Raising The Stones

by Tepper, Sheri S.

  Harribon had one brother, Slagney, and two sisters, Paragon (Parry) and Perfection (Perfy). The four of them wrapped their mother’s body loosely in a blanket and carried it at the first day watch hour to a place just west of the settlement where there was a considerable tract of high, wooded ground and a shallow grave they had all helped dig the day before. They laid her in the grave. Parry recited a poem her mother had been fond of. Harribon knelt above the body for a moment, tucking something inside the blanket, then they picked up the shovels they had left the day before, covered their mother’s body, and went back to the brotherhouse, where they prepared breakfast for the children.

  “I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me she wanted to be buried out there,” wept Parry, who was the eldest daughter. “Momma always told me everything.”

  “I think it just came to her within the last few days,” Harribon said in the calmest voice he could achieve, one somewhat liquefied by swallowed tears. “She told me during the night. I was the only one there. I should have mentioned it to you before she died, but I just didn’t think of it until yesterday.” He remembered the conversation, almost. Perhaps he had mentioned how lovely the view was from out there. Something.

  “What was it you put in the grave with her?” Slagney wanted to know. Slagney was the youngest, the baby, and he had a habit of petulance.

  “Her locket,” said Harribon honestly. There had been a locket in the packet, along with the thing Saturday Wilm had given him. “The one you gave her when you moved into the brotherhouse. She treasured it. She asked for it when she told me where to bury her.”

  “Oh,” said Slagney, his petulance detoured for the moment by sentiment. The locket had been his “leaving home” gift to his mother. Sons often gave their mothers gifts when they moved into the brotherhouse, gifts to say I’m still with you, I still love you, I’m no farther away than next door. “Isn’t CM going to be upset at us, burying her outside the authorized cemetery?”

  “If anyone tells them, probably so,” said Perfy, the second daughter. “Since she wanted to be buried out there and not in the burial ground, I’m not going to tell CM. Are you, Slagney?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “Of course not. But people here will know there was no grave dug in the burial ground.”

  “I had one dug there,” said Harribon. “Yesterday. We’ll go fill it in after breakfast.” He chewed his bread and nodded and made quiet conversation and wiped the faces of young children in between repeatedly wiping the palm of his hand against his trouser legs. He could still feel the warm stickiness of the white stuff when he had taken it from the filmbag and pressed it against his mother’s body. She had been cold and dead, but the fiber had been warm and alive. When she had died, he couldn’t remember what it was the Wilm children had told him that made him so sure, so very sure. He still couldn’t remember, not exactly. Something. Something very important. And even if he couldn’t remember what they’d said, he had remembered what to do.

  And now, now, now what was going to happen?

  • Shan, Bombi, and Volsa Damzel arrived on Hobbs Land middaywatch, immediately following the arrival of four men from Ahabar, and since both contingents were gathered simultaneously in the small reception area, the welcoming committee consisting of Zilia Makepeace, Dern Blass, and Tandle Wobster encountered them all. Dern, without displaying any of the interest and suspicion he felt at the advent of men who were unmistakably Voor-stoders, asked for their names—Mugal Pye, Epheron Floom, Preu Flandry, and a young man called Ilion Girat—without giving his in return. The name Girat rang a bell, of course, and Dern had to remind himself to show no sign of recognition.

  “And what brings you to Hobbs Land?” he asked.

  Preu Flandry claimed they would be doing a comprehensive survey of Hobbs Land for the Archives, and certainly they were laden with enough recording equipment to make this explanation seem reasonable. Even in Ahabar there were few barriers against travel by Voorstoders. Dern had no reason to act upon what he told himself was merely prejudicial dislike.

  Since Dern was being his usual casual self and Tandel was being her usual efficient one, the Voorstoders were speedily sent off to travelers’ housing without having any idea who it was they had met—or who had met them. Then the three Thykerites were escorted to VIP quarters, where they were introduced to their assigned servants (cook/chauffeur/valet/guide/interpreter/factotum) and generally welcomed with remarkably little fuss. Dern and Tandle soon bowed themselves away, leaving the three visitors with Zilia, as she had been mentally urging them to do for some little time.

