The pain in Letho’s muscles gradually subsided as he worked, but he soon realized that his stamina wasn’t what it had been the previous day. As he continued to scrub, he felt the sharp muscle pains being replaced by an aching numbness.
Maka showed no signs of weariness as he plowed through the muck. Letho stopped for a moment to watch him. He was clearing the tunnel walls at least three times faster than Letho. Maka hummed a tune while he worked, and before Letho knew it, the “song” was stuck in his mind. Throughout the day when Letho would surface from the mindless reverie of manual labor he would find the song reverberating in his head.
Letho tried to imagine the vocal chord structure that was able to create multi-part harmonies just as easily as a Eursan would sing a simple tune. What evolutionary steps had brought the Tarsi to such a complex manner of speech? Did they start out just like Eursans, able to speak or sing in only one voice, one tone, one inflection? Was their language so complex that multiple lines of harmony were required for exact expression? Letho found himself humming bits and pieces of Maka’s tune, though he could only manage one line at a time, and with minimal pitch accuracy.
I could listen to that sound all day on my uCom, he thought.
Letho realized that he hadn’t checked his device since he had come to work in the depths with Maka.
Probably doesn’t work anyways.
Instead he chose to relive some of his and Deacon’s varied capers from their formal ed sequence. Nights of too much whiskey, hugging toilets, and the ceaseless machinations of young men on the hunt for the fairer sex. Sila’s face kept appearing in his mind’s eye, a visage that to Letho was the perfect representation of human beauty. Her smile brought him a surge of strength that galvanized his cleaning efforts.
Before long the work klaxon was ringing again, and he and the Tarsi were making their way back to the platforms to empty their tunnel-scrubbers’ canisters.
This time Letho had no trouble disengaging the canister from his tunnel-scrubber. He hefted the canister onto the platform as gracefully as he could and waited for it to be emptied. No Tarsi laughed at him this time; in fact, they seemed much less interested in the newcomer. Most of them were engaged in their own lilting conversations, exchanging what Letho imagined were bland pleasantries and lewd jokes.
When Letho turned to step down from the platform he found Maka glowering at him, his good eye iridescent and fixed on Letho, the other staring into nothing. For a moment Letho felt fear rattling his insides—then the Tarsi’s expression changed from intimidating to mild. Maka placed a hand on Letho’s shoulder, engulfing it to the bicep. The Tarsi said something in his complex language, stimulating a faint sense of recognition deep within the recesses of Letho’s mind. Letho didn’t know what the syllables meant, but he had a vague notion that it was congratulatory. He felt warmth surging through his chest and limbs, and he couldn’t help but issue a brilliant smile that threatened to encircle his entire head.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The days ran together in a sweat-soaked haze, but Letho found himself enjoying his work—despite its backbreaking nature. When he had first come to dwell among the Tarsi his body had been weak and flabby, but the combination of the constant sweat and the brutality of the labor was breaking his old body down and re-forging it. After a week or two he’d no longer woken up sore, and in the following days his productivity grew by leaps and bounds. The tunnel-scrubber seemed lighter, the scum easier to break apart and suction away.
There was a certain primal satisfaction in his labor, a tangible purpose to what he was doing—which was something he had never known. It didn’t even bother him that he was breaking his back every day so that Fulcrum citizens could enjoy cool, fresh air—a luxury that he himself was not afforded.
Letho found himself thinking about his previous job less and less. He didn’t miss his apartment, his sleep chamber, or his uCom—though he did wish he had some way to get in touch with Deacon. He imagined that Deacon was consumed with grief over his friend’s disappearance, and under such strange circumstances. Letho wondered if they had run a story about his altercation in the Red Sector, or if they had suppressed the information. He made a mental note to try to find a way to get in touch with Deacon.
