The Shadow of the Ship, page 10
“With the waves?”
He indicated the nearest tiny ridge of water which swayed gently on the laketop by the dock, but refused to move before the breeze. “Reach out and touch it.”
Kneeling on the planking, Susannilar reached a small hand to the steady wavelet. She missed: her hand went right past it. Puzzled, she reached again. It didn’t seem to be where she saw it. She blinked. Her eyes were in focus; she saw it clearly in the round right where it ought to be. Slowly she reached out her hand and with palm flat to the water, she skimmed it above the surface to and fro in increasing arcs.
Using this method, she found the wavelet quickly; when she touched it, it broke. Her fingers were wet and the wavelet slumped down into the lake, ordinary water again.
“I’ve upset it,” she apologized, flicking droplets off her fingers to sparkle in the warm sunlight.
“No problem,” Ytrenath said abstractedly. “You upset its structure, which is rather delicate. Eventually I’ll have bigger and more stable ones. These are only prototypes.” He was staring at her eyes. “Tell me, Susannilar, has your mother ever hypnotized you?”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said simply.
Ytrenath carefully let himself down so that he was seated cross-legged on the dock, facing the girl. The dock did some slow heaves on the water in spite of his exaggerated slowness. “Sit like I’m sitting.”
She scrambled quickly into the position, causing further heaves. “I think I’ve got a splinter in my knee.”
“Don’t worry about it. I think you’re developing a doubled viewpoint. A dual stance.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know. I think my daughter, your mother Alalortem, has been developing that queer trick of yours farther than she’s told me. Not that she has to tell me—but if I know her she probably didn’t want me to worry.” He snorted. “I don’t see that she inherited it from me anyway.”
“What queer trick?” Susannilar demanded. “Do you mean her shift? That’s not queer.”
“It’s not? I’ll bet she ordered you never to talk about it in front of strangers.”
“How did you know that?”
“A little flower told me.”
“That’s funny. Anyway, you’re not a stranger.”
Ytrenath smiled sympathetically. “Certainly not. In any case, it’s not for you to worry over. Tell you what. Suppose I tell you some more about flowers, and then you can tell me what you and your folks have been up to since last I saw you. That’s called a contract trade.”
“Sure.”
“Let’s see. Look at that cloth your clothes are made of, Susannilar. The cloth itself is made out of fiber from the seeds of those red flowers growing in the far waterstrip.”
“I thought those were all powderpuffs.”
“They are. It’s those fibers which are so good for weaving cloth, after the flowers form their seeds. The red fibers, whose powder such young people of fashion as yourself dust and smear over their faces, are wonderful material. Cortian fibers, the botanists call them.”
She blushed at the allusion to face-smearing. “So the fibers are braided together. Like this?” She interlaced her fingers at right angles.
“Rather like that. Braiding creates a rope, weaving a flat sheet. Speaking of ropes, properly cured cortian fibers are used in all sorts of rope and cord, too. Each piece of natural fiber is only about half the length of your little finger, but when they’re put all together they can make a cord as long as you want and as strong as you want.”
Susannilar was doubtful. “Ever so long? Could we wrap one around the world?”
“Like a meadow trail in the gravity well? Undoubtedly, if we had the patience to make one.” Ytrenath hesitated, scratching his chin. “When you’re older, you’ll see how all channels of binding energy have much in common.”
She was still trying to visualize a cord wrapped around all of Fleurage. “Sounds like an awful lot of fibers.”
“Each powderpuff has ten thousand of them.”
“Wow! I guess you’ve got enough flowers on the lake to make a cord as long as the Yellow Trail!”
“Perhaps not quite so long as that. The trails are longer than you can imagine.”
She twisted around to see better the red powderpuffs, growing row on row in the gentle water. “How come they don’t get wet?”
“The same reason a plant on land doesn’t get wet in your garden when you water its roots. It sucks up the moisture internally.”
