He returned to find food set out on a terrace-cum-porch, where Jory rocked slowly in her chair, a large black-and-white cat in her lap and a clutter of kittens at her feet.
Later they all went with Cafferty to pick fruit from the tiny orchard and sat eating it on the sun-warmed wall of the terrace. They drowsed in the peace of the afternoon. And finally they saw the same woman who had spoken to them that morning come out of the trees at the bottom of the meadow and move slowly up the hill toward them.
“Well, comes the messenger,” said Jory. “To tell us what the Arbai have to say even though we already know what they have to say.”
Her matter-of-fact tone made Curvis simmer. He was still thwarted in his anger, not sure he knew why. Except … except that as an Enforcer he was accustomed to being in charge and he was not in charge. Not here. He wasn’t sure who was in charge. Not Jory, which somewhat surprised him. Not Asner.
“Patience,” said Latibor, noting Curvis’s heightened color. “No point in being annoyed.”
“I’m annoyed because if we’re going to get help for Danivon, we ought to get on with it. We Enforcers have a saying: ‘The right help helps, and enough help helps, but help that’s in time helps most.’”
Latibor shook his head, murmuring, “Curvis, I want to help Danivon as much as you do. Even though he’s a stranger to us, Cafferty and I can see in him the child we loved. We want to save him from harm, but there’s no way we can do it ourselves and we know the Arbai won’t.”
“We haven’t asked yet. At least, I haven’t!”
“Oh, yes you have. Believe me, the Arbai are aware of every thought you’ve had since you’ve been here.”
“… And here she is,” Jory said.
The woman held up her scroll and bowed. Jory bowed. They exchanged a few words in a sibilant tongue. Then the woman unrolled the scroll and began reading in the same language.
Cafferty murmured a translation: “The Arbai are aware that you would like to help your friends beyond the wall. The Arbai sympathize with your desires. The Arbai, however, have adopted a philosophical position that prevents the Arbai Device from—”
Curvis blurted, “The Arbai Device! Jory said there was no such thing on Panubi!”
“She really didn’t say that,” Asner corrected him in a hushed voice. “She merely questioned whether such a device could have coexisted with your vaunted diversity. There is such a device, but it is used only on this side of the Great Wall.”
“But….”
“Shhh,” said Cafferty. “Don’t interrupt, Curvis. They’re a patient people. They don’t mind my translating for you, but they’d consider interrupting their messenger to be abysmal bad manners.”
The woman finished her speech, rolled up her scroll, bowed, and departed down the meadow once more.
Cafferty said, “The message concluded thusly: ‘The people of Elsewhere chose to come here, chose to live in the manner of their ancestors, chose their gods, their rites, their way of life and death. We respect their choice and will not interfere with it.’”
Curvis shook his head, baffled.
Jory sighed. “You diplomatically left out the bit about Thrasis, Cafferty. The Arbai are quite annoyed about Thrasis. My argument is, of course, that the women of Thrasis had never chosen anything until I gave them a choice.”
“I don’t understand the problem about helping Danivon,” growled Curvis. “We’re not proposing to change anything in the provinces.”
“It should be very clear, Curvis. They won’t interfere anywhere in Elsewhere.”
“Even to save Danivon’s life?” demanded Curvis.
“Listen to yourself,” exploded Jory, her old voice trembling. “What was it you said to Fringe about Alouez? You were ready to turn Fringe in to the powers-that-be for interfering in Derbeck! What was it you and Danivon said about the child in the basket? Just the way things were, right? Nothing to get upset about. What was that argument in Molock about? What have you said repeatedly about diversity and the status quo? Only days ago you were snarling at Fringe for saying what you just said! What of your Enforcer’s oath? Is all that suddenly nothing?”
“But Danivon is one of us,” he cried angrily. “He’s an Enforcer. He belongs to us.”
“Almost without exception,” said Jory, holding on to Asner’s arm with all her strength, “everyone belongs to someone.”
