I have little more to say and your bottle is almost empty. But there are those among us who try to cast off the foot of the demon, who have tried before and will try again. Me? Don’t be stupid. You know what I am. Who would trust me with such things? I speak of rumor and tales you hear in the street, and out of my most secret dreams, no more. I dream and I wait, my friend, I dream and I wait.

  Vrithian

  on the oblique file [2]

  Willow ran along the edge of the lake, her long thin dawn-shadow jerking and gesticulating like a stick parody of a person, her feet kicking up flirts of rain-wet sand, pounding a rhythm up through her body to the top of her head, her breath coming in easy pants. She ran through ragged patches of shorebirds scratching about for grubs and worms, startling them into raucous, whumping flight, hardly higher man her head before they settled back behind her. A freshening breeze tickled the water into pointed, tight-packed ripples that whispered to the sand beside her beating feet; armadas of kimkim cousins twisted in dark funnels out over the shallow lake, their high singing hum floating above the water noise; fish leaping for the kimkim cousins beat the water into a continual boil under these dark tourbillons.

  She joyed in the dawning, in the sheen of sweat on her skin, the drive of her small body, in the smells around her, wet earth, rock and sand, the clumps of cattails in the shallows, old stems and leaves rotting into silt, the sweet-sweet-sweet yunyiun flowers growing where rocks sprayed into the water, stiff white, pink and crimson stars on rope-wide spongy stems, arrowpoint leaves as thick around them as spines on a nagri’s back. Rotten fish, bird dung, wet feathers, rich strong smells she sucked in with the clean clear morning air.

  She stopped running when she saw dimpled sand ahead of her, and began kicking it up, searching for kimkim grubs. Hyaroll provided ample meals for his zoo, but Willow sometimes preferred to find her own breakfast. In a way it was a reassurance that however much she’d lost to time and distance, she could still keep herself. And sometimes she simply had a craving for the kinds of food he would never think of providing. She found a heaping handful of the grubs, rinsed them in the lake and strolled along, cracking their shells, stripping out the plump white flesh and crunching it with relish between strong square teeth. When she finished the grubs and brushed away the fragments of shell, she kicked up a flake of stone and hacked out a long piece of tuber from among the yunyiun plants. She washed off the tuber in the lake, scrubbing away the silt, the fine white rootlets, the papery outer skin. When she was satisfied, she moved a few paces down where the water was clear, knelt again, drank deeply, washing away the aftertaste of the grubs and the last bits of flesh stuck in her teeth. Then she got to her feet, shook off as much of the water as she could, scowled at the sun, pale and remote as if it wasn’t ripe enough to let the warmth loose.

  Holding the tuber in her left hand, she began running back the way she’d come. The sand was a little drier now and the edge was off her enthusiasm, she didn’t push herself but loped easily along, the weight of the tuber adding an odd tic she rather enjoyed into the rhythm of her going.

  When she dried off and warmed up, she slowed to a walk, took out the folding knife Hyaroll had given her and began peeling away the fibrous inner bark of the tuber, working with meticulous care and the attention she gave every physical act. Hand-thinking, Hyaroll called it in the long-ago times when he still bothered to talk to his zoo. The pale tan skin came away in long strips, exposing the creamy inside little by little. When she peeled away the last strip, she started to toss it aside as she had the others, but checked her hand, caught , by a sudden thought, stopped and stared at the length of skin. Then she tucked it over her waistrope, winding it several times about the rope to make sure it wouldn’t work loose, started walking again, slicing off slivers of the sweet crisp tuber and eating them as she went back around the lake toward the sheltered oval lawn where Sunchild and Bodri would meet her later in the day.

  She sat on the grass, passing the rootskin from hand to hand, rolling it between her palms, chewing at it, gently, so she wouldn’t break the fibers. By the time Bodri came poking along, she had separated out most of the long tough hairs and was examining them with satisfaction, regretting that she’d taken a less than active interest in the hodgepodge of plants and trees Hyaroll had collected along with his mobile specimens and set out where the whim had taken him, leaving them to the care of the ironheads and the lizard people who lived here already. At her first waking she thought these folk were more specimens in the zoo, but when she’d followed her need to know the land and traveled to the edge of the dome, exploring along it until she circled the park, she saw them all around outside, working in fields, passing to and from a clutch of low houses just visible on the top of a hill some distance away. Not specimens, just slaves for ol’ Stone Vryhh, who made them do whatever he wanted.

