SISTER'S BOND
Table of Contents
PART 1
Chapter 1 — In the Beginning
Chapter 2 — Lyubov
Chapter 3 — Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr
Chapter4 — The Last Oo'oo'ooraam
Chapter5 — Fire Mountain
Chapter 6— The Planet Cooker
Chapter 7 — The Duel
Chapter8 — The Dowager Librarian
Chapter 9 — Flame Song
10 — Goers and Stayers
Chapter11 –Orth
Chapter 12 — Holmgang
Part 2
Chapter 13 — Pitipir II
Chapter14 — Desolate Years
Chapter15 — Son of the Throne
Chapter16 — Assassin
Chapter17 — Iroes-Orchillena
Chapter18 — Scorch
Chapter 19 — Sunrise
Chapter 20 — Storm
Chapter 21 — Wotan
Chapter 22 — The Maw
Chapter23 — Marriage
Chapter24 — Circle Rainbow
Chapter 25 — Nemesis
Chapter 26 — We Numeration and pronunciation About the author Other titles by Anthony Peacey Connect with me
PART 1
Chapter 1
In the Beginning
Shar sleeps across my feet.
I sit writing.
'But you cannot help me with this story, can you, Shar?'
As she hears her name the tip of her tail twitches, otherwise her sleep is disturbed by no movement but the rise and fall of her breathing, big marmalade cat-thing. No, she cannot help; she cannot answer my questions, though I talk to her endlessly. And yet at night, when the glory of the galaxy fills half the sky and she stands beside me, my hand in the fur between her ears, ah! she is the companion of my loneliness. On other nights with our rock ball looking away from the galaxy the sky is starless, empty, velvet black, save one or two tiny ghostly lenses of other star islands impossibly distant. For Old Bavariiya, our star, is voyaging on a wide eccentric orbit into vacancy; he will not reach apogee for aeearaana; and on this world, his only companion, I am the only human. This is my final exile.
I sit here in my hut waiting for Old Bavariiya to go nova, waiting for my dissolution. I survived the annihilation of the mighty Scorch but I will not survive Old Bavariiya.
Ah, the Scorch! We think we are safe. We live in the present moment, we cannot do otherwise. The past is mere memory; the future does not yet exist. We think the next moment will be much like this one and usually we are right. But we can never be sure. Melikaphkaz XIV was with his First Karnatch Fleet, making a symbolic imperial progress to the Voxa-Chorar region to collect tribute from those who remained in the ashes of recent conquest. The fleet was travelling within an impenetrable thousand leean wide force bubble. The Emperor sat at the evening banquet aboard his flagship Scorch. He was raising a spoonful of baruuz roe in aspic to the lips of Iriri, his latest concubine. Iriri, young and breath-takingly beautiful, smirked; the Empress of half the galaxy, Kai-
Orchillena, glared. At that moment, within the force bubble, the nine ships of the Valkyries appeared and disappeared. It happened in an instant. The ships appeared, by what means was not known, evenly spaced around a sphere with the Scorch at its centre. They unleashed some new potency of destruction, then disappeared in order themselves to avoid its blaze, hellishly confined within the last moments of the force bubble. All that remained was a raging ball of plasma expanding across the stars. Melikaphkaz's millennial tyranny was over. Perhaps it was better for Iriri to go out in her own little starburst at the zenith of her fortune. It could never have been other than brief. She was young and inexperienced. The cruelty and kindness of Kai-Orchillena were as limitless as her power, but though her moods were unpredictable, Iriri could scarcely have expected kindness.
And I—I was on the Scorch.
I write upon the dried skin of the ihn fish with the inky exudation of the biradia snail. Futile effort; Bavariiya in his rage will eat the skins. But I write, who am no writer. One finds something to do. I have started this story of my life several times, screwed up and burnt the pages and started again. It was a stew, a gallimaufry of different meats, words from different times and places, disparate cultures and worlds. For I have had many lives, more than I can count, more than I can remember. Now to give the story focus I have decided to write it for Nicky the Grub and his friends, Nicky who was me in my first instar. Those peoples who have understood the chain of lives most often use 'life' for the whole, and 'instar' or some such word for the links. 'Instar' in Nicky the Grub's language meant the stages of development of insects, as egg, larva, pupa, butterfly. The word serves well, for my first instar seems so different from later ones that surely I, Nicky, was a mere larva, a grub, a caterpillar. Nicky knew nothing of instars, nothing of galaxies and stars, nothing beyond the hills that rimmed his valley. On the lane of his childhood horse carts brought the milk and the bread; cars were rare. So I will try to use his words, his ideas, to rein the horses of my narration.
But I am uncomfortable with Nicky's numbers. 'Thousand' and 'million' are awkward to me. In most of my human instars I have had two thumbs on each hand. Perhaps because of this a twelve-based system is commonest. Aee is twelve; aeea twelve to the second power, one hundred and forty-four in Nicky's system, aeeara twelve to the third power, and aeearaana twelve to the sixth; so aeearaana is not one million, but nearly three million.
Nicky the Grub, me, my first instar. I will try to set it down because even then at the very beginning I was different. I lacked something, I yearned for something which did not seem to trouble anyone else.
Olly Dodd pushed Nicky the Grub into a hedge. The thorns scratched my face and dug into my legs, but I would not cry. Anyway, that was not the worst.
It is the first thing I can remember. I was five years old, had not long started school, and was on the way home with other kids. Johnny Grant was already my friend, a boy who smelt of the dairy on his father's farm. Olly Dodd was a year older than us, big and brutish. We were climbing a hill with fields on one side and a strip of woodland on the other.
'Wipe your nose, Johnny, you dirty kid,' said Olly.
True enough Johnny's nose exuded a yellow-green slime that he occasionally licked away.
'Wipe your own,' said Johnny.
'Watch it!'
'Your nose is a pig's snout.'
'I'll thump you.'
'Pig face,' said I.
'Snotty snout,' said Johnny, skipping away.
'Pig face, snotty snout,' I sang.
And Olly pushed me into the hedge. Then he chased Johnny and pushed him into the hedge. The other kids were laughing. The hedge was of hawthorn bristling with spikes. My cheek was bleeding, my leg painfully impaled.
I heard Johnny's sister Sylvia say like a grown-up, 'You've only got yourself to blame, Johnny. You shouldn't have cheeked him.' Even scolding him seemed like an act of care, of love; and she was helping him from the thorns, straightening his jacket.
I was overwhelmed by a wave of desolation, worse by far than the thorns. I had no sister to help me and care for me. I had no sister. There was a great gap in my life.
Somehow I must have struggled from the hedge and found my way home in that little company. But why were my feelings so unbridled? Why did I so yearn for a sister? Why did I have such a sense of lack, as if I were half an ancient bridge reaching out across the river of life, terminating in broken masonry hanging over an abyss, the other half missing?
At the bottom of our garden was a dry-stone wall, beginning in places to fall down. Over the wall was a little grove of trees. The hillside fell steeply to the valley bottom where was the next house, occupied by Policeman Pomfrey. Among the trees Adrian Pomfrey, the Policeman's son, known to us as 'Pom', had built a 'camp'. I helped him. This was some years after the thorny hedge episode. The camp was of bricks and boards with a tin roof. You could not stand upright in it.
Here one day sat a council of Indian Chiefs, Pom himself, me, my brother Jimmy, a year younger than me, Midge Clutterbuck, Tom Fox, and a couple of others, gathered to witness a certain transaction. In the fireplace burned a little fire of dry sticks. The smoke went up a rolled tin chimney. The business to hand was of great moment to me: I had bought Tom's sister, 'swapped' as we used to say, for my entire treasure of marbles.
We were gathered awaiting Rosemary so that the exchange could be made formally before witnesses.
I got out my marbles for everyone to see. Many were admired, but one in particular: 'Wow! That Biggie is a beauty.' Two or three times as large as any other, it was clear with internal golden spirals embasketting a burst of star flowers green and red.
'Anyway, what do you want a sister for?' asked Pom.
