by Kate Elliott
“This is Comrade Hawk,” said Lily. “He’s a physician.”
As if on cue, Red’s mother coughed. Kyosti took in the situation at a glance and within moments set up his medical kit on the only clean space on the counter and got to work. Within half an hour, as first Red and then Blumoris left to spread word of this bounty through the neighborhood, a good dozen more people arrived, yawning with sleep yet clearly ill or injured. Two were carried in, too sick to move themselves.
By morning, Lily had Blumoris’s assurances that Shanty would support them in every way they could, and that he and his son would do what they could toward the shuttle’s repair.
13 Hippocratic Oath
LILY STOOD ON THE dilapidated roof of the Blumoris shop and watched the sun set beyond a range of red-hued hills. Both evenings she had done so. The sight, even after her year on Arcadia, still astonished her in its beauty. She had traded her white tunic for grubby overalls borrowed from Blue; they fit her reasonably well, although she had to roll up the legs to avoid tripping and the sleeves to keep her hands free.
A scrape of shoe sounded from the ladder. She turned her head to see a crown of blue-tinged hair appear, and after it the rest of Kyosti. He smiled when he saw her and pushed himself easily up to the roof and walked across to stand by her, letting one hand stray to caress her neck. Two days of constant work running a makeshift clinic had left him looking rested and cheerful.
“I was thinking about Ransome House,” she said softly, returning her gaze to the sunset, “Paisley once said that sometimes you have to lose your home before you can find it. I had to leave Ransome House to discover what Heredes meant to me. And yet, there are many things at Ransome House that are worthwhile. I just didn’t see them at the time, because I was too busy rebelling, trying to get out. I didn’t realize how much I learned there that’s served me well these past months. So I wonder if what Paisley said can’t mean both of those things at once.”
“Waxing philosophical, my love?” He sounded both amused and pleased. “‘The modest Rose puts forth a thorn, The humble Sheep a threat’ning horn; While the Lilly white shall in Love delight, Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.’”
She sighed suddenly, a vocal sound, and rested her head against his shoulder. He did not react for a moment, as if this tiny act of tenderness surprised him, but abruptly he turned into her and embraced her tightly against him. He kissed her hair. When she lifted her head to look at him, equally surprised by his burst of feeling, she found herself caught by the maelstrom of emotions in his face.
“Lilyaka,” he murmured, a strange echo of Master Heredes, who alone besides her father ever used her full name. Except the very nature of the address was utterly different here: the Sar had used it casually and frequently, like any parent, and she had never bothered to attempt to trace his feelings any deeper than that; Heredes had spoken it with that stern affection she had come to love. But the music Kyosti made of her name left her dizzy with a longing she had never been able to explain to herself, much less understand.
How long they stayed that way, clasped, close, lips a finger’s breadth from the other’s as they gazed, she was not sure. The sun’s rim touched the hills; its glimmering disk sank and hid behind the darkening heights.
As suddenly as his embrace, Kyosti brushed her mouth with a brief, almost mocking kiss, and released her.
“Is the sullen Inocencio making any progress with the engines?” he asked in his usual languid voice. “Or has he thrown another tantrum over having to work with Paisley? One wonders how deep his commitment to rebellion really is when he paints his face to mimic tattooing and thus shock his elders on the one hand, and on the other shows the same boring prejudice that most of these socially backward peoples exhibit.”
“Actually,” said Lily slowly, “I was wondering about rebellions. Mine—and Blue’s, which I think is a lot like what I went through at Ransome House. Even Jehane’s. What kind of change is the Reft going to see? It’s hard to imagine.” She paused. The last glow of daylight still limned the hills. “Do you know, it’s still hard for me to imagine that you came from across the way—from Terra, from the League. I know a little what Terra must look like. It can’t be so different from Arcadia, I suppose. But I think it’s easier to keep it in mind as an abstraction, a place that only has life like Paisley’s Tirra-li: A paradise, a memory, not a place that really exists.”
