Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

Everything here was utilitarian and anonymous, with the exception of the holographic poster of the bright and happy Pandas. Maybe they were kin to the Panda that lived in the room. Pizlo had seen plenty of holos in several books Jorl kept of such things, but as a rule Fant rarely bothered with images of one another, not where memory could serve. Perhaps when Ailuros traveled far from their families they forgot what one another looked like.

Pizlo hid his sacks in the closet and closed it up again, then slipped into the lavatory, shutting the door behind him. He needed a few moments to figure out how to access the fixtures, turning the lights off and on and activating a drier in the ceiling before he actually managed to find the bathing controls and activate them with just his trunk. Water poured down into the tub like a mild rain and he let it flow over him, tilting his head back and drinking deeply. He pretended he was back home in the Shadow Dwell standing under a hidden waterfall that had called him to it, but he couldn’t sustain it. The tub, the lavatory, even the water pouring down on him all felt lifeless. Nothing here could talk to him. He had never felt more alone.

He pushed at his shorts, struggling at the task. He hadn’t been able to get them down back in the darkness of the cargo pod when he’d had two good arms, but managed to use his feet and trunk to yank them off now. In the process he tore off bits of recent scabs from his hands and started them bleeding again. He used up everything in the dispensers, slathering himself with gel and working the gunk into the shorts at his feet as well. The flow of water carried away assorted grime, filth, and tatters of skin, but left the inked circles on his chest unchanged. When both he and his clothes were as clean as they were apt to be, he pulled the shorts up his legs, and then rolled onto his back in the tub, tugging at them with his trunk and wriggling to get them all the way back on. He shut off the water and turned on the drier, then he just stood there, legs apart, one arm wide, ears fanning, and let the room dry him.

Refreshed but with his hands still damp and oozing, he stepped back into the main room, leaving moist, Fant-shaped footprints on the plastic floor as he retrieved his bags from the closet. The door to the hallway opened at his touch, and with a last backward glance at the smiling, waving pair of Ailuros, Pizlo slipped back into the corridor.

The light strips came on ahead of him and dimmed after he passed. He counted nineteen other doors like the one that led to the Panda’s room. Without touching, he listened at each door. At two of them he heard muffled sounds of conversation but couldn’t make out any words. Pizlo shrugged and moved on. It wasn’t a problem until it became a problem. Certainly the moon hadn’t mentioned anything about running into anyone.

At its far end, the corridor branched both right and left, but otherwise ended in another gate. Pizlo pressed his trunk against it. As with the other, the gate split down the middle and the two pieces whooshed to the wall on either side while lights came on to illuminate the new room, a space easily as wide as five cargo pods. Rows of tables and bench seats extruded from the floor, and cabinets and fixtures bulged from the walls on either side. But Pizlo barely noticed any of that. His full attention had been captured by the wall opposite him, which bowed out in a gentle curve and didn’t appear to be a wall at all, rather a vast window from floor to ceiling that gazed out onto the surface of Barsk itself.

He stumbled closer until he could stroke the transparent wall with his trunk. He knew the view was real, could feel the planet that was his home whispering faintly to him in too large a chorus for any of the individual voices to be understood. He just stood there for the longest time, eyes closed, basking in the light of home.

Minutes later, a new voice, solitary and strong, broke through the whispers. He opened his eyes. A moon had risen over the distant curve of the planet, Telko, the largest of them all, and one of the remaining four that he’d not yet seen.

Pizlo greeted it with silent joy and felt an answering acknowledgment. Its light washed over him. He communed. The three previous times he had seen one of Barsk’s moons they had appeared for scant moments during rifts in the clouds that blanketed the skies. Hanging there so high, the clouds wrapping the planet below, Telko had nothing but time to convey its message to Pizlo. Tears trickled down the boy’s face. He dropped to his knees and sobbed in the embrace of the moon’s light.

DESPITEthe strain on Lirlowil’s body, the Matriarch allowed herself only the briefest of pauses between ending her summoning of Jorl and beginning her pursuit of Arlo. Once the nefshons had been gathered, the act of Speaking itself would take less effort than actual conversation. But manipulating the particles, searching out a sufficient number to create a construct of the desired conversant could be exhausting, and back when she’d been alive, Margda had only rarely ever done so twice in a day. Her host would feel the fatigue, not her, which was a freedom and a danger, and she accepted both.

She allowed herself a small concession toward normalcy, conjuring up a fresh cup of tea for herself in the constructed space of her home back on Yargo. Sipping, she willed herself the ability to see nefshons that a real cup of koph-laced tea would have brought her and returned to the work at hand.

Even with the telepathically acquired details, Margda had only enough knowledge about Arlo to recognize him but not summon him outright. Such a limitation would have stymied other Speakers, but she possessed more ways than simply blending desire with perception to call the nefshons of her conversant.

If her visions held true, then despite the passage of eight hundred years no other Speaker, either on Barsk or off, had come near her level of focus. She’d developed techniques that she’d never shared, choosing to point her students down different avenues far from her private methodology. She plucked at the particles one by one, focusing her senses to let her examine what no living eye could resolve. She knew the feel of Jorl’s own nefshons, and her telepathic probe had confirmed that he had recently summoned his friend. Her prophesied Aleph-Bearer was near, and some few of Arlo’s particles would likewise remain near, dispersing away from him. These were the nefshons she sought. As she examined and discarded all others, these from an Eleph instead of a Lox, or too old, or the wrong sex, or not a Fant at all, she cast them from her awareness.

The process defined tedium, this more than anything had bolstered her confidence that no other Speaker would think to try it, looking at the particles themselves, independent of the conversant they could produce. Easier to go looking for one specific leaf among all rain forests of all the islands of Barsk across eight hundred years of seasons.

Margda had no choice. Her visions had not shown Arlo to her. Everything she had set in motion, the rules of the Speakers’ Edict, the creation of the aleph, the conditions for ensuring Jorl would be marked, all were so she could one day be resurrected and Speak directly to Arlo. The entire mad plan had seemed full of promise and daring back when she’d been alive, but since her possession of the Lutr’s body, doubt had crept into her mind. Her attempts to shape the future might fly apart, and the backlash could shatter her own construct even as it destroyed the mind of her host. In all her long life, even during the worst of her seizures, she had never felt so little control. And yet, if her people were to survive, she had to succeed. On that point, all of her visions had been as clear as still water.