The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Rashel announced loudly over dinner that there was concern among people in the Regime that Ayward was unrepentant. If that were true, come spring he might be sentenced to a second Chair!

  "No," said Gayla, giving her a horrified look. "Oh, no, Rashel. Don't. Enough is enough. He couldn't ... he couldn't stand that!"

  "Well," said Rashel in a severe tone. "It isn't my decision, Gayla. Ay-ward knows the consequences of behavior as well as I do!"

  Dismé expressed her anger at Gayla. "She married him! Doesn't she have any sympathy for him at all?"

  "She's required to be cheerful and supportive, Dismé, but not sympathetic," Gayla said in a bitter voice. "Not with Ayward's father gone the way he did. If Rashel were sympathetic and then Ayward went, eyebrows would be raised, questions asked. Had she been permissive? Had Owen not done his job well? Had the rest of us, including you, Dismé, made all their required visits during which we were optimistic, cheerful, and kindly? It's almost always the family's fault if people leave. If they are well-treated, people do not leave their loved ones."

  Dismé had searched Ayward's haggard face too often to believe such sentimental blather. "He hasn't the strength to love anyone," she said in an angry whisper. "It takes all his strength just to be awake every day until the Chair puts him to sleep at night. They've taken everything from him. His work..."

  "Whatever that amounted to."

  "You believe Ayward was mistaken? About Inclusionism?"

  Gayla threw up her hands with an explosion of hectic laughter. "Oh, for heaven's sake, child. You know Ayward! He can't decide between a boiled egg or a fried one for his breakfast. You've seen him dither for an hour over the choice of what color shirt to wear! Coming up with Inclusionism saved him from ever having to make up his mind, that's all!"

  Dismé flushed with instant humiliation. Though she had never thought of Ayward in this way, she knew it to be true the moment it was said. Who should have known it better than she? Even so, she had to warn Ayward about what Rashel had said, though she waited until Rashel went on a trip that would keep her away for several days.

  Ayward didn't reply for a long time. "Did she say when?"

  "She said this spring, Ayward."

  "Poor Rashel," he said. "Ah, poor Rashel. So unhappy. So embittered. So willing to destroy anyone to get her way, without even knowing what her way is. I believe that when your father did what he did, and your brother disappeared, she felt betrayed. All her life since has been taking vengeance against their leaving her..."

  "What do you mean, betrayed? What do you mean, did what he did?"

  "Well, taking his own life that way. Rashel said..."

  Dismé said in angry astonishment, "How can you think that, Ayward? Father didn't..."

  He interrupted her. "Hush, my dear. We won't worry about it now."

  Dismé's fury drove her out of the house. The rains had given way to an interlude of mist, and she felt as though the outward mist permeated her as well. Rashel had told Ayward that Val Latimer had killed himself! Why would Rashel have said such a thing? Was it only to build yet another drama around herself? To make her life more interesting and vital? Poor child, her dear, dear friends would say. Poor child. Look at what she's had to bear!

  She found herself running along the path that led to the glass towers, almost invisible in the light rain. As she approached the tallest of them, she realized she had literally walked into a great pool of ouphs who swirled and eddied all around her.

  "Listen." The smell of decay. The feel of slime on her lips.

  "Please." Roses, their odor, the brush of their petals.

  "Make them ... no, make them ... no, something else." Cold, the smell of smoke.

  "Wrong, all wrong." Sickness, aching, feculent reek.

  "Break ... all... break them ... all... please." Ice. Old Ice.

  She felt a wave of frustration, as though all around her, minds tried to find words and move tongues with all the linkages missing. Beings trying to speak, without anything to speak with, or of.

  "Oh, let go, let go, let go on, lost here"

  "Lost here"

  "Lost"

  The ouphs poured up the tower, covering it, and the voices washed around her, through her, for the first time creating a sensible and coordinated shout.

  "You ... must help ... only one... help us... not leave us like... are..."

  When they went away she knelt on the ground, gasping for breath through an uncontrollable weeping. That last voice. It had been so familiar. So very familiar. A long time ago, hadn't she decided to do something? Some particular thing...

