by Migration
The finger stabbed upward at the star-filled sky above the Square. “What hidden powers underlie the grandeur of the cosmos? Do you imagine it all happens for no reason, with no plan and no purpose, in the way that some, whose minds are unable to reach beyond the material and the mechanical, would have you believe? On Earth in ancient times – before its decline into the age of material distractions and self-worship that led to the Conflagration – a wisdom once existed that knew and could channel those powers. A level of mental and spiritual advancement that was able to mediate between the vaster reality and the limited realm of experience and perception that we regard as the universe and all that is….” Another pause, ushering in a louder, more strident note. “But out here, a flicker is beginning to arise once again. The retreat we have created at Etanne rejects the excesses of artificiality that make the rest of Constellation a mirror of what Earth became. Amid surroundings that bring back the peace and serenity that Earth once knew, the mind and spirit can reach out and make contact again with…”
Korshak knew the line and had no particular need to hear it again. He moved to where he could get a clearer view of the area at the front, beside the speaker’s platform. The platform with its rostrum was positioned off-center toward the crowd’s right. From it, a narrow carpet of colorful design extended leftward for perhaps seven or eight feet to a small wooden table standing on its far end. A rod projecting upward from the table’s center to a little less than shoulder height supported a metal urn in which the incense was burning. To Korshak, the setup told its own story immediately.
Bringing a carpet out for pure ornamentation to a street meeting like this would have been a needless chore and extravagance. The way it was positioned between the speaker’s platform and the table effected a superficially logical visual symmetry, but its only evident function was to serve as a totally unnecessary underlay for the table. Which meant that its real purpose had to be something else. It was concealing something. If Korshak’s guess was correct, the appearance of the table and the rod standing up from its center was deceptive. They were painted and grained to look like wood, but far from being lightweight and delicate, they were constructed from high-strength metal alloy. The carpet covered a horizontal extension to complete an L-shaped configuration that would resist tipping. The speaker was building up to a demonstration now, before everyone’s eyes, of the powers that the Mediators had learned to access. Anyone here could learn it, too. Yes, Korshak thought he had a good idea of where this was leading.
Movement nearby caught his attention. One of the acolytes was moving among the audience, distributing leaflets. Korshak accepted one obligingly.
“Don’t leave just yet,” the acolyte murmured. “The Master is about to show one of the wonders.”
“What wonder is that?” Korshak asked.
“You will soon see for yourself.”
Korshak studied his face curiously. He was young, maybe in his twenties, with yellow hair, gray, opaque eyes that revealed nothing of the person within, and lean features intensified by hollow cheeks and a narrow nose and chin. With the opportunities that abounded in Aurora, he could probably have become anything he chose. It had never ceased to amaze Korshak that so many people were enticed by promises of intangible magic that were never fulfilled, when all the time they were surrounded by countless visible proofs of what he still considered to be real magic. Was it just a case of familiarity dulling the senses, and the allure of the strange and the unknown? The acolyte had to know that the wonder he was peddling was faked. So what kind of rationalization did the cult instill to justify such deception and still preserve faith? There were depths to the psychology of this business, Korshak realized, that he still hadn’t plumbed.
The audience was primed now, impatient for the show. As the acolyte moved away, a girl who had been sitting out of view at the front rose to her feet. She was thin and wraithlike, dressed in an enveloping white robe secured by a cord at the waist. With the pallor of her features, Korshak’s first thought was that it could have been a shroud. Two of the other robed figures came forward, took her by the hands, and led her to the center of the strip of carpet, where she turned to face the audience expressionlessly. At the same time, the bearded Master was stepping down from the platform.
“This is Nyea,” he informed the onlookers. “Still a novice, but already attuned to actualizing and focusing energy drawn from a higher plane. In a way, like an antenna, if you will. What you are about to see cannot be explained by ordinary, materialism-based physics. Observe.”
One of the attendants had removed the urn from the top of the rod and stepped back. The other drew Nyea a few steps sideways until she was alongside the small table, and then raised her arm to shoulder height, at the same time bending it at the elbow to bring her hand, lightly closed, against the side of her head. This caused the underside of her arm just above the elbow, to where the sleeve of her robe had fallen, to rest on the ring at the top of the rod, in which the urn had rested. The attendant made a show of clasping the rod tightly with both hands, while the Master began making passes in the air, at the same time intoning a rhythmic chant that was taken up by the others, now assembled as a backing group on either side. The wraith’s eyes closed, and her face took on a distant look. Her body seemed to stiffen. Korshak glanced at his companions. Brel was watching the performance fixedly, while Ronti looked about at the reactions of the spectators. They were rapt with attention, expectations now at their highest.
Together, the Master, standing behind, and the attendant, to the side, stooped and gripped Nyea’s feet, which were adorned with just a pair of string sandals. Slowly, they lifted her feet from the ground, moving them sideways, in the direction away from the table. She remained supported by her upper arm resting on the top of the rod, still being held firmly by the other attendant. Already, there seemed something unnatural about the balance being effected. Her upper body was supported only by the rod, but it seemed stable and firm. A few murmurs of surprise went up among the audience.
