JO CLAYTON

BORROWED LIGHT

1. The awakening

"you are not my first death," Tsoylan sang to she who lay on the sleeping
platform, her breath barely stirring the air, a stranger odd and angular, paler
even than the Great Mother. When the Name came into his head, evoking Her image
and the Fear, he cupped his stubby hands over his eyes in the ritual see-me-not
gesture, forgetting the dark spectacles and knocking them away.

When his heart flutters stopped, he groped about the tile floor until he found
them and fumbled them back on. Even with the dark lenses, his eyes had hurt
since the beginning of this vigil, the tear ducts suppurating from the stress of
sunlight like yellow acid streaming into the room. The healers said that was
what the alien needed. Like the sowy, they said, she drinks from the sun and
darkness starves her.

"You are not my first death," he sang.

"Nor the first whose rushing breath Becomes a shout,

I won't. I will not go...."

Her eyes opened and Tsoylan stopped his song. "Kara Stavokal," he said, speaking
slowly to make sure she understood. "Do not be afraid. It is fate that wounded
you, not we."

He watched her head turn, her hands fumble about as if by touching the padded
platform and the sheet pulled over her, she could call her soul from wherever it
had fled. Her eyes gained focus, her groping stopped, and she began trying out
her body much as a Talq would test a machine, moving part against part,
evaluating the results. When she was satisfied, she swung her legs over the edge
of the platform and stood up.

She swayed, steadied herself. Her breathing slowed.

The healers had dressed her in a white shift that came to her knees and left her
arms bare. The hair on those arms was so fine he wouldn't have known it was
there if he hadn't felt it on her when he was helping move her from the litter
to the platform. The hair on her head was coatset, a color like that of
unstained wood; it was cut close to her head, fitting like a brown cap.

She took a step and he tensed. It was like a tree trying to walk. He didn't say
anything, just continued to watch her, amazed at her balance; it seemed to him
that she teetered on the edge of a bruising fall over and over again. His own
plump, malleable body with its low center of gravity and four legs to hold it
off the floor seemed so much more logical and stable.

She crossed to the sleeping room's barred window and stood there a while,
staring out at the walled garden with its fountain and grass and a tall narrow
naqon tree and two round beds of flowers. This was where the city mothers housed
those who came from the Island to talk trade with them. Though she showed no
sign that she recognized anything she saw, the healers told him she'd been here
before.

She came back and sat on the platform. There was a light film of moisture over
her face and her hands were trembling with weariness, but her eyes were hard as
jewels and there were edges to her gaze.

He took a handkerchief from his sleeve, dabbed beneath the dark lenses at the
matter gathering in the corners of his eyes. "What do you remember, Kara
Stavokal?"

"Nothing. Confusion. Pain. Salt water slapping at my face, salt burning in my
eyes, in my mouth. Holding onto something that tore at my hands..." She looked
at them, rubbed her thumbs across her fingertips. "How long have I been here?"

"Four days," he said. "The healers kept you sleeping until they knew your
injuries were not life-threatening.""What happened?"

"The island we gave you was volcanic in its nature and returned without warning
to its origins. Its fate crossed with the fate of a storm that also turned
without warning. These things happen as God wills them."

Her mouth compressed into a thin line and the bones of her face grew more
prominent. If he could have felt her anger, it would have been fierce as the
storm that blew her here. He sucked himself in to make a smaller target and his
hands moved toward his eyes before he could stop them, the spectacles falling to
the tiles once again.

He heard her sigh, heard the sounds she made as she shifted position on the
platform. "Don't shrink," she said, "it wasn't your doing. You know my name.
Will you tell me yours?"

He kept his palms pressed against his face, but he answered her as calmly as he
could. "I am Tsoylan, a puman of the Talqoya. I am your guide."

"Guide or guard?"

"Perhaps both."

"Hm. I'll leave that for now. What about the others in the compound?"

"Wingah Island spat you forth. It swallowed the others."

"All dead?"

"So I was told."

He heard a faint gasp, but when she spoke, her voice was crisp and detached. "I
appreciate what you and your healers have done, but I need to talk to my own
people, to let them know that I'm alive. This city was given a Corn system by
the Company that sent me here. If you could arrange for me to visit that Com, I
would be most grateful."

Tsoylan forced his hands down from his eyes and blinked at her through
thickening tears. "That is not possible, Kara Stavokal."

"Then bring someone here who can take me."

"You don't understand. You desecrated the Qawanya, the Holy Ground where the
mothers lay their bones."

"Desecrated seems harsh for being stormtossed somewhere."

He shivered. "Intent is irrelevant, it is the act that matters. The pumans who
carried you from there have already surrendered their lives to God. She requires
yours also." He straightened, intoned, "So says the Great Mother." Then he
collapsed in a shaking mass on the floor until the Fear evoked by the Name
passed out of him.

