KNOWLEDGE, QUESTIONS, AND CHOICE
FOR the past several seasons, Pizlo had pondered the flaw in his devotion to Jorl as his mentor. To be sure, there wasn’t a living soul in the galaxy who cared more for him, had been more generous with time and teaching, and believed in his potential. But for all that, no matter how he tried not to, Pizlo had at last come to the understanding that he could never do what Jorl did. Yes, he had followed him along one path, becoming a Speaker, but that was biology not intention. The choices Jorl had made were choices he wanted for himself. Pizlo, on the other hand, had no interest in history, nor could he envision a future in which he was either a husband or a father. And the thought of serving in the Alliance senate recalled to mind the nightmares he still had of Bish and how Jorl had caused everyone in the galaxy to forget him.
If Pizlo’s studies with the Archetype of Man meant anything, then Jorl had already fulfilled his responsibilities as mentor. Today, Pizlo stood on the edge of acknowledging—and thereby moving past—his own reluctance to take the next step. He’d grown up, mostly, which meant he had to reassign Jorl to a new role, that of friend and advisor.
It was part of a larger picture. Change was coming. Events that others would see as random held intention and meaning for him. The connections did more than talk to him, they suggested a call to action that he couldn’t resist much longer. The individual pieces had been building for nearly a year, little more than dust motes of possibilities in the beginning, but they’d since grown into solider forms. Leaves spoke to him of it, stones in the Shadow Dwell called to him. The signs made themselves known in the most routine of things. Portents fell like rain.
An outsider to Fant society, Pizlo nonetheless hungered for it, to know it vicariously if not directly. From earliest childhood he had built himself blinds that allowed him to observe people going about their day, hidden forts tucked into public walls of foliage that looked out upon busy boardways, camouflaged nooks providing access to parks and amphitheaters. From these spots he had watched and listened and witnessed the public lives of the citizens of Keslo, coming to know the names and ways and details of many in a city where everyone knew of him but never spoke his name. In recent years, he’d sometimes take koph while watching them, to see each of them cloaked all around in the golden fabric of their nefshons, burning their gleaming images into his brain to keep when the drug wore off. They were all so special, wondrous in ways he could never be, freely chatting and laughing and joking with so many others. He had so few. And yet, numbered among his handful was a person unlike any the people of Keslo would ever know, someone who was neither Eleph nor Lox, someone from another world.
The fourth person in all the galaxy ever to speak to Pizlo had been a Brady. She’d introduced herself as Druz, and in a time that no longer existed she’d been the personal assistant to Senator Bish. When Jorl took the Yak’s place her loyalties and responsibilities transferred to him. Under the terms of the Compact, Druz could not set foot upon the planet, she visited twice each year. She’d pilot her employer’s personal spacecraft to a water landing not far from Keslo’s shore, pretending the vessel was simply a ship for traversing the ocean. Jorl would sail out to meet her—sometimes allowing Pizlo to come along—and when they finished their business she would travel off to another world of the Alliance on some senatorial mission.
Pizlo had last seen Druz two seasons ago. While she spoke with Jorl and completed whatever errands had brought her to Barsk, he’d taken the opportunity to explore the ship that years before he’d actually piloted for a short time. Sitting at the control boards again, he found them a better fit at fourteen than they’d been at six. He reviewed the protocols and procedures for flight, hands moving across the locked-down helm as if at a simulator. The pilot’s seat seemed to whisper approval to him; soon, soon he’d fly this vessel again. He didn’t know why or when, but that didn’t change the certainty of it. Soon.
As a mental exercise, he ran through the checklist for shutdown, arriving at the configuration that the boards were actually in, then hopped off his chair, suddenly possessed of the knowledge that Jorl and Druz had concluded their business. Any moment now they’d call for him. He went to them instead, finding them in the cargo hold. The ship’s outer hatch stood open, water flooding the space. Jorl’s boat lay tied to a gantry, right where they’d left it after sailing into the spacecraft. Jorl, having finished his senatorial business, was in the midst of carrying some small crates onto the boat. He waved his trunk in a combination of greeting and summoning, but as Pizlo went to join him, Druz pulled him aside. She bowed to him and placed a small package in his hands.
“The senator informs me you have a birthday coming soon, Little Prince.”
She’d named him that on their first meeting and though it made him blush now that he was no longer a boy, he endured it as a sign of her affection. And, too, because Jorl had said it was so striking to see him blush given his albinism.
“It’s nearly a season away,” he’d responded. Birthdays weren’t something he tended to think about. Nor the passage of time in general. The future didn’t flow out before him as it did other people.
