Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

He hadn’t seen Tendlathe in a while, not up close, and took the chance to look carefully again. They still looked much alike, though Warreven had broadened through the hips and chest at puberty, while Tendlathe had stayed slim as a reed; their skins were the still same shade of golden brown, unmarked by the fierce sun. Tendlathe was still dressing as traditionally as ever, in the shirt-vest-and-loose-trousers suit that was popular in the Stanelands, but the material was better than before, showing off-world colors and an off-world eye for cut and form. Only the jewelry remained the same, the wide etched-steel bracelets, cut from the interior hull of the Captain’s cabin before the hulk that had been the colony ship broke up and fell flaming into Hara’s seas, and the matched steel hoops, each with a pendant square, faded blue etched with lines of gold, which might have been part of the ship’s computer. Warreven touched his own bracelets—smaller, darker, carved from the outer hull but still part of the ship—for reassurance and thought again that Tendlathe was an extremely handsome man. Not that there was anything between them beyond that admiration: anything more had been put firmly out of bounds the day he himself had refused to change legal gender. He accepted the glass that Tendlathe held out to him and sipped the wine, nodding his appreciation.

“This is nice.”

“It’s Delacoste, they’ve planted a vineyard outside Estaern, with off-world rootstock,” Tendlathe answered. “They paid a near fortune for it, mind you, and it has to be tended daily, but the result seems to be worth it.” He paused, looked away again, concentrating on setting the jug of wine back in its place. “I’m sorry about Father, by the way.”

Warreven nodded. The marriage was a sore point between them; he hadn’t expected even this oblique reference. “What’s he up to, anyway, bringing all that up again?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Tendlathe’s voice was cold, and Warreven sighed, accepting the rebuff.

“So what did you want, Ten?” he said, after a moment.

Tendlathe grinned, exactly the expression, amused and slightly abashed, that he’d always had when they’d both known he was speaking out of turn. “Like I said, it’s Aldess. She wants to go to an off-world doctor, maybe even go off-world, see if they can help her carry to term.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Warreven said. “They probably can.”

“I don’t think she should.” Tendlathe took a deep breath. “I think it’s dangerous, and I want you to help me talk her out of it.”

Warreven blinked. “Ten, Aldess is never going to listen to me—she doesn’t like me, she’s never liked me, and she doesn’t listen to anybody once she’s made up her mind to something. Besides, I think it’s probably a good idea.”

“It’s dangerous,” Tendlathe said again. “We’re not really like them.”

“The off-worlders have been dealing with the problem for centuries,” Warreven said. “It’s the same mutation that made the odd-bodied. Hyperlumin causes miscarriages and intersexual births, everybody knows that. And if anybody knows how to get around it, the off-worlders do—they’re still taking the stuff, you can’t go FTL without it.”

“I don’t want her going to them,” Tendlathe said.

“God and the spirits,” Warreven began, and Tendlathe went on as though he hadn’t spoken.

“The off-worlders—hyperlumin’s their excuse, it justifies what they are. But we’re not like them. We’re not the same.”

“We’re not that different, either,” Warreven answered. “You talk like they’re aliens or something.”

“Well, they are,” Tendlathe said. “In every way that really matters, they’re aliens. That’s what Aldess and I have been arguing about, Raven, that’s why I want your help. We aren’t like them, and we can’t afford to become like them. We’re all that’s left of what people, human beings, are supposed to be, and if we change, that’s lost forever.”

“Ten—” Warreven broke off, shaking his head. “I agree with Aldess on this one. If she wants to talk to the off-worlders, I think she should—if she wants to go off-world, I think she should. It’s stupid not to take advantage of their skills.”

Tendlathe sighed, shook his head. He lifted the wine jug again, and Warreven held out his glass automatically. “When we were back in school,” Tendlathe began, “remember the vieuvant ’s daughter, Coldecine—they were Black Stanes from way up north in the Stanelands, remember?”

Warreven nodded. He remembered the girl, all right, a year younger than either of them, but clever, so that she had been in most of their classes. She had been striking at fifteen, long-necked, skin like polished wood, her face already losing the roundness of childhood, fining down into the serene planes of a statue. He hadn’t thought of her in years, wondered vaguely if she had retained that beauty.

“Remember when we were studying the end of the First Wave?” Tendlathe went on, and Warreven nodded again. “The off-worlder they hired in to teach us—what was his name?”

“Sten something,” Warreven said, wondering where this was leading. “Or something Sten.” The Donavies, Aldess their leader, had joked that he was a blake sten , punning on the name and his nearly black skin: a stupid thing to remember, after all these years.

“Colde’s father wouldn’t let her come to those classes,” Tend-lathe said. “Said they might tell facts, but they weren’t true, and he didn’t want his daughter having to say they were.”

Warreven felt a chill run down his spine, told himself it was only the night breeze on his skin. The First Wave of Emigration had ended in 207, when people had finally made the connection between hyperlumin—hyperlumin-A, he corrected himself, remembering the classroom, the smell of shaefler outside the window and Sten-something’s dry, accented voice—and the increased rate of miscarriages and intersexual births. FTL travel had ended almost overnight—no one had wanted to risk the mutation, but it was impossible to travel through the jump points without taking hyperlumin to suppress the FTL shock—and hundreds of colonies had been virtually abandoned. Hara had been one of those, a minor place, settled late, at the end of a particularly unpleasant and ill-charted jump point. It had taken nearly four hundred years for the Concord Worlds to find Hara again: too many records had been lost as the old Federation split apart, each colony slowly losing touch with its neighbors. Planets are big: most colonies were well planned, well settled, and they survived; even Hara, as mineral-poor as it was, had thrived. What was the loss of technology, compared to the riches of the seas and jungles? But over that time, the rate of intersexual births and of miscarriages had remained just the same, something that could be ignored only as long as Hara was out of touch with the rest of human-settled space. He said, “It is true, Ten, and you know it. We’re human, they’re human, we all come from the same stock, we’ve all been exposed to hyperlumin. They just know how to handle it better.”

“They’ve let it take over,” Tendlathe said. “And that’s why we—why Hara can’t sign the Concord.” He took a deep breath. “The point I was making is, I think Colde’s father was right. Kids shouldn’t be taught this, not the way we were—I think that’s what ruined Haliday, Raven, and it’ll ruin you, too, if you’re not careful. We need to be very careful that we understand the difference between fact and truth, and I’m not having a child of mine exposed to that.”

Warreven stared at him for a moment. They’d had this argument before, in one form or another—it defined the basic difference between Traditionalists and Modernists, and Warreven had been a Modernist from the day he’d walked out on Temelathe’s offer—but this was the most extreme version he’d heard Tendlathe espouse. “Well, if you don’t go to the off-worlders, I doubt you’ll have that problem.”