by Jim Grimsley
Here was Great Irion, Lord of Iraen and Binder of the Oregal, walking alone into the mountains just as Malin had always predicted he would. The thought made him chuckle. “Not quite for the reasons I thought,” he muttered, lifting his face to the sharp wind.
He had often walked these mountains with Kirith Kirin, hunting or questing after some hint of what lay farther on in the peaks. Endless, jagged, inhuman they looked, worse the deeper one penetrated, but nothing had stopped the two of them in those days, far too long ago, and nothing need stop him now.
To present his consciousness as simple in this manner, as confined to his body, even his original body, would be deceptive. The physical part of him might no longer be the sum of him but it was of considerable use; a being without a body was not much good as a cantor. He carried many kinds of awareness at the same time: first of all of the tower over Inniscaudra, his home, the heart of him for too long to think about, and then of the Oregal, the hierarchy of priests, the choirs of Prin and Drune that he held in his train, whose presence he could feel from their appointed posts across the far-flung Hormling stars. He felt the gates, first the one that led to Senal, and then the other, the Anilyn Gate, the one that hung in space far above Senal, that led to a far, distant star, more remote than any of the Hormling had yet guessed. Just now he was keeping careful eye on the gate, since beyond it, on Aramen, was Rao; he could feel the choirs beyond, the Fukate millennium, his Prin in the trading stations as they wheeled in their long rush along the Trade Line, his Prin on all the worlds of the Hormling, each a separate strand of himself that he could pluck and engage or let alone to work as it would. He peered into places where copies of him stood, and he felt concerned about what he saw from those eyes as well as his own; he was in these other places as fully as he was here, in the Barrier Mountains, headed north in a direction he believed himself to have traveled before.
When he was a child, when people had called him Jessex rather than Great Irion, once during a hard storm while he was riding in the old forest Arthen he had been taken up by God’s Sisters and carried to their fastness in these mountains, the tower and fortress Chulion. That God had three Sisters Jessex had never doubted in those days, since he had met them and been taught by them. Only now he knew more about God and suspected her Sisters were not sisters at all, but something else. Now he meant to find them again, to ask them some questions that had come up over the last couple of thousand years.
Above all, he wanted to know where she came from, meaning God, and who were her enemies, for at least one of them was here now, on the verge of causing a problem. The question of her nature had plagued Irion for a long time.
This world was her body, he thought sometimes, and at other times he thought her body was the words he spoke, the language Wyyvisar, which he had learned from those same Sisters, who claimed to be its only teachers. If there was a source for this language, they would know it, and might even be it. This language he suspected to be, in fact, the substance of God, the last evolution of some species that had once stood like the Hormling on the threshold of all real knowledge, the final collapse of all their technology, all their information, into Words. She had become a sentient language, a body that had shed the needs of energy and space and existed as self-aware quanta of meaning, words that changed reality without reference to sequence, independent of time. Words that caused the world.
Or maybe more than the world.
He made fast progress across and up the peaks, reconstructing in his head the feeling of that long-ago journey, what had felt like a flight across the sky, wind pouring over his body, the Sisters speaking true language over him to keep him still. He and Coromey traveled fast, not bound by ordinary limitations, Jessex cheating their travel using tricks he knew, sometimes scaling straight up the side of a peak, the big cat-hound following, agile, equipped to grasp any crevice in the rock, to lift and stretch one step at a time. For Jessex there was little danger; he could climb and feel the cold pour over him and feel himself scattered across the landscape, fragments of his consciousness changing every second as each copy of him and each facet of him fed the center, which was partly in this head, his original head, and partly in the tower at Inniscaudra.
So he camped for the night and listened and heard, across the gates, the murmuring of that voice he had known lurked there, in the forest of the green trees—the Dirijhi’s Shimmering Garden, as they called it. He knew this enemy had come not only for him but for her, for YY, for God herself. This enemy had come to take the gate and make it his own, or learn to make another, or both. Irion heard the uncouth singing in a language that sounded hardly like words at all. His long peace was over.
That many would suffer and die could not be avoided; even the choir of the whole would not effect much of a change on such a strange singer using such an unsavory tongue. If this stranger who had come to Aramen were like YY, a being of her rank, what good could even Great Irion do?
He pressed forward, moving with more urgency.
Across the Anilyn Gate a long way from where he waited, but still within his awareness, Rao began to move. Jessex felt the vastness of him, this enemy, and understood that the long-feared day had come. Whatever troubles YY had made in her long life had found her here. So far from Inniscaudra, without his tower under him, Jessex could not longer defend the gate as he should, and so, without any fanfare, he closed it. Without warning to anyone, as if it were as simple as bringing two fingers together, and afterward a quiet rang through him.
When darkness fell he made a bonfire, gathering wood from a half-buried stand of pines blown mostly over in a storm. The roar of the fire soothed him, showers of sparks flying upward like summer insects. In the windless night the fire burned peacefully, and he watched the flame as an object for once, not as a device he might use to focus his Words. With the Anilyn Gate closed, with so much of himself focused within his flesh again, he felt a singleness that gave him a peace he had missed. If he was thinking of anything in that quiet, he was remembering Kirith Kirin during that other winter, long ago, when the cold was gathering and the world turned hard and there was nothing Jessex, the boy, could do about it except try to survive from one moment to the next.
