by Clay Gilbert
Liara smiled. “It is my parents’ way, but not mine. I like to set down words and watch them sing through my fingers. I like to turn them like puzzle-pieces, until they fit just where I want them. Lore-keepers use words, true; but they only write the words and deeds of others. If you understand.”
Annah nodded. “I feel much the same way about music. I love the way it feels when I sing something that has never been heard before—or an old song, in a new way.”
“They never told me about such feelings in the bloomlingcircles,” Liara said, sounding indignant, “but only about the different kinds of feelings my body could have.” She looked at Annah as if studying the other seed-maiden’s face.
Annah laughed. “Everyone has those feelings, so everyone has to understand them. But the feelings we are talking about”—
“Most people do not remember them,” Keleth said, as if the three of them shared a single thought. “They do not know how.”
“And that is why you are all here,” Serra said. “A hundred cycles have passed since the Breaking and Restoration of our world. But although its life and form was restored, all that long time ago, an important piece of its heart has remained missing. Until now.”
Annah smiled, a new wave of joy cresting in her heart. She knew what was coming. “You all know of the Talents,” Serra said, “and how, by following that seed planted within oneself by the First Ones, one may find his or her place within life’s Pattern.” All but one of the listening youths nodded. “Sleep-tales for bloomlings,” Charan said, his words souring the silence like a scream heard above a softly-raised strain of melody at first-light. “Some have no place. And some never find it.”
Seeing the expression in the seed-youth’s eyes, Annah felt a shock of fright. This seed-youth had golden eyes, like Chelries’, but there was a coldness to his gaze that reminded her of—-of him. Jonan. Jonan was dead, she reminded herself, and this one is just another of the circle. He is younger than I; barely more than a bloomling. There is nothing to fear in him.
The seed-youth’s green-ice gaze locked on to Annah’s own, and his voice inside her mind was like the bitterest wind. Do not be so sure, Annah, he said.
“What is your Talent, Charan?” Serra asked, and the expression in his eyes as they met hers was that of someone who’d been caught sampling the spice-grasses his mother had asked him to gather for Mid-meal.
“Nothing of any use,” he said, in a dejected tone. “Of all of us, Keleth has the only Talent that is good for anything. There must always be growing things to sustain life, after all. My Talent, like that of most of us, it is nothing.”
“But what is it?” Annah asked. “I was dragged out of my beddings and away from my mother’s hearth at first-light and brought here,” Charan said. “I did not want to be here. I only came because my mother asked me, and because Serra has been kind to us.” He paused as if finished, and then added, “I certainly did not come to explain myself to you, you freak.” The sound of the last tone was bitter and discordant, and the other youths looked at him in shock-all but Annah, who regarded him with a calm expression.
“Charan!” Serra barked.
But Charan showed no reaction to the elder Shaper’s reprimand, andAnnah did not flinch from his gaze. “But she is,” Charan said, looking at Serra as if it were the most logical statement in the world. “Just look at her. Her hair, her eyes, her form—-they are wrong.” Another twisted tone, as broken as the sadness Annah could sense inside him.
“We all know about her,” Charan said. “She does not care for the ways of this Grove.”
“You should not believe everything that you hear from others, Charan,” Annah said. “Or about them.” “Annah is a child of Laughing Waters Grove, the same as all of you,” Serra said. “She is not so different from you, Charan. Perhaps she does look strange, but who are we to think we know all of the ways of the First Ones?”
“We should not try,” he said, looking back at Annah. I do not like his eyes, Annah thought for a second time. But she saw more than hatred or anger there, she realized—there was pain there, too.
“There should be no new Shapers, Elder Serra,” Charan said. “Perhaps if there are not, our world will not be Broken again.”
“Don’t you know what you are?” the young seed-maiden named Liara asked Charan. “What we all are?”
Serra smiled, stroking Liara’s hair. “Did your words show you that, child?”
“Yes,” Liara said, a bright note of affirmation.
