“Where’s Earth?”
His father laughed, loud and alone, in the dining room. “You can’t see it on that map. It’s just the Pleiades Federation.”
Morgan put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I you a map of Draco next time bring.” The secretary, whose eyes were almond-shaped, smiled.
Lorq turned to his father. “I want to go to Draco!” And then back to Secretary Morgan: “I someday to Draco want to go!” Secretary Morgan spoke like many of the people in his school at Causby; like the people on the street who had helped him find his way home when he had gotten lost when he was four (but not like his father or Aunt Cyana) and Mommy and Daddy had been so terribly upset. (“We were so worried! We thought you’d been kidnapped. But you mustn’t go to those cardplayers on the street, even if they did bring you home!”) His parents smiled when he spoke like that to them, but they wouldn’t smile now, because Secretary Morgan was a guest.
His father humphed. “A map of Draco! That’s all he needs. Oh yes, Draco!”
Aunt Cyana laughed; then Mother and Secretary Morgan laughed too.
They lived on Ark but often they went on big ships to other worlds. You had a cabin where you could pass your hand in front of colored panels and have anything to eat you wanted anytime, or you could go down to the observation deck and watch the winds of the void translated to visible patterns of light over the bubble ceiling, flailing colors among stars that drifted by—and you knew you were going faster and faster than anything.
Sometimes his parents went to Draco, to Earth, to cities called New York and Peking. He wondered when they would take him.
But every year, the last week in Saluary, they would go on one of the great ships to another world that was also not on the map. It was called New Brazillia and was in the Outer Colonies. He lived in New Brazillia too, on the island of Sao Orini—because his parents had a house there too, near the mine.
The first time he heard the names Prince and Ruby Red it was at the Sao Orini house. He was lying in the dark, screaming for light.
His mother came at last, pushed away the insect netting. (It wasn’t needed because the house had sonics to keep away the tiny red bugs that occasionally bit you outside and made you feel funny for a few hours, but Mother liked to be safe.) She lifted him. “Shhh! Shhh! It’s all right. Don’t you want to go to sleep? Tomorrow is the party. Prince and Ruby will be here. Don’t you want to play with Prince and Ruby at the party?” She carried him around the nursery, stopping to push the wall switch by the door. The ceiling began to rotate till the polarized pane was transparent. Through the palm fronds lapping the roof, twin moons spattered orange light. She laid him back in the bed, caressed his rough, red hair. After a while she started to leave.
“Don’t turn it off, Mommy!”
Her hand fell from the switch. She smiled at him. He felt warm, and rolled over to stare through the meshed fronds at the moons.
Prince and Ruby Red were coming from Earth. He knew that his mother’s parents were on Earth, in a country called Senegal. His father’s great-grandparents were also from Earth, from Norway. Von Rays, blond and blustering, had been speculating in the Pleiades now for generations. He wasn’t sure what they speculated, but it must have been successful. His family owned the Illyrion mine that operated just beyond the northern tip of the Sao Orini mansion’s peninsula. His father occasionally joked with him about making him the little foreman of the mines. That’s what “speculation” probably was. And the moons were drifting away; he was sleepy.
He did not remember being introduced to the blue-eyed, black-haired boy with the prosthetic right arm, nor his spindly sister. But he recalled the three of them—himself, Prince, and Ruby—playing together the next afternoon in the west garden.
He showed them the place behind the bamboo where you could climb up into the carved stone mouths.
“What are those?” Prince asked.
“Those are the dragons,” Lorq explained.
“There aren’t any dragons,” Ruby said.
“Those are dragons. That’s what Father says.”
“Oh.” Prince caught his false hand over the lower lip and hoisted himself up. “What are they for?”
“You climb up in them. Then you can climb down again. Father says the people who lived here before us carved them.”
“Who lived here before?” Ruby asked. “And what did they want with dragons? Help me up, Prince.”
“I think they’re silly.” Prince and Ruby were now both standing between the stone fangs above him. (Later he would learn that “the people who had lived here before” were a race extinct in the Outer Colonies for twenty thousand years; their carvings had survived, and on these ruined foundations, Von Ray had erected one of his mansions.)
Lorq sprang for the jaw, got his fingers around the lower lip, and started scrambling. “Give me a hand?”
“Just a second,” Prince said. Then, slowly, he put his shoe on Lorq’s fingers and mashed.
Lorq gasped and fell back on the ground, clutching his palm.
Ruby giggled.
“Hey!” Indignation throbbed, confusion welled. Pain beat in his knuckles.
“You shouldn’t make fun of his hand,” Ruby said. “He doesn’t like that.”
“Huh?” Lorq looked at the metal and plastic claw directly for the first time. “I didn’t make fun of it!”
“Yes you did,” Prince said evenly. “I don’t like people who make fun of me.”
“But I—” Lorq’s seven-year-old mind tried to comprehend this irrationality. He stood up again. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
Prince lowered himself to his knees, reached out, and swung at Lorq’s head.
“Watch—!” He leaped backward. The mechanical limb had moved so fast the air hissed.
“Don’t talk about my hand anymore! There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”
“If you stop making fun of him,” Ruby commented, looking at the rugae on the roof of the stone mouth, “he’ll be friends with you.”
