by Diane Duane
There was a long silence. “If your story is like ours,” Memeki said, “the good time ends.”
Yes and no, Ponch said. We always heard voices when the Light in the Sky was full, the thing the humans call the Moon. But there came a Moon when all the First Ones actually heard what the voices were saying. One sounded like the brightness of the Moon: cold, and small, sometimes louder and sometimes very faint and soft. It said, “The time comes for you to choose a new path, in which you may become more than you have been. Wisdom will come to you, and the power that will descend on you in that path is great. The One who made all hunters and all the hunted alike will dwell within you and among you, in your own image. But to enter on that path, you must depart from your old comfortable certainties and walk the new way alone.” And then the second voice spoke. It was more like the darkness of the Moon, which is always all around it, trying to drown the brightness out. That voice said, “Greatness, indeed, awaits you, but these naked apes, who in your folly you treat like your own kind, will either turn you into slaves or, after the manner of prey with their proper predators, will come to fear your greatness and kill you. If you do my bidding and kill them first, neither death nor pain will touch you, and this world will be yours forever.”
“So your story has the killing as well,” Memeki said.
Almost, Ponch said, sounding somber. The First Ones drew aside to consider. And when they’d sung the matter over together, to the Voices they said, “We’ve eaten the same meat as these creatures, and hunted in company with them. Though they’re shaped differently from us, we’re in-pack with them. We’ll do them no harm. Yet neither will we desert them, for without our companionship, they might die.” At this, the second Voice laughed, and said, “Fools and weaklings! In repayment of your kindness, the ones you’ve spared will make you their slaves. They’ll change your bodies and your nature at their whim, until you no longer know yourselves. And since you’ve chosen to stay in-pack with them, you’ll suffer the fate they suffer—death and pain until Time’s end.” And that Voice faded away into the darkness, where it remains in the dark beyond the Moon, always waiting Its time.
Yet when It was silent, then the first Voice spoke, still and small. It said, “You’ve put your proper Choice aside, but this you did in loyalty’s name, and so in Life’s. For Life’s sake, therefore, some of Its power will still descend to you. In every generation will be whelped among you some of those able to sing the Speech that every creature hears. But no power more will come to you, and no new life, until you once more see before you the path you refused, and set out to walk it alone.” Then that Voice was silent as well, and though we’ve sung to the silver of the Moon from then till now, we haven’t heard it again. We live and work and hunt with them as we did before, and we take care of them as we promised we would. They give us what we need, which was always their part of the bargain. So everything is fine.
Kit lay there, hardly breathing.
“But if everything is fine,” Memeki said, “then why do you still sing to the Light?”
There was a pause while Kit heard Ponch nosing one last time, regretfully, in the biscuit box. It was empty. I don’t know, he said. It’s a habit.
“It sounds as if there’s something you still need to do,” Memeki said.
A brief cardboard-scraping noise suggested that Ponch had gotten his nose stuck in the dog biscuit box and, as usual, was having trouble getting it out again. That sounds strange coming from you, he said. You don’t even know what you’re supposed to do next.
“But if I knew what this thing I needed to do was, I would be doing it. It’s far better than what awaits me if life goes on as it’s been going.” That shiver again—
Kit felt Ponch looking up at her. Are you all right?
“Not all right,” she said, “no. Tell me again what you told me when we met—what it’s like where you live. Tell me what you do.”
From the way the point of view changed, Kit could tell that Ponch had rolled over and was looking at Memeki upside down. I get up in the morning. I go out and harnf. Kit’s eyebrows went up at Ponch’s careful use of the politest Cyene word for dealing with bodily waste. Then Kit gets up and gives me food. Maybe we go walking before he goes off to school. Afterward I go out to my little house in the middle of my territory and have a nap. Then I get up and check my territory and make sure that everything’s all right. I have another nap. Then Kit comes home and we go for a walk, and I run, and he throws the ball for me, and maybe I see a squirrel and chase it. And then Kit gives me food. Ponch’s stomach growled; he rolled over again, looking longingly at the dog biscuit box. Then he does things he needs to do for school, and I lie and watch him while he does that. And then we go downstairs and he watches the pictures on the Noisy Flat Thing for a while, or he does wizardry, or uses the Quiet Box with the screen that sends him messages. And then we go to sleep, and I lie on his bed and make sure that he’s safe. Then we sleep—and in the morning, we get up and do it again.
