Singer from the Sea (50 page)

Melanie began to stammer something, but Genevieve could not bear their shocked and angry faces or her own burning rage. She fled past them, pushing them aside, and went back to her own little cell, where she struggled with the sliding door in her attempt to slam it, finally jamming it half closed before she threw herself facedown onto her pillow and wept herself exhaustedly to sleep.

In the night, Genevieve woke to find Melanie sitting beside her bed, eyes closed, hands relaxed in her lap.

Her anger had not left her in the night. She murmured, half-resentfully, “Why are you here, Melanie?”

“I came to be with you. I thought you might be lonely.”

She laughed, still angrily. “Oh, Melanie. Yes, I’m lonely, but you don’t fill my empty niches. You’re not husband or baby, so you won’t do. Just go away.”

“I thought we might talk.”

“About what? Religion, Melanie?”

“Didn’t your mother ever talk to you about religion?”

“She did, yes. She said it was important to be seen being pious. She quoted the covenants to me, about purity of soul. Women, she said, were required to be pure of soul.”

“That’s … rather what I wanted to talk about.”

Genevieve sat up, not as annoyed as she pretended to be, surprised to find herself slightly curious. “It seems you won’t be satisfied until you do! I’ll listen, but that’s all I’ll guarantee.”

Melanie refolded her hands, took a deep breath, and said, “The difference between our belief and the belief you were reared in is this: We don’t believe people have individual souls. We believe living worlds have souls. We believe that all the species of life that have ever lived on a world are part of the soul of that world.”

“Stephanie’s book said something of that.”

“In the old language we call it te wairua taiao—the world spirit. It starts out small and simple, and it grows and develops and learns as billions of years go by, becoming old and wise. It’s of the world, our teachers say, an inevitable result of a living world, and it doesn’t die when the world dies. It separates itself and goes elsewhere.”

“Stephanie’s book said that,” Genevieve remarked, with something almost like amusement. “I discussed it with a strange little man named Jeorfy Bottoms, and we decided it was a concept one might accept, philosophically.”

Stubbornly, Melanie went on: “The world-soul includes every living creature that has ever been on the planet, every microbe, every animal, every tree, not as individuals, but as races, and at any time upon any planet, some of those races are harbingers …”

“Harbingers?”

“Indicators. Signifiers. You know … if you dig in your garden, the soil is full of worms.”

“If it’s good soil.”

“Exactly. If there are lots of worms, you know it’s good soil. The worms are … harbingers of the health of the soil. So, on any given planet there are harbingers. If they are alive and healthy, then that planet is also alive and healthy. If the harbingers are dying or dead, then the planet will surely die.”

“Then mankind couldn’t have been à harbinger, for Earth died even though men were many.”

Melanie’s mouth twisted. “You’re baiting me. You know Earthmen had no regard for other species. Even though it was the only soul they had, Earthmen evicted the soul of the Earth and moved out into space from a dead planet.”

“So what are they now?”

Melanie sighed. “A friend of ours calls them irrelevant intellects.”

“And all this time that I’ve worried over the state of my soul, I shouldn’t have bothered,” Genevieve said angrily.

Melanie sighed, moving restlessly in the chair. She said soothingly, “There’s a little story my mother used to tell me about Haven. A scrutator was sailing on Merdune Lagoon, and caught by a great fish who threatened to eat him, and the scrutator said it didn’t matter, for his soul would go to heaven. And the fish asked him, ‘When your soul gets to heaven, what will it say to enlighten the universe?’ The scrutator said he wasn’t that wise, and the fish said, ‘You’d better learn wisdom while you’re on the way down my gullet, because wisdom is the only thing that unlocks the gates of heaven.’”

“What else did your mother tell you?” Genevieve asked, suddenly intrigued.

“She told me that among the billions and billions of human beings, perhaps a few know some little thing of interest to the universe, and those few men are the leavening of mankind. Most men don’t know anything except myths and manners. She told me only the wholeness of a world that has lived for billions of years can speak to the universe about anything meaningful. Men’s lives are part
of that, of course, and the wiser men become, the more they learn about the universe, the greater part they are, which is an incentive to study, so far as I’m concerned. If my life is a part of the world-soul, it is truly immortal.”

