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The Street of All Designs

Monday, September 28th, 2009

The Street of All Designs

Note to readers — this is one of many complete stories in itself that Chelo told us.  It is in the timestream of story that takes place halfway through the book-length tale, Reading the Wind.

Here begin her words:

I asked Bryan, once, how it had been on Silver’s Home without me.  These were the years when we were separated, before the fight on Fremont, before we all went together to the planet of the fliers.  He talked to me about that ever-so-strange place all night.  This is the part of the story where he told me the most about himself….I’ve tried my best to remember his own words.  So as I speak this into the recorder, imagine that I am talking with Bryan’s voice……

“I want wings.” Alicia watched Tiala’s gold and red bird named Bell swoop back and forth above us.  Bell was a living thing, light and fast, with metal parts and the voice of an angel.  At the moment it was silent except the silk of its wings through the air.   If we weren’t hemmed in by silvery and black buildings, the sun would paint diamonds and stars on Bell’s feathers, so bright she’d be a red glow of life beating in a flame.

Bell was only one wonder among millions on Silver’s Home.  Even though we’d been on-planet a few months now, walking through Li City felt like an assault of the strange.

Alicia repeated, “I want wings.”

She didn’t want wings like Bell’s.  She wanted wings big enough to carry her above her broken soul.  “Why do you want to lose your ability to run?  I’d be happy with a bird like Bell.  Something to follow me around, let me put a camera on its neck so I can see anything I need to.”

“I’d rather fly than run.”

“That’s not nearly as useful.”  But Alicia never listened to me.  I’d worked all week to get her alone so I could convince her to choose mods that would help us save our people in the war, and all she could say was she wanted to fly.  “I’m happy enough to be a strongman, and you should be happy enough to be a pretty girl.”

“You sound old.  Jenna said we could pick a mod.  I want wings.”

“She also said wings take too long.”  I searched the crowd for a flier, hoping to remind her how pained they looked on the ground.  But we were nowhere near a flyspace, and there were only walking people on this street – tall ones, wide ones like me, pretty girls who were probably two hundred years old, and dressed in almost nothing.  “Besides, you wouldn’t fit in a spaceship with wings.”

“He’s right.”  A girl’s voice spoke so close behind me I startled.   I stopped and turned, tense and ready to defend Alicia.  There was no telling who was what here.  Or how old.  The girl looked about our age – maybe twenty or so – but I bet she was two hundred.  She had blond hair and blue eyes as startling as Alicia’s violet ones, and she smelled like the grass plains from home in spring when they were a sea of yellow and white flowers.  She smiled at us – coy and innocent, even her eyes – before she stuck out her hand.  “I’m Induan.”

“I’m Bryan.”  I ignored her hand.  “How’d you get there?”

She grinned and turned her eyes to Alicia.  “Jenna sent me to look for you.”

“Figures.” Alicia glowered at her, and she, too ignored the outstretched hand.  “Why not be a flier?”

Her one-track mind made me shiver, the way old Mayah, back home, talked about a Destiny Shiver when the destiny moon rose up over Fremont.  Alicia’s fascination with flying made me feel like destiny’s hand on her, like maybe it would be the death of her.  Alicia had more hardness than any of us, but more brittleness, too.  And here Alicia was, happy in this strange place, and dressed in almost nothing.  Just a sleeveless blue shirt that barely covered her top or behind, and the shortest blue shorts under it I’d ever seen.  I would have expected to like that, but I didn’t.  She wore a crystal data necklace that glittered when we walked under lights, another sign of how much she’d taken to Silver’s Home.

The blond put her hand back.  “Being a flier’s even harder than being a swimmer.  Jenna said I should keep you two out of trouble.”

That was my job.  Keeping Alicia safe for Joseph, keeping us all safe in this strange place full of hidden lies and hidden knives and beautiful women who appeared from thin air.  “I want to know how you got here.   How’d you sneak up on us?”

“I’m quiet.”

So she wasn’t going to tell me.  “What does Jenna want?”

“She wants you to figure out what you want to become.  You leave in a week.”

What I wanted to become?  What I wanted to become? You couldn’t choose that at home.  What you wanted to be inside, or what you wanted to learn.  But you couldn’t change your body.  So Alicia wanting wings wasn’t that crazy, except the winged ones I’d seen all looked miserable.  But she could change that much.  So could I.  It was one of the secrets of this world.  I felt struck silent.

On the way into the city on the first day, after Joseph landed the silver ship New Making in spite of himself, before she’d even taken us to her sister Tiala or shown us the bird Bell, Jenna had said these people changed rivers and islands.  The words of this girl-woman made me realize Janna had been telling a literal truth.

Induan cocked her head at me, like the camp dogs used to, and wrinkled her brow.

I felt slow, but I finally forced out a words.  “Thanks.  For finding us.  I guess.”

Alicia glared at her, but at least she didn’t pop out with the word wings.  Instead, she said, “How do we know what we can do?”

Induan started walking, easily finding a path through the sparse crowd. Bell followed the girl, banking tight gold circles above her head, and so we followed them both, too.   Staying out of the crowd was harder for me, since my attention kept snagging on new colors of hair and new shapes for eyes.  Some people ignored me, some smiled, some looked wary.  Many were lost inside their heads, walking around obstacles well enough, but gone into data like lovers.  Wind Readers.

Here, on their home turf, the people of Silver’s Home appeared to be a race of distracted beauty.

But what would they be like if we were fighting them?  What weapons were they carrying that I couldn’t see?

We were going to fight people with magic made of nanotech and flesh, the way the bird Bell was both.

And all I had now was flesh, stronger and faster that the original humans back home, but weaker than many people here.  Maybe weaker than all of them.

At home, I’d been the strongest person on the planet.

Induan turned a corner around a tall grey and smoke colored building.  I started wondering what kind of weapons she had, or what she could change into with a push of a button.  And then I turned the corner and forgot to worry about her, since my mouth gaped open and my feet stopped so hard that a tall thin man with a six-legged cat on his shoulder bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and flowed around me, the cat’s ringed tail twitching.

Ahead of me, a smoke-colored arch hung between buildings, ten man-heights or so above me.  Below it, figures and parts of humans floated in the air, showing off extra muscles in their backs, webbed feet, enhanced hearing, knives for fingernails, hairy pelts like on an animal.  And wings.  A faint smell like burned twintree fruit bothered me.  The air felt damp and tingly under the signs, the way it feels just before rain.

“Welcome,”  Induan twirled her hand in a small flourish and Bell rose higher as if in response, flying right through a sign for a shop that apparently sold extra arms, “to the Street of All Designs.”

“How do they do that?” Alicia asked.

“Which one?”

“Making all the pictures in the air.”

“Oh.”  Induan wrinkled her nose.  “There’s water and the barest bit of power and…I don’t remember. Some other elements they put into the microclimate here that lets them show stuff in the air.”  She blew on the bottom of a foot hanging just above her head, and the image shimmered and winked, then stabilized.  “There’s other places like this, but visible ads are banned on the main streets.”

“So there’s more places to look for mods?”

The man with the cat was already half-way down the street, just walking, apparently immune to the strange forms bobbing above him.

Induan led us deeper, letting us look up and around but keeping us moving.  “Well, sure.  But not nearby.  There’s always specialty things.  But you don’t have permission for beta mods.  What do you need to do?”

Keep my family from dying here or back home.  “I need to be…strong.  And lethal.”

“Well, you look strong already.  So shouldn’t you choose something that will surprise?”  She pointed up.  “Like cameras in the back of your head?”

“I don’t want to look different.”

Alicia laughed.  “A camera would help you see different.”

“Give me a minute to look around, okay?”

Induan looked at me quizzically.  “Can you? Do you have an interface?”

“I can see.”

Alicia gave Induan a conspirational wink. “Give him a little time.  He’ll decide if we don’t push him.”

So now I felt stupid, and vulnerable.  And backwards.  This was supposed to be home, already had become home for Alicia.  For the first time in my life I wasn’t the oddest being on the planet.  I wasn’t even close.  So why did I want to go back home so badly?

“Come on,” Alicia said, “Let’s look for me.  I’m glad I’m here, even if he isn’t.”

The shards of glass in her words drove me to turn away from her so she couldn’t see how they stung. I’d never turned away from her before, but now she wanted to impress this total stranger.  Was I ever going to understand women?  No wonder Chelo sent me off, and Alicia was with Joseph, and me alone.

I walked under the advertisements, staring at each one from as many angles as I could.  Every choice looked wrong.   I didn’t want prehensile toes; my shoes wouldn’t fit.  Or legs that were obviously much stronger, but so bulky they wouldn’t feel right.  All the mods that would look right on a strongman like me would make me even bigger, or even stronger, or give me extra arms.  But what would I do with extra arms when I didn’t need then to shoot extra weapons I already didn’t have?

There wasn’t anything I could imagine doing to myself.

I started looking around for the Induan and Alicia by checking near the wings, although I knew they were an impossibility.  They weren’t walking through the various weapons either, which was a different kind of relief.  Alicia had big, fast anger in her. Big fast everything emotional, really, but I didn’t want to worry about her with a weapon.  I finally spotted a brief flash of light on Bell’s wings, and Alicia, standing below her, under advertisements that were in words and video.   Induan was nowhere to be seen, but Alicia was a vision.  She stood poised and curious, like she belonged here.  Her bare legs gleamed. I swallowed and walked up to her, waited for her to turn her violet eyes toward me.  When she did, she looked light and happy. Curious.  And a little like she was bursting with something to tell me.  But she asked me first.  “Did you find one?”

“You can have mine.  You can have two, if you want two.”

The shape of her face told me she was about to say yes, but them she stopped.  “No.  You take one.  You want to go save us all on Fremont, and if you die because I stole your mod from you, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“I’m giving it.  You’re not stealing it.”

“Jenna wants us to get one each.”

“Since when do you do what she says?”

She stopped dead for a moment, and took in a breath and let it out and took in another one.  “This is big. And… what if we never get back?”

“I can’t.  Everything looks like I wouldn’t be myself.”

“But we’re already different.  We’ve always been different”

“That’s not the same as wanting to be different from myself.”

Alicia frowned at me, but it was gentler than she had been earlier.  “Oh, Bryan.  It’ll be okay. You’ll still be yourself.”

“How will I know?”

“How silly.”  It was Induan’s voice, coming from right behind me again.

I twitched and turned.  She was close, way too close.  She couldn’t have just casually walked in.  I sounded angry even to my own ears, a shade too loud for this quiet place. “Where did you come from?”

She didn’t take a step back.  Her voice was very quiet as she said.  “I came from right here.”

I took a step toward her. I didn’t mean her any harm, and I wouldn’t have hurt her.

But she wasn’t there.  Maybe a blur, at best, and then she was gone.  I drew in a breath and stopped, breathing harder than I should.  I straightened up and looked around.  There were a few other people shopping for new parts, no one close.  They didn’t seem to have noticed Induan popping in and out of the world.  But why should they?  Maybe people popped in an out of reality around here all the time.  Maybe she was only a little less a hologram than the advertisements all around us.  I turned toward Alicia, who had her slender fingers over her mouth and looked like she could barely keep from doubling over with laughter.

Induan had included Alicia in her secret, whatever it was.

It felt like being taunted by the original humans back home.  I ducked and started walking away.  No it didn’t.  It was worse.  All my life, I’d wondered why people could be so cruel, but we had never been cruel to each other.  Never.  Never been anything but support.

I walked out of the Street of all Designs, turned the corner, and found a space with a sky hanging above me instead of humans even stranger than me.  It was the only place I could look, up, since the sky looked like our sky.  Almost.

How had it happened that I had come to this place?  Even though years had passed, I had slept them away in a cold dreamless drawer in the New Making.  When I awoke, the same cuts and bruises I’d taken when the Fremont toughs beat me up had been red and purple and real.  And then healed, almost like magic, so all I felt now was tightness in my skin where the deepest cuts had been.

