I approached and sat, put my hands in my lap. They were still clenched, so I eased my fingers loose. Nikolas-dan knelt and sat back on his heels on the third side of the table.
“Oa-nadan ngali Enas S’tlian-dan,” the woman said formally.
The name was sort of familiar but I couldn’t remember from where. Maybe Nikolas-dan had mentioned it in one of his long lessons.
“Oa ngali Jos Musey-na,” I answered quietly. It was easy to say your name. It was all I could handle right now. Most of the striviirc-na vocabulary and forms Nikolas-dan had pounded into my head fled like criminals.
It seemed we sat staring at each other for a long time. I looked at her fully, the way Nikolas-dan always looked at me. The striviirc-na way, he said. Except nobody in this room was an alien. The features beneath the ultra-white face resembled my teacher’s. The high cheekbones, the vaguely almond shape of the eyes, the curve of the mouth. But female.
A sister? Or mother?
For some reason I’d never thought Nikolas-dan would have relatives. I couldn’t imagine him in a family.
Nikolas-dan poured what was now a familiar hot drink into three handleless cups placed at the center of the table. He’d explained that you should never let a guest’s mouth go dry. Over the weeks I’d gotten used to yenn—red root tea. I swallowed without breathing and it didn’t seem to taste so much like very sour apples. We took our first polite sips, then Enas S’tlian set her cup down and moved her eyes over my face and body. I knew better than to twitch when someone looked at me like that. I stared at the tabletop, at my blurry reflection in it with black shadows where my eyes should have been.
“How are you, Jos-na?”
I glanced at Nikolas-dan, then back to Enas-dan. They both stared at me, but not quite like pirates. Just curious and patient, waiting for me to tell them something they wanted to know.
Still, my heart didn’t slow down. “I’m all right.”
“You look well. Better than when Niko first brought you. My son tells me you learn quickly.”
Niko. Son.
Nikolas-dan sipped his tea, silent. It was his mother’s turn, then.
I shrugged, but not in the way symps did to emphasize a question. “I thought I had to learn or else.”
“Or else?”
I shrugged again. On the table by Enas-dan’s elbow was a slate. She saw me look at it.
“You want to know about your ship,” she said, not a question.
I had to think of the alien words now, just because I thought of Mukudori. It nudged my striv-mind out of place.
Always a bad sign. To know a language, Nikolas-dan said, you had to stand inside of it.
“Enh.” Simple was best.
Enas-dan poked the slate lightly, then slid it across the table toward me.
Just like that.
On the screen was the emblem of my homeship, a white bird-shape on a circular red background, in flight.
“If you have any questions,” she said, “perhaps words you don’t understand, you may ask. But the translation restriction isn’t in force on this slate.”
She knew about my lessons. I looked at Nikolas-dan, but his composed expression wasn’t any explanation. So I looked back at the slate, at that symbol.
The words beneath it were in Ki’hade. For a moment I couldn’t touch the screen, but out of the thorny shapes formed words I recognized, so I reached and scrolled and read.
About my homeship. About how on the merchant route between Austro and Siqiniq stations, a Universalist ship called Ascension discovered the remains of Mukudori. I read about how the Austro Salvage Authority and the Merchants Protection Commission investigated the wreckage and concluded that my homeship was attacked by a pirate, possibly two.
Simple distant words for a stifled, tangled thing.
I read how the MPC got a tip that Genghis Khan, a Komodo-class ship captained by former EarthHub officer Vincenzo Falcone, was responsible. But no ransom demands were made, nobody could do anything but catalogue the dead and missing and inform the living relatives. The Khan evaded the Rim Guard.
It was a report made over a year ago—September 30, 2183, it said, more than a week after my eighth birthday— with no follow-up. Nobody had discovered anything else. We had all just disappeared among the stars and nobody knew where. Unfortunate but maybe inevitable, because of the increased pirate activity in the Rim, it said. The slate gave translations when I asked, told me the short meanings for those long words, in perfect EarthHub lettering.
