand, though gingerly; the tension between them had continued since the discussion of magic. “You believe it?”

Himmer and Vitter simply laughed. Opit said, “I suppose I didn't ever tell you that story, did I?”

“No.”

“Well, we're pretty certain it's true. We have the original colony ship that brought us here, in orbit. It's a sacred place to us. And in space it will last forever, of course, properly maintained.”

Brun was clearly in disbelief, but attempted to mask her doubts. “So that's what you meant when you said earlier, there was nothing here when you came. No other people.”

Jedda felt a flood of warmth for Brun, surrounded by strangers, including a husband who must at times still seem much too different from the rest of her world. She reached for Brun's hand, cupped it under hers. “That's all right, Brun. I don't believe it, either.”

The smile Brun flashed was quick and uncertain. She rose to clear the table, and Opit, seeing her expression, moved at once to help.

On the walk back to the guesthouse, Himmer asked Jedda, “Is that really true, what you said? You don't believe in Earth?”

“I think I'd say it a different way. The story is so remote from the present day, I think it hardly matters whether it's true or not. Maybe we came here in the
Merced,
maybe we didn't, maybe it's all a hoax out of Craken's day. What does it matter? The story's from so long ago, there's no way to arrive at any truth that's in it, any more.”

Himmer stirred restlessly at the door. He was agitated, now that they were about to part, and wished she would come to his room. But she had been with him in that way for the last time. She kissed him on the stubble.