by Lauren Esker
"The more you tell me, the more nervous I get. Can we just go?"
"Right." He flashed her a quick grin. "You can do this. I believe in you. Let's get the goods."
They stopped at the cabin and Claudia collected a small bundle of Earth clothing: the clambake T-shirt (now clean and dry), a skirt with an African print, a pair of socks with sloths on them ...
"Ooh, those; take some of those," Skara said, pointing.
"Those are my panties. I'm not showing my panties to station customs."
"They're different from anything I've ever seen. Nobody wears underwear like that. You'll start a new fad."
She groaned quietly, and collected a couple pairs of her better, silkier underwear. "I can't believe this is your 'designer clothing,' Skara."
"What? It's exotic and different here, trust me."
She bundled it up in a bag he provided, and they went down to the cargo hold. Claudia looked over her shoulder at the softly glowing lights on Ilyx's stasis pod while Skara cycled the airlock.
"Will they be okay?" Claudia asked. "What if something happens and we don't come back?"
"Does it matter?"
"Skara."
"Oh, sure they will," Skara said dismissively. "There's water and a bathroom for Kriff, so at worst he'd get hungry, but if we really don't come back, the ship will be boarded and inspected sooner or later. As for her, she'll be fine in there indefinitely. Now stop worrying about the enemy." He opened the airlock.
Her heart tripped over. She was in an alien solar system to steal one of their most closely guarded treasures, and in a minute Skara wouldn't even be able to give her instructions without other people overhearing. She knew she ought to be terrified, and yet she wasn't. Nervous, yes, but also eager. Excited.
I don't know if there's something terribly wrong with me, or if I've finally found my calling as an intergalactic thief.
"And here we go," Skara murmured.
Nineteen
The docks were large, echoing, and cold. Claudia stared around in amazement at the ships and coverall-clad workers unloading cargo and pushing floating crates, and then hurried to catch up with Skara.
They went first to a station office, where Skara got them clip-on yellow visitor badges. He did all the talking, giving their names as Selu and Claadi, and displayed their "trade goods." A few minutes later, they were out of the office and free to wander the station.
"I can't believe there's not more security," Claudia said, gazing around in wonder as they climbed a set of metal stairs that gave them a long view across the rows of docked ships. "I mean, if they're that worried about outsiders, why do they just let people walk around like this?"
"Think about it, though," Skara said quietly. "Outsiders can't teleport; only Rhuadhi can teleport. They don't need security on the station, at least not much. All they really need to do is make sure any random visitor can't get down to the planet. Which most people can't. There are no shuttles to the planet, and there's an energy screen around it that stops any ship that tries to go down. I managed to get there before only because I can shapeshift to look like a local, and then went down with a group of other travelers. But we don't have to bother this time. You're going to portal us down."
"But I can't teleport anywhere I haven't been."
"Normally, you can't. But there's a way around it. You can portal somewhere if you can get an extremely accurate impression of what it looks like. Selinn was specifically taught to do that. So I'm going to try to teach you."
"How?"
"I'm getting to that. First I need to find what I'm looking for." He smiled. "Aha."
He opened a door to a small, closet-like room with what was obviously some kind of computer monitor and keyboard. After ushering Claudia inside, Skara closed the door. It was very tight with just the two of them ... which was actually quite nice. Seeming to feel the same, he slipped an arm around her to type on the keyboard.
"The Rhuadhi don't use cuffs like the Galateans do," he murmured into her hair. His breath raised the fine hairs on her neck in a pleasant shiver. "So they have these booths for calling people or looking things up. Mmmmm. You smell nice."
"Like an Internet café." She tilted her cheek against his for an indulgent moment, but she could feel the unnatural heat in his skin, and that brought her back to the seriousness of their task. "Skara, come on, focus."
"Right."
He typed, and suddenly the screen lit up with a view of a city or town. It hardly even looked alien. There were low, colorfully painted buildings. Snow was drifting down.
"This is the current view in ..." He checked a readout in the corner of the screen. "Ruby Sanctuary. Though it doesn't really matter which one. Hang on ..."
He typed some more, and suddenly the walls around them seemed to vanish. The buildings were all around them; the falling snow looked close enough to touch. Claudia had to reach out a hand until her fingers touched the wall of the booth to remind herself that she was actually still inside.
"It's a VR booth!" she said, delighted.
"Sure, if you say so. What do you think? Can you do it?"
"I ... I'm not sure." She concentrated, but there wasn't even a glimmer of a portal. Claudia made a frustrated sound.
"Keep your cool," Skara murmured, stroking the back of her neck. "Focus. You can do this."
There's no smell. That's what's wrong. It was a realistic, three-dimensional picture, but it was just a picture. Not the same as actually being there.
But maybe she could supply the missing parts of the sensory experience.
Claudia had grown up in warm places, and Seattle tended not to snow a whole lot, so she thought about a skiing vacation she'd gone on with some of her coworkers to the Cascades. She tried to concentrate on the sensory experience of snow: the way it smelled, the chill of it on her skin. She ought to feel cold, she thought, cracking her eyes open. The snowflakes over the city were dancing in a light breeze, so the chilly wind would flutter her hair and cut through her too-light clothing and blow snowflakes down her collar ...
