IN THE MORNING Spinel sauntered into the snug kitchen, eager to break the news to his parents. But neither of them was there. Sunlight streamed from the window, making bright diamond shapes on the cleared table.
His married sister, Beryl, stood over the stove, stirring a pot which gave off a heavy odor of groundnuts. Her apron rode high over her pregnancy. On the floor, pudgy Oolite sat licking a porridge bowl.
“Where's Mother?” Spinel asked.
“Up in the study,” Beryl drawled to emphasize how late he had risen. Their mother was up at dawn as usual, to spend the day adding up accounts for unlettered farmers. The extra income helped make ends meet. “Hey, Spinny,” Beryl asked, “will you never tire of running errands for Mother?”
“You'll soon sing another tune,” Spinel shot back, “when Doctor Bresius knocks on the door by and by.”
Her complexion deepened, from her neck below the tied-up hair to her nose, which had the same crook in it as his. Spinel regretted his words, a cruel reminder that his sister's gene quotient allowed no more than two children. He brushed her hair with a conciliatory gesture. Absently he drummed his fingers on the mosaic wainscoting. Then in three strides he crossed to the stairway. “Mother!” he yelled. “Mother, I'm leaving Chrysoport.”
Beryl gasped behind him. “Who signed you on, a gem trader?”
“Well, not exactly ⦠.”
The stairs creaked as his mother thumped downstairs with alarming speed for a woman her size. “You what?” she rasped, her double chin shaking. “You have a sponsor for a stonesign?”
“I'm leaving Chrysoport to see another world.”
“Leaving Chrysoport? Call your father!
Cyan!”
she shrieked downstairs toward the workshop, her beads rattling across her voluminous skirts. “Cyan, your son found a sponsor at last.” She flung her arms around Spinel with a strength that knocked his breath away. “Tell me now, which firm is it? The House of Karnak? I always said you'd do well in gem manufacturing.”
“Well, they're not reallyâ”
“Who is it?” Beryl insisted. “Come on, Spinny. What stonesign?”
“Well ⦔
Cyan's broad shoulders filled the doorway. “Yes, Galena?” He eyed his wife wearily as he clapped the grit from his hands. Then all were still as a frieze, except Oolite, who burbled and turned her bowl upside down over her head.
“It's not like that. They don't have a stonesign.”
“No stonesign?” Galena lifted her hands in astonishment.
“They're from the Ocean Moon. All I want is to see the moon, just for the summer ⦠.”
One look at his father chilled him. “Were you pestering the moonwomen again?” Cyan asked in a steely tone.
Beryl exclaimed, “Why, they're not even human!”
Galena shook her head and sank into a chair, which creaked as her weight settled like a sack of gold coins. “My poor son, what can I do with you?” she muttered. “Will you never get some sense into that troll's skull of yours?”
Spinel did not care to be compared with Valedon's extinct native race of anthropoids, and Beryl's laughter only made it worse. It was true that the notion of his adventure seemed less solid in broad daylight than it had beneath the mysterious Sharer plantlights, but he was set on it, nonetheless. He clenched his fists. “Why can't I go, just for a while? Just for once? Nobody needs me around here.”
“Go to Karnak of Iridis,” his mother urged him. “There you'll get a good place and see the city, besides.”
Beryl shook her head. “You'll never grow up, that's all.”
The voices closed in on him. Spinel fled from the kitchen and burst out of doors onto the sun-baked flagstones. Automatically he headed out toward the shore beyond the harbor, where he would cool off in the sea. He loped past the back of the granite town hall, whose arched windows carried ornaments of chrysolite, like glass eyes that mocked
him. Angry tears blurred his vision. His parents would never let him go. Why could they not understand his longing to see something of the universe beyond this troll's nest of a town?
As he rounded a corner in haste, he ran smack into Uriel the Spirit Caller. Spinel gasped and started to frame an excuse, but Uriel spoke first. “Never mind, son; the wind blew you in.” Uriel looked windblown himself in the loose cowl that wrapped his head like a potato in a sack. Yet his gnarled hands adjusted the chain of his stone with slow dignity. The stonesign of the Spirit Caller was a star sapphire, a deep blue oval lit by three intersecting lines of light. This gem alone, by unwritten law, was never bought or sold.
“Your face tells me,” Uriel said, “that you may need some wisdom of the Patriarch.”
Spinel winced and fought back his annoyance. “What's that to you? Why should the Patriarch care a flint chip for me?”
Uriel did not answer but passed his hand over the starstone. The six points vanished, then returned as the shadow lifted. “If we cut off the light, the star is gone. So, if we ignore the light of wisdom, how shall we see?”
The starstone intrigued Spinel despite his bitter mood. Cyan had drummed into him its physical nature: aluminum trioxide tinted by iron, and inclusions of titanium that reflected a star, if one cut the stone
en cabochon,
just so ⦠. Still, the sight of it tasted of magic, to him. And could there be any other explanation for spirit calling?
