A Passage of Stars (28 page)

“How did you get home?” Lily asked Kyosti when he walked in very late that night.

He merely smiled and went straight to Robbie. “How’s my patient?” he asked, sitting on the end of the couch.

“Walking very well,” said Robbie. “Wanting to get out again.”

“You have your wish,” said Kyosti. “I’m giving you to the Ridanis.”

“What!” cried Lily.

“Call up the underground nets,” said Kyosti. “You won’t see anything but those same damn Senators preaching to their constituents on the official channels. Isaiah, Feng, and Metoessa. You’d think they’d get tired of talking.”

“I never get tired of talking,” interposed Robbie. “Let’s be fair.”

“I don’t believe in being fair,” said Kyosti. “I know how these people think.”

“Hoy.” Lily was peering over Bach’s shoulder. “I saw troops out this afternoon, but—” A screen scrolled past. “Void help us,” she exclaimed. “Three hundred arrested in Ruana. More than five hundred arrests in Elfin and Byssina. They estimate more than ten thousand arrests over the coast. It says here a striker was beaten to death at the Wara District detention center. And—” She straightened suddenly, turned, speechless.

“Ah, yes,” said Kyosti. “Now you see why I am giving our estimable Pero to the Ridanis,”

“Oh,” said Robbie. “That.”

“Yes, that,” replied Kyosti.

“A new warrant for your arrest,” murmured Lily as if she were unsure whether or not she was dreaming. “They’re offering a reward of one hundred thousand credits for information leading to your arrest. That would make most people, especially these days, rich.”

“Central will never find you in the ghettos,” continued Kyosti. “Not even the Immortals will find you. Maybe Joshua could. Don’t argue with me, Robbie. I hate righteous people, because they’re hypocrites. But you, by the Mother, you aren’t. So you’ll do as I say.”

Most of Lily’s courier transactions took place now in three-di bars, because of the mix of its clientele, and because gambling could never be stopped—even with doubled Security patrols and a strictly enforced curfew. Especially when military pilots were among the most celebrated participants in the three-di tournaments.

“But it’s been quiet all month, Kyosti,” protested Lily. “If I make this run tonight it will cut the backlog of classified information that Bach’s been sitting on; it’ll complete the entire sixth level of coverage. One more level, and we’ll—”

“You love this business, don’t you,” said Kyosti. Watching him, Lily thought how much he had changed since she had first seen him. Most of those blatant affectations had vanished, although the seeds of them still lingered in his habitual postures and the slight drawl in his voice. At the moment, he looked—she would have said annoyed, but it was more than that.

“My hours at the Academy have been cut back because of the curfew, Heredes long since disappeared, and now Robbie has been gone a month. What am I supposed to do? And yes, I do like it. It’s the most exciting sparring I’ve ever done.”

Kyosti continued to stare at her. It unnerved her, as if he, the predator, having caught his prey, was now no longer sure he wanted to consume it. “
Abai’is-ssa
,” he breathed. The word was so alien that for a horrifying instant she thought she was not looking at Kyosti at all, but at some other creature. “Spare me her, at least.”

“Hawk?”

“Lily, sit here,” he demanded. He was Kyosti again, but with too much energy.

She sat down on the couch, leaving a meter between them. She checked the placement of the chairs—out of his immediate reach. Bach, at the terminal, had changed his hummed tune midphrase:
Monitoring
,
monitoring
, he sang now, one azure light winking in her direction.

“I had three patients in six hours, Lily. There wasn’t a soul on the street when I walked from the clinic to the station. Not even transients. Just Security and government troops, waiting for the third strike. Robbie’s sweet peace is going to shatter tomorrow, and you’re not going out tonight.”

“All right,” she said in her most neutral tone. “I can do it later.”

“Get out of it now, Lily, before it destroys you.”

“Kyosti—” she began.

He sat up abruptly, like an animal startled out of hiding, and grasped her wrists in his hands. With an effort, she did not pull away from him. “I should never have slept with you!” he cried. “I know it, I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself. You’ll hate me when you find out the truth.”

He fell silent. She said nothing, afraid to disturb this mood.

“You’ll hate me,” he repeated, almost relishing the sound of it.

“Kyosti What is the truth?”