At the node near the Deep, Lord God Subble Clore lost touch with some of the remote eyes and ears that had gone beyond the wall, but the losses did not distract him from his preoccupation. He was creating new boundaries for himself. Now that the others had gone, there was a lot of space to fill with one invention or another, one environ or another. He needed to center himself, to determine his essential nature. It was time to stop playing games, time to quit hiding behind minor demons and reveal himself, time to begin issuing commandments, time to assert his divinity!
In another node, Orimar Breaze also considered his god-hood. His followers would be called Breazians. He would demand behaviors and customs peculiar to himself. He would make rules, complicated rules, and many of them, that would take a lot of time and trouble and pain to keep. The only way he could know that his people truly loved him would be if they obeyed many onerous rules. There should be many rituals, also, rituals for everything. Much crawling. He liked the idea of crawling. Slithering, even. Also, abstentions from … from anything pleasurable.
He tried to remember what things were pleasurable. What were they? It had been such a long … so many … so … Was it sex? He seemed to remember it was sex. And food. Food had been pleasurable. So, he would make many rules about sex, many rules about food. If the rules were difficult enough, they would be cause for much backsliding, and that, in its turn, would be cause for much reproval! He would force … He would make people … He would punish them until they …
Though he could not remember the taste of food or wine, the feel of love, the joys of human movement, he felt a surge of pure pleasure at the idea of power. He would conduct himself properly as a god, using sweet and seductive words at first; then, if that failed, using power and pain to teach his people to adore him.
Evening came, and with it the cool and the dusk. The sandspit crawled in the evening wind, granules moving in rolling rivulets, making new ripples as they slid away from what lay beneath. Something was being uncovered here beside the river. Several somethings.
One had wings. One had webbed feet. Both were man-sized, with heads slightly larger than one might expect. One was sleek and furred; the other had feathers. Both of them slept.
One shape stretched and turned, half unfurling a wing. One moved a foot, stretching long-nailed toes apart, revealing the webbing between them.
An eye at the end of its stalk came back down the river, peering, peering, back and forth, back and forth, look-look, listen-listen! It stopped dead in the water. Afar, Great Crawler, Lord God Orimar’s monitor picked up the image, compared it to acceptable images, and screamed anomaly. The eye went closer to shore, raising itself higher on its stem. What it saw was true. There were anomalous beings upon the sandspit. The monitor compared the images to others it found in Files. Here was a bird, a not-bird, an angel maybe, a huge feathered something resting on the sand, a gylph. And there, there beside the bird was an otter, maybe an otter, maybe something else, a seal, perhaps (Files refers to ancient catalogs of beasts, looking for the right one). The eye wasn’t sure, except that they lived. Their chests moved up and down. They breathed.
They had no business there. Not the otter-seal, not the angel-gylph.
The eye pulsed a scream for Great Crawler, Lord God Breaze. The scream was picked up by Chimi-ahm, Great God Clore, who sent eyes of his own to see. Lord God Subble Clore looked and did not believe, saw and could not convince himself it was real. These beings were a trick. A delusion. Somebody feeding false images down the line toward him. Somebody being stupid.
The beings opened their eyes. They stared into the little senso
rs hovering over the water without seeing them, conscious of something dreadfully different, perhaps wrong.
Afar, Legless God Orimar Breaze howled rage and resentment at this nonsense. There were only two classes of beings: adorers or persecutors. Someone, probably Clore (who else would be as hostile?), was setting a trap for him! He made circumferential accusations and received tangential denials. He confronted and was confronted in return. He shouted. (He believed he shouted, he was convinced he shouted, though those he shouted at were unaware of it. How does a circuit shout? How does a pattern convey fury?)
“No,” Bland replied from some distant node. “No, Breaze. All imagination. It’s in your created world, no doubt, a dream.”
“No,” transmitted Thob from a node more distant yet. She believed Breaze was lying, but she chose to pretend to take the matter seriously. “Something you remember from some old mythology, Breaze. Why would I waste time manufacturing angels.”
