Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  His first name gave away the cause for his exile: Suhanathir, Half Light. His mother had discarded the offers of noble elves of the line and taken off to the Nightside to find herself a shadowkin mate. At the time this was the equivalent of finding an animal mate to the Dayside elves but Tanquona Taliesetra did not have a moderate bone in her body. She acted directly on what she loathed, determined to correct stupidity where she found it, and nothing was more stupid than the vicious racism of the Dayside, in her view. She was one of the most powerful sorcerer priestesses of the line and had no intentions of doing anything reproductively that wasn’t of benefit in demonstrating that the future of the elven peoples lay in uniting and not in their lengthy and bitter cold war. At the time her insistence on an evolutionary history for the elves (something she had picked up from Otopian study), rather than the notion they had sprung from an avatar of godhood speaking directly to the plants and creatures to unite their powers and bring forth a supreme form, was heresy. Also, she had a theory about power that needed testing—that crossbreeds would be better aetheric adepts and, Zal suspected, she had had distant visions of a united race brought together by her daring activities. Proof of spirit, proof of love. She was a romantic.

  But although Zal was half dark, his half-light side was respected by the ’kin and they didn’t try to do anything other than put him far from polite society.

  Zal was well aware of it all and tired of it by the time his aunt, Mysindrina, took over his care. She was also an exile. Where her sister Tanquo had been born with immense magical talents that were too valuable to let out of sight, Sindri had no aetheric power whatsoever in a race for whom such a thing was unheard of. Well, it was unheard of because they hushed it up, as Zal discovered when he made his home with Sindri and eleven others, who were all the same or worse. The blood of the dynastic families had suffered from voluntary eugenics. It threw up individuals of enormous power who were consumed by their own energies before middle age, and also individuals with peculiar weaknesses. The powerful rose to the top, because the Light worshipped power; for a bunch of creationists they had no trouble placing Survival of the Fittest as their watchword. Suha hated them all.

  Sindri was slow, weak, and her andalune body was as delicate as gossamer and easily disrupted. Ordinary elven life was too stressful for her with its constant melding of one andalune flow and another; it would have torn her spirit apart. She wasn’t the only one there. Around her others that Tanquo sent gathered themselves: the Hegemony’s shameful runts without power or skill, barely able to survive their own world. Only among them Zal stood out as vital and strong, but because of his shadow parent he was without question one of them and they were his family and the windswept islands became their home.

  It was because of them that Zal learned early how to completely control his aetheric self, to do no harm, and to heal if needed without destroying the other.

  There was enough incident in those times to fill an easy hour of whole-life-before-you moments, but one stood out.

  Between two of the islands, not more than ten metres apart shore to shore, lay a vicious strait that was as deep as it was narrow and through which the tides raced at furious rates. The islands themselves faced one another cliff to cliff and at some time in the past a rope bridge had been put across but in recent years it had rotted and fallen away. They were working on a new one. After Tanquo had made a visit that year and raised two pillars of stone on either side to act as anchors they had spent months developing cables using what materials they could find in the forested larger islands. Of course she could have raised a bridge, or even caused the islands to join together, but nobody wanted her to, not even Suha. It was a challenge they wanted to be equal to themselves. As soon as it was first talked about everyone’s eyes lit up as they saw that here at last was something difficult that they had a chance of doing without outside help. In their minds the bridge already swayed, majestic and graceful, creaking and moving with the weather, secure under their hands and feet with the comforting texture of the wood and fibres that those hands and feet had crafted lovingly from the giving forest; a true elven bridge.

  They spent many hours praying. Their prayers were movements. Walking, gathering, beating long branches and vines into fibre, knotting, twisting, carrying new fallen trees, swinging the adze to shape wood into planks. Their lives became the bridge. This is what Zal remembered. Long months and days of the dream of the bridge, the quiet, the single purpose, the single mind, the emptiness and stillness as if the world had stopped and was waiting for them and would wait forever if needs be. They forgot their own names. When work was done and night fell they sang and played their instruments together, letting the music rise out of them in its own form. Their happiness built the bridge and when it was done they all stood on it at once, without fear, over the hurtling torrents of water far below.

  Zal remembered the Bridge of Creation, where he was made, that moment with all of them there, looking both ways, safe in their own making. They held hands, a bridge on a bridge, from side to side of the narrow way, and they had a foot on both islands.

  It was not even an elven bridge, as they had dreamed. It was too rough and ugly for that with its clumpy ropes and warped boards. It was their own.

  Nobody spoke. There was no need to. They were where they belonged.

  Over the years that followed many of the friends died on the Islands, including Sindri, their fragile defences weathered away by time. An elf was an aetheric being. Without a strong andalune the body ran dry quickly on the meagre energies of food and drink and breath alone. It wore out. They were old when they died, though some were younger than Suha. With each one that departed the abilities of them all to survive, their will and their energy, grew weaker.

