Ammonite (33 page)

As she worked, she thought about what Thenike had taught her, about deepsearching, about patterning, about pregnancy.

They were all part of the same process. She rooted out a weed and tossed it onto the pile she would use for compost. Deep-search. Something that all did, once they thought they were ready. Often some time around puberty, though earlier or later was not too unusual. The searcher looked within, to find out… what?

“Whatever she looks for,” Thenike had said unhelpfully. “Almost always a name.

Sometimes what she would like to do with her life.”

It intrigued Marghe. What did they see, and how did they see it? Like a movie, an interactive net holo, an abstract painting? Maybe it was audio, or tactile. Olfactory.

“All,” Thenike said, and added, just when Marghe was beginning to feel satisfied with that answer, “or none, or a mix.”

The more Marghe had pressed, the less clear the viajera’s answers had seemed.

“You’re not being clear,” she had said, frustrated. “How do you mean, exactly,

‘listen to what’s inside you’?”

“Try it for yourself,” Thenike had said. “Then you explain it to me.”

That had been yesterday. Marghe did not want to take the viajera up on her suggestion. She was afraid.

She pondered that as she dug and rooted. Now and again she moved one plant away from another, or closer to its neighbor. She was not sure why she did this, only that it was good for the different plants; it felt right. When the plants were wrongly ordered, it felt on some dim level as though someone were screeching metal down metal, setting her teeth on edge. When she moved the plants, the discomfort stopped. At first she had been disturbed by the fact that she was behaving without identifiable empiric reason, and had tried not to do so. But the feeling became unpleasant. Now she allowed herself to act automatically and tried not to worry about it.

She stood up and stretched, moved to the patch of garden she wanted to break in for the jaellum seedlings growing indoors in the nursery, just off the great room. The ground was hard, still frosty in places. She dug until she was damp with sweat inside her tunic.

She straightened her back. Something was not right. She sat quietly, letting her mind idle, and then she knew: the jaellum seedlings would do better over on the south side of the garden, in the more sandy soil. Which meant she had broken this ground for nothing. She swore softly. It would take hours to dig over a new patch, and she would have to transfer the goura bulbs she had planted earlier in the sandy patch.

Maybe she was wrong. It would be easier if she was wrong. She would continue breaking this ground. Yes. After all, she had no real reason, no good reason, to believe they would flourish better in a different location.

By gritting her teeth, she managed to work for about another half an hour, but eventually she had to stop; her discomfort was almost painful. She admitted defeat.

Whether or not she knew how she knew it, the seedlings would fare better in the sandy south garden. All she was doing was wasting time and energy. What needed doing needed doing.

She sighed, climbed to her feet, and took her taar-skin mat and roll of wet felt over to the goura. She starting digging up the shoots, one by one, and laying them carefully on the unrolled felt. Next time she would listen more attentively to her instincts.

She paused, trowel in hand.
What needed doing needed doing
.

Deepsearch. If Marghe was honest, she herself knew she ought to do it. Ignoring the need did not make it go away.

She thrust her trowel deep into the soil and took her hand away. The handle gleamed, rounded and polished by a hundred human hands. She wondered how old it was, whether a woman of Ollfoss using the trowel could look inside her past and see her mother or grandmother or many-times-great-grandmother handling the same trowel, bending over the same patch of dirt. The thought terrified her, but what scared her more was the idea that she might look inside herself and find nothing.

Eight women pattern-sang for Marghe; she made the ninth. When she had asked Thenike why always nine, Thenike shrugged. “Nine is the right number.”

Marghe decided not to take that any further. “How long does it take?”

“A few moments, or the whole day. Everyone’s different. It depends how far you go, and how easy it is. Many of the young ones are frightened, which makes it harder. You’ll go in fast, I think. How long you stay is up to you.”

Not long, Marghe thought, not long.

They gathered outside in the early afternoon. It was almost warm, but Thenike had warned her to wrap up well. Standing motionless for hours did not produce much body heat. Two chia birds sang back and forth to each other.

Six of her family were there: Thenike, Gerrel, Hilt, Leifin, Wenn, Huellis. Kenisi and the two youngsters were with Namri, who had put her back out. Kristen and Ette made up the eight.