“Well, all right,” Lorq said warily.
Prince smiled. “Then we’ll be friends now.” He had very pale skin and his teeth were small.
“All right,” Lorq said. He decided he didn’t like Prince.
“If you say something like, ‘let’s shake on it,’” Ruby said, “he’ll beat you up. And he can, even though you’re bigger than he is.”
Or Ruby either.
“Come on up,” Prince said.
Lorq climbed into the mouth beside the other two children.
“Now what do we do?” Ruby asked. “Climb down?”
“You can look into the garden from here,” Lorq said. “And watch the party.”
“Who wants to watch an old party,” Ruby said.
“I do,” said Prince.
“Oh,” Ruby said. “You do. Well, all right then.”
Beyond the bamboo, guests walked among the stones, vines, trees. They laughed gently, talked of the latest psychorama, politics, drank from long glasses. His father stood by the fountain, discussing with several people his feelings about the proposed sovereignty of the Outer Colonies—after all, he had a home out here and had his finger on the pulse of the situation. It was the year that Secretary Morgan had been assassinated. Though Underwood had been caught, there were still theories going around as to which faction was responsible.
A woman with silver hair flirted with a young couple who had come with Ambassador Selvin, who was also a cousin. Aaron Red, a portly, proper gentleman, had cornered three young ladies and was pontificating on the moral degeneration of the young. Mother moved through the guests, the hem of her red dress brushing the grass, followed by the humming buffet. She paused here and there to offer canapes, drinks, and her opinion of the new realignment proposal. Now, after a year of phenomenal popular success, the intelligentsia had accepted the Tohu-bohus as legitimate music. Their jarring rhythms tumbled across the lawn. A light sculpture in the corner twisted, flickered, grew with t
he tones.
Then his father let out a booming laugh that made everyone look. “Listen to this! Just hear what Lusuna has said to me!” He was holding the shoulder of a university student who had come with the young couple. Von Ray’s bluster had apparently prompted the young man to argument. Father gestured for him to repeat.
“I only said that we live in an age where economic, political, and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition.”
“My Lord,” laughed the woman with silver hair, “is that all?”
“No, no!” Father waved his hand. “We have to listen to what the younger generation thinks. Go on, sir.”
“There’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity, even on Earth, the center of Draco. The past half dozen generations have seen such movement of peoples from world to world, there can’t be any. This pseudo-interplanetary society that has replaced any real tradition, while very attractive, is totally hollow and masks an incredible tangle of decadence, scheming, corruption and—”
“Really, Lusuna,” the young wife said, “your Scholarship is showing.” She had just taken another drink at the prompting of the woman with the silver hair.
“—piracy.”
(With the last word, even the three children crouching in the mouth of the carved lizard could tell from the looks passing on the guests’ faces that Lusuna had gone too far.)
Mother came across the lawn, the bottom of her red sheath brushing back from gilded nails. She held her hands out to Lusuna, smiling. “Come, let’s continue this social dissection over dinner. We’re having a totally corrupt mango-bongoou with untraditional loso ye mbiji a meza, and scathingly decadent mpati a nsengo.” His mother always made the old Senegal dishes for parties. “And if the oven cooperates, we’ll end up with dreadfully pseudo-interplanetary tiba yoka flambe.”
The student looked around, realized he was supposed to smile, and did one better by laughing. With the student on her arm, Mother led everyone into dinner—“Didn’t someone tell me you had won a scholarship to Draco University at Centauri? You must be quite bright. You’re from Earth, I gather from your accent. Senegal? Well! So am I. What city …?” And Father, relieved, brushed back oak-colored hair and followed everyone into the jalousied dining pavilion.
On the stone tongue, Ruby was saying to her brother, “I don’t think you should do that.”
“Why not?” said Prince.
Lorq looked back at the brother and sister. Prince had picked up a stone from the floor of the dragon’s mouth in his mechanical hand. Across the lawn stood the aviary of white cockatoos Mother had brought from Earth on her last trip.
Prince aimed. Metal and plastic blurred.
Forty feet away, birds screamed and exploded in the cage. As one fell to the floor, Lorq could see, even at this distance, blood in the feathers.
“That’s the one I was aiming for.” Prince smiled.
“Hey,” Lorq said. “Mother’s not going to …” He looked again at the mechanical appendage strapped to Prince’s shoulder over the stump. “Say, you throw better with—”
“Watch it.” Prince’s black brows lowered on chipped blue glass. “I told you not to make fun of my hand, didn’t I?” The hand drew back, and Lorq heard the motors—whirr, click, whirr—in wrist and elbow.
“It’s not his fault he was born that way,” Ruby said. “And it’s impolite to make remarks about your guests. Aaron says you’re all barbarians out here anyway, doesn’t he, Prince?”
“That’s right.” Prince lowered his hand.
A voice came over the loudspeaker into the garden. “Children, where are you? Come in and get your supper. Hurry.”
They climbed down and went out through the bamboo.
Lorq went to bed still excited by the party. He lay under the doubled shadows of the palms above the nursery ceiling, transparent from the night before.
