Authors: Sarah Zettel
“I’ve sent word of our situation to the High Law Meet.” D’seun dropped into T’sha’s line of sight.
T’sha shook her wings. “There isn’t much to report yet.”
“Not much to report!” D’seun bobbed up and down as if the sheer force of his exclamation rocked him. “Gaith is dead and decaying in front of our eyes! We have to spread the word!”
“Until we have a cause, that will do nothing but raise a panic.” T’sha stopped. “Which is the idea, isn’t it?” she murmured. “If the Law Meet panics, they will approve your candidate world without debate, won’t they?”
“How can you even be thinking of debate?” demanded D’seun. “Surely this shows us there is no more time. We must make New Home ours or we will all die!”
A dozen different thoughts, realizations, and responses rippled through T’sha. But all she said was, “You and my engineers have the situation under care. I must return to Ca’aed to make sure the latitude quarantines are coordinated. May I borrow your kite?”
It was not a request he could easily refuse. “I will ask for a promise against this.”
“A proportionate one, I’m certain.”
T’sha found the required wind and flew back to the place where D’seun’s kite waited. She gave it orders with the most urgent modifiers. The kite unfurled its wings without hesitation. Its engines sang as the air forced through them. T’sha flattened herself against the perches, wishing the team had brought a dirigible instead. But no need had been seen, no emergency anticipated. Certainly nothing like this.
The memories of the gray, bubbling growths coating Gaith’s sails and the black ashlike substance clinging to its walls flew round and round inside T’sha’s mind and she could not banish them.
D’seun had been a little right. This was new and this was deadly. The High Law Meet did have to be told. But told what? Told how? That was the next question.
The kite chattered in command language, sending the message on ahead that they were on an emergency run and traffic should clear the gates. Everything had some task to keep them busy, but not T’sha. All she could do was hang on until they reached the walls of Ca’aed.
The kite kept to the clearest routes. T’sha saw dirigibles and other kites in the distance, but did not ask any to be hailed. Even further away she saw the sails and walls of the Ca’aed’s wake-villages. The villages saw her as well, and their voices began to pour through her headset.
“I’ve heard the message of Gaith. My speakers are on the alert. All precautions are being taken.” This was T’aide, a young and confident village, strong in its faith of its people. “Good luck, Ambassador.”
“Message received from Gaith. The diagnostics are roused.” P’teri, an ancient village that had spread its boundaries so far there was talk of it growing into its own city. P’teri was cautious and content, though, and had so far been unwilling to agree to the expansion. “Good luck, Ambassador.”
Terse, protective T’zem came through next. “My people are well. I will keep them so. Look to Ca’aed, Ambassador.”
I do. You may be sure that I do.
Ca’aed itself shimmered in the distance now, its breadth dominating the horizon. Kites, dirigibles, and people swarmed around it like flies. No, no, not like flies. Like hunter birds, like shades, or even puffs. Ca’aed would not fall to the flies.
Ca’aed was an ancient city. It’s pass-throughs, arches, sails, and gardens had grown huge and richly colored with age. Its highest sails nearly raked the clouds, and its sensor roots dragged in the canopy. Where villages skimmed and bobbed on the winds, Ca’aed sailed ponderous and stately, as if it graciously allowed the winds to carry it along.
T’sha’s family had helped the city grow its shells and sails. They had protected it and been protected by it for thirty generations. They had been pollers, speakers, teachers, engineers, and ambassadors. Always, always, they had worked directly with Ca’aed, heard its voice, helped it live.
No, Ca’aed would not fall.
Ca’aed spread like a person fully inflated with their wings flung wide. Its walls were deeply creviced, making a thousand harbors into which to guide its people or their vehicles. It drew people in and exuded them again, as if people were what it breathed. Its lens eyes sparkled silver in the daylight. It watched the people come and go so it could advise them as to their routes and their loads or simply to wish them good luck. Lacy fronds of sensors stretched between the sails, constantly testing the winds, looking for riches to steer into and disease to steer away from. Ca’aed was careful. Ca’aed was well advised. Ca’aed might act quickly but never rashly.
“No wonder you have no husbands yet,” her younger sister T’kel had teased her once. “Your love is all for the city.”
