by T. J. Berry
“What was in the card from your mother?” asked Boges.
“I forgot about that,” said Gary, reaching into his back pocket for the card, now bent and torn on one edge where trisicles had bitten through the paper. He slid his finger under the seal and pulled out the card. It was an old one, printed in mass quantities with a decorated tree on the outside. Ricky practically purred as she saw it.
“I’ll give you two glasses of larval eggwine for that card.” Gary ignored her offer and opened the heavy folded paper. His mother’s handwriting was as round and exuberant as she had been. Seeing the loops made his heart ache like no gunshot wound to the chest ever had.
Beta,
I took something from you long ago to keep you safe. If you are reading this, the Sisters have decided that it is time to return it. Merry Christmas.
Love forever,
Ma
She was talking about his horn. She had sawed it off him when he was still a child in order to protect him from the Reason. She’d hidden it and never given up the location – even under torture. Gary tried not to show any of the discomposure he was feeling.
Ricky leaned over his shoulder and read the message out loud.
“A Christmas present, eh?” she asked, chewing.
“We never celebrated Christmas,” said Gary, turning the paper over for any hints as to where the item was hidden. The paper was blank.
“What did she take from you?” asked Jim.
“His horn,” said Jenny. “She hid it.”
Jim leaned all the way forward until he was nearly horizontal.
“Lemme see that.”
He grabbed for the card. Gary held it away from him.
“Don’t touch my card.”
“I’ll find out where that horn is,” said Jim, pushing off and reaching again. Gary unhooked his legs from the bench and floated upward.
“This is not yours,” he said, holding the card behind his back. A half-eaten sweet potato ricocheted off Jim’s cheek. Jenny floated near the table, hands on her hips.
“Gentlemen,” she said archly, holding a second potato ready to launch.
Jim pushed off from Gary’s sweater a little harder than he needed to and went back down to the table.
“He started it,” he muttered.
Jenny looked up at Gary.
“Do you want help figuring it out? We all have a vested interest in finding your horn.”
“It’s not likely to be on the ship. Perhaps it’s in the boxes the Sisters delivered.”
“They don’t open until just before the Summit. That would be spectacularly unhelpful,” said Ricky. “Do you think she left the horn with the Sisters?”
“No. They’re not exactly Reason, but my mother never trusted them completely.”
“So who did your mother trust completely?” asked Jenny.
Gary looked to Boges.
“Oh,” said the dwarf. “I swear on the Hexaxe of Abattor, she did not tell me where she hid your horn.”
“She wouldn’t risk telling you directly. But she always said you would stay with the Jaggery until your final day.”
“And I would,” said Boges with ferocity.
“So she hid it on the ship,” said Jenny. “But the Reason didn’t find it.”
All of them floated in the dining hall, wondering where one could hide a two-foot section of unicorn horn undetected. The Reason had combed through the ship looking for it after Gary’s arrest and had come up empty handed.
“Boges, is there anything left on the ship from my mother?” asked Gary.
“Not much,” said Boges. “Her earrings in your footlocker. A few tapestries in storage. A blue sari.”
He turned the card over and held the picture up to Boges.
“Does this have any meaning to you?” he asked.
Boges squinted at the picture in the low light.
“It looks familiar. Like I’ve seen it before, but I can’t recall where.”
“That’s a Christmas tree,” said Jim. “For Christmas. You see them all over in December.”
Boges frowned.
“No, but I feel like I’ve seen one recently. I just can’t…”
“Elf magic,” said Gary and Jenny in unison.
Elves were masters of subterfuge and disguise. What they called a sliding spell could cause someone’s eyes to glance right over the thing they were looking for. Gary did not prefer to think about the bodily fluids needed from a willing elf to make such a spell, but his mother was a warrior who would have done what was necessary to protect the horn.
“There are two ways to render a sliding spell inert…” started Gary.
