Bright Shards

by Meg Pechenick

  I nodded to his cane. “When do you go in for surgery?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. The Echelon wants a thorough debrief of the Listening before I undergo anesthesia.”

  “At least you get a break,” Zey muttered. “I’d let them carve up my leg if it meant I could skip out on the hearings. Both legs, even.”

  “I’ll just have to do them afterward,” his brother reminded him.

  “Good point. Well, we’d better go.” Zey raised one in a casual farewell. “Have fun on your tour, Eyvri.”

  “You’re not coming?” I said without much hope.

  “No way. I’m wrecked after all those hours of questioning. And also I wasn't invited.”

  It didn’t appear that anyone other than Kylie and I had been invited on the tour. We set off down the corridor with Zirian and Tavri, trailing Officer Nerev and a handful of her red-and-black-garbed fellows. I spent the first few minutes of the tour waiting for the Echelon representatives to hand us off to a subordinate, but it seemed they had chosen to do the honors themselves. I was glad I had picked coffee over an after-dinner drink. It wasn’t only the exalted company in which we found ourselves that demanded alertness. The corridors around us had begun to fill up with people. Most of them were out of uniform, and that fact, added to the lateness of the hour, told me they were pursuing errands of pleasure rather than business. This time, disconcertingly, I seemed to be the focus of their interest. Something about the governor’s presence made the connection between Kylie and me plainer than before. Whereas earlier their glances had slid off me and onto her, now they studied me—my uniform, my face, my hair—with avid curiosity. The bars were open, I thought, and people were starting to relax a little. I heard my name murmured over and over again, Alkhat, the Vardeshi rendering of my surname. Sometimes it was preceded by novi, sometimes it wasn’t. One or two passersby even went so far as to touch their arms, fingers brushing across their sleeves, miming the path of a bullet.

  Kylie and Governor Tavri had taken the lead. Councilor Zirian dropped back to walk beside me. “How does it feel to be a celebrity?” he asked. The question itself was a disquieting echo of Kylie’s earlier reference to heroism. Still, I was flattered, and somehow relieved, that he asked it in Vardeshi.

  “Undeserved,” I said.

  “Really? You’re a human in a Fleet uniform. That alone would be worthy of note, even if you hadn’t also survived a Listening. And an assassination attempt.”

  “All right, maybe not undeserved then. But uncomfortable.”

  Zirian said, “You were comfortable on the Pinion?”

  “Not most of the time, no. But I had time to get used to things. And the crew got used to me. If I was uncomfortable, it was because I was making mistakes. Or getting in trouble with Vekesh. It wasn’t because I was human.”

  He nodded. “When the Pinion was chosen to host a human representative, and then to be in effect the flagship of the exchange program, there were objections. Some people said the ship was too small, that it would be isolating, or stifling, for the human.”

  “Those people haven’t met me,” I said.

  “Indeed. Ambassador Seidel clearly has, though.”

  “Why, what did he tell you?”

  “I believe his exact words were, ‘She’ll try to disappear. Don’t let her.’”

  I was immediately intrigued, but before I could question him further, we stepped through a high arched doorway into a room that was like nothing I had ever seen before. It looked as though a section of the cylindrical core of the station, a few hundred meters across and several stories tall, had been transformed into an open-air market. We stood on a narrow catwalk set just under the ceiling. The catwalk ran along the perimeter of the room, but two perpendicular bridges spanning the void permitted a more direct crossing. Both the bridges and the shoulder-high barriers enclosing them were made of a clear glassy material. I looked out at the narrow arched walkways, supported by nothing I could see, and my stomach churned.

  A couple of stories beneath our catwalk was a wider balcony, thronged with pedestrians weaving their way between what I tentatively labeled food and drink stalls. Each stall had a standing bar built into it or a cluster of stools and tables nearby, and most of the seats were occupied. Below that balcony was a second, broader one, similarly full of customers and food stalls. I stepped closer to the transparent barrier and looked farther down. The floor of the space was obviously a marketplace, teeming with carts and stalls and tables on which vendors displayed their wares. The market looked hectic but at the same time highly organized, with a network of curving paths laid out for shoppers to wander at their leisure.

