Reclamation (30 page)

Evran stuck his chin out toward Zur-Allenden. “We’re not on
Quapoc
ground, Zur-Allenden. There’s no law against my talking to her.”

“But I’ll bet she wishes there was.” Arla turned away to hide her smile. “And face it, Sar Evran, Manager
ki
Maliad catches you trying to make her into a Determinist, she’ll boot you off-planet so hard you’ll reach Station Eight without a shuttle.”

Evran sniffed. “You are the ignorant child of an ignorant people.”

“And the Balancers decided there weren’t enough self-satisfied little shits in the universe so they sent us you.” Zur-Allenden stumped over to his corner table, leaving a whole trail of squashed leaves and earth behind. Arla groaned inwardly.

Why can’t he use the clearing room like everybody else?
she thought as Zur-Allenden began stripping his boots off and leaning over the tabletop to check the results of whatever experiment he had brewing under the glass, showering more dirt everywhere.

Fortunately, Evran’s stock of insults was smaller than his stock of pedantic speeches. “Arla, think about what I’ve said and come find me when you’ve got any questions.” And he stalked out.

Zur-Allenden shook his head. “What amazes me is he says that like he thinks you’ll actually do it. Like he thinks you don’t have a brain in your head.”

“Used to it.” Arla ran her thumb along the bottom of the monitor display to make sure she got the numbers right.
I hope I get faster at this soon.
Her hand dropped to her pouch again, and she stopped it midway. She stuck the pad into the feed-out slot on the edge of Myra Lar’s table so the two machines could talk to each other.

“Wouldn’t have thought so.” Zur-Allenden planted his stocking feet on the tile floor and folded his arms across his skinny chest.

Arla bent over the table and ran her finger down the line of glowing figures, slowly reading each one. Myra Lar had been overly diligent in explaining the importance of a manual check. “Be surprised, you would.”

Zur-Allenden sat silently for a moment and Arla tried not to wonder what was going on inside his head. She’d used every trick she knew to try to get him to drop his guard around her. She’d worked diligently. She’d volunteered to run extra errands. She’d been overflustered and profusely apologetic when she’d made mistakes. She’d occasionally “let slip” remarks about her children and her sisters. The performance had gained the confidence, even the friendship, of almost everyone else in the lab, but not Allenden, and Arla was beginning to wonder why.

Blasted Skymen. You all look alike but you all act differently. There’s no way to tell who’s going to do what. Why can’t you just mark your hands so a person can tell who you are by looking?
Her hand twitched like it wanted to move to her pouch. She pressed it harder against the tabletop.

She had asked Iyal if there were other places where the people were marked so they could be told apart, and had received a strangely sad smile from her. “Almost everywhere has a social hierarchy, Arla. It seems to be part of being human. Some places use tattoos, or natural appearance to enforce it. Some places use family names or histories …” Her sentence had trailed off, and her face had turned thoughtful. “I’d be willing to speculate that maybe your world’s hierarchy came from genotype … family … but if that was it, what’re you doing on the bottom?”

“Oh, I forgot.” Allenden snapped his fingers, interrupting her reverie. “Zur-Iyal wanted me to remind you to make sure you’ve got the lab cleaned and locked down by hour six. Maintenance is running the building check tonight and we all have to clear out early.”

Blast, blast, blast. I had work I wanted to do tonight.
Her eyes flickered involuntarily toward Allenden’s keyboard. Arla was glad she had her back to him so he couldn’t see. “Thank you, Zur-Allenden. I’ll have it done.”

“Good enough.” Boots under one arm, computer pad under the other, he shuffled out, trying to keep himself from sliding on the tiles.

When the door swung shut, Arla let her shoulders sag. She couldn’t have said who wore her out more, Allenden or Evran.

At least Allenden tries to keep a lock on it.
She sighed and started on the next set of numbers.
Why do they nag at me like this? The Nameless Powers have seen me deal with worse, most of my life, in fact. The Skymen just give me words.

Words and plenty of them. Iyal and her cohorts honked like geese sometimes about the contents of Arla’s blood and bones.

