Majipoor Chronicles

Tisana swirled the dark heavy wine in the flask. 'In Falkynkip, where I grew up, the weather is also hot and dry. Nevertheless, we don't drop everything and go cavorting the moment the rain comes.'

'In Falkynkip,' Freylis said, 'people take everything for granted. A Skandar with eleven arms wouldn't excite them. If the Pontifex came to town and did handstands in the plaza it wouldn't draw a crowd.'

'Oh? You've been there?'

'Once, when I was a girl. My father was thinking of going into ranching. But he didn't have the temperament for it, and after a year or so we went back to Til- omon. He never stopped talking about the Falkynkip people, though, how slow and stolid and deliberate they are.'

'And am I like that too?' Tisana asked, a little mischievously.

'You're — well — extremely stable.'

'Then why am I so worried about tomorrow?' The smaller woman knelt before Tisana and took both her hands in hers. 'You have nothing to worry about,' she said gently.

'The unknown is always frightening.'

'It's only a test, Tisana!'

'The last test. What if I bungle it? What if I reveal some terrible flaw of character that shows me absolutely unfit to be a speaker?'

'What if you do?' Freylis asked.

'Why, then I've wasted seven years. Then I creep back to Falkynkip like a fool, without a trade, without skills, and I spend the rest of my life pushing slops on somebody's farm.'

Freylis said, 'If the Testing shows that you're not fit to be a speaker, you have to be philosophical about it. We can't let incompetents loose in people's mind, you know. Besides, you're not unfit to be a speaker, and the Testing isn't going to be any problem for you, and I don't understand why you're so worked up about it.'

'Because I have no clue to what it will be like.'

'Why, they'll probably do a speaking with you. They'll give you the wine and they'll look in your mind and they'll see that you're strong and wise and good, and they'll bring you out of it and the Superior will give you a hug and tell you you've passed, and that'll be all.'

'Are you sure? Do you know?'

'It's a reasonable guess, isn't it?'

Tisana shrugged. 'I've heard other guesses. That they do something to you that brings you face to face with the worst thing you've ever done. Or the thing that most frightens you in all the world. Or the thing that you most fear other people will find out about you. Haven't you heard those stories?'

'Yes.'

'If this were the day before your Testing, wouldn't you be a little edgy, then?'

'They're only stories, Tisana. Nobody knows what the Testing is really like, except those who've passed it.'

'And those who've failed?'

'Do you know that anyone has failed?'

'Why — I assume—'

Freylis smiled. 'I suspect they weed out the failures long before they get to be consummates. Long before they get to be pledgeds, even.' She arose and began to toy with the vials of herbs on Tisana's workbench. 'Once you're a speaker, will you go back to Falkynkip?'

'I think so.'

'You like it there that much?'

'It's my home.'

'It's such a big world, Tisana. You could go to Ni-moya, or Piliplok, or stay over here in Alhanroel, live on Castle Mount, even—'

'Falkynkip will suit me,' said Tisana. 'I like the dusty roads. I like the dry brown hills. I haven't seen them in seven years. And they need speakers in Falkynkip. They don't in the great cities. Everybody wants to be a speaker in Ni-moya or Stee, right? I'd rather have Falkynkip.'

Slyly Freylis asked. 'Do you have a lover waiting there?'

Tisana snorted. 'Not likely! After seven years?'

'I had one in Til-omon. We were going to marry and build a boat and sail all the way around Zimroel, take three or four years doing it, and then maybe go up the river to Ni-moya and settle there and open a shop in the Gossamer Galleria.'

That startled Tisana. In all the time she had known Freylis, they had never spoken of these things.

'What happened?'

Quietly Freylis said, 'I had a sending that told me I should become a dream-speaker. I asked him how he felt about that. I wasn't even sure I would do it, you know, but I wanted to hear what he thought, and the moment I told him I saw the answer, because he looked stunned and amazed and a little angry, as if my becoming a dream-speaker would interfere with his plans. Which of course it would. He said I should give him a day to two to mull it over. That was the last I saw of him. A friend of his told me that that very night he had a sending telling him to go to Pidruid, and he went in the morning, and later on he married an old sweetheart he ran into up there, and I suppose they're still talking about building a boat and sailing it around Zimroel. And I obeyed my sending and did my pilgrimage and came here, and here I am, and next month I'll be a consummate and if all goes well next year I'll be a full-fledged speaker. And I'll go to Ni-moya and set up my speaking in the Grand Bazaar.'

'Poor Freylis!'

'You don't have to feel sorry for me, Tisana. I'm better off for what happened. It only hurt for a little while. He was worthless, and I'd have found it out sooner or later, and either way I'd have ended up apart from him, except this way I'll be a dream-speaker and render service to the Divine, and the other way I'd have been nobody useful at all. Do you see?'

