Vale of Stars (38 page)

Khadre said slowly, “They sent the message to Del?”

“And they disrupted the flyer.”

“Why?”

Yallia looked up again. “I think they are trying to…atone for something they did, or didn’t do, in the far past.”

Khadre didn’t answer, but looked upwards.

*   *   *

Kuarta and Dolen received their daughter in strikingly different ways. Yallia smiled indulgently at her father and hugged him warmly. The two looked at each other for a while, saying nothing, before Yallia whispered something to him. He nodded, looked at his wife, and left the two women alone.

“I told him I’d see him later,” Yallia said, preempting Kuarta’s question.

“But you have to unload some of your venom on me first,” Kuarta said.

Yallia didn’t rise to the bait.

“I heard about your…takeover,” Kuarta said carefully. She had thought to use the word ‘rebellion’ but instead chose a word that did not have familial implications.

“Of course. Life won’t really change much for a while in the Domes,” Yallia said. “Franc Kahlman will make a fine administrator.”

“But life will change.”

Yallia shrugged. “Eventually. There will be many more children of shippies and argies. We’ll take any of them you want to send.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

Kuarta said icily, “You’ve had such anger at me for doing the same thing. Why would you endorse it now?”

“Kuarta, do you really think it’s the same? You abandoned me twenty-four years ago. Now, we’re a thriving community. Children sent to us will be cared for, nurtured. Loved.” This last word she said with bitter emphasis.

“You think I didn’t love you?”

Yallia looked away, but said, “Your actions answered that.”

“You think because I sent you away I didn’t love you.” Kuarta waited for a response, but when none came, she continued. “If I had tried to hold you with me, Tann would have killed hundreds. Thousands. And he still would have taken you.”

“I would have appreciated the fight.”

Kuarta stared at her. “Even though the result would have been the same? You still would have been exiled, you still would—”

“But you would have fought!” Yallia shouted. “Don’t you see, Mother? I don’t want logic; I didn’t want it then. I know, rationally, that you did the only thing you could have done. But since when is love rational?”

Kuarta listened and answered, quietly, “You never met Renold Halfner.”

It took Yallia a moment to place the name. “My grandfather? Of course not.”

“He could have answered that question.”

“That’s convenient.”

Kuarta shot an angry glare at her daughter. “He was my father, Yallia. I hardly knew him, but Jene did. She told me about him. He was the most rational person she knew, and yet he loved me and loved Jene. To him, love was the most rational emotion, if there is such a thing, the human mind was capable of.”

“You’re hiding behind a dead man,” Yallia said, but there was uncertainty in her voice.  

“I’m answering your question. You asked ‘since when is love rational?’ I’m telling you that it always is. Dolen, your kind, loving father, never saw that, either. He would have kept you and fought off Tann’s men on his own if I hadn’t been there. And when I acted, he knew I was right.”

Yallia’s voice was considerably shakier as she said, “It doesn’t matter. You still did it. You can’t argue me out of my….”

“Your what? Hate?” Kuarta searched her daughter’s face—a face she did not know well enough to read. “Why are you still holding on to it?”

“You did not fight for me.”

“Would you have fought for your Family? The explosives you planted, would you have detonated them if Nessel hadn’t surrendered?”

Yallia looked at her with narrowed eyes. “How do you know—”

“Most of the Domers know. Things leak out, Yallia.” She returned to the question. “Would you have killed to save your Family?”

Yallia looked away again. She had thought about that as much as her tortured mind would allow in the past few hours. She always kept coming back to the same answer. “No.” She looked up at her mother. “But I tried. I was willing to bluff him.”

“You had an army. I had only your father, your grandmother, and a few unorganized supporters outside. I had nothing to bluff with.”

Yallia felt her emotions weakening. She wanted, desperately wanted, to hate her mother. It would solve so many problems. Her feeling of injustice would have more than one target. Hating Carll Tann was easy and therefore offered no solace. She had more hate than she could comfortably place on one man. If she released her mother, her hate would have nowhere to go. She did not wish to believe the universe was inherently unjust.

Realization crept slowly upon Yallia. Rationality was taking over—the natural enemy of hatred.

