Friend, your mind has betrayed you. On the back of your eyes it shines lies and says "It's real! It's real! Go out and die for it!"
How can I teach you that moments are counted in hundreds of years? You have trapped your self in a now, you cannot see past.
It has no truth value.
It is not even an f of an x.
It rots in your head.
A shut-up winged thing, you beat at your bars. I spell a word to free you.
—from Cornfield Crane, by s.e., a twentieth-century poet
First Journal Entry—November 3030.
My name is Star-Fox and I am in fealty to the noble family of Castle Fra. I live at the edge of the Castle wall, in the corner, so that two walls of my house are the Castle wall itself, and I am my mother's one and only child.
We are fortunate, my mother and I. My father was a playmate of the man who is steward to the Castle Economist, and he was given this house to live in out of friendship and old ties. When he died, the Fra let us remain here. For everyone else, there are the government issue bubble-houses—ugly, serviceable things. For us, we have two walls of real stone—these being the Castle wall—and two of synthostone almost six hundred years old. The post of gatekeeper has been held by the computer for nearly that long, but the house still stands and we live inside.
My mother is called Analyn, and she is a sorceress, a witch woman, a maker of spells. She has been useful to the Old Faith, which needs her skills of illusion and her powerful Singing. She has done the Singing at the first-day-of-the-month service each and every month for the past eighteen years at Castle Fra. I am proud to be her daughter.
First, the Citizen Pastor gives the signal and the bells are rung until they seem to be ringing inside our heads as well as outside. We kneel, facing the south where the dawn comes, and we all pray together that the sun may rise strong in the southern sky and light our day. A silly prayer, my mother says, but it is the tradition and we all feel comfortable in the saying of it.
Second, the Disc is raised, round and golden and full of a flickering light that hurts your eyes, so that you must not look at it directly but must always look just past it if you want to see it, and as it rises the music begins at the back of the Chapel, all the electric notes quivering together toward the top of the roof, high and thin and powerful.
Third, the service, which is dull, dull, dull—my instructions in this journal are that I must tell the truth—with the Citizen Pastor telling us what is expected of us yet one more time.
The duty of a Citizen is to support the state with one-twentieth of his-and-her goods, and all that he-and-she may earn, and all that shall come to him-and-her out of the grace and the goodness of the Supreme Being blah blah blah ...
The duty of a Citizen is to accept those laws and those lines which the state shall lay upon him-and-her in the exercise of its authority through the eight noble families, and to serve in willingness and blah blah blah blah blah ...
The duty of a Citizen is to rise before the dawn and prepare himself-and-herself to greet the Holy Sun that gives us a long and lightful day in which to labor for blah blah blah blah blah ...
There are twenty-four duties, the Twice Twelve Duties, and we know them all by heart. By the time we are able to sit at the comset in our infant-chairs, still held up by straps instead of our own spines, we are listening each day and three times each day to the recitation of the Twice Twelve Creed. By the time we must begin tuning in each morning to the edcomputers to be taught, we can say it all, although we have no idea what it means, and at the end of each week when we take the comset stylus to take the tests we can write the Creed as rapidly as the computer can check it. (I am asked to comment, as I write, upon our education. I can only say that this seems to be a silly way to teach anybody anything, because after a year or two the Creed is like the wind, like the beating of our hearts, we no longer hear it. Or perhaps that is what the educators intend?)
Fourth, the collection of our tithes for that week, as each one of us goes to the altar to insert our credit-disc in the Tithing Slot.
Fifth, the presentation of the newborn Citizens and the farewell to the new-dead.
Sixth, the formal blessing of the day to come, and the listing of our assigned tasks for that day.
And seventh, my mother does the Singing.
My mother. She goes to the front of the Chapel, to the small Chamber of Glass, and stands where the Disc is suspended, its brilliance above her head and the light it casts making a circle inside which she stands. She is dressed all in cloth-of-gold, hundreds of years old and preserved down the line of Singers by their power only. Across her body, from left shoulder to right hip, is slung the holy Sword, cast in platinum, studded with jewels from hilt to tip, the light leaping off its razor edge and playing among the light from the Disc. It is as if my mother is surrounded by lightnings, where she stands.
