Date Point: 13y11m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Akyawentuo System, Near 3Kpc Arm
Xiù Chang
Cimbrean vanished. One second it was below them, round and green and inviting, and the next…
The stars flickered like a missing frame in a badly cut amateur movie. Different constellations, different planets. A different sun, its light a little whiter and harsher than Cimbreanstar’s gentle orange, in a different corner of the sky. *Misfit*’s canopy and Xiù’s helmet conspired to keep its light from blinding her.
“Jump complete,” Allison reported, for the log’s benefit rather than for the crew’s. They all knew how Misfit felt; she was their home after all.
Xiù didn’t reply. Her hand hovered above the emergency recall button and she stared up at the sensor panel like a gazelle drinking from crocodile-concealing murky waters. If there was so much as a flash, a hint of something decloaking to attack them…
Even the ship seemed to hold her breath.
“Hope I’m not cursing us here…” Julian ventured, eventually, “But I think we might be good. Nothing on sensors.”
“Same.” Xiù told him.
“Awesome.” Allison sounded relieved over the line from engineering. “Beacon away in three…two…”
There was the peculiar heavy clang through the hull of a little pressurized gasp of their air being released to blast the beacon microsat out from its launch tube.
Ten kilometers out the beacon spat into life and the spacetime around it pinched, twisted, collapsed and deposited twenty tonnes of badly-named Gaoian starship in their lap.
“Okay…” Xiù cleared her throat and hit the local radio. “Drunk on Turkey, EV-Eleven Misfit. Welcome to the Akyawentuo system.”
“Still can’t fucking believe they called it that…” Allison muttered over the internal line.
They got Daar’s enthusiastic rumble back in reply. “Hey, Misfit! Thanks for the welcome!”
“Sensors are clear,” Xiù told him with a smile. “Are you going to follow us in manually, or slaved?”
“Aww, I always listen to a strong female! What should I do?”
Outrageous. Xiù took her hand off the send button long enough to laugh disbelievingly and shake her head before replying. “Alright, leash yourself to my nav you giant furry flirt.”
“Controls…slaved. And I’m not flirting!”
Julian chuckled on the internal line. “Some fellas don’t know how not to flirt, huh?”
“Sure. Not flirting, just being friendly,” Xiù replied for both their benefit, and loaded their planned warp down to Akyawentuo itself. They’d weighed the risks and benefits of a slower-than-light approach, but even the quickest such orbit would have taken weeks. In the end, expediency had prevailed. Better to go now while they were sharp and ready, than have to while away days of travel time and maybe get caught napping if something went wrong.
“Intrasystem warp at point-three kilolights in three…two…”
The icon showing her where Drunk on Turkey was jolted astern, but that was the only indication that Misfit had just accelerated to three hundred times the speed of light. There was no other visual indication at first, until she became aware that one of the brighter motes of light she could see was drifting across the sky faster than the others. It flashed past unguessably far away to her right, and when she looked away from it she found that the sun had moved. Just an inch or two, but it was drifting as well.
Then it was drifting a little faster.
Then it shot a quarter of the way across the sky as Misfit slung herself around its solar shallows, scooping up energy before decelerating sharply to an abrupt halt over the marbled tranquility of their destination, more than a light-second out and halfway between Akyawentuo’s twin moons.
Again there was the tense minute of waiting with her hand on the emergency recall, but again…nothing.
“Well. If they didn’t notice two ships coming in at warp, I think we’re safe to say Big Hotel aren’t paying attention,” Allison declared.
“That’s our first prayer answered,” Julian replied. “Let’s get the surveysats out.”
Xiù dropped the *Drunk On Turkey*’s slaved controls and left the military ship to hold station. Seeding the planet’s low orbit with dozens of cellphone-sized satellites was *Misfit*’s job, and they’d only get in the way.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s find them.”
They couldn’t possibly land soon enough.
Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Clan Straightshield Grand Precinct, Lavmuy City, Gao
Cytosis
“More trouble with the Whitecrests?”
“Champion Genshi has been a zephyr for weeks. Impossible to see, impossible to catch, and you only know he’s around after he’s already gone past.”
