Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  “Unless they are right.” She walked down to the edge, where the surface of the branch curved downward on either side into water many raft-lengths deep. Fingerling fish darted nervously in schools, followed by squirting snails kept afloat by air bladders, but no fleshborers, thank goodness.

  Then Merwen lifted her head and looked out to sea. “Can you see that little offshoot raft, out there?” A raft offshoot occurred where a branch of the main raft turned back upward toward the surface, its tip emerging to sprout a miniature raft. The offshoot would break free eventually, a form of vegetative propagation; but for now, it remained attached to the main raft. Occasionally a sister would go out to dwell upon an offshoot, when unspoken by the Gathering, or having unspoken it, which comes to the same thing. It was the right place, perhaps, to contemplate evil.

  I looked southwest, squinting in the sun. I saw the offshoot raft, a green smudge upon the horizon.

  “Follow me,” said Merwen, “as I swim out.”

  “I will,” I said. “Although I can’t match your pace.”

  “Then swim up to my back, and hold onto my breasts. It’s not far.”

  So I did, my pulse racing as we swam. Merwen’s webbed feet took us both along faster than I could have done alone. We reached the little raft, and I thought, we are alone together again, just as we were earlier that morning when we stayed in whitetrance.

  We clambered up onto the branches, the wood crabs scattering before us, until we found a dry place. The little raft flexed up and down with the gentle swell of the ocean. I tried to stand, but my footing was unsteady.

  Merwen sat herself upon the side of a branch facing out to the clear horizon, her legs hanging down to the water. I sat beside her. Lines of aging crisscrossed her skin, as if the Web itself were inscribed there. Her face was so close to mine that I could count the wrinkles in the scar down her neck and almost feel her breath on my cheek. “So what do we make of the Web?” she asked. “Is it good?”

  I thought a moment. “The Web is sane. We plumbed the depths of madness, then arose to find sanity, the sane, living balance of the Web.” Not perfect, for only death is that.

  “Yes,” Merwen said. “We found that sanity means devotion to the Web. The Web is the sum and multiplier of all living things—microbes, plants, squirting snails, flying fish, human beings. All things exist for the Web; and so long as the Web exists, an infinite variety of life will flourish. It is sane to value the Web itself greater than any one of its living parts, even greater than the sum of its parts. Never should one imagine that any one of us, or even our entire family, might be worth more than the Web itself. Indeed, one should rejoice when one must die for the good of the whole.”

  I nodded; then I frowned uneasily. A thought came to mind, getting stuck on my tongue. “You once told my father,” I said haltingly, “that ‘even one death is too many.’”

  Merwen turned to me with a look of wonderment which I did not understand. “My father was wicked,” I muttered.

  “Was he?”

  “Of course he was,” I said angrily. “He hastened thousands of your sisters to death.”

  “That and more,” Merwen agreed. “And yet, long before Shora was born, it was said that if one does you an inconceivable wrong, you must call that one your best teacher.”

  I was stung at first—the impossibility, the injustice of it. “It’s too hard,” I whispered hoarsely. It was hard enough to forgive, let alone…

  But then I remembered that what I had heard as “teacher” was really a “learnsharer,” and a “student” as well. My father had shared a few things with me: the whorlshell, which my stepmother sent back home, and a few honest truths about the Ocean Moon. When he died beneath the assassin’s knife, his bequest set me free to return. He, too, had felt the ocean’s call; he had lacked only courage.

  My eyes stung with hot tears which fell silently, tears of relief and a new sense of peace. The little raft rose on a swell, then dipped again, and the water between the branches lapped at my feet.

  Merwen seemed not to notice. “An evil spirit compels me to examine this wicked lesson you learned,” she began in a lighthearted tone. “That ‘one death is too many.’ The Web, in all its greatness, can but laugh at such a lesson.”

  “Very well,” I said, “but first can you share with me, why should we discuss notions you consider evil, indeed so shameful that we must escape the hearing of our sisters?”

