Raising the Stones

  “Strange,” she agreed, wishing he would quit talking about the Gods.

  “They call each God by the name of some settler that’s died recently. Kind of a memorial, I guess.” He grunted and put his right hand under his arm. “I shouldn’t have eaten anything. Now I’ve got a pain.”

  “Shall I call a tech?”

  “No, no,” he waved impatiently. “I’ve just been tired these last few days. I’m supposed to have a med-check, but I keep putting it off.”

  “Perhaps I’d better run along.”

  He turned the full splendor of his smile on her. “Sweetheart, no. If there’s any remedy for tiredness on this whole world, it’s right here next to me.” He reached out for her, and she lost herself in their usual and delightful preliminaries.

  Later he went into his bedroom while she visited the bathroom. When she came to him, he was sprawled out on the coverlet, face up, the lights dimmed. She was on the bed with him, snuggled against him, before she realized he was no longer breathing.

  • If Horgy had thought the rapid proliferation of Gods upon Hobbs Land strange, Zilia Makepeace considered it ominous. She wanted very much to talk to the survey team from Thyker, but they were all up on the escarpment, looking at odd formations no one had noticed until recently. From what Zilia was told, once Shan and Bombi and Volsa had started looking for them on the aerial surveys, they found others, a similar formation here, a slightly different one there, some protruding high out of the soil, others barely rounding the surface. Though it was not part of their project, the Damzels had decided to uncover at least one of them, just to see what they were, and the three-man team had been augmented by machine operators, techs, a doctor from Thyker, and even a funny fat Baidee named Merthal who was scrupulously polite but stubbornly insistent upon being supplied immediately with whatever-it-was the Damzels thought they needed. Since the project was being conducted under the aegis of the Native Matters Advisory, as Native Matters person upon the planet, Zilia had to see to all of it without being part of any of it, and her paranoia had given way to sheer annoyance and frustrated curiosity.

  She had even sought Spiggy’s company, only to find that he, of all people, had been invited by Volsa Damzel to spend some time up on the escarpment. According to Tandle Wobster, who knew everything, Spiggy was enough of a Baidee to be acceptable as a sex partner even if he did eat eggs and didn’t own a kamrac. Since she had little enough else to speculate about, Zilia speculated as to how Tandle had learned this interesting fact and ended with the suspicion that Tandle had probably illicitly tapped all their private stages.

  Ruminations and suspicions were disrupted by the unexpected death of Horgy Endure, who, as anyone might have predicted, died in bed with one of his trainees. Zilia could not remember which one she had been until she saw the blonde girl at the memorial service, supported by female associates and obviously still in shock. Horgy had had a large circle of acquaintances, a few of them men, many of whom came to CM for the service. Zilia dressed herself soberly and sat toward the back of the hall, hoping the eulogies would not take long. A young person took the seat beside her, and other young persons filled the surrounding area.

  “I’m Saturday Wilm,” said Zilia’s neighbor, offering her hand. “This is my cousin, Jeopardy. We met out at Settlement One when you came there for the visit. All these others are members of the visitation committee that Horgy Endure sponsored.” Saturday sighed, and a tear slid gently down her face to drip, unnoticed, from her jaw. “He was very nice to us.”

  “He was very nice to many people,” said Zilia, drily. She herself was almost the only woman in Central Management Horgy had not been intimately nice to. Herself and, possibly, Tandle, though Zilia would not have bet her life even on that. What had Horgy been up to with this child? “So you’ve come for the service.”

  “For the vigil, actually,” said Jep. “Our group does that, you know. We keep vigil the night someone is buried. It’s a sort of symbol of thoughtful remembrance. A kindness.”

  It was the first Zilia had heard of it. She had not looked at Horgy’s report on innovations, and though Dern Blass had been interested in the proliferation of Hobbs Land Gods, no one had mentioned vigils at recent meetings. “At the grave?” she asked, amazed. Graveside services were unknown. Only the family or those appointed for the duty took bodies to a grave or to whatever other form of disposal was used. This, a Baidee custom which had become accepted Systemwide, was almost never contravened. The Baidee considered the body simply as something to be disposed of, a leftover, not’ something to focus community attention upon. It was customary for families to dispose of bodies, quickly though respectfully, even before memorials were conducted.

