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Authors: Joan Slonczewski

BOOK: A Door Into Ocean
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Talion flexed his fingers and chose not to quibble. “Did you join the Gathering?”
“Indeed, yes. I took a selfname.”
There was a pause as usual, due to interplanetary time lag. It lent their discourse an artificial air of solemnity. Berenice often tried to spot the change of expression which marked when he had heard her. This time, it might have been a lift in the lines of his forehead. “So,” he said, “you really did pull it off.”
“Are you surprised?” she asked. He might well be, she thought with pride. To her knowledge, no Valan had ever shared a Gathering before, since the day her father's first explorer ship set down on a raft.
“Not at all.” His tone brightened. “And what is your ‘selfname'?”
She hesitated, knowing he was sure to misunderstand. “It means ‘Deceiver' or ‘Deceived'—and not for the reason you think. Merwen knows that I come here.”
“Of course, my lady, I know the game: now they'll trust you forever. You've told them, of course, about Malachite?”
“I mention him from time to time. They haven't the foggiest idea who he is and are unimpressed.”
Talion looked relieved. Of course—he had simply hoped to assure himself that Sharers so far had no contact on their own with the Torran Envoy. Berenice frowned at herself, for she need not have given
him that. “And what does Malachite think of your having relegated Sharers to subhuman status for thirty years?”
“He finds our former judgment reasonable enough, given that the Sharer race cannot interbreed with ours naturally.”
“For anatomical reasons only.” After generations of breeding without males, Sharer anatomy no longer enabled heterosexual coupling. Sharer women “conceived” by fusion of ova, a process requiring lifeshaper assistance and the consent of the Gathering. “But the genetic compatibility exists.”
“Genetic compatibility may exist. But we do not legally possess the means to ascertain it.”
“How very convenient.” Berenice's words lengthened with irony. “It should please you to hear that Sharers, too, have revised their estimate of our relationship. The Raia-el Gathering thinks Valans probably are human, after all. And therefore they just might not wipe us off their planet.”
Talion's expression did not change. “Go on.”
“I've told you, my lord, that Sharers are losing patience with us. And they have powers of which you know nothing.”
The pause lengthened beyond interplanetary lag. “It's absurd,” Talion exclaimed at last. “Their technology is pre-stone age, for Torr's sake.”
“They descend from Primes,” she pointed out. “Primes whom the Patriarch never bound. Perhaps they are post-metal age. They fulfull their needs entirely with organic ‘lifestuff.'”
“Why have you never told me this?”
“I've tried,” she said with immense satisfaction. “I told you how those ‘clickflies' store more information by the genetic code than does the data bank of Palace Iridium. I told you how Sharer ‘lifeshapers' regenerate mangled limbs and construct new living species to order, and you told me I was fooled by witchcraft.” And after that, of course, she had stopped trying. He thought her crazy enough as it was.
“Survival with Forbidden Sciences? Impossible.”
“Does Malachite think so?”
“Malachite has never been to Shora. The very existence of Sharers was unknown, before your father discovered them. Malachite knows only what you've told me.”
So Talion had taken her seriously, enough so to report to the Patriarch. Berenice tried to hide her exultation.
“It's nonsense,” Talion insisted. “Why don't Sharers turn their planet into a paradise? At the very least, they could exterminate seaswallowers.”
Berenice sighed. This was the part she herself found hard to understand. “Sharers know their own limits; that, perhaps, is their greatest strength. They don't like to alter the life balance. Something worse might replace seaswallowers … .” Every “lesser sharer” had its purpose, Sharers claimed. “But they do use their powers. Haven't certain fishing vessels run into environmental problems of late?”
“Well, well. So Sharers were behind that.”
That made her uneasy; there might be reprisals now. “Under extreme provocation, my lord. You must understand this: When Valan actions disturb the sea, they threaten not only the livelihood but the very center of being of every Sharer of Shora—”
His hand must have risen to stop her at her first sentence. “I know what you wish, my lady. You wish me to turn back the clock to the days when a few rugged souls ventured into the boundless ocean world and bartered a few curios to peddle back home. Your father was the first, now the richest of the lot.”
At that, Berenice swallowed hard. She ached to recall her earliest vision of Shora, when free trade had seemed much like the native concept of
sharing
, and each side had endless wonders to offer the other. Where had they gone wrong? Over the years a hidden venom had poisoned the dream. If only the Patriarch's Envoy could heal it again.
“I will not overburden the Trade Council,” Talion went on. “Business has suffered enough from the war; you should know how many Pyrrholite contracts Hyalite lost. This is no time to cut prices on Shora, or to squeeze the fisheries just because they offend the native aesthetic. A few fishing lines can't clean out a whole ocean.”
