Barsk (7 page)

“I may have a third.”

“A third?”

Pizlo scowled, pulled himself back onto the balcony and sat at Jorl's feet. “A third thing. Only it's not the word you used before. Not an accomplishment.”

“No? But it's something you've done?”

“Kind of. It's something I've always been able to do. I guess. I don't know why other people don't do it, but they don't.”

Jorl settled onto the polished wood of the balcony floor opposite the boy. “Okay, tell me about it. What is it you do?”

“I talk to…” He stopped. It was an odd thing to put into words when none of the things that spoke to him actually used words. He tried again. “Sometimes I know stuff … stuff that other people can't know, or won't know, or don't know yet.”

“Other people?”

“Yeah, like you and Tolta, and Arlo back before he died.”

Jorl winced. He'd never once heard Pizlo refer to either of his parents as mother or father, only by their proper names. “What kind of stuff?”

“Stuff. A lot of it doesn't make any sense. Like, which way up a skipping stone will land if I pitch it into the waves. Or how many bowls of cereal I'm going to eat between now and the solstice. Or the best route and time of year to travel from Keslo to Emmt and avoid the crowds of wandering bachelors. Or how one day, you're going to circle the entire island. You know, stuff.”

Jorl laughed. He took out his daypouch and withdrew several pieces of tart fruit, giving Pizlo his choice. The child grabbed one in each hand and greedily resumed eating. “What do you mean ‘circle the island'?”

The boy tilted his head to one side, and tried again. “You know. You. Keslo. Circling it.”

“Ah,” said Jorl, still lacking any understanding. “Maybe it's something you dreamed?”

“Maybe. For some things. But not all of it. Not even most of it. Sometimes it's like something I read in one of the books you loan me, where the words tell me one thing but later, maybe days later, something else that the book didn't come right out and say, makes sense, but it still came from the book. Only it didn't. It came from me from having read the book. Only sometimes, for some of the things I know, there wasn't any book that started it, and I just know them. Like knowing how to get to places I've never been, and feeling as familiar as sitting here. Like, a couple days ago, I knew where I had to go to find a kind of bug that I'd never seen before. It was a place I'd never ever been, but when I went there, there was the bug. Stuff like that. Would that count toward getting an aleph?”

Jorl had been peeling a piece of citrus while listening. He popped a couple wedges into his mouth and shrugged. “It might, I really can't say. There's a council that travels from island to island and makes those decisions for everyone in both archipelagos. Maybe next time they come to Keslo you can ask them.”

“They won't talk to me. They'll look right at me, but they won't see me. No one does.”

Sighing, Jorl admitted that was probably true. Instead of replying, he offered Pizlo a few fruit wedges, which the boy took without pause.

They sat a while in silence, enjoying the tart, juicy flavor released as they chewed.

“What did you do?”

“To get the aleph? I didn't really do anything. I just went ahead with my life. When the council gave it to me I was as surprised as anyone.”

“But what did you
do
?” Pizlo insisted, he squinted and stared at Jorl with obvious concentration.

“I was in the Patrol,” said Jorl, pausing to lick the juice from his sticky fingers. “I joined when you were only a couple years old.”

Pizlo glanced at his own fingers and mimicked Jorl, speaking around them as he dipped them one by one into his mouth. “It's more than six hundred years since anyone from Barsk served in the Patrol.”

“Why do you say that? Is that one of the things you just know?”

The boy gave Jorl a hurt look. “No. I read it. In a book. One of your books.”

“When was this? I don't remember you borrowing a book like that.”

“You were out. Don't be mad, it wasn't one that you were using, I found it on one of your shelves and I put it back when I was done. You didn't even notice.” Pizlo had the good grace to murmur this last bit in an apologetic tone.

Jorl hrumphed. “Fair enough. And you're right. It's a provision of the Compact; Fant are exempt from conscription.”

“And the council marked you for that? On account it had been so long?”

