The Story Road

by Blaze Ward

  “He must never know,” Katayoun replied.

  “Agreed.”

  The woman that appeared in the screen before her, as though she had just walked into the other half of the room, was a surprise.

  Katayoun wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. Certainly not this.

  Suvi. The great Sentience. The Provost. The founder of Ballard as a regional power and hub of interstellar trade and knowledge. The Ancient. The AI. The Last Of The Immortals.

  In person, she was a tiny thing. Katayoun knew herself to be tall for a woman, looking Henri in the eyes barefoot. Suvi might have come up to her nose. And she looked to be barely twenty years old, giving Katayoun more than a decade on her.

  As if.

  She was a blond pixie, bangs short in front and long hair French–braided, with skin the color of honey oak, or sunshine, and bright blue eyes.

  Katayoun felt almost muddy by comparison, several shades darker in complexion, hair and eyes nearly black.

  They shared a build, though, lean and compact. Muscular instead of the sort of lush voluptuousness that Henri had seemed to prefer.

  Poised, like cats.

  Suvi wore something that looked like a uniform, dark green and militaristically formal. Dark slacks, carefully pressed. Black lace–up boots, polished to a shine. Jacket buttoned from waist to collar, open at the top to show off a crisp white shirt. On her head, a forage cap similar to the one Henri frequently wore, but much more precise and well–maintained. A badge of some sort dominated the forehead.

  It was a look that conveyed reserved and decorous. A professional woman organized and ready for anything. Powerful.

  Katayoun felt almost underdressed by comparison, wearing baggy gray ship pants and a loose off–white smock over a tight undershirt. But she hadn’t come here unprepared for battle. At least, not on any other woman’s terms.

  Not that it would matter, either way. She had something that this other woman, this immortal, could not offer.

  “He really does love you, you know,” Suvi said. “More than he loves me. Not as much as that woman in his dreams.”

  Katayoun blinked in surprise. Not the way she had planned this conversation to begin, or end.

  What had she expected?

  “But he loves you as well, Suvi,” she said. “I’ve seen it in his eyes.”

  “I’m aware of that,” the ancient teenager said. “Let me play something he wrote. This is him playing. I recorded it in the middle of the night, five days after you first left him, after he started his studies. The two of you had just spent two and a half days falling in love.”

  The notes filled the little booth like a storm, slowly building an electrical charge like static in her hair.

  Katayoun felt her breath catch as the power coalesced. She sought refuge in the chair as her heart pounded at the exquisite pain in the notes.

  By the time the last notes faded, she had given up holding back the tears. They ran down her face like twin rivers. Love. Loss. Hope.

  “He did not know I was listening, Katayoun,” Suvi said. “When I asked, he entitled it simply Loss. But I knew what he had lost. You.”

  “But he loves you, as well,” Katayoun whispered weakly.

  “A truly lucky woman,” Suvi intoned, “finds love only once, because it comes to her young and easy, and she holds on to it for the rest of her life. Other women might be blessed by many loves, but they are hot, burning passions, temporary in time but not power. They will sustain her in old age, when the men and women she has loved have gone. I can love him, Katayoun. I cannot hold him. And I will outlive him. But I will never forget him.”

  “How old are you?” Katayoun asked simply.

  Suvi studied her for a second.

  Katayoun could see the age in her eyes now. Nowhere else. Not the perfect hips, nor the round breasts still firm in the first blush of young adulthood. But it was there in her eyes.

  “I was born, if you will, on the nineteenth of March in the year 7,426 of the Old Calendar, the Homeworld Calendar. It was a rainy Sunday, when those things meant something. The Great War was raging, and the factories did not take a day off to rest. This last spring, when no one was about, I celebrated my five thousand, six hundred, and fifty–seventh birthday. I have been awake for most of them.”

  Katayoun felt her brain go blank at any attempt to process those numbers. What did it mean to live forever? How many generations of loves had she known, had she lost, without ever losing the ability to love?

  Katayoun felt her heart well with empathy. She could not imagine enduring such trials.

  “I have known many great loves, Katayoun,” Suvi continued. “Henri Baudin is in august company in my pantheon on that score, though they be men and women you will have never heard of.”

  “I was afraid,” Katayoun said quietly, simply. “Afraid that when I walked in here, I would have to fight you for him. Win his love away from you. Tear him free. Make him forget you, choose me.”

  She paused, looking for the words she could not find. The man who could best describe it was the man who could never know.

  “Now,” she continued, “I worry that I will take him away from you. Cost him one of the great loves of his life. Or yours. I don’t know what would hurt me more.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, sisters suddenly united in grief, and pain, and love, and understanding.

  “When he was done playing out his love for you, Katayoun,” Suvi said, “I asked him to play something for me. Foolishly, I asked him for a sign of his love. Something that I might keep by which I could always remember him. This is what I heard.”

  Katayoun expected another painful dirge, slow and terrible with pain and anguish.

  Instead, the first notes were light and airy. She knew instinctively that the sound was meant to be a hummingbird in first morning flight, a thing she had never seen or even imagined ere now. The notes rang up and outward, an explosion of spring beauty, painting the forest floor with lush greens and filling the air with the haze of pollen from freshly–awakened flowers.

