Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
‘We can borrow mules at Northwest Citadel,’ Tasmin reminded them for the third time. ‘We don’t have to take our own.’
‘I like Jessica,’ said Clarin. ‘I like her a lot, and I’d just as soon not leave her here if you don’t mind.’
He didn’t argue. The trust between Tripsinger and mount had to be absolute. Gentle, unflappable, sensible – Tripsinger mules were all of these, as well as being sterile, which PEC rules demanded. The mares and jacks were kept at widely separated sites on the ’Soilcoast and breeding was by artificial insemination. Similar precautions were used in breeding foreign fish and fowl. Until there was a final declaration on the question of sentience, no imported creatures were allowed to breed freely on planets under PEC control.
Except people of course. The assumption had been that if it was necessary to evacuate the planet, every human would be deported. Most livestock, fowls, and fish would be slaughtered before the humans left. The mules would not be – it was generally accepted that the Tripsingers simply wouldn’t stand for that – but in one generation they would be dead. The imported trees and shrubs were sterile. The vegetable crops would be killed except for settler’s brush, which was a native species with only slight improvements. If the new commission they had been hearing about was to declare there was native sentience on Jubal and rule for disinvolvement, Jubal could be left as it had been before humans came.
Except that BDL wouldn’t let that happen.
‘Take Jessica,’ Tasmin said. ‘Take your own mule, Clarin. I confess to a fondness for Blondine, as well.’
‘Not mine,’ growled Jamieson, fondling his animal’s ears. ‘This old long-ear hasn’t got a drop of sense.’ The mule turned and gave him a severe and searching look, which the boy repaid with a palm full of chopped fruit. ‘I’ll see what I can round up in the way of transportation.’
‘Clarin and I will get the equipment packed,’ Tasmin said. They had already made arrangements for Vivian to travel to Deepsoil Five in a wagon train leaving almost at once. Tasmin had sent a message ahead to his mother, though he knew it might not reach her before Vivian did. Messages were sent by heliographic relay between widely separated parts of the planet, but the signal posts were only sporadically manned. Satellite relay worked if the transmitter was directly above the target receiver, but except on the coast or over water, both transmitters and receivers often burned out mysteriously. The Presences simply did not tolerate electromagnetic activity within a considerable distance, as a number of pilots had learned to their fatal dismay in the early years.
Clarin assisted Tasmin in repacking their equipment, checking each item as they went. ‘You didn’t leave this box like this, did you?’ she asked, pointing to Lim’s synthesizer, standing open on the table.
‘Servants,’ he mouthed softly. ‘They poke into everything. The story is that BDL pays for all kinds of information. Probably nine out of ten servants in the citadel are selling bits and pieces to BDL informers for drinking money.’
She flushed. ‘Someone told me that before. I’d forgotten. It seems so silly. We all work for the same people.’
‘Not really,’ he said, still softly. ‘If you ask me whom I work for, I’ll tell you I work for the Master General of my citadel, and ultimately for the Grand Master of the Order. Explorers work for their priories. I know BDL pays for all of it ultimately, but I don’t think of myself as working for BDL. Maybe that’s self-serving. There’s a lot about BDL I just can’t stomach.’
She seemed thoughtful, and he waited for the question he knew was coming, wondering what it would be this time. She had displayed a sustained though delicately phrased curiosity about Tasmin’s life, but they had pretty well covered his history by now.
‘Why do they call him Reb?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ He was surprised into blankness.
‘Jamieson. Why do they call him Reb?’
‘Because he is one. He was a rebel in choir school. He’s been a rebel in the citadel. He’s been in trouble more than he’s been out of it.’ Tasmin smiled at a few private memories.
She sat on the bed and fumbled in her pocket, taking out her green-gray crystal mouse, which sniffed at her fingers with a long, expressive nose as it inflated its song-sack to give a muffled chirp. ‘You know Jamieson wasn’t sent after you by the Master General.’
‘He wasn’t?’
‘He demanded to come. Because he thought you needed him.’
Tasmin was dumbfounded. ‘What was all that about the girl he left behind?’
‘So much smoke. We rehearsed it. So you wouldn’t think it was his idea. He thought you’d send us back if it was his idea.’
Tasmin dropped to a chair, astonished. ‘How did you get dragged in?’