They lifted and turned her slowly until she was horizontal, her body remaining impossibly rigid as it lay between the rod under her bent arm at one end, and their two pairs of hands holding her feet at the other. The Master’s eyes shone with mystical energy flowing through his being from unknown dimensions of existence. He removed one of his hands; the attendant did likewise, producing gasps of astonishment. They were supporting her now only with the fingertips of their two remaining hands, extended casually as if bearing no weight at all. Then, slowly and carefully, as if not to disrupt the delicate interplay of unseen currents, they withdrew their hands completely. Finally, the attendant who had been holding the rod at the other end let go of it and stepped back. Nyea remained hanging in the air in repose, her only contact with anything now being her upper arm on the rod. The Master snapped his fingers, and her eyes opened. She blinked several times, as if unsure for a moment where she was, then smiled, stretched her leg, and seemed to relax visibly, giving every impression of being perfectly comfortable and at ease.
Exclamations of amazement broke out all around, with some scattered applause. On the terrace above, people outside the casino entrance were stopping and coming across to see what was going on. At the front of the crowd, a man was rubbing the top of his head and looking upward, at the same time proclaiming, “I feel it! I can feel the energy!”
The Master put a hand to his brow and signaled weakly with a wave of the other that his strength was fading. As he stood back, mopping his face with a handkerchief, the rest of the troupe converged to catch Nyea and lower her back to the ground before the power expired. In moments the table was dismantled and returned to a stowage space in the platform, and the carpet folded into a stack – not rolled, as would have been more natural – doubtless to accommodate the sections of the concealed metal footing. People were coming forward with questions and comments, which the Master’s assistants stepped in to deal with.
Ronti turned to Korshak. “Do you see
it?”
“Oh, sure. The setup looked odd from the start.”
“Not a bad act, though.”
“How do they do it?” Brel asked them.
“That pole and the table aren’t what they seem,” Korshak said. “You wouldn’t bend them with a sledge hammer. There’s another part under the carpet. She’s strapped to a harness underneath the robe, that supports the side of her body and connects to a ratchet fixing in the top of the pole.”
Brel nodded slowly as the principle became clearer, if not in every detail. “Is that why they use someone skinny?”
Ronti grinned. “Well, it probably wouldn’t help things much if she were three hundred pounds,” he agreed.
“I’m not sure what you mean by a ratchet fixing.”
Leaving Ronti to explain, Korshak made his way around the throng toward the Master, and reached him just as a couple who had been pressing him on some point walked away, nodding and uttering profuse thanks. He stepped in before anyone else could intervene.
“I have a question.”
“I am extremely exhausted. If it’s about what I just demonstrated, one of my understudies will deal with it.”
“No, nothing like that. It’s about something that happened around two weeks ago.”
Suspicion flickered across the Master’s face. “What?”
“It was on another day when you were speaking right here. There was an unusual listener in the crowd. Very unusual. A robot.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
Korshak saw immediately that he was holding something back. Besides, a robot in the crowd was hardly something that would escape notice, and Brel had said the Master was there on that day.
“That’s unfortunate,” Korshak said. “Would it help your memory if I talked about leather corsets and a frame that runs under a carpet?”
The Master peered at him more closely, and then glowered. “Korshak! I should have spotted you sooner. So, what’s the story? Have you taken to crusading for moral righteousness now?”
“No, I live and let live. I’m here on personal business. But the robot was here, and so were you. You must have seen it. So, you tell me the story.”
“There isn’t much of a story to tell.”
“Then tell me as much as you know.”
The Master sighed. “It just appeared. We didn’t have anything to do with that, or know where it came from. But it was a believer, all right. Asked me all kinds of questions afterward about how to learn more. Said it wanted to become one of the family.”
“What? You mean the Mediators?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It wanted to join your sect at Etanne.”
“That’s right.”
And Korshak had thought this couldn’t get any stranger. Although, talking with Masumichi had half prepared him for something like this. In terms of its ability to conceptualize, Tek was a precursor of Kog, who had been able to perform the ball-vanishing trick effectively because it had an intuitive grasp its significance. Unlike their earlier predecessors, who hadn’t seen anything remarkable in such illusions at all, Tek would know that what it saw was impossible by the normal rules of how the world worked, but without the analytical ability to do other than accept it at face value. Hence, it had all the makings of a True Believer.
“So what happened?” Korshak asked.
The Master shook his head. “It was too weird. I didn’t know what kind of an outfit it belonged to, or what we might have gotten ourselves into. I just wanted it to get lost.”
“So what did you say?”
“The usual stuff when someone looks as if they could be trouble: that you have to be properly prepared, which I told it meant getting closer to what’s natural. All the dependence on technological stuff that life has become brings the wrong vibes.” The corners of the Master’s mouth twitched upward for an instant. “I figured that ought to keep a robot busy for a while.”