I couldn’t walk looking only up, so I made myself look ahead and walk through strangers until I found a tree in this place of buildings.   I leaned against a building, alien like all the rest in size and material, but I kept it at my back and watched the tree and the sky above the tree.

They found me, of course.  The building at my back kept Induan from sneaking up, but it didn’t keep Bell from trilling at the sight of me.  Just before they looked up, I noticed how they bent their heads together and chattered like old friends, even though they had only met.  They were shaped the same and looked the same age.  They contrasted in color; the two might have been the shadow and light of each other.

Alicia saw me first. Her face softened when she did, and she quickened her step.

The fist gripping my insides lightened a bit at that, and I tried to smile for her.

Before they said anything, they stood right next to each other in front of me, and Alicia said, “Take Induan’s hand.”

I did.  It was warm.  Flesh.  Even a bit sweaty.  I no longer doubted a human stood physically in front of me.  She blinked, and smiled, and suddenly looked a bit shy.

Induan took her hand away and Alicia said, “Watch.”

Induan smeared for an eyeblink, and then she was gone.  The space where she had been was so empty that people walked behind it, and I saw them.

“Squint,”  the air said, using Induan’s voice.

Shaking, I did as she said.  It didn’t matter.

Then it did.

The first sight I caught of her was a leftover dot of red against the clear sky after a man with a flowing red shirt walked by.  It took another breath to notice a smear of green near the ground.  “If I didn’t know to look, I would never see her.”

Then she touched me and my arm disappeared under her hand. I flinched as far into the cold building at my back as I could, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “No, please no,” before I plunged my hand back at her, making myself accept the invisibility and know my arm was still there.  She took it, holding it, a force alone as far as the eye could tell.

Then she let go and smeared into visible again.

Alicia never stopped watching me.  She had the sense to let me get my breath before she said, “That’s the one I picked.  Induan is a strategist, and she thinks it’s the best one for an unknown situation.”

Better than wings.

“So you can still have one.  You don’t have to give me yours.”

Two pretty girls with the will to become invisible stared at me, patient.  But no matter how patient, I had to answer.  I had set off this morning to pick a mod.  I had been looking for a new weapon, not to become something else.  Not to change myself.

I looked past Alicia and Induan, at the tall and thin men and women walking one by one or in groups.  They could change themselves.  They had.  If nothing else, they were all beautiful, even in their strangeness.  There was no age here, no infirmity.  My eye went to a pair of fliers, the first I’d seen today.  They did hobble.  But their faces, even the pain that shone in the tight lines of their mouths and the careful way they walked, looked transcendent.  Their wings glittered in the light.

Perhaps I needed to find a way to see changing myself as a gift.   To see it as becoming.  I nodded at the two women in front of me who were becoming faster than I could.  “Maybe you two can help me choose.”

They nodded, gracious to the outworld boy.

We were all going to have to outgrow our backward home to live here.  As we walked back toward The Street of All Designs, I leaned over to Alicia and whispered, “Maybe when we come back you can choose wings.”

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When Liam Joined the Band

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

This is a story fragment that we found on the first trip to Artistos. It is told by Mayah, Akashi’s wife, and is from long before the story told in The Silver Ship and the Sea started. Unlike many of the tales we’ve found there, this may not have been polished by years of storytelling. At least, it is far more personal than most of the community stories. There is another version of this, which may be the one that entered the mythos of the West Band. In that story, Akashi is not conflicted….

The child was no more than three. I watched him, looking for differences between him and us.

I sat on the end of a log, with Akashi standing beside me. The child, Liam, stood solemnly by the communal fire, a few feet between him and any of us. It was the band’s first night out of Artistos, and we had pulled hard all day up the High Road. Sweat ran in small rivulets down the boy’s bronze skin, and still he held his palms out to the fire as if he needed its heat.

I wanted to warm him in my lap even though a week ago we had tried to kill him and all of his kind. We had almost succeeded. He and five others lived.
Some of the band hated him. As if children between two and six could form up as an army and send killing machines at us. As if this babe would develop wings and fly from camp, or extra arms, or flex his fingers and produce knives that have been hidden under his skin.

We had faced all of those things from his kind. A third of our number had died. We had not known peace for so long I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t yet smell it in the stances or conversations of the band.

His eyes were deep blue, and the reflected fire in them looked the sun rising through the sky in early morning. If I saw a difference between him and us it was simply beauty. His limbs had all the right proportions, his skin a deep sheen with no scratches or bruises or old scars from thorns. His muscles were more defined than any of our children at three. Perhaps more than any of ours at any age. Even though he had been in hiding, and must have been hungry, the only thing that showed deprivation was the way he kept his palms open and close to the fire, growing red with the heat.

He did not show his pain, but he must feel it.

I curled my arm around my mate’s leg, noticing how taught his calf muscles had bunched, the way his weight was planted on the ground as if it he forced himself not to move. When I looked up at Akashi, he too watched the boy. I could see the curve of his jaw and then his eyes, but from this angle, I couldn’t see the look in them.

I glanced again at the silent, stoic boy. “Sweetheart?” I whispered to Aksahi.

“Yes.”

“Therese and Steven took in two of them.”

I did not have to tell him the subtext. That we led the band and we should take the child. The others had gone to leaders. Therese and Steven led us all. A girl-child had gone to Paloma who healed us all.

We should take this child.

But Akashi just stared at Liam, his jaw tight, and I didn’t whisper anything else. Something had turned inside me as the boy stood, and I didn’t want any anyone else to take him. I might fight anyone else who tried. Yet if I pushed Akashi to tell me no, I would not be able to change his mind. I was not – then – a co-leader in the way that Therese was, or a true leader like Nava, later. I was simply Akashi’s bride. Like Paloma, I had so far proved barren. That happened to many of us, maybe one or two in ten, and so we should be welcoming this perfect boy.

I watched around the fire, and saw at least two of the other childless women looking at the boy with curiosity.

I glared at them.

I rose and took his hand and led him to a sleeping tent. For now, he had been assigned to sleep with Old Maggie, since she lived alone in a large wagon. Two of the men had helped her fashion a small cage for him, so that he would be safe. He had slept there two nights already, and no harm had come to him or from him.

When Maggie took him from me, she shook her head and muttered. “No good can come of this.”

“Of course it can,” I replied.

“He brings back too many memories,” she said.

“They will fade.”

“Never,” she hissed, and took the silent child in with her, presumably to shut him in his cage for the night.

I went back deep in contemplation, hoping for a private conversation with Akashi. But by the time I returned, he was already in conversation with three of his Council, plotting out the route we could take into the mountains. I listened quietly. When Akashi and I married, I became an automatic member of the Council, but that night I had nothing to add, and my thoughts drifted over and over to Liam who slept in a cage.

Perhaps it is good that time passed. The moon Destiny had risen in the sky and hung bright overhead by the time Akashi took my hand and led me to the wagon. Even then, he did not want to talk. As soon as we went inside, he folded me in his arms and began to knead the stiff muscles of my back with his fingers. We had not made love since before the last battle, and it felt good and strange to be so close to him, to smell the smoke of the fire and his sweat. I leaned into him, moaning, but my back stayed stiff and even though he felt like love, I stepped away and turned to face him. “We should take that child,” I said.

He stiffened immediately. “We will have one of our own someday.”

“You are choosing not to understand.”

“I can’t do this.” He turned away from me and reached up into one of the cupboards above our head and took down a skin of water, pouring a cup and staring out of our small window, even though there was nothing to see but darkness.

“Someone needs to tame him, make him one of us.”

“I cannot forgive them yet.”

He meant the altered beings who flew down and demanded our land, and then killed so many of us. His own father had been skewered by a man with a sword for a hand. The child’s people had been liars. They had been bringers-of-pain-and-weapons. I put a hand on Akshi’s shoulder and kept my voice low. “If he sleeps in a cage long enough, he may become an animal.”

The muscles under my hand rippled, like those of a dog trying to cast off a flea.

I let my hand fall and turned away.

That night, we slept close but not cuddled. Moonlight fell on his face, which looked troubled even in sleep. His chest rose and fell with his breath, and he muttered unintelligible things from time to time. For the first time since our marriage, I wondered if I could obey him.

Before dawn, I woke to hear a small cry come from the direction of Maggie’s wagon. I knew immediately that it was something to do with the boy, and went out still in my nightclothes to hear her telling Khani that when she woke, the cage was empty. I peered into the wagon to see that the bars had been shattered, two of the stout wooden sticks snapped in half.

Akashi could not have opened the cage that way. Not from inside, not with so little room for leverage.

Liam had revealed one of the differences between him and us.

Strong or not, he was still three, and couldn’t possibly hide from us for long. I raced back to our wagon and dressed, alerting Akashi who cursed (he never cursed) and thus we were the first to follow his trail.

It turns out he was not only strong but fast. He has taken the main road back down, perhaps hoping to find the other children. Even though Akashi and I are two of the fastest members of the west band, it took up a long time to find him. We might have had to go all the way to Artistos if he hadn’t fallen and sprained an ankle. He sat in the middle of the path, clutching a rock in his tiny fist, staring at the forest. A demon dog bayed, and then another, the pack going away from us now that we had arrived.

Akashi stopped and stared at Liam.

Another few moments and he would surely have been dead. The look on my beloved’s face assured me that Akashi wished we had been slower. I could not hate Akashi for that, but I could not hate Liam for existing.

I left my husband’s side and went to the boy. We did not share a language, but he let me pluck the rock from his hand and pick him up. Akashi looked at me. “This is the price for you?” he asked.

“This is for the band,” I said.

He stared at me, and at the boy, for a long time. And then he smiled and said only, “I chose the right woman.”

And then the other members of the band started to catch up with us. I kept the boy in my arms as we walked back up the road, and the others followed, surrounding us but giving some distance as well.

There would be work to do.

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Reading the Wind: Chapter One

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

readinthewindcoversmall.jpg

1:  We Speak

Herb-scented smoke from the early evening fires lifted my heart while drumbeats lifted my feet.  Cool spring air bathed my skin.  My skirt swirled about my knees, slapping my calves as I danced behind Liam. A light sheen of sweat coated his back and thighs, shining nearly gold in the last full rays of the sun.

It was the last night of our semi-annual visit to town; a night reserved for the two bands of roamers to feast and compete together.

Twenty-five of us from the West Band had started this stick dance.  Just an hour in, no more than ten remained.

Our bandmates chanted with the drums, helping us dance the divide from dusk to night, holding bright torches.   The pace increased yet again, the drums seeking to exhaust us, the chant to buoy us.  Dark-haired slender Sasha fell away next, followed by red-blond blocky-and-strong Kiara.  They rolled free of our feet and took torches, joining the chant, cheering for us, for the band.  Every time I began to fade, Mayah’s voice wormed into the part of me that could quit, blocking it, whispering “Shuffle, two, kick, three, turn, jump, jump…”

As the stars winked awake my blood rose. My kicks grew higher, my dip and swirl lower and faster.  The drummers increased the tempo until sweat poured from them like it poured from us.

The clacking of wood on wood warned us just before long brightly painted sticks swooshed under us, horizontal, a foot above the ground.  The sticks swirling under our legs demanded precision and height from our jumps.   A crowd passed the sticks back and forth, hand to hand.  The watchers were all roamers, most from our band, some from the East Band, friends and a few skeptics, two judges.

More dancers fell away, feet tangling, bodies rolling.

More sticks.  The East Band had danced first.  They’d managed five sticks – we already danced over ten.  The joy of competition tore a grin from me.  And it was the band’s win –normal band members danced with us when we passed the East Band’s mark.  No one could blame our win on Liam and me.  We were free to play; it didn’t matter now that we were faster and stronger.

Contest had changed to exhibition.

