Barsk Read online

  “You can’t just wipe away belief systems that have been in place since before we arrived on Barsk. Pizlo was an accident. Tolta shouldn’t have been able to conceive before you two bonded. There’s a reason that children like him are given up to the community when they’re born. Their genetics are so messed up most never live out their first year.”

  “So now you’re a biologist? You should stick to history. Yes, Pizlo isn’t like other kids, and he’s not healthy. He’s got albinism, and he’s all skin and bones, and has no pain receptors, and … and … a host of other problems. But he’s beaten the odds that said he’d die in infancy. He’s five years old now, and he is my son.”

  “He’s six.”

  “What?”

  “He’s six now, almost seven. It’s been nearly two years since you saw him last. And he’s started filling out a little. You can’t see his ribs anymore.”

  “You’re keeping track of him?”

  “I was your Second, Ar, what the hell else was I supposed to do?”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. It’s what society says, and I have to live in society. His existence is a violation of Fant culture. But … you were my best friend, and he’s the only part of you left in the world. I couldn’t turn my back on that. Besides, he needs an education, and it’s not like anyone is going to let him go to school.”

  “You’re teaching him?”

  Jorl nodded. “I asked Tolta, and she thought it was a great idea. He’s still a wildling. He rarely sleeps under your wife’s roof, and even less often under mine, but we have lessons every few days and he doesn’t suffer for them not happening daily.”

  “He’s bright. And curious.”

  “He has your mind. Oh, and that specimen jar that sent me to summoning your mother? That wasn’t really for me. I thought Pizlo should have something of his father’s.”

  A flicker of delight chased a flash of pain across Arlo’s face. “Yeah, he’s always had a thing for bugs. That’s what set me on the track of … never mind. But you’re looking after him. I can’t tell you what that means to me, Jorl. It’s everything. Truly.”

  The two friends regarded one another, having run the gauntlet of emotions and arrived back at the core bond between them. Jorl smiled and asked, “Everything? Everything enough that you’ll tell me what was so important that you’re dead?”

  Arlo snorted with pained laughter. “You. Are. Such. An. Ass!”

  Before he could reply, Jorl felt a hand on his shoulder someplace else. The hand shook him firmly without producing any movement that Arlo could see. With a mental twist, Jorl focused his attention back in the physical world. Opening his eyes, he saw Tolta standing in front of him in the same small room.

  “I’m sorry, Jorl, but Pizlo came home tonight. He says you promised to tell him a bedtime story next time you were both here.”

  He smiled, wiping the back of his hand across the trail of drool Speaking produced in him.

  “She’s there now, isn’t she?” Arlo moved from the opposite wall and leaned closer, whispering like a conspirator. “I know that look. You always got that expression when she entered a room. That’s the hardest thing about being dead, you know? You’re the only one I ever get to see. Tell me, Jorl, please, how is she?”

  “She’s beautiful, Ar, you know that. As beautiful as when you last saw her this morning.”

  He sighed and eased back against the wall again. “This morning to me and what, coming on two years to her?”

  “He’s here now, isn’t he?” Tolta hovered closer, a delicate emotion lighting her face for an instant and vanishing before Jorl could put a name to it. “You have the same look on your face you always had when I’d catch the two of you in one of your foolish games. How is he, Jorl? Can you tell me?”

  The eerie duality thrummed through him like a minor chord and Jorl needed to take a moment to be certain which side he was replying to. “He’s fine, Tolta, just as you remember him. He sends his love.” He reached out in both phases and felt his loved ones grasp his hand, telling himself that somehow they managed to touch one another in the process.

  “Tell her I’m sorry, will you?”

  “She knows. We all do. I have to go now, Pizlo is demanding a story.” As he began the mental exercises to disperse his friend’s nefshons, Jorl nodded his farewell.

  “Tell him the one about Pholo. He always loved hearing about—”

  With a shiver and a shake of the head, Arlo was gone. Reality returned to only a single frame of existence, a single alcove in Tolta’s home. Jorl stood, stretching his arms and legs and trunk like a man rising up from a deep nap in the first afternoon of wind.

