Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He went to the palace offices and was directed down several flights of stairs to a maze of tunnels which, so he was told, housed the archives. There, he accosted one of the clerical staff, a dusty and bustling creature with a halo of elf locks, a pale, lined face, and a wild expression.

  “Why, why, what’s here for you, Colonel? What’s here in the dust, the rust, the musty fust?”

  Aufors chose to ignore this oddity and put on his most boyish and sincere expression. “I’m currently serving as equerry to Lord Dustin, Duke of Langmarsh, and though I do well enough with Langmarshian matters, being a native born and bred, I find I’m not well educated in the history and nobility of the other provinces.”

  “You’re no more ignorant than most, dumb as a post,” said the madman.

  Aufors smiled beneficently. “Maybe so, but I’m a man who likes to know all he can about the job he’s doing, so I thought there might be something in the archives that would let me sound less of an idiot. These people at court, they’re quick to find you out, I notice, when you don’t know what or who you’re talking about, and they don’t let you forget it if you step wrong!”

  The clerk gave him a sympathetic look, raised his eyebrows almost into his hairline, fluttered his eyelashes and his hands, all preparatory to glancing over his shoulder and skulking into the shadows between two stacks of books. From this refuge he summoned Aufors with a beckoning finger.

  “My supervisor’s another one like that! Don’t do this and don’t do that! He keeps his brains inside his hat, behind the brim, the hell with him, the sprat!”

  “You don’t like him?” asked Aufors, wondering whether the man had gone mad on the job or been hired because he was mad enough for the job. There were jobs where madness was an asset. The military was full of them.

  “I ask for my vacation, oh, first he says go then he says no. No leave, go grieve. I hate him.” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and counted audibly from one to twenty-five. Then he opened his eyes and said in a quiet voice, “If you promise not to spill the beans, I’ll let you look at the machines.”

  “Machines?” said Aufors, blankly. He had expected machines no more than madmen.

  The functionary smiled bleakly. “Off-world archive machines, Colonel.”

  “I didn’t know we had off-world things …”

  “When Lord Paramount says not, the things in storage, he’s forgot! But no forbidden off-world thing is forbidden to a king!”

  “Do you make those rhymes up as you go along, or have you got them all memorized?” asked Aufors.

  “A game,” said the functionary, flushing. “Sometimes we … we archivists play it together. Because we’re bored.”

  “For the moment, could we not play? You mentioned machines?”

  “All kinds,” said the man sullenly. “Not only medical stuff, but weapons and heavy-duty lifters. Can’t say I disagree with having archive machines. Notes one takes and words one jots, but vellum breaks and paper rots. In machines we save the past for that’s the only place they last!”

  “You can’t stop doing it, can you? What’s your name?”

  The strange one glanced over his shoulder, making a face, obviously thinking of the superior aforementioned. “Jeorfy. Jeorfy Bottoms. As for the versifying, well, it gets to be a habit. It’s hard to talk like a human being when one hasn’t been treated like one for years! Come along. Since everyone on Haven is supposed to be half-witted, the machines have been simplified. No offense, Colonel, but I could teach a pig how to use them in five minutes.”

  The clerk led Aufors down a twisty aisle into a half-hidden cubby equipped with chair, desk, and the same kind of keyboard most literate Havenites were taught in school to use for things like bills of sale, deeds to land, contracts or marriage agreements, that is, all matters needing clarity and permanent storage. Aufors’s family used such a device for breeding records, and after the clerk had explained the common usages of the mechanisms and led Aufors through the process, Aufors had no trouble imitating a man deeply interested in three-hundred-year-old squabbles between Langmarsh and Dania.

  As soon as the doggerel-body was out of sight and hearing, however, Aufors left the screen busy with its noisy reenactment of the battle for Wellsport while he cleared the screen and entered the words “Yugh Delganor.”

