Ann Maxwell - The Jaws of Menx

VIP免费
2024-12-24 0 0 932.06KB 127 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Jaws Of Menx
Ann Maxwell
1981
A STRANGE, ASCENDING HOWL ECHOED FROM THE MOUNTAINS ...
Shiya looked at Rhane and said, “They’re coming.”
Standing in the gloom, waiting uneasily to meet a legend, Rhane asked, “I don’t see any restraints.
How do you control them?”
“I don’t.”
Suddenly Rhane wondered if this was what Lor Jastre had meant when he asked Shiya if she had an
unpleasant accident prepared for Rhane. Ifreskans were no myth, they were among the most intelligent,
savage predators on the known planets. With rising anger, he turned on Shiya, reached for her.
“Don’t move!”
Something in her voice penetrated his anger and he stood absolutely still.
“Slowly, very slowly, turn your face toward the rocks. You won’t see anything, but the reskans are
here.”
He did as he was told and at first saw nothing. Then the top of the nearest boulder leaped off and
landed less than a hand’s length from him, and Rhane found himself staring into the eyes of a Menx
reskan, the eyes of death—
I
Rhane examined the slender, long-fingered woman who stood so quietly within the pool of light just
outside his room. It was too late for a casual caller; nor was she dressed in the manner of Siolan women.
“How may I please you?” said Rhane, using the neutral words of Galactic Courtesy.
The woman’s elegant hands moved in a gesture of gratitude and, oddly, regret. When she spoke
aloud, it was in the language of Siol, his native planet.
“First Son’s First Son, I am Meriel. I would share images of the planet Menx.”
Rhane could not control the quick tensing of his body at hearing the name of Menx, deathplace of
two en Jacaroens. He examined the woman more closely, but neither her clothes nor her words revealed
her planet of origin.
“Images?” asked Rhane in unaccented Galactic, refusing the stranger’s offer of his native language.
“Yes.” The woman called Meriel almost smiled. “May I touch your hand, Rhane en Jacaroen, and
share images of Menx?”
The woman’s request was made in Siolan, couched as a petition from a member of the ruled class to
one of the rulers. An en Jacaroen could not refuse the request. Even so, Rhane hesitated, searching his
instincts for any sense of personal danger. His reluctance showed in the slowness with which he extended
his left hand.
Meriel's long, long fingers closed around Rhane’s wrist, and the world exploded into images of the
planet where Rhane’s father and half brother had died. He saw khi in bloom, a silver lake smoking in the
dawn, blue-black boulders holding up the empty sky, and his father’s eyes, yellow-gray, and Cezine’s
just gray. Menx. The sound of children’s laughter and the silence of death.
After the first overwhelming moment, Rhane realized that the images were his own memories of his
half brother’s young laughter and the silky feel of Shiya, alien Shiya, more alluring than any child had a
right to be. Cezine laughing, melting, dying. Dead.
Rhane yanked free of the woman’s grasp. She did not resist, though his roughness must have hurt.
When she smiled, Rhane looked away, not wanting to see such sadness.
“Yes, you are Rhane en Jacaroen. You, too, have learned that Menx is another name for death.”
Meriel’s voice changed. She spoke in perfect High Galactic. “Forgive the intimacy, although I did warn
you.”
Rhane was too shaken to speak or even to examine the ramifications of the woman’s words. With an
effort, he met her glance. Though he was taller than the Concord average, he had to look up slightly. Her
eyes were neither purple nor blue but rather a restless combination of both, like Menx skies.
Suddenly Rhane sensed great age, an intuition that seemed to spread through him from the wrist
Meriel had held. He bowed to her in Siol’s reflexive respect for longevity. Her fingertip touched his
forehead in proper response.
At the instant their flesh met, images passed too rapidly for Rhane to assess, yet somehow he knew
that she had answered all of the questions he was going to ask.
“What—who are you?” asked Rhane, struggling to control his voice.
“I’m a Carifil.” Meriel paused, then almost smiled when Rhane showed no comprehension. “Wait.”
She held up a long-fingered hand. “Think about the word ‘Carifil’ for a moment.”
Rhane thought. At first mere was only an inchoate sense of borrowed memory. He repeated the
word in his mind, trying to focus his thoughts. Knowledge crystallized, prismatic with the colors of a
thousand planets. Carifil. A combination of unusual mental gifts and unflinching discipline. Carifil came
from every planet but owed allegiance to none. Their loyalty was to the ideal of a Concord of Planets, a
Concord whose first article of faith was that each race had a unique, invaluable contribution to make to
the future of intelligent life, a contribution that must be nurtured and protected. That, at least, was the
ideal. The reality was sometimes a planet like Menx ....
