Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
‘It’s almost as though they expected general disorder, isn’t it?’ asked Tasmin in a deceptively mild voice. He had been staring out over the ranges while suspicions gradually solidified within him.
‘What kind of general disorder? Who are those troopers going to be used against?’
‘Well, considering that BDL will probably start destroying Presences shortly after the CHASE Commission delivers its report, I would judge the troops are to be used against us,’ Tasmin said.
‘Us!’
‘Tripsingers. Explorers. All the dependents and ancillary services. All those who earn their living from us, the storekeepers, farmers, and mule breeders. Thousands of us, Reb. If we see the destruction of a few Presences, most of us will forget lipservice to BDL. We might get violent.’
‘Damn it, we would get violent,’ the boy asserted.
‘I think BDL knows that. If I were Harward Justin, I’d be planning to destroy a lot of Presences within minutes of the CHASE report. Before there could be any general uprising. Then I’d use the troops to keep order.’
‘So what do we do?’ Don asked again. ‘Sit here and die? Try to get out? To do what?’
‘Figure something out,’ said Clarin definitely. ‘We’ll figure something out, Don. But it would help a great deal if you would start by trusting us more than you have.’
Donatella shook her head as though she did not understand.
‘Oh, come on, Don. You’ve talked around and around it, for hours. You’ve told us you found this proof. You’ve told us you checked the proof. You’ve told us you have real, factual information. You’ve told us everything – except what the process was and what the information is. I don’t see how we can help you if we don’t know.’
The Explorer knight rose, stalked away from the fire and stood at some distance from it, her back to them, as rigid as when they had first arrived at the quiet pocket. The fire threw flickering lights along her back glimmering in her pale hair. ‘If anyone finds out, they’ll kill me,’ she said.
‘They’re trying to kill you anyhow. We didn’t bring the threat with us. It’s already here. I don’t think they’ll try any harder if they know what the real information is.’
Don returned to the fire, rather wild-eyed, like some feral, dirty-faced creature bent over a primordial altar, her face haggard in the leaping light. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Try us,’ suggested Jamieson.
‘I talked to the Enigma,’ she said. ‘And it talked back.’
Dead, disbelieving silence.
‘You’re joking!’ Jamieson said, choking.
‘I told you you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Talked? In words?’
‘In words. Real words. And the Enigma talked back. In words.’
Silence again. Silence that stretched into moments, each staring at the other, uncertain, unable to believe….
At last Tasmin’s voice. ‘That was a translator in the box!’
‘A new one,’ she answered softly. ‘Very powerful. My friend got it for me. I took the label off.’
‘I thought it was a transposition program.’
‘No reason you should have known it was a translator. But the translation is there, in the box. An actual conversation between a person and a Presence. A conversation that makes a kind of sense, too, which is remarkable considering that it’s a first of its kind. That’s what we were giving Lim Terree. That’s why he went to such lengths to get the score from you, Ferrence. He knew what we had.’
‘God!’ Shocked silence once more.
‘So, you see,’ she said, ‘we have to do something. And all I can think of is what I said before. Spread the word as widely as possible, assuming we could even get access to the com-net, and then hide out until the fallout is over.’
‘That wouldn’t work,’ said Jamieson.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It doesn’t matter that you know the Presences are sentient. You have no witness. The information you’ve got could have been faked. So long as the CHASE Commission is rigged to give a report of nonsentience, BDL can depend on the military to enforce that ruling, no matter what the truth is. The troopers don’t care. Even if you told people and some of them believed you, it wouldn’t do any good. BDL would stifle them.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Clarin.
Jamieson gave her a challenging look.
‘No, really Reb. You haven’t taken it all in yet. Listen to what the woman said! She talked to the Enigma. It talked back. If we can actually understand the words of the Presences, there are some very great voices here on Jubal that simply can’t be stifled!’
Bird-cloud, Silver-seam, Sun-bright, Star of the Mountain, Blue Glory Child of the Twelfth Generation, listening in the quiet of the evening….
To: Bondri Gesel the Wide-eared, Messenger of the Presences.
