Guided by Starlight

by Matt Levin

  It wasn’t the prettiest of days, with a thick layer of morning fog still settled over the city. The surrounding skyscrapers disappeared at the top. A gentle, cold mist hung in the air, like the weather wasn’t sure if it wanted to rain or not. Even if it wasn’t warm and sunny, however, Tanner found some enjoyment out of it. It was the kind of day that made you appreciate the warmth of your jacket.

  “You want coffee?” Rebecca asked as they passed an assortment of food and drink stalls on the way to the airbus terminal. “Seems like perfect coffee weather,” she said.

  “Okay,” Tanner said. He knew they should conserve funds until he found a new job, but something about the simplicity of just going out for a walk with his sister made all those concerns feel irrelevant.

  They lined up at one of the coffee stalls. He scanned the customers in front of him, and wondered how all the flabby-looking men in front of him could look at themselves in the mirror after paying too much money to inject sugar and liquid fat into their bodies.

  “Two mocha lattes, as usual?” Rebecca asked, intruding into his thoughts.

  “I’ll just have a black coffee,” Tanner said. The feeling of raw masculinity, of power, of superiority that the drink would give him would outweigh the bitterness he still hadn’t learned to appreciate.

  Rebecca scrunched her face, drawing the freckles on her cheeks closer into the bridge of her nose. “You never get black coffee.”

  He almost laughed. He liked the way Rebecca worded things. It wasn’t are you sure? or wouldn’t you prefer your usual choice? It was you never get black coffee. He had always appreciated his sister’s assertiveness toward him.

  But he was in the middle of great changes. Tanner had been stuck in a stupor for so long, blind to the obvious problems facing Natonese society. A few months ago, he would have been just like the other customers in line: addicted to nutritional junk, rendered impotent by the infantilizing comforts of modern society, and solely focused on the drudgery of his career.

  He was so much more now. He felt himself exuding a sense of power, of control everywhere he went. He symbolized all that used to be right in Natonese society, representing a sense of promise that others could still regain their former glory if they could only wake up.

  Reflecting on how different he was from the Tanner of a half-year ago made him feel dizzy, almost like his feet weren’t stable on the pedestrian platform below. Having Rebecca around helped remind him that not everything was different.

  He noticed she was still giving him an impatient stare. “I dunno,” he said at last, shrugging. “Just in the mood for something different.”

  Rebecca squinted her eyes, eyeing him over for another few seconds. “Okay weirdo,” she said at last, her mouth curled into a taunting grin.

  They arrived at the front of the line, got their drinks, and continued on to the airbus terminal. The feeling of the warm cup in his hand helped Tanner deal with the persistent cold. The warmth spread throughout his fingers and traveled up his arm until it lodged itself around his torso.

  “Have any tests coming up?” he asked Rebecca as they rounded a corner. The airbus terminal was at the far end of the strip.

  “Just got two back,” she said. “Aced them both, didn’t study.” She flashed a smug grin.

  Rebecca had always been smart, maybe smarter than him. She definitely got better grades. Even though Tanner helped her with her homework, it had gotten to the point where she was outmaneuvering him with her intellect. A sense of pride in his sister welled in his gut.

  Maybe he deserved some of the credit too. He had sacrificed so much for her, and spent his spare time helping her with her schoolwork. Onyx kept encouraging him to develop a healthy sense of self-respect. Congratulating himself on the role he had played in Rebecca’s intellectual development was part of that effort.

  They reached the bus terminal. Airbuses ran less frequently on the weekends, giving time for a large crowd to accumulate. Tanner naturally hung back from the throngs of commuters. Rebecca followed suit.

  When the airbus finally arrived, it was already packed with people. Tanner had to push someone forward just to make it on before the doors closed. He and Rebecca both grabbed the railing overhead, and they lurched as the vehicle’s engines fired. Tanner collided with at least three other commuters as they took off.

