Five days into the Hajo-aa’s passage through its door, Ari still could not discover where among the stars the door would spit out Nuna’s ship. She still didn’t know how she was going to escape Nuna before he learned who she was.
She had spent the time huddled in the Hajo-aa’s dim and overheated control room, trying to parse the door math. There had been moments when she emerged from Angel-song thinking she was back in her mother’s lost seedship, that the shadows around her were still inhabited by her mother, father, little brother. Then she would realize that the sounds stroking her synaesthetic hearing like soft brushes—of limbs shifting, loose hair rustling—had been made instead by Nuna’s chair.
She would again have to crush her nausea and terror, again shove the bone-deep shock of her loss to a remote distance. On this ship, she could not afford anything but perfect clarity of mind.
Nuna and his monsters had so far paid her scant attention. The soldiers were whiling away the door passage with exotic pleasure organs purchased from some meatshaper’s lab, and Nuna himself had disappeared into locked areas of the ship before the Hajo-aa had even entered its door. With only the ship to keep track of her, Ari’s mother would have expected her to have at least ascertained their destination. But Ari hadn’t been able to identify the Angels governing the door, and although the Hajo-aa allowed her to view the door math, the ship would not respond to her direct queries. Its tiny watchers might swarm through her flesh, but without the ship’s blood in her, she was a foreign object, granted scarcely more agency than an empty suit of clothes.
Finally she abandoned her search and let the door math scroll up the wall unhindered. Still sleepless, she stared at the other display she had found in the Hajo-aa’s neglected door station, which translated a few dimensions of their current locality into color, contour, and texture. Nubbly flowers raveled into cities of slick translucent rock, which in turn melted into a vista of far-off floating clouds, a sheen of rainbowed moires like a slowly rippling sea. This, too, told her nothing about the Angel-star to which they were bound.
She supposed the rendering had been created to monitor divergence between the actual topology of truespace and their plotted route. If Nuna’s door did prove flawed, if the Hajo-aa failed to squeeze out of its door back onto the skin of time, the ship’s tiny cocoon of spacetime would shatter in a burst of actinic radiance. Then she could belatedly share the fate of her family, who were now just a spray of particles a-shiver on the seething foam of the Great Reality. It would be one way to rectify not having been with them when they died.
It would be one way to avenge their murders.
But the display showed nothing untoward, and that disaster was, anyway, an unlikely one. Nuna’s door was no frayed commodity already sold a dozen times from ship to ship. It had come fresh from Nuna’s boss, and wherever it was taking her, it would be good math.
Ari had reached a dead end. She had arrived late to the disaster Nuna had arranged for her family; Ari’s mother had left her behind that day as a lesson, Ari was sure, in the importance of good timing. All she could do now was wait for an opportunity to flee, afraid of once more missing the advantageous moment.
The control room door clicked open, a sound shaped to her hearing like a small brass rod. Boot soles peeled from the sticky floor, pads of bristles scratching her ears. Ari, though, seemed to have forgotten where she had left her body. By the time she had uncurled her legs and swiveled her chair, Nuna himself stood beside her, hands on hips.
“Chiyela,” he said in his mocking, glass-edged voice, “what do you at I wall?”
Beautiful Nuna-captain, with his long black hair, his sharp cheekbones and full mouth, his golden skin dusted with glass flecks: today he wore only a pair of low-cut green trousers, silky and loose, and a light sheen of sweat. He was so beautiful she could hardly look away from him, even though she knew he had remade himself for precisely that effect.
Ari’s mother had liked to lecture her about her supposed predilection for coupling with good-looking, unsuitable men. In Nuna’s case, his beauty only made her more afraid of him.
“I just,” Ari began, and then remembered that she must not speak the pure language of the People of Heaven, but what her mother had called that debased Riftside creole. “I just scrub off shipmoss. No do Ship clean door-station longtime.”
Nuna bent to speak into her ear, enveloping her in the musky perfume that he had selected for his body odor. He was so close that she could see the minute light-tracks of shipsight crawling across his left eye.
“Chiyela-lovey,” he said, “I ask what you put on I wall that you look at so much. What do it-writing?”
“Door math,” she managed.
“Indeed,” said Nuna, “and all they pretty color?”
“Etheric energy. Mass-shape, like. Just tiny bit of door passage.”
Why was he asking? Nuna was the Hajo-aa’s master, its will and intention. He had only to inquire of his ship to know everything she did.
“Do it so, lovey? Do you know so much?”
“I tell you beforetime,” said Ari. “I can run you door station, true-true. I make good soldier for you.”
“Sure, lovey, I remember all you talk,” said Nuna. “But why spy you at we?”
Ari’s heart skipped several beats before she could calm it. “No spy I at nobody. I just look at math. No do there nothing else go work at, inside door.”
“Could you skinplay with I soldier.” Nuna favored her with a lovely smile. “So much would they like go meet I new recruit.”
He straightened and scritched to his chair. When he stroked its golden-skinned shoulder, it stirred, shifted, and extended a graceful human hand. Nuna clasped this and pressed spots that Ari, unwilling to examine the chair closely, had taken for freckles.
Then he offered the hand to Ari. “Or maybe would you like I chair better? He still do pretty.”
She shuddered involuntarily. Nuna, still smiling, released the hand and scritch-scratched from the room, leaving perfume in his wake. The arm retracted to float just above the chair’s lap.
Her heart was beating too fast. Breathe, Ari’s mother would have reminded her. On the wall, golden ribbons looped, merged, lengthened into red-gold tunnels that dissipated into mist the color of blood.
Whatever instructions Nuna had just given the Hajo-aa through his chair, he hadn’t locked away her view of the ship’s door passage. Nor had he ordered her from his control room.
But he was watching her closely after all. The danger came not just from the Hajo-aa’s endocytes inside her, which could tell Nuna when she was lying, or afraid. The Hajo-aa had surely sampled her geneprint first of all. Ari could abandon her mother’s tongue, she could cobble a new history for herself out of fragments of truth, but her flesh still carried her mother’s genes, naked, in every cell. Nuna just hadn’t yet thought to look for them.
Again the control room opened. This time two of Nuna’s soldiers stepped in. Ari turned to face them right away, but the monsters did not deign to notice her.
“Better call repairman soon as we come out door,” Shayeen, huge and blue-skinned, was saying to Powi. “Nuna hate Pelago, and he hate when Boss give he dirtworm pickup job. Do repairman make he wait, go he sharp-sharp at we.”
Powi grinned, red-lacquer cheeks creasing, yellow-glass eyes and teeth glowing. His two supernumerary pairs of arms swayed and clacked in the microgravity. Nuna’s soldiers, unlike their captain, had not shaped themselves to be beautiful.
“Repairman stay at Pelago longtime—two year now?” Powi said. “Maybe go bighead eat he.”
“No can they bighead loose theyself,” said Shayeen crossly. “Maybe do you think it so big haha, but better hope you, no happen nothing at Boss repairman, or Boss make we-all wish bighead eat we.”
She slapped the doors shut with a blue, taloned hand. Ari was cautiously relieved to hear that the Hajo-aa was at last arriving at its destination. She had never heard of a place called Pelago, though.
Shayeen and Powi scritched across the sticky floor toward their duty stations, giving Nuna’s chair as wide a berth as Ari had. Both soldiers were sweating in the oppressive heat despite being stripped to little more than their boots. At least they had shed their more noticeable recreational accessories, although Powi’s outsized chrome sockets on groin, chest and lower lip showed all too clearly where he plugged them in.
Suddenly Powi stopped, pointing with several red snake-arms. “Pretty, pretty! Shayeen, look what we chiyela make!”
Shayeen looked. She frowned deeply. Stepping toward Ari, she demanded, “What do you at we wall, chiyela?”
A little jolt of adrenaline jumped through Ari. Shayeen, unlike Nuna, seemed both surprised and angry—although it was hard to tell what Nuna was really thinking.
But right then Ari also noticed ominous clusters emerging over the horizon of the truespace rendering, clots of intense color in the fractal foam. They looked like knots of dark and baryonic matter perturbing the ship’s locality. Could something be wrong with Nuna’s door after all?
Shayeen ignored the display. Grabbing a chair to brace herself, she whacked Ari on the cheek hard enough that Ari saw flashes of purple light. “Shitsmear girlie,” Shayeen shouted in a voice shaped like iron wedges, “go answer I! What muck you?”
“I just clean I station,” Ari said. “Why do you want dirty ship-wall?”
Shayeen backhanded Ari again. “Dirty, no dirty, no matter it! Go Nuna say you touch anything?”
“He say I run he door station,” Ari said, sounding even more sullen than she intended. She swallowed blood, and the pain with it. Shayeen could shatter her skull with a single blow, but the display was competing for her attention. The ship’s proximate topology had warped further, the clots evolving into filaments like brilliant tangles of rainbowed hair.
“Shayeen, go leave it,” said Powi. “She screen do so pretty, look it like happy toy. What do it hurt?”
“Go rub you own happy toy, Powi,” Shayeen snapped. “We Ship door do mess enough without she muck it further. Now answer I, chiyela! What go you make? What do all it Skeenhay writing?”
