The Whisper Path * “Candice Amberlin,” Jarédo said, quietly, and almost to himself. He wore an expression of troubled introspection, as if reading arcane hieroglyphics inscribed beneath his eyelids. “The xenologist?” Marek asked. “The xenologist. My former teacher,” Jarédo said and from his expression, Marek knew that he was elsewhere: swimming in the seas of memory, maybe…or wandering through some past conversation (or debate) with a woman Marek himself never met. He knew of her, by reputation; he’d heard Jarédo speak of her and he liked the rakish, little anecdotes that were always a glimpse into Jarédo’s past academic life. They sat—face to face—in the dusty ambience of a bar: their favorite haunt. Overhead light wafted down from a complicated, hanging fixture of bulbs and amber globes. In another booth, closer to the front of the bar, someone laughed. There was never any music in Thisbē’s; it was a white-noise bar as local in sentiment, aesthetic, and clientele as any place Marek knew—as local (in a planetary sense) as Marek’s own vanished childhood in the village of Rosta. There were white-noise bars on other planets—as near as Telas and as far as Earth—but they weren’t very popular. Marek had been to Telas, where the bars were noisy with the jagged muddle of random talk and harsh, grinding music. He’d been to Minter, to Roth, and to the icy moons of Kesh. And now, confronted by the inscrutable complexity of Jarédo’s expression, he wished for the sound of music in Thisbē’s speakers, and not the complicated hiss of neutral acoustic ambience. He sipped his beer. “She’s dead,” Jarédo said, as if challenging himself to believe it. “What…?” The warmth bled from Marek’s fingers. “Yesterday,” Jarédo said. “According to reports, she’d climbed a tower—lost a hand-hold, a foot-hold…or something. It…well…she was pretty high up. Broke her neck.” Marek drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. “The story goes that it was an accident.” Marek opened his eyes and exhaled softly; he read an odd sort of reverse light in Jarédo’s gaze—a turbulence: like smoke, like anger, like an emotion he could scarcely name. “The story,” he echoed. “The official story as opposed to the real one?” “The story,” Jarédo said, dropping his gaze into the depths of his beer. “You don’t believe it…?” Grasping at straws and feeling like a child, Marek sat back as something caught his eye: random shadows thrown into the bar from the street outside. He knew of Candice Amberlin—professionally, at least. He knew her as well as any stranger might; he understood some small facet of Jarédo’s unrest. Jarédo knew her in a different way—as a friend, once, and something of a hero. There was more to what he was saying, to what he was feeling, but Marek could only sense the fog-shrouded tip of that emotional iceberg. He sensed treacherous currents around it, an urge to do something, to launch himself along a miscreant’s course of action in pursuit of— —what? An official investigation? A personal inquisition…? “The case,” Jarédo said. “Is closed. The story stands. Accidental death. I accept that, but I want to know why she was at that tower, why she’d decided to climb it.” Chilled and on sudden edge, Marek sat forward. A tickle of hair nagged the crest of his left ear. He brushed at it with his two middle fingers, tucking it back and noting that little reminder to get a trim. “You suspect something…foul play?” Jarédo shook his head. “No,” he said, and was quiet. Pensive. He threw back a swallow of beer: a gulp that reduced the amount in his mug by a third. “Something else…something gray.” He paused, considered his glass at rest on the table-top now. He traced the lip of the glass mug with the tip of his fingernail. He was taller than Marek. He was leaner. In his black, Enforcer’s uniform, he carried the bearing of an assassin; it was something Marek liked, though now—immersed in the white-noise of Thisbē’s, and at this precise moment, it terrified him. There had always been something playful in his poise: a naughty, provocative swagger (even as he sat motionless.) Now, however, there was only the darkness of his uniform, the darkness of his expression, and the sudden warmth of his hand as he reached across the table and clutched Marek’s pale fingers in his own dark, gentle clasp. “I need something, Marek,” he said. “From you. I’ll look the other way.” Marek’s heart skipped a beat and the moment hung in sick, crystalline suspension. Blood made sudden thunder in his ears as the full meaning of Jarédo’s unvoiced question decompressed in his mind. The Eul’taliib, Marek thought, clenching Jarédo’s fingers as if to transmit that thought through the contact of flesh. You want a bridge. You want to talk to them, off the record. “I’ll understand,” Jarédo said. “If you don’t want to do it. I wouldn’t blame you for saying no.” Silence, as goose-flesh prickled the sweep of Marek’s shoulders and smeared a chill down his spine. “There are preparations,” Marek said. “I don’t need anything direct,” Jarédo said, quietly. “I just need to know.” There had always been a secret language between Marek and Jarédo: words, gestures, expressions and a strange, blind-man’s orthography like Braille raised on skin and read—more often than not—in with the tongue, with the lips, and with intimate