  She found herself at the bottle wall, at its end, where the family bottles had been put when they arrived at Faience. She had the old bucket, her drum, in her hands. A shallow stream was overflowing from the river, draining away under the wall where Val Latimer's bottle had been installed. She had resolved long, long ago to do this. Why had it taken her this long? It could perfectly well be washed out by this stream, perfectly well destroyed.

  She struck her drum sharply, on its side, then again, then again. She summoned Roarer with her whole heart and sang as she drummed again. Her voice and hands together struck like lightning. A bottle cracked, then another. She crouched and drummed a fury, hearing Roarer's rampage, hearing the bottles crack, the crash and tinkle of their shattering, the slosh and gurgle of what had been inside.

  She came to herself sitting back on her heels.

  "Thank ... blessing ... Good child..." The feeling of an entity retreating, fading, vanishing, lost in a swell of fog:

  "All, all, all, all, please. Rest, rest. All, all Now..."

  She could not destroy them all. The Regime would know she had done it. She could only...

  Furiously she ran to the old shed near the barn where there was a pile of rusty tools including an old shovel, the handle splintering beneath her hand. Upstream, where the river was overflowing to make the slender stream beneath the bottle wall, she dug furiously into the bank to make the flow increase, digging and digging until she could dig no more. Perhaps the flood would be a large one. Perhaps it would do a lot of damage.

  She washed the shovel and put it back where she had found it. She washed the mud from her own legs and arms. It was a long time before she could get back to the house. Later she went to the center of the maze and stood before the enigmatic black statue there, believing for a moment that it had actually turned its head to listen. Then it was as before, and she was still alone. There was no one at all she could talk to about this.

  Rashel returned from her trip just after the worst of the flood. The rain had gone on for so long that the rivers overflowed, the torrent flooding two sections of the arboretum, the middle of the east garden, a stretch of the yew hedge that made up the southernmost aisle of the great maze, and a great length of the pilgrims' walk along the bottle wall together with a huge section of the wall itself, which left broken bottles and exposed nutrient pipes that leaked and stank. By the time anyone could get to it, the contents were too far gone to re-bottle.

  Ayward complained of the odor, though he said it came from him.

  He wrote, "I am drowning in my own stink, Rashel. The stench of what remains of my body, rotting."

  "Nonsense," Rashel said. "Owen keeps you beautifully clean, Ayward. It's the bottle wall you smell."

  It wasn't the bottle wall. It was a sad smell peculiar to Ayward's rooms that reminded Dismé of the ouphs and the foggy evening at the beginning of the flood. This was an episode which she wished to keep out of her thoughts, just in case someone asked. The damage to the Great Maze, however, drew her full attention. The news that some of the southern edge had washed out sent her running to survey the damage from the inside.

  It was true. Midway along the boundary hedge, which was even taller and thicker than those inside the maze, a several-paces-long stretch of the carefully squared yews had disappeared. As she gaped at this vacancy, she heard a workman outside the maze: "The damn thing has no bottom!" Sh
e held her breath to listen, at first thinking he was joking, but soon it was clear: they honestly couldn't find a bottom with the tools at hand.

  Rashel soon joined the men outside and directed that a barrier must be placed around the hole at once. This occasioned some confusion. The men could not barricade the inside of the hole from the outside of the maze, for the hedges pressed too closely on either side of the hole, and they could not barricade it from the inside, for they did not know how to get there.

  Waiting until Rashel was not among them, Dismé approached the hole from inside, calling to the workmen. "Can you toss the parts in here? I'll set them up for you."

  The barricades weren't heavy. One of the husky workmen pitched them across the hole, and Dismé arranged them, quickly, murmuring to the workman that she was not supposed to be in the maze, and she would appreciate his not mentioning it to Rashel. When the workmen left, she crawled to the edge of the hole—prudently anchoring one arm around the nearest trunks that were still in place—to lie prone, peering down.

