Tales from Kalgachia - 6
The Council of Perfecti had been relatively early in concluding this day's meeting, if day and night could be called valid distinctions this deep underground. There was no shortage of issues to discuss - the planned annexation of Toastytop, the accomodation of Mishalanski exiles and as ever, the problem of feeding a growing population - but for the time being, each of the Perfecti seemed to be on top of their brief and there was little to be said that had not been raised at the previous meeting. All the more time for each to study the missives of their subordinates in their private quarters, or else engage in the quiet reflection by which they cultivated wise plans and killed off foolish ones.
It was with some irritation, then, that the Chairman of the Council was waylaid by a tap on the shoulder in the narrow, granite-walled tunnel which led to his own place of peace. He turned to see the member responsible for Health and Public Welfare, dressed as usual in a white medical tunic with standing collar, squirming in obvious cognisance of his own displeasing interruption.
"Forgive me, brother Chairman," he said, "But there was a small matter I wished to raise with you alone."
"Alone?" said the Chairman, surprised at the doctor's break in convention. "You know we doesn't keep secrets from each other as a Council. You should have brought it up in session, whatever it is."
"And I would have done," said the doctor, "only it's a matter personal to yourself."
"Oh, you mean the awful smell that arose just after we started the session? I assure you that was not me, but I agree its source could use some medical attention."
"Oh no, brother, I don't mean that. At any rate, it obviously came from our brother concerned with the Tumultuous Wastes. His minions are always sending him spicy foreign food that his innards can't handle. I'll be raising the matter with him later. No, I wanted to inform you of a certain discovery made by my Directorate. Something of... historical significance."
"Well what does it have to do with me? Can you not liaise with our brother concerned with Education and Public Outreach? I'm sure he can provide the archaeologists."
"Yes I plan to do so, but not without your assent. The nature of what we found is... well... one of my Directorate's survey teams found the site, doing gold prospecting with a low frequency ground-penetrating radar. They picked up an obviously man-made void about a hundred kilometres southeast of Oktavyan. I had it checked with our brother concerned with Public Works, and he said it's nothing from his Directorate. I made quiet enquiries with the KDF, they didn't admit to a military installation in the area... so I authorised a blasting crew to crack it open out of curiosity, and..." The doctor tugged at his tight standing collar in hesitation.
"My friends the Troglodyti have something there?" said the Chairman. "Then why didn't you just ask me beforehand? I would have been happy to run it by them and set you at ease."
"No no," said the doctor. "If it had been anything of theirs, they would have got wind of my enquiries and set me straight themselves. You know that better than anyone, brother Chairman. In the circumstances I wish it HAD been one of their excavations. But as it turned out..." Since he had intercerpted the Chairman, the doctor had been fiddling with his leather document pouch, constantly buttoning and unbuttoning it. Now at last he opened it and produced a sheaf of large, monochrome photographs. "Now medically speaking, I remember our private consultation about your nervous disposition and I was reluctant to show you these, but as you say... I must conceal nothing from you." He screwed up his eyes and held out the photographs, which the Chairman took with a slim yellow hand and held up to one of the tunnel's electric light sconces.
The pictures appeared to have been retained in order of capture, first showing the placement of explosive charges against a high altitude mountain face and the gaping hole it left afterwards. Then pictures of a low entrance tunnel, then a round chamber containing three objects. The next picture taken more closely showed three raised slabs, with a dessicated but well-dressed corpse lying upon each. Obviously a tomb of some description.
The Chairman flicked more rapidly through the photographs, having guessed the outcome but still clinging to a silent denial. That was broken by the first close-up photograph of one of the corpses - a woman in a black lacy gown whose face was shrunken by death, but well preserved in the dry coolness of the tomb's local conditions. The Chairman recognised it immediately.
"Great grandm'ma..." he muttered. He whipped out the next photograph. A moustachioed cossack dressed in yellow chokha with a single arm. "Grandp'pa..." he found his voice quivering, although he had never been close to either of them in his youth. In the old Empire they had been been figures of great political importance, while he had been raised in a correctional environment and remembered nothing of them except for the occasional discreet visit.
The Chairman picked the final photograph from the stack, and in doing so he dropped all the others to the floor. From his quivering hand gazed up the shrunken, necrotic face of a figure with dark hair and an even, pointed nose.
"Papa..."
