Jeanne G'Fellers - No Sister of Mine

by Jeanne G'Fellers

  “Then why have you bunked with me the last three passes? I’ve kept you in trouble.” Malley, with an expression now on the verge of piteous, joined LaRenna and fingered the fringed edge of the blanket roll nearest her. The reason was plain enough, but Malley always proved too reserved to admit it. “I don’t know. Maybe because you never let me take myself too seriously.”

  “What’s the use? Life’s no fun if you can’t see the humor in things.” LaRenna winked at her friend, a gesture that sent Malley’s heart soaring. “Sometimes, the humor has to be coaxed out. Call it creativity.”

  Malley lowered her head as an embarrassed chuckle escaped her happy mouth. “Like the time you switched activation agents in Master Riles’s lab? I think she failed to see the humor in the test fuel cells foaming and freezing when they were supposed to be charging. I don’t remember you laughing about those seven off days you spent on night sentry post as punishment either. Mighty creative of you, Renna.”

  “You laughed enough for both of us,” LaRenna said.

  “That’s because it took an entire moon cycle for the green discoloration to wear off your hands and arms. Was body art what you had in mind?”

  “Bet I’ll never be posted on a cell maintenance station.” LaRenna punctuated the retort with a smart flick of her tongue. “That’d have to be boring duty. Worse than a stinking repair dock.” She checked the courtyard again.

  “Quall still down there?” queried Malley in futile hope.

  “Of course.” LaRenna settled her back against the sill. “She even gives the graduates a hard time. Right now she’s doing a number on poor Salu. Isn’t she senior level?”

  “Think so. I wonder what she did.” Malley’s voice remained low, as if believing Quall long-eared enough to hear three floors up. “We’d best stay out of sight. Get back from the window.”

  LaRenna cast her roommate an all too familiar grin. She loved to push things one step further whenever possible, a fact that had landed her at disciplinary hearings on several occasions. “But Malley,” she cried with a wave to the courtyard’s occupants. “If I lean out a little more I can spit in the center of Quall’s head!”

  Malley gasped. “You wouldn’t?”

  LaRenna cleared her throat and pursed her lips. “Watch me.”

  “Oh no!” Malley’s normal monotone disappeared into a shriek. “You’re not getting me in deep this time!” She grabbed LaRenna’s boot tops, pulling her to the floor. The weapons belt circling LaRenna’s curving waist gave a metallic clank as it bounced on the floor tiles.

  “Ouch!” LaRenna rubbed her insulted backside. “Would you give me a warning or a cushion?”

  “Let me know before you decide to wash Quall’s hair and you won’t need a cushion for your rump,” grumped Malley, offering a pillow.

  “Thanks, Mal. What hair? Quall’s guardian, remember?”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Malley snapped. “Or do you forget what I am?”

  “How could I?” A brief, intimate familiarity swept into LaRenna’s tone. “Besides, I knew you were when we first met.”

  “At sixteen?” Malley’s hands found their way to her mussed crop of flaxen hair. “I wasn’t even quite sure myself at that age.”

  “Everyone decides in their own time. I’d just decided before we met.” LaRenna tousled her roommate’s short, unruly locks as she ran her free hand over her own loosely tacked spirals. “You chose well.”

  Malley reveled in the warmth of her touch. How she loved LaRenna’s caresses, infrequent and platonic as they might be. Malley had always been attracted to women like her roommate— their curves, their gentle smell when she bent to kiss them, but with LaRenna her attraction neared obsession. Familiarity and trust led to the mind linking required of Taelach mates, they said. Malley held tight to those words. “Where do you think they’ll send us?”

  “Who knows?” said LaRenna softly. “But at least we won’t be alone.”

  “Yes, we will.” Malley’s head now rested fully against LaRenna’s shoulder. Should her urges, her emotions be expressed before they were separated? No, the timing just wasn’t right.

  “You’re assigned to a Kimshee your first post.”

  “That’s only temporary.” Malley’s return sounded almost angry. “Maybe it’s me, but I always feel so uneasy when I’m in a room of Auts.”

