Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  And then they were learning about the distance between their two worlds, and lightyears, and the distance between each of their worlds and Earth, and only Tembi—who had done this on her own as a form of curious self-defense—realized that this strange green woman had gotten them excited about maths!

  The next day, their old teacher showed up with two of the children’s parents.

  The day after that, Matindi had the school to herself.

  Schools in the Stripes were slapdash creations. Up in the gold section of the city, schools had entire buildings to themselves, and classrooms with a teacher in each. There were grades and designations and classes set aside for art and (Tembi had heard, but she could not believe) music! In the Stripes, schools were started when there was a critical mass of demand and available space. Tembi’s old teacher had taught three dozen students, some younger than Tembi, some nearly old enough to set off for whatever work that would have them. Their classroom was two units wide, with the joining wall cut out to form an awkward rectangle. There were windows, because a long-forgotten somebody had added them, but their old teacher had kept them sealed with their shiny metal shutters, because he was lazy.

  Their strange green teacher never insisted, never demanded. All she was, at first, was different, and she knew how to push back when Isaac and his friends went to work. She didn’t insist on changes to her classroom, but they seemed to happen in spite of that. The windows were opened to let in the air; the previous day’s best two students were appointed storm watchers, and they were awarded the seats nearest the windows to keep an eye on the sky. The display screen finally died; somehow, there was money to replace it with a newer holoscreen. The holes in the roof that had been covered over with layers of patching gel were repaired with heavy metal plates. A weather cage was built around a small patch of bare earth just outside the door; the ground beneath it was tilled up and fertilized, and the students planted an ackee sapling bred to thrive on Adhama.

  It was a lovely time in Tembi’s life.

  Matindi taught them what she could, when she could. Meditation, history, and art joined the practical skills of reading, languages, and arithmetic. There were trips up and down the Stripes, and the older students found employment, apprenticeships…

  Tembi never spoke to her new teacher about Witches, or past adventures. Not at school, where everyone could hear. But at night, in her dreams, they spoke about everything.

  “At some point,” Matindi told her late one night, as the Deep sang to them and moved their minds across the galaxy, “you’ll have to go to Lancaster.”

  The Deep’s singing stopped.

  “She will,” the Witch said with a sigh. “You know that. She’ll hit adolescence and know everything about everything, and then there’ll be no keeping this a secret any longer.”

  “I’m sitting right here, Matindi. What’s Lancaster?”

  “It’s where Witches go to train,” the green woman replied.

  Tembi thrilled to that idea. Her fear that she would become (or already was? Matindi could be frustratingly short with the details) a Witch had bled away through these dream-discussions, replaced with eagerness to learn all she could about this strange new life of hers. A school for Witches! A real school!

  Blue sorrow from the Deep; cold emotion from Matindi.

  “It sounds wonderful, I know, but it’s not what you think,” Matindi said. “They take young people and train them to hear the Deep, yes, but they’re trained to hear the Deep in a very specific way. And the other Witches… Tembi, you don’t want to go to Lancaster. Not now. Not until you know your own self well enough to fight back. If you can’t—” The Witch made a noise that was very unWitchlike and flopped backwards to rest against an especially comfortable shade of gray. “I am so bad at this!”

  They had, through trial and error, learned that Tembi could remember what the Deep said in the dreams if Matindi spoke for it. The Deep’s two-toned voice flowed from Matindi in layers of sadness, and the colors around them turned a deep violet. “I brought her to you,” the Deep said through its Witch. “Don’t make her go.”

  “You’re too much, beautiful beast,” Matindi replied in her own voice. “I can keep her safe until she’s older, but can’t give her what she needs to take you on. Not alone. Lancaster will help her learn how to talk to you.

  “You know that,” Matindi repeated, as if talking to a child much younger than Tembi.

  More sorrow from the Deep, with a note of oh-so-petulant acceptance.

  Usually, Tembi loved to watch Matindi and the Deep bicker. It reminded her of how she and her sisters shared space within their small unit, pushing against each other with words instead of fists. This time, though? The Deep kept swinging itself around and around, as if unable to rest. As the two of them were riding in the Deep while it was also riding along them in their minds, this was rather unnerving.

  “Stop it,” Matindi said, swatting the air around them. Colors blurred into feathers around her hands, and the Witch mimicked scratching a cat behind its ear. The Deep rolled over and quelled. “Quit making new problems.”

  The Deep used Matindi to say something quite foul; the woman slapped her hands over her own mouth, her brown eyes wide. Tembi tumbled through the colors, laughing.

  “Enough, enough!” Matindi used her teacher’s voice, which was very different than anything the Deep could muster. The Deep curled up around Tembi, bleeding silver and soft contentment. “Lessons, my dear little problem-makers. Lessons. More meditation, I think—we all need to know how to stay calm within the storm.”

  It was a lovely time in Tembi’s life; she liked to think it was for Matindi, too.

  It lasted three years.

  When she turned eleven, the Deep betrayed them both.

