Tales from Ardulum

by J. S. Fields

  “It will only take a moment,” Wan whispered unnecessarily.

  It had only taken a moment for Ran to shoot her mother, too.

  Still, Emn felt…nothing unusual from the device. She waited, Atalant’s fingers now wrapped tightly around her upper arm. Nicholas’s eyes darted from hers to Wan’s and then back again. Another two breaths, and the small device flaked from her forehead into Wan’s waiting hand.

  You okay? Atalant asked as Wan fed the biofilm strip into a genome reader.

  I…I think it just collected some skin cells, honestly, Emn returned. Definitely no interfacing.

  You’re still pretty tense, love.

  Emn snorted. Part of that might be because you’re cutting off the circulation in my arm.

  Atalant loosened her grip, sliding her hand down to Emn’s elbow and then finally to her hand. Her fingers were sticky—Atalant’s fingers were always sticky—but Emn felt the stuk thickening back to its normal texture.

  Emn looked back at Atalant and smiled. “Better.”

  “A lot of coding in here,” Wan muttered, likely more loudly than xe intended. “I’d forgotten how complex it’d gotten by the time we bred your mother.”

  Emn’s back stiffened.

  “Maybe we could bypass the husbandry language?” Yorden said in that dangerous, gruff voice Emn rarely heard him use. Wan missed the tone entirely.

  “Science is often callous, especially when translated. I’m not actively trying to offend. I’m just trying to—here!” The device in Wan’s hand chirped, and the Risalian looked up, triumphant. “I’d forgotten. We opened your telepathic bridgeway entirely. All telepathic species in your greater genus have this little…organ, for lack of a better word, right near your brain stem. It has a species-specific casing that works like a filter. It’s one of the big ways we can tell a Neek from a Keft, or from an Ardulan, etcetera.”

  Wan pointed at Atalant. “The casing is naturally sort of thick. Species with empathic mucus use this feature to amplify transmission. Like a coupling agent that reduces static. The more you breed with Ardulans, the more the natural casing degrades. Ardulans have one, of course, but it’s all full of holes. But you, Emn—” Wan held out the device. Emn wrinkled her nose as she looked at it, but the text scrolling across was so technical that, even though it was in Common, she couldn’t parse it. “We managed to completely remove yours. In theory, you could hear any subspecies. Any genetically compatible relative.”

  “Okay, but how does that help me?” Emn sat forward and slapped the device from Wan’s hands. Hir neck slits tinged momentarily purple, but xe didn’t retrieve the scanner. “I don’t want to be a beacon. I don’t want to hear every distress call from every subspecies. I want to be normal.”

  Wan’s tongue flicked over hir lower lip. Xe rubbed at hir neck with one long claw, the sound something akin to a dish from Earth that Yorden liked called squeaky cheese.

  Emn hated squeaky cheese.

  “I can help refine your telepathy, but I can’t fix it because there is nothing broken. This is what you were made to be.”

  Emn had tried so hard in the past year to find a place for herself on Ardulum. A place for herself with Atalant. Working with Corccinth’s flares and Arik and talking to Ardulum had caused that open wound of otherness to scab over, but now she was bleeding again. And this time, sweet words and tearing Atalant out of her clothes wouldn’t be enough to stop the flow.

  Emn shot to her feet, pushing away from Atalant’s hands. “I need some space.”

  “Emn!” Atalant called, but Emn stalked to the other end of the lounge and through the door that would take her to the main hatch and out into the spaceport. She looked back at the concerned eyes of the crew and narrowed her connection with Atalant to a whisper.

  “I don’t need platitudes from a Risalian!” she yelled back. “You figure out how to give me a filter, or at the very least a tracking option so I can find anyone who calls me, or get the fuck out of my life!”

  Emn threw open the main hatch as loudly as she was able and jumped the four steps to the floor of the docking bay. Her bare feet hit with a painful smack, but she didn’t care. Fuck Risalians and their uselessness. Fuck them for making her feel like an experiment. She could be surrounded by a billion subspecies and she’d still be the one bred in a lab.

  Atalant tugged at her mind.

