Chapter Eight
Chelo
After the heavy feast, I tossed and turned so much I was afraid the children would wake. The ceiling felt far above my head and dark. When I did graze the top of sleep, my half-dreaming self imagined fliers inside the guesthouse, battering at the window to get out, broken feathers filling the air. The image seemed so real I sneezed and startled myself awake again, my blood racing.
Even lying awake, my imagination replayed what I knew about the fliers over and over. Their beauty, the sadness in their ask-and-answer formal ceremony. The way giant wings made all of their movements foreign, their very balance occurring around different fulcrums. Theoretically, they were like us. But I did not believe that for a moment. Surely there was a point when genetic engineering made a different race entirely, and the fliers were there.
I gave up before dawn and untangled myself from the pile on the bed, lifting Liam’s hand from my shoulder and sliding Jherrel’s small arm from around my waist. As I fumbled for my shoes, I made a mental note to ask for small beds for the kids. There appeared to be plenty of everything in this town. In fact, since leaving Fremont I’d seen riches everywhere, even on the least well-kept of starship. No wonder people from the Five Worlds found the settlers on Fremont hard to sympathize with, or why the original humans at home mistrusted the rich and almost unnatural people from other planets.
And of course, we six were both.
Maybe that kept me up. The idea that this foreign place could become home.
I succeeded in getting out of the door to our quarters without waking anyone else, and crept slowly down the wide, steep stairs toward the kitchen. I wanted to go outside, but I didn’t understand the rules we might be under.
This wasn’t home yet, not if I couldn’t just open the door and walk outside. I almost did it anyway, but that would be a trick of Alicia’s. A soft scrape of spoon against cup suggested someone sitting in the dark kitchen. Maybe Jenna—she often woke early on the various ships, and we’d shared col and quiet many mornings.
Instead of Jenna, Dianne sat so quietly I didn’t notice her until I reached the table. She smiled at me, and silently got up and poured me a cup of col. A pile of red, blue, and purple fruits I’d seen at the feast last night adorned the middle of the table. I took a red one with smooth, taut skin. I expected it to taste like redberry from home, but instead it had a rich spicy taste that burned my tongue and reminded me I was in a completely alien place.
Thin and tall, Dianne moved with precision as she brought the cup to me and sat down. As we breakfasted in silence, I watched her angular face, which gave away very little of what she was thinking. She’d never really talked to me, not outside of groups, and she was usually quiet. But I’d seen her take charge well a few times, and when she did talk, she usually said something intelligent.
The sky was just beginning to lighten when we finished. People would be up soon.
Dianne caught my attention with a raised finger. “I’m going out,” she whispered. “Will you come?”
“Sure.” I took both our cups to the sink. She held the door open, closing it quietly after we both passed through. The graying of the light in the window had been a tease; it was dark enough that I could barely see my feet. Even though I had been the tallest woman on Fremont, I had to take three steps to Dianne’s two. We walked quickly in spite of the near dark, and in a few minutes I wasn’t cold anymore. “Have you been here before?”
She nodded. “Once. And of course, to the Autocracy where I was born, and once, on vacation with my parents, to Joy Heaven.” She glanced at me, “And to Fremont.” She knew this was the only place I’d been except home. “Do you get homesick?” she asked.
Why did it matter? We’d never go back. “I won’t be once I know where we belong.”
“I’m seventy-seven, and I still don’t know where I belong.”
After a while, I asked, “Why are Islas and Silver’s Home fighting?” We paused briefly at a fork, where she chose the path toward the city, clearly intent on some particular destination. “Pride.” She fell silent for a few steps before she went on. “Islas believes that Silver’s Home is experimenting too loosely with genetics, playing God too much. They want rules around the choices that are made, and to be able to veto some things. The Islan government believes they are supposed to chart Islas’s destiny, and that what Silver’s Home does, interferes with their control. They dislike it when people like Marcus or your brother do things they say are God’s prerogative.”
“God?”
“A power no one can see or touch or taste, but that some people believe in with all their hearts.” Her voice was slightly bitter, and she took a sip of water. “Not many people really believe in God these days, that’s not the real issue. It’s a question of how much we should alter the created world. Since God’s existence can’t be disproved, he or she is a convenient tool for powerful people to use to pretend they are subject to something even more powerful.”
“What has Joseph done that this power might do?”
