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CHAPTER ELEVEN,

an encounter with Dispucket,
queerest of creatures.

Psychologists cite this episode as archetypal of human drives, desires, and fears. For the late Korbuth Aggadhi, Benadek's struggle echoes primal human fear of becoming, the disinclination of Youth to submit to adult responsibility; Hars Kregulo * postulates inborn reluctance to assume responsibility in any form; others, concentrating on the mystery of why most humans become while some merely are, perceive an ancient conflict between the shape-bound and the mutable, a conflict buried for a million civilized generations, but still within us.
Achibol, in the classic tale, is instigator and facilitator—a kindly deity who leads Benadek to the threshold of understanding, unable himself to cross it. In others, he is Evil incarnate, thrusting unready Benadek into the abyss of premature change.
Biocybernetic reconstruction provides details hitherto unremarked. Experts at the Great School are working to unravel these mysterious revelations.* We have an exquisitely detailed description of the "veins" of a "leaf," a vegetal solar accumulator. We now know the superficial morphology of a small quadruped who may once have fed among or upon these "leaves." Such odd details emerge, unrelated to the tale itself. Perhaps we will never fully understand such graphic vignettes, but should we ever stand on a world where "squirrels" and "oak trees" exist in gentle symbiosis, we will know beyond doubt that the soil beneath our feet is that of Achibol's Home.
(Saphooth, Project Director)

 

"What's a `dispucket,' Master—and why do you want me to meet one?" The ground they trod was relatively dry, except for dew. Squirrels chattered in broad-leaved white oaks. Silver thorn bushes tinkled sweetly. They had followed the narrow game trail for almost an hour now, and Benadek became petulant at the old man's air of mystery.

"There is only one Dispucket, boy, and when you learn what he has to teach, you'll know why I wanted you to meet him. And now . . . the moment is at hand. Stand aside." He pulled Benadek off the trail, and . . .

The ground where Benadek had stood moments earlier bulged like a swelling boil. Sod cracked radially from the growing tumulus's center to its indistinct edges. As the ground rose, chunks fell aside in a ring several paces across.

From a distance Achibol assured him was safe, the boy watched the . . . thing . . . rise to man-height and higher. Its surface was convoluted, wrinkled, folded in a radiating pattern. It was dirty pink like old meat, streaked with dendritic markings that bulged and flattened in slow, regular cycles. Veins! Veins and pulsing arteries! Its pustules stank of carrion and ammonia.

Benadek pinched a dirty finger and thumb over his nostrils and reached for a stone. Eyes never leaving the hideous sight, revulsion twisting his visage, he drew his arm back to throw.

"Wait." Achibol's grip on his wrist was so tight the stone itself seemed to throb in time with the dispucket's undulations. "Does it offend you so?"

"It looks like a puckered asshole and smells worse."

"For that you'd injure it?" Achibol shook the stone from the boy's numb fingers. "Now, should I cast a spell that makes boils of your eyes, and your nose a crushed toadstool?"

Benadek quailed inwardly, realizing that his error must have been grave, but stubborn adolescent pride permitted him to show no fear. Achibol sighed. "Should I make your breath stink of gut-gas and hog-puckey, so every man will reach for stones to cast?" The sorcerer shook his head. "Benadek, Benadek."

Head down, Benadek mumbled, "I don't understand."

"I can't teach you what it feels like to be a dispucket. But were you as repugnant to others as it is to you, you might be less eager to throw stones."

"But it's only a thing, Master." Benadek was truly afraid. Would Achibol do that? Could he? This was no gentle chiding: the sorcerer wanted some enlightened response, but the creature disgusted him. He could not claim otherwise. "I'm sorry, Master," he said miserably. "I beg enlightenment."

"Enlighten you! Hmmph. If the cost of understanding is high, will you pay it?"

