Spinning Starlight

by R. C. Lewis

“Liddi Jantzen, seen here at Syncopy last night—”

  “Top fashion designer Igara confirmed that his new shoe line will be worn by Liddi Jantzen at—”

  “No word yet on whether the Jantzen girl will debut anything at this year’s Tech Reveal.”

  “With the deaths of Nevi and Savina Jantzen, control of Jantzen Technology Innovations passes not to one of their sons, but to six-year-old Liddi—or it will when she’s old enough to—”

  Tiav watches the screen, expressionless, so I scan the feeds for something current.

  “There’s still been no sign of Liddi Jantzen on any of the Seven Points. We all remember that strange morning she wandered barefoot into the borders of Pinnacle, but she hasn’t been seen since a few days after that incident. JTI officials have refused to comment, and the Jantzen boys likewise cannot be reached, leaving one question. Where are the Jantzens?”

  I turn it off, and Tiav takes a deep breath, processing it.

  “Okay, I guess sneaking around won’t be that easy after all. But we’ll figure out something.”

  We will. I need to think. But it’s hard to think when I feel dirty and smelly. I hold up a tangled lock of hair and roll my eyes at Tiav, which makes him laugh. After steering him to the guest room, I go upstairs to get cleaned up.

  Liddi Jantzen died of happiness upon returning to her own bathroom after a long time away.

  Once the dust and grime is gone and I’m wearing my own clothes, I’m ready to go back down and get to work. Except something catches my eye. I keep images of the family on screens throughout the room. An image of Durant and me on Yishu is next to my bed. We went to a concert on that trip.

  The stringed instruments captured my attention at the time. Each string vibrating, held down on the ends. Then the musicians would press their fingers somewhere, pinning the string so it held still in that spot and vibrated to one side. The music harmonized when the vibrations were at related frequencies.

  Related frequencies…

  I run down the stairs two at a time. I know what to do. At least, where to start.

  The space between the back of the sofa and the wall was tiny enough that only Liddi could fit there. Only if she turned herself sideways and squeezed in at just the right angle. It was the one hiding spot of hers the boys didn’t know about, so when all the strange people arrived to offer their condolences, she was nowhere to be found. Each of her brothers assumed one of the others knew where she was, and there were too many people, too much going on to realize she was missing. Too much noise to hear her crying.

  That was true at first, anyway. Then the crowd thinned out, and Durant spoke from somewhere nearby.

  “Fabin, I still haven’t seen Liddi. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. With the Triad, maybe?”

  “She’s not with us.” That was Marek.

  “We haven’t seen her, either,” Luko said.

  Durant’s voice took a hard edge, and Liddi could picture the face that went with it. “Find her.”

  He sounded like their father. That made her cry harder.

  “What? Where’s that coming from? Liddi?”

  Moments later, hands reached into the small space and pulled her out. Part of her wanted to scream and squirm, but she didn’t, and once Durant had her out, he held her tight. He didn’t say anything until they were in Liddi’s room, with no more strangers looking at them. Then he sat on her bed with his sister on his lap.

  “Why did you hide, Liddi-Loo?” he asked. “You scared us.”

  “I—I don’t know.” She hiccuped. “Because I’m sad.”

  “We’re all sad. You don’t have to hide it.”

  “But when I’m sad, Mommy makes me happy again. Mommy’s gone, and so is Daddy, and I’m alone.”

  Liddi’s oldest brother hugged her tighter than before. “There are eight of us, Liddi. You’ll never ever have to be alone.”

  WORKING WITH MY OWN COMPUTER, even without my voice, is such a release. All the familiar icons and subroutines, and Dom is still set to fill in the blanks where he can. Time to draw. I point to the existing picture for Tiav.

  “Right, blue are the Khua, the red are those false Khua—conduits.”

  He’s got it, so I minimize that drawing. For this to make sense, I’ll have to simplify. Just two planets, connected by both a Khua and a conduit. After some fiddling, I get the computer to animate the red and blue lines vibrating at the same rate, exactly aligned like a single plucked string on Yishu’s instruments. Each planet holds the ends of the “strings” like children holding skip ropes.

