The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Still, his landlady had a point, he had no shortage of tasks waiting for him and he’d already lost most of the morning. Best not to lose what remained. He flapped his ears to clear his head and focused on the immediate problem. “Why are you here, Kentl?”

  “I’m here to show you a new property, as I promised. One better suited to your status.” She drew a sheaf of papers from a hidden pocket within the folds of her dress, thrusting them at him like a child holding forth a glowing report card. Jorl ignored them.

  “I declined that appointment,” he said. “I have no desire to move. I’m comfortable here.”

  “You’ll be more comfortable in the new apartment.”

  “No, thank you.”

  She let the hand with the papers drop to her side, fanned her ears once, and changed tactics. “Look, Jorl, I didn’t want to go this route, but your continued presence here is costing me money. You’re bringing down the value of all my surrounding properties.”

  He shrugged. “Which is it, Kentl? I need to move to better accommodations because you think my social status has improved, but at the same time I’m a blight on your real estate? No, don’t answer. I don’t care. I’m happy here and I don’t want to move.”

  “Your wants won’t matter if I bring suit before Keslo’s housing board.”

  “Bring all the suits you like. I have a lease, a lease which you wrote. It stipulates all the reasons why you can evict me, all the fees and damages you can assess for irresponsible or negligent treatment of your property. But it also clearly specifies that as long as I pay my rent on time—and I’ve already arranged that you get prepaid a season in advance—my lease renews automatically until such time as I give you notice of my intention to vacate.”

  Kentl scowled and stuffed the papers away. “It’s unnatural.”

  “Hardly. Uncommon, perhaps, but in either case, there’s nothing in the lease that speaks to your opinions on how I choose to live. Have I violated any of your provisions? No? Have I expressed a desire to move? Also no? Well then, that matter is settled. Now, was there anything else? Because I actually am busy.”

  The landlady replied with an abrupt trumpet of disgust and rushed past him as if the winds of the entire season shoved at her backside. Jorl closed and latched the door, feeling almost sorry for her. Kentl did have a point. The norm on Barsk was for men to wander, rarely maintaining the same dwelling for more than a season or two. Bachelors traveled the most, often skipping from island to island, sometimes even jumping across to the opposite archipelago. Even bonded males grew weary of the same walls and regularly sought out new housing, albeit within an ever-changing proximity to the larger home that supported their spouses and offspring.

  Jorl had bonded with Dabni more than six years ago. Every other husband he knew throughout Barsk had lived in multiple different apartments, lodges, and boarding houses in that same span. But not him.

  Since returning from the Patrol, Jorl had maintained the same simple apartment, year after year. He’d experienced his share of life-changing events—becoming a Speaker, being marked with an aleph, achieving tenure, acquiring a seat in the Alliance senate, marrying Dabni, siring a child—Kentl had shown up at his door soon after each of these, attempting to roust him out of his familiar rooms and lock him into a more profitable lease, one appropriate to new beginnings. Then, as today, he’d declined. Initially, he’d told himself it was so he could remain near Tolta, the widow of his best friend who had likewise defied custom and lived on her own. Not that a grown and independent woman needed anyone, least of all him, to keep an eye on her. Then he rationalized that he stayed put for the convenience of Pizlo, his deceased friend’s son, providing some stability for the wild child denied by the rest of Barsk society. After that, he’d been courting Dabni, who worked in a nearby bookshop and it made sense to stay put. Once they’d bonded and he’d fathered a child with her, Tolta had graciously opened her own home to his new wife, and again it seemed the best of sense to just remain where he was, at least for a few seasons. More years had passed and, far from succumbing to the wanderlust that claimed nearly all men, he had become more complacent with where he lived.

  Unlike any other Fant alive on Barsk, Jorl had served in the Patrol. He’d visited the edge of the galaxy, and in the process traveled many times further than every man, woman, and child on Barsk combined. He suspected that experience had long since extinguished any need to move from apartment to apartment. Indeed, having resolved never to leave the planet again, he’d be content to purchase his current home outright and live out his days there, not that Kentl would ever sell.

  * * *

  HAVING lost the morning, Jorl didn’t bother with proper clothing, and even opted to forego breakfast. Keeping his robe he settled at the desk in his study and began by reviewing the letter that had arrived the night before by special courier. As a member of the Alliance senate, the Committee of Information had insisted he equip his office with state of the art communication gear, the better to weigh in on petitions and projects they vetted or rejected. But with rarely an exception, the people of Barsk eschewed technology of such caliber. Only two other comparable sets existed on the planet. His allowed him to send a coded message to the Alliance satellite in orbit, and from there to the nearest portal at the edge of the solar system where an automated repeater would transfer it via connecting portals from star system to star system until it reached halfway across the galaxy to Dawn in less than a day. Locally though, a note from the university on Zlorka took at least that long.

  More than a tenyear before, he’d been one of a small group of new, tenure-track junior faculty with hopes of making a name for himself as a historian. He’d taken a break from that—the university generously pausing his academic clock—to join the Patrol. When he’d returned, his position had been waiting for him even if most of his original cohort hadn’t. Few measured up to the exacting standards of the finest university on Barsk, but even a year there ensured employment at lesser schools on other islands. Zlorka was the gold standard for academic careers.

