In the Forest There Are No Lines

The Legion of the Lost.

That was the Inspector's name for the four or five thousand people who disappeared from the streets of Kuhesos each year. Most of them were young and newly arrived; sometimes a body turned up, floating in the bay or behind a trashbin near the docks, but usually these young strangers were never seen again. At first, Kria Marik read these stories avidly and with mounting anger. Why was nothing done about this? It's a scandal, it's a crime. Then, after a time, she read them sadly and with half an eye. Just another part of living in the City, just another price we pay. But that was long ago, three weeks ago, before she had ever heard of the Legion, or the Inspector, or Blue Smoke Rising at Dawn ...

She sighed and looked up from the Kuhesa Daily. From the seat in front of her on the #23 Krembak bus, a pair of bright brown eyes regarded her intently from a gaunt brown face. She smiled hesitantly, and just as hesitantly the young girl smiled back.

"Good morning," said Marik. "I haven't seen you on this bus before." Marik had ridden this bus every workday morning for the five years she had worked at the Kuhesos University State Cultural Museum, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with the other regulars.

The girl in front of her frowned slightly, shook her head, and cast her eyes down. She doesn't speak the language, Marik realized. She's probably new in town, a young stranger with no one to trust and no one to look after her -- oh, my god, she could be the next, the start of the next four thousand.

Marik bit back a scream; it came out as a harsh little gasp. The girl in front of her shrank back, eyes wide, arms folded protectively in front of her. She said something in a breathless, frightened little voice, and shook her head slowly back and forth. Marik didn't understand the words, but at least she recognized the language.

"You're Griga?" she asked.

The girl narrowed her eyes a bit, glanced around, swallowed mightily, and nodded. "Griga," she said. The word sounded different coming from her mouth, though Marik couldn't pinpoint the difference. It just sounded ... well, better.

"You don't speak Kalish?" Marik didn't expect an answer to this beyond the puzzled look she got. She gazed at the girl, who no longer appeared frightened, and considered. She got on this bus at 6 o'clock in front of her duplex in the Karch Ward. Had the girl been there already? Probably. The Karch Ward was solidly middle-class and Kalish. She glanced out the window. They had just crossed into the Nario Ward, upper class and Emres-speaking. They would have Griga servants, of course, and perhaps some of them spoke no Kalish.

"Do you speak Emres?" she asked in that language.

The girl ducked her head and looked up inquiringly.

"Do you speak Emres?" Marik repeated.

"Ah," said the girl, nodding and smiling.

"You do?" It would have to do. Marik's Emres wasn't good, but she could make herself understood.

"Do?" the girl said.

"Speak Emres?"

The girl nodded and smiled and said nothing.

Marik nodded and smiled back. "You don't speak Emres, do you?"

The bus jolted around a corner and Marik looked up, panic nipping at her neck. "Oh, no," she said. "This is my stop." She pulled the bellcord, stuffed her newspaper into her briefcase, and stood up. The girl watched her intently, her mouth slightly open and her hands pressed to her knees. "Well," said Marik, "I guess this is good-bye. Please take care of yourself. I wish you could understand me so I could tell you good luck." On impulse, she reached into the outer pocket of her briefcase and took out a card and a bill. The card had her name and office on it, and the bill was a five. She wrapped the bill around the card, gave them to the girl, who took them reluctantly into her cool, damp hands, and hurried off the bus.

At the bus stop on the corner of Fanth and Pigol, the liquid sounds of Emres filled the air as the white-collar workers of the Naria Ward waited to go to work. Marik didn't feel completely out of place, but she did wish she didn't have to transfer buses. The Krembak line, the only one that served her own ward, didn't go into the central city. The five bus companies had split up Kuhesos in a complex pattern that Marik couldn't fathom. Some places you could get to by more than one line; few places more than a couple miles apart could be reached without changing buses. She could have caught the #48 Krembak a couple blocks from her duplex and taken it directly to the Newgate, where a Larnoz bus would take her to the city center. She preferred to catch the Dippel #105 for the Inland Gate. It took slightly longer, but she liked the Inland Gate far more than the Newgate. It had character; the Newgate merely had mass. There were, of course, the twenty or thirty independent buses, but no one really knew when or where they were running.

The Dippel #105 was late and crowded. She squeezed between two young soon-to-be-millionaire commodities traders and tried to glean from their conversation if she should buy wheat futures. Her Emres wasn't up to it, so she stared out the window. From the Naria Ward, the bus looped through the unnamed tarpaper shantytowns where the Teyer-speaking laborers and squatters lived. The Teyer were up and about, scurrying among their shacks, putting out gaily colored laundry streamers, burning garbage, waiting on the dusty, rutted roads for the company trucks to take them to the fields or the mines or the factories. The Dippel bus did not stop in shantytowns.

