The Comet Riders: Book Five of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

  Chapter Ten

  Jerekkil decided to take a transport just south of the bucolic dwelling where he and Undina had made a home and walked on foot the rest of the way; as in time long gone by, he picked his way through the wide, rough pathways of upturned roots and stones, shaded under the high, vaulted arch of the canopy of lyra branches. As he turned into the path before the dwelling, a young boy sitting under a tree looked up at him with a startled expression.

  The boy's hair was slightly darker than usual, with a bright glint but soft as bird feathers, his deep blue eyes almost violet, and slightly almond-shaped. The boy appeared less of a mixed race child than most, his Seynorynaelian heritage physically dominant in his pale gray skin.

  Jerekkil felt his heart constricting in his chest. Creator above—a child like that could only be his and Undina’s.

  The little boy jumped up, then cast a suspicious glance towards Jerekkil.

  "Mother, there’s a strange man!" the little boy called, standing, and tore back to the dwelling.

  Jerekkil guessed that he was midway between his birth year and the end of childhood, born shortly after Jerekkil and the other explorers left for the region of space around Tulor where a small planetary colony was being created on a moon of the Tulorian system's fifth planet. "There's a strange man, outside, mother. Come quickly!"

  Undina hurried from the house, and stopped just outside the door, her eyes frozen with disbelief, then relief.

  She looked at Jerekkil, her unchanged husband, now younger than she was.

  Jerekkil’s eyes were pained for a moment; he waited, not knowing what she thought—

  Then he looked further.

  He headed towards her with a faint smile, a smile that was glad to be home, and glad that she held no ill will over his long absence.

  The boy stood by, confused, as Undina embraced the stranger. After a moment, she turned to let Jerekkil take a look at the boy.

  "Jerekkil,” she said, pleased that Jerekkil’s face was aglow in wonderment as he beheld his unknown son. “This is your son, Fynals.”

  The boy turned a suspicious glance at the stranger; after a moment, his eyes showed bewilderment, then, gradually, dawning comprehension. Then, as the child made a connection which the suspicion clouding his eyes had kept him from acknowledging—Fynals remembered the holo-picture in the living area, the picture of his father.

  Fynals’ strong-set, clenched jaw tried to hold back the tears.

  He failed, and rushed into his fathers outspread arms.

  “My boy,” Jerekkil said, holding him close. As Jerekkil held the child, he felt a primal bond with him, an instant, unconditional love for him. And after a moment, he sensed that there was something else which bound them, which would help to fill in the empty years he had missed of Fynals’ life.

  Fynals Hinev was also a proto-telepath.

  Fynals Hinev had been to Firien City to visit his Kayrian relatives enough times as a boy to know that the settlement in northern Firien where he lived was considered the backwater of society and the ends of Seynorynael.

  Fynals Hinev didn’t much care about that. Public opinion didn’t concern him/ Hinev had long ago decided that most people didn’t know about anything and could hardly feel half of what they said and so their judgments were worthless to him. He wasn’t trying to be critical, just accept what he thought was true. And he wouldn’t admit that he cared about what they thought.

  He was a half-race child in a world that considered such children an abomination, a world that did all it could to discourage such interracial children. And he had been born with an uncanny ability to feel emotions and sense thoughts; he knew exactly what they were all thinking of him, all the people he met that feigned tolerance and secretly despised him.

  He could see their hate for him.

  What was it like to be Kayrian, all Kayrian? he frequently wondered. Or to be all Seynorynaelian?—to feel this sense of belonging that everyone around him felt, without seeing the world he lived in through an outsider’s lens? What was it like to truly belong to one thing, to be secure in your identity? Fynals wondered. To know what place you had in the world, and to feel whole and happy?

  I am Fynals Hinev, he told himself, but who is that? What am I, but a half-race man?

  He was also a proto-telepath, and he knew what people thought of him, how little they esteemed his worth.

  Was it any wonder that for so many years he was content in Firien, where he sensed the essence of all that had lived and died there and a venerability of the eternal elements? God and the wild animals in Firien did not judge him.

  Fynals Hinev, like his father Jerekkil, had haunted the forests of Firien as a boy. He had a wild streak in his heart. His thin, sinewy, dexterous hands had been fashioned to climb trees and scramble over high, marshy banks; his movements, swift like a shadow, seldom disturbed the life of the forest which the young child observed with eyes keen and mindful.

