A Passage of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  He shrugged, drawing slightly back from her now. “Times come when change is necessary. It’s a natural process.”

  “Things are born, grow, and die,” said Lily, thinking of the animate disorder of the park. “And make way for new things. Is that what you mean?”

  He stopped her, in the midst of that crowd. Pinto halted as well. “Words can mean anything, Lilyaka. It is the gesture that will tell you the truth.”

  He embraced her, and she felt his warmth envelop her as completely as the sun embraces the day in cloudless summer weather. But when he thrust her back, she saw tears glistening in his eyes. “I love you, Lily,” he said. “Never forget that.”

  “You’re leaving me again,” she whispered. A terrible sadness ripped through her, and she was afraid. She tightened her grip on his arms.

  As she watched, his face lost its emotion, lost its tenderness, and he made her release him.

  “No matter what happens,” he said. “You do not know me. That’s a command, Lilyaka.” An instant more he studied her. With a brief smile he slipped away into the crowd.

  She stared after him.

  “Who is he?” asked Pinto, moving closer to her.

  “Damn it,” she said. “No.” And she followed, trailing Heredes, Pinto at her heels.

  “Ah, Lily,” he said, “he did say—” She ignored him.

  They were halfway across the station, Heredes a good hundred meters in front of them, when the white uniforms burst through the crowd in a tight phalanx,

  “Citizens! Stand where you are.” The announcement crackled out over loudspeakers. “Do not move. All entrances have been sealed by order of Central Security. You are in no danger if you stay where you are.”

  Movement came to a halt so quickly that Lily and Pinto, still going forward, barely avoided running into several people before Pinto grasped Lily’s arm and dragged her to a stop.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he hissed in her ear. “Those are the Immortals.”

  White scattered out into the crowd, precise lines expanding in a spiral. The Immortals. White uniforms, faces as clean of emotion as their uniforms were of color. Deathly efficient in their search.

  A sudden flash of movement caught at her eye, a flurry of running. White spun and rolled inward, pressing civilians back, broadening an empty space in the center of the station.

  “Encircle!” The command cracked out above the shocked silence of the crowd.

  Against the people shifting back, Lily pulled forward until she came to the edge of crowd. The Immortals had cornered him—not cornered, but exposed him by driving him out into the opening they had created. One woman in a white uniform staggered backward, clutching her abdomen. Heredes stood in fighting stance. The Immortals fell back slightly, but their circle filled in until only the spaces the crowd might look through onto the scene were left.

  Heredes faced them, twenty of them at least, but he was so utterly alert, so poised for attack that no one moved toward him, none spoke.

  “Comrades!” he called into the unnatural silence. His voice filled the air, a ringing call that caught at the attention more like a spell than like simple volume. “‘I see this system,’” he cried, “‘and on the surface it has long been familiar to me, but not in its inner meaning! Some, a few, sit up above and many down below and the ones on top shout down: “come on up, then we’ll all be on top,” but if you look closely you’ll see something hidden between the ones on top and the ones below that looks like a path but is not a path—’” His voice held them, commanded them to listen, even the Immortals. He had grown like a trick or an illusion until he held the entire station silent to listen to him, as if he was an actor quoting from some long-forgotten play. “‘It’s a plank and now you can see it quite clearly, it is a seesaw, this whole system is a seesaw, with two ends that depend on one another, and those on top sit up there only because the others sit below, and only as long as they sit below; they’d no longer be on top if the others came up, leaving their place, so that of course they want the others to sit down there for all eternity and never come up—’”

  A black-and gray-uniform shouldered through, appeared on the edge of the circle. “Surrender to our custody and you will not be hurt!” the officer shouted.

  “Surrender?” cried Heredes. But his eyes now swept beyond the Immortals, beyond the man commanding them, to rake the crowd. “You are my hope,” he shouted, and his words, his gaze, seemed to pinpoint, to touch, each face, each individual—touched Lily. “‘Whatever happens, do not break ranks! Only if you stand together can you help each other—’”

  The Immortals surged forward. He may have taken a couple out first; it was hard to tell. Pinto kept tugging her back; she kept pulling forward.

