“Let’s tell them they can stop, Dad.”
Sam told them they could stop, and they did stop, falling to the ground in heaps, suddenly looking less manlike than plantlike, strange convoluted shapes, which took their outlines from natural things. Rocks. Brush. Low trees.
And at last, the final ones. Three figures moving as in a dream, slowly, almost floating.
“There’s the Awateh, Dad. He has two of his sons with him. I think we ought to tell him about the people all being dead, don’t you?”
They came up to the Awateh where he pushed forward like the prow of a boat, breasting the falling dust, tiny step after tiny step. “My son says,” said Phaed. “Already killing on Ahabar. On Phansure. On Thyker. Already dead, families, flocks, none left but us.”
The prophet’s sons dropped, unspeaking. The Awateh leaned forward. Only the white of his eyes showed clean in the enveloping growth, his eyes and his teeth when he opened his lips and said, “Done? All done? All dead?”
“All dead,” said Phaed. “All but us.”
“Not!” cried the Awateh. “Not! This one, here …” he turned the white orbs on Sam and raised one hand as though to strike. It stayed there like a stout branch, swaying but unbending. The eyes went. The teeth went. The shape grunted for a time, and then was silent.
Sam turned to his father and saw another stumpy and contorted thing with an eye and a mouth.
“Tricked us,” said Phaed Girat, the one clean eyeball gleaming in the starlight. “Didn’t you?”
“Not I, Dad,” said Sam, weeping. “God did it. He was waiting for you, not I. We were the bait in God’s trap, Saturday and I, sent to catch all Voorstod, Dad.”
The mouth went away. Wood grew over the eye. Sam sat down and cried, clinging to the harsh trunk, hearing for a time the breathing that went on.
“My father died, too,” whispered Theseus. “I went to find him, but because of me, he died. Some things … some things are better let alone. A man may not face both ways at once. If he looks back, he cannot look forward …” The voice faded into remote distance and was gone.
“Come home, Sam,” a voice in his ear. “Come home.”
He looked up to see her standing there, leaning forward, offering him her hands. “How did you find me, China Wilm?”
“China couldn’t come just now, but she thought you might be lonely,” the Tchenka said. “She sent me to tell you she has a new girl child, up on the escarpment. And she thought you might need some company—leaving these legends behind.”
He took the Tchenka by the hand, his eyes still filled with tears of grief for a man he had never known, could never have known, had only longed to have, as a man longs for dreams.
“I sought the wondrous thing,” he complained, like a sleepy child. “I did.”
“Well, Sam, didn’t you find it?” asked the Tchenka. “Maire knew what it was. Remember?”
He remembered. Maire had found it before him, long ago, when he was a child. She knew that ancient evils could be left behind. One could choose not to remember. One did not have to dig into the slime pits of old anger and old hate. Forgetting was possible. The Hobbs Land Gods would allow it. Would make it easy. The pits beneath the stone could be left empty forever, if he so chose.
“There are no legends here,” said Sam.
“That’s it,” said the Tchenka. “Come home, Sam.”
• When the Royal Marines reached Ninfadel, they found that the Porsa had overrun the heights and swallowed all the Voorstod families and flocks, as well as the Ahabarian guards and the Native Matters staff members, before deciding (in what passes among Porsa for decision) to go through the Door the prophets had left open behind them. Not all the Porsa had been involved. Only those who had been selectively and secretly breeding themselves to live at higher and higher altitudes. It took the xenologists some time to figure this out.
All of the high-altitude-tolerant individuals had gone, via Enforcement, to Authority. After eating everything organic that the soldiers had left edible on Authority, the Porsa had explored the moon and had found a convenient route left open to a Door marked Noxious Waste. It was known that Porsa could read. The words “noxious waste” had evidently been most attractive to them. All of them had gone away by that route.