“Menx,” said Rhane. “You’re here because I requested use of the Menx Access.”
“Yes.” Meriel paused. “Concord made a mistake with Menx.”
“A mistake? How?”
“That’s what we want to know,” said Meriel dryly. “In two Centrex months, Menx will be
offered—and will refuse—Concord membership. We’ll survive that, naturally. But Menx won’t.”
“Scavengers,” said Rhane, distaste flattening the customary depth of his voice.
“Exactly. Once Menx’s Century of Protection ends”—long fingers hesitated—“the Menx Access will
be destroyed and the planet will be abandoned. Scavengers will come down in lightships. Menx is
temperate, varied and metal-rich. A prize for cultures that require conquest or expansion or simply
change.”
Unconsciously, Rhane moved his head in a curt gesture of rejection. Like the Carifil, he believed that
each planet, each culture, was both pragmatically and philosophically vital to the Concord.
“Why?” demanded Rhane. “Why would Menx refuse to join the Concord?”
“We don’t know.”
“What about their T’aeln mentor? Can’t Lor Jastre influence his Menx wards to accept Concord?”
Elegant fingers moved ambiguously. Meriel’s eyes shifted from blue to near-purple, reminding Rhane
vividly of Menx’s twilight skies.
“The T’aeln mentor is trying to convince the Concord that Menx should be proscribed or at least
prohibited until the source of Menx melting sickness is understood and eradicated. Thus, the question of
Menx’s acceptance or rejection of Concord would not arise,” she said.
Rhane tried not to think of Cezine, his half brother, melting into shapelessness and death, his last
moments lost forever on an abandoned planet. The woman’s lips shaped another sad smile. She spoke in
a language Rhane had never heard, and her fingers rested for an instant on his wrist. Comfort spread
from her touch, radiating through him.
“I know,” she said softly, sadly. “Your half brother melted on Menx.”
“He was alone,” said Rhane. “No en Jacaroen was there to bring his last cup or his death moments
back to Siol. No en Jacaroen has even stood where Cezine died.”
Rhane’s hands flexed in unconscious emotion. When he realized what he was doing, he concealed his
hands in the enormous pockets of his Siolan desert shirt.
“I doubt that anyone but an en Jacaroen could appreciate what Cezine’s unrecorded death means to
the en Jacaroen nation,” Rhane said carefully. “And to Siol. The lack of Cezine’s death moments
threatens our very history. It’s a loose thread that could unravel everything back to the beginning of time.
No en Jacaroen has ever died so ... alone.”
“Yet you waited eight years to return to Menx.”
The implicit question tugged at Rhane’s control. “I explained that to the Council.”
The woman waited.
“By Siolan law, only an adult is qualified to understand and enshrine an en Jacaroen’s death,” said
Rhane, his voice flat. “Normally, I wouldn’t have been considered an adult for seven more Siolan years.
But rumors of Menx reached Siol. We were afraid that Cezine’s deathplace would be lost to us before I
came of age.” Rhane moved with barely restrained impatience. “In more than one hundred thousand
years of civilization, Siolans have learned that even dogma must sometimes bow to necessity. My training
was rushed. I was declared adult. I petitioned for use of the Menx Access. I’m waiting for my answer.”
“The Council refused your request.”
Meriel’s soft voice curled around Rhane like a shroud. His hands jerked out of his pockets.
“They can’t do that! Don’t they understand? I must go! Our history is more necessary than other
planets’ religions. Our en Jacaroens are our—our—” Rhane groped for Galactic words to convey Siolan
necessity.
“Gods?” offered the woman.
“No. We have other gods. The en Jacaroens are Siol’s binding force, men and women whose
ancestors stretch back into unimaginable time. Their deaths are as important to us as their lives, for
without one the other is meaningless, and then we are meaningless, too.”
Rhane looked up slightly, searching the woman’s face for signs of understanding. “Surely the Council
can accept that, even if they can’t understand it.”
“The Council understands that there is only one direct living descendant of the RA Jacaroen. You.
What if you die on Menx?”
“There are five secondary and seventeen tertiary lines of en Jacaroen descent,” said Rhane tightly.
“Shall I recite their names and priorities?”
The woman’s laugh was small, almost wistful. “What of your own moment of death? Who shall carry
it to the en Jacaroen shrine if you die on Menx?”
