Chapter Six
Undina conducted an investigation into her father’s secrets and discovered that her grandparents still lived in the city Irek-ar, about three days by open-air transport from the main cultural center of Noritek, where the shuttle Neliyan had landed. Why was it like trying to crack a yelechi egg to find out anything from him? All her work, and but the barest trickle of information leaked out; oh, she was sure her father knew a world of things he wasn’t telling her.
She also knew that when she wanted him to do something very badly, he sometimes would, especially something that was for the general enjoyment of one and all. Undina asked her father if they could leave the dining facility early to join the throngs seated on the Neliyan's observation deck in hopes of glimpsing the landing. They headed through the crowds towards the lucky find of an unattended, small window with a half-view.
In minutes, the distant blue-white planet Kayria appeared from a sea of endless dark space and grew wide before them, until it was a comforting stretch of solid substance, delicately poised in the air, until the shuttle abruptly plunged through the cloud cover into a white world of rugged grey mountains, white sand deserts, and glorious fields of deep green vegetation.
An infinite-seeming curve of blue ocean also surrounded one side of the land mass in full afternoon sunlight where the shuttle was scheduled to land. After such a long journey in space, Undina was especially glad that they had not approached when the capital was in the dark side of night. The daylight beckoned them to this place; the night would have seemed as comfortless as space.
The sunshine was almost cloyingly-sweet when they disembarked.
Most of the passengers lingered in the astroport to wait for other connecting transports, but the diplomats, representatives from Seynorynael, and goods traders on negotiation assignments for the new Federation exchange were planning to remain in Noritek. Undina stood by the small load hauler that held their few belongings as her father negotiated an open-air transport to take them across the plains and hills to Irek-ar.
Undina had a vague sense that she should have been afraid, because she didn’t know anything about where she was, and the activities of everyone around her were veiled in mystery as though in mist; their complete indifference to their own surroundings, their unknown purposes, entranced her. She had the sense that she should be afraid, examined that thought, and shrugged.
Undina had never before traveled in an open-air transport; she looked forward to it blindly, with her imaginative ability in full force, but she still wasn’t sure what the reality of it would prove to be. All of the shuttles and transports on Seynorynael had protective screening against the radiation, the inside atmospheric temperature carefully controlled; to ride in those transports was like being any old where—within a protective city dome with little to view, and almost as bad as being in a space shuttle—no, that was the worst, because it was so confining and could be scouted and mapped in a span of three days; space shuttles were definitely the worst because they were so stable that they seemed always unmoving, getting nowhere as the stars slowly crept by.
Undina stared skyward at the sun, the white-yellow sun of Kayria, so large and luminous, but just for a moment lest it damaged her eyes—she was at no moment unconscious of the scientific repercussions of her actions. The sky seemed so pale by Seynorynaelian standards, a washed-out blue, but at least she could stay here and stare at it for as long as she wanted! Oh, and it stretched on so, comforting in its all-surrounding scope.
They ventured onto the fifty-passenger air-car, a silver transport with no roof; Undina suffered a moment of impatience until it filled up, then lifted off and shot away across the northern plains with formidable speed.
The view! The wind! Undina gulped raw air greedily, felt the wind pulling her hair and casting it about in force, until she was obliged to search for something to tie it with. She could concentrate on the strange specimens of tree and shrub, flower, and stone far ahead, following them with her eyes until they were close, dead even, and then lost far behind them. The mountains shifted their faces as more rolled into view; the forests undulated, dipping left and right into the open green meadows, dotted by white and cornflower blue flowers.
Her father was explaining that they would be getting off at Nai-ra-nai in a day. From there, they would take another transport northwest over the hills to Silseinat and then another on to Irek-ar; she tried hard to listen and to stop exulting in undignified worship of the land.
"We're passing through the agricultural fields," Ettrekh pointed, and Undina looked around at the beginnings of the domed greenhouses and open fields of urbin roots far ahead, which had been part of the patchwork she had seen from the air as the shuttle Neliyan landed.
She watched the city loom closer, with its smooth-shaped, wind-resistant buildings; the shuttle abruptly turned to bypass it. Undina slouched back, as disappointed as though she had been taunted by an unkept promise. The city rolled by, too far away for details to be noted.