  “Heir presumptive to the Lord Paramount, son of the Lord Paramount’s slightly younger twin brother, Elwin,” the screen informed him, going on with a lengthy list of diplomatic and fact-finding missions which the heir had handled for Marwell. The earliest date given was only forty years in the past. Aufors tapped his front teeth with a fingernail, musing, and then keyed in the names of some of the events Delganor was said to have been involved in. A diplomatic mission to Frangía, another to Mahahm. A survey of the Drowned Range off Merdune. Accounts of these missions were complete with dates; the oldest of them dated back a hundred sixty years and gave the Prince’s age as thirty. So, he was almost two hundred years old.

  Aufors, humming under his breath, entered “Marwell,” and received, “current Lord Paramount of Haven …” and it went on with a voluminous account of life and accomplishments, without dates. Again, Aufors tried keying in the names of the events themselves. The old Captain had been right. Some of the events were dated well over two hundred years in the past. So. One could not find dates listed under biographies, possibly because someone had purged them, but no one had purged the accounts of historic events.

  He tried the names of the Dukes: Gardagger of Merdune, Tranquish of Dania, Wayheight-Winson of Upland, Vestik-Vanserdel of Barfezi. With a little digging he found events that measured their lives at well over a century. Each of them had traveled for the Lord Paramount, had worked for him and had fought for him. So, he thought, tapping his teeth again, clickety click, the Lord Paramount rewarded his faithful servants with a long life. He tried the Marshal. The Marshal was relatively young: he had only recently turned sixty.

  The versifying clerk came into view at the end of the corridor, moving angrily, as though propelled, arms loaded with books. As he approached, Aufors blanked the screen, called up the genealogy of the Bellser-Bars of Merdune, and by the time the clerk peered over his shoulder, he seemed totally immersed in the Gardagger family tree.

  “Dreadful deadly dull,” sneered the clerk, obviously smarting from some very recent encounter. “Almost a total null….”

  “Stop,” said Aufors, forbiddingly. “I’m too tired to make sense out of you.”

  The clerk heaved a sigh and spoke, venom dripping from every word. “I don’t know why we put up with it. Royalty, I mean. It’s unfair, the attention we pay them, neglecting worthier men.”

  “From what I’ve read,” Aufors replied, somewhat startled by this display of ill feeling, “every society has some way of allocating power. Some places do it by age, some by money, some by war, some by class, like us. All systems have their faults, but everyone has roughly as much life as everyone else, and that’s as fair as can be, so far as I know.”

  “Well!” The clerk turned pale as ash. “If that were true it would all be very nice, but when power means two or three hundred years of life while others get cut off short … I’d call that unfair.”

  Aufors swung around, staring. “Now that’s interesting,” he commented, as though it were news.

  The clerk paled, shuddered. “My sense of preservation’s broken,” he muttered, wiping his forehead. “Believe me, I should not have spoken.”

  Aufors grinned at him. “Don’t worry. I shan’t repeat it. You may depend upon my word … if you’ll set aside both your sense of self-preservation and your versifying for a moment more.”

  The clerk barked a laugh, brief and cut off sharply, his eyes focusing on Aufors for the first time, sharp, vital, full of intelligence. “I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know anything real. Some of the Lord Paramount’s colleagues are very old, and the Lord Paramount himself ages slow as a tree. He evidently decides who’s to get the gi
ft of long life, whatever that gift may be.”

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  “It’s a well-kept secret, Colonel. We all assume—we being the dusty grovelers here in the bowels, we burrowers in the racks, we delvers in the stacks—we assume it’s from off-world, like the rest of the things forbidden to the rest of us. And we assume it’s expensive, for the ones who get it are favorite and few.”

  “It seems unthinkably criminal to me, to buy such a thing for oneself and keep it from one’s people,” said Aufors.

  The archivist bit his lip and whispered, “You’ve heard that old proverb, Colonel. ‘Thirst makes any wine drinkable …’”

  “‘And greed makes any crime thinkable,’” Aufors concluded the couplet. He himself could not, at the moment, think of any reward high enough for such dishonorable behavior, but he set that aside for the moment. “I wonder what determines who the favorites are?”

