Revolution's Shore

by Kate Elliott

  “But I bet she still sneaks into his—its—cabin some nights.”

  Lily shuddered, suppressed it. “I don’t have that much compassion.”

  Jenny raised her glass, tipped and turned it so that the amber liquid caught shadow and light in its flow. “Not many do. I certainly don’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Mule’s the fastest calculator I’ve ever seen play bissterlas, and I’ve seen lots of sta play in Stations all over the Reft.”

  “I wonder what it’s like,” said Lily slowly, “to be so cynical about life—and so very alone.”

  They considered the Mule’s fate in companionable silence while music and images blared from the vid screen that backed the bar, and a new swell of white-uniformed soldiers filtered in to sit at tables and counters in the big room.

  “Shift change.” Jenny checked her wrist-com. “I’d better go. I’ve got a class to teach.”

  Lily stood also, but paused, hand still on her glass. “It’s hard to believe we’ve been with Callioux almost half an Arcadian year. I can’t decide whether the time has gone fast, or slow.”

  “I can’t decide what in hell Jehane thinks he’s up to,” said Jenny. “A great initiative at Harsh, and now he’s retreated back to Tollgate and sent half his fleet into these Hells-forsaken backwaters to achieve Void knows what. All I can say is that this sad excuse for a Station is aptly named Bleak House.”

  “Training?” Lily suggested. “He had all the new people from Harsh to incorporate into his forces. That takes time. And a lot of information from Bach to incorporate and sort through—most of Central’s Intelligence files.”

  “You’ve been talking to Callioux.”

  “No,” Lily admitted. “I’m guessing. And I watch Jehane’s addresses now and then.”

  “Better you than me. After my time as an Immortal, where we had to stand through any number of boring senatorial speeches made by Senators who loved the sound of their own voice, addresses are one thing I refuse to attend or listen to over the vids. It’s the one thing Hawk and I agree on.”

  Lily chuckled. “Well, speeches rarely give away important strategic or tactical information anyway. I don’t know. But there are some government garrisons and pockets of Central loyalists out here that still need to be won over, or suppressed. And I can’t complain about my duties. Besides the couple of hand-to-hand classes I teach, I spend most of my time learning the ship and how it’s run, and tactics and strategy, and—you know.”

  “Does ‘you know’ include running a few obscure training missions for Callioux? Except for that little mop-up at Jezebel, which hardly could be described as a battle, you’re the only one of us who’s seen any action since Harsh that I know of.”

  Lily shrugged. “Callioux only had Bach and me run two intelligence-gathering missions. That doesn’t really qualify as action, although it was nice to get off the ship. You know they only picked me because of Bach’s abilities.”

  “They picked you because they mean to make you an officer and they’re putting you through your paces. Us simple comrades just get drill, no matter what our abilities.”

  “Or do the drilling.” Lily grinned. “I’ve seen you take your classes through their paces. And believe me, I feel sorry for them.”

  “Necessity breeds,” replied Jenny. “I really have to go. Walk me back?”

  “No. I think I’ll stroll the shopping district.”

  Jenny waved and left her.

  Lily wandered out along the shop fronts that lined the broad hub of Station. She still had not grown used to the perspective in the huge orbiting Stations that served as anchors for the great web of the highroad that spread out through Reft space, windows of passage from system to system. Partly it was the physical oddities: the curve, the constant view of changing stars in the port domes, and the feeling she often got in the smaller Stations of unending movement—rotation, orbit, the shift of the solar system itself in space. It made her dizzy.

  But the tiny fleet under Callioux’s command only docked in systems that had no landfall, no planetary colonizations: just the solitary stations necessary for calculating the shifting vectors of the road correctly. And in these places Lily felt uprooted.

  Born and bred on a planet, however inhospitable, she was used to a home, a center, a place with its own being and purpose. Here, besides the Ridanis and Station-hoppers marooned by poverty, the pygmies living their own strange lives in the low-gravity hub, the occasional merchant or shop-keeping family building their trade, the only purpose of a Station was to move its visitors onward, to cast them through that window of passage to another world. Bleak, indeed, for souls stranded in such a place.

