Raising The Stones (22 page)

Next beyond Phansure was Celphius, a frozen planet whose gem-rich rings were inhabited mostly by prospectors. Beyond Celphius was giant Tandorees, with more rings and dozens of possibly habitable moons of its own: gassy Tandorees, hot with its own belly rumblings. And after Tandorees came blue Siphir and far, cold Omnibus, and that was all, save the comets and the trash and the occasional strange visitor that came plunging in from outer darkness to fling itself into a sun or around them and out into forever-black once more.

Nothing ever came of the far-out colonization schemes. When all was said and done and the Blight was truly gone, it turned out that the habitable planets and moons had been hospitable enough to make room for the frightened and the desperate. Once they had departed, Thyker had found itself greatly depleted but much more homogenous. By coincidence (though there were those who alleged otherwise), the largest number of surviving and remaining inhabitants on Thyker had been High Baidee, devotees of the Overmind, followers of the prophetess, Morgori Oestrydingh, who had appeared on Thyker a thousand years before through a Door which no one had known was there.

The Door had been and still was—if anyone wanted to go look at it—near an oasis park a little beyond the western suburbs of Serena. It most resembled a twisted loop of timeworn metal set on a spacious dais of native stone, which, because of its undoubted antiquity and its convenient location, had acquired a certain mythic reputation and had come to be used as a site for all kinds of concerts and celebrations.

On that dais, during the solemn celebration of the bicentennial of the colonization of Thyker, while the patriarch of a local sect was delivering his annual blessing of the herds (drought-tolerant vorgashirs resulting from a cross between the ancient Manhome camel and a horny lizardlike creature found originally in the Vlees System), the twisted monument suddenly lit up with a curtain of fire and a dragon came through. The patriarch’s blessing was being recorded for posterity, and thus, perforce, the arrival of the dragon was recorded also: a great horned and callused beast with fangs and a fiery mane. Said some. Actually, the dragon did not show up terribly well on playback. Everyone saw something, but few people could describe or agree upon what they saw. Archives was no help. It could not recall what it had never actually seen, and there was not enough there to extrapolate from.

Everyone agreed, however, that the prophetess was riding upon a partially visible and quite formidable creature, that she dismounted and came forward to take the patriarch by the hand and pat him familiarly upon his shoulder. The patriarch, whose back had been turned to the monument, had not seen her arrive and believed for a moment she was part of the celebration, a notion of which he was disabused when he turned and caught a glimpse of the dragon before fainting dead away. A brave subdeacon had carried him to safety, and after a moment’s hesitation the prophetess had turned to address the crowd in archaic and imperfectly understandable language, which was later transcribed and annotated by the Circle of Scrutators and thereby made perfectly clear.

“My name is Morgori Oestrydingh,” she had said. “My companion has no name.”

A student of ancient languages in the crowd appointed himself translator and asked her why she had come. She told them the dragon had come to explore, and she herself had come to preach the opening of the mind. It was all there, on the recordings, the old woman with her feathery white hair floating like mist around her head, her intensely bright eyes seeming to stare into the hearts of those she spoke to, and, hanging like mist upon the air behind her, confused elements of tooth and claw and scale, which added up to an impression of dragonhood without ever condescending to be representational.

Prophetess Morgori Oestrydingh stayed on Thyker long enough to teach them that the twisted structure was an ancient Door to non-human worlds, that it had been built by—and those worlds had once been occupied by—the Arbai people, and that the Arbai people had been of surpassing abilities and goodness. She stayed long enough to preach at them for the better part of a season, naming them the Baidee, or “New Bai” people. They must become a new Bai people she had said. The first Bai people had been the Arbai, inventors of the Doors, and there were other Bai people on worlds Morgori had visited since. The prophetess’s life had been spent in a search for the Arbai, throughout a thousand worlds and over some thousands of years, so she said, and she told stories of those worlds and times that astonished the people.

She also said other things:

“God does not know our names any more than we know the individual cells in our brains,” she had said. “God is the Overmind of which all minds are part.”

