A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  The cottage itself was a rustic, sprawling building, built of wood and painted white, that floated like a low cloud on the brow of the mountain, against the forest’s edge. At the moment, except for Arekhon himself, it was deserted. Elaeli was in the city, entertaining and being entertained by the Provost of Elicond; and it was better for everybody’s peace of mind if her chief of domestic security—who was not, officially, her lover—stayed away until the Provost had finished his business and gone home.

  As a domestic arrangement it was less than ideal, but far better than nothing at all. They’d had a little over ten years of it, by local reckoning. Arekhon tried to do the arithmetic for converting the passage of time into Eraasian measures, and gave up when he couldn’t remember the exact ratio of one planetary year to the other.

  At the moment, though, he was content. This world was fair, and this country house was fair, and here, when her business with the Provost was done, Elaeli would be joining him. For a little while, at least, they could pretend that nothing would ever change—though the time he’d had here with Elaeli would never be long enough, and the time he’d spent away from the homeworlds was far too long.

  But both times are the same, he thought. Like the Void, where all times are the same time …

  “ … and all places are the same place.”

  The words were Eraasian, but marked by a strong accent, as though the speaker had learned the language as an adult. Turning, Arekhon recognized the strange woman who had come to him in his dream of Demaizen Old Hall, displacing Iulan Vai and telling him that he would know her soon. One of the wooden floorboards creaked faintly as she stepped forward out of what might have been a shadow left over from the night.

  So she was real, then, and a Void-walker as well, one of the powerful Mages who could journey alone and unprotected through the no-time, no-place that lay beneath the physical universe. Garrod syn-Aigal had also been a Void-walker, earning the nickname “Explorer” because of the worlds he had journeyed to in that fashion, marking a way through the Void for the ships that would follow; for that reason, Arekhon was less startled by the manner of his visitor’s arrival than by the fact that she had spoken to him earlier in his dream.

  Seen in the unexpected flesh, she wasn’t tall—perhaps half a head less than Arekhon’s own moderate height, even in the sturdy boots that she wore with her white shirt and black trousers—but compact and trim with muscle. The staff she carried in her right hand was a cubit and a half of ebony, bound and ornamented with silver wire.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Llannat Hyfid,” she said. “I’m your last student.”

  “Llann—”He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar syllables. The words weren’t Eraasian, or any other language that he was aware of. That meant nothing, given that a Void-walker could be from anywhere, or any when. If such a one had deliberately sought him out, first in dreams and then in the flesh … he tried the name again, this time with better luck. “Llannat.”

  “If the name gives you trouble,” she said, “you can call me Maraganha instead. Some people find it easier on the tongue.”

  “Maraganha.” The name meant “from the forested place” in Eraasian, which told him something, at least, about his mysterious visitor—and as she had promised, its syllables were easier for him to say. But the woman herself remained an enigma. “I don’t know you. And I’ve never had a student.”

  “You were—you will be—quite a bit older then.”

  Arekhon shivered, even though the morning was warm. He remembered how it had felt to look upon Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen as a great Magelord in the vigorous prime of his life, and know that the same man would in time become the white-haired idiot the Circle had already left behind on Eraasi. The thought of Maraganha or anyone else looking at him in the same manner was profoundly disturbing.

  “I said something like that to my own teacher once,” he told her. “When Garrod came back through the Void to show the rest of us the way to Entibor. But there aren’t any Mages on this world, Maraganha. Only Adepts, and they’re a cold and solitary lot.”

  “It’s their way.” Maraganha came forward and took a seat in the other chair, the one that was usually Elaeli’s, and laid her ebony staff across her knees. “I was one of them, until it didn’t suit me any longer. My fault as much as theirs; I’ve known Mages who would do well in an Adepts’ Guildhouse—”

  “I’ve seen it happen,” Arekhon said. “It’s not for me.”

  “Here you are, though, as lonely as any Adept in the galaxy.”

