by Faye, Audrey
The beauty in this galaxy needed to stand against that.
It couldn’t afford to be fragile.
The dancers finished their piece to polite applause, and then people began to move, looking for the next tableau on the street. A touch of light entertainment that had briefly promised more, but never materialized.
There were no visitors covered in clay or falling into paintings or listening to a musician for three hours just because they could. No one breaking into an impromptu dance in the street or in a kitchen over cookies. Nobody having a mad, passionate love affair with art, even for just an hour or two—and in the end, I couldn’t blame that on the audience. Thess invited them to a well-mannered garden party, not to something hot and sweaty and real.
But there were some who wanted hot and sweaty and real anyhow. Some of those were visitors and some were residents and some were Fixers who were just passing through.
A Fixer with her hands thoroughly tied.
I took one long, last look around me, collecting last impressions on this day that was suddenly shining with bold, bright clarity—and spotted a hat I knew. Magda, standing with a cup of tea, watching the next group of dancers getting set up to perform. Her yearning was delicate, just like the teacup, but it was there.
It wasn’t Magda who had my attention, though. It was the man standing beside her with obvious patience, carrying three shopping bags and looking like he had nothing better to do in the world than tag along at his wife’s shoulder. But it wasn’t Magda that Harold was watching. It was me. With the wise, observant eyes of a master diplomat.
The kind of man who might just know a little something about fomenting rebellion while officially doing nothing at all.
13
It turned out that I didn’t need to find Harold. He found me, sitting on the window seat in Greta’s kitchen, and he was holding two pieces of pie when he did it. “Magda is out shopping again—join me?”
I grinned and took one of the plates. “I’d have talked to you without the bribe, you know.”
He laughed, and it was the easy, mellow chuckle of a man who knew he was headed to the Etruscan sector and had chosen not to let it soak into this moment. That took the kind of fortitude that I’d been a Fixer for long enough to respect. “Is Magda still out there hoping to find someone who will make her dance?”
“Noticed that, did you?” He took a seat with the elegant grace of a man who had learned how not to offend in dozens of different cultures. “This place is wonderful for many reasons, but it’s never quite managed that. I keep angling for a placement on one of the wild worlds.”
I’d never met Raven’s people, but if she was any indication, nobody got to be a passive observer in a tribal culture. “My roommate is from Mazatlan.”
“Ah.” He looked at me with open curiosity. “Closed world.”
That would be why I’d never been. That, and my unholy terror at the idea of meeting Raven’s grandmothers. “That just makes it hard for people to go in. She chose to come out.”
“And makes the galaxy immeasurably richer for it.” He cut off a small bite of pie and smiled at me. “As, I imagine, do you.”
I shrugged, a little uncomfortable with innocuous words of praise that sounded like he’d meant them, and very personally. “Fixers do what we can.”
“Diplomats too.”
After the dissatisfaction of the last few days, I could feel myself yearning for a real conversation. A diplomat seemed like an odd choice, but he’d brought me a slice of the best lemon pie I’d ever tasted, and that somehow felt like all the reason I needed. “So why do you come here, if what Magda really wants is to dance?”
“Because we’re happy here.” He smiled gently. “Thess is a haven for us—a place of peace and serenity and beauty and lack of reality to fill us up with delightful comfort before we head off to somewhere that has none of those things.”
The same reasons Raven sank into a hot bath. “Lots of people probably come here for those things.”
“We all have our reasons. Sometimes Magda and I go to Alonuhu and sit on a beach and do nothing but drink in the sounds of the ocean.”
Something about the way he said it caught my attention. “And do you both enjoy that, too?”
He chuckled. “When we come here, I follow Magda around and bask in her happiness. When we go to the beach, she reads a dozen books and humors me.”
And drank in his peace. “It sounds like a good partnership.”
His eyes were soft and pleased. “Not everyone sees that.”
I hadn’t at first, but I figured he already knew that. “Maybe I’m judging Thess too harshly.” I wanted it to stretch people, and maybe they didn’t come here for that.
“Perhaps.” Harold was making his way through his pie with impressive speed for someone who gave off no sense of haste at all. “Or perhaps you live deeper—so you seek something deeper.”
He had the wrong Fixer. “That’s not usually what I’m accused of.”
“Oh?” His eyes were a cross between kind grandfather and priest confessor.
I remembered Yesenia’s parting words all too well. “I like ease and smoothing things. I’m kind of like the Thess of the Fixer world.”
“I don’t believe that at all.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You seem awfully sure of that for someone who’s barely met me.”
He laughed. “Occupational hazard. If Magda were here, she’d be sure to remind me that sometimes my snap judgments of people are wrong. However, in this case, if ease was your primary objective in life, you wouldn’t be sitting here wanting to kick Thess in the knees.”
That was exactly how I felt, even if it was an emotional state I tended to associate with Kish or Raven, not me. “There’s just so much that could be happening here, and it isn’t.”
He looked at me for a long moment, as if I’d both surprised and pleased him. “That’s because you understand art’s true power.”
