All of us looked at each other; and all of us smiled; because I really think we all – Thant children and Dyeth children – in one way or another loved the old creature whom, because of the privacy discs always in flight about her, we saw so little of.
As such encounters do, this one dissolved our conversational group, and the fragments moved to reconstellate. I heard Santine say, as she moved off with Thad: ‘But you were talking about Nepiy? Young Marq mentioned it to me not so long ago …’ Curiosity would have moved me off after them.
But there was a motion by my eyes – then shadow. I stopped, surprised.
Alsrod had stuck her hand before my face and shook it. I blinked – but it was just a way of getting my attention. ‘That,’ she said, dropping her hand once she was sure she’d got it, ‘is a cyhnk, isn’t it?’ She nodded towards the carved stone medusoid, which, moments ago, her sister had stood before. ‘What does it mean? I mean this particular one?’
‘Now you know a cyhnk is the sign of the Sygn,’ said Fibermich, stepping up to rejoin us in her lace of small chains, clearly deprecating her younger sister’s disingenuousness: but she flashed a huge and toothy smile in case I didn’t know she was part of it.
‘The Sygn is the veritable and virtual enemy of the Family on all, or almost all, worlds among the six thousand,’ concluded Nea, strolling up on the other side. As she moved in her armour of foil, studs, and leathers, a sly look suffused her dark, full mouth, to let us know she knew we knew she knew.
‘No, I mean,’ Alsrod insisted, ‘this cyhnk here. I know they all mean something different.’
‘It’s an old piece,’ I explained, ‘dating from about two and half centuries ago. It comes from a local monastery, the Arvin, at the south of Morgre.’ I glanced over at the statue. On its black display pedestal it was grotesquely handsome: a four-foot stone trunk that branched into seven writhing arms, each ending in a gross red gem. ‘At the Arvin, they used to teach that the cyhnk symbolized the difference between its own, unified trunk and its many-branching head, a sign of the difference between the one and the many. Myself, I was always quite sure it was a stylized presentation of one of the tolgoth cactuses growing on the other side of the Hyte: but even our local retreat stressed that the image didn’t come from our world or any world near it – though that was rather hard to believe with a forest of the things only a kilometre and a half away … at least that’s what it seemed like when I was eight or nine or ten.’
‘When did you learn,’ Alsrod asked, ‘that the meaning of the cyhnk was not the same everywhere in the universe?’
‘Only about ten years ago, actually,’ I told her. ‘On a world whose name I don’t recall, I came across an older Sygn retreat. Right behind them some looming temporary factory had just gone up that for twenty months would be hot-stamping out large, ceramic, ugly things so that the murals I had come to see in my free three hours before my ship took off – they dated from the time the building had been an exploratory outpost five centuries before – were gummed over with black, protective elastic to absorb the shock and keep them from cracking. Anyway, once I doffed my airmask inside the irregular and blobbed transparent walls, distorting the starscape and rockscape outside, somehow a priestess got to explaining that the shape of the cyhnk I was familiar with back here on Velm was only one of many a cyhnk could have. On some worlds, apparently, it’s a trunk with just two branches, both quite straight. On others – the one I was on for instance – it had five branches, each of which was a regular helix. And on some – though I forget the significance of the number – it is simply a cluster of a hundred and eleven twisting spokes; then, on others, it’s only a single bar with a jewel at each end; and on still others, it’s a jewelled sphere – while on still others, it’s a plain one. These wise women in their deep robes and the grilled mouth-speakers they wore to disguise the individuality of their voices told me that on many worlds the cyhnk signifies, as it does on Velm, a difference between one part of itself and another. But on other worlds – for instance, theirs – it signified the difference between one cyhnk and another, the difference between the myriad kinds of cyhnks that exist on myriad worlds, the difference between the myriad dogmas, each one different for each different part of each different world, that make up the institution so frequently known as the Sygn.’
