One of the figures, vaguely familiar, waved from the walkway near the top of the capsule. There were only a few thousand maji total, so many were known on sight, even to the common folk. What was his name? The mayor was speaking again, announcing the titles and names of the crew. Origon ignored the others until the mayor got to…ah. Teju. Origon had to admit the boy was a fitting choice. Teju was the one Methiemum out of the four maji in existence with access to the Houses of both Communication and Power. However, he was recently raised from the ranks of the apprentices, if Origon remembered correctly. A fitting choice, perhaps, but not a strong one.
The pretty show flames licked the bottom of the giant cylinder. The crew would be on their way shortly, the great capsule lifting high into the air. Just one more opportunity passing him by, given to a majus by far his inferior.
The air cracked overhead, and Teju stiffened. Shouts grew in the audience, arms rose, pointing. The line of guards pushed forward. Origon swung around, searching. A glint of reflected sunlight caught his eye, but the giant Etanela next to him motioned, and her elbow caught his head and knocked him sideways. Origon scanned the arena, trying to get his bearings. He rubbed his temple.
“My apologies,” the Etanela Speaker said, stooping. “What do you see? What happened?”
Origon ignored her. There. A cloaked person, all in gray-green, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, surely sweltering in the hot Kashidur sunlight. Something flashed again, a reflection from a long metal tube, peeking out underneath the long overcoat. A projectile weapon of some sort?
Origon thrust ahead, aiming for the figure. “Move!” he called to those in front of him. They surged, not listening. He knew he was too late even as he fought the crowd. The cloaked figure raised the long metal cylinder to its face for a second shot, and Origon let the Symphony of Communication flow around him, catching chords representing air currents as they flashed by. He used his song to tune the chords, harmonizing, arranging them in a lattice. Crystalline yellow, the color of the House of Communication, outlined a tunnel before him. His alteration to the music shifted the air, magnifying his vision.
Origon got a brief glance of fine hair covering a gruesome face, a flash of an eye and thin, high cheek. Then the head jerked out of his tunnel vision by the gun’s recoil. It was enough to recognize one of the Sureriaj, possibly even the one who had accosted him earlier. The xenophobic species was outspoken, but a rare sight on other homeworlds.
Belatedly, Origon grabbed at the notes of the bullet’s course, but it was far too fast, the beat frenetic, and the notes of its music slipped from him. The bullet pinged off the walkway to the capsule. It was not right that a tube with powder in it could defeat a majus.
“May all your feathers fall out!” He cursed the shooter. The saying might not apply outside his species, but he felt better for it. Still, some attribute of the Sureri nagged at him. Eye color? Were brown eyes common? He thought most Sureriaj were orange or gray-eyed, depending on the family lineage. And the eyes looked too small. Large eyes in a gargoyle face made Sureriaj generally unattractive to the other species.
Yet another shot rang out. The Mayoral Guard were hopelessly bogged down, unable to get to the shooter. The crowd heaved against him and Origon held on to a railing to keep his balance. Three shots. If he was incredibly fast, the shooter might have reloaded between the first and second shot, but a third, so close? There must be another barrel to his rifle, or he had a second one, already loaded. This was no snap decision to sabotage.
He followed the path of the bullets, feeling the way they cut through the melody of the air, and saw Teju slumped against the rail of the walkway. A pit of fire rose in Origon’s stomach. How dare someone shoot one of the maji!
When he looked back, the shooter was gone. Someone jostled him, then he was buffeted by dozens of people running. Clothing of all colors and beings of all sizes whipped past his view, blocking any hope of seeing where the shooter went.
“Ancestor’s eggs,” Origon cursed, and began running against the panicked crowd, back to the stage. He wrapped his robe close around his legs to keep it from getting stepped on. If he were high on the walkway, he might be able to see where the shooter was going. And he could help Teju.
