The Path of the Four

Ab-Druh started to get to his feet.

Ariana disengaged from him and backed away, as he strode to the tent’s opening.

She stopped crying, dried her tears, and followed him outside.

The fishermen, talkative and excited, crowded around Ab-Druh, their expressions scared.

Voh-Heem stood at Ab-Druh’s side. Where had he come from?

But of course. He must have been close by at all times. As Ab-Druh’s Side Clan attendant, he could do no less.

Voh-Heem gave Ariana an angry look.

OK, she thought. I got it. You don’t like me. Goofy Human playing spiritually grazing tourist with your guy. I promise I won’t even bruise the main man here, she thought, glancing at Ab-Druh.

She saw the fah-teens still circling above, but their flight silent, their singing gone.

Ab-Druh let the excited chatter of the fishermen go on for a while. Then he held up one hand, gesturing for silence, but the four digits on that hand loose, curled a little bit inward, the gesture therefore exercising authority, but not being strident.

The fishermen became silent.

Ab-Druh spoke to the villagers for about five minutes--still in North Zah-Gre, so Ariana didn’t know what he said.

However, it seemed to satisfy all concerned, because when Ab-Druh was done with his little speech, the fishermen started to drift back to their own tents and fires.

Ab-Druh exchanged a few words with Voh-Heem. Voh-Heem gave Ariana another dirty look and stepped back, disappearing into the shadows.

“I apologize, Ariana. Maybe next time Voh-Heem will at least say ‘hello.’”

“Well, thank you, but what was all this? This is about the fah-teens not singing all of a sudden. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“So it means something? What? And what did you tell them?”

“That we will perform the necessary ritual tomorrow that the moment calls for.”

“Well, that answers the second question. But what about the first? The fah-teens, when they stop singing, it all means – what?”

“We Zah-Gre have said since forever that when the fah-teens cease their song of flight, something will come to Zah-Gre that will be great in its lack of balance.”

“‘Lack of balance’? That’s it? That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Ab-Druh seemed surprised at Ariana’s cavalier reaction.

“Ariana, I apologize,” he said after a moment. “Instead of saying ‘great in its lack of balance’ I should have used an English word that we have no equivalent to in all five of the tongues.”

“Come on, Ab-Druh. What word?”

“Ariana, something is coming to Zah-Gre. A force. A power. Something evil.”

Hours later, Ariana was going to be late for the test.

The dream had started after Ariana’s nine hours in the Alignment Room. She had been trying to compensate for the natural movement of galaxies, solar systems, planets, and suns. At the test firing, the Y-beams would “shoot” digitally compressed audio and visual information to a moon that was several light years distant from Zah-Gre, deep in the heart of “Further Space,” a moon that long range scanning and unmanned probes had picked up. If the transmission bounced off the moon, and ricocheted back to Vertex and the crew received it, then Carne-Tischler’s plans for further expansion of their communications network would continue. The corporation connected these plans to possible exploration of Further Space by Earth’s governments.

Ariana had been trying to align the long tubes of glass, filament, metal, and bubble memory circuits, to get them aimed and focused. This meant she had to set the array of five tubes, the Yamato Beam projectors, into exactly the right robot-controlled pattern. This pattern would seem, to untutored eyes, like drifting. It wasn’t and it was bloody hard work getting the whole mess to come out right.

So Ariana sat in a saddle-like seat, working an assortment of controls in front of her. They were dials, buttons, and switches. She looked at the digital readouts. They fluttered near, settled on, and then drifted away from the correct settings.

They were two visual displays in front of her. A direct video feed of the Y-beam tubes outside the stations, and another one of those yellow outlines, three-dimensional computer animations on another green screen.

Also in front of her, on a wall close by, was a Yamato Update Poster, made out of a combination of memory paper and “Animation Weave.” She didn’t know about back on Earth, but on Zah-Gre, on Vertex, on Golden Horizon these posters were everywhere: bars, restaurants, virtual reality parlors, on the long and curving streets of the Old City, and so on.

They all looked pretty much like the one Ariana had in her field of vision, off to her right. The poster showed a big close up of Yamato’s round, stuck out ears face, turning to the people looking at the poster and a smile growing on that face. Above and below this poster image, these words streamed by:

Akira Yamato.

“Father of the New Universal Age.”

Missing: 14 days.

Search now extended to Bradburyville and Armstrong City.

(Mars and Earth’s moon.)

Any useful information, contact nearest police/security professionals.

