Ceremony

by Glen Cook

  It was the Up-and-Over or death.

  She knew what she was supposed to do. Technically. She had reached out and collected the appropriate ghosts occasionally, but had come up short on nerve. And never had she allowed herself to be taken through by someone else, though that was the customary way of learning.

  There was no option. The Serke were poised.

  She gathered ghosts.

  The Serke darkships vanished.

  Marika sealed her eyes and opened to the All, twisted her ghosts, and bid fear be gone. She reached for the Up-and-Over, twisted again.

  The stars vanished. Everything vanished. For several seconds nothing surrounded her but a chaotic sense of ghosts and screaming. She had penetrated a vacancy that made the void seem warm and homey.

  Stars reappeared, spinning. The darkship was tumbling. Marika looked for landmarks, and nearly panicked when she could spy nothing familiar. The world! Where was it? Where were the Serke darkships, the brethren ships, the mirror, Starstalker, the moons? She saw nothing at all. Only stars, distant stars. Had she hurled herself into the gulf between?

  Something huge and dark stirred nearby, aware of her presence, so powerful she could feel it without reaching into the plane of ghosts. It was the great grim dark thing she had so often sensed waiting at the lip of the system. Her skip through the Up-and-Over had thrown her almost into its grasp!

  Still battling panic, she steadied the darkship, polled her companions, found them frightened but safe. Her Mistress had no experience of the Up-and-Over either. What do we do now? she sent.

  Find the direction home.

  Marika scanned the void opposite the crawling darkness, and found a star that seemed brighter than any other. That one?

  The Mistress knew where they were too. Must be. Only the sun would be so bright from here. Hurry. It knows we are here and it is coming to see...

  The darkness had begun to move.

  Marika turned the darkship toward the sun and began moving inward, accelerating. Can we make it? She did not have the courage to hazard the Up-and-Over again.

  We must try. We cannot go through again. Another time, not knowing what we are doing, and we could be too far away to find our way. In the face of a problem less savage than the Serke the Mistress was perfectly calm. More rational than she, Marika thought.

  The homeward passage took three days, despite the incredible velocities Marika attained. She reached lunar orbit at the edge of exhaustion, with her bath and Mistress all but burned out, and had to be rescued by brethren ships working the mirror, for she and her meth did not have enough left to take the darkship down.

  III

  Bagnel came to Marika where she lay in a bed aboard the workstation the brethren called the Hammer because of its shape, two pods upon the end of a long arm rotating to create an illusion of gravity. He said, “I heard you cut it pretty close this time.”

  She had not been awake long and he was her first visitor. “Very close. I wasn’t sure I would make it this time.”

  He eyed her intently while shaking his head.

  “I tried something I didn’t know how to do and almost did myself in. Is that what you want me to say? I’ve said it. But I’ll also say I didn’t have any choice. It was the Up-and-Over or die. The Serke were closing in.”

  “I understand.”

  “How bad is it? How much damage did they do?”

  “The raiders? None at all. Unless you count a little caused by one of the wrecks. It ploughed through an area where we had some materials tethered. We’ll have to replace a few hundred sections of beam that got warped.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Evidently you took them completely by surprise. I hear there’s a great deal of despair among the recidivists down on the planet. This was supposed to be a killer blow.”

  “Then the other darkships did get there in time to keep them from wrecking everything.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What?”

  “They ran away. The Serke. Before the darkships ever arrived. We heard the warning, but for a long time we did not know what had happened. Actually found out from a captured rogue.”

  “But... “

  “Marika, nobody knew you were out there. I mean, some of the workers remembered a darkship nosing around, but they didn’t know whose it was. You didn’t tell anybody where you were going or what you were up to. Meth only started wondering about where you were after we captured the rogue and could not find any silth missing who were supposed to be out there at the time. Meth were talking about a ghost darkship for a while. Then when nobody could find you anywhere down below... Marika, you have to stop doing that kind of thing. You could have died trying to get back. If you had told somebody what you were up to, anybody, silth could have gone looking for you. It’s hard to save somebody when you don’t know they’re in trouble.”

  “All right, Bagnel. Don’t get excited. I get the message. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Everything turned out for the best. I’m safe.”

  He scowled. There was much more he wanted to say, but he held his tongue.

  Marika said, “The problem has become how to protect the mirrors. They would have destroyed the project but for the accident of my having been out there. Two of those ships were carrying bombs like the ones they used on TelleRai.”

  “Accident? What accident?” There was an odd glint in Bagnel’s eyes.

  “What is it? I don’t like the way you’re looking at me.”

  “You always discount the notion that you are fated. I don’t like superstition any more than you do, Marika, but this time I really have to wonder.”

  “Don’t you start. I get enough of that nonsense from silth. Anyway, if you assume I am a fated thing then the mirror would have been destroyed. Isn’t the pattern one of destruction? That’s what they keep telling me.”

  “Maybe that was to prepare you for the turnaround.”

  “Enough of this, Bagnel. I won’t have it from you. It’s pure silliness.”