Bondri singing, along with his troupe in four part harmony, to the outer Silver-seam, the skin, as it were, of the great Presence: ‘Peace, calm of wind, flow of water, gentleness of tree-frond turning, joy of sunlight, contentment of moonlight and star.’
Which did not serve. Silver-seam, Bird-cloud, Star of the Mountain, and so forth returned the song in a series of aching anharmonics: ‘Discontinuity. Distant: shore thundering. Close, whispering of change. Proliferation of Loudsingers. Disturbance of one’s edges and bits. Fingers itch. Noises in air and earth. Discomfort in the roots. Confusion. Query to Bondri: establish causation?
Bondri the Wide-eared, who had traveled fifty days with his troupe to carry a message to the inner Silver-seam, now paused, his song-sack in limp folds, shaken to the center of his being.
Prime Priest Favel, bent and trembling on his poor old legs, whispered, ‘Has this ever happened before?’
Bondri flapped his ears in negation, signaling quiet to the troupe. ‘No Great One has ever asked such questions before. No Great One has really seemed aware of us before, aged one. What shall I sing?’
‘Equivocate,’ suggested the Prime Priest. ‘Say nothing much at some length. Tell Silver-seam you will seek reasons.’
Bondri sang in canon form, which allowed the troupe to follow his lead. After going on at some length, Bondri concluded: ‘Causation currently unknown. Who knows what passes among the Loudsingers? Who can smell the sunlight? Who can taste the wind? Thy messengers will ascertain.’
He had uttered no word of the inner message he had come so far to deliver, even though it was a brief one: ‘Red Bird to the top of Silver Mountain.’ Most of the inner messages the viggies carried were no more lengthy than this particular one, which had come from the Great Blue Tooth, Horizon Loomer, Mighty Hand, the Presence humankind called the East Jammer. Prime Priest Favel, who had learned human speech in captivity among the Loudsingers in his youth, was fond of naming the Great Ones with human titles, using human words that he said were thought-provoking in their very imprecision. There had seemed to be no point in attempting to deliver the message that East Jammer had sent. Inner Silver-seam would not even have heard it so long as its skin was quivering like this or while this strange questioning was happening – though the latter seemed stilled, at least for the moment.
‘Should I try to quiet it for the message?’ Bondri hummed to the priest.
He received a gesture in reply, why not.
Bondri swelled his throat into a great, ruby balloon and sang again to the skin, sang of calm, signaling the troupe to begin an antiphon on the theme of evening, one composed by Bondri’s own ancestor in a season of incessant and troubling storm. It was one of the most efficacious of the surface songs. The troupe composed itself for best projection and howled harmoniously, throats swelled into sonorous rotundity, putting all their energy into it at length and to little effect. The very air quivered with annoyance. Bird-cloud, Silver-seam, Sun-bright, Star of the Mountain, and all – known among humankind as the North Watcher – was not tranquil and would not become so.
‘Cacophony, dissonance, melodic lines falling apart,’ whispered a part leader to Bondri. ‘Great Bird-cloud is annoyed with his messengers.’ High Priest Favel stood to one side, bent and waiting, making no comment, though Bondri threw him a nervous glance.
There was no help for it. Bondri stood forward and chirped a staccato phrase. Tumble down threatens here-about, dangerous for viggy-folk, go and stay away, away a time, quick, quick.’ He turned to the old priest. ‘Your perceptiveness must come quickly.’
This was the sense of Bondri’s message, though these were not the words. The words had other meanings – leader to troupe, experienced singer to novices in the presence of a Prime Priest of the people – and there were implications of the time of day and the season, modifications of language required by the site in which the words were spoken. When one of the Companions of the Gods quoted another, there was no need for the hearer to ask when or to whom the words were spoken or in what weather or circumstance. The words themselves said it all. The word
taroo – go
– was sung in the early morning. It became
tarou
at midmorning and
tarouu
at noon. It was
itaroo
sung in sunlight and
etaroo
sung in light mist.
Atarouualayum
conveyed the going of a mated pair, sans giligee, at midmorning in driving rain, somewhat north of the Shadowed Cliffs … in spring.
