by Mark Sumner
“Fix it,” said Denny. “Like you did the door.”
Yulia was silent for a moment, then she shook her head. “It's not like that,” she said. “This shuttle came in early because it has problems. Athena says it's scheduled to be serviced later today, and it can't work right now. There's no power. None at all.”
Kettle looked as if he'd been kicked. “I didn't know,” he said. He turned around until he was facing his mother. “I didn't know,” he repeated.
“Of...course...you didn't,” said Auntie Flash.
Denny went to the top of the ramp and looked around. As Kettle had said, there were walls all around the space where the shuttle was sitting. There were gates in the walls, but they were all closed. “What do we do now?”
“We leave,” said Auntie Talla. “It was a good try, but it didn't work. We leave.”
Cousin Haw started to pick up the heavy box, but Auntie Talla waved him off. “Leave it. Let’s just go.”
Denny clenched his fists in frustration. He knew Talla was right. If the shuttle didn't work, they weren't likely to fix it, and if they stayed too long, the dasiks would come. But it seemed wrong. Badly wrong. Getting away from the planet was their only chance.
Sirah came up beside him. “Denny? What are we…”
Before she could finish, an alarm began to sound.
31
For a time that seemed like both an instant and an eternity, Denny was in compete panic. He wanted to run for the door. He wanted to hide among the bags. He wanted to pound on the controls of the shuttle until the huge machine decided it wasn't broken after all. It wasn't until Sirah grabbed his arm that he came back to himself and began to think.
“Can we still go back into the port?” Sirah asked above the rising and falling sound of the alarm.
“I think... No.” Denny took a few steps down the ramp and quickly scanned the fences. On one side, the side behind the shuttle, he saw that there was one gate set back from the wall, surrounded by short walls on each side. “Kettle,” he called. “Where does that gate go?”
Kettle turned to look where Denny was pointing. “Outside.”
“Can you open it?
A quick shake of the head. “No.”
“Yulia.” Denny ran back to where the girl was standing against the wall, took her by the hand and led her to the bottom of the ramp. Her face was drawn, and she seemed to sway on her feet, but her right hand was still clutching firmly to the silver ball.
Before he could say more, Auntie Talla saw what he was doing. “Sirah,” she said. “Get over to that gate. Haw, go with her.” She looked at Denny. “Do you have her?”
Denny nodded. With Denny on one arm and Kettle on the other side, they guided Yulia over to the walled gate.
“Can Athena open it?” Denny asked.
There was a terrible moment in which Yulia gave no answer, then at last her face relaxed. “She can, but it's going to take a second. She's negotiating with the base maton.”
It took more than a second. It took thirty seconds. A minute. “Yulia...”
She held up her left hand. “Athena's working on it. Almost there.”
Then two things happened at once. The lock on the gate made a metallic tonk, and the gate began to slowly slide open. In the same moment, there was a tone behind them, a tone that Denny recognized as the door from the loading area being opened. He turned, trying to make sure that everyone was hidden from view behind the short walls that flanked the gate to the outside... and saw Auntie Flash.
Auntie Flash was walking–slowly, but with steadier steps than Denny had seen her make in months–straight toward the opening door. She was already more than a dozen steps away, halfway across the space from the shuttle to the spaceport. A pair of dasiks appeared. They were not merely touching the stunstiks, they were carrying them raised in long-fingered hands. The blue-gray metal of the stiks flashed in the air. The dasiks came toward her at a run, their long legs eating up the space between them in just a few strides.
There was a sound from Denny's left. Not a word, just a kind of “mumph.” He turned his head, and saw that Kettle was standing there. Or not standing. Kettle was actually leaning forward, his feet scuffling against the ground. Holding him was Cousin Haw. One of Haw's thick arms was clamped across Kettle's chest. Haw's other hand was pressed hard against Cousin Kettle's mouth. Above Haw's blunt fingers, Kettle's eyes were full of shock and desperation.
