Howling Stones

“Healing stones. I didn’t know …” He winced, his face contorting. His expression was drawn. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “I’m not surprised. Can you stand?”

  “One way to find out.”

  With her assistance he rose shakily to his feet, but he was able to stand and take steps without help.

  “You can’t walk all the way back to the station. Not in the shape you’re in.” She was unshakable in her opinion of his condition. “You haven’t had anything to eat since the day before yesterday.”

  “Two days.” He pondered this.

  “I’m sure Ascela and the others will be willing to carry you back. Or I can go and return with the skimmer.”

  “You’re right. I’d best not rush anything.” He eyed the attendant Parramati. “Maybe I could get something to eat besides energy tablets and concentrate bars.”

  “Sure. Meanwhile you’d better take it easy or you’re liable to keel over and hurt yourself.”

  He licked dry lips. “I don’t feel like racing any of the village sprinters, if that’s what’s concerning you. But there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with my appetite.” Again the gentle, familiar smile, which she appreciated now more than ever.

  “Funny,” he told her as she put the request for food to Ascela, “how in spite of whatever trauma the mind may suffer, the body responds with its own demands. Hunger, thirst, the need for warmth: some things are beyond shock. What have you got there?”

  She held out her hand to him. “More concentrates.” She urged him to take them. “Until real food arrives.”

  He nodded and took the thin, foil-wrapped bars. When his bare fingers touched her own she started slightly.

  “You’re cold, Pulickel.”

  “Too few calories and too much emotion.”

  Her lingers wrapped around his and he smiled as he squeezed back, but the usual wiry strength was absent.

  They spent the night in the village. Pulickel ate everything that was placed before him and asked for more. Fearful of overloading his stressed system, Fawn rationed his food and drink accordingly.

  It had been a long time—a very long time—since he’d been mothered, and while he had a hard time thinking of Fawn Seaforth as maternal, he found himself warmed by the attention nonetheless.

  Not until midmorning of the following day, and not until after he’d demonstrated to her satisfaction that he was capable of sustained physical exertion, did they start the long hike back to base. He snacked on concentrated field rations all the way and ran half a dozen programs through the food processor as soon as they entered the station. Just when it seemed that his bulging belly was about to explode, he declared with great satisfaction that he was finally sated.

  Retiring to the main lounge, he settled into the same couch on which he’d lain comatose the previous day and tried to give her some impression of his experiences.

  She listened to it all. Initial disbelief gave way to gradual, awed acceptance. It was too fantastical for her prosaic associate to have imagined, too rich in detail for him to have invented. Outside the realm of logic and reason, it hewed consistently to a frenzied, crazed internal logic all its own. For more than an hour Pulickel played the caterpillar and she was Alice.

  “They were some kind of traveling stones.” In contrast to his desperate downing of liquids earlier that day, he sipped judiciously from the mug on the table in front of him.

  She eyed him cautiously. “So what you’re saying is that they transported you to another part of Senisran?”

  He found that he was able to laugh. “No, not to another part of Senisran.”

  Her incredulity was boosted. “You’re not saying that they sent you offworld?”

  Leaning forward, he crossed his arms over his lap. “I’m not only saying that they took me offworld, I’m saying that they sent me to worlds that seemed to have no place in the normal scheme of existence.” For a brief moment his eyes looked haunted. “And once, to a place that not only wasn’t normal, it wasn’t even a world.”

  Slowly she sat back in her chair and regarded him silently. “Even if the stones aren’t stones,” she said finally, “and are something more, they’re not big enough to contain the power to do something like that.”

  “I agree. They must key or otherwise activate a larger device somewhere else. Buried beneath the village, perhaps, or on some other part of the island. It has to be the same for all the other stones. They only activate specific functions. The actual instigating mechanisms must be sited elsewhere. Maybe not even on Torrelau, or within the boundaries of the archipelago. There’s an awful lot of Senisran that’s yet to be explored, and I’m just thinking of islands and atolls. The extensive shallow submerged plains have hardly been touched.” He shifted his position on the couch.

  “Ophhlia and the other humanx bases are swarming with oceanographers, xenologists, geologists, and the like. Nobody’s looking for relics of a vanished civilization any more because the initial survey teams insisted there was no evidence of any. Well, I think we have incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Functional proof, no less.”

  She crossed her legs, another kind of functional proof that he always delighted in observing. “I don’t suppose that in spite of all the convincing detail to your story you could have just fallen, hit your head on a rock, and hallucinated the whole business?”

  “Of course I could have. Don’t you think the possibility’s occurred to me?” He finished his drink. “But I don’t think I did. There was a clarity to every moment of it, Fawn, a sureness, that reeked of reality. Even during those moments when I thought I was going crazy.”

  She was thoughtful for a while before responding. “All right. Deranged as it seems, let’s assume for a moment that this all happened for real, just as you describe it. When combined, the stones you had in your possession serve as, or trigger, some kind of interstellar transport mechanism. We either need to find the device or ascribe the entire business to magic.”

