Light on The Sound (v1.0) Read online

  Listen, will you!

  “No,” said Uncle Aaye, preoccupied again. “Not the grain, dolt! This is a meat bale! You want the people inside to get a vitamin deficiency or something?”

  Pause. Kelver watched them shovel. Watched the man at die console press the button. Watched the food disappear. What was it for?

  In the ground, along the paths between houses, soft light … Kelver realized another winter, another shadowtime, would come soon, when the dance of suns took them away from this part of the planet and the shadows became cold. People were testing the groundlights….

  He couldn’t stand it anymore. He just blurted out, “I saw black bubbles fall from the sky.”

  There was silence. He felt them watch him. He was the village liar and he knew it

  “Inquestors!” someone shouted. “It must be a coronation!”

  “Bah,” said Uncle Aaye. “Probably another tax assessment” He was trying very hard to act nonchalant, Kelver saw; but for a moment Kelver had seen the fear in his eyes. More kindly, his uncle said, “You all have leave to go and watch.”

  But he was talking to the air. They had all vanished, dashed down the path to the first displacement plate, out of sight.

  Uncle Aaye looked at the boy distractedly. “So what did you see, really?”

  Kelver sensed the old man’s worry. But he was still burning with the excitement of it. It was the first new thing he’d seen since … since his father’s corpse. He told him everything.

  “What are they, Uncle Aaye? What are they?”

  “You haven’t guessed?” Kelver couldn’t tell what he was

  thinking. Then he said, “You dreamer of starships, you … they were tachyon bubbles.”

  Kelver was afraid.

  ‘They are bubbles of realspace,” Uncle Aaye went on, “that are shot through the tachyon universe. They are used by the Inquest for instant travel between the stars. Some people say that whole suns die to fuel them. While other folk use the starships that sail the overcosm, and suffer from the disorientations of time dilation, the Inquestors can be anywhere at any time. Someone in the universe is putting on a show of power, Kelver. A great deal of power….”

  But Kelver wasn’t listening anymore. He was thinking, At last, Gallendys, our own planet, is at the center of something important. Maybe even I can get involved—

  A crinkled hand on his shoulder. “The last time the Inquestors came was to command the razing of a city … and the decimating of the population. One in ten of our planet, Kevi, painlessly put to death … because some distant village had rebelled against the senseless task of feeding the mountain. They said if our planet had been less important they might have annihilated it.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle! I shouldn’t have seen them, maybe I’ll be bad luck for all of us now!” said Kelver. That was when his father had been killed. He twisted free of his uncle, disliking the dry touch of his hand, and turned to watch Skywall, the unchanging blackness.

  The blackness reached up to the end of the sky.

  A whiff of raw meat for a moment, from the foodbales, and then he kicked the bale over onto the plate, pressed the stud, watched it fade away.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “I mean, Uncle, I mean—why are we doing this? Why is the Inquest so important?” There was no reply. He went on, more passionately now. “What gives them the right to do this to us?”

  “I thought you wanted to rush out into space and fight the Overcosm Wars and work for the Inquest!” his uncle said harshly.

  Kelver thought about it. His thoughts went round and round in circles. Something was wrong with the way things were and he didn’t know what it was.

  He sent another bale of food into the mountain. / hope you enjoy it, he thought at the people in the Dark Country. The people who didn’t exist. He reached out and patted his uncle’s hand. He was sorry for him sometimes . .. having an unwanted ,kid thrust on him like this. His uncle knew many true things, secrets; Kelver knew that they burdened him sometimes.

  Kelver had told too many of the others about the star-ships that he saw in the Skywall. He’d never live it down now. They’d thrown him out of their circle.

  But today he was something special. He had been the first to see the rain of tachyon bubbles; and by nightfall everyone would be talking of nothing else.

  They walked back to the house together.