  Their passing broke his heart and one night, sitting over yet another body in yet another Silent Hut, he felt an inner voice speak to him and tell him to get up and go. As he packed his few belongings he had no idea where until he stopped outside Sindri’s old hut for a moment of parting and then he knew, just as if she had spoken, that it was time to find his father. He closed the door of his own hut and fixed it securely with a twig, then called his mother’s name to the wind, because without her there was no way off the Islands.

  But her ship did not return. By dawn the ocean and the sky were as empty as a dry skull.

  The five strongest who remained found him sitting on the shore as the sun rose, looking out to sea.

  “I will stay,” Suha said, knowing the truth of the white clouds and blue sky. She would never come. “You need me.”

  “You will go,” they said. “We will find a way.” And then, without a pause, they all looked at the bridge.

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” they said and left him there on the shore. They cut down the bridge and made its planks and ropes into a raft with a tatty sail of canvas sacks. A boat would be destroyed but his vessel was draftless. A few pushes and shoves with a tough pole put it safely over the corals. He sang Tanquo’s song to the wind.

  Zal remembered the bright flag fluttering day and night, night and day, snapping in the breezes with the rhythm of the wind, its patchwork colours valiant against the vacant horizon, a black peace against the shocking brilliance of the stars. They had clothed the sky for him.

  Suha sang for days and at night drifted, his father’s name a mantra he repeated until he slept—Sharadar Zanhaklion.

  He came ashore without the raft. He woke half buried in sand. It was dark. He was sick with salt and rubbed raw by the sea. It was a moonless night, clouded, and the place was humid and thick with the sound of insects and frogs. He lay awhile, letting his spirit find the spirit of the place, connect with it, and use it to help him purge the ocean from his body. As he did so a silence came over part of the night.

  The silence moved like a snake in the grass. It flowed towards him in a strip like a new river. Suha felt the small animals leaving as the raw aether moved in vaporous charm through the dark towards him.
The sounds of nature died away, leaving a vast, demanding silence like an exclamation mark. Along the path of magic something trod towards him, its feet placed with exquisite sensitivity and care, making no disturbance. He felt it only as a beat inside his own andalune, a scenting curious, hungry presence, a mind listening, hearing him as he heard it. In that second he knew for certain it did not follow the trail of raw aether, it laid the trail before itself as a hunter sends his best dog ahead to scent out the prey.

  Zal remembered the taste of salt and grit, the cold fear of the stalking thing taking over his brief gratitude for being alive. Thinking how dark it was—he couldn’t see his hands.

  Suha tried to move away but the line of aether followed him, unerringly, and behind it came the stealthy and near silent tramp. He tried harder, stumbling through an unknown, scrubby landscape. It came on closer, not too fast. It had time. There was a steady confidence to it that made him weary as it made him try ever more risky moves to get away.

  He fell into gullies. He twisted his ankles among loose rocks. He tried to go faster. There were moments it seemed to have gone, but the silence didn’t stop, not once. And then the line of aether, and then the footfalls coming. His fear grew, his anger, his rage . . . but in time they wore him out and finally, as he crawled on hands and skinned knees, there came a moment when he found he had stopped. He sat down and accepted that there was no escape.

  Zal remembered lying curled up in mud trying to think of a solution, some trick of magic or power he could use—but he’d been brought up far from the skilled sorcerers of the world. His sum total of aetheric knowledge lay in how to light fires, put out fires, conjure water to rise from the ground, and heal by laying on of hands, as long as nobody was seriously hurt. None of his family had been able to demonstrate more, and besides, he scorned the power. He wanted to be like his brothers and sisters. He remembered the touch of the raw aether—a vapour full of promise that made him feel more alive than ever. He felt the tread grow strong in the ground and then there was a smell like thunderstorm air and a faint animal musk. He felt a large creature very close. The feel of its hot breath against his skin. Stink of old meat.

  He remembered a voice smiling as it said, “I heard you,” full of amusement and a slight uncertainty. “Get back, back, back Teledon.” There was the sound of a light smack and the big creature stepped away and was replaced by someone with an andalune that felt like vibrant cold water running and the shock of cold air on a winter morning.

  That was the first meeting with his father and the Saaqaa who was his charge and tracker.

  Suhanathir went with his father back to the Night Land, far from the reach of the Alfheim he knew, into an even older region, where the monuments to dead gods were five times the age of any mark that the Light had to offer and where there was no writing, only pictograms, and everyone remembered the history of the world, yes, even as far back as the Blind Aeon. That had come after the Winnowing, an event they knew only the name of, and before that they did not remember anything at all.

  Flashes from that time were many in Zal’s sudden picture show.

  The huge saurian Saaqaa, twice the height of any elf, gathered in their tented village at dawn, their violet, blue, and grey hides as prettily patterned as tigers and jaguars. Families of them asleep in piles in their half caverns, snoring the day away, tails curled around one another. Teledon giving him a ceremonial armband, made out of fallen feathers from a bird of paradise that were picked for their feel and not their colour . . . holding the delicate thing on one thick, clawed finger, his ugly, eyeless hammerhead facing off to the side and moving, always moving, to keep Suha in focus. Saaqaa were legendary monsters. Things. He never forgot the second he learned that they were people.