They were playing games with him, Breaze thought. Perhaps they had even arranged the escape of the prisoners! Perhaps they were plotting against him!
But in the node near the Deep, Clore summoned all his powers and made certain demands upon the network, certain demands upon the great factory in the Core. The very presence of these anomalous creatures demanded violent and definitive response. They had intruded upon his world, and he would kill them. He would kill the former captives first. Then he would find the other escapees and kill them too. Also, and most particularly, he looked forward to the long slow killing of the two men who had stolen the prisoners, during which he would find out if Breaze and Bland and Thob had put them up to it!
Furry self tried to move his eyes without moving any of the rest of him. This was not himself, not his own self, soft skin, tender hide, throbbing jointure, thub-a-thub of heart, huff of lungs, not any of that, something other than, else. This was dream time, asleep time, but without sleep’s certainty and ease. Oh, no, this was wakening and he was afraid to look.
“What are you?” asked a voice, Nela’s voice.
His head turned of itself toward the voice (he hadn’t willed it to move at all) and saw a feathered creature there, not Nela, even though the voice had been Nela’s voice. Why then was Nela’s face atop this being? This bird-type being, this winged thing, fluffed and sleek with feathers? Why Nela’s face scanning its feathered arms and legs, Nela’s face weeping, mouth stretched wide in a rictus of some unanticipated feeling. Joy? Probably not.
“Bertran!” she cried, and the sound was unmistakably terror.
He didn’t tell himself to move, and yet there he was leaping up to take her beneath his left arm where she belonged, where she lived, where she had always been, she half crouching, trying to get into her accustomed position, all the time crying, “Bertran, Bertran,” as though he were far away, not here beside her. “Bertran,” she cried again, as one bereft. “Hold me!” Even as she cried for him to hold her, she pushed the other thing away, tried to fight the furry thing off, to thrust this stranger away, to escape from it.
He held her, though he was as terrified as she, at her appearance, at her violence, at his own being lost in this strange skin, inside this strange body. He shuddered in a spasm of terror, and she broke away to fall huddled on the ground, screaming as though this separation were some new violation.
She crouched nearby, her eyes shut, panting an echo of his own heaving breath, making similar panicky noises.
“Nela,” he shouted in near hysteria, trying to control himself. “You … we’re changed, that’s all. We’ve been changed.” He shut his eyes tightly, not to see her, not to see himself. If he could not see, it was less dreadful!
“Change me back!” she screamed. “Change me back!”
“You hated that box,” he yelled, eyes still closed. “You hated it!” She had, he had, but maybe the changes were worse, worse even than that!
“Not the box. Not the box. Us. The way we were.”
The words went spinning off into nothingness. Oh, the way we were. Silence greeted the words. Quick breaths, but no other sound. The way we were. Who would listen to a plea to put them back the way they were when they had prayed so long to be something else?
“Nela, stop crying!”
Nela’s eyes opened, almost against her will. “I’m changed,” she said. “Berty, we’re changed.”
“I thought you wanted to be,” cried Bertran. “You told me you did.”
“Did,” Nela moaned. “Did. Not like this. All of a sudden. No time. No time to get …”
“We wanted to be separated,” cried Bertran.
“But we wanted to be us! We didn’t not want to be us!”
“How do we know what we are,” shouted Bertran. “All you’re doing is howling!”
She caught her breath. There had been something of Sizzy in those words, something of old Sister Jean Luc saying calm down. Stop having hysterics. Look around!
Which she did, slowly, with many false starts. She wasn’t hideous, Bertran wasn’t hideous. Not themselves, but not awful. Not ugly. Not human, but not ugly. Better than the boxes. Some better. But … but they were freakish still. There would be no others like themselves. It took no time to realize this. They knew at once they were still oddities, still sideshow stuff, platform people. “See the seal-man, umpteenth wonder of the world, he dives, he floats, he eats raw fish. See the bird-woman….”
“It was all those dreams,” whispered Nela. “All those dreams of flying, Berty. Whatever did this read my dreams. I didn’t mean them for real, but it thought I did.”
