by Aimee Ogden
“I’ve been here before,” Yanja says.
The officer seems to accept that as a meaningful answer. “Please attach as soon as possible to keep lanes clear for other traffic. Keep in contact with station personnel; we can provide you with food, as previously stated, and medications if you require them. Do you acknowledge?”
“We acknowledge.” Yanja sweeps his hand over the crystal and its inner light fades.
* * *
They make their way to the indicated docking anchor in silence. Yanja maneuvers the ship into position—backward, somehow, so that the airlock aligns with the magnetized anchor and its entry port. Its sealed entry port.
“It’s not fair,” Atuale says when Yanja has released his restraints. “We came so far.” She digs her knuckles against her eyes and sends another constellation spinning free. When she drags her hand through to clear the diamond-dust of her tears, they shatter coldly against her palm.
Yanja shrugs against his restraints. “Fair rarely comes into it, I think you’ll find.”
“There has to be another way. Another system with strong biotechnology.”
“Ea is the next closest and it’s still another six gate jumps away.” Yanja goes on as Atuale’s shoulders slump, “Farong would probably refuel us if we groveled to their satisfaction, but that still puts Ea another week’s travel out. Longer yet, on the return trip. And that’s presuming first of all that all the gates are in working order, and secondly that the same exact thing wouldn’t happen if we go knocking at their door. Ea’s inside the edge of Ooyet space.” His head tips forward and he sighs into the hollow space of his hands. “Word travels fast. Faster still when it comes to things like this.”
The airless silence rings in Atuale’s ears. Then Yanja ventures again: “There’s one more thing. Two gate jumps in a different orientation would take us to one of the secondary worlds of the T’t’t’t.”
“The Tkkh—” Atuale struggles over the explosive exhalation that separates each syllable. “The what? Who is that?”
“Another species of sentients. Two, actually, it’s a symbiotic relationship. Or so I’m told. I’ve never met one face-to-face and I can’t say if I did I would start off with questions on physiognomy.” Yanja turns to her. The stillness of his gaze, without the usual animated dart of his eyes, the twitch of a would-be smile, pins her in place. “They’re certainly technologically advanced, though whether they dabble in human health I’ve no idea. Some gene-eater tech is based on T’t’t’t nanotechnology, although no one knows if they even have DNA themselves. They’ve been known to be extravagant with gifts to visitors—atmosphere’s anoxic, but there are receiving centers for human guests. They’re quite accommodating, when they feel like it.” He spreads his empty palms wide. “They’ve also been known, on occasion, to shoot unannounced arrivals out of the sky. They’re not human; they can’t be expected to communicate like humans. Gods know actual humans can’t even manage that most of the time. But I’ve never chanced it myself. Before now.”
Atuale chews on the sweet rich fat of that idea. Interacting with other sentients, seeing with her own eyes an otherworld that few other humans have visited, walking on it with her own feet. In her chest her heart skitters over its beats, trying to regain a steady rhythm.
Yanja reads hesitation into her silence. “Or,” he ventures, “we can wait. Two weeks isn’t forever. The technopriests of Farong’s Undergray—collective? neighborhood? whatever they call themselves—they’ll know we’re here sooner or later. Who knows? They may already be working on a cure.”
“If they knew—if they know—” Atuale strains against her restraints and against the cold, hard edges of an idea at the same time. The pressure of that two weeks crushes down on the rest of her thoughts, leaving them powder-fine and too hard to grasp. Saareval has six days left. Eight, if he is strong. As he has so often been when she needs it. “Why haven’t they done anything to help?”
“Why not? A host of reasons.” Yanja’s disdain stings, though Atuale isn’t sure if it’s directed at her or outward. “Insularity. Stinginess. Ethical codes that forbid interference in the self-development of individual systems. The gods of Undergray are very keen on technological charity and healing and merciful beneficence to the smallworlds. I imagine those moon-eyed martyrs would already be arming a rescue fleet with dermis plasts and nano-scrubbers to send home—if they could. But they’re just one small unit of a much greater whole here.” He screws up his mouth as if to spit. “The prevailing sensibility across the known worlds is that human variant civilizations are a zero-sum game that one can only win if the others die out and disappear.”
