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tough, and refused to die easily. But my mind knew the value of death. I am
not grateful if life is what has been given back to me.
I had outlived two wives. My people had settled in the Kupe Islands, embraced
by Cape
Magellan in the south of Elizabeth's Land. I only remember broken pieces of
Yanosh's agents entering my hut and finding me on a soft cot of mat fiber
reeds, a special bed for dying.
"Elizabeth knew how to die," I say to Yanosh.
"The ecos," he says.
"Yes. The ecos. My wife's name was Rebecca."
"She would not leave to come here," Yanosh says. "She told us we were angels
and we could have you, take you back to where you were born."
"Yes."
"She was your third wife."
"Yes," I say. "Do you want me to tell you everything that happened? I've lived
a very long time, Yanosh."
Yanosh appears genuinely distressed. "It was not our intention to abandon you,
Olmy. You must believe that. The Naderites came to power and we could not
mount the effort for years. When the Geshels took power again, the Jarts
pressed us back. And when we finally returned, the geometry stack had become
even more tangled, and we could not open a gate. We thought Lamarckia was
lost."
"I understand," I say. My tone is still that of a tired old man, though my
voice sounds young. I do not care to press blame. I have had a long and full
life. I knew Shirla, and after her, Sikaya, and finally, Rebecca, who was an
old woman when I discovered her beauty and loved her.
With my death, I will finally be human. _I will know where I am._
"You want to know what she looked like," I say.
"Nothing of the field or the dome exists anymore," Yanosh says. "The pillars
are bare, the dome is gone. The jungle took over everything. Only what you saw
and remember remains."
He calls it a _jungle,_ not a silva. And that is what it had become. "All
green. The last of the old on Hsia."
I see ghosts around him, incorporeal images of others listening in. I am
telling all the
Hexamon. I am a celebrity.
--------
*25*
I approached the frame. Chung would not enter. Frick followed Brion next, for
he had been here before. He did not like being here, but he was loyal to
Brion. Salap was having an epiphany.
His face glowed with enthusiasm, skin creamy with brown shadows in the redness
and murk as blocks of storm clouds crossed the sky above the dome. He patted
my shoulder, smiled broadly, and passed through the curtainlike membrane, into
the inner chamber. The membrane sealed smooth behind him, like the inverted
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wall of a thick soap bubble.
The voice spoke again, perfect and high. I heard Brion sobbing like a child. I
pushed my hand against the membrane, felt it rush around my fingers and wrist
and arm like a lip of slick flesh.
Within the frame, she stood in the middle of a mass of shiny black
hemispheres, studded with black spikes and surmounted by black arches. She
wore no clothing and her skin moved, rippling slightly as if she were a badly
projected image.
Brion stood two steps from her, Frick by his side. Brion shook his head, chest
wracked with sobs. Salap came closer to the female shape, chin in hand,
studying her. Her hair hung long and muddy red, motionless and dull, in tufts
and spikes to her shoulders. Her face was crudely fashioned, the face of a
puppet made by a talented amateur. She paid none of them any attention.
Her mouth did not move as she spoke. "Know not names." Or, "No not names."
"May I speak to it?" Salap asked.
Brion dropped to his knees and lowered his head to the floor, palms flat
against the ridged, humped surface that slowly raised and lowered him as if on
a swell of ocean.
Frick said, "It isn't what he was hoping for."
Salap approached the shape. "My name is Mansur Salap. I would like to speak
with you," he file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Legacy.txt (160 of
183) [5/21/03 12:38:23 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Legacy.txt said, as if
introducing himself at a soiree.
The shape inclined its head in his direction, but its eyes -- pallid gray-blue
within fixed eyelids, without expression -- could not meet his. It lacked
refinements and could not express anything human except in broad strokes.
Whatever it had learned, it was woefully incomplete.
"You represent another, don't you?" Salap asked.
"Brion with names not," the voice said, coming from all around. The walls of
the frame vibrated like diaphragms, making the sounds, along with other
noises: windy flights of whispering, a steady low frog-throat grumble.
"Do you recognize Brion?" Salap asked.
"Talks."
"I talk and my name is Salap."
"I brought Caitla here. Where is she?" Brion asked. Another membrane of tissue
withdrew, and the body was visible on a raised hump in the living floor, slack
with death, months into its own private decay.
"You understand us," Salap said.
Chung had entered without my noticing and stood one step behind me. "Star,
Fate, and
Breath," she said.
The figure turned toward her voice. "Two speak gave and use what use. Two now
here."
Chung seemed aghast to be confused with her sister again. "I am not Caitla,"
she said.
"You've tried to become Caitla." She shouted at Brion, "She's dead, and you
wanted to bring her back!"
Brion had stopped weeping and stood before the figure, examining it
critically. "You could try again. More work ... More detail."
"It will take a long time to understand us," Salap said.
"Why?" Brion asked. "Why so long? It samples us, it must know what we're
like..."
"We've been mistaken," Salap said.
The figure, I realized, had not taken a step. It grew from the floor and could
not lift its feet. It was only a little more sophisticated than the discarded
husks behind us.
"Caitla and I gave her the chlorophyll," Brion argued. "She took the bottle
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and used it.
She made Caitla plants for her garden, working with the real plants Caitla
showed her."
Salap looked back at me. "Can you tell him, Ser Olmy? Bring the sophistication
of the
Thistledown to this little exercise in monstrosity?"
For a moment, I hadn't a clue what Salap wanted me to say. Then a thought that
had been below conscious expression for some months broke through. "They've
never sampled our genetic structure."
"Yes?" Salap encouraged, face seeming to glow again like a beacon. The figure
shivered, some rudimentary adjustment in turgor.
"Sampling is a way of identifying other scions. Each ecos carries its own
markers, its own chemical scheme. We don't fit any schemes. We don't come from
other ecoi. They can't analyze our structure from the level of our genetic
material. So they have to copy us from the evidence of other senses." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]