by Blaze Ward
A few more times, Henri thought to himself with a smile, and that phrase might qualify as a game. Certainly a tease that would stay with them for years.
Years?
Henri blinked.
Yes. Years.
He leaned close and kissed her. And then kissed her again because he could. And once more for luck.
“You promised not to laugh,” he began.
“I’m not laughing,” she said with a grin. “I just don’t want to hit anything out here.”
Henri stood back up and held out his hands wide to encompass the whole universe. “There’s nothing there, woman. Just a great emptiness sitting in the middle of an even greater darkness, itself mightier than the Story Road.”
She grabbed his shirt to pull him back down into kissing range, and then shut him up with a kiss.
“And you,” she said with a sarcastic tilt to her head, “have just told me that there is a star out here, hidden in a gas cloud, waiting for someone to run into it, mister.”
He laughed. “Six years that–a–way, wench,” he cried with a finger outstretched. “Destiny.”
She rolled her eyes at him and concentrated on her navigation console, aligning everything just right for the next jump.
She fixed him with a look when she was done, but remained silent, offering him one last opportunity to change his mind.
Henri leaned over her shoulder and pushed the big red button that cast them out of the universe.
“How long?” he asked her, with another kiss thrown in, just in case.
She shrugged. “Depends on how accurate you were, Henri Baudin. Two hundred ten, maybe two hundred twenty minutes. Less if the safety interlocks kick us out earlier.”
“Time to fool around?” he asked her with a leer.
“Maybe if I get lunch first,” she retorted as she rose. “Don’t you ever get tired of fooling around?”
He grabbed her by the shoulders tenderly and stared into her eyes. “Do you want me to get tired of you?”
She paused, and then wrapped her arms around him in a great, fierce hug. “Never.”
Ξ
At least, he thought, the gravplates controls were getting a good workout, too. It was amazing the things you could accomplish in ten percent gravity.
Henri felt three meters tall. And bulletproof. And kinda awesome.
This was a good way to Tuesday.
On the console in front of Katayoun, a clock–timer slowly made its way to zero.
As they dropped back into real space, the holographic projector remained stubbornly dark.
A moment later, a single light appeared.
Alone in the darkness
Even the color was right.
“How far out?” he whispered, afraid to speak louder.
She leaned over her controls for a few moments, sliding and spinning and pushing as she digested all the information being presented.
“About fifty A.U.,” she whispered back. “We appear to be about forty degrees above the ecliptic, inside any Oort Cloud. Wow. How did you know?”
Henri held his breath for a second.
“She told me,” he said finally.
“Suvi?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, that about summed it up.
“And there is an inhabited planet there?” she continued.
“Close in,” Henri replied. “Right at the inner habitability edge.”
“Are you sure?” she said. She stopped herself and laughed.
“Trust me,” he said.
He reached into the projection and touched a spot in the hollow. “Jump us here.”
Ξ
It was as he dreamed.
A single blue–gray orb like a vast tapestry below them.
The storm had risen in the south and was tumbling slowly northward along a long stretch of coastline as they raced overhead. A great, terrible eye looked up at them from the center of the storm, dark with menace amidst a sea of white clouds.
Over on their right, well above as they rode in orbit, the two moons, oddly crescented as they walked their careful path around the mother. The larger one a chalky white in the nearby sun’s warm light. The smaller, following like a happy pet, was more golden, a drop of sunshine made whole, a bead of amber dropped into cold water and frozen into perfect regularity, marred only by a variety of pocks and craters.
The darkness about them was barely interrupted, faint stars seen through black gauze.
Henri shivered at the prospect of a night under such a canopy. There had been whole nights he had spent practicing his art for Bayonne’s moon and the stars.
Where was the wonder, the dreaming?
It would be a boring world. Probably farmers. To bed when the sun set. Rise when the false dawn harkened. Odd festivals celebrating the arc of the full moons.
But no poetry. No worship of the night mother.
Still, he had been brought here for a purpose.
It remained to be seen what his destiny was, but he knew it only began on the world below him.
“Henri?” a voice intruded.
He blinked and came back to the present tense.
“Huh?”
That was about as coherent as he felt at this moment.
“I said, you need to hear this,” Katayoun apparently repeated.
“Hear what?” Maybe he needed more caffeine. Or actual sleep, the next time they made it into bed. He smiled.
Maybe not.
She removed the earpiece she had been listening too.
