by Judith Tarr
“Ah,” said Meru. “Because Aracele likes it.”
Ulani’s eyes dropped. Her feet shuffled. “I’m teaching her to like steamed buns. She says they taste like glue.”
“They do,” Meru said. “It really must be love, if you’re both trying that hard to meet in the middle.”
“She makes me warm inside,” Ulani said. She looked as if she might have said more, but nothing came out.
Meru hugged her suddenly. “Go to bed. Dream about your sea-girl.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Ulani asked.
“In a while,” Meru said.
She had to work hard to keep her voice from shaking. Ulani hesitated, as if she sensed something. Meru held her breath.
Ulani yawned. “Yes, I am tired. Don’t you stay up too long, either.”
“I’ll try not to,” Meru said.
Ulani was still yawning as she left the kitchen. Meru waited, listening hard. The whole family could decide to come down, and she would never get away at all.
The house was quiet. One or two of the aunts were on the house network, working through the night. Everyone else was either asleep or nearly there.
Meru gathered a few small things in a bag: a handful of protein bars, a bubble of water, one of the backups for her web implant. Her heart was beating, and she kept forgetting how to breathe.
Foolish, she said to herself. In a pair of tendays you’ll be going out alone into space, away from Earth, for a long time and maybe forever. This is only a little thing. A quick search. It’s not even off the continent, let alone off the planet.
When she scolded herself like that, she sounded like Grandmother Ramotswe. She could almost see the long finger shaking, and the dark eyes glaring the silliness out of her.
“I’ll be back as soon as I find Jian,” she said as if her grandmother had actually been there. “That is a promise.” And she meant to keep it.
She left a ping on the data stream, a guide to where she had gone. The family would wake up to it in the morning. By that time or very soon after, Meru hoped, she would have found her mother, and be on her way back home.
She took a deep breath and stepped out of the house, into the breathtaking rush of the wind, and the roar of the sea.
The body suit she wore was a barely visible shimmer, but it was strong enough to protect her against the void of space. Earth’s icy night was nothing to it. Meru allowed the air to penetrate to her face, gasping at the bite of it.
It was fierce, but it cleared her mind. She had been thinking of little past Mother—urgent—wrongness—go. Now she had a plan of sorts, and a trail to follow.
Hints and clues on the web led her from the house on its headland above the icy sea, down the empty road in the wind and the drifting snow. The starwing flew above her, shielding her with its wings. When she searched the web to find this road on this island, she saw no sign of herself, not even the flicker of a shadow.
The road down from the house was sand and stone, but it flowed into a smooth river of silver that looked somewhat like water and somewhat like ice. Meru paused before she stepped onto it. Once she set foot on that road, there would be no turning back.
She nearly did. A sleepy ripple on the web, a half-in-a-dream ping from her cousin Ti-shan, echoing and re-echoing through the streams of half a dozen other cousins and aunts and uncles, pulled at her with almost physical force. Meru? What are you doing? You’re not on the star-roads yet. Come down and share dreams with us.
She wrenched away. Her mother needed her. She had to go.
She braced for the current that would seize her and carry her off the island. It caught her with startling gentleness and wrapped her in a bubble of warm air. Between one sharp-drawn breath and the next, she was skimming toward the dark bulk and distant brightness of the mainland.
No earthly thing could fly faster than the starwing. It flitted ahead and then back, circling above her, now blotting out the stars, now vanishing into them. The joy of its flight swelled inside her. It was almost enough to dim the anxiety and fear that had brought her out on this bitter night.
Jian’s track through the web was fading, but Meru had found the source, mapped and marked it. She only had to get there, and try not to think too hard on what she would find.
The old city sprawled under and around the spaceport. Even in daylight, most of it lay in shadow: the long ribbon of the starcable blocked the sun, unwinding toward the station and the starships that hovered above the atmosphere. Cars ran and up and down it like beads of light on an endless string.
Once the road touched the mainland, traffic flowed into it: drone transports mostly at this hour, carrying cargo to the port. Meru in her bubble was the only single human, though she saw a handful of others traveling in twos and threes.
The starwing had vanished overhead, but it was still there, watching over Meru. She found that comforting. This was far from the first time she had come to the port. But she had never come alone before, and never at night.
She could not afford to be afraid. She focused all of herself on the moment when the road ended and she had to walk.
Properly brought up people never went to the old city. It was a wild place, and dangerous. There were creatures in there who had no link to the web; humans, even, whose implants had failed, or who had never been implanted at all.
Without the web, there was no Consensus. Meru tried to imagine a mind that could not, at the spark of a neuron, reach out to the whole universe of information. What must it be like to be completely and permanently alone?
Now as she hunted the last fading fragments of her mother’s message, she wondered, with a shiver of horror, if Jian had lost or destroyed her implant.
Jian would never do that. She loved to soar through the web, to link to the webs of other worlds and explore their strangeness, just as she loved to explore the physical reality of earth and stone and sky. Jian was complete in everything she was, mind and body.
Meru shut down the rest of the thought before she disintegrated into panic. The road’s end loomed ahead of her: a cluster of domes and arches with the lighted column of the cable rising beyond them. She focused firmly on it.
