“‘… these limits only I place upon you, that never shall a Speaker Summon a Speaker…’ was that so restrictive a law?”
In the slow swirl beyond sight, Lirlowil gasped as Margda took on visible form more rapidly, more solidly, than she had anticipated. She wore a shapeless gray toga that stopped just short of her feet, belted beneath her considerable breasts, but otherwise unadorned. As if wearing anything even remotely more artful was out of the question for someone like her. As if her clothing were a statement not only about herself, but about the vacuous priorities of the Speaker who had summoned her. More, the elderly Fant stared back with an icy gaze, fully aware of her circumstances and showing none of the confusion the recently summoned always showed. She’d asked a question even before she’d arrived, and from the look on her strange, hairless face she awaited an answer.
Startled out of her intentions, Lirlowil fell back on established ritual. “You are Margda, first of the Speakers. Your time in life has long since ended; you are now as you were in life, but not alive. In this, a world of my own making, I bid you welcome.”
The Fant snorted, whipping her trunk around abruptly and causing the Lutr to lean away. “So you’re not the complete renegade, are you? Some of the teachings you still follow.”
Indignation caused Lirlowil to narrow her eyes and protest. “I’ve been fully vested and certified by the Alliance’s Speakers’ Bureau.” Her conversant only snorted again.
“Don’t start in with me about your precious bureau, Child. They only know to teach what I taught them. I endured endless days shut away with their best people in a boardroom on a spacecraft bobbing on the ocean because they couldn’t be troubled to come to my home and possibly encounter other Fant. And I wouldn’t leave the planet. Oh how they squirmed, torn between their hunger to understand the techniques and capabilities of Speaking and their loathing for a member of a race they’d gone to such lengths to hide away.”
Lirlowil swallowed hard. Truth enough, she found this Fant — all Fant — beyond disgusting; it had never occurred to her how the objects of that revulsion might feel about it. But the flicker of compassion didn’t last. Her own discomfort at being lectured to by a conversant, especially a Fant conversant, pushed her back on the offensive. “You should feel honored that they’ve respected your teachings.”
“Which is more than you did, eh, edict-breaker? Congratulations! Of the tens of thousands of Speakers in the centuries since I wrote those rules, you’re the first to violate any of them. I knew you would, but it feels very good to be vindicated.”
“How could you know?”
Her conversant’s face contorted into what might have been a smile, though with that hideous trunk of hers it was hard to be sure. She brought a hand up and tapped a thick finger against the side of her head. “I know you know my life’s story. You summoned me here, after all. Surely you didn’t discount my long history of mental illness. Imagine what I might have accomplished in my time if I hadn’t been held back by madness and seizures. Though, to be fair, they also provided me glimpses of the future. Glimpses of you, my dear. I only instructed those fools so they in turn would create their little bureau and train you. I only created the rules of the Edict because I needed you to come along and break the first one.”
“Wait, you’re saying you knew I would do this? Hundreds of years before I was even born?”
“I knew someone or some thing would precipitate a crisis. Are you responsible for the Silence? No, of course you’re not. You’re just a piece on the board, not the game’s player.”
“What game? You’re nothing but a crazy old woman who died ages ago. You didn’t foresee any of this. That’s just a side effect of the same paranoia you had when you were alive.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? And it’s not paranoia when every other living being off your homeworld who knows your name would be happier if you’d never existed.” Margda turned away then, stepping around the room on her enormous feet. Her head pivoted back and forth as if she were examining everything in careful detail. With a start Lirlowil realized that her conversant walked, not bounced or floated, but walked, despite the absence of gravity.
“What a strange place you’ve brought me to,” the Matriarch said softly. “Do you know, I have never been in space before. I wouldn’t let them lift their ship when I was aboard. Made them leave it just offshore. Everything here feels just like that ship. It’s all … made. And too small. Lifeless. Not at all like a world. Not like my world.”
Lirlowil sneezed. There was a fragrance in the air, faint but undeniable, woody and green, and no part of the recycled air the station provided. Wrinkling her nose, she watched agog as Margda moved through the room, held down by a gravity that shouldn’t have been there. Having satisfied herself with her inspection of the various shelves and objects on the walls, she approached the large sphere of pond water occupying the room’s center.
The Otter followed, organizing her questions and marshaling her telepathic powers. The Fant completed a circuit around the watery globe. She turned back to her Speaker and smiled. Lirlowil hesitated, breathing in deeply through her mouth. This wasn’t proceeding like any summoning she’d ever performed. The odor in the room had increased, and now included the scent of impending rain. Margda meanwhile had raised one wrinkled hand and reached out to touch the glistening surface of the water. As her fingertips made contact, gravity returned to the globe and its shape collapsed. Water crashed to the floor and rushed outward in a great wave that swept Lirlowil beneath it.
* * *
AS she opened her eyes to darkness, Lirlowil knew she’d been unconscious. Something had gone very wrong. A traditional summoning would have ended, the efficacy of the koph long since passed from her physical body and normal consciousness returned whether she willed it or not. That hadn’t happened. In the reality of the station, she floated in the null field of her room, her body in a vaguely seated position, though her limbs hung lax, her muscles flaccid. Her eyes gazed languidly at nothing and her jaw had fallen open. She bumped from one wall to another, driven by the faint jets of the room’s air system. She moved with excruciating slowness, but as she was completely unaware of it, it hardly mattered. Eventually, after many rebounds and continued drifting, she would pass into the globule of water in the middle of the room, and either recover or drown.
“You still don’t understand, do you?” hissed Margda. “Silly child, haven’t you ever thought it through?” The voice moved around her and Lirlowil tried to orient upon it. It seemed at once to be near and far, above, below, within, beyond. She paddled against the water, far more water than should have been around her. Her head broke the surface but still all she saw was darkness. Nothing of her bedroom remained.
“Only those with intelligence, with souls, emit nefshons. What then, my fuzzy little Speaker, is the stuff of the setting created for yourself and your conversant?” Lirlowil trembled. Margda’s voice seemed to be whispering to her from inside herself, as if the faint exhalation of her words could be felt upon her skin.
“It comes from your mind, dear Otter, from your desperate need for order and structure. It is the Speaker who imposes reality upon this realm, forcing her own perceptions of dimension and texture into the summoning. It is all an illusion that you provide, because mortal minds find comfort in the familiar, concrete settings.”