“Reason?”
“For the way Sam was, before he left. For the way he is now. Not quite like the rest of us. Maybe a few oddities are needed, from time to time. A few strangenesses. We have to give him time.” She did not specify which him she meant.
So they gave him time. One day Sam went into the office and Africa asked him to fill out the requisitions. The next day it was the production report. Within ten days he was back at the work, not with any appearance of joy, but doing it in between long spells of sitting gazing out the window at nothing.
Sal recovered gradually. She hadn’t seen Maire’s body, and no one had told her how Maire had died, just that the prophets had killed her and she was buried in the courtyard at Cloud. One day, Sal was told, there would be a God Maire Manone in Cloud. They could go there, the whole family. The thought seemed to comfort her, though it did not comfort Sam.
Either Sal or China fixed him lunches, to be sure he ate. Sal’s children were sent to demand stories. Sal thought this would help Sam, but he sent the children away, refusing to open the books. Harribon Kruss, who spent a lot of time with Sal, took Sam fishing for creelies. Through it all, Sam moved like a ghost, like a spirit, an inhabitant of a world the rest of them could not see. China thought of him as a kind of hollow man, going through the motions. There was nothing inside him.
Not long after the fishing expedition, however, which had taken them up through the New Forest—vastly increased in size and awesomeness—and past Cloudbridge—which was enough to make a man catch his breath in wonder—he began to read legends again, starting with the books he himself had made. He kept asking himself what they had meant to the people who wrote them, rather than what they meant to him. It was not long before he noticed what had escaped him before. The legends spoke of victors. The stories told of survivors. Heroes were those who had died valiantly, with immortal words on their tongues, or those still alive when the story was over. Of the myriads slaughtered, of the uncountable maimed and enslaved, of the unnumbered victims, there remained only the poet’s voice or no voice at all. They could not speak for themselves.
• Dern Blass had been curious about the Voorstod Matter, which is what he had called it to himself, ever since Jep Wilm had been abducted. His curiosity had not been in the least satisfied by Ilion Girat, who seemed to know nothing and who, in any case, had been sent back to Ahabar (and internment) soon after Sam, Maire, and Saturday had left. Dern’s curiosity continued unabated after Sam and the children returned, but anyone could see that Sam Girat was in no condition to talk about anything, and humane considerations suggested that Jep and Saturday should be let alone for a time as well.
When Dern considered that enough time had passed for everyone to have settled down and recovered, however, he invited the returnees to join him, Zilia, and Spiggy, and fill them in as to what had happened. The two Phansuri engineers, Theor Close and Betrun Jun, happened to be on one of their periodic visits to Hobbs Land, so Dern asked them to come along. Dern liked both the Phansuris. They spoke his language and understood him better than many on Hobbs Land did, and they, too, were curious about what had happened on Voorstod.
Dern invited some settlement people as well, Sal Girat and Harribon Kruss, China and Africa Wilm. He didn’t want what he thought of as an official debriefing; that would be too formal and constrained. He wanted chat. He wanted colorful details. He knew parts of it were painful, but he wanted to know about all of it, even the painful parts. The twelve of them would fit nicely into one flier, and Dern planned to give the whole thing a pleasant informality by flying up to the new memorial park for a picnic. On his time report he would call it an inspection trip.
Jamice didn’t want to go along because she was getting over a stuffy head she had picked up from some visitor—despite all advances in medicine, there were still bugs busy mutating for the sole purpose of giving humans stuffy heads. Dern Blass appointed her acting director for the day and told her to stay in bed. Acting director, as Jamice well knew, meant less than nothing so long as Tandle Wobster was in the office, so Jamice stayed in her darkened quarters and plugged in her sleep inducer while her colleagues assembled at CM, to find that the CM commissary had packed food and drink enough for twice their number. Dern asked Spiggy to pilot, and they had an uneventful and largely silent flight.
Spiggy was the only one in the group who had seen the radiating mounds from ground level, though Dern had flown over them, just to see what people were talking about. They landed nearby, in a cleared plot convenient to the site, and all wandered into the mound area, marveling at the things.
“I don’t remember the mounds being this high,” said Spiggy. “I recall them coming up to my shoulder, but these are over my head.”
“The way I hear it,” said Dern, “you were kept very busy up here and can be excused for not having paid that close attention to your surroundings.” Dern had no moral qualms about Spiggy’s involvement with the Baidee, but neither did he intend to let Spig escape without joshing.
A number of bodies had been buried near the mounds since the first two from Settlement Three. Three of the oldest settlers had died in Settlements Two and Six. There had been an accident at one of
