Raising the Stones, Page 2

  “Isn’t that enough? It’ll keep some of us busy for some little time.”

  Sam couldn’t let it alone. “Did the initial Clearance Teams find any kind of field? I mean, nobody objected to the settlement being put here in the first place, did they?” The idea that some carelessness might have taken place only increased his feelings of annoyance. He took a deep breath and controlled himself.

  The med-tech was getting a little annoyed herself, and her snappish tone reflected that fact. “Topman, nobody had any reason to. We’ve called up everything available from the Archives and found nothing. Nobody found anything strange at this site except for the thing itself.”

  Sam growled wordlessly.

  She went on, waving her finger at him. “Since it was sacred to the Owlbrit, the decision was made high-up not to bother the thing except to test for radioactivity or harmful emanations, and there weren’t any. By the time the last of the Owlbrit died, your village seemed to have adopted the God as a mascot, and Central had more important things to deal with than investigating some animal, vegetable, or mineral which wasn’t bothering anyone, which might resent being investigated, and which was, so far as we knew, a unique phenomenon. Until ten days ago, nobody found anything weird about anything.”

  Sam shrugged, his best approach to an apology.

  The tech sighed. “Speaking of weird, I understand you buried a body elsewhere than in the approved burying ground. That’s a public health matter, and it ought to be reinterred.”

  Sam vaguely remembered Birribat had been buried, but he couldn’t remember who had done it, or exactly where, and after a brief and aimless search for the grave, the health people gave up on that.

  “You think we’re over the worst?” Sam asked the woman in charge finally, having run out of everything else to ask.

  “You’ve been mourning,” the med-tech said. “The psy-techs say the whole settlement had all the symptoms of grief. Even though you didn’t know what you were mourning about, that’s what you were doing. It’s pretty much over, I’d say. The biologists are pissing themselves for not having investigated earlier, but except for that everything is on its way to normal.”

  The medical person could be forgiven. She spoke as medical people have often done, out of a habit of authority and reassurance, in a tone that admitted of no doubt or exceptions or awareness of human frailty. She was, as many medical people have always been, dead wrong.

  • • •

  • First time visitors to Hobbs Land, at least those who came on official business, were usually subjected to an orientation session conducted by someone at Central Management. Production Chief Horgy Endure often got stuck with the duty since he did it very well, even though he called his presentation, with stunning unoriginality, “All About Hobbs Land.” On a particular morning not long after the death of Bondru Dharm (which Horgy had had no responsibility toward and had, therefore, ignored), he had a group of five to instruct: two engineers from Phansure (Phansuri engineers being as ubiquitous in System as fleas on a cat, and as itchy, though rather more benign) as well as the latest trio in Horgy’s endless succession of female assistants, three lovelies from Ahabar, not one of whom was actually brainless. The engineers, specialists in robotic design, were going out to Settlement One to meet with Sam Girat, and the lovelies were staying at Central Management to learn what Horgy could teach them. Two of them had already had a sample and longed for more.

  Horgy had gathered the five of them in the Executive Staff Room around an information stage, which he had programmed to display eye-riveting visuals concurrent with his well-practiced oral presentation. Horgy enjoyed orientations. He liked the sound of his own voice, which was rich and warm and did not belie the sensual curve of his lips.

  When they gathered, the stage was already showing a neat model of the System, the three tiny inner planets twirling in their orbits, then Thyker, Ahabar, the Belt, and finally Phansure. The truncated model included all of the occupied worlds and most of the occupied moons but not the outer planets, which didn’t fit the scale and weren’t important for orientation anyhow. When Horgy cleared his throat, the model gave way to actual holography of the Belt as taken from a survey ship, skimming past Bounce and Pedaria and a few of the other fifteen-thousand Belt worlds, the stage pointing out, unnecessarily, that though some of the Belt worlds were settled, some were merely named, while others were only numbered and not even surveyed yet. Belt worlds were tiny to smallish, by and large, a few with native life, some with atmosphere of their own, some with atmosphere factories, many of them with great light-focusing sun-sails behind them, gathering warmth to make the crops grow, farm worlds for the System.

