by Kate Elliott
It had been a mistake to marry a khaja woman. His grandmother had told him that all along. But she had wanted him to marry Baron Santer’s daughter, in Jeds, so perhaps it was only Diana she had disliked. It was true that it was dangerous to marry a Singer. They had their own ways, their own calling, and the gods might lure them away at any moment.
I’ve fallen in love with another man whose life and interests… That was not a calling from the gods. That was just selfishness.
The wind turned and hit him in the face, bringing with it the smell of salt and of things left rotting, untended among the reeds.
But Diana had already left him once. She had told him plainly enough that she had her world, and he his. He had written to her, finally, unable to endure without her company—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that although he did truly miss her he wanted to prove to his grandmother, to the tribes, that it had not been a mistake for him to marry her. He had written, asking her to make a final judgment, that if she wanted him to, he would willingly leave the tribes, the army, to come to her.
But he had left the tribes, he had left Rhui, before he had received her answer. Now, finally, staring into the lowering night, he wondered what that answer would have been.
A door soughed open, blending with the murmur of gentle waves on the pilings below. He turned to see Branwen come out onto the promenade.
“Want company?” she asked.
He regarded her for a few moments, silent. She was an attractive woman, competent, smart, and a good companion. But she was not Diana. He respected her, but he could not love her. Nor did she expect him to. “No, thank you,” he replied politely.
She smiled slightly, lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and retreated back through the door.
Ah, gods, how he wanted a family. He liked the crew of the Gray Raven, but they were his jahar, not his family; they might in time become friends, comrades, but that was not the same. If only Shura was here….
Why not? He had not yet heard, in the twice-yearly letter she sent him through convoluted channels, that she had married. She had stayed with the army all this time, as a scribe and interpreter. Why shouldn’t she leave Rhui and come to him? One person would make no difference.
But Charles Soerensen was right, too. Shura would be alone out here, with a brother but no sisters or female cousins or aunts. Was that fair to her?
Then, like a flare in the heavens, a sudden, piercing image of Ilyana Arkhanov burned before him and vanished. A jaran girl. Sixteen, or perhaps she was seventeen by now. That was a proper age for a girl to get married. She loved Portia already, and she could bring Evdokia with her, to be Portia’s companion. Diana had abandoned him. It would serve her right if he turned around and took a new wife. A beautiful wife. Young, one who would want children.
“Damn it,” he muttered, knowing it was unfair, and just plain mean, to marry Ilyana only to spite Diana. But he could travel to Naroshi’s planet, to see her. Who would stop him?
He could send a message to Rhui, asking Shura to come to him. He could do anything he damned well pleased.
Fortified by this thought, he went back inside, stopped beside a wall panel, and called up a route to the communications center. It lay in the south wing, perpendicular to the massive greenhouse wing, buried under an astonishingly ugly rococo hall that Soerensen used for receptions of his least favored guests.
Maggie O’Neill and three techs sat in stylish chairs, scattered around the room like islands in a sea of muted gray consoles and several tables which displayed above their flat black surfaces rotating three-dimensional images of Rhui, of Odys, and of the Delta Pavonis solar system. Two long screens on opposite walls displayed two-dee images of landscapes, one from Earth that Anatoly recognized, a mountain-scape of the Alps, and another from the sand pillar swamp of Tao Ceti Tierce. On a third wall a stellar chart glittered, seeming to sink three dimensionally into the emptiness beyond, even though Anatoly knew it was a trick of the projection itself.
Maggie jumped up and hurried over to him. “Heyo. What can I do for you? Are you here to start through that backlog of messages? If you turned each one into scroll and stacked them up around you, you’d have to wade hip-deep to get out of here. But you’ll get used to it.” She grinned.
He nodded politely. “No. That can wait. I want to put a call through to Jeds and Sarai. I want Tess Soerensen to locate my sister Shura.”