Rhane had no answer. The woman’s eyes seemed to search beneath his skin, probing for words that
he did not have.
“What if I guarantee that your death moment is not lost?” she asked.
“Impossible,” said Rhane. “The quest is mine. It can’t be shared. I must go alone to Menx.”
“Physically, yes.” The woman’s long fingers seemed to trace enigmas in the lime-green light. “There is
another way. You have an unusual shape of mind. Very promising, though equally difficult.”
Rhane frowned, baffled and uneasy. “Mind? Do you mean—?”
Psi.
Meriel finished Rhane’s thought for him, then withdrew as deftly as she had come. Even so, the
inarticulate, untrained outburst of Rhane’s thought/emotion made her wince with pain in the instant before
she shut him out.
“A very unusual shape of mind,” she repeated. “Doesn’t Siol train psi in its citizens?”
“No.”
“Is psi tabu?”
“No.”
The woman waited, silently asking.
“We don’t believe in psi,” said Rhane curtly.
“Oh.” Her tone was that of a person who had just been told that someone did not believe in gravity.
“Fascinating.” Then, hastily, “Apologies and regrets, Rhane. We didn’t know. There are so many planets,
so many societies, so many beliefs ... so little time since you requested use of the Menx Access. We
meant no offense.”
“There is no offense between citizens of the Concord,” said Rhane, automatically using the correct
phrase from Galactic Courtesy. “We of Siol recognize that beliefs vary among worlds. We’re not
threatened by what other cultures believe.”
“Neither threatened nor instructed,” murmured the woman. “Ah, well, I suppose inflexibility is better
than hostility.” She tilted her head aside as though listening to distant music. Her long fingers moved in
counterpoint to her thoughts, agreeing and disagreeing with equal elegance. “Yes,” she murmured to
herself, “we can only try.”
Rhane shifted his weight, not bothering to conceal his impatience. The doorway hummed slightly,
reminding him that it had been held open for an unusual length of time. With abrupt decision, he stepped
back and gestured the tall woman into his suite. The door hissed shut, closing out the pale-green light of
Siol’s eighth and largest moon.
Silently, Rhane set out the thorn wine and sand bread that Siolan ritual required every guest be
offered. Meriel drank and ate quickly, binding herself to Siolan custom, and binding him as well.
“The Council voted against your request,” said Meriel, holding the thin carved crystal glass that was
now empty, “But the Carifil control the Accesses. If you agree to help us, we’ll see that you get to
Menx.”
“Help you? How?”
“Information,” she said succinctly.
“I doubt that I can tell you anything that the T’aeln don’t know about Menx.”
“The T’aeln don’t seem to know anything useful.”
Though Meriel did not move, Rhane sensed a strand of danger as clearly as though it were wire
drawn about his throat. In the instant that the feeling passed, he realized that the danger did not involve
him. The woman was merely angry with a situation that she was powerless to alter. Her feeling of
impotent rage was one Rhane understood; he had felt it too many times since Cezine had died alone.
“In fact,” said Meriel, continuing as though the moment of anger had never intervened, “the T’aeln
have no interest in the highland tribes and their god myths. Normally that wouldn’t matter—more than
seventy percent of the population of Menx live in the flatlands. But the situation is no longer normal. It’s
imperative that we know more about the highlands.”
“Why? The First and Second Contact teams didn’t think it was necessary to go beyond the beginning
of the mure forest.”
“We thought we would have time, all the time in the Concord, We were wrong. Now we have to
learn why we failed, quickly, before Menx is abandoned. Then perhaps the same mistake won’t be
repeated in the future, and another world won’t have to be left to scavengers.”
The elegant fingers moved restlessly, as though with a life of their own.
“You are one of the few Concord survivors of that planet,” she said, her voice low but clear. “We
need every bit of information you have.”
Rhane thought of the eight years since his father and half brother had died on Menx. The planet had
been far from his mind, deliberately so. By choice and necessity, he had spent the years preparing himself
to be the RA Jacaroen, hereditary alter ego of Siol, and symbolic focus of Siol’s continuity.
And now Menx was here again in the form of an alien woman, asking him to remember all the things
he wanted to forget.
“I don’t know much more about Menx now than when I left eight years ago,” Rhane said. “I’ve
concentrated my studies on my own planet’s history. A history,” he added, “that is quite extensive.”
“You’ve regularly requested Menx data.”
