Barsk (11 page)

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AS
she opened her eyes to darkness, Lirlowil knew she'd been unconscious. Something had gone very wrong. A traditional summoning would have ended, the efficacy of the koph long since passed from her physical body and normal consciousness returned whether she willed it or not. That hadn't happened. In the reality of the station, she floated in the null field of her room, her body in a vaguely seated position, though her limbs hung lax, her muscles flaccid. Her eyes gazed languidly at nothing and her jaw had fallen open. She bumped from one wall to another, driven by the faint jets of the room's air system. She moved with excruciating slowness, but as she was completely unaware of it, it hardly mattered. Eventually, after many rebounds and continued drifting, she would pass into the globule of water in the middle of the room, and either recover or drown.

“You still don't understand, do you?” hissed Margda. “Silly child, haven't you ever thought it through?” The voice moved around her and Lirlowil tried to orient upon it. It seemed at once to be near and far, above, below, within, beyond. She paddled against the water, far more water than should have been around her. Her head broke the surface but still all she saw was darkness. Nothing of her bedroom remained.

“Only those with intelligence, with souls, emit nefshons. What then, my fuzzy little Speaker, is the stuff of the setting created for yourself and your conversant?” Lirlowil trembled. Margda's voice seemed to be whispering to her from inside herself, as if the faint exhalation of her words could be felt upon her skin.

“It comes from your mind, dear Otter, from your desperate need for order and structure. It is the Speaker who imposes reality upon this realm, forcing her own perceptions of dimension and texture into the summoning. It is all an illusion that you provide, because mortal minds find comfort in the familiar, concrete settings.”

“Then … where…” stammered Lirlowil.

“Where are we? Or, where did your room go?” Margda sounded like she was smiling.

“Both. Either. I don't understand … I summoned you! How can this be happening?”

And there was light. It came into existence as though it had always been there, Lirlowil's eyes already adapted to the level. A breeze laden with a faint resinous aroma and heavy humidity made her whiskers twitch. And gravity. Lirlowil found herself standing now, her feet flat against a broad wooden floor which in turn was part of a larger wooden room. Wall hangings composed of an impossible number of shades of green surrounded her. The Matriarch of Barsk sat on a large polished knob of wood that seemed to grow out of the floor.

“Welcome to my home, little Otter. I don't suppose it exists any more, but I remember it well enough.” The Lutr gawked, even as she realized she was acting like a newly summoned conversant herself. If the Fant noticed she gave no indication and instead continued her oration. “But, to answer your question, it happened because I wanted it to. And it is my desire, not yours, that shapes things here.”

“But you said it was the Speaker who controlled the environment.”

“Yes, and so it is, when the Speakers' laws are followed. But you broke the first rule of our Edict and summoned another Speaker. There are consequences that you must deal with.”

“So … if someone, another Speaker, were to summon me, I'd be able to do … this?” Lirlowil's thoughts tumbled over themselves, rearranging her understanding of her profession.

Margda stiffened on her seat. Her pallor darkened, her wrinkled skin grew drier and older. All semblance of life drained away. As Lirlowil watched, the Fant transformed into a withered husk as the centuries since her death caught up. Moments later, speckles of green appeared on the remains of her skin and quickly spread. A coating of moss, as fine as an infant's fur covered her. It thickened. Tiny leaves emerged here and there, followed quickly by stems, which in turn unfurled and blossomed with flowers. The limbs of the Matriarch's aged corpse cracked, revealing bare wood. Twigs emerged, swelled, and grew into tree limbs. The gray toga tore as the Matriarch-turned-tree stretched it beyond the shapes of a mortal body, removing the last vestige or hint that a person had ever sat there.

Lirlowil could only gape in silence. This wasn't possible. Even in the construct-space of a summoning, it could not be.

“Do you really imagine it likely that anyone would ever have interest in summoning you?” Lirlowil whirled as Margda's voice came from behind her. “Besides, there's a part of you that insists reality follow the same parameters it always has, even here. That attachment to the way things work in the living world precludes this kind of manipulation. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of spending a good portion of time, when I was alive, in the paroxysms of my own insanity. Rather liberating, in its own way.”

