Watchstar (5 page)

She thought: I am a bad person, keeping secrets from the village, getting angry, asking questions. The boy's presence and his questions had disturbed her more than she had realized. She would die during her ordeal, she knew it now, it was beyond doubt. Her skin felt wet and cold; her stomach was tight. She would die. Maybe it was the only thing that could save her now, dying; after her suffering, the Merged One would rejoin her to Itself. If It existed. She thought: if I still doubt, at the moment of death, will I be condemned to eternal isolation? Of course, if there was no God, she would be condemned anyway.

She walked slowly to the craft and peered inside. Reiho stared out at her suspiciously through the transparent dome, his face lit by the waning moon and the comet's bright light. She put her hand on the clear surface; Reiho shrank back. He probably thought he was safe inside the vehicle, but he was not. If she used all her strength, she could lift the craft and dash it against the hillside, or spin it so rapidly the boy would grow faint. She was beginning to understand why those without powers had to die.

She said, “I am sorry.”

The boy blinked his eyes and was silent.

“I am sorry,” she said, as loudly as she could. “Please open the door.”

At last the door slid open. Reiho, still seated on one of the reclining seats, peered out cautiously. He held one hand in front of his face, as if guarding himself.

“I'm sorry,” she repeated. “I should not have lost my temper. You were not trying to harm me.”

He put his hand down and frowned. Daiya carefully explored his surface thoughts. He was a frightened boy, far from his home, puzzled by her. He too was keeping a secret, telling no one about his encounter. His thoughts brushed against her. He was gripped by a loneliness so intense she could not bear it. Then another feeling rippled from him, capturing her; she struggled to recognize it. The feeling was curiosity. It was a cold blue light inside Reiho, dispelling his fears. It shone brightly, seeking out the dark places inside her.

She withdrew from him. She had never touched anyone whose curiosity was this strong. The boy had to be a great sinner. She shuddered.

“Why are you sleeping out there without a covering?” he asked. “I thought you would get cold.”

“I'm training,” she replied. “I am preparing myself for an ordeal I must endure, and to live through it, I must be able to control my mind and body.”

“I do not know one of those words.”

“An ordeal? Is that the word?”

He nodded.

“It is a passage.” He still seemed confused. “It is something all people my age must endure,” she went on, “before we are accepted as adults. I must go with others into the desert and face something so terrible that no one will say what it is. Many die during an ordeal. My own brother Rin did not live through his.”

Reiho's eyes widened a bit.

“Don't you have such a thing?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Don't you have to pass an ordeal before you become an adult? Perhaps yours is different. I have heard that in other villages, the young ones go high into mountains taller than those here, mountains that touch the sky, while in other places they are sent out in boats on the salty lake which surrounds the world.” She spoke slowly, so that he could grasp all her words. “I have even heard that in the north, young people travel across a cold white moisture which covers the ground like a blanket to places so cold that water stands still and solid. But the custom is the same everywhere. You must have your own ordeal, or how would you know when you are grown?”

He said, “That is barbaric and cruel.”

“Who are you to pass judgement?”

“I must say what I think. I would refuse to go.”

“You would have to go, or you would be cast out.”

He stretched out a hand toward her. She kept her arms at her sides. He withdrew his hand.

“What is your ordeal like?” she asked.

“We do not have that kind of thing, not something that might kill us,” he said. “We have other things. We must study and learn, we must master many fields of study and then decide which one we wish to specialize in, and what will be our work.”

“What are fields of study?”

He shrugged. “Cybernetics, anthropology, astrophysics, different types of engineering, genetics, history, those sorts of things.”

It sounded like gibberish to her, a chant, words running together in a stream; she could not tell whether he had said one thing or many. She thought of a field of study and saw the boy on a plain, roaming over it as he learned about its plants, animals, and weather.

“I think I see,” she said. “You learn some things, then you learn one thing more than others. Is that it?”

“It is something like that. When we decide on what we want to do most, we are adults. There are some things so difficult or demanding only a few can do them.”

Daiya puzzled over his statements, wondering why one would want to know only a few things. Those in the village who lived long enough could know everything there was to know. “What thing is the hardest?” she asked.

“I do not know. Perhaps raising our children.”

Daiya began to laugh. She tried to restrain herself, then noticed that Reiho was smiling a little. “That is very strange,” she said between giggles. “You have men and women, don't you? Surely their feelings tell them how to make love.”

“I said
raising
children. We all have them, we all contribute our genetic material to the wombs, but only a few are skilled enough to raise them properly, though the rest of us can spend time with them when we wish to do so.”

She shook her head; he used strange words to describe lovemaking. “I am sorry for laughing. We all raise our own children, those who pass the ordeal are considered fit to have them. We must have many, because many die.”