“My teachers have, yes. They knew I’d have to go back for Cezine’s death moments.”
The woman’s fingers touched the empty crystal glass, then closed around it with a precise strength
that was reflected in her voice.
“Tell me what conclusions you’ve reached about Menx.”
“Conclusions?” said Rhane, startled. “None.”
A shadow of amusement crossed Meriel’s face. “Your mind is more complex than you realize, even
though it’s not wholly formed.” Her fingertip rubbed over the rim of the crystal glass, leaving behind a
musical vibration. “Opinions, then. Surely you admit to having them?”
She looked up, probing Rhane with alien eyes.
“Menx is irrational,” Rhane said, dismissing the words even as he spoke them, “but that’s to be
expected of a theocracy.”
“Irrational. How?”
Rhane allowed impatience to creep into his voice. “As a whole, the lowland society is only a few
steps above survival. There’s little margin of fat. Yet they ship nearly one quarter of their crops to the
highlands—and get nothing in return! The caravans come back empty, not even the clinking metal that
passes for local credits to show for their journey.”
“The crops are a tithe to the living gods of Menx.”
“That’s what the Contact teams decided.”
“But?” prodded the woman gently.
“A tithe is like any other form of taxation or tribute. It must be a survival positive or the culture will
collapse. Yet the highlands give no service in return for the lowland tithe. There’s no benefit to the
lowlands that equals their loss of food.”
“None that we know of,” said Meriel.
Rhane’s shoulders moved in a Siolan gesture of impatience. “Anything that’s worth nearly one
quarter of a society’s output is worth Concord attention.”
“The T’aeln mentors disagree. They say the highland gods are legend and superstition, nothing more.”
“Surely it wouldn’t have been difficult to ascertain what actually happened to the lowland ‘tithe.’”
“Odd, isn’t it,” murmured the woman, holding the glass up to the light, “the T’aeln disregard of Menx
cultural dynamics.”
“T’ael is noted for its xenophobia,” said Rhane shortly. “Or perhaps they are simply contemptuous.
They have reason to be. Though Siol is justly proud of its hundred thousand years of en Jacaroen
civilization, that’s less than half of T’ael’s unbroken cultural history.” Abruptly, Rhane’s voice changed.
As an en Jacaroen, he appreciated historical ironies. “The oldest, most arrogant race in the Concord,” he
said, “joined by circumstance to what is probably the youngest and most defensive race—Menx. Not an
easy marriage. I wonder why T’ael didn’t let some other planet guide Menx into Concord. It would have
been better for Menx, at least.”
The sound of Meriel’s finger moving over thin crystal shivered in the room, reminding Rhane that he
was not alone. He heard her soft laughter.
“I’m pleased,” he said coolly, “that I amuse you.”
“Not you, young en Jacaroen. The T’aeln race. They have ninety-seven words for insanity—and
seem to practice all of them.”
Rhane, remembering his brief stay on T’ael, could only agree. “They’re obsessed with insanity. Or is
it sanity that compels them?” He smiled slightly. “Did you know that many of those ninety-seven words
describe physical appearance? They believe that sanity and phenotype are inseparable.”
Crystal hummed gently beneath Meriel’s long fingers, reminding Rhane of the Menx wiris his father
had pursued so relentlessly.
“Over two hundred thousand years of unbroken civilization ... who is to say that the T’aeln are wrong
in their beliefs?” asked Meriel without looking up from the crystal glass. “They’ve made an exhaustive
study of their own genes.”
“Perhaps sanity and phenotype are indeed inseparable,” said Rhane dryly, “but only on T’ael. Their
prejudices about physical appearance make life very uncomfortable for those of less than master T’aeln
phenotype.”
“Like the Menx?”
“T’aeln are impartial—they believe everyone is inferior to them. The people of Menx aren’t
especially despised.”
“Or loved?”
Crystal sang again, softly. Rhane caught himself listening with too much intensity, as though the
vibrations of a ceremonial glass could tell him why Meriel was deftly leading him to talk about a time and
a people he wanted to forget.
“What do you want from me?” he asked with an abruptness that was the prerogative of a future RA
Jacaroen. “All my memories of Menx and T’ael are simulcubed in the Concord files on Centrex.”
“All?”
Crystal trembled with delicate music. Rhane did not want to remember. Shiya had been young, but
Menx years were not the same as Siolan. She was neither child nor woman, rather a fascinating
combination. He did not blame himself for wanting her. He did blame himself for what happened. He
should have known—
“Some of my memories had no historical context,” said Rhane, his voice untroubled in spite of his
inner turmoil.
