A Passage of Stars Read online

  “And I not knowing a single person in this sector.”

  “Well, I’m not accusing you. But there isn’t a chance in high weather that mother will let me out before I’m thirty, not now, not without a bond or a sponsorship. Without either of those, I’ve got no resources to draw on. None, even though Ransome House is one of the richest on Unruli.” She paused, thinking over the inequities of this system. “And I won’t bond.”

  The monotone hum of the circulation vents hung in the air. “Your father,” Heredes began, “once told me that you received the highest score on your computer programming exams ever recorded in this system. The University might have let you in without the pregnancy requirement.”

  “Damn that,” said Lily. “I’m sorry.” She turned. “It was a mistake. I didn’t really get that score.”

  He stood, the loose, ankle-length pants and cloth-belted tunic rustling as they unfolded. Under the cloth his posture and his way of moving revealed complete self-possession. “You would have received it at this University.” He went to the door. “Come with me.”

  She had never been in his study before. He coded in to open its door, and a light winked on as the panel hissed aside. The room seemed alien, tinged with an organic scent, dominated by a huge desk made of a material unknown to her, grained, dark as Heredes’s skin. But the chair was built for a human frame, the artifacts meant for human, not alien, hands. On one wall a picture protruded from the wall: slung-bellied cars with sails, sitting on a textureless surface that resembled oil, but was blue. A curtain, patterned in a weave so coarse that she could identify the colors of individual threads, screened the opening to a farther room. She stared until, aware of her staring, she jerked her attention back to Heredes.

  “You know well enough, Lilyaka,” he said in the tone of voice he reserved for use of her full name, “that you are my best pupil. What you don’t know is that you are the best pupil I have ever had.” His tone was grave, almost alarmingly so. “I should give you what opportunity I can before it is, perhaps, too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  He walked behind the desk, fussed there a moment, and lifted out a tangle of light chain. “I do know someone, but it depends on how far you are willing to go.”

  “Since I can remember I’ve wanted to get as far from here as I can.”

  A pause. He stared, for a moment, at the picture. “As far away as you can might be farther than you think. Would Central be far enough?”

  “Central!”

  He smiled. “I know a woman there. She is my—ah—sister. She teaches, and on Central her Academy would be much larger than mine. Give her this, and she will apprentice you.” He handed her a necklace, a burnished medallion of five interlinked circles pierced by a spear.

  In this room, appointed so strangely, the odd symbol she now held in her hand reminded her forcibly that no one knew where Heredes had come from. He had simply arrived fifteen years ago and opened his Academy. There had, perhaps, been a handful of incidents: a woman who had flown in in a state of terror and shock and yet left ten cycles later in excellent spirits; the heavily robed stranger who came in furtively but was never seen to leave. But memory fades when times remain quiet, and Heredes lived very unobtrusively.

  Until Hiro’s bounty hunters. Was that what Heredes had meant by “too late”? Here was a man who recognized the Melep song, a song he could not possibly know, because it existed solely in her little robot, a creature removed from her time and her world. What if Hiro were right?

  Lily put on the necklace; it slipped like a cool circle of hope under her shirt, snaking down her skin. She looked up at Heredes. “What do I have to do?” she asked.

  “Trust me,” he said. “She’ll refuse to take you, at first, but she will take you. You need only persist. Her name is Wingtuck Honor Jones.”

  “Jones? That’s a strange name.”

  “In those days, we all got rather strange names.” He nodded toward the door, and they left the study and its extraordinary curios behind. “Ask the Sar if he’ll agree to let you go to Central.”

  “And if he won’t?”

  “Ask him first.”

  “I’ll ask him now.” Her eagerness made him smile. For an instant she stood, as if unsure what action to take next, then lowered her hands, palm to thigh, and bowed to him.

  In the anteroom she changed with remarkable speed, almost throwing her Academy clothes on a bench, forcing herself to fold them neatly and stow them in her locker. The lift eased upward, annoyingly slow. But she could savor it—Central! Administrative center for the far-flung systems of Reft space—navigable space. Center of everything.