“Nothing yet. But once he helps the fliers, Islas may declare him an enemy.”
So Diane thought he and Marcus could do this thing. “But don’t the fliers deserve help?”
“Of course they do. They’re love slaves. They’re adored and reviled, controlled and yet sought out. Silver’s Home sees them as the product of its creative output, Islas as abominations. If they become able to bear their own children, then they’ll be able to take charge of their own destiny. They’ll be a race of their own instead of manufactured things.”
She paused and we walked a bit more, the soft earth almost silent under our feet. We stepped over a little stream that ran inside of straight banks, sliding through rocks covered with mosses that the rising light showed as bright green and a deep, nearly purple, blue. It didn’t look like a wild stream, nor was it as pretty as a wild stream. I remembered my strange dreams of fliers battering the walls of our house, trying to get out. “They already seem so different I don’t think they’re human. What does it really change?”
“For one, it will challenge the Court of the Five Worlds.”
“What’s that?”
“There are rules and laws that govern commerce between the worlds. Some define who has what rights, and as long as the fliers are human, they have our rights. If they aren’t human, Islas will grant them fewer rights. And there aren’t any fliers on the Court to speak for them. Silver’s Home does now, but they might not if we succeed.”
So neither side would help them? Was that why they chose neutrality? I chewed on my lower lip. All of the powers in the Five Worlds seemed so delicately balanced. “Why don’t they have a voice?”
“There aren’t enough of them. There are only a few hundred thousand fliers on all the worlds. Despite their visibility, it’s a small contingent compared to either of the big planets. Lopali has a seat, but it’s held by a human who doesn’t like them.”
Well, of all people, my family and I understood how you could be more capable but have fewer rights than the people around you. “The world isn’t fair.”
The first morning birds began to sing. Dianne seemed to be listening for a moment, and then she said, “The fliers are as much a symbol as you are.”
There it was again. “So—why does everyone talk about me like they know my story?”
Dianne stopped me with a firm hand on my shoulder. Her gaze made me feel small and young and vulnerable. “Because you are a story. The Five Worlds are an information economy, or perhaps a gossip factory. New stories fill up a whole planet in moments, and spread across us all in months. Joseph was a story before you. Islas is using your story, and frankly so are we. The Port Authority, who helped start the stories about Joseph, is trying to suppress them now, which is like fueling a fire, since everyone hates the Authority except the Authority itself.”
I swallowed hard, watching the rising light make shadows on her face, and struggling to think about what she said and not just get angry. “You’re using my story? Our story? Why?”
“Well, you don’t understand our worlds yet, even though you came from here. So you can’t be trusted to know how to spin your stories. For now, you must leave that to us.” Her face and voice softened a little. “So think about how you hated it when the Star Mercenaries killed the people on Fremont. I could see your heart in your face—you loved those people. Even the ones who didn’t love you.”
“I don’t understand why anyone, anywhere, can kill another.”
She didn’t let me change the topic, just plowed on in the direction her thoughts had been taking her. “Well, I left Islas even though I loved it, because I thought too freely for them. You left Artistos on Fremont because you were persecuted and told to mind the leaders. You went to another island; I went to another planet.”
“That wasn’t exactly how it happened!” I protested.
“But that’s the story. And that’s the heart of it, right?”
Not really. But good enough for her. How could I possibly communicate the way the West Band of roamers loved us while the East Band didn’t, or how some would spit on us but some would help us? So I just said, “Sure.”
“It’s the same for me. I couldn’t bear to live on Islas anymore, couldn’t bear the control. I had to leave. I love Silver’s Home. It’s full of brave and clever people, even if some of them have too much power. I don’t want anyone to die in either place. So you see? I’m just like you.”
I’d reserve judgment about that for the moment. In fact, I was pretty angry, although I bit my tongue. The idea of my family’s stories being spread throughout the Five Worlds made my skin crawl. Our lives were being fed to strangers. Worse. Lies about our lives.
We walked over halfway to the forest of perch-trees before I had enough control to respond. “I’d like to see how these stories are told. I want to read them.”
“Your brother can find them for you.” Dianne took a few long steps to get into the lead, and then turned to the right before reaching the perch-trees. I followed, unsettled by what she had revealed and still unsure of her. Joseph was willing to trust her, probably because Marcus did, but I wasn’t yet sure I trusted Marcus.
The path we followed looked like it might circle the whole town. From time to time, other paths branched away.
