The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (22 page)

Val Tir Sye Morth moved through the Sacred Grotto, questing for Sarr Kris N' Morth T. He felt the Monarch's presence in the meditation chamber, opened his being for contact as he went there, and found Kris N' studying a cube nested within a cube, set on a pedestal.

Morth was humbled by the energy radiating from the old Lawkeeper's mind.

“They say this is the shadow cast by a four-dimensional object, Sye Morth.” Kris N' swam slowly around it. “The peoples of the Tunn System play with dimensions and time as we do with tel. But then, they are nearer the center of the Great Wheel.”

“Yes, I've touched them, Sarr Kris N'. This hypercube though, was designed by Terrans, who can only predict other dimensions through their mathematics, and confirm them with experiments.”

“Yet they designed it,” Kris N' I'd forgotten what a worlds' traveler you've become in your few short geths. And now a champion of the race of Terrans.”

“I'm sorry I did not respond to the Geth Kwaii Lor Calling, Sarr Kris N'. I was here, Sarr, but - if you decide that I deserve punishment for my indiscretion, I will gladly submit. But an urgent matter keeps me in my current geth state.”

“Sye Kor? What has he stirred now?”

“I touched an alien mind, Sarr, the Terran Jules, while in geth.”

The Monarch paused.

“I first learned of Sye Kor's deviance from the Terran. It was confirmed for me at the Calling gathering. Kor intends…oh this is difficult, Sarr Kris N'. I feel such shame for Kor's create. He intends to destroy all Terrans. Everywhere! I tried not to alarm the Jules Terran. I explained that there is no death, but only geth states.”

“I'm certain that was a great comfort to him,” Kris N' said disdainfully. He curled a tentacle against his chest. “I warned Kor to beware of Kor.”

“I met him, Sarr Kris N', journeying through a sunken river where he bragged to me that he had perfected the death agent.”

“Great Mind! Has he released it?”

“He would not say, but just laughed when I asked him. Can it be recalled?”

“Ah, dispersal!” Kris N” swam across the chamber and settled on a stone platform. “Once in our history, during sickness not of Loranth making, the kin focused tel to disperse the Binding of a disease. It was a great Calling, such as that at Century's End, beautiful in its Oneness.”

“Did it work?”

“No. But this agent is of Loranth making. Sye Morth, find Kor's friend, Syl Chrys, tell her to bring him here. Now! Make her understand this is not simply a request.” He swam in tight circles around the small chamber. Why does Great Mind burden me so when I am old and weary?”

“Sarr Kris N', I will await Sye Kor's next geth and help to purify his kwaii with the touch of Great Mind.”

“Only Kor can purify Kor. Have you ever considered that Great Mind may be simply a projection of your own kwaii force and that of other Loranths, Sye Morth?”

“No. I have touched Him.”

“Then perhaps you're right. Go now. Sye Kor's obsession threatens us all with war and an unbinding of Oneness.”

“Sarr Kris N'? Can we call this restitution for my indiscretion?”

“It is not a matter of punishment, Sye Morth, but the next fetus designated Carrier is yours.”

“Carrier? To crawl blindly through a short unknowing existence? Carrier? I would be current-swept. Desolate.”

“Then consider how your knowledge will expand in that desolate state. Morth caught the sarcasm in his monarch's tone. “Somewhat as it does in the center of a supernova,” Kris N' added tersely. “Now fulfill your mission, Val Tir Sye Morth.”

“Yes, Sarr Kris N'.” Morth swam dejectedly away.

It was then he heard the Call. And knew that all Loranths everywhere heard and felt it. A cry of pain and rage like that of premature death and the ejecting of unprepared kwaii back to space.

Loranths from the great Current Wheel's far edges took up their brother's wail. Some cloaked and withdrew, unable to endure the agony. Morth followed the call. It was as a path leading downward to black water and the deep graveyard of dreadfall where the bodies of shallow water fishes settled.

When he drew nearer its source, he found himself reflexively cloaking and had to will his being to open to his brother's cry. “Sye Kor!” The desperate call drew Morth to a lake which was a surface break in an underground river system. It supplied the Terran settlement with water, he knew. He came upon Kor, thrashing at the bottom of it.

“Sye Kor, what has happened to you? Was it the Terran?”

Kor trembled within a cloak of stirred sand and his own blood. “It was Great Mind.” He laughed and blood billowed from his mouth.

Morth felt a stab of fear. “What do you mean, Great Mind, Kwaii brother?”

“The Terrans are but one mask He wears. I have struck Him through that mask.”

“Sye Kor. Great Mind is benevolence and love. Our kin are on their way.”