The Sloth had continued. “My research suggests that our people share a custom of bestowing gifts at such a time. As I will be far away on the actual day, please accept this token in advance.”
He’d taken the gift, hugged and thanked her, leaving unspoken the fact that he’d received few such presents. Though the people in his life loved him, he’d only had cause to learn about birthday gifts a few years ago when Rina began receiving them. Fant society didn’t acknowledge the birth of abominations like him, and it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone to celebrate the anniversary of his entrance into the world, let alone mark it with a gift. Druz, not being raised to Fant custom, had seen him initially only as a precocious child, then later as a boy who enjoyed the kind regard of her employer, and finally as a young friend. What need of birthday presents when she already gave him so much?
As he stepped from the gantry and onto the powered boat floating as if at dock, he’d slipped the present into a pocket on his bandolier and forgot it amidst waving farewell and watching as Druz convinced the vessel to slip away from them on the water before rising up through the rain and vanishing in the cloud cover. Then he and Jorl had guided their own craft back to shore. It had been a short journey; Druz had “parked” her craft just beyond the island’s shallows and thus they’d returned quickly to the dock where Jorl maintained a slip. Pizlo knew the harbor well and frequently visited the boat while Jorl was busy elsewhere, raiding the craft’s galley or just enjoying the gentle rocking motion of being on the water.
Under the carefully averted gaze of the harbormaster they’d returned through the Shadow Dwell and back up to the Civilized Wood, chatting all the while about Pizlo’s studies, his conversations with the Archetype of Man, and what bits of senate business Jorl could share. After they parted, Pizlo slipped from the regular boardways used by other Fant and settled into one of the wild spaces he’d created for himself over the years, just another niche that he could find but which to the uninvited appeared to be a solid and uninhabitable space within the forest that defined the city. Only once he’d settled in did he remove the gift from his pocket and examine it.
At first Pizlo mistook the present for the box it came in. Druz had wrapped it in paper decorated with a colorful fractal pattern of shades of green. He appreciated the gesture; anything wrapped in such paper blended in instantly and vanished within his nook. That would have been present enough, but there was more. The box under the paper was a dark, burnished grey metal. It fit in the palm of his hand, a third as tall as it was wide or deep. Druz knew of the Barsk-wide aversion to polymers, machined items, and obvious signs of technology, but the simplicity of the metal box slipped past such prejudice and was a thing of beauty on its own. He didn’t know what he could use such a box for, but he had no doubt he’d keep it.
The issue was resolved upon opening it, discovering it had its own purpose as a home for its contents. Nestled snuggly in a bit of black cloth lay a circular amulet made up of inlaid woods in a swirling design, the whole thing hanging from a chain of tiny links of metal as pale as ash that nearly blended in with his own skin color. Pizlo fiddled with the chain until with a twist a magnetic clasp clicked apart and he was able to refasten it around his neck. The amulet itself rested at the base of his throat.
He ran a finger over both its sides at the same time, feeling a faint depression in the back. And then it talked.
“Happy birthday, Little Prince,” the amulet spoke in Druz’s voice, buzzing against his neck. “I hope you like your gift. It’s a personal recording device that will respond to your touch. Pressing against the spot in the middle of its back will let it know you want to use it. At the same time, tap the top front once to record and again to stop. Tap twice to begin recording a new item. Tap the bottom front to play back, and the sides to move from item to item. It’s easier than it sounds and you’ll learn the knack of it readily I have no doubt. You’re very special, Pizlo, and you witness things others do not. I thought you might find it helpful to be able to keep a record. If you ever wish to transfer the recordings to another device or other media, Jorl can show you how. Enjoy.”
Pizlo removed the amulet and stared at it a long while, agog at a message recorded just for him, at having Druz’s voice available at any time. He studied the gift, cataloging the look and shape and weight of the thing in his hand. He put it back in its box, wrapped the paper back around it and tucked it away in a nook. Making a record of his own observations in turn confused and excited him. But who would listen to him? Surely no one, if they realized the source was an abomination. Had Druz realized what a complicated gift she’d given him?
He drew a wafer of koph from his bandolier and slipped it under his tongue as he set off to another wild space higher up, midway between the Civilized Wood and the canopy. It was one thing to sit in a nook where he could watch the nefshons of Keslo’s inhabitants, but for actual summoning he preferred less accessible spaces. He had an urge to chat with the Archetype of Man, to include his new amulet as part of the nefshon construct of himself, and discuss with the long dead storyteller how he might make best use of it. Plenty of stories he’d heard had no witnesses other than the hero, which suggested that the hero had to be responsible for either writing down the tale or telling it to someone who did. Perhaps it was time for Pizlo to consider telling his own story, or at least recording some of its pieces.
