Stableford, Brian - The Pipes Of Pan

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BRIAN STABLEFORD - The pipes of Pan

BRIAN STABLEFORD

THE PIPES OF PAN

In her dream Wendy was a pretty little girl living wild in a magical wood where

it never rained and never got cold. She lived on sweet berries of many colors,

which always tasted wonderful, and all she wanted or needed was to be happy.

There were other girls living wild in the dream-wood but they all avoided one

another, because they had no need of company. They had lived there, untroubled,

for a long time -- far longer than Wendy could remember.

Then, in the dream, the others came: the shadow-men with horns on their brows

and shaggy legs. They played strange music on sets of pipes which looked as if

they had been made from reeds -- but Wendy knew, without knowing how she knew or

what sense there was in it, that those pipes had been fashioned out of the blood

and bones of something just like her, and that the music they played was the

breath of her soul.

After the shadow-men came, the dream became steadily more nightmarish, and

living wild ceased to be innocently joyful. After the shadow-men came, life was

all hiding with a fearful, fluttering heart, knowing that if ever she were found

she would have to run and run and run, without any hope of escape -- but

wherever she hid, she could always hear the music of the pipes.

When she woke up in a cold sweat, she wondered whether the dreams her parents

had were as terrible, or as easy to understand. Somehow, she doubted it.

There was a sharp rat-a-tat on her bedroom door. "Time to get up, Beauty."

Mother didn't bother coming in to check that Wendy responded. Wendy always

responded. She was a good girl.

She climbed out of bed, took off her night-dress, and went to sit at the

dressing-table, to look at herself in the mirror. It had become part of her

morning ritual, now that her awakenings were indeed awakenings. She blinked to

clear the sleep from her eyes, shivering slightly as an image left over from the

dream flashed briefly and threateningly in the depths of her emergent

consciousness.

Wendy didn't know how long she had been dreaming. The dreams had begun before

she developed the sense of time which would have allowed her to make the

calculation. Perhaps she had always dreamed, just as she had always got up in

the morning in response to the summoning rat-a-tat, but she had only recently

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BRIAN STABLEFORD - The pipes of Pan

come by the ability to remember her dreams. On the other hand, perhaps the

beginning of her dreams had been the end of her innocence.

She often wondered how she had managed not to give herself away in the first few

months, after she first began to remember her dreams but before she attained her

present level of waking self-control, but any anomalies in her behavior must

have been written off to the randomizing factor. Her parents were always telling

her how lucky she was to be thirteen, and now she was in a position to agree

with them. At thirteen, it was entirely appropriate to be a little bit

inquisitive and more than a little bit odd. It was even possible to get away

with being too clever by half, as long as she didn't overdo it.

It was difficult to be sure, because she didn't dare interrogate the house's

systems too explicitly, but she had figured out that she must have been thirteen

for about thirty years, in mind and body alike. She was thirteen in her blood

and her bones, but not in the privacy of her head.

Inside, where it counted, she had now been unthirteen for at least four months.

If it would only stay inside, she thought, I might keep it a secret forever. But

it won't. It isn't. It's coming out. Every day that passes is one day closer to

the moment of truth.

She stared into the mirror, searching the lines of her face for signs of

maturity. She was sure that her face looked thinner, her eyes more serious, her

hair less blonde. All of that might be mostly imagination, she knew, but there

was no doubt about the other things. She was half an inch taller, and her

breasts were getting larger. It was only a matter of time before that sort of

thing attracted attention, and as soon as it was noticed the truth would be

manifest. Measurements couldn't lie. As soon as they were moved to measure her,

her parents would know the horrid truth.

Their baby was growing up.

"Did you sleep well, dear?" Mother said, as Wendy took her seat at the

breakfast-table. It wasn't a trick question; it was just part of the routine. It

wasn't even a matter of pretending, although her parents certainly did their

fair share of that. It was just a way of starting the day off. Such rituals were

part and parcel of what they thought of as everyday life. Parents had their

innate programming too.

"Yes thank you," she replied, meekly. "What flavor manna would you like today?"

"Coconut and strawberry please." Wendy smiled as she spoke, and Mother smiled

back. Mother was smiling because Wendy was smiling. Wendy was supposed to be

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BRIAN STABLEFORD - The pipes of Pan

smiling because she was a smiley child, but in fact she was smiling because

saying "strawberry and coconut" was an authentic and honest choice, an exercise

of freedom which would pass as an expected manifestation of the randomizing

factor.

"I'm afraid I can't take you out this morning, Lovely," Father said, while

Mother punched out the order. "We have to wait in for the house-doctor. The

waterworks still aren't right."

"If you ask me," Mother said, "the real problem's the water table. The taproots

are doing their best but they're having to go down too far. The system's fine

just so long as we get some good old-fashioned rain once in a while, but every

time there's a dry spell the whole estate suffers. We ought to call a meeting

and put some pressure on the landscape engineers. Fixing a water table shouldn't

be too much trouble in this day and age."

"There's nothing wrong with the water table, dear," Father said, patiently.

"It's just that the neighbors have the same indwelling systems that we have.

There's a congenital weakness in the root-system; in dry weather the

cell-terminal conduits in the phloem tend to get gummed up. It ought to be easy

enough to fix -- a little elementary somatic engineering, probably no more than

a single-gene augment in the phloem -- but you know what doctors are like; they

never want to go for the cheap and cheerful cure if they can sell you something

more complicated."

"What's phloem?" Wendy asked. She could ask as many questions as she liked, to a

moderately high level of sophistication. That was a great blessing. She was glad

she wasn't an eight-year-old, reliant on passive observation and a restricted

vocabulary. At least a thirteen-year-old had the right equipment for thinking

all set up.

"It's a kind of plant tissue," Father informed her, ignoring the tight-lipped

look Mother was giving him because he'd contradicted her. "It's sort of

equivalent to your veins, except of course that plants have sap instead of

blood."

Wendy nodded, but contrived to look as if she hadn't really understood the

answer.

"I'll set the encyclopedia up on the system," Father said. "You can read all

about it while I'm talking to the house-doctor."

"She doesn't want to spend the morning reading what the encyclopedia has to say

about phloem," Mother said, peevishly. "She needs to get out into the fresh

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