The Kindly Ones

by Melissa Scott

  She shook herself, refusing to consider it any further. Oslac Rhawn was a typical Port Authority bureaucrat, to be used and ignored. What really mattered was that Guil would be piloting Pipe Major through the rings, and that meant not only that Moraghan could relax during transit, but that she could probably persuade the pilot to join her in making the rounds of the Necropolis, Destiny's entertainment district. Like most worlds, Orestes—or at least Destiny and its Necropolis, the only part of Orestes Moraghan knew at all well—was much more fun in the company of a native guide. Guil had acted as escort for her half a dozen times before, and those were the visits Moraghan remembered best. She smiled to herself. Now, the only problem would be figuring out how to phrase the invitation. For some reason, it was always hardest asking: Guil offered no openings, no easy ways to bridge the silences. But once you'd managed it, Moraghan thought, it was always worth the effort.

  She frowned then. It was surprising to realize how little she really knew about Guil, and how little of that knowledge had been given by direct statement. The pilot seemed to preserve a core of secrecy, an inner self that she revealed to no one. Maybe it was just part of being para'an, Moraghan thought. If you cut yourself off from all your kin, does it make it even harder to deal with total strangers? But no, Guil's occasional remarks about Electra made it clear she hadn't given up all contact with her relatives there. In fact. . . . Moraghan's frown deepened. She had asked, once, why Guil had chosen to become para'an. They had both been a little drunk, and for once, Guil had answered freely. She liked working as a tug pilot, she said, was better at that than at anything else, and there just weren't enough piloting jobs on Electra. Because of the union rules, the senior pilots took what jobs there were out of Glittermark, Electra's only port. On Orestes, members of the local Kinships took precedence at Destiny and at Madelgar, but there was enough traffic, especially at Destiny, to create a demand for pilots who could be available at any time. And that meant para'anin, who weren't bound by any Familial obligations.

  Becoming para'an had just been the easiest way to get a job, Guil had said, shrugging. Since then, she'd been good enough to work her way into the regular rotation, and still made extra money as a substitute.

  Moraghan shook her head slowly. She did not for one moment believe it had been that simple a decision for Guil—if nothing else, the pilot had once said something about sending money home, and Moraghan knew how poor a world Electra was. Guil's relatives probably needed the income the pilot could provide. And even if it had been purely a matter of choosing the best way of getting the work she wanted, Moraghan thought, the emotional cost must've been high. There was the ceremony para'anin went through, parachor. Guil had never spoken of it, of course, but Moraghan had read about it in the Survey pamphlets that dealt with Orestes. To become para'an, you had to kill three of your own blood kin, to demonstrate the sincerity of your intentions. These days, the parachor was—mostly—ritual, the ceremonial beheading of three straw dummies. It was strange, though, Moraghan thought. She could not quite picture Guil swinging the great axe shown in the Survey pamphlet's photos, chopping up a gaudily dressed bundle of straw. But she had no trouble at all believing that the pilot could have killed her siblings.

  She shook herself hard, and reached for the workscreen. She had been on the six-week mail run, Pippa to Orestes to Althjof, for four years now, and of all those worlds, only Orestes still held anything to intrigue her. There was something about the rigid honor code that touched a sympathetic chord in a woman who had been under military discipline since she was fourteen. Its customs were not always pleasant ones, but there was . . . something.

  Chapter 1

  Trey Maturin

  It began, I suppose, at Per Tamarisk, toward the end of the calendar-summer. I had spent the last two calendar-weeks in the Tamar Range, a spur of the Prosperities, escorting the Patroclan survey team on a tour of the mining district, and now we were returning to the Halex Tower to report their preliminary findings to the Matriarch. The Patroclans, Dario Yan and Slade Orteja, of the engineering firm of Kassan and Cho, seemed pleased enough with their work: they huddled together in the back of the snow car, fingers busy on the keys of their lapboards as they cheerfully discussed possible solutions to the problems facing the Halex mines. I had stopped listening even before we left the mine hostel. The Patroclans habitually spoke in ellipses. Now, when they added their technical jargon to the half-sentences, it was as if they spoke another, foreign language. I looked away, staring out the small side window at the mountains around us.