Benadek held his hands tightly at his sides. His thoughts raced like leaves in a wind-devil, and he waited until one leaf spun out from the flutter to land before him. "If the learning is needful, Master, and the cost not too great for me to bear, I'll pay it."

Achibol smiled broadly, his face all brown wrinkles and big, yellow teeth. "Clever lad! You throw my words back at me and wriggle away. Should I make such a slippery one into a worm, or reward his astuteness?" He continued to grin. "Should I reward you, boy?"

"If you judge me worthy, Master."

"See? Again you squirm away. Very well. I'll give you both enlightenment and reward. Dispucket awaits you. Spread wide your arms and hug him as you might your long-lost mother."

The cruel simile jolted Benadek, who was used to gentler teaching. He looked from Achibol to the dispucket and back. His boyish face wrinkled like the old man's, silently pleading. He looked again at the dispucket, purple-veined and suppurating, wrinkled and throbbing. "Go, boy," Achibol prompted. "Embrace him."

Slowly, as if his feet were mired in mud, Benadek began walking. Like a marionette jerked along by a clumsy child, he forced himself closer, unwilling brain struggling with recalcitrant legs, step after dragging step. The fetor of dead things clung to his nostril-hairs and made his gorge rise.

Not swallowing his own polluted spit or smearing away his tears, he spread his arms. The dispucket, seeming to divine his intent, stretched upward, an elongate mushroom, a phallus whose veins swelled and shrank in obscene desire.

Caught between embracing that foul perversion and facing his master's burning, yellow-rimmed eyes, Benadek yielded to the fear he knew best: in one rough motion he threw his arms around the dispucket.

 

As if a nightmare had just ended in bright, warm sunlight, the stink and corruption were gone! The dispucket was gone too. Disoriented, Benadek looked upon an unfamiliar scene. From beneath a leaf the size of a cartwheel he peered through giant grasses. His tiny eyes darted from one wind-moved blade to another, seeking danger. His tiny heart hummed too fast to feel individual beats. Then everything twisted crazily, and the scene was gone.

 

With reptile-eyes that gauged, focused, and tracked without thought, he watched the darting motions of a sting-fly, and felt his long, sticky tongue uncoil and dart from his lipless mouth. With tongue-tip chemosensors he caught a brief taste of the struggling insect even as the world lurched again.

 

Benadek saw his mincing white paws through fox-eyes. Then he had kaleidoscopic insect-visions of flower stalks glimpsed from the air. Through turtle-eyes he peered through muddy pond water. Each time reality shifted, he saw something new, from a viewpoint unimagined seconds before.

Benadek's vision-voyage took him skyward, where he perceived the air as a matrix of insect movements through a white-barred nighthawk's hunting eyes. Moments later, he understood water in three dimensions, being himself a fat trout moving beneath a rippling, mirrored sky. He saw. He understood.

* * *

One vision followed another, each clear and distinct. Vision was an inadequate word; sight was only the slightest part of his experiences. For a brief moment, he was each creature. He saw, felt, heard, and smelled the world through the senses of a hunting cat, a song-snake humming between tree branches, a fish-eating bird, and a fish being eaten. He knew senses no human possessed, and savored each one. He took life and he died. He mated, shifted, and lived again in form after form . . .

 

Abruptly, the visions ended. He saw his own shod feet, toes pointing skyward as he sat atop the disrupted soil where the dispucket had been. It had withdrawn, leaving only soft, churned humus.

"Boy?" He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Night approaches, and we must return to our vessel."

With legs that felt hardly his own, with downcast eyes, Benadek followed Achibol's dirty robe-hem. Later, while the sorcerer puttered and lit fire, he stared inwardly, seeing again the visions of his mind's eye. He ate with hands far away on arms that stretched distant and unfeeling to a platter that was a white blur on his lap.

 

When night enshrouded all but those few embers still reflected in Achibol's eyes, Benadek ventured speech. "I am enlightened, Master," he said, bemused.

"And rewarded?" Achibol prompted gently. "You are recompensed for the stink and the fear you endured?"

