A Passage of Stars (21 page)

She gave him a mock salute, and left the cabin.

T
HROUGH THE VIEWPORTS OF
the shuttle, Central appeared in blues and greens and browns and the white tracery of clouds.

“It’s magnificent,” Lily said, leaning toward Heredes so he could hear her above the tumult of the engines. “It’s like a jewel. What’s all the blue?”

He smiled. “Those are oceans, Lily.”

“Hoy. That’s all water?”

“Water and sweet air and the hot summer sun. It is, I believe, early summer where we’re going.”

“Summer. That’s a season, isn’t it? What’s it like?”

Heredes considered this question for a long moment. He finally shrugged with a gentle grin. “To a young woman who comes from a planet which has two seasons, freezing hard winds with dangerous avalanches, and cold hard winds with catastrophic avalanches, I think only experience can answer that question.” He looked past her out the port at the growing land mass beneath. “By the way, the planet is called Arcadia. Central is the government center in the north. It’s different here, Lily, from what you’re used to. Very different. Never hesitate to ask me any question.”

By now she could pick out surface features, flat plains, winding tracks of blue, mountains thrusting up into the atmosphere. What would Unruli look like, divested of its clouds? A barren wilderness of rock. She turned away from the port. “I do have a question. When you go through a window, it’s instantaneous, isn’t it?”

Heredes blinked. “That’s not quite the question I was expecting. And I can’t really answer it.” At the corners of his eyes as he thought she could discern the barest trace of lines in his dusky skin. “We perceive the window as instantaneous. However, there has been a great deal of debate about what the essence of a window in and of itself is. For instance, is it in fact no time at all? Or is it outside of time? And how do we account for the—the visions—that we have.”

“But people, they always experience windows as an instant?”

“Most experts say it’s physiologically impossible for humans to experience them as anything but an instant.” He touched a finger to his lip, considering. “But I’ve also read that some adepts, in certain forms of meditation, certain frames of mind, perceive a window as time. Perhaps
time
isn’t the right word. They perceive it as duration. I don’t know if there’s any way to measure it. I don’t even know if it’s true.”

“I think it is true.” At his surprised expression she leaned closer to him, her lips almost at his ear. “I think Kyosti is one of them.”

He drew back. “By the Mother.” His gaze flashed to the blue-haired man, who sat at the shuttle controls. “Lily, do you realize—” He stopped, frowning. “What if it’s true?” he said to himself, still watching Kyosti. “Mother protect us. No wonder he’s so altered.”

“But I thought you would have known.”

“No. It must have happened since I last saw him.”

“When
did
you last see him?”

Heredes waved a careless hand. “Twenty-five, thirty years ago. I can’t remember.”

Lily said nothing, turned back to the port. Kyosti looked perhaps five years older than her. How old could he have been when he held off an entire battalion? When he saved Heredes’s life? How old could Heredes himself be? Rejuv existed, expensive and not particularly effective; her own father indulged now and then. But the technology that had produced Bach and the sleek, massive bulk of
La Belle Dame
could surely produce miracles of life extension, couldn’t it? Central’s scientists still searched, and failed. What would they make of Heredes? What could
she
make of him?

She felt a hand on her shoulder, Heredes touching her, and she remembered what he had said to her long ago, at the Academy: “Trust me, Lily.” She turned back to him and smiled. They spent the time until landing talking about seasons and surface agriculture and breathing air beneath a cloudless sky without needing artificial aids.

They landed, engines roaring, with a jar. As the shuttle slowed, Lily saw an airstrip, two buildings set on a golden carpet, and beyond that, the roll of hills.

“Those are trees!” she cried just as the engines cut down to idle, and Kyosti turned from his seat in front to grin at her. They unstrapped themselves, collected their packs and Bach, and disembarked down the shuttle’s stair-step ladder.

“Look! Kyosti, the sky is the same color as your hair!” she called above the noise of the engines. Heredes took her arm, drawing her away from the shuttle as she stared. “Look! Are those flowers? They’re the same color as your lips! There’s no wind!”

The shuttle’s engines swelled to a scream. It turned on the airstrip and flung itself into the sky. Lily stared at its arc into the infinity of blue, an arc fading into the golden, bright disk of the sun.

