Foreigner

*6*

“The talking cure is not always pleasant,” said Nav-Mokleb, leaning back on her tail. She was standing about fifteen paces downwind of Afsan’s rock. “You will have to bare your innermost thoughts to me. Further, the cure takes a great deal of time. We must meet for a daytenth every other day for a protracted period—perhaps as long as a kiloday.”

“Five hundred sessions!” said Afsan. “Five hundred daytenths.” And then, as was his wont, he extended the mathematics: “That would mean the aggregate of our sessions would total fifty days.”

“Yes.”

“Mokleb, I don’t have fifty days to spare. I’m old.”

“To invoke math, as you are so famous for doing, you are not old. If you survive an average span, your life is a little less than half over.” Mokleb let out a long, hissing sigh. “Look, this is an unusual case for me. Normally, patients seek me out on their own. They believe in my techniques and are eager to be cured. You, however, are here because the Emperor and your physician recommended it. I see that you are skeptical, and reluctant to undertake the process.”

“Skepticism is the mark of a good scientist,” replied Afsan. “As for reluctance, as I said, I don’t have fifty days to spare.”

“The Emperor asked me to take you on as a patient,” said Mokleb, “and I am a loyal subject of Dy-Dybo. But if you are reluctant now, it will only get worse as our explorations take longer. You must be committed to this process, or it cannot work.”

“Then it will not work,” said Afsan.

Mokleb shrugged. “The loss is yours. I sleep well at night, Afsan, and I can see. I don’t expect you to envy me for that, but I had been led to believe that you desired those same things yourself. I see that I was mistaken. My apologies for taking up some of your precious time.”

Mokleb began walking away. Insects buzzed. She passed three Rockscape boulders before Afsan spoke. “Wait,” he said. And then, a moment later, “Come back.”

Mokleb walked back toward Afsan’s rock.

“I’m sorry,” Afsan said. “I understand you are trying to help me. Please—I do want to be cured.”

“Good,” said Mokleb. “That brings us to the question of compensation for my labors.”

“I have an unlimited imperial endowment,” said Afsan. “Please talk with Dee-Laree at the palace; he’ll make sure you are well looked after.”

“I will speak to Dee-Laree,” said Mokleb. “But simply having a third party provide me with recompense is insufficient.

We are about to embark on a long and difficult road, Afsan. There must be a contract directly between us. Normally, I wouldn’t say this to a patient, but I’m sure you would figure this out for yourself—and I know that the moment I leave, you will send an assistant to the library and have him or her bring back my writings and read them to you anyway.” She paused. “I have found that, as therapy progresses, patients begin to skip appointments. They wish to avoid facing difficult questions. Therefore, I will charge you a personal fee for every session, to be paid whether you attend or not, said fee to be dear enough to make you reluctant to waste it.”

“A fee! On top of what the palace will give you?”

“Yes. You’ve already made clear how valuable your time is to you, Afsan. Mine is equally valuable to me, and I won’t be trifled with.”

“But a fee! Doctors don’t trade directly with patients, Mokleb. Surely you already receive a stipend.”

“That’s irrelevant. You must be committed to the therapy, and a fee helps ensure that. Plus, there’s another reason to charge you a fee. Again, I wouldn’t normally mention it, but you will be savvy enough to see it, anyway. During the course of the therapy, you will have many different reactions to me. At times, those reactions will be ones of aggression and hate. Paying me a fee will help assuage your guilt over having those feelings. You must have no humiliating debt of gratitude to me for tolerating such outbursts; rather, you must feel that you have bought the right to make them.”

Afsan was silent for a time. Then: “Although Dybo looks after my needs, Mokleb, I personally own little. My endowment is mostly to finance research. I have no precious stones, no percentage interest in any ship or caravan, and only a few trading markers. How would I pay you?”

“What do you own that you value most?”

“I have few possessions. My greatest prize, I suppose, was the far-seer that Novato gave me. But that is in the custody of my son, Toroca.”

“What else do you treasure?”

Afsan’s tail, hanging off the back of the rock he was straddling, waggled back and forth. “Well, to my astonishment, my old teaching master, Tak-Saleed, left me a complete set of his Treatise on the Planets, the most famous of his works.”

“What good are books to a blind person?” asked Mokleb.

“Oh, occasionally I have a student read passages from them to me. But simply owning them, running my fingers over the kurpa leather binding, smelling the musty pages—that gives me pleasure.”

“How many volumes are there?”

