Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas Page 8

  I awoke once again in the gray metal room. The walls were streaked now, and spotted, as though it had rained. In the comers, black dust clung. A voice, the old voice, echoed once more.

  “Z,” it asked, “do you deny the Regimen?”

  “No, I do not,” I replied.

  “Then why have you failed to carry out your duty?” it demanded.

  “I was led astray,” I said in a small voice. “I loved B and thought I could withstand his influence. In a moment of weakness I followed him and not the path of duty. I see my mistake, now.”

  The voice paused. “It is true that you have been dutiful and helpful until now. But tell us, how can we trust you now?”

  “Do not give me another partner,” I begged. “I only wish to serve. Give me unimportant work that I can do alone.” They agreed, to save themselves a further murder.

  Bee, I think my heart is broken. I called you, called you, but there was no answer. They could not make you recant. So they killed you. That part of my mind that was filled with you aches, like a wound. I do not think that time is long enough for it to heal.

  Forgive me my betrayal. I tell myself I lied so that I could spread your story, but I know that is not the truth. I was afraid, afraid to die. We had forgotten the terror of death, Bee. Its grip is iron. I would do anything to live, even deny you.

  You cannot ask a people to die. You cannot be angry if they refuse. That was your mistake, Bee. Anger is not enough. You also need love and pity and a measure of diplomacy. Bee, you even hated yourself for the human in you, and that hatred destroyed you. So much else could have been done!

  Now I work, alone. They send me down into old Earth to scrounge exhausted mines. They make me count each mote of dust in Saturn’s rainbow rings. I have much time to think.

  The Dajja is always with me, in my mind. I think of all the things he said, and I find hope. We never understood him, Bee; we never saw what he was. “All time is One-time,” he said before they took him. It is true. Time is a complete cycle. We only see half of it, that part which goes forward. The past is swallowed up for us, destroyed, except in memory. The future is simply mute.

  But I think the Dajja sees all of it, time and anti-time. He exists in both, and knows it. We, poor creatures, see only one half of ourselves. We have grown up half-blind. He can remember the future; he looks forward to the past. Time to him is complete. And we can speak with him! He loves us.

  He tried to tell us, Bee, not to grieve. Somewhere in the past, you and I and he still swim in the depths of Daphne. In anti-time, you and I are still to meet. You are still to dazzle me into silence. Always behind me, you will be singing. It is all still there.

  Everything is perpetual. Death invalidates nothing. Nothing is made futile by it, or small. The flower blooms forever. Time goes to the end, and then springs back on itself. The universe saves itself! It doesn’t need Entropy Control to do that!

  I want them to understand that. They are so afraid to die. They pit themselves against time and entropy, and build monuments to prove that they ever existed. The Dajja can help them to know the reality of the past. He can teach them to roll with time and be at peace with death. He can show them their whole selves. They won’t need to be gods, then.

  He must survive. They must be made to understand the treasure that gleams half-forgotten in Aldebaran. Then, perhaps, Control will be allowed to fade, and the sweet fruits of decay can blossom. They watch me always. All I need do is speak for them to hear. I am sure they will understand. With time.

  So rest, Bee, rest in my memory. Dance freely in the past, and cease to accuse me. For I am Zoe, the slow and faithful, and with these Remembrances of you I begin my work.

  from the letters of Raul Kundara

  Hola Mari,

  I apologize for the lack of letters. There were reasons why I could not write. I am not allowed to explain them to you. Please understand.

  I have visited the Hellesians once more. They do not like to be called that. They call their world Channakale, for reasons that they do not explain. They do not call their sun Daphne, but Yildiz. It means simply, star. Less simply, it means Destiny.

  The trip was hot and unhappy, as before, but I knew better what to expect. We arrived at sunset while the settlers were in the fields. Chief walked on to the pava, but I stayed to record the work songs. They saw me with my recorder, but kept on working. A few made wry smiles and prodded each other. A bright-faced young woman waved and yelled something to me that made the others laugh. They were amused that anyone would want to record their songs. They call them kundara or esk-kundara. That means “old shoes.”

  The watersheets were rolled up and we went together through the growing heat of the day to the yemek pava. There I played for them the songs, and they hooted with laughter. The Senior of the pava brought me a glass of clear liquor. I was made to understand that I had to drink it in one swallow. It tasted somewhat of methane and burned my mouth, but I managed. They clapped me on the back and applauded. The Chief stood up and volunteered, not to be outdone as always. There were cheers and we all became great friends. The Senior can speak some Central. He told me the drink was called Bom aksamlayin: the evening bomb!

  They sang more songs, of a different sort, called haberi. These are true stories. One was about an avalanche ten years before. Another told how cloth is woven and of the discovery of keten, the plant that grows on cliffs from which cloth is made. The Senior sang his parents’ marriage-song. It told the story of their courtship and is quite lovely. They try to sing these songs seriously, stiff-backed, but their high, straining voices make even them giggle. At gatherings like these, the women are allowed to join in the laughter and the jokes, but not to sing.