The doctor mumbled something, but the Chairman could not hear him. His full attention was fixed on the face of his entombed father, the man whose committal to a Minarborian penal colony had resulted in the Chairman's own upbringing there. The latter had been released before Minarboria's collapse, to embark upon a life which had led through various implausible twists of fate to this very moment. His father, to his knowledge, had never been released - yet there he lay, photographed in a tomb in a more dignified fashion than his son had ever pictured in his mind.
"Is this... how they were found?" the Chairman managed to stutter.
"Yes, brother Chairman," said the doctor, his voice somewhat muted in response to the steam seeping out of the Chairman's eyes. "The pictures were taken immediately upon entry. I've ordered the tomb be left exactly as found, until you give instructions."
"No shrouds... no coffins... yet they had a proper tomb..."
"I've read some literature about lich burial practices," said the doctor. "The tomb is consistent with liches who have buried themselves in hope of regeneration. Obviously with the demise of lichdom's wider energy field they were unsuccessful. As you can see there has been... some decomposition."
The Chairman could not bring himself to view the bared teeth and taut skin of his desiccated ancestors again. Instead he passed the photographs back to the doctor and a final, inevitable question struck him. "Was the tomb... fully explored?"
"Yes, brother Chairman. It was just the tunnel and burial chamber. No secret doors or hidden voids. The radar made sure of that."
"And there were no other..."
"No, brother Chairman. Just those three."
"I see," said the Chairman whose golden, lizardlike eyes seemed to lose their focus. He turned and began to shuffle away down the tunnel.
"Uh, brother Chairman," called the doctor, "Forgive me. What am I to do with the place?"
The Chaiirman stopped without looking around. For a moment he stood in silence. Then his low voice crept to the doctor's ears:
"Seal it as you found it. Destroy the photographs. Nobody is to know."
The doctor looked the other way up the tunnel to make sure nobody had been listening. "Very well, brother Chairman," he said. "If you wish to..."
He turned his head back to see empty space. The Chairman had already gone.
For a full few hours, the Chairman had looked at an old photograph which he kept by his bedside; a modified Deep Singer of the old Minarborian vintage, this one a female of elegant face and mischievous eyes, crowned by blooming tentacles which cascaded down past several rows of arms and a serpentine lower body. Now the memory of her burned in the Chairman's mind stronger than ever, driven painfully to the surface of his conscience by her absence from the tomb of his lich family. True, he thought, In Minarboria's dying days it would not have made sense for her to accompany them, yet if she had expired alongside them her fate would at least have been known. But now she alone remained unaccounted by the demise of Minarborian Shrubdom, non-existent except in the memories of the golden-skinned boy she had always been proud to call her son, and would have been proud to see him chair the Council of Perfecti as he now did.
"I hope you got a decent burial too, Mama," he said. "Maybe the Garden will bring a part of you back to me someday. Maybe it'll give me a sign..."
He waited for a sign. There was only silence, a motionless scene of carved granite ceiling and bedroom furniture. No inkling of presence, no sensation at all except for the yawning, stomach-churning furrow left in the wake of death's passing scythe.
Like a million other Kalgachis who had survived the collapse of Minarboria, all the Chairman had left was his inner ghosts. Ghosts which would march to the fore and devour his soul unless they were set in context - of that he was certain. The trouble was that everybody in this immigrant population nursed ghosts of their own and thus the collective spectre of Minarbor's fallen Garden stalked them everywhere, even when they had made peace with their personal histories.
As the Chairman's associates in the Troglodyti had observed, however, there was one major exception to this - and in a moment of clarity after a bout of weeping melancholy, he resolved to cheer himself up by experiencing it.
The weather was fine for a journey around the surface, the blue sky combining pleasantly with the grey-brown mountainsides of the Oktavyan Lieutenancy. The winter would bring new hardships, but for now the local population were enjoying the benefits of a steadily more organised food supply, a more comprehensive welfare system and slightly more humane working hours. Being woven between the mountains in a reconditioned Minarborian limousine, the Chairman noticed people hiking and taking picnics along the gentler, sunnier faces of rock. A topography which to him seemed both blind and deaf in its indifference to the plight of those who stumbled around it was, for this brief summer moment, bordering on the hospitable. He made a mental note to report these things to the Council, and especially to the Trogolodyti who would use the entropic lull of such scenes to better inform their arcane meditations.
