The Magister (Earthkeep) (6 page)

When all heads turned to her, the woman pulled a long toke on her empty pipe.  Then she recited: "In the Endtimes the hair of the children will turn gray."

Ola’s voice rang above the tension, "Who says that, Germaine?  Where does that come from?"

The woman blew invisible smoke toward the ceiling.  "Comes from the Koran, that's where."

* * * * * * *

It was late afternoon when Jez found Taína and four other youngs at the edge of the long meadow.  They were covered with  dirt, proof of their enthusiasm for the transplanting of small trees.  As he greeted her, Donal Jain shouldered a mattock, a shovel, and a small clump of fatigue that turned out to be Luisa Maniboz.

"Jezebel, this is Chassel Heartseeker.  And I don't think you met Breden Santir."  Jez knelt to speak to the two girls, at the same time smiling up at Luisa.  Taína had come immediately to Jez’s side and taken her hand.

"Jida and Luisa both want to go back with me, correct?"

Both children nodded at Donal’s words, and Jida added, "Can we come see Calica Bess tomorrow?"

"Indeed you can," Jez answered.

"The sun will be with you another hour if you're on this side of the hill," Donal told her.  He stooped so Luisa could give Taína a wet kiss.  "Come home when you're hungry.  There are always cold snacks if you miss dinner."  Donal set out down the path with Luisa on his shoulder and Jida clinging to his shirt, trailing two empty gunnysacks behind her.

Long after nightfall, Jez still huddled together with the three girls against a warm boulder by a cave mouth.  She had discovered both a great joy and an accompanying sadness, for though she had indeed touched spirits that lived in dimensions she had only dreamed of, those spirits were unable, even with their mindreaching, to help her with the questions that haunted her.  Taína, Breden and Chassel lent her their images, their stories and their sensations, but they could not tell her why they had to leave, where they would be when they left, or what solace Jez could give to their families. 

They spoke of animals as if they touched them daily, they conversed among themselves in a language with no pattern or meaning that Jez could grasp, they bubbled with a boundless joy, and they unquestionably called the whole universe their home.  But they were in a place that Jez could not reach.  When, much later, after delivering them to their families, she sank gently onto the trundle bed beside the sleeping Dicken, she lay restless and puzzled.

Most inexplicable of all was a vision played out for her by a joint mindlink that Breden and Chassel had engineered with Taína's guidance.  Through the children’s eyes, Jez saw Zella Terremoto Adverb.

Zude was on a vertical rockface of majestic Kachenjung.  She was securely belayed 30 feet above, but she had slid one boot into a crevice.  The leg was awkwardly crossed in front of the other, wedged at an off-side angle.  Zude manipulated her rope and the mesh of harnesses that traversed her body, sweating in the heat of the freshly risen sun.  She tried to shift her body back over the trapped leg as she called up to her belayer, "I'm fine, Flossie!  Just give me a minute!" 

Then Zude was gone, and the children beguiled Jez with another vision.

A gas-lit city street and the Cathedral of Basil the Beatified, its unmistakable dome and surrounding cupolas covered by inches of snow.  The scene filled the large window of an unkempt studio where a tousled-haired violinist attempted for the sixty-fifth time an unflawed rendition of the sixteen-bar climax of Ruboff's Tyrolean Concerto.  Jez knew these particulars because the man's frenzy was evident, and because the words could be read from the sheet music on the stand.

"That's Mick," Taínahad ventured in voice-over captioning, "Vasily Mikhailovich Terenski.  He's practicing to perform for the emperor.  Emperor Nicholas II," she added, "the last emperor."

Then Zude was there again, able to shift her torso at last so as to move it back across her imprisoned foot.  But as she did so, she twisted the ankle in the opposite bias.  She screwed her eyes shut and howled with pain.

Mikhailovich stopped abruptly in midpassage and flung his arms upward with a loud cry.  Bow and violin shook with frustration. 

Zude made herself relax and lean on her rope.

Mick held his bow and violin in one hand and withdrew a large handkerchief from his pocket.  He wiped his face.

Zude closed her eyes, then drew in and released a deep breath.

Mick closed his eyes and stood for several moments breathing softly.

Purposefully, with tiny movements, the climber began working her boot out of the grip of the crevice.

