Raising The Stones (71 page)

Phaed was just ahead of him, talking to a circle of prophets.

“My son says the soldiers have gone to Ahabar, to Phansure. Already. Already killing everyone. They killed your families too. There aren’t any left …”

Sam moved gently through the hesitant group and took his father’s arm. “You should go tell the Awateh, shouldn’t you? Isn’t he up there ahead somewhere? Let’s go tell him, Dad.”

They began walking, arm in arm, Phaed stumbling from time to time. The dust fell endlessly from a green sky.

“Sing me a song, Dad,” said Sam. “Sing to me about the Gharm contract.”

Behind him the prophets sank to the ground, brushing fruitlessly at their eyes, at the corners of their mouths and nostrils. There was dust everywhere. Sam shook himself like a wet cat, arm by arm, leg by leg, and the dust flew away. Phaed trembled and brushed at himself, but the dust stayed, seemingly rooted into his skin, making him furry all over, as though he were covered in velvet.

“Sing to me about the Gharm contract, Dad?”

“Can’t remember,” said Phaed, wonderingly.

“Oh, but you sang it to Maire when you were courting. She told me. Maybe you and Mugal Pye sang it when you were making the gadgets that killed Stenta Thilion. Surely you remember the song?”

“No breath to sing.” Petulant now. “Can’t remember.”

“Tell it to me then, Dad. Tell me the story.”

“Stories like that aren’t for children.”

“But I’m grown now, Dad. I’m a man.”

“Not a free man. A man who does what other people tell him isn’t a free man.”

“But you do what the Awateh tells you.”

“That’s different. He speaks for God.”

“Tell me about your God, Dad. What kind of a thing is your God?”

“Demands … Obedience … From his sons … All his sons …”

“Does your god care about anything but men, Dad? Does he care about trees and birds and fish in the streams? Does he care about womenfolk? What about planets? Like that one the Gharmfolk had? The one Voorstod destroyed?”

“Demands …” said Phaed. It was all he said.

They walked on eastward. All around them the soldiers of Enforcement stood still, like monuments to a war which was not to be fought. Well, Sam had longed for monuments, and here they were. Lines of them, like standing stones. Towers of them. Menhirs. Dolmen. And among their immobile forms the shuffling prophets, still moving toward the east.

“Let’s tell them they can stop, Dad.”

Sam told them they could stop, and they did stop, falling to the ground in heaps, suddenly looking less manlike than plantlike, strange convoluted shapes, which took their outlines from natural things. Rocks. Brush. Low trees.

And at last, the final ones. Three figures moving as in a dream, slowly, almost floating.

“There’s the Awateh, Dad. He has two of his sons with him. I think we ought to tell him about the people all being dead, don’t you?”

They came up to the Awateh where he pushed forward like the prow of a boat, breasting the falling dust, tiny step after tiny step. “My son says,” said Phaed. “Already killing on Ahabar. On Phansure. On Thyker. Already dead, families, flocks, none left but us.”

The prophet’s sons dropped, unspeaking. The Awateh leaned forward. Only the white of his eyes showed clean in the enveloping growth, his eyes and his teeth when he opened his lips and said, “Done? All done? All dead?”

“All dead,” said Phaed. “All but us.”

“Not!” cried the Awateh. “Not! This one, here …” he turned the white orbs on Sam and raised one hand as though to strike. It stayed there like a stout branch, swaying but unbending. The eyes went. The teeth went. The shape grunted for a time, and then was silent.

Sam turned to his father and saw another stumpy and contorted thing with an eye and a mouth.

“Tricked us,” said Phaed Girat, the one clean eyeball gleaming in the starlight. “Didn’t you?”

“Not I, Dad,” said Sam, weeping. “God did it. He was waiting for you, not I. We were the bait in God’s trap, Saturday and I, sent to catch all Voorstod, Dad.”

The mouth went away. Wood grew over the eye. Sam sat down and cried, clinging to the harsh trunk, hearing for a time the breathing that went on.

“My father died, too,” whispered Theseus. “I went to find him, but because of me, he died. Some things … some things are better let alone. A man may not face both ways at once. If he looks back, he cannot look forward …” The voice faded into remote distance and was gone.