“Eighteen. Three per planet, other than the Face of God.”

“Excellent,” said Mokleb. “And how many times does eighteen go into five hundred?”

Afsan tipped his head. “A little less than twenty-eight: 27.778, to be precise.”

“Very good. You will pay me in advance. Today, you will surrender the first volume of the treatise. After every twenty-eight sessions, you will surrender another volume. If you are still being treated after five hundred sessions, we will renegotiate the contract. Agreed?”

“I cherish those books,” Afsan said softly.

“Agreed?” said Mokleb harshly.

Afsan tipped his head down, blind eyes looking at the ground. “Agreed,” he said at last.

Novato mentally whipped herself with her tail for not having come up with the idea. After all, it was a logical extension of her own invention, the far-seer. The far-seer used lenses to make distant objects appear close, and this device, the small-seer, used lenses to make tiny objects visible. The small-seer’s inventor, Bor-Vanbelk of Pack Brampto in Arj’toolar, had discovered amazing things. Tiny lifeforms in a drop of water! Little disks within blood. Minuscule chambers in the leaf of a plant!

Novato, balancing again on the side of the cliff, clinging with one hand to the rope web, was using a small-seer to examine the spreading blueness. Here, right at its very edge, she could see shifting patterns of dust. Even through the lenses, the grains were all but invisible. But unlike the random jostling in a drop of water, these motes moved in regular patterns, back and forth, up and down. It was as though Novato were watching a dance from the back of an impossibly high amphitheater, the individual dancers virtually impossible to discern but the mathematical precision of their movements still a thing of beauty.

Dancers, thought Novato. Dancers smaller than the eye could see. But they weren’t just dancing. They were working, like ants building an anthill, moving with determined insectile exactness.

Part of her said the little things must be alive, and part said that that was ridiculous, that nothing so ancient could be living. But if they were not lifeforms, then what could they be?

Whatever they were, they were making phenomenal progress. Already, almost the entire cliff face was blue.

If further contact was to be made with the Others, Toroca would have to go ashore—and he would have to do so alone. The Dasheter had sailed south and was now approaching the archipelago from a different direction so that the ship’s arrival would not immediately be associated with the death on the westernmost island. The ship stayed below the horizon, the islands out of sight.

This part of the world never knew real darkness. By day, the sun blazed overhead. True, for a good part of the day, the sun was eclipsed by the Face of God (although they were far enough north of the equator that the sun’s path behind the Face was a chord much shorter than the Face’s diameter). But even when the sun was eclipsed, and the Face was completely unilluminated, the purple sky grew no darker than it did at twilight. And at midnight, when the sun shone down on the other side of the world, the Face was full, covering a quarter of the sky, lighting up the waves in shades of yellow and orange.

Because of this, there was no time at which the Dasheter could sneak in to let Toroca off. Toroca, therefore, was going to swim to shore. He’d removed his sash; it would have interfered with swimming. But he was not completely naked: around his waist he wore a swimmer’s belt, with waterproof pouches made from lizard bladders in which he carried supplies.

Standing near him on the deck of the Dasheter were Babnol and Captain Keenir. There was no way for them to keep in touch with Toroca once he left the ship. They’d simply agreed that the Dasheter would sail farther out, then return to this spot in twenty days to pick up Toroca; if he did not rendezvous with them, Keenir would then set sail for home, rather than risk further disastrous contact.

Babnol’s tone was full of concern. “Be careful, Toroca.”

Toroca looked at her wistfully. He’d always wanted their relationship to be so much closer. “I will.”

“We’ll be back for you, lad,” said Keenir.

“Thank you.”

Toroca moved to the side of the ship and began to climb down the rope ladder that led to the shore boats tethered below. He could have paddled one of those to the island instead of swimming in, but the boats were pretty big for one person to manage; swimming would be easier and faster. When he got to the bottom, he managed a little tip of his torso and saw, up on deck, Keenir and Babnol likewise executing ceremonial bows.

The waves were high enough that Toroca had been splashed up the calf by the time his foot reached the bottom rung. Without further ado, he let go and slipped beneath the waves. They were far enough north that the water was cooler than what Toroca was used to, but it wasn’t cold enough to pose a hazard. He put his arms flat at his sides, stretched his legs out behind, and undulated his tail. His body sliced through the water. He passed a school of silvery fish at one point and later saw a couple of limpid floaters bobbing on the surface. The Face of God waned visibly during the course of the long swim in, and the sun moved closer and closer to its edge.