‘That was the Master General. He said if Jamieson was right, if you needed someone, you needed someone besides Jamieson because a steady diet of Jamieson was too much for anyone.’ Her mouth quirked as she petted the mouse, curled now in one palm, cleaning itself.
Tasmin stared at her. That kid. That boy. That … his eyes filled.
Seeing this she turned, going back to the former subject. ‘Why did they let him stay in the Order if he was so much trouble?’
‘Because more often than not he’s been right. And because he’s a fine musician, of course.’ And because he loves Jubal, Tasmin thought. Maybe as much as I do.
‘Is he right about … about the Presences?’ This was obviously the question she had really wanted to ask in the first place.
‘What do you think?’
‘It isn’t what I think. I
feel
he’s right. I guess inside somewhere, I know he’s right. But if he’s right, that makes everything else….’
‘Hypocritical?’ he suggested. ‘You used that word before, I think.’ He sat down, looking at her closely. Her eyes were tight on his. The matter was important to her. He decided to give it his full attention.
‘Well, I suppose it is hypocritical. I guess we – we Tripsingers – we go along with what BDL demands because it makes it possible for us to go on doing what we love to do. On the surface, in public, we pretend the Presences aren’t sentient because that statement allows us to move around on Jubal. Underneath, we believe they are sentient, and that belief is what makes moving around on Jubal worthwhile! We assent to hypocrisy, because it doesn’t seem to make that much difference. I guess it’s because we don’t see anything consequential happening just because we give lip service to nonsentience. It doesn’t change anything. We still go through the motions Erickson laid down for us, the quasi-religious, very respectful stuff he ordained, so while we say they’re not sentient, we act as though they are sentient. We have to. Otherwise we might lose Jubal, and Jubal’s in our blood.’
She sat down opposite him, her face eager. ‘I’ve felt that, you know. What is it like, for you?’
He lowered himself onto the bed, dangling a sock from one hand, thinking. What was it like for him?
‘It’s like going into paradise,’ he said. ‘We say going into peril, but I’ve always thought paradise must be very perilous. Anything beautiful, anything that takes hold of your heart and shakes it – that’s perilous.
‘The peril takes hold of you even before you leave, sometimes. You see the ceremonial gate opening. Everything inside you gets very still. You start to ride, the fields flowing by, slowly changing to Jubal lands. You smell the Jubal trees, and as you go up the trail, they turn, almost as though they’re following you, watching you. The ground begins to shiver, only a little, then more. Something is speaking in the ground, something enormous….’
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘You go on and the words being spoken in the ground get bigger and bigger until they fill your head. Until you see the Presence before you, glittering. Light comes out of it like daggers, like swords. They pierce you, and you begin to sing…. It’s like bleeding music instead of blood.’
He nodded. She knew. Oh, yes. She knew.
‘And if you do it right, quiet comes,’ he concluded for her. ‘Something listens.’
There was an aching understanding between them, a sympathy that was almost agony. He flushed and dropped his eyes, awash with an emotion he would not allow himself to feel. When she had spoken, he had felt her in his arms, as she had been there on the trail below the Watchers, trembling in his arms. He gritted his teeth, pushing the feeling away. It made him feel disloyal to the memory of Celcy each time he had one of these fleeting feelings.
After a time she pocketed the mouse and said, ‘Logically, if something listens, something should reply.’
He shook his head, smiling ruefully. ‘That’s what Chad Jaconi says. He’s spent forty years trying to make sense out of Password scores. I don’t know how many so-called universal translator setups he’s bought from out-system.’
‘Did he ever get anything?’
‘Nothing sensible.’
‘What about the other side of the conversation? The Presence side?’
‘Gibberish. For decades, people have recorded the sounds the Presences make. They’ve tried every known translator device. All they get is some kind of noise, Chad says. White noise or brown noise or something. Squeaks, howls, snores, gurgles. Nothing useful. Nothing with meaning.’
‘What about the viggies? They sing. Maybe they’re sentient.’
