Prime- The Summons

by Maeve Sleibhin

  “But how is she?” Joaquim repeated intensely.

  “She is…” Marco said slowly, groping for the words, “fifty two. Beautiful. Good. Absent-minded,” he added after a moment.

  “Does she still… does she hate me?” The last came out in an oddly plaintive tone of voice.

  Marco laughed. “I had forgotten what you were like,” he said, his face bright with amusement. “No,” he said gently, before Joaquim had the opportunity to speak. “She never hated you. I hated you, Hanuman hated you, everyone who loved her hated you. But Mika was always persuaded it was some sort of mistake. She never thought you were to blame. I even heard her once say she would not have done it any other way. We always thought her too forgiving—Mika would forgive the man who killed her. But as it turns out…” Marco stopped for a moment, his features filled with something very like pride. “She was right,” he said finally. “In the end, she was right.”

  Relief etched into Joaquim’s features. “And… the girl?”

  “Joaana?” Marco asked, cocking a pensive eyebrow. “Now that,” he said finally, “is an entirely different issue.”

  Joaquim’s face fell. “She hates me.” It was not a question.

  Marco shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. Joaana is not like anyone I know. When she was younger, perhaps. But she has something of her mother’s ability to forgive.”

  “That certainly did not come from me,” Joaquim murmured.

  Marco darted him a blank look and continued. “By not acknowledging her,” he said thoughtfully, “Ricardo has no power over her. Ricardo has some degree of power over every T’lasian except her, and it is a sore that never ceases bleeding for him. Everyone knows who she is,” Marco explained. “Everyone knows that by all rights she should have the markings on her cheeks and wear Prama’s colors. And yet she does not, and it seems to do her no harm. She runs a brisk trade in ancient Solaar artifacts. She is something of an expert in the lost ships. And she works with a little blind man who could be kin to her,” he finished, pointing at Xai.

  Joaquim abruptly remembered Xai. Turning, he put a possessive arm around her shoulders. Xai wanted both to step closer and to pull away. So she stayed where she was, caught between contrary impulses.

  “This is Xai,” Joaquim said. “She saved my life, risking her own.”

  Marco glanced down at Xai. She looked into his dark, judging eyes. “Enough so as to make her eligible?” he asked thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” Joaquim replied, his tone clear and strong. “I plan to adopt her.”

  Marco looked away from Xai and up at Joaquim, clearly shocked. “You cannot do that without the approval of the Clan leader.”

  Joaquim looked back at Marco, his jaw firming with his resolve. “I plan to challenge for leadership of the Clan.”

  Marco began shaking his head, a grizzled, aging man with worry on his features. “Joaquim, you do not know what is happening now, the—”

  Joaquim took a step forward, his eyes blazing suddenly with fury. “He knew my intentions,” he snarled. “He knew, Marco, he knew and he did nothing. He left the woman I love to live for thirty-five years without any assistance. He let my daughter grow up without the protection of Prama’s name. He cut off my credit line and he left me there, in stasis, to die. To die, Marco. What sort of a Clan leader is that?”

  Marco took a deep breath and ran his hand over his face, obviously worried. “This does not bode well.”

  Joaquim nodded seriously. “No. And Kumar or Salazar must second for the challenge to hold.”

  Marco shook his head. “Matme is Ricardo’s man.”

  “And Hanu?” Joaquim asked.

  Marco shook his head again, his features tight with anxiety. “He has no love for Ricardo,” he said reluctantly.

  Joaquim looked at the older man. “You know I am right.”

  Marco let out a long, unhappy breath. “You do not know what this might do to us,” he said finally. “It could rip us apart at the seams like an old coat. There are too many contrary impulses in us now, and we do not know where we are going.”

  Joaquim’s jaw set stubbornly. “I am only a man seeking justice for his daughter.”

  “For both his daughters,” Marco pointed out, nodding at Xai.

  Joaquim grinned, taking the comment as tacit approval of his intentions. “What was it that Amit Salazar once said,” he asked. “If you want the shortest path to wisdom, have a daughter? Well,” he said, smiling with Marco’s sudden smile, “I have wasted enough time already, no?”