Cytosis let his biodrone duck-nod agreeably, with a mildly irritated set of the ears. Something had happened in the halls of power among all the important Clans, and even the Straightshields largely didn’t know what it was. Their own champion, Reeko, had been uncharacteristically inaccessible himself.
“I’d bet my claws against going blind at fifty that there was a Champions’ Conclave,” Father Rakkan declared.
“There hasn’t been one in centuries.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Cytosis pointed out. It was the logical conclusion and there was no way that his host, the unfortunate Judge-Father Taarken, would have missed that. “The question is, why?”
He had his own dark suspicions of course, but no way of sharing them. Two of the Champions had gone off-network, implants removed. The rest had never had them in the first place, a fact that had simultaneously limited the operations of both Hierarchy and Cabal.
All across the Clans, formerly prominent Fathers were dropping out of favor while upstart Brothers and Officers were finding that their career trajectories had become unaccountably smoother. More and more, the most heavily augmented among Gao’s powerful elite were being promoted into positions of great prestige but limited influence.
That by itself was not quite conclusive—the Gaoians might simply have become infected by Human paranoia over neural augmentation—but it was suspicious, and alarming.
“Rumor from Cimbrean suggests some kind of…hm…friction between Daar and the Mother-Supreme.” Brother Aryo observed. He was tiny for a Straightshield brother, but the Clan made a point of taking in initiates who showed spirit and wit. He would never be a Judge-Father, but even Cytosis was impressed by the tiny Brother’s aptitude for politics, investigation and his encyclopedic knowledge of precedent.
“On what grounds?” Cytosis asked.
“Yulna has never been as…hm…subtle as her predecessor,” Aryo pointed out. “She travelled all the way to Cimbrean on a state visit and her first act there was to meet with him.”
“A rift between Stoneback and the Females would be historic,” Rakkan said.
“Epochal,” Aryo duck-nodded fervently.
“Certainly worthy of a Conclave,” Rakkan finished.
Judge-Father Shaal finally deigned to interject. “Ultimately, it isn’t our business,” he pointed out. “What Champions do between themselves is outside of our jurisdiction.”
“With respect, Shaal,” Cytosis replied on the grounds that his host was equal in rank to the battered old enforcer, “what Champions do between themselves inevitably drips down into the workhouses and the streets, where our Brothers have to clean up the mess.”
An insistent wheedling call for attention made itself known in the back of his mind, one that he couldn’t possibly ignore. He allowed Shaal to grudgingly concede the point, then plucked a tablet from his belt.
“…Perhaps I should check in with some of my informants,” he said.
“Your…hm…good friend Fiin?” Aryo asked.
Cytosis summoned the promising young Stoneback’s file. “I rather get the impression he’d like to disembowel me tip to tail. But he’s been…civil.”
“I have a patrol,” Rakkan said.
“And I should check whether any further evidence has come forward from that forgery case,” Aryo agreed. “But please…keep us informed, Judge-Father?”
Cytosis duck-nodded agreeably, sketched a gesture of respect to Shaal, and turned away.
He opened the link as soon as he could safely look distracted.
++0013++: Go ahead.
++0004++: <Terse> We are enacting a cleanse and reset protocol on the secondary control species. Code: Expose; Cleanse; Regenerate.
++0013++: <Surprise> So soon?
++0004++: <Firmly> With immediate effect. If we strike now we calculate favorable odds that the surviving Gaoian expatriates will be sufficient to rebuild the species under more secure influence. Your individual task code is: Curate; Diagnose; Rectify.
++0013++: Orders acknowledged and understood.
++0004++: Your point of contact for further developments is 0007. You may requisition 0138, 0514, 0665 and 0722 for support. Any questions?
++0013++: No.
++0004++: Good.
The link was terminated as abruptly as it had opened, leaving only the question of what, exactly, Cytosis was going to do.
Somehow, he suspected, there were no good answers.
Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
The women were still being strange about letting Vemik near his own son, even though the baby was almost a season old. They seemed to feel that men shouldn’t pay any attention to their sons until they were old enough to learn how to hold a spear.
He’d gone to his own father for advice, and while Vemet was being sympathetic he was also largely not being much help.