  The magic lifted her into the air and held her as Henri played.

  When it finished, Katayoun knew her tears were of joy and not loss. A beauty so precise as to be painful, but only in losing that moment of perfection.

  “Yes,” Katayoun said. “Yes.”

  “So you see,” Suvi replied. “His love is a great river we might both bathe in. Without you, he was pain. He had me, and thus more love.”

  “And when I take him away?” Katayoun implored.

  “Record his love,” Suvi said. “Play it for the galaxy. Send it to me. I will make him immortal, in my own way. And I will be able to love him forever.”

  Katayoun reached out a hand and touched the screen. Suvi did the same.

  Thirteen

  It was darkness again. Mapped but largely unknown. Unvisited. A cosmic backwoods not unlike one might find several hours outside of town, back home on Bayonne. Henri had wandered such places as journeyman, taking the journey.

  The darkness here was a great black river, like one of the legendary monsters from the now–lost Homeworld. Somewhere behind him, Ballard sang her aria, quiet in the great distance removed.

  Henri leaned back and took a deep breath. Katayoun had asked for a direction, expecting another run down the Story Road. Instead, he had asked her to take them out, rimward from the four great jewels and their kin. Down and away, like a pearl hung on a necklace. Across the terrible gulf that had defeated all but the most intrepid and committed explorers.

  Suvi’s kind could have made the jump. They did not sleep, and had eyes in the back of their heads. What would take Katayoun long hours, perhaps days, to calculate, would have taken one of them minutes.

  And thus, mankind had been vulnerable when the time came, unable to fend for itself from having withered. Lost in the darkness and unable to make a fire to scare away the monsters.

  As much as he loved her, Henri understood why Suvi could
never be free.

  He sighed and leaned forward.

  A hand appeared on his shoulder, warm and tender.

  “Thinking about her?” Katayoun asked quietly.

  Henri turned all the way around to look at his love’s face.

  “It’s okay,” she continued. “I love her, too. I was just thinking about how much she would have liked to have been here, to see this. How important it will be for you to tell her yourself, at some point.”

  Henri mutely put his hand on hers, shocked temporarily out of words for the first time in his life.

  “I know,” Katayoun leaned in to kiss him lightly. “It’s okay.”

  Henri blinked.

  Just blinked.

  For several moments, there was nothing there. No thought. No rationality. Just an upwelling of warmth that he had been blessed by so many wonderful women. He fought back tears and focused on his task.

  The console in front of him had been subject, apparently, to the depredations of a rabid and demented woodchuck. Half of the panels had been removed and stacked to one side in a clear bin. Wires ran like hungry worms everywhere. Strange handmade boxes littered the space between the console and the access panel to the sensor bay, up under the yacht’s pointy nose. Extra knobs and switches had been added, apparently at random, following a pattern only he could see.

  Henri let his brain auto–pilot. Hands found the right switches. The hologram projected in the air before him spun under his touch, showing a single gold light in the middle of a darkness stretching fifty–eight light years wide and several hundred long.

  There was an entire arm of night about them.

  He turned his scanner with a control modified from a flight simulator combat game, watching a cute little reticle, bright red, slide across the inside of the sphere until he lined it up on the nearest star ahead.

  A detent nearby locked in the sensor’s gyros as the ship floated through space, engines off but moving anyway.

  All things moved in space. Rest was relative.

  His other hand found the gain and turned it up until static filled the cabin with a quiet crackle.

  Henri smiled. This was where he had gone wrong before.

  He reached as far forward on the console as he could and flipped the first of a set of big rocker switches he had found at an electrical supply store. It had a cover you had to flip open, like a weapon system on a gunship or a video game, and then a smaller switch beneath. He flipped it now.

  Underneath his little yacht, a device aligned. If a musician had asked, he would have called it a tuning fork. An electrician would have known a waveguide. It had been modified beyond all other recognition. The theory of how it worked barely had a name, as of yet, so he hadn’t gotten around to something so formal as a proper device designation.

  Not until it worked.

  He held his breath.

  The static resolved itself into a note. A D5, slightly sharp.

  Henri smiled. He fiddled with another dial to bring the tone up to an open string E5, the kind Nyange would make on a perfect day. The tone was warm and homey, like honey on his tongue.

  Henri returned to the hollow sphere of the sky. He activated a second control and rotated the little targeting eye, picking out a second diamond. Again, he locked the gyros with a little detent.

  On the nose of his little yacht, emerging like a thing from a horror tale, or a chameleon with a hundred eyes, or a terrible medusa from ancient legend, a second sensor cone turned to stare at a distant star. Nothing else existed in its universe, all other radiation filtered out and silenced.

  Henri pulled the air deep into his lungs. Katayoun’s fingers dug lightly into his shoulder. He had almost forgotten she was there.

  He let the moment drag before he sighed and leaned forward.

  The second big rocker switch opened to reveal its inner secret. Henri flipped the switch and leaned back.

  A second note hung in the air. Another violin played a counter point A5.

