“Mothersister, that’s exactly what some in the Gathering say of you,” Weia told her wonderingly.
“Thank you,” said Merwen, accepting the compliment. “So this is the third wave: Wordweavers will rule the Web, but must always be ruled by the Gathering of Guardians, which takes no decision opposed by a single soul.”
“I don’t agree,” said Adeisha. “Since nothing seems forbidden just now, let me say that a few of our sisters in the Gathering are too foolish to be worth hearing, let alone stand in the way of wordweavers. As Guardians they would do no better. There must be some way to make decisions without them.”
“That, too, has been said of Mothersister,” Weia pointed out.
After a brief silence, Merwen said in a different tone, “For my part, I long to hear out the most foolish of our sisters.”
“All right then,” said Adeisha, “for your sake, we’ll let them speak. Let the wordweavers rule and be ruled.”
“By the Gathering,” Merwen concluded.
“So,” Adeisha summed up, “we are to learn compassion from infants, males, and microbes; we are to treat fish as Sharers; and let the wordweavers rule and be ruled. I’m convinced Shora will be the better for this! Weia, let’s bring this to the Gathering.”
Weia shrugged. “As you say. It’s worth a hearing.” In fact, she discounted most of the proposal; but, as a Sharer, she could hear out anything, knowing her own voice could never be overruled or voted down.
“Good luck,” said Merwen, as Adeisha and Weia arose to leave, casting long shadows into the hollow where the Gathering would meet that night in the glow of a hundred plantlights. “If you face a rough sea at the Gathering, don’t be discouraged. You can always weave this Web within your own soul and body. You’ve got all it takes—even the microbes.”
Adeisha’s laughter drifted off in the breeze.
I remained where I sat, pensively making marks with my finger in the moss.
“What’s left, Cassi?” Merwen asked, just loud enough for me to hear. “I can tell by your look, I must have gone far astray somewhere.”
I tried to speak, something which often comes hard to me, especially among Sharers. This time, it seemed the hardest ever.
“This imaginary Web,” I said at last. “Can any one person…weave it for herself?”
“I think so,” said Merwen. “Anyone can practice what we spoke of just now, if it seems wise. What do you think?”
“What if one person might be worth more than the entire Web of the universe? What if I said I’d see the whole Web destroyed, if one special person might be saved?” At that my pulse raced, for of course that’s how I felt about Merwen herself.
Merwen considered this. “We’ve assumed, so far, that this Web is good; perhaps the greatest good.”
“It is.”
“Then what you’ve proposed just now can only be evil.”
At that I was completely silenced.
“You are right to keep silence here,” said Merwen, “for the gathering hollow is hardly the place to propose evil. Let us leave here and swim out from the main raft, before we speak further.”
III
THE DANCE OF FIRE
Chapter 1
THE WINDCLANS RETURNED TO FIND THEIR HOUSE IN its usual friendly spirits. “I see you’ve generated another shonling,” it observed. “Be sure to have her registered.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” said Raincloud, letting Blueskywind down from the pouch at her chest. The pouch, made of goat hide, was especially designed to protect the infant’s head during a rei-gi move.
“And your visiting served well, I hope?” asked the house.
“Just great,” she said. “We ought to go out more often; the kids need to stretch their legs.”
“I agree,” said the house. “My visiting served well, too, and I hope to do this more often.”
Startled, Blackbear looked up and exchanged a look with Raincloud.
“Only under orders, I hope,” said Raincloud.
“Of course, Citizen.”
Blackbear added, “You’d better watch out, or Public Safety will come after you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. If they do, I’ve made arrangements.”
They absorbed this. Then Raincloud shrugged. “I expect we’ll be out at least one day a week. Sunny—watch the baby’s head!”
Sunflower was doing his best to pull the sleeping baby out of her pouch. Blackbear hurried to help him. “You have to put your hand under the head, see. Babies can’t hold their heads up yet.”
“Why?” Sunflower asked, as his father placed Blueskywind into her sleeping basket.