Ari looked at the wall, at both the rainbow tangles and the scrolling columns of ideographic math, and realized only then that neither Nuna nor his soldiers could read. She ought to have guessed. She had earlier examined the room and discovered that, except for the moss-grown door station, they had relabeled every control surface with crude pictographs.
Stupid! Ari’s survival depended, among other things, on not looking like a child of the People of Heaven. On not reminding them of the Shkiinhe exile whose geneline they had recently been hired to eradicate. Ari had stumbled on Nuna and his employer two weeks ago, at a place called Toomee on the very brink of the Rift, and Nuna’s seedship had at first seemed her only chance of departing Toomee before her family’s killers caught up with her. Only when it was too late had she realized they were the very assassins she was fleeing. In face and body type, Ari took after her gangling Poli father, and as far as she could tell, the soldiers thought her just another Riftside mongrel. Nuna didn’t expect to find Maane’s daughter so close to him; he wasn’t viewing Ari from the right distance, the right perspective, to find the true pattern of meaning in what he saw. She had to keep it that way.
But . . . what did Shayeen mean, We door do mess?
Opposing urges fought inside Ari. “No could I never muck you door,” she said finally. “No do Nuna give shipblood to I, and no do I have power of touch on you ship. It-here do just—” She cast about for a way to explain in creole. “Just way go show about door passage. It do inside door station already. I just put it on wall. No do it change nothing inside shipbody.”
“Why look you at it?” Shayeen demanded.
“Nuna say I run he door station,” Ari said, “and no do no other soldier watch you door.”
At this point in her earlier exchange, Nuna had departed, apparently satisfied. But Shayeen loomed closer, blocking Ari’s view of the displays, until Ari could feel the heat of her flesh on the stifling air, could smell its burnt-sugar odor.
“Go listen, chiyela,” Shayeen said. “Nuna-captain joke at you. Why do he need any soldier go watch he door? Boss take care all we door. He put new door in we doorbox, pull old one out. Think you, Nuna do sorry for you because you mamom enemy chase you, or whatever story you moan at he? Nuna take you for soldier only because Boss tell he to, and Boss tell Nuna, take this silly chiyela, so he can remind Nuna that he still do Boss. Better no do you put Nuna more angry. Or maybe Nuna slack you some sly way, hm? Just so can he show that no do Boss own all of he.”
Shayeen turned away to swing herself into the chair next to Ari’s. The foam restraints closed over her. Ari was about to ask why, if the doors kept going bad, Nuna did not need anyone to attend to them, but then Shayeen spoke again.
“Of course no can you read it-door for true. But better for you, no pretend that you know. Boss slack any person he think even guess at where do Pelago. Better stop you touch anything, stop you look at anything, on Pelago door.”
Dismayed, Ari said, “No do you know where door open?”
Shayeen began to jab at the grids of pictographs that decorated her console. “It do Pelago, girlie,” she said. “Boss door take we there, tomorrow he other door go take we away.”
Ari thumbed her console to put away her displays: first the useless math, then, much more reluctantly, the ominous tangles of light.
A location unknown to any but Nuna’s employer? A nasty lump curdled in her stomach. If she couldn’t escape at Pelago, could she survive to reach Nuna’s next destination? If the Hajo-aa couldn’t shape its doors properly, would she even reach Pelago?
A series of pebble-shaped chimes dropped into the control room. Banks of wall displays blinked online as the ship at last crossed back over the boundary of time.
But at the same instant, an alarm ripped the air, a shrill buzz with the texture of razored cilia. Yellow glare exploded into the control room, and the Hajo-aa’s walls emitted a terrifying chorus of creaks and groans.
Powi yelled; Shayeen swore and burst into frantic motion. On one newly activated section of wall, an Angel now blazed, way too large and bright. But even closer—appallingly close, blotting out most of that display—hung the shadowed orb of an Angel-child, swelling larger by the second. The Hajo-aa had conserved the momentum with which it had entered its door, and the ship now careened toward planetary mass at thousands of kilometers per second.
Commands in the Shkiinhe language of things jumped into Ari’s mouth, the ones she would have given her mother’s ship, but she bit down on them; the Hajo-aa would never obey her. The planet, still expanding on the wall, eclipsed its sun and plunged the control room back into dimness. Powi kept yelling at Shayeen, who pounded at her console; the alarm shrilled on, now two oscillating saw blades. Then massive thrust slammed Ari deep into her chair. The planet slewed across the screen.
“Chiyela,” said Shayeen between clenched teeth, “go you muck we door, Nuna shape you into worse than he chair. But first I-self pound you to blood spot.”
“No could I mess it!” Ari gasped. Unlike the augmented soldiers, she had to struggle against the acceleration just to breathe. “And why would I try kill I-self ?”
Shayeen did not answer, grimly jabbing away. An arc of hazy blue glowed along the planetary limb, swelled to a growing crescent. Then the Hajo-aa broke into brilliant Angel-light once more. Blue ocean turned below them, and swaths and swirls of white.
Clouds, blue air, blue ocean; that might be a living world down there. Ari had never seen one. A living world should have what she needed—a busy port, or a ship headed out to one.
Except that this place, Shayeen had said, was their boss’s secret.
The vise of acceleration kept her from turning her head to take in all the new displays, but she could spot no traffic of ships or drones, and no orbital facilities of any kind, not even a machine guardian to hail Nuna’s intruding ship. The Hajo-aa did seem to be the only thing moving above the blue world.
The razored alarm finally stopped, leaving an echoing silence in Ari’s ears. The weight on her chest evaporated. Shayeen’s talons clicked on her console as she spun the Hajo-aa for deceleration. The blue planet swung on the screen, and pressure grew again, but more moderately.
Powi said, “We door do mess longtime before chiyela come on board.”
Shayeen growled, “Go squeeze you gashole shut, Powi, and call up repairman.”
* * *
The sight of Powi tapping with his snake-arms made Ari queasy. Slowing her still-rapid pulse, she unlocked her chair and rotated it a notch for a better look at the half-circle of wall displays.
Nuna’s faulty door seemed at least to have opened near the right Angel. The emptiness of the blue world was odd, though. There ought to be some relics of Shkiinhe occupation, even if abandoned hundreds of years ago.
One section of wall modeled the Angel’s demesne, depicting the Angel itself together with a double handful of its children. The second child, shown as a blue-and-white ball, was the only possible match for the world below. The display gave it a pair of rocky moonlets, and a third satellite in low orbit that the Hajo-aa represented as a red hexagon: a made thing, not a heavenly object.
The People of Heaven had once visited here, then. But where was here?
Another display mapped the surrounding volume of stars, flattening it into a rectangular projection. Although this showed visible light only, Ari could locate the Rift easily enough: the dark void lying between the scattered local stars and the cloudy smear of the outer galactic arm.
But the Rift was a big place, stretching hundreds of light-years from its sparse upstream head to the crowding fields of its downstream termination. The great swarm of Angels the People of Heaven called Iigmrien, which had dazzled the skies of her childhood, here lay in a compact bunch on the left side of the display—except for giant Kaenub-Angel and its siblings, unmistakable in their brilliance. These stood separate from the main body of the swarm.
As her mother had said so often: the stars are always in motion; light is bound to time. To find yourself in heaven, you must be able to envision the Long Dance of Angels from all perspectives in space and time.
With dismay growing heavier in her gut, Ari placed herself:
She was on the far side of Kaenub, gazing back along the Rift toward Iigmrien. Nuna’s door had brought them a very long jump indeed. The light of this moment would not reach the downstream end of the Rift, where she had lived all her life until now, for another forty or fifty years.
Her mother had made her memorize the names of every one of the so-called Hundred Angels of the Shkiinhe homeland, as well as of the stars on Iigmrien’s downstream margins that Maane had learned during her Riftside exile. That meant not just the Angels’ word-names, mere print on a flat page, but the long ideographic names into which, as into the genes of a zygote, was packed the mathematical description of the radiance of their bodies and the shape of their song, the figures of their dance through time and through what lay beyond time—the currents of the Great Reality in which all their chorus was but a whisper.
So the music of Iigmrien Ari knew. This piece of the Riftside was another matter. No wonder she hadn’t recognized the Angels in Nuna’s door.
“Shayeen,” said Powi. “No do repairman answer.”
“Go you try again,” Shayeen said.
“I do, so many time. No answer he.”
Shayeen was silent a moment. “Should repairman know better than go poke at Nuna joyhole. Keep you try.”
The Hajo-aa spent many hours in orbit braking and steering, aiming for a rendezvous with the red hexagon in a slow and steady fashion very different, in Ari’s brief experience, from Nuna’s usual extravagant mode of travel. The hexagon was evidently the place the soldiers called Pelago.
Shayeen did not banish Ari from the Hajo-aa’s control room, for which Ari was thankful; she thought she was more likely to glean useful information here than anywhere else in the ship. Perhaps Shayeen preferred Ari where she could watch her, although the ship could perform that task more efficiently. Or perhaps, having delivered her warning, Shayeen had returned to ignoring her employer’s newest recruit.
