Reading the Wind (Silver Ship)

by Brenda Cooper

  Jenna had fought us both to get Alicia to accept being frozen two weeks after we left. “You might have to be more careful than me,” I said.

  She laughed, her second laugh in a short period of time. Maybe she enjoyed ignoring the Port Authority.

  Two hours later, I paced quietly beside Bryan’s warming body. He breathed, softly and shallowly His usually bronze skin looked pale against his dark brown hair. Unlike mine, Bryan’s body clearly displayed his core genemods—he was wider and taller and stronger than the rest of us. Always the strongest person in Artistos, he had been the victim of Artistos’ prejudices. A gang of young men our age in Artistos, led by Garmin, had shown him their fists.

  The skin around one eye and all down the cheek below had lost its swelling to the cold, but purple and yellow bruises made a strange map across his features. Medi-tape from the Artistos hospital closed slashes in his skull and along one arm. A taped tear decorated one bicep, bruises blushed his hands, and cracks highlighted his knuckles. A dirty gray cast enclosed his right leg, and a long jagged cut, barely scabbed, snaked up from somewhere inside the cast, rode across the top of his knee, and ended halfway up the inside of his thigh.

  He had always been the strong one who protected us in Artistos.

  Now, he lay pale and inert, vulnerable.

  I fidgeted, waiting for him to move and speak and become himself.

  His skin slowly took on color. It warmed his cheeks, crept up his chest, and seeped into the hollows of his neck and face. Twenty minutes passed before he finally groaned and licked his lips.

  “Bryan?” I whispered.

  At first, nothing. Then he sat bolt upright, surely an act of will more than strength at this point in the process, and looked around. “Joseph.” His voice was hoarse, nearly a croak. He rubbed his eyes and groaned, then shook his head. He must’ve been thinking clearly, since he immediately asked, “When and where are we?”

  I couldn’t remember what he knew. We’d learned so much while he was imprisoned, then hospitalized, then beaten again. “We’re going to Silver’s Home, where our first parents came from. We’ll land in about two weeks. We left Fremont three years ago.”

  “Chelo?” His voice trembled. “Did Chelo come with us? Is she here?”

  “No.” I reached a hand out to steady him, then dropped it, uncertain.

  He sighed at the unwelcome news. I handed him a glass of water I’d set by the bed, and stood silently as he sucked it down like a breath of air. He blinked. “Do we know she’s all right?”

  I shook my head as I refilled the glass. “Jenna says there are no facilities left on Fremont for that kind of communication, not without the New Making. She thinks they can’t send us a message. I bet they wouldn’t even if they could.” I handed him the second glass. He drank slowly and carefully as I continued. “We probably won’t know anything until we return.”

  His eyes lit up. “When are we going back?”

  “I don’t know.” I reached out and put a hand gently on his cast, noting that it felt mushy now, maybe a side effect of freezing. “But we are. How do you feel?”

  He laughed softly. “I wish you hadn’t asked.” He touched his face, wincing. “If I think about it, everything hurts.”

  “I’m supposed to take you to Medical when you’re ready to walk.”

  He slowly stretched his least-injured leg. As he lifted the other leg a few inches and set it back down, pain flashed across his face. “Not yet, I think. I’ll have to lean on you.”

  He’d come in to the New Making leaning on Alicia, her slight form twisting under his weight.

  He licked his lips. “Kayleen and Liam stayed behind with Chelo?”

  I refilled his glass and watched him take this one more slowly. He knew Liam and Chelo had become close. “Yes.”

  “I miss her. I miss them both already. Kayleen chattering like a bird at everything and Chelo—steady and always there.” He handed me the glass and clutched his damaged hands together in his lap. “I hugged her the last night before you all left me. I wish I’d never let her go.”

  Waking must’ve been making him muzzy; Bryan almost never talked about his feelings. I filled another glass and watched him drink it.

  I introduced him to Leo, who had been sitting still and silent in a corner, and he laughed and said, “You always did like to have pets.”

  I bristled. “It’s more than a pet. Leo can call for help. Maybe Jenna will give you a bot of your own.”