Thenike would keep her safe.

Gerrel, who had made her first deepsearch only last midsummer, started the singing. She hummed deep, tunelessly. The others took up the hum until it sounded like a creaky tree song, the rubbing together of branches. It wove back and forth like the wind high in the forest, apparently aimless. The singers took breaths according to their own rhythms and exhaled in the wavering hum that climbed and sank and wandered without apparent form. Marghe closed her eyes. Two, then three women began to breathe and hum at the same time, then a fourth, and a fifth. Marghe imagined she could hear their hearts mumping together. Her own breath ran with theirs.

Between one heartbeat and another, they all breathed and sang together, great powerful gusts of sound beating at Marghe like rain, rain that grew in intensity, spattering her face, running then pouring over her, pooling at her feet, until she felt she was standing under a waterfall of sound. The sound pulsed endlessly, like the world. Deep inside her cells, something responded.

Thenike will keep me safe.

She followed the plunging water down, where it wanted to go.

Marghe came up from her not-dream. She felt stiff from standing still so long, and her pattern singers were gone, except for Thenike. Marghe smiled at her, but said nothing; she did not want to talk yet.

In silence, Thenike helped her walk through the evening shadow of the trees until her joints unstiffened. Undergrowth rustled beneath their feet.

Marghe felt she had been gone a long time, much longer than the two or three hours it had taken for the world to turn away from the sun and toward the arms of evening. She had been inside herself in a way she had never thought possible; listening to her body as a whole, a magnificent, healthy whole. And she had done more: reliving memories of her childhood she had forgotten, experiencing again days she had never been wholly aware of. Now she knew how it felt to be a baby just ten days old, and that baby had been as alien to her as any species she had encountered since. There had been more: what felt like days of communication between herself now and herself of many thens. She had sent a question down all the avenues that opened before her: what is my name? And echoing back had come: Marghe. And again: Marghe. And then, whispered in a voice she knew: Marghe, and more.

She was on a thin and misty beach; her mother walked from the shadows and held out her hand. On her palm was the ammonite.

“Primitive cultures thought they were coiled snakes, petrified, and called them snake-stones,” Acquila said. “But the word ‘ammonite’ comes, of course, from the medieval Latin,
cornu Ammonis
, horn of Ammon, due to its resemblance to the involuted horn of Ammon, or Amun, the ram-headed god of Thebes.”

She put the cold thing in Marghe’s whole right hand. “His name, Amun, means

‘complete one.’ He acquired the power of fertility formerly invested in Min, the ancient Egyptian god of reproduction.” She looked amused. “Min was very popular.

But his time passed.”

Her mother had faded, leaving the ammonite. Marghe had not been surprised when it sank into her hand. And now she was herself, and more. The complete one.

Marghe smiled. “I have been so many places…”

“Yes,” Thenike said. “Mind this root here.”

“I see it.”

Two more chia birds called back and forth. The same ones? Marghe stopped and tilted her head to listen. “Do many women keep their child names?” she asked.

“Some. Not many.”

“What was yours?”

“Gilraen.”

“Gilraen…”She considered the woman next to her, with her rich hair, pinned up, her soft brown eyes and strong fingers. “A nice name, but not yours.”

“No.”

They started walking again. After a moment, Marghe said softly, “My name is Marghe Amun.”

The complete one.

No one suggested that Marghe move out of the guest room, but she wondered if she should. There was something she needed to do, she was sure of it. But what?

Marghe felt the need to do this unspecified something as a subtle pressure against her skin, as when the weather was about to change. She did not mention it to anyone. She gardened, and ate, and talked to Thenike and Gerrel and, now and again, Wenn or Huellis. Leifin disappeared on a hunt.

Marghe became restless. When she dug in the garden, she dug with hard, vicious jabs, and took pleasure in her aching muscles when she sank into the hot tub in the evening. She lay in the almost-scalding water hoping, longing for the heat to soothe her. It did not. It was as though she had a muscle, somewhere, that had not been exercised.