“Mother, I—”

“You don’t have to say it, Yallia,” Kuarta started to gather her up in her arms, but Yallia pushed her away.

“I still hate you. But….” She looked into her mother’s eyes. “I know it will not always be that way. You’ll have to give me some time.”

Kuarta put her arms back in her lap. “I think I can do that.”

The two looked at each other for a long time as the green mist rolled past the Dome.

Book Four

Home

She was glad no one could read her mind.

It would not do to have anyone else, human or otherwise, know that at times, she thought of the vix as her children.

Sirra reluctantly answered the summons that had been buzzing in her headphone for nearly a minute. She knew what the message would be.

“Yes?” she said, disingenuously.

“Sirra, we read your life support has redlined. You need to return to base immediately.” Fozzoli’s voice was balanced on the razor edge between respect and demand.

“Oh, really? Are you sure you’re not reading a malfunction, Foz?”

“Domeit, Sirra, you’ve been out for almost six hours!”

“I am fully aware of my suit’s capabilities, Foz. There’s a forty-minute grace period built into these things.”

“It’ll take you forty minutes to get back, plus another ninety seconds to flush the lock, plus—”

“All
right
, Foz. I’ll come back. Sirra out.” She switched off, not really angry at Fozzoli; he was a capable man. She looked at the vix nearest her and reached out to touch him. He was a young male whom Sirra had privately dubbed Vogel, after an ancient Ship philosopher who had proved empirically that his “world” was on a journey. Sirra could feel the vix even through her armored sense-glove: he was warm and smooth. She found she could always communicate more clearly if she was touching them.

“
I have to go now. I will return,”
she said. She tapped the appropriate keys on her vixvox to amplify her message, though she suspected that Vogel could understand her thoughts almost as well as he understood the high-frequency squeals coming out of the transmitter on her shoulder.

“
Thank you for your presence.”
She felt the answer come back. The vix’ speech was just outside normal human hearing range, but Sirra could feel the waves deep inside her head. She had “listened” to their speech for the past thirty-five years, ever since her first encounter with them after that awful flyer attack—she knew what the native creatures were saying. Others used her translation device exclusively. Sirra used it in tandem with her mind and its sense of understanding for the sea creatures.

“I will think about what you said, Speaker-From-Above.”
Sirra recognized the name Vogel had given her recently. She approved; it was at least secular, or rather less overtly religious, than some of the other names she had heard.

Vogel swam away, back to his settlement. Sirra knew he had taken a considerable risk in coming this far, but he was an adventuresome type and seemed to be able to tolerate separation from the oxygen vent for longer periods than his tribal partners.

Sirra watched him go, then set her buoyancy control to maximum and swam upwards to the lab with a certain degree of alacrity. Foz was right—she had redlined some time ago and would now have to hustle into the lock. Thirty-eight and one-half-minutes later, she entered it and started the cycle. During the ninety-second cycle, her helmet computer warned her, “Life support has run out. Return to surface immediately.” The warning continued—there was no way to shut it off. Sirra cursed softly to herself. The grace period had just begun; she could have stayed out with Vogel for at least thirty more minutes. The lock completed its cycle and Sirra started to climb out, only slightly encumbered by her deepsuit.

The laboratory was essentially a floating platform, maintaining its position over the vix settlement some four thousand meters below. It was constructed like a daisy, with a large central lab and several pods (power, machine shop, two subsidiary labs, and three habitation pods) surrounding it. The lab was home to seventeen researchers who rotated in and out on a three-month schedule. Only five were present at any given time, not counting Sirra, who had the right to come and go as she pleased. It was her project, after all.

Sirra finished her ascent into the spacious main lab to find Abromo Fozzoli staring disapprovingly at her.

“You can’t keep cutting it that close, Sirra. We’ve—”

“Here are your recordings, Foz,” Sirra said, withdrawing a small data disk from her belt computer pouch and tossing it to him as he spoke. Fozzoli stopped midsentence to catch the disk.

“Anything good?” he asked, his expression changing instantly from angry concern to hopeful curiosity. Fozzoli was the only member of the research crew who was more committed to deciphering the vix’ language than Sirra herself.

