A Passage of Stars

  “You make my life difficult, Joshua,” said Wingtuck with an exasperated sigh. “I’ll see her through her paces first.”

  “Where would you like me to warm up?” said Lily.

  “Gym Three.” Wingtuck turned and removed two garments from a cabinet. “Here’s a gi.”

  “Thank you,” said Lily. “Are you coming with me, Kyosti?” He followed her without a word out of the room.

  “Well,” said Wingtuck expansively. “She does you credit.”

  Heredes smiled. “You haven’t seen her do her forms yet. She’s much better than I deserve. But thank you.”

  “Taliesin.” She sat on the edge of her desk, one leg dangling, and regarded him seriously. “How many of us are left?”

  “I don’t know. Fewer than you imagine, I fear.” He sighed, pacing a slow circuit around the small office. “La Belle had some information. They say Sibaia, Haggerty, Annet, and Hovas are still at large.”

  “Robin?”

  He shook his head. “Dead. And Collobrieres as well.”

  “May the Lord bless and keep them,” she murmured, crossing herself. “Senegambia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Katajarenta?”

  This surprised a laugh from him. “Mother’s Breasts, Wing, they’ll never catch her.”

  “Foucart?”

  Heredes halted, turning to face her. “Now there’s an interesting case. According to Bella, both he and Korrigan have turned bounty hunter, and are existing on the edge of the law, but legally.”

  “Huh,” said Wingtuck. “I’d hate to have one of them contracted out on me. Insharish? Keng? Buru? Hyacinth?”

  He shook his head. “Dead, captured, or broken. It’s been a sad toll. And I only know what I heard from Bella.”

  “The bastards. Hawk was right about their gratitude. Good Lord, how did he get out of prison?”

  “He recanted. Evidently they believed him.”

  “Hawk could charm his way out of a snake pit. Jesus—” She gave her hard, unhumorous laugh again. “He did, more than once, Taliesin.” She rose and went to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. They stood close and easy together. Physically, they appeared to have little in common except perhaps a similarity in their shade of skin. But their eyes, in expression, the set of their faces, their posture, the musculature of their lean bodies, revealed some bond, some long, difficult road of shared experience that bound them as tightly as any blood tie. “Why isn’t Hawk going into Central with you? What did they do to him in that prison?”

  “I wish I knew, Lotus,” he said, soft as the room ventilators. “All I know is that according to Bella’s sources, he was in prison for twenty years, give or take a month.”

  “And?” He waited for her to consider. “But Hawk said sixteen years. Hawk is never wrong.” She removed her hand from his shoulder, troubled.

  “Yes,” said Heredes. “What were those axioms we had? Loud as Agina. Drunk as Korey. Ugly as Periwinkle.”

  “Irritable as Wing.” They both laughed, but Wingtuck sobered first. “Sharp as Hawk’s mind. If they had him in solitary, he might have lost track.”

  “Our Hawk? Who feels the rhythms of the universe in his body? The pulse of the stars in his blood? ‘Body is soul, spirit is flesh, and all thus combined touches the universe, no separation.’ We could put him down on any planet, in any system, and he could tell us the hour and the day and the season. No. When he says he was imprisoned—most of it in solitary, he admits that—for sixteen years, seven months, and three days, he means sixteen years, seven months, and three days. Lotus, he has lost three and one half years of his life. They no longer exist in his mind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He told me that he suspects that all the clocks and calendars were set forward, on his release, in order to confuse him into revealing information.”

  “Very amusing.”

  “He was completely serious.” He moved to seat himself on the edge of the desk, watching her now as she paced, “So you see why he’s not going in with me.”

  “My God,” she said.

  “Oh.” He raised an admonitory finger. “And I almost forgot. Lily thinks he doesn’t perceive windows.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I was on the Gesie run with him. He hated windows—instants he couldn’t measure as time. He used to get ill from it.”

  “Not any more. Lily says he moved three meters inside a window.”

  “Sweet Jesus, Taliesin.” She turned her back to him, staring up at the Academy poster, a woman forever frozen with the ridge of her high side kick touching the recoiling chin of a man falling in graceful lines to a white floor. “What has he become?”