A few of the East Band left the circle.  Not all.  Just the ones who hated Liam and I for our differences.

Three of us remained, then two.  Me and Liam, jumping, kicking, close to each other then away, a dance between us more than for the others.  Fifteen sticks, and still we didn’t stumble.  The stick-bearers grinned and raised them so high my skirt flew up past my knees. Drummers began to call for replacements.  Chanters called our names:  “Liam! Chelo! Liam! Chelo!”

Liam threw his head back and laughed, and I joined him, giggling, so short of breath the laugh tore pain from my torso.  Pain or not, our laughter reflected joy in moving well, joy in success, joy in being with each other and surrounded by family.

I held out my hands, palms down and he shook his head, not yet.

Jump, twist.

He grinned at me, his dark eyes bright with exertion.

Swoop, turn.

Faces, grinning.  Kiara and River and Sky and Abyl.

Hop, high, down, just the toes, then up again over two sticks. Cheers all around us.  I reached a hand to steady Liam and we leapt together as one, holding hands.  We side-hopped over the seated circle of first watchers, just above their heads, landing hard, almost falling.  After, we stood, slick with sweat and glowing in the firelight of twenty torches.

A cheer erupted all around us, a celebration of our prowess and, perhaps, relief that we were done.  The Last Night celebration of Spring Trading was now officially over, and the rest of the evening could be given to connecting band to band or band to townie.

###

I stopped by my wagon to change from my dancing skirt into pants and a shirt, and to slip light leather sandals onto my feet.  My home was small, but it was mine – just a tiny kitchen and an everything-else room just longer than I was tall and half as wide; light enough to be pulled by a single hebra.  I’d painted the inside pale blue with clouds and birds and, here and there, the tip of a tree.  A silver space ship arced across the ceiling, for my brother, who had gone into the sky.

Dressed for a trip into Artistos, I hesitated briefly in my doorway, centering.  I glanced at the wagon Liam shared with his parents, Akashi and Mayah.  It stood very close to my smaller wagon, signifying we were all in the same family group.  Mine, like Akashi’s, was decorated with maps showing us as geographers.  Light poured from the window in Akashi’s wagon, illuminating the designs.  My fingers caressed the paint, running across the slight ridges where mountains and lakes dotted the terrain here on Jini, the largest of the two continents on Fremont.  I had hand-painted them on the side of the wagon, not sure even at the time if I was painting myself into a profession or into Akashi’s family.  As usual, Akashi apparently knew my feelings, even the contradictory ones.  He had simply smiled and helped me get tough parts, like Islandia’s Teeth, painted right.

I shook my head, pushing aside the memory.  Right now, I had to find Kayleen.

Liam emerged, dressed simply in a pale-green hemp tunic and brown pants.  Like me, he stood a head taller than most of the original humans on Fremont.  A shock of blond hair hung over dark eyes, and a long braid twisted down his back nearly to his waist.  He broke into a warm grin as soon as he spotted me standing in the shadow of my doorway.  My grin answered his, and I immediately felt almost as much like we were one connected being as I had in the dance.

“We did great!” He reached for my arm, his voice tinged with pride and satisfaction.  “Dad said he was watching from the hill.  He thought we’d dance all night.”

“Well, and I thought you’d never stop,” I teased.  “I thought we’d just go until one of us fell.”

He laughed, not like in the dance, but soft and low.  “We’d have worn out the drummers.”

“I don’t think that even we could have danced much longer.”  I stepped briefly into his arms, then pushed away, unwilling to be lost inside of his embrace.   “Let’s find Kayleen.  I’m worried about her.  She seemed so…”  I searched for a good word. “…so listless yesterday.  She didn’t get excited about the maps we found in the cave on the way down and she barely ever even looked at me.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and looked past me, as if lost in thought.  “She is trapped here.  We are free.”

For just a moment I was glad that she hadn’t seen the dance we just finished.  Then a flash of guilt at the thought ran through me, making me shiver.  “Let’s go.”  I squeezed his hand.  The three of us had to look after each other, but it was so hard when Liam and I were out of town all but two weeks a year.

We jogged side by side, heading into town from our encampment in Little Lace Park.  The Lace River ran down a short cliff to our right, full with rushing winter-melt water, singing into the gathering darkness.  Here, we were protected by both physical walls and the data barriers that Kayleen and Paloma worked so hard to maintain.  We could walk freely, without sorting every sound for the dangers that roamed or grew in the wilds.  The end of the spring gathering meant the beginning of our summer travel season, our season of dangers.

Twintrees and lace maples and redberry bushes lined the path, reaching new spring branches across, trying, as always, to reclaim any part of Fremont we humans struggled to tame.  Night birds sang their early evening songs, twittering and calling to each other.

Kayleen still lived with Paloma in one of the four-houses a block away from Commons Park.  When I knocked on their door, Paloma opened it, smelling of spring mint and redberry.  “Chelo and Liam! Come in.  How are you?”

“We’re fine,” Liam said.

Standing in her doorway, I remembered a hundred times I’d stood here before, starting when I could barely reach the knob.  This close, streaks of gray showed in her blond hair and wrinkles blossomed like flowers around her blue eyes. “Is Kayleen here?”

She shook her head.  “Almost never.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She shook her head again, short and sharp, then smiled and said, “Sure.  Will you come in for tea?”

I wanted to stay and talk to her.  But finding Kayleen was more important.  “Do you have any idea where she is?”

“She’s probably down by the hebra barns – she has a young one she’s taken a fancy to, and spends much of her time there.” Paloma twisted her hands together. “She goes out after work every night, and only comes home to sleep.  I don’t even know what or when she eats any more.”

I winced.  “I’m sorry.”

Paloma sighed and took my hand. “The nets work well right now.  We’ve asked less and less of her.  Even Nava leaves her alone some days.  Kayleen’s been helping Gianna with the satellite data, and she identified the tracks of the last three good sized meteors almost perfectly.  Gianna is almost the only one she talks to any more.”  Her voice dropped lower, infused with sadness.  “I’m sure she misses you.”

Even though there was nothing accusing in her tone, a tug of guilt gnawed at me.  I looked up at Liam.  “Maybe we should stay in town next winter.”

Liam turned to Paloma, his voice apologetic.  “We can’t stay now.  The band needs us the most in summer.”

“She would like to see you more.”  She paused.  “Me too.  You can stay here if you like.  I…I’d like your opinion about Kayleen.”

It touched me that she asked.  But who else could possibly help?  “We’re leaving tomorrow.  We have to go, surely you understand.”  I glanced down at my chrono.  “We should get to the barn.”

Paloma smiled.  “I know.  Look, I’ll talk to Nava and see if Kayleen can come visit you for awhile this summer.  Is that okay with you?”

“Of course.” I returned her smile and touched her hand.  Small comfort, but all I could offer.  “What about this baby hebra she’s adopted?”

Paloma smiled again, as if she, too, were enamored of the little beast.  “She has.  A young one with the prettiest green highlights in her brown striping when the sun shines on it.   Kayleen’s training her.  She already follows Kayleen around the pasture, and she’ll be ready to ride by midsummer.  She named her Windy.”

I smiled, picturing Kayleen with the young hebra.  “I hope I meet Windy.”

Liam held Paloma for a moment, kissing the top of her head, and then I embraced her, breathing her in.  Her head came to my shoulder, and for the first time ever it struck me that I could protect and help her more than she could protect and help me.  “I hope everything works out all right,” I murmured.

Part way down the street, I turned to look back.  Paloma stood in the door, watching. She gave us a little wave.

I held my precious sun-fed flashlight, but left it off to protect my night vision as we jogged down to the barns.  Even though warm night air tickled my skin, the winter had been harsh and long, and only about half of the fields had been planted so far.  We passed a few people heading home from late-night chores, exchanging polite half-waves.  Already, town life seemed strange.

As we neared the barns, Stripes called out a greeting to me, and two or three other hebras whickered.  Their tall graceful forms made black silhouettes outlined by the soft light from the barns.  Their heads swiveled toward me.  I went to Stripes and buried my face in her neck fur.  She’d been in the common herd once, but Akashi had bought her for me the first spring after I joined the band.  As he’d offered her lead to me, his eyes had twinkled with joy. “You need someone you know you can count on.”

I’d cried.

I breathed in Stripes’s dusty barn smell.  “We’ll leave tomorrow,” I whispered into the long ear she swiveled down toward me.

As if in response, she dropped her big head over my shoulder, nearly an embrace.  Her hot breath trickled along the back of my neck.

I pushed away gently and looked around. I didn’t see Kayleen, or any other human movement.  “I don’t think she’s here,” I whispered.

Liam called out, “Kayleen!”

No response.

Low evening lights made circles on the rush floor in the long, tall barn.  The hebras each came up to be greeted, turning their long ears toward us and asking silent questions with their wide, intelligent eyes.  Two or three of the females had spindly-legged spring babies beside them, but I couldn’t tell if one might be Windy.  They were all beautiful.

Kayleen was not with any of them.

At the end of the aisle, I called again, “Kayleen, are you here?”

Still no answer.

We stepped out the back door into the big practice ring, and I called a third time.  “Kayleen?”

Liam stepped out into the corral, and leaned against the metal bars of the big practice ring, looking back at me.  “I don’t see any sign of her.”

The sun had already set into the sea.  A single light bolted high on the outside of the wooden barn illuminated his face and shone on his blond hair.

I walked over near him, and clambered up on the bars, sitting on the top one.  It made me taller than him by almost a meter.   “Do you remember last fall, when I told you Kayleen seemed so lost – somewhere – that I could barely get her attention?”

He turned his face up to me, and in the spare light his eyes shone with worry. He reached a hand up and set it over mine where it clung to the bar.  “Yes, I remember.”

“I’m scared for her.  Maybe, like Joseph, she’s become too different.”

“Have you talked to Gianna?” he asked.

“Not this trip, not enough to ask about Kayleen.  Besides, Gianna is so much older. It’s not the same as having friends.  Our bandmates support us, and I think Kayleen’s very alone.”  A brief shock of bitterness crossed my heart.  “And you know who’s here.  Garmin and most of the other people our age haven’t changed in how they treat us, so there’s no reason to think they’re any kinder to Kayleen.”

“I know.”  Liam hopped up next to me on the bars.  “But its not like the East Band loves us.  Surely some of how she’s treated is up to her?  If she’s distant with us, imagine how she must be with everyone else.”

I moved closer to him, brushing thighs.  “I’d still like to help her if I can.  I think… maybe she’s living too much in the nets and not enough in the real world.”

“Maybe.”

His profile in the half light swelled my chest.  Simply looking at him made me feel I could float from the bars and land on the barn roof.  “Being with us in the wild, she wouldn’t be in the nets so much.  You have to pay attention out there.”

Liam sighed.  “Well, I wonder if she’s focused enough for that?  I wouldn’t trust her to travel by herself.  Someone would have to come back for her, and we’ll be way out by Rage Mountain this summer.  It would be too hard.”

I nodded.  “You’re right.  I feel responsible, though.  It’s not so much my fault that she’s left behind, it’s an artifact of her skills, and besides, she wanted to stay with Paloma.  But I feel like I should be able to help her.  She and I used to be so close…”

“She has to let you help her.”  He reached an arm over my shoulder and pulled me close, unbalancing us a little so I gripped the rail harder.  “We’re all legal adults now, if barely, and you made sure we’d be treated that way.  Now Kayleen has to act like one.  You can’t solve every problem.”

I never could.  It had always taken us all.  I missed Jenna’s watchful eye and weird way of helping us learn, and I missed Bryan’s silent strength.  I even missed willful and lost Alicia with all of her pain and anger.  Most of all, I missed Joseph.  He would be able to help Kayleen in ways I couldn’t – he, too, rode the wind.  And more.  He flew space ships.  Where was he, and how different from me had he yet become?