  “Magic science, science magic.” He shrugged. “This experience has moved me beyond semantics, Fawn. Long ago humans learned how to slap two stones together to strike sparks and make fire. Now we point the appropriate device, and fire goes where we want it. Somebody else has learned how to slap two stones together and cast themselves between the stars. It’s all a matter of knowing what stones to use. Of knowing the right roads, as the Parramati would say.”

  “Find how the stones connect to the larger mechanism,” she surmised, “and we’ll find the mechanism itself. Wave-form contact.”

  “Maybe.” He laughed sharply. “It certainly isn’t being done by wire. Try explaining vit to an aboriginal. He’ll gawk into space trying to locate the pictures that appear on the receiver. That’s what we’re doing here: staring into space trying to find something whose characteristics we don’t have the knowledge to define. We’ve found the needle, but the haystack’s gone missing.”

  “I wouldn’t bet that it’s elsewhere on Senisran,” she told him. “No other native society that we know of uses anything like the stones.”

  “If there’s some kind of large concealed device located in the archipelago, it must be heavily screened or the survey drones would have picked it up, just as they reported on the rare earth deposits all the commercial interests in Ophhlia are so anxious to have a go at.”

  “Then you and I sure aren’t going to find it without Parramati help.” She rose and began to pace back and forth in front of him.

  “You talk to them.” He stared out the line of windows. “I’m already considered a possible thief.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that. You’re not Parramati, so you’re not held to the same standards they are.” She smiled knowingly. “I’ve already explained to them your rationale for ‘borrowing’ the stones. They’re not happy about it, but they’re not ready to dismember you, either. You see, our kusum is different from theirs, and that’s something they can understand. They consider you misguided and inept instead of depraved.??
?

  He sniffed. “I suppose I should be thankful.”

  “Of course,” she added, “it also means they’re not going to leave you alone with even the smallest, most insignificant sacred stone lest your misdirected kusum gets the better of you again. But your head should be safe in their company.”

  “That’s a great relief. Keeping all my body parts in one place should facilitate my continued work here.” Smiling thinly, he turned away from the window and back to his associate. “So where do we start? By questioning your friend Ascela? Jorana, perhaps, or this ancient Vounean Ijaju?”

  She chewed reflectively on her lower lip. “With Jorana, I think. Of all the big people on Torrelau, he’s always been the most patient and accommodating.”

  “We’ll need some patience of our own if we’re going to find an answer to all this.” His voice dropped slightly. “The stones are the keys to the roads, which link individual ‘spaces’ in the Parramati mind. Combining the stones and handling them in specific ways make the stones work, and these ways are part of the oral tradition of kusum. It all fits together very well. If only it didn’t smack so much of the incredible.” He turned wistful.

  “I wonder if the Parramati have used the stones to go traveling, if they’ve visited some of the places I visited.” A cloud came over his expression. “Not all of them, I hope.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard them speak of such a thing.”

  “I can understand why.” He gathered himself. “We must try to extract all the information we can, but if someone offers to ‘send’ us somewhere by way of demonstration, I think I will pass. I’ve had all the demonstration of these stones’ capacity that I want.”

  “If you’re right about what happened to you, Pulickel, then I still don’t understand how they found you.”

  “It’s simple. They know the roads, I don’t. I imagine it’s all a matter of knowing how to read the indicators along the way, the street signs. Not only couldn’t I do that, I didn’t even know I was on a road. Only that I was traveling, and lost.” He stared hard at her, and there was something forever lost in his gaze.

  “I very badly want to find out how all this works, but not at the risk of getting lost again.”

  15

  Fawn was right. Jorana was forthcoming and responsive when they questioned him about the transportation stones. As near as she could tell, the big person wasn’t holding anything back or attempting to sidestep their queries. The Parramati could be evasive in conversation, and a big person like Jorana more so than most, but he made no attempt to circumvent their questions, answering everything in a direct and forthright manner.

  “The stones have always been with the Parramati, the Parramati have always been with the stones. They are the foundation of kusum.”

  “Are there stones and stone masters on all the islands of the archipelago?” Fawn asked.

  “Not all, but many. They have been here for as long as people can remember. They have been here for as long as people have been.”

  The three of them were seated on thick woven mats in Jorana’s longhouse, deep bowls of fruit juice in front of them.

  “So the stones were just lying around when the first Parramati came here?” Using both hands in the accepted manner, Pulickel sipped from his bowl, swallowing the pith suspended in the liquid and politely spitting the seeds into his closed palm.

  “Yes. It is told that Kureo’o’oa, of the original Parramati, was the first person to understand the working of a stone. He found a stone that, when combined with another, brought all manner of good things to eat close to his boat, so that he might catch them. These were the first fishing stones. After that, other first people tried many different stones. Some did nothing, others led to different roads.”

  “Hundreds of years of trial and error,” Fawn whispered. “Maybe thousands.”

  “Over time, more and more stones became known to us, and their workings a part of our kusum. Some of these original Parramati became the first stone masters. Some vanished, never to be seen again. Some died.” Jorana’s barks and yips rose and fell euphoniously in the still, humid air of the longhouse.

  “Are all stone masters considered to be big persons?” Pulickel asked.