She hesitated, reached out to brush a finger over the back of his hand. His was a smooth, supple, long-fingered hand, with that rich, lightly bronzed skin tone that she sometimes suspected was artificially enhanced, although she could not guess how or why. “You once confessed to me that you were sixty-four years old, that Master Heredes was twice that. But that’s like Terra: I want to believe it, but it can’t possibly be true. And yet, it has to be.”
“Just give me more time,” he said, not looking at her. Watching him, she knew he looked no older than Jenny. “I was making progress with the equipment I got from Yi, but now that’s all gone, with Franklin’s Cairn. The Formula is simple enough, but without the facilities. …” He shrugged.
“What formula?”
He blinked, turning to look at her as if he were amazed to see her there. “The Hierakis Formula. I suppose you would call it life enhancement. Extension. Most people just call it the Formula. The medical term is more complex.”
“Kyosti, we have the drug Lipro, but it doesn’t make you live any longer, it just holds off the effects of aging for a while.”
He made an expressive face. “I got to look at its formula on Arcadia. It’s not worth the cost to make it. And long-term use breaks down the bonding—never mind that. That serum is just as primitive as the Reft’s outmoded hierarchical political structure.”
“I beg your pardon!” Lily jerked her hand away from his. “And Terra, and the League, has something so much better? I remember your bitter words to Wingtuck even if you don’t.”
He laughed. “Lily, my love, a more advanced culture has never made the individuals within it any less hypocritical, or less prone to exaggerated fears and unreasonable hopes and simple greed. That’s human nature.”
“Are you waxing philosophical?” Lily asked sarcastically. “Life may not be perfect in the Reft, but that doesn’t mean you have to denigrate it.”
Kyosti dropped to one knee and, availing himself of one of her hands, brought her palm to his lips and kissed it. “Forgive me, my sweet. I perceive I have offended you.”
Lily rolled her eyes, although she did not remove her hand from his grasp. “You look ridiculous. Would you get up?”
“Only if you forgive me.”
“Hoy. All right. I forgive you.”
He rose with dignity and kissed her firmly. “We have time,” he said obscurely. “I’ll show you the League soon enough.”
She glanced at her wrist-com, pushed away from him. “We’d better go. Bach is going to run that new set of signals that Blumoris devised—it’s our last chance to raise Yehoshua. If he’s still alive.” She walked across to the ladder, paused as Kyosti came up behind her. “Is it real, the Hierakas Formula?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“How long does it make people live?”
“About one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty years of relative youth. Then a fast decline of about twenty years.”
“Hoy. People will kill for it, you know.”
He considered her a moment thoughtfully. “I suppose they would. It hadn’t occurred to me. But in any case, the base is the most difficult part of the manufacture, and I’m back to scratch without equipment. We won’t be having any wars over it yet.”
“Don’t we have wars enough now?” she asked, and expecting no reply she turned to climb down the ladder. Stopped, staring at him. “That’s what you got the equipment from Yi for.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“But I didn’t—it didn’t sink in. Why? Why make it now?”
His gaze
, resting on her, left no room for any reason but the obvious one. “My magnanimous nature, of course,” he said impatiently. “Bringing the ambrosia of semi-immortality to the benighted. For God’s sake, Lily, you know perfectly well why.”
As the light faded, she could no longer see his face clearly, but the taut intensity of his body was easy to read. “Yes,” she said softly, beginning the descent, “You made it for me.”
In the shop, Bach was happily ensconced in Blumoris’s comm-room, hidden behind a cleverly disguised partition that was in itself partially concealed by a large pile of old metal and rusting pieces of antiquated equipment in the far corner of the work space.
Blumoris looked up as she entered. His coveralls were grimy with oil and unidentifiable stains, but his broad face creased in a grin when he saw her.
“Got your console fixed, I did,” he said. She began to speak enthusiastically, but he forestalled her. “It’s a nice piece, but I wouldn’t use it here. I reckon that’s how they caught you incoming and trained their fire so accurately: it’s got what I call a strong pulse. And that hand-pack’s got no range, begging your pardon.”
