Tales from Ardulum

by J. S. Fields

  “Hey.” Atalant brushed a lock of dark-red hair from the side of Emn’s face and kissed her cheek. “This is supposed to be a vacation, remember? No sentient planets, no whispering trees, and no council meetings.” Atalant brushed her hand across Emn’s shoulder and down her arm before she slipped it down to Emn’s hip. Her fingers began to stroke in small circles at the tight skin there. “Just you and me, Yorden, Nicholas, and Salice on a galactic joyride. No robes. No complications.”

  The blanket had fallen off Atalant’s shoulders and pooled around her waist, exposing the chain of linked hexagons—her Talent marking for Aggression—across her right side. “Even after so long, I’m still not used to these,” Emn said, nodding at them. She wanted to trace the raised, black veins that pushed from Atalant’s skin, but it seemed silly to do so. Emn knew what they felt like. Her whole body was covered with the same markings that she alternately despised and loved. Despised because they made her an outcast amongst her own people, but loved because they had brought her and Atalant together.

  Atalant raised an eyebrow. “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Would you come closer?”

  Atalant blinked in surprise, but scooted into Emn’s arms. Emn moved to her back as Atalant pillowed her head on top of Emn’s breasts and threaded their legs together. Within the heat of her skin against Atalant’s, Emn tried to let the last of the scream slip from her mind.

  “You’re having a hard time with this winding down thing,” Atalant remarked. “It’s been a year nearly to the day since we left Neek. The damn Ardulan Eld ceremonies are finally over. The Risalians have the Charted Systems back in working order, more or less, and the Mmnnuggls are quiet. We’ve got Ardulum in a nice, quiet, uninhabited solar system where it can’t do any major harm. Now, we all just need to decompress.” Atalant looked up and smirked. “I could help you, if you wanted.”

  Emn smiled and tangled a hand into Atalant’s hair. It was loose—a rare occurrence—and the strands were thick and slightly curled.

  “I would like that a lot,” she responded, glad to have left the conversation about why she was out of bed in the first place. “But I want to take my time because things were very one-sided last night.”

  Atalant snorted. “My head was comfortable between your legs. I didn’t see any point in moving.”

  “Mmm-hmm. My point is, I don’t want to get interrupted halfway through.” And you’re going to stay put this time, she added across their telepathic link.

  You could ask the andal to pin me to the bed, I suppose, Atalant suggested with a smirk. Or cellulose-voodoo the cotton in the bedsheets into a sort of restraint…

  Atalant sent images along with the words, making Emn flush. “I’ll be certain to bring a potted andal tree along next time. But right now—” Emn glanced at the digits glowing on the wall. “—we’ve about an hour before we promised we’d meet the others. Time for breakfast?”

  A heavy sigh came from Atalant as she nuzzled Emn’s neck. “I have some andal in the captain’s quarters. I can reach it from here. You wouldn’t even have to leave the bed.”

  “And when your stomach starts growling?” Emn asked. “You’re going to eat andal too?”

  Atalant pushed herself up and looked at Emn with a long, deliberate stare while her right hand trailed down Emn’s stomach and gently cupped her between the legs.

  “Atalant,” Emn said reproachfully, although the warmth of Atalant’s hand caused her hips to rise involuntarily from the bed.

  “If you insist. You know, nothing says we have to leave the ship on this vacation. The rest could go take a lengthy shore leave, and we could explore the various nooks and crannies—” Emn opened her mouth, but Atalant jumped back in. “—of the Lucidity, although I’m open to other suggestions.”

  This time, Emn giggled. The screaming seemed more like a distant memory now, fading as fast as a dream. Maybe she was just tired and worn down from the last year and a half or so. Whatever it was that was causing the noise, it could wait. She and Atalant had done enough waiting for a lifetime.

  Emn squirmed out from under Atalant, put her hands on her own hips, and tilted her head. Atalant’s eyes were looking everywhere but at her face, so Emn grabbed a green shirt from the floor and tossed it onto the bed. Atalant wrinkled her nose in response.