“Water and heat,” finished Jenny. “And unless we want to turn up the heat, which we don’t because of the redworms, I think we need to make everything a little wetter around here. Are the environmental controls still active?”
“Yes. Hibernation is meant to protect what’s inside the ship, not freeze it to death,” said Boges.
“Set the foliage misters up to full force,” said Gary. Dwarves flew in different directions to set the mist nozzles on high. When the ship was in full bloom, they kept everything watered and lush.
A huge smile spread across Jenny’s face. She’d just arrived at the same conclusion he’d reached a moment ago.
“That’s how your mother was going to know that you were back in charge of the ship. She knew we humans would take out all of the plants. As soon as you or another Bala took command and started watering and getting everything misty again, the spell would wash off and you would find your horn. Bloody brilliant.”
“That she was,” said Gary.
Nozzles in the walls began to churn out a fine spray of water. With the gravity off, the mist floated aimlessly around the dining hall, collecting in larger balls of moisture. Gary hoped it would be effective to wash off the spell in zero G.
“I had sprayers like that in the Blossom,” mused Ricky. “But for a very different purpose…”
“No one cares to hear about that,” said Jim, chewing resolutely.
“I remember,” said Boges, pushing off the table and up toward Gary. “Where I saw that tree. It was in your mother’s shrine.”
Boges pointed to the far wall of the great hall.
Gary sailed to the edge of the room where the shrine was tucked into an alcove carved into the wall. This spot served as a makeshift temple for his mother, even though she was the only worshipper of these gods on the Jaggery. She’d taught him how to pray to these human gods, lighting the lamp and folding his hands just so. But Ganesha, Shiva, and Krishna had never resonated within him the way Unamip had. By the time he was a teenager, he’d already turn his head away whenever he passed the shrine, hoping that his mother would not make him stop to light the lamp. She had chosen a wise hiding place, knowing that he would make every effort to look away from her gods and never even notice his horn under the Bala spell.
Tucked far into the back of the shrine, behind the framed pictures and statues, was a pink metallic Christmas tree. He vaguely remembered seeing the tree, but it never seemed of much importance. The elfin magic had caused it to slide away from his notice. Now it sat, damp and dark within the alcove. It had been sitting there, in plain sight, for nearly a century.
Gary pulled the worn tree off its base. Power thrummed in his palm. He peeled away the glued branches and unwound pink tape from around the trunk. If he had known, he could have saved Cheryl Ann’s life. His own life. When all of the gaudy Earth bits had been stripped away, what was left in his hand was the pearlescent shimmer of a unicorn horn.
A hand reached around him and tried to take it. Gary yanked it back and pushed off toward the rafters.
“Give that here, boy,” said Jim, coming up after him. “This ship is mine and so is that horn.”
“Jim, let him keep it,” shouted Jenny.
“I’m not gonna get stuck again,” said Jim, panting from the exertion of chasing Gary around the ceiling.
Jim
pushed off one of the massive timbers toward Gary, catching him around the neck. Gary felt the old man’s cold, bony fingers close around his windpipe and start to squeeze. It felt like a skeleton trying to choke a birch tree. He laughed at the feeble attempt to subdue him.
“Can’t quite get a grip any more, cowboy?” he chuckled. Jim pressed harder, barely getting his gnarled fingers around Gary’s neck. Gary put his hand onto Jim’s chest and pushed. The old cowboy bounced off the rafter with a grunt like a deflating balloon. Gary turned to head back down.
Jim pushed off again. This time he aimed for the base of the horn and pulled, stopping Gary’s inertia. Gary spun and faced the dried-up human hanging onto the other end. He put two hands around the horn like a cricket bat and shoved forward until the base hit Jim across the bridge of his nose. Blood bubbled out into the weightlessness. Jim coughed and let go.
“I’m the captain.” The plaintive cry was muffled through Jim’s hands covering his face.
“Are you?” asked Gary, with a raised eyebrow.
“Bastard,” said Jim.
Gary kicked off on the ceiling timbers and floated back down.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Jenny said to him.
