by Kate Elliott
“No,” a woman was saying—that was Dr. Hierakis, “Tess is not here. I received no message. Nothing. The scheduled shuttle came as usual, though not all the equipment I expected arrived on that flight.”
They waited long minutes; then the reply: “Anything else?” That was Soerensen.
From the same pickup as the doctor came Marco Burckhardt’s voice. “There was one discrepancy. Karima?”
The technician clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, activating her voice pickup. With her left hand, she pulled up a new screen, data, and a graph. “I ran back every slightest bit of tape from the Oshaki’s visit, from the moment it came into orbit until it left again. We do have a trace of the cargo shuttle leaving the Oshaki, and the record of its landing on the island. Considerably more time elapsed from leaving the ship until landing than was necessary for the distance traveled, and there were no atmospheric conditions to warrant the delay.”
A long delay. “Any ideas?”
“No trace.” Karima stared at the data from the shuttle’s flight. “As well as I could trace the flight pattern, it conformed to the default route, although given where it detached from the Oshaki, one could model any number of north-continent landing points given their usual flight patterns.”
“And they are so damned efficient,” said Dr. Hierakis. “Always the shortest line between two points. It’s the national religion, I think. It must have been deliberate.”
Delay. “Karima, any indications of unauthorized landing? Has the station picked up any planetside communications?”
“None. Off here.” She clicked off her pickup and concentrated on scrambling.
“Which doesn’t say a hell of a lot,” said Marco.
“Thank you, Karima. I’ll want a model of the most likely interim landing points if the shuttle did indeed make an unauthorized landing. It’s true, we’ve suspected Chapalii incursions in the past but never been able to prove anything. Damned chameleons. Marco, you were talking before about taking ship northward, up the north coast and into the inland sea.”
“Yes. I haven’t explored that way yet.”
“Make an itinerary that can overlap with points on Karima’s model. Then hold tight. I’ll be back to you. Cara, wasn’t it the Keinaba trading consortium that the medical establishment first worked with on the aging breakthrough?”
“Yes, in fact, it was. Why do you mention that?”
Marco made some noise, but not speech.
“I’ve got a cat and mouse up here. Echido is clearly acting as emissary for his family, but he’s being very circumspect. They want something, something very delicate.”
“Not just transport rights to Tau?” Marco asked.
“Something much deeper. Something linked all the way back to Chapal, and possibly to the emperor himself.”
“Do you want me to come back?” asked Marco.
“Not yet. Echido speaks Anglais.”
Marco whistled.
Dr. Hierakis said, “Damned right they want something badly if he’s bothered to learn human talk.”
Even Karima paused for an instant in her scrambling, astounded by the thought of a Chapalii not of the serving ranks speaking Anglais.
“Keep searching. No further transmissions until I get word from Suzanne. Soerensen off.”
Karima spread a burst of static over the Odys line and shut it down. “What do you think, Marco?” asked Dr. Hierakis, and then Karima shut down the Jeds line as well and went back to the trace of the cargo shuttle, running the pattern again and again.
Crawling out of her tent in the morning, Tess was first distracted by the smell of food cooking, and then by the acute fear that everyone knew about her and Fedya. But she heard no whispered comments. Fedya passed her as she saddled her remount, but he merely smiled quickly and went on. Beyond, the short grass on the sacred hill shone white under the early sun. The standing stone hulked black against the pale blue of the morning sky. If Bakhtiian had seen anything after leaving her the night before, he showed no sign of it now, eating his stew with relish and chatting and laughing with Niko and Josef and Tasha. The Chapalii stewards rolled up and folded their tents under Rakii’s supervision. Ishii reclined on the ground while Garii wrote laboriously with a stylus to Ishii’s dictation. She was too far away to hear what they were saying, and this morning she could not summon up the stubbornness to break in on their business.
“Good morning, Tess.” Yuri led his saddled horse up to her. “Have you eaten already?”
“Yuri.” She folded her arms, considering him, as she recalled what Bakhtiian had said the night before. Yuri raised his eyebrows questioningly. “Have you ever repeated things I’ve said to you to Bakhtiian?”
Yuri flushed, but he did not look away from her. “The welfare of the jaran must be my first consideration. Surely you understand that.”
“But if you told him things I said in confidence, things I might otherwise not have said—”
“Gods! You don’t think I’ve repeated anything…intimate that you said to me? Violated a sister’s confidence!” He looked disgusted. “You’d think that of me?”
She laughed, and Yuri laughed with her. His flush faded. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. Of course you didn’t.”
“It’s good to be stupid now and again. It isn’t healthy to be right all the time. That’s why I worry about Ilya.”
“Easy enough. We’ll have a contest to see who can catch him out first.”
“What will be the prize?”
“Satisfaction, Yuri. Pure satisfaction.”
“Tess! You’re wicked!”
“No, merely practical. He sets himself too high, our Bakhtiian.” And then, because she had been thinking about it all morning, because she didn’t want anyone to know but had to tell someone, she hesitated. “There’s something else. A secret.” She crouched down. Following her lead, he knelt beside her, so close their sleeves and thighs brushed. The horses grazed placidly behind them. He put his hand to her knee. “About Fedya.” Her voice slipped to a murmur.
