The Alchemists by Geary Gravel

Author:Geary Gravel [Gravel, Geary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Pleyen: There. The last piece in place.

Now we may begin. Pelna Pwan: What game is this? You have not

said.

Pleyen: Yours is the first move. Pelna Pwan: By what rules do we play? What

is the game? Pleyen: Come, come. Time runs out for

you. Pelna Pwan: But...

FROM SHADOWPLAY. BY DEVIWAK AND CHIME

From The Belthannis Workbook

of Cil iya dec yo Haim:

I am traveling toward winter.

Tramping in the droshky through these silent places feels awkward and intrusive, but I am closer to the earth than I would have been in an aircar, white still able to cover many kilometers in a relatively short time. It is a compromise, like everything we do on this world.

Today I am sitting on a stone bluff about halfway down the side of a great valley, looking out over an area of perhaps three miles.

The valley seems at first deserted: I hear no birdsong, see no large animals. But there is life here in abundance. One has to get used to looking closer at things, for every rock has its lichen: I have seen blacks, browns, greens, oranges, and pink and beige and rust red, all on my recent climb down this slope.

Everywhere the colors surprise. At first there is only green and silver, gray-green and brown. Look closer and you see twelve new shades, but hidden here and there, in small amounts. And in the distance... behind everything the eye fixes on, there is something else, farther and farther on, folds and valleys, ridges and saddles of silver-green land.

Rocks here below me: the earth's strong bones. And trees. Trees lying fallen where the earth moved years ago, their splayed roots tall as a man and wild, like sculpted explosions pointing to the indifferent sky. From this vantage point shadow reigns in the lowlands beneath my perch: great clouds cast their silhouettes like black vessels moving slowly, serenely on to the other side of the world.

The sun rises in the same place every day; the planet rotates with its poles perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, the degree of tilt so slight as to be negligible.

So there are no seasons here, and all large-scale climatic variation is permanent, regionally fixed. The mild equatorial summer is a perpetual one, as are the polar winters. In between is a gradual blending, producing at its midpoints the gentle autumn we experience in the latitude of our Hut.

This morning I remembered that first night when we fell in the packets and Jefany quoted that bit of Antique poetry to me, something about a "savage place, holy and enchanted." Much more accurate to call Belthannis a static place. Holy, perhaps. Unchanging, for certain.

And where do the kin fit into all this stillness? There is no living organism known to us which is not continually undergoing change. Can we have found in the kin a creature immune to evolution? Is this whirling dance actually a curb on the kin's evolution, a way of keeping the race precisely homogeneous, avoiding any sort of specialization

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