I wake to the steady patter of rain, crying over the damp sea rushes on the roof and chattering with the shells and small stones of the cottage wall. The thin grey light of morning suffuses the hut, and the air is colder. Our brief period of sunshine is at an end it seems, and more normal weather patterns are restored. I am contemplating the mysteries of individuality.
Tamsin lies beside me, still sleeping quietly. I turn to study her. Asleep, she has a fragile beauty, which I have not perceived before. Her mouth is small and delicate, and a lock of hair falls over one closed eye. Her skin is smooth and lightly tanned to a luminous golden brown. Did I once think it sallow? In this moment she embodies a perfect instant of tranquillity, which touches me deeply. Then, like all such moments, it passes. Something disturbs her and she stirs as the flickering of a dream crosses her features. I remain perfectly still, not wanting to wake her, and eventually I am rewarded by the return of even breathing and the restoration of the happy serenity of the dreamless.
She came to me in the night when the first rain was starting to fall. I was half awake at the time, listening to the murmur of the sea and the subdued sounds of the jungle in darkness. She didn’t say anything - simply came to my bed and offered herself. Does it sound strange to say that she seemed shy? Even as she committed herself to this wanton giving, it was quite without demands and I knew that I was as free to refuse as to accept her.
So we made love.
Once we had started the urgency of her need became apparent. Nothing else mattered. But afterwards, inevitably, came the words - the rhythmic accents of her soft Wild World cultured voice, cascading over me with human tears to match the rain outside. And this was her true catharsis.
“When we were seventeen,” she began, “we took a trip on the paddle steamer ‘Morning Rose’ all the way down the river Pearl from Low Wold to Tinkersness.”
She paused to evaluate the memory and to consider her next words.
“No. That’s not the right way to tell it. I have to start earlier.”
“With the green meditation?” I ventured to suggest.
She bit her lip. “No. That isn’t really the point. The green meditation is… well, it’s not relevant.”
I refrained from making the obvious remark. The green meditation might not have been relevant to her, but it was relevant to her sister. Samsin was our green drop out. We’d both ridden the emotions of her chromatic denouement, but I chose not to remind Tamsin of that. I’d missed something. I kept quiet and waited for her to enlighten me.
“Do you know anything about the Wild World?” she said at last.
“I know that the first human colonists started a settlement there over a hundred and fifty years ago. I know that it is said to be a very beautiful planet and to have many climates not unlike those that the Earth supported before the Dislocations. I know that it is part of the Solar Group; that the Earth Resource Management World Government has always kept a close watch on its development and that there are strict immigration rules for new settlers, including the ability to pass long and complex ecological exams. I know that Wild World society is reputed to be more restrictive than most and run on conservative lines. I know nothing more. I have never been there.”
“Samsin and I have lived there all our lives. This is our first trip away from the Wild World”, she said. “It is beautiful. For the rest of what you say, I’ve known no other society and I don’t care for politics, so I will take your word for it.
"There’s a law on the Wild World called the Settlement Limitation. It’s something the authorities take very seriously. No town is permitted to exceed a population limit of five thousand individuals and in some cases the town charter sets a much lower value. New towns are only opened up by planetary order and never more than one in ten standard years.”
“So, you have a population problem. It figures.”
“We have strict population controls,” she confirmed, the tone of her voice making it sound like a correction. “It’s how we keep interference with the native ecology down to acceptable levels.”
I have some reservations about this sort of non-interference, but I didn’t say anything.
“Samsin and I were a disaster for our parents. It was a fluke accident in the conception control system, and they only had a licence for one child. They had to fight hard to keep us both when they found we were twins. At the time we were conceived my mother had a high-profile job as a bioengineer on the policy board of the prestigious old town of Silver Canyon. My father was an irrigation consultant for the plateau settlements, and he travelled all over the Wild World, but Silver Canyon was his registered home. Silver Canyon was right up to its Settlement Limitation quota and wouldn’t or couldn’t accommodate an extra child. My mother had to move to poorer employment as an agricultural monitor in High Wold and it was nearly two years before my father could get a permit to join us.”
“It must have caused some tension,” I commented.
“I guess so,” Tamsin said, “but we were too young to be really conscious of that. We did suffer considerable antipathy from other children though. We’d get picked on for being ‘pea pods’ and for being ‘greedy’ because we were using two resources. It was just typical name-calling and bullying, and totally unfair. I imagine they were reflecting their parents’ resentments expressed in the comfort of their homes and amplifying them in the school playground. You see, it’s very unusual for children even to have a brother or a sister on the Wild World and twins are practically unheard of. Our story had made quite a feature over the local news channels, and we were almost famous, but not in a very nice way.”
“Do you think your parents resented you at all?” I speculated. “After all it must have been hard for them to face their colleagues and neighbours.”
“Oh no!” Tamsin answered. “The Wild World is a civilised place after all, and adults mask their prejudices so much better than children. I’m sure they had the odd uncomfortable moment, but I doubt if it was anything like the hostility my sister and I had to face. In any case, my parents aren’t like that. They’re a very determined couple and they were determined to do their best for us. I think the difficulties only served to reinforce their love for us. In fact, I think it made them somewhat overprotective. This is only something I worked out much later, you understand. It wasn’t obvious to me at the time, but in retrospect I can see that they kept us a little apart from other children. And Samsin and I were happy to go along with that. We were thrown on one another’s company on many occasions – perhaps too many occasions.”
