• Sam, Jep, and Saturday stopped briefly in Fenice to be decorated by the Queen. Maire received posthumous notice of a respectful kind. At Sam’s request, it was a private ceremony, though Queen Wilhulmia had longed for something a bit more weighty and regal. Since the Hobbs Landers were mourning Maire Manone, however, she forced herself to be understanding. When she placed the Order of Ahabar around Sam Girat’s neck and pressed her cheek against his own, she didn’t like the looks of him. Physically he seemed well enough, but there was something sadly wrong with him otherwise.
It was announced at the ceremony that Stenta Thilion was to have a tomb in Green Hurrah. A planetary contest for the two inscriptions on that tomb would be sponsored by the palace. One inscription was to memorialize the life and great talent of Stenta Thilion; the other was to decry the ugliness of fanaticism. The Queen made this announcement just before she bid Sam and his party farewell.
By this time, though no Ahabarian was aware of it, the underground net begun with the burials in Selmouth and Sarby and continued in Cloud and Scaery and dozens of other Voorstod hamlets, had covered all of Voorstod but the mountains, had crossed the border into Green Hurrah where it had spread swiftly through the fertile area, and was now exploring the deep soil of Jeramish. Ahead of this line went certain missionary Gharm, quietly and largely unnoticed, carrying out burials here and burials there. By the time of the winter rains, they felt they would have raised Tchenka almost halfway to Fenice. Everywhere near Voorstod upon Ahabar, biologists were noting the sudden emergence of new species that the Gharm greeted as old friends.
• Upon the moon Ninfadel, a flurry and swirl of arrival: prophets, carts, men, flocks, women and children last, many of them crying from the pain of the Door.
The guards that met them were sanguine, quiet-faced, saying Ninfadel, Ninfadel, you are on the moon Ninfadel—to general disbelief and fury, waved fists and maledictions. The prophets were not armed, but the guards were both armed and watchful. They took no notice of the threats.
“We’ve drilled new wells for you and your animals. We’ve erected pens to hold your flocks. There’s a bright yellow luminescent line out there. Stay above it, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”
To the assembled multitude, the guards and Native Matters persons gave their usual lecture: point one, point two, point three, to the end. They passed out face masks and nose plugs. Inventories of both were virtually depleted when they were through. After the lecture, prophets and the Faithful rose in their wrath and departed, not having listened; the flocks, women, and children followed, not having understood.
Most of the face plates and nose filters were left lying on the ground inside the walls. Guards and Native Matters persons shrugged. Porsa or prophets, the shrugs said. Good riddance to either. Neither group had been ordered to look after Voorstoders who refused to be enlightened about their circumstances.
The Voorstoders received enlightenment almost at once. Their flocks of vlish and dermot moved, for the most part, at the direction of the herdsmen. A few animals, however, dazed by the the Door and attracted by the scent of herbary, broke from the herds and ran down the hill. Herdsmen ran after them. Though the highlands widened south of the outpost, at the outpost itself the hills sloped steeply and the margins for error were small. The animals plunged downward, ever more swiftly, crossing the yellow line. All but one of the herdsmen skidded to a stop. That one had paid no attention to the warnings, and he plunged after the animals, whooping, as though it were a game.
The entire Voorstod population had the best possible view of what occurred thereafter. They heard and smelted it as well.
The prophet glared, belatedly inserting his nose plugs. His sons approached him, instinctively seeking reassurance.
“We can’t … we can’t live here,” said the eldest.
“We can live here,” said the Awateh loudly, and then more softly, “for a short time.” He raised his voice again, shouting instructions. The animals were herded into the pens which had been provided. The wide black tents were set up, those for the men first, then those for the women. At the point the pens had been built, the highlands were a mile across. The Voorstoders could still smell the Porsa, but not overwhelmingly. They could see the heaving forms, hear the shouts, but not loudly.
Highland brush was gathered, and fires were lit. Food was cooked. The Awateh sat in a tent alone with his sons, all fifteen of them, the youngest not yet twenty.