A shadow stirred at the edge of the fire, and he thought it was Coromey until he saw the figure of a person, robed, step out of the shadow of the pines. The appearance startled Jessex deeply, since he had sensed no one near him and ought to have. “May I share your fire?” asked a voice.
Coromey rolled over from the shadow where he had lain, bared his teeth a moment, flattened his head, and stretched out his paws as if he meant to pounce.
A young, smooth hand appeared, a man’s hand, ringless, traced with strong veins, skin clear, the color of ivory.
“Share the fire you may.” Jessex studied the figure uneasily. “I’ll allow that much.”
“But no more. A person of caution.” The voice purred. “May I take down my hood?”
“If I’m to see you, I suppose you must.”
A handsome face appeared, brutally scarred across the center, a slash at a slant that had not healed, cutting from forehead to jaw but somehow missing both eyes; blond hair, a strong neck, thin lips. The man touched the edge of the wound and appeared a bit self-conscious. “If you find my mark distasteful, you may say so and I’ll cover it again.”
“The scar looks fresh.”
“Maybe it is, in a way.” He squatted on his boots near the fire. “I came a long way because of it. Someone you know gave it to me.”
A hollow opened in the pit of Jessex’s stomach. A first hint of something unfamiliar flooded him, a touch of fear.
“I mean you no harm,” said the man. “I only came so far to talk. To fight at such a distance would not be practical for either of us.”
“So I know who you are,” Jessex said.
“I believe you do.” The man gave his head an almost coquettish tilt. His beauty had been extraordinary before the wound; one could see, at moments, the old face.
“I thought we should at least sit eye to eye.”
Jessex kept silent, watching the fire, deeply stirred. This body sharing the fire was not a physical copy or he would have felt its substance more clearly. “Will you offer me peace?”
The blond man went on reaching his hands toward the fire. “Will you offer it to me? I’ve done you and yours no harm.”
“Not until now, no.”
The face was earnest, the voice silken, and he opened his cloak dramatically to show his finery, his well-shaped form, chosen quite carefully. “Won’t you hear what I have to say?”
“How could I deafen myself to your voice?”
“She is a betrayer herself, the one you serve. You think she has not killed her trillions? More, even?”
Jessex was silent, making a show of tending the fire, adding the biggest logs he had found, heaping the flames onto flames. Rao stepped back to make room, and Coromey stretched his paws, still watching the man.
Jessex asked, without turning his head, “May I offer you tea? I have no wine or brandy.”
“You would serve me tea from your own supplies?”
“You’re my guest, Rao.” Jessex bowed his head.
He bowed his head in return. The gash was glistening; for a moment it was plain he felt the pain of it still. “Thank you for using my name. You speak it without rancor. Thank you also for offering hospitality, but this body doesn’t require tending. I keep it for traveling.”
“Is this your native form?”
“I have many forms.”
“The cut on your face?”
He gave Jessex a grim smile. “Your mistress gave it me. To tell you when would make no sense to you, but a great distance from now.”
Jessex bowed his head. “You’ve known her a long time.”
Light danced across his features, glittering on a necklace he wore, a circle divided from the center by radius lines at regular intervals, the lines intersected by smaller, more delicate circles at irregular intervals, the gold very pure and heavy. He took off his outer wrap, a sleeved coat with a long panel of fabric in front to be used to wrap the head and body again. “Yes, I have. You show your longing too well, Jessex. You long to ask what I know of her.”
After a while he faced the fire, his heart pounding. “I can’t deny it.”
“She rides you.” He offered his hand, and now there was a gold ring in it, plain and unadorned. “Take this and she’ll no longer task you so.”
He had shaped his form well. He had a body something between Arvith, who had been gone a long time, and the King, who had been gone far longer. Jessex bowed his head. “I’ve no need of anyone’s ring.”
“Take mine and she has no more hold on you,” he said.
“Then what would I do?”
He wet his lips, moved the ring to his other hand, stepped forward.
Jessex stepped back.
Coromey sprang to his feet, crouched.
“I’m as old as she,” he said. “I can show you far more than you would dream.”
“Better the master I know,” Jessex said, averting his eyes.
“I’m far more gentle to my servants,” he said, lowering his voice, stepping forward the smallest possible step.
“So you say.”
“I can tell you so much about the ones like us, like your mistress and me. Primes, you call us. I know you’re curious.”
He listened to the fire, wishing the wind would blow, or that something would howl in the distance; but there was only crackle of the wood, the popping embers. “I confess it’s true. I’d like to know who she is.”
Rao wet his lips, held Jessex’s gaze earnestly. “Hold the ring, then. Just hold it.”
Coromey hissed when the avatar moved.
“Stay where you are,” said Jessex.
“She’s lied to you for so long, in so many ways,” Rao said. “I can tell you the truth.”
“The truth is a strange creature, forced to compromise herself to fit so many mouths.”
His voice was honey-soft, as if he were speaking next to Jessex’s ear. “You’re lonely. You don’t have to be.”
