Watson, Ian - Black Current 03 (25 page)

 
          
"I should
never
contemplate blunting my faculties with excess alcohol!"

 
          
"Jolly party this'll be,"
remarked Peli to no one in particular.

 
          
"Oh I'll certainly make a show
of drinking," Martan said. He turned to Stamno. "Tamath's just
teasing you. Let's you and me try to find why they really ran out of their new
drug, hmm?"

           
"And whether we can ever produce it for ourselves!
And
control the supply!" Yaleen exclaimed, though no one had asked her
opinion.

 
          
Yaleen's intervention provoked a
furious scowl from Tamath. Martan, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. Marti
adopted an expression of nonchalant disinterest.

 
          
"Aha." Stamno's eyes
crossed—this was one of his less endearing traits—as he focused upon the hidden
truth of this moment. "Do I detect a naive young person happening to
pierce one of those very veils to which I have just alluded? Let me see . . .
We men, whether of west or of east, are all inhibited—are we not? The western
Sons feel a huge instinctive revulsion against the river and its mighty flow.
Whereas we in the east can sail the river once in our fives, and
only once, to get wed.
Now along comes a certain drug, discovered here
in the west, whereby the western soldiery can overcome their inhibition
temporarily—"

 
          
"We know all that." Tamath
tried to shut him up.

 
          
"So they invade the east. Yet
subsequently their supply of antiinhibitor drug dries up. Consequently they
can't reinforce—and we win the war. In so doing we capture a small remaining
stock of the drug, courtesy of which I am here today together with my good
colleague Captain Martan.

 
          
"How do our 'pothecaries fare in
their analysis of this drug? Not well, I hear. And maybe it is all for the best
that they fare poorly? Maybe success on their part would turn our society topsy-turvy!
And maybe, too, control of the
source
of the drug—namely the fungus, supposing that it grows in our own jungles—will
set the political pattern of the future.

 
          
"This pattern might be envisaged
in one style by the river guild— but in quite another style by our other
guilds! From the point of view of the river guild the ideal situation might
well be a useful
trickle
of the drug,
but not a flood. Is it then coincidence that our two impending guests—those
whom the guild prefers as ambassadors— are also reputedly the original
discoverers of the fungus drug?"

 
          
"Reef your sails!" snapped
Tamath. "You're racing headlong into Precipices."

 
          
"Oh gosh," said Yaleen,
dismayed at what her guileless contribution had provoked.

 
          
Stamno swung round. He trapped her in
his cross-eyed stare. His eyes focused on a point just before his own nose, in
such a way that his gaze seemed to divide, bend around, and drill a hole
through the back of Yaleen's skull.

 
          
Stamno mightn't booze, but suddenly
he was intoxicated—with himself. "I perceive a thin black barrier hundreds
of leagues long running down the whole midstream of our river! This barrier is
one which only
men
heed; and then,
not with their eyes. It is inscribed only in the brain. For men to dare this
barrier,
is to risk madness, sickness, and death. Who
inscribed it, but our distant ancestors? Those who were ancestors of our
ancestors? Yet a drug erases its black ink for a while. What is
written,
can be unwritten.
Then written
again otherwise!"

 
          
"Control yourself!" Marti
pitched her voice like a slap on the cheek. "Our guests will be here soon.
You're babbling balderdash."

 
          
"Quite," said Martan.
Martan was a practical man, to whom a tree was a tree. Far from stimulating his
train of thought, Stamno's outburst had knocked it on the head. Repelled, he
drew his chair noticeably away from the Truthseeker. Stamno refocused, and
looked crestfallen.

 
          
A moment later the door-gong boomed.

 
          
The names of the two Sons were Jothan
and Andri. Jothan was a red-head; Andri's hair was jet black. Both men wore
beards which had recently seen scissor-work. Their drink was strong ale.
Therefore jugs of this were poured, and replenished, and no one retired till
nearly
midnight
.

 
          
Later, as Yaleen was about to bed
down with a whirlpooling head, she recalled a sozzled Captain Martan blinking
at her in a puzzled way at one stage, and muttering, "I shouldn't be here.
Shouldn't at all.
Dear me, what am I saying? I've no
idea!" He covered his flagon with his palm. "Enough. Obviously I've
had enough. Damn this ale. What
am
I
doing here?"

 
          
'Mistress Marti patted his arm.
"Whenever we're feeling confused, Captain, we should be guided by
tradition."

 
          
"Exactly!" said he.
"Exactly.
But our guests are guided by their own
traditions. That's the whole bother of it."

 
          
The Son called Andri grinned like a
hound about to bite. "We're all of us guided by the words of life; that's
a fact. What guides us is words a million million letters long, written in our
flesh.
Our
words here in the west are
spelt a bit different from youm in the east. And our words say 'no' to the
river, while our women's words say summat contrary. Your men's words say
'no—except once'; and your women's words say the same as our women's. Who's to
say which spelling is the right 'un? Happen youm's a prettier way to spell.
Happen indeed." Andri regarded Yaleen across the table for rather too long
a time, till with a creepy feeling Yaleen thought that the man fancied himself
as owning her, using her for his amusement.

 
          
"You'll benefit by a spell in
the east," she said to him. "Men know how to behave like human beings
there."

