The Dark Reaches (14 page)

I ain hid his sigh of relief as the door of their quarters closed behind them, leaving him alone with Linnea. He’d seen her suppressed excitement, the slight tension in her expression, after her short private conversation with Cleopa. Now, at last, he could ask her what had caused it.

In the red “sunset” light streaming in through the window, she stood with her back to him, looking down at something in her hand. Without speaking he walked over to her and looked down as well.

A note on a scrap of paper—was that it? Linnea turned her hand slightly, and he could make out the scribbled words:
Market tomorrow alone FAINT
.

He looked into her eyes and saw only eagerness there.
Alone.
This must be another sign: like the blue flower that they still had not seen, that he hoped they would never see. She could be so incautious when she was sure of herself. Had she even considered that it was one of Tereu’s people who had given her this paper? One of Tereu’s people who wanted her to go to the market tomorrow, and mark herself out for—what?

He kissed her forehead. “I’m tired. Aren’t you?”

“Not really,” Linnea said. He saw the question in her eyes.

“I think you should stay here tomorrow and rest.” He tried not to put any particular urgency in the words.

But from her quick glance, he saw that she understood him. He saw her hand tighten, crumpling the bit of paper, and she dropped it into her pocket again. “Don’t come along, then, if you’re tired.”

“It’s you I’m thinking of,” he said, as gently as he could.

She lifted her chin. “Iain, you know that all I want, all I’ve wanted since we came here, is—the chance to learn.”

He took her in his arms. “Today we learned about ammonia purification. Will nothing satisfy you?”

She smiled, but the faint spark of anger underlying it was as plain to him as a flame in a dark room. She set her fists on his chest—the old distancing gesture. “Iain. Please. You’ve always trusted me to judge what’s best for me.”

“But I always worry when you take risks,” he said. “Which means I’m always worried.” He knew she would see past the lightness in his words.

“I do what I have to,” she said quietly. “You know that, Iain. And you know you have no right to stop me.”

“No right!”
Unfair.

Her head went back. “No right,” she said, and pushed away from him.

At that moment Iain knew, bitterly, that once again he had gone too far in his need to protect her. Once again she would prove her independence by putting herself in danger. And there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do to stop her.

Half an hour before dawn, Hiso stood in Tereu’s bed-chamber, straightening and smoothing his clothing before one of her many tall mirrors. Through the window at his left, the watery gray light of earliest morning lit the pale flowers of the walled private garden outside. Tereu lay smiling behind him, curled naked on the thin, soft padding of her bed, sleepy from their lovemaking. Always she liked getting this proof of her power over him; never had she understood that to him it meant nothing.

Tereu had never understood power. Or its price. Or the tools it required to maintain it and increase it. He turned his head, studying himself in the mirror. “What do you have planned for our guests today? Specifically Kiaho.”

“She’s off on another tour later this morning,” Tereu said lazily.

Hiso looked down at her in annoyance. “I told you that I need a private word with her, as soon as possible.”

Tereu got to her feet and touched a commscreen. “Then you’re in luck. She’s already gone to the breakfast room. Early for her—they must keep luxurious hours in those Hidden Worlds.”

Hiso turned and looked down at Tereu. “This is more important than you appear to understand. That ship of hers. The engines alone—” He leaned toward the mirror and smoothed his beard carefully. “There should be complete plans, complete technical specifications on board. Do you have any idea what they might mean to our efforts here?”

“That’s your department,” she said. “You pilots, all of you together. You, and Kiaho, and that man of hers.”

Again Hiso studied her in the mirror. “Then you admit that he’s interesting.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Tereu said, an edge in her voice. “He almost never speaks. . . . Tell me, Hiso. Once you’ve gotten inside Kiaho’s ship—do you even need her anymore?”

Hiso looked at her in the mirror, wondering again at her lack of subtlety. Without the complex linkage of family that had allowed her to inherit her high position, she would have been a lesser bureaucrat at most—not even a wife and mother; her body had failed at that.
Denying him sons. . . .
“These are early days,” Hiso said. “She and the man together are a force we need to understand, before we dare break it. The bond between them—they are not married in our sense, of that I’m sure, but there is something deep and dangerous there.”

“Romantic nonsense,” Tereu said. “The woman is nothing, aside from her piloting skill. But the man—he’s Line, Line by training if nothing else. He must know the meaning of service to humanity.
He’ll
understand our need.”

“But the ship, apparently, is hers.” Hiso turned and faced her. The lines on her face, the shadows under her eyes were plain to see in the bare, cruel light of morning. “And—consider, my dear. They’re both outsiders.” He folded his arms and looked down at her. “He might serve, they might both serve—until they understood the basis of our power here.”

She sat up straight, realization clear on her face. “And what we’ve paid to remain who we are.” He heard again the low, bitter note in her voice, the note he hated; the note that had crept into her voice in the empty years after her final miscarriage.

He let his anger show, to wake her to her cowardice. “Are you becoming weak? Now?”

Her eyes widened a little, even as she gave him a mechanical smile. “You keep me strong, Hiso. You keep us all strong.”