Akira Yamato, in the time he had been missing back on Earth, had received the odd honor of having his name translated into some Zah-Gre languages: Vur-Zah. The word, the name had emerged three days ago, in the Old City, and settlements in the West and South Lands. Ab-Druh had told her that the name came from vir-zah that was the Zah-Gre word, in most of their languages, for intelligence and imagination.

“Hey.”

She had then looked over her shoulder to see Joe Whitney standing behind her in the doorway to the Alignment Room. Ariana felt a flash of shame at her own prejudices, because it was always a shock to her when she saw a fat man well-dressed, and Joe was a fat man, and he was, no question, today well-dressed in what looked like an Italian blue suit, black shoes, and loose pink and white silk tie. Ariana had been wearing a gray sweat suit and she felt, in comparison, very under dressed.

“Ariana, how close are you?”

“Rounding out the thirty-two settings I have to get, I’m within point zero zero zero eight percent.”

“And how much do you weigh?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question. Answer it.”

“One hundred and sixteen pounds. But what does that have to do with--”

“I’m two hundred and sixty-two pounds. The surveillance records have you saying, ‘Shit!’ one hundred and nine times in the past hour. You take some time out, right now, or I’ll sit on you.”

She walked back to her quarters. She thought about loneliness. Everyone had their fair share. How much did she have? She had never, with much depth, considered the subject before, until just now, in this moment of the vacuum left by Yamato disappearing. Where were the girls she had grown up with, she wondered? Where were they now? With the establishment of orbiting private factories and residences back on Earth, with the settlement of Earth’s moon and Mars, with the invention of the Yamato Drive, outer space was a booming business and culture. It was not, however, for Humans, a source of great adventure. Most humans didn’t go off Earth until they were apartments to rents, factories to work in, and stores to shop in out there. Somebody had to put them there, those outposts of Human culture and commerce, and that was the “spacejacks.” The last sexist barriers to women’s ambitions had fallen many years ago, but as the slang term suggested, “spacejacks” were almost exclusively men. Ariana fingered the cross and pentagram around her neck. And the few fellow female “spacejacks” she did meet found Ariana’s interest in spirituality odd and embarrassing.

On Earth, a town the size of Vertex, one could find places to eat, entertain yourself, places to worship. The space station had all that. (Although Ariana never saw anybody else in the chapel on Vertex except her.) What the space station did not have was a place for an unmarried, young adult woman to meet somebody, like a nice man for example, who wasn’t also involved in the “spacejack” business. The Humans on Zah-Gre and Golden Horizon were all tourists and businessmen, none of whom interested Ariana. Maybe that was unfair of her, but there the feeling was, in her, not moving, and not going away.

The last time she had dated a fellow “spacejack” was almost five years ago. A snack food corporation had been building an extension to their Earth-orbit factory. The one Ariana had gotten involved with, a boy about nineteen, skinny, with lots of tattoos, had been prone to long silences after sex. Ariana had taken those silences for signs of deep thought, before she figured out they were, instead, signs of no thought.

So, she had returned to her quarters.

“Sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” she said to her voice-controlled waterbed. The bed’s circuits heated up the water to fifty degrees. Being ten degrees off was a flaw that Ariana could have corrected in a few minutes, but she had just found it more convenient to just know how hot or cool she wanted the bed to be, and then add ten degrees.

A waterbed was an outrageous indulgence for a “spacejack.” A tourist on Golden Horizon had ordered it from a company on Earth. When a delivery ship showed up with it, the tourist had skipped out on his unpaid hotel bill. The captain of the delivery ship worked for a company that would deduct the cost of undelivered items from his take-home pay. Joe Whitney had won the bed from him in a poker game and given it to his Chief Engineer.

In a technical sense, the bed didn’t even have water in it. It was a chemically and genetically engineered water substitute (oh, the odd age she lived in!) ordered by a hamburger place on Golden Horizon, for their soda pop machines. Vertex had obtained several gallons of the liquid under circumstances as peculiar as those connected to the waterbed.

Therefore, Ariana collapsed onto this bed, into sleep, and into this new dream.

It had started with her standing in a hallway lined with lockers and she knew, in the way one just knows things in dreams that she was going to be late for the test.

What test? She did not know that part.

It was no use standing still like this so she started to walk.

The lockers were that same tired, fake looking lime that had been the color of the lockers in middle school, high school, and in undergraduate college. She half expected the stench of cheap perfume and male cologne that she had to walk through every day at her high school.

