EIGHT hundred years ago, Margda had tattooed the first aleph on her forehead. Next she created a council to travel from the far end of the eastern archipelago all the way to the most distant end of the western one. Although they never took anything like a direct path, they visited each and every island along the way. The number of councilors changed from time to time, never fewer than three nor more than eight. They were always welcomed when they entered the harbor of any island, always housed in luxury guest quarters in every Civilized Wood. The precise timing of their arrival was likewise always secret, but once they docked word of their presence quickly spread. How could it not? Still, the residents prided themselves on not letting the news leave their shores until the council themselves did, and in this way people only knew where they’d been, and never where they were or where they were going.
The pattern of such a visit remained unchanged since the first. The councilors met with each island’s leaders, scholars, scientists, and artists, usually over a huge feast that moved from home to home and featured local dishes and local intoxicants. The following day, the councilors split up and went to speak and drink with the three oldest male Lox and three oldest male Eleph on each island. Next they went in two groups to the oldest female household and the largest. The topic of conversation was always the same: was there someone worthy of the aleph among them?
Every Fant knew what the council sought, not the best or most skilled, but the combination of three unusual abilities, talents, and experiences. Rarity defined such individuals. Only fifty-seven other Fant had been marked, two in Pizlo’s own meager lifetime, Jorl soon after he’d returned to assist in burying Pizlo’s father, and three seasons ago a fishwife from nearby Gumti. She had been ranked as a grandmaster in seventeen different boardgames since childhood, had improved on what had been universally acknowledged as the perfect recipe for cribble wine, and could recognize the prophetic dreams of others when they occurred.
Common sense decried the likelihood of another choice so soon, but the leaders of each Civilized Wood took the council’s visit with optimistic sincerity. History indicated and every iteration of the council confirmed that if potential existed it would emerge by consensus of the island’s populace. A mayor might point out a promising gymnast. An aged Lox would identify an amazing chef. Some aunt in the island’s largest house would grudgingly mention a new mother who had given birth to healthy and beautiful triplets. A renowned limner would mention a mathematical prodigy. And so on. The council members would then come together and validate the claims, eliminating any individual who lacked endorsements in at least three areas. Next, via a series of ever more probing interviews, they separated out the merely special from the truly exceptional.
The council could manage two islands in a tenday. They were picky. They were fastidious. They were jaded. The most recent pair of recipients notwithstanding, decades usually passed without a council identifying a new Bearer. But as with each of those fifty-seven that followed Margda, when the council agreed on a candidate they marked them with the aleph. The proud moment took place in the largest community space that Civilized Wood possessed. Local poets would write songs of the event. Wordsmiths would compose novels and plays, penning ever more absurd fictions about the new Bearer’s history. Historians would craft detailed monographs describing every facet of the marking ceremony. And even though all in attendance could tell you every step of what was about to occur, they all nonetheless held their breaths as it happened in the flesh before their eyes. The candidate would step forward, dressed in their finest garb, approach a raised dais upon which stood the island’s leaders and a single member of the council. The candidate knelt and the council member would write the mark of passage onto the forehead, a permanent tattoo inscribed using a proprietary, glowing ink of Margda’s own invention.
Pizlo wanted that ink.
He didn’t want an aleph. The council wasn’t ever going to give him one, no matter what astonishing things he’d already accomplished, like being an abomination and still alive after fourteen years, or making his way alone up to the planet’s space station, or swiping the ring of office from a senior senator only one other person in the entire galaxy could remember, or hearing the voices of clouds and trees and waves. Pizlo lacked sufficient advocates who might offer up his name, and it was a certainty that the council themselves were never going to interview him. No, he’d never get an aleph, but that was fine. He possessed moons.
He’d been drawing them on his chest ever since his trip up the beanstalk to the edge of space, a series of seven circles, one for each of the planet’s moons. And one by one he had filled in each circle after gazing upon and communing with each particular moon. Given Barsk’s near constant rain and clouds, and because most Fant spent their time deep in the tree cover of their island’s Civilized Wood, a Fant could go his entire life without seeing any moons at all. Experiencing even one was rare, and carried bragging rights at most drinking establishments.