I found this hard to answer. I knew by this time that no one would understand how I
felt. 'I just do.'
'I don't have one,' said Pom. He was an only child. 'What do you think, Jimmy?' 'I don't care. It's just a girl.'
'Tom wants to get rid of her,' said Midge Clutterbuck.
'I do not,' said Tom, perhaps worried that the value of the merchandise would be called into question. 'She's a good sister. She's worth a lot more than this, really.'
At this point in our lives we hardly understood what need there was for females in the world. We didn't really see a connection between girls and mothers. Mothers clearly had a place, though I'm not sure that we regarded them as females: they were grownups.
But there was Midge. He was small for his age, a hanger-on to our gang. We felt that he was a bit common.
'Nicky just wants to … you know.'
Something in the way he said this silenced us momentarily.
'What?' said Pom.
'You know, shag her.'
By the time, some seventy years later, that that instar came to its rather violent end such a remark would not have surprised children much younger than we were, so much had the world changed. But Midge's vulgarity made us happy innocents uncomfortable. 'You can't do that with a sister,' I said.
'No,' agreed Pom.
'No, you can't,' said Tom with force.
'Jeremy Burton shags Mary. Everyone knows that.' In the face of opposition Midge too became forceful. Jeremy and Mary were several years older than us.
'Anyway,' said Pom, 'what will she have to do when she's your sister? Will she come and live with you?'
'I don't think so. At least, not straight away.' There was the awkward matter of our parents, who still knew nothing of this arrangement.
'No,' said Tom, 'she'd better stay in our house.'
'Well, what then?'
'Well, she'll have to come with me when I do things.'
'What things?'
'Oh, go places, build camps …' I could not explain the feeling I expected to have of being completed in some way, of being a bridge with a firm footing on both sides of the river.
Just then, looking out of the hole which served Pom's camp for a door, Jimmy spotted her. 'Here she comes.'
Rosemary got down and came in crouching.
'Here,' said Tom.
He and Jimmy moved apart to make a place. She sat down opposite me, the only girl in a circle of boys, but she had brothers so boys were no mystery to her.
We were all silent.
'What is it?' said Rosemary. 'What did you want me to come for?' She was fair with eyes that seemed to reflect a summer sky. That day she had on a flowery summer dress.
'This is an important council,' said Pom the Indian Chief. 'Rosie, we are here to all see it done properly.' He was seeking some tone of formality.
Rosie was mystified. 'What are you talking about?'
I remember being aware just then, that although the voices of us boys had not yet broken, her girl's voice was different, and sweet to me.
'Rosie,' I said, 'will you be my sister?' At the last moment some instinct told me that I should ask her. Hitherto Tom and I had dealt like farmers at the market buying and selling a cow.
Rosie looked at me as if she didn't understand.
'Will you be my sister?' I smiled ingratiatingly.
'Well, I can't, can I?'
'Why not?'
'Yes, why not?' said Pom.
'Course you can,' said Tom.
She looked at Tom with the beginnings of irritation.
'I can't. You've got to be in the same family.'
'You can now,' said Pom. He was enjoying his role of chief Chief, host of the council. 'It's something new. We've just invented it.' 'Yes,' said Tom. 'And you like Nicky.'
There were some seconds of silence.
Rosie was looking at me with her big skyey eyes and a kind of affectionate puzzlement. She started to say, 'But you can't do—'
The dreadful Midge broke in to shine the glare of blunt truth. 'Tom has swapped you to Nick for his marbles.'
Rosie stiffened, her face went hard. Suddenly she punched Tom, an awkward movement but with vicious intent. 'You bloody 'orrible sod!' she cried. A mannish expression and a very bad one, which she should not even have known. It shocked us.
'Rosie, it's all right.' I extended my hand towards her.
'Don't touch me!' she shrieked, eyes wide and glaring into mine.
The boys sat, not quite so chiefly, their self-assurance punctured by Rosie's outburst.
She turned again to Tom. 'I hate you!'
'Well,' said the awful Midge, 'if you hate him you can go and be Nicky's sister.'
'I hate him too. I hate you all!'
She got up, her head brushing the low roof. She pushed Tom and he fell sideways, but her hair caught in twisted wire that held the corrugated iron to a pole and she fell herself. She began to cry tears of rage.
'I hate you,' she said again to Tom. 'But you're my brother and no one can say you're not. You can't swap me, never. Never, never, never! I'm going home.'
She crawled to the door, stood and ran. On the steep path she looked like a bird, light but unbalanced, in danger of falling. She vanished down towards the road.
My feelings were in turmoil. I had thought to leave the council with a sister—even though perhaps in the depths of my heart there was a doubt that a girl swapped for marbles could be the real thing—but now Rosie, who at least had been a good friend, said she hated me.
'I think the fire needs making up,' said Jimmy. He started to break small sticks to bring back the flames.
'Well, it's not my fault,' said Tom. 'I wanted you to have her. You should still give me something … that Biggie.' He trailed off as though aware that the request was not reasonable.
Pom, the paramount Chief, disappointed that his council should end in this manner, said, 'Yes, something. What do you think?' (The 'you' was plural. Most languages have different words for 'you' addressed to one being, and 'you' addressed to several, but that language was deficient in this respect. Awkward.)
A curl of resentment said that I owed nothing, but I didn't really care. I was unhappy.
'No, he shouldn't 'ave to give nothing.'
'Yes he should, cos Tom really meant it.'
'Maybe ten percent of the marbles,' said Pom. This was recent learning. In our little gang he fancied himself as something of a savant.
'What's ten pissent?' asked Midge.
'Anyway, it's too much,' said one of the other chiefs.
'The Biggie will do,' said Tom, cupidity crystallizing his demand.
I awakened from despond to say, 'Not the Biggie.'
'No,' said Pom, 'the Biggie's too much.'
The council decided that I should give Tom ten ordinary marbles. It seemed to me that I owed Tom nothing, but I really didn't care.
However, Tom was disgruntled and Tom was my best friend. I had lost Rosie; I didn't want to lose Tom too. I gave him the Biggie and found my generosity applauded.
In fact I won the Biggie back later. I had to stake twenty others to get Tom to play it, but he lost without rancour. Our friendship remained strong. Rosie too returned to amity and a couple of years later I was glad that she wasn't my sister for I began to wish other things of her. Not, in Midge's blunt language, to shag, but some exploration of love. The rich aspects and moods of the business were opening up to us. But it never happened. Julia intervened.
My father and uncle took my grandmother to a pretty old town on a river, along with Jimmy and I. Gran and dad went to book shops and an art gallery, while uncle Bart took us boys in a rowboat on the river. I fell in the water. Our boat was shooting ahead, and Julia pulled me out. I found myself in another boat with this dark angel with slightly tilted green elfin eyes.
There had been a war in my earliest years. Many people were displaced. Julia's family came from somewhere in the east. Her father, Maxie, was a big man, quiet but not gloomy, often smiling. I thought his face fierce. If Julia's face was not fierce, her love for me was, and I returned it for a lifetime. We had children, three I think, and the boys did have a sister, lucky lads. My own feeling of lack over a sister sank into the depths of my mind, forgotten for months, perhaps years, at a time, yet it never left me. The love of Julia filled my days like sunlight. In our later years we spoke of what would happen if one died before the other. It would be hard to bear. The bright childhood visions of heaven and hell had grown dim; we did not expect to find an afterlife where we might meet again. We hoped in some way to go together, but fortune did not grant us that.
The end of that instar came wholly unexpectedly. We were visiting one of our granddaughters in another city, a tall and beautiful girl recently married. She took a day off work and took us to the zoo, which was a rather fine one. We had left the tropical bird house when I found I needed to pee. With an old fellow's deliberate movements I stepped over a low fence designed to keep people on the path and sought the concealment of some shrubbery behind an enclosure of gorillas. When I had pissed to my satisfaction I continued around the building intending to meet Julia and Alexandra on the other side, for they had been walking slowly along talking about babies. There had been some brief shouting but at that moment it did not signify with me. I was on a concrete path made narrow by tall untended bushes on one side and the pale rear wall of the enclosure on the other. I rounded a corner and was face to face, chest to chest, with a gorilla.
