Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Jorl blinked. He felt buoyed up by a vast and artificial serenity that wouldn’t let him react emotionally to what he’d just heard. He believed his reply, but didn’t feel it. “That’s insane!”

  “Not at all. It is a thoroughly reasoned and responsible decision. I regret that you cannot see it as such, but that does not change things in the least. The events you witnessed today make it clear that I need to take a more direct hand if we’re to accomplish anything. That begins now, with you. You need to comprehend that I am utterly serious when I tell you that nothing is more vital to me. If you do not willingly provide what I require, I’m prepared to wipe out your people, island by island, until you do.”

  Bish patted Jorl’s cheek and turned back to Krasnoi.

  “Just as you have failed to appreciate how grossly you’ve exceeded your authority. I don’t pretend to understand Fant culture or their preference for geriatric suicide, but I do know that it involves a choosing of both place and time. Is it fair to say that none of the planetary residents you acquired selected this location and hour?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Indeed not, nor I suppose is it that you wouldn’t choose here and now either, but the situation demands accountability, and perhaps a touch of symmetry.” His right hand reached into his robes; when he withdrew it, a ring of platinum and fossilized wood gleamed on one finger, the sigil of the Committee of Information. He held the hand in front of him and nodded to his assistant. “Druz?”

  The Sloth had waited immobile as the senator spoke, her fingers spread across Krasnoi’s chest. She began speaking in a breathless rush, like an actor in a play that has run overlong who now seeks to catch up on the time. “This day, on the authority of Senator Bish, chair of the Committee of Information—”

  “What are you doing?”

  Something shot out from her sleeve and pierced Krasnoi’s clothing and fur below the spot where the Brady pressed against his chest.

  “—You are discharged from service, now and ever more.”

  Urs-Major Krasnoi bent at the knees and staggered, pulling away from the senator’s aide. A trio of gleaming metal talons extended just beyond her fingertips for an instant before vanishing back within her clothes. The Bear’s eyes bulged as he fell back onto the snowy ground, dead.

  “You and you,” Bish pointed at the two nearest Ailuros. “See to this body and carry it to my personal ship. Druz, take charge of cleaning up this mess. I want any sign that we were ever here to be gone.”

  “Yes, sir. I will have all materiel stowed in one of the station’s warehouses until it can be properly processed.”

  “That’s fine. Speaking of the station, inform them we will be arriving soon and that I expect to meet with the telepath there.”

  “And me?” asked Jorl. “What is your plan for me?”

  The Yak gazed down at him, his eyes as warm as a loving grandfather. “You, Son, will accompany me, as my guest of course. We’ll continue our discussion as two intelligent and civilized men. I hope we can come to an accord for the greater good of the Alliance’s citizens, but if not, I can promise you that many more Fant will die.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  FAR FROM HOME

  PIZLO sat in the dark for most of two days while his cargo pod raced upward faster than anything he had ever imagined. As it climbed, the temperature dropped, not cold enough to harm any of the pharmaceuticals aboard, but uncomfortably close to freezing for an exhausted, young Lox. He started to say something about it, more to remark than complain, but stopped himself. For the first time in his life, there was nothing that could hear him.

  He passed most of the time sleeping. His hands had since stiffened into immobility as he discovered when he woke with an urgent need to pee and couldn’t work his fingers to pull down his shorts. Pemma hadn’t told him how long the journey would take, but if the need arose Pizlo had expected to pee into his empty water bottle. Instead he ended up wetting himself, and while he couldn’t feel pain he did experience sensations of temperature.

  His humiliation increased when gravity went away. All his life Pizlo had leaped and jumped and flown through every high and low place in the forests on Keslo, and never once had his stomach registered a complaint. Now down had become a memory rather than a reality. His stomach revolted and everything in it came back up. Invisible in the darkness, his floating puke terrified him. The smell of his own stomach acids and partially digested meal accentuated the reek of his urine-soaked shorts. For the rest of the voyage he huddled into a ball, wondering if any of Barsk’s moons would ever want to talk to him when he couldn’t even go to the bathroom properly or keep his lunch where it belonged.

