by Wen Spencer
"Where do you think you're going?" Captain Bailey asked.
Hillary pressed a hand to her chest. "I'm your placeholder! Or do you really want to be stuck sitting and waiting for the Hak to talk?"
Captain Bailey gave her sister a dark look, glanced to Turk sitting beside Rabbit and then sighed. "Fine. Fine."
"Oni-chan, slide over!" Hillary tucked herself between the two Reds.
They moved into the foggy harbor, the horns of passing ships bellowing like great beasts. A flock of birds went overhead, flickers of white to vanish into the haze.
"Why is it so foggy here all the time?" Mikhail asked.
"Who knows. Nature of the beast." Captain Bailey concentrated on maneuvering around a slow barge. "The water around Ya-ya is much cooler. It might because there is a pocket of extremely deep water just outside the city. Some people think there might be crack in the shell under Ya-ya and water making contact with the outer void is freezing solid, sealing the crack, but also transmitting the cold up to the surface. Other people think the Hak are cooling the water in order to make the fog."
"Could the Hak be the creators of this place?"
Captain Bailey shrugged. "They say they aren't, and lying would go against everything they seem to believe. Personally I think the Hak are here because of the weather conditions, not that they're causing them."
"Who was here first, humans or the Hak?"
"The Hak. Yamaguchi landed first and found them. Being Shinto, they decided that the Hak were kami and that TempleIsland was sacred ground. Not sure what would have happened if the Yamoto landed first."
Both ships loomed like mountains in the fog.
"Where is the Hak's ship?"
She shrugged. "We're not even sure they use spaceships."
"You haven't asked them?"
She gave him a look of pure disgust. "This isn't like a conversation between a Ruskie and a Georgie, where they can pull out dictionaries and look up meaning of words if the discussion strays into unknown waters."
"I understand, but it seems to me that the first thing you try to determine about another species is . . ."
"If they're going to try to eat you in your sleep. Trust me. That's the first thing."
"I'll take your word."
"Here, take the wheel."
Mikhail leapt to the wheel as she stepped away from it. She scooped up a bucket, leaned over the edge, and filled it with the harbor's slightly greasy looking water.
"Here." Paige thumped the full bucket down beside him and pointed at it. "If I say 'dodecah' what does it mean?"
"Water?" He guessed. He wondered which language the word was from.
"No, dodecah means 'bucket.'" She filled her cupped hands with water and held it out to him. "Jaxin?"
He skipped the obvious, which would be again, water. "Wet?"
"No, I'm offering you a drink."
"I'm starting to see why understanding the Hak might be difficult."
* * *
Evangeline hadn't been at the shrine. Paige scratched out a message on the shrine's chalkboard and then led the others off in search of the Hak. The pea gravel crunched underfoot. The smell of incense hung in the area, mixed with the fragrance of the cherry blossoms. As usual, a sense of peace smothered the place, so that even Hillary's energy seemed muted.
She went to the places that Hak liked to meditate in and considered each of the aliens. Whereas it was usually possible to identify one Minotaur from another, it was nearly impossible to tell the Hak apart. The human priests had discreetly marked the Hak's shells so that they could be identified. Fifty-nine and Nineteen were by the koi pond. She could still see the faint line of their tails in the dirt leading up to meditation points, so there was no use to talking to either of them. Eight was beside the knee of the Buddha in the main sanctuary. As she watched, an elderly woman clapped her hands and made an seaweed-wrapped rice cracker offering to Eight and whispered a prayer. There were four other crackers on the floor in front of the alien, so Eight had only settled in hours ago.
Fifteen had a translator's placeholder sitting in front of the alien, waiting for the sleeper to awake. Paige kept moving.
There was a Hak under the cherry tree, covered with a thick layer of pink petals. She brushed them off the shell to undercover the hexagram. It was Thirty-six.
Paige knelt in front of the mediating alien and genuflected. Mikhail settled beside her, looking mystified.