  “This world we now call Hobbs Land,” said Horgy, watching it swim up on cue, a tannish-green blob with an angular darker green belt, blue at its poles, fishbone striped by wispy clouds slanting in from the polar oceans to the equator, “was mapped and sampled by the unmanned survey ship, Theosphes K. Phaspe, some sixty lifeyears ago. About twenty years later, when the relative orbits of Phansure and the newly mapped planet made the attempt economically feasible, Hobbs Land was optioned for settlement by Hobbs Transystem Foods, under the direction of Mysore Hobbs I.”

  “Mysore One died last year,” said the older of the two Phansuris to one of the lovelies. “Marvelous old man, Mysore. Mysore Two’s running things now.”

  Horgy smiled acknowledgement without missing a beat. “Transystem headquarters on Phansure sent a settlement ship with parts for a continuous feed Door and the requisite technicians.”

  The stage showed the technicians putting the Door together, leaping about like fleas. The newly assembled Door glittered with blue fire as construction materials, men, and machines began coming through on a continuous belt. Time-jump holography showed men and machines creating the Central Management structures—administration tower, equipment and repair, warehouses, staff and visitor housing blocks, and recreation complex—all of them sprouting from the ground like mushrooms. At the top of the Admin building, a sign flashed red and yellow: HOBBS LAND, a Farm Settlement World of TRANSYSTEM FOODS.

  Horgy went on, “Construction of the Central Management complex was already well underway when on-planet surveyors discovered that the world, which had been thought to be uninhabited, was actually the home of the Owlbrit people, a presumably ancient race, only twelve of whom were still living at the time of first contact.”

  Visuals of tiny villages, tiny round houses, fat, turnip-shaped creatures dragging laboriously about on their fragile legs.

  “Only twelve of them?” asked Theor Close, the older of the two Phansuri engineers, “Were there really only twelve?”

  “Only twelve,” said Horgy, firmly. “That is, only twelve anybody could find. Plus three or four of their Gods, and all but one of them died immediately.”

  “That’s sad,” said one of the female assistants, a willowy blonde with impossible eyelashes. “Even though they’re not very pretty.”

  Horgy smiled at her, his meltingly adoring smile, the smile that had convinced whole legions of female assistants—Horgy never had anything else—that each of them was the most wonderful woman in the universe. “It was sad,” he admitted, his voice throbbing. “Though, you’re right, they weren’t pretty.”

  “So,” said the other engineer, Betrun Jun. “What happened to the twelve survivors?”

  “Ah …” Horgy reviewed what he had said and found his place again. “Through the immediate efforts of topflight philologists and xenolinguists, it was learned that, far from resenting the presence of humans upon their world, the Owlbrit people welcomed settlement. Such had been foreseen, they said. Such had been promised by their Gods, in order that the will of the Gods could be accomplished.”

  “Nice for us humans,” said Betrun Jun, with a wink at his companion.

  Horgy acknowledged this with a nod and went on. “The last of the Owlbrit people died about five years after settlement, though the last of their Gods remained in the condition w
hich has been called ‘alive’ until just recently.”

  “Why didn’t I ever hear about the Owlbrits?” asked the brunette member of Horgy’s trio, a young person of astonishing endowments. “I never heard a word about them.”

  “It seems they didn’t build anything,” said Theor Close, thoughtfully. “No roads, no monuments, no cities.”

  “They didn’t create anything,” added the other Phansuri. “No art, no literature, no inventions, What did they leave, Endure? A few ruined villages?”

  Horgy, badly off his track but grateful for their interest, regrouped with his charming smile once more. “That’s about all. From space, the clusters of little structures look much like multiple meteor strikes, which is probably why they were missed on first look-see. The onsite surveyors found ten live Owlbrit, in ones and twos, among the ruins on the escarpment. They found one mostly ruined village down on the plain containing two Owlbrit who said they’d been waiting for us. ‘Waiting for somebody to show up,’ is the way the linguists translated it. That’s where Settlement One was put. A couple of xenologists were housed there until the last Owlbrit died. I recall reading that the last Owlbrit told one of the linguists that watching the humans had interested him so much that he stayed alive longer than he would have otherwise.”