Violet light glimmered on her fingertips.
"It's working," Skara murmured.
"Shhh!" The interruption blew her concentration, but it was easier, this time, to focus on the partly-real, partly-imaginary sensory picture she was building up around her of the scene. The dry cold of winter air in her lungs. The dampness of snowflakes melting on her forehead and nose and fingertips. The tingle of cold hands warming up, the discomfort of snow in her shoes—
The portal blossomed in front of her.
"You're brilliant," Skara murmured, pressing a kiss to her neck, and they stepped through.
As soon as her feet stepped into snow, Claudia discovered that it was one thing to imagine being cold and damp, but the reality was extremely unpleasant. Also, she'd accidentally portaled them onto a rooftop. She started to turn around, but the portal had already winked out, and she stumbled into Skara and then swayed as he caught her.
"It's a long trip. Breathe for a minute."
"I can't. I'm freezing," Claudia said through chattering teeth.
"Yes, er ... possibly somewhere more tropical would have been a good idea. I was going for sanctuaries that were geographically closest to the station. Still, we really just need to get inside and get warm."
"Skara, we're on a roof."
"We can climb down easily."
"Speak for yourself," she said, shivering. "Some of us can't just grow tentacles and extra pairs of hands. Also, it's a little conspicuous, don't you think?"
"Hmm. True." He pointed into an alley beside the building. "Portal us down there?"
The effort left her slightly woozy, but it wasn't nearly as difficult as portaling all the way from the station. Also, the alley cut the wind a bit. At least the snow wasn't going straight down her neck.
"I think we're going to need coats," Skara murmured. He unclipped their yellow visitor badges and pocketed them. "Acquiring winterwear locally would be less conspicuous than
getting it from the ship."
"And by 'acquiring' I suppose you mean stealing," she said, scowling at him with as much righteous indignation as she could muster while tucking her hands under her arms to warm them.
"Of course not. Much too conspicuous." He patted his pocket, which jingled slightly. "Last time I was here, I acquired—"
"—stole—"
"—some local currency. I still have enough left to cover our expenses for a day or two. And this shouldn't take any longer than that."
"It better not be a long walk to the nearest REI," Claudia muttered.
It wasn't. She could only assume that on a world full of teleporters, people portaling in with inadequate clothing happened all the time. There were booths on almost every streetcorner, not stores as such, but Skara fed in some crescent-shaped coins and then showed Claudia a screen full of colors where she could select her favorite. She decided on dark purple and gray, thinking it would look tasteful with her presently green hair, and a moment later the booth spit out a purple-and-gray jacket and gloves.
"Okay, that's nifty. Like your very own robot personal shopper. Another thing I wish we had on Earth." The jacket went on like a normal Earth jacket, although it fastened shut with a sticky Velcro-like strip rather than a zipper. She couldn't help laughing when Skara selected an orange and blue jacket with magenta gloves. "You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out you're colorblind."
"I can see colors just fine," Skara said loftily, pulling on the gloves. "I like colors. Other people simply don't appreciate them properly."
Claudia tugged at her glove and patted her jacket. As well as being warm, it had some sort of heating element built in, making her toasty. "Where are we anyway, the North Pole?"
"We're high up. It's always chilly in the sanctuaries except right along the equator."
She turned to give him a startled look. Somehow she'd completely forgotten—"We're in a flying city!"
"Well," he said, grinning, "yes."
"I have to see! Take me to the edge! Is there an edge?"
Skara took her gloved hand in his. "This way."
No one paid them the slightest attention, just a pair of coat-clad Rhuadhi, hand in hand. Skara led her briskly down the street, which became larger and grander, and eventually turned into a bridge.
No ... not a bridge. Not exactly.
The picture rearranged itself in her head. It was not exactly a bridge so much as a street connecting one neighborhood of the floating city with another. Below them was a view of cloud-shrouded mountains, like the view from an airplane window. The whirling snowflakes were not just above them, but also beneath and to the sides and all around. It was like being inside a snowglobe.
"But what keeps it up?" she asked, running from one side of the bridge to the other, peering down as she clutched the railing. The wind buffeted her. Surely there had to be something to stop pedestrians from accidentally falling over the edge. She hoped.
"Beats the heck out of me," Skara said. He hunched his shoulders in the coat, and she felt suddenly guilty. He was racing a clock, and here she was, playing tourist.
But he hadn't tried to rush her, and he smiled at her delight. He seemed to be enjoying it vicariously through her pleasure.
Time to move on, though, she thought reluctantly. "Where to now? The sanctuary?"
"First we get something to eat."
"Do we have time?" she protested, even as her stomach growled.
"We don't have time not to. You need to be at full portaling strength, just in case." He smiled at her. "Don't worry. If this place is similar to the one I visited before, there are a bunch of street-food vendors around the sanctuary. Come on."
He consulted his cuffs, tapping them with his fingertips to produce a small map, studied it for a minute, and then led her briskly off the bridge and down a side street.
