Collected Short Fiction, page 1083
“Look there,” Freylis cried. “The Superior!”
Yes, even the venerable Inuelda was out in the rain, dancing with stately abandon, the gaunt leathery white-haired old woman moving in wobbly but ceremonious circles, skinny arms outspread, face upturned ecstatically. Tisana smiled at the sight. The Superior spied Tisana lurking on the portico and grinned and beckoned to her, the way one would beckon to a sulky child who will not join the game. But the Superior had taken her own Testing so long ago she must have forgotten how awesome it loomed; no doubt she was unable to understand Tisana’s somber preoccupation with tomorrow’s ordeal. With an apologetic little gesture Tisana turned and went within. From behind her came the abrupt drumming of a heavy downpour, and then sharp silence. The strange little storm was over.
Tisana entered her cell, stooping to pass under the low arch of blue stone blocks, and leaned for a moment against the rough wall, letting the tension drain from her. The cell was tiny, barely big enough for a mattress, a washbasin, a cabinet, a workbench, and a little bookcase, and Tisana, solid and fleshy, with the robust healthy body of the farm-girl she once had been, nearly filled the little room. But she had grown accustomed to its crampedness and found it oddly comforting. Comforting, too, were the routines of the chapter-house, the daily round of study and manual labor and instruction and—since she had attained the rank of a consummate—the tutoring of novices. At the time the rainfall began Tisana had been brewing the dreaming-wine, a chore that had occupied an hour of every morning for her for the past two years; and now, grateful for the difficulties of the task, she returned to it. On this uneasy day it was a welcome distraction.
All the dreaming-wine used on Majipoor was produced right here, by the pledgeds and consummates of the chapter-house of Velalisier. Making it called for fingers quicker and more delicate than Tisana’s, but she had become adept all the same. Laid out before her were the little vials of herbs, the minuscule gray muorna-leaves and the succulent vejloo-roots and the dried berries of the sithereel and the rest of the nine-and-twenty ingredients that produced the trance out of which came the understanding of dreams. Tisana busied herself with the grinding and the mixing of them—it had to be done in a precise order, or the chemical reactions would go awry—and then the kindling of the flame, the charring, the reduction to powder, the dissolving into the brandy and the stirring of the brandy into the wine. After a while the intensity of her concentration helped her grow relaxed and even cheerful again.
As she worked she became aware of soft breathing behind her.
“Freylis?”
“Is it all right to come in?”
“Of course. I’m almost finished. Are they still dancing?”
“No, no, everything’s back to normal. The sun is shining again.”
Tisana swirled the dark heavy wine in the flask. “In Falkynkip, where I grew up, the weather is also hot and dry. Nevertheless, we don’t drop everything and go cavorting the moment the rain comes.”
“In Falkynkip,” Freylis said, “people take everything for granted. A Skandar with eleven arms wouldn’t excite them. If the Pontifex came to town and did handstands in the plaza it wouldn’t draw a crowd.”
“Oh? You’ve been there?”
“Once, when I was a girl. My father was thinking of going into ranching. But he didn’t have the temperament for it, and after a year or so we went back to Til-omon. He never stopped talking about the Falkynkip people, though, how slow and stolid and deliberate they are.”
“And am I like that too?” Tisana asked, a little mischievously. “You’re—well—extremely stable.”
“Then why am I so worried about tomorrow?”
The smaller woman knelt before Tisana and took both her hands in hers. “You have nothing to worry about,” she said gently.
“The unknown is always frightening.”
“It’s only a test, Tisana!”
“The last test. What if I bungle it? What if I reveal some terrible flaw of character that shows me absolutely unfit to be a speaker?”
“What if you do?” Freylis asked.
“Why, then I’ve wasted seven years. Then I creep back to Falkynkip like a fool, without a trade, without skills, and I spend the rest of my life pushing slops on somebody’s farm.”