  In the atrium he saw his aunt Telzi. She and his uncle were two of a kind: tired, plodding people. She was beautiful, though, even at fifty- she’d had a somatic renewal in Effelkang, at great expense. Firm breasts strained against her polyrobe, bright hair flamed. But Kelver saw as he stood watching her come towards them, down the steep steps from their sleeping level, how they had been unable to change her eyes. From the angel’s body, from the angel’s face, stared a hag’s eyes. He hated her, hated them both; and now she ignored him.

  To Ashaki she said, “Aaye, there’s been a message over the holocom. A tachyon transmission, relayed from Effelkang … the Kingling of Gallendys is dead. A new one has come, with an entourage, to be crowned by the end of the week. His name is Davaryush.”

  He heard his uncle begin to shout, “So what difference does it make? They’re all the same, one Lord of the Dispersal is just like another, they won’t change anything—”

  A slam. Darkness.

  Uncle Aaye had blanked the lights, completely forgetting that Kelver was still in the atrium.

  Kelver listened.

  His aunt, quietly, from somewhere above: “And how did the food moving go, dear, any hitches?”

  A growl. Then: “Why did that boy have to be the first to see them?”

  “It’s not his fault.”

  Kelver lay down on the floor; quickly it contoured itself to his body. The whispering upstairs began to crescendo. An argument was starting. “That boy, that boy …”

  He’d gone to sleep to the sounds of this lullaby for years, almost as long as he could remember now.

  He tried to imagine the new Kingling. Davaryush. In

  the formal style that would be Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning, Inquestor and Kingling.

  In the darkness he tried to picture the twin cities of Effelkang and Kallendrang; nothing came to mind. He knew of the towers built upon the towers of towers, but this was just a form of words, he thought. Once or twice he had seen holosculptures .. . but nothing whole, nothing to give an impression of the grandness of it. And descriptions from uncles and elders . •. wind from the desert

  So he closed his. eyes and thought of starships. He flung them out into the blackness, zapped them in and out of the overcosm, and started to pound the floor as he lay, so fast it couldn’t contour itself in time….

  Then he thought AM the starships in the Dispersal of Man work because of the Inquest.

  The thought chilled him for a moment; but then he lay back and counted starships as they crossed the overcosm in his mind, counted them over and over until he was asleep from exhaustion.

  THREE

  THE UTOPIA HUNTER

  A room in Kallendrang. In the lowest tower of the towers that hung downwards from the sky, almost kissing the pinnacle of the topmost tower of Effelkang, that tower built upon the towers of towers.

  Invisible towers, too: like the towers of force that kept the twin cities in this opposition, the one mirroring the other, suspended over it, the lower city Effelkang over the Sea of Tulangdaror.

  A round room like the deck of a starship. Like the towers’, its walls were of force. Now they had been de-opaqued to reveal the view.

  The view: the Sea of Tulangdaror, pale-blue sparkle-tipped water from horizon to horizon. Water to the west; to the east—even at this distance and despite the curvature of the planet Gallendys—the tip of the Skywall mountain peered, an impossible perspective. A black wall leaping from its shroud of mist from a vague somewhere beyond the horizon. Impressive; there was no mountain like this known through the whole Dispersal of Man.

  And below: spires of amethyst and chalcedony and azurite and rosequartz and olivine, skyscrapers of metals spattered with porcelain tiles, glass cathedrals sweeping in swooping curves, thin white streets that sutured the city.

  And ahead: hanging spires that echoed the leaping spires. Not a mirror exactly: they were not quite the same city. Here there were hanging ziggurats of stone, veined with vines from Vanjyvel and Ont, the Inquestral Palace; here the streets were the tongues of windows, lancing the sky.

  Kallendrang was all jeweled stalactites shrinking into the haze of mid-distance, arrowed by avenues, freckled with hovercars, glitter-rich with the dazzle of the blue and white suns.

  And in the room, a man, alone, naked.

  Waiting.

  He was Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning, for over three centuries an Inquestor, for two centuries a hunter of utopias, and now new Kingling of Gallendys. He did not see the view; his eyes, heavy-lidded and heavier with sleeplessness, were closed.