  “None of it was my idea. I had a Circle once, but it’s broken and scattered across the interstellar gap.”

  “Scattered, maybe,” she said. “But not broken.”

  He shook his head in protest. “I don’t know that. How can you?”

  “My first teacher was called the Breaker of Circles. Believe me, I know all about these things.”

  He sat for a moment in silence, not looking at her, gazing out into the flower-scented dawning. Then he said, “I’m not sure I like my future very much, if it has people in it with names like that.”

  “It’s all part of the great working. Did you think that putting the galaxy back together was going to be a quick and easy job?”

  “If I ever thought so,” he answered, “it didn’t take me long to learn otherwise. And if that’s what you’re here for, you’ve come a long way to tell me something I already know.”

  “Well, I didn’t come here for the sake of sitting on your front porch and admiring the view,” she said, rather more sharply than before. “I’ve got forests at home that I can look at.”

  “Why, then?”

  “I dreamed about you last night for the first time in—let’s just say, for the first time in a long while—and when I woke up I had a feeling you were going to need my help. So I walked the Void until I found where you were waiting.”

  “That’s certainly clear,” he said. “Did you happen to see what kind of help I was going to need?”

  Maraganha shrugged. “It’s as clear as I can make it. And I’m afraid the universe didn’t bother to give me specific instructions.”

  “I don’t think anything scares you, etaze.” He gave her the title without thinking, and wasn’t surprised when she accepted it as her right. If Maraganha was a Void-walker, then she’d have to be the First of her Circle as well. For all her superficial friendliness and ease of manner, Arekhon knew that he was looking at one of the great Magelords—Garrod syn-Aigal’s equal and perhaps even more.

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. “When I was young, I was scared to death of everything, and scared of myself most of all. That’s the biggest part of what you taught me, in fact—to trust in what I knew and what I was.”

  “I’m glad that I was able to help. Or will be able to, as the case may be.” He shook his head. “If we’re going to keep on talking like this, we need better verbs.”

  “I can’t help you with the verbs,” she said. Then she looked at him straight on, and her voice had the same firmness and surety it had held in his dream. “But whatever else it is you’re planning to do—I can help you with that.”

  “My Circle,” he said. There was no chance, not after all this, that his dreams of late had been mere homesickness, born out of a wish that his life here with Elaeli could be something other than what necessity had given them. This was the great working, that he had pledged himself to finish when he was still the Third of Garrod’s Circle, and there was no escape from it. “I need to find the rest of my Circle on Entibor, and take them home.”

  It was the damned ship-mind again.

  Lenyat Irao—known to his cousins and most of his workaday associates as Len—watched in disgust as the display on the chart table flickered. Fire-on-the-Hilltops was an old ship, a one-man light-cargo carrier purchased secondhand from the sus-Radal after that fleet-family had upgraded all of their own vessels to the new style. Len had known she was obsolete on the day he bo
ught her, but that was how the game was played. New construction was for the star-lords, and everybody else took what was left over.

  Still, he’d expected the Fire to hold together long enough for him to finish paying for her. And it was starting to look like—absent a complete flush-and-renewal of the ship-mind’s quasi-organics—that wasn’t going to happen. Lately she’d been growing reluctant to interface with anybody’s charts but her own, and if that kept up, there went any hope of getting another decent contract.

  The display blinked on and off and on again one more time, then settled down. The false-color display took on a three-dimensional aspect, the orbital lanes in blue, the world in yellow, and the marker-buoy in white.

  “Finally,” Len said. “Took you long enough.”

  As usual, he addressed his ship not in the Hanilat-Eraasian that he’d learned in school, but in his milk tongue, the language of Eraasi’s antipodal subcontinent. The Irao had never intermarried with outsiders, and Len’s knife-blade nose and yellowish-hazel eyes would have passed without remark in the homeland that his family had left a hundred years ago.

