The Kinship of Stars

by Julie Ishaya

  Reaching out his own mind, the chamberlain threw up a psionic mirror, which reflected the lingering images back into the source from which they came. The other's gray face betrayed a shard of distress, then the attack faded into itself. "The insults stop now," the chamberlain decreed, "or this negotiation is at an end."

  Rai Jinn tapped his fingers on the table top. The solitary light overhead glanced off his narrow, gray knuckles and the jewelry on his thin ears. His lips tightened to little more than a slit.

  (I will speak with Asmodéus on how we monitor aid to your planet,) the chamberlain sent. (Until then, we should move on to the next issue.)

  (We are sick of Nexian snobbery, Counselor.)

  When the negotiators retired, Rai Jinn disappeared down the extension tube to the Shiv vessel, while the chamberlain went to his cabin with intentions to meditate.

  At the cabin door, he paused, feeling something of a pain in his temple. After fortifying his psionic wards for almost three cycles, he found his own mind strained from the effort. He wanted to remove his mask and feel his skin breathe, to relax just briefly. He would not sleep so much as he would withdraw into himself to nurse the bruises on his psyche.

  The Shiv were deteriorating physically—anyone could see that—but their psionics were still outstanding. He shook his head at the thought, reflecting on the disturbance on the Shiv world two and a half years ago. How that bothered him now, he did not know.

  As he started to give the command for the aperture to open, something caught his attention. His foot knocked gently against a soft object laying before the passage.

  Behind his mask, he frowned and looked down at a piece of black cloth at his feet. Someone had dropped what looked like a pouch outside his chamber, and the ship's intelligence engine had somehow failed to detect the object or its owner passing through.

  Picking up the pouch, he weighed it in his hand, light but definitely containing something. He opened it cautiously and found within two devices. One had a needle, the sharp tip catching a sliver of light. The other was shelled and spiny, something of a segmented tail curled against its softer underbelly.

  He started to question the devices, but then he sensed a new presence near by, coming from behind him. Closer in still. Prickles and stings moved up the back of his neck and over his scalp, and his heart raced. His rational state deduced that he would only find one of the guards returning to his post at the end of the corridor. He rose, the objects still in hand, and turned around only to look deep into a set of yellow eyes.

  So close did they loom.

  "You," he whispered right before an alien silence engulfed his core being and stifled an inner outcry. He stood motionless for a moment, one tear straining from the corner of his eye and running down to entrap itself in the hot crevice between skin and mask.

  His hands moved to store the things back within the pouch which then went into the folds of his cloak, and he turned and stepped through the passage into the safety of his chamber.

  Lounging against the wall of the third floor balcony, Kieriell lost his gaze somewhere out toward sea, where lights from the storm flashed across the wall in the dark and carried waves of illuminated colors to shore. Evening repast had been over for some time, and Jarren had returned to the school.

  Kieriell felt his mother's presence moving out onto the balcony and he turned to offer her a weak but welcoming smile. Wearing a mantled blue silken robe, she looked splendid to him with her hair twisted down her back. He understood those moments when, in his lounge chamber in the Dyssian palace, he found his father staring at her portrait. She had spent much of her day in the meeting between Asmodéus and the Nallian delegates, but now the remaining plans were being wrapped up between the liege and the Nexian emperor.

  Kieriell faced out from the balcony again as she came to his side. The lights of the city made a crystalline blanket beneath the muteness of night.

  Jenesaazi reached up to stroke her son's cheek.

  He sensed her pain, subdued but ever present. He could do nothing to relieve her of missing him and his father. Her hand played down over his jaw line to his throat where he still wore the Ariahm School's crest in bronze. He watched her study the phoenix, how the great bird's wings rose up and swept around the inner circle of the piece.

  "Why do you still wear this?"

  "Um, I don't know," he murmured. He licked his lips and reached his own hand up to remove hers from the medallion. "I'm just so used to it being there that I can't even feel it anymore and forget to take it off."

  She nodded. "You do not dwell upon your days at the school?"

