“I see no reason we shouldn’t drop out,” he said.
“Do you want to give the order, for luck?”
“This is your ship, Captain.”
“So it is,” agreed sus-Mevyan. She didn’t change expression, but he could tell that the courtesy pleased her. She turned to where Elaeli stood at the Pilot’s station—like the First of the ship’s Circle, the ship’s Pilot-Principal had been called up because of the solemnity of the moment—and said, “Stand by for dropout.”
“Dropout on time,” Elaeli said, her face downbent and her eyes on the glowing screen beside her watch station. Letters and numerals shifted from purple to amber and back again, making a play of color against her face. “Stand by, on my mark. Mark.”
Over the speakers, the Rain’s chief engineer echoed her from the engine-rooms, “Emerging from Void-transit.”
The resultant discontinuity passed over the ship, making Arekhon shudder. He wondered what sort of dreams the off-watch sleepers were having. Then the grey mist outside the heavy windows turned to blackness lit by glitter and spangles.
“Stars showing,” said Elaeli, reciting her own part of the checklist. “Checking position against calculated.”
“Negative scan on light-speed modulated frequencies,” added the crewmember at the Rain’s communications board. “No one’s talking. We’re alone out here.”
Sus-Mevyan scowled. “There should be some noise,” she said. “Pilot-Principal—light off the star-chart. Let me see Garrod’s Star.”
“Star-chart up.” Another console glowed to life, and the familiar chart arose in the air above it. sus-Mevyan stepped over to it, and Elaeli joined her. The two of them gazed at the chart for a moment without saying anything.
Then sus-Mevyan said, “Pilot-Principal—show the Rain’s distance from Eraasi, based on inertial.”
“Rain-on-Dark-Water reference up.”
A bright red sigil appeared on the chart, in the middle of the dark area beyond the Edge. The mark was halfway between the white glow of Garrod’s Star and the green-yellow-black mottling of Eraasi. “Not quite halfway,” Captain sus-Mevyan said. “And we’ve already expended half our fuel, less our exploration and safety margins.”
She paused. “Pilot-Principal, lay in a return track to Eraasi.”
“Captain,” said Arekhon, in a low, urgent voice. “We’ve come this far—”
“I will not endanger this ship and its crew by taking it on another blind jump to nowhere.”
“Half the fuel is enough to get us where we’re going,” Arekhon said. “And we still have the exploration and safety reserves. We can get fuel at Garrod’s Star if we have to.”
“How?” sus-Mevyan demanded.
He pointed to the glowing white dot. “The marker. It says that this star is a class one system, which means abundant resources, refined and available. It’s bigger and brighter than anything else on the chart.”
Sus-Mevyan looked unconvinced. “The plans for this voyage were based on—what? Old charts interpreted by an obsolete house-mind? If they’re wrong—starvation is a dreadful way to die.”
“We have luck. The Circle has seen to it.”
“Only a fool trusts to luck alone,” sus-Mevyan told him. “Do you take me for a fool?”
Elaeli looked up from the star-chart and touched sus-Mevyan lightly on the arm. “Captain,” she said. “A word with you in private?”
Arekhon stood silent as Elaeli and the captain withdrew into the passage outside the bridge. He was glad, he supposed, that Ela had not come to his cabin, or he to hers, since the voyage began. She would never have dared to take his part otherwise, even though a ship’s pilot-principal had the right to give the captain advice on such matters.
A few minutes later Elaeli and sus-Mevyan returned. The Captain looked noncommital as always. Elaeli, walking a pace behind her, carefully avoided looking in Arekhon’s direction when the Captain asked him, “You’re certain about the fuel at the far end?”
“I am,” Arekhon said firmly.
Sus-Mevyan gazed out at the jeweled darkness for a long time. Finally she said, “Pilot-Principal, shape course for Garrod’s Star. And prepare a message drone for release on a homebound course. Give the fleet all our survey data from this emergence. Whatever happens, we’ve already put more new space on the charts than any ship in the past hundred years.”
It had taken Kerin Feyal several months to finish making all of his visits; the meeting with Theledau syn-Grevi sus-Radal had been the last. Such things, as he had been at pains to explain to the League of Unallied Shippers when they requested his assistance as a go-between, could not be hurried. Hurry made one conspicuous, and to become conspicuous, under such circumstances, would be fatal.
Feyal had, accordingly, contrived—in chance encounters, or in the odd minutes of boring civic occasions—and when the last of his word was done, he returned to the League offices in downtown Hanilat feeling pleased with the results. The great lords, one by one, had received him cordially, heard him out, and promised him nothing. And all of them, he was certain, had gone instantly into consultations with their closest associates, and begun issuing orders.
The atmosphere within the fleet-families these days was unsettled and suspicious, though no one could say with assurance what was the reason. Outside the families one heard more and more the murmuring of discontent and a desire for change. The League of Unallied Shippers, Feyal thought, had every reason to be happy with his work.