Freylis said, “If the Testing shows that you’re not fit to be a speaker, you have to be philosophical about it. We can’t let incompetents loose in people’s minds, you know. Besides, you’re not unfit to be a speaker, and the Testing isn’t going to be any problem for you, and I don’t understand why you’re so worked up about it.”
“Because I have no clue to what it will be like.”
“Why, they’ll probably do a speaking with you. They’ll give you the wine and they’ll look in your mind and they’ll see that you’re strong and wise and good, and they’ll bring you out of it and the Superior will give you a hug and tell you you’ve passed, and that’ll be all.”
“Are you sure? Do you know?”
“It’s a reasonable guess, isn’t it?”
Tisana shrugged. “I’ve heard other guesses. That they do something to you that brings you face to face with the worst thing you’ve ever done. Or the thing that most frightens you in all the world. Or the thing that you most fear other people will find out about you. Haven’t you heard those stories?”
“Yes.”
“If this were the day before your Testing, wouldn’t you be a little edgy, then?”
“They’re only stories, Tisana. Nobody knows what the Testing is really like, except those who’ve passed it.”
“And those who’ve failed.”
“Do you know that anyone has failed?”
“Why—I assume—”
Freylis smiled. “I suspect they weed out the failures long before they get to be consummates. Long before they get to be pledgeds, even.” She arose and began to toy with the vials of herbs on Tisana’s workbench. “Once you’re a speaker, will you go back to Falkynkip?”
“I think so.”
“You like it there that much?”
“It’s my home.”
“It’s such a big world, Tisana. You could go to Ni-moya, or Piliplok, or stay over here in Alhanroel, live on Castle Mount, even—”
“Falkynkip will suit me,” said Tisana. “I like the dusty roads. I like the dry brown hills. I haven’t seen them in seven years. And they need speakers in Falkynkip. They don’t in the great cities. Everybody wants to be a speaker in Ni-moya or Stee, right? I’d rather have Falkynkip.”
Slyly Freylis asked, “Do you have a lover waiting there?”
Tisana snorted. “Not likely! After seven years?”
“I had one in Til-omon. We were going to marry and build a boat and sail all the way around Zimroel, take three or four years doing it, and then maybe go up the river to Ni-moya and settle there and open a shop in the Gossamer Galleria.”
That startled Tisana. In all the time she had known Freylis, they had never spoken of these things.
“What happened?”
Quietly Freylis said, “I had a sending that told me I should become a dream-speaker. I asked him how he felt about that. I wasn’t even sure I would do it, you know, but I wanted to hear what he thought, and the moment I told him I saw the answer, because he looked stunned and amazed and a little angry, as if my becoming a dream-speaker would interfere with his plans. Which of course it would. He said I should give him a day or two to mull it over. That was the last I saw of him. A friend of his told me that that very night he had a sending telling him to go to Pidruid, and he went in the morning, and later on he married an old sweetheart he ran into up there, and I suppose they’re still talking about building a boat and sailing it around Zimroel. And I obeyed my sending and did my pilgrimage and came here, and here I am, and next month I’ll be a consummate and if all goes well next year I’ll be a full-fledged speaker. And I’ll go to Ni-moya and set up my speaking in the Grand Bazaar.”
“Poor Freylis!”
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Tisana. I’m better off for what happened. It only hurt for a little while. He was worthless, and I’d have found it out sooner or later, and either way I’d have ended up apart from him, except this way I’ll be a dream-speaker and render service to the Divine, and the other way I’d have been nobody useful at all. Do you see?”
“I see.”
“And I didn’t really need to be anybody’s wife.”
