Despite my misery, I found myself fascinated. There was the tiny pod, dwarfed by the curve of Dhara, apparently going into low orbit. The moon wasn’t in the picture, which was to scale, but we were informed that the planet, the pod, and the moon formed a more-or-less straight line through their centers. In its orbit around the planet, the pod began to tremble abruptly, like a leaf floating on a stream disturbed by a random eddy. Then it swung loose from its orbit and made straight for the moon. It traveled with such astonishing rapidity that all we could see was a silver streak. Then the scene cut to the moon, and the pod approaching it, swinging past it a few times, slowing gradually until at last it made a rough landing in the southern forest. There was a bloom of light, a brief fire where it hit, then the film stopped.
“This was taken by Kaushai, back about a century ago. All this time there have only been speculations as to how the devtaru pods get to the moon, why they suddenly change course from low orbit to the trajectory you saw. The pods themselves have no means of propulsion. There is nothing in the void of space between the planet Dhara and the moon. The first probes that were sent to duplicate the orbit of the pods suffered no strange perturbations, nor were they drawn toward the moon. The devtaru pods apparently violate fundamental laws of nature: that momentum and energy must be conserved.”
I knew something of all this, of course. But I had never seen the holo before. It was quite amazing. I felt Vik stir beside me—he looked just as entranced, and when my gaze met his, as miserable as I.
Yet it was a chance remark I made on that visit that set the sky scholars on the right track. I go back to that time in my imagination. Vik and I are both starting to realize that our paths are too different to allow for us to be together, although it will be quite some time before we have the courage to say so to each other. So the golden afternoon and our togetherness have acquired a deep, sad sweetness. We join Manda and her friends for a walk around the lake. They have been talking all day about the mystery of the devtaru pods, telling us how they spent years camping by a certain devtaru, watching it, getting to know it, asking it to share its secret. Now some of them feel as though the devtaru has communicated with them already, that they already know what the secret is, but it is buried deep inside them and needs some kind of stimulus, or reminder, a magic word or phrase to bring it into consciousness.
After evening sets in we find ourselves tired and hungry—we have walked a long way and the stars are beginning to come out in a pale pink sky. We are at a place where a small river empties into the lake, making an intricate delta of rivulets. We are wishing we had a boat to get to the shore from which we ventured, where the bulk of Ship looms, its many windows lit. The air is full of the trembling cries of glitterwings. I am speechless with emotion, with the thought that the end of our partnership is as close as the other shore. Vik is silent beside me. Just as we are talking about boats, I find the remains of one at the bottom of a rivulet. It is full of holes—in fact, most of it has rotted away, but for the frame. It lies indifferently in place as the water rushes through the holes.
“If this boat were solid,” I say, “and the current strong enough, it would move. It would carry us home.”
A pointless, inconsequential remark. But Manda stares at me, understanding awakening in her face.
She told me later that my remark was the thing she needed to unwrap the gift the devtaru had already given them. What had been one of the saddest evenings of my life was the moment when she and her colleagues solved the mystery of the devtaru pods. Two days later Manda spoke to a gathering of hundreds.
“Imagine an ocean that washes all of space and time. Like the water ocean, it has currents and turbulences. But its substance is invisible to us, as we are invisible—or transparent—to it.
“This is not so strange an idea. As the neutrinos wash through ordinary matter, through you and me, as though we weren’t there, as water washes through the broken boat with the holes in it, so the subtle ocean—the Antarsa, named by our poet Thora—washes through planets and stars, plants and people, as though we did not exist.
“We don’t know whether the Antarsa is made up of neutrinos or something else. We suspect it is something as yet unknown, because too much is known about neutrinos, which can be caught by ordinary matter if the net is both deep and dense.
“Now imagine a form of matter that is not ordinary matter. This, too, is not strange, because we know that what we call ordinary matter is rather rare in the universe. There are other forms of matter that make up the bulk of the cosmos. One of these forms, what we are calling the altmatter, is opaque to the Antarsa. So if you place a piece of altmatter in an Antarsa current, it will move.
“The pods, of course, have to be made in part of altmatter. How the devtaru acquires it we don’t know; maybe it draws it up from deep underground, mingles or combines it with ordinary matter, and forms the pods that are meant to go into space.”
That was so long ago, that moment of revelation. Some years later, experimenters took the discarded moon-pods that are empty of seed, the ones that the devtaru shoots out for practice when they are young, to make the first altmatter probes. And now I am here.
Here I am, working the sails in the navigation chamber. I’ve done enough waiting. I am steering my craft as close to the edge of the current as I dare, as slowly as it needs to go so that changes in speed won’t tear it apart. I want to get closer to my mysterious companions.