Benadek nodded gravely, then raised his head and blurted, "Master? What happened to me?"

"You saw what you saw through all the eyes of this small patch of forest. Isn't that so? I'm glad Dispucket was so kind to you," he said, "after what you did to him."

"But Master Achibol!" Benadek protested, "I did nothing! I only thought about throwing the rock."

"Ah! The cobble. I'd forgotten it. No, your offense was greater than that."

"Pardon, Master. I'm ignorant."

"Eyes, Benadek, eyes!" the sorcerer urged. "Think not about what you saw, but how."

Benadek put his chin on his knee and stared into the coals. "Let me think," he mused. "I saw through mouse eyes, and fishes', and a fox's. I saw through birds' and song-snakes' eyes, and I saw flowers as through a child's toy viewing-glass, in broken images—bugs' eyes, I think." He pondered the strange visions, then shook his head. "I saw only what the creatures saw."

"Why? Will you credit it to wild forest magic and dismiss it?" Achibol twisted his beard with impatient fingers.

"I . . . I assume the dispucket was responsible for the visions, Master. They began only when I touched it. Was I perhaps seeing as the eyeless monster sees?"

"Perhaps? Is the universe so vague and phantasmic? When you swim, do you only suspect the water is wet?"

Benadek frowned in angry frustration. Achibol was unfair. "I'm your apprentice, Master. If mules talk, and talismans fell honches, can anything be what it seems? I doubt everything."

"Indeed. I see now that your doubt is not stupidity—I forget the hard lessons of my own youth, long past. Assume then that Dispucket sees as you saw, through other eyes. Consider next what larger creature's eyes he might have used, there in the glade." Achibol's stare was bright and beady.

Benadek reviewed the scene. Sylfie had hung back, and Teress. Had the creature seen through their eyes, it would have seen only Achibol's back, and the forest trail. Using Achibol's, Benadek's own back would have loomed large . . . The boy's expression displayed sudden understanding. "Me! Ah, Master! The dispucket used my eyes. It saw . . . itself! Benadek hesitated, unsure of the implications of his revelation. Achibol's now-placid visage encouraged him. "Is it intelligent, Master? Could it comprehend what I saw? Could it sense the disgust behind my eyes?" His brow furrowed. "To be offended, mustn't it be a thinking being?"

Achibol merely gazed at him. "What is it, Master? What sort of thing is Dispucket?" Benadek now knew that "Dispucket" was no mere descriptor, but a proper name.

"Life, Benadek. Like you, me, and our sleeping companions. Life, and thus sacred."

"Intelligent life, Master?" the boy pressed on. "As intelligent as you or me?"

"I can't speak for you, boy. Answer yourself. As for me—no, I think Dispucket is less clever, surely less discerning, than old Achibol, for I am a human being, and it is not."

"Does humanity define intelligence, then?" Benadek challenged. "Can no other being qualify?"

"I know of none. Perhaps whales. Perhaps their shape-shifted, mutated descendants. But they don't converse with me. But between you and Dispucket, would an intelligent being choose to be the latter?"

"I would have been sure this morning," Benadek said, "but no longer. If not for the revulsion I feel, I might choose to be Dispucket for the depth and breadth of its vision. And after all, at most times, no being looks upon itself . . ."

The boy was thinking so hard that his crinkling forehead made dark lines by waning ember-glow. After many breaths, having reviewed what he had been told and what he had deduced, he spoke. "I'm sorry that I looked upon Dispucket with such disgust. I hope that his suffering was only aesthetic, and that he didn't partake of my judgments as well." He paused. Achibol refrained from interrupting his thoughts, which were deep, and which raced like stream water.

Long moments later, Benadek asked his question. "Who was Dispucket, Master, before he became what he is?"

"He was a boy," Achibol answered in a tone like sepulchral bells, "much like you." Was that gleam a tear? Was the old man crying, or were the fire's last fumes irritating his eyes?