Two hours on, Powi said to Shayeen, “No answer repairman, and no can Ship find he.”
Shayeen sighed. “Better we tell Nuna. But no do he happy.” She thumbed the link band on her wrist and returned to gloomy surveillance of her displays.
And indeed, when Nuna stalked in a few moments later, deep furrows creased his perfect brow, broken glass edged his voice. “Why no do we reach Pelago yet? Why plod we so slow?”
Shayeen and Powi gazed at their consoles. Shayeen said carefully, “We have juice enough only for go brake, Nuna-ba. Otherwise we overshoot Pelago, and no way back.”
“You burn too hard when Ship come out door. And why door go shitsmack again? What muck you?”
“No muck I nothing!” protested Shayeen. “Maybe she-chiyela do it. She fiddle at door station ever since we leave Toomee.”
“No could she change nothing,” Nuna said with contempt. “Would Ship tell I, go she even try!” He turned on Powi. “And what do wrong with you, turd-brain? How can you lose Boss repairman inside Pelago?”
“I so much work at it, Nuna-captain,” Powi said. “Think I, no can he hear Ship.”
“Of course he hear,” Nuna said. “Can Ship find he link?”
“Sure, Nuna-ba. Ship just say, no do repairman there. Maybe he turn off link, or rip it out.”
“He link do sew right to he ear-nerve, shit-dribble. No can he turn it off, and no could he rip it out from he brain, no way by heself. And never would Pelago let he leave! Try you ask Pelago direct where he do?”
“Nuna-ba, no can I talk with Pelago.”
“Boss give we key for Pelago from he wayfinder, muckbrain. You station have it.”
“I already use Boss key, Nuna-ba. Mean I, when Pelago talk, no understand I much-much.” Powi grimaced. “It all Skeenhay, like. All one shitsmear garble.”
“Why keep I such stupid soldier? Go make Ship turn Pelago talk to picture, and show repairman on Pelago map! Now, no bother I again till we reach there. Much must I finish before we meet with Boss again.”
Powi sighed. “Sure, Nuna-ba.”
Powi worked at his console; Shayeen began to brake the ship in earnest. Tension chewed at Ari’s gut. She wondered, repressing a shudder, why the repairman would choose to graft a transceiver directly into his nervous system—although it did sound typical of Nuna’s crew.
“Shayeen,” Powi said, “another ship do at Pelago!”
“What!” Shayeen jerked upright. Ari sat straighter, too.
Shayeen jabbed at her console. On the display of local stars, one of the points of light swelled in size so rapidly that Ari caught nothing but the final view, a mottled gray and black sphere joined on one side to an agglomeration of much smaller and clearly artificial shapes: blocks, fat cylinders, paired swellings resembling rocket nacelles. The artifice reflected blinding glare on its Angel-side, while the night-side hulked black against the stars. Ari could not judge its scale.
“No see I no other ship,” said Shayeen.
“It do hard, go understand Pelago!” Powi’s snake-arms tapped over pictographs. “Ship do at refinery dock, think I.”
“They steal we ship-juice?” said Shayeen, outraged.
“Here it do.” A gray and black slope blinked onto the wall above Powi, the artifice viewed from a vantage near its surface. At this distance, a paler geodesic tracery showed like bones under the gray portions of the sphere. In the foreground hung the obovate swell of an old Shkiinhe seedship, a distant cousin of Ari’s mother’s ship but so like the Hajo-aa that those two seeds must have originated in the same nursery. The pearly backdrop of Kaenub’s nebulae, the angle of shadow lying across the ship’s glinting sandpaper hull, told Ari that the other vessel must be docked on Pelago’s far side.
Who crewed that ship—a family? Or monsters like Nuna’s soldiers? Maybe, maybe, it was her escape route.
“Look ship like Hajo-aa,” Powi said.
“How do Pelago name it?” Shayeen asked.
“No can I read like we chiyela here,” sneered Powi. His snake-arms tapped away.
“Maybe do it belong at Glass Knife posse. Boss shit heself, go Glass soldier find Pelago.”
“Wait!” said Powi. “Now Hajo-aa give I sound-name. Other ship call itself Chresun.”
“Chresun!” Shayeen slammed her blue fist against her console so hard that Ari thought it might split. “I know they freelance trashpicker! Where go they ever buy door to Pelago? Boss slack we, go we let they leave here.”
“Must we bust Chresun now, before they run!”
“No have we enough ship-juice!” After a moment Shayeen said, in a calmer tone, “No could Chresun talk much with Pelago, not without some wayfinder like Boss have. And likely no do Chresun launch spy drone, or already would they see we and speed away. They do at dead stop. Do we sneak, and keep Pelago between we and they, go we jump on they easy.”
Tendrils of fear curled in Ari’s stomach. Were they serious about crippling the Chresun?
Of course they were. They had thought nothing of obliterating her family’s ship.
Shayeen poked at her wristband. After a moment Powi asked, “What say Nuna-captain?”
“No answer he. He still do busy with he cargo.” Shayeen rubbed at the swirls of black and silver tattooed on her bald scalp. “But we know what would Boss want, hm? Go you arm up holebuster.”
Powi hauled himself out of his chair and scritched to a new station. Anguish boiled up in Ari then, unexpected and overwhelming. Terrible pictures flashed into her mind’s eye: missiles shattering the Chresun’s hull, people flying into vacuum, decompressing. It would be messier than the annihilation of her family, because it would leave behind the frozen and disfigured corpses of the dead. And unlike her family, the crew of the Chresun would have time to know they were dying. They would feel the breath ripped from their lungs.
“How can you crack they ship just for they come here?” Her voice trembled, her throat had thickened. For a moment she feared she would lose control entirely.
Shayeen turned as if she had forgotten Ari’s existence. “Go shut you gashole, girlie. Or I toss you out airlock, no matter what Boss say. It-here do Boss business.”
“But how could you kill—”
“I mean it, chiyela.”
Ari clenched her fists. Her mother would have said, Your job is to survive. Exercise dispassion.
Ari could not prevent the Chresun’s destruction, not when she lacked agency on this ship. She shouldn’t spend her energy on what she couldn’t change.
She ought instead to consider what she might find at Pelago to help her. Squeezing her anguish down again into a hard and painful lump, she tore her attention from the poachers’ ship.
The secret Nuna’s boss guarded so zealously had to be more than the fuel refinery Powi had mentioned. The People of Heaven had sown clouds of refinery seeds wherever they visited and, centuries after the People themselves had withdrawn back into Iigmrien, working refineries and fuel depots still littered metal-bearing rock all over the Riftside.
The size of the poachers’ seedship, in relation to the curvature of the gray slope behind it, suggested that the sphere might be over a hundred kilometers in diameter. That was too large even for an orbital shipyard. And Ari could spot only a single pair of mooring sockets, one being where the Chresun had affixed itself. Perhaps Pelago had once owned an outer ring where people had lived and worked; perhaps the ring had been destroyed, or never completed.
The sphere bore no visible impact scars. The black patches mottling it, which covered less than a third of its surface, looked matte-smooth and featureless, reflecting neither sunlight nor starshine.
Pressure grew as the Hajo-aa started another deceleration burn. Their rendezvous with Pelago approached with agonizing slowness. Ari willed the poachers to notice them and flee, but in the image relayed from Pelago, the Chresun remained motionless. Even the sharp-cut shadows on its hull hardly budged.
She attempted the disciplines of tranquility. There were many things you could not control in the universe, and this ship, this moment, was not hers. Yes, how wonderful if she could take control of the Hajo-aa to stop them blowing up the Chresun. If she could punish Nuna and his soldiers horribly for her family’s deaths! Not by killing them. She wanted to, but her mother would not have approved. Rendering them impotent forever, yes, seizing their ship and stranding them on a forgotten rock deep in the Rift where no one would visit in a thousand years . . .
At last the Hajo-aa began its final deceleration, and the sphere rose up beneath them like the surface of a moon. As the dock came into sight, the Chresun did launch from its mooring socket, scattering red fire across Pelago’s surface. Hope rose in Ari that the other ship would escape; the Hajo-aa had no more fuel with which to maneuver. The Chresun burned past them, all red exhaust slits and swells of dark sandpaper glitter.
Then the Hajo-aa fired two missiles.
The slits flashed white and burst into an expanding cloud of shards. The Chresun’s upper pair of rockets, still firing, slammed the other ship down onto the sphere. Powi whooped.
Anguish scalding her throat, Ari clenched her fists and tried to exercise dispassion.
The debris cloud enveloped the Hajo-aa, causing Shayeen to mutter and tweak her controls, and then a larger and denser cloud of grey-white murk rushed up from the impact site, plastering long black strings against the Hajo-aa. Powi yelled, “Shit on it, what do it? It stick all over we!”
“Mucky water,” said Shayeen. “It freeze on we quicker than hull eat it.”
The Chresun, lying on its injured side, fired its steering thrusters one after the other, trying to rock free of the wound it had made in the gray sphere. Said Powi, “Go I bang out they other budger.”
