Shadow's End Read online

  Lutha sighed.

  Trompe said, "How much will you charge to tell them nothing?"

  The official shook his head chidingly. "We don't play games of that sort, Outlander Paggas. That leads to a pattern of darkness, and we try to avoid such. The only reason for our mentioning these people is that we thought you might know of them, know who they are, why they are here. Seemingly, you do not, so they will not be allowed to infringe upon your privacy—or, I should say, the privacy of Bernesohn Famber, whose lease has still two standard years to run."

  "You'll send them away?"

  "They have the same privilege as any other applicant. If they wish to buy a lease, they may buy one. The only cells available at the moment are in hives some distance from Cochim-Mahn, where Bernesohn Famber dwelt among us."

  "You're saying we won't encounter them."

  "I'm saying it would be extremely unlikely. Now, your other visitor presents a somewhat different situation."

  "Other visitor?" Lutha raised her brows.

  "Thosby Anent. Supposedly he is a broker in craft items, of which Dinadh creates a small array. He pretends to be a broker, and we pretend to believe him. He is actually a spy for the Alliance, and he was here yesterday, asking for you."

  "But we are here for the Alliance," Lutha erupted, spontaneously and unthinkingly.

  The Dinadhi beamed at her. "Of course you are. How nice of you to admit it. It relieves us of the burden of fiction! Old Anent is harmless, but I may not force him on you. Will you see him?"

  Trompe shrugged assent.

  "Rest here. I'll send him along, and then the vehicle manager to start you on your way."

  "And your name, sir?" Trompe asked.

  "Merely a humble patterner, doing his duty." He went away, leaving Trompe and Lutha to stare at one another, and then at the elderly man making his way across the floor toward them. He was somewhat gray and dried-out looking, with pale watery eyes of so light a blue they seemed almost white, when they could be seen through the wreath of smoke around his head.

  "Thosby Anent," he murmured, taking the pipe from his mouth and peering over his shoulder even as he cupped his hand beside his lips, a perfect parody of conspiracy. "Covert agent of Alliance Prime, at your service."

  "What do you mean, covert agent?" asked Lutha. "Why would the Alliance have a covert agent here?"

  "Why, why," he stuttered, "to receive information. To forward it to Alliance Prime. They sent me because there's some conspiracy here. Something going on. They needed someone of my experience. I knew you must have been sent to … " He made an inclusive gesture.

  "I see," said Trompe fretfully, pinching the flesh between his eyes into a ridge as he felt for what was actually going on inside the oldster's mind. He seemed perfectly sincere, feeling a little outraged dignity, a little pomposity. A minor functionary living on dreams of glory. "How did you know we'd been sent to … ?" He aped the other's inclusive gesture.

  "The ship," the man whispered. "It was an official ship."

  As it had been, without question. Well. Trompe bowed formally. "Thank you for your offer. If we learn anything at all, we will bring it directly to you."

  "I thank you sir. I will keep my, ah … network in readiness. Should you, by any chance, happen upon something urgent, the code word is vigilance." He pursed his lips and nodded rapidly to himself several times. "Vigilance."

  "I see," said Lutha, trying to keep from laughing.

  Leely chose that moment to stroke her face and mutter his customary polysyllable.

  "So this is the young man," Thosby said, peering at Leely like a squirrel peering at a nut, as though wondering where to begin nibbling. "They were speaking of him in the corridor. So this is he."

  "He is," said Lutha. "And we've come a long way, and we're tired. If you gentlemen will excuse us." She stood up and took Leely away with her to what was called on Dinadh the female privacy facility.

  Trompe bid Thosby Anent farewell, though it took several more conspiratorial exchanges to do so. As Thosby went the vehicle man arrived.

  "Are you the last one we have to deal with?" demanded Trompe in a weary voice.

  "The last person here at the port, yes," the man replied. "I am about to rent you a vehicle at an exorbitant price, and sell you a guidebook, also quite expensive, by which means you may reach the hive where Bernesohn Famber had—or, I should say, has—a lease on a certain number of cells. On Dinadh, leases survive the lessees. Kin may claim them as inheritance and may sell the remaining rights, with our approval, of course. So, Famber's place is still there, undisturbed, his belongings as they were the day he left, in the hive of Cochim-Mahn, where the songfather has been told to expect you."

