by Sharon Lee
SUMMONED, Jon dea’Cort arrived quickly and heard the tale out with a grin almost as wide as Bell’s could be, when he stood at the height of his powers. When all was said, he looked to Cyra, and inclined his head.
“Your Bell, he is at what stage in his continuing journey?”
She blinked against the rise of unexpected tears and made herself meet his eyes squarely. “He is painting. Please—”
He held up a hand. “Yes. You were right to come to us.” He looked to Captain sig’Radia, who lifted an eyebrow.
“A change of custody, I think,” he said to her. “Certainly, they will insist that he be heard, and fined, but he must be got out of the holding tank at once and allowed to paint before drunk-and-disorderly becomes cold murder.”
Cyra sat up, horrified. “Bell would not—” A bright glance stopped her.
“Would he not? Perhaps you are correct. But let us not put him to the test, eh?” He grinned suddenly, scout-manic. “Besides, I want to see what magic flows from his brush this time.”
THEY GAVE HER a room, and a meal, and promised to fetch her, when Bell was arrived. She ate and lay down on the bed, meaning to close her eyes for a moment only . . .
“Cyra?” The voice was quiet, but unfamiliar. “It is I, Jon dea’Cort. Your Bell is safe.”
She sat up, blinking, and found the scout seated on the edge of her bed, face serious.
“Is he well?” she demanded. “Is he—”
He held up a hand. “Would you see him? He is painting.”
“Yes!”
“Come then,” he said, and he led her out and down the hall to a lift, then down, down, down, perhaps to the very core of the planet, before the doors opened, and there was another hall, which they walked until it intersected another. They turned right. Jon dea’Cort put his hand against a door, which slid, silently, open, and they stepped into a large and well-lit studio.
Bell at the farther end of the room, his easel in the best light and he was working with that focused, feverish look on his face that she had come to know well—and to treasure.
The scout touched her hand, and tipped his head toward the door. Cyra followed him out.
“Thank you,” she said, feeling conflicting desires to sing and weep. “He will crash—sometime. Often, he knows when, but in a strange place, with this interruption—I do not know. Someone—someone should pay attention to him.”
“Surely,” the scout said amiably. “And that someone ought to be yourself, if you are able?”
She hesitated for a moment, thinking of the shop in Low Port, and then inclined her head. “I am able.”
“CYRA?” SHE LOOKED UP from her work, smiling, and found Bell gazing seriously down at her.
Having gained her attention, he went to a knee, and raised his hand to her face. She nestled her cheek into the caress.
“Are you sorry, Cyra? To leave your home, to be rootless, companioned to inconvenient Bell, and in the sphere of scouts . . .”
She laughed and turned her face, brushing her lips against his palm, and straightening.
“What is this? You will be painting tomorrow, my friend; do not try to tease me into believing that you are on the down-cycle!”
He smiled at that, and touched a fingertip to her nose before dropping his hand to his knee. “You know me too well. But, truly, Cyra . . .”
She put the pliers down and reached out, placing her hands on his shoulders and gazing seriously into his eyes.
“I am not sorry, Bell. Did you not say that you would take me away? You have done so, and I am not sorry at all.”
He had kept the other part of that pillow-sworn vow, as well, and the portrait of herself that he had completed in Scout Headquarters remained there, on display in the reception area, with other works of art from many worlds.
“I have the original,” he had said to Jon dea’Cort. “Take you the copy, and let us be in Balance.”
And so it had been done, and now they were—attached to scouts, spending time on this research station, or that surveillance ship, while Bell painted, and sketched, and fed his art. Cyra fed her own art, and her jewelry was sought after, when they came to a world where they might sell, or trade.
“We do well,” she said, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “I am pleased, Bell.”
He laughed gently and leaned forward, sliding his arms around her and bringing her on to his knee.
“You’re pleased, are you?” he murmured against her hair. “But could you not be—just a little—more pleased?”