“He shouldn’t have tried to take my horn,” replied Gary, plucking his mother’s card from where it hovered above the table. Humans always tried to take everything of value, then cried foul when you fought for what was rightfully yours.
“That’s going to end up bad for all of us,” continued Jenny, looking up at Jim trying to wipe the blood bubbles away from his face with his shirt. Anger rose in Gary. A feeling that he’d pushed down for years.
“Good. I am done coddling humans. You are all driven by self-interest and greed and a few more of you need to get your noses bloodied.”
He reached toward Jenny, and for a split second fear crossed her face. She thought he was going to hit her. His anger ebbed and he held out his hand.
“Can I have your tablet, please,” he asked, calmly.
She reached into her jumpsuit pocket and passed it to him. The door to the dining hall closed with a bang as Jim slunk off to his room.
“I guess you’re in charge now, Gary,” said Ricky, taking a potato and floating along behind him, as if to follow. “I’d just like to say that I have always been on Team Gary. You’ll remember, I gave you this ship.”
Boges tisked at her.
“You shouldn’t put a hibernating ship directly into FTL,” the dwarf reminded Gary. “None of the guidance systems will work.”
“Have the dwarves been able to wake the ship yet?” Gary asked.
“No,” said Boges. “Last time it went into hibernation, it took six weeks to wake it.”
“We don’t have six weeks. Just jump it from hibernation,” said Jenny.
“Traveling in the nullspace without guidance, we will almost assuredly collide with another ship in FTL. The nullspace paths are tunnels, not wide expanses like openspace. The guidance systems keep the ships from merging in the null. Unless you would like to partially merge with a Reason officer,” said Gary.
“I know how to wake a stoneship,” said Ricky.
“Quiet,” said Jenny dismissively.
“I’m not joking. I’ve done it before,” said Ricky, between bites.
“You have not,” said Jenny.
“Wait,” said Gary. Ricky was not bluffing. “Have you really?”
“Yes.” Ricky let the half-eaten potato float away. She leaned down and whispered something to Boges, who flew toward the crew quarters. Ricky pushed off toward the engine room. “Do you want to watch?” she asked. Gary followed. He did, in fact, want to watch.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Faster Than Light
“You don’t run the best bar on the continent without picking up a few things about stoneships,” said Ricky. “Drunk Reasoners are always dying to tell you about the time they woke a hibernating stoneship, captured and sold off its crew, then a got a big promotion.”
Gary led them along hallways that Jenny had never seen. This ship was a maze of caves in the center. Boges popped out of a nearby door in the wall, looking horrified by the conversation. She handed a fancy bottle to Ricky.
“Sorry. I mean, we all know they do it,” said Ricky. “Doesn’t make it right.”
They were deep in the center of the Jaggery. In the quiet of hibernation, there was still a thrumming heartbeat pulsing throughout the walls in this area. Cheryl Ann had mentioned this years ago. She’d said that the heart of the ship had sung to her. Jenny had laughed at the time, thinking her friend was exaggerating, but now it seemed to be singing to her as well. That anxious feeling was increasing the deeper they went into the ship. Like the little magical tricks she’d been doing wanted to burst out of her. She clamped down on the urge and pulled herself along behind the others.
The tunnel narrowed and the air vibrated with a multi-part harmony. Gary pushed open a door and held it open for Ricky, Boges, and Jenny. As she passed him, Jenny could see the shimmering whiteness of the horn in his hand. It looked like sunlight sparkling off freshly fallen snow.
Seven concentric rings of dwarves were deep in song around a sphere in the center of the room. They cried out in what sounded like seven distinct rhythms that occasionally came together in a single, elaborate melody, then broke apart again into warring notes. Jenny’s head buzzed from the noise, but in a way that left her feeling energized and sharp. It was as if the antsy feeling had intensified to an electric hum of power within her. Boges left her side to join the dwarves in the innermost ring. The dwarves on either side embraced her warmly without skipping a note. Her contralto voice soared above the others, pulling them along with her song.
