“Do not let them have my ghosts,” he said.
“I won’t. I promise.”
“It has been good to travel with you,” he said. “My old spirit wil be disappointed not to join forces with yours. But what do we know? Perhaps we carry al the old spirits, like the great First Human, whose forefinger was tal as a tree, and who held the souls of al his children, for al generations to come, within that finger.”
This was the first I had heard of such a being. Yet how was that different from what we had found here? “You must come away, come with us,” I insisted, but it was more for me than for the old man that I pleaded.
“No,” he said, looking off at the trees. “When I am stil, it wil take only a short while before I am safely fled. Keep the machines away until then, but leave my body here, for it is nothing after that.”
“How do you know?” Vinnevra cried, clasping his shoulder, the sinews of her forearm as tense as drawn bowstrings.
“It is true,” the monitor said. “If we do not scan while he lives, the imprint wil be lost.”
The Composer. Ask it about the Composer!
I shook my head, unwiling to listen to anyone or anything else. I had to folow my own instincts. I had to believe I was truly alone.
But I could not just run away from a dying old man. The sacred farewels had to be made. I drew close to him, touched his knee— was startled by how cool it felt in my fingers.
“Abada wil scare off the hyenas,” I said, “and the crocodile wil rise from the shore of the western waters and snap at the buzzards.
The Elephant wil nudge your bones from the dirt, and you wil finish your travels whole and sound, while the families of our ancestors await you on the far shore. For so I have seen in the sacred caves.”
Gamelpar’s eyes suddenly turned warm and damp. He pushed gently again at Vinnevra. “It is not seemly for an unmarried woman to see an old man die,” he murmured. “Daughter of my daughter, say good-bye to me now, lead the poor giant away from here, and let the boy speak to me alone. We wil al join up again, by and by.
You, young man, wil stay for a time. I need to hear these things you say, for they are old and true.”
Vinnevra shook al over and her face was slick with tears, but she could not disobey, and so she kissed the old man on the top of his head, climbed down the steps, and led the shadow-ape away by
her great hand.
Both looked back several times before they vanished into the ragged jungle.
I climbed the steps and squatted beside Gamelpar, whose name means Old Father. I recaled as much as I could of the paintings in the narrow, winding caves a day’s journey outside Marontik, and of what they meant.
“She is al I have,” he said, interrupting the flow of ritual. “She is wilful but loyal. If I leave her to you, wil you watch over her, and guide her away from this place? Take her to where she can be safe?”
Trapped! I trembled at the contradictions within and without. A vow made to a dying man had to be kept—there was no way out.
And I could not let this one die in shame and disappointment.
“You wil not leave her behind and go off on your own, wil you?”
“No,” I said, hating myself, not knowing whether that was a lie or not.
“Her true name . . . known only to her mate, her life partner . . .
or to her sworn guardian . . .”
And he whispered it in my ear.
I resumed the ritual storyteling, only vaguely aware of the blue- eyed machine stil hovering over the long grass.
Just as I finished, I saw that the old man’s eyes were mostly closed and had falen back the tiniest bit, unmoving, within his skul.
I stayed by him, listening to the last tick of his breath, watching the last twitch of his limbs. . . .
It did not take long before I knew he had crossed safely over the western waters. He had suffered much already, and the Elephant and Abada are kind. Stil, I wept and felt the sadness of the old spirit inside me.
We never shared. . . . Whom have we lost yet again?
Then I saw that the machine with the blue eye was slowly dropping into the grass, and the eye was dimming, turning black.
There was nothing left for Genemender to do, and no power left to do it, anyway.
I angrily gathered up a few scraps of clothing from the old huts.
Some at least of the food had been real—a final feast produced within the pavilion of cylinders—and I packed up what I could.
None of the monitors moved. Their eyes stayed dark.
I walked into the jungle a few hundred meters and joined Vinnevra and the ape at the start of a nearly overgrown trail, little more than a winding gap between the towering trees. I could not meet her look, and when she asked me if he had died wel, in tune with daowa-maadthu, I simply nodded.
I felt barren inside. No Riser, no old man, and even the voice within was quiet. I had no notion where we might go from here, and neither did Vinnevra. But we started down the trail, anyway, to the far side of the plateau. After her question about Gamelpar’s passing, she did not speak for hours. It was her way of mourning.
The station where Gamelpar had died was several kilometers behind us and the jungle was thinning when she asked me to tel her the old stories, just as I had told them to her grandfather.
And she in turn would speak the stories Gamelpar had told her, including the story about the First Human’s soul-finger.
It was then that Riser chose to rejoin us.
Chapter Twenty
WE WERE WALKING along the trail, picking our way over the creepers—or in the ape’s case, plowing and swinging through them —and watching through the broken canopy of branches and leaves the perhaps not so endless progress of shadow and light on the sky bridge. The skies had cleared for a time since midmorning and the air was moist, but the trail—dead leaves overlying stones and bits of wood—was drying and firm enough underfoot.
Al ilusion. How could I know anything was actualy solid?
Perhaps this was an amusement being enjoyed somewhere by jaded Forerunners. If I did not amuse, then at any moment my story, my life, might be crumpled up and thrown away. . . .
Our tales spun on while we walked. I told Vinnevra the ancient story of Shalimanda, the heaven-snake, who one night swalowed the original shining, jewel-encrusted stream of worlds, and the next night exploded, showering the sky with al the darker, earthy orbs on which humans would grow. As long as I heard us speaking, our voices soft and holow in the jungle, I seemed more tightly bound to what was real, to al that I could smel and see and feel.
The girl—the young woman, for she was no longer a girl—was a comfort to me. More knives in my head as I tried to resist.
But I continued to listen and to speak in turn. I knew her real name. Perhaps that is not something you feel much about, one way or another, but for anyone tuned to daowa-maadthu, the old man’s confidence was terribly important. I could not just leave her behind, not now, any more than I could abandon a sister . . . or a wife.