Skeen's Search (20 page)

Lipitero walked into the thin cold sunshine, Ti-cat limber and lethal beside her. Behind her the brutal black form of the tug squatted like a spider, its hoists were legs drawn tight to its mass. Ykx soared above her and the Garden, a swarm of wasps smoked from their nest, but they kept their distance, wary of her, frightened by the promise of power in that monstrous beast of a flier. She wore a harness she'd designed for this moment, plain, with no weapons, only spyeyes, so Skeen could see and hear what she saw and heard.

There was a gate in the wall about a score of meters from the landing site. When Lipitero reached it, she hesitated, wondering whether it would be locked against her. She hoped not, she'd rather start this talk on a friendly basis. If Skeen had to burn the gate open for her, well she didn't want to think about that. The gate was simple, planks of a velvety tight-grained wood polished by weather to a soft smoky gray. She flattened her palm on the wood, gave a short sharp push. The gate swung smoothly open, the hinges were oiled and silent. She stepped inside.

Two Ykx waited alone beside an immense tree that spread great russet limbs across a moss garden and a small noisy stream that came round heavy beams of roughcut unpainted wood which formed part of a structure that was mostly hidden behind clumps of bamboo, flowering bushes, trees and climbing vines, a stream that continued across the glade to pass under the wall a short distance beyond the gate. A quiet, peaceful place, filled with the music of the water, scattered trills of birdsong and the soft buzzing of hidden insects. With Ti-cat following half a meter behind her and slightly to one side, Lipitero crunched along a gravel path to a wooden footbridge. She stopped on the bridge and examined the two strange Ykx.

A stocky golden Ykx, no longer young but so astoundingly beautiful the breath caught in Lipitero's throat when she looked at her. Her harness was ancient leather, worn and comfortable, patched in several places with leather thongs, probably by her own impatient hands. The lacing was hastily done, with no attempt at disguising the utilitarian purpose of the work. Her fur had been brushed sometime in the recent past but not since she'd done some pruning, if the bits of leaf and bark dusted along her forearms meant anything. She was smiling a little, deep glowing eyes watching Lipitero and Ti-cat with gentle amusement and considerable curiosity. Beyond all doubt, the Kinravaly Rallen.

At her side, a tall Ykx, female in her prime, couldn't be much past her bearing years. A silver-gray like Lipitero. Stern handsome face. Sleek, rangy, strong. She stood at the Kinravaly's shoulder, looking like she wanted to be a step ahead, her body interposed between the Kinravaly and Lipitero. Seething with a suppressed anger that found expression in the unnatural rigidity of her body, she fixed her amber-crystal eyes on Lipitero as if she dared the stranger to make a hostile move. Obviously she didn't want Lipitero anywhere around the Kinravaly, strange scarred Ykx whose motives were suspect, who could threaten the woman she protected so earnestly.

Lipitero waited.

The gold Ykx smiled. “I am Kinravaly Rallen. You asked to speak with me.”

Lipitero spread her arms, letting her flightskins fall free, showed her hands, empty, claws retracted. “I am Lipitero the Bereft who come to speak for the last Gather on Mistommerk.”

“Bereft?” The Kinravaly took a step forward, ignoring the wordless protest of the silver-gray. Her ocean-deep eyes swept over the scars that marred Lipitero's face and torso. “You've been hurt.”

“My children are dead, my kin are gone, my Gather lies empty and broken.” Lipitero felt uneasy with the contrast between the formality of her speech and the quick fluid response of the Kinravaly (words and body language both), but the Kinravaly's accent and some of the words she used demanded hard listening and puzzling out at times; speech would grow easier as she grew accustomed to the accent, but at the moment she felt safest keeping to the most formal of exchanges.

“That's a terrible thing. Do you come from Ysterai? No, of course, I mix myself up, you said Mistommerk. Is that a colony settled after Rallen? Do you have trouble there?”

After sorting out the questions and puzzling out what the Kinravaly actually said, Lipitero dug for words. “Colony, yes. Settled not from Ysterai but from Tovazh. I am come a beggar from Sydo Gather to say this: The Gathers of Mistommerk are empty and Sydo is alone. We cannot exist alone. I am come to plead for colonists to fill the empty Gathers.”

