Dryland's End

by Felice Picano

  “In the beginning of all things were seven brothers: Capin, Trilufu, Jatoto, Maspiei, Filoscop, Suel, and Dryland,” ’Dward began. “Their father was named Ecilef, which means the Enigmatic One, and he gave birth to all of the brothers, one each day.” He looked at his guests, who gestured for him to continue.

  “Each brother possessed gifts of a different kind. But Dryland was the only one who could also give birth, and so he gave birth to all that we know: mushrooms and lichen, mosses and fung-trees, beetles and arachs, and people too. When he was tired of giving birth, Dryland showed his creatures how to give birth themselves, so he might rest. And Dryland lay himself down and nurtured them all so that they might continue to live and flourish.”

  A lovely story, Ay’r thought. But all males! What would Alli Clark think of this legend? Alli Clark, for whom creation and nurturing was such a female act. Alli Clark, alone somewhere on Pelagia awaiting them, no doubt so she could chastise them for taking so long to find her.

  “After Dryland rested, only six brothers remained in the sky above the canopy,” ’Dward went on. “Yet in those days, one might look beyond the canopy to the sky itself and see them. One brother, Capin, was largest and brightest and began to lead the other brothers in a great dance. He was partnered by his brother Trilufu, called the Follower. The two younger brothers, large Jatoto and Maspiei also danced. And somewhat distant, the most solitary brother, Filoscop, although no one minded what he did. But Suel minded that Maspiei and Capin danced so well, and he began to make trouble among the other brothers. Trilufu, the follower, tried to stop Suel, and for his interference, he lost both of his ears. Made bold by this success, Suel attacked Capin, but the eldest brother was too nimble: he danced away. Then Suel attacked Maspiei, who was neither large nor nimble and who was unable to escape. In a fury, Suel murdered Maspiei. Suel was banished, and the other brothers wept for years. Their solitary brother fled even farther away from them. And, so his children would no longer have to look at such violence, Dryland covered the face of the sky with canopy.”

  Ay’r was caught up in the tale. “Their father did nothing to stop it?”

  “Nothing,” ’Dward said sadly. “Which is why our fathers protect us Drylanders until we are old enough to be initiated. And also why the father of the seven brothers is called the Enigmatic One.”

  “When did all this happen?” Ay’r asked.

  “More than two hundred grandfathers ago,” ’Dward said. His father nodded.

  Ay’r supposed the term was a formula for listing a time span beyond years, a not-uncommon mode of time-telling for primitive societies that hadn’t yet developed the century or millennium span.

  “Thank you,” P’al said. “That’s a fine legend.”

  “And Dryland’s children?” Ay’r said. “Do they never quarrel?”

  “We are taught never to quarrel with our brothers,” ’Harles said and added dourly, “It sometimes happens.”

  “Some of us wish we still had a brother to quarrel with,” ’Dward added in a quiet voice.

  “Tomorrow,” ’Harles said to P’al, “we will ask the others in Monosilla Valley if they have encountered your companion.”

  He passed the long ceramic mold to them, and Ay’r lifted out the smallest joint of meat he saw. Holding it with two hands, he began to gnaw on it as he’d seen ’Harles, then Oudma, doing. He was pleasantly surprised by the nutty taste as well as by the butter smoothness of the flesh. The tuber he picked next was pale yellow, with an earthy smell, surprisingly both sweet and sour tasting. It was perfect accompaniment to the meat.

  “Excellent cooking!” P’al said.

  “My sister’s grasshopper legs are the best in the valley,” ’Dward said gallantly. “She raises her own and gives them free range.”

  Oudma smiled. “My mother taught me how to cook.”

  “Tell us of the kidnappings by the Gods,” Ay’r said to ’Harles. “’Dward told us the Gods were benevolent before. Why have they changed?”

