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March 11 - April 24, 2019
All food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the great buildings around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to their houses.
She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life, she obeyed.
Rolery pulled her groggy head erect and stole a glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; and she hated Rolery.
Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. Could that be true?
Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. Could that be true? She had left her people; now her people were all dead, or homeless in the hills in the Winter night. She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked in their hard voices. For a while Rolery had an illusion, which she knew for an illusion, that there was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a little sick, but was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the outskirts, the first stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She could not move. There was nowhere to go. Everyone was dead.
He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport. It’s happened before.”
Then there was a change. It was like a small light far off in darkness. She said aloud, though so softly only those nearest her heard, “Agat is coming here.”
“Is he bespeaking you?” Alla Pasfal asked sharply.
Rolery gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not seeing her. “He’s coming here,” she repeated.
“He’s probably not sending, Alla,” said the one called Pilotson. “They’re in steady rapport, to some degree.”
“Nonsense, Huru.”
“Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a Natural. And that established a rapport. It’s happened before.”
The others stared and Pasfal said sharply, “There are cups in the cupboard.” But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell like a spent arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice.
but with immunity to infection wounds healed very fast, and Agat paid scant attention to anything less than a severed artery.
It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we’ll be catching their colds. And that’ll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off.…
It wasn’t like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did not consider either time or space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step before, a step behind—the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this one day of the immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was merely today and “time-past.” They looked ahead only to the next season at most. They did not look down over time but were in it as the lamp in the night, as the heart in the body. And so also with space: space to them was not a surface on which to draw boundaries but a Range, a heartland, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the Range were areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one departed; the farther, the fainter. But there were no lines, no limits. This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both space and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man?
It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we’ll be catching their colds. And that’ll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off.…
He had been helpless to fight against them, now he was almost helpless to fight for them.
“Friend, enemy, what the hell,” he said. “Here.” He passed the hilf a hunk of bread from his wallet. “Rolery is my wife, since three days ago.”
As the men of Landin met at the wall they joined into squads of five to twenty men, and these squads kept together, whether in attacking groups of Gaal looters with dartguns, bolos and knives, or in picking up whatever Tevaran women and children they found and making for the gate with them.
No Gaal stopped their run—a queer bunch of women, children, men, led by Agat with a Gaal ax running cover for Umaksuman, who carried on his shoulders a great dangling burden, the old chief, his father Wold.
They had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed like the vast migrations of the beasts—fifteen thousand men, Agat had guessed.
They had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed like the vast migrations of the beasts—fifteen thousand men, Agat had guessed. Fifteen thousand warriors, between sixty or seventy thousand Gaal in all, with their tents and cookpots and travois and hann and fur rugs and axes and armlets and cradleboards and tinderboxes, all their scant belongings, and their fear of the Winter, and their hunger. He had seen Gaal women in their encampments gathering the dead lichen off logs and eating it. It did not seem probable that the little City of Exile still stood, untouched by this flood of violence and hunger, with torches alight above its gates of iron and carved wood, and men to welcome him home.
She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
“We can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another,” one of the others said. Agat nodded. “We will,” he said. “But the barricades have got to be manned.…”
For all the brilliant light from the sun and sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe.
“How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?”
One of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting, “Alterra, it must be the signal for an attack—” Another man, bursting out of the door of the College, interrupted him, “No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that’s why he was yelling like that—”
“Saw what? Did he attack like that all by himself?”
“He was running from it—trying to save his life! Didn’t you see it, you on the barricade? No wonder he was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck like— God, like this, Alterra! It came around the corner after him, and then turned back.”
“A snowghoul,” Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had heard Wold’s tales, and nodded. “White, and tall, and the head going from side to side…” She imitated Wold’s grisly imitation, and the man who had seen the thing from the window cried, “That’s it.” Agat mounted the barricade to try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking down at the dead man, who had been so terrified that he had run on his enemy’s lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no prisoners were taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short and thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was interbraided with red feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the man lay sprawled in his abrupt death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that had hunted him. The girl stood motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of the barricade.
“There!” she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the sea-cliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. “Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?”
She did not know; she only knew Wold’s story of having killed a snowghoul singlehanded, among last Winter’s mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory. Umaksuman said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf’s word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.
“How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?”
he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.
“Why is it that you don’t speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann…”
“Men aren’t hann,” he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.
“The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south.”
“Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind’s knowing it. That’s a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their fear or joy; there’s more to mindhearing than that, but it’s without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he’s heard anything. Especially if what he hears isn’t what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have perfect defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down one’s own defenses.” “
But the animals hear?”
