Bright of the Sky (34 page)

“Tarig,” Anzi whispered.

Quinn fought the instinct to hide. There was no hiding here, after the station steward had seen them.

“We have our story,” Anzi said, her voice husky, though she tried for calm.

Quinn could face them. He had been ready for weeks to face them, even if it was Hadenth, the enemy he could hardly remember. But the brightship filled him with dismay. It swooped down on them like a raptor, and a hungry one. There was something awful about those ships, not bright at all, but dark, dark, and he shivered involuntarily.

“The murders,” Anzi said, frozen in place, watching the ship draw closer, a mile away and dropping altitude.

So, Tarig justice
was
coming.

But maybe not today. The ship suddenly curved away on a new path, rushing up the minoral toward Bei’s reach. From behind, the brightship was just a crack in the sky, a black puncture revealing the black space that surrounded the cocoon of the Entire.

“Why are they going to Bei?” he asked.

“Asking questions, perhaps no more than that. . . .”

If so, then Bei was to admit having had visitors: Ji Anzi and Dai Shen. Anzi, he would say, was looking for scholarship, but she would not suit, and left disappointed. Bei would say she was accompanied by a Chalin warrior of Ahnenhoon, and when they left, they were bound for the Ascendancy on an errand from Yulin. Quinn hoped Bei was a good liar.

They watched the brightship until it disappeared.

When they could breathe again, Anzi rubbed her arms, suppressing a shudder.

Noticing her disquiet, Quinn murmured, “Like a bird of prey.” Then a tendril of memory escaped the trap of his mind, and he thought, They are like birds.
And
prey.

For the rest of that ebb sleep eluded them. Then, as the bright waxed into Early Day, the train finally appeared out of the yellow dust of the plains.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
N THE CONTROL ROOM
, Lamar and Helice stared at the wall screen. Titus Quinn had just evaporated from the lab module. The harness assembly suspended from the crossbar was empty and motionless, giving no hint that, moments before, it had held a 190-pound man. At the moment he crossed over, he had appeared to become two-dimensional. Then his whole body turned thirty degrees and moved backward, like a piece of paper being sucked into a copier.

“Did he make it?” Lamar breathed.

Helice pursed her lips, then said, “Let’s be optimistic.”

That sounded like a splendid idea, optimism. But Lamar was filled with a cool dread. Their instruments couldn’t penetrate the other dimension at will. There was absolutely no way to know.

“How long do we wait?” Lamar asked. What, short of seeing Titus Quinn reappear, would constitute success? And when?

Helice turned to him. “You mean how long before we retaliate against his brother?”

Lamar was often startled by her pronouncements. She looked so clean-cut. She hadn’t had time in her brief life to grow so bitter. Or had she?

Company gossip had it that her parents were both dreds. Or rather, to put it more politely, they’d opted out of their education, going instead for the dole.
Dred
was a word he never used publicly, denoting as it did those of average IQ: one hundred IQ points, give or take.
One hundreds
were the laborers of the world. Those who relied on muscle instead of neurons.

Helice had grown up smart despite her parentage. But no doubt the kids at school had thrown
dred
at her because of her folks, especially when she started to surpass her classmates. Jealousy. Kids could be cruel, often aiming for anyone who hadn’t the decency to be average. The irony of it was that Helice was now jealous of Quinn, and was punishing him for excellence. Abrasive and lonely, Helice doted on her dogs and the damn parrot that went everywhere with her, the creatures that loved her in spite of herself.

Lamar got it in his head to contradict her. “If we sent him into vacuum space, there’s no reason to take it out on Rob.”

Helice frowned. “But that was the deal. A promise is a promise.” She went on, “Plus, there’s Mateo.”

“Mateo?”

“Up for the Standard Test soon. I heard he might take it early.”

She had
heard
no such thing. She was investigating the boy. “Mateo has nothing to do with this, Helice.”

She turned on him. “He’s our insurance that Quinn will come back.” She popped open her water bottle and took a pull.

“If he can, he will. Why wouldn’t he come back, for God’s sake?”

With elaborate patience, Helice said, “Last time he stayed
ten years
. So I upped the ante. Even if the kid tests savvy, like his uncle and his grandfather did, his results are still going to look bad. Quinn knows this. It’s our leash to bring him home.”