“You don’t have a tit for him to suck on, so that makes you useless in their eyes,” he said sagely. They were relaxing together half-way up one of the Kettas near the village, watching clouds sulk among the mountains and sharing a small basket full of sticky berries and seeds that Vemet’s woman Ekye had made for them. The sap-stinger honey got all over Vemik’s fingers, but it was a rare treat: Vemet must have done something to make Ekye very happy recently.
“I’m not being strange though, am I?” Vemik asked. “It seems…natural. He’s my son, I want to spend time with him.”
“You aren’t being strange. Godshit, the way the women fought to keep you out of my hands when you were small…” Vemet sighed. “I don’t know why and the women say that men aren’t meant to know why, and that’s how night falls on it.”
“…I hate—” Vemik began.
“Yes, you hate not knowing the reasons,” Vemet finished for him. He trilled softly and gave his son an indulgent teasing grin. “In truth, I hate it too. But the world is too full of mysteries to solve all of them, Vemik. Let the women be women.”
He trilled again. “Besides,” he added, “You don’t have to clean the shit off his arse. That’s a duty I’m happy to let them keep.”
Vemik trilled too and scooped some more of the sweet mix into his mouth, but his heart wasn’t quite in it. Vemet noticed and put an arm around his son’s ever-broadening shoulders.
“…He’ll never replace the girl,” he said softly. “I know. Your mother and I lost our first as well. But don’t let that stop you from loving him, son.”
“Never,” Vemik promised. “I just…”
He hadn’t even properly formed the thought before he started speaking it, and he never finished it either. Both men nearly dropped out of the tree when a sound—a blessed sound, a sound Vemik had almost given up on ever hearing again—slammed down the valley with all the force of a boulder crashing down into a gorge.
Two sharp, low, crisp booms that rolled and bounced off the hills. The unforgettable sound of steel punching a hole through the sky from above.
Vemik looked at his father, both dumbstruck from the sudden change. Vemet was the first to leap down the tree and Vemik scrambled down after him, the sweet treat forgotten.
Children squealed and men and women alike ducked as not one but two steel flying-huts thundered over the villages, high up and faster than the wind. One was familiar: red and steel, square as an anvil, blunt as a rock. The other was longer, thinner, sharper, as if it was made to stab the sky. They growled as they soared out over the hills, fading to sharp glimmers in the distance that turned, slowed, rolled easily back toward the villages at gentler speeds.
And what a growl. Vemik had almost forgotten that sound, the deep grinding chant of forces he couldn’t begin to understand, straining to keep steel aloft. And behind it, a higher sound like the scream of a hunting bird but stretched and frozen.
The noises blended and changed each other as more metal than all the tribes could have made in a lifetime swung slowly to a halt above the clearing the People had made for them. He could see through the clear “glass” on the front of the square one as it dipped first and lowered itself softly onto the turf. Even behind her strange ‘helmet’ he somehow recognized Shyow, and she raised a hand to wave to him just for a moment before she returned them to her work.
Yet again, Vemik found himself struck by how delicately the huge lumpen weight of it kissed the earth. Something so big shouldn’t have looked so light.
The other sky-hut had no glass. It was as grim and as gray as an unfinished knife except for some sky-blue and yellow stripes on its upper surface and blue lights flashing across its body as it thumped down heavily beside the other ‘ship.’ Its legs bent and absorbed the landing just like a Person’s might when jumping down from a tree.
The growling, screaming sounds they made faded, changed, and died away. Not to silence, but to quiet enough that the other sounds could be heard—the familiar creaking and groaning of hot metal cooling down, and the peculiar whine of their metal skins opening here and there to reveal strange square bowl-like things that aimed themselves into the sky, tracked back and forth for a moment, and then went still.
There was a moment of perfect, awed stillness that Yan broke by barging through the gathered People with two hands of Given-Men behind him, dragging behind them a tail of fascinated, bewildered, scared and excited People from all the tribes.
”By all the gods…they’re actually real…” somebody muttered.
Yan apparently heard him, because he glanced in that person’s direction, then sighed heavily and at length.
“…I wish Tarek could have seen this,” he said.
