Grace laughed. "You see, Chinese girl?" she said. "Lie lie lie. And so lofty-sounding as he does it. Of course he has that jewel in his ear to help him. Tell the truth, neither one of you speaks a lick of Russian."
Peter looked grim and vaguely sick. Wang-mu put him out of his misery--though at the risk of infuriating him. "Of course it's a lie," said Wang-mu. "The truth is simply too unbelievable."
"But the truth is the only thing worth believing, isn't it?" asked Grace's son.
"If you can know it," said Wang-mu. "But if you won't believe the truth, someone has to help you come up with plausible lies, don't they?"
"I can make up my own," said Grace. "Day before yesterday a white boy and a Chinese girl visited my friend Aimaina Hikari on a world at least twenty years' voyage away. They told him things that disturbed his entire equilibrium so he could hardly function. Today a white boy and a Chinese girl, telling different lies from the ones told by his pair, of course, but nevertheless lying their lips off, these two come to me wanting to get my help or permission or advice about seeing Malu--"
"Malu means 'being calm,' " added Grace's husband cheerfully.
"Are you still awake?" asked Grace. "Weren't you hungry? Didn't you eat?"
"I'm full but fascinated," answered her husband. "Go on, expose them!"
"I want to know who you are and how you got here," said Grace.
"That would be very hard to explain," said Peter.
"We've got minutes and minutes," said Grace. "Millions of them, really. You're the ones who seem to have only a few. So much hurry that you jump the gulf from star to star overnight. It strains credulity, of course, since lightspeed is supposed to be an insuperable barrier, but then, not believing you're the same people my friend saw on the planet Divine Wind also strains credulity, so there we are. Supposing that you really can travel faster than light, what does that tell us about where you're from? Aimaina takes it for granted that you were sent to him by the gods, more specifically by his ancestors, and he may be right, it's in the nature of gods to be unpredictable and suddenly do things they've never done before. Myself, though, I find that rational explanations always work out better, especially in papers I hope to get published. So the rational explanation is that you come from a real world, not from some heavenly never-never land. And since you can hop from world to world in a moment or a day, you could come from anywhere. But my family and I think you come from Lusitania."
"Well, I don't," said Wang-mu.
"And I'm originally from Earth," said Peter. "If I'm from anywhere."
"Aimaina thinks you come from Outside," said Grace, and for a moment Wang-mu thought the woman must have figured out how Peter came into existence. But then she realized that Grace's words had a theological meaning, not a literal one. "The land of the gods. But Malu said he's never seen you there, or if he did he didn't know it was you. So that leaves me right back where I started. You're lying about everything, so what good does it do to ask you questions?"
"I told you the truth," said Wang-mu. "I come from Path. And Peter's origins, so far as they can be traced to any planet, are on Earth. But the vehicle we came in--that originated on Lusitania."
Peter's face went white. She knew he was thinking, Why not just noose ourselves up and hand them the loose ends of the rope? But Wang-mu had to use her own judgment, and in her judgment they were in no danger from Grace Drinker or her family. Indeed, if she meant to turn them in to the authorities, wouldn't she already have done so?
Grace looked Wang-mu in the eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then: "Good fish, isn't it?"
"I wondered what the glaze was. Is there sugar in it?"
"Honey and a couple of herbs and actually some pig fat. I hope you aren't some rare combination of Chinese and Jew or Muslim, because if you are you're now ritually unclean and I would feel really bad about that, it's so much trouble getting purified again, or so I'm told, it certainly is in our culture."
Peter, heartened now by Grace's lack of concern with their miraculous spaceship, tried to get them back on the subject. "So you'll let us see Malu?"
"Malu decides who sees Malu, and he says you're the ones who'll decide, but that's just him being enigmatic."
"Gnomic," said Wang-mu. Peter winced.
"Not really, not in the sense of being obscure. Malu means to be perfectly clear and for him spiritual things aren't mystical at all, they're just a part of life. I myself have never actually walked with the dead or heard the heroes sing their own songs or had a vision of the creation, but I have no doubt that Malu has."
