A Passage of Stars
Read A Passage of Stars Online
Authors: Kate Elliott
“Elliott’s sure-handed and seductive blend of exotic locales, complex interstellar politics, intriguing cultures, realistic romance, and wonderfully realized characters is addictive. I want my next fix!” —Jennifer Robertson, author of the Novels of Tiger and Del
“Sweeps the reader along like a wild wind across the steppes. Tell Kate to write faster—I want to read the whole saga NOW!” —Melanie Rawn, author of the Dragon Prince Trilogy
“[Kate Elliott] spins a splendid web of a tale to trap the unwary and hold them in thrall until the tale is done. Here is another one . . . take care, for if you open these pages you’ll be up past dawn.” —Dennis McKiernan, author of
Voyage of the Fox Rider
“A new author of considerable talent . . . a rich tapestry of a vibrant society on the brink of epic change.” —
Rave Reviews
“A wonderful, sweeping setting . . . reminds me of C. J. Cherryh.” —Judith Tarr
“Well-written and gripping. After all, with a solidly drawn alien race, galactic-scale politics, intrigue, warfare, even a crackling love story, all set in a fascinating world that opens out onto a vast view of interstellar history, how could anyone resist?” —Katharine Kerr
Book One of the Highroad Trilogy
Kate Elliott
Previously published under the name Alis Rasmussen
This book is dedicated first of all to the original Lily, and second to all the teachers who have helped me along the road.
But most of all, this is Jane’s book.
Thank you, Jane.
Will ye gang tae the Hielands, my bonnie, bonnie lass?
Will ye gang tae the Hielands wi’ Geordie?
And I’ll tak’ the high road, and ye’ll tak’ the low,
And I’ll be in the Hielands afore ye.
1 The Academy—Traditional
B
ECAUSE SHE WOULD, INEVITABLY
, have hit her, Lily chose not to throw her glass at her mother.
“And furthermore,” continued the Saress, “if what Hiro has told me is true, I think it is time we reconsider our decision to let Lilyaka continue attending
that man’s
academy.”
“What did Hiro tell you?” asked the Sar.
“It’s not true.” Lily turned to look at her cousin.
“It is too true,” said Hiro, undeterred—or perhaps spurred on—by Lily’s hand tightening on the glass. “I saw it. Six bounty hunters, with blazers, with license tags on their wrists, and Heredes took them all out. He was unarmed, and he scragged them all. And then he calls Security and has all six arrested for assault. What a push!”
“Nephew.” The Saress swept her hand across the tight coils of her head scarf. “You will not use vulgar street terms at this table.” She regarded her husband. “Bounty hunters. I always knew
that man
was a criminal. Well? Will Lily be allowed to continue?”
The Sar considered in silence, a silence that spread to the adolescents’ table in the far corner of the room. Even Eldest Aunt’s whispering to her ancient husband faltered and ceased as everyone else turned to hear the verdict. Lily did not move. The focus of her breathing centered on the tension in her fingers. Finally the Sar sighed. “That is a subject best discussed between Lily and me. In private.”
“And I think this nonsense has gone on far too long,” said the Saress. “Lily has been indulged to a ridiculous extent by you letting her attend class there, while she meanwhile refuses to show any interest at all in mining.”
Lily remained silent.
“You know, Lily,” said her eldest sister, “the Kollek Ransomes need a supervisor over in sector five-oh-two. It would only take a two-month course for you to be qualified.”
“But I don’t care about aluminum ore,” said Lily.
“Spessartite,” corrected her sister automatically. “That vein’s spessartite.”
Hiro laughed behind his hand. “They certainly aren’t going to offer her the tech opening over in Tanrin’s sector.”
“You could have had an excellent bond alliance,” said the Saress.
“That’s true, Lily.”
“Yeah.”
Lily jerked her head up. “What—the one Shardra Bajii Ransome contracted with, that fat Jai Foxmore merchant, just because his uncle owns some fleet of cargo boats? I think it’s disgusting.”
The Sar’s face remained impassive, but he flicked an impatient finger over the square of buttons on his chair’s arm. Strands of light shuddered to life on the wall behind him, tracing mineral veins, tunnels, current and future work, then died, fading back into the flat grey of the wall. “There is other employment available to members of this House, Lily.”
“Should I be daring like Phillippa and try for a civil service posting out in the asteroid belts? But she had to have two children before she could even apply.”
“I’ll never understand why she agreed to be posted all the way out there,” said one brother to another.
“Probably to get out of here,” retorted Lily. “Does anyone here really have any idea of what I’d like to do? What I might be suited for?”
“What you’d
like
to do?” cried the Saress. “I fail to see how ten years of training by
that man
can be put to use, except by enlisting in the government troops, which you
also
refused to consider—not even when the Immortals came recruiting—” She broke off, as if this ground had been covered once too often. “It’s time you realize that you have to contribute to the enterprises of this House like the rest of the clan. And we will start by forbidding you to enter Heredes’s Academy again!”
