The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “Did you enjoy yourself while I was out?”

  “You will never know! I have not had a hot bath, a real bath, in years, so it seemed. I went to sleep in the tub. But now I am ready for whatever Dawn can hand out. Bring it on! We have outraged probability on all sides.” Then, “So here we are in great Leilas! Leilas, the pearl of Dawn. Now, what?”

  She sat up on her elbows, a motion which tensed her collarbones, and cast shadows on her skin in the soft light.

  “I went around, trying to get an idea of what we can do here. It isn’t much. About all we can hope to do in Leilas is find out more about Dawn, and then we should try to get up to the ler communities in the upper trough. North is as good as any other. Reputedly, higher up, there are ler countries. I don’t know what we will find there. Maybe nothing.”

  “Maybe nothing. I agree, but it is still better than sitting still here in Leilas. The ler I have seen do not look like much, and they may be no better high up. But there is nothing here—this city is tenth-century preatomic, at least.”

  “Yes. Maybe worse. And it looks old, you know, like it’s been this way, just like we see it, for a long time. They aren’t going to build a spaceship tomorrow in the next alley.”

  She shook her head. “I see. Now tell me, Han. What you want to do. Yourself, not us. Really.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and reflected quietly for a long time, looking at the candle. Finally, he said, “I want to try to get back, of course. But if I can’t do that, then I suppose live as good a life as I can, here, if nowhere else. I want to return to my own world, my own people. I want to try to steal our ship back from them; but they are all the way around the planet, and for all we know, by the time we could get there, they could just as well be off somewhere. But I have no other.”

  “What did you find out about Dawn?”

  “Not much. There are geographers and astrologers, which is what passes for erudition and enlightenment. We will have to find out where we are in relation to where the country of the Warriors is, and then see if we can get there from here. And as for the upland ler . . . I don’t know. All we can do is go and ask.”

  “Ah. So then, we should begin tomorrow. Our money is short.”

  She arose from the bed, walked around it quietly, and stood by the window for a while. Han blew the candle out, and joined her there.

  “There is another matter, Liszen . . .” he said, expectantly.

  She shrugged her shoulders and let the shift fall to the floor, her eyes shining. “I thought you would never ask again,” she said softly. “Tell me, body-love, what is your wish?”

  He slipped out of his clothes as well. “That I could, this night, go all over your body, like a man with no teeth or arms or spoon eating a bowl of warm applesauce.” It sounded odd in his ears, but he knew by now from her that it was what she would have expected to hear from a lover of her own kind. She smiled at him, and shivered, deliciously. He moved closer to the girl, smelling her hair, filling himself with the scent as if he would never know it again, touching her cool skin. They turned, as one, and lay down on the small bed together, every sense wide open, even conscious of the rough blanket. They did not sleep for a long time, but neither did they bother to go out for supper. Supper could wait. This couldn’t.

  The next day they slept late, but as soon as they were up and around they set out through the streets of Leilas to see what hard information they could find out about Dawn. If it was anywhere to be had, it would be here.

  There were no books, they soon found out, except in the lockers of collectors and certain religious establishments; the printing press hadn’t been invented on Dawn, or had been forgotten, much the same thing. Nor were there anything like schools, where you could go and ask a ridiculous question like, what is the geography of this planet? Nor were there maps; the general outlines of the areas around Leilas were known to all, the gorge, the troughs, the mountains, and the flats west of the lake. All areas beyond that would have been marked “unexplored,” and left conspicuously blank. So in the end, they were reduced to visiting astrologers and soothsayers, prophets and religious savants, adding together what information they each contributed, and sorting out the suggestions of fact later on, back in the inn.

  Han was particularly frustrated with the lack of knowledge about Dawn, evident on the streets of Leilas. Sorting out their information, which Liszendir had memorized as she heard it, he complained in some heat about the general ignorance of the area. Liszendir was unconcerned, which made Han all the more agitated and impatient.

  “I want to know, how are these people ever going to do anything without schools, knowledge?”

  “Those things don’t really matter. People always learn what they have to, what is appropriate to their environment. Han, you grew up in a culture which has schools for general purpose and schools for every conceivable subclassification of data, but they do not as a rule spread knowledge or wisdom—just assemblies of data. As you have them, schools work on your society just like the differentiating fashions in clothes your sexes use, and hair styles as well—they obscure the innate differences, muddy them, make everyone equal, but it is the equality of a facade. People really are different from one another. And schools obscure the only kinds of knowledge worth knowing.”

  Han remained unconvinced. “Well, how do people learn to do anything unless they get some instruction? And what about your school, the one your braid operates—isn’t that a school?”

  “I have two examples for you. One, human and ler children learn to speak whatever language is native to their area, without school, at home, with playmates, with other adults in the area. At first their phonemes are unclear, their grammar is primitive, but they learn because they must communicate, and by the time they are adults, they do passing well enough. Sending them to school has only one effect—it makes them dishonest, for at school, they say what the instructor wants them to say, and when they leave, they go on talking the way they always did. Second, recall your own world, Seabright. It is a world of small continents and extensive seas and oceans. Winds blow over the water, and so sailing is still common there, even though you have powered ships for work. What is the difference between those sailing ships and ones which preatomic men sailed upon the salt seas of old Earth ten thousand standard years ago? And what did those sailors know about the physics of gases and liquids, principles of flow, drag, lift, coefficients of friction? Nothing. But they could see a smooth object moves easier than a rough one, and an elongated shape better than a blocky one. So they made boats, and held up sheets to catch the wind.”

