Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles (2 page)

Cheobawn studied her enhanced table top. Running her finger across the new menu array, she pulled out a submenu and touched another icon. A weather report replaced the menu display.

“Today’s weather will be sunny and hot. Expect highs…“ the machine voice murmured. The weather report droned on. It was not that she needed the table to tell her something she could have just as easily found out by searching the ambient above the Dragons Spine. It was just that she did not feel like getting tangled up in Bear Under the Mountain’s mind just yet. Bear, who danced the world about on his back, was a bloodthirsty creature. It was too early in the morning for such

nonsense.

The noise from her table filled the empty silence. An animated cloud map scrolled across its display underneath the scattering of cups, toys, sheet music, and colored styluses.

She stabbed a finger into the power icon, cutting off the machine in mid-sentence. The mindless voice annoyed her more than usual today. Cheobawn’s eyes wandered around her room, looking for something else to distract her mind.

“You must be at North Gate in 72 minutes,” her table reminded her softly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Cheobawn said as she rolled out of bed, goaded into motion by a formless feeling of unease. She glanced up as she crossed the room and caught sight of herself in the mirror over her dressing table. The strange girl behind the wall of glass wrinkled her nose at Cheobawn.

She had once harbored a vague hope that turning seven would fix everything that was wrong with her looks. It was not to be. Her short, pale hair grew in swirls at the corners of her forehead, defying all attempts to comb it flat. She ran her
fingers impatiently through the curls that wanted to cover her ears and dangle down between her eyes. The same sun that had bleached her hair had also burnt her skin a golden brown everywhere except her face. There, a liberal dusting of dark freckles marred the pale skin of her nose and cheeks. Her smoky gray eyes only added insult to injury. She thought she looked less like a little girl and more like a hunting cat. The girl in the mirror raised her upper lip in a snarl. The transformation to cat was complete.
 

Cheobawn turned away, snorting in amusement. She would never be in love with her mirror like a lot of the older girls, that was certain.

She crossed to her window, threw open the shutters, and leaned out over the wide sill, letting her eyes wander over the sleeping village. The tall whitewashed houses with their rooftop gardens stood like shaggy-haired stone sentinels amidst the lush greenery of the commons, their window eyes closed with shuttered lids as their inhabitants slept peacefully inside them. Nothing stirred there, nor on the paths that snaked around them through the gardens and landscaping.

A flash of light made her look up. High overhead, the transparent membranes of the dome’s apex panels opalesced under the first rays of the sun. A moment later, triggered by the warmth, a handful of panels popped open and pivoted out, the enviromatics turning the light-sensitive surfaces towards the rising sun while the venting fans whirled into motion. Cheobawn closed her eyes, imagining she could feel the first hint of a breeze.

A frown settled between her brows. The dream nagged at her, wanting her attention. More curious than worried, she checked the ambient around it but could not make sense of what she found. Something strange, a thing with an odd alien feel to it, hung just off the edge of knowing. Distance, time, and a chasm of understanding separated her from it.

Cheobawn pushed it out of her mind. If her year of experience at being Tam’s Ear had taught her anything, it had taught her to deal with the most pressing problems first. Time would resolve her confusion. It always did.

She turned her mind to other matters. Her Pack must surely be up by now. Even though they had the dawn shift of harvester duty, Tam would not neglect their practice sessions. Ever since Tam, Megan, Alain, and Connor had taken the name Blackwind and moved into Pack Hall, taking up residence in a single large dorm room alongside all the other Packs, Tam insisted on extra training outside the scheduled physical-arts lessons. Declaring Pack status seemed to have made Tam even more driven, if that were possible.

Cheobawn checked the ambient of the house once more, wondering who else was up. The house was silent. A silent ambient could mean nothing. Awake, the entire Coven and all their husbands could be in the house and she would not know it until she turned a corner and met them face to face.

