“You should be. Lanar, in particular, has been quite critical in years past of inner-family scions who turn out, in his words, to be a dead waste of an apprentice billet.”
There was a distinct sour note in Natelth’s voice on the last phrase. ‘Rekhe wondered if, perhaps, his brother had once encountered the rough side of Lanar’s tongue himself. Surely not … thought Lanar was old enough …’Rekhe found the possibility amusing, and strove with some difficulty to keep his thoughts from showing on his face.
“It was the Ildaon thing,” he said, “with sus-Dariv’s Path-Lined-withFlowers. But that was mostly luck.”
Natelth shook his head. “I’d call it keen ears and quick thinking, if the report is true, but I won’t deny that syn-Avran believes you’re a lucky man. Another reason he wants to advance you, in fact.”
That was the opening that ’Rekhe had hoped for. “If I’m a luck-maker, then I belong with the Circles, not on shipboard. Wild luck is dangerous.”
Natelth looked resigned. “You haven’t changed your mind, then.”
“We had an agreement,” ‘Rekhe pointed out. “Do my duty, make my ’prentice-voyage, and I could join a Circle with your good will and free permission.”
“I’d hoped that the time with the fleet would change your mind on the subject.”
“I’m afraid not,” ’Rekhe said. “It’s not the fault of anybody in the fleet—if I weren’t going to the Circles, I’d take Captain syn-Avran’s advancement and be happy to do it.”
“I understand,” said Natelth, though ’Rekhe didn’t think he really did. “syn-Avran’s loss will have to be the fleet-Circle’s gain.”
“Ah … no. I don’t think that would be a good idea.” This was going to be the tricky part; ’Rekhe would have to be very careful. “Going to the fleet-Circle, I mean.”
Natelth frowned. “Why not? You’ve trained with them before, and at least that way you’ll still be in the family.”
“That’s the problem,” ’Rekhe said. “I am in the family. Too much in the family; it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the Circle, having me around.”
“Hmph.” Natelth shoved the folder aside and looked at ’Rekhe. “Disappointing, but I can see your reasoning. Do you have another Circle in mind, then? Just so long as you don’t go to another of the fleet-families …”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. I’ll look around; there are always new Circles forming and old Circles needing to fill a place.”
As the oldest child of his family’s senior line, Kiefen Diasul was supposed to study trade and manufacturing and the keeping of accounts, the better to oversee his family’s mercantile interests. To the delight of his siblings and several cousins, however, Kief had adamantly refused to learn any of those things. He attached himself instead to the Institute of Higher and Extended Schooling in Hanilat, where he worked in the stargazers’ disciplines; and he left his family altars for the workings of the Mages.
The Circle he joined was a quiet one, associated with the Hanilat Institute and drawing most of its members from the students and faculty. The school grounds and buildings were quiet, and the local population was more-or-less well behaved. The Institute Circle had not needed to perform a great working for more than a decade, a fact which Kief found reassuring.
It was true that he had the Mage’s gift—he could see the eiran glowing like silver threads, and could act in concert with the Circle to make the threads weave according to his desire—but he had no urge either toward heroics or toward changing the shape of the universe. He was content to help perform the small rituals that kept the Institute happy and secure, at the same time as he used the school’s massive telescope and its equally massive multiple-node house-mind to watch the distant stars.
The stars, in the end, were his undoing.
From his first years with the Institute onward, he had studied the problem of interstellar navigation. The star charts used by the fleet-families, he would admit when forced to be polite, were marvels of practical utility. They combined observed data from known locations with markers left by Void-walking Mages to produce a tool upon which hundreds of spacefarers daily wagered their lives and fortunes. A good enough tool, and safe enough … but Kief nevertheless found it, as an intellectual construct, aesthetically displeasing.
“There’s no predictability,” he complained, not for the first time, to the fellow student who shared his cramped office space at the Institute. “Until some Void-walker makes it there and back, we don’t have a marker. And if we don’t have a marker, we can’t send a ship. And if we can’t send a ship, we don’t have observed data … and if we don’t have observed data, then the points on a star chart might as well be random imaging artifacts for all the truth in them.”
His office-mate, Ayil syn-Arvedan—whose own field of interest was the less emotionally taxing question of interstellar gas clouds—shook her head. “I’ll grant you that it’s not elegant—”
“Elegance doesn’t come anywhere near it,” he cut in. “If logical processes were pieces of string, this one would be a mended bootlace.”
“—but it works.”
“So does the bootlace, if you don’t pull on it too hard.”
He pushed his chair back from a desk covered with sheets of printout material, stacks of stiff plastic charts, a combined chart-reader and house-mind interface, and a half-dozen empty paper cups. Kiefen Diasul was tall and gangling, with long, light-brown curls already turning an early grey, and an abundance of nervous energy that expressed itself in quick, jerky motion. The cramped, windowless office didn’t give him much room to pace, but he used all the room that he had, moving restlessly from the desk to the bookshelves to the uffa pot on its ceramic heater.