  He shook his head but appreciated the honesty of the question.

  Then she said what he had been expecting to hear ever since his arrival at the manse: "Kieriell, you know that you can come home and stay any time you want to, for as long as you want to. You are not obligated to Nex in the same way as your father."

  "Mother," he said gently, "I am." Truth be known, he was. He belonged on Nex however much he would like to stay on Valtaer. Being away now, with the negotiations underway, he felt his own role as prince settle on his shoulders. He thought also of his abilities and his blossoming obsession with the grid. His last discovery gnawed at him to return to the map room on Dyss. He wanted to tell Jenesaazi about it but didn't know how. And he certainly could not tell her about the void or how he feared it.

  She frowned with disappointment, but it vanished quickly. "Well then, next I'll be hearing that you're on the Nexian consulate."

  "I'm still just an observer." He dropped a quick kiss on her cheek and turned for the house. "Let's go in. It's getting cold out here. Besides," he added reluctantly, "Asmodéus will be arriving soon."

  "Do you know when you'll have the chance to return?"

  He could see that the reality of her chosen path could some times bite harder than others. "I don't know, Mother. The negotiations are at hand."

  She closed her eyes and sighed, her mind lost to him for a moment, and he knew that somewhere inside there she was storing away agonies of past and present.

  Aiming to distract her, he draped his arm lovingly around her shoulders and steered her toward the entrance. Just inside the lounge chamber he stiffened, sensing a familiar presence come for him, sending him a soft greeting. "Grandsire is here," he said.

  Downstairs in the foyer, they met the new arrival. Servants were clustering in a doorway at the opposite end of the corridor, watching.

  "Lady Mahlharium," Asmodéus greeted his daughter-in-law. He took her hand briefly as he bowed slightly, then he straightened and towered over her by almost three full heads.

  Kieriell stood beside them both, waiting. He watched his mother drop a graceful bow before Asmodéus.

  She rose, looked up, and an expression of surprise glimmered through her eyes. "Lord Asmodéus, on behalf of the people of Nall, I thank you for undertaking the wall project to save our shores."

  Asmodéus gazed back at her with a smile seen more in the lift of his brows and in his eyes than on his lips. "No need to thank me," he said. "You played as much a part as I did." He gave a courtly bow of his own, and instantly Kieriell sensed a mild current of relief in his mother.

  "How did the final meeting with the liege go?" she asked.

  "The plans have been confirmed to construct the siphoning station," Asmodéus said. "For now the energy used in rift-tech will temper the tidal swelling. I'll delegate a team to return and begin construction while the negotiations continue."

  She nodded to that and he took a subtle but obvious breath. Kieriell noted that his grandfather's face continued to support a soft glow of good will. "Milady," he said, his voice almost a purr, "I'm afraid that I have never thanked you for giving me such a special grandson."

  A generous smile spread across Jenesaazi's face. "Milord, you are most welcome." She gestured him to lean over slightly. He did, but even so she had to rise up on her toes slightly to drop a light kiss on his cheek.

  Asmodéus blin
ked with surprise. The emperor of Nex straightened abruptly, and Kieriell sensed that a great weight was lifting from his shoulders.

  Kieriell moved in to embrace his mother, grinning that she should have the audacity to kiss the most uptight being in the macroverse. When their good-byes were over, he turned to accompany his grandsire from the manse. At the front gate, he found the transport which had delivered him two days ago. Imperial guards flanked the walkway.

  Kieriell glanced at his grandsire and smirked. (Careful,) he sent with a tiny wave of amusement. (What about masking emotional weakness?)

  (Be quiet, boy.)

  His eyes glittering, Kieriell felt completely content.

  15

  Only Dyssian and Hellan ships flecked the outer regions of the asteroid field to guard the gateway to and from the frontier. The rest of the Nexian fleet maintained positions obscured by the varying sizes of rock stabilized with the inner field, closer to Dyss. Raptors and raiks representing every order practiced flight patterns on the outskirts, a common enough sight, Adam noted as his shuttle bore him from Hella back to Dyss. He observed from the window a trail of plasmic residue glowing on the horizon and extending out from the nexus toward Dyss, and he knew that Asmodéus and Kieriell had returned from Valtaer.

