A Passage of Stars

  Bin ich gleich von dir gewichen

  Stell’ ich mich doch weider ein;

  Hat uns doch dein Sohn verglichen

  Durch sein’ Angst und Todespein.

  “Although I have strayed from Thee,

  yet I have returned again;

  for Thy Son has reconciled us

  through his agony and mortal pain.”

  “Wait!” she called, running after them. They both halted, Heredes in the lead. “Do you hear it?” she asked, stopping beside Kyosti. “There is wind—I can just barely feel it on my face, but can you hear it, in the trees? Like it’s whispering, but something we can’t understand.”

  Kyosti laughed and took her face, bright with discovery, between his hands. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”

  “Is this a summer’s day?” she asked, looking up into eyes that were as blue as the sky. Kyosti laughed again and released her. Turning, she saw that Heredes was frowning, but when he caught her eye he smiled. The wind moved in his brown hair as a lover’s fingers do, with a gentle caress. On her face the sun felt like a warm hand, one entirely without pressure or possessiveness. Nothing contained her; she felt almost giddy. “It’s glorious,” she said.

  “We’d better wait for Bach,” said Heredes. The tone of his voice mirrored the expression of animation, almost relief, she had seen in Kyosti’s eyes. “He hasn’t gotten used to the elements yet.” Lily turned.

  Bach was rolling in a most peculiar fashion, as if the wind kept upsetting his equilibrium. Lily walked back to him and set a hand on the curve of his underside. Even in the sun his metal-smooth surface was cool. The pressure of her hand seemed to steady him; by the time they reached the men, the robot had regained his stability. He sang a merry accompaniment as they walked across the clearing.

  Both buildings were untenanted. Heredes rummaged around, taking several blankets and filling his pack with food and a canteen that he found in a dusty kitchen.

  “Isn’t that stealing?” Lily asked.

  “Yes.” He handed her the canteen. “Think of it as being for the cause.”

  “Which cause?”

  He considered her for a moment, but under his grave expression lay an obduracy that reminded her how little she really knew of him. “Our survival,” he said. “Where is Hawk?”

  “Outside, lying down.”

  “Getting a new tan already, I see,” muttered Heredes under his breath. “Let’s go.” They went outside. Lily had to blink in the sun. Kyosti stood up, brushing grass from his clothing. Heredes tossed him the rolled-up blankets. “That’s your share,” he said. “We’re lucky this post is abandoned. Now we hike.”

  Lily surveyed the deserted clearing. “I thought this planet was overcrowded.”

  “It is. But most of the population is in the north coast cities. All the agricultural zones are off-limits except for workers.”

  “Then won’t we be arrested?”

  “Lily. On any planet with as many regulations and restrictions as this one has, there is always a flourishing black market in goods and labor and unauthorized movement.”

  “Ah, Gwyn,” said Kyosti as he tied the roll of blankets to his small pack with the long gold tippets left over from the dismantling of his robe. “Always so well informed.”

  “And you can stop calling me Gwyn. It isn’t really my name.”

  “Mother bless us. What is your name?”

  “Call me Joshua. That’s as true a name as Kyosti or Hawk, I expect.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Kyosti, looking sly. “If Kyosti Bitterleaf Hakoni isn’t my name, then I’ve forgotten the real one.”

  “Like Alexander Jehane,” said Lily. “That can’t be his real name. But I bet he’ll never tell the one he was born with.”

  Kyosti began to laugh. “Alexander Jehane? Is that what he told you? What—was his mother fell upon by a thunderbolt?”

  “Hawk.” Heredes looked, for a moment, much like a disgusted parent. “Let’s concentrate on business. Can you dye that hair?”

  “But it’s all the fashion.” Kyosti touched his hair with a hand that seemed oddly pale, until Lily realized that he had stripped his nails of their garish pink color.

  “Not on Arcadia, I think,” said Heredes.

  Kyosti sighed.

  “I like it,” said Lily, blushing, “but it is conspicuous.”

  “Very well.” He managed a martyred expression. “We’ll see if you still love me as a bleached blond.”

