The Book of the Ler Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Gameplayers of Zan

  BOOK ONE - Instar Cellae Sylvestris

  BOOK TWO - Vicus Lusorum

  BOOK THREE - Navis et Arx

  The Warriors of Dawn

  PART 1 - Chalcedon

  PART II - Dawn

  The Day of the Klesh

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  By M. A. FOSTER

  The Book of the Ler

  Omnibus:

  THE GAMEPLAYERS OF ZAN

  THE WARRIORS OF DAWN

  THE DAY OF THE KLESH

  The Transformer Trilogy

  Omnibus:

  THE MORPHODITE

  TRANSFORMER

  PRESERVER

  THE GAMEPLAYERS OF ZAN

  Copyright © 1977 by M. A. Foster

  THE WARRIORS OF DAWN

  Copyright © 1975 by M. A. Foster

  THE DAY OF THE KLESH

  Copyright © 1979 by M. A. Foster

  THE BOOK OF THE LER

  Copyright © 2006 by M. A. Foster

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1380.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11842-9

  First Trade Printing, October 2006

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  The Gameplayers of Zan

  “God hath given you the stars to be your guides in the dark both by land and by sea.”

  —Mohammed, the Koran, Sura 6.

  “He whose roof is heaven and over whom the stars continually rise and set in one and the same course makes the beginnings of his affairs and his knowledge of time depend on them.”

  —Al-Biruni

  BOOK ONE

  Instar Cellae Sylvestris

  ONE

  NOVEMBER 1, 2550

  Processes have uses; it is also important to realize that fascination with a process can grow, there being no automatic check against this, until the bemusement obscures the intended results of the original procedure. This is the easiest trait of all to observe in others and the hardest to see and act upon in ourselves. We shall speak of obsessions with results upon another day.

  —The Game Texts

  ONE ALWAYS MAKES an identification of self in terms of a matrix of otherness, never saying simply “there am I,” but always with the implicit definition “there am I in relation to all others I can know.” And so now alone as she could not imagine anyone ever being, there was only herself. She could no longer measure who she was; only refer to a what-she-had-been, which she suspected either was no longer valid, or else was now based on distorted memories. There was herself, the memory, the whole of her life and all the things she had seen and done. There was also imagination, projections of fantasies of hopes and fears, the projections of her mind into all the places and circumstances she could never be in actuality. She balanced delicately between that which was and that which might have been. The impossible now. There was nothing else.

  The present is never still, but a moving line between two points; in moving there is direction, source, destination. But with all references removed, by which one can measure motion, there was no longer any sense at all of the bridge of motion in time connecting the past with the future. They existed, of course: her memory and imagination reassured her of that; it was that she could no longer imagine quite how she related to those quantities. She was adrift in her own mind.

  She could review the circumstances easily enough; in fact, she had already done so a number of times, perhaps several hundred times, seeking an alternative, a flaw, a slip, some error she could at least feel guilty about, or blame on someone else. But it was all as impervious as armor plate, there was no chink anywhere in the fearsome blankness of existentials. She imagined she felt like someone who had stepped into an elevator at exactly the moment when all of its safety devices failed: accidents happen which are in fact not the fault of their victim. She had been caught near the scene of the mission for which she had been sent. For which she had volunteered. It now seemed in hindsight that her life had always been a series of closing doors, not opening ones, of narrowing passages and shrinking rooms. And this was the last door and the last room. There was no passage. It ended here, wherever here was.

  Near the Museum of Ancient Technologies, yes. There was nothing that could link her to the apparent vandalism that had destroyed beyond repair two obscure instruments left behind from the age of petroleum exploitation. Left behind, like astrolabes left behind from a rude era of ships powered by the wind they caught in their sails; left behind as the waves left shells, relics of life, on the beach. Artifacts of a vanished art, for there was no oil worth exploring for anymore. Yet of all those who might have been there, nearby, only she had been ler, deep into human lands beyond the reservation, and she had not had, even for herself, a convincing explanation for what she had been doing there. It was natural that they connect her with the damaged instruments. Her only remaining defense had been to remain quiet and somewhat passive, giving them nothing, not a name, not a reason.

  They had conveyed her to their headquarters; others, in their turn, had taken her farther, to a large urban area, to a building, to a room within the building. Everything seemed unmemorable, bland; there had been no way to memorize directions or landmarks. Everything was featureless, or nearly so, as much so as could be managed. Then came the interrogators. They had been insistent, but considerate and subtle, masters of their arts. They had been firm, not especially unpleasant, and above all persuasive. She had said nothing. Only repeated in her soft voice that they should notify the Shuren Braid—hostel-keepers by the main entry into the reservation, close under the Institute—that they had picked up a lost girl. They had agreed to do so immediately, and were very polite. She knew they hadn’t. No one came for her.