“Good. I'll enter geth in Sacred Grotto, where all our kin will see from my wounds the destructive nature of Terrans.” He twisted in his anguish. Acid seeped from his sacs and mixed with dark swirls of sand. So that when Terrans sicken and die, there will be no compassion for them, and my desire for revenge will be sanctioned.”

“Great Mind! You've already released the death agent?”

“How else can I achieve revenge and slip peacefully into geth?”

“Kor, this is against nature itself!”

“No, Sye brother, it is against Great Mind Himself.”

* * *

Sye Kor was taken to the Sacred Grotto, where healers sealed flesh over bone, skin over flesh, though Kor requested geth. Suicide was rarely condoned, for suffering increased one's capacity for mercy and compassion, and execution by another Loranth was out of the question by the most sacred of Laws. And one did not don bodies to shed them as some bottom dwellers routinely shed their skins.

Kor told the healers his pain would only make him angrier, would make him hate.

Morth agreed, but it was not for him to say.

“We really must find him a body,” the startled Speaker sent as Morth uncloaked his being and entered the council chamber still in kwaii state. The Monarch and two councilors, Syl Jai T Lor, Kris N's wise successor, and the Speaker, reclined at the base of a Monolith, the symbol of Loranth unity.

'This is a closed meeting, Sye Morth,” Kris N' told him.

“That's why I am here, Sarr Kris N'. May we link privately?”

“Are these not Loranth kin?”

“Yes, of course. I…I apologize to my kin. Sarr Kris N', when the Jules Terran wounded Sye Kor, I fled to my brother's side.” He probed the councilors' unbroadcasted thoughts, their moods. They were not pleased with his indiscretion at entering the closed meeting. “Forgive me. I…I have come to say…to say…

“Great Mind's ventral fin,” Sarr Kris N' sent, “then say it, brother.” The Monarch's dorsal fin raised stiffly.

“Yes, my Sarr,” Morth said humbly. “That Sye Kor has already released his death agent against the race of Terra.” He felt the ominous silence, shivered within his mind and drew his being further within the Monolith. “This is what I have come to say.”

“Already - Sye Morth,” the Speaker said, “Where are you? Will you come out of the Monolith! You say that Kor's create will annihilate an entire race? Have you been soaking dream crystals again?”

“I tell you what I know, Speaker,” Morth answered as he huddled within the Monolith.

Sarr Kris N', the Speaker said. “I myself do not gilltouch with the imperious Sye Kor, but this is a most serious accusation against a kin.”

“But if it be truth,' Successor Syl Jai T Lor said, 'we cannot afford to simply eddy it.”

“Great Mind,” Kris N' said, “the people are already rifted over this Terran issue. Further political upheaval could geth the Loranth Oneness! It could split us as Tril and his deeper hordes once split from the Oneness of Loranth unity.”

“As surely,” Syl Jai replied, “as Sye Kor's disease is already sending the dominant race of Terra in Cape Leone into geth state.

“Before we make any rash decisions,” the Speaker said, “remember Syl Jai, our first loyalty is still to our own kin, and to the correct path for Oneness.”

“But we would be shellers, indeed,” Morth said passionately, “to fold the truth in darkness while a race of intelligent if mute beings is destroyed? Is that Loranth?”

“I hope you did not bring us this tidestir,” Kris N' told Morth, “only to philosophize on what is and isn't Loranth. Do you have a plan? A solution which we may ponder?””

“Well, I…” If Morth were bodied he would have trembled. To call for a Binding, which was his intention, especially against a brother's create, was to take full responsibility for the Binding's outcome. But he felt Kris N' urging him on. “Yes. All right. I, I call for a Binding of all Loranths!” he blurted.

There was silence.

“A Binding?” the Speaker mused. “No one has called for a Binding since Tril's hordes abducted Sarr Rann D'Fror one hundred and twenty-eight, no, one hundred and thirty turnings ago.”

“A Binding to what end, Sye Morth?' Kris N' asked.

“Why to recall the death agent, of course, Sarr, or failing that, to create a healing agent the Terrans may carry to their Homeworld. And after the Bind, to contact Cape Leone, reveal ourselves and call the aliens brothers and sisters all!”

“Is that all?” Kris N' said tightly.

“Oh, Sarr Kris N',” Morth said, “This would please the Great Mind, to whom whole universes are but One Binding.”

“A Binding,” Syl Jai said, “could reunite opposing factions on this Terran issue and consolidate Loranth Oneness for long turnings.”