She dried herself off thoughtfully. A muscle that needed exercising. Perhaps that was it. She had to find out what she could do now, now that she had part of Jeep living inside every cell of her body; she had to find out how she had changed.

In the guest room—she could not think of it as hers—she lit a small fire, did some gentle stretching and breathing to ease her sore muscles, and then settled down cross-legged on the warm flags near the hearth.

Three breaths triggered a trance easily. Too easily. She jerked herself out, frightened. Such a deep meditative state should normally take twenty minutes or more.

She smoothed her heart rhythm, thought about that. Was it anything to be scared of? She was not sure. Was it something that she could control? Probably. Then she would try again.

As easily as before, she sank into a trance, her breathing slow and deep and regular. Her electrical rhythms, her brain activity, began to cycle hugely and slowly, like an enormous skipping rope. Behind her eyelids, she imagined her blood as a thick red river full of amoeba-like creatures: T cells, lymphocytes, phagocytes, doughnut-shaped hemoglobin, tumbling over and over, rushing past. The overwhelming impression was one of vigor, a good, cleaned-out feeling. No sluggish streams or narrow places, no dead-seeming backwaters where toxins gathered.

She had never been so healthy, or seen it so clearly.

She moved her mind’s eye on, roaming glandular production, the lymph system, her gut. She paused by an
E. coli
, moved on, settled on a cheek cell. She remembered a long-ago biology lesson: scraping cheek cells onto a slide, examining them under a microscope. It had been nothing like this.

The cell was like an enormous helium balloon in which she floated, swimming through cytoplasm and around mitochondria, bumping gently against the nucleic mass where DNA writhed like a nest of snakes. She moved inward. There, running through the center of the DNA like a bright electoral thread, was the virus. It thrummed like a tuning fork. She glided around it, examining it. So small. She reached out to touch it, pulled back at the last moment. Another time.

When she withdrew back up to conscious level, she found that the fire was long dead and she was shaking with cold.

She discovered that it was too tiring to trance more than once every three or four days, and too frightening. She persevered. Now that she had started, she needed to know more, much more. This was herself she was exploring, uncovering.

Discovering. If she was ever to be truly Marghe Amun, the complete one, then she needed to know what she could do, who she was.

The more she discovered, the more she realized there were places she wanted to go, things she needed to do and see, that might be dangerous for her to attempt now, alone.

One day, eating lunch with Gerrel, she remembered Thenike using the drums to take her to an impossible memory vision of the goth, and the way she had used her own body rhythms to keep Marghe alive.

Early the next morning, shivering slightly because it was cold under the trees, she went to find the viajera. The grass was still wet with dew; she followed Thenike’s bootprints and found her some way into the forest, gathering nuts for the family’s breakfast. Marghe watched her for a while. Thenike seemed separate from everything around her, distinct, as though coated in crystal; she moved here and there in the forest, stooping, tossing nuts into her basket, pausing now and again to look up at some wirrel’s chitter or chia’s call. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, like a wood-colored waterfall.

Marghe stepped out from the shadow.

“Marghe! It’s a beautiful morning. Come and help me with these nuts.”

“I need your help,” Marghe blurted.

Thenike put down her basket of nuts, sat down by a smooth-barked tree. “Tell me.”

Marghe stepped further into the clearing. “There’s so much I need to know, and I can’t do it on my own. Link with me in search.”

Thenike selected a nut, cracked the shell, and chewed. “Why me?”

“Because you’re a viajera. You’re skilled in these matters.” She was standing right next to Thenike now. “And because I trust you.”

Thenike nodded slowly, then gestured for Marghe to sit next to her. She took Marghe’s hand and seemed to study her a long time. “Very well.”

Linking was hard, Thenike said, and required preparation. They fasted one day, ate lightly of the same things at the same times the next, repeated the cycle, over and over. Fast, eat, fast, eat. As much as possible, they did everything together: walked, ate, cooked, bathed. They slept next to each other in the same bed; sometimes Marghe lay awake listening to their matched breath, and sometimes she fell asleep immediately, knowing that Thenike listened. Day after day, night after night they spent together, and Marghe began to feel a fierce energy building between them, heating and shrinking, pulling them in, like a star about to go nova.