I shrugged and smiled wryly. “Occupational hazard.” Fixers wielded song and dance to change the galaxy. I knew how much I could do with just a riffle of my fingers. Thess could be so much more than it was.
Harold contemplated his empty fork. “I used to be a teacher. The students who mystified and frustrated me the most were the ones who weren’t living up to their potential.”
I nodded slowly. “That’s exactly it. What happens here is lovely, and it serves many needs, and Thess would get really good grades on its report card.”
He smiled. “But it could be getting great ones.”
He understood, at least enough to help me think through my conundrum. And while that wasn’t strictly within the rules, even Yesenia wasn’t likely to get her shorts in a twist about a simple conversation, at least if I was careful. “Can I ask you something? Hypothetically?” I figured a diplomat would treat that kind of question the same way a fellow Fixer would.
“Of course.” He nodded, and somehow managed to make talking with his mouth full look positively gracious.
“If you’re in a situation purely as an observer, and you want to encourage change, how do you go about it?”
“Your hands are tied, are they?”
I liked him, even if he was clearly pie competition. “Hypothetically.”
“That happens more than it ought to.”
Spoken like a man who knew what it was to have his options restricted.
He ate his last bite and stared into the outside gardens thoughtfully. When his eyes returned to mine, I could see hints of the canny, experienced navigator of worlds. “In general, there are two ways. You can get an internal leader to move things along, or you can find them a common enemy.”
The latter seemed a lot more violent than what a slightly uptight arts colony needed, although it was definitely something I could see Harold pulling out of his bag of tricks in the Etruscan sector. “I’ve used both of those strategies in other places.”
He smiled. “We learn from the same Anthros you do.”
That made sense. “You use different tools, though.” Talents were good for quick interventions, but we tended to make people nervous if we stuck around.
He let his eyes roam the kitchen, with no apparent interest any deeper than surveying the snack shelves to see if more pie had magically appeared. “True. Some of them might even be considered observational.”
I stared at him—and then I felt the light dawning. The KarmaCorp operations manual was very specific on what I couldn’t do here, but most of it focused on use of Talent. It didn’t say much at all about fifty-three kilos of cranky artist taking a few cues from a master diplomat.
I grinned at Harold and handed him the rest of my pie. “You’re very good at your job, aren’t you?”
His eyes twinkled as he forked a large bite off my plate and handed the rest back. “Occasionally. Now head out there and be good at yours.” He winked at me. “Perhaps you’ll be fast enough for Magda to get a chance to dance.”
14
I stepped out the door of Greta’s cottage, wincing as the hinges creaked a little. The last thing I wanted to do right now was wake anyone up. I needed solitude—for my heart, and for my overtaxed social graces, and for my Talent to see clearly in what I sought to do next.
Harold had helped put my feet on a path that was important, but I wasn’t a diplomat. The artist believed in the path I could see now, but I was here because KarmaCorp sent me, and the Fixer needed to look with her own eyes and make her own choices. I couldn’t use Talent to lean on people or influence outcomes here—but I could use it to help guide my own soul.
I kicked off my shoes at the gate and stepped out onto the street. The air was cool, brushing gently against my cheeks. I spun a little, letting my filmy skirt float on the currents of the night. There were a few small lights to guide my way, mostly down at ground level. Faerie bulbs—there for ambience and little more. Clearly very few people went traipsing around Thess late at night.
I was happy to be one of them. I let my head tip back, enjoying the uneven lines of buildings edging the dark sky. The starscape was beautiful. I could see a planet off in the distance, one with pink pearlescent rings. Cherum, maybe. I was bad at interstellar geography even in my own corner of the galaxy.
I twirled again, remembering the little girl of earlier. She would love a ride on rings pink and pearlescent. We would laugh as we danced and she would giggle and challenge my feet to keep up with her.
The knot of frustration that had been riding just under my throat started to let go as my feet found their freedom. I tipped my head back again, drinking in the quiet nocturnal vibrations of a place of serenity and the many visitors it served very well, and finding my compassion for a village that could never be all things to all people. I would need to hold firm to that compassion if I really intended to try to be a force for change here.
A very careful force. My fingers danced their unease at this walk into the wildly gray areas of my mission parameters. I wasn’t the kind of Fixer who found myself there very often, and tonight I needed to be kind to myself, too.
It wasn’t weak to be a person who played by the rules.
I ran down the middle of the street and let my footwork bust loose a little. Smoothing some of my own threads. Reading the echoes of some that had been disturbed today and yearning to ease some, and to dust up others, give them a bigger voice.
I kept dancing and kept my Talent on a leash. I was here to observe.
Then I sighed and re-routed what lived inside me instead. Dancers didn’t leash very easily, and the thing I wanted to try tonight was going to take every drop of Talent I possessed. I might as well let it get started.
I let my passive reading skills unfurl out to maximum reach.
My job here was to be eyes on the ground, to help the StarReaders translate whatever it was they could see from afar. That usually meant sniffing out the nuances, the detail, seeing the small plants in the forest and reporting back.