  ’Harles was not anxious to answer, yet he told them grudgingly. When he was a child, the Gods had been good. They had led ’Harles’s family and friends into these mountain valleys. They had felled forests and opened up farmland so that Drylanders leaving The Bog could have another way of life. Naturally, none ever saw the Gods, but over the generations of Drylanders, one learned to hear their approach – ’Harles made a faint buzzing with his lips, which Ay’r immediately recognized as a slowed-down version of what he’d heard just before he’d been lifted into Colley’s wingfold. People would be out hunting or farming and hear the Gods passing through the canopy, and when the people returned to their homesteads, they would find gifts. The Gods had always given. That was why they had been revered.

  “But the kidnappings!” Ay’r insisted.

  “They began only a few years ago. First it was that a teen out hunting or farming alone would vanish, and everyone thought he had fallen prey to some large creature. But it began happening so frequently – and only to the young – that it became clear they were being taken. Among the people of The Bog Way at New River, the leaders and Truth-Sayers began to speak strangely, saying that the Gods had already given much and now they wanted something in return from the Drylanders. Some spoke of a city the Gods were building far to the west, past the nearer archipelago. The people of The Bog Way said that we must give up our firstborn sons to the Gods after initiation, to help the Gods build their city.”

  “Not all the Drylanders accepted this?” Ay’r asked.

  “In the great temple at the Delta, where all Dryland youths go for initiation, the youths asked the Voice and Eyes if it knew of such a city. It did not.

  Nor did the Voice and Eyes even know of the Gods, except through what the youths told it, although the Voice and Eyes has been on Dryland since the creation, a gift of Dryland himself. When the youths asked if they should be sacrificed to the Gods, the Voice and Eyes told them they should not.”

  “What did The Bog people say to that?” Ay’r asked.

  “The people of The Bog Way said that the Voice and Eyes had grown too old. That its Eyes could no longer see, nor its ears hear well. For clearly the Gods did exist, although it did not know of them. And equally clearly, the Gods were taking our sons. Then, as in the legend ’Dward told you, the people of Dryland’s flat valleys quarreled. Some saying we must offer up our sons. Some saying we must resist doing so, difficult as it is to resist the Gods.

  “Before brother could murder brother, the Drylanders of the great valleys divided. Most remained in The Bog, but others left and went to new places. Many came to live in these high mountain valleys. Down in The Bog, they offer up their firstborn sons. Here we resist. Yet it makes little difference. We lose our sons only a little less often than they do.”

  “Can no one stop the Gods?” Ay’r asked.

  “We hide our sons. That is all we can do,” ’Harles said. “And that not well enough. If a passing God thinks a son may be hidden, he comes down from the canopy and takes him.”

  “Before your eyes? How can you let that happen?”

  “When the Gods arrive,” ’Harles said, “we become as though a stone or a tree trunk. We smell their fragrance, then we see nothing, we hear nothing. When the Gods leave, we can move again, and our sons are gone. In the same way which for ten generations of fathers the Gods used to provide us with gifts, they now use to take our sons.”

  All five had now eaten, and Oudma passed around long thin threads of sinew, which she showed Ay’r and P’al were used to clean the teeth. Already ’Dward was drowsing. Outside the skin doors covering the opening of the shelled enclosure in which they sat, darkness had arrived. With it a steady patter on the ground, which Ay’r told himself was the sound of the fog’s cooling and condensing, became something called “rain.” It was an oddly irregular sound, unlike how it had been described in ancient records, and equally unlike the few very old discs of the sound he’d heard from the Metro.-Terran museum on Andromache VIII. Or
, rather, the sound was the same, but the feelings it induced in Ay’r were so unexpected they influenced his hearing: pleasure at being in a warm, dry, protected place, near the rain yet not in it, and a strange inability to predict whether the rain’s patter would remain at the same force, increase, or decrease.

  “Go to bed!” Oudma told her brother, who had to be helped up and pushed in the direction of the second, overlapping shell’s entry. ’Harles also stood up. “Sleep dreamless,” she told her father, and they touched each other’s faces.

  “You are as good a mother as she was,” ’Harles said quietly. “No matter what those fool lads say. After initiation you will bond to a fine Drylander male.” He turned to P’al. “Tomorrow, strangers, we will try to find your companion.”

  Ay’r and P’al remained where they sat, on a sofa of skin-covered pillows. Oudma did something with the oven, in effect closing off the heat, but retaining its glow. She returned to them and knelt between where they sat.