“That is no bad thing,” her birth father had replied. “If someone in the position to make promises does not love the city as well as she loves the people in it, she may grow careless with her promises and perhaps overtax its capacities. This can force growth where growth is not ready or even advisable.” He’d been answering T’kel, but his attention had been on T’sha. That had been while she was being debated in the general polls as a speaker, but already her father was trying to convince her to start building a base to become ambassador.
“Welcome home, Ambassador,” came Ca’aed’s familiar voice from her headset. “Have you answers from Gaith? Is there a name for its illness?”
“We don’t know yet.” All T’sha’s hands clutched the perches uneasily.
“But you are confident it will be found?”
“Not as confident as I was.” T’sha deflated just a little. “I have to send the kite back to Gaith. Open your gates for me?”
“Always, T’sha. Give me your kite.”
T’sha spoke the words to transfer command and Ca’aed took over, pulling the little kite unerringly into one of its harbors. As the rich brown walls surrounded them, Ca’aed’s welcomers fluttered out of their cubbyhole and surrounded T’sha in a swarm of reds and greens. They lighted here and there on her back and wings, tasting the emissions of her pores and flitting away again for Ca’aed to be sure there were no dangerous tastes, that she carried nothing hidden with her from Gaith.
But nothing was found, and the pebbled gates at the end of the harbor, which constantly strained and tested the winds for the beneficial elements as well as for the harmful ones, opened a portal for her to dart through. One of Ca’aed’s fronds brushed her as she passed, a touch of reassurance and welcome.
“An old city,” her birth father had often said, “becomes as full, rich, and complex as the canopy underneath, and its life becomes as tightly intertwined.”
T’sha sometimes thought “tangled” would be a better word. The inside of Ca’aed was decidedly a tangle. Bones braced it, corals defined its spaces, and ligaments bound its elements together. Plants and animals gave its walls color, and its air weight and life.
Between them, Ca’aed was a shell full of shells. Small dwellings and family compounds were tethered to each other and to the city, but were not part of its essential substance.
Ca’aed’s free citizens flew through its chambers, intent on their various businesses, or merely enjoying the tastes and textures of their world. Its indentured worked down in the veins and chasms of its corals, growing, researching, comparing, because the city could not be wholly aware of the workings of every symbiont and parasite, any more than a person could be aware of the workings of every pore.
Music, perfumes, voices, flavors filled the air, vying for attention, pressing against T’sha’s skin, filling her up with the vigor of life. The memory of Gaith made the miasma all the more precious. The people of Gaith had lost all of this when they lost their village. But, with care, T’sha might still be able to help them get it back.
T’sha flew into the tangle of life, angling herself vaguely toward her family’s district. “Ca’aed, I need my brother T’deu. Where is he?”
“Your brother is in the promise trees.”
Of course.
T’sha beat her wings, turning her flight up toward the city’s sculpted and vented ceiling. The promise trees were in this finger of the city. She would not have to snag a passing kite.
A solid turquoise and cream carapace encapsulated the promise trees and kept out not only the winds but all that the winds might carry. The ligaments that twined around its oval walls and anchored it to Ca’aed’s living bones did not themselves live. They carried neither information nor nutrition and so could not be used to tamper with anything within the carapace.
The only entrance to the trees was a long tunnel that was so narrow that only one person at a time could fly its length. Pink and gold papillae tasted the air around each entrant, making sure that he or she was a free citizen of Ca’aed. If the entrant was a stranger to the city or an indenture, it made sure he or she had received permission from the city or a speaker to come. If not, the ends of the tunnel would seal and Ca’aed would call for the district’s speaker.
Entering the trees was like flying straight into the canopy. It was a jungle of leaves, stems, branches, and trunks, all grown into one another. They spread from the center of the room to the carapace. They climbed the walls, until patterns of intertwining stems and roots covered the carapace’s grainy hide. All the colors of growing life shone there in a delicate riot. It all appeared extremely fragile, but the slightest root was many times stronger than the thickest metal wire T’sha had ever touched. It was as beautiful to T’sha as any temple.
