I followed Fire’s directions to select her icon and sent her a short message:
Hello, Fire. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. Why do you wish to speak with me?
She answered within half an hour:
We can tell that Olympia was built using ancient tech from the spaceship graveyard. Even more important, Oichi—we can tell that you were, too.
That was an interesting way to put it. We were built. An accurate description, but painfully so.
I took a breath. My reaction seemed a bit prickly. I was a mover and a shaker on Olympia now, but I had begun my life as a lowly worm. I liked to think I was over that. Maybe I had overestimated my own resilience.
I would have felt more inclined to say that we were engineered, since DNA was involved—but I didn’t grow up in the shadow of the Three, the entities who tower over the graveyard that defines the world toward which Olympia is bound. I had yet to lay eyes on that landscape, so I could only guess how crowded it might be with ancient machinery. Quite a few things had probably been built from those odds and ends. Possibly even intelligent things.
After all, the Three were intelligent things, and someone had built them. They had been in communication with me for years, before they finally shut down the conversation and resumed a sleep that must have lasted millennia.
Yet even now, I could sense those ghosts. On some level, they were still aware of us. The sleep they had imposed on themselves was not the illogical, insensate thing that it was for humans. I had no idea what to expect from them, whether they would decide to wake once we assumed orbit around Graveyard or to stay asleep.
What could they expect from us? Maybe that was the bigger question. A year had passed since their last communication. Now there were other people from Graveyard who wanted to talk. I’m no expert on trade, but Fire’s communication seemed like the sort of overture you make when you want to do business with someone. My prickly reaction would be useless if I wanted to cultivate our new neighbors—so I put it aside.
How can you tell we have that sort of connection to Graveyard? I asked.
Because you’re here, she said, and nobody has tried to blow you up, and things are stirring that have not taken notice of anyone in a very long time.
These things, I sent back. Are they three things? Three very big, old things?
Indeed, said Fire. At your current speed, you will pass through the Belt long before you reach Graveyard. You will contact the Belters. They will want to barter. What do you have to trade?
Perhaps we could trade the food and textiles we grow in our Habitat Sector. We had many resources that might prove valuable.
How much of that should I reveal to Fire? I decided to keep it simple. We grow food crops and have a textile industry.
She took longer to respond to that one, and I wondered if I had made a tactical mistake. Did our industries sound paltry? Had I just torpedoed our first contact? I should have conferred with Terry Charmayne and Ogden Schickele before I answered that query.
Yet when Fire responded, the tone of her message was enthusiastic. The Belters would like to meet you. Please visit Maui on your way past. Let us know when you think that will be.
I breathed a sigh of relief. If my reply had been ill informed, at least it hadn’t done too much damage. I sent an acknowledgment and promised to get back with the details.
At that point, I should have notified Medusa, and then Terry and Nemo, possibly even Ogden. Instead, I sat there and reviewed Fire’s messages multiple times. I’d like to tell you I was thinking about the best way to pursue trade with the Belters.
I’m not sure I was thinking about anything at all. Across from me stood one of the few objects I can claim to love, a painted silk screen depicting a tiger at the edge of a lake. It had been gifted to me by a member of an almost-dead clan. Full disclosure: I killed the man who gave me the screen. While he deserved it, that doesn’t make the gift any less sentimental.
My tiger eternally worries that the waves breaking against the shore of his lake might get his toes wet. I relate to his anxiety.
Finally I stirred to look for information.
Though I called him by name, he wasn’t always the one who answered. This time, it was his second-in-command.
That was more than twice the amount of time it had taken Merlin to reach us, though we would be traveling a fraction of the distance.
We were approaching Graveyard at an oblique angle to its orbital plane. We had made no plans to visit the Belters. We could use a shuttle to make the side trip, but our window of opportunity for getting there and getting back to Olympia, before she was too far away to catch, was narrow. Like the tiger on my screen, I worried about the unknown.
I worried for quite a while.
When I got tired of that, I used a Security camera to look at our visitor in Lock 212. Figures moved behind her view windows. They peered into the lock, undoubtedly searching for shadowy tentacles.
How long had it been since a ship had used that lock? When Olympia was built, supply ships had probably docked there. When Sheba and Baylor Charmayne plotted to destroy Titania, Baylor had used the shuttles to raid our sister ship of supplies. They must have used the big locks to unload their loot, possibly even this, my favorite lock.
Percy O’Reilly and Ryan Charmayne were killed inside Lock 212 for very good reason, not for petty revenge—but now I found myself questioning my motives for directing Merlin to dock there. Had my resentment of the Weapons Clan clouded my judgment? I think maybe it had.
Merlin traveled the distance it had taken Olympia a year to traverse, in a fraction of the time. She had structures, arranged in three pairs around the craft. Those structures belonged to her star drive.
