by Alex Oliver
The 'festival' began just beyond the shade of the nunnery wall. Those who knew what a real saint's day should look like would probably not have been fooled by the hastily tacked together cloaks, the three-year old faded masks, nor the pillow dressed in a christening gown and crown, that was being carried in front of the musicians in lieu of a proper saint's statue. The atmosphere of tense, transgressive joy was clear enough to Lali as the community came together to stick it to the man.
She was so proud of them, right up until the front gate of the nunnery opened and the Innocent stepped out. Tall, and white, he was armed with stun rifle and morning star, because he was not allowed to shed blood. As his pale gaze swept the crowd, the music seemed to kick up in volume and tempo, slipping out of key and back as the musicians' nerves failed.
Unearthing a disguise at the potter's would take too long. The Innocent would spot her and then he would begin shooting to clear a way to her. And standing out here with uncovered hair and a baby on her hip was asking for trouble. Lali found the nearest clump of cloaked, masked dancers and pushed herself into the middle of it.
"You're the one they're after?" said a tall man in a threadbare green cloak, a mask like the face of the sun. She had to hope he was friendly.
"Yes. Can I have your cloak?" She plucked at the fine blanket around Autumn, and unraveling it managed to bind the child to her belly under her huichil. Now she was not a woman carrying a stolen child, but a pregnant woman. Which was the best disguise she could manage without ditching the child altogether.
"Here." The man wrapped his cloak around her and settled the mask on her head. "Walk in the middle. I'll go tell the bearers to lead us out of the compound."
He strode off, unmasked but clearly innocent by virtue of his sex, and a moment later the revelers had formed themselves into a procession. Lali was jostled forward, passed from group to group until they danced through the compound's outer gate and she could see Xipil's flitter like a mossy rock with Xipil in the driving seat, and its gull-wing door invitingly open.
The procession had walked fast - more of a dancing jog than a walk - but now the guards were beginning to catch up, fanning out from the nunnery's front door with machine guns in their hands. The Innocent ran up until he was level with the false saint being borne aloft on the shoulders of four villagers, and he eyed the procession narrowly. She felt his gaze sweep over her like a cold searchlight and move on.
A hundred feet or less now to the shuttle. Lali's shoulderblades itched and sweat dampened her chest, heated by the warmth of a sleeping child.
"One chance," the Innocent raised his bracer to his mouth to amplify his voice. "You show her to me now or I shoot you all and let God choose his own."
She'd known something like that would be his play, so she was already breaking from cover and sprinting for the shuttle before he'd finished the sentence. Caught by surprise, he had to turn, and in that moment she hurled herself into the passenger's seat and Xipil took off, full throttle, vertically straight up.
The morning star clattered on the underside of the shuttle and fell away. "Good," said the distant amplified voice, growing fainter as they rose. "I will catch you at the spaceport then, when you trip the DNA scanners trying to board."
"All right, so this was fun," said Xipil, struggling to nurse more speed and altitude out of the achy old engine of her shuttle. She had reached twelve hundred feet and turned northwest, flying over the foothills and terraced slopes of the mountains. "But they're going to... shit."
Behind them the streak of four vapor trails lanced into the clouds as Kingdom vessels lighter and faster than their own took off from the compound precinct. "They're going to come after us," Xipil commented, unnecessarily, "and I can't get any more speed out of this. If they see us here and they have weapons, we're not going to make it to the spaceport."
"They won't kill the admiral's daughter," Lali replied, looking down and easing the tight wrap that held Autumn immobile against her. The child slept on peacefully, and she was glad for that. "So they won't shoot us down. But that bastard is right - I don't know how I'm going to get past him at the spaceport. The baby's hard to conceal."
"Oh no," Xipil groaned, just as the shuttle's laboring engines gave a sucking cough, and the small craft fell sickeningly two feet straight down. "Not again."
"Again?"
Xipil looked irritated and hard done by and frazzled, "Yes! It's been having cutting-out problems. I keep taking it to Atla's sister because she's a mechanic, but she's not very good. I just... I just asked too much of it, going straight up. It'll be fine, I just need to rest it for a while."