She raised her eyebrows but did not respond. Instead, she negotiated the maze of consoles and came to a halt before one that looked exactly like all the others except for a saffron-colored jacket thrown carelessly over the chair wheeled up in front of it. Maggie hitched it out of the way. “Suzanne may have the complexion to wear this color. I sure as hell don’t. I get jaundiced just standing near enough to squint at it. Here, put it over there.”
Dutifully, he did as he was told, draping the jacket carefully over a nearby chair. Maggie sat down and began keying numbers into the console, interspersed with terse vocal commands.
“No one’s home at Jeds,” she said. “Odd. I’ll leave a callback for when Cara catches up to us. Or wait, I think she was headed for Sarai last I heard. We can almost always at least get the ke at Sarai. Let me see…”
Anatoly leaned on the edge of the console. The thin line scored itself into the gray surface, forming a large square.
Mist coalesced up from that square, pulsing to an unheard heartbeat.
“Ah! I’ve got an acknowledge. On screen.” The mist dissipated to reveal a woman’s head and shoulders, peering keenly and with a somewhat perplexed expression at them. She narrowed her eyes, registered Maggie, and twined a finger through one of her braids and shifted her vision to the left. Seeing Anatoly, her eyes widened. “Anatoly Sakhalin! What are you doing there?” For an instant he could not reply, he was so surprised to see a jaran woman using interdicted equipment. Finally he found his voice.
“I give you greetings, Sonia Orzhekov,” he said.
Daiga transmissions are like a form of blindness to the ke’s eyes, which are not like daiga eyes, seeing only in the spectrum of visible light. The daiga whose appearance startles Sonia, the name which classifies the daiga of flowers, is simply a primitive collection of impulses, not the complex ever-flowing pattern that informs the person of a biologically-present daiga. The ke cannot even tell if the daiga is male or female, the identifying marker by which the daiga put greatest store.
The two daiga speak in a daiga language. The ke does not know this language, it is not the language named Rhuian by the daiga Tess, but all daiga languages have primitive characteristics in common, in the way their structure has grown up as time and generations of daiga have passed. The ke shifts to the intermediate brain, seeking correspondences, similarities, alliances. Meaning emerges.
“But of course you’re a prince of the Sakhalin,” Sonia says, labeling this daiga. “Why shouldn’t you go before the khepelli emperor? Except that Dr. Hierakis told me that Charles Soerensen does not want the khepelli to know where his people are hiding. That is why they have this…what is it they call it?…this interdiction.”
Prince of the Sakhalin replies. “I am now a prince in the Chapalii Empire. That means that the jaran have a place within the Empire, one without recourse to the khaja who have come down to Rhui and made their own rules for us. That means that we are now the guardians of all khaja space.”
“I am new to this. I don’t really understand what you are saying.”
The ke sees that, without patterns to read, without the ability to read patterns, names might prove useful to daiga. Otherwise, needing to order the universe so that they can grow out of their half animal state, they could only see the universe as an undifferentiated mass of light and dark and color, edged with borders. To cross those borders, the daiga name things. By naming the universe, they bring it into existence.
“Who is that with you?” asks the prince of the Sakhalin.
Sonia says: “This is the ke.” Thus does the daiga of flo
wers make namelessness into a name, bringing the ke into existence.
Able to see and sense in limited spectra, the daiga struggle to expand their sight and thus their interaction with the universe. Naming becomes both their prison and their key.
“How do I use this tool to speak to Tess?” asks Sonia after the daiga transmission ends.
“On this world,” explains the ke, “daiga can only speak through tools, through consoles. Such are the rules of the interdiction. A call may be placed to Jeds. The daiga Tess journeys toward Jeds. The message will wait there until it is answered.”
“How can a message wait when it is made of nothing permanent?” Sonia asks. Sonia is full of questions. “Even the speech with Anatoly Sakhalin vanished as soon as it was over.”
“The message remains, recorded into memory.” The ke touches several bars on the console. “By this means, the message plays back.”
The patternless daiga rises about the console again, and the entire conversation plays out while Sonia watches.