When his knees would work again and he pushed himself up, he saw a pale hand
holding out his spectacles. Taking them with gratitude, he eased them into place
over his eyes, tugged out the handkerchief, wiped away the exudate from the
ducts, then settled himself more comfortably in the cradle of his legs.

"Explain what you meant by guide," she said.

"I am to lead you to accept your fate," he said. "It is our custom that the
dying guide the dying to a gentle death.""then you...."

"I am redundant," he said. "It is my duty to step aside and allow another to
stand in my tracks."

"When? If it doesn't trouble you to talk about it."

"When Muya returns to the House of Homitis." He watched her intently to see if
she understood.

"Homitis," she said after a moment. "That's the small digger which looks like a
miniature Talq?"

"Yes. Our Past Readers have put together a theory that says when God created the
Talqoya, She took Flesh that already was and gave it Soul."

"And Homitis is also one of the band of constellations that make your Year
Cycle. Your moon Muya passes through them."

"That is so."

She looked past him, her will turned inward for the moment. Her pink-brown mouth
moved slightly and he thought, she's naming the signs. She knew Talq-speak well,
even had the correct variant for addressing a puman. She knew more than he
expected, but knew-not much that was common understanding. It would be another
thing to talk about while they waited for her angers and her grief to pass off.

"Six months," she said. "Redundant. What is that?"

"My komat was drawn in this year's Terminal lottery. Do you understand what the
pumans are?"

He waited with the patience he'd learned over the years while she considered her
answer and he knew it when she decided on candor. This pleased him because it
meant there was enough personhood between them to let him truly be her guide.

"Those who do not -- or cannot -- breed," she said.

"Cannot is the correct interpretation, Kara Stavokal. Fate speaks through the
Creche lottery and puts the mark of puman on all but a few of the children
there. Those with the mark eat different food, live different lives and the
capacity to recreate ourselves withers within us. I do not wish to talk further
about this. It will evoke images that are distressing to me."

"Then we'll talk about Pikaya Tsewa. Tell me about your city."

Laughter bubbled in him, surprising him. Even in such a short time and over such
a gap of strangeness, he was coming to like her. "You can't escape, Kara
Stavokal. And you won't be permitted to reach the Com."

"Tell me anyway. Talk to me about the things that please you. I need to
understand you. That is my nature."

He was not deceived by her graceful acquiescence. She was determined to avoid
her fate and did not yet understand the futility of her desire. He unlocked his
knees and lowered his belly to the floor and closed his eyes. "There is a subtle
beauty about the tunnels of Pikaya Tsewa...."

2. The struggle

When he woke the next morning, Kara Stavokal was gone. He sighed and went into
the washing place, used the water brush to scour away the exuviae from his skin,
pulling the folds taut and scrubbing the accumulations from the cracks and
crannies of his being. Between death vigils he let himself go, sleeping too much
and never bathing; it was a way of being angry, the only way he could afford.

During each vigil the Wardens of the Dead provided his clothing. He dressed
carefully, making sure every fold was in place. The worn uniform had been washed
so many times it was nearly as soft as the fur on his pivan, the pet which he
had to give away when his komat was drawn. His belly sagged and his hands
stilled as he remembered the feel of Enang's gentle quivering against his palms
when he lay on the resting frame and listened to the musicbox, relaxing after a
long day at the creche.

He was in the kitchen, taking a tray of kwibread smallcakes from the oven when
the Wardens brought Kara Stavokal back. He heard her scream with rage and curse
in her angular homespeak, heard the boom that told him she must have kicked the
slide that covered the door. He tumbled the small cakes from their shallow holes
and was pleased because he'd got them the exact golden brown that brought the
most flavor from the coarsely ground meal. He cut them open and left pats of
kapir butter to melt on the halves while he sliced up fat tasty wakasha
mushrooms to fry in more of the butter.

While the mushrooms were draining on the fiber pad, he took a pitcher of cold
soshil juice into the parlor, set it on the table where he'd put a chair and a
resting frame, went back into the kitchen and brought out the two plates.

She still hadn't appeared, but the long window was open. He sighed, pushed his
spectacles closer to his eyes and went out.

Two gwussies were diving at the naqon tree, their flight skins closed when they
darted downward, popping out to catch the air and pull them up again before they
crashed into the tangle of branches. The larger one, the mother, screamed at
Tsoylan as he edged closer. She stooped and struck with her talons, missing
because he let his knees collapse and she sailed past where he had been. He
crawled hastily away and she returned to her attacks on the tree.

He collected a handful of small stones from the nearest flower bed, retreated to
the window. "Kara Stavokal, even if you could get over the wall, there's no
place to go. You might as well come inside and eat your breakfast. Let the
gwussies rest."