  “Yes, but not all big persons are stone masters.” Jorana’s lips rippled along the sides of his long snout. “The stone master legacy is passed down within families, within clans. They are the ones who have charge of the stones, they are the ones who know the roads.”

  Feeling very self-conscious, Pulickel nonetheless asked the next question. “And no family or clan tries to take another’s stones?”

  “What good is a stone to one who does not know its road?” With the long middle finger of his right hand, the big person stirred patterns in his juice. “Besides, the stones are brought together for the good of all. One stone master helps another, just as big persons help small persons. When needed, stone masters from one island will assist those of another. Torrelau is a big island, with many villages and stone masters. We are always ready to help Parramati who live on smaller islands, even if it is only one family that lives by fishing from a sandbar.”

  Pulickel glanced significantly at Fawn before asking the question they had been leading up to all morning. “What about the transportation stones?” A group of youngsters outside was playing the elaborate Parramati version of leapfrog. Occasionally a deep thump would echo through the longhouse as one of them ricocheted off the exterior wall.

  “Like the ones you borrowed to try to study?” It was difficult to tell when one was being teased by a Parramati. Formal sarcasm had no place in their conversation. “Sometimes the masters of such stones will use them to explore certain roads. From these travels they bring back fresh knowledge, new ways of seeing and thinking. It is only for big persons that they do this, for such learning is wasted on middle and small persons. If what they learn proves useful, it is made a part of kusum.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” Fawn agreed. “Do the masters of these stones use them to travel frequently?”

  “No. It is difficult and can be dangerous.” For the first time, Jorana showed reluctance to elaborate. “Such stones are for use only in great emergencies.”

  “And what would qualify as an appropriate emergency?” Pulickel leaned forward intently.

  Jorana considered. “An incurable sickness. A war that the Parramati were losing. Anything that threatened kusum.”

  Was that an implied threat? the xenologist wondered. He didn’t see how the transportation stones could be used against the Commonwealth presence. Apparently Jorana thought such a thing was possible. It was an unpleasant thought, one they could come back to later if the need arose.

  “This Koreo’o’oa and the other first persons,” Fawn was saying, “they must have been very brave people.”

  Holding up the outside finger of each hand in the accepted manner, Jorana sipped from his bowl. “They were. I wish I could have known them. Since I cannot, I honor their memories.”

  “The sacred stones.” Fawn shifted nervously on her mat. “I don’t mean to commit blasphemy. Please remember that there is much of Parramati kusum I am still ignorant of, but—has anyone ever tried to break one of them open, to study the inside?”

  Jorana’s pupils parted wide and his long dark lips drew back in horror. “No! It would be a violation of the stone. Why would anyone think of doing such a thing?”

  Fawn hastened to reassure the big person. “I didn’t mean to suggest that it should be done. I only wondered if it had happened. By accident, perhaps.”

  Jorana seemed mollified. “To my knowledge, no stone has ever been broken open. Either by design or by mischance.” He looked sharply at Pulickel. “That was not what you were going to do, friend Pu’il?”

  “Who, me?” The xenologist was being at least half truthful. Had he succeeded in bringing the two stones he’d taken back to the station, initial studies would have preserved their structural integrit
y so that they could have been returned to their owners intact.

  Fawn hurriedly changed the subject. “Down through the centuries the Parramati have found hundreds of stones. Do you ever find any unmastered ones any more?”

  “Not in several lifetimes,” Jorana admitted. “Some think that the Parramati have identified all the sacred stones that there are to be found.”

  “Are there any transportation stones on Mallatyah?” Pulickel asked tersely, thinking of the AAnn.

  The big person’s reply was not reassuring. “Of course. Mallatyah is a large island, also, and home to the masters of as many stones as we of Torrelau.”

  They paused as one of Jorana’s several wives brought food and filled their bowls. Pulickel recognized cured chierofa, a molluscan delicacy from the outer reef. When chewed, it released a taste that suggested a jalape༐oed snail. He popped a strip into his mouth, bit down, and tensed slightly as flavor exploded against his palate. Fawn’s tolerance for hot and spicy being considerably less than his own, she chose something blander from among the offerings.

  Maybe it was the stimulating food, but a half-forgotten question suddenly occurred to him. “Jorana, has anyone ever tried to bring together more than two stones at a time?”

  Their host did not try to conceal his shock. “Of course not! There is no telling what would happen. Stones are always used in combination of twos.”

  Perhaps it was the delectable fire in his mouth, but Pulickel couldn’t let the matter drop. “Well, then, has anyone ever tried to use more than two stones together in combinations of twos? Four at a time, say, or six?”

  Jorana was staring at him out of gold-flecked eyes. “Why would anyone do such a thing? How much can a person eat? How healthy can they be made? How deeply in love can they fall? No, to my knowledge such a thing has never been tried. If it was, those who did so did not survive to speak to others of the consequences.” Jorana did nothing to hide his discomfiture. Unashamed, he found the concept distasteful.

  Ignoring their host’s unease and Fawn’s warning glare, Pulickel pressed on. “Four fishing stones might bring in better eating. Six healing stones might extend one’s lifespan.”