Shadow's End (5 page)

“That which we relinquished, death and darkness in the pattern
.

“
That which we took in its place, the House Without a Name…”

That's how the answer to the riddle goes, the one no one ever asks out loud, the riddle my grandmother whispered to me in the nighttime, as her grandmother had whispered it to her. “What is it men relish and women regret?” Grandma asked, preparing me. Letting me know without really letting me know. Frightening me, but not terrifying me.

It's the way we do things now. We hint. We almost tell, but not quite. We let young people learn only a little. If they never know it thoroughly or factually, well, that makes the choice easier. If they do stupid things because they don't know enough, that's expected.

As a result, ignoring the house becomes habit and I was able to ignore my approach to it until we arrived at the stone-paved area outside the door. Then I had to admit where I was.

“Shhh,” whispered Masanees, putting her arms around me. “It's all right. We've all been through it, child. It's all right.”

Still I shivered, unable to control it. “I'm scared,” I whispered, shaming myself.

Evidently I wasn't the only one to have said something like that, for Masanees went on holding me.

“Of course you're scared. Of course you are. The unknown is always scary. Sooner we get to it, sooner it'll be over. Come now. Be a good, brave girl.”

She pushed the door open. The house had a pitched roof, but there were wide openings under the eaves where birds had flown in and out and little nut-eaters had scrambled down to make their mess among the other droppings.

“First we had to make all clean,” said Masanees. The brooms were lashed to her pack, and I followed her example as we gave the place a good sweeping and brushing, including the tops of two low stone tables that stood side
by side. One table had a stone basin in its center. We wiped it clean and filled it with water we'd carried up from below. Then we emptied the packs at either side of the basin, and I exclaimed at the sight of such bounty! Meal cakes, beautifully colored and baked in fancy shapes. Strips of meat dried into spirals around long sticks of candied melon. Squash seeds roasted and salted. Dried fruits. More candied fruits. Masanees showed me how to lay it all out in patterns, varying the colors, making it bright and attractive. There is always a store of such foods kept in the hive, she said, even when we have nothing to eat but winter-fungus. Even when
we
hunger, these ritual foods are kept sacred so
they
will not hunger.

When everything was done on the one table, she cast me a look from the corners of her eyes, and I knew whatever was going to happen to me, Saluez, would happen now. She spread a folded blanket upon the other table and helped me lie facedown upon it. She gave me a ring of basketwork and told me to put my face firmly down in it. She shackled my wrists and ankles to the rings in the stone.

“Ready?” asked Masanees.

I jerked at the shackles. I could feel my eyes, wide. I knew the whites were showing, knew I was beginning to panic.

“Shh, shh. It's all right. Here. Drink this.” She raised my head and held the cup to my lips.

“I'll be all right,” I cried mindlessly, not drinking.

“You'll be all right,” Masanees agreed, tipping the cup. “Come on, Saluez. It's easier so.”

I made myself drink. My arms and legs jerked against the bonds. Gradually they stopped moving and lay quiet. I could hear. I could feel. I could breathe through the basketwork, but I did so quietly. The basket ring encircled my face, and beneath my eyes was only the stone of the table.

I heard the heavy door close as Masanees left. I knew
what was outside, nearby, hanging from the branch of an ancient tree: a wooden mallet beside a gong. I heard her feet pause, heard her voice saying words I knew, heard the metal struck by the mallet, a slow series of blows that reverberated among the canyons, a long plangent sound, not sweet but seductive. One, two, three. Then a long pause. Then one, two, three again. The series went on. Triplet, then pause. Triplet, then pause. Then a responsive sound. Was it what she expected? It seemed very loud to me.

My limbs wanted to jerk, to pull free. They could not move. The sounds outside increased. …

I heard her feet hurry off. Somewhere nearby, hidden in the trees, she would conceal herself to wait, and watch, until she could return to let me go….

