The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  We watched as the boat drew near to the wharf, its ocher sails fluttering in the evening wind from the sea. A globe lamp on the topmast announced its presence as it slipped into the calm harbor of the port. We collected our baggage and stood in anticipation, waiting to embark, but it was some time before the crowd thinned. Morrac said nothing to me as we waited, but as our turn to embark grew closer he embraced me suddenly and fiercely, as if he'd had to make up his mind to do so. Then I felt his warm mouth against mine as he kissed me. I was painfully aware of the whole length of his body, the elegant frame taut against my own. He held me so tightly that we might have been going forever, rather than just a few days. Then he released me, and after a moment's hesitation put his arms around his sur-prised sister. He whispered something in her ear, and she gave a faint smile. It was time to be going.

  We climbed the gangway, feeling the shallow dip and wallow of the boat beneath us. We were the last to board and, leaving the promissory note for service, took our place on deck amongst the bundles as the boat cast off from shore. I saw Morrac fade into the darkness as he turned to go.

  Three

  The Funeral

  1. Journal of Shu Idaan Gho

  We've been wrangling for over a day about what to do with Mevennen. Bel's all for taking her to the ruins right away and showing her the generator to bear out our story, but I think we should let the girl settle down before we start battering her with news of our discoveries. And I'd like to find out more about her before she gets distracted by the wonders of Outreven. I talked to her again last night, and once again we came back to this question of the bloodmind.

  Mevennen's people remind me of an old legend that I came across in Irie St Syre: tales of the loup-garou, the werewolf, changing from human to animal and back again as the moon waxes and wanes. A monster, I always thought, but ultimately a tragic one. These people are psychologically akin to the loup-garou. They seem to have developed societal mechanisms for dealing with their reversions, a dysfunctional culture which has turned a curse of nature into— what? Hardly a virtue, but at least a meaningful part of life. I have so many questions about this part of their natures. Is the bloodmind something that Elshonu Shikiriye tried to breed into the colonists, and if so, why? What benefits would it confer upon a society—if any? Or is it just a genetic accident, and if so, could it be corrected? What would happen to the Mondhaith if they were freed from its curse—how would they develop? It occurs to me that perhaps they have found the way to deal with the worst part of their nature: to give it outlets for catharsis rather than denying it wholesale. Maybe—but though there is no religious framework to give moral impetus, from what Eleres and Mevennen have told me, it remains an unsettled alliance between the two aspects of nature.

  I remember another story that they tell on parts of Irie St Syre, a very old tale from one of the ancient religions of Earth. I recalled it in the orchard when I was waiting for Bel to find Mevennen, and it keeps coming back to mind. The story is about the garden named Eden, and the two people who are cast out because they gain self-awareness and language. This world reminds me of that garden, but the legends say also that it was a paradise. Not so here. But perhaps that other garden was no true paradise, either, and its inhabitants might not see fit to return to it if they could. Yet, religion or not, if troubled Eleres is anything to go by, these people of Monde D'Isle still seem to suffer over what they cannot help, and maybe this is what makes us all human, in the end.

  And we're hardly perfect, either. It's as though, having failed to evolve anything better than an uneasy and ultimately disastrous relationship to our homeworld of Earth, we're now incapable of leaving anything alone. Everything has to be made to fit something else; we have a pathological need to impose order. But that's an issue for long discussion, and I'd rather not go head to head with Dia again just yet.

  As for personal matters, Bel Zhur seems happier now that Mevennen's here. Bel's very solicitous and protective toward her, and Dia just goes about with an air of vindication. I suspect Dia disapproves of Bel's increasing obsession with Mevennen, but I don't know when, or whether, she'll say anything. Bel's twenty-four years old and she's still blaming herself for her lover's death. I've never been much of a one for that fey left-me-here-on-the-cold-hill's-side quality, but Mevennen, bless her heart, has got it in abundance and so had Eve Cheng. I suspect it's more as a result of Mevennen's illness than some innate defect of character, but it's certainly appealing to a particular type of person. Such as Bel Zhur.

  I've spent a lot of time talking to Mevennen already, and she's managed to shed some light on many of the things— biology aside—that have been preoccupying me about this society. The culture's rather more sophisticated than I'd thought: literature and art are on the rise, and the history of the past few hundred years is vaguely known. Mevennen talks of history and memory as though speaking of a place: you can see the past, she says. It stretches out before you, as though you're standing on a high hill, so that you see most clearly that which is most recent. The distant past is like a far country, and though you may catch glimpses of it now and again, it is hard to reach. I suppose that in a society as preoccupied as these folk seem to be with the land, many metaphors are geographical.

  The satahrachin, Mevennen says, are the wisest of all, for they can experience not only the world itself, but also the past. Although there's no organized religion (which, I must say, is a bit of a relief); the Mondhaith don't worship anything, nor do they believe in gods. The role of the priestess on Irie—the keepers of memory and lore, the guardians of past and future knowledge—is taken by the sa-tahrachin. I asked Mevennen what is so special about these people, and as far I can understand it, it relates partly to memory, and partly to the fact that they possess a greater capacity to control the bloodmind. The satahrachin resemble normal humans far more closely than the rest of the Mondhaith; it is as though they form the missing bridge between us.