“Annah was just the first,” Serra said. “You are all here for a reason.” “All of us have a talent, Charan,” Annah said. “I know about the pictures. I know you draw them to forget—and that you want to forget the Talent that makes you able to draw them.”
“Then maybe you know that you killed my brother.” All at once, Annah saw Jonan’s eyes looking back at her from Charan’s face. She turned and ran, and did not stop running until she had reached the camp.
Our camp, Annah thought. Mine and Holder’s. Dearest, if only I could hear you. This testing is the worst of all. But our roots are planted deep. They will last, somehow. As she drew closer to the camp, she realized with a sudden joy that the campfire was already lit. She could see someone-yes, a man-warming his hands at the flames. Yes. My Holder, come home to me at last. It has to be.
As Annah approached, the figure by the fire turned toward her. He was not Holder, but he was not a stranger. “Goodman?” she asked, although she was already close enough to see him clearly. “Has the war ended?” She was standing beside him now, and the look on his face; the expression in his eyes-even the way he moved, as if burdened by a weight she could not see—all discomforted her.
It was him, but he seemed so different now. If Holder is still alive, might he be so changed? She knew nothing of wars, or how they might affect someone, except from her Memories.
“Are you all right, Goodman?” she asked him, avoiding the other question; the one that had been in her mind since she first saw him by the campfire’s glow.
“I’m not. You’re lucky to be here. Things are-less complicated here.” Annah looked at him in disbelief. “Just because you do not understand a world’s problems, or those of another being, that does not mean they are not there.”
“I’m sorry,” Goodman said. “You’re right. Have you been all right, Annah?”
Annah sighed. “No. I have tried to be, but I am not. Too much has changed. Too much is still changing.” He is not here, Annah thought, and we talk around him as if he were one distant star shadowed by many others, and hidden from view. “Goodman,” she asked, looking at him with a gaze he wanted to avoid, but couldn’t. “I may look small to you, but do not think I am fragile. I know that you came back here to tell me, so tell me. Where is Holder?”
This is the worst part of a war, Goodman thought. Not the fighting, or the dying, provided there’s somebody who’s a real threat and not just a gremlin some politicians made up out of guesswork, statistics, and greed. It’s talking to the ones who got left behind. “He’s gone, Annah.”
“What does that mean, ‘gone’?” Annah asked Goodman. “If he is dead, tell me he is dead. That is one thing I do not understand about humans. You build so many ways to avoid facing things as they are. Now, what happened?”
Although Goodman had hoped never to have to think of that day again, much less speak of it, he knew Annah deserved to hear. He began with the threat to Holdfast, and the Portal. He told her of the arrival of the Ghost Knives’ fleet, and was surprised as her eyes widened, not with shock, but with recognition. He remembered what Holder had told him of the bond between them. Could she have seen it, somehow?
He had thought the tale might get easier in the telling, but it grew only more difficult. “Holder was placing the charges when we got word some ships were coming through. He finished the job, I know that. He was like that. He was a good man.”
Annah felt grief hovering around her like the thickness of the air before a storm. She l
ooked into Vision; searched for Holder as she had before, and once again found nothing. “What did you see, Goodman?” Annah asked, her voice like a rain-bent branch, struggling not to break beneath the gale.
“I saw the Portal light up like it does just before something comes through; like a big blue fire. And then the bigger fire when it blew up-when he blew it up.”
“But you did not find-his body?” The last two words were as bitter on Annah’s tongue as the sourbark the Grove’s healers sometimes prescribed for a fever.
Goodman reached out, started to touch Annah’s trembling hand, but instead ran his fingers along the derelict wreck of the Recon craft that had brought Holder here. Looks like he’d just about gotten it up and running again, too. What a damn shame. “No. Didn’t find the runabout pod he was in, either. Nothing survives a Portal fire, Annah. I’ve seen it before.”
Now he did touch her, brushing his fingers along her arm in what he hoped was a gesture of comfort. After a moment, she gently closed her fingers around his. She had been looking away, as if searching the horizon for the exact point of Holder’s departure from life, but now she looked back at Goodman, and he was relieved to see no anger in her face.
