Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  Cassie stared around the giant room, awestruck a it. It was more than twice as big as the one in the little town, with a cistern that was perhaps fifty feet across and walls scrawled with swirling patterns in the lights.

  “You have blue light here,” Cassie said. “In the other ones, it was only green.”

  Charm made a little flitting motion with her hands, one that on healthy hands would have been detailed and graceful, but on her was just a flick. It indicated a twitch of amusement, from what Cassie could tell.

  “There are other, more treasured lights,” Cassie said. “Red, purple, yellow. We use them for special occasions. Only the big cities can afford blue.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Cassie said.

  “It’s one of my favorite places,” Charm said, her breath the only noise in the great space.

  “What do you do here?”

  There was the hand motion again, and Charm stepped forward, running her hands through the water.

  “What don’t we do here?” Charm answered finally. “Bindings, births, deaths, celebrations of all kinds. Our holidays are here. Everyone comes, no work on holidays, and there’s food and singing and talking until the little ones are all asleep around the room.”

  Suddenly the room felt very empty.

  “We don’t fill it any more. A year ago, we were talking about paving a new road.”

  “How do you do that?” Cassie asked. “They’re amazing.”

  “The men do it,” Charm said. “The women don’t go out much, because of the rain.”

  “Would you take me to see?” Cassie asked. That might have been a spark of rebellion in Charm’s eyes, Cassie wasn’t sure.

  “Of course.”

  Cassie ran her fingers over one of the designs as they left, and she heard Charm make an odd coughing noise.

  “I’m sorry, was I not supposed to?” Cassie asked. Charm’s hands turned out. Surprise.

  “To what?”

  “Touch.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “I just… you sounded like you didn’t approve.”

  There was a pause, then Charm made the noise again.

  “It means I’m sad.”

  Cassie gave her a soft smile.

  “Where I’m from, water runs from our eyes.”

  Charm stood looking at her for a moment.

  “I think that’s beautiful, but don’t let them see you. Many would be offended.”

  “Water isn’t quite so precious for us,” Cassie said. Charm put her shoulders back.

  “You must have amazing lives.”

  Cassie nodded, forgetting herself, then putting her shoulders back.

  “Yes. I think we do.”

  The men worked in a great field a long way away from the city. At a distance, it looked like the ground was alive, their charred flesh so resembled the ground they worked.

  “There are fields of …” Charm used a word she didn’t recognize and continued on. Cassie’s implant stalled for a moment, trying to find a word that fit, then translated the rest of her words in a rush, “mana in certain places. No one knows where; you just have to look. We have scouts who wander far and wide to find good places to dig, like this one.”

  “What is it?”

  “We mix it with ash and crushed rock to grow our plants,” Charm said. Cassie went to the edge of the pit and slid down the couple of feet of loose rock into the basin. She stumbled and caught herself on her palms, realizing too late what a bad idea that was. She wiped her hands off on her pants, watching with a normal, morbid fascination as the cuts started to seep blood.

  “You’ve injured yourself?” Charm asked, coming to stand next to her.

  “Not bad,” Cassie said. “My skin is very soft.”

  “Yes, it is. You don’t belong here,” Charm said, not unkindly. “Here.”

  Charm offered Cassie her arm, and Cassie took it, leaving her hand in air for now to try to give it a chance to scab over before it came in contact with the woman’s rough skin. They went to watch one of the men as he worked his tools, cutting away hunks of brittle rock to expose a soupy substance saturated with ash. He scooped it out and put it into an iron bucket as he worked.

  “Jash has a good vein, here,” Charm murmured. “Often they dig out the mana with their fingers.”

  “What are you doing out here?” Jash asked, looking over at them.

  “Aaron told me to take her to see what she wanted to see,” Charm said. “She asked to come here.”

  “I’ll bet she did,” Jash answered, grunting as he continued to break stone. Another man came by with a much larger bucket and picked up the debris, carting it away with a glance of disgust at Charm and Cassie. “What are you going to do if it starts raining?”

  “Does it rain often?” Cassie asked.

  “Every few days, maybe,” Charm said.

  “It rained earlier,” Cassie said. “When we were passing the first town.”

  “See?” Charm said. “It’s not going to rain.”

  “You’d wreck your pretty skin, being out in it,” Jash said.

  “Spent my whole life underground trying not to ruin my pretty skin,” Charm said, looking around the field. “Lot of good it did me.”

  “You still have very nice skin,” Jash said. There was a long moment of silence between them, and Cassie felt like stepping away, but Charm made a noise in her throat and Jash continued working. Cassie and Charm continued walking.

  “Who is he?” Cassie asked.

  “My intended,” Charm answered. Cassie stopped, looking back.

  “He’s…”

  Charm watched her with calm eyes.

  “I was to be bound to him,” she said. “And then I contracted the sickness and the oath was broken.”

  “What a jerk,” Cassie said.

  “No,” Charm said. “I don’t want to weigh him down. He should pick another.”

  “Why would you say that? Clearly he has feelings for you.”

