He sat back to think about the offer. It had Sissy’s sensibility written into it as well as Gregor’s caution.
He fingered the black crystal still in his pocket. Slowly, reluctantly he handed it to Pammy.
“In the next round of negotiations, offer to double the fleet and armaments in return for enough of these to anchor the nav systems in our entire fleet. Laudae Sissy should be able to figure out a way for the crystals to talk to each other and . . . and give us some advantage in avoiding hits in combat—like the Maril avian communication.”
Pammy whistled in amazement as she turned the crystal over and over, letting the blanket lighting in the ceiling catch the facets. “Is this what I think it is?”
“You bet your sweet titties it is.”
“I think you just earned another promotion and a fat bonus, Jake.”
The screen kept scrolling. He thought he’d read the last of it. The computer thought otherwise.
Then at the very bottom a single line of tiny letters. “Remember Milton and Godfrey. I remember Jilly.” He read those words out loud.
“That makes no sense at all,” Pammy said.
“Unless Laudae Sissy knew I’d be reading this,” Jake laughed.
“Who are Milton and Godfrey? And what is a Jilly? We’ve run the names through every database we can think of and nowhere do they show up together related to Harmony.”
“Except in Laudae Sissy’s menagerie. Godfrey is . . . was an exotic lizard, maimed. She rescued it, nurtured it. It adored her and loved sitting in her lap.” Settled for Jake’s when he had to. “Milton is her pet weasel. I guess it’s a weasel, something like a ferret native to Harmony and survived terraforming. Anyway, the two never got along, natural enemies, predator and prey, except in Sissy’s company. She makes everyone get along just by being . . . Sissy.”
“And Jilly?”
He couldn’t answer that. Not without choking into uncontrollable sobs.
“A prophetess,” he said simply.
“Then this is real?”
“Very real. And very important. Send your fleet to the rescue and name your diplomats to meet theirs. Just make sure I’m part of the entourage.”
“You can bet on that, Jake, my boy. Get a shower, I’ll meet you in the mess cabin to debrief you in twenty minutes.”
“Don’t you want a place more private than the mess of a battleship to hear my story?”
“No place more private than a crowded and noisy mess cabin. No one can overhear us and listening devices would be overloaded.” She stomped out, no more gently than she’d arrived.
“Reminds me of a solar flare,” Jake muttered. “Yeah, she and Sissy have a lot in common.”
“You do not have to go, Lord Lukan,” Gregor said. He placed a fatherly hand upon the younger man’s shoulder. “Your twin brother has equal rank and authority.”
“Bevan has less liking for compromise than I do,” Lukan smiled to himself. “He and you will be more comfortable with him sitting on the HC than me.”
Gregor frowned, not wanting to admit that he agreed.
“My brother cannot bring himself to speak to our barefaced comrades of the CSS. They are all Loods to him, and beneath a right to exist.”
“An attitude all too common among our people,” Gregor admitted.
“Having Laudae Sissy read a few lines of the Covenant to the people every Holy Day will help.” Lukan looked longingly over his shoulder toward the waiting Spacer shuttle craft. “We need to go.”
Lord Bevan, his mirror image turned his back on the Spacer captain who signaled the craft was ready to take Lord Lukan and his entourage to the vessel waiting for them in orbit.
The large number of people who had assembled to see the historic mission launched shuffled about. Laudae Sissy stood beside Gregor, silent and disapproving as ever. She, like every other Temple, wore a full array of robes and headdresses. All anonymous even down to their bare feet. Gregor had only height and relative build to distinguish any of them. Padded shoulders and wide drapes camouflaged much. All of the women and most of the men clung to the funereal black of official mourning.
The time had long since passed when Sissy should have let go of her grief for her family. She’d had time. Her family had all had respectful funerals. She’d had a grief blessing. Gregor did not understand why she wanted to cling to the destructive emotion. They had work to do, keeping the people calm in the middle of tremendous change.
