Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  He couldn’t finish.

  “The Deep won’t let that happen,” Tembi said.

  “Tembi—”

  She looked up at him. “The Deep,” she said, “won’t let that happen.”

  “Okay.” Matthew closed his eyes, unwilling to shatter her faith. “But you and I are listed as her next-of-kin. We need to talk about how we want to proceed.”

  Then it was meetings with doctors, and meetings with other doctors, and meetings with senior Witches on the Tower Council to see if the Deep could be used to separate Matindi’s brain matter from the toxin. (Answer: Yes, probably, but when Tembi heard what “probably” meant, she decided the answer was no.)

  After this, she and Matthew went down to the cafeteria, ate food without tasting it, and didn’t talk.

  That was where the law found him.

  Four men in Hub’s black uniforms were jumped in to appear beside their table. They were accompanied by another senior Witch, a woman who called herself Dale and who always wore a suitcoat over a long skirt. She couldn’t meet Matthew’s eyes as the lawmen arrested him for attempted murder.

  Tembi shouted. She protested. She told them that Matthew wouldn’t have done this to Matindi, never! And when it was clear they were going to take him away—that Dale was there to ensure the Deep wouldn’t let him jump away!—she wrapped her arms around him and tried to jump them both home.

  Home.

  Matindi’s house.

  Her house.

  Their home.

  It didn’t work, of course, but Matthew thought she was trying to hug him so he put his arms around her and held her. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “Stay with Matindi. I want her healthy so we can all go home together.”

  Tembi nodded, and let him go.

  “Miss?” One of the lawmen had stayed behind, and was trying to get her attention. “Miss? How old are you?”

  She didn’t bother to look at him, her attention fixed on Matthew as he was escorted from the hospital. Everyone in the cafeteria was staring. Gods, Dale wouldn’t even do him the courtesy of a jump, they were just walking him out into the street in front of everybody—

  “Miss?” The lawman put a hand on her shoulder. “How old are you?”

  Now she looked up at him; he dropped his hand and stepped away, quickly. “How old do I have to be to get you to leave me alone?”

  “Eighteen, but—”

  “Then I’m eighteen.”

  “Miss, you’re not—”

  She sent a mental request to the Deep, and two of the metal cafeteria tables rose in the air on either side of the lawman, then tilted so their flat tops were positioned on either side of him, like heavy hands ready to clap.

  The lawman froze. Around them, the other people in the cafeteria gasped; some gathered their children and fled.

  “I’m eighteen,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Tembi asked the Deep to set the tables down, and walked back to Matindi’s room.

  _________________________________

  bookman

  bookman talk

  stonegirl

  stonegirl listen

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 08 August 3116 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Time passed; Tembi barely noticed.

  Matindi was still in the hospital, still unconscious, still healing. Tembi had learned she could be reached in the Deep’s dreams: even though she was mostly rambling and unintelligible due to the sedatives, Matindi had consented to the wait-and-see approach to her own medical care. She had also had the presence of mind to shout at Tembi for pulling the stunt with the tables in the hospital cafeteria, yelling about how the Deep was not a weapon, young lady, and how dare you ask it to behave in such a way?!

  This, more than anything else, had assured Tembi that Matindi was on the road to recovery.

  Knowing that Matindi was still here, still alive and present and able to connect with the Deep, made things easier. Not better, but easier. Classes didn’t stop because Tembi spent her nights in a too-quiet house. Life didn’t stop because the senior Witches kept dropping by with casseroles and pestering her to leave and move into the dormitories with the other students.

  Life didn’t stop because the law was keeping Matthew in a cell.

  “He didn’t do it,” Tembi said to Bayle and Steven for what might have been the hundredth time that day. They were in class, and the usual tasks of moving foam balls around the room held no appeal for her.

  “We know,” they replied in unison.

  “This isn’t right!” she shouted at them. “I need help!”

  They didn’t—couldn’t—give her a good answer.

  She walked out of class, ignoring Leps’ protests. When the Deep floated her back to the classroom, she sat at her desk, unmoving, staring at the far wall.

  Leps let her go early. Tembi had expected another essay in punishment; instead, Leps had put one hand on her shoulder and told her to take a few breakdays to get her head together.

  Tembi walked to the hopper station and flew into Hub. She wasn’t sure where she was going, or why, but her feet knew: once they hit the pavement, they took her straight to Matthew’s holding cell. The law was keeping him in a small apartment located in the center of their offices in Hub. It was run down and smelled slightly of bodily fluids, but visitors were free to come and go.

  Not just visitors, it seemed. When Tembi arrived, Matthew was walking back to his apartment in the presence of a law officer and another Witch, a small bag of leftovers from lunch in his hands.

  “Um…” Tembi pointed to the bag after they had exchanged a quick hug.

  “Oh,” he said, and handed it to her. “I’m sorry, Tembi. If I had known you were coming, I’d have picked up extra.”

  “No,” Tembi said, shaking her head. “Why are they letting you walk around?”

  The law officer nodded at Tembi, unlocked the door to the apartment, and left.