  Finally, the pod must have reached the shaft’s apex. The walls around him clanged as if something had struck the container and soon after gravity returned, though much less than what he’d known on Barsk. The floor tilted a good thirty degrees, and this was followed by a more muted clanging and then a trundling sound and a sense of movement. The pod had lost some of its chill. Pizlo waited until the sense of motion stopped—with another clang!—and the floor went level again. Tugging his possessions with his trunk, he made his way back along the dark corridor toward the entrance and opened the hatch.

  Dim light poured in, more than enough to blind his already weak eyes. He was thirsty and smelly and cranky and he’d forgotten his hands didn’t work. They slid along the frame of the entrance and the rest of him followed out of the pod. He fell a greater distance than when he’d climbed in and landed with a heavy thud. His head spun for a while, and when he managed to get to his feet, his left arm hung uselessly at his side. He stared down at it, annoyed. “That’s not good,” he said aloud, and shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it now. He gathered up his mesh sacks which had fallen out with him, and took stock of his surroundings.

  The warehouse held thousands of cargo pods stacked in finished blocks running two wide and three deep and five high. The ceiling was high enough that they could have built the stacks even taller. Pizlo’s pod was one among the set of six that would complete the top layer of a stack, which explained the height of his fall. As he collected himself, a gigantic machine cradling a cargo pod in a three-limbed metal grip sped past. It deposited the pod and then returned back the way it had come. He staggered after it, making note of the countless rows all around him, defined by stacks of cargo pods stuffed with drugs and medicines.

  The machine led him to a gate. He followed it through and stopped as the machine turned left to approach a round hole in the floor. Five similar machines also surrounded the opening, and behind each lay an identical gate to the one he’d come through. As Pizlo watched, a fresh cargo pod hurtled up out of the hole and one of the machines extended multiple arms to snatch it. He recognized the resulting clang. The machine tilted back with its prize and rolled toward its gate.

  He turned to the right, away from the mouth of the beanstalk, and after only a few steps encountered a different gate, one that was too small for the machines to access but more than adequate for people. He pushed at it and the gate split down the middle, the sides retracting into the wall on either side, to reveal a corridor. The gate closed up again behind him and he froze. Hallways and corridors weren’t new to him, but nothing in the Civilized Wood ran so straight for so far. The only unending vistas he had seen had been at the beach or while on the sea. Everything spun for a moment and Pizlo sagged against the wall. His heart hammered like it wanted to escape his chest. His eyes ached and he couldn’t catch his breath.

  He let out a lone whimper, a sound too low for anyone to hear, and once was enough, an acknowledgment of panic that had crept into him unseen. That was fine. “I’m only six,” he said, wiping at his eyes with the nubs of his trunk. Admitting it made it okay for him to be frightened, and knowing that allowed him to set it aside. His hands itched but he thought better about scratching them. Instead he let them rest, positioning one above the other, on the moons he had drawn on his chest. He closed
his eyes and just breathed for a while. When his heart rate had slowed to normal he pushed off from the wall, opened his eyes again, and set off down the corridor.

  The air in the warehouse had smelled better though he couldn’t think why. He pondered that for a few steps until the closer space of his hallway made him realize that he was the source of the funk. Right. The revelations of his last moon had made it clear that he needed to come to this place but had been disturbingly silent on the specifics of what to do once he arrived. If the warehouse he’d been in with its endless stacks of stuff was like the entire island of Keslo, this space resembled the Civilized Wood. That meant that people lived and worked here. And just like back home, it would be simpler and easier for everyone if he could move about unseen. That included moving unsmelled; he needed to do something about that soon.