"What was he to you, Master?" the boy asked softly. Petulance, condescension, and irritability were Achibol's everyday repertoire. His apprentice was cautious.

"Dispucket, son of Egdappit and Mulgay, was my last apprentice but one. He used to be a handsome boy, not a mushroom, but I failed to teach him patience, obedience, and discretion along with knowledge. He was a smart boy, or so I thought . . . but I wonder, now, don't you?"

Benadek's tongue seemed swollen like a pond-leech, preventing speech. His head spun and Achibol's form blurred. What had he gotten himself into, that fateful day when he had tried to rob a helpless old drunk? The boy's mind was incapable of translating the fear that overwhelmed it into trembling, screaming terror. He should have done that long ago, in the alley where he had first seen the mage, or in that first temple where he had thought him a demon. Now it was too late. He, Benadek, had no choice to make. No choice at all.

 

Achibol wrapped Benadek's blanket around him. Benadek slept on, hearing the drone of voices only as secure sounds.

"Was it only fatigue?" one murmured.

"Fatigue, and fear. His reaction to the news that Dispucket was once a boy like him was merely a terminal event, not a radical one."

"Your words leave something to be desired, old man—clarity, for example."

"Radical, you mean?"

"It makes no sense, as you used it."

"Words change. In an ancient tongue, it was radix, a root. From that root—the root which is `root' . . ." He chuckled, and Benadek stirred uneasily. For a while all was silent. Then: "From `radix' came radish—the same radish Sylfie uses so skillfully in stews. Radical meant at the root of things. In the mouths of know-nothings it twisted itself to mean first `extreme,' then `politically unreliable.' You see?"

"I see that you are a foolish old man. Why was Benadek so put off by Dispucket? For that matter, why was I? He's no uglier than a trash-eating hog."

"We fear not what is different but familiar, but what is like us, yet unfamiliar. Dispucket's semblance is human, in part, but grotesquely sized and without referent."

"I know what he looked like, but I suspect there's more to it."

"I wonder if your pure-human teachers have prepared you to learn it?"

"Try me."

"Very well. Recognition pheromones—airborne hormones coded by histocompatibility genes that signal another being's relationship to you—species, tribe, family. The closer the ties, the stronger the signal. Such subtle messages attract mates if they are only species-close, but mute the tides of desire between siblings."

"My mother's sisters said as much—though I have yet to experience it."

"You'll only infer the signals after the fact. The chemistry can't be directly sensed. The first you may know is when your brain moves you to action or emotion. But have we forgotten Dispucket? Why does he raise such unlovely emotion in all of us?"

"Even you, his Master?"

"His erstwhile master. Dispucket has gone far beyond me, though for my own purposes he failed. But can you answer my question?"

"I need one more fact. Are Dispucket's `signals' close to our own, or as distant as his appearance? Are they human or beast?"

"They have not changed since he was a human boy."

"Then Dispucket repels us not by his appearance alone, which is no worse than some things we eat with relish—bright mushrooms and organ meats—but because his messages are not those of mushrooms or meat, but of a boy. That contradiction repels us."

"Just so. I hope my present apprentice can understand as much, and come to terms with it."

"Why did you bring Benadek here? What good did it do?"

"He's proud, arrogant, and selfish, and he has too few fears. He doesn't look deeply enough into others or himself. I hope this encounter will change that. And another thing," he said, raising his hands in a fatalistic gesture, "though the boy importuned me to become my apprentice, and no words of mine would dissuade him, I've discovered in him qualities and abilities I once sought but had despaired of finding, since Dispucket went his own way. Now, in fairness to Benadek, I'll give him a final opportunity to back out. For his sake, I hope he does. For the world's sake, I pray he does not."

"Is being apprenticed to you so horrible? And what can he offer the world, anyway?"

