And then, one day, one of your undergraduate work-study kids sticks her head into your office and says that Bigfoot is here and would like to speak with you.
Have you imagined that? Do you feel it? Because that, essentially, was the reaction we got when Kisarat and I arrived at the university in Phan-garad asking to talk to one of her old professors.
◆◆◆
For some reason, I expected that the (Taitalan-equivalent) Dr. Sloraq would be a talalong or dwenda. But when the two intensely flustered students, a linyang and a dwenda, ushered us into her office, I found a plump and rather posh cunelo frantically trying to straighten up her terminally disordered desk.
“Well!” she exclaimed, “Kisarat! To think after all our discussions and your wonderful papers for my classes that you would actually end up being a wife of the makalang!” She paused to look me up and down, breathing rapidly. Then she struggled to compose herself and set her hands on her desk.
“Oh! Your appearance is so amazingly similar to the illustrations in Tyrani’s The Makalang and the Unmated. Do you know what this means, Kisarat? It means that Tyrani must have seen the ninth makalang, as I have always argued. Her stories were not the fever dreams that Peerita and others have insisted.”
She plopped into her chair, breathing hard. Her ears twitched furiously. She wore an odd-looking pair of glasses that were more like slices of crystal than regular lenses back on Earth, and she adjusted them as she looked me over.
“The tenth makalang, in my office! I have so much to ask you!”
I held up my hands, stunned.
“Wait. There have been nine before me? Nine?”
“Well, I suppose that depends on whom you ask. The eighth and ninth are fairly well established, I think. Before that, there is disagreement. The literature consensus is that there were at least three more, but just how many is unclear. In my work, I have explored the historical and archeological evidence extensively, and I am quite confident there were actually another seven, not merely three. My conclusions, I must confess, are a bit of an outlier, but by my count, you are the tenth. So, my answer there would be yes.”
“Silas Jeroboam Johnson. He was the ninth?”
“Yes! Did you know him?”
I looked over at Kisarat, who was struggling to keep her composure.
“Professor –” she said.
“Please, please, sit. We must talk.”
Kisarat and I sat down.
“Professor,” I said, “you obviously have questions for us. I also have questions for you. I am willing to answer your questions for a while if you can answer mine.”
“Well, of course! Certainly. Give me a moment.” She threw several piles of papers around on her desk before coming up with something that looked like a notepad. Then she found a crystal tablet and held it up. “Do you object to my recording this?”
“Not at all.”
“All right. All right. Let’s see. I suppose we should begin with Silas Johnson.”
◆◆◆
We spent about an hour talking about me, Silas Johnson, and Earth. I didn’t mention Silas’s journals because I wasn’t done reading them myself and I knew she would insist on seeing them. But having read most of the way through the first, I was able to tell her quite a bit about him as she frantically took notes and dug around in her books looking for more points of disagreement in the literature she wanted to address. When I confirmed one of her key theories – she correctly surmised that reproduction on Earth must be very different from on Taitala, while her critics argued that Earth likely had no females at all – she let out a cry of triumph and called to the students in the outer office.
After that, I expected that she would be upset when I corrected one of her errors, but instead she was thrilled to learn the truth. She had, for example, spent a lot of time working out a theory about which Taitalan races were represented among Earth females. When I told her the only analogs were certain species of animals, she was fascinated and demanded that I list and describe all of them. All the while, people, mostly younger students, were coming and going in the outer office, talking and pointing and often taking photos of us. One caught my eye, a cute talalong girl with beautiful amethyst hair who lingered for a while.
Finally, Professor Sloraq paused to catch her breath and set down her notes.
“All right, I suppose I should stop. You have given me enough material to occupy me for the next talon or two. You had questions for me?”
I leaned back and exhaled, desperately hoping she could help me.
“To be honest, I have only one dilemma I need answered. There may be nothing. I am just curious if there are any examples in all these histories you’ve studied of a makalang’s wife being unable to have a child, and what, if anything he did about it.”
She looked at me curiously, eyes narrowing. I could see her thinking intensely about something. Then she spoke.
“The answer is yes.”
She stood and went to one of the bookcases behind her.
“It is a tale from the time of the sixth makalang,” she said as she looked through the stacks of books. “I doubt Kisarat would have ever come across it, so please don’t be upset with her. The story is at least six or seven kumala-talons old, and her work was on more recent histories. I do not have an original, but there is one in the library. Ah – here it is!”
She pulled out a narrow book and sat down.
“It is alternately called The Crystal Child or Child from the Crystal, depending on which version you use. There is a bit of disagreement on which is the true original, but the story is basically the same.”
I realized after a moment what the title meant.
“There was a child?”
