The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Q nodded. “Or possibly just manifestations of our own subconscious minds, helping us work through personal and philosophical issues. The guides are helpful, anyway, whether they have objective reality or not. Some people see their own personal guides – bees, frogs, talking fountains, ocean waves – and others never see the same thing twice, but many people see the same entities over and over again, which suggests either that they possess some external reality, or that we share an underlying pool of archetypes.”

  “Or they’re just primed to see the Green Lady because they heard all their co-religionists talking about her, or read accounts about her on the druggier parts of the Tangle,” Callie said.

  “Or that,” Q agreed cheerfully. “The church is a practical religion. Our practice makes us feel better, and makes us better people, so I don’t care too much about why or how it works.” Her face fell. “But, yes, that is why I take these disappearances personally. We had congregants on some of the survey teams. The leader of my branch here and some of my friends went out looking for them when they vanished, and they were lost too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stephen said. “I… My congregation was on Meditreme Station, so I know what it’s like, to lose people.”

  Q leaned back. “Oh, Stephen. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize there were any survivors from Meditreme at all.”

  “We happened to be off the station at the time,” he said.

  “Have you found anyone else to practice with?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve done some solo sacraments, of course, but without the group element, well. What’s the point of connection with no one to connect with? I’ve missed at least two Festivals. It’s been hard.”

  She stood up, walked around the table, and stood by him. “May I hug you?”

  “Churchgoers.” Callie shook her head.

  “Please.” Stephen rose, and the two of them embraced for a long moment.

  Q drew back, but kept her hand on his shoulder. “Come to our meeting hall tonight, all right? I know the Green Lady isn’t your preference–”

  “No, I begin to see the appeal, now that I’m on a planet, where things are growing,” he said. “I’d be very pleased to join you.”

  Ashok, in an incredibly rare moment of social awareness, left his spot on the bench and sat on the other side of the table, allowing Q to sit beside Stephen. She looked over at Callie. “I’m here as an agent of Almajara, but I’d also like you to look for any signs of my fellow congregants. They may merely be lost. I hope so.”

  “We’ll find out what’s happening,” Callie said. “We’ll bring back any survivors too.” Wishful thinking, but also the truth: in the unlikely event anyone was still alive out there, she’d bring them safely home.

  “I’ll have space for a few passengers on my ship, too,” Q said.

  Callie closed her eyes, counted silently to five, and then said, “Do you mean to suggest you’re going with us?” She didn’t bother to hide her disapproval of that idea.

  Her disapproval didn’t appear to bother Q a bit. “I am. Almajara wants a representative and observer, but I don’t want to interfere with your operations, so I’ll follow in my own ship.”

  “And hang back a bit, so if we get eaten by the devouring darkness, you can turn around and burn for home and send a splintercast back to Uncle Reynauld telling him what happened to us, right?”

  “Something like that,” Q said. “Did you say Uncle Reynauld? Reynauld Garcia-Hassan is your uncle?”

  “Only by marriage. Not even by that, any more. But old habits die hard.”

  “I had no idea you had such close connections to the family.” Q was clearly regretting her not-entirely-loyal-to-the-company talk from earlier.

  “Don’t worry about it. I met Reynauld at my wedding and at a funeral or two, but since he wasn’t interested in sleeping with me, he didn’t pay me much attention. We don’t sit down for friendly chats about the relative loyalty of his down-the-line employees.”

  Q breathed out. “That’s comforting. I’ve only ever seen him projected on a viewscreen, four meters high, complaining about production targets and our anticipated failure to meet them.”

