Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

by Aimee Ogden

  “You? Alone?” Yanja’s lips peel back from his teeth and the helmets rattle together harder this time when he pushes against the compartment door to hover over her. “You have to get inside. You have to make them understand what you want. You have to make them put you in contact with the Undergray. How many languages do you speak? How much interciv etiquette are you familiar with?” He laughs darkly. “How much do you know about operating the lightblade you currently hold in your delicate possession?”

  Uncertainty tips her head downward, her gaze falling to the pack in her arms. Yanja moves past her without waiting for an answer, a satellite flying too fast to hold in her orbit for long.

  That doesn’t make him right.

  “If I fail . . .” she says. Admitting that raw possibility scrapes the inside of her throat raw. “If I fail, then you’re still here to try again. One last time. With another human civilization, or those aliens, the—the T’t’t’t? If we’re both arrested, or if we both die here . . .” She stumbles on those last words. If we both die. Did she guess, when she set foot on that rocky path down to the sea, that she might be writing her own funeral-elegy? Should she have left a lingering goodbye kiss on Saareval’s sleeping brow; should she have stayed a moment longer in the shadows of her adopted Vo city? Death is yet another unexplored horizon, though one she would just as soon hold off on peering past. She squeezes the pack against her chest, as if in an embrace. “It can’t end here. Someone has to go on. To save the Vo.”

  “To save a contract,” Yanja corrects, but when her gaze pierces him, his sneer slides away. “I could be the one to go, then.”

  “And if something happens to you? I can’t fly your ship.” She would if she could. There is nothing she would not try. Though she would not like to fly it alone.

  Yanja tries one last line of argument, and his black eyes shine with things Atuale dares not name. “What if it doesn’t matter? What if the Vo are doomed, one way or another? You say it can’t end here, but what is an ending?” There’s the glimmer again, of something sharp beneath the smooth surface, of the Yanja that Atuale has come to expect if not to understand. “When the deepwhales die, the littlefolk and their herds make homes in the carcasses.”

  She holds out her hand and he takes it, pulling her upward, setting them both spinning together. “Show me what to do,” she says in the apogee of their quiet orbit. “And I will do what needs to be done.”

  “You will do what you like.” His mouth is tight; his eyes have lost their shine. “As you always have.”

  He shows her the cutting tool whose jaws can make a mince of even the thickest plating; he shows her the spare air-tanks and the tiny little engine pack that she must wear about her waist like a belt. He shows her how to control the internal environment of her suit with certain patterns of tongue clicks, so that she can maintain her temperature when the airless void around her would steal her lifeblood warmth. He tells her a little of the customs of the Faron Agai, the dominant culture in this part of Farong Nearpoint, but quickly throws up his hands in surrender. “How much can I tell you in ten minutes, an hour, a day, that will matter? You grew up in the seaclans and still you flouted our mores as easily as breathing.”

  She does not rise to the bait and he does not offer another such barbed hook. Finally he is floating beside her as the near airlock doors groan open. Weightless though it is, the pack feels heavy on her back, and its straps pull at her armpits, as if it has different ideas about how she ought to proceed now. Her hands tremble when she tugs them back into a comfortable position. She hopes Yanja does not notice.

  “Well,” says Yanja, who has shed his helmet. With the extra layer of glass gone between them, his voice is too close in her ear. “If someone has to do something foolish and brave, you are the one with the appropriate experience.”

  His hand lands in the middle of her back and he pushes. The move propels her forward. She spins gently around one shoulder, but her heart is slamming against the sides of her chest, searching for an escape. And when her rotation turns her around, Yanja is moving in the opposite direction. Backward, away from her and from Farong Nearpoint too.

  She catches a handhold over her head and steadies herself. The first time she grabs for the controls, she fumbles and the inner doors only spasm. A breath to steady herself and she manages to key in the command correctly. The doors close on the Unfortunate Wanderer, leaving Atuale alone. For a moment, her entire world is a small gray-black box made up of closed doors ahead and behind. She keeps breathing into the moment, hard and fast enough now that the moisture-attracting fabric in her helmet collar can’t keep up and the glass in front of her mouth grows opaque with steam.

