The Galaxy Game

by Karen Lord

  There was nothing, however, to match the pang that struck him when weeks later he saw an unusually large group of pilots, senior coaches and academics escorting a familiar figure along the broadened path to the hostel.

  ‘Revered Patrona!’ he cried out.

  She looked around immediately. Her face was tired, but she could not suppress a smile at the incorrect but sincerely meant address. ‘Rafidelarua, have you come to welcome me to your planet?’

  ‘Welcome, Patrona. I’m glad you’re safe. Who else is with you?’

  ‘Ixiaral and the Dean of Maenevastraya accompanied me. The Controller and Hanekivaryai have chosen to remain on Punartam to do what they can. Credit must not fail and commerce continues always! But I fear the Dean may return to try to mitigate Hanekitshalo’s nonsense.’

  The Patrona moved on, pulled aside by one of the senior pilots for a conversation. Rafi remained where he was, momentarily bewildered by her final words. Oesten appeared at his side.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said quietly to Rafi. ‘Tshalo’s in deep with the cartels. Anything for recognition and credit. He calls it “adjusting to the new realities of our galactic structures”. I could call it something shorter. I could call him something shorter, but how do you dishonour a name that never had much honour to begin with?’

  Rafi listened and nodded, but then he saw a very distracting sight on the lower path. ‘Ixiaral! And Ntenman!’

  Ntenman laughed and took a couple of running steps past Ixiaral. He slung a heavy bag over Rafi’s half-unwilling shoulder. ‘And Ntenman. I like your order of importance. And Ntenman indeed. Do you even care to let your friends know you’re still alive? Lazy, lazy Moo. Always waiting for the world to come to you. Well, here we are.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’ Rafi said, grimacing under the weight of the bag. ‘Welcome, Ixiaral!’

  ‘Thank you, Rafi. Come, walk along with us.’ She looked more than distracted; her gaze often flitted to the Patrona and her forehead was creased in a semi-permanent frown.

  Rafi staggered along and looked meaningfully at Ntenman to get his explanations. ‘When did you get here? I was in the dining hall; I saw when it fell. Teruyai and Oestengeryok were with me and we got out immediately.’

  Ntenman lowered his voice. ‘Then we left a Standard day after you did. I think Ixiaral wanted to leave earlier, but Syanrimwenil needed a bit of extra time to prepare for taking the Patrona and the Dean through transit.’ His expression grew sombre. ‘I had no idea. Is that the kind of training you go through?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He— She carried all four of us. She’s resting now at my padr’s estate. It was very hard on her.’

  Rafi opened and shut his mouth, briefly speechless with worry. He tried to explain. ‘I’ve never done it. I’ve learned to be part of collective movement, like with a team on a Wall, but that’s with others who have some ability to either be a nexus or respond to a nexus. I can’t imagine doing it with people who don’t have that.’

  A flash of self-loathing crossed Ntenman’s face. ‘I thought as much. I was the dead weight. Well, that’s yet another person I owe.’

  Rafi frowned, recalling Syanri’s insights about his mother and his sister. ‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Ixiaral confirmed, focusing on them at last as they entered the main building. ‘It rests on the level of knowledge the nexus has of the passengers, and that made you no more dead weight than the Patrona.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ntenman muttered, relieved but still sarcastic.

  ‘That was the purpose of the research at Maenevastraya, to simplify that knowledge for the nexus, or remove the need for it. Mindships carry most of the passenger information so that the pilots are free to navigate.’ Ixiaral looked around the crowded entrance hallway. ‘I did not realise there were so many people here.’

  Rafi let the bag drop to the ground. ‘More and more every day. Are you all staying, or returning to Ntenman’s place?’

  ‘We’re going to Tlaxce City,’ Ntenman declared. ‘That’s where all the key players are assembling, Rafi. You should come with us.’

  Rafi would willingly have gone anywhere, but – Tlaxce City? He badly wanted to see his mother and Gracie again, but going near the headquarters of the government that had caused him so much grief felt stupidly risky.

