Grater’s World

Gerald W. Page

Analog

May, 1983

He was nearly dead when he found the world. He stepped forward, like a drunken man bursting through paper, out of the concourse of the Way and onto the planet’s surface. He took two wild, staggering steps and dropped to his knees. He held himself there for a moment, swaying like a falling tree that was uncertain where to land, and stared straight into Grater’s face. Mouth gaping, Grater stared back. “Say something,” the man croaked. “God,” Grater replied. The man’s expression changed, softened with a mixture of gratitude and relief. He fell forward in a faint.

Grater reached out a thin hand and touched the fallen man’s shoulder. He poked him tentatively. “Hey, are you all right?” Grater asked. The man neither stirred nor made reply. Grater swore and stood back up.

A small green globe of energy hovered about a foot above the ground. It was what Grater had been working on. Angry, and not for the first time in recent weeks, Grater shoved at the globe. It bobbed to the ground and bounced high into the night sky where it burst, showering green shooting stars among the cold, more permanent pinpoints of space. Grater swore again, then looked down at the man on the ground.

He bent down to see again about the intruder. The man was big. He wore tan clothing. By human standards, which were still Grater’s standards despite his present disposition, the man was almost a giant. What belongings he had were carried in a small knapsack on his back but Grater wasn’t interested enough in that to even look. The man seemed asleep: it was altogether likely he was exhausted. It was possible to overexert yourself in the Way if you were stupid enough, and Grater’s opinion of his fellow humans was that most of them were more than stupid enough. He shook the man but couldn’t wake him up. “Come on now,” Grater said. “Hey, you got to get out of here.”

On the sleeping, exhausted face of the intruder a smile appeared. Grater guessed the man was dreaming. Grater hadn’t walked the Way in a long while, years possibly, but he remembered the dreams you could sometimes have after a long walk. Even angrier than before, Grater got to his feet.

“Shiva!” he said loudly.

The man remained where he was, sleeping.

Grater looked up at the sky. The green sparks had died away and the stars were cold and alone once more. So was Grater, but not enough alone. He turned and walked away, hoping the man would be decently gone by morning—but somehow, even then, knowing he wouldn’t be.

Grater wouldn’t learn it until morning, but the man’s name was Edric.

*

Sometimes the Way is like bedrock under your feet and your strides are sure, like the strides of the man in the old Earth story of the seven-league boots. Sometimes, though, the Way turns playful and you seem to walk knee-deep in water. Or else your feet seem to touch firm ground that’s rough and uneven. Though the Way is normally level and easy, there are times when the illusion is that you’re climbing or descending, or both at once. The Way is multiform and the mind is active, however serene it pretends to be. Edric felt as if he were walking in deep, soft sand.

He had never before found difficulty in the Way. Nor silence. He had heard about the Silences, of course, but to him that was just a story. Until now.

At times, the worldsongs are like wind chimes, or cathedral organs, or bells. Even voices. The songs of some of the newer, more primitive worlds could at times be all percussion, the beating of rock on rock or sticks on a hollow log. Sometimes the songs were not songs at all, in the true sense, but sounds: rushing water or great winds or the creaking of ancient wooden ships at sea. Only now the songs were stilled and it was terrible to be a human in the Way, alone and intimidated and more than a little awed and very, very frightened.

No sound at all, not even the sound of Edric’s breathing, for Edric was changed as men are always changed in the Way. The silence, the Silences, cut him off, left him abandoned, the only human in the universe.

And with no worldsong to find his path by.

All the old feelings, all the human things that had been discarded by people since they learned to walk the Way, all these things came back, one by one, or in pairs or small groups, small subtle things. Dry rustling poisons that had not been truly purged but only buried in the soul. Edric was afraid, and Edric had never been afraid before. He was no minstrel, this Edric, but he was human. So he sang. To fill the Silences.