"My family lives just southeast of the Kal-teci-la mountains," Ettrekh commented, once the city of Noritek and the great expanse of fields was out of sight behind them.
"Really?" Undina asked, alert again. "Then we won't be very far from where the ancient capital lies on the bottom of the sea." She reached to the back of a chair in front of her for the printvolume she had been reading earlier, but it fell down under the seat, rushing away behind them.
"Is this yours?" One of the passengers behind them stood and addressed them in perfect Kayrian, an older man with a slight smile that turned up the corners of his mouth; she observed once again that this was a common expression adults presented her with; of course, she acknowledged that it made her feel special and appreciated, even if for her youthful appearance alone, a reason that held no particular value to her—she would rather adults grant her a modicum of respect than to patronize her. At the same, time, her heart was struck by a pang at the older man’s sentiment; she couldn’t doubt that this moment of human contact pleased him for some reason, that it held an odd value to him.
In one hand he held out the fallen printvolume to them, its rubbery pages still open. Undina nodded gratefully and accepted the printvolume, "Wonders of the Federation of Five Planets.” She was about to thank him for stopping it from sliding to the rear of the transport, but she was suddenly struck mute, even as her lips parted to form words—
in Seynorynaelian.
"Thank you very much," Ettrekh offered for her, and for the first time Undina noticed a slight Seynorynaelian in her father's accent. She understood Kayrian, yes—but could she sound anywhere as genuine as either of them when she spoke it? Did this strange language really belong to her?
Undina tried to forget her unhappiness and let her eye stray ahead to the horizon, where large white clouds filled the blue sky, and a dark, flat storm cloud had fused with the distant hills.
"Is it too bright for you?" Ettrekh asked, and Undina realized she was squinting. But it wasn't that she had been overwhelmed by the bright day on Kayria. She was used to the intensity of Seynorynael's star, Valeria. She had been squinting to see better, but of course the effort did no good in producing more illumination.
Her father laughed. "You'll get used to it here, Undina," he said, and settled back onto the seat.
After several hours, the transport began to near the storm cloud. Undina looked up from her printvolume at the sound of thunder, wearing a discerning expression; she processed the data her eyes received—yes, the storm was going to hit soon.
After a moment, a sudden mechanical whine startled her and she felt something behind the transport move—in the ensuing seconds, a clear dome of chordent material rose on either side of the shuttle and from the rear, coming together to protect the passengers from the threat of a rainstorm.
She realized that she was disappointed with a sense of wonder. Could it be—could it be that she had wanted
to feel the rain?
She already knew she enjoyed the sound—perhaps because of the lulling effect it had on the senses of the many races of human being. At the same time, she was also aware that she felt an instinctual fear of environmental forces rising in her, a fear she rationalized had been ingrained from living on Seynorynael. There, the rain was often light and pleasant, but this only lulled the population with a long period of calm—for one of those hints of distant thunder was surely to bring unending torrents of rain and lightening every year, rain with the power to level an undomed city and the power to destroy even a domed city every hundred years or so. And more often than not, the darkening skies of Seynorynael brought great blankets of snow, snow that plagued the lands outside the dome with death and famine; on Seynorynael, rain was a rarity of the warm season.
The downpour began with scattered drops making a clicking sound on the overhead covering. Undina wondered about the density of the droplets, and if the sound had a repetitive pattern that could be analyzed. The transport passed into a grey rain cloud, an encompassing mist that darkened the interior until the automatic lighting to the side of Undina's chair came on, brightening her seat with enough light to read.
The scattered symphony of raindrops intensified and coalesced into an even clattering. She stopped trying to count the gaps between the loudest groupings. She was satisfied that the downpour was not as heavy as the strong rains Undina had heard ravaged Tulor, and found that this realization was not unpleasant.
She slept easily, knowing exactly what she was going to do and content that she could achieve it. She had a purpose and a goal—she was going to conquer the mysteries of this planet and make it her own.
"You're right, father, the Kal-teci-la mountains are as beautiful as the Mirakaya near Falyndae," Undina observed, shivering as a cool zephyr from the mountains swept over them. Why did the skin pucker up so, she thought, thinking of the reason technically—yes, she knew about follicles and nerve endings, but that wasn’t what she wanted to know. Why was it that Kayrians, Seynorynaelians, and Tulorians shivered, while the Berrachai didn’t? And why was it that their bodies had developed this particular mechanism and temperature sensitivity as opposed to something else?
