Harper's fist relaxed.
He closed his eyes. The blackness of the night Sky whispered behind their lids. He opened them again quickly. One heavy breath escaped like a sigh.
"– Den has a lower population density than most other planets in the Union, a quality that factored into their decision to accept this shipload of Skylanders."
A hand touched his shoulder, an arm rested on his neck. Zara. She stood behind him now and leaned silently against his back, cradling his head against her chest, smoothing his hair, brushing her slender fingers against his cheeks. She didn't speak.
"–The refugees will be subject to the immigration regulations and assimilation requirements, but Den authorities say they look forward to welcoming the newcomers with open arms."
"My Sky." Zara's voice was a croon, a sweet, soothing coo that didn't dispel the fear of the black spaces but worked at the rough edges of his fear, smoothing them out just a little. He leaned his head back into her chest. His eyes closed again and this time, with her voice floating into his head, he was comforted. "Why are we still here, my Sky? Let's go and rest. Tomorrow, this will all be less unsettling."
"No."
"Harper..."
"I am waiting."
For what? Come on, it is late."
"Hah! Late? You can't tell morning from night up here."
"No, but I can read a clock. It is late."
"Then you should go to bed."
"Not without you."
"No."
"My Sky..."
"Not yet."
"What are you waiting for? You need your res–"
"For my father."
There was silence behind him for a moment. The hands on either side of his face stilled. Zara's chest raised with a breath. Then another.
"No," she said. "You will not hear from him again."
"I will. The whole universe will."
"Harper..."
"It will."
"But who will do it? Not everybody will..."
"They will find someone."
"Maybe not..."
"They will. And if they do not, then my father will do it himself. All the Sky Reverends would."
"But maybe... maybe they will be delayed. And if they are delayed long enough, then maybe their plan will never happen."
"They have been planning the destruction of the ships since the city first began making them. They are prepared."
"Then there is nothing you can do."
"I can wait."
"My Sky..."
Her voice was working its way through his brain, softening more of the edges of his fear, calming him. He opened his eyes. Then he turned away from the black space outside the window and looked up into her dark eyes, more familiar, more comforting than the holy night Sky of the same color.
But he flinched away.
She doesn't know.
The darkness outside the window scared his wife as much as it scared him. Harper knew that. But she didn't have its reflection inside her. He did. And he could not expect her to see that or to understand it.
His body's clock had hit zero.
The ship had taken off, him inside it and it had reached up to the Sky, just like it was supposed to. But it wasn't supposed make it to the other side. He wasn't supposed to make it to the other side. It was his job to make sure that didn't happen. Now hours after launch, flying through space, Harper was still here. Still breathing.
What now?
There was no answer. There was just an empty expanse inside his mind that mirrored the blackness outside. The silence of his body clock yawned in the void.
He shivered.
But there is nothing for it... nothing to do...
He looked back into Zara's eyes and smiled. There was at least something familiar out here in the void of space. She smiled back at him, and the edges of his fear softened, just a bit more. Then he did what he always did after a long day of hopeless labor. He stood up, wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on top of her silky hair.
Then he drew her away from the emptiness outside, into the windowless innards of the ship.
Behind them, the news continued.
Chapter Eight
in which there is a space of Infinite Space...
Harper wandered.
Zara wandered beside him, but she had been mostly silent their second day on the ship, letting him come to terms with their temporary home in his own time. He was grateful both for the presence and for the space.
One foot stepped in front of the other, and then the other moved in front of it. And the process repeated until he was somewhere else, and then somewhere else and then somewhere else. His eyes drifted over the black floors and windowless corridors.
The ship was vast.
He knew it, but every time he looked up from his absently shuffling feet and realized that he was somewhere else, he couldn't help marveling at just how much somewhere else there always was inside the ship. He wondered (though he tried not to) how much damage his rustic weapon would have done. He tried to think that it would have done no harm. But he well knew that a century of perfecting and compressing the formula of the villagers was an achievement no less than the building of these giant flying fortresses.
And he wandered.
He missed the blue fields of his Sky that were now far behind.
Or that were never there in the first place.
His mind was clearer after the... night's... rest. He still had difficulty with the notion that there was night and day up here. But his body still demanded its cycles. Waking up this... morning... he'd felt like he did every morning when he woke up. Until he felt the cold floor beneath his feet.
He'd passed one or two windows but drew away quickly before he could look too far out.
Back home, the Sky changed; this was not unknown to him. She was dark, She was light. Sometimes, She was stained with the white splotches of clouds. In the past, so the stories said, She would grey over entirely before a rain storm. But She was always there.
Out here in space, she wasn't.
Is She invisible or absent?
His feet walked.
The solid metal under his feet asserted itself the way the ground of Skyland never had. The walls and floor hummed around him, quivering with the well-insulated thrum of the engines. Harper did not like it. Unlike the Sky, the ground beneath his feet had always been virtually invisible. It was horrid, unfeeling, unyielding, the enemy of the farmer. It did not give what was needed except when the Sky so decreed to rain upon it. The Sky was kind and blue and beautiful. The dirt was an angry, ugly thing.