He sang till his voice gave way and he sang as long as he could after that. Hoarse croaking songs that were sounds in utter silence. But the Silences were stronger than his songs: they challenged him. And won. His voice gave way and, finally, gave out. He could no longer sing. He was tired; not even the Way refreshed him. His feet seemed to drag through sand and without the beacon songs of the planets he was lost in a hopeless labyrinth of space from which he could find no exit world. Fear, which at first had been so strange as to be interesting, was fast becoming too personal a thing. Now it held no interest for him at all.

And then he heard the song.

It was no worldsong. He was hearing a woman’s voice. Edric had never heard a voice like it before, but he was certain it was human. For one thing, only humans seemed to have access to the Way. It was believed that any race could break through the fabric of space and travel from world to world as man now did, but just at this point in history, none were known to do so except humans. It depended on the race’s evolutionary stage, apparently. In the past there had been others and in the future there would be others, but just now the Way was open only to humans.

Besides, despite the unutterable, painful beauty of it, the voice was unquestionably human. A human woman who sang her poignant songs so clearly they could be heard in the Way.

Edric followed the voice like a beacon worldsong until it quit. The Silences engulfed him again, worse than before. Something seemed to grab his soul, to toss it as a rag doll is tossed by a playful dog.

Then he found the world. Almost beaten by the Silences, he tore through the spatial fabric and staggered onto the planet’s surface.

*

When he woke it was as if it all had been a dream.

He looked around and realized he was on a world he had never seen before. There was air. It was fairly breathable, though that wasn’t much of a problem to a human who had walked the Way. There was light. The temperature was pleasant enough, maybe even a touch warm, but that was (at this level anyway) even less a problem than the air. Edric sat up.

He was on a narrow rock plain between twin ranges of tall jagged mountains. The world was gray and brown with plenty of sharp, protective shadows, at least to judge from what he could see of it. He remembered seeing someone. A man, not the woman he had heard. There was no one here now though, man or woman. Whoever it was had walked off and left him to sleep, which was all right with Edric since that had been what he needed at the time. But now he had questions and he longed to have them answered.

He was not particularly surprised that his knapsack hadn’t been touched. The Way had changed mankind, after all. He found a packet of food and ate slowly, savoring the taste and the sheer sensation of using his muscles to eat: recovering some of the reality of which the Silences had drained him. When he finished eating, he went to find the man.

He found him on a small plateau some distance away, molding a shape out of shimmering blue material. The man, a small fellow who scowled at his work, gave Edric a glance from the corner of his eye, trying to make it seem he didn’t notice the newcomer at all. Edric watched him work for almost an hour before he gave up and spoke a simple, “My name is Edric.”

Grater kept on working.

“I said my name’s Edric.”

Grater acknowledged the statement with a nod.

“And your name?” Edric asked.

Grater turned his head. He scowled at Edric.

Edric smiled. “I’d like to know your name. But it is your right not to tell it to me.”

“I know all about my right.” There was a brief pause. “It’s Grater.”

“Grater,” Edric repeated, trying the word out. “You been here long, Grater?”

“I’m busy.”

He stood up on skinny legs and stepped back to look at what he had shaped.

It stood about three feet tall. The base didn’t touch ground but hovered about a hand’s width above it. That part of it seemed to have no particular shape to it, but moved and churned like water in a skin. Otherwise, the object seemed to stay pretty much as Grater had molded it, though it shimmered and did strange things to light. It seemed to resemble nothing but itself, to form some sort of intentional but indecipherable abstraction.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Edric said. “What is it?”

“My work,” Grater said. He moved his hands lightly over the thing’s surface, making slight corrections in the contours.

“No, I mean, what’s it made of?” Edric asked, reaching toward it.

He came close enough to experience a tingling sensation like static electricity, but before he could touch it Grater stopped him. “Leave it alone,” he said. “It’s not finished. Anyway, I don’t want you tampering and prodding at my work. Not you, not anyone.”

Edric stood back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interfere in what you were doing, I was just curious, that’s all.” He looked around. “What world is this?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No.”

Grater looked at him. “Then how’d you find it?”

“Believe me, it wasn’t easy. I got lost in the Silences. Really lost. But I heard a song.”

