Shadow's End (2 page)

Hah-Hallach knows all this. “She will watch over you,” he says, approvingly.

“Yes, songfather.” I suppose she will.

“Attend to the day. Soon you will go and our songs will go with you.” He strides past me, toward the song-study house.

So. The Gracious One has been mentioned in passing. I have fulfilled my destiny and said my words. The song-father has said his words. Sweet-Sally and Grandpa have said no words at all. The thing is resolved upon, whatever the thing is, and all Dinadhi know their parts in the pattern. They are they, and I am Saluez, who turns and goes back into the hive, for there is much preparation to be made.

Still I cannot keep my head from going back, far back to let my eyes look high, there, among the rimrock, among all those piles of stones where stands the House Without a Name. It has stood there since the Dinadhi came to this place. One stands above every hive. This was the choice we were offered by the Gracious One. This is the choice we made, so songfather says. We people of Dinadh.

But deep inside me I say no! No! This is not the choice
I
made. I had no part in it. You songfathers made this choice for me, and I have no part in it at all!

S
ongfather spoke to me at Cochim-Mahn on Dinadh. In another place another man spoke to another woman. That place was the city of Alliance Prime on the world now called Alliance Central. The world had once been called earth, when Alliance Central was only a department, a bureaucracy, that grew and grew until all the earth was covered by Alliance Central and no one called it earth anymore. So I have been taught, as all Dinadhi children are taught, for Dinadh is a member of the Alliance.

The powerful man was the Procurator himself, and the woman was Lutha Tallstaff. She was part of a happening thing and I was part of the same happening thing, a branching of the pattern, as we say, though she and I knew nothing of one another at the time. While we live, say the weavers, we are only the shuttles, going to and fro, unable to see the pattern we are making, unaware of other shuttles in the weft. After years we can look back to see the design we have made, the pattern Weaving Woman intended all along. A time comes when one sees that pattern clear, and then one says, remember this, remember that; see how this happened, see how that happened. Remember what the songfather said, what the Procurator said.

What he first said was, “You knew Leelson Famber.”

It was a statement of fact, though he paused, as one does when expecting an answer.

Lutha Tallstaff contented herself with a slight cock of her head, meaning all right, so? She was annoyed. She felt much put upon. She was tired of the demands made upon her. Anyone who would send invigilators to drag her from her bath and supper—not literally
drag
, of course, though it felt like it—to this unscheduled and mysterious meeting at Prime needed no help from her! Besides, she'd last seen Leelson four years ago.

“You knew Famber well.” This time he was pushing.

Skinny old puritan, Lutha thought. Of course she had known Leelson well.

“We were lovers once,” she replied, without emphasis, letting him stew on that as she stared out the tall windows over the roofs of Alliance Prime upon Alliance Central.

A single ramified city-structure, pierced by transport routes, decked with plazas, fountains, and spires, flourished with flags, burrowed through by bureaucrats, all under the protective translucence of the Prime-dome, higher and more effulgent than those covering the urbs. The planet had been completely homo-normed for centuries. Nothing breathed upon it but man and the vagrant wind, and even the wind was tamed beneath the dome, a citywide respiration inhaled at the zenith and exhaled along the circumference walls into the surrounding urbs with their sun-shielded, pallid hordes. Lutha, so she would tell me, had a large apartment near the walls: two whole rooms, and a food dispenser and sleeping cubicles and an office wall. The apartment had a window scene, as well, one that could create a forest or a meadow or a wide, sun-drenched savanna, complete with creatures. Lutha sometimes wondered what it would be like to actually live among other creatures. Came a time she and I laughed ruefully about that, a time when we knew all too well what it was like!

On that day, however, she was not thinking of creatures as she remained fixed by the Procurator's expectant eyes. He was waiting for more answer than she had given him thus far.

She sighed, already tired of this. “Why is my relationship with Leelson Famber any concern of yours?”

“I… that is, we need someone who … was connected to him.”

Only now the tocsin. “You knew Leelson Famber,” he'd said. “You
knew
him.”

“Why!” she demanded with a surge of totally unexpected panic. “What's happened to him?”

“He's disappeared.”

She almost laughed, feeling both relief and a kind of pleasure at thinking Leelson might be injured, or ill, or maybe even dead. So she told me.

“But you were lovers!” I cried in that later time. “You said you were made for each other!”

So we believe, we women of Dinadh, who sit at the loom to make an inner robe for our lovers or our children or our husbands or ourselves, beginning a stripe of color, so, and another color, so, with the intent that they shall come together to make a wonderful pattern at the center, one pattern begetting another. So people, too, can be intended to come together in wonder and joy.

So I pleaded with her, dismayed. “Didn't you love him? Didn't he love you?”

“You don't understand,” she cried. “We'd been lovers, yes! But against all good sense! Against all reason. It was like being tied to some huge stampeding animal, dragged along, unable to stop!” She panted, calming herself, and I held her, knowing very well the feeling she spoke of. I, too, had felt dragged along.

“Besides,” she said, “I was sick of hearing about Leelson! Him and his endless chain of triumphs! All those dramatic disappearances, those climactic
re
appearances, bearing wonders, bearing marvels. The Roc's egg. The Holy Grail.”

“Truly?” I asked. Even I had heard of the Holy Grail, a mystical artifact of the Kristin faith, a religion mostly supplanted by Firstism, though it is practiced by some remote peoples still. “Practiced,” we say of all religions but that of the Gracious One. “Because they haven't got it right yet.” It is the kind of joke our songfathers tell.