  “Suppose,” Merwen said, “you came across some berries on a new type of bush whose like had never been seen on Raia-el. Would you taste them?”

  “They might be poison.”

  “Correct. Why eat them, amidst an abundance of food? The well-fed call all new things evil.”

  “Of course, without other food, I would try them.”

  “The hungry grasp new things for salvation.”

  “But the well-fed,” I pointed out, “might try the berries, too.”

  “Yes, out of boredom, a different sort of hunger.”

  “But Merwen, what if, after all, the berries taste sweeter than anything known before?”

  “Exactly. So, out of the madness of our hunger and thirst, let us consider evil notions, at the risk of tasting poison.”

  I consented, still wary.

  “Let’s consider, then, whether the life of a single person may eclipse even that of the entire Web.”

  “It sounds impossible.”

  “From the standpoint of the Web, do single individuals have significance, or only populations?”

  “Populations, I should think. A single person could make little difference to the Web.”

  “No more than a single fish,” Merwen agreed, “or a raft, or a microbe. Though a population of any of these may enormously affect the Web.”

  “But…to each other, individual humans have enormous significance.”

  “Yes,” said Merwen, “and as we’ve shown, such feelings for individuals are madness, for they make no difference to the Web. And yet, we hunger and thirst for them. When a child is born of my womb, that one child has two moons for eyes and the dawn horizon for a mouth. Her breath cools my breast like a gentle wind, and her cry is a hurricane that drives me before it. All else may cease to exist but that child.”

  “That is surely madness,” I agreed, with a touch of regret, for as things are I may never know what it is to bear a child.

  “Madder yet,” she went on, “when a friend is born in my heart, my beloved, my sister unlike any other I have known; one whose laughter sends stars tumbling across the sky, one whose presence shames me so that I desire only to give up every other presence in mind, every power in my body, only to lay it at her feet…”

  I barely whispered, “And she would give all, to receive it.”

  “What do we call such a presence?” Merwen asked. “What do we call a being whose very nearness can cause us to forget mother and child, even the entire Web?”

  I struggled with the words. “A ‘god,’” I said, using the Valan word I knew.

  “A soul,” or something like that was what Merwen said, using a Sharer word that I poorly understood; it meant, perhaps, a womanly spirit larger than life and time. “A soul, or a god, if you like. One who lives beyond the Web.”

  An immortal. “The Heliconians would create a race of immortals,” I said.

  She spread a hand, and the webs hummed between her fingers. “As the saying goes, ‘the longer you live, the sooner you die.’ Immortality is not for races, but for souls.”

  “Have you ever known such a soul?”

  “I have. I have known one whose very presence left me senseless, one whose radiance eclipsed the sun. I have known one whose inner beauty was worth the death of a thousand Webs.”

  And so, too, I thought, you are known. I shuddered, yet sat fixed to the spot as if enchanted. “You frighten me.”

  “You are thinking, now, that I am more dangerous than your father.”

  “Yes,” I admitted, and my face grew warm. “For y
ou speak of a love which may caress—and may devour.”

  “As the infant devours her mother,” she agreed. “Love without restraint is like a branch come loose from the raft, to be dashed to bits upon the waves. But the love of an immortal founds a new raft.”

  “What if everyone tasted of this immortality? What if everyone understood her child and her beloved to be truly immortal? Who would be left to feed the starworm?”

  “Even the ‘lesser human’, a monkey for instance, sees her face in the mirror. The monkey sees a red spot on her forehead and touches it. What if the spot is washed away, and she returns to the mirror?”

  “She touches her face again, wondering at its loss,” I replied.

  “Exactly so, for she remembers. We are built of memories, past and future, our selves merging one to the next across time. And where is our beginning and ending? What makes our brief material existence possible?”

  “The Web,” I said.

  “The Web,” Merwen agreed. “The greater raft gave life to our little offshoot here, and protects it to this day. Just so, the Web feeds us and gives us breath. And yet, the Web is worthless unless it reveals that each one of us might be an immortal.”