  His Inquestral shimmercloak lay dead on the floor beside him. It had been ritually stripped from him and sprinkled with prussic acid. An Inquestor and Kingling must discard his shimmercloak and take a new one to symbolize his role as an anointed ruler; his shimmercloak must be grown from a double-yolked egg.

  Some hours before, he had stepped from the tachyon bubble into the room, dissolved the bubble with a subvocalized command. The room had been full then, Inquestors and the local nobility almost mingling. The Inquestors had included Exkandar, his contemporary in the seminary, Alkamathdes, a Grand Inquestor who had been his teacher, and others too—their shimmercloaks had swished and swept and glittered and sparkled in the huge chamber.

  And then Alkamathdes had broken the egg over his head and they had left him alone, for the standard day before t
he coronation, to reflect, to let the new shimmercloak grow to maturity upon his body … a ritual, meaningless enough.

  And tomorrow, more of the same. It would not be tomorrow on this planet, Davaryush remembered; here the days were strange and irregular, what with the complex dancing of the suns. But tomorrow he thought of it still— more meaninglessnesses. He would drift on a hoverfloat through cheering throngs and smile and cast an ember into the firefountain of Kenongtath that burned at the heart of Effelkang, in the Square of the Delphinoids; then ride the gilded elevator up the tallest of the towers, cross up to Kallendrang in a floater, traverse more cheering throngs, enter the Inquestral Palace, receive the iridium crown upon his head, be bathed in lustral water from the Sea of Tulangdaror, finally possess the multimillennial seat of carved, buttock-prickingly-uncomfortable basalt from the mountain of the Dark Country, smile again—

  All this didn’t change the facts.

  He was in disgrace.

  He had been made Kingling simply to render him useless, by an Inquestral Convocation that had been too baffled to dispose of him.

  He was a heretic!

  Its strange, he thought, how power moves in the world of the Inquestors. The people below, whose lives are over in a flash, like daydreams, like phantoms—they always think we are power, all the power in the Dispersal of Man, a pure quantity. Gods, almost If they only knew.

  Inquestors have all the answers. Davaryush opened his eyes now, and watched the sea. The broken egg tickled his head. Inquestors cannot argue amongst themselves, can they? Being an Inquestor strips you of your individuality. You become part of the unchanging ideology, dogma, power. A truth-symbol. A compassion-symbol. A symbol of unity.

  For the universe of the Dispersal of Man is vast, beautiful, terrible.

  But Davaryush knew also how lies had become embedded in the image of shining truth. He himself had dared to question some of these lies.

  He was the most dangerous of all the types of heretic. A heretic from within. And since a heretical Inquestor was an unthinkable anomaly, they had designed this elegant solution. To drown him with glory. To imprison him with ids own power.

  To be a ruler. Not to think.

  How many of the commonfolk knew that to be a King-ling was the lowest of the low, the only point of the In-questral hierarchy that even touched the commonworlds? As this room was the only room of the city of Kallendrang within touching of the topmost spire of Effelkang.

  Davaryush relaxed as the threads of the shimmeregg thrust out, intertwined, wove themselves. Already there was a grid of strands crisscrossing his body. He watched the city below. It seemed so changeless….

  This prison was a subtle one indeed. For Gallendys was a world vital to the survival of the Inquest. And the human race. Here they built starships. Here the giant delphinoid shipminds, carcasses of creatures who were all brain, were soldered into the ships so they could navigate their way through the overcosm. And now men needed ships: for the Overcosm Wars, for the War against the Whispershadows, aliens that had never been seen or heard….

  And how could Davaryush do anything that would jeopardize the entire human race? The entire Dispersal with its more than a million worlds? He was a heretic, not a lunatic.

  Davaryush admired the trap they had built for him.

  And then he thought, desperately, a lonely thought: But l do believe in utopia, still!

  For that was the nature of Davaryush’s heresy.

  Time passed: there was nothing but the tickling of the shimmerstrands as they inched across him, weaving, growing. Already the strands blushed pink against the blue, with new life, drawing some nutrients from his waste products and from the air. The growing of a new shimmercloak was a comforting sensation; four times he had felt it before, on reaching a different level of the Inquestral hierarchy….