“I know, Grandfather, but look at this; if I dip just the teensiest corner of my sleeve in the water, the water climbs up it. Watch.” She demonstrated. “If these whatchamacallit cortian fibers are the same in the plants over there, how come the tops of the plants are dusty instead of soaking wet?” She yanked her sleeve out of the water and squeezed the end of it to mere dampness.
“Ah, I see what you mean. That’s a good question. The answer lies in the internal structure of the plant. Remember, the whole plant is called a powderpuff, not just its flower. It needs that water because it’s thirsty, so it drinks it up. It doesn’t send much up to the flower, because it doesn’t need much there until the seed is being made, and then only a little more.”
Suddenly he reached to tweak her ear. “Just like you don’t send much water up here no matter how much you drink.” She laughed happily.
“The fibers are hydrophilic,” he went on. “They’ve an affinity for water, as your sleeve testifies. They’re hollow. That’s where the water moves.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? They’re so tiny.”
“The tube inside them, the lumen, is tinier still. But it’s there, and that helps to make the cloth, when that’s woven, easy to dye. The cloth absorbs water and along with it, the dye that’s already dissolved in the water. So we can have pretty clothes with bright colors.”
“I can hardly see one fiber all alone, if it’s fallen off a powderpuff. The lumen is the tube inside? It goes all the way through?”
“End to end,” he told her solemnly, eyes twinkling. “That’s neat. Does the pollen come out of the tubes?”
He nodded, shifting to a more comfortable position on the wood. The dock rocked gently under them. “Comes out of, and goes into. The stamen, which makes the pollen, and the pistil, which helps the pollen grow into a seed, are very small, so tiny that you need a magnifying lens to see them. But these are really important parts of the flower.”
“Not the fibers.” She realized her sleeve was still damp and began waving her arm rhythmically in the sunshine to speed its drying.
“No. What the fibers do is help convey the pollen which is released into the air—if it’s not dusted onto someone’s face—to regather the pollen and slide it down its inside corridor for the pistil. Insects help in this, as I think you know. The lumen, with some roundabouting, is the corridor between the fertile parts of the flower, and between flowers.”
“I get it, Grandfather,” she asserted matter-of-factly. “The flowers make the contact.”
“Correct. Contact, whether internal or external, is all-important. It’s an old spinners’ joke that cordage binds our civilization together. I suspect that they’re right.”
Ytrenath was silent for a long time, gnarled fingers dabbling in the water, his head turned toward the grassy green slope that swooped gracefully down to his house and around it to the sandy lakefront.
“Tell me some more,” she implored finally.
He turned back to her. “Not now,” he said gently. “Another time. Now it’s your turn: tell me what you’ve been doing and how you’ve managed to grow so fast your hair can hardly stay on top of your head!”
She giggled.
He reached behind him to the yellow stripe of ranked flowers growing in the water. He plucked a blossom off a long stem with a twist of his fingers. “Besides, I’m getting cramped sitting here. My bones are creaky.”
“Hmm.” She rested chin on fist. “What should I tell you?” He dangled the yellow flower by its stem. “What I’ve always been interested in, as your mother may have mentioned, is philosophy of mind. Your mother, Alalortem, possesses a very unusual mind, and I’ve speculated about what makes her tick when everyone else tocks.”
She smiled at the thought, made as if to speak, but he distracted her.
Ytrenath placed his elbow on his knee to provide a steady fulcrum, and the yellow flower swung back and forth as his thumb and forefinger evenly twitched the green stalk. He made it swing in a broad, slow arc, a constant period.
“This is an experiment,” he told her. “Try to keep your eyes on the flower. Follow it back and forth. Back and forth. Now I’ll chant you a little song. A ticktock song that goes like the strokes of a clock, like ringing a bell, and the flower is the pendulum of the clock as it goes back and forth:
“One!
O man, take care!
Two!
What says the meadow so dark?
Three!
I am asleep—
Four!
From a sleep of death I look and mark:
Five!
