Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  They had all spoken at once, and Needly looked up into three intent, concerned, demanding faces. She flushed before saying plaintively, “Well, Xulai . . . Everyone has been very busy since we got back. Willum and I . . . we didn’t get a chance to tell you anything we did while we were . . . taken away. Not about our new cave or becoming official Namers and making up a ceremony to name the Griffins, not about our costumes or Willum’s drumming or sending all the Griffins to Tingawa, or about how Griffins have pockets to keep their eggs in and how we hid the eggs and hatched one of them and fooled Despos and sent him away to the north pole . . .”

  Abasio sat down with a thud. Xulai, paling visibly, sagged onto a chair and took a very deep breath. Precious Wind, reaching for her notebook, said in a firm voice betrayed by only a slight quaver, “There’s no time like the present, Needly. Why don’t we start with Despos and the north pole.” Her eyebrows went up, very far up. “That is, of course, unless you have a more consequential point of origin from which you prefer to begin?”

  “Wait just a moment,” said Abasio. “No sense making her tell us twice. I think Arakny and Wide Mountain Mother need to hear this.”

  ARAKNY AND WIDE MOUNTAIN MOTHER joined them to hear the naming saga, everyone seated on cushions or folding chairs drinking tea, after which Wide Mountain Mother had left them. She had gone, speechless, shaking her head slowly side to side as though she feared something was loose inside it. Precious Wind, however, made an excuse to delay Arakny.

  Arakny looked them over with a wry half smile. “You’re looking very portent-­ious. Is there some additional disaster you didn’t want Mother to know about?”

  Xulai took a deep breath. “Sit back down, Arakny, do. Take off your shoes, you’ve been twisting your feet about as though they hurt. It’s nothing like that. We don’t want to be thought intrusive, but we’ve been told Wide Mountain Mother won’t visit the Oracles. Is there a reason for her avoidance that we should be aware of before we go there?”

  Arakny frowned, sat down, removed her moccasins as suggested. “I don’t think Mother’s avoidance should influence you. They make her uncomfortable, so she chooses not to visit.” She crossed one leg over the other and rubbed distractedly at the foot she had sprained during the quake. “We tell the Oracles things we think are important, and they tell us it doesn’t matter. And conversely, they make remarks that to us sound incidental and even silly, but they do it in a manner that seems to indicate importance. Of course, they don’t say ‘this is important’ or tell us why it’s important, which rather destroys the value of their having said anything about it at all. We have been keeping meticulous records, however, and we’ve found some correlation between things they’ve mentioned and subsequent events, though sometimes there’s a very long elapsed time between the two. That can be very annoying—­especially to Wide Mountain Mother.”

  “Could you . . . give us an example?” Abasio asked.

  Arakny stared into the distance. “Oh, there was a thing over a year ago. We had taken them a load of food supplies as a gift. They’ve given us to understand that such gifts are ‘acceptable.’ You should understand that Mother is not immune to criticism by her ­people, and food is considered to be a tribal resource which should not be needlessly wasted. During the unloading—­they weren’t helping unload, they never help do anything, but they were standing by, supervising, I suppose—­anyway, two of them mentioned that it was raining in the mountains. Two of them, a few steps apart, two statements apropos of nothing separated by a few moments of time. ‘It’s raining in the mountains.’

  “We were not surprised that it was raining in the mountains. It often rains in the mountains. If there are any clouds over the mountains at all—­Stonies or Little Stonies—­chances are it’s raining. They didn’t tell us that as a consequence of this particular rain, the river was going to flood the plaza several days later during the Corn Festival.”

  Xulai murmured, “Corn Festival meaning lots of visitors? Dignitaries and so forth?”

  “All of that, plus some. Well, we’ve gradually learned to . . . to extrapolate what the implications of any such seemingly meaningless but repeated statement might be. Distant rain might affect us how? Free association leads us to disaster words like ‘drown’ and ‘flood’ and ‘washout.’ Then we might ask ourselves whose drowning might most upset us, or where a flood or washout in the near future would be particularly troubling? Among other suggestions, we might possibly come up with ideas such as While Wide Mountain Mother is crossing a bridge in the Little Stony Mountains, or While an important visitor is trying to reach us, or During Corn Festival in the plaza.”