  "How long a journey to Cochim-Mahn?"

  "It will take you several days. There are hostels along the way."

  "It seems a long time. Why can't we fly?"

  "Flight is permitted only in certain, well-defined cases of emergency."

  "And why is that?" asked Trompe.

  The vehicle man shrugged. "Have you seen persons sitting at their ease in the afternoon, drinking, perhaps, or talking with one another, when an insect comes suddenly buzzing and darting about their faces? Have you seen how they slap at it, wave it away, how it plagues them? Or in the evening, beside the lamp, when one is reading, and a flapping thing comes to the light?"

  Trompe nodded.

  "So our mother world feels about unnatural flying things buzzing about her face."

  "But she doesn't object to unnatural things crawling on her?" Trompe exploded.

  "On her clothing," corrected the vehicle man. "We can all put up with a few tiny things crawling about in our clothing. So long as they do it quietly and do not bite!"

  "Which pretty well put us in our place!" Trompe remarked to Lutha when she returned. "In effect, we're mites in the seams of Dinadh's garments. Harmless ones, of course."

  Lutha went to one of the porelike openings in the outer wall and stood looking out. "Several of the female port workers came in to use the facilities while I was there. They were curious. Mostly about Leely."

  "Trying to talk to him?"

  "Just watching him. He did a portrait of one of them on the wall."

  "In what medium, dare one ask?" He allowed himself a hint of distaste, hoping she would look at him, speak to him, Trompe, rather than to the air over his shoulder as she seemed always to do.

  She ignored his tone. No Fastigat would use such a tone unless he were eager for argument, and she was not interested in argument. "In some pinky-colored dirt he found in a flowerpot in there. He peed in it to make mud."

  Trompe turned away, frustrated. "They were impressed?"

  "They seemed to be." She fell silent for a moment. They had been impressed. More than merely impressed. Awed, perhaps. "There was a great deal of discussion about Weaving Woman … "

  "A goddess, as I recall," he said distantly.

  "A goddess, yes."

  "One they feel rather guilty about," he said.

  "Guilty?"

  "Hmm. I note some who, when they speak of her, brood with a sort of self-reproach."

  "Then you note more than I do. All I know about Weaving Woman indicates she's an indwelling spirit of art and craftsmanship. The women using the facilities spoke of Leely as her child."

  "Which means?"

  She shrugged. The women's concentration had been a little frightening, but she chose not to mention that. Instead she gestured vaguely. "From what I recall of the culture chips I reviewed on the way out, Weaving Woman is pattern, which probably includes portraiture and sculpture, portrayal of any and everything."

  Trompe turned the idea around, seeing if it had any focus for him, then let it go with an impatient grunt. It was time to get moving. They had already wasted too much time.

  At the garages below, the manager of vehicles gave them precise instructions. The vehicles were economical, but of low performance. They could not be driven off the roads, which the hives kept cl
ear of overhanging foliage by cutting winter firewood along them. If visitors traveled without a guide, the route would be programmed into the vehicle before departure and could not be deviated from thereafter. The doors of the vehicle would be locked before they departed from Simidi-ala and would not unlock until they reached the first hostel. The same would apply between hostels. One did not get out of the vehicle between destinations.

  "What if we have a mechanical breakdown?" Trompe asked.

  "Press the alarm button in the vehicle and wait. The time will afford an excellent opportunity for meditation. Eventually someone will come to fetch you."

  "We can't hike to the nearest village?"

  "All worlds have their threats. We make rules to protect visitors from the threats present on Dinadh. Outside the vehicle, you might be injured, or even killed. Then your world would bring a complaint against our world. And our world would have to defend the complaint before the high Alliance courts. We would have to hire experts qualified to present cases before that court. We are a poor people. We cannot afford the expenses of litigation."