She closes her eyes and waits for the Sun to flood into her, while all of us, all we ordinary people who cannot Sing, breathe in holy meditation and watch her grow more and more golden.
She crosses her hands on her breasts, she places her feet in the sacred positions, she turns slowly twenty-four times round, once for each one of the Duties, she seems to grow more and more tall with each turn ... at the last she is a column of flame.
(There are times when I wonder, although such wondering is perhaps wicked, if everyone sees this, or if it is only we young ones. Perhaps the grownups, watching a Singer year in and year out, twelve times each year on the first-day service, half a dozen times more during the Highlidays, become bored with it all? Perhaps they see only a woman, wearing an ancient dress and a sword that is too heavy, going through rituals that have no magic left for them?
This is possible, of course. When I was a very tiny girl, I believed, with my whole heart, in the emerald spirits no longer than my littlest fingernail who are said to live in the spirals of the giant fern. I saw one once, I thought, perched in the turn of a young frond. I am aware now that I saw the insect that feeds on the fronds at that time of the year, but at that moment I saw the emerald spirit, as I now see my mother become a column of light and flame.
If it is like that, if I will outgrow what I now see in Chapel when my mother Sings, then I sorrow for that and will fight it when it comes.)
When my mother is there in the Chamber of Glass, there is no sound anywhere, not a whisper of breath, not a murmur. Her beauty hushes even the babies back of the soundbaffle, and then, ah, then she begins to Sing.
I cannot write very clearly about the Singing. How could I describe it? You would have to hear it yourself. My mother Sings the holy sounds of the Three Kinds ... Submission, Serenity, and Service. There are no words to these Songs, they are not like the songs of popular musicians; but they speak clearly to us, and they braid our spirits neatly for the coming month. While my mother Sings there is no time, there is almost no breathing, and the holy sounds take you out of yourself, bringing a peace, a bliss, a need to begin again in the work that you have been given to do ... poor words. Only if I could Sing would I be able to make it clear, and then the words wouldn't be needed, for I could simply Sing to you.
I had thought that I might be a Singer. I prayed for it, when I was small, and when I knew it wasn't going to happen, I wanted to die. But something else is intended for me, I believe, and although it is not Singing it is important. It appears ... I am almost afraid to set it down here, for fear it will tempt some fate to take it away from me ... it appears that I am going to Multiversity, that I will be a Student. There—I've said it.
All the billions of children, through three galaxies, sitting down every morning to do their lessons with the edcomputer. Out of all those billions, only one thousand can be chosen to study with a living Teacher, to be in classrooms with other Students, to go to school, real school. They say now that I will be one of the thousand. They say that a place will be set aside for me so that when I reach the age of sixteen I will leave here and go to become one of the thousand.
We shall see. Perhaps I will not continue to do so well. Perhaps the edcomputer will stop sending through the profiles marked MULTIVERSITY POTENTIAL TOP PRIORITY and send the other kind ... SATISFACTORY. Or COULD DO BETTER WORK IF MORE EFFORT WAS PUT FORTH. Or A VERY STUBBORN AND DISPLEASING CHILD—PUNISHMENT INDICATED. And if that happens, surely I will die, this time, of heartbreak and disgrace. Only two more years, now, until I am sixteen, and they are so sure that now I have been asked to keep the journal required of all MULTIVERSITY POTENTIAL students. How would I feel at sixteen to be refused, to have the journal taken away for study, for analysis of my failure, to try to find out where the potential went? They say that almost never happens, that the edcomputers do not make mistakes, but I am afraid. I am afraid that perhaps my fear indicates that this is one of the rare mistakes. It seems to me that I should be more confident, somehow.