Man is new light,
Six!
Brighter than light had been shone,
Seven!
Gloried his trails,
Eight!
Light—lighter yet than falling;
Nine!
Death commands: Fall!
Ten!
But all light makes not alone,
Eleven!
Wants light, lives floating lightness.
Twelve!”
Susannilar blinked. Ytrenath was bending over her, painfully snapping his old fingers unrhythmically. She stretched and decided to get up, as she felt rather cramped too.
Ytrenath repeated an earlier statement: “I’ve added a brand-new kind of flower, Susannilar. Can you find it?” He watched her carefully as she peered around her.
Unsuccessfully she studied the flowers standing in their watery beds on both sides of the dock. She took a pace forward, feeling the continuing firmness of the wood, and walked slowly away from the shore. Ytrenath followed. Finally, at the end of the long plank, she had to admit defeat.
“No. I don’t see any that’s really a new kind. All these, even the pink ones, I think you had before, only hardly so many or so happy-looking. Show me?” she pleaded.
Leaning past her, he pointed to a small and unobtrusive flower of a translucent blue, barely two inches tall. It was naturally camouflaged, a match for the water. Like a watery curl standing above the water, it stood firmly among the passing wavelets.
“I didn’t see that at all!” She leaned awkwardly out to examine it. “Doesn’t look much like a flower. I mean, it looks like one, but it doesn’t act like it’s made the same way flowers are, sort of. More like one of your bitsy standing waves, back there.”
Ytrenath smiled with creative pride. “Rather, it is the true waterflower, growing out of the lake rather than on it. All of these other flowers have roots and require ordinary nutrients, food, from the water. Their land cousins, by my house there, are rooted in a more solid medium, but live the same kind of lives for the same kind of goals. This little one is different.”
“It’s so pretty. Are you going to have lots of them?” She tried to imagine whole fields of these translucent blue waterflowers lying upon the blue lake, waving easily to her as the ripples passed beneath them.
“Well, I don’t know.” He paused, deliberating. “Would you like this one?”
She looked up at him. “Yes! But can you get more?”
“Make more? Now that I know how, yes. Go ahead. Pull it up.” The old man tensed into stillness as he watched her. His hands were at his waist, and he bent forward with fixed attention.
She reached out her small arm. Finding it too short for the second time that day, she got down on her knees on the hard planking. With a careful lunge she managed to pull the waterflower loose at the base, uncertain of whether she liked the gelled feeling in her hand.
“I’ll call it ‘Bluest,’ and replant it at home.” But her hand was wet, and she saw that the waterflower had no proper base. Its substance was trickling out across her hand.
“Oh, I’ve killed it!” she cried miserably.
A grave expression passed across Ytrenath’s face. “So it cannot be moved,” he said slowly, more to himself than to her. “I should have anticipated it. Again the goal recedes,” he added in a tone so funereal as to be comic.
The little girl was too downcast to notice this feeble attempt to cheer her. “What shall I do?” she asked.
Drops of water plopped on the dock in front of her as she knelt clutching the waterflower. Its blue translucence, its lovely watery curl of stem and petals, were rapidly draining away through its severed tube.
Then in one swift motion she answered her own question, out of her own need. She pressed her clutching hand to her mouth and ate the waterflower in a swift gulp. Inside her, she felt it burst, cool and quenching and flowing down her throat to the innermost Susannilar. As her grandfather stared at her in astonishment, she knew that she had preserved it in the only way she could.
8. The Detenebrator
Rheinallt closed his compartment door behind him and placed his flickering lamp on the stand by the door. The session with Susannilar had tired him, and he felt groggy. He could not have predicted her intensity, nor that absorbing a fragment of her history would exhaust him. And there would have to be more, until he understood her. Obviously he already felt empathy; if that had been the purpose of her narration, certainly she had succeeded.
