The Queen of Space, page 3
“Oh, Grandfather—”
“Don’t cry.” He tried to smile. “After all, it had to happen. I’ve already lived a good while longer than most men do, and the medics keep down the pain.”
She waited, afraid to ask about his illness.
“Don’t blame the nebula,” he whispered at last. “I love it, Jil, the way you do. But I took too many risks when I was young. Went too deep. Stayed too long. Caught too much radiation. It killed my own pilot sense a long time ago, back while your father was still away at the Academy. And now—” That was all he said. She caught his hand, feeling the thin old bones, and they walked very slowly back to the house, where her mother was dithering about what to pack and Macharn was angrily demanding a scrambled tachyophone channel to the Cosmic Harmony office on Alpha III.
The wedding was in the Church of the Oversoul. That was what her mother wanted, because it had been the church of the old empire, and Macham said he didn’t care. Jil sat through the ceremony with her grandfather on a hard metal pew at the back of the gloomy old building. Macham stalked out impatiently when it was over, her mother fluttering behind. Jil wondered how she could love him.
On that sad last day, her grandfather took her with him to Kere Nyaga’s law office. It was a long dusty room above the Cluster Suns Trust. Kere Nyaga was a withered little black man, her grandfather’s oldest friend. Very seldom busy, he always set a square amber bottle on his desk when they came in and rummaged through his cluttered desk to find her a sweet.
“Sit down, Miss Jil.” He limped around the desk to bring her the bonbon from a package he had bought just for her. That was long ago, and he was cheerily unaware of how dry and hard and stale they had become. “Good news for you today.”
For one delighted instant, she thought he had found some legal way for her to stay with her grandfather. She was darting to hug him when she heard something about the estate.
“That’s right, Jil.” Her grandfather put his bone-thin arm around her. “You’ll be my heir. Most of what I used to have is gone, but you’ll inherit the old house. And funds enough, besides, to let you choose your own career. Kere will manage the estate till you’re eighteen.”
She kissed him gratefully, trying not to think of the time when he would die. He came down to the starport with them that night. Knowing she would never see him again, she clung to him at the departure gate until Macham dragged her roughly away.
4
The planets of Beacon Alpha liked to call themselves the window worlds. Safe outside, they had grown fat with wealth from the nebular trade. Alpha III was a teeming human hive, all its land and half its seas buried under city level piled on mass-packed city level. On her first morning there, Jil woke bewildered and ill.
She didn’t know which way was north.
Feeling lost, she begged her mother to let her see out. The elevators took them up 200 levels, at last to a rooftop park. Still she couldn’t see the sky, but at last she found Alpha, a dim yellow patch in the smog. The planet seemed to tip, and things were suddenly right again.
As right as they could be, so far outside. Even though the nebula was hidden beyond the bitter-scented smog, she knew where it was. When the time came, she would know her way back.
To please her mother, she tried to like Alpha III. It was different and sometimes exciting. She had a tiny room of her own in the robotized apartment Macharn found for them on a residence level in a sector called Hawkshead Heights—she never knew why. They all bought new clothing in what her mother said was the Alpha fashion, and she went to school.
In spite of all her trying, life there was hard to like. The apartment seemed too small. Macharn was abrupt and cold with her, often angry for very little reason, and she never got used to his odor.
Nobody had much time for her, and she longed for the nebula. Longed for her grandfather, and her walks with him down the cinder hill to visit his friends in the Pass. Longed for the thunder crash of the meteor storms on frosty winter nights, longed even for the bitter dust and sticky mud her mother hated.
She felt hemmed in, smothered under steel and plastic and roaring machines and too many people.
She never saw the sky.
Yet school was fun, and she hoped it might help her get back to the nebula. The exams for the Academy would be grueling, she knew, when she qualified to take them. If she failed, even if she never made the Legion, life in the nebula would still demand every skill she could master.
Math and physics. “The laws of space,” her grandfather had told her. “You’ll need them first.” Interstellar navigation as soon as she was old enough. Geodesic theory, terraforming engineering, tachyonic signal systems. The military sciences: weapons technology, space strategy and tactics, personal combat.
“Baby doll!” Her mother refused to understand. “A lovely young girl, we can’t let you train to become a murderous monster. I’ve spoken to Shon, and he agrees we simply can’t let you toss your sweet young life away. You’ll drop the space combat and sign up for music.
“Or else we’ll stop your allowance.”
She didn’t like to quarrel, but she had to be ready for the Legion. It was going to be her life. Anyhow, the allowance had been too little to matter that much. When Macharn cut it off, she got a part-time job for spending money and registered for free-fall yawara. The instructor was a withered little wisp of a man who had been a black master in the Legion long ago. His name was Kita Kano.
“Our art is very ancient,” he told his students. “It began with my own honored ancestors back on Earth two thousand years ago. Using it in space, under all gravities and none at all, the people of the Legion have made it a finer art, more graceful and more deadly.”
His papery voice was hard to hear, his limbs twisted and stiff from some old injury the medics couldn’t repair.
