The Moons of Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  He was holding on, but barely. But the councilors kept moving their memes from one of him to the next. He held them at bay, stopped them from spreading their contagion further through his nefshons, but those that had already been infected continued their slow unraveling. It was like a forest fire; he could contain and attempt to extinguish the existing fires or prevent new ones from starting, but not both.

  Unaware of his struggle, Klarce babbled on. “Your protege isn’t a boy, he’s an abomination. Your inability to acknowledge this basic fact makes you a threat to our very existence. And your abilities, impressive as they are, are further argument that you must be ended.”

  He laughed anyway. It bubbled up out of him, and he couldn’t call it back. The absurdity. No, it was him. Sobriety had slipped away. His mental acuity had vanished, compromised by the meme, by the tatters of his nefshons. It was becoming harder to think. Any complex subtle strategy he might once have come up with had fled. All he found in the laughter was bravado and bluster. He used what he had.

  “My abilities are keeping you and your council of self-righteous puppet masters from accomplishing your goals. And believe me, when you’ve tired, when your koph has worn off and your weak grasp on me fails, I will come for you, the quick and the dead, and show you the full range of my abilities.”

  Several of the councilors gasped, flinching at the threat. But Klarce only glared at him.

  “Then it’s a good thing we have more of us at hand. This technique is known to every councilor going back centuries. And in place of your abilities we have technology.” She looked to the side, to someone in the real office. “Temmel, bring them.”

  A small mob of additional Fant materialized. Long dead councilors if Klarce was to be believed. He thought he recognized a few of them from his studies. They outnumbered him again and as he watched each took up the damned meme that was destroying him. Soon enough they would be on him, three to one, and his shredding would be assured.

  It was wrong, so wrong. Klarce was using the dead against him. It was one thing to have them on a council, to seek their insight, their experience. But no, she had weaponized them. Turned them into an instrument against the living.

  “Stop fighting, Jorl. You cannot prevail against so many.”

  “You’re wrong. Your many, living or dead, are nothing but a group of individuals attempting to work in concert. Even weakened, regardless of my number, I am one person, one mind, unwavering and indefatigable.”

  He couldn’t summon more duplicates, not before restoring more of his frayed and unraveling nefshons. But he still had resources. He just needed a moment or two without their memes pulling at him to recover, but it had to happen before the reinforcements began to attack. He needed reinforcements of his own.

  The solution came to him through the fog of his mind. He didn’t need to create more of himself, he could follow Klarce’s own example and let each of him bring still other Speakers to the fray.

  “You’re not the only one who can summon other Speakers,” he said, and the whole of him reached out for the nefshons of the twenty-eight Speakers he’d interviewed for his history. The illusion of Klarce’s office shattered under the volume required by their sudden appearance. Several of them surrounded each of his doubles, distracting the Full Council. The meme they’d been pressing on the eight of him faltered and the additional members Klarce had introduced stood bewildered.

  Confusion reigned. The Speakers from his interviews stared around themselves in consternation. Some recognized one or another of the Caudex’s past councilors, realized they’d been summoned in the presence of other summoned Speakers and whatever rationale they’d accepted of an aleph being responsible clearly didn’t apply now. They shouted. They trumpeted. They stomped.

  Their disruption bought Jorl the reprieve he needed and the eight of him focused all his efforts on binding and restoring the many threads that had not only come loose but proceeded toward tatters. He could feel the results as his mind cleared, still less than he wanted, but when he reached for his own nefshons to again increase his numbers the particles that came to him didn’t contribute to his further dissolution. And so he doubled, and again. For the moment, he didn’t have to resist the continuing depredations of the Caudex meme. Each of him contributed to the repairs of not just themselves but to those around him. As the health of his nefshon pattern improved he expanded his number still more, gaining more strength with each iteration, on and on until he was legion. Before the combined might of him, the last of the damage done by the meme fell away.

  Klarce quailed. “This is impossible.”

  Jorl allowed himself a smile. “No, this is why you cannot find a trace of the Matriarch. This is power beyond anything you’ve imagined.”

  The eight members of the Caudex Full Council and the additional sixteen past councilors Klarce had brought against him stared around them. Hundreds of Jorl stood before them, whole. With no sign of effort he dispersed his interviewees; they’d provided the distraction he’d needed. Now he would end this.

  “We’re done, Klarce.”

  Dozens of him disrupted the other seven members of the council. The living ones were likely back on Barsk, the dead had probably been summoned by Speakers back in their council room. In both cases, he effortlessly shattered the linkages they’d made to Klarce to participate in his demise. The sixteen others remained. They were present in the same physical space as her, and despite his efforts to disperse their nefshons as he might at the end of any normal summoning, they remained. No matter how many of him tried, he could not touch the nefshons of their constructs.

  Jorl tore his attention from the mystery of the sixteen figures he couldn’t disperse as Klarce trumpeted with rage.

  “No!” She was screaming now. Her eyes had gone wild and her ears stood out from her head. Far from giving up, she looked more dangerous than before. “If I cannot shred your nefshons to destroy your mind, I will break it another way!”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” said Jorl. “And you can’t harm me. Stand down.”