The wavering gas flame from the hand lamp threw grotesque, leaping shadows across the otherwise darkened room. He must have set it down fairly hard, in his weariness, for the mantle to jig so annoyingly and pass on its flickering to his furniture. The canopied bed, the wardrobe, the desk: wooden all, but all seemed to glow obscurely from some light within themselves, drowsing in half-dream.
He looked around for Arahant, but did not see him.
The furniture took its animation from the mantle of the lamp, which took its animation from his prior motion. So what? He asked himself. He felt too tired to try to analyze how furniture should look in the dark.
Whitnadys had not yet come tonight. Or perhaps she had been by, grew tired of waiting, and left already for sleep of her own.
The only sound in the room was the faintly rasping whirr of the ventilator, dispensing fresh air from one of the caravan’s tank cars. The air felt stuffy, the pressure too high. He took a step toward the desk to light the other lamp there, then stopped. He thought he heard his heartbeat, then lost the sound.
There was a vague rumbling from behind the thick curtain that shut away the view of the meadow. This rumbling revived last-year memories of thunder within the confines of a small trail sled, deep heavy bass notes more felt than heard. His muscles vibrated to the thrumming note.
The sound from behind the curtain was the sonic equivalent of a distant lamp passing before closed eyelids: stringy tone values flickering yellow and orange and red. Sonically, the yellow pierced, the orange bathed, the red heated.
Rheinallt had heard these vibratos before, and felt this fear that accompanied the bass rumbling. He could block a sonic attack—but he was so tired. His teeth clenched involuntarily. Harsh memories hammered into his still-groggy mind, further blurring thoughts and weakening muscles.
Being kicked while he was down from Susannilar, he thought uncertainly. To cast off this tinge of self-pity, he reminded himself that fear was a mental phenomenon, that the effects of fear were internally caused. With an effort, he asserted more control over his minute bodily processes. That helped brace him for what came next.
Across the room came a shouted thunderclap, rocking his whole body. It had started like this before. He gasped, stumbling backward, throwing his arm in front of his face as the whipping sound virtually burned the air of the room. The lampstand rocked, brushed by his outflung arm, and the room optically shook in the feedback of the moving flame—much more violently than when he had entered and joggled the lampstand. The afterecho in his ears brought sympathetic spots to his eyes to chase the tears around.
The Detenebrator, he subvocalized. The Detenebrator is here. He forced open his eyes, not until that moment realizing that he had closed them.
In the center of the most open, furniture-free part of the room, between the soft cloth canopy of the bed and the closed insulating curtains of the window, in midair, was a pearly-white globe, looking like a fuzzy basketball on the rebound, or a jellyfish with its tentacles drifting finely around it. The tiniest of strands seemed to hook to a few projections on walls and ceilings, to suspend it. This was the visible aspect of the Detenebrator.
“The greetings of light to you, Eiverdein!” it boomed cheerfully.
Rheinallt’s fingernails bit into his palms within clenched fists. “And to you, Detenebrator,” he ground out as evenly as he could.
How had it gotten into his compartment? Or for that matter, how had it managed to board the Special Caravan? Or could the cursed thing have been hidden somewhere the whole duration of the journey? It was not very big. Dwelling on such practical considerations helped calm the man, pegging down the weird entity so his emotions could get a handle on it, and themselves.
“You make much progress, Eiverdein!”
“How so?” he asked warily.
“Why, you are here instead of there. And you have kept your mind intact. Truly, Eiverdein, you are doing superbly. I have great hopes for you.” The booming mouthless voice rolled out laughter in great tides.
“While I can, I will,” Rheinallt said, referring to intactness.
“Are you still worrying about that little incident?” The Detenebrator conveyed wounded feelings, the tone of let’s-put-the-past-behind-us.
Rheinallt stared at the alien thing, trying to evaluate, trying to think through his sense of renewed disaster. Did this apparition have a purpose? Was it here for observation, capricious meddling, shaping of what it considered lesser beings? Or just a random catalyst of arbitrariness and madness?