  “I don’t even know what a bleached blond is,” said Lily to Heredes.

  It was cool under the trees. As they walked, Lily discerned a hundred noises blended into the expanse of air: the wind in its soft conversation with the trees; the snap of a branch breaking; the stuttering chitter of an unseen creature. The ground gave slightly beneath her feet, muffling the weight of their footsteps. Later a gurgling whisper approached them, growing louder as they walked. Neither of the men seemed alarmed. They came up to it at last: water, in a shallow, rock-strewn channel, rushing along as if it were the wind given substance. Kyosti stooped to drink from it, exclaiming as his fingers touched it. Lily knelt. It was bitterly cold. The water tugged against her skin. She could not bring herself to drink from it. They followed it down the slopes.

  At dusk they came to the edge of the forest. Beyond them stretched low hills ribboned with fields and terraces. Above, the first stars winked into view. She stared up at them until Heredes called to her. They ate, and afterward he led her to the stream to wash.

  “Wash in water?”

  “Yes, Lily. It’s how most people wash.”

  “Not in sonics?” She put a dubious hand in the cold rushing flow.

  “Most planets don’t have enough energy for that particular luxury.”

  “We certainly never had enough water on Unruli to waste it like this,” she replied, but she washed her hands and face. They went back together, and Lily got a blanket and lay down. Heredes went to sleep immediately. Lily gazed up at the interlace of shadowed foliage and stars in the black sky far above. If the earth were to let go of her, free her from its bonds of gravity, would she slowly rise, like Bach, into the infinity of that heaven? She fell asleep.

  Woke. It was dark. The air smelled strange, overpowering. There was rustling behind her. She sat up. Past the line of trees, on the border of the low hills, a steady light rose. Security had found them. She was half up to her feet when Kyosti whispered her name, coming up behind her. He drew her back to trap her against him.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “There’s a light—” She gestured.

  He laughed under his breath. “It’s the moon,” he said. “Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “‘Third seals,’” he answered, cryptic, and put a finger to her lips to still her question.

  He led her to the edge of the trees. Wind sighed in the branches above them. There were two moons: one, tiny but definitely rounded, was already halfway up the sky; the other was just coming over the horizon. As they watched, it cleared the hills and began to rise in its muted splendor.

  “It’s the crescent.” She turned to look up at Kyosti. In the moonlight, his hair shone as if gilded by silver. “That’s the shape that he painted on his face, under his eye. In the picture that you—that that other man—showed to me, of Heredes.”

  “So it is,” said Kyosti, not looking up at the moon at all.

  “What does it mean?”

  His eyes, too, had a silvery glint under starlight. He smiled. “It’s one of her signs. La Belle’s.”

  She gazed at the delicate curve of light hanging in the air, stars attendant like awed spectators. “It’s beautiful.”

  “As are you, Lily.” He moved into her line of vision so that she had to gaze up at him instead of the moon. “‘Now she shines among Lydian women as, into dark when the sun has set, the moon, pale-handed, at last appeareth, making dim all the rest of the stars, and light spreads afa
r on the deep, salt sea, spreading likewise across the flowering cornfields; and the dew rinses glittering from the sky; roses spread, and the delicate antherisk, and the lotus spreads her petals.’”

  The night held them as if in her own hands; she was like a third presence, yet without personality of her own, an empty vessel to be filled with whatever emotion was projected most strongly upon her, investing her with a particular magic of some sorcerer’s choosing. Lily gazed up at Kyosti’s face, lit half in light, half in shadow. That he had power, perhaps only the power of experience, over her she felt; that he was far older than he looked she knew: his words themselves had the texture of an ancient time, beguiling her across an immense gulf of history.

  “Who are the Lydian women?” she asked. Her voice faded into the air around them.

  “Long since dead,” he said, his voice delicate as the brush of wind. “It’s rather a sad poem. But the words paint their own image of beauty.”

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Ah, well.” He eased her down with him onto the blanket he had had the foresight to spread out on the ground. “I’ve always looked my best under the kinnas wheel.”