  A small blue light illuminates on the panel when the inner door is fully sealed. No hesitation this time before she keys in the next sequence. The outer doors cycle open, and as the air rushes out it sucks away the sound of its own movement. Atuale follows.

  Farong’s skin is so close, filling Atuale’s view through the open doors. She touches it and the magnetized fields in her gloves pull her hand flat against it. The sudden yank startles her, but when she jerks back the gloves mercifully hold her fast so that she doesn’t spin away into the nothingness outside. She cranes her head back, so that she can see a narrow band of stars between the two gray horizons of ship and station. A half-remembered prayer to the gods of the sea sputters out between her chapped lips: the stars are crushingly near! Atuale puts her face to the station and uses her open-palmed grip on the station to pull herself up toward that open sliver of void.

  Small motions, now, as she squeezes out into the open. The suit is doing its best to keep her cool, but her heart—the only sound left to her—thunders in her chest at the scope of the universe all around her. If she moves too fast, launches herself out of reach of the station, she will tumble outward forever. A worse fate by far than dissolving into sea foam to crash forever on the shores of the world.

  Of Maraven. There is a name for the place she’s from, and sliding that label onto it makes the endless starscape shrink a little around her, takes some of the infinite weight off her shoulders. She wanted to embrace the stars; instead they are embracing her. The experience is as exhilarating as she could have hoped, but the thrill is laced with need and dread. She must keep moving.

  There will be more wonders to see on the inside. Terrors, too, perhaps.

  She reaches forward, reaches again. Her hands and feet cling to the station, and her body too if she huddles in close enough. Not the docks, Yanja told her. There will be other travelers and Intake Assistance, any of whom might report her to Farong Council. “And worse,” he said, his face stretched into a knowing grimace, “no public attention. No outcry.”

  Time recedes from her as she crawls over the face of the station. When panic rises, she chokes it out with measured breaths. However it may seem with the endless surface rising in front of her, the station is not—cannot be—infinite. Progress is measured in steel seams and bolts, in degrees of curvature and the number of windows carefully skirted. When her suit chimes warningly, she anchors herself with as many points of contact as she can manage by lying flat, and wrangles a fresh oxygen tube out of her pack. The empty tubes she sets free into the void; for a brief moment they become one more faint-twinkling star among all the rest before disappearing from view.

  She can’t help counting progress against these depleted canisters, too. Three left. Then two. Is she moving fast enough? She dares not move faster; already she fears a misplaced handhold will shear her clean of the station to join the constellation of her empty oxygen tanks.

  All the while, she keeps the map Yanja drew for her in her mind and adds herself to the topography. An unexpected irregularity in the carefully planned torus. She has swum in darker currents than this, she reminds herself when the air of another canister grows thin. She will find her way.

  She is on the last tube when she finds the nexus he described, and sobs out her joyful relief. No, she must save her breath, she
is not yet inside to breathe the human-friendly station air. Inhalations balance against shuddering exhalations as she examines the nexus, an ugly and unloved elbow between two nodes of the station. Again she delves into her pack, not for oxygen this time but for a cylinder of similar size. She turns it this way and that, making sure of which end is which, making sure her grasp is as steady as she can make it, before she sets one tip against the station and slides her thumb up along the side to switch it on.

  The lightblade does not simply puncture the skin, as she expected, but slides in slowly until a pop underneath nearly sucks it out of her grasp. She yelps, but the wrist-loop she’s secured keeps her from losing the blade and her hope along with it. She guides the blade downward, and its slow progress opens a long line that bleeds light.

  She turns the blade to the left. Already she can see through the crack that response-tech has arrived to try to deal with the damage. Nanites crisscross in backlit webs to gum up the top of the first line Atuale cut. They are designed to deal with the sort of harm that a micro-asteroid can do, not a determined sentient with a knife sharp enough to pierce steelica. She forces the blade steadily upward, back toward her point of origin.

