by Sarah Zettel
Ca’aed was an ancient city. It’s pass-throughs, arches, sails, and gardens had grown huge and richly colored with age. Its highest sails nearly raked the clouds, and its sensor roots dragged in the canopy. Where villages skimmed and bobbed on the winds, Ca’aed sailed ponderous and stately, as if it graciously allowed the winds to carry it along.
T’sha’s family had helped the city grow its shells and sails. They had protected it and been protected by it for thirty generations. They had been pollers, speakers, teachers, engineers, and ambassadors. Always, always, they had worked directly with Ca’aed, heard its voice, helped it live.
No, Ca’aed would not fall.
Ca’aed spread like a person fully inflated with their wings flung wide. Its walls were deeply creviced, making a thousand harbors into which to guide its people or their vehicles. It drew people in and exuded them again, as if people were what it breathed. Its lens eyes sparkled silver in the daylight. It watched the people come and go so it could advise them as to their routes and their loads or simply to wish them good luck. Lacy fronds of sensors stretched between the sails, constantly testing the winds, looking for riches to steer into and disease to steer away from. Ca’aed was careful. Ca’aed was well advised. Ca’aed might act quickly but never rashly.
“No wonder you have no husbands yet,” her younger sister T’kel had teased her once. “Your love is all for the city.”
“That is no bad thing,” her birth father had replied. “If someone in the position to make promises does not love the city as well as she loves the people in it, she may grow careless with her promises and perhaps overtax its capacities. This can force growth where growth is not ready or even advisable.” He’d been answering T’kel, but his attention had been on T’sha. That had been while she was being debated in the general polls as a speaker, but already her father was trying to convince her to start building a base to become ambassador.
“Welcome home, Ambassador,” came Ca’aed’s familiar voice from her headset. “Have you answers from Gaith? Is there a name for its illness?”
“We don’t know yet.” All T’sha’s hands clutched the perches uneasily.
“But you are confident it will be found?”
“Not as confident as I was.” T’sha deflated just a little. “I have to send the kite back to Gaith. Open your gates for me?”
“Always, T’sha. Give me your kite.”
T’sha spoke the words to transfer command and Ca’aed took over, pulling the little kite unerringly into one of its harbors. As the rich brown walls surrounded them, Ca’aed’s welcomers fluttered out of their cubbyhole and surrounded T’sha in a swarm of reds and greens. They lighted here and there on her back and wings, tasting the emissions of her pores and flitting away again for Ca’aed to be sure there were no dangerous tastes, that she carried nothing hidden with her from Gaith.
But nothing was found, and the pebbled gates at the end of the harbor, which constantly strained and tested the winds for the beneficial elements as well as for the harmful ones, opened a portal for her to dart through. One of Ca’aed’s fronds brushed her as she passed, a touch of reassurance and welcome.
“An old city,” her birth father had often said, “becomes as full, rich, and complex as the canopy underneath, and its life becomes as tightly intertwined.”
T’sha sometimes thought “tangled” would be a better word. The inside of Ca’aed was decidedly a tangle. Bones braced it, corals defined its spaces, and ligaments bound its elements together. Plants and animals gave its walls color, and its air weight and life.
Between them, Ca’aed was a shell full of shells. Small dwellings and family compounds were tethered to each other and to the city, but were not part of its essential substance.
Ca’aed’s free citizens flew through its chambers, intent on their various businesses, or merely enjoying the tastes and textures of their world. Its indentured worked down in the veins and chasms of its corals, growing, researching, comparing, because the city could not be wholly aware of the workings of every symbiont and parasite, any more than a person could be aware of the workings of every pore.
Music, perfumes, voices, flavors filled the air, vying for attention, pressing against T’sha’s skin, filling her up with the vigor of life. The memory of Gaith made the miasma all the more precious. The people of Gaith had lost all of this when they lost their village. But, with care, T’sha might still be able to help them get it back.