She watched the Teyer go about their shantytown lives more closely than usual. They were a small people, with gaunt brown faces and bright brown eyes. She wondered if the girl on the Krembak bus might have been a Teyer. But why had she spoken Griga? Or had she spoken Griga? Come to think of it, Teyer and Griga sound a little alike, and the girl's voice was soft and low. Maybe she had been mistaken, and the girl was a Teyer. She shook her head sharply and sighed. She would likely never know.

At 6:59, only five minutes late, the Dippel #105 deposited her at the Inland Gate, the crumbling triple arch that alone remained of the great stone wall around the City. She passed through the middle arch, paid her 35-cent toll on the city side, and bought her morning orange from the half-blind Griga woman who had sold fruit there since, perhaps, the gate was new. She stared at the Griga woman, at her deeply wrinkled, dusty brown face, her wandering eyes with yellow whites and milky irises, her tiny, upturned, shapeless nose -- she couldn't see anything of the young girl on the Krembak bus. She must have been mistaken.

The #3 Larnoz bus wandered through the Kuhesos streets for twenty minutes on its way from the Inland Gate to the Market, and Marik usually used the time to finish her paper. The local news, the science news, the comics: that's all she ever read in the Daily. Kuhesos had thirteen daily newspapers, and the Daily was only one of five in Kalish. The Standard was better for international news, and the Bright Morning Star for economic news (though true economic animals read the Emres-language Kuhesos Business Journal). Most of the other papers were tabloids of varying luridness catering to the great polyglot masses. The 12 million people of the Greater Kuhesos Metro Area spoke nine major languages (and countless dialects), followed four major religions (and countless minor ones), and represented 12 of the 14 ethnic types described by Professor Lamvert of the University -- and most of those 12 million people, in all of those nine languages, were avid readers of the salacious and scandalous. The best of the lot was This Really Happened, an afternoon scandalsheet in the Teyer language. It sold about four million copies a day, and Marik bought one whenever she felt the urge to improve her Teyer. She would buy one today, she vowed, as the bus lurched through the narrow, winding streets, the indifferently paved and definitely not improved remains of cattle trails. It was unforgivable that she couldn't even tell the difference between Griga and Teyer. Maybe she should get a Griga scandalsheet, too.

She got off at Market Stop 2 and hurried across the rough green of Market Park. No trading was done in the Market any more, except, rumor had it, at night among the trees and bushes of the Park. She had never seen it and had no wish to, so she hurried through the Park, not looking at the ragged people sleeping under benches, yesterday's This Really Happened for a blanket. These people never seemed to move, Marik had noted. They were there when she arrived in the morning, when she went to lunch at the pricey restaurants across the street, when she went home at night. Maybe they worked in shifts. As far as she could tell, though, the derelicts were the same, last night, the week before, the entire five years she had worked at the Museum.

Marik's office was on the side of the Museum away from the Market, overlooking the broad and peaceful waters of Kuhesos Bay. From her sixth floor windows she could watch the heavily laden freighters waddle inside the protection of the breakwaters and up to the derrick-forested piers. She loved to watch the teams of sweaty stevedores swing blank-faced crates from the bellies of the ships and onto the backs of grumbling diesel lorries, and she dreamed of the goods they brought from the far-flung corners of the world. Silk brocades and bright cottons from the looms of Etavo across the sea, clever electronic devices from Claporn, trucks and trash compactors from the Varish Confederacy, microwave entrees from Dornal -- Marik saw these things in the stores and in her mind, though all she saw on the piers were plain wooden crates with writing she couldn't make out.

Sometimes at night Marik would figure the miles her possessions had come to be with her in her comfortable duplex, and wished that she had done the traveling while they waited at home for her. Her favorite blouse had come two thousand miles to be with her, her television three thousand, her good black leather pumps fifteen hundred. Her car, the two-seat 27J she used only for weekend trips to the country, had come 2,745 miles (she checked it on a map), though the odometer read only 3.6 when she bought it from Kuhesamotive. If she had done the traveling her possessions had, she could have circled the globe two hundred times, with side-trips to postcard points of interest. Maybe then she could stop daydreaming about the freight in the harbor and envying her possessions their worldliness and do something about the artifacts in the museum basement.

"There's so much crap down there," the Director said to her when she stopped by his office to say good morning. "Nobody knows what the hell it all is."

