“I was there, nonetheless.”
“No, you weren’t,” Allison coldly replied. The citizen seemed hurt, so she added more softly, “You have to participate to understand. You should come, next time.”
“Will you trust me, if I come?”
Allison smiled in spite of herself.
“It reminded me of a Buddhist meditation hall,” Kyoko went on, “but there, no communication is expected among the meditators.”
“But communication is the key thing. You do it through ‘emptiness,’ we through ‘silence.’”
Kyoko laughed in delight at this analogy and caressed the hair of one of her daughters, who were showing signs of restlessness at last.
Allison let them return to their supper. She wondered about the Buddhists and Quakers in UNI, and whether they lived “in the world, but not of it,” as George Fox used to do. Of course, the modern Quakers would be very different from Foxfielders, as different as Foxfield was from the world George Fox knew. Still, they were Friends; how would they answer the Light?
VII. Informal Education
On Friday Allison continued the roof repairs and tried to catch up with the Tech Center backlog. Seth’s absence depressed her, and the System relayed calls which unnerved her. People would call from bizarre places with equally bizarre questions which meant little to Allison except distraction from her work. After a while she placed a twenty-credit premium on acceptance, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it succeeded with little effect on her own credit level. The only questor who ignored it announced a referendum of some sort on a “Senior Self-determination Factor.” She had no idea what that meant, either, and was too busy watching Deltron to bother to find out.
That anti-eve, Dave sat on the floor with Rufus, trying with little success to tie the wurraburra’s eyefeet into knots.
“Dave?”
“What, Mom?”
Allison crouched beside him and held out his credometer. “Dave, I think you can have this back now. There will be certain restrictions, though—”
The boy tensed and gripped the wurraburra till it squealed. “I don’t want it, Mom.”
“You don’t? Listen, Dave—”
“I don’t want it. What if they come to kill me in there, or Rufus?”
“Now, Dave,” she began softly, “you know that can’t happen. It’s all just images in there, like the videocaps, right? Besides, you don’t have to go near the transcomm if you don’t want to.” And besides, she thought, no one could get away with calling her son an unproductive citizen.
By Saturday, a warm, summery air mass rested like a blanket over Georgeville and surrounding fields. It was a good morning to clean out the chicken coop behind the house, as Allison was doing.
She paused to stretch a moment and wiped her hands on her muddy overalls. Around the house, bushes seemed to have sprung up overnight, alive with rustling shapes and flying creatures which swarmed over the hill. The fibers of ground moss had grown into a tough, springy mass which became tricky to walk upon. Above the Center complex the radio telescope dish gleamed, a tantalizing reminder of projects which she had set aside for now.
Noreen’s weekly newscast carried over from the radio in the kitchen. The UNI encounter took up most of this week’s coverage, followed by the Tech Center accident. “Influenza outbreak,” it went on, “sends six children home from school in Blydentown…’Mensal Fractions converge in record numbers in the northern fields…Our latest forecast made possible by the new WEATHERCAST program: rain will hold off as warm front moves in, but electrical activity will shoot up early next week…”
The broadcast closed with the regular theme, an old American Shaker time. “’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free…” Dave had a good ear, and he sang along with the radio as he mopped the kitchen floor before hiking across Georgeville to give a hand on Aunt Anne’s farm. As Allison shoveled yet another load of organic filth into the recycler, she reflected that he had good reason to be cheerful, since she had let him off on this job for once. Those hens produced more dirt than eggs, that was for sure.
A bright object caught her eye as it settled downward through the sky. Allison stared in dismay at the shuttle; was Kyoko back again? Why had she not used the transcomm? Allison ran inside to rinse off and changed into a denim skirt and blouse. She slipped out the front door in time to see Casimir Stroem, the biosphere analyst, walking up the hill. Why should he be here, she wondered; to check out the storm damage which he had failed to prevent?
The citizen’s cherubic curls shone in the rising sun. Wings on his ankles would turn him into Mercury, Allison thought, as she twirled a wisp of her own brown hair.
“Hello,” she said, “I’m sorry; I had no idea you were coming. I was tending the hens; hope I don’t smell too bad.”
“No problem.” His grin was infectious. “I would have called, but you raised your credit barrier to such a level that I figured it wasn’t worth the expense.”
She half smiled. “Got to get work done somehow. Tell me what else I’ve been up to lately.”
“Not sure I dare. I heard about what Kyo did to you the other day, though. The clothes, I mean.”
“Oh, that.” Allison shrugged. “Most impressive.”
“We had a good laugh over it. On Kyo’s account, I mean; she’s so particular on details. I could have warned her off, though personal taste is a slippery business. Hope I haven’t done any worse, myself.”
She examined his “local” outfit: short brownish jacket, trousers nondescript gray, of uncertain material.
“I fed in data,” he added, “on a hundred specimens observed, then asked the System to generate a ‘typical’ suit and…you don’t like it.”
“Oh, it’s not bad. For a first approximation. You might try Jem’s place sometime. He’s the tailor in Georgeville.”
They both laughed. Casimir asked, “Is Friend Seth here today? I’d like to learn more about those commensals.”