The boy wrinkled his brows. “It sounds like a very hard life.”

She shrugged. She had never thought of it as hard, knowing, at least until now, that it was the same everywhere. “It's no harder than living in the sky,” she said, waving her hand.

“Why must you go through this ordeal?” he asked.

“I have already said why. We must become adults.”

“Why must you go through it to become adults?”

She folded her legs and sat on her heels. “Here it is,” she said. “As children, our thoughts are weak and confused. Whatever trouble they may cause can be controlled. I have a sister, Silla, she is very young, and I must often speak to her with my voice, as I am doing now with you, and listen to hers, for she has not yet mastered the ability to project her thoughts clearly.” She gazed into Reiho's eyes and saw that he understood her so far. “As we grow, our minds grow stronger, and we must learn something even harder, how to control our minds. It's difficult sometimes. I threw you into your craft here, I should not have done it, I might have hurt you. You see that a village could not survive if it had many who would do these things.”

The boy nodded.

“That is why we must go through a passage in the desert,” she continued. “I won't know exactly what happens there until I go through it myself, but I know one thing. Those who are able to control themselves and fit into our community return, and others do not.” As she spoke, she once again felt doubts about her own ability to survive.

“But why must you sleep outside with no covering to train for that?”

“Body and mind are one thing. It does no good to have mental control if the body fails. I have heard one can die returning from the ordeal. We must go with nothing, we must return with nothing.”

Reiho slouched, resting his arms on his thighs. “It is very puzzling,” he said. “I do not know very much, but I do not understand how you can have these mental powers at all.”

Daiya smiled. “And I don't understand why you do not,” she replied. “God gave us these powers so that we would no longer be separated from one another and the world, that is what we are told.”

“But the power, the energy needed for such things must come from somewhere,” Reiho said. “Your bodies cannot provide it. Something else must generate it.”

“God provides us with powers,” she said quickly, not knowing what the boy was talking about and afraid to ask. She stood up slowly, feeling weak and knowing she needed to sleep. Her stomach, which had been rumbling with hunger hours before, now sat inside her like a hollow space. “You tell me you live in the sky,” she went on, “and yet you ask me questions. What do you do, build villages on clouds?”

“Of course not. We don't live there, we live above the clouds.”

She said, “You cannot,” and turned to leave him.

“We do, we live there, that is my home.”

She turned her head and saw Reiho lift his arm and point his finger. She looked up to where he was pointing.

He was pointing at the comet.

4

Daiya awoke at dawn. The clearing was still clothed in shadows, but the sky was blue. Reiho was already up, standing in front of his vehicle. He held a small flat metallic object in his hand, passing it over the surface of the craft.

She stood up and watched him, then turned to stir the embers of her fire. She scattered the burnt, blackened wood and covered it with dirt.

She walked over to the boy. He stopped what he was doing and nodded at her. “Can you repair this thing?” she asked.

“Oh yes, I have tools, and this shuttle can repair much of the damage itself, it's already doing so. Then I'll do what it cannot, and check things afterward.”

She noticed that his words were more fluent today, though still heavily accented, and recalled that he had said something about learning her speech while asleep. “Then you will go,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you will not come back.”

“I am not supposed to be here now.”

She touched his mind. Again his form changed, becoming cylindrical and metallic. She sensed a wish: he wanted to return to Earth. They were both infected with curiosity.—You must not come back—she thought, pushing the words at him, but of course he could not read them.

“There is something I must ask you,” she said, withdrawing her mind and seeing only the boy's body now. “It will sound strange to you, it's strange to me. When I look at you with my eyes, I see one thing, but when I sense you with my mind, there is something else where you stand.”

Reiho drew his brows together. “What do you mean?”

“Right now, I see a boy of flesh and bone. That's what my eyes see. When I reach out with my mind, I see an object, a thing like a machine, a body not of flesh but of metal, a thing which should not have life. That is how I first saw you.”

The boy was silent.

“Why do I see that?”

“I'm not sure.” He peered at her closely. “Maybe it is because part of me isn't flesh. We are...” and he said a word she did not know.

“Say that again, explain it,” she interrupted.

“Part of us is not flesh and bone. My skin, for example, it is like skin, but it is actually made of a stronger substance.” He pulled at his arm with his fingers. “My muscles are supplemented by electrodes, my heart has been made stronger by artificial valves, even my eyes are shielded by a thin lens to protect them. I am also wearing a lifesuit to protect my body here.” He paused. “Perhaps that's why you saw me as you did. We are born as flesh and blood, but as we grow, we add these things to ourselves so that our bodies can live longer and survive in regions where otherwise we could not. Our implants are the last thing we acquire, just before we are ready to become adults.” He stretched out his hand to her. “But you can see that I'm still human in spite of it. We modify our humanness, we do not lose it. We originally came from Earth also, we're not so different really.”

