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 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 said, as if introducing himself at a soirée. 

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 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.” 

“But what about the chlorophyll?” Brion demanded. 

Salap said, “It understands chemistry. It can test and find uses for organic substances. You must have provided the final clues necessary ... given the pigments a context it could understand. But it can't break our genetic code. We are too different.” 

“Names,” the figure said. “Names know not.” 

Chung seemed startled. “Does she actually understand what we're saying? Or is she ... is it just stringing words together?” 

“She understands,” Brion said. 

“That's a miracle by itself,” Chung said. She stepped closer to the figure and to Brion, overcoming some of her repugnance. 

“What did you talk with before?” Salap asked Brion, pointing at the figure: before this was created. 

“When Caitla and I came here, this inner room was filled with tissues ... tools. It was a prototype factory. Part of a scion could be grown here, another there ... We saw them being carried by giant hairs—cilia—across this chamber, and matched with other parts. And we watched them being dissolved in large pools, turned into jelly or slime. Rejected. 

“Caitla realized what this was. She said that we were in a huge cell, all of its parts made large, but because of that, not a cell at all ... None of us knew why we had been allowed to come in here. On our last visit, before Caitla became ill, the seed-mother...” He gestured around the chamber. “She showed us the best of her human-shaped scions, still much cruder than this. It could only hum and whistle and make parts of words. Caitla spent a week teaching it, her, before we had to return to Naderville. We knew she wanted to communicate with us directly.” 

“Bring,” the voice said. “Know bring names.” 

“I brought Caitla back here when she was dying. Caitla told me to leave her here. ‘Put me where we put my plants,’ she said. We knew she could do better.” 

Brion turned, staring up at the red walls of the frame. He seemed uncertain whether to address the figure directly, or speak to the frame, the hemisphere as a whole. “There is so much more you can do!” 

“No making more for this child,” the voice said, acquiring a cello-like timbre. It had also taken on a quality I might have called conviction if it had been human. “New names, no making more, no making more, for this child.” 

“Why?” Brion asked, dismayed. 

The figure swelled again, filling itself with fresh fluids from below. It raised its arms. The color of its skin improved, and the motions in the skin subsided, coordinated, more nearly like the movement of muscles. I watched with queasy fascination the development of its facial features, the refinement of abdomen and breasts, still doll-like, but a better imitation of what Caitla might have looked like. Or Hyssha. 

“It's learning from you,” Salap said to Chung. She looked up at the gloomy heights of the frame, searching for eyes among the glints and tiny sea-floor glows. 

Brion seemed stung by this. He took a step back. “It isn't Caitla,” he said. 

“It never will be,” Salap said. “You've misunderstood what the ecos can do ... We've all misplaced our nightmares and our hopes.” 

The figure turned its head, opened its mouth, and the voice issued from the mouth now. “Sounds like smells, names deeper than I know. Two are not one, yet cling. Make third, but within. Third is child, but not like this child. Not of I, not of any I, from where.” 

Then it added the lilt of question: “From where?” 

None of us quite understood. 

“We're not from this planet,” Brion said quietly, as if this were a devastating admission. I think he was trying to shed the last hope for Caitla, and it was costing him dearly. He had some courage or some curiosity left, to speak with the figure at all. 

“There only is. There only is.” The figure lifted one foot, turned slightly on the other, and placed the free foot down awkwardly, bending forward to compensate. It returned to its original posture, but where the foot had lifted away, a small pucker remained. Though it knew the figure of Caitla/Hyssha would never pass, never enter the realm of a human ecos undetected, it still worked to finish its peculiar scion, the interface for its own selfless and eternal curiosity, the purest and most biological urge to know. 

“There's more,” Brion whispered. “Planets and planets and planets. In the sky. Wherever there are stars.” 

At the mention of stars, the lights within the inner frame, scattered in profusion over the braces and walls, dim blue and white, shone out in sudden splendor. 

“Stars,” the figure said. 

Brion turned to Frick and Chung. “I know it isn't Caitla. I know I'll never see Caitla again. But I could stay here and tutor her. I could be happy doing that.” 

Frick rubbed his hands together in front of him, not relishing what he had to say. “Ser Brion, you are needed. We need you.” 

Brion's brief resurgence of hope withered. He screwed his face up and imitated Frick's gesture of rubbed hands, then pushed his nose with the tips of his fingers. “Beys can take care of those things,” he said. 

Chung said, “You put far too much on Beys. Someday he'll discover he doesn't need any of us.” 

Brion jerked his head up at that, as if to make a sharp reply, but his eyes turned inevitably to the figure, and all expression melted away. 

“You have other responsibilities,” Salap said soothingly. “Everybody else here has other responsibilities. None of you ... pardon me, Ser Brion, not even you ... is prepared to study and teach here. I am.” 

“What would you teach her?” Brion asked resentfully, unwilling to give up this last possibility of fulfillment, of peace. 

“I would study her,” Salap said. “And then I would watch her die. I do not think this palace, this field, will be alive much longer, nor any of its kind across Hsia. You and Caitla gave her a very powerful ‘name.’ I think she uses ‘name’ to mean the chlorophyll you presented to her. She used the name. And that changes everything.” 

“The balloons,” I said. 

Salap nodded. “They carry larval seed-mothers, not just scions. If I'm right, in a few weeks, all this will wither.” 

“Old names die,” the figure said. 

“Nightmare,” Brion said, words venomous with disappointment. “It's all nightmare.” Brion turned to me. “Ser Olmy, you know history. That much change means death and destruction everywhere. The Hexamon must come. I've said it ... I've felt it. You must repair Lenk's clavicle, tell the Hexamon what's happened here.” 

There was nothing I could say. For Brion to make a plea on behalf of the humans on Lamarckia seemed ludicrous. Yet he was right. There was one last thing left to do: find the clavicle, and see if it could be repaired. 

Brion stepped closer to the figure and touched its face. It did not react, but even as he stroked its cheek, it said, “Are more names? Bring more names.” 

 

We left Salap with several weeks’ worth of food from the two boats, Brion's and the one that had carried Hyssha Chung and her attendants. 

“I won't die here, no fear of that,” Salap told me, walking back with me through the sea of green. “I'm a tough old vulture, as you doubtless know. Brion, on the other hand...” 

Brion had returned to the boat in an impenetrable daze, ignoring us all, and squatted on the bow, staring down the waterway. He had let the string unwind and carried it pinched between thumb and forefinger, lying in loose coils on the polished and painted xyla deck. 

“Watch him,” Salap told me. “He still holds a dangerous amount of political charge, as does Lenk. They must be eased together ... or apart.” 

We stood on overgrown dock, with the new silva—the jungle—rustling like grass in a wind, though there was hardly a breeze. Salap held me by my shoulders. “Even if you never get through to the Hexamon, even if they never come, some of us can survive.”