I
do not like remembering that time. Sometimes the whole thing comes back on me, all at once, before I have had a chance to shut it out. I cry out, then. I stand shivering. People pretend not to see me, turning their eyes away until I have shaken the memory off and closed the door upon it. I do not like remembering that time, so I shall remember something else instead.

I shall remember when I was a child in Cochim-Mahn.

Dinadhi girl-children have much to learn. Clay between the hands and the whirl of the wheel. Wool and cotton between the fingers and the twist of the spindle. The weight of brush and broom, the long hours at the loom. The feel of the grindstone under one's palms, the bend of the back when dropping seeds into the holes made by the planting stick. The setting of the solar cooker to gather all the sun's heat. The forward thrust of the head against the tump line, bringing down wood for the winter. A woman must be always busy if her family is to be clad and shod and fed and kept warm, so a girl-child is taught to be constantly busy as well.

Once each left-thumb day—it is how we count days:
little-finger day, lesser twin, longer twin, point-finger day, thumb day; right hand first, then left, making a double hand; five double hands to the month; twelve months to the year, plus the eight or nine extra days Daylight Woman gives us at harvest time. As I say, once every left-thumb day, my mother went to the sanctuary cells of Bernesohn Famber, taking me with her as her mother had taken her. Famber was not there, of course. He had become an outlander ghost a long time before, in the time of my great-grandmother. Still, he had paid for a hundred-year lease, paid for cells allocated to him and secured against intrusion or extradition for one hundred standard years. The price for such a lease includes food and cleaning. The food mostly came from off-planet, but the cleaning was done by us.

Each tenth day we took brooms and brushes and soft old rags and went into his cell, which is around the back of the main hive, on the cave-floor level, in a kind of protrusion built out from the body of the hive. We don't like outlanders stumbling about among us in the hive, so our leasehold has its own entrance. In case an outlander needs help at night, there is a corridor that comes into a storeroom of the hive, but it is seldom used except by those who serve the outlanders.

The Cochim-Mahn leasehold is three cells built around a toilet place. We don't use the manure of outlanders in our fungus cellars. There is some feeling it might kill the fungus. Instead we buy these closet things from the Alliance for our leaseholders to use, and when they get used up, we trade for new ones. So Bernesohn Famber's place was a little corridor with five doors in it, one to the hive storeroom, one to the toilet, and three more to the three cells. The cell nearest the front, nearest the lip of the cave, had a door to the outside as well. All of the rooms had lie-down shelves around the sides. One back room was where Famber had slept, one he had used for storage, and the one with the door to the outside had his worktable and a
comfortable chair and many strange devices and machines. These, Mama told me, were recorders and computers and analyzers, to help Bernesohn Famber with his work.

“What was his work?” I always asked, each and every time.

“Finding out about Dinadh,” she always said, winking at me. Grown-ups wink like that when they hint something about the choice. Or the House. Or the other world we had, before we came here. Things we are not supposed to talk about.

“Did he find out?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” she said, marching back through the cells to the back one, where she started with the broom and I followed with the brush, sweeping down the smooth mud walls, brushing off the sleeping shelves, making a little pile of dust and grit that got bigger the farther we pushed it from cell to cell, until at last we could push it right out the door onto the floor of the cave. Then I took the broom and pushed it across the cave floor, farther and farther forward, until it came to the edge and fell over, all that dust and grit and sheddings of the hive falling down like snow on the canyon bottom.

Sometimes, while Mama was sweeping, I'd sit and look at the machines, longing to push just one button, just to see what would happen. It was forbidden, of course. Such things were not Dinadhi things. We had to live without things like that. We had
chosen
to live without them. We had
chosen
to give them up in return for what we were promised instead.

After we cleaned Bernesohn Famber's leasehold, sometimes we went down to the storerooms to pick something for supper. In summers, there are all kinds of things, fresh or dried melon, fresh or dried meat, different kinds of vegetables and fruit, pickled or fresh or dried. There is almost always grain, head grain or ear grain, eaten whole or cracked or ground for making bread. We have seeds for
roasting, and honey too. We brought bees with us, from the other world.