  Chapter Forty

  THEY paused before a doorway. “You will enter here,” Marco told Xai, “and wait.” Xai darted Joaquim a worried glance. For some reason she had not thought they would be separated.

  Joaquim patted Xai on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. This is our way. Each T’lasian stands alone before Records. They will interview me, and then it will be your turn. Be patient.”

  Xai took a breath, nodded, and entered the room, letting the door shut soundlessly behind her.

  The room was a perfect cube, four meters square. Each wall was covered with a thin filament floating perhaps two centimeters off the surface. Looking down, Xai realized that the same filament was on the floor, and presumably the ceiling. Xai couldn’t understand how it bore her weight, but somehow it did. The filament was translucent, showing the walls, the floor and the ceiling, all seamed with tiny, multicolored strands. There were neither tables nor chairs, nothing other than the unadorned, complex fabric of the walls.

  The door opened and Marco stepped through. He seemed preoccupied. “Where’s Joaquim?” Xai asked.

  “Being scanned,” Marco replied. He examined Xai for a moment, his dark eyes serious. “That leaves us,” he said, finally, “with you.”

  Xai folded her hands together before her and tried to appear calm.

  “Do you wish to be adopted by Joaquim?” Marco asked.

  “Yes,” Xai said. It was the blunt, unalloyed truth.

  Marco nodded slowly. “You realize that by challenging Ricardo for leadership of the Clan Joaquim runs risks that go from being permanently banished to death?”

  Xai blanched. She hadn’t realized the stakes were so high.

  “I thought as much,” Marco said, noting the change in her facial expression. “And yet, still, you wish to be adopted?”

  Xai shrugged. “How could I not?”

  Marco raised his hands. “Have you no people of your own? No one to claim you, to regret your passing? No one to sing a departure on your death?”

  Xai thought of the Oracle, of the summons she had been given. Soon enough she would have to return to that world. Soon enough. But for now she would take the gift Joaquim had offered her and accept it as the honor it was. “To others I am a symbol,” she said finally. “Joaquim is the only person who would mourn for me.”

  “Any yet you realize you will never truly belong with us?” Marco asked. “You look like a Rydian. Those most likely to support Joaquim against Ricardo hate Rydians with a passion. The mere sight of your face will cause them to doubt when he most needs their backing.”

  Xai looked around the minuscule room for a moment. She thought of her aunts and uncles, of her grandfather’s face, and realized she had no words with which to explain. “I will accept that risk,” she said finally.

  Marco grimaced, as if he had expected as much, and went to the door. “So be it,” he told her. Standing there he called, “Records.”

  “Records activated,” replied a neutral female voice.

  Marco looked at Xai, his eyes seeming very sad. “Adoption procedures, according to the submission of Joaquim Salazar Syng.” He nodded once, with something like respect, and then stepped through the door.

  “Xai Ke-i’dzei,” Records said.

  “Yes,” Xai answered, glancing nervously around the room.

  “Do you seek adoption into the Syng?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you prepared to be bound by the bindings of the Chosen,
with all the obligations therein?”

  Xai looked up at the ceiling, trying to determine where the voice was coming from. “Yes.”

  “The subject will prepare for memory scanning.”

  Xai felt a sudden, strange thrill, like an electrical current, that ran through all her extremities and up through her torso. It gripped her, finally, in the throat, a thrumming feeling, a trill of a sensation. The room around her swam dizzyingly, sparked with flashes of red, green and blue. Great swathes of colors began swirling across the walls. Xai couldn’t move. She felt sweat break out as she unsuccessfully tried to regain control over her body.

  Then, as if it was wrenched from her mind, the room projected the sight of Joaquim’s bearded face within the stasis pod. She stared at him, at the gaunt features she had come to know so well, seeing them as she had seen them the first time, smelling the sharp scent of the oxygenated air, hearing the swift pace of her own breath.

  “Commencing,” Records called.