Liam must have felt my need, because he held me close and began to hum softly, a sweet song of summer fields.  I looked up at a sky full of stars gathered around Faith and Summer.  I searched for a third moon, which would have been a sign of good luck, but didn’t find one.

The light from the barn switched off.

“Why did the light go off?” Liam asked.

“Because I couldn’t stand to watch you two any more,” Kayleen said.  “Because I’m crazy and I do crazy things.  Because I live too much in the nets and not enough in the real world.”  A pause.  Her voice, ripped with pain, floating down from the top of the barn.  “I can’t be trusted to travel by myself.” The pain in her voice dropped down onto our heads like stones.

I sat up.  How much had she heard?  “Kayleen?”

She didn’t answer.

I turned on my flashlight and shone it up, looking for her.  We called her name, and Liam took my light and scrambled up onto the roof. After a while, he called down, “She’s not here.”

He climbed back down and stood a little distance from me, his arms by his sides, the closeness between us turned awkward by her sudden absent presence.  She was fast – if she wanted to ditch us here in the dark, in her place, she could.  I looked up at where the light had been, and spoke, hoping she was still close enough to hear me.  “Kayleen.  We’re just worried about you.  I miss you.”

The hebras stamped quietly in their stalls and a cool wind blew softly through the rafters.

Liam added, “Come out.  So we can talk.”

We waited, still standing a little apart, listening carefully for any sound that might be our friend, our sister.  Twenty minutes passed, in which we said nothing, afraid she would hear, or that she wouldn’t hear.

We walked back, side by side, not touching, not saying anything.

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The Day the Small Ship Flew Over the Sea

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

This is a scrap of story which was found in the archives on Fremont during the research trip that sister Mary Martin Moss commissioned even before she started the academy.  Because it was found then – and on Fremont which has no sophisticated nets or Wind Readers of its own – it is deemed to be authentic without the detailed vetting that occurs for other stories.  The roamers on Fremont were partly an oral society:  they told each other stories.  This is a first-person journal entry from the viewpoint of Sasha, the girl with the white streak in her hair who Joseph eventually named his companion dog after.  It is highly polished, so we think this version came after it was told and re-told around campfires under the many moons of Fremont.

It was the summer migration, and we were fat with the bounty of our three days in town and many of the wagons pulled new yearling animals behind them, goats and hebras and dogs just barely trained.

The cool morning breeze smelled of spring flowers.  I sat alone on Chelo’s wagon-seat, minding my own business, which was being watchful.  Even though the dust and noise of our passage had surely scared game or predator alike away, I watched the trees along edges of the road for djuri sign or the yellow eyes of paw-cats.  That is what we did, we roamers.  We watched.  What I would see, of course, was far worse than a tall cat with fangs as long as my fingers.

My parents were near the back, and one of nicest things about that morning was being able to ride by myself with no well-meant lectures from mom or teases from the twins, Kyre and Loma.   Chelo’s wagon rolled near the middle of a long line, rocking its way ever-so-slowly up the High Road behind Stripes.  The hebra made it look like work, even though I knew it really wasn’t.  Stripes stood tall for a hebra, her head taller than the top of the wagon.  She was generally well-mannered if a bit vain.  She kept her head up and pulled the hard way, as if still insisting she was too good to be harnessed.  Or maybe she was just too proud to dig in like the other beasts, head down, haunches straining.  She, too, watched.   Always.

We had already made it to the part of the High Road where the cliff is more a steep hill, a jumble of rocks that didn’t come down in the rock fall the night Chelo and Joseph’s parent’s died, but which looked like it might fall on us at any moment, even without an earthquake.  Some rocks appeared to be balanced so lightly that a summer breeze might send them down to crack our fragile wooden wagons open like bird eggs.

Indeed, when Chelo and Liam scrambled up the steep hill an hour earlier, rocks the size of small dogs had bounced down into the road and startled one of the young hebras being walked beside the wagon behind me.   But still Chelo and Liam made the ascent look easy, the high tinkle of their laughter the last real sign I had of them.  If I’d been climbing that, I would have been too winded to laugh.  Of course, they were not tired, and sounded like they always did, happy and strong and in love.

I didn’t expect any sign of them until dusk.  They did this every year, a ritual they shared with me since they needed a wagon driver and Chelo had no family.   That year, I was still so young  I thought they were simply sneaking off to make love in some private place.

If Chelo weren’t my best friend, I’d have been terribly jealous.  Chelo was everyone’s friend, of course, but I was the one she’d picked to drive her wagon and keep her hebra.  Mom had tried, as usual, to keep me from it, but dad had reminder her rather gruffly that I would be old enough for my own wagon in two years and so the day’s practice would do me good.  They had glared at each other for a long moment, then kissed, and they hadn’t even insisted I make sure the wagon was near theirs.

It felt good to be so adult.  I didn’t want to screw up.

Everything seemed fine until  Stripes turned her head all the way around stared down at me.  Her eyelashes and beard stood out like silhouettes as the sun haloed her head, and I couldn’t quite make out the look in her eyes.

“She’ll be back later,” I reassured her.

Stripes tossed her head, still walking forward while looking backward.   Her tack jingled as buckles scraped against each other.

I had taught her how dangerous that was myself, forcing a fall.   I snapped at her.  “Pay attention!”

She turned her head back around, her displeasure evident in the way she kept her long neck stiff and shook it from time to time, as if a swarm of flies had settled on her skin.

Stripes had a reputation for being as stubborn as her master.  She started prancing.  She’d never misbehaved like this for me – I had helped break her to harness and shown Chelo had to rub her down and feed her and watch for sores and thorns.  I shifted my weight and gathered the reins closer in my hands, holding them just tight enough to signal that I was in control.

Akashi rode by, glancing at Stripes, who had started prancing.  He pulled up his own mount and narrowed his eyes at the fractious hebra before looking at me in that way of his, all intensity focused entirely on me.  Although we were lucky to have him in the West Band, I still didn’t like being under his regard. “Can you handle her?” he asked.

He himself had helped train me to train hebras, so his words stung.  “Of course I can.”

A trace of worry or doubt touched his eyes.  Maybe he was like Stripes, worried about Chelo and Liam.  Maybe he knew where they went.  But if he did, he didn’t pass it on to me. He just nodded and went on, riding the line like a dog, offering help, encouragement, or admonition as required.

No sooner had he truly gone a few wagons past, when Stripes reared up in her traces.   I tugged her down, almost standing myself.  I smelled the fear on her then, and her nostrils quivered.

She bugled, a high ululating call that rose up the cliff wall and bounced out into the clear over the valley to our right.  Surely even the people in Artistos, far below, heard her.  And if they didn’t hear her, they heard the others, as first Brown Bead and then Girl-of-Grass and then Nix and Star and Moon-face and eventually all hundred or more hebras bugled together,  as if they were all watching and all of them had spotted a pack of predators.

I tensed, hoping they wouldn’t run.

Dogs began to bark.

A high-pitched whine touched my ears even over the calls and stamping feet of the frightened animals.  Stripes had stopped in her traces, feet planted and splayed, looking up.

So I looked up.

A silver cylinder floated above our heads.  It was bigger than our biggest wagon, and smaller than the silver ship Joseph had stolen from the plain.  Not quite round, but as if a round thing had been stepped on and squished just a bit.  Two flat wedges came out the sides, like a mash between fins and wings, widest at the back.

It wiggled, as if it were waving.

The noise it made grew until it was louder than the hebras and the dogs, until it stilled them all.  The silver cylinder seemed to hold in the air, to float for just long enough that I was scared it would fall down into void below and land on the town or in the Lace River.

But then it – simply left.  It moved so fast that it became quickly small and quiet, a silver bee going away from us over the ocean and then nothing.

In its aftermath a silence fell.  No barks.  No bugles.  Just the whisper of breeze in the trees.   Everywhere I looked the drivers and walkers and handlers looked at the empty sky.

A child cried.

People began to call to their dogs and to settle the hebras.

Stripes let out a long low moan, a sound I’d never heard from a hebra before.  I immediately knew what she was telling me.  Chelo and Liam had gone.  There had been no sign they meant to leave.  Chelo could have spent an extra moment with me, or given Stripes an extra treat.  She hadn’t even taken her clothes.
Akashi rode up and down the line, calling orders to move, to keep going, to gather, to focus.   The inside of my chest felt cold and empty.  Stripes walked ahead of me with her head bowed.

After a hundred steps and a hundred more, I noticed the day warm.  Sweat fell down my face, mixing with tears on my cheek, and I looked up at the sky over and over.

It remained empty.

Once, when Akashi rode by, I swear I saw tears on his face, too.

Liam was his son, and Chelo my friend.

The next time he came by, the tears were gone, but they had left faint tracks in the road-dust that coated his cheeks.   He couldn’t take my hand while we were moving, but he held his out in a gesture of support and his voice rose over the sound of the turning wagon wheels and the breath of dogs and the clop of hebras hooves on the hard road.   “I knew about the skimmer.  It’s called The Burning Void.  It isn’t ours.”

Of course it wasn’t.  The invaders had brought it, and that was where Chelo and Joseph went – to wherever their parent’s left things like The Burning Void.  To a secret place.  I looked away from him, and spoke loudly.  “Did you know they would leave?”

“They can’t fly it.”

I looked up at the sky, light blue so the middle above me was almost white.  I knew who it had to be, although she was only  a face and a set of rumors to me.  “Kayleen?”

“Only she or Joseph could fly it.”

Joseph had flown away seasons ago, and never returned.  A fear seized my stomach. “Can the skimmer go to the stars?”

“No.”

“Do you think they’ll come back?”

He swallowed, looking both angry and lost at once, like the two emotions warred in him.  He almost never looked that vulnerable, not to me.  “I hope they do.”

“I will hope with you.”

In that moment, Stripes snorted and looked at up both of us, as if she understood.  Perhaps she did.  Hebras understood it when we gave them commands, after all.

Akashi rode on up the line, his head bowed.

I wished Chelo and Liam were back and that mom was lecturing me about staying in her sight when we got above the High Road.

At that moment, I had no idea how much would change before I saw them again.  I only knew that the place on the bench where Chelo often sat beside me felt cold and empty.

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Wings of Creation: Chapter One

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

wingsofcreationcoversmall.jpgJoseph: The Ship’s Nursery

Space is full of stark beauty and darkness, and largely empty. But there are still surprises in it. The day our plans were changed started with only the small chaos of children and a dog.

I leaned against the warm wall of the simulated sun in the nursery, hearing Chelo, my beloved sister, my best support in the whole world, laugh as she watched her son. Two modified maintenance bots trailed after one-and-a-half-year-old Jherrel as he toddled from Chelo’s arms toward me. The bots looked like a cross between dogs and spiders, scuttling on four feet and holding two up, ready to save Jherrel from any emergency, including himself. It amazed me that he hadn’t figured out how to wreck the whole ship yet. If he were older, he might have.

Certainly, the nursery floors and walls showed evidence of the reasons we kept the two children mostly contained; the walls were scratched and even, occasionally, slightly dented. The room smelled like bot-grease and the sweet sweat of children. “Un-cle Jo-seph!” Jherrel exclaimed at me, his mouth twisted in a huge grin. He always came to me right away when I entered the room, as if I were his favorite toy or perhaps his pet dog.

Speaking of dogs, Sasha, the black and white stray I’d taken from Fremont, stood by my feet. Her ribs no longer showed and her coat had grown glossy. She bent her forelegs and head down in a play bow and wagged her tail at Jherrel.

Across the long silver floor, Jherrel’s slightly bigger half-sister Caro actually rode one of her keeper bots, while her mother Kayleen held her hands, balancing her. Kayleen’s smile for me was as wide as Jherrel’s, the one blue eye not covered by a stray fall of her dark hair twinkling a welcome even though she’d known I was coming. I’d spoken to her via the data nets as I neared the nursery, a warm sharing of our silent language.