Memeki was looking down at Ponch with what the dog could tell was the most profound kind of longing. “This is a life beyond lives that you’re living,” she said, wistful. “No carrying, no digging, no killing—”
I dig, Ponch said. I have to put my bones somewhere! Otherwise the dogs down the street might get them. And I carry things. Balls and sticks, mostly. But only when I want to. And as for the killing— He sounded a little wistful. It doesn’t happen that often, and only to the really stupid squirrels. I don’t usually get to catch the smart ones. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be, though. You have to send the stupid ones back so they can get it right the next time.
“But what a wonder to live in a world where there are next times,” Memeki said. “And to do what you want to do, not always what someone else says you must.”
You shouldn’t have to live a life like that, Ponch said. He was indignant. It’s terrible. Why don’t you come home with us! If you like caves, we have a cave under the house where you could stay.
Uh-oh! Kit thought, and his eyes opened wide in the dark as a series of truly terrible images started spreading themselves out in his mind. He could just imagine what his pop would think about Ponch bringing home a pet giant bug. He remembered his Popi’s reaction to all the neighbors’ dogs howling about nothing on the front lawn. Boy, once they got Memeki’s scent, would they have something to howl about then.
He was going to have to defuse Ponch’s idea as quickly as he could. Kit started to get up. Then he paused, for Memeki was saying, “It sounds wonderful—but I can’t leave here.”
Why not? They’re mean to you! Why should you stay?
Some seconds of silence passed. “Because this is my place,” Memeki said. “This is part of realizing that I’m an I. ” There was no more hesitation over the pronoun. “I’m here to do something. I must do it … as soon as I can work out what it is. But you give me a feeling that maybe things are not so terrible, if somewhere the killing doesn’t happen, if somewhere no one listens to every word you say and punishes you for the ones they think are bad. Someone should find a way for that to be the way things are here. Someone should do something!”
But why does it have to be you? Ponch said. He was sounding distressed now. You’re good! What if you do something, and then bad things happen to you? That wouldn’t be fair! In Ponch’s mind, Kit could just catch sensory echoes of things that had lately come to embody this unfairness for Ponch: the flower scent clinging to Kit’s clothes after Nita’s mom’s funeral, the faint cries of pain trapped in young Darryl’s mind during his seemingly endless Ordeal.
“Though it’s not fair, it might be right,” Memeki said. “If no one ever does anything, nothing will ever get better. Sometimes when I was young, I would go outside the City with the other moltlings, and in the forest we would hear the trees crying.” She shivered. “I always thought what the workers did to them was wrong somehow. But the Great One said that the City had to be bigger, so that there could be more warriors
to fight the Others, and there was no way for the City to be bigger without the paper that the workers make from the trees. Most Yaldiv didn’t care about the trees one way or another. And though their weeping troubled me, I’d never have dared say what I thought, because the warriors are always looking for anyone who says the wrong word. There’s never enough meat, and they get the first bite of any transgressor.”
Memeki shuddered again, but all the same, a new note started to creep into her voice, a sterner tone. “Yet I grew angry. I said to myself, if ever I could do something to stop the trees’ pain, I will. And later, after the Honor came upon me, I began to wonder: would they dare touch me if I spoke now? For I remembered what I’d said, and I could still hear the weeping in my heart, though a Yaldah who’s been favored by the King can’t leave the City.” Memeki rustled a little, a gesture like a sigh. “I was almost ready to speak. Then I turned around and saw Yaldiv in the tunnel who weren’t Yaldiv, and the world went strange… Now what I said comes back to me. If what the other Voice inside him says is true—” and she glanced over in Ronan’s direction— “if I’m truly one who can do something, if things here can be made different—”
Ponch whined once, way down in his throat. I’m afraid for you. Even when people mean to do good things, bad things happen in the world.