  He laughed for the first time since waking. “All right. Calm down, I like it.” His voice strengthened, and finally he stood up to walk. He almost fell the first time, but ten minutes later we headed for the door, Leo leading us. Bryan’s weight bore down on my shoulder and hips, at once both astoundingly heavy and like warmth from home.

  By the time we reached Medical, sweat shone on his forehead and upper lip, and his dark eyes were again filled with pain. As we came in the door, Jenna stepped forward. She took his weight from me without speaking.

  Alicia stood a few feet from me. I leaned back against the door frame, feasting my eyes on her. She watched me warily, not coming close. Her dark hair framed her face and spilled down her small breasts, hanging loose nearly to her slender hips. She wore the same outfit she’d left Fremont in: tight green work pants and a shirt so white it made her hair seem as dark as the void we traveled through.

  I walked to her, holding out my arms, wanting to feel her fill them. She let me hold her, but didn’t curl an arm around to touch my back for long moments. Eventually, she rested her head on my shoulder, smelling faintly of ship’s oil and the chemicals that woke us.

  I let her go and stepped back for a second. Jenna was still fussing over Bryan, laying him down and straightening his limbs. She looked over at us and said, “Go on…. I can manage him.”

  Needing no more encouragement than that, I took Alicia’s long slender hand in mine, and Leo and I led her to one of the common galleys. We sat in the small, nearly featureless room. She ignored Leo, who settled back into wait mode, silent. I handed her a cup of water. “How do you feel?”

  “Angry.” She held the glass loosely and scowled at the floor. “Why didn’t you demand that she wake me up? What have I missed?”

  I shrugged, wanting to calm her. “I was frozen, too. Jenna and I just came out of it.”

  “What will happen to us when we get to Silver’s Home?”

  “I don’t know.” I poured my own glass of water. “I’m glad you’re awake.” I sat down across from her, watching for her reaction.

  She looked away. “What will people think of us? We won’t know anything about how to live on Silver’s Home! And getting information out of Jenna’s impossible.” She took a long sip from her glass. “I think she’s still mad at me.”

  Well, I was still mad at her, too. But just a little. Alicia was our risk taker, and now I knew how risk twisted a situation and widened the possible outcomes. Looking at her—her dark curls, her white skin, her slender frame and long fingers, her violet eyes—my own anger was hard to feel anymore, drained away in the raw fear and joy of flight. I sighed. “You did steal a weapon she told you to stay away from.”

  A flash of the defiant Alicia surfaced. “If I hadn’t, we’d still be on that god-forsaken plain, dithering.” She sat back and wiped her hair from her face. “And Bryan would still be captive.”

  And Chelo, at least, might be with us. I blinked back tears, feeling my sister’s absence in Alicia’s presence. I didn’t know exactly what happened back in the Commons Park Amphitheater, but Alicia started it and Chelo finished it, and no one died. I think Alicia, at least, would have died if Chelo hadn’t gone.

  I tried for a light tone. “Besides, Jenna’s mad at me, too. I reprogrammed the ship to wake me a few days before her.”

  She grinned. “Good for you. Did you get in trouble?”

  “It was worth it.” I commanded the white wall to project an image from the ship’s forward cameras. Silver’s Home now took
up half the wall, big enough to see the ships and habitats and space docks ringing it. “That’s our people, Alicia. Altered, like us.” An image of Bryan’s damaged face flashed through my mind. “Maybe we have to learn to fit in, but surely they won’t beat us up for being different.”

  She leaned forward, peering at the planet on the wall. “I want to know enough so that we aren’t different when we get there.”

  It finally dawned on me that Alicia the Brave felt lost and frightened. I went to her and rubbed her shoulders and told her everything I knew, which didn’t feel like much at all. I included the messages, and that Jenna would want decisions from us, but I didn’t ask for her answer. I showed her the pictures from the data button, pointing out my parents and the tall elegant buildings in the background, but I couldn’t even say where on the planet the pictures were taken.

  She twisted gently under my hands. “That feels good.”

  When I leaned down to kiss her, she kissed me back, but pulled away after only a moment. “What else have you learned?”

