“Yeah, right. And a lot of help you are!” Dairine said.
“Who, me?”
“No, him!” Dairine said. “The Defender!”
We’re not omniscient, you know, the One’s Champion said, sounding annoyed.
“Oh, sure, you’re not. Just immortal and incredibly powerful, which doesn’t do us much good if after all this running around, you can’t give us a clearer sense of what we’re supposed to do!”
Ronan frowned and looked over at Kit. “What is it with these Callahan women,” he said, “that they’re always after yelling at you and giving you grief?”
“Not always,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Just when it’s going to get most on your nerves.”
“We yell at you because you’re hopeless,” Dairine said, and sat down, looking extremely cross. “But I guess it’s not your fault this time. And where did all these other names come from all of a sudden? I’d have thought you had enough already, just in our own mythologies.”
We pick them up in our travels, the Champion said with a weary and resigned look. It’s an occupational hazard.
“And it’s not like you don’t have a fair number of names,” Ronan added. “Dairine. Dair. Squirt. Right pain in the arse. Speaker to hardware. Botherer of her sister—”
“Deliverer of punches in the nose,” Dairine said, looking Ronan in the eye. “Ruthless punisher of those who don’t cut her some slack.”
“One of those was a little weird,” Kit said suddenly. “‘Guardian of the Divided Name’?”
Ronan nodded. “The One’s full name.”
Roshaun looked perplexed. “Why would that need guarding?”
It doesn’t, the Champion said. You do. From it.
“But the One is on our side, I would have thought,” Filif said. “Or we are on Its…”
That’s not the point, the Champion said. You can’t really have any sense of how much raw power is tied up in the One. Physicality can’t express it. Nothing can express it; it’s not meant to be expressed. It’s meant to be. If the One wasn’t careful about how It manifests Itself inside space and time, everything would all just dissolve.
“So that even the One’s Name in the Speech has to be divided up to keep it safe,” Kit said, “like a critical mass.”
That’s right, said the Champion. The Name of Names has so much primacy of power over mere created matter that it could change or wipe out whole universes if irresponsibly used. So the Names are leaked into creation only in fragmented form … a little bit here, a little bit there. Even names in less central levels of creation get divided up that way—a bit here, a bit there…
Dairine let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, well, if even the One’s names are so powerful,” she said, “why do we have to be running around all the time and cleaning up the messes all over our universe? Why doesn’t It just get Its butt in here and take care of things?”
Behind Ronan’s eyes, the Champion looked surprised. What fun would that be?
“For It?”
For us, the Champion said, sounding as if He was surprised Dairine didn’t get it.
She stared at him.
“All right,” Filif said, glancing at Dairine as she took a breath. “Memeki knows—for the moment—what she is. But not who she is, or what she can do. How can we best assist her? For until she fully becomes the Hesper, and achieves whatever her full power may be, there’s no hope that she can do anything about the threat to the rest of our universe.”
I have no immediate answers, the Champion said. She’s still only in the middle stages of embodiment. Such a process has to proceed at its own pace.
“There’s not a whole lot of time left for it to proceed in!” Dairine said. “The Pullulus is pushing everything apart out there, the structure of space is suffering, whole civilizations are going to pieces—”
“He’s right, though,” Ronan said.
Dairine stared.
“It took a while for me to come to terms, too,” Ronan said. His voice was unusually subdued. “I didn’t even know he was in there until Nita recognized him.” Dairine was interested to notice that when Ronan had started speaking, he’d been looking at Kit, but suddenly he wasn’t looking at him anymore. “And when I found out what was happening, I really hated it.” He glanced at Memeki. “She seems to have gotten past that, which is amazing. Different psychologies, I guess. But then there still comes a moment when you have to”—he shrugged—”agree to act together. Not just to passively accept what’s happened. How’s that going to be for her? Can she do it? Her people’s lifestyle seems to revolve around doing what you’re told. How fast can she get past that? Can she ever get past it?”
Dairine shook her head, and looked over at the great sleeping figure. “We’d better hope she can,” she said, “and try to figure out some way to hurry her up.”
Kit yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t help it … I need to at least stretch out for a while, whether I actually get any sleep or not. What do we do in the morning?”
Dairine shrugged. “Take her back. Turn her loose. Wait for something to turn up.”
“Wait?”
“Something always turns up,” Dairine said.
“But not because of the waiting!” Kit muttered.
“And in the meantime,” Dairine said, looking over at Ronan, “I think Kit’s got the right idea. You’re going to keep watch?”
Ronan nodded.
“Then I’m going to try to pick up where I left off,” Dairine said. She headed off for her pup tent, glancing over her shoulder. “Spot?”
“I can finish this analysis inside,” he said, and got up to follow.
They went back to the pup tent together. You’re a little quiet today, Dairine said, even for you. What’s bothering you?
I’ve been running analyses on more than the syntax of written Yaldic, if that’s what you mean.
Yeah, Dairine said, it is. She sealed the pup tent and sat down on the floor next to Spot. He crawled into her lap. “You’ve been really quiet ever since we got here from your people’s world. What’s going on?”