  Callie chuckled. “He’s a lot shorter in person. All right. I understand your position. You can follow along, but stay a ways back. We’ve got some experimental stealth technology on our ship, and we’re going to try to creep in where others rushed.” Callie was privately annoyed. She’d planned to use their bridge generator to jump to the far side of the asteroid belt and approach the region of the disappearances from an entirely unprecedented angle, but now they’d have to settle for stealth and a roundabout approach, maybe dipping way below the plane of the ecliptic and then rising up toward the danger zone. At least Q didn’t want to ride on the White Raven: the crew could still discuss the possibility of an Axiom threat openly on the way. “I’m giving the crew tonight to get some rest and relaxation, and we’ll set off in the morning refreshed. Shall – that’s our ship’s AI – will be in your comms tomorrow with an hour’s warning, so nobody overindulge tonight.” She looked at Stephen and Q sternly.

  “You know our sacraments don’t give us hangovers,” Stephen said.

  “Yeah, but staying up all night bonding over imaginary green machine fractals might tire you out, and I need you at peak. If we find any survivors out there, they may need medical attention.”

  Stephen sniffed. “I have never yet failed to discharge my duties, captain.”

  “Fair enough, XO. I’m glad you’re going to get some of your old-time religion, anyway. I know you missed it.”

  “I like it when you call him XO,” Elena said. “It sounds like what you’d sign at the end of a love letter – like hugs and kisses.” She made smoochie noises.

  “People from the past are so strange,” Callie said.

  “You should try hanging out with people from the future sometime. They don’t even laugh at super funny jokes reliably.”

  Chapter 14

  The crew was given quarters in Almajara Corp housing, but the company had contracted out the building to the same whimsical crew who’d designed the restaurant at the spaceport, and as a result, Elena and Callie slept inside what looked like a huge hollow tree, albeit with better amenities. The windows were knotholes, and you could take a spiral staircase up the center of the trunk and go through a hatch to a rooftop patio among the “branches,” which had real living vines twining all over them.

  There were two bedrooms in the vast trunk, a master and a junior, and they shared the big one: the bed was immense, with a headboard and footboard in the same branches-and-vines motif. The bed itself stood on a slightly raised platform, like it was on stage. Callie bounced on the edge of the bed, finding the mattress pleasingly firm. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a walk around Rheged, see the sights?” Callie said. “I know being on a planet is new and exciting for you–”

  “You know what else is new and exciting for me? Sex on another planet. I wasn’t kidding about collecting all the celestial bodies.” Elena pounced.

  After they showered – the showerhead was shaped like a tulip blossom, which was way over the “this is twee” line for Callie’s taste, prompting complaints that Elena stifled with a kiss – they got dressed and set out, taking a small electric cart along a winding landscaped path to see the sights, such as they were. Despite being the capital, Rheged wasn’t a huge settlement, and only merited being called a city because it was adjacent to the planet’s main spaceport. Most of the experimental communities and artist colonies had their own properties where they did things their own way, scattered elsewhere on this edge of the continent, most within a day’s drive of the capital. The people who lived in Rheged were either employees of Almajara or support staff for the spaceport, dealing with incoming and outgoing passengers and freight (Owain was already sending tons of food through their bridge to other colonies and stations from the auto-farms to the south, and they hardly imported anything except art supplies and
finished goods). The city center was full of more ultragel buildings, many whimsical and representational, clearly the work of a crew that enjoyed making buildings shaped like boots and boats and goats and so on, but there were other more avant-garde and abstract designs, too – structures that incorporated curves and spirals and unexpected angles. Many of those were ugly, and some were sublime. The latter ones made Elena think of Stephen’s machine elves and fractalines. He’d hinted once or twice that Elena might find his church’s sacraments helpful: she was a woman from another time, coping with the trauma of her arrival in a universe stranger and more hostile than she could have imagined, and that sense of connection and belonging might ease her path. Maybe. She had never dabbled overmuch in mind-expanding or enhancing drugs, and not even Stephen could claim that CoED’s sacraments were, strictly speaking, medicine, though he did stress their therapeutic value. In truth, Elena felt she was coping pretty well with her displacement. She’d always had a “change what you can, accept what you can’t” mentality, and she found what solace she needed beyond that with Callie.

