Light on The Sound (v1.0) Read online

  There was no song like that of

  the Windbringers …

  It was said that even the high warriors of the Dispersal wept, that even the stem Inquestors, Lords of the Dispersal, were so moved that their shimmercloaks glistened with tears.

  The imagesongs were the key to the overcosm, where light went mad and time became irrelevant The image-songs were the key to unraveling the quickpaths between the stars.

  Those who experienced the imagesongs wept and were changed, and declared that they had seen perfect beauty and that the desires of men no longer touched diem.

  The Inquest, as always, found a way. They sent men who could not weep at the imagesongs. They were blind and deaf; and the Inquest saw this as an act of compassion. For they were sent to kill the Windbringers, without knowing what they killed.

  Light on the Sound

  Books by Somtow Sucharitkul

  Light on the Sound

  Starship & Haiku

  Published by TEMESCAPE BOOKS

  Most Timescape Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs.

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  SOMTOW SUCHARITKUL

  LIGHT ON

  THE SOUND

  A TIMESCAPE BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK

  The section entitled “The Thirteenth Utopia” was originally published in slightly different form in Analog Science Fiction/ Science Fact in April 1979, Copyright © 1979 by The Conde Nast Publications Inc.

  The section entitled “Light on the Sound” was originally published in slightly different form in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in August 1980, Copyright © 1980 by Davis Publications, Inc.

  This novel Is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Another Original publication Of TTMESCAPE BOOKS

  A Timescape Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of

  GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1982 by Somtow Sucharitkul

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Timescape Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-44028-4

  First Timescape Books printing September, 1982

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  POCKET and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.

  Use of the trademark TTMESCA^fe is by exclusive license from Gregory Benford, the trademark owner.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  This one is for Mom and Dad

  Contents :-

  Book One Out of the Dark Country

  ONE THE OVERCOSM

  TWO THE SHADOW OF SKYWALL

  THREE THE UTOPIA HUNTER

  FOUR THE DARK COUNTRY

  FIVE DELPHINOIDS

  SIX TO TOUCH THE LONELY WIND

  SEVEN THE SHADOW FALLS FOREVER

  EIGHT LIGHT ON THE SOUND

  NINE BELOW THE WATER, ABOVE THE WIND

  TEN FROM DARKNESS TO DARKNESS

  Book Two Out of the Burning Wasteland

  ELEVEN WINDSTRIKER

  TWELVE WINDSHAPES

  THIRTEEN COMPASSION

  FOURTEEN COLORS

  FIFTEEN MAKRÚGH

  SIXTEEN AVKSIGARKAR

  SEVENTEEN THE PASSION OF YNYOLDEH

  EIGHTEEN THE QUEEN OF GHOSTS

  NINETEEN THE INQUESTORS

  Book Three Out of the Shining Cities

  TWENTY THE LAUGHING WORLD

  TWENTY-ONE STONEWISE

  TWENTY-TWO THE CRYSTAL DESERT

  TWENTY-THREE THE BOY WHO DANCED BACK THE WINDBRINGERS

  TWENTY-FOUR THE LAUGHING UNIVERSE

  TWENTY-FIVE THE CURSE

  EPILOGUE

  Book One

  Out of the Dark Country

  zenz Atheren a Kéanis

  áias Talassas

  aiud lukhs de’ skaapnai

  Z liddar den ypnolan

  on the Sunless Sound

  on the Sighing Sea

  came light from the shapers

  and songs from the dreamers

  —Galléndaran folk song

  ONE

  THE OVERCOSM

  At the core of the curving of time and space, the over-cosm coiled. A cosmic serpent. A monster of non-Euclidean paradoxes … beyond, between the dimensions of realspace that men perceive.

  In the overcosm light went mad and battered the senses with music of color, and time became irrelevant.

  Through the overcosm, pinholing from star to interstellar blacknesses to the hearts of dusty nebulae, ran hidden paths. Paths that could only be understood as abstruse equations in the memories of planet-sized thinkhives that stored all knowledge of the Dispersal of Man and wove perpetual patterns out of the chaos of data. Paths that could shorten the distances between the stars, if only someone could perceive them.

  The paths are nothings now; they are power-paths that have rendered secure the power of the Inquest over the million known worlds, over the twenty millennia of the Dispersal of Man.

  But once upon a time, there were travelers, traveling in the old way, searching for the paths: searching for centuries, sleeping mostly, awakening in new regions of space-time, searching a little, then dying … and they found a planet, which they named, in the old hightongue that is still used by the Inquest, Gallendys.

  What a strange planet it was!

  On one of its continents a volcanic crater stood, its walls a hundred klomets high, breaching the stratosphere; a thousand klomets wide, the walls rising pyramidally to an opening narrower than a house. In the crater, no light fell.

