It was just one more unknown in a whole disturbing catalog of unknown things to do with the Venatixi. Humans had been overdue to meet an alien they would never understand. Yet there'd been moments when he'd thought he pinned something down, captured some essence, stood on the edge of breaking through. Was there truly something to this, or was it only selfdelusion?
In spite of his promise to Essa, his visits to the northern hideaway became less frequent; his responsibilities to the students in the Mother House caught up with him. There was a need to find new faculty to train the lingsters increasingly in demand around the Arm once hostilities ended, and more students than ever applied for admission and had to be tested and evaluated and counseled. New buildings had to be planned, and roofs replaced on old ones. Money needed to be found. And the dolphin tutors demanded that they be given more say in the selection of students since they felt they could better evaluate certain areas of expertise than any human faculty committee; it took diplomacy on his part to settle the dispute that resulted.
He visited briefly as often as he could, and in between he looked forward to the regular reports Essa sent, relying on them for details of the children's progress. There was a certain joy to be gained from knowing the children were thriving in their hidden sanctuary. Essa was a perfect caregiver; his presence wasn't necessary—and sometimes that thought bothered him. Alone in his chambers at the Mother House at the end of day, he took his secret knowledge out and turned it over in his mind, enjoying the bittersweet memory of Keri.
The thought of her, he sensed, was less dangerous for him than the reality which threatened to undermine his careful life, flooding him with unaccustomed emotion. He began to catch himself at odd moments, brooding over what he'd given up to serve the Guild; the disloyalty of it frightened him.
On the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the project, he returned for a visit after a months-long absence. He set the 'car down in the clearing and saw Keri outside in mild sunshine. He was eager to see her, but a vague apprehension stopped him from calling to her as he'd been about to do. Instead, he stood watching, unnoticed.
Spring this far north was a brief explosion of color and perfume, a rebellion against the punishing cold that ruled most of the year. The little girl was playing with chains of tiny wildflowers, and beside her, the dog that had been her constant companion as a pup nursed a litter of her own. He saw she'd decorated the bitch's neck with the same small blooms.
“I taught her how to make daisy chains,” Essa said from the doorway.
“Daisies?”
“So unobservant, you are! Do you ever notice anything outside the library and the classroom?”
“When it's important to me,” he answered honestly, then became aware she was teasing when he saw her grin. He said ruefully, “I shall be a stuffy old fool in my old age, shan't I?”
Essa indicated the bench outside the door, and they sat comfortably together, old friends watching the young ones at play. The moment of unease he'd experienced faded away.
Then Keri came to him, hands outstretched. The touch of her little fingers in his own suddenly enormous hands started a rush of tears. He still didn't know how to behave. He glanced at his old friend for help and Essa smiled encouragement. He stooped and brushed Keri's soft cheek with his lips.
The result startled all of them. The child drew back instantly, staring at him as if she'd somehow made a mistake and given her hand to a stranger.
Before he had a chance to speculate what had caused Keri's reaction, T'biak trotted up to them, and he immediately forgot Keri's strangeness. The boy opened his small fist and revealed a dead bird—crushed, by the look of its mangled feathers and jutting bones thin as needles.
“Where did you find that dead old thing?” Essa scolded her favorite indulgently, taking the carcass away from him and brushing stray bits of feather and blood off his hand.
He had the unpleasant notion the bird had been alive when the child found it. It was a strange idea, and he had no proof; he decided not to share this with Essa.
The moment of warmth—of family, he thought, astonished at the word—passed. He sensed his own withdrawal back into a narrower self that for a brief second had unfurled like the petals in Keri's daisy chains. Essa threw the sorry corpse away into undergrowth, and they all went into the house.
Somber now, he moved into the office, anxious to bury himself in work and drive both the uncomfortable suspicions about T'biak and his own disturbing emotions away. A small fire murmured in the grate, filling the room with wood smoke. Birgit entered silently, bringing cubes of the children's progress as she always did on his visits; she fed them into the small terminal on his desk. He sat down at the desk, looking forward to the calm the routine of work brought with it.
Instead of leaving, Birgit stood by the desk.
He looked up. “Is something wrong?”
“Something bothers me, Magister. They still babble a lot together.”
“Babble?” He frowned, unwilling to entertain doubts about the project even in this revised version.
“Babies do it. Pre-language. Made-up words. But they should've passed that stage long ago. It's as if they're still inventing their own language. Not Inglis, certainly.”
He searched for an explanation. Birgit was a talented lingster and a gifted teacher, not one to come to hasty conclusions, a good counterbalance to Essa's fussy motherliness. If anything, he'd always judged her a little too calm and a bit distant.
“Maybe they're bored?” he suggested.
“You be the judge, Magister.”
She left and he turned his attention to the children's language. Almost immediately, he sensed that Birgit was right: something was indeed wrong. It wasn't Inglis that poured from the speaker, nor did it seem to be the proto-language they'd started to invent before the Venatixi attendant disappeared. Yet he could have sworn it wasn't nonsense babbling either. He frowned at the catalogs of nouns and verbs the AI spelled phonetically in Inglis—an already extensive list scrolling up the data screen.