Caro noticed me and squealed, but then Caro squealed a lot. Verbal, like her mom. Kayleen stood up and Caro got a little ahead of her. She lifted a foot up onto the robot’s rounded back, maybe trying to stand. Her foot went out from under her and she fell backwards onto the floor with a screech.

Sasha raced for the robot, snapping at its upended front legs as it tried to turn around and help Caro. Kayleen came between the dog and the robot, holding Sasha off the mechanical minder and letting it help Caro up.

I burst out laughing, and Kayleen and Chelo both glared at me with their most severe mom faces.

I put my hands behind my back and squatted down so I’d be closer to the children’s height, marveling yet again that Chelo and Kayleen and Liam could possibly be parents. Yes, they were older than me by the three years or so of cold sleep I’d spent on this same journey when I went to Silver’s Home, but at the same time they seemed as fresh and innocent as wild field flowers in the spring.

Jherrel waited patiently for Caro to make her way over to us before looking at me expectantly. I pulled my hands in front of me and opened them, palms flat, so the two tiny aircars I’d carved of cured laceleaf wood lay on them. The cars were baby-fist sized, and styled after the cars they’d see when we got to Silver’s Home. The children snatched them up, toddling around and pretending to fly the toys through the nursery. The robots clattered and whirred after the children. Caro came back to me, burbling engine noises while she flew hers beside my knee.

I laughed and caught Caro’s eye. “Really, they’re quieter than that.”

She ignored me, following Jherrel toward the far corner. Kayleen grinned as she watched her daughter go, completely intent on the noise of flying. “Thanks. It always fascinates them to have new toys.”

“I like making them things. It’s not like there’s much to piloting way out here.”

Chelo grimaced. “I know.”

“It felt good to create something with my hands.” And not my mind. It also made me smile to see the children so immediately absorbed. Sasha uncurled and stood, sniffing my hand for a pet. I knelt and gave her one. I’d bathed her yesterday, so she smelled of shampoo more than dog-breath. She was the closest thing I had to a child of my own, and kept me from feeling too hungry for Chelo’s attention. Long ago, my sister had been as inseparable from me as my dog was now.

Chelo gave me a hug, her voice wistful. “If only they could have open space to run in.”

She needed it, too, but there was no point in saying that. A space ship has no fields or plains in it, no High Road, and even though it is surrounded by stars, it has no sky. We made do with the wall I stood against. It gave them a dawn, midday, dusk, and night. Liam had demanded it, saying his kids would never acclimate to real time if all they knew was the no-time of space flight. In reality, I think he needed a clock as much as Caro and Jherrel.

By now, we were all stir-crazy.

The children were too young for cold sleep, so Chelo, Liam, and Kayleen chose to stay awake for the whole trip. They all swore they wouldn’t miss a moment of the kid’s growing up, but I thought they didn’t want to be separated from each other. How different might our lives have been if our parent’s had taken us when they fled Fremont? But Creator was outfitted for a waking crew, and perhaps our parents had not had this choice.

At eleven months out, we were almost halfway home. I was the only pilot, and Marcus had warned me not to trust the small ship’s defenses to autopilot. Alicia refused cold sleep, and I wanted her near me, so I gave in. She’d teased me she was afraid Kayleen and I wouldn’t be able to resist each other, since we had so much in common. Silly girl. I loved Alicia with all my heart, needed her, spent my daydreams on her. Of course there were special ties between Kayleen and I that came of being the only Wind Readers on Fremont; capable of plucking data from the air itself with no tools. But those were bonds of friendship, even if Alicia did not believe it.

Besides, Kayleen and Chelo and Liam loved each other. How could they not have? They were the only ones like themselves on a whole planet. Their bonds were as strong as mine with Alicia, and Kayleen often looked soft and sweet when she gazed at Liam.

Friend or not, it was time for Kayleen’s lesson. There was so much I had learned while I was away from her, and which she needed to know. The other seven people the ship lay inert in cold sleep. When I’d protested to Jenna she had just smiled at me, and very softly said, “You are the pilot, and you are responsible. Consider it an extension of our agreement on Fremont.”

Meaning, I supposed, that I had led the attack on the Star Mercenaries. Meaning that Jenna trusted me, at least on this leg of our flight – the part where we flew through nothing for almost two years.

I did notice Jenna had programmed herself to wake three months before we got to Silver’s Home. Meantime, that left me to deal with lessons for everyone, and most importantly, for Kayleen, the only possible back-up pilot we had. I crooked a finger at her. “Ready?”

You are a mean man, she spoke silently to me across the data streams.

I know, I answered the same way.

She sighed and glanced at Chelo. “Can you handle them both?”

“Sure. Liam will be along any minute.”

Kayleen followed me up to the command room. At any other time in her life, Kayleen chattered. But on the daily trip to lessons, she was almost always silent. I took a seat at the table, letting her choose where to be. There were only four chairs, and she selected the one closest to me, on my right.

“You can do it,” I whispered, and took her hand, letting it lie calmly on mine, a resting of the two together rather than a grip. If she was ever going to fly the ship, she had to learn to track multi-sourced data.

She dropped her head, not even bothering with preambles any more.

I was already there, waiting for her, linked well enough to the streams of ship’s data that I simply breathed information. With a nearly palpable twist of effort, Kayleen caught up to me, suffering as I drilled her quickly on ship speed and gravity, on water supplies and nearby stars. Creator was fast – just under lightspeed – so our place in the starscape changed regularly. Marcus had taught me that even though Creator did the daily course charts, a real pilot would know these things. If nothing else, it kept me linked to the physical world.

Pilots went crazy even more often than other Wind Readers. Kayleen knew.

“Are you ready?” I asked her.

Agreement. Something I felt as much as saw.

We matched our breath. I led, slowing her, slowing us both. She did this part easily now. It made me think of Marcus, who had taught me to match breath with him. Much like I was teaching Kayleen now.

She and I folded our virtual selves nearly inside of each other, and plunged into the ship’s library. We started in familiar places – the history of the Five Worlds, which had started as three and, through dissent, become five. As usual, she lingered near the Islas Autocracy, where the Star Mercenaries who had nearly killed her came from. But also as usual, she went on to Silver’s Home. Someday, she would learn the heart of her enemies, but I was no Marcus – I didn’t know how to push her emotionally.

I could push her technically. I began to bombard her with questions.

She twisted her hands absently in her hair, a habit from early childhood that she’d never lost, and which she did now even while in a near-trance. “A family of economic and other interest.”

“What is the Port Authority?”

“A power that hates you.” That came from her conscious self, not the data. I waited for her to get it right. “Regulator of space travel and thus commerce for Silver’s Home.”

“What are the Makers?”

Her answers came fast. She hated this. I knew because the way we saw each other raw and unfiltered inside the data meant we were, in some ways, naked to each other. At least her fists weren’t clenched today. “A term loosely applied to Wind readers who create new living things. Also means the Affinity Group that created the Silver Eyes, the island chain that you left from.”

And where we were returning. “What is Lopali?”

“Home of the fliers.”

“What are the fliers?”

“Humans who can fly.”

“What are the Swimmers?”

“Humans who live under the sea. There are not many of them.”

“How many?”

A long silence fell. Some of the other questions she’d answered before, but every time I asked some new ones, probed deeper. She’d have to figure out how to find this out. So much time passed that I worried she’d become lost. Eventually, she said, “When Creator left, there were fifty-two, but three were starting the de-sculpting and won’t count.”

Very good. I had the strength to open my eyes and watch her, even though she was so disconnected from her body that if she felt her heart beat, she’d probably drop most of the data threads she held now. The cadence of her answers and the breaks between words made clues, but it was even easier to see the autonomic responses as emotions flitted across her face. The small muscles in her jaw and neck tightened, relaxed, tightened, even as her answers remained perfect. But I couldn’t make this easy for her, I owed her better than that. “Where is Caro right now?”

I wanted to scream triumph when she didn’t skip a beat. “In the nursery with Liam.” That meant she went up to ship’s data from the library seamlessly. Harder than it sounded. And her hand hadn’t even twitched.

“What is the condition of the carrots in the garden?”

Hesitation. “We can harvest a few more this evening.”

Good. “What is the best school for Wind Readers on Silver’s Home?”She’d need to go back into the library. I waited.

She didn’t quite make it, her hand pulling away from mine, her presence gone from the nets. I caught her as she jerked up and back, so her head nestled against my arm, the long fall of her hair nearly brushing the ground. A light breeze from the air recirculation systems blew the loosest strands lightly, as if a true wind touched her, and her jaw quivered and tightened before she snapped her eyes open and sat up. “It’s always so hard to be back.” She lifted her hands and clenched and unclenched her fists, then stood and shook her oversized feet. “I forget I have a body at all.”

At least she wasn’t mad at me. Three days ago she’d emerged screaming that I was too hard on her. I wasn’t. She had always been more fragile than me. I had needed to hide for months on Silver’s Home, adapting and learning, lest the flood of data leave me a trembling idiot. After Kayleen had trouble in a place as simple as Fremont, it was all the more important for me to drive her to succeed. I was being far kinder than the impartial data streams of a full economy. They would not care about her.

A klaxon went off, and the data that I still breathed like air thrummed with warning so sharp my fingers jerked involuntarily and my spine stiffened.

Something man-made approached us.

Note:  Wings of Creation will be released November 10th, 2009.  Order a Copy.

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The Silver Ship and the Sea: Chapter One

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

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CHAPTER 1:  OUR SECOND LOSS

Let me start with a nearly perfect dawn on Fremont.  Morning light dappled my legs with patterns made by the broad leaves of the tent tree I sat beneath.  The Lace River ran smoothly fifteen meters below me.  Two of our seven moons shone above me: Faith, large and round, followed by her smaller companion, Hope; both pale in the bright daylight.  As round as the moons, but near at hand and small, the redberry bush fruit had swollen into sticky orbs the size of my thumbnail.  My fingers were stained red.  I sat, twirling a stick idly in my hands, thinking about the summer, which had been easier than most, about the good harvest being tucked into the granaries and the storage bins.  My hands moved of their own accord, restless because the peace made me restless.

Footsteps on the path behind me announced my little brother Joseph, just old enough for light fuzzy down to ghost along his chin and a slight widening of the shoulders to emphasize his thin frame.  He grinned widely as he sat down next to me, and then took the stick from my hands.

“Here, Chelo, let me show you.”  He reached up and plucked a wide green diamond-shaped leaf from a low branch of the tent tree.  He folded the leaf, then made a crack in the top of the dry stick and wedged the leaf into the crack.  “See?”  He twisted the stick, fast, so the black mottling of the whitish bark blurred to gray, his palms flat.  He smiled, impish, his dark eyes dancing.  His hands flew open and the stick rose, impossibly, higher than our heads, whirring like night-crickets.  Leaf and stick separated.  The leaf fluttered down onto my head and I laughed with him.

“Come on sis, let’s go.”  He stood, shifting on his feet, full of restless energy.  He was nearly my height, black haired and black eyed like me, and fast and strong, like all six of us altered.  In Joseph, speed and strength showed in long wiry limbs and well-defined muscles.  Neither he nor I displayed obvious physical differences; we didn’t have Bryan’s size or Kayleen’s long feet and extra strong toes.

We had work to do.  Green Valley spread below us as I followed Joseph down the packed-dirt path to the science guild hall.  Artistos nestled against the Lace Forest. The Lace River, behind us now as we walked, bordered Artistos to the north, cliffs marched up and away to the east, cleared land gave way to thick forest to the south. Another cliff-face bounded the valley, falling westward to the Grass Plains which themselves ended in the sea.  The town itself spread neatly out from the largest open space, Comm ons Park, and thin strips of green parkway ran beside the river, buffering Artistos and making space for fishing and gathering and walking.  The two cliffs, up and down, the high road and the sea road, forced the town’s small industrial base north, across the river, and barns and fields bellied up to wide tent-trees and tall thick-trunked near-elm of the forest in the south.  Dense thorny underbrush made the forest a true barrier.  All the land we needed so far had been long cleared, although each spring we fought the forest to maintain the boundary.