  Trompe muttered about this exchange to Lutha, concluding, "So much for exploration! Even though the route is programmed in, the vehicles aren't automatic, oddly enough. Evidently we can stop to rest or admire the view wherever we like, we just can't get out!"

  "You rejected the idea of a guide?" she asked curiously.

  He made a face. "The people here want us to hire a guide. They want it so firmly I feel we'll find out more without. During the trip we'll get a feel for the place, enough to be well acclimated when we arrive at Cochim-Mahn."

  "So be it, then." She smiled, indicating acceptance. She would have preferred to go quickly and get the matter over with, but it didn't really matter. They could go without a guide.

  The vehicle, though clumsy looking, was commodious, with both a sanitary compartment and a well-stocked food-service console. The food was off-planet, Lutha noted, prepackaged elsewhere and imported. Every meal they'd been served at the Edge had been off-planet food. Which made one wonder if planetary food was tasty enough for off-worlders. Or if there was enough of it. Of course, at the price they had paid to rent the vehicle, they could have been fed on ambrosia with enough left over to pay a year's expenses on Central!

  "Now if Leely will just leave his clothes on," Trompe remarked.

  His slightly sarcastic tone reminded Lutha of Leelson. Though she understood it, it angered her nonetheless. Fastigats could always empathize, always understand, except with Leely. They had no idea how or why he felt as he did. They were offended, as though they had reached out and been rudely rebuffed. She bit back an angry response. If Leelson himself had felt frustration, then Trompe was certainly entitled to a similar feeling.

  "Pity you have to be bothered with all this," she said, thinking it a pity she herself had to be.

  He made an impatient gesture. "Sorry. This is my job after all. You really couldn't have managed alone."

  "No," she said, mimicking his tone and surprised at the depth of her furious agreement. "I really could not have managed alone."

  Though their destination was a considerable distance north, they had first to go eastward from the coast, up a series of switchbacks on the face of a more or less vertical cliff until they reached the level highland that we, who live here, call the skylands. At first they were relieved to have reached the level road, but soon they found they made no more progress than previously as they traveled first eastward, then westward, then eastward again between the deep gorges that interdigitated the skylands from either side.

  "This is ridiculous," Trompe muttered, making yet another hundred-sixty-degree turn.

  "Dinadh at one time had a great deal more water than it has now," remarked Lutha. "These canyons must have been cut by sizable rivers."

  She peered down at the threadlike trickles glittering in the depths among clean-edged patches of green, letting her eyes move upward to the mesa tops, all of them like the one they were traversing, covered with low forest broken by occasional grassy glades.

  "Trompe. Stop!"

  He stopped obediently. "What?"

  "Animals." They were approaching an open glade where a group of small, woolly, long-necked animals grazed under the watchful care of herdsmen. "What are they doing?"

  "Eating grass," said Trompe. "Haven't you seen an animal before?"

  "I never have. Oh, sensurround, of course, but not a real one. What are the herdsmen doing? Twirling those things?"

  "Spindles. They're spinning thread from wool, or perhaps from wild cotton. It's in the chips I gave you."

  She nodded as Trompe started the vehicle once more, as they went slowly by. The herdsmen had a stout little wain with shutters at either end and head-high sections of woven-mesh panel racked at its sides. As they passed the group Lutha waved, receiving only the barest of blank-faced nods in return.

  "Was Dinadh this arid when the first settlers came?" Trompe asked as he maneuvered the vehicle along a road uncomfortably close to a sheer drop on one side. "Or did it change after?"

  Lutha let her subconscious seek the information. "It was as it is now. The first Alliance scholars to visit the planet were told the Dinadhi had come from another world and they 'remembered' emerging onto this world from their previous one through a hole in the ground. It's not an unusual origin myth. Other cultures have similar ones."

  "They were probably on one of the fabled lost ships,' " Trompe conjectured. "There've been enough of those to go around."

  She shrugged. "There have been 'lost ships,' but this is the only unidentified colony. I looked it up before we left Central. Except for the population on Dinadh, the Alliance ethnologists have always been able to identify the planet of origin, and that's true even when populations have ended up far from their original destinations."