“In the Silences?”

“It wasn’t a worldsong. It seemed to come from here. Anyway, this is where I ended up, wherever this is.”

“Silences, hey?” Grater said. “So you weren’t intentionally coming here, is that it? So why not move on now to wherever you were intentionally headed.”

“I’m not anxious to go back into the Silences.”

“The Silences move on, and the Way’ll be full of worldsongs to guide you away from here. You won’t have any trouble.”

“I could use a rest. Besides, I’d like to search down that song I heard.”

Grater scowled at him again. “You some sort of minstrel? Manawyddan knows there’s enough of them cluttering up the Way now.”

“I’m no minstrel.”

“Then why bother? What’ll you do with the thing if you do hear it?”

“It’s not the song,” Edric said. He was speaking defensively, he realized, as if it mattered what this small angry man felt. “I want to find the one who sang it.”

“A planet’s a planet,” Grater said. “Eyes of Mithra, man. You’ve walked the Way. Just open your ears and listen to the song, then get away from me. Away from my world.”

“It’s not the planet. I can hear this world’s song now, a sort of low humming.”

“That’s it, all right. The good Buddha knows it is. So get going and leave me to my work.” He turned back to the shimmering blue sculpture, eyed it without pleasure.

“It isn’t the world,” Edric insisted. “The planet didn’t make the song I heard, no planet did. It was a woman. Her song—no, her voice was so clear I could hear it in the Way despite the Silences. I heard that voice through the Silences.”

“No woman can sing like that,” Grater said. “Goodbye.”

“I don’t intend to leave until I find her.”

Grater gave him a look. It was hard to tell what it might mean. “Then—what’d you say your name was?”

“Edric.”

“Then, Edric, you just look to your heart’s content. But don’t get in my way, by Horus, just don’t get in my way.”

“Won’t you at least tell me who she is?”

“There isn’t any such person. I’m the only one here, anyway. And all I want to do is my work.”

“But—”

“Can you give me any kind of reason I’d be on a world like this except to be alone?”

Grater turned, not waiting for an answer, and walked off, leaving Edric alone with the shimmering blue work of art.

After several moments, Edric stepped up to the thing for a closer look. Cautiously he placed the palm of his hand on its surface. It throbbed and hummed beneath his touch, and offered a thin but interesting echo of the planet’s worldsong.

Yet it wasn’t the song Edric had heard or anything like that song. He left the strange blue object floating there in the air and began his search.

*

It was not an interesting world. It was small by planetary standards and mostly barren. There was water in occasional streams and green things grew close by the water. But mostly there was stone and shale and jagged unfriendly mountains. The surface of the planet was wrinkled and pitted like a peachstone. There was no reason to think that the girl he had heard singing was hiding from him, but if she wanted to, this planet offered plenty of places she could be. But why would she want to?

It was like searching for a flame on the sun. He wandered and he stared, for the most part, at whatever was the horizon from where he was standing. On even a small world there were too many places where a person could be at any given time. She had no reason to be hidden, but that didn’t mean he’d necessarily find her.

But on he walked, wandering and searching. He was afraid, those first few days, to slip back to the concourse where he had first heard the song, afraid of the Silences. Gradually his nerve was returning, though, and after several days he slipped back into the Way and stood, poised, just off the small lonely planet. He listened.

He heard.

Songs. Thousands of them, more than he could keep track of. Wind chime and trumpet, string and bell, mallet on iron. The rush of water, the swift movement of stormwinds, a fall of rock, whistles, ringings, crystal sounds, and sounds unlike anything but the sounds that planets make. Songs, thousands of songs. All at once, from thousands of places, some of them close, some of them far, all of them singing, singing. The Silences had passed on.

He stayed where he was until he could make out the humming sound of the lonely world. And he realized he had been mistaken about that, that it was not such a lonely world after all: perhaps two dozen of the songs he heard were strong enough to suggest other worlds in the same star system. But when Edric was certain he could clearly hear the faint and timid song of Grater’s World he started walking.