Pizlo had spoken with all seven. And as he had learned from the Archetype of Man, if he was the hero of his own life it followed that he needed a quest, something fresh and important that was his alone to accomplish. That morning he’d retrieved the recording amulet Druz had given him and fastened it about his neck. He stood now, on a small platform high up in the canopy, the same research station where years before Arlo had set himself aflame and jumped to his death. Pizlo gazed down into the shaft that defined the last journey his father had taken. He activated the amulet and spoke into the darkness.
“I have decided. It is time, no, it’s past time, that I stopped inking the moons on my chest. I suppose I could tattoo them myself with traditional dyes, but then there’d be no quest. So, instead, I vow to seek out the council that awards the Aleph and whether by persuasion, trickery, or theft—all celebrated practices of heroes throughout the ages—to obtain the very same ink they use to mark someone as an Aleph-Bearer. This recording is the proof of my decision. Let those who eventually tell my story take note. This was the day I began my quest.”
Being resolved to a course of action both thrilled and frightened him. His quest would produce an imram, sailing from island to island, like no other abomination on Barsk had ever done in pursuit of the council. That was the trick. Though they visited every island in both archipelagos, they did so without concern for convenience or pragmatism. Within any pair of seasons they usually stayed within either the western or eastern island chains, but they might visit adjacent islands in rapid succession or just as likely pass by ten before opting to go to shore at the eleventh. Currently they were still near, in the western chain. It was common knowledge that they’d been to both Telba and Kelpry this season, going to one and then the other, though a third of the archipelago lay between them.
He knew where they were now. The sky had told him the council was nearing the end of their visit on the island of Senjo, far to the south. But they’d move on to another island before he could reach Senjo and that destination was hidden from him. If the council hadn’t yet decided themselves, the future was not fixed. They hadn’t made a choice. That fit Pizlo’s new understanding of the ongoing battle between determinism and agency. Though it put an added burden on him, he found comfort in it as well.
He planned to start by sailing south, until such time as the world revealed where the council had landed. Then he’d adjust his course for that new island. If they left before he arrived, he’d repeat the process however many times was required. Eventually he would catch them, walk ashore where no one but that island’s residents knew them to be, and acquire their ink to create his moons. It was a quest that only he had the ability to pursue, and one that would only benefit him. The quest for moons.
* * *
YEARS before, Pizlo had walked into a shop and “acquired” an inflatable boat which he’d rowed all the way to Zlorka. That had been his first time off Keslo and while his gifts kept him on course and helped him to learn how to handle the boat, in hindsight he’d come close to permanently ruining his hands. This time he needed to travel smarter, and Jorl’s boat waited in the harbor. One could, in theory, consider that an invitation of sorts. And it wasn’t as though Jorl would mind, he hardly ever used the boat, mostly just to sail out to meet with Druz when she visited. He’d make a point of asking the boat, but couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t want to set off on a trip. That’s what boats were for, right?
Avoiding the attention of dock workers and harbor staff was a familiar game, and it took only a short while for Pizlo to secret himself aboard Jorl’s boat. Freeing its mooring lines without anyone seeing him do so required a bit longer. Then he fired up the engine, eased the boat from its slip, and set a course for Senjo. Fewer vessels moved through the harbor during flood, and fewer still sailed to and from nearby islands, but that presented no problems. The limited visibility imposed by the constant rain and the shadows cast within the wheelhouse ensured that all anyone saw of him was the outline of a Fant and not the pale skin of Keslo’s resident abomination.
As a sailor, Jorl was a fine historian, and so his boat came equipped with every technological convenience available on other, more tech-friendly worlds. Pizlo kept one eye on the boat’s modern display screen and the other on a point on the horizon where his gut told him Senjo lay two days’ journey to the south. This was the start of his imram, and though he didn’t expect to encounter giant cephalopods or other monsters of the deep, he couldn’t rule them out, either literally or metaphorically. He was on a hero’s journey. As the harbor fell behind, he squeezed the pendant at his throat.
