Wyrms

Chapter 13. TRUE FRIEND

SHE AWOKE LYING IN A BED, COVERED WITH THREE FEATHERBEDS.

A cold breeze from a broken window whipped past her face. The trees outside the window were golden with autumn. Are you really the trees of Earth? she asked them silently. Or are you strange alien creatures that have captured the trees and hidden them deep inside, so you can wear their mask?

She thought of all the children she had ever had in her hundreds of lives, pictured them smiling up at her, good children every one; but then something dark, a dark worm crawled into their mouths and now when they look out at her it is the wyrm with the tiny head and the fanlike fingers-not a wing at all-and the hundred fleshy organs of tearing and digesting and reproducing-Unwyrm, do you know the difference between eating and mating?

Or is there a difference to you? All hungers are the same hunger.

She opened her eyes. She saw him before she saw anything else, standing there half lit by the dim autumnal light through the window. Will. His face watching her in his utter silence, his unreadable stolidness, like an animal; or no, like a mountain, like the face of living rock.

Why are you watching me?

She did not speak; he did not answer. He only noticed that her eyes were open, nodded, and walked from the room. He closed the door gently behind him. It was the tenderness, the gentleness of the closing of the door that told her that he was not, after all, made of stone. It wasn't lifelessness that made him still, it was peace. He had made his peace with life, and so his face had no more to say, no silent pleas to make between speeches, and his mind had no speeches to make between silences.

He isn't hungry. He is already satisfied.

And as she thought of hunger, she felt again the Cranning call, as powerful as ever, gnawing at her womb.

I am hungry to have his babies, she thought. It came to her as the memory of a hundred nightmares during the time she slept. He will make me hungry for his seed in me, just as his mother made the Starship Captain yearn for her. He will make me think that it is ecstasy.

She shuddered. But now that she had dreamed Unwyrm a hundred times, his writhing as he devoured his mother and slaughtered his helpless deformed brothers, now that it was so familiar to her it did not make her lose control of herself and scream, as she had done in all the dreams.

She was too tired of it to cry out against it anymore. I'll just have to see to it that it doesn't happen, that's all.

He'll die before he has me, or I'll die. His children will not be born from my body.

But even if I live, will I ever want a man as I want Unwyrm? What if he dies while still calling me? Will that need be with me then forever, always unsatisfied?

Thoughts like that made her angry with herself. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. At once she was almost overcome with dizziness. The door to her room opened, and Angel came in. Angel, looking strong and healthy, no longer weak from the wound in his throat.

"Your wound has healed and the trees have turned colors," she said. "How long have I slept?"

"Forty days and forty nights, like Moses in the mount, like the rain of the deluge, like Elijah fasting in the wilderness. If you can call it sleeping. You've done a lot of shouting and kept us all awake. Even River has complained that you frighten his monkey. How are you?"

She reached up and touched the side of her head that Ruin had shaved. The hair had grown several centimeters.

"Weak," she said. "Unwyrm is calling me."

"We were afraid the scepter was too much for you."

"It wasn't the scepter, really. It was all the terrible things I had done."

"You didn't do any of them."

"But I did. Angel. No, don't argue with me. I didn't kill my own father and eat his brain, the way the first gebling king did, or kill my own wife, as my father did.

But I have killed. Obeying you or father, or to save my own life, I have killed easily, with pleasure, with pride.

That made it hard for me to-separate myself from all their crimes. I could only find and follow a very slender hope running from life to life throughout my past, Angel.

A hope that it all works together for good. That out of the blood I've poured into the ground, life can grow again."

"Many people who've just awakened from a sound sleep think they're philosophers," Angel said.

"Don't make fun of me," said Patience. "This is important. This is my-my contribution to the scepter, if I have one to make. All the children will look to me, gebling children and human children, they all will look to me and I have to keep them safe. From Unwyrm's children. And yet sometimes I think-Unwyrm's children would not be murderers. They would all be bound together with one heart and mind, the way the wyrms were before the coming of humans to this world. Before human genes made us strangers to each other. Unwyrm's children would never be alone. And I could be their mother."

"Don't say that. Patience," said Angel.

"It's just that I finally understood the thought he sends to me, Angel. I know what Unwyrm did to his own mother. He's the devourer, not me. I'll kill him if I can." But she knew she didn't sound convincing. It didn't matter, though. It wasn't Angel she had to convince, it was herself.

"He is a wyrm, then? A descendant of the ones the first colonists killed?"

"He is the Unwyrm, Angel. The very one. The only one. Alive for all seven thousand years of the world's history."

