Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  The whirlpool spluttered, and out of it erupted a fountain, like a geyser from a vent in the Hills. The geyser of white foam rose so high that it seemed to hang suspended before it flowed down again. Droplets of spray hit the window of the shuttlecraft, which took a sharp turn to distance itself from the eruption.

  “Fleshborers!” exclaimed Draeg. “The monster must have swallowed a nest of fleshborers—eels that can strip you to the bone in minutes. Now it’s trying to disgorge them…”

  The geyser turned pink. Raincloud tried to watch dispassionately.

  “…too late, I’m afraid,” Draeg continued. “Fleshborers nest beneath the outer branches of the raft, affording some protection from seaswallowers. Look. Kshiri-el lies just ahead.”

  The center of the raft was a gently sloping hill of green, with a shallow crater-like hollow. Outward in all directions, dark trunks of raftwood extended just below the surface, putting up branches which in flowering season would be thronged with orange blossoms. A raft in full bloom made the centerpiece for many a travel poster.

  The shuttlecraft landed firmly on the raft core. A strong odor of salt and seaweed blew in on the wind. Raincloud stepped out onto matted vegetation, ground cover with tiny interlocking branches, a sign of defense against aerial grazers. She looked upward. Long-snouted creatures slowly flapped their wings, circling overhead.

  “Fanwings,” said Draeg. “They grow large enough to carry off an infant.”

  Fish that had evolved wings, she remembered now. Looking back, Raincloud coaxed the reluctant trainsweep outdoors. Water and salt might not be good for a machine, she realized, but they had no choice.

  A couple of children appeared, like violet flowers, their hairless round heads gleaming in the sun. They seemed to know Draeg well, for they ran to him, the littlest one waddling like a duck on her big webbed feet. They reached out to him with their long web-fingered hands, trying to climb onto him. Raincloud watched those hands, recalling how their foremothers had lifeshaped their own children, rather than terraform their planet.

  Draeg laughed and went on, leading Raincloud across the raft to the building at the opposite end. It was a silkhouse, a tall multispired dwelling built of saddle-shaped panels of woven green and blue seasilk, fibers of a sea plant that grew off the raft. The silkhouse looked deceptively fragile; in fact, Raincloud knew, its twisted panels made for a sturdy, lightweight construction.

  A Sharer adult came toward them from the direction of the sea, beads of moisture still clinging to her violet skin. Like the children, she wore no clothes. Unlike the children, her skin was not smooth. It was crisscrossed all over with a fine net of scars, from feet to fingertips, almost as if a patchwork quilt had pressed itself into her skin.

  Raincloud could not help staring a little, for even the Sharer envoys to Bronze Sky had never looked like this. Sharers were known for healing, not scarification, but they liked to keep the scars of natural injury. What injury could have wrought this? She made herself look away, across the raft and sky, her eyes avoiding the piercing rays of sun. Sharers of Shora—here, before the fall of Torr, the forebears of this web-footed woman had defeated a Valan invasion. Their words filled The Web, and they had taught the Heliconians. Even today, they still met the universe on their own terms.

  The Sharer carried a bucket of little snaillike shells. She put it down to embrace Draeg. “Share the day, Draeg,” she greeted him in her own tongue. “You’ve come back early.” Through her fingerwebs the yellow sunlight sparkled.

  Two youngsters clamored for her attention, excitedly telling her how the great “flyer,” the shuttlecraft, had come to roost.

  “Uh, yes, Leresha,” said Draeg. Sharer was a difficult language to learn, and it still gave him trouble. “This, uh, sister needs to share words with you. She is Raincloud Windclan, from the world ‘Bronze Sky.’”

  Now it was the Sharer’s turn to stare. Raincloud grew cold, guessing what Leresha must think.

  “‘Bronze Sky,’” Leresha spoke at last, like a drawn-out sigh. “The world that died.”

  That was the Sharers’ opinion of terraforming. Raincloud wanted desperately to say something; it had happened two hundred years before her birth, after all…But she knew from experience that silence was best. Around them the sea groaned unceasingly.

  “Leresha the Coward,” the Sharer introduced herself at last, giving the selfname she must have chosen at her Gathering upon reaching maturity. Leresha was a wordweaver, Raincloud recalled, the one her doctor had mentioned. “May you swim calm seas,” Leresha said. “What help may we share with you?”