  ‘Or will you stay here,’ Ntenman asked, giving a slightly contemptuous stress to the final word.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rafi decided.

  Ixiaral’s frown vanished in one quick, magical second and she grinned at him. ‘Good. We have plans, and you can be part of them.’

  *

  The following day there was an open-air rally. The Patrona and the Dean had arrived with a purpose, and the Patrona gave detailed, passionate, eloquent speeches to a gathering that grew as the day wore on. The Transit Project – backers, consultants, researchers and guinea pigs – was set to regroup and relocate.

  Rafi was quite sure the crowd included taSadiri from the neighbouring areas, some of whom were transmitting the Patrona’s words via their comms to other unseen audiences. Within a day or two, it would probably be included in the local network’s filtered content to the rest of Cygnus Beta. At the end of four hours, Rafi was exhausted and there was a definite ebb-and-flow of focus-challenged Cygnians at the fringes, but the Punarthai refugees and Sadiri pilots kept keen attention on the discussion, constantly asking questions and querying the answers given down to the smallest details of schedule and logistics.

  The Patrona was cagey about one thing – the new location. ‘That remains to be seen,’ was all she would say even while requiring pledges of absolute loyalty and commitment from all who would participate. Yet no one pressed her. She was a powerful nexus and she had the charisma to draw in even the doubters with nothing more than a ‘perhaps’. Rafi watched her in fascination. He was no stranger to detecting compulsion, but this was something more refined. She seduced using blunt invitation and inspired with unpalatable facts. So much honesty should have gained her no followers, but by the end she had converted almost the entire hostel, turning refugees into volunteers.

  ‘If their guardians will allow, let the children come as well,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘We will need young, flexible minds for early training in these new modes of operation.’

  At sundown, the Patrona and many other Punarthai appeared startled by the sudden onset of twilight, but it was decided to take it as a good time to stop talking and start preparing. Rafi went to the dormitories to pack up the few things he had acquired – clothes, utensils, a basic datareader – not to take with him, but to return to the communal pool of belongings. He could borrow something simple to wear from Ntenman, but everything else was non-essential. Teruyai came up to him as he was putting together a neat, small pile on his cot.

  ‘You are not coming with us?’ she asked, sitting down and making the thin pallet slope towards her, disturbing the structure of his pile.

  ‘I think I am,’ Rafi said, grabbing a mug that was trying to roll off the cot. ‘Just not the same route.’

  She looked at him for a while as if hoping he had some inside information to share, but he remained focused on centring the pile on the cot’s thin blanket and tying the corners together into a rough bundle. When that was done, he met her gaze with a rueful expression.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve realised that I don’t plan my life very well. I dodge things and end up on a different path. I hop on passing cars. I follow my friends until I make other friends and follow them instead.’ He recognised it was starting to sound like an apology and stopped talking.

  Teruyai took his admission of weakness in stride, probably expecting no less of a Cygnian. ‘Make good choices, Rafi, even if – especially if they are last-minute. We thought Sadira would always be there to come home to. We thought we had found a place on Punartam. Things happen, but if you still have friends to follow, that is
a good thing.’

  He should have thanked her then for dragging him out of that dining room and across several light-years of galaxy to safety, but there were too many things to do and too much to think about, and Ntenman had just appeared in the doorway waving his hands frantically. He excused himself quickly and ran to his friend.

  ‘The shuttle’s ready,’ Ntenman said. ‘If we leave now, we can get the next sub-orbital flight to Tlaxce City.’

  *

  We had returned! Not a Year – barely eight months of actually being on Punartam and almost three months’ thumb-twiddling in quarantine or comatose in transit. Speaking of which, interstellar transportation with proper passenger modules could not compare to small-group jaunts by naked mindship or remarkably gifted nexus for speed and sheer terror. I have so, so much respect for Revered Syanrimwenil. I should never have listened to those who labelled her a failed nexus. Punartam’s society had hardly been kind to me, so I should have had more sympathy.