We were both taken by surprise. Before I could back off he made a sweep with his heavy arm and I was hurled down into the adamant stony meeting of wall and path. I don't think he was hostile, just startled, but my head struck the concrete. There was a flash of blinding pain, a moment—it seemed both extended and instantaneous—of darkness, then time slowed.
From far away as through an inchoate multi-coloured fog I heard Alexandra say, 'I'm pregnant, grandma. I didn't say because I wasn't sure. But just then I had a very strange feeling. Now I'm sure. That does sound odd, doesn't it?'
Julia did not reply. Before Alexandra had finished speaking she said in tones of anxiety, 'What's that noise? What's going on? Nicky's round there.'
Her words scarcely registered with me. Some dream had been disturbed. If a foetus can sweat I was sweating streams, and quivering—but for the moment I didn't realize I was a foetus. There was a regular beat that I both heard and felt. It had been going on since the beginning of time. I loved that beat; it was the pulse of my life.
Nicky the Grub had never considered that he and his body might be separable. He had vague ideas of 'soul', 'mind', 'awareness', but he had never realized that he himself was simply and fundamentally, and magnificently, Consciousness, and that his body was just the present vehicle. Now I began to learn, and later I acquired a word for the essential me: Shoma.
Here now did not seem to be heaven, and it certainly wasn't hell. There was another shoma, bright with life, but undefined. He regarded me as if with the huge eyes of a baby. We were like streams of water, the one from the mountains of years and the other a rill from rain recently fallen. We merged and flowed. Neither lost anything by it.
That is the first transmigration I can remember. I realized after a while that I had merged with my great-grandchild, that is to say with the shoma that inhabited the greatgrandchild body of my former body. It does seem that, although between bodies shomas do not inhabit regular time and space, proximity often facilitates the next incarnation. But not always. I once leapt into the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and across aeeara of years for no apparent cause. The wise have spoken of the Winds of Qi that swirl within shoma space and disturb its usual supposed alignment with the material universe.
After a while I-we settled down, ceased to 'sweat' and 'quiver'. The warm dream returned, and most welcome it was. Alexandra's heartbeat lulled me. The essence of shomas is not disparate; our individualities are defined by memories. A new foetus and a developed individual do not have memories that conflict. Was my brother 'new', that is a drop arriving direct from the Shoma Mother into a virgin brain? I think so. So are we born as individuals, then to persist through diverse instars. I don't think I made a conscious attempt to impress my memories upon the new foetal brain, as I often did later, but much of Nicky's memory seems to have survived. I sank into the warm dream of childhood, babyhood, renewed. In truth I was overwhelmed. I had discovered that the death of the body was not necessarily the death of the soul, of awareness, that is of the me shoma. I had learned that in transmigration one might merge (later I found that one might have to fight). Yes, I was overwhelmed. Let me rest and recuperate for a while and let the amazing universe take care of itself.
And Julia? I seem to know that, hard though my loss to her was, she weathered it and lived happy years among our descendants. Did she have a special bond with Alexandra's first boy? I like to think so, but I remember little of that instar.
Chapter 2
Lyubov
I have been thinking about memory. It is the machinery of brains that best preserves memory. While shomas are between brains memory seems to decay, to trickle off in runnels and fall off in chunks like ice from a warming glacier. But I am not happy with the brain I have now, its thinking is lurching and ponderous, like those heavy burrowing animals of old Orth—wombats, weren't they? Memories in this brain are shadowy, ragged as the winding sheets of old corpses. I wish for the brain before this, the bright and powerful brain that for aeeara of years shared the rule of half the galaxy. Well, crying over what is lost helps nothing, is a useless scattering of the coin of life's moments.
This body is fine, humaniform, as was my last. This one is larger, though not a great deal, than what was normal among Nicky's people, well muscled with gleaming ebony skin. I have let my mane and beard grow long. Why not? There is no one to see me but Shar and I don't think she minds if I am unkempt.
There is much I want to remember but I am slow getting to it. My early instars were coloured by a longing that I little understood. I came to realize that I carried a dream in my heart of hearts and though I thought it no more than that, when I began to transmigrate with some awareness I strove to preserve it. I was with Miri. We were human, very young. So young that a year's difference would have been clear, so I think we were twins. We walked hand in hand down beside a steep laughing stream, scrambled over rocks. There was a rhyme:
The freshets are ringing,
In Norland spring's springing.
About us towered summery mountains on whose heights the snows were melting, and we could only hear the birds when we strayed further from the noisy water. We were alone. Somewhere upstream perhaps was a mother, a father, or an uncle at the high summer pasture with the cows.
We settled among the grass and flowers by a pool from which the sun glanced in shards of light. We broke dark leaves from a bush and threw them into the water where they became dragon ships. If we threw them in the right place an eddy would carry them out into the current among the bubbles from the little fall that fed the pool, and they would sail away to disappear over the drop at the outlet. We began to race our ships.
The first to disappear was the winner.
The sun at last went behind the mountain and after a long twilight we found ourselves lost in a gloomy forest of pine. As it became dark and cold we crept into a hollow, deep-floored with pine needles soft and dry; we broke branches from the trees, curled up and pulled the branches over us. We slept with our arms about each other.
We were not in the least worried or frightened. We were hungry but that did not signify. We had all we needed: I had Miri, and Miri had me.
In the morning we woke to find the sunlight of new day streaming in beneath the eaves of the forest. That dream is saturated with a feeling of wholeness, rightness, of a world with nothing missing. I treasured that dream through instars, sought it, dwelt in it whenever the sense of lack and loss in my life became too poignant.
Orth (that was the name of Nicky's planet, wasn't it?) came to a bad end. So what's new in the galaxy? But I am really thinking not of the end of Orth, which may not have ended yet for all I know, but of that civilization. In that last Orthian instar that I can recall I did have a sister, Lyubov. She was a couple of years younger than me. This must have been many generations after Nicky, after Julia and the gorilla. The greater powers of the planet were plagued by a pernicious political system called democracy.
Unworkable. By the 'will of the people' the world ran on short-term gratification, with results as predictable as the ending by starvation and cannibalism of a plague of mice.
We damaged the climatic; the atmosphere heated; deserts grew on every continent. Water was scarce where the masses breeding without control needed it. War was endemic, always, whatever the excuse, over resources—plunder, that is.
By the time I was born in the kingdom of Farstan on the great continent of Uras democracy was in retreat, but too late. In any case few other forms of government are much better. Benign dictatorship or an oligarchy of philosophers seems to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number, but both are rare. A ruthless duad of intellectuals is best of all—but perhaps I am prejudiced.
I was pugnacious in that instar and my will was developing. Nicky the Grub was growing up. Some called me a bully but I had the knack of pleasing a following. Lyubov was born two years after I, and followed me like a puppy, but when there was strife she would hide, reappearing to dress my wounds or hold my victorious hand and gaze at me with adoration.
By twenty-five I was second in command of the army. I came to the attention of Natsha, the daughter of Mogul Barda, and she married me. She did not have much time for Lyubov.
I say 'army' and 'Mogul' but in truth Farstan was just a little valley ringed by mountains able to be briefly independent because there was nothing there that its larger neighbours wanted. Self-styled Mogul Barda was a petty kinglet and the army a chimera of border patrol and gang of condottieri.
When I married I established a house in the capital, the only real city in the valley, and arranged for Lyubov and her husband to move there also from the village of our birth on the skirts of the mountains.
'I don't know what you want her here for,' said Natsha, 'she's a rabbit.' 'And you're a lynx.'
She smiled at that. She meant that Lyubov was timid, which was true, and would not or could not help my career, help me in the jostling of the little court—also true. But neither was Natsha much help, she was too selfish and obsessed with her own schemes. Did we love each other? Yes, after a fashion. Her lips, long and full, carried fire and passion of which I was often the beneficiary, but rarely words of love. My chief support at that time was from Bogor and our henchmen. They intimidated my domestic enemies, one of the most persistent falling to Bogor's slim blade while I guarded him from retribution. A good friend. In time most became wary of me or fawned upon me.