He thought about Sila perhaps even more often than he thought about Deacon. He hoped that in his absence she hadn’t fallen on Deacon’s consoling shoulder. He knew that the distance between consolation and affection was a short one, and though he loved his friend dearly, he knew that Deacon was as much a young man as Letho, and prone to the same weakness when it came to the delicate features and general sweetness of girls like Sila.
Lost in his work and his thoughts of Sila, Letho didn’t hear the plodding footfalls or the tap of foot pads on the metal grating directly behind him. He was mid-hum, uttering a rising tone that reached a peak and disintegrated into a rapid fire procession of close-grouped tones, when he felt a great paw come to rest on the whole of his shoulder. Letho’s body jerked, attempting to extract itself from the envirosuit. Somehow his tunnel-scrubber became entangled in between his legs, and he stumbled. Maka grabbed the tumbling tunnel-scrubber and snatched Letho from his fall in one deft movement. Even in his state of panic Letho couldn’t help but marvel at how quick, how graceful the Tarsi’s movements were.
“Thank you,” Letho said as Maka let him down.
Maka was staring at him, his eyes wide. Letho fidgeted with his helmet for a moment, checked the fitting on his oxygen hose.
“What?” Letho asked, shrugging.
Maka eyed him, then, to Letho’s surprise, spoke. “What?” Maka said, imitating Letho. The bear was able to reproduce the word with exacting precision, even as far as to mimic Letho’s own voice. Maka ducked his head a bit, his expression blank.
“That was good! Hey, I thought you couldn’t speak Eursan!” Letho said.
Maka repeated the tune that Letho had been humming in his rich, chorded baritone. Maka pointed a finger at Letho, his head cocked to the side.
“You want me to sing?” Letho asked. “Well, here goes nothing.”
Letho attempted Maka’s tune, and after a few soaring tones his reedy tenor collapsed in a confused garble. The Tarsi clapped Letho on the shoulder, grinning. Letho couldn’t help but grin back. It was the first time he had seen anything other than a scowl or blank stare on the Tarsi’s face.
Maka gestured to Letho to pay close attention, then sang several syllables in metered andante. When he was finished, he pointed at his own chest, then repeated the syllables once more.
“That’s your name? In Tarsi?” Letho asked.
Maka nodded. Letho attempted to repeat the Tarsi’s name, singing the top line of the Tarsi-speak’s chordal structure. When Letho finished he flinched in apprehension, fearing that instead of singing Maka’s name he may just as easily have encouraged Maka to have congress with his own mother. But with relief, he saw that the Tarsi was grinning from ear to ear. It was a strange but wondrous combination: Maka’s scarred face transfigured by child-like joy. Maka clapped Letho on the back again, this time sending him tumbling to the floor. He landed in a heap at Maka’s feet. Maka sang something in Tarsi, which Letho intuited was an apology.
Maka reached out with his right hand and helped Letho to his feet. They stood looking at one another for a moment, and then Letho extended his right hand. Maka seemed unsure what to do, so Letho shook his hand up and down a few times. Realization dawned on Maka’s face, and he extended his own hand. He hesitated for a moment longer, then enclosed Letho’s hand and a portion of his forearm in his own hand. Maka nodded, and then the two of them returned to their work.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
At the end of the workday, after they had emptied their canisters and were heading back to the Tarsi community, Bayorn met up with them. He and Maka split off from Letho, easing a few steps ahead. Letho listened in on their conversation, attempting to draw what little information he could from their foreign tongue, which wasn’t much. He
heard his own name mentioned at least twice, and the series of medium-paced syllables that he now recognized as Maka’s full Tarsi name. Then Maka was showing Bayorn the handshake that they had shared earlier. After a few more unintelligible exchanges, Bayorn went on his way without so much as glancing back at Letho, and Maka and Letho quietly made their way to the showers.
Letho was happy to finally get back to his room, freshly showered, the day’s work behind him. He deposited his envirosuit inside his locker and threw himself down on his mattress. Almost immediately there was a knock at his door, and Bayorn entered. The Eursan and the Tarsi looked at each other for a time, as if neither was sure what to say. Letho still didn’t know where he stood with Bayorn, so he decided to let the Tarsi do the talking.