“I think so. Some stuff on philosophy this time. I managed to get Vogel to live up to his name.”

Fozzoli had slipped the disk into its proper slot on the lab’s main computer console and was downloading the information into the mainframe. “Oh? How so?”

“He started thinking—in the vaguest terms, of course—about proving his own existence.”

Fozzoli looked at Sirra, his eyes widening. He whistled softly. “That’s pretty deep stuff.”

“Well, it wasn’t all that deep. But at least he’s starting to develop his rational mind.”

“Anything more on their religion?”

Sirra sighed. “Not much. Oh, but he did use the name ‘Speaker-From-Above’ for me this time.”

Fozzoli grunted. “Better than ‘Divine Avatar.’”

Sirra grimaced. She had always hated that translation, but she knew it was correct. She had been called any number of permutations of that name: ‘Voice-of-God,’ ‘Celestial Messenger,’ even ‘Most Holy Fish from the Silence,’ although this last name had never been translated to her complete satisfaction.

Sirra watched as Fozzoli tapped the holographic keys and integrated her recorder’s data into his already considerable database. He frowned vaguely while she watched.

“What’s wrong?” Sirra asked.

Fozzoli jumped in his chair, and Sirra laughed. “Sorry, Foz, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, that’s okay.” His voice was distracted, distant.

“But what is it?”

Fozzoli turned in his seat and looked off into a corner of the lab. “These discussions you have with the vix….” Fozzoli stopped. Sirra let him finish at his own pace. For a linguist, she noted with irony, he was having difficulty expressing himself. Fozzoli took a deep breath and blurted, “I think I’m sometimes on entirely the wrong tack.”

Sirra’s gentle smile faded. “What do you mean?”

“Well….” Fozzoli punched up a display that hung before them in mid-air. “Look here. This is a listing of all the names given to you or any other researcher by the vix. I’ve indexed them by frequency. Not Hertz, but how often they are used.”

Sirra studied the list. She saw no surprises on it—all the names were variations of some kind of God-representative, ranging from the mildly religious to the profoundly sacred. There were even examples of names that carried tabu within themselves: “(S)he-who-must-not-be-named,” “(S)he-of-the-Unspeakable,” and so on.

“We’ve been analyzing these names as if they contain semantic elements that relate to awe. Sort of a combination fear and respect,” Fozzoli continued. He must have been aware that Sirra understood all of this without explanation—she waited patiently for him to get to his point. Fozzoli continued, “But when I have correlated the phonemes used to name the swimmers with phonemes in more secular constructions, they didn’t match.”

“Why not?”

“Here,” Fozzoli said, and tapped in on his keyboard. Presently, a different screen hung in space before them. Fozzoli pointed to it. “This is a listing of the phonemes in religious and in secular constructions.”

Sirra examined the table and frowned as well. “You’ve assigned most of them a fairly high negative index,” she noted. “Are the other settlements the same?”

Fozzoli sighed mightily. “We’ve only really begun to get substantial readings on one other vent-settlement. Khadre’s there now. The vix there have a different language.”

“They do? I suppose that’s to be expected. They have had no contact with one another. Could they have?” She asked the question half to herself, but Fozzoli answered.

“Not a chance. The nearest vent to this one is about eight hundred kilometers away. A vix would have to make a journey on low oxygen for at least five hundred of those klicks. And even then, he or she would still have to find the vent by chance. No. I’m certain—each vix settlement is isolated at its particular vent.”

Sirra nodded. She had reached the same conclusion years ago herself, but Vogel’s intrepid travels to the edges of the vix settlement had caused her to wonder. The volcanic fissures deep down in the ocean floor were easy enough to spot from the surface—the higher water temperature gave away a vent’s presence on infrared scans. Somewhere deep in the trench that bisected the vix settlement like a river was the volcano, Sirra knew. And in its violent, superheated state, it was spewing forth high concentrations of elements from the rock it melted. One of those elements was oxygen. The concentration of oxygen was fifty to sixty times higher near the vent than it was in the open sea, and although the oxygen diffused quickly into the water as it ascended, vix settlements were still very oxygen-rich. The vix were only able to survive near vents where their gills could take in the oxygen they needed to fuel their highly demanding brains.