“Do you really hear the Patriarch's thoughts in an instant?” Spinel challenged. “Across four light-years?”
Uriel nodded slowly, almost reluctantly, Spinel thought.
Spinel glanced at the sky, which shone clear as if polished, the inside of a porcelain bowl. Yet high overhead an Iridian jet scored it like a diamond-tipped glass cutter. His bitterness washed back. “Then why do Iridians use radio?”
Spinel broke off and walked quickly the rest of the way to the shore.
The water splashed and eddied around his legs, and clouds of fine pebbles sifted over his toes. As he waded out his arm plunged to grasp a flat rock, which he tossed with a twist. It skipped several times, and he followed its flight until the brilliance of the water's reflections hurt his eyes. Down beyond his feet spread masses of seaweed, dark and mysterious as a woman's hair. He stood very still. The wavelets muttered and seemed to whisper:
merwenmerwen ⦠.
Spinners, soldiers,
or spies; somehow he would figure out those Sharers who lived without stone on a world with no shore.
IF THE SHARERS were spies, Spinel decided, then he would spy on them and ferret out their mischief.
At first, their spinning wheel whirled as usual, and on Merwen's loom the batten swung regularly to beat the weft in. One day, something new did appear: an insect the size of Spinel's fist, with black legs splayed out and white eyes that bulged big as marbles. Merwen let the grotesque thing sit on her shoulder, where it clicked and squealed, scraping a lopsided pair of mandibles like a fiddler. About the same time that the insect came, more complex patterns began to grow in the weave, entwined swaths of green and blue and gold more fantastic than the robes of Iridian nobles.
And Usha wrought cures that astounded the villagers: a man paralyzed since childhood stood and walked, an infant born sightless cried out at the sun. Their reputation spread thoughout the province, and once even a nobleman from Iridis came to them, his clothes bordered with the distinctive nested squares. Exactly what he was cured of no one heard, but the refusal of payment provoked him. “What's wrong with my gold? It's not pure enough for you? What are you here for, if not for a profit?”
“We came to share judgment,” said Merwen. “To judge human souls.”
That answer took root in the village. “They must be noble judges,” Ahn assured Spinel, “just waiting for a good case worth their time.” But Spinel knew better: they were spies.
For spies, Merwen and Usha showed a surprising lack of interest in the worldly events that stirred Chrysoport. Not even the Pyrrholite rebellion caught their attention, though talk of it was on every Chrysolite
tongue. As summer lengthened, Spinel scrounged through dust-choked gutters for newscubes of Pyrrhopolis, the city that dared to build its own power plant in defiance of Iridis.
Only the High Protector, in Iridis, had the consent of the Patriarch to draw electrical power from an atom-smasher. All power must stem from one lord, and have its limit, just as the number of people had a limit on Valedon. That was the lesson of the dead gods: too many people smashed too many atomsâand planets, in the end.
Yet Pyrrhopolis defied the Patriarch's law, so the Protector called on Valans everywhere to beat the rebels down. From the mountains as far as Dolomoth divisions of soldiers streamed in through Chrysoport, on their way to join the siege of the rebel city.
Even a few Dolomites took an interest in the Sharers, thinking they were water witches from the sea. On one sweltering afternoon a Dolomite corporal named Kaol came to Usha, pulling after him a young woman with terrified eyes. The man's face was heavily bearded, and sweat dripped to his shoulders, darkening his cloak of gray mountain wool. At his waist clanged an iron chain.
“You must do this,” he told Usha. “I can't pay the doctor, but they say you can do it.”
But Usha shook her head and seemed to withdraw into an invisible shell.
“You
must,”
he insisted, jostling the young woman from side to side. “I had her sent all the way from Hagoth Peak. She bore a child out of wedlock, so now her tubes must be tied. If I can't pay for it, they'll send her to the slave market. It's the law, witch woman.” He drew a six-point star in the air.
The woman he held started to cry.
“Enough,” he barked. “Worthless daughter, to bear a child without a father.”
At that, a spring must have snapped behind Usha's tongue. “âFather'? What use is âfather'? I never had one, nor did my mother's mothers since the First Door.”
Furious, the Dolomite dropped his daughter and pressed a knife to Usha's neck until the skin puckered in. “You mock me? Death take you, witch or not!”
From behind Usha, Merwen lifted a hand, and the startling long fingers caught the man's eye. “And who are you,” she asked, “friend of Death?”
Kaol stood still, and his breathing slowed. His gaze shifted down Merwen's neck, to the scar that snaked down and around it. He said, “Death pays a fair wage. But only a fool calls Death âfriend.'” He whipped the knife back, then turned and took his daughter away.
The Sharers spoke quietly together in their own tongue, their fingers fluttering like gills. Spinel crept away, disquieted. A world without fathers could have no place for him.