Bayorn finally spoke. “Maka tells me that you can understand what he says in Tarsi.”
Letho paused, still unsure what to say.
Is this a test? he thought.
“Not exactly,” Letho began. “I recognize certain sounds that he makes, but it really doesn’t go much further than that.”
“But he said you spoke his name in Tarsi. Is this true?”
“It’s true,” Letho said. “Or at least I tried. Is this some kind of big deal? Is he pissed at me?”
“No, Letho. Quite the contrary. He is impressed with your tenacity. He still believes that your kind is a race of fools, but he sees strength in you that he thought Eursans incapable of.”
Letho smiled. The words of encouragement ran deep inside him and kicked off an explosion of endorphins. Pride. It was a feeling Letho had never really experience in the above.
“I thought Maka didn’t like me.”
Bayorn hesitated. “Let us just say he has no love for your race.”
“What did Eursans ever do to him? I mean, besides the whole slave-bear thing?”
“That is his story to tell. But it was a station inspector who gave him those scars.”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
After a month or so with the Tarsi, Letho stopped counting days altogether. He lost sense of time; Tarsi had no need to measure the hours as Eursans did. There were only the start and end klaxons, and then blissful sleep.
The existence of a never-ending sea of black scum to scrub from the air purification lines no longer bothered Letho either. He took pride in his work, and in the fact that his productivity increased with every passing day. Layers of soft fat had melted away in his sweaty envirosuit. The limp muscles that had lurked beneath his flab were now striated bands that rippled under his skin when he moved. His face had been re-formed, and he now bore the hard-cut look of a laborer. A stout, coarse beard the color of wet leather had sprung up, enhancing the line of his strong jaw.
The Tarsi had taken notice of the strange Eursan’s tenacity, and no longer regarded him with anger or distrust. They began to acknowledge him in passing, occasionally clapping him on the back, sometimes hard enough to send him sprawling a few steps. They would speak to him in their own tongue, and he would do his best to reply in broken but serviceable Tarsi. This always brought a smile to their wide, stubby snouts.
And Maka had loosened up considerably since they’d first started working together. In the beginning, Maka had merely taught him how to work the cleaning equipment; now he had taken it upon himself to educate Letho in the ways of the Tarsi. Every now and then Maka would hum a few words in Tarsi, then have Letho repeat them back to him—scolding him when he got them wrong, and applauding him when he was correct.
Letho was beginning to consider Maka a friend, and the connection that was forming between them meant a great deal to him. Maka had a gruff nature, but underneath the bristly façade he was a pleasant companion with whom to endure the day’s work. Maka had a great sense of humor and loved to laugh—usually at Letho’s expense. He also had a fondness for practical jokes—such as pinching Letho’s re-breather hose when he wasn’t looking. At first Letho was afraid to retaliate, but one day, when Maka was bent over cleaning the lower part of a tunnel wall, Letho attacked Maka’s large backside with his tunnel-scrubber. Maka hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day.
Letho no longer missed his life above. He had found himself in the depths of the Fulcrum stations, and for the first time in his life he sensed a purpose to his existence. He thought of Baran Gall sitting at his desk, completing the same meaningless tasks over and over for faceless masters. He still missed Deacon, and still liked to think that his friend was searching every crevice and service tunnel of the Fulcrum station for him, but he knew Deacon too well. He had the attention span of a rabid ferret.
He’s probably using the sob story of losing his best friend to pick up women, Letho thought.
When the day’s work was done, they headed back to dump their canisters, and then to the showers. The bath area was livelier than usual, the cacophony of multiple Tarsi symphonies filling the air. Letho noticed that some of the younger Tarsi were engaged in horseplay, slapping each other on the bottoms and chasing one another around. An older Tarsi scolded a group of them, ending the play session.
“What’s everyone so excited about?” Letho asked.
