Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
The marvel, the mystery – and almost always the exaltation – came when he left deepsoil. He anticipated the moment with a kind of hunger, never knowing exactly when it would happen, always sure it would.
He led the group through the sparsely populated area to the west of the citadel, past heavily planted fields of euphoric brou, Jubal’s only export crop. Behind them lay the citadel, the food crop fields, the dwellings, the nondenominational chapel, the service and entertainment center. Behind them lay Deepsoil Five: very ordinary, very real, very day-to-day….
And all around them lay dream country.
They stopped at the edge of a brou field to put soft shoes on the mules while Tasmin picked pods for each of them, a privilege that Brou Distribution Ltd. granted only to ‘licensed Tripsingers going into peril.’ The pomposity of the phrase never failed to amuse Tasmin. Any kid who was fast on his feet could pick brou under the noses of the field guards, and often did. In the last analysis, however, no matter how pompous the organization was, they all worked for BDL; BDL who maintained the citadels and paid for the caravans and the Tripsingers to get them through, and for the Explorers to find the way, and for the farmers to grow the food they all ate, and all the infrastructure that kept the whole thing moving. Tripsingers, Explorers, mule breeders, service center employees, hundreds of thousands of them, all working, in the end, for BDL.
‘May we achieve passage and safe return,’ Tasmin intoned, cleaving to the ritual, distributing the pods.
‘Amen.’ A stuttered chorus from the first-timers amid a crisp shattering of dry pods. They chewed and became decidedly cheerful. Tasmin smiled, a little cynically. The brou-dizzy would have worn off by the time they came near a Presence.
Soon the planted fields gave way to uncultivated plains, sloping gently upward toward the massif that formed a sheersided wall between the deepsoil pocket of Five and all the shallow soiled areas beyond. The stubby, imported trees gave way to taller growths, mythically slender and feathery, less like trees than like the plumes of some enormous bird. They smelled faintly spicy and resinous, the smell of Jubal itself. Among the grasses, smaller shrubs arrayed themselves like peacock’s tails, great fans of multicolored, downy leaves, turning slowly to face the sun. Out in the prairie, singly or in groups, stood small Watchlets no taller than a man. They glowed like stained glass, squeaking and muttering as the wagon passed. Tasmin noted one or two that were growing closer to the road than was safe. He had not brought demolition equipment along on this trip, and in any case he preferred to pass the word and leave it to the experts. He made quick notes, sighting on the horizon.
The balloon-tired wagon was quiet. The mules wore flexible cushioned shoes. There were no rattling chains or squeaking leathers. More than one party had met doom because of noisy equipment – or so it was assumed. They rode silently, Jamieson on the seat of the wagon, Tasmin and the students on their soft-shod animals. Part of the sense of mystery came from this apprehensive quiet. Part came from the odors that always seemed to heighten Tasmin’s perception of the world around him. Part came from the intrinsic unlikelihood of what they would attempt to do.
That unlikelihood became evident when they wound their way to the top of the mighty north-south rampart and looked down at what waited there. At Tasmin’s gesture, they gathered closely together, the mules crowded side to side.
‘What you see before you, people,’ Tasmin whispered, ‘is the so-called easy side of the Watchers.’ He didn’t belabor the point. They needed only a good look at what loomed on either side of their path.
Before them the road dropped abruptly downward to curve to the left around the South Watcher. A few dozen South Watchlings stood at the edge of the road, tapering monoliths of translucent green and blue with fracture lines splitting the interiors into a maze of refracted light, the smallest among them five times Tasmin’s height. Behind the Watchlings began the base of the South Watcher itself, a looming tower of emerald and sapphire, spilling foliage from myriad ledges, crowned with flights of gyre-birds that rose in a whirling, smokelike cloud around the crest, five hundred feet above.
On the north side of the road a crowd of smaller North Watchlings shone in hues of amethyst and smoke, and the great bulk of the North Watcher hung above them, a cliff formed of moonstone and ashy quartz, though chemists and geologists argued that the structure of the Watcher was not precisely either of these. In his mind, Tasmin said ‘emerald’ and ‘moonstone’ and ‘sapphire.’ Let the chemists argue what they really were; to him whether they were Presences hundreds of feet tall, or ’lings a tenth that size, or ’lets, smaller than a man, they were all sheer beauty.