Inside the trees’ veins flowed the DNA records of every registered promise of the world of Home. Not all promises were registered. Promises passed every day between friends and family that had no need to be here, but promises between businesses, between cities and villages, between ambassadors and any person or any city needed to be recorded. Their fine tendrils of implication needed to be tracked. In here were promises of marriage, merger, birth, inheritance, indenture, trade, service, and sale.
None of this luxuriant growth was necessary, of course. All of the promise registries could have been contained in a set of cortex boxes, and in a younger city it might have been, but the beauty and elaboration of Ca’aed was one of the aspects of it that T’sha had always loved about her city.
T’deu, T’sha’s older brother, hovered near the top of the chamber, away from the other trackers and registrants who dotted the chamber. T’deu was an archiver, trained in the reading and tracking of promises. T’sha wove her way through the maze of stems and branches until the air of her passage brushed against him. Her brother turned on his wingtip and leaned forward, rubbing his muzzle joyfully against hers.
“Ambassador Sister!” he said, softly but happily. She and T’deu shared the same birth mother. His father had entered the marriage because of a political promise, and hers had been promised in to help his family when their city fell into trouble. She and T’deu had been raised together and never lost their friendship, even after they were both declared adults and sent out to make their own lives. “It is good to have you here, no matter what the circumstances.”
“Thank you, Archiver Brother.” T’sha pulled away just a little. “You heard about Gaith.”
He dipped his muzzle. “Ca’aed spread the word to the speakers, and the speakers have not been silent.”
T’sha’s bones bunched as she winced, but she smoothed them out. “Brother, we need to redirect this wind. It is going to be used to rush us into an untenable situation.”
T’deu peered up at her, as if he could see into her mind and touch her thoughts. “If you tell me so,” he said, but he did not sound certain.
T’sha accepted his words and dismissed his tone. “I want us to bring Gaith’s body here.”
Her brother deflated in a long, slow motion. “That’s dangerous, T’sha—”
“No, listen, there are advantages here. If we give Gaith’s engineers the resources to regenerate and resurrect the city and they give us the knowledge and experience they gain from the task, we will be able to turn around and make our own promises with that information, should this strain of disease spread.”
“It will mean bringing in a potential contagion, though,” T’deu reminded her. “You’ll have to take a vote on that.”
“I’ll get the votes. Can you design me a promise that will do the job?”
“I can design anything you like.” T’deu waved one wing at the maze of stems and branches around them. “I could grow you a tree that would outline ownership of the clouds above us. Implementing it—”
“Is my job,” said T’sha, cutting him off. “Make sure you graft P’kan’s engineers into its branches. They hold several promises against the city. This will help close those down.”
“Of course, Ambassador,” T’deu said, deflating with mock servility. “Anything else?”
“Should fresh thoughts sprout, I’ll share them with you.”
T’deu moved even closer, making sure his words reached only her. “Why are you really doing this, Ambassador Sister? It is not only for the profit of the city, or even for the good of Gaith.”
“No,” she admitted. For a moment she thought of telling him he did not need to know, but that was not true. To design a truly effective promise, he needed to know the ultimate goal, especially if the promise were complex, as promises dealing with cities ultimately were. Trying to integrate the wrong person could jeopardize the entire balance. “I want to be sure Gaith is studied, and studied immediately. If I leave it free for D’seun to take over, he’ll fly the village’s bones all around the world and show everyone what horrors we are exposing ourselves to if we don’t all flock to New Home immediately.”
“He’ll still try to use Gaith’s illness to overfly you,” said T’deu.
T’sha shook her wings. “I won’t let him. All D’seun’s attention is fixed on a single point. If he will not voluntarily see the whole horizon, he must be made to see.”
T’deu dipped his muzzle again. “As my Ambassador Sister says. I’ll start growing your promise.”
“Thank you, Brother. Good luck.” She brushed her muzzle against his briefly and launched herself back toward the entrance.
And now there are only a thousand meetings to arrange. The district speakers must hear all of this of course and be brought around. That could be expensive. I’ll have to organize the pollers for a citywide referendum, but their schedule should be light right now, except for the poll D’seun has so thoughtfully called for.
T’sha emerged from the tunnel into the filtered light of the city. She turned her flight toward the city center and her family’s district where she kept her workspace. “Ca’aed?”