  The first time, now. When he was twelve, an initiate, in a small room facing the power of the Inquest.

  You have compassion, Davaryush.

  “Yes, Father.” He had been a veteran of three wars even then. Now he was alone, in a room with the Grand Inquestor, whose eyes glared fire and millennial wisdom. Even after three centuries the memory returned, vivid.

  When you came to kill the condemned criminal, you did not torture him or play with him, as was your right, an essential part of the initiation. You killed him cleanly, in a matter of seconds, slicing him into two congruent parts with your energizer. It was artistically done. But why?

  “Father, it was necessary to show skill, not cruelty. I have already killed many people.” He feigned assurance; in truth, he needed desperately to relieve himself.

  Very well. I name you to the Clan of Ton.

  Davaryush started, gasped audibly in spite of his knowledge of the proper conduct—he had come expecting to fail, to be returned to homeworld.

  The Clan of Ton … that would mean seminary, long years on harsh inhospitable planets, thankless labor for the sake of the Dispersal of Man…

  Loneliness.

  “Father—”

  You are unworthy. I know. Nevertheless, the Inquest takes what it can get.

  His first mission was the planet Gom, a hot planet of a blue-white star. The people lived in tall buildings, thousands to a building, fifteen billion to the planet. But they were happy. They were quite ignorant of their responsibilities as a Mien race: they relied on automata, they pursued their hedonistic existence without regard for their true natures. They suffered from the heresy of utopia.

  Davaryush was a perceptive utopia hunter; he had found the flaw very easily. Every year, in a special ceremony marked by compulsive gratifications of the senses, all those over the age of fifty intoxicated themselves and then committed suicide, leaping by thousands into the lava lakes that boiled conveniently on every continent.

  He’d saved those people. First he had whispered to only a few of them: And what if you did not die? He had created civil wars, unhappinesses, revolutions. People ran mad, setting fire to the machines that had succored them. Then the ships of the Inquest came, bringing comfort with them.

  Comfort and truth.

  But Davaryush had been tempted by happiness then. Alkamathdes, his mentor, said: Remember, man is a fallen creature, Davaryush. Utopias exist only in the mind, a state to which it is given us to aspire. But to imagine that we have attained that state—that is to deny life. The breaking of joy is the beginning of wisdom.

  And after a while he had been no longer tempted For he saw such as the planet Eldereldad, where the happy ones feasted on their own children, which they produced in great litters, by hormonal stimulation; and the planet Xurdeg, where the people smiled constantly, irritatingly, showing no face except the face of ecstasy, until he had finally learnt that the penalty for grief was dismemberment to feed the hungry demands of the degenerating bodies of five-thousand-year-old patriarchs. Yet, when he had asked one of those ancients what he most desired, he had replied: To feel grief. But l am afraid to die for it.

  When he was a young boy facing his new destiny he had first learnt about lying. Alkamathdes had said: Never forget the lie. This lie is the sacrifice that you must make9 the little sin you will commit for the sake of saving count-less millions. It is this: that the Inquest is seeking a perfect utopia. A planet that will be designated a Human Sanctuary, for the edification and glory of the Dispersal of Man. You will tell that always, and in your heart you will understand always that there will exist one fatal flaw.

  And always, after, the ships of the Inquest would follow him. In a year or so his subjects would awaken to their true natures. Then they would fight wars and exhibit pitilessness and avarice 1ike everyone else. For man was a fallen being. For centuries he had never doubted this.

  Until the thirteenth utopia.

  Until he came to Shtoma.

  A brief night passed.

  In the twin cities night and day were hinged to his whim, to his waking and sleeping. The dance of the twin suns had no provenance here; the shields that surrounded the cities could block out, could play holographic landscapes of their own choosing.

  When Davaryush woke, a gaudy dawn had dyed the Sea of Tulangdaror. Savage purple streaked the sea.

  He woke with a start, rose from the floor. The floor flattened.