Raising The Stones (26 page)

“Do you want me to come along?” Zilia asked, not sure whether she wanted them to say yes or no.

“Perhaps. Let us do a bit of surveying, first,” Shan asserted. “We may not ask you to join us when we get to Settlement One either. Just to avoid any appearance of undue influence, you understand.”

She smiled, indicating she did understand. Then she left them to go back to her apartment at CM staff housing, where she spent the night chewing her nails to the quick and wondering if she were really going mad. What did she think was happening here? She honestly didn’t know.

Meantime, the Damzel team got hold of Spiggy Fettle and invited him to dinner. They caught him with a companion, and he spoke to them with the screen blanked out, which his companion much preferred.

“I’m not observant,” he told on-the-screen Shan. “I don’t own a kamrac or a zettle. I wouldn’t know how to wind a turban if my life depended on it, and I eat eggs.”

“Not at our table, you don’t,” laughed Shan. “As for the rest, wear a loin cloth if you like, but we need to talk.”

Spiggy, who was having one of his all-time top highs, thought having dinner with a troupe of Thykerites would be great fun or ridiculous, one or the other, but in any case good for a laugh. Besides, his companion had to be elsewhere that evening.

As it turned out, the Damzels were nobody’s fools and gave him a good deal to think about. No, he told them seriously over the finishers of dried fruit and confections, he didn’t really think Zilia was mad.

“I rather like her, you know,” he admitted. “Despite her paranoia. She told me about her traumatic upbringing, and I’ve decided it’s really some kind of supersensitivity she has. She seems very alert to nuance. I don’t think she honestly
believes
anyone on Hobbs Land ever did anything naughty to a Departed, but she feels
something
covert is happening, and her quivering nerves translate that into something personal. By that, I mean something that affects Zilia or Zilia’s purpose in life. There are no remote and irrelevant sins with our Zilia. If there’s anything going on, she’s sure it pertains to her. She’s the only person I know who could overhear some harmless sexual hanky-panky between two settlers and translate it into a threat against the Departed.”

“So you think something could be going on?” Volsa asked.

“I know
something
is going on. Have you read Chaniger’s work on settlement applications of the classic Gaean hypothesis?”

Bombi shrugged at Shan who shrugged at Volsa, who said, “He was one of our instructors on Phansure.”

“He claims,” said Spiggy, ignoring the sceptical tone Volsa had used, “that the introduction of any strange species or, indeed, the loss of species causes great changes in the planetary psyche. Man has been on Hobbs Land some thirty-odd lifeyears, so, if Chaniger is right—and I’ve always felt there is a great deal to be said for his theories—we may expect the
persona
of Hobbs Land to be changing. It won’t be anything too obvious, I shouldn’t think. We occupy only a tiny land area and have been careful not to threaten local species in any way. Nonetheless, some change is probably occurring, and I think Zilia senses that change. It may be the most minor of adjustments. Some barely discernible shifting, but I think she feels it, as animals are said to feel the precursorial tension of climatic or tectonic events.”

“An interesting theory,” said Bombi, without expression.

“Of course, during this recent period, the Departed did die out,” murmured Volsa. “Assuming they were a predominate species, their demise might create considerable change in the planetary ecology. However, I think it only fair to tell you that the High Baidee do not accept the idea that planets or planetoids have
psyches
. To do so would imply that worlds have minds, and the proscriptions of the Baidee …”

“Oh, I’m well aware of all that,” Spiggy laughed. “I was born and bred on Thyker, after all. I lived there long enough to learn all about the Overmind and the Baidee prophetess. My stance upon such matters—which I will
not
allow you to call backsliding—is not due to ignorance of the words of Morgori Oestrydingh. No, my beliefs are, I like to think, my own device, not merely a reaction against revealed truth. However, you asked me a question, and I gave you an answer. You are free to reject the idea, or put it in terms you can accept if you like. Isn’t that what Baidee is all about, after all? Not allowing our minds to be controlled by others, so that we can be responsive to various ideas?”

