A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (8 page)

3/9.
I am alone on the High Roof.

No one else willing to continue ascent. Colin and Nigel will wait for me three days at Verandah Roof Camp; Derek and four
Sherbets began descent to Base. I set off with two Sherbets at 5 ack emma. Fine sunrise, in East, at 7.04 ack emma. Climbed
steadily all day. Tricky bit at last overhang. Sherbets very plucky. Omu Ba while swinging on rope said, “Observe fine view,
sah!” Exhausted at arrival at High Roof Camp, but the three advance Sherbets had tents set up and Ovaltine ready. Slope so
steep here I feel I may roll off in my sleep!

Sherbets singing in their tent.

Above me the sharp Summit, and the Chimney rising sheer against the stars.

That is the last entry in Simon Interthwaite’s journal. Four of the five Sherbets with him at the High Roof Camp returned
after three days to the Base Camp. They brought the journal, two clean vests, and a tube of anchovy paste back with them.
Their report of his fate was incoherent. The Interthwaite Party abandoned the attempt to scale the North Face of 2647 Lovejoy
Street and returned to Calcutta.

In 1980 a Japanese party of Izutsu employees with four Sherbet guides attained the summit by a North Face route, rappelling
across the study windows and driving pitons clear up to the eaves. Occupant protest was ineffective.

No one has yet climbed the Chimney.

A nurobl called Bu, working one day with her crew on the rockpile of Obling College, found the rock that changed things.

Where the obls live, the shores of the river are rocky. Boulders, large stones, small stones, pebbles, and gravel lie piled
and scattered for miles up and down the banks. The towns of the obis are built of stone; they hunt the rock-coney for their
meat feasts. Their nurobls gather and prepare stonecrop and lichen for ordinary food, and build the houses and the colleges,
and keep them neat, for the obis grow nervous and unhappy when things are not kept in order.

The heart of an obl town is its college, and the pride of every college is its terraces, which shelve down towards the river
from the high stone buildings. The stones of the terraces are arranged according to size: boulders make the outer walls, and
within them are rows of large rocks, then banks of small stones, and at last the inner terraces of pebbles set in elaborate
mosaics and patterns in gravel. On the terraces the obis stroll and sit in the long, warm days, smoking ta-leaf in pipes of
soapstone, and discussing history, natural history, philosophy, and metaphysics. So long as the rocks are arranged in order
of shape and size and the patterns are kept clear and tidy,
the obls have peace of mind and can think deeply. After their conversations on the terraces, the wisest old obls enter the
colleges and write down the best of what was thought and said, in the Books of Record that are kept neatly ranged on the shelves
of the college libraries.

When the river floods in early spring and rises up the terraces, tumbling the rocks about, washing the gravel away, and causing
great disorder, the obls stay inside the colleges. There they read the Books of Record, discuss and annotate, plan new designs
for the terraces, eat meat feasts, and smoke. Their nurs cook and serve the feasts and keep the rooms of the colleges orderly.
As soon as the floods pass, the nurs begin to sort the rocks and straighten up the terraces. They hurry to do so because the
disorder left by the floods makes the obis very nervous, and when they are nervous they beat and rape the nurs more harshly
than usual.

The spring floods this year had broken through the boulder wall of the town of Obling, leaving branches and driftwood and
other litter on the terraces and disturbing or destroying many of the patterns. The terraces of Obling College are notable
for the perfect order and complex beauty of their pebble-patterns. Famous obis have spent years of their lives designing the
patterns and choosing the stones; one great designer, Aknegni, is said to have worked with his own hands to perfect his creation.
If a single pebble is lost from such a design, the nurobls will spend days hunting through the rockpiles for a replacement
of precisely the right shape and size. On such a task the nurobl called Bu was engaged, along with her crew, when she came
upon the stone that changed things.

When replacement rocks are needed, the rockpile nurs often make a rough copy of that section of the terrace mosaic, so that
they can test pebbles in it for fit without carrying them all the way up to the inner terraces. Bu had placed a trial stone
in a test pattern in this fashion, and was gazing at it to be sure the size and shape were exact, when she was struck by a
quality of the stone which she had never noticed before: the color. The pebbles of this
part of the design were all large ovals, a palm-and-a-quarter wide and a palm-and-a-half long. The rock Bu had just set into
the test pattern was a perfect “quarter-half” oval, and so fit exactly; but while the other rocks were mostly a dark, smooth-grained
bluish grey, the new one was a vivid blue-green, with flecks of paler jade green.

Bu knew, of course, that the color of a rock is a matter of absolute indifference, an accidental and trivial quality that
does not affect the true pattern in any way. All the same, she found herself gazing with peculiar satisfaction at this blue-green
stone. Presently she thought, “This stone is beautiful.” She was not looking, as she should have been, at the whole design,
but at the one stone, whose color was set off by the duller hue of the others. She was strangely moved; strange thoughts arose
in her mind. She thought, “This stone is significant. It means. It is a word.” She picked it up and held it while studying
the test pattern.

The original design, up on the terrace, was called the Dean’s Design, for the Dean of the College, Festl, who had planned
this section of the terraces. When Bu replaced the blue-green stone in the pattern, it still caught her eye by its color,
distracting her mind from the pattern, but she could not see any meaning in it.

She took the blue-green stone to the rockpile fore-nur and asked him if he saw anything wrong, or odd, or particular about
the stone. The fore-nur gazed thoughtfully at the stone, but at last opened his eyes wide, meaning no.

