Raising The Stones (14 page)

Two persons had followed Sam from the settlement, had hidden among the ribbon-willows, had listened to his conversation with whomever he had been talking to. They had seen him put on his belt and his helmet. They had seen him sit on a hillside. They had heard him talking to someone, maybe to himself. There had been nothing wild or crazy or violent going on. Just a man dressed up and talking to himself.

“How often does he do this?” asked Dern Blass, who had come to Settlement One that afternoon, disguised as a peddler, in response to certain rumors he had heard. “How often does he sit out here talking to himself?”

“He rambles every other night or so,” said Africa. “Sometimes he walks a long way. Sometimes he sits and talks like this.”

“But he’s all right in the daytime?”

“So far,” she said. So far he had been. “So far he’s done his job as well as anyone could do it.” Africa thought this was true. She could not think of any improvements she herself could make over Sam’s performance.

“Any idea what he meant by … there aren’t any reasons good enough for some things …’?”

Africa shook her head. She didn’t know what Sam had meant. She knew what she would have meant. The words were true. There weren’t any reasons good enough for some things.

•
Jeopardy Wilm saw
himself as a future Team Leader, like Saturday’s mom. Jep felt his Aunt Africa was the best, better than any of the uncles, though they were all right. Africa’s Team Five was recognized, even among the children, as being extremely well led.

Thus, when it came time to cut the wolf-cedar for the roof of the temple the children were restoring, Jeopardy went to the sisterhouse next door to China’s to consult his aunt about the proper system for doing things.

“Let’s say,” he told her over her work table, while Saturday and her sibs did homework at the other end of it, “let’s say I’ve got fifteen men.” Actually he had eight, but fifteen sounded better. Friday Wilm, who was eleven and knew very well how many workers Saturday had, looked up and winked at him, but Jep pretended not to notice. “I’ve got fifteen men, and the job I have to get done is to cut wolf-cedar logs and transport them and lift them up about twelve feet.”

His aunt stared at him, trying to show interest without curiosity, ashamed of herself for feeling impatient. She had been up half the night, watching Sam with Dern Blass, and she was tired and unusually fractious. If she could have, she would have postponed this little conference. What the hell were these kids up to now?

“What’s the total weight of the logs and what’s the distance you need to move them?” she asked, keeping her voice calm with an effort.

Jep had been prepared for these questions and came up with reasonable estimates as to total weight and distance. After a computation session, in which Saturday joined, Africa suggested the use of a dilapidated utility vehicle which, while it was no longer sufficiently reliable to be used regularly in the fields, could certainly carry larger loads than twelve- to fourteen-year-olds would find possible without mechanical help.

When Jep had gone, Saturday said into her book, “Mom, do you feel all right?” The other children looked up expectantly, wanting to hear the answer to this question.

“Not really,” Africa remarked with an apologetic look at all of them. “I think I must be coming down with something.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t feel good,” Saturday said, giving her mother a troubled look. “You almost sounded as though you didn’t like Jep, and I know you do.”

Africa started to say she didn’t like anybody much right now, but decided that would be misinterpreted. Instead she merely smiled apologetically and hoped whatever was wrong with her and everyone else would soon go away.

Jep got his eight-man crew into the wolf-cedar forest the following day. For several days they cut, trimmed, and stacked the slender trunks, trying to pick ones that were straight and uniform in size, being careful not to clear-cut any area of the forest, a deed which Jep’s mom would have regarded as only slightly less dishonorable than genocide. When enough wood had been assembled in widely dispersed piles to do the entire job, Jep borrowed the utility vehicle Africa had offered, drove it slowly and solemnly to the forest, and then made a dozen trips back and forth to the temple. When he returned the vehicle to the equipment sheds, he was dirty, weary, and unmistakably triumphant.

The children started the roof the following afternoon. Jeopardy had promised everyone a potluck picnic when they got to the center. Someone—probably Gotoit Quillow, it was her kind of thing—swiped ale from the settlement brewery for the occasion, enough for the children to enjoy becoming a little high and happy. Though, when Jep came to think of it, it seemed they had felt that way most of the time since they had started work on the temple, which is why they kept coming back.

