Free Stories 2015 Page 12
Not to mention dealing with people who had a whole 'nother language to think in, that no 'bleaker Darby knew could even begin to wrap their tongue around.
"Melon-tee?" he asked. "What's that?"
"Ah." Kestrel looked at Hestya. She laughed softly, and picked up her cup.
"Melant'i," he said. "Melant'i, as my colleague Zack would have it, is choosing which hat to wear in specific circumstances, given a very large possibility of hats. For instance, Hestya and I are colleagues. She works with me at the clinic, to ensure peace of mind and calmness in those who seek our aid.
"Hestya and I are also lovers," he continued. "However, when we are at the clinic, working, that part of our relative melant'i's is not. . .active. Do you see?"
"It is a concept that comes more easily, when one has learned the language," Hestya said. "Which -- forgive me -- I fear you will be required to do."
Darby looked at her.
"I don't know that I'm very good at learning languages, m-- Hestya."
She smiled, and he felt, for the first time, her amusement, bright and sharp, like a new knife.
"Do you know?" she said; "I think you will prove to be very good at learning languages. Now."
She put her hands flat on the table, and looked at him very earnestly.
"You will be required to live at the Hall during the first phase of your instruction. It is our habit to assign an elder Healer to a novice, for both the safety of the House and the novice. Once you have mastered the core curriculum, you may choose to live outside of the House. When you are ready, Kestrel may commence his wooing, but you will tell him when you are ready, or if you are, indeed, interested in pursuing such a joint melant'i."
She gave him another one of her direct stares.
"I have overwhelmed your sensibilities," she murmured.
Darby laughed.
"You know that's not true," he said. "I want to learn -- to learn how to use my gift for the best."
"Then we are in accord, we three friends. You have kin, Kestrel tells me, who depend upon your protection."
He frowned at her, then at Kestrel.
"Your sister and her children," he murmured.
"Jewl?" It was a shock, to think of Jewl needing his protection, and he was about put them right about who needed whose protection, when he thought about Jewl huddled sick in her bed, and the boys alone, when Farnch came home drunk and demanding his dinner.
Farnch. . .he coulda hurt the kids that night. Coulda hurt Jewl, too -- killed her, maybe, if he'd managed to even half-rouse her. The reason it didn't get anywhere near that bad was he'd been there to deal with Farnch. Even had Kestrel by him to turn his bother's anger.
He looked at Hestya.
"Kestrel's right; I should talk to my sister. If Farnch gets mad. . ."
Or, he thought, if he moves Vesti in over Jewl -- sleet! That's just what he'll do, too; and Vesti ain't happy 'less somebody else ain't.
"Peace." Hestya said. She extended a tiny hand and touched him for the first time, fingers curling 'round his wrist. He immediately felt calmer -- more peaceful -- and raised his eyes to hers.
"I thought you were s'posed to ask," he said.
She laughed, and removed her hand; leaving him grinning with a bouyancy that had little to do with peace.
"Kestrel, my friend, your felicity grows! Not only do you find for us a Terran Healer when none are said to exist, but he is quick, and observant -- and lacks an appropriate sense of respect. He will, I think, do well."
"Shall we come with you, to your sister?" Kestrel asked. "She does not know either of us, and she will wish to satisfy herself that we mean you no harm."
"Sure," Darby said. "Let's do that now."
Miz Prestoro and Mister Warchiski were sitting on the stoop when him and Kestrel and Hestya came walking up the sidewalk, Kestrel carrying a sack full of the sweets they hadn't eaten, for the twins. He said.
"Brother's crew just brought 'im," Mister Warchiski said.
"Blood all over," Miz Prestoro added, and jerked her head up the street, opposite of where they'd come from. The sidewalk was wet.
"War 'n me, we hosed down the walk. Tinthy got 'em a blanket so he din't drip up the stairs."