Nearly everyone lived as close to Commons Park and the guild halls as they could, so the edges of Artistos were empty. Still, Joseph and I passed small groups of people hurrying to cross the river and begin work.

We began to walk faster.  If we were last, Nava would be mad.  We already angered her just by being ourselves, by being born at all.  We couldn’t help that, but we could be on time.  Our jobs were simple.  For us.  Joseph would slip open to the data nets, feeling the subtle messages carried on the air from the networks; his blood, bone, and then brain vibrating with and understanding the myriad stories of hundreds of pinpoint wireless data nodes that surround Artistos.  Today, he would monitor a repair team heading past the perimeter to fix and replace failing network nodes.  Meshed with satellite data and images from Traveler, Artistos depended on the wireless network to track movements of large animals, identify weather, gather seismic data, and provide a host of other information.  The data network served as warning, science, and reassurance all at once.

I would be Joseph’s help, bringing him water, asking him questions from the others and relaying answers, recording as much as I could in my pad for us to talk about later.  I would make sure he ate.

We crossed Park Street, heading for the science guild hall.  Garmin and Klia and May walked toward us.  They were all roughly our age, and in a hurry; at risk of being late for work across the river in the industrial complex.  Klia looked up and saw us, and elbowed Garmin, who glanced our way and grasped Klia and May’s hands, pulling them toward the other side of the street, away from us.

“Good morning Garmin!” I called, my voice as loud and cheery as I could make it be.

Garmin glared at me, just for a moment, and I expected him to say something mean.  But he only turned and whispered to Klia, who watched the ground.  I heard the words, “…darn mutants.  They shouldn’t be allowed out.”

I was mutant enough to hear his whispered words, but not rude enough to reply.  Joseph scowled, but he too, ignored them.

May watched the park intently, as if she expected something scary to pop out of the grass and frighten her.  Or as if she just didn’t want to look at us.  If we’d passed May alone, she might have nodded politely, maybe even have said hello.  In groups, almost none of the kids our age were even that polite.  Joseph and I glanced at each other and walked faster, getting distance between us and Garmin.  We didn’t look back until we ducked into the science guild door.

The main room of the science guild hall was large enough for five hundred people.  Offices, labs, and meeting rooms lined two sides of building.  The walls were wood from the Lace Forest, the roof tiles made of molded river bank clay.  The builders’ guild makes us glass windows, hauling sand up from the beaches and across the grass plains after the fall burn, when the grass is low enough for safe travel.  Guild members set the thick windows loosely in clever slides designed to survive the frequent small earthquakes that plague Fremont.

When we arrived, Nava, Tom, and Paloma waited for us in the monitoring room.  Nava frowned when we came in, her green eyes an icy contrast to her red hair.  “You’re late.”

We weren’t late, we were just last. I ignored her, accustomed to her coldness, her resentment of every use the colony made of our skills.  Her husband Tom, a dark-haired, stocky, and round-faced gentle bear of a man, greeted us more warmly, smiling and handing us glasses of apple juice.  We drank, and I ushered Joseph to the soft blue chair Steven designed so he could lie curled in his favorite monitoring position, hands and feet drawn up into a ball.  It was more like a little round bed than a chair, although Joseph could sit up in it when he liked.  He almost never did.

Paloma stood in the far corner of the oblong room, her back to us, poring over logs from the night before.  “Traveler,” she said to no one in particular, “reported two small chondrite asteroids last night.  One burned up on entry and the other landed in the ocean.”

Tom grunted.  “Could have been big ones.  Gianna said we’ll be in the storm for months.  It’s the worst on record.”

“Let’s just hope all the big ones miss us,” Paloma muttered, her words almost a prayer.  Only when she completed the logs did she look over and smile at us.  She was Kayleen’s adoptive mother, and she treated us, and our gifts, our alterations, as normal.  A rare treat, and I loved her for it.  Even Steven and Therese, who stood up for us, did not treat us if we like them.  Paloma grinned. “They’re leaving.  Are you ready?”

Joseph drained his apple juice, handed the glass to me, and leaned in to take my hand.  “Blood, bone, and brain,” he murmured, reciting the words he and Kayleen used to trigger the changes in their consciousness that hooked them into the data nets.  “Take care of me, sis.”  He smiled, falling away from me, his eyes closed, his face relaxing, slack, as if he were sleeping, as if he were dreaming a good dream.  He loved nothing more, then, than to feel and hear his body sing with data.

Today’s repair team included our adoptive parents, Steven and Therese, who led the colony.  They rarely left Artistos’ boundaries, tethered by their responsibilities.  Perhaps it was the easy summer, the comparative rest, that drew them out.

All together, there were ten, a large group, mostly because they planned to hunt for djuri.  Djuri flesh is soft and almost sweet, tender, a treat when you are accustomed only to goats and chickens.  Djuri herds often come near us in winter, but they stay higher in summer, and today the team took the High Road.  We all hoped for a feast.

The team was tied to us by four of the increasingly rare earsets that allowed people any distance apart to talk, using the satellite network and ground-based wireless nodes to beam clear voice anywhere inside the wireless net. I’d been allowed to use one twice on trips to the Grass Plains with Therese and Paloma to catalog species, and they tickled my ear inside.  We could not make new ones here yet; every one we lost reduced our communications ability.  Joseph though, Joseph could hear the earsets without needing one himself.  He couldn’t speak, but he could hear.

I looked at Joseph.  His body had softened, as if sleeping, and he breathed easily. By now he held at least three data streams in parallel, his agile brain watching them all, interpreting the varied messages from outer pods, the relentless pings of the boundary, and the voice streams from the expedition members, probably laughing and happy to be out, moving easily with their hebras’ fast, rolling gait.

The boundary bells rang friendly exit as the expedition passed beyond the near data nets, the walls, the hard-won relative safety of Artistos.  I wished I were with them, feeling a breeze cooling my sweat, hearing bird-song.  Being in danger.  I turned my face to the window to hide my longing and watched the long fronds of the twintrees in the park across the street and the play of five children throwing hoops on the fine grass.

Twintrees were native, but the grass, tightly controlled, came from Deerfly.  Children could fall on it without being scratch.  Commons Park was the softest place on Fremont.

We waited.  Joseph would speak anything we needed to know, talking through the repair process while Paloma and Tom watched on their own monitors, a step removed from Joseph’s intimate data immersion.

Never one to waste time, Paloma analyzed crop yields, periodically wiping her long blonde hair from her face as she took notes.  Tom and Nava argued quietly in the corner.

Joseph spoke.  “They’re starting up the High Road.”

Paloma stretched and went out.  I watched through the window as she shimmied up one twined trunk of a twintree set, and pulled down a shirt-front full of bitter-sweet fruit.  She came back in and handed me two fruits, round balls the size of my fist, crowned with small thorns.  I set one aside for Joseph, and started carefully peeling the bitter rind of my own.  The salt-and-sour smell of the rind filled the long narrow room.

Joseph narrated the trip.  “Pod 42A.  Test and replace.”  I wrote, my own recording of the journey, kept for Joseph to remember, to supplement the dry electronic recording of events. “Knitting pod data.”  Freed from its thick skin, twintree fruit is small and yellowish.  I popped mine into my mouth, whole, and bit down, savoring the sweetness as he continued. “Complete.  Moving up toward pod 58B.”  Monitoring was a rhythm.  He spoke, I wrote, he spoke, I wrote, I teased him up from his trance to drink water, to eat, he fell back into data and spoke and I wrote.

An hour passed.  Two.

“Djuri herd!”

I repeated his words loudly, smelling grilled djuri meat already.  Tom and Nava drifted closer to us.

Excitement painted the edges of Joseph’s voice. “Gi Lin counts ten, Therese counts twenty.”

I laughed.  The pessimist and the optimist.  I would bet on fifteen.  Djuri are small animals, human-sized, long-eared and four-legged, horned; thin runners that blend into thickets.  I imagined them in a band of trees, dappled with light.  There would be cliff, a stream, the trees, the broad High Road, and then a steep falling away to the Lace River below.  The expedition would break into two groups, one ahead, one behind, and drive them together to stun them.  Most would escape, but not all.

Alarm crept into Joseph’s voice, feeding data back down the pipe, to the expedition.  “Paw-cat above you.  In-line between pod 97A and B.”  He’d have caught the size and shape of movement only.  Enough.  The cats had their own data signature, in the way they moved fast and low and the heat of their strong bodies.  The nets almost never made mistakes identifying them.  Paw-cats loved djuri as much as we did.  I pictured the High Road in my head.  The cat would be in the rocks, hard to spot.  Joseph breathed a relieved sigh. “Steven and Mary see it.  Circling to run it off.”

“Are there more?” Tom asked.

“Probably.”

Which meant he hadn’t identified more.

Suddenly, Joseph tensed, then he called, “Quake,” and then, moments after the words registered, the quake bell rang in Artistos, once, for medium danger.  The window rattled in its clever cage, Joseph shook in his chair, my own chair bumped below me like a live thing, and Tom and Nava and Paloma grabbed for each other.

Then the quake was gone.

We laughed, the nervous relieved laughter of fright.

“Six point five,” Joseph said, then called to the expedition, “Are you all right?”  He began narrating.  “Gi Lin and Therese report everyone accounted for.  The hebras are nervous.  Steven lost sight of the cat, thinks it went up, away from them.  Therese says the djuri have gathered in a knot, the does in the middle, says she’s never seen that.  They’ll try and take some now, while they’re frightened.  Gi Lin can’t make his hebra move.  It’s –” his face screwed up suddenly, and he yelled, “The rocks.  Falling.  Run.  Quake. Run!”  He reached for me blindly, his eyes shut, his hand clamping down on mine, hard and tight.  His eyes opened and, dark whorls filled with horror.  I pulled him in, close to me, looking for a safe place to go.

The only sound I heard for the space of four heartbeats was his ragged breathing.

The quake bell clanged over and over and over: danger, danger, danger. Joseph screamed.  The window shattered outward, tiles fell, the ground bucked under my feet, throwing me on top of Joseph.  My ears were full of the bell, of Joseph’s scream, of Nava and Tom and Paloma yelling, of the dull thud of tiles crashing onto the street and landing on the shattered glass.  Alarm bells rang from the hospital, the school, the guild halls, the water plant,  The ground shivered a last time and went  still.

I gathered Joseph to me, holding him, rocking him, tears streaming down my face.  Why wasn’t he talking to Therese and Steven? To Gi-lin?  To me?  “Joseph, can you hear them?  Are they okay?”

He’d lost control.  Joseph never lost control monitoring.  But if he felt them all die?  What if they died?  Fear touched my voice as I called, “Joseph?”

He hung slack in my arms, as if he were someplace far away, as if he were crushed by the rock fall which devastated our team.  A scream filled me, wanting to burst out my throat, and I kept it in, fighting it, fighting for control.  Joseph needed me.

Nava’s voice behind me, demanding answers I didn’t have.  “What happened to them?  What does he see?”

I held Joseph close to me, not looking at her.  “He doesn’t see anything,” I snapped.  Couldn’t she see his pain?  We needed to be in the open, away from the shattered window, the damaged guild hall, away from Nava’s bad grace.  I tugged on Joseph.  “Wake up, wake up.  Now.  Come on.”   He didn’t respond. His eyes stayed closed and narrow.  His skin felt cool, as if he himself were not there in my arms at all.

