Annah and the Children of Evohe

by Clay Gilbert

  * * * “The last group’s loaded,” Turner said. “We’ll spread them out. Don’t want to overburden our safe houses right now. Might lead to ‘em not being so safe anymore.”

  The operation was pretty involved, Holder was learning, but it had to be. Homesec was only the face, for now, of the Human Preservation Front-but its arms had stretched far beyond Earth. The Portals had made trade easier, and that was why pirates had, for a long time now, used Holdfast as their base: because the Portals belonged to no one government, and neither did the planet. That made it a safe haven, for the pirates themselves, and those they protected. But the refugees they saved were relocated. When they could, the pirates made sure they got sent back to their homeworlds, but sometimes, those worlds couldn’t be found, or weren’t safe enough for a return. That’s what the safehouses were for. Every day, though, the job got harder. More and more planets joined the war every day. More and more blue turning red on the map. And more often than not, that meant they were on Homesec’s side. We don’t want them to fight at all, Holder said. Victory enough for us if they just stay neutral for now. But if enough worlds join their side, nobody who wants to stay free will be able to stay neutral.

  Holder thought of the marble, still in the hold of Goodman’s ship. They still hadn’t told anyone about it, and no one had asked to search the craft when they’d landed, or since. Honor among thieves, I guess. At least some still exists, somewhere. “What else needs doing?” he asked Turner. He’d found, since leaving Evohe, that sitting still for too long made him jumpy.

  “No more pickups tonight,” Turner told him. “We’ve been catching some things on the ‘com band from Earth. I think we’d better lie low a few days. I could use some help monitoring the signals, though, if you don’t mind. “That’ll be fine,” Holder said.

  “All right then,” Turner said. “I’ll see you later.”

  * * * Holder yawned. This is just like a slow night on a Recon patrol, he thought, listening to the flow of information bouncing across the Earth band on the ‘com.

  “Today, the World Congress met to determine passage of the Human Preservation Act, a bill that its author, Earth representative John Farnham, a senior member of the selfproclaimed ‘Earth loyalist’ lobby the Human Preservation Front, says ‘will open the way to give this planet back to the people it belongs to.....”

  Static. Damn. Why does there have to be so much interference with something this important going on?

  The signal cleared again. “Deadlock-”

  Dammit.

  “Some feel that-discrimination-”

  Holder banged his fist on the console, as much in anger as out of any thought it might actually help.

  “Others feel that opposition to the act is unpatriotic-”

  Unpatriotic to what? Holder thought.

  “-final hearing in four days.” The line went dead.

  Final hearing in four days. Damn. These people are insane. The law they were voting on wasn’t going to do anything but speed up the spread of the war. Can we just sit by and let this happen?

  I don’t think we can. What’s being a pirate for, if we can’t use our outlaw status to try and stop something like this? But we’ve got a little time, still, before we’ll have to do something. And, if and when that happens, I hope we do the right thing.

  * * * “Holder, wake up.”

  “Go away, Goodman,” Holder grumbled, in a voice that sounded worse than the staticky signal on the ‘com band had the night before.

  “No can do, man. Turner’s picked up something.”

  “The announcement about the vote? Saves me havin’to tell him.”

  “No, not that, although we caught that again this morning. This is bigger than that. Literally bigger.”

  “All right. Give me a minute. Tell Turner I’m on my way.”

  * * * “All right, Turner,” Holder said, making his way onto the base’s command bridge, where he found Goodman, Turner and a few of the other crewmembers gathered around a ‘com broadcast.

  “This morning, Homesec forces, including several of the government’s flagship battlecruisers, took steps to secure the Portal near Homesec Central headquarters—an action aimed at weakening any effort to aid the escape of any nonterrestrials still remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the vote on the legislation Homesec claims will ‘ensure the future of the human race’ continues in the World Congress-”

  “They can’t just commandeer the Portal,” Holder said. “Portals don’t belong to any one government.”

  “Right,” Turner said. “Unless Homesec’s decided the Treaty doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “The Treaty” was the Goodman Treaty, written by Kale Goodman’s own grandfather, whose distinguished career in the military and in the World Congress had sparked Goodman’s own interest in civil service. The Treaty had been designed to put the last Big War to an end by addressing some of the issues of free trade and governmental autonomy raised by some of Earth’s smaller neighbor worlds, some of which still had systems of rule far more varied than the world government that by then had been in place on Earth for more than a century. The Portal had been invented to enable trade between all worldstheoretically, in any case-and ease the rigors of longdistance space travel as well.

  It had been agreed by all parties involved in the War that the Portals, which had been invented by a coalition of both Earther and non-Earther scientists, were to be regarded as the property of all; under neither the jurisdiction or single ownership of any one government. It had been enough of an act of goodwill to get all the warring parties back to the negotiation table, and eventually, the Goodman Treaty had brought an end to the war.

  “So much for goodwill, I guess,” Holder said. “Surely they can’t do this.” “They can unless they’re stopped.” Turner said. “It’ll take them a while to move ships into position to block every Portal, everywhere. Homesec has the ships to do that, though, even though it’ll take time. Meanwhile, here we are sitting at one of the biggest Portal junctures in charted space. You can bet those ships are on their way here, and we have to be ready when they arrive. Send out some signals, Holder. Let’s gather everyone we can. Goodman, you come with me. We’re gonna stir up every pirate on this planet. Holdfast is about to live up to her name.”