  There had been a lack of overt threats, and there had never been any mention of anything like torture. She had not been fooled. She was too wise in her own ways not to know that people who hold all the cards have all the strengths and none of the weaknesses, and that they do not need to rant, rave, shout, pace up and down making histrionic gestures, parading about to turn suddenly, shouting bombast and threats. Or interrupting the silences with harangues and hectoring. No. They had no need to intimidate: these are acts that characterize an interrogator who is more interested in fondling the power he holds than in digging out the information he is paid to get.

  Her story had been transparently flimsy, but she had repeated it anyway. She had been lost, she said, after a little exploration, and had been trying to get back by dead reckoning. She had never been in the Museum. She was sure they saw through that, but she stayed with it, however skillfully they tried to steer her into other areas. She thought that it had been easy to resist the gentle but constant, tidelike pressure, compared with other experiences in which she could draw analogs. But under her own sense of self-confidence, she could see that her visitors were in fact extraordinarily skillful among their own kind, others of the humans, the forerunners. One untrained would have broken in hours under them, and all without a single raised angry voice, a single
twinge of pain. She couldn’t really determine exactly how long it had gone on. There had been frosted windows, but the light shining through them was gray and never changed; she never knew if she was seeing filtered light, or some artificial light. It grew dark through those windows regularly, and there had been conspicuous clocks in the room with her, but she suspected that in a subtle world the obvious was mutable. She knew the rates of things; that had been part of her skill, her training, and she could sense subtle fluctuations of rate. But they had allowed her to sleep when she had been tired, eat when she had been hungry, wash when she had felt dirty. She learned nothing from those experiences—the noise levels were precisely uniform whatever her position.

  She maintained her silence and her evasion as long as she could. After all, there had been some other close calls, and always before she had been able to bluff her way out. But perhaps those had not been so skillful as these, who seemed to sense the presence of deeper secrets in her silences, a presence that teased them, kept them at it. So despite the easy manners, the almost-pleasant sessions, the easy, relaxed interrogations, they smelled a secret. They didn’t know if it had anything to do with the original issue or not—they were not, she could see, not that perceptive. That had ceased to matter. . . . The girl has secrets and will not talk: dig them out and we’ll see.

  Their closeness to the truth terrified her, their knowledge of the basic relational needs of people, ler and human alike (after all, they were not all that different), shook her to her foundations, and their physical presence overpowered her. To her eyes, no matter how often she had seen them before, humans were harsh, angular, hairy creatures whose tempers were at best uncertain. She herself was almost to her full bodily growth, but they were all larger than she, taller, heavier. She imagined that the larger ones must weigh almost twostone. They were wild, primitive beings who, in her view, were not yet tamed, although the logical, factual part of her mind knew well enough that most of them thought of themselves as rather effete and overcivilized. And now she was in the very midst of them, completely in their power, separated from her own intricate and carefully structured environment. One step closer to the ancient and unforgiving wild, to the primal chaos, to the world, left long ago, of tooth and claw, sinew and strength.

  Here, in the city, the tooth was covered and the claw was sheathed, but neither had been removed, nor had been the will that had animated them. So, in the end, they had finally tired of her and their little game, and politely, always politely, suggested that she take a little rest, that she refresh herself, in the box. The box! Everything they did in their world revolved around a box, as it was called in the slang of the day. The box was a simulator. A training device with a controlled environment. Some were crude and simple. Others were so fearfully complex they were fully capable of denying the evidence of one’s senses. So did one have a job to learn? In the box! Bad habits and antisocial traits? In the box. Criminals? Eliminate them or put them in the box. And likewise with odd suspects who are obviously covering up something, who refuse for days to answer the most simple questions. In the box. Behavior changed by the classical methodology of the cult of behaviorism, orthodox as the dawn. They never questioned ends, and why should they when they had a means that worked so well and so consistently? In the box. They could transform by their simulator alchemy a misanthrope into a philanthropist, an artist into a salesman who won prizes, a satyr or nymphomaniac into a celibate philosopher, and an autistic child into a faith healer. Those who had never been able to cope were transformed into veritable paragons of efficiency. And for those who held to their silences, there was the remedy of total isolation.

  They shot her from behind with a dart; that alone, in itself, filled her with a sense of evil: they used a weapon that left the hand! The dart contained a drug that paralyzed her but left her conscious. She felt a bee sting at the back of her neck. Then, nothing. She could neither move nor feel. This part of her memory was clear and bright. Then they had gently placed her onto a little wheeled cart and rolled her down a hall into some other room, a larger one, although she could see little of its details. Her eyes could see only in the direction they were pointed. She had trained peripheral vision, as did the others of her craft, but against the bland background even that could pick up little. She sensed, rather than saw, meters, dials, instruments, switchboards. The room possessed a different odor, one that suggested machinery, electricity, not people. Then they had undressed her and looked over her body, which, judging from their expressions, seemed to them to be underdeveloped sexually; smooth and subtle of contour, hairless save some almost-invisible fine down which was all over her, undeniably female. In the eyes of one she saw the distorted longings of the child molester, but the implied assault within their imaginations did not disturb her. She did not object to nudity per se, and as for their longings, she had given a bravado mental shrug: she had given away more than all of them could take.