They thought I would be Mogul but fate ruled otherwise.
There had been a global communications net but with the grass fires of local war getting fiercer it had become ragged. Farstan was largely cut off before I was born. News of what was happening outside often arrived late and thus Barda called me to the capital at an inopportune moment. Someone had accused me—falsely—of plotting his removal. That was in my thirty-second year when I was generalissimo of our little gang of bandits. I convinced my father-in-law that I had no designs upon his life or throne and we had downed a couple of tankards to restored amity when the wireless man burst in, in great agitation. The army of Bing-bing was approaching our border. I suppose that even had I been there we could not have withstood them for long. We were pragmatic, Barda and I and Natsha. We fled.
The first leg of our flight was by road, for we expected that a Bing-bing force would already be sitting across the railway line. We fled to Karinaya, an outpost of the reduced empire of Mosk, our destination. I would have gone to Karinaya anyway, for Lyubov was there visiting the spiritual leader of her cult. I thought the city would fall to the Bing-bing but hopefully not before we had come and gone.
I could not find Lyubov. Guns were heard to the south, the snarl of planes, a spatter of bombs falling upon a suburb like the first fat raindrops of a storm.
'Come,' said Natsha, 'the train is leaving.'
The train for Mosk. Barda and his people were already aboard.
'Wait a bit. I'm going to this address for Lyubov.'
'I'm not waiting for that ninny.'
'You know I can't leave her.'
'Always that damned Luby getting in our way. It's our lives, Igar. Don't be stupid, come on!'
'There'll be another train.' This was highly uncertain.
'I will not wait.'
'You go on then. I'll see you on the train, or in Mosk.'
She did vouchsafe me a kiss and an embrace, fiercer than I expected, anger and— yes—love. She took our two boys and left. I never saw her again.
I finally found Lyubov in a dim room hung with rich silks. She was sitting on the carpet with a small crowd around the leader, a fellow in his fifties, heavy, dark, massively maned and bearded. Some raw animal smell contended in the air with incense, and I saw raised on a tripod a steel pan shining dimly. Upon it were the entrails of … a cat or rabbit? arranged in a knot like a flat flower.
(I start to write with some fragment of grave-cloth memory in my mind, and then I am amazed how it bursts into flame and throws off such sparks of detail.)
I had entered without ceremony. Seizing Lyubov's arm I hauled her to her feet.
'Come on, the Bing-bing are here.'
Lyubov appeared half in trance. When I shook her, her eyes came back to me, timid, anxious; then she looked at the leader for guidance or permission.
After a weighty pause, in a voice that seemed to come from a cavern, that one said,
'Go with him, daughter. It is your fate.'
Perhaps he did not want to chance his authority in contention with me. 'You should all get out,' I said. 'The city can't stand against the Bing-bing.' 'They will not harm us,' said the leader.
I did not stay to argue but went out into daylight still holding the bemused Lyubov by the arm, dragging her. In the car she said, 'Where is Arvi?' Her husband.
'I don't know. We couldn't find him.'
'Igar, we must go back for him.'
'That's impossible.' I explained the situation, the uncaring ploughshares of the world rending the sunlit meadows of her dreams. As she began to cry quietly I took her and held her in my arms.
'And you,' I said to the driver. 'Get on that train, or take your car. Get out.'
'I will. You're my last customer.' Indeed he could just about retire on what he was charging me. 'Do you want me to take you?' he said, perhaps thinking to increase the luxury of his retirement.
'No thanks. Just drop us at the station. Our people are there.'
But they were not. The train had gone. Another left a couple of hours later, likely to be the last indeed, and not heading west but north. Nevertheless Lyubov and I took it.
We slept on the floor of the carriage's corridor crushed among other groaning, snoring, weeping, farting refugees. Lyubov was quiet, grieving at the loss of Arvi. Would she ever see him again? she whispered. 'Of course. They won't destroy the place, and Arvi will keep his head down, won't he?' The contrast between Arvi's prudence and my rashness was a family joke. I believe she felt safer and more comforted in my arms than she would have felt in Arvi's had she lost me, my little sister.
In the morning we looked out to see wide featureless steppe fleeing south beside us under a high grey sky. The train stank; half the toilets, if you could fight your way to them, were blocked, the floor swimming in piss. I struggled through a couple of carriages and managed to buy part of a stale loaf and some salami from an avaricious old woman. On the second day we were hungry and desperately thirsty. A few left the train but the two or three stops were only villages. The landscape changed, became rolling with ranges of hills clothed with taiga forest of pine and birch. Although the air was thick and disgusting, we got used to it; we kept the windows closed for it was cold now. A rumour circulated that a group of Bing-bing thugs were on the train. Was it so? Why were they not torn to pieces? They had guns, they were a special force. What did they want? They wanted me as it turned out.
We left the train at Vyatask. There was half a kilometre of carriages and on the part of the platform that we could see there was no sign of the Bing-bing. In the last day we had seen the blaze of autumn in the forest, rust, vermillion, gold. The air was frosty. Some hundreds of kilometres west was another railhead and to this I decided we would make our way. I could not buy a car, and indeed it might not have been much use, for the roads were poor and the finding of fuel uncertain. Instead I bought horses, food, and extra clothes. It was late in the year to begin such a journey but not too late.
Two nights we slept under an oilskin in the forest. Lyubov was despondent, pining for Arvi, their daughter, their comfortable house in Farstan; and she suffered from the cold. The following morning, chancing upon an outlying farm, we asked to buy eggs and a chicken. The family, farmer and his wife, two sons grown and married with children of their own, regaled us with a huge meal of stewed rabbits and some unwelcome news. The thugs of Bing-bing had been there enquiring after us, or at least after a Farstan officer travelling with a woman that could hardly be another pair. They had not caused trouble to the farmer except to plunder his fuel drums for their two cars. There were six of them. Why were they pursuing me? Perhaps it was just the customary ruthlessness of Bing-bing. Their leaders had read their Machiavelli, or perhaps it was in their own Art of War—they had an ancient and rich culture—and they wanted to extirpate the entire family of the former rulers of a conquered nation.
'I was going to ask you if we could stay here tonight—we would pay you of course.
But—'
Lyubov broke in and said it for me. 'No, Igar. It might be dangerous for them.'
Lyubov was timid. She let me make all the decisions and start everything happening, from choosing our camping places and making our fires to saddling our horses and rationing their oats—while we still had any—but she always thought of others.
'Yes,' agreed the old man. 'You could stay as long as you wanted otherwise, but we get used to the quiet life out here.'
'Father!' said his son. 'Let them stay. If those pigs come back we'll kill them all.'
'What with? Didn't you see their guns? One of them could shoot us all down before we had loaded the second shell.'
'We'll ambush them.'
'Leave them alone,' I said. 'We won't be staying.'
'How did they come in?' said the farmer. 'Two to find the lay of the land while the others waited out of sight. They're trained. They're bad medicine.'
'Yes,' I said. 'We'll be getting along.'
The old farmer smiled at me over the debris of the meal on the rough boards of the table. He had twinkling blue eyes between bushy brows and beard, and he kept his wide battered hat on in the house. 'There's a hut in the forest where you can stay.
Warmer than sleeping on the ground.'
It was two days' journey. I think they used the hut when hunting. We stayed there a couple of nights keeping a huge fire alight for the luxury of warmth. The old farmer told us that no road was near it that went anywhere, but there was a track and one morning we heard a car in the valley. Though it could travel at no great speed on that track we left immediately, heading our horses up through pathless forest to a high pass. The ground on the other side dropped so steeply that we had to dismount and lead our animals down. Lyubov found it difficult. She looked at me with despair in her eyes, lovely eyes of darkest blue, rich and deep, almost violet—if only they had been bolder, glowed more often with fire! I dropped the reins of my horse and went back to help her.