  Here, then, was the alien bazaar I had been hoping for. It wasn’t exactly what I had pictured. Even in a crowded marketplace, the Vardeshi kept their voices decorously low, and there were no competing shouts of hawkers or skirls of wild music. Visually, too, the scene was muted. The shops and food stalls were mostly built of what looked like bamboo. I assumed, given our distance from the nearest forested planet, that it was a synthetic material. The colors of the scene were subdued, ochre and tan and dull green. I might have found the entire spectacle a little anticlimactic were it not for its most striking feature. The air above the market was filled with banners, scores or hundreds of them in every imaginable color and shape. Some were covered in Vardeshi lettering, some bore abstract swirls or patterns, some were of one solid color emblazoned with a sigil or mark in a contrasting hue. They didn’t appear to be suspended by strings, but rather by some application of the hover technology I knew the Vardeshi possessed. Many of the banners were stationary; a few drifted aimlessly on currents of air. The highest banners floated just below our feet.

  “Welcome to the Atrium,” said Governor Tavri, “Arkhati’s central marketplace. All our most successful vendors can be found here. The competition for a place is intense—many of these stalls have been handed down through generations. The market has been running continuously for over six hundred years. Everyone who visits the starhaven passes through here at some point.”

  “What are the banners for?” I asked.

  “They’re advertisements for shops or restaurants, both here and elsewhere in the starhaven. If you scan a banner’s insignia with your flexscreen, you’ll be given directions to the stall and information about the goods for sale.” Kylie and I both pulled out our flexscreens. I activated my camera and panned it slowly across the profusion of banners, selecting one in deep blue with a starburst design in white. “Zenesh Fine Tailoring,” the governor read over my shoulder, translating into English for Kylie’s benefit. “Handmade apparel of the highest quality, guaranteed ready before your launch date. Two hundred years of exquisite custom designs. Find us at Stall 171.”

  “They don’t say anything about their prices,” I noted.

  “With a stall in the Atrium, you can assume they’re exorbitant.”

  Kylie turned her flexscreen questioningly toward me. “House of Three Moons Senek Shop,” I translated. “Tier Two, Stall 38.”

  Councilor Zirian smiled. “I get my senek there every morning.”

  “Would you like to see the marketplace?” the governor asked.

  “Yes,” Kylie and I said in unison.

  We descended to the floor via a narrow spiraling ramp built of the same transparent substance as the bridges. I knew rationally that the material must be sturdier than glass, but it was perfectly clear and unnervingly thin, and after one quick glance downward, I opted to keep one hand on the rail and look out at the banners instead. Once in the maze of shops, I was instantly captivated by the variety and workmanship of the goods on offer. I saw vendors selling clothing, shoes, jewelry, musical instruments, tapestries. A few sold only memory crystals, the blue gemstones the Vardeshi encoded with their most precious images and audiorecordings. One aisle was entirely devoted to whiskey, senek, and rana, the drug that unlocked latent telepathic powers. I stopped to examine a pair of whiskey glasses each carved from a single glitte
ring gray crystal. The shop owner watched me narrowly when I picked one up for a closer look, but he smiled with genuine warmth when I thanked him. Kylie and I were both drawn to a display of intricately embroidered sashes. The vendor, a young woman, explained that they were traditionally worn by expectant mothers. I translated, and the vendor laughed with me when Kylie dropped the sash she was holding in horror. I lingered so long at another stall, where jeweled pendants hung like stars against a velvety dark cloth, that Kylie had to drag me away by the elbow. “We’ll come back,” she promised. “You have plenty of time.”

  When we’d walked from one edge of the market to the other, we climbed another ramp to the first tier of food and drink shops, where a vendor served the other three with senek and me with water. He refused payment for the drinks, insisting it was an honor to serve his first human customers. The exchange prompted a thought, and I said in an undertone to Kylie, “How do we pay for things here?”

