Skeen's Search (25 page)

As that last terrible cry swept the hollows of the hearspace, Lipitero shook out a rectangle of crimson yley cloth that had been folded and draped over a rung of the stool. The silky material caught the light and turned to liquid fire as she snapped it out of its folds and sent it sweeping through the air. She pulled it in and draped it over her arm. “Mistommerk,” she sang, “Mistommerk, my kin. Behold a piece of Mistommerk, behold a woman of the world I call you to. Timka, a Min of Mistommerk.”

The beast rose to its feet. It stretched and yawned, leaped lightly to the stool's round seat, balanced there a moment, then was a great wild bird with hooked beak and vicious talons, with burning golden eyes, a white head and a brown-gold body. It stretched its wings wide, posed for them, a figure from myth and magic with the secret power of such things hanging like perfume about it, then it powered into the air and swooped back and forth across the cavernous bowl of the Arena, its harsh eerie cries tearing through the gasp and buzz of the audience. It swung back to the stage, landed beside Lipitero and was suddenly a graceful four-legged runner with lyre horns on a long thin head; it caracoled about the stage, the tak-tok of its hooves turning the hard wood into a tympanum, beating out a kind of song as it kicked and leaped and danced back to the stool. In the awed hush (the Ykx had got beyond comment, almost beyond surprise) it changed a last time into a bipedal form, roughly like an Ykx without flightskins or fur. Small stature, mammary glands rather like the keeskey had, though rounder with small pink nipples, skin the color of skim milk, naked except for an exuberant growth of curly blue-black hair on the head and a much smaller, coarser patch of black at the juncture of the legs. It took the yley rectangle from Lipitero, wound the cloth about it so it covered its body from armpit to ankles, stabbed a dagger pin into the cloth over one of the mammaries to hold the improvised robe in place, then it turned to the goggling Ykx and said, “I am Timka, I am Min, I am of the blood and bone of Mistommerk, of the people who dwelt there before the Gate was opened. I am one of the dangers you'll face there, if you come.”

Kinravaly's Herald came onto the stage and tweener ushers flooded into the audience holding lightrods. The Herald cried: “Who among you have questions, come to the rods.”

“Question to Timka the Min.” A strong voice from the floor near the stage, a familiar voice to Mauvi, the justicer who owned a third share of the stable where she worked. “You say you are one of the dangers that colonists would face. Explain that please. Why are you here if you are a danger to us?”

Timka smoothed a slim hand over her hair. “I spoke as a symbol of what the colonists would face. I in myself am no threat; I have learned to live in peace and even liking with Nemin like you.”

“Are you in any way captive or slave of those you travel with? If you wished to stay among us, could you do that?”

Timka threw back her head and laughed, a full-throated joyous sound that filled the Arena. “No. Who could keep me if I wished to go? Skeen is my friend and companion, I travel with her to see the wonders of another universe than mine, I travel with Petro here because I like her and want to help her. One day I might return to Mistommerk, or I might not. As I choose, so it will be.”

Mauvi pushed Saffron's hand away. “Oh, quit it, Saff, I'm not in the mood. This is important. Let me listen.”

Mauvi was Worker class. She was good enough with beasts to have a job she liked as a groom in a stable of racing yauts, but she wanted a thousand things she'd never have. Most of all she wanted a chance to use her greatest gift. She played the habold, one of the smaller ones with only fifty strings, and knew she could be more than good given a chance and the proper teaching; she wanted to create music as well as play it, but there were no scholarships for such as she, her kind weren't supposed to have sufficient sensitivity to merit development of their rudimentary skills. It wasn't very likely that this new world would have the resources to train her the way she wanted, but there was a chance just a ghost of a chance …

“Yes,” Lipitero said, answering a question put in another voice Mauvi thought she recognized though she couldn't be sure. “We welcome anyone who is willing to come, whatever his skills, whatever class he belongs to here, but there's something I must make all of you understand. Mistommerk is dangerous, you must not forget that; you can't bring antagonisms and resentments with you, you'll die if you can't work together. You must be able to leave old ideas of class and capacity here on Rallen and learn to know the person behind the labels. If you can't do that, don't come. Please don't come.”

… a chance, an opening to possibility. Maybe there would be no teachers, no music, but there had to be something more than here. Failure, disappointment, she'd faced them often enough and lived through them and could do it again as long as there was hope. Hope and the possibility of change. She knew with a deadly certainty what her life on Rallen was going to be unless she took it in her hands and changed it. One day like the next repeated over and over and over. She hadn't told anyone yet, but throughout the long days and longer nights she was thinking about suicide. As the Veils closed on Rallen and the iron bands of her life tightened about her, hope was draining out of her, leaving her dry and limp and so weary there was no bearing it. She loved the boy beside her, but that was not enough to light the darkness within her and about her. That Ykx down there on that stage, Lipitero bereft and scarred and afraid, that Ykx had cracked the darkness wide and the light was blinding.

