Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

She strikes her chords sharply, a jarring dissonance. “Did he? He had grave doubts that Oschous had told him the truth, or at least the whole truth.”

“Then where,” Bridget ban asks with a sweep of her arm, “is he? Leaving the Confederation cannot be impossible, given that that has made it here.”

That sits on the sofa and grins without comment.

Deft fingers wrest a defiant tune from the strings. “Sometimes, when you are going through hell, there is only one thing you can do.”

Her mother cocks her head. “And what is that?”

“Keep going.”

Graceful Bintsaif says nothing. She senses that there is a different debate underway than merely whether Donovan joined the revolution. She puts an apple to her lips, but her eyes never leave the Shadow. Her right hand strokes the butt of her teaser. She has not yet refastened the snap. Sunlight slashes through the blinds of the bay window and strikes the carpeting like the burn lines of a light cannon.

“When a man is in stress,” says Bridget ban, “he runs to his beloved.”

“He was cooming here when I diverted him.”

Bridget ban tosses a fleeting look toward Méarana before turning to the Shadow. “So you say. He thought he left something here. But his greatest love has always been Terra. And that is the apple which finally tempted him to bite.”

Graceful Bintsaif glances self-consciously at the apple in her hand and quietly lays it aside. She thinks about moving her chair before the sun is directly in her eyes.

“I think, Mother,” says the harper, “that he had a greater love. Or one that with nurture might become so.”

“You?”

“We did go on a faring…” The harper hesitates and looks to the Confederal and decides against offering details. “All things have their final causes. We did go on a faring together, and were you not at the end of it?”

Bridget ban snorts derision. “And you at the beginning. When did he realize that you were his daughter?”

“Sooner, I think, than you have.”

Oh, that brings silence to the room! Bridget ban’s face turns marble; Graceful Bintsaif’s wary. Ravn Olafsdottr claps her hands and rubs them together. “I loove family reunions!”

After a moment, Méarana begins again to play with her harp, trying one theme, then another.

Finally, Bridget ban says, but as if to herself, “It matters not what he wist. The siren sang, and he has gone off with her.” She does not look at Ravn Olafsdottr when she says this, though her eyes search out every other quarter of the room.

“Ah, Mother, ye’re a fool. Ye hae e’er been his end, even when he knew it not himself. If he maun topple an empire and free a world to make his way here, why, he’ll do it.”

Olafsdottr raises her brows. “You think he can break an empire?”

Méarana strikes a gay chord. “He has a habit of breaking things.” But she does not explain.

Bridget ban has recovered her aplomb. She smoothes her blouse, tosses her hair, and nods toward Ravn. “Then, why is he not here? If this could come, why not that?”

The Confederal smiles broadly. “I coom to that part shoortly.”

Méarana misses a string, creates a discord. “He’s deid, isnae he?” she says without looking up. “An’ ye’ve come by here tae torture us wi’ the news.”

Olafsdottr’s eyes soften fractionally. “Ah, why would I wish to torture you, yngling? For who else here would feel pain at such a tiding? Only you and I.”

Bridget ban mutters, “Ha!” But Méarana stares at the Shadow. “You?”

Her mother answers for her. “You forgot, did you? Donovan made his choice well before—when he might have turned back with her but did not. She saved him from the Frog Prince; and he nursed her afterward. There’s a bonding in that. But never forget this…” And she pointed toward the Shadow as if toward an inanimate object. “They ne’er do aught by chance. Every word she’s spoken since coming, every gesture of her body, even her choice to chant her story like a skald, has been to a purpose. Everything has an end, you said? Aye, an’ ’tis true, or Nature would not follow laws. You say that you and I are the end that the Fudir pursues? Ask yourself, then, what is Ravn Olafsdottr’s end?”

The Shadow chuckles into the silence. “A nameless grave, moost like. But coome, my friends, this tale regards me noot. Let’s leap ahead to Yuts’ga, there to find deceit and ambush foul, where in her darkened alleys Shadows—and worse—do prowl.”

Yuts’ga was known once as Second Earth; but that was in the Commonwealth’s palmy days, when comparisons to Terra were made openly and with pride. She bulked larger than the Homeworld, tugged a bit more than bones or muscles liked, and spun more slowly. She owned a moon too, which they called “Djut Long Dji,” which meant “second moon” in some ancient tongue of Terra; but their grandchildren’s grandchildren wondered why it was called “second” if there was only one and the name eventually collapsed into Tchudlon.

She was a large moon as such things go, and it was a rare thing for a small planet to have a large moon; but she was not so large as Luna, and so was less of a pestle to Yuts’ga’s mortar. The seas were stirred by moderate tides; life was ground, but not so finely as on Earth.

Still, life was life. It was more than the prokaryote cryptolife that was the fruit of most worlds’ groanings; more than the lichens that had graced the downy cheeks of Dao Chetty. Her vast world-sea was called the Wriggling Ocean because there were—by the gods!— worms burrowing in the ooze. Who knew what might next be found?

The answer, as it turned out, was nothing; and as world after barren world followed, men ceased to care. Worms? They vanished under the bioload of the terraforming arks. An easy job, the old captains said. Yuts’ga had done half their work already. They stroked her seas and quickened her with fish and insects and smiling crocodiles, graced the land with pine trees and waving grasses and fragrant rhododendrons. They did remember to save a few of those ur-worms, and studied them closely and found them much like Terran acoels; but they did not let them get in the way of things. There was work to do! A galaxy to conquer!

Much later, the world was called “Tikantam,” which meant “the sensible horizon,” because her star was the farthest of the Commonwealth suns plucked by eye from the skies of Terra. But it was not too long after that men ceased to care what could or could not be seen from Terra. There were convulsions, wars, cleansings. In the end, as epigones reconnected their ancestors’ bones hoping that they might once more live, the older name was rediscovered and she became Yuts’ga once more.