His contact within the League, Seyo Hannet, was waiting for him in the second-floor office suite, leaning against the wall by the brewing urn and drinking red uffa from a paper cup. The suite was empty except for the two men; the League’s clerks and data-workers would not be coming in for another hour yet. Hannet preferred this time of day for their meetings, as did Feyal—lower-tier personnel might not know or care about the League’s true long-term goals, but they had been known to gossip with people who did. The fewer people who could tie the League’s public face with its private one, the better for everybody.
“How did this one go, Ker?” Hannet asked.
“As we expected.” Feyal took a cup from the dispenser and drew himself some of the cheap, strong red, noting as he did so that there was a sealed envelope lying atop the urn. “Theledau didn’t say anything, but he took the bait.”
“You’re certain?”
“He couldn’t afford not to. He was the last one … and if the fleet-families were suspicious of each other before, they’re probably twice as suspicious now.”
Hannet smiled. “Oh, they are. You’ve done excellent work, Ker—and the League is not ungrateful.” He glanced over at the envelope as he spoke, and nodded slightly.
“It was my pleasure,” Feyal insisted. He picked up the envelope without looking at it and slipped it into one of the pockets of his rambling-jacket. “I don’t want to rush this conversation, but I do have to go soon. Half a dozen families are convinced that I’m going to be spending the next month or so at a country house-party, and I mustn’t disappoint the agents they’ve got following me.”
“Were you followed here?” Hannet asked.
“Of course.”
“Then I think I’ll wait until you’re well away before I go. No point in coming so far only to have them connect us now. You’ll be hearing from the League again soon anyway—this game has only begun.”
“Until the next round, then.” Feyal drained the rest of his uffa and tossed the cup into the trash. Then he headed back down to the street where his groundcar waited.
Hannet remained behind, nursing his cup of red and counting quietly to himself. Feyal would be coming out onto the street … standing at the door of his groundcar … settling in behind the controls … and activating the engine … .
Now.
The sound of the explosion reached even the back room on the second floor where the League of Unallied Shippers had its offices.
Hannet toasted the late Feyal with the dregs of his u
ffa. “Our apologies, Ker—but your spectacular demise will definitely cause talk among the fleet-families.”
28:
Year 1126 E. R.
THE VOID: SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP RAIN-ON-DARK-WATER
ENTIBOR: VILLA OF MESTRA ADINA THERRAS
Arekhon left the bridge while Elaeli and sus-Mevyan were going over the finer points of the next transit and drop-out. He thought of returning to his cabin, but knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. The last few minutes had been too unsettling for that. They had committed the ship—no, he told himself, be honest; you have committed the ship—to completing the outbound leg of her journey without a known source of fuel for the return.
He wondered if he should call together the members of the Circle for a working, but decided against it. The time for a working would come later, when the vessel prepared to emerge from the Void for the second time. In the end, for lack of any place better to go, he went to the small observation chamber that also served as a wardroom for the ship’s officers. Nobody was there, and the steel shutters were down and locked, but the big copper uffa pot still had hot drink in it—the pale kind, but better than nothing.
He filled a mug and sat down to drink it. Before he had quite finished, however, the door to the observation deck opened and admitted Iulan Vai. She was dressed in her usual off-duty clothes, plain black without decoration—much like her on-duty clothes, except that their fabric and cut paid somewhat more attention to matters of style.
“I felt the drop-out,” she said. “How was it?”
“Uneventful.” He took a last swallow of the uffa and set the mug down on a side table. “Except that the distance calculations were off.”
“Badly?”
“Bad enough—we don’t have enough fuel left to get home with what’s on board. We’ll be picking up more when we reach Garrod’s Star.”
“If there’s any there.”
“There will be. Garrod wouldn’t have marked the star for us otherwise.”
“It’s a big risk for Captain sus-Mevyan to take on your say-so.” She paused. “What did the Pilot-Principal have to say about it?”
Arekhon picked up his abandoned mug and looked into the bottom of it … still empty. He stood up and drifted back over to the uffa pot, where he could busy himself pulling another round.
“She advised in favor of going on.”
“Because she thought it was a good idea?” Vai asked. “Or because you did?”
With his back turned, he couldn’t see Vai’s face. Her voice didn’t sound angry, though; just coolly interested in a piece of information. It would have been better, he thought, if she’d been angry.
He kept his attention on the burnished copper side of the uffa pot. If he moved slightly, he could see Vai’s reflection in the red-brown metal. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t moved, and her posture was as uninflected as her voice.
“Why do you ask?”
“She was your lover while you were apprenticed,” Vai said. A statement of fact, not an accusation. “And afterward, from time to time.”
“Yes,” he said. There was no point in denying it; shipboard rumor would give him the lie if he tried. “What does that have to do—”
“Would it make her advise against her better judgment?”
“For my sake? Not likely.”
He thought he heard a faint snort of what might have been laughter. “You underestimate yourself, if you think that no one would.”
“Elaeli Inadi syn-Peledaen”—he gave Vai Ela’s full name, for emphasis, though he didn’t turn back around—“intends to run the whole fleet some day, and she’s willing to take risks to get there. Maybe she’s a bit more willing to gamble on my good luck than a stranger would be, I don’t know. But nothing more than that.”
“So our lives rest on your luck and her judgment.”
“And the Captain’s choice. Sus-Mevyan would know the fleet gossip as well as you do.”