Deliberately, the violinist shouldered his instrument again.  Eyes still closed, he calmly addressed the passage once more.

As Zude felt her boot begin to move about in the crevice, she smiled with relief.

As Mick played, his body eased and lifted, sustained now by a new composure, a sudden confidence.

As her boot worked free, Zude laughed and yelled, On belay!  She then began a one-footed progress up the rockface, using the rope, her recuperating leg dangling limp and at rest.  "I'm coming, Floss!" she shouted as she gathered speed, hastening exuberantly up the face.

Vasily Mikhailovich Terenski's notes flowed brightly into the accelerating tempo, rising in perfect precision to the finish of the passage and ending with the triumph of his signature flourish.  He kissed the tingling soundbox of his precious instrument and whooped aloud to the snow-blanketed cupolas of Basil the Beatified.

Jez had found herself exhilarated by the scene and enveloped by the laughter of the girls at its close.  Now in her trundle bed by Dicken, she shook her head in wonder at the power that the little drama had held for her.  She pointed the itinerary of her mind toward the Tall Towers Of Gratitude.  At last she reached out to lay her hand on Dicken's and dropped into sleep.

* * * * * * *

In the days that followed, Jez visited with and worked beside the bereaved people of Chimney Corner.  Over and over she told them what little she had learned from the children: that they loved their families very deeply, that nothing could prevent their dying, that for them their dying would be joyful and absolutely safe.  She listened to the people of the covenant as they bore unbearable loss and, with their eyes and ears and fingers, made memories of their children. 

When Dicken was able, she wove her own modest strand of presence and love into the texture of the covenant's life.  Both visitors knew that they must leave Chimney Corner a day or two before the time of the children's dying.  By then they would have done all they could of hearing and holding, all they could of understanding and learning.  The covenant would say goodbye to its children without the attendance of outsiders.

With white-haired little ones, and often with other children as well, the visitors flew in low spoon over the greening hills.  Or they walked to the edges of the mountain stream where the melting of cold snows was swelling the waters into loud babblings.  Taína, Breden and Chassel sometimes tantalized them with cryptic glimpses of new realities that they clearly took for granted. 

Once when Dicken asked Breden where she would be after she had left them, the child swung Dicken's hand and announced simply, "We go with our friends."  And once when they were speaking aloud, Taína told Jez about the beings who guard Little Blue. 

"Their home is the Great Ear," she said, "which hears us all into Being.  And they call us Her Cherished Vividity."

"Us?" Jez frowned.

"Well, I mean, that's what they call Little Blue.  The Planet Being.  Her Cherished Vividity."

"So she really
is
alive. . .a being.  Little Blue?  Gaia?"

Taína was aghast at the doubt.  "Oh, Calica, of course!  And she's very busy, trying to get well."

"I see," said Jez.

One evening Donal Jain awaited them, standing like a solitary oak on the side of a steep hill. 

"With respect, Jezebel," he said, looking to the sky, "I dare to hope that I may fly again."  He turned to her.  "When I learn more of what our flight together meant.  And when there is a wise woman who will help me to the task."

There was an uneasy moment, for Jez had stalwartly set aside the memory of that desperate night and the magic that had followed, choosing not to think about it or its ramifications.

It was Dicken who banished the tension. 

"Donal Jain," she said, "you can borrow fire from my hearth anytime."  She shot Jez a glance.  "I don't know what it means that you and my Jezebel did what you did.  But I'm the one standing here because of it.  That makes you family to me, mister." 

She held out her arms.  Donal Jain welcomed that embrace.  He and Dicken drew Jezebel to them, and the three of them swayed together.

* * * * * * *

When at last Jez and Dicken flew out of Chimney Corner, Dicken had her life and her health.  Jez carried with her a deep gratitude for Dicken's recovery and a swatch of white hair that Taína had given her in a small ceramic box.  Both of them bore the memories of extraordinary days and sturdy new friendships.  Both of them basked in the love of a score of children, eight of whom they would never see again.

3 – New Druid Trench – [2088 C.E.]

When the mind is melted and used like water,

it can be sent wherever one wants to send it.

