The Memory of Sky

by Robert Reed

  Two bites told her what she had always suspected: humans tasted exactly like monkeys.

  “I don’t feel good,” Seldom said.

  “Are you throwing up?” Elata asked.

  “Not yet.”

  The prisoners were jammed inside the galley. Bountiful’s crew sat in the back, shoulder to shoulder. Only the pilot and captain were missing, presumably helping the papio fly their stolen ship through the night-bound wilderness. The first table was half-empty, reserved for the children and Master Nissim, for Tar`ro and Merit. The galley wasn’t built for papio. A giant woman was squatting in front of the door, and three glowering males were jammed inside the kitchen, guns behind the long counter.

  “Are you ill, or are you scared?” asked the papio woman.

  “He’s scared,” said Karlan.

  “You shouldn’t be,” she said. “Nobody lifts a hand, unless you give us cause.”

  “I won’t,” Seldom promised.

  “Then you are spectacularly safe.”

  Seldom was sitting between his brother and Elata, arms wrapped around his aching belly, his back to the guards. He was a stick next to Karlan, but there was no denying the resemblance in their faces, in the eyes and noses and the shape of their mouths. They had never looked more like brothers.

  Karlan was the only prisoner whose hands were tied. He liked that. There was an honor in the caution, and he picked up his thick wrists, studying the sharp brown cords that were already cutting into the flesh.

  “So you’re taking us to the reef,” said Tar`ro.

  The guards said nothing.

  Nissim and Tar`ro were facing the children, facing the kitchen. Merit had been told to sit alone at the far end at the table, closest to the woman soldier.

  “I’ve never walked the reef,” Tar`ro said.

  “I have,” Seldom said, and then he smiled at the memory, momentarily forgetting his bellyache.

  “Flying the canopy at night,” Merit said. “That’s a tough game.”

  The ship’s crew made concurring sounds.

  “I hope we don’t snag a sneaky branch,” he said.

  The male papio didn’t know the language, and they didn’t approve of any noise. One of them said something harsh to the woman, and showing her canines, she said a papio phrase to him.

  “What did she say?” Elata asked Nissim.

  The Master and Merit glanced at each other, neither answering.

  The papio woman had a quiet, careful laugh. “Wanting this and wanting that don’t matter, I said. Orders have been given, and we are walking the path.”

  Elata squirmed against the steel seat. “But why take all of us? If you want Diamond, put him inside a whiffbird and fly home.”

  Merit knew why but decided to keep quiet.

  “Whiffbirds can’t fly far,” Seldom said.

  Karlan snorted. “But they can refuel from Bountiful’s tanks. They’re probably doing that right now.”

  His tiny brother squinted at nothing. “Yeah, I forgot.”

  The woman papio shifted, letting her weight find a little more comfort. “I’m brave,” she said, “but I wouldn’t risk such a trip. Night inside a little craft is too dangerous. A rotor clips one branch, and the mission ends. And if we sit still and wait for daylight before launching, then your people would enthusiastically shoot down the whiffbird before it’s home, and that would be a terrible loss for the world.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “You see, we believe the boy is precious,” she said. “And we aren’t like you, killing ourselves while trying to murder him.”

  Seldom let loose a moan.

  “Let me take him to the toilet,” said Elata.

  “No,” said the woman. Then she spoke to the other guards, and a cooking pot was found under the counter. One guard handed it to her, wanting nothing to do with the prisoners, and she kicked it along the floor, putting it under his seat. “Heave into that bucket.”

  “Throw up in front of people?” he asked unhappily.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Always agreeable, Seldom bent down, and his last two meals spilled out into the bright steel pot.

  Elata patted her friend on the back.

  To nobody in particular, Tar`ro said, “Thunderflies.”

  The Master nodded.

  “Know of any chrysalises sitting around in easy reach?” Tar`ro asked.

  Merit looked at the two men, curious now.

  “Not so far,” said Nissim. “How about you?”