She considered sneaking out of the house without checking with an adult but then she shook her head. Nothing good would come from it, that was for sure. It was so unfair that Mora insisted she wait until she turned eight before she could train with her Pack.

She returned to her night table and palmed it again.

“Five twenty-seven,” the table informed her. “Exactly twelve minutes since the last time you asked,” her own voice added in exasperation.

She activated her study station again. “That’s two times. Don’t be stupid. Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern,” the other Cheobawn said. She was reminding herself that nothing went unnoticed for long inside the dome. Ignoring herself, Cheobawn scrolled down her study guide to ‘E’ and then touched the word ‘Escarpment’.

“The Escarpment is the name given to the natural boundary created by the overthrust of the continental plates …” the lecture began, the voice a soft susurration that carried no further than the edges of the room. She watched the simple animation showing two continents coming together, one floating while the other sank beneath its leading edge. The video was from the pre-history archives, the time before the tribes had built domes, the animation primitive, the frames obviously hand tinted, the information more entertainment than science. She closed the video and scanned the text that replaced it. Cheobawn sighed in frustration. Like the simple cartoon maps hanging on the walls of the underager’s classrooms, the article was geared for a seven-year-old, the content stripped, the language simple. If one were to believe only in what was taught children, one might think the world ended at the lip of the Escarpment.

She touched an icon that connected her to the dome’s core database. Linked to every other dome by a family of powerful bloodstones, the central crystalline mind contained the totality of tribal knowledge. If the information existed, it existed here.

A security warning appeared, requesting a passcode. Only people who had reached majority were given pass codes. Cheobawn entered Brigit’s number.

Alain, a veritable fountain of odd facts, carried an endless list of adult passcodes in his head. It seemed that as they got older, adults had problems remembering things so they kept their passcodes written down on bits of paper for anyone to find. He told her where to look. Alain was very clever that way. Of all the codes she knew, Brigit’s seemed safest. Brigit had a very relaxed attitude towards rule breaking and would not report Cheobawn’s sins to her other wives unless she thought it necessary for Cheobawn’s well being.

Cheobawn watched the menus on her table repopulate themselves, bringing up a much more extensive list. She found the subject she wanted, pulled out a cascade of menus, and then touched a title. An article about planetary geology appeared on her screen. Scrolling down to the end, she scanned the list of related articles. What she wanted was not there.

Cheobawn growled in frustration. How were you supposed to ask questions about things you didn’t know if you did not know enough to ask the questions?

She chewed on her lower lip, frowning. Time to rethink the problem, as Hayrald would say. Cheobawn found a pre-history file that contained images of the planet surface and expanded it.

Studying the map, she ran her finger along the serpentine line that represented the vertical cliffs called The Escarpment, a line that divided the entire continent, running almost due east-west. North of this line lay the land occupied by the tribes and their dome covered villages. She flicked her fingers over the image. The image zoomed in. More current local maps replaced the antiquated overall map. She scrolled until she found the dome labeled Waterfall. This was home. With this point of reference, she zoomed out again. To the north of her dome lay the mountain range, neatly labeled Dragons Spine. Perpetually hidden under snow and ice, the peaks fed the countless little creeks that ran over the tribal lands, all of them flowing south until they fell off the Escarpment. She found Badnite Creek and ran her finger down its length from its birth on the spire labeled White Dragon Peak to where it ran around Waterfall Dome before continuing south to where it ended at the high cliffs.

The precise details of the local map ended at that line. Below the Escarpment, the pre-history map showed only the general lay of the land, as if someone had laid the dirt bare and recorded the image from above. Thousands of streams like Badnite Creek gathered together into wide rivers that continued their journeys to the shallow sea far to the south. Orson’s Sea, the
label said.
 

But the rivers, in their empty valleys, had no labels and the land they ran through was remarkably lacking in names and effectively anonymous.

Since going out on her first foray, geography had become one of her favorite subjects. She was the best mapmaker in her class. To her mind, there was something wrong with this map if big things like rivers had no names.