  As she walked slowly along the facade of shops, not really examining what was in fact a fairly mediocre selection of goods for sale, she considered that these past months were a passage for her as well. Only she was not sure what destination she was vectored for.

  She paused to examine a necklace that, if unstrung, could provide new beads for Paisley to braid into her hair. Jehane’s service did not pay well, although it did provide room and board, but Lily spent so little credit on herself that she always had something to spend on her associates.

  “Definitely not your color,” said Kyosti from so close behind her that she managed not to drop the necklace, balanced across her palms, only by accidently catching it around one finger as she started.

  “So much for my training,” she muttered as she turned. “I thought I’d buy it for Paisley,” she said to him.

  He shook his head. “Definitely not her, either. Look at that pattern. Paisley is a—a paisley, after all. This is too geometric. It would do better for Pinto, although Rainbow might—”

  “Kyosti! These beads are so small that no one can tell the difference.”

  He raised one slender hand in a gesture meant to forestall and correct. “A discerning eye can.”

  The Ridani shopkeeper, perceiving a serious customer, moved forward, discreetly available, as Kyosti began to examine the rack of necklaces.

  Lily smiled, watching him. Like all of Jehane’s people, he wore white, but his were the medical whites universal to the profession: shirt, long jacket, and loose trousers rather than the close-fitting tunic and slim-legged trousers of the military uniforms. On Unruli, white had never been fashionable; on a mining planet it was impractical. But in the gleaming sterility of space, white proves dazzling and monotonous by turns. After half a year in Jehane’s rebellion, Lily had concluded that it was mostly monotonous.

  But Kyosti—Kyosti somehow managed in his medical whites always to look stylish. Perhaps it was just his posture, or the long, slender lines of his body, but he wore it, too, with a panache that was practiced and self-conscious, and with an ever-changing array of discreet but colorful accessories that lent a cunning enhancement to his clothing.

  And there was also, of course, his hair. Her smile sharpened to a frown as he held up a necklace and examined it with the eye of a connoisseur. For he had, as he had warned Jenny when he boarded the shuttle to escape Arcadia, let it grow out, had given up bleaching it blond.

  And it wasn’t really that it was growing in more slowly than she thought hair was supposed to grow. It was that the roots were coming in blue.

  He offered her the necklace for her consideration, and smiled at her expression. “But I thought it would suit Paisley so well,” he murmured.

  She gave the necklace a cursory glance and handed it to the shopkeeper. “I’ll take it.”

  Kyosti laughed. “The only saving grace to your complete lack of style, Lily my love, is that you are one of the few people who look stunning in the unadorned lines of Jehane’s uniforms.” He considered. “Jenny looks good as well, but that comes mostly from her complexion and her magnificent physique.”

  “But I like uniforms,” protested Lily. “It means I don’t have to decide what to wear in the mornings.”

  “Utilitarian to the core,” said Kyosti. “There must be a Bentham in your ancestr
y somewhere.”

  Lily had long since learned to ignore those of his comments that made no apparent sense, so she calmly paid for the necklace and turned down the corridor to continue browsing along the rest of the shops.

  He followed her. She felt him follow her, not without pleasure. And she wondered if Jenny was right—if Kyosti’s instability in regard to Finch did not indeed make him a weak link in their team.

  “Wait a minute.” She halted between shop awnings, jewelry at her back, scarves and tunics before her. “Where’s Bach?”

  “Analyzing blood samples in the lab,” said Kyosti casually, moving ahead to run his hands over a hanging row of scarves with real pleasure, as if the textures alone were a delight to him. His hands had a way of moving that awakened memories in her of other times, alone with him. She smiled. “We seem to have picked up a mild venereal disease at the Mother-forsaken hellhole of a Station so ironically named Renunciate, and it’s spreading through the Ridanis like wildfire.”