  Below her was a tangle of interwoven roots from which the missing section of hedge dangled upside down. Beyond that was a general darkness, but far down was a glimmer, like sunlight reflected from water. She searched for something she could drop into the hole and found a stone-littered gap at the bottom of the hedge across from it, the customary trail of some small animal, perhaps. Dismé picked up several of the smaller stones and dropped them, one by one, counting until she heard the plop. The count was the same as from the cupola of the museum tower to the bottom of the air shaft, six flights of stairs above the museum, which was itself four stories high.

  She started to rise, then froze in place. From below she heard voices: the hollow, reverberating sounds of people talking in cavernous space. No one had mentioned hearing voices! She huddled down once more, trying to make out words and phrases, thinking how much this would interest Ayward while remaining naively unaware of how intensely interesting it actually was. The return of the workmen from their lunch sent her scurrying back to the Conservator's House.

  Though she could tell the effort pained Ayward, he pulled his head up and looked her in the eyes.

  "I've been to see the hole in the Maze. They've set up barricades around it, but I went in from the inside to see it."

  "The statues still tell you the way."

  "Of course they do. That's not the important thing. There were voices, Ayward! Coming up from the hole!"

  He kept his head up, his jaw tight with effort as he concentrated on hearing her over the Chair noises. "Voices?" he cried. "Saying what?"

  "I don't know what they were saying. It was too echoey. I couldn't hear that clearly."

  "How ... how big is this hole?" he asked.

  "Oh, big. As big as this carpet," she said, indicating the one his Chair sat upon, two meters by three, perhaps less. "But it's at the far end of the maze. You can actually look out through the hole in the hedge and see the pasture, all the way down to Fels canyon. I could see water at the bottom of the hole, so I dropped a rock into it and listened for the splash. It's about as far down as from the top of the museum tower."

  His eyes were suddenly fiery, as though he had a fever, and he stared across her shoulder for what seemed to he a very long time before whispering urgently, his eyes darting to be sure they were unobserved. "Dismé, early in the morning, as early as you can, listen again."

  "And come tell you if I hear anything?"

  "Ah ...Oh, yes. Come tell me immediately if you hear anything."

  She looked at him worriedly.

  "Please," he stroked her fingers with his one usable hand. "Promise, Dismé. It's ... it's terribly important to me."

  She discerned a peculiar inflection in his voice, a famished yearning that was abhorrently intimate, like being touched by something voracious and engulfing. She had heard a hint of something similar in Arnole's voice once in a great while, a longing to be elsewhere...

  And Arnole had gone. She remembered everything about it. Only demons could make someone disappear like that. Demons lived underground, the Dicta said so. Now, here was Ayward, speaking in the same way Arnole had sometimes spoken, wanting to know what the underground voices were saying! My fault, Dismé accused herself. My fault. I shouldn't have told him about them.

  "Dismé!" he cried.

  She gulped. "If it's important to you, I'll do it, Ayward. Early tomorrow morning, I promise."

  "It is important. It could be ... terribly important."

  Leaving him, she tried to think of something else that would interest him more. Appallingly, until this hole was mentioned, nothing had interested him at all. This was the first time in ages he'd asked her to do anything for him, and it was such a small thing, taking little if any effort. Probably he was just curious, she told herself. That was natural. She, herself, was curious. She was making too much of the matter. How could it possibly do any harm?

  26

  another disappearance

  Dismé kept watch on the maze all afternoon. Men had arrived who said the maze had been planted over limestone that had been eaten away by seeping water to leave a thin, unsupported shell. The flood had cut through it. The engineers drilled all around the hole, during the afternoon, looking for thicker rock from which they could bridge the gulf. Dismé, hiding nearby, heard Rashel's voice, the anger barely suppressed.

  "Please estimate the cost of your repairs, Engineer. We will decide what to do when we are sure what our options are."

  The engineers did not mention hearing voices, which, Dismé thought, meant the voices were not always there. If she was to be sure of hearing them, she would need to listen at various times of the day and evening, starting tonight. She would have far more privacy when everyone else was asleep.