flesh best hidden within the boundaries of modesty. That language, Marek realized, was a muddle now: confused and fragmented and redolent with the tang of different pheromones. Fear, if Marek had to name what he sensed as it bashed itself against the cage of his ribs. Jarédo closed his eyes. “I just need to know,” he said, and finished his beer. Marek nodded. “It won’t be easy,” he said. “I’ll need an informant.” Jarédo shifted in his seat, listening—for a moment—to the ambient nothing hissing from concealed speakers. He still clutched Marek’s fingers; with his free hand, he reached into a pocket and drew a crisp, fold of paper into the open. It was expensive paper: thick. Its color was like cream, like bone, like something rare and decadent, and he slid it across the table face. Marek took the small, folded slip and pocketed it quickly. He fought the urge to glance around, to see if anyone watched the quiet exchange. They were near the rear of the bar, however; no one saw them, and still, all-too-aware of the probable contraband in his pocket, Marek refused to acknowledge it. There was time, later, and privacy, elsewhere. He nipped a sip of his beer and chased it with a larger gulp. “I…uh…I need to walk around a bit,” Jarédo said, quietly, finishing his own golden brew, its foamy head long vanished. “I’ll be at home,” he said. “Later tonight.” Marek nodded, troubled by the tones of hollow, uneasy abstraction he heard in Jarédo’s voice. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.” Jarédo smiled, reaching for Marek’s hand once more, and clasping his fingers. The gesture carried the intensity of a kiss. It lingered. It withdrew, as Jarédo dialed his code into the table face and paid for the drinks. Afterward, he slid out of the booth and walked, quietly, from the bar. * * * Marek was nine years old when he saw his first procession: aliens in the darkness. He stood at his bedroom window, watching the slow progress of lanterns in the pitch-black night. There were four lanterns, maybe five. They flared in the colors of liquid bioluminescence: greenish-yellow light and bluish-green light tinged with silver. It was soft and diffuse glow; it cast no harsh shadows. The lanterns—spaced regularly within the procession—vanished behind shagwort hedges, reappeared farther away, and vanished again behind the knotty, old turnip-trees, growing at the edge of the yard. They were something like willows in general shape, sprouted from bulbous, lumpy tubers as big as heavy cargo pods. And again, at some greater, meandering distance, they reappeared again. There was a point to the procession: something alien at its existential core. Its lanterns moved like haphazard ghosts in rigid formation, fluttering in and out of ramshackle existence. He saw them again: many, many times during his life in Rosta. “The whisper paths belong to them,” his father had once explained. He’d spoken with quiet and nearly-superstitious awe. He never called the Eul’taliib by their common species-name, never spoke to them, unless dire necessity demanded that particular act. The whisper paths were a Eul’taliib convention, older than the human presence on-planet…older than the most ancient Holy Lands of Earth, and so it was no wonder—then—that the whisper paths meandered where Eul’taliib cultural necessity demanded that they should. There were whisper paths on other planets—as near as Tellus, and as far as Proxima Minor, Centaurēs: courtesies to the Eul’taliib consuls on each of those planets. There were whisper paths on other worlds, too…Eul’taliib colonies far from the boundaries of human habitation. There was a whisper path in Nykēa. It meandered through the heart of the metropolis, and Marek walked along its serene, sweeping curve: the grate of gravel beneath his sandals. Grit found its way between his toes. It might have been smarter to walk the path with naked feet, but his sandals were a comfort, a barrier—however flimsy—between himself and the path’s inherent meaning. He’d read the name scrawled on the folded paper Jarédo had given him. It was a Eul’taliib name: complicated and poetic. It was an illegal possession in the shadowy depths of Marek’s pocket. They were alien as Marek’s father would always say. And so there was a certain necessity for restrictions. They were friendly enough to the humans who’d come to their world and settled in its empty regions. They lived in human cities, though they kept to their own social interests: and when the needs arose, they walked along whisper paths because on such paths, events always occurred, but nothing ever happened. That was their purpose: one humans had learned. Now, humans walked the paths as well. There were radical differences between the races. There were humans who walked various whisper paths, specifically because they needed to not be where certain things were not happening. This was a distinct deviation from the Eul’taliib purpose, but there was no way to express the alien purpose, without a headlong dive into clumsy half-meanings and ill-fitting conceptual similes. Marek needed to walk the path, because he needed to not encounter the Eul’taliib contact Jarédo told him to. Marek needed to not learn the real reason for Candice Amberlin’s death, and the means to that end involved not asking a few very important