They all broke the seals on their beer bags and drew long draughts through straws. “Ah,” said Ashok, “pretty good, for beer reconstituted from a lightbeam.”
“If the wayport couldn’t handle beer, I’d worry about all of us,” Sara said.
“You mean you don’t?” Touli muttered.
There was an easy companionship among them, a camaraderie Sara savored. This was the perfect relationship—not too close, not too far.
She returned to the problem that was puzzling her. “It’s not like any of us ever learned to see. We just did it.”
“Actually, we did have to learn, as infants,” David said. “Babies do it in the first few months of life, when they’re still laying down neural circuitry. Whether Moth can do it now, who knows? At least she’s young and motivated.”
“But even if we can teach her, should we?”
“Why not?” Touli rumbled, basso profundo. “Wouldn’t you want to learn, if it was you?”
“This from a man who’s devoted his life to inventing machines that sense things we can’t. Of course you would.”
Ashok stirred restlessly. “But even when Touli’s machines bring back data, we’ve still got to interpret them through senses that evolved to detect things with a bearing on our survival. Anything that doesn’t threaten us or improve our chances to reproduce, we can’t sense.”
“Not even that,” David said. “Can you tell me what your liver is doing right now? Your liver is essential to your survival, and you still can’t sense it.”
“You’re making me feel inadequate,” Sara said.
“We’re all inadequate,” David answered. “Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there’s a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall.”
Three hundred miles below, the pageant of light that was day on Iris was building to its climax. The continent, as far as the eye could see, was a bed of tinsel stirred by the wind. The boundaries of a phantom mountain range had emerged in the northern hemisphere. It was an optical illusion that would be gone by the next orbit. Visual light had proved useless in mapping Iris.
Touli stretched out his legs like a graven colossus, looking at the planet. “The Corroborationists are beginning to say that Iris is actually a metaphor placed here for our benefit, and the proper mode of understanding it is not analysis, but allegory. A planet of illusions, where gemstones grow from trees, and all you see is your own reflection.”
“Oh, who the hell are we kidding?” Ashok said. “We’re all Corroborationists. We’ve all come here to confirm our preconceptions. Some of us want to confirm that analytical thinking is best. Others want to confirm theories about how life evolves. But you know what? We’re all going to be right. Because Iris is going to be exactly what we each came here to find.”
“I don’t know,” Sara said, “I think Iris might have some surprises for us.”
“But will we be able to see them? When you lot were down on the planet, every one of you called those things you encountered ‘trees.’ They didn’t look like trees, they didn’t sound like trees, they obviously weren’t trees. But because you called them that, everyone who comes after us is going to shrug and say, ‘Oh, that’s just a tree.’ We’ve undiscovered them.”
They all watched the blinding crescendo of colors below. David said, “It doesn’t seem fair. All this beauty in a planet, and the only sentient life-form can’t even see it. What kind of preconception does that support?”
“That the universe is deeply ironic,” Touli said.
chapter seven
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
I am exhausted. All day long I have been disoriented, unable to relax, straining to make sense of this cursed, lightless place. If only I could sneak a look from time to time, just to get my bearings, it would make all the difference. I suppose this is what babies must experience all the time: having to construct a world out of a bombardment of new sensations. But my brain is not as supple as theirs. I long for the familiar.
Sitting here in my bedroom in Hanna’s house, my heart is still pounding too fast. I can feel the weight of dark pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe, as if I were trapped in a small space. I am trapped—in the small space of my mind, with nothing but invisibilities outside.
It seems to be night here—no, I need to stop thinking in terms of day and night, because I have no idea how much time has actually passed. It is a sleeptime, and the village has gone quiet. I have no tangible evidence it has not vanished around me. For all I know, Torobe and all the world could have ceased to exist beyond the mat I am sitting on, the recorder I am holding. Reality has shrunk to what I can touch.
But why should that be? Why did I trust my eyes so implicitly before? Eyes can be deceived, too. On Orem I saw things that did not exist. I find I am thinking of Orem too much. Perhaps it is the strength of the emotions I have been feeling, breaking down the barriers the curators built around my memories. Perhaps that was why I felt such dreamy detachment when they declared me cured—because emotions open windows they didn’t want me looking through.
I need to concentrate on something else. I need to record the events of this day—this wake cycle. I have learned a great deal, but I am no closer to finding a way out.
That was the first subject I raised with Hanna after breakfast. She only said, “We must bide awhile till Dagget-Min or another wender of probity returns.”
“No one else can help me?”
“Not to get to thy home.”
I tried to explain that I didn’t need them to lead me home, just to the outside where my tracking signal would work. But I soon ran into the same linguistic barrier I had encountered before. I didn’t know what they called the land outside the cavern, and all my guesses were wrong. For a moment I suspected that they were deliberately concealing it, but that is probably just my nkida.
“I can show thee round Torobe,” Hanna offered, to mollify me.
I quickly agreed, and stood to set off. She said, “Nay, let us stay till the weather is better.”
“Weather?” I said blankly.
“Aye, listen,” she said.