Lali laughed, three parts hysteria but one part genuine amusement. Perhaps she had had unduly good luck so far, and although her people were the best people in the universe, they were not the richest, nor were they in possession of the very best of equipment. They did okay anyway. She peered out of her mossy window, looking for the best place to land just as the fast transports of the Innocent and his guards screamed overhead.
Below, one of the terraces was still being cleared and leveled. The large boulders that got in the way of the plow had been uprooted and rolled to one end of the field, where they had been piled up together and left to grow lichens and small alpine plants. "Put the shuttle down there," she said, pointing. "We can fling some soil on the shiny parts and it might look like a rock from the air."
Moments later they were down, the shuttle's hot engine pinging in the thin mountain air and its windows open to let in the smells of thin fresh air, quinoa plants, and corn. The barren terrace on which they had landed had been leveled but had not yet been filled with soil; it was a rocky hollow on the side of a valley otherwise striped with plenty. The trails of the Kingdom craft in the dark blue sky above thinned and wisped away, and then the silence was so profound they could hear the work parties on the other side of the valley, five miles away, singing to the three sisters to encourage them to grow.
The peace of the scene struck Lali with a yearning deep in the bone. Why was she running around with other people's children when she could have been here with her hands in the soil? When she could have listened to her planet and loved her sun and been content? For a mad moment, she considered getting out, walking to the most remote village and disappearing here. It wouldn't harm the child to be raised as a woman of the hill people, not as it would harm her to take her into a war, where she would remain a prize fought over by her powerful parents.
A crackle interrupted her thoughts. She didn't recognize the sound at first, it was so unexpected, and then, "... do you read me? Lali, do you read?" she realized it was coming from her bracer. It was Morwen's voice on short distance coms.
She raised the bracelet to her mouth, beaming at Xipil as she did. "It's Morwen! Morwen? I read. Where are you?"
"Mile and a half straight up over the spaceport. I'm in the landing queue under ID as a deer embryo trader. I should be ground-side in an hour. Can you get to me?"
Lali's luck was holding after all. She raised her eyebrows at Xipil, who tried the ignition. Nothing happened except a grating noise and a slight shudder. Xipil shook her head.
"I can't, but can Charity zero in on my coordinates? I think this terrace is big enough for her to land here. I think it's sturdy enough to support her."
She expected Morwen to scoff, 'You think?' She expected her to need persuading to do anything quite so rash as to land on the hand-built, unfinished pile of stones sticking out from the side of a mountain, but Morwen just said "I'm on my way. ETA twelve minutes," and signed off, brusque and businesslike and kind of uncaring.
"She's in a mood," Lali commented, unsettled even when she should have been jubilant.
"Are you sure you want to go back?" Xipil asked, her face almost matronly for a moment beneath the thick coils of her plaited hair, more flattered than concealed by its gauze scarf. "You could stay, help your parents grow old, give them grandchildren of your own."
It was that, oddly enough, that pun
ctured her regret over leaving. Marriage, children growing in her own body? She didn't know why the thought repelled her, but it did. Sad though it was to leave so much behind with it, that part she didn't want. "I'm sure. I'm a marine on a mission, and I promised. You do that stuff for me, and I'll put the galaxy to rights for you, okay?"
Xipil laughed, opening the shuttle door and stepping out just as a mote in the sky became a star bright enough to shine in daylight. "I suppose I'm walking home then."
It wasn't that bad. She could walk to the road and the mountain folk would take her from there, in ground car or on donkey-back, but Lali remembered in time and scrabbled in her pockets, coming up with a double handful of fire that burst up from her open hands, red, red, glistering as a burst of new blood and sunrise.
"Here," she pressed the rubies into her sister-in-law's hands. "For the shuttle, and everything else. Help the nuns if you can, and my parents. I'm sorry I didn't have more time to get to know you."
