by Mindy Klasky
“You aren’t ready for another lover,” Zorar said. “I understand entirely.”
Zorar glanced at Yalnis’s bare stomach, at the one shy and three bold little faces, at the scar left from Zorargul’s murder.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Zorar said
Yalnis touched the scar, where Zorargul’s jagged remains pricked her skin from underneath.
“Maybe I should—”
“No.” Zorar spoke sharply.
Discouraged, Yalnis let the lacy panels slip back into place.
“It’s our memories Seyyan killed,” Zorar said. “Would you send out a daughter with only one parent’s experience?”
Zorar was kind; she refrained from saying that the one parent would be Yalnis, young and relatively inexperienced. Yalnis’s tears welled up again. She struggled to control them, but she failed. She fought the knowledge that Zorar was right. Zorar was mature and established, with several long and distant adventures to her credit. Her memories were an irreplaceable gift, to be conveyed to a daughter through Zorargul. The sperm packet alone could not convey those memories. “Let time pass,” Zorar said. “We might see each other again, in some other millennium.”
Yalnis scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “I’m so angry!” she cried. “How could Seyyan betray me like this?”
“How did you find her?” Zorar asked, as if to change the subject. “She’s not been heard of for…” She paused to think, to shrug. “Sixty or eighty millennia, at least. I thought she was lost.”
“Did you hope it?”
Zorar gave her a quizzical glance. “Don’t you remember?”
Yalnis looked away, ashamed. “I don’t have all Zorargul’s memories,” she said. “I savored them—anticipated them. I didn’t want to gobble them all up at once. It would be too greedy.”
“How old are you now?” Zorar asked gently, as if to change the subject.
“My ship is eleven millennia,” she replied. “In waking time, I’m twenty-five.”
“You young ones always have to find out everything for yourselves,” Zorar said with a sigh. “Didn’t you ask Zorargul, when you took up with Seyyan?”
Yalnis stared at her, deeply shocked. “Ask Zorargul about Seyyan?” Zorar might as well have suggested she make love in a cluster of ships with the dome transparent, everyone looking in. It had never occurred to Yalnis to tell the companions each others’ names, or even to wonder if they would understand her if she did. She had a right to some privacy, as did her other lovers.
“You young ones!” Zorar said with impatience. “What do you think memories are for? Are they just a toy for your entertainment?”
“I was trying to treat them respectfully!” Yalnis exclaimed.
Zorar snorted.
Yalnis wondered if she would ever be so confident, so well-established, that she could dispense with caring what others thought about her. She yearned for such audacity, such bravery.
“I asked about her, of course!” she exclaimed, trying to redeem herself. “Not the companions, but Shai and Kinli and Tasmin were all near enough to talk to. They all said, Oh, is she found? Or, She’s a legend, how lucky you are to meet her! Or, Give her my loving regard.”
“Tasmin has a daughter with her. She’d never hear anything against her. I suppose Seyyan never asked anything of Tasmin that she wasn’t willing to give. Kinli wasn’t even born last time anyone heard anything from Seyyan, and Shai…” She glanced down at her hands and slowly, gradually, unclenched her fists. “Shai fears her.”
“She could have warned me.”
“Seyyan terrifies her. Is she here?” She closed her eyes, a habitual movement that Yalnis did, too, when she wanted information from her ship’s senses.
“No,” Yalnis said, as Zorar said, “No, I see she’s not.”
“She said she would, but she changed her mind. It hurt my feelings when she disappeared without a word, and she never replied when I asked her what was wrong.”
“She changed her mind after you mentioned Seyyan.”
Yalnis thought back. “Yes.”
“Would you have believed her, if she’d warned you?”
Yalnis remembered Seyyan’s word and touch and beauty, the flush Yalnis felt just to see her, the excitement when she knew Seyyan looked at her. She shivered, for now all that had changed.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Oh, you’re right, I wouldn’t have believed her. I would have suspected jealousy.”
Zorar brushed away Yalnis’s tears.
“What did she do to you?” Yalnis whispered.
