The Wave and the Flame

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

Then, a scrawl that spoke of infinite frustration: “MORE DETAILED MEASUREMENTS!!”

  And finally, more purposefully: “CRI: new wind data. Increase resolution of model to check for possible instability mode.”

  Stavros neatened the papers and replaced them on top of the monitor. His hand lingered on them briefly. He knew now that he missed the energy that Danforth had brought to their group.

  Should have been just Clausen, he thought, and turned away from the darkened terminal.

  He took the lamp to light his way. He could return it to the local light station as he passed by on his way to the cave mouth. He hurried along the outer corridor, preoccupied with a mental inventory of the parts he would need to repair the antenna. He reached the lighted sectors and extinguished the lamp. As he passed through an area of living quarters, he noted the lack of the usual bustle and noise. He found a light station at an intersection, where a high-vaulted tunnel led to the MarketHall. The intersection, normally a jam of two-carts and pedestrians, stretched wide and empty. Stavros set his lamp on the long stone shelf in a row of similar lamps with large brown-glazed bowls and stubby chimneys of thick utilitarian glass.

  As he turned from the shelf, he heard the echoes of his footsteps returning along the vaulting, then dying away into an unprecedented silence. He could not hear a whisper of sound but his own.

  The Caves were deserted, and he was alone in them.

  “Susannah!”

  She started guiltily. She had been daydreaming in the sun. She searched about and saw Megan waving from beside a two-cart bumping down the inner stairs. Weng followed her in stately step, her white ship’s uniform bright against the shadowed walls. A man from the PaperGuild paused ahead of them to take a child up on his back. Megan climbed around them, automatically offering her arm to Weng. The old spacer put out her hand so as not to refuse the kindness but negotiated the obstacle on her own.

  Susannah smiled. How very Weng. The Commander’s feet would have to be agile on those stairs if her attention was to remain fixed on the object of their present all-consuming interest. Weng’s eyes sought the tilted coneshape of the Lander with the concentration of the single-minded.

  “Hedonist!” Megan accused, as the two joined Susannah in the weak sunlight. Susannah checked to be sure she had meant it playfully. Megan raised a hand to shade her brow as she squinted over the tortured plain.

  “Mud soup,” she observed. “How are they going to plant anything in that?”

  “I’m adopting a wait-and-see attitude,” Susannah replied.

  “What’s that booming noise?”

  Susannah had forgotten the basso howl from the top of the cliffs. “Horns. Big wooden horns that the priests are blowing. You can see them if you look up right from the edge.”

  “Later,” replied Megan with an uncertain glance over the precipice.

  Susannah smiled at Weng. “Good morning, Commander.”

  Weng withdrew from her long-distance inspection of the Lander long enough to be civil. “Ah, Dr. James,” she replied a bit myopically, as if Susannah were a pleasant intrusion on deeper, more important thoughts. Though Megan’s eyes were still slitting, Weng did not seem at all bothered by the pale glare. “I suppose one must indeed call it morning, for that is the sun rising, even though one has just recently finished lunch.”

  Lunch? marveled Susannah. Were we that long in the StoryHall?

  “Was that our young pilot with you just now?” Weng’s tone was genial but the question obviously rhetorical.

  “Um-hum. Want me to go after her?”

  Weng folded her hands at her waist, her eyes straying back toward the metal cone glinting on the plain. “No, I think not, Dr. James. Off into the hills again, is she?”

  Susannah nodded briskly.

  The officer chuckled. “No need to look guilty, Dr. James. A pilot needs her vehicle, and so do we.”

  Susannah’s nod was gentler. This pilot needs her man.

  “So it’s better she be out there finding it,” Weng concluded, “than pining around here underfoot.”

  Megan moved farther away from the edge as a loaded winch pallet swung too close for her liking. “I just hope she’s selective about what she brings back,” she commented sourly.

  Weng toyed with the adjustment of her braid-trimmed cuff. “You surprise me, Dr. Levy… Mr. Clausen was such a cultured gentleman. I would have thought you would find each other quite congenial.”