Up behind her glass, Shyow finished whatever it was she was doing, and vanished backwards into the belly of her ‘ship.’ She wasn’t gone for long—only heartbeats later by Vemik’s reckoning, the ‘door’ on the side opened, and a familiar, strange but all-too-welcome figure stepped backwards onto the steel climbing-bars below and slid down to the ground comfortably.
Vemik wanted nothing more than to rush his friend from the sky and bowl him right off his feet, but Yan was the Given-Man here. While the rest of the People stood still and watched, he swaggered forward and stood as tall as he could to look Jooyun in the eye, even as Awisun slid down to earth behind him.
He let Shyow join them, quietly, and only once she’d lined up alongside the other two did he finally react: He grinned, bounded forward, and gathered the three of them up in a vast, crushing hug.
“You’re late!”
Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm
Julian Etsicitty
The reunion took nearly an hour, all told. Vemik, Vemet, The Singer, Yan himself…then there were introductions to the Given-Men, Singers and Dancers of other tribes, plus a number of other important men of influence.
The People had changed. Every man who looked even vaguely important was wearing a steel knife, and the Singer—the one from Yan’s tribe—was wearing three Damascus rings of stunning quality considering how new to the process of steelmaking the People must be…but the biggest surprise was Vemik.
Julian had been fantasizing about maybe finally keeping the eager young Ten’Gewek at bay, maybe not being so hopelessly overwhelmed by his raw physicality when they wrestled. That idea had been his Motivation through the worst of Adam’s training, and in the final months it was the thing that helped Julian push himself right up against his unaided limits, and stay there.
One look at Vemik put that dream firmly in doubt. The face was still his, maybe a bit more mature, but his hair crest was a more saturated shade of red and every athletic line of the young “sky-thinker” had filled out and hardened dramatically, neck, arms, tail and all. He looked like he’d been beating on steel every day since their departure.
Perhaps he had. A thought that left Julian feeling unaccountably annoyed in a strange, competitive way.
It was obvious that the alliance of tribes that Yan had built was a tense one. Several of them, including a few Given-Men, lurked on the periphery and talked warily among themselves. That was okay—they’d never expected this to be easy—but at least things had mostly worked out.
They were finally invited to sit down at the fire and trade their stories by the Singer, who had to gently nudge her uncle to remember his manners.
“A season, you said,” Yan reminded them when they sat. “It’s been nearly three.”
“Things were…difficult, at home,” Xiù replied. “…People died. Somebody tried to kill us.”
“Over us?” Vemet asked.
“Yes.” Xiù nodded solemnly. “People who thought we should just…leave you alone. That we’d hurt you more by being here.”
“Idiots,” Allison supplied. This drew a big grin and a trill from Yan.
“We had the same. Tarek, a Given-Man. He…thought I was trying to rule all the tribes. Thought it was all a trick.”
“We lost people coming over the mountains,” Vemik said quietly. “Some old, some sick…some young.”
Something about the way he said it…there was something painful that Vemik wasn’t saying, and the Singer wasn’t saying it either. She was holding a baby in her arms, but now he looked at it…it couldn’t be the same baby. Not after more than a year.
Xiù was just a second ahead of him. “Oh…no? Vemik? Singer?”
“Our daughter,” the Singer sighed. “She got the shivering-sickness, up in the cold among the mountains…”
Julian didn’t think twice about standing up and giving Vemik a crushing hug. It wasn’t remotely enough, nor was Xiù’s hug for the Singer, or the “I’m so sorry…”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Vemik replied.
“No, but…in English that means something like *‘I share your pain.’*” Julian explained.
“…Thank you.”
“But you’re here,” Yan said, with remarkable tact. “And you have another…what was the word, Vemik?”
“Ship,” Vemik told him. That particular English word was easy for the People to say.
“Yes. Some…powerful people. The leaders of our biggest tribes, they agreed to help.”
“There are others in that ship?”
“Yes. Four like us and one who’s…different,” Xiù said.
“Very different,” Allison added.
This earned them both a long, slow stare from Yan and a bewildered frown from Vemik.
“How different can a person be?” he asked.
“You’ll see…” Julian promised.
Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Clockwise lane, Lavmuy City Ring Road, Planet Gao
Cytosis
Even in the age of gravity manipulation and forcefields, wheels had their advantages. A wheeled vehicle held firmly to the ground by gravity was more agile in its way, able to grip on an asphalt surface and maneuver without the characteristic skidding experienced by all hovering vehicles.
Hoverers had their advantages too, chief among them being lower maintenance costs. No tires to wear out, no suspension to align, and they were a lovely smooth quiet ride. But for sheer control and performance on the road, wheels won every time.
And—a minor heresy on Cytosis’ part—they were fun. He was riding a single-person transport not dissimilar to a motorcycle, with a low aerodynamic profile and a thundering beast of an electric powertrain that howled pleasingly under his borrowed body.
The Igraen digital reality had wonders that no corporeal creature could ever understand or begin to grasp…but it didn’t have the feeling of the wind whipping at his fur, ears and whiskers as, with a subtle shift of his bodyweight, he threaded between two thundering goods vehicles and briefly found himself hurtling down a narrow steel canyon at speed.
<Exhilaration>
The exit ramp to the Lavmuy starport spun down, around and through one of the gleaming glass needle skyscrapers that were Lavmuy’s architectural signature. Wi Kao had its lakes, gardens and landscaped parks, Aney Shen was oddly charming in a square, brutal, no-nonsense way and Yamwoi was a handsome stone throwback to the days before Fyu, Tiritya and the Clan of Females.
And all of it was soon to be destroyed. Those glass spires would be smashed, the stone buildings would be rubble. Aney Shen’s dynamic, exciting marketplaces would be charnel houses, and the parks of Wi Kao would be perfect for the Hunters to land their slave transports and march the cubs and females into their bellies.
Cytosis had existed for nearly two hundred thousand years by the Igraen reckoning. He had participated in three xenocides. Now, the depths of his guilt and remorse were impossible to calculate.
The galaxy was a great game of conflict, and the only winning move was to forestall extinction for as long as possible. That was…Doctrine. Even the Cabal adhered to it as truth—The Igraens planned to exist until existence in any form was simply no longer possible, and had controlled the galaxy for thousands of millennia in support of that goal. Now that their winning strategy was no longer winning, it was necessary to pursue an alternative.
But still Cytosis wondered if they had already gone too far. Perhaps forgiveness was already impossible. Perhaps, at long last, the Igraens were destined to lose the Greatest Game and the trend of their future history simply had too much momentum to deflect.
And even more quietly, he wondered if there might not be an important distinction between existing and living.
++SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER Cytosis HAS JOINED THE SESSION++
++WELCOME, USER Cytosis++
++YOU ARE ENTERING CLOSED SESSION…<ERROR>++ ++<SESSION LOG NUMBER NOT ASSIGNED>++
++Proximate++: Let me guess: They’re destroying Gao.
++Anoikis++: Idiots.
++Cytosis++: That’s right. They think they can still salvage the Gaoians as a control species. Local agents have been tasked with Rectification.
++Anoikis++: Inspire the survivors to blame the Humans for what happened.
++Cytosis++: Exactly.
++Metastasis++: …What happens if the Humans lose their closest allied species?
++Cynosure++: They will be very angry, and we will be fucked.
++Metastasis++: You don’t foresee any possibility of victory even then?
His biodrone’s reflex to produce a derisive snort was so powerful that Cytosis would have had to suspend concentrating on the road to suppress it. Carrying on the conversation while angling himself smoothly onto the passenger vehicle approach to the starport was already quite enough of a distraction.
++Cynosure++: As I always said: If not them, then somebody else. For the moment, we have reason to believe that the Humans will prefer not to exterminate us in the event that they win. We have no such confidence in any other species, and we will lose even that if the Hierarchy destroy the Gaoians.
++Proximate++: So. We need to save the Gaoians…I presume you have a plan, Cytosis?
Cytosis looked up at the slender white needle of the spaceport’s traffic control tower to his right, and thought hard as he angled the motorcycle toward its access gate. As a Straightshield Judge-Father, he would be able to simply walk in.
After that…
++Cytosis++: …I have the beginnings of one. We just need to leak the right information to the right people in the right way.
++Anoikis++: You are taking care of it?
++Cytosis++: Yes. Wish me luck.
