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Lawrence Schoen: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

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Lawrence Schoen Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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An historian who speaks with the dead is ensnared by the past. A child who feels no pain and who should not exist sees the future. Between them are truths that will shake worlds. In a distant future, no remnants of human beings remain, but their successors thrive throughout the galaxy. These are the offspring of humanity's genius-animals uplifted into walking, talking, sentient beings. The Fant are one such species: anthropomorphic elephants ostracized by other races, and long ago exiled to the rainy ghetto world of Barsk. There, they develop medicines upon which all species now depend. The most coveted of these drugs is koph, which allows a small number of users to interact with the recently deceased and learn their secrets. To break the Fant's control of koph, an offworld shadow group attempts to force the Fant to surrender their knowledge. Jorl, a Fant Speaker with the dead, is compelled to question his deceased best friend, who years ago mysteriously committed suicide. In so doing, Jorl unearths a secret the powers-that-be would prefer to keep buried forever. Meanwhile, his dead friend's son, a physically challenged young Fant named Pizlo, is driven by disturbing visions to take his first unsteady steps toward an uncertain future.

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My name is Selishta. This ship and these men obey my will. I’m the only one who gets to say how things work here.” She pulled her hand back, staring a moment at the glove as if her fingers had touched something disgusting, then stepped back. She directed her attention to the Cans.

“Maybe this one will know something useful about whatever shrubs and leaves the drug comes from. Hold him here a moment while the rest of the crew secures his flotsam, and then put him below in one of the vacant isolation cells.”

“Shrubs?” said Rüsul, more to himself than the others. “I was a wood carver, but that’s past. I’ve died.”

The Cheetah stepped back, waving one gloved hand in front of her stupid-looking nose. “If you had, I’ve no doubt you’d smell better than you do.”

Rüsul’s eyes widened and he studied his surroundings for the first time. As the Dogs had hauled him in he’d acknowledged only the formless gray of the place, but now the clear outlines of plastic wall panels, metal floor tilings, and piercing artificial light removed all doubt that he was inside an artificial structure. He gazed longingly back at the open gate they’d brought him through, where Nonyx-Captain Selishta stood silhouetted against the darkening sky. Rüsul watched as other Dogs in their red plastic suits hurried past the Cheetah, carrying away his supplies in the tarp that had previously covered them. Other Dogs had dragged the mast and sail in and down another corridor. Moments later, more of Selishta’s crew entered with the disassembled pieces of his raft. And then he saw the Cheetah stoop to pick up something else. As she straightened up and regarded the object in her hand, Rüsul saw that Selishta had found his carving of Margda.

The Nonyx waved the carving in a gesture encompassing everything that moments ago had made up Rüsul’s raft. “You won’t need any of that where we’re going.” She paused and regarded the image in his hand. “This is one of your women? Unbelievable. And I thought the males were the ugly ones.” She tossed it away.

The Cheetah dismissed Rüsul with a wave and the pair of Dogs took him away, deeper into the “ship” as the captain had named it. But it wasn’t like any vessel of good wood that he had heard of, open to rain and sky. The world seemed to close in around him, and at first Rüsul imagined that he had actually died. But he knew it wasn’t time yet. Time, in fact, seemed to have stopped. A claustrophobia that he’d never known before squeezed at his heart.

To the chagrin of the Cans leading him, Rüsul’s body went limp. Head and trunk down, he began to wail, as mournful a sound as any living being could manage. The Dogs dropped him. They clutched at their heads and kicked him until pain silenced him.

“Why do they all do that?” said one of the Cans, over the sound of the Fant’s moans. “I think my ears are bleeding.”

“Shut up and grab an end,” said another. “I just want to get him into a cell before he catches his breath and starts in again.”

“Why do I get the smelly end?”

“The whole thing stinks. All the more reason to hurry up and dump his ass where he won’t be polluting our air.”

One took Rüsul’s arms, the other his legs. Neither Dog came anywhere near touching his trunk or ears.

“How can something that’s been sitting out in the rain for days smell this bad?”

“Yeah, every time we grab another one, I worry the ship’s recycler is going to break down and then we’re all screwed.”

They hauled him ever further away from his death.

TWO. POSSIBILITIES AND MYTHS

JORL slipped the pellet of koph under his tongue, closing his eyes as the drug dissolved and began to take hold. His left ear tingled as it always did, and he flapped it once, twice, and then settled back, resting his head against the wall. The darkness behind his eyelids lasted only a moment, replaced by a roiling curtain of golden light, the gold of his own nefshons.

The first perception granted by the drug induced panic for many novice Speakers. One moment you were alone in the darkness of your own head, and in the next you saw yourself swaddled by shimmering subatomic particles of memory. Those layers of golden fabric could suffocate a beginner. A successful Speaker imprinted on it, learned to identify the unique tang that permeated every gleaming particle. Then it only required an act of will for the Speaker to blind herself to it and move on.

Jorl had been Speaking less than a year, but he had disciplined his mind in academia. At the first glimpse of his own nefshons he banished them from his perception.

He filled the resulting darkness with images from his own memory, imagining a familiar room in a house on the island of Keslo. The dimensions and materials, the colors and textures and scents formed around him. That easily, he sat in a small alcove that lay just off of the kitchen of the home maintained by his friend’s widow. The walls were beech, yellow, bright in their own right and polished to a high sheen. A hand-braided rug covered the floor from the kitchen’s threshold to the hidden door in the back wall that provided a less obvious entrance to the house. A tapestry woven of wild flowers hung on that wall, filling the air with light, sweet fragrance. Two comfortably curved benches faced one another, set far back against opposite sides such that their occupants would be unseen by anyone passing the opening. Jorl saw it all in his mind, just as he had seen it before taking the koph and settling into that very spot after dinner.

While his best friend’s widow busied herself with after-dinner tasks, he muttered a name aloud, “Arlo,” and began summoning particles, luring them with memories: sitting in a classroom in his grandmother’s hall learning to cipher … sampling their first efforts at distillation … introducing him to Tolta, the daughter of a friend of his mother … laughing in the rain as they took a raft to Gerd for the first time … embracing him, trunks wrapped around one another’s ears, the day he left Barsk …

When he had a sufficient number, he willed the particles to coalesce into his friend’s form, occupying the bench opposite him, visible to anyone who possessed the Speaker’s gift.

“Your wife made the most amazing dinner tonight,” said Jorl, the mental construct of himself smacking his lips with satisfaction while in the real world his head pressed back against the wall, his trunk draping languidly down his chest, a trickle of drool starting at the corner of his flaccid mouth.

Arlo smiled. It started at his eyes and spread with exaggerated slowness across his face, until his ears gave a little flap of merriment. “Did she? You say that like you’re surprised. Tolta’s always been a great cook. You know that.”

“Of regional dishes, sure. The safe and same traditional meals that everyone’s aunt knows how to make. I’m talking about recipes from other worlds, places where no Fant has been in centuries.”

“Now you’re just being foolish. No one is going to bother venturing into space just for dinner. Not even you.”

“I didn’t say we left Barsk, only that the recipes, the spices, were from offworld. Pay attention.”

“Or what? You’ll banish me? Spread the glowing bits of me far and wide?”

“I’d never — don’t even joke about that!”

“I’m dead, Jorl. You can’t tell me what to do. More importantly, you shouldn’t be trying to tell me anything. This is what, the thirtieth time you’ve summoned me? It’s not healthy.”

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