“Because that’s how their neck muscles are made before birth,” he explained. “The head has to relax completely, to help the baby come out of the womb.”
“Why?”
This could go on for a while. “Look—just hold the head gently in your hand, like this.”
“Just-hold-the-head-gently-in-your-hand-like-this,” Sunflower repeated solemnly, with crisp clicking. The baby’s head with its black fuzz of hair leaned back precariously upon his chubby little palm, eyes and mouth tightly shut. Her face was darkening, although she still looked pale next to her older brother.
A powerful odor emanated from the kitchen. It smelled like rotting eggs. “What’s that, by the Goddess?” Blackbear demanded, holding his breath.
Hawktalon came running out of the kitchen. “Yuk, look what the kitchen made! I didn’t do it, I didn’t!”
In the kitchen, the servo window had produced a bowl full of what looked and certainly smelled like rotten eggs.
“Out with it!” Raincloud ordered with a theatrical gesture, holding her hand over her face. The eggs disappeared down the disposal, although their smell lingered. Doggie raced out of the kitchen and tore around the living room, apparently caught up in the excitement. “Hawk, that’s wasting food and it’s not funny.”
“I told you, I didn’t do it. How could I? The house doesn’t answer me.”
“That’s true,” Raincloud admitted. “Well, who did then?”
“Doggie did.”
They all looked at Doggie, who was still racing around the living room like a cornered cockroach.
“Doggie did?”
“She asked me, what was the most disgusting thing I ever saw?” Hawktalon had developed a lengthy “vocabulary” of servo-squeak, most of which Blackbear had assumed was imaginary. “I told her about the time back home when Daddy lost an egg in the back of the fridge. So she went right up to the window and told it to make some.”
“Good Goddess,” Blackbear muttered. “Whatever would she do that for?”
“She’s jealous of baby Trainsweep.” Hawktalon had persisted in calling the baby by the first name from Raincloud’s dream. “She told me, ‘Send Trainsweep back to the Sharers.’”
Blackbear felt his scalp prickle. They had been warned, after all, that the little servo might be dangerous. “Well you tell Doggie, we’ll send her back to the Sharers soon enough.”
“And you, House,” added Raincloud, “you’re to ignore trainsweep’s orders, too, from now on; just like shonlings. Understand? Or we’ll report your defect to sector whatever-the-number-is.”
“If you insist, Citizen.” The house voice carried an unusual note of reluctance.
From the basket came gasping cries, as Blueskywind awoke for a feeding. Raincloud shook her head. “It’s bad enough having three kids with minds of their own around here,” she muttered. “Now we have five.”
NO WONDER DOGGIE WAS JEALOUS, FOR BLUESKYWIND enchanted her family like a sorceress. Blackbear could think of nothing else but that little peach of a face, her tiny hands and feet wrinkled with loose skin and baby fat. Her grip was tenacious; even as she slept on his shoulder, she held a fistful of his sleeve in her determined grasp. Hawktalon was soon holding her in one arm like an expert, while Fruitbat lay discarded on the floor. She especially delighted to watch the fontanel, where the tough patch of skin be
tween Blueskywind’s unclosed skull bones could be seen to pulse with each heartbeat.
But at last Blackbear and the older children and Doggie had to go back to the lab, while the baby went off to the Nucleus with her mother. “Hope they let her sleep,” Blackbear grumbled, still distrustful of the arrangement.
Raincloud laughed, as she bound the infant up securely in the pouch strapped from her chest to her hips. “I have a new office, now,” she reminded him. After the World Gathering, Raincloud had been promoted to Special Assistant and got an office with a built-in automatic diaper changer. Lem Inashon, too was promoted to Sub-Subguardian.
After she had confided her plans for Urulan, Blackbear no longer asked what she was up to. For now, though, the Sharers were her main concern. The Sharer witness against terraforming had spread to all twelve cities. The holo news showed them every night, usually a pair at a time seated cross-legged in the middle of the main thoroughfare, stark white and unclothed.
“Bye now,” said Raincloud. “Say ‘Bye-bye,’ Blue.”
