Raising The Stones (20 page)

Zilia, accompanied by China Wilm, made straight for the temple of Bondru Dharm. When she got there, she turned, glared, and asked, as China had almost known she would, “Someone destroyed it, didn’t they? Who was it, really?”

China shook her head. “I’m sure you’ve seen the report I sent to CM, Zilia. Sam assigned me as your escort just so I could tell you about it personally. I was right here when it happened, and nobody did it. The thing just fell in. The Theckles were here, too. You can ask them.”

“I find that very hard to believe,” Zilia sniffed, watching China from the corner of her eye, “considering the way you all felt about the God.”

“I think most of us rather liked Bondru Dharm,” China commented, not at all put off by Zilia’s manner, which everyone in Hobbs Land had encountered at one time or another. “Actually, Zilia, I don’t think you have any idea how we felt about Bondru Dharm. He was ours. He was Settlement One’s own thing. It was kind of prestigious to have something none of the other settlements had. We rather liked it.”

“You didn’t pay any attention to it!” Zilia charged, as though this neglect had been China’s personal fault, and ignoring the fact that in the two years Zilia had been on Hobbs she herself had visited Bondru Dharm only once. “None of you paid attention to the God.”

“Most of us didn’t,” China admitted, “but your inference from that fact is all wrong. Most of us went to a sacrifice maybe once a year, out of curiosity more than anything. But we all put in our share to support Vonce and Birribat, and they spent all their time maintaining the temple and serving the God, which means they spent no time helping with production. Settlements aren’t required to support nonproductive personnel, except for children and the disabled and their own retirees. In this case, we all voted to do it, and, as I recall, it was a unanimous vote.”

Zilia shook her head in her customary expression of skeptical disbelief and turned back along the road toward the recreation building where Sal was flirting with Horgy. Zilia ignored them, taking plenty of time to peer into each of the other ruined temples as they went by. When she and China came up to Sal and Horgy, Zilia interrupted their fun to say she was going on out the north road to inspect the other ruins. Horgy let go of Sal’s hand, which he had been stroking in a suggestive way, and said he’d go along.

China gave Sal an exasperated glance, which Sal ignored, and they walked on toward the northern edge of the settlement. On the way they picked up the other two visitors with their escorts—Jebedo and Fearsome Quillow, uncle and mother, respectively, of Gotoit and Sabby Quillow—outside the Supply and Administration building. All eight of them continued northward along the dusty road, all the settlement people except Sal, who had enjoyed flirting with Horgy, feeling that this visitation was a total waste of valuable time.

As they crossed the stream north of the settlement, they were joined by children: the two Tillan boys and all four of the Quillow kids, as well as Jeopardy and Saturday Wilm—the entire wolf-cedar logging crew. Horgy and Zilia led the group, closely followed by Spiggy and Jamice, as they strode up the slope to the temple.

Though the CM people had noticed the restored roof while they were still a good distance away, no one said anything until they were close enough to be sure it was no illusion. It was Zilia who put what they were all wondering into the most accusatory words possible.

“On whose authority was this temple rebuilt?”

Jebedo and Fearsome stared at the roof with their mouths open and shook their heads to say they didn’t know what it was or who had done it. Sal was equally ignorant. China had a kind of idea, based on something Africa had told her. “The children did it as a recreational learning experience,” she said mildly.

“On whose authority,” Zilia quivered. “Who gave them permission?”

“I don’t think they needed authorization or asked for permission,” China found herself saying in a dead-calm voice, without emotion or apprehension. “You didn’t ask anyone, did you, Jep?”

“No, Ma’am. We didn’t think anyone would care,” said Jep in an equally casual tone. “It’s outside the settlement proper but within the utilization zone, so we didn’t need to ask CM. We did it outside schooling time, a whole bunch of us, so we didn’t need our teachers’ permission. Since we were rebuilding, not tearing down, we didn’t need Ancient Monuments approval. The AM Panel directives say reconstruction doesn’t need approval. I did ask Aunt Africa about proper crew management when we put the roof on, and some of the grown-ups helped with that.”

“I don’t think anyone knew they were doing it until the job was nine-tenths completed,” remarked Sal in the same disinterested voice China had just used.

