A Passage of Stars (29 page)

“Damn you, Kyosti,” she said, but now she was merely bitter. “Why are you helping Pero? Why are you helping Jehane, anyway?”

“Because I can’t get out of the habit,” he said.

B
ACH HAD FOUR SCREENS
up on the terminal, monitoring the range of news. On three of the screens, crop statistics scrolled past. The fourth was blank. By evening, all official channels were broadcasting either a looping message for all citizens to return to their homes or a long speech by Senator Isaiah.

“… due to the unprovoked acts of violence against government personnel, we are forced to impose a state of emergency,” he declared in his familiar sermonizing voice. “Stay in your homes. In three days we will allow limited movement for the delivery of food. Brownouts will be instituted immediately in four-hour rotations throughout the metropolis …”

“Except in Central, I bet,” said Lily, turning him down as he began to moralize. As if in harmony, their lights dimmed.

In the morning, Bach found an underground net broadcasting on a new channel. Fifty dead in Esau. Full-scale riot in Byssina—no casualty count available. No contact with the Ridani districts. At least twenty dead at Peko Station.

There was no news of Pero. The underground nets that had gotten on-line broadcast his old speeches. Central raised its bounty to 200,000 credits.

On the fourth day, an old Ridani man arrived, bleeding from deep gashes all along the left side of his body, at their door. As Kyosti tended him, he told his story.

“Ya terrible trouble. Roanoak done burst—riot; worst I ever seen. Ya six troopers be dead, min, first day. Central sent in ya squad o’ Immortals.” His sigh held great tragedy. “One o’ their fellows fell behind, like. Ya crowd fell on him, hundreds. Ah. Ah.” It could have been gasps of pain at Kyosti’s probing, or at the memory. “Beat him to blood and innards. Couldna even tell if he be tattooed or not, but for ya white uniform. Ah. Terrible, terrible. They come back, ya Immortals. They didna even spare ya children. It be all blood, min. All blood, running down ya streets. You be sore needed.”

Kyosti looked at Lily.

“You have to go,” she said.

He held her for a long time before he left, as if he could thereby take the essence of her with him, and then she was alone with Bach.

At first, because she could not go to the Academy, she moved the furniture in the main room and worked out. But the enthusiasm with which she had begun all this, that rush after Heredes, faded as her isolation grew. The unseen but deeply felt center of existence seemed to recede from her. She practiced less. Began to devise, with Bach, circles within circles of disseminating information. Together they built a stand on wheels for him, which he could propel by a clever redirection of his flight mechanism. This harness allowed him to accompany her on the increasing numbers of courier transfers she now ran; having no direction to follow but her own, she spent most of her time on Pero’s work.

Kyosti called her when he could, but there was little he could say over the screen. Once, touchingly, he said he missed her. He looked exhausted. The underground nets reported that hundreds had died in the Ridani districts, that they were still occupied by government troops. But even on the underground nets, they had little sympathy to spare for the tattoos.

Spring unfolded toward summer, a process that amazed her, having never seen it before: slim trees, branched with light-leafed twigs like veins and capillaries against the white and blue sky, swayed slightly at their tops, brushed by the wind, wetted now and then with an obscuring screen of rain. Farther lay the sheeted silver-grey of the pool, moved in scalloped ripples by the breeze.

She heard Robbie speak for the first time since the final strike one night in a three-di bar. Bach had been sent into a back room by the proprietor, he plugged into a terminal and coded information back and forth. Lily waited at the bar. The tavern itself had its overhead lights dimmed to brownout dinginess, but above each billiards table, like twenty-four minor suns, hung a white globe of bright light that illuminated the depths of the table and the faces and forearms of the two players. At the hexagonal corner tables a handful of stas played humans at the sta mathematical game of
bissterlas
.

“Comrades, citizens of the Reft. You know I speak for you. You know that only together, only by struggle, only by perseverance, can we win.”

It startled her, Pero’s voice crackling out over the speakers behind the bar; it was a new speech. She could detect no weariness in his voice, only a touch of sadness. She wondered where he was.