He used the humming planetsong as a beacon to keep himself oriented as he circled the world. It would have taken years on foot but he did it in minutes through the Way.

Though he heard more songs than he could hope to recall later, he didn’t hear the one he wanted. He circled the planet once again before stepping out on the nightside.

For a long time he sat on a boulder and brooded.

He was human and in the human way, his imagination drifted. His mind conjured up ghosts and superstitions, answers to the mystery. He invented a Siren of the Silences. A beacon for lost Terrans. The Lost Woman of the Silences. He thought of wood nymphs and wondered if his secret singer could, in some supernatural fashion, live in a rock such as the one he sat on. He imagined that she might be invisible, that she might be deliberately hiding from him, watching him from the shadows, laughing at his efforts and his failure. But all along he knew the answer was simply that she hadn’t been singing. And the answer might even be that she had simply left this world last night and gone elsewhere, in which case he might never find her again.

He should move on himself. Only—suppose she was here? He wanted to hear her sing again, he wanted to see her.

After a time he gave up his brooding long enough to sleep. The next day he searched some more, with identical luck. Finally, late that day, he found himself at the same place where he had first set foot on this world.

So he went to find Grater.

*

“So you’re still here, are you?” Grater greeted him. He was seated on a rock outside the mouth of a great cavern. It was dark inside the cave, but Edric could see small shimmering points of colored light somewhere deep in there.

“I didn’t find what I was looking for,” Edric said.

“Why should you? Why should anybody, ever?”

“I feel like looking, that’s all,” Edric said. He hated himself for defensiveness, but added, “After a time, maybe then I’ll give up.”

“Mary of the Almond,” Grater said. His voice was surprisingly soft, though. “Don’t you know by now you won’t give up? Just look at yourself. If it isn’t this one damned song, it’ll be another one. You’re hopeless.”

“I just want to see her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“Sure.” For a moment he was silent, they both were, but then Grater spoke up suddenly. “What do you know about it? Feet of Adonis, man, what can you know of it? I’m not blind. I can see what you are, even if you can’t.”

“I’m just somebody who heard a song and wants to see who sang it.”

“But it isn’t a worldsong, right? And it came to you while you were in the Silences, right?”

“Yes.”

“And to you that sounds possible?”

“Well—”

“I thought so, it doesn’t sound possible, not even to you. You given any thought to the possibility this is all in your mind? That the Silences made you imagine that song?”

That made Edric angry, but he had no answer for it.

“Well, I guess you’re thinking of it now,” Grater said.

Suddenly he stood up. “I want to show you something.”

He went into the cavern without looking back. Edric hesitated only a moment before following him.

The entrance widened and sloped down toward what was evidently a vast chamber. There was light far below. There were sculptures.

The cavern blazed with color. Shimmering reds and blues and golds and yellows, blazing white and emerald green. And shades and gradations of those colors and more. Much more. Reds that were almost as dark as night. Scarlet and russet and crimson and so on to orange. Blues like earthsky. Blues like ocean water. Nightblue.

All the colors shimmered. Some of them were like types and qualities of glass, some like moving water, some like flames, others like bright gasses or tinted air. No two of them seemed to be the same.

Each was itself not only as to color, but as to shape, as well. Some were formed like things Edric knew, the figures of animals or trees or women. Some rested on the ground or seemed to grow out of it. Others—most in fact—floated above the ground; their levitation seemed a part of the design. There was one complex piece in the form of a dozen varicolored planets circling a blazing golden sun. Most of them were abstract, strange, shaped to Grater’s whim. Yet Edric was aware how brilliantly each and every one of them was conceived.

“It’s my song,” Grater said curtly. “Listen to it. Go ahead, listen.”

Edric could only gape.

There must have been a hundred of them. All of them as beautiful as they were strange. Now Edric understood. Songs, yes, like songs. But songs set to color and form. And strangely alive.

“I never thought there could be anything like this,” he said.

“You never thought,” Grater said.

“But why here? No one can see them here. People ought to know about these. They should see them.”