  Zilia had been keeping herself very much under control. She hadn’t known the Thykerites were coming until this morning. She certainly didn’t want them reporting back to the Native Matters Advisory that she’d gone off her head or was being wilfully capricious. She might be capricious while no one was watching, but not when Rasiel Plum and the whole Native Matters Advisory membership could pin it on her. Zilia had met Rasiel Plum and had the highest regard for his perspicacity and his determination.

  “Well,” she said in a shaky voice when they were left alone. The three of them were looking at her as though she were something doubtful and possibly dangerous. She looked back, thinking they were the dangerous ones, the whole ensemble of them: three stocky white-tuniced figures, each tunic diagonally slashed by a wide purple belt with a zettle tucked into it; three dark, round faces turned toward her under three immaculate and identically folded white turbans; three triangles of ochre hair showing over three unwrinkled brows; three pairs of pale yellow, very glittery eyes, which seemed to be examining her soul. Under those turbans, the hair would be long enough to sit on, but done up in tight braids. In obedience to the prophetess’s command, High Baidee did not cut their hair. The prophetess had said, “Do not let people fool with your heads,” and heads included hair. The Scrutators had ruled, however, that faces were distinct from heads, and the male Baidee were not bearded.

  “Well,” assented Shan, curving his straight lips into a narrow arc, like a slice of melon. “That was all very nice. I feel properly welcomed. Now, what can we offer you, Lady Makepeace.”

  “Zilia,” she said, still in the shaky voice. “Zilia, please. Nothing, nothing at all. I had luncheon shortly before you arrived. If you and your clanmembers are hungry, please feel free …” Shan was, she decided, the slenderest one of the three. And the handsomest. Not that she, Zilia, should care about that. Baidee did not mix.

  “I think something light,” declared Volsa in a surprising hungry-beast voice. “Something green or orange, with leaves in it. What’s good on Hobbs Land.”

  “If you’ll permit me?” Zilia went to the door and spoke softly to the CM steward waiting there. A salad dressed with cit juice and grain oil. Fruit. A bottle of the mild, sparkling wine made at Settlement Eight. Cheese from Six. A few small creely leg sandwiches. The High Baidee ate no mammalian meat, no eggs, and nothing contaminated by either, but they did eat fowl and fish. Zilia hoped creelies would count as fish.

  Evidently they were close enough to fish, though Bombi did ask if the creature had fins and scales. Bombi was the plumpest one, the one with the slightly exaggerated manner.

  “Both,” Zilia assured him. “Both fins and scales, yes.”

  “And what’s it called?”

  “Creely,” she said, leaving off the legs. Most things with fins did not have legs. So far as Zilia knew, the High Baidee had never ruled on the acceptability of creelies, which meant that eating them was, at least, not forbidden. “A creature unique to Hobbs Land. So far as we know.”

  “Now,” said Shan, chewing away at a piece of fruit, “What’s all this we hear about the Departed.”

  “What we have here is not about the Departed, at least not on the surface,” Zilia murmured. “What’s on the surface is human children rebuilding a temple of the God. The Departed God, one presumes.”

  When she had finished telling her tale, clarifying whenever they liked,
she waited for judgement. Inasmuch as she was alleging—or at least suggesting—some form of coercion, anathema to any Baidee, the situation demanded a pronouncement of some kind.

  “Do you have any reason to believe, any real reason,” Volsa asked at last, “that the children were coerced into rebuilding that temple?”

  Zilia shook her head miserably. She didn’t. Not really.

  “Do you have any reason to believe anything got them to rebuild that temple against their will?”

  She shook her head again. “I just have this feeling,” she admitted. “A feeling that something isn’t … isn’t the way it’s being represented.”