“And now you’ve come here together. What were you hoping to find?”
“Now we’ve come here.”
Tamsin was silent for a few moments, contemplating the outcome of the green meditation.
“When we were seventeen,” she resumed at length, “we took a trip on the paddle steamer ‘Morning Rose’ all the way down the river Pearl from Low Wold to Tinkersness. We boarded at the foot of the Thousand Step rapids, where the Pearl descends from the plateau and watched from the upper deck as bails of wool and flax were swung into the small cargo bay behind the wide white paddle wheel.”
Her voice caught a little as she recalled the anticipation of it all.
“It was a holiday. My father had paid for the trip as a present for Tamsin and I; a reward for our good exam results. It was the first time we’d been away from home on our own and we were very excited. We wanted to see the Great Stone Spire at Moss Town, the famous crossings at Three Bridges and the fisher birds of the estuary marshes. Then there was the ‘Morning Rose’ itself, a hybrid of cargo and passenger boat. We had luxury cabins on the upper deck, and we could sit in the sunshine on the promenade and watch the world float by. In the evenings we dined in the grand salon and sometimes risked looking in on the roulette wheels in the casino. Father had given us each a small allowance for luxuries, but he warned us not to gamble and we didn’t dare to disobey. Still, there was a certain frisson at the prospect of such a danger, which was quite heady enough for us. Mother violently disapproved of gambling and would have been horrified to think we were spending any time in a casino. Mother’s opinion was shared by most of the citizens of the Wild World. The ‘Morning Rose’ has a glamorous reputation all over the planet where most forms of gambling are banned, but you’d think it tame enough, I’m sure. You said yourself that the Wild World is very conservative. Anyway, we relished this taste of freedom and adulthood and we felt like queens.
"It takes fifteen days to sail down the lower reaches of the Pearl. We had a wonderful time until it all got spoilt.” She sighed and fell silent for a while, letting the dark music of the jungle nearly lull us back into sleep. Then she shifted uneasily and continued.
“Timber Reach is four days north of Low Wold just before the river Pearl broadens out to fill the Necklace Lakes. That’s where he joined the boat. Patrick Riley. He said he was a spice merchant, trading in pepper, laquonda, cinnabar, saffron, ururlis and salt.
"He was a handsome man. He had long black hair tied back in a ponytail and fastened with a silver ring. He used to wear a black velvet jacket and a white shirt, sometimes offset with a bright red scarf. It was very fashionable and looked chic and sophisticated to my sister and I. And Patrick was charming as well as handsome; so polite and courteous without being overly formal.
"We first saw him in the casino, scattering chips over the green beige table and laughing with the croupier whether he won or lost. It seemed wild and reckless, and I could sense Samsin’s disapproval, but we were fascinated.
"It wasn't long before he noticed us, and we got to talking. He told us that he would be travelling to Tinkersness and taking a ship over the ocean to the exotic port of Hydragood on the relatively unexplored continent of Pyruthia. He had business connections over there and obtained some of his rarest spices from licensed botanical stations deep in the underground forests.
"Over the next few days, we saw a lot more of Mr. Riley, in the salon at the casino or taking the air on the aft deck. He invited us to join him on several occasions and we spent an enjoyable afternoon exploring the streets of Conical Hill on Broken Tooth Island, whilst the 'Morning Rose' refuelled and exchanged cargo.
"I don't remember exactly when I first realised, he was setting out to seduce me - probably a lot later than it should have been but quite early enough to have put a stop to it if I'd wanted to. The thing is, I didn't want to. I was flattered by his interest in me. I'd led a sheltered life and I hadn't experienced such a concerted campaign before. It was heady and exciting and a bit dangerous and I loved it. Patrick spent more time with me than he did with my sister and his attentions were that much warmer - that much more intimate and special. He was polite to Samsin, but I was the one he favoured, and I loved that too. It was nothing overt at first. He was a subtle man. And by degrees he began to win me over."
“What happened?” I promoted her gently when she paused for a moment.
“Events took their course,” she said, and I imagined I could see her wistful smile in the darkness. “It was my first time – my very first time.”
“And you were happy?” I ventured.
“Oh yes! Deliriously so, for a little while. But such a little while. I thought Samsin didn’t know, you see. Then when we were only two days out from Tinkersness it all went sour. I hadn’t realised quite how clever Mr. Riley was. And how manipulative.”
Her soft voice had acquired a grim tone.
“I caught them in his cabin. Samsin and Patrick, making love. He’d fooled me completely. He’d been toying with my sister’s affections whenever I’d been out of the picture for a few moments, and he’d won her over the same way I’d been conquered. I can see it now. The evening light slanting through the shutters, the lemon-yellow lamps with three lazy moths to circle them, the pale blue sheets rumpled round the bed and the pair of them twisting to face me. I stood there dumb for a moment with my tongue thickening and drying out in my mouth. I remember wondering how on earth it had happened under my nose and how he thought he could possibly get away with it.
"But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was yet to come. It was before I could say anything whilst I was still paralysed with shock. He put his hand round Samsin’s bare shoulder and he said ‘why don’t you join us Tamsin?’