“The Vo aren’t going to die out!” Atuale finds herself shouting, and lowers her voice. “I don’t see how you can say such things as if—as if you’re rattling off a storm report or a fishing take.”
“Forgive me for not shedding tears over a people who view me as mainly a dispenser for otherworld trinkets.” Yanja fiddles with something on the console, and sighs again. He sounds tired, sinking into the same weariness that threatens to drag Atuale down into its lightless depths. “You asked a question. I answered it.”
No. Atuale will not be so easily capsized. She opens her mouth to tell him to cut loose from the station and take her to the T’t’t’t. . . . The risk, though, the risk is so great: if she and Yanja die in the light of an alien sun, torn apart to mere atoms, then who will save the Vo? Who will tell Saareval that she tried, and failed, and loved him to the last? Atuale tastes blood and releases her cheek from between her teeth. The strangeness sings to her. But if she must beg help, perhaps she should ask it of humans, to whom she can try to show the fear-torn ruins of her heart. Who might see that, and understand. “What do you think we should do?” she asks, and her voice is small and high.
But Yanja only shakes his head. “No. Oh, no. This is your little quest, not mine. Have you forgotten all the crèche-stories you grew up on? A Witch may provide the way, but the story’s hero must choose it and take it.” He shifts like a sea-serpent striking. Atuale flinches, but he only lays a hand upon hers. It is soft and warm, with hard sinews shifting beneath like kraken in the depths. He strokes the backs of her fingers once, twice, and then snatches his hand back as if he is the one who has been burned. It has been such a long time since they have touched one another that way. “Think about it.”
When he lets go her skin aches with the cold. Kindness from Yanja? She doesn’t know what to do with this, where to put it in her heart.
She closes her eyes and begs the gods of her childhood for answers. Either they can’t hear her, so far away, or they have nothing to say to her.
She knows what she would choose. But it is not her life that hangs in the balance. It is Saareval’s life, and so Saareval’s choice, made by proxy. Safe and familiar as a long-healed scar.
Yanja startles when her hand falls on his shoulder. His hand shoots out, clasping her by the back of the neck, and his face is suddenly too close, his thoughts thrown open wide by idleness. His fingers twist in her mane, but he lets go when she pushes back. She bounces lightly against the far wall and their gazes slide past one another. “Tell me more about this Undergray,” she says.
* * *
Yanja hunches over the frequency crystal, caressing shifts in bandwidth out of it. “No,” he says to each wordless crackle and hiss, and flicks his fingers again. “No. No.”
Atuale drifts behind the seats. The desire to help stretches painfully in her chest, but she holds it down, locks it inside her, with small, shallow breaths. She knows Yanja well enough to stay out of the way now.
Another sweep of his hand and the crystal emits an inhuman howl. He pauses, and Atuale looks over, hope pulling her shoulders high and tight. But this sound too resolves quickly into mere static. “No,” he repeats. His neck pops and cracks when he stretches it. “It’s possible there’s no one using the sector-assigned bands anymore. The way tech changes here, there’s no guarantee anyone’s even listeni
ng.”
The frequency crystal pulses arrhythmically at the edge of Atuale’s sight. “Keep trying,” she says. Not a command; she has never spoken to Yanja as the Greatclan Lord’s daughter to a lesser vassal. Not a plea, either. An encouragement, then. “For a little while longer. Keep trying.”
His lips press flat, but he bends to the crystal again. Another stroke, and the tide of white noise ebbs and flows. Another, and—
Gibberish bursts out of the crystal, an unintelligible chattering. An unintelligible and undeniably human chattering. Yanja shakes his head at the staccato speech and shouts into the first pause for breath: “Marav! Marav! Balat at mut!”