  He smiled, a rather forlorn thing, watching the straight, proud lines of her back. “Something more like his mother, I think, and little enough we know about her kind.”

  “Enough to know that her kind never lie.”

  “I expect that particular habit we can credit to his human half.”

  “Taliesin.” The flat calmness of her tone caught him midway to standing, an immobilized gesture. “Can we really trust him? My God, when I think of the things—what if he really did murder Hannibal? His best friend! We never had any proof.”

  “Only Maisry’s insistence that he was innocent, and we all knew what her word was worth. I can still remember the smile she had on her face when she said it. But Lotus, by the Mother’s Heart, we can’t abandon him. I can’t abandon him.” He rose completely. “And anyway, he won’t betray us.”

  “Let me rephrase that, in the time-honored fashion. Do you trust him with your own daughter?”

  “Too late, I fear.” His voice had the barest trace of self-mockery. “He’s already slept with her.”

  She whirled. “Jesus and Mary, don’t joke—dear God.” This last in a whisper. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  He met her eyes. “I am ashamed, Lotus. I never expected it. Not until it was too late.”

  He moved to stand behind a chair, running one hand along its smooth back. Wingtuck waited. “You have no idea how quickly he acted. How could I have expected that? You know how he was—he took three years, courting Maisry, before she finally persuaded him to her bed.”

  “And took fifty-two seconds,” added Wingtuck with caustic precision, “holding her dead body in his arms at Betaos, to go berserk. You were there.”

  “Yes, and so were you, and Paula, and Collobrieres, and an entire chameleon battalion.”

  “‘But that was in another country,’” said Wingtuck. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “By the time I realized—how in the Mother’s Name could I have stopped him? What can you threaten him with?”

  “You could have killed him—no, I don’t suppose you could have. You could have warned her.”

  Silence. His hand stilled. “Yes. I could have warned her, with the half-truths we know and the rumors we can only guess might be true. But I could have. If, Lotus, if I had expected him to be interested.”

  “He’d been in prison for twenty years, for God’s sake. Don’t think the rest of us have your low sex drive, Joshua.”

  Heredes laughed unexpectedly. “But Wing, he’d been out of prison three or four years already—if that was his only impulse, he would have acted on it long before he met Lily and we wouldn’t be discussing this entire subject.”

  She paused, taking in her next breath for another volley of words, and sighed instead. “And his sexuality is only half-human anyway. Oh, you’re right, you couldn’t have expected it. But why did he want her? Appearance couldn’t be enough to sway him, not when he knows what the consequences are—if not to her, then to him. You said it yourself: body is soul, spirit is flesh, there is no separation.” Silence sifted into the office until Heredes, moving, shattered it.

  “Why does Hawk want anything? I don’t know. I only hope the choice wasn’t entirely mercenary on his part.”

  “To get your protection? Maybe that was his motive, to begin with. It
will have gone far past that by now. And Lily, she’s so young. How could she have resisted him, when he turned the full force of that half-alien charm on her?”

  “How, indeed. I didn’t know you were attracted to him, Lotus.”

  She laughed in her unamused fashion. “My dear friend, I wouldn’t touch him with the proverbial ten-foot pole. What are you going to tell her?”

  “About Hawk? I don’t know the truth about Hawk. He has to take that responsibility.”

  She came to stand beside him, laid a hand on his unlined face. “Do you ever feel old, Taliesin?”

  He smiled. “But I know the secret of immortality, my Lotus Blossom.”

  “And your Lily is a beautiful child.” She smiled. It transformed her face as a bud, opening into flower, is transformed. “No wonder that Hawk could not resist her, being, as she is, Taliesin’s daughter.”

  “Flatterer,” said Heredes.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s go see her, this prodigy of yours.”

  In Gym Three, the prodigy limbered up while Kyosti paced. Mercifully there were no mirrors to reflect the unfortunate mixture of anguish and hostility on his face.

  “You can’t do it!” he exclaimed.

