I eyed her warily. “What reception?”
“Didn’t you hear Suvi Ekhran at the briefing this morning? The Outmarch is more than just a training exercise. It’s one of the ways the Echelon builds solidarity. They’re a small force spread across a vast territory. It isn’t often that they’re able to get two hundred officers together in one place. They’re not about to send them home without letting them at least talk to each other first.”
“Fine,” I said. “I can handle talking.”
Khiva’s eyes gleamed with sudden mischief. “How about dancing?”
I shook my head vehemently. “Oh, no. No way. I don’t dance.”
She looked surprised. “What, never?”
“Nope.” It wasn’t completely true, but I didn’t think anything I had witnessed or attempted at a smattering of weddings and high-school formals would be recognizable to the Vardeshi as dancing. Seeing her expression, I relented. “Dancing is more of a thing in some Earth cultures than others. In mine, you can get all the way to adulthood without knowing how to do it. I did.”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “if you don't know any dances of your own, you’ll just have to learn ours.”
“Khiva, it took me a week and a half to learn how the door codes worked. There is literally nothing I can learn about your dances, except possibly their names, between here and Rikasa. I’m not like you guys.” I had observed, envious and a little mystified, the ease with which my crewmates, and others on Arkhati, had picked up the routines—some of them quite complicated—in the music videos Kylie and I had shown them. If they danced the way they did everything else, I would save myself a lot of embarrassment by simply embracing my role as a wallflower.
“All the same, you’d better try,” Khiva said.
“You think?”
“You’re the guest of honor, so they’ll be a little offended if you don’t. Just ask someone on the ship to teach you a couple of dances. They’re not hard. We all learn them as children.”
Of course you do, I thought wearily. “Who would I even ask?” I regretted the question at once. What would I say if she suggested Hathan?
“Vethna?” She laughed at my expression. “All right, Zey, then.”
“I guess I could do that,” I said dubiously.
“You should. Soon. And Eyvri? Cheer up. At least there’s one thing you don't have to worry about.”
“What’s that?”
Khiva gave me a knowing look. “Finding something to wear.”
Back in my quarters, I dumped the Vardeshi hiking clothes onto my bunk and pulled the blue silk dress from the depths of my closet. I had no one to blame but myself. Participating in the Outmarch had been my idea, and mine alone. If I’d known there was a reception involved, I might have had second thoughts, but it was too late to back out now. Apparently a formal gala was the price I had to pay for a week in the Rikasan woods. And Khiva had emphatically vetoed all the other wardrobe options I put forward for consideration. Nothing else in my closet was dressy enough, and as the sole Fleet team in a roomful of Echelon officers, we would be effectively tossing down a gauntlet by wearing our uniforms. And I couldn’t very well borrow anything. Even if any of the women on board were my size, which, as Khiva helpfully pointed out, they weren’t, I was there to represent my own culture. This was it. It was why I had brought the gown along. It was why I had bought the stupid thing in the first place.
I slipped the straps free of the hanger, carried the dress into the sanitation room, and held it up to my shoulders in front of my mirror. Then, with a sigh, I threaded it back onto its hanger and put it on the hook by the door. I didn’t try it on. What was the point? I had literally nothing else to wear.
The next day I dutifully asked Zey to teach me to dance. And he dutifully tried, until he fell down on the floor laughing, which took about three minutes. I folded my arms and tried not to look like I was about to cry. I was though. It was impossible, just as I’d known it would be. Vardeshi dancing, from the eight steps I’d seen of it, married the elegance of a waltz with the joyful exuberance of—what? The tango? A Bollywood dance number? I didn’t know. Whatever it was, though, I couldn’t do it.
“I can’t do this,” I said when I thought I could trust my voice.
“No,” Zey gasped. “Sigils and emblems, no. You can’t. Promise me you’ll never try again. Especially not at the reception. No matter what anyone tells you. The alliance wouldn’t survive it. Vekesh, yes. The Flare, yes. Not this.”
“Thanks,” I said tightly. “I think you’ve made your point.”