Examining his webbed feet, Bertran knew she was right. He hadn’t meant it either. A fantasy, that was all. An indulgent fantasy, assiduously cultivated as one drifted off into sleep, a substitute for infantile thumb-sucking or adolescent masturbation. A fairy tale to while away a drowsy afternoon, this dream of floating, diving, plunging through emerald depths of liquid joy. Himself was what he really wanted. Himself as he might have been.
Still, it was better than the box.
He said so, and Nela caught her breath in a gasp of remembered horror. Oh, yes, better than the box.
Bertran sat up to run his webbed fingers down his sides, feeling them sleek and continuous from under the arms, across the ribs, down the flank, onto the hip, down the thigh. Continuous. Single. No longer joined.
Nela opened her wings and dragged them down, feeling the stiff slide of quill against quill, hearing a silken rattle of movement. Her feet left the ground. She reacted with panic and dismay. “My bones are hollow,” she whispered, terrified by her lightness. “Even my skull is hollow.” She ran her hands down her feathered breast, continuous and sleek. “Probably I can fly.”
“I can swim,” said the otter simultaneously, remembering his dream, letting the delights of that dream move him out and down into the shallows of the river, across the sandy bottom into the depths. He disappeared, erupting from the ripples moments later to come staggering and trembling back onto the sand, coughing water. “Cold,” he cried. “Cold and full of strange things.” It was not like the dream.
Nela, moved by a like impulse, had sprung into the air and circled upward. Suddenly she looked down, cried terror, and fell, wings thrashing, to tumble sobbing onto the sand nearby. “High,” she wept. “Oh, high, and all alone!”
They cried for a time, wondering, lost, their ignorance and confusion as frightening as their structure. They felt part terror, part curiosity, much loneliness. Their identities were true, but all else was conjecture.
Bertran squirmed on the pebbles, getting slowly to his feet. He could stand upright. Or he could walk on all fours. Either one. “It was that thing, the one Jory spoke of, the Arbai thing,” he said dully.
“The Arbai Device?” asked Nela. “The one she was talking about on the ship? Jory said that was a communication device.” This was mere conversation, for she knew that Bertran was right. The moment he said it, both of them recognized the rightness of it. Of course. They had been saved, tra
nsformed, by the Arbai Device.
Bertran touched her leg with one webbed hand. “It is a communication device. That’s what happened. We’ve communicated. All our fantasies, our dreams, they’ve been communicated. To … to something.”
“Oh, yes,” Nela commented as she staggered across the sand to sit beside him, fitting herself beneath his arm in her usual place. “Just like Mama used to read us stories. This time we told our own stories….”
Silence on the sandspit. Out of the sky a thing came at them suddenly, a tiny flying thing full of ugly danger. Bertran put up a quick paw and deflected it onto the sand where it lay groaning and screaming to itself. Writhing fibers lassoed it and joined instantaneously into a fibrous casing. The thing became a buzzing lump upon the sand. Then it was nothing at all.
“The monsters out there want to kill us,” Bertran said. “The gods. Those things. They hate us because we escaped.” He knew this was true, just as he knew other things.
“They can’t kill us here,” said Nela. “They might hurt us, but they can’t kill us.”
“But they can kill everyone else,” Bertran commented.
“All our friends!” cried Nela. “Oh, everyone we met, all dead.”
“The sailors on the Curward ship,” mourned Bertran. “The froggy people of Shallow. The music makers of Choire, and the Heron Folk of Salt Maresh. The Houm and the Murrey in Derbeck.”
“All of them,” wept Nela. “All of them.” Tears flowed from her human eyes and down onto bird feathers, making them soggy. She grieved, and her grief was noticed by the probing network that occupied her as it did the interstices in the sand. Her sorrow was real, a part of gray leaf and gray tree and gray wind rising. A part of that small crawling thing.
Silence from within.
“I want to find Jory,” said Nela. “I want to talk to Jory. Come with me to find Jory, Bertran.”