“Come home, Sam,” a voice in his ear. “Come home.”

He looked up to see her standing there, leaning forward, offering him her hands. “How did you find me, China Wilm?”

“China couldn’t come just now, but she thought you might be lonely,” the Tchenka said. “She sent me to tell you she has a new girl child, up on the escarpment. And she thought you might need some company—leaving these legends behind.”

He took the Tchenka by the hand, his eyes still filled with tears of grief for a man he had never known, could never have known, had only longed to have, as a man longs for dreams.

“I sought the wondrous thing,” he complained, like a sleepy child. “I did.”

“Well, Sam, didn’t you find it?” asked the Tchenka. “Maire knew what it was. Remember?”

He remembered. Maire had found it before him, long ago, when he was a child. She knew that ancient evils could be left behind. One could choose not to remember. One did not have to dig into the slime pits of old anger and old hate. Forgetting was possible. The Hobbs Land Gods would allow it. Would make it easy. The pits beneath the stone could be left empty forever, if he so chose.

“There are no legends here,” said Sam.

“That’s it,” said the Tchenka. “Come home, Sam.”

•
When the Royal
Marines reached Ninfadel, they found that the Porsa had overrun the heights and swallowed all the Voorstod families and flocks, as well as the Ahabarian guards and the Native Matters staff members, before deciding (in what passes among Porsa for decision) to go through the Door the prophets had left open behind them. Not all the Porsa had been involved. Only those who had been selectively and secretly breeding themselves to live at higher and higher altitudes. It took the xenologists some time to figure this out.

All of the high-altitude-tolerant individuals had gone, via Enforcement, to Authority. After eating everything organic that the soldiers had left edible on Authority, the Porsa had explored the moon and had found a convenient route left open to a Door marked
Noxious Waste
. It was known that Porsa could read. The words “noxious waste” had evidently been most attractive to them. All of them had gone away by that route.

Some persons were left alive upon Authority—those who had shut their doors, who had locked themselves in, who had kept quiet so the soldiers didn’t find them before the soldiers were stopped. For the soldiers had stopped, eventually. A woman had stopped them. She had shut herself into the robing room just off the Authority Chambers, where she was found sitting quietly behind a painted panel, reciting a phrase over and over before a red grill.

“The key for the last lock,” she said, again and again, not ceasing to do so even when the medical techs took her in charge.

Her name was Lurilile. She was the daughter of the Chief Counselor to the Queen of Ahabar, and she had shut the army down. She had done it alone because the two old men she had sent through the Door had emerged unconscious at the other end and had stayed that way for some little time. Partly because of her fortitude—and partly because no one had returned to Enforcement to send them—the soldiers who were to have killed everyone on Ahabar and Phansure and Thyker were still on Enforcement, immobilized for the foreseeable future and perhaps, so hoped Rasiel Plum to his old friend Notadamdirabong Cringh, forever.

•
It came to
be called the Greater Invasion of Hobbs Land. When it ended, the Baidee prisoners took up their labors once more. Most Hobbs Landians ignored them insofar as was possible, though some seemed inclined, in the emotional aftermath of their survival, to regard them more as misled accomplices than as instigators of violence. Within thirty or forty days, a few of the Baidee considered less culpable, or perhaps merely more personable, were recruited to sing in the CM choir, which they agreed to out of boredom as much as for any other reason. The choir, augmented by its Baidee members, sang when the new Horgy Endure was raised.

“Tell me about it,” Shan demanded from a Baidee who had sung on the occasion.

“Nothing to tell,” the man said. “They dug it up and brushed it off and put it in the temple, and then we sang ‘Rise Up, Ye Stones’ for awhile, and I came back here.”

Shan shook his head in disbelief. Here on Hobbs Land, he was a murderer. No one wanted to be his friend, or even his acquaintance. Churry’s men resented him. Except for Churry himself, who saw no point in blaming someone else for his own stupidity, Shan had no one to talk with about what he saw, what it meant, to have a God that grew underground, like a radish.

“What does it mean?” snarled Churry. “It means in primitive times men worshipped trees, or stones, or volcanoes. It means in Phansure men worship idols. It means on Thyker we worship the Overmind, of which no image exists. It means on Hobbs Land, men worship something that grows like a radish! That’s what it means!”