  “Kyosti,” she began, reproving almost as much for the jolting prosaicness of his comment as for the realization that without Bach monitoring him, Finch was left unguarded.

  “Get him transferred to another ship, Lily,” he interrupted in a sharp voice. “Do you have any idea of the effort it takes me not to seek him out, not to track him down to whatever cabin you’ve hidden him in? Or the bridge when he’s on duty?” He was still examining the scarves, and his voice, low, stirred no farther than her. “Franklin’s Cairn is not that big a ship.”

  “Big enough. Finch and Swann are lost enough as it is, and especially now that their mother transferred—at her own request, I remind you—to the Boukephalos, to run Jehane’s personal Portmastery division. I had no idea she’d turn into such an ardent Jehanist. I’m not going to abandon them now. Why do you have to kill him, Kyosti?” Her voice shook. “Why is your hair growing in blue?”

  He did not reply, but his hands trembled slightly as he drew out of the row of scarves one bearing a brilliant red pattern. He tied it solicitously around her neck, twisted the ends, and stepped back to survey her.

  He smiled. His smiles always disarmed her, and she suspected that he knew it quite well. “Yes. That’s what it wanted.”

  It was at times like this that she most hated it when he looked at her that way—because she loved it. Of course he was a brilliant physician. But she wouldn’t force him to leave because she didn’t want to be without him. Even if it meant risking Finch. Disgusted and exasperated, more with herself than with him, she turned to find a mirror, staring at her reflection.

  Her black hair still hung to just below her shoulders, cut absolutely straight around the bottom except for the short riffling of bangs above the oblique slant of her dark eyes. But the almost insouciant twist of the scarf lent her a rather rakish look, otherwise so proper in starched whites, that reminded her briefly of La Belle.

  “Someday, Kyosti,” she said to the mirror, fixing her gaze on his reflection behind her, “you ought to consider trusting me.”

  “Because blue is its natural color,” he replied without expression.

  “You’re not used to trusting people, are you?” She turned, struck by this sudden illumination, but he remained remote from her.

  “Should I be?” he asked bitterly. “My mother abandoned me when I was eleven. My father’s family disowned me when I was seventeen.”

  “What about your father?” she asked quietly.

  “He died before I was born,” he replied with an irony so deep that she knew there was a wealth of unspoken information in those simple words.

  “How could your mother just abandon you?”

  “An unfortunate choice of words, perhaps. She did what she had to do. I no longer blame her for it.”

  Abruptly she wanted very much to reassure him that she, at least, would not abandon him so callously. “Come on,” she said softly, brushing his arm with one hand, feeling his muscles respond, anticipatory, as she let her touch linger. “Let’s go back to the ship.”

  She began to untie the scarf, but he forestalled her brusquely.

  “No. I want to buy that for you.”

  She watched him carefully as he completed the transaction with the shopkeeper, but as they left the shop he turned away from the direction that would lead them back to their berth. It occurred to her that he was avoiding the intimacy that in his present mood might tempt him to reveal too much.

  “Kyosti,” she began, using the distraction of musical instruments in the next shop as an excuse to continue speaking, “I know that technology in the League is far advanced of what we have here in the Reft, or at least it ought to be by now, after we’ve been cut off for so long. Just look at Bach. He must have been marooned here when the original highroad fleet came in. And I know, although I still find it difficult to believe, that Master Heredes was far, far older than he looked—than any age extension technology we possess here—and that you are, too—”

  “Once the Hierakas Formula was discovered,” he interrupted as if at random, “it really proved quite simple, but the actual manufacture is not so easy, especially with the laboratory conditions prevailing here. Quite primitive.”

  “What’s the—never mind. Don’t try to distract me. Kyosti, there must have been someone besides your family in all that time that you loved.” She hesitated, aware of an ember of jealousy within herself that she did not yet want to examine. “A woman.”