It took longer than it should have to push through the crowd. Halfway through, he gave up and extended a hand. He caught at notes, readying his song to make a windy corridor. The air resisted, and Origon cursed again. The Symphony could not be changed in the same way twice in the same place and time. This was too similar to his magnifying glass.
He sighed, listening instead for the jangling chords of the Symphony of Power. They were harder to hear, discordant and irregular. People’s connections in a crowd were not so easy to change as the wind. Orange light dripped from his fingers as he encouraged those in front of him to notice his importance and move aside. He ran through.
When Origon reached the stage, he reversed the change he made to the Symphony of Power and regained the rest of his song. Every person was defined by their own specific vibration. Invest enough of that song permanently in changes and what would be left?
Rilan was waiting for him, plucking and fiddling with one of the white corseted dresses she was forced to wear on official business. It set off her black hair and dark features. She was here as representative of the Council of the Maji, then. He wasn’t surprised. Nor was he surprised she arrived before him. She had probably been invited to sit with the officials, being Methiemum herself. He nodded to her curtly and they both strode to the ladder leading to the walkway.
“Don’t know if he’ll survive,” Rilan said, as if it hadn’t been two cycles since they last spoke, this time. “The shooter was good.”
“Teju is the only one here trained to set the shuttle on its way,” Origon remarked casually. He shifted his eyes enough to see Rilan’s wry expression. He had missed her. Had they truly known each other for more than twenty cycles?
“There’s a good reason why you weren’t chosen, Ori,” she replied. “We all know you’re one of the best at manipulating the Houses of Power and Communication when they’re together. But you aren’t Methiemum. The government was insistent.”
“Teju is little more than a child. Now look what has happened,” Origon remarked. If he had been up there, he could have deflected those bullets.
“And what if we had chosen you?” Rilan continued. “You’d be up there chewing those Sureriaj bullets right now.”
Origon snorted, but ignored the jab. “You think it is their species as well?”
“Sure. Who else has trained marksmen who can hit a target that far away? Most people would miss their own foot with one of those things.”
“Agreed,” Origon said. Guns had only been around for fifty or sixty cycles, one of the nastier inventions of the Methiemum. The Sureriaj favored the weapons, though they had grudgingly accepted the invention at first. Most other beings still used swords and staves, trusty things with no need to reload, or crossbows for range. Origon wondered if that was where the idea for the capsule originated. It was in essence a giant gun, shooting at the ground, from what he could tell.
“In any case, that’s the rumor from people who saw the shooter firsthand.” Rilan added. “One of the cabinet members passed it on to me.”
Another reason to be included with the important people. Origon opened his mouth to say he had seen the shooter firsthand as well, but stopped. Rilan would ask for more details and he honestly did not have any except for brown eyes. He was beginning to doubt himself on that account. Later.
They reached the ladder and began climbing. Origon kept the Symphony uppermost in his mind, listening to the notes and phrases of the complex construct flash by as they rose above the milling crowds. The Symphony of Power’s glissandos and trills mirrored the holes and directions of the people below, many of them still running. The Symphony defined everything. What he saw was just the physical manifestation of it. The other four Symphonies were there too,
but of course he couldn’t hear them.
“Can you give us a shield?” Rilan called down to him. He shook his head, then realized she wasn’t looking.
“Not now. We will not be able to reach Teju.”
Once created, the underlying vibration would resist him creating a second shield until he was far away from this spot or much time had passed. He would have to hold it constant—unable to interact with Teju and the crew —or let it drop and be more or less defenseless.
Only now he felt just as defenseless, climbing the multiple-story ladder.
A few minutes later, they reached the top, without getting shot at. Up here the air currents were fresher, Communication’s melody almost playful.
Rilan hurried forward to Teju, who seemed to be the only one injured. One of the crew, probably the doctor, was already there.
“Here, Councilor,” the doctor said to Rilan. She crouched over the fallen man and pressed her hands to his abdomen, where blood ran freely. Origon saw the white and olive green glow form around her hands, sinking into the injured Teju’s belly. He always thought olive was a strange secondary color to complement the white of the House of Healing, but then, one did not choose the secondary color—it grew naturally. He was secretly happy for the anonymity of having two house colors—yellow for Communication and orange for Power. It meant he had no secondary color.