Some persons were left alive upon Authority—those who had shut their doors, who had locked themselves in, who had kept quiet so the soldiers didn’t find them before the soldiers were stopped. For the soldiers had stopped, eventually. A woman had stopped them. She had shut herself into the robing room just off the Authority Chambers, where she was found sitting quietly behind a painted panel, reciting a phrase over and over before a red grill.
“The key for the last lock,” she said, again and again, not ceasing to do so even when the medical techs took her in charge.
Her name was Lurilile. She was the daughter of the Chief Counselor to the Queen of Ahabar, and she had shut the army down. She had done it alone because the two old men she had sent through the Door had emerged unconscious at the other end and had stayed that way for some little time. Partly because of her fortitude—and partly because no one had returned to Enforcement to send them—the soldiers who were to have killed everyone on Ahabar and Phansure and Thyker were still on Enforcement, immobilized for the foreseeable future and perhaps, so hoped Rasiel Plum to his old friend Notadamdirabong Cringh, forever.
• It came to be called the Greater Invasion of Hobbs Land. When it ended, the Baidee prisoners took up their labors once more. Most Hobbs Landians ignored them insofar as was possible, though some seemed inclined, in the emotional aftermath of their survival, to regard them more as misled accomplices than as instigators of violence. Within thirty or forty days, a few of the Baidee considered less culpable, or perhaps merely more personable, were recruited to sing in the CM choir, which they agreed to out of boredom as much as for any other reason. The choir, augmented by its Baidee members, sang when the new Horgy Endure was raised.
“Tell me about it,” Shan demanded from a Baidee who had sung on the occasion.
“Nothing to tell,” the man said. “They dug it up and brushed it off and put it in the temple, and then we sang ‘Rise Up, Ye Stones’ for awhile, and I came back here.”
Shan shook his head in disbelief. Here on Hobbs Land, he was a murderer. No one wanted to be his friend, or even his acquaintance. Churry’s men resented him. Except for Churry himself, who saw no point in blaming someone else for his own stupidity, Shan had no one to talk with about what he saw, what it meant, to have a God that grew underground, like a radish.
“What does it mean?” snarled Churry. “It means in primitive times men worshipped trees, or stones, or volcanoes. It means in Phansure men worship idols. It means on Thyker we worship the Overmind, of which no image exists. It means on Hobbs Land, men worship something that grows like a radish! That’s what it means!”
That wasn’t what it meant, as Shan had already puzzled out for himself, but he did not argue the matter. The work he was doing was so laborious that he was worn out by the time his shift ended. He had no energy left for argument, or for dreams. He didn’t care anymore whether he had been swallowed or not.
One evening, when their shift was over, Shan and Howdabeen were visited by Samasnier Girat.
“Tell me about your prophetess,” said Sam, to their astonishment and considerable discomfiture. “Tell me all about this Baidee prophetess.”
They told him about Morgori Oestrydingh, describing the advent of the old woman and the dragon as they had seen it in the temple a thousand times since childhood, reciting her words from memory. Sam listened, and went away, and came back again, asking them to repeat themselves.
“Your understanding is that the prophetess was seeking this lost race of beings, the Arbai, but she had not yet found them?”
Shan said that was true.
“And she was very old?”
“Very old. Her hair was white and wispy. It flew around her head like smoke.??
?
“One would think she would have taken someone younger with her,” said Sam. “To continue the search.”
Howdabeen Churry shook his head. He had never thought of that.
“This Door,” Sam said. “The one she came through, is it still there on Thyker?”
Oh, yes, they assured him. It was a holy shrine. No one would dream of touching it. However, it didn’t work. Or, more accurately, no one knew whether it did or not.
“Have the Phansuris ever looked at it?” Sam asked.
They replied, somewhat embarrassed, that no Baidee would allow a non-Baidee to have access to the holiest shrine of the Overmind. Sam smiled his thanks and went away again. He had a high regard for the genius of Theor Close and Betrun Jun. He believed they could figure out anything they set their minds to.