It was a small report for something that sat big in my throat, like a stone I couldn’t quite swallow. I read it all until I felt like choking.
But I didn’t cry. It all just sparked in my head, jerked and writhed like live wires cut loose and dangerous.
“Falcone was an EarthHub Armed Forces captain?” I asked Enas-dan. This assassin. And her son, who was my teacher.
“Yes,” Nikolas-dan answered. “Long ago.”
“Jos-na,” Enas-dan said. “Do you remember if you have family that weren’t on your Starling?”
I kept scrolling the report in the slate. Soon the many-armed woman came up, with the word “Kali.”
“Jos-na?”
“No. I don’t know.” Maybe an aunt, but I didn’t remember her name or if she was a real aunt and not just a friend of my parents. “Kali, this was Falcone’s EarthHub ship?”
“Yes,” Nikolas-dan said, looking once at his mother. “It was a deep-space carrier.”
“What happened to it?” My eyes hurt. I didn’t want to read from the slate.
“He decided to chase my husband,” Enas-dan said. “And he lost.”
I blinked. “Your husband?”
“Drink your tea, Jos-na,” she said. And sipped her own.
I picked up the cup. It felt heavy. I drank and the liquid seemed to eat through my stomach.
Enas-dan said, in my language, “Falcone was a carrier captain for EarthHub twenty years ago EHSD. His ship was the Kali. He was a very good striv killer. He still is, when he bothers to be. When he isn’t raiding merchants and Rim Guardians for theft and ransom.”
Striv was okay to say, it was just an abbreviation. But I was surprised that she didn’t speak Ki’hade now. She didn’t even have an accent, like Nikolas-dan.
And she knew Falcone. She wasn’t going to hide it from me.
“I never met the man,” she continued. “But my husband Markalan did, ship to ship in the Battle of Ghenseti. Long before your time. Ghenseti was a military outpost, a double leap from Chaos. A major resupply base for the deep-space carriers. Markalan chose to attack it.”
“Why?” I said, before I thought. “Why do you—symps and stuff—why do you fight for the strivs? Against humans?”
Enas-dan picked up a thin piece of green root from a small plate on the table, rested an elbow on her bent knee, and chewed. A minty scent threaded through the air. “Falcone, he attacked your Starling, yes?”
It always came back to that. But I thought there was more to the question, so I just nodded and waited.
“Falcone takes things that don’t belong to him. He doesn’t care that it’s wrong to attack merchants and steal children. He thinks merchants are fair game in this war. I suspect he thinks this. I’ve read some things about him. He was the same way as a captain. He did what he wanted no matter what the Hub said, or what was right. Pirates are like that. If you don’t freely give them things, they take them anyway. So it is with the Hub.”
“How can you say that? My ship—” Was a Hub merchant.
She poured more tea. “Long ago, when I was younger even than Niko, Markalan and I went on a mission to deep space as part of an expeditionary force for the Hub. Have you heard of the Plymouth?”
“It’s the moon where the strits—where the striviirc-na were.”
She didn’t say anything about my mistake. Neither did Nikolas-dan. “Even before that. The Plymouth was the ship I worked on. We found the moon with the striviirc-na scientists. Qini
tle-na. The moon had a lot of materials that the Hub needed—elemental compounds that we use to make transsteel. Transsteel is the thing we build ships and stations with.”
I knew that from science classes on Mukudori, and hearing my parents talk. And Falcone’s lessons. For deep-space development, transsteel was the most important thing next to quantum teleportation of light, for communications. Falcone liked to attack shipments of transsteel.
“So,” Enas-dan said, not sounding like a symp at all now that she wasn’t speaking the alien language. “Plymouth’s captain tried to open communications. The language was difficult—as you well know—but not impossible to learn. It took a couple years but we established a rapport. Conversation. Just enough to find out that the striviirc-na wouldn’t share their moon.”