Between the Watchers, scattered among the Watchlings, was the wreckage of many wagons and a boneyard of human and animal skeletons, long since picked clean. Behind the Watchers to both north and south extended the endless line of named and unnamed Presences that made up the western rampart of Deepsoil Five, cutting it off from the rest of the continent except through this and several similar passes for which proven Passwords existed.
Jamieson feigned boredom by sprawling on the trip wagon seat, although he himself had only been out twice before. Refnic, James, and Clarin perched on their mules like new hats at spring festival, so recently accoutered by the citadel Tripmaster as to seem almost artificial, like decorated manikins. ‘Put your hoods back,’ Tasmin advised them quietly. ‘Push up your sleeves and fasten them with the bands. That’s what the bands are for, and it gets your hands out in the open where you need them. I know the sleeves are stiff, but they’ll soften up in time.’ Tasmin’s own robes were silky from repeated washings and mendings. The embroidered cuffs fell in gentle folds from the bands, and the hood had long ago lost its stiff lining. ‘Put the reins in the saddle hook to free your hands. That’s it.’
With heads and arms protruding from the Tripsingers’ robes, the students looked more human and more vulnerable, their skulls looking almost fragile through the short hair that had been allowed to grow in anticipation of their robing but was still only an inch or so long. They could not take their eyes from the Watchers, a normal reaction. Even experienced caravaners sometimes sat for an hour or more simply looking at a Presence as though unable to believe what they saw. Most passengers traveled inside screened wagons, often dosed with tranquilizers to avoid hysteria and the resultant fatal noise. These students were looking on the Presences at close range for the first time. Their heads moved slowly, scanning the monstrous crystals, from those before them to all the others dwindling toward the horizon. South, at the limit of vision, a mob of pillars dwarfed by distance marked the site of the Far Watchlings with the monstrous Black Tower hulked behind them, the route by which they would return. They knew that there, as here, the soil barely covered the crystals. Everything around them vibrated to the eager whining, buzzing, squeaking cacophony that had been becoming louder since they moved toward the ridge.
The Watchers knew they were there.
‘Presumably you’ve decided how you want to assign this?’ Tasmin usually let his first trippers decide who sang what, so long as everyone took equal responsibility. ‘All right, move it along. Perform or retreat, one or the other. The Presences are getting irritated.’ Tasmin controlled his impatience. They could have moved a little faster, but at least they weren’t paralyzed. He had escorted more than one group that went into a total funk at the first sight of a Presence, and at least one during which a neophyte, paralyzed with fear, had flung himself at a Presence.
‘Clarin will sing it, sir, if you don’t mind. James and I will do the orchestral effects.’ Refnic was a little pale but composed. Clarin seemed almost hypnotized, her dark brows drawn together in a concentrated frown, deep hollows in her cheeks as she sucked them in, moistening her tongue.
‘Get on with it then.’
The mules hitched to the trip wagon were trained to pull at a steady pace, no matter what was going on. Refnic climbed into the wagon and settled at the console while James crouched over the drums. Clarin urged her animal forward, reins clipped to the saddle hook, arms out.
‘Tanta tara.’ The first horn sounds from the wagon, synthesized but not recorded. Somehow the Presences always knew the difference. Recorded Passwords caused almost instant retaliation. The drum entered, a slow beat, emphatic yet respectful. Duma duma duma. Then the strings.
‘Arndaff duh-roomavah,’ Clarin sang in her astonishingly deep voice, bright and true as a bell. ‘Arndaff, duh-roomavah.’ With the first notes, her face had relaxed and was now given over to the music in blind concentration.
The squeaking buzz beneath their feet dwindled gradually to silence. The mules moved forward, slowly, easily on their quiet shoes, the muffled sound of their feet almost inaudible.
Flawlessly, the string sounds built to a crescendo. The drum again, horns, now a bell, softly, and Clarin’s voice again. ‘Sindir, sindir, sindir dassalam awoh.’
The mules kept up their steady pace, Clarin riding with Tasmin close behind, then the wagon on its soft-tired wheels, and the two riderless animals following. The synthesizer made only those sounds it was required to make. Muffled wheels and hooves were acceptable to the Presences, though any engine sound, no matter how quiet, was not. No mechanical land or aircraft of any kind could move about on Jubal except over deepsoil where the crystalline Presences were cushioned by fifty meters or more of soft earth from the noise going on above them. Since such pockets of soil were usually separated from other similar areas by mighty cliffs of ranked Presences, there was no effective mechanical transportation on the planet except along coastal areas and over the seas.