  “Breakfast first,” Emn ordered as she grabbed another shirt and pulled it over her head. “With clothes. Then, we can talk about whether we’re leaving this ship at all in the next two weeks.”

  “WHERE’S ATALANT?” NICHOLAS asked as he all but skipped into the galley of the Lucidity, where Emn was finishing off a steamed andal twig. He was dressed smartly in fitted brown pants that ended just above his ankles and a pale-blue collared shirt. His thick, black hair was neatly braided, and he walked with the confidence of an adult, although there was no hiding the youthfulness of his steps. Emn sat back in the thick cushioning of the chair and smiled. It was good to see Nicholas out of his flight suit and out of Ardulan work clothes. He was home—well, closer to home than he’d been in a long time—and Emn envied the lightness he carried even after everything.

  “She’s just gone to change her shirt,” Emn responded. She finished off her piece of andal and sipped water from a plastic cup.

  Nicholas chuckled as he tore off a piece of bread from a loaf they’d brought from Ardulum and flopped into the nearest chair. “And what happened to her old one?”

  Emn looked at him wryly. “She spilled juice on it. Nothing else.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t you have a meeting to prepare for?”

  Nicholas swallowed the bread and dusted his hands over the tabletop. “Yeah, but I can’t go anywhere without Yorden and Atalant. It’s great that the notary was willing to meet us in the Alusian System, but only Yorden can certify my Journey completion certificate, and since we’re on Atalant’s ship now, she has to be the one to sign me on for apprenticeship. I’m still too young to officially be on my own, at least by Charted Systems standards, so thank god Mom was willing to go for the apprentice extension, especially after I managed to get involved in two separate wars.”

  Yorden entered the galley, grunted at both of them, and headed to the corner where the oldest piece of technology Emn had ever seen, a Terran coffee pot, sat against the wall. It was held together with biofilm plaster and funny-looking silver tape and smelled like moldy perf.

  “Good morning, Cap— Yorden.” Emn still slipped on the honorific, especially when they were all onboard a ship. Fortunately, the slip brought a smile to Yorden’s face, which was rare before he’d had at least two cups of coffee.

  “And just where is that girlfriend of yours?” Yorden asked as the coffee began to percolate.

  Nicholas answered before Emn could. “Getting dressed. Again. But the better question is, where’s yours, Yorden?”

  Yorden cleared his throat for what felt like an excessively long time before answering. “Salice has had too many early mornings throughout her life and has been quite firm about not getting out of bed until she is damn well ready. This morning, that may not be until lunch.” He turned and winked at Emn. “Atalant, on the other hand, was always an early riser.”

  “Atalant spilled bilaris fruit juice on her shirt because the damn pitcher handle broke off and doesn’t appreciate your insinuation,” Atalant said as she stalked back into the galley, took a swipe at Yorden’s arm, which he deftly avoided, and sat down heavily in the chair to Emn’s left.

  “You had no other clean shirts?” Nicholas raised his eyebrows and gestured at the knee-length, pale-blue dress that Atalant wore along with some mid-calf utility boots. “We’ve been off Ardulum for, like, fifteen hours, and most of those, in theory, we’ve all been asleep.”

  Recognizing Atalant’s souring mood, Emn stood and put a hand on Atalant’s shoulder, dipping her fingers ever so slightly under the scooped neckline. “Nicholas,” Emn said in a low voice, “do you have any idea how hard it was to get her to ev
en print this?”

  Atalant folded her arms across her chest, which only succeeded in buoying her breasts, and frowned. “I’m allowed to wear dresses, people. You’re all allowed to wear dresses. They’re comfortable and let stuk evaporate properly, and for the first time in forever, I’m not stuck at a console or table for twelve hours straight. Leave it be.”

  Emn expected at least a smirk from Nicholas, but the young man smiled instead. “You look pretty, Atalant.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Let’s go get your paperwork done.” Atalant covered Emn’s hand with her own and squeezed it. “You’ll come too, right?” she asked, looking up at Emn. “Should only take an hour or so, and after that, we’re on our own.”

  “We should meet for dinner,” Yorden interjected as he finished the black sludge in his cup. “First day of vacation drinking. Salice should be awake by then.”

