“I learned a lot,” Thora said.
Her tone implied more than she said. It struck Sara that Thora also might have heard folktales of instantaneous travel. “Listen, don’t mention anything you’ve learned yet. We can do a debrief later.”
They passed through the center of town toward a cliff face with an irregular opening at its base. Beyond it, they entered a large cavern whose floor was comfortably strewn with carpets. As they came in, a group of musicians began to play on drums, flutes, bells, and a type of small harp made from the wires of the whish tree. Quickly, the crowd took up the tune in a complex polyphonal harmony, apparently unrehearsed. As the music swelled all around, echoing pleasantly, they took seats in a field of downy pillows.
“I thought this place would be beautiful,” Thora said, staring around her at the dull basalt walls.
When the music fell silent, the three old women proceeded to give long, formal recitals of their life histories. Sara listened to the trivial events of each woman’s life, listed in numbing detail, and her mind wandered. Beyond the inner circle, the whole village seemed to be gathered, listening patiently in near-perfect silence. She studied them: strong-featured women with laughter-grooved faces; gentle old men, white and delicate. There was a distinct shortage of younger men.
When the life stories ended, there was a silence. Thora whispered, “They want you to give your story.”
“Really?” Sara said, startled. “They won’t understand—”
“I know. Just do it. It’s polite.”
So Sara stood and recited her résumé: universities, degrees, fellowships, jobs, publications, grants, and contracts. Everyone listened gravely, as if they were a job search committee weighing every word. When she had finished, her companions were obliged to do the same. As she listened, Sara realized how little she had known about them. She had based her impressions on snapshots—freeze-frame slices of the present, highly weighted toward appearance, mannerism, and dress. She listened carefully when Atlabatlow rose, hoping for some insight, but his account was terse and full of inscrutable military acronyms.
After the life histories, the food arrived in brimming kettles, and everyone helped themselves to stew and a mildly intoxicating beverage called quencher. When everyone was pleasantly relaxed, the old ladies steered the conversation to what was on their minds. “Thy people are great travelers and traders, so we hear,” Songta said with studied casualness. “What sorts of things do you seek?”
“Information,” Sara said. “Knowledge.”
“Ah. We know not whether you would value ours.”
“We do,” Sara said confidently. “Almost all isolated cultures have unique traits we find valuable.”
“Do thy people know aught of the fold rain?”
Sara paused, baffled. Thora said to her in an undertone, “It’s a natural phenomenon, a kind of disturbance in the fabric of space. I told them we’d never encountered it.”
“Actually, that may not be true,” Sara said quietly. “We’ve been having some difficulties on the questship.” Addressing Songta, she said, “Touli is our fold rain expert. He has come here to study it.”
Touli, who was sitting behind Sara, leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “I’d like to hear what they know.”
Sara said to Songta, “Perhaps if we pool our knowledge we can help one another. Is there a place where Touli could set up monitors to study fold rain?”
“What mean you by ‘monitor’?”
Thora translated, “It’s a kind of box.”
“Ah.”
“We would like to place it where we could catch fold rain falling,” Sara said.
A new voice answered—a resonant man’s voice, from the entrance to the cavern. “When the fold rain cometh, it cometh everywhere,” he said. Sara swung her lamp to see who it was. A wiry, weather-beaten man stood there. He had a life-worn face, deeply creased with lines of laughter and sorrow. Thora leaped from her seat and cried out, “Dagget!”
“Aye.” He came forward, walking wearily. There was a rustle among the villagers to make way for him, usher him to a pillow, and press a bowl of stew into his hands. He accepted it all, but sat silent over his food, head bowed as if praying. There was a profound silence.
At last he straightened. “There is no escape from the fold rain,” he said. “The only safe place is in another habitude. I have tried to find a refuge for us, but I have failed.”
The silence that followed was full of dismay and disbelief. At last Rinka said gently, “Oh, surely not. Of all those we trade with, there must be one who would welcome us.”