  “You want to get both on the same frequency. Why? They’re already getting too close. That’s the whole problem, right?”

  I move that drawing aside temporarily and try another, eight people standing on a red line, arrows drawn from there to a blue line, and finally arrows drawn out from the blue to a house with a tree.

  “If we get the two synced, you think your brothers can cross over fully to the Khua and come out like we do?”

  Yes, that’s exactly what I think.

  “But there’s no way to do that. Khua are filtered to one ‘frequency’ using sempu, but only in one place, or on one ‘end.’ The filtered part makes sort of a bubble around us when we go in. The rest of that Khua’s being stays unfiltered on all the other Points, plus at their secondary connections to other planets like Agnac. Your conduits don’t seem to work that way. And besides, the only sempu we have right now is holding Spin-Still.”

  He thinks it won’t work, but at least he understands. I go back to the animated drawing and slide the anchor points off each planet, moving them along the “strings” toward the center until they’re practically on top of each other. The tiny lengths in between still vibrate as one.

  The four loose ends swing randomly, chaotically.

  “Bringing everything together into one ‘bubble’ somehow?”

  I nod. Something like that.

  Tiav just stares at the picture for a long time. “Liddi,” he finally says. “Is this something Spin-Still is telling you to do?”

  Good question. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s mine and what’s the speaking-through-instinct from her. As I wonder, though, the answer comes through clearly enough. No, this is my idea, because I see the Khua from the outside, as they can’t see themselves. I shake my head.

  He gestures to the diagram. “Even if I knew how to focus a Khua that way, and even if I knew how to force your people’s conduits to align with it, I don’t know what would happen. I don’t know what these ‘loose ends’ would do. The Khua embody powerful forces. The destruction could be severe, and I don’t mean the minor tremors they’ve been talking about. The stress could tear into the planetary cores.”

  Part of me doesn’t want to care. Part of me says I’d destroy half of every planet I’ve ever set foot on if it would save my brothers. More of me knows I can’t be that irresponsible. More of me does care. But freeing my brothers dovetails with undoing the damage Minali has already done to the Khua. There has to be a way.

  As usual, Tiav sees all that I’m feeling. “Can I see what Spin-Still thinks?”

  I hate that. The sempu around my neck is his. He shouldn’t have to ask for permission, and the answer is always yes.

  He slips his fingers beneath the crystal, brushing against me. I’m not sure if it’s my pulse or his that I feel, but I count the beats. It’s eight before he lets go, and his hand doesn’t move far, just enough to rest on my cheek.

  “She says the Khua won’t be well again until your brothers are released, and if they aren’t well again, worse things will happen. She thinks if we tell your brothers your idea, one of them will know how to do it.”

  That means finding my brothers. It’s hours until sunset, and we can’t wait that long. Hovercars aren’t anywhere near as fast as streamers, so getting to a place on Sampati where night’s fallen isn’t an option, either.

  We can talk to them inside the Khua. Not the “narrowed”
Khua that Tiav is used to. I couldn’t hear my brothers in there. It’ll have to be the unfettered, full-blown, on-all-the-frequencies kind.

  The kind Tiav didn’t want to go into again.

  I take his arm and lead him out to the yard. Looking for a Khua on Sampati is nothing like finding one on Ferinne. I wonder how we’re going to do this.

  THE KHUA ARE ALL CONNECTED. THEY TALK TO EACH OTHER IN THEIR OWN WAY. SPIN-STILL CAN CALL ONE TO US. THOSE I UNANCHORED ON FERINNE WILL BE THE STRONGEST AGAINST THE GROWING CONDUIT INTERFERENCE, SO SHE’LL CALL ONE OF THEM.

  Just like making a wish, a Khua winks into existence, ready and waiting.

  Tiav sighs. “We’re going in there, aren’t we?”

  I squeeze his arm. He likes it about as much as I like streamers. I’d go without him, but I need him to do the talking.

