by M. A. Foster
“As you say. But there is a thing I am uncertain on, which I must know before we go on. Will you allow this?”
“Go on. But we waste time.”
“All of your names mean something, yes? They are not just meaningless sounds, a label? And you recognize the significance of each name?”
“It is so. We do not call ourselves by numbers, or by letters that fulfill the same purpose.”
“What does Pantankan mean?”
“That is foolish. It is not a name. It can’t be. As a symbol, it means, I think, what you would call an alphabet. You say the old names of your first two letters. We say the first three. Panh. Tanh. Kanh. P.T.K.”
“That’s all it means?”
“All and only. To my knowledge, that trisyllable is not to be used for a name.”
“Well, that is what the dark ler told me his name was. Could he have been joking?”
“No. Names are not joking matters.”
“He made it a point to say that Efrem was here, but that we would learn no more by seeing him.”
“Did he say this before any of us?”
“No. We were alone, by the door. You were waiting in the lift. Did he give his name to your people, before I got there?”
“No. He did not. We would not ask, if he preferred silence. A name, in some ways, in our system, is . . . private. But. Never mind. I agree. I see the rat in the grain. Yes, we shall go and see this Efrem. But by my lead. There is a trap here, I think.” She said the last with something almost approaching friendliness, or camaraderie.
“ ‘Alphabet’ wants us to go there.”
“I think not. It seems baited for you. I should not have been interested, and you should have been ignorant enough to fail to tell me, or if you had, fail to convince me. No. I am sure now; the trap is for you. Good work! You are sharper than I would have given you credit for!”
“Thanks.” Han added, “Just what I needed.” He hoped this shallow foray into sarcasm would not set her off again; but she only gave him a cool glance in return.
The public telescanner catalogue, to their surprise, indeed listed one such Edo Efrem; and the address was not far away. Han at first wanted to call him, but Liszendir urged caution and deviousness. He agreed, and so they set out by roundabout ways which he knew. Along the way, Liszendir made a running commentary on the disadvantages of human cities, but as she did, she also pointed out strategic locations should street fighting ever be required. It was a subject she seemed ferociously knowledgeable in. Han felt he was no sissy, but all the same, he shuddered, invisibly, he hoped, at some of the things she calmly suggested.
When they arrived at the building where Efrem was reputed to live, she paused thoughtfully. She asked, after a moment, “If you were going to visit someone in one of these hives, how would you go about it?”
“Through the front door and to the lift. Then to the apartment and stand before the door and state who you are. If anyone answers, you go in.”
“Are there stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Then we will use them.”
Inside the building, at the floor they wanted, the third, she cautioned Han, “Ring the bell from the side, from as far as you can reach. Then step back. I will hold you.”
Han did as she asked, extending his hand to hers. She grasped it, firmly and directly. He felt a sudden shock: it was a soft, cool, feminine hand of no apparent great strength. The double thumbs, one of each side of her rather narrow hand, locked around his wrist in a peculiar grip. There seemed to be no real restraint in the grip, but he knew instinctively that he could not be pulled free of her.
Han rang the bell. A pleasant voice from within said, “Please enter,” and the door slid open noiselessly. Han leaned further forward, but Liszendir pulled him back, none too gently. He looked at her; she was making a gesture with her hand and her face . . . she put her finger to her lips, pointed to both eyes, then to her forehead, and then made a rotary motion with the finger. Han recognized the crude sign language. She was saying, “Be silent, watch, and learn.”
Liszendir moved around Han to come nearer the door, carefully lay flat on the floor, and undulated—there was no other word to describe the motion she made—into the doorway. Then she half raised, and made a peculiar motion upwards with her free hand. Immediately, from within the room, there sounded a faint hiss, which ended virtually instantly with a low thunk in the corridor wall behind her. Han started forward, but she said, in a low voice, “No. Stay where you are!” Some long minutes passed. Liszendir lay very still, as flat as a rug. Then there was another hiss-thunk. The girl gained her feet in one flowing, smooth motion, and darted into the room. A moment later Han heard her voice from within, “It’s fixed now. You can come in.”
He went into the room cautiously. Liszendir was standing opposite the door, holding a pistol of unfamiliar type. It looked like a pistol, but like no one Han had ever seen before. It was molded in one piece, of some dark and apparently heavy metal, and as he approached, could be heard to be hissing quietly to itself. The barrel was long and very slender, while the handle or butt flared into a bulge shaped somewhat like a shoe. To the side of the room lay a corpse.
Liszendir said, “This is a devilish thing. The gun was set in a triggering mechanism keyed by the door. There was a timer; there was no radar or sonics I could find.” She indicated the muzzle. There was a tiny hole in it. “I have disarmed it. It uses highly compressed gas to fire rifled slivers, probably made of a material which will dissolve in the body. The slivers would also contain poison and a coagulant for the wound. They are terrible things, but luckily for both you and me, weapons like this do not have a great range.”
She opened the magazine expertly, and removed gingerly a tiny, glistening needle of some transparent material. She handled it carefully, putting the needle down on a shelf to look at it. Han reached for it, but she stopped him.