“And what have harbingers to do with it?”

“They’re just indicators. Like warning lights. Or alarm bells. They’re born naturally, and they die naturally. They don’t seek long life. Sometimes they’re killed, but they don’t look for unnatural ways to protect themselves. If a harbinger hunts, it hunts with what nature gave it. Sometimes it eats the prey. Sometimes the prey eats it. Harbingers don’t play it safe, they adhere to the chain of life, and if the chain is healthy, so are they.”

Genevieve closed her eyes, going inside herself to another place. Melanie’s words resonated. Someone had said something like this to her before. Mother? Who else could it have been? “But if each living world has a spirit, didn’t you simply invade another spirit’s territory when you came here?”

“Spirits aren’t territorial, they’re inclusive. One joining another is like immigrants coming to a new land. They change the society, yes, but they broaden it and add to its wisdom. The spirit of Haven, the world, was not identical to the spirit of Earth that arrived with the creatures in the ark ship, but when the two united, the resultant spirit was not dichotomous.”

Genevieve rubbed her forehead wearily. “Melanie, I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless. I can believe your people came here to preserve Êarthian species that were in danger of extinction. I believe that’s why people on Old Earth built the ark fleet. I believe you are sincerely religious, and I concede that your religious interpretation of what happened might be true, but I haven’t even sorted out the beliefs I was brought up to! I’ve no inclination toward adopting a new credo just now unless I have to.”

Melanie sighed. “Of course you don’t have to believe anything. Mankind lived for a long time on Earth without believing in the spirit of the world. Right up to the end people thought the Earth was the center of the universe
and the god of all creation was fixated on humans as a race. Nonetheless, once the ark ships were gone, the world died.”

Genevieve asked, “What does your world-spirit look like?”

Her jaw dropped. “I have no idea. None of us has ever seen it. I’m not sure it’s seeable.”

“Well, your harbingers were sea creatures. They’re great whales, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Very old, very big, very vocal. And dolphins, and some other less bony things. And they can tell us things, sing us things we’ve learned to understand.”

“Do you go down, into the sea, to be with them?”

Melanie looked up, brows drawn together. “No, of course not. We lack the equipment that would make that possible. This ocean on Haven … it’s huge! And deep. All Earth’s oceans would plop into it without vastly raising the water level.”

“And you’ve never seen a great golden creature, lying like a floating sun within the sea?”

“No,” said Melanie, mystified.

“Ah.” Genevieve laughed, a brittle little laugh, full of self-mockery. “One more question. Who exactly was Tenopia?”

“Nobody knows, exactly! She’s said to have been a confidante of the spirits, a sacred woman. She was the first of her kind, a mystery. Her mother was one of the island women, a tapu woman who claimed she had been made pregnant by a wave from the ocean. The claim was heretical, according to her people, so the claim was put to the proof. When the child Tenopia was born, she was thrown into the sea, far from land. When the sea returned her, alive, to the shore where her mother waited, everyone knew her father was the sea.

“She grew up, she traveled all over Haven, and eventually, she came to live in Galul. She told the people there that when she’d been in Mahahm, that she’d had to escape from the Shah, and she sang a song about it. She bore many daughters in Galul. Some of us who live in Galul are descended from her. She sent several of her deseendents,
some say most of them, to Haven, and one of them was Stephanie, Tewhani, who became Queen.”

Genevieve frowned wearily. “Stephanie also bore many daughters, who bore many daughters. I can attest to that. I have paid attention. I have heard of the world-spirit, the harbingers in the deep, and some … considerable number of women descended from Tenopia. I pray that’s all of it? Please. For tonight?”

Melanie flushed. “I should have let you sleep.”

“Oh, I have slept. I will sleep. Eventually. Go away, Melanie. Let me he here in the cool. There is a vast knot of confusion in my mind, and something must untangle it.”

Doubtfully, ruefully, Melanie went away.

O
N THE ISLAND NEAREST
M
AHAHM
, A
UFORS
L
EY HAD
reached a point of no return with the Captain. Though Aufors was supposedly in command of the mission, evidently he could not command that the ship return to Mahahm to drop him off.