“Remember it,” he said curtly, and left her there.

 

 

 

In Tereu’s richly decorated breakfast room, by the light of a gas fire, Linnea waited impatiently for the hour when she could make her promised expedition to the deepsider market—when at last she might meet, face-to-face, someone who would finally answer her questions. Standing at the sealed window, sipping at a pouch full of coffee, she watched the slow rising of the artificial light over the park. There was almost nothing real about it but the living plants themselves; the birdsong was played from speakers in the trees, Tereu had said. . . . But Linnea had already sensed the reverence in which this small green space was held; those who had been selected to tend it moved and spoke like priests, and the flowers they brought Tereu were offered and accepted with precise ceremony.

The park was false, the shadow of a shadow of real nature; but these people could not know that. No living human in the Earth system had ever set foot on a world with open air, open skies—none of them had ever walked freely under the sun. Not for generations. She could not help but pity them.

She sipped once more at the bitter, fragrant coffee, and looked out again at the symmetrical ranks of rosebushes—stalked globes of red or white blossoms, their beds bordered meticulously by pale pink, fleshy-stemmed flowers whose names she did not know. She’d touched one yesterday, when no one was looking; but the leaves were hairy, and the whole plant had a strange, pungent smell that lingered on her fingertips.

Behind her in the breakfast room, someone coughed. Her shoulders tightened. She arranged a welcoming smile, then turned.

Kimura Hiso, perfectly groomed and smiling, bowed to her. “Pilot Kiaho.”

“Pilot Kimura,” she murmured. “May I serve you some coffee?”

“Thank you, no,” he said. “The servant told me you were here. I was hoping for a word before you leave.”

“Of course,” she said. They sat down opposite each other on soft pink chairs near the window, on each side of a small table on which was set a bowl of pink and white flowers that smelled faintly of cloves. Through the glass of the window Linnea could hear the faint buzz of clippers at the far side of the garden, no doubt perfecting the angle of a hedge.

“What I have to say concerns your ship,” Hiso said.

“I was hoping to hear of it at last,” Linnea said.

Hiso’s raised eyebrow registered the reproach in her voice. “We have it safe at our skyport. But we’ve not been able to check its systems. It will not open to us.”

“No,” Linnea said. “It will not. It requires my touch.” She would not mention, to this man, the Line override codes Iain knew, with which he could always gain access in her absence. “And I believe it isn’t, in any case, compatible with your interlink technology? Or so Iain said.”

“You’re correct,” Hiso said. “Our ships are old technology, compared to yours. See—” He lifted the hair behind his left ear, and Linnea saw with fascination the permanent, implanted plugs for ship leads, small buttons of hard black plastic set in his skin and, presumably, the skull beneath.

“So the neural connections are internal?” she said, trying to keep the fascinated revulsion out of her voice. “Permanently installed in your brain?”

“Yes. And thus subject to damage,” Hiso said. “Old technology, as I said; dangerous to install; it does not always function correctly once in place, and it can even do ancillary damage to the pilot’s brain over time. That is why we’re so few—and that few, so proud.”

Like my old enemies, the Line.
Linnea bowed her head. “Certainly your pilots run great risks.”

“We have maintained our ships for centuries with few resources. Some are failing. We have few, and we can no longer build more.”

“Cold Minds jumpships—”

“We tried, long ago,” Hiso said. “Always, always the pilots who entered the ships and joined with them became infested, had to be killed. We stopped attempting it centuries ago.”

“Yet the Cold Minds’ own pilots are not infested,” Linnea said.

“We know it,” Hiso said. “But that must be the Cold Minds’ doing.
We
cannot protect ourselves.
We
cannot use their ships.”

“And there’s no neighboring system you could hope to escape to?”

Hiso laughed. “Why do you think your own people went so far?”

Linnea caught her breath. “So you know where we went.”

A momentary hesitation. “I saw you both after you arrived here. You were nearly dead. Wherever you came from, it was far from here. No.” He shook his head. “We know all the nearby systems, every sunlike star—data from early explorations with the first jumpships. There are no suitable worlds in any of those systems. Nowhere humans could live and walk on a free surface, breathe free air. Nowhere better than here. So this is our home.” He looked at her and took a breath—
swallowing his pride,
Linnea thought—and said, “Will you help us?”

She clasped her hands behind her back. “How?”

Hiso hesitated. “We would be most grateful to learn more about the advances in technology your people have made since leaving this system. To study those advances directly—within your ship.”

The thought of this cold, relentless man prying about inside her jumpship made Linnea shudder. She suppressed it.
Stall him. Depending on what happens in the market today, none of this may matter.

“I don’t like the sound of it,” she said. “The ship’s systems are delicate—liquid circuits, carefully contained. You would have to allow us to supervise the work very closely and to stop it at any point. And even then—”

He looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t wish to be blunt. But you force me to it. You are not in a position of strength here. And we have a great deal at stake. If we need to proceed without your approval, then we will.”

“Unless I help you,” she said, “you cannot open that ship without destroying its systems. That’s the flat truth.”