  “What’s the kinnas wheel?” They were tangled, weight half on each other, long lines of warmth pressed together. His breath stirred on her cheek. His lips touched hers.

  “The wheel of the night.” His voice was so low it seemed not to come from him at all. “They call it the honor that patterns you. But also,” he kissed her throat, and she sighed and slipped her hand up to cradle the back of his neck, “the promise of love.”

  For the next two days they hiked across fields empty of human life, except the occasional shuttle high overhead and, once, bulky, slow-moving machines that appeared briefly, a choreographed line, on a distant ridge. Half-ripe crops waved in soft breezes, so alive, under the wind’s hand, that she wondered at first that these were not animals. But some of them Kyosti and Heredes could name for her, kilometers of wheat, vast rustling patches of corn, convincing her of their vegetability. And animals were everywhere: creatures of the air, creatures burrowed down into the dirt or scurrying away through the green. Part of the time she was fascinated by this riot of free, uncontained life; other times, the unsterility of it all revolted her. Kyosti rigged a hood for her, to protect her face from the sun. His bronzed skin deepened in color; in Heredes’s dusky complexion she could see no change at all.

  On the third day they came to an irrigation pond. Reeds choked the shore except for one bank that smoothed from wild grass to pebbles lapped by water. Fields paled into the horizon around them. Under the sun their backs had broken into a sweat unrelieved by three day’s march. Kyosti and Heredes looked at the water, looked at each other and, with whoops and cheers so foreign to their characters that Lily stopped in her tracks to stare, they rushed down to the bank. By the time she realized that this blue hollow whose length and breadth each would hold fifty of her, end to end, was all and entirely water, the two men had stripped and plunged in. The sound of their bodies striking was like a slap, startling her out of her amazement. Water drops sprayed off from them as they laughed. Heredes, as if he were walking on the hidden bottom, struck out for the far shore, gliding like a gear through oil, arms working about his head as if he were constantly pitching some object in front of him.

  “Lily.” Kyosti stood several meters from the bank. Water slipped off his chest and shoulders to dissolve back into itself around him; it covered him just up to his hipbones, leaving the hard line of his abdomen bare. He smiled and beckoned her closer. She walked down to the bank. “Are you coming in?” he asked. “The water’s fine.”

  “You must be joking,” said Lily. Heredes had vanished around a curve in the pond. Behind her, Bach sank down to rest half-hidden in the grass.

  “At least take off your boots,” Kyosti said persuasively. “Feel how good it is on your toes.”

  She did. Her feet were hot. The water felt deliriously cool.

  “You must be terribly hot,” he said.

  She was. Fine sweat eased itself down the back of her neck, sloping on down her back. Her tunic and trousers were too heavy for this climate, but Heredes had insisted she keep them on to prevent sunburn—whatever that was. “I refuse,” she said with dignity, “to get in that water. It must be filthy.”

  Kyosti laughed, but he inched closer to her. “My darling,” he said. “I can run faster than you.”

  “I suppose,” Lily conceded, admiring him as he waded another meter toward her. The water level fell noticeably; she forced herself to look away. He ran out of the water and grabbed her. Water speckled her clothing.

  “Now, Lily.” His eye was merciless. “Either you take those clothes off, or I’ll throw you in with them still on.”

  She took them off, but before she had a chance to move he picked her up, charged into the water, and dropped her.

  It was terrifying. The water closed around her, gave around her, like thick air, like nothing she had ever felt before. It splashed into her face, into her mouth and nose, but a strong arm pulled her up to stand. She gasped. Water lapped at her hips, yielding fingers. Before she got used to it, Kyosti propelled her further in. She gasped again at its touch on her belly, her breasts—he stopped and moved her around to face him.

  “Well?” he asked.

  She was speechless.

  “If it’s awful,” he said, “you can get out.”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t awful,” she said, “it’s … it’s …” Words failed her.

  He laughed. With a sudden twist and plunge he disappeared beneath the surface. The water rippled, and he erupted from it several body lengths away from her. “Come over to me.”