The sun began to send near-horizontal beams of light through the trees. It touched her eyes, then mine, so I held up a hand to shade them. Last night, as we walked into town and then to the feast, Lopali seemed wild. This morning, it didn’t feel wild. Sure, I noted grass and trees and rocks, bushes and butterflies, dirt and thin streams. Flowers grew. Everything was big and wavy, the stalks thinner. The lower gravity changed the way the plants shaped themselves. We’d seen that in the ship’s gardens. But something else about the landscape bothered me, even though I couldn’t tell what it was, like a name on the tip of a tongue. “How long has Lopali been settled? Is everything here native?”
I couldn’t see her face since she was in front of me, but it sounded like she was laughing quietly. “Nothing is native. This was a dead rock five hundred years ago.”
I blinked, looking more carefully. No thorns. No trip-vine struggled to entangle my feet, no insect spun and buzzed anywhere near. “It’s all a garden?”
“That’s one way to think of it.”
So complex. “Did it come from somewhere? The ideas or the plants or something? How does anyone get a whole ecosystem right?”
“They don’t always.”
“What about Silver’s Home? Is it made everywhere?”
“Mostly.” She stopped for a moment, looking around, and I imagined she was trying to see it all new, the way I saw it. She shook her head. “Silver’s Home had a natural ecosystem that man could live on with help, and so did Islas. But they’ve been remade. Silver’s Home gets redesigned all the time. Islas changes slowly and with great deliberation, and even has some places on it that haven’t ever been changed. Lopali and Paradise were built from moons, and then set into the best possible planetary orbits around their suns, and Joy Heaven was manufactured from nothing.”
Wow. As I looked around me, every flower and stone and bird looked and sounded perfect. Too perfect.
When Dianne paused for a moment, I bent down and plucked a fist-sized blue flower and crushed its stem. It bled light green water onto my fingers. The petals bruised if I squeezed them. I brought the flower up near my nose, inhaling a faint, sweet scent.
Dianne raised an eyebrow.
“It’s as real as I am,” I said.
“Of course it is.” She appeared to be looking for something specific near the ground. Finally, beside three small stone sculptures of leaves, she turned down a thin dirt path. It wound through trees and ended at a wooden door to a smallish house that looked old. “Seeyan?” she called. “Are you here?”
The door opened almost immediately and a tall chestnut-haired beauty threw herself into Dianne’s arms. “You did come back.”
Dianne’s return hug was more reserved than Seeyan’s, but for just a second I thought I spotted a tear in Dianne’s eye. Then she blinked and turned away for a short moment, and the next sight she let me have of her face showed her usual control. She disentangled herself from the other woman’s arms, and I got my first good look at Seeyan. She had the broad shoulders and wide-set eyes of a flier, but no wings. Her eyes were a deep brown, with reddish glints that matched her hair. Unlike everyone at the feast last night, she was dressed simply, in a loose flowing dress of pale green. She gave me a little bow, and said, “Pleased to meet you, Chelo.”
I tensed for a second, then held out my hand. It wasn’t her fault she’d heard of me. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Would you come in?” she asked.
Dianne glanced at me, her eyes encouraging me to accept Seeyan’s invitation. Why not? If the children needed anything, Kayleen or Liam could manage. “I’d be happy to.”
Inside, the house had three rooms: a bathroom, a large kitchen, and a single room that seemed to serve as bedroom and living room and study all at once. Plants and leaves hung suspended from the ceiling in the kitchen in small bunches, filling the air with pale, savory scents. Paloma would have a hundred questions for her, and I immediately made a note to myself to try and bring her here. This small place looked and felt more like home than anywhere I’d been on Lopali so far, and maybe it would help Paloma feel less lost. Was that why Dianne brought me here? Because it was like home?
Seeyan offered to make us tea. When we nodded, she looked pleased, and clipped bits of the hanging herbs and placed them in mesh bags. The bags went into cups shaped like flowers, and she poured water into the cups with a ritualistic grace.
Even though I’d have sworn she poured in cold water, the cup was warm to the touch when Seeyan handed it to me, and then moments later it was so hot I set it down on the table.
As soon as we were all seated, Dianne looked at Seeyan. “Can you please tell Chelo your story, like you told it to me?”
Seeyan looked out of the window, then down at the table for a moment, then back at Dianne. “Will it help?”
