Barsk (2 page)

Rüsul finished his dinner and leaned over the edge of his raft to rinse his bowl and spoon before tucking them away under the tarp along with his carving knife. With his trunk he cradled the day's work, a perfect rendering of Margda, Barsk's long-dead Matriarch. Her face looked back at him with complexity. There was pain and certainty, confidence and confusion, as if she'd just been thrust deep in the throes of one of her prophetic seizures. It was possibly his best work ever.

He had muttered a farewell to the carving and raised his trunk high, preparing to fling the figure into the sea, when the ocean dropped away.

The raft, which had risen and fallen with the sea's mood, froze stiller than calm water. The sudden stability caused Rüsul to tumble over backwards. The tiny rendering of Margda slipped from his nubs as he landed on his backside. He rolled onto his knees, one hand moving back and behind the bottom of his left ear to rub at a sudden stitch in his side. His other hand braced against the raft until his balance returned and allowed him to crawl to the edge.

Peering over the side he saw an expanse of grayness below the raft. It sloped down in all directions too far to measure in the rain. Beyond that lay water. The ocean had not so much dropped from beneath him as something else had surged up from below it, lifting him and the raft.

“There! At the far end. Take him, now. And quickly!”

Rüsul turned. From beyond the other side of his raft, a gate of some sort had opened in the gray below. A tall, bizarre-looking person stood next to the opening and three more poured from it. All four had been wrapped in fire-bright plastic, more plastic than he'd seen in his entire life. The legs of their slacks thickened to form heavy boots. The sleeves of their shirts flowed into gloves and the collars rose up into hoods that hid their heads. Following their instructions, three of them advanced upon Rüsul. Translucent gray masks covered their faces. Two had hold of his arms in an instant and hauled him upright like a wet sack of leaves.

It all happened so fast, so unexpectedly. He was on his way to die. The sameness of the past days had helped him to distance himself from the world and his past life. None of this should be happening. His brain wanted to deny it, disbelieve and make it go away. The hands gripping him made that impossible. As his feet scrabbled beneath him, the greatest piece of strangeness came clear to Rüsul and he struggled to pull free. No trunks. From even a short distance, their plastic hoods and masks rendered his assailants anonymous. But this close he saw the truth. Tiny pointy ears set well back. Long snouty faces with little black, slick noses. And all younger and stronger than him. His pitiful attempts to break away from the two holding him ended as the third wrapped more red plastic around each of Rüsul's wrists and pulled them behind his back. The three pulled him from his raft and began marching him over the grayness toward their gate, past the fourth figure.

“You're Dogs. Cans, aren't you? I've seen pictures. But you can't be here. You're not supposed to…” He passed within the grayness and stopped speaking, his eyes trying and failing to make sense of the featureless surface surrounding him on all sides. He knew he moved because his feet stumbled and scraped as his captors dragged him along. His stomach flipped and for a moment the possibility of his evening meal coming back up distracted him. They seemed to move in a broad arc and the grayness gave way to painfully bright light that defined a corridor. The three Cans stopped. Rüsul steadied himself against them, squinting down the walls that somehow existed where nothing belonged but the open sea.

Another person came toward him, taller and leaner than the others and clad in blue plastic that lacked hood or mask. She advanced on him with a liquid gait. A Cheetah with a significantly flatter face, a smallish nose, and even beadier, black eyes than the Dogs regarded him and drew back her lips to reveal gleaming teeth.

“I am Nonyx-Captain Selishta,” said the Cheetah. “Do you have a name?”

Rüsul blinked. The light hurt his eyes but the questions racing through his mind hurt more. Why were there Dogs on Barsk? Why a Cheetah? Why were they speaking to him when he'd left all conversation behind. Why would anyone ask the name of a dead man? Could any adult be so ignorant and stupid?

“I'm on my way to finish dying,” he said.

The Cheetah sneered at him. “Of course you are. You all are. And of course that's why you're naked as well? How foolish of me to think otherwise. Well, old man, your demise is going to have to wait a while. My people have many, many questions to ask you, and I need you alive for that.”