“And that’s it?” Korshak asked.
“That’s it. It went away. I never saw it again. That’s all I know.” The Master’s body language confirmed it. Korshak nodded. The Master waited for a few seconds, then leaned closer and winked an eye. “So, hey, we’re both in the same line, right? Kinda like partners. You meant what you said about live and let live, eh?”
Back at the Rainbow, Brel had bent a flattened drinking straw through two right angles to form three sides of a square. She stood it on the bar and held it with one of the parallel sides resting on the surface, the center part vertical. “That’s how I think you’re telling me they do it,” she said to Ronti. “Nyea is the top part. The pole and the table are the upright. And this is the bit under the carpet. Only the whole thing is rigid.” She made motions of trying to tilt the figure. “See, it won’t fall over.”
Ronti nodded over another Envoy. “You’ve got the idea.”
Osgar, watching from the other side with his elbows resting on the bar, nodded. “I’ve wondered about that one. It had to be something like that. You wouldn’t believe some of the explanations some people come up with, that I’ve listened to. Magnets, local suppression of the gravity simulators, vortexes in the ether….”
“You get the believers coming in and talking about it?” Korshak said. “Why here? It seems a bit out of the way.”
Osgar shook his head. “I didn’t mean here. When I was on Plantation.”
“What were they doing there?” Ronti asked.
“It’s a regular thing for them to spend a bit of time there. Supposedly they need to ‘go natural’ and get all the technical stuff from the other worlds out of their heads before they move on to Etanne. But what it is really, the cults connive with the farmers to keep them supplied with willing bodies to help out with the work. They do everything the old way, so there’s never enough.”
“Kind of a spiritual purification,” Brel offered. “Before they’re admitted to Etanne.”
Osgar nodded. “Something like that. And the cults get good deals from the farmers. So I guess everyone’s happy.”
Aspiring novices seeking preparation for Etanne would find themselves being steered to Plantation. Korshak and Ronti looked at each other as the same obvious thought came to both of them. “Hundreds of people would have seen it going there,” Ronti pointed out after a few seconds. “They couldn’t miss something like that. Masumichi’s been asking around for over a week. How could it have disappeared?”
“Istella has people coming and going all the time who don’t want to be noticed,” Korshak answered.
It took Ronti a moment to see what Korshak was getting at. “You mean it could have disguised itself? Big coat? Hat and beard?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“A robot? It’s too crazy.”
“That’s why I like it. Anyhow, got any better ideas?” It was clear that Ronti hadn’t.
Brel was giving them a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
Korshak grinned at her, then shifted his gaze to Osgar, who was wearing an equally baffled expression. “I think it’s time to turn our attention to Plantation,” he told them.
SIXTEEN
Plantation had been completed a little under three years previously. Its founding was motivated by a growing nostalgia among many of the Aurora’s population for the natural environments of Earth, and their desire for a change from artificial vistas. It was inevitable, of course, that whatever might be contrived to convey other impressions would rest totally on underpinnings as synthetic as anything that human ingenuity had ever devised, but the illusion was felt worth the effort by a sufficient number of people to get the project launched. Its subsequent success as a sanctuary where traditional farming skills could be practiced and preserved, and wildlife brought from Earth kept in more natural conditions, along with its popularity as a place for vacations and day trips, seemed to have vindicated the decision.
Sonja and Helmut Goben had moved there from Aurora a year after the newly completed miniworld began accepting
residents. Their former place in the Evergreen module, set amid plant-conservation zones and recreational parkland, had suited them well through the earlier years of the voyage. But with the mission’s population increasing as a new generation began to arrive, more of Evergreen’s park space was converted to food production, and its recreational facilities transferred to Plantation. Helmut’s work as a microbiologist involved a lot of field time studying microorganisms in their natural habitats, which Evergreen’s wildlife preserves had supplied initially, so it was expedient, as well as in keeping with their personal tastes, for them to move, too. Sonja had filled a teaching place in Plantation’s junior school, which was located near a village-style community called Huan-ko, huddled together amid the farmscapes and tracts of natural greenery.
Their abode was very different from the ultramodern integrated duplex that they had enjoyed in Evergreen. There were no electronics bringing life and news from other parts of Constellation; no transit tubes or runabouts; no constant reaffirmation of their dependence on technology by the ubiquitous presence and watchfulness of machines. Instead, they had a two-story house with windows and a roof, that superficially claimed to be of wood, along with an adjoining outbuilding and a patch of land that served as a kitchen garden and supported a mix of chickens, ducks, and several other kinds of animals; no part of Plantation that could be put to use was overlooked. Inspired by Masumichi’s layout, they lived in the upper part, and Helmut kept a field laboratory below. And they had finally kept a promise they made to themselves years before by also following Masumichi in having a tree growing up through the center. The children liked it, too. They had friends who came fifty miles from Aurora to see the Forest on Plantation. But they could point to their own personal one right here, forming one of the walls of their bedroom.