  “He said—he said—” cried Pinto above the crowd’s sudden noise, and she fell back against him, remembering what Heredes had said. More uniforms, black-and-gray Security now, pushed forward. She did not see them take Heredes out, did not see him at all after the Immortals converged on him. She did see four Immortals being supported or carried toward the exits.

  “Citizens!” The crackle of the loudspeaker sounded again, hushing the crowd into a frightened silence. “This station is now under Security’s jurisdiction. To those who are innocent of any treason against Central, we apologize in advance for the inconvenience.” A few groans greeted this statement. “You will all be conducted for questioning to Security precinct office. There will be no exceptions. Remain orderly, and our task will run smoothly. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to evade this sweep. All exits are secured.”

  “Bless the Void,” said a woman next to Lily. “Was that the agitator Pero?”

  Her simple comment was taken up and spread like fire through the crowd until it ranged out of Lily’s hearing.

  Pinto pulled Lily around to face him. “Was that Pero?” he asked, urgent now as the black-and-gray uniforms of Security filtered through the crowd and began to line up the masses of stranded travelers.

  Lily stared at him. His bruises still showed under the pattern of his face, showed along his arms. For an instant she marveled at how handsome he was. “It doesn’t matter.” She shook her head, aware now how true that was. Heredes had known it was coming. Had he even set it up himself, to assist his saint, to give Robbie time to move again, to mount the next campaign? But she could not imagine why he should do so.

  A woman in black-and-gray shouldered past a pair of clear-skinned men to come up to Lily and Pinto. “What’s a damned tattoo doing wandering loose in this district?” She beckoned to a comrade.

  “He’s my servant,” said Lily quickly, but at the same moment felt Pinto squeeze her arm slightly, a warning.

  “Take this,” he said with an assurance that surprised Lily and pulled a small diskette from his pocket and handed it to the Security officer.

  The officer began to reply, a scornful comment, but her companion suddenly silenced her. “Look at the damn seal,” he said. She did. She whistled. “Yeah,” said the man. “We better get the captain.” He looked at Pinto. “All right. You and the woman can come with us.”

  They turned and began to weave back through the crowd toward the entrance.

  “Don’t worry.” Pinto motioned Lily forward when she hesitated. The people around them stared at them.

  “What do you think you’re—” She faltered as she realized that the Security officers were not guarding them but rather leading them, expecting to be followed. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “You know I’ve got—” She stopped. He didn’t know Heredes had given her the diskette. “I can’t be questioned!” she hissed, leaning against him.

  “Don’t worry,” repeated Pinto.

  “What, you know a damn Senator?”

  He smiled, caustic and bitter. “How do you think a damned tattoo got to be a pilot?” he asked.

  20 Pinto’s Luck

  LILY GAZED, INCREDULOUS, NUMB, out of the spotless windows of the opulently appointed railcar onto an early morning
landscape that seemed as much of a dream as Heredes’s arrest. No noise, no crowding, no dirt. No house that ever exceeded two stories. No house within a hundred meters of the next. Flowers bordered the rail tracks, manicured and delicate. Lawns spread into the distance. Trees, entire groves of trees, demarked estate boundaries. Whole apartment blocks, along with the tiny parks allotted them, could fit into some of these estates. Had Robbie seen this place with his own eyes or had he simply the sure instinct of righteousness, the unutterable faith, that knew that such wealth and selfish privilege existed and that it must come, at last, to an end?

  At last, puling into a station, Pinto nudged her and she rose with him. “Sure, and here we be,” he said, drawling out the accent for the benefit of the two Security officers who escorted them. Or guarded them.

  They came out of the station, a tiny building of some organic substance carved into an intricacy of overlapping shapes, curls, and elaborate forms that caused her eye to linger disquieted on the patterns of Pinto’s tattoos. Was there a similarity, or was that just her fancy?