“My people installed a great deal of new software in me,” Spot said. “I’ve been getting to grips with it. Some of the things they loaded into me were patches for my oracular functions.”
“Yeah, I noticed you’d stopped the poetry,” Dairine said. “Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. The notes were starting to cramp my style.”
“I found them troubling, too,” Spot said. “The problem seems to have been that the messages from the Powers simply had too much content embedded in them: I wasn’t able to process them correctly, so they were coming out truncated. But with the patches, I’m now able to perceive more clearly exactly what it is the Powers and the manual functions are trying to tell me in terms of cloaked content, the kinds of things that were showing as blacked-out in Nita’s manual. As a result, I’ve been able to analyze the present situation a lot more accurately.”
“Sounds like good news to me,” Dairine said.
“It would be if the results of the analysis weren’t so troubling,” Spot said. “We’re missing something—both in terms of something we don’t know, and something that’s not here, something we urgently need. A variable is missing.”
“Nita,” Dairine said, and let out a breath.
“I think so. Her presence here has become vital. Whatever she went back to Earth to obtain, we’ve got to have it here very soon, or fail.”
Dairine got goose bumps. “And she wasn’t sure what she was going back for,” Dairine said.
“True. Let’s hope that she has it when she arrives; otherwise, all this will have been for nothing. And—”
Spot went silent.
“And?” Dairine said, hugging him a little closer.
“If she doesn’t have whatever it is,” Spot said, “then there is no ‘and.’”
13: Strategic Withdrawal
As Dairine vanished into her pup tent, Kit watched with considerable relief. D
airine could get difficult to deal with when Nita wasn’t around to stomp on her. And just where are you? he thought, glancing at the walls of the cavern as if Nita might suddenly step through one of them.
Ponch had flopped down beside him and was lying on his back again, though his head was turned so that he was watching Memeki. Kit poked him amiably in the gut. “I thought that was just another ploy to get an extra biscuit,” he said under his breath. “I don’t often see you giving food away.”
She was sad, Ponch said. She was sad before, too. That’s why I brought her. None of the others were sad.
They headed into the pup tent together. Kit lay down again, and within a few moments Ponch was lying with his head on Kit’s chest. Kit sighed. “What was Memeki sad about?” he said.
I don’t know, Ponch said. It felt like something wrong had happened to her. I wanted to make her feel better. I thought maybe if she went for a walk with me, I could take her away from the bad thing that made her sad. But it’s still inside her.
And that’s not all, either, Kit thought. He put an arm around Ponch. “Well, you did right,” he said. “We’re going to try to help her, too.”
Good, Ponch said.
Kit breathed out, closed his eyes.
But what if you can’t?
Kit sighed again. It was hard when there wasn’t even an answer that would make sense to a human. But when it was Ponch involved, sometimes the explanations got more involved rather than less. “It’s like this…,” he said, and trailed off, wondering where to go from there.
You were saying about the things you couldn’t talk about.
I was? Kit thought. No, I wasn’t—
And another voice spoke, both seemingly at a distance and very close.
“There is a story that every Yaldah knows for a short while,” it said. “When she’s very new. But knowing the story makes no difference. The ones who know it die, anyway. And speaking it means you die sooner. The wise thing is to forget.”
I was asleep, Kit thought. He realized that the weight on his chest was gone. But he also realized that once again he’d slipped into the upper reaches of Ponch’s mind, so he lay very still, doing nothing to disturb this state in which he could hear what the dog heard, scent what he scented. Right now, Ponch’s world smelled of warm stone, mineral-flake grit, somewhat sweaty or otherwise ripe-smelling humans, various foodstuffs and food wrappings … and the unique scent of a Yaldiv. It was like a more refined version of the crude-oil scent he’d followed here: a hot plastic sort of smell, shifting slightly from moment to moment, with the emotions of the one who spoke.
Why forget? Ponch said. Remembering things is good.
“Not when they kill you for it.” Memeki’s voice sounded weary. “And it was so long ago. Nothing that happened such a long time ago can matter now; things aren’t that way anymore.”
What way were they? I don’t understand.
Her voice went low, as if even here she was afraid she might be overheard. “When we’re very young,” Memeki said, “the blood inside us speaks for a while. It says that once there wasn’t a City, or even a little hive. Once the world was big enough for everyone to walk wherever they wanted. And there wasn’t just one King. There were many, and each King had just a few chosen ones. There was always enough to eat, and not so much work to do. And there were no Others.” She briefly sounded confused. “Or there were Others who didn’t want to kill us. I said it was a strange story! Then something happened.”
What?
There was a long pause. “No one is sure,” Memeki said. “But in the story, it’s as if there was a bigger King who made everything to be built—the sky, the ground—the way our own King tells us how to build a nest and kill the enemy. There were some who built the Everything that way, the story says. That other King was supposed to have shown them how. Then Yaldiv came to live in what that Great One’s servants had made. They lived there a long time—”
She broke off suddenly. “But that part of the story makes no sense,” Memeki said. “How could anybody build the sky? No one could reach it. It’s got to be true, what the Arch-votary says the King tells him—that the old stories are madness and death made real, a way for our enemies to trick us.”