"I turned and fled without a word, running round the gallery to the aft deck and leaning over the rail to stare at the churning violence where the giant paddle wheel thrashed the river water. I was totally appalled. I’d never even imagined such a thing. You have to remember I was only seventeen and this was my first trip away from home.
"After that the ‘Morning Rose’ felt like a prison. There was nowhere to run to escape Patrick Riley and I just wanted to reach Tinkersness.
"I was confused. A lot of things got mixed up in my head. I felt betrayed by Patrick and betrayed by Samsin for sure. But there was more to it than that. Two of the unconscious assumptions that buttressed my life had been undermined in a single moment. I’d been used to thinking of my sister as an ally and friend and never considered her as a rival before. And I’d always thought of the outside world as vaguely hostile to us. I’d never even dreamt that in the perverse mind of our seducer, twins could be attractive as twins. I even wondered if he’d always had this plan to take us to bed together. I don’t see how he could ever have thought to keep his dalliances with the pair of us secret from one another for long. We were on a small boat, and he knew how close my sister and I were. In fact, the more I thought about it the more I became convinced he’d looked on us as a double opportunity to satisfy his perverse desires."
She was finding this difficult, and I wanted to take some of the burden of explanation from her, so I broke in. Maybe I shouldn’t have.
"It must have hurt badly. You were at the age where you wanted to break free and stand apart from Samsin. You wanted to assert your individuality, and this was a dreadful prospect of continuing entanglement in that aspect of your life that should have been yours and yours alone.
"I can guess why you’re here now. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? You love Samsin but you need to test the limits of that love. You need to assert your own identity and so does she. That’s what you want the meditations to do – to identify and highlight your differences."
She spent a quiet moment or two thinking about that, but I had no doubts.
“You’re right,” she said at last. She didn’t seem offended. “What are you? Some kind of psychologist?
I hesitated, uncertain how much to reveal.
“Not really. But you could stretch the definition and call me a sort of psychologist. At least I was once. But I’m not now."
She didn’t question me further and I let it slide. She had other things on her mind.
“Tell me about the green meditation.”
“You were there too,” I reminded her gently. It was a polite attempt to deflect her but she had identified my rapidly growing power in the art of the meditations and she pressed me.
“But you’re the psychologist. I can only sense things vaguely in the temple,” she said. “One of the things I can sense though, is that you’re the most advanced of our pilgrim band. It’s obvious to me and to the others too. We’re all making progress but you’re learning faster than any of us. I suspect I’m only as perceptive now as you were already in the red meditation. Tell me about the green meditation. Tell me about the things I couldn’t discern.”
I twisted in the bed, the closest my body could come to a shrug under the circumstances, and I put my arm around her.
“There isn’t much to tell, Tamsin.”
But I knew this wasn't good enough. I knew she needed to be told everything I'd witnessed and that listening would heal her as much as talking.
"When you were six you went on a school trip into the hill forests above High Wold," I told her. "Not very far. Do you remember it? Your sister does.
"I'm not sure… I think I do," she said, but she sounded puzzled.
"Samsin wandered away from the party and got lost in a lime grove."
"Oh, that's right! Yes. Yes, I do remember that now. So that's what it was all about!"
"Samsin remembers it very well. For a few minutes all she could see were mossy black stems and the violent verdant green umbrellas of the lime trees giant leaves. She panicked and started to run around in circles. But she didn’t want to call out. The teacher had told you all to be silent so you could listen to the retta birds. And she'd told you that if you made any noise, you might wake one of the wrath hogs in the hill caves. I think she'd added that last part just to chasten you all a bit and help to keep an unruly class quiet. Samsin hadn't believed it when she was safely with the party but now she'd lost you, she believed it all right, so instead of doing the sensible thing and shouting for help she just blundered about getting further and further away from you all. It might have ended badly of she hadn't stumbled down a low bank and run into one of the child minders going back to school."
"And that's my sister's chromatic need, is it?"
"Yes. It's just a nasty childhood memory, that's all. It's not a fully-fledged phobia of the sort Dywhyiss suffers, or at any rate it's only a baby version of one. It's nothing like the guilt of Talamon Ka or Edulon-602."
I chuckled. "Do you know something? I think Willow was happy to find such a normal chromatic response. After the first three meditations the thinderin priests were starting to think we were all a little bit, how can I say this, 'extreme'. You know they think they've got it all taped but sometimes humans do send them into a bit of a panic. Samsin's reaction is more the kind of thing they expect to deal with. Perfectly ordinary and perfectly tame and nothing to worry about."
"Oh." Tamsin sounded disappointed and relieved at the same time.
"Yes. Oh. It proves one thing though."
"What?"
"It proves you're not exactly the same as your sister. You might be twins and you might have shared a claustrophobic childhood but you're not identical however it seems sometimes. She has her memories, and you have yours and they aren't the same. You didn't recall that trip, did you? It just wasn't traumatic for you, and it's gone the way of most childhood memories. But you'll have others that Tamsin can't recall and they're part of you and they make you special."
"Oh. Yes"
It was non-committal. She sounded happier though, and I knew I'd said the right thing.
"I'll tell you something else as well."
"What?"
