Angus grunted assent.
From there, the conversation in the room went back to asking Ichiko questions, and she asking her own of the Inish. Angus, Liam, and her mam said nothing at all to Saoirse, who noticed that everyone was also careful not to mention the arracht; Ichiko, in turn, never talked about the way she’d lost control of the flitter. As Low Fourth rang out, Saoirse rose from her seat and made her way through the gathering to the door of the room and outside, going down to the low wall that enclosed the compound. She leaned there on the stones, looking out from the height over the White Strand and the sea, and to where the Sleeping Wolf rested on the water.
She heard someone approaching from behind her, but she didn’t look to see who it was. She could guess by the heavy sound of the footsteps and the smell of pipe smoke that accompanied it. “I’m disappointed in yeh, Saoirse. I woulda thought yeh trusted me more.”
She continued to gaze out toward the island. She wondered if Kekeki could hear her even now, if she could hear everyone who’d been touched. “Would yeh have let me bring Ichiko over in the currach, Uncle?” she asked, turning to face him. She crossed her arms in front of her, putting her back against the wall.
“Neh.” He uttered the single word without hesitation, in a single cloud of tree strand smoke that the wind snatched away. “Yeh heard Kekeki and your mam same as I did. They dinna want the woman coming out here yet. Yet,” he emphasized. “Which, I’ll remind yeh, doesn’t mean never.”
“We don’t have much time before the Terrans make their decision, Uncle.”
“Is that what Ichiko told yeh?”
“No,” Saoirse admitted. “But I can hear it in her voice and by what she doesn’t say. I’m worried that they’ll decide to just leave us here.” And leave me behind, too, and I’ll never see Japan or Earth or anything.
“What if they do?” Angus answered. “We’d be no worse off than we are now, would we? Maybe we’d actually be in a better place, since we wouldn’t have the feckin’ Terrans showing us all that we’re missing with their fancy technology. What we have here has been good enough for us for generations. Or is it only yerself that yer thinking of, Saoirse?”
Saoirse scowled, and Angus gave a short laugh that held no amusement at all. “I thought so,” he said. “Ah, I’m not pissed at yeh. I’m just disappointed, Saoirse—not for bringing yer Terran here when yeh’d been told not to, but for yer selfishness. It’s not just yeh who has things at stake here; it’s all of us and the arracht as well. This ain’t who I thought yeh were. It’s not who yer mam thought yeh were, either.”
Saoirse felt tears threatening at her uncle’s stern scolding, all the more cutting because of how quietly and calmly he spoke. She fought not to show her distress. Yeh don’t understand, she wanted to shout at him. Everything’s changed since the Terrans came back for us and yeh can’t pretend that’s not the case. Everything’s changed. Can’t yeh see that?
But she said none of it. Angus took another pull on the pipe. “So is it her yer interested in?” he asked Saoirse. “If it is, it’s all scones to a sheeper. T’ain’t nothing gonna happen ’tween yeh, and yeh know it. Yeh can’t even touch the woman.”
“Not the way things are right now, neh,” Saoirse answered.
“But mebbe if yeh went back with them? Is that what yer thinking?”
Saoirse was shaking her head. “I don’t know Ichiko anywhere near well enough to know if she’d be interested even if it was possible, Uncle. I don’t know how it is with her or with the Terrans.” And it never will be possible now. Not after what yeh and Mam let Kekeki do to me.
“But if it were possible . . .”
Saoirse held up a finger and wagged it warningly in his face. “Uncle, just shut yer gob right now. Ichiko’s here because she’s interested in us. All of us, not just me. And I’m interested in her only because I want to know more about where she came from. Neh more’n that.” Angus opened his mouth to speak, but Saoirse held up the finger again. “Don’t. Please. I don’t want t’hear it.”
Angus just shook his head and walked back toward the compound and the meeting.
Saoirse looked out toward the Sleeping Wolf. She imagined Kekeki listening to her. Why did yeh change me? she asked. Why did yeh awaken the plotch in me?
But there was no answer in her head, so she followed Angus back to Ichiko and the others.
* * *
Ichiko watched Saoirse leave the room and saw Rí Angus follow after her. She suspected, given the exchange she’d glimpsed between Saoirse and the Banríon, that an unpleasant conversation between Saoirse and her uncle was about to follow.
For that matter, Ichiko would need to have a serious conversation with the young woman herself before her return to First Base, since it was apparent that she’d lied to Ichiko about having permission to bring her out to the archipelago. Ichiko wondered about that, especially since it had been obvious that Banríon Iona was rather annoyed that they’d used the flitter. There was something here that Ichiko was missing, something beyond just Saoirse disobeying her mam. She could feel the tension.
Still, she had to admit the mistake was partially her own fault; she should have verified the permission with Rí Angus before making the trip. She hoped this wasn’t going to cause diplomatic problems with the Inish or the Lupusians in general, and that it wouldn’t get back to Nagasi, Luciano, or Captain Keshmiri. Ichiko also knew that Minister Plunkett and other Mainlanders had been given com-units with which they could talk to Odysseus and each other, gifts from the captain. She’d have to ask Nagasi if a com-unit had been offered to the Inish as well. If it hadn’t, why not; if it had, did they know why Iona had turned down the offer?
