The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  He smiled faintly, but she felt the impact of his despair like the thunder of drums.

  “Actually, she was somewhat subdued,” he said. “She get into trouble?”

  “Not yet. Cheating,” Vi’ya said. “When she does, I suspect it will not be at the hands of the authorities. Just her victims.”

  Lokri grinned. He was also notorious for cheating, but only when there were no stakes except amusement—or sex. He waved a hand dismissively. “Might do her good to get thumped. For a day or so, anyway.” He sat back, his eyes narrowing. “She did give me a clear rundown. Clear enough.” He paused to draw in a slow breath.

  Vi’ya experienced the bloom of hope that he tried so hard to choke off. The effort he expended caused nausea to curdle in her gut. “You remembered something,” she prompted.

  His eyes lifted, his mouth pressing into a thin line. Then he said, “Yes. Conversation the night before they were killed.” He looked away, then back again, wry self-mockery slanting his brows. “I was young and naive, and I wanted—very badly—to go to the Naval Academy on Minerva.”

  Vi’ya did not miss the slight defensive tone: they were Rifters, after all, and no one had been more fluent about the perfidy of the Panarchy (and the Navy in particular) than Lokri.

  “So did Markham once,” she reminded him. “Were you thrown out as well?”

  He shook his head. “Never made it that far. If you test well, you’re in, and they take care of you. But getting there to take the test was expensive—Minerva’s antipodal to Torigan. It was an investment by families, or by patrons. My family thought it a waste of time. If I wanted to fly, I could join my mother in shepherding students to ancient trash heaps on worthless worlds.”

  “It was a subject of contention,” Vi’ya said.

  “A cold way to put it, considering the fights,” Lokri said with a too-brief flash of his old insouciance. “Anyway—the reason I’m dredging up this tedium—the night before the murder, it came up again. Mother had recently returned, and my father had been drinking. It wasn’t anger for once. He was smirking about something. He turns on me and says something like, if I thought I was such a hot pilot, I could tell him what a fractal spectrum was, and where to find an example.”

  Vi’ya nodded. “Go on.”

  “Well, I gave him a school definition of a fractal spectrum, how it was a laboratory phenomenon, but halfway through he started in on how I wasted my time, his time, the family’s time . . . .” He lifted one thin shoulder. “Never mind. The thing is, I’d forgotten all about that until Marim threw that phrase at me the other day. I suppose it’s unlikely there is any connection with the murder. Or anything else.”

  “As it happens,” Vi’ya started—then without warning, the Eya’a were in her mind.

  We separate one-patterns. We hear the one-in-three contemplating the distant-sleeper while in sleep. She hears a distant one-pattern, the same one-pattern Vi’ya hears while in sleep.

  Vi’ya shielded her reaction. Is the one-in-three afraid?

  Her pattern is afraid.

  Is his pattern still in sleep?

  His pattern is not in sleep, it moves in direction of the three-ones.

  Disentangling the Eya’a’s random use of gender pronouns was an automatic reflex by now. Vi’ya sent a calming thought: Celebrate the one-in-three being with the three-ones. This is amendment for him.

  We hear the three-ones, we celebrate new word-nexi, we share thought coloration and memory of the distant-sleeper . . .

  They were going into what Vi’ya thought of as Suneater mode: they would repeat everything they had gleaned of the distant Urian construct. Vi’ya had learned to shift her attention away, permitting the double voices to whisper in the back of her mind, like a vid that had not been shut down.

  She opened her eyes to find Lokri watching her curiously. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “No. Eya’a and Ivard. To resume. When we first returned to this station, I ran a search on fractal spectrums, thinking as you did that it was sufficiently unusual to cause some kind of interest.”

  “And?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing beyond academic speculations and definitions.”

  He sat back, rubbing his eyes. “Then there’s nothing more to pursue, is there?” His voice was almost too light to hear.

  She hesitated, not wanting to raise false hopes, except wasn’t even false hope better than this existence?

  “It’s little,” she said slowly. “And in light of what you just told me, perhaps it’s too little. But I would not call it nothing.”