  He’d worked hard but, despite some critical articles in the better journals, the Provost estimated his chances as, at best, one in three. Then the traveling council had arrived and marked Jorl with the aleph, a singular event that had not happened to anyone at a university in hundreds of years. The trustees, eager to claim him as faculty, not only granted him tenure but named him a “historian at large” as well. In exchange for a modest stipend, he taught a seminar on Keslo every three seasons and otherwise pursued his own research interests. The arrangement suited him, and once he became a member of the Committee of Information his fellow senators expedited the peer-review turnover time for his journal submissions. That was just another benefit the university enjoyed from his affiliation.

  Last night’s courier had brought a letter from the university, specifically from Mickl, his department head, inquiring as to the status of an overdue monograph. Worse still, the monograph was actually only the opening chapter of a larger work. For the last few years, Jorl had been building a secret history of Speakers based on direct interviews going back eight centuries. Though anyone capable of manipulating nefshons could summon a simulacrum of any decedent they could personally identify, the Speaker’s Edict forbade summoning another Speaker. Margda had been the first Speaker, the founder of their order, and her training as well as her rules had influenced all who had followed. Thus all previous direct accounts of Speakers had been limited to interviews with living subjects and perforce failed to capture the full scope and shape of the thing.

  But Jorl had learned Margda’s true reason for crafting the trio of laws that made up the Speaker’s Edict. And, as she had intended centuries before, he had broken all three. It only made sense then that he should set one of them aside now for his current project. Since Margda’s time, Barsk had produced one hundred thousand Speakers! The planet supplied koph, the Speaker’s drug, to the rest of the Alliance’s eighty-five other races, who in turn had mana
ged about half again as many of their own Speakers spread across four thousand worlds. Jorl limited his research to Speakers on Barsk, and had randomly sampled his interview pool from all successive generations, allowing every island a chance for inclusion. Even that had left him with more than thirty Fant to summon. His project manager contained an elaborate timeline of their names, with stacks of pages for those he’d already interviewed. He had started the task with enthusiasm, but the excitement of summoning other Speakers had waned. Everyone he’d summoned had been horrified to be on the receiving end of the experience, despite their intimate knowledge of it from the other side. Over and over, his violation of the Edict had created a nearly insurmountable affront in his conversants.

  Fascinating and heretofore unrecognized patterns had emerged after the first few interviews, developing color and complexity as the number of Speakers increased. Jorl had finished twenty-eight interviews. He already had more than enough material for the promised monograph and most of the book beyond, but he’d been putting off the few remaining summonings to complete the span of years. Mickl’s letter was just what he needed to dive back in and he resolved to resume at once.

  His stomach growled as he finished reading the letter and he allowed that in the long run he’d be better served if he paused. Sustenance first, and then work. He snatched up a bowl of fruit and munched through a plel to quiet his belly’s immediate complaints, then continued grazing on some berries as he consulted his notes and scanned the biographical specifics he’d already researched, familiarizing himself with sufficient details to accomplish the summoning of one of the remaining Speakers on his list. He settled back into his hammock chair and performed the familiar mental exercises to access nefshons. The koph variant that forever lived in his blood responded to his will and Jorl found himself in the mental space of a summoning, an imagining that left him seemingly seated in the same room, as he pulled the infinitesimal particles of another Fant’s life to him.

  As always, his self-construct included the glowing aleph on his forehead. This allowed him to do what none before him could have when talking to the dead. Every past Speaker that he interviewed had met their summoning with outrage for violating their laws. And each time he had patiently explained that, just as Margda had set forth the Speaker’s Edict, so too had she been responsible for the creation of the aleph, and thus implicitly established an exception to her own rules. The logic of his argument—as well as the invocation of the discoverer of the drug that made summoning possible—eventually mollified each of his conversants, at least enough to tease, albeit grudgingly, a meaningful interview out of them.

  He’d prepared for today’s Speaker for much of the past three tendays before becoming distracted by other things, but reviewing his notes brought it all back to him. Fisco had joined the ranks of the Dying and sailed off two hundred and thirty years ago at the ripe age of ninety-seven. In her day, she had been the most renowned and respected Speaker of the eastern archipelago. Eleph and Lox who manifested the talent to use koph had traveled to her home in Belp to learn their craft at her feet. Thirteen separate biographies had been written about her, and Jorl had read them all—as well as countless journal and diary entries from her contemporaries and students discussing her technique—to the point where he felt he knew her as well as his great-great-grandmother, a woman who’d sailed off well before his birth but lived on in endless stories told by the generations that remained in the family house she’d bequeathed to her daughters and their daughters’ daughters.

  It required little effort to call Fisco’s nefshons to him and pull together sufficient quantity to cause her to take form for him. An ancient Lox glared at him with squinty eyes. She wore a robe of pale yellow and a series of three decorative wooden studs pierced the upper edge of her left ear. From the biographies, Jorl knew them to represent the three husbands she’d outlived.