Tom came up behind me, gently moving me aside, separating me from my brother.  He knelt by Joseph, who must have sensed my absence; he struggled and kicked, lashing out wildly.  Tom pinned Joseph’s legs, picked him up, and started toward the door.  He looked over his shoulder and caught my eyes. “Follow me.” He spoke into his earset, his voice high and worried, “Report out.  Anyone.  Anyone.”

I followed Tom out and across to the park, thinking of Joseph.  Only of Joseph.  I couldn’t think of Therese or Steven or Gi-Lin yet, of the silence answered Tom’s repeated pleas. I focused on Joseph, limp in Tom’s arms, his eyes closed, his face over Tom’s shoulder completely white.

Soft grass tickled my ankles. Tom settled Joseph so his head rested in my lap.  My brother felt like an empty shell.  I stroked his shoulder, the side of his face, trying to pull him back from wherever he had gone.  My hand moved up and down on his chest; at least he breathed.

The sounds of the colony accounting for itself flowed around us.  Nava, taking charge, using the deep sonorous gather-tones of the central bell, pulling the townspeople to meet at the amphitheatre behind me.  Children crying.  People calling for their loved ones.  Dogs barking.

The guild halls and houses ringing the park nearly all showed damage, but they all stood.  Water from a broken underground pipe gushed up through the tight-packed stones on the street between me and the school.

Kayleen and Bryan found us, Bryan’s eyebrows drawn together in worry. Fear brightened Kayleen’s blue eyes.  Like Joseph, Kayleen could tap data streams, although two or three at a time, not the unlimited number that Joseph seemed able to juggle.  “He’s in shock.”  She reached a hand out and touched his cheek, her dark hair falling over her face.  “How connected was he?  What’s the last thing he said?”

I told them the story. Bryan sat across from Joseph, watching his face.  Kayleen sat next to me, chewing on her lip, uncharacteristically quiet.  She was at least as disturbed as me. It bothered me that she had no answers, no suggestions.

Townspeople poured around us, streaming to the roll call bell, discussing damage in loud, worried tones.  Hilario’s handsome dark face was covered in blood, his arms and hands bathed in it, as if something had opened a fountain of blood in his skull.  Gianna limped.  One group carried a prone form on a stretcher toward the hospital.

It all felt unreal.  We were used to death and danger on Fremont, but by ones and twos, nothing so widespread.

The bell called was for us too.  Bryan picked Joseph up, carrying him like a baby, and Kayleen and I followed, holding hands.  We settled at the top of the amphitheatre, Joseph lying on the grass, his head pillowed on my thigh.  Bryan sat on my other side, sometimes taking my hand.  Our feet dangled over the edge of the wall.  Above us, a large twintree leaned over the amphitheatre.  It was usually full of kids scampering up and down its broad branches, picking fruit and scaring their parents into high-pitched calls for care, but today only two small boys seemed brave enough to climb it.

We looked down into a ring of granite steps falling gently down-slope to a stage.  Built in the first hundred years, when the colonists were more hopeful, the open amphitheatre could hold two thousand easily; fewer than eleven hundred lived in Artistos today.  Empty seats surrounded any gathering held there.

There was no gathering today, rather a stream reporting in and being sent back out in small knots to check streets, record damage, find wounded, do all of the hundreds of things that needed to be done.  Nava and the other three Town Council members assigned work and recorded information.  Tom ran errands for them.  Hope surged in me as the boundary bell rang until I recognized the exit tone: riders being sent to check on the expedition.

Paloma took Kayleen to check on the hebras and goats, but Bryan stayed with us, silent and protective.  So he was beside me when Nava charged up the aisle toward us, standing over us like some red-haired warrior, her hands dirty, her shoulder-length hair hanging in damp red strings around her face, her green eyes boring into mine.  “Has he said anything else?  Does he know if any of them are alive?”

“He seems to be in shock,” I said, as evenly as I could.

“Well, your job, both of you, is to fix him.  We need him back on the data nets.”

The ground chose that instant to shiver and jerk again, enough to jolt more tiles from the guild hall roofs onto the ground, to cause a child to scream.  “I have to go,” she said. “Get him working.” Nava jogged away from us.

Bryan whispered under his breath, “He’s not a machine,” and I heard the anger in him.  Bryan’s strong, polite outer nature shielded him against rude treatment from his adoptive family, who never forgot his altered strength or forgave his extraordinary patience and intelligence.  Patience, however, is not forgiveness.  It is merely patience.  Bryan’s anger burned deep.  Now, it lit his blue eyes, tightened the line of his jaw, and flushed his skin.  He pushed his brown hair from his face with one large hand and stared out across town, his gaze apparently fixed on the horizon.  Bryan was always sweet and patient with us, but like the big sheepdog that helped Stile with the hebras, I knew he could be dangerous to anyone who threatened me or Kayleen or Joseph.

For now, Nava and I both wanted Joseph to heal.  We just had different reasons.

Bryan got up, smiled softly at us, and walked down the hill.  He came back a few moments later, carrying a blanket, a canteen, and a hunk of bread.  He covered Joseph carefully with the blanket and handed me the water and half the bread.  My shocked body welcomed the water, but I simply held the bread in my lap, unable to take a bite.  I stroked Joseph’s head.

Dusk had driven the twintree shadows nearly the length of the park when the boundary bell rang again: entrance. I looked up, my heart leaping with hope and confounded by dread all at once.  Bryan must have seen my feelings in my eyes, because he said, “Go, I’ll watch Joseph.”  I kissed them both on the forehead, and ran down the street toward the river.  They’d be coming in from the north.  I could intercept them at Little Lace Park.  If there were any dead, the searchers would have to pass through the park to take the bodies to the other side of the river for preparation.  I’d pass anyone bringing the living to the hospital.  I ran all out, blood pumping through my limbs, my fingers, my toes, my heart driven to find out, now.  I passed four groups of people before I ran up on Paloma, her blonde hair flying.  She turned toward me, her blue eyes startled,  and put a hand out, yelling, “Chelo!”

It took great effort to slow my steps, to bridle the energy that burned in me and obey her, to go no faster than her pace, draw no more attention.  But I did it.  At least she had long legs.

Kayleen and Tom and about ten other people had beaten us to converge on the riders in the park.  The long graceful necks of two hebras poked above the human heads, nearly silhouettes in the evening light. Tom struggled with a bundle strapped to the back of the nearest hebra.  I ran up to him. Tom narrowed his eyes and looked as if he were going to send me away, but Paloma and Kayleen stood beside me.  He sighed, and swallowed, and continued with his work.  It seemed to take forever.

The burdened hebra turned its bearded head, watching Tom carefully, its wide-set dark eyes curious.  Cold settled inside my stomach.  The body lowered and the shroud opened to reveal Gi-Lin, one side of his face flattened, the other perfect.  Kayleen and Paloma and I nearly crushed each others hands from sorrow and disbelief.

The other hebra was similarly burdened.  Just as Tom loosened the ropes,  a hand flopped out.  Steven’s hand.  His left little finger was missing, an accident from the last days of the war.  It is one thing to be certain of something, and another to have knowledge of it driven into you with the harsh stake of reality.  I landed on my knees on the stony grass of the park, and Kayleen and Paloma knelt on each side of me.  Someone keened, and then more voices.  When I found my breath again, I pushed myself back to standing.  Behind me, Paloma asked, “Any word of the others?”

Ken, one of the men who’d gone to retrieve the bodies, answered her.   His words were choppy, uneven, as if he still had trouble admitting their truth.  “Rocks fell almost all the way across the road. Hard to pass at all, but if someone was on the upward side, they could get to us.  We saw a dead hebra off the cliff, but there are rocks there too, rocks crossed the road.”  He swallowed.  “We did see Therese’s body, but there’s a rock too big to move covering most of her.  We’ll have to go back later.”

I stumbled into Paloma’s arms as the second expected blow became real.

Tom came up, putting his arm over my shoulder.  “Go on, Chelo, take care of Joseph.  You can’t stay in the park all night.  Your house came up safe in the survey.  Go there.  We’ll check on you tomorrow.”  He glanced at Paloma and Kayleen, his eyes demanding rather than asking.  “Can you take her back? Settle her and Joseph in?  Then meet me at the amphitheatre – I’ll be there in an hour.”

We walked back, clutching each other’s hands, stumbling through nearly complete darkness.  Only one weak moon, Plowman, added to the starlight. The town’s evening lights hadn’t come on, for whatever reason. We stumbled through the dark park to find Joseph and Bryan where I had left them.  Bryan carried Joseph, and the five of us shuffled carefully home, crunching shards of glass and ceramic roof tile under our feet.

Kayleen and Paloma helped me tuck Joseph in. Bryan made me a cup of mint and redberry tea.  After they left, I tried to drink the tea, but it tasted bitter.  I wandered about, restless, picking up cups and pictures that had fallen, sweeping the shards of a broken potted plant into the trash.

Steven and Therese should walk in any minute.  I knew better, yet I looked up for them over and over.

I pulled my bedding into Joseph’s room and lay down on the floor.  False crickets chirped outside the window and the occasional call of a night bird sounded from up above the house in the beginning of the Lower Lace Forest.

The night passed slowly. Possibilities whirled inside of my head.  What if Joseph didn’t get better?  What would happen to us now?  Who would take us in? Fremont

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Prologue for the Silver Ship and the Sea

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Fremont

Chelo’s take as told to the Academy, dated July 17, year 222, Fremont Standard

Fremont was discovered in the year zero. Zero always begins the marking of a new planet’s time, as if it did not exist before humans found it.

My story did not begin until after year zero, but I feel I should begin with discovery. With zero. Which is, in a way, full of infinite possibilities. Five bright metallic probes swooped in from Inhabited Space, circled my wild planet, and then, one by one, plunged to the surface. Three landed in oceans, reporting salt and brine and signs of life. One disappeared entirely; possibly swallowed by the hot molten rivers that run on our third continent, the one we call Blaze, after the fires of creation. The fifth probe landed in Green Valley, where we live today. It reported that humans could breathe the air and that carbon-based life existed abundantly on Fremont.

And so, a hundred years later, the thousand colonists came. All original humans, they came from a planet much like Fremont, much like Earth, called Deerfly after the shape of one of its seas, like a deer with wings. The shape of that sea is painted on the outside of the thousand colonists’ ship, Traveler.

They parked Traveler in orbit, taking seven small planet-hoppers to the surface, shuttling up and down for months with people and supplies. Being careful. Even so, Fremont’s predators began killing them even before they all made it to the surface. For Fremont was joyous, riotous, very alive, and very wild. The probes mapped a moment in time: a snapshot, not a movie. If more had found our valleys, had found the two livable continents (Islandia and Jini), had found the wide grass plains, the colonists might have been better prepared.

Fremont rumbles and moves and shifts. Its blood flows across the surface in red-orange rivers and slides into its waters, sending steam hissing and spewing to honor the marriage of water and fire. Fremont’s grasses and plants and animals are sharp-edged and sharp-toothed. Edible, but only once their defenses are breached.

New colonies often fail. Fremont’s almost did.

After a full hundred years, Fremont hosted only fifteen hundred people, now third and fourth and fifth generation, ragged and hungry and tired. About two hundred were wanderers, called roamers, scientists who traveled the continent of Jini, where Fremont’s one city, Artistos, nestles between the Lace Forest and the Grass Plains. The roamers planted and tended a continental network of information feeds, and documented the beauty and danger of Fremont. They fought to gain the knowledge and experience needed for the colony to survive. Everyone else lived in Artistos. Behind fences.

Artistos’ planners designed for five thousand. The houses, of course, were not all built. The Guild building and meeting rooms went up, surrounding the town’s true center, Commons Park. The park was kept up, the town maintained, the granaries filled, as well as possible, by stubborn hard-working people.

The colonists’ stubbornness nearly doomed them. They claimed true humanity, refused to be augmented, to improve their physical nature, to better match Fremont. Their spiritual natures were also stubborn; they did not give up when many others might have done so.

