“We're not sure.” Marcus looked up, from where he was helping young Cash Nah Trang secure three infant carriers for what promised to be a wild ride. He added apologetically, “Mum, I know it's not a good thing to sedate babies. But letting these kids scream just isn't safe right now! Even out cold, their folks would hear them. And that means so might the Misties Dan and Rachel are carrying. And so might, well, all the other Misties, because theirs did."
“So that's why they're not crying.” Katy's youngest (by arriving in the universe five minutes after Bryce) son was right, as much as she detested admitting it. “Do I take it that you're sure someone's going to try to stop us from leaving?"
“Not from leaving, by itself. But stop us from taking a SHIP? You bet they're going to try. If we give them a chance. Hopefully we can manage not to do that, though.” Marcus gave her a taut grin, and got back to work.
“Would someone please tell me why we want a SHIP in the first place?” Katy tried again. She also wanted to know why the flitter was carrying Mistie-inhabited people, if they were suddenly so dangerous to have around. Dan and Rachel. Kerle Marin. Nadja Nah Trang, and Astin Fort.
The flitter was full, carrying that many adults plus young Cash and the three infants. It soared out over the ocean, as Mistworld's sun rose and the planet proceeded to demonstrate one more time how it had earned its name.
From the water's surface the mist rose in one color—gold, today; but tomorrow it might just as easily rise in blue. From the land behind, in another hue—pale green. From the bluff, the grassy headland where so much had happened recently, mist ascended in a different shade than what was emanating from the village—and Katy realized, looking back now and seeing the sight from aloft for the first time, that the stone cottages and the gravel roadway were giving off different colors than the dirt paths. Than the garden patches, or the fishing boats.
What a kaleidoscope it was! Especially since she had a feeling, at once apprehensive and eager, that she was seeing it from aloft for the last time as well as for the first.
“Because someone's going to use it, and all the others like it, to leave. And I think that someone ought to be us,” Ewan Fralick told his mother, answering the question that she'd nearly forgotten asking. He waited until he'd lifted the flitter above the highest tendrils of golden mist, up where it could ride as smoothly and swiftly (and as economically for fuel consumption purposes, too) as possible. By which time Katy had become so engrossed in the multicolored, twisting, and finally entwining and melding tendrils and billows of mist, that she took her eyes from below reluctantly.
“Where can anyone go, though? If the Warden's inability to contact those it called the Rulers means what I think it does?” She was glad right now that a Human disembodied by death, yet mysteriously kept “alive” here, wasn't transformed into a being exactly like the ones she called Misties. Which could happen no longer ... she'd wondered, at times over the years, why Humans didn't flock to Mistworld in order to die in this magical place. She supposed it was because the planet frightened people with its inhabitants’ strangeness, so much that even the hope of immortality couldn't lure them en masse, although other promises of “life beyond death” so often had.
“I don't even dare think about it, Mum. Literally. Because if I do, someone may hear me!” Ewan gave her a taut smile, and then went back to his piloting. He added, without looking at her again, “We can't take four hours to get there. We haven't got it, and that's that! I'm going to climb higher and try to catch a tail wind. Make sure everybody's strapped in, because things may get bumpy!"
* * * *
Rachel Kane regained a measure of awareness when she heard a groan from beside her, and a whimper from somewhere not quite as near. Dan's groan, and one of their babies’ incipient protest. She tried to move, and promptly discovered that her upper body was restrained.
Just her body, though. Not her arms. An aviation harness? She thought so, because the slight pressure against her flesh had a familiar feeling to it. So did the other sensations she was experiencing, which all added up to “in atmosphere flight in progress."
Another infant whimpered, and then the first one uttered a small, almost experimental cry. From somewhere Rachel heard an adult voice say firmly, “Don't give them more, Marcus! Dammit all, we'll just have to take our chances. I'm not going to do anything that could cost me a grandchild."