She laughed and wrapped her arms closely around his neck, rubbing her cheek against the softness of his beard.
“Why, yes,” she said, teasing him. “I might be—just a little—more pleased.”
He laughed, and rose, bearing her with him, across their cabin to the bed.
—Standard Year 1293
Naratha’s Shadow
For every terror, a joy. For every sorrow, a pleasure.
For every death, a life. This is Naratha’s Law.
—From, Creation Myths and Unmakings:
A Study of Beginninng and End
“Take it away!” The Healer’s voice was shrill.
The scout leapt forward, slamming the lid of the stasis box down and triggering the seal in one smooth motion.
“Away, it is,” she said soothingly, as if she spoke to a child, instead of a woman old in her art.
“Away it is not,” Master Healer Inomi snapped. Her face was pale. The scout could hardly blame her. Even with the lid closed and the seal engaged, she could feel the emanation from her prize puzzle—a grating, sticky malevolence centered over and just above the eyes, like the beginnings of ferocious headache. If the affect was that strong for her, who tested only moderately empathic, as the scouts rated such things, what must it feel like to the Healer, whose gift allowed her to experience another’s emotions as her own?
The scout bowed. “Master Healer, forgive me. Necessity exists. This . . . object, whatever it may be, has engaged my closest study for—”
“Take. It. Away.” The Healer’s voice shook, and her hand, when she raised it to point at the door. “Drop it into a black hole. Throw it into a sun. Introduce it into a nova. But, for the gods’ sweet love, take it away!”
The solution to her puzzle would not be found by driving a Master Healer mad. The scout bent, grabbed the strap and swung the box onto her back. The grating nastiness over her eyes intensified, and for a moment the room blurred out of focus. She blinked, her sight cleared, and she was moving, quick and silent, back bent under the weight of the thing, across the room and out the door. She passed down a hallway peculiarly empty of Healers, apprentices and patrons, and stepped out into the mid-day glare of Solcintra.
Even then, she did not moderate her pace, but strode on until she came to the groundcar she had requisitioned from Headquarters. Biting her lip, feeling her own face wet with sweat, she worked the cargo compartment’s latch one-handed, dumped her burden unceremoniously inside and slammed the hatch home.
She walked away some little distance, wobbling, and came to rest on a street-side bench. Even at this distance, she could feel it—the thing in the box, whatever it was—though the headache was bearable, now. She’d had the self-same headache for the six relumma since she’d made her find, and was no closer to solving its riddle.
The Scout leaned back on the bench. “Montet sig’Norba,” she told herself loudly, “you’re a fool.”
Well, and who but a fool walked away from the luxury and soft-life of Liad to explore the dangerous galaxy as a scout? Scouts very rarely lived out the full term of nature’s allotted span—even those fortunate enough to never encounter a strange, impulse powered, triple-heavy something in the back end of nowhere and tempted the fates doubly by taking it aboard.
Montet rested her head against the bench’s high back. She’d achieved precious little glory as a scout, glory arising as it did from the discovery of odd or lost or hidden knowledge.
&n
bsp; Which surely the something must carry, whatever its original makers had intended it to incept or avert.
Yet, six relumma after what should have been the greatest find of her career, Montet sig’Norba was still unable to ascertain exactly what the something was.
“It may have been crafted to drive Healers to distraction,” she murmured, closing her eyes briefly against the ever-present infelicity in her head.
There was a certain charm to Master Healer Inomi’s instruction to drop the box into a black hole and have done, but gods curse it, the thing was an artifact! It had to do something!
Didn’t it?
Montet sighed. She had performed the routine tests; and then tests not quite so routine, branching out, with the help of an interested, if slightly demented, lab tech, into the bizarre. The tests stopped short of destruction—the tests, let it be known, had not so much as scratched the smooth black surface of the thing. Neither had they been any use in identifying the substance from which it was constructed. As to what it did, or did not do . . .