  A pale blur of child-sized Fant pushed past Tolta and threw itself upon Jorl, attempting to climb him like a tree branch. With one arm and his trunk Jorl swung Pizlo up to his shoulder and followed Tolta out of the alcove and down a hall to the room set aside for the boy’s use when he chose or could be persuaded to sleep under a roof. As Pizlo’s trunk circled tightly around his left ear for the ride, Jorl began his tale of a legend of Barsk. He knew the story would end with the hero’s enlightenment and the boy’s slumber.

  “Whilom, Pizlo, and oh so very long ago, there lived a young man named Pholo. But this was no ordinary Fant.”

  “No?” That one syllable was all breathless anticipation and no part question.

  “No, because Pholo possessed the gift of flight! While all others walked or ran, skipped or jogged, Pholo soared through the passways of the Civilized Wood like a purposeful leaf on the edge of a storm…”

  THREE

  AIRY GLYPHS

  THROUGHOUT the tree cities of Barsk’s archipelagos, Fant went about their daily affairs. Occasional travelers worked their way through the maze of massive roots and boles, mud and gloom and deceptively deep pools that defined the Shadow Dwell, before stumbling without warning onto open beach and welcome rain. Families of mothers and aunts, sisters and girl cousins and children of both sexes, worked and studied, laughed and dreamed in homes, offices, and workshops carved and grown from the trees that defined the Civilized Wood. Adult males established smaller bachelor homes or circulated through the assortment of lodges and fraternal apartments that changed residents almost as frequently as their occupants changed clothes. Fant lounged and strolled along platforms and balconies, cooked meals, made music, enjoyed their lives. Children played on public balconies, studied in gymnasiums, slept in warm beds in homes populated with adults who loved them as the promise of their own posterity.

  None of that applied to Pizlo’s life.

  He hung in open air, ruminating, suspended upside down in a well-tended shaft walled on all sides with living green. Seven such chimneys existed on the island of Keslo; every island on Barsk boasted at least one. Fant society created the insubstantial monuments as part memorial and part warning. Few reached all the way to the uppermost limits of the forest, or ran all the way down to its roots. This one, Suth’s Shaft, was one of only three that Pizlo knew did both. It curved and meandered, bulged and narrowed, a metaphor for the twists and turns of Suth’s life some two hundred fifty years in the past.

  Maintaining the memorials required countless hours of effort. The shafts provided conduits for seedlings, pollens, and molds to float from one height to another, eager to root and grow. Everyone took turns to keep them clear, from roving teams of elderly bachelors to field trips of school children. They’d snip and clip, groom, and sculpt, preserving the negative space, until lunchtime bade them pack their tools and leave the living task for the next day’s team.

  This day, Pizlo had arrived early enough to have the space to himself. The walls of Suth’s had called to him, promising an adventure. A collection of hastily knotted vines had proved sufficient to his need and allowed him to dangle in the middle of the Shaft, far from the safety of any side or railing. His feet wriggled above him and his head grew dizzier by the moment.

  But the chimney wasn’t his destination, mer
ely the staging area. Eyes tightly closed, he listened to the forest as it revealed the path for him to take. When he had it clear in his mind, he squirmed free of the vines and dropped like a stone.

  Like Arlo had dropped.

  Unlike him, Pizlo bounced on curves, snagged branches, passed turns, and briefly clutched bits of vine to gain spin. The effort transformed his fall into a controlled plunge that ended in a deep pool many levels down in the Shadow Dwell.

  Since coming to Barsk and adopting an arboreal lifestyle, few Fant learned to swim. As with so much else, Pizlo was an exception. He let the water absorb his momentum, diving down to the pool’s murky bottom before executing a perfect flip, his legs scissoring to propel him upward. He surfaced and swam to the water’s edge. Mud-covered stone surrounded a pool scarcely wider than the boy’s height. He hauled himself up onto a stone and lay back under the fronds of a butterleaf plant, panting and complimenting himself on the speed of his descent, a personal best for reaching the Shadow Dwell.