  “C’mon in,” Matthew said, as he opened the door for her. “Do you know Maxwell?”

  “No. Hello,” she said to the other Witch. He gave her a little wave but didn’t bother to speak. He was a few years older than Moto, probably somewhere near Leps’ age, and was typing away on a holo-projection generated by a databand on his wrist, all but ignoring her and Matthew. “Why are you—”

  “Basically a free man?” Matthew said, as he motioned for her to sit at the seedy kitchen table. Tembi sat, and he went to scavenge utensils from the drawers. “Matindi wasn’t the only Witch on the Tower Council who’s been poisoned.”

  Tembi, who had been unwrapping the bag to see what was inside, snapped upright. “What?!”

  “We’re keeping it quiet,” he said, as he slid a plate and a mismatched knife and fork over to her. “The law has decided I’m most likely not responsible, but until a better suspect comes along, I’m under their supervision.

  “And Maxwell’s,” he added, nodding towards the other Witch. “He’s here to make sure I’m not using the Deep to jump poison into anyone’s meals while I’m locked up.”

  Maxwell waved, but didn’t bother to look away from his holo.

  “Okay…” Tembi said, a little hesitantly. She would never understand Hub’s legal system. If they had been on Adhama, Matthew would be in a small room with bars instead of walls and a hole in the floor for his bodily fluids.

  “Have you gone to see Matindi yet?” Matthew asked her.

  “I came to see you first,” she said. “I’ll go by the hospital on the way home.”

  Matthew sighed. “I wish you could jump,” he said. “All of this running around, that’s got to be taking a toll on you.”

  “Not really,” Tembi said. “I like to walk. And the Deep doesn’t—”

  She realized what she was about to say, and snapped her mouth shut and busied herself scooping the leftovers out onto the plate. They hadn’t mentioned their fight, and she wasn’t ready to return to
the topic of the Deep. She knew she was wound too tightly as it was, and she didn’t want to lash out.

  Well. Not at Matthew, at any rate.

  Matthew, apparently, was ready to talk. “It’s fine, honey,” he said. Tembi looked up and smiled at the archaic nickname Matindi used for her. “I was angry, and you were angry, and we took it out on each other. It happens—we’re only human. The trick is to make sure it doesn’t weigh us down from here on out.”

  Tembi nodded, slowly, and said, “I’m still angry, but…”

  “…but other things got in the way,” he said. “I understand. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why we were fighting over the past few days. Maybe we should realize that means we’re not mad at each other, but at the situation.”

  “Yeah.” She began to poke at the food. Some kind of fried rice dish with a lab-grown meat she didn’t recognize. It tasted almost like dry seafood. “I don’t know why you think it’s okay to treat the Deep like your slave.”

  Across the room, Maxwell’s head popped up, then dropped down towards his holos again.

  “I don’t,” Matthew said.

  “You might not think it’s okay, but you still do it,” Tembi said. “If it isn’t right, then why do you let it happen?”

  He spent a few moments examining the tabletop, then said, “Do you know the story of the first Witches?”

  She nodded. “You took me to the Lancaster Museum when I was a little kid, remember?”

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me the story.”

  It came easily; she had told this same story to Kalais a few months before as she had dragged him around the orientation building next to the hopper platform. How, nearly three thousand years before, eight people working on the supply line between Earth and the Mars colonies found their shipments appearing on the other end of the line without any apparent human intervention.

  They began to tell each other about strange sensations that appeared and disappeared without an obvious source.

  The words which sidestepped their ears and appeared in their minds.

  And the…well…the…the floating objects. Everywhere.

  Had they gone mad? No, they decided. Not if these things were happening to all of them. For a time, they thought the shipping docks were haunted by the ghost of a friend who had died in a loader accident.

  Then, the news of similar events began to reach them. All across planet Earth, shipping companies began to report that items were appearing at their destinations as soon as the paperwork had been filed. Scientists were looking into the phenomena, and wanted to collect data from anyone with similar experiences.

  The dock workers went to the scientists and told them about the ghost.

  The scientists laughed, and thanked them for their time.

  The dock workers looked at each other, and then asked their dead friend to lift the scientists up to the ceiling.

  After that, they were taken seriously.

  It took nearly a century to work out that the ghost was not a ghost at all, but an (here, Tembi scrunched up her nose and went with the accepted version of the Deep, for simplicity’s sake) energy field. One that was sapient and wanted to help humans explore the galaxy and expand across the planets.

  And so? They did.

  “That hits the high points,” Matthew said as she finished. “Now, think of that from the perspective of the owners of the shipping companies. The ones who employed those dock workers.”

  Tembi stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Why?”

  “Humor me.”

  “They must have been happy,” Tembi said, thinking back on her classes. “Faster-than-light travel is slow. It can take weeks to reach a planet that the Deep can reach in seconds.”

  “True, but don’t bring FTL into the discussion,” he said. “We invented FTL after we began using the Deep—soldiers needed a quick way to get across the galaxy, and the Deep wouldn’t touch them—so that’s not a factor.”