  “Promise me, strangers, that you will abide by the rules of hospitality.”

  “We promise,” P’al said, which was imprudent, Ay’r thought, since neither of them knew those rules.

  “I know ’Dward is fair to you. Leave him to sleep dreamless,” she said.

  “Aren’t you concerned about yourself?” Ay’r said. “You are also fair to us.”

  “I sleep lightly,” she said, and stood up. Still whispering, she added, “Never has anyone, even my father, met anyone like you two. And he has been all over Dryland.”

  “Not to the far north!” Ay’r said.

  “To the north,” she said, “I don’t know how far.”

  “We are from the glaciers,” Ay’r said. “Near the Old Port.”

  “You are from much farther than I can say. For all I know, you may be the Gods. They were said to visit in the form of handsome strangers.”

  “We are no gods,” P’al said.

  “Gods or not, remember the rules of hospitality: harm not my brother,” she reminded them in a whisper, then passed off toward the sleep chambers.

  After a while, Ay’r couldn’t resist getting up and pulling back one flap of the protective skins to see and to feel the rain on his face. It tasted of nothing and yet it also tasted of Dryland on his tongue – loamy, rich, fertile.

  P’al was suddenly at his side, whispering. “My pod is nearby, Ser Kerry. If you wish, you might sleep inside it tonight.”

  Ay’r wondered what it would be like stumbling about in the rainy darkness. He had to admit that he felt an unfamiliar sensation thinking of it, a coldness threading through his arms and chest, which he supposed was fear of the unknown.

  “Better that we remain here, in case one of them awakens.”

  Still staring into the rainy night, P’al said, “As a Species Ethnologist, what is your impression of Pelagia’s Seedlings?”

  Ay’r almost laughed. “I have so many impressions!”

  “Perhaps, Ser Kerry, I may bring one salient impression to your attention.”

  “Go on.”

  “Although I am not a Species Ethnologist, while we traveled to this system, I scanned the Fast’s references on the subject. Perhaps that cursory knowledge as opposed to your own more professional knowledge of –”

  “Ask your question!” Ay’r whispered irritably.

  “Considering the age of the Seedlings and their apparent lack of continually and openly guiding Cybers, aren’t you unprepared for how advanced they are?”

  Ay’r smiled. “I did expect to find primitives less advanced even than the N’Kiddim.”

  “Their language, even the complexity of their legends. Only one out of two hundred other seeded cultures possesses sky gods. And that only because it has been a much-visited world almost from the beginning. Yet, for these Drylanders, it is ancient history.”

  “Have you wondered about their great temple and what they call the Voice and Eyes?”

  “The last of the guiding Cybers, no doubt,” P’al said. “I assume that at initiation, each of the youths is spoken to, given some sort of vocational or personal guidance. It sounds like whatever Cyber remains is itself quite primitive. Enough so that many Drylanders question its efficacy, its knowledge, and even ignore it, as ’Harles told us. That could not be the cause of their finely graded sense of honor, of their acute self-consciousness.”

  “I didn’t think so either.”

  “Nor do environmental factors seem challenging enough.”

  “No, but you forget, P’al. The Drylanders possess what none of the other two hundred Seeded Worlds ever possessed, and what may be the key to their advancement – they possess the Gods!”

  “Who have turned against them. It’s strange,” P’al said. “And sinister.”

  Ay’r awakened to hear what sounded like a long, deep rumbling outside. It was still dark. No, dim daylight seeped in, despite the skin flaps carefully closed to make it still seem like night.

  “P’al,” he whispered.

  “I hear it,” P’al whispered back. “The sound began a few minutes ago. I calculate it to come from seventy meters to our southwest.”

  “Earth tremors?” Ay’r asked. He was waiting for a shock.

  “No. It might be what’s known as thunder. An effect common to electrostatic discharges during precipitation. Quite harmless. By the way, we are alone here.”

