The Braided World (18 page)

“No, what the Quadi have hidden. There's no time anymore, Maypong-rah.”

“Even though you will be easier to kill outside the king's palace? Especially Zhen?”

Anton knew it was a risk. Zhen knew. “Yes.”

They sat without speaking for a time. He was glad of her company, and that she'd shared the burden of his news with him. Somehow he had grown easy with the woman, despite their conflicts. Though he couldn't remember exactly when or how it had happened, she had replaced Nick as his confidante.

Maypong spoke, finally. “What will happen to your Erth, Anton? We are confused about what will happen to you.”

He thought he knew who she meant by
we
, she probably reported to him frequently. Still, he thought she was more than what Nick said, a spy “My people will die. We have been dying. We have no future.”

“You need our pri.”

“No, we need what we have lost. Although maybe it's pri, as you say.”

Maypong kept her eyes on the rushing water as it began to enliven, struck silver from the morning sun just now cresting the pavilion rooftops. With the sun came a searing heat, even filtered through branches. But the barometer was falling, and rain coming.

Maypong said, “If you take the hoda from us, how will we live?”

“That is not an option, to take the hoda.”

“Thankfully.”

“We're not an army Our ship is not large. We might like to seek hoda as partners, that's true. But it's not our answer by itself.” He tried to get her to look at him. “Will you help us, Maypong-rah?”

She kept her eyes averted. “I am the least of the king's chancellors, Anton. But I will see what is possible.” She spoke with a sadness in her tone. He wondered if she had not been the least of his chancellors, if the king would have spared Gilar, her daughter. Or if it made any difference to her.

“What is a daughter to the Dassa, Maypong-rah? How did you bear—what happened?”

As he feared, raising the subject had offended her. She pulled her legs closer and sat stiffly. She responded, “How did your father give up his daughter?”

That jolted him. How did she know that?

Maypong went on, ‘And his wife, as you term it—how did he give her up as well?” She fixed him with her golden stare. “To keep you from harm, perhaps?”

The words nicked him. Maybe what his father did was to prevent an epidemic. But he never wavered, never grieved.

“Do the Dassa cry, Maypong?”

She rose, but remained staring at the canal. “No, of course.” The music of the flute stopped in mid-melody “It would mean that her fate was for nothing, instead of for the
Olagong. You saw that hoda who came here with me? Who would care for the children, who would help us harvest our lands quickly, when the rivers recede? And if the Olagong is weakened, will the Voi come down the Sodesh?”

He hadn't meant for the discussion to become blaming. Strahan's death and Maypong's sympathy over it had created a moment when he thought certain things could be said. But some things could never be.

The hoda had returned. With her was Zhen.

“Sorry, Captain,” Zhen said. “I've been looking for you.”

He stood. “Something?” By the look on her face it was not good news.

“Yes, Webb was on the comm. We need to get back in touch with him.”

Maypong said, “I will leave you, Anton.”

She turned, but before she could walk away, he said, “How did you know about my father?”

Maypong turned to him. “Oh, Bailey, certainly. She thought that the story might help me to understand you.”

He watched her leave in the company of the hoda and her child. One of three. Not including Gilar, of course.

As he walked back to the crew hut with Zhen, he said, “What did Webb have to report?”

“He wouldn't say without you being there.”

“Ask Nick and Bailey to join us.”

“I can't find them.”

“We need Nick there.” Anton didn't want Nick to be left out again, not if he could help it.

“He's been gone for hours.”

Where would he go? “Did you check the king's archives?”

Zhen looked stony. “That was the first place I looked.”

“Right.” They crossed an arched bridge, then went up a ramp into the main pavilion. He saw how tired she was, her hair plastered against her head, with no thought for a comb.

“Zhen, you can take a break, you know.” Even early this morning when they'd heard the news about Strahan, Zhen
had preferred to work at her bench than to sit with the others and absorb the news together. She'd said she'd rather “work it out.” Meaning, literally,
work.
It wasn't healthy. “You knew Strahan, too. You've watched a lot of good people die, Zhen. There's no shame in grief.”

She opened a sliding screen to the science hut. “I don't do group grief, Captain.”

She was nothing if not frank. As was the whole team. He'd heard
Frankly, Captain
, more than enough, usually followed by advice someone thought he needed. Bailey, Nick, Sergeant Webb—they all had plenty of advice. Only Zhen withheld. He rather liked her for it.

When they hailed the ship, Webb was waiting for them.

“Zhen and I are here, Sergeant Webb. Go ahead.”

Webb's voice came through a soft background fizz:
I thought I should get to you right away, sir, about what's going on. We've been working on that satellite, one of the others that we brought in.
He paused.

Some of it's what we expected, and… some of it isn't. So the part that isn't, we've been working on it. And the computer program says that it's a language, but we can't decipher it. Not yet, anyway.

“Slow down now, Webb. What language are you talking about?”

That's just it, sir. We don't know. Back when we came into orbit, we jumped to some conclusions. We were so focused on the Message, we assumed that the satellites were all broadcasting the same thing. And then we found debris from some of the satellites that had been destroyed by meteorites, and we thought that the remaining three satellites were simply redundant mechanisms to supplant any lost devices. Wrong assumption.
Static filled his long pause.

“Go on, Sergeant.”

Sir, this one satellite is broadcasting a code. It's not noise, like we thought, not a deteriorated satellite at all. Corporal Rodriguez has been running the data through our language program. It's a code. But not the same as the code that we were picking up on
Earth all those years. And its tight-beamed into a different quadrant of space. It's not even our solar system, Captain. We think it's aimed at a star called Gamma Crux, two hundred twenty light-years away.

Zhen and Anton glanced at each other, but neither one spoke.

