Six Moon Dance (40 page)

Questioner nodded. “One like this was a gang unto herself. So long as we think of such people as humans and attempt to treat them as humans, we cannot protect the innocent.”

“They really can’t be cured?” asked Ornery.

Questioner waved the idea away. “We haven’t found a way. Haraldson said that if a being has sufficient sense of justice and civility to know it has done wrong, knowing it has done wrong is often sufficient punishment. If the being has no remorse, punishment will only increase its anger.”

She sighed, gesturing at the scene around them. “I don’t think Marool felt any remorse.” She turned toward Mouche and called, “What did she mean, ‘Her sons, that damned Ashes’?”

Mouche was by now sitting head-down in the sneakway, still fighting his nausea and revulsion. He turned reluctantly. “I’ll tell what I know, but if you’re finished, Ma’am … Questioner, can we get out of here?”

Questioner nodded. Her olfactory receptors were still turned down, but the others had no such amelioration. She herded them ahead of her.

When they were inside the wall with the opening shut behind them, Mouche mopped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his shirt. “When Bane and Dyre first came to House Genevois, they broke all the rules, and Madame sent for someone. I never saw him, though I heard his voice. When Bane and Dyre were sent to him, he did something painful to them, and he told them to mind themselves. Later on, Madam had to summon that person again, to stop their attacking me—”

“Why?” she interrupted. “Why attack you?”

“I’d had a run in with them before, at home.” He gulped, suddenly overcome with a longing for that home. “I stopped them killing a little native creature I’d made a friend of, and they hated me for it. It was Bane did this to my face, later on. Well, the person Madame summoned could have been their father, their real father, for he smelled as they did, and I know Dutter wasn’t their real father. The Dutters were only paid to rear them.”

“Was Marool really their mother?” asked Ornery.

“Does it fit in with what we’ve heard from other sources?” Questioner asked.

Ornery offered, “The gardener said she’d disposed of two or three a year since she’d been back, so she was away, somewhere, perhaps long enough to have had those two.”

“So. If she bore these boys, she was guilty of mis-mothering?”

Both Mouche and Ornery nodded, Ornery adding, “Oh, my, yes Ma’am. That’s about as mis a mothering as anybody could do. And then, playing about with them here … Well, that’s as bad a thing as you can do on Newholme.”

“Most places would agree,” said Questioner.

“She’d of been blue-bodied sure, if anyone had caught her at it.”

Questioner murmured, “I wonder who Ashes really is….”

“Jong,” interrupted someone. “Ashes is jongau.”

The voice sent a thrill through Mouche, shivering him to his feet. “Timmy,” he whispered, as though to himself. “Timmy?”

The others turned, Ornery crouching defensively, searching the darkness. The voice came as a spider-silk whisper, drifting to their ears a word or two at a time, from any direction and from none:

“Mouchidi.”

A caress, that voice, as it whispered, “She, the evil one is gone.”

And another voice. “She will never come to the Fauxi-dizalonz where Bofusdiaga waits. She will never be remade.”

Questioner turned on her massive feet, peering into the darkness. She saw only a vanishing glimpse of moving colors around a globe of wavering green, like a cloud of seagrass.

“It’s the Timmys,” cried Mouche, who had turned an instant earlier. “The dancers!” He could not mistake that movement, that slender, sylphlike form. The most graceful creatures mankind could produce could be only an awkward copy of that.

Questioner muttered to herself, “Aha. So here is our indigenous race!” Then, making her voice soft and un-threatening, she called, “Why have you come here?”

The first voice came again, fading, departing: “We were coming for Mouchidi. Corojum said go get him. Now you are coming anyhow, so we will lead you across the seas, but you must hurry.”

Questioner stood, immovable. “Why should I listen to you? You have stolen my people.”

“They are not hurt,” said a slightly different voice, sounding both impatient and surprised. “We do not hurt things as you do. Two of them are dancers! We needed dancers. Even now they skim the waters, on their way across the seas to the Fauxi-dizalonz. They go there to help us with the dance.”

The last words faded into distance. She or he or it was not waiting for them to get closer, so much was clear.

“What dance?” whispered Ornery.

“I have no idea,” Questioner replied. “Though I had no doubt dancers might be helpful.”