Darby didn't wait; he flung himself up the stairs, two at a time, feeling Kestrel at his back. The door to their partment was half-open, he hit the door with his shoulder without slowing down --
. . .and ran straight into Ornil, Farnch's third, who grabbed him and shook him, until Ron, Farnch's second, snarled at him.
"S'only the kid brother. You snow-blind?"
Ornil didn't let him go, but looked over his shoulder.
"That ain't no kid brother," he said.
Riding the wash of angry surprise, Darby twisted, kicked Ornil hard in the knee, pushed him away, and threw himself hard against Ron, knocking him off balance before he could grab Kestrel.
"Leave 'im alone; he's a doctor!"
"He's a damned Liaden, same's Farnch got shot up by!"
Ron pushed him; he staggered, caught himself, spun, and managed to put himself in front of Kestrel.
"You better go," Darby said over his shoulder.
"Indeed, I think I had better stay," Kestrel answered, and raised his voice. "I am a doctor. There is a wounded man in the house. Let me through; I can help!"
"Let him through!" came another voice, from behind them. A hard voice, crackling with power. Ron and Ornil fell back, eyes wide, and --
"Let him through!" Jewl shouted from the kitchen. "My brother and the doctor, too!"
Darby felt a push go past his shoulder. Ornil and Ron went back another three steps. He moved forward, toward the kitchen door, feeling Kestrel, and something else, something like a wall of ice, behind him.
There was blood everywhere. Farnch was on the table, stripped to the waist. Vesti was pressing a towel soaked and dripping red against his shoulder. Gil was holding another against his side. Jewl had their kit out and open on the counter. Her sleeves were rolled up and she was bloody to the elbow. Darby saw her see him, and felt her relief; then she saw Kestrel and she raised a hand, hope blazing like lightning.
"The bleeding won't stop," she said.
"I understand," Kestrel said calmly, moving past Darby to Jewl's side. "Where are the children?"
"Down with Gran Delaros."
"Excellent," Kestrel said, reaching into his jacket for his little kit. "Now, tell me what has happened -- he has been shot?"
"Damned Liadens," Vesti spat.
"That is useful, thank you. If the pellets came from a Liaden gun, they will be of a different size than those in common use on the street here. Darby, my friend, please call the clinic. Ask them to send the taxi."
"No!" Vesti yelled. "Clinic'll call the Watch. We was there, you unnerstand? We was with them taking a stand 'gainst the New Bosses! Watch'll arrest us all!"
Kestrel gave her a long stare.
"That may be," he said, cool-voiced. "But it is not the problem before us. Please move the compress, so that I may examine the wound."
Vesti snarled, grabbed the compress -- and Darby felt a blast of freezing cold go past him.
Vesti froze in the act of throwing the bloody towel into Kestrel's face. Gil shifted then -- and he froze, too. Darby snaked past him, out of the kitchen, to the hall, where Hestya stood, face calm, eyes hard.
"Do you need help?" he asked, pausing at her side.
"I may, later," she answered, and he felt. . .something slip into the core of him, like she'd put a piece of candy into his hand. "Go, call the clinic; then return to help me watch these."
He nodded, and ran, past Ron and Ornil, who were sitting against the wall, eyes closed. Ornil was snoring.
* * *
"Well, I hope they'll be good to you, Darb," Jewl said, as she folded blankets into boxes. Her and the twins was moving, after all, to that new place closer to her work and the school.
Farnch -- well, the Watch was gonna have him; they'd already taken up the
rest of the crew. The New Bosses were gonna be holding trials, they said, for the ringleaders who had come out shooting against them. Farnch, and his crew, they hadn't quite been ringleaders. The New Bosses needed to make a Policy, word was, about what to do with the 'streeters who'd just kinda. . .gotten involved.
That wasn't Darby's problem, though. Not right now, it wasn't. He had his bag packed -- not much stuff; clothes, books his Dad'd given him. Pictures of Jewl and the twins.
"You come visit us, when they let you," his sister said, putting her hands on his shoulders, and kissing his cheek. Promise me, Darb."
