Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (28 page)

“A bit of interest there?” Ghost ventured.

“You’re blind, remember?”

“Only visually. I’m getting excellent audio from your terminal. Let me play it back—you’ll hear how your voice perked up—”

“Elio’s always been friendly enough to me, that’s all. I’m not interested; he’s
definitely
not, or he hides it awfully well. Besides, El is…”
Ugly
, I almost said, and realized how that would sound, coming from me.
His eyes are nice, and his hands. But his face—the eyes are set too close together, his nose is too long and the mouth too large. His skin is a patchwork of blotches. And the one time we tried…
“At least he doesn’t look at me like…like…” I hated the way I sounded, hated the fact that I knew Ghost was recording it all. I hugged myself, biting my lower lip. “Look, I really don’t want to talk about this.”

Ghost flickered. Her face morphed into lines familiar from holos of the Matriarchs: Gabriela. “Making sense of an attraction is like analyzing chocolate. Just enjoy it, and to hell with the calories.” The voice was Gabriela’s, too: smoky, husky, almost as low as mine.

“You’re quoting.”

“And you’re evading.” A line of fire-edged darkness sputtered down Ghost’s figure from head to foot as the image began to break up. “Doesn’t matter—I’m also drifting out of range. See you in three days this time. I should have a longer window then. Make sure you document everything about the Miccail body.”

“I will. You get me those age estimates from Máire’s uploads when you can.”

“Promise.” Static chattered in Ghost’s voice; miniature lightning storms crackled across her body. She disappeared, then returned, translucent. I could see the murdered Nomad’s body through her. “Go help Elio find Euzhan.”

“I will. Take care up there, Ghost.”

A flash of light rolled through Ghost’s image. She went two-dimensional and vanished utterly.

.

.

CONTEXT: Bui Allen-Shimmura

.

“Bui, Geeda Dominic wants you. Now.” Bui felt his skin prickle in response, like spiders scurrying up his spine. He straightened up, closing the vegetable bin door. Euzhan wasn’t there, wasn’t in any of her usual hiding places. Bui looked at Micah’s lopsided face, and could see that there was no good news there. He asked anyway. “Did anyone find her?”

Micah shook his head, his lips tight. “Not yet,” he answered, his voice blurred with his cleft palate. “Geeda’s sent Elio out to alert the other Families and get them to help search.”

“
Khudda
.” Bui didn’t care that
da
Micah heard him cursing. The way Bui figured it, he couldn’t get into any more trouble than he was already in. If he found Euzhan now, he might just kill the girl for slipping away while he was responsible for watching her. It wasn’t fair. He’d be ten in half a year. At his age, he should have been out working the fields with the rest, not babysitting.

“How’s Geeda?” he asked Micah.

“In as foul a mood as I’ve ever seen. You’d better get up there fast, boy.”

Bui’s shoulders sagged. He almost started to cry, sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Go on,” Micah told him. “Get it over with.”

He went.

Geeda Dominic was in the common room of the Allen-Shimmura compound, staring out from the window laser-chiseled from the stone of the Rock. A dusty sunbeam threw Dominic’s shadow on the opposite wall. Bui noticed immediately that no one else from the Family was in the room. That didn’t bode well, since the others sometimes managed to keep Dominic’s infamous temper in check. “Geeda?” Bui said tremulously. “Micah said you—”

Dominic was the eldest of the Allen-Shimmura family, a venerable eighty, but he turned now with a youth born of anger. His cane, carved by the patriarch Shigetomo himself, with a knobbed head of oak all the way from Earth, slashed air and slammed into Bui’s upper arm. Surprise and pain made Bui cry out, and the blow was hard enough to send him sprawling on the rug.

“
Hakuchi
!” Dominic shouted at him, the cane waving in Bui’s face like a club. “You fool!”