  He used his trunk to snatch up several mouthfuls of dusty, golden leaves, grimacing at their bitter aftertaste. He squinted, as much with concentration as to focus his weak eyesight, and exhaled pollen rings through his trunk. In the circular glyphs of Barsk he spelled the consonants of his friend’s name in the humid air. J … R … L …

  Jorl had been Arlo’s friend and somehow that friendship had transferred to him, doubling the number of people in his world after Arlo’s death left him only Tolta. He liked that, much as he liked the irony that all the thousands of Fant, the Lox and Eleph that shared this island with him while denying his existence because of his differences, were themselves denied by millions and millions of other people on more worlds than he could imagine. And none of the Fant who pretended he didn’t exist had ever been to any of those other places or met any of those other people (who wouldn’t have wanted to meet them anyway). Except for Jorl. He had done both, been there and met them and come home to be his friend.

  Maybe that was why Jorl kept showing up in his conversations with the world. It didn’t matter that only two other Fant acknowledged his existence; the rest of the planet conversed with him on a regular basis. Not words so much, because only people had language. Even though he was only six, Pizlo knew the difference between real and pretend. The trees of the Civilized Wood had brought him here today, and many times in the past rocks and streams in the Shadow Dwell had shared secrets with him. On two occasions, the entire island of Keslo had alerted him to time and place so that he could position himself just so, sprawled out on one of its thin strips of beach or secreted upon an observation platform poised above the canopy. On both junctures he had occupied just the right spot when the ubiquitous clouds had parted to reveal one of Barsk’s moons. He’d looked up at them and felt them gazing back down in turn. The moons were the wisest things he’d ever met. Their light shone onto his face and passed knowledge to him, ideas and thoughts and stories, of what had been and what was yet to come. Pizlo smiled as he remembered the experience; Jorl would have called those conversations visions.

  Conversing with the world was yet another way he differed from other Fant. They had gray skin, his was colorless white. They winced and pouted when they stepped on a sharp stone or cut themselves on a broken branch, but no injury, large or small, bothered Pizlo. Tolta had tried and tried to get him to wear long-sleeved shirts and thick pants, but he preferred less encumbrance, and since he couldn’t feel the hurt of the innumerable cuts and scratches covering him from ear to toe he ran wild, wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts and a daypouch on a strap around his chest.

  The daypouch held food, but he’d been thinking about making one large enough to carry books. Jorl had taught him to read and loaned him books, one at a time at first, but as many as three at a go, now. Most had stories about Fant who had lived in the past, and he liked best the stories that Jorl himself had written. Pizlo’s penmanship was just about good enough for him to write down some of his own stories, the ones that swam in his head, coming to him from a place beyond dreams. But paper and ink were hard for him to keep hold of as he rambled from place to place.

  He spat out the last of the leaves and stood. He’d come here with a purpose beyond plunging down at speed. Clambering over tree roots, slogging through thick mud, and fording a pair of fast-moving streams, he came at last to his destination at the base of one of the massive meta-trees that made the Civilized Wood possible. A name had been carved into the bole, the incised letters stained and filled in with something like sap. Arlo’s name.

  A small pile of river stones marked the spot where the remains had been planted. Pizlo had watched from hiding as Jorl performed the rite.

  He’d awakened this morning to the whisper of one of the marking stones, urging him to visit. That had been new, and new was always interesting. He was here now, and wondering what would come to him.

  As though stumbling from a dream into deep water, Pizlo pulled together several pieces of concentration and compared memories of the letters written on the tree and the fading letters he’d written earlier on the air. He closed his eyes and felt the world fall away. In his mind, the blackness deepened to something darker than black. He waited.

  Time passed. His little body grew exhausted. His stomach rumbled and his throat felt dry. He chose not to notice. He emptied his attention into that blackness, like a fisherman might lower a net into the sea, patient for the catch to come to him.