Montet had combed, scoured and sieved the Scouts’ not-inconsiderable technical archives. She’d plumbed the depths of archeology, scaled the heights of astronomy, and read more history than she would have thought possible, looking for a description, an allusion, a hint. All in vain.
Meanwhile, the thing ate through stasis boxes like a mouse through cheese. The headache and disorienting effects were noticeably less when the thing was moved to a new box. Gradually, the effects worsened, until even the demented lab tech—no empath, he—complained of his head aching and his sight jittering. At which time it was only prudent to remove the thing to another box and start the cycle again.
It was this observation of the working of the thing’s . . . aura that had led her to investigate its possibilities as a carrier of disease. Her studies were—of course— inconclusive. If it carried disease, it was of a kind unknown to the scouts’ medical laboratory and to its library of case histories.
There are, however, other illnesses to which sentient beings may succumb. Which line of reasoning had immediately preceded her trip to Solcintra Healer Hall, stasis box in tow, to request an interview with Master Healer Inomi.
“And much profit you reaped from that adventure,” Montet muttered, opening her eyes and straightening on the bench. Throw it into a sun, indeed!
For an instant, the headache flared, fragmenting her vision into a dazzle of too-bright color. Montet gasped, and that quickly the pain subsided, retreating to its familiar, wearisome ache.
She stood, fishing the car key out of her pocket. Now what? she asked herself. She’d exhausted all possible lines of research. No, check that. She’d exhausted all orderly and reasonable lines of research. There did remain one more place to look.
THE LIBRARY OF LEGEND was the largest of the several libraries maintained by the Liaden Scouts. The largest and the most ambiguous. Montet had never liked the place, even as a student Scout. Her antipathy had not escaped the notice of her teachers, who had found it wise to assign her long and tedious tracings of kernel-tales and seed-stories, so that she might become adequately acquainted with the library’s content.
Much as she had disliked those assignments, they achieved the desired goal. By the time she was pronounced ready to attempt her Solo, Montet was an agile and discerning researcher of legend, with an uncanny eye for the single true line buried in a page of obfusion.
After she passed her Solo, she opted for field duty, to the clear disappointment of at least one of her instructors, and forgot the Library of Legends in the freedom of the stars.
However, skills once learned are difficult to unlearn, especially for those who have survived scout training. It took Montet all of three days to find the first hint of what her dubious treasure might be. A twelve-day after, she had the kernel-tale.
Then, it was cross-checking—triangulating, as it were, trying to match allegory to orbit; myth to historical fact. Detail work of the most demanding kind, requiring every nit of a Scout’s attention for long hours at a time. Montet did not stint the task—that had never been her way—and the details absorbed her day after day, early to late.
Which would account for her forgetting to move the thing, whatever it was, from its old stasis box into a new one.
* * *
“This is an alert! Situation Class One. Guards and emergency personnel to the main laboratory, caution extreme. Montet sig’Norba to the main laboratory. Repeat. This is an alert . . .”
Montet was already moving down the long aisle of the Legend Library, buckling her utility belt as she ran. The intercom repeated its message and began the third pass. Montet slapped the override button for the lift and jumped inside before the door was fully open.
Gods, the main lab. She’d left it, whatever it was, in the lab lock-box, which had become her custom when she and the tech had been doing their earnest best to crack the thing open and learn its inner workings. It should have been . . . safe . . . in the lab.
The lift doors opened and she was running, down a hall full of security and catastrophe uniforms. She wove through the moving bodies of her comrades, not slackening speed, took a sharp right into the lab’s hallway, twisted and dodged through an unexpectedly dense knot of people just standing there, got clear—and stumbled, hands over her eyes.
“Aiee!”
The headache was a knife, buried to the hilt in her forehead. Her knees hit the floor, the jar snapping her teeth shut on her tongue, but that pain was lost inside the greater agony in her head. She sobbed, fumbling for the simple mind-relaxing exercise that was the first thing taught anyone who aspired to be a scout.