  He looked up. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said. There is too little information. I find it unusual that so little information on this topic can be located, particularly in light of the very recent discovery of the Suneater and its fractal spectrum.”

  Lokri still rubbed his eyes, an absent movement, as if it could smooth the headache that she could feel. “But it would take a hundred years to dive through all the data if a straightforward search doesn’t work.”

  Vi’ya rose to her feet. “Perhaps,” she said, “and perhaps the priorities on the data have changed. You grew up with the DataNet stitching together your world and linking it to the Thousand Suns. How much do you really know of its workings?”

  Lokri sighed sharply. “I know that the Anachronic hubs automatically deal with the constant influx of new data, prioritizing and sorting it. I know the Infonetic techs on them assign priorities only to the data the algorithms bubble up to their attention, for no one could process it all—as fast as we are, the inflow of data is faster.” He looked up. “So what’s your point?”

  “Whole fortunes have been built on the assignment of priorities, and how data gets processed through the Hubs,” she said. “I have nothing but time. It might be illuminating to probe some of these processes.”

  He said nothing, but she sensed a sharp surge of hope in him, and a resurgence of his will to live.

  She left then. They had all agreed to keep their visits short. She knew someone logged visits to the prisoners. Brief visits from his shipmates were, she had hoped, too unremarkable to bear further investigation by inimical eyes within the Panarchist government.

  She walked out, then once again the Eya’a flooded her mind. This time it was with their speech, which they used rarely. The effect was like a skipmissile to the brain. She stopped as if she’d walked into a force field, ignoring the people streaming around her.

  Images battered at her: green limbs, weird colors, traces of smells that did not exist in the clean, sterile-air corridor near D-Five. Fighting her way through this hurricane of sensation, she sought the cause, and homed in on Ivard, flailing desperately to make sense of . . .

  “The Kelly ship,” she said out loud.

  Vi’ya! he called, but immediately his thoughts swirled away, and she could not find him.

  The Eya’a’s mental voice rose in alarm, excitement, and intensity until Vi’ya felt her head would explode.

  Digging the heels of her palms into her eyes, she fought to shut all the voices out.

  Again came a change, a synthesis as vast and immutable as the voices chanting in her head.

  Through that sound came the booming of a great drum, steady, syncopated like the beat of a thousand hearts in unison.

  The Eya’a fell silent. From the air around Vi’ya came sound: great chords, minor ones, running melodies, distilled from the emotions of those in her proximity. A sudden spray of color shot across her vision, scintillant as the radiants of a ship.

  Drawing an unsteady breath, she recognized enough of what was happening to force herself to run, stumbling and half-blinded, for the safety of her own space.

  A bright flurry of brass notes summoned memory. She no longer saw the dyplast walls, the flat corridor, but instead the high ceiling and fabulous chandelier of the concert hall. And as the powerful Manya Cadena enmeshed her in its vast grip, she saw instead of the accessway to Det
ention Five a lone figure, slim and straight, standing high on a balcony, blue eyes blazing with light as bright, no, brighter than a sun.

  Breath rasping her throat, she fought her way to the lift.

  Sweet and yearning, young voices wove KetzenLach’s melodies about her, and like gilded chains, memories tightened on her heart.

  The Aerenarch’s concert; then, echoing from further back, the same music—KetzenLach’s And Horses Are Born with Eagles’ Wings—this time with a beloved blond head lying next to hers, smiling and smiling.

  “Markham,” she said—she had spoken aloud.

  But an instant of clarity cleared her vision: she had made it to her crew’s quarters. And she was alone.

  And then the dark and mournful rise and fall of men’s voices brought her stumbling to her room, where she dropped to her knees. For it was no longer a plain cream-walled chamber, furnished with bed and console. Instead she was surrounded by soot-blackened stone, the air frigid despite the fitful red fire in the corner, and tasting of ash. The battered wooden furnishings were huge, as if seen from below—seen from the perspective of a child.

  “Hreash ni remmeth ka hekaata, eppon enDol bi-sechreash.” The men’s voices sustained a long note, the echoes slipping between stone walls as they held back the ever-vigilant demons and wraiths crowded in the ever-present aurora-thrown shadows of Dol’jhar’s too-bright nights.

