by Aimee Ogden
It takes her a moment to recognize the speaker, distorted by the crystal as he is. “Yanja?” Relief floods over her so suddenly, she is swept away by its current. Her limbs melt. She falls against the floor without catching herself, and tastes blood. There is still hope, however small and faint. There is still a chance, as long as Yanja is there. “They have me locked away, Yanja. All my hopes are hanging on you, now.” She tries to keep the note of pleading out of her voice, and fails. “Where are you going to go? What will you do now?”
Silence crackles down through the crystal, lifting the fine hairs between her arm-scales. “The T’t’t’t,” he says finally. “Never charted a course through honest-to-gods nonhuman territory before. It would be a thing to see, wouldn’t it?”
Would-be is a word for Atuale, whose sea and skies are dull-scraped steel now, whose air is recycled and ripe with her own souring fur-oils. Will-be is for Yanja. But she doesn’t correct him. “How soon do you need to leave?”
“Refueling’s already underway, I’m happy to say. After that, they’ll have to check the local traffic and clear me for disconnect. And of course there are a few legal matters to get out of the way first, related to one of my passengers, who may have violated a few local ordinances.”
Atuale’s fist clenches around the crystal. The rest of her body still splays bonelessly on the floor, all her energy and emotion channeled through five taut fingers. “That was all my fault! They have to blame me!”
“Exactly what I told them. There are still forms to fill out, though, things to sign. A small matter of fine—not to worry, I’ll handle that, fault or no.”
“The Vo will be thankful for all you’ve done.” Atuale’s arm-scales press into her cheek, raising tears in her eyes. “I’m thankful too.”
Yanja laughs. “The Vo will resent me all my days for giving them what they couldn’t get on their own. But they’ll pay me fair, and coin spends better than thanks anyway.”
“Still. Please. When you get back, tell Saareval—”
A dismissive click of Yanja’s tongue. “I’m already running your errands. I’m not carrying your love notes, too.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
Silence stretches out. Yanja’s breathing carries over the frequency crystal, its peaks and valleys amplifying Atuale’s own. When his next inhalation hitches, as if he’s about to speak, Atuale blurts out the question whose claws are in her heart. “Why did you agree to do it? Come out here, burn your last bridges with the clans? You hate my family and you hate me. You can’t love coin all that much.”
Even warped by the crystal, the blade of Yanja’s voice cuts deep. “And you can’t be so curious as to stick your hand into an open flame, yet here we are. Don’t ask questions you won’t like the answers to.”
But there are no answers, to be liked or hated or slowly dissected in the growing silence. Only questions, torn open wide, and an airless void on the other side. Atuale shudders with the first sob, and by the time she has calmed, her own breathing is the only sound left to her.
* * *
The stains on the sheets are brown and red, pulsating clouds of blood and amniotic fluids. Atuale twists her fists into the soft fabric. Giving birth under the cruel press of gravity is so different, such an act of endurance compared to the infants she littered under the seas.
Or perhaps it is not gravity’s pull that threatens to submerge her now but that of emotion. She wanted this child, wanted it with Saareval, wanted that sense of justice and rightness in her birthing-bed that has been denied to her all along.
Where is Saareval? Dealing with the remains of the infant, perhaps. Mourning. The Vo do not pray, but they have their rituals, their purifications, for dealing with the dead. The never-living. The fetus endured less than half of the way through its gestation, surrendering its grasp on existence before a doctor could take a reliable scan. Would it have been any easier to have this news delivered coolly and clinically by a medical professional than by the vehement rejection of her own body?
A sob grinds into powder under the contractions of Atuale’s throat. The midwife, still crouched between her legs, breaks her stoic grimace to look up sympathetically. Her hand rests briefly on Atuale’s bare, blood-streaked knee before she returns to her business. Atuale knew, they all knew, that this could happen. That the mods that had remade her somatic cells might not have acted fully upon her ova. That the chromosomes might fail to match up neatly, that the worlds of seaclan and Vo might never be so fully intertwined as to reproduce together.