She put the question aside—if there was no answer to be found, what was the point in wondering right now? The third day of their journey was nearly over, and ahead they could see the city of Irek-ar and its brown and white dwellings. The sight of it captured her eager eyes and wouldn’t let go of them.
"Thirty thousand Kayrians used to live here, but it looks like it has grown some since my youth." Ettrekh said as his daughter stared in open wonder out the side of the transport. He was glad he had arranged to get the side seats for them in Silseinat. Undina was capable of expressions that entertained him to the core, he thought fondly. There had been a time, not so very long ago, when he knew he had been capable of making them himself.
"Does anyone know we're coming?" Undina asked, turning curious eyes to him at last.
"Yes. I contacted my family by holo-video before I went to look for the shuttle."
"Why did you leave, father?" Undina wondered; she watched his face study her just for a second, but it didn’t register the urgency of her question—perhaps because she always asked questions she just had to know the answers to with such urgency? But couldn’t he see how much it mattered this time? Couldn’t he reason that she had always wanted to know this secret most of all? For this was the unknown mystery upon which her very existence hinged. The impossibility of her father and mother meeting had he never left Kayria—she couldn’t even begin to contemplate the odds, the impossibility of her own life. This mystery filled her with a sense of the miraculous, and she hated that—she hated the power it had over her and needed to find a plausible, reasonable truth she could understand and accept.
Her father kept silent. There it was again—this conspiracy of silence! She hated it. Did he think she wasn’t capable of understanding his reasons if he told her? Why was it that adults always neglected to explain the most crucial, interesting things about their lives? Why, why were there so many secrets?
She decided to read her printvolume again; there, mysteries were revealed indiscriminately.
"I’ve only been gone fourteen years as far as I measure time, but on Kayria, forty three years have gone by." Ettrekh seemed to say this to himself, an hour or so later.
Undina turned to him, with a blank expression of horror.
“That’s terrible.”
“Not all things in this world are good, Undina, and every choice we make means sacrificing the alternative.” He said, and then the silence reigned again.
Ettrekh and Undina tarried in leaving the transport when it arrived in the central station; the crowd was thick, and they were in no hurry. A moment after Undina had lifted her belongings from the load carrier, a large group of Kayrians approached them.
Undina watched the effect these people had on her father. He seemed very still, but all-intent upon their visages and their words; she recognized the familiarity of his eyes and made a deduction.
The man and woman in front were her grandparents. They were strangers to her, as strange as the unknown history that linked her father so forcefully to them; yes, she could see that they had a hold over him, over his action and entire outlook of life, deeper than she would ever know.
Could it be that nature didn’t command all of a person’s development? she wondered, her eyes hardening in concentration. Could it be that something of them, something non-biological, non-genetic, had been perpetuated in her father without her even knowing it? She looked at them with a sense of jealousy for only a moment, a jealousy that they truly knew him better than her, that they knew him better than he would ever allow her to know him.
They were kind to her, spoke kindly to her, made her feel welcome, softened her heart to love them as much as she loved her father, for they revealed themselves to be something akin to him, her father whom she adored.
But she noticed that secrets surrounded them, too, secrets they kept from her with eyes incapable of understanding how much it mattered to her to know them.
It was a long time before she realized that this sharp realization was a feeling, not an observation, and that feeling was painful; sadness had found her and touched her while she was so decidedly looking the other way.
"Is this my little brother Belliadh?" She heard her father ask so easily after several moments, and she saw a middle-aged Kayrian man standing behind the elder couple, a man smiling like a boy once again, in awe of the older brother that had gone away.
"This is Undina," Ettrekh said, looking around for his daughter, who had moved to the side, lost in all of the conversations going on at once.
“Hello, I’m glad to meet everyone,” she said, putting her words together in Kayrian before she spoke.
They ignored her informality and paid kind words and attentions to her which she heard from a distance. She felt very awkward, and for all their superficial invitations and welcomes, she felt as though they wouldn’t ever really talk to her, especially the elder couple. Didn’t they know that their kindness was appreciated, but it wasn’t what she wanted? She wanted so desperately to know them.