Tonight I wanted to see the forest.
I was more used to reading the energies at that level than most, thanks to my unofficial thread-smoothing duties back on Stardust Prime, but it wasn’t anything I ever used on assignment. I shifted to the filters that would let me see patterns instead of people, almost like changing the magnification on a microscope. I grinned—Tee would be amused that my occasional playdates with her lab equipment had finally paid off.
I settled both feet back on the ground and shifted into a swaying, mostly stationary dance that would let me focus inward without running into a lamppost. The threads always seemed brighter at night, which probably wasn’t a real thing, but it was pretty. I let myself float, feel lighter. Rising higher, but not looking down. It wasn’t the threads close to the ground I wanted to see tonight.
The view reminded me of a vid I saw once of a camera on the tail end of a vertical rocket launch, back in the crazy days when they still used to do those from inside planetary atmospheres. At first I could make out the individual homes and lampposts and flower baskets of Thess, an intricate web that blurred and melded as I floated my senses higher. The small spaceport came into view next, with a thick rope of threads running into the center of the village, and another thick one following what I assumed was the primary path up to the orbiting space station. Both ropes had a few small, frayed bits running off them, but not as many as I was used to seeing. The people who lived and traveled here never went very far off the beaten path.
I floated what my Talent was reading up still further, imagining myself dancing in the starscape. I kept a small part of me tuned in to the night air brushing against my cheeks. This was deep work to do without a partner to pull me out if I tumbled in too far. Dancers didn’t tend to come unanchored from their bodies very easily, but precautions were still a good thing.
There were so many stars. I shifted my filters again, trying to get a view that would show me the right level of threads. It was tricky—I’d only done this a few times, and Stardust Prime wasn’t in nearly as dense a sector of the galaxy as my complacent arts colony.
Thess was a small node below me now, with a big, dark forest around it and the very empty silence of undeveloped moonscape beyond that. I could see several in-system planets on my various horizons, or whatever you called it when a Dancer didn’t have her inner feet on actual ground anymore but wanted to pretend like she did.
I was never one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut. I let my fingers move, feeling the threads. Letting them center me, remind me why I was up here.
I nudged my filters a little more and smiled as the web of threads gelled into something at the resolution I needed. I took a moment to look at the shimmering beauty that was a starscape overlaid with the peculiar way my Talent interpreted what it could see, and then I focused on the village below me. For a while, all I did was watch. It was a vibrant fabric, thanks to all the visitors who had arrived this weekend.
I raised an eyebrow as a particularly strong, stable thread led me right back to the house where I was staying. Harold was so much more than a standard-issue Federation diplomat. I studied the two threads that were him and his wife and noticed the direction of flow. They would leave brighter than they came.
Intrigued, I hopscotched my way down the street, picking up visitor threads and tracking them to their source. I’d never been entirely sure how to explain the way my Talent differentiated people. It sometimes saw strength where nothing on the surface would seem to back up that claim, and it quite often dismissed worldly power as irrelevant. This time, I didn’t bother to try to understand who was getting ranked where—I just looked at incoming and outgoing.
My Dancer saw pattern almost immediately, but I insisted on the discipline of repetition, of letting the data speak and not just my leaps of intuition. When logic finally agreed with the leaping, I let myself float back down.
And gently Danced with the kernel of what I’d found.
Most people left Thess happier, more full than when they’d arriv
ed, but there were exceptions—and almost all of the exceptions were the most vibrant threads, the strongest and most interesting, the ones that held a special place in the energies of the galaxy for reasons I might not understand, but my Talent could see.
Harold was one of the few exceptions. He had figured out how to make Thess work for him, but so many others—and many of those the best and the brightest—didn’t.
I knew what the StarReaders saw here now. Thess was a nexus, a crossroads, a stopping place on the journey where travelers came for sustenance, for solace, for inspiration, to relight a place in their souls that had dimmed. And for those who wanted those things on a small scale, Thess delivered.
I bowed my head and let myself sink fully back into my body. I could feel the exhaustion, the quivering legs, the fingers that found gravity harder to move against than usual.
But my Fixer had found her answer. My artist was one of the threads who wanted to drink deeply here, and I was right that I couldn’t kick Thess in the knees on her behalf alone. But she had company—a minority, to be sure, but KarmaCorp had never focused on numbers. We knew better than anyone how much a single flap of a butterfly’s wings could matter.
Bright and shiny threads came here and left hungry, and that was the kind of thing my Fixer heart could totally get behind doing something about. Or rather, she could watch while my artist did the doing.
Observation only.
I smiled out into the dark night. One amateur painter about to see just how far she could stretch the definition of those two words.
15
I yawned as I walked out Greta’s front door. It wasn’t that many hours since the last time I’d stepped outside, but the ambience had surely changed. The sun was high overhead, the view was a maze of color, and the streets had been reclaimed by the chattering masses.
A shrunken mass, to be sure—people were headed home today, and the crowds were thinning.