“You can’t count Alladora’s work,” Sociology interrupted. “Her treatment of the desert nomad myths demonstrates scandalously poor methodology.”
“Yes, you can,” Comparative History snapped. “Her conclusions are absolutely correct, and her insights into the repeated motifs of occult wisdom from sources as diverse as the Archipelago epic chants and — ”
Terricel couldn’t afford to have his proposal taken over by an ongoing departmental feud. He remembered stories of other presentations, when committee members had so diverted the discussion that the candidate was failed for an incomplete proposal.
“If we didn’t arise here,” he began again in a loud voice, “then where did we come from? The few studies that address the issue of our origins have been essentially negative — studies of what isn’t there. But there’s one source of information they haven’t examined.”
Terricel placed his hands on the table and leaned forward for emphasis. He was sweating hard, but at least he’d stopped shaking. “And that’s our oldest artifact, the Starhall itself. What it will tell us is that we didn’t come here from someplace halfway across the night sky, we came from a place very much like Harth — ”
Ancient History leaned forward with an expression of predatory interest. “Describe the mathematics of this dimensional relationship.”
Don’t let the question throw you! Terricel stumbled through a superficial explanation. He knew to expect irrelevant questions, even misleading ones. They were testing his poise as well as his knowledge.
It came back to him now, that night so long ago when he’d dared to creep into the Starhall alone. As he’d made his way past the public areas, he swore silently that he wasn’t crazy, he wasn’t a coward and he would show them all, his mother and the Councillors and everyone.
Darkened passageways gaped at him and shadows turned ordinary objects into eerie shapes, but still he continued. The weight of hundreds of years, all the layers of wall and ornament, bracing and expansion, seemed to bear down on him. His breath rasped in his throat, loud enough to wake a sleeping guard, but no alarm came.
Deeper and deeper he’d gone, down one flight of stairs and then another. More than once he’d thought of turning back, and each time he’d stood against the wall, knees trembling, gulping air, fighting back the growing vertigo, until he was able to force himself on. At last he came to a landing, deep underground, dimly lit, the air gauzy with dust and cobwebs, and then he could go no farther. He told himself there was nothing more to find, but even then he did not believe it.
There was something hidden under the Starhall, he felt it then as he did now, in every nerve and fiber of his body. He had thought to face it as a child, whatever it was, face it and conquer it. But when he stumbled home, retching and sweat-soaked, the feeling had not vanished. The following morning, when he accompanied his mother to the Starhall, the sensation of prickling unease had been replaced by sudden, whirling nausea and bone-deep shivers.
Terricel pulled himself back to the present. From the partly-opened windows came the muted sounds from the courtyard below. Someone called out, the words indistinct. Boot heels clattered on paved walkways. His head spun for a moment with the overwhelming normality of it all — students rushing to classes, masters examining candidates. But things were not normal: Pateros had been cut down in plain day, and Laurea would never be the same again.
“Are we to understand,” Sociology asked slowly, “that you propose excavating the Starhall — physically dismantling the oldest and most revered structure in all of Laurea — not to mention the risk of disrupting vital government functions — now, at a time of national crisis — all this, on the basis of a highly questionable theory?”
“Yes, there’s a certain amount of...of disassembly that must be done,” Terricel stammered. “Removing the wooden paneling, maybe, and some of the plaster.”
Even as he spoke, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. He shouldn’t be debating how much damage might be done to the Starhall, he should be — he couldn’t think what he should be doing. He glanced at Wittnower, hoping for some sign, but met with only a bland, impassive stare.
“We won’t know how deep the artifact lies,” he went on, praying he sounded more clearheaded than he felt. “Not until we actually dig. I want to get beyond the foundations and there’s already been some — I’d work at night and there wouldn’t be any disruption — maybe a little inconvenience, but it’s not as if — ”
“And you have the Senate’s permission for this?” asked Modern History.
“Well, no. I didn’t want to apply until I had an approved topic.”
“And have you consulted a gaea-priest as to the ecological correctness of this action?”
“I didn’t think — ”
“You mean you kept your scheme a secret?” Classical History demanded. “Why was that?”
“More to the point, is there any historical precedent to your proposed excavation?” Sociology asked.
Stammering, Terricel tried to address their questions. Facts and arguments slipped through his grasp. His thoughts disintegrated into gibberish. His voice stumbled on and on, but every point he thought of, no matter how rational it seemed, only made things sound worse.
Afterward, he couldn’t even remember what he’d said.
o0o
They let him leave the room while they debated his fate. He leaned against the smooth, white-plastered wall and shut his eyes. He couldn’t hear anything through the door.
A few junior students wandered by. Terricel recognized them from the beginning courses he tutored. One of his friends from History, a tall redhead named Ralle, paused, looked at the door with a pained but sympathetic expression, clapped Terricel on one shoulder, and continued on his way without a word.
He shifted from one foot to the other, debating if he should just leave. He’d learned to master his body during those long years at the Starhall. If only he could control his emotions as well.
Finally, the door opened. Wittnower stood there, one hand on the latch, his expression unreadable. His eyes seemed blank, tired.