"Promise," he said, and kissed her, too, then stepped out from under her hand, and walked down the hall, out the door, and down the stairs, where the taxi was waiting to take him to the Surebleak Healer Hall, and on to the rest of his life.
We Fly
by K.B. Rylander
Winner of the 2015 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award
Get me out. Let me breathe.
The carbon-steel hull lies a scant half-centimeter from my face, but I can't dwell on that. It's what started me into panic in the first place.
I crawled to my spot next to Matthew James in the back of Dad's two-door classic Chevy, trying to keep my bare legs from burning on the peeling vinyl. Dad rolled down the window in an attempt to cool things off, but I resigned myself to sucking it up and breathing the soupy hot air. As the engine puttered to life and the radio blared "Summer in the City," I scowled at Mom and Dad's delight in the ancient song. In the rear-view mirror Dad's bushy eyebrows crinkled as he laughed.
He tossed back a hard candy. "Hang in there, Natasha."
In deep orbit around Alpha Centauri AB.4, encapsulated in a coffin-sized hunk of metal, I'm surrounded by nothingness—silence and cold and dark. The ship pings, announcing the return of the first Little Guy probe. Cool peppermint lingers on my phantom lips from the memory.
My robotic eyes open, but see only darkness. The metal shell around me clunks and there's a mechanical whine as the beach ball-sized Little Guy docks with the ship and silence again while its data uploads. Please let the planet be habitable. I came all this way, give me something.
While I wait, I check with the comm-bots on the Beacon construction and try to ignore the itching. My skin is a synthetic polymer covered in forty-two thousand sensors that were overkill in training, but now, inside the capsule, they're worse than useless. They pick up every tiny dust particle. My mind-construct interprets these as itches and somewhere during my malfunctions I've lost the ability to turn the sensors off.
My biggest complaint is the choking. I know I'm not actually choking. I'm not crazy. But it's the same sensation, a tightening as if a hand grips my non-existent throat.
I think back, trying to figure where I went wrong. It makes no sense. Everything was normal before I shut down for the journey—months of training, psychological assessments, and self-diagnostics came back with flying colors. Upon arrival three days ago I awoke to panic and malfunctions. Sure, fifty-two years passed back home but it felt like a blink of an eye for me. I remember with perfect clarity the day they mapped my brain and uploaded me into the probe, how afterward I said goodbye to my old self, that human Natasha, and watched her go on her way.
The data from the Little Guy finishes uploading. This is it. I can't get the files open fast enough.
The first several photos show a dense atmosphere of swirling browns. A few manipulations give me access to surface images of a gray crust filled with rocky gullies like the wrinkles of a massive elephant.
As the rest of the Little Guys return and fill me in on the data they've collected, the choking in my throat gets worse.
Alpha Centauri AB.4 is a lump of rock. Six thousand kilometers in radius, dense carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. No chance of sustaining life. In other words, Venus but warmer. All of this, my life's work and traveling 4.3 light years to find the twin of our nearest neighbor.
The rain pattered against the windows as Grandma pulled chocolate-chip cookies out of the oven and I watched from the kid-safe distance of the kitchen table. Grandma hummed absently and I took a deep, cookie-scented breath. Warmth filled me all the way to my toes. Just as my mouth started watering, shadows fall over the memory, swallowing Grandma and her kitchen, and I resist a tug pulling me into the darkness.
Vivid, perfect memory is one of the perks of upload technology, but with my malfunctions I can't even get those right.
I jerk free of the shadows and end up on the road beside the airfield. This isn't a memory I'd choose. When I was thirteen, not long after Sophia died, my parents took me all sorts of places trying to cheer me up. During one of those attempts we stopped at Luke Air Force Base. Mom, Dad, Matthew James, and I stood beside the chain-link fence with the Arizona sun beating down on us as it leached the sky a dull blue. The air smelled of rain and there was not a cloud in sight. The necklace I wore that day feels too tight now in the memory and I want nothing more than to take it off, but the memory doesn't work that way. Mom and Dad stood close to me, but all I could think about was the terrible inside-twisty feeling of everything being so wrong.