“Shiv’s toenails!” Rilan cursed at Teju. “Hold still! I’m a psychiatrist, not a surgeon. I’ll do what I can, but you can’t go dying on me.” Origon saw the crimson flow lessen slightly, and the bewhiskered doctor pressed a cloth to the wound, but there was an awful lot of blood darkening the narrow walkway. Rilan had never been good at physically healing with the Symphony, but then, not many maji were.
“Is anyone else injured?” he asked the shaken crew, cowering on the carpeted walk. The whole thing trembled with the smallest breath of wind, and Origon was tempted to stabilize it, but that would take too much effort and time. He asked in the Trader’s Tongue, the common form of communication between species. He and Rilan had not needed to use it, of course, being maji.
“No, Majus,” answered one of them, an older woman with gray hair pulled into a severe bun. She looked only slightly less petrified than the rest. She and the rest of the crew were wearing matching heavy blue suits with gray piping, thick and all one piece.
After a moment’s contemplation, Origon knelt down, too, behind the engraved metal handrail. He wouldn’t be able to see as far, but he was taller than the average Methiemum and didn’t want his topfeathers shaved off by another bullet.
“Did you see the shooter?” a crewmember asked.
Origon nodded. “From very close. It was to be one of the Sureriaj. Now quiet, while I find him again.” He listened to notes from the House of Power, peering over the walkway’s handrail. Far below, he heard trills of fear running through the crowd. There was a strange base line as well, which he ignored. The Symphony was as complex as reality and often more confusing. Origon traced the path of the shooter with the House of Power, reading the tremolos and vibratos of people shying away from the gray-green cloaked Sureri.
The path started where Origon first glimpsed the shooter, gun to his shoulder. It cut across the crowd, the spikes of fear in the melody decreasing farther from the source. And then it vanished. Origon scratched his head, then let his crest resettle. Surely the shooter continued to cause confusion as he moved through the crowded amphitheater. But there was nothing.
“Ori!” The shout intruded on his surveying, and he lost the thread of the music. The Symphony flashed by, leaving him with no sense of the shooter’s path. Origon frowned. If he wanted to track the path again, he’d have to find another way. He turned to Rilan.
“What is it?” he asked, annoyed.
Rilan jerked her head toward the capsule, where the crew were scuttling toward the safety of the entrance. Origon’s eyes widened as the strident base chords intruded again from the Symphony of Power. Smoke drifted past the edge of the scaffold, burning his nose. The dense fuel the pilot light would activate was heating up. The pilot flames had been going too long in the chaos. Soon the real fuel would start to burn, disastrous without a majus to control it. He stroked his moustache, thinking.
“Can the pilot flames be shut off?” he asked, again in the Trader’s Tongue. The older woman—probably the captain, from the many bands of color on the sleeves of her jumpsuit—shook her head vigorously. She was hunched against the rail, only paces from the hatch leading to the interior of the capsule.
“It was designed to burn fiercely for a short time, Majus, to provide a power source for Majus Teju to use. If the real fuel catches fire too soon, it will burn out in an explosion the size of this arena. Many will be injured, and it will be multiple cycles before we can amass this much fuel again. Our flight to Ksupara will be scrapped. Can you direct the pilot flame? Could you fly the ship in Majus Teju’s stead?” The woman must have been informed of his abilities.
“We’re losing him, Ori!” Rilan called. She had her hands pushed tight against Teju, whose head fell back against the railing as if it were too heavy for him. The crew’s doctor was trying to investigate the wound as she held pressure, but his hands were already soaked with blood, his doctor’s bag next to him splayed open to reveal a variety of tools. “Even if we get him down from here in time, I don’t think Doctor Chitra can save him. There’s too much damage.” Her eyes were wet when she stared up at him. “Ori, help me make my people proud. I don’t want this day to be a complete failure.”