  Once the shuttle set down within the colony, he disembarked to hurry up to his chambers. He returned his official's mask to the drawer in his wardrobe, and then he concentrated a question toward the walls and received the answer that Kieriell was alone in the map room.

  He hastened through the corridors until he reached the library aperture. At the same moment it opened for him, he sent a greeting out to his son. He stepped onto the upper level balcony and looked down to the lower level, angling his gaze toward the map room in time to see Kieriell emerge.

  "Father," Kieriell called up to the balcony, giving a relaxed wave.

  Adam crossed around the balcony and descended the steps. "How was your trip to Valtaer?"

  "Great," Kieriell said, "but not long enough."

  "Would you have preferred to stay?"

  Kieriell shrugged. "I would be restless if I stayed there. How goes it on your end?"

  "Hellan tensions aren't so bad yet. The worst will come when the opening talks are over and the emperor and the kai meet." He threw a glance around the library. "So what have you been up to?"

  Scarcely was the question finished when Kieriell said, "I'm working on a new project with the grid. Come." He waved a hand in the air as he spun for the passage into the map room.

  Adam followed but stopped in mid-passage awe-stricken. "Kieriell, exactly what kind of project are you conducting in here?"

  Every screen in the room moved with light lines depicting hundreds of aspects of the grid. The screen closest to him reconfigured the grid starting from the center and growing out. Another screen played different arrangements of the base numbers that comprised the coordinates of each nexus point. Throughout the room, the activity continued. Each crystal screen worked to solve a puzzle which Adam could only assume his son had invented from the mobile console that hovered next to the large back-conforming chair Kieriell had situated in the middle of the room like nothing less than a command center.

  The most impossible to ignore masterwork was the central holographic projection in the air over the chair. It reconstructed a model of the center grid in three dimensions with the approximated center directly above where Kieriell's head would be when he was sitting in the chair. Only, it wasn't the center Adam was accustomed to, as this one was not a pyramidical structure formed by the titan walls as they closed in on its location. This was an orb into which the titans appeared to feed. It glowed with a soft blue and pulsed and sent out vibrations through the web of titans.

  "All right," Kieriell said, taking a breath. "You know how, from the beginning, I've had trouble looking at that center? I see it as spherical and pulsing, you and everyone else seem to see it as simply the pyramid defined by the map projection."

  "Yes," Adam eased closer¸ staring into the center. "So this is how you see it?"

  "Exactly. Well almost how I see it. All of this time, I was also trying to force it into the original model, but then I just gave in and went with it and used meditation as a guide. I know that's not exactly an accepted scientific practice, but I've exhausted the archives, so hunches are all I have to go on. I think what I see is relevant to my ability. If I really am somehow connected to the infinity grid via my genetics, that would make sense, right?"

  Adam didn't have a valid argument. There was a look of muted desperation in Kieriell's eyes, a deep seated desire to know things. His pupils were thin slits closed against the glare of the holograph, while the blue light accented his irises, bringing out a white shimmer, especially when the center of the sphere pulsed. "That's quite a hunch, but it does make sense, yes." This was good, he thought, that Kieriell was attempting to expand on his instincts, but for a father who knew admittedly little about the real extent of his son's abilities, it was also frightening to say the least. "So how do you figure this?" Adam gestured up into the sphere and indicated the pulsing walls around it.

  "My sense is that the center is feeding energy out into the grid, possibly even building it, not that I can prove that since we haven't mapped the outer reaches yet. I read in this book—" He reached for one of the larger volumes. "It emphasizes Asmodéus II's obsession with the center. Why was he so interested?" He sat the work down with a low thud in front of Adam and pried it open near the mid-section. "The coordinates to get there are basic enough, they just count down from the coordinates we have on the Nexian plane stretching toward the center, but once you reach that center, coordinates won't mean anything, not if it's really what I think it might be. Might be. I also think it's possible that Asmodéus II saw it the way I do. Maybe he was a transcendant who never met his potential. But maybe he could at least see the center as a vortex, too."