  I’m fine, she sent. I just need, like, an hour to process. I’m coming back, just…give me a little air.

  Atalant reluctantly backed away.

  She slammed her bare feet onto the floor, letting the sharp tingles of metal on flesh ground her. This was Yorden’s private hangar, but it was easily big enough to fit five or six more tramp ships. He’d mostly used it for “excess” haul storage over the years, so towers of crates and boxes littered the floor. It was the perfect place to punch things, kick things, and generally vent her frustrations without anyone trying to calm her down.

  “I’m so tired of being like this!” Emn kicked a small cardboard box. A tinkling sound came from inside as it skittered across the floor.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  Emn jumped at the voice, landing against a marble statue of some Terran without clothes in an awkward pose. She turned towards the voice, rubbing her hip. A mass of orange curls peeked out from a pile of stacked paper books tall enough to kill a biped if it collapsed. August waved tentatively and offered a sheepish grin.

  “I’m not creepy, I swear. I was coming to find you and saw you storm from the ship. I wasn’t sure how to approach, what with all the kicking.”

  Emn sighed and rubbed her temples. “Why are you looking for me? I know we were pretty clear at the bar.”

  August’s mouth opened and then snapped shut. Their brows furrowed. “This isn’t a pickup. I wanted to ask you this at the bar, but your girlfriend stunned me a bit. But I guess she would, right? She’s Eld Atalant?”

  Now, it was Emn’s turn to gape. Ardulan culture—and Neek culture, for that matter—barely registered as a blip in the Charted Systems. Atalant was still easily recognizable as Exile, but few outside the Neek homeworld would know of her recent…promotion.

  “Who are you?” Emn asked.

  August’s head bobbed left to right, taking in the otherwise deserted hangar, and then held out their hand. “An explorer,” they said in a whisper. “An orphan of a planet that died the moment Ardulum appeared in the sky.”

  Emn stared at the Terran’s hands. They wore thin leather gloves, which Emn hadn’t noticed before, but bulging underneath…

  August nodded and pulled the gloves off their wrists. The skin matched the gloves, but at the end, where nails should have been, bloomed multicolored feathers.

  “Oh,” Emn breathed, the frustrations from minutes before slipping from her muscles. “You’re…”

  “A genetic cousin,” August finished. “And I’ve come a really long way to find Ardulum—and you.”

  Emn stared at the feathers as the dream she shared with August pieced back together in her mind. She studied the bleed of the colors, the angle of the downy barbs, the way the structure melted into mammalian flesh right where a fingernail might end. It was so much easier to contemplate the genetics of avian and mammalian crossing than to figure out what to say to someone you only knew through screams and feathers and the memory of a crumbling planet.

  “I’m sorry,” August said, finally filling the silence. “I didn’t think… I didn’t think this would be that big of a surprise. I’ve been traveling the Charted Systems for a number of months. I’ve been to Neek and heard the stories. I mean, I even watched a holo of Eld Atalant flying an old settee with the Heaven Guard pilots during the big fires. I was led to understand there was a sort of…reconciliation afoot. Or, at the very least, that Ardulum wasn’t hiding from its children anymore.”

  Emn slowly moved her gaze up, following the thin, silver flower stenciled on the sleeve of August’s shirt. The collar of the shirt was white, the skin touching the colla
r a pale pink. From there, Emn followed the heavy dusting of brown and orange freckles to August’s tilted head and arched eyebrows.

  A refugee from an exploded planet that likely had gone the way of Keft. Atalant would explode half the Lucidity when she found out.

  “We, uh,” Emn stumbled for words. “We’re on vacation.”

  August blinked. “That’s why you’re destroying containers in a cluttered ship berth?”

  Emn felt her face flush. “I’ve been picking up your nightmares, I think. We weren’t sure what was going on, and it meant we had to import someone I hate to figure out what was wrong with me.” She tried to force a smile, but it likely came out more as a grimace. “It would have been nice to have gotten an explanation from you at the bar.”