  Susannah studied Weng carefully but only the slightest deepening of the soft lines around the officer’s chin betrayed her. Why, Weng, you old fox!

  Megan grinned appreciatively. “Yes, if ever there was a threat to your authority, I guess it was that one, eh? Bad influence on Taylor, too.”

  Weng’s hint of a smile did not change as she replied coolly, “My authority was not endangered, Dr. Levy. Besides, any crew is a threat to a captain’s authority if they’re worth their salt.”

  “Very noble and archaic, Weng,” Megan countered airily, “but first of all, Clausen was hardly your ordinary crewman.”

  “But like Dr. Danforth, he was crucial to this mission.” Weng’s tone was suddenly stem, as if reminding Megan that she too was considered “crew.” Susannah also noted her use of the past tense. She hoped that Weng would not get started on the subject of The Mission. Music and the Mission were the Commander’s own sister-deities, and the latter particularly encouraged her to indulge in a knee-jerk rhetoric that Susannah found embarrassing in an otherwise so admirable figure.

  “We are one machine,” Weng continued, “not self-sufficient parts. If we have lost some of our parts, we cannot go home a success.”

  “I know, I know. Dammit, Weng, you brought it up.” Megan sulked in complaint of being encouraged to vent her loathing of Clausen and then unfairly taken to task. “I’m sorry about Taylor. I wished him no ill.”

  Susannah pulled herself up from her slouch against the wall. She suspected that Weng’s real objection had been the questioning of her hold on the captaincy. “Were you headed down to inspect the Lander, Commander?”

  Weng accepted the diversion gracefully. She could easily slide from leadership to companionship, as her expression of both was equally formal. Susannah now understood that the Commander’s fabled calm was not relaxation but collected and controlled vigilance.

  “I was indeed,” Weng replied. The square of her thin shoulders directed their gaze over the ledge. “The sun may be shining at last, but we are still far from an optimum situation. There is considerable question as to the possibility of getting ourselves aloft again.” She paused to glance back into the cave mouth. Laden Sawls still poured down the inner stairs, but there were fewer animals and heavy carts coming through. “Will you join me, Dr. James? Dr. Levy?”

  “Sure, I’ll come along.” Megan made a halfhearted attempt to make up for her diplomatic blunder. “The Sawls’ll put me to work in the mud otherwise.”

  Weng nodded graciously.

  The Old Lady, thought Susannah. In the sunlight, Weng looked more nearly her true age, information privileged only to the ship’s computer… and the ship’s doctor. Yes, Weng, I know. But I’m not telling. Besides, look at you. Skin like fine Chinese silk. Untouched by worldly weather for most of your years.

  She thought it odd to realize that she had never before seen Weng in natural light, except of course starlight, that faint supernatural light that bathed the Orbiter’s bridge during night watch, when all but the running lights were down.

  Susannah could not keep her eyes from drifting upward. Seems so long ago now… I wonder how they all are up there?

  “Dr. James?”

  “Coming, Commander.”

  He had never been alone in the Caves before.

  The realization stopped Stavros dead while he considered the ramifications. He had free run. He could go where he liked. Either the Sawls had forgotten about him in the heat of their celebrating, or they had decided to trust him at last.

  Because I was there…?r />
  Embriha Lagri!

  Standing in the middle of the deserted intersection, Stavros lost his inner battle with the thought that had been yammering at him, demanding attention.

  He did it. Kav Daven changed the weather.

  No, that wasn’t quite right.

  His dance changed the weather… by lending power to Lagri.

  Impossible, of course. But hadn’t he seen it with his own eyes?

  No. Coincidence.

  His knees wobbled. He tottered over to the stone bench at the light station and dropped onto it, his head in his hands.

  It had been easy, up until now, to play the game of belief. Stavros was practiced at it from a solitary youth filled with holes and fantasy games. Later, he found it a useful tool in his work, a technique for which he had developed the philosophical defense he used so successfully to goad more orthodox colleagues like Megan Levy. It was often vertiginous to hang along the edges of belief. It led to unstable behavior. The empathetic gift that made him a superior linguist also left him vulnerable to the worldviews that infuse all languages. But he had learned ways of dealing with that. He played games of logic and semiotics with their symbolisms while pretending to accept, and coexisted with the supernatural while allowing it to remain unrealized in his mind.