  _________________________________

  mother father

  come

  come

  help me

  help you

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 28 September 4181 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Four

  The end of that lovely time began with a trip to the docks.

  Adhama had one moon, but it was a crumbling mess good for nothing but keeping the tides on schedule. Instead of investing in its stability, or building an orbiting platform around it, the local governing councils had decided to build planetside docks. One of these wasn’t too far from Tembi’s city, just a short flight away by hopper.

  Most of the students hadn’t been on a hopper before. They took a beat-up bug that shook a little too much in midair. The plass windows were scratched so badly that no amount of polish would bring them back to clear, and the seats smelled of…feet.

  Still.

  Tembi and her classmates zoomed about the hopper. The parents who had come along as chaperones would try to impose some semblance of order, shouting or waving their hands, sometimes bobbing in their own seats.

  Matindi, who never raised her voice unless accidental death was imminent, merely watched the ruckus and sipped tea from an old metal bottle with a little smile on her lips.

  The hopper flew through a weather cage and landed on a dock sized for a vessel many times larger than itself. It was a wide open space within three walls, with the missing wall protected by a weather field so shipping and fishing vessels could come inside the safety of the human-made harbor. The students leapt out and spilled across the room like ball bearings, followed by the chaperones, and several commuters unlucky enough to catch an earlier flight. Matindi brought up the rear, her brown robes swirling in the air cast by the anti-grav lifts around the landing platform.

  “All right, your attention, please,” she said, clapping her hands. The students fell into rough order. “We are guests and are here to learn. Anyone who does not act like a guest and a student will spend the rest of the day in a bathroom, where your time will be at least somewhat productive.” Only the chaperones laughed; the students knew it wasn’t an idle threat. “Stay w
ith your assigned chaperones. No one is to get lost or ship themselves across space.”

  Tembi snuck over to her chaperone, a harried man whose son was named Escher. Escher was two years younger than Tembi and prone to daydreams: Tembi was sure she had been assigned to this group because Escher’s father would spend most of the day making sure that his son didn’t fall into heavy machinery.

  “Watch,” Matindi had told her in last night’s dream. “Tomorrow, watch everything, no matter how inconsequential it seems. This is what you need to know—the hands-on part of working with the Deep.”

  Dream-Tembi had nodded, eager. Around her, the Deep fluffed itself in a rainbow of excited noise.

  “Remember the rules,” Matindi had said. “Don’t talk to anybody outside of the class. Don’t say anything aloud, unless you have a question that any student would ask. And if you see another Witch?”

  “I put on my ’kit and pretend to sing along.”

  (Tembi both loved and hated her soundkit. It was secondhand, and the earcuffs were designed for Earth-normal humans: if she moved her ears too much, they fell off and bounced away. But it had been a gift from her mother and sisters, and it gave her music!)

  “Good. Why?”

  “Because young Witches are taken to Lancaster as soon as they’re found.”

  They had talked about this. They had talked about this a lot. Lancaster was an inevitability, yes, but they had decided that Tembi should go when she was fifteen. That would make her the youngest Witch at the school, but not too young to begin the next phase of her life learning the skills she needed to work with the Deep.

  Now,” Matindi had said, “I know bribery is a terrible teaching tool, but I’m going to use it anyhow.” She held up a sound chip. There were no markings on it; Matindi had not bothered adding those details to the dream, but her intention was there regardless. “You get through the day without calling attention to yourself, and this is yours.”

  “Who is it?” Tembi asked, trying to catch any sign of what might be on the disk.

  “A talentless shrieking pretty person,” Matindi sighed. “One of your favorites. It’s a live performance, too, so—”

  The Deep had thrown irritation into their minds, and its song took on another chord.

  “Yes, yes, you’re the prettiest singer of them all,” the Witch said. “But I’m trying to bribe Tembi into good behavior here!”

  The girl had grinned at her teacher and rolled onto her chest. The Deep appeared beneath her in clouds of rainbow feathers, and she tickled its sides until it wiggled and its song rang out as a cascade of chimes.

  Now, this morning at the docks, Tembi still felt the Deep around her. It was harder to feel its presence in the waking world than in the dreams, but Matindi had said its attention would be concentrated at the docks as it worked with the local Witches. Tembi wished she could reach out and pet it, maybe tell it how happy she was to be here—

  —a nudge at her back from something unseen—

  —a flutter of color at the edge of her senses—

  Tembi kept the grin from touching her face, and followed Escher’s father and the rest of her class into a large room. The plass windows were opaqued and there was nowhere to sit; the students ran about in the darkened room, wild creatures in a cage.

  (Tembi made sure to follow Matindi’s directions and act exactly like her classmates so as not to arouse suspicion, and anyhow Isaac had tried to punch her and she was not about to let him get away with that.)

  A man entered through an opposite door. He was older, with a dusting of white hair against his brown scalp, and was wearing a Spacers’ uniform of a heavy black jacket over black pants. The grounding plates in his boots rang against the metal floor with each step, and the…the…authority! of that sound quieted the students almost immediately.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he muttered, both hands lost inside a satchel that was slung across his shoulders. He found what he was looking for: a gray tab, thin as paper, which he flipped around in his hands until it beeped awake. “Okay, ah… Madam…Green?” He looked up and noticed Matindi for the first time.