  Deep night. Never light in any home. Fires during daylight only, for cooking or making. A life of hunting and much lying around in the various layers of the forest; floor, median zone, and canopy. Sleeping the midday away. Map reading the stars. Finding a second family in his father’s house. Forgetting he didn’t look like everyone else.

  His father trained his aetheric abilities, mostly in deep forest retreat. Zal remembered sitting in natural pools of raw aether until his butt ached and his knees hurt and his patience was long gone, waiting for the revelation of the true nature of aether that Shar insisted was the only necessary knowledge for any elf. He remembered realising it one day and then going back and asking Shar if that was it; “Everything is the same,” he said. “Every being is the same in eternal nature, in aether, but they’re like crystal, and you can only be one facet at a time, outwardly, but really, you’re the whole thing. And everything is like that. And the conscious things are more polished and definite, and the unconscious things are . . . like rough stones. And everyone is a facet of a much much bigger jewel . . .”

  “Very wordy,” Shar said, nodding.

  “Well, couldn’t you just have told me?”

  “Nobody can tell anybody anything,” Shar said, his hugely elongated and slanted eyes with their white inner membranes closed against the light looking ghostly and supernatural. “But everybody can find the truth. So, there’s no need.”

  Suha rolled his small, wide open eyes.

  He met Dar there. They spent years alone together, living in shelters built each night anew, running in the Night Land.

  There followed many years of which nothing stood out exactly until Demonia. None of the long times of planning and plotting he and Dar and others had made, all for the overthrow of the Light. This was not to occur by outward forces, but by inward revolution. The White Flower would be a group of elves who were distinguished by their actions. They would not take up the ways of the enemy. Years of training. Years to creep forward with the plan, infiltrating.

  He recalled instead the musical instants where, in free time, he renewed his passion for singing.

  Suha joined the Jayon Daga after many trials. Meanwhile the hidden business of the White Flower crept on. Finally he sickened of waiting and began to doubt his vision. He already felt old and weary by the time he entered Demonia, weary enough to do or die. Travelling there was an attempt he felt he had to make, to prove that hard-won obvious insight about everything sharing a common centre correct. If all beings were only a facet of themselves then the other parts could be manifest, and if they were then there would be no more point in the divisions that so plagued his world.

  Zal recalled his father’s face on being told of Suha’s great plan and its reasoning, the day before his departure: Shar looked resigned and disappointed.

  “It will not change anything,” Shar said, then hesitated.

  “I am not trying to correct the past,” Suha protested, believing it until he heard it when he knew he was lying. “I am not just taking up where mother left off.” Twice.

  Shar seemed to reach an inner conclusion. “If it is your desire, then I wish you well,” he said, which was all he ever said. And then he did something he never did; he smiled and rolled his eyes, just like Suha, because he didn’t understand and thought the plan was crazy, but he didn’t mind.

  That made Zal smile, falling as he was through the Void to uncertain death holding onto Mr. Head’s sandy hand.

  He barely survived Demonia. He remembered waking up in a canal in Bathshebat, coughing lagoon water and clinging to a lump of floating rubbish as fifteen imps jumped up and down gleefully on top of him, fighting each other with unalloyed savagery for the privilege of being the next in line to his ear and shoulder. The floating rubbish turned out to be the dead body of a demon with whom he had a vague recollection of fighting on the bridge above. He pushed it down in the shallow water, pressing it into the mud as he stood on it and managed to get his fingers over the lip of the bank. The imps swarmed up and down his arms, chattering.

  “He’s mine! I was here first! No good you being here. He’s a moronic idealist who wants to save the world. That’s MY speciality!”

  “No no no, he’s a crazed pseudoscientist with visions
of grandeur and that’s what I do best. I know all the best works of misinterpreted data, statistical analysis, and wishful thinking in the entire library, and that’s more than you do, you son-of-a-monk!”

  “Both of you are wittering fools! His biggest problem is his idoli sation of his mother and the longing to become a worthwhile son who wins her approval. Oi, as if you had an inkling of the trouble in this boy’s poor weary heart! See how his longing to conclude that dear relationship has strangled every impulse he ever had to be himself! He’s a lost hero whose cause is his own redemption and I am the imp of lost causes so get off . . . Oof! That’s my spot!”

  “Gah! You pithering toadfleas! He’s got a persecution complex a mile wide, any fool can feel it. It radiates out of him like the insincerity of an insurance salesman’s smile. Why else would he come here, knowing we would only torture him to death? He does it to himself because he feels he deserves punishment for his failure to save the world. Why, it almost reminds me of that stupid human . . . the one with the wood. They never learn.”

  “Hey! He was mine! The point is, I saw him FIRST.”

  “I didn’t say not, did I? Anyway, I was right there second in line on that one and in this case it’s my show, so back off dictator-maker!”