Evergence: The Prodigal Sun

by Sean Williams

  Roche dealt with the pain as best she could and forced herself to talk. "The survival suit," she wheezed to Cane, who stood nearby. He seemed none the worse for the exertion, perhaps even healthier than he had been before — more alive. " ... I brought five ... out of the lander?"

  "That's right. Maii has the other, in one of the pockets of her own."

  "Good." She turned to Emmerik.

  "I'm too big," he said, understanding what she was about to suggest.

  "Doesn't matter," said Cane. "It'll block IR. Any cover will help, just as long as we can keep on moving."

  "That's right," added Roche. "As much as I'd like to rest ... I don't think we can afford to."

  He nodded. Veden calmed Maii while Cane rummaged through the Surin's pockets for the suit. The one-piece garment unfolded from a parcel scarcely larger than her hand. Roche showed the Mbatan how to activate the chameleon circuits and moisture reclaimer. The processor in the belt would do the rest. IR opacity was standard in all Armada survival suits; the heat would be absorbed to hold the desert chill at bay through the night.

  Emmerik managed to get his arms into the elastic fabric, but had no luck with his legs. The rest of the suit, where it couldn't be tied into place, flapped from his body like an overcoat.

  "Better than nothing," he said, the gruffness of his voice offset by the look of gratitude he directed at Roche. Leaning out from the overhang, he listened for a moment. "They've moved on, and so should we. The others will be waiting for us at the Cross."

  "The Cross?" asked Cane.

  "Houghton's Cross is the town we're heading for," said Emmerik. "And if we can get there by dawn, then we'll be able to rest."

  "How far?" asked Cane.

  "Four hours' walk, at a steady pace."

  "Night here is how long?"

  "This time of year, about eleven hours."

  "Okay," said Cane. "Morgan? Are you sure you're up to it?"

  Roche glanced at Cane. This was the first time he had used her first name; she supposed he had earned the right. "I'll manage," she said, "once this painkiller takes effect."

  Cane smiled. "And maybe we can rustle up something to eat on the way. Anything edible in these hills, Emmerik?"

  The Mbatan smiled. "Depends what you regard as edible," he said. "We should be able to find some vintu buds, and choss roots are closer to the surface at night. If you're really lucky we may be able to find some rapeworm-infected animal. It's a parasite indigenous to Sciacca. It paralyses the host and injects the eggs into the animal's gut. Two weeks later, the young emerge. If you get the larvae on about the eight or ninth day, the meat can be quite delicious ... "

  Roche listened with only half an ear as she performed brief stretching exercises to ease her aching muscles. Feeling confined under the shelf of rock, she stepped out to look at the stars. Despite a fine haze of lingering dust, it was a beautiful sight.

  The sun, although it had set, was still shining on the Soul. At the eastern horizon, the band of moonlets twinkled a dull silver; above her, it brightened considerably, coloured by the coppery light that filtered through the thin lens of the planet's atmosphere; to the west, it was brighter still, catching the full, unrefracted light of the sun. Occasionally, one of the larger moonlets would reflect the light, making it twinkle. Otherwise the belt was a solid band — a long, glowing cloud on fire with the colours of sunset.

  She didn't hear the conversation behind her cease, or the Mbatan move to her shoulder, until his voice boomed in her ear. "Heartwarming, isn't it?"

  She started slightly, then nodded. "Yes, very." When she turned to look at him, his face was beaming with an emotion almost like pride: pleased both by the sight and by her appreciation of it. "Small compensation, though, for being condemned here forever."

  "Perhaps." The Mbatan returned her gaze steadily, and she wondered what crime he had committed to warrant transportation. Murder, perhaps; he'd certainly disposed of the two Enforcers in the tunnel easily enough. Yet he seemed so trustworthy, so at peace with himself, that she found it hard to imagine him committing a crime of passion. Maybe he had learned temperance, not achieved it naturally.

  As though reading her mind, he said, "I was born here, you know."

  Roche stared at him. "But you — I assumed — "

  "My parents were transportees. I was conceived illegally, and should have been shipped back to Vasos when I came of age. Of course, I was an outcast by birth, and couldn't return, even if I wanted to." He shrugged his huge shoulders. "Regardless, I wouldn't have let them take me. This is my home." He paused again before saying, "I suppose it's hard for you to understand that anyone could feel genuine affection for a prison planet."

  "Well, yes," she said slowly. She did find it difficult to believe, even though the proof was standing before her. "Are there many like you?"

  "A few. We tend to stick together, away from the port, although we have our differences. You'll meet them soon enough."

  "I'll look forward to it."

  "Will you? I hope so. We need allies desperately."

  She shivered then, catching herself by surprise. Night had fallen rapidly, and the temperature with it. Her survival suit's heating system had not yet responded to the change.

  Emmerik noticed the small movement and nodded. "We should be going." He turned back to the others. "Veden, are you and Maii ready to move?"