  Hinev played games in the turbid waters of low standing pools after the rains, and slept on the soft ferny, mossy undergrowth in a grove near a running, stony brook; he swam through Lake Firien, finding scleropods on the bottom of the sea, whenever Undina wasn’t looking to tell him to come back to the shore. Hinev’s bare feet were always dirty, plastered with sand, muddy, or wet.

  Fynals Hinev was fascinated by the waves, the powerful and changing tides, the changing positions of the ethereal orb Nanshe and the fiery Ishkur that hung so tantalizingly close in the sparkling tapestry of the violet-blue heavens. He thought about the lyra, the fine-threaded veins of its leaves, and examined them next to the back of his own hand. He studied the land like his own body, came to know its every aspect and function, and loved it as himself.

  Hinev romped through the snows that dominated three of the four seasons. He sometimes held his breath in the haunting silence of the edge of the forest at dawn, when the sun Valeria filtered through the skeletons of the sher-inn and sedwi trees onto the unchanging lyra. The silver-gold leaves, blanketed in snow and ice, seemed exquisitely fashioned all of ice; they sparkled rainbow colors in the shaded light under the canopy, while the bare limbs of the sher-inn trees glistened pale and thin in the direct light of the sun. Hinev’s boots sank through the snows; he tore through high drifts in glorious delight and collapsed in triumph onto the banks until the cold chilled and dampened his hair through; his mother claimed it was a miracle he hadn’t died of hypothermia.

  In the heart of the coldest season, Hinev watched from the window, yearning to go out into the land, even as the temperature north of the weather-safe ring dropped to a lethal cold. His lips cracked in the cold, his hands chapped, his nostrils froze inside; returning to the warmth, his fingers pricked with pain as his nerves came back to life and the blood surged back into his extremities.

  There were days when the energy shipments never arrived, and the people of Firien were obliged to ration what they had and try to aid those in dire need; in desperation, Hinev and his mother often gathered the dead sher-inn branches and made bonfires like the primitives that once inhabited the land, aeons ago.

  Hinev came to adore the smell of the ripening sher-inn wafting on the breeze as the warm season approached, the smell of the last days of the warm season, when the bite of the coming cold stung the air and stung his nose; he knew the scents of nature, the individual scents of each animal, of the trees and shrubs and plants; he knew the land with such intimacy, and the land knew him, as if both of them had been fashioned for each other.

  Fynals Hinev was a child of nature, but his fascination for the science that invisibly governed the wild led him through the gateways into the world of science and discovery; there, he found his mother to be his guide, his leader, his source of wisdom. And as much as he loved the land, it was to his mother and their dwelling that he returned at the end of the day.

  Hinev adored his mother. Most of the women he met on the s
treet on visits to the provisions center, by chance, or on trips to Firien City, even who would be kind to a young boy born of two worlds, were foolish and prattling—though he was not trying to be mean in thinking this of them—but they were not at all like his mother, Undina.

  Undina was almost always silent.

  Hinev and his mother shared a special bond. In the early days, it was she who had introduced him to the land and made him aware of it; it was Undina who had taken Fynals by the pathways and taught him their secrets, immersed him in the waters under the bright sun and taught him to swim, she who had taken him rock-climbing, hiking up to their favorite spot on the weather-beaten top of the neighboring hills to the east, where the vaporous mists drifted low across the distant peaks, and fishing in the small mountain rivers and in Lake Firien itself.

  And then Undina had stopped. She retreated into the dwelling as he grew older and bold; she armed him with wisdom but gave him his freedom. He had then gone out all on his own.

  Hinev returned to Undina for answers, answers she never kept from him when he asked for help or knowledge; she told him all she knew, shared all the secrets of her heart and mind; Hinev was sensitive to the power of her mind, and he knew, knew with his empathic soul, that he had been cast of the same mold, and of the same mind as her. But there was something more, something from his father—the very talent he had to sense the feelings of others, though he did not know it.

  Hinev adored his mother, for she was the central figure of his life. And though he was lonely without her, he was happy to be alone.