Zorar took a deep breath, and drew up the gauzy hem of her shirt.
She carried the same companions as when she and Yalnis first met: five, the same number Yalnis had accepted. Yalnis would have expected someone of Zorar’s age and status to take a few more. Five was the right number for a person of Yalnis’s age and minor prosperity.
“You noticed this scar,” Zorar said, tracing an erratic line of pale silver that skipped from her breastbone to her navel, nearly invisible against her translucently delicate skin. “And I shrugged away your question.”
“You said it happened when you walked on the surface of a planet,” Yalnis said. “You said a flesh-eating plant attacked you.”
“Yes, well, one did,” Zorar said, unabashed. “But it didn’t leave that scar.” She stroked the chin of her central little face. Just below her navel, the companion roused itself, blinking and gnashing its teeth. It neither stretched up aggressively nor retreated defensively. Yalnis had never seen its face; like the others, it had remained nearly concealed, only the top of its head showing, while Yalnis and Zorar made love. Yalnis had thought the companions admirably modest, but now she wondered if their reaction had been fear.
Zorar pressed her fingers beneath the companion’s chin, scratching it gently, revealing its neck.
The scar did not stop at Zorar’s navel. It continued, crossing the back of the companion’s neck and the side of its throat. “Seyyan claimed she behaved as she’d been taught. As she thought was proper, and right. She was horrified at my distress.”
She stroked the companion’s downy scalp. It closed its eyes.
Her voice hardened.
“I had to comfort her, she acted so distraught. I had to comfort her.”
“She accused me of teasing and deceiving her,” Yalnis said. “And she killed Zorargul.”
Under Zorar’s gentle hand, the scarred companion relaxed and slept, its teeth no longer bared.
“Perhaps she’s learned efficiency,” Zorar whispered, as if the companion might hear and understand her. “Or…mercy.”
“Mercy!” Yalnis exclaimed. “Cruelty and sarcasm, more likely.”
“She killed Zorargul,” Zorar said. “This one, mine, she left paralyzed. Impotent.”
Yalnis imagined: Zorargul, cut off from her, unable to communicate with either pleasure or memory, parasitic, its pride destroyed. She gazed at Zorar with astonishment and pity, and she flushed with embarrassment. She had felt piqued when Zorar created Zorargul with a secondary little face, instead of with her first companion. Now Yalnis knew why.
Yalnis laid her hand on Zorar’s. Her own fingers touched the downy fur of the damaged companion. Involuntarily, she shuddered. Zorar glanced away.
Could I have kept Zorargul? Yalnis wondered. No matter how much I loved Zorar…
She thought Zorar was the bravest person she had ever met.
Would it be right to say so? She wondered. Any more right than to ask the questions I know not to ask: How could you—? Why didn’t you—?
“What do you think, now?” Zorar said.
“I’m outraged!” Yalnis said.
“Outraged enough to tell?”
“I told you.”
“You confessed to me. You confessed the death of Zorargul, as if it were your fault. Do you believe Seyyan, that you deceived her? Are you outraged enough to accuse her, instead of yourself?”
Yalnis sat quite still, consid
ering. After a long while, she patted Zorar’s hand again, collected herself, and brushed her fingertips across Zorar’s companion’s hair with sympathy. She kissed Zorar quickly and returned to her own ship.
Preparations, messages of welcome to old acquaintances, greetings to new ones, occupied her. Zorar’s question always hovered in the back of her mind, and sometimes pushed itself forward to claim her attention: What do you think, now?
While she prepared, the ships moved closer, extruded connections, grew together. Yalnis’s ship became the center, till the colony obscured her wide vistas of space and clouds of stars and glowing dust. She felt her ship’s discomfort at being so constricted; she shared it. She felt her ship’s exhilaration at intense genetic exchange: those sensations, she avoided.
She continued to ignore Seyyan, but never rescinded her invitation. Yalnis’s ship allowed no direct connection to Seyyan’s glittering craft. Seyyan remained on the outskirts of the colony, forming her own connections with others. The ships floated in an intricately delicate dance of balance and reciprocity. As the people exchanged greetings, reminiscences, gifts, the ships exchanged information and new genetic code.