‘A lot of people tried to establish that. There were a number of viggies captured in the early years, well treated so far as anyone could tell, and they almost all died – overnight sometimes. A very rare few were said to have lived in captivity. The one I had, the one Lim let loose, was supposed to say a few words, “pretty viggy” and “viggy wants a cooky,” but there’s no record of any of the things the PEC looks for in determining sentience. No toolmaking. No proof of language. No burial of the dead. And, of course, there’s simply no way to go among them and study them as our naturalists would like to do. They’re nocturnal, elusive, die when captured, and they don’t talk. So much for viggy sentience….’
There was a tap at the door and Jamieson thrust his head in. ‘I’ve found an empty brou truck that’s leaving for Northwest in half an hour.’
‘Right,’ Tasmin agreed, rising. ‘Let this stuff go, Clarin. I’ll finish packing here. You two get your own gear.’
There was a brief delay while the truck was fitted with a proper hitch to pull the trailer Tasmin had borrowed from the mule farm. Since there was only space in the truck turret for two passengers, Jamieson chose to ride with the mules. They set out early in the afternoon.
First came the city outskirts, mud houses, mud stores, untidy gardens, these separated from similar stretches by great swatches of hard surfaced road, with more of it building. ‘Military construction,’ bellowed the driver over the noise of their travel. ‘Somebody decided they needed better roads to move the military around. That’s why bricks are so short. They’ve got all the solar furnaces out here surfacin’ road.’
They passed several of the furnaces, huge mirrors hung on complicated frameworks that both tracked the sun and focused the resultant beam. Behind the furnaces, road surface smoked hotly, fading from red to black.
Once past the construction, though the road was narrow and bumpy, they made better time. They were traveling through fields of grain and narrower strips lined with root crops. Occasionally they could see pens of fowl or small meat animals, chigs or bantigons, omnivores native to Serendipity. Tasmin’s mouth watered. He had an insatiable hunger for grilled bantigon. Fried bantigon. Bantigon pie. On this meat-poor planet, Tasmin was an unregenerate carnivore. Clarin, watching him salivate, gave him a sympathetic look. She, too, enjoyed fresh meat.
They reached a wide, shallow river and were ferried across. They passed a small town on their right, then more fields and farms, and another small town on their left. They were bending away from the sea, toward the uplands. Ahead of them were the only deepsoil hills yet discovered on Jubal, great sandy dunes pushed up by the sea winds and overgrown with settler’s brush and feathery trees. They wound among the hills, startling tiny native animals who fled across the road, once surprising a group of viggies who fled whooping as the truck came near, turning their heads backward to peer behind them with enormous pupilless eyes, ears wagging and feathery antennae pointing at the truck. At the top of the hill, the largest viggy inflated his song-sack and boomed reproachfully at them before the group fled out of sight.
‘I had no idea they came this near cultivated lands,’ Tasmin said as he stared at the retreating gray-green forms. In all his trips he had actually seen viggies only five or six times, though he had heard them almost nightly all his life.
‘See ’em all the time along the coast,’ said the driver. ‘Six, eight at a time. Had engine trouble along here once. Had to stop and spend the night on the road. Heard ’em singing real close by. Must’ve gone on all night. Lots of other critters around here, too. Ones you don’t see very often.’
When they came out of the hills, the sun was behind them, falling slowly into the sea. ‘We’ll spend the night in Barrville,’ the driver advised. ‘There’s a BDL agri-station there. Imagine they’ll put you up.’
Sandy Chivvle, the local manager, did indeed put them up, glad of the company and eager to show someone what was being done with the ubiquitous brou. She insisted that seeds from this batch be tested against seeds from that batch, and by the time supper was put before them, none of them cared if they ate or not. The night passed in a cheerful haze.
Laden with reports to be delivered to Jem Middleton, head of the BDL Agricultural Division, they left early in the morning, somewhat headachey and lower in spirits. The driver dosed them with hot tea from a thermos flask, and they rumbled along endless fields of brou, the pale green-gray of newly planted fields alternating with the dark gray-green of mature crops, passing lines of loaded trucks headed the other way. They came into Northwest City a little after noon.
They unloaded the mules and then inquired at the neighboring BDL center for Jem Middleton. They found him in the bowels of the building in a remote room in which there was a welter game in progress. At least there were cards and stacks of consumer chits on the table, though the open document cases on the side table argued that something else might have been going on. To Tasmin’s surprise, perhaps to his dismay, one of those present was the Grand Master of the Tripsinger Order, Thyle Vowe.