“To some extent. That’s done without words again. Some people have that knack for projecting to animals. It’s useful in herding and hunting, all right. Did you never hear that farborns were lucky hunters?”
“Yes, it’s why they’re called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you.”
“Yes. And you bespoke me—once, in my house. It happens sometimes between two people: there are no barriers, no defenses.” He drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled circling worlds on the long wall across the room. “When that happens,” he said, “it’s necessary that they love each other. Necessary … I can’t send my fear or hate against the Gaal. They wouldn’t hear. But if I turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery.…”
“Why don’t the creatures bite farborns?”
“Oh—creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only show ’em to you with a special glass, like that one in the case over there. They live nearly everywhere; they’re on the weapon, in the air, on the skin. If they get into the blood, the body resists ’em and the battle is what causes the swelling and all that. So the books say. It’s nothing that ever concerned me as a doctor.”
“Why don’t the creatures bite farborns?”
“Because they don’t like foreigners.” Wattock snorted at his small joke. “We are foreign, you know. We can’t even digest food here unless we take periodic doses of certain enzymoids. We have a chemical structure that’s very slightly different from the local organic norm, and it shows up in the cytoplasm— You don’t know what that is. Well, what it means is, we’re made of slightly different stuff than you hilfs are.”
“So that you’re dark-skinned and we light?”
“No, that’s unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color and eye-structure and all that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small—one molecule in the hereditary chain,” Wattock said with relish, warming to his lecture. “It causes no major divergence from the Common Hominid Type in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means that we can’t interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react to your viruses.… Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as the First Generation did. Pure superstition, some of that. I’ve seen people come in from long hunting-trips, or the Atlantika refugees last Spring, who hadn’t taken an enzymoid shot or pill for two or three moonphases, but weren’t failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all.” As he said this Wattock got a very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty, since she had no idea what he had been explaining to her: none of the key words were words in her language.
“Life what?” she inquired timidly.
“Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and enough generations, the favorable adaptation tends to prevail.… Would the solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical norm? … All the stillbirths and miscarriages then would be overadaptations, or maybe incompatibility between the mother and a normalized fetus.…” Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to his work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense way and muttering, “Strange, strange, strange!… That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place.”
“I listen again,” Rolery murmured.
“That men and hilfs could breed together!”
This she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or a wish or a dread. “Elder, I am too stupid to hear you,” she said.
“You understand him well enough,” said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra, lying awake. “So you think we’ve finally turned into a drop in the bucket, Wattock?” Pilotson had raised up on his elbow. His dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face.
“If you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact’s got to be explained somehow.”
“Damn adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility!” the sick man said, and looked at Rolery. “So long as we’ve bred true we’ve been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and the Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human blood will be lost before another Year’s past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing. Nobody will set these instruments, or read these books. Jakob Agat’s grandsons will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time.… Damn you stupid barbarians, can’t you leave men alone—alone!” He was shaking with fever and fury. Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in his smooth doctorly way and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm. “Lie down, Huru,” he said, and with a puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. “I don’t care if I die of your filthy infections,” he said in a thickening voice, “but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep ’em out of the … out of the City.…”
She sat there among the sleep of wounded men, under the ruined city full of death, and brooded speechlessly on the chance of life.
A terrible strength bent his head back, baring his throat; and he saw the stars whirl in the sky far up above him, and go out.
His dartgun had been in his hand all along, but his hand was stiff from yesterday’s wound, and the glove hampered him: he shot and the dart struck, but the creature was already on him, the short clawed forearms reaching out, the head stuck forward with its weaving, swaying motion, a round toothed mouth gaping open. He threw himself down right against its legs in an effort to trip it and escape the first lunge of that snapping mouth, but it was quicker than he. Even as he went down it turned and caught at him, and he felt the claws on the weak-looking little arms tear through the leather of his coat and clothing, and felt himself pinned down. A terrible strength bent his head back, baring his throat; and he saw the stars whirl in the sky far up above him, and go out.
And then he was trying to pull himself up on hands and knees, on the icy stones beside a great, reeking bulk of white fur that twitched and trembled. Five seconds it took the poison on the dart-tip to act; it had almost been a second too long. The round mouth still snapped open and shut, the legs with their flat, splayed, snow-shoe feet pumped as if the snowghoul were still running. Snowghouls hunt in packs, Agat’s memory said suddenly, as he stood trying to get his breath and nerve back. Snowghouls hunt in packs.… He reloaded his gun clumsily but methodically, and, with it held ready, started back down Esmit Street; not running lest he slip on the ice, but not strolling, either. The street was still empty, and serene, and very long.