  I’d underestimated the keenness of Vardeshi hearing. Councilor Zirian said in English, “As an employee of the Fleet, you draw a weekly salary, and Kylie, you’ve been provided a stipend as well. You both have currency accounts linked to your flexscreens. It’s difficult to estimate the conversion rate, but . . .” He swirled his cup thoughtfully. “A cup of senek costs roughly six units, and a full meal is around sixty or eighty. A good piece of bespoke clothing should cost about four hundred. That whiskey glass you were looking at, Avery, would be about six hundred. As a novi in the Fleet, you earn about a thousand units a week. Kylie, your account has twenty-five thousand units in it. Any vendor will be able to check your balance on your flexscreen.”

  Kylie elbowed me. “Looks like there’s no money in drudge work.”

  I laughed. “And it pays so well back home.”

  “If you’re ready to move on, we’re not far from the Arboretum,” the governor said.

  The Arboretum was located at the very top of the starhaven’s main column. I found it as breathtaking as the Atrium in its own way. It was like a little woodland enclosed under a transparent dome, its floor sculpted with natural-looking rises and depressions to disguise the artificial flatness of the horizon. Soft globe lights hanging from the boughs of the trees provided a gentle illumination without obscuring the stars that glimmered beyond the dome. Leaves rustled in a manufactured breeze, and a tiny stream whispered over stones in its bed. Another sound, faint yet distinct, stopped my heart for an instant: the night-call of a bird or an animal, unseen in the dimness somewhere overhead. I stood in the entryway, transfixed, breathing in the scents of a night forest. The fragrances of the individual trees were unfamiliar, but there was an underlying resinous tang that evoked the woods of home.

  “During the day, the ceiling panels turn opaque and emit simulated daylight,” Zirian explained. “The starhaven has several hydroponics bays as well, of course, but the Arboretum is something special. We come here when we want to remember the feeling of being soilside. And it isn’t only ornamental. The trees play an important role in our carbon dioxide processing and oxygen production, and the aquatic plants are part of our filtration system for reclaimed water.”

  We followed a winding path through the trees. It was startling to feel soft soil underfoot again. Passing under a low-hanging branch, I reached up to brush my fingers across the cool undersides of its leaves. The little stream crisscrossed our path a handful of times, and at one point we came upon a place where the water ran into a pool encircled by a grove of trees. Several hexagonal stone seats were placed beside the water. The clearing was more brightly lit than the paths on either side, and as I gazed down at the pool, I caught an unexpected gleam of sapphire in its dark depths. I knelt to look closer. Even as I recognized what I was seeing, Governor Tavri said, “They’re memory crystals. People started leaving them here a hundred years ago or so, and it’s become something of a good-luck ritual. This pool is filled with the memories of all the Vardeshi who have passed through Arkhati. Every few years we collect them all and expel them into space. We have to: otherwise they’d carpet the whole Arboretum by now.”

  “What kinds of memories?” I asked.

  “I’m told they’re mostly images of loved ones. There’s a superstition that leaving someone’s image in the pool invokes a kind of protection. But some people leave memories of those they’ve lost. It’s a symbolic way of forgetting, I suppose.”

  “You’re told?” Kylie repeated. “You don't look at the crystals?”

  “Certainly not,” Tavri said in surprise. “Our people would consider it an intrusion.”

  Kylie shrugged. “Ours would say that if you leave your memories lying around in plain sight, you can pretty much assume someone’s going to look at them.”

  “Maybe the Vardeshi have better self-control,” I said. “Or maybe they’re just not interested. Pictures aren’t that exciting when you’re used to getting memories straight from the source.”

  “You’d know better than I would.”

  The words were Kylie’s, but for an instant all three of them fixed me with speculative looks. I shivered. I didn't like feeling like a specimen, particularly when one of the people examining me was human.

  After exploring a bit further, we emerged from the trees near a doorway, possibly the one by which we’d entered, though I wasn’t sure. I checked my flexscreen, took note of the late hour, and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.

  “I think you’ve seen enough for one night,” the governor said, alert as ever. “You’ll be seeing the medical and bureaucratic levels tomorrow, in any case. Avery, your hearing is tentatively set for one o’clock, with a medical examination to follow. Will that be acceptable?”