  Storm greeted her at the lock, but the trudge across the twenty meters of flat felt exhilarating. A goal, like the first line of heights, seemed reachable, achievable. A third of the way up the slope, she paused in the lee of a cliff of striated rock to look down at the swell of the Academy. Of course Heredes had found something for her. He would never fail her.

  Movement to her right. A flash of dull light, of bright blue, and a ship, lit fore and aft, bolted into view. The storm tore at it. Its bow swung up crazily, flung down, yet still the vessel moved along meters above the ground.

  An aircar. No one had aircars. Of course they were possible, theoretically; her tech siblings speculated sometimes—

  The ship rocked to a halt, hovering tenuously above the telltale rise of the Academy. An appendage snaked down from the hull and touched ground. The ship sank until it hung scarcely half a meter off the windswept flat. An opening appeared in one side, and three forms emerged, stepping down, the wind whipping their short tunics and shoulder-caped cloaks around their thin bodies. Lily knew with the immediacy of instinct that they were aliens.

  They went swiftly to the lock and disappeared into the lift. A fourth emerged, stumbling slightly as it touched the ground. It turned, and the wind whipped back its cloak and hood.

  So close to human, but excruciatingly thin; delicate, she might have called it, but it remained unbowed in the strength of the wind.

  For long moments, the solitary figure remained motionless below. The lift opened.

  Four figures emerged, but one was limp, carried by two of the aliens. Heredes. Completely in their power, unconscious—not dead, not that—as if he had been as helpless as an infant against them. The fourth alien clambered up into the ship.

  Lily, breaking out of shock, impelled herself forward, sliding and scrambling down the slope. But the aliens were faster; oblivious to her presence, they loaded Heredes like an unwieldy sack of food into their ship. Before she reached the plateau, the last one pulled himself up and the hatch shut behind a final billow of cloak.

  Lily stared, as helpless as Heredes, as the alien ship rose into the hard wind, turned and, buffeted constantly, flew away in the direction of Apron Port.

  2 In Ransome House

  CLOUDS BOILED UP TOWARD the heavens, colored violet near the ground but changing in a dizzying shift up the spectrum until, at heights she could barely make out, they appeared red. It mirrored her, this whirlwind of violence; like the clouds, torn upward, she felt powerless against the forces that had taken Heredes. Without him, there would be no classes, no long discussions about interpretation and tactics, no Academy: the entire focus of her last ten years, gone. She had to find him.

  She pulled herself along a ledge, wind pushing her toward the edge, and at last found the escarpment that led to the final stretch of ground before Ransome House. A flash of white startled her. A thin, interwoven lace of white filaments drifted into view; a gust flung it forward. She slipped, staring, and threw out her hands to catch herself. Jagged rock cut into her hand, but for a moment she forgot even Heredes as Unruli’s native life swept past her, as intangible as the wraith it was named for. Dream, the settlers had called it: Boo, the spirit, the ghost of loved ones lost in storm—like Heredes.

  Three meters from her an updraft caught it and it disappeared into an eddy of violet cloud. The rock
slipped beneath her. She scrambled for an outcropping and clung to it as the shale around her spilled down, avalanching, drowning the wind in its roar. She held tight as her footing began to go and clutched higher, until the spill slowed, stopped, and only the echo remained. It shuddered around her as she picked her way up to the top of the defile. The House beacon shone before her.

  At the lock, she had to encode high risk clearances in order to cut through the security shutdown on the lift. Her glove, ripped clean from her wrist to the base of her fingers, dangled open, revealing a ragged cut on her hand. Slow drops of red formed and fell, shattering into invisible fragments as the wind caught them. The hum of the lift rising to the surface lay like an ominous undertone to the clatter of the furiously spinning wind generators. The light on the panel blinked and a wailing beep sounded. She hastily tucked the bleeding hand under the opposite arm. The door yawned open.

  “Lily!”

  She ducked inside to face her eldest brother.

