Raising the Stones Page 6

  “We can try, can’t we?” Sam asked, still dancing. He had led the ominous, silent driver almost to the door and was now turning to bring him back again. “Can’t risk leading him outside. He might see somebody else moving.

  “I’ve got the ampules,” whispered Jun.

  “You think you could … ah, put them down somewhere in the direction I’m moving in. Like on the breaker guard of that small harvester?”

  Jun moved quietly toward the harvester and sneaked the kit onto the guard.

  “Open!” pleaded Sam. “For God’s sake, man, I’m not going to have time to open it.”

  Jun took the kit down again and opened it, shaking half a dozen of the ampules into his hand and laying them in a pile on the flat guard.

  “Now,” said Sam, still conversationally, still dancing, still keeping the man moving, the bar moving, the expressionless, silent man moving. “Now, there’s an emergency med alert over by the kit. Would you please go press that button and say, very clearly, that we need restraints and immobilizers.”

  “Sam, you could at least take that cutter into your hand,” pleaded Close.

  “I need my hands,” said Sam. “Why don’t you get over behind that harvester, Theor. So Hever won’t see you when we come around.”

  Theor went.

  The silent man attacked, rushing Sam, swinging the bar in a lethal arc. Sam moved to one side, put out a foot, tripped his attacker and danced away, toward the harvester. The ampules were within reach and he grabbed them, dropping all but two into his pocket. He stripped off the needle guards and palmed the two ampules. As Hever came up off the floor, Sam sped by, slapping him on the back with both hands.

  He dropped the empty ampules and palmed two more.

  “Come on, Hever,” he whispered. “Give old Sam the bar, like a nice guy, will you.”

  Hever did not hear, did not care, did not change expression. The two ampules might as well have been water. If anything, he moved slightly faster. The bar swung again, missing Sam’s head by inches. Sam ducked under the swing and slapped Hever on the chest with both hands. Hever clutched at him. Sam dropped and rolled, coming to his feet with his hands already at his pocket, reaching for the last two ampules.

  “Restraints and immobilizers,” Jun was saying, over and over again. “There’s been a fuel pod leak. We need restraints and immobilizers. Hurry, please.”

  “Sam, for God’s sake,” pleaded Theor Close. “You could at least take off one of his legs. He can be sent to Phansure and grow a new one!”

  “Not soon he can’t,” panted Sam. “He’d be out of commission for a long time, and I need him. Production’s already down.” He darted forward, then back, then forward. “Besides, it’s painful losing a limb. It’s painful growing new ones!”

  The bar swung again. This time it caught Sam a glancing blow, a mere brush down one arm, and the arm fell at his side, the hand clenching, the ampule dropping.

  “Damn,” said Sam. “Oh, damn.” He dropped to one knee and picked the ampule up again, trying to bend the arm. It moved reluctantly.

  Hever moved in, the bar swinging ….

  And then he fell. All at once. Forward, almost where Sam was kneeling. He fell, and squirmed briefly, and was still.

  Three settlers appeared at the barn door with restraints and immobilizer guns.

  “Is he dead?” asked one.

  “He’s got four ampules of painkiller in him,” said Sam. “And he could still come out of that raging. Don’t take any chances with him.”

  “What about you, Sam?”

  Sam shrugged with a decidedly pained expression. “I think my arm is broken.”

  Theor and Betrun went with Sam to the infirmary, and stayed with him while his arm was examined and put into an immobilizer, while he was given a shot of quick-heal, while he was given a painkiller of his own and told to go home and rest for the remainder of the day.

  “Sorry,” said Sam to the Phansuris. “It’s not broken, but I don’t feel much like going back to work.”

  “That’s all right,” murmured Theor Close. “Really, Sam, that’s all right.”

  “You can go back and finish what we’d started,” Sam suggested. He stumbled a little, and they both caught him, one at either side and turned him in the direction of his brotherhouse.

  “We could do that,” said Betrun Jun. “Tell me, Sam, was that man—Hever, was he a friend of yours?”