She looks at the winged nebula of red-black fluids that spreads out on either side of her, and wonders: Is this what was meant to be? And how can that be so?
* * *
Sleep steals Atuale away from her condition for only a little while. A banging from outside her cell jolts her awake, and she scrambles to a sit as the door swings outward. Two faceless humans enter—some of the same ones who intercepted her in the marketplace, or others identically dressed. It hardly matters. They bark bewildering orders and gesture sharply until she pieces together the charades-game and stands in the middle of her floor with her hands upon the back of her head. One figure levels what must be a weapon at her as the other approaches. The object is slender and slightly curved, flaring wide at the end nearest her; it looks like no weapon Atuale has ever seen, but the posture of threat is a universal language.
The nearer figure commands her again, a needle-sharp syllable into which Atuale can thread no meaning, and then they are up in her face, reaching around behind her head. She wills herself not to tremble at this invasive nearness. Something touches the back of her neck—lightly at first, then a deep-reaching sting. She cries out, and the figure jumps back to the safety of their companion.
“Don’t move!” cries the other, the one with the weapon, and this time there are familiar words overlaying the strange, incomprehensible sounds. She touches the back of her skull with her upraised hands, and finds a small metal rectangle whose teeth bite into her flesh. What wondrous thing is this, that can whisper to her in an alien tongue?
“I won’t,” she says first, “I won’t move.” As she hears it now, even her own voice is layered, an echo of her own words translated back upon themselves unaltered. She swallows, and shakes her head to clear it; hearing an echo of herself in her own head fogs up some primal understanding of speech. “What is happening?”
“You’ll be brought before the Farong Council for a hearing.” The unarmed figure holds up a small canister, spiraled at either end like the spire of a seashell. “This biofilm will reduce the risk of contamination. Do not attempt to tear it.”
“I wouldn’t.” She holds out her arms to either side as they direct, and closes her eyes. The canister pops, and a cooling sensation cascades down over her face, her torso, her limbs, even sliding over the soles of her feet when she lifts them one after the other. When she is permitted to look, she wears a second skin of bluish gel, one that follows the contours of her shape and moves when she does. “Thank you,” she says, looking between her two captor-guardians.
The armed one gestures to the open door. “Come along.”
There are more steps of decontamination, chemical showers and layers of pale powders that absorb into the blue biofilm. The other two figures abandon her for the duration of these ministrations, and only a series of opening doors ushers her onward from one scouring to the next. When at last she emerges into the last chamber, what must be the same two await her, though they have discarded their bulky protective suits in favor of a simple sash and kilt. No need to ward themselves against Atuale any longer, not now that she is severed from their world and bound up inside a tiny blue-tinged universe no bigger than herself.
They are different kinds of humans, the taller one lightly covered in soft white down, the smaller’s brown skin bare of fur or feather. It also does not escape Atuale’s notice that, now, both of them are armed.
Through the bowels of Farong they lead her, along oft turning corri
dors decorated only with bare, irregularly corrugated metal. So different from the busy halls above—or below, or simply elsewhere? No way to know which way her travels through the station have oriented her. Here, some unnameable fluid drip-drops down from a seam overhead; there, faint light squeezes through a crack in the wall. Is this flimsy machinery all that stands between Atuale and the cold, uncaring vacuum outside? She puts her eye up to the opening, and peers closer at the orange light. It originates in a web of pulsating sacs on the other side—and when Atuale’s fingers touch the wall, she finds that it is not metal at all, but some leathery organic material. She yanks her hand back as the guard behind snaps at her to move along.
