Skeen's Search

by Clayton, Jo;

  PICAREFY IS REVELING IN MARATHON CONVERSATIONS THAT HAVEN’T STOPPED FROM THE MOMENT THE KINRAVALY VOICED HER APPROVAL. WHEN ONE SET OF SEEKERS WEARS OUT OR HAS ALL THE DATA IT CAN ABSORB FOR THE MOMENT, ANOTHER SET REPLACES IT.

  HAVING BEEN STERNLY WARNED TO BEHAVE HIMSELF, SKEEN SAYING I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU KILLED BUT IF YOU MESS UP OUR WELCOME HERE, I’LL LEAVE YOU TO FACE WHATEVER THE RALLYKX SEE FIT TO DO TO YOU, ROSTICO BURN TAKES A SKIP AND GOES SLIPPING IN TO VISIT FRIENDS HE’D MADE ON HIS LAST VISIT.

  ZELZONY AND HER FORCES ARE BUSY HUNTING DOWN THE RITUAL KILLERS AND WORKING ON THE MESS IN UROLOL AND MARRALLAT, BUT NOT TOO BUSY TO SAMPLE REPORTS ON THE ALIENS AND THEIR PROGRESS ABOUT THE WORLD.

  or

  STIR UP THE NATIVES AND WATCH THEM EXPLODE.

  Marrallat. Government Reserve. Office of outGurn activities, records department.

  Present: Data Retriever, Kinravaly Reserve. Name: Haraka Purpose of the DR’s visit: the annual collection of statistics from all Government Reserves on Rallen.

  Clerks assigned to assist the DR (2 young males, minor functionaries with no influence or seniority but a reasonable competence at their work) Names: Dugohuzh

  Alleyeth

  Liaison from Kinra Sulleggen’s Office (intermittently present, there to make certain Haraka didn’t go prying into things that were none of his business, the clerks also being warned to report any activity they find unusual) Name: Sullaplon

  Scene: Haraka running through records the clerks bring him. He is a russet Ykx with gray spreading through the red-brown fur on his head and shoulders, less conspicuous but present in the warm cream of the fur on his inner arms and stomach. A mild harmless little Ykx on the edge of being old. Calm blinking eyes with a tinge of green in the crystal. A comfortable smiling wrinkled face, everybody’s favorite uncle. Soft unassertive voice. Formidably competent at his work, his shorthand almost sleight-of-hand. Given to a mild chatty flow of stories as he worked, adept at drawing similar stories out of his co-workers even if they began the collaboration sullen, suspicious and silent. Which they did, a state that lasted less than a single workday, its vanishment coinciding remarkably with the departure of Sullaplon.

  “Hmm, yes. Interesting. The number of exit visas has halved itself, and most of those are wanderflights; you Marallese are turning into homebodies, getting wisdom as it were. Hy yai, if I had my druthers, I’d have my feet up on a hassock reading Veratisca’s latest poems.” Haraka lifted his head and stopped the dance of his claws for a moment as he watched the short square figure of the Liaison swagger out, then he went back to entering the figures from the screen in front of him and to the gentle flow of chat that didn’t require any response, quoting snatches of poetry he’d read recently, murmuring comments about a drama he’d watched in another Gurn, praising the felicities of the land about the Reserve which he’d observed as he winged in, blessing the pleasant spring weather outside, an unobtrusive, soothing sound that insensibly smoothed away the jags his presence had torn in the quiet lives of the two clerks, jags exacerbated by the intrusion of Sullaplon who had stumped about the computer rooms asking stupid questions and using his scowl and his connections to intimidate the Ykx working there.

  By the third day Sullaplon no longer bothered showing his face and the three workers had settled into comfortable habits; Dugohuzh and Alleyeth took Haraka around to inexpensive eating holes, to a drama put on by a well-respected group of amateur players, and finally (after some anxious whispered consultation) to a vaguely illicit poetry reading.