  Disappointed, I tried zooming in on the camera image dancing on the wall in front of us. It fuzzed out before there was enough detail to do any more than make out cities, which covered at least half the land, and see that transportation buzzed regularly between and in the cities.

  Strings of continents and islands butted up against each other like a necklace near the equator, thinning a bit partway up, and filled in again at both poles, which were white and less populated, but still more settled than anyplace at home. I walked to the image, pulling data from Starteller as I went. I pointed at the continents: “There is Li, where we’re going, and next to it is Juh, and just past that string of islands—the Silver Eyes—that one’s called Black’s Mountains…”

  I glanced back at the expression on her face. Alicia, afraid? I looked at the display again, trying to see it through her eyes. The busy landscape, the many continents and islands—it contrasted so with Fremont. Jini and Islandia would fit together on Li, and leave room for more. All together, we would not fill a single city.

  On Silver’s Home, all the land appeared tamed. Even the seas were full of cities, floating or maybe rising on platforms. A human place, and sitting there beside Alicia, my blood pounded in nervous anticipation. Alicia was our adventurer, our risk-taker, and Silver’s Home had apparently cowed even her, at least for the moment.

  We were heading someplace where I wouldn’t be a freak, and that had to be better than Artistos. Besides, Alicia would bounce back—she’d wanted to leave the most of all of us.

  I leaned into her, kissing her fully on the mouth. She returned my kiss, greedy for touch. When we separated, I whispered, “Jenna will be busy for a while. Follow me?”

  She opened her mouth wide as if to protest, then her eyes sparkled and she said, “Go.”

  Jenna and Bryan woke us up after what felt like the best sleep I’d had since we left Fremont. Jenna clattered noisily in the kitchen when I knew from experience that she could make breakfast so quietly I wouldn’t hear her at all. I opened my eyes and pushed up on one arm. A new white cast gleamed on Bryan’s ankle. The old medi-tape had all been pulled off and replaced with something clear, showing the neat seams of his cuts. Even his bruises had faded some.

  I climbed out of bed and sat in one of the soft chairs scattered throughout the common space between the galley and the sleeping areas and grinned at him. “You look better.”

  He nodded. “As long as I don’t die of starvation.”

  Suddenly hungry as well, I said, “Me, too.”

  Jenna glared at me, but said nothing about Alicia and I sharing space.

  “Alicia! Time to get up,” Jenna called out as she poured juice made from garden berries, and brought it over, one purplish-red glass at a time. “We have choices to discuss.”

  I helped Jenna lay places and cut up tomatoes and carrots. I opened up packages of what Jenna called “spaceman’s waybread,” a hard, nutty wafer kept in dry stores, probably ever since the New Making left Silver’s Home. I liked its crunchiness and the way it gave me a lot of energy for just a few bites.

  Alicia emerged just as all of the food was ready. She hugged Bryan, sat beside me and took my hand, and ignored Jenna entirely.

  “Did you hear back from your sister?” I asked Jenna.

  Jenna glanced up at me. “Did you fill Alicia in?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. We got a second notice from the Port Authority that said the same as the first.”

  “Can they make us do anything?” Alicia asked.

  “Sure—they can make us die. But they won’t.” Jenna shook her head. “They want credit, and we can’t give them that if they kill us on the way in.”

  Bryan leaned forward. “Do they ever shoot ships out of the sky?”

  For the second time, Jenna shook her head. “But they certainly could. You four should know that. Because it’s dangerous, I want your approval for what I plan to do.” She looked at us, fixing us each with her single eye, making sure we knew she wanted our attention. Unsettlingly, her gaze rested longest on me. “Defying the Port Authority could get us all in trouble. I’m going to refuse to follow their landing instructions. Joseph will have to make his first-ever landing under duress and possible danger. And we won’t be met very nicely.”

  Bryan looked at her evenly, his taut emotions once again almost palpable. In his kind, even voice, he said, “If I understand the options right, the other choice is to leave the New Making somewhere we can’t get to it, risk having her cargo stolen, and be far from all of our—what do you call it? Affinity group?”