But those were questions for later. Right now, she didn’t even have the time to ask AMI to check for her. The Inish were still hurling questions at her, most of which she either couldn’t answer, wasn’t allowed to answer, or was reluctant to answer. After the twentieth time someone in the group asked her another variation on “Will Lupusians be allowed to go visit Earth?” Ichiko raised her hands in what she hoped looked like self-deprecation.
“Everyone, I’m sorry, but you all have to understand something. I’m not important enough to even be able to guess at the answer to that question,” she told the group, looking around from the Banríon and Rí Craig to the cluster of Inish around her. “All I’m doing is trying to get a sense of the ways in which the archipelago differs from the mainland. That’s my sole job: to learn as much as I can about the way Canis Lupus works. So let me ask you a question: what’s the biggest difference between the way things work in the archipelago and how they work on the mainland in the towns?”
There was no immediate response. People shrugged or glanced at one another—and especially looked to Banríon Mullin and Rí Craig. It was Rí Craig who answered first in his quavering, graveled voice. “Out here, we mostly still do things the way we’ve always done them since our ancestors left the mainland,” he said. “Don’t have no motors on our boats or our farm equipment, don’t have many machines a’tall ’cept those we can work with our hands and our sweat. On the mainland, they’re still trying to get back to the way things were before yeh left us. Minister Plunkett got electricity run into most of the town and compounds long before the Terrans came back; some of the clans are making their living by making things that require machinery using electricity. Out here?” Rí Craig took a long pull on his pipe and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “We don’t have no interest in that.”
“Why not?” Ichiko asked. “Wouldn’t the technology and machinery make life easier and better for you?” As Ichiko asked the questions, she saw the door to the room open and Rí Angus come back into the room with a stern expression on his face. He leaned against the wall near the hearth, taking out his pipe from a pocket and relighting it.
Banríon Iona stirred. “Yeh might think so because yeh’ve always lived in a world full of technolo
gy,” she said. “When the Dunbrody left us behind, almost seven millennia ago by our reckoning, that act essentially threw us back into a preindustrial world with no chance to prepare. After what little technology we had broke down, we didn’t have resources or the knowledge to repair them and put things back together.”
The door opened again, Iona’s attention going to the creak of the hinges and the motion. Saoirse sidled into the room, not moving to her previous chair. She stood near the door, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed tightly in front of her, unsmiling.
Still watching her daughter, Iona continued. “When our two clans came out here to the archipelago, our people realized that we didn’t need what we’d lost. We found that we could lead good and fulfilling lives just as we were, with what we had. Hard lives, mebbe, in the eyes of them who don’t know better, but there’s nothing wrong with working hard and being close to the land and sea around us. It made us stronger, made our families and the bonds between us powerful. Yeh need to understand that we don’t regret our ways a’tall; we’re proud of ’em and I, for one, don’t see the need to change ’em. I think yeh’ll find most people here would tell yeh the same. There are reasons—good ones—that we’re the way we are and reasons we keep to those old ways. But we love and respect each other even when we have disagreements.”
Ichiko, too, was watching Saoirse as Iona talked, realizing that it was her daughter the Banríon was really addressing. Saoirse’s head was turned slightly to one side and downward, as if she couldn’t bear to look directly at her mother. When Saoirse’s head lifted, it was Ichiko’s eyes that she found.
Ichiko nodded and smiled at her, and Saoirse managed an uncertain smile in return.
AMI chuckled. Which Ichiko found strangest of all. She’d never heard of an AMI laughing.
Exploration By Foot And Boat
THE CYCLE LOOKED LIKE it was threatening rain with angry clouds racing low through the sky above them, though Rí Angus had told them that the rain would hold off for at least three more bells. Bells were on Ichiko’s mind, since she and Saoirse were standing inside the bell tower on An Cró Mór. The tower was the height of two people, steepled like a beehive and made of drystone so tightly placed that, according to Saoirse, no rain ever entered the space inside except through the windows left open to allow the sound of the bells to escape. Ichiko ran her hand along the bronze hem of the larger bell—the “low” bell—suspended by its crown from a thick wooden beam near the top of the tower. She glanced underneath the bell. A rope hung there, attached midway along its length to a lozenge-shaped mallet of hard wood that evidently served as the clapper. The ends of the log were battered, flattened, and cracked.
The “high” bell was slimmer in shape and smaller overall, though hung and struck the same way.
“Clan Craig has the bell masters charged with keeping time,” Saoirse said, answering Ichiko’s unasked question. “Yeh saw the cottage we passed just down the slope? That’s where the bell masters live; there are four of them and two apprentices. They also keep the island’s two clocks there so that they know when to come up here and sound the bells.”
“Is that how it’s done in all the towns and compounds?” Ichiko asked her, and Saoirse shook her head.
“That’s how it’s done here, out in the archipelago. In Dulcia, they rotate the responsibility for ringing the time between the various clans, changing clans once a year, and Dulcia’s clocks as well as the bells are all inside the Pale Woman. In the other towns, they may have other ways; I don’t actually know.”