“You caught me,” said Auntie Flash loudly. Like her steps, her voice was surprisingly steady. “I just wanted to see a shuttle before I was consigned.”
The dasiks closed on her in a scramble of movement. They didn't press any buttons. They didn't say anything. The pair of stunstiks came down on Auntie Flash with such force that Denny could hear the solid thunk from across the tarmac. Could feel it in his stomach. The blows didn't so much knock Auntie Flash from her feet as drive her into the scorched ground. She crumpled straight down on herself, her legs folding beneath her. Her head and shoulders twisted around at an angle to the rest of her, as if, in the middle of falling, she had tried to turn back for a final glimpse of the others. Of Kettle.
A hand took Denny by the arm. “Let's go,” said Sirah in an urgent whisper.
Denny turned and saw that the door was open. Cousin Haw had already pulled a struggling Kettle through the opening. Yulia was through, though she looked as if she was about to fall. Auntie Talla was holding Yulia by one arm, guiding her. The door began to close. Denny followed Sirah through the gap before it could disappear. He turned his head at the last moment.
Out on the tarmac, the dasiks were carrying Auntie Flash away.
32
As soon as Cousin Haw put him down, Kettle started running. It took both Denny and Sirah to tackle Kettle long enough for Haw to grab him again.
“I have to get in there,” said Kettle. “I can talk to them. They know me.”
“They know you,” said Auntie Talla. “And if you go back in there, you won't come out. They have to know that you're the one who let your mother in. They're probably looking for you right now.”
Kettle's face fell in on itself in a way that reminded Denny of the way Auntie Flash had fallen in front of the dasiks. With Haw's hand still on his shoulder, Kettle walked with the rest of them down to the ground transport.
Denny wished that there was some other way to get away from the spaceport. They could walk—it was a long trip back to the quarter, though he'd done it several times—but seven humans...no, six. Now they were six. Six humans walking together down any street in Jukal Plex would attract a lot of attention. A lot of anger from cithians. But transport pods seemed a ridiculous way to make an escape. To go only a hundred steps away from the front of the building they'd just left, then queue up politely, waiting for the pods to arrive. It was like part of an awful joke. If the dasiks realized that Auntie Flash wasn't alone–and they had to, had to be looking for Cousin Kettle at least–then all they had to do was step outside to find them.
Meanwhile, Kettle was still arguing that he needed to go back in, while both Auntie Talla and Sirah tried to convince him that the dasiks would bring his mother back to the quarter. Denny didn't think anyone else had seen the way the dasiks struck Auntie Flash. He wasn't sure that they were going to take her anywhere at all.
A ground transport appeared in the distance and started down the last sweeping curve to the port. Every second of its approach increased the tension in Denny's mind. Not only did he expect the dasiks to come charging toward them out of the port, he was suddenly convinced that the transport was going to arrive filled with cithians. He could already see them waving their forelimbs. Hear the rapid-fire trill of clangers signaling anger.
The transport pulled up to the stop, the doors of the two pods opened. Empty. A moment later everyone was aboard, Cousin Haw still dragging a struggling Kettle, and the transport was gliding smoothly away, back toward the heart of the plex. Without all the bags of supplies they had carried out to the port–and
of course, without Auntie Flash–they all fit into a single pod. There was a strange silence in the pod. Auntie Talla spoke softly to Kettle, who said nothing in reply. Denny was relieved to see that Yulia had finally released her hold on the maton, but the effect of using the device again had left her looking ashen, like she had been sick for a week.
Denny pressed his face up against the clear side of the pod and watched the plex slide past. He had made this trip many times, but this was probably the last. Everything was the last. He'd made his last trip to the Porium. He'd eaten his last Restaurant. Made his last trip to the port. He'd seen Loma for the last time. Seen Poppa Jam for the last time. And maybe seen Auntie Flash for the last time.
