The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  But his thoughts tonight were not for the living. He walked a weaving path through blackness until he stood upon a tiny patch of sand on one of the island’s innumerable minor coves—this one not so different from where he’d found the statue he’d used to pay back the chemist—emerging from rainforest into rain and a slightly lesser darkness in the clouds far above. He sat in the sand, a trunk’s length above the wet line where gentle waves climbed the meager beach. Water lapped at his feet. Druz’s gift rested against his throat. He brought a hand up to it and began recording.

  “I liked you better when I was just a kid,” he said, speaking to the world around him, beach and ocean and sky. All seven of Bark’s moons were shining down on him that night, though the clouds blocked any sign of them. Pizlo looked up, moving his gaze from one part of sky to another, acknowledging where each hung. He felt their yearning to speak to him, which in turn gave him strength to talk to them instead.

  “It was easier. Everything simply … was. Nowadays all of it requires thinking, and then more thinking about the thinking. Everything is a question that demands an explanation that suggests a theory, and most people can’t even agree on any one of those for anything at all.” He paused, applying some of that same thought to what he’d just said. “Or maybe they do, I’m not sure. I only know six people, and one of them’s even younger than me, and one doesn’t much like me, and one’s a Sloth and so maybe doesn’t think like a Fant at all, and one’s never had flesh or blood and besides is already dead. So … yeah, I don’t have a lot of experience to draw on here. And when you think about it, that really begs the question of why I got picked to have these conversations with you, to carry the knowledge you give to me, to just know things.”

  He drove a fist into the sand at his side and brought up a handful of coarse grains as several tiny crabs scampered free of his grasp, fell to the sand, and burrowed deep again. He rolled the sand between his fingers and as he focused, each solitary grain spoke to him, expressing delight in being part of this patch of beach, of the endless waters they had known, of how they were both like and yet utterly unique from the other grains. Not a single one of them asked questions or posed hypotheses or would probably ever feel a need to.

  Ignoring the moons, he asked the sand, “Can you explain it to me?”

  Ideas of waves in infinite variety seemed to come from them, and for an instant he perceived the solidity of the beach as an ever-changing configuration across a span of time. It made him gasp. The sand had a lot to say, but none of it spoke of life or purpose. It happily shared with him, provided no insight beyond the simple metaphor of the endurance of granular existence.

  As had been happening more and more lately, Pizlo found these sorts of conversation deeply unsatisfying, not least of all because no one else could hear them. Years in the past, he’d tried to share some of them with Jorl. Far from being a mentor in that moment, he had instead suggested that perhaps Druz was better equipped to advise him, and had made a point of giving them time to discuss the matter during her next visit. In hindsight—as was often the case—it had been a wasted effort born out of false optimism. Like most adults in his limited experience, she’d heard what she thought he was asking and not what he was saying. This had led to her explaining his experiences as a projection of his talents, that the whispers of moonlight and waves and wind were not real, despite his obvious experience of them.

  “All of it comes from within you, Little Prince,” she’d said, even while the world around them refuted her words and rolled its eyes for his observation alone. “I have met no few beings with similar precognitive talents, though never so powerful nor in one so young. What you think to be conversations with bits of the world are really glimpses of the future.”

  When she’d said it, he’d wanted to believe her, less because she might actually be right than from honoring that he had such a person in his life, someone who wasn’t a Fant and hadn’t been taught to shun him or turn away just because. He’d been newly turned ten when they’d had that talk, feeling proud and mature to be in double digits, he’d been especially open to the notion that childish ignorance had caused him to attribute his experiences to the world around him and not some talent that lived in his own mind. More, Druz had been so certain, wrapped in the confidence that adults could possess about the world. Except … the world itself constantly reminded him that this Sloth possessed only a piece of the puzzle, nor should he expect her to understand things she’d never experienced. Doing so would be like asking a fish how it felt to live without breathing the air.

  Similes. He’d come to hate similes. Too often that’s how the world spoke to him, not in simple and clean language, but talking about one thing as another, and frequently before either had yet come to pass. And metaphors were even worse. He’d grown up immersed in both blends of figurative language long before he had words or concepts for the things. That alone might explain the odd way he saw things. Well, no, maybe, but probably not.

  Whether in response to a change in the rain, an unspoken word, or some nudge of his talent, Pizlo set aside these recollections. It was time. The thing he’d been waiting for came to pass, as he knew it would. He slipped some koph under his tongue and lay down on his back in the sand. A tiny patch broke in the cloud cover in just the spot for someone seated right there to catch a glimpse of a portion of Telko where it held court amongst the other unseen six. This was the largest and wisest of Barsk’s moons. He had once seen it in all its glory, when he’d snuck aboard the space station. It had filled his field of vision and flooded him with its light and knowledge. Since that experience, Telko had appeared to him more often than to any other Fant on Barsk. But this once it did not pour its wisdom into him. This time it waited upon him, the master ready at last to hear the student speak.