“Thank you for coming, Goodman. It was kind, and it is good to-to at least see you again.” She drew her hand away, and glanced back toward the wrecked ship.
“Have you been safe here?” Goodman asked. “I mean—all of you? Holder and I had both been worried that Homesec would run across this place, on a scout patrol or-”
Annah shook her head. “If they have found us, there has been no sign. It is still quiet here, for now.” Silent, she thought. It is silent here, not merely quiet. Annah felt the silence within her: not stillness, like the Shaper’s trance, or the grove after last-light.
It was the silence that falls when there is a song waiting to be sung, and no melody in which to frame it. She glanced at Goodman. He has the silence within him too, and he has been taught no way to fill it. “We have our own troubles here, though,” she said. “Sicknesses of body, mind, and heart.”
Goodman looked past Annah, who had knelt down and begun kindling a flame in the camp’s firepit. His eyes fell on the disused, disabled recon craft in its corner of the site.
“Well, if I know you, you’re trying to do something about that. Holder told me about the-Making?”
Annah laughed. “Shaping. Really? He told you of that?”
“Yeah. We had a lot of time to talk out in the black, and one of the things he liked to talk about most was you.” “It has been the same for me since he has been away. I have talked of him to anyone who will listen.” She smiled. “Serra is, no doubt, tired of hearing about him by now. What did he tell you of Shaping?”
“That Shapers-like the two of you, I guess-have talents that they can use to help put the world back together. Sounds like a lot of hocus-pocus to me.”
Annah frowned. “What is this—hocus-pocus?”
“Magic. Make-believe. Bullshit, if you ask me.”
“Do you mean lies, Goodman?”Annah glared at him. “Something like that, I guess.” Maybe I’d better back off a bit. Holder seemed like he believed in the stuff an awful lot, too. “More like—something children believe in, before they know any better.”
Annah’s expression did not soften. “Shaping is not a lie, Kale Goodman.” She could not resist breaking into laughter, though, at the shock in his eyes. “I see you did not think I would remember,” she said, smiling.
Goodman found himself smiling back, against his best intentions. “No, I didn’t.” Her face grew serious again. “It is not a lie, Goodman. But many of my own people think as you do—or think that it is real, but a thing to be left alone. There are few left to tell them differently. But that is changing. He believed, though.”
“Well, I don’t know everything,” Goodman said. He looked around, as if noticing his surroundings for the first time since arriving. The fire was blazing and crackling now, and its warmth was welcome. Annah was standing by the wrecked ship now, studying its markings, even the blastburns from the crash, as if they were a new language to be learned.
“Not good for much more than scrap, now,” Goodman said.
“He told me it was almost repaired.” She just can’t let him go, Goodman thought. I guess I’d have the same problem—if I’d ever felt that way about someone in the first place, or had someone feel that way about me. “‘Almost’ doesn’t count for much, Annah. And he isn’t here to finish it. Or to fly it, if it was finished.”
“I am not blind, Goodman. Could you not fix the ship?” “Well, sure, if it’s not too badly fucked up. I’ve got some spare parts in the cargo hold on mine. I’d have to see what it’s missing. But what’s the point?”
“The ‘point’, as you say, Goodman, is that something should not be left broken when it can be made whole.” Kale Goodman watched the first rays of dawn in the indigo skies over Evohe, and thought, for the first time in months, about walking in another man’s skin. You should be here, Holder, he thought.
The night before, he’d looked over Holder’s ship for the better part of two hours-all the time he’d had before sunset. Annah had followed him, inspecting every move. And finally, it had been she who broke the silence between them.
So, have you seen what is wrong with it?” He nodded. She had the look of someone whose loved one was dying in a hospital bed; someone trying to decide whether to pull the last tubes loose and let go. He’d seen the look before; more than once. It never got easier. “Yes,” he said. “Hyperlight capacitor. He wouldn’t have been able to get out of this part of the galaxy with that still on the fritz.”
