Star of Wonder

  * * * * *

  “As you can see,” the guide intoned, sweeping a hand towards the manicured greenery beyond the safety shield, “this species of anthrofelinoid spends its time mainly in sleep, social grooming, and play. The upright posture, rather than being a step forward as is most often seen in evolutionary progression, is thought to be a genetic dead-end within this particular subspecies, slated to die out within the next few dozen generations at most. And now if you’ll follow me, we’ll take a look inside a typical dwelling…”

  Carol hung back, edging as close as the shield would allow to the small group of creatures the guide had been describing. Her older cousin Layna and her friends were all busy tagging after the guide himself, tripads in their hands, but instead of following along in the interactive program the exhibit-ship offered, no doubt they were texting back and forth gushy words like “sleepy chocolate eyes” and “hair kissed by the sun” and “skin like coffee with cream”. The guide’s good looks, unusual in both type and quality for Moria and accentuated rather than marred by the slight limp with which he walked, were the reason the Layn Gang (Carol’s own coinage, kept carefully inside her head but liberating nonetheless) had taken this tour every afternoon since their Christmas semi-vacation began, three days ago on the eighteenth of December, and were planning two more, which was all the longer the ship would be in orbit around their world.

  It’s all the longer anyone spends here, once they find out what kind of a place this is. Eleven years of experience in living on Moria, and six and a half in her aunt and uncle’s household, kept Carol from venting her snarl of frustration, but enough of a muffled growl escaped her that one of the children, cubs, kittens, whatever they were called looked up from its concentration on the small hole it was digging. Golden-brown, slit-pupiled eyes regarded her curiously through the shimmer of the safety shield, and pointed ears covered with a coat of soft tan fuzz pricked forward, then back, barely disturbing the fall of thick dark hair through which they poked. One clawed hand reached up to scratch under the top of the cobbled-together furs which covered a no-less-furry torso from shoulder to knee.

  In all other respects, Carol estimated, she and the young female “anthrofelinoid” on the other side of the shield could have been one another’s twins.

  “I wish I was you,” she breathed, her own unclawed hands locked around the railing that edged the shielded walkthrough of the creatures’ shipborne habitat (she knew they had a proper species name, but it never quite settled into her ears as the guide slurred past it at the start of every tour). “We’re both locked up, but nobody keeps telling you that you ought to be grateful for it all the time. Nobody keeps saying you should be happy that you’re in a prison and you’re going to be there forever and ever. Maybe it does mean that you have a bed and food and clothes and nobody hitting you, but maybe there are other ways of getting hurt than hitting.” She looked away for a moment, not wanting even a cat-girl to see her eyes well up. “And maybe some of them hurt more. Especially at this time of year.”

  “This time of year” was a misnomer on the mining world of Moria, which had no tilt to the axis on which it rotated and therefore no seasons (or rather, only one season, hot and dry and thoroughly unpleasant, with plains and mountains alike devoid of life and skies endlessly choked with dust). Nonetheless, like most settled worlds, Moria followed the calendar which had come to the stars with humankind, and its people dutifully festooned their underground towns with bits of artificial greenery, sprayed with artificial scent, and strings of twinkling lights every December. Their children had a few half-days’ freedom from school around the twenty-fifth of the month and a full day off on Christmas itself, and some families even saved pennies and dimes out of their wages or allowances to buy one another gifts for the holiday.

  Or that’s what they do if they like each other, anyway. Carol looked up, measuring the distance to the ceiling hidden behind an illusion of endless blue sky, then out, to the compartment walls she knew were there, cloaked in the appearance of rolling grassy hills. But even if my aunt and uncle liked me, they couldn’t buy me the only things I want. Things like room to breathe and run, and nights filled with fresh air and stars. Things like sunrises and sunsets, rivers and trees, chances to dance in the rain or play in the snow, and people to share all of that with, people who would love it as much as I would…

  The cat-girl tilted her head to one side, her eyes exploring Carol’s face, then chirruped once, softly, sliding the sound upwards at the end as though asking a question.