“Jep,” Gotoit asked from her sprawled position in the bottom of the completed trough, “what are we going to do with this place when we finish it?” Over their heads the neatly laid logs glimmered with the light that sparkled between them. “And how are we going to finish the roof? This’ll rain right through.”

Ignoring Gotoit’s first question, Saturday said, “First, we put a layer of straw over the cedar to keep the clay from coming through. I’ve already begged the straw from the meat foreman. He says it’s last year’s and he doesn’t need it for the animal pens. Then over that we put a layer of wet clay and straw, mixed. And when that dries, we thatch it with ribbon-willow.”

Willum R. Quillow, who, between sports practice sessions, spent as much time recumbent as possible, adjusted the pad of grasses he had accumulated for a cushion and asked, “What about the middle part. Over where the God goes. We haven’t done anything about a roof for that yet. It’s going to take bigger wood. The cedar sags if you cut pieces that long.”

“Trusses,” said Saturday and Jep at the same moment. The picture had appeared in their minds at once—triangular structures made of small logs, not too heavy to move, which could be assembled into a multisided peak. The settlement was built entirely of sponge panels. Neither Saturday nor Jeopardy could remember seeing a truss, but the pattern was there in their heads.

No one noticed that Gotoit’s original question had gone unanswered.

Over the next several days, the children cut, hauled, < trimmed, and joined with stickum and lashings of rope the wolf-cedar logs that made up a conical roof for the center of the temple. Over the next several months they worked at thatching the roof. When they needed some extra muscle to haul their carefully constructed roof-cone over the central well, several adults stopped by to see what was happening. The grownups seemed unsurprised to find themselves helping and were sufficiently unimpressed by that fact not to make anything much of it. Africa mentioned to China something about the children’s project, but China, along with everyone else, paid very little attention.

When the roof was complete, the children finished up the last few bits of mosaic, washed the stone walls inside and out with borrowed brushes and buckets, and then went back to the settlement to resume their more usual recreations. The rebuilt temple stood as they had left it, sound and tight, thatch and walls gleaming, needing only a coat of mud plaster and a door to look almost exactly as the temple of Bondru Dharm had done, before the death of the God.

•
Specialists arrived from
Central Management to duplicate, first, the tests China Wilm had already done, and then the results of those tests. No one could find any reason whatsoever for production to have dropped, and no one could think of any possible way to get it up again. Settlement One, despite thirty-odd years of above normal crop production and below average internal conflict, seemed destined to be one with Settlements Two through Eleven: simply average.

•     •     •

•
Once each ten
days or so Dern Blass held a staff meeting in his office, complete with lunch laid on and assorted interesting drinkables. In Dern Blass’s opinion, food and drink went some way to ameliorate the boredom he almost always experienced during meetings. He knew that no matter what the purpose of the gathering, Jamice Bend would take offense at Horgy Endure’s handling of some situation with personnel implications; Horgy would suggest yet again that he should have the last word on any personnel decisions involving production; Spiggy Fettle would point out—in either his who-cares or his God-this-is-portentous voice, depending upon where he was in his joy-pain cycle—that the organizational structure of CM was mandated by Hobbs Transystem, and there wasn’t much they could do about it; and Zilia Makepeace would raise some angry though specious concern about incursions against the natives, all of whom were dead, Departed, and thus beyond incursion.

Today Sam Girat had been summoned to Central Management to take part in the meeting, so maybe the others would behave themselves, though Dern didn’t count on it. Dern was trying to think of some way in which their behavior might be permanently altered when his ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of Tandle Wobster who gave him a knowing look, to which he returned one of bashful innocence. This was their usual relationship. The perfect secretary, Tandle. Self-effacing. Modest. Mean as sin.

“What’s on the agenda this week,” he asked.

“Spiggy’s dramatizing about the shortfall at Settlement One,” she said, as she stacked papers at each place around the conference table. Dern was a primitive. He liked paper. He liked something he could fiddle with, doodle on, write scurrilous comments in the margins of.

“What about Zilia? What’s she up to?” Dern asked.

