When she called his name, he lifted his pencil from the paper, and waited while she climbed the hill, which wavered underfoot. That was probably the booze. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t leave either, or shy away as she settled down beside him.
“That’s good,” she said, and his drawings were: a map, and two sketches in different styles, one mottled and shaded, one spare, shape suggested by unbroken undulating lines. He’d drawn some of the ships, too.
“Thank you. I cannot walk the ship, I cannot pray—so this serves.”
She passed the drawing back. “I’m sorry. I want us gone as much as you do. We’ll get there.”
“We may.”
“You planned the antenna yourself. It will work.”
“You trust Zanj that much?”
“What do you mean, trust her?”
“Once she returns to the Cloud, she’ll be beyond your reach. Beyond your command. Why would she come back?”
The antenna pierced the purple night, and sparks fountained inside: Zanj working, with desperation and need—for freedom. The group’s freedom, Viv had thought. Zanj hated being trapped, here or anywhere, she hated waiting, she passed her time aboard ship reading or playing puzzle games or arm wrestling with Gray, even tidying, but never still. She’d had enough stillness in three thousand years of prison. She wanted freedom and revenge. Viv offered both. But she might seize freedom anyway, and work her way up to revenge.
Viv wondered why it never occurred to her that Zanj might leave them. Back home, she expected all kinds of fuckery from rivals. But to build anything real, you had to trust your people, even if they might let you down. Zanj had helped Viv, in one way or another, since High Carcereal. She came back to Orn when Viv hadn’t called her. Surely she wouldn’t leave them here.
But Hong thought another way. For him, Zanj was not a colleague, but a monster bubbled up from myth.
She didn’t know which of them was right. “She’ll come back.”
Hong said nothing.
“She will. Or…” After all, why not consider the chance? “Or we’ll try something else. And if nothing works, there are worse places we could end up.”
“Refuge is a strange town.” He set paper and board on the grass before him, and weighted them with small stones. “They live and die and leave so little record, so few marks on the land. Yannis claims they’ve been here thousands of years, but if so, why aren’t there more of them? Their technology—the plows, the carts, the smith’s shop—it’s all primitive but efficient. Refined. Every innovation you could manage with the materials available without pushing them into steam. They have good hygiene. They sing recognizable versions of songs millennia old. They should have changed by now, or developed their own literature. But they haven’t.”
“I feel like I’m doing something wrong,” she said to the night as much as to him, expecting no answer from either. “It’s not as if I like this place, but Zanj is so angry, and you’re … suspicious, I guess. And Xiara’s … I don’t even know.”
“You should talk to her.”
“She just sits on the mountain. I say things, and she doesn’t answer.”
“Have you tried listening?”
“Of course,” Viv said, and realized she had not.
Hong stood. “Here’s what I think. I respect you, Viv, and I want to help you. But for you, this is just one more adventure. Being trapped here is no different from standing free on the ’fleet, or Orn, or on the Question. It’s better, even, since it’s more like the world you know. If we never make it off this rock, well, it was a long shot for you anyway, the chance of getting home. But Zanj will lose her chance at revenge, Gray will never see his family again, I’ll die unable to pass on anything I’ve learned, lost in static, and Xiara—it’s not my place to say what she feels.”
He slipped the board and paper beneath one arm, and his pencil into a pouch in his robe, and when he was done, she still had not spoken. There were no answers, except the one she didn’t offer.
“I’m sorry,” Hong said first.
“No.” She scrambled to her feet. “No. I’m glad you said that. Thank you.”
Those weren’t the right words either, but they moved in the right direction, and the shadows on Hong’s face seemed lighter—or else that was an illusion caused by the revolving battleships above, reflecting the light of the set, fake sun.
She worked the next day in a fugue, in denial. Her mind melted into muscle, into touch, into the heat of the forge as she worked iron, as she helped Zanj weld systems into place. She stopped trying to joke, related no cheerful stories from the field. Zanj either softened in return, or seemed less hard without the contrast.
That evening, Viv borrowed a pair of scissors from the blacksmith, and climbed the mountain.
The slope, gradual at first, grew treacherous, purplish-green grass yielding to broken stone, with squat piney trees spreading horizontal to gather light. Viv pulled herself up hand over hand, breathing hard, her body more used at this point to farming than to climbing, until she saw Xiara seated at cliff’s edge, a shadow against pink sky.
She raised her hand: “Hi!”
Xiara did not wave back, but neither did she run. She could have, while Viv hauled herself up the rock face, bracing her feet against gravel. She had before. Viv had tried to talk to her many times after that first night, to invite her to the fields, ask how she was doing, if she’d like to help with the antenna. Those attempts had not ended well.
When Viv reached the cliff edge, Xiara scooted to one side to make room. She drew her legs against her chest, and hugged her knees, and looked down at the lights of Refuge. “Hong said you might come. And he said I should listen.”
Viv knew just what she had to say, but couldn’t now. Which was why she’d brought the scissors. “I wanted to ask—can you give me a haircut?”
Xiara looked over, and up: wind had blown loose long hair across her face, across her eyes.
