Every City Planet had a substrata, but there was only one where Em had grown up. More often than not, Nia tried not to think of her old crew, but there was one memory that was necessary to dredge up despite the pain: her former engineer’s stories of growing up on Galena. The violence he’d known. And his connection to a woman who had a finger on the pulse of the black market.
Morissa. All Nia remembered was the first name, but after a few hours of cold calls to the countless Morissas who lived in the substrata, she finally found one who recognized Em’s name—and more important, the name of Em’s cat.
Speaking Nanda’s name won Nia the woman’s trust, and directions to her belowground apartment complex; to the door at the end of a long hall, lit by harsh fluorescents, and walls graffitied in languages unknown to Nia, for down here, even Umbai could not standardize everything. When Nia knocked, she was greeted by the looming silhouette of a man with a half-burned face, the scars crinkling when he smiled and asked if she would please wipe her shoes on the mat first before entering, as he had only just cleaned. It was a warm home. The kind found in a fairy tale, rich with pillows and curtains, and a table made of real wood, adorned with teacups and a steaming kettle, where an old woman with a severe underbite welcomed her with a surprising hug. Fragile arms that wrapped around Nia’s body, held her close, with a whisper in her ear: “I loved him. And I will do all I can to help his friends. But I need to know now, before I give you what you came for: Are you a slaver?”
“No.”
She parted from Nia, hands still on her. “This is the truth?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “It’s not so difficult to tell these things,” she said. “But still. I had to ask.” She nodded at the man with the half-burned face, who then left the room and returned with a package wrapped in crinkled foil. “One license scrambler,” she said with a touch of pride. “Should confuse the judiciary enough to let you go unnoticed. But space out its usage. Keep the time between jump requests random. Don’t let Umbai pick up a pattern, or before you know it, they will swarm you.”
Nia accepted the package. “How much?” she asked.
But Morissa held up her hand. “Not many captains remember the name of their engineer’s old pet.” She smiled. “A good memory should be rewarded.”
When Nia returned to the hostel, Sartoris was in bed, asleep, the note she had written him clutched in his hand, the paper crinkled so that the only words she could make out were Don’t worry. She touched his shoulder, then placed the scrambler in the bag. And then, on the hostel’s terminal, she made the call to procure a ship—to Toral Anders, former captain of the commercial transport vessel Solus, now head of Solus Bussers Incorp. He blinked in surprise when he saw her face through the vid. “I can’t believe you’re alive,” he exclaimed. “Baruk was certain you’d passed in the fringe. Where the hell did you go?”
“It was a job. A long job.” She went into no further detail. She looked at her old colleague. Toral was noticeably older, but not so much so, a decade maybe. He had only stopped using the Pocket a few years ago. There were bags under his eyes that betrayed how exhausted he was, but despite that, he was still handsome. “It’s good to see you,” she said.
“You too, Imani.” There was a lost quality to his eyes, like he was staring at a ghost, or a shimmer. It was clear by the tentative smile on his lips that he still remembered the night they had spent together. “What can I help you with?”
“Acclimation,” she said. “I left the fold a few weeks ago, only to discover that things have changed while I was under.”
“Isn’t that always the way. But I bet you weren’t expecting the upending of interstellar travel.”
“That’s the thing. Now that folds are obsolete, I’m looking to reorient my business. I heard the busser movement is strong. Was hoping with your position you had leads on a cheap vessel for me. Something I could start on.”
He nodded. “I’ll send over a list. Should warn you though, bussing isn’t an easy market. It’s crowded with hopefuls, most of them failing by month’s end, and with the new taxes, it’ll be a while before you make it in the black. Umbai’s about to open up some Resource Worlds for tourism. Proud to say that Solus Bussers Incorp won the bid on one of those routes.” He smiled. “I can make an opening for you, if you want to work with us.”
If Nia had no plans of her own, plans that needed to stay secret, she would’ve considered his offer. “Appreciated. Truly. But I’m going to try on my own for now. I’ll come running if it’s as bad as you say.”
“I hope you do,” he said.
She could tell he meant it.
The list he sent her was comprehensive. The names of a few hundred prospective sellers on Galena alone; the histories of the ships, and the offers made and pending. While Sartoris snored on the other bed, she flipped through the list until she found a busser in her price range and to her liking. She called, and then met the seller in the Port Authority. He was a younger man with the drowning look of someone who’d never had a break in his life. He showed her to his busser; a small thing, as squat as a brick, at home in the less-guarded docks of Galena. It was a twenty-seater, and smelled of a sour incense. The back room was crowded with bags of trash, which she threw to the side while the younger man threw out apologies and complained about his lazy fool of a brother, but she paid him little attention. She didn’t care about his brother or the trash or the smell. In the engine room she placed her hand on the black box. The Fast Travel Chip. After a test jump, she traded the iotas for his key and sig-card, and he thanked her profusely before running down the dock, as far and as fast as possible, as if afraid she’d reconsider, and renege on the one fair deal he’d known. He did not know that for Nia, there was no reconsidering. That there was only forward.