Maka made a cutting gesture across his neck, then gestured to his own mouth.
“All right, fine,” Letho muttered. He repeated the question in his best Tarsi.
“They are excited because tonight we have a great feast,” Maka replied in Tarsi.
“Cool.”
“You are invited, of course. There is someone who would like to meet you.”
“Wow, really? Who might that be?”
“Wait and see, Letho. Wait and see.”
What’s with these guys? Can’t anyone give me a straight answer? Letho thought.
Maka gave him a wink and a large grin, and the two of them went to have the day’s grime blasted away.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Zedock Wartimer watched Letho Ferron as he exited the shower station.
“So, Letho. Makin’ friends with the locals, huh?” he said to the screen.
When the report came in that a worker from the Red Sector had overwhelmed and eluded an entire squad of his best men, he had scoffed. Then he had seen the video footage of the young man. He saw Letho move with a quickness that seemed impossible, his arms moving so fast they blurred in the security tape. At first Zedock had assumed it was some sort of video artifact, a glitch in the system. But when he had the computer clean up the footage and zoom in a little closer, he saw with picture-perfect digital clarity that Letho was truly moving too fast for the camera to keep up.
In his youth, Zedock had been spooky fast; he could outdraw and outshoot anyone in his recruit class. He was a small man, but his wiry frame belied a hidden strength and agility that allowed him to get the drop on many a fellow recruit in hand-to-hand training. Yet this Letho character…
No one should be able to move that fast.
Zedock had to admit, he was quite impressed that the pudgy Red Sector worker had managed to survive for a month now among the Tarsi, doing the kind of work that would kill the average man. He just might be the one the Elder is looking for, he thought.
Could it be true? He personally didn’t take much stock in such things. A man should only believe in the things he can see right in front of his nose, he was fond of saying. He had lived three quarters of a century with strict adherence to this maxim, and then this Letho Ferron came along.
Thoughts of the Elder Tarsi and prophecies rang in his head as closed down his workstation. And that night when he collapsed onto his bed, he fell right into a deep sleep, dreaming of Tarsi warriors clashing against evil beings that blotted out the sun wherever they deigned to tread.
EIGHT - Shadow
Alastor Wyrre knelt on a circular metal platform in the direct center of his Master’s quarters. It was his pedestal, the place where he had knelt numerous times across the centuries to show his fealty. The pedestal was surrounded by concentric circles inlaid into the floor; some were gilded with fine-grained wood, others c
rafted from the alien metal that the ship was made of. Around the perimeter of the pedestal were runic markings that glowed in Alastor’s presence, though it was not any power that Alastor possessed that illuminated them so.
“Master, I would speak with you,” he whispered.
This mid-sized room had once been the medbay of the ship; now it was the Master’s chamber. Root-like channels of gnarled wood ran through the floor, dividing it into organic wedge-like shapes. The wooden streamlets terminated a few meters away from where Alastor knelt, underneath a pill-shaped medical capsule that levitated at a forty-five-degree angle from the floor. Hundreds of wires and tubes snaked out from the bottom of the capsule—the wires connecting to a bank of computers that whirred and clicked off to one side, and the tubes delivering some sort of reddish-brown paste from great canisters off to the other side.
“Please, my son. Come closer so that I might see you.”
Alastor stood and made his way over to the capsule. He placed his hand on the lacquered surface, and with a ping and hiss a viewing window opened. Inside were the gnarled remains of a forgotten god. The creature’s bony frame was enormous, but the skin was withered and thin like parchment. His snouted face was slack; his mouth open. But in his eyes burned ageless intelligence.
The broken creature seemed to be held in place by some sort of thick, vine-like material. It was hard to tell where the vines ended and the broken body of Alastor’s Master began. He had been in this state when Alastor had first stumbled upon the wreckage of his ship. Even now, Alastor didn’t know how long the Old One had lain in this state before their first meeting, before Alastor had placed the Master’s remains inside the life support capsule.
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