The woman’s breath came out in a sigh that was echoed by crystal vibrations.
“If you were to go to Menx—”
“You said the Council refused—”
“If you were to go to Menx,” repeated Meriel, overriding Rhane’s objection with a single hooded
glance, “you would need a guide. The girl who helped your father—what was her name?”
“Shiya,” Rhane said tightly.
“Yes. Shiya. She has built a home on Mure Lake.”
Meriel’s eyes watched intently, but Rhane showed nothing of his inner emotions. He left his sleepless
brother by Mure Lake. He also had left Shiya, but she had been asleep, smiling. His young brother was
dead, and Shiya was alive.
“I doubt if Shiya would agree to guide me,” said Rhane evenly. “I understand that the shayl’m are
avoiding all off-world contact now.”
“Yes. Very much yes. Yet there is always a way. Are you familiar with the shayl’m custom of death
debt?” asked Meriel, her voice as neutral as Rhane’s.
Rhane frowned, trying to remember, but all that he could think of was Shiya’s body lit by flames and
then Cezine’s face, light and shadow and sorrow.
“No,” said Rhane. “I don’t remember it.”
“If you leave a child in the care of a shayl’m tribesman, and the child dies, the tribesman owes you a
death debt. Not necessarily money,” said Meriel, accurately assessing Rhane’s distaste. “A service.
Anything you chose. As your half brother died while in the care of—”
“I can find my way to Mure Lake without a guide,” interrupted Rhane coldly. “Besides, eight years
ago Shiya was no more than a child herself. She was not responsible for my brother’s death.”
“By Menx standards,” said Meriel, “Shiya was an adult.”
Rhane knew he could hardly argue that point. “I can find Mure Lake without a guide,” he repeated.
“It’s the planet I’m having trouble getting to, remember?”
Meriel ignored Rhane’s abrupt manner. She turned the glass in her hands, staring at the light thrown
off by carved crystal facets. The glass coruscated, turning faster and faster while her hands faded into
shadow and her voice spoke softly.
“Mure Lake is only the beginning. Cezine died in a highland region known as the Jaws of Menx. The
exact location is called the Fountains of Madness.”
Rhane felt uneasiness crawl like a many-legged insect over his spine. The brilliant crystal turning, the
woman’s alien voice, the room in shadow.
“Impossible,” he whispered.
“The Fountains are just beyond a highland city called Shaylmir,” continued Meriel in her soft,
relentless voice.
“Lies. Why are you lying to me? No alien ever has gone beyond First Pass, much less over the Ghost
Pass into the Jaws of Menx. As for that city—‘Shaylmir’ means ‘Home of the Gods.’ It’s a pious legend
with no more reality than the mythical Menx reskans.”
“You’re very sure,” said Meriel. “Have you been to the Jaws of Menx?”
“Have you?” retorted Rhane.
“No. But I’m certain something is there. Did you know that a Concord medical team went to Menx
to study melting sickness?”
“Yes.”
Rhane’s answer was as harsh as his thoughts of Cezine alone on an alien planet, melting into hideous
death. The woman did not notice Rhane’s grimace; her focus was turned inward and her words were as
unflinching as the lines around her mouth.
“The medical team found that melting sickness was unrelated to the Access locations. Melting
sickness doesn’t come from a lethal blend of Menx and Concord viral life.”
Rhane listened, trying desperately not to remember what he knew about melting sickness ... Cezine.
“Melting sickness is endemic to Menx,” continued Meriel, “but not to the lowland cities. It spreads
down out of the highlands, out of the Jaws.”
“How?” said Rhane. Then, “The caravans.”
“Probably. We can’t be sure. Volunteers from the medical team set out for the Jaws. Three of those
volunteers were Carifil.”
Rhane was drawn out of his own memories by the sharp keening of crystal beneath the woman’s
fingers.
“What did the Carifil discover?”
“Death.” Meriel’s voice thinned, then resumed its normal low tone. “Not right away, of course. Their
skull transceivers worked long enough for us to trace their progress through the Mountains of Light, from
First Pass to the Ghost Pass, and on into the very center of the Jaws. There, one by one, the transceivers
failed. Skull transceivers are powered by the individual’s bioelectric field. If the person dies, so does the
transceiver.”
“Melting sickness?” asked Rhane after a long silence.
“Probably. One of the team was showing symptoms before First Pass. But more important even than
their deaths is the fact that all psi communication with them stopped after the Ghost Pass. The three
Carifil were still alive, but we could not touch their minds.”