  “Little Stonies being the small range just north of here? And difficulties which you couldn’t do anything about?” asked Xulai.

  “Oh, but we could! We could treat it as a mystery. We could pretend some enemy had set a trap for us, that rain had been given as a clue, and we could examine our routines to see what unpleasant event might occur as the result of rain. We could make sure Mother—­or any other clan leader—­didn’t traverse any route until it was checked. It was time to do that anyhow, though we’d intended to delay the routine for a while; we went ahead and had the maintenance teams check trails and bridges at once. Also, since we all know this place was built near the confluence of the Wickinook and the Chawook streams, we’d have a good water source . . .”

  Abasio said, “And since both these streams originate in the Little Stonies . . .”

  “Exactly! And finally, since many of us are old enough to remember this plaza has been flooded in the past, we could move the festival to higher ground, just in case!”

  Precious Wind murmured, “All of which, in fact, you did?”

  “Indeed. Most of it required only a revision of the schedule. We found the bridge over the canyon near Black Peak had a piece of timber under it that had been chewed in half by a packrat, or a pack of rats; the maintenance team found the only trail from Shangos’k’nee had been both blocked and collapsed by a big stone dislodged from the ridge above. It’s not a trail that’s in constant use, but it’s the only one that saves half a day’s foot travel from there to here.

  ”Men from half a dozen places volunteered to do a quick rebuild of the trail. It’s along a cliff side and dangerous if not shored up. The bridge got a new piece of timber—­after we dug out the packrat nest under it—­a monster nest, must have been hundreds of generations of rats. Normally the stream bed that separates the plaza from the men’s houses is just that, a dry or almost dry bed. However, when an infrequent very heavy rain comes down, it is likely to pick up all manner of things, a huge dead cottonwood, for example, which will inevitably hang up on something, somewhere, with brush and deadwood piling around it. The water level rises, and the plaza is slightly lower than all the houses around it. It was indeed flooded. As we had arranged to hold the festival somewhere else, it was no great problem. It has flooded before, and we have little flood dams to put at the bottom of all the doors to keep the water from running into the houses. For that very reason, the lower parts of the walls around the plaza are laid up in stone, not adobe.”

  “I see,” said Xulai. “Telling you without telling you could be very irritating.”

  “It can indeed,” Arakny said, throwing up her hands. “I should point out, however, that no one’s life would have been endangered if we had not corrected these things. The bridge was a long way from breaking; the trail block was obvious from a distance; both of these would have been routinely corrected within a short time. The flood would have been fatal to no one. It’s not that we can’t deal with the Oracles, but all this allusive maybe/maybe-­not hinting at things seems foolish, particularly when you consider that the mention of rain was only one of about six similar mentions, and none of the others seemed to have any relevance whatsoever. It makes life difficult for Wide Mountain Mother. She says she has to feel . . . omniscient in order to do her job, even t
hough she knows she isn’t. I confess I don’t really understand what she means.”

  “I do.” Abasio looked up with a rueful grin. “Getting things done requires a competent person to give the orders and competent ­people to follow them. When I visited Ghastain it was apparent the king liked a lot of marching and flag-­waving by his army. I’d never seen an army before. Anyhow, I noticed the insignia they wear. It’s called a chain of command, and they told me it indicates who can get orders from above and give orders lower down. It reminded me that Xulai’s father once told me he lost ‘the power of command’ during his wife’s long illness. He said he couldn’t summon it up. He was too involved with her suffering.”

  Arakny exclaimed, “That must be it! Mother said the Oracles made her feel incapable! I hadn’t thought about giving life-­and-­death orders while feeling unsure of oneself! If there’s anything the Oracles are good at, it’s confusing ­people!”

  She fell silent, unconsciously kneading the sore foot, remembering that she was possibly next in line to be Mother-­Most of the clan. Set the thought aside! Oh, please let Mother live forever or get the clans to elect someone else Mother-­Most for life. Please! Even though I can’t think of anyone but me who would do the job very well!