“You are saying that some person decided how I should be?” Arla had asked Iyal once.

Iyal had come into the lab just to stare at her. A recent analysis had just come out of the machines and Iyal was more confused than usual.

“Basically, yes. Not you, personally, of course, but at least one set of your ancestors. Probably more than one.”

And the Nameless Powers spoke the names of all the People that would be and in each name declared the soul and life that it would have …

“That’s not unheard of.” Iyal leaned against the wall. “I’ve met GE descendants before. What’s incredible about you is what your … engineers bred for.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.” She threw up her hands. “That’s the problem. Usually it’s obvious. Strength, speed, intelligence, creativity. You, though, you make no sense.”

Neither do you,
but she didn’t say that.

Zur-Iyal spread her hands. “Let me try to explain this. We’ve talked about cells, right? Cells in a body communicate via a series of messengers. Chemicals emitted by one cell cause a reaction in second cell. That second cell might undergo an internal change, or it might send off its own messenger.

“That’s extremely simplified, of course.”

“Of course,” said Arla humbly.

Zur-Iyal’s eyebrows went up. Her puckered mouth twitched into a half smile. “Deserved that, I suppose.” Iyal was quicker than most of them to pick up on when Arla was acting. Around Iyal she had to be extremely careful how she played the Notouch.

“All right,” Iyal went on, “your people are, obviously, from the same Evolution Point as mine. That should mean you have the same messengers in your cells, plus or minus three or four to allow for your native environment.

“As far as I can tell, your cells will react to twenty separate messengers that aren’t present in any other known Human variant. Then there’s your brain.” She shook her head. “The brain, as we know it, is a complicated, disorganized organ with three or four backups for every function. It stores information, but it stores it wherever there’s room and reacts according to a branch of chaos theory. That doesn’t even begin to cover how it decides whether the information gets stored as short-term, or long-term, or muscular memory.” She scowled at Arla. Arla didn’t flinch. She had learned fairly early on that Zur-Iyal’s scowls had nothing to do with her personally. The woman was annoyed with her cells, or her brain, or whatever it was that she couldn’t understand today. “Your brain, on the other hand, is more tightly organized than a Vitae datastore. I can predict, PREDICT, where a given piece of information is going to end up, down to the cell. Your short-term memory is ridiculously huge, and your long-term memory defies description, and you’ve got no backups.” She frowned even more deeply. “You should be a flipping genius, but you’re not. You should be totally impossible, but you’re not. Although for the life of me I don’t know why.” Again she shook her head. “I find it hard to believe that someone so carefully constructed has no idea of her function.” Zur-Iyal looked at her very hard, as if trying to pull the ideas out with her eyes.

“Would help if I could, Zur-Iyal,” Arla told her honestly. “But there’s too much I don’t understand.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Iyal had sighed and stumped out again.

I could tell her the apocrypha, but, Garismit’s Eyes, how would I make her understand it?
Arla stared out the laboratory window. There were fifteen separate stories about the Nameless and the Servant that the Teachers had declared to be lies. One of them told about her family and her namestones.

The gardens’ flat, cultivated land spread out in front of her. The window frame gave it just enough shape to keep her leftover fears quiet. Silver drones bobbed between the long rows of plants, checking soil quality, watching for parasites and fungi, administering fertilizer or pesticides as necessary, or harvesting the mid-season crops. Not all of what they harvested would be used as it was. Even through the window, Arla could catch the faint green scent of the processing sheds, where the raw organic materials were augmented with artificially produced animal products and turned into a variety of unpronounceable things that had mechanical or medicinal uses.

The cleanliness and precision of the place was the most completely and utterly alien sight for Arla on the entire world.

She leaned her hip against the counter and watched the drone’s movements. She remembered the smell of animal pens where she spent what felt like half her life in the Realm. She remembered the ache in her shoulders as she dug out the manure and mud. Chilblains broke through her hands from spending hours up to her knees and elbows in water harvesting grain. She lived with the rain, the stink, the ache, and the Teachers coming once a month to her village to tell them all it was what the Nameless meant for them. And she had believed. From the time she could hear and understand, she’d believed because everyone around her did.