"You want me to take a look?" Marik was good at eagerness.

"I want you to do more than take a look, Kria honey. The Board of Governors was here yesterday, and let me tell you, they were more than a bit upset about the main room display."

Marik forgot her retort to "honey." She gaped. "The Four Heroes display?" That was a great display, the best display she had ever done. What was wrong with it?

The Director nodded. "Yes. I know, you worked long and hard, and you did a good job. But that was over a year ago. They saw that display last time they were here, and they want something new. Something really new. Something they haven't seen before."

"Something new? Like what?"

The Director rubbed his bald head with a damp pink hand and adjusted his tiny gold spectacles. "Haven't you been listening? Something from the basement, of course. There must be something down there you can do something with."

By the time she went home that day she had decided that most of the stuff in the basement had been put there for a reason. Some of it was from recent displays that had proved unpopular or confusing, but most of it had not left the basement since it arrived at the Museum, deemed redundant or useless – too much of what the Museum already had or not enough of what it didn't have. A lot of it was still in packing crates, unexamined, uncleaned, uncatalogued.

Jeris, the old Teyer custodian, helped her sort through the crates, his small dark body straining under their weight, his skin the color of his tightly curled gray hair from the dust. For three days now she had watched him shamble into the basement, with his old man's rhythmless walk and his old man's shapeless clothes, seeming too frail even to mount the stairs out again, much less lift as easy as fluff the crates that Marik couldn't even budge. By the time the first layer of gray dust had settled on his shoulders, he would lose the look of an old man, would gain the rhythm and fluid grace of a man in his prime, fit for any task set him.

"What you look for, missa?" he wheezed on the third day, for about the thousandth time. "Alla junk. No else but junk."

"It can't all be junk, Jeris," she said, shoving aside the latest disappointment. "Let's keep looking."

Jeris shrugged. "You say, we look."

He wiped the dust from his eyes and the sweat from his brow and hauled another crate bigger than himself from the stack they were working on. He may have been stronger than his age and size suggested, but this crate was too much for him. He dragged it off the stack and managed to hold it over his head for a fraction of a second; it wavered in time to his grunts, then crashed to the floor.

"Damn!" screamed Jeris. "Fire damn hell damn!"

He clutched his right shin and turned circles in the settling dust. The crate lay broken at his feet, its contents spilled in shapeless piles on the floor.

"Jeris, are you all right?" Marik ran to him. "Are you hurt?"

"Hell hell hell fire damn!"

She bent over and tried to pry his hands away from his shin, but he kept turning and cursing, kicking dust in her eyes.

"Damn it, will you stop that? I only want to look." He dropped abruptly to the floor, his legs stuck straight out in front of him. His dark skin did not show bruises well, but she could tell there would be a beauty here. The crate had hit at an angle, dented the flesh just below the knee, and scraped off a healthy patch of skin before it hit the floor. The raw skin was pink, to Marik's surprise, and pinpricks of blood were seeping out. Nothing was broken, though, and Jeris's dramatics were stilled for a moment. He shook his head sadly at the splintered wood around him.

"I move no more damn crates," he said.

She helped him up the stairs to the first aid station near the main entrance. He leaned heavily against her breasts, and she suspected that he was favoring his leg a bit more than was absolutely necessary. His arm was tight about her waist; he moaned with every step, turning up his eyes to her, dark and full of tears. The Teyer were a dramatic people. The City boasted three Teyer-language theaters and numerous wandering acting troupes. Jeris, Marik decided, would be at home with any of them.

She washed his shin with alcohol, bandaged it, and left him left him smoking a cigarette on the upholstered marble benches lining the museum foyer. He had earned a break, and if he wasn't going to move any more damn crates, she'd better hope that she could use what was in the last one.

Burlap.

Bundles of burlap held together with rough twine and duct tape. She tore a nail opening the first one, and dropped it. "Damn hell fire," she swore, then laughed that she sounded like Jeris. She sucked her finger until it lost its taste, and tore away the twine and tape with her teeth. Inside the burlap was bubble wrap, and inside the bubble wrap was a pot.

It was rough, sun-dried rather than baked, and unpainted, with a jagged line incised around the neck and another around the belly. The neck itself was narrow, and plugged with a lump of hard unformed clay. A loop of plaited grass was fastened to the neck with a dark substance that looked to Marik like hardened tree gum.

"Great," she said. "This'll be the exhibit of the year."

She set it aside and attacked the next bundle: a shallow bowl in the same style, the inside coated dark red. The third bundle produced a long, highly polished piece of wood with a groove down the middle and a square peg at one end: an atlatl, a spear-thrower. The next four bundles held well-worn pieces of stone. These were well designed and fashioned by an expert stoneworker, but she could not tell what they were for.

