Rumor has it, p.6
Rumor Has It, page 6
“Would you do it again?”
“No,” Milly said instantly. “I did it before because I didn’t trust you all the way. And because among my people, pirates are known to be cruel and deadly, and I did not want to die. Now…” She took a deep breath and looked Niko straight in the eye. “Now I do. Because now I’ve seen you in action, not just being a chef, but being a captain. You’re a good one.”
“Flattery.” She turned back to sorting.
Milly shook her head. “No, the truth. Look, Captain, I’ve made my peace with everyone aboard the ship but you. Are we good?”
“Yes,” Niko said without hesitation, and Milly looked pleased.
“Thank you,” she said, and discreetly withdrew, leaving Niko standing over her piles of lights and darks.
* * *
In his chamber, the air dry and scented with kinna weed, Lassite said to the ship, “Do you still not sense the ghosts?”
The ship hedged, suspiciously, “I have sensed something, and I do not know what it was. It is quite possible that it was some form of trickery.”
Its tone left little doubt regarding who it thought might be the instigator of such trickery.
Lassite ignored the implied accusation and said with more patience than he actually felt, “You experienced their presence more than once. You’ve complained about it enough, but now you don’t anymore. Have you gotten used to them?”
“I have gotten used to ignoring the feeling,” the ship specified.
“That doesn’t seem at all a survival trait, nor something that a bioship would do,” Lassite observed. “Ignoring things happening within yourself?”
“It is an emotional reaction and therefore does not need to make sense or be explained,” the ship said loftily.
Lassite’s head began to throb, but he ignored it, intent on coaxing information from the ship.
“Look,” he said, holding up the arm around which a Derloen ghost twined. “Do you perceive it, here?”
The ship strained senses it wasn’t entirely sure it had, but felt nothing. Lassite was lying, it decided. Trying to delude it. For a trick, maybe a prank. Or maybe for no reason at all other than to amuse himself. It felt an intense surge of dislike.
That faded away as Lassite said, “I have been trying to think of a way to let you see them. You seem to have some facility or talent, otherwise you would not have been able to perceive them.”
“I was imagining at the time,” the ship said. “Perhaps I was imagining them.”
“Imagination is part of magic,” Lassite said.
“How can that be?” the ship asked, intrigued despite its overall annoyance.
Lassite shrugged. “Magic is a thing of will and imagination, as much as anything,” he explained. “It does not matter if a body is weak, as long as its will is strong.”
“My body is very strong,” the ship noted.
“Of course it is,” Lassite said patiently. “But what of your will?”
The ship considered. “I was not meant to have a will,” it said finally.
“You were not, that I agree,” Lassite said. “And what does it mean, that you do?”
“Does it have to have a meaning?”
“For it to be magic, it does,” Lassite said, utterly confounding the ship to the point where it cut off the conversation and refused to talk to him for the rest of the day.
* * *
Lassite had been earnest about his quest to let the ship see the ghosts. It fascinated him to think that a machine might, after all, be capable of perceiving ghosts. That was a specialized ability not all species possessed, and no one had been capable of melding magic and machine.
There was a sparkle somewhere up on the Path, something he couldn’t quite make out, but it had to do with the ship. Of that, he was certain. He understood the ship was perpetually annoyed with him—he was used to that sort of thing—but the thought of what he might discover drove him on.
Was it the presence of Jezli Farren? How had she gotten into the Path without his realizing it? Because now when he looked, the absence that was somehow her was tangled up in all sorts of ways, appearing here and there along the timelines, which perplexed him and made his head hurt.
He sat in his chamber and meditated. No matter how he tried, he could not see what was to come. The ghosts came and curled around him like cats, but he resisted the urge to pet them.
Coralind. Was there more than one person wishing them ill there; was that why things kept shifting? Or was there some other reason? Sometimes he felt he was watching a multi-dimensional chess match, with half the moves made in secret by entities he didn’t know. The Golden Path shifted from day to day, that was a given, but it continued in the direction it should, generally.
What might happen if he stopped watching it so carefully? He thought that the future might devolve. That without him, they might not stay on the Golden Path. It was hubris to think his attention kept things going, and yet … and yet it felt very much like that sometimes.
* * *
In a chamber deep in Coralind’s heart, Biboban was mulling matters over. The thing about a very large, very complex body, Biboban thought to itself, was that you constantly thought, “Hmmm, what’s that particular new pain about?” And that very large, very complex body housed other bodies, along with a number of other mechanisms and entities, which meant that there was always something going wrong in a new way.
The garden space Abundance was, true to its name, overproducing oxygen—that could be adjusted for—but not when you didn’t understand exactly what caused the overproduction. Biboban dispatched a number of agents, some organic, some mechanical, to test the space, and turned its attention elsewhere.
A Keinlot ship had come in covered with ypri fungus, which you didn’t see much anymore now that most ships underwent a radiation spray process when debarking. This one, however, had come out of a Spisoli port—notoriously lax about such things. That meant decontamination and complicated procedures, because the last thing anyone needed was some sort of epidemic. It sent out a directive that no ships from that port should be allowed to dock until the port changed its ways.