“An exacting art,” he told them. “It demands a special aptitude. A gift more of mind than muscle, to be used with more love than fury. A sense of force and mass and rhythmic motion, never used to maim or kill. Those who follow that false path can kill only themselves. To the true master, the encounter becomes a dance of life and death, in which the blind opponent seeks the harm that then falls back upon himself.
“If you would grasp the art you must meet it boldly and wisely, yet forever humbly. You must learn to leave evil feeling behind, because fear of pride or hatred can become weapons against you. The ancient saying ‘Love your foe’ means that you must forget yourself to share all he feels and thinks and does, withdrawing only at the instant of his fall.”
He asked her to walk across the mat, to kneel upon it, to stand again. He frowned and shook his age-faded head.
“You stumble,” he told her. “You tie your body into knots and trip yourself on your own feet. You have never been taught how to move.” He must have seen her welling tears, because his frown became a deep-wrinkled smile. “Yet I will accept you, Jil Gyrel, if you willingly accept yawara discipline, because I see a future master within the uninstructed child.”
“Please!” she whispered. “I do accept.”
Accepting, she came to love both the teacher and his art. The ancient feints and shifts and spins really did become flowing dances that she learned in the null-G gym and mastered on the high-G centrifuge. Before the first term ended, Kita Kano was calling her to the training mat to let her show the class the strangely named classic forms and modes he had grown too old for.
“Bow your head,” he warned her once. “The power of yawara dwells not in the artist with his instant of apparent victory, because there never is a victory. When harm is done, your feeling should be sorrow for the fool undone by his own folly. If ever you must feel pride, let it be not in your own small skill, but in the enduring wonder of the art itself.”
She toiled to master that precious art and all the others she would need in the nebula. She tried to keep the peace with her mother and avoid Macharn. As time went by, she felt glad the Antiac movement left them so little time for her.
Her mother had begun to sing with a musical group called the Wings of Peace. Her favorite number was “The Ballad of Giles Habibula,” and Jil rejoiced that her grandfather didn’t have to listen. The group became famous, though she couldn’t see why. Money came from somewhere. A little of it went to designers for the Alpha styles Jil never learned to like, but Macharn took most of it.
What he spent it on, she didn’t even try to guess. He was traveling, sometimes off the planet, but he never talked about his work, not even to her mother. The change in him was still a dreadful mystery. Though he seemed strong again, he was never even a little bit like the great, laughing, loving man who had been her father’s friend. He turned white and furious when anybody mentioned that he had ever been sick.
The day Jil tinned sixteen, her mother pressed her to leave school and begin training for the Wings of Peace.
“You’re growing up nicely, baby doll.” Jil was still elated from a call from her grandfather that morning from Hawkshead Pass, but her mother’s calculating smile killed everything. “You’re getting quite a foxy figure, and good instructors in voice and dance can help you find enough of my own talent to win people for the movement if you’ll just forget your silly notions—”
Jil walked out.
She was in her bedroom at home a few nights later, trying on a new school uniform, when she caught a sickening wave of Macham’s bog-rot scent. Whirling, she found him in the doorway. His bulging eyes were fixed on her, and white froth was oozing down his chin. He sprang without a word when she moved, arms spread to grab her.
Feeling his lust, she found her body moving to his motion, flowing into the mode of the flying bird, which let his savage plunge carry him above her. Almost before she knew it, he lay gasping behind her on the floor. Staring at him, swaying and faint from what she had felt in him, she heard the whispery voice of old Kita Kano.
“Act and actor, nothing at all. Only the art is eternal.”
Sprawled there on the floor, Macharn had a strange seizure. His gasping changed to a pitiable moan. Agony convulsed him. Bleeding now, his lips worked as if to speak, though no words came. A pang of helpless pity wrenched her, but she left him twitching in his own reeking puddles and walked out to look for a place where she could stay.
Kita Kano helped her find it and gave her a part-time job cleaning the gym to pay the rent. A few days later, when she knew Macharn would be gone to an Antiac rally, she went back for her things. Her mother let her in, puffy-eyed from crying, begging her to forgive poor Shon and come back home.
“Baby doll, you must try to understand him. He feels so terrible about what happened. He really loves us both, and he means no harm at all. It’s just those dreadful nightmares his sickness left. They keep coming back, but he would die before he’d hurt you. Do forgive him, baby doll. You must come back, because the movement needs you so.”
“Mother, I’m sorry—awfully sorry for you.” Her own voice was shaking. “But I’ll never join the Antiacs, and I’m not coming back. All I want is the things out of my room.”
“Kere Nyaga called,” her mother told her then. “The same night you ran away. He talked to Shon and left a message for you. About your grandfather. He’d just died—”
“Oh, no—”
The fact stabbed through her. She remembered his birthday call, his loving voice so bright and brave it had made her hope to find him still alive when she got home to the nebula. A hard lump of pain closed her throat.
“Nyaga knew you couldn’t get back for the funeral,” her mother was saying. “But he left word with Shon that you were the only heir. Your legacy will be waiting for you, the day you turn eighteen.”
She nodded blankly, blinking at her tears.