Meriel’s unwavering stare made Rhane want to look away.
“You don’t understand, do you?” she asked.
Meriel’s pale fingertips touched Rhane’s shoulder. Desolation moved within him, an emptiness that
began to fill with fear. Her fear. In that instant he knew there was no explanation for the absence of
contact with the three Carifil. Even if they were in a deep coma or had folded in upon themselves in total
mental retreat, some vestige of energy would have remained to tell their psi monitor that they were alive.
Yet there had been nothing. There was neither precedent nor rationale for such a failure of mental
contact.
“Melting sickness?” asked Rhane again.
“Possibly,” said Meriel, but her fingertips told him that she did not believe in such a simple
explanation.
“Then what?”
“We don’t know. We believe,” she said and paused, letting the silent communication of her touch
stress that belief was not fact, “that the answer is in the Jaws of Menx. Many answers are there,
including, perhaps, the answer to Menx’s rejection of Concord.”
Meriel’s touch seemed to burn through Rhane’s thin desert shirt with a heat that owed nothing to
sensuality. Images poured through his mind too quickly to count or comprehend. The flood ended
abruptly, leaving a residue of certainty in Rhane’s mind: melting sickness spread down from the highlands
rather than up from the Accesses; mental contact ended somewhere in the highlands; and Cezine had
died in the very center of the Jaws of Menx.
“Impossible,” whispered Rhane. “How did he get through the Ghost Pass? Even my father gave up
trying to reach the Jaws.”
“Cezine died at the Fountains of Madness,” said Meriel.
Rhane looked through her, absorbing her words. The Jaws of Menx. Melting sickness. Shaylmir.
Cezine. The Fountains of Madness. Death. It could not have been worse. Now he understood why the
Council was so sure that he would die on Menx that it had risked Siol’s wrath by refusing to let him use
the Menx Access.
“How do you know Cezine died in the Jaws?” demanded Rhane after his long silence.
“Lor Jastre told the Council while it was weighing your request.”
“He told the Council, but not me. Why not?”
“Would it have made any difference in your petition?”
“No.” Rhane felt suddenly tired, besieged by circumstances he had never asked for and could not
evade. He pushed aside his feeling of resentment. He had enjoyed the privileges of being an en Jacaroen;
now he must take up the responsibilities. “No,” he repeated. “I still must go. If I can’t retrieve Cezine’s
death, the hundred-thousand-year en Jacaroen rule ends. Siol will have to adjust to the se Jacaroen or
even the gan Jacaroen, and neither clan is noted for stability. There would be war. Do you understand
now?” he asked softly, focusing on the alien woman who had told him of his death sentence. “I must try.
A clan that can’t match lives with deaths isn’t fit to govern itself, much less a world.”
“Does power mean so much to you?” asked Meriel, her eyes indigo in the room’s bland white light.
“No. I’ll rule as my father did—symbolically. Other en Jacaroens will hold practical power.”
“But you’re taking a suicidal risk to ensure your own succession. All that, for a mere symbol?”
“My life against the continuity of Siol’s history. A fair balance.”
“To a Siolan.”
Rhane shrugged. Other races died for their gods or their dreams or their greed or because one moon
eclipsed another. He did not expect to understand the imperatives of other cultures, nor did he expect his
own to be understood.
“Everything is moral somewhere in the universe,” said Rhane, repeating the Concord creed of
tolerance, “and nothing is immoral everywhere.”
Meriel’s lips shaped a thin smile. “In a few maturities that thought won’t comfort you.” Then, before
Rhane could respond, she said, “You’re willing to risk death for Siol’s unbroken history. Are you willing
to change your ideas of reality for Siol?”
“Of course,” said Rhane impatiently.
“Of course.” Meriel’s voice was both sad and gently mocking. “Don’t be so certain, young en
Jacaroen. Most people find death easier than change.”
“I’ll do whatever I must to stand on Cezine’s deathplace,” Rhane said. His voice was emotionless,
utterly certain.
Meriel’s eyes seemed to penetrate as deeply as her touch had. Rhane had a distinct feeling of being
measured on an unknown scale. Then Meriel’s eyes closed and she said a phrase Rhane did not
understand.
“What?” asked Rhane.