  There was a pause. Xai watched his features, masked by the beard and thirty years of immobility. She could feel her own indecision, her worry. She could think about her own thoughts, an eerie double layering, as she tried to remember the little she knew of T’lasians. It was all going to go into the Records? she thought, with something like horror. She felt herself think of Ta’o Xiang. Then, with no prior warning, her entire past began rushing before her at a terrifying speed—emotions, smells, thoughts, sounds, sights, feelings, swirling through and around her, magnified by the walls, the floor and the ceiling. She didn’t have time to feel violated, she was too busy trying not to be swamped by the collected impressions of a life.

  The philosophers, first, Xaing Wu, Teksa—the tart scent of the oils used in the practice rooms, the sharp slap of the training guide on her wrist. Hunger. Had she really been so hungry? Crying on her bed because of the pain in her arms, her legs. How old had she been—nine? Ten? The sight of T’zein’s face. The dull snap of her wrist as her Grandfather broke it, and his eyes, flaring with violence. The death of T’maao, her nursemaid, when she was eight. Records followed that face with something almost like curiosity. The odd little games they would play. The stories she had read. Why had she read Xai Primer stories, Xai thought—why not Messinian ones? The first time she met Marcus—T’maao, Xai realized with a sudden shock—T’maao had introduced them. She could see Marcus’s young face, agleam with curiosity.

  Marcus. Their squabbles. The time she had defended him against the bullies in his classes. The sheen of the Tellorian against the backdrop of the nebula. The shrill, high sound of his cracking voice, before his death.

  Records rifled through her memories, focusing with dizzying speed on the past several months. Her bar fight. The dull feeling of her splitting lip, the fear she felt when she saw Teo’s face falter on learning the name of her father, the great heaves of her breath. The sight of those bodies being pulled into space, spinning. The shrieks and tortured groans of the space station collapsing. The accident in the dumping ground. That heady feeling of companionship, the ease of Joaquim’s voice. The sharp, sour scent of Vlad’s breath. Xai felt the sheer, sharp flush of fear and desperation, was swamped with it. And then, suddenly, an arc of pure beauty, the sight of the Salak gleaming against the stars, tinged by an unexpected sense of homecoming.

  Abruptly it was finished, and the walls went blank. Xai slumped down onto the floor, exhausted by the memories of an entire life.

  Chapter Forty-One

  THE ASSASSINS fell upon them as they were coming out of the pod on the Fifth Circle. Xai had not thought it was possible to be so tired, her mind fogged by a thousand memories she had believed completely forgotten. She had not thought of T’maao in years, that stern, elderly, unexpectedly loving woman, or the rage on her grandfather’s face, the day he heard of the Gangcat ascension, and she followed Joaquim silently out of the pod, adrift in the past.

  She felt it first, the sharp rush of sound that precedes an attack and ducked, her reflexes dulled but still active. A sharp brand shot through her upper right shoulder. Xai realized almost abstractly that she had been stabbed. She palmed her knife and crouched as she turned, thrusting up into the shape that she knew, somehow, would be there. She saw his face, then, a squat, hard man with brown eyes, widened with surprise. She pulled the knife from his gut and watched as he fell away from her, watched as the life seeped out of him along with the blood, as death crept up, feeling the bile rise in her throat at the throbbing, dull knowledge that she was taking a man’s life. He fell to a clumsy sitting position, his eyes locked with hers, watching her watch death creep up his extremities.

  Joaquim cried out, a sharp, shrill sound of pain. Xai turned to see a man drive a knife into his back as another drove one into his stomach. Xai ran as fast as she could, as if she might turn back time, the sharp blade of her knife pulling a great arc of blood from the first man’s throat. He fell to his knees, gasping for a breath he would never find, and the last man’s eyes met hers. She saw as they widened and he turned to run, to flee whatever he saw in her face. She threw the knife at his back with all the force that she could muster, slamming it between his shoulders, sending him careening forward, the great muscle of his heart pierced.

  Joaquim was on his hands and knees, blood at his waist and shoulder, seeping into his space suit. He looked up and his eyes met Xai’s. There was blood on his lips. The smell of it swarmed around her, sticky and thick.