  “When were you ever in a room of Auts?” Malley’s teeth clenched and released at LaRenna’s biting observation. “Most of them accept us these days. They depend on us as much as we do them.” LaRenna continued stroking Malley’s hair and smiled thoughtfully. Her high-shouldered roommate was demonstrating some of the customary Taelach reservations. Besides, a strong sense of protection was part of a guardian’s nature, and Malley’s had come to include LaRenna. It was all right that it be extended to her. They had been roommates for quite some time. “Like it or not, we are related to them.”

  “Yeah, we’re mutant cousins.” Malley slid down to use LaRenna’s thigh as a headrest, affording her the lingering physical contact she longed for.

  “That’s not our fault.”

  “They treat you differently if you’re Taelach. It’s as if they don’t trust us.” Malley toyed with the holder loops of LaRenna’s loose belt. “You’re losing weight again. Get much smaller and someone will mistake you for a child.”

  LaRenna ignored the affectionate concern. Malley knew well enough that she was frequently mistaken for a Taelach youth. “Look at our history. We’re like them but nothing like them. Too hu-man—” she stumbled over the pronunciation—“in appearance. Physically too similar to the witches the Autlach’s Raskhallak deity warns against. Besides, would you trust a people who obtain their young by taking yours? Even if what they take are your castoffs, your misfits, your cursed?”

  “Your gay.”

  “There’re gay Auts.”

  “Not if they’re caught at it.” Malley shuddered a bit. “The way they cleanse . . . it’s so . . .”

  “Fire cleansing’s been banned so there’s not as many disfigurements as there used to be. Kimshees are helping in that regard.” LaRenna sat up a bit taller.

  “Only ’cause we forced the Auts into it as part of the treaty.”

  “Doesn’t matter how it came to be, only that Kimshees are opening Aut eyes. A Kimshee’s purpose, besides bringing infants to their raisers, is to help us adapt to the Aut and them to us. That’s why I chose to become one.”

  “Well, I certainly couldn’t do it.”

  “Why?” asked LaRenna, though she had no doubt about the answer.

  “Too much bad blood.” Malley’s lean face darkened with contempt. Autlach blood might course through Taelach veins, but it certainly didn’t mean they had to be an intricate part of their lives. Malley couldn’t understand why a beautiful, bright woman like LaRenna would want to either. Taelachs who never dealt with Autlachs seemed to live much happier lives. “They used to hunt us. Slave us. Burn us alive. Cleanse us en masse. Worse. Many Auts would still have it that way if it weren’t for our technology. How can you possibly get past that enough to deal with them on a daily basis?”

  Malley’s bitterness deeply disturbed LaRenna but it was something she knew she’d never change. Like Autlach prejudices, they were ingrained into the Taelach mentality. “I think about the future. I think about the young ones I will get to hold before their own raisers do. I think of how lucky we are that now we no longer have to abduct mothers carrying Taelach sisters to ensure the baby’s survival. I think of how the Kinship’s numbers are growing because we finally convinced the Autlach to accept us.”

  “They merely tolerate us because we could blow them from the sky at any moment and they know it.” Malley’s mouth twitched with scorn. “And so do you.”

  “I admit it’s sometimes a strained relationship, but it’s something and more than we’ve ever had before.” LaRenna’s fingers unconsciously tightened about Malley’s hair until her eyes opened. LaRenna’s downward gaze was by
far her most serious. “I want to help change things, be part of the peace. That’s why I chose to become Kimshee.”

  “And go through apprenticeship training to do it. You’ll never finish your schooling.” Malley ran her finger down LaRenna’s soft palm. “Do you ever think about them?”

  “Kimshee apprentices?”

  “No, your birth parents. Don’t you ever wonder what they’re like or if you have Aut brothers and sisters?”

  “Of course I do.” LaRenna scratched at her hand. “Who hasn’t? But I don’t very often. Belsas and Chandrey raised me with love. I feel almost guilty asking for more.” She pushed Malley away, rose to her knees, and peeked hopefully at the courtyard. “All clear. Let’s check our postings.”

  “What was it like?” Malley lingered on the floor, still holding LaRenna’s hand.

  “Being raised by the Taelach of All?” LaRenna settled cross-legged beside her.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My gahrah is like most of your brooding types, pretty reserved, sometimes unemotional. I never could read her well enough to tell when I had overstepped my bounds.”

  Malley raised a high arched eyebrow in suspicion. “Really?”