 
          
"I never had
no
truck with incinerating women, let me tell you! And we've stopped that now.
Part of our peace agreement, right? Now we'll receive fine wines and gems and
oh, all sorts."

 
          
"The goods we'll trade aren't
bribes to ensure good conduct, sir!" said Marti.

 
          
"Didn't say as they
was
.
Though happen we'll pay for 'em
sometimes in conduct rather than coin."
Dismissing Marti from his
attention, Andri returned his gaze to Yaleen.

 
          
Marti would not be so easily
dismissed.
"Plus a decent road to the riverside, sir,
built by you.
And a proper quayside there, with your
women in charge of it."

 
          
"Yes, yes." Andri continued
his scrutiny of Yaleen. "Have you thought," he said to her, "you
so slim and fresh, with the nutbrown hair and that beautyspot on your neck all
unveiled!—have you thought that mayhap the agency as wrote those words in our
flesh intended all of us to act humanely, by
limiting
what us men can do? '
Cause
we're
descended from beasts with a taste for territory and flesh, and a yearning to
shove our squirter into any woman as looks good; and when our dander rises we
snarl and hack and rampage.

 
          
"Only,
that
agency limited us wrong—by making us men madly fear
big stretches of
water. We said a flat no to the river—and to our women, too, who like the
waves. We didn't let women take the lead, as you did. We specialized ourselves,
like piranha-mice as can only ravage whatever's in their way;
then
fall asleep oblivious. Truesoil, I'm saying now, sweet
maid." He leered.

 
          
Eat
dirt,
thought Yaleen. But she buttoned her lip.

 
          
"In my opinion," said
Marti, "our origins
must needs
remain a
mystery—at least till such time in the far future when perhaps we can sail the
sky, and find out. Right now, the shape of that future's up to us. We shall
change what was written in the past. Bit by bit."

 
          
"Change what was written!"
echoed Martan drunkenly. He hadn't done too well at only making a show of
drinking.

 
          
Andri gazed at Marti. "Happen a
person
can
wash out the dye he's first
dipped in. Or leastways change the hue. Happen I need one of your fine gentle
ladies to rub myself up against, to teach me graces? Get to know her really
well.
^,,
He took a swig of ale then tilted his
flagon in Yaleen's direction.
"As a human being."

 
          
Yaleen decided it was high time to
knock her own ale-pot over. Or maybe the pot knocked itself over; she wasn't
sure.

 
          
"Oops!"

 
          
Yaleen dreamt a peculiar dream. For
as long as the dream endured— and who can say how long that is?—she was
convinced that she was wide awake; until some backyard cockerel crowed, and the
dream fled from her awareness. . . .

 
          
She was standing in the Kirque of
Manhome South, a building she had never been inside. Even so, she knew that it
was the Kirque.

 
          
The interior was blue and cavernous.
Ribbed and buttressed walls curved upward to a vaulted roof. The floor was of
bumpy turquoise cobbles, which felt strangely soft underfoot. Mauve-fronded
ferns sprayed out from terracotta pots; the air smelled of dead fish.

 
          
In the midst of the
Kirque stood a hillock of white marble, with steps mounting one side.
Chiselled into the front of the hillock was a word,
Ka-theodral,
which meant nothing to her. From the apex rose a tall
marble reading-stand carved in the shape of a flutterbye. The open wings held a
heavy volume.

 
          
A man popped up behind the
reading-stand. He was nude and totally bald of any hair. His whole body was as
blanched and soft and sickly-looking as a war casualty's whose bandages have
just been taken off. His flesh was poached egg-white. He looked like a giant
jungle-grub. Yet from the man's cross-eyed expression Yaleen knew that he must
be Truthseeker Stamno.

 
          
Gripping the open book, Stamno
proclaimed at her:

 
          
"What you write, so let it be!
But do you remember when the void bubbled up about you in the never-ever? You
might have dived into a private time and place. Into a personal universe! Thus
everything happening to you thereafter—"

 
          
"Voids?" cried Yaleen.
"Bubbles?
What are you talking about?"

           
"I
don't say that you
did
do so. 1 only
say
that you may have done. Alternatively, when you died
into the Ka-store—"

           
"The what?"

 
          
"—of the Worm—"

 
          
"
whor

 
          
"—when you died with your mind
split in madness,
then
also you might have woven a
world-for-one. Or on the other hand the Worm might have woven it for you."

 
          
"I don't understand a word of
this! Shut up!"

 
          
"Then again, maybe we should
consider the effects of the time- stop drug?
Unusual effects,
in your case.
Exceptional effects.
While time
halted, during the Pause a whole skein of private events might unwind."

 
          
"Pause?
What do you know about the Pause?"

 
          
"I don't say that such
suppositions are true.
Merely, that they might be true."

 
          
"Who are you?"

 
          
The grub-man gurgled out a laugh.
"Who am I, indeed?
A Seeker of Truth?
A ghost of a Worm?
The voice of the void?
Or of the assembly of the dead?
Or of all the worlds
which might have been?" The naked man stabbed an accusing finger at her.
"Or am I simply
you,
Yaleen?
Maybe everyone is you!"

 
          
Although Yaleen didn't understand
this, she felt terrified. She fled from the Kirque out into the open air.