“Perhaps. Chelo will be helping her brother.”
“I will.” Seeyan dropped her gaze to her slender hands and took a deep breath. Dianne leaned back, looking relaxed, watching us both. Seeyan started talking, her voice soft and her words slow in coming. “The first thing I remember is waking up inside a big space with a high ceiling and a floor painted green. A woman held up a mirror, and I could see myself. I was a little girl, and I had wings on my back.”
She stopped and smiled at me, watching for a reaction. “Go on,” I said. “I’d like to hear.”
“My wings were a soft yellow, with brown on the ends and a red stripe. Even to this day, I haven’t seen any adult fliers like me. After a while, there was also a little boy with the same wings, and they called us brother and sister.” She sipped her tea, gazing through me as if I weren’t even there. One side of her mouth quirked up. “His name was Will, and he and I learned to open our wings and fan them and to jump up and start flying together. We learned this in a big cage on a ship. I didn’t know it was a ship then, or that there were fifty other flier children on board.
“Will and my teacher, Siona, were the only people I ever saw. And since I didn’t like Siona, Will was my only friend. We talked to each other almost all the time, and we shared the same locked-up bedroom, and since that was all we knew it didn’t seem strange at all.” She looked at me, shy, checking for a reaction.
I smiled, hoping it would encourage her.
Dianne gave her a go-on gesture, hurrying her back into her story.
Seeyan’s words came faster. “Eventually, Will and I could both jump up inside the ship and fly around, almost to the ceiling. Siona was pleased. One day, she took us into a different cage—a big open cylinder with dirt on the bottom and some trees. She told us it was a park, and invited us to fly.
“We flew.”
She smiled wistfully.
“The park was a beautiful flyspace, with more open air than we’d ever seen. I soared and banked and turned, and I loved the wind against my wings. It was hard—and my wings and back hurt after each flight. For six weeks we went there every day and flew, just me and Will. And after every flight, Siona rubbed ointment into our long wing bones. She tugged and twisted our wings and shoulders, hurting us, all the time whispering she was helping us fly.
“Will had more trouble than I did. His body was heavier, and his wings were the same size, so he sank when I glided, and he couldn’t follow me all the way to the top. Siona saw this, and she promised he would get stronger as he got older, and we’d both be able to fly as high as we wanted.”
She paused and sipped her tea, and her gaze fastened somewhere through the window. She took three deep breaths before she started again. “They started changing the conditions on us, making us heavier. I didn’t know it then, but we had started flying in almost no gravity. They began adding and adding, with the idea that we would be strong enough to fly here by the time the transport ship arrived.
“But we were only halfway when Will fell out of the sky one day. He just fell.” She swallowed and licked her lips. “One of his wings broke.” She pointed to a picture on the wall of a flier with widespread wings, and touched a place halfway along one broad wing. “I could still hear him screaming as he went down, and worse, his silence when he landed.”
She fell quiet and I imagined her hearing her brother’s screams again.
“I never saw him again. I asked, and I cried, but Siona would never answer me.”
I wanted to strangle Siona.
“After that, I was afraid to fly. Siona was gentle with me at first, but I kept seeing Will fall. I knew that if I flew, I’d die, too. I thought maybe if I fell and my wings were cut off, I’d find Will.”
“Did you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Of course not. I know the statistics now. There were fifty of us on that ship. Every one of us cost the families who wanted us over two years of work. Flier families chose us before we were born, even helped choose traits like hair color and eye color and the tint of our wings. Of the fifty that were made, twenty are fliers now, seven are like me, and twenty-three died.”
The numbers made me seethe.
“Will and I were chosen to be brother and sister to a family that lives in Oshai, near the spaceport. I see them sometimes, and I want to cry every time I do.”
“So Will died?” I asked her, imagining Joseph dead.
She nodded and got up to get more water for her tea. In spite of how I could see that telling her story affected her by the look in her eyes and hear it in the cadence of her voice, there was an ethereal grace to her movements.
“So what do you do now?”
She smiled. “What they tell me to. I’m a Keeper. That means I get to live here, and watch over the land between me and the next Keeper’s plotline. It’s about as far as I can walk for two hours in every direction except the town.”
“What do you watch for?”