  “She’d just smile like nothing happened and find me the most horrid chores to do around the housing compound.”

  “She never smacked you?”

  Shock sprang into LaRenna’s long-lashed eyes. “Why, no! Mamma would have exploded if Belsas ever had. When things got intense, Bel would just walk away. I probably would have preferred a thrashing to those chores or Chandrey’s lectures. It certainly would’ve been quicker.” LaRenna shook her head as childhood memories encroached her thoughts. “Those lectures made me feel so small.”

  Malley dropped her handhold to smooth the bedrolls into inspection perfection. “I would have taken chores or words over a belt to the back end any day. Believe me, LaRenna, you would have too.”

  LaRenna offered her friend a considering stare. Malley’s childhood had been impossibly rough, plagued by a pair of raisers who had never gotten along and had taken their problems out on their only child with regular ferocity. No wonder Malley had gone into military schooling at such a young age; it was an escape mechanism. “You make me feel privileged to have been raised by them. Chandrey and Belsas have always been close. That’s probably why they waited so long before they took a child to raise. I guess they were making sure of themselves.”

  “Lucky you.” Malley’s expression turned dourer than ever. “Dressa and Whellen seemed to think raising me involved intense screaming and yelling. Not that it matters. I survived it.”

  “And managed to rise above it, Third Engineer Malley Whellen.” LaRenna gave Malley’s hand a confident squeeze and then tugged her toward the door. “Come on, you overcharged sodium cell.” Laughing, she vaulted down the corridor to the floor-level lifts, dragging her reluctant roommate behind. “Let’s check our posts.”

  Chapter Three

  Speak not of your Taelach daughters. Their birth is substantiation of your sin.

  —Autlach saying

  In the high plains of southern Vartoch, deep within the Taelach-owned lands opened for Autlach settlement, Sentry Commander Trazar Laiman watched his father polish two names listed on the Death Stone. Unlike the other forgotten names, these two were meticulously kept. “You keep their memory well.”

  “You’ll be going soon, won’t you?” His father’s hands never wavered from their task.

  “My launch leaves in an hour.” Trazar ran his palm over the top of the weathered boulder. “I wish I had better memories of M’ma.”

  Laiman nodded slowly. “You weren’t yet six when she died. Mercy barely seven. Neither of you was old enough for many memories. I did what I could to make her seem real.”

  At the sound of his father’s anguish, Trazar offered what comfort he could. “You did well by us.”

  “I’m proud of my children.” But Laiman avoided his eyes. “I sometimes wonder how things would have been if she’d lived. Losing the baby destroyed her so. It wasn’t half a moon cycle later that she . . .” Laiman’s voice trailed off.

  Curiosity topped Trazar’s better judgment, driving him to question what no one dare speak of. Minor inconsistencies in what little he had been told indicated his mother’s suicide but not his infant sister’s fate. “Why did the baby die? Nobody ever told me.”

  Laiman gave his son a long, pained look. Memories hurt. So did lies. “She was a lot like you in the face, same chin, same jaw line. She even had the same birthmark on her ear. If only . . .”

  “If only what? What happened to the baby?” Trazar stopped his father’s polishing hand with his own. “What happened?”

  “It’s a long trip to the launches and two hard days to Langus. You’d best go.”

  “Answer me!”

  Laiman bowed his head, shoulders slouched and arms drawn as if cuddling the lost child. “She was perfect except—” He paused. “Then, despite my efforts, she was gone. No one could have prevented it. It doesn’t matter what took her, only that she’s gone.”

  “I wish I’d known her.”

  “Me, too,” mumbled Laiman, pushing away the invisible bundle. “Me, too.”

  Trazar looked at the sun’s place in the afternoon sky, aware of the time but reluctant to leave. “I have to go. I’ll send word as soon as my post on Langus grants time.”

  “Safe journey to you.” Laiman wrapped his arms around his son in a gruff embrace. Trazar had matured well. He was a full head taller than Laiman and almost twice as broad in the shoulder which, though not astounding for an Autlach, was unusual for the family’s small-statured genetics. Laiman admitted military training could fill one out in such a way, but liked to think a childhood spent in the fresh air of Vartoch’s single expansive continent had. “Be careful. Langus can be dangerous.”