  “You fool!” He hit the “close” button with one fist. “Do you want to shut the whole system down?” The door scraped shut behind her, a swirl of sand settling at her feet. “Why you think it’s such a lark to go out in high weather I’ll never understand. We already have a breakdown in the second vein—can you imagine if we’d gotten a code two in the warehouse just because you had to run outside?”

  “This is serious,” said Lily. “I have to take the tunnel into Apron Port, right now.”

  “Of course we’ll divert the car from second vein. We don’t really need to send anyone out there to prevent the collapse of the entire workings.”

  Lily reached past him to the com-panel and punched up the “status” codes. The second vein blinked in third, under a broken wind generator and a mine engine in fifth vein. “That’s not bad enough that two hours will make any difference.”

  “Lily, we can’t let everyone who gets it into their head go diverting maintenance and schedules for whatever trifles—”

  “Heredes was kidnapped! Don’t you care?”

  The door slid away to reveal the warehouse. The whine of a drill pierced above the rumble of grinder and one engine that sputtered into life, held on tentatively for a drawn-out space, and failed abruptly.

  “Lily.” Her brother stepped into the warehouse and walked toward three figures who had gathered around the spent engine. “I have work to do.”

  Cast carelessly back over his shoulder, the words barely reached her. She ran to her room, stripped off her outside gear, and bandaged the cut on her hand. A duffel bag of traveling gear packed, a change of clothes, and she went in search of her father.

  The metal walls slid off in bareness around her, linking lab and workshop, kitchen and private rooms. Some led into the blankness, ended without reason, work abandoned or not yet begun. They were so alike, each to each, as to be indistinguishable, but the entire House was laid out so succinctly on a grid that it was impossible to get lost. And what joy, thought Lily, in a world where there is no uncertainty at all?

  In the center of the grid lay the offices, grouped around a circular chamber. From the communications center the back talk from the intercom link to the field supervisors whispered in the still air: “Ten-eighty-eight. Let me have a spiker on five-eight. Ten-four. I’ll send it with Seke.” One of her sisters sat at the com-desk, playing “Vector Storm” on the computer and periodically responding with a terse “Eight-twelve, you’re coded in” to a request. Squawks and static punctuated the low exchanges; now and then a high beep sounded from the game.

  “Lilyaka!” Her mother’s voice penetrated forcefully into the quiet of the foyer. “Come in here.”

  Lily walked to the entrance of her mother’s office.

  “Come in, girl. You needn’t pretend to avoid me.” The Saress rose from her chair, pausing to erase a screen from her computer. Lily stayed in the doorway. “You continually disobey me,” the Saress continued, beginning now to pace the large room. Metal-sheathed walls mirrored her stride, her height, the long, tapering fingers that she clasped and unclasped before her. Only her expression was lost, for lack of detail. “I have offered you any number of options for your future, but you refuse to listen to me. The time has come that you simply no longer have a choice—”

  “This is an emergency,” Lily said, stepping back.

  “You will wait, young woman, until given my leave.” The Saress swept one hand over her scarf, brushing a stray strand of black hair, tensing as she forced it back into its place under the coiled cloth. “Emergency! I tell you, my girl, when the next offer—”

  “You never listen to me!” cried Lily.

  Her sister stepped out from the communications room, shrugged, and went back in. Lily whirled and ran to her father’s door.

  “Lily!” came her mother’s voice from behind her. “As of this moment—”

  The Sar’s door slid open. Lily dodged inside as the door sighed into place behind her. Here, the still, dry air smelled as if it had been touched by some unidentifiable spice.

  “Excuse me, Sar-father,” Lily said into the silence.

  His dark head remained bent over a graph. “If you must argue with your mother, at least do so in private, not where the entire field division can overhear you.” He turned in his chair to face her, straightening a sleeve that had slipped askew. “I am aware,” he continued, “that we have not been able to provide you with a job that suits your talents. I don’t want to force you into a bond that you would despise, but eventually you may leave me no choice. You must have some occupation, Lily.” A frown creased his face, a soft break in the copper of his complexion. “I feel constrained to add that you haven’t even done us the courtesy of providing children for our House.”