  “So there’s really nothing left of them,” Theor Close said, his voice conveying both wonder and regret.

  “The ruins and a few words and phrases of their language we’ve adopted as localisms,” admitted Horgy. “Names for places and things. Creely, that’s a kind of local fish. Bondru, that means noon. We can make only an approximation of their sounds I’m afraid. We can’t really duplicate their language vocally.”

  “That’s why I never heard of them, then,” said the brunette with satisfaction. “They were all gone before I was even born.” Her tone conveyed the unimportance of anything that might have happened, anywhere, before she came upon the scene. Horgy’s assistants tended to be self-approving.

  However self-absorbed, she was right. The Owlbrit, an enigmatic people, less than legendary, were indeed gone, as the people of Hobbs Land knew. Xenologists in various places read books about them, or wrote books about them, but in the last analysis there seemed very little to say about the Owlbrit except they had lived once but were no more.

  Turning to the engineers, Horgy said, “Before you go out to talk to Sam Girat at Settlement One, a few brief words about the geography of Hobbs Land. …” And he summoned up pictures of undulating and remarkably dull plains to get himself on track once more.

  • When Samasnier Girat, his sister, Saluniel, and their mother, Maire, had arrived on Hobbs Land, when they had first set foot upon the glassy sand beyond the Door, with the wind of a strange world riffling their hair, Sam’s mam had knelt down to touch the soil.

  “Thanks be to God!” Maire had cried. “There are no legends here.”

  She had uttered the words with a certain fatalistic satisfaction, in the manner of a woman who is packing up house and has resolved to abandon some troublesome possession even though she knows she may miss it later. Her words, uttered coincident with their arrival, had carried the weight of prophecy, and the whole event had seemed so pregnant with intent that Sam never forgot it. Even when he was grown he could recall the feel of the wind, the smell of the air—an empty smell, he had thought then and often since—his mother’s haggard but beautiful face under the dark kerchief she wore, her heavy shoes beside his small ones on the soil, the very sack she had set down, the one that held their clothes and Sal’s doll and his own carved warriors, Ire and Iron and Voorstod, though Mam had not let him bring his whip. The sack had been threadbare and stained, with a leather drawstring, and Mam had carried it all the way from the town of Scaery, in Voorstod upon Ahabar.

  After that, during his childhood, Sam thought of legends as things Mam had left behind; not valueless things, like worn out shoes, but things difficult and awkward to transport, things that were quite heavy perhaps, with odd knobs on them, or even wheels, difficult but fascinating things. Without ever saying so in words to himself, and certainly without ever asking Maire, he assumed that one of he difficult things Mam had left behind had been Sam’s dad, Phaed Girat. Sam was never sure from day to day whether he could forgive Mam for that or whether maybe he had forgiven her for it already, without knowing.

  Maire had offered Sam his choice, back in Voorstod upon Ahabar, in the kitchen at Scaery, where the fire made shadows in the corners and the smell of the smoke was in everything. Sam could not remember that time without smelling smoke and the earthy scent of the pallid things that grew along damp walls. “Sal and I are going away,” Mam had said. “You can stay with your dad or go with us. I know you’re too young to make that decision, but it’s the only choice I can give you, Sam. Sal and I can’t stay here. Voorstod is no place for womenfolk and children.”

  He had wanted to stay with Dad. Those were the words crowding at his throat when she gave him the choice, but they had stuck there. Sam had been born with a quality which some might have thought mere shyness but was in fact an unchildlike prudence. He often did not say what came to mind. What he thought at the time was that he wanted to stay with Dad but it might be difficult to survive if he did so. Dad was unlikely to help him with his reading, or cook his dinner, or wash his clothes. Dad didn’t do things like that. Dad threw him high in the air and caught him, almost always. Dad gave him a whip and taught him to make it crack and to knock bottles over with it. Dad called him “My strong little Voorstoder” and taught him to shout, “Ire, Iron, and Voorstod” when the prophets went by and all the women had to hide in their rooms. But there were other times Dad scarcely seemed to notice him, times when Dad growled and snarled like one of the sniffers, chained out behind the house, times when Sam thought this big man was really someone else, someone wearing a mask of Dad’s face.