  Sam looked at him blankly. “Not particularly. No.”

  “Ah,” said Jun. “Well. I guess we could go do a little work. Then maybe we could … oh, go sightseeing until you’re feeling better.”

  “I don’t know what you’d sightsee. It’s all pretty much like this,” Sam gestured at the fields around them with his good arm. “North of us is the escarpment,” he pointed again, toward the single upland that twisted like an angular snake around the girdle of the world, edged on both sides by precipitous and columned cliffs. “That’s where all the ruins of the Owlbrit villages are, if you’re interested in ruins. There are some lakes up there, some wildlife, a thing called the upland omnivore. It eats most everything, including rocks for its gizzard. You might see one of those.”

  dangerous, I mean, I’d rather like someone like that to be in charge.”

  “I’d already decided that.”

  Theor patted his colleague on the shoulder. “Let’s go get that fuel pod put away before someone else gets hurt.”

  • Sam went into his brotherhouse in no very pleasant mood. He was hurting, and now that the whole incident was over, he felt a little foolish getting injured that way. It wasn’t … well, it wasn’t heroic. He should have moved faster. Old Hever wasn’t that quick, not usually. The painkiller was making him feel drugged and remote, and on top of all that he was annoyed at the two Phansuris. He knew Hobbs Land wasn’t much, from the point of view of adventure—Theseus himself said that—but it wasn’t up to two damned smart-ass Phansuris to tell him so.

  Sam dug a bottle of wine from the place he had hidden it and sat down in his own room to drink it and play with his books until he got sleepy or felt better, one. Playing with his books generally improved his mood.

  He had taken up the craft of bookbinding a few years before he became Topman, and he kept it up, despite the many claims on his attention and the assumptions of others that he would not be able to continue with the hobby.

  “You won’t have time for your books anymore,” his mother had sympathized after he had been selected Topman. “What a pity. Oh, I do like them, Sammy. They smell so good.” Which, indeed, they did, being rare leathers and woods, whatever he could lay hands on at the artisans’ market at CM. The pages were generated by Archives, of course, though Sam had taken some pains in determining the size of them, and the type style and the spacing and arrangement of paragraphs. He had selected the pictures also, deciding for each book whether it was to be illustrated in the style of woodcuts or of engravings or of paintings, or even with something that looked like photographic images, any of which Archives could produce as easily as it could spew plain print. Each book had one or more of the stories he had found in the Archives—he had done Theseus’s story first—each one modified and augmented by Sam, written and rewritten until it suited him, until it was properly heroic. When they were printed, he enclosed them in hard, well-made covers with fancy endpapers handmade by a woman in one of the other settlements, and with titles embossed in gold. When Sam finished a volume, it looked very much like the ones the Archives showed him, the ones the museums kept in vacuum containers, their millenia-old names going back even to Manhome.

  “They smell so good,” Maire had said, never thinking of reading what was inside. She had never read an old-style book. Outside the universities or the great libraries, few people had. If you wanted to know what was in some old volume, it was so much easier to ask the stage to summarize for you, or do a commentary, or even dramatize it, if you were in the mood for that.

  “Why do you take all this time?”
Sal had asked, holding the children back from the shelves, lest they pull one of the things out onto the floor and ruin it. Sam, however, had reached for his favorite volume and had sat down with one child in the lap and one over each shoulder as he showed them the pictures, fascinated them with the story of the hero of ancient Manhome time whose father had left him a sword and a pair of shoes buried under a heavy stone. And then, when he found his father at last, he was sent away to fight the wicked Minotaur.

  “Why would the King do that?” breathed Sam’s oldest nephew. “The boy just got there.”

  “What’s a father?” asked the next oldest.

  “Like a progy,” Sam had replied, slightly annoyed. “And the King knew his son wanted to be a hero, so he sent him to do something heroic.” The Archives hadn’t really said that, but Sam thought that’s the way it should have been, and Theseus had not contradicted him.