Around mid-morning the Chairman was dropped off at the Abiding Rustle Elementary School, a modest compound of classrooms surrounding an unpaved playground at the end of a valley village. The school day had not long begun and the Chairman rehearsed his legend as he entered the porch of the school office; he was to be Efim Togliatti, a pedagogue from the Directorate of Education and Public Outreach who was researching the emergence of new teaching methods in provincial villages. As ever, he had been equipped with the paperwork to prove it and he duly reported to the headmaster, one Mr. Levity, whose barely-concealed alarm at the unannounced visit was soothed by a flutter of assurances that it was not a snap inspection. Levity immediately offered his visitor free reign of the school, silently praying that this golden skinned Nezeni with an oddly incongruous Tellian surname would leave the office before noticing the baited rat trap in the corner, amongst other incriminating paraphernalia.
The visitor walked through the corridor, stopping outside a classroom in which a number of small children were singing a cheerful song. He peered through the door's small window at the teacher leading this vocal exercise, a woman of fellow Nezeni stock in a flowing green dress, and waited for the song's final verses to play out before entering:
"See the little flowers, one two three,
Peeking through the rocks at me,
Where do they all go when it's frosty,
Waiting for the springtime free?
Tell me all your secrets, mountain wind,
Whisper them to me, your kin,
I will hold them close, no tattling,
Watching what tomorrow brings!"
The teacher, whose full-throated and tuneful voice had easily outclassed her scratchy students, conducted them to the end of the song with a silken flourish of the hand. "Now that was much better!" she said. "But you MUST remember, keep a tight rhythm in the first half of the song and let it slow toward the end! You should be following my hand and not looking out of the window. Or at the door! Why are you all looking at the... oh."
She noticed the visitor who had quietly entered the classroom, her silver eyes fixing him with an inquisitive gaze. "Hello," she said. "May I help you?"
"Forgive the interruption," said the visitor. "I am Mister Togliatti."
"Hello Mister Togliatti!" the children sounded off without hesitation.
"Hello everyone. I'm from the Directorate of Education and Public Outreach. Does anyone know what that is?"
A show of hands, from which the visitor picked a swarthy boy of Ashkenatzi appearance from the front row. "They're Mister Levity's bosses!" the child said with a smug grin. "I heard him talking about you guys yesterday when I was going past the teachers' break room! He says you're a bunch of-"
"Yes thank you, Joshua!" cut in the songstress teacher through clenched teeth, her blueish skin exhibiting a bead or two of perspiration. "A simple answer is all Mister Togliatti needed. Perhaps he can tell us why he is here today? Was he attracted by our singing?"
"As it happens, yes," said the visitor, following the teacher's cue in playing to the children. "Very good singing it is, too. But my main reason for being here is to find new and interesting ways to teach children like you. To see if we at the Directorate can learn anything from your teacher here, Mrs..."
"Aerit," said the teacher. "MISS Aerit, that is."
"Ah, very well," said the visitor. "Please don't change anything on-a my account. This is notta n'assess-a-ment." To his horror, he found himself slipping into the character of his Tellian surname a little too deeply. Now he would have to keep up the charade. "I'll just-a take-a this spare seat over here and I'll-a notta bother you any further."
Miss Aerit's purplish eyebrows twitched in a combination of derision and amusement at her visitor's odd speech habits, deciding to put it to the back of her mind for the moment. Instead she carried on with the class as best she could, leading the children in another two renditions of their song. To the visitor it seemed as if this singing was some kind of off-curriculum activity, performed purely because Miss Aerit seemed to enjoy it. He resisted the temptation to join in; in the current shakiness of his disguise, it would only have manifested as a hideous pastiche of Tellia's Romero Opera. At the conclusion of the singing, Miss Aerit abruply switched the children to the study of algebra, chalking out exercises for them on the blackboard. To his quiet embarrassment, the visitor found even these simple equations to be somewhat beyond what he had learned when he was the age of these children - then again, education in a Minarborian penal colony was never going to equip him with first-class mathematical knowledge.
After a time, the soft jangling of a distant hand-bell drew the visitor out of his reverie; it was lunch time. After the children had rocketed out of their seats and headed out toward the playground, only the visitor and Miss Aerit remained. As the door closed, to the visitor's suprise, the teacher burst into a fit of falsetto laughter and threw up her hands.