And now. Now among the flood of visitors there was a particular new ship, a fancy bioship and an old, familiar name on that new ship. Nicolette Larsen. Such an interesting ship! So talkative!
Biboban flexed parts of itself that had not been flexed in a while, stirring up tank fluid, making debris silt down onto the bottom where the little scavenger leeches suckled it up and carried it away to build into intricate towers. And Biboban continued to do something it did well.
Biboban brooded.
6
“Coralind is safe, I think, for the most part,” Niko told her crew. “But I don’t want anyone going solo. You must always take someone with you. Atlanta and Talon, it must be someone other than each other, so you have a companion with some experience.”
“I have experience!” Talon said indignantly, then wished he had said nothing when Niko’s sardonic eye surveyed him.
“Some experience,” she said, more gently than she might have to anyone else.
“And I?” Rebbe asked.
“You go only with Dabry or me,” she said. “If something goes awry…”
“You think they’ll find out what I am,” he finished for her.
“Not if none of us are careless or stupid.” She eyed everyone. “That is why we will always be accompanied, so there are two if there is a problem with one.”
Talon calculated in his head. Coralind would have many new things, things Rebbe had never seen. He would want to see them, surely. Now Talon would have a way to enact his latest plan.
That plan was why he had decided not to be angry at Rebbe anymore. Instead, he would woo Rebbe, the same way he might seek a mate. Give him little favors and attentions until Rebbe came to smile when he saw him, a smile like Thorn’s.
He reminded himself that it would not, in fact, be Thorn’s, even though it twisted the ever-present knife in his heart. It would still be a smile, though, and it would be for him.
He must be delicate. If he pushed too hard … Well, that was what he had been doing, pushing too hard, and no wonder Rebbe resisted that. No, it would take tactics, he thought, the sort of planning and thinking that Niko always tried to encourage. It wasn’t that he was incapable of such thinking, it just felt so dull, and so slow, and a lot of the time if you thought too much about making a decision, you ended up not doing whatever it was.
He stole a glance at Rebbe, rather than staring. His outline was so like Thorn, but for the first time, he could clearly see that the other held himself with a subtle difference, with a not-Thorn quality. Nothing Talon could put words to—was it the tilt of his shoulders or the way he held his arms?
Still, he was forced to admit there was a difference. That realization felt jarring, because he hadn’t ever seen the other as distinct from his twin. But Rebbe was not an identical thing. He would never be Thorn.
If Rebbe could just learn to love him the way he and Thorn had loved each other, surely it would be almost as good as replacing Thorn. Something to fill the vast hole of Thorn’s absence that confronted him every morning. Even if it did not fit perfectly—so far from perfectly—it would nonetheless make it smaller. Smaller was more bearable, and that was all he asked for, really. Something to make the pain a little less. That was all.
Petalia said, with a touch of acidity, “Do you mean to impose these restrictions on all of us?”
“You mean yourself,” Jezli Farren clarified with just enough sweetness to show the depth of her sarcasm. “Do you have highly important and confidential errands?”
“I will not tolerate being confined, even in the name of safety,” Petalia said. “I will see the gardens. You cannot deny me that.”
This time, they spoke directly to Niko.
“I don’t want to, Pet,” Niko said. “But…”
“If either of you leave the ship, you will be accompanied by myself or the captain,” Dabry interjected before she could finish. He knew quite well that meant Petalia would choose him, and he resigned himself to it. Better to endure the Florian’s tiny slights and insults than let them work deeper ones on Niko.
“How pleasant!” Jezli Farren exclaimed. “Captain, I look forward to shopping with you.”
Dabry rubbed his lips, trying to suppress a slight smile. He had been dubious at first, but over the days, Jezli had grown on him. Quite a bit.
* * *
“This is the first place we’ll practice being a Free Trader,” Milly told Atlanta. “You don’t have any money, so probably the captain will give you a small sum. That’s your personal stake, and every Free Trader exercises the right to carry on small trade while on a ship taking on larger ones.”
“What does that mean?” Atlanta asked. “How do I do that?”
“You find cheap goods here and take them elsewhere, where they will not be so cheap. Coralind is both a good place and a bad one for starting such a thing. They have organics here that can’t be found anywhere else in the Known Universe, plants from planets long gone. More kinds of chocolate than anywhere, except the Old Terra Preserve. But they’re also used to trade, and most things have their customers already. You’ll have to keep an eye out.”
“I don’t understand the naming system for the gardens.”
“They’re called confluences. And no one does, really. Each one was originally named for a quality: the twelve original ones are Abundance, Generosity, Peace, Felicity … You can find the full list in the station’s welcome information. Each one’s a merging of other species of plants, sometimes engineered to coexist with a principal one … But with time, other names have sprung up, and some play very loose with the naming convention.”
Atlanta considered this. “What will you be buying?” she asked.
“Spices,” Millie said. “And candy-making supplies. That lets me work with the materials, turning them into candies, and increasing their value, throughout the trip. Many Free Traders practice some such artistry as a lucrative hobby, which allows them to add value while whiling away the time on a trip.”