Speechless and sick with horror, Daiya stepped back, away from Reiho, away from the monster. From Earth, he had said: cast out was the way he should have put it. She trembled, feeling the sweat on her face and under her arms; the back of her neck prickled. Reiho was separate from other minds, separated from Earth, apart from Nature; he had mutilated his body in his separateness.

He moved toward her and she threw up her hands, warding him off. “I should never have talked to you,” she cried. His face blurred. She blinked, suppressing her tears. Despair gripped her as she saw her world torn apart by these beings, these creatures who had been cast out and should have died.

“I mean no harm, Daiya,” he said, using her name for the first time.

She covered her face, wishing she had never told it to him. She moaned, trying to control herself, feeling that even the ordeal could not be as bad as this. She wanted to pull at the Net, call others, but she was afraid to infect them with this horror, this solitary blasphemer. She could not do it; better to bear it alone for the sake of the village.

She felt his smooth dry hand on her arm. She pushed it away violently, then pinned his arms to his sides with her mind, holding him there. He struggled, then relaxed, staring at her with his dark eyes.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You must leave, and you must never come back, you nor anyone else of your kind. Let me tell you something you had better know. Sometimes, in my village, a child is born with a mind like yours, a separate mind which can't ever master mindcrafts or have mental abilities, a mind which is born without them. Such children have to die so that they do not destroy us with their isolation. Do you understand?”

She saw him swallow and knew he understood. She released his arms and he moved closer to his craft. “If you or anyone of your kind returns, we shall kill you, too. If you come back, I'll kill you myself. Already you have built a wall between me and my village, but I'll tear it down and you'll never do it again. If you come back, I'll kill you.”

He slumped against the side of the vehicle. She touched his mind, wishing that she could impress him mentally with her will. She felt his resistance. He had heard her words, and understood them, but he did not feel their force. His thoughts of death were dreamlike; he did not seem to connect the idea to himself. He was still mired in his curiosity.

She readied her mind to crush him, but could not do it. She had spoken to him for too long, had touched too many of his feelings. She could not strike. She thought: God, help me. It is in your hands now.

She spun around and hurried quickly to the hillside, carelessly thrashing her way through the bushes, and began to climb the hill. She stopped near a tree and looked back.

Reiho was still standing down below, watching her, the corners of his mouth turned down. She turned away and clambered up the hill.

Daiya lay on the ground by the creek, listening to the water gurgle as it rippled over rocks. The fire near her crackled, as if defying the water. She twisted her body, her mind and muscles tired from the long day of exercises and training, of trying to forget what had happened.

Unable to sleep, she found herself staring up at the sky, at the comet Reiho called his home. It was a fire burning in the heavens, dividing the night with its long tail. She thought of Reiho dwelling in the fire with his monstrous body.

She wondered again if she should have killed the boy. But maybe she had done the right thing by sparing him. She had practiced restraint, as she should before an ordeal. He had been able to contact another on his world; if he had done that before dying, he might only have brought others seeking revenge to Earth, making things even worse. He would go, and that would be the end of it; he had said he was not supposed to be here anyway. She tried to forget that she had, for a while at least, treated the thing as a person. Even now, she found herself thinking of him as a boy, as a human being, though he was not that, he could not be that. The thought tormented her. The feeling and sympathy he had engendered were his most dangerous weapons. They had saved his life.

She turned on her side and slipped her hands under her head. She tried to calm her mind, wondering how she could face her ordeal, worrying about how she could return to the village, infected by Reiho as she was. She could not think of that now, she had to sleep. She closed her eyes and relaxed her muscles, pushing herself into darkness and oblivion.

Daiya stood at the top of the hill, gazing down at the clearing where the boy had been. The creature and his craft were gone. A gust of wind ruffled the small bushes in the clearing. Soon even the marks of the craft's runners would disappear from the ground.

She thought: I must put it out of my mind, erase it. She shivered as she imagined her grandfather Cerwen peering into her mind and seeing the isolated spot where Reiho was stored.

Weary with fear and hunger, she sat down, resting her head on her knees. The sun warmed her back, relieving the stiffness in her shoulders. She felt twinges of curiosity. Why would Reiho and his people want to do such unnatural things to their bodies? How could they possibly live in a comet, which must be like living in the middle of a fire? What did the symbols in his book tell him? How did his craft fly through the air with no mind to hold it aloft? There were too many questions; every time she thought about him, there were questions, each one another step away from her people, away from the Merged One, another step toward the cold, black deep abyss of isolation.