“On the moon Enforcement there are two of the Faithful,” said the Awateh, beginning a litany all of them knew well.
“Praise Almighty God,” his sons intoned.
“Halibar Ornil is the servant of God. Altabon Faros is the servant of God. Before we left Voorstod upon Ahabar, we received word from these Faithful that time is fulfilled. The army of Enforcement is being turned to God’s service.”
A spasm of ecstatic movement went among them. “How soon?” breathed the eldest of the sons.
“Only so long as it takes to teach the army of Enforcement the words of God.” The Awateh visualized the army of Enforcement as a kind of angelic host, hovering, awaiting a single command, but he knew intellectually that this was not accurate. According to the latest word received, Ornil and Faros, working alone, had managed to program less than one-hundredth of the army. Once the Commander’s unconscious body had served its purpose, it had been disposed of in a manner that suggested accidental death. There was now a new commander, with new-broom attitudes, poking into corners, looking up directives and seeing whether they had been complied with. Ornil and Faros were unsuspected and were proceeding with the Great Work, but they were doing it slowly, daring to do nothing that would seem suspicious. Considering the vast size of the army on Enforcement, the Awateh had decided to move at once. One-hundredth was quite enough for a first step.
“Then we need survive upon these heights only a little time,” said the eldest son, optimistically.
The prophet nodded. “Only a little longer.”
“Where?” asked the youngest son, greatly daring. He had been accustomed to saying nothing, asking nothing, in a culture where seniority was everything. “Where will the soldiers be sent, Father? Phansure?”
For many of those in the wide black tent, it was the only time they had ever seen the Awateh smile.
“When we struck at the traitorous Gharm in Ahabar, there were three who offended us,” said the prophet. “Two offended greatly, because they are of our blood, apostate, deniers of Almighty God and of his prophets. The other one offended us by calling up hatred against us, by singing a devil’s anthem into our faces. I learned of her identity too late to take her when she was in our hands.
“One of those three is dead. She was hung like rotten fruit upon the walls of the citadel at Cloud. Our faithful servant, Phaed Girat, saw that she was put there.
“One of the others is her son. The third is a girl of Hobbs Land named, blasphemously, Saturday Wilm.”
“You will send the soldiers of Enforcement to Hobbs Land to kill two people?” asked the youngest son, incredulously. He had heard there were only a few thousand people upon Hobbs Land. It made no military sense whatsoever. “To kill two people?”
“To kill all the people,” said the Awateh. “And their false gods whom they arrayed against us in Voorstod upon Ahabar. Those gods came from Hobbs Land.”
There were expressions of wonder and anger.
The Awateh went on. “First, some smallest part of the army of Almighty God will go to Hobbs Land while at the same time another small part goes to Authority. And then, when Hobbs Land is no more, when Authority is taken, thereby removing any threat to our continued work, the soldiers will go in their millions to Phansure. After Phansure is taken, they will go everywhere in the universe, in God’s name.”
“When?” the son asked.
“As soon as there is a diversion,” said the Awateh. “Something to focus the attention of the System elsewhere.”
“A diversion,” the son breathed.
“But that could be a long time.”
“As Almighty God wills,” breathed the Awateh, still smiling. He believed it would be soon, very soon.
• • •
• China Wilm, who had wished change upon Sam before he went to Ahabar, considered him unduly changed now. At first she hardly knew him. He looked at her out of haunted eyes, his cheeks sunken from loss of weight. He seldom remembered to eat. China, despite her far-advanced pregnancy, took him in. Sometimes a woman did that with a lover, usually not for long, but it was certainly acceptable behavior if the man needed care and couldn’t find it among his sisterhouses—which Sam couldn’t, because Sal was grieving so over Maire that she wasn’t competent to look after herself or the babies. Harribon Kruss came over from Settlement Three to look after Sal. That was sometimes done, too, when there was no brother to look after things.
