This Gulf of Time and Stars

by Julie E. Czerneda

  “I know you didn’t want this.” He took my hands, sending sincerity and love. “Whatever you decide, I’ll support you. But—” His eyes brightened and I realized with a sickening lurch of my heart that it was with hope. “—a baby, Sira. Something wonderful, out of all this. Our family.”

  And what could I say to that?

  At my hesitation, the expression on his dear face changed, flickering through distress and guilt to pity; I felt something break inside me. “I’m sorry,” Morgan said, who had no reason to, nor cause, and wasn’t happiness better than grief—

  Or fear?

  “I shouldn’t—”

  “Yes, you should.” Always I learned from my Human, his optimism and bravery today’s lesson. “‘Partheno-genesis.’” I had to admit it sounded better than Perversion and, after all, Turrned did it, who were pleasant, unremarkable beings, renowned only for their somewhat obsessive charity to others.

  I bent to kiss my remarkable Chosen soundly, tendrils of hair tickling his neck. “Don’t mind me,” I whispered in his ear, following that with a nibble. “It’s still a bit—” what wouldn’t upset him further? “—overwhelming.”

  Pulling back, I unfastened my coveralls and let them fall, kicking off my boots. I tipped my head toward the fresher stall, hair sweeping over my shoulders like a silken cloak. As a collaborator, it had its moments. Morgan smiled.

  “It’s my turn,” I reminded him. We’d a schedule for the use of the ship’s limited resources. Sharing made sense.

  And offered the illusion of privacy. I stepped inside, holding open the door.

  Only to see Morgan shake his head and grimace. “I’d best tidy this and get back to the control room. The ship’s not going to fly herself.”

  Certain even the Fox could wait a while, I sent a wave of heat, pleased when he let out a flattering growled “Witchling,” less so when he chuckled and secured the door for me.

  Swallowing disappointment, I keyed the timed spray.

  Foam slid over my skin. My hands followed it, resting over my abdomen. Nothing had changed, not outwardly. Nothing would, according to Jacqui, for weeks yet. I dared follow that inner link.

  Still nothing, beyond the strong, steady sense of life.

  To Morgan, that was enough. But it wasn’t. For all he’d filled me with hope, I knew better.

  There should be more. A consciousness, however wordless at this nascent stage. Demands. Awareness. Words would follow. Some unborn were loud enough to be heard by those around the mother. I’d been one such, able to make the entire household feel my every twist and grumble.

  Let alone what happened after birth.

  Jacqui had said nothing; that didn’t make her unaware. There was no hiding what was wrong from a Birth Watcher.

  I took hold of as much hair as fit in two hands, pushing it into the foam. Engine grease was more than even a Chosen’s hair could clean from itself, not that I could reason with the stuff.

  More likely, I thought as locks squirmed, Jacqui was too kind to speak of what my baby lacked when she had no solution to offer.

  Other than going to my mother.

  I grabbed more hair, pulled, thought.

  Morgan and I would deal with whatever grew in me, when the time came. It—she—could wait. What couldn’t? Safety for the Clan who remained. They were asking. What to do? What next? Some were quiet. Others demanding and querulous. The number grew with each hour.

  Because all were afraid.

  I didn’t let them touch Morgan through our link; I didn’t doubt he knew.

  My mother hadn’t been attacked. I went over my brief interaction with Jarad. He’d found her, decided she was safe, and left, speedily. If she’d found a haven, it would be temporary.

  I’d reached to ask her. She’d rebuffed my contact, as I should have expected. Mirim and those with her distrusted the M’hir, relying instead on those Clan abilities free of it. It was rumored they refused to ’port, taking ships wherever they needed to go, as we did now.

  Traveling at Human speed.

  When I could be there in less than a heartbeat.

  Couldn’t I?

  I stilled, letting my hair squeeze itself free of foam. I’d used the Fox as an excuse, hiding here with Morgan, pretending the ship’s needs were greater than my kind’s.