“Lily!” Heredes’s sharp tone caused her to look at him. “Don’t stare at the sun. You’ll go blind.”

“Oh.” She reached down to brush tentatively at the grass with one hand. “It’s sharp,” she said, “but so light.” Neither answered her; they walked across the clearing toward the two buildings. Beside her, Bach sang.

Bin ich gleich von dir gewichen

Stell’ ich mich doch weider ein;

Hat uns doch dein Sohn verglichen

Durch sein’ Angst und Todespein.

“Although I have strayed from Thee,

yet I have returned again;

for Thy Son has reconciled us

through his agony and mortal pain.”

“Wait!” she called, running after them. They both halted, Heredes in the lead. “Do you hear it?” she asked, stopping beside Kyosti. “There is wind—I can just barely feel it on my face, but can you hear it, in the trees? Like it’s whispering, but something we can’t understand.”

Kyosti laughed and took her face, bright with discovery, between his hands. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”

“Is this a summer’s day?” she asked, looking up into eyes that were as blue as the sky. Kyosti laughed again and released her. Turning, she saw that Heredes was frowning, but when he caught her eye he smiled. The wind moved in his brown hair as a lover’s fingers do, with a gentle caress. On her face the sun felt like a warm hand, one entirely without pressure or possessiveness. Nothing contained her; she felt almost giddy. “It’s glorious,” she said.

“We’d better wait for Bach,” said Heredes. The tone of his voice mirrored the expression of animation, almost relief, she had seen in Kyosti’s eyes. “He hasn’t gotten used to the elements yet.” Lily turned.

Bach was rolling in a most peculiar fashion, as if the wind kept upsetting his equilibrium. Lily walked back to him and set a hand on the curve of his underside. Even in the sun his metal-smooth surface was cool. The pressure of her hand seemed to steady him; by the time they reached the men, the robot had regained his stability. He sang a merry accompaniment as they walked across the clearing.

Both buildings were untenanted. Heredes rummaged around, taking several blankets and filling his pack with food and a canteen that he found in a dusty kitchen.

“Isn’t that stealing?” Lily asked.

“Yes.” He handed her the canteen. “Think of it as being for the cause.”

“Which cause?”

He considered her for a moment, but under his grave expression lay an obduracy that reminded her how little she really knew of him. “Our survival,” he said. “Where is Hawk?”

“Outside, lying down.”

“Getting a new tan already, I see,” muttered Heredes under his breath. “Let’s go.” They went outside. Lily had to blink in the sun. Kyosti stood up, brushing grass from his clothing. Heredes tossed him the rolled-up blankets. “That’s your share,” he said. “We’re lucky this post is abandoned. Now we hike.”

Lily surveyed the deserted clearing. “I thought this planet was overcrowded.”

“It is. But most of the population is in the north coast cities. All the agricultural zones are off-limits except for workers.”

“Then won’t we be arrested?”

“Lily. On any planet with as many regulations and restrictions as this one has, there is always a flourishing black market in goods and labor and unauthorized movement.”

“Ah, Gwyn,” said Kyosti as he tied the roll of blankets to his small pack with the long gold tippets left over from the dismantling of his robe. “Always so well informed.”

“And you can stop calling me Gwyn. It isn’t really my name.”

“Mother bless us. What
is
your name?”

“Call me Joshua. That’s as true a name as Kyosti or Hawk, I expect.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Kyosti, looking sly. “If Kyosti Bitterleaf Hakoni isn’t my name, then I’ve forgotten the real one.”

“Like Alexander Jehane,” said Lily. “That can’t be his real name. But I bet he’ll never tell the one he was born with.”

Kyosti began to laugh. “
Alexander
Jehane? Is that what he told you? What—was his mother fell upon by a thunderbolt?”

“Hawk.” Heredes looked, for a moment, much like a disgusted parent. “Let’s concentrate on business. Can you dye that hair?”

“But it’s all the fashion.” Kyosti touched his hair with a hand that seemed oddly pale, until Lily realized that he had stripped his nails of their garish pink color.

“Not on Arcadia, I think,” said Heredes.

Kyosti sighed.

“I like it,” said Lily, blushing, “but it is conspicuous.”