T’sha flew into the tangle of life, angling herself vaguely toward her family’s district. “Ca’aed, I need my brother T’deu. Where is he?”
“Your brother is in the promise trees.”
Of course. T’sha beat her wings, turning her flight up toward the city’s sculpted and vented ceiling. The promise trees were in this finger of the city. She would not have to snag a passing kite.
A solid turquoise and cream carapace encapsulated the promise trees and kept out not only the winds but all that the winds might carry. The ligaments that twined around its oval walls and anchored it to Ca’aed’s living bones did not themselves live. They carried neither information nor nutrition and so could not be used to tamper with anything within the carapace.
The only entrance to the trees was a long tunnel that was so narrow that only one person at a time could fly its length. Pink and gold papillae tasted the air around each entrant, making sure that he or she was a free citizen of Ca’aed. If the entrant was a stranger to the city or an indenture, it made sure he or she had received permission from the city or a speaker to come. If not, the ends of the tunnel would seal and Ca’aed would call for the district’s speaker.
Entering the trees was like flying straight into the canopy. It was a jungle of leaves, stems, branches, and trunks, all grown into one another. They spread from the center of the room to the carapace. They climbed the walls, until patterns of intertwining stems and roots covered the carapace’s grainy hide. All the colors of growing life shone there in a delicate riot. It all appeared extremely fragile, but the slightest root was many times stronger than the thickest metal wire T’sha had ever touched. It was as beautiful to T’sha as any temple.
Inside the trees’ veins flowed the DNA records of every registered promise of the world of Home. Not all promises were registered. Promises passed every day between friends and family that had no need to be here, but promises between businesses, between cities and villages, between ambassadors and any person or any city needed to be recorded. Their fine tendrils of implication needed to be tracked. In here were promises of marriage, merger, birth, inheritance, indenture, trade, service, and sale.
None of this luxuriant growth was necessary, of course. All of the promise registries could have been contained in a set of cortex boxes, and in a younger city it might have been, but the beauty and elaboration of Ca’aed was one of the aspects of it that T’sha had always loved about her city.
T’deu, T’sha’s older brother, hovered near the top of the chamber, away from the other trackers and registrants who dotted the chamber. T’deu was an archiver, trained in the reading and tracking of promises. T’sha wove her way through the maze of stems and branches until the air of her passage brushed against him. Her brother turned on his wingtip and leaned forward, rubbing his muzzle joyfully against hers.
“Ambassador Sister!” he said, softly but happily. She and T’deu shared the same birth mother. His father had entered the marriage because of a political promise, and hers had been promised in to help his family when their city fell into trouble. She and T’deu had been raised together and never lost their friendship, even after they were both declared adults and sent out to make their own lives. “It is good to have you here, no matter what the circumstances.”
“Thank you, Archiver Brother.” T’sha pulled away just a little. “You heard about Gaith.”
He dipped his muzzle. “Ca’aed spread the word to the speakers, and the speakers have not been silent.”
T’sha’s bones bunched as she winced, b
ut she smoothed them out. “Brother, we need to redirect this wind. It is going to be used to rush us into an untenable situation.”
T’deu peered up at her, as if he could see into her mind and touch her thoughts. “If you tell me so,” he said, but he did not sound certain.
T’sha accepted his words and dismissed his tone. “I want us to bring Gaith’s body here.”
Her brother deflated in a long, slow motion. “That’s dangerous, T’sha—”
“No, listen, there are advantages here. If we give Gaith’s engineers the resources to regenerate and resurrect the city and they give us the knowledge and experience they gain from the task, we will be able to turn around and make our own promises with that information, should this strain of disease spread.”
“It will mean bringing in a potential contagion, though,” T’deu reminded her. “You’ll have to take a vote on that.”
“I’ll get the votes. Can you design me a promise that will do the job?”