She crouched there for a lifetime, finding the pattern and losing it; and beginning again, with forced, frantic patience. Finally, she found the concentration necessary, ran the sequence from beginning to end, felt the agony recede—sufficiently.
Shaking, she pushed herself to her feet and faced the open door of the lab.
It was then she remembered the stasis box and the madcap young tech’s inclination toward explosives.
“Gods, gods, gods . . .” She staggered, straightened and walked, knees rubbery, vision white at the edges—walked down the hall, through the open door.
The main room was trim as always, beakers and culture-plates washed and racked by size; tweezers, blades, droppers and other hand tools of a lab tech’s trade hung neatly above each workbench. Montet went down the silent, orderly aisles, past the last workbench, where someone had started a flame on the burner and decanted some liquid into a beaker before discovering that everything was not quite as it should be and slipping out to call Security.
Montet paused to turn the flame down. Her head ached horribly, and her stomach was turning queasy. All praise to the gods of study, who had conspired to make her miss the mid-day meal.
The door to the secondary workroom was closed, and refused to open to her palmprint.
Montet reached into her utility belt, pulled out a flat thin square. The edges were firm enough to grip; the center viscous. Carefully, she pressed the jellified center over the lockplate’s sensor, and waited.
For a moment—two—nothing happened, then there was a soft click and a space showed between the edge of the door and the frame.
Montet stepped aside, lay the spent jelly on the workbench behind her, got her fingers in the slender space and pushed. The door eased back, silent on well-maintained tracks. When the gap was wide enough, she slipped inside.
The room was dim, the air cool to the point of discomfort. Montet squinted, fighting her own chancy vision and the murkiness around her.
There: a dark blot near the center of the room, which could only be a stasis box. Montet moved forward, through air that seemed to thicken with each step. Automatically, her hand quested along her utility belt, locating the pin-light by touch. She slipped it out of its loop, touched the trigger—and swore.
The stasis box lay on its side in the beam, lid hanging open. Empty.
&n
bsp; Montet swallowed another curse. In the silence, someone moaned.
Beam before her, she went toward the sound, and found the charmingly demented lab tech huddled on the floor next to the further wall, his arms folded over his head.
She started toward him, checked and swung the beam wide.
The thing, whatever it was, was barely a dozen steps away, banked by many small boxes of the kind used to contain the explosive trimplix. The detonation of a single container of trimplix could hole a spaceship, and here were twelves of twelves of them, stacked every-which-way against the thing . . .
“Kill it,” the tech moaned behind her. “Trigger the trimplix. Make it stop.”
Carefully, Montet put her light on the floor. Carefully, she went out to the main room, drew a fresh stasis box from stores and carried it back into the dimness. The tech had not moved, except perhaps to draw closer round himself.
It was nerve-wracking work to set the boxes of trimplix, gently, aside, until she could get in close enough to grab the thing and heave it into the box. It hit bottom with a thump, and she slammed the lid down as if it were a live thing and likely to come bounding back out at her.
That done, she leaned over, gagging, then forced herself up and went over to the intercom to sound the all-clear.
PANOPELE SETTLED HER feet in the cool, dewy grass; filled her lungs with sweet midnight air; felt the power coalesce and burn in her belly, waking the twins, Joy and Terror. Again, she drank the sweet, dark air, lungs expanding painfully; then raised her face to the firmament, opened her mouth—and sang.
Amplified by Naratha’s Will, the song rose to the star-lanes, questing, questioning, challenging. Transported by the song, the essence of Panopele, Voice of Naratha, rose likewise to the star-lanes, broadening, blossoming, listening.
Attended by four of the elder novices, feet comforted by the cool, dewy grass, strong toes holding tight to the soil of Aelysia, the body of Panopele sang the Cycle down. Two of the attendant novices wept to hear her; two of the novices danced. The body of Panopele breathed and sang; sang and breathed. And sang.