  Raincloud spread her hands, remembering the custom. “Thank you, Coward. I have a great favor to share of you.” To ask a favor, and to offer one, were both “to share” one; all Sharer verbs worked both ways, equating subject and object. No wonder their speech made Draeg uncomfortable.

  Raincloud pointed to the hapless trainsweep. “This animate device, though non-life, has shared good service with our children. The children call her ‘Doggie’; and see, they have even drawn pictures on her back, without harm.”

  Leresha examined the crayoned carapace. “Your children served her well,” she agreed seriously. “They draw excellent figures.” Sharers never missed a chance to compliment one’s children.

  “But now the Elysians want her to share parting with us,” Raincloud said. “They claim she is dangerous; that she might even hasten death.” The phrase “hasten death” was the Sharers’ concept of killing: since all death was inevitable, the “killer” could only hasten it. Raincloud added, “I do not understand the Elysians’ fear. They share fear of many things.”

  Leresha considered this. Above her bald head a fist-sized insect hovered and settled on her scalp, its limbs splayed out. It generated loud rasping noises by scraping a large claw against a smaller one. A “clickfly,” Raincloud thought, one of the Sharers’ messenger insects. She herself would have called it a “rasp-fly,” for it did not sound at all like the clicking of her own language. After Leresha echoed the clickfly’s vocalization, it departed to alight upon an enormous web it had spun beside the silkhouse. The Sharer word for “web” also means “book.”

  Leresha said to Raincloud, “One must remember, the Elysians are young.” Sharers considered everyone young, until they bore their first child.

  “Elysians are young,” Raincloud agreed, “but they are our hosts. They have asked us to put Doggie away from Elysian territory.”

  “They unspeak her?” Leresha asked. “Unspeaking” was a form of ostracism, the gravest Sharer punishment for intolerable behavior. “They unspeak her for a crime she has yet to commit?”

  “That is so. That is why we asked Draeg to share keeping of her out here, on a Sharer raft. We provide her nourishment.” She explained the solar electric cell.

  Draeg added nervously, “I know that Sharers share dislike with, uh, nonlife devices.”

  “Some do,” said Leresha a little sharply. “Some nonlife devices share dislike with us; they stop moving and lie prostrate without a word to say, until a Valan comes to demand ‘payment.’” “Payment” was a borrowed Valan word, unknown in the Sharer tongue. “Never mind,” Leresha added. “We accept your favor,” she told Raincloud. “My raft Gathering has never refused a fugitive and never will. From a dead world, you bring us a ‘dead’ fugitive; so be it. We will share her keeping.”

  “Thank you, sister,” said Raincloud, letting out her breath. “Protection of fugitives” was a sacred obligation for Sharers, which the Elysians respected by treaty. It took her by surprise that the Sharers would so easily accord the trainsweep human status. But this little trainsweep could scarcely harm anyone.

  “Thank you,” replied Leresha. “Thank you, Raincloud, for sharing this fugitive to quicken our compassion.”

  WHEN RAINCLOUD GOT HOME, THE CHILDREN POUNCED on her to tell them everything. Blackbear, too, was curious; he keenly regretted missing the chance to meet the ocean-dwelling goddesses of whom so much w
as said.

  “The wordweaver thanked me, in the end,” Raincloud concluded. “Can you imagine? For ‘quickening her compassion.’”

  Blackbear smiled in amazement. “Compassion…” He remembered the day Alin tried to ask him.

  “The Web is all about compassion,” Raincloud explained. “I first took Rhun’s course to read it.” The Web was a dialogue between Sharers and a Valan exile, that took place before the founding of the Republic. Blackbear needed to read it.

  “I wish I’d gone to see the raft too,” he sighed.

  Having seen the seaswallowers, Raincloud was just as glad he had stayed home. “Two more weeks,” she promised. “Then the monsters will be gone, and we’ll all go out to see Doggie.”

  The children cheered. Raincloud wished she felt the same, but a sense of dread would not leave her. What had happened to the Urulite legation? And Doggie—had she really done the right thing? The Sharers must know what they were doing. They had taken far more dangerous fugitives, during the ancient Valan invasion.