There was silence for a moment, then the tree rustled, the woman dropped to the
grass and ran for the window as he threw the stones to keep the gwussies off.
She stalked past him without a word.

He followed her in and found her standing beside the table pouring soshil juice
into her glass. He too said nothing, established himself in the resting frame
and began eating the food he'd cooked.

As the days passed, she kept turning and twisting, trying every way she could
think of to run from her fate. When none of these came to anything, she went
from rage to weeping spells with huge, shuddery sobs tearing through her body
and back to rage again. Both were reactions to being helpless, caught in a trap
from which there was no escape. He understood that and hovered round the edges
of the house, letting her have her anger and her grief -- and her silences.

"You are not my first death," he sang to himself in whispers so she wouldn't
hear.

"Nor the first whose rushing breath

Becomes a shout,

I won't. I will not go...."

She retreated into her sleeping room, locked the door and wouldn't come out even
to eat. He worried about her, but left her alone though his keypac would open
all locks in this house. At this stage, it was better for her to work things out
herself. If she could.

On the third day she emerged and came in the kitchen to find him. She was thin
and drawn, but quieter. "Thank you, Tsoylan," she said. "What are you making
this morning? I hope it's as good as it was the last time. I'm rather hungry."

3. Talking

KARA STAVOKAL sat on the low sill of the open window, her head against the
glass. The air from outside was cool and pleasant as the sun sank near the
horizon. Shadows gathered like cobwebs inside the room. Tsoylan sat in the
deepest of them, untroubled enough to take his dark spectacles off; they were on
the floor beside him. His head was sunk into the hollows of his arm shoulders
and his belly was comfortable on the tiles.She turned her head to look at him.
"How old are you?"

He scratched at the whiskers on his chin and wondered why she wanted to know. "I
have thirty-seven years."

"Hm. How long do Talqoya usually live?"

"You mean am I going sooner than I ought? What is there to say? Pumans die when
their komats are drawn, some sooner, some later."

She was silent a while, her face drawn together in way he'd learned meant
concentration rather than anger. He shrank himself smaller, anxiety surging
through him because he thought she was going to ask things that would wake the
Fear.

"If I were a puman, how old would you think me?"

His body fluids flowed back to his perimeters and his muscles softened with
relief. After a moment's intense thought, he said, "Were I to assess energy
levels, ease of movement, general assurance and ignore those physical elements
that I cannot assess because I do not know your kind, I would see you as a high
function puman of experience, a builder perhaps, or a breeder of luminaria. And
you will have been doing your work long enough to have acquired the habit of
authority, yet not long enough to have surrendered to the Lot. Considering all
this, if you were puman I would say you had perhaps forty years."

She laughed then, a sound that rang happily in his ears and made his body expand
yet more. "I like your way with words," she said. "Were you a poet or a maker of
tales?"

"I was a teacher, Kara Stavokal. In a creche. An eminently replaceable object."

"Hm. I have difficulty thinking of you as replaceable, Tsoylan, but I see this
drift bothers you, so I'll leave it. Your estimate amuses me, I'll tell you why
in a moment. My people have a way of postponing age as you would an appointment
with someone you don't want to meet, but in the end, of course, that annoying
stranger is still there waiting for you. I wish I could say all that time made
dying easier, but it doesn't. The longer our lives are, the more greedily we
cling to them. I've had about three hundred years, Tsoylan. Ten years ago, I
received my last treatment and knew that every day that passed was one gone from
the total left to me. Now you Talqoya are going to steal the rest of them." She
clicked her tongue. "Nu, that was mean-spirited of me. Forget I said it if you
will. The reason I was amused-- my first treatment stabilized me at thirty. Add
ten to that and you see how close you came."

"And what is it you've done all those many years?"

She brushed brown hair off a face softened by memory. When she spoke, her voice
was barely louder than a whisper. He had to strain to hear her. "I was learning.
You were a teacher, I'm a learner." It was several moments before she spoke
again. "I remember a world called Haddalice. It was my first time in the field.
I was a busy little..." she hesitated, searching for a Talq equivalent, "...a
busy pivan gathering tidbits for my team leader. It was his last chance with the
Company. He'd made too many mistakes, ruined the insert before this and cost
them a market. And I could see him making more, but he was arrogant in his
desperation and wouldn't listen to me. It got him killed. Hm. Odd how my working
life is bracketed by death. I hadn't thought of that till now. The Haddalicci
are...you don't have the word; they are born in water but leave it for the land.
They create tapestries like dreams drawn from the mists in which they spend
their lives and they make songs that are almost as intricate. They are a jealous
folk and quick to take offense." She turned her head to smile at him. "With the
Haddalicci too a man's intent has no weight because they believe no man can know
another's heart and men do lie. My team leader gave offense again and again
until he exhausted their patience. And one morning we found him face down in a
muddy pool of water, drowned very dead."