  For a small world—a large moon, really—Orestes had some fairly spectacular mountains—not merely the Prosperities here in the Halex Mandate, but the Greater Tolands and the Toland Hills in the Brandr Mandate, and the Spiderlegs on the unclaimed Far Continent. The Tamar Range towered behind us, the rock showing reddish grey where the slope was too steep to hold the snows, but the central spine of the Prosperities shouldered up behind them, its peaks rising another three hundred meters above the tallest of the Tamars. Plumes of steam were visible against the dark blue of the sky, a massive cloud sitting above the Heartlight, a thinner feather drifting away from the Old Forge. Both volcanos seemed fairly quiet now, even though the moons would be in syzygy in four days, and the Geo/Met office in Destiny had already issued its standard "tremors and volcanic activity" warning. The miners at Tamar One, where we had spent the night—and at all the mines throughout the Prosperities, and across Orestes—had been working hard to bring out a last load of ore before the danger of earthquake closed the mines.

  The snow car jerked as we reached the snowline, and the driver put down the little wheels. We bounced heavily across the rutted ground for a hundred meters, and then the car reached the metalled road, and settled to a steady swaying. The gleaming roofs of Per Tamarisk were already visible over the driver's shoulder. As the car negotiated the next switchback, still more of the town came into view. It was a typical railhead settlement, a collection of narrow two- and three-story towers clustered on the down side of the gentler slope that characterized the foothills. The steeply pitched roofs were covered with solar panels that reflected Orestes' dark sky and the hair-thin sliver of Agamemnon. The few windows were barely more than slits cut into the downwind sides of the buildings, but they, too, were covered in solar film to extract every calorie of heat from Atreus's thin sunlight. Only two buildings broke that pattern: the barnlike Guildhall, banners waving from the triple staff above its door, and the rail station. It was a long, low building, with a sharply pointed roof capped by the massive dish antenna that was Per Tamarisk's primary link with the rest of Orestes. Beyond the station house lay the silver tracery of the rail yard, and the bulky roundhouse. A small work engine was moving in the yard, shunting boxy ore carriers from track to track, and a passenger train—the train we would take back to the Tower—was drawn up to the station's main platform. At the intersection of two streets, a mixed group of laborers was digging an apparently purposeless ditch, but not much else was moving in the narrow streets. Of course, the Eclipse had ended less than an hour before, but I would have expected a little more traffic.

  As we traversed the final sharp bend and turned onto the main street, I leaned forward to touch the driver's shoulder. "Is it always this quiet here?"

  Corol Ingvarr shrugged. "It's a small town, Medium. And most of the people're probably up at the mines. There's extra work, this time of the calendar-month."

  I nodded, leaning back in my seat. That was true enough, with the more fragile equipment to recover and the delvings to secure as much as possible, but boarded-up windows in perhaps a third of the dwelling towers told another story. Like all too many of the Halex mines, Tamar One and Two had had to lay off workers as the seams were played out. Having worked for the Halex Family for nearly eight calendar-months, I was fairly certain that the Matriarch had done her best to provide jobs or at least food and shelter for the various Kinship members thrown out of work, but I was equally sure she had found it
hard to find suitable jobs for all the miners. The ditch back at the intersection had a definite air of make-work about it.

  Corol glanced quickly at me, and his rather grim expression eased slightly. "And things haven't been going well," he admitted. He gave the Patroclans, still chattering over their lapboards, a quick look. "Though maybe now. . . ." He didn't finish the sentence—he didn't have to. Most Branches of the Halex Kinship, with the exception of the code-bound Rhawn, had pinned their hopes on the Patroclan survey, if only because most of the other Kinships strongly disapproved of it. Officially, the Brandr and the Fyfe and the Axtell didn't like the idea of bringing in off-worlders to solve Oresteian problems; more likely, I thought, they were envious of the hoarded wealth that enabled the Halex to afford off-world advice.

  "They sound pretty optimistic," I said.

