Tacenda

by Christine Jayne Vann

  Arucken couldn’t send to her under the guise, but he reached out and grasped her hand. She could hear the man making excuses, always with the excuses. As she’d done the same for her parents.

  As they got closer to the chamber that held her parents the corridors changed, became more open and welcoming. Large glass windows held scenes of autumn trees, shaking a little in the breeze. The sky it showed was a dull grey, with some light filtering through some heavy clouds.

  Kerris wondered, not for the first time, what it looked like outside.

  Her parents greeted them both in a rush, her mother trying, as she always did to offer them more and more food. This time Kerris took some, as Arucken made some pretense. Kerris perched on an armchair, eating a small bagel as her dad spoke to her about a recent ballroom trip the residents had held. With a live band and good food and exactly the kind of thing she and Aludra had always hated.

  She said so aloud, and Arucken picked up her cue. Seeing him there, wearing her sister's face like a uniform, made her a little sad but grateful. Perhaps, with all the lies they had to tell this one wasn’t so awful. In this section of the world, a tiny bubble away from the main universe, her sister still lived.

  Not as she’d truly been, her parents would never have accepted the wildly independent life Aludra had loved. But a more pared down version, of a dutiful child piloting ships amongst the human colonies, they could accept.

  And what human parent knew their child, anyway? They all saw sanitised versions.

  After a little while the conversations grew awkward, and it was impossible to miss the covert glances her mother and father would share.

  Kerris took her empty plate to the small kitchen, and heard light footsteps behind her.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to tell us?” Her mother asked, picking up an Ereader from the table. It was such an odd echo of Arucken during testing, that Kerris took the item without commenting and looked down at the dispatch.

  For services rendered: Kerris Chachine.

  Maylith Tara would like to thank….

  Her heart grew cold as she read it, and she cursed the stupidity of the council to have forwarded it to her parents. She hadn’t known that her parents were down as a point of contact. Despite the pleasant tone of the mailing, they’d seen fit to dock some of the fees due to ‘flying violations’. She wondered, with a distant irritation, what they’d expected her to do at that point.

  She scanned it briefly, looking for damage. It didn’t say enough, but it told her mum enough to ask many questions. She saw Arucken’s name and species mentioned several times.

  She met her mum’s eyes, not knowing what to say.

  “Your Dad hasn’t seen.” Her mother answered, taking pity. Her eyes looked far more sad than angry. “Wipe it. I won’t tell him and I won’t ask.”

  “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Kerris said, a lump in her throat. She thought of Aludra, and the truth was a weight through her body. If Arucken hadn’t been under the guise, he’d have known something was wrong in an instant.

  Instead, she could hear him and her father still talking softly in the lounge. Making plans for a holiday that would never happen.

  “Yes, you’ve managed well to date.” Her mother said. Her voice was as cool as ice but she did reach out to stroke Kerris’ arm. “When you are ready to tell us, you’ve always known where we are.”

  Kerris nodded, and her mother left the kitchen. She stared out the window to the fake landscape and wiped the tears from her face. She deleted the dispatch notice, taking a moment to check it was completely gone.

  It took her some time before she rejoined her parents.

  Arucken sat on the sofa, listening to the tale of the ballroom dance. He was smiling gently, tapping his finger against a glass of water he must have been coaxed into drinking. His mannerisms were perfect, her sister's face even adopting an expression that spoke of slight boredom.

  She’d mentioned before that he didn’t need to be an exact copy, some of her sister’s traits weren’t always that nice. He refused though, playing her only as he knew how. It wasn’t an interpretation, he’d insisted - but based on memories and truth.

  He saw it as much less of a lie than she did.

  They made their excuses, traded hugs and promises to come back. Her mother stood by her father's side, and waved them off.

  She walked back to the airlock in silence, and when they returned to Octavia she checked the messaging system. Arucken came to her side when he heard her angry fingers across the keys and helped her edit without question.