"I won’t be sleeping with Samsin. You can trust me on that."
"Oh."
She sighed. I bent to kiss her, and she snuggled against me, but it was an asexual thing. We'd spent our energies and now it was late, and we were tired from talking. Now we only wanted to listen to the jungle lullaby, the rustling of leaves and the rasping of insects that expected no thoughts and demanded no answers. We fell asleep, exhausted, and comfortable in the mutual warmth of our bodies.
And now it is morning and the light of Silusia falling on the temple hill shines flat through the grey clouds and the soft warm rain. I look at Tamsin still sleeping peacefully and feel a wave of tenderness sweep over me. I’m suddenly overwhelmingly grateful to her, not just for the shared moments of passion but also for the way she has opened herself to me outside the meditations. Both offerings, from her body and her mind, are gifts that no temple ritual could provide, and I will treasure them, freely given and freely accepted. It has been a long time since I made love and a long time since I was happy. Tamsin has liberated me with her intimacies, and I feel free to recall lost times in a manner I have been scared to contemplate before. I’ve been scared to face up to the good and the bad for fear that it will compromise and weaken me in the meditations. But now I realise that I’ve been foolish. I must order my own memories and marshal them properly before they are tested further against the more stringent meditations.
Back to Earth. Consider Lake Vostok in the deep cold below a still frozen continent. The delegates’ station sat above the thick Antarctic ice plain, a vaulting series of decks of blue shining chromium, plexiglass and steel insulated with thick white genegeneered fur. My quarters were on level five, looking north to the landing field. I had a spectacular view over the drilling platform, the elevator, and the subtly textured whiteness of the plain, which seemed to expand to an infinite horizon. Sometimes, when a storm was raging, Alice would come to my room and we would watch the snow blasting past the window, looking as if it could scour the station down to the ice anchors. In the season of perpetual night, the flakes in the voracious wind were picked out by arc lights over the platform, the thin yellow beams of the sleds and the mercury vapour floods that ringed each deck of the station.
“It’s all changing,” Alice would say sadly and at first, I’d think it was only a lament for the badly controlled aftermath of the Dislocations, which were still wreaking havoc with the global climate, despite everything that Their Majesties could do or say. So, I’d nod in sympathetic melancholy, enjoying the power of the elements and watching the inexorable Antarctic warming. But later I realised she meant more than just the climate. If only I’d been quicker to see the truth. Instead, I was absorbed in my work and in the intricacies of being a delegate to the viwodian embassies in the darkness of the lake far below. I thought I was the one who knew it all. I didn’t.
Ah, Alice, I think now. You should have been more explicit! You should have told me earlier! I might have saved you. I might have saved us all.
But I'm not sure it would have made any difference.
So, I remember too, descending beneath the drilling platform into the super cooled silence of the black lake. I remember the cramped chambers of the tiny submersible as we groped on sonar and radar through the still waters. And round us in quickly rendered graphical forms came schools of viwodian avatars, the small robotic agents that always accompany their masters, leading us into great underwater domes of ice where the viwodian ambassadors held court. I remember the surrogate images, huge as whales but sometimes amorphous, bleeding together like giant cells, thick and old and wise. The business of a delegate required much subtlety. We needed viwodian expertise and we didn't always have the means to pay for it. Who would have been foolish enough to risk offending the viwodia? Their Majesties, evidently.
I don't want to dwell on this any longer. I bend over and give Tamsin a kiss and she wakes, her eyes still sticky with sleep. She returns my kiss and I wonder, half hopefully, if she will want to recreate our frantic biological collision. But this morning she's shy and formal and she slips out of bed before any physical reactions have a chance to start. Ah well. I sense that the night will be a sweetness that will not repeat, just as I will never repeat those nights when I was happy with Alice. I harden my heart a little and remember that I'm here on business.
"Let's get some breakfast," I say.
We dress quickly and run through the relentless downpour to the village hall. Two Light Guards are on station outside. They have dropped root into the stony soil and have their packs of cards laid out on a wide stone pedestal. They are engaged in that uniquely complex thinderin pursuit of gambling for "life" stakes. Their personal weapons are stacked carelessly against the wall, and they take no notice of us as we hurry inside out of the rain.
Bilachai acolytes have already laid the bare wooden table with metal spoons, cereal bowls, jugs of cold milk, slabs of crusty bread and pots of crystallised golden honey. The triangular lighting filaments are dark today. Instead, fat beeswax candles cast a smoky glow in the early morning light although as the sky brightens their radiance gradually retreats into their pale little flames. Dovrich Galda and Ramon Avva are already seated and eating. The old woman raises a quizzical eyebrow at our joint entrance. There's no hiding anything from her. The priest, however, studiously continues with his bowl of porridge. Either he hasn't noticed anything or he's choosing to ignore it. I don't really care. It should be none of their business. Except that we are all one another's business in the chromatic meditations.
We've hardly finished eating when Willow makes an appearance. It's early for her. Normally we have time to walk on the cliffs, feel the wind over the ocean and see the risen morning light brighten the whole temple hill before the silver bells summon us. But Willow hasn’t come to take us to the blue meditation just yet. Instead, she speaks to me.