He looked away. “I can’t tell you.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“That’s not true!” He jerked his gaze back to her. “It’s not you I can’t trust. It’s myself.”

When she did not respond, he began to examine the room, his gaze drifting over its contents piece by piece, measuring them, or his place between them: the desk, empty without Pero; the terminal scrolling out official news headlines, half-hidden by Bach; the tiny kitchen counter; the high window that looked out over the park. “They caught me,” he said, as if to the room.

“Who caught you?”

“The League. I was the prodigy. I thought I was invulnerable. I didn’t believe they would arrest me.” Still he did not look at her.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I used to think I was sixty-four.”

“Void help us,” she gasped, losing her careful balance of equilibrium. “How old is Heredes?”

“Do you know how long I was in prison?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Sixteen years, seven months, three days. Eleven hours and thirty-two minutes.” This close, she could see clearly the blueish strain in his hair, and she began to wonder if blue was, in fact, its natural color. “But you know, when I got out, they told me it had been twenty years, two months, seventeen days. Eleven hours and thirty-two minutes.” A mocking smile curved his lips. “A clever trick to play on me. Did they think they could deceive me? Scare me into betraying my comrades?”

“Then what were you doing on that ship?”

Now his gaze focused on her, an acid stare. “Getting as far from prison as possible,” he snapped. “They were fools. Didn’t they know—my sense of time is absolute. Absolute.”

For some reason, this display of arrogance restored her shaken composure. “I see,” she said.

His hands still held her wrists. “But afterward. I used to get sick in windows, before. They so offended my sense of time. Physically sick.”

“You don’t anymore,” she replied, on surer ground here. “Kyosti, you moved.” It was an accusation.

“But they don’t exist,” he said. He looked at her helplessly. “They don’t really exist. Windows. They last forever—not forever—Lily. Do you know what is inside a window?”

“No one does.”

“Hell,” he whispered, as if it were the greatest secret he knew. “Or heaven. Take your pick.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t.” His voice was bitter and he released her wrists. “Have you ever been put in sensory deprivation? Do you even know what it is?”

She left her hands on her lap. His bitterness was easier to deal with than his abstraction. Behind her, Bach broke from his “monitoring” hum into a single phrase:
Wir durfen niemand töten
—“It is not lawful for us, to put any man to death.”

“I was in solitary, but it didn’t work. They couldn’t break me. So they put me in sensory.” He stared toward the window, “You can’t see, you can’t hear, you can’t smell—” His voice faltered. “There’s nothing to touch.” His eyes, almost sly, almost wary, slid back to her. “Finally they took me out.” This time he took her hands gently, pulling her against him as if the memory of that time drew forth from him a need to have all these sensations in full. “Lily, my love,” he murmured. “What if I was in that prison for twenty years and two months and seventeen days? What happened to those three years, seven months, fifteen days? Where did they go? Is that what exists inside the windows—lost time?” He laughed, short and hard. “‘Sharp as Hawk’s mind,’” he said with scorn. “Mother help me, Lily. I don’t know.”

There was a long silence. His pale head rested on her shoulder, the touch of his lips on the bare skin of her neck. He kissed her neck, the hollow of her throat, the line of her jaw, her cheeks, her mouth. Sensation began to rise in her—but he drew back suddenly, releasing her, and stood up.

“So, Lily,” he said, the assumed weariness back in his voice, “we don’t go out tonight. We don’t go out tomorrow—” As if the entire conversation had not taken place. “The Mother knows I’ve created enough violence in my time to see it coming now. Poor Robbie. I’d hate to be an idealist.” He smiled.

It was his familiar smile, but behind it, like a half-voiced suggestion, that indefinable sense that it was different, that something about him was just removed from her experience—but she could not complete the thread to find where it attached. He turned his candid blue eyes on her, eyes concealing, like some buried treasure, the truth that lay deep beneath. She was suddenly reminded of the sta who had been incarcerated in the cell next to her on Remote, but she did not know why.

“Why did you recant?” she asked.