Lirlowil reeled around, then back again, glancing from flowering tree to long dead conversant, and back. And then she fainted.

“Damn,” Margda sighed. With a mental gesture she unmade the tree that had so unnerved her summoner. With another she caused the Lutr's body to float once more, move across the room, and settle on the cushions of the window seat that looked out on the warm green of a time long past. “Poor child. I didn't think to shock you quite so much. Ah, but it's nice to know that even dead I can still learn new things. Who would have thought a nefshon construction could lose consciousness?”

 

NINE

A VOICE OF SILENCE

EVEN
while he'd been wailing, a part of Rüsul had heard every word the Cans had spoken. They'd called it a cell but it felt more like a box, like a giant version of a plastic cube that he had seen as a child when his island's mayor had received a mis-addressed shipment from the Alliance's Committee for Cultural Exchange. He could no longer recall what it had held, but the plastic container had captured his imagination like some inanimate monster that lived in a child's night terrors.

His cell wasn't all that larger than the near-forgotten shipping crate of his youth. It was tiny, not quite as small as the water closet in most bachelor homes, but it felt like it was, lacking either purpose or window or anything that might be reassuring or familiar. What kind of people would put the Dying in a box? What kind of people would keep the Dying from their appointment with death? Rüsul couldn't tell how long he'd been held captive. Without weather, how could there be time? Without the thrum of life in wood and rain, how could existence continue? The light from the box's ceiling and walls was constant, and though dim its harsh white stung his eyes. The walls stank of plastic. The flooring stank of metal. A container of slop had appeared soon after his incarceration. They might have meant him to believe it to be food, but it had a similar chemical odor as the walls and just as easily could have been intended as paint to cover the plastic. Rüsul was more inclined to use it for the latter, but he lacked a proper tool for its application and couldn't bring himself to touch the stuff with fingers or nubs. He certainly wasn't going to eat it until hunger drove him to desperate measures. Fortunately, the oppressive plastic stench all around him suppressed his appetite.

He huddled in the middle of the box, succumbing to a claustrophobia he hadn't known he possessed. His heart raced like it wanted to lunge from his clammy chest. He couldn't still the wild trembling of his ears or the shivering of his trunk. It wasn't just the unnatural substance of the walls, or even the dry air that tasted like nothing at all. The panic coursing through him came from the shattered promise his world had made with him, that once he had launched his raft and set out to die he would never after be enclosed by anything but the walls of the world itself. The horrific setting exacerbated the anxiety, but he would probably have felt a lesser kin of it had he been forced to stay back home in his studio, or anywhere in any island's Civilized Wood. The time for such things had passed, but he had been pulled outside of time.

Rüsul strove to occupy as small a footprint of contact with the metal flooring as possible, equidistant from the box's four walls. He kept his eyes squeezed shut against the painful light, and rocked in place, wishing he had a chock of wood in one hand and a familiar knife in the other, just to lapse into the ritual comfort of carving and calm the beating of his heart. Rüsul had spent his entire adult life shaping wood, setting up shop in the Civilized Wood of one island or another for a few years until the need to see newer faces sent him on his way again. It had been a good life, making art and making friends, and he had no regrets. But it was over and done. He was Dying now. Everything came back to that, and he could not wrap his head around it. Why would anyone interfere with it?

He rubbed at his eyes, red and aching. His throat was sore and his trunk felt raw, but other than chasing his captors away, his wailing hadn't accomplished anything. He didn't want to stop, but he just couldn't physically cry any longer. Worse, he couldn't catch his breath. Rüsul knew he'd been hyperventilating for some while now. His heart hurtled toward exhaustion and a kind of escape. His feet hurt like he'd climbed down to the Shadow Dwell and back up, over and over. And he had the grandmother of all headaches pounding away with the kind of persistence only a grandmother could muster.