  “At the grave, yes. So far, the weather’s been very good, so we just bring blankets and sort of sing until the suns come up.” Saturday’s eyes were as limpid and clear as the mountain streams which fell from the escarpment. “Just a remembrance.”

  Zilia was not to be taken in by childlike eyes. This was another behavior she did not understand. “I’d like to join you,” she said. “Would you mind an observer?”

  There was a hesitation so brief that it went unnoticed. “Why, of course,” said Jep. “We’d be glad to have you. We’ll be getting together at the burying ground around nightwatch two or three.”

  Zilia walked out to the burying ground at nightwatch two and a half, splitting the difference. The place lay in an elevated basin, separated from the CM complex by a raised ridge of stone and shrubs and curly native trees. As she approached the ridge, Zilia heard singing, and once she had climbed it, she saw the lights of several lanterns and the shifting shadows thrown by a small fire.

  The children were gathered around an area of disturbed soil which Zilia assumed was the grave. Saturday welcomed her and offered a blanket, since Zilia had not brought one of her own. The singing resumed, a multiversed chant called “Singing up the Gods,” which told the story of a scene-by-scene, virtually rock-by-rock, ascent to the escarpment. This was followed by storytelling in which Horgy Endure was given the leading, though fictional, part as he explored strange and wonderful places such as the Isles of Flowers. Then there was a quiet perambulation around the grave and then a repetition of the same sequence, with minor variations. The children seemed to know a great many songs which had no real words but very complicated rhythms, songs which had no end but merely went on until everyone was tired. Sometimes they wore masks while singing or perambulating, blank masks with round holes for eyes and mouths, so they all looked alike.

  “Why?” Zilia asked, troubled by this facelessness.

  “Because we are not here as individuals,” said Saturday. “Who we are isn’t important. It’s the intent that matters.”

  “Why do you say who you are isn’t important?”

  Saturday frowned, tried to speak, frowned again. “Because … because there’s no … no reward,” she said at last. “We don’t get a gold star or anything.”

  “Our name doesn’t get put on a plaque,” said Jep. “Who did it isn’t important. Only the fact it was done.”

  Zilia did not understand this. Nothing was being done, that she could see. Whether something was done or not seemed utterly irrelevant, and she could not believe it was important. “What do you think you are doing?” she asked.

  “A kindness,” said Saturday. “A kindness of eight.”

  It was true there were only eight of them. Jep, and Saturday, and six from other settlements, not as many as Zilia had assumed there would be.

  “Where’s your friend Willum R.?” Zilia asked Jep.

  “He wasn’t feeling well,” he responded. “Gotoit and some of the others stayed with him.

  Nightwatch ten passed, and eleven. Somewhere in the night was the sound of someone or something digging. “Pocket squirrels,” said Jep calmly, in response to Zilia’s questioning glance. “The big kind. I saw one before dark that was as long as my forearm.”

  “I didn’t know they got that large,??
? said Zilia, wonderingly. “Really? Or are you exaggerating?”

  “I have seen some very large pocket squirrels,” Jep said stoutly. “And at night they look even bigger.”

  The others agreed with him, telling stories of pocket-squirrel oddities from the settlements.

  Along about nightwatch thirteen, Zilia fell asleep. When she woke, it was almost dawn, and the children were yawning as they put out the fire and extinguished their lanterns. One more parade around the site, and then they straggled back toward the management complex, Zilia as weary as any, though she had slept four or five periods. She waved them goodbye at the door of her apartment building, washed off the dust of the night, and fell into bed.

  Meantime, the weary children trudged back the way they had come, into a small gully, which ran behind the burying ground, where Willum R., Gotoit, and a dozen other shivering children waited for them around a blanket wrapped form.

  “You were far enough from the real grave that we could get him up,” said Willum R. tiredly, “but we couldn’t carry him over where we picked for the temple without that woman maybe seeing us.”