They all laughed again, this time, oddly, all on one pitch. One after another and each at a different speed, they began to rock, at first Fibermich, at last even George – who had come up to join us somewhere in the midst of my recitation. And though I now requested explanation from the sociological GI program I always keep on tap with visitors from different cultures (as they no doubt keep one on me), I could not learn the significance of that alien motion.
From the metal cloud that was Thadeus, once more her brassy voice boomed: ‘Respect for the old and appreciation of the new, that’s what the name of Thant is all about! And that’s what I found on Nepiy, too – that’s what made it such a wonderful world! Oh, if you’d ever been there, you’d remember Nepiy: chalk-white deserts under an onyx black sky, stretching to the horizon in all directions, with orderly crevices dug into them, where women live in harmony and goodwill in the dwellings cut into the stone – oh, no! Not like the zigzag canyons of Zetzor, but rational, orderly, precise. The gestures of civil intercourse there have a clarity and lucidity to enchant whoever appreciates the fine heights that human civilization can reach. A fine world, a wonderful world – I had a wonderful time there! Someday you must visit it. Oh, yes! You must!’ Thadeus laughed again, hugely and generously, while Eulalia, through the array of my own parents and siblings, trailing her clouds of metals, gems, and lights, moved around and around her co-spouse, miming gestures that, in our own world’s theatrical tradition, at any rate, indicated here obeisance, now mockery, there despair; or joy. And I could not help thinking that, although Thadeus and I may have been on the same planet, because, no doubt, we had been on it months and geosectors apart, we had really been to different worlds.
The evening drifted on.
When, for the tenth time, my eyes had gone ceiling-wards – not to examine constellations but to imagine the real stars far above their argent representations – I finally decided I’d had it.
Standing by a decorative wall of falling water from the spillway upstairs, I waited out the end of a story from (of course) Clearwater Thant, and (it was a rather good one), laughing, excused myself. Dark hands came up, but not to halt me so much as to push me on my way. And Clearwater’s own light laughter followed me as I threaded from the thrumming falls. But I’d taken as much as I could of strangely behaved, too easily impressed, boisterous, familiar friends.
I went to my room.
6.
Way down and away from anywhere else, it had once belonged to a Dyeth mother, Ari, two ripples before. I’d been ten and had just returned from that first extended visit offworld to the giant moon, Senthy: Egri had taken me there to stay with my grandmother Genya for nearly a standard year, and my memory still swarmed with images of those tall women, their fur parkas drawn tightly around their pitted faces as they poled their boats in towards the high steel docks. Into those reveries, made suddenly exotic by a simple trip of twenty-six light-years home, my mother Maxa inserted the hard fact: I was of an age to choose up a local habitation and a name. The last was easy. With a bunch of my parents, I went down to the record union in Morgre’s lowest level, the knots in the polished pith walls recalling faces on another world, and registered the ‘Marq’ which people had been calling me all my life. The habitation, however, took some trips over and around the area to search out a proper spot – I wanted something rural, with natural rock, water, and all the technological comforts a rather spoiled twelve-year-old could imagine. My temp-parent, Kelso, was with us; and after several hundred k’s cruising about, she suddenly declared: ‘Look. I know what Marq wants! Do you remember Ari’s old place? Whatever happened to …’ Back home, there was the scrabble through the closet f
ull of discarded domestic cassettes …
Today, honestly, I don’t know if I love the location more or the fact that it’s been a living room for Dyeths as long as it has:
Twenty-foot fire cactuses rose behind the ornate rail at the polished planks’ oest end. (Shells and rocks, rocks and shells.) Overhead, a few night clouds pulled away from the brilliant oversized star that is our larger moon. The rocks beyond the rail were tufted with giltgorse. An orange carpet on the dark wood gave under my bare feet as I walked from the fading entrance column. Beyond the platform, through the tolgoth growth, the stream plashed. How many times a week do I open the railing gate, take some text-crystal from the fiche-board standing below my bed (six carved legs, with strange ball-claws for feet, rumpled sleeping mat over it), along with a portable reader (what we have instead of clumsy, beautiful books), to go and sit, to sit and dream, my back against some velvet-barked elephant lichen, to dream and read, with warm water washing my ankles?