China took Sam in and fed him, petted him, and cosseted him with delicacies. Within a few days he looked more like himself physically, though the look in his eyes had not changed.
“He should be back at the job,” said Africa, who had been holding down Sam’s job and her own for far too long.
“Look at him,” whispered China. “Don’t push him, Africa.”
“Seems he should start to get over Maire’s dying. It’s been a while now.”
“It isn’t just Maire’s dying. It isn’t her death he can’t get over. It’s that she knew she was in danger of death and he pooh-poohed it. He had never understood what she was trying to tell him, but even that isn’t what’s eating at him. It’s that he never really tried to understand. She told him things, and he heard them, but he never asked himself what they meant to her. He only asked what they meant to him. He had his dad built up as some kind of misunderstood hero. Now he feels guilty, and he won’t let go of it. You know Sam. He always has to wring every drop of blood out of everything, even when there isn’t any blood to wring.”
“Birribat Shum will. …”
“I know. I think so, too, if we give him time. There had to be a reason for everything.”
“Reason?”
“For the way Sam was, before he left. For the way he is now. Not quite like the rest of us. Maybe a few oddities are needed, from time to time. A few strangenesses. We have to give him time.” She did not specify which him she meant.
So they gave him time. One day Sam went into the office and Africa asked him to fill out the requisitions. The next day it was the production report. Within ten days he was back at the work, not with any appearance of joy, but doing it in between long spells of sitting gazing out the window at nothing.
Sal recovered gradually. She hadn’t seen Maire’s body, and no one had told her how Maire had died, just that the prophets had killed her and she was buried in the courtyard at Cloud. One day, Sal was told, there would be a God Maire Manone in Cloud. They could go there, the whole family. The thought seemed to comfort her, though it did not comfort Sam.
Either Sal or China fixed him lunches, to be sure he ate. Sal’s children were sent to demand stories. Sal thought this would help Sam, but he sent the children away, refusing to open the books. Harribon Kruss, who spent a lot of time with Sal, took Sam fishing for creelies. Through it all, Sam moved like a ghost, like a spirit, an inhabitant of a world the rest of them could not see. China thought of him as a kind of hollow man, going through the motions. There was nothing inside him.
Not long after the fishing expedition, however, which had taken them up through the New Forest—vastly increased in size and awesomeness—and past Cloudbridge—which was enough to make a man catch his breath in wonder—he began to read legends again, starting with the books he himself had made. He kept asking himself what they had meant to the people who wrote them, rather than what they meant to him. It was not long before he noticed what had escaped him before. The legends spoke of victors. The stories told of survivors. Heroes were those who had died valiantly, with immortal words on their tongues, or those still alive when the story was over. Of the myriads slaughtered, of the uncountable maimed and enslaved, of the unnumbered victims, there remained only the poet’s voice or no voice at all. They could not speak for themselves.
• Dern Blass had been curious about the Voorstod Matter, which is what he had called it to himself, ever since Jep Wilm had been abducted. His curiosity had not been in the least satisfied by Ilion Girat, who seemed to know nothing and who, in any case, had been sent back to Ahabar (and internment) soon after Sam, Maire, and Saturday had left. Dern’s curiosity continued unabated after Sam and the children returned, but anyone could see that Sam Girat was in no condition to talk about anything, and humane considerations suggested that Jep and Saturday should be let alone for a time as well.
When Dern considered that enough time had passed for everyone to have settled down and recovered, however, he invited the returnees to join him, Zilia, and Spiggy, and fill them in as to what had happened. The two Phansuri engineers, Theor Close and Betrun Jun, happened to be on one of their periodic visits to Hobbs Land, so Dern asked them to come along. Dern liked both the Phansuris. They spoke his language and understood him better than many on Hobbs Land did, and they, too, were curious about what had happened on Voorstod.