  Not even starlight through the roofchink. For in the crater there survived a dense atmosphere, from a forgotten eon in the planet’s past; and there were only darkness and the churning winds, howling like anguished animals over Keian zenzAtheren, the Sunless Sound.

  Elsewhere, the planet seemed human enough: here a desert, there a sea, here a valley for a Kingling’s pleasure garden, here a mineful of precious ores fit for a punitive colony.

  But over the Sunless Sound, in the hidden country of darkness—

  They found vast creatures, Windbringers, who swam through the thick air. They had huge, formless brains, a hundred meters long, and were borne aloft by a tang-scented light air they puffed into huge flapping sailsacs.

  What a dull perceptual cosmos for them, if they had been built like men! There would have been nothing to see but the darkness, nothing to hear but the whistling of their self-made winds. But their minds were turned inward. They perceived the overcosm directly, that part of space that is at once the center and the farthest edge of spacetime.

  In the darkness they soared up from Sound to ceiling, from wall’s edge to wall’s edge—

  And they sang!

  Imagesongs. Lightpoems that shattered the thick darkness. Harmonies that bounced and rebounded from the whispering walls, echoshifting, never quite dying, so that the whole enclosed world resounded with the weavings of their overcosmic visions. They sang and were at peace.

  Until men came.

  They heard and saw the imagesongs. It was said that even the high warriors of the Dispersal wept, that
even the stem Inquestors, Lords of the Dispersal, were so moved that their shimmercloaks glistened with tears.

  The imagesongs were the key to the overcosm, to unraveling the quickpaths between the stars. They had to understand them! For they had a need to leap from star to star, to trade, fight, conquer, to stand on ever-new earths.

  But no. Those who experienced the imagesongs wept and were changed, and declared that they had seen perfect beauty and that the desires of men no longer touched them. The Inquest, as always, found a way.

  Then more men came who could not weep at the image-songs. And then the imagesongs burst and resounded over the darkness, but the men did not see or hear diem. They were blind and deaf; and the Inquest saw this as an act of compassion. Not knowing they could not see or hear, they were free men.

  Or thought they were.

  TWO

  THE SHADOW OF SKYWALL

  Great eyes of a young boy staring at the endless Sky-wall—

  “Don’t dawdle, Kelver!”

  Kelver pressed another button. A bale of food vanished from the displacement plate. And then—

  Skywall! They called it a hundred-klomet-high mountain that penetrated the roof of the atmosphere, a mountain a thousand klomets long … to him it was Skywall, an utter blackness that halved the zenith, that divided the world into known and unknown. And behind it—the mythical Dark Country.

  For a great distance the mountain was perpendicular and quite black; further up it dissolved into a sheer mist flecked with greenery, and higher still, at the limits of perception, more blackness.

  You could pretend the black was a giant holoscreen. You could project your fantasies on it, say it was the blackness of space and spatter it with stars and planets and hurl yourself into the thick of the Overcosm Wars.

  Kelver had passed his third winter: fourteen years that was in the highspeech of the Inquestors. And when you were fourteen and stuck in a back village, with no clan-name, and you’d never been so much as a step off-planet, not even to the moons—what could you do? Dream. Make alien things in the Skywall, that only you could see.

  From the side of the Skywall mountain, perhaps a hundred meters up, the Cold River began, enclosed in its own metal wall and borne on pylons, dropping at a sharp angle until it reached ground level and stretching on forever away from the Skywall, impossibly straight

  Kelver pressed another button idly.

  “Kelver—” It was Uncle Aaye.

  “It’s pointless anyway,” he said. “We’re just pressing buttons and food is disappearing, and we always do this every week and it’s a waste….”

  He pressed a button. Another basket of fresh meat vanished.

  Uncle’s voice: “You know as well as I do, Kevi. It’s to feed the other people, the people in the Dark Country.”

  As if anyone could live inside a mountain.

  “Uncle, Uncle, this whole setup insults our intelligence! Why do we have to grow food for ten times the village population, and then sit here and watch it disappear?”

  “Quiet!” Uncle Aaye said. “I’m ashamed of you!”

  I’ll slip away, he said to himself suddenly. Nobody will mind, really.

  So he did.

  First he reached the edge of the village of porcelain houses, shunning the displacement plates that would have eased his feet. Then he passed the place where workmen tended the source of the Cold River. He started to run faster.