“Not quite.” Jorl paused to find the right words. “I came back because your father had died. Soon after, I discovered I was a Speaker. That's when the council gave me the aleph.”

“But there are a lot of Speakers in the world. More than a dozen here on Keslo alone.”

“You're right; we've had thousands since Margda, though I'm only the second Speaker to come after that got an aleph. Even so, the council counted that as one of their requirements for marking me.”

“But that's only two!”

“Well, there was a third, but it's not really something I did.” He leaned back against the railing, closing his eyes, the memory still very fresh.

Pizlo interrupted the reverie. “Who then? What was the third?”

“The third was something I'd studied back at university, from the writings of the Matriarch. At the time I never imagined it was about me. She's the one who invented the idea of giving people the aleph in the first place.”

“A prophecy!” shouted Pizlo, causing Jorl to flinch.

“More like a footnote. The Matriarch had written a letter to tell future councils to expect someone, and to give him an aleph when they found him.”

“How would they know who to give it to?” Pizlo's voice had grown quiet and dry, like a storyteller building tension.

“She wrote that there would be one who had gone out and come back, and who though of the present would look into the past. The council took that to mean leaving Barsk and returning, and being a Speaker.”

“But that's still only two!”

“Yep, and here's the weird part. The Matriarch told them that those were the first and second reasons to bestow the aleph, and that the third reason was finding the person she wrote about. Kind of circular, but there you have it.”

“So it really was a vision? Not just a letter she wrote and mailed into the future.”

Jorl smiled. The life and times of the Matriarch had been the focus of his study back at university and occupied much of his professional life. “Technically, though it's not viewed as one of her more serious or bigger prophecies.” He paused, his thoughts returning to his conversation with Arlo from days earlier.

“So, she knew things. Things other people didn't know. Did she write them all down, or did she keep some just to herself?”

“She wrote some of them down. She wrote a whole book about the visions that came to her when she had her seizures, and notes about what she thought each of them meant,” said Jorl. “But was it everything she saw? How would we know? Maybe she kept some to herself.”

“Can you ask her? You know, cuz you're a Speaker and all. Maybe she's got other stuff she wants to talk about now that she's dead and all.”

“That would be something, wouldn't it? To actually sit down and have a chat with the Matriarch? But I can't do that. No one can. It's against the rules for a Speaker to summon anyone who was ever a Speaker.”

Pizlo scowled again. “That's stupid. Who gave you that kind of rule?”

“Ah, well, that would be the Matriarch again. Maybe that's why she wrote down her visions, because she knew no one would be able to talk to her about them.”

“Maybe. Maybe I should write down the stuff that I know. Just in case I ever become a Speaker, too. It could happen. Yeah, I'm going to do that. I'm going to start right now!”

With no further warning, Pizlo jumped up and pulled himself through a gap in the railing. He grabbed an underside support, balanced for an instant, and then dropped. Jorl rushed to his feet and leaned out, looking for the boy. He caught a glimpse of him, already far below, crashing through the leaves and branches at the bottom of the bowl, making his own paths, heedless of the damage he did to either his surroundings or himself.

 

SIX

ORDERS AND CHOICES

UNLIKE
most officers in the Patrol, Krasnoi had achieved his rank through merit rather than favoritism, nepotism, or outright commerce. If he had acquired a reputation for following his superiors' orders without question—which he knew some saw as evidence of a lack of initiative—he was also known for efficiency that his detractors described as frugality. Neither evaluation bothered him. The Urs-major saw himself as having a job to do and the responsibility to do it well. Everything else became secondary.

Which is not to say that he didn't find some of the actions required by his assignments distasteful.

When Bish, a high-ranking senator, had informed him that he would establish a base on Barsk's uninhabited south polar continent, he had done so. As support personnel poured in, so, too, did documentation, including an annotated version of the Fant's cherished Compact. The Alliance spanned thousands of worlds, each with vast histories of treaties and documents, and as a rule Krasnoi left knowledge and facility of them to the politicians. But in situations where he expected to spend extended time on a planet, he took the time to brief himself on local policies and regulations.