“Seth is away.” Allison looked intently into his face. “Some of us feel…unsettled by recent events.”
“Of course.” He quietly added, “You must have expected that.”
“We had little chance to ‘expect’ anything. It’s you who’ve been watching us for ages.”
“Just four years, from hundreds of kilometers out—no substitute for good fieldwork. Did you say you were tending poultry? Do you keep any other livestock?”
“Only chickens, for eggs. We’ve got a vegetable garden, too. Would you like to see?”
She led him around back to point out the rows of tomato plants and scrawny bean stalks, with a few meter-long yellow beans dangling. “Have to get after Dave to pick those,” she apologized. “But it’s nice to have extra greens when in season. Here are the chickens.”
She unlatched a wire gate and three hens waddled out into the enclosure. “Come on, Abby, that’s a good girl…”
Casimir clicked his fingers at them, and one came over to investigate.
“That one’s Shadrach. She’s the ornery one.”
“Quite a name for a fowl.”
“David named them Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego after he left them out one antinight and they nearly fried to death.” Allison sighed. “They are a nuisance. Resource Committee periodically urges us to give them away because we can’t get them to lay more than once a week. But Dave always throws a fit. He’s lonely out here.”
“Most of your families are larger, aren’t they?”
Allison frowned. “That’s what Ministry and Counsel gets after me for.”
Casimir attracted the clucking birds like a Pied Piper. “Do you eat their meat?” he asked.
She shuddered. “No, we recycle them, like human bodies. Do you?”
“We have something called ‘cultures’ which are roughly like animal flesh grown as a plant; there are many varieties. You have no burial rites, then?”
“In the ground, you mean? Heavens, no; that stopped when they left on the Plowsha
re. Of course all fertilizer goes to the ground eventually, including the ’mensal stuff.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry Ghareshl’s not here; I think she’s up north, conjoining at last.”
“The mating process?” Casimir asked. “Why do commensals all migrate northward before conjoining?”
“Because that’s where the Splints have to be ‘born.’ Splints form as seed embryos within a postconjunctive Fraction, who deposits them in the ground. They sprout and grow like plants until autumn, when the daylight hours wane. This signal induces root conversion to motile pseudopods so that the organism can pull free from the soil.
“But if she sprouts too far south, where the sun varies less, limiting daylength will occur too late or not at all.”
“So what happens then?”
Allison winced. “I’ve never witnessed a case, myself. Seth has. I understand it’s a very slow death, like asphyxiation over a month or so.”
“So they really did evolve from plants, then,” Casimir mused. “But why the mind’s eye would a plant evolve to be motile, and more incredible still, intelligent as well?”
“That’s hard to say. I think plantlike species in general are more complex here than on Earth.”
“Which is complex enough.”
“But you should read Rachel Coffin’s essay in the Records. She thought that at the time of the last ice age the uprooting of plants in the north would have enabled migration to warmer climates, and provided greater access to secondary nutrient supplies by scavenging.”
“Couldn’t be otherwise,” Casimir agreed, “as far as nourishment goes, since true plants can’t ever get up enough energy by photosynthesis to move around like animals.”
Allison sighed. “I know the feeling. At times I’m convinced that I’m a ‘true plant.’”
He chuckled. “Join the club: Homo iners, ‘lazy man,’ first true plant to evolve from a higher mammal. Coffin’s theory sounds good,” he added, “although it fails to explain why similar phenomena have not been observed on Terra or other planets.”
Just then Rufus scampered over the ground and climbed like a monkey to Casimir’s shoulder.
“That beast really does go for you,” Allison observed. “It tends to avoid me, as a rule.”
He pushed an eyefoot away from his face. “As I said, there’s no accounting for taste—” As he tried to settle the creature, his foot caught in the web of moss, and he nearly lost balance. He bent down to pull at the fibers. “This stuff is deceptively strong,” he said.
“That’s right,” Allison agreed, “and its roots reach many meters down. Even commensals can barely digest it, with all their fancy chemistry.”
“What sort of digestion do they have?”
“It’s like a chemical factory which performs millions of chemical transformations on demand. Give a ’mensal a few molecules of virtually any organic compound, and she’ll produce it in quantity, usually within minutes.”
“Mind’s eye, how do they manage it?”
“You tell us. You’re the modern scientist,” she pointed out. “Rachel thought that they might use magnetic resonance to observe chemical reactions. You familiar with that? The atomic nuclei and electrons align like magnets with an applied field, in two or more energy levels—it’s a quantum effect. Then you induce transitions with radio frequencies, and the spectrum is highly sensitive to chemical composition.”
“Yes,” said Casimir, “we still use the technique as a diagnostic tool. But how would a commensal make a radio transmitter, or a high-field magnet? The planetary field? Granted a hundred gauss is strong as planets go, but still the resonance energies would be very weak.”
“A biologist thought this up, remember.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Commensals can sense a magnetic field,” Allison pointed out.
“So can Terran magnetotactic bacteria,” said Casimir. “They grow tiny crystals of magnetite, and the cells orient along field lines. But that’s a far cry from what you propose.”
