The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  The dice rolled, rebounded, bounced and jounced and came to rest on the table. Everyone around the table was looking at the place the Cattermune had been. Only Mondragon’s eyes were on the dice, his dice, Makr Avehl’s loaded dice. He picked them up, dropped them in his pocket and waited, holding his breath.

  A moment went by.

  The Cattermune next to him became misty, indistinct, shadowed. The table turned into smoke, into mist, then vanished. Someone said, ‘So I told the Cattermune…’ the voice fading away into a reverberating silence. The outlines of the room began to quiver and shake, like a mirage. Darkness approached, enveloped everything, and was gone in its turn. He felt himself falling, endlessly, through absolute nothingness.

  ‘Marianne,’ he cried, wondering for a hopeless moment if he had miscalculated.

  ‘Makr Avehl,’ said Ellat in a sharp, imperative tone. ‘Answer me!’

  He opened his eyes. The hotel room swam before him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she cried again. ‘When are you going to go?’

  He took the dice which the Cattermune had used from his pocket and threw them onto the table, watching with satisfaction as they turned up one, and one. Snake eyes.

  ‘I’ve been,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Marianne!’ asked Therat. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Call the Zahmanis,’ he yawned. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, Marianne will be in Dagma’s room. Dagma and Aghrehond are probably there as well.’ He threw the dice again, smiling when they came up snake eyes again.

  ‘What are you playing with those dice for?’ Ellat asked in exasperation as she dialed the phone.

  ‘Admiring them,’ he said. ‘Admiring a one-way ticket to a Forever.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘I would have thought,’ Haurvatat Zahmani said with an expression of acute annoyance, ‘that your great-aunt would have come back with you.’

  ‘She…’ Marianne hesitated, wondering just how to say it. ‘I think she felt that if Makr Avehl managed to get us back at all, she had very little to come back for. She said pretty much that to me before I … well, before I left. Evidently while Aghrehond and I were busy with Buttercup, Dagma simply concentrated on where she wanted to go and threw a nine.’

  ‘At the time,’ said Aghrehond gloomily, ‘I could not recall precisely where a nine might take her. Now, of course, it is obvious that she went to the Illusion Fields…’

  ‘Or to Mother’s Smithy. Or some other place,’ said Marianne. ‘We really don’t know.’

  ‘And you think she’s there still?’ Arti wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, whether from joy over Marianne’s return or from sorrow over Dagma, she herself could not have said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘Haven’t vanished people been showing up in droves? I know Fanetta did, because I called Seattle to find out. Your postman, Arti? I’ll wager he’s back. Your butcher’s wife. The man who sits on that charity board with you? Your neighbor and her children. I imagine all of them are back unless they happened to get into a Forever.’

  ‘Or,’ said Aghrehond ominously. ‘Or…’

  ‘Well, yes. Or the ones who were hunted down in Cattermune’s Pique.’

  ‘Dagma wasn’t hunted down. But she hasn’t come back, either,’ said Arti.

  Marianne sighed. ‘Mother, there was one Forever nine squares from Cattermune’s Pique. Not an obvious one, to be sure, but then Dagma seldom did the obvious…’

  ‘Dagma is not the only one in this family of whom that can be said,’ grumped Haurvatat. ‘And here you are within weeks, within days, of having a baby. What if it had been born there?’

  Marianne shuddered delicately. ‘I’d rather not think about that.’

  ‘I should hope not. Think of something else. Something cheerful. Such as, what are you going to name the baby?’ He looked at her triumphantly, sure, from what he was pleased to think of as his intimate knowledge of feminine psychology, that this subject would drive all others from her mind.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Marianne. ‘Well, Daddy, it’s going to be a girl, you know. Makr Avehl and I have considered many names. Family names. Historic names. Old Alphenlichtian names. Kavi names, even. Considering everything – and I do mean everything – I really think there’s only one thing I can call her. It will be my way, at least in part, of making up for a broken promise.’ Her tone was rather stiff as she said this, and she avoided meeting Makr Avehl’s eyes.