  Where it crosses the first line it stops, stuck. The nanotech is not steelica and the lightblade does not serve to sever those fine webs as it could with two inches of metal plating. The knife’s purpose is spent, but Atuale doesn’t let go yet. Instead she grasps it as tightly as she can and slaps the other hand flat against the station outside of the shape she has cut. She swings her feet backward, and for a moment she is certain she has broken away, floating to an airless death with only the nanites to bear witness. Dizziness pounds in her head and steals the edges of her vision.

  But no: she is still anchored, however tenuously. This is not over yet. She tightens the muscles of her abdomen and brings her feet forward as hard as she can. Not asking entry politely but demanding it.

  The cutout gives way, bouncing back into the small chamber on the other side. An environment room, Yanja called it, though to Atuale’s eyes it looks denuded of anything like environmental ambience. Her work has depleted the air inside, but there is no water, no green growing things, no sunlight. Pale panels flicker here and there; pipes gleam with the lace of flash-frozen condensation.

  When she looks over her shoulder, nanite webs crisscross the entire gaping triangle she has cut. Guilt flashes through her, though these things are far, far subsentient. She can still help them at their purpose. The magnets in her suit palms grasp the broken wall-piece from the inside, and there is still no gravity to resist her as she hefts the rough-cut triangle against the pull of its inertia. She holds it in place for the long minute it takes for the nanites to complete their work, until the hiss of air returns, the gentle tinkle of the pipes, a high-pitched chiming alarm.

  Atuale’s inner ear has no strong sense of up or down, but the room was clearly built with one in mind, based on the orientation of panels and pipes. She grasps the rungs of a ladder built into the wall. For a moment she hangs there in a perfect unbroken bubble of anticipation. Then she pulls herself what will have to be upward, toward a hatch in the ceiling. Toward the unknown. Her heartbeat no longer sings its lonely, fast-skipping rhythm in a void of air and noise, but she still hears it over the grind of the hatch-wheel as she forces it open and pulls herself through to the other side.

  * * *

  Gravity reasserts itself so suddenly that Atuale nearly falls back through the hatch. Lights pop and flash against the glass of her helmet; she seizes the hatch opening with both hands and overrules her roiling equilibrium. What sound arrives in her ears has been hammered blunt. She pulls herself up on shaking legs, and blinks up into the strange new world around her.

  It’s an arcade of some kind, a marketplace or bazaar, perhaps, whose tight-crowded booths and throngs of patrons transcend the language of any individual world even though the goods for sale are nothing recognizable. Atuale stretches her fingers toward an asymmetrical bowl in which pearl-pink vapor swirls, contained despite its lack of cover. At the last second, she pulls back before touching it, lest she break the spell or, worse, contaminate it.

  The—woman?—behind the table draws back, rapping the backs of her knuckles together and shaking her head. Her hair is not hair at all but something that looks like ribbon, growing blue and green silken and straight out of her head. She says something whose susurrating syllables fail to penetrate Atuale’s understanding, and repeats it, louder but no clearer, when Atuale only holds up her hands helplessly. “I’m sorry,” Atuale says, and turns away.

  There are so many people here, so many more than any Vo market day. They all move back as Atuale staggers through the bazaar, small people pressing close to larger ones, grasping the forked tails of a coat or the bell-shaped curve of a sleeve. Some are tall and thin, stretched out to fit the gentle gravity of low-mass otherworlds. Others are short and broad. There are fur-coated faces and strange hairless ones, diamond-shaped scales very much like Atuale’s and curvate, rough-edged iridescent ones not like hers at all. A few make the same gesture with their knuckles as the first woman did. All of them stare.

  Atuale wants to stare, too, but she keeps putting one foot in front of the other. Even if she did not have a pressing deadline, she would have had to tear herself away from the sights and sounds of the marketplace before she would have wanted, in order to eat and drink and sleep. Maybe she could walk these wondrous paths again, one day, if she succeeds now. Maybe she could come back. Saareval wouldn’t like it.

