Pump Six and Other Stories(33)

The sharp clicking of his mother's tongue woke him, a gentle tap tap from the vicinity of his doorway.

He had been dreaming of Keli. Dreaming that he stood again in front of the Pasho libraries and stared up at Milliner's statue. Dreaming that he ran his fingers along the hook knife hackings at its base, that he stared up at the founder of the Pasho order, carved in marble mid-escape. Milliner fled with one hand forward, Pasho's open eye on his palm. His other arm clutched a pile of torn pages, falling free. His head was turned back, his eyes fastened on the destruction he fled.

Raphel's mother clicked her tongue again. Raphel opened his eyes in time to see her withdraw behind the wool hanging curtain. Her marriage bangles clicked on her wrists as she let the curtain fall, turning the room back to dimness. Fully awake, he noticed other morning sounds: the virile crowing of roosters challenging one another across the village, children shouting beyond the high slit windows in the haci's walls. Sunlight pierced into the room in tiny shafts, illuminating dust motes stirred by his mother's presence.

In the Pasho towers, he had woken each day with the dawn. His cell had faced east and filled early with the sterile light. He would wake and go to his window and stare into the bright dawn, letting it bathe him as it glinted across the mirror stillness of the thousand lakes. The sharp hard light reflected like mica splashes and turned the land molten as far as he could see, blinding him and obscuring green Keli's bridges.

Soon after, his master would come to his door, a soft Keli man, fed well on the fish of Keli's lakes, his tattoos well set into the comfortable folds of his flesh. "Come desert Pasho," he would laugh. "Let us see what destruction Gawar's grandson has in store for us this morning. How many books will you tear through today?" To him, all men had been the same. Jai or Keli made no difference. Only study mattered.

"Raphel?" his mother whispered. "Pasho?" Her tongue clicked again from behind the curtain, a faint probing of his room's silence.

Raphel sat up slowly. "You don't need to call me 'Pasho,' Mother. I am still your son."

Her voice came back, muffled. "That may be. But your skin is covered with knowledge and everyone calls me Bia' Pasho."

"But I am the same."

His mother didn't answer.

Raphel kicked off his blankets and scratched at his dry skin. It was peeling in the aridity. He shivered. It had been cold in the night. He had forgotten that about the basin, that its nights, even in the dry season could be so cold. In Keli the nights were hot, even when the sun went down. Humid warmth saturated everything. Sometimes he would lie in his bed and think he could squeeze the air with his fists and warm water would run down his arms. He scratched again, wistful for the smooth suppleness of skin always caressed with liquid warmth. The air in the basin seemed to be an enemy, attacking him much as his grandfather had the day before.

Raphel began pulling his robes on, covering the sharp knifelike script of his attainment marks. It was an old language, more basic than the Jai, more direct in its impulses, less careful of offense, an impatient tongue, for lightning-quick, impulsive people. He began tying the stays of his robes, quickly hiding the learning hooks covering his body: The One Hundred Books, The Rituals of Arrival and Release, The Scientific Principles, The Rituals of Cleansing, Essentials of the Body, Bio Logic, The Rituals of Quaran, Chemic Knowledge, Plant and Animal Observation, Matica, Physical Matica, Principles of Construction, Earth Studies; Core Tech: Paper, Ink, Steel, Plastic, Plague, Production Line, Projectiles, Fertilizer, Soap . . . ten thousand chanted stanzas, interlinked and attached to symbol rhyme to aid their stability. Knowledge locked in verse from a time when books were hard to make and harder to protect, from a time when Pasho wandered like dandelion seeds between far-flung villages, holding up their palms in greeting to show the Open Eye and beg their free movement, dispensing their knowledge as far as their seed-pod minds could carry them, hoping to set down roots, and begin schools where they would seed new Pasho further afield.

"Raphel?"

His mother's voice broke his thoughts. Hurriedly, Raphel finished dressing and pushed the curtain aside.

His mother gasped. "Raphel! Your scarf !" She stumbled away from him desperate to keep Quaran.

Raphel ducked back into his room. He found his electrostatic scarf and wrapped it over his face. When he emerged again, his mother stood at the far side of their common room. She pointed at a cup of smoke tea sitting three meters from their hearth. Safe distance. Raphel skirted the hearth and squatted with his tea. A sweet bean porridge sat cooled beside it. The fire coals were already floating in a bucket of gray water, black and cold.

"How long have you been awake?" he asked.

"Hours. You slept late. You must have been tired."

Raphel sipped the cool smoke tea. "It's dark in the room. I'm used to the sun waking me."

His mother began sweeping the hard-packed floor with a straw broom, carefully avoiding coming too close. Raphel watched her cleaning process. Nine more days of ritual isolation.

When his grandfather had burned Keli, he and his army had camped at the village edge to keep Quaran. They had sung songs of blood and fire across the intervening distance, but did not enter the village until Quaran had passed. The Jai kept to the old ways. It had been absurd for him to think the old man would welcome him with open arms.

His mother swept dust out the door, then turned. Her tongue clicked uncertainly. Finally she said, "There is a girl I would like you to meet. She's from a very good family."