Shayeen, hand at her ear, said, “No, wait,” and in the same moment, Nuna rushed in yelling, “Go stop, stop, ass-wipe, stop!”
But Powi had already lobbed another pair of missiles into the Chresun’s remaining exhaust slits. This time, the exploding missiles, in combination with the Chresun’s efforts to free itself, jolted the poachers’ ship out of the impact wound. The Chresun tumbled over the gray horizon, while another flood of dirty water and black snaking strings gushed from the sphere.
“What do you, spray of runny shit!” Nuna shouted at Powi. “Go Pelago tell you where do repairman? Think you ever, you steamy squish-squish shit-puddle, maybe no can you find repairman because they freelancer steal he? What muck go you mamom poo in you skull when you born?”
Shayeen and Powi stared at their consoles, but now this display of subservience only made Nuna madder. “Why sit we here? Go grab they trashpicker!”
“We do clean-ass empty, Nuna-ba,” Shayeen said. “No juice. But—” she went on, as Nuna seemed about to burst into another flood of scatology, “no do we crack they hull. Most like, they-all still live. And no burn they nowhere. Chresun just drift around Pelago now.”
The Hajo-aa’s deceleration cut out entirely. Nuna pulled himself down into his chair, whose arms clasped him like a lover’s. He re-knotted his floating hair. For a moment the room was silent except for the rasp of his feet as, jittering, they peeled and unpeeled from the floor.
“Nuna-captain,” Powi said, obsequiously, “no do Pelago see repairman, but Pelago also say, no go repairman leave. He vanish on Pelago.”
“How could he vanish?” said Nuna, with contempt. “Where do he headlink?”
“Link do inside Pelago, Nuna-ba, inside portal. But not repairman. No do he nowhere.”
Nuna stilled. “Repairman do dead, then?” And, when Powi just shrugged, “Come any other ship here, beside they poacher? Go you ask!”
“I already go. Pelago say, since Boss drop off repairman, Chresun do only ship that come visit. And not one trashpicker pass beyond dockside, not one cross Pelago portal. Pelago just say, repairman do here beforetime, no do repairman here now, no go he leave Pelago.”
Nuna said, sharp as glass, “Do it another of he trick, so much go I make he sorry. And then Boss make he sorrier.”
He fell silent, gaze resting on the Hajo-aa’s view of Pelago, where the mooring socket now loomed through a fog of ice and debris. The ship chimed a warning. Magnetic fields embraced them; the Hajo-aa and Pelago touched without so much as a bump; but no angular momentum transferred to the ship to give them weight. Pelago, oddly, had no spin.
“Go juice we up, Shayeen,” Nuna said. “And whiletime search dockside for repairman. Then go you grab Chresun and rip out it doorbox, make they tell you where they buy they door to Pelago. Search it-ship and every person on it, head hair to toe muck. They shitsmear poacher alltime sniff around for Skeenhay trash, thief it away for go sell. Maybe they find repairman and steal he somehow. But no slack you not one-one single trashpicker till we clap hand on repairman. And mind you how he shape heself different way, beforetime he try run away from Boss.”
Ari took a deep breath and released it, trying to force her adrenaline out with the air. The Chresun’s crew had a reprieve, if a short one.
“Quick-quick, Shayeen!” Nuna said, and as Shayeen departed and he rose from his own chair, “You, Powi-turd, go strip off you snakies and fetch you fat link. Send to Ekka, too. We do trip inside Pelago.”
“Inside—?” From the grimace on Powi’s red-lacquer face, Nuna might have gut-punched him. “But, Nuna-ba—”
“Shut it, stupid. Go we see, can Pelago even stand you sick-shit taste inside it finicky mouth!” Then Nuna’s voice turned smooth as skin. “You come, too, chiyela.”
Ari jerked around and found herself staring right into Nuna’s dark and lovely eyes.
“Sure, go stir you skinny sitbone, lovey,” he said, now full of mocking charm. “Come help you captain find Boss precious repairman.”
Purity of the Body
Ari climbed stiffly out of her chair and followed Nuna from the control room. The narrow corridor outside was even hotter and dimmer, the ship’s air-purifying moss growing rampant on walls and light panels alike.
“Do you carry inware, chiyela?” Nuna called as he strode along.
A sweaty, mostly naked soldier squeezed against the wall to make room for Nuna. He smirked at Ari, and whatever was inside his hand-shaped codpiece wriggled fingers at her.
She slid past sideways. “You know already,” she said. “No do I.”
“Not even plugin port? No kind meatshape?”
“No kind at all.”
“Virgin meat!” Nuna marveled. “And how much do you Skeenhay? Do you own Skeenhay shipkey in you genestuff ?”
Ari’s heartbeat jumped; she calmed it. “You know already. You ship taste I geneprint soon as I come on board.”
“No ruff you up, lovey,” said Nuna. “Hajo-aa can only tell I that you own gene enough for go run seedship. I ask about whole Skeenhay shipkey, gene for top kind of Skeenhay machine, like high house or wayfinder. Ship tell I, you gut and airway keep all clean-clean like pure Skeenhay person. No shed you even you own scalp-flake. You say you mamom come from Eeg Mareyan—” (so, in Riftside fashion, he pronounced Iigmrien) “—maybe do you have whole Skeenhay genekey.”
“I mamom have whole key,” Ari said. She chose her words with care, since Nuna would know if she veered from the truth. “And all they work, she tell I. But I dadad do dirtworm. No own he no Skeenhay gene at all. Sure, I have enough of genekey for go run seedship. But no know I, do I own gene for they top-top Skeenhay machine. Maybe all I have, or only part. Or maybe all I have and no do they turn on. No learn I never.”
Nuna stopped and swung toward her, frowning. “What mean you, lovey, ‘turn on’?”
Ari stopped too, again smoothing a ragged rhythm in her pulse. “Must you turn on all-all shipkey gene inside mamom and dadad, even before they make babychild, or no work they for wayfinder, or other top machine.” And, as Nuna continued to stare at her, “Skeenhay have secret way for go turn on shipkey in they child. No born I among Skeenhay, no could I mamom make sure they all turn on.”
“Indeed,” said Nuna, “do it so, lovey?”
He gazed at her another discomfiting moment before striding onward. Ari followed, angry at herself. She had said nothing untruthful, so what attracted Nuna’s attention must be the Shkiinhe knowledge that she had, once again, emitted by accident, like an unfortunate smell. She and her brother had always stood out in the little Riftside dometown where they had grown up, the children with the strange and scary foreign mother, who were compelled to devote their days and nights to her harsh training. There was no way Ari couldn’t stand out in this company, too, but her survival depended on making her differences uninteresting.
They reached the portal antechamber. Nuna flung open a cupboard and yanked out a garish orange shirt. The rustling as he pulled it on slid against her ears like resin sheets.
A soldier entered carrying a stubby rifle. Nuna asked, “Go say I bring weapon, shit-pellet?”
The soldier was Powi, transformed. He had detached his snake-arms and donned a tight coverall that displayed flashing real-time images of his red lacquer face.
Powi protested, “This do flash-and-burn, not holebuster.” But Nuna yanked the rifle from his grasp and slapped it on a sticky shelf. “No go I into Pelago without weapon!” Powi said, almost wailing. On his coverall, dozens of nightmare faces gaped and grimaced.
“No do Pelago allow it,” said Nuna.
He fished a bright pink leech from a canister and poked it up one nostril. The leech squirmed out of sight. Another soldier arrived—Ekka, also newly dressed, but in more sedate clothing the shade of her slick bronze scales.
They proceeded into the Hajo-aa’s portal. When the outer gate opened, Nuna stepped into Pelago’s airlock as quickly as if his ship had spit him out, and Ari and the soldiers followed. Pelago’s air was wonderfully cool.
The lock closed and dusted them. While they waited for Pelago’s endocytes to sample, clean, and mark their bodies to its satisfaction, Ari brought her metabolism up to its normal level and looked around her. The tiny room was entirely bare. Beside her, the folds of Nuna’s clothing and the stray locks of his hair had settled downwards. Pelago might not have spin, but it was massive enough to impart a bit of weight to them—hardly enough to notice without such cues.
Nuna started to jitter; perhaps his leech had begun to release its fresh burden of stimulants. Then he fastened his shirt and said to her, as if he had only just noticed, “You alltime stay dress on Ship. Why no sweat you?”
Sneezing endocytic powder, Ari shrugged. “No do I move around, no do I sweat.”
She wished he would not keep staring at her. She hoped it wasn’t because he had once laid eyes on her mother and now recognized a trace of her in Ari’s face. He had all the evidence, really, to identify Ari. If he was starting to focus on her at this distance, if he was finding the right perspective, she would have to move closer. But how would she bear it? Just standing next to him made her skin crawl, her gut churn.
Minutes passed. The lock remained sealed. Pelago dusted them a second time, and Nuna’s jitter grew more pronounced.
“What do wrong?” Powi asked.
“I already tell you, muckbrain,” Nuna said. “Pelago do finicky.”