Bui clutched his arm, crying openly now. “Geeda, it wasn’t my fault. Hizo, he’d fallen and skinned his knees, and when I finished with him, Euzhan—”

“Shut up!” The cane
whoomped
as it slashed in front of his face. “You listen to me, boy. If Euzhan is hurt or…or…” Bui knew the word that Dominic wouldn’t say.
Dead
. Fear reverberated in Bui’s head, throbbing in aching syncopation with the pain in his arm. “You better hope they find her safe, boy, or I’ll have you goddamn shunned. I swear I will. No one will talk to you again. You’ll be cast out of the Family. You’ll find your own food or you’ll starve.”

“No, Geeda, please…” Bui shivered.

“Get out of here,” Dominic roared. His hand tightened around the shaft of his cane, trembling. “Get out of here and find her. Don’t bother coming back until you do. You understand me, boy?”

“Yes, Geeda Dominic. I’m…I’m sorry…I’m awful sorry…” Bui, still sobbing, half crawled, half ran from the room.

Dominic’s cane clattered against the archway behind Bui as he went through.

.

.

.
VOICE: Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

.

“Euzhan!
Damn, it, child.…” I exhaled in frustration, my voice hoarse from calling. Elio sagged tiredly near me. He rubbed the glossy stock of his rifle with fingers that seemed almost angry. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “It’s near SixthHour. She’ll come out from wherever she’s hiding as soon as she notices. She always wants the light on in the creche, and she’ll be getting hungry by now. She’ll be out. I know it.”

Elio wasn’t convincing even himself. There was a quick desperation in his voice. I understood it all too well. All of us did. Our short history’s full of testimonials to this world’s whims—as our resident historian, Elio probably understood that better than I did.

Mictlan had not been a kind world for the survivors of
Ibn Battuta
. Two colonies—one on each of Mictlan’s two continents—had been left behind after the accident that had destroyed most of the mothership. The colonies quickly lost touch with each other when a massive, powerful hurricane raked the southern colony’s continent in the first year of exile, and they never resumed radio contact with us or with Ghost on the
Ibn Battuta
.

Another storm had nearly obliterated our northern colony in Year 23, killing six of the original nine crewmembers here. I suppose that was our historical watershed, since that disaster inalterably changed the societal structure, giving rise to what became the Families. Local diseases mutated to attack our strange new host bodies, stalking the children especially—the Bloody Cough alone killed two children in five by the time they reached puberty. I know: I see the bodies and do the autopsies. There are the toothworms or the tree-leapers or the grumblers; there are the bogs and the storms and the bitter winters; there are accidents and infections and far, far too many congenital defects. Most of them are bad enough that nature itself takes care of them: miscarriages, stillbirths, nonviable babies who are born and die within a few days or a few months—which is why none of the Families will name a child before his or her first birthday. I also know the others—the ones who lived but who are marked with the stamp of Mictlan.

I knew
them
very well.

The rate of viable live births—for whatever reason: a side effect of the LongSleep, or some unknown factor in the Mictlan environment—was significantly lower among the ship members and their descendants than for the general population of Earth. Just over a century after being stranded on Mictlan, our human population nearly matched the year; there’d been no growth for the last quarter of a century. Too many years, deaths outnumbered births.

Mictlan was not a sweet, loving Motherworld. She was unsympathetic and unremittingly harsh.

I knew that Elio’s imagination was calculating the same dismal odds mine was. This was no longer just a child hiding away from her
mi
or
da
, not this late, not this long.

Euzhan was four. I’d seen the girl in the clinic just a few days ago—an eager child, still awkward and lisping, and utterly charming. Ochiba, Euzhan’s mother, had once been my best—hell, one of my only—friends. What we’d had.…

Anyway, Euzhan had been a difficult birth, a breech baby. All of Ochiba’s births were difficult; her pelvis was narrow, barely wide enough to accommodate a baby’s head. On Earth, she would have been an automatic cesarean, but not here, not when any major operation is an open invitation for some postoperative infection. I could have gone in. Ochiba told me she’d go with whatever I decided. Ochiba had delivered three children before—with long, difficult labors, each time. I made the decision to let her go, and she—finally—delivered twelve hours later.