“‘On the fritz?’” Annah asked, cocking her head to one side.
Goodman chuckled. “Lot more to Standard than a ship’s servoteach can tell you. It means ‘broken.’”
“Oh,”Annah said. “And how easily might that be fixed?” “Depends. There’s a good bit of circuit-wiring needed to put in a new capacitor, and it also looks like the rear thrusters need to be repaired. It could be done, though, if somebody wanted it done.”
“I want it done,” Annah said. She sat down beside the firepit, gazing into the sparks as if they were stars in the black.
“But why?” he asked her. Because it may be all I have left of him, she wanted to say, but she thought of a deeper reason, too, one she dared not mention yet. “I-I just do. I do not want you to do it for me, Goodman. I want you to help me do it.”
Goodman ignored what she had said. “You shouldn’t stay here, Annah. It’s got to be terrible. And it’s not like you don’t have anywhere to go, now. Your parents are awake now, right?”
She was lying on her side, still staring into the fire, but she turned and looked at him as he spoke. “They are,” she said. “But I have been living with my teacher now for some time. Serra. You met her at mine and Holder’s Promising.”
“Yeah, I remember.” That was the day I first came here; landed right in the middle of the happy occasion. Didn’t know what to make of Annah or Holder, either one. How times change. “So why aren’t you there now?” She looks nervous, Goodman thought, watching her moving her foot back and forth as if she were splashing in a stream or pond.
But then she looked at him, an odd, almost playful look in her eyes. “You ask many questions, Goodman. I have been here making peace with an old memory. And I do not mean Holder. It helps me, being here. I feel closer to him here. You believe he is dead, do you not?”
Goodman hesitated a moment before he answered. “I don’t want to believe that, but I wouldn’t be here right now, if I didn’t. I wanted you to know.”
“You are fighting in this new war?”
“I suppose so, yeah. But not for them. Not for Homesec. Holder and I found some people who are fighting back, and we’ve been helping them.”
“I think there must be better ways of resolving one’s differences than fighting. I do not see how it helps, at all.” “I don’t really either, Annah. But
sometimes there’s more than just ourselves on the line. Sometimes, if we don’t fight, a lot more people die.”
“There still must be other ways. And although you think it ishocus-pocusthat is one thing Serra says Shaping is for.” “I’m sorry I said that,” Goodman said. “I wasn’t really thinking. I’ve always had to be-practical. A realist. But maybe there’s more than one kind of realism; more than one kind of real.” He was standing above the spot where Annah lay, looking up at him now as they talked. “Still, you should be glad to be here. It’s so much quieter here; so much safer.”
“That is what you see,” Annah said. Without warning, she reached up, and, lightning-quick, caught his hand in hers, bringing him down beside her on the grassy ground. She let him go just as quickly, and smiled. “It is a matter of vision, Goodman-all of it.”
Goodman laughed. “I suppose so.”
“Holder has always had clear vision,” Annah said.
“He’s not the only one,” Goodman said. Annah’s face clouded over again. “I am sorry, Goodman. I am, perhaps, not good company. I miss him very much.” Goodman nodded. “I miss him, too, Annah. But what can I do?”
“That should be the question we all ask ourselves.”
Goodman got to his feet. “We can start with this ship. Come on.” To Goodman, the wreck of Holder’s recon craft looked too much like the mess he’d made of his own life. Careful organization fallen to chaos; gears that had once worked gone to rust from resting in one place too long; a shell cracked from crashing against an obstacle that was, at last, harder than its own defenses. Why do this? he thought.
He had only to look at Annah to see the answer. She focused on each new task, however small, as if the ruined ship were Holder’s own body, waiting to be brought back to life. She replaced gears, attached new wires, accepting very little help from him, other than guidance as to what part went where and what each did. He could almost see her cataloguing the ship’s parts and systems like some sort of schematic in her mind. From what Holder had told him, she’d taken to the work just as quickly when the two of them had worked on it.