  She wanted to shake her head. Part of her was paralyzed with fright at this liquid that moved as if it were alive around her, some being whose intelligence she could not fathom—yet another part felt intensely the seduction of such smooth fluidity caressing her skin. In the end, her training got the better of her. “It is our limitations that train us,” Heredes would say—she began to walk. The water tugged at her. Each step pulled against her chest as if G forces were being expended to halt-her progress. But she kept going, a little grim-faced, until Kyosti’s arms caught her in a slippery embrace.

  “That’s my warrior,” he said with admiration. He honored her with an intensive kiss made more fervent by the brush of water against their bodies and the quiet rustle of wind through the reeds,

  “Hawk!” The shout from Heredes broke them apart. “Damn you to hell, Hawk!”

  Lily sank lower until the water covered her to her shoulders, lapping at her neck.

  “I’ve already been there,” Kyosti replied cheerfully. “Anywhere else you’d like me to go?”

  Heredes did not reply. Instead he swam past them, looking as if all his pleasure in this outing had been destroyed. Kyosti smiled.

  “He doesn’t want us to be lovers,” Lily said. “Why not, Kyosti?”

  He bent to kiss her. “Typical father. He’s shocked by your sexuality, my love.” She pushed away from him, but he only laughed. “We’d better get you out of the sun. You’ve gone quite pink.”

  That evening, they came on a work crew.

  “Wait here.” Heredes motioned them to lie just below a bluff that looked over the field on which the workers, perhaps one hundred spread far across its green-leafed and yellow-flowered expanse, were engaged in an arcane activity Lily could not decipher. He left.

  “What’s he going to do?” Lily whispered. Kyosti shrugged. “What are these people doing?”

  “Picking strawberries?”

  “What is a strawberry?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It could be aris.” Lily rubbed her lower lip ruminatively.

  “What is aris?”

  “Got you at last. I don’t think it could be, anyway. Not from what Jenny told me.”

  “Don’t you know what it looks like?”

  It was her turn t
o shrug. “I only see it processed.”

  Kyosti stiffened suddenly. “Your hood,” he said. As she handed it to him, she heard voices. He tied the hood on, covering his hair, just as Heredes appeared with a dusky-skinned woman.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Heredes said. “I’ve found a Jehanist nest. This is Carmelita. They’re going to help us get to the city.”

  She was middle-aged, with a weathered face and calloused, dirty hands. The look she turned on Lily was rapt. “You’ve met him?” she breathed. Lily nodded, but did not feel it politic to mention that she had also shot him. “It is an honor to help you, in your mission for Jehane.”

  “Ah, yes,” muttered Kyosti under his breath. “Our mission.”

  Heredes had done his job well. For the next two days they worked out in the fields, getting a crash course from the workers on weeding supirina bushes, a delicate and time-consuming task whose fruits, in both senses of the word, would be received only by those well-to-do enough to afford the wine the supirina blossoms produced. At some point Kyosti managed to turn his hair color from blue to a faintly blue-tinged blond. He refused, despite Heredes’s entreaties, to cut it.

  On the third day the shift changed, and it was as easy as that. At Carmelita’s suggestion, Lily had concealed Bach in a lean-to where old equipment rusted. With Heredes, she programmed the robot to wait for his return, when a method could be devised to get Bach into the city without attracting Security’s attention. Then, surrounded by their quiet allies, they boarded the workers’ rail and were raced across a blur of countryside into the city. Lily caught a glimpse of it—brown haze and a wall of buildings—before the rail went underground. It roared along, echoes dark around them. Kyosti seemed nervous. She put her arm around him, and he calmed. Heredes consulted with Carmelita over directions.

  The workers dispersed at a large station. With a final exchange of words and a com-screen for Heredes, they left their benefactress and rode a series of trains into a labyrinth from which Lily doubted she could ever find her way out. Heredes eventually led them off a train and up, past turn gates, past incessantly chattering screens with news and weather and inexplicable dramas, past individuals lounging in all their dirt along the unscrubbed concrete tunnels, past uniformed Security, up escalators, into the sun again.