Rift in the Races (35 page)

She held off pointing out that he was the one who had invited her to begin.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“You don’t understand my people.”

She turned and walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Petulant, again. Sometimes the Puritanical ways of society on Kurr were not charming. They were just annoying. “Your people are pretty backwards on that one, Altin. If you want to know the truth.”

A low rumble sounded in his chest, but it died there, snuffed by exasperation. She was so easily set to pout sometimes.

“I’m sorry,” he said after watching her for a while. “Eventually we will learn. Our people will influence one another.” Still she said nothing, so he added, “And I will learn.”

She smiled, if barely. “I know.” She picked at the loaf of bread sitting on the table. “This is pretty stale.” She’d lost the enthusiasm to ask him about the transmutation spells.

“Yes, it’s a few days old. They don’t get replaced as often as they used to.”

She pushed it away. “So, what did you find out from the ship?”

“I realize that the general consensus of your people is that they are not being pursued, but I thought it wise to look. I lingered on the bridge of your ship there, the
NTA II
, for some time, looking for any signs of urgency. There were none. I decided to let my view slip out of the ship then, to see if I could detect pursuit. I saw nothing. I searched for a very long time.”

“Yes, you did.”

She was irritated. He could feel it. Her voice filled with it just as the lines of her posture drooped beneath its weight. She hated being out here. It was obvious. The liveliness that animated her on Prosperion vanished out here like sunlight behind storm clouds, like a potted flower kept too long inside, away from the window, where in darkness, it wilts and dies. This flower had wilted while Altin’s vision was away. He had brought her even farther from where she belonged than she had been while working on Tinpoa.

“I’m taking you back,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” she shot back. “We came out here to find the Hostiles, and we’re going to do it. So go. Start reading, or do whatever you have to do.”

Frustration returned, but he didn’t want to argue. He turned to go, then turned back. “I could use your help,” he said, then went upstairs.

She watched him climb until his bare heels vanished beyond the lintel. She cursed herself silently.
Why do I do that to him?
she wondered.
What’s wrong with me?

She stood, knowing as she did that she had to work on her attitude, just like Roberto had said. She shook off the funk and climbed to the battlements.

He was staring out into the night when she arrived. She watched him silently for a time. He was so focused. So determined. He was the icon of stability in that way. She’d never met anyone so completely capable of committing to something. She was glad that he was committed to her. The safe feeling came back. She felt even more guilty for her bout of negativity.

“How can I help?” she asked. The softness she put into her voice, and the way she placed her hand on his arm, served as an apology.

He turned back to her and without hesitation replied, “I don’t know where to go.”

His honesty struck her. He was so completely unhinged from pride. He was the distinction between confidence and that foul other thing, the thing that filled the tired old Earth ships whenever things got tense, the thing that had been slowly taking over for the last few years: pride.

His was just conviction and truth. For all his astonishing mind and vast power, he was so simple in that way. She made a silent vow to stop teasing him so much. He was a rare creature, something beautiful, something so unique and precious, teasing him was like experimenting with a species for which he was the singular example of its kind. There was far more to lose in losing him than there was to gain from understanding how it had evolved or how it fit in with all the rest of the universe. Who cared how? Or why? She realized in that moment that she was the product of her world, always picking everything apart, poking and prodding, looking for some knowledge, some deeper insight and, invariably, some way to capitalize and turn it to her own needs. For a moment, she saw herself as the weed that had popped up in Altin’s Eden.

“No ideas either?” he said, misinterpreting her wayward thoughts. “Well, then we’re stuck with my divining spell.”

“No,” she said. “I do have an idea. My thoughts wandered for a second, that’s all.” She shook herself. “Look.” She moved next to him and pointed. “Do you see those two bright stars right there, kind of close together? The big yellow one and the bluish one just below it and a little to the left.”

He moved behind her, squatted some, and tried to sight down her arm. He closed an eye and snaked his head a little from side to side, minor movements, then suddenly stood up and laughed. “You’ve found the picker!” he proclaimed. “That’s my little man picking fruit!”

She regarded him over her shoulder, then looked back at the stars she was pointing at. She considered the section of space near it, then slowly began to nod. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you could shape a man. More of a stick figure than a man, but I see it.” Her nod became more emphatic the more she thought it out. “Although you’d have to ignore a lot. And he’s got a very bright knee.”

He laughed. “An art critic, I see. I like to think of that one as a bit of falling fruit.”

She allowed herself to laugh as well. “Yes, I guess I am a critic, then, because it’s not even the same color as the other one. What kind of crazy fruit tree is that?”

The tension left them like butterflies from a shaken shrub, though Orli was having nothing to do with his explanation of how the one fruit might have turned blue. The argument that ensued was one of laughter and relief. When they were done finding each other again, the business of working together to find the Hostiles was once more a pleasant thing.

“Okay,” she said at length, “the big yellow star above his bright blue
knee
is where you want to go. That’s where we suspect the Hostiles are. You should have just asked me.”

“Why that one?” he asked.

“Because that’s the only place we can go,” she replied. “That’s the only other system we can get to in anything approaching a reasonable length of time—at least if any of us want to get home before we are too old to salvage anything like a real life on Earth. So, since we didn’t get to go home after Andalia, we only had two choices left: your solar system or that one. We’ve already been to yours, so that’s where the fleet was going.”