Jessex looked Rao in the eye, one last moment. The wound had grown somehow more pronounced. The moment lengthened and Rao closed his fist around the ring, looked into the fire as if he were sad and lonely himself.
“Come, fur-ball,” said Jessex, and the cat leapt to him, pressed closed to his sides. He bowed his head to Rao. “Good night to you, friend. Enjoy the fire. My cat-hound and I have a bit more walking to do before we rest.”
“There’s nothing to find where you’re going,” said Rao. “Plenty of reason to stay by the fire with me.”
“Not a one that I can see, no offense, friend. But as I’m the one who built the fire, let’s say I’m the better judge. My road’s this way.”
“They’re coming,” he said, advancing a few steps toward Jessex, still offering the glittering thing on his palm. “The ones like me and your mistress, the ones you’ve been fearing. They’re all coming.”
Jessex trudged into the dark, shadow lengthening, one of Coromey’s ear-tufts brushing his hand.
“Your gates are a big draw. They’re all going to want to meet you.” The voice echoed. The wind did come up, blew some clouds over the nearest peaks, and soon enough the shadow of a ridge cut off his view of the pine stand and the bonfire. He trudged through the dark, wrapping his cloak around him.
Flat Head Farm
1. Fineas Figg
The flitter made the journey quietly and efficiently, not a sound from the mag-lev drive, only the wind rushing against the sealed chassis, buffeting the car slightly. Figg watched the weather, the skies clear now that the air armada had passed. The others in the cab were quiet, Dekkar sitting with his head against the headrest, eyes closed; Nerva and Keely collapsed into one another, breathing deeply and peacefully. Figg’s link was still down; there was some news on the one station from Ajhevan that the flitter receiver could pick up through the silverfield, but the broadcasts consisted of jubilant repetitions that the revolution was under way and Aramen would be free, no details or real coverage.
Near the Ajhevan coast a patrol spotted Kitra and queried, and she gave her ID. Off the radio, she said to the others, “The flitter is registered in my name and I live on Ajhevan, so we shouldn’t have a problem.”
Circumstances proved her right, though Figg felt easier when the flitter was cruising in one of the overland fly routes toward his farm.
He had bought land along the river David, a tributary of the Silas, one of the major river systems on the continent; the David began as a creek in the hilly part of Greenwood, flowed out of the forest and drained a goodly part of the Ajhevan hills, descending into the plain and flowing into the Silas about mid continent, at Arsa. The farm was called Flat Head and occupied most of a valley nestled between hills covered in conifers, big oaks and hickories, open meadows, plowed fields. The continent had long since been settled, though never as densely as Jharvan; treaties with the Dirijhi fixed population densities and growth rates, and had for the most part been adhered to; that and the Dirijhi policy of paying a generous bounty for Ajhevani teenagers to be turned into symbionts had kept the population under control.
“Is it true that the trees only buy northern children to become symbionts?” Figg asked.
Kitra glanced back at him with a flickering of interest that made Figg feel unaccountably pleased with himself. She was rearranging her heads-up display for better flying in the uneven country. “Yes. The trees claim that humans not born here don’t taste right in the link; the trees and their syms are joined almost totally at times. A sym has to feed from its host regularly or it dies.”
“Nonnatives don’t taste right?”
“I know. It sounds rather parasitic. A person who’s born here and moves away won’t work, either. The flavor changes, apparently.”
“Parents must sell their children fairly readily.”
“Mine sold my brother. He begge
d them to do it, he fell in love with the whole idea of living with the trees, having them talk to him. He saw a lot of vids that were nothing but nonsense, but he was too young to know. He was too young to make the decision, too, but the trees pay a lot for a sym. The Dirijhi term for a sym is something like ‘hands and feet.’”
“Your brother was sold.”
“I divorced my parents because of it. The Dirijhi call it a bounty. The whole process is supposed to be voluntary. But the bounty is the price of a small farm. The money is coercion in and of itself.”
“They have that kind of money?”
“The Mage long ago conceded that the trees actually own the planet, but since nobody intends to let them run the show here, the Hormling factions and combines pay a huge indemnity for use of the world, a royalty on nearly everything that’s made or sold or imported.”
“I didn’t think you could own another person.”
“You can’t. That’s why they call it a bounty. The volunteer agrees to be a sym for nothing. The parents or the family are paid for the referral. It’s all strictly legal.”
“So the trees had a vested interest in helping you northerners get your independence in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” Kitra asked.
“To protect their supply of humans,” Figg answered. “Just about now your people will be learning how free the Dirijhi intend for them to be.”
Dekkar opened his eyes and looked at him.
Kitra said, “I believe that’s your farm. That’s the beacon I’m homing on, anyway.”
“I’m sure that’s it. I’ve never been here myself, you know.”
Kitra glanced at him uncertainly; Figg watched her hesitate, then decide to speak. “I feel as if I ought to know you from somewhere. I’m monosexual, so that’s not a pick-up line.”
He liked her bluntness. As for her being monosexual, he took any such declaration with a grain of salt. “I’m a figure of some scandal.”
Dekkar grunted and chuckled.