"Ask Dispucket. He failed when the lessons were simple. Benadek has yet to begin. The change may destroy him—as was Dispucket, he is as far evolved beyond you and other pure-humans as you are beyond the ancients. Beyond me."

"I hadn't considered the change an advancement," Teress said.

"It is. Survival in a mutable world requires mutability—but intelligence cries out for control. You have only minimal control over your changing, but it won't destroy you. Benadek has the potential for absolute control over his, but failure at a single, critical moment may leave him like Dispucket. And Dispucket was lucky. Everything has its price."

The change. Teress avoided thinking about that. Begging off from Achibol, she retired to her blanket and tried to sleep, only then realizing that Achibol had only answered half of her last question.

 

Sleep was no escape. The change. She could not keep it out of her thoughts awake, and even less when she fell into uneasy, exhausted slumber . . .

. . . I hide in the thick brush, watching men in black swarm in and out of our caves. They call to each other in hoarse voices. Nobody's screaming. Nobody's alive. Mother is dead. I saw her. I trip over Father. He has a red hole in him, black on the edges. He stinks of roast meat. I recite the mantras the old women taught me, to still my pounding heart. I flee into the trees, the change upon me.

My blood boils with strange essences. My sweat is brown. The stink of burning granaries, hanging like fog among the branches, masks my stench from the killers. I think I'm going to be sick.

I run, leaving my last meal on the ground, my last happy meal with my dead brothers. Fear, anger, and helplessness slough off along with dead cells and unspeakable waste. I tear off my befouled clothing. It shreds like spiderweb, because I am becoming strong. Naked, I slink further into the darkness.

The fine, black hair on my arms has thickened, and no pale skin shows through. I look down at my breasts, expecting pink nipples erect in the chill of my nakedness, but my chest is flat. Tiny black teats hide in cowlick-twisted fur. I flee again, fleeing myself and what I am becoming. I lurk behind trees and in patches of tall ferns, hiding from shadows, among shadows. I am no longer me.

I climb rough tree bark, my curved, thickened nails biting deep. I sit in a crotch and try to cry. Instead, I squall like a wild hunting-cat. I can't cry any more.

I'm hungry. I hunt. I pounce. A fat water-billy squeals, wriggling desperately. It is a sensuous struggle, and I prolong it until hunger goads me too strongly. I disembowel it with a swipe of my toes, and bury my face in the delicious stink of immediate death.

I back away from the dead thing and squall in frustration and anger. My teeth are small and weak, my face too short. I try again, smothering myself in slick meat. My stubby nose plugs with offal and my breath comes in gasps.

A strange thought penetrates my rage: I have hands, odd long-toed paws, black-furred and blood-flecked. I reach inside my prey, digging under ribs for a dark treasure. My sharp claws shred soft liver that keeps slipping from my clumsy, raking digits. I yowl again, and the forest becomes an absolute silence. Hands. A thumb and fingers. Slowly, carefully, I perform strange half-remembered motions. I grip. Fingers and thumb come together over a pink gobbet of lung. I lick food from between my fingers. My tiny teeth tear bits from the morsel and my narrow gullet swallows them. Remembering, I reach for more—liver this time. I feed, and am soon sated.

 

I course the deep swamp on thick foot-pads. I hunt often, because my gut is small, and fasting even a day weakens me. Small things surprise me: cat-sight is not gray but red. Shades of red and pink, and a palest rose sky. Crimson darkness, not black. I remember other colors, but see only one.

I am lean and sleek-furred, cat and not-cat. I sleep in daylight. At night I hunt. I cup my hands because I cannot lap. A woods-cat comes to drink, upwind and unaware. It is male. My anus twitches. I hunch down on my elbows and lift my behind experimentally, but have no tail to raise over my back. I smell cat scent, strong and sharp, but am not aroused. I am ashamed. I back away, unseen.

I encounter no more cats. They have fled my hunting-ground, for I am strange. I mark my boundaries—I want nothing to do with them. I'm not content. I'm not all cat.