Dern invited some settlement people as well, Sal Girat and Harribon Kruss, China and Africa Wilm. He didn’t want what he thought of as an official debriefing; that would be too formal and constrained. He wanted chat. He wanted colorful details. He knew parts of it were painful, but he wanted to know about all of it, even the painful parts. The twelve of them would fit nicely into one flier, and Dern planned to give the whole thing a pleasant informality by flying up to the new memorial park for a picnic. On his time report he would call it an inspection trip.
Jamice didn’t want to go along because she was getting over a stuffy head she had picked up from some visitor—despite all advances in medicine, there were still bugs busy mutating for the sole purpose of giving humans stuffy heads. Dern Blass appointed her acting director for the day and told her to stay in bed. Acting director, as Jamice well knew, meant less than nothing so long as Tandle Wobster was in the office, so Jamice stayed in her darkened quarters and plugged in her sleep inducer while her colleagues assembled at CM, to find that the CM commissary had packed food and drink enough for twice their number. Dern asked Spiggy to pilot, and they had an uneventful and largely silent flight.
Spiggy was the only one in the group who had seen the radiating mounds from ground level, though Dern had flown over them, just to see what people were talking about. They landed nearby, in a cleared plot convenient to the site, and all wandered into the mound area, marveling at the things.
“I don’t remember the mounds being this high,” said Spiggy. “I recall them coming up to my shoulder, but these are over my head.”
“The way I hear it,” said Dern, “you were kept very busy up here and can be excused for not having paid that close attention to your surroundings.” Dern had no moral qualms about Spiggy’s involvement with the Baidee, but neither did he intend to let Spig escape without joshing.
A number of bodies had been buried near the mounds since the first two from Settlement Three. Three of the oldest settlers had died in Settlements Two and Six. There had been an accident at one of the mines, which had killed four. Though the graves were unmarked, it was easy to see where they lay from the slight dimpling of the ground. While Zilia and Africa unpacked the food and drink, the others of the party walked along the mounds examining the cracked and fallen soil around them and exclaiming at their size, excepting Jep and Saturday, who were unaccountably quiet.
“What do you think?” asked Dern, encountering the two youngsters at the end of a mound.
“I think whatever this would grow into would be huge,” said Jep.
“Dormant, the Baidee experts said,” Dern smiled.
“Dormant for how long?” asked Saturday.
Dern hadn’t thought to ask that question of the Baidee scientists. He found himself wondering
if the Baidee scientists had asked that question themselves, and he stopped smiling.
“It’s only a hundred feet long,” he said, gesturing at the mound. “Some trees have roots that long.”
“This thing,” said Saturday, “is circular and is almost two hundred fifty feet in diameter. The visible part is about twelve feet high. There’s a circular mound started up in the middle. It’s all one thing, Director Blass.”
“Well, yes,” he admitted, rubbing his chin doubtfully. “I suppose it is.”
They went into the nearby Departed village, just to look around, and found the Theckle brothers from Settlement One, roaming among the ruins.
“What are you doing up here?” asked Sam.
“Picking gravesites for us,” said Emun Theckles.
“Having a nap under the trees,” said his brother, scratching the back of his neck.
“Are you really picking a place to be buried?” asked Saturday, curiously.
“That’s the idea I had,” said Emun. “Woke up this morning with the idea very clear that I should come up here and pick a place to be buried. Then when we got here, we were both sleepy, so we had a nap.” He brushed clinging, hairlike fibers from the back of his neck. “Now we’re hungry.”
Dern laughed and asked them to join the party. He had no objection to their hearing what had actually happened in Voorstod. They all sat down, and Dern asked for the tale. Jep began; Saturday continued; it went on for some little time. At the end of the rather rambling narrative, in which Saturday and Jep shared about equally, with Sam saying so little that it almost seemed he had not been involved, Zilia shook her head and said, “Now wait a minute, Jeopardy Wilm. There’s something here I don’t understand. You’re saying that the Gods in Voorstod changed the people there. The Gods here on Hobbs Land have not changed us.”
Dern Blass, who was able to appreciate the changes in
Zilia more than any of the rest of them, decided not to comment.