“But how does it do that?” she demands, and the ke realizes with surprise—surprise!—that part of the daiga pattern of voice and physical body includes the force daiga name as emotion. To learn to recognize the patterns of emotion is to learn to read daiga patterns correctly. Then, as swift as a gust of wind, Sonia speaks again, casting off the last question. “But I must send a message to Tess. Or to Cara Hierakis. She left twenty days ago. Could her machines have gotten her to Jeds so quickly? Well, of course they could. There was that, what did you call it? She sent a brief signal to say she got there, but nothing spoken or written. It’s just hard to…imagine. Even the swiftest, untiring messenger changing horses at every station would take forty days to ride from Sarai to Jeds. Yet words spoken into this tool can reach Jeds as quickly as I can speak them! I must call Cara Hierakis. Can you show me how to speak to Jeds?”
The ke considers, but neither the daiga Tess nor the daiga who had hidden the ke in the laboratory in Jeds for five orbits of the planet—for five years—have forbidden the daiga Sonia from learning whatever Sonia asks to learn. Nothing is interdicted from this daiga, now that the concealing curtain has been drawn aside. It is a daiga metaphor, a way of naming that classifies one object because it acts similarly to another. Or is that a simile? No wonder the daiga remain primitive. Language has taken the place of physical evolution. Naming and seeing have become synonymous.
“This gold bar seems to trigger the appearance of an image,” says Sonia, trying to manipulate the console without instruction in order to discover the correct sequence.
The ke shows Sonia how to put a call through to Jeds.
The daiga named by the others Cara Hierakis answers. The two daiga converse. The ke follows the conversation intermittently, distracted by other questions.
“No, I’ve heard nothing from Tess, but she only had an emergency transmitter. Anatoly Sakhalin says he did what? That he was named a prince…in the Empire? That he saw a female Chapalii? But males can’t cross into female territory, or at least…that just doesn’t make sense. I’ve heard nothing from Charles. Oh, wait. I’ve got an incoming coded message, a download, from Odys. Let me call you back.”
The visual image of Cara Hierakis vanishes. Sonia waits at the console, calling back old messages, watching the replay, even those in a language that evidently is incomprehensible.
“Is there an interpreter tool?” Sonia asks. “So I might understand what this woman is saying? She says Tess’s name, so she must know Tess.”
An image of a daiga speaks over the console, a daiga like all the rest, indistinguishable without a pattern to read. Daiga can discern subtleties in daiga morphology that allow each daiga to discriminate any one daiga from the others. Ke have no need for such fine discriminative control, brought on in the daiga, perhaps, by territorial instincts or the need to have and keep a name, which then grants existence.
“Is there no means within the daiga brain to translate words?” the ke asks.
“If I know another language, then I can understand it, or at least if I don’t know it very well, I can think of what the meaning is in a language I do know well. But if I don’t know the language at all, then I don’t have any way to figure out what it means except through an interpreter.”
“A daiga program exists,” replies the ke, “which translates one daiga language into another. Tess has written such a program. Others exist.”
Sonia makes a movement with the mouth that the ke translates as a smile, a daiga way of showing pleasure.
“You are my interpreter,” Sonia says.
The ke pauses, startled by this new name, this new designation. What is an interpreter? An interpreter is someone who crosses borders for others, making one language intelligible to a second, making the outer world intelligible to a daiga who has lived confined to this inner one.
If it is true that this Prince of the Sakhalin has become a prince in the Empire, then the daiga naming their selves as jaran will need to understand how the Empire works. They must learn to name and to see the Empire. How can they learn to see it? Only through names.
The ke shows Sonia how to work the translation program, but then the ke retreats to a corner of the room and broods. The ke is not used to brooding. Ke do not brood, but this ke has crossed the border into daiga lands and can no longer go back to being a true ke.
This ke has been thinking about daiga.
