Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Dern cleared his throat. Three heads swiveled in his direction. “I don’t recall your ever mentioning that, Jamice, or you, Sam,” said Dern. There was iron under the velvet of his voice.

  Sam frowned and snapped, “What was there to mention? We don’t report negatives.”

  Jamice leapt in. “There was nothing to report, Dern. It was simply an anomaly. I’ve always assumed the higher production was due to the lower conflict rate. Which seems to be the case. At least, the two seem to fluctuate together.”

  “Are you attributing a causal factor to one or the other?” he asked gently, looking first at Jamice, then at Sam, then back to Jamice.

  Horgy didn’t give Jamice time to answer. “The production levels were high because they have the best leadership of any of the settlements, that’s all. All five of the leaders out there are absolute gems. Africa Wilm should be used as a paradigm.”

  “She is that,” said Sam with relief, glad to be off the hostility topic but wondering why he was attending this meeting. They all seemed to be getting along fine without him. They all knew everything he knew.

  Dern gave Horgy a polite you’re-out-of-order look and returned to Jamice. “A causal factor?” he demanded.

  Jamice flushed once more. “I can’t go that far. It’s a bird-and-egg question, Dern. When you only have one incident, you’d be a fool to predict on the basis of it. The fact is they fluctuated together. Production down, hostilities up. Or in reverse order. But it’s only happened once.”

  “Has anything else happened? Anything noteworthy?”

  “For heaven’s sake,” cried Zilia angrily, going off all at once in a clatter of wings, like a ground bird startled from its nest. “Of course something happened. Their God died.” She glared at Sam as though he’d personally committed deicide and then stared, red-faced, into her lap once more.

  “Bondru Dharm,” murmured Tandle, fishing the proper references up on the stages. “Perhaps we should not go so far as to call it ‘their God.’ ”

  “The Departed God that was there when you people settled,” amended Horgy with a nod to Sam. “You settlers probably have your own religion or religions, don’t you? Most of the Settlement One people are from Phansure, aren’t they, Sam? Phansure has lots of religions.”

  “They probably do,” Spiggy interjected in a gloomy voice. “Last thing they’d want would be a God who was actually present. Last thing anybody’d want would be a God who actually worked.”

  “Worked?” asked Jamice, sneering. “A God who worked? What do you mean, Spig?”

  Sam, seeing Spiggy drifting away again, said hastily, “Our people come from a number of backgrounds, but all of us had this thing, this so-called grief reaction, which lasted about ten days. We just blanked out. I hadn’t seriously considered it as the main factor in the production drop, but I suppose it could be the cause.”

  “If production dropped, and if your people out there had always taken pride in being number one,” Dern said, “could their chagrin and disappointment lead to annoyance? To hostility?”

  Sam shrugged, not pleased with the thrust of the conversation, but not able to refute it.

  Spiggy murmured, “You know it could.”

  “So?” Dern asked. “It could be causative?”

  “I suppose,” Sam admitted. “I suppose it could.”

  “It wasn’t,” Zilia murmured. “I know it wasn’t. It’s because they killed their God. Guilt, that’s what it was.”

  Silence. Against the wall, the blonde whispered to the brunette, and the two of them covered their mouths, either in laughter or in shock. The third girl stared at Zilia, as though she could not believe what she had heard.

  Dern said, “Zilia, that would be upsetting, if indeed, any such thing occurred. What makes you think it did?”

  “Because of the way they acted afterward. I don’t believe they grieved over the God. I’ve been out there. Nine-tenths of the people didn’t pay any attention to it at all. No, it’s something else. I think they killed it.”

  “How did we do that?” Sam asked in a dangerous voice.

  “Starved it, poisoned it, I don’t know.”

  “And who do you think did it? My sister? Maybe my mother?” Sam felt fury flooding upward from some central reservoir, felt himself becoming flushed, every muscle tightening. “Me?”

  “I don’t know who. You all had reasons.”

  “What reasons,” Sam thundered, infuriated by the holier-than-thou expression on Zilia’s face.

  “The God got in the way, it took up personnel, it …”

  “Shit,” said Jamice. “Do we have to put up with this utter, damnable nonsense from this silly woman!”

  Damn all paranoids, Tandle thought. Oh, somebody treat this damned Native Matters person or get her off our necks.

  The lights in the room seemed to pulse. Dern took a deep breath, rather more interested than otherwise. At least the current discussion was something new. “We’ve had no evidence of any such hostility, Zilia. Indeed, from everything we’ve ever heard, Settlement One took good care of its God. Right, Sam? I scarcely think that after thirty, almost thirty-five, years they would do any such thing.”

