Raising The Stones (59 page)

China took Sam in and fed him, petted him, and cosseted him with delicacies. Within a few days he looked more like himself physically, though the look in his eyes had not changed.

“He should be back at the job,” said Africa, who had been holding down Sam’s job and her own for far too long.

“Look at him,” whispered China. “Don’t push him, Africa.”

“Seems he should start to get over Maire’s dying. It’s been a while now.”

“It isn’t just Maire’s dying. It isn’t her death he can’t get over. It’s that she knew she was in danger of death and he pooh-poohed it. He had never understood what she was trying to tell him, but even that isn’t what’s eating at him. It’s that he never really tried to understand. She told him things, and he heard them, but he never asked himself what they meant to her. He only asked what they meant to him. He had his dad built up as some kind of misunderstood hero. Now he feels guilty, and he won’t let go of it. You know Sam. He always has to wring every drop of blood out of everything, even when there isn’t any blood to wring.”

“Birribat Shum will. …”

“I know. I think so, too, if we give him time. There had to be a reason for everything.”

“Reason?”

“For the way Sam was, before he left. For the way he is now. Not quite like the rest of us. Maybe a few oddities are needed, from time to time. A few strangenesses. We have to give him time.” She did not specify which
him
she meant.

So they gave him time. One day Sam went into the office and Africa asked him to fill out the requisitions. The next day it was the production report. Within ten days he was back at the work, not with any appearance of joy, but doing it in between long spells of sitting gazing out the window at nothing.

Sal recovered gradually. She hadn’t seen Maire’s body, and no one had told her how Maire had died, just that the prophets had killed her and she was buried in the courtyard at Cloud. One day, Sal was told, there would be a God Maire Manone in Cloud. They could go there, the whole family. The thought seemed to comfort her, though it did not comfort Sam.

Either Sal or China fixed him lunches, to be sure he ate. Sal’s children were sent to demand stories. Sal thought this would help Sam, but he sent the children away, refusing to open the books. Harribon Kruss, who spent a lot of time with Sal, took Sam fishing for creelies. Through it all, Sam moved like a ghost, like a spirit, an inhabitant of a world the rest of them could not see. China thought of him as a kind of hollow man, going through the motions. There was nothing inside him.

Not long after the fishing expedition, however, which had taken them up through the New Forest—vastly increased in size and awesomeness—and past Cloudbridge—which was enough to make a man catch his breath in wonder—he began to read legends again, starting with the books he himself had made. He kept asking himself what they had meant to the people who wrote them, rather than what they meant to him. It was not long before he noticed what had escaped him before. The legends spoke of victors. The stories told of survivors. Heroes were those who had died valiantly, with immortal words on their tongues, or those still alive when the story was over. Of the myriads slaughtered, of the uncountable maimed and enslaved, of the unnumbered victims, there remained only the poet’s voice or no voice at all. They could not speak for themselves.

•
Dern Blass had
been curious about the Voorstod Matter, which is what he had called it to himself, ever since Jep Wilm had been abducted. His curiosity had not been in the least satisfied by Ilion Girat, who seemed to know nothing and who, in any case, had been sent back to Ahabar (and internment) soon after Sam, Maire, and Saturday had left. Dern’s curiosity continued unabated after Sam and the children returned, but anyone could see that Sam Girat was in no condition to talk about anything, and humane considerations suggested that Jep and Saturday should be let alone for a time as well.

When Dern considered that enough time had passed for everyone to have settled down and recovered, however, he invited the returnees to join him, Zilia, and Spiggy, and fill them in as to what had happened. The two Phansuri engineers, Theor Close and Betrun Jun, happened to be on one of their periodic visits to Hobbs Land, so Dern asked them to come along. Dern liked both the Phansuris. They spoke his language and understood him better than many on Hobbs Land did, and they, too, were curious about what had happened on Voorstod.

Dern invited some settlement people as well, Sal Girat and Harribon Kruss, China and Africa Wilm. He didn’t want what he thought of as an official debriefing; that would be too formal and constrained. He wanted chat. He wanted colorful details. He knew parts of it were painful, but he wanted to know about all of it, even the painful parts. The twelve of them would fit nicely into one flier, and Dern planned to give the whole thing a pleasant informality by flying up to the new memorial park for a picnic. On his time report he would call it an inspection trip.