  He retorted, heatedly, “Yes, and they lived with ignorance and superstition for thousands of years as well.”

  “Every age is superstitious, no more, no less, than any other, your and my age, as well as in the ancient histories of old Earth.” She answered back amicably, as if speaking to an errant child. “Han, knowledge is just like a mathematical notation of a number and a part, what do you call them?”

  “Decimals? Where you symbolize the fraction by successive repetitions of the number base, after a point which cuts off the whole number?”

  “Yes. We have the same thing in our numbers. Very well, let me use your system, ten base. You have a number, yes, which is not divisible by whole numbers evenly—it has a part left over. So you keep after it, you say, ‘I’ve got to know exactly what this quantity is,’ and so keep dividing, dividing. But it doesn’t end, it just keeps on going, and each new digit is unexpected. You discover, but for every one you derive, you know there is another one waiting for the operation in the next place.”

  “You mean irrational numbers?”

  “Yes. And what do you call things like this? Irrational! Yet they are the very symbols of the universe, the very heart of what rationality it has. So, knowledge is just like that—you can drive as many places as you please, the next one is just as unknown as was the first, and there is no end to it. Do you understand me? There is no such thing as exact knowledge
.”

  She waited a moment to see if he was following her. “And so we do not have what you would call public schools which teach things the child can and should learn on his own. The only people who learn in schools are the dumb. But we do have other things, where you learn a particular discipline, an art. Do you know that? Ler do not have science, we have arts only. We have physicists, chemists, mathematicians, as many as humans, but they practice arts, they learn discipline, and they do not play with abstractions. It is things like that which brought the ler into being in the first place.

  “In my school, the place of the Karens, we take the child only when it becomes adolescent, sexed. What do we teach? We teach philosophy, knowledge of the body. How do we start? We make them sit down and learn about themselves, about nature. The first year, all they do is look, at waves in the sea, streams, leaves, small animals. We have a saying: ‘To learn calligraphy, leave pen and ink at home, for calligraphy does not consist of pen, brush, and ink, but of what is within the calligrapher.’ Or you will say, ‘I wish to learn how to paint pictures of nude humans,’ and ler as well, for all I know. So you gather up all kinds of surfaces upon which you will paint, you arm yourself with brushes, knives, various sorts of paints, you spend years learning about these things, and all this time you have not learned anything about the body, that irrational surface which you will represent, or how you may feel about it. And to treat it well, you will have to love it and be at peace with yourself. So you come to a ler school for painting pictures, and the teacher will say, ‘Now, you take all those brushes and things and we will go and have a nice bonfire with them, perhaps cook something over them, because what I will teach you is not of brushes and techniques, but of the subject, for if you do not know it, you will never represent it.’ You say, ‘Oh, but I want to paint!’ He will reply, ‘We can get to that later, perhaps.’ So I know how to fight, hand-to-hand, I am trained, I am an adept. I did not get this way by learning about tensile strengths of bone, compressibilities of skin and tissue, about weights and forces. I learned by thinking, exercising, making love with my fellow students, dancing, and other things. You look to the side of a star when you wish to see it, yes?”

  “Does that help us, here?”

  “Yes. We do what we can, with such style as we can muster.”

  But they discovered there wasn’t very much they could do, alone on a strange and primitive world. The locals of Leilas knew very little about conditions elsewhere on the planet—they thought that the world was flat, and that the sun moved, and that earthquakes were caused by the carrier of the world, a primitive reptile called a khashet, which occasionally stumbled or itched. The poles were hells for sinners, unknowable and unapproachable, and the middle latitudes scourged by two winters a year. West of Leilas the desert started, and as far as they knew, it was endless. The mountains marched far to the north and south, and the only break in their great ramparts was the gorge, cut by the great river, which led to the “freecountries.”

  Geography was against them. The country of the Warriors was somewhere around the curve of the planet, probably at least 12,000 miles away, and to get there, they would have to walk, braving the winters, short but hard, and physical conditions which had brought civilization on Dawn to a standstill, to its knees. Who could cross mountains on foot whose passes were at the pressure equivalent of 20,000 feet altitude; who could cross high plains such as they had landed on the edge of when they escaped the Warriors; or cross desert sinks where water boiled when the sun was overhead?

  Nor could they join trade expeditions, pilgrimages, or the like. Outside local areas, there was no travel on Dawn. It was rumored that there were other settled places, lands, cities. The Warriors, for example, were reputed to live in a very large country. But nobody went there, unless the Warriors came to get him in their ship. So people were stagnant on Dawn, barely holding their own, ever so slowly becoming steadily more crude as the years marched on.