Day by day my hunting shifts eastward, but I don't know it. Each day I am closer to . . . A hunger not-in-my-gut grows. I move toward the dawn.

The stench of old burning awakens a memory. It awakens Teress. I cringe and cower, unwilling to be me. Fire and death are now ashes and rotten meat. I remember a cave.

There is danger downwind. I smell dead skins and strange stone. Leather and metal, I say in my head. I remember the mother-killers, father-killers. I scrabble up crumbling rock to safety, to darkness. Heavy hard-soled feet vibrate the ground. Noisy pebbles rattle down-slope.

It knows I am here. I watch the cave-mouth, red brightness, white-pink intensity. I look away as if it were sun. I crouch, I wait. Crimson shadow blocks the brightness. I smell man-fear.

I hear a new noise. Warm emotion suffuses my blood. I hear voices, words, a rhythm of hooves. I remember happy excitement at the sound of such hooves. My muscles tense to propel me forth, but fear holds me back.

Shadow darkens the hole into daylight. I don't move, I don't breathe. Round eyes dart about, unseeing, but I see them. I pounce. My mouth is wide, squalling. My hands/nails/claws rip hard leather and soft, white skin. I snarl, remembering death and fear. I yowl anger and sudden hunger. The twitching thing screams, then gurgles. I tear into it, pushing aside tasteless gut, seeking dark, rich meat, soft meat for my small teeth, my skinny throat. I eat one handful, then another. The liver is pale and sour, and I want no more. I hide again, licking my lips and fingers.

My prey drags itself away, into the brightness. I hear a warm-familiar voice. I move forward, but not far. I wait. I wait. The brightness fades, pink to red to crimson-dark. Night. I'll slip away soon.

A low voice is crooning. I edge closer, but another voice intrudes. I freeze, angry, afraid, but it carries a good new scent. Tea, and cooked meat with roots. A word: stew.

Something breaks in my head. Words rush through it, tumbling. Father mother door house person girl honch fire love death fear want hate see man cat woman old man know I know I know old man I know the old man I know him . . . I shake my head, overwhelmed. I move my mouth and twist my tongue and contort my lips. I make a word in my head. In my head, it is a word, but the sound is a mewling growl in my ears.

"Don't fear," the old soft voice murmurs. "Remain calm. I don't know who you are, but you know me, don't you? I'm Achibol, a friend. You remember Achibol. You remember me."

I remember an old brown man who laughs and bickers with my father. My mother feeds him and I sit on his lap. He finds bright beads in my ears and nose, and pulls a string from my hair. He lets me keep them all, and I string the beads and return proudly to show him. I wet my finger and rub it on the back of his brown hand, perplexed.

"It won't come off, Teress," he tells me. "No matter how hard you rub." I rub harder, but he is right. I laugh.

I laugh out loud. "That's better," Achibol says. "You remember how to laugh." Yes. I remember. I remember Achibol, and Teress. I feel wet on my cheek and I rub it away with the back of my paw, my hand. I lick the wetness and spit out fur. On my hand is a patch of pink skin. I rub one hand with the other and more fur comes loose. There is more pink skin.

"Come out," Achibol croons. "You're safe with me."

I want to obey. Achibol is warm. Achibol is my friend. But fur clogs my mouth and I itch everywhere. I brush myself with my hands, I scratch with my claws, and fur comes loose. Beneath it, I'm pink. I rub my flat chest, and fur rolls into balls and drops from me. I peer at my nipples, still tiny and dark, like little mouse-eyes. I remember clothes.

I remember nakedness. I remember Teress, and being shy. "Aaachiiibol," I croak, "wooooait."

"I'll wait," comes the low, pleasant voice. "When you are ready, come out."

"I'm not . . . not huuu-maaan." I am naked and ugly, covered with dead fur. My sweat is dark and foul. I'll be days in the change.