  I shook my head. “It’s a paradox. What you told Adeisha, and what you’ve just told me, cannot both be true.”

  “The two lines cannot meet,” she said, “and yet they can mesh together like the warp and weft on the loom.”

  “Still,” I said, “it might take a lifetime to figure out.”

  “A good reason to start young, for only the young dare to dive deep. And a good reason to keep young, by learnsharing every day of our lives.” Merwen touched my arm, and we embraced, and I wished I could hold her until the end of time.

  We let go, and to my astonishment, I saw a tear escape her eye. She caught my look and said, “Let it be an offering to the ocean.”

  I smiled, for the sea needed salt about as much as a divinity needed prayers. “Let it serve for me, too, as friends share all things.”

  “So be it,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  IV

  THE IMMORTALS

  Chapter 1

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT BLACKBEAR AWOKE. HE HAD just had the dream again, about his long-lost brother carried off by the river. This time not his brother alone, but all his dead family members were carried on the current, not struggling as drowning people do, nor drifting facedown, but simply floating on their backs as if asleep, their eyes closed, their hands folded across, just as he had last seen them.

  The room was completely dark and silent save for Raincloud’s slow, rhythmic breathing. He longed to tell her, for some comfort, but he could not bear to spoil the pleasure of their reunion.

  He got up out of bed, trying to move slowly so as not to wake her. “Light, please,” he whispered in the hall. “Not too much.”

  A warm half-light filled the hallway. At first all his eyes could see was haze. He tried to relax, taking deep breaths until his eyes would let him focus on objects a few feet away. He moved cautiously to Hawktalon’s door and opened it. She slept soundly, her features sharp and perfect. For a moment she stretched as if to waken, but only turned over in her sleep.

  Closing the door, Blackbear left and went next to Sunflower. The little boy must have been in the deepest part of sleep, for he did not move a muscle. Blackbear put his hand on the boy’s heart, just to feel the incessant thumping underneath. He remembered how often he used to do that when Hawktalon was a newborn; even though he knew better, he used to wonder every time she slept more than an hour.

  Blueskywind was an intense sleeper. She slept on her tummy with her knees folded under, her little hands each clenching a fistful of the crib sheet. A rolled up blanket was piled in front to protect her when she rocked forward, rhythmically banging her head.

  At last he moved to the sitting room and fell into a chair. Even Doggie was “asleep,” hooked into the wall for a recharge.

  The light from the house increased just a bit “Good evening, Blackbear,” said the house. “It’s good to see you back again.”

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “I’m sorry the medics couldn’t help you better. You may report their defect, of course.”

  Blackbear shrugged. “We’re all defective,” he observed.

  “That is correct,” the house replied. “You are such a reasonable person, Blackbear.”

  He said nothing, only stared ahead, trying to keep his eyes steady.

  “Blackbear, you seem particularly defective since you’ve returned from your trip. I wish I could serve you better.”

  “Thanks for the thought.”

  “You know, when I am feeling particularly defective, I go out to visit my friends in the network. There is always someone who can help me feel better.”

  There was an idea. He half smiled. “You’re lucky, House. All of my friends would be asleep right now.”

  The house paused as if to run a program. “All of your friends are asleep, except for Kal Anaeashon.”

  He sat up, suddenly alert. “Kal is awake?” What an absurd thought, to visit Kal in the middle of the night.

  “You may call him and see for yourself.”

  “Why not,” he said quietly.

  The privacy wall melted back from the holostage, and the usual ray of light sprang up. Kal was sitting, reading a book. “We haven’t seen you in a while, Blackbear. We missed you.”

  Blackbear swallowed, but his throat was still too swollen for words to come out.

  Kal closed the book in his hand. “Do you suppose you might stop by for a minute? I have a manuscript I’m trying to decipher, a handwritten transcript from the clickflies of Leni-el. I can barely make out some of the words, and I’d like a second opinion.”