Perhaps they would eventually see that, she thought.
She was preoccupied by the odd exchanges going on between father, mother, and son; there was an expression of pain in their eyes that they couldn’t hide, and expression of acute love and yearning, mixed with a grain of judgment and anger.
He hadn’t ever come back from the short journey he was to make, leaving so many things unresolved, so many things unclear. Undina forgot her own irritation and wished with all her might that she could smooth over the tension between them, this aching melancholy that washed through the air like an invisible vapor.
"I remember how I cried the day you left that you had not taken me w
ith you, Ettrekh.” Murilsa, Ettrekh’s sister was saying.
Undina’s mind wandered. She listened absently, until her father mentioned her mother.
"This is my wife, Ilina," Ettrekh lifted a holo-transmitter with a recorded message of greeting to her husband's family. Murilsa took the device and watched the message, then passed it along. They noted the woman, looked hard at Undina.
Someone got the idea that it was time to head back, and they moved along. Undina was glad they had stopped staring at her.
"Where’s father?" Undina asked the next morning, descending the stair to the meal unit room.
A dark cloud descended upon the room; her father was conspicuously absent.
“He went to the interment field.” Her grandmother, Duvilsa, said.
“What?” Undina said, a slow creeping cold falling on her.
“He went to visit Umi-umi and Almager.”
When her father returned, she sensed a shroud of melancholy and guilt around him; he found her eyes and smiled, a bittersweet smile she would have given her soul to understand.
"Why didn't you invite the others to come?" Undina asked the next morning as she followed her father away from the dwelling and up onto the mountain path. Her father had woken her before sunrise to go on a sudden expedition, and the yellow sun, now burnt orange, had just begun to rise over the horizon, tingeing the land with rosy beams.
"I wanted you to see the mountains first with me. I used to go off on my own and climb to the peaks over there—we won't go that far, and the foothills here aren't very steep, but I wanted it to be quiet so you could enjoy your first glimpse of the mountains and the view of the valleys from the summit."
Why did this excursion seem so important to him? she wondered. He had prepared for it with a religious air, an air that suggested he knew every small detail involved in the ritual. And he was inviting her to learn it now.
Still, he never verbally explained anything. No one seemed capable of explaining anything to her. Perhaps they thought she would understand from the scanty clues she stumbled across? But she couldn’t! She wanted to hold on to her frustration at the silence, but even though she didn’t understand the ritual, she was nevertheless struck by the power of this ritual in governing her father, her intractable, brilliant father. She had just learned that he was as much affected by the power of tradition as anyone.
And though she wanted to feel angry at the fact that she had been neglected in an explanation, she felt humble that her father wanted to share this tradition with her more than anyone, even those he had known for so long, his family.
At the same time, she wondered—why was there a veil of mystery and silence around everything?
Undina only nodded, and the two of them set off. They spoke little, and gradually the chirps of early morning birds were swallowed by the rushing wind. They climbed their way to the top and over several foothills before they came to the closest mountain, moving until the sun was directly in the sky overhead. Undina stopped on the mountain side, leaning into the mountain with her feet balanced on two flat rocks that poked up through the short green vegetation and took out her water bag.
They stopped by a stream and spent an hour fishing for piarlk.
After the long walk, Undina surveyed the growing pile with interest.
“It’s good to be hungry,” she said, with enthusiasm. Her father agreed. They packed up the fish and set to hike a little farther.
"Just a few more steps and we'll reach a ledge where we can stop and eat," her father called from above. "We'll head back after we climb to the top of this mountain."
Undina followed him up to the ledge and sat down under the shade of a small Ku-mie tree, relieved to rest her aching feet. Her father pulled out the assortment of foods he had packed in his sack, then cleaned and spit the piarlk fish, and started a fire. The fish was wonderfully hot; there were neri cakes and various Kayrian fruits that had always been a rare luxury on Seynorynael to follow it, stacks of taigh filled with jer-ba paste.
After the meal, Undina stood to look over the mountain side at the city in the valley far below. The white mountains covered in short, dark green vegetation and bright purple and white flowers gave way to bright sand plains and dark green fields far beyond the city. Closer to them was the small cluster of buildings arranged around the transport highways, now hairline thin.