"There'll be more time when you've won your war," Xipil pocketed the rubies quickly, looking stunned, then lunged forward and hugged her. The pressure of her arms stopped Lali from saying that would never happen - that she couldn't honestly see victory ahead. Maybe she couldn't, but she could pretend.
By now, the star had expanded to become the welcome sight of the Charity, with Diane's reddish sunlight beaming off her silver sides. It was a squash, but she fitted herself onto the terrace with fussy precision. The door sighed open, as though she was relieved. One more hug, and then Lali sprinted for the ladder, sure all the way there that the Innocent's flitters must have doubled back by now, sure she would be blasted from the ladder before she could dive through.
But she did, and the door latched behind her, and they were rising again, smooth and easy as the passage of a snake into its burrow.
Lali found a cabin and washed, watching Autumn sleep on the bed. She changed back into her trousers, feeling the weirdness of the carpeted metal cabin and the engines’ all encompassing thrum slide back into normality as she divested herself of the things of home.
Autumn had begun to stir, grumbling in the crook of her arm, as she made her way to Charity's small bridge. That was good. Even if Morwen was occupied with her wife, with no time to spare for Lali, she still wanted the triumph of handing the child over, bright, alert and glad.
Morwen was not with her wife. In fact she was crouched in the pilot's seat in clothes three times her size. A fluffy garment had slid half off her shoulder to reveal a mottling of bruises. Her normally pale skin was now so transparent it might have belonged to a cave-dwelling fish, and there were circles like caldera shadows all around her eyes.
"Is that her?" she asked, dull eyes straying to the baby's face as if in search of something. Lali swallowed and then stepped close. Morwen's obvious misery tied lead balloons around her own floating triumph.
"Yes," she said gently, and laid the child in Morwen's lap. Autumn yawned again, and smacked her lips thoughtfully as though she was very soon going to be hungry. Smiling vaguely, Morwen touched a fingertip to Autumn's nose, drawing it down the slope and gently pressing the blobby tip.
"Well, at least you're wanted."
Oooh, Lali thought. So the rendezvous with her wife had not gone well. She was frankly surprised that Morwen had claimed to have a wife at all, but 'I could have told you that wouldn't be allowed' was not the best thing to say right now. She could see that well enough.
"Are you all right?" she tried, quietly, tentatively. "Is Priya...?"
"She's fine." Morwen turned to press buttons. Random buttons, as far as Lali could tell. "I'm fine."
Suddenly feeding the baby and even changing her nappy sounded like attractive prospects if they would get Lali out of this atmosphere of anger and misery combined. 'So she chose not to come with you?' seemed redundant as well as unkind.
"I've been thinking," she said instead. "We can't take Autumn back to Cygnus 5 just to be killed when the battle cruisers come. We need somewhere to hole up until the fight's won. If we tell the captain we've got her, she'll have something to fight for, but I'm sure she'd agree that we need to keep her safe."
Autumn had woken enough now to take note of the spirals of Morwen's flame colored hair falling around her in a spectacular curtain of warmth. She put out both hands, seized two hanks and yanked, trying to get the curls into her mouth.
Maybe the pain woke Morwen up, or maybe it was just the surprise. She raised her head and looked at Lali with clearer eyes. She was still in there somewhere, buried under the grief. Still calculating away like the brilliant programmer that she was. "You're right. But we can't stay in orbit here either. And what if..." her eyes went glossy and her shoulders shook, but she reined it back with a scowl. "What if the captain's dying and she just wants to see her to say goodbye? We need to be close."
Mboge had gone to Snow City, hadn't he? Lali remembered being taken by the idea of a whole world hurtling through space on the inside of a comet. Hopefully by now he was back at Cygnus 5 with a hold packed solid with food, but she could take a leaf out of that book.
"Cygnus 6 is an ice world. Close enough to act if needed, far enough away to be safe. How about we go there, burrow ourselves a hole and wait it out?"
~
"I am..." Charity sounded uncertain, and that was new. Abruptly, Lali felt guilty for not greeting the ship when she came on board. But Charity hadn't said anything to her either. She still had problems remembering that the machine was a person, and it hadn't registered until now. "I am making a landing approach to Cygnus 6. Shall I activate the view-screen? Information in my database suggests humans find it an aesthetically pleasing sight."