One change he refused to accept was marriage within Temple. For that reason he had chosen Penelope and her acolytes to accompany Lord Lukan.
Even now she and Guilliam stood apart from the rest, heads bent close, hands clasped desperately.
Disgusting.
Penelope, at least, wore shoes.
“My brother will help you ease the changes into our civilization slowly,” Lukan said quietly, as if he’d read Gregor’s mind. “Very slowly.”
Another shuffling of people as Lukan’s assistants and servants loaded luggage and themselves into the waiting shuttle.
Sissy’s dogs hopped in and out of the vessel, racing from her to Penelope and back to the shuttle.
Then a surge of young people across the wide stretch of pavement as all of the acolytes pushed forward to help Penelope’s six girls in. Her oldest had accepted ordination to fill the vacancy left by Shanet. Penelope had not replaced her, keeping the symmetry of seven.
Guilliam escorted Penelope to the gaping hatch and reluctantly let go of her hand.
Lastly, Lukan took his place. The doors closed. The engines roared and the shuttle lifted free of Harmony’s gravity.
Sissy raised her hands to lead those left behind in a prayer of farewell.
Only Penelope’s voice came from beneath the veil, not Sissy’s.
Gregor started running. “Call them back!” he yelled at anyone and everyone. “We have to stop them.”
“Too late, My Laud,” Guilliam held him back. “This was her wish.”
“She said there was nothing left on Harmony to hold her,” Penelope added. “Harmony stopped speaking to her. She has to search to find a new connection to the Universe.”
“Out there,” Guilliam finished.
They both sounded so terribly smug and satisfied.
Gregor sank down, deflated and defeated. “She tricked me. You all tricked me.”
“We did what we had to do, My Laud,” Penelope said. “We did as Harmony’s avatar commanded.”
“We can’t tell anyone. The people will rebel if they know she has deserted them.”
“That knowledge, like the changes to our Covenant will come slowly, bit by bit,” Guilliam mused. “We begin by abolishing the asylums and fixing those with broken caste marks. As Laudae Sissy commanded.”
“Then we integrate the schools,” Penelope added.
“We begin by putting the tablets back in their crypt,” Gregor snarled. “Laudae Sissy is gone. I am in charge now. She can’t override my decisions anymore.”
“She may be gone, but she still has influence. And she will never be forgotten,” Penelope and Guilliam reminded him, together, in one unified voice.
“Mama?” One of Penelope’s acolytes tugged at her sleeve. “We don’t feel right.” She and another acolyte of the same size removed their headdresses. Twins. Mirror images of each other.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Guilliam lifted the girl who had spoken into his arms.
Penelope crouched down and wrapped her arms about the other one.
Both girls grew rigid and still. Their eyes lost focus and turned silver.
Oh, no! Not again.
“Harmony becomes elusive,” Guilliam’s charge said.
“Harmony changes paths,” Penelope’s continued in the same voice without pause. As if they spoke as one being.
“Harmony’s path is no longer straight.”
“It leads where we do not expect along twisted and obscure avenues.”
The ground beneath them shook and quivered.
The buildings around them began to sway.
The girls began to sing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
SISSY MADE THE ROUNDS OF sleeping children in her care, six acolytes plus her youngest brother and sister. She kissed each in turn and tucked light blankets around them. Then she checked their nul-g straps that would keep them in bed if the artificial gravity failed. All secure.
The animals twitched in their crates secured to the floor and the walls. Some of them slept. Some of them fought the sleepy drugs.
A soft chime, not much louder than the ringing in her ears, came through the spaceship’s communication system. “Hyperspace in two minutes.” A soft feminine voice followed the bell. “Please inject sleep inducers now for full effect before hyperspace.”
Sissy had given the children their shots only moments before. They’d fallen asleep within seconds. Only an antidote would wake them in less than twenty-four hours.