  “I could have been safe in Athens,” Theseus had told him. “But mere safety wouldn’t have been worthy of me. So I volunteered to go to Minos. I went to face the Minotaur with a song in my heart. At least, so my face said.” He turned up his lips and became a mask, beaming with confidence and courage.

  “I know,” Sam had breathed. “You had to face danger and death without flinching to be worthy of the King.”

  Sal’s comment was, “The hero and his father did get together at the end of the story, I suppose?” She said it with a certain wry emphasis, which Sam ignored. “That’s the point of the story, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” said Sam, remembering that the story hadn’t ended all that happily. The hero’s father had died, at the end, because of something the hero did, or didn’t do. But then, that was destiny, working itself out. He had been destined to die all along.

  Sam also read the children the story of Heopthy Jorn, who promised his father he would care for the kingdom, whose older brother imprisoned him as a sacrifice for the horrible Chagrun, which was eating the people, and how he escaped and came back to win the kingdom as his own and father many sons.

  “There’s a lot of fathering in those legends,” Sal commented, disapprovingly. “A lot of fathering, a lot of kinging, a lot of death and violence, and very little uncleing and ordinary kindly living. We are a matrilineal society, Sam, and there’s good reason for that.” Sal wholly approved of the society the way it was, but then she’d been too young to remember anything else.

  “Some of the legends do say uncles,” Sam had admitted, a little wearily, wondering momentarily why he bothered to show Sal anything at all. She was so unrelentingly … female! Tricky, as Theseus said. Not at all understanding.

  “The children could punch up Archives and get the same thing,” Sal had persisted, still curious as to why Sam did these things. She had always wondered why Sam did the things he did.

  Sam had not bothered to set her straight. They couldn’t punch up Archives and get any such thing. They could get an account of the hero, sure enough, comparing him with a hundred other similar tales and telling what he symbolized, and what the monsters meant, and what the psychological significance was of the tensions between the hero and the King, but one couldn’t get the tale itself. It was Sam who had restored the tale to itself, by pulling it out of the commentary which was strangling it and giving it back its power and blood. If anyone wanted to know the true stories, they would have to take one of Sam’s books and read.

  Now, sipping his wine and stroking the soft bindings, Sam reflected that he had never answered Sal’s “why.” Why was simply that he needed to hold the past in this way, to preserve the tales, to make sure he didn’t lose them as he would if they were left in the Archives, lose them as he had lost his dad, lost his whip when he came to Hobbs Land. People vanished, and their stories died with them or were left behind to be buried under a thousand other things. It wasn’t enough that they were in the Archives. Things could stay buried in the Archives forever, like geological strata, layer on layer, never to be raised up again. Here on his shelves, the ancient stories were like bones dug up and made live again, fleshed out, peopled, creatured, whole. He couldn’t make them for his own son (which rankled), but he could for Sal’s sons. When they were old enough to come live with him here in the brotherhouse, then they would read the books together. He had never mentioned that to Sal.

  He had mentioned it to Theseus, when he met with him out at the old temple during the night watches. After Bondru Dharm had died, Sam hadn’t seen the hero for quite a long time, but then he showed up again, out north of the settlement, even stronger and more sure than he had been before. Theseus had understood about the books, about tales, about epics and how important they were. He had told Sam to look in his books for tales of monsters, for undoubtedly there were some Sam could fight here on Hobbs Land, to get in shape for his eventual quest.

  Sam doubted there were monsters, but he could not doubt the large number of very heavy boulders Theseus found for him to turn over. Sometimes Sam woke at dawn, far from the town, sore and exhausted from the night’s effort.

  “Patience,” Theseus always told him, laughing. “The time will come.”

  Sam, drinking his wine and stroking the covers of his books with his uninjured hand, leafing through them in search of pictures of monsters and heroes, forgot the minor annoyance of the Phansuri engineers and hoped the time of his own destiny would come while he still had the strength to meet it.