  “Sure…” Tembi said, shoveling rice into her mouth. Whatever the meat was? Very pleasant. Natural seafood was always too soggy for her tastes. “Then they’d be even happier.”

  “No,” he said. “The management at the shipping companies? Furious. Simply furious. They had lost control over their supply chains, and as the fundamental rule of supply chains is control, they had a planet-sized problem on their hands.

  “Nobody out there,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the city, “thinks about supply chains. They aren’t exciting. They don’t care how they get food, only that they do get it. Reliably. Consistently.”

  Matthew poked the edge of her plate. “Most people don’t have enough food in their own homes to last them a week, Tembi,” he said. “They take for granted that they can go shopping, or stop at a restaurant on their way home. Even very poor people who live off of scraps? They’re at the mercy of rich people who have access to food.

  “Supply chains aren’t exciting,” he repeated. “But they are necessary. Lancaster is a glorified shipping company—that’s all we are. It’s our responsibility to help the galaxy survive.”

  Tembi glanced over at Maxwell. The Witch had been nodding along as Matthew spoke, and towards the end, he had put down his holo to follow the conversation. He noticed Tembi watching him, shrugged, and went back to his reading.

  “Can’t we do this and not treat the Deep like a—” she stopped talking, not yet ready to throw loaded words around him. “Can’t we treat it like a friend?”

  “Tembi?” Matthew’s face dropped, and he looked extremely tired. “I’m dealing with twenty thousand Witches. Many of them are old and stubborn and, to be honest? They can be pretty nasty people. I’m still forced to explain why we allowed music into Lancaster, and that’s been a settled matter for over two millennia.

  “There are so many moving pieces that would need to be changed,” he said. “And the Deep tells me it’s satisfied with how things are, except—”

  He paused to let her finish his thought for him.

  “—except for the Sabenta,” she said.

  Matthew nodded. “I’ve been trying, honey, I really have. But the Tower Council? They’re older than I am, and many of them have forgotten that the Deep isn’t just a convenient garbage disposal. They don’t bother to listen to it anymore. And they won’t tolerate any discussion that they might be the problem, not the Deep. And they most certainly won’t listen to the younger Witches who came to Lancaster after them, and who might be more flexible to change.”

  “If I were the Deep, I’d throw them out,” Tembi muttered.

  “But you’re not,” Matthew said. “That’s the Deep’s decision to make. Not ours.”

  She didn’t have a good answer to that. Instead, she got up and moved her dishes to the cleaner.

  “I’ve been working on getting the Council to help the Sabenta,” he said, as Tembi returned to her chair. “It’s not easy, but I was making progress.” His eyes moved towards the databand on his wrist. “In fact, I was supposed to be at a general hearing in an hour to plead the Sabenta’s case,” he said. “That hearing has been delayed until my release.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” she asked.

  “Because I can manage Lancaster when we use the Deep as a tool,” he said. “I can’t manage Lancaster if the Deep is a coworker, or a friend, or a family member. I can’t reconcile the business of keeping the entire galaxy going with how you and Matindi want all Witches to treat the Deep. There are too many moving pieces for me to deal with.”

  “This is why you two have been fighting,” she said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “But…this isn’t right.”

  Matthew nodded. “I know,” he said. “But neither is letting fifty billion people starve while Lancaster fights amongst ourselves.

  “Why don’t you go and see Matindi,” he said gently. “I’d like to talk about this some more once we’ve had a little time to process, if that’s okay with you. I’m still trying to figure out
whether I can consider the Deep a friend. I don’t know if I can.”

  Tembi’s ears went back; Matthew spotted this, and gave her a very sad smile.

  “I’m old, honey,” he said. “Please remember that it’s hard for me to change, too.”

  _________________________________

  friends

  all

  forever

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 01 December 2714 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Her feet took her to the hospital, through its halls, and to Matindi’s room.

  Her brain wasn’t in any way involved with the journey. No, her brain was busy trying to process the last few months, the anger and frustration that had gone along with almost every stray thought she had towards Matthew—

  —the terrible things she had said to him—

  —but all the while he was trying to change, or at least thinking about whether he could change, and…

  …and…

  …she found herself by Matindi’s bedside. The green Witch was still buried beneath medical equipment, with monitors and dripping liquids and nanobot chambers humming all around her. Tembi stared down at the too-still face of her guardian and knew—well and truly knew!—that someone had tried to kill Matindi…and maybe her, too.

  “No,” she whispered to herself. “No.”

  Her entire world slipped behind a bloody red haze.

  Tembi didn’t remember how she reached the darker neighborhoods of Hub, with the golden birds washed from her face and her robes run through the dirt until they looked rougher than they were. She walked until the sun went down and two men a few years older than she was tried to roll her—for credit or her body, she wasn’t sure. She laughed as she threw the first man against a building, and laughing turned to dark words and crying as she bashed the second man against a trash bin. She grabbed him by the hair and cracked his head against the thick plass, again and again, until the Deep seized her and hauled her from his unconscious, bleeding body.