Gulliver's Fugitives Part 13

Troi could tell Rhiannon already had one of those fixations an adolescent girl can get for a big-sister figure.

"How long have you been living here, Rhiannon?"

"Since I was this high."

Rhiannon lowered her hand to the level of her chest.

"Where are your parents?"

"I don't know. They were declared criminally incompetent. The CS took them away and I had to live in a group home. That's not the only thing that made me run away, though. It was school. My teachers.

They wouldn't let me do anything I really wanted or learn anything I really wanted. I wasn't allowed to ask, 'what if this,' or 'what if that.' No telling stories. No drawing pictures unless I traced them from a stupid photograph. They made me get my mind cleansed every week. Didn't that stuff happen to you, too?"

"No, my childhood was a lot different. What do you do all day down here?"

"Don't you know about our library? We have tons of books. I'm reading all of them."

Rhiannon went on to list what she was reading right now. Troi began to realize this wasn't just a frivolous young runaway. This was a literate young mind in development, following its own inspirations. The scope of her reading was amazing. She was becoming a scholar in the early Welsh and Irish stories, especially the story of Rhiannon and the other branches of the Mabinogi.

Rhiannon wasn't beautiful in conventional terms, but Troi felt a quality of magic about her, a mysterious source of female strength and independence that echoed the mythical Rhiannon. And though her haguya-friend, the flying beast, was hardly the beautiful pale horse the mythical Rhiannon rode, still she spoke of it with reverence, as more than an equal.

Troi was going to ask her more about that, but suddenly Rhiannon decided she couldn't look at those ugly metal bands on Troi's wrists any longer, and summoned Nikitushka Lomov.

The huge strongman sang Russian Bylina songs as he began to file away at Troi's cuff-bands, and Rhiannon hummed harmonies with him.

Outside the caves of Alastor, in the larger caverns, the Dissenters known as the Nummo crawled around deep inside the huge boulder pile that comprised the man-made dam. They had built the dam themselves long ago. Like the mythical African water-beings after whom they had named themselves, they were always involved with water; with all the streams, pools, springs, and weirs in the caverns.

But at this moment they were hiding from a one-eye, which hummed and hovered above the rocks, trying to find the humans it had detected from a distance. The Nummo had seen the one-eye coming from far away and had had time to worm their way deep into the dam. Now the Nummo reached a s.p.a.ce in the middle, like a beaver lodge, where they could be safe, shielded by the water and the rocks.

While the Nummo twins were forced to hide, the rest of the CS squad pa.s.sed by the dam and began to set up for their a.s.sault on Alastor.

Rhiannon and Lomov led Troi into the cave used for dining.

Around a great round table hewn from stone sat two dozen people eating, laughing, and talking in many languages. They were all clothed in parti-colored, dirty castoffs.

Odysseus sat away from the table, on a step in a rough stairwell, following Troi's entrance with interest.

The diners fell silent.

Odysseus stood and addressed them.

"This is Deanna," said Odysseus. "She seems to have arrived in our midst by mistake. I'm afraid we can't let her leave, but other than that she can be treated like any other Dissenter."

With that he withdrew to the background and let Troi fend for herself.

Rhiannon motioned Troi toward a rough wooden stool next to a white-haired, ebony-skinned elderly woman. Troi sat.

"My name is Gunabibi," said the elderly woman, as her face, which Troi recognized as the Australian aboriginal racial type, crinkled in a smile. "Have some of my stew, won't you?" She pushed a bowl toward Troi.

Troi still felt jumpy inside and wasn't sure if she could bring herself to partake of the lumpy green and brown stew. She recognized some of the plant leaves in it; she had seen them growing around the sulfur pools farther up the caverns.

Aromatic fragrance from the stew reached her nose and her mouth began to water. She was suddenly hungry. Rationality dictated caution but her stomach seemed an independent unit. Picking up a wooden spoon, Troi tasted the stew.

It was delicious. She ate it all.

After dinner, everyone left the table and sat on stones set around a pile of glowing red embers.

Troi noticed that Odysseus didn't join them. He stood near the entrance to the dining cave. Staring out, he seemed intensely vigilant, as though he sensed an imminent danger.

He looked at that moment so much like an ancient Greek epic hero that Troi found she had to stop herself from believing that he was one. She remembered the character "exercises" she'd seen him do. Now he was fully in his character.

She approached him.

"You think we're going to be attacked, don't you," she said.

That got his attention. He seemed fascinated at the way she'd guessed his feeling.

"What makes you say that?"

"That's not important. Is it true?"

"The Nummo never returned from their patrol. That might mean the CS are out there."

"Then why can't you let me leave? Why do you want me to be arrested along with you?"

"I don't. Neither of us is going to be arrested. The CS are stupid, like a cyclops. We'll protect you from them."

She didn't know what to say and couldn't see how they could protect her.

He seemed to understand her feeling and looked her directly in the eye. "I give you my word as Odysseus, son of Laertes, that I, and my people, will protect you with our lives."