"Why the accent?" she giggled. "Honestly, that was terrible. I don't know who you are or why the Directorate deems it necessary for you to put on that act, but gatecrash the Garden! That was hilariously bad."
The visitor squirmed a little, unaccustomed to the effortless intimacy that she, a fellow Nezeni, had seen fit to drape over him. Outside of his underground home, such things were a distant memory. "I think it's better that you don't know the reasons," he said, averting her eyes which were reaching deeply into his again.
"And I know better than to ask," said Miss Aerit. "I must admit I'm surprised to see one of my own kind above ground. I suppose I should ask the inevitable..."
"Stronetree Xantochromatic 14C," said the visitor, rehearsing the well-established custom of Kalgachia's ethnic Nezenis to compare the engineered genetic strains they inherited from their Minarborian Deep Singer ancestors. "A special variant. Long story."
"Must be the weird accent variant," said Miss Aerit with a mischievous smirk. "I'm Lepidopterum Quadrupedal 12G, Iridescent. Had the surgery a year ago, to cut me down to two legs. Call me a racial traitor if you like, but I got tired of all the awkward looks around town and the taunts from the kids here. It's bad enough having a complexion like a fish."
"There's no such thing as racial treason in Kalgachia," said the visitor with a shrug.
"You know the government line well," said Miss Aerit. "Spoken like the Perfecti themselves!"
The visitor managed to keep a straight face.
"I'm only sorry I have no amazing pedagogical revelations for you," continued Miss Aerit. "As you can see it's a pretty average class. Got a few Mishalanski refugees in last month, though. They're a tough bunch to teach... either they're traumatised from seeing family members eaten by giant hamsters during the crossing over here, or they've got fetal alcohol syndrome from their mothers' vodka habit. I've had to send most of mine off to Mrs. Rosenhan in class five... she teaches the special kids."
"I don't know about your class being average," offered the visitor. "You've taught them to sing better than most children their age."
"That's what ten years in the Hall of Oats Arborial Opera gets you. I know it's bad form to drag up what we did in the old Minarborian days, but I figured I'd try using my skills to someone's benefit."
The visitor, at the mention of the past, remembered his real reason for coming here. "Do the children ask you about the old days much?"
"Not really. I try to weave old stories into my lessons, but they moan about me trying to teach history when I'm supposed to be teaching algebra. Even when they're listening, they just don't get it like people who were there, you know?"
"That's probably a good thing."
"Really?"
"Well, they don't have to grow up with the weight of all those memories."
Miss Aerit was silent for a moment. "True," she eventually muttered with a sigh. "Even the good memories are... bittersweet, I guess."
"Right," said the visitor. "You know it as well as I do."
"What did you do back then?"
"Nothing of note. My father was in trouble with the law. I was with the old Church for a while. Most of my family were liches, except my mother. And she never made it out of the collapse."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"I'm over it." The visitor's frenzied blinking suggested otherwise. "Besides, I shouldn't dive into self-pity. We've all got dark stories to carry around."
"Mmm," said Miss Aerit with an affirmative nod, her eyes glazing over with memories of her own. She dropped to a cautious whisper. "I had a little daughter once, but..." Her words faltered and her throat locked up, unable to recount the full tale.
"Is that why you became a teacher?"
Miss Aerit nodded. "I guess so. It's not the same, but it's better than nothing. At least I can help these kids, right?" She forced a smile.
"Right," said the visitor. "And they'll do better than we ever did. True, we'll have to teach them some history so they know why the Garden of Kalgachia exists, why it's important and such, but at least we can take out the trauma so they can concentrate on the important things. We'll always be damaged goods, let's face it, but them... they have promise. And it's been nice to see them here, singing away without a care in the world. I'll be making that known to... my colleagues." He would have named the Directorate again, but suddenly it felt improper to lie to this woman.
They made small talk until the hand bell rang outside to signal the end of the lunch break, rather too soon for either of them. The visitor rose to his feet, running a hand through the field of pale filaments that constituted his hair. "I'll leave you in peace now, Miss Aerit," he said. "It's been nice talking to you. I've learned a lot."
"Likewise," said Miss Aerit. Then, as the visitor was almost at the door, "will you... come back sometime? You'll be quite welcome... whoever you are." An iridescent shimmer crossed her blueish face, the equivalent of a blush.
"I'd be glad to," said the visitor as he swung the door open, standing aside as a pack of children charged into the room. For once, he meant it.