  But Kav Daven’s dance and the clear dawn that followed called out for more than technical belief.

  ACTUAL belief?

  His head sunk deeper into his hands. What, after all, had he seen? An old priest did a dance and the sun came out. Simple. No problem.

  A soft moan escaped him as a vision of Kav Daven’s brilliant blind smile swam into his consciousness unbidden. Stavros had not really known the profound potential of belief until now. He had not known that it could wrap itself around your soul and take you unwilling prisoner.

  There was nothing technical about the Sawls’ belief. There was also nothing symbolic. To believe with them, he must accept the actual existence of the sister-goddesses, not as spirits, not as disembodied energies, not even as the icons of a more abstract faith which rational societies tended to let their deities evolve into. Nor were they mere mortal representations of a deity, like a prophet or a pharaoh.

  He must accept them as actual beings of incomprehensible power.

  Goddesses incarnate.

  He was surprised that his mind balked so at a concept that his neoChristian grandparents had accepted wholeheartedly. But their acceptance had been required long after the supposed fact of that particular incarnation, when time and faith had pulled a veil over history and there was no longer a physical body around to muddy the waters of their mysticism. The Sawl goddesses still walked the planet.

  He remembered his reckless statement of conviction to Megan on the part of his Greek ancestors, and tried a laugh that came out as a strangled sigh. Bad enough to have gods messing with the weather, but if you have to think of them as people…

  Knowledge and Belief, Ibid. Your own argument.

  He could not yet accept the knowing.

  He was stalled at the point of being ready to believe that he had seen a miracle occur, but was unable to go further. He was unsure of what definition and degree of deity he could persuade the rational part of his mind to accept. The less rational part and the good old unconscious would travel willingly down any path, but past experience suggested that an inner split would not benefit his sanity.

  Again, the strangled laugh. Well, they’ve always said I was crazy…

  But the thought of it made Stavros sweat.

  For he was sure that he would rather risk a tumble into the abyss of belief than let stubborn unbelief sever the umbilical of trust that even playing at belief had helped establish with the Sawls. Actual belief might threaten his balance but it would make him a truer interpreter of the language. To lose the trust would render him useless.

  He thought again of Kav Daven’s smile, a very knowing smile, directed at him, as if the old priest were interpreting him. He rocked a little on the cool stone bench, then raised his head and stood. His weakness had passed. He stretched as if his exhaustion were merely physical.

  This need not be immediately resolved, he comforted himself. Yet he stood immobile. He had intended to head for the cave mouth, for the outside and the sun and other people. He was unable to make a start. The silence and the emptiness urged him in another direction. It drew him inward and down, toward the center of the rock.

  All right, then, he thought. A compromise. The antenna repairs could wait awhile longer. He decided to climb up to the StoryHall to retrieve his translator units.

  While at the back of his brain, Liphar’s voice kept repeating, Embriha Lagri!

  23

  Susannah swore as she sank into ocher mud up to her knees.

  Clever me, volunteering to lead the way…

  The cold mud resisted with obscene sucking noises as she wrenched her legs free. Silted clay clung to the ridges of her bootsoles so that her feet weighed heavily, like some larger creature’s feet. Behind her, Weng and Megan gingerly steered clear of the sinkhole she had blundered into. When she did not need both arms for balance, Weng lifted both white trouser legs as if protecting the hem of a skirt.

  Beyond the layered terraces of rock at the base of the cliffs, the solid areas of the plain were rock-strewn and broken by frequent rivulets flowing between murky puddles as big as ponds. The rest was as treacherous as a swamp. Where she was able, Susannah chose a path across the high ground, avoiding the bottoms of ravines and gullies, with their promise of quicksand and flash floods. Even on the upper flats, the mud was so deep that they left a trail of rubbery footprints clearly visible all the way back to the cliff face. The shallowest slopes were slippery, the steeper ones were perilous. Susannah led her party down a long hill sideways and stopped to rest beside a pile of boulders after the ground had begun to rise again. Megan sighed and lowered herself to a rock. Weng remained standing with her hands on her hips, gazing over the plain like a sea captain on the forward deck.