"To live so long-"

"We're strangers here. The native life can adapt itself, make changes in a single generation that we take a million years to make. Unwyrm is more intelligent than all of them. In him are combined the most powerful of the native gifts, and he called the most brilliant of human minds, and they must have taught him all they knew. What's to stop him from repairing himself genetically, when he finds any part of him becoming weak, decaying?

What's to stop him from living until he's ready to mate?"

"Why would he wait so long?"

"I don't know. I only know how humans looked to the first geblings. The machines that let our ancestors fly, that made pictures in the air, that chewed up forests and spat out wheatfields. What did the wyrms see, when a new star appeared in the sky and metal birds skittered above the surface of the world? They weren't gnats, replacing safe and stationary wheat. They were at the peak of the ecological system, these wyrms, but we were more powerful than they. And if they were to replace us-"

"They had to know all that we knew."

"The wheat sits there, passively waiting for its enemy to destroy it. But the wyrms knew that human beings weren't passive. We were the most deadly competitor for life that this world had ever seen. To overpower us, the wyrms' grandchildren not only had to be identical to human beings-they had to excel at the things that human beings do best. They had to know more, to be more beautiful, more brilliant, more powerful, more dangerous.

How could a single wyrmchild, Unwyrm, hiding in his ice cave in Skyfoot, how could he learn enough to prepare his children?"

"An ice cave? That means he's high in the mountain, where the glaciers are."

"Don't you understand, Angel? He couldn't defeat us if we built machines. The wyrms knew it from the start.

When they captured the Starship Captain, before they even brought him down, they first made him destroy all the metal that was easy to mine. But there was still metal-I remember my ancestors who pursued it, who mined it, who tried to build machines with it. They might have succeeded. But always the geblings came, a flood of geblings out of Cranning."

"I'm reasonably familiar with the history of the world."

"Angel! I'm telling you what no one ever knew. I'm telling you the why of it. I've seen the pattern in it, remembering it all at once like this. Unwyrm sent the geblings to stop mankind from making the machines that would have made us irresistible. He waited all this time to keep us weak while he gathered wisdom to himself.

He gave himself seven thousand years. And then fulfilled his own prophecy by causing my brothers to be killed and me to be-"

He touched her head gently, to soothe her. His hand felt cool and loving on her forehead, on her cheek.

"River tells us that Cranning is only a week away, and the autumn winds are strong for getting there. But we have to go now. The winter winds will beat us back. It's good you came to yourself today-we'll bring you to Cranning in your right mind."

There was an artificiality in his tone as he spoke; his heart wasn't in what he said, and she couldn't think why he was lying to her. But that was no surprise, she could hardly think at all. So she let it go, didn't try to discover what it was he was concealing. "Tell Reck and Ruin that I also know the map of Cranning."

"They know you do. You've told us much in your sleep. We've been writing down the stories you shouted out, and Heffiji has been storing them away here and there. I've tried to figure out what her system is."

"She doesn't have one."

"That was my conclusion. A true dwelf. But no one else could have done this. Unwyrm was calling all the people who knew things. He would have called her, too, if she had actually known anything. The only way the knowledge could stay in the world was with someone like Heffiji who knew nothing of any value, but could lay her hands on everything that mattered. It's all here. All the learning of the world. Reck and Ruin have called geblings out of Cranning to guard the place. They're going to glaze and shutter the windows, put on a new roof. Whatever it takes to protect this house."

"Do the geblings accept Reck and Ruin as their king?"

Angel shrugged. "Who knows what goes on in their minds? They say one thing, but something completely different might be going on under the surface. The fact remains that for the time being, these kings can't go more than a few dozen meters away from you, or they start being driven away from Cranning by Unwyrm.

They can't exactly claim their right to lead the geblings while they're still chained to the human Heptarch, can they?"

"We've wasted enough time," Patience said. "Take me to the boat."

"We'll go as far as Cranning, but no deeper into the mountain until you're stronger."

"I wasn't sick, just crazy," Patience said. "Crazy people can be amazingly strong."

"Is the call-any different now?"

"Only because I know who it is that's calling me."

"So he doesn't control you-"

"Or if he does, he controls me so thoroughly that I don't know I'm controlled."

"That puts my mind at ease."

"Angel, I've become a terrible person."

"Have you?"

"If the scepter had been given to me before I knew the things we learned here in this house, I could never have coped with it. If I had been brought to Cranning without understanding all the things I understand, I would have been helpless when I faced him. I look back on all that you and father did, all that I did and the geblings did and-it was right, it was necessary."

"Why does that make you terrible?"

"Even Mother's death, Angel. Even that."

"Ah."