“The fusheyea has requested a meeting with you,” the thinderin seedling says. I’m mystified. We all speak freely to Hessuru, Rahelo and Frenane. By now I almost feel they are our friends. But this sounds like something more formal. Tamsin gives me a puzzled look and I shrug. I’ll find out soon enough.
Hessuru has an office in a courtyard behind the hall. I briefly put my hands behind my back before bringing them in front of me and clasping them together. It’s a gesture of politeness akin to a bow in most bilachai cultures. She’s sitting in a high-backed wooden chair and motions for me to take a seat in front of her. As I do so, I notice that displayed on the wall behind her are the traditional instruments of the honoured position of ‘salt mother’, two copper coloured evaporation pans and a glass mortar and pestle. I don’t know a lot about bilachai customs, but I do know about this one. The title of ‘salt mother’ is only an honorary one now. Its origins date back to a time more than two and a half thousand years ago near the beginning of the rise of the current cycle of bilachai civilization. In this period an important empire called the Warenta arose, occupying part of the region now known as the Sun States. It was this empire which revitalised the North in the days long before the Rain Cities League, and although it collapsed after five hundred years, it left many literary and intellectual legacies to the succeeding bilachai cultures who went on to develop their civilization to today’s sophisticated levels. The tools of the Warenta salt mothers are now treasured antiques and status symbols in the Rain Cities League. They are often passed from generation to generation.
My cowrie shell is sitting on the desk in front of Hessuru. “Did you give this shell to Frenane?” the fusheyea asks. I nod my head then realise that she needs a more explicit answer.
“Yes.”
There’s a low burbling from Hessuru which I interpret to be a long drawn-out sigh.
“You shouldn’t have. And Frenane should not have accepted it. Something has not been properly explained to you and the fushem from the Sun States were also ignorant. That is something I have now corrected.
"There are long traditions of service at the Temple, and they are important. Our traditions exist to maintain a balance of behaviour suitable to meditation. It is a rule that pilgrims must not give gifts to the fusheyea or the fushem. It is a corruption to do so – a distraction. Do you understand?”
I’m being told off and I feel embarrassed. I hope I haven’t made too much trouble for Frenane.
“I understand,” I say meekly.
Hessuru gives the cowrie back to me and I return it to my room. Rahelo is waiting for me in the drizzle when I come out.
“My wife says she is very sorry,” he tells me. Now I am even more embarrassed. “She has asked me to ask you if you will teach her some other human card games. That is not against the rules. And perhaps you can teach me as well?”
I can’t help but smile. I may have offended Hessuru but at least my transgression hasn’t offended the fushem.
The blue meditation is coming soon. What can I do to prepare for it? I don’t know. But I let my mind re-digest a chunk of personal history, anyway, reminding myself how I first left Earth.
My transfer from the Bureau of Economic Affairs to the Bureau of Xeno Relations took place at the beginning of 1946 A.H. when I’d been working for the BEA only a little less than a year. Shania Goldstein, the white-haired head of security at the Trusters rally where I’d run into that little riot, formally recommended it. It turned out that I’d impressed some very important people by saving the werm memgems, not least the werm themselves. There was an internal investigation, and I was asked whether I would like to work with the BXR. To be honest, I’d never thought of it before. I didn’t even know how candidates were selected for consideration and I assumed that experience of interstellar travel or life on one of the colony worlds was a prerequisite. But I was wrong there. Party loyalty was more important than experience. It was explained to me like this.
“We’re looking for natural aptitude and interest, not knowledge. We can teach you all you’ll need to know. You’ve shown you’re interested and we know you’re a reliable worker.”
I swallowed all this without too much thought and seized the opportunity. I was already getting bored of Economic Affairs, although I wasn’t bored of travelling.
My exit interview surprised me. I’d expected that Kern Slandyn would go through a few formalities and then I’d be free to travel to Dallas where the BXR induction centre was located. That’s what it said in the government schedule. But when I got to the interview I found that no less a personage than Mohamed Janjua, the bureau chief, was present and my line manager had been relegated to other duties. I was astonished. Mohamed Janjua was so far above me in the organisational hierarchy, I couldn’t understand why he would be concerned with the fate of such a junior employee; which just goes to show how naïve I was.
Janjua was very interested in the BXR from a professional and political stand point. The BXR came under the nominal remit of Katarina and was something of a closed book to the spies of Imran - unless of course they could get someone working there on the inside. And that’s where I came in. Janjua wanted me to act as an agent of the BEA within the BXR. It took me some time to understand all this because he phrased it in such a roundabout way and I’d always thought that the arms of government were supposed to be working on the same side anyway. It wasn’t so straightforward. So right from the start I found myself a pawn in a power struggle whose players I hardly knew and whose goals were shadowy at best. I should have got out of it then but probably it was already too late. Janjua reminded me of my upbringing, of the work I’d done for the BEA already and of the tradition of Nouakchott. Subtle but real pressure was applied and in the end I consented to reporting back to the BEA – discretely of course.
At first I worried about my dual role, but if I’d known how these things worked I would have realised that nothing was going to come of Janjua’s conversation for a long time. I was a sleeper. I wasn’t going to be of much use to anyone as a trainee agent. Janjua was thinking ahead – thinking of the long term. He’d planted a seed and he’d wait to see if there was anything to harvest.