He got to his feet, wiping his eyes and making a credible effort to school his expression. “It’s okay, Eyvri. There had to be something you couldn’t do.”
“What are you talking about?” I counted my failures off one by one on my fingers. “I can’t dance. I can’t fight. I can’t fly a shuttle. I can’t do anything.”
“That’s okay. You can read a star chart. Kind of. And you can do the Listening. And”—he stepped adroitly back out of reach—“you clean toilets really, really well.”
I didn’t allow my dread of the reception, powerful though it was, to occlude my excitement for long. As the days ticked down, it became more and more real to me: this wasn’t going to be like Vardesh Prime. I wasn’t going to be turned away again. I was finally going to see another planet. The plan, as Reyna explained it, was simple. The traditional structure of the Outmarch was for the twenty-five teams to be dropped at exactly equivalent intervals along a circle drawn with mathematical indifference to geography around the endpoint of the race. The varied terrain meant each team had different obstacles in its way, an intentional randomness meant to heighten the challenge. Use of navigational aids to locate the finish was strictly forbidden; dead reckoning was part of the game.
The endpoint for our race, it was announced a few days prior to our arrival on Rikasa, was a resort called the Perch set high on a cliff in one of the planet’s most beautiful and remote mountain ranges. The resort would be emptied in advance of the competition and the rooms set aside for the participants to use as dormitories in the interval between race completion and pickup by their home ships’ shuttles. On a course as “soft” as Rikasa, Reyna said, toward the end of the race, the leading teams inevitably converged. If they sighted each other, so much the better; it was invigorating to have a visible opponent. The teams were monitored at all times, and sabotage of any kind resulted in automatic disqualification. Team Ascendant would be dropped with all our gear at one of the starting points offering a relatively facile approach to the Perch seven days to the minute before the race was scheduled to begin. Ziral, who would be piloting our shuttle, would transport our formal wear and overnight bags to the Perch for us. All we had to do was get there.
Scoring of the race was hearteningly straightforward. All eight members of a given team had to cross the finish line within the designated completion window in order for that team to be eligible for victory. When they did, their finish times were averaged and the resulting averages ranked. The fastest team won. Times were measured down to the microsecond. There had never been a tie.
The night before we went soilside, Zey and I sat in the lounge studying maps of the Perch and its surrounding mountains. We were looking more for fun than for any real hope of learning anything useful. Due to differences of gravity, air oxygenation content, topography, and various other factors, there was no standardized distance for the Outmarch. We could only guess at what the Echelon course engineers might have judged a feasible yet challenging distance for their officers to cover in three days. And even had we had an exact perimeter to draw around the Perch, it was anyone’s guess at what point along it we might be dropped. After an hour of zooming in and out of stunningly detailed topographical maps, I said, “I know one thing for sure. We’re not going to win this thing. I just hope I can finish it in ten days.”
“It isn’t that simple,” Zey said. “There are the special challenges to consider.”
&
nbsp; I turned a dark look on him. “The what? We’re at twenty-seven hours and counting, and no one’s said anything about special challenges.”
He waved a hand. “Relax, they’re not mandatory. On a planet like Rikasa, where the conditions are favorable, the course engineers look for ways to spice things up. Sometimes they throw in extra challenges at random locations. They’re marked off by black and white flags.”
“Echelon colors,” I said.
He nodded. “Not all the flags are accessible. Some are deliberately put in impossible places, like in the middle of a cliff face, or hanging in midair. If you see a flag that looks retrievable, you send a team member to get it. Attached to the flag will be a token of some kind. It’s a bonus. Time deducted from your finish. But there’s no way of knowing, when you’re out on the course, how much time it buys you. It could be ten seconds, or two hours. You have to weigh the odds of earning back significant time against the potential waste if you spend three hours scaling a cliff face to gain back twenty minutes.”
“So you send the slowest person on your team to get the flag? To improve their time?”
He put his head on one side like I’d made an elementary arithmetic error, which, of course, I had. “It all averages out, remember? You can send anyone. Or no one.”
“It’s a gamble,” I said. “You guys just love games of chance, don’t you?”