  And from what they could determine, Dawn as a planet was in an early phase of the evolution of life; there was no animal life native to the planet more complex than things intermediate between reptiles and amphibians, and the plants, save some things which were obviously imported, were no better. It was a world, young and raw, on which its own mammalian life forms were somewhere three hundred million years in the future. If the primary didn’t go nova first.

  And the Warriors had Han and Liszendir’s ship, and their own. These were the only two spacefaring craft on the whole planet, and in fact were the only long-distance craft of any kind on the whole world. Thousands of leagues lay between them and the ship. They could do little. Before they went to sleep, they slid into each other’s arms, and made a slow, exploratory kind of love, again. And then slept, daring to hope for no more than that, for the present.

  On the morning, they bought a small pack animal similar to a burro, and loaded it down with food and provisions, on which they spent most of their money. Han suspected that the ancestors of the little animal had arrived with the people. They left the inn, the Haze of the West, with sadness, for if what they had learned had been hard to bear, the peace and rest they had known within its walls had been welcome to them, a quiet time they had enjoyed deeply. The last of the money went for a short sword for Han and a dainty, but effective-looking, knife with a leaf-shaped blade for Liszendir. With all of their things stowed on the pack animal, they departed Leilas through the north gate for the country of the upper trough.

  As they left the city and began climbing up the gentle but steady slope, they looked back briefly at the great city, or what passed for one on Dawn. The wall around it was neither high, well fortified, nor continuous, being broken in places by time in two winters a year. They may have needed it once; that was many years ago, judging from the condition of the wall. Behind the wall, the irregular, rambling city spread itself out in the harsh sunlight, and as they got farther away from it, blended into the background of rock, mud, and sparse vegetation like some natural growth of dun-colored moss, or perhaps an odd type of lichen.

  They faced to the north and began walking in earnest. On their right, they could see full on the harrowing mountains which rimmed the high plateau to the east; they went up, up, first snow-covered on the lower slopes and peaks, then naked rock, and still higher, the terrible broken summits whose highest points stood glaring over the planet from a height above ninety per cent of Dawn’s atmosphere. To the west, their left, there was another range, lower, and from all appearances, mostly volcanic. No vent was erupting at present, although several peaks trailed thin streamers of smoke from their summits. And although the west range was lower, it still was too high to be passable. Once away from the city, they looked out on a bleak, harsh landscape, lit by a piercing sun, that was not a lot better than the view they had seen from the high plains.

  In Leilas, Han and Liszendir had been in a relatively warm climate, low down close to the river. During the day it was decently warm, cooling off only at night. But as they gained altitude walking up the north trough, the air cooled noticeably, and began taking on the unmistakable colors of autumn. They were not walking fast enough to keep up with the sun of Dawn on its journey north to the pole. A steady wind began blowing from behind them up the trough, whose end lay over the horizon, out of sight. As each day passed, the sun made smaller circles in the northern sky, and in the south the darkness grew. It became colder.

  Human forms of buildings, particular styles of houses and outbuildings, ways of cultivating land, began to give way to ler forms, gradually, then predominantly, then finally completely. The houses were not the ellipsoids of the ler familiar now to both Han and Liszendir alike, but smallish stone houses of two stories, each with what appeared to be a watchtower attached to it. By the time they had reached ler country, the weather had finally turned sour, and rain and cold were common. They met fewer and fewer travelers on the road, which grew more and more narrow. They were both beginning to feel like fools. The few ler who would talk to them were
worthless for their purposes—and they seemed even more ignorant and benighted than the humans of Leilas and its outlying areas. Liszendir pronounced them hopeless, fidgeting with frustration. They were not the people she was looking for.

  On a night of a wild storm of either very wet snow, or half-congealed rain, they could not be sure which, they reached the top of the trough. In the darkness and wind, they would not have noticed, except for the fact that as they were looking for a place to shelter, Han saw that the sluggish creek they had been partially following no longer flowed south, but northwards. North, there was a hint of greater darkness than there had been before. They had no idea how far they had walked; only many days, perhaps twenty, in the worsening weather. In the dark and storm, they finally managed to discover an abandoned shed, and just as they were moving into it, it started snowing. Inside the shed, they were protected only from the wind, not the cold. They looked outside several times, but it grew no better. Without any comment, they resigned themselves, and curled up together in their blankets, unspeaking and unmoving. They were beaten, most of the food was gone, and there was nothing left to do but start back for Leilas.

  In the morning, Han went out to see to their few remaining packs of food. Inside, it had been cold, but as he stepped through the door of the shed, the air bit at his face with a new vigor he had not felt yet on Dawn. It was a portent of what would come with colder weather. He looked about in the dim, north-autumnal light leaking over the mountains. There had been a fair amount of snowfall during the night, and most of it had drifted in the winds; but for the while, it was all they were going to get. The sky was absolutely clear, deep violet-blue, through which an occasional star could still be seen. Eastwards, the mountains reared high above them, casting deep shadows. The south lay in a hazy darkness, and to the west, the other range looked hardly less forbidding, though at the least the west range had snow on its summits. It was unhuman, wild, fierce beauty. He stood in the cold morning air for a moment and looked out over the rocky, desolate scene. They were at the high point of the trough, and there was nothing there, absolutely nothing.