“Do not let them have my ghosts,” he said.
“I won’t. I promise.”
“It has been good to travel with you,” he said. “My old spirit wil be disappointed not to join forces with yours. But what do we know? Perhaps we carry al the old spirits, like the great First Human, whose forefinger was tal as a tree, and who held the souls of al his children, for al generations to come, within that finger.”
This was the first I had heard of such a being. Yet how was that different from what we had found here? “You must come away, come with us,” I insisted, but it was more for me than for the old man that I pleaded.
“No,” he said, looking off at the trees. “When I am stil, it wil take only a short while before I am safely fled. Keep the machines away until then, but leave my body here, for it is nothing after that.”
“How do you know?” Vinnevra cried, clasping his shoulder, the sinews of her forearm as tense as drawn bowstrings.
“It is true,” the monitor said. “If we do not scan while he lives, the imprint wil be lost.”
The Composer. Ask it about the Composer!
I shook my head, unwiling to listen to anyone or anything else. I had to folow my own instincts. I had to believe I was truly alone.
But I could not just run away from a dying old man. The sacred farewels had to be made. I drew close to him, touched his knee— was startled by how cool it felt in my fingers.
“Abada wil scare off the hyenas,” I said, “and the crocodile wil rise from the shore of the western waters and snap at the buzzards.
The Elephant wil nudge your bones from the dirt, and you wil finish your travels whole and sound, while the families of our ancestors await you on the far shore. For so I have seen in the sacred caves.”
Gamelpar’s eyes suddenly turned warm and damp. He pushed gently again at Vinnevra. “It is not seemly for an unmarried woman to see an old man die,” he murmured. “Daughter of my daughter, say good-bye to me now, lead the poor giant away from here, and let the boy speak to me alone. We wil al join up again, by and by.
You, young man, wil stay for a time. I need to hear these things you say, for they are old and true.”
Vinnevra shook al over and her face was slick with tears, but she could not disobey, and so she kissed the old man on the top of his head, climbed down the steps, and led the shadow-ape away by
her great hand.
Both looked back several times before they vanished into the ragged jungle.
I climbed the steps and squatted beside Gamelpar, whose name means Old Father. I recaled as much as I could of the paintings in the narrow, winding caves a day’s journey outside Marontik, and of what they meant.
“She is al I have,” he said, interrupting the flow of ritual. “She is wilful but loyal. If I leave her to you, wil you watch over her, and guide her away from this place? Take her to where she can be safe?”
Trapped! I trembled at the contradictions within and without. A vow made to a dying man had to be kept—there was no way out.
And I could not let this one die in shame and disappointment.
“You wil not leave her behind and go off on your own, wil you?”
“No,” I said, hating myself, not knowing whether that was a lie or not.
“Her true name . . . known only to her mate, her life partner . . .
or to her sworn guardian . . .”
And he whispered it in my ear.
I resumed the ritual storyteling, only vaguely aware of the blue- eyed machine stil hovering over the long grass.
Just as I finished, I saw that the old man’s eyes were mostly closed and had falen back the tiniest bit, unmoving, within his skul.
I stayed by him, listening to the last tick of his breath, watching the last twitch of his limbs. . . .
It did not take long before I knew he had crossed safely over the western waters. He had suffered much already, and the Elephant and Abada are kind. Stil, I wept and felt the sadness of the old spirit inside me.
We never shared. . . . Whom have we lost yet again?
Then I saw that the machine with the blue eye was slowly dropping into the grass, and the eye was dimming, turning black.
There was nothing left for Genemender to do, and no power left to do it, anyway.
I angrily gathered up a few scraps of clothing from the old huts.
Some at least of the food had been real—a final feast produced within the pavilion of cylinders—and I packed up what I could.
None of the monitors moved. Their eyes stayed dark.
I walked into the jungle a few hundred meters and joined Vinnevra and the ape at the start of a nearly overgrown trail, little more than a winding gap between the towering trees. I could not meet her look, and when she asked me if he had died wel, in tune with daowa-maadthu, I simply nodded.
