by Aimee Ogden
“Unknown vessel, return to sea level!” The voice from the frequency crystal cracks. “You lowclan barnacle, get back here!”
Another set of vibrations shakes them, but weaker this time, farther: enough only to rattle Atuale’s teeth.
“What are you going to do at this range, Greatclan Watch? Tickle us to death?” Yanja spins the frequency crystal out of tune without waiting for an answer, and the ship reaches for the heavens.
“Is that why you wanted me to come?” Her voice slithers rough and raw out of her throat. Was she screaming during the descent? She doesn’t remember that. If she presses against the restraints with all her might, she can only just see the blue below and, speckled here and there, the scattered archipelagoes of the Vo. Unseen forces shove her back, though, and she wearies quickly. “Because you thought the Watch wouldn’t shoot at me?”
Yanja’s lips draw back. “Some insurance you are.” It’s not an answer to her question, but it’s as close to one as Yanja is likely to offer. He eases up on the yoke as the vibrant blue of the sky bleeds away into darkness.
The extra pressure sloughs off of Atuale slowly as she takes in the nearness of the stars, the sun. The distance of the world behind her.
She really has left without saying goodbye.
* * *
By the time gravity has abandoned them completely, so has the last meal Atuale ate on her way down the cliff. The sickly acid smell still lingers, though Yanja collects all the floating vomitus with a small hand-vacuum before it spreads too far around the ship. “Egg-eaters,” he says as he works, frequently and with a great deal of bile. His dexterity in free-float is impressive, despite the circumstances. She came to the land to learn how to run on her own feet, but in the meantime, he has taught himself to fly.
After he disposes of the waste, he programs something into the console. “Before I set a course for the jumpweb gate, I need to do a visual check on the outside of the Wanderer—make sure your father’s friends didn’t shake loose anything we can’t do without. Do you think you can keep yourself from imploding the ship if you’re left to your own devices in here?” His teeth gleam when his lip lifts in a sneer. “I’m not risking my neck trying to keep you tethered on untrained extravehicular activity.”
“I’m fine.” Atuale folds her arms. “Do what you need to do.”
“I’ll be back soon.” He pushes away into a somersault but catches himself on a loop anchored to the ceiling. “You don’t need to stay buckled in all the way to Farong, you know. If nothing else I certainly hope you take the opportunity for toileting between here and there.”
“. . . Thank you.” Atuale waits till he flips away again before reaching for the buckles across her chest. The mere action of pressing her shoulders against the seat to slide her arms free sends her sailing upward; she gasps and flings up her hands to ward off the ceiling. Again she rebounds, more gently this time, and a tentative kick sends her arcing out into the ship.
There are long narrow windows set into the upper walls of the Unfortunate Wanderer, and as she drifts past them, moving alongside familiar stars, Atuale has the irrepressible impression that she is the spaceship in flight. She laughs, and blinks hard, and a new constellation of glittering diamonds swirls up to join her. She catches another of the ceiling handholds and oscillates there, caught up in the moment’s wonder.
Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a flicker of movement: the inside lock of the ship, opening wide. Yanja floats in front of it, one hand on the control panel. Watching her. He breaks the stare by ducking his head into a helmet that seals against the wide collar of his suit, and kicks into the lock before it closes between him and Atuale.
She drifts in embarrassment for only a moment. There is something both strange and familiar about the sensation of zero gravity, and the combination is intoxicating. It’s like being back under the sea, but without the attendant weight and pressure of a quarter kilometer of water over her head. She no longer has the biological equipment for deep-sea diving, but she is whole enough here.
She wishes Saareval were here, so that she could share the sweet strangeness. A joy divided is a joy doubled, as the Vo like to say. Maybe someday, when he is made whole again, they will walk the way between worlds together. Even if spaceflight did not prove to be the sort of pleasure fitted to the contours of Saareval’s heart, surely he would smile to see how it filled Atuale’s. A sharp pang jolts the inside of her cheek where she’s bit it. A joy divided is one thing, a joy wasted on what cannot be is something else entirely. She makes a few tentative efforts at swimming, which are less than successful—pulling against the empty air gets her even less far than she made it paddling toward Yanja’s front door with unwebbed hands and dense unpadded body. But she learns quickly how to push off from the cabin wall with a hand or foot and send herself arcing gently, weightlessly, from side to side.