  Haraka began edging the exchanges in the office toward the topic of nepotism, relatives of justicers, high admin officials, Remmyos, anyone with influence of whatever kind, who went poking into recordrooms and messed up the files so thoroughly that staffs had to work extra hours to get things straight. He had several stories like that, with names and dates, keeping things gently humorous, showing a mild disgust at such stupidities. One story led to another; Dugo and Aleth capped his stories and didn’t notice he was noting down the names and dates they provided, just reveled in the chance to vent their resentment without endangering their jobs. Haraka would leave the Reserve in another day or two and most likely wouldn’t return; he certainly wouldn’t do any talking to those authorities they were grousing about. The agents of the Kinravaly were tolerated here but not welcomed; Sulleggen resented furiously the need to let them in to gather the data that ancient tradition granted the Kinravaly Rallen; there was a fixed though unstated policy of ignoring the presence of these insects. If any ears were safe, his were.

  Two days later he left Marrallat with three gourds of data and seven names of outsiders poking in the lists with no apparent reason behind their curiosity.

  Around Rallen, in every Government Reserve, Kinravaly’s agents (all carefully selected by the wily Borrentye for their artful natures) used their various skills and assorted personalities to tease out similar lists of prying outsiders.

  Itekkill. Korika Gather. Ishtayll Arena. Early evening, rainy outside, chill wind blowing off the sea. Interior of the Arena brightly lit and warm, though rather drafty as great fans pushed air about to keep the hundreds of Ykx hunting seats around the stage reasonably comfortable.

  Saffron and Mauvi elbowed through a noisy, pushing, excited throng and climbed to one of the darker corners of the Arena’s second balcony; there were fewer Ykx up here, leaving them their own path of shadow and a privacy that Saffron immediately began to exploit once they were comfortable on their cushions. He leaned into Mauvi and began playing with the soft curling hair that covered the nape of her long neck.

  Mauvi giggled, a faint breathy sound inaudible two steps away. She danced supple hands down his body and began tickling his knees.

  The noise below them hushed suddenly. Mauvi sat up with a jerk, spilling Saffron off her. He bumped his head on the ledge of the row of seats behind him. “Ohf. Ay Mau, what …”

  “Shush. I want to hear this.”

  Lipitero was sitting on a stool in the center of the stage, the light teasing glitters from her silver-gray fur and deepening the shadows in the terrible scars that marred her face, and her torso. Stretched out on the polished planks of the stage floor near the stool, a sleek, dangerous beast twitched its long tail and yawned, its tearing teeth like curving yellow knives crisply clear against the dark red of its gullet. Mauvi sucked in a long breath, whispered to Saffron, “I wouldn’t want to meet that in the dark.”

  More interested in her, here only because she’d talked him into coming and it was something to do that didn’t cost the earth and was out of the rain, Saffron looked past her, muttered agreement and went back to playing with her shoulder fur.

  Speaking with halting earnestness in a husky, emotion-filled voice, Lipitero recounted the history of the Stranger’s Gate and the Gathers on Mistomrnerk. She finished with a listing of the flakes she had given into the hands of the Kinravaly, saying no matter what decision her audience made, she’d leave these (with a flake player, of course) so the Rallykx could regain parts of the history they’d lost coming here. She slipped off the stool to stand beside the beast, her arms held wide, her flight skins glistening. “Come with me.” Her broken voice sang through the Arena, filling it with the intensity of her need. “Come fill the empty Gathers. Come with me or Ykx will fade from Mistommerk, my Gather will die as my children have died. Come with me, see the wonders of another world, face the dangers your ancient ones faced so bravely. Come with me. It won’t be easy or comfortable or safe. Come with me.”

  As that last terrible cry swept the hollows of the hearspace, Lipitero shook out a rectangle of crimson yley cloth that had been folded and draped over a rung of the stool. The silky material caught the light and turned to liquid fire as she snapped it out of its folds and sent it sweeping through the air. She pulled it in and draped it over her arm. “Mistommerk,” she sang, “Mistommerk, my kin. Behold a piece of Mistommerk, behold a woman of the world I call you to. Timka, a Min of Mistommerk.”