“So that is the nearest one to my sun, the sun of Prosperion?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But that one is bigger,” he said pointing at the blue one. “And so is that one. And that one.” He pointed out two more stars that were in the same general vicinity, if not part of the constellation he’d devised.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “None of them are the same size. Some are so big, you can’t imagine it. Suns so big you could put your whole solar system inside of them.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Yep. All of it.”

“Well how big is that one?” He pointed back to the blue star.

“Big,” she said. “But not
that
big. Still, it’s about a hundred times bigger than your sun.”

“By the gods.”

“Yes, if you believe that sort of thing.”

He laughed. “Now you sound like me.”

He stared out at the man he’d imagined picking star fruit, studying the bright golden light that was his primary object. “So, do you truly think that’s where they come from? The Hostiles?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, there are only two other systems we could reach and still have any expectation of having even a tiny speck of life left by the time we got back home. One of them happened to be you. The other could be them. It’s a guess.”

“I wonder what would have happened if you’d found us before we found you.”

“Captain Asad would have probably nuked your planet before we even said, ‘Hello.’”

“Nuked the planet?”

“Yeah, blown it all up. With missiles. We’d make a big dust cloud. Everything dies. All of it.”

“Your fleet could do that?”

“Any one of our ships could. Wouldn’t even deplete its arsenal. Your planet isn’t any bigger than ours, and it’s pretty easy to do on that scale.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why would I make something like that up?”

“Tidalwrath’s teeth.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. A handful of your sorcerers could just mash us all together like you do the orbs.”

“Not if we didn’t see it coming first.”

“I thought you guys could see the future.”

“You know we can’t.”

“But you have divining. Couldn’t you sense it coming with that?”

“No. It doesn’t work in that way. Not if we weren’t looking for it.” He shrugged. It wasn’t a perfect school, to be sure.

She could tell the thought of planetary obliteration startled him. “Hmm. Well, best try to be nice then, eh?” She worked up a menacing glare to go with it.

He wasn’t laughing. “Don’t ever tell Queen Karroll that.”

“Why? She’s very sweet.”

“She didn’t become known as the War Queen by accident.”

“I thought that was from the wars with the orcs. You said there were lots of them.”

“There were. The big ones all before her time. Kurr used to be seven kingdoms. Now it is one. How do you think
that
came about?”

“Oh.” Orli looked surprised. “Do you mean to say your Queen conquered all seven kingdoms?”

“In three years.”

Orli stepped away from him in horror. “Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

“Wow.” She blinked a few times incredulously. “Well, as long as we are keeping global secrets, definitely don’t mention that to any of my people if you can help it. Especially not Captain Asad. That little detail might freak him out.”

“He and I are hardly chummy enough to be exchanging notes from history.”

“Altin, I’m serious.”

“I know you are. He has enough against us as it is. The last thing he needs to know is that we are exactly as warlike as he thinks we are. Best let him discover that on his own, and at some other time.”

She paused and stared at him for a moment, a long, deep, contemplative study that had, for the briefest moment, a shadow of doubt, a specter of suspicion that flit across her mind and then disappeared, as if Captain Asad had possessed her thoughts for just that blink of time. She dismissed it. If Altin thought Queen Karroll had sent the Hostiles, he wouldn’t be out here. He wouldn’t have been out here all alone. Moreover, there was not a duplicitous bone in his body. In fact, in some ways he was almost grotesquely naïve.

She dismissed that too.

“Let’s go see if that’s them,” she said, turning back to the yellow star.

The depth of her enthusiasm nearly startled him. He took his turn to study her. Every last angle of her bearing communicated a deeply rooted determination now. He frowned, bewildered by the unexpected change of attitude. He pushed back the thought that she was only putting on the act for him, putting herself into the mission because
someone
had to be unselfish after all.

“Come on,” she urged again, this time pointing from the basin to the crate of seeing stones and then back out at the distant golden sun. “Do your stuff, superstar.”

Bemused, confused, but happy that she’d found the heart for the task, he took up a seeing stone and cast. He could feel guilty later.

Chapter 22

O
rli was able to convey some idea of distance to Altin by comparing what he knew of scale from having found her originally with what she knew in terms of actual relative distances. So, by a rough muddle of blind casting and looking for something that felt like “three times that far,” they got to work.

It wasn’t good science, but it was, eventually, good magic. With the help of the Liquefying Stone, about which he swore Orli to secrecy, Altin spent the better part of seven hours teleporting the tower within range of the Hostile sun or, at least, in range of the sun that the fleet felt might bind the system from which the Hostiles came. On the last cast, just before he’d done it, he’d even told her that he expected he only had another hour in him at best. And then, there it was.

The tower emerged from the spell, and suddenly the golden star flared brightly enough to make them shield their eyes, unable to look at it from such proximity, though it was still very far away.

“Whoa,” Orli said. “Good thing you didn’t go much farther than this. Have you ever thought about what would happen if you did this trick and ended up in the middle of something like that?”

He squinted and tried to consider the blazing sun while watching it through the filter of his eyebrows. “No,” he said at length. “But I suspect that would be very bad. I don’t imagine Polar Piton wrote his shielding spell with that sort of thing in mind.”