The pause draws longer, then dissolves into a crackle. Atuale opens her mouth to insist that Yanja chase down the lost speaker. Before she gets a word out, the voice is back, but altered, modulated and electric. “Well, as I was saying, if you would hold a frequency for more than a millisecond you might have more luck. This is Undergray speaking. Who is this? If this is another prank from you lot in Sixhaven—”
“We’re not on Farong at all,” Yanja interrupts. “This is the vessel Unfortunate Wanderer, and I guarantee you, we are genuine Maraveni.”
“Oh? I’ve never met a Maraveni myself. But it looks here as though your dialectical specificity is very good. And the transmission artifacts are a nearly perfect match for Maraven’s last recorded tech levels.” A pause. “You said you were transmitting from a vessel outside Farong? Why aren’t you going through one of the intake points? That’s protocol.”
Yanja hisses and kicks away from the crystal. “You talk. You’re sad. They’ll like that.”
Atuale scrambles for the console, clumsy with weightlessness. “I’m just a Technical Initiate,” the voice goes on, “really I’m not authorized for primary interciv contact—”
“We need help.” Atuale’s mane spills over her shoulder; it crackles where it brushes up against the crystal. She catches it and twists it between her hands, to give them something to do. “We’re from Maraven, which is dealing with a plague. We already spoke with the intake officers, but they quarantined us for two weeks.” The length of time turns her stomach anew. “My people are sick. We’ll lose so many, waiting that long.”
The voice hesitates. “That seems bad.”
Yanja rolls his eyes and twitches two fingers together in an old lowclan gesture: all the spine of a wetworm and half the brain. Atuale pulls herself sideways, floating over the seats, to put her back to him. “My husband is back there,” she tells her own reflections, scattered among the crystal’s facets. It’s easier with a face to say it to. Not easy, but easier. “He’s dying.”
“. . . I’m sorry.”
The silence that ensues pours into Atuale and fills her with something darker and uglier than grief. She raises her fist as if she would strike the frequency crystal; a click of Yanja’s tongue stops her short. “That’s it, then? You won’t help us?”
“No! I mean, yes—I mean, I will help. I was—I am—I’m thinking.” The voice hums tunelessly. Atuale twists her hair hard enough to break several strands, which float away when she opens her palm. “Let’s see. Let’s see. Oh! Well. First of all, are you sick?”
The anger that filled her so fast is slow to ebb away. It turns, instead, inward. “No. I’m not really . . .” Atuale sucks on her teeth. “Neither of us is from the affected human variant. I don’t know if we can carry the disease, but we’re not ill. We brought samples, though: blood, skin scales.”
“I have a transit pod,” Yanja says loudly. “If you have a port to receive such a thing.”
“Yes, yes, of course. That’s good! That’s much easier than trying to smuggle you aboard.” The voice laughs, then cuts off short, as if their contact has just remembered the reasons for such scheming. “My second orthogonal spouse is biotech dominant and he was just ordained last month, so access to facilities shouldn’t be a concern.”
Yanja floats up beside Atuale, occupying a large swath of her peripheral vision. “It’s considered healthy to have at least one marriage outside your primary discipline,” he whispers in her ear. His breath is sour with fruit-paste from the morning meal, a lifetime ago. He speaks louder for the crystal again. “Send us a heading for the transit pod.”
“Done,” the voice announces confidently, and a light flashes on the console. Atuale reaches out to touch it, but Yanja knocks her hand lightly away. “Biotech and nano aren’t my specialty, but Nessik is brilliant. We’ll have something for you as soon as we can. Is this frequency all right to contact you on again?”
“Yes, of course.” More tears have crept up on Atuale; she swallows them. It is still too early for relief or gratitude. She puts one hand over her heart, as if that will keep it inside her chest. “Before you go, may I ask—what is your name?”
“Magxi,” the voice says. “You can call me Magxi.”
“Thank you, Technical Initiate Magxi. My name is Atuale.”
“Atuale,” Magxi repeats. “It’s my honor to serve in all the capacities the gods have granted me.” The crystal emits one brief shriek, which dies away into faint static that tickles Atuale’s ears.
* * *
Yanja’s transit pod is smaller than Atuale expected: the length of one arm, perhaps a bit less, a tapered rectangle. “Yes, it’s for black market trades, and no, I won’t tell you what I’ve had in here.”