'Leave me,' she said. 'I am only slowing you down.'
The flash of rage was so sudden that I had my arm back to strike her before I knew what I was doing.
'Sister,' I said, mastering myself, 'how can you say such a thing?'
Her eyes were wide, brimming with tears. 'Igar, oh Igar.'
'Come on. This is not so hard.'
When we sat to rest upon dry pine needles on a little flat spot, she was quiet a long while. We sat with our backs against a rock, my arm around her shoulders. The noise of a small torrent came up to us from the valley bottom. Between the dark towers of the trees we saw an eagle sail down the valley on stretched motionless wings. She circled widely before us, a little lower than we, then continued her imperial way.
'You left Natsha to find me.' Lyubov's tone was difficult to read. It was not an accusation, nor yet a statement of gratitude. Perhaps it hovered between the two.
I had not thought about it but it was true of course. After a moment I said rather truculently, 'Aren't you glad?'
'Poor Natsha!'
'She can take care of herself. Aren't you glad you are with me?'
Leaning her head on my shoulder, her thick black hair long and shining, quietly she said, 'Yes I'm glad. Of course I am.' She was happier to be with me in a time of trouble than with the cautious Arvi.
An hour later at the bottom of the slope we came out upon another track, and fell into the arms of our silently waiting pursuers. I think they had run around the mountain so as not to scare us off with engine noise. They had radio devices and could get maps —Bing-bing's military was still able to use the information nets and talk to the satellites.
At all events they smiled in a most welcoming manner and took us under their iron wing.
'This is an auspicious moment. I am so happy to meet you, honoured Igar Alanovits,' said the leader. He was holding Lyubov with an arm twisted behind her back. Two of his men were holding me, having relieved me of my gun—a feeble thing indeed compared to theirs—my knife and the little axe I carried in my belt.
Lyubov had gone into some bushes to pee. I heard her cry out, but not in a way that alarmed me. As I went to her the Bing-bing materialized from the bushes beside me and I was taken like a witless boy. I was furious at myself, and at Lyubov. If she must walk into a trap (I had too) why couldn't she have called in a way that alerted me, instead of that feeble squeak of surprise? No, I am unfair to her. I always was. She was a wonderful woman and sister, trusting, trustworthy, a helpmate to her capacity. It was as if I had a wrong idea of her, an idea of someone much stronger and more determined, and Lyubov fell short of my ideal, not of her own sweet nature.
Why the Bing-bing didn't kill us, or at least me, immediately, I don't know. I never knew what they really wanted. As I discovered later they were short of fuel. We continued to travel west but our flight had taken us away from any main route worth the name. Where they expected to find a small town were only smoking ruins. I did not know what was happening, and I don't think they did either. I knew something of their language, but their radio conversations were difficult to understand and the news of an accuracy which even they doubted. It was clear at least that the conflict was spreading and Mosk had become involved.
The leader Chen, of many smiles impossible to read and of few words, ditched one car and three of his men. The rest of us crammed into the second. A day later we abandoned that with an empty fuel tank, and walking Chen set a gruelling pace which became torment to Lyubov. I supported her as we went, remonstrating with Chen until he threatened to shoot her.
Half way through a morning of sunlight and hard frost, which made the branches of the trees sparkle like a forest in fairyland, we were walking along an empty dirt road through scrubby birch. We had seen no other people for two days.
Out of the blue there was a celestial, a universal, a world-blasting flash. Stillness and silence followed, and then while the world was still distorted by the brilliance that battled in my eyes, another flash and another. Time stood still, but then I was rolling upon the ground, propelled by a giant fist, battered by the debris of trees ripped and torn, my ears and head overwhelmed, stupid and bursting with a sea storm of noise. I had never known anything like it.
'Shit!' said Chen some time later. He was sitting up five metres from me. I too had raised myself on one arm, looking around for Lyubov. She was not far away, lying motionless. Beyond her one of Chen's men was messily impaled upon the stump of a broken tree. He groaned, but could not live. I crawled to Lyubov.
Chen pointed his gun at me. 'Stop!'
I crawled the last metres to my sister. 'Nuclear bombs,' I said over my shoulder.
'Shit, shit, shit!'
In spite of treaties and endless hand-on-heart lies, Mosk, Bing-bing, and especially the so-called Republic of the Two Amriks under its supposedly elected presidents but actual ballot-rigging Caesars had not reduced but augmented their nuclear arsenals. But why did the bombs fall here? There was no city that I knew of. Silos with Mosk's own weapons? But they were obsolete, surely. Mobile launchers, an army on the move?
I never knew.
Lyubov was breathing, not even unconscious, but frightened. The sky had darkened. To the south great dirty mushrooms towered into the stratosphere, looming over us, growing and becoming ugly as their initial symmetry distorted. Wind had arisen pouring back in the opposite direction to the blast. The forest was a desert of stumps and tangled debris.
When we could stand and stagger Chen put a pair of bullets in the head of the man crying upon the stump. The other was limping. Chen wanted us to hurry on; I wanted to comfort Lyubov who stood bemused in my arms. Chen and I shouted at each other. The rattle of the gun rose above the roar of the wind as Chen shot into the ground a line of bullets that stopped just short of Lyubov's feet. He drove us as fast as we could move along the littered road, he and his limping man behind us. One cheek, one side of my nose, my left hand, were painfully burned.
To the south the sky was filled with roiling continents of fume, black and filthy. The winds of the stratosphere were bringing it over us and the day darkened yet more. Smoke was rising too from the destruction of the forest, several separate blossoming clouds; fire appeared, which threatened to cut us off. Chen drove us faster; he was as one obsessed. Surely his own fate and that of two lordlings of a defunct petty kingdom no longer signified. It seemed impossible that he could take us back to his masters, and yet he did not kill us, much less let us go. That day was a nightmare, or was it the next? I was staggering, half carrying Lyubov, battling fatigue such as I had never known, while the outer world, dark and burning, seemed to advance and recede upon a deeper blackness where I dwelt within. Hitherto I had been alert for any opportunity to turn upon Chen, but now I stumbled mindlessly on before his urging, in an extremity of sickness and exhaustion, scarcely even aware of my rage at his callous treatment of Lyubov.
At some point I touched my painful nose and found the skin on the side of my face suppurating. Lyubov suddenly bent over and vomited. There was little enough in her belly. Hearing the sound, Chen's remaining man fell into a paroxysm of vomiting, and some time later Chen and I were seized.
How many days did it take us to die? I can't remember. There was darkness, fire, choking smoke, embers that fell upon us and burned our clothes. There was a deluge of black rain in black night—or was it black day?—drops that seemed as big as golf balls striking us like hammers. The insane Chen drove us on, stitching bullets around our feet. We were filthy and stinking, lacking even the energy to remove our clothes when diarrhoea assailed us.
Chen was kicking me. I surfaced from oblivion to find ash in my mouth and sticking to the side of my face, to find the sky filled with the pale light of a clear dawn. I was lying against Lyubov on a bed of black cinders, smoke rising peacefully from a burned stump close by.
'Come on, darling sister.'
'Let me lie here. I am with you, Igar. It's all right.' She sounded more awake than me, in a mind of final acceptance.
It was not enough for Chen. He prodded me with his gun, which now seemed to weigh upon his arms, and we staggered up, swaying upon our feet. Chen kicked the other man, who lay unmoving; he was dead. I found charred poles to help our walking.
I don't suppose we got a half kilometre. Looking around at Chen I saw that he had dropped his gun somewhere and seemed hardly able to keep his feet. How any of us had done so for so long was a mystery, he a madman driving, we no saner driven. In a final act of feeble rebellion I lurched with Lyubov to the side of the track and collapsed. Chen came up and fell upon me, pummelling me with his fists. 'Get up! Go, go!' But he could rise no more than I.
I drew the long combat knife from the scabbard at his belt. It was razor sharp as I found out when I cut his throat. I watched with hot satisfaction as blood pumped from the gash into the charred leaves on the floor; I heard the desperate tearing of breath dragged into the new aperture, the final long bubbling groan of exhalation, and inconsequently I was trying to work out if my cut had severed his wind above or below his vocal chords. Strangely I did not care about my own woes; I was avenging the insults to my sister.