There was a mental discipline which could help her, but she did not know if she had the ability to make it work. It was a discipline used only in rare cases, when a person had suffered so grievously that only temporary forgetfulness could heal the hurt. She could take her memory back to the time when she had first seen Reiho's craft, then, carefully, erase every trace of him. The memories would return if she saw Reiho or anything that reminded her of him, but that could not happen; he was not coming back. The comet would seem only what it had been before, a mysterious omen.

She had to try it; she had no choice. Her parents might not see her agitation as anything other than a normal disturbance for someone of her age, but Cerwen, or any of the Merging Ones, would notice it. If they caught even a glimpse of what she knew now, they would enter her mind to grasp the rest, and then she would be lost. She did not know what they would do to her after that. It might even be worse than facing the ordeal, where she could at least hope to live and become an adult member of her community.

She closed her eyes. For a moment, she was frightened; doing this thing alone, without the aid of more experienced people, might be dangerous. She risked damaging herself without knowing if it was possible to hide such a bizarre event from others indefinitely. But it was that, she thought bitterly, or not returning at all, and even if she stayed away, the Net would pull at her sooner or later.

She concentrated, returning to the past:

the object fell from the sky, hovering for a moment over the hills

a tiny light glowed among dark clouds, pulsing

a metal cylinder waved its limbs over a blurred human face

she touched his mind, he did not sense her

she sat before the boy named Reiho, asking

she peered at scratches in lines black against soft light

she seized him and shot him toward the craft

he was mutilated, mated with machines

I'll kill you I'll kill you myself

The images, clear and frozen, passed through her. She blotted out each one, pushing it below her consciousness.

Daiya opened her eyes. It was growing dark; the sky was violet. She tried to stretch her legs, and groaned with the pain. She stumbled to her feet, her arms aching. Her legs were filled with sand. She stomped on the ground and flexed her muscles, trying to restore her circulation. Her heart fluttered; she slowed it to a steady beat.

She gazed at the clearing below. There were two long lines, faint, half-covered by dirt, on the ground. She wondered what they were. She had come up on this hill but she could not remember why. She had been training, that must be it, so hard at work she had not noticed the time. She felt weak. She wobbled unsteadily on her legs, feeling as though she had not eaten for two or three days, maybe longer. But she had just come from the village the day before. She shook her head. Had she been training so hard she had lost track of time?

As she looked at the clearing, a cold hand seemed to grip her. There was a dark, gaping, empty space inside her, making her numb. The shadows cast by the nearby trees were malignant, black cylinders with distorted limbs. It would soon be night; she would see the comet then, that mysterious omen with an obscure meaning. She wondered why she had thought of it now.

She was trembling. Perhaps she was ill. She lifted a hand to her face; her forehead was dotted with sweat. She turned away and began to climb back down the hill.

Daiya strode along the ground, the foothills to her right, her shadow made squat and fat by the sun overhead. Her legs seemed to move almost by themselves, propelled by her will. She was growing weaker, plagued by the dark feeling that had been hanging over her for the past two days, a feeling she could not dispel. Her mind seemed divided; there was a blank spot in it, a gap in continuity. She could recall only three days of training, though her body felt as though she had been without food for at least five or six days.

Ahead, she saw a slender willow standing alone on the grassy plain. She went over to it and sat down. Dappled shadows danced on her tunic as a breeze ruffled the tree limbs above her. Even at a slow pace, she would be home by evening.

As she thought of the village, her head sank. She was numb and empty. She tried to push the feelings away; she was tired and hungry, that was all it was. The black emptiness swelled inside her, darkening the day. The village seemed impossibly distant, beyond her reach, as if a high wall separated her from it.

Her back pressed against the bark of the tree. She thought of rising, taking a sip of the water she had left, and going on to her home. Her arms were stiff, as heavy as granite; she could not move them. She thought of her ordeal and tried to see herself coming out of the desert, making her way back over the mountains to her home, alive, ready to celebrate and begin her life with Harel. The vision was unreal, without conviction. I shall die, she thought, I may die even before I leave the village again, I'm not ready, there's something wrong. Those notions had an air of reality, though she was not quite sure why she thought she would die before leaving the village.

She sat, her will and body paralyzed. Something was holding her back from the village. The numbness was mingled with despair. She saw herself lying under the tree, her lifeless body an empty shell. That would solve everything, she thought, wondering exactly what it would solve.

She stared at the waving grasses on the plain, surprised at how sharply she saw them, each tall blade distinct, yet rippling with the others, some of them a dark green, others paler, a few brown at the edges. She felt the uneven bark of the tree through her tunic. She lay down under the willow and began to slow her heart, curious about what it was like to die, hoping abstractedly that she would catch at least a glimpse of an answer before she joined the Merged One, or passed into nothingness. The threads of the Net were more tenuous; when they broke, the Merging Selves would know someone was gone, even her parents might sense it. It would be too late by then.