  He shook his head in dismay. Her bearing, her tone, everything told him he was not going to like what she would say next. He swore silently to himself that he would not say one thing, not one thing.

  ‘But I’ve never known you to break a promise, Marianne,’ said her mother. ‘Never once.’

  ‘You taught me not to, Mama. But this is one I’m going to have to break. There is no way that I can go to Frab Junction, to the Marveling Galosh, and have lunch with the Queen. That’s why I’m going to name the baby Buttercup.’

  ‘Buttercup!’ roared Haurvatat. ‘Of all the…’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Makr Avehl, shaking his head at Marianne with a fondly rueful expression. ‘Father-in-law, don’t upset the mother-to-be. In English it does sound rather silly. We could do it in Latin, of course. Ranunculus.’

  ‘I won’t have a granddaughter named Ranunculus!’

  ‘No. I couldn’t take that seriously myself. There is one – a buttercup – that grows in our mountains, however. Ranunculus asiaticus. A rather charming flower, actually. It has a common name, of course. An Alphenlichtian name.’

  ‘What is it in Alphenlichtian?’ asked Haurvatat suspiciously.

  ‘Therat,’ said Marianne. ‘This time I think she really will be surprised.’

  THE END

  The Song of Mavin Manyshaped

  Sheri S. Tepper

  www.sfgateway.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  CHAPTER ONE

  Around the inner maze of Danderbat keep – with its hidden places for the Elders, its sleeping chambers, kitchens and nurseries – lay the vaster labyrinth of the outer p’natti: slything walls interrupted by square-form doors, an endless array of narrowing pillars, climbing ups and slithering downs, launch platforms so low as to require only leaping legs and others so high that wings would be the only guarantee of no injury.

  Through the p’natti the Shifters of all the Xhindi clans came each year at Assembly time, processions of them, stiff selves marching into the outer avenues only to melt into liquid serpentines which poured through the holes in the slything walls; into tall wands of flesh sliding through the narrowing doors; into pneumatic billows bounding over the platforms and up onto the heights; all in a flurry of wings, feathers, hides, scales, conceits and frenzies which dazzled the eyes and the senses so that the children became hysterical with it and hopped about on the citadel roof as though an act of will could force them all at once and beforetime into that Talent they wanted more than any other. Every year the family Danderbat changed the p’natti; new shaped obstacles were invented; new requirements placed upon the Shifting flesh which would pass through it to the inner maze, and every year at Assembly the Shifters came, foaming at the outer reaches like surf, then plunging through the reefs and cliffs of the p’natti to the shore of the keep, the central place where there were none who were not Shifters – save those younglings who were not sure yet what it was they were.

  Among these was Mavin, a daughter of the shapewise Xhindi, form-family of Danderbat the Old Shuffle, a girl of some twelve or fourteen years. She was a forty-season child, and expected to show something pretty soon, for Shifters came to it young and she was already older than some. There were tho
se who had begun to doubt she would ever come through the p’natti along the she-road reserved for females not yet at or through their child-bearing time. Progeny of the Shifters who turned out not to have the Talent were sent away to be fostered elsewhere as soon as that lack was known, and the possibility of such a journey was beginning to be rumored for Mavin.

  She had grown up as Shifter children do when raised in a Shifter place, full of wild images and fluttering dreams of the things she would become when her Talent flowered. As it happened, Mavin was the only girl child behind the p’natti during that decade, for Handbright Ogbone, her sister, was a full decade older and in possession of her Talent before Mavin was seven. There were boys aplenty and overmuch, some saying with voices of dire prophecy that it was a plague of males they had, but the Ogbone daughters were the only females born to be reared behind the Danderbat p’natti since Throsset of Dowes, and Throsset had fled the keep as long as four years before. Since there were no other girls, the dreams which Mavin shared were boyish dreams. Handbright no longer dreamed, or if she did, she did not speak of it.