In the distance, Toroca could see a few of the Others’ own sailing ships, but they tended to stay close to shore. That wasn’t surprising; the Others presumably long ago determined that there was nothing except empty water for thousands of kilopaces around.

Even from far away, Toroca was surprised by how different the Others’ ships looked. Quintaglio vessels had diamond shaped hulls, square sails, and an even number of masts (the Dasheter had four). The ship passing Toroca far to the left had a rounded hull, three masts, and overlapping triangular sails.

Toroca was now a hundred paces from shore. He was approaching what seemed to be a small coastal city made of wooden buildings. Right off, that seemed alien. Quintaglios normally built from adobe or stone; surely wooden buildings were at risk of fire from lamp flames. And these buildings were such odd shapes! The Others seemed to avoid right angles; it was hard to tell from this vantage point, but most of the buildings appeared to have eight sides. Toroca stopped swimming for a moment. There were fifty or sixty people walking along a broad wooden pier built along the contours of the water’s edge. So many! Why, it was as if they had no territoriality at all. And then Toroca saw something that amazed him: two individuals walking side by side down the pier. He could see them clearly, and there could be no doubt about what they were doing.

Holding hands.

Incredible, thought Toroca. Absolutely incredible.

He began to swim again, his tail propelling him over the remaining distance. Finally, somebody noticed him. He saw a hand pointing in his direction, and a shout went up. Others turned to look out at the waters. More arms pointed at him. One person turned and ran toward the octagonal buildings. Two large Others grabbed a juvenile and, against the juvenile’s apparent wishes, dragged the child away from the edge of the pier. One Other was shouting gibberish. Two Others shouted back; more gibberish. Toroca was about ten paces from the pier now.

Someone pointed a blackened metal tube at Toroca. A flash erupted from its open end and a sound came from it like the bellow of a shovelmouth. The water exploded next to Toroca as something crashed into the waves. Someone ran to the Other holding the tube and motioned angrily for him to put it down.

There was a rope ladder dangling from the side of the pier into the water. Toroca grabbed it. The rope itself was of a material Toroca had never seen—perhaps some kind of waterweed fiber—and the knots along its length were tied in a complex style he’d likewise never encountered. Still, it was clearly meant for accessing the pier from the water, or vice versa, and so he pulled himself up, rung after rung, his body feeling cool as the air ran over his wet form. At last he was up on the pier; it, too, was bizarre, made of long planks that went lengthwise instead of crosswise, the way a Quintaglio would have built it.

Toroca stood there, dripping, hands on hips, looking at the Others, and they stood looking at him. Some were pointing at his swimmer’s belt, and Toroca was reminded of how he had made much of the fact that the first Other they’d encountered had been wearing jewelry. They must know he was intelligent. These Others all sported copper jewelry, but some were also wearing vests made of a material that looked too pliable to be leather. The Other with the metal tube was near the front of the crowd. He held the tube in such a way that he could raise it again in a fraction of a beat. One of the Others stepped forward and spoke, a string of nonsense syllables emanating from its mouth.

At the back of the crowd, Toroca could see someone trying to get through. Incredibly, he was actually tapping people on the shoulder to get them to move, or gently pushing them aside. On Land, this fellow’s throat would have been ripped out by now, but people were gladly making way for whoever this was. Once he’d gotten to the front, Toroca saw that this Other also was brandishing a metal tube, but it was smaller and more compact. He was wearing black bands around both his arms; no one else had such bands.

“Hello,” said Toroca, and then he bowed. The moment seemed to call for some sort of speech, but if the Others’ language sounded like gibberish to Toroca, his words would likely sound the same to them. “Hello,” he said again, simply.

The Other with the armbands said ‘Hello’ back at him. For a moment, Toroca thought that the Other understood him, but it was soon clear that he’d simply repeated the sound Toroca had made. If this Other had been a Quintaglio, he’d have been a good piece younger than Toroca, but none of the Others seemed as large as an old Quintaglio. Either this wasn’t a location frequented by the elderly, or Others simply didn’t grow as fast or as big as Quintaglios.

Toroca made a gesture toward the city, indicating, he hoped, that he wished to go there. The Other with the black armbands looked warily at Toroca, then stepped aside. Toroca began to walk down the pier, and this Other walked silently beside him. There was a hubbub among the spectators. Some had claws out; others had them sheathed. If these were Quintaglios, that would mean some were frightened and others were just curious—exactly the mix of emotions Toroca himself was feeling as he continued down the pier.