  “It’s short nights now,” murmured Saturday. “Nobody’ll be awake at Central for a while yet. The grave’s all dug, so we’ve got time if we go quickly.”

  The body of Horgy Endure, carried on a blanket folded around two poles, was hustled over a stretch of rolling ground to a small eminence overlooking the management complex and was there shallowly interred together with a scrap of the sticky, whitish God-stuff, which Saturday Wilm had brought in a filmbag in her knapsack.

  “It’s about time,” moaned Gotoit, rubbing her aching arms.

  “I’ll say,” agreed Jep. “I’m tired. This is the last one.”

  “No more vigils,” said Saturday. “I’ll sort of miss the singing.”

  “No reason for vigils,” Jep shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  “I’ve got four left,” said Saturday, peering into her knapsack. “I cut fifteen when we raised Birribat. We used ten in the settlements and one here, so I’ve got four left. Why did I do that?”

  “Don’t throw them away,” said Jep. “If you’ve got them, you’ve probably got them for a reason. Keep them safe.”

  “I wonder how long they’re good for?”

  Jep only shrugged. He hadn’t any idea.

  “Who’ll build the temple at CM?” he wanted to know. “They hardly have any kids here at all.”

  They had no answer to the question, and even the most impudent among them could not have foreseen the day when Dern Blass and Zilia Makepeace and Spiggy and Jamice and the rest of the administrative staff would scribe the inner and outer circles of a temple and begin laying stones near the grave which had just been filled. Nor did they foresee the day when those same folk would see to the raising of the God, Horgy Endure.

  They went back to their temporary quarters at CM in a straggling procession, yawning and dragging their feet. Jep and Saturday lingered behind the others, hand-in-hand.

  “Now we can just live,” said Jep, rather wearily. “Now we can just live, Sats.” He put his arms around her, and they leaned together, two tired children, Ones Who had done everything the God required and were now entitled to rest.

  “Now we can just live,” she agreed, kissing him on the cheek, a small kiss, just to say everything was still there, intact, between them.

  “Come on,” cried Gotoit, beckoning. “We need to get home.”

  Jep stopped abruptly, shivering.

  “What’s the matter?” Saturday asked.

  “When she said that, I got all cold,” he complained.

  “When she said what?”

  “About going home. Like maybe something’s wrong there.”

  “Nothing’s wrong there, Jep. You’re tired, that’s all. So am I. You’re tired, and when we get home we have to go to school, and there’s sports practice, and your body isn’t interested in doing anything but sleeping. Neither is mine. The idea of music practice makes my throat hurt like crazy.”

  “I guess that’s it,” he said, returning her kiss and smoothing her wild hair away from her face. They smiled comfortingly at one another and set out after Gotoit and Willum R.

  Voorstod

  ONE

  • Jeopardy Wilm woke into a strange world and a strange time, with a headache that roared and howled between his ears. His body was on a bed, arms and legs flung out in all directions. His mind was somewhere else, looking for him. The air smelled wet and moldy. There were voices in his head that he did not know, voices and a horrid wrenching he thought he might have felt once before, long ago, and hated then and now. Both the voices and the wrenching had happened elsewhere, in the darkness before he woke, and he remembered them as he sometimes remembered parts of an unpleasant dream from which he had wakened too quickly.

  A moan came from his throat of itself, unintended, making the pain in his head thunder and throb. Nearby a chair scraped on a wooden floor, the noise sending jagged lightning through his skull. It was not a usual sound, not the sound a chair would make in the settlement. Sponge panels made a soft, cushiony sound. This sound shrieked, but he knew what it meant. Someone, someone getting up to see to him.

  The face that came to hang over him was not a face he knew. It had an aura of red light around it, a disturbing tendency to swim toward him and then away.

  “Wakin’ up, are you?” the mouth above him asked, a gaping maw of teeth, ogrelike, with a great oar of a tongue waggling in it. Jep squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, and again. The aura faded; mouth and face dwindled to a proper size; and he was able to understand the voice. It wasn’t a Hobbs Land voice. He knew the words—System language—but the pronunciation was odd, full of sliding tones which had nothing to do with the sense of the words.

