Green, Sharon - Ram Song

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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
/ would like to thank these people: Thomas Deitz for taking my
scrawk and transforming them into handsome maps and illustrations;
Jean Karl for her editorial advice; Wendy Nesheim for throwing a
lifeline when I took my floundering dip in the genetic pool; Bryan
Webb for everything else.
I would also like to offer my appreciation to this silicon life-
form: Algernon Apple HI for his masterful typing and editing and
especially for his startling and serendipitous revision.
SHARON WEBB
Music, Artisan of Ahbr. AM. The highest degree. One who has
knowledge of all the disciplines of the Composition. After study
of all sectors of the Composition (itius. below), and an arduous
internship, the candidate must complete an F.tude of Synthesis
after which the degree is conferred and the recipient is appointed
to a Conductus. As Conduc-tus, the artisan assumes command of city
or national government and mediates all disputes between
subordinate officials.
MUSIC, Composition of The unifying field in the affairs of
Humankind. In the Composition, Music encompasses the four quartals
of Canon Law, Mathematics, Esthetics, and Medicine, and their
connecting disciplines, the conjuncts of Ethics, Science,
Communication, and Spirit.
Diagram of the Composition
Music, Field Practitioner of Abbr. FP. A
technician trained in a quartal or conjunct. One who practices
under the supervision of a monodist or quartalist.
MUSIC, Monodist of Abbr, MM. One holding a degree with a specialty
in one of the four con-juncts. A monodist studies at the conjunct
and its two adjacent quartals. EX: A MM/SPT studies at the
conjunct of Spirit and draws from the .quarta! of Medicine
knowledge of physical derangements which affect spiritual health
and from the quartal of Esthetics appreciation of the beauty of
the human spirit.
The Trigon of Monody, Spirit
The Shield of Quartal, Medicine
Polytext of Aulos Introduction to the Composition, 2d rev. ed.,
Baryton, Anche, AU
MUSIC, Quartalist of Abbr. QM. One holding a degree with a
specialty in one of the four quartals. A quartaiist studies a
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quartal and its two adjacent conjuncts. EX: A QM/MED studies the
quartal of Medicine and its two conjuncts, thus moderating
treatment of the body with laws drawn from the conjunct of Ethics
and consideration of psyche from the conjunct of Spirit.
PORTO
PLAGAL
' iiifefr/Aa
Prologue
The creatures stood at the far reaches of time without knowing
that they did this. They stood at the jar reaches of time and felt
the universe shudder like a live thing at the approach of another.
Impingement...
The breach in space-time was minute. The rift sealed instantly.
The captured wave of energy from the alien universe was no more
than a ripple growing from an infinitesimal point.
The creatures turned anxious, slanting eyes toward the instruments
of their starship and saw the wave echoed there.
The wave was a stormtide.
Cataclysm...
A tag-end of the universe turned in upon itself. Flesh pulsed into
energy. A billion thoughts spilled free to swirl like flotsam on
an alien tide rushing backward in time.
Chapter 1
The Ram sang in the night of space. As she circled the blue-green
world beneath her hull, she sang of another place and another
time.
She spoke to the stars and the lonely reaches between them,
telling of her origins in metaphors of light, mapping her genesis
with whispered infrasound and ancient cadences.
And as the starship sang, she listened as she had for ten thousand
years for the answer that had never come. Instruments catching the
subtle rhythm of the stars probed and analyzed, storing data
within the Ram's vast memory. Yet there were minute changes that
the ship could not detect. Not until the fabric of space and time
began to warp.
Within the shell of the Ram the lights on the wide control console
flashed a warning.
The man spoke to the heart of the ship. Again the warning. His
eyes met the woman's next to him. "He'll have to be called."
She looked away. "I don't like to."
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"What choice do we have now?"
"I don't like to." She turned from him and a thousand tiny
crystals on her cap danced around her ears with the motion. "He's
on retreat," she added needlessly.