  Adam noted the emphasis on certain words. Kieriell obviously wanted to be clear on keeping postulation separated from known fact. The boy paused to stare up into the glowing model, his face suddenly as still as a consulate mask, but as his eyes flicked from one juncture to another, there was clearly much more going on behind the facade. Adam wished he could tap that vast swarm of thoughts, ideas and hypothesis, not to mention the emotions stirred by them. "Where do you think that energy could be coming from?"

  Kieriell blinked and lowered his eyes to refocus on his father. "Like I said, I'm working on it. It does have to come from somewhere. That would be the real mystery, wouldn't it?"

  "Have you told your grandsire about this?"

  "Yes, last evening."

  Adam quietly hoped that it was all true and further proof how special Kieriell was. He knew that it was a parent's pride driving such a notion. The macro gridcode composed Kieriell's primary fabric. Why couldn't it give him access to knowledge no other being could ever hope to comprehend? Infinity itself existed in him. Channeled in and out through his body, it made him one with its eternal reaches. "But what could it mean for him?" he asked in a whisper, realizing too late that he'd intended to keep the question to himself.

  "Come again?"

  "Oh, nothing." One thought spread out into another, creating a chain of possibilities in his mind. "You've got me pondering now. I'm guessing that the only thing which could pierce the infinity of the center vortex is something also made out of energy. A conscious, non-physcial being, perhaps?"

  "You mean a transcendant." Kieriell looked uncomfortable. "Maybe. But the question is, what happens to him or her once they enter it? Maybe that's where the last transcendant went after she accepted Nehmon's adversarial challenge."

  "Okay, you don't have to go that far," Adam said, his rising excitement instantly tamping back down.

  Kieriell stood and maneuvered his way around the table, giving the command to blank every screen and the holographic model also dropped away. The change from the excited state of examination to a cool, dim room was daunting.
The remaining light from the ceiling orbs turned the papers on the table a yellowish hue and the darker corners of the room seemed like deep, empty holes. "It's just an idea," he uttered as he bunched several of the papers together and stood ready to leave the chamber. "Please, right now let's just leave it at that."

  Adam nodded. "Of course." With a sigh he looked at the glassy divisions of screens, resisting the urge to reactivate them and examine the subject further. He moved away from the remaining abandoned articles and took note of the look on his son's face: the thrill of discovery suddenly shut down. Ah, Kieriell, he thought, careful not to send it out, when will you stop underestimating yourself?

  "Well," he said then, "tell me what else is new. What's the old man up to?"

  Much of Asmodéus' time was now spent in the tabernacle until he was ready to step forward in the negotiations. Long periods of quietude fell, leaving the corridors sterile of activity though the tabernacle operated ceaselessly. Asmodéus found a numbness within his own mind that he had never experienced before. It bore some resemblance to the dull chafing on his core-being in the early period after Illyria's death. But the death strokes he felt now related to his own kingdom.

  In his private chambers, where the window projections virtually surrounded him with images of live space, he watched pensively. The vaulted ceiling above matched the view from the dome in the throne room. Some small asteroid debris, otherwise black against the backdrop of space, caught the light of Arctus and radiated sparks of reddish light. The glittering field spread out in an amoeboid fashion, and Asmodéus swore that he was foreseeing the destruction of his kingdom, all orders reduced to lingering dust. For all the strength underlying Nex's facade, the structure weakened with the approach of possible unification, and when the emperor tried to put this out of mind, commanding the screen to go dark, the recently reprogrammed system pulled up a mirror image.

  His own face stared back at him from the screen, perceived by the neural system and then fed back to him. He had not looked at his reflection for a long time, and what he saw now gave him no pleasure. The bitterness in the eyes taunted him, and he wondered if he always looked like that. Did Adam and Kieriell see it and say nothing? Or had they accepted it as a permanent feature in the stolid planes of the emperor's own living mask?