Mother will not speak of it at all. She says we must not. We must not count on my going to Multiversity; we must assume I will grow up and marry one of the men chosen for me by the Citizen Pastor as husband-candidates, and live out my life in this Sector, in a bubble-house with two extruded bedchambers and walls of a poisonous mauve.
At the prospect I am sick and weak and I feel my mind dull in its bony coverings and shrink into itself. You see that I cannot afford the luxury of discouragement.
We are to write down everything we can, they say. The word they use is "copiously"; we are to write copiously. The more we write, the better they can prepare for us our program of study, the better utilization can be made of our potential as Students. I understand that and see it as an obligation, as does the Citizen Pastor, obviously, since he has released me from three hours of other duties to do this writing.
But I am growing tired. The writing process does not suit me. Numbers are my function, the elegance of them weaving in and out of their patterns, the beautiful names of them ... dodecahedron, tesseract, tri-tesseract-anapsis, cube and line, sine and root ... I have a language made only of numbers and their grave and delightful names, and its grammar is formed of its own fitness, without need for all this fat that you have when you deal with words. Words are sloppy, untidy, flopping-about things, and I dislike and distrust them.
But I must set down here what happened yesterday at our house, it is my duty to do so. It was such a strange thing, and well worth noting.
Just before the noon tea, when I was in the kitchen-alcove trying to coax our cranky old Nutrirobot to produce something fit for human beings to eat, there was a feeling that came suddenly and encircled our house. Like a questing ... like something seeking us out and warning us of its coming.
My mother went quickly to let Drussa Silver in, where she stood waiting at our stone-framed door, and she did not seem in the least afraid. I was afraid, because it is very near to treason to have that woman in a house of the Old Faith, but of course a Singer need not fear anything or anyone. Still, my hands were cold and my breath came fast in my throat; and if my mother had not told me sharply to stay where I was, I would have run out of the house.
She is called Drussa Silver, but she is a woman of gold, not silver. She is tall and slender and has glowing brown silken skin that draws your fingers toward it, you want so badly to touch it. She wore a tunic of pale wheat color with a border of the deep green the Shavvies use so much—the color of the giant ferns they border their dancing-circles with—and her feet were bare, her gold-brown hair in two thick braids like all the Shavvy women. And she was beautiful, of a beauty that made the air about her beautiful and shed light on our housewalls and was like a note of music in the rooms. My mother is beautiful only when she Sings, but this woman was Singing just by her presence, and beautiful in and of herself.
She came in and sat down on the stone ledge beside our front door, and for a few minutes she said nothing, only looked around her, looking at me where I stood frozen in the kitchen alcove, and looking at my mother, who was calmly looking right back.
YOU ARE THE SINGER, she said then, her mindvoice cool and scented of the black loam beneath the nishia-bella trees. My face went hot and I gasped aloud, because only prostitutes behave in that way, but my mother answered as if mindspeech were as common in our house as bread and takkafruit.
I AM ONE SINGER OF MANY, she said, and I blushed for her.
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS NEEDED, ANALYN, said Drussa Silver, and my mother's eyes widened, and she said, NEEDED? AND HOW AM I NEEDED?
There was a mindsound of wind and water, an image of iris unfolding purple and crisp and flecked with gold fur at the throat, spiked green leaves studded with dew, and Drussa Silver spoke again.
ANALYN OF FRA, WHEN THE TIME COMES YOU WILL KNOW.
I AM NOT NOBLY BORN, said my mother. I AM A COMMON WOMAN OF THE COMMON PEOPLE. I SERVE THEM AND THE NOBLE FAMILIES IN THE ONLY WAY I KNOW.
Drussa Silver smiled then, and for the first time she spoke aloud.
"Nobility," she said, "is an inner thing. It has nothing to do with bloodlines and marriages."
"What will be asked of me? And by whom?"
I saw now that my mother was beginning to be afraid, and the walls closed in around me. She is my rock, and I had never seen her afraid of anything before—not even when the deadly snakes came after the last seaflood and our floor was alive with them. Drussa Silver raised one hand beside her face, her fingers arranged in the Teacher's gesture, though she is no Teacher. "There is an ancient line," she said softly. "Of one unto whom much is given, much shall be required. The equilibrium of the universe does the requiring, Analyn of Fra, that the delicate life-balances may be maintained."