Â
One evening soon afterward, Spinel got home late for dinner, expecting an outburst from his mother. Yet only Beryl and Harran sat at the kitchen table.
“Hey, what's going on?” He must really be in for it, this time.
Harran stopped chewing and looked away. A netmaker for the fishermen, Harran was a quiet sort who often seemed cowed by his in-laws. Beryl slipped another spoonful of spice pudding into Oolite's mouth, then wiped the baby's chin. “Mother and Father are upstairs,” she said, not meeting Spinel's eyes. “Settling your future.”
He raced up to the study, his heart pounding as hard as his feet hit the steps.
Galena's study was a corner room under the slanting eaves, filled with files and account books. Her chair was turned forward from the desk, and she sat in it solidly. Cyan stood beside her, and on the couch by the wall, the two Sharers sat with their outlandish feet tucked beneath their crossed legs.
“We've been waiting for you,” his mother said. “The arrangements are concluded.”
“Arrangements?
” Appalled, he looked to the Sharers, whom his father had forbidden him to pester.
Cyan said, “The Sharer judges have agreed to sign you into their calling. This is a great honor for a stonecutter's son.”
“True,” said his mother. “You'll never have to count coins for a failing business, that's for sure. And look at the fine sign gift they have brought in your name.” On the floor lay a seasilken tapestry with one end unrolled, the brilliant colors and intricate patterns that Spinel had watched for so long on Merwen's loom. The seasilk alone was worth more than a month's work in the stoneshop, and the weaving was finer than any moontrader showed.
“But ⦔ Spinel found his voice. “They don't even have stonesigns.”
“What stone swims in the sea?” said Cyan. “They do have a calling. They are âSharers': that's a kind of judge on the moon.”
“It is?” As well as weavers, doctors, and spies?
“A great honor,” Cyan repeated, a little sternly.
Spinel clung to his mother. “You can't do this to me!”
“What? I thought you wanted this.” Her voice grew hoarse with excitement. “My son, my only son, I only want the best for you. Haven't I always tried to make you happy?” Her face puckered and she wrung her puffy hands.
“I didn't mean itânot to sign away, that is.” He remembered something. “They're spies, Mother! They're spying on Valedon.”
Cyan demanded, “Who charges this?”
“They told me themselves.”
“Impertinent fool, what spy would tell you so to your face? Forgive him,” Cyan told Merwen, “he speaks without thinking.”
“And besides,” Spinel gasped, “there aren't any
men
on Shora.”
“Nonsense. You can't populate a world without men.”
Galena said, “There are fewer men, that's all. That's why they want you, for a son.”
“A son?”
“You'll be so special.”
“But they aren't even human.”
“For shame.” Her bosom heaved. “Do you realize we'll lose the stoneshop, if you don't sign away soon?”
So the business was that bad. Cyan looked away. Spinel looked again at the precious cloth, thinking, I've been sold off.
Then Merwen spoke up, for the first time. “If you please, let us speak alone with Spinel, for a minute.”
“Very well,” said Galena. “Cyan, help me up, please.” Cyan grasped her arm to help her stand. She kissed Spinel on the cheek. “Come, now,” she whispered. “We're so proud of you. So far away; you'll come back to visit your own mother, won't you?” Tears started down her cheeks as she turned away, following Cyan out. The stairs creaked on her way down.
Merwen faced him, calm as always. “It is true that Shora knew no men before traders came. But that does not prove that a man can't become a Sharer. As I said before, you may leave us whenever you wish. The moonferry crosses often, except when the sea swallows. Will you come with us, Spinel?”
His mind was feverish. He was certain, now, that Sharers were not real “judges,” any more than they were anything else that they did.
Share the ways of stone ⦠and of this.
He remembered the curious silken loop he received from Merwen's webbed hand. It must have been magic to snare him. He watched her hands now, smooth-tipped fingers bound below the first knuckle by umbrella folds of skin, with only the thumbs completely free. “I still want to know: are you human or not?”
“We try to be.”
“If you're a catfish, it doesn't matter how hard you try.”
“We descended from the same fish you did.”
Spinel was taken aback. His notions of evolution were hazy at best.
Merwen added very seriously, “I believe you are as human as we are.”
Usha said, “Close enough to interbreed. I tested genes from Nisi the Valan.”
“No, thanks,” said Spinel, recoiling from this new horror.
“Nisi the Valan,” said Merwen, “has shared life with us for many years now. You would know her as Lady Berenice of Hyalite.”
“Oh, I wouldn't know a lady.” Though he did know of the House of Hyalite, the oldest of the moontraders, whose name was emblazoned on the Sharers' houseboat. So the Sharers did have friends in Iridis, after all. That was reassuring; and yet, it was unthinkable that he, Spinel, might find himself consorting with Iridian nobility, so unthinkable that it made him uneasy again. What in Valedon could these Sharers want with him, if they shared acquaintance with a Lady of Hyalite?