The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  After a time, Han arose and went up to the pinnacles, to look out over the land and think about how it would be then, when they were much older. As he came to the top of the ridge by the broken rocks, he looked to the south, and felt ice in his heart. There were lights over the area of the city, lights which moved together, slowly. A bulk darker than darkness lay behind them; and Han knew that it could be only one thing.

  He stood for a long time, looking at the lights of a huge ship, one in the darkness whose true size could not be guessed. Liszendir, noticing his long absence, joined him quietly, so that he did not know she was there until he felt her warm hip pressed against his. She said nothing, but she looked at the lights for as long as he had.

  Finally she spoke, bitterly. “There is a ship.”

  “I don’t believe it will be going the way we want, Liszen.”

  “No. But we may yet ride it.”

  “Do you think they will hunt for us?”

  “I know it with the same certainty that I know we cannot escape them. And even if I were whole in my wrists again, and you were armed to the teeth, it would be nothing against the numbers they must have in that thing.”

  As if in answer to what Liszendir had said, the cluster of lights began to move, slowly gaining altitude, moving north, towards them. Han saw the movement, and started violently. Liszendir watched for a moment, and then laid her hand on his arm.

  “Not tonight. They can’t see us from that thing. They will come later.” The dark mass and lights moved into the clouds overhead. But they could still see some of the lights. It moved majestically northwards, and then disappeared.

  She motioned to him. “Run the drif off; he will be all right. And come inside with me. We will have one more night, at least.”

  Han half expected not to wake up again. Thinking it very well might prove to be their last time together, they had outdone themselves; she had been exquisite, delicious. He yearned to take her again, but he knew as he awoke that he could not. He left her, warm and half-sleeping, and started out of the house to the stream. He was only a few feet from the cabin when he became aware of an incongruity in the now-familiar landscape. He looked again. It was Hath’ingar. And many more. The Pallenber, unmarked and undamaged, had been grounded and sat placidly, somewhat down the defile, shining in the early morning sunlight. He looked back to the cabin, hesitantly. Liszendir stood in the doorway, looking quietly out on the scene in the dooryard.

  Hath’ingar broke the silence. “Bravo, bravo! You see the wisdom of inaction! You cannot run, you cannot fight. There is hope in no direction. And of course no one else will come. You must wish to know how I came here so easily. It is simple. No magic, no powerful instruments. Just good ears. I heard her say to you on the ship that she would meet you here. So I came here also. I agree with you—you have excellent taste: this is indeed a fine place.”

  Han was steady. “What do you want of us?”

  “Really, little enough to fear. I am revenged for my ear, as you and she doubtless know by now. In other circumstances I would be tempted to seek more, but she is a highly trained fighter and much more valuable than the petty satisfactions of personal pique. We have many uses for such as her on Dawn.”

  Liszendir said plainly, “I will not aid you. I will autoforget before then, and you can treat the remainder as you will.” It was a good threat. Total autoforgetting would erase her personality. The body would respond, but Liszendir would no longer be in it. Han felt a deadness inside. Yes—she would be beyond the reach of pain. And pleasure.

  “I think not. Your pet, here. You would not see him treated unkindly? So none of us would. You can escape inwards, but he can’t. So by certain arts, if it came to that, he would remember you forever, and us, of course. And little else. But let us not descend to such a level. Besides, I wish you no bizarrity. You, Liszendir, will breed and teach the Warriors. No indignity. Share and share alike. Leave these four-bred weaklings. The Warriors will engulf them all in time.”

  Han asked, “What about me, Hath’ingar?”

  “You have a certain value. You appear to be close to the, let me see, ah, yes, the Mnar-geseniz type, and doubtless capable mechanically. I have no interest myself in that breed, you understand this is nothing personal, but I can sell or trade you on Dawn. Who knows? If you two conduct yourselves respectfully, I may even sell you to her,” he said, gesturing at Liszendir. “If she can afford my price. You, Han, are a trader. So am I, in my very own small way.”