Listening, still watchful, she noticed the young man playing three-di at the table nearest her. First because he was a Ridani, and that was unusual enough, but second because he had a certain lightness of gesture, a mercurial mobility, that reminded her of Paisley. He glanced a final shot into Corner C and took the game from an old, grizzled woman with pilot’s bars on her cap. A younger man, smartly dressed, stepped up and took challenger’s corner.

“… let Central divide us and we shall surely fail. We all suffer from their oppression. But we must bear our grievances to Central. We cannot blame our relatives. We cannot blame our neighbors. We cannot blame the Ridanis. No one but Central is to blame for this assault against our rights. Save your anger for Central. Save your hatred, if you must have hatred, for Central. Save your energy for the struggle …”

“Yeah,” said a man in trooper’s fatigues to his companion. They had paused to watch as the young Ridani made short work of his latest challenger. “So they kill an Immortal, we supposed to throw them a party? Pero makes a bit of sense now and then, I can say ’cause we’re private, but them damned tattoos—” They moved out of Lily’s hearing.

A new man, middle-aged, a respected merchanter’s pilot patch on the sleeves of his gray tunic, came forward to match the Ridani player. Bets passed through the crowd that was growing around the table.

Most people who traveled out over the highroad got their first lesson in the vector drive by watching the three-di tournaments. It was true that the navigation teams, supported by computers, found the correct velocity vector for each individual window within each individual system’s current alignment, but the pilot sent the ship through. And it was while watching pilots engaged in billiards, on those huge transparent boxes filled with heavy air and shifting physical windows that led the player like a maze of angles through the game, that the average citizen felt most reassured about the reliability of this form of transportation. After all, the point of the game was to go from point A to point C
or
from point B to point D by the safest, quickest route.

The merchanter lost. As another challenger came forward, Lily nodded to the proprietor, who had just ducked away to check on Bach. “Is the transfer going?” she asked.

A quick nod. “Smooth.”

A man, military pilot’s stripes on his sleeve, came up for a drink. “Smooth?” He took his drink and followed their gaze. “That tattoo? I seen him over at Charson’s. No one’s managed to figure out how he’s cheating.”

“Maybe he’s a pilot,” said Lily.

This only brought a laugh. “A damned tattoo? Hoo. But we got a treat in store for him tonight. Tseh-Lee’s here; she’ll split him good. You’ll see.”

He left.

“How much longer?” Lily asked.

“You tell me,” said the proprietor. “Hour, maybe.”

In an hour the Ridani beat three more challengers, Bach emerged from the back room, looking ungainly but relatively normal in his four-legged stocks and complaining about his unwieldy disguise in an almost inaudible melody, just as a well-groomed, dark woman in military uniform—obviously the fabled Tseh-Lee—stepped up to the table.

“Hoy,” said Lily and whistled as if to herself,
Just this game. Bach. I want to watch.

Patroness, I feel it my duty to remind thee that any delay jeopardizes our
—

Bach.
He lapsed back into his quiet complaint.

The customary tiny beaded braids of the Ridani clustered around the young man’s head, but his hair was shorter than Ridanis usually wore it; Paisley’s had hung halfway to her waist. A stark geometric pattern covered his face and arms. His hands had a certain delicacy that reminded her of Kyosti. But most striking of all, he had that grace that is peculiar to those people who never consciously think about the impression their body and movements make on observers—the spontaneous coordination that is five parts effortless stillness and five parts impulsive momentum. Watching him, she wondered what indenture was like on Harsh, what kind of work a child such as Paisley would be given. He beat the military pilot by a ratio of seven to four.

The pilot challenged him to best of three, and in the second game defeated him six to five. But despite the win, Lily felt the tension grow. Bets increased to ridiculous proportions. The Ridani must have made a huge sum already—troopers crowded as close to the table as was allowed. On their faces as they stared at the Ridani she saw the hatred Pero had spoken of.

He’s going to get beaten up, she thought. No one will bother to stop it—just like with Paisley getting arrested. Just like with Paisley.

Hush shuttered the table. The military pilot began, and the only sound was the slip of her hand on the cue and the hard sigh of the ball through the box. The vector speeds and settings were at the highest level the program could deliver, a difficulty unlikely to be met in real space. She got through six of the ten windows before a “fail,” and the troopers relaxed.