“I’m picking up a signal from below,” she continued. “We just came over their horizon.”
He looked at the display. That great storm was already a quarter turn away. The ocean below had turned into land broken by water, too small to be called continents, but too large for islands. They would be a people of the sea.
It was dark down there. That terrible night where the farmers would sleep and the chickens would lurk in ambush to ruin a good sleeping–in.
He saw lights.
Lights?
At least four cities down there with artificial light, the kind you found in cities that weren’t sleeping. Perhaps cities was too strong a word. They weren’t the great sprawls of Pohang or Saxon, visible like art from orbit.
Just four pearls, nestled on interior coastlines, well sheltered from the sorts of monster storms that would probably punish the ocean–facing coasts.
Katayoun leaned over and pushed a button on her console.
The cabin filled with music. Harsh, almost disturbing, but music.
“What is that?” she asked, her voice nervous.
Henri closed his eyes and sniffed the air. Somehow, that had always made his ears sharper, as if he could smell the notes flying through the air, like they sometimes did in a children’s cartoon.
“You might call it a folk orchestra,” he said after a bit. “The drums are obvious. That wailing horn is a kind of bagpipe. Those strings are a gadulka.”
She looked at him blankly.
He sighed. Nobody got musicians. Except other musicians. And they were crazy too.
“People,” he said. “Civilized folk, regardless of how weird the music sounds. Technological, if they have radio powerful enough to play music we can hear in orbit. Not too technological, or we would see satellites and stations up here.”
“Do they know the universe is out there?” she asked, cutting to the very heart of his fears.
“In my dream, they do,” he replied quietly.
“Some days, Henri Baudin, you frighten me.”
“Because I dream?”
“Because you’re right.”
Fifteen
It was morning when they landed. A wonderfully bright morning that felt like spring, although Henri had no idea what the season might be on a brand new planet. The air had that raw tang of salt water as they cracked the hatches and let the daylight in.
They had parked the yacht on a broad field that could, he supp
osed, be called a starport, by some inventive stretch of the imagination.
There was an obviously–dead space–ship, a freighter of some sort, sitting in one corner, engines and panels removed. Next to it, a smaller vessel, a crude–looking, boxy affair obviously designed to land rough and disgorge cargo without advanced machinery, possibly onto the bed of a horse–drawn wagon. Weeds had grown up, threatening the landing struts in places.
Aquitaine looked like a sleek racing dog, or a hunting breed like a saluki, next to a mangy street mutt.
The city they had overflown to get here had been far more interesting than he had expected, though. The entire waterfront side was filled with docks and marinas, backed onto warehouses and factories, with the rest of the city trailing inland like a wave petering out as it climbed to higher ground.
A number of houses had caught Henri’s eye as well. Unlike the reds and browns he was used to back home, many of these were blue. Not painted, but blue wood cut and stained. A blue wood he knew well. It still haunted him, but he suspected he knew whence it came now.
He and Katayoun had debated the next step after landing. There had been no port authority challenge on the usual radio channels.
Just music.
They had finally just overflown the city low enough to be seen, spotted the field, and set down.
Now, they had hung out a tarp from the side of the ship and set up a table and two chairs underneath while they enjoyed some tea and waited. Nyange was carefully set to one side, within reach, but otherwise out of the way.
The wait would not be long.
Already, Henri could see several vehicles trundling along a sparsely–populated gravel road from the city to this field, trailing a fog of blue–ish exhaust from their engines. Henri guessed internal combustion.
Early mass industrialization.
And yet, he could see at least two honest–to–Creator starships from where he sat, not counting the one that had brought him thus.
Him and a single board of instrument–grade wood. He couldn’t forget that. He knew in his soul it had come from here.
This world was a secret someone had wanted to keep. Maybe it was time for that secret to be over.
And, because it was a hostile world with potentially dangerous people or wildlife, Katayoun had insisted on being armed. Henri had insisted that she keep it hidden, but he was happy to have her paranoia close at hand, especially given the nearly–dozen vehicles pulling onto the grass at the far end of the field.
You never knew.
But he had destiny on his side.
The vehicles pulled to a stop and folks got out. Far enough back as to be respectful. Not so far that people had to walk a great distance to talk.
Polite.
He could work with that.
He was a Bard, after all.
Henri reached down and touched Nyange’s case, mostly for luck.
Katayoun made a show of sipping her tea.