More finicky than his seedship, in other words. The Shkiinhe had built their notions about purity of the body into everything they made: purity of the Shkiinhe genome, which had been perfected by the Elders; and purity of the flesh, which should remain unsullied by implants or disfigurement. Some lower intelligences like seedships could be manipulated to tolerate mongrels and monsters, but Pelago was evidently not among those.
The door did unseal at last, however, opening on a hallway. This led to a larger room where Shayeen and three other soldiers clustered at a row of wall stations. A second wall displayed a view of the sphere identical to the one they had watched on the approach to Pelago, except that the seedship in the foreground was now the Hajo-aa. The room was built of the same pale beige ceramic as the lock and hallway, and it was just as devoid of clues to Pelago’s origins or intended function.
Nuna strode toward Shayeen. “Go you find repairman?”
“No, and no sign of he, either,” Shayeen said. “But we just peek here and in hangar.”
“Go he at least pack up Boss cargo?”
“Hangar do empty,” she said. “Bare as rock.”
“Shit on he! Must we root up repairman and cargo?” He stalked toward an arched opening in the far wall, Powi and Ekka hurrying in his wake.
As Ari turned to follow, Shayeen said sourly, “Why do you take chiyela, Nuna-ba?”
“Oh,” said Nuna. He stopped, gaze swinging to Ari again. “She do so clean. Pelago like she taste better than any of we, I promise.”
Beyond the arch lay the hangar Shayeen had mentioned. This space, perhaps two hundred meters long and with a ship-sized airlock at one end, could have accommodated several seedships like the Hajo-aa with room to spare. Conveyor lanes for ships and cargo, now silent and still, crisscrossed the floor in broad gray stripes. Although ice coated much of the clear roof, Ari could nevertheless make out a sunlit cliff-wall of cylinders looming above them and, beyond it, one of the vast nacelle-like structures.
As Shayeen had said, the hangar was as bare as if it had never been used.
“He move all Pelago flyer, too!” Nuna burst out. “Now must we muck it long way to portal!”
He stalked across the hangar floor, a flurry of garish clothes and flapping hair. The grain of Pelago’s adhesive floor was finer than the Hajo-aa’s, and his footsteps rustled like paper.
The soldiers followed Nuna, and Ari trailed the soldiers. It was a profound relief to move her body in this wide, chilly space, to gaze at something beside the grotesqueries of Nuna’s ship. So far, though, she hadn’t spotted a single mark indicating the identity of Pelago’s first owners: not a name, not a crest, not so much as a discreet symbolic pattern embedded in floors or walls. Not even color. The Shkiinhe rarely used beige and gray as geneline insignia, as those were, according to her mother, colors of earth, not heaven.
It was contrary to all Maane had taught her about Shkiinhe artifices, and also to Ari’s limited experience of them. In the dometown on Boivo where she had grown up, the best efforts of residents to alter the wall colors could not stop the town’s indwelling intelligence from returning every surface to a sickly yellow, emblem of the geneline that had built it.
“What do you lag about for, lovey?” Nuna called from the far side of the hangar. “Stay close to I!” He had reached a door and was slapping at the hand plate to no effect. “How go you muck it, pile of poo?” he snarled at Powi.
“No muck I nothing, Nuna-ba,” said Powi in an injured tone, jabbing first at his wrist link and then a patch of link paper he had affixed to his glossy red palm. “Just, no do Pelago see we. No know I why.”
“No do it see you, shit-puddle,” said Nuna, “because no have you Pelago blood inside you. But Ekka and I drink it blood beforetime. I pass through all Pelago door, slip-slap, when I do here last!”
“Boss do with we, it-time,” said Ekka.
A line appeared between Nuna’s eyebrows. “Go I ask you talk, sticky ass-smear? No do Boss here now, but Boss go master Pelago and still he do it master. Boss key open Pelago for we.”
The door remained stubbornly shut, however. As Powi kept prodding at his palm, Nuna rubbed the nostril with the leech inside it, jittered on the balls of his feet, began to pace in tight circles.
Said Ekka nervously, “Maybe, since no do Boss here, go Pelago change it mind and scrub it blood from we.”
“Then we all do mucksmear,” Nuna said, “since must we still find Boss repairman, or go Boss shape we all into shithole wipe.” He slammed his fist against the recalcitrant door. “Powi, turd-brain! Have Hajo-aa ask Pelago!”
Powi nodded, red-lacquer grimaces flashing up and down his coverall, and he bent his head over his link again.
After two or three more seconds, Nuna asked, “Could you take more longtime, shit-drip?”
“It do hard, so much must Ship and Pelago talk each other!” said Powi, aggrieved, jabbing away.
But at last the seal popped, the door slid open. Nuna stalked through it and down the long, dim corridor beyond. Ari and the soldiers followed him. Overhead, light panels blinked on and off to keep pace with them, casting multilayered shadows on the floor. The shush-slap of their footsteps scurried beside them like dry leaves. The soldiers tried to imitate Nuna’s swaggering lope, but their hunched shoulders and skittish glances ruined the effect. They knew, of course, that contrary to what Powi had said, Pelago certainly saw them; the very dust Pelago dropped on their skin watched them. It had simply decided not to acknowledge Nuna and Ekka any longer.
Now Nuna and his soldiers had been brought down nearly to Ari’s level, mute and foreign objects. One difference still remained: because of the key Boss had given the Hajo-aa, Pelago would talk with their ship, even if not directly to them.
Ari lacked even that tenuous link. Unlike the soldiers, though, she was not afraid of Pelago, even if perhaps she should be. This mysterious Shkiinhe artifice aroused longing in her instead. She had never been to the Shkiinhe homeland, but through her mother, Iigmrien had pervaded every part of her life, a realm of wonders almost tangible if forever out of reach.
Pelago was a lost piece of Maane’s country. And it was, Ari thought with grim satisfaction, resisting Nuna as Maane herself had not been able to.
As she could not yet see how to do.
The corridor became a glass-enclosed catwalk that dove into a black space so immense that Ari wondered if they had returned to Pelago’s outer skin. Then, several hundred meters further, a mass of rock loomed up beneath them, webbed in the nearly invisible scaffolding that also cradled the catwalk. Glimmering worm-trails of track snaked across the rock, and here and there slept strings of ore carts and diamond-jawed diggers.
It required another half hour of low-gravity hiking before Pelago’s refinery asteroid sank once more into blackness, and the tracks, braiding together, dove into a tubular maw that must lead to the refinery proper. The catwalk became opaque ceramic corridor again, with an occasional door or a fork leading away.
The papery echoes of their footsteps skittered beside them, ran ahead, returned to pursue them in the shadows behind. Nuna navigated without hesitation. Of course he had been here before, and maybe the Hajo-aa relayed a map into his shipsight. Lacking such an aid, Ari tried to construct her own model of Pelago’s layout, but with the way the corridors curved, and seemed to ramp irregularly up and down according to variations in local gravity, she lost all sense of direction.
At length Nuna stopped at a featureless door just like the others. This one, too, at first refused to open. While Powi worked at his link, Nuna paced, Ekka’s gaze flitted uneasily. Ari wondered what pictographs Powi used: a sketch of a doorway, a person walking?
The door gaped to reveal a wall of stacked crates. Nuna pushed down a cold and shadowed crevasse, through an icy breeze smelling of ozone. After a hundred meters they reached open space. The crates filled only half the warehouse.
Nuna stalked out onto the empty floor. “ ‘I repairman will have it ready to take away,’ ” he mimicked his employer, half in i-shkiinhe, half in creole, swinging in a circle to take in the entire warehouse. “But look: no do repairman touch one-one crate! And where go he hide all Pelago shitsmear machine? Without they, must we bring Hajo-aa right here, weself hump crate on board!”
“We load all they crate?” Ekka said. “How go we make room?”
“Not all, muckbrain,” said Nuna, with contempt. “Ten or twelve, maybe. We just more-more squeeze.”
He thumbed his link and, black hair and orange shirt rippling behind him, strode toward the airlock at the far end of the warehouse.
Out here, at the edge of the open floor, light from overhead fell brightly enough that Ari could make out the hexagonal layers packing the crates. Each was about a meter thick and perhaps three meters across, and absorbed light so completely that she could form no impression of its texture. Where a layer had not been perfectly positioned over the one beneath, the overhang had sagged slightly under its own weight. It was the first evidence Ari had seen of the passage of time on Pelago, of change or decay.
She extended a hand toward a crate but, when the cold sharpened, snatched it back.
For a moment she still could not guess what the crates held. Then she remembered the black patches mottling Pelago’s gray sphere. Long ago, someone had been coating Pelago with these black hexagons. Or removing them.
Giant nacelles, tens of kilometers long; a refinery asteroid as large; the rows of huge cylinders—those must be for fuel storage, but, if full, could service a hundred seedships—
This black stuff was hull glass. Long ago, Pelago had been intended to travel, and not just within this Angel’s demesne. Long ago, someone had given Pelago a starship’s hull so that it could cross the boundary of time.
The ship hulls Ari had seen before had all been seed-grown, stratified into visible layers and larded with tiny color-coded organelles. This stuff looked to be more sophisticated. It had been rendered dormant, she supposed, so that it did not absorb the matter and energy that touched it, although (she shivered in the cold breeze) it was not completely asleep.