“Why not? It’s because of them this war—”
The EarthHub language fooled me. As if I now had a right to speak to them this way.
But they didn’t tell me to shut up. Nikolas-dan watched me with the same calm, unreadable face. And Enas-dan just shrugged a bit.
“Is it because of them? Why did they need to give a reason? They were clearly first on the moon and had been there for a few years. Yet when they said no, Plymouth’s captain decided to take over the mines anyway. Many strivs were killed.”
This wasn’t how they taught it in school, or what I remembered from the Send. “So that captain was like a pirate?”
“Yes,” Enas-dan said. “Human technology was more advanced. The striviirc-na hadn’t the ability to leap or travel faster than light. Their scientists had taken a ten-year trip to reach that moon. And they wanted it for themselves because we weren’t part of their system, we didn’t understand that when their scientists study something, they believe there is an almost spiritual link between the observer and the observed, that each has their place and it shouldn’t be interrupted lightly. We are the aliens to them. We had no na, to their thinking. Do you know what na is?”
Na. Place
. The first principle of striviirc-na belief. Nikolas-dan had taught me. So I nodded.
Enas-dan said, “The strivs don’t have gods, they don’t worship a higher power. But they respect na. It’s the center of their beliefs. Or… I ought to say it’s the center of Nan’hade beliefs. Not all strivs on Aaian-na believe the same things, and not all sympathizers are allowed everywhere on this planet.”
“Then why do you stay? Why do you live here with them?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Because I helped them repel the Plymouth from that moon. Me, Markalan, and half of the crew. I made my decision long ago not to side with pirates. In whatever shape or form.”
She sat there with her alien skin color and tattoos, in alien dress, in an alien room, and I believed her. But just because she didn’t see herself as a pirate didn’t mean it wasn’t true. In school you learned that the first symps stole weapons and tech and gave it all to the strits, training them so they could fight us and kill us, which made the war really bad. But I remembered the fast way the teachers covered the starmaps, and where EarthHub’s borders were, and how we successfully kept the strits at bay. We didn’t want to destroy them, we just wanted them to stay in their place. What was bad about that?
Nobody ever mentioned that the war started when striviirc-na were killed in the first place because the Hub was greedy.
“I know this is a lot right now,” Enas-dan said. “And you might not believe us. I hope you will make up your own mind about us, now that you’re here.”
Enas S’tlian. Markalan S’tlian. The names clicked in my memory. Not S’tlian, but Gray and Maida. They had started the war, everybody said. My parents had said so when they talked with Evan’s parents sometimes. Markalan Maida and Enas Gray.
And their son the Warboy.
Terrorist, killer, strit-lover. Those were the meanings of the Warboy that the Hub hated and Falcone half admired. Because Falcone said the Warboy was the best kind of pirate. He hit fast and disappeared, keeping the enemy off balance.
But that had come from a pirate.
But Mukudori hadn’t liked symps either.
But this was Nikolas-dan. My teacher. Who never once touched me and never raised his voice.
“Why—” The tea was a sour taste at the back of my throat. “Why do you care what I think about you?”
They looked at me, gray eyes and dark, from the two other sides of the table.
Nikolas-dan said, “We want you to be happy here, Jos-na.”
I found myself staring at my cup and the deep red flakes of tea at the bottom of it, like dry bits of blood.
“Did Niko teach you what Aaian-na means in Ki’hade?” Enas-dan asked.
I shrugged, remembered they read that as a question, so shook my head.
“Aaian-na,” she said. “The place on which we stand. Striviirc-na: those who live inside the place. Jos-na: Jos who stands in his place. You see the subtle differences? There are places that are sacred—hiaviirc-na. The place where we find ourselves. Our place in relation to others. Our place in society. Our place—here.” She tapped her heart. “Where is your place, Jos-na?”
She spoke so softly yet it made my head hurt. It made everything inside of me twist and ache. I couldn’t look up. “I guess my place is wherever you put me.”