His attitude faintly disgusted her, although she herself had no proof of Sharer claims, only her faith in their word. “Something has to give,” she said flatly. “Otherwise, the moontrade will face a boycott.”
“Boycott? Explain yourself.”
“They'll stop trading, stop talking; that's it.” Her hand sliced the air. “Traders will go Unspoken by the Gatherings.”
“So a few natives stop trading.”
“But if it spreads, my lord—”
“There's no leadership to organize them.”
Berenice shrugged. “I've warned you before.”
“Indeed, with phenomenal accuracy.” Talion crossed his arms and leaned forward on his desk. “Just bear in mind that I commission you to report on trouble, not to instigate it.”
She sat up, rigid. “Why, how could you suggest such a thing? Would I hurt my own father's business? I'm trying to dissuade Sharers from anything drastic. I told them I'd speak with the traders, and with you—”
“Silence.” Talion waited for her to take in his command. “You know too well that the last thing I need is for those natives to turn up their noses at us, just as Malachite is about to look their way. If you help them scheme at our expense, my lady, you'll live to regret it.”
“I am a Valan citizen,” Berenice replied frostily. “I serve Valan interests in the broadest sense. If you don't trust me, my lord, then I'm wasting your time.”
“I'll be the judge of my own time. And when Malachite appoints a High Protector of Shora, that is who I'll deal with.”
A High Protector? For Sharers? She tried to keep her face straight.
On second thought, though, it was no laughing matter. It was the one thing that could save Sharers and Valan settlers alike—if Sharers would accept a Protector and face the Patriarch on their own.
SPINEL FOUND THAT of the countless seafoods and herbs that Sharers knew, there were more than enough to delight his tongue. Now that he was determined to try everything, his stomach rebelled at the unaccustomed onslaught, and by morning he groaned with indigestion.
So he was sent below to the place of lifeshaping. A doorhole opened in the floor of the silkhouse, and tunnels extended through the raft, winding in an eerie phosphorescent maze. Some opened into brilliantly
lit chambers, and in one such place Usha sat him down for examination.
Usha took between her hands a fine, leafless vine which descended from a profusion of foliage at the ceiling. She set the vine below his ribs, and it swiftly snaked around his waist. Startled, Spinel pulled back, but Usha insisted that he stand still. As his eyes adjusted to the brilliance, he spotted sources of light tucked away amid leafy patches, but no sign of firecrystals. Vines like the one on his arm extended and curled in all directions, like cobwebs come alive. It made his skin crawl, and he would have hurried out, were not Usha standing over him.
As above in the silkhouse, there was no demarkation between wall and ceiling, though in some places shelves curved like pockets among the vines. The pockets held objects of coral and shell, and a sort of clear plastic, and fibrous seed pods the size of his fist. At any rate, nothing hurt yet, which was not bad for a visit to a doctor. In fact, his insides had stopped churning, and warmth diffused through his limbs. Energy surged into him; he wanted to spring up from the niche in the wall-floor that he sat in and dive into the sea to swim all day. But Usha's hand held his shoulder, and her grip was deceptively strong.
When at last the vine whipped off his waist, he felt just the faintest twinge of something pulling from his skin. “You mean that thing wormed into me?” He stared at the spot, which tickled a bit, though there was no blood.
“How else? Not just look pretty.” Usha still spoke Valan crudely, half on purpose, Spinel suspected. “Have to stir up gut chemistry, for new bugs in food.”
At that, he wrenched away from her and ran all the way outside.
 
For the next two weeks, Lystra stayed mainly out with the starworms, to Spinel's relief. Merwen traveled to distant rafts, bent on obscure missions of “wordweaving.” So Spinel explored the branches with Flossa and Wellen, exhausting himself to keep up with their swimming. Usha gave him a skin oil that repelled fleshborers, and he soon learned to avoid the worst nests of them. Raft blossoms were shedding petals like golden confetti; soon their seeds would drop to sprout new raftlings in the sea. Beneath the petal-strewn waters, he went hunting for shellfish and even those nasty crab-beaked octopi. He gathered silkweed, and dried it on racks in the sun, and tried his hand
at the loom. With Lady Nisi, who had grown purple as a Sharer, he stretched the woven silk onto raftwood frames and twisted them into the saddle-shapes that upheld the spires of the silkhouses. To stiffen the shapes, they used a plastic glue from those pesky legfish. Lady Nisi worked ceaselessly, as though it were nothing out of the ordinary for an Iridian lady to spend her days fixing a roof for stonesign-less moonwomen.