The shapes on the radar flicker in and out with increasing frequency now. Some are shaped like fat pods, but some appear like vaguely oblong smudges. I want to see a pod ride by with Moon-woman in it, waving. If that happens, I will extend a grappling hook, gently as I can, and bring the moon-pod close to me so she can crawl into my little craft and share a tube of tea. But no, there is no likelihood of moon-pods being this far away from Dhara. After all, the Ashtan system is a few months away. The star is discernibly a round yellow eye, no longer a point, and the planets around it, including Ashta, appear disk-like as well, although I need my telescope to clearly see them. I can just see Ashta’s polar ice caps. It is far from my spaceship at the moment, but when I enter the system it should be at a point in its orbit that brings it close to my trajectory. I have to be careful that the Antarsa current does not pass directly through the planet, because I will simply crash into it, then. I am anticipating some delicate maneuvering, and there is no time like this moment to practice.
After a long while, I discover something.
My companions move unobtrusively away as I approach them, which means, of course, that they can sense my presence. Are they simply making room for me, or is it something else? However, what I’ve found through this experiment is that the Antarsa current, the central, fastest channel at least, has widened considerably. It took me much longer to find its edges, where there are dangerous eddies and rivulets. The speed of the current has not changed, however. Mystified, I continue on my way.
I send my offer of kinship out, but as yet there is no answer but silence.
Listening to the silence, I am reminded of a story my father, the trader, told me when I was small. Among our people the Kinships are fairly self-sufficient, but we do have need of small shipments at regular intervals: metals from the Himdhara Mountains, cloth from Tura-tura and so on. We send out our herbs and jewelry. There is constant flow of information between the Kinships (except for the People of the Ice, about whom my father told this story) and also with Ship University. Most things are transported where possible by boat, in a rare while by flyer or shuttle, but there are also wandering caravans that go overland, and my father has traveled with many of these. He is from a kinhouse of my own people farther east of here, deeper in the forest and he met my mother during one of his journeys. Neither was interested in a permanent partnership but they remain cordial when they meet. And always he has tried to come see me, to bring me a shell from the Western Sea, or a particularly pretty pebble from Himdhara.
The People of the Ice stopped s
peaking to us from the time that the second generation of humans was grown. By that time the Kinships had each chosen their place, depending on where they felt most accepted and would do the least harm to the beings already present. My people of the Devtaru had genetically modified ourselves to digest certain local proteins; the Western sea folk had modified their bodies to be more agile in the water and to hold their breath longer than any other human. The People of the Himdhara could thrive in the thin mountain air. The People who settled in the Northern edge of the great continent, where there is ice even in the summer, adjusted themselves to live in that terrible cold. It was said that they grew hairy pelts like the beasts that dwelt there, but this could have been a joke. All the Kinships tell jokes about each other, and most are reasonably good-natured, but the People of the Ice got the worst of it because they were so remote, in both geography and temperament.
When I was little, my father said, his caravan was asked by the World Council to go into the North to find out what had happened to the People of the Ice. Was it that they did not answer radio calls because something terrible had befallen them, or were they being obstreperous as usual?
Take only a few people, said the Council, so that they don’t feel invaded. So my father and three others—a man and two women—went. They wandered for days and weeks through forest and scrubland, desert and plateau, until they came to the land of perpetual snow. Here the trees grew up into tall spires, and the wild creatures all had thick, luminous coats and some knew the use of fire. My father knows this because one night the party followed a flickering light through a snowfall, and found large, hairy creatures huddling before a fire, tossing twigs into it and grunting. As is our custom, the four travelers sat some distance away and waited, speaking softly the offering of kinship, until the creatures waved their paws at them and invited them, through expressive grunts, to join them. My father says these were shaggorns, and fortunately this group was full of meat and therefore amiable. They are very curious and they poked at the travelers with twigs to see what they would do (some of his companions laughed but my father only smiled and gently poked back) and one of them wanted to try on my father’s coat—my father let him but had to give him his watch to get his coat back.
It was bitterly cold, but the four survived with the help of the shaggorns, and one late afternoon they found themselves at the edge of an icy plain, over which rose a city.
The city was made of ice. The buildings were constructed with ice blocks, and had slit windows, and the streets were ice. People moved about them on skates, and the travelers could not tell whether they wore hairy pelts or if they had grown their own. The travelers set themselves down outside the city’s perimeter but in plain sight, in keeping with the tradition of waiting for an invitation.
But there was none. People skated across the ice, from building to building, and didn’t even look at the travelers. One little girl stared at them but was roughly pulled away by an adult. The four travelers sang the offering of kinship, but there was no response. This was a terrible thing to witness, my father said, because they had come so far and endured so much to make sure that their kin were safe. They were cold, hungry, and tired, and the song was acquiring rather angry overtones. So they stopped their song, and set up camp there because the evening was setting in.
In the morning they found some supplies—meat, some cooked roots, all frozen by now, a pelt blanket. The meaning was clear: the People of the Ice did not desire kinship, but they meant no harm. There was no weapon left symbolically at the edge of the camp. They did not want a kinship of enmity—they simply wanted to be left alone.
So the travelers began their return journey, somewhat mollified. The next evening, before they were able to go very far (they were tired, as my father said), they saw a small dwelling in the forest. To their surprise they recognized the home of a farsister. Farsisters and farbrothers are people who wander away from their Kinships for a life of solitude, usually seeking some kind of spiritual solace. Some of them have done terrible things and seek to redress them or have suffered a loss and need to find a reason to live. Others simply wander in search of something they can’t identify, and when they find it, usually in a place that calls to them, they settle down there.