I know a story like that, Ponch said. I don’t think it’s a trick.
Silence again. “You don’t?”
From Ponch, Kit got a sudden sense of reticence. If your story is like mine, then there’s more to tell.
“Yes,” Memeki said. She sounded subdued. “It’s as if when everything’s made, another Great One appears: another King. That one went about saying that he knew more things than the first Great One, better ways to live. He said that having so many little kings among the Yaldiv was wrong, and that there should be only one—himself. That would make warriors mightier, he said, and workers stronger, and the vessels more fruitful. The little kings and their consorts said they didn’t want his way of living. They started a war with the great King and his vessels. It went on forever. But, finally, the second Great One realized they would never do what he wanted, so he made the sky catch fire. Small suns like Sek fell from the sky on the little kings, and killed them and all their Yaldiv.”
But the story that your people tell each other now says something different, Ponch said.
“It says there was never any war before the War of Now,” Memeki said. “The only King that has ever been is our own Great One. And when we win the War of Now against the evil City, then the world will be pure.”
Ponch was quiet. Then he spoke again.
Do you want another biscuit?
What? Kit thought. Very slowly and cautiously, so as not to make any noise, he put his hand out beside him. The dog biscuit box was gone. Why, that sneaky—
Vague crunching noises came from the cavern, much amplified in Kit’s inner hearing by the fact that he was inside the mind of one of the creatures doing the chewing. After a moment, Memeki said, “What happens in your story?” She crunched a little more. “Is there a great war? Do suns fall from the sky?”
No, Ponch said. There’s some singing, but mostly we eat.
Kit got a sudden glimpse of Memeki’s mirror-dark eyes looking down into Ponch’s. “Your people’s story… is about food?”
Later, Ponch said, yes. But it didn’t start that way. The crunching started up again.
I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, Ponch said after a moment. You tend not to think about it … there’s so much to keep you busy. Barking. Running. Eating. Doing what the One You’re With wants you to do. But that’s what we’ve done for a long time. We promised to take care of Them…
He trailed off. Kit asked me to tell him the story not long ago, Ponch said after some more crunching. It’s not the kind of thing you ever think of Them being concerned about: They’re even busier than we are. I was so surprised, I told him the puppy version, because I wasn’t sure how he would take the other one. We love Them, but humans can be strange sometimes.
Kit lay there, staring into the darkness, wondering what to make of this. The story seemed to be working its way out of Ponch with the same difficulty as it had worked its way out of Memeki.
It was a very long time ago, Ponch said, when our parents, the First Ones, realized who they were. They woke up and started singing to the Light in the Sky, and heard others singing back, so that they realized we were all singing the same song. Instead of staying alone, the First Ones started to run together in groups, hunting for food together. It was a hard time. The world was full of things to eat, but catching them was hard. Then many of the things we ate went away, or died, and many of us died, too. Our mothers bore more and more of us. They had to, because so many of us died young.
There was more crunching from Memeki. “That must have been terrible. What did you do?”
At first, we didn’t know what to do. There was a pause while Ponch put his nose into the dog biscuit box, knocked it over, and pawed another one out. Then some of the First Ones started to thin
k, Maybe we should go away. Maybe there’ll be more food somewhere else. So we traveled. We journeyed a long way under the Light in the Sky, and came to a place where there was a little more food. But we found something else there, too. We found Them.
He was quiet for a moment. We found them living by themselves, Ponch said, in cold places. They wore furs, like us. They denned in caves, the way we did sometimes. They were lonely, the way we were before we found out how to live together. And they were so hungry! And we remembered how that had been for us, too.
“Did they eat the same things you ate?” Memeki said, sounding dubious.
They did then. Some of us said, “Let’s go away from here! There won’t be enough for everyone to eat.” Others said, “Let’s drive them away! Then there will be enough.” And some—Kit could hear the shadow of a growl stirring at the bottom of Ponch’s mind—some said, “Let’s eat them, and solve both problems.”
Slowly the growl faded. But then, when they found different ways to catch things to eat, and we saw them do it and cried because we were hungry, some of the humans did what the First Ones thought was the strangest thing. They gave us some of what they caught! They started sharing, the way we learned to do when we began hunting together. So we took them in, into life as a pack, and showed them the other ways it could be—caring for the pups and watching out for each other, and especially the hunting in a group. They learned fast. And the humans took us in as well, into life with another kind of creature, and showed us how to learn their strange new ways. Like how they made things with their clever paws—sharp teeth that they could throw, so that food was bitten and fell down without the humans actually catching it and biting it themselves. We learned to drive the food into those extra teeth of theirs, and then we shared the kill with them. That became the bargain. We promised we’d help our human packmates find food when they needed it; they helped us with food when we needed it. When the animals that hated our packmates got close to their dens, we shouted to warn them; then they’d bring out the fire that scared those things away. We’d even sit together, after the meal, and sing at the Light together. It was a good time.