“I see. We must talk about this more.” The Kinravaly turned to the silver-gray Ykx who was grinding her teeth with frustration. She looked up into the rigid face and smiled. “Zem-trallen, go reassure the Kinra, will you? Be sensible, my friend. Our visitor wants help, why should she harm me, what good would that do her? Go, before I have Sulleggen storming in here foaming at the mouth and demanding answers to questions I haven't even thought of yet.”

The Zem-trallen clamped her lips together, threw a searing glare at Lipitero, swung round and stalked off.

The Kinravaly beckoned to Lipitero. “Come round to the patio, we can sit and chat there, be more comfortable. I've ordered some iska and cakes. Do you know iska? No? It's a sweetish herbal decoction drunk hot or iced, very refreshing. We've been a long time apart, but I don't think it would be dangerous to you. I've heard that the young alien who visited us a few years back ate and drank with Ykx and had no trouble from it. Hmm, was it him who guided you here?” She laughed suddenly, a warm accepting sound. “You probably don't understand half of what I'm babbling.”

“That is true, Kinravaly.” Lipitero spoke slowly, carefully. “But I am growing accustomed to hearing you and understanding becomes easier. Please continue, but be patient with my thick head.”

The Kinravaly laughed again and continued a steady flow of conversation as she led Lipitero and Ti-cat to a covered patio looking down a long slope of grass and flowers. Carved wooden screens were placed about to block the wind and several braziers provided enough heat to keep them comfortable in spite of the chilly air. When Lipitero was seated, her feet on a low hassock, Ti-cat stretched out beside her, the Kinravaly pulled a bell cord, then settled herself in a worn old chair, her feet propped on a three-legged stool.

Anki came in with a heavily loaded tray. The Kinravaly took a cup of iska and sipped at it as the young Ykx brought a cup and a selection of wafers to Lipitero and set these things on a small table at Petro's elbow, then glided out. The Kinravaly set her cup down, laced her fingers over her stomach fur. “Tell me why you are here. More detail now. Take your time, I will listen as long as you need.”

“It requires preamble,” Lipitero said. The iska warmed and relaxed her. I should take some plants back with me, if I can talk Skeen into carrying them. She closed her eyes a moment. The words were starting to come easier, but this chase between two similar languages was hard on her head, long habit came constantly out of the shadows to trip her up. “I do not know how much the Rallykx remember of the seedtime, the time when the colony transports were sent out?”

“There was an accident to the memory of our main computer, what we know of that time comes from the colonists who recorded what they remembered. The knowledge we retrieved that way, even the technical data, is more incantation than information. So. Assume we know a little of our history but that knowledge is spotty. Be sure that if you mention something unclear, I will stop you and ask for explanation.

“I hear,” Lipitero said. “You know nothing of what happened after you left Ysterai?”

“There was no way to learn anything.”

“I see. There are hard things for you to hear. To get the hardest over with, Ysterai is ash. A lifeless cinder. Victim of a three-way war between Pallah, Nagamar and Funor. This happened less than a century after the Rallen transports vanished. I know little of Keelava and Tozeed. Skeen tells me she hadn't heard of our species prior to her Leap through the Stranger's Gate. Yes, yes. I'll explain in a little, let me finish this first. As far as anyone knows, the only Ykx alive exist here on Rallen and in the Sydo Gather on Mistommerk. I told you before that Mistommerk was colonized from Tovazh which now has the name Kildun Aalda. There are no Ykx on Kildun Aalda.” She drank the last of her iska, sat silent as the Kinravaly brought the pot to her and filled her cup again.

“My folk came from those planted on Tovazh. I don't know how much you know about that colony, it was a place where some very radical and esoteric experimentation was happening. Remember these things. A gathering of the finest and no doubt wildest minds among the Ykx. Trouble between the Balayar and the Chalarosh. Tovazh's star a flare star, something not generally known because of the length of its cycle, something discovered serendipitously in connection with other research by a group of Ykx Seekers. The time of the flares approaching rapidly. Soil cores indicating the burning off of all life above ground during previous flares. The Tovazhi Kinra begin planning for the evacuation of the population before the flares make living there impossible. Before the evacuation can get under way, the Balayar and the Chalarosh move from irritation with each other to open warfare, and both refuse to recognize the neutrality of the Ykx. Ships of both species swarm about Tovazh, coveting that planet for its strategic location halfway between their home worlds. They establish a blockade about Tovazh. Neither Balayar nor Chalarosh listen to Ykx warnings about the flares and they will not permit the Ykx to desert that world unless the Ykx cede ownership of it to one or the other. But Chalarosh will not permit the Ykx to give the world to the Balayar. Balayar will not permit the Chalarosh to take it. A few Ykx chosen by lot get offworld when the Balayar and the Chalarosh are busy sniping at each other, but not one tenth of the population manages to leave.