“Or give us a new horde of enemies,” the Speaker declared. “May I remind you, Syl Jai, of the deep rifts and old animosities that have surfaced during such deep mindsprobes? Rifts that split the peoples for Turnings to come?”

“You must understand, Sye Morth,” Kris N' explained, “That Tril and his clan might benefit most from your Binding. It would not bode well for your kwaii.”

'My Sarr,” the Speaker said, “would Tril not use a rift among our communities as a signal to attack and regain former territory? Better to shell this particular swirl of alien genocide within our own cloaked memories.”

“That which is shelled cannot be resolved, sister,” Syl Jai said. “We are the leaders of our peoples. We do not shell important issues.”

“Forgive me, Successor,” the Speaker said.

Syl Jai turned to Kris N” “I have already touched the twin colds of anger and fear among our people. This issue goes deeper than our treatment of Terrans. The people are beginning to ask, “What is Loranth?”

Morth drifted out of the Monolith and huddled beside Syl Jai, feeling a new kinship with the gentle wise Successor.

“You will have your Binding, Sye Morth.” Kris N' tapped the Monolith. “Morth? Are you prepared, should circumstances shatter your create, to perform the Carrier role for many generations of unborn kin?”

“I am here, Sarr Kris N', beside Syl Jai T Lor. Yes, I accept the consequences of my Calling.” He felt Syl Jai's T Lor's approval and it lifted his spirit.

I felt no tel power, but Kor's lair entrance was open. An invitation? The ditch he'd tried to trap us in three days ago when Jack and I escaped on Gretch was still there. Christine's tent too, lit only by the last rays of day.

Carrier's body was gone, though. I looked around. Memories. None of them fond. Like returning to a battlefield after the fighting. Well, the war wasn't over yet.

Perhaps Kor hadn't made it all the way home. Perhaps he was dead and we were going for a nice easy night dive. Yeah. Perhaps the moons of Syl' Tyrria would shine blue tonight instead of red.

We were quiet as we suited up. Jack didn't like the air-layered lenses used for water vision, or the sonar headgear with adjustable visor screen to be lowered for murky water navigation. He wasn't comfortable with the exoskeletal legbraces for added swimming strength either.

“Feels like I've got arthritis,” he complained, flexing stiff knees.

I handed him the small artificial gill unit and knew he wasn't going to like wearing its mask over his nose and mouth when we dived into Kor's pool. We strapped on knives, took fins and checked throat mics.

“What's this do?” he asked, poking the narrow compressed air cylinder embedded in his weighted dive suit.

“It regulates air in the suit's arteries. Keeps you from floating away or crawling around in the primal ooze.”

He slid me a look.

“Then again, if you want to stay on the bottom…” I pointed to the suit's compensator valve and showed him how to adjust it.

He nodded silently.

“Jack,” I said as we walked toward Kor's lair, “the diving equipment will do most of the work for you. All you have to worry about is Kor. That's enough, isn't it?” I stopped, turned to him. “When…if you feel the slug's tel, don't think about what you're going to do next, OK? You'll just broadcast it to him. Don't even tell me. Just do it.”

“Annie says that's the way my mind operates all the time.” He turned on the compensator unit. “I guess I usually just do it. C'mon, Julie. Let's get this job done.” He walked crookedly toward the entrance in all his gear.

“Jack, I told you, all I wanted was for you to buy me the gear I needed. You don't have to come with me on this one.”

“Aren't divers supposed to have buddies?”

“OK. It's your call.”

We turned on lights and unholstered stinglers as we entered the lair. I held my breath when the smell of brackish water hit my nostrils. Shreds of green and blue fungi emitted glowing light. The familiar sound of water dripping, wearing down rocks with beats of time, elicited emotions better left unexamined.

I paused, took a step backward, and realized I was breathing hard. Even our lights seemed to drag across the dismal tomb.

Mine snagged on splintered animal skulls and hollow bones that jutted from sand and threw ropes of shadows to scale wet walls.

I blinked as Jack turned his light on me. “This was home for two months, huh, buddy?” he said.

I nodded, my eyes riveted to the pool. It was not easy to hold my ground. Night air and stars would have been sweet.

Jack put down his light, took out a cigarette and lit it. He extended it to me.

I shook my head. “Now's no time,” I said with a tremor in my voice, “to add another vice to my repertoire.”

He inhaled a breath of smoke. “I guess if Kor was here we wouldn't be thinking straight, right?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and felt the pain in my chest sharpen. Just the restriction of the dive suit and straps, I lied to my fear. “The animals are gone, too.” I wondered about Faun. And Stan, for that matter. “C'mon, Jack, you were right. Let's get this job done!”