  The familiar litany faded past her. “You don’t understand.” Eight strides took her to his chair. “I just came from the Academy. Someone—they weren’t even human—someone abducted Master Heredes.”

  “An alien abduction? Lily, that’s ridiculous. In this weather? And what you were doing out I can’t—”

  “They had an aircar. I saw it.”

  Black eyes met black eyes, “By the Void, did they now.” He stood up. “An aircar.” He paused suddenly, considering her. She, in her turn, was struck by that unequal balance of years between him and Heredes. The Sar was as young a sixty as anyone Lily knew, since he could afford the occasional dose of rejuv. Yet Heredes, looking thirty years younger, felt as old to her. And picturing him, she experienced so strong a rush of fear that it took all of her years of training not to run out of the room.

  “Lilyaka,” said the Sar finally, almost a sigh. “Only Central has clearance to grant bounties and to allow intersystem arrests. And only Central would have access to aircars, if there were any. I’m afraid that Hiro’s tale must have been correct. If you like, we’ll send out a query, follow the usual channels. I’m sure we can get word of him. What happened to your hand?”

  She thrust the bandaged hand behind her. “It’s nothing to do with Central. I know it.”

  “Even if it were nothing to do with Central, which I doubt, what possible responsibility do you have toward Heredes?”

  “Because—” She faltered, thought of Heredes unconscious in an alien grasp, and went on. “Because he’s the only person who understands what I want out of life. The things that matter to me. Not mining.”

  For an instant she saw a flash of emotion in his face, as if some old pain had returned to haunt him. “Of all my children,” he said slowly, “you have been the most disobedient, Lily. And in that way, you have always reminded me of myself at your age—but I did not have the luxury to seek some more—shall we say—spiritual calling. I had to rebuild the Ransome mining operation, and whatever inclination I might have had to an artistic vocation—or to an elite military group like the Immortals—” With a slight grimace he shrugged, as if relieving himself of old dreams long since withered. “My responsibility was—had to be—first of all to Ransome House.”

  An
other time she might have been surprised at this revelation, or perhaps flattered that her stern and single-minded father had shown this side of himself to her. But now she only shook her head. “Then you see why I have to go after Master Heredes.”

  “No, I don’t see. Your obligations are here, Lilyaka.”

  She bowed her head, but she did not reply.

  “Daughter.” He looked down at her with forty years of authority over Ransome House in his gaze. “I forbid you to go. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” she replied, quite levelly.

  She walked, without undue haste, to her room; the un-decorated walls, white bedcover, and uncluttered plastic desk revealed nothing of her character. She had left no mark here. Without regret, she grabbed her gear and left.

  It was alarmingly easy to get Bach through the warehouse and into the hangar. Bach had played this game before, on furtive trips to her room where lay the wonderful and much-loved computer, his idiot relative. He shielded his outside lights; his two sensors he dulled to a deep orange, like sparks guttering on the ground. Dust puffed out along his track, and Lily walked beside, her parka and duffel hanging from one hand to screen him. Once, when the drill and grinder and the reluctant engine all wailed at once in an excess of high harmonics, Lily heard the little robot sing softly, as on an indrawn breath, his anguish at such dissonance. Workers hurried to help consolidate these hopeful repairs, and Lily and Bach escaped into the hangar lock.

  The hangar was empty and cold. A single light hanging over the counter that housed the computer lit the room. Shadows held court here, filling the far limits of the stone hall, covering the little fleet of trucks and remodeled vehicles. Huge dents in their exteriors seemed more a trick of the light than the mark of their world. In the dimmest reaches lay the salvage and the one incredibly flattened vehicle, no longer recognizable as a truck, that her sisters had teased her with when she was young, telling her that it still contained the body of a man, the metal crushed so tightly around him by some fearful combination of rock and wind on Unruli’s surface that he could not be recovered. Lily savored the stir in the dry air, the hiss of her breathing plug, and walked over to the computer. Bach rose, singing, behind her.