  “To answer your original question, no, I don’t think Mother’s refusal to go to the Oracles is anything you should worry about. You and Abasio are doing very well, supremely well. You will not do it the way the Oracles would, but that simply doesn’t matter.”

  “What are they like?” asked Xulai. “Appearance, manner, speech . . .”

  “If you see someone in bright clothes, that’s one of the servants. They’re young to middle-­aged adults, and they’re quiet. Evidently they work for a season, then go home for a season, in rotation. They say the pay is good and the work light. They aren’t our ­people. Most of them come from farther east, where there’s good farm country. Their only duties are to keep the caves clean. The House of the Oracles is actually a cave.

  “The Oracles wear gray robes with names embroidered on the shoulder, which is a good thing—­they look identical. It’s best if you don’t ask them any questions at all. Pursuing a question makes them disappear. Do not ever ask ‘why?’ They seemingly can’t deal with why . . .

  “Let’s see, what else? The rooms they give human guests are fully equipped for human use. We started with the assumption they were male and female, no particular reason except one does label things in accordance with custom. Either the males are clean-­shaven or they don’t grow facial hair or they aren’t sexed at all. No one of us has ever seen them unclothed. We’ve never seen a child among them. They may very well be identical. We have wondered if they take the shape of whatever ­people they are with.”

  “They’re not like Dervishes, then,” said Abasio. “I’d thought they might be.”

  “Dervishes?” asked Arakny.

  “It’s one of those dreams he mentioned,” said Xulai, giving him a fond look. “He’s been floating around in some other world in his dreams.”

  “Really?” Arakny gave Abasio a keenly interested look. “That Lom world you were talking about? Where the starships went?”

  “You said you didn’t know that Lom is a place-­name on the world where the ships went from the Place of Power,” said Precious Wind. She was staring at Abasio as though she had suddenly decided to dissect him.

  “They’re just dreams,” he said, uncomfortable beneath that penetrating gaze. “I may have heard the name somewhere. I don’t remember how it came up . . .”

  Xulai reached over to take his hand. “You were explaining to Willum and me that the ­people in your area, where you grew up, believed that most of the ­people on Earth had flown to the stars in starships.”

  Needly came from the wagon holding a cup and a cloth and approached Arakny. “Let me put some of this on your foot.” She knelt down and bathed the foot in the whatever it was and unbuckled the other shoe, saying, “Let’s put some on the other foot as well. As soon as it dries, you can put the shoes on, and I’ll leave the cup here. You can put it in a bottle and keep it if you’d like to use it again.”

  Arakny sniffed at the stuff, looking puzzled. The foot Needly had bathed felt warm, almost hot. And the pain had gone. She picked up the cloth and cup and did as Needly had suggested with the other foot. “Xulai, was it you who told Abasio about Dervishes and the other Gamesmen on Lom?”

  “No!” Xulai cried. “How could I? I’ve never heard of Gamesmen. All I told him was what little I remembered of the messages from the ships that were received in Tingawa.”

  Arakny stared into nothing for a long moment, then said matter-­of-­factly, “There were two ships; one landed in a valley, one on a flat mountain. Valley ship you can forget. All the females left that ship when it landed, and the men stayed behind to start what they called the University, which blew itself up a few generations after landing. The mountain ship has never stopped functioning, however. They’re still training cadres of technical ­people every generation, and they’ve continued to maintain the ship and provide information.”

  Xulai had stopped moving, eyes wide. She cried, “Information until now? I wasn’t told that any of the receivers here on Earth were still functioning.”

  Arakny shrugged. “So far as I know, they aren’t. The current information comes directly into the library helmets through what they call a ‘wormhole alternate communications link.’ The helmet ­people pronounce it ‘whack-­el’: W-­H-­A-­C-­L.”

  Precious Wind stood, slowly turned. “Arakny, are you saying Earth is still receiving information from one of the two ships that went to a place named Lom at the time of the Big Kill?”