Most of their communications were cryptic. Oftentimes even the ships had no idea what the new information would do, but they collected and exchanged it promiscuously, played with it, rearranged it, tested it. The shimmery pattern of rainbow reflections spread from Seyyan’s craft’s skin to another, and another, and the pattern mutated from solid to stripes to spots.
Yalnis’s ship remained its customary reflective silver.
“The ships have chosen a new fashion,” Yalnis said.
“True,” her ship said. Then, “False.”
Yalnis frowned, confused, as her ship displayed a genetic sequence and its genealogy tag. Yalnis left all those matters to the ship, so she took a moment to understand that her ship rejected the pattern because it descended from Seyyan’s craft. Her ship led her farther into its concerns, showing how many new sequences it had considered, but rejected and stopped taking in when it encountered Seyyan’s tag.
“Thank you,” Yalnis said.
“True.”
That was a long conversation, between ship and human. She was glad it had ended without misunderstanding.
The ship did understand “Thank you,” Yalnis believed, and Yalnis did understand its response of appreciation.
Maybe Seyyan was right, Yalnis said to herself. Maybe I am naive. I feared direct assault, but never thought of a sneak attack on my ship.
She wondered if her encounter with Seyyan had changed the balance between the two ships, or if their estrangement had its own source. She wondered if she should try to exclude Seyyan’s craft from the colony. But that would be an extreme insult, and Seyyan had more friends than Yalnis, and many admirers. She was older, wealthier, more experienced and accomplished, more limber of voice and of body.
“I trust your judgment,” she said, remaining within the relative safety of simple declarative statements. She would leave decisions about Seyyan’s craft to her own ship.
“True.”
The shimmering new fashion continued to extend from Seyyan’s to other craft, each vying with the next to elaborate upon her pattern.
Seyyan’s popularity created a second center for the colony, decreasing the stability of the delicate rotation, but there was nothing to be done about it. It was ships’ business, not people’s.
Yalnis was ready. She made her last decisions, dressed in intricate lace, took a deep, shaky breath, and welcomed her guests.
Zorar arrived first, too well-established to concern herself with being fashionably late. Yalnis embraced her, grateful for her presence. Zorar kissed her gently and handed her a sealed glass ampoule.
“For your daughter’s vineyard,” she said. “I think the culture’s improved even over what I gave your mother, when she launched you and your ship.”
“Thank you,” Yalnis said, honored by the gift. She put it on the central table, in a place of distinction.
More guests arrived; an hour passed in a blur of greetings, reunions, introductions, gifts. People brought works of art, stories, and songs. They brought ship silk as refined as fog, seeds of newly-adapted plants, embryos of newly-discovered creatures, unique cultures of yeast and bacteria. Yalnis accepted them all with thanks and gratitude. Her daughter would be well and truly launched; her ship would be rich, and unique.
Her guests ate and drank, wished each other long life and adventures, congratulated voyagers on their safe return. They exchanged compliments and gossip, they flirted, they told tales, they even bragged: Kinli had, of course, been on another great adventure that made all others pale by comparison. Guests complimented Yalnis’s ship’s cooking, especially the savory rabbit, and the complexity and quality of her wine. Everyone wore their best ship silk, and most, like Yalnis, wore lace so their companions could remain decently modest while watching the party. A few guests wore opaque garments to enforce a complete modesty; Yalnis thought the choice a little cruel. The very youngest people, recently debuted from solitary girl to adult, revealed their virgin midriffs.
Yalnis found herself always aware of the new connections leading from other ships to her living space. The openings, glowing in the cool pastels of biological light, changed her living area from one of comfortable intimacy to one of open vulnerability.
Zorar handed her a glass of wine. Yalnis had based the vintage on the yeast Zorar gave her ship when it, and Yalnis, were born and launched.