He was laughing at them, and all three of them knew it. The prophetess had declared it a sin to believe in absolute truths, but the Scrutators claimed that didn’t apply to religious truths, of which they had manufactured a good supply over the centuries.

“If you can’t accept a planetary persona,” Spiggy went on, “then think in terms of shifting ecologies. No doubt they would also cause a bit of a premonitory tension. My real point is, I don’t want you to discard Zilia’s concerns as
mere
paranoia. She’s paranoid, yes, as many of those who share Voorstod heritage seem to be, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something going on.”

“Would you be interested in joining our survey? If we could get you time off?” Bombi put the question as a hypothetical one, but Spiggy took it seriously.

“No,” he said, after some thought. “If I went with you, it would be for pure curiosity’s sake; I might do some damage, and I can’t imagine being of any help at all. My refusal isn’t due to lack of interest, however. I feel bound to suggest that, if you could record your travels, there’d be a ready market among the settlements for your records. Settlers are intensely curious about the unsettled parts of Hobbs Land.”

He accepted their lifted brows as sufficient consideration of his idea, and then fell back on hospitality. He invited them to walk about CM, to visit the Admin club as his guest, to use the sports complex, to take advantage of the Archives. He made appropriate small talk, then left them to settle into familiar patterns of half talk, half musing, which was their family trait.

“Personas …”

“… not likely, but …”

“Something they haven’t even thought of …”

“… seems to be alert and responsive …”

A very long silence.

Then, “Tomorrow,” said Shan.

And with that and their evening obeisance to the Overmind, they ended their day.

•     •     •

•
In the upper-level
personnel office of CM, Mugal Pye was attempting to impress Jamice Bend rather more than he had impressed a number of lesser functionaries on the floors below.

“You see, Ma’am,” he was saying in his insinuating voice, “this boy here, Ilion Girat, is a nephew of Maire Girat, who came here to Hobbs Land snorbel’s years ago. All the boy wants is to convey the greetings of members of the family and get to meet his aunty, and we’ve had all these persons below and outside telling us it was impossible.”

“Mr. Pye,” said Jamice. “You would be amazed to learn how many uncles and nephews and sisters and sons come to Hobbs Land in order to escape from their kin and their families and all entanglements of the past. Even when so much is clear, we have all manner of relatives coming here saying they only want to talk to dear old aunty or advise dear sister that mother has died or that they only want to say hello and carry greetings back to the family. It may well be that this young man’s aunt will be glad to see her nephew, but it is equally likely such a meeting is the last thing she desires. We’ve learned this to our sadness. It’s why there is no roster of personnel available to visitors. You won’t even find it in the Archives. Casual visitors are not told where our people are.”

“But what if she wanted to see him,” pressed Mugal. “Would you forbid her doing so?”

“Of course we wouldn’t. I have a form here which you, or in this case, the young man should fill out. He should give us the name of his aunt, or the name she was known by before she came here, for she may have changed it since. He can tell us what the relationship is, and what the purpose of his visit is. Then we’ll transmit the message to the person involved, and if he or she wants to meet you, he or she will take time off from the work of the settlement and come here to CM to do so.”

“We can’t go there?”

“No, you can’t go there for that purpose unless you have a written invitation to be a guest in her clanhome. The settlements are not set up to receive casual visitors.”

Mugal, since he was already committed, had Ilion Girat fill out the form and then watched while Jamice herself fed the information into her desktop stage. He had little hope Maire Girat would want to see her nephew, but anything was worth a try.

They left the office to join the others outside, and Ilion asked, for the dozenth time, “How long am I going to have to stay here? This place is so empty.”

It was true that Hobbs Land had no mists to create walls and ceilings among which men could move, half-hidden from others of their kind. Here the horizon was far and clear, and vision disclosed more than Voorstoders were accustomed to see.

“You’ll stay until they send you home,” said Mugal. “And they’ll ask you how come you got left, and you’ll say you don’t know. You don’t know, do you?”

Ilion shook his head. He didn’t really. He only knew that someone else would go home in his place, someone who had some connection to a woman named Maire. The whole thing, so far as Ilion was concerned, was pointless.