  “Right. The two ships that were built on the moon over a millennium ago by the Place of Power. About a quarter of the ­people working on the project were your countrymen, Tingawans.” Arakny slipped her feet into the moccasins, took a ­couple of steps away, testing for pain. None. “Needly, what was in that stuff? Never mind. Tell me later.” She turned her back on them, running her fingers through her hair, pressing her head for a long moment as though to ease an unpleasant memory.

  “The ­people from the Place of Power were never comfortable neighbors. Still, we had always tried to get along with them, and after the ships went, some of the ­people from the Place of Power moved down in our area and some went up toward Fantis, where, I’m told, they joined up with the Edgers.”

  “That’s all the Edgers needed,” snarled Abasio. “More highly destructive technical expertise. But I suppose everyone from there had to go somewhere else.”

  Arakny laughed. “Actually, not, Abasio. Most of the ­people are still there, in the town of Golden-­trees. It’s quite nice, really.”

  Precious Wind murmured, “From your tone, I assume it has become . . . ordinary. That’s all and the end of the Place of Power? It’s ordinary.”

  “Yes,” Arakny agreed. “Except a few amusing footnotes. At least I find them so. There were at least two other ships sent from Earth to Lom, or Lom’s planet, that were built elsewhere.”

  Xulai cried, “Ships no one knew about? Arakny, how in the world did they . . . ?”

  Arakny smiled, shaking her head. “Since the Big Kill, ­people on this side of our planet forget there are ­people on the other side of our planet. The Place of Power wasn’t the only enclave that managed to survive the Big Kill. The area called Yurope sent off at least two ships, small ones, carrying only a few hundred ­people each.” She stopped, grinned widely, and said, “Now, you’ll think I’m telling you a fairy tale, but it’s a favorite thing of mine. One of the ships from Yurope carried an entire marching band to Lom. The band belonged to the royal family of a tiny principality only a few miles across: it had nothing in it, no business, no agriculture, no anything except places for ­people to gamble.”

  Abasio nodded. “The only thing I know about gambling is that whe
n Grandpa was younger and the town had a tavern, he and his friends used to gamble for toothpicks. Everyone started with twenty or fifty or whatever, and the one who ended up with the fewest toothpicks had to buy the beer for the others.”

  Arakny smiled. “Well, this family gambled real money, not toothpicks. The head of the family, the prince, didn’t gamble, but he took a share from those who did: enough for this family to build a ship and put it in orbit and send it to Lom . . .”

  “How could they send it to the same world?” cried Precious Wind. “The Place of Power destination was a secret! It was kept secret from everyone, because of the Big Kill!”

  “They no doubt bribed someone to obtain the planet location just as they bribed someone for the technology that let bodies and minds survive the thousand-­year voyage. The ‘mind survival’ technique is very similar to the ‘helmet technology.’ The mind is stored; the body is preserved; the mind is fed back into the body when the trip ends. The prince and his family and his band and the families of the band members went to Lom, just as the Place of Power ships did, and they very definitely got there. Mountain-­ship messages referred to them, saying things like ‘The Band marched through School Town yesterday.’ ”

  “Where are you getting this information?” cried Precious Wind. “Where’s all of it coming from?”

  Xulai interrupted, “Yes, Arakny, please. You’re telling us things we’re utterly ignorant of. I think we deserve to know . . .”

  Arakny made patting, “sit down and listen” motions. “Don’t get all ruffled! I’m one of Artemisia’s librarians. On the surface Artemisia is a simple society. We do things in very simple ways. Our apparent simplicity gave us protective coloration that helped us survive the Big Kill. Seeing how primitive we were, no one suspected us. However, under the simple surface, Artemisia has a number of highly technical . . .” She paused, searching for a word.

  “Inclusions?” suggested Precious Wind.

  “Very well. Inclusions. We call the things we’re given ‘library helmets.’ The ­people who give them to us call them Universal Receivers. The library helmets are the most sophisticated information-­gathering-­and-­disseminating devices ever invented—­that anyone on Earth has seen, at least. Don’t ask about the power source, because I have no idea. For all I know, it might actually be sunlight, more—­or less—­specifically, starlight. Maybe they’re fueled by the information itself.”