“This is day one of my quest,” he said. “I am at sea again, for the first time since I set off up the beanstalk to help Jorl on the station. It’s a very different trip though, and not just because I’m heading in the opposition direction. And that’s okay, because I’m different too…”
He sailed without incident the rest of the day and into the night, passing several other islands and ignoring the calls of greeting and inquiry from other vessels. He snacked from the stores Jorl had provided and when he eventually tired and found himself dozing at the wheel, Pizlo dropped anchor and bid the sea and sky all around him a good night, went below deck to the cabin, and slept. The second day and night were more of the same.
He passed Gerd, feeling a frisson of satisfaction at sailing beyond the archipelago’s focal point. He continued south and west. On the third morning, he awoke to the certain knowledge that the council he sought had completed their interviews on Senjo and moved on. Returning to the wheelhouse he called up maps on the boat’s display and considered where the council might have moved to. Senjo was about as far south as one could go. But east to north to west of it were plenty of potential destinations. He could set off in one direction or another, but when awareness of where they’d arrived finally hit him, he was just as likely to have guessed correctly and so be close on their heels as to be wrong and even further from his goal. He sat and waited, considered visiting with the Archetype but stayed his hand and conserved his supply of koph. The council had a much bigger boat but his was swifter. He remained anchored and waited for them to reach a destination. Another day passed and boredom clubbed him. He waved off a handful of passing vessels that drew near with concern over his floating in place. He swam in ever increasing circles around the boat until his arms and legs began to fail him and he had to drag himself back aboard to collapse onto the desk and let the falling rain wash the fatigue from him. He fished, seeing how many different varieties he could catch and release before reeling in one he’d seen before and deciding that was justification to consume it. But mostly Pizlo mourned the missed evenings telling Rina stories.
After six days out from Keslo, the morning rain whispered that the council had made landfall on Fintz, a somewhat more isolated island a couple days further east and a bit north of his position. He could be there in three days, two if he let the boat sail on while he slept. The council would still be there, still meeting with civic leaders or, in the worst case, interviewing potential claimants. He could catch up to them, perhaps even catch them unawares, simply take some of their ink and avoid a direct encounter. He set the new course, weighed anchor, and started up the boat’s engine. Only then did he allow himself breakfast.
* * *
A faint but persistent tone woke Pizlo from a dreamless sleep. Morning light, such as it would be, was still a long way away. Despite the dark and the rain, devices on the boat insisted he’d arrived and demanded his attention. He climbed to the wheelhouse, shut off the alarm, and took stock. Fintz boasted three main harbors, two of them larger than the one Pizlo had departed from at Keslo. One lay directly ahead of him, but after only a few minutes at the controls he had the boat skirting past, choosing instead to follow the call of the second harbor and execute a northern curve that took him around a quarter of the island.
He hadn’t intended to arrive at night. A mass of gleaming lights shone through the rain as he approached the harbor, making the council’s boat impossible to miss or mistake. Pizlo guided his boat past row after row of local vessels until he reached the visitors’ dock. The council’s boat was one of only four craft moored. Pizlo maneuvered into an open adjacent slip, powered down, and took his time securing the lines.
He disembarked and crossed the pier until he reached a gangplank that connected it to the council’s ship. Glowing lanterns hung from it, hundreds of them, from spots barely above the waterline all the way up to its wheelhouse. The entire ship was lit up like a floating celebration. By now the councilors themselves would all be abed in assorted guest quarters high in Fintz’s Civilized Wood, but as he climbed aboard and his hand moved across the gunwale the ship whispered that a crew of five remained as well as where each lay sleeping. More importantly, it told him where he would find the object of his quest.
It was a very large vessel, many times bigger than Jorl’s boat, though less than a quarter the size of his senatorial space yacht. Slipping belowdecks, he left the glare of the ship’s lanterns behind. He moved as silently through the narrow corridors as he might have traveled through the Shadow Dwell back home, and soon reached a minor supply hold. Amidst a great many bottles of distilled spirits—gifts from other islands the ship had visited—he found several vials of the special tattoo ink. He took one lightly in his trunk and grinned. “In the Archetype’s stories, finishing a quest always seems harder than this,” he told the vial, then slipped it into a pocket of his bandolier. He reversed his path and retreated back through the ship, up onto the deck, and then over the side to the pier without incident. In fact, he felt a bit of disappointment that there hadn’t been any complications to overcome.