They came out on a boulevard that dwarfed the other street. This was a grand avenue, though the buildings were about the same as the ones elsewhere, three and four stories high. There were wide, well-shoveled sidewalks, though she saw few vehicles on the roads, just a handful of small bug-shaped skimmers, like floating Volkswagen Beetles.
But then, you wouldn't have as much need for vehicles on a planet where so many people could teleport, she thought.
At the end of the avenue loomed a building that made her think of the Taj Mahal, or at least her vague idea of what the Taj Mahal looked like, based on pictures. It was a towering light-colored building that dwarfed everything around it, topped with a dome, with a number of spires or office towers around it.
"I'm going to guess that's the sanctuary."
"Good guess."
They walked toward the building, and the mostly-empty street began to acquire a few more pedestrians. When they got closer, she could see that the building was surrounded by an enormous courtyard. As Skara had said, there were vendors in stalls, not just selling food but also assorted items like winter gear and souvenirs.
Claudia looked at the wares in a few of the booths—it would have been suspicious not to, she thought. Skara vanished briefly and came back with cups of soup and paper-wrapped twists of something crunchy and sweet and vaguely churro-like. They ate while browsing tourist goods and looking up at the looming facade of the building. It had a wide set of steps leading up to a pair of enormous double doors guarded by attendants clad in yellow and purple.
"So how good is the security on this place?" she asked quietly, munching on a spiral churro. "Can we just walk in?"
"Looks like," Skara said after they had watched for a few minutes. Indeed, the guards' main function seemed to be opening and closing the doors. It didn't even look like they were checking IDs. "That's how it was before, but I thought they might've increased security after I walked out with one before." He shrugged. "Want to try it?"
"Are you serious? What if we get caught?" Her voice rose to a squeak. "Skara!"
He tossed their trash into a nearby bin and started strolling that way. Claudia scampered to catch up.
"If they ask, just tell them we're visiting a dying relative," he said quietly. "I don't think we'll need more of a cover story than that."
As it turned out, they didn't even need that much. The guards took their (fake) names, and opened the door with no further questions. Warm, humid air gusted out as the double doors opened.
Well, Claudia thought, if something terrible was about to happen, at least they would be warm.
They entered a vast entry hall, big enough to accommodate a row of trees down the middle. In fact, it was an entire indoor park. Towering glass windows and skylights—these patched with snow—provided light for the plants, trees, and shrubs. The trees were like nothing Claudia had ever seen, with straight red-barked trunks and drooping fronds of blue and purple. There were a few other people walking around, and as each of them passed near enough to one of the trees, they reached up to lightly touch a drooping purple frond. The leaves of the entire tree seemed to rustle slightly whenever someone touched it, or perhaps that was only the breeze from the door.
"Resurrection trees," Skara murmured. "I think they only grow here. Have you ever seen them before?"
Claudia shook her head. "Why are they called that?"
"Local superstition," Skara said. "That's all."
He had spoken quietly, but an elderly woman nearby overheard. "Have you ever been in a sanctuary before, dear?" she asked.
"No," Claudia said. "It's my first time."
The woman looked up at the tree. "The souls of the dead rest in their branches, it's said, until it's their time to be reborn. Touch the leaves and think of someone you've lost, if you like."
With that, she suited action to words, reaching up to brush her fingertips along the edge of a purple leaf. Claudia hesitantly followed suit, stretching to run a light finger across a leaf. She hadn't intended to think of anyone, but instead a memory popped into her head. She was five or six years old, sitting in the kitchen of the house in Louisiana wh
ile her grandmother leaned over her to help her cut out cookies. It all came back with a rush, like it was yesterday: Grandma's soft arm around her, the smell of her perfume, and most of all the warm feeling of peace in the kitchen. When Grandma was there, Mom and Dad didn't fight. The house felt like a home, warm and cozy and safe. It was, perhaps, the last time she'd really felt like that.
She hadn't thought of that in years, and to her surprise, she found that she was blinking back tears. Dashing at her eyes, she looked around for Skara and found him a few feet away, hands tucked under his arms, staying well away from the trees.
It occurred to her that Skara wouldn't want to be reminded of all the people he'd lost.
She gave him a moment to get himself together, and looked up at the tree again. It rippled at the slightest touch, and now, up close, she saw why. The entire branch structure was very loosely joined together, causing it to flutter in the slightest breeze.
Fallen branches littered the grass around the bases of the tree trunks. Not too far away, she saw a worker in a purple uniform picking some up and putting them in a cart.
And then it hit her that this place was not a park, exactly; it was more like the grounds of a hospital. Somehow in all of their planning, she'd forgotten that dying people came here. The sanctuary was primarily a hospice, and now she took a closer look at the people around her and realized that most of them were either visibly infirm or supporting someone who was. Many of the people in sight were very old, hunched in the floating version of a wheelchair, or leaning on a younger person who might be their child or grandchild.
She hadn't really felt like a thief until now.
But she reminded herself that, just like any of these people, they were here because they had to be here. Skara was going to die without a symbiont.