Turk remained standing. "Is the boulder the alien, or is there something else that I can't see—like the seraphim?"
"Hak are turtles." Paige said.
Turk eyed the Hak as if trying to judge how to kill it. "Very large turtles. Are they dangerous?"
"We'll be lucky if it even moves." She patted the ground to the left of her. "Sit."
"I'd rather stand." He grumbled.
"Turk," Mikhail said in a tone that was half pleading, half warning.
"I told you this would be tedious," Paige said. "They've proven to be more willing to talk to someone who is sitting than standing."
Turk chose to sit to her right and slightly back, perhaps so he could easily reach either her or Mikhail. She tried not to let it seem more than it was.
"What are turtles?" Rabbit whispered to Hillary.
"Here, I'll show you some little turtles." Hillary led the boy away. Paige suspected that Hillary's plan all along was to get Rabbit off alone.
They sat in quiet as the cherry blossoms drifted down. Both men were surprisingly patient and went unmoving for a long time. Paige tried to ignore them and focus on meditating; reaching that clear state of mind that seemed to help establishing contact with the Hak. The stillness though only gave her time to think of all that was troubling her. The fact that Turk might not stay with her. That Ethan might have been the male translator working with Evangeline. That her little sister might be heartbroken when Rabbit left. That she might be putting her family into harm's way. It was almost a relief when Mikhail broke the silence.
"What's the symbol mean?"
"It's a hexagram. The priests marked the Hak to be able to tell them apart."
"It's some kind of Japanese hexadecimal system?"
"It's an ancient Chinese symbol system. The six lines are actually two sets of trigrams, or three lines, of solid and broken lines. The broken lines, the ones with spaces in the middle, represents yin, and the solid line represents yang."
"Two to the third power; eight possible trigrams," Mikhail murmured. "Two to the sixth power; sixty-four possible hexagrams."
"Yes. And each hexagram has a very complex meaning. They use them sometimes for divination."
"How many Hak have they numbered like this?"
"Sixty-four."
"Because they ran out of symbols?"
"No. That just happened to be the number of Hak that come and go here."
"That's . . .odd. Exactly sixty-four?"
"Yes."
"Which one is this one?"
" Thirty-six. Darkening of the Light. The inner trigram is li; radiance or fire. The outer trigram is kun; field or earth."
"If you were doing a divination, what would this hexagram tell you?"
Paige wondered why Mikhail would want to know. "Darkening of the light. He lowers his wings. He finds difficulties and does not eat for three days."
"He who?" Turk asked.
"I was never really clear on that part." Paige said.
"Anything else?" Mikhail asked.
"Stay on track, but beware of difficulties. The correct path is not always the easiest or most popular. Explore disorder to conquer it. However do not deal too harshly with disorder which has been the standard for a long time. Change must be gradual. He enters the left belly of darkness. He sees the true nature and understands that which is obtainable and that which must be avoided."
Turk grumbled something too low for her to hear, then asked, "We just sit here until . . ."
"Until it comes out of its shell."
So they waited
as the cherry blossoms drifted down.
* * *
Hillary and Rabbit returned with food they'd purchased from street vendors. It was amusing although a little sad to see Rabbit puzzle over the strange form and tastes; the boy had eaten pre-packaged protein bars his entire life.
After they ate, there was nothing to do but sit and wait. Time seemed to slow down until it nearly stopped. Nearby a cicada had taken up its drone, somehow even more timeless than silence.
"This reminds me of Urashima Taro." Hillary yawned.
Paige murmured agreement. "It always makes me think of him too."
"Who is Ur-Ur-" Rabbit stumbled on the Japanese name.
"Ura-shi-ma Ta-ro." Hillary pronounced out the name slowly. "He was a young kind-hearted fisherman who saw some children tormenting a sea turtle. Taro bought the turtle and released it into the ocean. Sometime later, the turtle returned and invited Taro to visit an enchanted palace of the dragon king. He was welcomed there, given wonderful things to eat and drink, and fell in love with the beautiful Oto-hime, or Princess Oto. But after three months, he grew homesick, and asked to be returned to his village. Reluctantly, Oto-hime granted his wish. She gave him a box with instructions never to open the box. So Taro left the wonderful palace under the sea, but when he arrived at his village, he found everything had changed. He'd been gone not for three months, but for three hundred years. Everyone he knew was dead. Everything he knew was gone."
