Conquerors' Heritage

8

The sun was glinting through the clouds near the horizon by the time the railcar pulled onto the siding and let him out. According to his father, his mother was living out in the farmland two thoustrides south of town in a small reddish house with white edging and a large vymis tree growing beside the roadway.

A house that Thrr't-rokik himself had of course never seen. Reeds Village was 115 thoustrides from the Thrr family shrine, fifteen thoustrides out of Thrr't-rokik's anchor range. The more Thrr-gilag had thought about that fact, the more ominous it had loomed in his mind. Something had caused his mother to move such a deliberate distance away, and he wasn't at all sure he was going to like the reason.

The darkness of latearc was filling the sky by the time he reached the house, which stood alone at the edge of the farmland, looking just the way his father had described it. Stepping up to the door, he knocked.

"Why, hello, my son."

Thrr-gilag jumped, turning to his left toward the voice. His mother Thrr-pifix-a was kneeling in a small garden beside the house, almost invisible in the gloom. "Hello, Mother," he said, starting toward her and letting his lowlight pupils dilate. She looked reasonably good: a couple of cyclics older than he remembered her, but strong and alert and capable. "Sorry I didn't notice you there."

"That makes us even, then," Thrr-pifix-a said, easing to her feet. "No, that's all right." She waved Thrr-gilag's hand away as he moved forward to help her. "I can manage. Sorry if I startled you; I didn't notice you myself until you knocked. I was trying to get the last of my seeds planted before it got too dark to see. I'm afraid my lowlight vision isn't all it used to be. Not to mention my hearing."

"Next time I come by so late, I'll be sure to whistle," Thrr-gilag promised lightly, touching his tongue gently to her cheek. "So what are you planting this cyclic?"

"Flowers, mostly," she said, taking his arm and returning the kiss. "Plus a few vegetables. The home-grown ones always taste so much better than mass-cultivated, don't they? Goodness, I must look terrible. Please excuse me—I didn't know you were coming."

"I tried sending you a message," Thrr-gilag said, eying his mother closely. "The communicator said you wouldn't accept it."

"Oh, I don't talk to Elders much anymore," Thrr-pifix-a said equably. "Have you eaten?"

"Ah—no, not recently," Thrr-gilag said, frowning down at her. "Is there some reason you don't talk to Elders?"

"Well, as long as your timing has worked out so well, we might as well put you to work," Thrr-pifix-a said. "I'll get you started on dinner while I go clean up. Come, I'll show you to the kitchen."

The meal was, for Thrr-gilag, a strange and rather discomfiting experience. On the one side, it was a warm, comfortable reunion with his mother, a time for food and conversation after too many cyclics of hurried neglect as he flew back and forth across Zhirrzh space studying alien races and artifacts. But even as he tried to relax in the warmth of family love, he couldn't ignore the taste of apprehension at the back of his tongue. Thrr-pifix-a was his mother; and yet, somehow, she wasn't. She had changed, in a way Thrr-gilag couldn't seem to get a grip on.

And she wouldn't talk about it. That was the most disturbing part of it. Every attempt he made during dinner to reintroduce her comment about Elders—every delicate probe he floated as to why she'd left home and come out here to the edge of a tiny Frr village—all were deftly deflected and instantly buried under a new flurry of news about distant cousins or friends.

So they sat and ate and talked... and it was only as the meal drew to an end that Thrr-gilag caught the new look on his mother's face and realized that she hadn't been ignoring the issue at all. She had, instead, been postponing it.

Until now.

"Well," Thrr-pifix-a said, setting down her utensils and getting carefully up from her meal couch. "That was excellent, Thrr-gilag; thank you. You must be getting a lot of practice in cooking out there on all those study worlds."

"Actually, you'd be surprised at how little cooking we try to get by with out in the field," Thrr-gilag confessed, stepping around the table and taking her arm. "And the meals out there certainly suffer for it. Why don't you go sit down in the conversation room while I get the dishware cleared away?"

"The dishware can wait," Thrr-pifix-a said, her voice quiet and serious. "Let's go sit down together, my son. We need to talk."

The conversation room was tiny, less than half the size of the one in their old house. "Small, isn't it?" Thrr-pifix-a commented, looking around her as she eased down onto one of the couches. "Nothing like the house I raised you and your brother in. Or the house I was raised in myself, for that matter."

"The size of the house isn't important," Thrr-gilag said. "As long as you're happy."

"Happy." Thrr-pifix-a looked down at her hands. "Well. I'm sure you've talked with your brother. And... others. What have they told you?"

"Absolutely nothing," Thrr-gilag said. "I didn't even know you'd moved until a few fullarcs ago."