Lali had retreated to her cabin, leaving Autumn with Morwen. The baby had seemed to wake something in Morwen, or at the very least she had seemed to find some comfort in having someone to hug, but it just made Lali feel extraneous. She tried to tell herself that she'd done her bit bringing the baby on board--that any mothering needed to be done by someone else--but it didn't seem to help the itch of discomfort under her skin.
What was she feeling anyway? Grimy, annoyed. Yes, she was worried about Morwen, because it was presumably awful to be dumped like that, and yes, she was maybe feeling like she should have got more praise for accomplishing the mission all by herself, but none of that was quite right. She was... jealous, maybe? Jealous that Morwen saw Autumn when she didn't see her? That made no sense, but there it was.
"Yes please, Charity," she said, and got up from her bed to look as the outer wall seemed to disappear and she was left standing in the immensity of space, warm and safe, breathing and impossible. Out there, Cygnus was a pale green pinhead of brilliance around which the galactic center glowed like a distant opal.
Cygnus Six filled half the horizon. It was a semi-transparent ghost of a planet, its surface dusted with white snow where meteors had impacted the ice and shattered it. But below the surface, sunlight sliced through its many layers of clear water-ice, tinted with deposits of minerals, and filtered back out again in coronas of rainbows. Many coloured auroras flowed over the planet's surface like clouds, gold and deep blue and aquamarine, changing with its thin cold winds and the movement of the ship.
So delicate! Lali took a deep, cleansing breath at the sight and remembered that her problems were small in the face of the universe. "It looks like a soap bubble," she said. "Just hanging there in the dark. I'm afraid we'll pop it if we try to land."
"We are incapable of harming it," said Charity, but she had modulated her voice to suit Lali's; she sounded as though she was moved too. "I am scanning the surface to find a suitable cave."
A long moment of peace, and then Charity tried again, "I am glad to have you back, Private Citlali. I didn't wish to speak out of turn in front of Engineer Crouch. Her vital signs are low and her brain activity is darkened, and I have not known what to do to help her. I don't wish you to think that I am glad to have you back only because of that, but I have found it... sub-optimal to
watch her in distress and not be able to do anything."
Maybe that was what Lali was feeling? She'd got through life pretty well in the past by letting other people deal with their own problems. Not that she'd been mean - she wouldn't try to hurt anyone that wasn't in an enemy army - but she'd never felt responsible for anyone else's emotions before. It was up to them to navigate the minefield in their own heads. It gave her a jolt, though, to think that the spaceship was more empathic than she was, and then it made her wonder why Morwen should be so special. Why should she be the one that Lali learned to care for?
"You and me both," she said. "Is that why you're not talking much? You don't know what to say?"
"Yes. I am not..." a faint whine in the background hum of the ship's processors, as though she was thinking too many things at once. "I am not as sentient as I had hoped, if I cannot navigate this... this labyrinth of human interaction at all. It should not be more complex than multi-dimensional astrogation, but--"
Lali laughed, caught by the intense beauty of a sheet of emerald light lancing up from a glass canyon unveiled by the sweeping curve of the night-line. "You're not less sentient, Charity. There's a whole bunch of humans who can't cope with this stuff either. Why do you think I'm hiding in my room?"
"It is not a failing?"
"It's not," Lali pulled herself together slowly, feeling bolstered. "Or at least, if it is, it's one I share. Maybe the best thing we can do for her is take care of everything else, right? I mean, all the practical stuff. Have you scanned Cygnus 5? What's happening there?"
"I have not previously been instructed to operate long-scan," Charity said, her inflection becoming a little more machine-like as she transferred processing power to her scanners. "I have not known whether it was permissible to do so without instruction."
"Always," Lali reassured her, feeling kind of bad now about the ship--how it seemed to think of itself as a child or a slave. "You're always allowed to act on your own initiative. Don't let anyone tell you differently."