We swept lights across the chamber as we walked, illuminating the ChristLotus pendant on its cross of sagging branches, the bowls Christine had laid around it, each with a wax candle, like eyes startled now by sudden light. I was startled myself when the beam touched Thad's yellow slicker, discarded like a reptilian skin.

'You think the cloud weaver ever got his story?” Jack said. “I used to watch the six o'clock report with Gail. She's into journalism, you know? Denning was a pain in the ass when we were out looking for you, but he was a good reporter, until that thing got to him.”

“And so that's why he suffered,” a voice said from the darkness behind us.

I almost fired as I swung and nailed Stanley in light.

“He thought he was an interpreter of truth,” Stanley said casually. He sat on his knees, squinting and rubbing his eyes. He was naked, dirt-smeared, bruised, probably hungry. A true disciple of Kor's. “But he couldn't interpret not even his own experience in life, you see?” He spread sandy hands. “What the boy never understood is that temporary events, those news stories he thought were so important, are just a manifestation of the flux. A lamp to guide us to everlasting permanence. Have you seen my glasses?”

I swept the ground with light. “No.”

He sat back. “This ignorance is the first cause of all suffering. You understand what I mean?”

Jack looked at me.

I shrugged. “Sounds like something out of the True Testament.”

“Stan,” Jack said gruffly, “you remember me, Jack?”

Stanley came down on his hands and knees and crawled forward.

“What's Jack?” he asked. “Jack is an illusion. Where is the 'I' in Jack? Is it in your body? Your feelings? Your will, or your mind?”

I squatted beside Stanley, felt pain in my joints and ignored it. “I think I know what you're trying to tell us, Stan. You've eradicated the cause of suffering in yourself, right?”

He smiled. “And I can help you also do it, the way the Master helped me.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at Jack. “But don't you think we should learn directly from the Master, too?”

“It's more a matter of unlearning.”

“I agree,” I said. “But to move toward enlightenment, we first need to find the Teacher himself. Do you know where he is, Stan?”

He scraped at his crusted red beard. He smelled sour as a barrel of rotten apples, but then so had I. It's our primate heritage, I think. “With guns you want to learn from the Master?” He lifted his rows. “You think that life is a gift, don't you, Jude?”

I adjusted the headgear, which was giving me a headache. Well, I hoped it was the headgear.

He took my arm. “But it's a gift that's given over and over, a gift of suffering. You see?” He drew me closer. I went to one knee to keep my balance. His breath was foul. “You can't push Sye Kor off the Wheel any more than you can jump off yourself.” He stared past me. “We can only dream and wake and dream and wake, and try to reach the state of non-arising before we go crazy.” He felt around in the sand.

“Nirvana?” I asked, still trying to gain his confidence.

“So, you do you understand the doctrine of no self.” He continued brushing at sand. “I thought I left them here.”

“I'm trying, Stan, but I need Kor's help.” I slid the stingler into its holster.

He patted my knee. “Better you should stay here and meditate with me, Joab. Maybe you could help me find my glasses.”

“Come on, Julie,” Jack said. “Kor's driven him for a spacedrift. He don't know anything.” Sweat shone on Jack's face and dripped down his hands from the suit's sleeves.

“Ah, if only I didn't!” Stanley grabbed my arm again. “That's the real permanence, you see?”

I gently pried his hand off my arm and stood. “Either that, Jack, or he's had his Night of Enlightenment.”

Jack wiped his brow. “The water's going to feel good. This damn suit's hotter than a scrabbler's ass at a gridbake.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. The suit had temp-control filaments. Stanley was right about one thing. If Kor had already released the virus, and that was a possibility I could no longer ignore, we could all stop worrying about the cause of suffering in this lifebind and meditate on incubation periods. “There's food in the manta,” I told Stanley, “and blankets. It's parked right outside.”

“Thank you, but I don't eat very often now.” He reached out a hand. “Stay with me, Jacob, we'll talk. There's so much you need to unlearn.”

“You're probably right, Stan. But this isn't the time.”

He smiled and nodded tolerantly.

The water was cold on my face, the rest of me was too warm, until the suit adjusted. I felt scared, determined and sick, in that order. I switched on battery pacs, checked bi-metal cells for current, donned fins and concentrated on
determined
.

Was it all blind striving toward a goal that was illusion? I tried not to think about Leone, about merchant ships from the settlement already landing on Earth and our colonies, and what they carried besides their cargo. The quarantine might well have been too late. Maybe the world's effort, surely in hyper motion by now, would find a cure in time. Meanwhile, I'd make sure Sye Kor departed this lifebind, before he had a chance to undo whatever measures the interstellar leagues were taking.

