Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

Where Maorgan was now she’d hadn’t the faintest idea, and she was too tired to care. On the other hand, she had a very good guess what he was doing-the Bйluchar weren’t used to female harpers, but they didn’t let that put them off. During the first break from playing, the Olteraun Fior had crowded round her, men and women both, offering themselves as bed partners, brushing against her, hands moving on her breasts and buttocks until she slapped them away and got the idea across that she wasn’t interested in kaus and kikl.

She shifted the strap of the harpcase, dug in her pocket for the odd cylindrical key the Blai Olegan had given her, started to insert it into the lock hole-and stopped, sniffing. There was a peculiar pungent smell coming from the next room over. Danor’s kip.

She frowned. The way he was acting… She eased the strap off her shoulder, set the case down, and walked the short distance to Danor’s door. She tried the latch. Locked. The smell was much stronger here, made her feel… well… odd. The closest she could come was that time on Avosing where the planet’s air was permeated with hallucinogenic spores.

She leaned against the door and tried to get some sense of the man, but all she could read was a jumble of pain, rage, and a flood of grief so terrible she cried out against it. She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate, her head so tired from the music and the exuberance of the dance, from the excited attentions of Keteng and Fior, from the glory of the Eolt song, that her brain felt like mush. Focus. Exclude. Strip away the flourishes of emotion, feel the beat of the body.

By the time she managed to reassure herself about the strength of Danor’s life flow, she’d breathed in enough of the smoke to send her floating.

She contemplated stretching out there on the walkway, melting with the smoke, absorbing just enough to keep her drifting, in a state where nothing mattered, all the twists and turns of need and rejection wiped away… Her knees stopped holding her up. She didn’t fall, it was a slow-motion folding down. It amused her. She kept folding until her face was pressed against the tiles. That was amusing. And pleasant. The tiles were cool and smooth.

She drew in a long breath-and sneezed violently, the spasm triggered by the pollen grains she’d sucked in with dust from the grouting between the tiles. She sneezed again and pushed onto her knees, appalled at what had happened to her.

Bones feeling like half-set gel, she used the latch to pull herself to her feet, then staggered back to her own door. She stood leaning into it, her forehead pressed to the wood, half forgetting what she was there for until her nose prickled again and broke her out of her trance. She unlocked the door, hauled the case inside, and stood slouched in the doorway, gathering herself.

As soon as she managed to get the bar down and into its hooks, she stumbled across to the bed and fell facedown on it, sinking into a sleep so deep that if she dreamed she never knew it.

Aslan clicked the Ridaar off. “That’s enough for now. I’ll show you more when you’ve talked a bit.” She settled back in her chair and smiled at the four youngsters, two Meloach and two Fior boys, all of them around eight or nine years old.

I want children who are good friends, she’d told Teagasa and Oskual. They’ll be shy at first, but having friends with them will help them relax and loosen their tongues.

Why children? Oskual asked. If you’re gathering history…

There’s an official truth and a folk truth in every culture and often they don’t coincide. Children pick up on folk truth, sometimes it seems from the air itself, and they aren’t driven by politics and adult shame to conceal these things. I’m not a historian, Aslan finished. I record cultures. All facets of them.

She leaned forward, moved her eyes from face to face, a gesture meant to collect them and make them feel part of a whole that included her. “What do you do when you want to decide who goes first? Say in a game you’re playing.” She watched the scrubbed, sober faces, suppressing a sigh. So obviously on their best behavior, spines stiffened by parental admonitions. “No, don’t tell me. Show me.”

An eight-year Meloach named Likel had already proved to be the most talkative of the four, the leader insofar as this small group had a leader. Xe had bright red mossflowers blooming on xe’s head and shoulders and already a beginning of the Denchok lichen web threading across xe’s torso. Xe fidgeted in xe’s chair, twisted xe’s narrow pointed face into a comic grimace. “If it’s just us,” xe said, “and ev’one wants to go first, we do the Digger Count.”

Xe turned to Colain, a short Fior boy with shiny black hair and eyes bluer than a summer sky. “Le’s dig.” Xe and Colain made fists, pumped them together through the air. “One. Two. Three. Diggit!”

Colain grinned. He’d kept his fist while Likel had flipped out his middle finger. “Stone b break knife.”

Likel did the hand flutter that served Keteng for a shrug.

Sobechel, a younger Meloach with most of xe’s mossflowers still in bud, though showing bright orange tips, played a knife to cut Colain’s paper. Brecin, a gangly Fior boy with hair close to the orange of Sobechel’s flowers, wrapped Sobechel’s stone in paper. Then, with a nervously engaging grin, Brecin extended his fist to Aslan.

She raised her brows, grinned back at him. “Phra phra, why not.”

“One two three,” they chanted together. “Diggit!” Aslan kept the fist, saw herself breaking Brecin’s knife.

His grin threatened his ears. “You win, Scholar. You go first.”

“Mm. I think I’ve been framed.” She chuckled. “All right. What do you want to know?”

Likel scooted his chair closer. “You got any pictures in there of where you come from?”

Brecin pulled up his long bony legs and sat on his feet with his knees pointing out, his shoulders up, his arms hooked over the back of the chair. “And what’s your family like?”

“And why d d do those mesuch want to c c come here and mess up everything?” Colain pushed at the lank black hair that kept falling into his eyes. There was an edge of anger in his voice that embarrassed him when his eyes met Aslan’s; he went almost purple, looked quickly away.

“And what it’s like riding between the stars.” Sobechel had a dreamy look on xe’s face, pale eyes the color of dust glistening with visions of distant places and strange things.

“Hm, that covers a lot of ground. Let’s start with my family. My mother is a businesswoman, she runs her own company… um which makes things sort of like locks only fancier with a lot of bells and whistles to discourage thieves. She lives on a world called Droom which is so far away you couldn’t see its sun if you went out at night and looked at all the stars. Even from University I can’t see Droom’s sun, though it is a bit closer. My father is a poet. I don’t see him much. He’s always somewhere else.”

“Like Glois’ dad,” Sobechel said. “He an Ard and he never comes back.”

“Maorgan?”

“Uh-uh, another one. I think Glois’ Da, he stays mostly on Melton. Maybe he’s dead. Those mesuchs over there are crazy they say.”

“How c c come you live on… um… University and your Mum is way away somewhere else? D d do lots of people do like that?”

“University is a whole world that’s a school where people go to study things, write books, teach classes. They come from a thousand and a thousand worlds. Some stay and some go home. I stayed.”

“Ah.” Colain nodded. “Like Chuta M m meredel. Our teachers went there to study. But they c come b back.”

Sobechel clicked his tongue against xe’s chewing ridge. “So it’s different out there. And everyone don’t come back. Your cousin Timag for one. He went for a bargeman and hasn’t showed face here since Teagasa was beating the letters into you head. Scholar, you said you’d show us pictures. Can I see a starship? Ol’ Barriall, he use to deal with Free Traders and he said he’d bring me a picture of a ship, but he never did. Yours will be better anyway, his woulda been just flat and black and white.”