  Once the moon had risen, she went out her window and into the maze, running swiftly, her slippered feet silent on the bark-strewn paths. When she came to the barrier she was shocked into immobility by rumbling male voices she had not expected. Men. From outside or inside, she couldn't be sure.

  In a panic she turned toward the narrow stone-littered gap she had found earlier in the day,' flinging herself down and wriggling backwards as the rugged yew trunks tore at her with spiny twigs and serrated bark. She was bloodied but well-hidden beneath the shadowed bulk of the hedge when the men arrived, at the outside barrier.

  Covering her face with her hands and peeking between her fingers Dismé made out the furtive, amber glow of a lantern with Rashel's pale face seeming to float within it. The two men were heavy, bearded, familiar: both Turnaways, members of the Committee on Inexplicable Arts who had visited Rashel at the house in Apocanew on several occasions.

  "The engineers tell me they are stretched thin," said Rashel in an ingratiating voice. "We're all aware of the manpower shortage, of course. With only a few hundred thousand of us here in Bastion, we aren't enough to do everything needing doing."

  "Nonetheless, the terms of the agreement are clear, Madam," one of them muttered, shaking his head so that his loose jowls flapped from side to side. "The Office of Conservation and Restoration, of which you are Conservator, is charged with maintaining the grounds as well as the buildings. The Great Maze is part of the grounds. Additionally, some believe Caigo Faience discovered an arcane significance in the pattern of the maze."

  The other murmured, "May we say, Madam, that until now you have done an exemplary job of maintaining the place, and you have done so at modest cost. We applaud your stewardship, but even though it could be done cheaply, fencing off this section of the maze would not be permissible. Until the maze is formally removed from the Canon, it must be preserved as it is. If Inexplicable Arts is to retain usage of the place, the maze has to be repaired."

  Rashel said firmly, "Since doing so within my budget will require me to let essential employees go, I thought, perhaps, that my cooperation with the Regime had been such that a small, very small exception might be made..."

  The two Turnaways shared a look over
Rashel's head, and one remarked in a less agreeable voice, "Your cooperation has been no greater than we expect of every citizen."

  "He is my husband," she replied slowly, with some dismay. "Some women might not have been so conscientious."

  The other Turnaway laughed shortly. "He is guilty of The Disease. The fact that you denounced him does not demonstrate superior adherence to the Dicta. We expect such action."

  "Besides," said the first. "We know you are not fond of him. No more than you were of his father, whom you also denounced. There was in both cases, perhaps, a certain element of self-interest? As for service to the Regime, you are being well-paid for that. Few citizens live as well as you are living. And there is the matter of the new discovery. You would not want to miss that opportunity..."

  "I have earned my place," she cried.

  "You have earned your place? Ha ha. Well, perhaps in a sense you have. Someone no doubt thinks so."

  Even in the amber glow, Dismé could see the flush of fury on Rashel's face, the quivering muscles, the clenched hands brought slowly, slowly under command until at last she turned away, making a half bow and uttering a few diplomatic words of apology for her presumptuousness. She led the men back the way they had come, and Dismé remained where she was, waiting for their voices to fade as their words still filled her mind. Rashel had denounced ... Rashel had accused ... not because they had any disease, but because Rashel wanted them, him ... what? Gone? Dead?

  Dismé trembled, furious tears sheeting her face, and deep within her, Roarer stirred. She could smell blood. Through the thunder in her ears, she could still hear the murmur of voices, retreating ... only to be replaced by another sound, a shrilling insect voice, a mechanical keening that cut through the shrubbery like a blade. Not loud, not threatening, almost ordinary, yet it sent her into panic, her legs frantically pulling her back, toes digging in like mattocks, knees thrusting, hands and arms pushing her away from that sound through the scratchy bulk of the monstrously thick hedge, squeezing her body into impossible angles among the multiple trunks and rasping twigs, knife-edged stubs of pruned branches jabbing into her flesh, emerging breathless on the far side, bleeding from a dozen wounds. She was prickled all over with gooseflesh, sweat standing in frigid beads on her face and chest, chilled through by a deep well of horror she had not known was there.