"You are human, a pure-human," Achibol says. "You're not a beast. You have a name."

"T'ressss," I say, and then more clearly, "Teress."

"Teress. Come to me, little girl—or are you a big girl now? Come sit on my lap and I'll find a pretty blue bead in your ear."

Achibol brushes fur from me, sticky with sweat. I shiver. "Wait while I fetch clothing. You're cold." I wait. Achibol goes in the cave. A red glow from his eye lights the wall beyond him. He rummages about. The glow dies, and he comes out. He wraps me in cloth that scratches, and raises a hood over my head. "My companions must not see your face yet, Teress. It's our secret."

I'm grateful. I hold the hood closed, peering from my small new cave. I curl my fingers to conceal my long fingernails, my claws. I must hide until I am me again. Tomorrow I will bathe. Tomorrow and the next day and the next . . .

 

Benadek awoke slowly when the dawn-sounds of birds and insects aroused him, an old man's awakening, not the sudden leap into awareness of an urchin-child. With great show of unconcern, Achibol greeted his bestirral with a gesture toward the teapot on the rejuvenated fire.

Sylfie handed him tea. The warm, earthenware cup drew the grave-deep cold from his hands. The bitter brew seemed to course through his veins immediately, enlivening the rest of him. He felt almost human. (Human? Like Dispucket?) Benadek shook his head to clear it of what he wanted desperately to believe was a dream. He ate breakfast—crusts and berries—in silence. While he ate, the others broke camp. No one, not even Teress, asked him to get up and help.

While Sylfie and Teress restowed their gear on the boat, Achibol squatted beside the boy. "How do you feel about Dispucket today?"

"Master," Benadek answered, "I'm no wiser, only more fearful. Today, I have no desire to become as Dispucket, though I now appreciate that all beings make such compromises—his human appearance for extended vision and perhaps other benefits."

"Yet being my apprentice subjects you to the risk of becoming like him, or becoming something infinitely more different. I can't hold you to your expressions of desire to follow me, so consider the subject of your apprenticeship once again open."

"I'll think on that, Master," Benadek replied carefully. The same thought had crossed his own mind. With the tricks he had picked up from Achibol—with his new, innovative mind-set—he could succeed on his own, telling fortunes and perform charlatan's tricks. He could travel, and explore new towns and villages. But did he want that? For the first time in his conscious memory, he felt that he belonged. He had adapted to the cantankerous old man's moods and vagaries, and he felt they understood each other. Of course there was danger, and not only from the honches hunting them—the old man and his unpredictable lessons were more dangerous than any honch. But where wasn't there risk?

Sylfie would not stay with him, either with or without Achibol, though Benadek still denied the implications of her depression, her desperation to be templed—thus denying his own responsibility for her predicament. Of course, staying with Achibol meant putting up with the insufferable Teress. That, strangely enough, gave him the most difficulty. The fear of becoming another Dispucket was so abstract as to hardly bother him, in the light of day.

He dismissed speculation, in favor of present reality, when they boarded the boat. He had learned to handle the sheet and tiller skillfully in the narrow channels. Achibol sat next to him, tucking his tattered robe-hem between his knees. "Well? What will you do?"

Benadek's reply surprised even himself: "I have many unanswered questions, Master. I know I must answer them myself, but alone I'll never learn to ask them properly. I must stay with you, or remain ignorant forever."

Achibol might have been pleased by Benadek's answer, or might not. His face reflected only stony acceptance. "Then let us begin teaching you to question. First, tell me what you know, and what you suspect to be true, in light of what Dispucket has taught you." He settled on the narrow cockpit seat, with his arm over the low coaming.

"I know that Dispucket was . . . is . . . human. I was disgusted because he was different, and because he stunk. I suspect such hatred is inborn, and I couldn't help myself."

"Ah! You hated him because he was different! As you no doubt hate song-snakes and birds and the very bench you sit upon?"