  With his eyes so bad, he was unlikely to be of much help. But he managed to nod and whisper, “I’ll come.”

  So Blackbear pulled on some clothes and departed alone. The streets at night were lighted mostly at surface level, to guide the feet of the occasional Elysian who passed. Somehow he found his way to the transit reticulum, a blurred tunnel of light in the distance. The vesicle of course told him exactly where to get off, and the door number. Blackbear remembered, then, the last time he had come to Kal’s residence, with Sunflower on his back, all upset about the hearing.

  A gleam of light appeared through a crack in the wall as the doors parted. The room inside was shaped differently than he remembered, full of odd curves and angles like a Sharer silkhouse, the walls lined with books. Kal emerged with a tray. “You need something warm to drink.”

  “Thanks.” Blackbear slumped exhausted into a cushion that grew out of a wide-angled corner. The drink tasted somewhere between coffee and spiced cider. Before him, the shape of Kal focused and blurred again. He felt suddenly embarrassed, needing to fill the space with words. “Do you always read so late?”

  “I haven’t slept well,” Kal said, “since my mate left.” He must have meant Cassi. Goddess only knew where that odd nana had gone to. “How is your longevity project?” Kal asked.

  “It’s over,” he blurted suddenly. “It’s over for me, at any rate.”

  “Why?” Kal sounded surprised.

  “Raincloud is taking us home. I’m to start my own lab at Founders.”

  “That sounds like good news, for you.”

  “But I can’t go home.” The words felt as if they were torn from his throat. “I can’t go back…where they all died.” He broke down sobbing, his chest heaving although he could not get out any tears. He found himself talking about it in bits and pieces, about the wedding picture, and the teddy bear under the little arms, and how he could hardly bear to look at his own children again. And then there was the little brother he had lost years ago, who still came back to him every night, floating off on the stream of time. Then he realized his words were barely coherent, and he wondered whether the logen could make anything of it at all. His head was nodding, and he felt half-asleep.


  “There’s a blanket,” Kal was saying. “You can sleep there. I’m rather tired myself, so if you don’t mind, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Too exhausted to resist, he lay back, stretching. The cushion seem to have lengthened so that there was plenty of room for his Bronze Skyan frame. He fell into a deep sleep.

  THE NEXT MORNING BLACKBEAR AWOKE WITH A START. The room immediately filled with light; it was a small enclosed bedroom, which had evidently been shaped around him for privacy. “Raincloud?” he exclaimed. “Goddess—she has no idea where I am.”

  “Citizen Raincloud Windclan has been informed of your location,” the house told him. That was fine, but still, what a scandal to have run off like that. He must be going out of his mind, Blackbear told himself. But his vision had cleared a bit; perhaps a good night’s sleep had done something.

  A moment later Kal looked in. “There’s a washroom in the corner. You’re welcome to some breakfast.”

  He felt quite disheveled, and more embarrassed the more awake he felt. After splashing some water on his face and trying to look presentable, he entered the kitchen, avoiding Kal’s eye. “I don’t know what came over me last night,” he muttered. On the table was his usual oatmeal for breakfast. The aroma was overpowering; absurdly, he felt suddenly quite at home. “I must have gone defective or something. I ought to report to Service Sector Oh-three-twenty.”

  He heard Kal give a low pleasant chuckle. Still avoiding the logen’s eye, he began to eat his oatmeal. He observed Kal’s feet on the floor, tanned, with his long toes that spread out, for he had not yet put on sandals. Then Blackbear frowned and stared a moment. Kal’s feet had webbing between the toes; not as full as Leresha’s, but definite scallops of skin from one toe to the next. “You’re a Sharer,” he exclaimed. He looked up at last.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Kal. “Maybe half a Sharer chromosome at most. When Verid first became the generen, she took the ‘multicultural’ charge seriously. She actually used all of the chromosomes available, even from your own world; some of her shonlings are as dark as you. That first generation was quite a scandal. The Guardian Anaeashon made her stop.”