She tossed the trash out of the busser’s entrance.
In the morning, she showed Sartoris inside their new ship. Strapped him to the copilot’s chair, and, with her hands in the cat’s cradle, guided the ship from port, away from the City Planet. The hull rattled and there was a whisper-sound of air that leaked through the cabin doors, but she was used to old ships. Preferred their marks of history. She smiled once they were outside of orbit and floated in space, far away from all things. She peeled the scrambler from its wrapping, opened the hatch in the floor of the cockpit, and set to the wire work. “What is that?” Sartoris asked from above her, but before she could answer, he shut his eyes, said, “No. Do not tell me. I can remember.”
Half her body inside the hole in the floor, she waited.
His mouth hesitated into a smile. “License scrambler,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said with pride.
“So they cannot find us.”
“If the theory holds,” she grunted, snapping on the last node. She pushed herself back out and ignored the cut on her arm as she withdrew the flute. “Do you remember this?” she asked him.
After a beat, his smile widened.
“It’s his,” he said.
She winked as she brought the mouthpiece to her lips, and played—
* * *
—
—and like a finger plucking a web, a pulse of music ran down the veins of Pocket Space, a spark through the swirling currents, into the border between, to that dark shore hosted by memory, where a second fire bloomed down the coast, a fire that, though far away, he could see, and hear, even from where he sat: the whisper-voice in its crackle, that voice that hugged him from behind, and the Kind One observed him through their dark eye slits as he sprinted to this second fire, nearly tripping over one of the logs that surrounded it, on his knees before it, shouting as he did before and the busser jumped and City Planet Galena was gone.
They were in deep space now.
There were only stars outside the busser’s viewport.
Nia lowered the flute from her mouth,
her hands trembling, unable to bottle the vicious swell of emotion, the dared hope now certain, for finally she knew that he was listening.
* * *
—
The jump hadn’t taken them far; a single-planet system that neighbored Galena. In orbit of the blue Jovian, Nia paced up and down the busser’s aisle, her fingers wrestling with one another, nerves electric, while Sartoris followed her circuit from his perch on one of the passenger seats and listened to her theories. “The way I see it, there are two possibilities,” she said. “One. He’s alive. Somewhere. And he heard the song, however that’s possible, and he reacted. The jump was his way of reaching out. Or.” She slowed her walk. Fingers stilled. “He’s dead. That what happened with the flute was some…reaction to whatever part of him was left behind in the system, and all we did was dance with a shadow.” She stopped. “What do you think?”
“Please give me a moment,” he said with his hands on his temples, as if rubbing out an ache. “Apologies. This is all a bit much for me. Thinking is somewhat trying. Where are we?”
“Sledge.” She sat down beside him. “It’s one system from Galena.”
“Hardly enough to establish a pattern, is it? Perhaps you should play the flute again, and see where it takes us next.”
“Not yet. Morissa warned me to be careful of timing. We should wait a few days before we jump again.”
“Terrific. Plenty of time to draft up a plan of action. Let me get something to write with.” He fumbled around in his bag for his notebook. But when he pulled the notebook out, he furrowed his brow, returned it, and rummaged some more. He chuckled. “It’s around here somewhere.”
“You’re looking for your notebook,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he muttered. He pulled it out, along with his pen. Opened up a fresh page and began writing Our Plan in slow, trembled letters.
“Maybe I should write,” she said.
He ignored her. Step one. Play flute.
Drops splattered on the page as he wrote.
Tears.
“Sartoris.”
“I need to learn again,” he said, writing through the blurred ink. His wet cheeks. “I need to get better.”
“Okay,” she said.
“So. We have our first step.” He cleared his throat, his pen ready. “Now, what is our second?”
For the duration of their three days in orbit of the Jovian swirl, they discussed the plan; what they knew, and what they still needed to learn. The busser was without bedrooms, so at night they slept in the rows of seats, with Sartoris near the front so that he could access the bathroom, and Nia in the back, near the engine, where she was closest to the FT Chip. They knew the chip was responding to the flute song, and they knew the chip itself was in communication with an Umbai capsule that lay somewhere in the Pocket—this was known rumor, but what time-stalled eddy the capsule swirled in no one knew. The information was useless to Nia regardless. She was not a soldier. She couldn’t storm a company ship even if it was in real space, and she was unwilling to risk the fold, not even for a day, not one more second of time. All she had was memory—their last two weeks together on the Debby, when he told her of his power—that when he was lost, it was her song that guided him home. That was the plan. Guide him home.
“And if he never returns?” Sartoris asked, at night. “If possibility two is correct, and he is no longer with us…what will you do then?”
“Then I will keep playing,” she said. “Until I come to him.”