“My hair’s getting long. I’d cut it myself, but I haven’t seen a mirror here, and I’d end up looking like a doll in a horror movie. That’s, um. It’s a kind of story. With creepy dolls. It would look bad, is what I’m saying.” The longer she went, the worse all this sounded. “Will you help me?” She drew the scissors from her belt, and offered them, handle first.
One corner of Xiara’s mouth twitched up, and her lips parted to hint at teeth. Something like humor reached the edges of her eyes. “Sit.”
Viv lowered herself and swung her legs over the edge. The drop wasn’t far, but the valley stretched before her, and as she sat, still, quiet, she considered the merits of having a sensitive conversation at the edge of a cliff, while someone stood behind you with a knife. Or scissors. Not that Xiara would do anything. Probably.
Her fingers combed Viv’s hair, pulling through its length, judging the shape of the skull. The scissors chilled the skin of her neck.
Listen, was what Hong had said, but she couldn’t just listen. Or she wasn’t brave enough to start that way. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Snip.
“You’re feeling lost right now. You left your home, but then you had the ship, and the stars. And me. If I really matter to you. Then you came here, and we flew through that fleet, and you felt the fleetmind, and then it all was ripped away.” She waited between sentences, and listened to the wind in the high places, the passage of blades through her hair. She felt Xiara’s strong, steady hands on her head. She ached for them. “I’ve been all plans: how are we getting off this planet, how can we catch the Empress, what happens when we do. I was thinking about myself. Not you, not really.” Xiara’s hand circled to her forehead, traced her brow. “I’ve fucked up like this before. God. I could tell you stories. I’ve always been … driven. I start things because they’re fun, because they seem like a good idea at the time, and I forget it’s not always simple.”
The scissors paused. Xiara said: “I’m not in love with you, you know.”
“Oh” didn’t seem li
ke the right response, but that was what Viv went with. She kept still. She tried not to think what that raw tone of voice might mean.
“You’re … you’re weird. I don’t know what you are. I don’t know where you’re from, or where you’re going, except that you want to leave. You make bad jokes, you’re disrespectful, and you don’t know the first thing of how it’s done, to lie with a woman: you give no gift, you offer no dance. No secrets pledged or traded. You’re … you understand nothing, you’re rude, and you’re selfish, you’re…” She broke off, and set the scissors down. Her hand fell heavy and warm on Viv’s shoulder, and Viv sought it with hers. “Who am I, out here? The Ornchief’s daughter, hundreds of light-years from Orn? A shipless pilot? I kissed you, I lay with you, because I like you, wanted you, chose you. Needed you. But you don’t change, or learn, or offer. You’re just you, always. You didn’t need me. And when you get where you’re going, you’ll leave, without a thought for what remains behind.”
“No.” Viv squeezed her hand, her wrist, started to turn—and stopped when Xiara shifted weight as if to draw away. “No,” she repeated. “I have to get home. But what we’ve had—what we’ve done, god, yes the sex, but more than that, the five of us, together, out there, up there—it is real to me. I feel it. I just … I suck, okay? I suck at this. At feeling things. At sitting still to feel them. I want to get us off this rock. I want you to have a ship, a big one, the most beautiful ship in the galaxy. I want Hong to find his fleet, his answers. I want Zanj to do whatever the hell she wants. I want Gray to see his home again. And I want to see mine. But. Christ. This happens every time—I get caught up in the plans. I make it all about what happens next and I never let myself get real, get scared, because if I did, I don’t know how I’d stop. So I keep going. I pull away. I’m sorry.”
Xiara’s other hand settled on her shoulder, and for a second Viv, mad, thought, she’ll push me off the ledge, because it was easier to imagine the fall and the sharp stop than it was to imagine saying all that and time continuing. Then Xiara’s arms slid over Viv’s shoulders, and her body pressed against her from behind, her cheek against Viv’s neck, her breath soft and shallow. She felt the presence of her lips—not a kiss, just her lips resting there on skin. Felt her swallow. “You’ll never get a haircut like this. We’re almost out of light.”
“How much is left?”
“Not much,” she said. “Here. Hold still.”
As she worked, Viv asked: “What did you mean, about secrets?”
“We give them, on Orn, to those we trust.”
“I don’t have any secrets. I mean. I used to have a lot, millions of them, formulas and algorithms and patterns and corporate dirt, but they wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“Of course you have a secret. To live is to grow secrets.”
“Okay,” she said. “All right. Fine.”
Silence. “Do you have one yet?”
“Don’t rush me!”
More silence.
“Okay. This is a shitty secret. I don’t know if it even counts.”
“Stop trying to dodge the question.”
“Okay. Don’t laugh.”
“I make no promises.”
“My first memory is of the underside of a table.”
“What?”
She felt her face heat up. “I was, maybe, one? One and a half? I remember looking up through a table, and seeing trees through the slats. I’ve never told anyone before.”
Xiara set down the scissors, and ran her hands over Viv’s hair again.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What’s yours?”
“You’re all set.”
“Hey. I did the thing, so it’s only fair you do it, too.”
Xiara drew breath, and let it out. “I was lying earlier.”
“About the secrets?”
“No. That is my secret.”