The crowd over there was finally sorting itself out.
Henri guessed there were maybe two score people, possibly three if a few had stayed behind in vehicles.
They weren’t a mob. Just a group of people, maybe a touch nervous, certainly minding their P’s and Q’s.
One man emerged as the group stopped ten meters away.
Henri and Katayoun rose to greet him, standing as he was, perhaps a whole meter in front of the rest.
Henri guessed him to be the local official charged with First Contact. He had that air of a Burgher about him. Black shoes that looked uncomfortable. Slacks, tunic, neckpiece, and jacket that was obviously the sort of uncomfortable thing businessmen inflicted on each other in the name of fashion. Even a cute hat made from black fur, somewhere between a homburg and a bowler.
He appeared to be in his fourth or seventh decade, depending on the state of health technology on this world. Pudgy in that way an active man gets when he goes and sits behind a desk too much. Wheezy and a bit nervous. Well–meaning, but on the edge of panic.
Henri smiled nicely to try to put him at ease.
The man pointed at Katayoun politely and rumbled something long and involved.
It sounded familiar. To forestall Katayoun’s response, whatever it might be, Henri took a half step forward.
“I’m sorry,” he said clearly, “but I can’t understand you.”
For good measure, he repeated himself in a couple of other languages that sounded similar.
One downside to having once had space travel on a truly epic scale, followed by the Great Collapse, was that there had been seven great Trade Tongues, once upon a time, to supplement the hundreds of regional languages and dialects people had brought into space with them. Millennia of isolation had not helped narrow things down.
The man repeated himself slowly, apparently relaxing at Henri’s tone.
“Is she the Scheherazade?” he asked, still politely indicating Katayoun with one hand.
Bulgarian. Vaguely. At least a kissing cousin of it. That made sense, considering the gadulka and the bagpipes he had heard during the landing approach.
Henri smiled, confused, while he digested the man’s sentence, certain he had missed something.
“The Scheherazade?” he repeated.
The man’s face was equally confused. “Are you not the ones foretold? Is this not the end of the darkness?”
Henri felt his face squint in a way he could not prevent.
And then his eyes tripled in size.
Foretold?
His back–brain finally parsed the Bulgarian words culturally, instead of literally.
The Scheherazade. They had been told to await a traveler. A story–teller.
A Bard.
Henri looked out over the crowd with a watchful eye, even as he smiled at the people waiting.
There.
A flash of strawberry blond vanishing behind a panel truck.
He could chase her, but she would be gone. He had not made that mistake in years.
She was the morning dew, fool’s gold. But he was ever a fool.
Henri reached down and lifted Nyange’s case to rest it on the table.
The crowd gasped audibly as he pulled forth his great love and drew her to his chin.
He pointed the scroll at Katayoun and encompassed the entire world with his look.
“She is not the Scheherazade, come to lead you from the darkness,” he said, voice ringing loud enough to be heard clear in the back, perhaps by someone resting by the side of a panel truck.
“I am.”
Henri drew the bow back across the strings, the opening notes to The Story Road.
Read The Librarian, one of the earlier Suvi stories.
Suvi survived for thousands of years, waiting for humans to return.
The salvager Doyle works hard to make a buck, with a healthy fear of sentient robots.
Can they overcome their distrust and fears? Is the galaxy ready for them to unleash the future?
Read The Science Officer, one of the earlier Suvi stories.
When pirates commandeer Javier’s starship, they give him a choice: corpse, slave, or volunteer.
Javier chooses to survive, as well as keep his honor and his sanity intact.
However, when things get rough, will he save the pirates from someone even worse?
This is Volume 1 of The Science Officer. Find the continuing stories of Javier Aritza in The Mind Field.
About the Author
Blaze Ward writes science fiction in the Alexandria Station universe as well as The Collective. He also write fantasy stories with several characters and series, from an alternate Rome to epic high fantasy in the desert. You can find out more at his website www.blazeward.com, as well as Facebook, Goodreads, and other places.
Blaze’s works are available as ebooks, paper, and audio, and can be found at a variety of online vendors (Kobo, Amazon, and others). His newsletter comes out quarterly, and you can also follow his blog on his website. He really enjoys interactin
g with fans, and looks forward to any and all questions—even ones about his books!
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Table of Contents
The Story Road
Part One: BAYONNE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part Two: BALLARD
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Part Three: AQUITAINE
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
About the Author
About Knotted Road Press