"I thought you were a scholar," said Peter.
"If you want to talk to the scholar Grace Drinker," she said, "read my papers and take a class. I thought you wanted to talk to me."
"We do," said Wang-mu quickly. "Peter's in a hurry. We have several deadlines."
"The Lusitania Fleet, now, I imagine that's one of them. But not quite so urgent as another. The computer shut-down that's been ordered."
Peter stiffened. "The order has been given?"
"Oh, it was given weeks ago," said Grace, looking puzzled. Then: "Oh, you poor dear, I don't mean the actual go-ahead. I mean the order telling us how to prepare. You surely knew about that one."
Peter nodded and relaxed, glum again.
"I think you want to talk to Malu before the ansible connections are shut down. Though why would that matter?" she said, thinking aloud. "After all, if you can travel faster than light, you could simply go and deliver your message yourself. Unless--"
Her son offered a suggestion: "They have to deliver their message to a lot of different worlds."
"Or a lot of different gods!" cried his father, who then laughed uproariously at what certainly seemed to Wang-mu to be a feeble joke.
"Or," said the daughter, who was now lying down beside the table, occasionally belching as she let the enormous dinner digest. "Or, they need the ansible connections in order to do their fast travel trick."
"Or," said Grace, looking at Peter, who had instinctively moved his hand to touch the jewel in his ear, "you're connected to the very virus that we're shutting down all the computers in order to eliminate, and that has something to do with your faster-than-light travel."
"It's not a virus," said Wang-mu. "It's a person. A living entity. And you're going to help Congress kill her, even though she's the only one of her kind and she's never harmed anybody."
"It makes them nervous when something--or, if you prefer, somebody--makes their fleet disappear."
"It's still there," said Wang-mu.
"Let's not fight," said Grace. "Let's just say that now that I've found you willing to tell the truth, perhaps it will be worthwhile for Malu to take the time to let you hear it."
"He has the truth?" asked Peter.
"No," said, Grace, "but he knows where it's kept and he can get a glimpse now and then and tell us what he saw. I think that's still pretty good."
"And we can see him?"
"You'd have to spend a week purifying yourselves before you can set foot on Atatua--"
"Impure feet tickling the Gods!" cried her husband, laughing uproariously. "That's why they call it the Island of the Laughing God!"
Peter shifted uncomfortably.
"Don't you like my husband's jokes?" asked Grace.
"No, I think--I mean, they're simply not--I don't get them, that's all."
"Well, that's because they're not very funny," said Grace. "But my husband is cheerfully determined to keep laughing through all this so he doesn't get angry at you and kill you with his bare hands."
Wang-mu gasped, for she knew at once that this was true; without realizing it, she had been aware all along of the rage seething under the huge man's laughter, and when she looked at his calloused, massive hands, she realized that he could surely tear her apart without even breaking into a sweat.
"Why would you threaten us with death?" asked Peter, acting more belligerent than Wang-mu wished.
"The opposite!" said Gr
ace. "I tell you that my husband is determined not to let rage at your audacity and blasphemy control his behavior. To try to visit Atatua without even taking the trouble to learn that letting you set foot there, uncleansed and uninvited, would shame us and filthy us as a people for a hundred generations--I think he's doing rather well not to have taken a blood oath against you."
"We didn't know," said Wang-mu.
"He knew," said Grace. "Because he's got the all-hearing ear."
Peter blushed. "I hear what she says to me," he said, "but I can't hear what she chooses not to say."
"So . . . you were being led. And Aimaina is right, you do serve a higher being. Voluntarily? Or are you being coerced?"
"That's a stupid question, Mama," said her daughter, belching again. "If they are coerced, how could they possibly tell you?"
"People can say as much by what they don't say," answered Grace, "which you'd know if you'd sit up and look at their eloquent faces, these lying visitors from other planets."
"She's not a higher being," said Wang-mu. "Not like you mean it. Not a god. Though she does have a lot of control and she knows a lot of things. But she's not omnipotent or anything, and she doesn't know everything, and sometimes she's even wrong, and I'm not sure she's always good, either, so we can't really call her a god because she's not perfect."