  "But not here."

  "According to the stuff the Procurator gave me. No one knows for sure how the Dinadhi got here."

  "No missing ship with a Dinadhi-like society?"

  "No record of one."

  "No similar societies from which this could be an unrecorded offshoot?"

  "One theory had it they came from a frontier society beyond Hermes Sector. The world was called Vriat or Breadh; something like that. The colony on it disappeared."

  "The Ularians?"

  "Nobody knows what happened. They just disappeared, that's all."

  "There have been a lot of Nantaskan-speaking worlds that colonied out. Arriving from any of them makes more sense than this hole-in-the-ground story."

  She glanced at him sidewise. "There is a real site for the supposed emergence, Trompe. As a matter of fact, it's in a wide valley not many days' travel from Cochim-Mahn. Or so the maps say, at any rate."

  "A sacred site, no doubt," he said flippantly.

  "Oh, very sacred! It's the omphalos. Extra-special rites every third year, a Dinadh year being six hundred and a fraction days. Every third year they draw an additional day out of the omphalos, the navel of time. That doesn't quite do it, so every sixtieth year they have to pull two days. Tahs-uppi, the ceremony's called."

  "Meaning what? You're further along with the language than I am."

  She mused. "Tahs-uppi. Tasimi means the edge or the border. Well, actually it means 'our borders',' plural possessive. Tahs probably means something like end, or limit. There's a word … uppas, uppasim, uppasimi." She fell silent.

  "So?"

  "I was trying to figure out the ending. It has something to do with selection, I think. Part of the litany of Weaving Woman gives her the name of K'loch mahn uppasimi. Selector of our patterns. Well, not quite that. Chooser, intrinsic."

  "I don't quite get that."

  "Well, in our language we wouldn't say the rain chooses to fall. It just naturally falls. Weaving Woman is pattern, she doesn't choose it."

  "So the name means what? The end of pattern?"

  "The crux, the fulfillment. That would fit. Every hundred standard years, more or le
ss, they reach the fulfillment of the pattern, pull out an extra day or so, and start over."

  "With feasting, I suppose. Processions."

  "More likely fasting and prayer. Actually, I don't know. The chips you gave me merely mention Tahs-uppi and gave the date for the preceding one. When a ceremony is very holy, taboo, it's hard for an outsider to learn the details." She stared down into the abyss they were skirting. "The pattern is due to end fairly soon. Maybe we'll get a chance to ask about it."

  "I wonder what would happen," Trompe mused, turning the vehicle away from the canyon and toward the forest, where the road disappeared around patches of thorny growths, "if they didn't find one."

  "Find one what?" she asked, startled.

  "An extra day. When they went to fish one out of the navel hole."

  She laughed. "You're an idiot, you know, Trompe. What an idea." She chuckled, thinking about it, a kind of black joke on the Dinadhi. The high priest, or whoever, dipping into the omphalos with his what? His wand? His day hook? Slowly withdrawing it to the sound of drums and flutes, only to find it empty. No extra day. Gradually, as she thought on it and considered the implications, she stopped finding the idea at all funny.

  Toward evening they arrived at the hostel, the first one between Simidi-ala and Cochim-Mahn.

  "And not a moment too soon," Lutha muttered as she parked the vehicle and heard the doorlocks make a solid thunk as they disengaged. "I'm exhausted."

  Leely was sitting up, looking around himself with some interest.

  Lutha got out, sniffed the fragrant air, sighed, stretched, held out her arms to the boy, who came slowly into them, head turning as he tried to see everything at once.

  They were at the top end of yet another of the endless canyons, its branches and ramifications receding into the distance: carved buttes, slender pillars and towers, stepped ziggurats of stone, vertical walls pocked with caves, some of them occupied by busy hive communities or by the lonely bulk of abandoned hives, all thrown into brilliantly colored contrasts of fire and shade by the level rays of the setting sun. Sound came softly from the canyons, voices and drums, the high shriek of a bone flute, the hissing rainsound of rattles.