  “I’ll do everything I can,” Holder said. “Looks like being a Recon man just got a little more important.”

  * * * Annah lay in her beddings at her parents’ homeground, watching the glow of the hearth-fire and thinking about the changes that were swirling around her, like seeds stirring in the soil, just before the season of Firstwarmth. Ardan and Kyrin would be Promised soon, and then they would more than likely depart for the flatlands, to have their Choosing ceremony in the grove where Kyrin had been bloomed and born.

  Annah pulled her bedding-blanket around her shoulders. She was not cold, not really. It was rarely intemperately cold on Evohe, although there were seasons, as she had learned there were on Holder’s world. Her world had only three: Firstwarmth, Suntide and Evenfall, the last of them named for the last and coldest part of the day, when the sun that gave their world its warmth receded back for a time into the Sea of Stars, as it did in that part of the Cycle as well. Only in Suntide didAnnah sleep without her blankets; the remainder of the Cycle, she liked the extra warmth they brought; the sense of security, and she even felt that they helped her to ease her mind more readily into meditation.

  Evohe had nothing like the winters that Holder had told her were regular back on his world, and which he had described to her. She did not much think she would care for the cold, even with her body’s higher heat—in fact, she knew she would not—still, she could not help feeling she would like to see this thing called ‘snow’, just once. Perhaps one day, he will take me there, and I will see it. Perhaps he will show me many wonders of his world, one day. One day when this new war has passed. Holder and her father had both told her it would not be safe were she to go there now, and at first, she had not completely belie
ved them.

  What danger could there be to me? Annah had wondered, more than once. Holder would be with me. He would protect me-and I am not incapable of defending myself, even if he could not.

  But she had been doing the work Serra had asked of her; first with Memory and now in Vision. And while it was still often difficult for her to summon the state of Vision when she was awake, she found she slipped into it effortlessly as she slept—and lately, she was not always so pleased with the results. However, a Shaper’s vision, Annah knew, must extend to all things—not merely that which was good, or pleasant. She knew that her inner eye must be open to even the shadows. And so it was that lately, her rest had often been broken by glimpses of the war that burned, like a fire grown out of control, through the Sea of Stars, somewhere beyond her world: a war in which she knew Holder and his friend Goodman might even now be caught. And tonight, she had seen Holder, not merely in the dreams she knew were somewhere between memory and fantasy, but with the eye of inner vision. He is helping, she had sensed, as the pictures played across her mind. She saw great numbers of what she knew must be spacecraft like the ones Holder and Goodman piloted, but much larger: some of the ones she saw would cover the whole expanse of Laughing Waters Grove, if they were to land. She saw long columns of people; people neither like herself, nor like Holder, but people nonetheless, of all colors, shapes, and sizes— making their way aboard the ships. And now there was another craft, like a silver hunter-bird swooping down, spitting burning light at Holder’s ship—

  Dearest, no! Annah willed herself to remain calm, took a deep breath, and released her mind once again, seeking for the broken strands of Vision. But the still point inside her had been shaken, as she had found still happened all too often.

  “Stillness is the Shaper’s sanctuary,” Serra had told her that very day, as they sat in the heart-place. “If you master it; if you master yourself enough to reach it, it will open possibilities to you that you can only dream of now. Stillness is the seed from which everything else you learn must grow.”

  She had been frustrated, even angry, at the elder Shaper’s words. “How can I find stillness when half of my heart, half of my soul crosses the Sea of Stars alone?” she asked Serra. Serra had not returned Annah’s anger with her own, as the seed-maiden had been afraid she might. Instead, she had touched Annah’s hand, an expression of tenderness in her eyes that told the girl that Serra understood precisely the fears she was facing.

  “I do not know,” Serra said. “I know only that you must.” And she had tried. She was still trying. She shook off the last remnants of her troubled rest and made her way away from the hearth-fire where her parents lay, their arms around each other, still, from all signs she could see, sleeping deeply.

  For so long, Laughing Waters Grove had been Annah’s still point; her center. This fire; these stones, the wood she had, since just after she had learned to walk, helped her father carry from the forest, given freely by the life-forces that dwelled there, who knew that everything renewed itself in time. She had been a part of this place, and it a part of her, even if she had so often felt she existed only on its borders. Annah thought as she walked, but she kept her mind open, her thoughts as clear as the night sky above the field where the Grove sometimes gathered as one: in birth-times, in the time when a new Cycle came upon the world; when it drew to a close again—in times of Promising, times of Choosing, and in times when one of their number went to his or her sleep. This place has held me, Annah thought, the way my mother’s and my father’s arms held me when I was but a bloomling. But now, I must see with my own eyes; guide myself by my own reckoning. And I must build my own hearth, and light the fire to warm it by.