She’s already forgotten Yanja and his business outside the ship when the lock gapes open beside her and blasts her with a breath of subzero air. Before she can roll out of the way, Yanja brushes past. Her knuckles scrape the sleeve of his suit and burn with the terrible cold. “How does it look out there?” she asks, and cradles the hand against herself until it warms.
“Nothing I couldn’t fix.” His fingers find an invisible seam and the suit parts over his shoulders. A strange urge passes over Atuale, to lay a hand between his shoulder blades and see if his flesh has chilled to match the impossibly cold suit. “I’ll send your family an invoice for the parts I had to use when this all is said and done.”
“I’m sure.” Atuale looks away from the hard lines of his body. The last time she saw Yanja, the World-Witch was in confinement, disallowed from travel while soft and replete with spawn. Bred by order of the Greatclan, onto—who was it?—a few of the younger princes from the western clans. She blinks rapidly, dissolving the image of Yanja-past. This Yanja is more himself than that silent, gravid ghost. Or perhaps that is only the fog of memory clouding Atuale’s vision. “Does that mean we can be on our way?”
“As impatient as ever.” His smile curves sharply. “To the gate, then.”
Atuale abandons her free-fall dance to strap back into her seat at the front of the ship. Her eyes scrape the stars for the first signs of the gate, though Yanja reminds her more than once that the ship will detect the gate radiation before she ever can. Finally, long after the console has pinged to warn them of their approach, she catches sight of the first of the gate nodes. There are eight in total, Yanja explains, though Atuale can make out only six, the farthest two of which fade to mere specks at their distance. If she looks past them, she sees only more stars. “Different stars,” Yanja swears, and she has to take his word for it. All her childhood education seems like a fairy tale now, the otherworlds that modified humans for life on myriad planets nothing more than someone else’s often recounted dream.
Yanja counts down their final approach. “Four . . . three . . . two . . .” And just like that, the ship slides through. The stars at the periphery of Atuale’s vision shift dizzyingly, but those ahead of her, the ones she’s been watching as they approached the gate—those haven’t moved, of course. After the bottomless joy of freedom from gravity, the gate jump is shockingly anticlimactic.
She jumps when Yanja laughs at the petulant push of her lip. “Oh, little fry.” He’s shaking his head as he works up a new trajectory on the console. “If every day you’re looking for the next thing that’ll change your life—what’s left in the moments in between?”
Atuale doesn’t have an answer, but then of course Yanja wasn’t really asking a question. Behind and beneath her, the engines growl to change their course. To steer her that much closer to her goal.
* * *
Contractions slash Atuale’s belly like a knife. The birth is an easy one: she has already dropped three of her litter, and the fourth is well on its way. Yet there is a wrongness to all of this. She flushes water over her gills, hungry for a breath of proper air. This sun
-spangled undersea sandbar is her mother’s spawning ground, and tradition and instinct agree that this is where she must deliver herself of her own young.
Or tradition decrees this, at least; instinct refuses to catch up and walk in lockstep. Something is missing, the animal parts of Atuale’s brain scream, something has been forgotten. Overhead, a wave rolls, shattering the light on her face into smaller pieces yet.
One last contraction rises like a spring tide. Atuale groans and pushes into it, wrapping her arms more tightly into the seaweed that anchors her. Finally her last offspring wriggles free of her. She catches only a glimpse of jet-black fur before the nearest midwife wraps it up in a waxcloth bundle and tucks it under one arm to swim away. Her webbed feet wash lazy currents over Atuale’s face. The child will be delivered, of course, to its father’s clan, the artisan Tressh of the southern seas, in the agreement bound by his body and Atuale’s and under the authority of both of their fathers.