  “There are other ways to hurt you,” she said, and all at once she held a coruscating lattice of light. She stared at it for a moment and as Jorl watched she found what she sought and summoned nefshons from afar. It took a moment, and then she had pulled another Fant onto the plane of her mindspace. The councilors he couldn’t affect watched with as much confusion as he did. The construct of a child took shape. A very young Lox. Rina.

  “Papa? What’s happening? Where am I? Why are there so many of you?”

  “I should have done this to you myself, in the beginning, instead of trusting the task to your wife. But from what I’ve seen here, you could probably have dealt with the effects before your body surrendered to organ failure. I doubt your daughter will fare so well.”

  Her hand contained a different meme now, a different shape, a different program of memories and rules. One moment she held it high above her head, and the next she sent it racing down the thread that connected her to Jorl’s daughter.

  Rina blinked. She staggered and fell. Her construct vanished as Klarce let the thread that had drawn her there fall away.

  “Rina!”

  He felt sick to his stomach. All around him on the faces of the sixteen inviolate Speakers he saw horror and shame. But Klarce hovered over him glowing with victory.

  “Like I said, there are other ways to break you. Your daughter’s own body is killing her, Jorl. And it’s your fault.”

  The hundreds of him vanished, each of them reaching for his daughter’s nefshons and pulling themselves to her, leaving only one behind.

  She laughed to see him flee, likely guessing where most of him had gone. “This meme isn’t like the shredding. It’s delivered its message to her very cells, taught them new directives which they immediately began to carry out. Her nefshons aren’t being affected and there’s nothing for you to fix. She’s dead before another day passes. You did this, Jorl. You and your abomination.”

>   And as if invoked out of nothing, Pizlo appeared and took her hand.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A GENUINE ECHO

  SHE slapped his hand away, aware that in removing his touch she was touching him. But it didn’t matter, it wasn’t real, he’d obviously forged another contact with her and appeared in her mindspace, present only as a shared fiction that meant nothing. This abomination with his pallid and scabby flesh, his rheumy red eyes, had no place in her life let alone in Ulmazh, the site of so many of the Caudex’s victories. Almost she was moved to personal violence, even as she wanted to retch at his imagined touch. Both were reasonable reactions.

  The wrongness of him tore at her, and strengthened her justification for the meme she’d unleashed. Condemning a child to death violated everything she believed in, but it would break Jorl ben Tral. If she could end the perverse fool who willfully empowered this boy beyond any sanity then every Fant on Barsk would sigh with relief.

  All that passed through her in the instant. The creature’s hand pulled back, but a pulsing ball of light remained on her fingers, a meme. Somehow, he had not only learned to Speak but to craft ideas into stable shapes. Jorl hadn’t known how, so who had taught the boy? It didn’t matter. Klarce wanted nothing of him, certainly not any thoughts that had passed through his mind. She sent her intention into the nefshons of his creation intending to sunder it before it could taint her.

  She failed.

  It wasn’t like any meme she’d encountered, not a simple memory or directive. It cycled upon itself, pulsed like a living thing. Not the idea of life, but life itself.

  Klarce stumbled backwards, flailing her arms and trunk at Pizlo. She glared at Jorl. “Is there no limit to your offense, that you would tie an abomination’s threads to this meeting?”

  Surrounded by the hovering, gaping councilors trapped in place by the physicist’s discs, only a single instance of Jorl remained, hunched over having folded in upon himself as the other versions presumably tried to save his daughter. He shook his head, ears lifting in surprise. “Pizlo? How … what are you doing here?”

  “I came to help. To save you. This is my quest.”

  “You didn’t bring him?” Klarce pulled further away from Pizlo. “No … I can see that now. No threads tie him to you. You didn’t summon him. And I didn’t. Then how … No! No, it’s impossible!”

  She fell back into the waking world and saw the abomination an ear’s length away. She struck him across the face and sent him tumbling backwards on the desk. He opened his eyes and locked his gaze to hers.

  “You’re here!” She shrieked at him, extending one arm in a warding gesture.

  Pizlo righted himself on the desk, scooted to the edge and pushed off to stand directly in front of her.

  “I am. I came all this way to speak to you. To stop this before anyone is harmed. To save everyone and tell you to listen to Jorl. Please.” He reached out his trunk and curled it around the wrist of her outstretched arm.

  She collapsed back into her chair and fled to the mindscape where Jorl still remained. The boy followed her, too far away to touch but she felt his grasp in the real world.

  “I WILL NOT BE TOUCHED BY AN ABOMINATION!”

  “What? Pizlo, where are you?”

  “I’m on Ulmazh. In it. In her office.”

  “Jorl ben Tral, is there no limit to your treason against our kind? To send this filth not merely beyond the confines of your island, but past the atmosphere of our world? You empower him to foul me with his touch?”

  Pizlo nodded to Jorl. “I won’t let her hurt you. I’ll protect you.”

  “There’s nothing to protect me from. I’m fine. It’s Rina who’s in danger.”

  She saw confusion on the abomination’s pale face. “Rina?”

  “Klarce, stop this.” Jorl pleaded. “She’s an innocent, and no part of any dispute you have with me.”

