Tiadba handed him a soft gray stick to be used on the finely woven shake cloth, then opened the first jar and tipped it out. The bugs—long and shiny black, with five legs on each side and brilliant blue eyes, dropped out and chittered, none the worse for being tightly packed, but eager to spread out, team up, and resume their endless wordplay.
In the two adjacent jars, letterbugs had been arranged in bundles, heads up beneath the pierced lid, twitching short feelers. She dumped them out as well. The more bugs, the longer the words. Tiadba took up her stick and sat beside Jebrassy. As the old bugs pushed together in parallel rows, he was already recording the simplest combinations.
Tiadba reverentially opened the first book.
Two wakes of hard, weary work passed before she would allow them to make any guesses about the text. Jebrassy already knew the name Sangmerwas there—he turned out to be more skilled than Tiadba at transliterating from the old alphabet. But it soon became apparent the book was not just aboutSangmer, it had been written byhim—a new concept for both.
“What would it be like to actually writeabout one’s adventures?” Tiadba wondered as they shook out an edge of their cloths, where their transliterations and thus their translations had been proved wrong. Gray stick dust fell in a fine cloud to the floor.
“First, you have to haveadventures,” Jebrassy observed dryly. “Ancient breeds are too humble to presume.” He lay back with a yawn and a half stretch, inviting seduction.
“Nonsense,” Tiadba said. “I’m a breed, and I’m not humble. Neither are you.”
“No,” Jebrassy admitted. “But I’d be embarrassed to write my life from start to finish. It wouldn’t be interesting—not yet. It wouldn’t be proper.”
“Presumably you’d only write the good parts,” Tiadba mused. “Otherwise, your readers…did I just make up a word?” She looked pleased. “Your readerswould find they had better things to do. Like…”
She lay down beside him, and Jebrassy was gratified to learn he still could distract her from their work—however briefly.
Before the ceil brightened with the fourth wake, they could make out with some clarity the book’s opening paragraphs.
Not quite knowing how to use a book, they had tried starting from both ends, and then, confused, thumbed through to the middle. Gradually they realized that this book was unlike the stories breeds told their children, which always began in the middle, at a perilous moment, and only after more adventures returned to the beginning, to explain what those adventures meant. Breed tales had a puzzlelike quality. This book actually began at the beginning—opening the cover from the right—continued through to the middle, and then concluded at the end, near the left. Once transliterated, the language was not very different, which struck Jebrassy as odd—so much time had passed. “This is supposed to be old. Why do we all tongue with so many of the same words?”
“If it was too strange, we couldn’t read it,” Tiadba said. “And somebody wants us to read. Or, maybe we’ve been held back,” she said. “We’re not natural.” Here, she used a word that usually described a young one’s easy introduction into a sponsoring group. “Let’s read out loud what we’ve got so far. It’s not that hard, actually.”
After a while another doubt struck Jebrassy. “Sangmer’s not a breed,” he said as they fed the bugs from a small bag of dried cutsloop and pars. The bugs sang softly as they chewed. The older bugs apparently did not like pars, for they separated the dried grains and nudged them over the edge of the table.
“So?” Tiadba said. “Maybe he was a Tall One.”
“Some of these new words are strange. I can barely sound them. What’s this one?”
“I think it’s a number. A very big number.”
“And what’s a ‘light-year’?”
“Just read…We’ll figure it out as we go. Read,” she ordered, flicking his small ear with her finger. Jebrassy began again in earnest. Tiadba took up when he faltered, and together they read the preamble—the introductory pages—and assumed, like innocents new from the crèche, that what they read was true, though so much of it was beyond their understanding…mere sounds rising from the pages, but sounds that conveyed a creepy, compelling sort of sense, as if they shared something innately with the author and the people he described.
We traversed a ruined course between broken galaxies in a demented ship—died, revived, and wished to die again—and came home along an even harder track, carrying Earth’s salvation—and when we returned, we found ourselves splintered by our triumph, celebrated in our madness, surrounded and adored by those we had once hated as mortal enemies.
Through this, I achieved power and a small measure of freedom—and then gave it all up for love, and lost that as well. So much for my voyage to the Realm of the Shen, who claimed no human descent, nor any gens relation with the five hundred galaxies.
I tell this now to arouse enthusiasm in a Kalpa that cares little for what lies outside its walls, seeking a second dispensation—permission, if not a commission, to make one last journey, far shorter, far more dangerous, from which little doubt none of us will return.
Jebrassy sucked in his breath. “This is not going to be a happy story,” he said.
“I think you’re right,” Tiadba said.
Jebrassy gently pushed aside a letterbug that had crawled up on the book, and together, fingers intertwined, they turned to the next page.
They found what followed tougher going, especially as the bugs tired of being rearranged and neglected to form useful rows.
Eventually, Jebrassy closed his eyes and napped. Checking to make sure he was asleep, Tiadba jumped ahead through a finger’s width of pages. She thought she could feelthe book—its connections, its shape—and that left to her own devices, she would instinctively open to pages that could almostanswer her questions.
My wife, condensed out of lost principles—
Bright nimbus, eternal shadow—
Ishanaxade—the most willful, intelligent, and powerful female I have ever known—ever reconciled, even made flesh. In our life, she sought perfection through conflict, honing through strife, correction through victory and defeat—Gens Simia’s greatest contribution to the human triumph of the Trillennium, so she claimed, with a strange knowledge I dared not dispute.
And like all Devas, she linked herself to Gens Simia. Even the daughter of a Great Eidolon, unique of her kind, clung to the families of a past—however manufactured they might be, certainly in her case. My parentals, equally irrationally—and like all Menders—claimed descent from Gens Avia, a heritance reaching far back into the Brightness, associations none now understands—but what threads remain are cherished.
In the middle of our wedding, my parentals insisted on collecting the traditional fee for the legendary devouring and swallowing once carried out against us by Gens Simia: the Consumption. Perversely, Ishanaxade reveled in this myth. She paid the fee with enthusiasm, and I soon learned why; when she asserted this dominance in our marital chamber.
This became the cause of our first dispute as bound partners, a foolish argument over the Feast of Parts and Nests. In the midst of all those archaic, ritual distractions, I submitted—and endured, keeping my silence as she nibbled at my “drumstick” and my “wing,” and then began on my “thigh.” I had to subdue all my natural responses to maintain dignity.
When she looked up at me, lips rouged in blood, and while my tissues swiftly regrew, she declared we had a perfect balance—that she would always consume, and I would always provide, and survive to collect my paltry fee.
I think she meant this in jest. However, I soon found it wearisome. Tiadba underlined the last few words with her finger, unsure what any of it meant. She felt an angry unease at things she could not understand. “Did she actually eathim?” she whispered, aghast. She wasn’t sure she wanted Jebrassy to read these parts, and thought about tearing out the page—even gave it a tug, but it was too tough.