  “As you wish. I came to see how you are. I have my answer. You’re as nasty as ever. And those who had hopes of your early demise will be disappointed again.”

  “Right. I intend to keep disappointing them, too, because I intend to outlive them all. I have too much to get done to waste time dying.”

  He looked at her hard, surprised by her intensity. “Things such as?”

  “The project has reached takeoff. It is running itself. Not so?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “This misadventure got me to thinking. There is very little I can contribute now, unless it’s protection. Or if I just help lift materials from the surface. The rest of the engine is running on its own impetus.”

  “So?” He sounded suspicious.

  “So I think it’s time I went looking for trouble instead of waiting for it to come to me. No smart remarks! Remember when I was young? Remember how the novice Marika always jumped to the attack? She hasn’t been doing that since she got older. That antique factor in your quarters that time was right.”

  “You’re so old now? About to turn into one of your Ponath Wise meth? Eh? Eh? I know. You attacked even when you didn’t know what you were attacking. Yes, I remember that Marika very well. She was a fool, sometimes. I think I like today’s Marika a little better.”

  “Fool. That Marika made things happen. This Marika just sits around reacting. Mainly because she has been too cowardly to take what she knows to be necessary next steps. Before Kiljar finally gives up dying and actually yields up her spirit to the All--which may not happen for another century, the rate she’s going, always going to die tomorrow and going on for another year--and maybe leaves the Redoriad Community in the paws of somebody less sympathetic, I’m going to learn the ways of the gulf and the Up-and-Over. I am determined. I will defeat fear, learn, then go hunt those who would destroy us.”

  “Marika, please understand when I say I don’t approve. I don’t think... “

  “I know, Bag
nel. And I appreciate your concern.” Marika close her eyes. For several minutes she did nothing but relax, comforted by his presence. Much of their friendship remained tacit, undefined by confining words.

  “Bagnel?”

  “Yes?”

  “You have been a good friend. The thing we mean and wish when we use the word friend. The best... Oh, damn!”

  Bagnel was startled. Marika so seldom used words like damn. “What is the matter?”

  “There are things I want to say. That should be said, for the record. But I can’t pry out the right words. Maybe they don’t even exist in the common speech.”

  “Then don’t try to say them. Don’t look for them. I know. Just relax. You need rest more than talk.”

  “No. This is important. Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete. Like in some of our silth magics, where the name must be named before the witchery can be.” She paused a time again. “If we had been anyone but the meth we are, Bagnel. Anyone but silth and brethren, southerner and packsteader... “

  He touched her paw lightly, diffidently, actually squeezed it gently for a second, then hastened out of the cubicle.

  Marika stared at the cold white door. Softly, she said, “They might have made legends.” She could recall him having touched her only once before, for all they had been in close contact for so many years. “We will have to make them for them, for they will never be.”

  He had dared, at last. And fled.

  One did not touch silth.

  She had touched him once, before she had known him, atop a snowy ridge as they stared down upon the nomad-gutted remains of the place he had called home. It had been his responsibility to defend that place, and he had failed.

  Silth did not show fear. Ponath huntresses did not show fear. Neither did either weep.

  Marika wept.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I

  For the first time in nearly six years Marika put the mirror project out of mind--though she debated with herself many days before admitting that it could get on without her there trying to run everything herself.

  Kiljar allowed her to draft whomever she wanted from among the Redoriad dark-faring Mistresses of the Ship. She took the best as her instructresses.

  She went up into the dark, out into the deep, and drove herself to exhaustion again and again, learning the Up-and-Over. She pushed herself as relentlessly as she had when she was younger, and she regained some of the enthusiasm that she had had then. She forced herself to learn the guile and craft that were needed to placate or elude the great darkness lurking at the edge of the system, waiting for no one knew what, filled with a hunger so alien it was impossible to comprehend.

  “While we perceive them in countless ways they are all much the same, what you call ghosts,” Kiljar said. Not once in all her years had Marika encountered another silth who called them that. Most called them those-who-dwell. A very few did not believe in them at all. “The farther from the world’s surface you get, the larger they are, and fewer, till out in the gulf you find the rare black giants.

  “Most of us do not worry about what they are or why. We just use them. But there are those sisters, seekers after knowledge, who have been debating about them for centuries. One popular hypothesis about their distribution says that they feed upon one another, like the creatures of the sea, larger upon smaller, and the largest are least able to withstand the distortion of space that occurs near large masses. The perceived size gradient does run right down to the surface here, each ghost seemingly pushing as close as it can. The feeding theory would say for safety from larger ghosts and because if they get closer they might catch something smaller.

  “I do not accept an ecological-feeding hypothesis myself. I have been silth more years than you care to imagine and never have I witnessed one ghost preying upon another. And I know for a fact that the gradient, while generally true, will not hold up to close examination. Among the several thousand forms ghosts take there are those who refuse to follow theory. Even out near the big black there are several different small forms. I have seen them. Ones no bigger than my paw flashed about in swarms of millions.