The Fant shook his head. “It doesn't work like that, I…”

A cold plastic hand slapped Rüsul across the face. And then again.

“
My
name is Selishta. This ship and these men obey my will. I'm the only one who gets to say how things work here.” She pulled her hand back, staring a moment at the glove as if her fingers had touched something disgusting, then stepped back. She directed her attention to the Cans.

“Maybe this one will know something useful about whatever shrubs and leaves the drug comes from. Hold him here a moment while the rest of the crew secures his flotsam, and then put him below in one of the vacant isolation cells.”

“Shrubs?” said Rüsul, more to himself than the others. “I was a wood carver, but that's past. I've died.”

The Cheetah stepped back, waving one gloved hand in front of her stupid-looking nose. “If you had, I've no doubt you'd smell better than you do.”

Rüsul's eyes widened and he studied his surroundings for the first time. As the Dogs had hauled him in he'd acknowledged only the formless gray of the place, but now the clear outlines of plastic wall panels, metal floor tilings, and piercing artificial light removed all doubt that he was inside an artificial structure. He gazed longingly back at the open gate they'd brought him through, where Nonyx-Captain Selishta stood silhouetted against the darkening sky. Rüsul watched as other Dogs in their red plastic suits hurried past the Cheetah, carrying away his supplies in the tarp that had previously covered them. Other Dogs had dragged the mast and sail in and down another corridor. Moments later, more of Selishta's crew entered with the disassembled pieces of his raft. And then he saw the Cheetah stoop to pick up something else. As she straightened up and regarded the object in her hand, Rüsul saw that Selishta had found his carving of Margda.

The Nonyx waved the carving in a gesture encompassing everything that moments ago had made up Rüsul's raft. “You won't need any of that where we're going.” She paused and regarded the image in his hand. “This is one of your women? Unbelievable. And I thought the males were the ugly ones.” She tossed it away.

The Cheetah dismissed Rüsul with a wave and the pair of Dogs took him away, deeper into the “ship” as the captain had named it. But it wasn't like any vessel of good wood that he had heard of, open to rain and sky. The world seemed to close in around him, and at first Rüsul imagined that he had actually died. But he knew it wasn't time yet. Time, in fact, seemed to have stopped. A claustrophobia that he'd never known before squeezed at his heart.

To the chagrin of the Cans leading him, Rüsul's body went limp. Head and trunk down, he began to wail, as mournful a sound as any living being could manage. The Dogs dropped him. They clutched at their heads and kicked him until pain silenced him.

“Why do they all do that?” said one of the Cans, over the sound of the Fant's moans. “I think my ears are bleeding.”

“Shut up and grab an end,” said another. “I just want to get him into a cell before he catches his breath and starts in again.”

“Why do I get the smelly end?”

“The whole thing stinks. All the more reason to hurry up and dump his ass where he won't be polluting our air.”

One took Rüsul's arms, the other his legs. Neither Dog came anywhere near touching his trunk or ears.

“How can something that's been sitting out in the rain for days smell this bad?”

“Yeah, every time we grab another one, I worry the ship's recycler is going to break down and then we're all screwed.”

They hauled him ever further away from his death.

 

TWO

POSSIBILITIES AND MYTHS

JORL
slipped the pellet of koph under his tongue, closing his eyes as the drug dissolved and began to take hold. His left ear tingled as it always did, and he flapped it once, twice, and then settled back, resting his head against the wall. The darkness behind his eyelids lasted only a moment, replaced by a roiling curtain of golden light, the gold of his own nefshons.

The first perception granted by the drug induced panic for many novice Speakers. One moment you were alone in the darkness of your own head, and in the next you saw yourself swaddled by shimmering subatomic particles of memory. Those layers of golden fabric could suffocate a beginner. A successful Speaker imprinted on it, learned to identify the unique tang that permeated every gleaming particle. Then it only required an act of will for the Speaker to blind herself to it and move on.