  He shook his head at Sam, apologetically, sighed in fatherly fashion, and went on, “Suppose you and Horgy and Jamice put your heads together, my boy, and see whether we need to take any action at Settlement One. Horgy and Jamice can fly out there and take a look.” Which would get them out of his hair for a few days, at any rate. Horgy had a good head and was reliably discreet. Dern could ask him to check around, see what people were saying about Sam. Though he had to admit, Sam looked fine. That’s really why Dern had had him come in, to look him over, see how he behaved around people. Nothing abnormal, so far as Dern could see. A little hostility, but then Zilia could do that to anyone.

  “I’ll go with them,” said Zilia. “I must.”

  “If you wish,” said Dern, annoyed. “All of you go, if you like. Make it a holiday.”

  “If that’s all you wanted me for …” murmured Sam, rising to his feet, longing for escape.

  Dern nodded, irritated at them all, without exception. “Sorry to have interrupted your work schedule, Sam. Give my best to your family,” and then when Sam had gone, “Zilia, that was really quite outrageous, even for you. Horgy, tell your girlies to go study the previous ten years’ production schedules. I don’t want them at another staff meeting until they know what’s going on. Jamice, stop fiddling with those things in your hair. It’s annoying. Now, Spiggy, if we’ve aggravated ourselves sufficiently over the crop shortfall, may we get on to the budget reports? What is this ridiculous set of figures listed under ‘Miscellaneous’?”

  At lunch, Tandle sat next to Spiggy and tried to keep him from vanishing under his own weight of woe. “What did you mean when you said the last thing anyone would want was a God who worked?” she asked, just to get him talking.

  He focused on her with difficulty. “Well, it is,” he said. “Early on, of course, it was assumed there were lots of gods who caused various things, and one needed access to them to propitiate them or ask them to undo what some other god had done or, in rarer cases, to say thank you. Since there were lots of them, one always had a god to go to if some other one was acting up. Not a bad state of affairs, really, very much the system Phansure has today. Of course, it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because some of the priests that rose up around the man-gods got carried away with their own greed or need for power.

  “So, some of them became prophets, each of them claiming his particular god—or some new one he’d thought up—was the biggest or the best or the only. Sometimes they said God was all-good or all-powerful or all-something-or-other or even, God knows, all-every-thing, which inevitably created dualism, because if God was all-everything, why did these contrary things keep happening? This required that man postulate some other force responsible for contrariness, either a sub-god or a bad angel or man himself, just being sinful, and that placed
man squarely in the middle of this cosmic battlefield, always being told it was his fault when things went wrong.

  “And as long as man was in the middle, nothing could happen but a kind of tug-of-war. Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized, and later on just before the Dispersion he was still doing it, making war like crazy, while praying for peace the whole time, of course.

  “Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy’s god to fight some other guy’s god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant, of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between different people’s ideas of god, depending on who’d won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle.

  “This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let’s kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren’t any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.”

  Tandle was deeply regretting she had ever asked the question, but by this time Spiggy was in full spate and couldn’t be stopped.

  “For example, during the middle years of the Dispersion, the three largest of the surviving tribal-retribution religions left Manhome, to unite and eventually become Voorstod. Nobody ever accused them of having a god that worked. And so far as I know, nobody has accused any human society of having a god that works!” Spiggy took a mouthful of stewed poultry-bird and dumplings and chewed, sadly, grieving over the state of mankind. “The ones on Phansure are among the best. They don’t do anything, but there’s always one of them around to blame.”

  Tandle, who had until now always believed herself to be quite respectful of religion in general, could think of no response to this and moved quickly to another topic of conversation.

  • While Preu Flan dry and his fellow conspirators had agreed to fulfill the desire of the prophets by luring Maire Manone back to Voorstod and possibly back to her husband and house, they had not yet agreed on the best way to accomplish this end. They believed it best not to mention the matter to Phaed Girat, not yet. Phaed might be dedicated to the Cause, but he had a streak of contrariness in him likewise. Better wait until Maire was back before telling old Phaed.

  Openly forcing the woman to return would be counterproductive. A forced return would be worse than no return at all. She must seem to return of her own free will, without any Voorstoders along, coming out of longing for her homeland and its people. “Have you heard?” they would ask in the taverns. “Maire Manone has returned to Scaery. She sang there just the other night.”

  To guarantee her cooperation, they could come up with no better plan than the abduction of one of Maire’s children or grandchildren as a hostage against her return and good behavior. They had not, however, decided yet which hostage would work best.

  “By now her son Sam’s a grown man,” said Mugal Pye in a judicious tone. “He’d be forty lifeyears if he’s a day. If he takes after Phaed, he could be hard to handle.” He sipped his ale and waited for comment. “Also, maybe he and his mam don’t get on all that well.”

  “Maire’s daughter Sal’s younger by some,” said Epheron Floom. “She’s what? Five years younger?” Epheron had lately become active in the Cause after some years spent out in the fatlands among the Ahabarians as a reporter for the Voorstod news, which was to say, as a spy for the prophets. He was youngish yet, smooth-faced, plump, and quiet looking, with dead-calm eyes and a naturally cruel nature.