  Corol grunted—he was Oresteian enough to be deeply suspicious of experts as young as the two Patroclans—and turned his attention to negotiating the turn into the narrow drop-off lane. He brought the car up to the edge of the station steps, then set the brakes and locked the engine at idle before he popped the side doors. The Patroclans, still talking, collected lapboards and their carryalls, and stepped out into the watery sunshine. They were conspicuously off-world, short and stocky by Oresteian standards, their quilted parkas showing the unmistakable sheen of off-world materials, and the adolescent who came running out to take the car checked abruptly, staring.

  "Manners!" Corol growled, and the youth shook himself.

  "Sorry, sor. For the train, sors?" The singsong accent was very strong in his voice. Looking at him, I guessed he had never been more than a few hundred kilometers from Per Tamarisk in his life. He wore his hair long, bound up in the old-fashioned topknot that had gone out of style in Destiny twenty years earlier. His clothes, the usual felty trousers, knitted jumper and overvest, had an indefinable something to their shape that practically shouted "country." Then he looked full at me, and I saw the tattoo on his cheek. It was the Ansson ringed mountain, but the exact branch of the Kinship was less important than the fact that he had been marked. Only the most conservative of the families still tattooed their adolescents; in the cities, it had been out of fashion for even longer than the topknot.

  "That's right," Corol was saying, impassive as always. "The car goes back to the pool, with Herself's thanks to the baillie for its use. We'll handle our own baggage."

  "Yes, sor, at once." Despite that assurance, the boy dawdled, spending an unnecessary length of time brushing imaginary dirt from the car's windscreen, until Corol snapped something at him in a dialect too broad for me to follow. The boy flushed, and ducked at once into the car, gunning its motor angrily.

  "Idiot boy," Corol growled, hoisting his own bag to his shoulder. "Let's go."

  Without waiting for an answer, he stalked off down the long platform toward the entrance. We followed, the Patroclans still murmuring to each other, apparently impervious to the boy's stares. As we came closer to the double doors, I caught sight of a woman sitting in a patch of sunlight, her legs folded gracefully beneath her thick skirts. A wooden tray full of michi—handmade tree-sugar candies—was set in front of her, a saucer full of change beside it. Seeing that, I looked again, and saw the ghostmark splashed on her forehead. Her eyes were closed, and she leaned against the wall of the station as though she were asleep.

  When the left-hand door slammed, she opened her eyes for an instant, but closed them again as soon as she saw the figures that emerged from the lobby. They were all three young, two men who looked to be in their early twenties, and a woman who might have been a year younger, and all three were dressed in the height of city fashion. All were scowling, and the woman, at least, seemed to be continuing some argument with the darker of the men. He shrugged her off, but did not continue toward us down the platform. The other man, a tall blond, paused to contemplate the tray of michi, then angrily snatched up half a dozen of the candies and turned away without paying. The ghost's eyes flew open, her mouth rounding into a shocked "o," but there was nothing she could do to protest. By the Oresteian honor code, she was dead. Those who left money on her tray did so not out of obligation to her, but out of their own charity. The young woman broke off her argument to glare at the blond, but he gave her a blank look. She subsided, unable to complain without acknowledging the ghost's presence, which would in turn offend against the code. Living beings do not see the dead.

  Corol stiffened in outrage, but he was as bound by the code as any other Oresteian. Orteja said, "Trey, he can't—"

  "Hush," I said, cutting off Yan's protest as well, and stepped forward to confront the thief. I was angry—the ghosts have few enough rights in the cities, but the ones trapped in the rural settlements, where mediums are few and far between, are subject to everyone's petty spites, and this ghost-woman had no other way of supplementing the Kinship's meager charity. It took a real effort to keep my tone within the bounds of courtesy.

  "You, boy."

  The blond turned to confront me, his face setting into an expression of defiance. I touched the medium's black-hand badge that was pinned to the collar of my tunic, and his eyes wavered. As a medium, I was entitled not only to speak to the "dead," but to speak for them. I could denounce him as a thief—a mortal offense—and he knew it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Corol Ingvarr give a wolfish grin. That, and the blond's fear, steadied me.

  "Bad move," I said. "You owe the dead."

  The blond stared at me for a moment longer, half resentful, half still afraid. "I didn't see anyone," he said at last.

