Courtship Rite

5

THE CONSTELLATION OF THE OGRE moved across the midnight zenith and was replaced by the Winner. Joesai sneaked himself through Kaiel-hontokae on the final day before the trek to the coast was to begin and, unannounced, appeared at Kathein’s instrument shop. It was an old building of stone, converted from some purpose which had once required its own aqueduct. He had never been here before. The tedious craftsmanship of experimental fail-and-seek-again asked more patience of him than he was willing to give. The shop’s primary purpose was to supply the priests with more and more accurate biological tools.

If you needed a device to promote cross-over in chromosomes you could have it built. If you wanted an organic machine to synthesize gene chains, someone would build it for you. If you wanted an implement to record from a neuron there were craftsmen who knew the fabrication ritual.

But, if you were like Joesai, and wanted a really large sky-eye for some theological investigation, forget it. Kathein had tried to fund the construction of a plate-sized lens for him but was refused the appropriation. She had wryly told her husband-to-be that she thought there was a fear in the Race of probing too deeply into the terrors of the World Above from whence God had rescued the Race. Joesai thought only that the obsession with biology was natural in an environment whose life forms would kill you whenever you failed to understand them.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Kathein said when she found him in the arched doorway.

“The spittle of insects! You’re quick with my child. I love you. In any event, I’m here! May Aesoe give his guests diarrhea at his Feast of Ritual Suicide!”

She pulled him inside, obviously glad to see him. “Getasun’s flame will die before he finds himself at the bottom of the kalothi list!” Which was where she wanted him because only then would he be eligible for Ritual Suicide.

Joesai laughed at her venom. “Don’t be so sure. Someone will take his hide soon enough, may he roast slowly in an oven until he is too dry to eat!”

“We’ll be caught here!”

“Ho! Find us a place where we can be alone!”

She hurried into one of the side rooms and closed the door. He found himself next to racks of bioluminous bulbs that cast an eerie pallor over bulky apparatus.

“It is for reading the crystal,” she said, touching the plastic casing of the Kaiel’s most advanced instrument.

“You built it yourself?”

“Joesai! I built it with the help of thirty craft clans and all the gold of the Dry Bone Mine. I’m not even sure I know how it does what it does!”

“Was your hunch about the crystal right?”

“No,” she said sadly.

“It doesn’t hold the frozen Voice of the God of the Sky?”

“Yes and no,” she said with puzzlement. “Do you want to see some silvergraphs of His writings?”

“My nose in trade!”

She showed Joesai the single intact crystal, shaped like a small tile but transparent. When he reached out to touch it she pulled away. It looked like glass but it didn’t refract like glass. The hand-size corroded machine which had originally read the crystals was nearby in its own protected case. An early Kaiel exploration had found it buried in the catacombs of the Graves of the Losers, holding this one crystal. For generations the discovery was a mystery known only to the Kaiel. Kathein was a student of the priest who had decoded the function of the machine.

To duplicate its function, Kathein’s team had invented coherent light-beam generators and strange precision optical devices. She had made more advances in electron manipulation in the past 300 weeks than had been done since the electron was discovered. The resulting apparatus filled up half a room and sometimes even worked.

“You can’t believe how hard it is to read from that crystal. There are about 4000 layers, alternately conducting and non-conducting. The conducting layers have elements in them that go opaque in the presence of electron flow. If the approach ritual doesn’t please God He responds only with blackness but if our obsecrations are sufficiently servile only one layer is sensitized. There are 1600 pages to a layer. Even then different pages fade in and out and sometimes whole layers of pages overlay an area so that our vision is obscured. We can go for days without getting through to God and then suddenly a patch of forty pages will appear for long enough to be silvergraphed.”

“What do they say?”

Kathein showed him a silvergraph of a single page, one of the clearer ones. She lit an oil lamp to increase the room’s brightness.

“The God of the Sky mutters,” he said turning the page upside down and squinting at it.

“You can read it.”

“It’s beetle talk. It looks like a beetle danced the maedi with ink on his feet — an eight legger.”

“No. You can read it.” She pointed with some excitement. “That’s the symbol for carbon and that’s the symbol for hydrogen.”

“I’ll be low listed! It’s a genetic map. My God!”