  When it did, the sight made him smile. There was Jorl. He looked tired, maybe a little scared. Before Pizlo could ask himself what could scare a grown-up, he saw Jorl change. He couldn’t say what was different, and it didn’t make sense. There was more of Jorl than could possibly be, but he was still himself. Like the ocean was the same water whether you cupped some of it in your hands or waded out until the waves crashed over your head. Jorl smiled as he grew, so vast he filled up the darkness and forced Pizlo to open his eyes to the more ordinary gloom of the Shadow Dwell.

  He reached up and found a handhold in the tree, enough to start scrambling up, beginning the long trip back to the Civilized Wood. With luck, he might get back in time to visit Tolta for dinner. As he climbed, Pizlo’s fingers roamed over his face. He discovered he’d brought Jorl’s smile back with him from the blackness. He wished he’d managed to bring an aleph with him. Maybe he would find a way to do that. Next time.

  FOUR

  SOLUTIONS IN MEMORY

  THOUGH she had never actually met one in the flesh, Lirlowil hated the Fant. Her hatred was a recent development, acquired after she’d been forcibly removed from the world of her birth and imprisoned in a suite of rooms aboard an automated station orbiting Barsk.

  Beautiful by Otter standards, she’d spent the last few years enjoying the peaks of privilege earned not by any act of her own, but by the random chance that gifted her with being able to both read minds and talk to the dead. Unless you had the misfortune to be one of those disgusting Fant on Barsk, you could go your entire life without encountering a Speaker. The drug that triggered the ability was fiendishly expensive, and rarely worked the first few times. Alliance science had yet to determine what genetic markers resulted in the talent. Off Barsk, Speakers were unlikely, though hardly uncommon. True telepaths though, people who could effortlessly slip inside the mind of other beings and sample their memories and knowledge as easily as flipping the pages of a book, were orders of magnitude more rare.

  The number of individuals with both sets of abilities would make for a very small dinner party indeed. Lirlowil’s mental gifts emerged with puberty and elevated her social status a thousandfold. The discovery that her talents included Speaking occurred a couple years later when she’d sampled some koph at a party and began seeing nefshons over the next hour’s time.

  Sharv, her home, was a mixed world, a glamour planet of mild climates. The days never grew uncomfortably hot, and the rain fell only lightly and at opportune times. Tourists came as much to enjoy its many sights as to be seen en
joying them. Artists of every description lived and worked there, mingling media and inventing new delights which sold for outrageous sums offworld. None of its cities contained more than a million souls nor possessed any heavy industry. The population included not only Otters but also Bears, Elk, a smattering of Yak, and the omnipresent Cats. The people of Lirlowil’s homeworld had registered her as a planetary treasure, and even among the hedonistic lifestyles common to Otters she began to set a new standard as a sybaritic party girl. But there were no parties aboard the station, and the closest thing to hedonism Lirlowil had found was the ability to sleep in as late as she wished.

  The station consisted of a giant wheel of attached warehouses connected to a central hub; the hub in turn linked to a beanstalk reaching down to a spot on the equator of Barsk. Enormous containers climbed up the beanstalk every hour. The Patrol crew that lived in the hub moved each of them to one warehouse or another, until such time as a vessel arrived and emptied the contents into its own hold and then departed. Sometimes these ships swapped out people, station workers taking berths on a supply ship or vice versa, trading one form of monotony for another. No one ever came to relieve Lirlowil.

  She’d arrived there like so much cargo herself. A Bear from the Patrol had shown up at her home on Sharv. One moment she’d been fast asleep, dreaming of the debaucheries from the night before, and the next he’d been standing over her bed with a writ of transference in his hand and trailing a small entourage made up of a Prairie Dog wearing a civil parson’s ring in one twitching ear, and an Otter, only a few years older than Lirlowil, garbed like a physician’s assistant.

  “I am Urs-Major Krasnoi,” said the Bear. “I do not need your consent, but I do require you to be fully conscious. Can you tell me your name?”

  This didn’t make any sense. She wriggled her neck and shoulders a moment in thought, remembered the distinction between dreams and hallucinations, realized she was in bed and made a leap of faith as she asked, “What the fuck are you doing in my dream?”