  Then they deleted the message. The Concordat was not an entity to offend.

  I’ll send an error report in tomorrow to update the details. Arucken said quietly. His inward voice was a whisper.

  She won’t talk. Kerris said to him.

  I’d agree. You forget, I’ve known them for many years now.

  They were the closest to family, he had she knew. It made her feel awful.

  The purge doesn’t allow people to change. She thought, to herself. Her mother's eyes haunted her. She and her sister had never even given them a chance, and now the laws meant they were unable to.

  The laws were wrong.

  Octavia chimed, a curious sequence of notes in entirely the wrong order.

  “It’s fine girl.” Kerris said, resting her hands across the smooth sides of her ship as she rose from the console. “But you are well past due a check-up!”

  “We aren’t that far from Iop…” Arucken said, with a grin.

  “True enough!” Kerris answered, refusing to give him the answer.

  And Octavia, frustrated with them both, shot them back a few paces as she made the necessary corrections herself.

  ***

  Kerris and Arucken stole a glance at each other, as the mechanic was left standing puzzled. They walked away with rapid steps, suppressing laughter.

  The woman was one of Arucken’s kind, and also in the second phase of life. Her double jointed fingers and slender build were ideal for fixing ships, although Kerris could never imagine Arucken doing so. More acerbic and frank than most nestlings the mechanic had not been shy to point out plenty of signs of misuse in Octavia.

  And not understood that she was only there to identify them.

  “We could pay mechanics less?” Arucken asked as they walked towards the local watering hole. It was a large public house, and one of their frequent haunts upon one of the smaller moon bases in this sector. An isolated spot, but one of the few refuelling spots in the sector. It saw frequent trade. No-one wanted to be left drifting. Having to call for help due to miscalculating fuel was more than merely embarrassing, it cost a substantial fine.

  “Maybe.” Kerris wasn’t sure that would help. The extra money wasn’t to be fair, but just to cancel out the fact that the mechanic wouldn’t get the answers they so often wanted. It was a profession that invited the curious, they’d found.

  But Octavia was brilliant at fixing her own problems; she just needed guidance to find them. She was young yet; her prototype evaluated every year at the same time Arucken and Kerris were called in.

  Octavia’s consciousness was growing all the time. Soon it would be inaccurate to call them a partnership. She wondered what pieces of Octavia she had in common with Talibeth’s ship, and realised then she didn’t even know the name of it. It felt like something she should know.

  She hadn’t known Octavia had kin. Arucken’s people had claimed she was unique. She wondered then if it was just the pair of them, or whether a whole wealth of odd aunts and uncles were flying across the galaxy?

  In that, Talibeth had done them a favour. No-one would hack into Octavia’s systems that same way again.

  The sole bar on Iop was a sprawling hulk of metal, perching across the metal walkways as if it were the casing of some large and ugly insect. No writing in any language told what it was, and there were no windows.

  Once you entered, it was far from dark. A blaze of
light spun across the ceiling, thin lines of various colours adorned with glittering bulbs like a festive spider web. Not all were in the visual range she could see, so to her there were odd gaps in the array. The noise was similar, an overwhelming cacophony of speech in all manner of ways. It was quiet yet, the night still early but after so long away, it still surprised Kerris anew.

  Arucken took to it with ease, smiling at a few people he recognised. Kerris was more reserved, assessing any potential threats.

  Relax my friend! Arucken sent to her, as he shook off an overly friendly approach from a young nestling intent on selling him something. She didn’t see what particular substance it was offering, but he took the brush off with good grace. This wasn’t a place to draw attention to yourself.

  The air was hazy around the bar area where the scent of smoke still lingered. Kerris ordered their customary drinks, a simple beer for her, and some weird concoction for Arucken that Kerris had only tried once. She didn’t see how he could stand it, even with a different digestive system.