“Yes. The story goes like this. A beautiful linyang girl wanted to mate, but no male would have her. In her despair, she goes to live alone in the woods. One day, she meets a very large, pale-skinned male of great beauty and character. Now, the word makalang arose later, so the male is never described as such in this work, but it’s obvious that’s what he was. They fall in love, and he takes her as a wife.”
She paused for a moment.
“Now, understand that up to this point, you have a very common theme in Taitalan literature. There are literally hundreds of examples I could show you, and not just with the makalang. Sometimes the protagonist finds a male who appreciates her good qualities unlike all the others and claims her, sometimes she finds love with another female, sometimes she just magically has a child on her own. I don’t suppose any of this should be surprising.”
“No.”
“The twist here is that, despite being a brave warrior and a paragon of the sword as these linyang heroes always are, she’s unable to bear a child. The makalang’s other wives mock her for her failure. So she despairs again and goes in search of a solution. In the forest, she finds a cave filled with beautiful crystals. She takes the largest one and carves it into the shape of a baby. When she returns with the crystal child, the other wives all laugh at her cruelly. But in time, she loves the child so much that it becomes real.”
“And happily ever after?”
“Yes, essentially.”
“Do you think any of that actually happened?”
Professor Sloraq leaned back in her chair and tapped her finger against her glasses as her ears went erect.
“I find it very interesting that you should ask that, because I do indeed believe The Crystal Child has some basis in fact. The reason is this: Makalang literature, and here I mean all the fantasies and stories that have grown up around it, not the actual histories, is fundamentally about wish fulfillment. For a girl to find the makalang, yet not bear him a child, runs directly counter to all of that. And that suggests to me that this was based on some actual event. So much so that I consider The Crystal Child to be one of the main pieces of evidence for the sixth makalang, though there are many who disagree with me.”
“There are no other stories like this?”
�
��There are a few later examples, but in my mind they are clearly all derived from this one, and mostly inconsequential fluff of no real historical interest. The Crystal Child is really the only one that fits what you asked about.”
“Is there any evidence of where this might have happened?”
“It is the same as most other makalang stories, a forest in the mountains, much like the one you emerged from.”
“And nothing else about crystal children?”
“Well, perhaps, but not in this context. Nothing I would consider relevant here.”
◆◆◆
After promising to visit her again for another discussion, Kisarat and I headed back to the house. Since the university was not far from the city center, we’d walked over with the sorai guards Varycibe had sent, and they were waiting outside for us. Several dozen girls had followed us from the house. That crowd had now grown to more than a hundred, swelled by what looked like a lot of students from the university.
As we began heading back home, it was clear they were going to follow us, still taking pictures and calling to me.
But out of the squeals and offers to mate, one voice caught my ear, because the tone was different.
“– talk to you! Makalang, I need to talk to you!”
It was the girl with the amethyst hair. She saw me looking and waved frantically.
“I need to talk to you, it’s important!”
But before I could say or do anything, she was swept away into the crowd, and I lost sight of her as our guards kept moving us forward.
I turned to Kisarat.
“Please don’t breathe a word of this to Narilora. At least not until we know more.”
Her face was tight.
“I will say nothing.”
“What do you think all that means?”
“I do not know. Certainly I know no more than Professor Sloraq.”
“I don’t think carving a crystal child is going to help Narilora.”
“No. But there was a time when crystals were used for healing, long ago.”
“Used how?”
She shook her head.
“That is a question for Ayarala.”
The crowd at the house had also continued to grow while we were gone. The one following us merged with it, swelling the whole group to several hundred. Sticking close to the guards, we worked our way back inside.
Eladra and Lorelat were waiting for us.
“Will, are you ready to claim the new girls?”
“Ah . . . okay.” I looked at Kisarat. “Let’s talk to Ayarala later.”
We went upstairs to a room on the second floor that I had converted from a meeting space into our workout and sparring area. The four new girls were there waiting for us, the sorai wearing armor and the linyang in tight leggings and tops.
One by one, I went through some good-natured sparring and mock combat with them. After a few minutes, each girl would stop, drop to her knees and surrender to me, and I would claim her as a wife. When we were done, I had worked up a good sweat and I was definitely looking forward to mating with all them. I wondered if I might take all four of them at once.
When we were done and the girls had been welcomed into the family by Eladra and Lorelat and gone back their rooms, I asked Lorelat what my schedule looked like. We’d had to create one just to keep things organized, since maintaining the clan balance mattered so much to certain people.
“It will probably be a sampar before we can get to those girls,” Lorelat said. “And Loreloo sent over two new cunelo while you were gone.”
“What’s the breakdown like now?”
“In terms of wives, you’re still pretty much even, thanks to the new cunelo. One extra talalong, that’s it. No new pregnancies today, so far at least. Sorry.”
Loreloo had rather neatly neutralized my attempt to rebalance the numbers.
“How much space do we have for anyone else?”
Lorelat checked her notes.