  "Almost," replied the Eckandi, opening his eyes as though stirring from a deep sleep. Rising to his feet, he stretched his legs experimentally and rubbed his hands. "Give me a moment."

  The reave's words whispered through Roche's thoughts. Her voice might have belonged to the wind, it was so faint, but it was definitely there.

  "How long have you been ... ?" Roche stopped, unsure how to phrase the question.

  The Surin smiled and turned to the Mbatan.

  The burly man nodded awkwardly. "Thank you. I hope you will forgive me for the way I mistreated you."

 

  The Mbatan grinned, although the tone underlying her words was ominous. "I can believe it. Veden has warned me that you're not to be underestimated."

 

  "Then here's to the former." Emmerik slapped his hands together. "And to our journey. We still have far to travel before we can resolve our differences. I think we should get moving."

  the Surin purred, then fell silent with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting.

  "So let's go," Cane said. "Do you want me to lead the way again, Emmerik?"

  The Mbatan shook his head. "No, I'll lead. You can take the rear, or wherever you feel most useful. I'll leave it up to you. Just keep your eyes and ears peeled. They won't be far away." He glanced at the ring of faces surrounding him. "That goes for all of you."

  "Understood. Whether we like this or not," Roche said, deliberately catching Veden's steely eye, "we're in it together."

  * * * *

  The night deepened with unnerving speed. The only light came from the Soul and its constantly changing colours. The last dregs of the dust storm gusted through the valleys and ravines of the foothills like short-lived ghosts, robbing warmth and occasionally blinding them. Roche quickly learned to anticipate their arrival, as Emmerik did, by the distinctive whistle each gust made, and bunched closer to the others to prevent losing them.

  Conversation was hesitant, confined mainly to Emmerik's infrequent lectures on the vagaries of the weather. Dust storms had been known to last for days at this time of the year. Although the foothills were catchments, with a rudimentary vegetation and a small amount of insect life, the moisture-stealing wind made life difficult even for the hardiest of species.

  Roche listened to him with half an ear, expending the remainder of her concentration on her surroundings. Occasionally flyers bu
zzed overhead, scanning the area, and a couple of times she even noticed the distant flicker of lights lower in the hills. Enforcers, Emmerik had told them, searching for evidence of their passage. Pursuit was never far behind, it seemed, and constantly at the forefront of her mind. She swore to herself, and to her distant superiors, that she would not let herself be captured.

  That she was trapped on a prison planet many light-years from her destination with, as yet, no concrete plan to reach a communicator didn't deter her. There had to be some way left to complete her mission. The Box was too important to be allowed to fall into Dato hands.

  The others, with the possible exception of Cane, seemed to share her tight-lipped determination. Veden kept to himself, his expression stony and unapproachable. Maii walked with a stubborn independence, as though the time spent severed from her secondhand senses had humiliated her and left her needing to prove her abilities. Emmerik plodded steadily onward with the sure footing of someone who knew his way well.

  Cane just walked, silent and pensive, taking in everything around him.

  After an hour or so, the foothills steepened into a mountainside with paths that doglegged through crevasses and gullies. Roche's side and shoulder began to ache again, but she didn't allow herself the luxury of complaint. She simply bit down on the pain and kept walking.

  Then, after three hours, a warning from Maii:

  The reave's words were cut with urgency.

  "How near?" asked Emmerik, keeping his voice low.

  Maii replied.

  "Very well." The Mbatan scanned their surroundings. "Over there — in that small niche. We'll rest there."

  They did so, squeezing awkwardly into the narrow split in the rock. Something crawled across Roche's hand, but had disappeared by the time she reached down to brush it away.

  "Wait here," Emmerik said when they were settled. "I'll go look around." Cane followed him out of the niche, moving, Roche noted, with all the soundless grace of the silver dust-moths she had chased as a child on Ascensio.

  Roche leaned into the rock and breathed deeply, cautiously, feeling the pain in her ribs but thinking through it, trying to negate it by willpower alone. Years of advanced medicine had undermined her basic survival training, however; the twinge in her bones refused to fade. At home, or on almost any other civilised planet in the galaxy, relief would have been moments away under the care of an automated medkit. She was slowly learning that, on Sciacca's World, access to such fundamental medical treatment would have been a luxury.

  She wondered how Emmerik could stand it.

  said the Surin suddenly.

  Roche glanced at the Surin's blindfolded, unreadable face. She found it ironic that one who could appear so closed, so isolated from the viewpoint of others, could have such intimate access to her thoughts.

  asked the reave unexpectedly.

  "No, I — "

 

  Roche gritted her teeth. She knew it was nothing more than her personal aversion to epsense that had made her react badly to the Surin, nothing to do with the girl herself.

  said Maii.

  "Because you do have control. It's not like any other sense. And I — I guess I find the power unnerving."

  The Surin moved closer in the confined space.