•
In Settlement Three,
Vernor Soames was learning how to lay stone. He and six or seven of his friends had fallen prey to an urge to build something. Vernor wasn’t sure what. A clubhouse, maybe, he thought.

“I told them it would be all right with you,” Dracun had told Harribon. “I told them you wouldn’t mind their being fully occupied doing something sensible.”

“Where do they want to build it?” Harribon had asked, in a flat and unsurprised voice which seemed natural to the occasion.

“Out west of the settlement. There’s some open ground out there and a lot of broken stone at the bottom of a ledge.”

Harribon not only agreed to the project, he also used some personal credits to hire an ancient-arts hobbyist, two-jobbing from CM, to come give the boys lessons in stonemasonry. At least, it had started with boys, but there were as many girls involved by the time the lessons had progressed through foundation digging and stonecutting and mortar-mixing to actual stone-laying. So far as anyone could tell, the young people had no plan, but as the central ringwall and radiating arches took shape, Harribon relaxed into a mood of fatalistic acceptance. He seemed to be the only one who noticed the resemblance of the stonework to an architectural form already found upon Hobbs Land. But then, he was probably the only one who had traveled to any part of Settlement One except the sports complex. The ruined Owlbrit villages up on the escarpment were out of bounds for settlers.

While the older children cut and laid stone, whole teams of younger ones combed the stream beds for flat colored stones, which they sorted into boxes by color and size. Many such boxes sat near the construction site, waiting. Sometimes adults wandered out to the site and helped with the digging. The area inside the arches had to be scooped, just so, and then lined with large, flat stones, with the interstices filled in with clay, to make a surface on which mosaics could be pieced together with construction stickum.

“What would you do if you didn’t have stickum?” Harribon asked Vernor one day as the boy took a brief respite from lifting stone.

Vernor thought about it. The whininess which had always distinguished his manner was almost totally absent, Harribon had noted. “Clay,” he said finally. “We’d set the stones in a bed of clay. But stickum’s better.”

Harribon agreed that stickum was probably better. So long as Central Supply didn’t cavil at supplying such large quantities of it.

After the arches had been completed and the central ringwall had risen to the height of three tall men, Vernor came into Harribon’s office and announced, “We need some grills. Each three of the radiating arches comes down over one arch in the ringwall. There’s twenty-four radiating arches, so that means there’s eight arches in the ringwall. Each of those needs a grill, and one of them has to open, like a door. There’s nothing in the settlement that will do. None of the machine grills will fit. They need to be metal, and we can’t make them here.” Vernor was not in the least apologetic as he explained his needs.

Harribon told the boy he would take care of it. He made another trip to Settlement One, this time with an engineering recorder capable of sampling materials. He made a record of the grills in all six temples, the rebuilt one, the recently ruined one, and the four others, where only fragmentary bits could be found. The grills differed mostly in details. Some were wrought with leaves, others with blades of grass. Some had curlicues, others were plain. Harribon’s mother had been fond of certain aromatic native plants, which she had grown in pots. Harribon made pictures of the plants and took the recorder notes and the pictures to an artist hobbyist at Settlement Nine who sent the resultant plans on to the artisans’ shop at CM for bid by any metal-working hobbyist. When the grills were delivered, subtly decorated with entwined metal leaves and stems, the children working on the structure did not seem at all surprised.

Harribon helped with the central roof truss, as did seven other men of the Settlement, including a couple of the Soames brothers. By that time, the thatching on the lower roof was complete and the mosaics were ninetenth’s laid on the scooped out floors. This building had a slightly shallower scoop to the floor than in the Settlement One temple, Harribon noted. As though something had realized humans weren’t built at all like the turnip shaped Departed.

When the building was complete, except for plastering, everyone went back to doing what they had done before. Except, of course, that they got more done these days because people had almost totally stopped getting angry with one another. At the end of the quarter, Harribon looked at the stats on production and permitted himself a wry and slightly fearful smile. If this kept up, Settlement Three would be neck-and-neck with Settlement One.