Captain, are you still there?

“Still here, Sergeant. Fairly stunned, that's all. What else have you got?”

Not very much. Rodriguez says if it's a language, it'll be tough to crack. We've got no clues to go on, no context. This is going to be a language that doesn't even have roots in Earth languages. With the Dassa language, we had a lot of variety of text to piece together. But with this stuff, well, the message is short. Abo …

Anton and Zhen just waited. Webb was going to tell this in his own time….
also, a quick analysis of the broadcasts from the other satellites suggests that the static
—
what we thought was static
—
may be aimed at other stars. Different content, if Rodriguez has it right.

“So you're saying it's not just one language. Not just one star receiving the broadcasts.”

That's it. There are two other broadcasts besides the ones to Gamma Crux and Earth. But we're still working on it. Things have been busy up here, Captain. The funeral…

“No need to explain, Sergeant. Understood. Thank you.”

But sir? Why would they be calling other places? We're all just wondering about that.

2, htn
sighed. Anton murmured to her, off mike, “Because Earth wasn't the only planet depleted by the Dark Cloud.”

“Right,” she said. “Not the only inhabited planet.”

Anton said to Webb, “Maybe they're getting the same message we got, Sergeant. You want a wild-ass guess, that would be mine.”

Mine too, Captain. Just wondered how crazy I was getting.

Only, what's down there, on planet, then? We can't even find our own stuff, not to mention… other worlds. What if it's all a lie?

“Even crazier, what if it's all true? But right now, Sergeant, we're just gathering the facts. Keep going.”

After the radio communication, Zhen and Anton stood silently in the hut. She raised the screen to let in a breeze, and blessedly, one came, bearing with it the smell of muddy water and rotting leaves.

“What is this place?” Zhen asked.

His very question. What was Neshar? And next, Where was the promised information stored? It must be someplace the Quadi considered obvious. They built no temples to withstand the ages, no prominent obelisks to house the secrets of the Dark Cloud. They wished to remain in the background, perhaps for the sake of the Dassa culture, to allow the civilization to rise without relation to an alien and advanced culture.

But what was the obvious thing Anton was overlooking?

“Neshar is the repository,” Anton said, answering Zhen's question. “It's the holding pond of the Quadi. It's all here. That's what I think.”

Zhen stood looking out on the Puldar. “What if other beings come here, like we have?”

In frustration, Anton muttered, “Then they can bloody well help us look.”

Gilar could smell the storm approaching. She breathed
the hot, moist air as the baby in her arms fretted. Gilar rocked her, this babe of Aramee's.

Here in the nursery hut, a half-dozen hoda tended to the infants, laughing with and humming at them. Bahn held a fat two-year-old, bouncing him while the child giggled.

In the corner, an old hoda was singing of the lands of the Voi, where hoda might have real lives. The Voi inducted the tongueless into their army, where they were equal to Voi warriors.

Bahn, thinking her a troublemaker, argued, but good-naturedly, that such hoda would just become slaves to poorer masters. Still, the old hoda said, we can be warriors in that land, and warriors have respect.

If Nuan had been here, Gilar was certain, she wouldn't have allowed the slaves to speak of this, it being disrespectful to Aramee, and dangerous. For this reason, Gilar knew, no one here dared to mention the truly dark thing: that some hoda managed to avoid the contraceptive drink, and sought to gestate babies within themselves because the Voi
rewarded any hoda who came to them bearing a future warrior. In the land where children gew poorly. Gilar fended off the thought that humans also bore children of their bodies. It was a price she would pay if she had to.

Rocking the baby in her lap, she thought of a place where she could be a person of consequence: Erth. Often, looking into the night sky, she searched for the star that the palace astronomers identified as the Erth-star. Near to this star was a world where hoda—high hoda—reigned.

A wondrous sound broke into Gilar's reverie. It was not a hoda song, but something entirely different. Kea was singing something without sense.

Gilar turned to Bahn. What is this she is saying?< Gilar didn't know the song language very well yet, and sometimes signed to Bahn to ask for translations.

Oh Gilar, she is not saying anything. This is Bailey's song, which Kea heard in the forest. <

The notes went up and down and up in a pleasing sequence, one that fit into the mind as a pattern. A marvelous pattern.

When the woman had finished, Gilar signed, Sing it again, sister. < She had never called a hoda
sister
, and it surprised her that she did so now. But she knew very few words, and Bahn made sure she knew that one.

The hoda repeated the song of the human woman.

Then, unbidden by anyone, Gilar sang the pattern. The notes were very difficult, after what they had done to her tongue. In the weeks since that terrible day Gilar had not put her fingers inside her mouth. It was as though if she never tried to touch it, she had no proof it was gone.

As she sang, everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at Gilar. Even the babe in her lap blinked in surprise. Some of Bailey's notes were very high for the other hoda, but Gilar held on, because the high register was where she liked the sounds best.

Old Kea looked surprised. You sound like Bailey. <

A rush of pleasure passed through Gilar. In a moment
the group had turned to other subjects: chores, projects, children. But Gilar was still imagining the song.

Bahn sat close beside her. You have tonal wisdom, indeed, sister.< Her smile was tender. Let me hear your voice again. <

Exulting in this melody, Gilar began again. Kea joined in, correcting her pattern of notes.

Then Bahn put her hand on Gilar's arm. The babe is content,< she signed, urging her to put the infant in its hammock. The other hoda noticed the arm-touch, smiling, as Bahn led Gilar into the shadows in the corner of the hut.

Gilar followed Bahn, because her heart had lifted with a new hope. It had been weeks since she had had any closeness. No one dared approach her, and her scent said,
Stay away.
Until now.