There was a certain murkiness to the computer's translations. Closing his eyes to concentrate, he listened to the high pure voices filling the room. Language was a signal, but this set of signals lacked constants; it had variable referents, moments when the ground underfoot vanished though the children strode confidently ahead. His heart constricted with the pain of being left behind.
In this queer, sad mood, he realized there was an odd something other present, like something dimly glimpsed in the dark woods outside, sensed rather than recognized. He stopped the voices and glanced quickly at the screen.
“Inglis equivalent for—” He thought for a second, then touched one of the transliterations of the babies' sounds.
The data screen divided and displayed Inglis words—six—ten—a dozen—
“Stop. They can't all be homonyms?” How could they all be equivalencies for the same word? Worse, he saw, some translations were totally opposite to each other. “How can they have made one word mean ‘far’ and ‘near’ at the same time? ‘Dark’ and ‘light.’ What am I missing?”
And then he knew. Why had it taken so long to see what was happening?
“Run comparison with Venatixi,” he ordered.
The AI complied; two columns of collected data flowed over the screen.
“Probability of a match?”
“Greater than 98 percent.”
Essa came into the office, having tucked the children in bed. She peered anxiously over his shoulder at the screen. “Does it matter?”
He glanced back at her. She'd always been remarkably protective of her babies. He wondered now if that wasn't a negative attribute, something he should've guarded against.
“Instead of T'biak learning Inglis so we can work with him, Keri's learning Venatixi from him,” he said. “That shouldn't be possible. He lacks models for Venatixi.”
Essa warmed her hands at the fire. “So? Apparently the Venatixi are born with full language capabil
ity. Not just potential like us.”
She wasn't surprised, he realized. She'd known this for a long time. Perhaps she'd even been hiding it from him. “What language do they use with you? Come now, Essa. Tell me the truth.”
“I know them so well, you see…” She hesitated, stuffing her hands into large pockets in her skirt. “We don't really have to say much to each other to get along at all! It doesn't matter, does it? They're only children, after all.”
But it did matter. And perhaps at this late date he was experiencing the scruples he should've felt all along. Something of the bleak mood he'd experienced earlier on the porch came back. He said stiffly, “The boy will have to go back to his people. I'll do what I should've done before. I'll contact the ambassador.”
Essa began to protest, but he waved her objections away and she ran out of the room near to tears.
Before he had a chance to talk himself out of his decision, he instructed the AI to open a channel to Geneva. Within the hour, he received an answer to the query he sent: the ambassador had been accused of treasonable activity with the Venatixi and executed.
Heron was now, by default, the boy's sole guardian.
“And even then,” Orla Eiluned noted, her tone heavily sarcastic, “you didn't foresee trouble!”
She stood with one hand on the door of her aircar, waiting. The old man lowered his head. The telling of his story sucked energy from his bones like sap retreating from the leaves and branches of deciduous trees as winter conquered the land. Willow and ash, poplar and elm, the trees of the estuary bloomed and decayed, the rhythm of life. He felt his own December approaching.
“Perhaps, by then, I didn't want to see trouble,” he said.
He gazed past the vehicle to the river, shining now in the full light of the low sun, as if he would never see it again and must imprint it on memory. A lone butterfly floated over the surface, and rainbows flashed into being and disappeared again as birds flew up, fish glinting in their beaks. They seemed to know the guardian of the fish was going away, leaving them to poach undisturbed. He didn't begrudge them an occasional fish. It was their nature, and nature made no moral judgments. Some lived and some died; he accepted nature's plan.
She indicated he should enter the 'car. He climbed in slowly, aware of a growing arthritic stiffness in his joints. Somewhere, a lark's song skirled down from the vast sky. It sounded like a funeral dirge.
He'd jeopardized his position at the Mother House by spending so much time away on business he couldn't explain to anyone. The death of his faculty member, which he'd managed to smooth over, was brought up again by enemies he hadn't known he'd made in the Guild. During the next year, urgent work kept him in Geneva for weeks, unable to get away. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, there was also fear of the tangle of emotions he experienced whenever he saw Keri. Easier to stay away than deal with them.
A great source of concern was the fact that T'biak grew increasingly alien before his eyes, his moods shifting quickly from light to dark. He was a very beautiful child, even more than Heron's little favorite, yet without her winning charm. But his social interaction with Heron and Essa deteriorated rapidly, and he was given to quick flashes of disapproval when crossed. Not temper, exactly, for there was no heat in them, but Heron could find no name for these outbursts, and he was coming to fear them. Things touched by T'biak ended broken and damaged more often than not—Like the bird, he thought. The child was not yet five years old.
Then one of the house cats disappeared, and this time when he found the mangled corpse under a fir tree he knew who was the killer. He'd managed to cut a little time out of his overloaded schedule to go back to the stone house, and he was prepared to stay for a while; he had a sense of things out of control, coming to a head. So he wasn't surprised to find its front paws had been hacked as if a clumsy attempt had been made to remove them.
