Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (14 page)

 
          
We
have been
brought to the waterfront
pyramid at last, to meet the Yarrish of Lyndarl: the mayor or headman of ‘Three
Rivers’. His office complex is inside the pyramid.

 
          
The
Yarrish lacks one hand. His right wrist is a shorn stump. Yet he gestures as
though the hand is still there, as though he not only feels a phantom hand but
can actually make use of it. Curiously, I sense that one is indeed there;
yet—how can I put it?—not ‘here’. I’m reminded of the guide we met on the bald
cuesta
and the wrapping about himself of
furled, invisible wings or limbs: a second self—except that I didn’t know on
which wavelength to look for it.

 
          
Did
he lose the hand to some sword stroke? Does he who grasps the reins of power
lose the power of grasp, lest he overreach himself?

 
          
Sereny,
our day tutor, has led us here: into a bronze-wood room with rows of sitting
cushions on the floor. Light reflects in from mirror-lined slits in the
slanting stone walls. In the chamber already are a dozen Getkans, including the
g-string couple who have stayed on at the caravanserai, though spending several
days in between over on
Menfaa
Island
. They have behaved rather coolly towards us
so far when in residence, as though blaming us for some delay in their
schedule—whatever that schedule might be. Or is it simply circumspectly—a
matter of weighing us up? I suspect that somehow—to their surprise as much as
ours— their destiny is now entwined with ours. At least we know that his name
is Samti and hers is Vilo, and that they come from somewhere up the northern
archipelago, which accounts for their scanty dress in these hotter climes.

 
          
The
Yarrish drinks us in. “Now that you can speak, Starborn, we can speak.”

 
          
Yes,
we can speak. This has been an immersion course, and a curious, haunting one at
that. Like the proverbial iceberg, a lot of it seems to have remained hidden
away under the surface of our consciousness. We simply can’t be so quick on the
uptake! No microphones lurk beneath our sleep trees, to whisper to us. Yet
there have been whispers in our dreams. I’m sure we’ve dreamt in Getka-saali
and grown more fluent by this route. The workaday teaching of Sereny and the
other tutor is increasingly like a scattering of seed crystals into a solution
which becomes ever more saturated, dream by dream. Now we can use the dyad form
of T (but what do we use it for?). We can use the partial plural
(‘one-and-a-half-wc’), but how can there be half a person? The verbs shift,
following subtle rules.

 
          
The
Yarrish inclines his head. “Powa is my born name, and menHarl will be my death
name, Starborn. Though, as I am already a hero it will not be used in this
world. You may address me as Yarrish if your business is between cities, or,”
he pauses, “between worlds.” Again he drinks us with his eyes, while that
phantom hand which isn’t there . . . spreads its fingers wide. “But not for
business between this-world and other-world.”

 
          
A
death name? Something ceremonial by which he’ll be known after his death? In
the history books? On statues? But what records are there? What books? None
that we’ve seen. What statues or what art? There’s only architecture, which
happens to be essential, and of course that missing-music. But they do not
‘die’, so they say. Yet they do; they have death names.

 
          
And
what is ‘other-world’?
Askatharli
is
the word he uses— literally ‘other-half-plane’.

 
          
“I’m
not, at this moment,” he adds, “the Tharliparan.” Yes, the ‘plane-doubler’, the
‘world-doubler’ . . . “His place is in the
men-
pyramid,
when he wears that mask—”

 
          
And
of course introductions have two sides to them.

 
          
“How
are you named, then?”

 
          
“Amy
Dove, Yarrish.”

 
          
“And
the root of the name?”

 
          
“Well,
Amy means friend. It’s a word for love. Dove’s a white bird, our symbol of
peace.”

 
          
“Peace
lover, then. So that is what you are, what you do?” “No, not really. I study
the types of people on my world—what divides them, what unites them. Customs,
behaviour, ceremonies. What . . . masks they wear, for themselves and for
others.”

 
          
“So
you’re wearers of masks? We saw masks in your ship.” “Shit, they’ve been on
board,” Ritchie mutters in English.

           
The Yarrish gauges the sentiments,
if not the words themselves. “We interfered with nothing.”

 
          
“Those
are for breathing, out in space.” Ritchie waves a hand grandly aloft.

 
          
“But
what do you see through them?”

 
          
“Whatever
there is to see.” Ritchie shuffles about on his cushion. “What do you see
through yours?”

 
          
“Maybe
you don’t know that living beings are masks, for the
men
in them? Thus Powa is the mask for menHarl. So you wore those
masks in Askatharli, Amy Dove . . . and saw what there was to see.”

 
          
Is
Askatharli ‘space’? Or, no, hyperspace? I shake my head. What did we see?
Phantom spaceships.

 
          
“So
you study peoples. Have you come to study us?”

 
          
“Yes.
No. We were . . . bidden here. By shining shapes which became like us. Like . .
. our wise-speakers of old, and like our Gods.” The word that encompasses
‘Gods’ rises to my lips spontaneously. It has resonances that I can’t yet
catch. “They appeared and disappeared again.”

 
          
Ritchie
is in a huff. “We come from the stars,” he announces proudly.