Harpers eyes had always looked up, not down.
Now he looked down.
He looked down as he walked. One foot stepped down upon the metal floor of the corridor; then the other followed; then the first again.
I can see ground. But no Sky. Where? Where is She?
The "ground" beneath him was metal and it was human-made and it was humming quietly and unpleasantly. But it was there. Unlike the Sky.
Where is she?
So he walked, and so he thought, and did not know how far his walking had taken him, and Zara silently by his side, from their beds through the humming corridors. And then...
The ship was not the only thing that was humming.
Harper realized that there were other sounds beneath the ships melody. Another hum cooing beneath the thrum of the floors and the walls of this flying thing they stood in.
One foot stepped in front of the other, then stopped.
From down a corridor, voices rose, voices without words, music between a song and a wail.
Waaooo... waa... ooo. Ohhhh... ohhhhh... iioo.
He looked up from his feet. The he took the first deliberate step since he'd fled the night before from the observation deck and its window onto a Skyless blankness. A pale glow came from an open door halfway down the corridor. He walked towards it.
Candles? Who...?
Skyland was not t
echnologically primitive, not most of it anyway. These rockets had been built by what the city claimed were some of the galaxy's preeminent, Union-trained engineers. But many of the country people not only couldn't pay to keep the electricity on, but couldn't even afford the wax in candles or the oil in lanterns. Their days ended when the sun went down and began when it rose. Wax and oil were precious, gathered from rare beasts and sold for high prices, usually to the city folk. And burning wood or other plant matter was almost unheard of. Completely aside from the Consumption laws (not one of the farmers had ever had enough of anything to worry about being arrested for excess), the farmers would not burn something that could be eaten or composted or made into something useful. Even cooking fires were rare; kale was not more palatable when heated, and meat was rare. Hunters and scavengers kept torches only for the most dire emergencies.
Candles, dearly bought and kept by the honored Sky Reverends, had one purpose in the country: the Worship of the Sky.
Harper had reached the open doorway. He squinted into the dim room at the people seated on the floor in a semi circle around the light. Here and there was a swatch of blue fabric, a decorative sleeve or scarf, but the people were mostly dressed in black.
City folk. This is not the for the Sky. Infinite Space...
The closer to the city center one got, or more accurately, the farther one got from the farms, the more diverse the population got. Not that it was ever that diverse anywhere on the crust of Skyland, isolated as it was from Union Proper. But in the center of the city Harper had heard that there were some – maybe one in a thousand –people who worshiped Space rather than Sky, as they did in the Union. Their altars were black, not blue. They prayed with eyes cast down not up. And they sang. Their god was the invisible space above the sky, removed, invisible, infinite.
Harper had never heard their song.
Like their god... shapeless, wordless.
The wail-song continued. It wavered up and down. Harper leaned on the doorway and closed his eyes. He heard Zara sigh beside him. Her hand brushed his and he held it. The wail-song went on and on.
The sound was... not beautiful. But he loved it.
Then it disappeared.
Harper opened his eyes. The figures on the floor knelt perfectly still in silence. Harper stared at them. He counted fifteen. In one corner two women stood, heads cast down like those on the floor, dressed in the red coats of the Transport Union workers. One had silk scarf tied at the neck, black with a silver twist imprinted on it. The other had a rough black swatch stuck in the collar of her uniform like a napkin. The edges were rough like it had been torn hastily from something else. A luggage sack or perhaps one of the curtains on the windows of the nicer cabins. Harper had seen some of those as they wandered through the ships. But he always looked away from the windows quickly.
Zara was tugging on his sleeve. He looked at her. She looked from him down the corridor and twitched her head. He could almost hear the thought: We don't belong here. He started to back out.
One of the kneelers looked up.
His eyes met Harper's. The man held out his hands towards them, palms up. He stood and came towards them, stepping around the people still on the floor.
"Come in."
Some of the kneelers looked up. Others were still.
"Sorry. Really, we were just walking by." Harper moved back and turned to go back down the hall. Zara was already a few steps away looking back, waiting.
"No, stay."
"We'll go... get out of your way. We're sorry to disturb you."
"No. Please. We are not disturbed."
"Well we would hate to–"
"Join us."
"Oh, we're not–"
"You are here, that is what matters."
"But we are not in Infinite Space."
"All people are in Space. Come in to our chapel. The Transport Union has been gracious enough to give us this room for our chapel."
Harper paused, stopped trying to shuffle away. He tilted his head and frowned at the calm man's words. "Wouldn't you prefer to be on the observation deck?" he asked.
"We are happy that they have allowed us any room aside where we can meet."
"But why don't you meet where you can look at Space?"
"All Space is Space."