Zey passed his hand over the tabletop display, which obediently went dark. “I guess. They keep things interesting.”
“And yet the arranged marriages.”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “We don’t gamble with the fuel mixture in our engines either. Some things aren’t supposed to be interesting. Listen, don’t worry too much about the extra challenges. If you see a black and white flag, tell Hathan. Ultimately it’s his call whether to try for it or not.”
Every team participating in the Outmarch was required to designate one member as the official leader. One of our earliest planning meetings had concerned the question of whom to select. Hathan’s expertise in navigation, added to his interest in the outdoors, made him a natural choice. The vote had been nearly unanimous. I, along with six other members of Team Ascendant, had voted for him. He had voted for me.
“You’re already the leader in everything but name,” he had argued. “We wouldn’t be going to Rikasa at all, let alone fielding a team in the Outmarch, if not for you. It’s your show. You should run it.”
Despite being outnumbered seven to one, he had shown no signs of yielding until I told him I’d have more fun if someone else was making the decisions. I was relieved when he conceded the point, but secretly thrilled, at the same time, that he thought me qualified to lead the team.
In late afternoon of the day following my map session with Zey, after several hours of decontamination and medical examinations on a tiny orbiting starhaven, we were finally cleared to go soilside. The Rikasan day was shorter than that of Vardesh Prime; our race window of ten standard days worked out to just over fourteen local ones. There were only a few hours of daylight remaining when Ziral set the landing craft down in the designated zone, a flat spot in a saddle between two mountaintops. While the others unloaded the gear, she and I stood together at the edge of the clearing, moved to silence for different reasons, taking in the view. All around us the mountains rose to towering heights, their exposed peaks slate gray and purple, their lower slopes carpeted in crimson forest. The silver thread of a river glinted far down in the shadow of the valley below us. I breathed in and out, sensing the incremental changes in gravity and light, and caught again the ghost of cinnamon in the air. It was at once strange and puzzlingly familiar, this new world. My second world. “Rikasa,” I whispered. Ziral heard me and smiled.
Hathan and Saresh came over to stand beside us. They had clearly made their own, more effective study of the same topographic maps Zey and I had looked at, as they had already pinpointed the location of the Perch. From their talk, I gathered that it was high on a mountain hidden from view beyond the range directly opposite our current position. I listened as they discussed possible routes, my mind half on their words and half on the warmth of sunlight on my face, an animal pleasure too long deferred. It was odd, and somehow fitting, that the ten days allotted us by the Echelon should work out to fourteen Rikasan days. To my companions, accustomed to an eight-day week, fourteen was an odd, unsatisfying number. To me it was simply two weeks, exactly the length of my planned stay on Vardesh Prime. Nothing was lost. I remembered something Dr. Okoye had said to me long ago, in a different context: I had traded one world for another.
Ziral’s flexscreen chimed. She spoke briefly into it, confirming with Outmarch headquarters that all eight of our transponders were functioning correctly. Then she wished us luck and departed. The shuttle’s liftoff was swift and eerily silent, the only mark of its passing a brief stirring of warm air. Red dust swirled around us and settled.
“Okay,” Zey said behind me, already impatient. “The clock is running. Let’s go.”
We went. The rocks around us were covered with a dense thorny undergrowth which would have been difficult to push through, but after a few minutes of scouting, Khiva identified an animal track running roughly downhill from our landing site. Ziral had assured me that the wildlife of Rikasa were notably shy, a fact I recalled with gratitude when I saw the width of the trail, which afforded us easy passage in single file. I quickly fell into the rhythm of hiking, which was no different here than in the mountains of home, apart from the need to pause every fifteen or twenty minutes to breathe from my portable oxygen inhaler. We were at high altitude, and Rikasa’s air was thin. I concentrated on taking shallow, even breaths.