  She told me that in theory a perfect transit should be instantaneous, something which I cannot understand, far less explain, but it has something to do with living, conscious matter being able to access certain dimensions and bypass certain others in a way that purely inanimate matter cannot. Of course, it’s not as straightforward as that. A single person can’t stroll through a transit. There’s something about having a critical mass of sentience, which is how the mindships and their pilots do as well as they do. And the Wallrunning Brotherhoods, they were armies, trained to go through transits awake and alert by becoming a kind of temporary collective organism, and then carrying that shared consciousness into battle. They couldn’t bring much beyond themselves, but what weaponry they did bear was disruptive enough to cause galactic war and shut down all the transits for good . . . almost all . . . except for a few, rediscovered and used secretly by those of us who knew enough to coax through a few grams of rare cargo.

  Bringing the four of us through the Haneki–Mwenil transit alive, intact and sane was a feat. I bow to Revered Syanrimwenil. I gushed about her to my padr before I left and made sure she was treated like the queen she is. She was tired – more than tired, slightly unanchored from this world, perhaps, sleeping often, dreaming with eyes open and slowly regaining control over her own body instead of, for example, trying to flex my fingers, turn Ixiaral’s head, blink the Patrona’s eyelids and twiddle the Dean’s toes.

  Not that it was easy for us. We spent a day or two out of it ourselves, but at least when we were ready and able to stand unaided, the rest of the cargo had come in and the duplications were proceeding perfectly. I was impressed. The Academes had prepared for the worst, and that meant a swift transit of everything important in the only way that mattered – as information. We received duplication templates for several experimental transit systems, datachips galore, seeds and other things I could not recognise and they refused to identify. Ixiaral guided me in packing a bag with particular templates and datachips and then made me carry it as the junior of the group.

  It took a lot of resources. We called in favours, made some unexpected alliances and became ridiculously busy at a time when all other galactic commerce to Cygnus Beta was grinding to a halt. My padr was torn between debilitating anxiety and equally paralysing pride when he realised that his cooperation would mean an immense drain on his financial credit but a skyrocketing of his social credit. But old habits remained and I heard him chuckle and mutter something about getting ahead of my mother and her present husbands . . . ahead by Punarthai reckoning, of course. I sighed and let him gloat. I had no ground to stand on. Wasn’t I the one who not too long ago had been desperate for a successful Year and recognition as an adult?

  In another matter, he managed to have the last word over me, pointing out that for a son who had complained and resisted taking over the family business, I had somehow managed to turn my act of independence in going to Punartam into an accidental display of complete filial obedience and loyalty. I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or amused at myself, but then he formally named me a full partner and I really didn’t care how many laughs he had at my expense. He gave me a platinum pin with a green diamond as an accoutrement to mark the occasion. I wore it on a thin band like a Wallrunner, because whether I made my next transit naked in a mindship or stripped-down in a passenger module, I was never taking it off. Never.

  But I digress. We had returned! We were once more in Tlaxce City. Once an insignificant lowlister in the annals of galactic cities; now, by process of elimination and a fortunate history of blended heritage, the host of its first Galactic Consortium Meeting, albeit one that was hastily done up and ragged around the edges. Tlaxce’s Halls of Parliament had been reserved for the purpose and the spectator galleries of the Primary House were massive. We plebeians of Punartam found ourselves a comfortable corner and settled in to hear the deliberations of our rulers and betters. Rafi was nowhere to be found. He had muttered something earlier about keeping a low profile and I hadn’t seen him since. I decided I would wait until the end of the day before sending out the search parties.

  Ixiaral gave me a few details and I was curious enough to look up the rest. The only full delegates were those who had come from Punartam and Ntshune. There was, surprisingly enough, a delegate from the planet Zhinu A – well, not entirely a surprise considering they’re the only one of the Zhinuvian home planets and associated colonies to have anything approaching a planetary government, but they usually sent their local Consul or Ambassador to attend the proceedings in whatever city the Meeting was held. To spend money and time on a ship from Zhinu was within their means, but they had never demonstrated such interest before.