Nikolas-dan said, “Another word, Jos-na. Buntla-na. The displaced ones. Orphans. Criminals. It’s not a desired state.”
“I didn’t ask to be orphaned.”
“No. But here is where you are. On Aaian-na. Place is a changeable state, Jos-na. It can be altered.”
I turned the cup slowly on the table. I got away from Falcone. Is that what he meant?
Enas-dan said in my language, “The most elusive of places is not where we are, but where we can be.”
I looked deep into those gray eyes, searching for truth.
I knew Nan’hade was ruled by groups—castes. Nae. Places, again. The ruling na was the ka’redan-na. I read something about how the country used to war a lot until the ha’redone made order and taught their students how to make order through “righteous killing.” Oka’redan. That was what Nikolas-dan called it. And everyone was born into a societal na, but you could change your na if that was where your spiritual na led you.
Did they want me to be in their place? Their na? A symp on this world? Was that going to make me happy, learning what they said was important?
Buntla-na. So I learned a new word, another way to say what I was. Another small word for a meaning so large it filled my head and spilled into my dreams, and never left me. My parents were gone but this new meaning stayed. I was going to be buntla-na for the rest of my life, because a report said my ship was dead and everybody was lost or killed. And that was all. That was all and everything.
I didn’t know if I’d ever be anything like happy—here or elsewhere.
Maybe they knew this, because they didn’t ask again.
* * *
VIII.
Nikolas-dan walked me back to my room. Our steps made no sound on the thick carpet. I couldn’t relax with him at my back. Once inside I faced him, arms folded, ready for a talk about how I’d conducted myself in the meeting with his mother. The knot hadn’t left my chest. It pulled tighter.
But he stayed in the doorway and just said, “I’ll bring you something to eat.” He moved to slide the door in, then stopped, giving me a second look.
I stepped back a pace, glanced at the wall.
“Do you want to come to the kitchen?” he said, as if it was something he asked me all the time.
That surprised me and I shrugged to hide it.
“No? Yes?” He imitated my shrug but for a different reason.
“Nikolas-dan, what’s going to happen to me?”
“Whatever you want, Jos-na.”
“Stop lying!”
His brows went up. “Why am I lying?”
“You teach me strit, make me meet your mother, and you tell me you want me to be happy because you felt sorry f
or me or something when I was shot. So what am I supposed to do for you?”
“Nothing.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“There is nothing to tell.” He stared at me as if something was wrong with me but it wasn’t my fault. Like you’d stare at a crippled person in the dark corners of stations. “Jos-na, listen to me. Falcone killed your ship—”
“I don’t want to go over that again.”
That report and its big, blunt words.
“He killed your ship and took you and it was no place to be, Jos-na, with a pirate. I understand.”
“No you don’t. Just leave me alone, okay?”
“He’s with you still, even though he isn’t here.”
I looked at the symp. Hard. “So what are you? Why should I believe you? You’re going to a lot of trouble to make me feel good about being here. So what am I supposed to think?”
“Maybe that if your parents were in my place and found an orphan, they would do the same thing. For no other reason than it was right.”
I heard my breaths. We both did.
“You never knew them, you don’t know what happened!”
Why was it that bad things stayed longer in your memory and good things faded? Their faces were beginning to gray around the edges, even when I shut my eyes. The longer I stayed on this planet, talking strit, talking with symps, the quicker they faded. Everything I knew was fading, except the bad things.
“I know what pirates do,” Nikolas-dan said. “I’ve killed my share.”
He didn’t say it proudly, like Falcone did when he talked about Hub ships. My teacher’s calm face hardly smiled, but then it never twisted in rage either. “Warboy” didn’t seem to suit him, until you saw the way he moved and those blade shapes beneath his clothing. Until you talked to him and knew everything he said was more than just the words.
“Where is your life now, Jos-na? On Mukudori, with Falcone, or here? How many times have you divided yourself? When are you going to collect your pieces? I’ve provided a place but you fight it all day.”
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