  An avenue, bordered by neat lines of low trees, stretched to a white house of columns and porticos and a glinting, golden roof. Ransome House and all its mines might have fit under this place, she thought as they walked. The sun illuminated flowering bushes and tracts of brilliant flowers; lawn, clipped to plush uniformity, spread in all directions. A fine spray of water shed its soft hiss over the green. Once, in the distance, she caught a glimpse of a charming cottage, white-walled, streaked with green vines. A walkway of cunningly fitted stone branched off the avenue; they followed it, curving into the shadow of a grove of slender trees, out onto a smaller lawn surrounded by a hedge. This lawn was tenanted.

  A woman, old by her stooped back, rose from the two young children who sat on a blanket at her feet and turned. Her face, lined by the sun and by some old sorrow, bore a frown as she blinked into the light, but as sudden as a cloud clears the sun, the frown vanished into radiance.

  “Jonathan!” she cried. She rushed forward, halted an arm’s length from the young man to survey the two officers with disdain. “I will sign the manifest,” she said.

  “Do you duly swear you recognize the citizens in question. …” The Security officer droned his questions, got her palm print, and they left, bored with the entire detail.

  “Who has hurt you?” cried the elderly woman, indignation breaking through the joy in her bearing. She enfolded Pinto in a tender but encompassing hug that carefully avoided pressure on his bound left arm. “My dearest child,” she murmured. “How I have missed you.”

  “Nanna,” he said, and Lily was shocked by the affection in his voice.

  She thrust him back from her, studied him with a long-practiced eye. “How have you been, my darling boy? How have you lived these past years?”

  He looked away from her. “Here and there. I got work from companies and captains desperate enough to employ me for as long as they had to. Between those times, I play three-di.”

  “And is that how this came about?” She was scolding him, but her hand touched his bruised face with such gentle solicitude that Lily felt impelled to look away so that she would not think too painfully of Heredes.

  “Nanna! Nanna!” The older of the two children, a girl of about Jenny’s child Gregori’s age, ran up and hung with spoiled impatience at the woman’s skirts. Pinto stared down at the girl, an ethereal, blond wisp of a child, with an expression on his patterned face that Lily could not read. “Nanna, we don’t want no tattoos here.”

  “Mind your tongue, Arabinthia!” The frown eased back onto the woman’s face. “Oh, Jonathan, you shouldn’t be here. When I got the call, I had to say yes, but he told you never to come back.”

  Pinto lifted his gaze with an effort from the pale little girl, glanced at Lily. “We have to see him.”

  Nanna also glanced at Lily, briefly measuring. “That’s impossible. You’re free from that trouble now. Can’t you go?”

  “Please. Nanna. You must help me.”

  That Nanna was not proof against such a plea Lily could see immediately. She disentangled the girl’s hands from her skirt; she frowned; she prepared an argument, gave it up. She could not deny him. “I’ll take you in the back way. Go to his study. He’s always there at eight.”

  “I know,” Pinto’s eyes strayed to the exquisite blond child.

  “Arabinthia.” Nanna’s voice was commanding now. “Can you sit with your brother for ten minutes without moving?”

  “No,” stated the child, staring with fixed hostility at Pinto.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Nanna.

  “Can so,” the girl reneged.

  “Oh, I daresay not.”

  “Can.” The girl ran back to the blanket and threw herself on it with stubborn determination. A blond boy, barely able to walk, was holding onto a large animal-shaped toy and gazing at Pinto with great interest. “Sit!” proclaimed the girl to her new charge. The boy sat.

  “Come with me,” said Nanna.

  Lily tried not to watch them as she trailed behind them through the garden. She was jealous, she knew it, at their intimacy, at the affection this woman gave to Pinto, that he, unlikely as it seemed, returned to her. They came to the house at last and Nanna relinquished her darling boy with such genuine reluctance that Lily felt ashamed of her envy.

  With a delicate key the old woman opened a door of wrought glass into an airy, comfortable room that held a large desk, a terminal, two plush chairs, and a wall of shelves displaying a myriad of exquisite curios. Lily sat down in one of the chairs. It was astoundingly comfortable.