  “I think I’m like a tree.” He spoke softly, knowing Telko could hear him despite the distance and vacuum that lay between them. “Everything on Barsk, and you and your fellow moons, you’re like the soil that I grow in, providing the nutrients and water and light that I need to grow tall and strong, to become something that you’re not. You give me knowledge, explain what is, and often that includes things that haven’t happened yet. But it’s like the stories the Archetype tells me. It’s not just stuff to know. I’m starting see that now, everything you offer me, all of it is actually tools. In the beginning, when I first started hearing you, you just told me things. But then, as I learned more, I realized that you told me those things so I would start asking questions. And I know that made you happy.”

  Though it still hadn’t spoken, Telko’s radiance projected approval.

  “Yeah, but it’s not about the questions. I get that now. It’s about choices. Knowing can be a path to asking. And asking creates the possibility of choosing. And that’s scary, because at one level it means that everything—absolutely everything!—that you’ve taught me can be undone by choice. Because in that sense, nothing is fixed. When you showed me Jorl becoming many, that wasn’t inevitable. When he unleashed the Silence and destroyed that Yak, it could have gone differently. This is what Druz means when she talks about me being a precognitive. She didn’t get all of it right, but she led me to find the heart of it. Knowing a thing isn’t the same as choosing a thing. And that’s hard. There’re millions of people on this planet who would cringe at the sight of me, owing to knowledge and not from their own decision. And there’s only four people here who can see me as me, and act from choice. I’m only fourteen, and you’re as old as the world, and it’s mean of you to ask me to think about these kinds of things. And you know that, and you do it anyway, which makes you cruel. And I don’t think it’s right that moons should be cruel. Ever. But I talked it over with the Archetype, and it helped me to understand that all this time you’ve probably been preparing me to go on that Hero’s Journey, and it’s time for me to cross some kind of threshold. Only, before I do, in case I fail, I want you to have something. I want you to know me.”

  He closed his
eyes. The koph had had time to work and when he looked around again it was to see himself in a space created within his own mind. He floated above the clouds, above even the atmosphere, hovering at the same height as Barsk’s space station hung above Zlorka, the archipelago’s northernmost and only equatorial island. To left and right at varying distances hung the other six moons, Nita and Ulmazh, and all the rest. Telko, much closer to hand, shone upon him in all its brilliant glory, its imagined light bearable here in his imagination. It regarded him silently, waiting.

  “Jorl can do things other Speakers can’t. I know that. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve seen him choose to do it. And I also know that there are laws that all Speakers follow. That’s knowledge too, but it’s false. They’re not laws, they’re only rules. He’s chosen to break them, and I can, too.” He focused on his own nefshons then, bringing back into awareness the golden weave of particles so dense and close that Speakers always dismissed from their perceptions before attempting a summoning. Instead, he made them the object of his concentration.

  All of his memories lay before him, the nefshon warp and weft of his life. Everything he’d experienced, everyone he’d ever met. Here were particles dedicated to time spent with Arlo, the one dead person he might have summoned but Jorl had told him not to, that his father had asked to be allowed to rest. He had many many particles from talks with Jorl. Other particles were memories of Tolta, going back to his earliest thoughts. More recent were those of Rina and her mother Dabni. Different but vivid were particles from the stories told to him by the Archetype of Man. Others linked him to Druz. The chemist was there, the Ailuros from the station, the Yak that had so frightened him half a lifetime ago. Everyone he’d ever met lived on in these nefshons.

  But there were no nefshons from the forest or the beaches that had whispered to him all his life, nothing from the rain that had chatted with him every day, nor anything from the ocean. He had knowledge from each of the moons he’d seen, but not a single one of those experiences tied him to them, not even the epiphanies that Telko had shared. In every instance where he had learned things from the world around and above him, the only living source that shone in the nefshons of those events had been himself.

  “It’s just me,” he whispered. “It’s always just been me. I made you up and set you outside of myself, but that was just another metaphor. None of you actually exist. You’re only real because I needed you to be real.”

  Staring into the writhing cocoon of his own nefshons, Pizlo lost himself. It was as if he stumbled and fell into it. The swath of golden fabric that he routinely dismissed as soon as koph made it perceivable now gripped him and would not let go, would not be banished. It swallowed and engulfed him. Pizlo struggled and found himself drowning in it, drowning in himself. And even that experience was a new memory that added to the whole. There was no way out because he couldn’t stop being him. There were no moons, no world, no sand, no water. Only Pizlo, for ever and ever. No escape.

  “Okay, so this is why Speakers have rules.”

  He flailed, but it was like being helplessly deep in water, trapped in another stupid simile. But maybe that was the solution, that none of this was literal. To save himself he had to be figurative. He reached out, grasping the nefshons around him instead of trying to wrench free of them. They defined him, leaving them behind was an impossibility. Instead, he focused on that definition, on the idea of seeing every particle as a piece of who he was, sorting them in infinite combinations, to produce his entire existence.

  Suddenly he was free, floating once more in space above Telko. And floating not an ear’s length away was a golden, gleaming simulacrum of himself. Not a simple construct like any Speaker might make of a conversant. This was him. All of him. Every particle of his existence duplicated and assembled before him and gawking right back at him. Pizlo reached out his trunk and his doppelgänger did the same. They touched and his creation dwindled and shrank, lost shape as it compacted tightly upon itself, collapsing into a single golden grain, bringing to mind the beach he’d been on.