And, “It is our minds and not any other attribute which gives us personhood and value. We share intelligence with other living things, and they are no less important than we. Even creatures without detectable intelligence have adapted themselves to play necessary roles. To make God in our image or we in God’s is blasphemy.”

And, “When our minds are gone, our purpose is gone, and we are only meat, whether living or dead. Personhood resides only in the mind, not in the body, though once the mind has gone, there are always those who will try to maintain the body, because the body and what the body did are all they knew or cared about.”

And, “Freedom comes only with uncertainty. Because man does not like to feel impotent, he would rather believe himself guilty of causing evil than to know he is helpless before uncertainty. If there is uncertainty, there must be evil, just as there must be good. You must accept that evil and pain may be among the inevitable consequences of every action, just as goodness and joy may be. Do not attempt to find explanation either in good intentions or in guilt. Man neither merits joy nor earns pain, nor will he learn from either alone, though, if his race lives long enough, he may be informed by both concerning the nature of what is.”

And, “There is no sin inherent in any mind save the sin of pride in believing one has seen or been taught the absolute truth. The second greatest sin is refusing to search for the truth one must acknowledge one will never absolutely find.”

Her last and greatest commandment was said to be the words she had whispered to her favorite disciple just before she left. “Even when people are well-meaning, do not let them fool with your heads.”

So she taught, this old, old woman, before she got onto her dragon and went away through the Door once more. The first Baidee, the Low Baidee, were those who followed her teachings. That is how the Baidee began, and that is how they thought they had continued, century after century, cleaving always to the teaching of the prophetess. They still began their services with the first words the prophetess had spoken to them as a teaching. “This I say unto you, be not sexist pigs.”

The Primitive, or “Low,” Baidee still clung to the naive prophesy, claiming that Morgori had never meant to prohibit brain surgery and the techniques to cure mental illness, but only psychological manipulation, particularly religious cultism. The High Baidee, however, had carried the word forward, through generations of theological disputation and political manipulation. Over the centuries they had defined meaning and eliminated heresies and had set up a canon against which future innovations might be judged. Where the Low Baidee found a prohibition against sexual discrimination in the words of the prophetess (“be not sexist”), the male Scrutators of the High Baidee found a warning against bestial behavior (“be not pigs”). It was not long until bestial behavior was defined as consorting with the
other kind,
that is, the Low Baidee. Though the Low Baidee were at first the only people shunned, as a practical matter, the prohibition was soon extended to everyone else as well.

In order to make recognition of the real, or High, Baidee immediate and unfailing, certain distinctive dress and food habits were ordained by the Scrutators assembled, who claimed to find justification for these singularities in the words of the prophetess herself. “Be not pigs” obviously meant “take not into yourself the substance of pigs,” and that obviously meant “eat nothing resembling pigs,” such as anything having four legs or hairy skin or a snout and so on. Since on Bounce there were creatures which resembled pigs but laid eggs, eggs were likewise prohibited. Other such interpretations were used to order the dress of the High Baidee, which included such items as the zettle, a small scarf of precious material hung from the belt, on one side of which were embroidered the words “Stuff happens,” and on the other “Not guilty.”

The Low Baidee had mostly died out or emigrated, though there were sizeable colonies of them left near Chadnarath and Bajasthan, where they maintained Temples of the Original Revelation and held ceremonies notable for the cheerful frenzy of their dancing. As for the High Baidee, they revered the prophetess (who would have been astonished at their interpretation of her teachings), clung to her last and greatest commandment, and considered their own beginning to have been a large and fortunate one. It was from among these folk that the Native Matters Advisory chose the team to do the Ancient Monuments survey.