She mumbled some kind of thanks and walked away, taken aback by the intensity of his determination. At that moment she was caught in ambivalence; on the one hand these Dissenters seemed so idealistic, so caught up in their stories, that she thought she should seek escape and strike out on her own, and on the other hand, she found herself wanting their help and able to believe that they could somehow provide it.

In this frame of mind she went to sit with the other Dissenters near the glowing embers. The old woman named Gunabibi came over and sat next to her, explaining that it was storytelling time. She said that all of the Dissenters were experts in their own myth-heritages. She herself was an expert in the stories of aboriginal Australia and had named herself after a Fertility Mother myth-character.

"But tonight Coyote will tell stories," she said.

An elderly white-haired American Indian man stood up next to Troi. It was clear to her that in spite of his age, he was youthful and strong in mind and body. He reminded Troi of a picture she'd once seen of Red Cloud, the great leader of the Oglala Sioux many hundreds of years ago. In fact, both he and Gunabibi, the two oldest people here, gave Troi the impression of quiet power held in reserve.

Troi had noticed him earlier at dinner. She had caught him staring fixedly at her, as though he were trying to determine her true character. But now he was smiling at her, and Troi felt as though he had accepted her. He spoke.

"For our newcomer I will explain that I am a Miwok Indian. My ancestors lived in California, and many of them were utentbe, professional storytellers, long before the Europeans came. You might say I'm an utentbe too. I'm named after a hero of many Native American stories, and I'm going to tell some of them now."

He wove several stories with grace and artistry.

The mythical Coyote in these stories was a Trickster, but often for the benefit of mankind. He gave people fire, like Prometheus, and the power of words.

His trickery was often eloquent. In an Apache story he showed the invading white colonists how greedy they were, convincing them to buy a burro which defecated money. He even showed them how the burro "worked," how it had to be fed first. Of course it was one of Coyote's tricks, he'd created an illusion, and when the excited colonists got the burro home they fed it and prodded it, and waited for money to come out the other end, but all the burro would do was break wind.

When the stories were concluded, Troi asked if the mythical Coyote was an animal or a human, or something beyond either.

"Each person may interpret the stories as they choose," the white-haired Indian said. Troi liked that answer and thought to herself how different these people were from the Rampartians above ground.

Troi asked if someone could explain more about the Dissenters and their chosen stories. Gunabibi stirred up the embers with a stick and began to talk.

"My own culture was forty thousand years old when the white colonists came to Australia and tried to stamp it out. I'm sustaining it in my stories of the aboriginal Dreamtime, as the others here are sustaining their own stories. The people who follow the Rampart way, all facts and regulations, will never have the connection with life, nature, universe, however you want to put it, that the people with stories have. The Rampartians haven't the imagination to see worth in a tree or a mountain. The universe is just so much meaningless stuff to them. They are worthless in their own eyes, just a lot of pitiful animalcules who will work, buy lots of things, grow old and die, while their facts and regulations won't ease their loneliness or their suffering. If old folks like Coyote and I were up there now on Rampart, we'd be regarded as just some useless senile n.o.bodies waiting to die, and if we were like the other old Rampartians, that's just how we would feel.

"But, see, in a culture with imagination, old people are respected-they're the ones with the most understanding, the most stories. They've had the time to use the stories and metaphors to identify themselves not with the greedy ego that clings to life yet must die, but with the infinite living universe.

"The Rampartian Bible claims as an objective fact that the infinite is some real man with a white beard sitting up in the sky, separate and distinct from us. But that is such a sad misunderstanding, such a cause of needless alienation. Infinity is here and now, all around us, and we are part of it, from moment to moment."

Gunabibi made an expansive gesture with her arms and hands, taking in her surroundings.

"And stories can bring one to that feeling," she concluded.

Troi watched the embers. She began to understand why there was a feeling of comradery among all these Dissenters of different ethnic groups. The Dissenters didn't reject each other's stories and mythologies as false. All were metaphors, and all were valid if they worked as a means for personal insight.

She wished she could take these Dissenters to twenty-fourth-century Earth. They could be whatever they wanted there, tell whatever stories they wished. But she still didn't understand how they conducted their rebellion here on Rampart. How did they defend themselves against an overwhelming police state?

"Do you possess weapons?" she asked. "Do you have anything to fight with?"

"We use our stories for that," said Gunabibi. "That's why we name ourselves after myth-characters. We use the power of the stories. We don't believe in using guns. A gun has never imparted knowledge to anyone."

"But are you people the only rebels? Is this the whole Dissenter movement right here?"

"No, there are lots of little groups around. We have to stay small to stay unnoticed. There isn't much structure to it. Odysseus is the leader of this group in matters of tactics and fighting, because he's good at that, but we're all equal. And we get new members once in a while. People who are sick of having their minds cleansed every week, sick of not being able to read and think what they want. I don't know where you lived up there, but you must have seen people going crazy, all those murders and suicides."