  This time, August flushed, the red creeping from their—no, if August was from a seeded planet, then it would be zir—zir neck to forehead. “I didn’t realize who you were until Eld Atalant came over and then… Ardulum is a legend to my people. Not a religion, like on Neek, but still. Meeting an eld of Ardulum, especially one I’d just heard spoken about like she was a literal god, overwhelmed me. I’d also just hit on her girlfriend and really didn’t want to be impaled by a piece of andal.”

  The corner of August’s mouth quirked up, and Emn nodded in amused agreement. “Yeah, that was a good call.” She clasped her hands behind her back, her anger slipping away. “Is there something you need from us? Did you just want to meet us? Your planet—” She paused, unsure how best to word the question. “Your planet is beyond help at this point, correct? Are there people who need aid?” Emn thought of the rounded shadow in the dream. “Ardulum only came the once? Or, did it actually come as your planet burned? Because that’s…” She was going to say, “cold even for Ardulum,” but the truth was, that was probably no worse than half a dozen other things the planet had done.

  “Oh, no.” August sat on a cardboard box marked DEFINITELY NOT FRAGILE IN ANY WAY. “That was my brain being weird, I think. As to your other question, I’ve got one of our scouting ships out on research. I’m an explorer, as I mentioned. We have a branch of scientists that works sort of like the Heaven Guard. We know we are a blend of two different species. It’s been a mission of ours for almost a century to find that second species, but we are from a long ways away. Tesseracts are great, but they still take time over incredible distances and, of course, Ardulum travels.”

  “You’re the first one to make it to the Charted Systems?” Emn asked. She’d never really thought of the Systems as being backwater, but then again, she didn’t give a lot of thought to the layout of the universe, either.

  “Yes. We’d made it to the Alliance, of course—it’s much larger and closer to us—but that was before Ardulum came there, so we missed it. And the Charted Systems are particularly difficult to navigate since you use wormholes instead of drives of any kind, so your allied systems are not in any particular arrangement. Earth is actually the closest, which is where I started and, consequently—” They waved their feathered hand. “The reason for the gloves. Terrans are surprisingly xenophobic. Besides, it became clear that there wasn’t a lot of bipedal diversity in the Systems.”

  “And then you found Neek,” Emn concluded, trying to imagine both the arrival on Earth and then the stumbling onto the equally religiously fervent Neek.

  “It’s not a lot of fun to stick out around here.”

  “Heh.” Emn rubbed her temples. “I know. I suppose if you know about Atalant, then I’m guessing you know about my history?”

  August sat back and regarded Emn curiously. “You’re Ardulan. Was there something else?”

  Exasperated, Emn held up her arms so that August could clearly see the intersecting geometric veins that melded just underneath her skin.

  August frowned and then lifted up zir shirt. Emn froze. Zir freckles were much more ordered on the skin of zir belly, spinning into patterns and forms Emn knew all too well. Triangles. Hexagons. Geometric patterns spanned down into actual Talent markings on zir side and scattered into flare nonsense everywhere else.

  Coloring aside, zie looked just like Emn.

  Emn brought her arms down and sat down on the box next to August. She ran a hand through her short, auburn hair, her mind spiraling like disordered cellulose.

  “Do all your people have that?” she finally managed. “Those markings?”

  “Not in the same place,” August responded matter-of-factly. “Some have more, some less. Some are completely covered, like you. Some just have a few freckles on their face. Historically, it wasn’t very prevalent at all, but we had to do some genetic tinkering to survive on the planet we colonized when Rithorununun failed, and these cropped up as a result. More is considered fashionable.” Zir voice softened. “They’re a mark of beauty. It’s why I first sought you out in the bar. Even if they’d just been tattoos, they’d still be pretty.”

  “You… Beauty? Genetic tinkering? You did this to yourselves? To survive?” She had so, so many questions, but…Risalian biotechnology. Ran’s work. They hadn’t introduced anything. They hadn’t made anything. They’d turned things on and turned things off and combined phenotypes until Emn had been unrecognizable, but she was still a person.

  August took her hand and traced a thumb over the dark lines of Emn’s palm. Emn shivered—not from arousal, but surprise. August was… Zie wasn’t reverent, exactly. Zie was…comfortable? Validated? No. None of those words were right.