That wasn’t what it meant, as Shan had already puzzled out for himself, but he did not argue the matter. The work he was doing was so laborious that he was worn out by the time his shift ended. He had no energy left for argument, or for dreams. He didn’t care anymore whether he had been swallowed or not.

One evening, when their shift was over, Shan and Howdabeen were visited by Samasnier Girat.

“Tell me about your prophetess,” said Sam, to their astonishment and considerable discomfiture. “Tell me all about this Baidee prophetess.”

They told him about Morgori Oestrydingh, describing the advent of the old woman and the dragon as they had seen it in the temple a thousand times since childhood, reciting her words from memory. Sam listened, and went away, and came back again, asking them to repeat themselves.

“Your understanding is that the prophetess was seeking this lost race of beings, the Arbai, but she had not yet found them?”

Shan said that was true.

“And she was very old?”

“Very old. Her hair was white and wispy. It flew around her head like smoke.”

“One would think she would have taken someone younger with her,” said Sam. “To continue the search.”

Howdabeen Churry shook his head. He had never thought of that.

“This Door,” Sam said. “The one she came through, is it still there on Thyker?”

Oh, yes, they assured him. It was a holy shrine. No one would dream of touching it. However, it didn’t work. Or, more accurately, no one knew whether it did or not.

“Have the Phansuris ever looked at it?” Sam asked.

They replied, somewhat embarrassed, that no Baidee would allow a non-Baidee to have access to the holiest shrine of the Overmind. Sam smiled his thanks and went away again. He had a high regard for the genius of Theor Close and Betrun Jun. He believed they could figure out anything they set their minds to.

Subsequently he spoke to Dern Blass and to certain other of the people at CM and the settlers concerning the prisoners. They had been misled, he said. Mistaken and misled, and could that not be true of anyone? After a little thought, everyone agreed with him.

When the new Door reached Hobbs Land and was installed, there was general agreement that the prisoners should be sent home. By that time, Shan had been well and truly swallowed. By that time, Shan was also a member of the CM choir. When he went back to Thyker, he carried with him the substance necessary to bring the God to Thyker—at least to all the fertile parts of it.

Shanrandinore Damzel went home, and Mordimorandasheen Trust, and Howdabeen Churry. They dug up the mummified bodies of the Hobbs Land invaders and buried them again in moister climes, as, for example, in the gardens of the temple at Chowdari. Though Chowdari was set in the midst of the desert, it had fountains drawn from deep aquifers to water the flowers and grass. There was moisture enough that the burgeoning network soon underlay the temple itself and a great part of the training grounds. It was not long after the net reached its outermost limits that revelations came to the Circle of Scrutators in an almost continuous sequence. It was revealed that Baidee might cut their hair, might do without turbans and kamracs and zettles, might eat eggs, might be friends with people of other opinions. Various Baidee began reassessing the words of the prophetess in the light of current understanding. Surprisingly, once stripped of the millennial old accretions added by generations of old men on the Circle of Scrutators, the words of the prophetess seemed quite sensible.

“Which,” said Bombi Damzel to his brother, “when you
really
stop to think about it is
quite
understandable.”

Shan said nothing at all. He, like some other members of The Arm of the Prophetess, had decided to become a missionary. He would carry the God first to the Celphian Rings, and then … then Outsystem. Going Out-System had its risks. Shan believed the risks were outweighed by the eventual outcome. It would be a way, a convenience, a kindness.

•
Sam gave a
picnic bonfire on an off-day when certain invited guests could come from several of the settlements and from CM. So far as anyone knew, Sam was celebrating their deliverance from the army of Enforcement. The guests brought a generous quantity of beer, however, and by the time lunchtime came, everyone was celebrating whatever he or she felt most joyous about at the moment. Children shrieked, and people played musical instruments, and sections of the Settlement One choir sang antiphonally at themselves while the great bonfire Sam had collected fuel for for weeks burned itself down to embers and everyone laughed and sweated and turned red in the heat of it.

Sam had a further purpose of his own, which he had not discussed with anyone. He sat with China Wilm a little distance from the fire, half-reclining against a blanket covered pile of something as he played with the girl child, now almost a half-year old but thus far unnamed.