Grace shook her head. "I wasn't talking about some Platonic god, some ethereal perfection that can never be understood, only apprehended. Not some Nicene paradoxical being whose existence is perpetually contradicted by his nonexistence. Your higher being, this jewel-friend your partner wears like a parasite--except who is sucking life from whom, eh?--she could well be a god in the sense that we Samoans use the word. You might be her hero servants. You might be her incarnation, for all I know."
"But you're a scholar," said Wang-mu. "Like my teacher Han Fei-tzu, who discovered that what we used to call gods were really just genetically induced obsessions that we interpreted in such a way as to maintain our obedience to--"
"Just because your gods don't exist doesn't mean mine don't," said Grace.
"She must have tromped through acres of dead gods just to get here!" cried Grace's husband, laughing uproariously. Only now that Wang-mu knew what his laughter really meant, his laugh filled her with fear.
Grace reached out and laid a huge, heavy arm across her slight shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "My husband is a civilized man and he's never killed anybody."
"Not for lack of trying!" he bellowed. "No, that was a joke!" He almost wept with laughter.
"You can't go see Malu," said Grace, "because we would have to purify you and I don't think you're ready to make the promises you'd have to make--and I especially don't believe you're ready to make them and actually mean what you say. And those are promises that must be kept. So Malu is coming here. He's being rowed to this island right now--no motors for him, so I want you to know exactly how many people are sweating for hours and hours just so you can have your chat with him. I just want to tell you this--you are being given an extraordinary honor, and I urge you not to look down your noses at him and listen to him with some sort of academic or scientific superciliousness. I've met a lot of famous people, some of them even rather smart, but this is the wisest man you'll ever know, and if you find yourself getting bored just keep this in mind: Malu isn't stupid enough to think you can isolate facts from their context and have them still be true. So he always puts the things he says in their full context, and if that means you'll have to listen to a whole history of the human race from beginning to now before he says anything you think is pertinent, well, I suggest you just shut up and listen, because most of the time the best stuff he says is accidental and irrelevant and you're damn lucky if you have brains enough to notice what it is. Have I made myself clear?"
Wang-mu wished with all her heart that she had eaten less. She felt quite nauseated with dread right now, and if she did throw up, she was sure it would take half an hour just to get it all back out of her.
Peter, though, simply nodded calmly. "We didn't understand, Grace, even though my partner read some of your writings. We thought we had come to speak to a philosopher, like Aimaina, or a scholar, like you. But now I see that we've come to listen to a man of wisdom whose experience reaches into realms that we have never seen or even dreamed of seeing, and we will listen silently until he asks us to ask him questions, and we'll trust him to know better than we know ourselves what it is we need to hear."
Wang-mu recognized complete surrender when she saw it, and she was grateful to see that everyone at the table was nodding happily and no one felt obliged to tell a joke.
"We're also grateful that the honorable one has sacrificed so much, as have so many others, to come personally to us and bless us with wisdom that we do not deserve to receive."
To Wang-mu's horror, Grace laughed out loud at her, instead of nodding respectfully.
"Overkill," Peter murmured.
"Oh, don't criticize her," said Grace. "She's Chinese. From Path, right? And I'll bet you used to be a servant. How could you possibly have learned the difference between respect and obsequiousness? Masters never are content with mere respect from their servants."
"But my master was," said Wang-mu, trying to defend Han Fei-Tzu.
"As is my master," said Grace. "As you will see, when you meet him."
"Time's up," said Jane.
Miro and Val looked up, bleary-eyed, from the documents they were poring over at Miro's computer, to see that in the air above Val's computer, Jane's virtual face now hovered, watching them.
"We've been passive observers as long as they'll let us," said Jane. "But now there are three spacecraft up in the outer atmosphere, rising toward us. I don't think any of them are merely remote-controlled weapons, but I can't be certain of it. And they seem to be directing some transmissions to us in particular, the same messages over and over."