  He stopped in the shadowed corner of an awning and pulled her to face him, close, hands on her shoulders. “Do you want the truth? There were two women, Lily. One was murdered by a man who thought he could save his own life by killing her. I saw her die. The other”—he paused—“was killed in the Betaos engagement against the Kapellans. I saw her die, too. But I didn’t love them in any sense that you mean the word. And I had my comrades in arms, in the fight we terrorists led for the League against the Kapellan Empire. We were close because we had to be, in such circumstances, in such work, but we could lose a friend to death at any moment those years. We knew the risk. It made the experience, and the attachments, more intense.”

  “No one you loved?”

  His face took on an expression almost inhuman in its detachment, yet his voice shook. “So many years ago. I had a friend whom I loved, like a brother. What a terrible, trite phrase that is—the worse for being true.”

  “What happened to him? Was he one of the League’s saboteurs, too. And he died?”

  Kyosti smiled, so bitter and so mocking that Lily felt as if she could cry to see such pain in his normally controlled and blithe facade. “I murdered him, Lily.”

  At first she was too choked to speak, half out of pity, half out of fear at his hands resting so tenderly on her shoulders. “Why?” Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Because he slept with my—” He hesitated, searching for a word.

  “Your lover?”

  “Yes.” He shut his eyes. She could scarcely hear his voice.

  “But if he knew—that she was your lover.”

  “He didn’t know. She seduced him, because she didn’t believe me when I told her that I would have to kill any man she slept with. So she chose him. She wanted to know that she had that power over me.”

  The soft conversations of other shoppers flowed past them, rippling around their silence.

  “I think it amused her that I couldn’t repudiate her, not even after that,” he continued, his voice growing more detached as he spoke, as if the memory was too awful to attach emotion to. “But I was glad when she was killed on Betaos.”

  In the silence following this remark, the shopkeeper approached, looking apprehensive, and after a moment retreated again.

  Too shocked to speak, Lily very carefully did not move from underneath his hands, but with deliberation he removed them himself and turned to examine with feigned interest a row of whistle pipes in the shop.

  “I trust you, Lily,” he replied, a murmur, “and someday we are both going t
o wish that I didn’t.” And he said something else, fluid as a prayer, under his breath, in a language she did not recognize.

  Because she could not decide whether his unqualified statement of trust was a blessing or a curse, she began to walk again, as if movement alone would dispel her troubles, or at least hold them at bay.

  Was she better than that woman, willing to risk Finch? Doing everything she could think of to protect him—that, yes—but it still put his life at risk. She did not know what to say to herself. She could not possibly think of what to say to Hawk, and she was suddenly afraid to ask any more questions, because they might reveal the selfishness of her own motives as clearly. Had she really thought she could manage Hawk so easily? Obviously, her first duty on returning to the ship must be to request that Finch be transferred—anywhere.

  Kyosti followed her, walking alongside her in a silence that was, perhaps, in deference to her taut expression. They simply walked and, casting a glance at his set, serious face, for the first time she really wondered what Master Heredes had known about Kyosti’s background that had caused him to oppose Kyosti’s interest in her so strenuously and yet acquiesce so abruptly once he knew with certainty that they were lovers. And yet, having been one of the League’s saboteurs as well, what more had he needed to know?

  “Heredes! Hawk!”

  The hail interrupted her thoughts so thoroughly that it took her a moment to recall where she was. Then she saw Yehoshua and his cousin Alsayid sitting at a cafe table under a striped awning that jutted out into the hub corridor. Yehoshua motioned them over with a glittering wave, and as she and Kyosti approached the table, Lily realized that Yehoshua had gained an artificial arm since she had last seen him unconscious and injured on Harsh.

  He grinned and lifted the arm up for her and Kyosti to admire. It was metal and plastine, and stiff jointed, with a three-pronged hook apparatus where the hand would be.

  Kyosti frowned and reached out to examine it more closely. Yehoshua looked on with pride as Kyosti slid a hand up to tickle the straps and down again to test the hook mechanism.