THE DRAMATURGES OF YAN Read online

  Externals, to his lasting regret, marked the limit of his assimilation. He had to go back to the enclave now and then, though he kept his visits to a minimum. He could breathe Yannish air, drink Yannish water, take a Yannish mistress whose loveliness gripped his throat every time he looked at her—but this was not an Earthsider’s world, made over to fit his race, and he sometimes had to step out of it, to buy essential foods or medicines, and endure the cold-shouldering, the scornful stares, the whispering behind his back…

  It wasn’t only his living with Shyalee which so angered the inhabitants of the enclave, he was sure of that. They treated Alice Ming civilly enough, and her situation was like this, although the sexes were reversed. She, however, was always among the first to dial the library when a new batch of Earthside tapes was delivered, and collected groups of apes to watch them with her lover. His name was Rayvor, but he preferred to be known as Harry.

  Demonstrating the proper status of her species, Marc summarised sourly. Whereas I’ve “gone native”. I’m a traitor.

  What, though, was the point of being on a planet with intelligent aliens, unless one got to close quarters and tried one’s hardest to understand? And that meant more than just a tumble with a native bed-mate now and then… an experiment he was sure almost every adult in the enclave must have tried by now, with the possible exception of old Dr Lem. Even that arrogant slob Warden Chevsky! And he actually boasted of not speaking a word of Yannish!

  Doesn’t it matter to them that the Mutine Mandala was standing tall and fine before the crudities of Stonehenge or the Pyramids were cobbled together by barbarians?

  Presumably not. Yet this above all was what fascinated him about his adopted home: the sense that something wonderful had been accomplished, with a kind of finality about it, leaving behind the indelible impression that the Yanfolk were—were fulfilled. He had struggled often and often to convey to Shyalee and her friends his view of the relative merits of what Earthsiders and Yanfolk had done, trying to make them see why the blind random hunting which had carried humanity out among the stars was not automatically superior, because it could never lead to a satisfying conclusion. How could anyone foresee an end to the wanderings of mankind? Like the purposeless sprawl of a climbing plant humans had crept out from sun to sun, with no promise of an ultimate achievement to crown the scheme, such as he was sure he sensed on Yan. He believed beyond the possibility of contradiction that here some colossal task—logically the one described in the eleven books of the Mutine Epics—had been conceived, and undertaken, and concluded. Now, their struggles behind them, the Yanfolk were at peace.

  Shyalee would not even listen to that kind of talk any longer. Nor would her friends. One could hardly say they had rebelled, because no members of the older generation had ever put more substantial obstacles in their path than an occasional caustic comment, but they had turned their backs on their own way of life. They thought everything Earthly was marvellous, preferring syntholon to webweave, alien tapes to their own infinitely subtle traditional culture-forms. Instead of accompanying him to Goydel’s soirées, which he regarded as a tremendous honour because notoriously Goydel was the current arbiter of taste in Prell, he knew she would far rather have gone to Alice Ming’s, sipped distasteful Earthside liquors with feigned enjoyment, gabbled the evening away in small-talk, as much in the foreign tongue as in her own.

  Yes. She puts up with me. That’s all our relationship amounts to.

  Despair darkened his mind for a moment. Then, suddenly, he realised that—as though repenting of her short-tempered behaviour when they left Goydel’s—Shyalee had stopped by the door of their home and was waiting for him. He hurried the last few yards and caught her hand, forcing a smile as he opened the door for her. It was not locked. Theft and burglary were contrary to Yannish custom, which meant they were literally unthinkable.

  Together they stepped over the threshold into the atrium, where at the far end of an oval pool a fountain pumped ceaselessly among nenuphar-leaves. There was something a little Roman and something a little Japanese about this commonplace Yannish house where he had settled; instead of interior walls it had screens which could be moved aside in warm weather so that the paved centre court became an extension of the three small plain rooms with their sparse furniture and perfectly proportioned ornaments. The fountain had been an idea of his own, which had been copied widely by Shyalee’s friends. As he had realised later, it was too vigorous to accord with authentic Yannish attitudes, because it repeated over and over the same unaltering pattern, wasting effort to an utterly predictable end. But before he recognised how out of keeping it was Shyalee had become too attached to it for him to have it removed.