At last they emerge through a dilated hatch—much like the one in Atuale’s cell, albeit far greater in scale—into a vast chamber. The shape of the space is faintly pyramidal, and the walls are irregular with three or four dozen podiums of various heights: some scarcely taller than Atuale’s head, and one reaching nearly all the way to the peak of the room, where vines bearing gold-white lamps cast their blazing light on those below. If she cranes her head back, she can see where small figures peer over the edges of those podiums. Some are plainly human, in a rainbow of browns and grays and pinks and yellows; the species origin of others, at this distance, is harder to discern.
“Go on, then.” The nearer guard nods at her when she looks over her shoulder at them. “These are the councilors from Nearpoint, Kitefall, Advance Heights, Undergray, and the Scales. They rarely convene all together, but they have for you. They will hear you out and offer what justice may be had.”
“For the needs of your people,” says the other guard, “and your crimes alike.” They give her one last prod with the flared end of their weapon, and she stumbles away as they retreat back to the margins of the room.
Only then does she realize that she is not alone on this vast and brightly lit floor. Another solitary figure, limned in naked blue, waits near the center. His shoulders are turned away from her, his head bowed, but she knows the shape of him.
She raises a fist as she comes up on him, but when he does not turn to confront her, she loses her momentum and her arms fall to her sides. “You said you were going,” she hisses. Her vision blurs with tears that have nowhere to go; they squeeze down over her cheekbones and cling beneath the biofilm there. A tiny tidal pool of snot collects on her upper lip. “You said you’d be gone.”
“I lied. Gods of the deep, you’d think you’d expect that by now.” His shoulders jerk up and down, less a shrug than a shudder. His face-paint is gone, scrubbed clean by decontamination. Without it he looks younger, less disdainful than honestly bewildered. “They boarded the Wanderer in a spray of decontamination gel just after you sliced your way into their station. Afraid I would get the same fool idea in my head, apparently.”
“Who’s going to save them now?” she asks, and only then does he look at her over his shoulder. He reaches for her and instinctively she reaches back, and their bodies slide coldly one against the other with the gel layer between them. Under her cheek, his chest is harder than she remembers, but he is still of the right height for her head to nock neatly under his chin.
An amplified voice sends them staggering apart. “The Council of Justice is now in session,” it booms. Atuale looks around wildly for the podium of origin. Only when she cranks her head back to peer at the highest one does she find the speaker. At such a great height, the apical vine-lamps are almost directly behind him, which casts his backlit face in shadow. “You will present your plea. The Council will debate your case. And justice will be handed down to the best of our ability. Do you understand?”
“The samples!” Atuale breaks away from Yanja, standing under the tall podium and its darkness-veiled speaker. “Please! Where are the samples I had?”
Another speaker, from a lower platform, raises her voice. “The diseased blood is under analysis in the temple laboratories of Undergray.” She leans forward with her elbows on the edge of her podium and steeples her fingers. Her eyes are not on Atuale but on the chief speaker above. “As they should have been directed immediately upon these pilgrims’ arrival.”
Though his placement hides the chief speaker’s face, his sneer is audible. “The religious beliefs of Undergray cannot be permitted to dictate the protocols that keep the people of this habitat conglomeration safe.”
“Perhaps on another day we will bring to a vote a discussion of what constitutes safety and how best to provide it.” Undergray’s speaker tucks her chin to her chest to look down at Atuale. The scales covering her skin are jet black, though around the eyes and mouth some have lost their color. Her longish face brings an eel to mind, and her darting eyes its sinuous path through the water. “I have been to Maraven, some years ago when I thought I might understand the universe better through seeing as much of it as I could. I remember a kindly welcome from the dwellers beneath the waves, and visiting their pearl-palaces and porcelain great-halls.”
Atuale forces words past the thickness in her throat. “The seaclans can be generous.” If they thought you might be generous, in turn, with your knowledge or goods or body. “And the Greatclan Lord is always pleased for the opportunity to show his wealth and power.”
“Is there a purpose to this anthropology lesson?” asks the chief speaker. Two other low-speakers slap open palms on their desks and rebuke him with hushing sibilance.