  No longer, I thought, filled with determination.

  The door opened. “Ready to go, chit?” Morgan asked, leaning in with a slow smile.

  Why that— “Not quite,” I assured him.

  Taking hold of his coveralls, I pulled him the rest of the way, resetting the foam.

  Without telling the others, after Morgan and I had made what plans we could, I left that shipnight . . .

  . . . for Stonerim III.

  Home, in a sense. I’d been born on this world, then taken from it as a child. I hadn’t been back till now.

  Feeling sentimental, I’d chosen a locate from my past, a favorite, private place overlooking the lake. Time hadn’t been kind. I walked down a cinder path, my spacer boots crunching dead leaves. At what had been the shore, I stopped. “I’m back.”

  The words startled a few birds from a tangled scrub nearby.

  So much for memory. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The lake had been drained, the luxury towers taken down, all such materials of more use elsewhere, no one wishing to live close to calamity.

  Stars crusted the night sky. Once, I could have looked from here and seen Norval rising on the horizon. A sparkling confection of a city, grown as a hill, I remembered it as bedecked with glass and light and gardens, surrounded at all hours by aircars, like flocks of birds, coming and going.

  In reality, it had been a compost heap, rotting from within as the layers upon which each new version had been constructed began to fail. Its inevitable collapse had been both well documented and entertaining.

  For those who hadn’t lost home and livelihood.

  Of course, the Clan had abandoned Norval before its ruin, choosing a province of wealth unconnected to events to the south. My mother had moved there, lived there.

  >here<

  And here, of course. My hair shifted uneasily. After our link, the binding of mother and child, had broken at last. After Rael and Pella . . .

  Whatever grew within me, its future? Couldn’t matter less at the moment. Morgan needed to know the whole truth; I wouldn’t confide in anyone else until he did. He’d set course for my mother, as if there was hope here, and I’d seen how the others had reacted, gaining strength, gathering courage.

  >here<

  A direction did that. Movement did. I applauded my Chosen’s wisdom and took it for my own.

  Being here was a start.

  >here<

  I started, suddenly aware of the word I’d heard—felt—more than once. It wasn’t a sending.

  “Who’s there?” Turning slowly, I scanned my surroundings.

  Wind tousled leaves and pushed long waves through the grass. The sky was heavy with cloud and I could smell rain. Listening as hard as I could, I could hear my own heartbeat and nothing more.

  >here . . . here . . . here<

  Another ghost, I decided, firming my shields with a shiver, tied to this place. It felt like one: confused, demanding, no longer sane.

  Impotent.

  Even without the M’hir and the minds dissolving there, this world should be full of them.

  No more, I promised myself. Time to talk to my mother. I formed the locate Jarad had sent, and pushed . . .

  . . . finding myself in an alley.

  I sneezed.

  A filthy, stinking alley. Why were there no clean ones? What was wrong with civilization?

  Something grunted.

  My hand sought the handle of Morgan’s spare blaster. He was many things, my Chosen. Careless was none of them. H
aving seen my somewhat creative choice of weaponry in the past, he’d made sure I could threaten with something actually deadly.

  Until the Assemblers, I hadn’t thought I would.

  The grunt was followed by a rhythmic whistling snore as whatever I’d disturbed settled again. I relaxed, as much as I dared.

  Most of the lights had been removed or broken, possibly by the alley’s inhabitant. My boots squished and slipped through what I was just as glad not to see, and I guided myself down the middle by looking ahead. There, the alley met a brightly lit roadway wide enough for docking tugs and the starships they cradled in their arms, marking the boundary between Norval’s portcity, a district of warehouses and hostels, and its more ephemeral shipcity.

  While such was now-familiar turf to me, it was hardly a place I’d associate with any others of my kind.

  Light rimmed the outline of a door to my left even as words formed in my mind.

  Welcome, Daughter.

  Times had changed.