  “Do you want,” Shyalee said, beginning in her own tongue and ending in his, “a nightcap?”

  Rage gripped him for an instant: how often must I tell you that I hate this ape’s habit of mixing Yannish and human words? But he restrained himself, and managed to nod, even though speech was for the moment beyond him. She vanished into the house, and he continued to his favourite stone seat overlooking the pond. As he went, he tugged from his baldric-slung pouch his copy of Book Nine of the Mutine Epics; currently he was revising his translation of it, and had taken it to Goydel’s tonight just in case his original…

  No, what’s the use of fooling myself? Not “in case my original poem was so well received they asked for more.” In case my courage failed me at the last moment…

  Staring at the nenuphars, noting how the spring warmth had brought the buds forward, he murmured under his breath a snatch of the passage he was having most trouble with.

  “By water standing fast, forging decision,

  Mastering fluid-flow, murky creation

  Carving a softness—”

  He broke off. It wouldn’t do. It simply would not do. It was lame, like a spavined horse driven under too heavy a load. The notion of “carving softness” lacked the paradoxical quality of the original, because carving suggested knives or chisels, hard sharp edges, whereas the root associations of the Yannish words implied that the tool was softer than the material being worked—like water eroding a rock. Yet “eroding” had overtones of long patient geological processes, while the Yannish verse made it clear that what happened took place instantly!

  “Oh, hell,” he said aloud. Was there any point in going on? Was there any point in trying to sort out the hard core of historicity in these baffling Epics? It went without saying that behind these actual solid mementoes, the menhirs, the mandalas, the wats, behind these fanciful descriptions of sunken continents and shattered moons, there must lie objective truth. But how far towards which end of the scale?

  The orthodox view was the rational one; about ten thousand years ago, it declared, there had been a catastrophe—perhaps Yan’s moon had been dragged from orbit by the intrusion into this system of another body of comparable size, or possibly there had been a collision. The moon had been barely outside the local Roche’s Limit. The event had either smashed it into fragments, or else tugged it close enough to the planet for it to pull itself apart. Either way, it had thereupon become the Ring.

  This fantastic calamity, according to the rational explanation, had shattered not only the moon but the confidence of the Yanfolk. From a vaulting, ambitious people with considerable scientific knowledge, they had declined into a beaten one, half of whose world was inaccessible to them thanks to the rain of meteorites from the Ring, and most of whose technical achievements had been left to go to ruin while they contented themselves with staying alive.

  To console themselves for their retreat to a semi-primitive existence, to excuse their decadence, they invented a myth about a vanished Golden Age which it was futile to try and imitate because the greatest and most powerful individuals of the species, the geniuses—half poets, half scientists—whom humans referred to as “dramaturges”, had been destroyed.

  But according to that myth the dramaturges themselves had caused the breakup of the moon. In some sens
e, possibly this might be true. Some dangerous experiment—unlikely to have been the release of fusion-energy because Yannish “science” had taken a different route, but perhaps interference with molecular binding-forces—could have torn the satellite apart.

  Yet no one had been able to determine whether the suspicion was correct. For Earthsiders there was a body of knowledge called “science”, which began with steel and steam-engines and continued to go-boards and interstellar ships, but was a continuum at every stage, conditioned by an attitude of mind. If this system got results, the Yanfolk let it be inferred, in their opinion it was in spite of and not because of its postulates: a kind of magic. An Earthsider might argue that his view was correct because his machines worked when you switched them on. A Yannish opponent—not that they descended to this kind of debate—might quote Book Seven of the Mutine Epics and point to the Ring as evidence that that was also “the truth”.