  Emn’s stomach dropped a little—not because she didn’t want to spend time with the crew, but because she did have every intention of taking revenge on Atalant for last night’s rather one-sided lovemaking. That wasn’t going to happen if they were all drunk.

  You’ll still have me for lunch, Atalant reminded her after Emn’s thoughts leaked across their telepathic bond. I promise to behave.

  That brightened Emn considerably. She offered Atalant a hand up, being sure to take in the flow of the dress around Atalant’s thick legs and wide hips as she stood. I suppose that—

  The scream came again, worse than ever. It scraped the back of her skull and wound through her ears, the sound of an animal caught in a snare. A screech of desperation and fear. Emn fell to her side and screamed back into the void. She clawed at her ears, at the back of her head, yelling to drown out the screaming and the pain.

  Emn! Atalant’s voice edged through the wall of noise, but Emn couldn’t form words. She was dying. Her world was dying, and she was watching. She was being forced into a metal cylinder by Risalians. The voice in her head cried out for help, for a mother, and Emn yelled for her own.

  EMN!

  The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had started. Emn took a moment to breathe, to rest her raw throat, before she opened her eyes.

  She was lying on the carpeted floor of the galley, curled in a fetal position. Atalant had a steel grip on her arm and was fumbling to get another under her to lift Emn upright. Yorden and Nicholas were down on the floor too, their faces etched in concern.

  “Just a funny dream, I think,” Emn said as Atalant eased her into a sitting position. Although Atalant didn’t say anything, Emn felt the other woman’s stuk thin in concern. She tried to force a smile.

  “Where I come from, we call those terrors,” Yorden said. Emn caught him pass a look to Atalant that she couldn’t discern. “This your first one?”

  Emn wanted to lie, but with Atalant right there, her stuk bleeding all over Emn’s wrist, she doubted very much she would get away with it. It didn’t seem fair to burden all of them with what was likely just some repressed first-don issue that her mind finally had time to process. This was supposed to be a vacation, after all. She didn’t want to deal with this. She didn’t want to deal with anything, outside of how to keep Atalant’s clothes on the floor.

  “There have been a few others,” she admitted.

  “How many others?” Atalant’s voice had an edge that made Emn shiver. It was her Eld voice, the voice that had taken command of entire worlds and was slipping easily into a role of unarguable leadership.

  “A few.”

  “How many, Emn?”

  Emn sighed and slouched. “This is the fourth, but they’re not a big deal. They don’t usually make me scream like that. Really. I’ve had nightmares before. A lot, actually, when I was with the Risalians.” Of course, these weren’t anything like those, but that was irrelevant.

  “Christ,” Yorden muttered. “For how long now?”

  Atalant’s grip on her wrist had loosened, but Emn could feel the tension in her body as she leaned against it.

  “It’s not a big deal.” She pushed herself up, but Atalant’s hand fell on her shoulder.

  “Emn.” That was Eld Atalant. Emn shivered.

  “Since we left Ardulum. They started the moment we entered the Systems. Well, this particular type, anyway. They’re…different from my normal nightmares.”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “They’re short. Never longer than a minute, and they’re…telepathic. I think. Or a memory of telepathy. Maybe being on Ardulum got me used to people being guarded with their telepathy, and someone out here is just…spraying emotions or something. Please stop worrying over nothing.” Emn kissed a very stern-looking Atalant on the cheek.

  “If it was telepathic, Emn, I think I would have heard it. I should have the same telepathy potential as you, if not slightly more with the andal stuff.”

  Emn tucked a lock of hair behind Atalant’s ear, hoping she could make the Eld part of Atalant revert to vacation mode. “Yes, but I have a bunch of marks that we don’t even understand. Besides, stray telepathy isn’t dangerous, just irritating. If it gets worse, I’ll see a healer, but until then, could we just forget it? I’m not in any danger. I just need to relax, and Nicholas needs his paperwork.”

  “We are late,” Yorden admitted as he stood. Nicholas followed suit, remaining uncharacteristically quiet. “Atalant?”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  Emn rolled her shoulders. “I know my limits, Atalant.”