He slowed for the gate guard and signed out of the channel..
Frankly, they were going to need much more than just luck.
Date Point: 13y11m2w1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
Different.
It was a simple word. It just meant ‘not like us’ which was an easy enough idea for Vemik to get his head around. He hadn’t appreciated how much it could mean that, though.
Things had been easy enough at first. The other ship had opened a kind of steel mouth at the front, making a smooth slope for the people inside to walk down.
They were all different certainly. One was small, smaller even than Shyow maybe, and he walked with a kind of quiet swagger. Another was rounder, softer. His hair had flecks of white and steel-gray in it and he was already sweating powerfully. One, perhaps the strangest of them all at first glance, was a completely different color to the rest—his skin was as dark brown as Forestfather bark, not the odd pale flesh of the others.
One was big, looking like a sky-person version of Yan and he seemed to not care about the large bag over his shoulder. His other hand was resting lightly on the back of some kind of furred beast they had obviously tamed to carry their things.
What a beast, too! Vemik promptly knew that he never, ever wanted to be on the wrong end of those teeth and claws. The animal looked as dangerous as a yshek, which made the big sky-person who had tamed it…
The beast stopped at the bottom of the slope, stood up, and tugged firmly on one of the straps holding on the load it was carrying. The bags thumped solidly to the ground, and the beast shook itself vigorously before settling back down onto four paws and watching expectantly.
That was…Very clever of it. A ridiculous suspicion began to cook in the corners of Vemik’s head.
Shyow stood up and indicated them with her hand. “Yan Given-Man, Vemik Sky-Thinker…I’d like you to meet Daniel, Walsh, Coombes, Hoeff and Daar.”
She unmistakably pointed at the furry creature and named it as Daar, and Vemik’s ridiculous suspicion became ridiculous reality when ‘Daar’ ducked its head in an obviously respectful fashion…and spoke. In The People’s own words.
“Hello. I am Daar, [Champion] and [Stud-Prime] of Clan ‘Stoneback.’ It is good to meet you.”
Yan stood up out of sheer astonishment. Several of the tribesmen actually retreated toward the trees and even Vemik found his hand going to his knife.
‘Daar’ for his part sat on his haunches and waited patiently.
Slowly and carefully, Yan sat down again. “…Shyow? Jooyun? What…?”
Vemik had never heard him sound truly lost for words before. Shyow’s expressive, mobile face softened into a smile that said sorry and she cleared her throat.
“We said before that some of the…Tribes of Sky-People are very different to us,” she said. “Daar is from a Sky-Tribe called Gao and is a great leader among their people. Our Sky-Tribe is called human, and…well, we weren’t expecting to bring him. At least, not yet.”
Daar made that ducking motion with his head again. “It is important that I did come, though. My…Sky-Tribe has suffered at the hands of the Enemy, too. We will not allow yours to face this fight alone.”
Yan stood up more slowly this time. He held himself fully upright and strolled over to the big furry…person with a rolling, authoritative gait that Vemik knew well enough by now was largely a bluff. Yan only looked so big and important when he was uncertain.
He squared off in front of Daar and the two stared each other down for a long, quiet moment before Yan’s tongue flickered out to taste the air around the bestial sky-person.
Whatever he tasted, Yan stepped back, bared his teeth and smiled.
“The world is a stranger place than I thought. Again. But you are welcome at our fire, Daar Given-Man.”
Daar made a strange sound, a rapid clicking-grumble that…somehow felt like amusement. “Thanks! I bet we got lots to teach each other.”
Yan turned his attention to the other…what was the other word Shyow had used? Human.
“Are you Daar’s…” he paused, glanced at Daar, and reconsidered. “I’m sorry. I was about to ask something disrespectful.”
‘Walsh’ replied in ‘English.’ [“We will take no offense. Ask!”]
“…You are good friends with Daar?”
Daar chittered again. [“I know where this is going!”] He didn’t seem the least offended. Instead he rose up to his hindpaws and wrapped his arms around ‘Walsh’, then rubbed their heads together and nibbled on his ear.
Walsh squirmed under the much bigger beast’s—no, Person’s—grip, much like Vemik did when Yan wanted to tussle. [“We are…good friends. Yes.”]