This I understood; it is mathematical. However, I have yet to see it demonstrated in the world around me. Everything is given to the noble families, of whom very little is required.
She spoke to me, then. "You, child," she said, "you will help your mother. There are days coming soon when she will be at the storm's center, and only she will have some power over the forces that shake this world. When that time comes she will need you beside her, and when you go away, she will need your learning and your thoughts. It is a solemn obligation, and it will be heavy upon you."
I could not help what I did, I fell to my knees before her because her eyes compelled me, and I heard the indrawn hiss of my mother's breath. We of the Old Faith kneel only to the Sun, and to no human born—not even to the Reverend RabbiPastor. But I had no more power than a creature struck down, and I was glad to kneel.
"That was a cheap trick," said my mother, lashing out at the holy woman, "and it is a good thing you use it on a child! Only a child would be impressed."
I saw a look cross Drussa Silver's face, a look of sorrow and of one heavily burdened; and then, while I looked out from behind my trembling hands, she turned those eyes on my mother.
It was as well that I was kneeling already, for I would have fallen in any case. The room was whirling around me. My mother grasped the frame of the door and held it, and I saw the cords stand out in her throat, saw her whole body shudder as she fought the swirling of power all about us, and I heard her cry out in despair. And then she knelt, too, compelled as I had been, Analyn the Singer on her knees before this woman who had come to tear away the accustomed fabric of our lives.
It stopped, as a wind ceases sometimes to blow, and it was Drussa Silver who went to her knees, beside my mother. Her voice was like cool water on a burn, and she spoke close to my mother's ear so that I could scarcely hear.
"I must show you something," she said. "I must, because you are going to be sorely needed, and because you are the only one strong enough to bear it. I am going to show you what is real, Analyn the Singer, so that you will remember it forever, and so that this dream-structure set up by human beings cannot ever again confuse you."
My mother was trembling. I could not bear to see her so; when Drussa Silver stood up I ran to my mother and put my arms around her to still her shivering.
LOOK THERE, said the holy woman, AND LOOK WELL.
My mother's body went rigid as stone in my arms, and I saw her eyes grow wide and a distance come in them. My heart pounded in me, but hers had stopped at what she saw.
As for me, I saw nothing, because the world tipped once and went black around me. I heard my mother say—or perhaps I heard her Sing—"Forgive me," and then the words of the woman called Silver, in my mind.
IT IS I WHO MUST BE FORGIVEN, FOR THE THINGS THAT I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO DO.
And then I knew nothing more. When I came to myself I was on my bed, and my mother bending over me, and Drussa Silver had left our house.
When I tried to speak, Mother hushed me. "Truly," she said, "now is a time when you must keep silence, child."
I do not know what to think of all this. A Singer is not humbled by anything ordinary. And yet Drussa Silver is a known sorceress, a woman who has tempted millions of our people away from the Old Faith with her trickery. All of us know the tricks a person of strong psibility can play on others, and the Silver woman was for all the years of her childhood at the Communipath Creche, a potential candidate for the post of message-channel to Three Galaxies. Who knows what sort of deviltry she may not have learned there? And it is known that she was released from the Creche as unfit for service, surely a sign of great wickedness—though when she was near me I thought only that she was holy.
I am going back to my equations, where things behave as they ought to behave, and where one thing follows from another in elegance and rigor. My mother will not speak of the Silver's visit, or of what happened. She said only, "I am bruised of spirit ... " and has said nothing since. She talks of our house, and of my behavior, and sometimes she speaks of the small garden we keep along our side window. She spends much time walking, high in the nishia-bella trees, even when the upper branches are lost in fog and rain; and she comes home soaked through to the flesh, with a look in her eyes that I have never seen before.
I can only wait and see what will come to pass.