  “That’s about right,” Jenna said.

  “But why would they expect us to do that?” Alicia asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, count me in.” Alicia’s eyes almost glittered with excitement. “Me, too,” Bryan said. “I’m tired of being told what to do.” We all were. I raised my glass. “To a safe landing on Li continent.” All four of us drank together, turning our lips red with the juice.

  13

  LANDING

  The ping of an incoming message caught me with a spoonful of hot cereal halfway to my mouth. The message was from the Port Authority, but again, it was coded to Jenna. I looked up to see the content of the message reflected in the tight set of her jaw, in the way her hand fisted on the table beside her empty plate. My appetite vanished.

  Alicia noticed I’d stopped eating and paused, following my gaze to Jenna. Her spoon sank to her bowl and she sat straighter. Bryan, too, stopped eating and sat up. We watched Jenna, like three djuri alerted by a sudden movement in the tall grass. When she refocused and looked at us, her smile balanced between cunning and anticipation.

  I fingered the data threads in my captain’s coat, reaching deeper into the ship’s data stream for the reason behind her smile. The message’s trail was closed, but a sudden insight crossed my mind. “Hey, Jenna,” I asked, “the Port Authority didn’t like you before you left, either, did they?”

  Her only answer was a twisted smile that disappeared as soon as I noticed it.

  She stood, taking her plate. I followed with my bowl and spoon. Nothing short of a life-threatening emergency excuses leaving anything loose in a spaceship. As she washed her plate, her voice was quiet and controlled. “They figured out we’re not on course for Koni station. They claim the spaceport on Li is closed; Tiala told me yesterday that she would try to meet us there, so it wasn’t listed as closed in the nets then.”

  We were half a day from the point where we’d be so caught in Silver’s Home’s gravity well we couldn’t turn away easily. “Who’s right?” Alicia asked.

  Jenna laughed. “Maybe both of them. But if we try to land, my bet is they’ll let us.” She finished stuffing her clean plate in a drawer, grabbed my bowl and spoon, did the same. She started for the door. “I’ll meet you all in the Command Room.”

  Bryan looked up. “Where’s that?”

  I was two steps towa
rd the door, following on Jenna’s heels, and turned at his question. Alicia answered before I could. “I know where it is. We’ll be right behind.”

  That was all I needed. I nearly beat Jenna there. “What should we do?”

  “I’m going to ignore the Authority for a few more minutes.”

  “And then?”

  “I need you as connected to the ship as you can get—go deep. You may not need to do anything. But be ready to react.” She walked over toward the pilot’s chair, taking her usual place at the head of the chair, giving me an intense, warning glance. “And stay focused enough on us to hear what happens.”

  Right. Easy for her to say. I settled into the chair, leaning back a little for comfort. Alicia and Bryan tumbled through the door, taking seats, looking at each other and then at us.

  Jenna put her hand on my shoulder. “Relax.”

  I closed my eyes, reaching for the meld of data and body.

  Alicia’s voice, a little strident. “But what can we do?”

  The ship fed me reports, one by one, the data dancing through my consciousness in a set pattern. Every single sensor reported as completely normal. Jenna’s reply to Alicia floated over my head, patient and calm. “There is nothing to do yet but be ready.”

  “Which means?” Alicia demanded.

  Jenna’s short, sharp response was, “Be here where I can see you.”

  Alicia held her silence, the muscles in her neck taut and her eyes snapping frustration.

  I didn’t have time to worry about her. My thoughts raced across a flood of ship’s statistics, half-focused on each reality, the firm weight of Jenna’s hand on my shoulder keeping me balanced between the two. Anticipation licked along my nerves.

  I opened my eyes to see that Jenna had asked Starteller to display data on the two vid walls. Silver’s Home, bright and clear, on one wall. The other wall displayed a map of our trajectory over a washed-out version of the same picture. The red line that represented New Making arced in toward a yellow fuzz symbolizing the planet’s atmosphere. A blue light blinked near the dot at the end of the red line that showed where we now flew. Alicia and Bryan leaned forward, watching closely.