  “I am not his responsibility.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cassie said, letting Charm draw her forward again. “I just can’t look at that and say it’s okay.”

  Charm didn’t answer her for a while, and Cassie began to worry that she had offended the woman.

  “Do you have an intended?” Charm finally asked. “The healer?”

  “No,” Cassie laughed. “No, he is as different from me as Jash is.”

  “At your home then?”

  “No,” Cassie said.

  “Are you of age?”

  “As much as I’ll ever be,” Cassie said.

  “That must make your mother sad.”

  “My mother died a long time ago,” Cassie said.

  “That is sad,” Charm said.

  “It was a long time ago,” Cassie said.

  “Why do you not have an intended? Or a mate? Do you not want one? Are you…?” The word didn’t translate, but Cassie had a guess what it was intended to mean.

  “It’s not that,” Cassie said. “I’ve just been busy with other things.”

  “How can you be so busy that the men who notice you can’t ask for your oath?”

  “By not being there at all,” Cassie said. “I’ve traveled to other planets for as much of my life as I could. I haven’t spent a lot of time around humans who could… ask for my oath.”

  “Then you are…” That word again. Cassie frowned.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Alone,” Charm said. “By choice.”

  “And is there a social stigma to it?” Cassie asked.

  “Of course,” Charm said. “They work the fields with the men. They don’t think of themselves as women, so we don’t either.”

  Cassie raised an eyebrow and Charm blinked.

  “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  She touched Cassie’s forehead, pulling her eyebrow up. Cassie raised it again, and Charm laughed.

  “It’s strange, to move just a part of your face.” />
  “You laugh,” Cassie said. Charm pulled her shoulders up and forward.

  “Not often,” she said.

  They wandered the pits a while longer, and Charm was drawn into conversation with a few of the men, but it was obvious even to Cassie’s eye that the pit was much larger than the men who were able to work it could ever need.

  “Where do you get the tools?” Cassie asked after a while. “And the metal for your doors?”

  “It comes from another pit,” Charm told her, “and we have craftsmen who forge our tools at the flow.”

  “You forge metal over active lava?” Cassie asked.

  “Where else?”

  “In a…” she didn’t have the word. “In a box for…” There was another gap. She struggled, looking for ways around the words she didn’t know. “When things get very hot, what’s the word for what happens?”

  “They melt,” Charm said.

  “No,” Cassie said, putting the heels of her hands together and flicking her fingers out from her palms. “Foom. Like that.”

  “It burns?” Charm asked. Cassie pulled her shoulders back.

  “And what is the thing that does the burning?”

  “The heat,” Charm said. Cassie wiggled her fingers.

  “Where I come from, it’s mostly red and yellow, but you might get different colors, here.”

  “Fire?” Charm asked.

  “Fire. Why don’t you forge your tools in a box for fire?”

  Charm looked alarmed.

  “Why would we waste fire to make tools?”

  “Waste?”

  “Fire is very rare,” Charm said. “We have very few things that burn.”

  Cassie looked around and had to admit that the woman had a point. Everything had come out of the guts of a volcano. No deep deposits of organic material to just put a match to, around here.

  “Isn’t it dangerous?” she asked.

  “The fire?”

  “Working around the lava.”

  “Oh,” Charm said. “Yes. Our smiths don’t have long lives, and they don’t take the oath. They…” She hesitated, looking at the men around them. “They burn up faster than anyone else.”

  Cassie put her hand over her mouth.

  “They’re burning,” she said. “That’s why their skin…”

  “They take it on themselves, so the women don’t have to,” Charm said. “We keep the homes and ensure that there is enough food, but they live in the heat and the rain, and…” She paused again. “They die many years before the women do.”

  “That’s awful,” Cassie said.

  “It is what must be,” Charm said. “Not that it will matter for much longer.”

  “Don’t give up on Jesse,” Cassie said. “He may still come up with something.”

  Charm took a breath and turned to face her.

  “What would you like to see next?”

  They spent days wandering. Cassie saw iron mines and one day Charm took her out to where the blacksmiths stood over flowing lava and shaped tools with hammers and a single anvil that they apparently carried around as necessary to get close enough to the magma to work, but far enough away to keep from losing it in the event of a major change of flow. One of them told Charm that they would be giving up, soon. There weren’t enough of them to carry it.

  They went to see the last working mine of the mineral that they processed into the green lights. The man there said he was the last one who hadn’t fallen sick, and he was needed, maintaining the water system.

  Cassie spent an afternoon with Jesse as he was on a break eating a rare meal in the quiet.

  “Are you making any progress?” Cassie asked.

  “It’s an interaction,” Jesse said, hunching over the bowl of mush. Charm had brought a plate of vegetables as well, and had gone to find a friend and see how she was doing. Cassie felt a little bad for keeping the woman away from her friends and family as much as she had, but she sensed that Charm preferred it over the sickroom culture in the city. Jesse chewed for a moment then swallowed and looked at Cassie.

  “There’s something chemical going on,” he said. “I just don’t have the tools to do the right tests. There are bacteria involved, ones that most of them should be immune to, or at least able to manage, nothing that should turn into an epidemic like this.”

