“Drink,” Matindi said again, as she bumped the mug against Tembi’s arm. “Driiiiink.”
Tembi scooped one hand around the mug and pulled the tea towards her. “Bayle and Steven are my only real friends,” she muttered from the crook of her arm.
“For now.”
Tembi raised her head and glared. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Oh heavens no, Tembi, everyone at Lancaster loves you!’”
Matindi lifted one dark eyebrow, and Tembi collapsed into giggles.
“Personally? I think you should be glad that your friend has a gentle heart. There are too few people willing to put peace before war.” Matindi got up to pour herself some more tea. She liked to make it the old-fashioned way, with a kettle and a mesh strainer, and she busied herself with these at the sink. Every night, for as long as Tembi had lived with her, they had finished their day sharing time over chamomile tea.
“It was sparring, ’tin! Against Moto! That’s not exactly going to war.”
“Right, right.” Matindi returned to the table. “Sorry, I’ve got work on the brain.”
Tembi’s eyes shifted to the stacks of folios and holocubes scattered around the kitchen. Matindi tended to bake when she was stressing about work. When she had come home for the night, Matindi had been sliding the cinnamon buns onto a cooling tray with one hand, while scrolling through a holo with the other. Tembi hadn’t done too much classwork using action reports, but it looked as though Matindi had been reading something about casualties resulting from an armed conflict. Matindi had snapped off the cube and refused to talk about it, but Tembi was willing to bet it was a report about the war in the Sagittarius systems. Again.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
Matindi nodded. “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “I’m only involved because a pack of fools want to use the Deep to move military forces, and they’re making some good arguments.
“But don’t worry,” she assured Tembi. “I won’t let the Deep be used that way.”
Tembi smiled at her teacher. They had resumed their dreamtime lessons once Tembi had started her training, and the Deep seemed…agitated. Happy, but agitated, as if it needed to talk to Tembi but couldn’t figure out how to do that. Matindi said that the Deep had begun pestering her during Tower meetings, too, trying to call her attention to something important, but it wasn’t able to communicate anything more than bursts of too-complex song. The Deep kept circling back to agitation whenever the Sagittarius conflict came up; they were sure it had something important to say, but it couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell them what it was.
“How about that Steven boy? It’s time you started dating.”
Matindi was usually much more adept at changing the subject. Tembi sighed and let thoughts of a distant war slip away. “Got dumped right before the Deep picked him, and I don’t want to be a rebound fling,” she said. “And, like everyone else in my class, he’s at least three years older than me!”
“Oh gods, yes, I keep forgetting.” Matindi squeezed her eyes tight in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Tembi. I’m twenty-six hundred years old—anyone under a hundred and fifty looks the same age to me!”
“It’s okay,” Tembi laughed. “No one’s lining up to date a girl with skin like mine.”
Matindi pointed at her own face.
“Yeah, I might look Earth-normal, but…” Tembi rubbed her fingertips together, and a sound like small rocks grinding underfoot filled the kitchen. “They say I don’t give kisses, I give abrasions.”
There was a mortified cough behind them. Matthew, clad in one of Matindi’s bathrobes with his bare hairy legs sticking out beneath the hem, scurried out of Matindi’s bedroom. He waved hello to Tembi and scurried down the hall to the bathroom. The sound of the shower kicking on was a loud burble before it dissipated into the white noise of daily life.
“Did I say I was twenty-six hundred?” Matindi said, sipping her tea with her pinkie finger extended daintily. “I should have said I’m twenty-six hundred and twenty-eight.”
Tembi groaned and dropped her head to the table again.
That night, her dreams were full of colored wings.
She stood in the middle of a plane of white nothingness. Most nights, this was where she would meet Matindi, and the two of them would talk to the Deep.
Tonight, Matindi was occupied with her paperwork (or, possibly, Matthew), so Tembi walked into the void alone.
She thought about calling for the Deep, but that never worked. Not in the dream. Instead, she sang.
It was an aria stolen from a planet far across the galaxy, a melody full of high notes which carried across the plane. She didn’t understand the words—the language was dead, or maybe dying, which turned the song into a lament of itself.
But it was beautiful.
L’amour est un oiseau rebelle, Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle, S’il lui convient de refuser.
Music, arcing and wild, full of brightly-colored notes and the smell of deepest night, echoed back to her from across the plane. She could not hear its voice, but she could hear its song; she kept singing and let the Deep fly alongside her, tumbling within its own music.
L’oiseau que tu croyais surprendre, Battit de l’aile et s’envola.
L’amour est loin, tu peux l’attendre; Tu ne l’attends plus, il est là.
Tout autour de toi, vite, vite, Il vient, s’en va, puis il revient.
Tu crois le tenir, il t’évite, Tu crois l’éviter, il te tient!
The Deep joined its song to hers, and colors rained from them upon the featureless plane. Their song went on, reaching a crescendo. By then, Tembi was flying too, riding on the soft and downy back of the Deep.
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime; Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime;
Mais si je t’aime, si je t’aime; Prends garde à toi!
And so the song ended.
