A Working of Stars (11 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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“I always wanted a favorite aunt,” Arekhon told her, and went to talk with the woman at the big desk.
“You are the Overseer of Ships and Crews?” he asked.
The woman looked as if she recognized his An-Jemayne accent and scorned it. “Yes.”
“I need information, if you have the time, on a certain crew member of the fishing boat
Ninefold Star.”
“The name?”
“Narin Iyal.”
The woman’s expression changed from scorn to something he couldn’t identify. “She is gone.”
“Yes. I need to know where she went.”
“She is not here. She is gone.”
“Where?” asked Arekhon. “Do you have an address?”
“Gone,” the woman repeated, then made an exasperated noise and switched to An-Jemaynan.
“Dead,
you understand?
Gone.”
For a moment Arekhon could only nod in reluctant comprehension. Then he found his voice and asked, as steadily as he could, “What happened?”
The woman shook her head. “This office does not say.”
“Do you—does this office—know?”
“We do not say.” The woman turned away from him and pulled a file folder out of the tray on her desk, deliberately cutting off his inquiry. “My sorrow if she was your friend. Now I have work to finish.”
Arekhon tried to say something in protest, but the words caught in his throat. He stood for a while in silence, waiting for the woman to say something more, but she kept on working as though he were not there.
Finally he gave up and went away. He was almost out the front door of the building before he heard Maraganha’s footsteps coming up behind him.
“I think I got a lead on something,” she said.
“So did I. She’s gone and we’re fucked.” Arekhon knew that he sounded ungracious, but he didn’t care; he was still trying to absorb the shock of hearing so abruptly about Narin’s death.
“I don’t know. The clerk I talked to—he knew there was more to the story than the Overseer was letting on. I could feel it.”
“Oh.”
“So I leaned on him a little. Not enough to disturb the
eiran
much; if anybody looked, it would just be the language trick working again.”
In spite of himself, Arekhon felt a stirring of curiosity. “And then?”
“He said that if we wanted to know what really happened, we should ask a fisherman by the name of Juchi Haris.”
“Did he say why?”
Maraganha shrugged. “Only that Haris doesn’t go out on the boats anymore—and he was one of the crew members on
Ninefold Star.”
 
 
The wall speaker in the workroom chimed, and the house-mind said, “Your brother has arrived from the orbital station, and asks for your attendance in his office.”
Isayana sus-Khalgath reluctantly laid aside the needle-tipped drill she’d been using on today’s part of her current spare-time project—retooling a basic medical dispensary
aiketh
into a high-level biotech assistant. Strictly speaking, the household emergency closet didn’t need such a specialized piece of gear. Anything beyond the scope of the
aiketh’
s original instruction set would properly be a matter for the family’s physicians. But Isa wasn’t really happy if she didn’t have a device of some kind to tinker with, a small piece of the universe to fine-tune until it shaped itself conformably with her desires; nobody would be surprised that she had set herself to such an apparently needless task.
Her other brother—’Rekhe, who was dead—had been the same way when he was young, building models and constructing small ingenious devices. Then he had grown into a Mage, and had worked with the
eiran
instead, making patterns with the lives and luck of the people around him, until his own luck had failed him at last.
Resolutely, she put the thought of Arekhon away—no point in courting bad luck through brooding on it—and considered the house-mind’s summons. It was odd for Natelth to come down from the station; as much as he disliked living there, he liked the isolation and improved security more.
Whereas I could live on the station year-round and be happy,
she thought,
but what I do needs the quiet and obscurity of a dirtside life. Life these days is just full of little ironies.
Even odder than Natelth’s presence, however, was that he should ask for his sister’s attendance in the middle of what was, for him, a working day. She had no direct voice in fleet decisions—they had divided up the work of the family that way between them in the beginning, when it had been just the two of them against all the star-lords on Eraasi, even against the rest of the sus-Peledaen—and if her own security had been the issue, the house-mind would have already informed her. The quasi-organic intelligence inhabiting the town house knew quite well who had built and instructed its defenses.
“What’s the problem?” she asked the house-mind. “Has something gone wrong in the fleet?”
“It’s a matter of family, Lord Natelth says, and of some urgency.”
“Ah.” Deftly and rapidly Isa cleared away the debris of her mechanical experiments. “Tell him I’m coming.”
Natelth was waiting for her in his office. Her older brother’s black hair had gone grey over the last few years, but he was still a vigorous and attractive man—solid and square-shouldered, the same height as Isa but heavier in bone.
He rose from behind his desk and gestured her toward the office’s bow window, where two chairs and a low table overlooked the streets of downtown Hanilat. A pot of
uffa
perched over its heater on tripod legs, steaming gently; a pair of crystal glasses waited alongside. Natelth seated himself in one of the chairs and filled the glasses with red
uffa.
Isa took the other chair and drank three sips of the
uffa
for politeness’ sake before saying, “So what is this family problem you’re so eager to talk with me about?”
“Strictly speaking,” Natelth said, “it’s not a problem at all; it’s an unexpected opportunity.”
“What kind of opportunity?” Isa asked warily.
“A chance to increase the size of the sus-Peledaen fleet by at least a third, without incurring significant extra expense.”
She sipped at the
uffa
again. It was the family’s own leaf, spicy and rich and brewed up to a vivid crimson. “Um. It sounds good, but if it were that easy you wouldn’t be bothering to consult with me about it. So what exactly do we have to do, in order to carry off this masterstroke?”
“Not we,” said Natelth. “I. The head of the sus-Dariv has offered me a personal marriage alliance, their inner family to be junior line to ours.”
“Who
is
the head of the sus-Dariv now, exactly? To hear it on the gossip channels, everybody who was anybody in the whole family was wiped out at the Court of Two Colors.”
“There’s always somebody left standing,” Natelth said. “In this case, head-of-family defaults to Zeri sus-Dariv sus-Dariv—she’s inner-family, senior line, and it’s pure luck that she went home early that night.”
Isa tried to recall what, if anything, she knew about Zeri sus-Dariv. The answer was, very little: a vague memory of a youngish woman, pretty without being beautiful, met once at an arts-and-letters party somewhere in Hanilat. Isa had been bored by the company—too many talkers and not enough doers—and had left as soon as she politely could.
“And you want to know if I think you should take the offer?” she said. “That’s up to you, Na’e; I can’t help you there.”
“I won’t lie to you—the proposal is a tempting one. The sus-Dariv assets are impressive even if their current luck is not.”
“Somebody tried to kill her,” Isa said. “You may be marrying into enemies you don’t even know.”
“Let me worry about that,” Natelth said. “I’ve dealt with our enemies before. The harmony and order of this household, on the other hand, are not something I’m willing to throw away. You have a right to be consulted before I decide.”
“I don’t know—let me think.” Isa ran her hands through her hair, dislodging the stylus she had put there for safekeeping some hours earlier. Automatically, she caught the writing implement and jammed it back into place, still thinking. The sus-Dariv girl had been living alone in a small apartment, or so she’d said at least twice during the few minutes Isa had spent conversing with her. She would not have any idea how to manage a multiple-node house-mind and a full staff of
aiketen.
Which was just as well; someone with even a modicum of knowledge could get in the way and cause all sorts of trouble.
“You should marry,” Isa said finally. “But this house stays mine to run. The sus-Dariv woman can come here or live elsewhere, however you please, so long as she doesn’t interfere with anything.”
 