  “The hypothesis of our age, perhaps growing out of brethren disbelief in anything not subject to measurement and physical analysis, not yet widely accepted but becoming more so, is that they do not exist at all. This hypothesis says they exist only mentally, as reflections of silth minds trying to impose patterns upon the universe. The hypothesis makes of them nothing more than symbols by which powers entirely of the mind are able to manipulate the universe. This hypothesis would have it that silth trained that way could do everything the rest of us can without ever summoning those-who-dwell.”

  “No one actually has done that, though. Right?” Marika asked. She like to believe she had an open mind, but she could not see this. She had seen ghosts before she had heard of silth or silth powers. Her very conception of them, as supernatural entities, came from that time, when nothing else in her experience could explain what she had sensed and experienced.

  “Silth tend to be conservative, as well you know. They remain devoted to methods that work. From a purely pragmatic point of view it does not matter if those-who-dwell are real or symbolic. What counts is the result of the manipulation.”

  Marika reminded Kiljar, “I saw ghosts before I ever heard of silth. I still recall the first instance vividly. It was right after we found out that the nomads were watching our packstead. I had developed a feeble grasp on the touch and was trying to track my dam while she was out hunting them.”

  “That has been explained away as genetic imprinting, the argument being that the touch itself is proof enough that we rely on the powers of the mind. It has been pointed out that we never summon those-who-dwell to make a touch, only to physically affect our surroundings. And the summons itself is with the touch.”

  “Mistress, we are entering an age when meth, even silth, prefer explanations that are not mystical or magical. They will search for new reasons. I am content to accept what is, without explanation. If it works, I am satisfied. I do not need to know how it works. But, to change the subject, I believe I am ready for my solo star flight. What do the Mistresses who have been instructing me say?”

  “They agree with you. Almost. But you have yet to make a supervised crossing to another star. It is a rule: The first time you go you must take someone with you who has experience. Just in case.”

  Marika was mildly irked, yet could not understand why she should be. Kiljar made perfect sense. She supposed it was the rebellious pup within her still, the pup with the overweening self-confidence. “Very well. I will go do that. If I can find a Mistress willing to go with me.”

  “Be careful, Marika.”

  “I shall. I have goals I have not yet achieved.”

  Kiljar’s ragged face tightened momentarily. She was not pleased by the way Marika had fixed herself on stalking the Serke and rogue brethren. “Be very careful, pup.”

  “Pup, mistress?”

  “Sometimes you are. Still. You came to your powers too early.”

  Grauel and Barlog looked grim as they took their places. They controlled the appearance of fear, but they were afraid. Grauel had been into the void only once, and that time she had not passed beyond the orbit of Biter. Once returned to the surface, she had stated a strong preference for remaining there the rest of her life. Barlog never had been up.

  Now Marika wanted to drag them with her to one of the fabled starworlds. Worlds in which they still did not wholly believe.

  “Relax,” Marika told them. “It will seem strange, but it will be no more difficult or dangerous than a surface flight from Ruhaack to Skiljansrode.”

  “It isn’t the same,” Barlog insisted. “Not the same at all. Inside.”

  “We’re still Ponath huntresses, Marika,” Grauel said. “Very old ones, too. Very near the end of our value as huntresses. If we were in the Ponath still we would be on the edge of becoming Wise. A ye
ar or two more at the most. And you know the Wise. They are not inclined toward risk.”

  “I’ll do my best to keep it from becoming too harrowing. After all, the purpose is to instruct me, not to take off on an adventure. That time lies a way down the river yet.” She beckoned the senior bath, who brought a bowl of the golden drink. “Each of you drink about a cup of this elixir.”

  The Mistress who was to share and chaperone the journey tossed off a drink after Grauel and Barlog finished, then settled her tail upon the axis platform. She had been to the starworlds countless times. For her this journey would be routine.

  The bath drank, then their senior brought the bowl to Marika. She finished it, feeling the drug taking effect immediately. “Have you finished your rites?”

  The senior bath said she had.

  “Good. Is everyone strapped?” She noted the tight grips Grauel and Barlog had upon their weapons. This was one time she had not needed to remind Barlog. The huntress had brought her arms as talismans against the unknown.

  Marika touched her own weapons. Rifle across her back. Revolver inside the tattered otec coat that had been with her almost forever. She carried a knife in her boot, another on her belt, and a third concealed under her arm. She had ammunition enough for a small battle and dried meat enough for a week.

  She felt foolish when she gave it a thought. She, too, was carrying amulets into the unknown.

  “Take it up,” the practiced Mistress said. “Time is wasting.”

  Marika closed her eyes, gathered the strongest of those-who-dwell, and began the long ascent into the void.

  The dream of a lifetime was coming true. Her feet were upon the path to the stars.

  She was terrified.

  Though during the long climb she attained velocities not to be imagined onplanet, she became impatient. She wanted to get into it in a hurry, get through it, get it over, get the fright thoroughly tamed.

  The void demanded new realms of thought of those who would navigate it. Mental habits from the surface could not be transferred. Often dared not be, lest they be fatal.