"What kind of person am I, to agree that my own mother had to die? I have lived through that so many times, all my life, only this time through Father's eyes. He never forgave himself for it. Yet I forgive him."

Angel bent down and kissed her forehead. "My Heptarch, only you are fit to rule mankind."

"What kind of person am I?"

"A wise one."

She didn't argue, though she knew it wasn't true. Wise she was not. But strong-she was strong. She had mastered the mindstone. There was a true self before all the folds of her life. She knew that much, but the rest of her self was still elusive, out of reach, out of sight. So let Angel call her wise, she cared nothing for that. "But am I good, Angel?"

"As Heptarch, your choice is no longer between good and bad. Your choice is between right and wrong."

She had been his student long enough to understand the difference, and agree that he was right. At least in her role as Heptarch, she could no longer live by the same moral code that others lived by. Her decisions now were the decisions of a larger community than just herself. But what community? "Right for whom?" she asked.

"For humankind, Heptarch."

She knew at once that he was wrong. "No. The King's House is all the world. I am a gebling, too. All the life that speaks, and all the life that doesn't speak, all the life of the world except one."

"And that one wants you. But I'll die before I let him have you. He thinks I'm too weak to save you, but I can, and I will."

His fervor as he spoke was no pretense. Whatever lies he was telling, this was not part of it. He did love her.

She touched his cheek. "Serve me as a free man. Angel."

"Slave or free, I serve you the same. What difference does it make?"

"I ask you now, as a free man, to help me."

Angel gently dressed her and led her from the room.

To her surprise, the house was busy with geblings, hundreds of them. Her room had been off limits to them, but through the rest of the house they were busy glazing, patching, repairing, making it whole again. Patience sat in the common room by a scant fire, a fall of sunlight catching her chair to help keep her warm, and watched the ladders going up and down, moving along the walls, the geblings scattering here and there. River's monkey scampered underfoot-a dozen times he was kicked, nearly stepped on, or knocked off some high perch. Always he got up, screeched a string of unintelligible obscenities, and bounded back into the thick of the fray. Patience could not help but notice that Heffiji was much like the monkey, almost frantic with delight and worry, scurrying in and out of the house, up and down the stairs. "Don't touch that!" she'd cry. The geblings would laugh and mock her, but they would also obey.

In his jar on the mantle piece. River slept. Away from Cranwater, the world did not exist for him.

Patience found herself trying to feel the geblings' silent communication, the speechless call of the othermind.

She remembered so clearly how it felt, when she was each of the first few gebling kings. Yet now she felt nothing. It was like reaching out with her hand, only to discover that her hand had been cut off. She watched them wistfully, grieving that she could never know them except in the vicarious memories that came to her through the scepter. And the geblings went about their business, not knowing who she was, not guessing that she was the one living human who knew what it was like to be a gebling, who could understand the constant fellowship that gave them their anchor in the world. How did I find the courage to live before, when I never knew what it was to know another person?

"Patience," whispered someone behind her/She knew the voice, knew that Reek's hand was reaching for her shoulder, and reached up her own hand to touch. And yes, it was there, the soft fur of the gebling hand. For a moment she thought that perhaps she had felt Reek's proximity through the othermind. But no; it could only be her instinct as an assassin, to know when a hand was reaching for her. She could not hope ever to take part in the gebling community.

"Reck," she said.

"We were afraid we'd carry a madwoman with us into Cranning."

"A madwoman should stay here. After all, this is a madhouse."

Reck laughed. "Not really. These geblings came to rebuild Heffiji's house, to keep the learning of humankind safe."

"How did you call them?"

"Oh, the gebling king is known. Not by face or name-no, when they see us here they think we're just two more geblings who were summoned and came. But in the othermind, they know the call of the gebling king."

"Do they come from Cranning?"

"I don't think so. We called, and the nearest geblings heard it and passed on the call. As more and more took it up, it got stronger, until we knew we had enough. We're not Unwyrm. Our own call, alone, could never reach from here to Cranning."

"It's good of you to keep this house alive."

"This house has done the impossible. It has humbled my beloved brother Ruin. All the ideas that Heffiji has saved here. Ruin's made a pest of himself, questioning her, dogging her heels from answer to answer. He's hardly known a human in his life, and for obvious reasons he's never known any of the Wise. Now, though, he's seen what human minds can do at their best."

"If he ever wants to know us at our worst, he has only to take the scepter," said Patience.

"Not likely," said Reck. "We used to pity you humans for your solitude. Well, I pitied you, and he despised you. But now, well, he keeps telling me that solitude is the foundation of true wisdom, that all the brilliant thoughts in this house come as the desperate cry of one human being to another, saying, Know me, live with me in the world of my mind."