  It was the unwritten rule of Obrigan City public transit: you had to push your way to get both on and off, and you were bound to have a bad time if you valued your personal space. Tanner had never liked having to do so in the past, but in recent months, he had found it satisfying to muscle his way through the crowds. Fewer people had the physical capability to push him around anymore.

  In the warmer months, it always reeked aboard the airbuses. Even the most well-groomed individuals still sweat profusely during the heat of Obrigan’s summers. Grabbing the bus railings inevitably exposed the stink of your drenched armpits to everyone around you. The ferocity of the overhead cooling units just distributed the stench around. The winter cold made public transit more bearable.

  Tanner found the smell of raw humanity increasingly disgusting. People needed to learn how to groom themselves properly. Proper hygiene was what made people different from animals. From the damn newars.

  In crowds, Tanner always enjoyed people-watching. Everyone’s actions looked quirky from the outside. There was a young child at the other end of the airbus playing some imaginary game against herself on the window. A young woman perused some hidden file on her wrist terminal, her face alternating between disgust and intrigue. A man in one of the seats nearby had his eyes closed and was trying to take deep breaths, but every few seconds his eyes twitched and the rate of his breathing quickened.

  Rebecca, on the other hand, always retreated inside herself when she was in a crowd. He looked over to see his sister slouched against the wall of the airbus, her eyes locked on her feet. Tanner had always worried about the young woman who could tease him and stand up to him when they were alone, but seemed unable to do any of that the moment she was around strangers.

  They approached the terminal for Eltanos Park, and their vessel latched into the docking clamps. As the doors swished open, Tanner tried his best to stay upright in the face of pedestrians pushing him from all directions. He placed a hand on Rebecca’s shoulder to make sure they didn’t get separated.

  Following her down a staircase and a winding pathway, the siblings arrived at the entrance to Eltanos Park. With the weather being what it was, few pedestrians were inside. Tanner and Rebecca headed down one of the paths, surrounded by trees and thinning grass that had lost the luster of its summer greenness. Both sipped at their coffees from earlier. The sounds of the traffic almost entirely disappeared thanks to the sonic sound dampeners lining the perimeter of the park.

  “Feels nice getting away from the crowds,” Rebecca said.

  “Obrigan City just keeps getting more and more overpopulated,” Tanner said. “I can’t believe there are people who want to let those refugees settle here.”

  Rebecca gave him a confused look. “What’s wrong with the refugees?”

  “They could be dangerous,” Tanner said. Better not to expose Rebecca to the full list of hazards posed by the newars, he thought. Protecting her was still his priority.

  “Since when have you ever cared about politics?” his sister asked.

  “This is a really important issue,” Tanner said, an edge of harshness in his voice that he didn’t intend.

  Rebecca’s face showed few signs of being convinced, but she dropped the topic. The two naturally gravitated toward a bench overlooking a pond. A layer of fog had settled over the pond, and no one was out. Tanner finished the rest of his coffee and enjoyed the moment, trying to forget his rage at the refugees.

  Rebecca reached into her satchel and retrieved a small wooden box from within. “Chess?” she asked.

  “You know me too well,” Tanner said with a grin.

  When they were younger, Tanner had pe
stered Rebecca constantly to let him teach her how to play, mainly so he could finally play against a real-life opponent. They had been lying down on the floor of their old house, playing their first game of chess together, when the police arrived at the door to tell them that their parents had been killed in an aircar crash.

  They hadn’t played for months after that. Even Tanner had nearly given up the game. And then slowly, through unspoken agreement, the two had finally started playing again. Every time the pain of their parents’ absence became unbearable, the two would sit down and play a game together.

  Chess evoked bitter memories of their parents’ deaths. But it also symbolized their bond in the face of that tragedy.

  The game proceeded the same as always. Both played defensively until Tanner broke out with a carefully designed stratagem. The ferocity of his attack threw Rebecca off balance, and before long she was down two rooks and a knight. The game was effectively over.