Two unexpected ships landed on the Grass Plains in the year two hundred, bearing my parents and others like them. New Making and Journey were smaller and more flexible than Traveler, so they flew down and landed in the open field next to Artistos’ spaceport, searing the ground black and bending the yellow-green whip grass flat. A mere three hundred people, but three hundred altered. Modified for brains, for strength, for quickness, for long life. My early education on Fremont taught me they were arrogant, but since they were my own people, I prefer to imagine they didn’t understand what they flew into. Surely they had the skills to survive, had they only understood the battleground.

The seeds of the war lie buried in history, history from long before either group came here, but we now call it the Altered War, the Last War, the Ten Years War, and all of us hope that no one else comes to make another one. Most say it started over scarce food supplies, or over demands from the altered that the original humans follow their footsteps. Others whisper that it started over bad advice given intentionally to the newcomers.

I don’t care. I do not know why it became war. Why couldn’t we all live here? After all, we believe both Jini and Islandia are habitable, even though no human lives on Islandia yet. Never mind, for it does not matter. It took only months for war to break out.

However it began, in the end fewer than a hundred altered survived to flee Fremont, taking the Journey. Half of the first colonists were dead. One altered still lived: Jenna — blind in one eye, one arm lost, but fast as a paw-cat. Jenna ran, climbed, hunted, and outfoxed everyone who tried to kill her.

And us. The only altered, as far as we know, born on Fremont.

There are six of us. Children of the dead. We were adopted, mostly separated. Alicia and Liam, both three years old, went to two groups of roamers. Four of us went to Artistos. My brother and I remained together, adopted by Artistos’ leaders, Therese and Steven, as a sign of the end of the war. Kayleen went to the popular, and barren, biologist, Paloma. Bryan became part of a large household in the builder’s guild, who have never liked him much. I was five at the time and Joseph two. Kayleen and Bryan were both four. So I was the oldest. The responsible one.

My new mother, Therese, once told me the altered hoped our unique talents would help them gain a future, help them save themselves. The words she used were “They made you for this place.” My first parents must have been made for Fremont as well, but made for the snapshot the probe sent back, not for the real place. We did not grow up in time to do whatever they made us for. They are, of course, gone. Or dead. Their ship, the New Making, stands upright where it landed. The ground surrounding the ship is still mostly bare and black in a circle as wide as the ship is tall. Wider than twenty of us lying down. It reminds us of our heritage. It remains locked, inaccessible.

It is twelve years since the end of the Black War, but it has not been twelve years of peace. The first colonists returned to an enemy that had harried their flank, and in some ways had become their ally, as they fought the altered. They returned to the struggle to survive Fremont.

I barely remember my first parents. They floated in and out of our lives like smoke, coming to our tents late at night, exhausted, then leaving again at daybreak. I do remember Chiaro, one of the last altered to be killed. She raised us. She was our teacher. To this day, although the pain has shrunk to a small stone in my belly, I miss Chiaro. Therese told me once that Chiaro saved us, bartered her own life for the six of us, claiming that we would someday be helpful.

Therese and Steven treat me well enough, and I respect them. At first, they were our captors more than our parents. It was only when we became old enough to work alongside them, old enough to begin learning our abilities, how to offer them carefully and subtly, that they began to treat us with respect, and perhaps, as family. My brother Joseph loves them, I think. He has no memory of our first parents. He has little memory of the first few years we lived in Artistos. He does not recall being watched carefully, as if he would turn and bite the hands that brought him breakfast. He does not remember the time before Artistos began to appreciate our abilities, to begrudgingly allow us to participate in the life of the colony.

And why not appreciate us?

I am very strong, and think well about spatial relationships, about trajectories, about trends, about relationships between people. Those skills let me become quietly important, useful without being easily noticed. Joseph, like me, has no external physical enhancements, although he too is strong and fast with keen senses. His extraordinary gift is built deep inside him. He absorbs and synthesizes and directs data, balancing multiple streams in his brain, accepting many inputs, seeing multiple current moments and correlating information. He is so earnest in his desire to please that most love him. And why not?

We all need each other to survive.

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Prologue for Reading the Wind

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

readinthewindcoversmall.jpg

It took Chelo nearly two weeks to tell the tale which we published in one collected stream as The Silver Ship and the Sea.   Reading the Wind is composed of bits collected from Joseph and from Chelo.  This is where Chelo picked up the story effective  August  3rd, 222.

The last story I told you was of our sundering.  The long war for the wild planet Fremont ripped the seven of us apart:  it sent away my brother Joseph, his sweetheart Alicia, our friend Bryan, and our best protector, damaged and broken Jenna.  The sundering sent them to the stars aboard the silver ship, the New Making.  It left three of us on Fremont: three genetically changed teens amongst a few thousand original humans.

I could have stayed in Artistos, where I grew up, but Artistos would have been full of Joseph’s ghost: in our house, in the guild halls, in Commons Park, in the school.

Instead, I went with the West Band of field scientists, or roamers, to build a different life for myself.  That very choice was, in a way, a different and smaller sundering.

So the story I will tell you now begins after both the big sundering and the little sundering, after the ship flew away and after I fled Artistos to become a roamer.

Three years passed between the end of the last story and the beginning of this one.  The first was my year of sharp pain from losing contact with Joseph.  I spent the second year learning to be a roamer, and the third becoming useful, maybe even needed, within the band.  Becoming family.

By the end of these three years, I was happy.  I loved being a roamer, loved being able to hunt and run and be smart and be myself.  The West Band gave Liam and me respect in spite of our differences and we gave them even more success than they had before.

Even though Liam and I didn’t promise each other a future with words, our hands sparked when we touched, and our eyes found each other in any crowd, across nearly any distance.

I had my own little wagon; no small thing.

And every year, we got to visit Jenna’s cave twice.  Our cave now.  We named it the Cave of Power, and there we were learning who we were.

Perhaps, in spite of the gaping hole where my brother had been, I was happier than ever.

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Prologue of Wings of Creation

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

It took Chelo nearly two weeks to tell the tale which we published in one collected stream as Reading the Wind.  This story, Wings of Creation, is composed of Chelo’s tale, her brother Jospeh’s tale, and also of Alicia’s tale.  This is where Chelo picked up the story effective September 17th, 222.

War leaves fear and loss worse than bitterlace in the hearts of everyone associated with it.  There are no winners.   Only scars, and for the lucky, the time to heal them.  We were not lucky.

The first tale I told you detailed how I separated from my brother Joseph and three of the other six people that made up my heart.  The second tells of the events before an even bigger sundering, after Joseph came back.  He saved my life, and the life of my world, the colony planet Fremont.  He won the second war fought on her soil.  Not singlehandedly, but he made the difference.

Joseph almost died.  My children almost died.  Some parts of me died.

So now I’ll tell you about war, since my life is built on its bones.  Then I’ll tell you about the actual sundering, since you asked how I felt when we left Fremont for the Five Worlds.  But since it’s an old memory, I’m going to creep up on it so I can tell it fresh.

I was born during the first war of my life.  That happened on Fremont, a planet big enough and empty enough and challenging enough that everyone involved could have lived there in peace.  That war cost me my parents and many who might have been my friends, all gone, fleeing or killed by the first settlers, who refused to give up their claim.  And who could blame them?  They were, after all, on Fremont first.  They went there to escape people like my parents. They lived through paw cats and yellow snakes and earthquakes and meteors rather than face a world of shifting genetics.

At the end of the war, my parent’s people had to leave seven of us behind:  six children and an injured adult.  The colony raised us, but made us pay for being different.

So you see, even before the Star Mercenaries came, I knew the sharp pain of war.  We were beginning to lose our scars when my own father caused the second war.  He sent mercenaries from Islas to kill everyone on Fremont.  I cannot feel guilty for that, since he and I were separated when I was six.  I didn’t even see him, or know he lived, until the day he died.  But I feel tainted anyway.  How could I not?  You see, my decisions helped further the war he started from the first day the mercenaries landed among us.  I chose the first deaths.  I helped until the day the Star Mercenaries fled my brother’s strength, leaving Fremont free.  That’s a story I’ve already told, and it hurts to think about it.

So on to the sundering.

I remember how my body felt trapped. I lay strapped to an unfamiliar chair aboard the spaceship Creator, watching the only home I’d ever known grown small in a viewscreen that hung above my head.  Already the people I loved were too far away to see; their absence a sharp twintree fruit thorn thrust deep into my heart.

Akashi, Sasha, Maya, Sky.  The hot breath of my riding animal, the hebra named Stripes.  The dead: Nava and Stile and Eric and a few hundred more.  They might as well all be dead now, at least to me.  I had no illusions I would see any of them again.

Fremont was warm, wet, and wild.  The space ship, Creator, was cold, dry, and followed my brother’s commands like a well-trained house-dog.  Far more metal than life filled the hull.

Kayleen and her mother, Paloma, watched over the two children.  For the take-off, they occupied our new, tiny, home – a section of sleeping compartments that shared a common room, which included four ugly benches that could each be turned into something full of restraints and support that Joseph called acceleration chairs.

Liam and I lay strapped into similar chairs in a different set of rooms, unblinking eyes fastened to the last sight we would ever have of home.  We were close enough I felt his warmth as we watched the single city, Artistos, grow so small that the view included the cliffs and the Grass Plains and the Lace River and the High Road and then even the volcano Blaze.  The force of flight kept me from turning my head, so surely Liam didn’t see that a tear fell unbidden down my cheek.  Even though the people of Fremont had hated us, how could they live without us to help them?  Who would stop the paw cats and tend the electronics?

My own family had cast me out.   I could never know how their tales ended, and they could not know how mine ended.

My eyes stuck to the viewscreen until Fremont was only a speck around a sun and the thrust had fallen off enough for Liam and I to look at each other.  He was beautiful, with honey-colored hair that fell around his broad shoulders, and his face in profile now, showing his high cheekbones.   “Is it safe?” I asked.

“To get up?  I guess.”

My brother, the pilot, had told us we could move around when we were no longer forced down by acceleration.  Joseph had warned me, so I didn’t stumble when I felt too light.  I clutched Liam for balance, and he pulled near too easily, as if I were drawing a child to my chest.  A reminder a ship is not a planet.  At least he still smelled like himself, and still, faintly, of the Grass Plains and of hebra.  For that smell, I clutched him to me, breathing deeply while I massaged the stiff muscles in the small of his back.  He leaned down and kissed me, and then we stared at each other for a long time, as if breaking away would be the final movement away from home.

But of course, we eventually slid from each other’s arms.  There were no words for our loss.  It was as great as the gulf between us and home, widening into forever.

Thirst and hunger drove us to the nearby galley for bread and goat’s milk cheese and water.  After, I returned to the viewing room and Liam went to check on the others.  By the time I sat back down and focused on the screen, we must have turned or gone further than I thought, I couldn’t find Fremont in the vast starfield.   Just darkness and points of light that were whole suns.

So many stars.  It made Fremont so small.  Me so small.

Joseph had warned me of the vastness of space and how Creator would be a small speck of dust travelling between grains of sand on a beach of stars.

I had been made to find the positive, to see opportunity in difficulty, to lead through hope.  And what better place to feel the hope of worlds than the incredible beauty of space?  I had expected to live and die on a single grain of sand.  And now, now I was going off to a new future in a faraway place.

This is the loss and awe that frames this part of our story, writ large:  leaving everything we knew behind, and moving through the vastness of space  with our tiny, fragile family.  We didn’t yet know we flew toward beings more beautiful and complicated than I’d ever imagined, and so my worries were diffuse.  Under the awe that filled my very bones, I knew there would be humans in space, and thus, there would be war.

I swallowed and saluted the viewscreen, then got up and went to find my family.  Among humans, there would also be love.  This moment was good for love.

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