  “I hear you saw trouble. At Maylith Tara?” The person serving said as it passed them both their drinks. It was a creature Kerris had seen little of - an Illick. Illicks were short, with thin, fibre like antenna wrapped round the sides of their heads. They were a light grey colour, and like this one, often seen draped in long robes that hid most of their differences beneath them. This one’s voice was high-pitched, musical in its way.

  Kerris nodded, but she turned her attention to her drink. It had been months since they’d been here, and their supplies had run low even before that. She’d missed beer. The foam of it tickled her nose.

  Arucken answered for them, moments later. “It follows us!” His laugh was erratic and Kerris frowned at his half empty glass, it wasn’t like him to drink so fast.

  The Illick, Parion, raised its brows as if it had eyebrows. “Well you said it. Care to tell more?”

  “Not now.” Kerris interjected, tapping Arucken on his hand. Parion often sold information to subsidise his trade, but she wasn’t meant to know that. Arucken laughed quietly again to himself, but she let him be.

  “Last one was more than we expected.” Kerris said, softening a harsh, tired voice with a smile.

  Parion glided away after nodding, his attention taken by a new trio of customers. They were Kaimahi she saw, and she watched them carefully for a bit trying to make them out. They had little issue communicating with Parion, nor did he seem to have difficulty understanding them.

  Kerris whispered to her partner, outward, so he didn’t need to reveal himself. “We can visit them again. See how they get on.”

  Arucken nodded, but his sigh was deep. “Family.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer.

  She didn’t know much of how nestlings were raised other than it was rough, no-one outside the species did. She’d seen Arucken get morose before but usually with more drink inside him. But then, it had been a long mission and seeing Talibeth always shook him up.

  It would be many months before she had to visit her parents again. That thought made her selfishly grateful, she couldn’t stand visiting that last remnant. She thought then of Malik’s age, and wondered if he’d been missed in the purge.

  Parion thought the purge funny, although he’d soon learnt not to raise the subject with her. Although the bar on Iop had seen many different, drunken arguments, Parion had informed her that the night he’d baited her rated amongst the top few. Illick were a gregarious species, in part due to the fact that they already had several symbiotic possibilities. They’d learned to co-operate with other species before they’d even developed the options to get off-planet.

  Whereas her own kind had technology that outstripped their characters.

  “I thought it was my turn to be the grumpy one?” Arucken said aloud, but there was a glint to his large eyes. He turned towards her, lifting his glass to clink it and though a few people turned to look at the human custom, they soon returned to their own conversations. The Kaimahi held a booth in the corner opposite, laughing in shrill voices as they swopped round various coloured drinks on a large tray. She made a note to look back when they tried the solar flare. That was always an interesting watch.

  She looked back at her partner, and her mind was full of possibilities.

  Parion glided towards them, without turning to face them he asked. “Are you to be found tonight?”

  Kerris raised her glass, slightly, and inclined it towards him.

  The Illick caught the movement from the corner of his eye, and gave a small nod. He moved off with a twist of his mouth, what passed for a smile she’d gathered. Arucken raised his brows at her and his colours were bright with amusement. He didn’t even try to hold them back. Unlike in the packed interior of the human hall, they passed here without comment. Parion’s bar had seen much odder things than a nestling’s display.

  It’s good to have more variety again!

  Kerris scowled at her partner in mock outrage, as they began a familiar argument. She didn’t think either of them would know what to do, should they ever win their corner of it.

  The night grew older, filled with the sounds and presence of many different beings. Parion didn’t send anyone across to them just yet, but it was only a matter of waiting.

  About the Author

  Christine Jayne Vann was born in the Outer Hebrides and is a multi-genre author. Christine works as a web developer, and lives in Oxfordshire with her family, dog, hedgehog and various squirrels. She runs the exotic pet resource website Crittery, and also enjoys geocaching.

  Connect with Christine Jayne Vann

  Thank you for reading my book, if you enjoyed it please take a moment to leave a review at your favourite retailer. To learn more about my works or to connect with me on social media please take a look at my website: http://www.christinejayne.co.uk/