  “My surname does not move easily from the tongue,” the Witch said demurely.

  “Ah, yes, very good,” the Spacer said, as if a green woman with a false name was an everyday occurrence. And perhaps it was, even this far off the Earthbound shipping lanes. “Welcome, everyone. First time here?”

  The class bleated a yes.

  “Good, good, I remember taking this tour when I was your age. Wouldn’t it be something if you ended up working here?”

  The students giggled. Work was for old people. You didn’t begin working until you were a teenager!

  The Spacer shared a glance with Matindi and the chaperones. “I know,” he said. “But maybe it’ll be an option someday. So…” He pressed a button on his tab, and the plass windows shimmered to let in the view of the docks below. They were built on the same model as the dock on which the commuter hopper had landed: the enormous room had three walls, with the fourth open to the ocean but protected by a weather cage. “We’re not the biggest or the busiest dock on Adhama, but we get the most diverse traffic. There’s a big demand for shaa fish on most worlds, and the rich folks from hundreds of planets’ll pay plenty to get it fresh. We get small ships in and out all day.”

  As if to prove the Spacer right, the open air above the dock was instantly filled by a grayish craft. The plass windows rattled from the sudden air displacement, and the children squealed.

  Tembi realized that outside of the channels, she had never seen a real spacecraft. It was flatter than she would had expected, and hung like a thick saucer in the air. With a rush of its jets, it lowered itself to the platform below. As soon as it landed, a series of doors along its edge opened, and Spacers and dockhands began to exchange cargo.

  “As you can see, we’re all about efficiency here,” the Spacer said. “This is a cruiser-to-ground transport. We load the imports off, then we load the exports on, and we get the ship back into space. Everything has a place, and if part of the system breaks down, it causes problems down the line.”

  The Spacer talked them through the loading process, which sounded especially dry despite its reliance on the ocean around them. Tembi watched the dance of machines and workers on the dock below, and tried to feign disinterest.

  It was easier than she had thought it would be. These were just…things. Boring, irrelevant things. In spite of Matindi’s warnings, Tembi had wanted to see another Witch. Not that she would have said anything! She would have just…watched. Like Matindi had said to do.

  “C’mon, this way,” the Spacer said, and led them out the side entrance to the shipping platform below.

  The workers had filled the docks with a frighteningly massive quantity of shaa fish, each of the fish in different shades of bright red with four eyes on the very top of its head. The fish had been packed in stasis fields contained in cubical frames, with three centimeters between each fish to keep them from damaging each other during their journey. Tembi thought the cubes looked like militarized aquariums.

  “Why do people want those?” Isaac asked, quite loudly. “They taste like mud.”

  The Spacer ignored him.

  The class stayed behind a yellow line painted across the edge of the loading dock. It was hard to see what was happening; they had had a better view of the action from the observation room above. The noise of the place was deafening; Tembi and her classmates flattened their ears, and Matindi pressed her hands against the sides of her head.

  It was also slippery; the weather shield serving as the room’s fourth wall kept out the worst of the wind and the flying debris, but air and mist could pass. The ocean was happy to oblige, and the floor and walls were damp. The Spacer was the only one in their group who could walk without his arms outstretched, as the grounding plates in the soles of his boots grabbed the floor with each step.

  Well, not just the Spacer. Matindi looked very much at home, dancing al
ong the slick floors on her oversized feet.

  “Grace is where you find yourself,” their teacher said to no one in particular.

  They paused so the Spacer could yell at them about shipping lanes. Tembi’s attention shot away and landed on the cube full of fish beside her, four hundred empty red eyes staring at her. She poked the cube—honestly, she couldn’t not poke it—but while her fingertip broke the surface of the stasis field, nothing happened to either her finger or the fish inside. She snuck a glance at Escher’s father to make sure he was preoccupied with his son, and then stuck her entire hand into the field.

  It was cold inside the cube. Tembi had thought the stasis field would feel like water, or at least be as damp as the loading dock itself. The weather cage around the family garden was a type of stasis field, but the temperature inside the cage was always the same as the outside environment. In the cube, it just felt…cold.

  She touched the nearest fish. It bobbled around a little, then came back to center.

  “Kid.”

  Tembi looked up to find a dock worker glaring at her. She yanked her hand out of the stasis cube. “I wasn’t doing any—”

  The worker hoisted the cube onto an anti-grav lift cart and moved it away without another word.

  Tembi rejoined her classmates, brushing away the cold of the cube on her robes.

  “All of this is thanks to the Deep,” the Spacer was saying. “Do you know what the Deep is?”

  “Energy,” said one of her classmates.

  “Sentient energy,” the Spacer clarified. “It’s found in the interplanetary and interstellar medium, and doesn’t go beyond the edge of the Milky Way. So while we can use the Deep to travel across the galaxy, we can’t use it to move beyond that point.”