Katy. The Matushka, as Dan always called her. The only mother that crèche-reared Rachel Kane had ever known, speaking in her characteristic “midst of battle” voice. Which the first Star Service gen officer recognized, of course, from other wild rides they'd taken together—during their first days of acquaintance, fleeing from a corporate marshal back on Narsai.
What could they possibly be fleeing from now? Rachel lay still, not yet trusting her body to obey her commands; and knowing, from the babies’ voices, which two were unhappy and that neither was desperate yet for adult attention. Katy had promised that she and Dan would both develop that ability to decode their infants’ pre-verbal ways of communicating, after caring for their children long enough; and as usual, Katy had been right. Although until she realized one day she was doing it, Rachel (who'd never held an infant until one of her own was put into her arms for the first time) thought that telling one squall from another must surely happen only in a besotted adult's imagination.
What had happened to bring her here, wherever “here” might be? She slitted her eyes, at last, in hopes of finding out. Without letting anyone who might be watching her realize that she had regained consciousness ... she didn't know why keeping that a secret mattered, but it seemed very important.
She was on board a flitter, almost surely the one belonging to the village she now called home. Her first home; because welcome though she was at the Romanova house in MinTar, she'd never imagined she would stay there forever. She didn't dare, yet, to turn her head toward the on-going sounds from her babies, but she could glimpse Dan beside her. Slumped against his own acceleration harness, breathing deeply and regularly as he did through most nights, apparently not waking up after all. Not just yet, despite the groan she'd heard earlier.
Seat-backs blocked her from looking further, which meant they were somewhere in the flitter's middle. Not all the way back, because the babies’ increasing objections to their lot in life were coming from behind her. What was she doing here, anyway? Leaving her new-made home, for where?
Something stirred inside her, then. Something, someone ... she had no name for the second consciousness that was waking up inside her body. Using all of her training, both what she'd learned as a crèche-child and what the Star Service had taught her, she clamped down on her own rising sense of panic and forced herself to greet that consciousness as if it wasn't coming at her from within. As if it were only a fellow being that she'd encountered in her life's normal course ... why, it was afraid of her! Terrified that she would somehow manage to push it not just away, but out. Force it from the haven her flesh provided, to places where it couldn't hope to survive.
Why is that? Why is Mistworld-Here not able to support you in your noncorporeal form, when Mistworld-There could? She thought the question, and by doing so managed to retain her separateness for a precious moment or two longer.
Because this is where we came from, so long ago that we'd nearly forgotten. And when we left, when Mistworld-Here became Mistworld-There, we still had bodies.
Getting an answer surprised her. The answer itself, though, did not. It merely made perfect sense, to Rachel Kane who now realized that she and the “Mistie” she carried could share her body without—well—merging, as they had before. When it first entered her, without warning and in such terror of losing its heretofore endless life that it wasn't capable of stopping to consider the moral implications of its actions.
It wasn't used to being cut off from the rest of its kind. Unlike those Misties who'd boarded SHIPs and gone to Narsai with their protégés, this one hadn't freely decided to enter a Human'
s body. Nor had she, Rachel, accepted it as a willing partner. She'd fought like hell to expel it, she remembered now, when it woke inside her after yesterday's incredible transition from galaxy to galaxy. She hadn't known what it was, or how had it managed to slip into her flesh in the first place; and that lack of knowledge, she realized now, had crippled her.
Look, I won't throw you out. But you can't take me over lock, stock, and barrel like you did before, either! That's not right, and you damn well know it isn't. You do that, now when you've got the choice, and you're going to prove that those “Rulers” from a hundred thousand years ago were right about your species. That no matter how much good you did while you lived on Mistworld-There—refusing to let the Matushka's sons and a lot of other warriors like them lose their lives entirely, making contact with the Commonwealth through her and letting the colonists stay on “your” planet's surface, going out in your SHIPs to find help for them when they and the other Outworlds needed it so badly—you're still willing to trample on the rights of others whenever it suits you. Just like the bastards who made me!