The BXR offices in Dallas occupied the top twenty floors of Fountain Place, a sixty-storey skyscraper built back in the twentieth century CE when the USA was the dominant world power. This was before the first dynasty of the Resource Management World Government and close to the end of the age of the great skyscrapers. Apparently, there had once been taller buildings, even in Dallas, but Fountain Place was now the highest surviving structure on the continent and our place within it reflected the importance of the BXR. It was here that we received our security briefings and a first glimpse of the reality of human relations with the rest of the galaxy.
I was part of a cadre of fifteen drawn from all around the world. For six months we were treated like students, though we had no alien lecturers at Dallas. That would come later. To begin with we had to unlearn almost as much as we were learning.
It was a humbling experience. If you believed everything put out in Their Majesties propaganda, Earth was a co-equal or even superior partner in the endeavours of the Contemporary races. We soon found out that this comforting picture was far from the truth. Much of the covert work of the BXR was to try to identify exactly how far from the truth. There was an amazing degree of ignorance about the way that the other Contemporary races ran their internal affairs and their relationships between one another.
I studied history again, both relevant portions of human history and galactic history in so far as we knew it. Human history was the simpler.
Everyone knows the story of the unexpected discovery of the flicker drive in 1698 A.H. and the first contact with the Viwodia in the same year. The Bureau of Xeno Relations was put together in a hurry by the first dynasty of the Resource Management World Government in two years, their last politically significant move before the 2nd dynasty swept them from power two decades later.
Right from its inception the BXR had many jobs and soon branched into separate divisions. Immediate politics was its main concern but to understand immediate politics it soon found it had to understand galactic history. This was no easy task. There was a lot of galactic history.
By virtue of our independent discovery of trans-light travel, humanity qualified as a neophyte member of a group which calls itself the Society of Contemporary Races. Within the Society of Contemporary Races the date when a new species discovers a mechanism for faster than light travel is known as the date of its Emergence. The Society of Contemporary Races distinguish themselves from a number of intelligent species that haven’t attained autonomous inter stellar travel (such as the bilachai) and more ominously from a long line of races which once Emerged but are now extinct (such as the Cata-Zin, who died out long before the Society was formed) or merely “absent” (in the strange and unique case of the Amnyine, whose “Passage” also long predates the founding of the Society).
The Counter Xarctic Traders are the species with the best knowledge of ancient history since their lineage is longer than that of any other living civilization by an order of magnitude. Only the Counter Xarctic Traders have accurate knowledge of the ages before the foundation of the Society and they remain independent of it. They claim to keep good historical records stretching back 15 million years and to have half-truths, myths and legends from ages more ancient still. But they are notoriously reluctant to talk in detail about anything before the time, only just over half a million years ago when the now extinct races of the Paladen and the Kunamaka came together, following a long period of anarchy and confusion called ‘The Age of Convalescence’, to establish the Society of Contemporary Races.
According to the Counter Xarctic Traders the ages before the Society existed were characterised by a complex kaleidoscope of shifting political alliances and empires between a disparate and ever changing community of species who rose and fell from prominence over millions of years. Whilst there were many long periods of stability there were also some eras of terrible warfare. It is the aim and proud achievement of the Society of Contemporary Races to keep peace in the galaxy. There have been no major military campaigns since the Asamack Response to the Tetratic Empire degenerated into the Age of Convalescence three quarters of a million years ago.
The BXR soon learned that the Society is no utopia, however. There are still political games to be played and internal power structures to be aware of. Although there is usually some approximate correlation between seniority, in terms of age since Emergence and authority within the Society councils this is not an invariable rule. The Counter Xarctic Traders, for instance, despite their ancient Emergence are not numerous and are no longer thought of as significant players in galactic politics (indeed it is doubtful if they ever were). Nor can any of the Contemporaries be usefully considered as a single block, even to the extent that the Resource Management World Government unified humanity on a single planet. It remains important to remember that there are many subtle internal political divisions between members of the same race and understanding the nuances of these differences is a perpetual study.
Two major species were of immediate interest to the fledgling BXR because they both operated substantial fleets of flicker drive ships and occupied several colony worlds in the volume of space around our sun; the Viwodian and the Thinderin. The Viwodian were technically senior to the Thinderin, having Emerged more than two hundred and eighty thousand years before the first Thinderin ships began to cross the dark spaces between the stars. To all intents and purposes, however, it appeared that they were of equal standing in the councils of the Society of Contemporary races. Both were considerably more powerful than the Werm, for example, whose Emergence only fifteen thousand years ago was so recent as to be considered practically simultaneous with our own – or at least that’s how the Viwodian and the Thinderin claimed to consider it. From the perspective of humanity, the Werm were technologically far enough advanced from our discoveries to merit quite enough respect in their own right.
Publicly and on most occasions in private too, the Viwodian and the Thinderin maintained a unified front on all matters of diplomatic policy concerning the Society of Contemporary races and its relations with humanity. Only later did it become apparent that there was a long standing if well suppressed rivalry between them – maybe even a certain tension behind the scenes.