Subsequently he spoke to Dern Blass and to certain other of the people at CM and the settlers concerning the prisoners. They had been misled, he said. Mistaken and misled, and could that not be true of anyone? After a little thought, everyone agreed with him.
When the new Door reached Hobbs Land and was installed, there was general agreement that the prisoners should be sent home. By that time, Shan had been well and truly swallowed. By that time, Shan was also a member of the CM choir. When he went back to Thyker, he carried with him the substance necessary to bring the God to Thyker—at least to all the fertile parts of it.
Shanrandinore Damzel went home, and Mordimorandasheen Trust, and Howdabeen Churry. They dug up the mummified bodies of the Hobbs Land invaders and buried them again in moister climes, as, for example, in the gardens of the temple at Chowdari. Though Chowdari was set in the midst of the desert, it had fountains drawn from deep aquifers to water the flowers and grass. There was moisture enough that the burgeoning network soon underlay the temple itself and a great part of the training grounds. It was not long after the net reached its outermost limits that revelations came to the Circle of Scrutators in an almost continuous sequence. It was revealed that Baidee might cut their hair, might do without turbans and kamracs and zettles, might eat eggs, might be friends with people of other opinions. Various Baidee began reassessing the words of the prophetess in the light of current understanding. Surprisingly, once stripped of the millennial old accretions added by generations of old men on the Circle of Scrutators, the words of the prophetess seemed quite sensible.
“Which,” said Bombi Damzel to his brother, “when you really stop to think about it is quite understandable.”
Shan said nothing at all. He, like some other members of The Arm of the Prophetess, had decided to become a missionary. He would carry the God first to the Celphian Rings, and then … then Outsystem. Going Out-System had its risks. Shan believed the risks were outweighed by the eventual outcome. It would be a way, a convenience, a kindness.
• Sam gave a picnic bonfire on an off-day when certain invited guests could come from several of the settlements and from CM. So far as anyone knew, Sam was celebrating their deliverance from the army of Enforcement. The guests brought a generous quantity of beer, however, and by the time lunchtime came, everyone was celebrating whatever he or she felt most joyous about at the moment. Children shrieked, and people played musical instruments, and sections of the Settlement One choir sang antiphonally at themselves while the great bonfire Sam had collected fuel for for weeks burned itself down to embers and everyone laughed and sweated and turned red in the heat of it.
Sam had a further purpose of his own, which he had not discussed with anyone. He sat with China Wilm a little distance from the fire, half-reclining against a blanket covered pile of something as he played with the girl child, now almost a half-year old but thus far unnamed.
“So why this celebration now, Sam?” China asked him, as she watched him dandling the baby on one knee, doing horsy with a girl child far too young to be horsied around.
“Now’s a good time,” Sam said lazily. The child chirruped in a voice like a bird.
“She sounds as Saturday did when Saturday was a babe,” said China. “She’s going to be a singer. Samasnier Girat, would you like it if I named her for your mam? Would you like it if I named the child for Maire?”
Sam stopped dandling and looked at the baby. She stared back at him with eyes which were totally aware.
“She knows she’s my child,” he said, surprising himself. “And she knows about Maire.”
China started to object to this, then stopped. The child did know she was Sam’s child, so why object? Children these days knew many things. So did cats. So did the strange trees out on the flatlands, the trees that sighed when the wind blew through them and murmured charming nonsense in prophetic voices.
Several people were raking coals out into the roasting pit. Several others were tossing more fuel into the flames. Sam sat where he was and watched, moving his leg gently with the girl baby astride it.
Across the fire, Saturday Wilm exclaimed, got up, and ran toward a figure which was suddenly standing there.
“Isn’t that your mam?” asked China Wilm, almost without surprise.
It was Maire Girat, looking at them from across the fire, her face younger than when they had last seen her. Saturday stood beside her, clinging to her hand. Someone started a song they all knew, and the people joined in, all-of them, their voices rising in intricate harmonies. Maire Girat smiled and waved and vanished, leaving Saturday still singing. Jep went to stand beside her, holding out his hands to her and smiling.