  After staring at her for an uncomfortable moment, Atalant nodded. “We could revisit this after we get Nicholas’s apprenticeship in order.”

  “Or until after lunch,” Emn added hopefully. She allowed Atalant to help her stand and then brushed off the side of her pants. “Waiting another few hours won’t make any difference.”

  “AND YOU SWEAR by your solemn rights as a Charted Systems citizen that you take this oath freely and without duress, and that you understand the restrictions imposed by your age and station?”

  “I do.”

  Emn watched from the far side of the room as Nicholas signed the biofilm, Yorden standing to his left, Atalant to his right. She couldn’t help but grin along with him. In Terran culture, yearly aging seemed to come without any large ceremonies, but in many ways, Emn thought this felt very much like a don ceremony. Ardulans kept growing through their first don and didn’t reach their full height until second don, but she remembered standing next to Nicholas, her head just below his shoulder, in the cockpit of the Pledge. She remembered their late-night stories and how he could make any number of improper sounds that had Atalant scowling from across a room.

  She remembered their stolen Mmnnuggl pod and trying to figure out her new body. Looking at Nicholas now—as he straightened and shook hands with the notary, as Yorden clapped him on the back and Atalant gave him a hug—she remembered how similar they had been. And it was hard not to think about how different things would have been if she had gotten to embark on Youth Journey. Or travel at all. Or been perceived as a sentient being.

  The notary, a Risalian with hair just greening at the temples, scanned the document, nodded, folded it, and put it in a wooden briefcase. “The film will be filed tonight and will show up on the record tomorrow.” Xe leaned on the edge of an andal desk that spanned the width of the small room and let hir black, curved claws clack irritatingly against it. Of course, the notary was Risalian. Plenty of other species had taken up administrative government roles since the Crippling War, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it, that they’d still end up with a Risalian.

  “You understand that he cannot begin work until tomorrow,” the Risalian finally concluded after staring an uncomfortably long time at Atalant.

  “That’s fine,” Atalant responded. “We’re not going anywhere for a bit. Anything else?”

  The Risalian’s blue eyes flicked to Emn. They’d done that a dozen times already. She wanted to pluck those white orbs from hir head and mash them into a paste between her hands.


  “Anything else?” Atalant prompted again.

  “No.” The notary replied, hesitation gone. Xe held out two long claws towards Nicholas, who tapped them once with his right hand. “Congratulations, Nicholas St. John of Earth. You are hereby signed to the Scarlet Lucidity for a period of one year, until such time as you come of age. On your birthday, the contract will be null and void and you will be free to move about the Systems without any form of supervision.”

  “Great!” Nicholas grinned and, without any warning, ran back to Emn, took her hand, and half pulled her towards the door. “Come on. Enough with this stuff. Let’s head out and catch a ferry to Craston proper.”

  Emn raised an eyebrow. “Nicholas, I was sort of hoping for—”

  “One hour. That’s barely any time at all.” He turned back to Emn with a lopsided grin. “I’m not a Journey youth anymore. I’m not some stupid kid anymore. It’s like I’ve…” He searched for the words. “Like I’ve just come out of my first don and am ready to start my life, you know. I want to celebrate with my friends.”

  Emn’s insides melted a little. He was right. This was a time to celebrate with friends. Yorden was a mentor and Atalant was her lover, but Nicholas…Nicholas was her first friend. Her only friend, really, although she and Miketh were making reasonable strides in that direction, and Arik made an attempt to talk to her on a regular basis. There was Salice, too, but Emn had not spent much time with the other Risalian Ardulan since her and Yorden’s courtship had blossomed. Nicholas was right. He deserved a celebration, and she needed to be there.

  “Of course, Nick. Let me just tell Salice to get up and dressed. By the time we make it back to the Lucidity’s berth, she should be ready to go. Where do you want to head first?”

  “Well, they have these waterslides on that little continent in the southern hemisphere—”

  Anything else Nicholas said was lost as Emn reached out to the place in her head that Salice’s consciousness occupied from time to time. Hey, friend. Ready to get up? We’re heading to Craston to celebrate Nicholas’s graduation.