  His trunk grazed the ink on his chest. “I am like the moons. Invisible behind tree and rain and cloud, but always there.” He fanned his ears and listened but detected no sound. As he stepped forward, light filled the near end of the corridor from above, a trio of thin strips that illuminated walls and floor in his vicinity but let the rest of the corridor trail off in ever diminishing light. The lights overhead left trailing lines on his vision when he looked away. They also revealed a series of doors set flush with the walls, alternating continuously, or at least as far as the light allowed. Everything was plastic, rendered in muted shades of color that invariably tended toward gray, though a paler shade than the Fant back home. Time to explore.

  The nearest door had a threshold framing it in darker gray than the gray green of the door itself. Someone had stenciled several tiny glyphs on the frame a bit above his eye level. He pressed his head to the wall but heard nothing from inside so took another step and listened against the door itself. Much like the gate at the head of the hallway, it gave way and vanished into the side of the wall with a faint whooshing sound. It happened so quickly that Pizlo stumbled into the resulting space, waving his good arm for balance and barely keeping his feet. A light came on in the room, brighter than the corridor outside; the door whooshed closed behind him.

  A pair of Pandas stood facing him, waving and smiling like they were happy to see him. Pizlo yelped and scrambled backwards. The door opened behind him with another whoosh and only after he had crossed the threshold again did he realize the Ailuros hadn’t actually noticed him. He stepped back inside, closer, and they continued to smile and wave. They stood framed by a background of leafy green plants and a cluster of bamboo, beyond the edges of which was the same uniform gray plastic as the corridor outside, walls, floor, and ceiling.

  “Oh!” Under the cheerful gaze of the Ailuros on the wall he investigated the room. A molded desk bulged from one side and a matching bench seat extruded from the floor in front of it. A sleeping platform was little more than another bit of raised floor with some bedclothes wrapped tightly across. A door in the far corner slid open onto a lavatory alcove, the commode and basin and tub all one piece with the room itself, and a shelf above the basin contained tiny dispensers of gel. The near corner’s sliding door held a closet with three black uniforms hanging from a crossbar and a small chest of drawers containing several tunics and pants of a soft and pale green fabric. All the clothes were of a size and shape appropriate to an Ailuros. Three small hooks protruded from the wall at higher than head-height, like upward-curving fingers or nubs, on the wall halfway between the door and the closet. Something very much like a daypouch on a long strap hung from one.

  Everything here was utilitarian and anonymous, with the exception of the holographic poster of the bright and happy Pandas. Maybe they were kin to the Panda that lived in the room. Pizlo had seen plenty of holos in several books Jorl kept of such things, but as a rule Fant rarely bothered with images of one another, not where memory could serve. Perhaps when Ailuros traveled far from their families they forgot what one another looked like.

  Pizlo hid his sacks in the closet and closed it up again, then slipped into the lavatory, shutting the door behind him. He needed a few moments to figure out how to access the fixtures, turning the lights off and on and activating a drier in the ceiling before he actually managed to find the bathing controls and activate them with just his trunk. Water poured down into the tub like a mild rain and he let it flow over him, tilting his head back and drinking deeply. He pretended he was back home in the Shadow Dwell standing under a hidden waterfall that had called him to it, but he couldn’t sustain it. The tub, the lavatory, even the water pouring down on him all felt lifeless. Nothing here could talk to him. He had never felt more alone.

  He pushed at his shorts, struggling at the task. He hadn’t been able to get them down back in the darkness of the cargo pod when he’d had two good arms, but managed to use his feet and trunk to yank them off now. In the process he tore off bits of recent scabs from his hands and started them bleeding again. He used up everything in the dispensers, slathering himself with gel and working the gunk into the shorts at his feet as well. The flow of water carried away assorted grime, filth, and tatters of skin, but left the inked circles on his chest unchanged. When both he and his clothes were as clean as they were apt to be, he pulled the shorts up his legs, and then rolled onto his back in the tub, tugging at them with his trunk and wriggling to get them all the way back on. He shut off the water and turned on the drier, then he just stood there, legs apart, one arm wide, ears fanning, and let the room dry him.