questions. The whisper path was the only way to get those answers, which—of course—didn’t exist in any official manner. * * * “Is it you who wants to know?” the creature asked. “Or is it him? One bead, or two?” There were always those—among the Eul’taliib—who worked as informants. It was their purpose to know, to tell, and in ways that were sometimes troubling, to show. They were bridges. They were windows. Informants: for law enforcement, for xenologists, linguists, and even arcane miscreants at home in the strange, liminal spaces between human and Eul’taliib societies. They were ghosts of a sort, at home on one whisper path or another. It came a no surprise—then—that Jarédo knew an informant he couldn’t approach as a policeman, and that Marek knew the same being, though by a different name. Names, among the Eul’taliib, were markers of—among other things—profession. “Yes,” Marek said. The informant made a sound like insect-noise: the papery, rasping hiss of Eul’taliib laughter, or the closest that such a being could come to both the physiological and emotional concept. “Two beads,” s/he said, bobbing hir head in what was probably a nod. Marek watched—with idle fascination—the slow and complicated manner in which the creature’s labial plates opened and closed on their delicate, biological hinges, revealing and then hiding the extravagant complexities of the creature’s mouth. “Two beads,” Marek said, chilled in the manner in which he agreed to The Informant’s proposition. There was more to the death of Candice Amberlin than he thought, more—perhaps—than even Jarédo understood. “It will take a short time to brew the beads you need,” the Informant said. It spoke in rasps, clicks, and growling, sonorous chortles: the sounds were complex, rhythmic, and shaped by a brain and muscles Marek could scarcely understand. The words, as Marek heard them, came in a human male voice from the translator imbedded in the band around the creature’s neck like an odd, improvised priest’s collar. Marek nodded. “Walk with me,” the creature said. * * * Marek never asked his father what he thought of the Eul’taliib. Mother’s pensive reticence forbade any inquiries as well. He learned what he could, at night and in darkness: always alone, at first, and always as everyone slept. It rained—once—when he was eighteen and on break from his studies at Port Charles University. Rosta, upon his return, had been too quiet, and Marek (on the first few nights at home) had grown restless and hungry for sounds at alien odds with the heavy silence of village life. It was muggy on that night after torrential rains, and—restlessly and in silence—he stepped out of the house and into the forested land just beyond the border of family property. There was a procession. There were firefly lanterns; there were the lights of deep-sea dwellers, displaced and irate in this strange, waterless realm. Their signal flares did not flash and strobe in the blackness, but remained constant in the glare of greenish yellow, silvery blue, and other colors Marek could scarcely name. He knew about luciferin and how it made heatless light. He knew that animals made use of it, and certain fungi, too. Aliens, it seemed, had learned to make the stuff—artificially—and kept it in ornate, glass bubbles suspended from pikes. He’d seen them, once, shaking the glass bulbs in order to make them glow. Marek picked his way toward the light, as if by insect-navigation: a moth to flame…a blood-sucking aneph hunting mammal-prey in infrared and landing on that particular light source to drink its blood or insert eggs beneath the skin, her ovipositor like a nail-gun embedding her un-hatched young in neat lines that formed scabs like zip-seams. There were no anephs here. They were extinct, but long ago—when Marek was a child—he’d been infected with nine infant aneph maggots, itching beneath his skin. It had been Mother who bought irregular sheets of fatty pork skin, wrapped it around Marek’s arm, securing it with clear, clingy plastic wrap. The maggots, in need of air, detached their anchor hooks, and burrowed into the dead animal skin wrapped tight around his arm. Mother yielded to Marek’s vindictive streak, and allowed him to watch as she fried the skin until the maggots stopped moving through it and exploded like popcorn. He’d stopped itching a day after that. On the night that he walked with squishy footsteps through mud and undergrowth, there were no blood-hunters, no mosquito-imports from Earth, nothing to make him itch, unless he stepped too closely near a flechette-weed or thorny silkvine. Those were tropical plants, however, at home far from Rosta. Damp with rain-spill from the forest canopy, Marek approached the procession, careful to make noise so as to avoid startling the lantern-bearing walkers. There were only four of them on that night. As tall as children, they resembled immigrants from Earth’s prehistory. They were confusing to the human eye, hairless and armored, like insect-things, or outsized, mutated crustaceans, centaur-things, and any number of other biological and mythical creatures. They were robotic in the way they moved, in the ways in which four alien gazes locked on him, unblinking and like faceted glass, with complex liquid crystal shapes swimming beneath like abstract honeycombs, moving and shifting like bubbles in foam. Pupils seemed to form here—and then there—always following him, always existing in his direct line of sight. They resembled nothing familiar in shape, though in the most simplistic terms, Marek understood that they resembled grasshoppers or other jumping insects with muscular hind legs. They resembled centaurs, torsos emerging on a slanted, vertical plane from their largely horizontal hindquarters. Muscular arms extended from their shoulders, ending in strong, six-fingered hands with double, opposable thumbs. Their faces were snouted, pseudo-insect masks, extended from their cranial domes, and their mouths—dear god!