Undergray tilts her head, less fish now than curious mammal. One finger pecks at her lower lip. “There was no love lost, as I recall, between the people of the deepwater and those of the dryland, who ignored my entreaties toward sharing my technology. It surprises me, then, to see the two of you together in this hope of saving the drylanders.”
“I was born in the sea and remade for the land.” Atuale’s hand darts out, finds Yanja’s elbow, and slides down to his palm. “My friend found a way for me to move between the worlds. For love.” Yanja’s fingers seize around hers, and the words skitter across her tongue too fast. “And f-for freedom, too, and for curiosity.” The yellow of Undergray’s eyes flushes amber at hearing that. Atuale’s heart flutters. “I’m the daughter of the one who offered you welcome and plenty.” Even though he did not want her to be here—but the Farong Council hardly needed to know that. “For the sake of what goodwill you still bear toward your time on Maraven, for the gods you honor with your knowledge and generosity—”
“And for love.” A taut smile pulls the lines of graying scales around Undergray’s mouth into arcane angles. “Tell us about the plague, its progression, its symptoms. We will hear you through. Then the Council will talk. Public opinion is mixed, certainly, after your . . . shall we say appearance in the Gathering Halls.” The smile broadens. “Magxi sends zir greetings.”
“Later,” says the chief speaker, “we will discuss the matter of consequences.”
His tone chills Atuale, but Undergray ignores him. “I’m certain I am not alone in refusing to turn my back on a world in need. We’ll help you, traveler, in what ways we can. Tell us what you know.”
Atuale presses her free hand to her heart. “Thank you,” she says, and searches for the words to start.
* * *
When the Council withdraws to deliberate, guards escort Yanja and Atuale back to the shuttle, where they wait together in sharp-bladed silence. Here and there, blobs of decontamination fluid have congealed into pinkish orbs. When they rip away their layers of biofilm, these clot together too and drift ominously through the air. Neither Atuale nor Yanja has the energy to attack this debris with the liquid vacuum. Nor have they bothered to put away the objects dislodged from storage compartments.
Yanja’s long hair is wet and sticky with the fragments of the biofilm. “Let me braid it,” Atuale says, and when Yanja does not object, she anchors herself around his torso with her legs and combs her fingers through. It’s good to be close. It’s good to feel something. She wishes he would feel something back at her—that he would say something, sigh, shove her awa
y. She tucks her knees up under his armpits and pulls herself tighter.
She’s just finished tying up the plait when the frequency crystal pulses with light and life. “Unfortunate Wanderer, are you there?” It is the speaker from Undergray.
Atuale somersaults across the shuttle to activate the crystal on her end. “We’re here. We’re listening.”
“Excellent.” Atuale closes her eyes to imagine Undergray’s face-stretching smile. “Several of the finest biopriests in our order are at work on your problem. They’re developing a sort of bionanite—something with which your people can be injected. It will produce a variety of antiviral peptides to combat the virus in its current form as seen in your samples, and it will also be able to react to combat new mutations as needed. We will be able to provide you with a working prototype in . . . I am told six hours, perhaps four if testing runs smoothly.”
Bits and pieces of those words wash through the net of Atuale’s understanding, but the gist remains: a cure for the Vo. A lifeline for Saareval. If he still lives. She wrings the words out of her clamped throat: “Thank you. Thank you.”
Yanja has drifted up behind her. He leans toward the crystal. “We can pay, of course. We have trade goods, and some Farong credit—”
“Your thanks are appreciated, but not necessary, and you will not insult us with further offer of payment.” Undergray’s chuckle takes the sting out of her words. “It is no less than our duty before the gods, to protect life where it remains. To strengthen our knowledge of the universe they left for us, and to build bridges between our far-flung humanity.”
“You are very kind,” Atuale says.
The crystal hisses with a sharp intake of breath. “We are very reverent. And before you ascribe any kindness to the people of Farong, there is something else you ought to know.”