The sphere glowed gold around the edges, but the center was filled with the darkest of blacks swirled with distorted lines of color like paint on the surface of water. When Jenny was young, an oil spill had washed up onto the beach near her home. It had swirled in the same way; a rainbow of distorting colors that curled into spirals. Her gran had warned her not to touch the oil. She had touched it anyway and her fingers had come away sticky and black.
“What is this?” asked Jenny over the drone of multi-part harmonies.
“This is a stoneship engine,” said Gary.
“Why are they singing?” asked Jenny.
“Because that’s what it runs on,” said Ricky, looking at her like she was a fool. “Did you not know?”
“How would I know that this ship runs on a bunch of dwarves singing? I thought it ran on… I don’t know… magical rocket fuel?” said Jenny.
“Spaceships run on rocket fuel. Stoneships run on the power of ancient song sung into the great void,” said Gary.
Jenny’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“I know. Just go with it,” said Ricky. “When stoneships hibernate, you have to prime the engine to get them started again. Luckily, I brought along some stoneship engine lubricant.” She held up the crystal-cut bottle, which looked heavy. The label on the side said “Gravitas”.
“You’re selling engine lubricant for five hundred a glass?” asked Jenny.
“You wouldn’t believe what people pay for coolant fluid,” said Ricky.
She floated toward the sphere in the center of the room, uncapped the bottle of Gravitas and let the liquid float out into the void. It curled around the colors within and infused them all with a silvery sheen. Ricky poured out almost all of the bottle, then capped it and floated away from the sphere.
The swirling colors were now tinged by silver and reminded Jenny of the plume of smoke behind the booster rockets of Reason troop transports. She’d been a grunt back then, young and scared. Her hands had quivered in her lap on the shuttle to her first assignment. They quivered now. The energy coming off the void was making her both excited and terrified. She couldn’t shake the jittery feeling that they were all waiting for a miracle or a disaster.
“Now what?” Jenny asked.
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“Now they have to restart it,” said Ricky.
Gary moved to the front row near Boges and joined the song. His voice began low, creeping under all of the dwarves in the room, then it rose above them, daring their voices to meet his. The song became louder until Jenny was carried along with the noise like a leaf caught in a river current. She felt wrapped in it, like a safe, suffocating blanket of sound.
Gary looked back and flicked his head to indicate she should join them. But she couldn’t. She didn’t know the song or the words.
“Gary wants you to sing,” shouted Ricky over the harmonics. “Stoneships get attached to certain people. I think you should join them.”
“I can’t,” replied Jenny.
She felt a strong sense of disassociation, as if her body and mind were not quite aligned. It was the same sensation she felt when entering nullspace, but this time it didn’t dissipate. She was swelling with unspent energy. She was going to be sick from it unless she found a way to release the pressure.
Jenny flexed her fingers and flowering vines bloomed out of the stoneship floor – the size of a dinner plate and thick with fragrance. She took a long breath and the pounding in her head felt a bit better. Ricky moved toward the floor to inspect the blossoms and Gary raised an eyebrow at her. Boges left her spot to float toward Jenny and take her hand.
Boges’ hand was calloused and strong. She pulled Jenny along above the plants that had sprung up in the pathway. She pushed Jenny into a spot in the innermost ring and patted her shoulder. They wanted her to sing, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know the words or the melody and her head was swimming awfully. She closed her eyes and felt pinpricks of power coming off the sphere and landing on her exposed arms. The engine was nudging her. She resisted.
The room slid sideways, and she felt the same dizziness she did after too many beers. She reached out, but there was nothing to grab onto to steady herself. It was like she was falling toward the void in the sphere. Inside of the blackness, past the sheen of colors, there were millions of twinkling dots that looked like stars. There was a sadness in the void. A feeling of loss not unlike the Sixian parrot’s hum back in the Bitter Blossom.