The man raised an eyebrow. "I know that."
She had no choice, not really, but still she hesitated. Foolishly,
she told herself, yet a part of her
I
2 RAM SONG
stood in awe of the man they called Kurt Prime. She looked back at
the console. The man was bending over his instruments now, his
brows beetling. The yellow and amber warning lights reflected
sharply from his cap and she narrowed her eyes.
"The effect is increasing," he said. "You can see that yourself."
She nodded slowly. "We'll do it then." He straightened. "We should
go now." Again the hesitation. She looked up as if she could see
through the ceiling, as if she could see the lake many kilometers
above her reflecting like blue sky on the village beneath. "We'll
have to bring the interface. He'll need it."
The immortal, Kurt Kraus, walked alone through the ancient
subtropical forest ringing Sky Lake. Brushing a thick, dark lock
of hair from his eyes, he looked up at the tangle of branches
silhouetted in the brilliant light of midday.
He had begun to see the woods with new eyes now—not a static
grouping of leaves and bark, but instead a slow-moving war dance,
a frozen battle for supremacy. There a giant mahogany fought with
another for the light from a bogus sun. On a slight rise above him
a young gumbo limbo, springing from the rotting remains of its
parent tree, methodically starved its spindly siblings. But even
as it prospered, the gumbo limbo carried the instrument of its own
death: the dark green leaves and clinging aerial roots of a
strangler fig showed in the young tree's crown—another cycle
beginning.
He moved to the shore of the shallow lake where five brown ducks
broke formation and waggled their tails at his approach. Across
the wind-rimed water ancient liveoaks marked the edge of the Ram's
mortal colony. Once it had been called New Renascence. Now it was
simply Renascence—or The Choice.
At the juncture of far shore and woods stood a small group of
young men and women in their mid-teens. Children really, he
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thought Poignant young
RAM SONG 3
new lives. He watched as one by one they stepped forward. It was
time again for the choice—the Final Decision. He had seen it come
a dozen times during his retreat. Though he could not hear their
voices, though he had heard no voice except his own in the five
years of his isolation, he knew what it was they said.
That one, the girl with slim brown legs straight beneath her short
garment and eyes raised to meet the interrogator—she would choose
to deny immortality. But the next? Not that girl. Her head was
thrown back a trifle too high, her chin thrust out too far. Kurt
imagined that he could see the flash of defiance in her eyes,
though the distance was too great. That one would choose with a
bright smile on her face. She would choose immortality, he
thought, and later, in the privacy of her tiny cabin, she would
weep at her loss.
Each time he viewed the ancient ceremony of Renascence the
memories replayed, and again he wondered how he might have
answered. The question he had never been asked spoke in his mind:
How do you choose, Kurt Kraus? And what if he had denied his
immortality? What if, instead, he had chosen his music, his
creativity?—a blaze of being gone in a flash of time, a tiny sun
gone nova, then dark? A firefly? He tried to peer into the dark
well of distant memories and wondered if the spark of what he
might have been could still be seen after ten thousand years.
He looked across the shallows once again. The ring now. They
placed it on the finger of the first girl as if she were a bride.
He could see her looking at it, and a bit of the wonder crept into
his heart. A simple ring of ancient design, the golden lazy eight
of infinity, broken, vanishing into black, and then the words:
"For Art."
Cycles.
It was strange about memories, he thought. Strange how something
could stay in his mind in tiny protein coils for millennia while
other things could
4 RAM SONG
vanish without a trace. No, not without a trace. Vague thoughts
glided in and out of his mind— incomplete hints that lay just
beyond his grasp. They seemed to be dreamlike echoes of things he
almost knew, things he should know. But just why he should know
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them, he could not say.
At the beginning of his retreat these shadowy, fragmented thoughts
tormented his dreams, and he would waken in the dark to feel the
cold sweat gathering on his body.