"What was in the box?" Turk asked.
"The effects of time on him." Hillary said. "He opened the box and poof, he aged three hundred years in a moment."
"Why would he open the box when she told him not to?" Rabbit asked.
"Because he was a man." Hillary said.
"What else could have he done? He'd lost everything important." Turk said.
"He could have gone back to Oto-hime," Paige said.
Turk frowned, perhaps recognizing the connection that could be drawn between Taro and himself.
"Was Taro's turtle one of the turtles in the koi pond, or one of these big turtles?" Rabbit asked.
Hillary shrugged. "It might have been a Hak."
"It's an old story." Paige said. "I think it was first told on Earth. There are stories from almost every culture like it. There's the tale of Oisin, who fell in love with the fairy woman called Niamh. She took him to a magical land to live with her, but after what seemed to be three years, he returns to Ireland only to discover three hundred years had passed there."
"It could have still been one of the Hak," Hillary clung to her theory. "They say that Hak jump using their chi instead of spaceships."
"That's never been proven." Paige said.
"But why do the men leave?" Rabbit asked.
No one could answer him.
* * *
Mikhail was called away, taking Rabbit with him. Hillary volunteered to ferry Mikhail back to the Svoboda. It left Paige alone with Turk with lots of uncomfortable silence to fill. Luckily, Oust appeared to save her. The old Red paused at the edge of the clearing and eyed the Hak, looking to see if the alien was stirring.
"It's still mediating." Paige stood.
Turk started to rise. She didn't want him in tow until she was sure Ethan wasn't involved. It was unlikely that he had been; Ethan left Ya-ya some time ago. But there was a profound lack of male translators. Paige motioned that he should stay seated. "Stay here and play placeholder. Someone will take our spot if we all leave."
Turk settled, trusting her completely.
"You're looking for Evangeline." Oust murmured once they were out of earshot.
"Yes, I want to ask her some questions about some translating she's done."
Oust shook his head. There was sorrow in his eyes. "She's not in Ya-ya. She went off with Hardin."
"She left?"
He darkened. "That bastard treated her like she was one of his cats. Nothing. Expendable. And the worse he treated her, the more addicted she was to him."
And the hard question. "Was Ethan working with her and Hardin?"
"Yes, he was."
Even expecting it, it hurt.
"How did they get involved with a man like that?"
Oust looked away, something like shame on his face. For several minutes, he was silent, and then, wetting his mouth, he said, "I didn't realize what Ceri was doing. Not at first. I thought she was just teaching our little girl to be good. I didn't realize how quietly her mother had destroyed Ceri. How quietly Ceri was destroying our daughter."
Paige covered her mouth to keep in the gasp. Oust was talking about the traditional Blue training. She had heard how it ingrained into a woman the need to please a man. Any man. All men. That good little girls were sweet, and gentle, and gave to men what they wanted. She thanked the gods often that her family avoided passing on the training, although she wasn't sure how.
"The men here in Ya-ya, they are in awe of those that talk to the gods. But Hardin, he saw Evangeline as a Blue, and he treated her that way, and she craved it, because that's what her mother had taught her was the only way of being good."
She didn't know what to say in the face of that horrible confession. What worried her was that Evangeline sick love somehow involved her brother. "How does this relate to Ethan?"
"Ethan had been working to establish a lexicon for the seraphim. He asked Evangeline to help him. He needed someone to be placeholder for him with the Hak, but she became more involved. I think she realized that ultimately Hardin would see value in Ethan's work. As soon as they had some success, she went straight to Hardin."
Blues were very good liars. Evangeline was one of the few people in Ya-ya that could have kept Ethan from realizing that she meant to betray him.