  “What are you fussing at now, Willow?” Bodri came stumping around a bush, settled himself with a thump on the grass. She stared at him, startled. He never called her by just her name without adding a bit of fond embellishment. There were dead and yellowing leaves on the miniature bushes in his back-garden, and a flowerstalk held several withered blooms, a sure sign he had sunk, into one of his rare melancholies.

  She held out her hand so he could see the fibers. “I gonna make me a cord,” she said.

  His mouth worked, settled into an almost smile, and some of the dullness left his eyes. “A very short one.”

  “Seein if I could. Seein if these’ll hang together.” She began teasing the fibers with her thumbnail. “Old Stone Vryhh, he got poison plants around here too?”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, began rolling some of the fibers against her thigh, twisting them into a thin tight thread. Fiber by fiber she added length to the thread, holding it up now and then to see how well it was bonding together, how tight the twist was, how firmly it was set. She continued working, clicking her tongue in a work song, deeply satisfied with how her experiment was turning out.

  “A noose for old Vryhh?” Drawn out of his gloom, Bodri had edged closer to her and was watching with an intentness he usually gave only to his plants.

  “Mmmp. Maybe. Maybe bowstring.”

  “Ah.” He unfurled his antennae to their full length, waved them in slow graceful arcs, curled them back again. “Better not say any more.” Absently, still watching her, his tentacle arms came from under his shell and the thin strong fingers at the end of each began to prod among the garden rooted into his back, nipping off the dead leaves and gently stripping away the withered flowers.

  She watched that from the corner of her eyes as she rolled and twisted, rolled and twisted, happy that she’d roused him from his sorrows. Though she hadn’t expected much from them, seeing the fibers in the rootskin had started her thinking and remembering. Hands going quiet, she looked full at him, frowning a little, then turned her head to look over her shoulder at the house rising behind the treetops. She finished adding the last of the fibers and wound the thread about her left hand, feeling a strength in it that was changing her mind about its possibilities. “Old Vryhh,” she said, “he like watchin you me makin plots. Like my folk laugh and clap hands at a song-dance. He won’t do nothin long as we workin. He tell hisself I stop the funny ol’ things come time they ready to take me.” She fiddled with the thread, feeling the hard twists. Fishnet maybe if the water don’t loosen it too much. Somethin to do, anyway. “I thinkin, “ she said, “all kind plants here. I thinkin you know how makin them grow, maybe you know what ones make poison. Otter, other men back-back when …” She fluttered her hand in a broken wing drift meant to say long-ago, far-away, lost to me, oh lost to me. “When rains come, they hunt papkush and dofuffay. Dry time they sit around makin bow, arrow, chippin stone for point. Little arrow. So big”—she held her hands about the length of her forearm apart—“and dofuffay he make two Bodri, some left over.” She laughed. “So women we boil kakoya root till it sticky glop in the bottom of the pot, poosha for the arrow. Poosha not for killin but for makin sleep. Dofuffay hit, he run and run, then he fall over.” She flicked her fingers out and up like a beast rearing, then made her fingers legs that ran and ran, then she slapped her hand flat on the grass. “Then the men blood him, cut him up. I thinkin we make poosha for Old Stone Vryhh.”

  “Be ready for you, now he’s heard you say it.” Willow wrapped the ends of the cord about her thumbs and tugged sharply at it, grunted as it cut into her flesh. “Let ‘im watch. Take a while to make poosha right, try it on Vryhh-size beast. Then we figure somethin.” She canted her head, grinned at him. “Sunchild and me, we makin one piece here one piece there, now you make your piece, eh-huh?”