"It's a very poetic thought."

"I told him he's lovesick-he's fallen in love with the human race. But you know how it is. I've never hated humans the way he has, and so I'm not quite so impressed when I find out that not all humans are worthless."

Reck walked to the chair on the other side of the fire.

"It's funny," said Patience. "I kept dreaming about houses. Different houses that I needed to take care of.

Sometimes Heffiji's house and sometimes my father's house, and sometimes Heptagon House. Sometimes the house where my mother was killed."

Reck looked thoughtful. There were footsteps on the stair. Ruin padded into the room. Patience noticed at once that he was no longer naked. He wore short trousers.

A step toward accepting human civilization.

"Why did you call me?" he asked.

Reck turned to him, beckoned him closer. There was no one else in the room, but still it was better not to talk too loudly, not when they were saying things that could reveal who they were before they wanted to. "She heard our call," said Reck.

Ruin looked at Patience, as if analyzing a strange new herb he had just noticed on the forest floor. "The need to come fix a very important house? And where it was?"

"I saw paths sometimes, I never knew where from or where to. But always in the distance I could see the house burning, and I knew I had to hurry-"

Reck shook her head. "There was nothing about fire in our call."

"We don't even see images," added Ruin. "The othermind isn't that precise."

But Patience was excited at the thought that she might have experienced the gebling othermind in her own body. E She wouldn't let these small objections disprove it. "I'm not a gebling, and my brain may translate things into images that I can understand. I may be more of a gebling than you think. I remember the othermind. I remember, feeling all the other geblings, and the map of Cranning.

And besides, I have the scepter now. Maybe that lets me feel your call."

Reck stroked her tongue with the long nail of her thumb. "No," she said. "Heptarchs have borne the mindstone before, but they have never heard the call of the king to the people."

Ruin cocked his head, studying Patience's face. "If it; isn't the mindstone, then perhaps Unwyrm's call has i made her more sensitive, so she hears what no human could hear before."

Reck raised a finger. "Remember, though. No Heptarch has ever worn the mindstone so close to Cranning. When the other geblings took up the call, to pass it on, perhaps it grew strong enough for her to hear."

"It was nothing like Unwyrm's call," said Patience.

"That is so clear and powerful."

"Unwyrm is much better at it than we are. Our human nature. It weakens us." Reck sounded a little resentful.

"Do you wish that you had no human parent?"

Reck laughed bitterly. "Do you think the wyrms look any prettier to us? Nobody gave us a choice of ancestors."

"I saw it," said Patience. And she told them of the birth of the first geblings. Ruin made her slow down, tell every detail. He listened with his eyes closed, as if by concentrating on the sound of her choice he could conjure up the memories that the geblings had lost forever when they lost the mindstone of the kings.

When Patience told how the infant Unwyrm killed his mother, Ruin nodded. "Yes, yes," he said. "It wasn't murder. He had to eat the crystal, you see. To know all that she knew."

"We're more discreet now," said Reck. "We're more human. We wait until our parents die naturally. It means we have more life on our own before becoming our parents. But there's nothing unnatural about a child eating its parent's memory, not on Imakulata."

Patience went on with the story, with all she could remember of the life of the first geblings. And ended when the last of the gebling kings to bear this mindstone found the corpse of the last living wyrm. Humans had burned it to death.

"Of course," said Reck. "If it's strange and frightening, kill it. The human credo."

"Humans do what they have to do," said Ruin. Reck grinned wickedly and winked at Patience, as if to say, See how my brother has become a humanophile! "The wyrms did what they had to do," said Ruin. "They knew the humans could and would kill them all, with their machines. What do you do when the enemy is too strong to destroy? You become the enemy."

"Oh, yes, everybody's doing what their genes tell them to do," said Patience.

"If they hadn't chosen to mate with humans," said Reck, "we wouldn't exist. We can hardly condemn the choice they made."

"But you see, Heptarch, we geblings are not what they decided to become," said Ruin. "We're the castoffs of the second generation, the failed experiments, the doomed hybrids, the pitiful grotesques. Dwelfs with no brain. Gaunts with no will. We geblings, we came close.

But not a perfect match. It's the next generation that will be the perfect match, while we are meant to die."

"It's not as if anyone planned it," said Patience. "Its the way life evolved here on Imakulata."

"When you put it that way," said Reck, "it makes you want to bound up to Unwyrm and have his babies, doesn't it?"

"With all due respect to the wisdom of our most ancient forebears," said Ruin, "the gebling king has decided not to go along with the plan."