  Han saw motion out of the corner of his eye: the ship of the Warriors was returning from the north, bulking over the horizon. As it came closer, Han realized that its size was far beyond any artifact he had ever seen before. It was truly colossal, a great fat rounded shape, somewhat conical. He could not accurately guess its real size; it distorted scale and measure in its immensity. Accompanying it was an orbiting swarm of irregular blocks, each one following its own circular path generally in the horizontal plane. Han looked again. The blocks were apparently meteorites. One passed under the approaching ship, passing near the ground and a landmark Han had become familiar with. He was impressed. That one appeared to be a good half-mile in diameter.

  Hath’ingar said, “You marvel at our ship and its toys? That is good! Those are our weapons. They need no fuses, no tricky timers, no magic juggling of atoms. Just good old iron, the warrior’s tool. When we need persuasion, one goes out, to gain momentum, and back, using planetary gravity in part. If we shoot from high over the planet, it is even better: then we can speed them up so that they act like real meteors when they impact. One of those beauties, so employed, will leave a beautiful clean crater, about a hundred miles across and several miles deep, say, a score or so. No escape, no hiding, no fortifying. And no defense.

  “We expect,” he continued, “to move inwards shortly and indulge ourselves to the great disadvantage of so-called civilized humankind and four-by ler. The latter we will liberate from their effeminate enervating philosophy, and the former we will own. We need more ships, but I am sure you can see we could do the task with just one.”

  Liszendir said calmly, “The ler will not cooperate with such a scheme.”

  “Then we will obliterate them. They will cease to be. And as for your nova-detonator, we know about it and fear it not. How shall you aim at a star whose location is unknown, and whose inhabitants have already left?”

  From the bulk of the Warrior’s ship looming nearby, as if to lend weight to Hath’ingar’s words, a shuttlecraft emerged, at first looking tiny against the enormous, pitted mass. But as it approached, Han could see it was almost as large as his own ship. His and Liszendir’s, the one they had lost.

  Without further expostulation, Hath’ingar herded them into the shuttle as soon as it landed. Inside, they lost all view of the outside, for there were no windows or screens in the section in which they were housed. After a short, rough flight, they stopped. Then Han was herded off to one part of the large ship, while Liszendir, well guarded, was marched off another way.

  He eventually found himself in a small, padded cell, which was, though secure enough, not especially harsh. It was fully equipped. The door closed. Han was immediately knocked off of his feet by a whole series of tremendous lurches. After some minutes, the violent motion stopped, or rather, subsided to the point where he could sit or stand upright. He guessed they were on their way.

  PART II

  Dawn

  6

  “Desire arises of the face and not of the body or any of its parts.”

  —Fellirian Deren

  “Love is a thing whose degree of intensity is directly proportional to the degree of strangeness of the partners.”

  —Leskormai Srith (The Tenth Sage)

  “We all interpret the new in terms of the old and are thus comforted or terrified, as the case may be. But the error to which we are prey does not lie in the area of misidentification, so much as it does in the area of scale. One may identify essentially correctly, say, for example, th
at an object is a mountain, and yet get the scale so wrong that the identity must be questioned. It is true that a ripple is in fact a wave, but very small ones are not of importance except to a weather-seer, medium-size ones a type of beauty, and large ones a great danger.”

  —The Survivor’s Manual

  FOR A CERTAIN time, Han knew nothing. The food was insipid, but self-dispensing at regular intervals from a slot in the wall, and it kept him alive and well without apparent ill effect. There seemed to be a bit more than he needed or could stomach; Han suspected that the rate of dispensing had been designed for creatures with a higher caloric requirement than humans. Namely, ler. It made sense to him; they were slightly smaller than humans, and seemed to eat more, or so he had noticed from observing Liszendir. He remembered achingly the heat of her body. He suspected their normal temperature was higher, also. But he ate the pellets, stuffing the remainder in his pockets in case he should get hungry, which seemed remote.