The quantity of glass crated here was only a fraction of what would be needed to cover the sphere’s exposed gray surface. But perhaps there were other, full warehouses on Pelago, or perhaps the rest had never been brought, or had long ago been carried away.
These crates might well be the reason for the fierce secrecy demanded by Nuna’s boss. Ari could not begin to estimate their value. Still, freighting already-filled crates from one part of Pelago to another could not have been the task for which Nuna’s boss had been prepared to maroon his “repairman,” clearly a prized employee, for two years.
The repairman’s task seemed unlikely to be repair, either. Almost everything on Pelago looked as if its builders had abandoned it yesterday. Maybe she had misunderstood repairman; even creole forms entirely i-shkiinhe in their elements didn’t always retain their expected meaning.
Nuna stalked back toward them, re-knotting his hair. “Shayeen go fetch Boss cargo from here,” he said shortly. “We keep search.”
He led them back to the corridor. More hiking, a long, ramping climb; another door, where Powi again had to jab away at his palm. In due time this door, too, opened.
Beyond waited a vast, triangular, glass-roofed space, formed in the acute intersection of a row of storage tanks and what must be a wall of the refinery. Nuna strode across the floor, Powi and Ekka dogging his heels. Ari followed more slowly, passing in and out of the rays of golden Angel light that spilled over the cliff-wall of tanks. High overhead, a small bright shape toppled past: the ruined Chresun, or the Hajo-aa in pursuit of it.
How had the repairman vanished, if he had indeed left Pelago? She had seen nothing so far to aid her own escape.
Her mother said, the remembered shape of her voice still as clear and bright as Angel-rays: There are always resources around you. Use what you have. Use what you are.
What she was? She and the soldiers were all mongrels together, all of them imperfect and impure.
My geneline is very pure, very dominant, Maane said. That assertion had always sounded wishful to Ari; Maane’s miscegenation with a son of dirt humanity was more likely to have crippled her children, rendering them unable to master their Shkiinhe patrimony if ever the exile from Iigmrien ended.
Pelago was the first artifice Ari had encountered that could tell her how pure her genes really were.
“Chiyela!” Nuna called across the sunlit floor, with more sharpness in his voice now than sugar. “Stay with I!”
She reluctantly hurried to catch up to them. “What do danger here?”
Powi and Ekka started at the sound of her voice. “Danger?” Ekka said.
“Pelago,” Ari said. “Why do you scare?”
“Boss lose many soldier when first we find it-place,” said Ekka. “They die even though we drink Pelago blood, and should Pelago protect we. But now Pelago scrub it blood from we. No care Pelago now, go we live or die.”
Nuna said, without breaking stride, “Boss lose he soldier inside tank, shit-puddle. Bighead kill they. Boss go mistake. Think he, no would Skeenhay place ever let animal kill person. And think he, no could animal kill he so-hard and ugly soldier.”
“You say Boss master Pelago,” Ari said.
Nuna glanced over his shoulder, brow furrowing. “No do Pelago let they hurt Boss.”
Observe, think, said her mother’s lost voice, in the very shape of the Angel light. Understand, so you are ready to act.
Ari’s brief encounter with Nuna’s employer, at which she had begged to join his soldiers in the mistaken hope that he would laugh and send her away, had concluded with a glimpse of Boss’s wayfinder, a shadow sliding across the stars. While she had never heard anyone speak Boss’s name, he was, surely, an exile like Maane—perhaps the reason Maane’s enemies had hired him to kill her. Boss had apparently brought his ship with him out of Iigmrien. Wayfinders were the crowning glory of the Shkiinhe shipwrights’ artifice: intelligences that fed on the song of Angels, that slipped in and out of time as soft as an eye blink, that spun doors from their own tomography of truespace. They floated at the pinnacle of the Shkiinhe hierarchy of made intelligences, and they were unheard-of on the Riftside. Boss’s was the first Ari had ever laid eyes on.
If Pelago could resist being mastered by a wayfinder, it must be as powerful as a wayfinder.
And what does that tell you? Ari’s mother would have asked.
To transit truespace, even once, Pelago would need a shipmind. Pelago’s shipmind could only be a wayfinder’s—an intelligence that could generate any door at all, for any ship at all.
Now that was a bit of Shkiinhe artifice worth scavenging, worth any number of soldiers’ lives. Those who owned the doors, as the Shkiinhe said, owned heaven.
But the repairman couldn’t have vanished through one of Pelago’s doors, not without a working starship to carry him.
And, according to Powi, the repairman had not left Pelago.
They reached an inconspicuous exit at the far side, which unsealed after Powi’s usual manipulations. Lights blinked on inside to reveal a bare chamber even smaller than the dockside airlock.
Nuna and his soldiers crowded in. “Go come, chiyela,” Nuna called. “It do Pelago true portal. No trip we further into Pelago save through it.”
Ari squeezed in, trying not to brush Powi’s glossy red flesh or Ekka’s bronze scales even through the barrier of their clothing. If she turned away from the monsters, though, there was Nuna, face to face: the clean line of his cheekbone and jaw, the curve of his lips, the perfume of his skin. Loose strands of his hair, thick and glossy, clung to her shirt. His arm and flank pushed against hers, warm, lean, and strong, as he fished the leech from his nose and flicked it into the wall receptacle.
Ari, swallowing bile, breathed slowly and forced herself not to flinch. The chamber puffed dust over them. A long moment followed while motile powder trawled their skin, gut, and airways, in which nothing happened but a pair of sneezes that wracked Ari. Nuna began to jitter again.
Trays slid out from the wall, each proffering a single gray sipsucker.
“Pelago give we blood!” said Powi.
“It give we drink,” said Nuna, sharp as glass. “Soon do we learn what kind.”
He grabbed a sipsucker for himself, pulled out another and thrust it at Ari, urging, “Go on, go you sup!”
She began to swallow the sweet, salty endocytic cocktail it contained, keeping her heartbeat steady. Now Pelago would embody in their flesh the judgements it had made about their purity.
“Boss,” said Ekka nervously. “No give Pelago drink for I.” She was reaching for a sipsucker, but the tray kept retracting into the wall.
“It-drink belong to Powi, muckbrain.”
“But—” Ekka began.
Nuna said, “You spend too much time at meatshaper lab, Ekka. Pelago like only clean Skeenhay meat. Powi look fright-ugly on he skin, but he gene do much-much Skeenhay, and he dig out most of he inware. No would I use so-stupid soldier except Hajo-aa grant he all power of touch.”
“Pelago give I blood last time,” Ekka protested.
“Like you say,” said Nuna, “Boss do here then. He make Pelago give it.”
Powi poked at his link, and even Nuna undertook a session with his wristband, but the Hajo-aa could not persuade Pelago to yield a drink for Ekka. In the end Nuna lost patience. “Go you wait by warehouse for Shayeen. Help she load Boss cargo.”
“Pelago go kill I,” Ekka said, and she actually began to tremble.
Nuna laughed, flashing his perfect teeth. “Only do bighead hungry,” he said, and he shoved Ekka through the door in the direction they had come.
At last Nuna, Powi, and Ari stepped through the inner door, and the portal sealed behind them with a sigh.
A bare corridor, pierced by occasional doors, curved away into darkness in both directions. Powi’s quick breathing and the rustle of Nuna’s silks were the only noises to roughen the surface of the deep silence.
“Powi-turd,” Nuna said. Faint disk-shaped reverberations of his voice dropped from the walls. “Go you ask Pelago where repairman stay, before he vanish.”
Powi worked at his link. After a moment, he pointed unsteadily to the left. “It-way.”
They set off in that direction. The curving walls threw back dry-leaf echoes of their footsteps that rustled disconcertingly loud and close.
How could she test the nature of the drink Pelago had given her—the degree of purity it had discerned in her?
“I tell Boss,” Nuna said bitterly, “no should he leave repairman here, with no eye do watch he. Boss say, ‘Can Pelago watch repairman better than any person eye.’ ”
Said Powi, “Boss save heself so much trouble, go he just copy repairman brain.”
“Copy do more stupid than you,” Nuna said. “It do easy, teach machine all repairman know. But it so much-much hard, go make copy that can fix all repairman fix. He know feel and want in the shape of he meatbrain, and he need feel and want for go act. No would copy know neither.”
A tiny clatter jangled behind them, a spill of metal beads in Ari’s ears. Powi and Nuna spun around. Ari glanced that direction, but recalling how sound ricocheted in these corridors, she looked ahead as well, just in time to catch a shadow slipping beyond the curve of the wall.
A drone under Pelago’s guidance, surely, or a machine that had assisted the repairman, carrying out its assigned tasks after its master was gone.
If the repairman was gone.
The three of them set out again, Nuna breathing faster now. Then, he burst out, waving his arm in front of him, “Shit-splat! What go muck it here?”
Ari, too, had collided with the eddying droplets.
“Bighead!” said Powi, trembling. He backed away, fearful grimaces flashing over his clothes.