Zilia started a complaint with, “You can’t just let your children … ,” and Spiggy laid his hands on her shoulders, calming her down.

“Come on, Zil. No damage done. For heaven’s sake, girl! Make up your mind. The kid is right! This is exactly what the Native Matters Advisory would like to see done, isn’t it? Exactly what
you’d
like to have had the Ancient Monuments Panel doing. Quit screaming about it and take a look.”

“Come see the beautiful job they’ve made of it,” called Jamice from the temple doorway. “Look at these mosaics, Zilia. If you’d had artists sent in from Phansure, they couldn’t have done better. And see how neatly the children have laid the roof logs.” She went in, still talking, leaving the others to follow.

The children sat down where they were, watchful but quiet. After a time the visitors came out of the temple, trailed by their settlement escorts, the latter looking slightly puzzled though not at all concerned.

The children rose politely, as they had been taught to do in the presence of elders.

“Are you going to reconstruct another of the temples?” Jamice asked them, using her sweetest tone of voice. She was moved to make much of the children, partly by her scorn for Zilia Makepeace, and partly by her well-developed esthetic sense. The graceful complexity of the designs in the newly laid floors had impressed her greatly.

“No, Ma’am,” said Saturday in her most courteous voice. “We don’t plan to. It was very hard work, and we learned just about everything there was to learn about it.”

One of the men was watching her very closely, a rather ugly man. He smiled at her, and she blushed, suddenly realizing who he was. He wasn’t nearly as ugly as Africa had said.

“What are you going to do with it, now that it’s done?” the ugly man wanted to know. It was the same question Gotoit Quillow had asked, months before. Now, as then, no one answered it. Saturday looked at the questioner from beneath her lashes, shrugging. Jeopardy glanced at Willum R.

“Would you like to come to our Settlement Series tonight?” Willum R. asked Spiggy, with an ingenuous smile and a gesture indicating that all the visitors were included in the invitation. “We’re playing Settlement Three, and winner gets to play Settlement Four in the semifinals.”

•
Guest quarters in
Settlement One, as in all the settlements, were on the upper floor of the Supply and Administration building: half a dozen bedrooms with bath and sanitary facilities, a kitchen, and a comfortable room furnished with information stages, which could be used for relaxation or meetings or work. As was customary during visitations by CM staffers, a kitchen crew had been detailed to cook for the visitors.

The people from CM were served a plentiful and well-prepared supper, after which they separated: Horgy and Jamice going off to attend the game they’d been invited to by Willum R; Spiggy and Zilia announcing their intention of taking a walk out to see the place Sam had been attacked. Once Horgy and Jamice had left, however, the other two found reasons to put off their exercise, lingering over the cheese, sweet filled cakes, and dried fruits which had been served as “finishers.”

“What are these?” wondered Spiggy.

“Plum willow,” she said. “They grow here and over around Settlement Five.”

“Amazing,” Spiggy murmured. “I’ve been here for over fifteen lifeyears, the last six in management, and I’m still learning things every day. You know a remarkable amount to have been here such a brief time.”

“My father always said I was a fast learner. And it’s been almost two years, now.”

“You came from Ahabar, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“You used the word
father
. Hardly anyone does, unless they’re from Ahabar.”

“I was born on Ahabar, in the southern counties of Voorstod. A county called Green Hurrah. I grew up mostly in the Celphian Rings.”

“I’ve never been to the Rings.”

“Nobody with any sense would ever go there.”

“You must have had some reason for being there.”

“My
father
was sure he could find moon-gems where other people had failed. Father always had this conviction that he was destined to succeed where others couldn’t. He took other people’s failures as favorable omens. If they couldn’t do it, he’d try it. If other people were successful at a given endeavor, father wasn’t interested. He needed to succeed at something other people had failed at. It made his life, and ours, a succession of disasters and disappointments. In the Rings, we lived in a environment container unit with a faulty recycler. Father was out prospecting for fire opals most of the time, and he got food at the outpost, but Mother finally died, mostly from malnutrition. I was very sick, too.”

“Your family had a marriage tradition?”

“All the Voorstoders do, yes. Mother was from there.”