Sophia would never grow up and fly. She'd never even get to see a plane.
My eyes prickled as a jet engine roared, the ground beneath our feet rumbling. Matthew James, ten years old at the time, let out a whoop and jumped against the chain-link fence. "This is more like it!" he yelled. The rest of his words were swallowed by the roar of the plane.
A whoosh of adrenaline surges through me in the memory as the jet zoomed off—a child-like excitement I don't remember having felt in actuality then. Some of the pressure lifts from my chest.
Dad sighed and squeezed my shoulder. "We can take you someplace else if you'd rather?"
I didn't mind watching a few more, but I said, "Yes, please."
Matthew James scowled.
The files from Earth include forty-eight years of updates sent to me at the speed of light while I slept. In those files was the discovery of another rocky planet, AB.6—this one looking even less promising than AB.4, so they didn't send me there right away.
It's taken me two months at my reduced speeds, but AB.6 is within spitting distance. During that time I've been awake, malfunctioning, and staving off panic by reliving memories and avoiding shadows. I can watch my video library thousands of times per hour, but somehow memories take longer.
Once again the ship's cameras fail to respond, so I'm blind as the ship settles into high orbit around the planet. Metal clunks within the capsule as the bay doors open to release the five Little Guys that will take pictures and run analysis of the planet below.
I reboot and run another self-diagnostic that tells me the same thing as the others:
Great. As if I didn't know that before running the tests. The least it could do is give me an idea of where my processing went haywire.
Only seconds after the bay doors close the comm-bots ping me. The Beacon relay ship beat me here by weeks.
The "Beacon" is a misnomer really. It's not setting up an actual beacon so much as connecting two points in space, allowing instant transfer of data four light-years away. It's revolutionized our ability to work with the Mars teams, but this one is the farthest out by far. Some of the pressure on my chest lets up with anticipation of communication with Earth.
Another ping, call it a virtual knock on the door, this time from a human-controlled computer back on Earth.
The Beacon works.
As the systems connect—thank God they connect—I pull up my avatar file, look it over, and decide my face doesn't look quite right. I sharpen the features and add a different hairstyle. I remove my once-beautiful braids and give avatar-Natasha short hair.
I'm done in nanoseconds and wait a few more before the channel opens and two video feeds of Mission Control come into view, o
ne an overview of the room, the other near ground level.
In fifty-two years Mission Control's design has changed little. A redesign with dark wood paneling and comfortable-looking leather desk chairs gives the room a warmth it never had before. Three rows of desks have given way to a more spacious two and the room is packed with people smiling at the camera in anticipation. In a couple of seconds their visual feed kicks in and they break out in applause and cheers and clinking champagne glasses.
I send a smile to my avatar face and their cheers grow louder. Don't act crazy, don't act crazy.
"Can you hear us, Natasha?" says a man's voice.
They all laugh in delight even though it wasn't funny and I search the crowd for familiar faces, albeit much older ones. Three individuals stand in front of the up-close camera: a man and woman in lime-green uniforms with United American Space Agency splashed garishly across the front in neon orange and a young woman in a tan business suit. It looks like something my mother would have worn.
"I'm Commander John Cook," the man in the garish uniform says. He reads from the palm of his hand and clears his throat. "I see you're sending us your data already, that's excellent. Have you already reached AB.4?"
"Yes sir, but I'm afraid the news isn't as we hoped."
Cook looks at his companion. The crowd murmurs.
Halfway through briefing them on AB.4 and AB.6 there's a hiccup in my processors so I restart and reconnect.
When the cameras come back online Cook stands frowning at me, his arms folded. "Did you go offline for a second?"
So much for hoping they wouldn't notice. I feel remarkably like a child standing in front of the class. "I'm back now," I say, sending a toothy grin to avatar-Natasha.