Tembi pressed her face against the Deep and whispered, “I’m still mad at you. A little.”
The Deep blew a cloud of bright pink smoke that sounded like a wet bowel movement.
“Stop it,” she said. “You never even asked if I wanted to be your Witch! Everyone else gets a choice. You picked me and that was the end of it.”
The pink smoke went gray, and spiraled up towards where the sky should have been.
“Is that an apology?”
There was a smell of fresh mango and vanilla, spun into sugar and frozen cream.
“Yeah, I love you too, you giant… What are you, anyhow?”
The Deep spun her around in the void in tight pirouettes until her sides hurt from laughing, and they flew on.
They sang together for a while; that was enough for Tembi, but the Deep began to slow down.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
It answered by throwing a fountain of deep blue bubbles at her. The color seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place its source. Before she could ask for clarification, there was a sense of falling; then, she was standing.
Bayle was in front of her, hunched over and crying as she had been in the dojo earlier that night.
“Is this a vision?” Tembi asked the Deep. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
Bayle’s head snapped up. “Tembi!”
“Oh, you’re really here.” She held out her hand to help the older girl up.
“Where are we?” Bayle stood and wiped her face on the sleeve of her robes. “Where is this?”
“It’s…I don’t think it matters,” Tembi said. “It’s where Matindi and I go to train with the Deep at night.”
“Is this a real place? It doesn’t feel real!”
Tembi shrugged. “It’s real enough, and private.”
“There’s no up, there’s no down, there’s—Wait, what do you mean, you come here to train? The Deep’s not here! I can’t hear it!”
Tembi felt as if Moto had landed a so
lid kick to her stomach. “You can hear the Deep?”
“I—well—” Bayle cocked her head to the side, as if listening, and then shook her head. “Yes. Not now, but yes.”
“Why are you in the beginner’s class?!”
“Can we talk about this later?” Fresh tears were starting to stream down Bayle’s face. “This place scares me! I just want to get out of here!”
Tembi was about to argue when the Deep sent a gentle storm of green triangles to tumble like playful kittens around their feet.
“I don’t know what that means,” Tembi told it.
The triangles scrunched up their surfaces to glare at her in disgust, and then disappeared.
“It means I want to leave,” Bayle said. “Please, Tembi.”
“You didn’t see the triangles?”
“All I see is you, and me, and nothing else.” The other girl closed her eyes. “If you know how to get me out of here…this is a prison.”
“It’s not, but—” Tembi didn’t know how to put Bayle at ease. She gave up. “Just wake yourself up.”
“This is just a dream?” Bayle took a deep breath. “How do I do that?”
“You do it every night,” Tembi said. “Your mind already knows the way out. Let yourself follow it.”
Bayle stood quietly, eyes still closed and breathing deeply. After a few moments, she vanished.
“All right,” Tembi said to the Deep. “What was that about?”
The sensation of being nuzzled by a gigantic friendly dog came and went in a cloud of warm woody brown. This was replaced by more of those deep blue bubbles—Tembi realized with a start that these were the same color as Bayle’s eyes.
“Go to Bayle?” she asked.
The Deep pushed at her with that head-butting sensation again, very gently.
“This would be so much easier if I could hear you,” Tembi muttered. “Maybe.” She gave the Deep a hug, and woke herself up. It was night—so late at night that morning was an earnest threat—and Taabu was curled beside her in a nest made from her knees and the sheets. She petted the cat, dressed herself in yesterday’s robes, and slipped out the window.
(Matindi didn’t have a curfew. She said that putting rules about how and when Witches could come and go was busywork for fools, and that Witches needed to know how to police themselves. On the other hand, Matthew would roll his eyes and sigh at Tembi when the quiet got to be too much and she left to go to Hub when he thought she should be sleeping. So, when he slept over, the window it was.)
She hit the ground outside the window with a hard thud! This was followed by a quiet prap-prap of paws as Taabu joined her.
“Coming?” she asked the cat.
Taabu glared at her before it stalked off in the direction of a nearby clump of bushes.
Tembi wasn’t sure where to go next. There was the dormitory where most of the Witches-in-training stayed, but—
At the back of her mind came the smooth, soft press of water.
Oh. Right. The lake.
The lake was a quiet walk towards the east. Sheltered within a grove of Earth-normal redwoods, it was the ideal spot for young Witches to rest and play after classes. Tembi had never visited the lake this late at night; it was empty except for a streak of white cutting through the water.
Bayle did a dozen quick laps in the time it would have taken Tembi to swim two, and then beached herself on a floating dock. She dressed, and then appeared beside Tembi on the shore in a quiet *whump* of displaced air.
“So you can jump, too,” Tembi said. She wasn’t jealous. Not really. “If you’ve got this much control, why haven’t you told Leps and moved out of the beginners’ class?”
“Because I want to go home.” Bayle was holding herself as if she was made of ice. “I want to be a Witch, but I don’t want to be posted anywhere except Atlantis.”
Atlantis: Bayle’s homeworld. All water except for great spikes of land, with cities built in spirals around them. Not to Tembi’s liking, but Bayle could stare at her fingernails for hours, meditating on those tiny windows to her sea.