We lay together Lyubov and I, touching, holding, in deepening oblivion. I do not know who died first.
I loved Lyubov, I loved her more than Natsha. It was different, of course. I had some of the best copulations I can remember with Natsha, Natsha the predator, Natsha the lynx. Yes, I loved Lyubov, yet at times in that instar I felt disappointed in her, and troubled with the disloyalty of that thought. It was as though the timid Lyubov was not her real self. I would search in her eyes for some firmness, some strength that I could not find. I would sit beside her as she gazed down at flowers, watching the curve of her neck, and will her to turn to me with some scheme for us to go forth and challenge the world, if only in a small way.
The Lyubov I thought she should be was not there. She was not Miri. But Miri was only a dream. And in the dream Miri was a child; how could I know that she was so strong, so self-certain, with demands upon life that would not be denied? Miri the dream was a sister of sisters.
Chapter 3
Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr
Shar often hunts at night. She woke me from deep sleep when she came in, turning round, thumping down against me into our nest of grass, pushing and shoving until she was satisfied. I did not return to sleep immediately, nor was I properly awake. Shar was curled up with her back in my belly, my chest and knees wrapped around her, her shoulders at my chin and fur tickling my nose. She could hardly get closer, I thought, like two shomas in one brain. As that thought drifted through my mind Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr stood forth as if revealed in a flash of lightning, the strange instar that followed Lyubov— and another later instar, the beautiful Haikka Anakurvi, the powerful maned Lev Stibahrson, the Society for the Risorgimento of Old Orth, a jumble of memory that had been lost to me for aeeara. It was days before I could reduce it to some sort of order.
I stood—hovered?—and our bodies were at my feet before me, and the body of Chen. No, I had no feet. Our bodies were ghostly, while I, invisible, had a greater solidity. I cannot say that I was seeing our bodies, not in the normal way. And Lyubov was with me, reaching out; but we could not touch and the wind carried us away, separating us further and further. She was gone and I thought I would die. But I could not die, or I had died. The darkness enfolded me like a mother, dark wind. It was not that there was nothing to see. See? Dark colours, colours of darkness, currents of darkness, flowing, streaming, mixing, world without end. Lyubov! Lyubov! There were other shomas, twittering like bats. We were in a labyrinthine bat cave whose limits were unknown, a current of jostling shomas streaming we knew not where.
How long this went on I cannot say. Or, as I may have said before, shomas without a body or brain exist outside time. The bat stream grew thinner; many shomas were no longer with us. Where had they gone? Had they simply dissolved into the mother stream? It was not colour, of course, it was not darkness, but how can I say what it was? And the smell. Not smell, of course, but I can only find this to say, that it became pervasive and might have been like hot copper, pepper—biting. It was almost delicious. I am hot delight, live or die, let me burn you.
I think now that perhaps there was such a throng of shomas because so many died that time on Orth. Where could they go? Where could they find new bodies and brains when most had been incinerated? So there was something like a racial urge to flee far away, an instinct to search for other gateways back into the physical world. Could it be so?
For me it ended suddenly, yet not startlingly. I was like a knight taken up with deliberation by a chess master and set down upon a new square. At first there was no discomfort, no question. I felt arrived, and settled into a new crib in which a soul of amity, a jewel of strange and alien cut, already slept. I discovered later that I was in the brain of an insect, a large ant-like creature. We shared that brain and body for an instar, Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr and I; we never merged.
It had been like some seismic upwelling of memory, and I emerged groggy. We were instar mining.
Haikka's green eyes were upon me, glowing with fascination. 'Hell's flames!' she said, 'That was the Exodus, wasn't it?'
The researches of the Society for the Risorgimento of Old Orth had uncovered a cluster of stories that seemed to point to such a mass migration of shomas at the time of the catastrophe.
'But where in the infinite parsecs did you end up?'
'The Lesser Magellanic Cloud.'
'How? Why there?'
'I was looking for my sister, perhaps following her, I don't know. But I thought this later. At the time I was not thinking. I felt powerless; I was carried along.'
Stibahrson, a lion-like man, argued with me about that transmigration. How did I know I was in the Lesser Magellanic? I could not explain, I was just sure. Was the holocaust I remembered the one that destroyed that Orthian civilization? If so, how and when did humanity spread beyond the planets of old Sol? On one occasion we sat all night until the blue light of Isirjais crept through the tall windows into the luxurious lounge of the Society, talking of those problems and others. As the light grew, clashing with the warmth of the lamp flames, Stibahrson called Bleet and ordered the lamps doused; Haikka ordered breakfast. Bleet knelt, touched his forehead to the ruby buckles and clasped the supple lilac leather of the tall boots that encased Stibahrson's feet, then rose to do their bidding. I should mention that in that instar I was as to body human among humans; indeed we prided ourselves that we were old Orth stock.
It was many, many instars, aeeara of years, after my flight from Orth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud when Stibahrson on a research trip had recruited me. Why did I leave my wife, my boys, my fleet of beautiful lateen-rigged fishing boats, and my comfortable place as headman of a village on quiet Mera to follow him back to the turmoil of Beshtoten-Ainissai? I came to find Lyubov. I carried ever with me a vision of my sister, a beautiful woman with cascading black hair and violet eyes. She appeared to have two phases: sometimes she was timid, padding quietly at my heels; sometimes a goddess before the flash of whose eyes Stibahrson himself might quail. Of course it had occurred to me that if I, if everyone, might enter new instars, so might she. Indeed there were stories of shomas who had met once more their former loves or enemies. But how to find Lyubov again? Where in the vast reaches of space and time to search?
Stibahrson painted an alluring picture of the Society for the Risorgmiento of Old Orth, its researches into the histories and migrations of shomas, its development of the techniques of instar mining. They were sure there were patterns.
The journey back to Beshtoten-Ainissai was accomplished in a primitive starship in shipsleep. Stibahrson found his wife dead. He had expected that and soon married another, but he was aggravated to find the Society in the hands of the Dreamers. By plotting the history of known human groups the Society wished to discover the lost whereabouts of Old Orth. When Orth was found the self-styled Doers, among them Haikka and Stibahrson, wanted to return thither with knowledge that would lift its few remaining inhabitants from the barbarism into which it was believed they had fallen. The Dreamers, though they enjoyed the stories of history and the exploration of past instars, had no real intention of squandering their or the Society's considerable wealth upon an actual mission to Orth. The Society served the meeting and recreation of many powerful people, who meddled, not without effect, in matters of state. Now the rival faction had the ascendancy and Stibahrson's dreams of Orth were obstructed.
'Right,' said Haikka Anakurvi when we were both comfortable, I on the couch, she in a soft chair, 'I am for you. I am hearing ears and seeing mind. What can you give me to see?'
Success in instar mining was greatly helped by a good osservatrice. Haikka was one of the best, intuitive, empathic, and a rock of safety in the black vortices and storms that were sometimes unleashed.
'I am for you …'
The familiar formula rang in my mind like the iron triangle in the village of my lost home on Mera, which we struck to announce urgent news.
'I don't know,' I said slowly, my thought questing like the lookout in the prow for signs of the submarine fishy throng.
'Sink … sink. The water of time is warm.'
'Wait …' I had closed my eyes. Haikka's lovely face, her breasts and slender body sheathed in green silk, were gone. 'Desolate ... desolation,' I muttered. 'Not water, air, cold air plucking at our wings. Wings of paper not feathers, thin wings of a bat, no—of an insect. I am an insect. We … we are tucking our wings about me, folding a brolly that the wind wants to whirl away. We are not enemies. She is here, in my brain. We cannot grasp the perspectives and angles of each other. But we need each other.' 'I hear, I see,' murmured Haikka.