  "But I do." I waited, but the blond didn't answer. He was not of the Halex Kinship, of that I felt sure, but I couldn't tell which of the other Kinships he belonged to. The Brandrs ran to blonds, especially in the mainline family, but so did branches of both Axtell and Fyfe. Then I saw the design painted on the back of his thin leather gloves, three moons in the curve of crescent Agamemnon: Fira Brandr of the Brandr Kinship.

  "Live Halex are no concern of mine. Why should the dead ones get anything from me?" the blond burst out suddenly, with an air of grievance.

  "Lael!" That was the young woman. She caught at the blond man's sleeve, stopping the angry words, and faced me with what dignity she could muster. There was a tattoo scar on her cheek, but the dermatologists had removed enough of the pigment to make the family symbol illegible. "Your pardon, Medium, we could not see." She glanced at the blond, who still looked mutinous, and added with emphasis, "of course we will pay what's owed, won't we?"

  The darker man was already fumbling in his pockets, flushed with embarrassment. He drew out a handful of money, change and notes mixed, and threw it into the saucer without bothering to check the amount. It was twice, maybe three times what the candies were worth, but I did not bother to point that out.

  "Charity is always rewarded," I said, quoting one of Chan Chariot's maxims, and capped it with another. "But to pay one's debts is merely right."

  The blond gave me a fulminating look, but he knew he was in the wrong. If I chose to press the matter, I could have him condemned to social death—further than I would have liked to take the matter, but he could not have known that. The woman tugged at his sleeve, and, still glaring, the blond let himself be drawn away, back toward the station. As the door closed behind them, I took a deep breath, trying to calm down. The blond hadn't hurt her, or spoiled her stock—both tricks young bloods were known to play when no one was on hand to stop them. It was hardly a serious matter.

  "What a bastard," Yan said, and Orteja echoed him. Corol made a noise deep in his throat that might have been agreement or disgust or both.

  I ignored them all and went to crouch beside the ghost. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, thank you, Medium." The ghost's voice was hoarse, as though she did not often speak.

  "Is there anything I can do?" As so often, my words were totally inadequate. What I wanted to do was tell her to get out of Per Tamarisk, to move to Destiny, where there were thou
sands of ghosts and para'anin, and where she would not be alone, but I had learned that such advice was useless. If a ghost wanted to go to Destiny, he/she would go there. All too often, the ghosts chose to remain where they had lived, preferring a half-life among familiar things and people to the strangeness of the Necropolis in Destiny.

  The ghost shook her head, a half smile on her lips. "No, Medium, though I thank you."

  "If you're certain," I said, but rose to my feet. The others were at the door now, waiting for me. The ghost nodded. "Then good day." Corol pushed open the door for me. I didn't look back, but stepped past him into the warmth of the station.

  To my relief, the three troublemakers were nowhere to be seen. We walked the length of the empty lobby, past rows of warmly polished benches, and paused at the ticket counter only long enough for Corol to show the Matriarch's pass to the sleepy-looking attendant. The sight of Herself's signature was enough to jolt even the attendant awake, and he hurried to unlock the turnstiles. At his shout, another gawky adolescent, a girl this time, just as old-fashioned in her dress as the boy who had taken the snow car, scurried out of the dispatcher's booth to escort us ceremoniously to the train. There were only two cars hooked up to the engine—others would be added as we moved north toward the Tower—but she led us aboard anyway and brought us to a comfortable four-seat compartment in the leading car. Once there, she unbent enough to stow our bags in the side racks, and ask if there was anything we needed. Corol, with true Oresteian instinct, asked if there was anyplace we could buy snackboxes. The girl, motivated, I guessed, as much by the likelihood of a good tip as by the magic of the Matriarch's pass, promptly offered to fetch us four. The Patroclans, who had not yet acquired the Oresteian habit of eating at every possible opportunity, said they'd share one, but Corol told her to bring four anyway. The girl accepted his four-kip note with a grin, and vanished. She returned within a quarter-hour, carrying four foamform boxes and a large thermos. Corol nodded his acceptance, and waved away the girl's perfunctory offer of his change.