Olivia (21 page)

Olivia looked at Cheyenne.

The red-head folded her arms and looked coolly back at her.  “Go ahead,” she said.  “You’ve got this speech all worked out, haven’t you?”

Liz and Anita were waiting, apprehensive.

Olivia sighed, sat down, and started talking.

6

Vorgullum came to take Olivia back to their chambers early in the evening.  Olivia offered brief, rather vague highlights of the day’s conversations on the way back through the tunnels (all but the important one, which had not been as unpleasant she’d feared it would be; “I figured,” had been Anita’s only comment on that regard, although Liz had cried for a while), and as she climbed up the narrow chimney into the entry room, she asked, “Have you spoken with old Murgull yet?”

“Not since this morning,” he replied, climbing up behind her.  “Why?”

“Oh,” she said, shrugging.  “She was so cross at being sent to feed us, she made us think she was on her way to do something important.”

“Everything is important to Murgull,” he answered.  “Unless it is important to someone else, and then everything is a tremendous burden.”

“Are you afraid of her?” she teased.

But he looked at her quite seriously.  “Oh yes.”

“Even you?  The tallest of all gullan?  Great leader of Hollow Mountain?”

“Great leader,” he mused, not without a certain pleasure.  But then he shook his head and turned serious.  “She is older than any gulla here, the oldest in the whole world, perhaps, and she knows things.  Woman-things.  Man-things.”  He thought about it, and actually suppressed a shudder.  “Spirit-things.  She is life and death in this place.  She heals and she hurts…and she loves no one.  Your Mojo Woman could not be the ground beneath old Murgull’s crooked feet,” he finished, and started to lay out food on the bench by the fire.

“She’s not my Mojo Woman.”

He grunted, then paused with a heavy loaf of bread in hand, and looked at her.  “But is she anyone’s Mojo Woman?  Are her powers real?”

The words
Of course not
were right there, dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed them.  Maybe it was a mean way to do it, but it was the way Maria coped with all this, and who was Olivia to take that away?  “What do you think?” she asked instead.

“I think she’s full of air,” he replied at once, and frowned mightily.  “But even air can kill if it goes bad.  Grunn believes her.  And he is not alone.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Olivia asked, coming to join him.

He made room for her.  “Kill her,” he said, and tore the bread in half.  He offered her some, studied her expression while he held it out, and then set it on the bench and said, “There are some who say talk, simple talk, can’t be dangerous.  I think it can.  And when minds are weak, as so many of our minds are weak,” he admitted sourly, “talk can be more dangerous than spears.  This Mojo Woman, her mouth is full of poison.  She has bit into Grunn and he is biting into others.  I want it stopped.”

“If you kill her, do you know what that will do to the rest of us?” she asked softly.  “Do you know what that will do to the trust some of us are trying to make between us?”

His jaw clenched.  He looked away.

“And don’t think you can kill her and just not tell us, because sooner or later we’ll hear about it, and the longer you let
that
secret fester, the worse it will be when we do.”

“And the longer I let her live, the more power she claims to have!”  He scowled and took a savage bite of bread.  Chewing took a long time.  He was noticeably calmer when he swallowed and said, “I can trust neither to Grunn’s good sense nor Mojo Woman’s mercy, so I will trust you instead.  Perhaps, when she sees there is nothing to fear from us, she will abandon this evil whim of hers.  The Great Spirit knows, she’s not the worst of them.”  That seemed to remind him of something, and he reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a magazine.  “Our
sigruum
found this for you in our archives,” he said.  “I told him you like to look at human books.”

She unfolded it with some trepidation, studied it in silence for a few seconds, then started to smile.  “Oh my,” she said in amused English. It was an ancient copy of TIME magazine, the one with the cover showing the cosmos and the words “God is Dead.”

“Is it a good one?” he asked.

“A very good one.  Give the
sigruum
my thanks.”