The three were residents of the capital city, Chowdari, and members of one family, the Damzels. They were two brothers, and a sister: Shanrandinore (Shan) and Bombindinore (Bombi) Damzel, fraternal twins sharing the same progenitor; and Volsalobinag (Volsa) Damzel, their younger sister whose progenitor had been, their mother said, the randomizer on the Baidee sperm bank at the Temple of the Overmind. All three Damzel children had spent the requisite three years of late adolescence in religious and military service. All had attended a prestigious university on Phansure; all had specialized in xenology; all were committed conservationists. Shan’s commitment (or arrogance) was so great that he had gone to Ninfadel to do postgraduate study of the Porsa, and though he spoke of that time frequently and feelingly, he actually remembered the realities as little as possible. He had undergone a ten-day cleansing at the Temple of High Baidee when he returned, and he had learned self-hypnosis to allow him to forget, but he still woke up yelling in the middle of the night.

All three, when advised of the appointment, went immediately to the Temple of the Overmind, to give thanks that they were considered capable of service. In the Sanctuary of the Scrutators they were admitted to a solemn reading of the sayings of the prophetess (two chanters and a dozen intoners), given instruction for those faithful to the Overmind, and supplied with the names of coreligionists on Hobb’s Land. A notable thing about High Baidee was the way it kept young people of breeding age in touch with one another. First among the names they were given was that of Spiggy Fettle.

•     •     •

•
In Settlement One,
Jeopardy awoke one off-day morning with a feeling of intense anticipation. That feeling had recently had only one cause: his cousin Saturday. Therefore; when he had dressed himself and eaten and found a small spade in the tool room, he wandered over to the next-door sisterhouse, his aunt’s place, knowing he would find Saturday waiting for him. She was, in fact, leaning on the front stoop with her own spade lying beside her.

“Did you bring film bags?” she asked him.

He shook his head, realizing for the first time that they would need film bags. Of course they would. He just hadn’t thought of it.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got fifteen. That’s enough.”

“We’ll need the Quillow kids,” he said. “Suppose they’ll meet us there?”

She shrugged. They would need the Quillow kids. Maybe Willum R. and Deal and Sabby and Gotoit would meet them there, and maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Thash and Thurby Tillan would be there, too. No telling until they got there. No matter, either way.

They went north out of the settlement, down the slope to the creek, through the curtain of ribbon-willow and up the opposite slope toward the rebuilt temple. Near the temple they found a slight declivity in the soil, and they sat down near it to share a drink from Saturday’s canteen before beginning to dig. The digging was a gentle process during which they slowly laid small neat spadefuls of earth in a sculptured pile at each side of the armspan-wide trench they were making.

Saturday sang as she dug. “Owee, owee, owee, janga, janga.” The words made no sense, but her voice was tuneful and happy sounding. Jeopardy contented himself with grunting occasionally. When Willum R., Deal, and Gotoit came up the slope to join them, each with spade, Deal and Gotoit joined Saturday’s psalmody, and Willum R. grunted along with Jeopardy. Neither of them had enough sense of music to notice that the grunts were rhythmic, that they punctuated the song the others sang, that the whole was greater than its parts.

Six cats appeared out of the surrounding grasses and sat in a circle beyond the piled earth, waiting curiously. The trench slowly deepened. The deeper it became, the slower the children dug, until they were moving in a gesture ballet full of long pauses. First Willum R., then Deal, then Gotoit got out of the trench and watched while Jep and Saturday went on uncovering, quarter inch by quarter inch.

“Here,” said Gotoit, bending forward to offer Saturday a paint brush. “You’ll need this.”

Saturday did need it. Of course, Gotoit had brought it, because Gotoit’s mother was a hobby artist and the brush was right there where Gotoit could lay hands on it. Saturday leaned down and began to brush the soil away. She had come to a thick, felty mass, like a mattress. “Knife,” she said.

Willum R. handed Jep his knife, a very sharp one. Willum R. had spent most of the previous evening sharpening it. Jep slipped the knife into the felty mass and began to cut it, a long cut, from the head of the trench to the bottom. Then he made cross cuts, from side to side, a dozen of them. Finally, he cut fifteen palm-sized pieces of the mat loose and handed them one-by-one to Saturday, who put each into a film bag, sealed the bag, and put it into her knapsack.

“Now,” said Gotoit.

Saturday and Jeopardy laid the fibrous mat back at either side. Beneath it was … something. Dark. Hard. Faintly sparkling. As big as a grown man, or bigger.