He laughed. “What amuses me,” he answered, “is that no one ever suspects the real reason. Well, certainly, I did it to get out of prison. They wanted to believe me, poor souls. They wanted to believe all of us, us throwbacks, that we would repent our wicked ways. But it wasn’t the solitary. I was solitary enough as a boy. It wasn’t even the sensory, even though they thought it was. No.” He wandered to stand by the window, staring down at the budding park, the slow unfurling of green. “They gave up. They put me back in the main wards. I couldn’t stand all the people. So I recanted, and they let me out.” He measured her across the distance. “Eventually I got used to having people around me again. But I can never go back.”

“To where?”

“You misunderstand. To
what
I was before.”

“I don’t know what you were,” she said.

He did not reply. The light, coming through the window, highlighted part of his face, but mostly he was shadowed.

“Or what you are now,” she added.

“Ah, Lily, didn’t you know? I’m a shaman.”

“All these words!” she snapped, all at once resentful. She stood up. “I don’t understand most of them. And you don’t mean me to. Why should I bother to ask anymore?”

Silence gathered like water pooling in a sink of ground.

“Now I see,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t trust me.”

“What reason have you given me to trust you?”

“I gave you myself.”

“You gave me your body. I don’t know what that has to do with your self.”

He changed. She felt his anger, even at such a distance, felt with frightening instinct that same moment of anticipation before he struck, shattering the chair. Felt that he was only controlling himself by such a massive force of will that if she were to move even a finger, twitch even a lip, he would lose every vestige of rationality. Green gleamed in the depths of his eyes. His very stillness was a threat.

“How can you say that to me?” he uttered, hoarse, and he walked into their bedroom and shut and locked the door behind him.

She waited, straining, for noise; surely he would break something, hit something. Silence, but for the distant buzz of transport vehicles and the faint click and hum of the computer, conversation lost beneath layers and layers of muffling cloth.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but the words dissolved as mist does under the sun.

A cool touch—she jumped, stifled a yelp, and whirled. Bach nudged up against her. On a sigh, she sank down onto the couch. Bach settled beside her, and sang, a soft chorale. After a bit, because she recognized it, and recognized that it was, in a strange fashion, appropriate for Kyosti, she joined in.

O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden

Voll Schmerz und voller Hohn!

O Haupt zu Spott gebunden

Mit einer Dornenkron’!

O Haupt, sonst schön gezieret

Mit höchster Ehr’ und Zier,

Jetzt aber hoch schimpfieret:

Gegrüsset seist du mir …

“O head, full of blood and wounds,

full of sorrow and full of scoffing!

O head, wreathed for mockery

with a crown of thorns!

O head, once beautifully adorned

with highest honor and renown,

but now highly abused:

Let me hail Thee!”

That night she slept in Robbie’s bedroom.

In the morning, Kyosti brought breakfast to her bed as if it were an offering. She accepted it. That afternoon he suggested they walk in the park—helped her on with her jacket, wondered aloud how Robbie was getting on, put his arm around her as they strolled across the green. It seemed, under the warm spring sun, easier to accept this truce than to probe any further into the sources of their disagreement or, indeed, to attempt even to define her feelings about them. On the shore of the pond, under a flowering tree, he stopped her. Kissed her in a way he had never kissed her before, with a tenderness that made her feel afraid for no reason she could describe.

The shots splintered their reconciliation. Two heads snapped toward the direction of the sound.

“That’s coming from Zanta Station!” gasped Lily. Another volley of shots, the scattering sound of automatic weapons ricocheting through the high-rise of apartment blocks. “They’re firing on the strikers!” She broke away from Kyosti, started to run toward the sound.

He caught her, pulled her so tightly against him that she could not even struggle, “Don’t bother,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”

“Damn them!” cried Lily as a third round of shooting shattered the quiet of the park, like a distant celebration. Now, a faint counterpoint, they heard the first cries, screams and yelling nearing them.

“They’re panicking,” said Kyosti. “Let’s go home.”

“Kyosti! If people are hurt, you’ve got to help them.”

“What? In the middle of the park, using their own clothes for bandages?”

“Why not?”

“For one good reason.” He turned her, stared straight into her face. “Learn this now, Lily. We know Pero. We know the Ridanis have him. We have Bach, and the link to Heredes, and we’re passing that knowledge out to the rest of the universe. If they take us in for questioning, if they decide we know something—we can’t take that risk. People get hurt, Lily. That’s what happens in rebellions. People die. Get used to it.”