  Days passed, or perhaps it was weeks. Han had no way to mark time, and all attempts he made to gather an idea by timing his own body functions, breathing and heartbeat, seemed to make the time stretch alarmingly long. So he stopped that. The cell was lit, and the light stayed on, without relief. He knew very well the danger to his mind in such an environment, but he did not think they had intended it that way. Now and then, at irregular intervals, groups of Warriors would come by to look in on him; they always came in threes, and like all ler Han had met so far, minimized sex differences as far as was possible. But Efrem had heard correctly—they were a barbaric-looking lot. Some were tattooed, males and females alike, and all wore their hair in various odd configurations, plumes, queues, bristles, fuzzes and indescribable concoctions. None of them spoke.

  Han began playing a game with himself, to retain his sanity. He called it, “See how much you can learn about a ship from the sounds you can hear from its brig.” It wasn’t particularly long before a definite idea began to creep into, and then dominate, his mind. But when it came fully out in the open, he was astounded. It came in a flood: this ship, this colossal fortress that hurled meteors for weapons, and was certainly capable of wrecking an entire planet, was old and in an advanced state of decay and disrepair. Only extreme and clever maintenance had kept it alive as long as it had. How old was it? He had no idea; hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. He half-recalled Liszendir’s tale about that ler rebel, Sanjirmil. The Klarkinnen. Yes. He stopped pondering and listened.

  The ship groaned and vibrated constantly, and occasionally lurched uncontrollably. Han fingered the padding material; it was new stuff, of course. This whole section seemed new, or recently rebuilt and refurbished; and any ship would show some modifications across time. But the material, rather crudely woven, did not make him feel any better about the ship. The creaking and groaning went on, and increased ominously.

  He had also noted another distressing symptom: the air vent system only worked sometimes. Now and then the air in the cell would become stale, and at other times, it would develop peculiar odors. And these symptoms also seemed to become worse as time passed at its unknowable pace. Han began to grow apprehensive. Finally the lurching, shuddering and discoordinations reached a climax. Then silence.

  Not too long after the silence came, to Han’s surprise, Liszendir appeared at the cell-door window, looked in, and opened the door. She had a large bag slung over her shoulder, he guessed, filled with food concentrate pellets, and in addition had brought with her an ancient crossbow and a quiver of darts. It had to be for him. A crossbow? In a spaceship? But he took it, gratefully. The first time he did was to cock the weapon, using an obvious foot-strap, and load it with one of the crude but deadly-looking iron darts. Liszendir was smiling, unhurt, and not even busy-looking.

  “Come on! No talk, now. You won’t believe it, but I really think that we can get out of this thing. We’re on Dawn.”

  A single guard appeared in a corner of the corridor, looking confused and harried. As he or she—Han couldn’t tell—caught sight of them, he shot it deftly without hesitation. The plumed Warrior sank to the floor, and the only sound it made in dying was a small groan, which apparently went unnoticed. Liszendir gave Han a look which he could not quite interpret—as if she approved of the action, but not the methodology. But she had brought him the weapon, so she intended that he use it, even though she wouldn’t.

  Han recocked and reloaded the arbalest, thinking dire thoughts about men who designed single-shot weapons of any sort, and hurried off down the corridor with Liszendir. She led the way through a series of tubes and halls until they were at a shuttle craft, either the one which had brought them to the ship, or one just like it.

  She asked, “Can you fly it?”

  “I don’t know. Damn! All the controls are for hands with two thumbs, and the labels are in their characters.”

  “That is old writing. We used to use that system long ago. I can read it. Let’s see . . . ah, this one, it says hovgoroz. Even the right verb form. Do you remember hovgoroz from your language lessons?”

  “To go out. Verb of motion. Easy.” He pushed the button, having an afterthought that the word could also mean escape, and in that case, how did the mechanism work? He did not want to be pitched into space again. But no, it was the right interpretation. Before them, a section of the wall opened, as a section of the shuttlecraft wall suddenly became transparent before them.

  Liszendir was still puzzling out the indicators and controls. Finally she pointed to some levers and knurled wheels, half-sunk in the console. “This one for speed. This one, this stick, for altitude. This one controls vector. And this, this silly little furry button, is what activates it.” She pushed that one herself.