  She shook her hand again but the meme the boy had placed there would not fall free. She glared back at Jorl. “The same can be said of the millions of Fant your own actions put in jeopardy. Now, recall your creature. Or I’ll send the same meme to another person you love.”

  “No!” Pizlo shouted and stepped between his mentor and the councilor. “It’s not that actions have consequences. You have it wrong. It’s that all reaction is predetermined. And that’s all you’re doing, reacting. That’s why your future is set. But knowing that means you can change it. That’s the real power you have, that everyone has. Dabni could do it. It’s what Bish understood, indirectly.”

  What was this babble? “What is a Bish?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If you choose, you could act instead of react. That’s the paradox. That’s why I’m here.”

  Jorl wept openly. “Pizlo, no, you have to leave. Please, for Rina—”

  Klarce stood taller, sick to her stomach at the price of her victory, but victorious all the same. “There’s nothing on all of Barsk that can save her. Your daughter is beyond hope.”

  “She’s not,” insisted Pizlo. “Jorl, only you know what you can do. You’re not limited to Barsk. You can fix her. Go.”

  “He can’t leave. He may have control over the others of him he created, but this one I drew here and even were he to disperse the thread I’d summon another before it was gone. His awareness remains with me so I can see him suffer.”

  The boy looked at her with an expression that suggested she was the abomination.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and vanished from the illusion of mental space. Remembering he was there in her office, she switched a portion of her awareness back to the real world in time to see and feel his trunk slap her across the face. Startled by the physical attack, she released the threads and Jorl vanished. It didn’t matter, his child was doomed and when she died the father would shatter. Klarce dissolved and fled the mindspace she’d created and stared at Pizlo. The sixteen former councilors vanished from her awareness, the discs that kept their nefshons in place the only sign of them. As if from a dream she became aware of a pounding coming from the other side of her office door.

  “Please, I understand. You’re not thinking through any of this. You’re just responding. But there’s another path, one that leads to your goals, if you just choose to take it.”

  Klarce marshaled her courage and pushed up from her chair to stand and face him. Her hands trembled, but not from anything of his doing.

  “I am a member of the Full Council. I have responsibility for the posterity of our people in a galaxy that has shown itself to be inherently hostile to us. I’ve dedicated my life to this cause, and I am prepared to give everything in pursuit of it. And I will not be dictated to by a disgusting creature that threatens everything I hold dear. You should never have been born!”

  Pizlo winced but held his ground. “That’s more reaction. The culture. The stories. That’s not me.”

  “You’re all that’s foul and base, our sins made manifest!”

  “No,” said Pizlo. “I’m just a young man, a little different, but with more in common with you than not. Please, let me show you.”

  With the last bits of koph in his system, he took the choice from her and pressed the echo he’d given to her into her mind.

  “What have you done?” An instant later both versions of reality fell away.

  * * *

  SHE was falling. Leaves and vines, twigs and branches, brushed and scrapped and tore at her on all sides but she felt none of it. She tumbled through the air, reaching out with hand or foot or trunk to touch this spot or that branch or this other bough, each time as if by design that seemed wholly providence, slowed or altered her descent. She hit hard, but not critically, as she plunged into cold water, tumbling ears over ass until, with a sense of delight, one hand tapped a stony bottom and pushed her up up up until she broke the water’s surface and inhaled with joy to be alive. That first simple breath after falling and immersion was like an exaltation. And all around her it seemed the world was more alive than she’d ever not
iced before. The water shared her pleasure. She pulled herself to the edge of what turned out to be a very small pool—what if she’d missed it by even an ear’s width in her fall?—and the rock and dirt there sung wordlessly. She pulled herself up and out of the water, acknowledged her body was young, male, pale, bleeding, and full of wonder.

  In the next instant she was on a beach, rain pouring down upon her as she communed with the waves and clouds and the moons orbiting high above. There was unity to the world that she’d never heard before, and wisdom, and direction. She tried to frame a question, to engage in dialogue even as she understood this was a conversation long past, a memory. And then she was gone again.

  She was in a boat, a pitiful coracle that she rowed with a paddle in each hand, numb from endless hours of it. Her hands weren’t used to such work but had kept at it, not feeling the pain or ruin. Then she was sitting beside a bed telling a story to a child—Jorl’s daughter?—describing impossible concepts for an adolescent to be expected to grapple with, let alone worry down to the understanding of her audience. She lay upon an examination table, groggy but alert, gazing at a younger version of Jorl but seeing someone else behind his eyes.

  A bowl of the most delicious paella she’d ever smelled lay before her and she devoured it with spoons held in one hand and her trunk while a woman watched over her with a motherly but haunted gaze. Before she could eat her fill, she was elsewhere, in a room with the feel of generated gravity; she climbed an adult Bos like a tree, reaching within his robes to steal something and run away. She spoke for hours with an ancient machine that had never known a Fant but told tales that moved her at her very core. She ran along the boardways of a Civilized Wood, seeing people flinch and turn from her, feeling sad for her isolation and pity for their helpless reaction to her. She sat with an even younger Jorl, learning to read and to write, glorying at the realization of print and the worlds opening to her by the wall of books in his home.