—were a complicated mass of shapes: each like a beak behind hinged armor and fringed with finger-shapes, each ending in little, bristly tweezers. One of them—the smallest, and perhaps a child—threw hissing sounds into the night-time silence. Kssksskssksss, like a cicada rattle, or the toneless chirrup of a cricket. The sound, Marek learned—later—was analogous to laughter. Humans—to the complicated Eul’taliib eye—were hilarious, improbable creatures. “You are ready?” the Informant asked, snatching Marek’s thoughts from past to present. He flinched at the sound, shocked—momentarily—by the intensity of his remembrance and the jarring brilliance of daylight around him. He’d worn sandals on the night he saw the four Eul’taliib in procession. He wore sandals now, the grit of fine gravel biting between his toes, where half-shuffling steps had lodged it. “I’m ready,” Marek said. He focused on the park: the moss-growth like succulent, spongy grass and the local tree-variants as redolent as pepper: anything to take his mind away from the Informant’s mouth-fingers flexing and molding a glob of amber-colored neuro-interactive enzyme into something of a spherical shape. The creature worked quickly, before the glob hardened. Marek didn’t need to see the process, the tongue-like appendage (one of two) secreting speech-sap. The less he saw, the easier it was to accept the actions that followed: his own action and Jarédo’s…later. “You should sit,” the Informant said calmly and with typical, emotionless detachment. Marek nodded, angling from the path itself to a nearby tree, a turnip-tree, its trunk swollen with water and its crown like the shaggy head of a mop, riotous with pollen-bearing nodules, leaves like hag’s hair grown from branches like drooping, indolent whips. The Informant walked with him, picking its way across dry, spongy moss growth. It held the nodule of speech-sap in one hand, between two fingers, letting it dry, letting it harden. The stuff was an odd spit-miracle, a result of biological processes it took an advanced PhD in biochemistry to understand. Informants knew far more about humans than humans knew of themselves, and so it was no problem for them to synthesize human-compatible spit-speech. “Candice Amberlin,” the Informant said, as Marek sat—spine pressed—to the spongy bark of the willow-shaped tree. “You will taste her death its reason. You are ready for this?” Marek glanced at the creature, taller now—in every subjective way—from his seated perspective. He nodded. “I’m ready,” he said, unsure of the veracity of his statement. The Informant bobbed its head in a strangely human nod, mouth-fingers still and furled under its chin. It crouched, rear-legs flexed as if set to spring, forelegs bent, like a wrestler’s arms ready to grapple with an opponent. Marek accepted the gleaming clump of solidified information. It might have been a lump of hard candy, something flavored with honey for its color, its incongruous, crystalline beauty. He twirled it between two fingers, watching as it gleamed in fading late-afternoon light. He closed his eyes, popped it into his mouth and allowed it to dissolve. * (…to be continued…) * It comes as no surprise to me that insects inform quite a lot of what I think of whenever my thoughts wander in the direction of aliens. In many ways, insects are aliens, as are deep-sea creatures, or anything that isn’t primate-mammalian. Indeed, every other life form on earth could be considered alien in one sense or another, even other primates. I thought of this as I wrote this tale (it concludes tomorrow.) The Eul’taliib are not grasshoppers. They’re not even insect-derived, but I suspect that were they real, we’d conceptualize insects when we saw them. The human mind works like that after all…it makes connections, even where connections do not initially exist. If the human mind can “visualize” faces on Mars, it would, most surely, visualize grasshoppers, based on only the vaguest of similarities. The image accompanying this text implies that this story takes place on Gamma Lepus IV, a world that appeared, recently, in a manipulated photo-montage in my gallery. I was rather surprised to learn of this. The image accompanying this tale is a similar manipulation, a combination of three distinct photos I’d taken (a park, a person, and the tower of a vertical lift railroad bridge.) All manipulations were done with The Gimp. As for the story itself, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it’s beginning as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and thank you for reading and commenting, and—hopefully—enjoying this glimpse into yet another world.