The baby grimaced in her sleep.
“So long as your office doesn’t try to feed her, too,” Blackbear warned.
At the laboratory, change was in the wind. “We’re losing Onyx,” Tulle told Blackbear. “The House of Hyalite hired her to direct their share of the genome project. It was part of the deal.”
Blackbear nodded. “Good for her. It’s hard to imagine our lab without her.”
“You’re right. Besides being the sharpest embryo analyst I’ve had in decades, she gets along with everyone. Draeg is bright, but he and Lorl don’t even say hello.”
“At least he and Pirin agree on whom to hate.”
Tulle laughed and reached down to stroke the black hood of her capuchin. “Personalities. They’re the bane of a lab director’s existence. If only servos could do good research! But that would be much less fun,” she added hastily.
Blackbear was silent, regretting his own thoughtless remark. Of course most of the lab detested Kal, but he himself did not; in fact, he looked forward to finding the logen again sometime at the anaean garden.
“As for the Fertility Project,” Tulle added more quietly, “it looks like Onyx will take that with her.”
Puzzled, he asked, “You mean the genome project?”
“Fertility work—the whole field.” She averted her eyes for a moment, then faced him squarely. “The Guardians have pressed me, even my strongest supporters. They’re anxious to placate the Sharers any way they can. They want me to drop fertility, and stick to longevity.”
Blackbear’s mouth fell open. “But the Sharers did not agree. Some of them believe that Elysians should raise their own children.”
“The Guardians won’t listen. They’re scared stiff over the terraforming controversy, and they’ll grasp at straws.”
“Why should a couple of naked people in a street scare anyone?” he wondered.
The blond Elysian scientist looked thoughtful. “Suppose your ‘High Priestess’ were to sit in protest in the middle of Tumbling Rock.”
He shuddered. “That would be different.”
“Among Sharers, everyone’s a High Priestess.”
“But in Tumbling Rock, it would never happen. We would obey the High Priestess immediately.”
“Your people are a matriarchy,” Tulle pointed out. “Ours are a democracy, dealing with communitarian anarchists.”
“Does democracy guarantee bad management?”
“It sure looks that way, doesn’t it,” Tulle exclaimed with exasperation.
“You’ve fought so hard for the fertility work,” he insisted. “You can’t just give up.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m letting Onyx take the project out to Valedon, where it’s less controversial. She has to take something, after all. The genome approach is really the best we’ve come up with; and you made a real contribution. You should transfer to the Valan lab, too.”
“That would be hard, with Raincloud’s job here.”
“The moonferry’s not a bad commute. Of course, I’d be glad to keep you here. You could go back to that Eyeless gene. Most of its fertility regulators govern longevity, too. Several Eyeless alleles in the Elysian population start causing problems by the end of one’s first millennium.”
Just how common was this “premature aging,” he wondered.
The capuchin sprang up to his knee. It took to examining the lines of his hand with great care, as if a morsel of food might be hidden there. Another decade left, perhaps, yet this little soul had no thought of mortality.
WITH HIS PROJECT TAKEN AWAY, BLACKBEAR FELT LOST and tired. He took two extra Visiting Days to catch up on sleep, for the baby still woke every night, and he made sure Hawktalon kept up with her homework. Hawktalon had developed the unnerving habit of conversing with Doggie as if she were a girlfriend who understood everything she said. Doggie responded in servo-squeak, her rhythms of expression echoing the girl’s.
As he rested, his sense of loss turned to anger. What right did those self-righteous Elysians have to take away the one project that might have ultimately benefited less fortunate foreigners?
Kal had won after all, he realized. By making their work a public issue, the logen had forced them to quit the basic research. Now, if the Valan venture failed, who would start from scratch again? And the news said that Kal had leaked the terraforming contract, too. Draeg had been right all along. Kal was dangerous and destructive.