"We are wyrm enough to feel the life of every other gebling," said Reck, "and human enough to have an individual will to survive. As far as we're concerned, the adaptive process went far enough when it produced us and the gaunts and dwelfs."

"We are the heirs of the wyrms," said Ruin. "Different from humans, but enough like you to live alongside you. The genes of the wyrms are best preserved in us.

Not in the perfect copy that Unwyrm means to make."

"We are allies in this war," said Patience. Impulsively she slid from her chair, sat on the floor before the fire, leaning against Reek's legs, her head resting on the gebling's knee. "I remember living gebling lives. I want you to survive as much as I want human beings to live."

Reck stroked her hair. "I have come to know you as I've known no other human being but one. I would regret it if the only way to stop Unwyrm were to kill you, too."

"But you would do it," said Patience.

"If there be no other way, I will."

"And if there be no other way," said Patience, "I want you to."

She happened, as she said it, to look back to the door.

Angel stood there, his hands on the jambs on either side.

The look on Angel's face said that he had overheard their conversation and that he would not consent to Patience's death.

And for the first time it occurred to Patience that Angel might have no intention of obeying her when it came to the final battle with Unwyrm. Angel had his own plans, and however much he might call her Heptarch, he still thought of her as a child under his tutelage.

A chill swept over Patience as she thought. What if I have to kill you, Angel, in order to do what I must do?

He could not have seen what she thought in the expression of her face, but weak as she was she could not hide the shudder. He saw it. Wordlessly he went back outside, closing the door behind him.

If Reck and Ruin noticed the momentary byplay, they did not comment on it. Perhaps it was because Reck felt her shudder that she asked, "Are you strong enough to go on?"

"What strength does it take?" asked Patience. "I'm sane, I think, and so we can go as soon as the work here is finished."

"Then we can go now. There's no need to wait here for the house to be done. It will be finished whether we're here or not. Besides, we can supervise it, in a general sort of way, without being here at all."

Reck got up.

"Wait," said Patience. "I wanted to ask you. Will.

He was watching at the foot of my bed when I woke up."

Reck shrugged. "Will does what he wants."

"How long had he been there?"

"I don't know. Whenever I've noticed him, he was either coming from or going to your room."

Ruin chuckled. "He's a human male, after all, and you only came out of your boy disguise when I operated on you. Perhaps he likes looking at you. He's been celibate for a long time."

Patience was disconcerted for a moment, to think of Will perhaps desiring her as a woman. Then she realized Ruin was joking. She laughed-

"Don't laugh," said Reck. "I gave up trying to decipher Will's mind long ago, however, so my guess is almost worthless. He does what he wants. But I doubt he thought of having you, Child. I've never seen him want anything for himself. His life is nothing but service."

"A natural slave," said Ruin.

"No one could ever own him," said Reck. "He serves, but only where he thinks service is needed. I think that secretly he believes he's Kristos. Isn't that what the human god is supposed to be? The servant of all?"

"I'm a Skeptic," said Patience. "I don't pay attention to religion."

"Well, like it or not, religion pays attention to you," said Reck. "If you come out of this alive, you'll be lucky if they don't claim you're the Kristos."

"She's as good a choice as anyone," said Ruin.

"Or why not you?" said Patience. "That would stand them on their ear, to have a gebling savior."

Ruin laughed. "Why not? The goblin Kristos."

Patience laughed with him. As she did, she felt the Cranning call strengthen within her, as if it had been holding back, during her long madness, but had now awakened with the sound of her laughter. Lust for Unwyrm burned within her. She called for Sken, and Sken and Will readied the boat that afternoon. And in the morning, Patience herself took River's jar from the mantle piece.

"Wake up," she said to him.

He slowly opened his eyes, then clicked twice and made a kissing sound. The monkey scampered into the room almost at once, and began pumping the bellows frantically. "About time," River said. "About bloody time, what do you think I had them save my head for, to watch while a bunch of goblins redecorate a dullfish house? Get me down to the boat, and you may rest assured that I'll remember this as the worst, the stupidest voyage of my life!"

He scolded all the way down the hill. Only the rocking of the boat in the water stilled him; then he sang the most curious song to the river, a song without words, without even much of a melody. The song of a man returned to his body at last, the ecstasy of once again wearing his own arms and legs, of once again being himself. River restored to the river.

They cast off from Heffiji's ramshackle dock and sailed north on the last of the autumn wind. Patience could feel Unwyrm rejoicing that she was coming to him once again. This month of waiting must have been hard for him, not knowing what it was that kept her, not knowing if she was injured, or had gained strength to resist him, or had been captured. Now she was coming to him once again, and he made her body tremble with the pleasure of it.