The committee began filing out, heads up, eyes level. They glanced briefly at Terricel, as if they were passing him in a hallway on the way to yet another lecture. Acknowledging his existence, nothing more.
“Come in, sit down,” said Wittnower.
Terricel’s hands were wet and cold. He kept them under the table.
Wittnower lowered himself into the nearest seat, turned it so they were almost facing, and ran his fingers through the meager fringe of his hair. Terricel stared at his teacher’s hands, the age-mottled skin draped over the tendons except where the arthritic knuckles pulled it taut and shiny. There was an ink-flecked callus on the inside of the right index finger. Terricel thought his own hands would look like that in another fifty years.
“I never cease to wonder at the eternal optimism of the young.”
“It was that bad?”
The old man sighed. “What are we going to do with you?”
“If I fail, I fail like everyone else.”
“Have I said the proposal was a failure?” The wooden joints creaked as Wittnower straightened in his chair. “It was delivered with far more passion than precision, but so are many others, and, I might add, for the good. Would we want masters’ projects no one cared about? I warned you when you first suggested this subject, and a few days ago I reminded you again, but no, you insisted on a topic that relies on evidence you cannot possibly obtain.”
“That’s not true!” Terricel burst out. “You said it would be difficult, not impossible. Besides, the evidence is all there, under the Starhall.”
“Suppose the priests gave their blessing and the Senate agreed to allow the excavation — and after all that, you found nothing but a pile of rusty framing — ”
“But there is something! There must be — I know there is — ”
“What if, by some perverse and wildly improbable mischance, you prove to be mista
ken? Have you considered what would happen then? I assure you, the committee has.”
Terricel brushed the question aside. “Worst-case scenario, then — I’d prove it wasn’t a starship. We didn’t come from another planet. It’s worth the degree to eliminate that hypothesis.”
“All it would cost you is the difference between a brilliant thesis and a mediocre one.”
“So what’s your point? That it would cost someone else more if I’m wrong?”
If I were anyone else, anyone else at all, they’d let me try. It would be my own responsibility if I was wrong. But I’m Esme’s son...
He could fight Wittnower, he could fight the committee. He could even fight Esme herself. But how could he fight what she meant to Laurea?
Terricel’s shoulders sagged. Even if the department gave its approval, the Senate would never agree. He must have been smoking ghostweed to think they might. “I guess I’m out of History.”
Wittnower waved one hand in negation. “We’re not such bullies, and you’re not such a bad student. We’re giving you a ‘no show.’“
Terricel blinked, then digested the words. ‘No show’ — just as if he hadn’t come. As if the morning had never happened.
If this were another time, he could begin again. Begin where Wittnower told him to, with a topic of guaranteed success. In another semester or two, when things had settled down in Laurea, he’d pretend he’d never seen those ancient log books. He’d slog his way through the standard literature searches and put together a coherent presentation. He’d come before the committee again. It would be a scene out of memory, with the mint tisanes and scones, the imperceptibly nodding heads. This time they would shake his hand as they filed past, shake his hand and smile.
Another time... But there would never be another time.
Everywhere he turned, Esmelda was there. Looking down at him from the University walls. Lurking in the minds of the masters. Not merely Esmelda the University Senator, but Esmelda of Laurea, Esmelda who had saved the city. He’d been a fool to think an academic career, or anything else, would give him a life of his own.
Chapter 9
Only a few days ago, the suite Terricel shared with the other History candidates had been as familiar as his own bedroom. Now, as he drifted to his desk, he stared at the partition walls as if he’d never seen them before. As usual, the rooms hummed with activity — study groups, junior students being tutored, somebody calling for coffee or asking everyone to be just a little quieter, please, some people were trying to work.
He sat down in his chair and stared at the clutter on his desk, the piles of references and outlines. The mess looked only vaguely familiar and yet, although he’d never noticed it before, reminiscent of Esmelda’s ubiquitous piles. The sheet of notes he’d made on the mathematics of inter-dimensional space was incomprehensible, the handwriting a stranger’s.
Nearby, a handful of students raised their voices, carried away in debate.
“You’ve got it all wrong! Solstice means changing of the ‘seasons,’“ said one student, a dark-eyed girl. “It’s clearly an allegorical construct to explain the passages in a human lifetime.”
“The ancients weren’t that sophisticated,” said one of the boys. “Sol was their god, who was born each year at the Solstice and then sacrificed at Midwinter. Otherwise there’s no difference between the two festivals. And certainly no esoteric significance. It’s all just an excuse to get drunk and party in the streets.”
Terricel remembered having almost exactly the same conversation with his own friends. He could predict the argument phrase for phrase, point and counterpoint. Any moment now one of them would start talking about reverence for the natural harmony and the preservation of the environment.
“You don’t have to posit the existence of a god to recognize the importance of preserving your ecological balances,” the second boy said, right on cue. It was practically a direct quote from the junior-level bioethics course.
The conversation veered into the traditional rituals and how they ought to be eliminated, since their purposes had clearly been long since fulfilled. Terricel had heard enough.
