CHAPTER TWO –
KERRA
The planet hung
below, a shimmering cast of sea and cloud. This was an old planet: Kerra could
feel it in the bones of her body, in the dry aged knowledge of them. Silence
hung around her, waiting her decision.
“Anything from
the planet?” she asked.
“An old distress
signal,” Rana said. He flashed her a smile, one that she knew the promise
within, but she ignored him. A mission was not the time to indulge, no matter
how pleasant that indulgement was. Especially a mission that she hadn’t filed a
flight-plan for, had taken out of the mesh, and which had taken her far beyond
the Seven-Stars. A mission she hadn’t, truly, expected to succeed in.
Excitement
bubbled. She’d spent the last weeks imagining returning to her father and
telling him what she had achieved. This was his mission, although he did not
know of it, carried out on the back of their last meeting, on a planet deep in
the outer zone.
Her father was
so different to the one she’d known as a child. He may have fewer
responsibilities but those that he had – that he added to each day – drained his
energy. His face was thin – had always been so – and lined, as if the years spent
under the baking sun of Abendau had stolen his vitality. But he’d been
delighted to see her and had embraced her with the strong arms she’d always
known. They’d stood as the sunset fell, a long, low one that seemed to last
hours. The evening had been muggy, the day’s heat lasting into the darkness unlike
in Abendau where it chilled in little more than an hour.
“Do you ever
wonder…?” He’d plucked a moon-flower, the plant that was slowly colonising the
terraformed planets, bred for its toughness, genetially matched to each planet,
a green fertiliser which would, in years to come, provide fertile ground that
could be farmed and allow this – and so many other planets, brutalised and
hard-worn from years under the Empress – to feed its people. He pointed upwards.
“What’s up there?”
She squinted,
suspecting a trap. He knew she was a Controller. He knew she did not ask such
questions. Even from the planet, her skills were so enhanced – and her place in
the mesh so strong and assured – she could sense the call of the planet’s small
satellite, the deep glow of this system’s young star.
“Space,” she
offered after a moment, when he didn’t go further. “What else?”
He rubbed the
moon-flower between his fingers, making its smell twine around them, musky and
slow.
“Where we came
from,” he said. He turned to face her, his face in lean shadows. Would she ever
know him? They were connected by the mesh, of course, but would she ever
understand how he could be sitting with her today, sane and strong? She knew,
as she never had as a child, what he had faced. But knowing did not bring the
understanding of what it had taken to move past the hell he’d been forced into.
“On Abendau,” he
said, “they have a legend. About Anshara?”
“The tribal
necklaces?” she said. Talk of the tribes made her think of Baelan: where he was, and if he was all right.
“They’re named
after a tribal ancestor. That Anshara is supposed to have led the first people
from the desert, to the waters of an oasis. They adore Anshara as a goddess. So
much so, it was her image the Empress tried to make her own.”
His words were
flat, unemotional, as if the Empress was a distant reality, not the mother he
hated and who had hurt him.
“Anshara led her
people from a ship, it’s told.” He dropped the flower and wiped his hands.
“I’ve travelled most of the planets in the Seven-stars. I’ve spent a lot of
time in the Outer zone planets.” He frowned. “Their people have a closeness to
the old stories that many of the central planets have lost.” He checked off a
finger. “Anshara, on Abendau.” The next finger. “On a satellite of Tortendiel,
they have a temple to their past. Amazing place. It took me three days just to
work through the index of the archive.” This, from Kare Varnon, whose mind took
in data like a computer. “But, at last, I found it. There, they call it the
Earth-ship. Their people, too, emerged from it.” Next finger. “On Ferran.
Descendants of the Al-Halads. They tell the story of a dashing space captain,
who … guess?”
“Led their
people from a ship?” She knew where this was going.
He raised an
eyebrow, and nodded. “Go on.”
“The Roamers. We
are descended from the great sky-ship that lies under the flooded waters of
Syltte.”
“Yes.” He ran a
hand through his white hair, a sure sign he was engrossed in his train of
thoughts. “I’ve traced the story to eight civilizations: the central stars and
the Roamer planet. It varies a lot. Sometimes it’s a ship from the stars,
sometimes a royal ship, sometimes a crash. But it was there, once I started to
plot it.” Making links, doing what he was best at. He met her eyes. “We came
from somewhere, Kerra.”
“Somewhere?”
“Somewhere up
there.” He pointed again. “Another planet. Another place. Another time.”
“So…?” She wondered
if there was a reason he’d chosen this place to tell her, so close to the edge
of the systems, far from any of the space hubs. Was it to keep his thoughts
secret – he knew, too well, how information could be misused – or to make her
believe. Because here, in this isolation, it was easy to believe.
“So, I’d love to
work it out.” He clapped his hands together, sending up pollen into the air,
spreading the plants further. “I thought having another brain to pick might be
useful. And that, perhaps, when you are travelling you could keep an ear out
for any more links. After all, no one travels more than a Roamer.”
The idea had
taken seed, right then. He was right, no one travelled more than a Roamer. And
no one else could fly without charts, or seek to find a planet that had never
been mapped. That might not even exist.
She could find
it for him. She didn’t ask if he was right, if his research was correct. It
would be, she knew. She craned her head back, taking in the stars, and she had cast
out with her mind, searching for the pattern he’d found in writings and stories
replicated in the stars.
Now, some ten
months later, she stared down at the blue planet, sure she’d found his
Earth-cradle.
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