I was standing on a hillock in a landscape of darkness and desolation, silent but for the whisper of the wind. It was a half-buried concrete porch, one of the entrances to the city that was dying beneath our feet. Our skin was shell, black with red gleams; our fingers were needles; in the corners of prismatic vision our face was the snout of a helmet, mandibles flexing sideways. The armoured body of an insect, astonishingly supple and sensitive. I flexed my mandibles now in perplexity.
'Wait, that is not the beginning ... I am sinking deeper ...'
It was the beginning, the beginning of a considerable exploration, the uncovering of the story of Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr, upon which Haikka as my osseervatrice accompanied me.
The name Y'y'y'y'y'y'y'yr, her name, my name, our name, was a beautiful stridulated sound which insects make well, humaniforms with little success. To save ink and my writing fingers I will shorten it to Y'y'yr.
So I, Y'y'yr, awoke from the sleep of metamorphosis in great confusion and voraciously hungry. I was male. Male?! That was not possible! But wings? I stirred them against my back, muscles flexing—yes, wings. My awakening should have been as a wingless worker-female, as a runner. I had been looking forward to becoming a runner. I remembered no life as egg of course, but as grub, yes—all the lessons of the lectors: the exquisite music of mathematics; hive science; the emotional meteorology of the Oo'oo'ooraam. All those lessons singing in my kinderform antennae as they touchtaught. And the promise of sexipedal dance with aee of others moving as one. But as larva I could not dance, I could barely squeeze myself forward the length of my own body in the time between one feeding and the next. We awaited the grown runners to carry us. We were dependent … Sacred Mother! Where did that notion come from?
What is 'dependent'? The idea has a terrible taste. We belonged, we were drops of the ocean, numberless sisters and brothers of the great family.
What? There is something with me. A brother? How—?
At that moment the consciousness of Y'y'yr failed.
We never merged, Y'y'yr and I who had been most recently Igar Alanovits; perhaps we were too different. Yet we shared that brain and body while it lived, and perhaps that was possible precisely because we were so different. But we shared the same desires, and above all in that world of desolation the need for a sister, for a brother.
It is impossible to explain. At times I would be I, at times I would be Y'y'yr, and at times we would 'converse' as one individual to another. We could understand each other but little. No, that is not so. As Y'y'yr I understood Y'y'yr very well, but it is almost impossible to put what I felt and knew into the kind of language that I am familiar with. Everything she did, thought, or said—everything—lived and breathed in the Oo'oo'ooraam, which we might call the world; but this world was the nest-city, the family, the numberless presence, the limitless communion, the ocean of drops, the drop Y'y'yr as ocean. What I would usually call the world was a shadowy realm beyond the Oo'oo'ooraam without the life, the vitality, the f'feem of the Communion.
So Y'y'yr went to sleep as a full-grown grub and woke not as runner but as male. Perhaps it was because the runners had stopped feeding the larvae properly; perhaps because her dreaming brain was invaded early in the sleep of metamorphosis by the fugitive Igar. (Shomas are not essentially male or female, but I have lived mostly as male. Body influences shoma, of course; and shoma influences body. How could it be otherwise?) The awakening was a shock and Y'y'yr lapsed for a while into unconsciousness. That left the field of consciousness to me, Igar. Strange feeling, strange feelings. Strange f'feemings. I could not avoid the fact that this body's sensorium was very different to anything I had encountered before, with organs of taste, touch, smell, chemo-reception, chordotonal vibration receptors in strange places among my limbs and segments. My antennae and mandibular palps were like an orchestra around my head singing with rainbow sensation—not all pleasant. Yes, there was a worrying wrongness in the air.
When Y'y'yr awoke again I tried to convey goodwill and the idea of mutual assistance. For a time, although it all took place within a single brain, I had the weird notion that we were circling each other and palpating antennae—as if I had great hypersensitive fingers springing from my forehead. The results were satisfactory: help within this weirdness offered and accepted; agreement to try and understand; acknowledgement of difference. I felt an overwhelming rush of relief, and companionship —from me? to me?—and … love!
Did it really happen that easily? At all events, that is how I remember our meeting. We were so different that there was no cranny for rivalry to get a toehold. Between Y'y'yr and I the ideas older and younger, wiser or more foolish, stronger and weaker had no meaning. We were so lost that any hint of favour or companionship must be embraced. And in truth we had been 'sleeping' together as strange nestlings for most of the period—days, weeks?—of our metamorphosis from larva to, not runner, but winged male.
We could wait no longer. We bit and tore at the pupal sack that embagged us. We struggled free, rising to our new, and by Y'y'yr long desired, sexipedal stance. No sisters came to clean us of the fragments of pupal coat and larval skin that adhered to our limbs. We must do it ourself. I marvelled at the lightness and dexterity of my six sprung stilt-like legs, at the tool-like efficacy with which antennae, mandibles, palps and comb-like strigils could be employed. My marvelling alerted Y'y'yr to what she had been doing. She glowed with shy wonder, which for a little took her mind off anxiety—an anxiety that I could not but share. We knew each ourself, yet we were not separate.
The air was heavily tainted. To me the smell was unfamiliar and unpleasant, but Y'y'yr knew the breath of corruption. There were stacks of man-sized—what am I saying?—aani-sized, runner-sized, pupae. They had been orderly, but now there was disarray; and their uniform buff hue was blotched and discoloured. We were in a charnel-house. Not far from us lay the twisted bodies of three runners, looking to me, Igar, like giant ants. Soft yellow-orange light emanated from diverse parts of the architecture. That architecture: low bowl ceilings, Romanesque arches, squat pillars, all patterned and sculpted in honey-coloured stone, or as I later learned of cement masticated and extruded by specially fed runners.
Disquiet was growing in me. I, Y'y'yr, was alone, could find no other, could find but a single sister-brother within my own brain. I ran, skittered, slid through arches and passages, across wide floors, up stairs and down: and everywhere the fallen, the heaped dead. Desperation became a whirlwind, a black storm. I was rigid, femur and tibia peaked above my head, tarsi and metatarsi locked and tangled with others, antennae tearing at the antennae of a fallen runner upon whom I was lying, but she was still and stinking in death.
The brother saved me, called me back.
Yes, I, Igar tore myself from the black storm, I know not how, and extended my hand so to speak to Y'y'yr, who seized it and clung with the grip of the drowning. How else can I tell the figures of this dance of minds within a single brain?
The shadows retreated. I climbed half fainting from my pitiful dead sister and stood. What now? said the foreign brother voice that echoed so strangely in my darkened mind. That voice, so fiercely kind, kind to me, not the common kindness of all for all. It made me feel dizzy and called up in me not the gentle, ubiquitous, world-washing love of the Oo'oo'ooraam but a fire compounded of need to help and to be helped, need to give and take to exhaustion. Later when I could think I was not sure that I wanted it, but I could not deny or escape it. Within the mind at that moment was that voice; without— silence.
I knew what I must do. I let the brother understand, and he did understand. We went through the widening ways to the cantons of the Mothers. As he looked about the brother thought splendour. He was juggling with strange ideas: mansion, hive, city.
Strangely lifeless ideas. He caught resonances of my thought and echoed: family, common mind, sisterhood. It was like a game, briefly diverting. But then we came into the great hall of the Mothers and an icy reality pierced my heart, heart that belonged to the Oo'oo'ooraam.
The Mothers were all dead upon their great couches; and around them all their attendants, dead. Ai'e'e'e'e! There were piles of blackening eggs that no sister had at last been able to carry to the halls of incubation.
I stood a long time. The hall was softly lit, the electrical glows would endure for years, but in me was darkness. The brother seemed to be holding me, tarsus to tibia, antenna to antenna. Of course it was only an illusion but he seemed to be holding me, and thus I was able to stand. Finally I knelt and made the long farewell to those who leave the earthly Oo'oo'ooraam for the Greater. The brother was patient, although that is an idea that I gained from him. He seemed to need the idea of patience because he also had a very strange idea of notpatient. But the brother knew that I must make the farewells, that I could not live further without them; and what comfort they gave me he also could sip.