“Better go pimp up you meatbrain, Powi, before you stupid kill you,” said Nuna. “Think you true-true, go Pelago let any bighead climb out of they tank?”
“But you say to Ekka that Pelago—”
“I joke at she, shit-dribble! Go ask Pelago what bring it-mucky water here. Then see you, no do it bighead.”
Powi prodded his palm with a shaky finger. Ari wiped her face and stared at the spots of moisture on her sleeve, telling herself that Pelago would not allow anything impure into its body, or hers. In these clean, empty corridors, though, the strength of the sulfur-and-iodine stink was shocking, and even more shocking was its familiarity. Her father used to consume a rank substance called benbi that smelled like that, microbially cultured from a variety of Poli seaweed and imported from the blue world of Polu itself. He claimed it was a much-prized delicacy. Her mother claimed it stank up their apartment for days.
Ari shoved down the memory. Exercise dispassion, Maane said. Seek understanding.
Light from overhead showed tiny droplets drifting downward in Pelago’s light gravity, swirling in the turbulence their breath and movement imparted to the air. About five meters up the corridor, a pair of cleaning drones, the first Ari had seen on Pelago, sucked the water from air and floor. Because of the drones, it was now impossible to tell how far down the corridor the trail of liquid had extended. The drones could not have made the clattery noise she had heard; they worked in complete silence except for an occasional sputter of indrawn liquid.
Nuna had already started onwards. Then Powi blurted, “Nuna-ba, Nuna-ba, I shipsight grow dark!”
Nuna stopped and blinked. He jabbed at his wrist link. After a long moment he said, grimly, “Pelago scrub not just it own blood. It clean Hajo-aa from we, too.”
“No trip we further,” Powi implored, and then, with a note of panic, “Go Pelago even let we leave?”
For an instant, fear surged through Ari, too. Was this the repairman’s fate, Pelago first erasing its markers of agency in him, then purging its body of unclean things?
“We still do link to Hajo-aa, muckbrain, through Pelago,” Nuna said, “just like other side of portal.” With shaking hands Powi poked at his palm, nodded. Nuna went on, “Can we step along without shipsight or shipvoice. Just go show I where repairman busy heself.”
“I lose I map, Nuna-ba,” said Powi.
“And where do you lead I, fart spray, just one-one second before you sight fade?” Powi pointed to a door just beyond the waist-high cleaners. “Then go open it!”
But that door slid open as soon as the three of them drew near.
Faces all over Powi’s coverall gawked in surprise. “Pelago give we blood after all!”
“You do so stupid,” said Nuna, pushing through the doorway.
Beyond lay a maze of rooms furnished as living apartments, eating lounges, and laboratories, but containing no trace of recent occupation. Even the walls were clean of moss, as if the repairman had breathed too little air to compel Pelago to grow any. Each door slid wide as they approached it, but Ari had no opportunity to determine which of them Pelago opened it for.
Then, through one doorway, she again heard the sound like polished metal beads. It was fainter this time, hardly more than a brush of tactile-topological synaesthesia along the outermost skin of her hearing. On the other hand, the sulfur-and-iodine stink that wafted from that room was very strong.
Perhaps the others didn’t notice, because they continued through the doorway with no more than the usual swagger (on Nuna’s part) or (on Powi’s) a nervous shuffle.
“It do Pelago control room!” Nuna said. “But repairman muck it.”
Ari stopped on the threshold. This chamber was much larger than the Hajo-aa’s cramped control room, perhaps twenty meters across. Some of the duty stations, display tables, and acceleration chairs still sat in neat parallel arcs; others had been ripped out and shoved aside to make space for a clutter of cupboards and tables dragged in from elsewhere.
Nuna stalked through the room, slapping consoles and displays to no effect. “Go trip in, lovey,” he ordered her. “Stay next to I, and no touch you nothing.” To Powi he said, “Go on, shit-drip, turn all they on!”
Ari stepped toward Nuna, watching for more dirty water, checking beneath chairs and behind tables for what could have shed it. The floor was springier here and more porous; the ceiling shone brighter, too. One section was dimmed—the first thing she had seen on Pelago not in perfect repair.
When she absent-mindedly braced a hand against a console to peer behind it, light, color, and shape flashed into displays all across the room.
Heart pounding, she snatched her hands back and tucked them into her armpits. Nuna, luckily, was not looking in her direction. “Here it do!” he exclaimed, stopping beside a table where a model of Pelago had begun to blossom into translucent solidity. He slapped the blank work surface at the base of the display column, but the table still did not respond to him. “Now have Ship go show I Pelago doorbox, Powi-turd. Hurry!”
Powi blinked. “Doorbox?”
“Pelago do starship once, muckbrain. Go find it! We go fetch it away with we.”
“But, Nuna-captain,” Powi said obsequiously, “Pelago doorbox belong to Boss.”
“And go remove it do repairman big job here.”
“But no have Hajo-aa room—” Powi began.
“Just look you, pebble poo!”
It would be a fruitless search, Ari was sure. Whatever instructions Nuna’s employer had given the repairman, Boss must have kept Nuna in ignorance of Pelago’s true nature. A wayfinder had no need for a block of memory dedicated to the storage of door equations fed to it by other intelligences.
Still, hands in her armpits, Ari edged closer to the exquisitely detailed model. It confirmed the general notion she had formed of Pelago’s layout: dock, refinery, warehouses, and asteroid haphazardly accreted to the orderly geometry of the four nacelles and the sphere. On the last, Pelago had overlaid an elaborate three-dimensional grid, and Ari could also see how the disk-like module where they now stood was affixed to its north and leading pole.
Then, still careful to examine possible hiding places, she drifted away through the room. Pelago’s makers had possessed the luxury of space to install more display tables than she had ever seen in her life before. Some of the labels were hard to parse, however. Fuel Supplies seemed clear enough (all tanks full). But what about Disengagement Sequence; was she reading that correctly? And Engine Status; could all four engines really be on line?
That last caused her to stop, unease prickling up her spine. By now Ari had gathered that the repairman served Boss with less than complete enthusiasm, and he had had two years, after all, in which to lay plans against the return of Boss’ soldiers.
But what could he accomplish, where could he go, by firing those huge engines? Massive Pelago couldn’t accelerate fast enough to escape the Hajo-aa inside spacetime, and it couldn’t depart through truespace with only scraps of a proper hull.
Beyond Engine Status another display caught her gaze: a sphere a-glitter with stars and dust.
It contained half the swarm of Iigmrien.
Ari walked to it, put her hand against the display column as if she could thereby slip inside Angel-song. Of course she could not feel the shape of heaven; the gel medium was hardly more palpable than a breath of air.
But a glowing yellow pointer blinked into existence inside the gel. Moved when she moved her finger.
She closed her fist and the pointer vanished; tucked her hands in her armpits and took two steps back.
Nuna and Powi’s search still absorbed them. She fixed her gaze on the fragment of heaven so that Pelago would know where to answer her. Quieter than a whisper, she mouthed words, not in i-shkiinhe—the language given by the Elders to the People which, despite its perfection, was mutable like every human tongue—but in i-naat, the language of things, which never changed, lest the millennia erode the capacity of the People to command their machines.
“Show me the map for the Angel of this demesne,” she told Pelago. “Show me thirty years of heaven.”
And Pelago showed her.
She was part of Pelago’s body, she was the one the rooms had opened for.
And Nuna would have guessed this already, because the displays hadn’t responded to him or, evidently, Powi.
The command map altered the glory of light to a less beautiful but wonderfully tidy stellar chart. Colored beads modeled stellar type, size, mass, and luminosity; dust showed as silvery clouds; apparent folds and twists of the display medium hinted at etheric gradients.
The map told her Angel-names, too, but not the familiar ones. Giant Kaenub was labeled Kbe; red Shriar was Shra. Pelago’s Angel, the small yellow bead at the center of the map, bore the poetic but mathematically meaningless title Ani Chrenash Nege, Angel-Mother-Father-of-Blue-Water.
On impulse, Ari mouthed to Pelago, “Run the map backward in time, to when your makers brought you to this demesne.”
And then she watched while Mother-Father-of-Blue-Water slipped back along the Riftside. It was being pushed toward the Rift, tossed out of Iigmrien, by massive Kaenub and its siblings. The date in the display was running backward by hundreds of years, thousands of years, heavenly not planetary years, the Elders’ years—
Cold awe scurried up Ari’s spine. No wonder she had trouble reading Pelago’s graphs; Pelago had been brought here before the Shkiinhe had even left the Elders’ service. The Elders themselves must have dispatched Pelago. But for what purpose?
No, no; she had to focus on the here-and-now. “Show me the full name of this Angel,” she mouthed to Pelago, “its mathematical name.”
The display dissolved back to starry darkness.
Pelago didn’t know that command. Or would not respond to it. Maybe she needed to be Pelago’s master.
Ari glanced again at Nuna, who was pacing while Powi worked at his link. She stepped quickly forward to place her palm on the base of the display. Pelago responded by throwing column after column of ideographs onto the work surface. It was not math, though.
“What do it?” Nuna roared. “Chiyela, go I tell you touch anything?”