"No, Master," Benadek replied seriously. "He was human and, through some sense or magic, I knew it all along. But because he was not as I am, I hated and feared him."

"I see. Does that same hatred move you to pursue poots? Yes, much is explained—your disgust with the female difference compels you to seek to dominate them in undignified manners."

"Please, Master!" Benadek said, blushing hotly. Neither Sylfie or Teress seemed to be paying the slightest attention. "I meant only differences from what is usual or expectable."

"And such disgust and hatred seems innately human?"

"I suspect so," Benadek admitted reluctantly, fearing further disparaging commentary.

"You're right," the sorcerer said unexpectedly. "You sense differentness in many ways, and you define them in even more ways. But what is innate? Just the facility to hate, or the definition of what is to be hated?"

"Perhaps some of each, Master. I don't know what sense told me Dispucket was human enough for me to hate him, but once recognized, his semblance to . . . to isolated body parts . . . disgusted me. And it must be natural to hate the stink of death and corruption, though some people love ripe fish-cheese, which is foul. I don't know, Master. There's too much to be learned."

"You think swiftly, apprentice," Achibol said in a rare burst of generosity. "Perhaps you can learn it. With me for your teacher . . . After all, Teress's people, even in their rude caves, taught their children the rudiments of genetics and microbiology."

"I don't even know what those arts are, Master," Benadek replied with an air of dejection.

Achibol raised his hands helplessly. "When I think of poor Dispucket," he said sadly, "I begin to doubt that any man not raised in the Age of Knowledge could comprehend my mysteries. I tell myself that my teaching is doomed to produce results like him and not the successor I seek." A tear crept down the sorcerer's withered, brown cheek. "But then," he said, brightening, "you are not Dispucket. Where he was headstrong and sure you, with potential that exceeds his, go forward in doubt and trepidation, but are still willing to see things in new ways. Only in social matters are you utterly blind and without virtue. You underrate yourself."

Heartened by his master's praise—such as it was—Benadek declared that he was ready to forge ahead . . . with proper doubt and trepidation, of course. As for social virtues, such things would sort themselves out. After all, he meant no harm, and wished no one ill. But it was time to eat. The sun was high, so they moored the boat, angled so the sail would provide shade.

"And what of Dispucket?" Achibol asked later. "What would you do if he reared up from the water before us?"

Benadek took a long time to reply. "Knowing now the source of my fear and revulsion, I would conquer them, or if that proved beyond me, I'd look away to the shore or the sky, and not let him see himself through my eyes. I wouldn't hurt him with my flawed vision because someday I'll meet him again, and I'll look at him differently."

"You wish that to be?"

"I know it. My desire doesn't matter."

"Is it a true knowing? Are you sure?" Achibol, despite the skeptical attitudes of one trained in ancient sciences had, over many centuries, cultivated an open-mindedness about things paranatural. He himself could not read the future—his fortune-telling was an amalgam of careful listening, distraction, and circumlocution—but he had witnessed preternatural ability among the most unlikely simples. Perhaps precognition, telepathy, and the ability to twitch dice were artifacts of simples' design, or had been there all along, masked by ancient men's brilliant intellects and power over the material world. Plan or no plan, humans were still a grab bag. All the planners had really done was to make the bags' contents constant, not understood.

"I'm as sure as I can be," Benadek mused thoughtfully. "I must learn to see beyond my eyes, and feel beyond my deceptive senses."

"Oh? Why?"

"I think it's destiny—and why I must follow you. I must cease to be an ignorant boy, and must become a man." Achibol had no further questions. He took the tiller from Benadek, who settled in his master's vacated place, and promptly dozed.

"So I've an apprentice who makes me seem a fool," Achibol whispered to the trees, the water, and the wind. "His vision surpasses my own." The water made no reply, nor did the feathery breeze in the branches of channel-side trees. They only seemed to snicker when wavelets washed over protruding roots, when leaves and branches moved.

 

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Framed