  A hand touched Vi’ya’s cheek, the skin of palm and fingers rough and callused. A furtive caress, then a woman’s low voice in her ear. Tomorrow will they come for you, my child. Talk little, work hard, and never, ever, let the lords see your talents growing, for then they will have you killed. If I can, I will buy you back.

  A glimpse of a long, dark-eyed face—

  With all her strength Vi’ya banished the old memory, but more snaked out, prodded by flourishing melody. Emotion—her own, and not her own—surrounded her now, transmuted into music.

  Through it she barely perceived the calm voices of the Kelly, cadenced in triple counterpoint, with the Eya’a singing an eerie descant high above.

  I know what this is. I know, she cried, though no words made it past her throat.

  And with a last effort of will, she forced herself to stand, and to move not to the bed and welcome oblivion, but to her chair. Shaking hands stretched over the keypads of the console—

  And, heralded by ancient trumpets, she fell into dataspace. It was information as music made perceptible to all her senses, the harmonies forcing intuition to a visceral, multimodal apperception of truth. She flew down corridors of light, buoyed by a driving theme of string and wind instruments.

  Her sense of her body, sight, hearing, taste, touch, even her sense of time, all her senses combined to guide her in a complex fusion that defied language. Her perception of the net was inverted; not diving deep to pursue a thread, but soaring, pulled by the ineffable pleasure communicated by music as a lure and surety of progress.

  She heard a hungry, ponderous leitmotif, a stain of malice that stank of soft things rotting in dark corners. Vi’ya darted into a tunnel of light, following it, as though leaving Ares dataspace, the synesthetic distortion of her sense of time bringing past events frozen in replicated data to vivid presence. A pentatonic melody announced the planet Torigan, trampled by the stentorian tones of the Archon Stulafi Y’Talob. But his motif was too simple, yielding to a silky, darting counterpoint that wove Vi’ya through to the heart of a purulent decay mounting on microtonal stems of disphony blatted by tubas and enormiums. She plucked what she sought and the tube of light shot her back into Ares data and she swooped up and up and up, the curving surface of dataspace falling away beneath her in a network of light to a flourish of mellow horns and a rattle of drums, crescendoing to a bright pinwheel of sound.

  Now she perceived the pattern of darkness spreading through the net with a hissing discord, like air escaping from a shattered hull. Fingers of black lightning forked out of it toward the decayed wreckage of a despairing leitmotif composed of the rage of bass viols and a nasal woodwind.

  She heard a choir chanting, mournful, bending semitones to set her teeth on edge and rasp across her skin. “. . . save Galen . . . need Semion . . . betrayed . . . betrayed . . .” And above, malevolent, a serpentine theme in thundering percussion and string harmonics guarded the bright mouth of the tunnel of light connecting Ares to the Thousand Suns beyond, forbidding her return. The theme expanded, emitting a dry, musky scent, billowing into a lightless circle that sucked at her, pulling her into discord and nullity. She knew its source without words, the image Jaim had shown her foul in her mind. She fought violently, hurling at it the dancing themes of KetzenLach and the lazplaz intensity of the love she could not trust, slashing through its fabric with knives of light.

  But the malevolence was too powerful and long-entrenched, anchored firmly to the substance of dataspace with threads of malignant, fissiparous data. Her strength waned. Blackness roiled up thick and hateful on either side, pressing in on her.

  Then a theme of mellow woodwinds, deep and chuckling, shot up from the deep levels of dataspace, a bubble of bright merriment that danced around her with darting movements, whirling through inversions of its theme in joyous flight. The dark malignity recoiled from it, blown back upon itself as though by a sudden wind, revealing an opening to sanity and light. With a last blast of lancing sun-heat powered by her emotions, she broke free and fell at last into oblivion.

  o0o

  Ivard practiced his new mode of perception on his way to see Tate Kaga. The blue whirl of the Kelly Archon had diffused into his mental landscape; he sensed threm exploring areas not accessible to him.