  The rest of Zhinu was loosely represented, if you can call it that, by a group of Tlaxce-based Consuls who insisted quite happily that they were only there to observe. Sadira-on-Cygnus was there, of course; the pilots appeared to have formed some kind of space nomad free state, whatever that meant; and the New Sadira Consul spent a long hour blathering out his complaint concerning the unseemly haste with which the Meeting had been convened, such haste having prevented him from either bringing in a full delegate or obtaining accreditation from his government to be their delegate. The sidelong looks and narrow-eyed glares he got from both pilots and Cygnian-Sadiri were a joy to behold.

  The real excitement came not from a delegate but an observer. Revered Bezhtan of Academe Nkhaleëngomi had lived several years on Punartam but was originally from Ain. The murmur that ran through the crowd of delegates, observers and spectators was thrilling. Bezhtan was registered as academic rather than governmental representation so there was no reason to bar her, but you could feel the air go prickly with unresolved emotions as the Sadiri eyed her uneasily. Bezhtan sat and calmly bore the stares of curiosity and hatred with an expression that looked more like resignation than contrition.

  That was only the morning session, everyone having their own little introductory piece to say, but it was already exciting. Ixiaral had to attend to the Patrona so I went to find Rafi, desperate to talk about the possibilities from this Meeting. Before I saw him, I noticed another familiar face, one that made me forget any memory of embarrassment or awkwardness when I saw how it lit up at my presence. Serendipity! We all but ran to each other and gripped arms in a cheerful mockery of the old Lyceum greeting.

  ‘Ntenman, so good to see you!’ she cried.

  I laughed and only said, ‘Serendipity!’ but with enough fondness that she could decipher the rest.

  Were we finally old enough to forget about pettiness? I can’t tell you what changed, whether I had finally found my place in the galaxy or she had become more settled and secure, but we were simply glad to see each other alive and well in an unpredictable time.

  ‘I was looking for Rafi,’ I told her.

  Her expression changed to wry amusement. ‘Don’t. He’s with Delarua and she hasn’t finished with him yet. Why didn’t you let us know you were here?’

  I stammered out my truthful but someho
w inadequate-sounding explanation that we’d arrived separately and we’d both been very busy. ‘Regardless,’ I concluded, ‘please keep me away from Grace Delarua. I’m convinced she dislikes me, and if she thinks I kept Rafi from her, she won’t like me any better.’

  We went to get a snack and sat outside in a small park nearby. I told her briefly and incompletely what wonders we had seen and perpetrated on Punartam, and she told me about her time in Grand Bay, swimming with baby mindships.

  ‘What?’ I demanded in shock. ‘Does this mean you’re a pilot now?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed, but there was a little wistfulness in it. ‘I’m only a passenger. I’m a pretty good one because I do have a connection with them, but becoming a pilot takes years of training and a certain kind of biology that Cygnians don’t have.’

  She sounded a little in love with them. I knew enough not to scoff. Communication and intimacy but also privacy – that was all Serendipity had ever wanted. I smiled and showed her I was happy for her but felt at the same time slightly guilty that my crush had subsided enough that I could do this with complete sincerity.

  ‘Come sit with us for the next session.’ My invitation was offered with impure motives. Of course I desired the pleasure of her company, but another thing I greatly desired was the opportunity to watch her reaction to the coming revelations. Rafi would have done as well, but it sounded as if he was going to be busy for some time. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly in the know myself. I was aware that certain options were being explored. I had my own guesses as to which way the decision would swing. It could have been fun to make a bet on it, but I preferred to say nothing of my speculations and instead enjoy to the fullest Serendipity’s amazement when the time came.

  The afternoon session went directly to the reason for the Meeting being convened. I knew that some spectators thought it would be about the cartels taking over the Academes, or the pilots’ general shift in allegiance from New Sadira to their own sweet selves, but it was a mundane, almost banal request. Ntshune was requesting permission to implement a galactic transportation system. I glanced at Serendipity out of the corner of my eye, just in case she’d had any hints from pilots and might be less shocked than I hoped, but she was leaning forward and frowning, almost biting her nails.