“How do you feel about that tradition?” he asked curiously.

“After watching Mother wither away among the Rings? I feel the same way I feel about slavery and genocide,” she snarled at him. “Which are also Voorstod traditions. Why do you ask? Were you going to propose a contract.”

He laughed shakily, set back by her sudden ferocity. “No, I was just curious. Cultures with marriage traditions are so much in the minority, I find them exotic, that’s all. I’m from Thyker, and Thykerites regard marriage as a kind of slavery. I know Voorstod has one of the old tribal religions that allows slavery.”

“That insists upon slavery,” she spat. “They have an interesting doctrine. According to the prophets, the only men who are free are those who do only what they want to. Doing what someone else wants you to is the sign of a slave. However, since there are always things that must be done, but that no one wants to do, a free man must have slaves to do those things. According to the Voorstoders, slavery is God’s signs of approval to his people. It isn’t allowed, it’s required.” She made an angry sound and rubbed her forehead, “Luckily, my father’s family wasn’t pure Voorstoder. In Green Hurrah there’s been intermarriage for generations.”

“So, how did you get away from the Rings?”

“After Mother died, Authority wouldn’t let my father leave me in the Environmental Containment Unit alone. Child endangerment, it’s called. At the time I thought that was pretty funny. Wife endangerment isn’t a crime under the Authority—or among the Voorstoders. Perhaps they see women as consumables—and if the child is with the wife, you can endanger them both and nobody cares. Once the mama dies leaving minor girl children, though, then the Authority gets very exercised. Some kind of incest taboo, probably, for the Authority certainly has no religion to move it in that direction. My father sent me back to Grandmother Makepeace, and I left as soon as I could. Fifteen years ago now.”

“That long.”

She fished in the neck of her blouse for the life-timer which hung between her breasts, flicked open the cover and read the numbers glowing at her. “This read almost sixteen when I got off the moons. It reads thirty now. Almost fifteen lifeyears.” She subsided, simmering.

He said nothing more but merely stood at the window, watching the darkness come down. Gradually she calmed as the quiet remained unbroken. In the kitchen, the settler crew finished cleaning up and left, one man poking his head through the door to ask what time they wanted breakfast.

“We said we were going walking,” Spiggy suggested, when the kitchener had gone.

She shook her head. “It occurs to me that going out in the dark to a place a settler was attacked by a large unknown predator may not be very intelligent.”

He nodded. “You have a point. Would you like a game of some kind? Chess, maybe. Or four-way?”

She shook her head, rose, and went to the window where she stood, looking out at the settlement. “What did you think of that temple. The one the kids rebuilt. Or say they rebuilt.”

“Do you really doubt they did it?”

She thought about it, trying to set her usual skepticism aside. “Not really, I guess. But I don’t believe they thought it up all by themselves.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of the amount of work involved. I looked at the ruined temples in the settlement. I estimate there’s somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred square feet of mosaic in the floors with four or five hundred stones to the square foot. There’s over two thousand square feet of roof, with clay laid several inches thick over all of it. The labor involved …”

Spiggy shook his head at her, grinning.

“Why are you grinning at me?”

“When I was about eleven, back in Serena on Thyker, where I grew up, six of my friends and I built a clubhouse. We dug a tunnel over twenty feet long, shored it up and cased it with sponge panels we stole from a construction site. Then we dug a twenty-by-twenty cave, eight feet high. It took us one whole year, every spare minute we had. Nobody urged us to do it. Nobody even knew we were doing it. When we were finished with it, we used it half a dozen times, then we had some heavy rains and the thing collapsed, luckily not when we were in it. Kids do things like that. Of course, they’d think it was slavery if their parents wanted them to do it. Part of the attraction is that nobody knows, that it’s a secret.”

She shook her head at him. “I suppose that’s true, Spiggy, but the difference is that this temple isn’t going to collapse. Children can exert enormous amounts of energy, but when they build things, they usually do it as you and your friends did, not quite competently. They haven’t gained the experience and knowledge they would need to build competently. The temple we saw today couldn’t have been done better if the settlers had done it themselves under expert direction. I believe it’s exactly as it was originally. Where did the kids learn how?”