  “Mr. Ibiá tells me,” she said, “that the Sawls call this plain the Dop Arek, the Gaming Board.”

  “The Goddesses’ Gaming Board,” Susannah added.

  “More like a washboard,” snorted Megan. “You know, I was in a flood once, back home. When the water went down, it was like all the color’d been bleached out of the landscape. Fences, houses, signs, cars, everything the flood touched was turned the same dreary gray.”

  “Be the same here if there was anything left upright for the flood to touch,” said Susannah. “Except it’s yellow. Look behind you.”

  The cliffs towered above them, even from a quarter of a mile away. The white rock shimmered amber in the dawn. Over the muddy rise of the plain, the terraced base was barely visible. The cliff face wore a band of ocher mud two stories high.

  “Now that’s one hell of a flood,” said Megan.

  Susannah only shivered.

  The rising sun threw the cave openings into deep relief against the pale brilliance of the rock. Wind-sculpted alternations of shadow and striation were broken at intervals by the dark zigzags of vertical clefts. Four long rows of openings pierced the sheerest drop, joined by a herringbone pattern of ledges and stairs. Susannah counted twelve to fifteen openings per level, spaced more or less regularly. Since this was her first opportunity to see the cliff unobstructed by either snow or floodwaters, she had not realized that the big main flight of stairs they had just come down actually climbed to the second level of caves. The first level was well inside the band of mud.

  “Look,” she pointed out to Megan. “There are caves lower than the stables. Must be abandoned now. Could the floods have been rising that much over the years?”

  “Umm. You know, I’d bet there weren’t even the beginnings of natural caves here,” said Megan. “Those energetic little folks searched out a cliff that suited their needs and went to work. Imagine how long they must have been at it!” Her sigh was as weary as if she had been at it herself.
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  “And there they are busily moving out,” Weng commented.

  Susannah laughed. On the broad rock ledges that spread out from the base of the cliff, a huge contingent from the FoodGuild was setting up a small city of tent canopies and cookfires. Wagons and two-carts were being unloaded and hauled off to one side. The little hakra ventured to the edge of the terraces on their own to sniff the mud, while the hjalk stood in a patient huddle, being harnessed. “It’s just temporary, I’m sure,” she replied. “Got to feed those diggers!”

  Without seeming to pace, Weng contrived to place herself in their line of view. “Are you rested, Dr. Levy?” she inquired.

  Megan roused herself with a sigh, and they continued across the slope to the top of the rise. From there, they followed a ridge that skirted a ragged gully. Thick yellow water oozed through the boulders piled along the bottom. Susannah dallied along the edge, scanning the shallows hopefully for signs of life. Even on urban Earth, the dirt would be squirming after a good rain. But then, two and a half weeks was more than just a good rain. It would be a miracle if anything survived.

  Have to run high or burrow deep to make it on Fiix, she decided.

  The yellow mud did not smell like the earth she knew, yet when she rubbed it between her fingers, it seemed rich with particulate organic matter. She was surprised. She had expected a desert soil, sandier and with fewer organics. On Earth, organics would have made the soil dark.

  They hurried in and out of a narrow dip where a side wash fed into the gully. Slipping on the slopes, they gained another rise. The Lander loomed before them. Weng’s head mirrored its tilt as she began her close-up assessment of the damage.

  “Our very own Tower of Pisa,” Megan quipped.

  The gully snaked around, then ran under the Lander’s belly. The number-three landing strut was sunk in the streambed, with a mare’s nest of rocks and vegetable matter tangled in its trusswork. All four struts and a good three meters worth of hull wore a thick coat of drying mud. A shallow trench ringed the entire craft, an artifact of the ice wall created by the melt-and-freeze between the snowmass and the force field. The trench was filled with muddy water, like a moat. The only way across it was through it, and Weng did not hesitate. She pulled her trouser legs high as if at a Victorian beach party and waded in.