Six Moon Dance (41 page)

Mouche and Ornery stared doubtfully at the pods, looking around for something more solid, seeing nothing that would float. It seemed to be the pod or nothing. Questioner, reading their minds, patted them on the shoulders comfortingly. “Many things will no doubt be made clear as we go.”

Several Timmys leapt into one of the boats, which then slipped into the water of its own accord and floated a little way downstream, remaining there, quiet in the current. Mouche and Ornery started to push one of the boats into the river, only to have it slip along the rocky beach by itself. They climbed into it, sat in the rubbery bottom facing one another and felt their bottoms bumping over small rocks that were easily discernable through the half-flexible substance of the vessel. Questioner waded into the stream and hooked herself to the back edge of the boat that held Mouche and Ornery, her mid parts ballooning until she bobbed on the ripples like a hollow ball. She was near enough that her reddish glow still illuminated both Mouche and Ornery, near enough to speak and be heard, though once they had pushed off into the river, she seemed disinclined to do so. There were no paddles or oars. Evidently it was intended they should simply float wherever they were going, though that did not explain the fact that the little boats maintained their relative distance and position, no matter how the tunnel twisted or how the water eddied.

From the front of the other boat a green glow swam upon the river. Mouche knew this was Flowing Green, that she led him to his destiny, that she knew he followed willingly even though he hadn’t wanted to approach her, not really. So far … so far nothing had happened to disenchant him, but if it did … oh, he would feel … feel so …

“What?” asked Ornery, leaning toward him. “You look as though you had lost your last shoelace and the race about to start.”

Mouche managed a smile. “I was thinking how wonderful … how wonderful they are.” He gestured, making it clear who he meant.

“They always were,” said Ornery. “I always thought so.”

“You’ve both seen them?” Questioner asked. “I mean, without their coverings.”

“Not recently,” Ornery admitted. “But when I was a child, of course I saw them. They didn’t wrap themselves up with
us
. Not when we were little.”

“Mine did, mostly,” Mouche confessed. “We had such a little place to live. Unless we were out in the woods, then my Timmy would take off her wrappers.”

“Her
wrappers? You knew she was female?”

“No! of course not.” Mouche subsided into a new fit of guilt. Thinking of Timmys as male or female was also forbidden. “We weren’t supposed to wonder about them, or to think of them being families or having babies or anything.”

Ornery snorted. “Oh, well. Supposed to! We’re supposed to be veiled, but on ships we aren’t. We’re supposed not to see Timmys, but we don’t trip over them, so we must really see them, right? You can drive yourself crazy with stuff you’re not supposed to.”

“And women aren’t supposed to be … running around loose,” murmured Mouche in a slightly angry tone.

Surprisingly, Ornery grinned. “Right. Not supposed to.”

From behind them, the Questioner murmured, “And girls aren’t supposed to pretend to be boys, but I doubt you’re the first.”

“How did you know?” Ornery asked, jaw dropping.

“I can smell you, child. My sense of smell is copied from Old Earther canines. Differentiating between sexes is nothing. I can also tell about how old you are, where you’ve been and what you’ve been eating recently, what your state of health is, and what was in the soap you last used.”

“Can you tell where we’re going?” asked Ornery in a slightly sarcastic voice.

“From the fact that water runs down hill, I assume we go down,” she said. “Somewhere this streamlet runs into a river, and that, I should imagine, runs eventually into an underground sea. I believe so, for seas figure in the legends of this place and because Mouchidi’s little friend has told us we will cross them.”

Mouche flushed. “She isn’t my … my friend.”

“Ornery is right, you know. She isn’t a she, either.”

Astonished, Mouche tried to turn around, a maneuver that set the little boat bobbing. A Timmy voice came clearly through the darkness. “Still, sit, you make peevish Joggiwagga!”

Without moving, Mouche said, “She isn’t? I mean, it isn’t?”

Questioner murmured, “It isn’t, no. Is the one leading us the one you’ve been watching?”