She read bits and pieces to him over supper, stopping quite often to explain terms and words.  He accepted, after a brief debate, the concept of the planet Earth, and after a much longer debate, the fact that humans lived everywhere on the planet, and could keep in near-constant communication through mediums such as this magazine.  She tried to sell him on the idea of television and radio, but when he proved utterly incapable of visualizing something broadcast instantaneously from one point on the planet to a million separate points, she gave up.  She didn’t even try to explain broadcast satellites.

“The moon is a rock floating in the sky,” he said, for the tenth time and still just as dubious as he was the first time.

“Yes,” she said wearily.

“Then why doesn’t it fall down?  When I throw a rock into the air, it falls.  If I forgot to flap my wings, I would fall myself!”

“There is something called gravity, which means that bodies with mass are pulled together.  That’s why we can’t jump off the Earth and fly to the stars.”

“Mass is what?  How heavy a thing is?”

“How heavy and how dense,” she explained, again, covering her eyes.

“What is this dense?  I know, I know!  Two things of an equal size, where one is heavier than the other.  Like lava rock: Pumice is light and obsidian is heavy.  Because there is more…what did you call it?  Matter?  More matter packed more tightly into obsidian?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised, peeking at him.  “Obsidian has more matter compressed into the same space.  That makes it more dense.”

“The lighter rock is larger, but has less mass,” he mused.  “The Earth, this planet,” he interrupted, pointing down, “is lighter and has less mass than the sun, which only looks smaller because it is far away.  So the sun pulls us around it in a circle you call an orbit, and the Earth is larger and has more mass than the moon, so we pull it around us in another orbit.”

“Yes!” she said, straightening up.

He considered this for a very long time.  “Then how is it,” he began in frustration, “that the Earth is not pulled all the way into the sun?  Or the moon all the way into the Earth?  What keeps gravity from crushing everything together?  Why will it pull a pinecone to the ground but not a pinecone into me?  I have more mass than a pinecone!”

Olivia shook her head, saying, “That’s a good question.  I know there’s an answer, because I had to learn it once, in school.  But I’ve forgotten now.  Maybe one of the others knows.”

He seemed disappointed, but he didn’t disbelieve her.  At least, not out loud.  Instead, he took the magazine and turned pages until he came to the photos of Earth as shot from space.  He stared at these for a long time.  “This is…Earth?  We live here?”

“Yes.”

He inspected the photo, as though hunting for signs of life on the tiny Earth.  “Have you ever been in space, Olivia?”

“No.  You have to be special for that.”

He looked up intently.  “You are special.”

She smiled.  “Yes, but I meant that you have to know more about gravity than I do.  And how to fly the machines that take you out into space.”

“Humans have walked on the moon,” he murmured, and shook his head.  “Have they been to the sun?”

“No.  The sun is too hot.  Humans would burn up and die long before they got there.”

“Ah.”  He turned the page slowly, inspecting the pictures rather than the meaningless jumble of words.  “My kind believes that the moon is the belly of the Urga, the Great Mother, swelling with new life as she chooses which among us shall have the honor of bearing her whelp.  Your kind thinks it is a rock.  My kind believes that the sun is a glowing coal pit, banked every night and brought back every morning by the Great Spirit to warm himself.  Your kind thinks it is…?”  He glanced at her expectantly.

“A flaming ball of gas,” she finished, smiling.  “I like your way better.  It’s more poetic.”

“It’s more true.” He closed the magazine and put it aside.  “Lie down with me, Olivia, and I will tell you about the Great Spirit.  I am no
sigruum
, but I think I can tell the story right.”

Amused, she went with him to the pit, undressed, and crawled underneath a sleeping bag while he stirred up the fire.  When he was lying comfortably beside her, he tucked an arm around her, thought hard, and said:  “In the beginning, there was darkness.”

Olivia started a little.

Vorgullum didn’t notice, all his concentration turned inward.  “There was only empty sky that stretched out forever in all directions, and all was dark and cold and still.  Into that night was poured many years of time, forever and forever, until finally, the flow of endless years became seed and the night became a womb, and a soul was conceived.

“That first soul became aware of the darkness and the cold and the stillness of night and the passage of time.  It became aware of itself.  It gained a wisdom and it created thoughts, but at first, the little thoughts all slipped away and tumbled through the night to places the soul could not reach.  Again and again it tried to recapture its lost thoughts, but it was unable to find them in the night, so the soul turned all of its thoughts into light, so that even if it could never think of them again, at least it could keep an eye on them.”
 