“Nor I,” said Tisana. She sniffed her batch of new wine and approved it and began to clean off her workbench, fussily capping the vials and arranging them in a precise order. Freylis was so kind, she thought, so gentle, so tender, so understanding. The womanly virtues. Tisana could find none of those traits in herself. If anything, her soul was more like what she imagined a man’s to be, thick, rough, heavy, strong, capable of withstanding all sorts of stress but not very pliant and certainly insensitive to nuance and matters of delicacy. Men were not really like that, Tisana knew, any more than women were invariably models of subtlety and perception; but yet there was a certain crude truth to the notion; and Tisana had always believed herself to be too big, too robust, too foursquare, to be truly feminine. Whereas Freylis, small and delicate and volatile, quicksilver soul and hummingbird mind, seemed to her to be almost of a different species. And Freylis, Tisana thought, would be a superb dream-speaker, intuitively penetrating the minds of those who came to her for interpretations and telling them, in the way most useful to them, what they most needed to know. The Lady of the Isle and the King of Dreams, when in their various ways they visited the minds of sleepers, often spoke cryptically and mystifyingly; it was the speaker’s task to serve as interlocutor between those awesome Powers and the billions of people of the world, deciphering and interpreting and guiding. There was terrifying responsibility in that. A speaker could shape or reshape a person’s life. Freylis would do well at it: she knew exactly where to be stern and where to be flippant and where consolation and warmth were needed. How had she learned those things? Through engagement with life, no doubt of it, through experience with sorrow and disappointment and failure and defeat. Even without knowing many details of Freylis’s past, Tisana could see in the slender woman’s cool gray eyes the look of costly knowledge; and it was that knowledge, more than any tricks and techniques she would learn in the chapter-house, that would equip her for her chosen profession.
Tisana had grave doubts of her own vocation for dream-speaking, for she had managed to miss all the passionate turmoil that shaped the Freylises of the world. Her life had been too placid, too easy, too—what had Freylis said?—stable. A Falkynkip sort of life, up with the sun, out to the chores, eat and work and play and go to sleep well fed and well tired out. No tempests, no upheavals, no high ambitions that led to great downfalls. No real pain, and so how could she truly understand the sufferings of those who suffered? Tisana thought of Freylis and her treacherous lover, betraying her on an instant’s notice because her half-formed plans did not align neatly with his; and then she thought of her own little barnyard romances, so light, so casual, mere companionship, two people mindlessly coming together for a while and just as mindlessly parting, no anguish, no torment. Even when she made love, which was supposed to be the ultimate communion, it was a simple trivial business, a grappling of healthy strapping bodies, an easy joining, a little thrashing and pumping, gasps and moans, a quick shudder of pleasure, then release and parting. Nothing more. Somehow Tisana had slid through life unscarred, untouched, undeflected. How, then, could she be of value to others? Their confusions and conflicts would be meaningless to her. And, she saw, maybe that was what she feared about the Testing: that they would finally look into her soul and see how unfit she was to be a speaker because she was so uncomplicated and innocent, that they would uncover her deception at last. How ironic that she was worried now because she had lived a worry-free life! Her hands began to tremble. She held them up and stared at them: peasant hands, big stupid coarse thick-fingered hands, quivering as though on drawstrings. Freylis, seeing the gesture, pulled Tisana’s hands down and gripped them with her own, barely able to span them with her frail and tiny fingers. “Relax,” she whispered fiercely. “There’s nothing to fret about!”
Tisana nodded. “What time is it?”
“Time for you to be with your novices and me to be making my observances.”
“Yes. Yes. All right, let’s be about it.”
“I’ll see you later. At dinner. And I’ll keep dream-vigil with you tonight, all right?”
“Yes,” Tisana said. “I’d like that very much.”
They left the cell. Tisana hastened outside, across the courtyard to the assembly-room where a dozen novices waited for her. There was no trace now of the rain: the harsh desert sun had boiled away every drop. At midday even the lizards were hiding. As she approached the far side of the cloister, a senior tutor emerged, Vandune, a Piliplokki woman nearly as old as the Superior. Tisana smiled at her and went on; but the tutor halted and called back to her, “Is tomorrow your day?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Have they told you who’ll be giving you your Testing?”
“They’ve told me nothing,” said Tisana. “They’ve left me guessing about the whole thing.”
“As it should be,” Vandune said. “Uncertainty is good for the soul.”