I did. “I can’t hear anything but the waterfall.”
“That’s it. There is no world out there.”
I had no idea how to take this. “You’re not serious, are you?”
She laughed. “’Tis still and dead. Not fit to be going far. Best to wait till there is a direction in the world.”
I learned what she meant a little while later, when a wind began to stir—first just a gentle gust, then a steady, damp breeze smelling of rock. It woke a thousand wind chimes all around us, and I remembered the cords strung with chimes along the paths. From one direction came a clacking noise, from another a rustle of fabric. With the wind, Torobe became a soundscape with dimension and direction. There was now near and far, upwind and downwind.
“We have a saying, that the wind is gracious, for it bringeth the world out of silence,” Hanna said. “Each time it comes is like a new little creation, when all things form out of the void. When the wind speaketh, its language is the world.”
I stood a while with my eyes closed, listening to the creation of the world around me.
Then my Capellan senses came back. The wind must be driven by atmospheric conditions on the outside, I thought. It might be a significant clue. “Does the wind always come from the same direction?” I asked.
“Nay,” said Hanna. “There is the hotbreath and coldbreath, and the fragrant easebreath. There is the uneasy fretwind and the bowler blow. We have many winds to amuse us.”
“What direction does the easebreath come from?”
“Why, from the easebreath direction.”
I soon deduced that the winds are
the natives’ orientation mechanism. They have no north, south, east, or west; instead, they have a three-way directional system of easebreath, hotbreath, and coldbreath. I think she called the easebreath fragrant because it smells of foliage, and therefore comes from outside. It is a clue, but not a useful one at the moment.
As she was getting the baby ready to go out, I heard another clue—a chittering sound in the air far above. When I asked Hanna about it she said, “Birds.”
I think they are actually bats. We must not be far from the outside. Bats need to forage for insects by night. “Where do the birds go?” I asked.
“Wherever they please.” There was amusement in Hanna’s voice.
“Has anyone ever followed them?”
“Nay, we have not wings.”
I apologized for my crazy questions. “I am just trying to find my way home,” I said.
“And you would fly thither like a bird?”
“If I could.”
I was pulling on my boots when Hanna said, “Nay, leave off thy clompers.”
I hesitated, but since I had been going around in bare feet I had noticed that the floor of Hanna’s home was textured in patches: here a rubbly surface, there a grooved one. I asked her if it were meaningful. “Oh, aye,” she said, as if suddenly realizing why I was so blind.
Now that I had a patient teacher to lead me, it turned out that I was surrounded by coded markers. Absolutely everything in Torobe has meaning. The textures on the floor signal thresholds, edges, and steps. The paths are lined with water channels to give them aural definition, and to signal stairs, slopes, and turns.
Demonstrating, Hanna said, “The furrows tell thy feet that steps are ahead. Then the cascade doth tell when they start.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to have a stairway in the path? Don’t people fall?”
“Well, if they are drunk or not paying attention, all manner of ill may befall. They must listen to their feet.”
Hanna led me into the heart of town. She would have walked with a measured, methodical gait, but I held her back, moving like a timid old lady, afraid of unseen hazards. As we passed people’s homes, Hanna explained that the chimes on the cords lining the pathways were also coded; each resident had a particular set of notes, so that she always knew where she was. Doorways were marked with rattling curtains of something like seedpods. Even people were defined by the jingling jewelry they wore on ankles, wrists, and hems. If I stood still and paid attention to all the clues, I could almost form a mental map of the village around me. For me, it took an effort; doubtless Hanna does it automatically.
When I understood how deliberate and orderly everything was, I said in awe, “Did your people build all this?” As soon as the words left my mouth I was ashamed at the condescension in them. Why should I doubt that people without sight could manage such sophisticated engineering and construction? They are competent and self-sufficient here, while I am the disabled one. I had to think that in worlds where there are still blind people, the main obstacle they face is coping with a landscape not designed for them. What would an influx of sighted immigrants do to this culture, so perfectly adapted to their circumstances? Would we not overwhelm them with our haste, disorder, and acoustical pollution?
Fortunately, Hanna heard no paternalism in my tone, only admiration. As we passed into the heart of the village, other people we met called out their own names in greeting, and Hanna replied with hers. It seemed to be the equivalent of midday.
She finally turned aside into a home that stood a little back from the path. “I have an errand here,” she explained, “with Rugli the sound carver.”
“Sound carver?” I said.
“Listen and thou shalt hear.”
She shook a clacker by the door, and a man’s voice called out vigorously, “In the workshop!” Hanna led me forward through the blackness into an area that was a perfect cacophony of whirring, jingling, hooting, ratcheting, sighing, crackling sounds. “Is’t not wondrous?” Hanna said at my side. “’Tis like being in a world of shapes unknown.”
I could not imagine what she meant.
Rugli came to greet us, and Hanna explained who I was. “Welcome, stranger,” he said, feeling my face curiously. I touched his, and got an impression of apple cheeks and a short frizz of hair and beard. “Comest thou to trade?” he asked.