  “This is definitely not what I expected in all the years my mother trained me to be an Aelo. But I guess important things are often unexpected, aren’t they?”

  We enter the Khua, and I focus everything on not going anywhere—none of the other Points—just letting my brothers find me. Through the chaos and the freezing heat of dark fire and the screeching silence and the pain-pain-pain, I have to keep my focus.

  Fabin is first, then the others one by one, gathering around us as they did when they took me to Ferinne. As then, their presence blocks most of the pain, but they’re weak. They won’t last long, not in a Khua twisting and pulling like this, poisoned and sick.

  But we’re together. All of us.

  “Liddi had an idea,” Tiav says. He’s better at focusing through the chaos than I am, and he dives into explaining.

  My brothers listen, not interrupting, not questioning until he’s done.

  “That works on the figurative,” Luko says. “But we have to work out how to make it happen on the literal end.”

  “I might have a piece of it,” Fabin says. “We came in through the conduits, but our biological energy pulls us toward the Khua, because they’re drawn to life. The eight of us are what’s getting the two tangled in each other. We’re the glue.”

  “If that’s true,” Durant says, “getting us out will let them untangle and separate, fixing everything.”

  “After all this, the conduits will probably collapse,” Ciro adds. “They’re too damaged.”

  Emil gives an uncharacteristically dark look. “Good.”

  Tiav is watching me and sees what I want to say. “We still need to know how to get you out so all this can happen.”

  “I have an idea,” Fabin says. “But we’ll need help from the Khua, if they’re willing.”

  He talks about convergence and nesting energies and things I only half understand, but I get enough. Tuning several conduits and Khua to match, creating the “bubble,” pulling my brothers free…and Spin-Still. We’ll definitely need her.

  Ten minutes and five eternities later, we have a plan.

  It’ll take a lot more wishes to pull this off.

  I’m pacing. I know it won’t accomplish anything, but there’s nothing else to do. We’ve slept—my brothers insisted on it as we left them in the Khua—but all it’s done is make me restless.

  Through a lot of drawing and gesturing, I got Tiav and Dom working together on fabricating a blank sempu. Between the two of them, they got the right crystal composition, and Tiav’s engraving it now in the workshop. When he’s done, Dom will make exact duplicates, some for the Khua and some modified to interface with the conduit control systems, ready to filter the Khua and bring those conduits into harmony with them. Temporarily.

  My job is to figure out how we’re going to get to the conduit terminals to set things up. Eight conduits, one for each of my brothers. Not just any conduits—the ones they were working on when they were trapped, which they made Tiav and me memorize. We have to get to them even though the second I go into any city, the vid-cams will be all over us. Minali will know I’m back, and she’ll stop us.

  I can’t let that happen, but I also can’t find a way around it. If Tiav goes alone, the vid-cams will ignore him, but he has no voiceprint, no one knows him, so no access to anything. I need to be there, because Liddi Jantzen would be let into a restricted conduit terminal, but I can’t go, because Liddi Jantzen can’t go anywhere without getting noticed.

  I’m an idiot.

  Tiav is sitting at Fabin’s usual spot in the workshop when I come in. I don’t want to mess up his engraving, so I wait until he notices me. It’s difficult when I’m ready to explode.

  “You have an idea?”

  Yes, but I really don’t know how to explain it. Then I remember one of the news-vids Dom summarized. I pull it up and scan to the right moment.

  “JTI technologists are working on repairing the damage to the conduits.”

  I freeze the image accompanying the words—people in JTI uniforms entering a conduit terminal. I point to one of them and point at myself.

  “We’ll disguise ourselves as repair workers from JTI?”

  No, not that. Vid-cams use sophisticated face-recognizing algorithms, so disguises are useless. Before I can think of a way to be more specific, Dom jumps in.

  “Liddi hardly needs to disguise herself as a JTI employee when she stands to inherit the company.”

  Perfect. With a nod, I put on a stern face and act out marching around giving people orders.

  Tiav slowly smiles. “You’ll go as yourself. With something as big as all the conduits being down, of course the head of the company should oversee repairs personally. Will it work? Will people believe it and let us in?”