She ran her finger down the rivers to where they unwound themselves again as they crossed the flat plain at the verge of Orson’s Sea. Cheobawn, an avid student of the natural world, recognized the shapes of the river. At the delta, she knew, the marshes and swamps sucked the last of the nutrients out of the water before merging with the mineral laden waters beyond.

Through some sort of mapper’s magic, the image of Orson’s Sea showed the underwater landscape as if the sea had been drained for the mapper’s convenience. Cheobawn studied the shallow reefs and puzzled over the ridges and valleys that seemed almost identical to those of the dry land.

She wondered if there existed a pre-history technology that could see under water, then shook her head at her fanciful imagination. Why go to all that trouble? More likely the mappers in the Temples merely dreamwalked to the sea under the influence of the hallucinogenic dreamsmoke so that they could draw the reefs in a guided trance.

Cheobawn laid her palm on the sea. Such a small thing, her hand, to be able to cover a whole sea, that surely must have been thousands of clicks long. Her hand nearly covered all the little dots of land at the southern edges of Orson’s Sea. The islands were so abundant it seemed no one had been inclined to name them individually. They were simply labeled Ten Thousand Islands.

This band of undersea mountains marked the edge of the deep ocean. The image showed nothing but water from there until it disappeared under the cap of ice on the bottom of the world. The label said South Ocean. The mapmakers had not bothered draining all of the world, apparently, for there was no indication of what lay below its surface.

Studying the map, one thing became abundantly apparent. The mapmakers had used absolutely no creativity when it came to naming things. It was as if they had grown tired of inventing names and settled upon the most boring and obvious of labels.

Cheobawn snorted. Elders. Was she going to be as boring when she grew up?

It suddenly occurred to her that she could use this flaw to her advantage. If mappers made this image then the same mapmakers would have been unable to resist the overwhelming urge to label everything. Perhaps the names were there but were just turned off. It shouldn’t be hard to guess what they were.

Thinking herself immensely clever, she studied the land between the Escarpment and Orson’s Sea as if she were the mapper who first created it, then she pretended it was her job to name things. She keyed in the names as she thought of them. Flatland, Orsonland, Southland, Riverland, Greenland. Nothing. She even tried Land of the Thousand Rivers. Nope. But the word Lowland got a reaction. An article bloomed under her fingers. It was a single sentence. The Lowlands is a term used to refer to all those lands situated between Orson’s Sea and the Escarpment, it read. No related articles were suggested.

Cheobawn stared at the offending blankness. This was impossible, of course. All things were connected. One fact led to thousands more. She rephrased her query using variations of Lowland and ran the search again and then again. The data base claimed no knowledge.
 

A cold, unformed premonition washed through her causing the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. What if there was something down below the Escarpment so hideously lethal, so terrifying, that the Mothers hid it from more fragile minds? Cheobawn shook the feeling off, refusing to let her imagination destroy her logic.

There had to an explanation for this lack of information. Was the Escarpment so impassible, the cliffs so high that no one had ever ventured down it to discover what lay under the clouds? Was there a vast and empty land out there just waiting to be explored? Or did the world truly end at the base of the great cliffs? Cheobawn’s mind filled with an image of The Dragons Spine, floating, adrift and rudderless, on an endless sea of clouds. She shuddered, suddenly unable to breath as vertigo washed through her.

“By all that is holy, you are doing it again,” she hissed at herself. She shook the ramblings of her overactive imagination out of her head and thought of the things she had learned from her lessons, things she knew to be true. She knew about planets. Planets had gravity-wells that warped space/time, said gravity wells caught up moons, said moons having more of the same, as did the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe on into infinity. She understood infinity. She even knew the math to calculate gravity based on a location in the gravity-well but she did not understand how a large chunk of the world could be unlabeled and unnamed.

There had to be a word or a code that would make the crystalline hub-brain give her what she wanted.