  The clerk patted the console Aufors was seated at. “Well, you want to ask, let this do the task. It’s very strange that I know how, but never thought of it till now.”

  “How, then?”

  “Give the machine some names or common factors, it’ll come up with a list for you. And, Colonel! Delete what you’re doing before you leave. I’m not supposed to let anyone in here.”

  He drifted away, and Aufors entered, List all persons currently alive in Haven who are more than one hundred twenty years old.

  The list came spitting at him, longer than he had thought it would be. All the names were male. He stared at it for a moment, then asked, Who was the first person to gain this age on Haven?

  “Marwell, Lord Paramount, reached his one hundred-twentieth birthday in the year 1070 After Settlement.”

  Which meant he’d been born in 950 A.S. Which, since the current date was 1190, meant he was now almost a quarter of a millennium old, sixty years older than the Prince.

  Were there any persons, now dead, who lived longer than one hundred twenty years?

  “There were such persons, most recently Lord Wayheight-Winson, Duke of Highlands, who died at age two hundred three.”

  He should have been able to figure that one out. The Duke’s funeral processions had filled Havenor’s streets just a short time ago. How did he die?

  “Senile paralysis,” said the machine. “Listed as natural causes in the record.”

  What was the cause of death of the others?

  “Also senile paralysis.”

  Aufors stared at his fingers on the keyboard. What did all of this have to do with the covenants? He started to key in the question, but was stopped by voices shouting among the stacks: Jeorfy and someone else. Instead, he keyed quickly:

  Print all this information. Then clear all reference to this transaction.

  “Printing,” said the machine, “Clearing.” When it had finished, it switched itself off. Aufors, keeping one eye on the aisle, ran his eyes down the list, noting the men he knew or had heard of. The list and the other information had been printed on fold-tight. When Aufors let go of it, it snapped itself into a flat bundle that would fit easily in a pocket.

  He left quietly, taking care not to be seen by whomever the shouter had been.

  “What did you find? What’s on your mind?” whispered the clerk from the near end of a side aisle as Aufors passed down the corridor toward the door.

  “Nothing much,” he replied softly, taking care to sound bored. “Mostly the Lord Paramount’s relatives.”

  “What we’d expect,” said the clerk. “If you come again, be sure you talk to me, Jeorfy. Jeorfy Bottoms. Nobody else. And please, don’t tell anyone where you got the information or I’ll end up … well, worse off.”

  Aufors made a solemn promise, expressed his thanks, and went out into the air.

  The palace walls at Havenor ran around the edge of a leveled hill, but at one point outside the walls an original stone outcropping had been left untouched to continue upward in a narrow pillar. Some former architect had topped it with an observation deck and furnished it with a stair for those inclined to look at the view or the stars or simply to be alone with their thoughts. Aufors had climbed to this aerie several times in the past and did so again today, finding himself the only sightseer. He leaned across the railing into the brisk wind that was blowing from the southeast.

  Dark clouds massed low on the horizon. If he were farther south, he would see the limitless range of the ocean, wandered by billowy petticoats of cloud, brushed by blue brooms of storm, as though the Mother of Worlds swept the seas. Whenever Aufors felt overcome by beauty or joy, he thought of the Mother of Worlds, Queen of the Skies, a deity peculiar to the rural areas of Wantresse.

  There were a number of religions on Haven, the largest one being that of the nobility, the One True Church of the Divine Author of the Covenant. The Divine Author was invoked during weddings, dedications, jubilees, and the covenanting of noble girls at puberty. The Divine Author was anthropomorphic, inexpressibly regal, and He dwelt in heaven, which He had created and maintained as an ecstatic home to which all covenantly men were welcomed after death. There they would be served by angels, allowing their wives, daughters, and other female relatives a well-deserved rest in a separate heaven of their own (as the commentaries on the covenants made clear) where they could flutter on bright wings among the celestial flowers.