  Mavin’s own mother, Abrara Ogbone, had died bearing the boy child, Mertyn – caught by the shift-devil, some said, because she had experimented with forbidden shapes while she was pregnant. No one was so heartless as to say this to Mavin directly, but she had overheard it without in the least understanding it several times during her early years. Now at an age where her own physical maturity was imminent, she understood better what they had been speaking of, but she had not yet made the jump of intuition which applied this knowledge to herself. She had a kind of stubborn naiveté about her which resisted learning some of the things which other girls got with their mother’s milk. It was an Ogbone trait, though she did not know it. She had not before now understood flirting, for example, or the reasons why the men were always the winners of the processional competitions, or why Handbright so often cried in corners or was so weary and sharp-tongued. It wasn’t that she could not have understood these things, but more that she was so busy apprehending everything in the world that she had not had time before to make the connections among them.

  She might have been enlightened by overhearing a conversation between two hangers-on of the Old Shuffle – two of the guards-cum-hunters known as “the Danderbats” after Theobald Danderbat, forefather and tribal god, direct line descendent, so it was said, from Thandbar, the forefather of all Shifters – who kept themselves around the keep to watch it, they said, and look after its provisioning. So much time was actually spent in the provisioning of their drinking and lechery that little enough energy was left for else.

  “Every time I flex a little, I feel eyes,” Gormier Graywing was saying. “She’s everywhere. Anytime I’ve a mind to Shift my fingers to get a better grip on something, there she is with her eyes on my hands and, like as not, her hand on mine to feel how the change goes. If there’s such a thing as a’ everwhere Shifter child, it’s this she-child, Mavin.” Gormier was a virile, salacious old man thing, father of a half-dozen non-Shifter whelps and three true-bred members of the clan. He ran a boneless ripple now, down from shoulders through fingers, a single tentacle wriggle before coming back to bone shape in order to explain how he felt. Some of the Danderbats would carry on whole conversations in muscle talk without ever opening their mouths. “ Still, there’s never a sign she knows she’s female and I’m male, her not noticing she gives me a bit of tickle.”

  “’Tisn’t child flirtiness.” The other speaker was Haribald Halfmad, so named in his years in Schlaizy Noithn and never, to his own satisfaction, renamed. “There’s no sexy mockery there. Just that wide-eyed kind of oh-my look what you’d get from a baby with its first noisy toy. She hasn’t changed that look since she was a nursling, and that’s what’s discomfiting about her. When she was a toddler, there was some wonder if she was all there in the brain net, and she was taken out to a Healer when she was six or so, just to see.”

  “I didn’t know that! Well then, it must have been taken serious; we Old Shuffle Xhindi don’t seek Healers for naught.”

  “We Danderbats don’t seek Healers at all, Graywing, as you well know, old ox. It was her sister Handbright took her, for they’re both Ogbones, daughter of Abrara Ogbone – she that has a brother up Battlefox way. But that was soon after the childer’s mother died, so it was forgiven as a kind of upset, though normally the Elders would have had Handbright in a basket for it. Handbright brought her back saying the Healer found nothing wrong with the child save sadness, which would go away of itself with time. Since then the thought’s been that she’s a mite slow but otherwise tribal as the rest of us. I wish she’d get on with it, for I’ve a mind to try her soon as her Talent’s set.” And he licked his lips, nudging his fellow with a lubricious elbow. “If she doesn’t get on with it, I may hurry things a bit.”

  The object of this conversation was sitting at the foot of a slything column in the p’natti, in full sight of the two old man things but as unconscious of them as though she had been on another world. Mavin had just discovered that she could change the length of her toes.