  Hinev worried about his mother, though, because she was alone. As years passed, he came to know that she had no peace of mind, because she loved and resented her husband, the father Fynals had never known, and so Fynals had little peace of mind. He felt as though he had to be there for Undina—he felt he had to be strong and responsible and no problem to her; he felt he should be there to love her, take care of her, to fix things if anything went wrong. To be the solid rock she could lean on that his father should have been.

  Fynals only thought of Jerekkil as an illusion. He listened in rapture to stories of his father’s exploration mission, stories from his grandmother Malina about her son Jerekkil as a youth; Fynals had long since made his father into a hero, a phantom hero, and often this heroic image did much to draw him from the depths of his racial shame, to raise his heart, and restore his pride. His father was an explorer, even if Fynals was a poor half-race child from Firien.

  Now, Fynals sat in awe of a figure seemingly come to life from a holo-frame.

  Jerekkil Hinev was here, in the flesh!

  "You named him 'dreamer'," Jerekkil laughed, taking a seat in the food preparation room. He knew Undina was anxious to hear about his mission, a trip that had taken only a few months on the new advanced explorer starship. But Undina had not seen him in many years. Jerekkil felt the awkward silence in the room as Fynals gazed at him curiously.

  It’s so good to be here again, he thought, looking at Undina. As though she had read the expression in Jerekkil’s eyes, Undina laughed and smiled at him. Watching his mother's reaction closely, young Fynals sat down next to Jerekkil and began to inspect his black explorer's uniform.

  "Fynals was born during a snow storm in the height of the cold season the year after you left," Undina said. "Malina tried to get me to the medical center, but the transport couldn't get through, so Fynals was born here. Does Malina know you're home yet?" Undina asked, suddenly changing the subject, and Jerekkil noticed young Fynals' eyes light up with excitement at the possibility that Malina would be visiting.

  "No. The transport arrived in Ariyalsynai, but I took an express shuttle directly to Firien City. How has my mother been since I left?" Jerekkil hesitated.

  "She’s doing well. She comes to visit quite often. She spends a lot of time with Fynals, telling him stories and taking him into the city to visit the learning center. My mother was jealous until she got to keep Fynals for a couple of tendays. She had the entire family come over from Kilkor to see him. I hadn't seen my great uncle since before I went to Kayria—he tried to convince me that Fynals looks Kayrian—can you believe that?"

  "Is he related to Gilwsa?" Jerekkil laughed, sharing a joke Fynals didn't understand, but it seemed their laughter was strained.

  Fynals listened to his father's stories of outfitting the new colony and exploring the outer planets to set up supply routes, fascinated by his father's descriptions of the great violet colored nebulae, the asteroid fields between Tulor and its colony Pior, and the giant outer planets of the Tulorian system. Fynals wanted to hear about the explorer's starship and about the other explorers, but most of all, he wanted to know about the specimens that the ship had collected on their brief stop on Tulor.

  Undina was relieved. Undina's concern that Fynals would not accept his father had vanished by the second day of his return. Jerekkil had suggested that they go swimming together during the morning meal, and the two of them set off together for the water's edge. After they had tired of swimming, Fynals was delighted to discover that his father could skip stones across the water, but Jerekkil knew he had much more to teach him, and now he was home for good.

  That evening, Fynals went outside after star's rise.

  He was too young to really understand the importance of the reunion, that his mother and father were still catching up, and Undina had been explaining all that had happened during Jerekkil's absence. Fynals understood the necessity of reunions, but it didn’t have the impact on his young mind that it would had he been older.

  Fynals Hinev could have been jealous of his father’s place in his mother’s heart, but he wasn’t; Fynals wasn’t jealous because he was aware of his father’s right to Undina first, and if he had harbored a slight injury at being replaced by his father in her affections, he also wanted to be beloved by this hero, this man he knew and sensed so clearly.

  Fynals Hinev was like his mother in mind and in many ways, but he and his father shared the bond of proto-telepathy; while Fynals knew his mother, she did not know him as well, and that had wrenched his heart with frustration that he couldn’t always make her see what he knew, felt, and understood, except in subdued words. He was frustrated when she said she just couldn’t ever be like him, a proto-telepath. However, Hinev understood his father Jerekkil instinctively, and he knew that Jerekkil could understand him the same way. Thus their bond was a deep bond of understanding, uninfluenced by time.