She returned to her own cabin, adjacent to the children’s room. A hard narrow bed that folded against the wall during waking time awaited her.
The warning bell came again, louder this time, as she pulled the nul-g strap diagonally across her chest. “Hyperspace in one minute. Inject sleep inducers now.” The voice became imperative, almost strident.
Sissy put her hand in the stationary glove and poised her free hand over the plunger. A long moment of hesitation.
The sterile ship felt empty and inanimate, more so than any structure on Harmony. The Host of Seven infused life into the stones and timber of every building and object made from Harmony’s raw materials. Even the metal cars and paved roads had come from Harmony and vibrated minutely in sympathy with Her.
Out here in the nothingness of space, Sissy’s body and mind felt empty, devoid of tune. She needed to find a way to connect to the universe beyond Harmony, to make it as much a part of her as her home.
How could she do that if she was drugged to insensibility?
Gently she withdrew her hand from the injection glove and sat back in her bunk, legs folded beneath her, spine against the metal wall that separated her cabin from the children’s.
Angry bells that jangled her nerves and hurt her ears sounded throughout the ship. “Warning, hyperspace in seven seconds. Six, five . . .”
Sissy forced herself to keep her eyes open through the countdown.
“Two, one.”
The lights blinked off for the length of a heartbeat. They came back on in a softer hue, more blue than yellow. Sparkling lines shot across Sissy’s vision, fracturing reality.
The constant noise in her head, that she’d almost learned to ignore, ceased abruptly.
The absolute silence frightened her. The last vestige of Harmony deserted her.
Her mind and soul emptied.
The cracks in her vision widened, opening to new realms, new perceptions.
And out of that crack stepped her mother.
“Mama,” Sissy gasped, amazed that she looked just as she had last seen her, dressed in her favorite brown dress sprigged with tiny yellow flowers, a grease-stained apron tied around her plump form, flour dusting her sleeves and her face.
“Oh, Mama, I’ve missed you.” Sissy opened her arms and tried to run to her mother. The nul-g strap held her firmly in place.
She ripped at it frantically, needing to feel her mother in her arms one more time.
“And what do you think you are trying to prove this time?” Stevie asked from right behind Mama. He held Anna’s hand. His spouse cradled one hand beneath her swelling belly, emphasizing the precious new life that had ended with her own in the explosion.
The explosion.
Her family showed no signs of the devastating blast that had torn them limb from limb and pierced their bodies with deadly flying debris.
Papa stepped into Sissy’s reality behind Stevie, followed by grandparents, uncles, aunts, another brother and sister. Shanet with her full entourage of seven, and finally little Jilly trailed in, too. The tiny ship’s cabin filled with the ghostly presences of all those Sissy had lost.
Lost, never to regain.
They weren’t real. They were ghosts. Figments of her imagination.
Tears slipped down her cheeks.
“What are you trying to prove?” Stevie repeated the question on all of their lips.
“I don’t know. I just know that I have to go.”
“Go where?” Mama asked gently.
Sissy shrugged, unable to speak or think coherently.
“Go where?” they all asked.
“Away. Away from Harmony. There is no Harmony left in me. The Goddess has deserted me. I have to go away to find Her again.” There, she’d said it out loud. The thing that had eaten away at her since the explosion. Since discovering the truth about the origins of her people. Since reading the Covenant and knowing how far from it her people had strayed.
“Harmony is only as far away as you let Her be,” Mama reminded her.
“I’ve lost everything, everyone I care about.”
“What about Jake?”
“I forced him to leave. I cannot care for him. We are out of caste. He is not one of us.”
“And yet you love him as one of your own.”
“If we ever come together, I can never go home. Not until the caste system goes away completely. Not until prejudice against outsiders is totally forgotten.”
“That will take generations,” Stevie said. “Can you wait a lifetime to love again?”
“I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost Jake as well as all of you.”
“We are only as far away as your memories, little ’un,” Papa said.