Origon looked to the dying Teju, to the burning smoke, the crew on the shaky walkway, and to where the shooter had disappeared, far down in the crowd. Who had gone against the trading might of Methiem? Who had disobeyed the wishes of the Great Assembly of the ten species, and the Council of the Maji? Both organizations had given approval to this endeavor. Without a culprit, there was as much chance of sabotage if the Methiemum tried a second time. But if they were able to get to their moon this day, he could do Teju’s job: create a portal back to the Methiemum homeworld. Once complete, the knowledge could be disseminated, and travel to Ksupara could be an everyday occurrence, protected by the maji. And from there, farther into Metheim’s solar system.
If he did this, he would be the one to guide the capsule into the sky, remembered as the first majus to fly a space shuttle.
There was really only one choice.
Origon pushed up from his crouch on the walkway, running to the capsule’s entrance, ears straining for the sound of another bullet whizzing past. None came. The crew followed. One of the crewwomen began closing the heavy door of the capsule behind them and through it, he saw Rilan dragging the body of Teju back toward the ladder. The doctor was shaking his head, wiping blood from his hands and packing up his bag. Origon could investigate the body when he got back, assuming he got back intact.
Origon stepped through the short hallway to let the doctor pass, then followed the crew to the one circular room at the nose of the shuttle. He reached out with all his senses.
I shall be the one to put this capsule on Ksupara! The thrill raced through him. The first time members of the ten species are traveling in space! There would be time to grieve for a fallen majus later, after he returned from the moon. Honor and ceremony would accompany the return, though he pushed the thought away. For now, it is critical to concentrate on the task.
Around him, the eight crewmembers scurried to various tasks, flipping levers and tallying up sums on chalkboards. Several checked gauges for liquids coursing along walls of the room and down into the bowels of the lengthy cylinder beneath them. Origon stood near a half-sphere of metal, detailed with ornamental filigree, thrusting up through the center of the domed room. The burnished ceiling missed his topfeathers by a handsbreadth, and the diameter was maybe four times its height. Polished riveted walls reflected the light of Methiem’s morning sun through small portholes filled with thick lead glass.
Origon ignored the scurrying Methiemum, feeling the awe inspiring verses of the Symphony of Power below him, like a thousand trumpets blowing at full volume. His mind recoiled from the roiling furnace of fuel attached to the bottom of the capsule. Surely this was too much? Once that melody was released to its full potential, it would consume the shuttle. But the Methiemum would not have designed it so poorly. He traced the racing lines of music describing the pilot flames, a candle to the sleeping sun in the tanks of fuel at the bottom of the shuttle. He could hear the shape of it in the languid Symphony of Communication. Air passed beneath it, blown through a tube by a slight breeze from outside. A small valve stuck closed, but a directed staccato trill, a burst of air, would be enough to switch the valve and let the pilot flame in. It would happen anyway, if he didn’t control the burning pilot light first. It was designed for a majus to use.
“Is everyone to be ready?” he asked. There was little time before the pilot flame reached the main tank. Crew scurried around his unfocused eyes, and someone tugged on the sleeve of his robe.
“Please, sit, and tuck in your restraint,” said the captain. Origon looked around. Everyone else was seated in reclining chairs around the periphery of the room, each stationed near a bank of dials and levers. They watched, eyes wide, firmly strapped in place. The captain pointed to one of two empty seats.
Origon sat, and the captain helped him buckle his restraints. His height made the seat uncomfortable—it had been designed for one of average Methiemum stature.
“Is this all to be necessary?” he complained.
“Quite so,” the captain answered. “There. Done.” She stepped back. “Please wait until I have restrained myself, and then feel free to start our journey, honorable Kirian.” Quickly, the captain strapped in, then nodded to Origon. “Our lives will be in your hands.”
Merchants and Maji: Two Tales of the Dissolutionverse (Dissolution Cycle) Page 10