“Can’t no one beat that lead,” someone muttered, and was waved to silence as the Ridani bent to the start.

He went through all ten windows to finish with an ease that seemed arrogant and, perhaps, deliberately insulting.

“Damn,” Lily murmured as the Ridani collected his winnings and escaped out a side door. Three troopers followed him. “I don’t care what Kyosti says. It isn’t fair. Bach, come on.”

Stepping outside, a warm drizzle met them, a soothing, light hush on the alleyway that they entered. Out to the left a dimmed streetlamp illuminated a damp patch of street. To the right, in the shadowed end of the alley, hidden except for the nebulous suggestion of sharp, jerking movements and the low exchange of muffled noise, three soldiers beat up a huddled body. They did not hear as she and Bach came up behind them.

“For pity’s sake,” said a low voice, indrawn from pain, breaking through in a sudden lull in the blows, “you can have all the credits.”

“Hoo.” A spiteful, hostile voice. “But ain’t he a generous one. Well, it ain’t credit we want, you mangy cheater, but satisfaction for insult given.” There was a simultaneous crack, a gasp of pain.

One of the soldier’s behinds loomed squarely in front of Bach. Bach winked an emerald light at Lily. She shrugged. He snaked out an appendage.

When the light flashed, she took the second soldier in the face with a jab, followed with an elbow up through the chin. Shifted her weight and back knuckled the third, swept him down.

“Can you run?” she hissed to the figure on the ground.

He moved, pushing up, gasped in anguish. “My arm—broken. I don’t know.”

Bach whistled a warning. Lily spun, blocking by instinct, caught a punch on her forearm, punched twice, kicked for the groin. A second flash of light, dimmer, followed by a slight gasp; all three soldiers lay still.

“Come on,” Lily said. Grabbing an arm, she yanked him up.

He yelped, a suppressed scream, and she transferred him to her other side and pulled him forward with her toward the street.

“Can you go faster?”

His breaths came in labored gasps. “Mother of All,” he swore in a soft, choking voice. “It hurts.” He said something else under his breath, a curse, and stumbled. “I’m afraid the left ankle is broken as well. And I can’t see out of my right eye, either.”

“And you’re obviously not even the damned tattoo,” muttered Lily, but she continued to support him.

“I beg your pardon?” Now the voice came much stronger, laced with anger.

They came into the reaches of the streetlight and Lily turned her head to look at him. Stopped—for the space of a moment stared at him. It
was
the Ridani man. He suddenly laughed, a sound bitter with an anguish that went beyond physical pain.

“Sure,” he said. “I bain’t be speaking ya tattoo speech.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“Move it,” she snapped. Leaning heavily on her, he let her lead him down the gloom of the far side of the street. His breathing, punctuated by wordless exclamations, marked his distress; otherwise he was silent. Bach motored quietly along behind them, a dim light winking in each direction.

Detouring through a back street, she helped the man sit on a dirty step that led to a boarded-up storefront. Bach labored up to them.

Patroness,
he sang in a soft voice that the Ridani, panting heavily in exhaustion and pain, could not hear.
My wheels are sticking! This device beest the most shameful use of my locomotive abilities I have ever in mine entire existence been made to endure. Indeed, I could be
—She did not have the breath to tell him to stop. Bach, perceiving this, halted.
Dost thou require my assistance?
he sang, a solicitous tone.

“Just a rest,” she said. Rain stilled the shift of her feet on the pavement. At the Ridani’s left hand, where it rested half-off the step, a small green shoot had broken through the concrete, splitting it as it drove upward into the air. The street was entirely deserted, eerily quiet,

“Sure,” said the young man suddenly in his soft voice. “You must be wanting sommut o’ me. Or else ya confusion hae taked you.” Even in the shadow she could see the discoloration of blood on the right side of his face. His left arm was swollen. “And being as you saved my kinnas, min, I do be in ya complete service tae you. So be it.” He bobbed his head in a sarcastically menial manner, gasped at the pain.

“Serves you right,” replied Lily. She undid her belt and rigged it to hold up his broken arm. “Now, can you go on?”

“Light o’ glory,” he said, a mockery of Paisley’s innocent accents, “ya blessed be green grass angel.”