Lamar muttered, “Even you can’t subvert the Standard Test.”

“But it’s numbers, Lamar. I’m very good with numbers.”

So
this
was why Quinn had made Lamar promise to protect the family, because Helice had threatened the youngster.

She noted the expression on his face. “Okay, be outraged, Lamar. Must feel good to be so pure. Just remember people are dying in those Kardashev tunnels—hundreds of people every year. And it’s all we’ve got for transport. You think Rob and Mateo and their
careers
are worth more than that?”

“It’s not as though shit-canning Mateo will save lives, Helice. Hurting the boy is just plain vicious. And he’s practically kin to me. His grandfa-ther—”

She interrupted. “Donnel, Quinn’s father. Right. Well, he’s been dead twenty years. All your contemporaries are dead, Lamar. I hate to point out that you are retired—and at the request of the board that no longer found your perspective helpful. You’re out of the loop. Now that Quinn’s in the other place, we really don’t need your advice anymore. Don’t interfere.”

“You hate him, don’t you?”

She stared at her water bottle.

“Because he got the assignment and you didn’t?”

She turned to face him. “I hate him because he’s going to scratch the assignment. He didn’t go there for us, you know. He won’t be on-task, not on
our
task.”

“How do you live with yourself, Helice? How do your dogs stand you?”

Her face hardened. “How do you live with
your
self, Lamar? Look at you, pasty-faced, turkey neck, age spots. And that’s only the beginning. Soon there’s incontinence, impotence, and all the little transplants you can stand. I’m never going to be like you. Never.”

Lamar was stunned. Where had all this come from? “Age comes to us all, my dear,” he said with satisfaction.

“Perhaps.” She paused, resetting her tone. “Sorry for the outburst. That was uncalled-for.”

He nodded, not wanting to fight with her.

“Look,” she said. “I hope as much as you do that Quinn will come back. If he doesn’t, we’ll have to send someone else, that’s all.”

A chime on the control board got Helice’s attention, and she toggled the comm switch. “What?”

“Thought you’d want to see this,” the tech’s voice reported. On-screen, they saw what one of the cameras had captured Quinn from a low angle as he’d gone through the cleansing process before suiting up. The picture showed that his feet hadn’t exactly been bare.

She squinted at the screen. The close-up view showed what looked like pieces of paper stuck to his soles. Helice swore under her breath.

Lamar suppressed a chuckle, but he couldn’t help saying, “He never did mind.” He imagined those were family pictures, taped to the soles of his feet—the pictures that Quinn had wanted to bring in the first place.

Helice stormed out to talk with the technicians, leaving Lamar wondering about her comment,
I’m never going to be like you.

Did she just despise him that much . . . or did she hope for more out of life than most people got? He looked at the door where Helice had just exited. The woman had never learned to live with limits.

He caught his reflection in a darkened computer monitor and turned away, not liking mirrors and the story they told.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

        
This is where the nascence leads: to the minoral;

        
This is where the minoral leads: to the primacy;

        
This is where the primacy leads: to the heartland;

        
This is where the heartland leads: to the Sea of Arising;
        This is where the Sea of Arising leads: to the Ascendancy;
        This is where the Ascendancy leads: to the heavens.

—a child’s verse

S
YDNEY WOKE TO A DRIP OF WATER IN HER FACE
. The stables resounded with the patter of water falling from the roof.

Knowing that the fog must be heavy, Sydney drew on her padded jacket, cinching it tight around her waist. She slipped her knife into her belt, in anticipation of breakfast if she was lucky.

Akay-Wat stirred on her pallet. “The traps, yes?” came her voice.

“Go back to sleep, Akay-Wat.” She wanted no freeloaders along.

“Your mount could bring you breakfast, but he is in mischief, oh yes?”

The whole stable knew of Riod and his pack of rogue Inyx. Again yesterday they had thundered off across the roamlands to test their courage against nearby hapless encampments, and better-behaved ones.

Ignoring Akay-Wat, Sydney slipped across the stables to the door, hoping to avoid the notice of the Laroo sleeping in a pile in the corner.