“I can design anything you like.” T’deu waved one wing at the maze of stems and branches around them. “I could grow you a tree that would outline ownership of the clouds above us. Implementing it—”
“Is my job,” said T’sha, cutting him off. “Make sure you graft P’kan’s engineers into its branches. They hold several promises against the city. This will help close those down.”
“Of course, Ambassador,” T’deu said, deflating with mock servility. “Anything else?”
“Should fresh thoughts sprout, I’ll share them with you.”
T’deu moved even closer, making sure his words reached only her. “Why are you really doing this, Ambassador Sister? It is not only for the profit of the city, or even for the good of Gaith.”
“No,” she admitted. For a moment she thought of telling him he did not need to know, but that was not true. To design a truly effective promise, he needed to know the ultimate goal, especially if the promise were complex, as promises dealing with cities ultimately were. Trying to integrate the wrong person could jeopardize the entire balance. “I want to be sure Gaith is studied, and studied immediately. If I leave it free for D’seun to take over, he’ll fly the village’s bones all around the world and show everyone what horrors we are exposing ourselves to if we don’t all flock to New Home immediately.”
“He’ll still try to use Gaith’s illness to overfly you,” said T’deu.
T’sha shook her wings. “I won’t let him. All D’seun’s attention is fixed on a single point. If he will not voluntarily see the whole horizon, he must be made to see.”
T’deu dipped his muzzle again. “As my Ambassador Sister says. I’ll start growing your promise.”
“Thank you, Brother. Good luck.” She brushed her muzzle against his briefly and launched herself back toward the entrance.
And now there are only a thousand meetings to arrange. The district speakers must hear all of this of course and be brought around. That could be expensive. I’ll have to organize the pollers for a citywide referendum, but their schedule should be light right now, except for the poll D’seun has so thoughtfully called for. T’sha emerged from the tunnel into the filtered light of the city. She turned her flight toward the city center and her family’s district where she kept her workspace. “Ca’aed?”
“Yes, Ambassador?” answered the city.
“Ca’aed, I have a case to put to you. It concerns your well-being, so I cannot move without you.”
“What is it?”
As T’sha flew, she told Ca’aed her plan to bring Gaith to the city to allow Gaith’s own citizens to effect its resurrection in return for sharing their knowledge with Ca’aed’s engineers, thus saving the Kan Gaith years of potential indenture for their food and shelter in some other city.
Ca’aed was silent for a moment. “We have the room to bring the Kan Gaith here,” it said finally. “Our binding of promises with them is not strong or detailed, but there is some exchange that could be worked out.” Again, the city paused. T’sha suspected it was mulling over the conversation T’sha had held with T’deu. “We do need to know what infects Gaith,” Ca’aed went on. “Yes, bring it here. I agree. I will start working on precautionary plans so we can implement this action as soon as you have secured the people’s votes.”
“Thank you, Ca’aed,” said T’sha earnestly. “This is not just to further my cause with the High Law Meet. There is good for all concerned here.”
“Yes,” answered Ca’aed. “I do comprehend the good in this.”
Something in the city’s voice kept T’sha from asking what else it comprehended.
T’sha’s workspace was a small coral bubble in her family’s compound. The veins holding her records twined all around its insides, spreading out crooked tendrils of blue and purple. It was not as grand or complex a space as many ambassadors had, but T’sha preferred to work on the wing and conduct her meetings and requests in person.
This time though, that would be impossible. She needed all of her specially trained cortex boxes to organize a meeting of the city’s thirty district speakers and coordinate their schedules. Each speaker, in turn, would have to reserve time with their chiefs and the pollers because this was a voting matter. The entire process would take dodec-hours.
T’sha was not even halfway finished when the room told her D’seun waited outside.
“Let him in,” she said, reluctantly. She was not quite ready for him yet, but she had no polite way to delay.
D’seun drifted into her workspace. He looked shriveled and settled at once on a perch.
“Good luck, D’seun. Can I offer you some time in the refresher? Surely whatever you have to say can wait an hour or two until you are restored.”