  “Well?” she asked, contemplating Pinto as he prowled the room like a creature reassuring itself of its territory. “You got me out of that station pretty neatly, I’ll admit. But we don’t have much time. Now what?”

  The other door, the one that led into the interior of the house, opened. With her eyes raised to watch Pinto and her back to that door, she had only the young man’s expression to measure this new arrival.

  His face opened, a look of such heartbreaking sweetness, such loving vulnerability, that, an instant later, seeing that expression close into wariness, into a guarded tightness, as though he were bracing to receive a blow, she wondered if she had dreamed what she first saw. Under the vivid swirl of tattoos his bruised eye and lip seemed just part of the pattern. Lily stood and turned to face the newcomer as he shut the door with a stiff, deliberate shove that was not welcoming. Of course she recognized him. She could hardly fail to. It was Senator Isaiah.

  “Hello, Father,” said Pinto.

  “I told you never to come near this house again. It would have been better if you had left Arcadia completely.”

  Pinto smiled, caustic. “Certainly, sir, although you neglected to bribe a company to hire a common tattoo to pilot their ships.”

  “Don’t come wallowing to me.” Senator Isaiah walked between Lily and Pinto and crossed to stand behind his desk. “You chose the profession. I bought you into Central’s finest Academy.” In person, the sharpness of his thin face was emphasized by a pallor in his skin that had not been evident on the screen. His pale eyes surveyed Lily, snapped back to Pinto. “Who is this woman?”

  “My kinnas, Father, If you remember what that means.”

  “Spare me that superstitious nonsense. Do you owe her credit, is that it? Am I to clear your debt? How much?”

  “Just my life. However little that may be worth to you.”

  For the first time Senator Isaiah seemed to take in Pinto’s battered face, the bandaged, immobile arm. Pink flushed his high-boned cheeks. “Who did this?” he demanded.

  “Some of your military men, who were beating me up for being too proficient at three-di.”

  “Is that how you make your living now?”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  The Senator pivoted abruptly and strode to the glass door, his gaze locked on some sight out in the garden. “You ask a great deal of me, Jonathan. Ho
w can I possibly discharge such a debt?”

  On the other side of the desk Lily looked at Pinto and found that he was regarding her steadily. She took one step forward, “Release the man you arrested last night,” she said.

  In the silence that followed this remark, she noticed how truly quiet it was here; not the damped-down hum of suppressed activity, as at Zanta, not the filter-laden muffling that permeated Ransome House, but a stillness that could only grow in a place where a handful of people lived in a space so enormous that it could absorb effortlessly the tiny noises of their existence.

  Senator Isaiah turned back to face her. “Pero?” he asked.

  “He isn’t Pero,” said Lily. “You’ve caught the wrong man.”

  Those pale eyes scrutinized her as if she were alien. “If he isn’t Pero,” he said in that reasonable tone she recognized from his broadcasts, “then who is he?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “I see.” The Senator settled himself carefully in his desk chair, propped his elbows on the dark surface of the desk, his chin on his clasped hands, and regarded Lily thoughtfully. With the fingers of his left hand he drummed a slow, soft, almost mesmerizing pattern on the back of his right hand. “That is a blatant lie. He is far too young.”

  “He’s older than he looks.”

  “I am older than I look.” The drumming stopped. “I can afford the maximum dose of rejuv. Do you suppose I neglect to take it? I could give that man thirty years. How could he have a daughter your age?”

  She was so used to thinking of Heredes as older that it was only as she now looked at Isaiah that she realized the truth of his words. The Senator was probably in his sixties. Rejuv might have kept his hair from graying, might have smoothed the wrinkles on his face, but the lines at his eyes had a deep-set quality to them, and his shoulders bore the burden of aging: that growing, inexorable awareness of death. Void help us, she thought, he’s Kyosti’s age; Heredes must be at least twice as old as him. She remembered how much Jehane had wanted her, thinking her a fugitive from the League. How much would this man want her if he thought she knew such secrets?