* * *
AS a general rule, Pizlo liked abstract things. While concrete objects had the advantage that you could touch them or taste them, hold them in your hand or hide them under a stone or in a stream deep in the Shadow Dwell, they contained within themselves a lie. A book he borrowed from Jorl existed not only on the shelf in his advisor’s home, but also as a memory, a recollection of the emotions and thoughts it had sparked in him. The memory of a thing was different. An image in his mind owed nothing to the physical world, and presumably could exist within him even if the concrete source of it was lost or destroyed. Jorl had called this the “permanence of idea” and at first Pizlo thought his friend had it wrong. How could ideas be permanent when every time he rolled one around in his thoughts it changed? That was before he’d come up with the idea of building a catalog of his insect collection in his mindspace. The bugs in that memory were static. Yes, each specimen led to a more elaborate memory of how and when and where he’d acquired it, but they didn’t roil in his brain like abstractions did.
So, maybe Jorl was half right, at least when it came to ideas about things. But thinking ideas about ideas still felt like an endless cycle of rain that was always the same but always different. It made his ears twitch, as if holding such a thought in his head meant he knew something that not even the moons above had realized yet. That didn’t happen very often. After talking with the Archetype, he’d spent the next day and night and most of another day wandering through interstitial spaces of the Civilized Wood, ostensibly restocking his various hideaways, but really using the physical motion as an analog of profound cogitation. By the end of it, he had things to share with the moons.
He sought out the deepest darkness that existed only in the Shadow Dwell. Any artificial light from the inhabitants of the Civilized Wood lay far above and behind him, blocked by impenetrable layers of branch and leaf. Pizlo nestled amid the roots of a massive meta-tree, sorting out what he wanted to say and waiting for the right time to say it. There was life all around him, the tiny bugs and animals that made their home in the rocks and muck and soil of the place. Parasites and symbionts lived in bark and leaves, spores and pollens and things too minuscule to see floated on the air with opportunistic hope, fungi grew in colors that no one ever saw, molds rippled with alkaloids that would produce visions to rival anything imagined while under koph.
But his thoughts tonight were not for the living. He walked a weaving path through blackness until he stood upon a tiny patch of sand on one of the island’s innumerable minor coves—this one not so different from where he’d found the statue he’d used to pay back the chemist—emerging from rainforest into rain and a slightly lesser darkness in the clouds far above. He sat in the sand, a trunk’s length above the wet line where gentle waves climbed the meager beach. Water lapped at his feet. Druz’s gift rested against his throat. He brought a hand up to it and began recording.
“I liked you better when I was just a kid,” he said, speaking to the world around him, beach and ocean and sky. All seven of Bark’s moons were shining down on him that night, though the clouds blocked any sign of them. Pizlo looked up, moving his gaze from one part of sky to another, acknowledging where each hung. He felt their yearning to speak to him, which in turn gave him strength to talk to them instead.
“It was easier. Everything simply … was. Nowadays all of it requires thinking, and then more thinking about the thinking. Everything is a question that demands an explanation that suggests a theory, and most people can’t even agree on any one of those for anything at all.” He paused, applying some of that same thought to what he’d just said. “Or maybe they do, I’m not sure. I only know six people, and one of them’s even younger than me, and one doesn’t much like me, and one’s a Sloth and so maybe doesn’t think like a Fant at all, and one’s never had flesh or blood and besides is already dead. So … yeah, I don’t have a lot of experience to draw on here. And when you think about it, that really begs the question of why I got picked to have these conversations with you, to carry the knowledge you give to me, to just know things.”
He drove a fist into the sand at his side and brought up a handful of coarse grains as several tiny crabs scampered free of his grasp, fell to the sand, and burrowed deep again. He rolled the sand between his fingers and as he focused, each solitary grain spoke to him, expressing delight in being part of this patch of beach, of the endless waters they had known, of how they were both like and yet utterly unique from the other grains. Not a single one of them asked questions or posed hypotheses or would probably ever feel a need to.
Ignoring the moons, he asked the sand, “Can you explain it to me?”
Ideas of waves in infinite variety seemed to come from them, and for an instant he perceived the solidity of the beach as an ever-changing configuration across a span of time. It made him gasp. The sand had a lot to say, but none of it spoke of life or purpose. It happily shared with him, provided no insight beyond the simple metaphor of the endurance of granular existence.