  Life clung to Norval only at its western edge, life that came and went in starships, life that scrabbled and dug like scavengers quarreling over a corpse. What any considered worth having was hauled offworld, legally or not; what wasn’t, dumped. Decades of waste had begun to consume the portcity, filling its roads even as refuse piles swallowed row after row of abandoned warehouses. The few remaining buildings stood like a dam protecting the shipcity’s landing pads. They’d be next. Ultimately, Norval would win.

  My mother lived here.

  Having expected a hovel, given the neighborhood, I was surprised to find a well-appointed apartment waiting behind the door. The furnishings were worn, but gently. I recognized a chair and rug, a piece of pottery and a lamp, and looked a question.

  “I brought them from home.”

  Like her furniture, Mirim di Teerac appeared worn, but gently. Her hair was confined in the pre-Stratification net she’d used as long as I could remember, hair now more gray than gold. Fine lines rode her eyes and mouth, but she bore herself with quiet strength. A long table along a wall was covered with fabric and what I’d taken for a piece of art nearby turned out to be a torso with more fabric pinned to it.

  Memory surfaced. My mother sitting, an embroidery hoop in her ever-busy hands. Singing to me as I played by her feet.

  Mirim noticed my attention. “I do repairs and alterations. You’d be surprised how many from the shipcity need them. It’s a good living.”

  Defensive.

  A Clan—a “di Sarc”—working for Humans? It certainly explained my father’s conspicuous absence. “I’ll have to get your rates,” I said, demonstrating how my sleeves, if unrolled, covered my hands. The ubiquitous spacer coveralls outlasted their original wearers many times over; I’d only seen new ones on crew from company ships.

  She frowned. “You’ve changed.”

  How would you know? I might have asked, but didn’t bother. The past was behind us. “Everything has.” I looked around. “When did you move here?”

  “The day you dragged me through that cursed dark.”

  To attend the treaty signing.

  She waited for me to acknowledge how terribly wrong I’d been. As I prepared to do just that, I studied her face, finding Pella in her forehead, Rael in that expressive mouth and high cheekbones.

  Then, in my mother’s gaze, I found what we shared. A fierce and relentless will.

  This was not, as my father believed, a Clanswoman who’d conveniently accepted her lack of Power and influence. Not, as I’d believed, one who’d withdrawn from a loveless family. Had I met Mirim sud Teerac while trading, I’d have put thumb to contract, as the saying went, with eyes open and an exit in sight.

  I sat in the nearest chair rather quickly. The other thing about becoming a trader? Knowing when to gamble. I selected my next words with care and tossed the dice. “I’ve come for your advice, Mother.”

  Affront, plain and stark. “The First Chosen of the di Sarcs, come to me. The Clan Council’s Speaker, come to me.” Oh, no forgiveness there. She’d started civil, surprised to see me or curious. No more. “Why?”

  I matched her bluntness. “We must survive.”

  An eyebrow lifted. “Why?”

  I leaned forward, hands on the arms of the chair, and let the edge of my vaster Power brush hers. “Because I say so.”

  The Clan measured worth in Power, dominance by strength. Any Clan would have backed down.

  Any Clan but my mother. “You?” Her lips twisted as though to spit. “I warned them about you. That change would begin with your birth, change to everything, and they’d regret wanting this Power of yours.”

  As hurts went, this was less than others and hardly a surprise. What was? That my mother tasted change. I’d not known she had that rare and disturbing Talent.

  I put an edge into my voice. “You want the Clan to go extinct,” I accused. “I think you’re pleased Pella and Rael have died, that their Chosen have died, that the families on Acranam have—”

  Her unClan-like slap stopped me.

  Rubbing my cheek, I almost smiled. Trader trickery had its place. I had her. Understood her as I mightn’t. Morgan would be proud.

  “How dare you—”

  “Mother.” I stood to gesture profound apology and respect, saw her toss her head back in startlement. Before she could speak, I did, hearing my voice ring with the truth. “You’ve tried to save the Clan all along, but no one listened. This—” I glanced around her apartment “—is how we should have lived among Humans from the start. As part of their lives.”