“They’re happening already,” Memeki said. “Pretending they’re not won’t help.”
Memeki began to tremble again. Once again, through Ponch, Kit felt the tremor—and another one, something that felt like it was happening under the floor. Uh-oh! Kit thought. Is this place earthquake-prone?
He started to get up, but the tremor subsided. I still think you should come home with us, Ponch said.
“But this is home,” Memeki said. She still sounded sad, but there was a touch of affection in her voice. “And if it can be made more like yours…”
They went on arguing, if it was actually an argument. That little shake was weird, Kit thought, reaching sideways into the air to retrieve his manual from its otherspace pocket. The last thing we need right now is to find that we’re sitting on some kind of volcanic plug. But if we are, it’s better to know about it.
He opened the manual and paged through it to the marked section that dealt with Rashah’s physical structure and characteristics. Kit flipped through to the page that showed mapping references for their present location, then zoomed in on the massive outcropping of rock that concealed the cavern. The schematic on the page shifted to show a wire-frame diagram of the cavern’s structure. Kit put out a finger and drew it down the schematic: the image obeyed his gesture and the wire frame changed scale to show the structure of the underlying stone. He studied it carefully, and let out a breath. Okay, at least there’s no lava or anything like that moving around down there. I feel better.
“…but why can’t I?” Memeki was saying. “Why wouldn’t it be right to change the way things are? The Great One has been telling everyone what was right for—for forever—and nothing’s any better! Maybe it’s time to try something different! To stand up and decide something different for ourselves, and not wait to be told.”
But you might get it wrong!
“Maybe we will. But that’s no reason not to do anything. Maybe someone else got it wrong, too, did the wrong thing a long time ago. If they did, why shouldn’t we fix it? And whether they did or not, what’s important is to make it right now. No matter what that takes.”
And without waiting for anyone to tell you it’s right, Ponch said, very slowly. Just look to see what went wrong, what needs fixing, and then fix it? All by yourself?
There was a very long pause. “I think so.”
A shiver, a jingle of dog-license tags. It sounds scary.
Kit looked over the underground schematic for a moment more before getting ready to put it away. Interesting, he thought, seeing that there appeared to be several minor interconnecting caverns underneath the large one. The stone’s structure seemed a lot more intricate than he’d thought from Ronan’s description—
He felt another tremor, stronger this time. Okay, just what is that? Kit thought, glancing down one last time at the schematic. And then he was shocked to see that one of those smaller caverns somehow looked longer than it had a moment ago.
He went cold with fear. I should have looked at this before! Kit thought, scrambling to his feet as he stared at the manual. I knew I should have! “Life signs, quick!” he said to the manual.
The display shifted focus, and various colored sparks of light appeared in it, some of them haloed to show that they were in a “mitigating” field, which meant one or another of the pup tents. Three Earth-humans, one Earth dog, one Wellakhit humanoid, one Yaldiv female—Kit blinked at the fog of life signs associated with Memeki. But of far more concern were the eight, nine, ten other life signs down there in one of those narrow caverns, and getting closer—
Kit plunged out of his pup tent, shouting, “Incoming!” He also really wanted to shout, “Ronan, how the heck did you miss this!”—but it would have been a waste of time. He felt another rumble underfoot as the others burst out of their own pup tents, as Ponch and Memeki looked up in alarm.
“What is it?”
“What’s going on?”
“They’re digging up from underneath!” Kit said. “It’s solid rock underneath there; how are they able to do that?”
Ronan looked completely stricken, but for the moment all he did was point the Spear of Light at the spot on the floor where, slowly, with a noise like a series of muffled gunshots, a thin crack had begun stitching its way across the cavern floor, and the stone to either side of it was humping up in fragmenting slabs.
Dairine looked at Roshaun. Roshaun nodded. “How many?” she said to Kit.