“Oh, Questioner, we’ll find out,” cried Mouche. “What an adventure!”

Adventure or not, he stood as one stunned by delight, incapable of movement. It had been her, its voice. The voice of divinity.

“Come,” said Questioner, shoving him gently. “I think haste may be appropriate.”

 Down the road from Mantelby Mansion, the man known as Ashes sat in a carriage behind two black horses. They and their saddled stablemate, tethered to the back of the carriage, heard the sounds of approaching feet before Ashes did. They started and stamped their feet, ears erect.

“Daddy Thunder?” called a voice.

“Here,” said Ashes in his deep, dead voice. “D’jou get the ring?”

“Couldn’t get it off her damn finger,” said Bane. “Didn’t have my knife to cut the finger off. Figured you’d rather we got here on time than go off hunting for cutlery.”

“Damnation. She had that ring when I knew her under the bridges. I wanted it. A souvenir. She’s dead?”

“By now, I’d say. Good thing we saw that picture at Madame’s place. Otherwise we wouldn’ta known which machine it was.”

“You’da known. I told you the Machinist fixed it the way I told him. He fixed it so’s it couldn’t hurt our kin, not any of the sons of Thunder. He put sensors in the pads so it wouldn’t run if it was you, or me. That machine’s your friend, boy. You could’a got on it with her, it’d of killed her and set you down without a scratch. Well, that’ll pay her back for the daughter she owed me!”

“So how come she picked us? The way we smell, we figured nobody would.”

The man smiled. “She’s addicted to the smell. Not that she knows it’s a smell. I can do the same to anybody when I’ve got a little time. Once they’ve got the smell in their head, they’re gone, lost, can’t do a thing against it.”

“What’d you mean, paying her back for the daughter she owed you?”

“Arrgh. Three times I tried for a Rikajor daughter. They were said to run to girls. Rikajor refused me each time. He couldn’t refuse me Marool. Her, I bought with other coin.”

“She asked who our mother was. Why’d she care?”

A gleefully gloating expression fled across the older man’s face. “No reason. Just trying to confuse you. Get on in here. I’m sick of towns. Time to go.”

The boys climbed in, and Ashes took up the reins, starting the horses up the hill, along the road that led past the mansions into the wild, the same way Marool had gone when she investigated her parents’ deaths in the badlands.

“Where we going now?” asked Dyre, yawning.

“Off into the wild to meet your cousins, boy. Our kindred. The first settlers of this world. The Wilderneers.”

 Ornery moved off down the tunnel, sped both by curiosity and by Questioner’s urgency. Mouche moved with more eagerness, though Questioner noted that both Mouche and Ornery seemed somewhat reluctant to look where they were going. Like guilty children handing around a dirty picture, they peeked at the darkness ahead, and pretended not to and peeked again. So long as they were all headed in one direction, it made little difference, though Questioner could imagine circumstances in which this preoccupation and inattention could be dangerous.

“Mouche,” murmured Questioner, placing her heavy hand firmly on one of his shoulders, “stop trembling.”

Instead of steadying, he quivered like an excited horse.

“Whoa,” Questioner said. “Stop. Take a deep breath; stop.”

She turned Mouche toward her, staring into his dazed eyes. “What is this business of not looking where you’re going?” She snapped her fingers in his face and shook him lightly. “What?”

Ornery had turned and came back to them. “It’s hard for us, Ma’am. They do not exist, Ma’am. So we are taught. We are not allowed to see or hear them. I can see them or not, depending, though I am still surprised at myself, but Mouche seems to be having trouble looking at them.”

“You cannot see them?” Questioner turned her searching gaze on the sailor. “What do you mean you cannot see them?”

“I mean … I can sort of not. Not look. I mean, I … know they’re there, but I don’t. They wear brown robes that cover them all up, and we’re not allowed to look. Not once we’re six or seven years old.”

“Why?”

“Because … well … they don’t exist.”

“They what?”

Ornery cried petulantly, “They don’t exist! There weren’t supposed to be other creatures here. And they weren’t here when our people came, which means they probably came from somewhere else. But even if they didn’t, it wasn’t playing fair to hide all that time….”

“So, what’s the matter with your friend, here?”