Long ago, before she'd been blinded by love, Essa had seen the demon behind the angel eyes of the Venatixi. The uncanny echoes of the killing and mutilation of Merono chilled him even though the day was bright and warm, but he didn't know what to make of them.
The boy came up as he contemplated the body. He watched Heron, his eyes bleak as the mountains that ringed the stone house. Suddenly, Heron had no desire to move the corpse or confront the killer.
It didn't make sense. He accepted by now that the Venatixi language was inherited complete at birth and did not need to be learned from models in the inefficient way of human languages. That seemed plausible, once he thought about it. Birds still chirped even when handraised from hatchlings; they didn't have to be taught. Some even inherited their songs. But an entire culture, down to its rituals—and how else was he to interpret the mutilated animal than as a child's imitation of what adults do?—was unbelievable.
For several weeks he tried to explain the almost daily oddness the boy manifested as coincidence. “We see it because we look for it,” he told Birgit. But he didn't believe that himself. Essa, as usual, would have none of it. “He's just a child, Heron!” was her constant refrain.
The summer after the children's fifth anniversary, Keri brought him the mother dog that loved her so warmly. He was in the office, going over accounts with Essa, when the child laid the body tenderly on the desk before him. He didn't need to examine it to know there were no paws at the end of the bloody stumps.
The little girl gazed at him with that pure, cherubic look he'd grown so attached to. It was a game, a mimicry of the adult behavior that had led to the killing of Merono. But he had no idea what the rules were.
He wanted to shout at her. He wanted to weep. He did neither. Angels, he understood now, were as amoral as scientists. Like lingsters, they kept emotion out of the interface.
“What have you done?” Essa exclaimed in horror.
Keri's expression clouded. Without a word, she swept the mangled dog off the desk and carried it outside. He glimpsed T'biak waiting for her under a fir, sunlight striping his cheeks like war paint. It had been some kind of test, he knew. And he'd failed it. His fists clenched with frustration but he did nothing.
Even then he wanted to believe it was a mistake, that T'biak had killed the dog and Keri was only bringing it to them. The language—well, yes, he could believe she could pick that up to the exclusion of her native tongue. But not the culture. That couldn't be transmitted without adult models. Not an entire culture!
Essa rose from her chair, her face white. “It's my fault. I've failed you. I should've seen—”
“Nobody could see this coming, Essa. Don't you think I would've made some provision if I had?”
“We must end it now.”
“End it how?”
“Admit to the Guild what we've been doing here. We have no choice now, Heron! They'll find a way to return T'biak to his own people.”
He could see love for the boy at war with fear of him in her expression, and wondered if she saw a similar conflict in his own eyes. “And Keri?”
“You've lost her already, Heron. If it's the last thing you do here, accept the truth!” She ran out of the house.
He knew he should go after her. But instead he sat and stared out the window at the forest where fragile wildflowers bloomed so briefly and birds darted through conifers, nest-building, scraps of fur scavenged from the household cats and dogs in their beaks. He couldn't recall ever noticing them before. So much had changed in the way he viewed the world. Hatched only a year ago, now the birds knew—all untaught—how to seize life's flickering warmth in a year mostly cold and dark. The sheer bravery of tiny things touched his heart.
He ran outside at the sound of the first scream, but he was too late to save Essa. He did, however, manage to prevent T'biak from cutting off her hands.
“The Procurators decided it was better not to let the true story get out,” the old man said. “I was allowed to ‘retire’ from the Guild.”
The 'car hummed softly, lifting over the sea to the destination the Head had coded into the onboard AI. A
fter a while she sighed.
“And you exiled yourself on that island, far away from your life's work—”
“As penance, Magistra.”
She stirred irritably at his use of the honorific. “There're better ways to make amends than becoming a hermit!”
He felt drained of words, a relief, as if he'd lanced a boil and let infection flow out. After the shock of events had begun to fade, he'd made the decision that he couldn't trust himself ever again. Hubris, Essa had called his crime. On his river mouth, where silent fish and noisy birds pursued their instinctual ways, he'd found healing if not forgiveness. For that, one had to pay one's debts, but it had not been possible to pay his.
“Did you ever learn why T'biak killed Essa?”
“I think because she loved him. They can't take too much love.”
The Head glanced quizzically at him. “Well, we shall never know. He was returned to his people not long after.”
The 'car was descending now and he recognized the autumnal gold-green dress of the Alps. They skimmed over ripe fields and flag-bedecked towns; in the distance, he saw the white buildings of the Mother House, surrounded by apple orchards. He imagined the shimmer of young voices under the heavy boughs, practicing their craft on each other, their music a reminder of how much he'd loved the Guild and its mission. Everything looked fresher, more prosperous than he remembered. The peace, incomprehensible though it might be, had held; things had improved.
“You don't seem curious to know why I came for you.” Orla Eiluned waited for him to answer. When he didn't, she said: “The girl asked for you. You must find out why.”
He raised an eyebrow at that.
“Oh yes,” she said, misunderstanding. “We've taught Keri Inglis! She learned fast enough once the boy was gone. We have great hopes for her as a superior lingster. Something good will emerge from your abominable experiment, after all.”
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