  Vrithian

  action on the periphery [2]

  Amaiki came to the garden early that morning, riding her skimsled from the small neat house in the workers’ quarter tucked up next to the downcurve of the dome, a delicate lacertine figure standing on the small round platform, five long long fingers (narrow crooked thumb tucked neatly under) resting lightly on the squeeze controls at the ends of quarter-circle arcs coming from a narrow column rising before her, a smooth pebbly skin, mottled gray-green, long soft folds of loose skin draping gracefully about her neck and along her sides, those delicate seductive vertical folds seen and not seen through the openings between the front and back of the brown-black tabard she wore, a tabard with no decoration but subtle patterns woven into the cloth, patterns that shifted with each movement she made, each push of the wind against the cloth, a silent music in the play of light and shadow.

  She came to the garden early intending to work on the circle of tazukli bushes, coaxing them to grow in the candalabrum form that gave maximum scope for the flitter-blooms that were even now budding on the side branches. It was sensitive, demanding work that the androids simply could not do, requiring the deftness of Conoch’hi fingers and Conoch’hi aesthetic intuition, it was work she liked, the kind of work she needed after the dreams that plagued her last night; three times she dreamed of fire and death and each time woke not knowing if what she’d heard the odd ones saying had seeded the dreams in her or if they were tomorrow dreams. If her family were here, she’d know, through the lots and the echoes. She thought of calling them to the corn-kiosk near the workers’ quarter. I will tonight; maybe the dreams won’t come again. She maneuvered the skimsled into a rough shed built next to the wall of Hyaroll’s house, took the toolbag from the shelf at the back of the shed and went walking slowly through the clean clear morning to the tazukli ring.

  After she’d been working for around half an hour, on her knees before a single tazukli, softening the strongest branches, straightening them, curling them up at the ends, painting on the porous hardener that would hold in place the curves she wanted, she heard the pat of the little woman’s feet, the tongue-clicking rhythm of her walking song. She was always singing or dancing, even when she sat she danced, except when she was absorbed in some bit of handwork. One of the odd ones, but not so odd as some. Amaiki finished the shaping with the click song in her ears, lending her some of the happy calm of the woman on the far side of the shrubbery, began carefully pinching off buds the wrong shape or in the wrong place. Death and fire, a bad time coming for the Conoch’hi, if her triply repeated dream was true, but one cone’s dream had little validity, it took a consensus of family, then line, then the whole to reach reliably into tomorrow, to send the whole acting as one. In the life weave of her line mother, the patterning of the whole was rare, once twice no more. A single dream was nothing, born perhaps of a bellyache, a quarrel with a co-wife or the naish of the love group, of fears or shame or a thousand other things. She kept telling herself that, her mind knew it was truth, but the cold knot in her belly would not go away.

  She moved on her knees to another tazukli, deliberately choosing a bush near where the odd one sat on the other side of the bushes. She’d heard the three talking here some days ago when she came to assess the tazukli and see how ready these were for shaping. Now she both wished and feared hearing more. Her pointed leaf-shaped ears shivered; there was a strain in her neck as she worked with the bush, cutting away the side shoots and sealing the cuts with the graft tool. The beetleman was right, the sunthing was right, Hyaroll was sinking into a lethargy that threatened them all whether he died or not. The year she left Shiosa the upland rain was late and thin; this winter and last, there was no rain at all. Wells were drying up, especially close to the dome, where Hyaroll’s pumps sucked away every spare drop. For the first time in memory, for the first time noted in the life weaves of the upland Conoch’hi, the Vryhh Hyaroll broke the Covenant and did not bring the winter rains. Her folk were beginning to leave the land; whole villages would be emptying soon when all their wells ran dry. The line mother of the Yumoru in Dum Ymori came to the caller kiosk, but Hyaroll would not talk to her. Old Stone Vryhh, the little woman had called him. She was right. Heard nothing, saw nothing, wanted nothing. Last year and this, Naish Ha-erdai, speaker of the fifteen, went to him at the double full of the moons, saying it is in the covenant, O Vryhh, give us rain or let us go. No rain came. They could not go. Amaiki tended the tazukli with gentle care, listening to the exchange between the odd folk, hearing the seriousness behind the words. With Hyaroll watching over their shoulders they were going on with their preparations to attack him, working slowly, meticulously, feeling their way along toward their final plan, knowing it might be futile because nothing they could do would be secret from him, Old Stone Vryhh watching their twists and turns with a rusty amusement, letting them go on because their energetic activity filled the emptiness in him.

