One anomaly could perhaps provide me with an explanation for my predicament, if I could only elucidate what it means. It is the strange bright star that now appears beside Cassiopeia. It should not be there, yet its presence is undeniable. What does it mean? For now, I do not know.
Silas lived in an age long before anyone knew there were star systems beyond Earth. So it would never have occurred to him that the familiar constellations would have changed, were he viewing them from another world.
And yet.
From what I’d just read, it seemed that from his perspective – an experienced ship captain from a time long before GPS, when the stars were a key means of navigation – the constellations had barely changed at all. What the hell did that mean?
It occurred to me that it might mean I wasn’t really that far from Earth. How far would I have to travel for the constellations to become noticeably different? I had no real idea, but surely it wouldn’t have to be that far. Twenty light years? Even ten? Silas had noted only one strange star. Was it the Sun?
On the one hand, though, did it even matter? For me right now, one light year was as good as a billion.
On the other hand, how close could I be? What was the closest star system to Earth? That much I knew: Alpha Centauri, which I remembered was about four light years away. That was unfortunately all I really knew, though. But assuming that my recollection from my general-education astronomy class back in college wasn’t completely off, it meant that, if I’d traveled here at light speed, the blink of an eye I’d felt getting here had taken only four years back home. So I wasn’t a billion years ahead of what I’d known, as I had feared. My kids were still there, still alive. If I could get back to Earth somehow, I could see them again. Disappearing for eight or ten years wasn’t good, but it was something you could recover from. Assuming I managed it.
I closed the journal and put it back in the safe. I’d found nothing of any use to Narilora, and right now, that was all I cared about.
The house was still and dark. Nearly everyone had gone to bed except a few of the guards. I stopped at the sitting room to pour myself a glass of malvina, then climbed up to the fifth-floor garden. I went out onto the balcony, looking out on the city. Down below, I could see the campground that had grown up around the gate. There were lights, campfires, small tents, groups of girls sitting together talking and drinking. It was hard to tell, but it looked like about two hundred of them were out there staying the night. I heard a few of them playing instruments and singing. From this distance, it looked like a music festival after the last act had finished and gone back to their hotel.
I don’t know how long I had been standing there when I noticed the shape off to my right, just under the roof where it extended over the glass walls.
For a moment or two, I wondered if it was merely a shadow.
Then it moved. It took several slow steps out from the alcove toward me.
Yet I could still barely see it. It seemed like a thing of physical darkness, a piece of the night that had taken form. I blinked, trying to separate it from the blackness around us.
It kept walking toward me. I felt my skin crawl, and a cold weight grew in my stomach. I took an involuntary step backwards.
That step was enough to bring it into the starlight above us, and I saw just enough to make out what it was.
It was a girl.
A girl with skin as black as the night around us. Her eyes, in the starlight, were yellow, and her hair was tawny, black-brown, flowing behind her. Furred ears like Merindra’s stood out from her head. She was small, smaller even than Narilora, who was maybe five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet.
As she grew closer, I realized she was naked. Her form was lithe, athletic, small breasts, muscles tightly defined on her shoulders, abdomen and chest.
She closed within a foot of me, and I finally saw her face: Beautiful in the same way Ayarala was, large eyes, cheekbones, fine sculpted features.
She reached up and touched my chin. Then she spoke, in a voice that was high-pitched and musical.
“Makalang.”
Before I could react or even say anything, she turned and ran gracefully across the balcony toward the edge. With a single leap, she got her foot up onto the glass wall, spread her arms, and disappeared into the night.
Panikang.
I broke out of my inertia and ran after her. But by the time I got to the wall, she had vanished. There was nothing there.
I watched for quite a while, wondering what had just happened, before finally giving up and going to bed.
◆◆◆
I was drawn out of a rather pleasant dream featuring Merindra, Lorelat, and a very upset and annoyed Jacqueline – my ex-wife – by some kind of rhythmic sound. It rose and fell in thirds, repeating over and over.
Rah-rah-rah, rah-rah-rah, rah-rah-rah.
I drifted up into about three-quarters worth of wakefulness. Slowly, the sound penetrated my consciousness, and I realized I recognized the word.
Mak-a-lang, mak-a-lang, mak-a-lang.
I was awake. I opened my eyes slowly. I was lying between Narilora and Kisarat, who were sitting up in bed. Across the room, by the balcony, I saw Merindra, Eladra, and Ayarala. As my eyes came into focus, I saw Merindra trying not to laugh at something, Eladra simply laughing, and Ayarala with her hands on her head and look of exasperation on her face.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Ayarala took a few steps back into the room.
“Will, I love you, but I told you this would happen.”
By this point, I could hear things clearly. A large crowd of people was chanting makalang over and over.
“What is it?”
“You should come see for yourself.”
I got up from the bed. Narilora followed me, Kisarat coming behind us. As I got closer to the balcony, things slowly came into view.