  I asked Mevennen if she knows why some people are sa-tahrachin and others not. She said no, and that she does not know why some folk end up more “human” than the rest. It happens fairly rarely. I'd suggest that it is a recessive gene, a random reversion to original type (more or less, since the satahrachin apparently do go out in the world as children. I wonder what it must be like for them? Do they have consciousness throughout their childhoods, as we do? It makes me grow cold, to think of a “normal” human child set loose in such a wilderness). But Mevennen is adamant that the satahrachin are not priestesses, or priests, as we would know them. The world itself—its landscapes and its seasons—seem to have taken the place of deity. (Not hard to see why that is, if Mevennen's subjective reports are anything to go by.)

  The satahrachin also remember who their children are, even long after their birth, which Mevennen's people apparently don't do—at first I found this deeply odd, but then I remembered that, after all, most animals'attachment to their offspring doesn't last long after weaning, turning to indifference and sometimes even hostility. As to why the Mondhaith should have reverted to this pattern, I don't know. Here, we get back to this strange animal consciousness again.

  “Don't you know who your mother is?” I asked Mevennen, and she just shrugged—an anomalously human gesture.

  “Why would I care?” she asked, puzzled, then, “And why would she care about me?”

  I couldn't let this go—I asked her if she had any idea of her parentage and, thus pressed, she said she thought her mother was one of “Luta's” daughters. Luta is apparently one of the satahrachin in Mevennen's clan, and remembers who her kids are. But relationships within the clan itself are divided between siblings and cousins: across the generation is important, rather than a vertical relationship between parent and child. Mevennen knows that she has aunts and uncles, because she knows who her cousins are; Luta and the other satahrachin could specify the relationships for certain, but Mevennen says that it's something you can feel. If they can sense who their brothers and sisters are, then why not th
eir parents? But there is a bond, Mevennen tells me: the mother knows if the child is alive, out there in the world, and she is often there to see the child come home. After that, the child is once again left to go its own way, and the bond withers. The clans seem to function a little like feline prides: parents are around, but there's no special relationship, and the main relationships are between siblings and mates. I don't pretend to understand this very well. Mevennen also told me more about the Mondhaith's highly unorthodox methods of child-rearing—or antichild-rearing.

  “The children go to the wild,” echoed Mevennen airily, when I asked her.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?” I said. “When do they go?”

  “When they are very young … several months, a year. As soon as they can walk and feed themselves, they are taken somewhere they can hunt—or where there is food, like the funeral places where folk leave offerings—and there we leave them.”

  Having divined that the children of her species evidently grow rather faster than those of normal humans, I asked why the children weren't simply kept at home. After all, the mortality rate must be pretty high—not prohibitively so, otherwise there wouldn't be anyone left, but it seems a pretty extreme method of raising one's young. I was reminded of the ancient Spartans, though they only exposed the children overnight. Mevennen replied that it was “too dangerous” to keep the children at home; they are feral, like animals, and do not adapt well to “captivity” —the blood-mind again. It seems that the kids return home, rather in the manner of young birds who migrate and then come back to their old nests or burrows, once they reach puberty. Quite what sexual maturity has to do with reverting to a more normal human state of consciousness remains to be seen and Mevennen, not being a xenobiologist, was unable to explain it. She said that it has something to do with “crossing the house defenses.” I don't know what this means, and Mevennen and I got ourselves in a tangle trying to work out what she meant.

  Once the offspring return home, they are soon conscious and self-aware, and language and other conceptual abilities seem to come very quickly. They also gain a greater control over the bloodmind itself, although this is by no means total—as was so tragically illustrated on the day of the hunt. This would, in part, explain why a total lack of education in the early years has not prevented these people from developing a culture. Also they live longer than humans—presumably if you've survived your childhood, you're tough enough to withstand anything.

  So where does Mevennen herself fit into all this, our brave, skeptical, unsettled guest? I asked her many more questions, and she has answered some of them—but as with all anthropological investigations, her answers have only given rise to more questions. My surmise would be that Mevennen is a mutation of some kind, a throwback to a type that is closer to the human, but yet not a satahrach. She does not enter into the bloodmind. I'd expect this to have psychological effects (alienation, isolation from her kindred et cetera—perhaps this is what she means by that curious phrase “hearing the world” ) but we're still not quite sure exactly why this seems to affect her so badly physically. It could be psychosomatic, but I am reluctant to fall into the trap of attributing psychological causes to physical ailments—one look at the sorry history of diagnosis of female illnesses will tell us why. Moreover—and very worryingly— Mevennen seems to be becoming increasingly dependent on the sedatives. Well, we'll keep on trying to figure her out, and no doubt she feels the same about us.