She also had a main thruster at her tail, with her center of mass aligned above it, closer to her nose. Captain Nemo said she could operate in atmosphere; Merlin could land on Graveyard.
How well would Merlin navigate in the asteroid belt? She had small thrusters, too. She had used them to dock with Olympia, so one must assume they would help her avoid bumping into asteroids. She might be quite versatile.
I watched our visitors in Lock 212, through the Security cameras. Again, I saw movement behind Merlin’s windows, and I considered the questions Captain Nemo had asked about who would be our allies. They had sounded rhetorical, but really—they were practical.
My painted tiger always looked worried, but he still dared the edge of that lake.
Bearing that in mind, I composed another message. Fire—what if we could meet you sooner? Say, in a few cycles?
4
Crow
I stayed up late, exchanging messages with Fire and congratulating myself for finessing what I felt sure would be the next stage in our introduction to the Charon system, the establishment of trade and cultural exchanges with the Belters. The possibility that I might be doing so by hijacking the emissaries of the Weapons Clan gave me particular satisfaction. True, I had almost killed the Merliners, and that would present a challenge when I tried to talk them into working for us, but I felt optimistic we could come to some agreement.
It’s a little sad to look back on that moment of irrational exuberance.
Ashur also remained wakeful, far longer than was good for him. When he finally closed his eyes, he thought it would take him forever to drift off, but the whirlwind in his mind settled quickly. Looking back, he realized he should have been suspicious about that.
How do I know he felt all those things?
Because I ended up in the same dream.
* * *
That business about mental whirlwinds isn’t just poetry. Knowing that Ashur felt responsible for making peace with the emissaries from the Weapons Clan provoked a similar sort of storm in my own head. Back when I had thought I was the only one engaged in sedition, I had enjoyed a moral clarity that eluded me now that I could see the results of my actions on my comrad
es, some of whom were very young.
When Ashur said good night to his father, I didn’t break my link with him. I meant to, but I wanted to let him do that first. I thought he might have something more to say to me. Once I got to talking with Fire, I forgot about it.
Hours later, I closed my eyes, probably at the same time he did. We both felt as if we had gone to sleep—until we opened our eyes again.
Ashur and I stood together. He blinked, and any notion I had that he could explain what we were doing there together was quickly dispelled by the expression on his face. Looking around didn’t clear up the mystery. Our surroundings were strange—though not completely unfamiliar. We have no cities on Olympia, but we’ve seen plenty of them in movies.
“Am I dreaming?” said Ashur.
“I doubt it,” I said. “This is what it was like when the Three talked to me. They looked real.”
Indeed they did, but they hadn’t shown me anything as odd as this. The stark and jumbled city in which we stood was nothing like Olympia, inside or out.
“This isn’t one of your immersive programs?” I said, though I knew that was a shot in the dark.
“Not one of mine. Maybe it’s somebody else’s? It’s like the city in The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
“Yes! And who could forget the wonderful score by Danny Elfman?”
“Which isn’t currently playing in our heads—otherwise, this would be a lot less scary.”
What our situation lacked in music, it made up for in other effects. The air felt warm and dry, a new sensation for we who were accustomed to the chilly tunnels of a generation ship. I smelled plants, as if we were in the Habitat Sector. Stars crowded the sky.
I barely noticed them, because I couldn’t look away from the scarecrows.
Probably they were why Ashur had thought of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Though there were also a couple of brief-but-memorable scenes in Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers Creepers 2 where the monster pretended to be a scarecrow. Last but not least, Scarecrow was one of the main characters in The Wizard of Oz (one of Kitten’s favorite musicals).
All those straw men would have been lost in this crowd. This City of Scarecrows stood or hung or sat or reclined on every side in various stages of construction or decay. Their heads were made of pumpkins, and those that had eyes glowed with an inner light. I considered the lyrics from Danny Elfman’s song “This Is Halloween”: Pumpkins scream in the dead of night.…
If these pumpkins started screaming in the dead of night, I might feel inclined to scream right along with them.
“Are they going to talk to us?” Ashur said. “Like the Three talked to you?”
Good question. Somehow, that seemed like a bad idea, as if speaking to one of these entities would be making a choice we couldn’t take back.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” I said. “They’re getting too interested in us.”
Ashur offered his arm, and I took it, glad for the contact, even if it was just virtual. The scarecrows watched us go. They seemed interested in our progress.
We watched them, too, worried that they might try to approach us as we passed. If some carved faces looked malign, their neighbors were comical—or friendly or serious or bemused. Many were just weird, and the shape of the pumpkins contributed to their character. They grew in patches linked together with vines that snaked up and over fences.
We turned down a crooked lane between contorted houses. The streets that branched from our path sometimes twisted at painful angles, and I sensed that if we followed them, we would see something very different.