  Refreshed but with his hands still damp and oozing, he stepped back into the main room, leaving moist, Fant-shaped footprints on the plastic floor as he retrieved his bags from the closet. The door to the hallway opened at his touch, and with a last backward glance at the smiling, waving pair of Ailuros, Pizlo slipped back into the corridor.

  The light strips came on ahead of him and dimmed after he passed. He counted nineteen other doors like the one that led to the Panda’s room. Without touching, he listened at each door. At two of them he heard muffled sounds of conversation but couldn’t make out any words. Pizlo shrugged and moved on. It wasn’t a problem until it became a problem. Certainly the moon hadn’t mentioned anything about running into anyone.

  At its far end, the corridor branched both right and left, but otherwise ended in another gate. Pizlo pressed his trunk against it. As with the other, the gate split down the middle and the two pieces whooshed to the wall on either side while lights came on to illuminate the new room, a space easily as wide as five cargo pods. Rows of tables and bench seats extruded from the floor, and cabinets and fixtures bulged from the walls on either side. But Pizlo barely noticed any of that. His full attention had been captured by the wall opposite him, which bowed out in a gentle curve and didn’t appear to be a wall at all, rather a vast window from floor to ceiling that gazed out onto the surface of Barsk itself.

  He stumbled closer until he could stroke the transparent wall with his trunk. He knew the view was real, could feel the planet that was his home whispering faintly to him in too large a chorus for any of the individual voices to be understood. He just stood there for the longest time, eyes closed, basking in the light of home.

  Minutes later, a new voice, solitary and strong, broke through the whispers. He opened his eyes. A moon had risen over the distant curve of the planet, Telko, the largest of them all, and one of the remaining four that he’d not yet seen.

  Pizlo greeted it with silent joy and felt an answering acknowledgment. Its light washed over him. He communed. The three previous times he had seen one of Barsk’s moons they had appeared for scant moments during rifts in the clouds that blanketed the skies. Hanging there so high, the clouds wrapping the planet below, Telko had nothing but time to convey its message to Pizlo. Tears trickled down the boy’s face. He dropped to his knees and sobbed in the embrace of the moon’s light.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  DEAD TO DEAD

  DESPITE the strain on Lirlowil’s body, the Matriarch allowed herself only the briefest of pauses between ending her summoning of Jo
rl and beginning her pursuit of Arlo. Once the nefshons had been gathered, the act of Speaking itself would take less effort than actual conversation. But manipulating the particles, searching out a sufficient number to create a construct of the desired conversant could be exhausting, and back when she’d been alive, Margda had only rarely ever done so twice in a day. Her host would feel the fatigue, not her, which was a freedom and a danger, and she accepted both.

  She allowed herself a small concession toward normalcy, conjuring up a fresh cup of tea for herself in the constructed space of her home back on Yargo. Sipping, she willed herself the ability to see nefshons that a real cup of koph-laced tea would have brought her and returned to the work at hand.

  Even with the telepathically acquired details, Margda had only enough knowledge about Arlo to recognize him but not summon him outright. Such a limitation would have stymied other Speakers, but she possessed more ways than simply blending desire with perception to call the nefshons of her conversant.

  If her visions held true, then despite the passage of eight hundred years no other Speaker, either on Barsk or off, had come near her level of focus. She’d developed techniques that she’d never shared, choosing to point her students down different avenues far from her private methodology. She plucked at the particles one by one, focusing her senses to let her examine what no living eye could resolve. She knew the feel of Jorl’s own nefshons, and her telepathic probe had confirmed that he had recently summoned his friend. Her prophesied Aleph-Bearer was near, and some few of Arlo’s particles would likewise remain near, dispersing away from him. These were the nefshons she sought. As she examined and discarded all others, these from an Eleph instead of a Lox, or too old, or the wrong sex, or not a Fant at all, she cast them from her awareness.