Lily smiled slightly. “I’m hardly likely to take offense at that truth, especially after all you’ve done for us. I wonder if the engines—”
He shook his head, a gesture she took for a moment as a complete negative. “I never thought,” he began with that ponderous way of speaking that marked him as a man of deep opinions and long patience, “that any good would come of Inocencio’s obstinacy about off-planet vessels. I told him there wasn’t any good setting his sights on a living he couldn’t ever get admittance to, but he kept on. I don’t say he’s fixed them, or even that he can, but he’s in paradise just working on that boat, and if anyone here can cobble up a fix, given the damage she took, I think it’s not boasting to say that my boy can.”
“I think you have every reason to be proud of him,” said Lily carefully.
He considered this seriously. “I won’t say he isn’t a stubborn boy, just to show he can be, or that he doesn’t make trouble just to get attention, or get the Telesford girl into scrapes to prove he can influence her, but still, he’s the gift in him for understanding and coddling engines. Here now, that creature of yours seems to be saying we’re ready.”
He refused to call Bach a robot and had shown a remarkable aptitude for reading the basic messages in Bach’s singing speech to Lily. Neither had Bach surprised him, when he first saw the ’bot, a circumstance later explained when he had lifted a similar round globe out of his junk heap and showed it to Lily. The globe had several obvious differences from Bach; slightly smaller, it was also an imperfect sphere, being heavier at the equator. Although Blumoris did not say as much, Lily suspected that he had not given up on fixing it someday.
Lily cleared a space for herself on a stool and sat down, watching the console. Bach had an attachment plugged in, and as one of the unauthorized broadcasts Blumoris had previously mentioned began its brief evening’s program, he began a coded transmission to the old man’s specifications.
“Now,” said Blumoris softly, “if we don’t get anything with this, there’s another broadcast we can hide in at sunrise, and that will give us a broader—”
Bach winked red. Through the soft static of the receiver a voice spoke, faint, and desperate enough that it dispensed entirely with codes or identification.
“Thank the Void. Is it you, Heredes? We’re in desperate trouble.”
Lily had no difficulty recognizing Yehoshua’s voice: strained, weak from fatigue, but steady. She grabbed for the switch, almost tripping over her own feet in her haste. “This is Heredes. We are safe for now. Where are you?”
Yehoshua coughed, shuddering the static. “I don’t know. But there is an embankment here, studded with five metal poles and three dishes in a Quince configuration. We’re dug in at thirty Q seven.”
“That’s Cemetery Hill,” said Blumoris softly. “I know it. It’s a good thirty kilometers from here.”
“We’ve got a fix,” replied Lily. “We’re coming tonight.”
“Bring Hawk.” His voice shook on the name. Someone spoke behind him, but the words were muffled by static and distance. “Military is still running sweeps, but none through here since last night.”
“Any news of Two?”
A pause, and the undertone of the illicit broadcast giving trading prices on the black market. “All dead. Have you had news from the Cairn? We can’t raise her.”
Lily caught in her breath, let it out, feeling choked for a moment. Swann dead, and Yehoshua did not know about Callioux. “We’re on our own, Yehoshua,” she replied. “I’m going off now. Acknowledge.”
Another pause. “I see.” The hiss of static. “Accepted.”
The connection broke.
Lily stood up. “I need a guide.”
After some argument, Absinthe Telesford—Red—was allowed to volunteer. Lily kept her own forces small: herself, Hawk, Jenny, and the Mule—strength and speed. With some trepidation, she left Pinto in charge, giving Lia the job of intermediary between the Shanty elders and the crew.
Elder Hoang had an old six-wheeler van, marked for deliveries, which he claimed was registered to someone on the other continent. Jenny drove.
Red lost her bearings once, but the mistake proved fortuitous. Driving up without lights on the back height of Cemetery Hill, they saw three military vehicles stopped on the road they had meant to come in on. Jenny shut off the engine and let the van drift into the cover of a large satellite dish.