Kane chose that last argument because she could put behind it a wave of honest and righteous fury. On her own behalf, and on that of the three babies whose vulnerability had driven her to escape from her owners, when she might (no, make that would) never have done it for her own sake.
She couldn't stop the Mistie from claiming her completely, if it chose to do so. She knew, from recent and humiliating experience, that she didn't have the strength. No Human did. Or did she, after all?
“Neither of you will ever belong to Mistworld, Matushka. If there's a way to return to your own home, you'll take it.” Nadja Nah Trang, speaking under the domination of her own Mistie inhabitant, had said words like that to Katy Romanova. On the headland by the community bonfire, last night; or rather, very early this morning. Explaining why no Mistie had tried to enter Romanova's body, or that of Lincoln Casey, the Matushka's life-mate ... had there been enough receptacles, then, without them?
Yes. You've drawn a correct conclusion, Rachel Kane. None of my kind ceased being for lack of a haven, when we had to find bodies again or die. But you've also wronged us, because we didn't enter into any corporeal who lacked sufficient maturity to host without madness. Or without ceasing to be, and giving the receptacle over to its new inhabitant entirely. Which would have happened, if any of us had entered a body like one of the small ones that began their lives inside yours.
The Human shivered at that realization. And told the other within, quite simply, Thank you.
We could have overcome the woman Romanova and the man Casey, if necessary. It wasn't, and as with the children—maturing young ones, like the boy called Cash Nah Trang—forcing them to host our kind could, and likely would, have damaged them forever. So we didn't do it. We want to survive, Rachel Kane. Just as do all living creatures. But you're wrong, if you believe we're willing to do that at any price.
She lay still in her seat, with her eyes closed again. With all her faculties focussed inward, so that she barely heard even her children's now strident demands for attention. She asked, after a time: Can you talk to the others like you? Inside other, well, corporeal beings?
Yes. And I will try to persuade them to give their host-beings the liberty that I am now giving you. The liberty that would have been possible from the first, had there been time to prepare for this. As has been true for other Humans hosting us, voluntarily, when the SHIPs set out for Narsai; and as is true, still, for the three Humans lending form to the deceased sons of Romanova.
There was risk in this. It would call all of Mistworld's attention to where Rachel and those she loved were right now, and she had a wary sense that this might not be a good idea at all. Yet she couldn't let herself redirect her attention outward, without first completing this most important conversation of her life thus far; and that meant she couldn't ask the Matushka, or anyone else on board the speeding flitter, whether or not she ought to ask the Mistworld consciousness she carried to “bespeak” the rest of its kind.
She'd taken risks before. Huge ones. And she'd done it on behalf of others, first as a starship officer and then (even more painfully) as an expectant mother. So she steeled herself now, and decided. Because, as on those other occasions, someone had to decide; and fate was assigning her that task.
Do it, then! she said. And sat up, opened her eyes, and used her voice again at last. “Where are we going, Katy? How much longer until we get there?"
The innocently uttered questions set pandemonium in motion.
* * *
Chapter 26
The merger took no more than a heartbeat. Both Ishi Sanibello and Ewan Fralick had feared it ever since they reintegrated, coming back together in Ishi's body after being apart for a time following their return to Mistworld from Narsai. But when it finally happened, the two young men barely realized they had become one forever. Later, they/he would learn it had been the same for both Bryce/Chad and Marcus/Dram. But right now, at the helm of a flitter traveling faster than it had any right to move—thanks to both a vigorous tail-wind, and a desperate pilot who was pushing its engines for all the speed they could possibly deliver—the task at hand filled Ishi/Ewan's thoughts to the exclusion of everything else.
The passengers, unconscious when they'd been hauled aboard and dumped into seats and strapped in for the journey, were waking up now. From behind him, Ewan could hear a cacophony of confused, frightened, and angry voices. Babies, his nephews and his niece by adoption, yelling in outrage—adults shouting at each other, and the thumps and bumps (and slight rockings of the flitter's deck) that meant at least some of them were engaging in a struggle.