  “It sounds fine,” I said.

  “We recommend that you bring at least one companion to your hearing. You’re not on trial, and we’d like you to feel as comfortable as possible. I assumed . . .” She hesitated delicately.

  “Kylie,” I said. “Of course. If you don’t mind,” I added to Kylie herself. “And . . .” I paused to think. “I’d like Rhevi Daskar to be there.” Daskar was the Pinion’s physician. Her calm maternal presence had been a source of comfort to me more than once in the tumultuous events of the last few weeks.

  “Certainly,” the governor said. “We’ll see that she’s informed.”

  The appropriate thanks and farewells were exchanged, and Tavri and Zirian took their leave of us. They weren’t accompanied by any security personnel, at least not that I noticed; apparently Nerev and the three others who had been keeping pace with us all evening were solely for the benefit of the humans. Kylie and I didn’t speak much on the short walk back to her suite. I started stripping off my uniform as soon as we were safely within her rooms.

  “I’d offer you a cup of tea,” she said, “but I know you’re ready to crash.”

  “I’d love one tomorrow, if the offer doesn’t expire.”

  “Sure. We’ll talk then. Sleep well.”

  “You too.” I went into my little gray and copper room, finished pulling off my uniform, and dropped it in a heap on the floor before stretching out on the bunk. It was considerably wider than my bed on the Pinion, but the tilt was identical, and while the hum emanating from the bulkhead wasn’t a perfect match for the one I’d left behind, it was close enough. I reached for the blanket folded at the foot of the bunk and found it to be far softer than any of my Earth-issue bedding, the exact twin of the one in Zey’s quarters that I’d been coveting. Maybe he’d gotten it on Arkhati. Maybe I could find one for sale in the Atrium. Hell, I was a diplomat now; maybe I could just take it with me. I burrowed under its cloudlike softness and fell immediately asleep.

  * * *

  I woke to the smell of bacon frying. I fumbled for pajamas and made my way into the galley, where I found Kylie busily putting together a feast. In addition to the bacon, there were eggs, toast, butter, marmalade, and tea in a real English teapot. I sat down and pulled the teapot toward me. “You’re a miracle worker. How long have you been
up?”

  “An hour or so. I’ve been going through the publicity photos from last night.” She waved at her flexscreen, which was sitting on the counter in what I judged dangerous proximity to the pan of bacon.

  “Publicity photos? That’s a Vardeshi thing?”

  “No, but it’s a human thing, so the Council asked the Echelon to assign a photographer for major events. I’m supposed to review the photos and send the best ones home. I’m basically my own press secretary.” She wiped her fingers on a towel, logged into her flexscreen, and passed it to me. I skimmed through the pictures while she finished crisping the bacon. There were a couple of me and Hathan talking together at the beginning of the dance performance. I flicked past those quickly. I would have liked to examine them more carefully, on the off chance that not all of them were catastrophically unflattering, but I couldn’t, not with Kylie only a few feet away and casting intermittent curious glances over my shoulder. There was one candid close-up shot I liked of myself and Zey laughing about something. I sent it to my own account and pushed the flexscreen to one side as Kylie set the plate of bacon between us.

  We ate in ravenous silence for a few minutes. Then I poured myself a second cup of tea and went to light the camp stove to boil another pot of water. As I sat down again, I said cheerfully, “So, sex with aliens? Tell me about that.”

  Kylie let out a bark of laughter. “You don't waste any time, do you? Let me guess. It’s Saresh, right? You’re in love with Saresh.”

  I eyed her narrowly over my teacup. “I don’t remember saying anything about love.”

  “Oh, well done,” she said approvingly.

  “And no. All joking aside, I’m not in love with Saresh. I couldn’t have done the Listening if I were.”

  She gave a grudging nod. “All right. It’s hard to argue with that.”

  “I’m asking out of general interest. But I am interested. Who wouldn’t be? I felt awkward talking about it in front of them, but they’re not here now, so fill me in, because you obviously know more than I do.”