Jamice didn’t want to go along because she was getting over a stuffy head she had picked up from some visitor—despite all advances in medicine, there were still bugs busy mutating for the sole purpose of giving humans stuffy heads. Dern Blass appointed her acting director for the day and told her to stay in bed. Acting director, as Jamice well knew, meant less than nothing so long as Tandle Wobster was in the office, so Jamice stayed in her darkened quarters and plugged in her sleep inducer while her colleagues assembled at CM, to find that the CM commissary had packed food and drink enough for twice their number. Dern asked Spiggy to pilot, and they had an uneventful and largely silent flight.

Spiggy was the only one in the group who had seen the radiating mounds from ground level, though Dern had flown over them, just to see what people were talking about. They landed nearby, in a cleared plot convenient to the site, and all wandered into the mound area, marveling at the things.

“I don’t remember the mounds being this high,” said Spiggy. “I recall them coming up to my shoulder, but these are over my head.”

“The way I hear it,” said Dern, “you were kept very busy up here and can be excused for not having paid that close attention to your surroundings.” Dern had no moral qualms about Spiggy’s involvement with the Baidee, but neither did he intend to let Spig escape without joshing.

A number of bodies had been buried near the mounds since the first two from Settlement Three. Three of the oldest settlers had died in Settlements Two and Six. There had been an accident at one of the mines, which had killed four. Though the graves were unmarked, it was easy to see where they lay from the slight dimpling of the ground. While Zilia and Africa unpacked the food and drink, the others of the party walked along the mounds examining the cracked and fallen soil around them and exclaiming at their size, excepting Jep and Saturday, who were unaccountably quiet.

“What do you think?” asked Dern, encountering the two youngsters at the end of a mound.

“I think whatever this would grow into would be huge,” said Jep.

“Dormant, the Baidee experts said,” Dern smiled.

“Dormant for how long?” asked Saturday.

Dern hadn’t thought to ask that question of the Baidee scientists. He found himself wondering if the Baidee scientists had asked that question themselves, and he stopped smiling.

“It’s only a hundred feet long,” he said, gesturing at the mound. “Some trees have roots that long.”

“This thing,” said Saturday, “is circular and is almost two hundred fifty feet in diameter. The visible part is about twelve feet high. There’s a circular mound started up in the middle. It’s all one thing, Director Blass.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted, rubbing his chin doubtfully. “I suppose it is.”

They went into the nearby Departed village, just to look around, and found the Theckle brothers from Settlement One, roaming among the ruins.

“What are you doing up here?” asked Sam.

“Picking gravesites for us,” said Emun Theckles.

“Having a nap under the trees,” said his brother, scratching the back of his neck.

“Are you really picking a place to be buried?” asked Saturday, curiously.

“That’s the idea I had,” said Emun. “Woke up this morning with the idea very clear that I should come up here and pick a place to be buried. Then when we got here, we were both sleepy, so we had a nap.” He brushed clinging, hairlike fibers from the back of his neck. “Now we’re hungry.”

Dern laughed and asked them to join the party. He had no objection to their hearing what had actually happened in Voorstod. They all sat down, and Dern asked for the tale. Jep began; Saturday continued; it went on for some little time. At the end of the rather rambling narrative, in which Saturday and Jep shared about equally, with Sam saying so little that it almost seemed he had not been involved, Zilia shook her head and said, “Now wait a minute, Jeopardy Wilm. There’s something here I don’t understand. You’re saying that the Gods in Voorstod changed the people there. The Gods here on Hobbs Land have not changed us.”

Dern Blass, who was able to appreciate the changes in

Zilia more than any of the rest of them, decided not to comment.

“Well it did, you know,” said Africa in a kindly voice. “It’s just that it didn’t need to change us much. Most of us were already fairly peaceable people, fairly kind, decent to our families and friends. Mostly what it changed was our response to surprise and fear, I think. In my experience, and from what I’ve read in learning management, most of human nastiness comes out of shock or fear.”