Slowly, as if his body were no longer his to command, he began taking down the pictures from the partition walls. His favorite was a sketch done by Gaylinn sen’Raimuth, the art student with whom he’d been lovers earlier that year. It was a seascape in colored charcoal. He felt a distant tug, as if someone else named Terricel sen’Laurea had once yearned to see that wild, windswept shore. The drawing was too good to throw away, so he rolled it up and tied it with a bit of string he found in the top drawer.
He placed it on the desk top and began making neat piles of the books — some to keep, some to return to the library. Everything else he tossed into the recycle basket.
o0o
Gaylinn’s studio in the Arts Complex of the University was empty. The student in the adjacent studio, a mousy-haired woman who looked as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in a month, murmured that she never knew where Gaylinn was, she wasn’t any friend of hers. If Terricel just walked in, it wasn’t any business of hers.
The room smelled of paint, solvent, and dayflowers. Terricel sat down on the stool in front of the oversized drafting table. He remembered how, when he first started work on his proposal topic, they’d spread out the Starhall maps and planned where to dig in the basements. Gaylinn had teased him about being a mole at heart, and then they’d laughed and made love on the big sofa. The lumps of red and orange glass she’d used to pin down the maps now served as paperweights for pencil and charcoal sketches and portrait studies. She’d done a series of one of her friends from Raimuth, a woman engineering student who’d left the University suddenly last term. Gaylinn had been quite upset about it at the time.
In the corner by the window stood a covered easel. It bore a large stretched canvas, much bigger than those Gaylinn usually used. He walked over to it and lifted the muslin drape.
It was a study in oils, almost finished, the head and torso of a young man, nude, lying on his back with his face turned away from the viewer. The perspective, superbly rendered, accentuated the lines of the jaw and cheekbones, the sensuous curve of the collarbone, the arch of the thin, slat-ribbed chest sloping down to the velvet abdomen. The model’s unkempt black hair fanned out over the rumpled sheets. Sunlight filtered in from a point above his head, deepening to blues and grays.
Terricel stepped back a pace to get a better look. The skin tones were so lifelike that he almost expected to see a pulse beating in the exposed neck. But lower down, in the shadows, the flesh by degrees turned pale, as smooth and perfect as marble. At the transition point, right over the heart, there was just the hint of green, as if a plant nearby had cast a reflection from its shiny leaves.
It was a master-work, even he could see that. No student could have charged the canvas with such vitality and such pathos. She had only to submit it to her committee and she’d receive her degree.
Terricel jerked the muslin cover over the canvas. He paced back to the stool, sat down, and covered his face with his hands.
She must have lain awake, watching him after they’d made love, memorizing each line of his body. The way his hair flopped away from the cowlick in back, the contour of his shoulders, the faint shadows between the muscles of his belly. He had slept on, unaware, even as the figure on the canvas did.
Terricel covered his eyes with his hands. He seemed to have grown a second skin beneath his own, like a layer of rotten bile. If only he could run, scream, sweat it out of his pores. If only he were a norther or one of those eastern nomads and had a god — any god — to cry out to.
o0o
The door latch clicked open and Terricel heard the rustle of full skirts and smelled the faint, sweet aroma of dayflowers. He opened his eyes. His vision swam as his retinas readjusted to the room’s brightness.
Gaylinn, her dark brown curls tied back with an orange scarf, set down a basket of fruit on the sofa. “Terr? What are you do
ing here?”
She laid one hand on his shoulder. Her fingers felt warm and soft. Once she would have taken him into her arms and held him, her body as round and strong as her artist’s hands.
He jerked away from her touch. “I brought your seascape back.”
“You took it down...” Her eyes searched his. Why? What’s happened?
“I gave my proposal today.” In case you’d forgotten.
“And it didn’t go well?”
“Not go well? Not go — What a joke!” He began to pace. A strange, hot energy boiled up in him, making him careless of his words. “My committee — those acidic bastards — they’re so scared of Esme, all they could think of was what would happen if I dug up the Starhall, not whether I found anything or not. They don’t give a contaminated damn for the truth. They’re nothing but a pack of bootlickers.”
He whirled around to face her, gesturing wildly. “The worst part is they didn’t even have the guts to fail me. Just gave me a no-show to save their forking asses with my mother. And for about half a second I was actually grateful to have a second chance — I must have been an idiot to think I could have an academic career! I might as well follow in Esme’s footsteps and have done with it.”
Gaylinn nodded, chewing her lower lip. “I’m sorry you had a hard time. But do you think you’re the only one to fool yourself? The only one to make stupid choices? People have all sorts of dumbshit reasons — trying to please their parents, or wanting to kick their teeth in, or some half-assed compromise like yours.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Terricel grumbled, sounding very like the Pateros Brigade girl.
“Oh!” She waved one hand as if brushing away a cloud of pollen-flies. “This was pure batshit luck. I started out in my father’s print shop back home in Raimuth, all set to take over the business with my big brother. But he started me doing illustrations and saw how fired up I got. He even took my side when Father said no to University art training.”
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