“That’s a dumb secret. What were you lying about?” And then: “Oh.” Xiara drew back, and Viv turned on the cliff’s edge to face her: saw the slight smile, the freckles on her dark skin, the being behind the eyes. “Um.” She laughed—couldn’t help it. Laughter was easier than an answer.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. You have people to get back to—lovers, maybe. Friends. Family.”
“But I’m here now,” she said. “What do you want to do next?”
She looked down, colored, looked up. “Can we just … be here, together? For now?”
And she said yes.
They lay a body’s length back from the cliff, in one another’s arms, beneath the whirling sky. The night was warm, the rock hard and cool. Xiara made small rabbitlike jerking motions in her sleep, grunted and growled as Viv had heard her do while flying; she held her close, and breathed her in, and for once her own dreams were void of gods and Empresses.
The next morning, Xiara shook Viv awake. “Come on, bear. Sun’s up. Let’s go help Zanj.”
Three days later, they finished the antenna. Viv worked the fields by morning, and the antenna by night. Hong checked and rechecked the wiring, and Xiara lifted and carried and learned what she could of the odd electronics, adjusting this bond or that by instinct, which Zanj or Hong or Viv confirmed more than they corrected. Even Gray joined them when he recovered from his afternoon stint as a pond—he wanted to marshal his strength, but he could work the forge, so long as they didn’t mind him eating a few coals. They finished in midafternoon. Viv’s media experience of mad science protested that there should have been a thunderstorm, but none suggested itself. Hong ran a current through the system to test it, checked lights, adjusted. Zanj placed upon her head the helmet that would, if the signal carried, translate her out into the Cloud.
“Ready?”
“Go ahead, monk boy. Get me off this rock.”
Hong threw the switch. Zanj closed her eyes. Viv felt the loud pop in the center of her chest, the wave of heat as Zanj’s battery discharged into the antenna. Lights blazed. Wheels turned. Dials spun. Lightning arced around wires. Xiara balled her hands to fists; Viv watched, as tensely as she’d ever watched a stock price fall. Her calm and cool all broke.
Minutes passed.
Zanj tore the helmet from her head, and threw it across the room. It struck the wall hard enough to dent wall and helmet alike. “Fuck!”
“It’s not broken,” she snarled as Xiara knelt and started tracing wires to find the fault. “You saw it. I felt it. The damn thing worked like it was supposed to. It just didn’t do anything. And we’re stuck here.”
“It’s fine,” Hong said. “I can fix it.”
“There’s nothing to fix, monk boy! The whole idea’s wrong. We’ll have to start again, ground up. Something else.”
“Maybe this wire—” But Xiara shook her head. “No, never mind. It’s connected.”
“How long will it take?” Viv asked, because she didn’t want to. One week was what they had. What she had. One week, and after that, their escape might as well take forever. Hong knew that. He knew what answer she wanted him to give. He didn’t say.
Zanj punched one of the antenna struts, and it snapped. Gray ran to hold the structure up before it could collapse and bury them: “What’s the matter with you?” But Zanj growled at him, and marched away into the dark.
Viv went after her, but Zanj walked fast, then broke into a run. Viv fell step by step behind, lungs aflame, legs lead, until at last she fell and lay panting in the fields.
When she could walk again, she did not go back. Back was a failure; she’d tried, and now she had to sit alone with the consequences. She climbed the mountain once again, and brooded condorlike, contemplating death, until sunset threatened.
She felt foolish. She felt done. The work wasn’t over. They needed her—her allies, her friends. Hong. Gray. Zanj.
Xiara.
Whom she’d left behind, because she had to sulk.
Way to go, Viv. You get through all that, and then you act like a perfect goddamn child.
Still, there was no way out but through.
Viv rose to go, but she heard, nearby, footsteps on stone. She stilled, and scanned the slope until she saw the source of the noise: a hunched, robed figure trudging alone up the mountain with a two-pronged pitchfork for a walking stick. Not foraging—climbing, with steady purpose and surer steps than Viv had ever seen Yannis take in the village below.
She tried to follow the old woman without being seen, but she fell behind as she scaled a ridge, and at one point she was caught in briars, and when she worked through, Yannis was gone.
Above, the dead fleet turned and turned in the night.
29
“THIS,” HONG WHISPERED on the third night, as he helped Viv follow Yannis up the mountain, “is a bad idea.”
“Shut up and give me a boost.”
“These people are secretive. They have rituals and rites unrecorded in the deepest archives of the ’faith. And they’re deeply conservative. They’d have to be, to survive for so long with so few changes in their lives. Of course they wouldn’t share all their secrets with outsiders, no matter how much—” He grunted as Viv put her weight on his shoulder and jumped up to catch an overhang. “—of a show they make of welcome.”
She lay flat on the ledge and stretched her arm down to him; he made most of the climb under his own power, clinging spiderlike to rocks, which was good, because when he caught her wrist her arm almost popped out of its socket. All the farm and forge work was making her stronger, but not enough to one-armed curl a guy with a metal leg. Good thing isolation from the Cloud hadn’t slowed his absurdly fast healing. “We’re not sneaking into their bedrooms here. We’re just going for a climb.”
Empress of Forever Page 27