  Stretching on the floor, she sank into horizontal splits, bent at the hips to touch her chest and face to the polished wood planks. “Why not?”

  He stopped, spun to face her. She pushed herself up to look at him. “Because I love you!” He crouched beside her, reaching for her as if to pull her to him.

  With an impatient gesture she waved him away. “What other alternatives do you suggest, then?” He said nothing, turned half-away. She was struck yet again by the high sweep of his bone structure, the suggestion of delicacy that she could not reconcile with his strength. “Kyosti,” she began, attempting now a reasonable tone, “a one-year bond is such a temporary thing. It won’t mean anything anyway, it’s just to get me a visa extension.”

  He gazed with melancholy fascination at the opposite wall. “I’ll probably kill him,” he said as if he were talking to himself.

  “Kyosti!” She leaned on her elbows, frowning at him. The lack of self-pity in his despondency disturbed her. “I probably won’t even sleep with the man.”

  Like a drowning man who has seen a life raft, his face brightened. “Promise me, Lily. Promise me you won’t.”

  “Hoy.” She rolled up to her feet. Against her bare soles the floor felt eager for her to work along it. “I’m probably whistling down the wind the handsomest man I’ll ever meet,” she said to the ceiling, thought of Jehane, and reconsidered. “The second handsomest.” She threw a set of back thrust kicks, added a hook, a crescent, and came to rest beside Kyosti. He rose. “All right. I promise.” She put out a hand for him to shake. With a trace of confusion, he did so. “Now will you stop acting stupid?”

  “You don’t love me,” he said, but it was not an accusation, merely a bald statement.

  “Oh, Kyosti.” She flung away from him, executed a quick series of strikes, the last of which, a spinning back knuckle, came to rest just at the tip of his nose. “I haven’t even known you a month.”

  “Is it one of the other two that you love?”

  She dropped her hand. “I beg your pardon?”

  “One of the other two men you slept with before you met me.”

  She had to look around the empty room, so clearly did she feel he must be talking to someone else. “I never told you,” she said slowly, “that I’d slept with two other men.”

  He smiled, more like himself now, that languid confidence. “You didn’t need to.”

  “Heredes couldn’t have told you. He didn’t even know one of them.” She stared at him. “What—you can read my mind?”

  He shrugged, at a loss. “But it’s there—it’s—”

  “Yes?” she said sweetly.

  “I can’t explain it, Lily,” he said in some distress. “It’s like a—I don’t know—” He shook his head, his wild mop of hair like a symbol of his confusion, “I can just tell,” he finished with complete finality.

  “Well,” said Lily comprehensively. “That’s rolled up my flanks, as Heredes is used to say. Any other revelations?”

  “Actually.” He lowered his eyes to examine the grains in the wood beneath, raised them finally, unwinking blue with a hidden depth of green, to gaze at her. “There are.”

  The door opened, and Wingtuck and Heredes came in. A look suspiciously like relief fled across Kyosti’s face. With a brief, apologetic smile, he retreated.

  “All right, Lily,” said Wingtuck. “Let’s see what you can do. Kata first.”

  Lily bowed. But after the second kata, Wingtuck waved at her to stop. Heredes was failing in his attempt not to smile. Kyosti watched Lily with possessive interest.

  “Oh, all right, Joshua!” said Wingtuck in her most irritable tone. “For God’s sake, you needn’t smirk at me.”

  “But—” Lily faltered. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “My dear girl,” Wingtuck interrupted impatiently. “If you don’t know how good you are, you’ll soon find out. Joshua, you offend me.” She observed that Heredes was coughing into his hand. “You may cease laughing.”

  “You’re taking me?” Lily asked, a little shaken.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you!” Lily came forward impetuously, halted, managed a reserved bow to sensei Jones, which that woman returned with awesome formality.

  “This appointment is contingent upon your obtaining a visa and a bond with an as yet unspecified male citizen of Arcadia. You will be issued three gis, and forwarded enough credit for a week’s food and lodging—there is a good hostel on Bettina Street where you may be able to reserve a double.” A disapproving glance for Kyosti here. “You will begin as an assistant. Progress thereafter depends on your enthusiasm and your ability. This Academy has a reputation to uphold. You will report at oh eight hundred hours tomorrow. Is that clear?”