We moved aimlessly on, wandering in catacombs. Y'y'yr—we—were numb with horror. It was a subterranean nation with strange workshops, libraries, parks, temples. I have to use my words, which make it sound too much like a human society. It had grown around ideas very different about what was important in life. Mind was important, but mind within and as part of the Oo'oo'ooraam, the Communion, the constant oceanic intercourse of all the sisters and brothers, the f'feem.
The dead were without number, sprawled heaps, pairs embracing, isolated individuals that in the aura of Y'y'yr's thought I came to see as the most pitiful. What had happened? The memory of the race, which Y'y'yr seemed to possess, knew of no such holocaust in all history.
We did find lone sisters still living, or rather dying. From them we learned that the people had been struck by an incredibly contagious disease. Aani began to run frantically and without aim, then stopped rigid and trembling; at this point their speech (which occurred via stridulation) would be wild. There followed a period of apparent recovery but weakness. It deceived: it was the prelude to death. The whole city was lost in five days. This we pried piecemeal from several dying runners. They communicated with difficulty; their thought processes were sluggish, the touch of their antennae the pawing of cripples. They will die, said Y'y'yr with fathomless sorrow. They seem to have been immune to the sickness, as we, but without the Communion of the Oo'oo'ooraam they cannot live. I should die too, but you have saved me, Igar, brother. I do not know whether I am thankful or not.
She used my most recent name, which gave me a glow of pleasure, though she could equally have said Nicky, or perhaps some other. Igar was fading. I was beginning to feel that my name was simply Y'y'yr, but for my narration I will keep Y'y'yr specifically for her, my body- and brain-sharing sister.
After a couple of days we knew that the chance of finding anyone truly alive was slight. What can we do, brother? came her thought. It was an effort for her even to consider the future. How could one exist alone? I could see her mind, of course. There was nothing but darkness before her. Without me to consider she would have collapsed, lain motionless, and starved. The Oo'oo'ooraam was dying, dead. Not to die was to tear herself from it; not to die was of leave the Communion, was to leave life. A paradox.
We must go outside, I said. We cannot stay breathing this air. We will fly, explore. No no! said Y'y'yr. She could not fly, she should not fly, she was a runner. Let us at least go to the surface and look, I said. She lived for my sake. Now she followed me, showed me the way to the outside world.
We stood atop that concrete porch surveying the landscape, cold, dark, desolate. As memory has waxed and waned through instars, it was the scene from my time with Y'y'yr that was the last to fade and the first to resurface. Y'y'yr and I, a female insect and a male humaniform—as to our usual or expected conditions—in a male insect body. For the first time she was out of the subterranean nest-city and in the upper air. In the emptiness of that wide landscape the knowledge of her aloneness was inescapable. In the dawning awareness of her individuality we understood our unity, understood that we would stand or fall together. Bi'i'i'iriror, her Oo'oo'ooraam, was at its final end; and I was a stranger in a strange land indeed.
The sky was a high canopy of dark cloud, pendant mounds mirroring the land below, which was not flat but nowhere greatly elevated save a far range of hills. The cloud was unmoving. Not so the wind at the ground. It tugged at us so that we closed our wings around our body. It was cold. We aani had limited homoiothermy, but this chill would make us slow and low spirited.
Y'y'yr surprised me. Let us go, came her gentle thought. Let us fly, I know not where. You want to fly. I will fly with you.
She left it to me, and our body seemed to know. Our wings were four, veined and transparent. I lifted them. The wind ripped, threatening to topple us. Reflexively we pulled our wings in tight again. After catching my breath, so to speak, I extended them a little further. The wind hit us but as we tumbled I found that we were moving our wings in an easy vibrato that caught the air and made it our slave. We rose upon its back, feeling light and exhilarated. The porch fell below, became tiny as we flew faster, higher. We seemed to turn face to face (black triangular aani faces) and touch antennae; we were laughing together. I say laughing: my human laugh was part of it, and the light rippling fire that ran along Y'y'yr's limbs, rustled and glowed upon all our bristles. I was surprised; I had not dreamt that the chitinous Y'y'yr could laugh. And what else? In her pleasure was naughtiness. She, a runner, was flying as a male. Did that naughtiness come to her from me? It seemed a concept foreign to the aani. We embraced the air and each other, flight, pleasure, freedom, intoxicated after the days below in the ruin
and decay of the world. We whirled away over the grey land. Mind-touches echoed: Will we be able to find Bi'i'i'iriror again? Does it matter? Can it be our home now?
On my world there were snails, creatures that crawled upon the earth and carried their houses on their backs. We must carry our house with us now. What was I trying to say? Y'y'yr knew better than I: A little Oo'oo'ooraam of two. And her love and gratitude flooded through me, mingling with the warmth that came from the beat of our wings, the throb of the muscles within our shoulders.
How long was the day on that planet? I don't know. We tired at last and fell on fluttering wings down the air to alight upon a grey granite rock outcropping from country of heath and crouching forest. We were warm from hours of flying, thorax and abdomen swelling and shrinking as we breathed.
I had thought for days that I would not need to ask this question, that I would know the answer, but I still did not.
Are you Lyubov?
She was puzzled. What—who—was Lyubov?
Are you my sister?
Of course. Of course I am your sister. Her gift of herself was like the water of life.
But she was not Lyubov. It took me some time to be certain but in the end there could be no doubt. She was not Lyubov, and of course she was not Miri.
She asked what I had meant with 'my world', the world with creatures with houses on their backs (there were such creatures here, too). It seemed a good time to talk of instars and transmigration, a good time to suggest that the end of the Oo'oo'ooraam might not be the end of everything. Trafficking in the wares we brought from lives so different was joy to us. The flow of thought was like a duet, or a concerto with first one and then the other being orchestra or solo instrument. And always thoughts behind thought, cultural assumptions and underpinnings, inescapable, alien and strange.
The idea of instars was not known to the Oo'oo'ooraam except as little regarded speculation. Y'y'yr saw it now through me, of course, and strangely it troubled her. She said that the death of the Oo'oo'ooraam should not be shunned, it must be faced and— paradoxically—lived. What life gave, good or bad, must be faced. The philosophy of her people was subtle, powerful.
The light was dying. We descended from the rock, which was in two parts, divided by a crack that slanted up to the sky. We could creep into its wider floor and there among dry bones, the litter of ancient tenants, we settled. Our brightness faded as the night cooled and we slept, each comforted by the other's closeness.
With the new day we sought food. We had eaten seeds in a cavernous store before leaving Bi'i'i'iriror; now our body was hungry again. We made our way through the heath searching for insects to milk or devour, leaves and seeds that would sustain us. The plants had no thriving aspect; much appeared on the point of withering. In a clump of trees many were losing their leaves. What was this? There appeared to be some disaster that extended beyond the Oo'oo'ooraam of the aani. We found nuts, which proved good. Beyond the trees the olfactory sense of our antennae drew us to a fallen goat animal, a'adh Y'y'yr called it, several days dead.
We found ourself wandering aimless in a landscape from which life seemed to be draining. What were we to do? There was another Oo'oo'ooraam, Nis'a'a'anuza. Runners could reach it in a dozen days, we in half that. Were they friendly? They were not hostile, they were not slavers like the Na'adva'azh. We could go there and see. In the air our spirits rose. We 'talked' as we flew, each of us a treasure chest of the alien and the fascinating for the other. Yet what was most important blossomed with known quality and flavour from either side: companionship and love.
The days continued overcast, which was not usual. At night we found rock shelters, burrows, thickets in which to sleep. The Oo'oo'ooraam of Nis'a'a'anuza had its porches widely scattered upon a vast slope. The lower country before it was well watered, dense with vegetation, which now showed mournful evidence of decay. We entered the Oo'oo'ooraam, spent a morning exploring, found one of the halls of Mothers. There was nothing to cheer us. The dead beyond count lay where they had fallen.
I clung to the brother. The great blackness sucked at me, at him too, but he stood, for himself and more for me. So I resisted the blackness for him. Without him I would have let go and let myself be sucked down. Ai'e'e'e'e! That would have been easier.