  "Is it true that the council is planning a long exploration mission?" His father was sure to know, and Fynals was curious. There had been rumors everywhere when Malina started to take him to the learning center.

  "Yes—but they haven't completed the starship. I don't think the mission will be launched for several years." Fynals only nodded, and Jerekkil turned again to hear about his parents’ trip to Ariyalsynai with Fynals and Undina.

  Later that night, Fynals Hinev sat under his favorite lyra tree, gazing up at the starry sky, and then he made a decision.

  "I'm going to visit the Federation planets someday," he told the kelacs that made soft humming sounds in the night. "I'm going to follow my mother and father's journeys to the stars. But I'm going to be an explorer on that mission. I'm going to go further than any Seynorynaelian ever dreamed." He sat and thought a moment about his mother whom he adored. "But if I leave, who will be here when I return?" Fynals wondered, growing distressed.

  He didn’t want to come back here, back to his home, if his mother weren’t going to be there waiting for him. At the same time, the idea of following his father out to the stars wouldn’t clear from his thoughts.

 

  "I don't want Fynals to go away for training," Fynals overheard his father saying as he returned to the house.

  "But he's already six years old—nine by Kayrian years, and I don’t want him to suffer the way I did—”

  "But you and I can teach him her
e," Jerekkil insisted. "I can teach him what I learned in explorer training, so he won't waste his time with the beginning training years. If I know you, my dear, you've already been giving him a solid foundation for his learning, and this way—I'll have more time to spend with him. I've already missed so much of his childhood," Jerekkil said with a regretful sigh.

  Fynals banged the door loudly as though he had just come in to the dwelling.

  "Ah, Fynals, you're back," Jerekkil smiled at him. Then unexpectedly, Fynals ran to his father and hugged him tightly, as though the gesture alone could keep Jerekkil home forever.

  Fynals wasn’t satisfied with a few stories; he wanted to hear everything about Jerekkil’s training days in Ariyalsynai, everything about his trip to Gildbatur down to the finest detail. But Jerekkil spoke as though he had all the time in the world to tell the boy; didn’t his father know that Fynals was impatient to know it all now?

  Jerekkil laughed at him, looking into Fynals’ anguished face with a keen eye, and decided to spend an evening of story-telling; his own memories cast him back to the days when he sat coiled upon Allia’s lap, hanging upon her words.

  After a while, though, Jerekkil’s enthusiasm dulled to a sensitive candor; Fynals listened, but he seemed to have sensed more than he wanted to know.

  “You talk about exploration as though there is something to be lost, not gained,” Fynals said slowly, constructing a sentence without much forethought.

  Jerekkil nodded. “I do. Alone in space, it’s the fears that surround you, not the excitement. Fears of suffocation, of the great unending unknown... fears of life,” he added, with an odd laugh.

  “I don’t want to think about those things.” Fynals protested.

  Jerekkil stared at him so intensely that Fynals found he couldn’t look away. The expression in his eyes seemed to be looking completely past him, as though he were trying to burn a hole into his son’s memory, as though he already knew to what ruin the boy’s naive enthusiasm might lead.

  “Remember, Fynals—remember what I’m telling you.” Jerekkil said very quietly. “For these are the hardships an explorer must endure.”

  "Now, Fynals—show me what factors are essential to the enzymes that are necessary for muscle contraction—I want to see a diagram of the energy cycles and their roles in the muscle tissues," Jerekkil said, and went away to get them something hot to drink.

  The sun was rising through the silica window that morning, halfway through the third cold season since Jerekkil's return.

  “Looks like it's going to be warmer today,” Jerekkil said.

  “What did you say?” Undina asked.

  “It’s warming up today. Maybe we can go outside for a while. Or go fishing.” Jerekkil said, coming back. “Fynals has been working so hard since the cold weather began, but I think there’s more for him to learn about—”

  “Oh, no, don’t criticize me.” Undina laughed. “I’m not the one who’s been gone so long.”

  “But Undina, you never taught the kid how to have fun!” He said, grabbing her by the arm again as though she were a child, then ushered her outside.

  “Wait—” she screamed. “I’m not dressed.” ]

  Jerekkil’s smile was fierce, and she relented.

 

  "I was thinking about taking you and Fynals out today," Jerekkil suggested, several days later; he had begun to make these adventuresome excursions out of doors something of an unpredictable habit; frequent enough that Undina no longer grew surprised but timely enough that Jerekkil’s ideas always maintained an air of spontaneity.