  “No. But I’ll keep hunting.”

  The papio understood none of that. But the woman was suspicious enough to say, “Be quiet now.”

  “Sorry,” Tar`ro said.

  Merit took a breath, and then against the rules, he stood.

  “Sit down,” said the woman.

  In papio, Merit said, “No, I will not.”

  “Sit down,” she repeated, in papio.

  He shook his head. “Shoot me.”

  The male guards were willing. The woman studied the old tree-walker, planning where she would slap him and what would break if she used force.

  A solitary thud came from some distant part of the ship.

  Nobody inside the galley noticed.

  “My son won’t be safe with your people either,” Merit said, shifting back to the prisoners’ language.

  Inside her mind, the woman beat him.

  “Your weapons dropped our trees,” he said. “I’m sure of that much. My people helped you, but the blame rests mostly on you.”

  “None of us,” she said.

  Merit rocked slowly from side to side, thinking.

  A door opened and closed in the hallway, and papio feet walked past the galley, making no effort for speed.

  Once again, the woman said, “Sit down.”

  “Are you certain?” Merit asked.

  “Certain?”

  “That they’re trustworthy,” he said, gesturing at the papio soldiers who couldn’t piece together any of this noise.

  The woman looked at the three faces.

  Another thud was followed by shouting, not close but loud enough to seem loud. A papio had yelled a few words.

  “What did that mean?” Elata asked.

  Merit hadn’t heard enough.

  Nissim had, and he gave Tar`ro a careful glance.

  Somewhere in the back of the ship, somewhere past the shop, gunfire suddenly broke out, intense and swift and then gone again.

  Echoes and the memory of gunfire lingered. The imprisoned crew jumped to their feet, and the four papio shouted orders at them and each other, waving their automatic weapons. But then nothing else seemed to happen. Normal sounds of engines and life drifted into the galley, lasting long enough that the mind could almost wonder if nothing was wrong. The slayer crew began to sit again. Nobody relaxed, but most of the room was ready to stop breathing fast.

  Then another voice shouted, closer than the first.

  “Enemy,” a woman called out, in papio.

  Gunfire erupted again, and wild shouts, and this time the mayhem didn’t melt into doubt.

  Three guns were firing. Soldiers were fighting inside the machine shop, and then they were climbing and shooting. Diamond was almost glad for the distraction. He counted the guns and listened to voices, imagining a single brave crewman who had managed to remain free. He pictured Tar`ro running with his pistol in hand, and then Karlan swinging a huge steel bar. But he didn’t imagine Master Nissim, and he never used Father. Even in his head, those two men weren’t allowed to be heroic.

  Eventually the gunfire slowed and then was gone. Shrill papio words wandered through Bountiful. Someone yelled for someone to be careful about the bladders. Corona flesh was strong, but bullets were stupid. If a bullet found weakness and the hydrogen jetted free, they could be screwed. That’s what the papio were shouting in both languages. “Screwed screwed screwed.”

  The cabin door had been left slightly ajar, allowing the guarding soldier to keep watch over Diamond.
The guard filled the hallway. The boy was lying on the narrow bed, wearing his school trousers again, watching his new thumb emerge. Good was sitting in the cabin’s safest corner, his back to the walls. The hated sack needed to be torn to ribbons. Still furious for being shoved inside that blackness, the monkey punched holes in the sack with his incisors, and he tugged with his arms and with curses, creating long ribbons of canvas.

  “Bad evil bad wrong,” he told the growing stack of rags.

  Diamond watched his thumb, but he wasn’t thinking about his thumb.

  Then a single shot rang out, as far from the cabin as possible.

  One very big body ran up to the door and the soldier. An officer looked inside the cabin, staring at the chewed-up hand, and without a word, the newcomer shut the door and used a small key to work the lock.

  It was dark inside the tiny room.

  The soldier in the hallway said several papio words, including, “Why?”