“Unless you want to start doubling people up, we’ve got room for five more wives.”
“Let’s fill those out, then.”
Her mouth twisted a bit in concern.
“From out front?”
“Yes.”
She took a slow breath and exhaled.
“Okay. You’re the tsulygoi.”
I leaned over and kissed her.
“You’re doing good, bunny-girl.”
She smiled.
“Anything for the Bunny-daddy.”
“I may hold you to that one.”
◆◆◆
I found Ayarala up in our bedroom. She looked up as I came in.
“Have you looked outside in the last hour?” she asked.
“No.”
“Go look.”
I went past her onto the balcony. The crowd had continued to swell. There had to be three hundred girls out there now. They cheered when they saw me. I waved and went back inside.
Ayarala gave me a look.
“It can’t get much worse than that,” I said.
“I certainly hope not, my well-meaning but somewhat naive tsulygoi.”
I sat down with her and explained what I’d learned from Professor Sloraq. She was intrigued at first, but as I got to the end of the story, her face was lined with stress.
“I think I can tell you what that means, Will, but you will not like the answer.”
“It’s bad?”
“It is more that it is not what you seem to think it is.”
“Go on.”
“Back then, if we are talking six or seven kumala-talons ago, crystals were used in what passed for medicine. The healers then knew nothing about germs, or cells, or how organs actually work. They believed that everything was about these supposed ‘energy flows’ in your body. Are you sick? Your flows are out of alignment. Are you injured? You need to tune your flows to promote healing. Do you have a headache or stomachache or some other unexplained pain? It is because some flow in your body is impacted. And so on.
“And these healers believed that crystals could be used for all this, to redirect and realign your ‘energy flows.’ But it is all nonsense. We know now that is not how it works. So, hearing that story, what I hear is a girl who went to a healer who used these crystals on her, or maybe this girl found one herself and did it on her own. And when she finally got pregnant, she decided the crystal had done it. It is just how people thought about their bodies back then. And my guess is that someone changed the crystal she used into a ‘crystal baby’ just to make the story more interesting.”
What she was saying made sense. Except for the fact that I knew these energy flows were not nonsense – not for me.
“Babe, if this is nothing, how do you explain what I’m doing with you, and the others? When we mate? I can feel what you feel. Even now, the words you’re saying make no sense to my ears, but I still somehow understand what you mean.”
“I do not profess to understand any of it. You are the makalang. They do not teach that in school.”
I sucked on my teeth, pondering whether I had the right to do this. But it was ultimately for her benefit.
“There’s something else I haven’t told you, though. And it concerns Narilora.”
“What?”
I explained about the fight with aJia’jara, how he had nearly killed her. And how I had used the energy flow to bring her back from the brink of death. When I was done, Ayarala’s big purple eyes had swelled even wider.
“How did I do that, if it’s all nonsense?”
“I do not know,” she said softly, after a few moments. “I have often wondered about your incredible rate of healing. It is because of us?”
“Seems like it.”
She bit her lip.
“When we mate, it is like nothing I have ever felt. I feel so swept away, and so drained afterwards. You think it is because you are taking this energy from us?”
“That’s exactly what it feels like.”
“And then you put it into
Narilora?”
“So, imagine you’re one of these ancient crystal healers. If I had taken all that energy, from five different girls, then poured it all into her, on the brink of death, wouldn’t that throw her energy flow, or whatever it is, completely out of whack?”
“Will, you are asking me to speculate about something I do not even believe in and do not begin to understand. I have no idea. But, I guess if you believed in it, that would make a sort of sense.”
“Is there anyone who still understands this stuff?”
“Not in Phan-garad.”
“Then where?”
“I . . . let me talk to some people. There may be something. I will try, for her sake.”
Chapter 6
I retired to my office, asking my wives to leave me alone to think and read. One of the cunelo servants brought me dinner, but otherwise I had some peace.
I went back into Silas’s journals. The Phan-garad of his age seemed far more orderly and vibrant than mine. Though he struggled with much of the same tensions that I was dealing with, they seemed less sharp and threatening. He was welcomed into the city and given what sounded like a large home. He took about twenty wives. Many were with children.
Yet he was conflicted by his desire to return home one day, as I was. And like me, he had no idea how to do it.
For about thirty pages, he recounted his extensive but ultimately fruitless attempts to find a way back to Earth. Then, almost in passing, he mentioned something that leapt out at me from the words he had written 240 years earlier.
I have taken extensive notes and readings from the night skies, and the results continue to confound me. I know I am not terribly far from home, yet how has this society existed for as long as this, completely unknown to the travelers and scientists of our age? If my readings of the stars are correct, I should be perhaps a thousand miles west of Boston. That should place me within the lands of the Indian tribes, yet I have encountered none of them, only these strange combinations of human and animal.
The Black Sky Page 5
