When she opened them again, she realized that she was not alone. A figure was outlined against the stars, floating weightless in lotus position. The woman had turned to study Sara with dark, unblinking eyes set in seamless, golden skin. A river of straight black hair streamed back toward the clasp at her neck, interrupted by a streak of white at the temple, like rapids where black water stumbles and foams over a hidden rock. The caste-stone in her forehead gazed at Sara, still as the axis of a whirling world.
There was no doubt in Sara’s mind that this was the person she was supposed to spy on. But at the moment she was concentrating on not introducing herself by vomiting.
“Hello,” she managed to say.
“It helps if you look first at the stars,” the Vind advised calmly.
Sara tried it, and found it did help anchor her. She still didn’t let go of the door handle. “This is embarrassing,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the sophisticated Waster who’s seen everything and can’t be impressed. Fact is, I’ve never spent much time in space.”
“You’ll get used to it,” the other woman said.
“Sorry to barge in,” Sara said. “I’m Saraswati Callicot.”
“Thora Lassiter,” said the Vind, confirming Sara’s expectation. “You got here just in time.”
“In time for what?”
“Sunrise,” Thora said, turning back to the window.
The ship’s bow was pointed at the planet. They had been on the night side, where Iris was only a dark circle against the stars. Now, a bright arc appeared, the outline of the planet’s limb against the night sky. Seconds later, the sun edged over the horizon, a blinding-bright jewel set on a tiara. Irresistibly drawn, Sara let go of the door and floated forward, quelling the feeling that she was going to fall. Thora stared out fearlessly, completely absorbed.
As they orbited into day, the planet below became a shimmering mass of tinsel. The surface was a sea of reflections stirred by the wind. Sara had never seen anything like it.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, mystified. “But what makes it sparkle?”
Thora looked back, her face sidelit by Irislight. “Organic crystals,” she said. “The dominant form of plant life.”
“But—”
“It’s a non-Terran biota.” She turned back to the planet, a look of utter love shining through her mask of detachment. “Every other live planet we’ve been to was terraformed in the First Diaspora. Not Iris. This is independent evolution—a real alien ecosystem.”
Trust Ashok and Touli not to mention this little detail, Sara thought. They were physicists; biology was a sideshow to them. As she absorbed the news, Sara frowned in puzzlement. “I thought the planet was habitable. How could it have an Earthlike atmosphere without Earth organisms?”
“We don’t know yet,” Thora said. “It’s one reason we need to get down there soon.”
Below them, prismatic gleams danced across the land. Out of the shifting mass of reflections, patterns formed, then dissipated. A thread of river appeared, a silver whiplash in the glitter; then it snaked sideways, and was gone.
“Did you see that?” Sara asked. “What makes those patterns?”
“We’re not sure. Most likely, they’re like parts in the planet’s hair, that disappear when the wind blows a different way.”
Sara had to look away from the planet. It had gotten too dazzling; little pinpricks of light danced before her eyes. She watched the light playing on her companion’s face. “Are you a biologist?” she asked.
Thora tore her eyes away from the planet with an effort. “No,” she said. “I have trained as a Sensualist.”
“A sensualist, eh?” Sara grinned broadly. “Good, so am I.”
“You are thinking of the ordinary meaning of the word,” Thora said gravely.
“Sensualism’s not ordinary to me. I practice it very seriously,” Sara said.
“Sensualism is a philosophy of sensory perception,” Thora explained. “Its basic tenet is that the human sensorium is capable of observing a greater range of phenomena than we normally realize. It’s devoted to discovering new techniques of observation.”
This hadn’t been part of her briefing, but it was ringing a bell in Sara’s mind. “From the planet Gammadis, isn’t it?” she said.
A spark of animation lit Thora’s face, for a moment. “You’ve heard of it? Its modern founder was a Gammadian philosopher named Prosper Tellegen, but it’s much older—it goes back to Plato, really.”
“So you’re a philosopher?”
“A noncognitive researcher.”
“Are there others in your department?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Everyone else on board was linking up in social structures, but this woman must have been walking around in an envelope of oblivion. Sara wondered what the curators had really done to her. The woman’s gaze was unnervingly direct and fixed; Sara felt like a specimen, or a bug about to be whacked.
“Have you traveled much?” she asked, to deflect the scrutiny from herself.
Thora didn’t look away. “Never this far.”
“The long journeys are hard,” Sara said. “For a while, you go through a period of mourning for the world you left behind.”
“Yes, I suppose that must be true,” Thora said.
“But after a while, the Wasters become your family. You detach from sequential time and join the gypsies who live like stones skipping across the surface of history.”
“Yes.”
Thora’s eyes hadn’t moved, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere, studying something Sara could not see. It was odd; from the files, Sara had expected someone more unorthodox and strong-willed, not this serene sleepwalker. Another wave of nausea threatened her poise. Since it was hard anyway to keep up a conversation with someone who had mentally left the room, Sara held out a hand and said, “Well, I’ve got to go find my berth. See you around.”
“Yes,” Thora said, shaking her hand.