  She looked at her partner, driving the cart with her usual fixed attention, and smiled. Callie didn’t believe in accepting what she couldn’t change. She’d just change the circumstances until she could change whatever needed changing. Elena worried sometimes that she might be getting dependent, but she didn’t worry about co-dependence: as far as she could tell, Callie didn’t need anything or anyone, and was with Elena solely because she chose to be. That could be a little scary, admittedly – what if Callie got bored and wanted to move on? They were together on a great endeavor, protecting the universe from the Axiom, but that mission didn’t require romance. If Elena lost Callie’s heart, how adrift would she be in this strange universe, without a guide? She wasn’t with Callie just because Callie offered security and a sense of stability in an uncertain world, but that was certainly a nice side effect. Elena’s talk with Michael had made her feel better, at least. She had no intention of betraying Callie, and it sounded like Callie was the loyal sort, when it came to love – maybe even loyal to a fault. Elena would try to be worthy of that.

  They found a café (bulbous, with an open inner courtyard, like a torus) with live music – traditional instruments with a local twist, apparently – that wasn’t too cacophonous. They settled down in a shaded corner of the courtyard to sip some very creditable coffee and tea. “This is a London Fog.” Elena closed her eyes and inhaled the steam from the cup. “That means they had to grow tea leaves and something akin to bergamot oranges to make the Earl Grey, raise bees for honey, and keep cows for the cream. The way they’ve recreated so much of Earth here… it’s incredible. Almost as incredible as them still knowing what London is. Unless they don’t even associate the name with the city any more.”

  “London is still a place. It was raised from the sea floor and refurbished, hundreds of years ago, and now it’s one of the rotating capitals of the One World Government. It’s not especially foggy nowadays as far as I know. It probably looks a lot different from the city you knew, though they kept the historic structures intact where they could.” Callie offered one of her rare, sweet smiles: what Elena thought of as her secret smiles. “You’re a genuine time traveler, you know that?”

  “Ha. Only like everyone else: moving forward at the rate of one second per second. Time travelers in the stories can go back and forth. They can return home with knowledge of the future or the secrets of the past, and actually make a difference. Me, I just took a long nap.”

  “Still. The way you look at the world, it helps me. I try to imagine I’m you, sometimes, and attempt to see everything with fresh eyes. It’s good for me. You’re good for me.”

  “Be careful, captain. You’ll use up your allotment of romance for the year.”

  “It’s OK, I’m done. I’m glad your tea is good. The coffee is merely adequate, and it’ll be a decade before there’s any Owain whiskey worth drinking. You can’t rush the aging process.”

  “A decade doesn’t sound like very long to me at all.” Elena sipped, then grinned. “So. Stephen and Q. What do you think?”

  “Ha. You saw that too. He’s smitten, and I’ve never seen him smitten before.”

  “I didn’t even know he was interested in that kind of thing. I thought he was maybe aromantic, like Uzoma.”

  “He used to be married to a woman. It ended badly – I think she died.”

  “You think? I thought Stephen was one of your closest friends.”

  Callie nodded. “One reason we’re so close is because we don’t pry too much into one another’s pasts. The kind of people who end up – ended up – working out in Trans-Neptunian space are usually trying to get away from something. That’s definitely the case for Stephen. He wanted to go someplace that wouldn’t intersect at all with his old life. When I met him, he was performing gray-market body modifications – he did some work on Ashok. He used the money from that to help fund a free clinic for the families of Kuiper Belt miners – he kept on donating a chunk of his pay to the clinic even after I hired him as XO and ship’s doctor.” A look of fleeting sadness crossed Callie’s face, and Elena realized the clinic, like the rest of Meditreme Station, must be just so much irradiated dust now.

  “You moved to Meditreme full-time after your divorce, right? Were you trying to get away from your old life too?”

  “I don’t think too deeply about my own psychology, if I can help it, but probably. I was doing lots of work out there on the fringes anyway, even when my marriage was going well. I wasn’t running away from anything then – I just wanted to explore. To see everything. To see something new more days than not.” She smiled. “Drake and Janice wanted to live someplace where no one would care what they looked like, or ask what happened to them, as long as they could do the job. They found that.”