“Not all habitudes are fit for such as we to live in,” Dagget said wearily. “They bemind us in ways that suit us not. In others, they let us come amongst them, but do not like us much. They regard us as devils and phantoms, and will pay us to go away. Some of our young wenders delight in the mischief they can wreak in such places. I did not bother to ask those to succor us. I asked only the friendliest, but none are willing to give us a place. They all have an excuse.”
“Ungrateful churls,” Anath-Not said indignantly. “After our wenders have been bringing them what they desire for years.”
“Aye,” Dagget said, “but we cannot force ourselves upon them. We are wenders, not warriors, and we cannot go where we have not good will.”
Someone from the crowd spoke up: “The Boxmasters were sent here to aid us! Ask them!” There was a murmur of assent from the crowd.
Sara shifted uncomfortably on her seat. “I’m not clear about what you need.”
“We need to join thee in thy habitude,” Rinka said.
“The Escher isn’t big enough for all of you,” Sara said.
“So they all say,” Dagget said resignedly.
“No, really, it isn’t big enough. And I’m not sure it would solve your problem anyway. When you say the fold rain comes everywhere, what do you mean?”
“Everywhere,” Dagget said. “In the songlands, in the coldlands, above and below. There is no refuge.”
Sara turned to Touli, speaking in an undertone. “Do you think it could be a planet-wide disturbance? Even system-wide?”
He gave a ponderous shrug. “Beats me. But remember, we could see there was something odd about this patch of space even from Capella Two. We assumed it was dark matter, but maybe this phenomenon mimics dark matter. Or maybe dark matter isn’t matter at all. All we know is, the gravitometers show anomalies everywhere we look around this star. If the fold rain turned out to encompass the whole system, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Thora interrupted in a whisper, “I’m sure it would be possible to find another planet to take these people in. The only question is whether we have time to evacuate them all.”
“That’s not the only question,” Sara said, feeling grim. “The wayport is down. Even we can’t get out. We were intending to ask these people if we could evacuate to the planet, if worse came to worst.” She gave a humorless laugh. “I guess we didn’t quite know what ‘worst’ meant.”
They stared at each other, unable to think of what to say.
Thora was the first to break free of shock at their situation. “Between our knowledge and theirs, surely we can figure something out,” she said. “I need to continue the studies I started here.”
“You think they know something valuable?” Sara said.
“I’m sure of it. It’s valuable, and dangerous. I just don’t know how useful yet.”
Sara didn’t want her to reveal any more, so she said, “We’ll talk about it later.” She turned back to the Torobes, who had been waiting patiently as they conferred. “Elders, we would like to propose a trade.”
“Ah,” Songta said, as if this were now a situation she could understand. “What trade?”
“First let me ask, how many of you are there who need another habitude?”
This question caused quite a lot of discussion; it was clear they had not counted recently. At last they reached a consensus. “With the wenders, abou
t half a thousand,” Songta said.
There were not nearly that many here; clearly, many wenders were dispersed elsewhere. But Sara had feared it would be more. She continued, “We Boxmasters know many habitudes. In fact, we come from a coalition of habitudes called the Twenty Planets. There is plenty of space for you there, and people who would be pleased to have you as neighbors. The only problem will be getting you there. We will conduct more research on how to get you to a new planet, if that is truly what you want. In exchange, we want you to share your knowledge with us, just as you have been doing with Thora already.”
This deal will never stand up in court, Sara thought to herself. If they were to discover something of value, Epco would never be able to defend ownership of intellectual property so irregularly obtained. But contractual niceties were the least of her worries just now.
The old ladies seemed a little suspicious at how easy the bargain was; they conferred amongst themselves till the crowd began to buzz with tension, then turned and said, “Very well, we are a generous people and you shall have your bargain.”