  The beast rose to its feet. It stretched and yawned, leaped lightly to the stool’s round seat, balanced there a moment, then was a great wild bird with hooked beak and vicious talons, with burning golden eyes, a white head and a brown-gold body. It stretched its wings wide, posed for them, a figure from myth and magic with the secret power of such things hanging like perfume about it, then it powered into the air and swooped back and forth across the cavernous bowl of the Arena, its harsh eerie cries tearing through the gasp and buzz of the audience. It swung back to the stage, landed beside Lipitero and was suddenly a graceful four-legged runner with lyre horns on a long thin head; it caracoled about the stage, the tak-tok of its hooves turning the hard wood into a tympanum, beating out a kind of song as it kicked and leaped and danced back to the stool. In the awed hush (the Ykx had got beyond comment, almost beyond surprise) it changed a last time into a bipedal form, roughly like an Ykx without flightskins or fur. Small stature, mammary glands rather like the keeskey had, though rounder with small pink nipples, skin the color of skim milk, naked except for an exuberant growth of curly blue-black hair on the head and a much smaller, coarser patch of black at the juncture of the legs. It took the yley rectangle from Lipitero, wound the cloth about it so it covered its body from armpit to ankles, stabbed a dagger pin into the cloth over one of the mammaries to hold the improvised robe in place, then it turned to the goggling Ykx and said, “I am Timka, I am Min, I am of the blood and bone of Mistommerk, of the people who dwelt there before the Gate was opened. I am one of the dangers you’ll face there, if you come.”

  Kinravaly’s Herald came onto the stage and tweener ushers flooded into the audience holding lightrods. The Herald cried: “Who among you have questions, come to the rods.”

  “Question to Timka the Min.” A strong voice from the floor near the stage, a familiar voice to Mauvi, the justicer who owned a third share of the stable where she worked. “You say you are one of the dangers that colonists would face. Explain that please. Why are you here if you are a danger to us?”

  Timka smoothed a slim hand over her hair. “I spoke as a symbol of what the colonists would face. I in myself am no threat; I have learned to live in peace and even liking with Nemin like you.”

  “Are you in any way captive or slave of those you travel with? If you wished to stay among us, could you do that?”

  Timka threw back her head and laughed, a full-throated joyous sound that filled the Arena. “No. Who could keep me if I wished to go? Skeen is my friend and companion, I travel with her to see the wonders of another universe than mine, I travel with Petro here because I like her and want to help her. One day I might return to Mistommerk, or I might not. As I choose, so it will be.”

  Mauvi pushed Saffron’s hand away. “Oh, quit it, Saff, I’m not in the mood. This is important. Let me listen.”

  Mauvi was Worker class. She was good enough with beasts to have a job she liked as a groom in a stable of racing yauts, but she wanted a thousand things she’d never have. Most of all she wanted a chance to use her greatest gift. She played the habold, one of the smaller ones with only fifty strings, and knew she could be more than good given a chance and the proper teaching; she wanted to create music as well as play it, but there were no scholarships for such as she, her kind weren’t supposed to have sufficient sensitivity to merit development of their rudimentary skills. It wasn’t very likely that this new world would have the resources to train her the way she wanted, but there was a chance just a ghost of a chance …

  “Yes,” Lipitero said, answering a question put in another voice Mauvi thought she recognized though she couldn’t be sure. “We welcome anyone who is willing to come, whatever his skills, whatever class he belongs to here, but there’s something I must make all of you understand. Mistommerk is dangerous, you must not forget that; you can’t bring antagonisms and resentments with you, you’ll die if you can’t work together. You must be able to leave old ideas of class and capacity here on Rallen and learn to know the person behind the labels. If you can’t do that, don’t come. Please don’t come.”

  … a chance, an opening to possibility. Maybe there would be no teachers, no music, but there had to be something more than here. Failure, disappointment, she’d faced them often enough and lived through them and could do it again as long as there was hope. Hope and the possibility of change. She knew with a deadly certainty what her life on Rallen was going to be unless she took it in her hands and changed it. One day like the next repeated over and over and over. She hadn’t told anyone yet, but throughout the long days and longer nights she was thinking about suicide. As the Veils closed on Rallen and the iron bands of her life tightened about her, hope was draining out of her, leaving her dry and limp and so weary there was no bearing it. She loved the boy beside her, but that was not enough to light the darkness within her and about her. That Ykx down there on that stage, Lipitero bereft and scarred and afraid, that Ykx had cracked the darkness wide and the light was blinding.