“Tess! You didn’t. You did! Hah!”
“Shh! Yuri!”
He lifted one hand to yank playfully at her braid. “By the gods, we’ll make you jaran yet. Sonia said we would.”
“Did she? When was this?”
An approaching horse interrupted them. “We are leaving,” said Bakhtiian, far above them, his face and hair framed by the sky. Tess and Yuri stood hastily, brushing off their clothing. They exchanged furtive looks, stifled giggles, and Tess went with Bakhtiian.
Much later, they paused to water the horses.
“They had a light,” said Bakhtiian. “Neither a torch or a candle. Can you explain this?”
“No,” said Tess truthfully, meeting his gaze.
“I think they were worshiping the stone, or its god. I couldn’t make out their rituals. It was too dark.” An animal rustled through the grass. “I wouldn’t care to be a god confined in a rock. Do you know if that is what they worship?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that people worship many strange things in many strange ways. There is a people in my land—”
“In Jeds?”
“No, in the land overseas where I studied. They worship their god by abstaining from all earthly pleasures.”
“All of them?” Bakhtiian looked like a boy being told a tale he did not believe but could not disbelieve. “Wouldn’t they starve, or die of thirst?”
Tess looked away to hide her smile. “They eat and drink enough to stay alive, of course.”
“Of course. Undoubtedly.” He looked at her, eyes widening. Tess grinned. “You don’t mean to say they don’t—By the gods, what insanity.”
“No.” She blinked, straight-faced. “They are filled with the passion of God’s divinity.”
“But how tedious.” They both laughed and, quite suddenly, he blushed and looked away from her. They rode on, but later he demanded that she explain how such a religion could exist after one generati
on.
Two days and four days and six and eight, and then, to vary it, she counted in threes: three days and six days and nine and twelve. It grew warmer and windy. The Chapalii remained polite, and she left them alone, for the moment. They set up their tents every night and packed them up at dawn, all as they had done before, but now the stewards occasionally unbent so far as to gamble with the riders: they taught each other a few simple games and played for ridiculous stakes—beads, needles, necklaces, trinkets. Tess could not see that one or the other ever had the advantage. However technologically superior the Chapalii might be, in these gambling games wit and luck were all that counted. Niko learned how to say ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ and ‘the weather is fine today’ in formal Chapalii, but when Garii requested that he be allowed to give Sibirin further lessons, Ishii refused, just as he refused when Garii asked to be allowed to scout with Bakhtiian and Tess.
And all the Chapalii came to listen when, for ten evenings running, Fedya sang for them the long epic tale of the first dyan Yuri Sakhalin and his feud with the demons of the hills and his love for the sun’s daughter.
Tess now spoke khush with little hesitation. To relieve the monotony, Kirill pretended to be in love with her, which made everyone laugh; even the Chapalii could appreciate the humor of frustrated passion. Tess marveled that no one suspected her and Fedya. Yuri said simply, “Why should they look? Who would care, anyway?”
Bakhtiian told her more ancient stories: the coming of the people to the plains; the birth of the moon and the sun and the clouds and the wind. How mother sun and father wind gave birth to daughter earth and brother sky, to sister tent and son river. How aunt cloud and uncle moon gave birth to cousin grass and cousin rain. And they discussed Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.
Tess wondered what Charles thought he was doing. She remembered his last visit to Earth, five years ago—and wasn’t it five years ago that Bakhtiian claimed to have first met the Chapalii? She had been eighteen, Charles fifty-eight, looking no older than Bakhtiian did now. She took him to her favorite outdoor cafe; it was summer in Prague, hot, but he drank coffee so she did as well, though she had never liked its bitter taste, though she wanted something cool. He sat across from her at the little cafe table, well-groomed, neatly dressed. She tended toward a diffident, sloppy casualness, and she sat warily, nervous, wondering if anyone would recognize them, dreading that always. Charles simply held his cup and mused, looking supremely relaxed. Though she was his only sister, though her first memory was of him taking her for a flitter ride, still she could never read past his surface, know his thoughts, tell his fears or his doubts, if indeed he had any. He spoke that day of his work in the Delta Pavonis system, of his efforts to keep Rhui preserved.
“I’ve seen records of too many civilizations ruined because a stronger, more forceful civilization swept in and destroyed them. Sometimes inadvertently. Sometimes on purpose. It’s easy enough for us to say that the Rhuian natives are primitive, that it is our duty to raise them up to our level. But without respect for what they are, we will destroy them. That’s the Chapaliian way, the paternalistic way they treat all of their client states. Like us.” His voice was calm and serious, never intense or passionate, but always forceful. “When the Chapalii modernized Odys, they completely wiped out the old indigenous culture. Accidentally, of course. A by-product of civilization. All of the indigenes died.”
“Aren’t there some onasiu left?” she asked, eager to show off her knowledge.
“In arcologies. That doesn’t count.”
“No. No, of course not.” She flushed and took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee to cover it.