  “Fisco of Belp,” he addressed her. “Your time in life has ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I welcome you.” The ritual of establishment complete, Jorl braced himself for some variant of the withering retort that all previous Speakers had delivered when he’d summoned them.

  Fisco had other plans.

  “What’s going on? I was in the middle of a seminar. Why did you pull me out?”

  “I … I…,” Jorl stammered with surprise.

  “And what are you playing at with a ritualized summoning? If I never have to hear that nonsense again it will be too soon. Well? Is your tongue lost up your trunk? You still haven’t answered. What was so important that’s worth more than the time of ten of my best students?”

  “I’m researching a history of Speakers. I chose you to be part of the survey.”

  “Oh for the love of … Thousands of Speakers to choose from between the island, the moon, and six new worlds, and you had to bother me? What’s your name, oaf?”

  “I’m Jorl. Jorl ben Tral. Of Keslo.”

  “Keslo? The island, Keslo? This is making less and less sense. By what right does a field agent pull me out of my seminar?”

  “Field agent?” Jorl’s ears flapped with confusion.

  Fisco’s face paled and her own ears dropped. She extended her trunk and snapped her nubs in front of his face. “No, of course not. Not with an aleph. Tree and leaf, you’re not of the Caudex, are you? You haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.”

  “I … I don’t. What did you mean I pulled you from away from something? And what is the … Caudex, you said?”

  She slashed her trunk left and right and her construct stepped away from him. “Never you mind. It’s not for you to know.”

  “But … hold on. What was that about new worlds?”

  “None of that matters. Forget we spoke, Jorl ben Tral. This was all a dream.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Trust me, it’s better if you do.”

  Fisco closed her eyes and to his amazement took control of the nefshons he’d gathered. Before he could stop her, she dissipated her own construct and left him alone in the mental space of the summoning.

  With the ease of power and long practice Jorl relinquished his perception of nefshons and sat once more within his actual study, staring at the notes he’d prepared for his conversation with Fisco. Nothing he’d read had made mention of agents of any kind, field or otherwise. What was that nonsense about her teaching a seminar? He’d intentionally gathered nefshons from the end of her life, a point shortly after she’d sailed away and her students were a part of her past. So, what island had she meant, and which of the seven moons was she invoking? And new worlds? Was that some kind of metaphor? And why, most importantly, why hadn’t she balked at being summoned, as every other Speaker he’d interviewed had?

  Jorl had been a historian and a researcher for longer than he’d been a Speaker. He opened a drawer in his desk, withdrew the compact data terminal his senate colleagues had insisted he needed though he seldom bothered to use it. Activating it, he began the protocols for a mega-query across all library channels. Probably most of them would time out without encountering any hits. Some would return useless, false positives. But with luck a few might provide some clues, clues that would allow for still further queries, which would in turn generate hypotheses that he could test. Such was the way of research. One way or another, he’d eventually have answers. He finished keying in the parameters of his search and leaned closer to speak directly into the terminal’s pick-up. “Caudex,” he said. “Begin search.”

  FOUR

  COMBATTING ENTROPY

  BERNATH had been true to her word. After a warm bath and light meal, Ryne had been shown to a luxurious bed and slept well into the next day. Clean clothes awaited him upon his awaking, as well as an impressive assortment of morning foods. Midway through breaking his fast, he’d looked up to find Bernath waiting for him, smiling to see his appetite in such good form. They chatted a while and others joined them, asking questions about Ryne’s work,
his theories, the kind of schedule he liked to keep, what equipment he saw himself needing overall and which bits sooner rather than later. Some of the people who came and went clearly couldn’t follow any of the math and seemed more interested in details of what he liked to eat or how he preferred to dress. A few of the others, Bernath among them, scribbled furious notes and listened with slack trunks as he walked them through the physics that had been living mostly unspoken in his head for the last few years. She and one or two others would ask an innocuous question that had bubbled up in them in response to something he’d said, and he’d go barreling off on a tangent that set them all to scribbling ever faster. He smiled to himself. Hadn’t she promised him there’d be people who wanted his ideas? He continued like that, holding court, describing the math, until others came with the evening meal. Ryne found himself eating and drinking like a much younger man, despite keeping up a running commentary on his theories and responding to the endless questions of his hosts.

  In the morning, Bernath escorted him to a large office—his office, she insisted—replete with a massive desk and slate walls and a pitifully inadequate supply of chalk. His new routine began in earnest. Over the next several days he covered the walls with endless formulae written in a specialized subset of the ëgul used for mathematics. Two assistants had been assigned to him, an impressive Lox woman—young even for a graduate student—and a middle-aged male Eleph who spent half his time as faculty at the island’s own university. They introduced themselves as Gari and Krokel. Both had been among the scholars in attendance the previous day, but neither had managed the nerve to ask any questions.

  Now they glommed onto him, taking turns to ensure one was always on hand. They carried themselves with a blend of pride over assignment to his project and diffidence at being in the same room with him.