“Trade,” Lipitero said, “yes, there's a great deal of trade on Mistommerk; let the buyer beware is the core philosophy of a large part of that trade. There is also considerable piracy at sea and more than a few outlaw raids on land caravans. The Balayar are sharp traders but generally honest. They have their hands firmly on just about all major water transport. They build the best ships and are certainly among the finest sailors and navigators on Mistommerk. Though I must add, one of the most respected of the sea captains is the Aggitj woman, who carried my friends and me halfway round the world. Very competent she was at sailing and at chaffering. Yes, sailing. Wind power. Ninety percent of the folk on Mistommerk are in a pre-industrial stage of development; the desperate flight through the Gate before Kildun Aalda's sun flared and ashed them, meant that many of the refugees came through with little more than they could carry on their backs; then they had to fight the Min and the earlier Waves for a place of their own. A lot was lost in the process. If any of you are med-techs or medics or Seekers doing medical research, you will find an almost untouched market if you can develop and deliver species specific antibiotics for Balayar, Nagamar, Chalarosh, Aggitj and Pallah, perhaps even the Min. Surgery and anesthetics, vaccines, there's almost nothing available except among the Skirrik who will deal only with their own needs and perhaps among the Funor Ashon who keep themselves very much apart from anyone non-Funor. And there's whatever it is that depresses fertility among the Nemin, that's everyone not Min, another reason for embracing anyone who can bring medical knowledge with him or her.”

In the beginning, even during Lipitero's impassioned plea for colonists, Saffron was more interested in cuddling with Mauvi than in what was happening on the stage. Timka's startling metamorphoses chased away his indifference; he leaned against the balcony's railing and began listening to the questions and answers, though he was still not as involved as Mauvi until Lipitero began talking about med-techs. He was in training as a medtech. He wanted desperately to be more than that, but like Mauvi he was Worker class. If he'd proved unusually brilliant in his schooldays, the admin might have made a rare exception and educated him further. He wasn't anything like a genius, merely a bright intelligent tweener with a slightly better than usual facility for making things and nowhere to go with that intelligence and dexterity. He'd survive, of course; he was already a bottom-level med-tech and that was better than most of his kin had managed, a bit of luck for him. But he wanted so much more. As passionately as Mauvi, he wanted more than Rallen could give him.

Urolol. Masliga Gather. Rainy twilight. A grubber stable outside the Gather, with a leanto where a handler slept when one of the grubbers was sick or about to lay a clutch and the handler had to be there to see she didn't eat them. Yellow lantern light leaking out of the cracks in the wall of the leanto. Two figures inside, sitting at a shaky table (one leg replaced with a thin barrel that once held salt fish), a stone bottle between them and heavy mugs partly filled with a murky liquid before each of them. Rostico Burn and Fafeyzar, his first contact on Rallen.

Fafeyzar was deep into his fertile stage, but he hadn't changed much from the stocky young Ykx whose stolid sedate exterior gave no hint of the rage that smoldered deep within or the capacity for organization and manipulation that lay behind those dull brownish eyes, more like muddy water than crystal. His fur was a smoky gray fading to silver along the inside of his arms and legs and across his belly. His hands were broad and blunt, heavily callused with several of the claws broken near the tip; they were painful when he retracted them but he gave no sign he felt anything. He wore a harness of grubber hide, old and stained, without even a touch of ornament. For a moment, when he grinned at Rostico Burn and his face lit with delight and welcome, he was almost handsome; the charm he ordinarily kept hidden but could use like a weapon flowed out from him and surrounded Ross with warmth. He reached out, touched the tip of a forefinger claw to Ross' palm. “I hoped you would come.”

Ross produced a tight smile more like a grimace. “I didn't know if you'd be here. I've been hearing things. Like it's really gone rotten over here, folk disappearing, slave camps behind shocker fences. You're a slippery son, Faz, but well, you know, it happens to the best of us, falling off the high wire.”

Fafeyzar widened his eyes. “Not you, Rosta?”

“Even I. Bona Fortuna be blessed, though, I've got a cousin who can get in anywhere. She pulled me out. Skeen, yes, one of them that's going round now doing deals.”

“They promise a lot more than they show.”