Coming to consciousness like a man anesthetized, he tried to
validate himself with the memories that would not come. He had to
remember. Had to. He tossed on his narrow pallet and struggled for
a hold on the cloudy shards of his mind. Then, as surrogate winds
blew over his sweaty body and chilled him, he wrapped himself in a
robe and listened to the faint sounds of lake and woods until at
last he could sleep again.
Now, although the fragments still lodged in his brain, they seemed
less important, less threatening.
The midday winds were beginning, riffling over the silver blue
lake, tossing the leaves of the trees, sending tiny seeds and
pollen on currents of air to renew the forest and the fields. The
wind was cool on his face and pleasant. As it rose, it sang in the
leaves and brought with it another sound. Voices. Closer than they
had come in the five years of his isolation.
He could see them in the distance: five of them cresting a low
hill. They moved purposefully, and when they saw him, they lapsed
into silence.
He felt a wrenching pang of regret. They had come for him. But it
was too soon. Too soon.
One of them, a woman, stepped out of the group toward him. He
stared at her. She seemed familiar, but he could not call her
name.
She held a small bundle in her hands, but made no move to open it
or offer it. She seemed apologetic, and it was obvious to him that
she desperately
RAM SONG 5
wished she were somewhere else. "I'm sorry, Kurt Prime," she said
at last. "There's trouble"
He tried to gather his thoughts. "Trouble?"
"With the Ram. Communications with star drive are garbled. Our
instruments are showing an echo effect, but nothing registers on
sensory."
He stared at her. "Where are we?"
"Off Aulos, the second planet of Cuivre. The mortal colony from
Renascence," she prompted. "Most were musicians."
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When he said nothing, she went on. "There's something else. We've
lost contact with one of our skimmers. We're sending a homing
beam, but we can't read the skimmer's position." She hesitated,
then said, "Alani was on board."
"Alani?" His little girl? Alarm tracked through him. "Does Liss
know?" She had to be told.
A puzzled look came into the woman's eyes. "Who?"
"Liss. Her mother.... My wife."
Her eyes widened, then dropped, and she refused to meet his gaze
again. Instead, she thrust the little bundle toward him.
It opened in his hands. He stared down at the iridescent helmet.
Its crystal tendrils spilling through his fingers glittered as
they moved in the wind. He looked at the little group, first at
one, then another, finally the woman. At her faint nod, he lifted
the cap and put it on.
It was soft and light. Its tens of thousands of tiny crystals,
woven intricately together, covered his hair completely; its
faceted tendrils hung to his shoulders. He felt the helmet mold to
the contours of his head, and as it did, he knew that it was his
alone. He sensed rather than felt it interface with the circuits
hidden beneath his hair at the base of his skull; and as he did,
the flood came and he staggered against its intensity.
Alani. Not a little girl. Not a little girl for ten thousand years
now. And Liss? Gone for a thousand,
6 RAM SONG
left by her own choice on a watery world half a galaxy away. No
more than frozen memories.
He looked evenly at the woman whose name he knew was Kiersta. He
was Kurt Prime now, and in his mind he carried the glittering
memories of the Ram's ten-thousand-year voyage. He nodded sharply.
"I will come at once."
Chapter 2
A crowd of vacationers pushed aboard the skimboat and jostled one
another as they headed up the curving ramps of her tower. The ship
sat high in the water, and the view from her lofty observation
deck was magnificent. Shoreward, the southern coastal city of
Punta D'Arco sprawled at the point of the low peninsula like a
scattered tumble of children's blocks. To either side of the city,
vast stretches of the tall musical reeds, the Anche, that gave the
major country of Aulos its name, tossed in the afternoon wind, but
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their song and the high-pitched cree of a wheeling flock of blue-
backed harks was lost in the distance and the hubbub of the crowd.
The vacationers' bright, loose clothing reflected their festive
attitude. They were about to leave the quartals of civilization
for the mezzo and adventure.
A young couple, obviously newly duet, strolled hand-in-hand toward
the railing. In a burst of exuberance, the man hoisted the girl to
his shoulder, where she steadied herself with one hand around his
neck. "There it is. I can see it."