“When it’s right, they will,” Grater said.

“But…look at them. I don’t see how they could be more right than this. They’re incredible.”

“Not incredible enough. I’ve seen more incredible; I’ve seen better, much better.” Grater tapped his forehead with two thin fingers. “Up here, there’s better. You understand that?”

Edric hesitated. “I don’t think so—”

“No, of course you don’t. Yet. But you might in time, you might. How could I know what you might know in time?” He turned his back as if he didn’t want Edric to see his face. Or maybe he wanted to stare at that small yellow abstract over in the far corner. Who could say? He kept talking. “The Way changes people in thousands of ways. All people. But some it changes more than others. And in special ways. You know that. Even you know that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t understand why you’ve hidden these things away where no one can see them.”

“Two reasons, not that either one of them’s any of your business. I told you one of them. They aren’t ready to be seen; I haven’t done what I want to show yet. The other is that I like it here, on a world like this. I don’t like interruptions. I like a world that hums quietly rather than one that bongs like a Dionysius-be-damned bell every five seconds. I like the quiet.”

“Yeah, I guess I understand that.”

“Then guess again. What you understand is here I am talking like this to you and you tell yourself ha-ha this old bastard’s so lonely for some company he’ll say anything. He’s talking merry-go-rounds around the real truth and what he means isn’t what he’s saying but what he isn’t saying. You really think that, don’t you. Don’t you? You don’t know at all.”

“I’m sorry. But that’s not—”

“You know how the Way affects people. Like they’re able to walk on worlds where the air should boil your insides out or the gravity should flatten you to a fine coating of salve? Sometimes the changes go deeper than that, Edric. Look—”

Grater reached an empty hand up into the air.

It was like a conjurer’s sleight-of-hand trick, an illusion for your eleventh birthday party. But it was no coin or card that Grater plucked from the air, not two small balls he held between his fingers. It was like a handful of clay, but it was the color and clarity of pale honey and it shimmered and was alive with its own light.

And Grater reached into the air and gathered a second handful and joined it to the first. Again he gathered honey-colored shimmering clay for his sculpture until he had a fair amount of it packed together and suspended in the air in front of him.

“You can’t do that,” Grater said.

When he could find his voice, Edric said, “No.”

“No one can, but me. It was what happened to me from walking the Way. I don’t know how or why—if there is any such thing as a ‘why.’ It was just a one-in-a-billion fluke, a bonus tossed in in addition to all the other ways, even the inner ways, that people are changed. I seem to be able to gather the stuff to build my sculptures from the basic fiber of the universe itself.”

“No wonder these statues are so magnificent…”

Grater faced him again. He seemed almost on the verge of tears, but instead of sobs it was all coming out of him in rage. “Magnificent, yes! No one’s ever done anything like that, not Cellini, not Michelangelo, not Rodin, not Sarretto, not anyone but me. Look at it, just look. Sure, it’s great. But not my part of it. It’s what I’ve worked with that’s great. I’ve added nothing to the clay. None of the shapes are worthy of the stuff they’re built of.”

There was a moment where neither spoke, not as deep a silence as the Silences, but somehow more profound. All Edric could think of to break it was, “I’m sorry.”

“Just get out of here. Winds of Azazel, just get out of here.”

Grater stood unmoving. Edric wondered if there was anything he could do for him. After a few moments, he realized there wasn’t. He left the cave and sat down on the stone shelf just outside the entrance.

After a time, Grater came out and sat down on the other side of the opening. They spent the rest of the night without speaking.

*

This was a world where morning came weakly. But the distant sun rose and the mountainside was bathed in first light of a fashion. Edric woke, surprised to find that he had been asleep. He saw Grater standing, staring down into the small valley below the mountain. There was grass, after this planet’s fashion of grass, and small trees only a bit larger than bushes.

Grater said, “Made up your mind what to do?”

“Not really. I guess I’ll go. Be stupid to do otherwise.”

Grater turned, looking so pale in that daylight that Edric found himself wondering if he had managed to sleep. “Is it?” Grater asked.