  “We should never have taken from them,” she snapped. “Never ruined their minds and used them. We could have renounced the M’hir and Power; been happy as we were. Greed took us down a path with only one ending. You—were inevitable.”

  Her one Talent of strength. It hadn’t only warned at my birth. “You fled after the treaty because you tasted change coming. Why didn’t you speak?”

  “Who’d have listened?” Mirim turned away as if wearied by our conversation, walking to the tiny kitchen. “It’s not as if I could point to any one danger. That’s not how the gift works.”

  How many times had Morgan had such instinctive warnings, their true source clear only after the event?

  “What about now?”

  Mirim paused by the counter, then gave me a sober look. “It’s not over. Not yet.”

  More change, I thought, my heart sinking. More chaos and disruption and death. I’d scolded Barac for losing hope; I came close to losing my own in that instant.

  I clung to why I’d come—to find safe haven for those who remained.

  It wasn’t here. Nothing about the portcity, Norval, or my mother’s apartment would be proof against the Assemblers or even a Human with an ax and a grudge. I was slightly astonished my father hadn’t ’ported her away with him to save his own skin.

  If not here, then where?

  >. . . here . . . here . . . here . . .<

  Instead of being startled, I froze. Was I hearing a voice, or was something deep inside insisting I listen to myself, to a hope I hadn’t let myself believe?

  Here. This place. Every Clan knew our history began on this world, Stonerim III.

  Mirim had fled here for a reason. If I believed anything, it was that. She and her group, the M’hir Denouncers, were united in their intention to return to the pre-Stratification life of our ancestors. For all I knew, they’d started a colony elsewhere on this planet.

  A dream not remotely big enough. Not to save the two hundred and seventy Clan left. Not to give them a future.

  Not to keep the Trade Pact from weakening or worse.

  We needed a world of our own.

  “Mother,” I asked, telling myself I was a fool, telling myself myth couldn’t save us, “do you know where we came from?”

  “Now you ask
. Now you believe.” Mirim leaned on the counter, her back to me, and I sensed defeat. “When it’s too late.”

  “It’s not. I don’t accept that.” I went to her. About to touch her hunched shoulder, I thought better of it and dropped my hand to my side. “I won’t. Please, believe in me. We have to act.”

  Her hand reached back to capture mine, gripped, and all thoughts of the Clan Homeworld, of anything else, disappeared as Mirim shared . . .

  Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Years of dreadful patience. Years of wasted time and effort and disappointment. Waiting . . .

  For me?

  Waiting. For me to—?

  I jerked free, shaken. “You wanted me to keep taking Candidates for my Choice. To carve a bloody swath through an entire generation if necessary! Why?”

  “To save us! To be the first!”

  We stared at one another. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. All this time—“I did what I could,” I said finally, desperate. “I found what was happening, that we were doomed—”

  “Your work was meaningless. The M’hiray would not have gone extinct.” Her eyes flashed with impatient anger. “We cannot.” Suddenly, the passion left her face, leaving it old and tired. “What does it matter? Others have ended us. It’s too late.”

  The life within me. A child outside a pairing. Commencement without Choice, reproduction without sex. Parthenogenesis.

  The Turrned did it.

  Not by Perversion. Nature. The past, the present, everything I’d believed shifted along that axis, disorienting—

  —then, as abruptly, clear.

  Jacqui’d been right to send me to my mother; she just hadn’t known why. I’d never have believed this, any of it, if it hadn’t already happened to me.

  “It’s not too late,” I told my mother. “I am the first.”

  You agreed to this?

  Oh, I knew that tone. It went with the look of incredulous dismay I’d see on Morgan’s face whenever I’d had a “better idea” concerning the ship. The results weren’t always disasters, but having been raised by technophobes, I, according to my captain, lacked several fundamental understandings. Admittedly, there’d been times I may have overestimated what I could learn from vistapes and going ahead on my own had, occasionally, caused a flood.