She looked up at him again, and he felt his tongue stiffen against the side of his mouth. Here it came. "It's really very simple, Thrr-gilag," she said softly. "I've come to the conclusion—and the decision—that I don't wish to become an Elder."

Thrr-gilag stared at her, his heart thudding out the beats as an unreal sort of silence filled the room. Had she really said what he thought he'd heard her say? His own mother? "I don't understand," he managed at last.

She smiled slightly. "Which part don't you understand? Eldership, or my not wanting it?"

"I'm glad you're not taking this lightly or anything," Thrr-gilag shot back with a force that startled him. "Mother, what in the eighteen worlds are you thinking of?"

"Please." Thrr-pifix-a held up a hand. "Please. This isn't some bright new idea I dreamed up last latearc and haven't properly thought through. Nor is it the product of insanity or a broken mind. This decision has grown gradually, with a great deal of thought and study and meditation behind it. The least you can do is hear me out."

Thrr-gilag took a slow breath, willing his tail to calm its dizzying spin. No wonder Thrr-mezaz hadn't wanted to talk about this through a communicator pathway. "I'm listening."

Thrr-pifix-a looked around the room again. "I know it's rather a cliché, my son, but the older I get, the more I've begun to realize that it really is the smaller things in life that make that life worth living. The taste of one's food; the delicate smell of flowers or rainfall or the sea; the touch of a loved one's hand. Things we all too often seem to take for granted. I know I did when I was your age. But not anymore. My senses are fading—have been fading slowly for a long time now. I can't see or hear nearly as well as I used to, or taste or smell."

She lowered her gaze to her hands again. "I can still touch. But with all too many of my old friends, touch is no longer possible."

She looked up at him. "Eldership isn't life, Thrr-gilag. That's the long and the short of it. It may be a shadowy illusion of life—a wonderfully clever imitation, even. But it's not real life. And I've enjoyed life too much to settle for an imitation."

Thrr-gilag seemed to be having trouble breathing. "But there's no alternative, Mother. Without Eldership there's nothing afterward but..."

"Death?" Thrr-pifix-a said gently. "It's all right, you can say it."

"But you can't do that."

"Why not?" she asked. "Zhirrzh did it all the time, you know, until we learned how to remove and preserve fsss organs. Millions of Elders were summarily thrown into the great unknown during the various Eldership Wars. Even now some are lost each cyclic to accidents or the simple weight of age of their fsss organs. Eventually, we'll all have to face death."

"Eventually, maybe," Thrr-gilag said. "But not now. Not while you're still—" He broke off.

"While I'm still what?" Thrr-pifix-a asked. "Young? Capable? Able to impart the wisdom of my cyclics to my descendants?"

"All of those," Thrr-gilag insisted. "And more. We need you, Mother. More than that, we want you. How can you think of taking yourself away from us?"

She looked him straight in the eye. "How can you think of demanding that I stay?"

There was no answer to that. Only an ache deep within Thrr-gilag, an ache that had no words. "Couldn't you at least give it a try?" he asked at last. "Perhaps it's not as frightening as you think."

Thrr-pifix-a flicked her tongue in a negative. "I'm not frightened, Thrr-gilag. You've missed the point entirely if you think that. I know what the grayworld is like—I've heard all the descriptions and talked to many Elders. If anything, all the fear lies on the other side, with the unknowns and uncertainties of death. It's simply a matter of not wanting to live the way an Elder must."

"But you can't make that kind of decision without giving it a try," Thrr-gilag persisted. "You can't."

"But I have to," Thrr-pifix-a said. "Don't you see? If I wait until I've been raised to Eldership, I'll have lost my chance to decide otherwise."

Thrr-gilag stared at her, sudden realization sending a jolt from his tongue straight through to his tail. "Mother, what are you talking about?" he asked carefully.

"I'm sure it's obvious," she said. "The only way I can avoid Eldership is to go retrieve my fsss organ from its niche at the family shrine. And to destroy it."

Thrr-gilag took a careful breath, the room seeming to tilt around him. "Mother, you can't do that," he said, hearing in his voice the tone of one explaining something to a very young child. "Tampering with a fsss organ is a grand-first felony."

"But it's my own fsss," she pointed out. "Taken from my own body. Why shouldn't I be able to do what I want with it?"

"Because you can't," Thrr-gilag said. "That's all there is to it. It's the law."

"Oh, come now," Thrr-pifix-a said, tilting her head in that peremptory way Thrr-gilag always associated with her challenges to his schoolwork answers. "Just because something is a law doesn't mean it's right. A thousand cyclics ago it was illegal for anyone except clan and family leaders to have their fsss organs removed at all."