  Besides, with Sam’s brother Maechy dead—Mam said he was dead and would never come back—wouldn’t Mam need a son to take care of her? Dad needed nobody, so he said. Men of the Cause needed nobody but themselves and Almighty God, whether they had been men of Ire or of Iron or of Voorstod to start with.

  So Sam, prudently and dutifully, had said he would go with Mam and Sal. Even when Maire had told him he would have to leave his whip behind, Sam had figured out it was his duty to go, but he wasn’t sure then or later he had made the right choice. As he got older, he still wasn’t sure. Sometimes he dreamed of Dad. At least, when he wakened, that’s who he thought he’d been dreaming of. He also dreamed of hands over his eyes and a voice whispering to him, “You don’t see them, Sammy. They aren’t there. You don’t see them.” He woke angry from those dreams, angry that he’d been kept from seeing something important, or that he’d chosen to come to Hobbs Land, or that Dad hadn’t come along.

  Remembering what he could of Dad, however, he could imagine why Maire had left him behind with the rest of the legends. Dad had been much too heavy to move. When Sam remembered Phaed Girat, he remembered him that way: a ponderous and brooding shape with no handles a person could catch hold of. The thought was comforting, in a way. If Dad was too unwieldy to be moved, then he was still there, in Voorstod, where Sam could find him later if he needed him. Voorstod upon Ahabar would always be there, half-hidden in mists, smelling of smoke and of the pale fungi growing along the walls.

  On Hobbs Land—as in most places elsewhere in the System—children had uncles, not fathers, and Sam had to grow up without an older man of his own. Though Maire had had brothers in Voorstod, they would not have considered betraying the Cause by leaving it. Sam pretended his carved warriors were his father and his uncles. He put them on the table by his bed, where he could see them as he fell asleep. Clean-shaven Ire, with his sandals and jerkin, his shield and sword; bearded Iron, wearing flowing robes and headdress, carrying a curved blade; and mustached, heavy-booted Voorstod, with his whip at his belt. Voorstod’s name meant “Whip-death,” and he was the fiercest of the three. Sam believ
ed he looked like Dad, the way Dad had sometimes been.

  Sam grew up to be both dutiful and willful, a boy who would say yes to avoid trouble but then do as he pleased. He was biddable, but not docile, innovative in his thinking and tenacious in his memories. He had an occasional and peculiarly trying expression, one which seemed to doubt the sensations going on inside himself. Sugar was not sweet, nor vinegar sour, his face sometimes seemed to say, but to hide some other flavor concealed therein. “It’s all right, but …” his face sometimes said, to the irritation of those around him. Beneath each sensation, within each explanation, Sam felt there must be others, more significant and more profound.

  When Sam was about twenty, he sometimes lay on his bed looking out at unnamed constellations, thinking deep thoughts about who he was and what Hobbs Land was and whether he belonged there. The settlers talked about all kinds of worlds, real ones and ones they had only imagined. Hobbs Land had to be real, for who would bother to dream up a world like this? No one. Hobbs Land was dull and bland, and not worth the effort. Except for a few blotches (scarcely more than pimples, really), a few thousand square miles of field and farm and vineyard and orchard where the people were, there was no human history or adventure in this place. No human-built walls staggered across the shallow hills; no menhirs squatted broodingly upon the escarpment; no painted animals pranced at the edge of the torchlight in chambered caves, full of wonder and mystery and danger, evoking visions of terrible, primitive times.

  Of course, men had never been primitives on Hobbs Land. They had come through the Door already stuffed with histories and memories and technologies from other places. They had come from troubled Ahabar and sea-girt Phansure and brazen Thyker and this moon or that moon. They had arrived as civilized peoples—though not as a civilized people, which might have given them the sense of common identity Sam thought he wanted.

  And so far as monuments were concerned, it made no difference what kind of people had come there. Hobbs Land had no monuments of any kind, civilized or not. No battles had been fought here, no enemies defeated. The landscape was bland as pudding, unstained by human struggle, empty of triumph. so he told himself, lying on his bed, longing for something more. Something nameless.