A moment later, in this dream, Ab-Druh walked with her. He smiled, as he often did when he was with her, and she knew that if it wasn’t for that smile that thick nose and neck could make him look unsettling and scary.

“You know about the test.”

“Yes, Ariana. I don’t know everything about everything, despite what some think, but I do know a few things about this test you have to take.”

“What can you tell me about it?”

“That I can only wish you luck.”

“But why? With what we’ve been through --”

The implications of the elliptical sentence lay outside the dream, in the real world. In the two weeks since Yamato’s disappearance back on Earth, and her visit to Der-Ween, Ariana and Ab-Druh had been spending even more time together. The Old Inner Clan Zah-Gre seemed to be interested in telling her almost everything about Zah-Gre’s beliefs and rituals. However, there were some things he was cryptic about to the point of being incomprehensible, or refused to answer questions about, like the still secret contents of the Fourth Book of the Garb Ock.

“Like I said, Ariana, I can only wish you luck in passing the test.”

She looked away for a moment, looking for the right room, trying to remember the room number and, in the dream, when she looked back at where Ab-Druh had been, he was gone.

Then all the doors in all the hallways were gone except for a big pair of black double doors.

She threw them open and saw a dark room.

She walked in and the lights came on, without her throwing a switch.

Nothing magical or dream-like there. Most public buildings had movement-activated, automatic lights in each room.

The classroom was a little auditorium, with the floor slanted down to a small stage, and the chairs bolted down in rows. Then it was just a classroom and the chairs were in large circles. Then the chairs were organized in more traditional rows.

At the front of the classroom, Michael Orlando sat behind the teacher’s desk and put his feet up. He wore black sneakers, with gray laces, which was unlike the rest of the way he dressed. The shoes were a touch typical of Michael from his high school days, but he himself still looked like he was about forty years old, the same age he had been when he died.

“It doesn’t matter how we arrange the chairs, does it Bella Figura? It’s still teachers, students, lessons, learning to be done.”

“I thought I was late for the test, Michael. Am I?”

“We’ll see. Have a look out the window, little sister.”

Ariana walked over to a window and looked out. She saw a cold, dark, afternoon somewhere on Earth. Snow stood in heaps and mounds along sidewalks and along streets.

“Ariana, behind all the scenery, the props, the costumes, the scripts, the rehearsals, and the special effects--out there, what you’re seeing, that’s Earth. Cold and dark. Despite all the glittering optimism.”

She continued to look out the window.

“I’m sorry to hear you so sour. When the boy, that schizophrenic, shot that clerk because he didn’t take his drugs, you argued against the boy getting a mandatory ‘mind-sweep’ punishment. You even went on TV to speak out against it.” She paused, and wondered if one could or should cry in dreams. “Then a drug addict shot you dead for the $8.25 you had in your pockets.”

“And then the government makes heroin and other drugs legal and that reduces addiction and drug-related crime by over ninety percent in a few years. I have a great sense of timing, huh?”

Then she looked away from the window and back to her brother and on the teacher’s desk, now, was a miniature, model version of what Ariana was starting to think of as “the dream building,” the six-sided tower of red and brown glass, and the five gargoyles on top: the one who laughed, the one who frowned, the one had his eyes closed, the one who had a droopy left horn on its head, and the one whose mouth was opened so wide it looked like its face was about to disappear.

“But things are pretty good on Earth, Michael, now.”

“Are they?”

“So do I take the test now?”

“Look in this other window first.”

He stood and pointed at a window in the model on the desk.

Ariana walked over to the desk, leaned down, and lined her eyes up in front of the window to which Michael pointed.

Inside the model building, she saw the chess set, the one that, everyone thought, Brother Chaos had left in Jafari’s office.

Then she was on the chess set, moving around with caution, sensing trouble.

She was the same size of the carved, wooden pieces that looked like Akira Yamato, Roger Brantley, Joe Whitney, Ab-Druh, Voh-Heem, Mac and Bud.

The chess piece with no face was alive.

It saw her and started to stride toward her. Something about the characteristic motions of the head, the limbs, Ariana found threatening.

She ran away, trying to hide among the chess pieces. It sort of worked. It was like trying to hide in a forest, but a forest with very few tress, and trees all about the same size of her.

However, after a time, the chess piece with no face stepped in front of her.

It held a huge laser pistol.

The living, blank-face chess piece raised the weapon and pointed it at her face.