Seated in a front bubble, Lily surveyed the uneven height around them. “Why is it called Cemetery Hill?” she asked.
Red shrugged with the blithe disinterest of youth. “I don’t know. Reckon people must have been buried here once. My mam once told me this used to be a courting place when she was a girl. I guess it’s lonely enough.” She looked out at the lights of the military trucks, sweeping in arced patterns across the series of embankments that shored up the hill itself. “Or used to be.”
“Courting?”
“Yeah. You know.” Red used that tone of voice that suggested that she herself knew quite well and did not want to say, but revealed instead that the opposite was more likely true.
Jenny chuckled softly. “Oh, yes, Lily-hae. You know. Hawk once told me—”
“Leave Hawk out of this,” Lily muttered grimly.
“Hawk?” murmured Red. The way she spoke his name betrayed her conversion to Blue’s worship of Kyosti as the pinnacle of rebellion, cosmetic and otherwise. After a suitable silence, she let out her breath. “Gee.” She sounded disappointed, but whether that sprang from her judging Lily unsuitable to receive such an honor, or from her own now-shattered dream of becoming the Chosen One—given the competition—was unclear.
“Hoy.” Lily loosened her rifle strap and eased out her pistol. “Jenny. Based on my reading of this configuration, Yehoshua should be over—damn.”
Jenny echoed the curse. Dark figures fanned out from one of the trucks below: troopers on foot recce.
“Red, stay here.” Lily’s tone was adamant and not a little threatening. “Let’s go, Jen. You and the Mule downside, Hawk and I covering upside.”
She soon lost sight of Jenny and the Mule. Her own face was streaked with grime. Fingerless gloves covered most of her hands. Kyosti had a hood pulled down to cover his head and face—all but his eyes and nose, and they both wore the dark night-fighting coveralls issued for planetside missions.
The rough outlines of the hill, the product of much excavation, provided good cover. They reached the Q7 line out from the center and circled out as far along its circumference as they could given the terrain. So far the troopers had not advanced farther than a quarter of the way into the kilometerwide configuration.
“Good thing they’re cautious,” whispered Kyosti as Lily stopped, panting, beside him after her bent-over run across a dark, flat gap between ditches. “I keep expecting to see them move in on the roa
d we came in on.”
She did not reply, but let herself relax, grow still, stretching out her senses as far as she could. In the distance, she heard an engine idling; far above, a shuttle passed over the city. Embankments slid away into darkness below them, traced by the nimbus of light coming from the trucks beyond, which they could not see.
Kyosti’s hand tightened on hers. “This way.” His voice was barely audible. “I smell the blood.”
He was off so swiftly and silently that she did not have time to question his comment. The ditch led down, deeper, until their view was restricted to a narrow band of sky. They turned a steep corner and ran up against the stub end of a laser rifle.
Jenny lowered it. “Just in time. We’re ready to pull out.”
It was not a heartening scene. Four shadowy figures huddled over two prostrate ones on the ground, the pitiful remnant of Yehoshua’s crew of ten. One of the figures straightened to reveal the thin crest of the Mule. Five left from One. Two was gone entirely. Lily wondered what had happened to Team Veeta on the other continent.
Kyosti had already gone forward to kneel beside the wounded. Lily gave a curt nod to Jenny, and the mercenary moved out to establish a more generous perimeter. As Lily joined the group around the casualties, she heard Kyosti’s overly sharp rejoinder to someone’s suggestion.
“No, I don’t need a light. It isn’t safe to risk it, which any damn fool would know if—”
“Hawk,” she said softly, and then she realized how close the edge on his voice was to complete loss of control. She reached down and touched his neck. He was trembling—shaking—and his head was lifted to look not at the injured but at someone else. He was poised to rise and lunge.
“Finch,” she said, knowing who it must be even as her grip tightened on the nearest thing to hand—Kyosti’s hair. “Get out to your left, on perimeter with Jenny. Now.”
“You’re protecting him?” Finch’s voice cracked and he caught back a sob. “You aren’t worth—” He broke off, gasping in pain.