“Nothing,” she sighed. “A prayer, a curse, a benediction. Nothing at all.” Her eyes opened clear and
hard and very blue. “Prepare yourself for change, Rhane en Jacaroen. We can’t make a Carifil out of you
in the time we have,” she said grimly, “but we can guarantee that by the time we’re finished, at least one
Siolan will believe in psi.”
Rhane’s yellow eyes narrowed, concealing his reaction. “How will that benefit Siol?”
“You’ll go to Menx as you hoped, but with one difference. I’ll touch your mind, see Menx as you
have seen it, learn what you have learned about Menx.”
“And Cezine?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We’ll teach you how to use your mind. Then I’ll know if you are dying, and if you die ... if you die
I’ll be with you, in your mind. I’ll take your death moments to the en Jacaroen shrine, a sharing such as
Siol has never known in its hundred thousand years. Would that satisfy en Jacaroen necessity?”
“My death shared ...” murmured Rhane. “What about you? Won’t being in my mind when I die affect
you?”
Meriel’s eyes seemed to withdraw. “Yes,” said the woman simply. “I’ll be affected.”
Though Meriel said no more, Rhane sensed that her risk would be almost as great as his, “Is Menx
so important to you?”
“Understanding Menx is.”
“I can’t guarantee that I’ll give you enough information to understand Menx.”
“And I can’t guarantee that mental contact will be possible in the Jaws.”
Rhane hesitated, watching the crystal turn brilliantly within the woman’s hands.
“Are you certain that I have enough psi?” asked Rhane at last.
Meriel almost laughed. “More than enough. More than I have.”
Rhane looked up, startled, but the woman said nothing more.
“Do whatever you have to,” said Rhane abruptly, “but get me to Menx.”
Meriel’s hand moved; crystal spun through the air. Rhane caught the glass expertly. Before he could
say anything, the woman had gone, leaving him alone in a silence punctuated by the sharp cry of crystal
beneath his fingers. He turned the glass over and over, staring down at its brilliant shroud of light,
wondering what he had agreed to.
II
It was nearly sunset when Rhane first saw the Mountains of Light. Range after range they rose,
serrated walls of stone and ice that separated the highlands from the lowlands where Menx cities coiled
like creamy snakes along the humid river margins. The mountaintops burned orange and gold, lines of
flame frozen against an amethyst sky.
Beneath the flyer the land lifted in long, gentle swells that gradually became the foothills of the
Mountains of Light. The countryside was open, but no signs of people showed. Menx was thinly
populated, with most of the people concentrated along lowland rivers. Except for droves of wild loris,
Rhane had seen no signs of life since midday.
Yet he had the uneasy feeling that he was not alone. He put the flyer on hover and looked back
through the transparent canopy. His intent, pale eyes saw neither movement nor a telltale flash of metal.
Behind him there was only empty sky and a rumpled plain of smokegrass motionless beneath the orange
light of a falling sun. Ahead, nothing moved up the long rise into the wooded foothills. He was definitely
alone. Whoever had been following him had given up when he crossed into the tribal lands of the
shayl’m.
Rhane pulled a caplike arrangement of metal and crystal wires onto his head. The psitran was still
new to him, a tool and a concept with which he was not really at ease. He glanced, around once more,
quickly, then settled back into his straps and concentrated on the code that would link him to Meriel.
The contact was immediate and clear. Rhane wondered which of the thousands of Concord planets
Meriel was on, then rejected the thought as irrelevant. He focused his mind on the highly compressed
mental language of the Carifil. With his simple matrix of mindspeech went multilevel images and emotions,
an edited version of the hours since he had stepped into an Access on Siol and emerged an instant later
on Menx.
I was followed until I crossed the Shadow River. Apparently that was the boundary separating
lowland from highland Menx. The flyer still works, but it won’t be long before I’m walking.
There was a pause while Meriel digested Rhane’s sensory impressions, as well as his haunted feeling
of other life watching him and the undercurrent of angry rage of Cezine’s death that the very smells of
Menx provoked in Rhane.
No questions, responded Meriel, but her words were rich with sympathy and concern. Then, almost
at the level of reflex, Guard your back.
The contact dissolved, leaving Rhane alone again. He pulled off the psitran and pressed key points
along its glistening structure. The psitran reshaped itself into an armband that fit snugly beneath the sleeve
of his shirt.
With long, hard fingers, Rhane rubbed through his hair to his scalp, trying to ease the headache that
had not left him since the moment Meriel had begun his education into the demanding intricacies of psi.