“The perturbations grow more intense. The weather turns unpredictable. Food begins to run out, impossible to grow sufficient in the few hydroponic gardens. It looks like a race between starvation and cremation.”

Lipitero paused, sipped more iska. “You see the bind they were in. They did find a way out of it, I'm here as evidence of that. This is how they did it.

“Among the wildest and most brilliant of the Seekers on Tovazh was an Ykx called Mierzel ap Xon; like the Tovazhi Sun, he was hot and bright but unstable. He required adulation like some require drugs and gathered about him a small band of sycophants who worshiped him as a genius, almost a god, and got him funding for his experiments. The greater part of those on Tovazh, though, ignored him and his work. More orthodox Seekers thought he was either crazy or a charlatan or both, and had good reason for thinking so from what I've read off flakes made around that time. Inclined to acerbic and megalomaniac pronouncements about things entirely outside his field of competence, he was a bigot, a snob, dishonest in small things and large, cruel, incapable of sympathy or compassion, with a severely inflated estimation of his own worth. Within the very narrow limits of his specialty, despite his delusions, despite the general inadequacy of his persona, despite the unsavory nature of his acts and ideas, he really did have flashes of genius. Withdrawing to the compound his acolytes had built for him and furnished lavishly, scrambling desperately to escape the death he refused to countenance for himself, throwing together insights and data from his prodigally various researches, he drove a bridge across the insplit gap into another universe, collapsed that bridge into a Gate that he thought he alone could open. A way for him to leave Tovazh and take his faithful with him, along with as many pre-fertile females as they could gather up in the time left to them. The Gate opened on another world, you see, a habitable world. Mierzel's Luck, he wanted to call it, Mistommerk it was, named already by those with a better right. Being what he was, he proposed to take his chosen few and let the rest of the Ykx on Tovazh be what he called Purified by the Flare.

“Fortunately for my ancestors, that was too much for three of his acolytes. However fervently they adored him, however thoroughly they were cut off from their kin because of that adoration, they could not persuade themselves to run to safety and leave brothers, sisters, cousins, whatever, to burn. They duplicated Mierzel's records and took them to the Tovazhi Kinra. Dishonest in almost every phase of his life, the one thing Mierzel wouldn't fudge was his data. He kept meticulous records of every experiment and noted down every step of his thinking. The acolytes added their own testimony; they'd looked into that other world, they had taken samples of its air, its plant life, they had even trapped a small rodent and brought it through into the courtyard of the compound where the Gate was built.

“Mierzel ap Xon learned of the defection of the Three, Frightened, he gathered those present and fled through the Gate. He was never seen again. In opening the Gate he had drawn from someplace between this universe and that other one an amorphous Thing we later named the Ever-Hunger. Ever-Hunger ate him and his minions and the young females he took with him.

“Perhaps the forces unleashed by the opening of the Gate hastened the onset of the flares, perhaps the Seekers were wrong in their timing of the cycle, but there was just enough time to recreate the Key to the Gate and gather the folk. The Kinra collected all Ykx left on Tovazh; skim sleds were piled with food, tools, texts, instruments and the youngest children if their parents couldn't carry them. They stripped Tovazh of whatever was valued and useful and brought it to Mierzel's Compound.

“Tovazh's Star was pulsing, throbbing, so the flakes tell it; the air burned mouth and lungs, the earth groaned beneath their feet. Cubs wailed. Adults quarreled, fainted, fought; some died. Seekers struggled with the Gate; there was much the acolytes didn't know about its workings, perhaps only Mierzel ap Xon ever really understood what he created. At last they got the Gate open. An advance party stepped through and discovered the Ever-Hunger; two out of twenty got back to describe what had happened. The Kinra and the Seekers struggled to deal with that, but time was running out; finally they had no choice, they began sending Ykx through with instructions to flee from the Gate as swiftly as possible.