  “What about Ashok? He doesn’t seem like the dark-past type.”

  “Ha. Ashok wanted to live someplace with very few regulations about self-improvement. He wanted to be able to buy black-market prototypes and stick them on his body without anyone arresting him for using unlicensed tech, or trying to treat him for mental illness. If we ever master mind-uploading in a way that doesn’t make the subjects go insane from not having a physical body any more, he’ll be the first to load himself into a robot.”

  “Various outcasts by choice and circumstance, and me, the amazing unfrozen woman. It’s quite a crew.”

  “The best I could ask for.”

  “Except for Sebastien, I guess.”

  “He’s not crew. He’s cargo.”

  Elena chuckled. “For now. Stephen says we should give the new drugs some more time. He is so good at his job. I hope Q is smitten back. Stephen has lost so much. He could use some comfort. She did jump right into hugging him, at the restaurant.”

  “Sure, but they’re churchy. She might just think of him as a wounded bird that fell out of the nest, or an amputated finger that needs to be reattached to a hand.”

  “I suppose,” Elena said. “I might have the soul of a matchmaker. I’d hate for Stephen to feel like a fifth wheel.”

  “What… are the other four wheels supposed to be?”

  “You and me are a couple, of course. And, you know. Ashok and Lantern.”

  Callie stared at her. “What do you mean, Ashok and Lantern?”

  “Haven’t you seen how they are together? I can’t claim to read Liar body language perfectly, but come on. They’re at least best friends. I don’t know if there’s anything more between them, but then, I don’t know if humans and Liars ever, you know… get involved. Do they?”

  Elena knew there were things Callie didn’t much like to think about, and judging by the look on her face, cross-species romance was one of them. “I mean… yes, you hear about it. Liars and humans, sort of, bonding. Saying they’re in love. It’s tricky, probably, with the way Liars lie about everything. How you have a relationship with no basis of trust is beyond me. At least Lantern is from the cult of tr
uth-tellers. That would make it easier. We barely even understand how Liars relate to one another. Some Liars pair bond, some form group relationships, some are purely solo – I don’t even know if they think about romance the way some humans do. Asking them doesn’t help – one of them will tell you all Liars are beings of pure logic, and another will say they’re the greatest creators of love poetry in the universe and our feeble human minds simply can’t apprehend their genius.”

  “Sure, but there are some things that can be viewed objectively – what about Liars and sex? I ask, of course, as a xenobiologist.” Elena actually knew about all there was to know regarding the practicalities of Liar sexuality already, having done research on the Tangle to satisfy her scientific curiosity during their months on Glauketas, but sometimes it was amusing to make Callie wince.

  Callie winced. “That’s not something I’ve looked into. I know Liars don’t have reproduction and pleasure intermingled the way humans do – they reproduce in a bunch of different ways, and some of them only require getting friendly with an incubator – but they do have bodies and nerve endings so who knows. I don’t browse the parts of the Tangle that would educate me about their sexual habits. As for Liars who are involved with humans, I can’t even imagine. I’m sure there’s someone who’s tried everything, and if it’s between consenting sapient creatures with a basis for common communication, it’s none of my business.”

  Elena chuckled. “There were xenophiles in my time, fantasizing about sex with aliens. The world is wide.”

  “Too wide, sometimes. Forgive me if I don’t want to speculate on the logistics. Ugh. Now I’m speculating on the logistics. Ashok has so many options for attachments.”

  “I hope he and Lantern are happy, if I’m right. They sure seem to enjoy one another’s company.” Elena looked around at the laughing couples and groups, at the musicians sawing and blowing away at their instruments, and suddenly felt a cold spot open in the midst of her warmth. She leaned back in her seat. “It feels strange, Callie. Enjoying myself, joking, being with you… all while knowing there are people out there who need rescuing.”