The meeting broke up in a spirit of amity, and they were besieged with invitations to stay at people’s houses. Sara would have accepted, but Atlabatlow was adamant that they had to stick together and establish a camp outside the village. But when he insisted that Thora come to stay with them, she utterly refused to consider it. “It would jeopardize my work to shun them now, after all they have done for me,” she said. At last they reached a compromise; the rest of them would choose a campsite close to Hanna’s house, where they could easily keep in touch.
Thora helped them choose a spot that was strategically located near running water and a hot spring. As soon as they had agreed, Atlabatlow decided to take Touli back to the cave mouth to set up a string of communication relays so they could be in touch with the ship at all times. In other circumstances, Sara would have cheerfully undertaken the domestic chores of setting up the camp, but since it was Atlabatlow, she bristled at the implication that she ought to do it while the men undertook important technical jobs. As she watched the colonel and Touli mounting the steps above the village, she said to Thora in a tight-clenched undertone, “That man makes me want to commit some sort of violence.”
She wasn’t prepared for Thora’s reaction. Her face drained of color; she looked agitated, haunted. “What is it?” Sara said, concerned.
Thora’s eyes were focused on something inside her head. At last she shook free and said in a strained voice, “Sara, you have to be careful. On Orem, there is a thing called an abindo relationship between a man and a woman. It is a hunter-prey relationship—violent, obsessive, sexually charged. It is forbidden, but key to their culture. It starts with a woman expressing antagonism or power.”
Carefully, Sara said, “Are you telling me that he might interpret my standing up to him as some kind of … foreplay?” She could not have been more staggered.
“It’s possible. He’s not from Orem, but it’s very embedded in their culture.”
“Holy crap,” was all Sara could say. To think that all this time he might have been reacting as if her defiance were a twisted attempt to seduce him—it was horrifying … and strangely interesting.
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
I cannot get used to how completely light has altered my perceptions of Torobe. It is almost as if there were two different towns: the auditory and tactile one, and the visual one. The place I have known for nine weeks now is fading fast before the one re-created today by sight. The visual one seems so much more real to me.
At first it was hard even to relate what I saw to the village I knew. The layout of the streets and houses has snapped into focus, now that I can see it all at a glance. My mental maps of the spatial relationships were all wrong. And yet I wonder: why do I believe my eyes more than I believe my other senses? Why do I think I know the “real” Torobe now?
Just as light has transformed Torobe, my colleagues are quickly re-making it by their presence. Capellans everywhere have the reputation of being impatient and hurried, and now I can understand why. I have become accustomed to the measured, methodical pace of life here, where they simply cannot hurry safely. In Torobe, every task is done in a controlled way, conscious of where all tools are set down and what stage the job is at. My compatriots, by contrast, work in frenzied, chaotic spurts. There is constant noise coming from their camp—thumpings, beeps, radio static, conversations. They walk fast and talk fast. They have taken up more of the auditory space of the village than is strictly their share, making it impossible for anyone to ignore their presence. It seems like many more than four people have arrived.
At one point when the noise from the Capellan camp had died down—they must have been asleep—I overheard Hanna talking softly to someone who had missed their arrival. The story already had a mythic ring. “There are four of the Boxmasters,” she explained. “One is wise and one is foolish, one is friendly and one is churlish. They all obey the woman. She is very mighty. They have promised to lead us away to a land where we will be reborn safe. First, we must pass their test.”
All across Torobe, I have no doubt, people are fitting us into a story of their own devising, in order to make sense of us. Perhaps someday there will be an epic in which we all figure as magical visitors. If so, it will be no falser than the stories we tell of Torobe. Our stories will be scientific, or politically self-serving, or marketable back home. I wonder which version of Iris will dominate: Planet of the Blind? Dangerous Eden? Innocents in Peril? They are all false, because we brought them all with us. We look at the alien and see only ourselves.
The urgency of my work here has redoubled. I need to understand what I have found—that is, if I have found anything but delusion. I need to know: did I have an elaborate hallucination of Orem, or was I really there?