“No, it cannot wait.” He lifted his muzzle. “I must hear you say that you now understand that we cannot wait to find another world to be New Home. I must hear you say we will work together in this.”
Shock swelled T’sha. That really was all he thought about. There was no swaying him, no changing the focus of his mind.
“I understand that we are not always as wise as we think we are,” she told him fiercely, leaning forward from her own perch. “I understand that we might not know all the rules of life, and that if we act like we do, we are breeding disaster, for ourselves and for these New People.”
“I respect your caution, Ambassador T’sha, but I cannot let it endanger us any further.” Righteousness swelled D’seun to his fullest extent. “I will proceed with the poll of your families.”
“I know that,” replied T’sha calmly. “I’m already arranging time with the speakers and the pollers. You will have your vote.”
D’seun cocked his head. His eyes examined her from crest to fingertip, trying to guess what made her so complacent. If he succeeded, he gave no sign. “Thank you for your cooperation then, Ambassador. I will wish you good luck and go prepare for the vote.”
“Good luck, Ambassador D’seun.” T’sha lifted her hands. D’seun lifted his briefly in return and flew away.
T’sha watched him go. There are advantages to dealing with someone whose attention has narrowed to a hairs-breadth, she thought. He has not yet thought to make a try for Gaith’s body.
“Ambassador?” came Ca’aed’s voice suddenly.
“Yes, Ca’aed?”
“I want you to know, I’m going to vote in favor of using D’seun’s candidate for New Home.”
“What?” T’sha stiffened. “Ca’aed, why?”
“Because I’m afraid, T’sha. I’m afraid that what happened to Gaith will happen to me and to you.”
T’sha shriveled in on herself as the city’s words washed through her. Ca’aed was afraid. She had never heard the city voice such a thought before. What could she do against that?
“We will protect you, Ca’aed,” she murmured. “But who will protect the New People?”
“You will find a way.”
T’sha dipped her muzzle. “I will have to.”
Chapter Three
“THIS IS YOUR 7 A.M. wake-up,” said the room’s too sweet voice. “This is your 7 A.M. wake-up.”
Around Veronica, the hotel suite woke up. The lights lifted to full morning brightness. In the sitting room, the coffeemaker began to gurgle and hiss, while a fresh lemon scent wafted out of the air ducts.
Vee, who had been awake for an hour already, looked up, sniffed the combination of coffee and lemon, and wrinkled her nose.
“Should’ve shut off one of those,” she muttered.
She looked back down at the desk screen in front of her with its list of names, degrees, and recent publications. She frowned for a moment and then moved Martha Pruess to the top of the list. She was a research fellow in photonic engineering from the Massachusetts Federated Institute of Technology, and her list of publications took up half the screen.
“Checking out the competition?”
Vee jumped, twisting in her seat. Rosa Cristobal, her friend and business manager, stood right behind her chair. “Jesus, Rosa. Don’t sneak up on me. It’s too early.”
“Sorry.” Rosa tucked her hands into the pockets of her thick, terry-cloth robe. “But that is what you’re doing?”
“Yeah.” Vee sighed and tugged on a lock of her hair. “Rosa, I am not going to get this.”
“They invited you,” Rosa pointed out, as patiently and as firmly as if this were the first time she’d said it.
“Why?” Vee spread her hands. “They need scientists, engineers. I’m an artist, for God’s sake. It’s been years since I’ve set foot in a real lab.”
“You’ve got a Ph.D. in planetary atmospherics and your name is sitting pretty on five different patents.”
“Which you will remind them of.” Vee dropped her gaze back down to the list. Actually, maybe Avram Elchohen should be at the top. He’s got a few more papers on optoelectric engineering—
“Which I will remind them of.” Rosa reached over Vee’s shoulder and touched the Off key. The desk screen blanked. “Get dressed, Vee. The interview’s at nine and you do not want to be late.”