“I won’t let that happen to Rhui. Odys can remain my proper ducal capital, as the Office of Protocol once reminded me was necessary to a duke—” His grin was ironic. “—of my station.” His sand-colored beard, trimmed almost to a point at the chin, emphasized the hollows of his cheeks. “How can I complain?”
“You’re still alive,” Tess said, because she knew he liked her sardonic sense of humor.
He laughed. “Yes, and in such a beautiful, modern, expensive place. But I wonder what Odysian mythology was like. They had no moon. Imagine that. Sun for god, and only the light of the stars at night.” If one looked, this close, when he sat this still and in the glaring light of the summer sun, one could see faint lines at the corners of his gray-blue eyes. “How I wonder.”
Then, of course, a journalist had found them, and they had been forced to retreat from such a public stage. Or had that been the time the proprietor had hidden them in the kitchens and, when the media had been sent away on a false trail, ensconced them merrily at his tables once again? “Whatever I can do for the next rebellion, for the long haul,” the proprietor had said, and he was only half joking.
“But however much I loved the learning there,” Bakhtiian was saying, “I never thought to stay there.”
“To stay—in Jeds?” Tess stammered, caught out by her thoughts, unsure of what Bakhtiian had been saying before, of where this conversation had come from and where it was leading. They rode slowly, following the curve of the hills.
“There was too much to be done on the plains.”
“With the jaran?”
“A people poor in reputation, unknown. How strange that I never knew that until I went so far away, and the people whom I met on my travels did not know who I was or from whence I came. Not a soul knew of the jaran.” Watching him as he stared raptly out at the far horizon, at the sweep of grass and the soft curve of the land, Tess realized that however much Bakhtiian was like Charles in being a leader, he was utterly unlike him. Where Charles concealed his strength and his power, working quietly and in tiny steps, Bakhtiian radiated his. Where Charles masked his feelings so completely that no one, not even his sister, could read him, Bakhtiian projected all of his; even when you could not tell what he was thinking, you knew it was because he wanted you not to be able to tell what he was thinking.
“But they will know,” Bakhtiian said at last, slowly, imbuing each word with potency. “Soon we will be spoken of even in Jeds.” He glanced at her, gauging her reaction. “We are only now coming into our time of greatness.”
“Measured against—?” It came out before she thought, but of course he did not—could not—understand her meaning: that measured against the vast reach of the Chapalii Empire, against the slow progress of Charles’s plans, his campaign was trivial.
“How does one measure the good against the bad? My sister and her child died because of me. My parents died because of me. I know well enough that more of my people will die.”
Tess gazed at the horizon of green grass and blue sky, so like Earth and yet so unlike, a subtle shifting of color and shade. She felt abashed. Of course his campaign was not trivial, not to him. Not to the people who would die.
“But still you persist,” she said at last, thinking of Charles.
“Still.”
They rode on in silence.
That night at campfire Fedya persuaded Bakhtiian to sing. He was slightly embarrassed but not ill at ease. He sang without accompaniment. He had a clear baritone and he sang a man’s song: days of riding, little rest, the hope of a woman’s smile. He knew what suited his voice and kept to it. When he finished, he grinned and began another song. The men chuckled. This was a maiden’s song, and a man of the jaran who sang a maiden’s song did it to mock women, maidens in particular. He sang it well. Men laughed, wiping at their eyes. Tess hid her grin, glad she sat in the shadow.
“This is the night for the quiet ones to sing,” said Yuri, looking at her.
“Yuri, you don’t think I’m going to—”
“Of course, you must sing for us.”
“Good Lord.” Tess frowned at Yuri. “You’ll be sorry for this.” She stood up. “This is the only song in khush that Yuri has taught me,” she lied. It was a man’s song, about none of the women wanting to go off with him. She sang it straight-faced, managing to finish
that way despite the laughter that erupted all around the fire.
“By the gods,” said Yuri proudly, “you sang that well. You should sing more often.”
“You should teach me suitable songs.” She sat down.
Niko came over to them and crouched, still chuckling. “You are undoubtedly gifted, child. But I’m surprised at Yuri.”
“At me?”
“At you, Yurinya. To teach a woman such a song—” He clucked disapprovingly. “Such indelicacy in a youth shocks me.”
“But, Niko, I have four sisters.”
“That is true,” replied Niko sagely. “We cannot fight the gods, or women.” He and Yuri sighed together.
“Of course,” said Tess. “Blame it on the women.” She glanced up to find Bakhtiian standing behind Niko. He caught Tess’s eye, and he smiled. If it had not been so dark, she would have sworn he winked. “I suppose next you’ll be saying that Sonia taught you that song and encouraged you to teach it to me.”
“But she did,” Yuri said guilelessly.
Tess laughed, and Yuri, who could never help but laugh with her, covered his face with his hands.
Niko contrived to look offended for a moment. “You see, I am vindicated.”
Smiling, Bakhtiian crouched down between Niko and Tess. “I would be honored, Cousin, if you would agree to teach me some of the songs you know, from Jeds and other lands.”
Tess caught in her breath, but she smiled at him. “Only if you will teach me jaran songs.”
For an instant, she thought he drew back slightly, but then he shrugged and relaxed. “That could be arranged.”