  Lily bowed.

  “What name will you be using?”

  “Ah—Lily?” she ventured.

  “First names are unacceptable,” snapped Wingtuck.

  Lily considered, serious at first, but her eyes met Heredes’s and her lips quirked up slightly. She bowed. “Heredes, if you please, sensei Jones.”

  Wingtuck laughed. “You’re as incorrigible as Joshua. So be it, sensei Heredes.” She saluted her with a slap on the back. “Go on. I’ll see you tomorrow. Though I won’t, I hope, see either of you gentlemen here again.”

  Kyosti offered her an elaborate bow; Heredes smiled.

  They found with comparative ease the hostel on Bettina Street and installed Lily and Kyosti there in a “double,” which consisted of a bed not much more than a meter wide, a metal clothes cabinet, a terminal with folding chair, and a tiny water-based washing cubicle.

  “Hoy,” said Lily, but Kyosti was so cheerfully stowing their possessions in the cabinet that she felt she could not complain about their surroundings. “What are you going to do?” she asked Heredes.

  He sat on the bed watching Kyosti. If he had any misgivings about this arrangement, he showed no sign of it. “First I’ve got to get you ID.”

  Kyosti coughed, turning from his work, and surveyed Heredes with cold civility. “I think I can manage for myself and Lily,” he said.

  Heredes considered him a long moment, that slender frame leaning against the cabinet, and he saw with sudden clarity the three features that really marked Kyosti as half-alien, for him at least: the delicacy of his face; that distant green tangent hidden in his blue eyes; but most of all, and most subtle until you knew what to look for, the slight elongation of his body which covered thirteen pair of ribs. “Very well, Hawk,” he said. “You can of course do it for yourself, but we’re not arguing over Lily.”

  Kyosti frowned, but he said nothing.

  “Then,” continued Heredes, “I shall fetch Bach. After that I believe I will hunt down Mr. Pero.”

  “Why Pero?” asked Lily. “I
t seems to me that he’d be hard to find, and terribly suspicious. And I’m not sure I want to ally myself with Jehane in any fashion. He’s”—she shook her head—“not my type. I like to think for myself.”

  “Don’t think of it as allying with Jehane,” answered Heredes. “Think of it as expedience. Pero will serve very well precisely because I believe I possess the means to convince him to agree.”

  The days fell into a pattern. She rose and went to the academy, worked out, observed, began to be allowed to instruct. Returned to the hostel to eat in the common room with Kyosti. Then they would retire to the privacy of their room. Lily began to feel, inexplicably, that his need to touch her was more physiological than emotional, as if she were the one drug he could become addicted to. Still, she felt disinclined to complain.

  On the fifth day she returned home to find Bach, but no Kyosti. She and Bach, nevertheless, enjoyed a musical evening together. When Kyosti appeared, very late, he showed her their new com-screens—here credited to Lily Ash Heredes, his to Kyosti Maisrei Accipiter. He had also, he informed her the next morning, applied to take the technologist’s certification exam. The next night he insisted she put Bach in the washing cubicle while they made love.

  They slept late, woke, only to lay together in lazy, sensuous amiability. Bach serenaded them with a muffled aria from behind the cubicle door:

  Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben,

  Den Schönsten, den Liebsten bald bei dir zu sehn!

  Deine Wangen

  Müssen heut viel schöner prangen,

  Eile, den Bräutigam sehnlichst zu lieben!

  Prepare thyself, Zion, with tender desire

  the Fairest and Dearest to behold with thee soon!

  Thy cheeks

  today must shine the lovelier,

  hasten most ardently the Bridegroom to love!

  Kyosti delighted in kissing her; “I’m marking you out as mine,” he would say, as if it were a private joke only he and she could share. When the intercom buzzed, Bach answered it in Paisley’s voice. If this disconcerted Heredes at all it could not be discerned by his voice.