"No, you can't," he said. "That's just an offshore
RAM SONG 7
island. The mezzo lies that way." He squinted at the brilliant
reflections from the choppy gulf and flung and arm toward the
horizon.
The peninsula pointed like an arrow toward the Plagal, the strip
of land that formed the mezzo between the north polar country of
Anche and the torrid, almost uninhabitable continent that lay
beyond. The girl gave a shiver of excitement. "Is it really as
wild as they say?"
The young man affected a look somewhere between sophistication and
boredom, but it was lost to the girl who stared eagerly toward the
mezzo. "It's safe enough," he said, "as long as you're with me.
Safe enough in the city at any rate, but you wouldn't want to
leave Porto Vielle." He gave her a mischievous look. "The Tatters
might get you."
With a vibrant hum, the skimboat came to life. The girl gave a
breathy little shriek and clutched the young mans neck as the ship
rose on its cushion of air. A moment later it began to accelerate.
They skimmed across the gulf like a great white pebble skipping
across a pond until at last the pale cliffs of the Plagal came
into view.
Spilling from the skimboat like bright flowers, the vacationers
scattered through Porto Vielle. Some, succumbing to the insistent
call of vendor's gongs fashioned of scraps and flotsam, shoppped
for trinkets at the native tam-tams that lined the whitewashed
streets and drove what they took to be hard bargains. Others
strolled along the bluffs overlooking the blue-green waters of the
harbor and watched the kitesingers perform for small coins and the
occasional hoped-for quarter note.
By early evening the lowering sun, Cuivre, set the sea on fire,
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and the tourists gathered in twos and fours in the open-air plenos
by the gulf to dine on fresh fruits and the specialty of the
Plagal, sea harp broiled in its nest of feathery nettles. When the
moon Presto began to show a crescent low in the sky and the first
sign of Allegro gleamed over the hori-
8 RAM SONG
zon, the visitors smiled and nodded to one another. There would be
two moons for Festival tonight.
Porto Vielle perched on the flat plane of the broken and Fissured
Plagal Plateau. It was a city divided by its terrain, its three
sections connected only by the sculpted lace of suspension
bridges. Far below them, the river Largo and its tributary the
Larghetto crept through twisting beds toward the
gulf-
Beyond the city and its seasonal fringe of bright tents and
banners, the Largo ran swifter as it fell from the foothills. Here
open woodlands touched its banks, and far above the river silent
waterfalls tumbled in clouds of mist.
A boy of about eighteen sat leaning against a giant boulder
overgrown with blue-gray moss. Staring with serious dark eyes at
the leaping water, he held a primitive reedflute to his lips and
played a song as liquid as the river at his feet, but he played
without thought. His mind was still in Porto Vielle.
It had taken him nearly half a day to come here from the city. At
first he had walked, but his steps quickened to a lope and then a
run as if Hexen pursued him. Finally he collapsed, his ragged
breath searing in and out of his lungs. After that, he paced
himself with long, lean-legged strides until he reached the
foothills.
The river ran clean and cool here. He stripped off his clothes and
scrubbed away the city's dirt, watching as the cloud of brown
swirled away from his body and ran downstream, knowing that he
would meet it again when he returned to his family and the crowded
tents of the Tattersfield.
As he played his flute, he stared absently at the river. A shoal
of stretchscales broke the surface, bodies gleaming silver in the
sun, but he saw only his mother. He saw her eyes, pale gray and
strained in her gaunt face; he saw her thin hands clutch at her
swollen, knotted belly. Her pains had begun before
RAM SONG
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9
dawn. While his sister kept the smaller girls, Shawm ran for the
midwoman of the stave.