Yesterday there had been perhaps a hundred girls outside the house. This morning, there were easily a thousand, maybe two. And across the green fields of the residential area where I lived, I could see even more of them coming, in twos and threes and fives, streaming in long lines toward us.
When the crowd saw me, the chanting turned into a roar as the girls began screaming and yelling and jumping up and down and waving at me. Somewhat sheepishly, I waved back at them.
Narilora and Merindra came up on either side of me. As the roaring started to die down, I could hear another chant beginning. But makalang was a word I knew; I was too far away to understand this one.
Then Merindra gasped, throwing her hand over her mouth. Narilora just laughed out loud, the first time I had heard her laugh in quite a while. I turned around, looking at the others. Ayarala had her face in her hands, Kisarat just looked amused, and Eladra had turned beet red.
And as the chant grew, despite my distance from the girls below, somehow the collective emotional energy was enough to reach me.
And I understood what the crowd was chanting.
Mate with them, mate with them, mate with them.
“Tsulygoi?” Merindra said to me.
“Uh.”
I was stunned at this turn of events past the point of even being able to engage with it. What in the world? What would even give them the id–
Then it hit me: Yisaraq.
Some of them down there had surely seen me with Yisaraq. And having seen me, they would have told others. Now they all wanted to see it.
I felt Narilora’s fingers sliding down my arm. I turned to see her smiling and leaning forward, resting her arms against the glass wall. She curled her butt upwards, lifting her tail in the air.
Merindra let out a half-growl, half-giggle, and bent forward as well. Her long fluffy foxtail rose upward.
I looked back at the others. They were all on a couch back in the room, watching. Ayarala was laughing and shaking her head in disbelief, holding Eladra and Kisarat. She waved her hand at me, like, get it over with.
I turned back to the
two girls waiting for me. I had never performed for any kind of an audience before, and certainly not in front of a crowd of thousands. But having Merindra and Narilora bent over and ready like this was enough to counter any stage fright.
I entered Merindra from behind, provoking another growl. She pushed herself back at me as the crowd began to cheer encouragement at us. The chant intensified. I pounded her butt for several minutes before she cried out in release. The girls below cheered. I moved over to Narilora. She was wet and ready and pounded herself back at me as hard as I pumped into her. Her yowls rose above the chants below, and I saw the linyang guards in the courtyard cheering her on. Just she came around me, I thrust into her hard enough to almost push her over the edge. I had to grab her around the chest, finishing myself off as she shuddered against me, claws digging into my arm. The crowd cheered again, jumping up and down in excitement.
I withdrew from Narilora with a final wave and fell back into the room.
◆◆◆
I had to spend the rest of the morning with Lorelat getting caught up on the wife maintenance, as Eladra had put her in charge of managing the “event schedule,” as it were. There were two new girls, a talalong and a dwenda, and two linyang who hadn’t yet gotten pregnant. It was a bit tedious, but with Lorelat helping out, it went well enough.
When I arrived on Taitala six sampars ago and truly began to appreciate what kind of world I’d landed in, I wondered quite a bit about the social elements of a society that was almost entirely female. Ayarala told me our first night that females who were not claimed as wives usually paired off, so I assumed that some form of lesbian relationship was the overwhelming norm. Kisarat later explained to me that it wasn’t quite that simple. It was more accurate to say that the spectrum of human relationships was largely duplicated on Taitala within one physical sex.
For the roughly 95% of females who were neither wives nor mothers, polyamorous lesbian relationships were most common, but there were plenty of other permutations. Some females just focused on their work and never paired off, while others assisted mothers with children, being viewed as sort of quasi-mothers. Still others formed groups for which they acted as pseudo-tsulygoi, taking “wives” and generally acting like males. Some of these groups even adopted children whose mothers died or could not take care of them.
Former wives who were now mothers were expected to focus on child-rearing and avoid romantic entanglements, though there were certainly exceptions. Once children were grown and on their own, that stricture eased, and they could then do what they liked.
Then you had the wives. A wife was supposed to focus on one thing and one thing only: getting herself with child. Thus, there were taboos against any sort of physical relationships between wives. But of course, it was impossible to confine multiple females in a difficult shared experience for talons on end without certain things happening eventually. Kisarat even told me that “forbidden love between wives” was a popular if discreet element of Taitalan fiction and drama.
So when, after this discussion with Kisarat, I told my wives that not only did I not care what they did with each other, I actually enjoyed the idea, that announcement was greeted with a considerable amount of delight. From their perspective, I’d just given them blanket permission to engage in something that was forbidden, naughty, and exciting.
For that reason, part of Lorelat’s orientation sessions involved showing new wives exactly what went on in my household. When we got done, she was about as tired as I was. I cuddled with her, just feeling the little spark of our combined energies twinkle inside her belly. She rested her hand on mine. I couldn’t feel any difference in her body yet, but the little bunny-girl was there.
“How’s she doing?” she asked.
“Looks good.”