  That night, alone with her at last, Blackbear watched Raincloud emerge from her clothes and smooth her new braids down over her breasts. He always liked to linger and prolong this time of evening, like the sun of Bronze Sky with its long ruddy twilight. “Raincloud,” he said suddenly. “Would you read to me…from The Web?”

  The Web

  Part I

  I WAS BORN LADY CASSITER, DAUGHTER OF THE HIGH Commander who led the Valan assault on the Ocean Moon. I followed my stepmother into exile here, and joined the Gathering of Raia-el. Then I named myself Cassi the Deathsister, for my brother back on Valedon now wields my father’s weapons, and I myself had slain bears before he was out of diapers. All that is past, yet the past and future clasp each other like knots of the same web: Tear one strand between two, but countless others still hold. Who knows; Torr may yet destroy us, though no one has heard from Torr in twenty years.

  This season, the seaswallowers took a raft from our cluster, and many dear sisters will swim no more. I mourned in whitetrance, inside the silkhouse with Merwen the Impatient and the rest of her family. In whitetrance, the present moment recedes, while one’s past and future appear to the mind as outstretching networks of possibility. A lover may appear, or perhaps a daughter yet unborn, and as always the swallowers and fleshborers lurk in the deep.

  It occurred to me just then, how simple it would be to make an end now and leave my troubled past behind; with a single thought, my heart could be stilled, and I would pass forever through the Last Door. But then, just at the point of deciding, I remembered that Merwen sat nearby, and that if instead I turned from the Door and awoke, I might share the look of her eyes once more. So, for the sake of Merwen’s eyes, I awoke.

  I lifted my hands, still white although the purple was seeping in as the breathmicrobes in my skin drew oxygen. My throat felt dry as raftwood; the trance must have lasted long. I turned my head, my neck muscles aching with stiffness. There I saw Merwen seated cross-legged on the floor, still completely white, almost translucent. The other sisters must have woken by now.

  Another Sharer, awake and gleaming purple, came over to us and offered me a cup of water. It was Merwen’s daughter born of Usha, Weia Who Spits up Her Food. Weia, now a mother herself, had attained her unusual selfname as a three-year-old during the Great Deathhastening, the Valan assault which my father had led. At that time, even the littlest of Sharers had had to take selfnames and share their own protection, instead of waiting till they came of age.

  “It’s about time,” Weia told me, whispering because Merwen was still in trance. “Everyone else is dancing and feasting late upon the water, even neglecting their fishing nets by day.” After the seaswallowers have passed comes the season of calm, when tiny luminescent sea creatures dance in the waves, making waterfire. Then the Sharer sisters hold a great festival for Shora the Mother of Ocean.

  I swallowed some water. “How long?” my voice croaked.

  “Three days you’ve been out. And Mothersister’s still out, of course, trying to outlive her name as usual.” Her “mothersister” meant Merwen, whose lovesharer had carried Weia in the womb.

  I tried to reply, but no words came out.

  “She’s not as young as she used to be,” Weia added. “She’d better watch her health.”

  “We dare not wake her,” I managed to say. The intrusion of an adult might trigger death.

  “Of course not, but Oolioo will do. Oolioo? Where’ve you got to?” Weia called out of the silkhouse.

  Oolioo sauntered inside, a slippery purple fish of a four-year-old. She was young enough to awaken her grandmother; for the cries of the child and the sick are always heard, even in whitetrance.

  “Merwen will be angry, though,” I warned. “She’ll unspeak us for Shora knows how long.”

  “Then we’ll offer words, instead of unspeech,” said Weia with a wink. “Just the right words.” Weia was right, for to Merwen, a wordweaver, words are as stone to the stonesick.

  So Oolioo came and crossed her legs on the mat before her grandmother, who sat white as a statue of alabaster, lost in that inner country that no sister ever shares. Oolioo said carefully, “Grandmama, I have a question. What is this thing called ‘compassion’?”

  At first nothing happened. Only the ocean waves crashed on, endlessly, at the raft’s edge outside the door of the silkhouse, where the rays of the morning sun came to rest. Then something flickered and stirred in Merwen’s body. Her breathing deepened, and the purple bloomed through her chest and her limbs, and up her neck, revealing the long pale scar that snaked up into her scalp. She took a deep breath, and she consented to sip from the cup which Weia hurriedly prompted Oolioo to offer. At last she replied to the child, in a voice that still croaked with dryness. “What is…‘compassion’? Tell me, Oolioo: Why do you gather whorlshells?”