This last discomfort began to overpower the others. It expanded down from his head, reaching throughout his neck, down into his shoulders and chest, a low, dull thrumming that was more than the sound of his blood rushing within him or the pumping of his own heart. The beat was rhythmic. It held a pattern, one that felt as old and familiar as the pain in his joints, or older still, hearkening back to a time long before the aches of age. And odder still, as he paid it more attention, he discovered the throbbing existed outside himself.

Rüsul opened his eyes, blinking away tears. He moved his empty hands in the motions of carving, trying to center himself and halt or at least slow his rapid breathing. The stupid light of his box was just stupid light, and his hands knew his art well enough to do their work in dark and storm. He had no need to make the light mean anything more than a pesky circumstance, like a neighbor's newborn testing out a healthy set of lungs while he tried to work. He shaped empty air with a nonexistent blade and calm settled upon him. His eyes closed of their own accord, his own lungs settled into a relaxed pace. The throbbing in his forehead continued even as the other complaints and outcries of his body began to fade into the background. It came into focus, not a headache at all, and not coming from his head but only resonating there in that space between his eyes and above the root of his trunk. It played in him like he was a living soundbox, a sensation both familiar and impossible to place.

With his eyes still closed, Rüsul rose on unsteady knees. He turned from the waist, rotating his chest and shoulders back and forth in as wide an arc as he could. He leaned back, keeping his jaw pressed down against his chest, and presented the broad surface of his face to the walls of the box his captors had put him in. There. It was coming from that direction. He pushed up, onto his feet, dragging them in tiny steps toward one wall, stopping when his forehead touched the plastic surface. He recoiled half a step, arms lax at his side, letting the fullness of the thrumming beat enter his head and travel through his body.

In that moment Rüsul forgot his own pains. He heard, he felt, a meaning in the faint but persistent pounding. It was a rhyme of changing pressure, a child's game as universal as green leaves and falling rain. One would hide and the others would search and whosoever discovered the hidden child would in turn hide and the game continue, on and on. In the opening spaces of his skull, Rüsul felt the refrain he'd not made for almost ninety years, the faint pounding of infrasonic signals,
where, oh where, play fair, be there,
over and over again.

He opened his eyes. A slight turn of his head, to first one side and then the other, assured him he had targeted correctly. He leaned in, pressing his head against the wall, no longer caring about its alien plastic or the light or the closeness of his box. Somewhere beyond this wall, close enough to be felt, another Fant called out in the wordless way that children had used to tease their playmates, or when lost to cry out for their missing parents. Rüsul was not alone.

The decades of adult life dissolved in his mind. From dusty, untraveled corridors of memory he grasped after knowledge and skills untouched since childhood. The rules and rhythms of the games flittered on the edge of knowing, like a word dancing just out of reach on the tip of the tongue. After a few false starts, they came to him, each fragment trailing other memories and pieces until he had enough. His eyelids drifted down once more and with long forgotten ease he flexed and pulsed out the prescribed reply.
Hiding … Abiding … Will you be confiding?

Over and over again he sent out the rhythms, more a well-learned pattern than actual words. He repeated it twelve times in all, as required by the game, lest he be forfeit. The idea struck him as so absurd he almost giggled and had to start again. Almost.

With his first pulse, the other Fant's infrasound had stopped. As Rüsul completed his cycle he felt a probing, meaningless pulses pushed out by the other in a rush of echolocation. A flush of relief and comfort washed over him like he hadn't felt since he'd wandered away from his mother as an infant and found her questing pulse before he had a chance to wallow in his own panic. And then, clearer, no doubt aimed directly at him as he had locked onto the position of the other Fant, as welcome and rare as sunshine upon his face, the classic reply:

Free … Free … Tree and me … Free …

Rüsul slipped to his knees in silence. The enormity and horror of his capture fell away. He thrummed back a reply of
Free …
even as he allowed the shock and fatigue to claim him. As he plunged into unconsciousness his face relaxed into a smile. He was not alone.