Atuale tries to feel sorrow for the loss, for the spawn she created but will never really know. Grief slips quickly away from her, though, and only a queasy airless sensation remains. She lets go of her seaweed bindings and kicks upward, making for the shallow surface.
* * *
When Atuale’s eyes grow sticky, she snatches a scrap of sleep wrapped in a body-sized pouch pinned to the wall. By the time she wakes, her lips are chapped from the air blowing out of a vent just over her head. Wriggling out of the sleep-sack squeezes a few muttered complaints about the vent’s placement out of her. Yanja doesn’t even look up from the book he’s perusing. “Dry skin is a hazard of the lifestyle, my dear. Beats suffocation, anyway.”
Atuale loses count quickly of minutes and hours. They pass a bit of time eating, but not very much: their “meal” is a thick fish-food paste that she has to squirt out of a tube directly into her mouth. It tastes good enough but doesn’t require much in the way of chewing. It’s enough to keep her alive.
The ship cuts across systems and slides through more jumpweb gates. They pass close to a brownish world barely striped with blue water; Atuale wonders how they live. Another system hosts a distant blue-white sun, and as they pass by Yanja points out the half-dozen “stars” that are really planets in orbit. “Why don’t we stop at one of these?” she asks half a dozen jumps deep into their journey. She’s counting the days—counting Saareval’s days. Each passing tide carries away more lost Vo souls. “Since they’re closer?”
Yanja sighs and sits up in his seat, bouncing lightly against his restraints. He holds up his fingers and ticks them off, one by one. “Deficient technology. Unwillingness to traffic in available currencies. Worse xenophobia than your precious Keita Vo.”
“The Vo aren’t xenophobic!” Atuale frowns and picks at the rough edge of a knuckle scale. “I live among them, and I’m not one of them.”
Yanja clucks. “Still not one of them after all these years?” A click of his restraints and he slides free of his seat. “Then again, it seems you are not-Vo-enough to avoid taking ill.” Atuale opens her mouth for a sharp remark, but every blade she tries to grab hold of cuts her first. Before she can surface on the sea of her wounded pride, Yanja kicks against the headrest and glides away. “One last jump before Farong. I’m going to get some sleep before we make port.”
She bites her tongue on explanations, reasons. Sharpened-spear retorts. “What do I do?” she asks instead. “With the ship? The controls?”
“Sit on your hands so you don’t touch anything. I’ve programmed in the last point, and it can follow the jumpfield radiation to make any minute adjustments to our course. In short, it’ll fly itself, if you don’t interfere.” Elastic squeaks as he straps himself into the sleep-sack. “Think you can manage that?”
“Good night,” she says flatly, and then feels foolish, for is it even night back home, or at their destination, or by whatever clock such things ought to be measured here and now? Yanja only chuckles, and then Atuale is alone with the stars.
The last gate jump comes and goes as silently as the first: only a flicker in the periphery of her vision signals her that something has changed. If she cranes her neck she can just make out what she thinks is the nearest gate node, receding into the distance. Disappointment gutters in her belly; she extinguishes it under a breathless push of hope, of necessity, of purpose. She turns the other way, angling for a glimpse of the planet where Yanja hopes to find help.
But there’s no planet out there. The air squeezes from her lungs under a tight band of amazement. “What is that?” she breathes, unable to stay silent but unwilling to wake Yanja. She wants this moment alone, to commune with the wonder in front of her.
There’s a star somewhere in the middle, she’s almost certain of that, an impossible glow that leaks out here and there through the gaps. But wide bands of some material—metal? surely it must be, what other substance could serve?—wrap their arms around and around its light in an impossible knot. On the outside surface of those strips are nodes, nodules, where lights glimmer more warmly than any stars Atuale has seen. Can people really live in such a place? Her heart skips again. Do people live here? Or is this an altogether alien place, populated by bodies built to an incomprehensible plan, minds that do not reckon on the same scales and planes as Atuale’s?