They spoke through the night, while in the place below ancient instinct, the young man sat on the beach and watched the two fires, both of which were occupied by his shadow selves, shouting silently into the flame. The sight of the fires comforted him—enough even to distract from the nausea he felt, his belly full of knives. The throb in his head like the gentle nuzzling of a hammer. “More ships fly on your blood each day,” the Kind One, who stood beside him, said. “They are draining you. Soon there will be nothing left but a husk.”
“A husk,” he whispered.
He was tired.
“Your death is certain. Nothing will change that. You only prolong the pain with your stubbornness. Unless you can break the sky, what use is there in remaining?”
A third fire bloomed down the shore.
The young man understood.
“Then I will break the sky,” he said.
* * *
—
Umbai made the obligatory gesture of forming a small task force to keep tabs on the situation, but they knew the task force would in all likelihood emerge empty-handed. The ID that popped up on the judiciary was scrambled, untraceable. One in thousands. An itch to be slapped at but not fussed over, for as ever, they had more pressing concerns.
They were in the process of creating the New Tourism industry. The people demanded new places to go. And so the Resource Worlds once isolated to protect the harvested commodities were opened up for public consumption.
But first, preparations had to be made.
On Umbai-V, in the house at the top of the hill, the governor’s son stood behind his bedroom door, listening in on his father’s conference with the offworlders in the main room. He strained to understand the words, the sharp yet controlled inflection of his father’s voice. The boy was proud of his father. Everyone knew him as a very brave man. But that day, with the unexpected arrival of the offworlders, he was different. Like a cornered animal. And as the boy peeked around the door, he saw his father, slumped in his chair, his face pressed into his hands as he asked the five strangely dressed others if there was no other choice in the matter.
“The contract was signed well before your time,” one of the women said in her doubled voice while small jewels floated around her head like stars; the boy tamped down a powerful need to snatch one of the jewels and toss it back into the sky where it belonged. He kept out of sight. “As for your other choices, there is but one alternative. A long and involved process, one that you or”—she glanced toward the boy’s room and he hid behind the door—“the others would not likely see the end of. Do you understand what I am saying?” The boy pressed his back against the wall. He did not hear his father say yes, but he supposed he nodded, for then the woman said, “Good. Here is what is going to happen.”
It happened like she said it would. The following week, when the ships returned, he asked his mother what they were building in the fields beyond the village. She told him with some wariness in her voice that they would be having many visitors, and that large house was where they would arrive. She held him tighter than she had ever held him before and whispered that it was called a Port.
There was agreement among the adults that the Port was a bad omen, though there were those who never cared for working the fields or milling endless containers of dhuba, and saw in this new construction a chance for a better life. These differing opinions filtered down to the children, who parroted the arguments of their parents and guardians among themselves in the yellow fields, shouting at one another with the ferociousness of those uncertain what they were fighting about, while behind them, the great machines installed the last of the landing pads. The governor’s son, like his father, remained quiet. After the Port was finished, and with it the tall building called a Hotel, which blocked the eastern view of the river delta with its glass body, the first of the visitors came. They came on strange ships, wearing strange clothes, with guards that wore outfits a nauseating yellow. He stayed glued to his father’s hand as these visitors approached the village, until his father shook him off and smiled for the first time since he spoke to the representatives, and welcomed them, the offworlders.
The governor’s son was young enough that he would one day forget the strangeness of these new quantities. In time he would no longer remember the unease as the tourists walked the roads of their village, looking at everything, his home, as if in wond
er at how anyone could live like this. Nor would he remember his anger when one of them was offered a bowl of unsweetened, unworked dhuba, and after thumbing a taste, spat it on the ground, making a sour face as his friends laughed at him; or the embarrassed joy when one of them crouched in front of him and asked him with a kind smile what his name was. One day, his memory of these first visitors would evaporate, and he would believe that they had always been there; that of course they would march through the stalks, disturbing the soil, to ask one of the startled farmers if they could try a swing of her machete. That was what they did.
Life adjusted around these people, with new buildings erected to accommodate their growing numbers. The representatives suggested that the people of the Fifth Village learn Station Standard. Some of the visitors stayed and taught the children. By the time he was eight, the governor’s son had basic fluency, which made his father and mother proud, or so he at first thought. He never understood why they would forbid him from speaking in Station Standard when they sat down to eat. They never told him the reason for this rule, but there were times when he thought he got it—when he saw his father look at him as if he were a stranger.
The boy did as he was told. He kept the new language to himself. And he absorbed the new teachings, unaware that his life was beginning to split in two, right down the sternum. There was little else for him to do but adapt.
Change was coming regardless.
* * *
—
Change approached on the wings of music. Nia played her flute, and he chased the fires. The third flute-jump brought them to another neighboring system. The same with the fourth. And the fifth. Sartoris wrote his observations. There is no—“What’s the word for when two things are related?” he asked her. “Correlation,” she told him—correlation between the song Nia plays & our destination. The same notes bring our busser to different stations or no station at all. The dead spot between stars. Our end points are random. We skip on reflex. Her note is the hammer on the knee. The jump is the leg twitch.
The Vanished Birds Page 36