  "To the learning center?"

  "No," Jerekkil shook his head playfully, enticing her to guess again.

  "Not the market again," she said tentatively.

  "No," Jerekkil smiled.

  "Then—I give up. Where?"

  "We're all going on a picnic," Jerekkil said simply.

  "You're not serious—it's freezing out there," Undina protested.

  "Then dress warmly." Jerekkil laughed. "But the weather report for today predicts a rise above freezing. It may get cold again tomorrow, so we're going to enjoy the day outside."

  "You are without a doubt absolutely unpredictable."

  “You like that.”

  “I adore that.”

  Without a word of explanation, Jerekkil took them to the shuttle station heading south. They arrived at the southern white beaches of Lake Firien, near a popular coastal town frequented by visitors from Ariyalsynai during the warm seasons. But there were only a few other people outside and about when the family arrived.

  “I’m hungry. What kind of food do we have?” Hinev asked after a while.

  “Taigh rolls.”

  Hinev winced. “Last time they were dry.” He said, but he took one anyway and ate it. It wasn’t dry this time.

  Since it was too cold to swim in the water, Fynals went away along the shore after their afternoon meal, looking for things that had been washed up on the beach. Undina and Jerekkil didn't sit very long before the blanket they had brought began to let in some of the cold, and they stood, deciding to follow young Fynals down the beach and keep an eye on him.

  "His Tulorian is getting better—but then he's had a lot of exposure to Kayrian and I think his mind better accepts new words and language because of that," Jerekkil was saying when the device on his wrist frequency receiver activated, interrupting the sonorous sound of the waves.

  Undina remembered that sound—how she remembered it!

  She felt the blood drain from her face as Jerekkil brought his wrist to his lips hesitantly and tapped the reception device.

  "Message to second-chief explorer Jerekkil Hinev: message received from the express starship Deltor from the council representative on Gildbatur. Pro-independence group instigated a small insurrection on Gildbatur. Orders for all explorers to return there to quell the protesters. Diplomacy requested in dealing with insurrectionists—orders to persuade hostiles to visit Seynorynael to remind them of benefits gained by the Federation alliance."

  "Fynals," Undina called after a moment of stunned silence. Several feet away, Fynals was prodding a dead water fowl with a short piece of driftwood, oblivious to the rest of the world. "Don't touch that!" She cried, her voice betraying an unaccustomed note of panic.

  Fynals looked up; his sensitive child’s eyes scanned the two of them, took in the vague meaning of his sensations. He swallowed back tears.

  He knew what was happening.

  His father was leaving again!

  The world was sinking beneath him.

  It only took a moment for reality to change forever.

 

  Hinev was watching a video report of the wildlife of the Kilkoran province when the holo-monitor lit up with a sudden transmission from the news center. An image of the communications tower in Ariyalsynai appeared, then the face of one of the young communications operators in the middle of the communications center.

  "Explorer starship Ishkur has exploded in Seynorynaelian airspace due to unknown causes. The ship was heading to Gildbatur to alleviate the persistent crises there. Reports from the moon bases on Nanshe report that all aboard the space cruiser have been lost."

  Fynals heard a startled intake of breath at the door to the living area and turned around. Undina stood there, her eyes wide in horror. Fynals ran to her and buried his head in her chest, feeling his own tears burning his eyes. Then he realized that he had to be her comfort, as she had always supported him.

  He looked up into her vacant expression, expecting her to weep or shout her grief.

  “Fynals, you know what this means, don’t you?” she asked a moment later. He shook his head, but he was vaguely unsettled.

  “Your father is dead.”

  He felt a slow, dawning sense of horror and panic descending on him.

  Dead...

  Hinev st
ruggled to grasp what that meant.

  The first thing that hit him was that his father wasn’t coming back.

  He tore away from the dwelling. He ran outside, collapsing under the small lyra tree, his favorite place, where he had been the day his father returned. He gazed up into the disinterested constancy of the star-filled sky and had to look away. A light wind whispered in the lyra trees around him, articulating his grief as the forest mourned with him.

  And inside the dwelling, Undina sat alone.

  Alone as she had once wanted to be, before she knew better.