Between the hills that gentled the horizons to the north, the crazy jewellery of Morgre-complex’s upper park levels – my night light all through those strange years when childhood gives way to the beginning of adulthood – glittered like a little cyhnk; I was as far away from the city now as Santine’s room, but in another direction.
In the platform’s centre stood a round desk – old, locally crafted, a horror to look at, but ridiculously efficient. Its reddish top was cluttered with gaming pieces, editing blocks, lengths of tape, and the reassembled skeleton of a small creature resembling a desert skate but indigenous to one or the other of Velm’s polar wastes. Suspended above it all glowed a globe that, besides serving as a lamp, was also the central star in a double-sunned orrery – no, not Iiriani/Iiriani-prime – of ten planets (thirty moons among them, one of which was, yes, giant and nostalgic Senthy, circling its huge, useless world, NRJ-6B), all rotating and revolving on their hugely slant and varied orbitals.
On the desk, the comscreen was still up out of its slot, a pile of dice in front of it; a piece of string on which I’d been practising whed-knots (an art performed by a small northern tribe of Velm natives with their hind feet; and I was improving) lay across it. Scattered before it were some text crystals from my seven-times great-grandmother’s unreadable memoirs which, that morning, I’d once again taken from the Old Library.
As I approached the desk, the bench rolled out from under it; the bench-back swung up and took the proper curve and angle. On the comscreen, which for some reason hadn’t turned off when I’d left, the pale colours of the ball court still pulsed: within the pentagonal frame, among the laughter, I watched Thadeus Thant (voice like a cracked klaxon, a gentle, jovial, jealous creature, who, now at age eighty, has learned to turn jealousy into ambition), Clearwater Thant (the quietest, smallest, and blackest of the Thants – the most prolific, in years the oldest, but looks not a day over fifty, my favourite, and by me the one with the dryest sense of humour) and imperious Eulalia Thant (an impressive redhead surrounded by more jewellery than I think all of us Dyeths owned, kilos of it floating out on suspensors that kept it turning slowly about her, as she turned about her children, her spouses, a woman with an insight into human motivations both cultivated and uncanny), and Fibermich, Nea, George, Alsrod … all bobbing about among human and inhuman Dyeths and friends of Dyeth.
I sat.
I watched.
I pondered the performance below long enough to sense what an odd feeling familiarity is, consisting as much of the dark things that attract as it does of the bright ones that repel. Was it simply all that warmth and those good wishes? Sitting there, I felt it swinging at my side, and ran my hand down the chain to retrieve it: the pink light still glowed above the leather bound screen. Runes swarmed as I lifted it, giant gnats swinging about it as the book swung. (But I thought I’d turned it off …) Apparently in my haste I’d just flipped the random selector to still another poem. It had been on all this time.
On my cluttered desk top I set the book that could have been stage or sculptor’s pedestal. Above it hung dark runes that could have been a statue or a performance. Between them I watched the comscreen, bright with the party.
Before I tell you which poem was on, I want to tell you something that the title (in lower case runes at the very bottom) brought immediately to my mind. An evelm philosopher once wrote: ‘Almost all human attempts to deal with the concept of death fall into two categories. The first can be described by the injunction: “Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying.” The second can be expressed by the exhortation: “Concentrate only on what is truly eternal – time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in – and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself.” For women who adhere to either position,’ this wise creature noted, ‘the other is considered the pit of error, the road to injustice, and the locus of sin.’ At this point, I must explain that by ‘human attempts to deal with the concept of death’, the evelm philosopher in question meant only those humans who happened to have lived in this world, Velm, up in the beleaguered north or here in the calmer south, for the last three hundred and eighty years. This philosopher was no doubt unconcerned with that greater death, Cultural Fugue, and if someone ever told her that the first attitude more or less categorizes the Sygn and that the second is indicative of Family, I suspect that this venerable sage would have returned a look to remind any human that the evelmi are, indeed, alien. (Of course: the perfect translation for the title of Vondramach Okk’s early participatory poem, even though the connotations differ: ‘The Alien’. Why hadn’t I been able to think of it with Alsrod?) The title of the poem I had accidentally opened to translated clearly and simply: ‘Stranger’.