He'd had a brief moment of conscience, wondering if his superiors had sent him unlawfully, and having ignorantly followed such orders if anything could be accomplished by crying foul now. But no, distasteful as it might be, that path offered no gain and only led to waste. It would not erase the illegal trespass, nor accomplish any good. Better to complete the mission with efficiency and move on. Having reached a decision, Krasnoi had put the matter out of his mind.

His command grew as season passed season on Barsk. Under the authority of the Bos senator, he visited several worlds to acquire needed or assigned assets for the work ahead. Work crews constructed a durable albeit temporary base anchored upon a century or more of hard-packed snow. The bored crew of the mostly automated orbital station had been reassigned to perform whatever tasks he deemed necessary. A Patrol vessel began making scheduled visits, bringing naked, aged Fant who variously claimed to be already dead or seeking some ordained demise. Supplemental staff, everything from cooks to guards to an interrogation squad, reported in as the mission's needs unfolded.

The interrogators had brought his thoughts back to his original concern over illegal orders. Personally, he loathed the Fant. Something about them, maybe their trunks, maybe their vast hairless bodies, made him truculent. He'd quickly given up attempts to engage any of his charges, after the first few encounters had left him belligerent regardless of the conversational content. He didn't like that about himself, and prior to the arrival of the interrogators—a squad of Badgers from Scrothe, a world on the barely habitable edge of the spectrum—he hadn't imagined anyone would. He hadn't met any of that race before, though he'd been aware of the stereotype of Taxi being anti-social. Even on long-established and well-mixed worlds, they kept to themselves. He stood now in front of the vid-wall in his office, watching a live feed as they practiced their craft on one of his captive Fant, an old woman whose sickly gray, wrinkled flesh elicited his own aggression.

It did more for the Badgers.

They circled around her, none standing more than waist-high to her. The Taxi took turns, not so much making inquiries as screaming questions at their victim. Before she could complete a response to one, another on the other side of the circle demanded an answer about something else. As Krasnoi watched, the Fant became disoriented, spinning in place to face and answer each current interrogator. After several minutes of this, she stopped responding at all. The Urs-major appreciated the strategy; what point when the interrogators obviously weren't listening?

The Badgers took it differently. They started over, the same range of questions about koph, what it was derived from, how it was manufactured, but this time they punctuated their queries with jabs from electrified batons!

The Fant resumed speaking, but no matter how forthcoming her responses, as Krasnoi watched the Taxi became anxious, or frustrated, or perhaps simply irritated with the quality of her answers. Each held a baton, each baton possessed an apparently limitless supply of charges. The Badgers unleashed these from behind the Fant, against calf or knee or thigh, occasionally reaching up to attack the stomach or back, making their victim whirl and spin all the faster. But always the smaller interrogators danced back out of reach of a rare swinging fist or flailing trunk, and always another of the squad darted in from a different direction with another baton.

In the end, the batons failed to elicit the desired answers. The Fant simply accepted the attacks as one more kind of pain, not so different than the aching cold or the smell of plastic that they all had complained of from their first days. After she had crumpled to the floor, either exhausted or unconscious, the Badgers had delivered a few more jabs before giving up and retreating from the room.

Some among the Fant referred to themselves as the Dying. Perhaps the harsh physical interrogation and torture dispensed by the Taxi counted as something the living suffered, making it just one more thing that the Dying could endure.

Was this Fant an isolated case or a representative one? Were the females more resistant than the males, the Lox more than the Eleph? Or did the interrogation fail because she simply didn't have the answers to the questions Krasnoi had been charged to pursue?

The Badgers had a yard full of prisoners upon which to test these questions. The Urs knew that none among the squad would be at all troubled that their tasks marked yet another violation of Barsk's Compact, the execution of another unlawful command.