  • In Settlement One, the favorite game of the children of the middle school (lifeyears ten through fourteen) had for some time been “Exploring Ninfadel.” Ninfadel was the larger of the Ahabarian moons, home of the Porsa, one of System’s three indigenous intelligent races. What the Porsa were, and how they were, was sufficient explanation for the fact that, except for a guard post, Ninfadel was left strictly alone. It was also sufficient reason for all adults to consider playing at Porsa utterly disgusting, which was probably the reason the children enjoyed it so.

  Recently, however, there had been a new game. The children didn’t call it anything except “Going out to Play,” which children had been using for millenia as an excuse for being elsewhere. This particular play was the discovery of the cousins, Saturday and Jeopardy Wilm, who were friends, possible sweethearts (though at around fourteen lifeyears they weren’t ready to admit that to themselves), but constant companions in any case. After afternoon classes, when Saturday wasn’t scheduled for a voice lesson and Jeopardy wasn’t at sports practice, they often went exploring beyond the northern edge of the settlement. In every other direction, cultivated fields stretched for mile after endless mile, but north was the creek with its groves of ribbon willows, north were the ruined temples on their gentle prominence, north was a wide stretch of rising, rocky, undisturbed semi-wilderness reaching all the way to the escarpment.

  Though Saturday was slim and dark and Jeopardy was light and sturdy, there was a certain likeness in the expression of the eyes and the curve of the mouths and the tenderness with which their hands found one another’s sometimes, quite by accident. They had discovered the new amusement on a certain afternoon shortly before Saturday’s lifeyear celebration.

  “I want to find some glaffis,” Saturday had announced. “I want it to flavor my birthday cakes.” She had tossed her head back, making her dark hair ripple.

  “You want glaffis-flavored birthday cakes!” Jep had exclaimed. “Yech.”

  “It’s almost like new-cinnamon,” she had argued.

  “And we’re out of new-cinnamon.”

  “It’s nothing like new-cinnamon. It’s more like … like famug.”

  “Honestly, Jep, your taste buds are all on your ears. When did you ever taste famug? Huh? Your mom and my mom talk about famug, but CM hasn’t brought in any famug since our moms were little girls because the blight on Thyker wiped out all the famug plantations, and they ran out of what was left in storage, so when did you ever taste it, huh?”

  “Mom told me what it tastes like,” he said, trying to remember if she had.

 
; “That’s what I meant. Your taste buds are in your ears.”

  “Well, I know what glaffis tastes like, and I still say, yech. Don’t expect me to eat any.”

  “Wait until you’re invited.”

  “I’ll be glad to.”

  They had left the edge of the settlement behind them and were crossing a brookside line of ribbon-willows, beyond which the ruins of two old temples sprawled in the amber sun of afternoon.

  “If you really want the stuff, I saw some growing inside one of these temples,” Jeopardy offered.

  Saturday made a face. She’d been into the old temples now and then, along with others, when they were exploring or playing last man, but she didn’t really like being there. Something about the arches or the way the floors scooped made her slightly uncomfortable, like certain styles of music, kind of creepy. However, she didn’t dislike them enough to complain about going there. Provided they didn’t stay too long.

  They splashed through the narrow stream, circled two squatty ribbon-willow trunks, parted the straplike leathery foliage, which hung in curtains around the tree, and walked slowly up the slope toward the temples. From this angle the temples looked like building blocks, each a round fat lower layer with a narrower chunk on top.

  “They’re funny looking,” opined Saturday. “Like a muffin with a candle stuck in the middle.”

  “In the middle is where the God lived,” Jeopardy instructed her. “Like Bondru Dharm. And they wouldn’t look so funny if they had roofs on them.” They clambered over fallen stones and piles of trash to reach the opening and went through it onto the narrow flat place inside. Before them the floor swooped down in a gentle arc, then up at the far side to the base of the stone ringwall perforated by grilled arches. Over this declivity stretched a radiating series of arches, each outer leg buried in the outer wall, each inner leg resting on the ringwall. Saturday decided that, from the inside, the thing was shaped like the doughnuts Africa made sometimes, when she felt like it.