“They’re all plants, hundreds of them. Sacred Plants, Joesai. There’s nothing there characteristic of the coding of profane biology.”

“My God! That means there are more than Eight Sacred Plants. What a strange thing for Him to tell us.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said with deep puzzlement.

“Could He be telling us to make new Sacred Plants?”

“Joesai! We couldn’t even make a wheat seed!”

“Maybe. We made my mother.”

“Your mother is half human, and the other half isn’t there.”

“Don’t you insult my mother. She has seventy-four artificial genes. How complicated can a wheat seed be?”

“God wouldn’t ask us to do the impossible!”

“God could ask us to do anything. He could laugh at us. He could sulk for a hundred generations if it pleased Him.”

“Don’t say that! If He hears you, I’ll never get another picture out of that crystal!”

“Let me try talking with Him.”

“You won’t get anything. I have to use all kinds of supplications to get the fineness that the reading requires.”

Kathein lit a small, quick-firing steam engine attached to a copper-wired wheel she called an electron pump. She waited for a short while until the steam pressure was up, and then waited again until the electron pressure stabilized. That done, she threw switches and began to electrify one of the mysterious machines that was taller than Joesai. Banks of hand-made electron jars began to glow red from tiny internal filaments. “We have to wait for them to soak up heat.” Then she inserted the crystal into the machine’s mouth and made delicate adjustments with little wheels.

Time passed. The ritual reminded Joesai of a childhood toy called “volcano” which required the player to roll five tiny balls up the slope of a miniature volcano, one at a time, holding each at the peak while the next climbed. Impossible but absorbing.

Finally they got one clear picture, another chain of genes. “Are they all like that?”

“Yes.”

“I like your devotion to God, Kathein. It’s an inspiration.”

She turned off the machine, and stopped the wheel of the electron pump, and doused the steam engine’s fire. In the room, now quieter, she held him. “What will we do? You inspire me, too, Joesai. When Gaet thinks big he thinks of the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves. When Hoemei thinks big he thinks of administering a united Geta. When you think big you want to face the God of the Sky.”

“Where do you think He came from?”

“A very dangerous place, if Geta is truly a refuge as the Chants say.”

He squeezed her. Then he ran a finger fondly but roughly along the lines of her facial cicatrice. “You’re the only person I can talk to about these things. I cherish you.”

“Oh you can talk to Teenae,” she said pushing him away, “and you know it!”

“Only if I formulate my fantasies as mathematical problems.”

“That’s good exercise for your mind!”

“And another reason I love you is because you make me laugh.”

“Did I tell you,” she added excitedly, “that we just heard that a team of o’Tghalie from the north have completed a parallax measurement of the star Stgi and found it to be at least one million times as far away as the distance between Geta and Getasun! That’s what you should be doing if they’d let you! Do you realize what that means? The universe could be so big that it would take a man’s lifetime for light to cross from one end to the other. The God of the Sky could have come from anywhere!”

“We have to get to Him and talk to Him!”

“Can you express yourself in polynucleic acids?” Kathein laughed.

“You know about these things. How would we get to Him?”

“Energy, Joesai. More energy than you can possibly imagine.”

“We’ll discuss it when I get back. I love you, Kathein. I’d murder to keep you.”

“Don’t say that! Joesai! Be quiet! If you ever violate the Code once, even once, you’ll be destroyed by the storm you will have created within yourself!”

“Ho! The Code was made by man. Different priest clans have different moralities. God stopped speaking to us to let us learn our own way.”

“Joesai, listen to me! I believe in tradition. It is there for a reason. It is the accumulation of more wisdom than one man can ever hope to master in one lifetime. I can’t understand its purpose. You can’t understand it. I have faith. Don’t test it, Joesai! Please!”

“If this heretic has kalothi, she’ll live. That’s what kalothi means.”

“Fecal Fool! That is the justification for every sin that has ever been committed on Geta! You know that kalothi can be overwhelmed!”

He sighed. “I promise you I’ll be hard — but I’ll break no rules.”

“Thank you.” She held him and cried. “You’re breaking one now by being here with me.”

“I’ll go.” His face was wet.

“Be careful. Take care of Teenae. And watch out for that coastal witch!”