Sara glanced back when she reached the hatch, but Thora was only a black silhouette against the dazzling planet. She was staring outward again at the light.
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
I know the Magisterium must have sent someone here to spy on me. They are angry and guilty, a dangerous combination. Angry because I disgraced them, guilty because they cured me against my will. I have not spotted the spy yet, though I have my suspicions. But then, suspicion is my nature.
In the Vind language we have only a single word for both “strength” and “weakness”—nkida. But in the union of two opposite meanings, a new one is born, for nkida can also be translated as “power source.” A person’s most abiding flaws are also the driving forces of her personality. A practitioner of the mind-body disciplines of apathi will seek to develop those flaws, draw strength from them, and explore their nature.
My cousin Bdiwa Ral had known me only two weeks when she looked at me and said, “I know what your first nkida is: inability to trust. That is what you must cultivate.”
She was right, of course, though I argued for a long time that it was simply a rational response to the world. I thought then that she was criticizing me for lack of trust, but no—it was my nkida, a thing I could never overcome, and should not want to. Unacknowledged, it could destroy me. Developed, it might still destroy me—but it could also lead to focused, disciplined power over myself and the world around me.
To others, my nkida manifests as aloofness when I am not in control of it, judiciousness and even mysterious authority when I am. But to me it means a life sentence of isolation. All my life I have observed people forming communities wherever they are thrown together, as if it were part of their nature. It is a skill even children possess, but not me. My shipmates here have been forming bonds and groupings, on what bases I am not sure. Today, an artless Balavati woman spoke to me of friendship and family. I envied her ability to offer spontaneous friendship to a perfect stranger, and felt suspicious of her motives for do
ing so. This was my nkida out of control. She was so perfectly unreflective that you could see straight through her, and there was nothing hidden inside. I longed to be like her, even as she left in discouragement.
I think friendship may be nothing but the ability to trust someone enough to put your happiness in their hands. If my discipline stays strong, it is a feeling I will never know. But if ever I do, then I will lose my power, and become like all the other content, unmindful people, ordinary and undriven.
* * *
I need to record this now, while it is still fresh in my mind. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable, because the senses are unreliable, but memory plays havoc even with the shards of truth that come through to us untouched. So, before memory has distorted everything, let me set this night’s events down.
It started with a dream. I stood in an empty white corridor, in a part of the questship I had never seen. The ship was larger than any of us had realized; it stretched for miles into space. Behind me lay the familiar, inhabited part we had begun to make our home, a tiny human outpost in the immense structure we had not yet discovered. Ahead, everything looked sterile, scoured clean. It was perfectly silent. Not even my footsteps made any sound, and when I knocked on a wall as an experiment, I felt the impact on my knuckles but heard nothing. Vacuum, I decided. The air had all escaped from this part of the ship. I would have to be careful not to fall through any holes into space.
Moving forward, I passed empty, branching corridors. It was a perfect maze, acres of it—but what was its purpose? Doors began to appear, but all were locked. One of the doors was cold to the touch, and something was moving around behind it. I felt dread at the knowledge that I was going to open it. I did not want to, but it was the logic of the dream. As I touched the door the lights in the corridor failed, plunging me into gray dimness. The door fell open, but I could not see what lay inside. All I knew was that something had found me. I turned to flee, but now I had to grope my way forward, torturously slow, unable to see. I strained on, propelled by panic, desperate to find my way to the parts of the ship I knew.
A sickening ripple passed through my body, and I woke. The bed under me was shuddering. But was it me that had jerked, or the ship? “Lights!” I ordered, and they immediately came on, showing me the inside of my tiny berth. It looked oddly distorted, just as it had before.
With the dream still vivid in my mind, I listened to the soft breathing of the ventilation. When I had fallen asleep only a little while before, the man in the berth next to mine had been talking and moving around, as he often did. I did not know his name or position, just his nighttime habits, which at first had disturbed me. But I had studied my own reactions and now the sounds he made were familiar enough to be soothing. He was silent now. I got up and pulled on a robe, then opened the door.
The berths are arranged in pods of five, all opening onto a shared relaxation area. When I first arrived aboard I chose a berth in a deserted pod, but it had gradually filled up around me. When I stepped out, the lights were already on in the common room but no one was there—an odd thing, since the lights are activated by motion sensors. I looked at the door next to mine, and felt an uncomfortable fullness in my throat. A dark pool was seeping under the door, staining the carpet. I knelt beside it, but could not tell what it was, so I touched it. On the tip of my finger, it was red.
I quickly crossed the room to the on-ship comlink. “Security,” I said, and it connected me. “I think you had better send someone down here.” My voice was weirdly calm in my own ears. “There may have been an accident.”
Then I faced a choice: to open the door or not? The dream was still thick in my head, clogging my usual responses. I had no desire to see what lay beyond the door. But what if I could be of some help? So, unwillingly, I crossed the room and tried the door handle. To my relief, it was locked. I knocked, but there was no response.
The first to arrive was Dagan Atlabatlow, the Oreman head of security. He took in the situation at a glance and radioed for backup. Then he used a security pass to override the door lock. When he opened the door, a sluggish pool of blood that had been backed up against the door flowed out. Inside, the body crumpled on the floor was wearing a security uniform. Its head was missing.