  The camp was dark with twilight shadows, but Annah knew her way well enough; she found the still silhouette of Holder’s half-repaired ship and let it draw her, the way the pale moon over her parents’ homeground had drawn her from her beddings to stare at it in wonder on many nights when she had still been very small.

  Shadows everywhere, Annah thought, a door in her mind swinging wide now that she was in this place that so reminded her of Holder. The thought remained suspended, isolated, like a piece to one of the puzzle-boxes one of the Grove’s craftspeople would sometimes carve as a birthday gift for a young bloomling, or as an item to sell on a Market Day. Black shadows, darkening the sun of this world whose name I do not know. Shadows steered by men; men like my Holder, but so different, too.

  Annah was frightened, but she was excited, too. This was the clearest her Vision had been yet, and the furthest from her that she had been able to cast her Sight. She knew it was the breakthrough that Serra had been urging her toward for all the time Holder and Goodman had been gone. But why now? What are those ships doing? Whatever it was, she knew that was why Holder and Goodman were there: to stop them. What is that larger shape? Annah wondered; the larger shape that hovered just beyond the swarm of smaller shadows, something like a circle. No, not a circle. An eye; an eye of fire opening in darkness

  This last vision was too much for her to bear, and Annah slipped into darkness herself.

  “Holder, we can’t let them take the Portal. We can’t let them do this anywhere else.”

  Holder’s mind was reeling; a sudden darkness stirring in his mind, and a sharp, dark thought: Annah. Something’s happened to her, and I can’t see what it is. He forced himself to focus. “I know. “

  First Ones, he thought, take care of her. Look after her. Because these things I have to do here—they’re for both of us, and a lot more people besides. “So what’s next?” It was a bad time to lose focus, Holder knew. The worst. They’d flashed every pirate ship and every unaffiliated spacer they could track down. Goodman had known a name or two from both his time on Active and his time spent paperpushing for Homesec. Even a paper-pusher saw things. Useful things, sometimes. Recon men did, too. Holder had been able to come up with a few people in his own experience whom, he was sure, weren’t exactly Homesec supporters. One real blessing on their side of things, Holder thought, was that, with the war raging through most parts of the galaxy now, Homesec’s resources, and those of the few worlds they’d managed to pull to their side, were spread too thin to be able to do much about Holdfast. We need a place, Holder thought, and this is as good as any. Better than most. Maybe, if we keep control of the portal here, we can start to steal back some of what Homesec’s taken, elsewhere. That’s what pirates do, isn’t it?

  “Goodman,” Holder asked, “how many guns do we have?”

  “Quite a few.And here come more on the way.” The first wave came as one: a storm of silver, glass and fire; sleek, slender ships of silver and black that fell through space like blades thrown by the gods. The Ghost Knives. That’s what spacers called them, the name Holder had heard grown men stammer on more than a few Recon missions he’d run at the sites of their raids. His own hands trembled a bit, now, at the sight of the ships. The Ghost Knives were among the most legendary of pirate clans. No one knew how many of them there were, what port they called home, or whether their ranks were made up of Earthers, Offworlders, or some motley mix of both.

  There looked to be a dozen of the great floating blades hovering in the space surrounding Holdfast once the first Portal burst had stilled. What’d we do to draw the Ghost Knives’ notice? Holder wondered. The number of men left alive after facing down their fleet in a fight were few, and all who survived bought their lives with blood or else were left behind with some dark purpose. At least, those were the stories that were told, but Holder knew who wrote most of those stories.

  “You seein’this, man?” Holder heard Goodman’s voice burst from the ‘com in front of him, startling him away from the spectacle of the great ships gathering just outside the station. Holder knew Goodman had an even closer view from where he was now, on the upper deck, the location of the main launching hangar and the battery of guns guarding it. The guns, themselves, were set to be triggered from the very control bank Holder was seated at.

&n
bsp; “I’m seein’ it,” he answered. “When Turner calls for help, he calls for help. The gods-damned Ghost Knives. Hell, I wasn’t sure they even existed.”

  Goodman laughed. “Those ships look real enough. Any of ‘em call to come in and dock yet?” “Nah,” Holder said. “Not sure I expect ‘em to. They’ll probably just sit where they are, which is fine with me. I guess I wouldn’t mind meeting a few of them, though, assuming they know we’re on the same team.”

  When Holder had dreamed, as a boy, of going out into space, he’d sometimes imagined going up against a fleet of pirates like the Ghost Knives. He thought he’d kick some ass for Homesec. He was lucky even to end up getting to space to start with, and now he felt more kinship with the Ghost Knives-even if they made him a little nervous-than he did with his own government.

  Goodman’s voice burst from the com again. “So I gotta ask, man. Where are the Homesec ships?” “Sitting at home scared shitless, I hope, if this has made the green band ‘com by now.” “Green-band” was the common name for the military ‘com channel.

  “I can tell you from experience, my man,” Goodman said, “those Homesec boys don’t scare easy, even when they should. They might still be on the way.”

  “That, or they’re making some calls of their own. Earth may not have that many friends in free space, but they owned half of the galaxy even before all this got started. They’re not coming to this game just to stand on the field with their asses hanging out in the wind.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Goodman said. “But they’re gonna find a hell of a defensive line waiting.”