Spear of Light (26 page)

Satyana was again surprised when they found themselves on stage next to the Colorima, with the delegations from all two hundred and seventy-seven of their allies arrayed in theater-style seats. It wasn't what she had pictured. But then, the Next would hardly host a banquet, right? The room looked as if it had been newly created just for this event; not a mar or scratch visible anywhere. Maybe they had created it, and would uncreate it with a word or a press of a button as soon as it served its purpose.

It smelled new.

A reminder—again—of the differences in power.

The Colorima did provide the expected speech—partly what she had told them in the pre-meeting and partly an exhortation to be the stewards of their fellow men and women.

Gunnar fidgeted next to her, almost like an excited—or maybe apprehensive—student rather than like the richest businessman in the solar system. He didn't seem to notice, but from time to time he rubbed his chin or twisted his hands together in his lap like living things. At one point she even put a hand on his entwined hands, stilling them.

Eventually the Colorima moved on, and Gunnar fell silent, completely attentive.

“We have decided to begin to . . . slowly . . . release some of the things that we know to you. We thought long and hard about what might be of most use. We have been asked for the obvious things. For equally obvious reasons we cannot provide you with weapons or better ships. These will need to be earned.”

To his credit, Gunnar didn't flinch.

“Way out beyond the Ring of Distance, where the sun Adiamo appears like another star in the sky, and where power of any kind must be created or must be sieved carefully for, way out where there are almost no minerals or materials that are not stolen from an unwary ship or captured from a wandering comet, way out there in our place of banishment, we learned to make things.”

She was laying it on thick, and serving a sprinkling of guilt on top.

“Eventually, we learned to make the things you hunger for. We learned to make metals, and to program almost any material to become any other material, to take flesh and blood and bone and metal and turn it to atoms and then rebuild it. We created porous fields that can harden in an instant like the shield over Nexity.

“For there were two things we had: time and compute cycles.”

The Colorima paused.

The audience moved restlessly. Some whispered to one another. Gunnar remained silent and still.

“The first thing we will give you is power over the materials you work the hardest for. We will give you the programming to create the minerals and gems that you mine from Mammot, so that you are no longer dependent on any particular supplier or supply for your raw materials. This will free you to use your distribution resources in our service, and at our request, while benefitting you far more than it harms you.”

Gunnar had gone completely still.

They had completely destroyed his most lucrative income streams.

She didn't dare touch him for fear that he might explode. Even Gunnar would not be foolish enough to talk back to a Colorima, would he? At least, not in this setting.

The Colorima continued. “We will put this in the hands of Gunnar Ellensson for the Diamond Deep, of Lou Highnor for the Breaking Sun, and of Rachel Night from Rising Storm.”

They weren't even leaving it all to him. They were treating two middling-sized rivals as equals.

“We will provide the programming, the teachers, and the initial equipment.”

A small smattering of claps rose from the audience, but if Gunnar weren't on stage, she suspected she would be hearing cheers.

She sat in stunned silence, careful not to show any emotion. The Next surely knew what they were doing, and she believed they wanted peace. Perhaps not as viscerally as she did, but she and they shared some level of common cause.

Getting through the next few months might be an interesting dance. As she left the stage, she touched the Colorima Kelm's hand. It was silvered and smooth, almost like a lotion. Not a thing she could grip. It made her shiver. “Thank you,” she said. “I look forward to working with you.”

The robot's unreadable gaze promised her nothing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

YI

Yi hesitated as he led Jason Two and Chrystal toward the gate out of the Mixing Zone. The tallest guard, a man with the hallmark height and multiple tattoos of a spacer, swung the door open for them. After they were through, Yi said,
The Jhailing must have set that up
.

Neither of the other two answered. They had never been outside of the Mixing Zone, and they looked around uneasily.

It's okay
, he told them.
It's safe enough here. We'll have to be very careful after we clear the spaceport, though.

Yes, chief worrier
, Chrystal teased.

Especially you.

He checked out a skimmer from the common motor pool, and flew them around, giving them time to become accustomed to the vast long-lined horizon broken by the tops of trees and/or the tops of mountains, or—in one direction—the great flat line of a blue-gray sea meeting a deep-blue afternoon sky.

After they had flown for an hour and seven minutes, he landed in a meadow and pulled them both out of the skimmer to stand on the grass in a clearing just far enough from town that he wasn't worried about people coming on them unaware. He took their hands so they were a circle of three and suggested,
Please open. I'm looking for any sign that the Next are coming along with us.

Chrystal cocked her head.
Won't the fact that you just asked that question out loud make them hide if they're with us?

Do you sense any inside of you?

No.

Jason?

No.

All right then
, he told them.
Please
?

Jason looked resolute and Chrystal the slightest bit upset, so he went in and out again as quickly as he reasonably could. It wasn't as much a braiding as an examination. When he was done, Jason said,
I hate that.

I know
.

How do you know if you see traces of them?

I know you all. Anything that doesn't feel like you is probably a guest.

You could miss one though, couldn't you?
Jason asked.

Yes. The Jhailings don't surprise me anymore, just talking in my head suddenly. Maybe they can't get in as easily now. There's still more we don't know about them—and us—than we do.