“Some things like this are hollow. This one does not seem so. If that is true, the whole needle is poison and may be activated by handling.”
He nodded agreement, then turned to the body.
“No,” she said. “It may be trapped. We can learn nothing from it. We can call the police from the ship, although we should call Hetrus. But let us leave here, quickly. I have danger-sense. This room is loaded with traps.”
They left the room cautiously. Han picked up the strange little pistol where Liszendir had dropped it.
“Can this thing be recharged?”
“Oh, yes. The reservoir I bled off is the secondary one, the one that powers the firing chamber. The main reservoir is still almost full.”
“I thought I’d take it with us. We may have need for it.”
“You may. Do not ask me to touch it again. I will explain after we have boarded the ship. But not now! We must move fast. Someone wanted at least for you to come to this room, perhaps to be killed, perhaps to be caught and accused.”
Han agreed, and pocketing the deadly little gun, hurriedly left the apartment.
2
“The sage knows more than four seasons; the Fool says that the four of which his calendar speaks are of no importance.”
—Ler saying, attr. to Garlendadh Tlanh.
LISENDIR WAS TENSE during their trip to the spaceport, and did not fully relax, or reach a state which appeared to be relaxation, until they were actually on the ship, Pallenber, and well into space. Indeed, she had gone over the ship with extreme care, looking carefully for snares, traps and miscellaneous tracers, bugs and the like. After a few days, she pronounced the Pallenber free of all such devices. Han agreed, although privately, he reflected that such an absence might in itself be curious in the light of the events which had occurred just before they left.
In the meantime, he had also been busy, counting and checking their provisions, the ostensible trade goods, the state of the weapons carried aboard the ship. He had also been engaged in several commnet conversations with Hetrus over the matter of the body in the apart
ment (which had indeed proved to be that of Efrem), the possible trap and the identity of the unknown fifth ler. Hetrus was definitely interested, and was pursuing matters with a great amount of bureaucratic zeal, but at least up to this point, he had uncovered nothing. The ler he had contacted knew no more than he did.
Among these jobs, they entered matrix overspace, set the course and settled down to routine. They set up shifts, so that one of them would always be awake. Liszendir did not enjoy being responsible for the ship while Han was asleep, but she accepted the training he gave her stoically and agreed to awaken him immediately should an emergency occur. He didn’t expect one, but at the same time he saw no lack of virtue in a little caution.
He wondered what it would be like if she should have to wake him up in an emergency. Would she pitch him out of his hammock in some artful way, so that he would perform some odd pervulsion of motion before he hit the deck? No, he thought. To imagine that was silly. More soberly, he suspected that she would not use her “skill” without good reason or provocation, in line with other, similar disciplines which had appeared from time to time among humans. No. She would be completely inhibited during normal situations by a complex code, or if one preferred, a set of rules of engagement. Such creatures would be incredibly dangerous turned loose in society without some inhibitions of that nature.
After several days, however, he found out. He had fallen out of sleep early, for some reason, and was just lying in his hammock, drifting, imagining, half-asleep. Then he became aware that without his noticing it, a presence had entered his cabin and was watching him, silently. He lay quietly, waiting. After what seemed to him as an almost eternal passage of time, she leaned forward and touched him gently on the shoulder. As she did, he caught the tiniest shred of her scent, which was her own and not perfume; it was heady, rather grassy, with some sharp, but very faint, undertones.
He nodded, pretending that he had been asleep, and got up, hoping that she would not see that he was pretending.
“Is it time already?”
“No. I woke you early. After a few days of this, I am bored and lonely and need some talk, some interaction. We are not used to solitude. Do you mind?”
“No, no; not at all. I feel much the same way. But I did not wish to offend you by forcing anything you did not want.” The last was a barb at her early haughtiness. If she noticed it, she gave no sign.
“I understand. We are not all that different. Good, then. I will wait for you in the control room.”
She turned and departed, as silently as she had come. Han wondered at that. At first, during the busy first days, he had not noticed, but as the time they had been alone together on the ship increased, he began to notice, more and more, the silence and grace with which she moved. It looked effortless, flowing like water in a stream, but he knew with the logical part of his mind that a thousand years or more of tradition and training went into that uncanny movement.
His thoughts strayed further. She was in no way he could identify like the girls he had known, chased, loved in short and desultory affairs which were the norm for Boomtown society. She was curved and feminine, true enough, now that he had time to notice, but the shape was all subtlety, suggestion, hint. He thought, almost like a riddle, whose question was at too fine a focus to be put exactly into words he knew. The shapeless robe she wore, a standard ler garment, was a concealer which revealed, and contributed in no small way to the growing sense of eroticism that he felt. He was sure that to ler eyes, she was young, agile, pretty and extremely desirable. And of course, easily attainable, with no qualms on either side. But to him, it was a different matter.
That, he shut off, abruptly. He strongly suspected that he would be able to cherish no hopes in that area. He didn’t even know if anything would be possible between them, emotionally or physically. Ler adolescent eroticism was well known among humans, yet at the same time, there were few tales of any adventures between the two. And such tales as were, were invariably structured like the vulgar stories of little boys, whose imaginations so easily outstripped reality, and even probability.