  The proof of the pudding…

  He heard a footfall behind him—Shyalee’s. Reflexively he turned, expecting to take a cup from her, and found her staring foolishly into the sky. He copied her, and saw the moon.

  III

  Of those inhabitants of Prell who had been asleep when the moon appeared, almost the first to be awakened were Speaker Kaydad and his present matron… to use the conventional term for a Yannish female keeping company with a householding male whose child she had not borne. (But the analysis of Yannish family relationships was complex.)

  Their son and daughter—respectively, hers and his—had been among the group of seventeen young people who had passed the evening with Alice Ming and Rayvor. It was their shouts from outside which roused the household.

  And seventeen loud voices on the street, dispersed over an area of several square kilometres, were quite enough to waken the entire population by a sort of chain-reaction. As those who had seen the moon alerted those who had not, gloglobes came back to life within half an hour of being extinguished, so that the town bloomed like a field of fantastic flowers: blue, red, yellow, green, white. In the enclave the communet buzzed frantically, all the rarely-used emergency circuits coming alive, as the inhabitants woke their friends or applied for explanations from the informat. Human and Yannish, clad and naked, people came out of doors to stare in amazement, abandoning dreams, the watching of tapes, music or making love. Shortly even babes in arms, seized by their parents and carried along for fear something might happen while a wall separated them, were lit by the strangeness in the sky.

  “Your tireless efforts have, then, been rewarded,” Speaker Kaydad’s matron said to him in the mode of extreme respect reserved for persons of outstanding individual worth. But he replied in the mode of determined contradiction.

  “No. Observe and analyse. That is no moon.”

  He could not disguise his fury and disappointment.

  Indeed, it had become clear within a few seconds of the thing’s appearance—at least to those who had bothered to learn about such matters—that this could not be a large heavenly body at a considerable distance. It moved far too fast, and must therefore be close, orbiting well inside the Ring. Even so, it was colossal; no artificial object of such apparent size had been seen in the vicinity of Yan before, unless perhaps in the days ten thousand years before when…

  The idea stopped there, for most of the watchers.

  Having regained his presence of mind, Dr Lem let go the grooved wooden rail of his verandah, at which he had had to clutch to steady himself. Something nuzzled his left leg. Thinking it was Pompy, he said aloud, “Easy, old girl—it’s all right!” And reached down to pet her head.

  Only his fingers encountered smooth chilly metal, and he realised in annoyance that the house’s built-in medical reflexes had dispatched support mechanisms to him. Pompy was still asleep, her elegant whiskers trembling as she breathed.

  He pushed the machines aside vigorously enough for them to get the hint, drew a deep breath, and resorted to an ancient yardstick to try and determine the object’s angular diameter. Holding his thumb up at the full stretch of his arm, he covered the disc with the nail, and found the latter approximately twice as broad. In other words, the thing subtended about a quarter of a degree. However, being so much brighter than the Ring under which it flew, it seemed larger, and no doubt deceitful memory would later make people swear that it had covered an eighth or more of the sky.

  In its wake, as the Ring shed meteors, this too shed tokens of its presence.

  They began in the far north, where—as on any similar world—the local sun had stung the molecules of the upper air into activity. Owing to the constant downward sifting of particles from the Ring, there were always vivid aurorae on Yan regardless of the season.

  Now, as though a supernal finger had beckoned them equatorwards, the potential gradients of the polar stratosphere stretched into long easy declines down which poured the brilliant discharges of the arctic night. Huge draping curtains of luminosity shook out their folds along the course of the River Smor, bluish and yellowish and occasionally shifting without warning into deep red. Free radicals sown from above sparked fresh reactions, so that the curtains seemed to draw apart, looping upwards and becoming vast double inverted rainbows with the colours interchanged. On the airy stage for which the aurora now formed a sort of proscenium arch, magnificent pyrotechnics began. Intangible jewels glittered, fiery wheels resolved, blasts of lightning threaded whiter than the eye could bear down the black-with-silver background of the night.