  “I don’t know.” Carol leaned against the railing, letting her eyes go unfocused. If she did it just right, she could imagine that the safety shield wasn’t there at all, that the hills and sky really did go on to forever, that in just a moment she would dart forward past this silly little barrier to join her friend. Together, hand in hand, they would race into the distance, laughing with the simple joy of speed and health and youth, matching their paces and refusing to stop until they were ready. Or perhaps they would run only far enough to find the homes that lay hidden beyond those hills, the places where warmth and happiness and cheer all waited, given as freely as gifts always ought to be at Christmas time…

  “I don’t know,” she repeated, pulling herself unwillingly out of the illusion. “But I’ll try and come back tomorrow, all right? Tomorrow, and the day after that.”

  And then the day after that, you’ll be gone, and I’ll never see you again. The thought tasted sour in her mouth, but she swallowed it down nonetheless. You didn’t live to be eleven years old on Moria without learning to swallow lots of things you didn’t like.

  The cat-girl chirruped again, brightly, and one furred hand rose as if she were waving goodbye. Which, of course, Carol knew, she wasn’t. No matter how human these creatures looked, they weren’t. The guide, the one Layna and her friends spent all their time mooning over, said so clearly every day.

  And if Carol was going to be there when that same guide returned his tour group to the shuttle which would carry them back to the planet where their parents, guardians, and other responsible adults were waiting, she was going to have to run.

  Spinning on her heel, she dashed off, crossing her fingers that she hadn’t been missed. Wandering off by herself was on her aunt and uncle’s long, very long, list of “ways Carol Fuhrman is just like her no-good fools of parents”, and she wasn’t exactly panting with eagerness to sit through that lecture again.

  My parents weren’t no-good, and they weren’t fools. They were just a little…unsettled. And very unlucky.

  But being unsettled, on staid, down-to-earth, no-nonsense Moria, was tantamount to blasphemy and heresy combined, and being unlucky was seen as a clear sign that you hadn’t been respectful enough of the proprieties. It had taken all of ten minutes for the I-told-you-so’s to start after her father had crashed the small sealed flyer he’d bought used and lovingly refurbished. It had only been intended for one rider, but he had recalculated everything for two, so that he and his wife, Carol’s mother, could take an occasional outing by themselves, rather than waiting for their scheduled turn with the shared flyer of the cave-neighborhood where they lived.

  And because they couldn’t wait, because they wanted to be just that little bit different, that tiny bit free, they died. And I went to live with Uncle Frank and Aunt Taisha, and with Layna, and I’ve been hearing about what a burden I am to them ever since…

  There were days, many of them, when Carol wanted to cry, when she wanted to beat her fists against the invisible bars of her cage and scream until someone came to let her out. But she knew it would do her no good. The only way out of the prison called Moria was the way her parents had taken.

  Or no, there’s one other way. You have to learn something that people want in the greater galaxy. To study some specialty that has applications beyond mining and processing ore. But no one around here believes any of that is important. Especially not…

  Even her mind’s voice dropped to a hush
before thinking the word, the single most offensive word on Moria.

  Music.

  She knew what music was rather as she knew about stories, or rain and snow, though water falling out of the sky was only impossible on Moria, not forbidden the way music was, or carefully regulated like stories. Things that manipulated a human being’s emotional state without any true reason, teachers told kids in school, were dangerous to experience, even under what seemed like controlled conditions. Humans had only so much ability to feel things, and wasting it on recreation was practically a crime, to say nothing of how badly it could affect the other real people in the world around you if you were busy thinking about fake people.

  And as for music, what right does noise without any connection to reality have to take up space in a person’s head? You should be concentrating on your work, on the things you need to see and hear and notice and do, not on some arbitrary collection of sounds, no matter how good they make you feel. Carol’s imagined perfect-Morian voice spat the words in a crisp diction which reminded her of the teacher she had suffered under the year before, the teacher who had obviously spent the entire year before that listening to Layna whine about her useless, anti-social cousin. Only animals spend their lives in an endless, senseless quest to “feel good”. Human beings, proper human beings, must make a conscious decision to live so as to benefit others around them, to work together for everyone’s good, and to that end, they must shun the selfish pursuit of so-called happiness.