‘Dassalom awoh,’ Clarin sang as they moved around the curve to the left. ‘Bondars delumin sindarlo.’ Few women could manage the vocals for the Passwords needed around Deepsoil Five, though Tasmin had heard there were a lot of female Tripsingers in the Northwest. He gave her a smile of encouragement and gestured her to continue, even though they were in safe territory. If there had been a caravan with them, the Tripsingers and trip wagon would have pulled aside at this point and gone on with the Petition and Justification variations until every vehicle had passed. Tasmin felt she might as well get the practice.
Clarin began the first variation. If anything at all had been learned about the Presences, it was that they became bored rather easily. The same phrases repeated more than a few times were likely to bring a violent reaction.
At the end of the second variation, Tasmin signaled for the concluding statement, the Expression of Gratitude. Clarin sang it. Then there was silence. They pulled away from the Watchers, no one speaking.
A thunderous crack split the silence behind them, a shattering crash echoed from the far cliffs in retreating volleys of echoes. Tasmin swung around in his saddle, horrified, thinking perhaps the wagon had not come clear, but it was a good ten meters beyond the place where the smoking fragments of crystal lay scattered. Behind them, one of the Watchlings had violently shed its top in their general direction.
‘Joke,’ muttered Jamieson. ‘Ha, ha.’
Clarin was white-faced and shivering. ‘Why?’ she begged, eyes frightened. ‘Why? I didn’t miss a note!’
‘Shhh.’ Tasmin, overwhelmed with wonder, could not speak for a moment. He took her arm to feel her shaking under his hand, every muscle rigid. He drew her against him, pulled the others close with his eyes and beckoning hands, whispered to her, and in doing so spoke to them all. ‘Clarin, I’ve never heard the Watcher score sung better. It wasn’t you. What you have to remember is that the Presences – they, well, they’re unpredictable. They do strange things.’ He stroked the back of the girl’s head, like a baby’s with the short hair.
‘Joke,’ murmured Jamieson again. ‘It was laughing at us.’
‘Jamieson, we can do without that anthropomorphic motif!’ Tasmin grated, keeping his voice level and quiet with difficulty. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to have to talk, wanted only to feel the adrenaline pulsing through him at the shuddering marvel of the Presences. With an effort, he focused on the frightened first trippers. ‘These are crystals, very complicated crystals. Certain sound combinations cause them to damp their own signals and stop their own electrical activity. It’s complex, it’s badly understood, but it isn’t supernatural.’
‘I wasn’t thinking supernatural,’ Jamieson objected, the everlasting rebel. ‘Laughter isn’t supernatural!’
‘It is if a crystal mountain does it,’ Tasmin said with finality, aware of the dichotomy between what he said and what he felt. What he said was doctrine, yes, but was it truth? He didn’t know and he doubted if any of those promulgating the position knew for sure. Still, one didn’t keep a well-paid position in the academic hierarchy by allowing unacceptable notions to be bandied about in front of first-timers, or by speculating openly about them oneself, particularly when the BDL manual laid out the official position in plain language. It was in BDL’s interest that the Presences be considered merely … mineral. What was in BDL’s interest was in Tasmin’s interest. He contented himself with a fierce look in Jamieson’s direction that was countered with one of bland incomprehension. The trouble was that he and Jamieson understood one another far too well.
He gave Clarin a shake and a pat, then watched with approval as she sat up on the mule and wiped her face. She was very pale but composed. Her hair made a dark shadow on her skull, and the skin over her high, beautifully modeled cheekbones was softly flushed. She had made a quick recovery.
‘Ooh, that makes me seethe,’ she grated. ‘I’d like to …’
‘To demolish a few Presences, right? I know the feeling. Look at them, though, Clarin! Look down there!’
He pointed down the long slope in front of them where the False Eagers stood. She followed his gaze. Light scintillated from the Eagers in ringed rainbows, corruscating and glittering, a rhapsodic symphony of color, the flocks of gyre-birds twisting around them, a swirling garment of changeable smoke.