  Got to get out of the shadow world—

  Some days when the Skywall cast no shadow, when the suns were in opposition, you could hurl a ripe krellash at the wall and watch it sizzle and plummet, and you could run with the hot sour juice dribbling into you until you started to run into a country inside your head, a country of subtle shifting lights • . . but in the shadowtime you could freeze the same krellash against the wall, into an icecandy. In the shadowtime—and he had seen three of them—you couldn’t run to the edge of the Skywall’s shadow. Not in a day’s running.

  Run! Run!

  He had to get away. And think. A strange anger drove him. He wasn’t the thinking sort, so he couldn’t define it. Like—an anger of wanting but not knowing what you wanted. He took it out on the hard earth, pounding the softness out of his fur soles, banging the rocksmooth ground.

  He had to run anyway, for the cold. Shoveling food had warmed him for a while, but it was a deceiving warmth. He was wearing nothing but a small cloak of costly clingfire that his uncle had brought back from Effelkang the great city….

  At the edge of shadow he braked himself.

  A tongue of sweat licked at his hard little body, honed by the sandsharp winds from the badlands of Zhnefftikak. He was lean, his muscles wound tight like the strings of a whisperlyre. Only his eyes showed any softness … they were green. Like the furgrass that dappled the walls of the Cold River, where moisture had condensed from the burning cold behind its crystal-clear, Inquest-built walls. It was along the Cold River that the earth was hospitable enough for villages.

  He sprang out of the cooldark shadowland—

  Lightblaze. Twin suns, white and blue.

  The system of displacement plates had ended. Ahead of him lay a glarewavering carpet of chalksand.

  It was a world of straight, everstretching lines for Kelver. The mathematical straightness of the Cold River, the skysplitting straightness of Skywall, the far white horizon, razorstraight from eye’s end to eye’s end, and always the same.

  There was a world of curves out there. Far beyond the Zhnefftikak wasteland. A journey of maybe a hundred sun-passings. There was the Sea of Tulangdaror, the twin cities of Effelkang and Kallendrang, one hoverfloating over the sea, the other high in the sky. You could see it as a star sometimes—Kallendrang that is—when the two sunpassings coincided and the bright side of Skywall became a flicker-flecked darkness for a few horns.

  He longed for the world of curves. But he didn’t really believe in it. He didn’t believe anything his uncle told him, anymore. Even though his uncle was Elder of the Food-movers and an Interpreter and had a clan-name, too.

  He looked up.

  The blue eye danced with the white, in the dazzleglare of the sky, and—

  A black bubble burst from between the suns.

  It fell. Grew. Kelver froze.

  The bubble fell more, in a delicate spiral, and he couldn’t tell how far it was or how big it was because everything was so featureless, so white….

  The silence was eerie.

  It grew to fist size, then balloon size, then—

  A hail of bubbles, popping from nowhere in mid-sky! Blotting out patches of the whiteness, cascading, dancing so slowly, so…

  This is new. This has never happened.

  He heard a sound then. His own heart, pounding.

  It’s something special! It’s just for me!

  They were all growing now. One of them swooped not twenty meters above his head, and it was larger than a man, he saw, larger than several men. And then they all swung past his head, figure-eighted above each other, and there was a breeze, parch-hot, springing up in its wake—

  Got to tell someone. Maybe it’s important.

  For a moment he panicked. He didn’t want anyone to know about it, he wanted to clutch the secret to himself for a few moments—

  He tensed for the sprint back to the first displacement plate, stopped himself, turned….

  It was real.

  He dashed into shadow. The shadow swallowed him. Almost as though the wall itself had eaten him.

  He found them shoveling more food.

  Behind him were the porcelain houses, box-shaped interchangeable-looking things, each box a solid glaze, blue, red, yellow, orange. Ahead a hundred meters loomed Skywall.

  He flung himself through the crowd of workers, elbowing a woman aside. “Uncle Aaye!” he shouted.

  The big displacement plate had been emptied. He saw his uncle’s face mirrored in it, furrowed and unpleasant The metal, curved a little, widened the face like a balloon. He
crossed the plate and went to his uncle.

  “How many times have I told you not to run over a displacement plate like that? Kevi, you could find yourself in the middle of Skywall, buried in solid rock under a hundred klomets of basalt!”

  He looked up into his uncle’s face. The scolding had been automatic; there was no heart in it.

  No love passed between the two of them.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle.” Then, bursting with what he’d seen:

  “Uncle Aaye—if only you’d seen it! Outside, beyond shadow, today—”

  “If only!” Uncle Aaye sighed. “You should have been shoveling food, but I know where you’ve been—staring at Skywall till your eyes popped out, dreaming about starships.” To the workers: “Carry on. We’ve another load of food before the week’s quota is done.”

  Kelver said, “I have to tell you this, Kaz Ashaki, Village Elder, Master Interpreter—”

  His uncle stopped. “Formal, aren’t you?”