In between the city and the mountain were the small valleys of the foothills, the clear blue tarns and scattered Ku-mie trees that protected the Kayrian creatures. As her eyes wandered over the lake far below on their left, Undina was sure she caught a glimpse of a tirani run from the water's edge back to its burrow in the underbrush of a copse of Ku-mie.
"It's breathtaking," Undina said, shielding her eyes from the glinting sun that had reappeared from behind a large white cloud. "But it doesn't look as though very many people ever come up here," she added. She loved it, but at the same time she thought the land seemed forlorn.
Ettrekh joined her on the ledge, offering her a draught of cool water.
"Perhaps not in recent years. You’re probably right—or the tirani wouldn’t have returned," Ettrekh said. Undina looked at him a moment before returning to the view and sighed appreciatively.
"I'd like to stay here forever—"
“I said the same, once.”
Undina turned to him, but his eyes were a mystery.
"Come on." Ettrekh smiled. "Let's see if we can reach the peaks before we have to return home. But if you want to see them, we'll have to go on now. We shouldn't chance being caught outside after sunset."
"Is it dangerous?" Undina asked, apparently delighted by the possibility.
Ettrekh suppressed a laugh. "Only in a manner of speaking. The land is safe enough for humanoids, but Mweilade wants the family together for the evening meal."
Was this, her father, obeying orders not his own?
Wonders never ceased.
Undina helped prepare a dish her mother had taught her to make, a spicy urbin root stew with duga and horeca, two popular Kayrian vegetables. As she watched her grandmother and cousins come over to scrutinize her work curiously, she smiled; in spite of herself, she really liked her cousins. They were vibrant and funny, and creator above, there were so many of them! Had she ever spent time in play? She couldn’t seem to remember.
On their way back from the mountains, her father had taken her through the town to collect his brother, sister, and their families from their work stations at the distribution center, medical station, and young Ettrekh II from the local training center. He had contacted them on his holo-communicator as they neared the city and made plans to return to the dwelling together.
Most of the city's inhabitants were out and about collecting fresh produce after work hours in the city market, and as they wove their way through the crowds, Undina was again struck by how strange it was to see mostly Kayrians around her. Only one Seynorynaelian and a few Tulorians appeared here and there among the throngs of people looking for their provisions. There were more automated robotic units than aliens, she noticed.
Undina had lived on Seynorynael her entire life, and she had grown used to seeing Seynorynaelians so much that their faces were normal to her. On Seynorynael, Undina had often forgot that she was a Kayrian when playing with her friends. Even on the ship Neliyan, there had been more Seynorynaelian children than other children from the Federation's five planets.
But it was on Neliyan that she had begun to realize how the Seynorynaelians saw her, away from the open-minded part Kayrian population of Falyndae.
As a Kayrian humanoid she was different from them, but some of the Seynorynaelians on Neliyan had treated her as sub-human, looking at her like she was disgusting or avoiding looking in her eyes at all. She hadn't told her father how her classmates had teased her desire to become an explorer and see all of the mountains in the Federation, the Emerald Se
a on Tulor, and the violet interstellar nebulae visible from Berrachai.
Some of the boys who had never been around Kayrians before had grabbed her hair to see what it felt like. They had wondered how Seynorynaelian Kayrians could speak their language without the three voice-boxes and then insulted her speech. Only a few of her fellow students had defended her.
She couldn’t remember having such a marvelous, unfettered time in all her life; it seemed Mweilade’s house was the focal point of the entire planet, and it symbolized everything that was good about the world. She drank the air like happiness distilled, unafraid of it clouding her thoughts.
Undina carried her contribution to the table, but a stray finger made her dart aside.
"Get your hands away from that, Nolandner," she threw him a look of reproach, but her cousin only shrugged.
"I wouldn't do anything, Undina, now would I?" he laughed and gave her a wink.
"You will begin to take Undina with you to training soon I hope, Nerai," his father Belliadh reminded the boy as the two of them approached the table. "No doubt her father will keep her out of training for a while, but I expect she must continue her studies as well."
“Of course,” Nerai said.
The Comet Riders: Book Five of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 12