  The officer responded with orders. Listening to papio was different than reading it. Diamond didn’t understand, but the tone and breathless speed of the words made the orders important. Then the officer named the enemy with a word that was the very much the same in both languages.

  “Jazzing,” he heard.

  “Angry angry angry,” said Good, staring at him.

  “I’m sorry,” Diamond said. But he didn’t feel sorry. He had saved the monkey’s life and was bitten for his trouble.

  Good had never been this furious with his boy. “Angry mad pissed,” he said.

  “They’re chasing a jazzing,” Diamond said.

  The monkey’s eyes understood before the rest of him. The eyes grew bigger and scared all over again.

  “One of the wild jazzings got onboard,” Diamond guessed.

  No monkey was ignorant about jazzings, even if he lived far from the wilderness. Good looked past Diamond, and his arms quit ripping the canvas.

  Full-grown jazzings were powerful killers, and huge. But the giant predator wouldn’t be able to climb between the bladders, which was why this jazzing had to be a lost youngster.

  Diamond felt sorry for the imaginary animal.

  He felt very sorry for himself.

  He had been working for a long while, trying to push aside certain awful moments. But his mind was too perfect to cooperate.

  A distant shot reverberated.

  Then the echo was gone, and a new noise found him. The tapping was light and very quick. Good heard the tapping. Something was striking the cabin’s little window, and the talk of wild jazzings was too much of a coincidence. The monkey jumped up, staring at the shades before deciding to crawl under the cot.

  Diamond imagined a fingernail striking glass.

  The tapping stopped.

  Bountiful was still pushing towards the reef. Branches might have clipped the ship as they passed, although they would never sound so clean and neat, so rhythmic.

  Again, the tapping began.

  The cabin wasn’t as dark as before. Diamond’s eyes had adapted. His thumb looked too pale but otherwise felt and acted normal. The other wounds needed more healing. What wasn’t pain told him the state of affairs. His brown trousers still had loose buttons, but he didn’t want to touch himself there. He would finish dressing when he wasn’t thinking about the knives or the papio man bent over his exposed body, and maybe then he would be healed.

  The tapping became complicated, swift and full of patterns. By the sound of it, twenty fingertips were working the glass.

  Diamond stood, the trousers drooping without falling.

  From under the cot, Good offered a quiet growl.

  The shades were black and heavy, ready to help an exhausted crewman sleep through the middle of the brightest morning. Diamond touched the outer corner of one shade, and the tapping continued. Then a single shot—a loud closer shot—startled him as well as whatever was outside.

  Nothing was outside. Clinging to the ship’s skin wasn’t possible.

  The tapping had stopped completely.

  “Because it wasn’t real,” the boy whispered. And then he grabbed both shades by the touching corners, and he yanked them open.

  A face was plastered flush against the flat glass.

  Diamond took a step backward.

  The face wasn’t human, and it wasn’t a monkey or bird or anything else normal. And it didn’t resemble King either. The only creature that wore any face like this was an insect. A long jointed mouth and various antennae were wrapped around the bulging eyes that covered a substantial portion of the head. But insect eyes were built from hundreds of little eyes. What was staring at Diamond was were smooth domes, clear like glass, and nothing in the world resembled them. Even the coronas were not half as strange as this creature.

  Stepping up to the window, Diamond said, “Ghost.”

  The glass eyes couldn’t blink, or they wouldn’t.

  “It’s you,” the boy said.

  And then the face was gone.

  The ambush came between pages. Prima was studying the tense account of a dinner with List’s supporters and King’s explosive reaction to some perceived insult. That dinner was three hundred and nineteen days earlier. That King was smaller and angrier than the creature she last saw. How long ago was that encounter? Thirty days. What these files revealed, time and again, was that he was changing. The fiery vindictive King was absent from the later accounts, but Prima doubted that he was hidden very deep under those spines and proper manners.

  For the last hundred recitations, Prima had done nothing but peel back one report to reveal the next, gaining tiny insights into a species that was utterly familiar at the core.