  “We cannot help you with the dreams,” the Kelly had said, and such was the richness of their synesthetic speech that Ivard understood all the modalities of their reluctance: spiritual, psychic, political, and others for which there were no human concepts yet, and might never be.

  He practiced, too, suppressing his new ability, a difficult process he likened to looking at a word but not reading it. But he persisted, for he found that synesthetic perception was little use among humans. They were oblivious to the ancient unities that lay behind their language and their symbols, so that when he slipped into the new mode the Kelly had taught him, what he perceived was random: sometimes ugly, mostly drab, once hilariously funny.

  Ivard was glad to get off the transtube at the nexus. The people on it had stared at him when he laughed out loud. He smelled their mix of suspicion and fear and the constant tense anger engendered by overcrowding as a whirl of nested polygons with razor edges trying to enclose his head, smelling of jagged music like old soap in a filthy pissoir.

  He shook his head and spat, ridding himself of the taste.

  “Please!”

  Ivard started and looked up. A large man in elegant attire stared, affronted. Next to him a small man with a round, red face, equally well dressed, looked at him unsmiling. “Control your Polloi habits, boy.”

  Despite the finery of their apparel, Ivard knew flash when he saw them. The little man moved forward smoothly and lifted his hand, which had an override in it.

  “Sorry, this transfer point is temporary closed,” he said to the other passengers debarking behind Ivard. The others grumbled but complied, intimidated by the air of authority projected by the two.

  Ivard turned, too, but the big man laid his hand on his arm, saying nothing. The youth recognized an Ulanshu restraint, knowing it was invisible to anyone watching.

  Ivard started to apologize, trying to twist his arm away, and then a sensation of cold leather and shattered glass stroked his forehead and the backs of his hands, drawing his attention to the third man standing before the adit from the terminal.

  The flush of fear prickled Ivard’s skin, and he wished Gray and Trev were with him. Maybe he could call them, he thought as he controlled the physical manifestation of fear, but the foul psychic miasma beating on his mind from the tall, thin figure with long black hair could
not be so easily dealt with. He’d seen him before, at the Ascha Gardens: Archon Srivashti’s bodyguard.

  “Death breathes through his nostrils,” Portus-Dartinus-Atos had said, and Ivard was glad the dogs were not there. Instinct convinced him that this man would breathe death on Trev and Gray if they got in his way.

  Because it was clear that these men had been waiting for Ivard. The little transfer terminal was empty. That alone should have alerted him on crowded Ares. He reached for Vi’ya, hoping that his fear would drive a signal to her.

  And he reached her. Shocked, he pulled away and lost the sense of her, buffeted by a maelstrom of sensation almost akin to what he had experienced in the first few minutes on the Kelly ship. She couldn’t help him—had she been trapped, too? He couldn’t find the Kelly presence, either. He was alone.

  The big man smiled, not a reassuring sight. “You have been granted a signal honor, boy. It will take but an hour of your time.” He applied pressure and turned Ivard toward the adit. The man knew higher levels of the Kinesics than Ivard did, so resistance would be wasted energy. He knew he must preserve his energy.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked, hating the tremor in his voice. His physical control seemed to be deserting him.

  “The Archon Srivashti wishes to speak to you.”

  Ivard endured an adrenaline spike of danger-fear. “Why?”

  The man tugged him toward the wall, where an access hissed open, and Ivard was pushed into a small pod. The bodyguard—Felton, he remembered now—followed as his captor stepped back. “Don’t be impertinent, boy,” the captor said a moment before the hatch closed, leaving Ivard alone with Felton.

  The rest of the journey passed in silence. Ivard didn’t want to talk to Felton, and was relieved when he remembered that the man was mute. He concentrated on shutting down his synesthetic sense: in the confines of the little pod the associations radiated by the man were painful.

  The pod debouched them into a small, sparsely furnished room and Felton withdrew. Ivard looked around at the elegant appointments. It was a typical nick room. But the table should be five-sided, not round, he thought as the angular scent of the flowers in a vase on it stroked his cheeks. And the deep rug underfoot was the wrong texture for the colors in the tapestry above the sideboard that was too squat for the color of the subdued lighting. The nicks seemed blind to the wrongness.