  With the chart finally stabilized, he went to work setting up the Fire for emergence from the Void. The marker he’d asked for was a deep one, out at the farther limits of Eraasi’s normal-space travel lanes. He’d have a long crawl past the outer planets, doing it that way, but he wasn’t hauling perishable cargo and safety was better than speed.

  For a good enough contract, sure, he’d pop out of the Void close in over Eraasi, and risk having one of the big fleet-families take him for an unlawful intruder and respond with force. He’d gotten his latest contract through the sus-Dariv, and Fire-on-the-Hilltops was listed with their fleet for the duration of the current voyage, but that wouldn’t help much if a trigger-happy guardship captain decided not to bother with asking for his papers.

  All the Fire had aboard this time was mixed-lot bulk cargo: transport, not trade, most of it, and not big enough to warrant a fleet-family’s direct attention. Independents like Len handled the small jobs, and the urgent ones that couldn’t wait for a convoy or a fleet courier, but the star-lords would come down hard on any pilot they suspected of working without a contract—“in the grey,” as the slang term had it.

  “Hard times, old girl,” Len said to the Fire, as the ship-mind chewed its laborious way through the calculations for normal-space emergence. “Hard times. You and I, we were born too late.”

  There had been a time, not more than a generation or so ago, when a family working in the grey could gather enough ships (by trade or purchase or outright capture) to put a syn- or even a sus- in front of their name and have it stick. Len had daydreamed of it himself in his boyhood, back when he was the space-happy one among all the cousins. He’d pictured himself taking the family out of the groundside shipping and transportation business and into the stars, making them syn-Irao and star-lords and a fleet-family in Hanilat. Then he grew up, of course, and understood that those days were gone.

  He took the figures the ship-mind ground out for him and entered the series of commands that would pass them to the Fire’s navigational console. “Emergence in five,” he said, and keyed in the final sequence. There was only the ship-mind to hear him, but he’d learned to observe the formalities during his training days, when he’d served as hired crew aboard fleet-family ships.

  A little while later he felt the disquieting inner sensation of Void-emergence pass through him like an oily wave. The distinctive hum and vibration of the Fire’s passage changed in response. Even if he’d somehow managed to sleep through the emergence, he would have known, by the sound and by the feel of the ship around him, that Fire-on-the-Hilltops was moving through normal space.

  It was eight hours before he heard the distress signal. He had the Fire’s search-and-scan routines set to a tripwire sensitivity these days—a lowly contract-captain couldn’t be too careful. They repaid him this time with a clamoring alarm and, when he put the signal onto ship’s audio, a voice:

  “This is sus-Dariv’s Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms,” it said, and the synthesized clarity of its pitch and elocution raised up all the fine hairs on the back of Len’s neck. The only thing in space with a voice like that was a ship-mind, and if the ship-mind alone remained able to put out a signal, something very bad had happened aboard Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms “If you are receiving this transmission, know that we are in distress and call for aid. We beg of you, make all speed to our location at—” There followed a warbling noise that Len recognized as the Garden’s ship-mind transmitting its reference coordinates directly to the ship-mind of whatever vessel might be listening. Then there was a pause, and the message started all over again.

  Len hit the Transmit button on the Fire’s communications board. “Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms,” he said. “This is contract carrier Fire-on-the-Hilltops. Try to hold on—I’m coming as fast as I can.”

  He turned back to the navigation console. For once, the Fire’s ship-mind had behaved itself properly. The false-color display now included a flashing amber dot—the Garden’s reference coordinates. He contemplated the symbolic representation briefly, then checked the alphanumeric readout and tapped in his course-query. More numbers and letters came up in reply, and the false-color display shifted, then shifted again after a second query and a second response.

  After the third query, he said aloud, “I think you’ve got it this time, old girl.”

  The Fire’s ship-mind didn’t have an internal speaker. Instead, the alphanumeric display at the navigational console reset itself to zero, then said, THIS COURSE CONTRADICTS PREVIOUS EXPRESSED PREFERENCE FOR NORMAL SPACE RUNNING DURING ERAASI APPROACH.