But Lutha shook her head at me, crying angrily, saying well, no, not the Holy Grail. But Leelson had found the Sword of Salibar, and the Gem of Adalpi. And there was that business about his fetching home the Lost King of Kamir. Well, we knew what came of that!

Perhaps the Procurator understood her ambivalence, for he lurched toward her, grimacing. “Sorry!” He chewed his lip, searching for words, his twisted body conveying more strain than the mere physical. “I perceive the fact of his disappearance does not convey apprehension.”

“His disappearance alone does not make me apprehensive,” Lutha drawled, emulating his stuffy manner. Though it annoyed the Fastigats, who claimed intuition as a province solely theirs, even laymen could play at inferences. “I gather from
your
obvious distress, however, that his disappearance does not stand alone.”

Seeming not to notice her sarcasm, he gestured toward the wide chairs he had ignored since she entered the room. “Sit down, please, do. Forgive my rudeness. I haven't had time for niceties lately. Let me order refreshment.”

“If it pleases you.” She was starved, but damned if she'd let him know it.

“I hope it will please us both. Today …today could use some leavening of pleasure, even if it is only a little fragrance, a little savor.”

She seated herself as he murmured rapidly into his collar-link before scrambling into the chair across from her, a spindly lopsided figure, his awkwardness made more evident by the skintight uniform. When in the public gaze, draped in ceremonial robes or tabards or togas or what-have-you, even elderly bureaucrats could look imposing enough, but without the draperies, in official skinnies with their little potbellies or saggy butts fully limned, many of them were a little ridiculous. Even the Fastigats. So she said of him.

He, peering nearsightedly at her, saw wings of white hair at either side of her face, stark against otherwise char-black tresses, a bed-of-coals glow warming the brown matte skin at lip and cheek: forge lights, comforting or burning. He saw her square, possibly stubborn jaw. He looked into her eyes, a dark warm gray, almost taupe,
showing more anger and pain than he had expected. No doubt the Procurator saw it all. If he cared about such things, no doubt he thought what I thought: how lovely! Though perhaps he had less reason than I to value loveliness.

So he looked at her but did not speak again until the almost invisible shadows had fetched fragrant teas and numerous small plates of oddments, something to suit every taste. Lutha averted her eyes from the food items that were still moving or all-too-recently dead and concentrated on the tray of small hot tarts set conveniently at her elbow. The aroma and taste were irresistible.

“You have some problem concerning Leelson Famber?” she prompted, brushing crumbs from her lips with one of the folded finan skins provided as napkins, soft and silky to the touch. On its own world, the finan is rare, almost extinct. Using its skins for napkins would be a conceit had the animal not been made for that purpose, as the Firsters aver. They are the hierarchs of homo-norm, of whom there are many, even upon Alliance Central. Besides, the finans' genetic pattern had been saved in the computers at Prime. So Lutha told me.

Instead of answering, the Procurator asked, “Are you familiar with what is now called the ‘Ularian crisis'?”

Familiar, Lutha thought. Now there was a word. The crisis had been when? Almost a century ago. And on the frontier, to boot. Why in the world would a linguist like herself—a document expert, yes, but withal a mere functionary—be expected to be “familiar” with such distant and ancient history?

She put her mind in neutral and stared at the table, noticing the foods she found most attractive were now closer to her and the disgusting dishes had been removed. How did the shadows know? Was her face that easy to read? Or were the shadows taught to interpret the almost imperceptible twitches and jerks most people made without realizing it. Were they empaths, like Fastigats? Perhaps
they actually were Fastigats, turned invisible as penance for some unseemly behavior. Fastigats were great ones for seemliness.

What had the old man been talking of? Of course. “Ularian crisis,” she said. “Around twenty-four hundred of the common era, a standard century ago, give or take a little. Alliance frontier worlds in the Hermes Sector were overrun by a race or force or something called Ularians.” She paused, forehead wrinkled. “Why was it named that?”

“The first human populations that vanished were in a line, a vector, that led toward the Ular Region,” he replied.

She absorbed the fact. “So, this something wiped all human life off a dozen worlds or systems or—”

The Procurator gestured impatiently at this imprecision.

She gave him a half smile, mocking his irritation. “Well, a dozen somethings, Procurator—you asked what I knew and I'm telling you.” She resumed her interrupted account, “Sometime later the Ularians went away. Thereafter, briefly, occurred the Great Debate, during which the Firster godmongers said Ularians didn't exist because the universe was made for man, and the Infinitarians said Ularians could exist because everything is possible. Both sides wrote volumes explaining Ularians or explaining them away—on little or no evidence, as I recall—and the whole subject became so abstruse that only scholars care one way or the other.”

The Procurator shook his head in wonder. “You speak so casually, so disrespectfully of it.”

She considered the matter ancient history. “I shouldn't be casual?”

He grimaced. “At the time humans—at least those who knew what was going on—feared for the survival of the race.”

“Was it taken that seriously?” she asked, astonished.

“It was by Alliance Prime, by those who knew what was happening! All that saved us from widespread panic was that the vanished settlements were small and few. Publicly, the disappearances were blamed on environmental causes, even though people vanished from every world in Hermes Sector—that is, every one but Dinadh.”

She shrugged, indicating disinterest in Dinadh. She who was to learn so much about Dinadh knew and cared nothing for it then.

The Procurator went on. “My predecessors here at Prime could learn nothing about the Ularians. The only evidence of the existence of an inimical force was that men had disappeared! Prime had no idea why they—or
it
—attacked in the first place.”

He leaned forward, touching her lightly on the knee. “Did Leelson ever speak to you of
Bernesohn Famber
?”