“By then, baby doll, you’ll surely come to see what our movement is.” Her mother was talking on too sweetly. “The only way to universal peace. With all our expenses so terrible, noble cause—”
She turned away to gather up her teacher tapes and uniforms.
At the gym, Kita Kano made her his assistant. She kept records and drilled new students in the basic swings and bends. He gave her private lessons in the black master modes. When she started to remind him that she had no money, his rusty quaver stopped her.
“The art itself repays me, when it allows me to instruct another master.”
Throat aching, she could hardly speak to thank him.
Marking a Legion calendar, she counted the months and then the weeks until she would come of age.
Walking out of the uptown elevator one day on her way to class, she heard a voice she knew and turned to see her mother passing on the slidewalk. She stood with her back toward the elevator, talking to a man.
Rem Brendish!
It took Jil an instant to recognize him, though his nasal whine hadn’t changed, or his sharp-nosed fox face. Wearing Alpha fashions, he seemed a strutting stranger. His naked, narrow-chested torso aglow with gaudy body paint, he was floating in a null-G harness, his jeweled boots just touching the walk.
“. . . too deep, Rara.” She caught a few urgent words. “I love you too much to let you destroy yourself, but you know the movement can’t allow you—”
That was all. She had stepped back inside the elevator. Intent on their talk, they hadn’t seen her. She thought her mother looked worried and pale. Brendish was gripping her arm to anchor himself, as if he owned her. In a moment the walk had carried them out of her view.
Back that night in her own lonely little room, she wanted to call her mother. Her heart felt sick whenever she thought about those old times when her father and his great friend came home from the nebula with flashing laser-diamonds and tales of high adventure, times when nothing was bad and they could all love one another.
But she never called.
She couldn’t ask about Brendish or about what she had overheard. Whatever it meant, she wanted no more of the movement. Though she felt haunted by pity and bewilderment, she still could not imagine what had changed Macharn or how her mother could love or even endure him now, but she gave up trying to understand.
It dismayed her to see the Antiacs gaining power all around her. When a Legion noncom came to screen nominees for the Academy, student rioters heckled him out of the campus with their changed slogan: “AKKA’s a bomb—a bomb—abomination!”
Trying to speak at a Legion rally, she endured Antiac jeers and got a black eye. She could have used the mode of the spinning top to let her heckler break his arm, but she remembered in time that she didn’t really want to cause him that much harm.
When her last term began, she asked about the Academy exams. The military-science instructor told her none would be given. The Hall of Stars had cut Academy funds, he said, and there would be no admissions from Alpha III. That hurt, but she stayed on to finish the term with honors in interstellar navigation and something else she valued more. That was the little patch, pinned on her tunic by the twisted fingers of old Kita Kano, that said she was now a black master.
At last the great day came. She quit her jobs and sold her teacher tapes and cried a little when Kita Kano warned her one last time not to be betrayed by her own pride or passion. With barely enough funds, she booked passage to Beacon Beta I.
A few hours were left. She decided to risk a farewell call on her mother.
When she reached their old apartment sector, the sector management program wouldn’t let her off the elevator. Her entry code had been canceled, its synthetic singsong informed her. The citizen Machams had vacated their proper premises, leaving no new address. Their current location was unknown, and no message could be delivered.
Returning to the starport, she felt crushed beneath an unexpected sadness. In spite of many things, she had loved her mother. Captain Shon had once been just as dear. She would probably never know what dreadful thing had caught and transformed them both.
Her spirits began to rise as the starship climbed. It would be docking on her birthday, back at Hawkshead Pass!
5
Hawkshead Pass!
Riding down the ramp, Jil was jubilant. Her school days were over, her troubles left behind. Here was the sky again, and the limitless freedom of space. Beta stood huge and red above a dusty yellow horizon, but what her mind saw was the black-beaked shadow-head printed against the flame-winged nebula. Its old spell held her, its mystery and its promise and even its peril still alluring.
Reality jolted her, if only for a moment, when she looked out and down at the old starport. In the years since she left, time had hit it hard. Docks and pads and cradles were empty, hangars closed and paintless. Everything was smaller, shabbier, crumbling into gray defeat.
Outside the fence, the leatherweed looked triumphant. Rank, thick-leafed stuff, it had survived the shockwave. The first settlers had tried to clear it from the town site, but now it was coming back, its red-black jungles overwhelming Terran grass and trees. Hating what she called its bitter stink, her mother had been forever chopping and spraying to keep it off the barren yard, but Jil breathed a little deeper now, because its penetrating pungency was the scent of liberty.
The bottom of the ramp woke her to the moment. Counting the small coins left in her purse, she decided to check her bag at the terminal and hike downtown. She asked the traffic manager about passage up the channel and on into the nebula.
“Better stay aboard,” he told her. “Your liner is the only one still landing here. Inbound now for Gamma and Nebulon. Nothing else expected till she comes in again from Alpha on her next round trip.”
But of course she had to see Kere Nyaga, and the mirrored arrow of another starcraft caught her eye when she looked across the leatherweed jungle to the Legion base. It was the Sunmark, the manager told her, standing at the repair dock. When she asked if Kynan Star was still its commander, he didn’t know.