  "You're wrong — "

 

  Before she could answer, Maii had entered her mind and filled it with images:

  A Surin woman with pendulous breasts bent over her, touching her, pleasing her, in a town called Erojen on an outpost far from the heart of the Surin domain, where outriders and social outcasts came for shelter, where those on the edge of society sought succor, where the normal could find what the rest of the Caste rejected — where anything that had a price could be bought. Yet somehow, in the squalor and perjury, was a strange dignity, a perverse pride, and dreams too, of betterment, profit, and sometimes, revenge ...

  ... a place of passion, of vivid memories ...

  ... a Surin adult taking her hand and leading her from her mother, her tears staining the front of her white smock, the world seeming so large and awful everywhere she looked, through ten kilometres in a jeep to the sanctuary, then the soft snick of the lock to her room sealing her in ...

  ... in the hospital ...

  ... learning to use the implants, with their gentle, cajoling voices, learning to avoid the discipline if she somehow got it wrong, learning to know what the doctor wanted in advance and what the treatment involved (if not what it meant), learning not to be afraid (or at least bottling it up where no one else would see it, where not even she could feel it, unless she wanted to), learning to forget what she had been, to concentrate on the now ...

  ... feeling the sharp sting of the needle, feeling the voice of the doctor vibrating in the electric tingle of the implant (rather than hearing it pounding on her now-sensitive ears), feeling darkness creep over her from her toes up, feeling nothing in the end but an echo of the fear, and then feeling nothing at all for a very, very long (and yet somehow timeless) single moment ...

  ... then ... awakening to nothing.

  Her higher senses — visual and aural, not the primal, animal senses of touch, taste, and smell — were gone, as was her ability to talk. The implant could still communicate with her, but it did so reluctantly, to quell her overwhelming panic, and then only via the bones in her skull, tapping out words of instruction and guidance into the outer layers of her brain itself. It monitored her every neuron, testing, probing, rearranging, rebuilding, using the tissues that had once belonged to her severed senses to rebuild a new sense, a new ability, one that (it said) would make her more valuable than anyone else on the planet.

  She was the first successful outcome of a new procedure, one that could replicate in months what years of training could only hope to achieve. A procedure that was both illegal and immoral — in that it could only succeed when applied to children in their prepubescent years — but one that had the potential to increase her worth by millions after one simple operation.

  All this, and more, she learned from the doctor in the spectacular moment her mind first opened — when, effortlessly, she reached into him with an invisible hand, searching, feeling, sensing, and leaving nothing but a burned-out ruin in her wake.

  She was a reave. And she had been made that way.

  It took time — and practice — to come to terms with this wondrous new ability of hers. And in a way it was perhaps fortunate for her that of every ten subjects she practiced upon, nine of them died. Had the doctor lived, and the process been completely successful, who knew what might have happened to her, to whom she might have been sold?

  Even as her control improved — and she came to realise that the years of training endured by naturally occurring psychics were not necessary so much to develop the power, but to control it when it finally appeared — she understood that they would never use the process again. Not only had much of the theory gone with the doctor, but the risks were too great — the risk of creating a monster, of creating a failure, of being caught. Of creating another her, whom they would have to get rid of somehow, without her realising it.

  So she escaped. And entered the real world. And came to realise that what she had was even less of a gift than she had thought.

  It wasn't sight — not sight as she had once known it, but an impression of sight, sight with all the baggage. Someone saw a knife and thought
of a lost lover; buildings evoked memories of people long dead, of past events that had no relevance to her, the observer. Sounds were even worse, bringing unwanted impressions of voices, songs, screams, and sighs. Her world was secondhand, passing through the filters of other peoples' minds and emerging tainted rather than purified. She began to lose her own voice in the relentless ambience of echoes, overwhelmed by a world full of other peoples' thoughts.

  But she maintained, grew bolder, travelled ...

  ... received guidance from a bonded reave on Fal-Soma, many light-years from home ...

  ... worked ...

  ... and ...

  ... returned with no thoughts left for herself. Not for a long while. All she saw — through her own eyes, her own sense of touch — was the orange-grey shelf of rock before her and the grit of dust on her fingertips.

  Roche. Not Maii, the child sold, the experimental subject, the wanderer — the young Surin woman sitting opposite her, her mind elsewhere, far away and unreadable — whom she had been for an instant. Not Maii, not anymore.

  All Roche felt was herself.

  When Emmerik returned, he was pale-faced behind his beard. Cane followed, as soft and as silent as the Mbatan's shadow, yet full of the same vitality Roche had glimpsed earlier.

  "Did you find them?" asked Veden.

  Emmerik glanced at Cane and did not reply immediately.

  "We found them," said Emmerik softly.

  "And?" Veden prompted.

  Maii said.

  "We should keep moving," said the Mbatan, shifting his pack awkwardly, impatiently. "More could be following, and the Cross isn't far away now."

  "Good." Veden was on his feet before Emmerik had finished speaking. "We've wasted enough time for one night."

  In a wordless silence broken only by the crunch of their footfalls, they filed out of the niche and headed up the path.

  8

  Sciacca's World