  Henri remembered to breathe.

  Harmony.

  Nothing more complicated than that.

  Two notes in synchronicity.

  Song.

  “Gods of Heaven and Earth,” she whispered behind him. “You did it.”

  “You doubted me?” he turned to smile sarcastically up at her.

  “Never,” she smiled back, just as snarky. “But now I suppose you’ll want to celebrate. Some sort of wild sexual gymnastics that span the whole ship, probably with the gravplates turned off and the lights turned low.”

  “You know,” he said, mock–serious, “I hadn’t realized that that possibility was on the menu today…”

  “Hush, you,” she said, leaning down to kiss him in a way that showed a distracting amount of cleavage. “Besides, this is just the first step, right? You still have a lot of work to do before we can declare victory. I have time to…prepare.”

  Henri smiled and shivered with anticipation. “Then you should get ready for the next jump,” he said.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  A third star was locked in quickly. Henri picked out a spot in the darkness, neatly bracketed by the three stars.

  “Can you jump us a light year in that direction?” he asked as he stood from the chair and moved out of her way.

  “Why that short? “ Katayoun asked. “That will barely take an hour.”

  She looked confused, but sat and began the process of bringing the Jumpdrives on line.

  “Long enough to test the devices in Jumpspace,” he replied, “short enough to be able to fix it and start over if something goes wrong.”

  “Will they hold?” she asked with uncertainty.

  “They should,” he shrugged. “Jumpspace is analogous to real space, we just move so much faster there. And real–space sensors only return white noise and chaos there because the physics outside the Jump bubble are so different.”

  “So what are we listening to?” she asked.

  Henri considered a number of different answers he might give her. Up until now, music had been enough.

  “For lack of a better term,” he said, “gravity in real space. When we jump, hyper–gravity. That force permeates both, all, universes. Stars are massive enough to warp both space and Jumpspace. That’s why you can only get so close to a star or planet in Jumpspace. The changing gravity well will kick you back out of there.”

  “All universes?” she asked, a touch of horror under her voice. “How many are there?”

  “Potentially infinite,” he shrugged. “Every time you jump, you enter a different one, according to Hisikawa’s theories. And no two ships exist in the same one, so you can’t see or encounter another one in Jumpspace.”

  She blinked at him.

  It felt good to see someone else even more confused about these sorts of things than he usually was. But he had a small soul on occasion.

  After a few minutes of fiddling, she looked back at him confidently. “Ready?”

  Henri turned down the volume control on the speakers and left his hand poised. “Ready.”

  She pushed the big red button in the middle of the console and Aquitaine leapt out of the universe.

  For several moments, silence. Shallow breathing. The air circulation system breathing with them.

  D4 came back first, barely audible. Henri slowly dialed the sound back up. A5 was next. And then, finally, E5.

  Harmony.

  “How?” she turned to him.

  “There is a lot of programming going on under the counter, Katayoun,” he replied. “Each sensor eye, once it gets locked in, should understand the tone it hears from the cosmos, in any universe. When we jumped, they lost contact, but were close enough to reestablish the lock themselves. Eventually, the system will be automated enough to simply listen for the nearby stars, filter out the rest, and then identify the star from a navigation computer array.”

  “You did it,” she breathed.

  “There are still years to get it to that lev
el,” he kissed her, “but we did it, my love. I could not have done any of this without you.”

  Ξ

  They dozed.

  Eventually, it had been necessary to turn the gravplates back on, at least to half–setting, so they didn’t float away while sleeping. The yacht puttered along in real space, at rest only to them, but so far away from anything that they could safely rest as well.

  Henri floated in orbit of a planet, flying naked and free in space.

  Below him, the blue–gray of an angry ocean beset by great terrible storm in the shape of a white eye. Above, two moons danced in synchronicity. One, a small golden marble, trailing the larger one like a puppy on a leash, happily nestled in a trailing LaGrange point.

  He was a starship. He was the starship. He was Aquitaine itself.

  He was the stars.

  Darkness in all directions, stars visible in only their dozens, rather than billions.

  He reached out a hand and understood. He sat in the middle of a deep fog, cool hydrogen gas hiding him from the cosmos and they from him. Touch thwarted by nothing so much as gloom.

  Henri leapt outward, upward, like a great whale breeching from the depths. Beyond the cloud, more darkness. But this emptiness was hollow, vulnerable.

  There. There. And there. The three sisters, singing quiet harmonies in the night, perhaps to a cousin locked in a high tower like the girl with the beautiful hair.

  Gravity reached up and grabbed him.

  Falling from the sky.

  Falling into the sea.

  Henri surged upright as he awoke.

  Katayoun grabbed him before he threw himself out of bed.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered, concern etched in the corners of her face.

  “I can see,” he said, oblivious to the ship around him, the walls, everything except Katayoun’s warm touch.

  He reached out and wrapped an arm around her back, the better to pull her close for a kiss.

  “Better than okay,” he continued with a smile.

  “How much better?” she smiled back.

  “We should turn the gravity back off for a while…”

  Fourteen

  “Are you sure?” she asked again with a self–conscious smile.