I didn’t read it.
Fingering my scrotum, I felt my penis move on the back of my hand, till some unspecified desire began to weight and lift my genitals with blood. I waited for that desire to fix on some current masturbatory image. When it didn’t, I briefly thought I might leave my room, my home, and seek one of the city’s runs. But apparently whatever I was feeling could not express itself through public copulation any more than through private satisfaction. Desire died. What replaced it was a GI access code.
Had I really been thinking about it during the intervening time? I turned off the book and pushed it aside. I’d carried Clym’s warning about with me, anent security reclassifications contingent on inquiries after Rhyonon. But there was another operative in the tale that could be inquired after.
Why did I think about it now?
Perhaps it was simply because I was feeling I shouldn’t be feeling so at home.
I thought: Non-human life forms, and my mind filled with another lengthy access code of numbers and colours. I read them over to myself. They cleared away, and I thought –
7.
– Xlv.
From the bottom of some distant GI storage bank – rank upon rank of the tiniest, brightest metalloids submerged in some super-chilled, coal-black, linearly conductive syrup – the information welled into my mind like memory: Among the many forms of life discovered in human world-hopping, a surprising number of them clearly intelligent, many of them culturally advanced, and even a handful with extraordinarily ingenious methods for getting between the planets and moons of their own sun systems, the Xlv are the single species besides humans who have an efficient means of interstellar travel. For many years their starships were mistaken for natural objects: massive, black, irregular as meteoric rubble, here and there a huge multifaceted crystal face glittering – through which nothing is visible.
Inhabitants of at least two hundred gas giants throughout the galaxy, the Xlv still can not be designated a race with whom we have ‘established communications.’ Our ignorance of them is oppressive. Do they have [a] language[s]? Can the term intelligence be applied to them? Do they know of our existence? There is still a raging debate on whether they construct their ships as humans
do, or whether they secrete them in some way similar to the way certain insects secrete the waxy material for their nests …
As I reviewed their tripartite plasmoid biology, learned of their odd colonies that may or may not be floating well down in the atmosphere of gaseous planets almost large enough to ignite into small stars, reviewed the rare space encounters between human and Xlv – so baffling as to leave moot in almost every case whether an encounter had or had not occurred – I recalled Okk’s absent half-lines in The Alien/The Awkward/The Exotic.
For most women, the Xlv are a complete question mark, nor are we even sure which direction that question mark faces. (They are a shiftrune whose sound sequence remains unuttered.) When our instruments detect Xlv on one world, how are we to know their social or political relations to the Xlv on another (Do they have societies? Cultures? Politics?); not to mention the relation of Xlv on one ship to the Xlv on another. (In the conflict between Sygn and Family, if one does something appalling to a neutral party – as has more than once been the case – the other certainly doesn’t want to take the blame.) What kind[s] of government[s] do they have? Which kinds get along? Which kinds are constantly falling into tension situations? Is interstellar travel for them analogous to the human discovery of the potter’s wheel, paternity, the solar system, or the semiconductor?
Among six-thousand-two-hundred-plus worlds and thousands of billions of humans and aliens, there are probably hundreds of thousands, even millions, at any moment, exploring aspects of the Xlv, scattered across any hundred or five hundred worlds. That is still a microscopic percentage of humanity as a whole.
If only because there is so much to know in our human universe, the working assumption you can go on is: You may assume, about absolutely any fact (how many transuranic elements are there? why does cold water remove human blood stains faster than hot?) that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do not know it – which goes for the working assumption too. And the Xlv, who, after all, are alien, touch an even more microscopic percentage of human lives than most things. Thus: ‘There is an alien life form that travels between stars’ is simply another little-known fact – because in our human universe, of necessity, all facts are as little known as the works of great poets.