Olivia laughed, delighted.  “And those thoughts are the stars!”

“Yes.  The soul realized that by creating lights to shine against the darkness, it now had the power to separate all things into two conflicting and distinct forms.  Eagerly, the soul set its will against the emptiness and stillness of the night and created substance and form to divide it.”

“Earth,” Olivia guessed.

“All worlds,” he corrected, but gently.  “And the soul quickly turned this power inward, and became the first living creature.  It grew a body that breathed and ate, and could run and fly and swim.  It became the Great Spirit.

“For many seasons, the Great Spirit created.  He made the mud and grew things in it.  He made the water, and poured it into rivers.  He made the stone and shaped it into mountains.  He threw colors all around, to separate his creations from the night, and he made things of every shade, in the sky, on the land, and in the water.

“But when forever and forever had passed by, the Great Spirit ran out of things to do.  He looked around and saw that by creating substance, he had only interrupted the emptiness, he had not defeated it.  His creations were devoid of the life and consciousness that he possessed.  Depressed, he crawled down into the clay and slept.

“But he had forgotten the thoughts of his youth, the thoughts that had fled from him into the night to be stars.  These were thoughts he had given up back before he had power over them.  These thoughts had become their own souls, and one of them looked down at him and had pity.  The star-thought threw itself out of the sky and fell to the ground, where it transformed into a beautiful woman, all made of stars.  The Great Spirit woke up and saw the woman, and discovered that he was a man, and they coupled for years and years.”  Vorgullum trailed off with what sounded like a wistful sigh.

“This was Urga?” Olivia asked.

“Urga, the Great Mother,” he agreed, returning to the story.  “And when she had filled herself with pleasures, she flew back up into the sky, but because she had been a thing of flesh, she could never be a star again.  She flew through the sky as the moon, but when her hour came, Urga knew the child would be mortal and so she fell back to the earth again and birthed.  The child was made in the shape of the Great Spirit and of Urga, and had his claws for climbing and shaping, and her wings for flying through the sky.  The Great Spirit was so happy with his son that his heart exploded, and all the animals and creatures of the world came out from the heart and ran away, but Urga took no joy in her baby and wished to leave it and return to the sky.  The Great Spirit commanded her to stay and give milk, but Urga’s ill humor grew with every day that she was forced to remain on the ground.  When the child was weaned, she flew away, leaving her son to fate and the elements.  The Great Spirit gave the child, and the others that inevitably followed, a place of their own and provided game to hunt and growing things to eat and they became the first gullan.

“For a time, all were happy, but then the Great Spirit noticed that all his children were sons and they were growing old.  He thought they should have mates, for there was nothing he liked so much as coupling with Urga and he wished for his sons to know that pleasure as well.”

“What a thoughtful father,” Olivia remarked, smiling.

He seemed about to make some light-hearted chastisement, but then looked pensive.  “It is a strange thing to want for a son, isn’t it?  I remember mine urging me once to take a mate, but I don’t believe he ever told me what to do with her.  And between us, in all honesty, he should have.”

“I don’t mean to distract you.  Please, go on.”

He didn’t right away, but he managed eventually to shrug his thoughts away and find the threads of his story.  “When next the Great Spirit met with Urga, he ordered that his next child be born female, to be a mate for his sons.  Urga argued—”

“Good for her!  Their own sister!”

“—saying that it was the Great Spirit who put the spark in her belly and she could not make or unmake at her own will.  But wishing to please her mate, she flew up to the sky as high as her wings could take her and called out to the other stars whose company she had once shared, begging them to carry her back to her place among them.  So piteously did she call and weep that one by one, the stars fell close to her, whereupon she seized them and cut their wings and molded them into female form and dropped them among the sons of the Great Spirit.  Then they too discovered they were male—”  He broke off and frowned at her, making her realize that she was staring at him, open-mouthed and appalled.  “This is how the story goes,” he said.