  “Have you been making any friends at school?” Tanner asked, feeling confident he could take his full attention away from the game. Rebecca was the kind of kid who spent most of her free time at home, who preferred huddling in her bed over a book instead of going to parties. Not that Tanner objected—kids her age didn’t need to be wasting their time or ruining their futures with dumb frivolities—but he wished she could at least find a few close friends.

  Rebecca frowned, surveying her options on the game board as though she hadn’t heard him. Dissatisfied with all of her choices, she picked the least bad option by sacrificing one of her pawns.

  “I just don’t have that much in common with my classmates,” Rebecca said with a shrug. “I guess most people seem more into getting boyfriends and girlfriends than just making friends. No one wants to be spending time with me when they could chase whoever they’re interested in.”

  Tanner had been fourteen once. He empathized.

  The last of Rebecca’s pieces melted away under the onslaught of his latest attack. Before long, he had the remnants of her army trapped in a corner. It was all too easy to move his queen to the back rank and checkmate her king. Rebecca rolled her eyes and shook his hand in an exaggerated state of huffiness.

  “Maybe I should just start dating,” Rebecca said, turning her head to look out over the pond. “It’d just make things easier.”

  Tanner felt the familiar contractions in his chest that came with stress. Absolutely not, he wanted to blurt out. It took him a few seconds of trying to calm himself down, but he finally managed an “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I thought that’s what you’d say,” she said. “But honestly, I don’t get it.”

  Because you have a future to look forward to, and because messing around with some guy who isn’t worth your time is a good way of sidetracking that future. He was trying to figure out how to put that in a way Rebecca would understand.

  Maybe because of their previous conversation about the refugees, his mind wandered back to the Offspring video he was watching earlier. The video explained how the newars had undergone some kind of muscular shock therapy while in cryo aboard their sleeper ship. Which meant they had freakishly strong bodies.

  The video featured various artists’ renderings of what a newar might look like. The images were all frighteningly animalistic, showing people with huge, bulging muscles, stout features, and jagged, yellow teeth. Tanner had never seen a mammal in anything but pictures, since the original wave of Natonese settlers hadn’t seen fit to bring Earth livestock with them, but the renderings were what Tanner imagined a beast might look like. Something not truly human.

  And then his mind pictured some newar male embracing Rebecca, his brawny arms locked around his sister’s waist, his hands inching their way further and further down until…

  Rebecca must have noticed the harshness of his breathing. “I’m sorry, I just thought it was a simple question.”

  “Because I said so,” Tanner finally managed. “You don’t need to get involved in anything like that at your age.”

  Rebecca turned her body to face away from him, pouting dramatically. Tanner knew he had upset her, but one day she would realize he was just looking out for her.

  With his sister preoccupied, Tanner turned his attention to his wrist terminal. The revolting image of the newar and his sister still swimming around in his brain, he didn’t feel as though he had the luxury of staying on the sidelines any longer. He keyed in a request asking Onyx about attending the next official Offspring gathering.

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  Obrigan hadn’t looked alien to Isadora until now, but with a shuttle ferrying her and her staff to a private villa a few hours outside Obrigan City, she could appreciate just how strange the planet really looked.

  From the viewscreen of her shuttle, she saw many huge fungal trees that looked like giant mushrooms, interspersed with low-hanging trees with twisted branches nearly kissing the underbrush. The fungal trees’ caps glowed a translucent blue-green shade.

  Isadora had spent all her time in the Natonus System either aboard the Preserver or in the well-curated urbanity of Obrigan City. It was hard to remember that there were real alien worlds all around them. Until now, it hadn’t felt like she had ever really left her old home.

  Getting out of the city calmed her down almost immediately. Isadora had resigned herself to the stresses and bodily tightness that came with her job, as well as—according to the physician she had seen to get the immuno-boosters needed for a trip to the Obrigan wilderness—chronically elevated blood pressure. She wasn’t wearing an inflatable cuff on her arm, but it wouldn’t surprise her if the vista of the Obrigan countryside had brought her numbers down. She folded her arms over her chest and enjoyed the slow drum of her heartbeat.