  “Xai,” he began, his voice rough.

  “No,” Xai said angrily. “No!” She ran to the body of the last man—lying on the ground, still twitching—and pulled the knife from his back. There was blood everywhere, on her hands, on her clothes, on her face. She wiped the knife on her calf and holstered it. Then she went over and pulled Joaquim roughly to his feet. He cried out, a great, weak gasp.

  “Don’t,” Xai snarled. She was so angry she was shaking. She began to pull him down the esplanade, passing the hotel, toward the Tellorian.

  The walk took forever, foot after foot on the crowded walkways, people moving away from them in shock and horror, blood seeping from between Joaquim’s fingers, his face a tight, bloodless mask of pain. The wound in Xai’s shoulder was a searing brand. At one point Xai felt someone behind her and she turned with a snarl, ignoring Joaquim’s gasp of agony, the knife in her hands. An audible wave of fear and excitement came out of the crowd.

  It was John, the young Panjim, his hand outstretched toward her.

  “Stay away,” Xai snarled. He fell back, fear in his eyes at the sight of her face.

  The Tellorian’s hatch keyed open without a sound and Xai dragged Joaquim and herself into the narrow confines of the ship. There was blood on Joaquim’s chest, stomach and hands. His eyes had fallen shut in his pale, clammy face; he was breathing too fast. He had gone into shock. Xai didn’t know what to do, and felt the first thrill of real fear.

  “Annabel,” she said, “do you have a medical databank?”

  “Due to the grafting of an encyclopedia onto the operating system,” the Tellorian replied in a reproachful tone of voice, “both a basic medical databank and Jemima von Zorn, Prime’s medical operating system are available. The basic medical database was first created in 45, early Prime era, with—”

  “Access Jemima von Zorn,” Xai said, feeling a rush of something close to relief. Early in Prime history there had not been enough doctors for the breakaway planets. Using herself as a template, Jemima von Zorn had created a medical assistant to fill the vacancy until they had trained enough medical staff. Most doctors kept Jemima running in their medical labs—she had, among other things, a wonderfully calming bedside manner. Xai had encountered her several times while accompanying Marcus to Primer medical areas for a variety of aches and pains. She had even been loaded into his quarters to keep an eye on him when he had the mado flu.

  “Activating Jemima von Zorn, edition 37.3.4,” the Tellorian said.

  The translucent ghost of a small, plump female in
her early forties was projected in the middle of the Tellorian. She had one of the very early Prime implants, a gleaming metallic strip running from the right temple, over the ear, and all the way to the back of the skull. Her hair covered most of it, but the flesh around the implant at the temple was an obvious, rough, puckered red. Integration with human systems had been a long, painful process for Prime, and Jemima von Zorn had been at the very beginning of it.

  After a moment, the hologram activated, taking a breath and looked up. “Mm,” she said, quickly surveying the ship. She took three steps forward and loomed over Joaquim, examining his chest. “Move the cloth aside, please,” she told Xai.

  Xai leaned over and pulled the cloth back from the bloody mess at Joaquim’s chest. The lips of the wound gaped open, giving Xai a brief sight of bone and pink flesh, before being drowned in blood. Xai thought she might be sick.

  “There’s more blood at the shoulder,” Jemima said.

  “He was stabbed in the back, too,” Xai explained. She looked out through the hull of the Tellorian at the stars gleaming between the rings of the Salak, trying not to think of what she had just seen.

  Jemima nodded, her expression pensive, her holographic fingers running over the surface of his clothes. “Computer,” she said, “Project a body image of the patient.”

  The Tellorian projected a man’s shape before them, in yellow and blue. Two great slashes of red, one in the stomach area and another in the upper back, scored the diagram. A pink haze seeped out from both wounds, but far further in the stomach.

  “Mm,” Jemima said again, spinning the projection before her with deft fingers. “Let’s start with four pressure packs,” she said finally. Pressure packs were medical supplies designed for use during combat and other extreme situations. Inserted into the wound, in contact with the flesh, they coated the affected area, sealing the tears in the flesh and giving the body some assistance in healing.