“No—not yet.”
“Well, if thy people love music, I fashion it,” he said. “Instruments, chimes, reeds, knockers, and whimsies.”
The sounds around us were evidently being produced by the wind blowing on an assortment of devices—the whimsies, I had to assume. We had interrupted Rugli in the midst of cutting some wind chimes. “Where do you get the materials?” I asked.
“The chime leaves?” he said.
I thought of the chime trees outside and said eagerly, “Yes!”
“Rugli is a master songwender,” Hanna said. “He hath taught Moth a bit.”
“Nay, she took to it natural,” Rugli said.
“But the leaves,” I persisted. “How do you get them?”
“Do your people lack leaves?” Rugli said slyly. “I can sell you some.”
He deflected every question so deftly, I finally realized I was impolitely asking for proprietary knowledge, like a trade secret. A Capellan would have acted the same as he.
He did explain how he cut a chime, first scoring then breaking it like glass, drilling a hole, and carefully tuning it by sanding the edges with a treadle-driven wheel. At the end he demonstrated his wares by striking a series of chimes that all sounded the same note.
“You must have perfect pitch,” I said.
He understood at once what I meant. “Aye, ’twould be a tedious job without it, like speaking without knowing the words.”
When his demonstration was over, Hanna said in a low voice, “I have brought thy smudge.”
“Ah, let us go in.”
I now learned what Hanna does for a living. She is an aromatist—a craftswoman specializing in perfumes, incense, potpourris, and other scented things. From the quiet way they spoke, I gathered that it is not an entirely respectable profession. Later, when I asked her about it, she said, “Scents are dangerous things. They can bring back memories, or change a mood. Some folk act unwisely under the influence of a scent, or fall in love. Scents can even cure or kill. A scent-vendor must be very careful.”
So she is like a pharmacist, or perhaps a witch.
“Where do you get the raw materials?” I asked. But I got only that all-purpose reply, “From the wenders.”
By now, I was finding the economy of Torobe quite puzzling. They seem to have access to foods, wood, cloth, and many other products that can only come from outside. Yet I haven’t discovered what they produce for export. Nor can I understand with whom they are trading—“other habitudes” is all Hanna will say. They must be settlements that entirely escaped all our orbiting sensors. I will have to wait for the return of the wenders to have my questions answered.
As we were leaving Rugli’s house, a woman who passed us in the street said to Hanna, “Songta is seeking thee.”
In a tone of strained patience, Hanna said, “What doth she want?”
“The Three wish to treat with the stranger.”
My interview with the authorities, I assumed. “Who are the Three?” I asked Hanna.
“The old ladies—Songta, Rinka, and Anath.”
“Are they in charge?”
“Only when we let them be. I will go with thee.”
She led me a circuitous way I could not hope to retrace, till we came to another doorway. Hanna shook the rattle, and when a voice called out, we passed through into an enclosed space. The sounds from outside were muffled, and our voices dampened, as if we were in a tent or shelter. A soft carpet cushioned my steps, and a fragrant scent hung in the air. Hanna prompted me to say my name, and we were greeted by Anath-Not and Rinka-Doon. “Sit thee down, visitor,” Rinka said in a thin, birdlike voice. I groped for a chair, but
all I could find were pillows, so I sat on one of them.
“Is it mannerly to greet a guest with aromatics?” Hanna asked softly.
“’Twas Songta’s wish,” Rinka replied.
“I dare say.”
Unable to see their faces, I could not interpret this exchange. I realized I was almost as handicapped in a social situation as in a physical one, because so many of my cues were visual. It made me feel uncomfortably vulnerable.
Songta-Min soon joined us. She did not seem too pleased to find Hanna there, but stopped short of asking her to leave. They passed around a plate of savories, and offered me a drink, which I declined. I was preparing to exchange small talk, but instead the old ladies proceeded one by one to give long, formal recitals of their life histories. Anath went first, giving me a picture of an uneventful, domestic life punctuated with achievements like sewing thirty-seven coats, installing drains in the family home, and the births of three children, each by a different husband. Never had she ventured away from Torobe, not even as far as another village. As the others proceeded, the stories grew repetitious. I listened over and over to the same quotidian events, listed in unrelenting detail, and my mind began to wander.
When the last one finished there was a long silence. At last Songta said, “And where do thy people hail from, Thora Lassiter? Camest thou by songpath or tanglepath?”
“I … my people come from many places,” I said. “We call our homes the Twenty Planets. We came here by a vessel that is now floating above your sky. We didn’t know you were here, but now we want to meet you, and learn from you. I need to return to my people and tell them the good news.”
Another long silence followed as they attempted to process this explanation. At length Songta said, “What do thy people have to trade?”
“Knowledge,” I said. “We want to share ours, and purchase some of yours in return.”
This seemed to elicit interest; I heard them whisper to each other. “What sort of knowledge?” Songta asked, her voice sharper.
“Many sorts. It depends on what you need.”
“There hath been a rumor of a new knot in the tangle. Can thou tell us aught of it?”
Dark Orbit Page 14