  But then, Saareval wouldn’t like her reasons for being here now either.

  Four humans recline around an enormous purple gem-rock, the size of a sea-wolf or bigger; its sides run violet-slick and each of those around it have slender silver straws that run from their lips to the strange liquid. They pull back stray limbs at Atuale’s approach, flinch away from her passage. A fifth figure approaches, from Atuale’s periphery, faster than she would like; she jumps and spins, only to find something less than human bearing down on her. No, not less than human, simply other than; concentric rows of pulsating cilia frame a rugose opening from which formless noise issues. Longer cilia snap out at Atuale, sending her stumbling backward, but the tears that rise in her eyes are not of pain or fear but of wonder. A wild urge to pull off her helmet beats fiercely at her breast, to add smell and texture to the sights and sounds that immerse her. She pushes desire away, and looks around, as if she has not already stumbled far off the path that Yanja set her.

  A small man steps into her path, pulling her up short. He wears gloves that conceal impossibly long, slender digits, and in his spider-hands he holds up a chain of flowers. The petals are so black they seem to drink down noise as well as sound, or at least the rustle and roar of the bazaar falls away as the man leans in to say in a thick lisping accent, “I know where you come from, far-traveler. My world is a dead one and I wish you well on your way.” He leans forward on his toes and throws the flower-loop necklace upward, toward the crest of her helmet.

  As black flowers fill her sight, the rustle returns and crescendos into a roar. A mechanical shriek, and Atuale’s arms are bound to her sides by rubbery strands that resist her struggle—her old friends the nanites, repackaged for use against her. Voices, artificially loud, echo in the confines of her helmet. Gloved, splayed fingers steal the view through her faceplate as she crashes to the ground. The last thing she glimpses before she is bodily hefted and pulled away is the flower-chain, crushed into a weeping black ocean beneath heavy feet.

  * * *

  Atuale shivers naked in the dark. The green, faintly acid-scented ooze that coats her scales glimmers wetly in the dull light overhead; the cool air blowing out of a vent nips unkindly at the liquid. The room huddles close around her—less of a room than a cell, really, enough space for only a cot and toilet and sink and Atuale and all of her fears.

  Her pack is gone. She tried to explain about the samples inside, the precious blood sleeping i
nside its nest of durafreeze, but her words struck no spark of understanding that she could see. No more than the blared commands of her captors had pierced her own confusion. She has no faces to which she can assign fear, hate, despair; putative emotions roll over her memory of those smooth, blank white masks, and wither without taking root.

  There are a few gape-mouthed sores, on her arms and belly, where healthy scales ripped away in the cruel thoroughness of their decontamination procedures. When her mind sets to screaming about all that has receded beyond her reach to impossibility, she picks at these oozing wounds. Perhaps her remaining scales and Saareval’s will line up together. A complete set between the two of them. She tries to remember how many he had lost by the time she left, where exactly those lesions had marked him, and whether they matched up to her own.

  The sharp scrape of metal on metal cuts through to her. The hatch embedded in her door dilates, and a small oblong object tumbles through. Atuale winces, waiting. But nothing else happens as the hatch contracts. Her breaths chain together, expanding in either direction to fill the empty, endless solitude, waves of time pulsating back to the past, forward into the future. Maybe it’s a lifeline. Maybe it’s poison.

  If it changes the status quo, is there any meaningful difference?

  She accepts the thesis set out by the object’s arrival: to know is better than to not. Her legs cramp and twinge as she unfolds them—how long has she been curled up atop the cot?—and crawls to the door.

  At her touch, the unknown object glimmers yellow. She turns it, and identifies a regular geometric shape inside a cool, clear case.

  A frequency crystal?

  She strokes the side of the case, trying to find a way to tune it. They can’t have given her a lifeline to the world outside with its other end severed. Can they? She strokes again, squeezes it, tries twisting it between her hands. When finally she lifts it to slam against the wall, as if its case is a block of ice from which she must free it, a voice slips free: “Atuale? Are you there? They said you’d be there.”