The generous interior can easily hold all her precious samples, wrapped and rewrapped as they are in layers of protective crabweb netting. Still, Yanja separates out one vial of each kind and nudges the rest back into their shipboard cubby. “You never know, with the Undergray. They love asking questions even more than answering them, sometimes. Best not to give them too many toys to play with so that our little biotech friend doesn’t get distracted trying to resolve a complete Vo protein biosynthesis dynamic scheme or some such equally useless thing.”
“All right.” Atuale looks into the almost empty chamber, with its two lonely vials firmly tucked into a side casing. She half wants to curl herself up small and crawl in alongside them. “I trust you.”
A tension snaps Yanja’s shoulders high and hard at that remark. “Stand back,” he says. “Before you lose a finger.” He locks the case shut and seals the edges, then maneuvers it to the airlock.
Though already in zero-g, Atuale finds herself a little lighter, the inertia of burden reduced ever so slightly. She lays a hand on the case once, bidding farewell, then steps aside to let the doors cycle closed. The outside doors open, the air inside the lock boils. A faint glow of propulsors burns through the white fog, and the case flings itself out into the nothingness beyond. “Swim fast,” she says. “Swim true.”
“Swim—” The last part of the blessing goes unsaid. Yanja breaks it off with a curse as a bright light flares through the ship’s windows.
Atuale flings up an arm to shade her eyes, but the light is already gone. Metallic pings chime against the ship’s exterior, like ice shards breaking on rock. “What was that?” she asks. But she already knows, for the gravity of fear and doubt already has her back in its grasp.
The frequency crystal flashes, a pale echo of the blaze outside. Before Yanja can reach it, a voice crashes out of it, sending him and Atuale reeling. “Vessel Unfortunate Wanderer, we have detected propulsion fire from your location. This is your only warning. If you attempt to break quarantine a second time, we will sever umbilical support, whereupon you will be permanently refused boarding.”
The crystal sputters and goes dark. Atuale’s heart flutters like a beached fish’s gills: suffocating, fragile. She ought to say the funeral rites, for that was a small piece of Saareval’s life that she has consigned to the void forever. But the Vo words do not come to her; for all the years of speaking and even thinking that language, it escapes her now.
She never did manage to dream in Vo.
The seaclan tongue seeps out of her from some dark, forgotten place. “It was the engines. They saw the engines.”
“Yes.” Yanja uses the Vo word. He is looking at her sidelong; his fingers rub against his own palms. When he speaks again, he does so in the seaclan language. “Atuale. Are you all right?”
Her eyes are heavy, half-lidded. She is groping her way forward now, feeling the shape of the future and changing it with her hands.
“We have to go to them,” she says, and saying it makes it so.
* * *
They work in silence at first, sliding into helmets, digging through Yanja’s stowage compartments for what they need. Yanja, face furrowed in a terrible scowl, casts unwanted objects over his shoulder without a second glance. Freed from storage, these things float gently through the ship like an asteroid field. Occasionally one bumps Atuale’s shoulder, a polite nudge for attention. As often as not she finds herself catching them, turning them this way or that, trying to figure out what they are: this one a tool with some unknown function, that one a musical instrument, this one a pot of blue face-paint with a complicated clasp. For each one, a burgeoning question rises in her gorge, only to be strangled by urgency, necessity. It is pleasant to think that there may be a time for such questions later. Foolish, perhaps, but still pleasant. Atuale’s grasp lingers on a pearlpaper scarf, before she lets it slide between her fingers to join its brethren.
Finally Yanja has accumulated everything he thinks they will need, and stowed it in a series of packs and pouches, all laced together. Last of all Atuale puts her precious cache of stealthily collected samples, protectively swaddled in their case, and folds the pack cover over it like a prayer. She holds the whole thing to her chest, and hooks the toes of her suit on the raised edge of a panel to anchor herself in place before she looks Yanja in the eye. Their helmets click lightly, one against the other. “Just me,” she says. “I should go alone.” The words echo through the helmet plate, through her very bones.