He pulled down another paper cup from the dispenser and filled it with the pale yellow liquid. It was lukewarm, as usual. “There should be a way to make the charts give us hard numbers and not just probabilities … hard enough numbers that we can use the charts to reach places we haven’t yet been.”
Ayil looked at him as if he had produced the last piece of an especially intriguing puzzle. “That’s the important part for you, isn’t it—the ‘never been before’ thing?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “It’s hard for some people to understand. You … your family is—what?”
“Country,” she said. “Land.”
“Then they wouldn’t know. And the City-professionals … they don’t know either. But the Diasul are traders and manufacturers, and we come up against it all the time.”
“Up against what?”
Kief made an impatient gesture. “How slow it all is,” he said. “So many stars—so many planets, if we only knew how to reach them! So many worlds waiting for trade. And the fleet-families own them all.”
“Not really,” she said.
He gave her a scornful glance. “They own the charts and the routes and the ships, which amounts to the same thing. But that’s not the worst of it. They own all the Void-walkers, too.”
Ayil blinked, startled. “I didn’t know that. I thought—”
“—that the Circles did their work for its own sake?” He was pacing in earnest now, his paper cup of uffa forgotten on a corner shelf. “Once, maybe, but not any more. The only Circles that do serious exploration are the ones attached to the fleet-families, and the fleet-families don’t want new worlds opening up faster than they have ships to trade with them … and nobody designs ships or builds ships or lifts ships except the fleet-families. So it’s slow, too slow. Not enough trade, not enough real data coming in to make the charts useful for anybody outside the families. It’s like choking to death when you know the room is full of air.”
Ayil was undiscouraged by his tirade. “I was going to say, I thought there were still independent Circles doing work like that.”
“Name one.”
“Demaizen,” she said. “My brother Del is working there, and he says that Garrod—”
Kief halted in his pacing. “Garrod.”
“This Demaizen,” Kief demanded. “Where is it?”
“In the country,” she said, and added, before he could expostulate further, “I have the address.”
‘Rekhe met with Elaeli Inadi on the third morning after the end of their prentice-voyage. His first day back in Hanilat had been filled with all the rituals of homecoming: The greetings and exclamations about his increased height and strength and presumable maturity, the dutiful presentation of flowers and incense at the family altars, the welcoming feast. Isayana had instructed the kitchen-aiketen in the identity and preparation of all his favorite dishes, and ’Rekhe had been obliged to eat heartily.
On the second day had come the discussion with Natelth. By the time that bit of family business was over, Elaeli had packed up her gear and left Ribbon-of Starlight. It took ’Rekhe most of the afternoon and evening to find her again, and to set up a rendezvous at the sculpture fountain outside the Five Street transit hub.
‘Rekhe arrived at the meeting place early, but Elaeli was already there, sitting on a stone bench and watching fresh water rise up from the pool and tumble downward over the fountain’s tall abstract shapes of steel and bronze. Unlike ’Rekhe, she still wore the sus-Peledaen blue and crimson, now with the piping and emblems of a Pilot-Tertiary.
He sat down beside her on the bench and put an arm around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and they sat that way for several minutes without speaking, while the rented groundcars came and went in the lot across the plaza, and the city busses rumbled up to the curbside, disgorged their passengers, and moved on.
“How did it go?” she said at last.
“Natelth? Better than I’d hoped, actually.”
She chuckled, a warm throaty sound. “You weren’t really expecting your brother to order you into the fleet, were you?”
“Mmh,” ’Rekhe said. “Natelth’s stubborn if you hit him wrong. If he’d taken it into his head that I was crossing him outright …”
“He couldn’t have stopped you.”
“No, but I might have had to leave the family altars for real if it came to that.”
“But it didn’t,” she said. “So where are you going?”
“I have a letter of introduction from the fleet-Circle’s First to another Circle out in the Wide Hills district.”
“That’s a long way from Hanilat.”
“It’s shorter than the far end of a trading voyage,” he said. “And I didn’t have much choice. Garrod syn-Aigal is the only Void-walker I know of who isn’t bound to one of the fleet-families. He was working at the Institute when we left Eraasi on the Ribbon; I thought he’d still be there when I came home.”
“But he wasn’t, so now you’re going away to—where in the Wide Hills, exactly?”
“Demaizen.”
“Never heard of it … you will write me a letter once in a while, won’t you?”
He smiled and drew her closer. “Only if you promise to write me letters back.”
9:
Year 1122 E. R.
ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT
AREGIL HIRING HALL
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: AN-JEMAYNE
The Port Street Foundling Home kept the children it took in until they reached the age of legal employment; resources did not exist to shelter them further. The warden made every effort to find some kind of work for those who departed, but not all of his efforts were rewarded with success.
In spite of Ty’s unpromising origins, nobody expected him to be one of the warden’s difficult cases. He came to what would of necessity be his last year at the Home easy in heart about his future path. He would leave the Home and its school for the fellowship of the Three Street Circle.