  “Whorlshells?” said Oolioo. “Why, to share the pretty things with my friends, of course, so they will like me better.”

  “Excellent.” Merwen’s head turned slightly toward Weia. “They used to send you to me, once, youngest daughter. I see you shared that lesson well.”

  Weia’s cheeks darkened, for of course Merwen saw through the trick.

  “It’s always a delight,” Merwen added, “to share words with the very young. For they remind us of what we have been, and what part of us lives longest.”

  Then Merwen turned to me. My face grew warm, and I fingered the whorlshell hanging from my neck, the sole adornment of my body. “What are you?” she asked. “What have you been, and what shall you become?”

  “Whatever becomes me.” I swallowed and added lamely, “I, too, would share learning about compassion.”

  Merwen nodded. “Where learning is shared, the amnion breaks, and hope is born.”

  “Compassion is worthless,” said Weia mischievously, trying to provoke her mothersister. “That is what many sisters say, alone in their silkhouses, if not in the Gathering.”

  A gleam of intensity filled Merwen’s eyes, and I knew then that the Impatient one had returned to us for good. “Do they say so,” she replied. “I wish they’d share this new thought with me. I am well known for my love of all that is new and evil.”

  At this, a tear escaped my eye, for there were still those who blamed Merwen for having opened the door of ocean to Valans like myself, and all that followed. “You need water, and food, Merwen,” I reminded her. So she drank and ate, and then we three went out onto the raft to pursue the defense of compassion, the question Oolioo had bequeathed us, while she wandered behind gathering seaweed and fingersnails.

  From the water’s edge came Merwen’s granddaughter Adeisha the Shortsighted, an apprentice lifeshaper. Adeisha actually had a Valan father, the first male ever to join a Gathering. The lifeshaper had wisely given her the webbed feet and fingers of her Sharer mother; but her thick black hair and her ingenuous upturned nose were the very image of her father. “Grandmother, and Aunt Weia, share the day,” Adeisha ca
lled out. “What do you think of these Heliconians who came to learnshare our lifeshaping?”

  The Heliconian doctors had come to us from a distant star, shortly after they discovered the galactic Fold. They sought to learn the Sharer art by which children are conceived between women, the sick share healing, and the creatures of our ocean are bred to wondrous forms.

  Adeisha added, “They plan to lifeshape a race whose individuals escape death.”

  “They will fail,” Merwen replied as we walked upraft toward the central rim. “But they may fail most beautifully.”

  “But our Gathering calls it scandalous! Our sisters won’t accept them, even now after they shared the swallower season with us.”

  “The Gathering is right.”

  “You surprise me, Grandmother,” said Adeisha. “Surely, in the long run, we need to share friendship with our worthy sisters from the stars. Shora knows, other worlds may send us sisters less worthy, and then we’ll be glad of friends.”

  “You are right, too, Adeisha. And you, and the Heliconians, will prevail without my help. Just now, compassion needs my help. Will you join us? We need to show that compassion is not only the most right, but also the most desirable of all virtues.”

  “If you can,” added Weia doubtfully.

  “I hope you can, Grandmother,” said Adeisha. “When I hear sisters talk, at times I share doubts myself. So I’d like nothing better than to hear you defend compassion.”

  “But first,” warned Weia, “you will hear it destroyed utterly. For of all faults a sister may own, surely ‘compassion’ is the worst.”

  At her aunt’s remark Adeisha laughed, and even Merwen’s wrinkled eyes smiled. “What a selfname that would make,” said Adeisha, “the Compassionate One! The worst of faults! The Gathering would surely laugh that one down.”

  “Perhaps not so soon as you think,” said Merwen. “And yet, you both astonish me; for Weia herself offered her life to save her sisters, at age three, while Adeisha devotes her lifework to the welfare of Sharers great and small. When I see that you both share these doubts, yet practice such goodness despite them, I admire your conduct all the more. I think, Adeisha, it is for you to begin by saying what compassion is.”