Mouche’s life of sin had caught up with him all too swiftly. He quivered with mixed joy and shame, muttering, “I’ve been watching them. I’ve been watching them at House Genevois. I’ve been … I’ve been …” His sins had been settled, dependable. He had made a detente with his sins, taking his inspiration from his sins, but now he was in actual pursuit of the ideal, and he could not say what he had been. “… maybe wicked,” he concluded, head hanging.

Questioner mused over this for a moment, shaking her massive head as an indication of the astonishment she did not feel but knew was suitable to the occasion. “Young ones, listen to me. During this present time we are in, this
now
, Timmys do indeed exist. During the near future, it will not be forbidden to look at them. During the near future, everything you learned … when? When you were mere schoolchildren? Well, whatever you learned then was wrong. For the near future. Can you absorb that? When we catch up to them, or when they return to us, you will see them for they will be there, right? All this pretense has to end. Ending it is one of the reasons I am here!”

“Ahh … if you say so, Ma’am.”

“I do say so. And I am smarter than your teacher, so what I say, goes. You understand?”

Both of them nodded, Ornery obediently, Mouche equivocally. Ornery didn’t care one way or the other, but Mouche had set certain limits on his dreams and delights. He didn’t particularly want them to be sullied by reality. He wanted to have without the burden of having, to imagine without being imagined in return, and most, to be inspired without questioning his inspiration. Now, having heard Flowing Green’s voice so near, he alternately rejoiced and suffered. She had come to get him, him, personally. Why? What did she think of him? What did she see when she looked at him? Did she look at him? What would she think of his face now? Or did that even matter? Would she hate him?

Thinking was troublesome, hurtful, and useless. He gave up thinking and merely went.

They had left the sneakways of the house and entered a natural tunnel, or so Questioner identified it from the texture of the stone. There was no way to get lost, for there were no side tunnels, merely this partially dissolved stratum of limestone, floored with harder stone, naturally sloping downward and penetrated from above by rough tufts of root. Among the roots she heard the squeak and chitter of small creatures, and when one fled across the edge of her sight she saw a being the size of her hand, winged with tight membranes stretching between fore and rear limbs.

“What is that called?” she asked, directing her voice down the tunnel ahead of them.

“Dibigon,” came a drifting voice, soft as the twitter of a drowsy bird. “Self-creators. You would say swoopers.”

“I didn’t know they could speak our language,” muttered Mouche, talking to his feet. “No one told me.” Then, remembering his childhood, he flushed again. Of course they had spoken his language. How could he have forgotten?

Questioner called, “How far down do we go?”

“All way,” whispered the voice. “To baimoi. To dwell-below.”

As they went farther, the stones around them began to glow, at first with a hint of palest green along the edges, growing brighter the farther they went, enabling them to see the outlines of the stones around them, the fading distance of the tunnel ahead. Questioner reduced her own light to a soft, reddish glow, and soon the luminescence became a brighter yellow. Coincident with this brightening, they heard the murmuring of a stream.

They found the source of the liquid burbling at an intersection of their tunnel and a larger, more cylindrical one was half-filled with smooth, dark water, visible as a shadow against the bright luminescence of the opposite wall. The water, though silent elsewhere throughout its course, burbled at the conjunction of the two tunnels where irregular blocks of stone had fallen to interrupt its flow. There, also, were two podlike shapes drawn onto the shingle, each one about five meters long and less than a meter wide, each shining with the same light as the stone itself.

Questioner put her face close to the rock, amplified her vision, and saw that the luminescence was the product of bacteria accumulated in lichenous growths that covered every surface. Some were effulgently yellow, others emitted blue or green or even violet light.

Ornery looked over the pods, thumping them with her fist and finding them rather rubbery. “You don’t call these ships, I hope,” she said in a disgusted tone. “Canoes, I’d call them, if that.”

“Their size befits a small river,” said Questioner. “Neither of these will bear my weight, however, so I will rely upon my flotation devices.”

“Flotation devices?” asked Ornery.

“Some worlds are water worlds,” said Questioner. “Some people swim or even dive about their activities. Some people are arboreal. Some are cave dwellers. I was designed to get about in any of them, to swim or dive or brachiate or soar or crawl, not always gracefully, but always efficiently.”