  “Maire’s kept in touch with her mother’s sister here,” said Mugal Pye. “She’s sent messages from time to time. She’s mentioned that Sal has young kiddies. Two or three.”

  “Young ones and their mams are a problem,” Epheron opined. “Separate them, and you have trouble with them. Babies need a woman to keep them in good condition. That means we’d need to bring Sal as well, or come up with some woman here to keep the kids, and every extra mouth is a mouth that might talk. Besides, if anything happened to one of ’em, the word might get around. Dead babies aren’t what’ll bring the women back.”

  “We know Sam has a son,” said Preu Flandry. Preu was the oldest of them, his white hair and slightly lame right leg speaking of long years at risk. “A boy called Jep. Maire mentioned him thirteen or fourteen years ago, in messages to her aunt. There’s been no mention since, but likely she would have said something if he’d died. Likely if you brought him, Maire would behave herself.”

  “The boy’d be old enough to get along without his mam, but still young enough to be manageable,” agreed Mugal Pye.

  They went on arguing, with this one opting for Sam, and that one for Sal, and then changing their minds and settling on one or more of the children.

  “Whoever we take, we can keep them at Elsperh’s farm above Sarby,” said Mugal. “It’s well hidden in the hills; even if Ahabar sent troopers in from the sea, they wouldn’t look for a hostage there. And Maire never knew Elsperh, so she’ll have no thought where her offspring might be.”

  They thought about this for a time, exchanging specifics. How old was each of the children? Their plan might involve some mutilations before they were done, were the children strong enough to survive such treatment for however long it took?

  “Whoever we take, he or she or they’ll have to be carried or forced off Hobbs Land, either by subterfuge or by threat of harm,” said Mugal Pye. “Which means we’ll need a party of at least three or four to handle the matter. Why don’t we wait until we get there to decide who we take? There’s nothing like seeing the ground before we decide on tactics.”

  “Who will it be going from here, then? Who goes?”

  “There’s you two, and me,” said Epheron, “and I think some relative of Maire’s, just to make our inquiries seem natural.”

  “We’ll find someone, no fear,” said Preu. “Someone Maire knew, or at least knew of.”

  “Not Phaed?”

  “No, I think not.”

  They drank to the project, and laughed about it, and so set in motion the chain of events that would end with the taking, and possible killing, of someone’s child far from love and home and hope.

  Or perhaps they started the sequence that would only begin there.

  • Shallow under the soil, near the temple at Settlement One, straight fibers ramified into feathers and the feathers into lace, which reached beneath the houses and the storage yards, beneath the settlement buildings, beneath the old temples, out toward open country in a tenuous, cottony web which enclosed in its fibrous reticulation all the land from the temples north of the community to the fields in the south. Under roads and paths, where people walked and machines rolled, the web grew thick, almost feltlike, able to absorb the repeated pressure of men and their tools. Under the fields, it spread itself in random polygons, leaving and finding itself, again and again.

  As it spread, it encountered the gullies and channels of former, similar networks. Tiny canals led through clayey soil. Grooves had been cut along
subterranean strata. The rock-hard roots of stone-oaks had been bored through long ago by a million thread-thin fingers. The evidence was everywhere that other webs had gone this way before, but the new net did not care. It took the easy way, the path of least resistance, the way of former times. The net that had run in these channels before had been old and weak, barely able to hold itself and its environment together. Finally, it had died. The smell of that death still clung, the fragments of that dissolution were still present. Some places, recent places where the ancient and moribund net of Bondru Dharm had run, stank of it. The Birribat net was new and strong and full of questing. It did not pause to consider the past.

  Upon the hill, where the burying ground had been established by the earliest settlers, the web sent out curious wormlike extrusions to snout along old bones, to twist through dried skulls, to find a few rags and tatters, a few shreds of organic material. Nothing recent. Nothing of interest. Nothing usable.

  Under the temple where the children had labored, beneath the flat-topped pillar where a God had sat one time long past, the net sent fibers upward through hair-thin channels in the stone. Near the top they stopped, the end of each fiber sealing itself off into an oval button, hard as tooth and tiny as a grass seed.

  And in the thick, mattressy felt where Birribat had once lain, the hard, strange nucleus continued to grow, laid down molecule by molecule, aggregated as stalactites are aggregated, patient as time itself. At the center of the mass something was taking shape, growing faster the larger it got.

  • Maire Girat and Saturday Wilm went out into the countryside so that Saturday could practice vocalizing. Usually Saturday sang in the recreation hall, but Maire had told her that nothing contributed more to humility in a vocalist than to sing in the empty out-of-doors, where one’s voice went away into nothing at all, like a little wind blowing at elsewhere.

  When they had spent their usual time at it, she and Maire sat on the bank of the nameless little stream that flowed across the high ground west of Settlement One.