He stared out across Jukal Plex, with its circles of supply domes, sleeping stadiums, and work blocks. On the far side of the plex, the tall white spike of the Cataclysm cast twin shadows across the nearest buildings. The low blue sun spread its shadows so far that for a moment, the train passed through that near darkness. Maybe this would also be the last time Denny saw the plex. Or anything.
The ground transport reached the stop nearest the human quarter and they all filed off. Now even Kettle seemed quiet. There was no longer a need for Haw to hold onto him, but Kettle walked along with his shoulders hunched and an expression on his face that seemed to be half sorrow, half rage. Denny couldn't blame him. He stared down at the worn toes of his shoes. They'd had just one chance to get away, and instead they had lost one of their own. Or maybe there had never been a chance at all.
Denny suddenly bumped into someone. He looked up and saw Sirah looking away from him, down the street. “What's wrong?” he asked. It seemed like a stupid question. Everything was wrong.
“Look,” replied Sirah. She raised her head, pointing with her chin past the old gate markers into the quarter. Between the compartment buildings and the low buildings of the stores, a dozen cithians were in motion. There were dasiks, too. These dasiks weren't carrying stunstiks. They were holding... something else. None of the cithians or dasiks in the quarter seemed to have spotted the group of humans standing at the gates, but that was surely a matter of seconds.
“Over here,” Denny said. “Hurry.”
He led them through the broken side door into one of the buildings just on the other side of the gate. It was the same building where Denny had put on the moltling costume. That had been only four days before, though it seemed like years. The chemical smell in the building seemed to be stronger than Denny remembered it. When everyone was inside, he closed the door.
“What are they doing here?” asked Sirah. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Is it because we were at the spaceport? Do they know we were all there?”
“Maybe,” said Auntie Talla, also speaking softly, though the cithians were a hundred steps away. “Or maybe they are here because it's their day to be here. Maybe this is the day we are all to be consigned.”
Whatever the reason, no one seemed anxious to try and talk with the cithians. They milled around the front room of the building, past the old benches and tables. There was only a single small window in the building that faced back into the quarter. Haw and Kettle stood beside it, staring back down the cracked pavement of the street.
“I don't see–” started Kettle. “No. There's a dasik. Two more. They're carrying something.” He watched a few seconds more, then turned away and slumped against the wall.
“What?” asked Sirah. “What is it?”
Kettle looked down at the floor. “Poppa Gow's chair.”
After that, Cousin Haw kept up the watch, but the rest of them spread out around the room. Yulia, who had said little since leaving the port, rested on one of the benches with her back against the wall. As far as Denny could tell, she was asleep. Sirah sat down beside her, folding her arms on a table and resting her head. The heavy braid of her hair had pulled loose from her head-cloth, and it brushed a path through thick dust. Denny found that, tired as he was, he could not sit still. He paced around the room, his hands opening and closing. There had to be something. There had to be something.
Auntie Talla simply stood in the center of the room, stiffly upright, with her arms folded across her chest. Her head turned slightly to follow Denny. “What now?”
“I don't know.” Denny stopped in his tracks and looked at her. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For believing me. For listening to me. For fixing such good things to eat at Restaurant and never making me pay more than I had.”
A quick bark of laughter escaped Auntie Talla. “That seems like a small thing to think about now.”
“Believe me,” said Denny. “It isn't. It never was to me.”
The hard expression on Auntie Talla's face faltered. She turned away from him and put her hands to her face. Her back shook softly.
Denny wandered out of the big room into the long room with the stains on the wall. There were no windows here. Just the low benches against one wall and the row of pipes and nozzles. He was about to walk back to the other room when he saw something on the floor. At first he thought it was just a rag, maybe something left over from assembling his moltling disguise. But when he stepped closer, he saw a stripe of color, a band of yellow barely visible in the faint skimsday light that filtered in from the other room.