'I see.'

'And I didn't really need to be anybody's wife.'

'Nor I,' said Tisana. She sniffed her batch of new wine and approved it and began to clean off her workbench, fussily capping the vials and arranging them in a precise order. Freylis was so kind, she thought, so gentle, so tender, so understanding. The womanly virtues. Tisana could find none of those traits in herself. If anything, her soul was more like what she imagined a man's to be, thick, rough, heavy, strong, capable of withstanding all sorts of stress but not very pliant and certainly insensitive to nuance and matters of delicacy. Men were not really like that, Tisana knew, any more than women were invariably models of subtlety and perception, but yet there was a certain crude truth to the notion, and Tisana had always believed herself to be too big. too robust, too foursquare, to be truly feminine. Whereas Freylis, small and delicate and volatile, quicksilver soul and hummingbird mind, seemed to her to be almost of a different species. And Freylis, Tisana thought, would be a superb dream-speaker, intuitively penetrating the minds of those who came to her for interpretations and telling them, in the way most useful to them, what they most needed to know. The Lady of the Isle and the King of Dreams, when in their various ways they visited the minds of sleepers, often spoke cryptically and mystfyingly; it was the speaker's task to serve as interlocutor between those awesome Powers and the billions of people of the world, deciphering and interpreting and guiding. There was terrifying responsibility in that. A speaker could shape or reshape a person's life. Freylis would do well at it: she knew exactly where to be stern and where to be flippant and where consolation and warmth were needed. How had she learned those things? Through engagement with life, no doubt of it, through experience with sorrow and disappointment and failure and defeat. Even without knowing many details of Freylis' past, Tisana could see in the slender woman's cool gray eyes the look of costly knowledge, and it was that knowledge, more than any tricks and techniques she would learn in the chapter-house, that would equip her for her chosen profession. Tisana had grave doubts of her own vocation for dream-speaking, for she had managed to miss all the passionate turmoil that shaped the Freylises of the world. Her life had been too placid, too easy, too — what had Freylis said? — stable. A Falkynkip sort of life, up with the sun, out to the chores, eat and work and play and go to sleep well fed and well tired out. No tempests, no upheavals, no high ambitions that led to great downfalls. No real pain, and so how could she truly understand the sufferings of those who suffered? Tisana thought of Freylis and her treacherous lover, betraying her on an instant's notice because her half-formed plans did not align neatly with his; and then she thought of her own little barnyard romances, so light, so casual, mere companionship, two people mindlessly coming together for a while and just as mindlessly parting, no anguish, no torment. Even when she made love, which was supposed to be the ultimate communion, it was a simple trivial business, a grappling of healthy strapping bodies, an easy joining, a little thrashing and pumping, gasps and moans, a quick shudder of pleasure, then release and parting. Nothing more. Somehow Tisana had slid through life unscarred, untouched, undeflected. How, then, could she be of value to others? Their confusions and conflicts would be meaningless to her. And, she saw, maybe that was what she feared about the Testing: that they would finally look into her soul and see how unfit she was to be a speaker because she was so uncomplicated and innocent, that they would uncover her deception at last. How ironic that she was worried now because she had lived a worry-free life! Her hands began to tremble. She held them up and stared at them: peasant hands, big stupid coarse thick-fingered hands, quivering as though on drawstrings. Freylis, seeing the gesture, pulled Tisana's hands down and gripped them with her own, barely able to span them with her frail and tiny fingers. 'Relax,' she whispered fiercely. 'There's nothing to fret about!'

Tisana nodded. 'What time is it?'

'Time for you to be with your novices and me to be making my observances.'

'Yes. Yes. All right, let's be about it.'

'I'll see you later. At dinner. And I'll keep dream-vigil with you tonight, all right?'

'Yes,' Tisana said. 'I'd like that very much.'

They left the cell. Tisana hastened outside, across the courtyard to the assembly-room where a dozen novices waited for her. There was no trace now of the rain: the harsh desert sun had boiled away every drop. At midday even the lizards were hiding. As she approached the far side of the cloister, a senior tutor emerged, Vandune, a Piliplokki woman nearly as old as the Superior. Tisana smiled at her and went on; but the tutor halted and called back to her, 'Is tomorrow your day?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'Have they told you who'll be giving you your Testing?'

'They've told me nothing,' said Tisana. 'They've left me guessing about the whole thing.'

'As it should be,' Vandune said. 'Uncertainty is good for the soul.'

'Easy enough for you to say,' Tisana muttered, as Vandune trudged away. She wondered if she herself would ever be so cheerily heartless to candidates for the