“Such as?”
“We need to provide it with some direction,” suggested Nylan.
“How?”
Nylan sat up straighter. “I don’t know. Even trying to use any control of order flows seems to set off a reaction.”
“Balance…that’s the message.”
“But why? It doesn’t really think, not the way we do.”
“Does it have to?” asked the redhead dryly. “That’s our job, and we aren’t doing very well at it.”
The silver-haired angel untied the mare. “We need to think some more. Or talk. Or something.”
“You didn’t want to think,” she said with a faint smile.
“I have…we have…to think smarter…somehow. And I’m hungry.” And tired and worried and frustrated, and that’s just for starters.
“I know,” Ayrlyn answered softly. I know….
CXX
The silver-haired angel plopped on the ground in front of the bushes, setting Weryl down between his legs, and glancing out across the kays of lower lands filled with tree shoots that separated the house from the older growth of the forest.
He ran his hand across his chin, clean-shaven, and with a few cuts. His hand-forged equivalent of a straight razor wasn’t especially forgiving, especially when there was no equivalent of soap around. Water oozed down his neck from his damp hair.
The grass that had covered the hillside was turning blotchy brown in some places, and not others, and he wondered what pattern the forest had in mind, if it had a mind, for where there would be grass and where there would not.
Weryl levered himself up by grabbing Nylan’s right knee, then stiff-legged his way to the nearest bush, where his fingers closed on a branch, gently.
Ayrlyn sat down beside Nylan, her short hair damp from her efforts to wash it. “What are you thinking this cloudy morning?”
He glanced at the low gray clouds, then at her. “The forest is the key to it all.” Nylan felt stupid-again-for stating the obvious, but the obvious was all he had.
“Do you know why?”
“No. Not exactly. The whole planet is like a ship’s flux system-enormous power, constrained by order, with a continual swirl of lesser fluxes.” Nylan swallowed, then rubbed an itching nose. “The white stuff-what we call chaos-that’s where most of the power lies. Order-the dark flows-they’re more like boundaries than real flows, and they maintain the system. You need both.”
“You’ve made progress.”
“It’s all taxonomy, just reclassifying the stuff we’ve known already.”
Weryl released the first branch, glanced back at his father, then walked perhaps ten cubits before sitting down with a plop to study a green shoot growing in a crack between two stones of the front walk. His fingers stroked the green, gently.
“If there’s no chaos, there’s no energy to run the system,” observed Ayrlyn. “Without your order, then you’d have uncontrolled energy that would swirl out and dissipate in entropic heat?”
“I don’t know. That’s my guess. There’s got to be a balance, and somehow the Old Rats maintained that balance. Something happened-”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to act as system engineers, I guess.”
“I’m no engineer.”
“This isn’t a ship’s system, either. It takes feel. That’s where you come in.”
“Oh?”
“I’m going to try to feel out the system.”
“After what’s already happened?”
“We’ll try it just inside the old growth.”
“We’re going to walk into that?” Ayrlyn frowned.
“Why not? As we found out, it can hit hard even from a distance. What’s the difference between being in the middle of a flux or standing at the edge if it goes chaos?”
Ayrlyn grinned wryly. “Only the size of the particles that you’re reduced to, but I don’t know that I’m in the mood to be reduced.”
“Before you do battle with the forest,” suggested Sylenia, standing by the edge of the bushes, “best you eat.”
“She has a point.” Nylan lurched to his feet and toward Weryl, scooping his son up and carting him back into the small house. The smith’s shoulder brushed the green-glazed ceramic screen. Such artistry-all abandoned so quickly. Then he supposed he’d have abandoned it too, especially if there were a lot of those big cats prowling around. The locals, Ayrlyn had pointed out, didn’t carry much in the way of weapons.
Several loaves of bread were spread on wide leaves, along with some nuts and what looked to be yellow apples.
“Those are pearapples,” Sylenia explained. “Yusek brought me one, once. These are better. They are fresher.”
Nylan sliced off a chunk of the loaf and chewed the moist and tangy bread. “What…is this…?”
“It be squash loaf. I can bake. With but one pot…” The dark-haired woman shrugged. “Weryl, he is good at finding the healthy fruits and things. I follow him.”
Ayrlyn looked at Weryl. So did Nylan. Was Weryl sensing the forest the way he did the notes from the lutar?
“Da! Ahwen!”
“Does this bread keep? For travel?” asked Ayrlyn. “We’ll need something on the way back.”
If we get that far.
Ayrlyn frowned. “Pessimist.”
“I could wrap it in leaves.” Sylenia shrugged. “Do you plan to leave soon?”
“Not that soon,” Ayrlyn said after taking a swallow of water. “The nuts are good.”
“They must be cooked, or they are bitter.”
Nylan was glad Sylenia knew about the local vegetation. He probably would have starved. Then, those of them in Westwind nearly had in the first year, at least partly out of ignorance. He tried the nuts, and they were tasty. He kept eating until he realized that he was no longer hungry, but that he was almost stuffing food into his mouth.
“Nervous?”
Nylan nodded. “You?”
“Of course.”
He wiped his mouth and took another low swallow of water, then stood.
“Da! Ahwen!”
Nylan bent and lifted Weryl, hugging him tightly for a moment. Weryl hugged him back, then turned his head.
“He wants to give you a hug.” Nylan eased Weryl toward the redhead.
Ayrlyn embraced the silver-haired boy, and Nylan could sense her tears. “Be good, Weryl. Be good.” She set him on the glazed tile floor, and Sylenia immediately took his hand.
Nylan swallowed. Am I doing the right thing? Have I any choice?
No, came the thought from Ayrlyn.
They walked quickly out the rear door to where the mounts they had saddled earlier waited.
“This is scary,” he admitted after climbing into the saddle.
She nodded, pursing her lips.
They rode into the growing outer forest without speaking, letting the mares pick their way toward the unseen wall and the boundary between the ancient domain of the forest and its recent acquisition.
“We can do this. We just have to think about balance.”
“Thinking about it is easy, but trying to make ourselves part of it isn’t going to be easy.”
“Nothing important ever is.”
Nylan nodded. She was right about that.
After tying both mares to trunks that were noticeably thicker than the day before, the two walked slowly toward the creeper-covered wall that was measurably lower than the day before.
“For something that doesn’t think, it’s certainly removing its past boundaries quickly enough,” Ayrlyn noted.
“Thought and intelligence are just illusions that primates glory in.” Nylan’s voice was dry. So was his mouth. The narrow gray-green leaves on the new trees seemed to rustle, though he could sense no breeze, and a mist drifted out from the older growth, carrying the unfamiliar mixed floral scent that was neither too cloying nor too astringent.
Nylan swallowed and stepped across the creepered and vanishing wall. He swallowed again, and tried to relax.
Ayrlyn touched his arm. “We’re doing this together, remember.”
What were they doing?