The air cooled rapidly as the sun’s angle steepened, and I wasn’t the only one to pull on a warm layer when we broke for water after an hour or so. We had been hiking for just over two hours, and the light had turned diffuse and golden, when we entered the trees. I looked around in fascination. The gray trunks bent and twisted at fantastical angles beneath umbrella-like canopies of dark red leaves. The trees were spaced widely apart, and the leaf litter was soft and springy underfoot. Sprays of scarlet fern made pools of brightness around most of the trunks. The landscape wasn’t otherworldly so much as dreamlike. Forgetting Daskar’s instructions, I knelt to brush my fingers across the delicate fronds of a fern. The woody fragrance it released, reminiscent of rosemary, clung to my fingers for hours afterward.
We hiked on, following the downward slope of the hill, until Zey and Khiva returned from scouting ahead to report a stream a few minutes farther on. It was a tiny trickle of crystalline water, so narrow I could step easily across it, chattering down over a series of shallow stone ledges. The water was ice cold, I found when I dipped my hand in. “Too small to swim in,” I said in disappointment.
“It’s only the first day,” Sohra said consolingly. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Daskar had reported—her expression as dubious as it had been when I first broached the subject—that Rikasa’s lakes and rivers had been deemed safe for swimming. “Use your judgment,” she had said sternly. “Tolerable water temperatures and an absence of large aquatic predators don’t guarantee safety. Keep in mind that, should you encounter trouble, your crewmates will almost certainly attempt to save your life. And, since they don’t know how to swim, they may do so by sacrificing their own.”
Suitably humbled, I had said meekly, “I promise I’ll be careful.”
Immediately after that conversation, I had consulted Sohra and Khiva as to the appropriateness of wearing a bikini in front of our male crewmates. They had demanded that I put it on for them. After twenty minutes of giggling and speculation, they had decreed that my swimsuit, while revealing, wasn’t so far removed from Vardeshi undergarments as to be culturally offensive. When I asked, half hopefully, if a man who saw a woman undressed was required to marry her, or something along those lines, Khiva laughed and said, “We’re not that naïve.” They were as baffled as Daskar by the appeal of s
wimming as a leisure activity, but Sohra, seeing that the matter was important to me, was determined to make it happen. So was Khiva, mainly, I thought, in anticipation of the expressions on the men’s faces when I dropped my towel. I was determined not to be nervous about that part. I’d been working out diligently all year, and after all, a bikini was a legitimate expression of my culture. I would just have to avoid looking directly at Zey, who would undoubtedly find the whole thing hilarious, or Saresh, who wouldn’t.
We followed the river downstream to where it slowed and broadened a little. The banks on either side were invitingly flat. Hathan dropped back to walk with me. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s perfect,” I said. And it was, once the twilight had settled over the trees, revealing a white moon, tiny and coin-bright, rising through a filigree of dark branches. The force fields of our tents, rendered slightly opaque by no mechanism I could fathom, made a cluster of glowing amber domes along both banks of the river. My tent dome, along with Sohra’s and Khiva’s, was on one bank; the men’s were on the opposite side, a decorous distance away. Hathan had explained to me that it was standard practice during wilderness exercises to segregate male and female sleeping areas to afford both groups some privacy. There was, inevitably, some banter about river-hopping under cover of darkness. Not likely, I thought, laughing along with the others. I could daydream about what it would like to be out here alone with Hathan, but given his indifference, and the sensitivity of Vardeshi hearing, I couldn’t do much more than that.
Setting up camp took only a few minutes, and preparing dinner scarcely longer; Vardeshi camping gear included a sheaf of round silver adhesive patches which, attached to the bottom of a cooking vessel, heated its contents instantly to boiling point. When we had eaten and cleaned our dishes, I rose to refill my water bottle, looked up, and gasped. “Oh my God, you guys. Look.”
My companions turned, bemused, to follow my pointing finger. The sky above the river had darkened to a clear indigo. The stars were as brilliant as any I had ever seen, their constellations warped slightly from the shapes I’d known since childhood, but they weren’t what had drawn my attention. The white moon still hanging above the trees had been joined by a second one: a hazy gibbous orb with an unmistakable gold tint. Two moons. The feeling of incredulous gratitude I had felt earlier, when I stepped down from the shuttle ramp, rose up in me again. “Oh my God,” I repeated. “The ships were one thing. And the starhavens. But this . . .”
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