  He rolled his eyes. “Another metaphor,” he said, even as he clutched the grain and turned to address Telko once more.

  “This is me. Kind of. It’s me as of this moment. Everything I am, but it’s not who I can be because there’s no choice in it, no agency. It’s an echo of me. An echo of what it is to be me.”

  All seven moons shone upon him where he hung in space. Serious, listening. Just as he needed them to be.

  “I’m going to leave soon. I don’t want you or anyone else to tell me what might be just ahead. This is my journey to take, my choice. And maybe it won’t go well. So, because you’ve given me so much, I want to give you something back before I leave. You’re not a Speaker, and when I die you can’t summon me. But in case I don’t come back, this is how you can always know me.”

  He hauled back his trunk and then let fly, hurling his echo at Telko. It fell toward the moon, taking its time, instantly lost to view but still visible in his imagination. Pizlo waited and watched. In the real world, far below on the tiny cove, delicate waves had climbed Pizlo’s legs, the rain fell upon him, and the clouds had long since closed to again hide any glimpse of what lay beyond them. Eventually, Pizlo returned to his body, sat up, and ran off into the forest, ready to begin his quest.

  EIGHT

  GENIES AND BOTTLES

  CHALK dust covered Ryne’s hands to their knuckles. Broad slabs of slate had been bolted to three walls of the lab and he’d spent the morning filling them with tightly scrawled formulae that defined and described the manipulation of forces in ways no other mind had imagined let alone tried. Over the span of several days, Gari and Krokel had fed his earlier equations into the computer model, which in turn had offered up half answers and more questions, glitches, and hints. He had pondered all of them during a particularly lengthy walk last night, and arose this morning to write out the answers that his brain had sorted out while he’d slept.

  The chalk slipped from his fingers and he stared at what he’d wrought, panting and grinning.

  Krokel stepped into the periphery of his vision, lifting his trunk in inquiry and Ryne nodded permission. His assistant began transcribing the contents of the chalkboards.

  “Your last simulation went well?”

  Ryne turned to regard Lolte. She’d dropped by his lab earlier—shortly after he’d arrived but before he’d lost himself in the fugue of chalk and equations—to give him an injection of what she laughingly called “Ryne juice.” Her business done, she’d invited him to join her for a picnic later that day, Gari having apparently told her that he’d get so caught up in his work that he’d forget to eat. He’d agreed and watched his physician leave before beginning the day’s work. He had no idea how long she’d been standing there, a large picnic hamper held before her. The flow of concepts and the song of the math had driven everything else out of his perception. If she’d spoken before now, he hadn’t noticed. In reply to her question he just smiled, still too caught up in the math to drop back into mere language. Instead, he took a moment to wash the chalk dust from his hands, and then left the lab with her, walking in a companionable silence to one of the city’s public spaces, an oblong park of carefully tended lawns, gaming benches, and minor performance alcoves. The biologist put down a coarse cloth and unpacked the contents of her enormous food basket onto it as Ryne lowered himself to the grass. She’d warned him that occasional joint pain could be a temporary side effect of the longevity treatments, but it was minor and only troubled him when he’d been on his feet all day, which admittedly was every day he worked at the boards. Even so, he already felt better than he had in years. As he made himself comfortable he let the math slip away and found his voice, answering at last the question she’d voiced in his lab.

  “Too well. I’ve gone as far as I can with simulations. The model is solid, the math works. Today’s work will correct the last few issues—minor irregularities that could have led to instabilities in the f
ield effects but that weren’t otherwise substantive on their own. Krokel and Gari will apply the corrections to the designs I’ve drawn up for the engineers and they’ll implement a prototype to demonstrate the effect.” Ryne paused, blushed, and added, “Assuming it works.” He accepted an offered bowl of succulent leaves drizzled with an exotic sauce that his assistants had introduced him to.

  “Why wouldn’t it work?” Lolte prepared her own meal, seemingly focused on the food, but Ryne knew better.

  “It should, but how would I know? I’m working from theory. I have no sensitivity to koph. I can’t actually see the particles that I’m working with.”

  “Surely that’s not a problem. Particularly here.”

  “I suppose not. Krokel assures me there is a line of qualified engineers with the Speaker talent eager to test the prototype.” He munched on his leaves, unable to keep from smiling at the flavor. Something about the new sauce continued to delight him.

  “Is that the end of your work then, a device that puts theory into practice?”

  “What? Oh my, not even remotely. The prototype is really just a proof-of-concept. It will show Bernath and the others that my theories are sound, that otherwise dispersed and free floating nefshons can be maintained in an organized state, without an active mind or the use of koph.”

  Lolte frowned around a mouthful. Nearby, a mob of children squealed as they chased one another around the park in some kind of game that involved tripping the leader and then leaping over the victim’s prone body before running away. She smirked. “Like you, I don’t have the Speaker’s gift. My expertise is all in life sciences. I’m afraid I know little more than the basics of nefshon science.”