Shadow's End (14 page)

“In what medium, dare one ask?” He allowed himself a hint of distaste, hoping she would look at him, speak to him, Trompe, rather than to the air over his shoulder as she seemed always to do.

She ignored his tone. No Fastigat would use such a tone unless he were eager for argument, and she was not interested in argument. “In some pinky-colored dirt he found in a flowerpot in there. He peed in it to make mud.”

Trompe turned away, frustrated. “They were impressed?”

“They seemed to be.” She fell silent for a moment. They had been impressed. More than merely impressed. Awed, perhaps. “There was a great deal of discussion about Weaving Woman….”

“A goddess, as I recall,” he said distantly.

“A goddess, yes.”

“One they feel rather guilty about,” he said.

“Guilty?”

“Hmm. I note some who, when they speak of her, brood with a sort of self-reproach.”

“Then you note more than I do. All I know about Weaving Woman indicates she's an indwelling spirit of art and craftsmanship. The women using the facilities spoke of Leely as her child.”

“Which means?”

She shrugged. The women's concentration had been a little frightening, but she chose not to mention that. Instead she gestured vaguely. “From what I recall of the culture chips I reviewed on the way out, Weaving Woman is pattern, which probably includes portraiture and sculpture, portrayal of any and everything.”

Trompe turned the idea around, seeing if it had any focus for him, then let it go with an impatient grunt. It was time to get moving. They had already wasted too much time.

At the garages below, the manager of vehicles gave them precise instructions. The vehicles were economical, but of low performance. They could not be driven off the roads, which the hives kept clear of overhanging foliage by cutting winter firewood along them. If visitors traveled without a guide, the route would be programmed into the vehicle before departure and could not be deviated from thereafter. The doors of the vehicle would be locked before they departed from Simidi-ala and would not unlock until they reached the first hostel. The same would apply between hostels. One did not get out of the vehicle between destinations.

“What if we have a mechanical breakdown?” Trompe asked.

“Press the alarm button in the vehicle and wait. The time will afford an excellent opportunity for meditation. Eventually someone will come to fetch you.”

“We can't hike to the nearest village?”

“All worlds have their threats. We make rules to protect visitors from the threats present on Dinadh. Outside the
vehicle, you might be injured, or even killed. Then your world would bring a complaint against our world. And our world would have to defend the complaint before the high Alliance courts. We would have to hire experts qualified to present cases before that court. We are a poor people. We cannot afford the expenses of litigation.”

Trompe muttered about this exchange to Lutha, concluding, “So much for exploration! Even though the route is programmed in, the vehicles aren't automatic, oddly enough. Evidently we can stop to rest or admire the view wherever we like, we just can't get out!”

“You rejected the idea of a guide?” she asked curiously.

He made a face. “The people here want us to hire a guide. They want it so firmly I feel we'll find out more without. During the trip we'll get a feel for the place, enough to be well acclimated when we arrive at Cochim-Mahn.”

“So be it, then.” She smiled, indicating acceptance. She would have preferred to go quickly and get the matter over with, but it didn't really matter. They could go without a guide.

The vehicle, though clumsy looking, was commodious, with both a sanitary compartment and a well-stocked food-service console. The food was off-planet, Lutha noted, prepackaged elsewhere and imported. Every meal they'd been served at the Edge had been off-planet food. Which made one wonder if planetary food was tasty enough for off-worlders. Or if there was enough of it. Of course, at the price they had paid to rent the vehicle, they could have been fed on ambrosia with enough left over to pay a year's expenses on Central!

“Now if Leely will just leave his clothes on,” Trompe remarked.

His slightly sarcastic tone reminded Lutha of Leelson. Though she understood it, it angered her nonetheless. Fastigats could always empathize, always understand, except with Leely. They had no idea how or why he felt as
he did. They were offended, as though they had reached out and been rudely rebuffed. She bit back an angry response. If Leelson himself had felt frustration, then Trompe was certainly entitled to a similar feeling.

“Pity you have to be bothered with all this,” she said, thinking it a pity she herself had to be.

He made an impatient gesture. “Sorry. This is my job after all. You really couldn't have managed alone.”

“No,” she said, mimicking his tone and surprised at the depth of her furious agreement. “I really could not have managed alone.”

T
hough their destination was a considerable distance north, they had first to go eastward from the coast, up a series of switchbacks on the face of a more or less vertical cliff until they reached the level highland that we, who live here, call the skylands. At first they were relieved to have reached the level road, but soon they found they made no more progress than previously as they traveled first eastward, then westward, then eastward again between the deep gorges that interdigitated the skylands from either side.

“This is ridiculous,” Trompe muttered, making yet another hundred-sixty-degree turn.

“Dinadh at one time had a great deal more water than it has now,” remarked Lutha. “These canyons must have been cut by sizable rivers.”

She peered down at the threadlike trickles glittering in the depths among clean-edged patches of green, letting her eyes move upward to the mesa tops, all of them like the one they were traversing, covered with low forest broken by occasional grassy glades.

“Trompe. Stop!”

He stopped obediently. “What?”

“Animals.” They were approaching an open glade where a group of small, woolly, long-necked animals
grazed under the watchful care of herdsmen. “What are they doing?”

“Eating grass,” said Trompe. “Haven't you seen an animal before?”

“I never have. Oh, sensurround, of course, but not a real one. What are the herdsmen doing? Twirling those things?”

“Spindles. They're spinning thread from wool, or perhaps from wild cotton. It's in the chips I gave you.”