  “Hmph,” said Bombi. “Well, I, for one, am going to get proper charts from the Central Management office and lay out a schedule for an Ancient Monuments survey. That’s what we’re here to do, after all. We’ll do a little back-country, then a little civilization. There’s only the one village with temples in it, right? Settlement One? When we get to that point, we’ll see what we can find out, right? See if we find anything to confirm your ‘feelings.’ ”

  “Do you want me to come along?” Zilia asked, not sure whether she wanted them to say yes or no.

  “Perhaps. Let us do a bit of surveying, first,” Shan asserted. “We may not ask you to join us when we get to Settlement One either. Just to avoid any appearance of undue influence, you understand.”

  She smiled, indicating she did understand. Then she left them to go back to her apartment at CM staff housing, where she spent the night chewing her nails to the quick and wondering if she were really going mad. What did she think was happening here? She honestly didn’t know.

  Meantime, the Damzel team got hold of Spiggy Fettle and invited him to dinner. They caught him with a companion, and he spoke to them with the screen blanked out, which his companion much preferred.

  “I’m not observant,” he told on-the-screen Shan. “I don’t own a kamrac or a zettle. I wouldn’t know how to wind a turban if my life depended on it, and I eat eggs.”

  “Not at our table, you don’t,” laughed Shan. “As for the rest, wear a loin cloth if you like, but we need to talk.”

  Spiggy, who was having one of his all-time top highs, thought having dinner with a troupe of Thykerites would be great fun or ridiculous, one or the other, but in any case good for a laugh. Besides, his companion had to be elsewhere that evening.

  As it turned out, the Damzels were nobody’s fools and gave him a good deal to think about. No, he told them seriously over the finishers of dried fruit and confections, he didn’t really think Zilia was mad.

  “I rather like her, you know,” he admitted. “Despite her paranoia. She told me about her traumatic upbringing, and I’ve decided it’s really some kind of supersensitivity she has. She seems very alert to nuance. I don’t think she honestly believes anyone on Hobbs Land ever did anything naughty to a Departed, but she feels something covert is happening, and her quivering nerves translate that into something personal. By that, I mean something that affects Zilia or Zilia’s purpose in life. There are no remote and irrelevant sins with our Zilia. If there’s anything going on, she’s sure it pertains to her. She’s the only person I know who could overhear some harmless sexual hanky-panky between two settlers and translate it into a threat against the Departed.”

  “So you think something could be going on?” Volsa asked.

  “I know something is going on. Have you read Chaniger’s work on settlement applications of the classic Gaean hypothesis?”

  Bombi shrugged at Shan who shrugged at Volsa, who said, “He was one of our instructors on Phansure.”

  “He claims,” said Spiggy, ignoring the sceptical tone Volsa had used, “that the introduction of any strange species or, indeed, the loss of species causes great changes in the planetary psyche. Man has been on Hobbs Land some thirty-odd lifeyears, so, if Chaniger is right—and I’ve always felt there is a great deal to be said for his theories—we may expect the persona of Hobbs Land to be changing. It won’t be anything too obvious, I shouldn’t think. We occupy only a tiny land area and have been careful not to threaten local species in any way. Nonetheless, some change is probably occurring, and I think Zilia senses that change. It may be the most minor of adjustments. Some barely discernible shifting, but I think she feels it, as animals are said to feel the precursorial tension of climatic or tectonic events.”

  “An interesting theory,” said Bombi, without expression.

  “Of course, during this recent period, the Departed did die out,” murmured Volsa. “Assuming they were a predominate species, their demise might create considerable change in the planetary ecology. However, I think it only fair to tell you that the High Baidee do not accept the idea that planets or planetoids have psyches. To do so would imply that worlds have minds, and the proscriptions of the Baidee …”

  “Oh, I’m well aware of all that,” Spiggy laughed. “I was born and bred on Thyker, after all. I lived there long enough to learn all about the Overmind and the Baidee prophetess. My stance upon such matters—which I will not allow you to call backsliding—is not due to ignorance of the words of Morgori Oestrydingh. No, my beliefs are, I like to think, my own device, not merely a reaction against revealed truth. However, you asked me a question, and I gave you an answer. You are free to reject the idea, or put it in terms you can accept if you like. Isn’t that what Baidee is all about, after all? Not allowing our minds to be controlled by others, so that we can be responsive to various ideas?”