“Great Inish’s bells were made here?”
Another shake of Saoirse’s head. “Neh. We don’t have the ore or the foundry. Clan O’Clery in Newtown does the bell-casting for all the towns; they’re known for their grand metal work. The O’Clerys made these bells in their compound, then brought them down the river from Newtown and over to the archipelago on a barge. I believe these are the third set of ’em we’ve had, and they’re already nearly three thousand years old. I’m glad I wasn’t around to help haul them all the way up here from the White Strand. That would have been a sweaty and slow effort.”
“Impressive,” Ichiko said. “And I’ll bet it’s terribly loud in here when the low bell’s struck.”
“Probably,” was Saoirse’s curt answer. “Honestly, I’ve never been here to know, although the Craig bell masters are notoriously hard of hearing.” She opened the wooden door of the tower and went outside; Ichiko followed her with a last glance back to make sure everything had been recorded and sent to Odysseus via AMI. On the summit of Great Inish, the wind had picked up significantly, blowing against their faces with swirling gusts. Here on the spinal ridge of Great Inish, Ichiko could look down the slope to the lower pastures where the white dots of sheepers grazed and the mottled specks of milch-goats moved among the bushes. Further down, peat smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses and compounds of the village, and below that was the sea crashing and exploding into foam against the rocks of Great Inish’s feet and rolling high on the White Strand, while out in the white-capped distance were the blue-tinged mounds of the Sleeping Wolf and the Stepstones. On the misty horizon, she couldn’t quite make out the peaks of the mainland.
With the weather, their world had contracted to the archipelago and the sea. Nothing else existed.
“I need to tell yeh this, Ichiko, and I should have said it before now,” she heard Saoirse say. “I’m sorry. I should have told yeh that Mam had changed her mind about letting yeh come out here, and I never should have let yeh do so in yer flitter.”
“Apology accepted,” Ichiko told her. “But, yes, you should have told me. I was embarrassed, but mostly for your sake, not mine.”
Saoirse didn’t answer immediately. “We . . .” she began, then stopped with a deep breath. Her cheeks colored with more than just the wind. “We don’t like technology out here. Yeh heard Rí Craig and Mam at the gathering last cycle.”
Again, Ichiko had the sense that Saoirse was, if not outright lying, at least holding back some of the truth. Even as she thought of it, AMI played back a statement Minister Plunkett had made on her first cycle at Dulcia. <“Inishers like things the way they always were. They even claim yer technologies won’t work out on the islands.”>
“There’s a difference between ‘not liking technology’ and what happened to the flitter on the way here, which felt like a deliberate attack. There’s just the two of us here,” Ichiko said. “What aren’t you telling me, Saoirse? Who’s the ‘we’ that nearly crashed the flitter?”
The color on Saoirse’s face deepened; her hands fisted at her sides. She half-turned from Ichiko and seemed to be looking out toward the Sleeping Wolf. “There are some things I can’t tell yeh,” she answered, turning back. “Not without destroying what little faith Mam has left in me. Please don’t ask me again, Ichiko. Please. If Mam even knew yeh’d asked me this much, she’d send yeh back to the mainland and tell yeh never to come back here again. Please.”
Ichiko lifted her hands in mock surrender. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Saoirse. But I can promise that if you tell me what I’m missing here, it won’t go any further than me.”
Saoirse looked unconvinced. “Mebbe yeh might not say anything to anyone, but what about that implant yeh have. What’d yeh call it? AMI?”
“I can order AMI to turn herself off,” Ichiko said. I just can’t be sure that would act
ually work right now.
“But how would I know?” Saoirse responded. She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Ichiko could see that she’d pushed Saoirse as far as she could. She took a step back, smiling at her. “Then I won’t ask.” She saw motion down by the bell keepers’ cottage: a young man emerging from the dwelling and starting to trudge up the short path to the tower. “Look, it must be time for the next bell. Can we stay and listen?”
Saoirse brightened at that. “Certainly,” she said. “That’s Owen; why, he might even let you sound the bell. We can ask him, but we’ll need to talk loudly.” Saoirse tapped her ear and smiled.
* * *
If Ichiko thought that she’d have no issues being out to sea in a currach, she was quickly disabused of that notion. The wind whipped across the water, and while it wasn’t actively raining yet, the spray from the whitecaps were enough to douse her initial enthusiasm even if the water never actually touched her skin. The boat lifted and fell, lifted and fell again, tossing from side to side as well as up and down as Rí Angus and Liam rowed while Saoirse managed the single sail. This was worse than anything Ichiko remembered from her flitter simulations or her childhood experiences in sailing crafts. She realized now that her parents had never taken her out in anything resembling foul weather and always in a far larger boat. She found herself gulping back acid reflux from her stomach and wondering what happened if one upchucked while wearing a bio-shield.
She thought she heard another chuckle in response, but it may just have been the boards creaking in the buffeting. “Is it always like this?” she called out to Rí Angus. He glanced at her as he rowed.
Amid the Crowd of Stars Page 15