She nodded as Trompe started the vehicle once more, as they went slowly by. The herdsmen had a stout little wain with shutters at either end and head-high sections of woven-mesh panel racked at its sides. As they passed the group Lutha waved, receiving only the barest of blank-faced nods in return.

“Was Dinadh this arid when the first settlers came?” Trompe asked as he maneuvered the vehicle along a road uncomfortably close to a sheer drop on one side. “Or did it change after?”

Lutha let her subconscious seek the information. “It was as it is now. The first Alliance scholars to visit the planet were told the Dinadhi had come from another world and they ‘remembered' emerging onto this world from their previous one through a hole in the ground. It's not an unusual origin myth. Other cultures have similar ones.”

“They were probably on one of the fabled ‘lost ships,'” Trompe conjectured. “There've been enough of those to go around.”

She shrugged. “There have been ‘lost ships,' but this is the only unidentified colony. I looked it up before we left Central. Except for the population on Dinadh, the Alliance ethnologists have always been able to identify the planet of origin, and that's true even when populations have ended up far from their original destinations.”

“But not here.”

“According to the stuff the Procurator gave me. No one knows for sure how the Dinadhi got here.”

“No missing ship with a Dinadhi-like society?”

“No record of one.”

“No similar societies from which this could be an unrecorded offshoot?”

“One theory had it they came from a frontier society beyond Hermes Sector. The world was called Vriat or Breadh; something like that. The colony on it disappeared.”

“The Ularians?”

“Nobody knows what happened. They just disappeared, that's all.”

“There have been a lot of Nantaskan-speaking worlds that colonied out. Arriving from any of them makes more sense than this hole-in-the-ground story.”

She glanced at him sidewise. “There is a real site for the supposed emergence, Trompe. As a matter of fact, it's in a wide valley not many days' travel from Cochim-Mahn. Or so the maps say, at any rate.”

“A sacred site, no doubt,” he said flippantly.

“Oh, very sacred! It's the omphalos. Extra-special rites every third year, a Dinadh year being six hundred and a fraction days. Every third year they draw an additional day out of the omphalos, the navel of time. That doesn't quite do it, so every sixtieth year they have to pull two days. Tahs-uppi, the ceremony's called.”

“Meaning what? You're further along with the language than I am.”

She mused. “Tahs-uppi. Tasimi means the edge or the border. Well, actually it means ‘our borders',' plural possessive. Tahs probably means something like end, or limit. There's a word … uppas, uppasim, uppasimi.” She fell silent.

“So?”

“I was trying to figure out the ending. It has something to do with selection, I think. Part of the litany of Weaving
Woman gives her the name of K'loch mahn uppasimi. Selector of our patterns. Well, not quite that. Chooser, intrinsic.”

“I don't quite get that.”

“Well, in our language we wouldn't say the rain chooses to fall. It just naturally falls. Weaving Woman
is
pattern, she doesn't choose it.”

“So the name means what? The end of pattern?”

“The crux, the fulfillment. That would fit. Every hundred standard years, more or less, they reach the fulfillment of the pattern, pull out an extra day or so, and start over.”

“With feasting, I suppose. Processions.”

“More likely fasting and prayer. Actually, I don't know. The chips you gave me merely mention Tahs-uppi and gave the date for the preceding one. When a ceremony is very holy, taboo, it's hard for an outsider to learn the details.” She stared down into the abyss they were skirting. “The pattern is due to end fairly soon. Maybe we'll get a chance to ask about it.”

“I wonder what would happen,” Trompe mused, turning the vehicle away from the canyon and toward the forest, where the road disappeared around patches of thorny growths, “if they didn't find one.”

“Find one what?” she asked, startled.

“An extra day. When they went to fish one out of the navel hole.”

She laughed. “You're an idiot, you know, Trompe. What an idea.” She chuckled, thinking about it, a kind of black joke on the Dinadhi. The high priest, or whoever, dipping into the omphalos with his what? His wand? His day hook? Slowly withdrawing it to the sound of drums and flutes, only to find it empty. No extra day. Gradually, as she thought on it and considered the implications, she stopped finding the idea at all funny.

T
oward evening they arrived at the hostel, the first one between Simidi-ala and Cochim-Mahn.

“And not a moment too soon,” Lutha muttered as she parked the vehicle and heard the doorlocks make a solid thunk as they disengaged. “I'm exhausted.”

Leely was sitting up, looking around himself with some interest.

Lutha got out, sniffed the fragrant air, sighed, stretched, held out her arms to the boy, who came slowly into them, head turning as he tried to see everything at once.

They were at the top end of yet another of the endless canyons, its branches and ramifications receding into the distance: carved buttes, slender pillars and towers, stepped ziggurats of stone, vertical walls pocked with caves, some of them occupied by busy hive communities or by the lonely bulk of abandoned hives, all thrown into brilliantly colored contrasts of fire and shade by the level rays of the setting sun. Sound came softly from the canyons, voices and drums, the high shriek of a bone flute, the hissing rainsound of rattles.

“Evensong,” Lutha said. “Farewell to Lady Day. And that, too, is about time.”

“We're more tired than we should be,” said Trompe as he slowly removed their belongings from the vehicle. “The trip wasn't that arduous.”

She agreed with a weary brush at a lock of hair that dangled at her forehead. “Indeed, Trompe. We are scarce begun and I am so weary I can hardly see. What is it about this place?”

He considered the question soberly. “I think it's the fact that we have no sense of distance traveled toward our goal. It's been like a maze. One goes and goes, then comes a turn, and one goes back almost the way one came. It takes hundreds of lateral marks back and forth among these canyons before we make much progress toward the
goal. I'm conscious of frustration in myself. I can certainly feel it in you.”