So now, Bondri’s words conveyed a chill autumn evening in the vicinity of the North Watcher during which a familial troupe of viggies – males, females, giligees, and young, all, except the very newest trade daughters, sharing the same thought patterns – had approached the Great One to deliver a message but could not get past the skin to deliver it and were putting themselves in peril if they didn’t move. Bondri felt compelled to reissue the warning to which Prime Priest Favel had not yet harkened.
‘Your (autumn chilled but most valued) perceptiveness? The (mighty but not quite trustworthy) Presence in whose (arbitrary and sometimes simply vengeful) decisions we trust grows (dangerously and maliciously) agitated. Best (imperative) we depart.’
The priest flicked his elbows in agreement, and Bondri made the wing sign in turn to the pouchmate pathfinders of the troupe, who slithered off at once down an almost invisible track along the side of the North Watcher. This was a proven track on which movement was possible without alerting the Great One. The crystalline structure beneath it had no fractures, no vacancies, no dislocations, no planar defects or interstitials – none of those deviations from uniform crystalline structure that in the Presences served the function served by neurons and neurotransmitters in fleshly creatures. Not that the viggies, or as they called themselves, ‘etaromimi,’ knew that. They did know that the track was solid, stolid, and without sensation. In a few hundred yards it would debouch upon a pocket of safe soil where a small grove of trees provided a place to rest. The Prime Priest was very old and needed surcease.
‘Is far enough?’ hummed one of the troupe. ‘Silver-seam can make great destruction, very far.’
Bondri was by no means sure it was far enough, but it was as far as the Prime Priest was likely to get, given the state of his legs. They had been broken in his youth and had never healed properly. While they were broken, he had been captured by the Loudsingers and held captive long enough to learn their language. Much later one of the young Loudsingers, blessed be his familial patterns of thought forever, had kindly released Favel to his people. That Loudsinger’s name was Lim Ferrence, and his was one of the names of honor whose patterns were recalled by Bondri’s troupe during times of recollection.
Behind them on the slope, several of the Great One’s fingers blew their tips with a crash and volley of tinkling glass.
‘ ’Lings,’ murmured Favel, giving the fingers their human name. ‘ ’Lings.’
None of the debris came near the viggies, and Bondri sighed in relief. The Great Ones were not always sensible about assigning fault. If a viggy did something to displease them, their skins or fingers might kill quite another viggy in retaliation. It was almost as though the skins did not know the difference between one individual and another. Or did not know there was a difference. They were the same with the Loudsingers. Sometimes the Great Ones would incubate annoyance for a very long time, exercising vengeance long after the original culprit had gone away or died. At least, this is the way it seemed to Bondri, even though the Prime Priest told him otherwise.
‘It is the difference between their insides and outsides,’ panted the Prime Priest, making Bondri realize he had been vocalizing. The surfaces of their minds are shallow and quick to irritate. They slap at us as we twitch at a woundfly, unthinking. In the Depths, where the great thoughts move at the roots of the mountains, they are slow to reason and, I believe, largely unconscious of us. I have often thought there is little connection between the two parts of them.’
‘Except for the way Silver-seam behaved tonight,’ caroled Bondri. ‘Strangely.’
‘Strangely indeed! It seemed well aware of us, did it not? As though some midmind had come awake.’
It had indeed seemed quite aware of them, a very uncomfortable thought. ‘Blessed be (all Presences, large and small, their fingers and skin-parts) they,’ said Bondri, antennae erect and curved inward over his head, warding away any ill fortune that the priest’s remark might otherwise attract.
‘Oh, by all means,’ sighed Favel. ‘Yes.’
‘May I assist your (aged and infirm and overly chilled) perceptiveness?’
‘If you would be so (gracious in this season) kind, youngster. I get creakier with every moon.’
‘We would be honored to carry you.’
‘That much is not necessary. A shoulder to lean on would be welcome.’
The troupe sped down the track, moving as quickly as possible consonant with the requisite care. Dislodging bits of crystal trash often made the Great Ones very angry, particularly if it was done noisily. Pieces had to be picked up gently and set aside, and that took time, but long practice made the troupe both quick and silent.
By the time dark fell, they had reached the grove of trees.