  “I’m sorry, Emn,” August said in a near whisper, zir thumb pressing ever so slightly against Emn’s skin. Emn felt August’s mind brush hers—feathery, polite—a request for entrance. Emn slid her mind back like one would move away from a swinging door and let August step inside.

  I’m sorry I broadcasted and ruined your vacation. At puberty, we start taking a certain plant extract that limits our dream telepathy range. I’d stopped taking it because there weren’t any of my people this far out. I know my nightmares… I’ve been seeing someone for them, for the post-traumatic stress, but it never occurred to me that someone else could hear them. Zie paused. Probably because I didn’t think there would be other subspecies. Besides Neek, anyway. I guess we’re all pretty myopic in that way.

  Why do you dream about your planet exploding? Emn asked.

  Sadness laced with fear danced across their link. We’d left the planet a century ago because it failed. The andal failed, then the ecosystem failed, and then the planet failed. It failed to be breathable, habitable—everything—but it was still there. I’m not just an explorer—I’m an archeologist. I was there doing a solo dig that day because my assistant was sick. We never…we never thought the planet might be unstable. I barely got off in time.

  In the memories and emotions that chased August’s words, Emn caught the undercurrent of context. August shouldn’t have been there. Being on the planet wasn’t allowed, but zie had ignored the law and gone anyway, and it had almost killed zir.

  “But I found something finally, didn’t I?” August said. Zir voice felt too loud in the quiet bay, even buffered as they were by so many old packages covered in Yorden’s sprawling handwriting.

  “Yes, you did.” Emn stood, keeping hold of August’s hand, and tugged zir in the direction of the Lucidity. She’d never been great at keeping her emotions from leaking over to Atalant, and so, unsurprisingly, she felt a hesitant, questioning presence in the back of her mind. Emn laughed to herself because she felt like a settee pilot on her first mission, like an Ardulan flare peeling off their makeup and walking through the capital. Most importantly, she felt kinship, because she might be unique as a Risalian Ardulan flare whatever, but it wasn’t anything the Risalians had done. It was what they’d undone, and she, like August, was exactly who she was meant to be.

  “Emn?” August asked.

  “Would you like to come meet them?”

  Confusion crossed August’s face. “Meet them? Meet whom?”

  Emn grinned widely enough to feel it in her ears. “Would you l
ike to come meet my family?”

  SILENCE COULD BE a spiny thing, Emn decided. Silence could prickle and jab and poke you in places you never thought about, especially when the silence was shared between everyone you loved.

  But silence made sense, too, because really, what was anyone going to say?

  Atalant sat next to her on the long plush bench in the game room of the Lucidity, Nicholas to her left. Salice stood near the far wall, and Yorden barred the door, his hand alternating between tapping the wall and smoothing his beard.

  August stood before them all, shifting zir weight and failing to not look nervous. Even the Risalian asshole was still around, but in this moment, Emn didn’t mind. She felt too good, too light, to let one Risalian ruin things.

  There’d been a lot of words already—words on the boarding ramp, words in the hallway, words while Atalant paced across the game room while Emn tried to calm her down. Because yes, August’s existence brought a lot of questions—but it’d brought a lot of much-needed answers, too.

  That feeling was better than sex with Atalant. Well, almost.

  But now was the time for more technical discussions. The planet Rithorununun had been seeded over four centuries ago according to the Ardulan calendar Atalant had dug up. It was long enough ago that there were no star charts available and the name of the solar system it inhabited didn’t match any database they could access.

  Wan’s genetic reader had proved similarly useless. August’s genetic code had too much drift for the little portable device. Several attempts to use it had almost drained the battery, leaving Wan cranky but intrigued.

  Nicholas was the only one of them who was asking the questions Emn thought were important, although even he seemed shell-shocked. Maybe that was maturity, Emn mused, or maybe it was a reaction to absurdity, especially since August had pretended to be human. Still, there could be no doubt now about zir genetics. Delicate feathers no longer than Emn’s thumbnail sprouted from every one of August’s ten fingers. The quill of each feather was blue, the downy barbs purple, and the main barbs a forest green.