  After this phase came another which was totally abstract: a series of elegant swooping curves of colour and light, as though some skilled master of an organ uttering visual rather than auditory music had briefly chosen to explore the harmonic relations between the notes of a trivial theme given to him by a wealthy patron, before attempting to make a more formal structure out of them. Following this sequence, which lasted ten or twelve minutes, there was a new series, a group of signs and portents. A huge fire-breathing monster stirred and spat flame and eventually swallowed its own tail. Next, two armed figures with swords and shields clashed in mid-heaven and dissolved into a flower with blue leaves and a white crown. Finally the entire sky was overspread by a brilliant yellow wheel, which rotated, fading, on its invisible axle and seemed to draw the dark in from its edges as it turned.

  Terrified, her almond eyes so wide their slant was lost, her sallow complexion paled to stark ghost-white by her—alarm, careless of the fact that she was bare to the waist on the balcony outside her dormicle and that to any of the Earthsiders gathered in the street who happened to glance this way her drooping breasts would not be an exotic marvel as they were to Rayvor-Harry, Alice Ming clutched at her lover’s arm.

  “What—what is it?” she whimpered.

  Still in the Earth-style clothes he had worn during the visit of the seventeen youthful apes who had spent the evening here, he swallowed hard and tried to think of a reply which would not disappoint her. And could not.

  He forced out finally, “I don’t know!” The words emerged in Yannish, his grasp of human language destroyed by the shock of what he was saying.

  “But your legends! Your ancient tales—your folklore!” Alice was eager to speak; if she didn’t, her teeth chattered and the muscles of her jaw vibrated like a plucked fiddle-string. “Don’t they tell about the time when your planet had a moon?”

  Valiantly, Rayvor-Harry said, “That’s all mythical nonsense. You told me so, lots of times.”

  But that was as far as his self-control extended. From that final declaration of scepticism he slid without intention into reciting a traditional Yannish formula of intercession, not addressed to any god—the Yanfolk, if they had ever worshipped supernatural beings, had long forgotten them—but invoking powers beyond knowledge, beyond science, beyond belief.

  Also one witness was Vetcho, who held what was not an office, nor a rank, among the Yanfolk of Prell—because the very notion of authority was foreign to Yannish minds—but who behaved in such a manner
that, so far as relations with the Earthsiders were concerned, it amounted to the same thing.

  His first response was dual, and in real time at that: a facility largely due to his anatomy. With part of him he was thinking as Speaker Kaydad’s matron had thought, that this was success after so much trouble. With the rest of him, he was wondering in a hurt tone of mind why the climactic step had been taken without his assistance.

  Then the truth dawned. After which: as near as Yanfolk could come to objurgation, or cursing.

  More or less, and much less than more, he thought: Those devils, those fiends! There will be nothing left for us. Must they strip us even of the shadow of the echo of our pride?

  But he was resolved that they should not, even though they were adding this latest mockery to the long toll of insults so far recorded: that they dwelt in plain view of the Mutine Flash, that they set their automatics on the border of the go-board to prevent Yanfolk travelling to other worlds, that they pried into the mystery of the Epics, that they…

  His matron emerged to join him at that point, and he was un-Yannishly rude to her. And said nothing about the moon not being a moon. Let her find out.

  Warden Chevsky was asleep and snoring. Drunk. His wife Sidonie was awake at his side, having tried several times to turn him over so that his mouth would not fall open. The last time he had struck out at her in his sleep and she was now nursing what felt as though it would be visible as a bruise in the morning.

  It was not her first failure of the night. She had tried to encourage him to make love when they came to bed, and been rebuffed. Now she sat up against the pillows, moodily hating him.

  Is the bastard past it? Or has he acquired a mistress? A Yannish mistress? Would one of those delicate, fragile creatures look twice at him?