Whether we would survive that exploration was another question. With so many bright eyes watching us, I felt inclined to be careful with my feet. You can talk to us, if you like, the scarecrows seemed to be thinking. Will you see us? Will you wake us? What will we do if we become aware of you, Oichi? What will we make of each other?
“Pretty intimidating, isn’t it?” someone said.
We were confronted by a scarecrow who leaned against a fence post, his thin arm propped on his hip and one leg crossed over the other. He wore a spotted shirt, a red vest, and faded blue trousers over a body made of long sticks of wood. On his neck sat a round yellow pumpkin with a face carved on it. The face reminded me of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. The light that shone behind his eyes glowed steadily. “How do you do?” he said. “I’m Crow.”
Ashur squared his shoulders. “I’m Ashur. This is my friend Oichi.”
“Can you guess what it is you’re seeing?” Crow’s carved mouth moved stiffly, though his words were clear. “It’s okay to guess wrong. I won’t think less of you.”
Ashur kept his eyes on Crow. “I may have seen it in a movie. My subconscious is turning it into a dream.”
Crow turned his head in negation. “This is not a dream, Ashur. We are speaking to you.”
“We?” said Ashur. “Are you one of the Three? Is this the graveyard?”
“No,” said Crow, “and yes. I am not one of the Three, though I will be your emissary to them should you chose to approach them. This is the graveyard you see around you—or its analogue, to be more accurate. As you can sense, there are entities here—not just the Three—and you may choose to speak to these others. You may bargain with any of them—and they may try to bargain with you.”
“Some of them seem so—” Ashur let his gaze travel to other scarecrows. “—odd. Dangerous, even.”
“Oh yes,” said Crow. “No doubt about that. Some are dangerous because they’re so different, some because they’re evil. Some are dangerous because they have so much to offer, and who knows what will come of that? After all, the Empire of Clans created powerful arsenals from this ancient technology. Their children almost destroyed the far-flung colonies of humans, right along with those of other species, though they aren’t the only ones to have engaged in mass destruction.”
This was the first that we had heard of human colonies, far-flung or otherwise. I wasn’t sure if I should be thrilled or sad.
“So,” Ashur said, “the graveyard is full of weapons?”
“Yes, but not just weapons. In fact, weapons are a small part of what you can find here.”
“If that’s true, then why is the Weapons Clan so interested in the graveyard?”
Crow’s smile stretched wider. “That’s the question you should ask. Keep it in mind when you come here. You should do so, as well, Oichi.” Crow turned to me. “I can’t answer it for you, but you’ll find some sort of answer. That’s definite.”
“How do you know we’ll go there?” said Ashur. “I mean, here?”
Crow didn’t budge from his casual pose, but his eyes glowed brighter. “We know whom we want to talk to. You’ll get an invitation soon.”
I couldn’t let that go unchallenged. “Ashur is twelve years old.” I tried to ignore the outraged expression on Ashur’s face. “If they invite him, can we refuse?”
Crow’s lantern face assumed lines of dismay. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Will they be angry?” I said. “Will they try to hurt us if I leave Ashur out of it?”
“Oh no.” Crow waved his hands. “Quite the opposite. If Ashur isn’t in your delegation, things will turn out differently. You’ll make connections, and they will improvise. Only—take a look around you, Oichi. Do you want any of these entities to improvise your fate?”
To Ashur’s credit, he didn’t smirk at that. He was going to get his wish, though I would not relish explaining that to his father. Because I didn’t want those entities to improvise our fates. Not even a little bit.
“I’ll let you get some real sleep now,” said Crow. “I just wanted to say one more thing before we meet again. It’s not just about whom you chose, Olympians. It’s about who chooses you.”
* * *
I woke in the dark. Ashur’s presence had evaporated in my hands, like smoke.
I called him.
It wasn’t a dream, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble. Besides, who was I to say what we had experienced? It was a lot like what I had felt when talking to the Three, but it wasn’t exactly like that.
What the hell am I going to tell your father? I wondered.
Nuruddin would have the final say on that, but the whole thing felt like fate to me. I don’t get that feeling often.
I couldn’t blame him for trying to get his mind off Crow’s message, because I couldn’t either. It took me a long time to get to sleep.
Then I woke with plenty of other things to worry about.
PART TWO
POLITICIANS AND AMBASSADORS
5
The Kitten Cam
Warning lights flashed and a siren squawked. The outer door of the air lock had been ordered to open, and explosive decompression was imminent. Medusa and I stood blinking in confusion, trying to adapt to our new situation with very little time to do so.
If we got blown into space, this wouldn’t be the first time. I venture to say it wouldn’t be the last. All those moments of danger and indecision might make an excellent synopsis of our partnership, if you strung them together. Each of them shared similarities. Each of them had its differences.
Medusa in the Graveyard Page 4