“There are supposed to be trials,” he said, tapping the disc around his neck and recording his thoughts as he stood in the rain. “It’s not a very good story without them. I mean, I want to succeed and all, but what kind of quest ends so easily?” Something was missing. No one had witnessed his actions, which meant there was no one to tell the tale. He turned back toward the councilors’ ship with half a notion of waking up one or more of the crew so they could see he’d taken the vial of ink, but a better idea came to him. He set off along the pier, aiming for the harbor buildings and routes up into the forest and the city that waited within. There was a better place that he needed to reach.
In the unlikely event that the council found someone on Fintz that they deemed worthy of an aleph, the inscribing ceremony would take place in the city’s largest public space. As he left the harbor, Pizlo consulted a visitor’s map of the island’s Civilized Wood, located an amphitheater labeled “Spoonbender’s Place,” and charted several landmarks along the way. He expected his timing would be near perfect—there were always people about in such a place at first light, groups doing morning exercises and stretching, oldsters who slept little enough by night and gathered with the dawn to greet one another and rehash old arguments, merchants crossing through the open area on their way to their shops and markets. What better spot to tattoo his moons than the center of this city as the first lights of a new day trickled through by vents and lenses and mirrors?
And so he climbed. The meta-trees here were the same as back on Keslo, as were most of the lesser trees and other plants that grew from its Shadow Dwell up through the Civilized Wood. The only real difference was the placement and quantity, and every few moments he caught himself in a blur of confusion at a feeling that something was not as it should be. A lifetime of moving through every bit of green space on Keslo, of hearing the voices of each leaf and vine proclaiming its spot in the mosaic of life there, assailed him with surprise and delight that they could exist here in new arrays and concentration and still be themselves, familiar but unique.
Pizlo emerged onto the upper edge of the amphitheater as first light began to warm the upper levels. He squinted into the fading darkness expecting to detect movement and infer people. But no one was there. Not a soul. Perhaps they were running late or sleeping in. Annoying, but not critical. They’d flee once they saw and recognized him for what he was. It was only the symbolism of marking himself here that mattered. Holding the vial of ink aloft in his trunk, he skipped and danced along the rows of wooden benches, descending toward the center of Fintz’s public space that still lay entirely in shadow.
He reached the bottom—the main stage that had seen untold performances of professional orators and school children and dance troupes and choirs—just as the first bits of light gleamed across the polished floor. He wasn’t alone after all. A tiny bundle, smaller than a child’s ear, barely bigger than both his hands together, mewled once and coughed.
He rushed to it, mind racing as he looked in all directions, trying to find the parent who could possibly leave a tiny infant unattended. It made no sense. Helpless and defenseless, he knelt alongside the bundle and scooped it up, cradling the sleeping child in the crook of one arm. He shoved the ink vial into his bandolier so he could use both hands and his nubs to tuck the blankets more securely around the infant. It was horrific and irresponsible and clueless. What had they been thinking?
And then he knew.
This wasn’t a normal baby and its parents hadn’t forgotten him. The newborn child in his arms was exactly where its parents—or more likely its maternal grandparents—had left it. Where they had deliberately abandoned it here in the heart of Fintz. It was the way things happened for a child born out of a couple’s proper time. It was what society required when giving birth to an abomination.
“No no no no no.”
He rocked in place, clutching the infant to his chest, still searching the empty amphitheater for someone, anyone.
The child was broken, hideous. Albinism was the least visible defect. Its trunk ended in a featureless knob at half its proper length. Its arms bore fingerless flippers below the elbow. And a thin, translucent membrane in the center of its chest showed the movement of its tiny heart several times too large for its new body and beating much faster than it ought, racing as if in fear for its life.
“Shh. It’s okay. You’re going to be all right. I’m here. Pizlo’s here. See? You can grow up and be strong and free. This doesn’t have to end the way they want it.”
He whispered to the baby, helplessly cataloging its injuries and deformities. Most horrific of all, its body was cold as the worst storms of the season. He held it closer, feeling it warm from contact with his own heat. Its tiny eyelids fluttered open showing the barest of slits, revealing eyes of brilliant blue. Pizlo looked to the back of the amphitheater and the boardways leading to all parts of Fintz’s Civilized Wood. The population of an entire city lay near at hand. All the assistance he could wish for.