“Is it what?”

“Stupid to continue looking.”

“Isn’t it?”

“That’s up to you,” Grater said. He looked back at the valley. “Lots of things up to a man if he’d only think about it. If he’d only face it. But you don’t really want that sort of responsibility, do you?”

“What’s responsibility got to do with it?”

“If you ever talk to yourself, I’ll bet it’s like two strangers that don’t speak the same language. You’re like me. Like I was. In a while you’ll be just like you see me now. And I don’t mean standing here all by yourself doing statues that aren’t good enough to satisfy yourself. Tell me, Edric. You’re no minstrel and you’re no artist. I don’t think you’re a wordsmith. Just what are you?”

“Do I have to be something? I’m just me. That seems enough.” A pause. “I just like to search things out.”

“Sure,” Grater said, drily.

Edric got to his feet. “Anyway, I’ve made my mind up now. Going’s the best thing.”

“What…?”

“I said—”

“Hold it. Shut up!” Grater snapped. He had a strange look. “Listen. Don’t—”

Then Edric heard it. The song. He turned, stared down into the valley. She was standing at the valley’s mouth.

She wasn’t close enough to see well. He had a glimpse of blue-gray dress, of long blonde hair, of straight flashing arms and legs. But the song crossed the distance to him. It was strong, clear. Easy to hear.

He listened. He dared not call out even to attract the woman’s attention. Beside him, Grater listened.

Then she was gone.

With a lithe movement she opened space and stepped off Grater’s World into the Way. She had not looked toward the men, could not know that anyone had been listening. She simply left.

The song went with her.

Edric stood staring at the emptiness where she had been. Her song echoed in his mind.

He turned. Grater dropped to a sitting position on the ground. “Jesus,” Grater said. “Sweet Jesus.”

“She’s real,” Edric said. “I know that now. I can find her, if I look. By her song. Anyone who ever heard her sing would remember.”

“There’s a lot of songs between her and you by now,” Grater said.

“But I know she’s real now. I know she can be found. I have to try.”

Grater knew that too. He nodded.

Edric stepped off Grater’s World and left Grater staring at the emptiness where he had been. Grater wasn’t sure whether to envy or pity him, but that wasn’t important. Things like that had never been important.

Grater stood up.

He went into the cave and looked around at the works that filled the great chamber. How many years? How much effort did these things represent? He couldn’t say. But did things like time and effort matter? Not when they weren’t right. If he took five minutes and finished one to his own satisfaction, it would outrank all of this, wouldn’t it? In spite of years, in spite of what he had put of himself into these.

He had heard the woman’s song, heard it and understood, had known why she was here. Understood how she had been changed and how she had perfected what she could mold from the clay given to her. God, that song of hers rivaled the worldsongs—

His statues—

His statues…He grabbed the closest one and sent it hurtling into another.

He willed them apart. He tore them with his hands. All of them, the statues, close to a hundred of them, he’d shaped out of the fabric of space itself as only he could do, he who had the responsibility but not the talent. He rent them and set the shimmering colored energy of them free, like gas out of a balloon.

Colors rolled across the ceiling of the cavern. They rolled across the ceiling and up to the cave mouth and out into the sky, where they burst like ecstatic fireworks, all red and green and gold, silver and yellow and blue. The sky crackled with a display of rockets and roman candles such as no man had ever seen in all of time and never would have the opportunity to see again. But Grater stayed in the cavern and cursed himself until the last of the works was spent, so there was no one to watch what was in the sky.

It was a week that Grater brooded and dreamed and thought of going back to the worlds of men. It had been ages since he walked the Way, but that’s not a thing a human forgets how to do.

But that wasn’t all he couldn’t forget.

When his brooding was finished, Grater put it and the thoughts of leaving aside and went back into the cave.

In the way that only he could, he took hands full of shimmering, colored material and molded a statue. He worked with an intensity he had never known before. When he was done, it was not what he knew it should be, but it was better than any he had ever done before. The next one was very good indeed.

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