But Ochiba’s exhaustion after the long labor gave an opportunistic respiratory virus its chance—Ochiba died three days after Euzhan’s birth on 97 LastDay. Neither Hui Koda-Schmidt, the colony’s other “doctor,” nor I had been able to break the raging fever or stop the creeping muscular paralysis that followed. Our medical database is quite extensive, but is entirely Earth-based. On Mictlan-specific diseases, there’s only the information that we colonists have entered, and I was all too familiar with that. Ghost had been out of touch, the
Ibn Battuta
’s unsynchronized orbit trapping the AI on the far side of Mictlan. I don’t have the words to convey the utter helpless impotence I’d felt, watching Ochiba slowly succumb, knowing that I was losing someone I loved.

Knowing that maybe, just maybe, my decision had been the reason she died.

I’d been holding Ochiba’s hand at the end. I cried along with her Family, and Dominic—grudgingly—had even asked me to speak for Ochiba at her Burning.

A damn small consolation.

Euzhan, Ochiba’s third named child, was especially precious to Dominic, the head of Family Allen-Shimmura. Euz was normal and healthy. As we all knew too well, any child was precious, but one such as Euzhan was priceless. The growing fear that something tragic had happened to Euzhan was a black weight on my soul.

“Who was watching Euz?”

“Bui,” Elio answered. “Poor kid. Dominic’ll have him skinned alive if Euz is hurt.”

Nearly all of the Allen-Shimmura family were out searching for Euzhan now, along with many from the other Families. The buildings were being scoured one more time; a large party had gone into the cultivated fields to the southeast of the compound and were prowling the rows of white-bean stalks and scarlet faux-wheat. Elio and I had gone out along the edge of Tlilipan. I’d been half-afraid we’d see Euzhan’s tiny footprints pressed in the mud flats along the pond’s shore, but there’d been nothing but the cloverleaf tracks of skimmers. That didn’t mean that Euzhan hadn’t fallen into one of the patches of wet marsh between the colony and Tlilipan, or that a prowling grumbler hadn’t come across her unconscious body and dragged her off, still half-alive, to a rocky lair along the river.…

I forced the thoughts away. I shivered under my sweater and shrugged the strap of the medical kit higher on my shoulder. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I found myself praying to whatever
kami
happened to be watching.

Just let her be all right. Let her come toddling out of some forgotten hole in the compound, scared and dirty, but unharmed.

The sun was prowling the tops of the low western hills, the river trees painting long, grotesque shadows which rippled over the bluefern-pocked marshland. Not far away was the pit where we’d dug the Miccail body from the peat. Behind the trees, the chill breeze brought the thin, faint sound of voices from below the Rock, calling for Euzhan. I turned to look, squinting back up the rutted dirt road. There, a tall blackness loomed against the sky: the Rock. The first generation had carved a labyrinth of tunnels in the monolithic hill of bare stone perched alongside the river; from the various openings, we’d added structures that poked out like wood, steel, and glass growths on the stone, so that the Families lived half in and half out of the granite crag. Now, in its darkness, the familiar lights of the Family compounds glistened.

The Rock. Home to all of us.

“Let’s keep looking,” I told Elio. “We still have time before it gets too dark.”

Elio nodded. Where his light skin met the dark cloth of his shirt there was a knife-sharp contrast that stood out even in the dusk. “Fine. We should spread out a bit.…”

Elio looked so forlorn that I found myself wanting to move closer to him, to hug him. As much as I might have denied it to Ghost, the truth was that Elio was someone I genuinely liked. Maybe it was because he was so plain, with that pale, blotchy skin, his off-center mouth and wide nose, and his gawky, nervous presence. Elio was not one of the popular men, not one of those who spend every possible night in some woman’s room, but we talked well, and I liked the way he walked and the fact that one side of his mouth went higher than the other when he smiled. I liked the warmth in his voice.