She didn’t answer. He saw her reflected image move away from the polished copper of the uffa pot, and turned, finally, to keep her in view.
“Vai—!” he said.
But the door was already shutting itself behind her, and she was gone.
He stood for a moment looking at the closed door, then collapsed into one of the empty chairs and rubbed his face wearily with both hands. That had not gone well … foolish, to think that he could have both Vai and Elaeli in his life at the same time, and not face the consequences.
If he went back to his cabin now, he wouldn’t sleep. Meditation, in his current frame of mind, didn’t appeal to him, though he knew that it should. He might as well stay here in the observation chamber, and wait out the hours until ship’s morning. He closed his eyes and let himself go wandering among the isolated landscapes of his waking dreams, until sleep came to him at last where he sat.
Garrod stood in the center of his room at the villa belonging to Mestra Adina Therras. The pack he had brought with him from Eraasi lay on the polished stone floor at his feet. He wore a fur-trimmed robe around his shoulders, red cloth with a gold stitchery pattern—the first cold snap of winter had come that morning, with frost on the ground outside, and the Mestra hadn’t wanted her visiting foreigner to suffer from the chill.
The ceiling of his room was a dome of clear glass. Like a north-country devotional, he thought, although his hosts didn’t know what one of those was. They knew he studied the stars—Hujerie had spoken of his observations, taken every night during their trek from the occupied hinterland to the relative safety of Raske-by-the-Sea—and so had given him a room they thought he would find congenial.
These Entiborans were a thoughtful people, for all that they wasted their energy on warfare and refused to cultivate their world’s eiran as they should. It would be hard to leave.
Still, leave he must. His observations were done. He knew where this world was, and he could show others the way. The star-lords would send out their merchant fleets along the path that he had marked for them, and the lives of Hujerie and Saral and Minnin and Mestra Adina and all the others would never be the same again.
Or perhaps—he paused, with one hand at the collar of his robe—perhaps it would be Eraasi that would change irrevocably. The worlds on this side of the gap already had space flight, and already had their own network of trading partners. Even Garrod’s rough list of locally-known worlds, culled from idle talk and indirect questioning, had more names on it than there were open planets on the far side of the interstellar gap. And the Entiborans’ knowledge of the physical universe, and their manipulation of its structures, was beyond anything that he could do or had seen done at home.
Perhaps it would be better for Eraasi if he never mentioned what he had seen or where he had gone.
He took off the robe and hung it over the back of a chair, as if he would return soon. He felt sorry for his friends, the new ones he had made; they would wonder what had become of him. Perhaps there would be a search, and the suspicion of foul play. He hoped that nobody here would suffer any indignities as a result.
He put on the Eraasian clothing that he had worn when he first came to this world. His notes on Entibor’s location were already sealed away, encrypted and hidden inside the metal frame of his pack. Once he returned to Eraasi he would find another place for them—one from which only he could retrieve them—and he would leave them there until he decided what it was that he should do.
He could already foresee spending a month or more in meditation to determine if this was a secret he could share. It would be easy enough just to go home and tell the Circle that he had been wrong, that they were alone in the universe. No one would ever know that he had lied.
No one except him. And if the eiran were already drawing Entibor and Eraasi closer together, keeping them apart might require more luck than even his Circle would be able to give.
He shrugged his pack onto his back and set out. The grey mist of the Void encompassed him, chilling him after the warmth of his room, and te
ndrils of fog floated up around his feet. He fixed his Circle in his mind, and set out walking.
The road between Eraasi and Entibor was a long one, but the way back would be easier than the journey out. The homeworld was marked out clearly in the Void; it was the beginning and the end-point of all his other journeys, and the journeys of the Void-walkers who had come before him. He’d needed a Great Working and the luck of his Circle to find a habitable world so far away from Eraasi. His own luck should be enough to take him back.
The first part of the walk was uneventful, though in the Void the creatures of a mind’s nightmares could take on shape to strike against the unwary. Imagination placed monsters in the fog—monsters which Garrod forced himself to not think of, lest his thoughts call them to being. Nothing rose out of the fog to menace him.
Thoughts of monsters gave way to other thoughts as the cold sapped his strength and the barren mist wrapped itself about him. He pondered yet again the wisdom of telling his Circle what he had learned of the worlds beyond the Farther Edge. The people of Eraasi, and the star-lords in particular, would be less than pleased to find out that they were not, in fact, the richest and most sophisticated in the galaxy.
He had almost decided that ignorance might not be so bad when, between one step and another, an icy pain shot upward through his legs, and a deep rumbling sound filled the grey non-substance of the Void. At the same time he felt the sudden nearness of his Circle, though Demaizen Old Hall was half a galaxy and a different order of reality away.
Called by my thought? he asked himself. Or another illusion of the Void?
A moment later he felt a jab of awareness—They are here!—and twisted again to follow it to its source, taking himself through the particular angle that separated the Void from all places and all times. The physical universe rushed back in, and he found himself standing at a juncture in a labyrinth of cold steel halls lit by tubed lighting. A placard set at eye level on one of the metal panels warned him—in Eraasian script—of Critical Controls Beneath.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 24