Her bubble popped with a rush of frigid air and deposited her on the solid steady surface of the platform. The drones rumbled and purred onward through the tunnel to the port. The humans followed on a lesser road, skimming more slowly but just as irresistibly toward light and safety.
There was nothing in the port for Meru. She turned away from the light toward flickering dimness.
This corridor had no ribbon of road to carry her. It was low and narrow and dingy and old. It smelled like bare ground under snow, and like the ghosts of ancient chemicals: sulfur, benzene, and a distant bite of hydrochloric acid.
Mist and warmth enfolded her. The starwing had come down out of the sky. It shrank until it was hardly larger than its youngest hatchling self, and wrapped its half-solid, half-insubstantial body around her neck and shoulders.
It had no weight, but it had presence. It purred softly in her ear.
It gave her courage. When the lights in the passage grew so dim she could barely see, it cast a glow ahead of her, faint but clear. She stroked the edge of its wing in gratitude.
The corridor ended in a platform only a little like the one at road’s end. No road waited there to carry her onward. Instead there was a wall, with the shimmer of a force field around and above it.
There were gates in the wall. When she called up their schematic on the web, it marked them as guarded, but the watch systems were as tired and faded as the rest of the old city. She convinced the one nearest to see nothing but a gust of wind as she passed by.
After she had done that, she stopped. Why had she done that? There was no need to hide. The aunts and uncles would rebuke her for going so far alone, but they could hardly stop her now.
Her mother’s signal was nearly gone. So was any time Meru might have had to waste. She had too much sense to attract notice by runni
ng, but she walked quickly through the gate.
The city was a maze. Dark walls rose above her. Things moved in the shadows. In what light there was, people crowded together, talking, laughing, singing.
Meru had not expected the singing. Or the music, either, that boomed or jangled or lilted out of every window and door. It should have been a deafening noise, but it all flowed together somehow, like the countless data streams of the web.
She had never been in a crowd of live and breathing people before. Bodies jostled her, crowding her forward.
The starwing hissed. The large figure that had been caroming toward her veered sharply off. She had sense enough to keep moving, and to try to avoid colliding with anyone.
On the web it was different. People did not crash into each other there, with bruises to show for it. Or step on toes. Or yell in her face, blowing warm rank breath over her, and saying things that made her cheeks go hot and her ears burn.
It was like swimming in the rocks along the island’s edge, pushed and pulled by the ocean’s currents. Once Meru understood that, the movement of the crowd began to make sense. Then she could dart and swerve and sidestep in much the same dance as the rest.
While she concentrated on getting through the crush of people, she almost let go of the map and the beacon. In a surge of panic, she ran another link to them.
Not so far now. It would have been easier if she had dared to close her eyes. She had to try to navigate both the street with its noise and crowds, and the web that kept promising an easy and simple way to the spark that said, Here. She was here.
There was nothing simple about the old city. The map must have been nearly as old: not all the streets led as it directed. Gaps and rubble lay where the map marked buildings, and streets ended abruptly or took unexpected turns.
The starwing unfurled from Meru’s neck and flew upward. Under the surge and flow of the web in Meru’s mind was something like a thought and something like an image of the starwing rising above the tops of the buildings, mapping what was there and matching it to the map on the web. And then, at the end, the starwing’s search found warmth and a faint scent of alien flowers that said Jian.
Part of Meru wanted desperately to cling to the starwing, but she needed its view of the city from above. She stumbled into a doorway, pressed into a corner that stank of cats and something rank that was not, somehow, earthly, and squeezed her eyes shut.
There.
The starwing had found the last bits of broken data that belonged to Meru’s mother.
They were in the oldest of the old sector, which was half in ruins; half of the rest was overgrown with stark and winter-withered trees. The wall around it was newer but still ages old, its force field patched and re-patched, but still full of gaps.
On the far side, nearest the port, the wall had begun to mend. The strength of the field fed the starwing like a blaze of sunlight, making it so giddy that it spun upward toward the stars.
Meru’s cry brought it back. It hovered above the place where Jian had been, where Meru hoped desperately that she still was.
Meru had to move quickly. The field was spreading to close off the sector.
She knew that because the starwing knew it. There was nothing about that field on the web, no warning or explanation—and that was strange.
She took as deep a breath as she could bear to, sighted along the crowd and sprang into it, aiming as best she could toward the place where the starwing waited.
Chapter 3
I snapped awake, and caught my laptop before it slid off my lap to the floor. My neck had a kink in it. I eeped when I tried to unkink it.
I’d been asleep sitting up. My story was still on the screen, the one I’d been writing before I fell into that dream or hallucination or whatever it was. It had nothing whatsoever to do with a girl named Meru or a world of ice and darkness or a creature called a starwing.
That was the weirdest dream I had ever had. Weirder still, I could remember every detail of it.
I don’t remember dreams, not like that. But this one wouldn’t let go. If I closed my eyes, I could see the half-broken city, and hear it and feel it and smell it.
Especially smell it. I know what the projects smell like, and there was plenty of that, but there were other things, things I couldn’t put a name to. Alien things. Weird and sharp, catching at the throat; making my eyes water.