“Oh, they can produce, if the price is right. Believe me, Faz, Skeen's a wonder when she puts her mind to something. The stories I've heard about her, hah! And I saw her work, she pulled me out of a place no one has ever escaped from.”

“Why?”

Ross gulped down a mouthful of tuvviz, coughed, cleared his throat. “Blood calling to blood, maybe. You b'lieve that? No. You right. She needed me to find Rallen. She owed Lipitero, you hear that story? Hey, it's a hummer, ask me later, I'll give you the gist. She owed Petro a debt and she always pays her debts. No, no, that IS true, Faz. Everyone knows it. Do her good, she pays you back; mess with her, you get paid too, but you won't like it.”

“She's set her hooks deep in you.”

Ross shifted uncomfortably. “'S not like that, Faz, it's just I heard stories 'bout her since b'fore I c'd walk. What'd you do 'f Elezar the Wise came in now and sat down and poured herself some of that tuvviz and started talking to you?”

“Elezar is a child's story, no more substance than the smoke from that oil.” Fafeyzar waggled a thumb at the lantern. “If she walked in now, I'd look up the nearest headmed because I'd be seeing things that aren't there.”

The warmth of the tuvviz rising in him, Ross laughed until Fafeyzar had to quiet him. He looked at the tuvviz left in the mug and pushed it away. “This stuff gets you, don't it. Whew, that makes the world go round. What you need, Faz? I'm down to my skin right now, but I can maybe talk some gadgets out of Picarefy, she likes me a little; I think it's b'cause I look like Skeen. My cousin.”

“And which of them is Picarefy?”

Ross tried another grin; Fafeyzar was going soft around the edges and the walls of the hut were tilting ominously. “The starship,” he said, taking care to shape the sounds carefully, because his esses were starting to slur on him. “She's sa wonder too, she is.”

Fafeyzar examined him closely, got to his feet and moved to a shadowy set of shelves. He rummaged in a coarse-weave sack, came back to the table with a handful of hard biscuits. He fetched a jug of water and a cloudy glass, set these beside Ross. “Eat something, Rosta; if you want to get serious, I want you sober.”

Fafeyzar was deeply involved with an illicit association that spread like a fungus across Urolol and Marrallat with threads into Itekkill and Oldieppe, an informal coming together of workers and others to provide an outlet for furies and frustrations that seethed among those without any hope of changing the conditions locking them into roles that cramped the spirit and twisted lives into ugly shapes. Being Ykx, there was no blood in this, but Fafeyzar and a few others were adept at devising strategies to disconcert and embarrass targets in authority, especially those belonging to the Consortium in Urolol and Sulleggen's pets in Marrallat; in effect he ran a consulting service for rebels. Or had been running it. The situation in Urolol was deteriorating so fast he was being sucked into a full-blown conspiracy to overthrow the Consortium. When Rostico Burn knocked on his door, he was sitting, staring at the jug and trying to adjust himself to the hurry hurry pressing in on him. He was not accustomed to feeling the earth turn liquid under his feet; always before this he'd been one step ahead of everyone else, his feet firmly planted for the next. Now his deftest scheming served to keep him afloat but no more than that and he was contemplating the necessity to change his outlook and his goals, to completely revamp the way he worked.

He watched Rostico Burn breaking up biscuits and soaking the shards in the water so he'd have a hope of chewing them into something he could swallow. The young alien was caught in the tuvviz melt, having reached the stage where he had to concentrate mightily on whatever he was trying to do; he was frowning at his hands, moving a finger at a time as if he didn't trust them to act in unison. Hit him hard, I shouldn't have given him that brew when I didn't know how it was going to take him. Saa, saa, I hope it doesn't kill him, I need him if I can get a grip on him. A little over three years ago he'd used Rostico Burn as his ante in a dangerous game with the Zem-trallen where he'd exposed more than he was comfortable remembering. It was worth the danger because he won what he'd been fishing for, the Hand of the Kinravaly Rallen held over him, protecting him from the malice of Uratesto and the Consortium. It was still protecting him, but the shelter was beginning to fray and if he wasn't careful he'd be up to his neck in wet shit. The Zem-trallen was no fool, the reason she didn't flay him and hang his skin to dry had to be what she thought of the mess she found here in Urolol; what she'd said about him to the Kinra made him look harmless, what she might think of him was something else. If the Kinravaly ever got around to cleaning up over here, we'd better have a hole to dive into, Zelzony wanted the world to stay the way it was, just prettied up a bit. She was an ally now, come the day she'd be his most dangerous enemy.