Gunabibi's description of Rampart life made Troi remember the early experiments on Earth where people were deprived of REM sleep. The mind goes mad when it can't spontaneously dream. Maybe depriving the mind of stories and imagination had the same result.

"Are you going to join us?" asked Rhiannon, who had sat down next to Troi. "It doesn't matter what you were up there. Coyote was a plain old postal worker. Caliban was an oxygen salesman."

Troi wondered how best to respond. As she stared past the fire she saw a small white object fall from the darkness above and land near the embers.

Suddenly Odysseus leapt into their midst out of nowhere, diving at the white object. "Grenade!" he shouted, as he threw it toward the entrance to the cave.

He then pushed Troi to the ground, among the rocks.

"The stones will help shield you," he said.

She waited for an explosion but heard only a sweet little peeping sound. Instantaneously, she felt the effect of the grenade as an overwhelming wave of mental numbness, as though her brain had been immersed in novocaine. She stared around in a daze.

The effect seemed to wear off quickly, though Troi had no way of knowing how much time had pa.s.sed. Her lucidity returned like a rush of air into a vacuum. Odysseus helped her stand.

"Thought-grenade," he said. "The CS are here."

"Save the books!" she heard someone shout.

Around them, the other Dissenters were getting up, recovering their wits. Odysseus led them toward an annex-cave, from which Troi could hear frantic fumbling movements and anxious whispers.

Odysseus and Coyote came out of the annex first, whispering to each other. They each had cloth bundles bound to their backs with cords. The rest of the Dissenters came out behind them, all bearing similar bundles on their backs.

Odysseus led everyone through the stairwell and into the great statuary cave. Troi followed them through the shadowy stone throng toward the door-boulder, where the strongman, Nikitushka Lomov, stood with a fearless, distant expression. Odysseus positioned the Dissenters along the wall near the door-stone, while Coyote disappeared into the galaxy of statues. Then Odysseus pulled Troi to stand beside him against the wall. They waited.

Troi could hear voices outside Alastor, from the other side of the door-stone. The door-stone began to shift heavily.

Troi quickly tried to run through her options. What if there were a confused skirmish and she had the opportunity of escaping either alone or with the Dissenters? Which would she choose? Wouldn't being with the Dissenters increase her chances of being arrested, as they were always targets? On the other hand, wouldn't she be vulnerable in the vast caves by herself?

The door-stone moved, then moved again, then fell forward onto the floor with a thunderous boom.

Six white-uniformed CS men holding radiation guns ran over the fallen stone and into the statuary room, followed by a pair of one-eyes.

The CS men all wore imagination-proof helmets.

They looked around at the great chamber, then quickly took up positions in front of the Dissenters. One of the CS, the one standing nearest Troi, brandished his weapon.

"This place has been identified as a criminal hideout. The facts are already a matter of record. All of you are under arrest."

He looked young, and Troi felt his skittishness without needing to see the eyes obscured behind the jagged, moire-quivering rasters on his helmet visor. She read the nametag on his uniform: "Lieutenant Daley."

"We are going to scan you one by one, starting with you on the end," he said, pointing to Caliban. If-"

A pebble struck him in the back of the head. He glanced behind him and saw Coyote, far out in the middle of the statue garden, dodge from one statue to shelter behind another. The mult.i.tude of stone images created confusing shadows and false perspectives.

"I'll take care of him," Daley said to his men.

He aimed his gun at a statue of Mahu-ika of Polynesia. The gun whined, the stone glowed, and Coyote leapt from behind the statue just before it burst like a bomb. He took cover behind the voluptuous curves of Venus Callipyge.

Again Daley fired, and again Coyote escaped to the protection of another statue. Troi was astonished at the old Indian's agility.

"What are the one-eyes picking up from his mind?" Daley asked the CS man on his right.

"They're not getting much from here, sir. What they're getting, they're censoring. Must be all fictional. Unrepeatable. No usable information. Send the one-eyes in after him?"

Daley nodded. "I'll go, too."

The pair of one-eyes drew up and flanked him as he walked toward the host of statues.

"Hoooeee!" Coyote shouted with elan from the middle of the crowd of stone figures.

Daley threaded his way with difficulty through the statues. His eye-rasters were filtering the statues, making them into vague globular shapes.

He reached a small open s.p.a.ce near the center of the room. He stopped and looked about for Coyote. The one-eyes hovered overhead, sweeping their scanners downward, moving about, trying to get a line-of-sight fix on the elusive Indian.

When the one-eyes were aligned in a pair over Daley's head, Coyote reached up from behind a statue of the Chinese deity of literature, Wen-ch'ang, and tugged at a rope that was anch.o.r.ed to Wen-ch'ang's fat pencil.

Troi heard a ripping sound, then saw a heavy dark ma.s.s fall from above onto Daley and his two machines, knocking them all to the ground.

Daley yelled and thrashed about on the stone floor. The one-eyes rose back up, circling in a wild mazurka, covered with muck.