“Spindles. They’re spinning thread from wool, or perhaps from wild cotton. It’s in the chips I gave you.”
She nodded as Trompe started the vehicle once more, as they went slowly by. The herdsmen had a stout little wain with shutters at either end and head-high sections of woven-mesh panel racked at its sides. As they passed the group Lutha waved, receiving only the barest of blank-faced nods in return.
“Was Dinadh this arid when the first settlers came?” Trompe asked as he maneuvered the vehicle along a road uncomfortably close to a sheer drop on one side. “Or did it change after?”
Lutha let her subconscious seek the information. “It was as it is now. The first Alliance scholars to visit the planet were told the Dinadhi had come from another world and they ‘remembered’ emerging onto this world from their previous one through a hole in the ground. It’s not an unusual origin myth. Other cultures have similar ones.”
“They were probably on one of the fabled lost ships,’ “ Trompe conjectured. “There’ve been enough of those to go around.”
She shrugged. “There have been ‘lost ships,’ but this is the only unidentified colony. I looked it up before we left Central. Except for the population on Dinadh, the Alliance ethnologists have always been able to identify the planet of origin, and that’s true even when populations have ended up far from their original destinations.”
“But not here.”
“According to the stuff the Procurator gave me. No one knows for sure how the Dinadhi got here.”
“No missing ship with a Dinadhi-like society?”
“No record of one.”
“No similar societies from which this could be an unrecorded offshoot?”
“One theory had it they came from a frontier society beyond Hermes Sector. The world was called Vriat or Breadh; something like that. The colony on it disappeared.”
“The Ularians?”
“Nobody knows what happened. They just disappeared, that’s all.”
“There have been a lot of Nantaskan-speaking worlds that colonied out. Arriving from any of them makes more sense than this hole-in-the-ground story.”
She glanced at him sidewise. “There is a real site for the supposed emergence, Trompe. As a matter of fact, it’s in a wide valley not many days’ travel from Cochim-Mahn. Or so the maps say, at any rate.”
“A sacred site, no doubt,” he said flippantly.
“Oh, very sacred! It’s the omphalos. Extra-special rites every third year, a Dinadh year being six hundred and a fraction days. Every third year they draw an additional day out of the omphalos, the navel of time. That doesn’t quite do it, so every sixtieth year they have to pull two days. Tahs-uppi, the ceremony’s called.”
“Meaning what? You’re further along with the language than I am.”
She mused. “Tahs-uppi. Tasimi means the edge or the border. Well, actually it means ‘our borders’,’ plural possessive. Tahs probably means something like end, or limit. There’s a word … uppas, uppasim, uppasimi.” She fell silent.
“So?”
“I was trying to figure out the ending. It has something to do with selection, I think. Part of the litany of Weaving Woman gives her the name of K’loch mahn uppasimi. Selector of our patterns. Well, not quite that. Chooser, intrinsic.”
“I don’t quite get that.”
“Well, in our language we wouldn’t say the rain chooses to fall. It just naturally falls. Weaving Woman is pattern, she doesn’t choose it.”
“So the name means what? The end of pattern?”
“The crux, the fulfillment. That would fit. Every hundred standard years, more or less, they reach the fulfillment of the pattern, pull out an extra day or so, and start over.”
“With feasting, I suppose. Processions.”
“More likely fasting and prayer. Actually, I don’t know. The chips you gave me merely mention Tahs-uppi and gave the date for the preceding one. When a ceremony is very holy, taboo, it’s hard for an outsider to learn the details.” She stared down into the abyss they were skirting. “The pattern is due to end fairly soon. Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask about it.”
“I wonder what would happen,” Trompe mused, turning the vehicle away from the canyon and toward the forest, where the road disappeared around patches of thorny growths, “if they didn’t find one.”