Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

And yet, of the three limits Margda’s Edict imposed on all Speakers, she had only broken two of them. Not summoning another Speaker had made a certain amount of sense and propriety. Not Speaking to the living had also seemed obvious. But the third, a restriction against summoning oneself, had never made sense to him. Why should any Speaker wish to Speak with himself? And besides, wouldn’t doing so be covered under the first two restrictions? But the Matriarch had thought it important enough to her vision of the future to proscribe it on its own. Perhaps like the other two, she had done so to keep it sacrosanct until she herself needed it. Or … what if she had meant for Jorl to break this last rule himself?

He left the desk and returned to the corner, sitting on the floor and bracing himself between the walls once more. It required nothing more than closing his eyes to slip back into the awareness of nefshons, his waking reality supplanted by the mental one. He conjured up the same meeting place he’d used for the Archetype of Man and imagined himself standing at its center point.

Once there, he concentrated on his own nefshons, the very thing all Speakers were taught to filter out with their very first lesson. His nefshons enshrouded him, roiling and gleaming gold. Some of the particles were newly born elements of his personal history, while others, minutes or seconds older, pushed outward as if to diffuse like the particles of the dead, only to pull back and enmesh themselves among fellows without number, because he was very much alive.

The second lesson of every Speaker was to draw sufficient numbers of one’s own particles to create a self-construct. Gathering them was like holding out your hands during a leafstorm and becoming filled almost as rapidly as the idea occurred. A mental tweak, a nudge, and one’s own construct coalesced. He’d done it so many times before, it was as automatic as removing his own particles from his perception. He’d already done it upon returning here; he did it now, again and deliberately.

Jorl stared, open mouthed, at Jorl. One nefshon construct confronting another as in any summoning, both existing only in the mind of the Speaker, but both a part of that mind.

“You’re me,” the first Jorl said, realizing how stupid it sounded as the words left him. So did his twin.

“And you’re me,” he replied with a self-deprecating smirk. “We’re us.”

They paused, each studying the other, both aware of the golden fabric of nefshons surrounding them. Simultaneous grins burst out across both faces as the full ramifications took hold and they spoke in unison. “And we’re both Speakers!”

The two Jorls took a moment, concentrating in the way all Speakers do when summoning, and then there were four of him, all grinning like a child who has told each of his older sisters and aunts that one of the others is looking after him and then sneaks off to pursue adventures of his own.

Four became eight, effortlessly; Arlo’s drug making it trivial to maintain more than one construct, especially when the other constructs distributed the burden among themselves. Eight became sixteen, became thirty-two, became sixty-four, on and on, doubling and redoubling until they overflowed the meeting space the first Jorl had imagined and they let the venue fall away as hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of Jorl, imagined themselves linked, side by side, hand in hand, forming a vast chain of themselves around the island of Keslo, feet planted firmly on the edge of the shore, waves across their feet, the rain falling upon identical laughing faces.

With one purpose, they cast themselves wide. The Jorls reached out to encompass the galaxy. Together they did what no single Speaker could ever achieve, they sought out the essence of Dr. Chieko Castleman from wherever each isolated nefshon might lie and compelled every one of them to this single place. Like a magnet of personality, they drew the particles, the strength of their compulsion outstripping the restrictions of distance and time.

For a long while there was nothing. The pull hung in otherwise empty air. But then, slowly at first, nefshons trickled in. Like the first faint and tentative drops of a shower at the end of the season of wind, they came. Then more and more, swifter and in greater number. The trickle built to a steady flow, the flow to a torrent, the torrent to a deluge. And as the particles poured in, one by one the individual Jorls began to disperse. Their purpose achieved they dismissed themselves, until at last there was just the one of him standing there, the image of the cabin on board the space station restored around him amidst a growing collection of sixty-three-thousand-year-old nefshons. With no more effort than it would take to blink, Jorl exercised his will, and Dr. Chieko Castleman came into being again.

THREEkinds of people existed in Pizlo’s taxonomy. Almost everyone everywhere fell into the first group: people who didn’t talk to him. The people who did talk to him accounted for the other two groups. There were his parents, Arlo and Tolta. That group had dropped from two to one, though now he wasn’t so sure. He’d talked to Arlo before going to sleep here, and he had the order right, it hadn’t been a dream. The last kind of people was anyone else who talked to him but who wasn’t related to him, and before today that had only been Jorl. In his mind, this was more than enough to make Jorl his friend. But now another person had talked to him, a woman who wasn’t even a Fant. She’d been nice, and also interesting, and he hoped that meant he could count her as a friend, too. The possibility danced sweetly in his dreams while he slept.

He awoke to find the Sloth hovering over him. She’d changed the bandages on his hands and was in the midst of slowly moving one of her sleeved arms back and forth above his head. The sight of her round face made him smile. Jorl would be proud of him, having made a friend who wasn’t a Fant.

“How do you feel, Little Prince?”

“I’m excited.”

“Ah, I imagine seeing this station must be very strange and wondrous to you.”

He shrugged, and his smile increased as he realized he’d never done that while lying down before. “No, it’s not that. It’s mostly pretty boring once you get over how ugly everything is.”

“Well, why don’t we go do something more interesting then?”

“Really? Like what?”

“Do you know what a spacecraft is?”

“Sure, Jorl worked on one before he came back home. Why?”

“We’re on one right now. It’s docked with the station you were on. Do you remember when I carried you here? We passed through an airlock and a connection tube.”

“Yeah, the little room with the big doors. I remember.” He sat up and looked at one of the walls and pointed with his trunk. “That’s open space through there, right?”

“Yes, how did you—”

“Wow. This is even better than being on a station.”

“I agree. I’ve always found stations to be significantly lacking relative to vessels. Would you like to meet the person who owns this one?”

Pizlo laughed. “You can’t own a spacecraft. They’re too big and important.”

“The man who owns this one is important. He’s a senior senator. Do you know what a senator is?”

“Is it like the captain of a ship?”

“No, even more important. So important that he has his own ship, and it goes wherever he says.”

“Wow.”

“Just so. His name is Senator Bish, and you actually saw him before, when you bumped your head. I’ve been telling him about you, and he’s very interested in having a chat with you.”

He gasped, eyes wide with surprise. “He wants to talk to me? Really?”