  “Not the base, Dah, and that’s where I’ll be.” Trazar turned and walked down the hillside toward the launch stop, his shoulder pack swaying with his pace. He wondered if things were really as his father said, or if possibly . . . ?

  Laiman ran his hand over one of the Death Stone’s names. The ridged letters stung his fingers with the lie they contained.

  LARENNA NELL LAIMAN

  BIRTH/DEATH

  DAY 4–CYCLE 10–RECORDED PZ4428

  Turning back, Laiman watched his son fade from view. He longed to stop him and tell everything, something, anything about that morning twenty-two passes ago. It had been unfortunate, a terrifying event, and if anyone ever found out . . . Laiman shook his head. If anyone found out, the family lineage would be marred for generations. They would be known as producers of Taelachs, of white witches, of the barren, pale-eyed women who’d rather die in the fires than kneel before an Autlach husband. To seed or bear one was unnatural, despite any rumor the Taelach might spread about genetics. If anyone knew, Laiman’s descendants would be unmarriable, untrustworthy, barred from holding public or temple positions. No, it was too great a risk to tell Trazar. The midwife’s silence had cost the family’s savings, and the ties had been cut with the infant’s shushed cry. Laiman’s hands returned to LaRenna’s etched name. The Taelach pair had seemed stable enough. Well off. Not children, but the Taelach never sent children. Nor had he ever heard of them sending anyone besides the customary Kimshee, and worst of all Laiman had recognized the taller one’s voice. It was a voice few Auts could forget. Belsas Exzal had spoken to the Autlach people at large on several occasions since the Taelach civil war had ended. Laiman’s recognition of the voice had only made things worse. To be known as the sire of the Taelach of All’s daughter? No one could ever know. It would be the family’s ruin. The secret was his alone to bear and bear it he would, for the rest of his life.

  Chapter Four

  Your post is your life. Guard it as such.

  —Sarian Military Standards of Honor

  “It must be there somewhere. You’ve just overlooked it.” Malley fidgeted as LaRenna re-read the courty
ard postings.

  “For the third time, Mal, it’s not damn well there!” LaRenna flung the list at her dorm mate. “You look!”

  Malley’s fingers drew over the series of names and destinations in hopes of spotting an error. Finding none, she gave LaRenna a nervous, lip-chewing glance. “You’re right! What gives—you fail a final or something?”

  “Not bloody likely,” came the flustered reply. “There must be a mistake. I’d better check with the Master Yeoman. I’m sure she has my posting.” LaRenna cast her roommate a circumspect look and their eyes locked in the same dumbfounded manner. What could she possibly have done wrong? Had Quall been aware of her mischief? “I hope she has my posting.”

  “I’m sure she does.” An odd grin splashed over Malley’s cheeks, scrunching her broad face as she turned toward the opened dormitory doors. “You check then come back to our room. I’ll be packing. I still can’t believe I’ve been posted to Master Engineer Ockson on the Predator. Praise be, my posting is to a Taelach ship. No Auts to deal with and no Kimshees to work under! No offense intended.” Malley bubbled with such excitement that LaRenna felt a twinge of jealousy. “Besides, I’ve no desire to be around the Master Yeoman. Grandmaster Quall lurks around there entirely too much.”

  “Well, they are life mates.” LaRenna sucked her cheeks in dismay. “But I so hope Quall’s not around. Last thing I need is the Protocol Master on my back—again. Wish me luck.”

  “You’ll need it if Quall is about.”

  “Gee thanks, Malley.” With that thought weighing her mind, LaRenna jogged toward the Stores building, reciting a little prayer as she went.

  Mother Maker take this day and make it work for me.

  Your gentle help I’ll hold up high for all the world to see.

  Your praises I will sing out loud, rejoicing in your light.

  Give me the strength to do your work, do what you will as right.

  The Stores was a massive facility located in the heart of the training grounds. It was easily ten times larger than the senior dormitory and all the darker, its echoing halls the dirge of many a disobedient student, LaRenna included. The outside columns were carved with the everyday scenes of Sarian life and the walls graced with paintings of Taelach folklore. LaRenna usually stopped to enjoy these captivating pictures but this time passed them without notice. She identified herself to the sentry posted outside the main doors then went down the hall leading to the Yeoman’s workroom. The door was ajar.