Bu took the stone up to the inner terraces and set it into the true pattern. It fitted the Dean’s Design exactly; its shape
and size were perfect. But, standing back to study the pattern, Bu thought it scarcely seemed to be the Dean’s Design at all.
It was not that the new stone changed the design; it simply completed a pattern that Bu had never realized was there: a pattern
of color, that had little or no relation to the shape-and-size arrangement of the Dean’s Design. The new stone completed a
spiral of blue-green stones within the field of interlocked rhomboids of “quarter-half” ovals that formed
the center of Festl’s design. Most of the blue-green stones were ones that Bu had laid over the past several years; but the
spiral had been begun by some other nur, before Bu was promoted to the Dean’s Design.

Just then Dean Festl came strolling out in the spring sunshine, his rusty gun on his shoulder, his pipe in his mouth, happy
to see the disorder of the floods being repaired. The Dean was a kind old obl who had never raped Bu, though he often patted
her. Bu summoned up her courage, hid her eyes, and said, “Lord Dean, sir! Would the Lord Dean in his knowledge be so good
as to tell me the verbal significance of this section of the true pattern which I have just repaired?”

Dean Festl paused, perhaps a touch displeased to be interrupted in his meditations; but seeing the young nur so modestly crouching
and hiding all her eyes, he patted her in a forebearing way and said, “Certainly. This subsection of my design may be read,
on the simplest level, as: ‘I place stones beautifully,’ or ‘I place stones in excellent order.’ There is an immanent higher-plane
postverbal significance, of course, as well as the Ineffable Arcana. But you needn’t bother your little head with that!”

“Is it possible,” the nur asked in a submissive voice, “to find a meaning in the
colors
of the stones?”

The Dean smiled again and patted her in several places. “Who knows what goes on in the heads of nurs! Color! Meaning in color!
Now run along, little nurblit. You’ve done very pretty repair work here. Very neat, very nice.” And he strolled on, puffing
on his pipe and enjoying the spring sunshine.

Bu returned to the rockpile to sort stones, but her mind was disturbed. All night she dreamed of the blue-green rock. In the
dream the rock spoke, and the rocks about it in the pattern began speaking too. Waking, Bu could not remember the words the
stones had said.

The sun was not up yet, but the nurs were; and Bu spoke to several of her nestmates and work-friends while they fed and cleaned
the blits and ate their hurried breakfast of cold fried lichen. “Come up onto the
terraces, now, before the obls are up,” Bu said. “I want to show you something.”

Bu had many friends, and eight or nine nurs followed her up onto the terraces, some of them bringing their nursing or toddling
blits along. “What’s Bu got in her head this time!” they said to each other, laughing.

“Now look,” Bu said when they were all on the part of the inner terrace that Dean Festl had designed. “Look at the patterns.
And look at the
colors
of the rocks.”

“Colors don’t mean anything,” said one nur, and another, “Colors aren’t part of the patterns, Bu.”

“But what if they were?” said Bu. “Just look.”

The nurs, being used to silence and obedience, looked.

“Well,” said one of them after a while. “Isn’t that amazing!”

“Look at that!” said Bu’s best friend, Ko. “That spiral of blue-green running all over the Dean’s Design! And there’s five
red hematites around a yellow sandstone—like a flower.”

“This whole section in brown basalt—it cuts across the—the real pattern, doesn’t it?” said little Ga.

“It makes another pattern. A different pattern,” Bu said. “Maybe it makes an immanent pattern of ineffable significance.”

“Oh, come off it, Bu,” said Ko. “You a Professor or something?”

The others laughed, but Bu was too excited to see that she was funny. “No,” she said earnestly, “but look—that blue-green
rock, there, the last one in the spiral.”

“Serpentinite,” said Ko.

“Yes, I know. But if the Dean’s Design means something—He said that that part means ‘I place stones beautifully’—Well, could
the blue-green rock be a different word? With a different meaning?”

“What meaning?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might know.” Bu looked hopefully at Un, an elderly nur who, though he had been lamed in a rockslide
in his youth, was so good at fine pattern-maintenance that the obls had let him
live. Un stared at the blue-green stone, and at the curve of blue-green stones, and at last said slowly, “It might say, “The
nur places stones.’”

“What nur?” Ko asked.

“Bu,” little Ga said. “She did place the stone.”

Bu and Un both opened their eyes wide, to signify No.

“Patterns aren’t ever about nurs!” said Ko.

“Maybe patterns made of colors are,” said Bu, getting excited and blinking very fast.

“The nur,’” said Ko, following the blue-green curve with all three eyes, “—’the nur places stones beautifully in uncontrollable
loopingness.’ My goodness! What’s that all about?” He read on along the curve—” ‘in uncontrollable loopingness fore,’ what’s
that? Oh, ‘foreshadowing the seen.’ ”

“ ‘The vision,’” Un suggested. “‘The vision of … ‘I don’t know the last word.”

“Are you seeing all that in the colors of the rocks?” asked Ga, amazed.

“In the patterns of the colors,” Bu replied. “They aren’t accidental. Not meaningless. All the time, we have been putting
them here in patterns—not just ones the obis design and we execute, but other patterns—nur patterns—with new meanings. Look—look
at them!”

Since they were used to silence and obedience, they all stood and looked at the patterns on the inner terraces of the College
of Obling. They saw how the arrangement by shape and size of the pebbles and larger stones made regular squares, oblongs,
triangles, dodecahedrons, zigzags, and rectilinear designs of great and orderly beauty and significance. And they saw how
the arrangement of the stones by color had created other designs, less complete, often merely sketched or hinted—circles,
spirals, ovals, and complex curvilinear mazes and labyrinths of great and unpredictable beauty and significance. So a long
loop of white quartzites cut right across the quarter-palm straight-edge double line; and the rhomboid section of half-palm
sandstones seemed to be an element in a long crescent of pale yellow.

Both patterns were there; did one cancel the other,
or was each part of the other? It was difficult to see them both at once, but not impossible.

After a long time little Ga asked, “Did we do all that without even knowing we were doing it?”