“No!” With a crack like a sharp exhalation, the glass shattered under Lily’s hand. “Never.” She stood, a single scarlet drop of blood spreading into the white sheen of the tablecloth. “Beg leave to be excused from the table, Sar-father.”
“Surely,” began the Saress, “you won’t allow her—”
The Sar raised a hand. The Saress stopped speaking. “You may go, Lily. I will expect to speak with you later, however.”
In the silence, a last sliver fell from her fingers to land with a subdued chime on the porcelain. She nodded.
At the door she turned back to look at her cousin. “Master Heredes isn’t a criminal, Hiro, no matter what you and your friends in that claustrophobic town say—just because he’s a foreigner.” But even as the door hissed shut behind her she heard voices opening into avidity as Hiro was encouraged to elaborate on his story. And behind that, lower, the Sar discussing the sixth vein workings with his eldest daughter.
Frustration as much as anger impelled her down the hall. She felt enclosed, tiled in, buried within rock. Ransome House might be vast, kilometer after kilometer of tunnel curving away into darkness, forgotten passages ending in abandoned rooms, but it was also utterly contained, sheathed both in metal and in the strictures necessarily imposed on a large conglomeration of people bound together under the surface of as turbulent a planet as Unruli.
She halted at the warehouse lock. The sheen of the walls mirrored her: the slant of her eyes; the pale, graceful line of her neck; her slender, upright figure. There was a set to her shoulders, a cast of her legs in the finely woven trousers, a turn to her wrists, that betrayed her strength and agility. The Hae Ransomes were renowned for their beauty, all willowy height and brown skin and tightly curled hair. Some other strain had crept in to pollute Lily with straight black hair, pale skin, and a stature a full head less than her ten siblings—and, her mother claimed, with irresponsibility. Although less than five years from her majority at thirty, she had not shown any inclination toward a profession, an apprenticeship, a bond alliance, or the University. Had, in fact, shown no inclination at all toward anything except recalcitrance, stubbornness, and Master Heredes’s Academy.
The lights on the door panel blinked red. The gauges ran into the warning zone: storm. How appropriate, she thought, gazing at these signs with the dispassionate gaze of a native as she pulled on parka, gloves, goggles, and hard hat. She smiled wryly, encoding the opening sequence into the panel. When the door rustled aside she slid a breathing plug on and went into the warehouse.
Only a few lights burned. Shadows disguised the distant walls of the cavern and spread, as disease brings decay and disrepair, over the equipment that littered the expanse of floor. Darkness hid the roof. Lily walked, her footsteps muffled on the bare rock, past broken-down mine engines and new machines from the provincial suppliers, to a far corner. Here lay the relics, machinery from the early days, smaller and more sophisticated—machinery her father could not use or repair but would not sell or scrap.
By the time she had graduated First School at fifteen it was obvious she was no technician: the five mechanical Kollek Ransome cousins had laughed at her because her suitability ranking for tech was impossibly low. So she had crept out secretly to the warehouse one night, piqued, furious, and humiliated as well by a failed attempt at running away from home, and she had made one of those ancient machines work.
Barely, not understanding it or its function, scarcely knowing how she had done it, but she
had
done it. It had taken one year before she could communicate with it in the most rudimentary fashion and five more before, achieving reasonable fluency, she had discovered that it could speak and understand Standard but preferred not to use it, because Standard was, after all, primitive compared to the sophistication of its own language. That was the year when, hidden in her room, it had somehow latched onto the University screening “computer programming” examination file and, taking the ten-hour test in fifty-two minutes, had gotten a perfect score—in her name. Five months later, she had received miserable scores on the entrance examination taken at Apron Port, and so ended that sensation.
Reaching the line of dust-ridden machines, she whistled a quick, intricate melody. After a pause, a light blinked in the darkness, steadying to blue, and the reply came, sung, as a recapitulation of that single line in four voices. A spherical shape, perhaps half a meter in diameter, moved toward her, out into the half-light, hovering at her eye level. Two appendages dangled like stunted arms from its equator.
A robot, of course, but when she had carefully asked her tech brother what it was, he had laughed: an ancient line, workings unknown.
In ten years she had learned that its primary language was based on music, that it seemed sentient, and that it was, with a few adjustments, in perfect repair—or so it had once claimed with an exultant full cadence. And because she, Lilyaka Hae Ransome, had saved it from decay and disintegration—the phrases it used translated more closely to power loss and loneliness—she gained its complete devotion and loyalty, and its series name and number: Bach 1689.
It was a felicitous relationship. Bach had infinite patience with her limitations, because, after all, she could only whistle or sing one voice at a time, and assured her she was making excellent progress through the collected works, rewarding her with a variety of pieces from other series, which bore equally strange names: Mozart, Gabrieli, Melep. For his part (she thought of it as a “he”), he loved to play on her computer. She would hook him up whenever she could get him to her room unseen. For she had told no one, not even Master Heredes, about Bach.