She frowned. “Death. Imbalances. Unwanted evolution. A plant that grows too fast, or too slow, too high or too wide. Keepers also manage the aesthetics of plant and stone—what is placed next to what.” Again, she looked out the window. “I’m not a very important Keeper yet and this is only a small plot meant for people like me, and not for spiritual growth, except in the way that all things are for truth. It’s a garden of the town, not a garden of the soul.”
I wondered what a garden of the soul looked like.
“If I become accomplished, I might get to work in the gardens we make for visitors.”
“Do you like being a Keeper?”
She shrugged. “All fliers live with few choices. It would be easier if I could also fly.”
“Well, I can’t fly either, so you’re no more failed than me.”
“It’s different.”
“How old are you?”
Dianne interrupted me. “It’s a rude question.”
“No,” Seeyan said, “I’ll answer. I’m only twenty-five. People like me, well, we only live to be thirty or forty. Our bodies were meant for wings.”
Twenty minutes later, Dianne and I were on our way back. I understood why she brought me to Seeyan. How could I help but want Joseph to succeed now? Seeyan was a pseudo-slave the way we had been once, except she was enslaved for lack of abilities, while we’d been in trouble for having too many.
“I like her,” I told Dianne. “But why won’t she live longer?”
“Fliers have a faster metabolism than most people. Even with the nanotechnology and drugs that they need to stay healthy, they don’t live as long as the rest of us can.”
The implication soured my stomach. “And their failed children die young, too?”
“Yes.” The set of her jaw told me she disapproved of the situation as much as I did.
But I did like Seeyan, particularly her grace and fluidity. “Can I go back there sometime? I can find my way.”
“If we have enough time here.”
“Why wouldn’t we have time?”
“The Port Authority is looking for us. The Star Mercenaries may look for us. Someday, we’ll be found.”
“And then what?”
“Then we go someplace else.”
I almost tripped over nothing. Marcus had chosen to drag my children into a fight that might cost them the ability to grow up under a sky. It might even kill them. And he’d picked a fight I had to support.
The sun warmed everything now, the colors of full morning a deeper hue of gold than back home. I looked for small touches of the wild, and found them. Sometimes blue flowers stuck up from fields of red, or one plant waved above my head while the others like it grew to my elbows.
Far above, fliers flashed by and, closer to the ground, a flock of small bright songbirds with blue heads and green wings flickered from tree to tree.
In front of me, Dianne gasped and stopped, her back rigid. I stopped, too.
Just ahead of us both, a flier blocked the path. I didn’t recall seeing him at the feast. His wings were an iridescent, shining black, his eyes as dark. He wore plain black boots over his long feet instead of the usual jeweled creations. His hair was short and simple, too, and his only jewelry was a band of blue leather around his neck, with a small, single pale blue feather hanging from it. His luck?
He stepped forward and spoke over Dianne’s shoulder, addressing me. “Chelo. It’s not safe to wander the side roads here with the riffraff.”
Dianne tensed, but said nothing.
He didn’t like Dianne because she was Islan? “Dianne is my friend.”
His lips thinned, and puzzlement flashed across his face before disappearing back into the haughty look. He hadn’t meant Dianne at all, but Seeyan. After a moment he nodded. “Out here, not everyone is friendly to us, which means they are no friend of yours. You are,” he hesitated for a fraction of a second, “encouraged to stay in the gold guest house, in the area around it, in the city center, and wherever your brother goes.”
“Encouraged” was not exactly a rule. I chewed on my upper lip for a moment. He stood taller than even Dianne, but would be no match for me on the ground. I would never have to match him in the air. So which choice? Stand down, and set him up as a keeper of mine, or risk angering someone of rank? I usually liked the middle, but there wasn’t a clear one. Dianne drew in a breath and I spoke before she could speak. “Thank you for your kind consideration. I have enjoyed my morning walk, and I find Lopali to be very beautiful.”
His body language did not relax.
“You know my name. I don’t have that advantage.”
He hesitated, and then said, “I’m glad you find it to your liking here. Just remember that a pretty facade can hide dangers. Not everyone wants you to fix what you came here to fix. I am speaking for your safety.”
He lifted his wings, and just before he crouched and drew them down to take off, he said, “I am a protector.”
Protecting us from? The wind of his wings in my face was warm.
We stood and watched him go. Dianne put a hand on my shoulder. “Well done.”
“Thank you.” I had been bred to be a diplomat, and I wasn’t exactly sure I’d done the best possible thing, but I hadn’t given all of my own power away.