Still, even after thousands of years, the ler were remarkably casual about dalliance; or for that matter, about refusals. Oddly enough, all their myths seemed to revolve around the efforts of individuals; nowhere was love or passion about it featured in even a major role.
So Han dressed, depilated his beard, and went to the control room. The forward part of the room, which was the largest on the ship, was not a window, but a converter screen which passed a real-space view even when the ship was in any one of the matrix overspaces. Moreover, it was tunable over a wide range of frequencies. It was now fully open, tuned to the slightly broader response characteristics of the ler eye. The only light in the control room came from this screen and from the instruments; outside, with no apparent barrier between them, lay the deeps of starry darkness, drifting visibly at the corners of the screen. Liszendir sat quietly in the pilot’s chair and looked out on the spectacle. If she noticed Han enter, she gave no sign.
“Have you traveled space before?” he asked, trying to start a conversation. He knew very well that she had, because there were no ler anywhere near Seabright.
“Oh, yes, many times. But never with such a view as this,” she replied, almost cheerfully. After a short pause, she continued.
“This is not new, it is just the endlessness of it which both attracts me and disturbs me at the same time. There is more here than all of us together can ever know. Here, I become receptive to the reality of my own insignificance.”
Han agreed, but only in part. He did not understand why she should become so pensive over the immensity, and implied infinitude, of space. It really didn’t matter whether you were on a planetary surface or not, you were still a finite creature working and striving, or just coasting with the current, in infinite systems. But he replied, “Yes, it does prompt that feeling. I know it well. Still, we must do what we will measured by what we are able to do.”
“Yes, like the sea. At my home, on Kenten, our yos, where the braid lives, is beside a body of salt water, a narrow bay of the sea that connects up in the west with the ocean. All around are mountains, some wild and rugged, some terraced with gardens and orchards, other yosas, towns, towers. I used to watch the sea before the garden for hours. The waves, the play of light, the changeable winds and that timelessness which is great time, kfandrir, passing, greater than our lives. The sea said to me, ‘I was here, reposed, filling the basins of my will, gathered, caressed by the wind, before ler came to this planet; and when they have gone, I will still be here.’ The waves, such little things, mock us in their infinitude; I look here outwards in my shift and I see the same words.”
Again she became silent, and resumed looking at the darkness immense and the spotted glory of the far stars. Han tried to imagine the depth of the picture of her home she had painted. He could not. He knew about ler “family” structure and how it dominated their society, but he had no insight into it, how it was.
The ler “family” structure, the so-called “braid,” was dictated by their low birthrate, which rarely produced more than two offspring per bred female during the fertile period, which ran roughly from age thirty to forty. But other elements played important roles: the long, infertile adolescence with its high sex-drive tended to make individuals independent and solitary by nature. The short, fertile period with its long gestation periods, eighteen months. And their original low numbers, with the associated small gene pool. On Earth they had had several family models to emulate in their early period, but they had liked none of them. So they invented a structure which would widen the gene pool, use the birthrate to the fullest, and provide an organism for raising children. But it was not, like human models, a heriditary chain, a bloodline, but a social procedure which wove their society together in a complex fashion.
Basically, the braid originated with a male and female of the same ages, at fertility. They would mate, hopefully producing a child, who wou
ld be the nerh or elder outsibling. At age thirty-five standard, the two would select and recruit second mates for each other, and remate. Each pair would produce a child, who would be called toorh, insiblings. After that, the inductees would mate and produce a last child, called thes, or younger outsibling. All lived under one roof, together.
At their fertility, the insiblings, who were not blood-related to each other, having separate parents, would weave and become the nucleus of the next braid generation. The nerh and the thes would weave into other braids as afterparents. So each child-generation would be distributed into three braids. This process kept the genetic pool wide and actually prevented inbreeding and the establishment of racial traits.
As soon as the insiblings had woven, the parents of the old braid would leave and go their own way, leaving the house and everything that went with it in the hands of the new generation. They were then considered free of all responsibility and could do as they would. Some stayed together, some went off on their own.
That was what it was, but few humans, if any, had any feel for how it was, as it was completely at variance with the way humans, with variations, structured their families. At times, on various planets, some enterprising humans would set up analogues of the ler braids. But they never lasted very long. The strains were too great, emotionally, sexually, and particularly in the matter of property. And in the fact that, after all, the braid was a mechanism for making full use of fertility. Used with humans, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Han said, “Tell me about your family, your braid. Your friends. What you did at the school. I suspect that you know more of the way I live than I of your way.”
She turned back to him. “Not necessarily so. You know I am Nerh. I am now at a point in my life when for all practical purposes school is over, but I am not quite old enough to be invited to weave as aftermother with another braid. I was head of house, with the other children of my generation, probably much like an older sister in your terms, but with more authority. Still, it was a waning authority. My insiblings were Dherlinjan and Follirian. They pay attention to me, but they know very well that all they have to do is wait. In your society, eldest gets all. In ours, the insiblings get everything—house, title, braid name. Even the parents leave when the insiblings become fertile.”