 
Berenice still hoped to forestall the trade boycott. At the Gathering of the System, for all eight rafts of Per-elion, she tried yet again to explain about Malachite.
It took half her strength just to rise to her feet amid this sea of faces, all dark as the depths of the ocean. How much harder it was to face several hundred “protectors” than one alone. “A messenger will come from the ‘Patriarch.'” Her voice echoed from the rim of the hollow. “The Patriarch is a worldmother, like Shora. He will build understanding.” Of course Sharers would hear “She,” but Berenice could not think of the Patriarch as anything but male. “His messenger is a malefreak who knows Valans and shares care of them.”
“A malefreak with a selfname?” someone asked. “I'd like to see that. He must be a wise one indeed to share care of so many children.”
The selfname; that was a bridge to be crossed later. “This malefreak is very wise, as wise as the Patriarch.”
“As wise as Shora?” asked one of the Doorclosers.
Berenice sensed a trap. “Who alone could be as wise as Shora?”
“If the Patriarch is so wise, then why does he grow so few selfnamers on Valedon?”
“Because he lives so far away, with more than ninety planets and trillions of people to share his care.” And Shora, with less than a million, would have to learn to share that care. Now, though, was hardly the time to say so. As it was, Berenice's offer generated little interest. After all, how much could one selfnamer do, however wise, for all of Valedon's psychotic children?
It was hopeless; there would be a boycott. Even Merwen wanted it, although she did make one request. “Must we Unspeak the traders as well?”
The sharing that followed ended predictably with an outburst from Yinevra. “You never could stomach Unspeech,” Yinevra charged, “even for the most incurable condition.”
Berenice felt for Merwen, then; she knew what the wordweaver had suffered in the past, at the hand of some who were better left Unspoken. Merwen, however, did not rise to the bait. “I only wonder,” she said, “what this ‘Patriarch' would think of a Gathering that sets a raft full of children afloat, Unspoken.”
So, in the end the selfnamers reached unity to stop trading but left open the doors of speech. As usual, Berenice believed, Merwen the Impatient had wrought precisely what she wished of the Gathering.
 
Merwen herself felt nearly lost at sea, as events drew her to the lip of an intangible seaswallower. There were times, she thought, when a doorhole had to constrict just a bit to get unstuck, but once it closed altogether, what then? Only Nisi could hope to hold it open, and Spinel, if he became a Sharer in time. In her dreams Merwen still heard the tramp of boots on a sea of stone and saw Kaol the Dolomite with his knife at Usha's neck, he who had said, “Death pays a wage.”
Meanwhile, starworms sang through the ocean and clickflies sped from raft to raft, system to system, all the way around Shora. Merwen herself sailed hundreds of raft-lengths behind a glider squid, despite Usha's fretting about the storm season, to share the boycott with as many Gatherings as she could reach. The boycott outraged some because it was impolite, and others because it was long overdue. In the end, nearly all rafts joined, and for days sisters could talk of nothing else but this unprecedented planetwide show of disapprobation.
Nonetheless, while all Shora watched the boycott and the silent witness at the traders' doors, Merwen watched Spinel. She waited, and she wondered. When the first test came, would he become a Sharer or not?
 
Spinel picked up more of what went on, nowadays. He knew of the trade boycott, and how Yinevra's witnessers sat on the steps all day to make sure that no sister “forgot.” He shrugged it off as no concern of his. In Chrysoport, the same advice held for politics and the weather: watch where the wind blows, and don't tempt fate.
One day when he was out raking silkweed with Flossa, the twelve-year-old abruptly tossed her rake into the boat and insisted they return at once to the silkhouse.
“What,” said Spinel, “tired already?” His own swimming strokes were getting stronger every day, and Flossa was just a girl, after all.
“The coralworms are dancing,” Flossa said.
“So?” It was true, he saw; the coralworms swam wildly up and down, flailing their tails at random instead of darting at minnows and hatchling squid. “Won't eat you. Share fear with coralworm?” He was getting the hang of Sharer speech, a bit at a time.
Flossa wrinkled her nose at him. “Coralworms know when …” The last part escaped him. Flossa pointed to the sky; it was blue and still, but for a thin curdled cloud at the horizon.
By the time they reached the raft core, sisters were running in all directions, tying boats down and packing looms and cookers into the tunnels beneath the silkhouses. The wind whipped up, and clouds appeared from nowhere, billowing angrily and shutting out the sun. The ocean frothed and pounded over the outer branches, while the raft core rose and fell, buckling so far that cracks opened in the soil.