 
Arekhon and Maraganha tracked down Juchi Haris in the Blue Nipper, a waterfront tavern with a pair of ragged claws outlined on the front window in azure light. At night, Arekhon suspected, the place was probably something of a dive. Now, in the middle of the afternoon, it was all but deserted. A vidscreen on one wall flickered with the shifting images of a dramatic program he vaguely remembered had been popular three years ago in An-Jemayne; the voices had been done over for translation into Immeringic.
According to the bartender, Juchi Haris was one of the late-afternoon regulars. “He misses a day now and then, but that’s about all.”
“We’ll have a drink, then,” Arekhon said, “and see if he shows up.”
He bought a pitcher of beer and settled in with Maraganha at a table near the back. He’d been willing to work the
eiran
if he needed to, in order to bring
Ninefold Star
’s former crew member into his net, but such drastic measures turned out to be unnecessary. The drama playing on the vidscreen hadn’t yet reached its temporary conclusion before a man came up to the table and sat down in one of the empty chairs. The newcomer was gnarled and white-haired, and wore a fisherman’s pullover and heavy trousers; when Arekhon said, “Juchi Haris?” he wasn’t surprised to receive a nod in return.
“That’s right. I hear you people have been asking questions about me.”
“Yes,” said Arekhon. “I ask pardon if we have offended. But Narin Iyal was a friend of ours.”
“So I’d gathered,” Haris said. His An-Jemaynan had an accent different from the local one; Arekhon supposed that, like Narin, he’d drifted down to Gifla Harbor from someplace else. “Buy me a drink, then, and we’ll talk.”
For answer, Arekhon held up the empty pitcher where the bartender could see it, then pointed to Haris. That done, he settled back in his chair and said, “One thing I have to know—they said at the shipping office that Narin was dead. Is that right?”
Haris nodded. “That part was the truth, I’m afraid.”
The barkeep brought over a fresh pitcher of the bitter local brew, along with a clean glass for Haris. The fisherman took a long pull from his glass and went on, “Thing is, there’s all kinds of dead.”
“You’ll get no argument from us on that,” Maraganha said softly. “We’ve been around. Tell us the rest of it.”
“All right.” Haris drew a deep breath. “We were crew together on the
Star,
me and Narin, trawling for dabbers and flakes in the Immering Drift. The
Star
wasn’t the best ship ever to come out of Gifla—she was old, and her engines were cranky—but she wasn’t the worst one, either. Cap’n Sellig knew how to get the most out of her, when to push and when to let it go, and there never was anyone like him for smelling out the fish. Narin said that he was a lucky man, and maybe she was right—he did well enough off the
Star
to cash in his shares and buy a house on the mainland, and that’s more than you can say for any of the rest of us.”
He looked out at the middle distance for a while without speaking. Arekhon said quietly, “Go on.”
“So
Ninefold Star
got a new captain. I won’t name him, because it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t handle the
Star
like Cap’n Sellig did—he wasn’t all that bad at the work, and who knows, he might have matched Sellig, given time. Narin worried about him, though; said he wasn’t well matched to the ship’s luck, whatever that means—”
“She said things like that often?”
“Yeah. Claimed she’d left the mainland because nobody there believed in luck. Is that true?”
Arekhon thought of the Adepts of Cazdel, who refused to work with the
eiran,
or even to admit of their existence. “I’m afraid so.”
Haris shook his head. “Takes all kinds, I suppose. Anyway, there we were … old ship, new captain, and a season’s worth of fishing to get done … when a big storm blew up in the waters south of the Drift. We’d kept our ears open for the weather reports, so we knew it was out there, but all of the projections had it passing well to the east of us, and the captain wanted to stay out one more day and top off the catch before running back to Gifla.”

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