“You looked at the demon city, didn’t you?” the priest pressed. “You looked even though you were warned not to, and it started to steal something from you.”
Littlefeet nodded. “Yes. Steal what be me.” He paused. “Steal names. My name. Your name. All names.”
Memory was coming back, not as a flood but in bits and pieces, and there were whole experiences that were quite firm, from his first night of manhood to scouting the rock, but while the faces were there the names did not come back, and when he heard the names, it was as if he’d never heard them before even if they were constantly repeated, and as soon as the person left his sight, the name vanished from his mind.
“What did you see up there? What did you see that made you upset?” the priest pressed, knowing that Littlefeet had several times made references to intangible threats.
“Shapes. Dancing Fam’lies.” He brought up his right hand and started tracing with his index finger. “Dance here and here and here and here, till you get here. Then you dance and dance backward to here.”
“Who is dancing? Or what?”
“Us. We dance. Fam’lies dance. Fam’lies dance now. Everybody know but the dancers…”
There was something here, the priest knew, enough to discuss it with both the male and female elders of the Family, but what did it mean? Littlefeet had given up a part of himself but he had gained some kind of information, perhaps insight, that the Family as a whole did not have. This, too, had happened before, but just what wisdom had been imparted wasn’t clear.
“The other thing he speaks about often is lines. Pretty lines,” the priest told the gathering of elders. “Lines in the air that crisscross. I had him try drawing what he meant, and he came up with this.” Taking a stick, Father Alex wiped a dirt area clear and then drew a set of intersecting lines.
“A grid, that is what it was called,” said Perry, the oldest and therefore senior of the guard. He might have been as old as the priest, and looked even older. “We still use it, in a sense, to know where things are from season to season.”
“These are on the ground?” Mother Paulista asked, confused.
“No, no, Mother! In our heads. We learn the grids as you learn the scriptures, and teach it to our next generations. It does not even resemble a grid at this point, but we use these kinds of dirt drawings to show where we go the next time, and the next, and where the water is, and so on. Our scouts use this knowledge to find the best places.”
“I don’t think he means on the ground,” Father Alex agreed. “I think he means that he saw some kind of grid that went up to the sky as well as from horizon to horizon. It’s not there now, or, most likely, we can’t see it, but he is convinced of its reality.”
“Stuff and nonsense! Fever delirium, that’s all it is!” Paulista huffed.
“Perhaps not. Perhaps the demons use this grid somehow, and if you are high enough up there it becomes visible because you are looking at it from a different, downward angle. It could be any number of things, but the fact that he saw a grid, I think, is real. Others have reported this in times past, although not quite so clearly. The question is, what is it for and does it threaten us?”
“It can’t!” argued not only Mother Paulista but many others, including Perry. “It surely would have been there since the Great Fall, and it has meant nothing to us or our survival even if it has been there all this time!”
Father Alex was not so sanguine. All the Families in a dance, a whirling dance to here, then they stop and dance backward…
According to a grid? A dance was a structured thing, whether done for pleasure or in ritual. It had to be. Something Perry said about the grid they memorized and passed on…
If it was random, why did they need a grid? And if it wasn’t…?
He decided for now not to press that point, but he was beginning to see what Littlefeet was getting at. We’re all afraid of becoming pets, of becoming animals wandering the garden, just another bunch of animals in the demon groves. What if they already were? What if they were and didn’t even realize it?
The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became, and the more frightening. This was suddenly so obvious, since it was so much of a ritualistic pattern in how and when and where they moved and camped, that it was incredible that nobody had seen it until now. Others had climbed, and others had also experienced the kind of terrible insight that Littlefeet had, but not that kind of information.
Why not?
Littlefeet had learned it at the cost of forgetting all names, even his own. What if that wasn’t an effect of fever? Even Mother Paulista, who was always so keen to ascribe every bad thing to demonic plots and faithlessness among the people, had dismissed this as nonsense and the ravings of fever.
Had the ability of most of the people to follow this logic somehow been stolen from them in the night? Was there information, memory, certain processes that they were blind to?
That was a discomforting thought, but also a dead end. If you had been somehow influenced not to think of certain things or to see certain things, then how would you ever know?
And, if that were so, why did he see it now? He hadn’t been up there.
Not in twenty years, anyway…
EIGHT
Riding the Keel
The daily briefing for all who had been stuck for so long aboard the Odysseus was getting to be a real yawner, but as long as they were in the project and somebody else was paying the bill, attendance was mandatory.
This particular briefing, however, had some excitement attached to it, and they sat there, waiting, with slight but palpable anticipation that, perhaps, at last they were going to move.
A packet boat had come through during the previous watch, and among the things it carried were sealed and encoded courier pouches for the Odysseus. It was known that the old captain of the ship, along with the Orthodox priest and the old diva, had been huddled for a couple of hours looking over whatever had come in, and that the robotic systems were testing and preparing visuals.
The group was pretty well divided over the length of the wait. A number, led by the scientists Takamura and van der Voort, thought that this was as far as they were going to get, and that it was something of a wild goose chase. The mercenaries were content either to go or to continue to train both themselves and the civilians in what was to come. It was pretty well known that Colonel N’Gana believed that it would be far better for most of the others if this did turn out to be a wild goose chase, since he didn’t give them much hope of surviving any conditions that they would probably face were they to get a “go!”
And then there were Krill and Socolov, both of whom were bored to tears and just wanted something to happen before they died of old age. Krill felt certain that she’d swept the ship as thoroughly as technology made possible, and that nothing important was getting back to Commander Park. She was well aware of the tiny robotic bugs that kept crawling all over, but there were ways to limit them, or jam them completely if need be. Others had not been so kind about their discovery, but amateurs always believed that if you paid enough money and demanded that you juggle three planets and breathe pure carbon monoxide, then you should be able to do it all while singing your old college fight song.