The houses and the steep streets of the city lay very quiet in the morning light.
He finally found her, and taking her hands he said, “They’re gone, they’re gone, they’re gone…”
“The Men of Tevar kept our walls side by side with the Men of Landin. They are welcome to stay with us or to go, to live with us or leave us, as they please. The gates of my city are open to you, all Winter long. You are free to go out them, but welcome within them!”
IMAGINE DARKNESS.
IMAGINE DARKNESS.
In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.
As unremembered light brightened about him he moved, crawling, running sometimes on all fours, sometimes pulling himself erect, but not going anywhere.
As unremembered light brightened about him he moved, crawling, running sometimes on all fours, sometimes pulling himself erect, but not going anywhere. He had no way through the world in which he was, for a way implies a beginning and an end. All things about him were tangled, all things resisted him. The confusion of his being was impelled to movement by forces for which he knew no name: terror, hunger, thirst, pain. Through the dark forest of things he blundered in silence till the night stopped him, a greater force. But when the light began again he groped on.
She turned to them with a wondering look, saying, “Do you see his eyes…?”
When he broke out into the sudden broad sunlight of the Clearing he rose upright and stood a moment. Then he put his hands over his eyes and cried out aloud. Weaving at her loom in the sunlit garden, Parth saw him at the forest’s edge. She called to the others with a quick beat of her mind. But she feared nothing, and by the time the others came out of the house she had gone across the Clearing to the uncouth figure that crouched among the high, ripe grasses. As they approached they saw her put her hand on his shoulder and bend down to him, speaking softly.
She turned to them with a wondering look, saying, “Do you see his eyes…?”
They were strange eyes, surely. The pupil was large; the iris, of a grayed amber color, was oval lengthwise so that the white of the eye did not show at all. “Like a cat,” said Garra. “Like an egg all yolk,” said Kai, voicing the slight distaste of uneasiness roused by that small, essential difference. Otherwise the stranger seemed only a man, under the mud and scratches and filth he had got over his face and naked body in his aimless struggle through the forest; at most he was a little paler-skinned than the brown people who now surrounded him, discussing him quietly as he crouched in the sunlight, cowering and shaking with exhaustion and fear.
“Mindless or out of his mind,” said Zove. “But also starving; we can remedy that.”
His feet have walked, his hands have worked. Sleep and the drug relax his face, but only a thinking mind could use and wear a face into these lines.”
The blind girl moved closer to the pallet. She reached out her hand, and Zove guided it gently to the stranger’s forehead. They were all silent again. All listened. But only Kretyan could hear.
She lifted her bowed, blind head at last.
“Nothing,” she said, her voice a little strained.
“Nothing?”
“A jumble—a void. He has no mind.”
“Kretyan, let me tell you how he looks. His feet have walked, his hands have worked. Sleep and the drug relax his face, but only a thinking mind could use and wear a face into these lines.”
“not a Terran man, though how that could be— But he may think differently than we. Try once more, while he still dreams.”
“He may be an alien,” Zove said, “not a Terran man, though how that could be—But he may think differently than we. Try once more, while he still dreams.”
“I’ll try, uncle. But I have no sense of any mind, of any true emotion or direction. A baby’s mind is frightening but this … is worse—darkness and a kind of empty jumble—”
“No-mind is an evil place for mind to stay.”
“Yes, a gold ring without marking or design. It was all he wore on his body. And his mind stripped naked as his flesh. So the poor brute comes to us out of the forest—sent by whom?”
“If he can be taught, then he is to be distrusted. He may have been sent here to be taught, to learn our ways, insights, secrets.
“See if he can be taught,” said Zove’s wife Rossa.
The Master’s eldest son Metock spoke: “If he can be taught, then he is to be distrusted. He may have been sent here to be taught, to learn our ways, insights, secrets. The cat brought up by the kindly mice.”
“I am not a kindly mouse, my son,” the Master said.
“Then you think him a Shing?”
“Or their tool.”
“We’re all tools of the Shing. What would you do with him?”
“Kill him before he wakes.”
The wind blew faintly, a whippoorwill called out in the humid, starlit Clearing.
“Death is a false mercy,”
“If we don’t kill him like a wild beast,” said Buckeye, “then we shall have to tame him like a wild beast.…”
But if he is neither Shing nor human, what is he?