Jorl had been Speaking less than a year, but he had disciplined his mind in academia. At the first glimpse of his own nefshons he banished them from his perception.

He filled the resulting darkness with images from his own memory, imagining a familiar room in a house on the island of Keslo. The dimensions and materials, the colors and textures and scents formed around him. That easily, he sat in a small alcove that lay just off of the kitchen of the home maintained by his friend's widow. The walls were beech, yellow, bright in their own right and polished to a high sheen. A hand-braided rug covered the floor from the kitchen's threshold to the hidden door in the back wall that provided a less obvious entrance to the house. A tapestry woven of wild flowers hung on that wall, filling the air with light, sweet fragrance. Two comfortably curved benches faced one another, set far back against opposite sides such that their occupants would be unseen by anyone passing the opening. Jorl saw it all in his mind, just as he had seen it before taking the koph and settling into that very spot after dinner.

While his best friend's widow busied herself with after-dinner tasks, he muttered a name aloud, “Arlo,” and began summoning particles, luring them with memories: sitting in a classroom in his grandmother's hall learning to cipher … sampling their first efforts at distillation … introducing him to Tolta, the daughter of a friend of his mother … laughing in the rain as they took a raft to Gerd for the first time … embracing him, trunks wrapped around one another's ears, the day he left Barsk …

When he had a sufficient number, he willed the particles to coalesce into his friend's form, occupying the bench opposite him, visible to anyone who possessed the Speaker's gift.

“Your wife made the most amazing dinner tonight,” said Jorl, the mental construct of himself smacking his lips with satisfaction while in the real world his head pressed back against the wall, his trunk draping languidly down his chest, a trickle of drool starting at the corner of his flaccid mouth.

Arlo smiled. It started at his eyes and spread with exaggerated slowness across his face, until his ears gave a little flap of merriment. “Did she? You say that like you're surprised. Tolta's always been a great cook. You know that.”

“Of regional dishes, sure. The safe and same traditional meals that everyone's aunt knows how to make. I'm talking about recipes from other worlds, places where no Fant has been in centuries.”

“Now you're just being foolish. No one is going to bother venturing into space just for dinner. Not even you.”

“I didn't say we left Barsk, only that the recipes, the spices, were from offworld. Pay attention.”

“Or what? You'll banish me? Spread the glowing bits of me far and wide?”

“I'd never—don't even joke about that!”

“I'm dead, Jorl. You can't tell me what to do. More importantly, you shouldn't be trying to tell me anything. This is what, the thirtieth time you've summoned me? It's not healthy.”

“I'm a Speaker. It's a rare gift, even on Barsk. Why shouldn't I use it?”

“Just because a thing can be done doesn't mean it should be done. I'm not telling you not to use your gift. You're a historian, and I imagine it must be a powerful tool in your work, talking directly to the people who made history. That's incredible. Do more of that. But you shouldn't keep talking to me. Let me go. Even a historian can't keep living in the past.”

“I don't want to have this argument with you.”

Arlo spread his hands, his trunk lifting in an ironic gesture. “Stop summoning me and you won't.”

“I needed to talk to you. Something's going on and I don't understand it. I thought discussing it with you might help.”

The smile fell away from Arlo's face. “Something more than Tolta's cooking?”

“I've been studying the prophecies of the Matriarch since our school days.” He grew still, head bowed, hands clasping the nubs of his trunk and one another in his lap. Even his ears had stopped moving. “I think one of the dire ones is coming to pass.”

“I've long since forgotten the details of her warnings. Of all the areas of history to study, I never understood why you made her life your focus. Most of her writings bored me, and the prophecies were so weird they made little sense, at least at the time we covered them in class. Which one are you going on about here?”

“The Silence.”

Arlo scrunched up his trunk and spat. “I hate that one. You remember how my mam told us stories about it when we were small, years before we got to that section in school? Scared the leaves out of us.”

“I remember. I had nightmares. Sometimes I think I grew up to study them as a reaction. You know, so that I could really understand what scared me.”