"I'm familiar with Zhirrzh history, thank you," Thrr-gilag said. "But you can't use arrogant stupidities in our past to justify breaking the law now."

"I'm not trying to justify anything, Thrr-gilag," Thrr-pifix-a said tiredly. "There's no challenge to the law itself in this—I'm sure it was written for good reasons by Zhirrzh who were intent on doing the right thing. All I want is the right to choose for myself. And I should have that right. All Zhirrzh should."

Thrr-gilag closed his eyes. "Who have you told all this to?"

"This part? Just you. Though your brother may have recognized on his own where the track was leading."

"And father, too?" He opened his eyes. "Is that why you moved out of his anchorline range? So he wouldn't have a chance to try to talk you out of it?"

Thrr-pifix-a stood up and stepped over to one of the windows. "Your father is gone, Thrr-gilag," she said, almost too softly for him to hear. "What's left out there at the shrine is not the Zhirrzh I bonded to and worked beside for forty-eight cyclics. I left home because the reminders of what I'd lost were too much to bear."

"I understand," Thrr-gilag said, a twinge of her same ache tugging at him. He'd felt it himself at the shrine: talking to the Elder his father had become was not the same as having his father there beside him. Not really. "I wish I knew what I could say that would make it better."

Thrr-pifix-a turned back from her contemplation of the darkness outside. "I know. And I thank you for caring." She made an attempt at a smile. "I wish I knew what to say to keep you from worrying about me the way you are right now."

"You could say you'll think about this idea of yours some more," Thrr-gilag suggested. "You could say that you understand that this loss is still fresh, and that you'll give it more time to heal before you do anything drastic."

"How about if I just say I'll put you up for the latearc?" she countered, the smile more convincing this time. "With a promise of breakfast at the other end? I won't even make you cook this time."

Thrr-gilag sighed. "I'm sorry, Mother, I wish I could. But I've got to get going. I have to leave for Gree in a few tentharcs."

"Gree?"

"Yes. Klnn-dawan-a's there with a study group."

"Ah," Thrr-pifix-a said. "I should have known. Please give her my best when you see her. I hope you two find the time to be bonded soon. While I'm still around to come to the ceremony."

"Yes," Thrr-gilag murmured, frowning at the unconcerned look on his mother's face. Could it be that she didn't know about the Dhaa'rr threat to revoke the bond-engagement?

No, of course she didn't know. She wasn't talking to Elders anymore. "We'll try to accommodate you," he said. "Look, I really have to go. But you take care. And... keep thinking about all of this. All right?"

"I will," she promised, stepping over to kiss him farewell. "You think about it, too. And take care of yourself."

"Sure. I'll talk to you when I get back. I love you, Mother."

"I love you, my son."

The walk back to the rail seemed longer, somehow, than the earlier walk in the other direction. Colder, too, in the chilly latearc air. Thrr-gilag plodded mechanically along, oblivious to the silent, starlit world around him. And tried to think.

It was a waste of effort. There were too many questions, too many potential crises facing him and his loved ones. And no solutions to any of them.

Should he tell his father what Thrr-pifix-a had planned? Or if not him, should he tell Thrr-tulkoj? Surely the Zhirrzh charged with protecting the Thrr family shrine would want to know of this kind of threat. And it was almost certainly Thrr-gilag's legal duty to report it to someone.

But on the other side, it had been only half a cyclic since Thrr't-rokik had been raised to Eldership. If this attempt to run away was really nothing more than an expression of her grief and her struggle to adjust, reporting it would do nothing but cause more trouble for everyone. And shame to go along with it.

Or should Thrr-gilag himself have tried harder to talk his mother out of the whole thing? Canceled his trip to Gree, perhaps, and spent more time with her? Maybe it was loneliness that was driving it, or a cry for help and support?

Maybe he should have told her about the threat to his bonding with Klnn-dawan-a. It would have given him an opening to suggest that she should bury such radical thoughts for now in favor of family solidarity, as well as reminding her of the advantages Elders had in obtaining knowledge and information.

No. Thrr-pifix-a didn't care about information and knowledge. She cared about her garden, and her cooking, and her edgework, and her family. And Eldership would take three of those away from her.

He sighed, a startling sound in the stillness of the latearc. No, there was nothing more he could do about this. Not right now. Maybe when he got to Gree and had a chance to talk with Klnn-dawan-a, the two of them might be able to come up with something.

He picked up his pace, the weariness lifting a little from his spirit. Yes; Klnn-dawan-a. Together, the two of them would find some way to resolve this mess. All of it.