To begin with humanity learned most from the Viwodian, the race we had contacted first. Their gargantuan tear shaped vessels filled with water and a complex oceanic ecosystem under high pressure were common visitors to the solar system in the early years after Emergence. It was the Viwodian who explained the constitution of the Society of Contemporary Races. They described the Policy of Isolation which had been in place for the last fifty thousand years, broken only once when a Thinderin faction of exiles set up Groves on Silusia Alpha and founded the Temple Light Guards. According to the Policy of Isolation, planets with promising indigent species which might Emerge given time, were to be left to develop their own path to membership of the Society of Contemporary Races. In previous ages, the Society had sometimes held to a Policy of Intervention, but it just so happened that the entirety of human civilised history had taken place when Isolation was favoured. This accounted for the Great Silence when early SETI studies failed to find evidence of alien intelligence. The intelligence was there and monitoring with interest but had actively decided to do nothing until we Emerged of our own accord.
There were numerous worlds on which life had developed and many where it had attained complexity and even rudimentary intelligence. Some worlds were suitable for human colonists, although whilst the Policy of Isolation was in force this must exclude the ones with the most developed intelligences. The Viwodian explained that colonial activity was an accepted and inevitable consequence of emergence but that in addition to the Policy of Isolation we must follow two more important Society rules.
Firstly, we must strive to live in harmony with indigent life on any planet where humans settled, identifying cherishing and respecting existing natural balances. This did not mean that the ecologies we found would go unchanged. The Society did not believe that it was either possible or desirable to retain any artificial ecological stasis. Time and evolution worked on all life, and the impact of alien intelligence on this process was to be considered a potential moral improvement on the unthinking forces of the universe rather than a sin. It did mean, however, that all life was to be treated with respect and sensitivity with careful monitoring of human impact. Once, humans would have found this difficult or impossible but after the Dislocations and the strictures of the Resource Management World Government we had begun to learn some of these lessons for ourselves.
The second rule was the rule of life. The Society believed that it was the responsibility of Contemporary races to extend the boundaries of life in ways impossible to the planet bound. For every live world on which humans chose to settle there was an obligation to start the process of bringing a barren world into the fold. This could only ever be a long-term process. It might take thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years to transform some vacuum husk of a moon into a benign biosphere with water, air and simple life, but the Society saw it as something akin to a sacred duty. Viwodian and Thinderin engineers would help us in this work, but it was fundamentally our task to perform if we were to be respected in civilised galactic society.
The period of human history, which is sometimes known as the Golden Age of Adventure, lasted only eighty years. Time enough to start the Great Push and colonise the prime movers of today’s Solar Group. Time to contact the Counter Xarctic Traders, the Thinderin and the Werm, but no time to explore the wider field of stars and the mysterious domains beyond a relatively small spherical bubble centred on the sun. Then came the Limitation.
Our education in Dallas was of the formal academic variety, which had more or less died out elsewhere. We wrote essays and sat exams, and those that failed were released from their service to the BXR. I never doubted that I would pass but I can still recall struggling over one particular essay with the title ‘To what extent did the Limitation modify the policies of the Resource Management World Government?’ I couldn’t see that it had.
The Viwodian announced the Limitation, but it originated with a race humanity had hitherto heard absolutely nothing about called the Pthyle. The rules of the Limitation were quite simple. No human being was to travel outside a prescribed region of space defined by a tessellation of triple star frontier planes which taken together, enclosed a roughly spherical volume of space centred on the solar system, about four hundred and fifty light years in radius. It didn’t matter whether the travel was in human made ships or as passengers on vessels of one of the other Contemporaries. Any craft found to be violating the exclusion would be destroyed.
The Limitation caused considerable consternation. By external decree the universe was divided into the accessible and inaccessible, which soon became known as the Bubble and the Forbidden Regions (the latter being a peculiar linguistic usage since these so called ‘regions’ were virtually the entire universe). Although the Golden Age of Adventure had been short, politicians had felt safe to make the unwarranted assumption that our place in the Society of Contemporary Races was secure. The BXR thought that at least it understood the fundamental currents of galactic society and that they ran in our favour. Now we found that it was not so. Worse, we found that the Viwodian and the Thinderin whom we considered so puissant were in reality only middle ranking members of the Society of Contemporary Races, and both obliged to defer to their elders. The Pthyle Emerged long before either of our main mentors and now, for some unclear reasons of their own, had decided to intervene in a very direct manner.
No reason was given for the Limitation, it was simply stated in a precisely defined legalism that left no room for doubt. Naturally this led to many theories as well as to some subtle testing. It seemed inconceivable that any race could be powerful enough to watch a frontier of more than two and a half million square light years, so unmanned and manned vessels probed the limit. None returned.
However, it was the psychological shock of the Limitation that was more profound than the practical results. Humanity learned that at least some of the Contemporary races were more powerful than we could imagine and that we were not to have the freedom of all space promised by the flicker drive. We were on probation. An awareness of this dimension didn’t really help me as I gazed out of blue tinted windows at the bleak Dallas landscape trying to write my essay. What actually changed in public policy? Nothing much.
The Great Push continued. There were still plenty of legal planets to occupy. Although some people conjectured that it was the way human beings had managed colonies in the Golden Age of Adventure that had led to the Limitation, others disagreed, and the result was that there was no real difference in our approach. Certainly, the Watch Towers were established at the edge of the Bubble, but they were only beacons to warn shipping – hardly a great policy shift. There was still plenty of ‘adventure’ to be had in the Bubble, so much so that I personally considered the phrase “Golden Age of Adventure” a stupid one, if indicative of the mental state of historians at the time of the Limitation.