  “Trade,” Lipitero said, “yes, there’s a great deal of trade on Mistommerk; let the buyer beware is the core philosophy of a large part of that trade. There is also considerable piracy at sea and more than a few outlaw raids on land caravans. The Balayar are sharp traders but generally honest. They have their hands firmly on just about all major water transport. They build the best ships and are certainly among the finest sailors and navigators on Mistommerk. Though I must add, one of the most respected of the sea captains is the Aggitj woman, who carried my friends and me halfway round the world. Very competent she was at sailing and at chaffering. Yes, sailing. Wind power. Ninety percent of the folk on Mistommerk are in a pre-industrial stage of development; the desperate flight through the Gate before Kildun Aalda’s sun flared and ashed them, meant that many of the refugees came through with little more than they could carry on their backs; then they had to fight the Min and the earlier Waves for a place of their own. A lot was lost in the process. If any of you are med-techs or medics or Seekers doing medical research, you will find an almost untouched market if you can develop and deliver species specific antibiotics for Balayar, Nagamar, Chalarosh, Aggitj and Pallah, perhaps even the Min. Surgery and anesthetics, vaccines, there’s almost nothing available except among the Skirrik who will deal only with their own needs and perhaps among the Funor Ashon who keep themselves very much apart from anyone non-Funor. And there’s whatever it is that depresses fertility among the Nemin, that’s everyone not Min, another reason for embracing anyone who can bring medical knowledge with him or her.”

  In the beginning, even during Lipitero’s impassioned plea for colonists, Saffron was more interested in cuddling with Mauvi than in what was happening on the stage. Timka’s startling metamorphoses chased away his indifference; he leaned against the balcony’s railing and began listening to the questions and answers, though he was still not as involved as Mauvi until Lipitero began talking about med-techs. He was in training as a medtech. He wanted desperately to be more than that, but like Mauvi he was Worker class. If he’d proved unusually brilliant in his schooldays, the admin might have made a rare exception and educated him further. He wasn’t anything like a genius, merely a bright intelligent tweener with a slightly better than usual facility for making things and nowhere to go with that intelligence and dexterity. He’d survive, of course; he was already a bottom-level med-tech and that was better than most of his kin had managed, a bit of luck for him. But he wanted so much more. As passionately as Mauvi, he wanted more than Rallen could give him.

  Urolol. Masliga Gather. Rainy twilight. A grubber stable outside the Gather, with a leanto where a handler slept when one of the grubbers was sick or about to lay a clutch and the handler had to be there to see she didn’t eat them. Yellow lantern light leaking out of the cracks in the wall of the leanto. Two figures inside, sitting at a shaky table (one leg replaced with a thin barrel that once held salt fish), a stone bottle between them and heavy mugs partly filled with a murky liquid before each of them. Rostico B
urn and Fafeyzar, his first contact on Rallen.

  Fafeyzar was deep into his fertile stage, but he hadn’t changed much from the stocky young Ykx whose stolid sedate exterior gave no hint of the rage that smoldered deep within or the capacity for organization and manipulation that lay behind those dull brownish eyes, more like muddy water than crystal. His fur was a smoky gray fading to silver along the inside of his arms and legs and across his belly. His hands were broad and blunt, heavily callused with several of the claws broken near the tip; they were painful when he retracted them but he gave no sign he felt anything. He wore a harness of grubber hide, old and stained, without even a touch of ornament. For a moment, when he grinned at Rostico Burn and his face lit with delight and welcome, he was almost handsome; the charm he ordinarily kept hidden but could use like a weapon flowed out from him and surrounded Ross with warmth. He reached out, touched the tip of a forefinger claw to Ross’ palm. “I hoped you would come.”