Context (38 page)

Slowly, Ro and Luís urged their
mounts into motion. There was a reassuring gurgle from the saddlebags: full
water bottles. Strands and EveryWare notwithstanding, this was still a desert
they were riding into. A place of danger.

And death was no abstraction.
Anne-Louise’s murder had taught her that.

As
she rode, she thought about Flight Officer Armstrong Neil, and the meeting with
Ilse Schwenger which was surely prearranged, but whose purpose remained a
mystery. It was the next morning that she had learned of the field trip to
IllinoisCentral, the second-busiest spaceport on the continent: an unexpected
bonus for an intern who was new to DistribOne.

Frau Doktor Schwenger, pulling
strings?

And this was what Ro had seen, as
she sat with her strand’s analysis displays pulsing and scrolling, and watched
the departure lounge:

An old woman, bent with care and
paranoid mistrust, carrying her own baggage while an empty smartcart trailed
almost plaintively behind her; a newly married triple, voluptuous fem-bi
linking arms with her blushing partners, wedding-glitter sparkling on their
slash-cut suits; a large family, farewell tears tracking down their cheeks,
followed by a small convoy of heaped smartcarts—emigrating offworld; a teenage
boy, wired with excitement, his wide-eyed stare brightening when he saw Ro.

Behind the swirling crowd, the
vendors: faint warm scents of toffee-ants—nouveau africain vite-cuisine—and
butter-fried cicada-chews; of beer (inadvisable before a mu-space voyage’s
delta-coma) and fresh-fruit shakes; of dark rich coffee.

Later, Ro had been the last one
into the small private lounge, where the other researchers were already
breaking off chunks of caramel doughnut, sipping espressos.

‘... got Jim bumped off the list,’
one of them was saying.

‘Must be someone’s little flooz—’

Their voices died as Ro stepped
inside.

‘So
... “He went to town”.’ Ro shifted in her saddle, trying to ignore the chafing.
‘How would I say that? “He went”.’

They were a world away from UNSA
and its bureaucratic machinations, in a desert which stretched to the horizon
in every direction, looking stark and eternal—except that once, in its
geological past, the wide sands had formed a sea floor, while strange forms,
few of which would leave any traces for the curious hairless primates to
follow, swam in the warm, salty waters which covered it, thinking mysterious
thoughts, hunting their exotic prey.

‘That depends.’ A tight smile. ‘The
verb expresses the method of locomotion.
Kintahgóó ‘o’ooldloozh
if he
travelled on horseback,
kintahgóó bit ‘o’oot’a’
if he flew.’

Ro blinked. The hot dry air was
making her sleepy.

‘You mean, “rides” and “flies”.
But what is the simple verb: “to go”?’

Luís shook his head. ‘The verb is
bound up with context, always. There are different words for travel on foot, or
mounted, by ground vehicle, or by air.’ Luís made a gesture with his mouth
which Ro could not interpret. ‘And, for the same mode, different terms
depending on speed.’

‘But—’

‘Also, if there are several
possible consequences, the verb choice reflects the result. Or the frequency:
to do a thing once, to do it many times on one occasion, to repeat it on many
separate occasions ...They’re different words. Different
ideas.’

‘My God.’ A linguistic
timelessness? An alternative concept of cause and effect? ‘That’s amazing.’

What difference might it make to
her worldview if she were fluent enough to think in Navajo?

And when the People, the
dine’
é,
feared evil
chindhí
spirits, did they sense something real and
tangible which poor non-Navajos, bound by their limited ways of perception,
simply could not see?

Superstitious nonsense.

Ro touched her heels to Quarrel’s
flanks, increasing the pace.

In
the sweaty darkness, the Singer’s—Luís’s uncle’s—lined face was a graven
ancient mask, whose eyes had looked on sights no man should experience. The
hogan’s interior was not small, but the dark air seemed to draw in, to vibrate
with resonance as the chant continued.

It was a Far Voyage Way, a family
Sing, and it gradually dawned on Ro that the ceremony was focused on Luís.

There were six Navajo men and two
women, besides the Singer and Luís. All were family members, though clan
kinship was another complex relationship Ro had not deciphered: in some sense,
everyone belonged to two tribes—born
into
the maternal clan, and
for
the
father’s.

As the ceremony drew on, the
mundane world—that manufactured illusion of consensual reality—slowly receded,
and the hogan defined the cosmos, where Luís, like a bronze warrior from olden
times, was bright in its firmament. Ro felt herself swaying, lost in the
rhythms of the Sing, enchanted by the gestures, entranced by the repeated
elaborate giving of turquoise and bright shells: always the same four colours
(white, yellow, blue, black); always the fourfold repetition in the chants.

One of the women, leaning close
to Ro so she could whisper, translated part of a story: of Coyote, the
Trickster, gambling all in an eating contest. Using his supernatural abilities
to eat not just the food, but the plates and even the tabletop as well.

But Ro, brought up on Norse
legends, already knew the tale, except there the Trickster was Loki. And eating
contests were a fantasy of starving folk, like 1930s Depression-struck America.

‘I am the Trickster, and I dance
upon the boundary between Chaos and Order, the Dark and the Light.’
The woman’s whisper, in
counterpoint to the Singer’s octave-wide range of chants, became hypnotic.
‘For
the Holy People know the Four Houses: Dark Wave to the north, Gravity to the
south, Strong Nuclear to the east and Electroweak to the west. And I move among
them...
’

Luís had said that ceremonies
continued to evolve: he had not mentioned they included unified matrix theory,
the Fourfold Way.

Ro watched him now: face bronze,
then gold, in the flickering firelight.

You’re the one.

They hadn’t even kissed, but she
was sure.

Around them, the chanting, the
flames and the dancing shadows: but she was aware only of Luís, and the
tangible bond coalescing between them.

‘And the locusts broke through
the sky’s blue shell, into the world above where the Yellow Grasshopper People
lived

Different races, ascending
through stratified worlds until finally, the
dine’ é,
the People, were
born of First Man and First Woman.

Hours passed.

Or centuries. Stars tumbled, nova
heat burned, and pulsating darkness took hold.

Sharp scent of mesquite.

I’m having a vision.

But that was a metathought, soon
discarded.

The world faded.

A chesspiece upon an infinite
board. A solitary king
—

The piece. Why was it important?

Anne-Louise. It floated, above
her body.

Board shrinking, rotating. It was
eight-squared now, in normal planar dimensions, and the piece occupied the
seventh rank upon the fifth file. The realization came to her: it was not the
piece, but its
position
which held import.

Keep that thought...

Fighting to hold the vision: but
that was a bagatelle, a surface illusion, before the deeper dream which was to
come.

No—

But her strength was insufficient
to hold the chessboard or reality—the smoke-filled hogan—in her mind.

And then it was upon her.

Adrift
in a golden sea.

The universe she had always
dreamed of.

Golden amber, and the floating
stars: fractal, black. Spongiform absences of light.