  She couldn’t wait to bring Meredith here.

  She walked back into the shuttle’s main compartment, where Alexander Mettevin, Gabby Betam, Katrina Lanzic, and a dozen other staffers were all strapped in. Her entire executive branch fit in a cramped shuttle. Isadora hoped that might strike her as funny someday.

  Everyone else seemed to enjoy getting out of the office too. Normally, her staff hardly ever struck up small conversations in the embassy hallways. There was just too much to do. But now, everyone was engaged in conversation, with the sound of light laughter occasionally sprinkled in.

  She had been asking these people to devote almost every waking hour to ensuring that their people had a future in the Natonus System. She had been asking them to lose sleep, to ignore the emotional tugging of relatives or other loved ones still in cryo aboard the Preserver, to put any hobbies or other pursuits on the back-burner. She had been asking them to endure all the things she had been enduring for almost half a year.

  Isadora knew it was necessary, but that didn’t make her feel less guilty. A weekend staff retreat to the planet’s wilderness felt like the least she could do, but it assuaged some of that guilt. She’d take it.

  “Looks like we have activity down in the landing zone,” the pilot called from the front. Furrowing her brow, Isadora returned to the cockpit to see what the pilot was talking about. Two of her security staff, hardly missing a beat, unstrapped themselves and fell into step on either side of her.

  From the shuttle viewscreen, Isadora could make out several dozen individuals crowded around the entrance to the villa. A handful held signs with lettering that was mostly unintelligible from a distance. But they looked like protesters.

  “I wasn’t aware anyone else was supposed to be out here,” Isadora said.

  “They’re not in the villa itself,” the pilot shrugged. “So they’re not trespassing.”

  The technicality made Isadora’s eyes roll, but her security staff seemed more alarmed than annoyed. “We need to take this seriously,” one of her guards said.

  But Isadora wasn’t paying attention. They were closer now, circling a helipad and about to touch down, which meant the protesters' signs were finally legible. Isadora could make out t
hree of them: NATONUS FOR THE NATONESE and GO BACK HOME NEWAR SCUM and THE NATONUS OFFSPRING WILL PROTECT OUR HOMELAND.

  Offspring.

  Almost five months ago, right after Isadora had come out of cryo and met with Tricia Favan, the prime minister had discussed the formation of a variety of new nativist, anti-refugee organizations. Which was frustrating to Isadora, of course, but hardly unexpected. There would always be people like them.

  But Tricia had never mentioned anyone called the Offspring. Except, Isadora remembered, she had overheard one of the prime minister’s aides whisper the word. It had been so quiet that Isadora had thought she had imagined it. And then she had promptly forgotten about the incident.

  Until now.

  “Ma’am?” one of her guards said, just before the shuttle touched down on the helipad.

  “Hm?” Isadora asked, turning to face her security personnel. She realized they must have been talking while she had been reflecting on her first meeting with the prime minister. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” Isadora said.

  “We should be careful about getting all of our people into the compound,” one of her guards said. “We recommend having us escort each staff member individually, one-by-one, to make sure the protesters don’t cause any trouble.”

  Isadora doubted any of these protesters would—after all, her political experience meant she was no stranger to crowds of people shouting about some inane thing or another—but it was a reasonable precaution. And she had no idea if it was reasonable to expect the protesters to be armed.

  “We’d recommend you going somewhere in the middle,” the other guard said.

  “Actually, I’d like to go first. I’m not going to ask my people to do anything that I haven’t done first,” Isadora said.

  The two guards exchanged glances, realized it wasn’t worth arguing about, and nodded in agreement.

  The trio headed back into the rear of the shuttle, where the two guards explained the situation to a sea of anxious faces. The same light, relaxed mood that had marked the ride to the villa had dissipated.