  “Maybe it’s just a super bug,” Cassie said.

  “They don’t have antibiotics to breed superbugs,” Jesse said. “And they don’t have a population density big enough to really breed a lot of strains. They should pass them back and forth from town to town, but not like this.”

  “It couldn’t be a mutation?”

  “Anything is possible,” Jesse said. “But the odds are so small.”

  “All of the planets in all of the galaxies in the universe, and you want to talk to me about statistics?”

  Jesse gave her a glum laugh, finishing his mush and picking up a tuber of some kind and pulling it apart with his hands.

  “So how are you holding up?” Cassie asked. She felt a little bad that she’d been out playing with Charm while he’d been back here working who-knows what kind of hours, but he hadn’t seemed to mind. Once he’d told her that not having to worry about where she was kept him focused, but that felt patronizing.

  He rubbed his face.

  “I’m tired, I won’t lie,” he said. She swallowed, pushing her bowl away and looking at him for a long time.

  “How far do you take it?” she asked, glad they could speak in English.

  “If I can save the species, I will,” he said. “They’re good people, and they deserve a shot.”

  “We would say that the right thing to do would be to let nature take its course,” Cassie said, evaluating for a moment whether she regretted saying it or not, then standing behind it. It was what they would say, whether or not she believed it personally.

  “How’s your friend?” Jesse asked.

  Cassie frowned, thinking of the previous day when they’d gotten caught out in the rain. Charm had known how to find a little pit in the ground she said the workers dug to keep themselves out of the worst rain. The little storm they were out in wasn’t so bad that the men would have even paused from work, but apparently there were violent storms some seasons that drove the men into these tiny shelters. Just big enough for three or four people to sit huddled around a pool of water in the middle of the cave as it filtered into the lava rock, the cave was dim and surprisingly cold. Charm had sat with her arms wrapped around her, easing her hands up and down in an attempt to be subtle, but her skin was simply too rough. Cassie had asked her how she felt, and Charm had refused to answer.

  “She’s getting worse,” Cassie said. Jesse nodded.

  “She’s held up well, from what I can tell, but since she won’t let me look at her, it’s hard to say if it’s just bravado. She’s not the kind to go quietly, that one.”

  Cassie felt sick.

  “I know you’re doing everything you can,” she said. Jesse’s eyes were unforgiving as he watched her.

  “There are other things we could do,” he said. “You know that.”

  She looked away. It had occurred to her.

  “We’re letting them die,” she said. He nodded.

  “Three more today.”

  Cassie cringed. She was aware of breeding theory, the minimum number of individuals necessary to perpetuate a species, and the minimum number necessary to maintain a population that can expand. Thirty to fifty to keep a tiny little colony of them, prone to birth defects and mutations. Three hundred to give them a chance of filling out their old cities again. Three or four a day was more than they could afford. A pregnant woman had died the day before. They tried to keep it away from Cassie - it wasn’t her place to be a part of the gossip, and they understandably didn’t want her around for their grief, but she couldn’t help but hear the grim summaries out of the sickrooms.

  “Why don’t we do more?” she asked.

  “Do you want to? Would you off
er sanctuary on Earth, and access to your labs?”

  “I can’t,” she said. He nodded.

  “I have a few places I could take them, but you can’t rescue every species with modern technology. Some of them do have to die. This is the middle path I’ve chosen.”

  He finished his tuber and wiped his hands against each other.

  “I would invite you to come and see, but they’re proud. They don’t need spectators. Tell me if anything changes with Charm. I may have something to try to slow down the course of the disease.”

  “Promising?” Cassie asked. Jesse blinked, and suddenly she could see the weariness he concealed just below the surface.

  “Not enough data,” he said. She took his hand and squeezed it.

  “Get some sleep tonight,” she said.

  “I’ll sleep when it’s done,” he said. She shook her head.

  “Even you will start functioning below capability with little enough sleep. I’m going out with Charm and when I get back, I’m going to come get you. You need to sleep.”

  “I thought I was commanding officer on this side,” he said, standing. He rubbed his face then nodded. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Cassie cleaned up the bowls and picked up a root plant and chewed on it as she went looking for Charm.

  The maze of halls was still confusing to her, and she ended up in a large room with a low ceiling and a number of beds built up out of the floor. It smelled abandoned, but she found little trinkets on the floor next to several of the beds. A lock of hair, some small iron bits that might have been toys, a shriveled plant.

  “It’s for children,” Charm said from the door. Cassie turned. “They said you were looking for me.”

  “They stayed here?” Cassie asked. Charm followed her into the room, sitting down on one of the beds.

  “All of us stayed here, for a little while,” she said. “All of us of a certain age within walking distance would come here for a few weeks after the storms passed. We learned…” she hesitated, then made a dismissive motion with her chin. “We learned the stories. The girls braided each other’s hair, and you weren’t supposed to dye your hair until after you’d been here.”

  “It’s a recognition of coming-of-age,” Cassie said.