As the pod filled, first with security, then with medical personnel, I took a seat on the other side of the common room and focused on my dova, my center of gravity, hanging like a plumb bob inside me. It is one of the first exercises they taught me on Vindahar. It turns a person’s face into an impenetrable, blank sheet. When a security man sat down to take my statement, he frowned and commented, “You don’t seem very upset.” I gazed at him till he looked away.
In truth, I felt a distance from the event, the stance of witness rather than participant. Perhaps it was the medical treatments, or the fact that I feel sure I have seen such a thing before, though I cannot call to mind exactly where. I watched Atlabatlow direct the investigation with the hungry intensity of a stalking panther. He never raised his voice, but everyone who came within the field of his concentration instinctively mimicked him. He almost had the look of a man in love—and in a sense, so he was, for whoever had committed this brutal act was now his prey.
chapter three
News of the murder spread through the ship at the speed of rumor, casting sinister shadows everywhere. In the first terrifying hours after the discovery, people gathered spontaneously in the refectory to talk in intense little groups. But the comfort of being together was offset by the knowledge that the murderer could only be someone still on board.
Two grisly facts stoked the panic and claustrophobia: the pointless violence of the act, and the missing head.
“Sheared clean off, as if with a cleaver,” the doctor told Sara in an undertone when she pumped him for information. “Even a particle weapon would have left some trace.”
“So you think someone’s got a trophy?” Sara asked.
“Let’s just say I’m being careful when I open closet doors.”
You could always trust David for some gallows humor. From him, Sara also learned the other puzzling aspects of the incident: how the door had been locked from the inside, that the only fingerprints on the door had been the victim’s and Thora Lassiter’s, and the absence of any sign of a struggle. “He probably never even knew what hit him,” David said.
“Who was he?” Sara asked. So far, no one she asked had known the victim.
“One of the security guards,” the doctor said. “Nothing in his record to make him stand out. So far, we haven’t found a past history with anyone on board, other than his boss.”
“It makes you wonder if he was chosen randomly.” Sara voiced the fear that was spreading like contagion through the halls.
“Or whether the assassin got the wrong room,” David said with a significant look.
That had occurred to Sara, as well. It seemed curious that the attack had taken place in a berth next to the only person aboard with the connections to make her a political target. It made Sara’s curiosity flare all the brighter: what had Thora Lassiter done, and who had she done it to?
“It seems crazy,” she mused.
“What?”
“That anyone would bring a grudge fifty-eight light-years to settle.”
“People can be strange that way.”
Sara noticed several things about the staff reaction to the crime. First of all, everyone got a little sentimental. The day after the incident, Director Gavere called a convocation of the entire staff in the lecture hall, the only room large enough to hold everyone. He did well, since his speech was full of conventional compassion. Listening, Sara realized that everyone had needed a homily infusion. Familiar words deflected the panic and confusion, making the situation seem more normal. Due to the number of belief systems aboard, Epco could not sponsor any overtly religious memorials for the dead man, but the Director’s secular sermon satisfied all but the most hard-bitten rationalists.
The second reaction was that the facult
y became unusually tolerant of authority. Ordinarily, scientists and security formed a combustible mix, but now guards visibly patrolling the halls in their gray-and-maroon uniforms were accepted as a reassurance, not a provocation. Nor did anyone object when an announcement went out that there would be a search of the entire ship, personal quarters not exempted.
But though every nook and cranny was supposedly inspected, neither murder weapon nor head was found. As the days passed without progress in the investigation, amateur theories metastasized underground.
“What can be so hard about finding the culprit?” Magister Sarcodan asked as several of them sat talking over bags of beer. He was head of Descriptive Sciences; he had a black beard and a booming voice that made it easy for him to win arguments with sheer volume. In a bar he could be genial company, but his alpha male behavior gave Sara an unbecoming urge to disagree with him even when she was on his side.
“After all, there’s a limited pool of suspects,” he continued, “and they have all our personnel files.”
“Yeah, you’d think they’d do a database search for all the psychopathic killers,” Sara said.
The magister didn’t acknowledge the sarcasm. “The number of people who had motive, means, and opportunity can’t be that large. Why not just eliminate all the ones who were accounted for at the time of the killing? All it takes is some deductive reasoning.”
“I’m sure they will appreciate your explaining it to them,” said Sandhya Prem in her inconspicuous way. Sara had learned to respect her. She was head of System Sciences, a woman who cultivated a mousy image to hide extraordinary intelligence. Right now, her limp brown hair was pinned back with a paper clip. Her sharp humor was mouselike too, darting out from dark corners. As a rule, you only saw it out of the corner of your eye.
“Some people are saying the security guard wasn’t the real target,” Sara let drop, to see where it would take the conversation.
“Oh right, our Vind celebrity,” Sarcodan said. “Well, if anyone is out to get her, it would be that Oreman they’ve got in charge of security. The whole affair gave his planet a black eye.”
Dark Orbit Page 4