He had, by that time, worked with the Circle for half a dozen years: From the early days when he had been a wide-eyed youngster coming around once a week to watch the Mages at their staff practice, to the present, when he was spending all of his free time in their company. He had learned how to use the simple visualizations and meditations, and had begun to practice regularly with—though he did not yet own—a short wooden staff. He had not taken the final step that would mark him as a Mage forever, the act of joining his strength and will to the Circle’s larger intent, but he knew that the day would come soon.
When the warden called him to the office one afternoon close to the end of the term, Ty felt no particular twinges of unease. He hadn’t been a discipline problem—except sporadically, and in the usual proportions—for years, ever since he’d found out that the Mages wouldn’t let him study with them on those days when he had fallen from grace. He’d learned to keep up his classwork for the same reason; he never became one of the Home’s shining academic lights, but he did well enough to stay out of trouble.
The office was a small, worn room on the first floor of the Home. It had seen a number of different wardens, and a generation or more of such interviews as this. The immaterial dust of all those past conferences lay thick on the cabinets and the chairs and the wide wooden desk; Ty considered saying as much aloud, but after a moment’s thought decided not to bother. The warden, who saw the physical world and nothing more, would only want to have someone come around with a dampened rag.
Ty took the plain wooden chair across the desk from the warden, folded his hands, and waited. The warden looked at him for a moment, then pulled a sheet of paper out of a large grey folder.
“It’s time we talked about your future,” the warden said.
It was his invariable opening line for an end-of-school interview. The Home’s dormitory comedians had been doing parodies of it for decades. Ty had learned sense, if not respect, over the course of the past few years, and kept his amusement to himself.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The warden cleared his throat. He seemed ill-at-ease; Ty, noticing this, felt a distant, feathery moment of apprehension, quickly suppressed by a clear conscience.
“We all thought,” the warden said, “that once you left, you would be going to join the Three Street Circle.”
The moth-like touch of apprehension returned, stronger this time—thought? would be?—but Ty said nothing and strove to keep his bearing serene.
“I was hoping to go there,” he said. In spite of his best efforts, his hands tightened. “Is there a problem?”
“Well, yes … they say they can’t have you.”
The apprehension wasn’t a light and far-off thing any longer; it settled in Ty’s stomach like a block of lead. For the past six years, ever since the day when he had first comprehended its existence, he had bent himself toward a single goal. Now—if that effort was to be rejected—he wondered if he had accomplished nothing except to make himself unfit for anything else.
He swallowed. His mouth felt dry inside, like paper. “Did they say anything about why?”
“Umm … yes.” The warden looked again at the sheet of paper he’d taken from the folder. “The First apologizes on behalf of the whole Circle, but he says that they’re not brave enough to teach you.”
Ty stared at him. “The First says what?”
“Listen.” The warden read aloud from the paper. “‘We are, honesty compels me to admit, a minor neighborhood Circle with no ambition to become anything more. Your student Ty has already learned those things which we can teach without bringing him completely into fellowship with us; but to take that final step would, I fear, push our Circle onto a path which we do not have the strength to walk all the way to the end.’”
“Where do I go now?” Ty whispered. His eyes burned with the effort of holding back the tears of shock and betrayal. “What can I do?”
For a moment the room darkened and he saw the bright
cords of life like arrows piercing him through hands and heart, straight and hard. Then he blinked and the visions vanished, though not the pain they brought with them.
“We’ll find a place for you, of course,” the warden said, not noticing Ty’s words or the blackness. “Here is a letter of introduction for each of the two hiring halls in Aregil. A strong young man willing to work should be able to get by there while seeking other opportunities.”
Karil Estisk turned down her lamp. The rainy night outside was only city-dark. The lights of An-Jemayne, her own lamp multiplied a thousand thousands of times, reflected off the bottom of the low-hanging clouds and turned the sky a sullen charcoal color. The street lights along the road outside her apartment building shone upward, patterning her ceiling with the shadows of tree branches outside and lace curtains within.
These days the planetary news was full of stories about heightened tensions and the chance of renewed conflict to come. So far, though, Karil hadn’t seen a return to the blackout nights of her early childhood, when she and her family had slept in the bomb shelter more often than not. If she were lucky, she’d be back into space and away before things got that bad again.
Maybe I should close up the apartment for good this time, she thought. I can always rent another one if I have to.
She found the idea depressing. She didn’t like the thought of becoming like the older spacers, the ones from her parents’ generation and before, who did their best to live their lives outside of atmosphere and never went dirtside if they could help it.
Karil turned away from the light and went back to her treadmill. She used the machine whenever the cold or rain made running outside too uncomfortable. A professional spacer needed to keep in shape. In an emergency on shipboard, the strength and reliability of her own body might be the only thing that would prevent disaster. Karil thought about disasters a lot, trying to work through what to do in each event, so if the real thing ever happened she’d be ready.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 8