A whisper: “Lorq!”
And: “Shhh! Don’t be so loud, Prince.”
More softly: “Lorq?”
He pushed back the netting and sat up in bed. Imbedded in the plastic floor, tigers, elephants, and monkeys glowed. “What do you want?”
“We heard them leaving through the gate.” Prince stood in the nursery doorway in his shorts. “Where did they go?”
“We want to go too,” Ruby said from behind her brother’s shoulder.
“Where did they go?” Prince asked again.
“Into town.” Lorq stood up and padded across the glowing menagerie. “Mommy and Daddy always take their friends down into the village when they come for the holidays.”
“What do they do?” Prince leaned against the jamb.
“They go … well, they go into town.” Where ignorance had been, curiosity came to fill it.
“We jimmied the baby-sitter,” said Ruby.
“You don’t have a very good one; it was easy. Everything is so old-fashioned out here. Aaron says only Pleiades barbarians could think it quaint to live out here. Are you going to take us to go see where they went?”
“Well, I—”
“We want to go,” said Ruby.
“Don’t you want to go see too?”
“All right.” Lorq had planned to refuse. “I have to put my sandals on.” But childish curiosity to see what adults did when children were not about was marking foundations on which adolescent, and later, adult consciousness would stand.
The garden lisped about the gate. The lock always opened to Lorq’s handprint during the day, but he was still surprised when it swung back now.
The road threaded into the moist night.
Past the rocks and across the water one low moon turned the mainland into a tongue of ivory lapping at the sea. And through the trees, the lights of the village went off and on like a computer checkboard. Rocks, chalky under the high, smaller moon, edged the roadway. A cactus raised spiky paddles to the sky.
As they reached the first of the town’s cafes, Lorq said “hello” to one of the miners who sat at a table outside the door.
“Little Senhor.” The miner nodded back.
“Do you know where my parents are?” Lorq asked.
“They came by here,” he shrugged, “the ladies with the fine clothes, the men in their vests and their dark shirts. They came by, half an hour ago, an hour.”
“What language is he talking?” Prince demanded.
Ruby giggled. “You understand that?”
Another realization hit Lorq: He and his parents spoke to the people of Sao Orini with a completely different set of words than they spoke to each other and their guests. He had learned the slurred dialect of Portuguese under the blinking lights of a hypno-teacher sometime in the fog of early childhood.
“Where did they go?” he asked again.
The miner’s name was Tavo. For a month last year when the mine shut down, he had been plugged into one of the clanking gardeners that had landscaped the park behind the house. Dull grownups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship. Tavo was dirty and stupid. Lorq accepted this. But his mother had put an end to the relation when, last year, he came back from the village and told how he had watched Tavo kill a man who had insulted the miner’s ability to drink.
“Come on, Tavo. Tell me where they went.”
Tavo shrugged.
Insects beat about the illuminated letters over the cafe door.
Crepe paper left from the Sovereignty Festival blew from the awning posts. It was the anniversary of Pleiades Sovereignty, but the miners celebrated it out here both in hope for their own and for Mother and Father.
“Does he know where they went?” Prince asked.
Tavo was drinking sour milk from a cracked cup along with his rum. He patted his knee and Lorq, glancing at Prince and Ruby, sat down.
Brother and sister looked at each other uncertainly.
“You sit down too,” Lorq said. “On the chairs.”
They did.
Tavo offered Lorq his sour milk. Lorq drank half of it, then passe
d it to Prince. “You want some?”
Prince raised the cup to his mouth, then caught the smell. “You drink this?” He wrinkled his face and set the cup down sharply.
Lorq picked up the glass of rum. “Would you prefer …?”
But Tavo took the glass out of his hand. “That’s not for you, Little Senhor.”
“Tavo, where are my parents?”
“Back up in the woods, at Alonza’s.”
“Take us, Tavo?”
“Why?”
“We want to go see them.”
Tavo deliberated. “We can’t go unless you have money.” He roughed Lorq’s hair. “Hey, Little Senhor, you have any money?”
Lorq took out the few coins from his pocket.
“Not enough.”
“Prince, do you or Ruby have any money?”
Prince had two pounds @sg in his shorts.
“Give it to Tavo.”
“Why?”
“So he’ll take us to see our parents.”
Tavo reached across and took the money from Prince, then raised his eyebrows at the amount.
“Will he give this to me?”
“If you take us,” Lorq told him.
Tavo tickled Lorq’s stomach. They laughed. Tavo folded one bill and put it in his pocket. Then he ordered another rum and sour milk. “The milk is for you. Some for your friends?”
“Come on, Tavo. You said you’d take us.”
“Be quiet,” the miner said. “I’m thinking whether we should go up there. You know I must go plug in at work tomorrow morning.” He tapped the socket on one wrist.
Lorq put salt and pepper in the milk and sipped it.
“I want to try some,” Ruby said.
“It smells awful,” said Prince. “You shouldn’t drink it. Is he going to take us?”
Tavo gestured to the owner of the cafe. “Lots of people up at Alonza’s tonight?”
“It’s Friday night, isn’t it?” said the owner.
“The boy wants me to take him up there,” said Tavo, “for the evening.”