“I was afraid,” said Saturday. “In Voorstod. I was out of my head with fear sometimes.”

“We were separated from Birribat,” Jep mused. “And there was something real to be afraid of.”

“The Gods don’t interfere with real fear,” nodded Africa. “Not when there’s a reason. You get a malfunctioning harvester after you, the Gods won’t stop your running.”

“Interesting,” said Theor Close, the Phansuri engineer. “A panic suppressant that can distinguish between real and imagined fears?” He felt the whole matter could be explained in terms of chemistry, if the proper Phansuri researchers could only come to Hobbs Land and investigate.

Zilia shook her head. “You’re saying the prophets were afraid?”

Saturday nodded. “Were. Are. Of everything.”

Sam said, “I’ve been reading …” His voice trailed away.

No one said anything, waiting.

“I’ve been reading about Manhome. About the retributive religions, the surviving ones. They all came from a pastoral background. In primitive times, everything out there in the dark was a predator. One had to guard against everything that threatened the flock, had to kill it if possible. At night, the flock had to be sequestered, put in the fold and guarded. The shepherd had to stand guard, sleepless, night after night. Many of these societies had a taboo against dogs, so they had no guard dogs. They had to be their own dogs, always alert. The shepherd had to be afraid of everything …”

Africa said, “I imagine wives and children were thought of much as he thought of his vlishes or dermots …”

“Sheep,” said Sam. “Back at that time it was sheep.”

“Sheep, then. The sheep were property, the wives were property, the children were property, and they had to be guarded. Because they were a pastoral people, they didn’t have secure caves or houses. They had fragile tents. They didn’t have secure lands; they migrated, on foot. They were probably afraid all the time, of everything. They would have been very alert, I suppose. Very nervous.”

“Over time, I suppose,” said Jep, “only the people survived who were very alert and perpetually frightened, and thus very irritable and quick to attack. Perhaps it became a racial characteristic.”

“Reinforced by the religion,” Sam went on, staring into his plate. “It explains why violence and war went on under the name of religion for so long. Fear and hatred were simply racial characteristics of the people who had that religion—those religions. It’s a logical explanation, though I have no idea whether it’s true or not.”

Zilia said, “The prophets couldn’t … couldn’t change, was that it?”

Jep said, “It has to be genetic. I think the God could pacify any merely environmental influence. Either Sam’s right, and these people were the descendents of a race which selected for fear and apprehension, or maybe every now and then there are people born in the human race who are hardwired for hatred. They can induce some others to go along, followers, people who’ve had bad rearing or traumatic childhoods …”

“Like me,” said Zilia, without rancor, suddenly seeing the point.

“Well, yes. Like you used to be. As I say, these followers may go along as long as the leader is influencing them, but they can change. The selected ones or the mutants can’t. Something inside them won’t let them trust anything or anyone. They have to fear. They have to attack.”

Emun Theckles, who had been listening to this with close attention, made a sudden, revulsive motion.

“What’s the trouble?” his brother asked.

“I was thinking of Enforcement,” Emun said. “The soldiers of Enforcement are programmed that way. They trust no one, believe no one. They, too, are hardwired to hate.”

Theor Close raised his eyebrows at Betrun Jun. China leaned toward the Phansuris and whispered, “Emun worked on Enforcement for forty years. He was a maintenance engineer for the army.”

“If they trust no one,” asked Dern, “how can you deal with them?”

“They’re programmed to ask questions,” said Emun. “When they ask questions, you’d better have the answers they’ve been programmed to accept, that’s all.”

“True,” murmured Theor Close. “You read a catechism of attitudes and opinions into the Enforcement soldiers, then they will seek that set of attitudes and opinions. Any living thing not manifesting that set, dies.”

“Enforcement would kill a poultry-bird because it didn’t recite the proper formulae?” Sam barked in unamused laughter.

“Unless it was programmed to ignore poultry-birds,” Betrun Jun agreed. “Mostly, the Enforcement machines are programmed to ignore all living creatures except those fitting a certain pattern. Manlike, for example. Or like some alien people.”