  Nonetheless, despite the official ban, a few recordings of music slipped onto Moria every year, passed around among kids (and for all Carol knew, adults too) in total secrecy. Carol herself had only ever heard snatches of two of these hidden songs, both in the few seconds between a new arrival from the Layn Gang slipping through Layna’s bedroom door and said door being slammed shut, but they were enough. She knew, deep in her blood and bone, that music was what she wanted from life.

  And it’s something I knew before. Before my parents died, when they were still making plans for us, plans for a life somewhere that wasn’t Moria. Daddy could have done it, too. He was a good enough mechanic that any starship, any company would have been happy to have him. And Mommy could have cooked, or cleaned… A tiny, secret smile flitted across Carol’s face. Or maybe sung for her supper. She used to sing to me all the time. Songs from her past, from her family’s past, from long and long ago, and some of them were even special for this time of year…

  She slowed to a walk, hearing the noise of the guide and his group ahead of her. It wasn’t too late after all. She could even spend one more moment here in the privacy of the ship, enjoying the quiet and the priceless luxury of a few moments when she wasn’t being watched, remembering her mother’s favorite Christmas song.

  Under her breath, she hummed.

  It came upon the midnight clear,

  That glorious song of old,

  From angels bending near the earth

  To touch their harps of gold…

  The last line seemed to echo oddly from the bulkhead beside her, and Carol spun, panicked, frantically looking for the person who had caught her singing—

  Golden eyes blinked at her from beyond the safety shield. Her cat-friend flicked her ears twice and emitted a soft trill, which Carol thought sounded rather like a laugh, but a friendly one, not the nasty sort like Layna’s. You looked a little silly, the other girl seemed to be saying, but I want you to share the enjoyment with me…

  “I suppose I did,” Carol said aloud. “Look silly, I mean. But…” She frowned, stepping closer to the cat-girl. “Was that you? Singing, I mean?” With a glance towards the direction where she could still hear voices, she leaned as close to the shield as she thought she could get without receiving a warning shock and hummed the first line of her mother’s song.

  After flicking glances over her shoulders in both directions, the cat-girl hummed back a rising run of notes, descending by one at the last moment.

  “It was you,” Carol breathed. “But how did you—” A sudden rise in the noise level shot her upright. “I’ll come back!” she whispered urgently, and bolted as fast as she could in the direction of the voices.

  “—must be lost somewhere, because she’s not here, and I’m not going to get in trouble for it if she’s been eaten by one of your animals!” her cousin’s voice rose over the background hubbub, making Carol wince. She’d been missed after all.

  But it doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care how many extra chores Aunt Taisha finds for me or how much Uncle Frank grumbles about not being able to get Layna the new tripad she wants because of having to provide for me or how much they all watch me to be sure I don’t do something as stupid or crazy as my parents did—I know something no one else knows, I know a secret, and for once it’s even a real secret instead of one I made up for myself, inside my own head—

  “Here I am,” she called, slowing to a walk as she rounded the last corner. “Here I am, I’m sorry for lagging, I was just looking at one of the…” For lack of the word, she waved her hand at the safety shield, behind which an adult female anthrofelinoid and a male juvenile, both bearing a definite resemblance to her newly-made friend, were observing the ten or so Morians in the tour group with as much curiosity as the Morians were observing them.

  “Lurans,” the guide said smoothly, inclining his platinum-blond head to her, “and that’s quite all right. You see, Miss, your cousin is perfectly well,” he added to Layna. “There’s no possible way in which she could have become lost, or been put in danger, here aboard the Rover. The path is shielded on all sides and entirely self-contained, so that neither you nor the Lurans can make contact at any time.”

  Except we can. Carol fell in at the back of the group, sliding her arm deftly out of reach as Layna reached back with her fingers primed for a vicious pinch. It isn’t physical contact, but it’s contact all the same, and it was real, I didn’t dream it or make it up the way I do my stories and my bits of music, it’s really, truly real…

  But as the tour started back towards the ship’s airlock, where they would board the shuttle which would return them to Moria’s single spaceport, from there to make their way to the planetary capital of Refinery (in the Layn Gang and Carol’s case) or whichever other of Moria’s cave-cities held their homes, Carol began to worry.

  Was it real, though? Or did I make it up, dream it with my eyes open, just because I want so badly for there to be someone, anyone, who understands how I feel about music? Someone who knows what it’s like to feel those sounds, to have them drum inside your head while you’re trying to sleep and pound so loud you can hardly hear the teacher at school and shake you almost to bits because you don’t have any way to get them out of your head?