  I scan through the news-vid again until I find an image of Minali. Freeze. Point. Shake my head.

  “That’s her, the woman who did this? So everyone but her? Okay. Then we definitely watch out for her.”

  We’ll need a few things from Dom. I didn’t want to resort to this, but I can’t think of any other way to explain it, so I fish into Tiav’s pocket for his com-tablet. Not connected to the Ferinne network anymore, but it still has the read-aloud program. He keeps engraving while I work out a message.

  “Dom mayk mee tock nooz-vid.”

  “I don’t believe I understand,” Dom says.

  Of course not. He wasn’t programmed to interpret something so broken, but Tiav’s become an expert at it.

  “She wants you to make one of those news-vids with her talking, but she can’t talk, so you’ll have to fabricate it. Can he do that?”

  “Certainly,” Dom answers for himself. “It depends on what she wants to say, naturally, but with the number and variety of recordings on file, it’s quite likely I could find the right words.”

  “You want to announce that you’re going to check progress on the conduits?” Tiav asks. “Is that smart?”

  It’ll be a little bit tougher for Minali to quietly get rid of me if everyone knows what I’m doing. I nod. I need something else, too, but I think I can draw this one. A sketch of myself standing at a door, little sound waves traveling from my mouth to the receiver.

  “Voiceprint,” Dom says. “Yes, if a conduit is unattended, you’ll need to use it, and that will be difficult if you can’t speak. Shall I prepare a high-quality recording of that as well?”

  Another nod, and I get to work writing the exact words I need for the news-vid. No shortcuts, no skipping anything. Word-for-word.

  By the time Tiav finishes engraving the sempu and fabricating the duplicates, I’m finished, too. Dom pieces together the script, remodulating it so it sounds natural, and I practice mouthing along a few times so it looks convincing before we record. Tiav has a strange expression, so I give him what-face.

  “First time hearing your voice, sort of,” he says with half a smile. “But I’m still holding out for the real thing.”

  With the plan as we worked it out with my brothers, he’ll hear it soon enough. We link Dom to one of my own com-tablets in case we need him and head out to the hovercar.

  Time for me to show Tiav around Sampati.


  Being the oldest also made Durant the busiest, so when he offered to take Liddi to visit Yishu, just the two of them, she was thrilled. She wasn’t sure what they’d do there, but time with her brother was good enough.

  They got there, and she was confused.

  First stop was an art institute where they saw students working on paintings and sculptures, and walked through the galleries. Sometimes Liddi could identify what the piece depicted. A painted landscape. A sketch of a child’s face. A sculpture of a dog. Others made no sense. Splotches of color and random shapes.

  Next they took in a series of concerts. Stringed instruments. Metallic instruments. Big drums and little drums. Some of the music had rhythms that spoke to Liddi’s sense of patterns. Others felt discordant, unnatural.

  Finally, a dance performance. More music, and then the movements of the dancers. Some fluid, some sharp. The lines and angles of their bodies forming patterns of their own, moving again before Liddi could fully take them in.

  During an intermission, she couldn’t take the confusion anymore. She tugged on Durant’s sleeve. He turned to her, but she waved him down to her level so no one else would hear.

  “What’s the point?” she asked quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “On Pramadam, I get it. They cliff-dive for adrenaline, and they play sports because they want to win. But what’s dance or any of this for?”

  Durant’s response confused her more. He looked concerned. “When they were dancing just now, what did you feel?”

  “I don’t know. That I didn’t get it.”

  “You’re thinking too much, Liddi.”

  At eleven years old, Liddi had never been accused of doing that. Thinking too little, maybe. “You’re all always telling me we’re Jantzens and we use our heads.”

  His expression softened as he smoothed her hair back. “I know, maybe we say that too much. When we go back in, try not to think about what they’re doing. See what you feel, okay?”

  It wasn’t easy. Liddi just wanted the answer, and hated that Durant wouldn’t tell her. Not thinking wasn’t natural.