She rolled against me, ears twitching affectionately against my face. I gently ran my fingers through her long caramel-colored hair.
“Will, can I say something?”
“Sure.”
“I always wanted to be a mom. Most females do, right? But I never expected it to happen this fast. It’s one of the hard parts about being cunelo.”
“What do you mean? Your people are so fertile it’s ridiculous.”
“That’s actually it, though. We’re valued as wives because we’re good at managing households. Most tsulygoi want a cunelo wife so they don’t have to deal with that stuff themselves. But males also know that if they mate with us, we’re almost certainly going to get pregnant and leave. So they don’t mate. They just let us hang around for talons keeping house for them, until they get tired of that wife and finally give her a child, so she’ll go away.”
She sighed.
“And I knew I was probably facing that. I mean, you know what I look like. You’ve said it yourself.”
“Yes.”
“So I knew I had a good chance of being claimed. And I was then going to have to deal with ten talons of drudgery for some revolting male I despised, just waiting for the day he condescended to mate with me. And only then could I start having the life I wanted.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yes.” She kissed me. “Bunny-daddy.”
I hugged her.
“So,” she said, “I just wanted to say that I love you, I’m very happy, and I can’t wait to raise our child together.”
◆◆◆
I really liked Lorelat, and I was glad she’d stuck around. But in truth, all the bunny-girls were like that, bubbly, happy and affectionate pretty much all the time. Eladra told me it was largely because almost all of them were pregnant, which made sense.
It gave me a good feeling for a while.
At least, that was, until I was in the office later and Ayarala came in with a sour expression on her face. But rather than saying anything, she just sat in my lap and leaned against my chest.
“What’s up?”
“I am sorry, Will.”
“For what?”
“That I keep failing you. With what you are trying to do for Narilora.”
“We’ll figure it out somehow. Maybe this crystal energy stuff is it.”
She sighed.
“That is it, actually. After we talked yesterday, I spoke to my clan leader. I do not know her, but obviously she knows who I am now. I asked if there was anyone she could recommend for me to talk to about this. She put me in touch with people at the university. I went over there this morning. It . . . did not go well.”
“What happened?”
“It is as I told you. There is no one who takes ‘crystal healing’ and ‘energy flows’ seriously anymore. It is not how medicine works. Even the crystal engineers who work with actual crystal energy physics think it is nonsense.”
She sighed.
“So, I am sorry. Again.”
I hugged her.
“It’s something. We don’t know the answer, but we know what we don’t know, at least.”
“I am afraid the answer is somewhere else, Will. I have searched all the leads I can think of.”
Chapter 7
I was just about to go in search of some lunch when I heard a low boom-boom-boom in quick succession from outside. I ran to the nearest balcony just in time to see another building across the open area crumbling into a heap. I waited for another blast. Nothing came.
But this was a bigger building than anything before, one I’d noticed and wondered whether it was abandoned. It was a single crystal-adorned cylinder rising above most of the buildings around it. But the patterns of the crystals seemed incomplete, as if many had fallen off or been removed, which was why I had assumed it was no longer being used.
As it crumbled to the ground, it fell forward into the residential area, sending a rolling cloud of dust across the grass.
The crowd out front of the house reacted, though not as frantically as before. With a lot more of them out there, they seemed to take some fortitude in numbers. Most just stood there watching the cloud of smoke and dust rising into the air. But then a m
oan of dismay began rising from the crowd.
Kisarat came out of the bedroom, down at the other end of the balcony. She put her hands on her head.
“Oh, no! No!”
I went over toward her. She seemed more upset than last time.
“That was a big one.”
“It was the Tower of Starlight! Why? Why would they do that?”
“What was it?”
“It was abandoned, yes, but not by choice. Why?”
I tried to calm her down.
“What was that building?”
She had to take a few deep breaths to answer me.
“The Tower of Starlight is . . . it was . . . a landmark. It was built almost two kumala-talons ago by all the clans together, when Kumala was at her closest. It was supposed to represent a unity of the clans, working together for the good of the city. When it was new, it would catch the light of Kumala at night in an array of crystals, sending six beams of light across the city. The crystal reflectors have not worked in many talons, but I have seen pictures of it.”
“But it was abandoned?”
She bit her lip in frustration.
“It required maintenance that the clans neglected, due to the expense. Things fell into disrepair. But there was hope among many that it could be restored.” She sighed. “No more. It is gone.”
I put my arm around her. She laid her head on my shoulder.
“What a terrible loss,” she said. “I fear how this may be received.”
“It’s another message.”
“It is an escalation. A huge one. All the other buildings the Black Sky has destroyed were essentially worthless. Decrepit and meaningless. Nothing anyone cared about, which is why most of them have been left as the rubble they are now.”
“So why something so important, all of a sudden?” Then something occurred to me. “You said six rays?”
She looked up.
“Yes. The panikang once had a delegation here. Not large, but they were represented. They left long ago. Many citizens did not welcome their presence.”
The Black Sky Page 6