  “Hang on,” said Han. There was no sound, but the shuttle craft rose smoothly, hovering. Han pressed the levers in combination. The craft gave a great bound for the portal opening, slewing sideways as it did. They barely missed colliding with the portal edge. Finally, Han got it figured out which motions he had to make for pitch, roll and yaw, synchronized with velocity. Liszendir was busy holding on, and Han was busy with controlling the craft. By the time they had time to look out at the world, they were well outside the warship, falling out and away from its bulky mass. The controls were impossible to handle correctly; they were tiny, but their effects were great. The craft responded immediately, as if it had no inertia of its own. Han reasoned that this was a power effect, not one of the unified field, as if they had had that, they would have not felt their own inertia in the cabin.

  They had fallen into a world of harsh, piercing bright light. The shuttlecraft was flying above a great plain, flat as a table top. Han got a quick glimpse of the ground. To one side a sandy riverbed meandered, bordered by a darker growth, which appeared to be trees. He couldn’t tell. The distance was too great. The sky was cloudless, and a brilliant, electric blue, almost violet color he had never seen before. The sun was stark white with a tinge of blue, powerfully and painfully bright, and objects cast razor shadows, so sharp they seemed dangerous, as if they would have cut one if one had fallen on them. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was, morning or afternoon. Behind them bulked the ship, its orbiting meteors grounded on the plain below, still and unmoving. In the distance, seemingly not so far, jagged mountains reared. Near? He looked again. The lowest peaks in front of the range, and the lower saddles between them, were streaked with cirrus. Near? They were a great distance away. He revised his estimates of their size; they must be enormous.

  Liszendir said, gloating. “We had to land for repairs. The ship is falling apart. They couldn’t even make it to their own country after we made planetfall—that is several thousand miles away, on the other side. We had to land, to adjust the drivers. No sooner had they stopped, than these people came rushing over the plain and attacked the ship. They are using chemical rockets and cannon, and the like. And they have done some damage! It seemed to be light, just chips off this hulk, but it made the Warriors mad! You should h
ave seen them! They all sallied out to fight like a crowd of maniacs. They were actually worried about their monster. Look below!”

  Han looked below to the plains. There was fighting there, and figures rushed madly about, smiting and being smitten. He could not distinguish figures into factions from altitude, but the action seemed lively and vicious. Groups on foot strove against groups mounted on animals of some indeterminate sort.

  As they increased the distance between the warship and themselves, Han asked, “So we’re on Dawn?”

  “Yes. I think their country is behind the ship relative to us. This area is considered no man’s land, under partial control. They either can’t subdue it, or they think it isn’t worth the trouble. Those are humans down there attacking, not ler. The Warriors used some term for them—it was klesh. Part of it—I didn’t understand the adjective. Klesh is what we call a domesticated animal.”

  Han looked again. There was a puff of black smoke perhaps from a cart or carriage. Seconds later he could see a small explosion on the underside of the warship, now well behind them. This was answered by green flares from the upper part of the large ship.

  “That’s the recall signal!” Liszendir exclaimed. Below the groups began to disengage, some of the tiny figures scurrying back to assembly points, where shuttles from the warship were already arriving. And farther out, the meteors began to stir in their landing spots, at first rocking back and forth, wobbling unsteadily. Then, one by one, the smaller ones first, they began lurching off, rolling and bouncing as they went, leaving huge gouges on the plain and shedding chunks of themselves as they attained flight. Short bursts of dazzling light came from the ship; if the bursts were from weapons, they were singularly ineffective.

  Liszendir said, “For sure, we’ve got to hurry, now. They don’t know you and I are gone. They left me in the control room with three guards. A mistake. Now they are reduced by three.” She chuckled to herself and smiled, baring her teeth in a gesture of hostility. “One person can’t fly that monster by himself; it takes a whole crew, all over the ship. Otherwise I would have stolen it while they were out and dropped some of their own eggs on them.”