“What's keeping you?” cried Lady Nisi. “Get below, for Torr's sake.” She whisked him down through the doorhole in the floor, through passages farther than he had ever ventured. At last the passage opened into a cosy hole where sleeping mats were arranged. Weia and Wellen already huddled among the blankets with grandmother Ama. Weia clung to Ama with one arm and squeezed a pillow with the other, her eyes wide and moist, yet too frightened to cry.
Spinel waited, somewhat scared, though vexed at being stowed away without knowing what was going on. Sharers came and went, and at the very last came Usha and Merwen.
Merwen's gaze swept the chamber. “Are we all here?”
“Yes,” said Usha.
“The Unspoken as well?”
“What do you think?” was the sharp reply.
Spinel looked around, but he saw no Unspoken ones, aside from Lystra and Lady Nisi who had Unspoken each other alone. There must be other chambers, for the Unspoken, and for all the other families of the raft.
“Are the doors sealed?” Usha asked.
“From this end, yes, each behind me as I came. We're tight as a nautilus shell.”
The sound of wind and sea was absent here, until the muffled clap of thunder arrived. For hours the raft heaved and rolled, and Spinel longed more than anything else to set foot on solid land once more; just once, and he would never touch the sea again.
Sharers huddled together, disconsolately at first; then they began to come alive and filled the time with song and learnsharing. Neighbors appeared, for all the tunnels seemed to interconnect beneath the silkhouses. Trurl brought a twisted flute of a shell that spiraled to a steep point. Everyone hushed to hear her play, with no accompaniment but the intermittent groan of thunder. Food was passed around, dried octopus and pickled seaweed, and even “pudding,” which did not taste so bad if Spinel could forget what was in it.
The storm died at last, but most of the outer tunnels were flooded, so Spinel had to emerge from a different entrance. It mattered little, since all the silkhouses were gone. Where Merwen had lived, only a few battered fragments of paneling still stood, jagged as a cracked eggshell. The surface of the raft was torn and stripped to the gnarled wooden core, while many outlying branches had been ripped off altogether. Some floated beyond, thudding when they crashed.
Spinel was stunned at the wreckage, but everyone else seemed too busy for that, sweeping debris, and pumping out flooded tunnels, and hauling up the new silk panels he and Lady Nisi had built and stored below.
“Be easy,” said Merwen, sensing his distress. “It will be months till we get another storm that big.”
“But everything is … gone.”
“Only the outer shell. We're still here. What else do we need?” Merwen peered at him earnestly, but Spinel was deeply shaken. “We'll build a new house,” she said, “and paint new designs in all the wall moss. It will make a lovely change.”
It made no sense to someone whose own home, modest though it was, had stood for generations, the one bit of property his family could call their own.
Spinel could not easily shake off his depression, though the sky was at peace now, with clouds that were but puffs from a grandfather's pipe, and the sea was mirror-smooth. He threw himself into the rebuilding of the silkhouse and took to scaling it to patch the seams with legfish glue. His coordination was good, and he swung like a monkey among the ladders and handholds. Even Lystra was heard to mutter approval of his skill.
He often swam without his shorts, now, and they finally vanished, as had the rest of his clothing—how, he did not know, although he suspected
that imp Wellen. Well, if that was how they felt about it, he couldn't care anymore.
Spinel's dark skin was tanned nearly black from long exposure. One afternoon on the rooftop, he leaned on an arm to rest and wiped the sweat from his face, shaggy with hair and unshaven beard. As his hand fell, an odd color flashed from his relatively pale palm: a touch of lavender, faint but unmistakable. He scratched at it; the hue reddened, but remained. It was there, on his soles, too, and parts his shorts had covered.
It had happened to Lady Nisi, of course, but—surety she did it on purpose? Spinel had no intention, had never dreamed it would just happen to him.
To Spinel, at that instant, it meant one thing: he was metamorphosing into a moon-creature.
The shock exploded through him. He screamed and lost his hold; the sky tilted over, a bottomless ocean. Somehow instinct brought him safely to the raft, but he was still screaming when he got there. Sharers reached out to him with livid limbs and flippers, grotesque signs of what he would become. Spinel thrust them away and ran, without knowing where. Somehow he craved shelter, a cocoon to hide away from them. The tunnels: he slipped through the floor doorhole and dove blindly through the maze until no one followed. At last, he came to a stop and crouched in the curve of a raftwood trunk, shivering, hugging his knees to his chest. There was only a dim yellowish light, and his skin no longer horrified him. He squeezed himself all over as if by sheer force of will he could keep himself from becoming a monster.

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