  2. Eleres

  The boat's passage out of Etarres was quiet. We left the harbor mouth behind and sailed beneath the lighthouse island. I did not want to look back and see the town fall into the darkness, the wintervine sign of Morrac's clan House fade to a point of light, so I closed my eyes and listened to the rustling sails above my head and the slap of the sea against the ribs of the boat, then the roaring of the beacon fire above us. I came close to falling asleep, and when I finally roused myself and walked across to the rail of the boat, I saw that the coast was only a thin shadowy line far away to the east, an uneven smear against the bright summer night. Rhe hung low over the western horizon, directly above a black peak.To the left, the smaller humps of islets broke the line of the ocean. The moon Embar swung in a great crescent to the north, still warmed by the light of the summer sun to a yellow sickle. Elowen had not yet climbed out of the well, as they say, although a faint nimbus of light over the sea promised her imminent rise, like a thumbprint against the clear sky.

  Leaning over the rail, I could smell the salt in the water and the sourness of the rafts of weed which rode close to shore. Beneath the boat, a shoal swam fast on a carrying current, spirits flickering through the night seas. Some had already given up their brief lives, for the odor offish fried in a pan was now prominent, cooked by one of the boat's owners. I had heard that the islanders spend most of their year at sea and many live on the moored boats in preference to an existence within walls. It's always appealed to me, but it's a life that you have to be born into, to know the fierce tides and the sea roads.

  My meditations were interrupted by the landwalker, who was announcing unwanted prophecy to his fellow passengers and had singled myself out as his audience. I tried to ignore him, wondering why it was always I who encountered these people while traveling. I'd had enough of prophecies, I thought, and once again I remembered the mehedin whom we had met on our way to the summer tower, seeming to foresee a child who would never come home. Was it this death that he had glimpsed, or Sereth's own, as she had feared? Whatever the truth, I did not want another foretelling and indeed I was spared. For soon, muttering, the landwalker ambled along the deck and vanished into the crowd at the stern.

  Neither Sereth nor Hessan were anywhere to be seen, so I went to the bags as the stars turned on the tide of the heavens, and sat with my back to them. Idly, I began to spin fantasies around a girl strolling down the deck—partly to help me forget Morrac sleeping alone (I hoped) in some dark quiet room of Rhir Dath—but I didn't feel inclined to approach her. She was very young, and my preference is for those who are not so close to the sinister shadow of childhood. Anyway, I was tired. It wasn't long before I slept, and did not wake till morning, uncomfortable and somewhat stiff from my night spent sprawled across the baggage.

  Collecting tea from a kettle steaming on a stove at the prow, I escaped the chaos of newly awoken people by going up onto the topmost deck. It was pleasant up there, with the sky a morning green and the sea so transparent that they blurred one into the other at the horizon. I went through the fighting exercises to ease the cramp from my muscles, slow flowing movements which discipline the senses as much as the body. I undertook the Tide of a Spring River, the Flight of Carrion Birds through Clouds, and Morning Rain in Winter sequences, and then I caught sight of movement behind the boat, a small silver head bobbing among the placid waves. Sereth, swimming. So I went back down to the lower decks and helped pull her up as she climbed the jerking rope ladder up the side of the ship. She had wound her hair up in a knot at the top of her head, but it was still damp at the edges. She was shivering; the sea must have been colder than it looked. Together we walked to the prow of the boat. Pale, indistinct lights rode in the sea below the waterstars which appear in the summer seas of the north.

  “Look,” Sereth said. She pointed to a cloudy shape rising out of the south. “Pemna. Bird Island. We have to call into Mora Port, and then we sail on to Tetherau.”

  We passed the rest of the morning on deck, with little to do except watch the green waves and wait for Pemna's wooded crags to grow closer. We reached the island toward noon, and stayed on the boat as the family concluded their business beneath the overhanging eaves of Mora Port. Some passengers disembarked: the blue-robed woman, two tall men in rust-colored coats. I did not see the landwalker; presumably he remained below deck. I could see the tops of the crews'heads, small beneath the bulk of the boat, swinging up crates with practiced ease. Eventually, the boat was loaded and the ropes unhitched, and we sailed with care back up the
narrow inlet.

  Although I had thought that the morning would bear heat, I could see a bank of clouds over the hills east of Tetherau, massing dark against the clear sky. The air, which had been warm against the skin in the morning, had become cooler and moist, and a slight but rising wind lifted the sails of the boat, obliging her crew to tack her toward the coast.

  “A storm coming?” I asked Hessan, who stood by me.

  “Certainly rain,” he said. “It might change to storms this evening; we sometimes get them in summer. But we'll be docked in Tetherau by then.”

  And indeed, the boat was making good speed toward the coast, trying to beat the weather. Pemna fell behind, hazy in the dampening air, and the little towers of Tetherau were rising clear against the clouds. I began to feel a bit livelier; I don't respond well to heat. Excusing myself to Hessan, I went to find Sereth. She was in my earlier place, curled up asleep on the bags, and I shook her awake. She growled at me, not affectionately.

  “Wake up,” I said. “We're nearly there, and it's going to rain.”

  “How can it rain?” she grumbled. “It was so hot.” But she got up and came with me to watch Tetherau grow close.

  3. The mission

  Shu opened the door of the biotent and stepped inside. The biotent hummed gently to itself, and Shu realized for the first time how intrusive even this soft sound had become in comparison to the silence outside. Her own voice seemed very loud as she called, “Mevennen?”