“And if Leps learns you can jump?”
“Then I’ll be bumped up. Probably posted to an apprenticeship on a big station in a year or two. Atlantis is a nowhere planet. Nobody wants that duty. They’ll assign a third-rate Witch there, especially if she asks for the post, but…”
“…but not a really good one.” Tembi pulled her robes flat against her legs and sat. Light sparkled off of the lake and got tangled within the early morning fog gathering in the air, gleaming like one of the Deep’s sensory thoughts. “How long are you going to keep faking?”
Bayle gathered her own robes around her legs and sat beside Tembi. “Figured I’d wait until you and Steven moved up to the next class, then join you.”
A dark thought poked Tembi straight between her eyes. “Were you… Did the Deep tell you to be my friend?”
“It tried,” Bayle said with a grim chuckle. “I told it I’d talk to you first, and then I’d decide what I wanted to do.”
Tembi groused a little at that, but… Well. Given the options, it was the best outcome.
“I also told it that if I pretended to be your friend and you found out, you’d never forgive it. Or me,” Bayle added. “I don’t think it understands humans.”
Tembi felt a prism of unreal feathers fluff at that statement. Bayle’s gaze drifted away, and she said, “I’m allowed to have my opinions, and you don’t understand us! Sorry.”
“What?” Tembi asked.
“Oh, the Deep is complaining,” Bayle said, waving one hand as if brushing the Deep aside. “It says we’re too…simple to understand.
“At least, I think it means simple,” she added. “Sometimes it mixes up its intentions.”
Tembi picked up a pebble and tossed it into the lake. The water and the mist above it broke into shards of liquid light, and then fell back into their usual ripples. “But you can hear it,” she said. “Can’t you make it explain itself?
“Not really? It’s not conversation,” Bayle said. “When it speaks in words, it’s… It’s like the Deep doesn’t really understand what it’s saying. It gets most of the words right, but I don’t think it fully recognizes what they mean.”
“Matindi says it likes to talk about shipping and schedules, because those use straightforward terms. Anything more complex, and it starts to get confused. Especially if it needs to talk about concepts like friendship.”
“Poor thing,” Bayle sighed. “Imagine if you could only talk about work.”
Tembi felt the Deep settle around them. She reached out with one hand and began to scratch an invisible…something. “And never took any time off,” she said, wondering if she was actually feeling the Deep lean into her fingertips, or if she was imagining it. “And had to talk to twenty thousand Witches across the galaxy, all of them at once—”
“Poor thing,” Bayle said again, then added, “What are you doing with your hand?”
“Oh, it likes to be scratched in the dream,” Tembi said. “Maybe it enjoys it here, too.”
Bayle stared at her as if she was mad, but then stretched out her own hand and began to scratch the air. “It does enjoy it,” she said quietly. She sounded almost awestruck.
They stopped talking. Or, Tembi stopped talking: Bayle seemed to be having a conversation with the Deep. Tembi quit scratching the air, threw a few more smallish rocks into the lake, and then lay back to watch the edges of the trees appear as the sun began to rise.
“Hey, Tembi?” Bayle asked, almost shyly. “I think it wants you to teach me how to sing.”
_________________________________
they come
mother father
far
far
they come
Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 16 December 3439 CE
_________________________________
Chapter Eleven
The next few weeks had nothing to do with music. Instead, it was class
work during the day, and at nights Moto would teach Bayle to spar.
“The Deep doesn’t want you to sing,” Tembi had told Bayle. “Not really. Singing is just one of the ways it talks. It wants you to learn how to move with it. Sparring helps me focus on moving with another person, so maybe it’ll work for you.”
Bayle listened to the Deep for a moment, and then said, “It says yes, but also no, and then I think it threw up in purple?”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“What does the purple vomit mean?”
Tembi shrugged. As far as she could tell, the colors didn’t have meaning. Neither did the motions, or the textures, or the smells, or…or any of it, really. Those differed according to the Deep’s mood: one day, it would use deep blue bubbles in place of Bayle’s name; the next, the wild smell of the open sea.
Music could keep pace with the Deep, because music was always changing. To Tembi, it made perfect sense that music was part of the Deep’s language. But she couldn’t understand why nobody at Lancaster tried to sing along with it, or why music wasn’t part of their training. In fact, she had been astonished (and bewildered, and more than a little dismayed) to learn that when the Deep was new, music had been forbidden to its Witches! Not just in their school, but in the entire city of Hub. It had been thought that a song in the mind could crowd out the Deep, so when the city around the school was built, the Witches demanded that music—all music—be excluded.
A mighty feat, that. Among all the peoples of all the worlds, music was their shared constant. The Deep bound those worlds together and allowed them to be as one, so they could cross the Rails without ships or fuel or the other burdens of travel. And, as the Deep allowed them to bind their fortunes, so they had given the Deep this one vast city to seal music away from its Witches.
As for the Witches themselves, they had built their school behind walls and forests and gardens and great green lawns not for safety or beauty, but to dilute the sounds of the city, as cities make their own music.
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