 
          
“Not
from all of them, surely?” The Yarrish is amused. He knows perfectly well what
spacesuits are for. He’s
teasing
us,
to find out how much we know! “We know where you come from.” Wu and Ritchie
exchanged quick glances. “How can they? Star maps?”

           
Again, the private exchange is
easily decoded. “Our Tharli- paran has been told that you come from the third
world of a sun very like our own. Slow light takes twenty-five of our years to
come from it. But do you know why you have come? The fact of your arrival
proves that you are able to know.”

 
          
“There’s
a struggle,” I say. What did the avatars warn us of? “A war. A fight.”

 
          
“There
is indeed a struggle—of minor significance as yet. So, peace lover, you came
here to fight. Strange paradox! ” Trickster native!

           
“We fought our own selves on the
way,” admits Zoe glumly.

 
          
“Ah
yes, one must fight oneself in Askatharli. And you lost? You didn’t come from
your star in that little ship.”

 
          
“We
lost our main weapons. There was a battle of illusions.”

 
          
“Then
those must have been the wrong weapons.”

 
          
“They
could wipe out a city!” snaps Ritchie. “Just one of them could.”

 
          
“Does
one drain a whole lake to catch a few fish? You cannot carry such weapons
through Askatharli with impunity. The Imagining protects us and itself.” The
Imagining: ‘Gods’ is one resonance of that word. “It should have been your
askas
that fought.” Our ‘other-halves’?
The meaning of the word arises, of its own accord. This seductive, esoteric
language! “Did many die?” he asks me.

 
          
“Only
our weapons specialist. He was killed in Askatharli.” (Yes: High Space does
correspond to Askatharli—the other-half plane.)

 
          
“Who
killed this person?”

 
          
Zoe
and I both speak at once. “He was found hanged.” “He hanged himself.”

 
          
Why
am I sobbing? God, this is shameful. Their eyes may drink us in, but mine do
flow. Damn you, Jacobik. Can’t you leave me alone? You’re dead. We should have
dumped your corpse, not frozen it; it rode with us too long. Pull yourself
together, Amy. “Then afterwards we were attacked by creatures like the . . .
vindi
.” Earwig things that drift by on
gossamer strings, trails of spittle in the early morning. “Much larger. So big.
They live out in space, on star-rocks. They captured our mother ship. That’s
when we lost our friends. Only six of us escaped.”

 
          
“The
Group-ones, yes. We know of them.” The Yarrish pouts. “How dare they interfere
with ambassadors to us? This is more serious than we thought. You shall speak
to our Tharliparan soon. The Paravarthun will be told.” And who are they? The
hemisphere-wide government with whom the Tharliparan communes from his pyramid
across the water? It seems to be a collective noun for all the Tharliparans of
the world.

 
          
“I
had not supposed the problem had become critical. You were forewarned, but the
warning could only be phrased in . . .” He says a word. It suggests the
‘language of vision’, ‘symbol language’, ‘religious language’—a mixture of all
these, though they don’t seem to have religions in our sense according to Zoe.
(She’s a little more sensitive to that end of the emerging language spectrum.)
It is the psychic wavelength on which we received the God’s World broadcasts.

 
          
“So,
six of you escaped. That should be sufficient.”

 
          
“What
for?” asks Wu softly.

 
          
“The
Tharliparan will show you. Are you bonded to one another?”

 
          
“How
do you mean?” demands Ritchie hotly.

 
          
“Do
you love, do you mate?”

 
          
“Yes,”
says Wu quickly, and changes the subject. “How do you know what’s out in space?
One would never guess it from looking at this town. What you know is rather
well hidden, Yarrish.”

 
          
“Do
you
know? I repeat, what did you see
between the stars?” The Yarrish turns to Ritchie, proud astronaut.

 
          
“Nothing,”
he shrugs. “A confusion. A jumble. Disorder of light. Like soup all around us.
We came through a different kind of space from ordinary space where you can see
the stars.”

 
          
“You
came through Askatharli space, the space from which this world descends. You
aren’t the first star travellers to arrive this way on Getka. Here is the
wellspring of being.”

 
          
Ritchie
sighs. “Sure, you’re the centre of the universe . . . Hey, do you really mean
that? Other star travellers. Are their ships still here?”

 
          
“So
that you may fly home in them? You may only return home with our help, humans.”

 
          
“That’s
impossible,” snaps Wu. “You only have swords and sailing ships.”

 
          
“You
will die, then live. Then you can go home.”

 
          
“No,”
shivers Zoe.

 
          
“Isn’t
that what you believe? That you die into another life?” Zoe has no reply, for
in most definitions of religion it’s perfectly true. “The self is the mask of
the
men,
is it not?”

 
          
“What
did these others look like?” Ren6 wants to know.

 
          
“Differences
of appearances hardly matter. If they were not alike in the quality of aska,
the Paravarthun could not have reached them.” Paravarthun is more than just a
collective noun. It suggests almost a
gestalt
entity beyond the individual, beyond the world, more than the sum of the parts.
“You will see them, or some of them. We meet them in our dreams, even in
menLyndarl. And more species will come, unless the Group-ones learn from
captured humans some way to impede this great work . . . Ah, they might as well
try to put out the sun with buckets of water!”