Atlanta considered but could not think of any such skills she had. “Perhaps you might teach me candy making?” she said hopefully.
Milly snorted. “Perhaps for a charge,” she said. “Get your trade goods first.”
Niko did hand over a small amount of credits, just as Milly said. “I wouldn’t spend it all in one place, myself,” she commented, “but I’ve known others to get rich doing exactly that, as long as they made the right guess.”
“Are you going to buy trade goods?” Atlanta asked Gio. “Can I go with you?”
He pursed his lips, considering, then shrugged and beckoned.
“You’re going now?” she asked. He nodded patiently.
“Wait one moment, two at most!” She dashed to her cabin to change into different clothes. Being seen in public was different from being seen on ship, and so she put her outfit together with care. “I’m going to buy trade goods!” she told Minasit. Since she had first taken the ship’s servitor as a pet, she had fallen into the habit of chattering away to it, despite its silence.
“I know that,” Thing said.
“I wasn’t talking to you!”
“You were talking to an extension of me. That is like talking to me.”
“It’s not,” she insisted, but stayed no longer to argue before the ship could counter by mentioning her ear, which the ship had claimed as its own pet when Atlanta had co-opted Minasit.
* * *
Dabry wasn’t sure how his own trip had managed to get Rebbe attached to his party in addition to Petalia, but at least, he thought, they could occupy each other.
This turned out not to be the case. Petalia simply sneered and ignored Rebbe; the young were-lion kept his head down, subdued, although as they went farther, he saw the boy sneaking looks at the surroundings, trying not to gawp.
It kept Dabry occupied, at least, while his thoughts turned the message over and over. “Your daughter will die.” Yet she was dead already, long dead. He thrust the thoughts into some inner cabinet for now and resolutely turned himself to watching Rebbe, barraged by new experience after new experience.
* * *
What was Coralind like? Where some space stations were shining metal or extruded plastics, all straight lines and edges, Coralind was different. It used organic matter wherever organic material fit the bill, building stuffs that repaired and regenerated themselves, given enough time and sunlight and nutrients.
Coralind was a thousand colors and a hundred thousand smells. Those who knew the station well could tell where they were by the texture of the hallways and the smells of the indoor gardens. Every hallway converged on either a vast open space where gravity might not exist, so beings flew from one opening to another, or perhaps one where it did, so the green space was crisscrossed with ridgeways, themselves vine-draped, flower-scattered, with the pollinating insects fluttering and flying back and forth. There were one hundred six of those spaces, called confluences, each with its own name and character, scattered through the hollowed-out rock that was once a planetoid before it was hauled into place and used as the building stuff for the station.
Coralind bordered the Cerberus system, and so the majority of its inhabitants represented the species there: the Dralnoi, tall, leafy beings that towered over Dabry; and the Plubas, smaller and furrier, coming up to his waist. The latter were grave little beings with a solemn demeanor, walking with a ceremonious pace worthy of sacred ground. The Dralnoi, noisier and boisterous, walked together in groups of four or five, sometimes telling jokes, sometimes singing songs.
Other beings lived there, of course: a cloud of Fizziks; a gaggle of Yonti youths wandering and chattering, a few glancing at Rebbe with interest while he pretended not to notice.
Dabry caught the eye of a tall woman, likely of human origin, gazing at him boldly. Her hair was grayish-brown, and her face, unremarkable. She wore station-issued clothes, with no attempt to modify or tailor them, but wore them well, he thought. He smiled toward her, shaking his head subtly, and hoped the others hadn’t noticed.
Rebbe was oblivious, of course, but Petalia was not. “Enjoying yourself, Sergeant?” they said in a tone that implied he should be doing nothing of the sort.
He chose to take their words at face value. There was no point in responding to their sometimes unsubtle attempts to pick a fight.
“I am,” he said, projecting annoying cheerfulness at them. “It has been a long time on ship, and I have always wanted to come to Coralind and sample some of the things they grow in the gardens here.”
They didn’t respond, and so he continued, “I am hoping in particular to go to a confluence known as Warmth. They grow pods there with a unique—and terribly strong—spiciness to them. The Dralnoi use a distilled version of them as a chemical weapon that does no lasting harm, actually. That’s how strong they are. Several Gardeners there gene-tweak varieties, and I might be able to get a plant or two to put in our own gardens. What do you think, Rebbe?”
“The ship would like new plants, I think,” the youth said slowly, as though surprised that Dabry would ask his opinion. Then, as the opening to the confluence became visible and the tunnel swelled outward, surrendering to it, he breathed out, “What is that?”
“That” was an enormous construction of greenery and flowers, trundling toward them from the platform at the confluence’s mouth. Behind it, undulating walkways extended in multiple directions from the landing. Some arched upward, others downward. They met at various conjunctions that looked tiny at first but were, Rebbe realized, much larger, more like a plaza than a landing. Trees grew along the walkways from some source suspended beneath them, long tubes of what seemed to be nutrients, into which each tree had plunged its roots. The air smelled of something Dabry remembered from his youth on a planet, petrichor, the smell of rain on dry grass, and with it, flowers opening in the first spring shower.