I felt barren inside. No Riser, no old man, and even the voice within was quiet. I had no notion where we might go from here, and neither did Vinnevra. But we started down the trail, anyway, to the far side of the plateau. After her question about Gamelpar’s passing, she did not speak for hours. It was her way of mourning.
The station where Gamelpar had died was several kilometers behind us and the jungle was thinning when she asked me to tel her the old stories, just as I had told them to her grandfather.
And she in turn would speak the stories Gamelpar had told her, including the story about the First Human’s soul-finger.
It was then that Riser chose to rejoin us.
Chapter Twenty
WE WERE WALKING along the trail, picking our way over the creepers—or in the ape’s case, plowing and swinging through them —and watching through the broken canopy of branches and leaves the perhaps not so endless progress of shadow and light on the sky bridge. The skies had cleared for a time since midmorning and the air was moist, but the trail—dead leaves overlying stones and bits of wood—was drying and firm enough underfoot.
Al ilusion. How could I know anything was actualy solid?
Perhaps this was an amusement being enjoyed somewhere by jaded Forerunners. If I did not amuse, then at any moment my story, my life, might be crumpled up and thrown away. . . .
Our tales spun on while we walked. I told Vinnevra the ancient story of Shalimanda, the heaven-snake, who one night swalowed the original shining, jewel-encrusted stream of worlds, and the next night exploded, showering the sky with al the darker, earthy orbs on which humans would grow. As long as I heard us speaking, our voices soft and holow in the jungle, I seemed more tightly bound to what was real, to al that I could smel and see and feel.
The girl—the young woman, for she was no longer a girl—was a comfort to me. More knives in my head as I tried to resist.
But I continued to listen and to speak in turn. I knew her real name. Perhaps that is not something you feel much about, one way or another, but for anyone tuned to daowa-maadthu, the old man’s confidence was terribly important. I could not just leave her behind, not now, any more than I could abandon a sister . . . or a wife.
The ape listened to us and occasionaly threw in her own commentary, low rumbles and occasional sighs. If she used words, I could not understand them—perhaps they were hidden in her grunts.
Something made a smal crunching sound off to our left and silenced us. Vinnevra cocked her head to listen, then threw it back and sniffed. “It’s your friend,” she whispered. “The little one.”
Riser came out of the jungle, climbing over two embracing tree roots, then stopped several paces in front of me, stood straight, and folded his arms. He looked me up and down, as if to satisfy himself I was not another ghost.
His smal, wry face was as hard and serious as a stone.
I was stil numb at the loss of the old man and the loss of my freedom. I wanted to reach out and touch my friend but didn’t dare.
Then, Riser began to silently weep. He wiped his eyes with one long-fingered hand and turned to Vinnevra.
“You knew first,” he said, and then, to me, “The woman is smarter than you. No surprise.”
“Why did you folow us and not show yourself?” Vinnevra asked him, as if chiding an old friend. Riser had that way with some people.
“The ape is smarter than both of you put together,” he said. “She smeled me and she knew I was folowing, didn’t you?”
The ape pushed away creepers and branches, showering dead leaves over the trail. Standing tal in a shaft of afternoon sun, her white-fringed jowl and cheek fur forming a nimbus around her nearly black face, she withdrew her lips, showing strong, square teeth, and shook out her arms, softly guttling. She was glad to see the little one.
My tension broke. I could not help but laugh. Even now, Riser could befuddle me. He looked me over criticaly, walking around me and poking my ribs, my back, determined I was sound, then snorted at the ape. She snorted back. “Cha manush once knew Sha kyanunsho—her people. So she says. She even speaks a language I understand, a little, so it must be so. She says her lending name is Mara.”
“You were there al along, but you didn’t trust me,” I said.
“Forerunners make ghosts,” Riser said, eyelids flicking white. I got down on my knees before the Florian, held out my arms, and he fel into them like a child—though he was easily ten times my age.
We hugged for a moment, then became aware that Vinnevra was watching with a needful expression. So Riser wriggled loose, stepped over to her, grabbed her around the hips, and hugged her as wel.
“Sister or wife?” he asked me, looking back.