  The creation and maintenance of heaven were the Divine Author’s only duties, so far as Aufors could tell. Seemingly, the nobility didn’t want a god who interferred in their lives. They needed no other scripture than the covenants and the commentaries. If they worshipped anything, they worshipped the covenants their own ancestors had written, though, so it was taught, the writing was done by divine inspiration. The members of the Tribunal, the Covenanters, served as clergy; and the Invigilator enforced compliance on those the scrutators found nonconforming. It was a very neat, contained system.

  The Frangians, on the other hand, worshipped the Whatever, by eschewing toil of any kind. Toil was seen as an offense against the generosity of Whatever, though there were a few Frangians, the Mariners’ Guild, who did toil on ships. They were tolerated by their brethren for it was assumed the ships would be needed to transport all purified Frangians to heaven, which they called Galul and identified as being near the south planetary pole. Since all Frangians were sterilized at puberty—to avoid the toil of parenthood—they would have died out long ago were it not for the converts from elsewhere, who flowed constantly into the province in defiance of the Lord Para-mount’s edicts.

  Though the Covenanters and the Whatevers had the largest numbers of adherents, nothing in the covenants required commoners to give up the religions of their forebears, and there were dozens of beliefs current among them. Aufors had never been particularly interested in religion, certainly not enough to seek spiritual help from it, not even from the Mother of Worlds. Whatever was done for Genevieve, he told himself, it would have to be done without divine intervention, which meant he must do it himself, though he judged himself to be barely capable of it.

  Less than a month before he had prided himself on his self-control, now he found himself becoming frantic at the idea of Genevieve being betrothed. It didn’t matter whether it was to Yugh Delganor or to any other of the old men whose names he had just learned. Despite his concern, he was not so out of control as to forget that a frantic man is a careless man, a lesson every soldier learns soon or dies wishing he had learned sooner.

  All these concerns were simmering in his mind, like so much consomme, as yet unjelled, when he returned to his quarters to find a message from the lady in question: Could he help her find a dressmaker?

  Aufors sat upon his bed and laughed until tears ran from his eyes. He had planned on rank and privilege and an honorable retirement; he had struggled with the idea of seeking divine intercession; he had determined to assure Genevieve’s salvation; what he would actually do, for the love of heaven, was find a dressmaker!

  An hour or so later he was at
her door, ready to provide whatever help he could. She did not disappoint him in her response to his service.

  “Aufors, this is beneath your notice, and I would not ask except that I have no confidante here in Havenor. While I got on well with the Duchess Alicia, it’s not the sort of thing I want to ask a completely new acquaintance. You’re the one I know best—”

  He stopped her apologies with an upheld hand. “Genevieve, say no more about it. On my way here, I stopped at the home of one of my colleagues who has a pretty and well-dressed wife. Both of them are gregarious people who go about socially, so she knows what is needed. She gave me three names.” He handed her a card on which he had noted them down in a firm hand. “She says the first woman is totally trustworthy, though without much imagination. The last one is inclined to imagine rather more than she might wish, and she counsels a firm hand. She says in general the first woman does less with more, while the other two do more with less. The second name on that list dresses the Lady Charmante, consort of Prince Thumsort.”

  Genevieve surprised herself by giggling. “The … lady was very strikingly dressed at our dinner. If you had not told me what you told me, I’d never have known. Oh, Aufors, thank you. Father feels our first effort was so well received he must do another as soon as may be, and after that, who knows? A whole string of dinners, probably.” She sighed, looking down at her hands in her lap. “If Prince Thumsort comes again, I must learn more about fish and batfly fever! And, oh, I almost forgot, I have been invited to a concert by Duke Edoard. What does one wear to concerts here in Havenor?”

  “I’ll find out,” he murmured, examining her lowered face closely, though it gave very little away. She did not seem cheered at the thought of concerts or new dresses, which won his sympathies as he himself preferred less frippery in both men’s and women’s clothing. Her hands were tightly clenched, as though they fought for control. He decided to pry, just a little.