Six Centrex weeks had passed since then, or 5.24 Siolan, but he was on Menx now, and must think in
Menx terms. Nearly seven weeks, then. Seven weeks of neuro-learning and intense mental gymnastics to
utilize the psi potential he had inherited from a mother he had never seen.
At least, he assumed it was his mother’s legacy, for his father had lacked even the low-level empathy
common to most races of men. And Cezine ... who knew what Cezine might or might not have become if
he had survived Menx?
Deliberately, Rhane turned his mind away from the unhealed wounds of the past. But it was not as
easy on Menx as it had been on Siol. In Rhane’s mind Menx and Cezine were inextricably mixed,
murderer and murdered.
Rhane forced himself to look ahead to the place where the Mountains of Light leaped out of the
twilight, their peaks fiery with a day that had long since fled the plains. With a weariness only partly due
to the strain of adjusting to an alien planet, Rhane pressed the flyer’s yellow go-bar.
The machine shifted from hover into forward motion with a thin whine. The change in the engine’s
sound told Rhane that the flyer was approaching the end of its range. On Menx, city technology did not
function beyond a certain altitude. Menx gods did not welcome those who came riding on machines.
Rhane chewed on a handful of nuts native to a world that was light-centuries distant from Menx. The
nuts contained nourishment and a mild stimulant. He needed both. The Concord immunization medicine
had reacted badly with his metabolism, costing him two weeks of acute illness and reducing his margin of
safety to nothing. In sixteen Menx days, the Century of Protection would be over. Scavengers would
descend. He had to be off-planet before then.
With subtle shifts of his body, Rhane eased muscles that still ached from the aftermath of exotic
fevers. As he did, he cursed Menx’s omnipresent, irrational religion. A quick shuttle flight into the Jaws
and back would have accomplished his goal with a minimum of risk. But he might as well wish that
Cezine were still alive, that there were no death moments to collect.
The Mountains of Light lifted incandescent heads above the horizon. Rhane’s eyes kept returning to
the jagged lines of upthrust rocks. He had seen many planets, many varieties of geography, but the
Mountains of Light called to him as nothing had but Siol’s endless deserts.
The mountains were first to receive light, last to let it go. Such shining isolation seemed to require a
presence greater than that of mere man. Add to that the violent weather shifts created by the mountains
themselves, and the hallucinations brought on by oxygen deprivation in the high passes, and the result was
the shayl, the mythical living gods of Menx.
That was what the official Concord survey had concluded after First and Second Contact, but Rhane
could not help remembering the first time he had looked at the mountains eight years ago. He had felt as
though they returned his scrutiny, if not his admiration. Even now he felt irritable, ill at ease, as though the
mountains watched him. It was an absurd thought, mingled somehow with the knowledge that Cezine’s
ashes had been blown throughout the ramparts by restless alien winds.
The whine of a warning signal dragged Rhane out of the unfinished past. A quick glance at the control
grid showed him that he had only a few minutes before the flyer would reach its final stop high in the
foothill forest.
Reflexively, Rhane glanced over his shoulder once more. He saw nothing unexpected. He silently
cursed the flyer’s unsophisticated scanning equipment and his own inexperienced psi. With a final,
unconvinced glance over his shoulder, Rhane settled himself for the landing.
Like every other aspect of the flyer, the landing process was automatic and relatively primitive. The
ground skids touched with a jolt that made Rhane appreciate the safety harness that he wore. He
unstrapped quickly, collected his backpack and stepped down the scarred plastic ramp that the flyer had
extruded on landing.
The air was cool and light, revitalizing after the dense wet heat of the lowlands. Rhane stretched,
restoring suppleness to his body after the long flight. Though he appeared to be fully relaxed, his eyes
surveyed the nearby land with the cold attention of one who intends to survive the ambushes of
circumstance and man.
A wind exhaled out of the dense mure forest, causing a thin stirring of gold leaves. The tall upland
摘要：

TheJawsOfMenx AnnMaxwell1981 ASTRANGE,ASCENDINGHOWLECHOEDFROMTHEMOUNTAINS...ShiyalookedatRhaneandsaid,“They’recoming.”Standinginthegloom,waitinguneasilytomeetalegend,Rhaneasked,“Idon’tseeanyrestraints.Howdoyoucontrolthem?”“Idon’t.”SuddenlyRhanewonderedifthiswaswhatLorJastrehadmeantwhenheaskedShiyaif...

展开>> 收起<<
Ann Maxwell - The Jaws of Menx.pdf

共127页,预览26页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：127 页 大小：932.06KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-24

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 127
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注