  It is an old Channukale joke that the men love their machines more than their wives. They repeat this joke endlessly, and do their best to make it seem true. All their machines have affectionate names. They sing songs about them. The women groaned when the first machine song began. The best of these was a doleful ode to a still called Sofia. After that one, the women insisted no more of them be sung.

  Many of the haberi tell of how the colony has survived and grown. No history of Channukale has been written. Yet it is all there for the collecting in these songs. It is a wonderful story. The first Channuks were workers on Ruin, and were expelled on a pre-Slide vessel. Its guiding jig, faced with spreading and irreparable breakdown, chose the first marginally inhabitable world. Most of the equipment, including the cloners, was lost in the landing. The settlers dug themselves into the caves now called the Old City. They established ways of gathering water not too different from those used now. They developed the watersheets, dug ditches, and made crude batteries and boilers for electricity. There are now six major settlements on Channukale. They are populated by 70,000 people, all descended from the 350 colonists from Ruin. Each settlement is self-sufficient. The nearest to Highplain Snow is Scout-sighted, 50 kilometers further along the Kizildaglar, Red Mountains. No one in the pava had been there.

  In exchange for songs, I had to answer many questions. They became interested when they learned I am a certed bio-engineer. They wanted to know about colonial adaptations. The original 350 were all trained in some discipline. Their bio-engineer worked the change in their skins, but then died, leaving no apprentice. Still, I found their knowledge surprising. I told them about the enlarged lungs, the strengthened bones, the chill-resistant metabolisms. They listened, shook their heads, and stifled some disagreement among themselves. “We live here without such things,” said the Senior, “Some of us think it would be good to change.”

  They also asked about the Angels. They call them yildizi-bojeyee, fireflies, star flies. I told them what I knew—of their cold, piping voices, of how they plunge through fire and space and the substratum, of how they see the unseeable and translate for us, of how they never die. The Channuks sing songs about Angels. They believe children can hear Angels without headpieces—or so one old woman nodded wisely. She spoke of Ang
els visiting children at night and whispering stories to them in the dark. The Senior dismissed what she said.

  I do not think they much favor Entropy Control. They say they follow the Regimen, but are more interested in their ancient religion. They worship a god and his prophet. They would not talk about it, but in the midafternoon, I heard a song go through all the corridors, and they all went to another pava called a Jami, to pray.

  I asked them if they looked forward to a newer sun, and life without coolsuits. They shrugged as though it did not concern them. Perhaps they cannot conceive of it. “You came here. No one asked,” said a stern young man called Ekrem. This was considered bad form, I think. He was cautioned by an elder, or so it seemed. I could not understand what was said.

  There was one brief unpleasantness, after the singing. The Senior’s eldest daughter, Hatija, had been talking with me. She asked about Home, the clothes, the language, the music. She was very lively, and yearned, I think, to see other places. The Senior and Ekrem, leading me back to the misafir pava, drew me aside.

  The father spoke to me first, with an air of not wishing to offend a pleasant off-worlder. “Please,” he said. “You must understand. Our women. They are our treasures. You must have nothing to do with them.”

  “Hatija,” said Ekrem. He puffed out his chest in a way that made me smile without showing it. “You must stop courting her!” I tried to explain I had only been speaking politely, as a friend. To a Channuk, that sounds the same as courting.

  “Nevertheless, you must not do it, please,” insisted the Senior.

  It is understandable. Off-worlders might have caused trouble before. Some women might find them exciting, though not, surely, the regulars of Entropy Control. Still, I will be friends with the settlers. They are pleased a bit I think that an off-worlder takes such an interest in them. They have asked me to return. They will let me talk to Hatija in time. I like them, even solemn Ekrem.

  Enclosed with this letter are some of the songs. The first is a work song. I have translated it into Central as best I could, with its rhymes and plodding rhythm.

  Destiny is glaring down

  Are the good leaves browning?

  Was there too much rain last night?

  Are the good leaves drowning?

  Does the sunscreen let in light?

  Are the good leaves paling?

  Should the soil be re-plowed?

  Are the good leaves failing?

  Sister Sezen stands there dawdling

  Smoothing down her trousers.

  Brother Raul sits and smokes,

  Never himself rouses.

  Look out on the wide green fields

  Each flower feeds a child.

  Look then to your children, sisters.

  Are the good leaves browning?

  The second song is the Senior of the pava, singing his parents’ marriage song. The old couple are still alive. New words have been added as they age. The song is now very long and records the birth of their children and grandchildren, and many domestic disasters. I have been able to translate only part of it. The “thin skin” refers to the lack of callusing of the Channuks when young.

  Though you would not know it now,

  They were young with thin skin.

  One was known as Laughter

  The other one was Grin.

  She had loved another man.

  We will not give his name.

  He bedded down another wife

  and left her to her shame.

  She turned then to her childhood friend,

  The boy who always smiled.

  One night the winds about them whispered

  Warm and wet and mild.

  “I love you,” he said simply.

  “I love you like the rain.

  “I love you like the boiling clouds

  “That hang above the plain.