“Wasn’t that your mam?” asked China again.
“As the Green-snake Tchenka is the Green-snake Tchenka, so that was my mam,” agreed Sam.
“But she was buried upon Ahabar!”
“But she lived here and is remembered here. As the Gharm remember the green snake from the planet from which they came, the one that Voorstod destroyed. I saw the green snake myself, on Ahabar. Not the Tchenka, the real one. It was there, little and jewel bright, slithering through the grass. New born or hatched or however they come. The God missed it, so it made it.”
“How does the God do that?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps those busy and curious folk from Phansure will find out. Now that we have a safe Door again, many folk will come and go, seeing what the God can do. I would not be totally surprised to see Maire walking down the street of Settlement One, though I do not believe the God will do that.”
China thought about that, and decided she agreed. The God would not do that. A visitation, yes, but not reanimation. Such would not be proper except in a case of great need.
“The child has had enough jigging, Sam. Tell her a story.”
“You mean tell you a story.”
“No, I mean tell us both. She will know what you mean.”
Sam thought for a time. The fire was burning down nicely, getting itself a good thick bed of coals, just right for what he had in mind. People were gathering around, roasting diddle-nuts and sausages, wrapping rough-skinned tubers and bundles of creely legs in ribbon-willow leaves and laying them upon the coals of the roasting pit.
“Once on a time,” Sam said, “was a man, Samasnier, who told himself there was a secret hidden under a stone.”
From the grass at his feet a tiny man sprang up out of nothing, dressed in a tunic, barefooted, looking very heroic and handsome. The child reached for it, but her hands went through it. It was only a vision, a tiny Tchenka, made of jellied smoke.
“Samasnier asked everyone where the secret was, but no one would tell him. Samasmier thought his dad had hidden it, or maybe someone else entirely, but who it was did not matter, for Samasnier was so curious, he had to know what the secret was, no matter who put it there, for heroes always find out the secrets, always.”
The little manikin turned about, looking curiously behind pebbles, around blades of grass. The child reached again.
“So, when he was very young he began turning over rocks, looking for the secret thing. And the bigger he got to be, the bigger rocks he turned over, bigger and bigger
yet, looking for the secret thing, the single wondrous thing.”
The manikin turned a pebble over, then another, making comic faces when he found nothing there. The child crowed with laughter.
“ ‘Come away, Samasnier,’ his friends cried to him. ‘Come away and play. You’re breaking your back over those silly rocks!’
“But Samasnier wouldn’t give up looking …”
The child tired of the game and reached out to her mother. The manikin vanished. China Wilm took the baby and put her to the breast. Sam pulled China against his chest, his arms around her, and she settled with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Samasnier,” he went on with his story as he watched the fire slowly dwindling, “Samasnier could not be tempted into accepting the day or being contented with the night. He could not be tempted into seeing beauty or singing music. When a man wants to be a hero, such things stand in his way. He just went on reading of heroes past and raising the stones and raising the stones …”
“Why did Sam do it?” whispered China.
“Oh,” said Sam, “he’d started from anger, that his dad had been taken from him. And then he read too many books in which anger and vengeance figured greatly. And he’d become convinced of his own importance. He hadn’t found a God yet, to tell him he was only part of creation, not all of it. He thought every vague question bubbling about in the back of his head deserved an answer. He was spoiled.”
Spoiled, perhaps, he said to himself. But a hero, nonetheless. With a destiny still awaiting.
Across the glowing embers of the fire, Jep and Saturday Wilm were dancing an extravagant minuet at the center of an admiring circle of cats.
“He knew he would be a hero,” said Sam. “Somehow.”
“The fire’s almost out.”
“Not quite,” said Sam, reaching out one hand to pull the blanket off the pile of things beside him.”
“Those are your books, Sam.”