Wisdom Of The Ancients

Sky Captain Lila Monteflores, one of the Vigilancia's low solar rocket engineers, turned her eyes from the bright wide Pacific flying beneath her to the pantomime of fierce competition that raged beyond her transparent sound block.  Below and behind her an old-fashioned game of spoons was escalating to its inescapable conclusion: Magister Adverb, Commander-In-Chief of the Vigilancia, was just about to realize that she had been outwitted by a very round little boy named Enrique, Regina his raven-haired sister, and Ria their mother.

"Whoa!" shouted Zude, when she discovered that all the spoons had disappeared.  Enrique and Regina cast away their cards and shrieked their jubilation.  With taunts and whoops they threw themselves upon the defeated one, pummeling her unmercifully with the very trophies of their victory. 

Monteflores spun half-circle in her pilot's cup, scanned the ocean again, and noted that their destination was less than ten minutes away.  The sound block puffed open and closed again to admit a much-scathed Zude, hauling with her the accoutrements of her full-dress uniform.  "Captain," she said, "may I put myself together in here?"

"Indeed, Magister."

"Better question: If we behave, may I bring Reggie and Enrique up here to watch the landing?"

"Of course, Magister.  No problem."

"Good." 

Zude sank into the secondary cup just below Monteflores and began snapping on the belts and scarf loops of a visiting Tri-Satrapy Magister.

Minutes later the pilot spoke over her shoulder.  "We're beginning landing preparations, Magister.  Shall I open a line to the children?"

"Please," answered Zude.  She was about to speak her summons into the comchannel when Monteflores held up her hand.  Zude listened.  From the bowels of the fore-suite below them came a sound incomparably sweet.  Piping childish voices sang in soft tones, with Ria, mother of the voices, sometimes helping:

"¿Dónde estás pelícano?

¿Dónde estás cordero? 

¿Dónde estás elefante?

¿Dónde estás salmón?"
sang Enrique.

"Sólo, sólo, sólo,

Sólo en mi corazón,
" answered Regina and Ria.

Then Regina sang:

"Te ruego, salmón lindo,

Y a ti elefante grande,

Y a ti cordero inocente,

Y a ti blanco pelícano."

And all three sang:

"Te ruego, te ruego, te ruego:

Que algún día estés a la mano."

The song ended with a flourish.  At Monteflores’s invitation, two animated children tumbled loudly onto the bridge of the rocket.  They plastered themselves immediately against the transparent walls, the better to exclaim at the ocean passing beneath them.

In the back of the craft, other Kanshou and civilians were listening to an interactive audio-commentary: "We're slowing to ground speed as we approach the topmost and largest of the Bathsheba Islands.  We'll land on Punto, the smaller island just beyond Bougainville, to allow Magister Adverb and her party to disembark.  Then we'll depart immediately for Manila and your destinations.

"Just below you and to your upper left are seaweed operations up and down the archipelago.  With no animals to curb it, all the phytoplankton — all the plant life, in fact — blocks out its own sunlight with its heavy bloom.  If it's not constantly monitored, it literally dies of its own self-shading.  You can still note the differences in the color of the seas surrounding the islands.  No coral anymore, of course, but you can see the shallow shelf extending some 20 miles from the beach before it drops off far to the west into the New Druid Trench.  That trench is 150 miles in length, northwest to southeast."

"How deep?" asked one of the passengers.

"About 9,200 meters to the bottom," answered the computer.  "Less than 500 meters down into it, the wreck of a World War II destroyer has settled onto a wide shelf.  The Amahrery's Sea-Shrieves maintain a small fleet of phaetons or underwater jitneys for island undersea watch.  They are similar to the old submersibles and available at a hefty credit outlay for tourists who want to see the wreck or explore the upper regions of the trench. 

"On the southwestern tip of Punto are three facilities.  The first one you see, there, is the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion tower.  The second is Labine Village, the experimental underwater community."

"Is that where they do ovular merging?"

"No, that's the work of the third facility, the McClintock-Saria complex, whose buildings you can see almost below us now on the eastern shore.  McClintock-Saria was one of the centers established in the hope that animals might be cloned back into existence.  The equatorial conditions seemed the best chance for sustaining the lives of clones if viable subjects were ever produced.  As long as frozen embryonic animal cells were available, the work continued.  When those efforts met with no success, centers like this one were converted into human ovular merging facilities."