“The Dwelling,” said Allison, “is located over a region of anomalously high field strength. Why do you suppose that is—a matter of taste?”
He smiled as he tucked down the restless wurraburra’s eyefeet once more. “I wouldn’t put it past them. What maximum does the field strength reach?”
“We don’t know. We’ve never been allowed to measure it, since electronics of any sort interfere with Dwelling purposes. We do know that commensals communicate by chemisense; that is, bursts of volatile compounds with structural information tags which convey complex networks of ideas in an instant.”
“That sounds like a flexible system, with fewer linear constraints than human speech. What sort of ‘brain’ do commensals have? Are they smarter than we are?”
Allison shrugged. “Who knows? They think differently, more in terms of probabilities than of discrete events.”
“Have they got families? Culture? Formal education?”
Allison laughed. “Formal education? What a quaint idea. Do you have ‘formal education’?” she challenged.
“Not that you’d recognize,” he admitted. “Everything works through the System. Children pass a series of tests, usually by age fifteen to twenty-five, and then they become ‘mature citizens.’ Beyond that there are endless forms of education.”
“Life is endless education,” she agreed.
The wurraburra refused to keep still, but would not be put down, either.
“Does a commensal have a brain, a central nervous system?”
“I guess so. I’ve never cut one open; don’t suppose anybody has.”
“Something taboo? For a corpse, I mean.”
The question irritated her. “I don’t know. We never see them dead, for one thing.”
“Do they bury their dead?”
“Of course not. They would scavenge it, probably. But they don’t usually—” She stopped.
“Yes?”
“Commensal Fractions rarely die up here.”
“Where do they die?”
“I’m not sure that I would call it ‘death,’ exactly.”
The citizen raised an eyebrow. “A supernatural state?”
That hit a nerve. “What are you trying to say?” Allison demanded. “What do you think of us, just because we’re religious? There’s plenty of mystery in the natural world—”
He threw up his hand. “All right, all right, I stuck my neck out. Truce?”
Allison nodded. “We still don’t know much about the Dwelling, the central core of the One. Coral Vale was founded fifty years ago in order to increase our understanding of it, but so far they’ve made little headway.”
Rufus flopped to the ground and scampered over to the back door. The wurraburra flung itself against the door, screaming in terror. Allison promptly let it in to the house.
“What was that all about?” Casimir asked. “Did I hurt it, somehow?”
“I doubt it.” She looked up and surveyed the hill. Sure enough, she caught sight of a familiar Fraction approaching around the house. “Yshrin is here! Rufus is scared to death of Yshrin, ever since…”
Allison took a closer look. “I take it back; she’s not Yshrin, at least not entirely.”
“What do you mean?”
“See the deep fissure down the stalk? It’s not fully sealed yet. She must have conjoined yesterday or the day before.”
“How far north? They don’t seem to travel fast.”
“Georgeville is just far enough north, unfortunately, and farther north there’s still frost this early in the season. One spring a conjoining started just outside of town, and the whole settlement had to be evacuated. Do you know Transac yet?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Let’s find out who she is.”
“Which Fractions conjoined, you mean?”
“Sure; which memories she has. Conjoining is a kind of education, you know, especially for a Splint who does it for the first time.”
“So much for formal education,” he muttered dryly.
Allison gazed at the creature’s eye, set like a jewel in the frontal fissure. She saw her own image reflected a thousand times over in its mirrorlike components, and recalled a saying of the One, “The One Eye has many faces.”
“Know me?” Allison signaled.
The commensal responded, “Remember odors, form, Plant-spike.”
“Name Al-lis-on Thorne (Plant-spike). What is your name?”
“One Organism.”
“Which Fraction?”
“Lherin.” A coronal fold opened to reveal a cluster of new scent pods.
“Marvelous,” said Allison aloud, “that’s one less thing I’ll have to explain all over again. David?” she called. “He must be out by now. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She ran off to the kitchen to fetch a jar for the new pods. When she returned, Lherin was conversing with the biosphere analyst.
“You new from sky,” signaled Lherin.
“How do you know?” asked Casimir.
“Strong energy waves.”
Allison asked, “Waves disturb you, Lherin?”
“Disgusting, but tolerable,” the Fraction reassured her.
Casimir asked, “What do you know of ship in sky?”
“Place where World goes away.”
“Comes back,” Allison reminded her. Ghareshl for sure, but who else?
“No matter,” Lherin signaled. “Some world-forms fun to make disappear.”
Allison groaned; that was Yshrin. “Remember Tech Center, place of many wave-forms? Place of Danger for Fractions.” And to be a nuisance at times.
At this point Lherin folded up her whole corona except for several inner tendrils which escaped at the tip to signal, “‘One exists, you exist, World exists.’”
“‘Existence affirmed,’” Allison signaled. “You have to reply correctly,” she told Casimir, “or else she’d go away. Well, two down, three to go.”
She drew a blank on Friends Meeting and other subjects which Rashernu might have recalled. That was inconclusive, though, since not all memories would be retained by each postconjunctive Fraction.
“Know far jungles?”
Still Forms On Foxfield Page 9