"How many worlds have you seen, Kara Stavokal?"

"Fifty, sixty, something like that. I lost count after a while."

It was dark outside now. He could smell the pollen off the grass beyond the
walls and the sticky, sweet perfume of the naqon tree as it opened out its
nightpods. It was time to think of supper, but he didn't feel like moving. "I've
never been anywhere but Pikaya Tsewa."

"Do you regret that?"

"I don't think so. I want life to be predictable. It's difficult for me to
understand how you can relish such chaos and find pleasure in not knowing where
to put your feet. I wonder if it's because you take such chances simply moving."

She laughed again and again he shivered with pleasure. "Four foot talking to two
foot?"

"It could be so. You continually astonish me with your agility."

"Hm." She got to her feet, stepped over the sill and stood in the garden gazing
up at the stars. "My children are out there somewhere looking at another sky. I
wonder what they're thinking."

Tsoylan covered his smile with a hand though she couldn't see him from where she
stood. She was strange and sometimes frightening, but at the same time so very
much like the pumans he'd guided before he came to her. There was the same anger
and grief and they too worked at him, hunting for the keys to his sympathy, his
help, wanting him to make it not so. She was pushing a little too hard, but he
thought it was because being separated from her people had left her off-balance.
"Your children?" he said.

"Two girls and a boy. Nu, that was a long time ago." She returned to the window,
stood leaning against the hinge side, still watching the stars with a hunger he
could almost feel. "It is one of the better consequences of extended life that
your children can become your friends. I miss them." She sighed and turned her
back on the stars. "I haven't been here long enough to learn this, do you have
rites to give dismissal to your dead?"

"The mothers do, I can't talk about those, the pumans and the fathers, no. There
are the guides, but that's a private thing."

"Would it be forbidden?"

"I don't know. The dead are taken away and we don't talk about them after that."
He found that he was troubled by this when he said it to her, though he'd never
thought about it when it simply happened, even when he knew it would happen to
him. He brushed his unease away and concentrated on her. This was part of her
new attack, he was sure of that, but more subtle than her opening move. What was
she aiming at?

"We have a Passvic when somebody dies," she said. "It's a celebration of the
dead person. A remembrance. People who knew him come, his children come, his kin
and connections. They sit together all night telling stories about him, what he
was like, some of the things they did together, the happy times and sad times
they shared with him. There's food and drink and music, though each Passvic is a
little different because people are different."

"Why are you telling me this?"

She ran her fingers through her hair. Muya's light touched a single white strand
and made it glow until she moved her head again. "Vengeance," she said, her
voice quiet and a little sad. "I was thinking of lying to you, Tsoylan. I
changed my mind. I don't like feeling dirty."

"Vengeance? I don't understand."

"The word or what I mean by it?"

"The word I know. Why did you use it?"

"You like the idea of the Passvic, don't you? Never mind answering. I see the
anger that hides behind your calm eyes. You'd like to be recognized and
remembered when your life ends, but I think such a rite would be forbidden if
the mothers learned of it. It is the quietness of the end and the silence that
comes afterward that lets the Terminal Lot keep happening. You vanish and your
place closes over like a healing wound -and at the same time the other pumans
are reminded subtly, silently, that they too are replaceable. Your word. Your
truth. The idea of the Passvic would fall like a tiny drop into a still, deep
pool. But even a drop makes ripples and the ripples spread. Time passes. Quite
likely a lot of time. And one day the pumans refuse to be replaceable." She
crossed the room and knelt beside him, touched one of his hands. "May I?" At his
nod, she lifted it, bent her head over it. "Vengeance," she breathed against his
palm, then straightened up and folded his fingers over the warm spot. "I give it
to you. Do with it what you want."

4. Acceptance

When he was sure the time had come, when she seemed quiet and resigned, he fixed
a last breakfast for her, though she didn't know it was the last -nothing
special, but one she'd liked when he made it for her before. Kwibread smallcakes
oozing with kapir butter, wakasha mushrooms and a cold pitcher of soshil juice.
He brought in the plate of fried wakasha slices and as he leaned across her arm
to set it down, he slipped the needle knife into the place at the back of her
skull. The healers told him she'd be dead before she knew it, if he got it
right. And he did.

He lifted her from the table and took her into the garden, laid her out on the
grass, her face in the sunlight. While the gwussies circled overhead, screaming
at him, he washed her body, dressed her in a clean white shift, folded her hands
above her ribs. When he was done, he fetched a glass of soshil juice and
crouched in the shade of the naqon tree. "I accept your poisoned gift, Kara
Stavokal. Let this be the first Passvic in Pikaya Tsewa." He drank from the
glass. In the beginning the soshil was bitter on his tongue, but it soon grew
sweeter.

"You are not my last death," he sang.

"Nor the last whose rushing breath

Becomes a shout,

I won't. I will not go...."