“We are a part of you. You came from us. Someday you will return to us. But not until you recognize Harmony within you again,” Stevie said.
Jilly stepped forward. Her eyes glazed with starshine. She looked directly at Sissy, and through her at the same time. “Did Harmony abandon you? Or did you abandon Harmony? Listen to the universe. Listen to your heart. They are one and the same.” She blinked her eyes and they cleared. Then she wrinkled her nose just like she always did before telling a joke.
She stepped back behind the adults and faded back into the crack.
“What’s the joke, Jilly? Find something funny for me to grab hold of.”
The softest of giggles floated through the air. “The entire universe is a joke.”
Mama giggled, too, as she stepped back into that other reality beyond Sissy’s perceptions. One by one, they all disappeared until only Stevie remained. “Remember us, Sissy. Love us. Love Jake. Love the universe as you love us and it will love you back.”
Then he, too, was gone.
The loud warning bells clanged. “End of hyperspace in seven minutes. Antidotes automatically administered in four minutes.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
COLONEL (FULL BIRD COLONEL, NOT just an LC) Jeremiah Devlin, CSS diplomatic liaison to the Harmony delegation, tried to take a deep calming breath. His brand-new class A uniform constricted his chest and his throat. The artificial air of the space station tasted stale, despite the slight citrus essence added to make it seem more palatable.
He’d grown too used to the real thing on Harmony.
At least he’d stopped itching from Pammy’s antidote nanobots. His body and coloring had returned to his normal neutral status. He felt shrunken without the added muscles. Bland with dark blond, straight hair instead of the bright yellow curls.
But he’d persuaded her to leave the caste mark, complete with the officer slash and the purple Lauding. Diminished, he could handle. A naked face he couldn’t.
“You may have a new job, but never forget that your ass still belongs to me,” Admiral Pamela Marella whispered beside him.
Not any more, Pammy. Not any more. I belong to the universe. And to Sissy.
Was Pamela Marella still smarting that he hadn’t come to her bed, despite several vague and then very obvious invitations? He didn’t care. The ship from Harmony would dock wit
hin minutes. He dared not hope he’d see Sissy again. At best, he might hear her voice in a carefully worded and coded message.
Anything, any contact at all was better than the emptiness in his heart and his gut.
“Why meet them here on Labyrinthe Seven Space Station, Admiral Marella? These people are going to have enough trouble dealing with us barefaced humans. A station filled with aliens may just send them running.”
“Neutral territory. The First Contact Café is privately owned.” She gave the human nickname for the giant station poised at the intersection of a whole bunch of crossroads across this sector of space.
“And,” she continued, “this is just a substation of the original. Only four different species allowed. They all have to keep to their own atmosphere specific wings. These seven arms of the station are leased indefinitely and jointly to the CSS and Harmony. Three for us, three for them, and one for meeting rooms and communications. No aliens allowed without invitation, not even the owner, or any of her alien children,” she explained.
“We need our own planet for Headquarters. Not a tin can with spaghetti sticking out of its sides.” That’s what the station looked like from space. Each one of those strands of spaghetti was over three kilometers long and half that in width. Only a third of the arms were occupied at the moment, waiting for new expansion in this sector.
The entire rig rotated at tremendous speeds to generate gravity, heavier at the ends of the arms, nul-g at the center where the transport pods ran.
Somewhere in another wing, A’bner Labyrinthe, owner of the station— or one of her daughters, no one could tell the difference—controlled atmosphere and pressure to suit the different species. Little mingling among species at any of the seven First Contact Cafés. A’bner herself handled most cross-species and cross-language negotiations.
But not this one. This was Jake’s party, even if he wasn’t head of the delegation.
“We’re looking for a home for the Confederation,” Pammy reassured him. “But habitable planets in neutral territory that no one else already occupies are few and far between. Then once we find a place we have to build. Give us another year.”
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