[“The most bestest friends!”]
Walsh sighed and grinned, while ‘Daar’ made a deep grumbling noise and nuzzled harder. [“Yes, Daar,”] he said indulgently while reaching back to scritch Daar’s ears, then gave Yan an apologetic half-smile. [“we’re friends as fellow *People.*”] he added. [“Even if he doesn’t wanna act like it sometimes.”]
The dark one spoke up. Coombes. [“Later, when there’s time, we’ll tell you about a beast he killed. Maybe saved our lives.”]
[“Don’t you fucking dare Hoeff.”] Daar added, addressing the small one. [“I know you wanna.”]
Obviously there was a really good story there, waiting to be told. The promise of it seemed to satisfy Yan.
“We have stories to tell each other, then,” he said. He gestured back toward the fire. “And a long night to tell them. But I think I want to hear the story of the people who tried to kill you, first…”
The five men on the ramp visibly relaxed as he turned away, especially the soft, older one at the back who hadn’t spoken.
[“That went well…”] he commented, obviously thinking that he was too quiet to be heard.
Daar must have thought the same thing. He stood upright again and shook out his legs for comfort. [“Fyu’s furry ballsack…”] He grumbled. [“I can handle supergravity, I can handle it being the most humidest ever… but both at once is gonna suck ass.”]
Vemik couldn’t help himself. [“Who is…Fyu?”] he asked. There was also the question of what ‘supergravity’ might be, but if these Gaoian sky-people were anything like Jooyun then he’d only get one question at a time. Better to ask the simpler ones first and soften them up for the harder ones.
Daar didn’t seem even the least bit embarrassed at being overheard. In fact, encouragingly, the question seemed to delight him. [“Great Father Fyu was the most bestest Gaoian to ever live! Lemme tell you about him—”]
[“One story at a time, Tiggs,”] Coombes reminded him. By the fire, Shyow and Jooyun were already telling Yan the story of their troubles, while Awisun sat still and listened to them.
“…Tiggs?” Vemik asked. “…No. Never mind. I’ll ask later. And I probably won’t understand the explanation.”
Daar chittered again at that, and Vemik got the idea that he was the sort of…yes, Person, who decided who he liked quickly, and in a big strong way. He took a seat right next to Vemik and pressed up close in a strangely affectionate way.
“You will. Don’t worry.”
His People-words didn’t come from his mouth, Vemik noticed. Instead, Daar was wearing a small black shiny rock on a band around his upper arm that did strange things to the sound of his voice. Up close, he could just hear other words, strange words he didn’t know at all, but they sounded faint and far off like a sap-stinger buzzing in somebody else’s hut. And then the stone spoke People-words in Daar’s voice, just an eyeblink later.
Shyow’s word-magic. He remembered she’d once said she knew the words of more than a hand of tribes, and wondered if Gao-words were among them.
Looking around, he was surprised to see how many of the People from other tribes had crept in close to listen.
“Why would they wish you to stay home?” Yan was asking. “We can’t threaten your tribe.”
“But we can threaten yours, even if we don’t mean to.”
Yan inclined his head and scratched his left calf with his right toes. “And that is a reason for you to stay away?” he asked. “I…am grateful that you mean us no harm. But I sometimes wonder why.”
Jooyun cleared his throat and turned to the aging, soft-bodied one.
“One for you, Daniel,” he said.
‘Daniel’ nodded, seeming calm despite the way he immediately became the target of everybody’s attention. “It’s…a good question,” he said. “And a perceptive one.”
Yan made the quiet grunt that Vemik knew meant he was pleased by a compliment but didn’t want to show it.
“…You were not introduced,” he said instead.
“This is Daniel Hurt,” Shyow explained. “He’s a respected sky-thinker among our people.”
A sky-person sky-thinker? Vemik started to pay closer attention the older human as he acknowledged Shyow’s introduction with a nod.
“I think about minds, and people,” Daniel said. “And about questions like why we don’t want to harm you.”
“And this is…a good question?” Yan asked.
“Yes.”
Daniel sat forward, laced his fingers together, licked his lips and cleared his throat.
“…How would you like us to answer it?” he asked.