The farsister’s courtyard was snowy and bare, and furnished with only two low flat-topped rocks that my father assumed were intended to be chairs. This meant that the farsister did not like company, but one person would be tolerated. There was an intricately carved block of ice near the door, which indicated the occupation of the person within. That she was female was indicated by a red plume of feathers that hung from her door.
My father sat outside the courtyard and waited. She made him wait for several hours, by which time it was night and getting very cold. Then she came out and ushered him in. She turned out to be a grim, dour woman who seemed to be made of ice as well. The inside of her little hut was just as cold as the outside and this didn’t seem to bother her.
She told him that she was not of the People of the Ice, and that there was not anything to be done about them; they kept to themselves. She gave him a cold tea to drink that made my father feel dizzy. He felt himself falling into deep sleep, and the icy fingers of the farsister easing him down into a cold bed.
When he woke up he found that the hut was empty. Moreover, there was no sign that it had ever been inhabited. The hearth was cold, and filled with ashes, and a wind blew through the open window. My father felt frozen to the marrow. He got himself up slowly and painfully and emerged into a snowy dawn. The courtyard of the hut was bare—no sitting rocks, no ice carvings, no evidence that anyone had ever lived here. His companions were waiting anxiously for him at camp.
It was a long journey home, my father said, and they were glad to come back to the warm lands and make their report to the Council.
When he used to tell us children this story in the sunny garden in front of the kinhouse, with the warm sun at our back, we would shiver in the imagined snowfall. We were trapped in the hut of the ghostly farsister, or lost in the enchanted forest with the People of the Ice in their hairy pelts, wandering around to scare us, to take us away. Later we would come up with games and stories of our own, in which the Ice folk were the principal villains.
When I was older, my birth-mother would take some of us to Council meetings. Council meetings rotated from Kinship to Kinship, and when we were the hosts, my mother would let us come. We would see our sea-kin, with their scale-like skin and their webbed hands, and the tall mountain folk with their elaborate head-dresses, or the cave kin with their sunshades over huge, dark eyes, and our own eyes would go round with wonder. In the evenings various kinfolk would gather round a fire or two and tell jokes. We would joke about the people of the Ice, and why they didn’t ever come to Council (“they were afraid they’d melt” or “it would be too hot in their fur coats”). During one of these occasions my father was also present—he pulled some of us older ones aside.
“You all talk a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Listen, I never told you one part of my story about the People of the Ice. What I dreamed about while I slept in the hut of the farsister.”
We were all eyes and ears.
“Listen. I dreamed that the farsister took me to the city of Ice. Some of the Ice people met me and took me in, saying I could stay the night. I was put in an ice-cold room on a bed of ice, and it was so cold that I couldn’t sleep. In the night I heard my hosts talking about me, arguing. Some said I should never have been brought here, and another voice said that maybe I could be made to substitute for some relative, an old man whose time had come. The executioners would not know the difference if I was wrapped in furs and made unconscious, and that way the old man could live a little longer in secret. This went on for a long time, until the people moved away. I was so scared that I fled from there. My captors chased me some of the way but without much enthusiasm. Then I woke up in my cold bed.”
My father paused.
“I may have simply
dreamed the whole thing. But the dream was so vivid that I sometimes wonder if it didn’t actually happen. Since that time I have wondered whether the reason for the silence of our Ice kin is something more sinister than mere bad manners. What if their genetic manipulations to adapt to the cold resulted in something they did not expect—something that prevents them from dying when they are old? Since they cannot die, they must put to death the old ones. And they are terrified that by mingling with us they will let loose an epidemic of deathlessness. So in their shame and misfortune they keep themselves separate from all other humans.”
We were appalled. To cheat death, even to wish to live longer than one’s natural span, is to show so much disrespect to all living beings, including one’s own offspring and generations yet to come, that it is unthinkable. It is natural to fear death, and so it takes courage to make kinship with death when one’s time has come. How terrible to have death itself refuse kinship! To have to kill one’s own kin! It was an honorable thing to isolate this curse in a city of Ice, rather than let it loose among the rest of the Kinships. After my father’s revelation we found ourselves unable to joke about the People of the Ice with the same carelessness.
I am thinking about them today because I wonder about the silence of the spacecraft around me, and the deeper, longer silence of the Ashtans. Did they settle on their planet, or did they find it unsuitable and move on? Did some misfortune befall them? Or did they simply turn away from us, for some reason?
I don’t know if I’ll ever find out.
——
So much has happened that I have not had time to speak my story until now. Dear, kind darkness, dear kin on Dhara, I have made such a discovery! My companions, whose flickering images on the radar screen have so mystified me, have revealed their true nature. It is hard to say whether there are simply more of them—they are so clear on the radar now—or whether I have gained their trust and they have moved closer.
Ambiguity Machines Page 21