"Why was Hardin interested in communicating with the seraphim?"
Oust looked uncertain. "I don't know. Ethan had started building odd machines in an attempt to talk to the seraphim. Ethan rented a workshop and hired some workers. It was a strange mix of people. A couple of humans from here in Ya-ya. A few newcomers. A minotaur. An obnaoian. He had some success before he ran out of money; Hardin gave him more."
There seemed to be a weird hiccup of logic. She knew that ultimately Ethan had built something that allowed Fenrir's engine warp out of the Sargasso—but how did he go from trying to communicate with the seraphim to that. "What exactly were the seraphim telling Ethan?"
Oust shook his head. "I don't know. I do know that the first device allowed them to talk to the seraphim. Ethan thought of whatever the seraphim told him as a mandate from heaven. Hardin didn't see it that way, so Ethan started to keep parts of what he was doing hidden from Hardin. Ethan was afraid anything he told me would find its way to Evangeline. Ethan realized after he saw her with Hardin that she'd tell Hardin anything she learned."
The last part sounded like Oust was quoting Ethan, which meant Ethan was obviously still talking to Oust about something. Namely Hardin. "He told you he didn't like working with Hardin?"
Oust nodded. "He kept coming to me. Encouraging me to do something about Evangeline. He needed the money that Hardin was giving him. He was sure that if Evangeline wasn't leaking his secrets that he could control Hardin. I think he underestimated the man."
For a Blue, Ethan could be blind. "What did Evangeline tell you?"
Oust sighed and spread his hands helplessly. "Hardin told them both not to tell anyone about Ethan's project, and that included me. And then Hardin took them both away."
"Ethan didn't tell you anything?"
"He didn't want to jeopardize his source of money."
That sounded like Ethan.
* * *
Hillary and Rabbit returned while Paige was off with Oust. Turk was about to track Paige down when she returned to the Hak. Oust had delivered bad news; Turk could see it on Paige's face when she rejoined them.
"I have the address of Hardin's workshop." She studied the Hak for a moment. "I don't think it's going to come out soon. We might as well go and check out the workshop. Hilla
ry can stay and be my placeholder."
The girl pouted. "How am I supposed to contact you if it starts to stir?"
Paige let out an exasperated breath. "You should have thought of that before you volunteered. I'll check back every few hours."
"Rabbit can stay with her." Turk didn't like the idea of leaving the young girl completely alone, unarmed, without a boat or any way of contacting them. Rabbit could keep her safe. "He can radio me."
Paige gave him a dark look but said, "Fine."
They left the two teenagers watching the unmoving alien and headed back to their boat.
"Evangeline is Ceri's and Oust's daughter," Paige explained. "Oust says that Evangeline went with Hardin. He's quite upset. Hardin sees Evangeline as nothing but a Blue."
Turk realized then that Ceri had been a Blue. It seemed a small betrayal that Paige hadn't told him the truth about the woman. "Why didn't you tell me Ceri wasn't human?"
Paige gave him an odd look. "She's human."
"She's a Blue," Turk said.
Paige shifted uneasily. "Blues are human."
"They're adapted. Like Reds."
"Doesn't make them less than human," Paige snapped.
Turk wasn't sure why it seemed to bother Paige. He tried edging around whatever was making her angry. "So Ceri's a Blue?"
Paige studied him a moment before nodding. "Her mother was one of Mary's original cache of Blues. The woman been 'classically trained' which is fancy words for the brainwashing they do to Blues in crèche before selling them. They're taught that their value comes from how well they sexually please men. They're worthless if they're not visually perfect and fuck any man silly."
Turk nodded. He'd known about the training but he'd never met a Blue. Before, the knowledge had been a set of facts. Now it was distasteful.
"Ceri showed her ability young and was switched to be trained as a translator before she was eight, but not before her mother had instilled classical training into her. The reason everyone expects sex from translators is because Ceri thinks that all business dealings have to end with sex."