He reached down to pick it up and found that the cloth was actually wrapped around something else, something solid and dense. Denny carefully unfolded the layers and found that what was inside was a book. Not a picture book, but a word book. A book like the one that Loma had given him.
It was a slim volume, with only a single word for a title. It was one of those words that Denny didn't know, but he knew the book. He knew it was one of Loma’s. She had been here sometime in the last few days.
Denny opened the cover of the book. He had only read one book before, and he hadn't even really read that one. Just picked at it, reading the words he could read, trying to make some sense of the story from what little he could make out. This book was much harder in a way. There seemed to be so many words that he didn't know. From what he could tell, it was about some people, many people, who were being held prisoner by some other people. But the book was full of names for places and for things and for people that didn't mean anything to Denny. In the middle of one page, a line had been drawn under a single sentence. Denny guessed it was Loma who had drawn the line. Or maybe someone who had owned the book before Loma. Even in this one line, he couldn't make out all the words. But he could make out enough.
To forget the dead would be...killing them a second time.
33
He walked back into the other room and went straight to Yulia. He thought she was asleep, but as Denny got closer, her eyes opened.
“I want to talk to her,” he said.
Yulia didn't ask who Denny meant. She only tugged open the pocket of her big jacket and stretched it out toward Denny. Inside, he could see the glimmer of metal.
Sirah raised her head from the table. “No. Denny, don't.”
Denny reached into the pocket and took the maton firmly in hand. The pain ripped through him. It seemed worse than before, but then it was hard to remember pain. It was just...pain.
Athena was there. Only she was no longer the stone woman Denny had met in the storage dome. She was one of them. Athena had Yulia's weight of heavy dark curls. She had bare arms that looked both slender and strong, like Sirah's. She had deep brown eyes that Denny didn't recognize, but which she had surely stolen from some other human. Even her clothes looked like theirs–raggedy, old, and bleached down to just the ghost of colors.
Denny wasn't fooled. No matter what she looked like, Athena wasn't really a human. She was a thing. A machine. “Tell me why,” he said to her.
Athena cocked her head to the side. That faint smile was on her lips again. “Why?”
“Tell me why they hate us so much.” He shook his fist toward the small window at the far end of the room. “Tell me why they kill us.”
/> Athena nodded. “I have pertinent information regarding that question,” she said. A light appeared in the middle of the room.
Auntie Talla whipped around. “What's that?”
Sirah scrambled to her feet as the light began to form shapes. “Denny? Are you doing that?”
“She's doing it,” he said. He turned to Athena. “I thought you could only show things to the person holding the maton?”
“I am only visible to the user in interface,” she said. “However, other materials are less limited.”
The light in the middle of the room resolved into images. A voice began to speak.
34
Tranquility
The planet Rask lies in a stable orbit around the gravitation center of the binary star system, Andersen-Ikirii 204. Rask is nearly tidally locked at a position near the white dwarf, though the actual position is offset slightly toward the gravitational center of the system. The result is that one side of the planet enjoys fairly equitable conditions, with the white dwarf star visible continuously for most of the central land mass. The opposite side of the planet is cold, and has very little plant life.
The species commonly referred to as cithian evolved 1.6 million years ago on the second largest of Rask's continents. Over the next million years, they reached all areas of the planet, survived a period of usually high stellar output, and successfully established communities on the colder, less habitable side of the planet as well as establishing large settlements on every part of the star-facing side of the planet.
A strongly structured civilization was established. Large scale architecture developed. A series of wars were fought, which led a gradual consolidation of the planetary government. Significant advancements were made in mathematics. Engineering. Logistics. For 348,000 years, cithians built on this foundation. They learned to predict the weather despite variations in their planet's path through the binary star system. They learned to make wheels. They learned to make both bronze and iron. They developed, and discarded, several philosophies about the nature of existence. They built an elaborate social system, a language rich in both syntax and symbol, and art forms that were both subtle and meaningful.