“Neither!” Vinnevra said.
“You like this boy,” Riser said. “No?”
“No!” Vinnevra said, but glanced at me.
The shadow-ape squatted, pushing aside several saplings, and watched us contentedly while combing fingers through the fur on her arms.
Insects had found us again, and so we moved on. “How long have you been here?” I asked Riser. “Tel me how you got here.
You fel from the sky?”
“Long story. Tel soon.”
“I want to hear it now.”
“So do I,” Vinnevra said.
“First, make a wide look around,” he said.
Riser ran ahead of us, up a gentle slope to a smal clearing above the tree line, set with three giant rock pilars. We made a circuit around the rocks and joined him to survey the landscape below.
We had come to the lower edge of the plateau and now faced wildly hummocked terrain, many mounds and low hils, while off to our right, mountains rose steep and forbidding, folded around their skirts by more jungle, above that a barren belt, and finaly, patches of snow.
I sighed. “I have no idea where we need to go,” I said.
“My geas says nothing,” Vinnevra confessed.
“I fel into a bad, bad place,” Riser said. “We won’t go there.
Everyone dead. Ugly.”
“War?”
He pushed out his lips. “Maybe. I walked from far over that way.” He pointed away from the mountains, at a sharp angle inland.
In that direction, many hundreds of kilometers away, the hummocky terrain blued out in thick atmosphere and clouds. Beyond the clouds, naked foundation stretched al the way across the band, marked with geometric details—the usual Forerunner imponderables. Foundation material stretched up that side of the wheel for perhaps four or five thousand kilometers, then ended in a turbulent roil of perpetual cloud.
Within that mass of cloud, lightning flashed every few seconds— briliant but silent.
“You mean, your ship—the ship that carried you here—crashed out there?”
He tapped his shoulder once, yes. And that also indicated he wanted to use the mix of cha manush signs and chirps and grunts he had taught me back on Erde-Tyrene, a patois we had never shared with Bornstelar or used in front of any Forerunner. He settled on his haunches and picked at a patch of moss, then puled out a tuft and sniffed it philosophicaly. “I tel it, and when I finish,” he said, “you tel them.”
As if Mara would understand! But perhaps she understood more than I suspected.
And so Riser began. When he spoke this way, his halting speech and mannerisms seemed to drop away and he became positively elegant—but only with difficulty can I convey the flowery style, with so many inflections and declensions. Florians used nouns, adjective- like phrases, and verb tenses that recognize thirteen different genders and four directions of time. So I simplify.
Pity. When inspired, or when bragging, Riser was quite the poet.
RISER’S STORY IF I WERE happy I would sing this for al time, but there is much sadness, not of our doing, and so this can only be a tale told by slaves.
“The first part you know. We were there. Then Forerunners put me away like sugar-fruit in a pot. You, too, I think.
“Later, I woke up on a dying star boat, faling through noise and heat. The boat became bent and broken with parts and things glowing, not fire, like the spirit of the boat trying to come together again or just find home and die. The boat fel apart when it became too tired to keep trying. And we spiled out onto a graveyard- desert, below those clouds, way over there.
“We means three Forerunners and me.
“Al of us wore armor at first. One of the Forerunners, his armor was al locked up so he could not move. The other two were making sure he did not move. He must have falen out of favor with those two.
“My armor was not much good, no blue lady, so I climbed out, but it was no use trying to run away. I did not know where I was.
This place—very strange, and the graveyard-desert, terrible.
“So I stayed with the Forerunners. They did not seem to know anything about me or care much at first, but then the locked-away Forerunner, very angry, told them a story. I only understood a little.
He said I was important and they could use me later to become rich. I was treasure. You like that, huh, maybe you sel me to Bornstelar, huh?
“It was enough. They paid more attention and tried to protect me.
“This locked-up one said a monster had come to the wheel, where we had crashed, and that the monster spoke long years to the machine that bossed this place under orders from the Master Builder, you remember that one—the arrogant bad one who opposed the Didact, another arrogant bad one, I think, but I do not judge him forever, that one, yet.