  Then the woman dipped her head, just for a moment, her forehead kissing the desk as she fell into deep sleep.

  The ambush came with dreams.

  She woke shouting. She was sitting upright with her face sweat-drenched and Sondaw standing before her.

  “Madam, are you all right?”

  Hardly, and she never would be again.

  “You were yelling,” he said. “About Rail.”

  “Because it was falling and wanted to pull us down with it.”

  The lieutenant nodded soberly, understanding the image too well.

  “I’m all right,” she lied.

  He looked at the files, the sweat and upside down words.

  “What are our loyal allies doing now?” she asked.

  “Chasing us and signaling us,” he said. “It took those big ships a long time to leave their berths.”

  She knew that would happen.

  Sondaw said, “Madam.” He had questions, but the youngster was too polite or lowly to give them words.

  Prima turned the pages, letting both of them learn from the incident. King had battled the human witness with insults as well as spit thrown from the ugly tooth-jammed mouth. Even when List took exception to the behavior, the monster boy continued to berate what had been a wealthy, powerful individual.

  “Are these records helpful?” Sondaw asked.

  “There’s a scheming monster at work,” she said. “Vain and charmless, prepared to cheat and mislead governments and an army of opponents to get his way.”

  The lieutenant nodded, believing that he understood.

  “I mean List,” she said, correcting the misapprehension. “Every Archon has heard the stories. Believe me, each of us has scars. Even List’s supporters—particularly his supporters—understand that he has few principles, except for earning the greatest profit possible for his office, for the District of the Bloodwoods, and for those who can stomach watching him slice apart every political threat.”

  The young man flipped back through the rest of the files, finding the brief, inadequate account of Diamond battling with King.

  “Somehow our child won,” he said doubtfully.

  Prima didn’t hear the comment. “Yet List does seem to be civilizing his son,” she continued. “An armored beast roaming Creation, yet the boy ate dinner with me at the last fest
ival . . . .a young man who stayed calm and in control. It’s hard to believe, but he seemed ten times more appealing that his adopted father.”

  “Yes, madam,” Sondaw said.

  “Which makes King even more dangerous,” she said.

  Suddenly her aide was tense enough to tremble.

  She didn’t understand his thoughts.

  “You think that King is responsible,” he said.

  “Responsible?”

  “For the attack on Rail and Marduk,” the lieutenant said. “The monster found allies to help him try and kill the boy again. That’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Honestly, no,” she said.

  Not until that very minute, at least.

  The Ghost’s face was gone, replaced with brilliant green light.

  Diamond saw blackwoods and other trees that didn’t belong with the wilderness. Beyond that little window, daylight had returned. He blinked and his heart leapt as he stepped closer, nose to the glass. This was some kind of picture, and parts of the picture were moving. Branches swayed. Airships climbed and fell while winged creatures beat at the bright air. One male hairyheart elf came close enough to show its bright face, except the colorings were wrong. Rings were etched inside the purple plumage on the breast, but Diamond knew that bird didn’t have rings. That was a wrong detail, until he remembered how Master Nissim once said in class, “We have our light, what our eyes enjoy. But blossoms and feathers sometimes have details that we can’t see. They hide past violet, and without special tools, we’re as bad as blind.”

  Two fingers and the new thumb touched the glass.

  The picture ceased moving.

  Stubborn latches held the window closed, but Diamond managed to open them and pull the glass into the cabin far enough that his head and neck could fit into the gap. Then the picture began to move again. Birds had voices and the nearest airships moved with engine sounds, but far more impressive, Diamond found his nose full of rich flowery stinks and rain smells and an aroma that was like an animal, only it wasn’t.

  Diamond eased his healed hand through the opening.

  Out from the bright air, an insect’s limb emerged—jointed shells ending with a collection of hard dry fingers.

  Those fingers reached for his hand.

  Diamond pulled back.