Grudgingly, the old woman consented to come, but not before she
had her breakfast. He waited while she blew the coals of her stove
to a glow and cooked her meal. She ate it slowly, squatting on her
haunches in front of her tent. But still she wasn't done. With
growing impatience he watched as she licked each drop of fat from
her fingers with greedy darts of her tongue. At last, when Cuivre
blazed over the horizon, she rose and followed him to his mother.
Crimping her lips in a pinch of a smile, she unfolded her pouch
and, kneeling at his panting mother's side, drew out her
instruments. They were made of metal touched here and there with
rust or streaks of dried blood, he could not tell which.
She drew out a vicious curving probe and set to work.
Shawm stared down in an agony of fear at the gush of fluid stained
with blood. At his mother's strangled cry, he pulled at the
midwoman's arm. "Stop. You're hurring her."
The midwoman spat at him. "Get out."
"No."
But his mother blinked and pressed his hand. "Go, Shawm."
He stood then, hesitating, staring at his mother. When she nodded
faintly, he turned and strode out of the tent.
Outside, his sister Clarin sat with the two little ones in the
shade of the family jig, her back pressed against the shaft of the
two-wheeled cart. She looked up at him with anxious eyes. He
started to speak, then shrugged and turned away with a catch of
his breath. It seemed to him that if he stayed, the city would
smother him with its press of people and its dirt.
He turned toward the distant mountains where he had been born and
began to walk. Soon he was running.
10
RAM SONG
Cuivre was low in the sky now. It was time to go back to Porto
Vielle.
Kneeling, he gathered the small bundle of gray-brown mimeset
tubers that he had dug from the riverbank. The scentsinger would
pay well for them, and they needed the money. He thought of a new
child in the crowded tent and scowled. Another belly that would
need filling. The twisting stab of resentment grew. Maybe it would
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die. Maybe it would be dead. The intensity of the hope washed over
him, and he felt both defensive and ashamed.
It was .time to go back to the city, yet he hesitated, drawn in
the other direction. Only a day's walk more and he could be in the
high mountains. He could be home again to stay. He wouldn't leave
again, he told himself. He'd never again follow his people to
towns and cities scattered over the Plagal; he was sick of
wandering. But what was the use? It was time to go back to Porto
Vielle.
Not moving, he knelt in the crumbly soil at the river's edge. A
tiny jailor carrying its mate on its back crept along the ground
near Shawm's knee. He stared at the insects. The male had trapped
the female in a curving mass of upturned legs that had grown
together now. She thrust stalklike eyes through the trap. He could
see her swollen egg sac. For the rest of her life she would
produce young, shedding them like dust through the bars of her
cell. His fingers itched to free her, to tear apart the flimsy,
chitinous prison, but he knew if he did she would die. "Maybe
you'd be better off," he said aloud.
The answering voice was as shocking as a splash of icy mountain
water—a girl's voice speaking a barrage of gibberish.
Startled, Shawm scrambled to his feet, but there was no one there.
Nothing but woods and water and a tiny cloud of golden darts
hovering over a bank of sweetset.
Another string of phrases. This time he caught a meaning from one
of them: "Calling. Calling."
He whirled around; he saw no one.
RAM SONG
11
"Answer, please," the voice insisted.
Feeling foolish and a little uneasy he said, "Who's there?"
There was a pause. Then the girl's voice came back, accented, but
intelligible. "Good thanks. I was afraid you wouldn't." Then, "Say
something else so I can connect your dialect."
He stared in what he took to be the direction of the voice. "Where
are you?"
"Oh ... sorry. There."
Suddenly Shawm was looking into the blue-green eyes of the most
beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was sitting in the shade of
a bitterbole by the riverbank, sitting gracefully on what seemed
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摘要：

AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments/wouldliketothankthesepeople:ThomasDeitzfortakingmyscrawkandtransformingthemintohandsomemapsandillustrations;JeanKarlforhereditorialadvice;WendyNesheimforthrowingalifelinewhenItookmyflounderingdipinthegeneticpool;BryanWebbforeverythingelse.Iwouldalsoliketooffermyappreci...

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