Mouche nodded miserably. “One of them. I call her … it, Flowing Green.”

“Because of the hair, of course. Flowing Green is very attractive to you, is it not? Tim, not. I think we will find they do not say him, her, he, she, but merely tim. Mankind proposes, tim-tim disposes.”

“No sexes?” drawled Ornery, with a sidelong glance at Mouche. “That should simplify things.”

“Not really,” murmured Questioner. “Reproduction of nonsexual beings will inevitably have its own complications. We simply don’t know what they are, yet.”

Questioner dimmed her light to the slightest, reddish glow, watching in fascination as the luminescence around them continued to grow brighter. The surroundings were in no sense illuminated. Much of their environment appeared as patches of darkness outlined or interrupted by strings, shades, lines, or clouds of light ranging from pale yellow through all possible greens to deep blue. Part of this, Questioner knew, was due to her reduced light and their own eyes adjusting to the lower levels of illumination, but part was a real increase in luminosity and a shift in color toward the slightly longer wave lengths. One did not actually see a rock, one saw a fuzzy angular yellow outline around a black patch partly filled in by pale green with blue prominences that one could decode as a rock. The green fangs that hung above them had been deposited there ages ago by water leaching through limestone. The green glow in the boat ahead of them was brighter now, and occasionally Questioner could detect twin silver eyes peering at them from within it as well as from other, accompanying glows, various shades from amber through blue. Flowing Green was not alone.

Questioner had already adjusted her senses to pick up the talk of the Timmys, which she was stowing away while her internal translator worked at it. Give her a few days, and she’d know their tongue as well as the fifty or so others she’d come equipped with.

Ornery leaned to whisper into Mouche’s ear. “What do you think of her, the Questioner?”

Mouche considered it. He had spent hours every day for some years considering what this or that individual woman was like, for if one could not know that, one could hardly be a Consort.

“I think she’s sad,” he whispered back. “Not showing it, of course. Very soldierly about everything and taking a proper pride in her duty, but underneath, she could use a bit of happiness.”

Ornery, surprised, sat back in her own place, thinking of what Mouche had said. All in all, she thought, Mouche was probably right. Questioner, who had heard every syllable, was slightly surprised.

The tube in which they were floating began to narrow slightly. From ahead came louder water sounds. Without interference from those aboard, the two little boats lined up end to end, their speed increased to a dizzying rush that carried them through the last narrow bit of small tunnel into another with a diameter several times as large. Beside the boats, a huge eye, like a pale balloon, emerged from the dark water and stared at them. Great dripping, weed-hung swags of line or cable pulled themselves above the water, dark against the background glow, heaving the boats into the slower current. Not cable. Too thick for cable. Tentacles. Far above, the higher, broader ceiling shone softly with fractal patterns of amber and emerald.

The two canoes stayed in line, as though they were linked, and the moon-eye ahead of them swiveled from left to right before turning in the direction of their movement, the joined boats holding steady in the slow current.

A voice drifted back to them, “Drink this water now. To make you visible.”

Ornery began to laugh. “So now
we’re
invisible.”

“It isn’t funny,” complained Mouche.

“You are only darkness, Mouche,” said Questioner. “You’re a black hole in the middle of light. I’ve been analyzing the water. I detect no impurities that would endanger your health, but it does have luminescent bacteria in it. Presumably, if you drink the water, soon you will glow, and we can see you. I must admit, I’m curious to see a glowing Mouche, a shimmering Ornery!”

“The bacteria? They won’t make you glow?” asked Ornery.

“Probably not. But I can make myself glow, so you know where I am and what I’m about. I’d like to know what that thing was that came up just beside us?”

“Joggiwagga,” whispered the darkness.

“Joggiwagga,” murmured Questioner. “I’ve heard that before.”

“It is Joggiwagga who raises the pillars,” said Ornery. “It is Joggiwagga who keeps track of time, by the moon-shadows. I saw one once, by the side of the sea, setting up the stones!”

“Dangerous,” whispered the voice. “To be seen by Joggiwagga on the land.”