And so it went, the whole damn crate.

Marik sat in her office, the list of artifacts from the crate on the desk before her, and three weeks to go before the new display was to be unveiled for the Governors. She watched the stevedores unload hidden treasures from foreign parts and wondered again what the hell she was going to do for a display.

The list was in an old-fashioned hand on a crumbling piece of paper:

8 assorted clay pots

1 wooden atlatl

3 polished stone disks

2 swatches painted bark-cloth

6 unidentified carved wood artifacts

14 unidentified worked stone artifacts.

There was also a file number, A20854A, but the file was currently unavailable. Lost, in other words. Well, she could fill up the display case, but the cards would be rather empty. "Here's a lot of neat stuff. We don't know what it is." No, the Director would never go for that, and god knows what the Governors would say.

Marik considered faking the whole thing. A friend of hers in museology school once put together an exhibit called "Relics of the Pre-Ailurian Phase in South Central Dimonsly." The descriptions of the artifacts and the culture they represented were fascinating and imaginative -- and completely bogus. The artifacts themselves came from a trashbin in the Remnic Ward.

She could call the unidentified wood carvings "ritual objects" and the unidentified stones "assorted hand tools." A few of Jeris's grandchildren could demonstrate their assorted uses: this is a marrow extractor; this is a nutcracker; this is a meat tenderizer; this is a spear sharpener.

She gave this up when she kept forgetting which was the nutcracker and which the meat tenderizer.

When in doubt, her father used to say, go to the library. She sighed; what did she have to lose?

The Kuhesos University Library was housed in thirteen buildings on seven sites. Half the collection was untraceable, lost in the limbo of change, somewhere between the obsolete Quinary classification system and the nearly obsolete University Decimal system. New acquisitions were cataloged in the modern and adaptable Zipfo-Kleeger 3/2/3 system, but it seemed unlikely that the older collection would ever catch up. Books in the three classification systems were tracked on three catalogs, though there was no correlation of one to the other. One catalog was typed on cards, and kept more or less current by the Library Science staff at the College of Education on Lampwright Street. One catalog, the smallest, was coded for now-obsolete computers, and was kept, though not updated, in the School of Applied Electronics at the old Laartsal winery outside the Inland Gate. The largest and most up-to-date catalog, the one imaginative administrators saw one day as the only catalog, was completely computerized and available through any infoterminal on the University Net. Valuable books, recent books, and popular books were housed either in the main University building, the old Guild Hall, or in the Library Annex across the Street of the Seven Gods. Most science books and almost all periodicals lived in the Allobar Memorial Science Lab in the shadow of the Garden of the Moon. Other science books, the historical curiosities, were kept with ancient literature and popular periodicals in three buildings at the School of News way out in the suburbs toward Landro.

Marik started close to home. The history, archeology, and anthropology collections at the Museum yielded no clues about her trove. The referenced file was still not accounted for, and Marik considered the idea that is was fictitious until she found an obscure note that it had indeed been catalogued forty years before. She left a message at the Main Library, and another at Applied Electronics, almost begging for help; she called in favors at the School of News and the Science Lab; she asked advice from everyone she vaguely knew who had a vague connection with libraries, books, or just the university. These avenues led nowhere but four days closer to the Governors' visit.

At the end of a frustrating day of running everywhere and getting nowhere, Marik was answering her messages on the UniNet, snarling at the terminal every time it offered her another. Her mood had swung from foul to homicidal since early afternoon. A lead she had followed for two days had petered out in darkness and dust in the abandoned wine cellar of a house on Fourteen Martyrs that, rumor had it, had once been owned by a collector of rare books and antiquities. All she had gained from the trip were a headache from the dust and a sprained wrist from tripping in the dark. Neither helped. The headache made her mood more foul as she shoveled through her messages, and the wrist flared in white hot pain every time she slammed off a terse reply.

The last message found her growling in anger and whimpering in pain, almost unable to read through the tears. "Kria, dear Kria," it started. She wiped her eyes and glanced at the From line. Analupta Mopassar, her best friend since their first year of school. She hadn't seen Lupta in two weeks, she realized with a guilty start, and quickly read the rest of the message. "Where have you been? What's griping you?"

Marik took a deep breath and clasped her hands tight until she could see straight, and keyed in her response as calmly as she could.

"What's griping me? Some bastard stole A20854A," she wrote. "And if I ever find him, I swear I'll kill him." Then she keyed off and went home to mope.