In late winter and early spring, though, there's mostly fungus from the cellars, pale and gray and tasting like wood. The only good thing about fungus is that it's easy to fix. It can be eaten fresh or dried, raw or cooked. We usually put some salt and herbs on it to make it taste like something. Most all of our cookery is done in the mornings, when the sun is on the cave. We use solar reflectors for cooking. The whole front edge of the cave is lined with them, plus all the level spots to either side, and any time of the morning you can see women scrambling across the cliff wall to get at their own ovens and stewpots.

After food is cooked, it's kept warm in padded boxes until eating time. None of our food is very hot, except in wintertime. Then we have fires in the hive, and we sometimes cook over them. It would take too many trees to have fires in summer. That was part of the promise and the choice as well. We have to protect the trees and certain plants because the beautiful people need them.

Even though girls had much to learn, sometimes Mama would tire of teaching me and say, “Go on, go play,” and then I'd have to try to find somebody else whose mama had said, “Go play,” to them too.

Shalumn and I played together mostly. We played babies and we played wedding and we played planting and harvest, smoothing little patches in the dust and grooving them like ditches, and putting tiny rocks down for the vegetables. We had dolls, of course, made out of reed bundles, covered with cloth, with faces painted on. We didn't play with the boys, not once we were old enough to know who was a boy and who was a girl. Boys played sheepherder and songfather and watermaster, and they had games where somebody always won and somebody always lost. Shalumn and I played bed games together, and once Mama caught us at it and whipped us both on
our bottoms. I still have a little line there, on one side, where the whip cut. After that we were careful.

I remember those as pleasant times, but I can't make them sound like much. Nothing much happens with children on Dinadh. We don't have adventures. If we tried to have an adventure, we'd probably die right away. Maybe better … better I think of some other story. Not my life or Lutha Tallstaff's life, but someone else's. Another person entirely, the third one of us. The one Lutha and I met together. Snark the shadow.

A
t the end of each workday the Procurator dismissed his shadows, allowing them to descend the coiled ramps that led from occupied areas to Shadowland beneath. There each shadow entered the lock as he was programmed to do.

“Strip off your shadow suit,” said the lock.

The shadow stripped off the stiff suit with all its sensors and connectors, hanging it in an alcove in one side of the booth.

“Place your hands in the receptacles.”

The shadow placed.

“Bend your head forward to make contact with the plate.”

The shadow bent.

Light, sounds, movement. Snark stood back from the plate, shaking her head, as she always did, bellowing with rage, as she always did.

“Leave the cubicle,” said the voice, opening the door behind her, opposite the one she'd come in by.

“Goddamn bastards,” screamed Snarkey, hammering at the cubicle wall. “Shitting motherfuckers.”

The floor grew hot. She leapt and screamed, resolved to obey no order they gave her. As always, the floor grew too hot for her, and she leapt through the door just in time to avoid being seared.

“It's the mad howler,” said slobber-lipped Willit from
a distant corner of the locker room. “Snarkey-shad herself, makin' noises like a human.”

“Shut the fuck up,” growled Snark.

Willit laughed. Others also laughed. Snark panted, staring about herself, deciding who to kill.

“Slow learner,” commented Kane the Brain, shaking his head sadly.

Snarkey launched herself at Kane, screaming rage, only to find herself on the floor, whimpering, her thumb in her mouth.

“An exceptionally slow learner,” repeated the former speaker, kicking Snark not ungently in the ribs. “Poor old Snark.”

“Good baby-girl shadow.” Willit sneered as he passed on his way to the door. “Play nice.”

Snark sobbed as the room emptied.

“Have you quite finished?” asked the mechanical voice from a ceiling grille.

“Umph,” she moaned.

“I'll ask one more time. Have you quite finished?”

“Yessir.” The word dragged reluctantly from her throat, burning as it came.

“Then get up and get dressed. The locker room will be steam-cleaned in five minutes. Besides, you are no doubt hungry.”