“Very well.” He managed a martyred expression. “We’ll see if you still love me as a bleached blond.”

“I don’t even know what a bleached blond is,” said Lily to Heredes.

It was cool under the trees. As they walked, Lily discerned a hundred noises blended into the expanse of air: the wind in its soft conversation with the trees; the snap of a branch breaking; the stuttering chitter of an unseen creature. The ground gave slightly beneath her feet, muffling the weight of their footsteps. Later a gurgling whisper approached them, growing louder as they walked. Neither of the men seemed alarmed. They came up to it at last: water, in a shallow, rock-strewn channel, rushing along as if it were the wind given substance. Kyosti stooped to drink from it, exclaiming as his fingers touched it. Lily knelt. It was bitterly cold. The water tugged against her skin. She could not bring herself to drink from it. They followed it down the slopes.

At dusk they came to the edge of the forest. Beyond them stretched low hills ribboned with fields and terraces. Above, the first stars winked into view. She stared up at them until Heredes called to her. They ate, and afterward he led her to the stream to wash.

“Wash in
water
?”

“Yes, Lily. It’s how most people wash.”

“Not in sonics?” She put a dubious hand in the cold rushing flow.

“Most planets don’t have enough energy for that particular luxury.”

“We certainly never had enough water on Unruli to waste it like this,” she replied, but she washed her hands and face. They went back together, and Lily got a blanket and lay down. Heredes went to sleep immediately. Lily gazed up at the interlace of shadowed foliage and stars in the black sky far above. If the earth were to let go of her, free her from its bonds of gravity, would she slowly rise, like Bach, into the infinity of that heaven? She fell asleep.

Woke. It was dark. The air smelled strange, overpowering. There was rustling behind her. She sat up. Past the line of trees, on the border of the low hills, a steady light rose. Security had found them. She was half up to her feet when Kyosti whispered her name, coming up behind her. He drew her back to trap her against him.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered.

“There’s a light—” She gestured.

He laughed under his breath. “It’s the moon,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“‘Third seals,’” he answered, cryptic, and put a finger to her lips to still her question.

He led her to the edge of the trees. Wind sighed in the branches above them. There were two moons: one, tiny but definitely rounded, was already halfway up the sky; the other was just coming over the horizon. As they watched, it cleared the hills and began to rise in its muted splendor.

“It’s the crescent.” She turned to look up at Kyosti. In the moonlight, his hair shone as if gilded by silver. “That’s the shape that he painted on his face, under his eye. In the picture that you—that that other man—showed to me, of Heredes.”

“So it is,” said Kyosti, not looking up at the moon at all.

“What does it mean?”

His eyes, too, had a silvery glint under starlight. He smiled. “It’s one of
her
signs. La Belle’s.”

She gazed at the delicate curve of light hanging in the air, stars attendant like awed spectators. “It’s beautiful.”

“As are you, Lily.” He moved into her line of vision so that she had to gaze up at him instead of the moon. “‘Now she shines among Lydian women as, into dark when the sun has set, the moon, pale-handed, at last appeareth, making dim all the rest of the stars, and light spreads afar on the deep, salt sea, spreading likewise across the flowering cornfields; and the dew rinses glittering from the sky; roses spread, and the delicate antherisk, and the lotus spreads her petals.’”

The night held them as if in her own hands; she was like a third presence, yet without personality of her own, an empty vessel to be filled with whatever emotion was projected most strongly upon her, investing her with a particular magic of some sorcerer’s choosing. Lily gazed up at Kyosti’s face, lit half in light, half in shadow. That he had power, perhaps only the power of experience, over her she felt; that he was far older than he looked she knew: his words themselves had the texture of an ancient time, beguiling her across an immense gulf of history.

“Who are the Lydian women?” she asked. Her voice faded into the air around them.

“Long since dead,” he said, his voice delicate as the brush of wind. “It’s rather a sad poem. But the words paint their own image of beauty.”

“You’re beautiful,” she whispered.

“Ah, well.” He eased her down with him onto the blanket he had had the foresight to spread out on the ground. “I’ve always looked my best under the kinnas wheel.”

“What’s the kinnas wheel?” They were tangled, weight half on each other, long lines of warmth pressed together. His breath stirred on her cheek. His lips touched hers.