The next afternoon, on his way home Blackbear stopped at the swallowtail garden as usual to let Sunflower and Hawktalon run a bit. The two children chased Doggie around the trees, while Blackbear sat on a mooncurve thinking how homesick he was. Quail would be getting ready for the Dance of Fire, the third great festival of the Clicker year. Actually, he realized, it was just over one standard year since the first day the Windclans had set foot on Helicon; but the Bronze Skyan Year would last another five months. The Dance of Fire celebrated the burning season, when great thunderstorms set fire to the oldest stands of forest, charring broad swaths to return their minerals to the earth. It was said that the Goddess Herself could be seen in the columns of black smoke with their uplifted fingers of flame.
Blackbear was about to call the children and depart, when he noticed an Anaean watching him. The man wore a talar of burnt orange, its pattern depicting fallen leaves in such profusion that he nearly blended into the scenery.
It was Kal. Astonished and disconcerted, Blackbear took a step closer. “You’ve put off your mourning,” he blurted out.
Kal rose to meet him, with an air of hesitancy. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen today. But now that you’re here,” he said, “you may as well do your worst.”
Blackbear frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I know how you feel. I look in on friends now and then,” Kal admitted with a smile.
He still tended to forget he was on display for much of the day. “Well, if you’re ashamed of yourself, you ought to be. You couldn’t have your way through the logathlon, but now those cowards in the Guard have given in.”
“The Guardians are cowards, I agree. As for myself, I gained nothing. Tulle was rather clever, I think. She retained both financial and consulting interests in the genome project, while placing its development effectively beyond my reach. Meanwhile, I suspect that the longevity problems hold greater scientific interest for her.”
That was true, he suddenly realized. What was more boring than to rearrange a few chromosomes? Besides, the fertility problem was really a matter of outsmarting human invention, whereas postmillennial longevity was an open frontier. “Well, little good that does me,” Blackbear exclaimed. “I came here to work on something for the good of my people—and now what’s left?”
“You’re right, and it’s all my fault. As I said, I didn’t want to be seen today.”
With difficulty Blackbear suppressed a laugh at this absurd confession. “And what about all the trouble you caused over terraforming? Telling the Sh
arers, without warning—”
“That’s not true.” Kal shook with agitation, and his voice rose. “I knew nothing about that. Of course, I don’t approve of terraforming; but I would never pass a stolen document behind Verid’s back. You must tell everyone, it’s not true.”
Blackbear stared at him, taken aback. “All right, then,” he muttered. “But what’s wrong with terraforming? You yourself said we’d have no choice, in a few decades.” He was starting to talk about time like an Elysian, he thought ruefully.
Kal sighed and looked away. He resumed his seat on the bench, and Blackbear followed, with a quick glance to locate Hawktalon and make sure Sunflower was not gobbling caterpillars. “It’s evil,” Kal said simply. “If anything is evil, to kill a world is.”
Blackbear tried to consider this idea, but somehow a cloud of fog obscured it. He knew his own existence, and the way of his people on Bronze Sky, to be good; and anything that existence necessitated could not be bad. He shook his head. “So what would you have us do?”
Kal did not answer. But he had answered already, on that night after the hearing when Blackbear had first confronted him.
“You want me to stop having children, let alone ageless ones,” Blackbear answered for him. His hands gripped the air, as if somehow to shape the indefinable. “What is life without a house full of children? Children are like stars with faces. Their play makes magic of the very dust on the floor.”
“I know,” said the former generen.
“It’s no use giving up children, anyway,” Blackbear exclaimed with sudden insight. “That is why Elysian consumption grows, despite their level population: to replace the children’s magic with adult toys.”
“You are right. But one has to start somewhere. It’s enough to live one’s life clinging to the edge of an abyss; one needn’t actually fall in.”
That was just what The Web said, Blackbear recalled.
From behind a tree Sunflower screeched as Hawktalon tried to pull him in one direction, according to whatever the game was. Blackbear started to rise, then gripped the seat to hold himself back. Sure enough, their cries subsided as the pair managed to resolve their difference. A sign of growing up. How quickly they would turn into adults and fly off with the butterflies…A good thing he still had a baby in the house.
Daughter of Elysium Page 36