  She glanced to one side as they passed through the doorway which led out of the Lurans’ habitat. Was there a pair of pointed, golden-furred ears lurking deep in the shadows, or was she imagining it?

  Then she saw a shape further back in the habitat, a very particular shape, and stopped for an instant to stare.

  “Carol!” Layna shouted from the far side of the compartment which housed the elevators leading to the airlock. “Come on, or you’ll get left behind!”

  “I’m coming!” Carol hurried across the compartment as two of the elevators pinged at once. Layna, as was her usual practice, shoved her way onto the first one as soon as the doors were open, her gang shouldering their way in behind her. Carol hung back, loath to let go of even a few moments of her day which might conceivably be free of her cousin’s surveillance, and heaved a small, guilty sigh of relief when the doors closed on a full load. As long as they ended up at the same destination, not even Layna could blame her for traveling in a different elevator.

  Though that doesn’t mean she won’t try.

  “Quite a charming girl, your cousin.”

  Carol jumped, looking up at the guide, whose eyes were crinkled at the corners even more than usual as he smiled at her. “Are these her na
tural manners,” he asked, pressing his arm against the elevator door to hold it open for Carol and the few remaining tourists, “or is she on better behavior than usual for visiting our fair ship?”

  “I don’t think she has a better behavior,” said Carol, surprising herself with the bitterness of her tone, though her words were only true. “Sir…”

  She nearly bit her tongue on the question. It was stupid and pointless, the guide wouldn’t want to waste his time satisfying the curiosity of a little girl like her, and the answer was self-evident anyway.

  But he talked to me first…

  “Was that a Christmas tree inside the habitat?” she blurted out before she could change her mind.

  “Yes, it was.” The guide’s smile broadened. “Did you like it? The Lurans certainly do, and they have their own ideas about the ways the decorations should be arranged, let me tell you. I’ve had to break up more than one squabble over those strings of popcorn!”

  Carol laughed, feeling some of the weight of worry lift from her. Her imagination hadn’t completely run away with her. The world still made sense. Of course a kind man like this one would want his charges, the creatures he exhibited to the settled worlds of the galaxy to make his living, to have all the comforts they could, especially at a festive season like this one.

  But that doesn’t explain the music.

  “…know that the tree means they get presents after a certain number of days, and they are not patient creatures,” the guide was saying as Carol’s attention returned to the outside world. “It’s very much like having a shipful of boisterous children, although of course they don’t know how to say ‘What did you bring me? What did you bring me?’“ His imitation of a small child bouncing impatiently up and down, tugging at its parents’ clothing, was as funny as it was accurate, and the other inhabitants of the elevator laughed as the downward motion slowed and stopped.

  Lingering as the rest of the group disembarked, Carol tried to think of how to broach the subject. “Excuse me,” she said diffidently.

  “Yes?” The guide turned to her politely, one eyebrow raised.

  “I wasn’t lagging back on purpose,” Carol said in a rush, “it’s just that I was looking at one of the Lurans, a girl, about as old as I am, she actually even looks a bit like me—”

  She looked up at the guide’s face once more, and her eyes widened in shock as the slant of his eyes, the set of his cheekbones, rang bells of recognition in her mind.

  And she also looks like you.

  But how—

  “Sundance,” the guide breathed, going to one knee and beckoning her closer. “Her name is Sundance. What else did you see? Or—” His eyes searched her face. “Was it something that you heard?”

  Carol swallowed hard and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said as politely as she could manage for the tremors which had seized her. “I was mistaken. It was nothing. Please, excuse me?”

  Ducking around the guide, she bolted for the shuttle, her thoughts in a tangled furor.

  There were a limited number of reasons why her cat-friend might look like the man who was supposedly the guardian of her race. None of the ones that Carol could think of were good.

  That doesn’t mean there isn’t a good one, she tried to remind herself, dropping into a seat beside Layna and fastening her safety belt. Just that I can’t think of it.

  But maybe I was wrong before. Maybe Sundance and I are in exactly the same kind of prison.

  The difference is, I might be able to do something about hers…