Yalnis sipped it, glanced around, swallowed a whole mouthful. The effects spread through her. The companions squeaked with pleasure, leaning into her, absorbing the alcohol, yearning. She brushed her hand across the lace of her shirt. She had been neglecting the companions, since Zorargul’s murder. She drank more wine, and Zorar refilled their glasses.
Yalnis blocked out the rising level of conversation. She was unused to noise, and it tired her.
“What do you think?” she said.
Zorar raised one eyebrow. “That’s the question I want you to answer.”
“Oh,” said Yalnis. “Yes, Of course.” She blushed at her misstep. “But I meant, about the wine.”
“It’s excellent,” Zorar said, “as you well know. Your ship is of a line that seldom makes a recombinant error, and I can only approve of the changes. What about Seyyan? Did you ban her?”
“No. I want her here. So she knows she failed. Maybe she banned herself.”
“Maybe she’s trying to unnerve you. Or to wait till you drink too much.”
Yalnis drained her glass again.
“Maybe if I do, I’ll be ready for her.”
She was ignoring the noise, but she noticed the sudden silence.
“And then I—” Kinli said, and stopped.
Seyyan stood in the largest new entryway, silhouetted by golden bioluminescence, her face shadowed, dramatized, by the softer party light. Yalnis’s heart pounded; her face flushed.
“I thought she was so beautiful,” Yalnis whispered to Zorar, amazed, appalled. She thought she whispered: a few people nearby glanced toward her, most amused, but one at least pale with jealousy for her relationship with the renowned adventurer.
If you only knew, Yalnis thought. I wonder what you’d think then?
Yalnis mourned the loss of the joy she had felt when Seyyan chose her, but she mourned the loss of Zorargul much more.
Seyyan strode into the party, greeting allies, her gaze moving unchecked past the few who had rejected her craft’s fashionable offerings. Misty ship silk flowed around her legs and hips, shimmering with the pattern that newly decorated the flanks of so many craft. No one else had thought to apply it to clothing. She wore a shawl of the same fabric around her shoulders, over her breasts, across her companions.
But her hands were empty of gifts. Yalnis declined to notice, but others did, and whispered, shocked.
Then she flung back the end of the shawl, revealing herself from breastbone to pubis.
She had accepted more companions since she was with Yalnis. She bore so many Yalnis could not count them without staring, and she would not stare. Her gaze hesitated only long enough to see that the son-spot had erupted and healed over.
The other guests did stare.
How could any person support so many companions? And yet Seyyan displayed health and strength, an overwhelming physical wealth.
She turned to draw another guest from the shadows behind her. Ekarete stepped shyly into the attention of the party. Ekarete, one of the newly debuted adults, already wore new lace. Seyyan bent to kiss her, to slip her hand beneath the filmy panel of her shirt, so everyone would know that if she had neglected a launching gift for Yalnis’s daughter, she had given a more intimate one to Ekarete.
Seyyan wanted Yalnis to know what had happened to the new companion, that she had easily found someone to accept it.
Seyyan whispered to Ekarete, drew her hand down her cheek, and continued toward Yalnis and Zorar. Ekarete followed, several steps behind, shy and attentive, excited and intimidated by her first adult gathering.
Seyyan’s first companion, the assassin, protruded all the way to the base of his neck, eyes wide, teeth exposed and snapping sharply. Her other companions, responding to him, gnashed their teeth and blinked their eyes.
“What a pleasant little party,” Seyyan said. “I so admire people who aren’t caught up in the latest fashion.”
“Do have some wine,” Yalnis said. She meant to speak in a pleasant tone, but her voice came out flat, and hard.
Seyyan accepted a glass, and sipped, and nodded. “As good as I remember.”
Yalnis wished for the ancient days Seyyan came from, when poison could still wreak havoc with a person’s biochemistry, undetected till too late. She wished for a poisoned apple, a single bite, and no one ever to kiss Seyyan again.
Maybe I can have that last wish, she thought, and took action on her decision.
She let Zorargul’s wound break open. The stab of pain struck through her. Her companions shrieked, crying like terrified birds, reacting to her distress. Blood blossomed through the lace panel of her shirt. All around her, people gasped.