Perhaps the most significant restriction resulting from the Limitation, wasn’t access to volumes of space but rather exposure to other Contemporaries. Only Werm, Thinderin, Viwodian and Counter Xarctic Traders operated in the Bubble. Conceivably the Pthyle did too, but we never saw them. Yet we were told that the Society had over a hundred member races.
There were other important consequences of the Limitation though, and not ones I cared for. There was resentment of every one of the Contemporaries, all of whom were free to travel in the Forbidden Regions. There was speculation that the Pthyle did not actually exist and that they were just a cover story for the Viwodian and/or any combination of the other Contemporaries who were really responsible for enforcing the Limitation. This in turn led to alienation from aliens who had ostensibly shown us nothing other than kindness and friendship. Then too, there were hypotheses about the reason for certain indentations and irregularities in the Bubble, the largest of which took a giant bite out of it in the direction of the constellation of Orion. There was, in short, a great deal of frustration about ‘imprisonment’, although there was plenty enough to explore, to see and to do inside the Bubble.
Striving to come up with a politically correct answer to the essay question title ‘To what extent did the Limitation modify the policies of the Resource Management World Government?’ I foundered around in the shallows, making much of the change from the second to the third dynasty, which took place soon after the Limitation, and the subsequent formalisation of the Solar Group. But intellectually I considered these ostentatious developments to be no more than window dressing; a lot less important than the changes between the 3rd and 4th RMWG dynasties, which had happened since. I also believed that conspicuous political developments were less important than underlying psychological ones.
The BXR was not one of those old-fashioned liberal universities, even if it had adopted some of their teaching methods. I was careful not to lay stress on any issues that might suggest disloyal thoughts. I passed my exams remembering that my allegiance and my orthodoxy were being tested as much as my knowledge.
After the long Dallas induction course, BXR students needed to acquire some real experience with the races we’d been studying in abstract. We were split up and sent out into the Bubble, attached as junior interns to a variety of organisations that had agreed to provide BXR developmental training.
My first posting was to the haunting and harsh system of Inuwarmah. That’s where I met Fitararye Wilson. And that’s where my troubles really started.
No time to think about that now. It’s time for the journey to the Temple; time for the blue meditation. Tamsin takes my hand and clutches it tightly as we climb. I can feel her pulse racing. Willow is setting a fast pace and we all struggle to keep up as we ascend the steps of the Circle Hall. There is a ceremony of some sort taking place in the Dome of the Great Prism today, with perhaps two hundred thinderin and three times as many bilachai chanting a long mnemonic poem in sibilant rhythms. We skirt the edges of the congregation, keeping a respectful silence and pass through to the higher precincts. Once again we navigate the labyrinth of corridors where last time we found the green altar. This time, we travel a slightly different route, ever upwards by a countless series of shallow steps and sloping hallways, until at length we reach a corridor with an open balcony on the right. Now we are looking back into the Dome of the Great Prism from a considerable height. The assembled crowd is far below us, tiny heads only dimly visible in the pale light cast by the Prism, a susurration of piety rising softly to our ears. Stone clicks crisply below our feet before the sound is muffled in dark corners and swallowed by draughty black holes in the walls. I get a touch of vertigo, because only a low balustrade protects us from a fatal tumble into the great chamber below. We reach the Spiral Way, a wide gently ascending helical corridor from which twelve long halls radiate at one hundred- and twenty-degree intervals. And at the top of the Spiral Way, we emerge into the Dome of Water, the second of the great internal spaces of the Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment. I judge this chamber to be somewhat smaller than the Dome of the Great Prism, but it is hard to tell exactly. It is still a considerable chamber by any reckoning. A large circular pool surrounded by a low stone wall dominates the Dome of Water. At the centre of the pool is another low circular wall and above this wall I can see motes of dust dancing in an illuminated column in the air. It extends up to the fan-vaulted ceiling high above our heads, the artery by which the Great Prism is supplied with focused sunlight. Silver circuit worms crawl slowly over recessed doors and fluted columns. All around the central pool there are other smaller pools of varying sizes, some set deep into the floor and surrounded by subterranean seats, others raised on rings of concentric steps. Many of the pools are no bigger than dinner plates and these are supported on stone pedestals and plinths at waist height and knee height. Fountains play in several of the pools, but most are undisturbed, their surfaces quiet and mirror smooth. There is light under the main pool and delicate white caustics dance across the moulded stonework of the walls.
The chapel at the far end of the Dome of Water is smaller than the ones we visited before – more intimate and complex. Delicate pierced stonework decorates the ceiling with an artful swirl of galaxies. What Amnyine artist conceived this misty beauty? I have no time to contemplate such an unanswerable question. The blue meditation has begun, and it will demand some kind of answer from us all.
Blue sky, blue as sea, blue as the blue, blue, soul.
I feel a curious need to apologise for this old cliché and yet there it is, and there it was. The archetypal blue as distance: water and air. We will never be rid of that cliché for as long as we humans are. Let us explore its ramifications together...