Truth
, Chrystal said, nodding sagely.

Yi shrugged. I
don't even know if we care—we aren't doing anything wrong. But a piece of me likes to know if I'm seeing everyone who's along. I have a feeling they may have wanted us to come out here.

Even me?
Chrystal asked.

Probably not.

She frowned at him.
Even though it's not as often, they still come into me on their own sometimes, like a surprise.

He gave her a quick hug. Even though they looked like their old selves, they did not smell like that. But he liked the way she smelled now. Clean.
Okay with leaving the skimmer someplace near the foot of the mountains and running in?

Chrystal smiled.
I'll race you.

We should fly a little closer.

Jason looked puzzled.
Why?

It will save half a day.

Chrystal blinked, absorbing the idea that the distances might be that vast. But she climbed back into the skimmer. She stretched her arms way up over her head and stood on tiptoe. Everything about her looked poised, ready to move.
Can we run by Nona?

No
.

All right
.

She had acquiesced to that a little too fast. It was good to have her with them, but it was a worry. He'd have to keep an eye on her.

They couldn't leave the skimmer in any old place. Its lines gave away the fact that it belonged to the Next, and Yi really wanted it to be there for them if they needed it. He parked it twice and decided against the places he'd chosen.

After the second abortive parking incident, Chrystal teased him. “You worry too hard.”

“Which is why you are alive,” he said.

No one could disagree with him.

He finally settled for a copse of trees that butted right up to a rock wall. Hopefully it would provide them some protection from discovery via the air.

From there, they ran. After half an hour, they stripped and carried their clothes in light packs. It protected the clothes, and, besides, thorns and branches simply slid off of their skin. Another difference. Their new skin felt human to the touch, but it didn't tear easily.

They were out in the wild, being entirely themselves, doing a thing they wanted to do.

Yi led, Chrystal next. Jason followed. They had taken everything important in this order for a decade. The sun drove their shadows long until it merged them with darkness. Yi adjusted his eyes as the light changed, so he ran up a cliff and across a ridge in scant light with no problem.

It had been a long time since he'd run on uneven surfaces and pulled himself up boulders. The leap and pull—the race and test—the slight risks—he loved it all. In this body, everything could be adjusted for. When a rock broke away under his right hand he had time to find another hold. When an entire rock-face crumbled under Chrystal, Jason took a great leap from behind her and caught her, bounding on the still-falling rock and landing with one foot on a barely safer rock, leaping before it could break and sticking a landing on a flat surface, laughing, twirling Chrystal around and around, her black hair flying in the black night.

At one point, Yi began a song that he hadn't sung since he was human. They all knew it, and they all sang. It was a ballad of stars and starships, of love gained and love lost, and it felt like exactly the right thing for that moment.

At one point they stopped in a great boulder field and played—leaping from one dark, shadowed stone to another, holding hands and team-leaping, doing somersaults. Jason finished a perfect backflip, landing with his arms up like a sports competitor. Chrystal moved like a dancer, lithe and smooth and breathtakingly beautiful.

The sun shone in their faces again when they hit Ice Fall Valley, and full on their backs by the time they came to the right part of the mountains.

Yi explained what they should be looking for, and they began to move in a horizontal line, watching for the rounded opening in the cliff. It eluded them for most of the day, but then they moved quietly, careful to avoid being seen by the satellites up above, or any other human camera.

They even climbed into two caves that proved to be shallow and empty except for the footprints of animals, and, in one, a snake.

Jason finally spotted the right opening just after sun fled the bottoms of the deeper ravines, but while it still fired the top of the mountain above them in a golden-yellow hue that nearly blinded them.

It was a relief to stop looking. Yi was apprehensive about the cave itself, though. It wasn't a place he wanted the humans to find. Nevertheless, he led them down through the long shadows of evening and into the dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

SATYANA

Satyana poured wine for the best of her current crop of performers. She threw celebrations like this to reward her artists for remaining loyal to her. Every time, the party was in a different part of the Deep. This time, it was in a new restaurant she'd bought the week before. It served only pastes and crackers and wine, but the pastes were a rainbow of taste and texture, the current hot thing. Many of them were decorated with tiny edible flowers, as bright and beautiful as if they had been grown on Gunnar's cliff.

Even though she liked the restaurant, she'd sell it again after the party and reap a tidy profit.

There were two full bands, a single singer, a duo, and a poet. The poet had surprised her, but maybe his success was a side effect of so much change. He tended to write and then perform long poems about the meaning of life and then follow them with discussions. His fanciers followed him all over the ship. He met them in bars and stim shops to talk deep talk and write more poetry. His latest hit had been about the fall of Manna Springs. The whole damned station had become obsessed with planetary events for the first time in its history.

She went up to the single singer. Unlike the surprise poet, she'd been grooming Kelso Longview for a decade. He had a sweet, soulful voice that left women waiting in long lines to fill her concert halls in person. It didn't hurt that he was a tall man who possessed extraordinary beauty and enhanced musculature. “What's the good news out there?” she asked him.

“Everyone's waiting.”

“Patiently?”

“Restlessly.”