  Amaiki let her hand fall onto her thighs as anger flushed through her; the tazukli had not harmed her, though it was taking water that her people needed. She closed her eyes and sat very still until her trembling stopped. Though the beetleman and the little woman continued to talk, chewing over what they’d said already, she no longer listened, concentrating all her attention on the tazukli, working calmly, steadily; she had to finish what she’d begun or harm the plant, and she would not do that; she curbed her impatience, shut a mind-door on frustration and shaped the plant to the pattern in her mind, sealing the cuts, stabilizing the curves, pinching away buds growing in the wrong places. Again she dropped her hands on her thighs, closed her eyes. Again she trembled all over as the rigid controls came off her emotions; rage and fear flashed through her, strangling her, shaking her until she thought she was going to fly to bits. She dropped her head onto her knees, whimpering softly, until the spasm passed. She stayed folded up like that for several breaths, then straightened her back in time to see a patch of golden light slipping behind the trees, Sunchild joining his companions, whose voices still sounded beyond the leafy screen. For a moment she thought of listening to see if this creature would have anything to add, then she shook her head; no point in it. Besides, she wanted rather desperately to reach out to her family, to feel the gentle soothing mind-touch of the naish Se-passhi, who was their far-speaker and the tie that bound each to each and all to all. Moving with silence and precision, she collected her tools, cleaned them, inspected them, then set them neatly back into their loops in the bag. She knelt listening a moment to the noisy argument between the three odd ones, smiling, thinking that they’d given over caring anything about what they said or who heard them, knowing that he heard everything. They were trying to find a way to trap Hyaroll, each punching holes in the plots of the others, everyone getting nowhere. She stood, looked around at the ring of tazukli, the two plants shaped stark and elegant next to the fussy prolixity of the others, a sigh her sole farewell to a project that would have given her much pleasure.

  Amaiki sat on the hykaros jewel rug, a gift from one of her mothers, meant to help her feel back into family warmth while she was exiled inside the dome. It made it easier for her to reach out to the far-speaker of her own mate-meld. She crossed her legs at the ankle and looked slowly around at the room with its muted earth colors, the intricately knotted grass mats, the cushions, their covers weaving of her own and gifts from Kimpri, the panels carved in low relief that Kimpri and Keran had made, the bubble glass in the round windows, the scattered lamps, no two alike, giving off a soft golden glow, making as many shadows as patches of light, perfuming the room with their scented oils. It was becoming her place finally, after nearly two years of nesting there. She sighed, closed her eyes. One by one, she brought the faces of her mate-meld to her mind, dwelt lovingly on each: Keran, long and narrow, eyes like amber fire, tinkerer extraordinary, builder of anything; Betaki, round and chubby, sleepy-eyed and sensual, nurse and nurturer; Muri, tiny but strong, fast enough to catch lightning on the leap, handler of the family finances; Kimpri, dreamy and intense, a shaper of form and texture, weaver and carver; Se-passhi, tinier even than Muri, the naish of the meld, deeply loving, the bond in flesh.

  Se-passhi touched her, folded round her, drawing in the others, she knew them, whispered their names, felt behind them the ghost touches of the hatchlings, one two three four—four?—a new hatchling, she poured out her joy to them, absorbed their joy … she sighed and opened her sorrow to them and her need …. “Come,” she whispered, “come to me, I need to speak to you ….” Whispering the words knowing what they received was not exactly words …. “Come, I need you, I need you all ….” Se-passhi’s whisper came to her, not words exactly, but when the murmuring was done, she knew with certainty that the mate-meld would be at the corn-kiosk two days from this at noon, knew also that they needed to see her almost as urgently as she needed them … she sent them love and a sigh of loneliness, caught the return then felt the touches fade, felt the ache of loss that never lessened.