Outside, the fog met her face in a cool wool. It was early, the Between time. The fog might last until Early Day, by then filling their catchment system on the roof, supplementing the reservoir water that had retreated farther underground in recent days. Sydney snugged her jacket around her and made her way to her traps. She had high hopes for a steppe vole or two. The desert prey liked her traps in the heavy dew times, because they offered a roof—an innovation that other riders had copied from her. Technology in this sway was a receding dream. The mounts could use none, and liked independence from Ascendant things—the engineered food crops, their programmable adobe, their molecular computers.

Sydney liked that the Inyx shunned the mantis lords. Referring, in her former tongue, to the gracious lords as insects gave her a keen pleasure. Once a mantis lord had assaulted her, but that would never happen again, here in this far sway.

The stiletto claw flicked out. His voice, rasping: Now you will look out for the
last time, small girl.
But she had promised herself not to think about that. It was written down.

The things that could never be written down, nor barely thought of, concerned her friend, so far away, so close in her heart: Cixi. When, in her messages, Cixi urged her to remember the vows, they were not the vows of the mantis lords. Cixi had taught her new ones:
Oppose the lords. Forswear the Rose.
Raise the kingdom.
The first two were easy, and she would have vowed them, anyway.
Raise the kingdom
was less clear to her, but Cixi had taught her that the kingdom yet to be was a worthy vow, and for love of her foster mother, Sydney had sworn to it.

Kneeling before her trap, she felt inside, finding several plump grubbies massed around her bait. She clipped them to the chain at her belt to carry them back to the roasting pits.

A noise pierced the fog, the high scream of an Inyx in the distance. She stood, listening, attending. Riod was home. She worried when he was gone, worried that he would stumble, as Glovid had, or that Priov would punish him, or that one of the herds he set upon would teach him a lesson.

Inyx hooves pounded in her direction. By the mount’s sendings, it wasn’t Riod, but Skofke, the battle-worn mount of Akay-Wat.

Drawing close, Akay-Wat announced: “They come with a stranger and large!” Her mount was eager to be gone, and stomped impatiently. Sydney picked up Skofke’s excitement that Riod’s band had captured a monster.

“Bring me with you.”

Akay-Wat extended a leg to help Sydney swing up behind her. On Skofke’s back, they pounded toward the pasture.

“What monster, Akay-Wat?” Sydney asked as they galloped.

“Big as a mount! Dumb as a rock!”

Well, the monster must be dumb indeed, if Akay-Wat thought so. They approached the pasture, along with a throng of Inyx and their riders. Through many Inyx viewpoints, she was aware of the hulking mounts, horned and broad, and their unkempt alien riders. But of course, they were not alien here, only herself. Their smells clotted the air, a familiar stench that had long ago ceased to offend.

Through Skofke’s eyes, Sydney saw Riod, his black hide darker and more lustrous than the others. Also, among the mounts, a troll moved, dark and lumbering.

More Inyx pounded in from across the encampment, massing into a dense herd. Not a good thing. It would have been better if Riod had sneaked in with less notice, since Priov disapproved of the forays. Riod tossed his head and snorted at Sydney, for now staying by his fellow rogue Distanir, an enormous dun-colored beast with one of his neck horns missing.

Riod sent,
Riod is back, best rider.

Priov nosed into the center of the crowd, along with his rider, the detestable Feng. Cruel and big-boned, the Chalin hag still rode despite a withered leg, the result of a crushing fall under Priov. She nursed a particular hatred of Sydney for no good reason except that Sydney equally despised her, and once had beat her in an Inyx race when others would have let Feng win.

Feng spat at the stranger’s feet. “Ya. Ugly as a turd.” The Chalin man— for he was Chalin, surely, despite his lumpish and gigantic form—glared at her with blind eyes. A nice trick, one that Sydney would like to learn.

From a hundred pairs of eyes, Sydney saw a fractured image of the man. The top of his head came nearly to Distanir’s ears, if you counted his prodigious white topknot, gathered up in the military style. His arms were as big around as one of Sydney’s thighs, his chest like a rain barrel. Even on such a large body, his face was oversized, from crumpled forehead to wide chin. In the stony face, the only expression was in his eyes, small and mean.