Belatedly Ari saw that the same columns of graphs had flashed onto every work surface in the room.
Powi gaped. “She make it?”
Nuna stalked toward her. Ari stepped away from the table so he could not trap her against it, but she didn’t dare attempt one of her mother’s techniques of transformation that could redirect the material vector of Nuna’s rage. She could not afford to resemble an exile’s daughter to any degree.
So she let Nuna seize her wrist and crush nerve against bone, until electric bolts seared up her arm.
He brandished a glass knife in his other hand. “Go you touch nothing, perfume-ass girlie!” he yelled. “Or think you, because Pelago like you meat better than I, it go stop I clip off you lovey finger, one by one?”
He sharpened the pressure on her radial nerve until white light sheeted across her vision. Then a piece of ceiling flew down at the two of them. A ropy black mass and a spray of stinking water burst after it.
“Bighead! Bighead!” Powi screamed.
The impact shoved Nuna to his knees even as, roaring, he sliced upward with his knife across the monster’s writhing appendages. A sticky-sharp rope clutched at Ari’s neck; Nuna severed it, freeing her to stumble backward. He slashed and slashed, scattering pieces of tentacle, until the creature at last fell still.
Breathing hard, he climbed to his feet. Water drenched his torn shirt, and bleeding gashes crisscrossed his chest. For a moment, though, the tension had fled from him, and he was all grace and beauty, exhilarated.
With an effort Ari calmed her wildly spiking pulse. She took a step toward the thing again, then stopped to avoid the slow rain of water and blood.
The monster’s head bulked larger than a human torso. Five scissoring bony plates rimmed its mouth, and palm-sized lidless yellow eyes circled the monster’s head—ten of them, she guessed, to match the radial symmetry of the legs. The tentacles, each longer than she was tall, appeared smooth to the touch, but the raw scrape on her neck, Nuna’s bleeding cuts, testified to hidden edges.
“No can they bighead get out, you say.” Powi’s voice shook. “No would you let I bring weapon.”
The furrow between Nuna’s eyebrows reappeared. “Pelago let I bring knife, squishy turd, because never can knife hurt it precious body. But no do it-thing bighead. It do puppet.” He showed his knife to Powi, the transparent blade of which was entirely clean of body fluids, and then he kicked a nearly-severed piece of the monster’s head to expose, not alien flesh and organ tissue, but pale rubbery foam that contained finger-sized slots for memory sticks and other bits of hardware Ari did not recognize.
A puppet indeed. Beads of water nevertheless clung to the thing, and it stank of iodine and sulfur. As did she now. Her shirt was soaked.
Powi took a shuddering breath and craned his neck to peer into the dark cavity exposed in the ceiling. “How do puppet happen there?”
“Maybe they bighead send it for go grab I,” Nuna mocked him. Then he turned to Ari, his voice so sharp it could have cut her. “Chiyela, Pelago like you pure Skeenhay meat so much, it give you blood and leave we blind. But no forget, you own one-one single way go leave Pelago, and it do Hajo-aa. And I do Hajo-aa master. Stay close and no touch you nothing, and make very sweet for I, or I go, I go knife off you hand and leave you behind.”
He pointed with his knife at the nearest display. “You so much boast you can read. Go tell I what it-writing say.”
Nuna had surely not dismissed from his mind the question of how the puppet had gotten into the ceiling. But, as he ordered, Ari turned to look at the text.
The celestial dates accompanying it were clear enough, and so recent that they must refer to the repairman’s tenure here. Scrolls and dots and slashes elaborated the graphs themselves, however, into such complex shades of meaning that she could barely decipher them. Maane had told her that the writing the Elders had given to the People was like i-naat and never changed. The ideographs signified, not ephemeral sounds or mutable grammar, but eternal meanings, so that you could read records a millennium old as easily as last year’s. Now Ari had to wonder if it was true.
Many occurrences of cephalosoma, head-body beings: she could guess those were the creatures the soldiers called bigheads. Sonolexicon, kinosemy, neuroanatomy, histolysis, enzymology . . . It was technical vocabulary. She understood the elements, but her Shkiinhe education had been in what her mother called matters of heaven, not of earth. Her rudimentary knowledge of comparative biology came mostly from the Poli side of her schooling—which had been in her father’s language.
“No can chiyela read so much, then?” said Powi. Smirks flashed across his coverall.
“It all do what repairman study,” Ari said, “all about bighead and how it live, like.” She pointed to the black puppet sprawled on the floor.
But Nuna had lost interest already. He shoved Ari toward the jumble of cupboards and tables crowding one side of the control room. “Go tell I what repairman work at here. But first, chiyela, put you two gropy hand where I can see they.”
Ari tucked her hands in her armpits, the crushed nerve still twinging in her forearm, and let Nuna propel her through the clutter.
Then he jerked to a stop, breathing hard. His hand fell from Ari’s shoulder. His fingers began to twitch.
At the epicenter of the chaos sat a medical couch. The diagnostic and healing apparatus had been retracted, and a partially disassembled maintenance machine—a dozen neatly folded tool-tipped limbs atop a segmented, extensible body—was strapped to the padded gray surface. Curved plates of resin, in which conduits of various sizes and colors had been grown, lay alongside. A faint aroma of solvents hung over the couch, mixed with the stink of sulfur and iodine.
With his knife Nuna hooked a tangle of nearly invisible filament from the pile. “How go he pull it out?” His voice began to rise. “Boss say, go repairman try touch he link, he body seize up like rock! Boss say, no do Pelago let drone touch repairman, and never do it let repairman teach machine go do it! Boss say: ‘I do master of Pelago, I think of everything!’ ”
He flung himself away and began to stalk in circles, slamming tables and equipment cupboards, his hair flying, garish clothes flapping, bleeding skin a-glitter, bright and violent as an Angel tangling truespace.
How, Ari thought suddenly, could any Riftside bigman who made so many miscalculations, renegade Shkiinhe or not, keep Nuna leashed?
The answer was, of course, Boss’ wayfinder. Those who owned the doors owned heaven.
As if sensing that her thoughts had turned to him, Nuna slowed and came up beside her. “Now come you big-big moment, lovey,” he said, his sugar-syrup voice laced with diamond shards. “Now can you show you captain do you useful, do you for true read Skeenhay writing.”
“I can read,” said Ari. “Just no do I know all they animal word.”
“Then help I find out, chiyela, how repairman move he brain from here.”
“Move he brain?” she said.
“Do you any more smart than Powi? From here! From it!” He stabbed his knife at the couch.
She looked, but could make out nothing she hadn’t seen before. “It do machine.”
Nuna laughed in her ear. “It do repairman. He run away from Boss too many time. He move he brain beforetime, once-twice, when he try hide heself. Last time Boss punish he, and no go he give repairman back he meat. Boss lock repairman brain in he own tool-drone.”
Ragged shock rushing over her skin, Ari stared at the disassembled equipment. Who would even imagine creating such an abomination, much less carry out the thought?
But why did she keep being surprised? Look at Nuna’s once-human chair. She already knew about the repairman’s head-link. They were ready to kill every person on the Chresun. They’d murdered her family.
Boss must have supplied motor connections so that the repairman could operate those tool-tipped limbs. Must have allowed some perceptual input to replace the senses ripped from the repairman’s awareness.
But Boss had intended punishment, imprisonment, amputation. Ari could not suppose but that it had been as quick and brutal a job as any meatshaper could make it. Gone would be the symphony of skin talking to self about the world: sharpness, heat, cold, pressure, wetness, roughness. Gone would be the trickle of moisture on tongue, the rustle of hair on scalp, the crack of joints unfolding, the swell of breath and the rhythm of heartbeat, the resonance of sound in muscle and bone.
Gone, too, the lightness of joy in your chest. The knot of anxiety in your throat, the squirm in your foot soles from fear, the swelling heat of arousal, the sick chill when you have yet again caused disappointment, the searing coals of smothered anger.
Boss would have had to leave the repairman feel and want, as Nuna said. But what were either of those without a body to know them?
Ari heard her own voice ask, hoarse and unsteady, “Why no do Boss let he leave?”
“What,” said Nuna, “think you they repairman just float around like so many rock? Boss repairman do almost like shipwright, he so good.”
He touched her nape and she flinched, which made him laugh and press against her side. Then she felt another caress: Nuna’s glass blade, cool and smooth, on her cheek.
“Chiyela,” he said, as soft as she had ever heard him, “chiyela, I know you play tricky, tell I just bitty-bit of all you know. Go tell I now how repairman cut Boss link out of he brain, and what he turn heself into this time. Show I, do you have some use beyond you pure lovey meat. Most-most time, no own I no use for plain meat. Hajo-aa carry too much already, and it just drop shit and breathe up air, and make too much moss grow on I wall. Do I just as happy go toss you into tank-water for bighead snackies. I know they go eat you quick. Longtime I do soldier-captain and many time I see even purest Skeenhay meat die, as easy as any mongrel.”
The knife blade slid against her cheek. It was so sharp that at first she did not feel the cut itself, only an ache somewhere under her skin, and a faint tickle as blood welled out.
Then fire raked her face…