  Outside the rain was stopping, and this Pelagia morning seemed a great deal like Pelagia’s late afternoon of the previous local day. Except perhaps for the sight of Oudma, walking about in a sort of pen made of slender reed sides and a loosely thatched cover. She was strewing some sort of feed from a satchel hung over one shoulder, and was followed about by a grayish-brown variety of insects that Ay’r immediately recognized as grasshoppers – or, he supposed, on Pelagia, lichenhoppers. They were almost up to her knees in size, almost her height in length, yet because of the pen’s top hatching they couldn’t unfurl their wings to escape. Instead, they would dart forward suddenly to catch the apparently still-living tiny creatures she tossed them. Amidst the large, ungainly creatures, Oudma seemed more strikingly Hume and beautiful than Ay’r remembered. She tossed the food almost absentmindedly, occasionally swatting away the head of a too eager insect with her free hand.

  “Mer Clark would chide you for your thoughts,” P’al said.

  “Abort Mer Clark!” Ay’r said, hoping to shock the MC official. But P’al didn’t respond at all. However, he had spoken loudly enough for Oudma to hear, turn, and wave at them.

  “Father and ’Dward are talking to the rest of the valley. From what I could make out, no one else seems to have encountered a stranger yesterday.”

  She pointed through the pale yellow morning mist to a hillock in the distance, upon which Ay’r could just easily make out – using his genetically added long-distance optics – the small figures of her brother and father, sitting astride what looked to be a long, curved, multisegmented pipe. ’Harles was tapping its side with what looked like a mallet. He would stop and appear to listen to the air itself.

  “You may join them,” she said. “Did you sleep dreamlessly?”

  P’al said he had.

  Ay’r said he had dreamed. But before she could frown, he added, “Of one of my hosts. It was a pleasant dream.”

  It was something of a trek to where the two males were. As they got nearer, the thundery sound changed so that it sounded higher, more complexly structured than at first he’d assumed.

  A sort of drum or horn, P’al supposed. “The regularity of the segmentation as well as the pure hollowness suggests a natural origin. Gastropodic or enchillidic.”

  “A snail shell that large?” Ay’r scoffed. “The animal would have to be immense!” Yet the beetle had been. Was the beetles’ size natural, he now wondered, or had they been mutated purposely for domestication?

  P’al seemed unfazed. “As was the shelter we slept in, a snail shell, although of another type. Perhaps they are fossils from another age.”


  They approached from the easiest, lowest gradient, and so looked up into the object. It seemed to curve upward perhaps ten meters in length. Gray but mottled with dark lichen. ’Dward waved to them.

  “Neither Monosilla, nor Capensis, nor even Aldovar Valley knows of any stranger,” he reported.

  ’Harles was listening again, and now Ay’r also heard a response, almost like a basso voice speaking from a great distance, although the words were garbled.

  “They all know of you two now,” ’Dward added.

  “A rancher in Aldovar heard a large crash yesternoon,” ’Harles said, “He thought it might be one of Maspiei’s bones. They still fall to Dryland from time to time. No one knows why.”

  Recalling what ’Dward had told them last night, Ay’r recognized ’Harles’s name for a falling icesteroid. “Have you ever seen one?”

  “Once, when I was ’Dward’s age, one fell near the Delta. I was visiting kinpeople there. So large was it that it cut the canopy, letting in a terrible brightness and then a terrible darkness, blacker than any cave. The Delta people were terrified and hid in their houses for days, prophesying the end of Dryland. Three days and nights my friends and I traveled toward it, three young teens full of adventure and folly.”

  ’Dward had evidently heard the tale before. “Tell them what you found.”

  “Water!” ’Harles said. “Not a puddle. Not even a pool, but water almost filling the sight from hill to hill, and deeper than we could walk into. Sweet, clear, and cold. Maspiei’s Tear, we called it.

  “That night, when we saw the sky’s darkness, all our splashing and playing came to an end. We cringed miserably in a small shell.” ’Harles shuddered at the memory. “But by the fourth morning after it had fallen, the canopy had appeared again, and we left the spot.”

  “It became a Deltan shrine!” ’Dward said.

  “In the far north, such sights are common,” P’al said calmly.

  “Then you will not frighten easily.”