  The face turned away, the mouth still uttering. “He’s comin’ back, Preu. I guess you didn’t kill him with the stuff after all.”

  “I’ll see for myself, Epheron.” Another face ballooned over him, one with white hair fringing the edges of a dark cap, a face that wavered in his sight, back and forth, back and forth. Jep shut his eyes again, sure he was lost in nightmare.

  “Boy,” said a harsher voice. “Listen to me. You’ll get your sense back quicker if you know where you are and who you’re among. I’m Preu Flandry, and this is Voorstod.”

  Nothing. It meant nothing. “Who’s Voorstod,” the boy mumbled through dry lips. “Voorstod? Who is that?”

  “You’re in Voorstod on the planet Ahabar,” Flandry said angrily.

  “Ahabar,” mumbled the boy. He knew the meaning of the word. Ahabar was a planet. One of the inner-System planets. Large. Ruled by a monarchy. Queen somebody. “I’m on Ahabar. Queen somebody.”

  The man struck him, not hard. “We don’t talk of Queens here. Though we may share the planet, this isn’t Ahabar, this is Voorstod.”

  Which left him where he had been before: nowhere. If Voorstod was not a person, what was it?

  “He’s never heard of Voorstod?” someone said incredulously. “Maire Girat’s grandson?”

  “Not anybody’s grandson,” mumbled Jep, coming to himself a little. “China’s mom died. I don’t have a grandma.”

  There was angry murmuring punctuated by snarls, like dogs fighting over a not-very-interesting bone, more out of habit than appetite.

  Another man came to the bed, a squinty-eyed man. “Who’s Sam Girat?” the man asked.

  “Sam Girat?” asked Jep, trying to pull himself up a little. “He’s Topman of Settlement One.”

  “He’s your father,” snarled a voice from somewhere else, not one of the voices he had heard before.

  “You don’t need to talk like that,” said Jep. “He’s nothing to do with me. That’s improper, saying my mother’s friends have anything to do with me.” He succeeded in getting more or less upright and stared around the room. Against the far wall was a stone hollow with a fire in it and a small door next to it. The floor was wood, not polished
, as Jep was accustomed to seeing wood, but dry and splintery. The ceiling was crossed with round wood beams, then crossed the other way with flat boards laid side by side. The walls were splotchy and stained, dun and rust colored, as though water had leaked through everywhere, in some places more copiously than others, making islands and peninsulas of stain upon the dank surfaces. A curtained window occupied the center of the wall opposite the fire; plank doors, bound heavily with metal straps and hinges, opened at the middle of the other walls. From where he lay, Jep could see that the door to his right was spiked shut with huge nails, driven deep.

  Two of the three chairs by the fire were occupied. The man beside the bed went back to the third chair, slumping into it gracelessly. “Kid doesn’t have a grandma! Hah.”

  “Question is, Pye, does the grandma have a kid?”

  The white-fringed man leaned forward to warm his hands at the fire. For the first time, Jep realized how cold and damp the room was, how bitterly cold he himself was. He shivered. The blanket across his body was sodden with moisture, like a fungus after rain. He shivered again and tried to distract himself by identifying the men. The white-haired one was Preu. The younger one with the huge mouth who had spoken first was Epheron. The squinty-eyed man who had just left him was Pye, and Jep had seen him before.

  “What’s your whole name?” asked Jep, pointing.

  “My name is Mugal Pye,” the man said, turning his daggerlike eyes upon the boy. “We’ve met before.”

  All three of them wore large caps, which had the effect of making their heads look larger and their faces smaller. Jep remembered noticing that before. He had been walking out to the temple alone, very early. There was something he had to do for Birribat Shum. And there had been a stranger on the road, a man wearing a cap, a man who had said his name was … was Mugal Pye.

  “What did you do to me?” Jep asked. He could remember nothing after the man told him his name. “Why am I here?”