“I moved very fast,” Ornery confessed.

“Wise,” murmured the darkness. “Wise. It would not hurt us for we are part of it, but you are not.”

“What do you mean, you are part of it?” asked the Questioner. “You are part of Joggiwagga?”

A verdant glow ahead of them billowed, then shrank once more, as hair was tossed wide and then fell into place. “Joggiwagga is part, we are part, all everything is Dosha, all is made in Fauxi-dizalonz, except you people and jongau people and Her and Niasa.”

“What are jongau?” the Questioner asked.

“Bent people. People not put together right. That Ashes one is jongau. That Bane, that Dyre, they are jongau. All their kinfolk and like, many, many more! They are not finished. They are only half done, and they smell bad. They should have the courtesy to die, but they do not.”

“And who are the Corojumi?” the Questioner pursued.

Out of darkness: “Once were many Corojumi to open spaces, make the dances, fix what is broken …”

“And Bofusdiaga?”

“Bofusdiaga mixes things together. Bofusdiaga stops pains and breaks chains and burrows walls and sings to the sun. That is Bofusdiaga.”

Questioner spoke to Mouche and Ornery: “Are you making any sense of this?”

Mouche said, “I’m afraid not.”

The voice came again, this time with some asperity. “You mankinds always need everything right now. Your babies, too. Why this. Why that. Tell me this, tell me that. Explain, explain. You should learn to wait. See a little, then a little more. It will be clear. Drink water.”

None of them dared ask any further questions, though Questioner said in a jolly tone, “Drink water. By all means.”

Ornery and Mouche obediently scooped water from the stream and gulped it down. Aside from being very cold, it was simply watery, with nothing at all unpleasant about it. When he had wiped his hands on his shirt, Mouche turned gingerly on his haunches to speak softly to Questioner.

“When I was little, my Timmy used to sing me to sleep with a song that had Corojumi and Bofusdiaga in it. It was all in their language, and I asked her … it to tell it to me in my language, and a few days later she … it had it figured out in our language, rhymes and all. After that, it sang it to me in my language part of the time.”

“Can you sing it to me?”

“Not the way she … it did. Their singing is wonderful, but it’s all full of little trills and lilts and runs. I’ll just say it very softly.”

Mouche cleared his throat and began:

After a long moment, Questioner said in an interested voice, “Is that all of it?”

Mouche shook his head. “No, there was more, but I can’t quite remember it. Their language is a lot prettier than ours. You’re right that it has no hes and shes. They sang
tim
in their language, but they put in the
hes
and
shes
in ours. In our language they couldn’t put all the trills in, and I usually fell asleep along about the burrower of walls line. I’ll try to remember the rest of it.”

“How do you explain it?”

Mouche scratched his head, trying to remember. “It’s the story of the Quaggi. Aren’t they a kind of huge something that lives out in space? I guess they’re travelers, sailing between the stars, and the male lurks around in the dark spaces between outer worlds to catch the female, and he impregnates her. And she’s supposed to lay the egg, but in the song, she’s hurt so badly she can’t ever fly again. When I was a little kid, I always just thought it was just a sad story, a lament, you know.”

Questioner murmured, “I think it’s a story about real things. It’s an odd story for a child, however, all that rape and violence, though it may be a clue to something your Timmy said earlier. It remarked that everything was part of the Fauxi-dizalonz except the jongau people, us people,
Her
, and Niasa.”

“Well, there are lots of songs or rhymes about Niasa, like:

Questioner mused, “So, Niasa is Summer Snake; Ashes is jongau; we are unequivocally us; so could
Her
be the Quaggima?”

“You think there’s a real Quaggima?” asked Ornery.

Questioner answered. “The Quaggi are one of the four races we have met who are definitely not human. The Quaggi we’ve met—or rather, seen, since one does not really meet a Quaggi—are all alike according to our sensors, so we’ve always rather assumed the females are somewhere else. This story you tell, which is the same story the Hags tell, by the way, accords with some information I received from a trader….”