As had been happening more and more lately, Pizlo found these sorts of conversation deeply unsatisfying, not least of all because no one else could hear them. Years in the past, he’d tried to share some of them with Jorl. Far from being a mentor in that moment, he had instead suggested that perhaps Druz was better equipped to advise him, and had made a point of giving them time to discuss the matter during her next visit. In hindsight—as was often the case—it had been a wasted effort born out of false optimism. Like most adults in his limited experience, she’d heard what she thought he was asking and not what he was saying. This had led to her explaining his experiences as a projection of his talents, that the whispers of moonlight and waves and wind were not real, despite his obvious experience of them.
“All of it comes from within you, Little Prince,” she’d said, even while the world around them refuted her words and rolled its eyes for his observation alone. “I have met no few beings with similar precognitive talents, though never so powerful nor in one so young. What you think to be conversations with bits of the world are really glimpses of the future.”
When she’d said it, he’d wanted to believe her, less because she might actually be right than from honoring that he had such a person in his life, someone who wasn’t a Fant and hadn’t been taught to shun him or turn away just because. He’d been newly turned ten when they’d had that talk, feeling proud and mature to be in double digits, he’d been especially open to the notion that childish ignorance had caused him to attribute his experiences to the world around him and not some talent that lived in his own mind. More, Druz had been so certain, wrapped in the confidence that adults could possess about the world. Except … the world itself constantly reminded him that this Sloth possessed only a piece of the puzzle, nor should he expect her to understand things she’d never experienced. Doing so would be like asking a fish how it felt to live without breathing the air.
Similes. He’d come to hate similes. Too often that’s how the world spoke to him, not in simple and clean language, but talking about one thing as another, and frequently before either had yet come to pass. And metaphors were even worse. He’d grown up immersed in both blends of figurative language long before he had words or concepts for the things. That alone might explain the odd way he saw things. Well, no, maybe, but probably not.
Whether in response to a change in the rain, an unspoken word, or some nudge of his talent, Pizlo set aside these recollections. It was time. The thing he’d been waiting for came to pass, as he knew it would. He slipped some koph under his tongue and lay down on his back in the sand. A tiny patch broke in the cloud cover in just the spot for someone seated right there to catch a glimpse of a portion of Telko where it held court amongst the other unseen six. This was the largest and wisest of Barsk’s moons. He had once seen it in all its glory, when he’d snuck aboard the space station. It had filled his field of vision and flooded him with its light and knowledge. Since that experience, Telko had appeared to him more often than to any other Fant on Barsk. But this once it did not pour its wisdom into him. This time it waited upon him, the master ready at last to hear the student speak.
“I think I’m like a tree.” He spoke softly, knowing Telko could hear him despite the distance and vacuum that lay between them. “Everything on Barsk, and you and your fellow moons, you’re like the soil that I grow in, providing the nutrients and water and light that I need to grow tall and strong, to become something that you’re not. You give me knowledge, explain what is, and often that includes things that haven’t happened yet. But it’s like the stories the Archetype tells me. It’s not just stuff to know. I’m starting see that now, everything you offer me, all of it is actually tools. In the beginning, when I first started hearing you, you just told me things. But then, as I learned more, I realized that you told me those things so I would start asking questions. And I know that made you happy.”
Though it still hadn’t spoken, Telko’s radiance projected approval.
“Yeah, but it’s not about the questions. I get that now. It’s about choices. Knowing can be a path to asking. And asking creates the possibility of choosing. And that’s scary, because at one level it means that everything—absolutely everything!—that you’ve taught me can be undone by choice. Because in that sense, nothing is fixed. When you showed me Jorl becoming many, that wasn’t inevitable. When he unleashed the Silence and destroyed that Yak, it could have gone differently. This is what Druz means when she talks about me being a precognitive. She didn’t get all of it right, but she led me to find the heart of it. Knowing a thing isn’t the same as choosing a thing. And that’s hard. There’re millions of people on this planet who would cringe at the sight of me, owing to knowledge and not from their own decision. And there’s only four people here who can see me as me, and act from choice. I’m only fourteen, and you’re as old as the world, and it’s mean of you to ask me to think about these kinds of things. And you know that, and you do it anyway, which makes you cruel. And I don’t think it’s right that moons should be cruel. Ever. But I talked it over with the Archetype, and it helped me to understand that all this time you’ve probably been preparing me to go on that Hero’s Journey, and it’s time for me to cross some kind of threshold. Only, before I do, in case I fail, I want you to have something. I want you to know me.”