I winked at Jack, beside me in the pool, lowered the illuminated sonar screen over my eyes, and felt half blind as I dived. Blue is the color of fantasy. For me anyway. Diving into clear water, cutting through it as though it were melted blue glass, my body held in its luminescence beneath a quicksilver surface, I always feel a shedding of the human skin and condition, as though my muscles were fluid, the water silk, and I am become water myself.

But not this time.

We dived into gray murk. Our lights, bouncing off stirred particles, were useless. The sonar screen's black and white gridded images were the closest thing we had to reality. I wanted a ten-meter-long cephalopod to appear on it, sprawled motionless there on the bottom.

No such luck.

Down into thickening night and increasing pressure. Jack stayed close. We paused often to clear our ears.

At sixteen fathoms I felt a cold draft of water on my face as we were drawn into an underground river through a dark passage. My wrist compass said it was running southwest.

It could change course, but it could also feed the reservoir. We used our hands to grip the smooth limestone walls and slow ourselves as the current drove us into the darkness ahead.

If the gods were with us, Jehovah, Brahma, Christ, Buddha, Great Mind, Zeus, Quetzacoatl, or whatever forces rule the universes, then perhaps we would find and destroy Sye Kor before his virus killed us.

* * *

I was worried about Jack. I didn't want to tell him that being a non-diver, he just added another burden to my accumulated pile. He was being tumbled, sometimes against walls. I could tell by his chest that he was breathing too hard. I should have brought a buddy line to string from him to me. He wasn't used to “seeing” by sonar either. I lifted my visor screen and turned on the light in a world where light had never shone. Here, the water was clear. Wherever I shined the beam, its yellow disc lasered polished walls and lit crumbled rock beneath us. Dark tunnels branched, but I kept us to the main artery, hoping that was the right tunnel, feeling claustrophobic, scraping arrows on the wall with my knife to guide us home whenever we took a new branch.

It was a vast drowned labyrinth we traversed, sometimes wide and lazy, sometimes plunging, snakelike, narrow and fast as rapids. But whatever form and speed the river took, we were trapped in its wandering ways, no more the movers of our own destinies than a boat adrift in a storm.

Scratchings! Symbols? Word? Something. A road sign in alienese, carved there on stone just before a main branching. I held onto a ledge to study it. Strange it was to see this confirmation of alien civilization thirty fathoms down in a measureless river which sustained no life forms, not even the humblest spineless creature. “Jack, grab something,” I said through my throat mic. He did. My ankle. Stringing us out like flags in a wind.

“Don't tell me you're lost?” His voice was raspy through the mic.

“No. You've got to know where you're going before you can get lost.”

The symbols were symmetrical designs, patterns. Two roads diverged and I…couldn't read the goddamn road sign!

Jack yanked my leg as something brushed by me. He was still using my foot as an anchor. I swung the light. A pair of unblinking saucer eyes stared back above a mouth that might make a swamp mumbler retreat to the bog. My hands were full of ledge and light, or I would have drawn the stingler. Jack's stingler was in his hand. The fish's fat brown body bore its own set of headlights, like many deepers, and a sagging belly pouch which was probably for prey larger than himself. Another parallel development? He sniffed my light, my leg, decided neither was edible when I kicked him, and shuffled upriver on six thick bottom-adapted fins. Without reading the road sign, he waddled into the left tunnel.

“What the hell was that?” asked Jack.

“Our guide. C'mon.” I shook him off my ankle, grabbed his arm and headed into the left tunnel, hot on the trail of the Neon River Waddler's tail lights. Well, somebody has to name the alien fauna. I hoped he wasn't partial to waterfalls.

When the mind song began, I thought it was the fish. A method of drawing in prey? But no, not as the song grew to an intricate play of melodies. These notes, distilled from the silent rhythms of the mind, transcended the natural world. This was music, internally structured, song held by many minds, perhaps thousands!

This was Loranth. All in tune, all orchestrated to produce one effect: A yearning to return home. Home to the source, the wellspring.

There came an image of raindrops threading air, losing themselves in a single pool that reflected all movement while remaining quiet itself.

Home?

I was moving swiftly. I turned on the leg braces and was still holding Jack by an arm, my direction certain from the song as if the sun's own light lit our path. Jack was swimming weakly. His free hand fanned water.

“Jack? How are you doing, buddy?”

He nodded but didn't speak.

The pain in my chest was worse. It's difficult to gauge your physical condition underwater, where you don't carry your own weight, but I became aware of deepening aches in my joints, soreness in muscles, and a general feeling of malaise which had nothing to do with the long swim.