Beyond the sound of wind in trees beyond the storm-enshadowed seas, on stairs of sunlit stone the fair daughter of Airek stands …
On one of the empty tables Ranya had left her tëanb, a flat, keyed instrument, said to be of Hainish origin. Parth picked out a tune in the melancholic Stepped Mode of the Eastern Forest, then retuned the instrument to its native scale and began anew. She had no skill with the tëanb and found the notes slowly, singing the words, spinning them out to keep the melody going as she sought the next note.
Beyond the sound of wind in trees
beyond the storm-enshadowed seas,
on stairs of sunlit stone the fair
daughter of Airek stands …
She lost the tune, then found it again: …
stands,
silent, with empty hands.
A legend, who knew how old, from a world incredibly remote, its words and tune had been part of man’s heritage for centuries. Parth sang on very softly, alone in the great firelit room, snow and twilight darkening the windows.
she was moved, and sang no more. Later that night she saw Falk stand by the table on which the tëanb lay. He raised his hand to it but dared not touch it, as if fearing to release the sweet relentless demon within it that had cried out under Parth’s hands and changed her voice to music.
There was a sound behind her and she turned to see Falk standing there. There were tears in his strange eyes. He said, “Parth—stop—”
“Falk, what’s wrong?”
“It hurts me,” he said, turning away his face that so clearly revealed the incoherent and defenseless mind.
“What a compliment to my singing,” she teased him, but she was moved, and sang no more. Later that night she saw Falk stand by the table on which the tëanb lay. He raised his hand to it but dared not touch it, as if fearing to release the sweet relentless demon within it that had cried out under Parth’s hands and changed her voice to music.
“My child learns faster than yours,”
“My child learns faster than yours,” Parth said to her cousin Garra, “but yours grows faster. Fortunately.”
“Tell me another thing. Who is our enemy?” “The Shing.” “Why?” “They broke the League of All Worlds, took choice and freedom from men, wrecked all man’s works and records, stopped the evolution of the race. They are tyrants, and liars.” “But they don’t keep us from leading our good life here.” “We’re in hiding—we live apart, so that they’ll let us be. If we tried to build any of the great machines, if we gathered in groups or towns or nations to do any great work together, then the Shing would infiltrate and ruin the work and disperse us. I tell you only what you told me and I believed,
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“What was kept from us and stolen from you, the Shing will have. That you can be sure of.”
“I will tell you what I believe about you. I think you came from a lost world; I think you were not born on Earth.
“I will tell you what I believe about you. I think you came from a lost world; I think you were not born on Earth. I think you came here, the first Alien to return in a thousand years or more, bringing us a message or a sign. The Shing stopped your mouth, and turned you loose in the forests so that none might say they had killed you. You came to us. If you go I will grieve and fear for you, knowing how alone you go. But I will hope for you, and for ourselves! If you had words to speak to men, you’ll remember them, in the end. There must be a hope, a sign: we cannot go on like this forever.”
“You’ll find those who know. And then you’ll do it. I don’t fear it. If you serve the Enemy, so do we all: all’s lost and nothing’s to lose. If not, then you have what we men have lost: a destiny; and in following it you may bring hope to us all.…”
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie.
“If that was a trail we crossed, I don’t know where it comes from or goes. Early tomorrow we’ll cross a real path, the old Hirand Road.
“If that was a trail we crossed, I don’t know where it comes from or goes. Early tomorrow we’ll cross a real path, the old Hirand Road. Hirand House was a long way west, a week on foot at least; nobody’s gone there for sixty or seventy years. I don’t know why. But the trail was still plain last time I came this way. The other might be an animal track, and lead you straying or leave you in a swamp.”
“All right, I’ll try the Hirand Road.”
The name seldom spoken sounded flat and strange out here under the sky.
There was a pause, then Metock asked, “Why are you going west?”
“Because Es Toch is in the west.”
The name seldom spoken sounded flat and strange out here under the sky. Thurro coming up with an armload of wood glanced around uneasily. Metock asked nothing more.
when all ways are lost the Way lies clear.
It was as if the great level space had been flooded with melted amethyst.
A wild boar walked out of the trees, crossed his tracks, and stopped to snuff the ground. A grotesque, magnificent pig, with powerful shoulders, razor back, trim, quick, filthy legs. Over snout and tusk and bristle, little bright eyes looked up at Falk. “Aah, aah, aah, man, aah,” the creature said, snuffling. Falk’s tense muscles jumped, and his hand tightened on the grip of his laser-pistol. He did not shoot. A wounded boar was hideously quick and dangerous. He crouched there absolutely still. “Man, man,” said the wild pig, the voice thick and flat from the scarred snout, “think to me. Think
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