“We haven’t enough fuel,” the Captain reiterated, as he had been doing for two days. “We cannot return to Mahahm more than once and still make it back to Haven. Once we have returned to Mahahm-qum, the only movement open to us will be to return to Bliggen straight across the Southern Sea rather than along the arc of islands. If we go to Mahahm, we place ourselves at the mercy of the Mahahmbi. If they ask for you in return for the Prince, and if the Prince demands that you be turned over, I would have no choice but to order the men to deliver you.”

The Captain regarded Aufors almost with desperation. “I’ve winked at evil too long, Colonel. If I’m to live with myself, I can’t do it again. I won’t see any of my men sacrificed by those bloodthirsty fanatics. If I take you back there, I’ll have to leave the men and the provisions here. If I take only you, there’ll be no one to pick off for slaughter but you.”

“And no way to moor the ship.”

“I could drop a message saying they must moor the
ship from the ground if they want me to pick up the Prince. The Prince can’t fly this ship, so he’ll need me.”

“And if you were free to choose what to do next?”

“Either go directly to Bliggen or, since we’ve plenty of food, wait here for a Frangían ship to come by, and negotiate a trip to Mahahm with them! Those are the only ways I can think of to stay here without danger to my men or myself.”

“I can think of one additional precaution,” said Aufors. “If you decide to approach Mahahm for any reason, alone or otherwise, I’d remove the cannon before you go. Mahahm might consider a life for the cannon would be an appropriate trade-off. The life might be the Marshal’s, or the Prince’s.”

The Captain paled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“As for the rest of it, I agree with your reasoning. It’s probably best that I don’t start my mission from outside the gates of Mahahm-qum. Have we any kind of small craft aboard? A skiff? Some kind of inflatable boat?”

The Captain nodded, relieved that Aufors had adopted a reasonable tone. Casting a quick look about to be sure they were not overheard, he said, “We do, yes. We have inflatable lifeboats in case of accident over the sea. They have electric motors with no very great range, but one of them has a solar regenerator. If you steal one, it would be only by accident that you might make off with that particular one. I, of course, would have no advance knowledge of your plans.”

“I understand you completely, Captain.”

“Get the steward to provision you, but try to keep me out of it. Be sure you have enough drinking water. You’ll need that most. By the way, did you talk to the doctor?”

“I tried, on and off, between episodes of badgering you. He has some kind of professional oath standing betwixt him and telling me what I need to know, so he says. I think it’s more fear than honor. He turned quite white when I opened the subject. Where is he from, anyhow?”

“The man is from Chamis. His homeworld is dying; its people are streaming off in all directions. He came here, with his wife and family, trading his expertise for permission to stay. You could probably frighten the information
out of him if you threaten him. He has no stomach for violence, that one.”

“Nor have I, Captain,” murmured Aufors. “If I thought he could lead me to Genevieve, I’d do it, stomach or no, but the doctor knows no more about her whereabouts than I do, and cruelty for its own sake has no attractions for me. The very fact that there’s something evil about the P’naki trade tells me where to begin looking. I’ve picked up hints of my own, and since you’ve indirectly affirmed most of them—though I’ll never disclose that you did so—the rest will fill in.”

“Where are you really going, Colonel?”

“After my wife and son.” He raised his eyebrows. “Though, if anyone asks, it may be more expedient to say I have gone to rescue the Prince and the Marshal.”

Aufors had already taken time to dye his hair and eyebrows. The dye was among the supplies he had fetched from Haven, for he had had a notion, even there, that the time might come when he would wish to pass for a Mahahmbi, and there were absolutely no redheads among them. While the Captain kept his crew busy elsewhere, Aufors gathered his supplies together and set off across the sea toward Mahahm, getting the boat out of sight as quickly as possible. He did not wish to come ashore near the Frangían port or anywhere that could be seen from the Mahahmbi towers. His only real plan was to find the old woman who had been in his house, and though the house had been blown up, the subterranean ways to it still might be intact. If he could get into and through the city. If.