Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

Méarana followed the Shadow down the long hall from the control room. All this time, all these many weeks of travel, and she had forgotten that her companion was a Shadow and had her own objectives. Méarana remembered another thing. Ravn had said in the sitting room at Clanthompson Hall that in the Shadow War she had already killed her brother.

The harper did not care for being manipulated. She did not like it from her mother, she had not liked it from Donovan, and she certainly did not like it from this strange, charming coral snake of a Shadow. The Shadow had wanted the help of Bridget ban and, failing that, had taken Méarana to force her mother’s play. And the Shadow had managed all this while allowing Méarana to suggest and lead the escapade!

And so a little reserve grew in her resolve. She was no longer quite so intimate with the Ravn, did not follow her around as before or hang over her shoulder. Perhaps Ravn was relieved by this, though nothing showed in her demeanor. It would not be accurate to say that Méarana acceded to the stopover at Dao Chetty. Her consent was neither requested nor required. But she did agree, if only to maintain the fiction that she and Ravn were partners in this enterprise and she was not simply a stage prop. Ravn, whether she saw the need for the charade or simply did not care, accepted Méarana’s agreement with grave thanks.

And so Méarana spent the next two months composing goltraí in the lounge where Ravn had once so fruitlessly imprisoned her father. In the hidden room where the smuggler had died, Méarana found traces of the blood that had splashed there: stains painted in difficult corners and angles. She thought how easily her father could have died. She thought how easily the Ravn could have bought herself time by slamming the door and shutting Father and Froggie together. The laments played without a title in Méarana’s mind and ran from there down to her fingers and so out to the strings.

She tried as well to compose a tune to depict her mother hastening after her, but it would not cohere. In the night, when the strings were stilled, a thin sliver of doubt would stab Méarana: There was no pursuit. Bridget ban had weighed the costs and the benefits and had written her daughter off as lost. It was a relic of her childhood, was this cold fear, a piece of an age when her mother would disappear for weeks or months at a time and the daughter would wonder if she would ever come back.

And that led to a fresh, new thought. Had Méarana initiated the play with Ravn as much to test her mother as to rescue her father?

In the Triangles, space had so configured itself that a cluster of priceless sunlike stars lay cheek to jowl, each a mere dozen light-years or so from the other. This had once mattered a great deal, as the first starships had gone the Hard Way, across the Newtonian flats. The Hard Way was a long way, though longer for those left behind than for those setting out, but it was doable at the margins. First steps are larrikin steps, and these suns lay where a child might stumble eagerly toward them. As the old song ran:

Oh, it might be more than a dozen, or less, but “fourteen-point-three lights from Bhaitry to New Vraddy” does not scan. Afterward, the discovery of the tubes had made flatland distances irrelevant. It might be 14.3 light-years “as the crow flies,” but who flies with the crows anymore? Distances were measured in days, now, not in years. And sometimes, at long, long intervals, ships drifted in from the Newtonian flats, bearing their cargos of ancient spooks, after journeys far longer than their crews.

The old home-stars from which we once set forth.

That line resonated with poets of a certain bent, those for whom the glamour of forgotten pasts conjured emotions of loss and regret, of faint distant bells and twilight languor and ruins seen by moonlight. But Méarana gazed upon the skies of Dao Chetty not because she was seized with nostalgia but because somewhere in that firmament her father sat seized. Ravn flagged the star for her on the view screen while they lazed into co-orbit with the way station: Tsol. An undistinguished star—bright, but no brighter than others nearby—sixteen degrees north of the equatorial line, and just south and east of a brilliant marker star called Arctors. It was not even the closest sun to Dao Chetty. That honor belonged to Epsidanny, which lay farther east near a trio of markers called Reckless, Nan Ho, and Denrō, the last named of which was also known as the Serious Star because it was the brightest in all the sky.

Méarana regarded Terra’s sun with the same affection and longing that the ancients had felt on contemplating Ur of the Chaldees, which is to say none at all. Her father, she knew, felt different. Once upon a time, everyone had lived there. But that was a fact, not a feeling, and she knew it only as a place from which she must rescue him. Once upon a time, everyone swung in trees in some African valley. No point getting all choked up over it.

Ravn docked at Tungshen Waising, a vast habitat built into and around a dwarf planet situated sunward of the primary ramps off the superluminal tubes. It could barely handle the traffic, and the throngs that moved through it were a focused lot, rushing to make the bumboats, or other liners bound elsewhere, or to arrange layovers while they awaited connections.

Dao Chetty was the capital of the Confederation and like any center of power she attracted a multitude of people eager to wet their beaks in her nectar. From harmless touristas to would-be bureaucrats; peddlers and purchasers of influence; messengers, merchants begging relief, immigrants and visitors, emissaries of sector and planetary governors, Shadows, rebels, boots, assassins, spies and saboteurs. This was the honeypot of the Confederation, the thunder-mug of the Central Worlds. Here docked the great liners and humble yachts, the ominous warships of the Fleet, the stealthy ships of the Lion’s Mouth, and the bristling survey vessels of the Kazhey Guk-guk bringing word of worlds at the farther edge of settled space.

Tungshen herself boasted docks and maintenance yards, freight transshipment and passenger transfer, residence quarters for the staff, and—to maintain the ever-percolating transients—hosted entire cities of hotels and gardens and restaurants and theaters within her bosom. Ravn and Méarana put up at a hotel in the Seventeenth Sector called the Four Great Heavenly Kings. It would take several days to find Domino Tight, keepers of safe houses being by design not easily found, and he would need several days thereafter to climb up to the coopers, so they had might as well be comfortable in the interim.

Méarana was surprised at Tungshen’s dowdy appearance. Little enough had she glimpsed of the Confederation during her slide through it, and she supposed its age ought not have surprised her. The Triangles had been the heart of the old Commonwealth of Suns, but it seemed as if little had been refurbished since then.

It was less the antique feel—the red and gold lacquer, or the translucent panels and low ceilings, styles and skins—than it was the general air of dishevelment. Dirt snuggled in corners, rust peppered surfaces, ad hoc repairs had become permanent by the sanction of passing time. On the way from the customs clearance to the hotel she noticed a crew of technicians consulting small pocket-sized manuals and arguing over the precise meaning of the text, so it did not surprise her to learn that some subsectors of the habitat had been sealed off and abandoned in place.