He closed his eyes. The koph had had time to work and when he looked around again it was to see himself in a space created within his own mind. He floated above the clouds, above even the atmosphere, hovering at the same height as Barsk’s space station hung above Zlorka, the archipelago’s northernmost and only equatorial island. To left and right at varying distances hung the other six moons, Nita and Ulmazh, and all the rest. Telko, much closer to hand, shone upon him in all its brilliant glory, its imagined light bearable here in his imagination. It regarded him silently, waiting.
“Jorl can do things other Speakers can’t. I know that. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve seen him choose to do it. And I also know that there are laws that all Speakers follow. That’s knowledge too, but it’s false. They’re not laws, they’re only rules. He’s chosen to break them, and I can, too.” He focused on his own nefshons then, bringing back into awareness the golden weave of particles so dense and close that Speakers always dismissed from their perceptions before attempting a summoning. Instead, he made them the object of his concentration.
All of his memories lay before him, the nefshon warp and weft of his life. Everything he’d experienced, everyone he’d ever met. Here were particles dedicated to time spent with Arlo, the one dead person he might have summoned but Jorl had told him not to, that his father had asked to be allowed to rest. He had many many particles from talks with Jorl. Other particles were memories of Tolta, going back to his earliest thoughts. More recent were those of Rina and her mother Dabni. Different but vivid were particles from the stories told to him by the Archetype of Man. Others linked him to Druz. The chemist was there, the Ailuros from the station, the Yak that had so frightened him half a lifetime ago. Everyone he’d ever met lived on in these nefshons.
But there were no nefshons from the forest or the beaches that had whispered to him all his life, nothing from the rain that had chatted with him every day, nor anything from the ocean. He had knowledge from each of the moons he’d seen, but not a single one of those experiences tied him to them, not even the epiphanies that Telko had shared. In every instance where he had learned things from the world around and above him, the only living source that shone in the nefshons of those events had been himself.
“It’s just me,” he whispered. “It’s always just been me. I made you up and set you outside of myself, but that was just another metaphor. None of you actually exist. You’re only real because I needed you to be real.”
Staring into the writhing cocoon of his own nefshons, Pizlo lost himself. It was as if he stumbled and fell into it. The swath of golden fabric that he routinely dismissed as soon as koph made it perceivable now gripped him and would not let go, would not be banished. It swallowed and engulfed him. Pizlo struggled and found himself drowning in it, drowning in himself. And even that experience was a new memory that added to the whole. There was no way out because he couldn’t stop being him. There were no moons, no world, no sand, no water. Only Pizlo, for ever and ever. No escape.
“Okay, so this is why Speakers have rules.”
He flailed, but it was like being helplessly deep in water, trapped in another stupid simile. But maybe that was the solution, that none of this was literal. To save himself he had to be figurative. He reached out, grasping the nefshons around him instead of trying to wrench free of them. They defined him, leaving them behind was an impossibility. Instead, he focused on that definition, on the idea of seeing every particle as a piece of who he was, sorting them in infinite combinations, to produce his entire existence.
Suddenly he was free, floating once more in space above Telko. And floating not an ear’s length away was a golden, gleaming simulacrum of himself. Not a simple construct like any Speaker might make of a conversant. This was him. All of him. Every particle of his existence duplicated and assembled before him and gawking right back at him. Pizlo reached out his trunk and his doppelgänger did the same. They touched and his creation dwindled and shrank, lost shape as it compacted tightly upon itself, collapsing into a single golden grain, bringing to mind the beach he’d been on.
He rolled his eyes. “Another metaphor,” he said, even as he clutched the grain and turned to address Telko once more.
“This is me. Kind of. It’s me as of this moment. Everything I am, but it’s not who I can be because there’s no choice in it, no agency. It’s an echo of me. An echo of what it is to be me.”
All seven moons shone upon him where he hung in space. Serious, listening. Just as he needed them to be.
“I’m going to leave soon. I don’t want you or anyone else to tell me what might be just ahead. This is my journey to take, my choice. And maybe it won’t go well. So, because you’ve given me so much, I want to give you something back before I leave. You’re not a Speaker, and when I die you can’t summon me. But in case I don’t come back, this is how you can always know me.”
He hauled back his trunk and then let fly, hurling his echo at Telko. It fell toward the moon, taking its time, instantly lost to view but still visible in his imagination. Pizlo waited and watched. In the real world, far below on the tiny cove, delicate waves had climbed Pizlo’s legs, the rain fell upon him, and the clouds had long since closed to again hide any glimpse of what lay beyond them. Eventually, Pizlo returned to his body, sat up, and ran off into the forest, ready to begin his quest.