  “That was then,” he said. “And this is now. I’m not going to drag my feet through normal space on my way to answer a distress call, and neither are you.”

  2:

  ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE

  Rain had fallen since before sunset on the grounds of the Hanilat Institute of Higher and Extended Schooling. No surprise there—the city was in the deep middle of the winter wet, and heavy, wind-driven rains came on schedule every afternoon.

  Today’s downpour had only intensified with the fall of night. Someone not familiar with the Institute’s paths and walkways might have gotten lost looking—as Kiefen Diasul was looking—for Quantret Hall. Quantret was built in the same old but not ancient style as most of the Institute’s other structures, and the buildings all had much the same size and outline in the wind-lashed dark. The sign near Quantret’s front entrance, set well back from the street and half-overgrown with night-blooming clingvine, was scarcely visible even in daylight.

  But Kief was no stranger to the Institute grounds. He had come to Hanilat as a young man scarcely out of his basic schooling, and had studied the stargazers’ disciplines at the Institute for more than a full hand of years; he had first trained as a Mage in the Institute’s own Circle. He remembered the fastest way across campus from the Ten Street transport stop to Quantret Hall: down the brick-paved Long Diagonal, around the side of the tall brick Thalassic Studies Building, then across Quantret’s back parking lot and down the three concrete steps to the little door that led directly to the sub-basement.

  The Circle had met in Quantret Lower Level B when Kief was a student, and according to his researches, it met there still. Esya syn-Faredol was the First now. She had been only an unranked Circle-Mage when he left. Well, so had he been, but he had gone to the Demaizen Circle after that, and she had not.

  The Institute’s Circle worked the eiran to promote safety and tranquility on campus, a low-key and not especially demanding task. Demaizen, on the other hand … Demaizen’s Mages had crossed the gap between the homeworlds and the rest of the galaxy, walking through the Void and marking a path for starship navigators to follow. That had taken a great working, paid for in blood and pain and lives. If the Circle here on campus had ever done such a working, neither tradition nor official record made any mention of the fact.


  There was a puddle of muddy water at the foot of the steps. Kief halted on the last step above the puddle, and set down his daypack on the wet concrete. Then he shed his long weather coat and draped it over the slick metal handrail. The Mage’s working robes that he’d been wearing underneath—and that had made his public transport ride a stuffy ordeal—tumbled free and fell loosely around him. He felt suddenly cooler, almost cold, and told himself that it was the result of taking off the sweltering coat.

  Kief bent and unfastened his daypack. Inside the pack lay an ordinary ship-combat hardmask, done up in smoky grey plastic and black enamel. He took out the mask and put it on.

  The harsh glare of the incandescent lamp over Quantret Hall’s rear basement entrance dimmed to a muted glow. Kief drew in a long breath of satisfaction between his teeth. The hardmask had been a matter of practical necessity at first. In the work he and his Circle did for Natelth sus-Peledaen, it was not always convenient for his face to be seen and recognized. Only later had he become aware of the other advantage that the mask conferred: In the diminished light, the silver threads of the eiran stood out clearly, a dense network of them, looping and interweaving in a pattern as familiar to him as the lines on his own palm.

  Garrod’s working. The last, great working of the Demaizen Circle, still ongoing even though the Old Hall at Demaizen was nothing but rubble and the Mages themselves were dead or scattered across the galaxy.

  All but me, Kief thought. Anyone else would say that I’ve done well since then. I have another Circle; I am a power that not even the sus-Peledaen can ignore; but Demaizen will not let me go.

  Tonight, though, would see his old Circle’s hold on him broken, and the pattern of the great working ripped asunder for good and all. So far as Kief knew, nobody on Eraasi had ever tried to do what he was planning to do, once he got to the room in Quantret Hall’s subbasement where the Institute Circle met—nobody else had even considered the possibility of doing it, and there had been Circles working on Eraasi for as far back as history and legend ran.