“Help. Please someone, help.”
Pizlo struggled to stand. Not because of the burden of the infant in his arms but rather his legs didn’t seem to work right at first. He staggered upward, and then firmed up his gait and began running up the stairs, crying out.
“I need a doctor. Please! Someone. Anyone. This is a medical emergency. Help!”
He crossed onto a major boardway, a mixture of prosperous homes and high-end shops. Few people were abroad yet, but those few who saw him, saw the bundle he carried, rushed to the nearest doorway and literally flung themselves within. Pizlo ran to the first of these, kicking at the door but it didn’t open. Faces peered at him from adjacent windows, and from cracked doors further along the street; doors slammed shut at his first hint of movement in their direction.
He kept on, running down another boardway for a greater distance than he’d ever gone in his life, out in the open the way normal people traveled, driven by the frantic and fragile heart he could feel beating so close to his own.
“No no no.” He muttered, half to himself and half to the infant. He felt sick. His eyes were watering and his throat had seized up like something was choking him. Words tumbled from his lips. “You’re someone’s child. You’ve done nothing wrong. You don’t deserve this. If Druz was here, if we were on Jorl’s yacht, there’d be all sorts of things that could be done to help you, heal you. Maybe you wouldn’t be normal, but I’m not normal. Normal people did this to you. They’re doing it to you. Innocent baby, you don’t deserve this.”
He arrived at a municipal building. A sign out front indicated the mayor of Fintz had offices inside but held an open meeting for any interested citizens each morning beneath the statue of the island’s founder. Several had gathered there, speaking to a well-dressed Eleph who stood with his back to Pizlo.
“Help me, please. I need medical assistance!”
The citizens of Fintz scattered, all but the one that had been facing away. That one, the mayor, turned and cried out as Pizlo closed with him.
“Please. You can’t condemn an innocent infant like this. Get us to a doctor. Now.”
The Eleph opened his mouth, whispered “two of you,” and passed out, collapsing at Pizlo’s feet.
Still it was an answer. The highest elected official in Fintz would rather flee consciousness than aid him. Bells began ringing throughout the city, the kind of public alarm that told people to stay in their homes. Bells that normally rang only in the bedtime stories parents told about the terrifying abominations that came to torment naughty children.
He marched on, setting a course back down to the harbor and his borrowed boat. He’d take the infant back to Keslo. His mother would help him. She’d find a doctor, get the newborn whatever it needed to survive. She’d done it for Pizlo, and with his help she would do it for this baby, too.
At the edge of the Civilized Wood he boarded one of a series of elevators that ran down to the Shadow Dwell and opened onto the beach of Fintz’s second harbor where he’d left the boat. No one challenged him. The bells had seen to that.
He reached the harbor and had crossed to the guest pier and nearly arrived at his boat before realizing that somewhere on the way he’d stopped feeling the pounding of the infant’s heart. Pizlo fell to his knees, midway between the traveling counsel’s vessel and his own, frantically peeling back the thin blankets that wrapped the baby. It was warmer than when he’d first picked it up, but that was all his own body heat. Its eyes had closed. Its frail body gone stiff. That breath of life that had inhabited it had fled. The infant that any right-thinking Fant would recognize as one that should never have been born, had died in his arms. He had been unable to save it.
Kneeling on the pier, Pizlo wailed. In all his fourteen years he’d never experienced pain. He’d born countless scrapes and cuts, shredded his hands, dislocated limbs, once even caught his trunk in a door—none of it had hurt. He understood what pain was, had seen those he loved afflicted with it, but his inability to personally experience physical suffering was part of his abnormality, like his weak eyes and his lack of pigmentation.
How then did he hurt so much now? He felt it in his gut, a twisting and strangling. His head pounded. His body wanted to vomit until it turned him inside out and then begin again. Tears streamed down his face, and his throat ached with a rawness.
And more, he knew, knew with useless hindsight, that his hero’s quest had never been about acquiring a vial of ink. He was supposed to have saved an innocent, a fellow abomination, because in all the world who else could be expected to do so. And he failed. Failed his quest but gained something he’d never understood before.
At fourteen, after a life apart from Fant society, Pizlo now knew what anguish was.