Lacking deep brains, possessing only partially-formed intermediate brains, the daiga have constructed an interlocking web of names, like the great web that binds together the universe. Like a true building, this web is still in the process of growth. It is living, not dead.
Perhaps the daiga are civilized, but not as Chapalii recognize civilization. Civilization can manifest through more than one phytogeny.
“I am glad you are here to explain this all to me,” Sonia adds. The pattern that distinguishes her to the ke’s sight is bright, hectic with excitement.
The ke creeps closer to the daiga Sonia, as to warmth and light. Sonia shows neither fear nor shrinking, as many daiga do when confronted with a robed, veiled figure. The ke no longer needs veils, in front of Sonia.
“I hope you will stay with me for a while,” says Sonia. The daiga reaches out and touches the ke lightly on the arm. Two patterns swirl together briefly. It is a daiga way of connecting. The ke knows this now.
This ke has become an interpreter. This ke is no longer truly nameless.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
By Right
ACCORDING TO THE KHAJA priest at White Tower, a formal betrothal was as binding as a marriage.
“It makes sense not to marry until we reach Mircassia,” said Vasha to his father. It was dawn. The army was ready to leave. They waited in front of the crushed grass where the great tent had stood. Behind them, guards rolled up the awning. “But I need a binding agreement so that I can’t be thrown over once we reach there.”
“Marry her and be done with it,” snapped Bakhtiian, “if you mean to do it at all.”
Vasha felt a flash of irritation, but he quelled it. He knew he was right; he could not help that his father felt impelled to disagree, to dislike new ways of doing things, khaja ways of doing things. He could practically hear his father add: That is how the jaran would do it. In any case, Vasha did not think Ilya had recovered yet from his captivity. “Let me at least tell you my reasons. First, it will give me a chance to become acquainted with her, and her with me, without being thrown at once into the intimacy of marriage. Second, if we are married in Mircassia before her grandfather and the court, the marriage will appear to have the king’s sanction. Third, if we marry before the child is born, then by jaran law that child is mine. It makes no difference to me, of course. But Princess Rusudani will hate the child, if we keep it. So there will be no other objection to sending the child to Lady Jadranka to raise. She will raise it well. It will have an inheritance.”
“All good points,” said Tess reasonably.
> Fuming, Ilya glared at her. He looked back at Vasha, and Vasha was heartened to see that the worst edge of his anger had been blunted by Vasha’s words. “If you en gain Mircassia, then I don’t care what means you use.”
“Will you attend, then?” Vasha asked hopefully. “The betrothal ceremony? You won’t be in Mircassia for the wedding.”
Tess closed a hand firmly over Ilya’s wrist. “Of course we will attend.”
Faced with a direct order from his wife, Bakhtiian did not dare disobey, or even protest.
So, a short while later, Vasha knelt on a white cloth trimmed with gold braid before the altar in the castle chapel. His father and Tess stood behind him, as witnesses, and farther back, Katerina sat beside Stefan on a bench. Vasha did not need to turn his head to know how Katya would look, watching this: tense, impatient with her own curiosity, forcing herself to keep silent and still within the stone walls that must remind her of her captivity. But she had come to witness because he had asked her to.
Rusudani knelt beside him, her hair covered by a lace shawl and her eyes cast down toward the floor. She held her hands in front of her as if she was praying, but her lips did not move. No expression showed on her face that he could interpret.
The priest set out the written contract on a side table and had first Vasha and then Rusudani repeat the words that bound them to the contract. Vasha did not understand much of what he said, but it was short, and he repeated the phrase “bound by God’s law,” twice. Watching Rusudani, who did not look at him as she spoke the words in her turn, her voice so soft that it died into the loft of the chapel, Vasha was satisfied. Rusudani believed faithfully and sincerely in her God. If she swore to be bound by God’s law, then she would keep her word.
Last, they exchanged rings, simple gold rings which the priest had nervously donated before the ceremony.
The priest called forward the interpreter—Jaelle, as Vasha had also requested. The khaja here gave him everything he wanted, of course.