What? "I don't–"
"There are Spaces everywhere. Today, this is our Space of Infinite Space. Our chapel."
"We really don't want to bother you."
"There is no bother. This Space is for all people. Especially today."
"Is this... the Tenth Day?"
Unlike the farmers who worshiped the Sky with every day, every night, every look up into the heavens, the Infinite Space devotees in the city only worshiped once every ten days. Though he had never seen one before, Harper knew that there were gatherings on every Tenth Day, somewhere in the city.
"No. Today we hold a vigil.
"A vigil?"
"For the dead."
"For the..."
"On Skyland."
Harper's stomach turned. "What?"
"Did you not hear?"
"We... have been walking... just walking."
"The second ship, the one that was to follow us today, was destroyed."
"No..."
"Yes."
Harper shook his head and asked the unnecessary question. "How?"
"Blown up. By one of the passengers."
"It wasn't an accident?"
"Not as the broadcast tells it, last we heard."
"Have you been watching–"
"Now is not the time to watch. Now is the time to pray."
"Of course..."
"Come, sit with us. We pray for the lost souls."
"No, I don't think we will. It's not our way."
"You are welcome to join us at any time."
The man turned around and went back to his spot beside the others. He bent his knees to the floor and bent his head down and closed his eyes. Harper backed away. Zara's hand was gently pulling at his arm again.
But this time, she was stepping back towards the room. "We should..."
"What?"
"We should pray with them," she whispered.
"What?" One of the kneelers looked up. Harper pulled Zara a few steps down the hall and lowered his voice. "Why?"
"They are not so different. We both pray to something–"
"Something–no. We pray to something. They pray to something else, some... nothingness. Emptiness, silence, wordless void... that what they pray to. 'All Space is Space.' What is that?"
"It is what they believe. We have a god too."
"Yes, one that I can see."
"Harper–"
"I see the Sky. I see the sun and the moon imprinted on it. I see the threads of clouds. I see the rain when she chooses to throw it down." He was quoting the Sky Tomes and he cringed internally, shrinking from the rote, but he couldn't stop the words. "I see the blue."
Zara didn't answer, her head was down. Then,
"We did not see Her when we flew through Her."
Harper was silent.
"Let's pray with them."
He shook his head.
Zara stood on her toes and leaned in so that her breath brushed his face and her wet eyes shone level with his, and she whispered so softly that her words were almost silent.
"It is the least we can do."
He turned away from the words, the accusation.
The least we can do...
He thought back to the bridge over the dried up river, to the scavenger and the twisted mask of hate, and the ragged Sky-colored sleeves of the city folk of the outskirts. Then he took a step, then another, then another back towards the doorway with the candlelight spilling out. Then he was in the room and Zara followed. There was a spot at one end of the semi-circle and they went and sat beside the now-silent people. Everyone had their eyes closed and heads bent so Harper bent his head and closed his own eyes. The night darkness behind his lids greeted him, remindi
ng him of the Sky.
But She is not here.
He did not know what he was supposed to be looking at.
He opened his eyes and snuck glances at the others kneeling in silence around the room. He kept his head bent, but down on the cold floor of the ship, knees grinding against the hard surface, without any Sky above him, he did not know how to pray.
A sigh shook the air behind him. A sniffle. Another sniffle. Somewhere else, a sob. There were soft footsteps somewhere in the room, and a man in a red Transport Union uniform knelt down beside Harper. He had no black cloth anywhere on him, but he bent his head in silence like the other. His hands shook as they covered his face.
Shit.
Chapter Nine
in which there is a sign...
Someone screamed. Or maybe it was many someones. Or maybe it was the chair maker himself. Light flooded into the workshop. For the first time that day, the dim shop was bathed in light from corner to corner. But it was the scene illuminated outside the shop that held the chair maker's gaze.
Mouth hanging open, he stared stupidly at the blaze outside the window. He stared at the giant fireball that was the second ship. He stared at the black cloud of smoke smudging the Sky. He stared at the ashes and the flaming debris, falling, falling down to the crowd. He stared at the docks full of scrambling people. Then–
His head slammed against the ground.
He lay face down, nose folded painfully against the packed dirt of the floor. The back of his head burned. Glass pressed into his face. A splinter caught on the pad of his finger, not glass but wood. He looked up. The smell of varnish filled the air. He turned over and looked up at the window, or what used to be the window. The wall of the workshop was burning.
Outside, between the flames, there was a patch of dark blue and an even darker smudge running across it. The mass of fire that was the ship had disappeared. Instead, there were now bits of many fires, falling, flying across the Sky.
The second explosion had broken the fireball into a rain of burning debris.
More ships were burning outside. The ships on the ground. He could see their peaks burning as he lay on the dirt floor. One, two... the chair maker couldn't tell how many, couldn't count, couldn't think... Everything was sore. He flopped his head back on the dirt. Glass crunched underneath him. Smoke rose above the chair maker laying on the floor.
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