  He was laughing at them, and all three of them knew it. The prophetess had declared it a sin to believe in absolute truths, but the Scrutators claimed that didn’t apply to religious truths, of which they had manufactured a good supply over the centuries.

  “If you can’t accept a planetary persona,” Spiggy went on, “then think in terms of shifting ecologies. No doubt they would also cause a bit of a premonitory tension. My real point is, I don’t want you to discard Zilia’s concerns as mere paranoia. She’s paranoid, yes, as many of those who share Voorstod heritage seem to be, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something going on.”

  “Would you be interested in joining our survey? If we could get you time off?” Bombi put the question as a hypothetical one, but Spiggy took it seriously.

  “No,” he said, after some thought. “If I went with you, it would be for pure curiosity’s sake; I might do some damage, and I can’t imagine being of any help at all. My refusal isn’t due to lack of interest, however. I feel bound to suggest that, if you could record your travels, there’d be a ready market among the settlements for your records. Settlers are intensely curious about the unsettled parts of Hobbs Land.”

  He accepted their lifted brows as sufficient consideration of his idea, and then fell back on hospitality. He invited them to walk about CM, to visit the Admin club as his guest, to use the sports complex, to take advantage of the Archives. He made appropriate small talk, then left them to settle into familiar patterns of half talk, half musing, which was their family trait.

  “Personas …”

  “… not likely, but …”

  “Something they haven’t even thought of …”

  “… seems to be alert and responsive …”

  A very long silence.

  Then, “Tomorrow,” said Shan.

  And with that and their evening obeisance to the Overmind, they ended their day.

  • • •

  • In the upper-level personnel office of CM, Mugal Pye was attempting to impress Jamice Bend rather more than he had impressed a number of lesser functionaries on the floors below.

  “You see, Ma’am,” he was saying in his insinuating voice, “this boy here, Ilion Girat, is a nephew of Maire Girat, who came here to Hobbs Land snorbel’s years ago. All the boy wants is to convey the greetings of members of the family and get to meet his aunty, and we’ve had all these persons below and outside telling us it was impossible.”

  “Mr. Pye,” said Jamice. “You would be amazed to l
earn how many uncles and nephews and sisters and sons come to Hobbs Land in order to escape from their kin and their families and all entanglements of the past. Even when so much is clear, we have all manner of relatives coming here saying they only want to talk to dear old aunty or advise dear sister that mother has died or that they only want to say hello and carry greetings back to the family. It may well be that this young man’s aunt will be glad to see her nephew, but it is equally likely such a meeting is the last thing she desires. We’ve learned this to our sadness. It’s why there is no roster of personnel available to visitors. You won’t even find it in the Archives. Casual visitors are not told where our people are.”

  “But what if she wanted to see him,” pressed Mugal. “Would you forbid her doing so?”

  “Of course we wouldn’t. I have a form here which you, or in this case, the young man should fill out. He should give us the name of his aunt, or the name she was known by before she came here, for she may have changed it since. He can tell us what the relationship is, and what the purpose of his visit is. Then we’ll transmit the message to the person involved, and if he or she wants to meet you, he or she will take time off from the work of the settlement and come here to CM to do so.”

  “We can’t go there?”

  “No, you can’t go there for that purpose unless you have a written invitation to be a guest in her clanhome. The settlements are not set up to receive casual visitors.”

  Mugal, since he was already committed, had Ilion Girat fill out the form and then watched while Jamice herself fed the information into her desktop stage. He had little hope Maire Girat would want to see her nephew, but anything was worth a try.

  They left the office to join the others outside, and Ilion asked, for the dozenth time, “How long am I going to have to stay here? This place is so empty.”

  It was true that Hobbs Land had no mists to create walls and ceilings among which men could move, half-hidden from others of their kind. Here the horizon was far and clear, and vision disclosed more than Voorstoders were accustomed to see.