  The feeling was rather but not entirely like pain. There was a kind of itchy delight in it as well, not unlike the delight which could be evoked by stroking and manipulating certain body parts, but without that restless urgency. There was something in it, as well, of the fear of falling, a kind of breathless gap at the center of things as though a misstep might bring sudden misfortune. Despite all this, Mavin went on with what she was doing, which was to grow her toes a hand’s-width longer and then make them shorter again, all hidden in the shadow of her skirts. She had a horrible suspicion that this bending and extending of them might make them fall off, and in her head she could see them wriggling away like so many worms, blind and headless, burrowing themselves down into the ground at the bottom of the column, to be found there a century hence, still squirming, unmistakably Mavin’s toes. After a long time of this, she brought her toes back to a length which would fit her shoes and put them on, standing up to smooth her apron and noticing for the first time the distant surveillance offered by the two granders on the citadel high porch. She made a little face, as she had seen Handbright do, remotely aware of what the two old things usually chatted about but still not making any connection between that and herself. She was off to tell Handbright about her toes, and there was room for nothing else in her head at the moment, though she knew at the edges of her consciousness the oldsters had been talking man-woman stuff.

  But then everyone was into man-woman stuff that year. Some years it was fur, and some years it was feathers. Some years it was vegetable-seeming which was the fad, and other years no one cared for anything except jewels. This year was sex form changing, and it was somewhat titillating for the children, seeing their elder relatives twisting themselves into odd contorted shapes with nerve ends pushed out or tucked in in all sorts of original ways. Despite the fact that Shifters had no feeling of shame over certain parts – those parts being changed day to day in suchwise that little of the original topography could still be attached to them – the younglings who had not become Shifters yet were tied to old, non-Shifter forebear emotions which had to do with the intimate connections between things excretory and things erotic. It could not be helped. It was in the body shape they were born with and in the language and in the old stories children were told, and in the things all children did and thought and said, ancient as apes and true as time. So the children, looking upon all this changing about, found a kind of giggly prurience in it despite the fact that they were Shifter children every one, or hoped they were soon to be.

  All this lewd, itchy stuff to do with man and woman made Mavin uncomfortable in a deeply troublesome way. It was by no means maidenly modesty, which at one time it would have been called. It was a deeper thing than that – a feeling that something indecent was being done. The same feeling she had when she saw boys pulling the wings off zip-birds and taunting them as they flopped in the dust, trying, trying, trying
to fly. It was that same sick feeling, and since it seemed to be part and parcel of being Shifter, Mavin decided she wouldn’t tell anyone except Handbright she was Shifter, not just yet.

  Instead, she smoothed her apron, pointedly ignored the speculative stares of old Graywing and Haribald, and walked around the line of slything pillars to a she-door. At noon would be a catechism class, and though Mavin made it a practice to avoid many things which went on in Danderbat keep, it was not wise to avoid those. Particularly inasmuch as Handbright was teaching it and Mavin’s absence could not pass unnoticed. Since she was the only girl, it would not pass unnoticed no matter who was teaching, but she did not need to remind herself of that.

  Almost everyone was there when she arrived, so she slipped into a seat at the side of the room, attracting little attention. Some of the boys were beginning to practice Shifter sign, vying with one another who could grow the most hair on the backs of their hands and arms, who could give the best boneless wriggle in the manner of the Danderbats. Handbright told them once to pay attention, then struck hard at the offending arms with her rod, at which all recoiled but Tolerable Titdance, who had grown shell over his arms in the split second it had taken Handbright to hit at him. He laughed in delight, and Handbright smiled a tired little smile at him. It was always good to see a boy so quick, and she ruffled his hair and whispered in his ear to make him blush red and settle down.

  “I’m nye finished with you bunch,” said Handbright, making her hair stand out from her head in a tangly bush which wriggled like a million little vines. “You’re all coming along in one talent or another. I have to tell you today that it looks like Leggy Bartiban will be going off to Schooltown to be fostered. Seems he’s showing signs of being Tragamor. Not unexpected, eh Leggy?”