“Well, comes the messenger,” said Jory. “To tell us what the Arbai have to say even though we already know what they have to say.”
Her matter-of-fact tone made Curvis simmer. He was still thwarted in his anger, not sure he knew why. Except … except that as an Enforcer he was accustomed to being in charge and he was not in charge. Not here. He wasn’t sure who was in charge. Not Jory, which somewhat surprised him. Not Asner.
“Patience,” said Latibor, noting Curvis’s heightened color. “No point in being annoyed.”
“I’m annoyed because if we’re going to get help for Danivon, we ought to get on with it. We Enforcers have a saying: ‘The right help helps, and enough help helps, but help that’s in time helps most.’”
Latibor shook his head, murmuring, “Curvis, I want to help Danivon as much as you do. Even though he’s a stranger to us, Cafferty and I can see in him the child we loved. We want to save him from harm, but there’s no way we can do it ourselves and we know the Arbai won’t.”
“We haven’t asked yet. At least, I haven’t!”
“Oh, yes you have. Believe me, the Arbai are aware of every thought you’ve had since you’ve been here.”
“… And here she is,” Jory said.
The woman held up her scroll and bowed. Jory bowed. They exchanged a few words in a sibilant tongue. Then the woman unrolled the scroll and began reading in the same language.
Cafferty murmured a translation: “The Arbai are aware that you would like to help your friends beyond the wall. The Arbai sympathize with your desires. The Arbai, however, have adopted a philosophical position that prevents the Arbai Device from—”
Curvis blurted, “The Arbai Device! Jory said there was no such thing on Panubi!”
“She really didn’t say that,” Asner corrected him in a hushed voice. “She merely questioned whether such a device could have coexisted with your vaunted diversity. There is such a device, but it is used only on this side of the Great Wall.”
“But….”
“Shhh,” said Cafferty. “Don’t interrupt, Curvis. They’re a patient people. They don’t mind my translating for you, but they’d consider interrupting their messenger to be abysmal bad manners.”
The woman finished her speech, rolled up her scroll, bowed, and departed down the meadow once more.
Cafferty said, “The message concluded thusly: ‘The people of Elsewhere chose to come here, chose to live in the manner of their ancestors, chose their gods, their rites, their way of life and death. We respect their choice and will not interfere with it.’”
Curvis shook his head, baffled.
Jory sighed. “You diplomatically left out the bit about Thrasis, Cafferty. The Arbai are quite annoyed about Thrasis. My argument is, of course, that the women of Thrasis had never chosen anything until I gave them a choice.”
“I don’t understand the problem about helping Danivon,” growled Curvis. “We’re not proposing to change anything in the provinces.”
“It should be very clear, Curvis. They won’t interfere anywhere in Elsewhere.”
“Even to save Danivon’s life?” demanded Curvis.
“Listen to yourself,” exploded Jory, her old voice trembling. “What was it you said to Fringe about Alouez? You were ready to turn Fringe in to the powers-that-be for interfering in Derbeck! What was it you and Danivon said about the child in the basket? Just the way things were, right? Nothing to get upset about. What was that argument in Molock about? What have you said repeatedly about diversity and the status quo? Only days ago you were snarling at Fringe for saying what you just said! What of your Enforcer’s oath? Is all that suddenly nothing?”
“But Danivon is one of us,” he cried angrily. “He’s an Enforcer. He belongs to us.”
“Almost without exception,” said Jory, holding on to Asner’s arm with all her strength, “everyone belongs to someone.”
At the node near the Deep, Lord God Subble Clore lost touch with some of the remote eyes and ears that had gone beyond the wall, but the losses did not distract him from his preoccupation. He was creating new boundaries for himself. Now that the others had gone, there was a lot of space to fill with one invention or another, one environ or another. He needed to center himself, to determine his essential nature. It was time to stop playing games, time to quit hiding behind minor demons and reveal himself, time to begin issuing commandments, time to assert his divinity!
In another node, Orimar Breaze also considered his god-hood. His followers would be called Breazians. He would demand behaviors and customs peculiar to himself. He would make rules, complicated rules, and many of them, that would take a lot of time and trouble and pain to keep. The only way he could know that his people truly loved him would be if they obeyed many onerous rules. There should be many rituals, also, rituals for everything. Much crawling. He liked the idea of crawling. Slithering, even. Also, abstentions from … from anything pleasurable.
He tried to remember what things were pleasurable. What were they? It had been such a long … so many … so … Was it sex? He seemed to remember it was sex. And food. Food had been pleasurable. So, he would make many rules about sex, many rules about food. If the rules were difficult enough, they would be cause for much backsliding, and that, in its turn, would be cause for much reproval! He would force … He would make people … He would punish them until they …
Though he could not remember the taste of food or wine, the feel of love, the joys of human movement, he felt a surge of pure pleasure at the idea of power. He would conduct himself properly as a god, using sweet and seductive words at first; then,