“You know,” says a voice, warm against her ear, “if you hadn’t chained yourself to the Vo and their sand-blasted hellscape, you could see sights like this all the time. This is hardly even the strangest place I’ve been in my travels.”
“It’s not a chain.” The silent communion of the moment has shattered; Atuale blinks and looks away from the unknown world that lies ahead. “It’s an anchor.” That’s not quite right. She loves the bright warm sun of the Vo world, the equity baked into each brick of their social structures. And yet. She corrects herself: “He is my anchor.”
Yanja laughs, and his hot breath rolls down the curve of her neck before he slides past her into his own seat. “An anchor’s a burden for those who have a destination to make.”
“But it’s a blessing in a storm.” And when there is both a storm and a destination to desire—what then? She tries to picture Saareval buckled into the seat beside her, and cannot quite make the image fit. Like her, he has his own private longings, hurts that he thinks he has hidden from her. Ways he believes he has failed her. Only let him live, and they will find a way to shape words to their wounds. They will find a way to heal, or if not that, to soften the scars that linger.
The frequency crystal glows faintly at Yanja’s touch. “Farong Nearpoint Intake, this is the vessel Unfortunate Wanderer, under the command of Captain Yanja Isk. Do you require registration data?”
Atuale leans into her restraint until it cuts into the scales of her shoulders, waiting for an answer. These people are strangers and simply strange as well: space-dwellers, star-tamers. If they can do such things, what illness could they not heal? What wounds could they not mend?
Sparks pop in the periphery of her vision by the time the crystal glimmers in response. “Captain. Apologies for the delay; I had to update the Marat language module.” There is a slight strangeness to the speech, pauses amid words and between them, that signals to Atuale that the words arrive via machine intelligence rather than directly from the intake officer on the other end of the line. The grammar, however, is impeccable enough to pass in the Greatclan halls, and the accent is pure southern clan. “This is Farong Nearpoint Intake. What is your system of origin?”
There Yanja hesitates. He flicks a finger over the console, running down a list of some kind. “We’re here from Vancis Voyr.”
“Transmit your navigation data.”
Yanja sucks on his teeth. He turns, looks at Atuale through lowered lashes. “All right. We’re coming from Maraven, as you seem to have surmised.”
It takes Atuale a moment to understand that Maraven is someone else’s name for the planet on which she has lived her entire life, the place she has only ever thought of as the world. The Far
ong Nearpoint Intake officer, heedless of her revelation, says, “Travel from Maraven is interdicted throughout Ooyet Treaty space. If you still desire to come onstation, you may submit yourself to a quarantine period of no less than two weeks, after which you may submit an entry application under the subheading of ‘Refugee Status, Disease or Famine.’ If you require additional food supplies during the quarantine period—”
“Two weeks!” Atuale cries. Her arm slashes out, a gesture of denial, but of course the intake officer cannot see. “My husband and his family will be dead in two weeks!”
“We cannot risk the integrity of Farong.” The machine-generated syllables roll out of the crystal with preprogrammed inevitability. “We are sorry for your loss. But many human diseases are cross-reactive to other variants. We can’t risk the lives of the millions of sentients that live here.”
Hope evaporates too quickly for Atuale to grasp it, force it back down into her breast. For a moment she forgets to breathe, like a youngling lifting her head clear of the water for the first time. When the air comes back, it breaks out of her, half gasp, half sob. How stupid, how childish, to trust a path that seemed clear from a distance. “S-samples,” she stammers breathlessly, “we have samples on board, we could leave the package in the airlock and you could come and get it and—”
“We don’t allow civilians to transport biohazard materials onstation.” Is that statement issued with sadness? Irritation? Atuale grasps for a sense of emotion across the great distance between them. It’s suddenly, desperately important that she know whether she ought to hate this person or empathize with their struggle to comply with cold regulations. “We’ve cleared a docking anchor for you: Lower Nearpoint, anchor thirty-two. The anchors are marked in our local language as well as K’lil, Barrakenni, and Ssp. Will you be able to recognize any of those?”