  And after that, after they had looked enough, they had carefully and tenderly placed her within some enclosure: from its smell she thought it was a machine, but with a human fear-scent veneered over it as well, a dark place that disturbed her. She heard them refer to it as a sensory deprivation unit. She heard some more talk as they set the machine up, and fitted her into its bowels, so that she could deduce what the machine was. The unit was a life-support system that maintained a constant temperature and controlled all the inputs and outputs of the body. And some extra things: it caused total anesthesia of the sensory and motor systems, and what functions it didn’t control, it monitored. It could speed or slow her heartbeat. It created and maintained a sensory environment of exactly and precisely zero.

  Her universe now. Dark, odorless, weightless, sensationless. She felt nothing, was a disembodied mind. If the absence of discomfort could be said to be comfortable, then it was comfortable. There was no sensation whatsoever. She could remember being placed in it, but afterward had come the darkness and the silence. An unknowable span of time had passed since then. Sometimes she thought that it had been only minutes or at best perhaps an hour or so. Other times, she felt weary and thought of years, of growing old, of reaching elderhood in the box, or else being prolonged as an adolescent-phase infertile ler forever, as the monitoring sensors either disregarded or suppressed the hormone chemistry of her reproductive system, which she knew to be different from the human. She suspected the machine thought she had some disorder and was trying to cure her! But the time. Minutes or years. She didn’t know the difference anymore. The reality of the now expanded to enormous distances, gulfs she could not imagine.

  So now she could not avoid the realization that in the end it had not mattered how effective or ineffective her passive defiance had been. She had been confident at first, although she admitted to some fright and self-concern; yet she must face the fact that, to this point, she was losing this one, and that she was facing a path with only one way to go, no exit, and no place in which to turn around.

  At first, the box had been easy, almost pleasant. She couldn’t believe this was a threat: after all, all it did was allow one to be lazy and to daydream, which people wanted to do anyway, but somehow never found the time. She had a number of open-ended practices which were primarily cerebral in nature, and which served admirably here, in the box. So at first she renewed her sense of defiance; it had served her well before she had been caught, and so it would serve her now. After her initial adjustments to the new environment had been made, she started out by spending her waking times playing the Zan, a game of large scope and interesting subtleties. At first she left all the virtuoso play to herself, her side, but later this seemed too easy, no matter how complex she made the play, so she began to elaborate and embroider the antagonist side as well, carrying both sides simultaneously. This had been some challenge, for she had played before primarily in the protagonist team role; in any event, it kept her occupied.

  She also tried her hand at dramatization, making up or recalling tales she had heard before. Th
is was more challenging, as the ler did not produce plays on the stage, but either read them or listened to a storyteller, the practice of which was considered one of the ler social graces. She admitted to a deficiency at the telling end, but she had always listened well, and now the habit initially served her well. They favored tragedy, borrowing freely from human sources and presenting them as they were, or else changing the names of all the characters to ler names and proceeding from there; they also made up dramas of their own according to a complicated set of storytelling rules, and these could occur in various cultural matrices. So it was that she made up and remembered, perfecting her powers of visualization. She recalled great dramas whose roots were openly acknowledged to be from the forerunners: Trephetas and Casilda, essentially a tale of lust thwarted by rigid social conventions. She liked that one, for it reminded her, at a certain remove, of a situation which applied somewhat to herself. She also recalled Thurso, with its violet-eyed female antagonist, which always made an audience of ler listeners gasp with horror; ler eyes were invariably lightly and subtly colored, definitive colors almost never being seen, such traits indicating a force of will which could not be borne without tragic consequence to all around the possessor. Tamar Cauldwell and The Women of Point Sur pleased her with their studied intricacies and soaring flights of emotion. There was a famous ler version of Tamar, changed somewhat in details, called Tamvardir the Insibling, which in some ways was an improvement over the original.

  She moved from realistic, if highly emotional tragedies, to more fantastic dramas, Ericord the Tyrant, the scary Siege of Kark, and the weirdly beautiful The King of Shent. And then the pure ler dramas, some of which had been adapted from human legends and tales: The Revenge of the Hifzer Vlandimlar, Hunsimber the Beast, Schaf Meth Vor, better known perhaps as Science and Revolution, and Damvidhlan, Baethshevban, and Hurthayyan, the last of which she found herself recoiling from somewhat, as she tended now to identify herself with the victim Hurthayyan.