I took a lamp with me when I went to see Dagget. But even though I knew he could not tell, it felt like an invasion of his privacy to be watching him when he could not watch me, so I turned it off. It felt more familiar, more comfortable, without the distraction of sight.
I described what had happened when I attempted to reach the Escher with Moth. I did not tell him the details, just that I had felt and acted shockingly unlike myself. The memory still disturbed me; I was grateful for the privacy of the dark.
“What happened?” I said. “Was it a trick my mind played on me?”
He did not speak right away, and then it was not to answer directly. “There are wenders other than ourselves. I would have warned thee. We do not understand them all. Some loiter about certain habitudes waiting for other wenders to come nigh, as if they cannot take form without us. We shun such places. Did Moth take thee there?”
“No, it was a place—a habitude—I have been before. I felt I was being called there. As if I were needed.”
“What sort of habitude is it?” he asked.
How to describe Orem to a blind man? All my impressions of it were of baking sunlight. “The place I know best lies in a desert, very hot and dry. It is a crowded city that smells of sewage, smoke, and spices. If you came by day, it would seem to be all men. The women live in compounds, hidden behind walls.”
“I know it not,” Dagget said. “You say you were called there?”
“By the women. That is what it felt like. The impression of being there was very vivid, very concrete, as if I were physically present.”
“Aye, and so thou was,” Dagget said, “if beminded by those who summoned thee.”
“I don’t understand how that works.”
He gave a slight laugh. “Nor do I. Centuries of wisdom do not tell us.”
“You said wenders could be beminded in ‘ways that suit us not.’ What did you mean?”
“What I said. It is another danger I would have taught thee. If they think us monsters, that is the shape we take.”
“Or gods?” I said.
“That too.”
I was sure that at the end I had not been Emissa
ry Thora Lassiter. I had become the goddess Witassa, because that was who they had needed to see. I don’t mean that in the psychological sense, that people mimic what their peer group expects. This had been no metaphor; Witassa had inhabited me, possessed me, and I had become her.
As I thought back to my original experience on Orem, trying to sort through the recovered memories, the false memories, and the memories blocked by my Capellan curators, I had an intuition that it had not been a case of psychotic delusion, but a much older thing: divine possession. Somehow, in the vulnerable state of mind induced by suffering and despair, I had been contacted by an entity other than myself. She had guided me, then inhabited me, and in return I had given her a physical presence in the world of Orem. I had been her agent, her avatar, and now she and all her worshippers wanted me back.
My Capellan self rebelled at the idea. It was so primitive, so superstitious. And yet, there were centuries of testimony from people with firsthand experience of contact with the supernatural—visionaries and saints … and lunatics. And yet, what is a lunatic but a person whose evidence we discount because it is at variance with the norm? Someone on the far end of the bell curve.
“Are you telling me that I cannot go to Orem except as the person they imagine me to be?” I said.
“We cannot go anywhere but in the guise our beminders give us. I would have warned thee not to venture where thou hast not left a fair and honest memory behind. To be true to one’s self, one must be true to all others.”
Once again, Dagget’s teaching turned a moral precept into practical advice. It was almost as if common morality were woven into the rules of his cosmos.
“I understand now why you think maturity is so important to a wender,” I said.
“Aye,” he said with frustration in his voice. “These young folk who delight in knavish tricks make us unwelcome. Now we are in need, we shall all pay for it.”
I was curious about the habitudes he visited, and asked him to describe them for me, but of course his experience of them was not visual, so I could not get the sort of detail I wanted. He knew the habitudes mainly as relationships with “people,” though it seemed he did not use that word as we did, exclusively for humans. “They are oddly shaped,” he said of the residents of one habitude, “with whiskers like snakes. But their hearts are good. They are quiet, honest folk.” The implication that the wenders had discovered true alien worlds was intensely exciting. I could not recognize any of the Twenty Planets in his descriptions, but considering how vague and personal his experiences were, I also couldn’t rule them out.
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