"What message?"
"It's the genetic molecule stuff," said Jane. "I can tell you the composition of the molecules, but I haven't a clue what they mean."
"When do their interceptors reach us?"
"Three minutes, plus or minus. They're zig-zagging evasively, now that they've escaped the gravity well."
Miro nodded. "My sister Quara was convinced that much of the descolada virus consisted of language. I think now we can conclusively say that she was right. It does carry a meaning. She was wrong about the virus being sentient, though, I think. My guess now is that the descolada kept recomposing those sections of itself that constituted a report."
"A report," echoed Val. "That makes sense. To tell its makers what it has done with the world it . . . probed."
"So the question is," said Miro, "do we simply disappear and let them ponder the miracle of our sudden arrival and vanishing? Or do we first have Jane broadcast to them the entire, um, text of the descolada virus?"
"Dangerous," said Val. "The message it contains may also tell these people everything they want to know about human genes. After all, we're one of the creatures the descolada worked on, and its message is going to tell all of our strategies for controlling it."
"Except the last one," said Miro. "Because Jane won't send them the descolada as it exists now, completely tamed and controlled--that would be inviting them to revise it to circumvent our alterations."
"We won't send them a message and we won't go back to Lusitania, either," said Jane. "We don't have time."
"We don't have time not to," said Miro. "However urgent you might think this is, Jane, it doesn't do a lick of good for me and Val to be here to do this without help. My sister Ela, for instance, who actually understands this virus stuff. And Quara, despite her being the second most pig-headed being in the known universe--don't beg for flattery, Val, by asking who the first is--we could use Quara."
"And let's be fair about this," said Val. "We're meeting another sentient species. Why should humans be the only ones represented? Why not a pequenino? Why not a hive queen--or at least a wo
rker?"
"Especially a worker," said Miro. "If we are stuck here, having a worker with us would enable us to communicate with Lusitania--ansible or not, Jane or not, messages could--"
"All right," said Jane. "You've persuaded me. Even though the last-minute flurry with the Starways Congress tells me they're about to shut down the ansible network at any moment."
"We'll hurry," said Miro. "We'll make them all rush to get the right people aboard."
"And the right supplies," said Val. "And--"
"So start doing it," said Jane. "You just disappeared from your orbit around the descolada planet. And I did broadcast a small fragment of the descolada. One of the sections that Quara pegged as language, but the one that was least altered during mutations as the descolada tried to fight with humans. It should be enough to let them know which of their probes reached us."
"Oh, good, so they can launch a fleet," said Miro.
"The way things are going," said Jane dryly, "by the time any fleet they send could get anywhere at all, Lusitania is the safest address they could have. Because it won't exist anymore."
"You're so cheerful," said Miro. "I'll be back in an hour with the people. Val, you get the supplies we'll need."
"For how long?"
"Get as much as will fit," said Miro. "As someone once said, life is a suicide mission. We have no idea how long we'll be trapped there, so we can't possibly know how much is enough." He opened the door of the starship and stepped out onto the landing field near Milagre.
7
"I OFFER HER THIS POOR
OLD VESSEL"
"How do we remember?
Is the brain a jar that holds our memories?
Then when we die, does the jar break?
Are our memories spilled on the ground
and lost?
Or is the brain a map
that leads down twisted paths
and into hidden corners?
Then when we die, the map is lost
but perhaps some explorer
could wander through that strange landscape
and find out the hiding places
of our misplaced memories."
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
The seagoing canoe glided toward the shore. At first and for the longest time, it seemed hardly to be moving at all, so slowly did it come closer, the rowers rising higher and looking just a little larger each time Wang-mu could see them over the waves. Then, near the end of the voyage, the canoe suddenly seemed huge, it seemed abruptly to speed up, to lunge through the sea, to leap toward shore with each wave; and even though Wang-mu knew that it was going no faster now than before, she wanted to cry out for them to slow down, to be careful, the canoe was going too quickly to be controlled, it would be dashed to bits against the beach.