  “And should you die or leave me

  “My heart would wait for you

  “Until the sands blown by the wind

  “Have planed the hills away…”

  That is the best I can do. Those last lines say literally, but in fewer words, “Until the sands of the wind have ground away the hills and the plane of the world is perfectly level.” Strange how Humankind can pierce the substratum and fly between the stars, only to live on a world that still seems flat. Some things never change. Perhaps all conditions are extreme.

  Love,

  Toni

  FAN

  Billie fell in love with Eamon Strafe when she was fifteen years old. Billie was quiet, unconfident, but festooned with symbols. She was bold in the language of signs—anhks, Hittite seals, vampire chic. She read Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker and wore black. She liked spiders and coffins and poems about death. For a time, she confused sex with horror.

  Then she heard Eamon Strafe sing. She was buying snacks in a Pakistani supermarket. It was open late, and sold things like coconut-coated peanuts and fresh ginger. The radio was on, a soft-voiced DJ who played hard music, but the song he played now was quiet. The moment she heard it, Billie was shocked by a sense of recognition. Without knowing it, this was what she had been waiting for.

  The music was measured, almost stately, and seemed to say some things were important. The voice was high and sweet and grieving, and it came in breathless gasps. Was the singer a woman? Who was it? Billie stood still, straining to hear the DJ, but after the song, he issued a warning about traffic congestion. Billie asked the woman at the counter if she knew what that song was, and the woman smiled sweetly back, barely speaking English.

  Billie heard the song again a week later. She was going home from London to South End on the train and a girl called Tora got on. Billie knew her from school. Tora was alarmingly confident and slightly beyond Billie’s social ken. Tora dropped down onto a nearby seat, laughing with older friends and slightly out of breath. Ghetto blasters had come back. Tora aggressively turned hers up. From the first sighing note, Billie knew. The song hauled her up from her seat.

  “Hi Tora. I’m sorry to bother you, but who is that? What’s the song?”

  Tora was flattered. “This. Oh, it’s Eamon Strafe.” As if everyone but Billie knew.

  “It’s wonderful!” said Billie.

  “You bet,” said Tora. And passed her the disk cover.

  For the Lebanon Dead, it said. There was a picture of a slightly older man, with a kind, lumpy, ultimately handsome face.

  “He’s a monk,” said Tora and giggled. “An Irish monk. He’s got an album coming out next month.”

  “I’ve got to get it.”

  “Tom here knows his manager.”

  Tom was older, with rodent smile. “He’s gonna make it, the industry’s behind him. People done Goth, they’re bored with rave, they need stars.”

  Billie, in Goth, caught the drift. “Hype,” she said, and passed the disk back.

  “Yeah, but the music’s fucking brilliant,” corrected Tora. Billie’s friend Janice still sat on the other seat looking slightly wasted and abandoned. Billie waved her forward.

  Tora was gratified by the effect she had had on Billie, so gratified that she and even Janice became friends. They became fans, before anyone else did, fans of Eamon Strafe. They read in the newspaper that he was going to sing on a late night arts program. “We can put our handbags in a circle and scream,” said Tora as a joke. But when the camera caught him for the first time, all three girls turned in silence and looked at each other.

  “Isn’t he beautiful? Scrum-my,” said Tora.

  He wasn’t handsome. He had a rough boxer’s nose and a heavy jaw, and he was burly about the shoulders, but his arms and lower body seemed to shrink away, like a carrot. It was his expression that made him angelic, the crinkled, smiling eyes out of which shone ice blue irises. And the teeth, the famous teeth. They were too big. Whenever he smiled they took over, illuminated his face. Billie lost her taste for the Gothic. White became her color, Eamon’s color.

  Billie and Tora united in
a campaign of conversion. They wore white jackets, white trousers, and white headscarves tied under their chins, like wimples. They sat in Piccadilly Circus, playing his music as loudly as they could. The police would move them on. They carried a poster of him and walked, singing his name, and accosting passersby, demanding that they give up meat and alcohol. The world would have to come to love Eamon Strafe as well.

  And for a time, incredibly, heartbreakingly, the world did.

  He was right for the times. The New Aestheticism, the newspapers called it. They always led with a photograph of Eamon—The Antithesis of a Pop Star. It seemed so wonderful to Billie that other people could feel as she did. For a brief time, two or three years only, she and the age were one. It seemed there would be a place for her in the world after all.

  He was beautiful, his music was beautiful. Somewhere he lived and breathed, she reminded herself, somewhere right now, in Ireland. She seemed to hear him sing everywhere she went.

  For the Lebanon Dead was followed by Afghanistan, and it was even better. He had actually gone there and seen the fighting. Afghanistan got to number one. It was followed by a book of poetry, and a further disk of the verse recited over sparse music. Every six months there was a new album of proper music. There was plenty to buy.

  But there were no live performances—videos, yes, but no tours. He’s shy, thought Billie, and loved him for it. Eamon said he found tours exploitative. He felt he owed it to people to give them more than a rehearsed performance. He wanted to talk to them all in person, and that was not possible. That meant he would need to find some new and better way to reach them. Billie was not entirely sure she understood what he meant.

  Billie wrote him letters.

  Dear Eamon

  This is just to let you know that someone cares.