Kit glanced down at the manual. “Nine,” he said, “no, ten that I can see.”
“Someone’s started paying attention,” Dairine said, frowning. She reached into the air beside her and came out with what Kit could only think of as a lightning bolt, writhing and jumping in her hand and looking positively eager to be flung at something. “What do you think?”
Roshaun looked over at her, then at Kit. “Once we have stopped this incursion,” he said, “I can make sure that no more are able to use that route.”
Underfoot, that rumbling got louder. “Okay,” Kit said. “Try not to mess up the mochteroofs!”
“Leave that with me,” Filif said.
And then everything started happening at once.
The crack burst open, scattering shattered stone and rock dust in all directions, and Yaldiv warriors started clambering up out of it. The first two vanished in a burst of fire from Ronan’s spear, but within a second two more had come up. Dairine came up behind Ronan and threw the blinding bolt she was holding. The second pair of Yaldiv vanished. Then came three more, only one from the spot where the first two had appeared, for the crack kept on stretching and widening across the cavern, making room for more and more of the Yaldiv to enter. A secondary crack split away from the main, still-forming crevasse, toward the mochteroofs, and first one, then a second mochteroof started to pitch down into it. But Filif was already reaching out fronds to them, and in a glow of dark green light, all the mochteroofs together floated up and away from the widening crevasse in the floor. Kit leveled his own weapon and took out one of the next pair of Yaldiv warriors; Ronan destroyed its companion. Only a few more, Kit thought. Only a few—
But it wasn’t only a few. Easily another five or six came clambering up along the length of the crevasse. They were waiting out of range, Kit thought, and glanced around the cavern in the beginnings of a panic. Now what? How are we going to get all this stuff out of here, and Memeki—
And that was another problem, for the next few Yaldiv to come up from under immediately charged at Memeki with claws open. Ponch leaped out from beside her, snarling. Oh no! Kit thought, and dashed over toward the two of them with his personal force shield turned up higher than he’d ever had it before, saying
the words necessary to fling it well out to either side of him, far enough to cover Ponch and Memeki until he could get to them. He could feel the power flowing out of him and into the shield in tremendous amounts. But as he got close enough to Ponch and the terrified Memeki to seal the shield completely around them, and the Yaldiv warriors began throwing themselves up against the shield, Kit started to wonder whether, even with the augmented energy, he and the others were going to be able to hold their own. The Yaldiv have been augmented too, Kit thought. That’s how they were able to tunnel up through the stone— He concentrated on keeping the warriors away from the crouching handmaiden. “Ronan!” Kit yelled.
Blast after blast from the Spear of Light picked off Yaldiv after Yaldiv, but there always seemed to be more. Any time Ronan flagged, Dairine was there with her pocket thunderbolt. But the Yaldiv kept coming, and more and more of them were piling themselves against Kit’s shield, scrabbling at it like mad things, apparently willing to sacrifice themselves for the chance that one of their number might be able to get through. The Great One’s decided it doesn’t have to do anything but use these things to wear us down, Kit thought. But something’s made it wake up all of a sudden. What? We have to find out.
“Roshaun?” Kit shouted, watching Dairine blast several more Yaldiv to nothing. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Might be smart not to wait!”
“I hear you,” Roshaun said. He was standing there, as often, with a little light in his hand, his implementation of the manual. Now he gazed into it and began to speak, and it began to glow more brightly. “This is an argasth-type implementation,” he said in the Speech, “requiring a median-level transposition of—”
Down at the far end of the crevasse, something went BANG!, the abnormally loud sound of a worldgating in an enclosed space where the air was more than usually well sealed in. Then came another loud report, and another, the sound of some kind of energy weapon. Kit’s heart froze as a Yaldiv fell over, and behind it, through the dust and smoke kicked up by the fighting, he could faintly see a human shape glance around her and swing the long, lean shape of a wizardly accelerator up to her shoulder. Kit swallowed hard. Of all the times Nita could have turned up, this was both the best and the worst. She started firing.