“She has convinced herself yet again that the earliest settlers committed genocide against the Departed.”

“The shortfall is something we’ll have to deal with,” growled Dern. “Since I’ve asked Sam to come in, put that item first and Zilia dead last. We can hope Sam will have left before she starts accusing him of anything.”

Tandle had time to enter the revised agenda before the first of the staff members arrived: Horgy Endure, trailing his trio of girlies. If Dern had no objection, he murmured to Tandle, they could sit along the wall and observe. Dern had, as usual, no objection, said Tandle.

“Another of your usual beauty pageants?” commented a chill voice as Jamice Bend stalked from the door to the: table, flicking a dismissive finger at the pile of papers before her chair. She moved like some creature from a jungle, all sinew and grace and predatory intention. Her red hair was wound tight on top of her head, the knot pierced by two Phansuri spirit rods, which gleamed green with cabochon gems. Whenever Tandle saw them, she gritted her teeth at the arrogance which could stick millennia-old artifacts in its hair. Nonetheless, the effect was striking—as emerald-eyed, ochre-skinned Jamice well knew.

“Morning,” tolled the third member of the meeting, slouching across the room and into his chair, not looking at anyone, his ugly face made plainer yet by its pained expression, lank beige hair dangling across his rippled forehead, his lithe, long-muscled form twisted into a tortured skein. Spiggy’s eyebrows, which could be clownish, were this morning raised at the center like a mask of tragedy. “Morning,” Spiggy tolled again, his voice a dolorous bell rung across watery meadows.

Tandle sighed. When Spiggy was up, he was delightful, though wearing. When Spiggy was down, he drained energy from a room as though someone had pulled the plug. Abruptly, the day seemed dim. Tandle sighed again and turned up the light and heat. By the time this meeting was over, Dern would be fit for nothing but escape. He said having Spiggy around during a depressive cycle was like giving a continuous blood transfusion.

Of course, Spiggy could have been treated. Any of them in the room, Tandle often thought,
should
have been treated, including Dern himself. The technician in charge of the CM medical center was totally competent to straighten Spiggy out, but Spiggy’s parents had been Thyker Baidees, High Baidees, a sect which rejected all psychotropic intervention because (supposedly, though Tandle had her doubts) the prophetess had commanded so. Spiggy wasn’t a Baidee observant. He held to no other tenets of the faith—most certainly not the elaborate dress or the complex and difficult food taboos—but this one canon he was adamant about.

“Am I late?” Zilia Makepeace asked from just inside the door. “I was afraid I was late.” She knew she wasn’t. Dern wasn’t present yet, so she couldn’t be late. It was her way to start each conversation with an apology, so she could be offended when the apology was accepted. The response she expected now was, “Yes, you’re late, Zilia. Only a little.” At which she would be annoyed, pointing out that Dern was not yet present.

“No, not in the least,” said Tandle offhandedly. “In fact, you’re a little early, but then, so is everyone else.”

“Come on in, Zilia. Don’t hover,” sneered Jamice, totally wiping out any good Tandle’s stratagem might have accomplished.

“I wasn’t aware,” Zilia responded in a defensive voice verging upon anger, “that I was hovering.”

So much for peace and tranquility.

Sam had been waiting outside until the staff assembled. Now he strode to the table, his tall, vital presence making the rest of them seem juiceless and pale, even Jamice, even Horgy—poor Horgy, who surprised a couple of calculating glances thrown Sam’s way by Horgy’s very own new brunette.

Tandle subvocalized into her corn-link that everyone was present, and Dern came through the door smiling, nodding to each of them, asking about this and that, giving Sam a firm hand on the shoulder, skipping over Spiggy the moment he looked at his face, kissing Zilia’s hand, admiring Jamice’s hair, slapping Horgy on the shoulder, smiling at the wide-eyed row of trainees along the wall, being the good fellow all round, finally seating himself at the head of the table to reach for the piled papers topped by the revised agenda.

“Spiggy,” he said in an interested tone, after they had all settled down, “we’ve asked Sam to come in today to talk to us about the shortfall at Settlement One. What’s your final count?”