Then came her Marking Day. At the end of that day, she lay on her mat, her hands wrapped in bandages and throbbing from the pain. The leather belt her old grandmother had fastened around her chafed her waist and legs miserably. Outside, the night’s hail clattered against the roof. The wind rocked the house on its stilts. Its fingers found their way through the cracks in the walls and drew themselves across her. She stared into the darkness, hearing the sounds of her father and little sisters breathing and snoring all around her and wishing for sleep to come.

The floor had creaked from gentle steps and she smelled her mother’s musky breath.

“Get up, Arla, I’ve something to show you.”

She’d sat up, blinking. Mother had taken her by the arm right above the ragged bandages and led her out into the other room. The fire on the central hearthstone was nothing but red coals buried in ash. Mother poked them carefully with a stick until the tiniest flames flickered up. The dim orange light showed up her wrinkled, leathery face and Arla wondered why her mother was smiling. She never had before.

“Now that you’ve lived to be marked, Arla, I can start telling you about your name. Stone in the Wall. Arla Born of the Black Wall. What I say is true, daughter of my blood, but you must never, ever tell anyone. If someone comes who has need of you, they will already know. If anyone else hears, you’ll be killed for a Heretic. What I say is from the Nameless Powers to our family, do you understand?”

Arla didn’t, but she’d nodded anyway. Mother’s anxious tones sent chills through her that were worse than the ones the wind brought.

Mother sat back and folded her hands like she was making a vow or a curse. She stared at the moss-chinked wickerwork that made up their house walls. She spoke in measured cadences like she did when she was reciting the Words. “When the Nameless Powers left the Realm for the place beyond the Black Wall, they knew that the people would have need of aid and protection. So they gave their Words to the Teachers and their authority to the Royals. They set the seasons and the days in motion so that the people would have time and life.

“But they knew the Aunorante Sangh were waiting with their tricks and their traps. They knew, for they were the Nameless Powers and nothing is hidden from them, that the Aunorante Sangh might send servants to disrupt the workings of the Realm, which would kill the People.

“To prepare against this, the Nameless Powers spoke new words and these words became jewels. They took each jewel and they spoke its name over it. As they spoke, the jewels split into four parts. Three parts remained stone, but the fourth became a person.

“The names that the Powers spoke for the jewels gave the stones the power to hear and understand the workings of the world, but only in the hands of the people who had been made from the jewel’s substance. The Nameless scattered the people across the world. One became a Royal, one a Noble, one a Bondless, one a Bonded, and one a Notouch.

“The years passed and the stones and their names were handed from parents to children. But the names became corrupted and garbled by the speaking of men and, gradually, the truth was lost by all, except the Notouch. For we who cannot touch power or coinage cannot be distracted by the ways of the world.

“The Nameless Powers, where they watched through the Black Wall, saw the Aunorante Sangh breeding their servants the way a farmer breeds pigs. They saw, too, that they were building their own Realm that their servants might have a fortress from which to launch attacks upon the People. The Nameless knew those servants would one day be sent into the Realm. So the Nameless Powers spoke new words. Metthew Garismit, they said, and they created their own servant and opened the Black Wall so he might walk down to the Realm.

“Garismit knew his name from the beginning and he knew that to save the Realm from the Aunorante Sangh, he would need to move it to where the Aunorante Sangh could not reach it.

“The Teachers say that Garismit went into the belly of the Realm and spoke to it with its own name. That is not all he did, Arla.

“To make the world hear him, and to hear it, he needed the stones and their keepers. He went first to the Royal and the Noble. But they had hidden their stones in their money houses and would not dig them out. He went to the Bondless, but they had gambled the stones away years ago and did not know where they were. He went to the Bonded, but the slave had given the stones for a master’s favor and did not know where they were.

“So Garismit went to the Notouch. He called her by her name—Clear Sight—and Clear Sight took her stones into her hands. Garismit opened the ground for Clear Sight and he led her down the paths to the center of the earth. The stones became eyes and ears and the Realm saw Garismit and heard him as he spoke its name and it moved at his command.”