At that Ewan bellowed, using the flitter's built-in system to magnify his voice, “Belay that, dammit! Get back in your seats, and stay there! Or it won't matter who's got control of what, or whom—'cause if I can feel all that bouncing affecting our course, you're putting the whole damn load at risk! Have you got that? You Misties, especially? You're back in bodies now! They've got mass, and they can die!"
There. That should do it ... he hoped. He still couldn't see everyone, but a glance in the pilot's cabin-monitor showed the aisle clear instead of (as when he'd looked before) clogged with grappling bodies. After a moment, during which he allowed himself a huge sigh of what he hoped wasn't premature relief, he asked the woman who'd just returned in a disheveled state to a seat near his, “All secure now, Mum?"
“I hope so,” Catherine Romanova answered, through taut lips. “Linc's staying back there. Even though that makes it crowded. Problem?"
“No. She's flying trim again. What just happened?"
His mother, the Matushka, drew a breath even deeper than his just-expelled sigh. “I'm not sure,” she admitted. “But I think the Misties who're hitchhiking with our people just went from being squatters to being guests. And I don't think that's happened with all the other, um, pairings that came together when the system transitioned. Ewan, can you pick up any other flitters on instruments now? Heading where we're headed?"
He'd had that monitor on constantly, of course. He looked at it now, and frowned. “Half a dozen of ‘em, Mum,” he answered, wishing he could say something less discouraging. “And I'll bet there are more on the way, but out of range. Looks like everyone's got the same idea!"
“Which is? Hate to tell you this, kiddo, but I still don't know why we want to get to the SHIP. If there's no ‘Civilization’ out there waiting for the Misties to rejoin it, what's the point?"
“Thanks for trusting me, Mum.” He hadn't remembered that he was asking her to do so, and the realization shamed him. Yet it delighted him, too; because he'd earned this from her at last. “The teleporter on the SHIP is what we're after. If we can get it out into space, beyond this system's gravity well, we may be able to ‘port across even the kind of distance that's between here and our own galaxy. We plan on trying that, anyway! Are you still game? Or do you want me to forget the whole thing, and take you back to the vi
llage?"
Where she and the others could live out their lives in peace. Where new generations of Humans (with a strong Morthan component) would live after them, and eventually find their way to other worlds because that was their heritage. That wasn't such a bad idea, Ewan realized, from some folks’ viewpoint; except that the woman who was staring at him right now would never accept this planet as her home.
And almost no one among the Misties wanted to stay here, either, now that they understood their own history at last ... why not? What did the Misties have in mind, since going back to the galaxy where they'd lived for the last hundred thousand years could change nothing for them that he, Ewan, knew about?
Oh, yes, it can change something! The Mistworlders on the flitter with him spoke to him, now, as one. We want to try something else, before you try moving just one SHIP from galaxy to galaxy.
That's crazy. You're all stark, raving insane! Ewan sent the thought back in a wave of mingled horror and slightly demented anticipation. He felt just as he had fourteen years earlier, when he aimed his small Star Service raider at Mistworld's upper atmosphere and dove to the aid of his younger brothers’ doomed ship ... he had to do this. It was probably going to get him killed all over again (and for good, this time!), but he still had to do it. And what was more, he wanted to.
* * * *
“We could use more help, Ewan. Couldn't we? And it doesn't make much sense to try to do this on our own, as long as we can trust the people taking the other SHIPs out.” Lincoln Casey asked his stepson that question as a flitter landed on the platform above another ancient vessel's underground berth, which coincided with the young Captain Fralick/Sanibello's order to seal the access port and detach it from the shaft leading upward to the steppe with its tall orange grasses.
“How the hell am I supposed to know whether or not we can trust them, Linc?” Ewan shook his head, wearily. “Okay, okay. Rachel. You were the first to make peace with your, um, passenger. What do you think we should do about that flitter that just landed next door to us?"
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