“Easy enough for you to say,” Tisana muttered, as Vandune trudged away. She wondered if she herself would ever be so cheerily heartless to candidates for the Testing, assuming she passed and went on to be a tutor. Probably. Probably. One’s perspective changes when one is on the other side of the wall, she thought, remembering that when she was a child she had vowed always to understand the special problems of children when she became an adult, and never to treat the young with the sort of blithe cruelty that all children receive at the hands of their unthinking elders; she had not forgotten the vow, but—fifteen or twenty years later—she had forgotten just what it was that was so special about the condition of childhood, and she doubted that she showed any great sensitivity to them despite everything. So too, most likely, with this.
She entered the assembly-room. Teaching at the chapter-house was done mainly by the tutors, who were fully qualified dream-speakers voluntarily taking a few years from their practices to give instruction; but the consummates, the final-year students who were speakers in all but the last degree, were required also to work with the novices by way of gaining experience in dealing with people. Tisana taught the brewing of dreaming-wine, theory of sendings, and social harmonics. The novices looked up at her with awe and respect as she took her place at the desk. What could they know of her fears and doubts? To them she was a high initiate of their rite, barely a notch or two below the Superior Inuelda. She had mastered all the skills they were struggling so hard to comprehend. And if they were aware of the Testing at all, it was merely as a vague dark cloud on the distant horizon, no more relevant to their immediate concerns than old age and death.
“Yesterday,” Tisana began, taking a deep breath and trying to make herself seem cool and self-possessed, an oracle, a fount of wisdom, We spoke of the role of the King of Dreams in regulating the behavior of society on Majipoor. You, Meliara, raised the issue of the frequent malevolence of the imagery in dreams sent by the King, and questioned the underlying morality of a social system based on chastisement through dreams. I’d like us to address that issue today in more detail. Let us consider a hypothetical person—say, a sea-dragon hunter from Piliplok—who in a moment of extreme inner stress commits an act of unpremeditated but severe violence against a fellow member of her crew, and—”
The words came rolling from her in skeins. The novices scribbled notes, frowned, shook their heads, scribbled notes even more frantically. Tisana remembered from her own novitiate that desperate feeling of being confronted with an infinity of things to learn, not merely techniques of the speaking itself but all kinds of subsidiary nuances and concepts. She hadn’t anticipated any of that, and probably neither had the novices before her. But of course Tisana had given little thought to the difficulties that becoming a dream-speaker might pose for her. Anticipatory worrying, until this business of the Testing had arisen, had never been her style. One day seven years ago a sending had come upon her from the Lady, telling her to leave her farm and bend herself toward dream-speaking, and without questioning it she had obeyed, borrowing money and going off on the long pilgrimage to the Isle of Dreams for the preparatory instruction, and then, receiving permission there to enroll at the Velalisier chapter-house, journeying onward across the interminable sea to this remote and forlorn desert where she had lived the past four years. Never doubting, never hesitating.
But there was so much to learn! The myriad details of the speaker’s relationship with her clients, the professional etiquette, the responsibilities, the pitfalls. The method of mixing the wine and merging minds. The ways of couching interpretations in usefully ambiguous words. And the dreams themselves! The types, the significances, the cloaked meanings! The seven self-deceptive dreams and the nine instructive dreams, the dreams of summoning, the dreams of dismissal, the three dreams of transcendence of self, the dreams of postponement of delight, the dreams of diminished awareness, the eleven dreams of torment, the five dreams of bliss, the dreams of interrupted voyage, the dreams of striving, the dreams of good illusions, the dreams of harmful illusions, the dreams of mistaken ambition, the thirteen dreams of grace—Tisana had learned them all, had made the whole list part of her nervous system the way the multiplication table and the alphabet were, had rigorously experienced each of the many types through month upon month of programmed sleep, and so in truth she was an adept, she was an initiate, she had attained all that these wide-eyed unformed youngsters here were striving to know, and yet all the same tomorrow the Testing might undo her completely, which none of them could possibly comprehend.