I was freaking myself out. I snapped the laptop shut a little harder than I really needed to, though the dream didn’t have anything to do with it at all, and pushed it away.
While I’d been dreaming my science-fiction dream, the sun had gone down. Mom was asleep on the couch—I freaked again till I made sure she was breathing. Then I told myself she didn’t look sick. Of course not. Just tired.
I was still mad at her. That hadn’t changed a bit.
Dinner hadn’t made itself while both of us slept. I found the rest of the roast chicken from yesterday and made a salad out of it, but when I went to wake Mom up, I couldn’t face another round of Yes You’re Going, No I’m Not. I let her sleep.
I wasn’t hungry anyway. I covered the bowl and shoved it in the fridge, and left Mom a note on the board: Salad in fridge. Gone to Ice Creamery with Cat and Rick.
“Seriously?” said Cat. “They’re giving you Egypt for your birthday?”
When Cat gets excited she gets squeaky. She was up in bat territory now.
Between that and the arctic air conditioning and the solar-flare lighting, the Ice Creamery was a migraine waiting to happen. I’d had a psycho break and ordered a Bama Slammer, which was a double banana split with blackberries, pecans, peaches, three different sauces, and enough ice cream to feed a third-world country.
I already had brain freeze from eating the first few spoonfuls too fast. I picked at the rest while Cat gnawed on her Choco-Cone. In between bites she kept squeaking. “Egypt! King Tut! Pyramids! Barging down the Nile!”
“Terrorists,” I said, two solid octaves down from her. “Sandstorms. Mummies.”
“Mummies are fascinating,” Rick said. He wasn’t really paying attention: he had his tablet and the game of Mighty World of Gruesome Gory War he was playing with his friend-if-you-know-what-I-mean, Greg from space camp at the Cape. Between that and his Authentic New York City Egg Cream, he was as happy as he could get when he wasn’t on a horse.
“Mummies are gruesome,” Cat said. “Mummies are wonderful. Will you be digging up any?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going.”
“That’s crazy,” Cat said. “Of course you’re going. It’s the trip of a lifetime. You have to go.”
“My mom’s lifetime,” I said, “and I don’t have to. I want to stay here.” My Bama Slammer had started to melt into a pool of purple and orange and off-white. I stirred it together into purple-tinged mud. It was about the color of Cat’s hair.
“They have horses in Egypt,” Rick pointed out. He turned his tablet so I could see.
There was a lot of sand. A Pyramid. And a rider in a helmet on a delicate little horse.
Giza Adventure Tours, the caption said. See the Pyramids the Old-Fashioned Way.
I pushed the tablet back at Rick. “That’s up near Cairo,” I said. “I’d be stuck a thousand miles away, digging around in old tombs.”
“There must be horses there, too,” he said. “Or camels. I always wanted to ride a camel.”
“I did once,” Cat said. “When Dad was stationed in Saudi. It’s like the most back-breaking Warmblood trot you ever sat. I almost got whiplash.”
“Lovely,” I said.
Cat popped the last of the Choco-Cone into her mouth and crunched it into submission. She’d flipped out of squee mode into frowny-serious. “All I got for my sixteenth was a fourth-hand minivan. You get a whole country.”
“I’d rather have the minivan,” I said.
She threw her scrunched-up napkin at me. It caught me dead between the eyes.
I threw it back—three feet off targ
et. “Why didn’t you go to Egypt? You were right there.”
“Dad got sent to Afghanistan. The rest of us came over here.”
I knew that. I was being a jerk, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “You and Mom can go. I’ll stay here.”
“I wish.” Cat pushed herself away from the noisy little table.
She was pissed off at me. I didn’t blame her, but I wasn’t going to apologize, either. She was my friend. She was supposed to be on my side.
Rick wasn’t any help. He was winning his stupid game with his stupid friend. That was all he cared about.
We didn’t say much in the car on the way home. When Cat dropped me off, she kept on giving me the silent treatment. Rick’s half-absent voice floated out the back window of the minivan. “See you at the barn.”
“I’ll be there early,” I said.
“Crack of dawn,” said Rick as Cat gunned the minivan down the street.
Mom was in bed when I got in. Good. I didn’t have to talk to her.
I should go to bed, too: when I’d said I’d be at the barn early, I hadn’t been kidding. Six a.m. for feeding and stalls. Then ride. Then, vet emergencies willing, Bonnie’s preg check.
I was too restless and pissy and sugar-shocky to sleep. My laptop was open; when I woke it up, the story I’d been poking at was still there.
I halfway expected it to mutate into another science-fiction dream, but I wasn’t likely to have one of those again. I was a little sorry. I would have liked to know what had happened to Meru’s mom, and why the old city was being cordoned off, and...
Maybe I’d write my way through the rest of it. But not tonight.
I went to put my laptop on the bedside table, and found something in the way. A book.
It used to live on the coffee table in our old house, when I was little and Dad was still more often there than not. It was my favorite book in the whole world.
I cussed out Mom for thinking she could get me that way. When I reached for the book, meaning to throw it in the general direction of the closet, I found myself pulling it into my lap instead.
