The meal was somber on the heels of Petalia’s departure. Rebbe and Thorn were seated as far apart from each other as they could manage. Neither spoke, but both ate with their usual unquenchable enthusiasm for the task, putting away bowls with relentless rapidity. Both were in the early stages of adulthood, restless and active, and moreover, the thaumic energy that enabled their transformation from human to lion and back required fuel. They wore fully human forms right now. It made chewing easier, what little of it they did.
Niko said to Rebbe, “I have arranged papers for you. They will stand up to most scrutiny, though you will want to avoid central points.”
He looked up from his plate. “They say my name?”
Niko hesitated, then confirmed, “They do. Is that acceptable?”
His eyes narrowed. “Where do they say I came from?”
They all knew that the true answer would get him destroyed and most of them incarcerated.
Niko said, “You understand that it was easiest to build on something actual. A preexisting identity.”
If he had been in lion form, his tail would have lashed, but in human form, he refrained from motion, the tight control of that speaking volumes. He said, “Something actual.”
Niko ripped the bandage off. “There was no record of Thorn’s death. So I used him but have said that you have changed your name to Rebbe. That is a reasonable past, one that matches your DNA, and one that will cover your continuing with this crew, if that is what you want to do.”
He swallowed hard to contain the emotion that surged in his throat at this half invitation. He didn’t know where he belonged, but it was good to know there were options, not just voids and choices of one vacuum or another. At the same time, he was angry that she would saddle him with the name, unreasonably expecting him to take it on and act like he was truly Thorn’s replacement.
That was a terrifying thought. How could he replace someone who actually knew who he was and where he belonged in the universe?
He fought for words to express all of this and managed only an inarticulate growl, but Niko seemed to understand.
“Think about it,” she said gently.
Talon, sitting silent, swallowed resentment. They were treating this interloper better than him. Giving him papers, talking to him like he needed to be soothed. It was unfair, unjust.
If anyone deserved soothing, it was Talon. His world had been torn to pieces, and he had tried to put it back together, tried to replace his lost brother by cloning him. Instead, he got this stranger. Who hated him. And that was fine. He’d hate him back. He shoved more food in his mouth and chewed with a grim expression.
Atlanta said into the momentary lull, “What is Coralind like?”
They all tried to answer her at once, seizing the chance to lighten the atmosphere.
“There are gardens—”
“They’re called confluences, actually.”
“Full of all the plants you can imagine, ones from across the Known Universe—”
“Tell her about the Festival!”
“So much music—”
“Every confluence is different, they say—”
Dabry leaned forward, commanding silence. “They have hollowed out an asteroid,” he said. “And inside it are the gardens of Coralind, each one kilometers across. Every time a ship comes, it does not leave without having fed a garden in some form, either with new plants or with organic matter. There are no gardens more varied or better tended, or so Coralind claims.”
That caused the babble to break out anew over which confluence to visit first, and which would be the most likely to yield trade opportunities.
“Enough!” Niko barked. “Atlanta, I suggest pulling up a basic overview and studying it. Then ask questions and we’ll give you plenty of answers.”
“Okay. But who is the person you mentioned meeting with there?”
“A friend who runs that station.”
“They’re its manager?”
“Not precisely.” Niko didn’t elaborate further.
Lassite ate silently, but his attention stayed as always, unobtrusively, on Jezli Farren. She was not supposed to be here. She had been invisible in his prophetic visions of the future, of Niko’s Golden Path. What did that mean? Was it that she introduced some new factor or that she had been hidden up till now? Did her presence mean the Path would fail?
He didn’t care where they went next. The several possibilities all led in the right direction, but could they exist in the presence of Jezli? No, she was anathema and would have to be eliminated in order for the Path to proceed.
Jezli, if she was aware of his scrutiny, gave no sign of it, eating and listening, occasionally interjecting some quip or barb.
Nor did Atlanta mark his watchful gaze, though she had her own reasons for watching Jezli Farren.
It was not that Jezli Farren did not mourn Roxana, deeply and achingly, in her own way. She simply was not and never had been a person to reveal her vulnerabilities. She had not been made that way, and she did not intend to give in to sentimentality now. Sentimentality led to foolish mistakes and overly reckless gambles, throwing random pieces on the game board that could go just as wrong as right.
She talked to almost everyone on board—charming Dabry out of tidbits and Gio into reminiscing, teaching Milly several new songs and dances, and even cuddling with Skidoo—though never going further—more than once. A few of them she simply avoided if she could, like Petalia’s cold sarcasm, but the one person that she was never found around was Atlanta.
And Atlanta was the person who most wanted—even needed—to talk to her. It made Atlanta feel censorious, seeing someone older and supposedly more responsible than herself and yet incapable of coming up to scratch. Surely Roxana would have wanted Jezli to tell her all that the woman had learned of paladins in their travels together.
Certainly, in the final journey when the paladin had died, she had talked to Atlanta as they walked through the vast ruin that had floated for eons undisturbed. But that had been a few hours’ worth of speech. Now Atlanta had days’, maybe weeks’ or longer, worth of questions.
At first, she thought she was imagining that Jezli avoided her. Then it became clear that when she entered a room, Jezli did not seem to notice, but very soon after she would unobtrusively drift out, if feasible, and if not, would always, somehow, seem to be standing well away from Atlanta.
Should she confront her? She wanted to. Wanted to march up and demand that Jezli give her the knowledge and guidance she needed.
But Jezli must be mourning Roxana, must be missing her more deeply, more wrenchingly than Atlanta, and was it fair to touch that pain?
She’d wait, she decided, and tucked her impatience away. For now.
Dabry was chopping vegetables and thinking. Gio nudged Atlanta where they both stood stacking dishes into the sonic cleaner and signed, “Dreaming of the gardens.” He indicated Dabry with a lift of his chin.
“I don’t understand why everyone’s so excited.”
Dabry started from his reverie and turned toward them, though his lower hands continued sorting slices of soft-fleshed root.
“The best and freshest ingredients,” he said. “Things that could never be grown on ships for one reason or another. Though plenty of ship plants, to be sure. I’ve told you they take plants in barter.”
“Do we have plants for them?” Atlanta finished loading the cleaner and closed its lid. It gave off a whiff of steam and began to chug soapily.
Dabry shook his head regretfully. “I wish we did. It would make trading easier. But the plants and herbs I have with me are not that uncommon, and they already grow in Coralind. I have checked their databanks already to make sure. No, we will give them the traditional mass of organic material.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You mean…”
“Oh yes,” he said, selecting another root and chopping it into rounds of watery flesh. “The waste produced by living beings makes the best fertilizer, or so the Gardeners believe. They even have a number of animals there in the gardens, intended to increase the amount of organics. If we have excess, in fact, they’ll pay us well for it, particularly if it’s a kind they don’t get that often.” He grinned outright at Atlanta. “This is not an uncommon trade,” he said. “That may have been obfuscated somewhat in your imperial training.”
She was forced to admit that it had been.
“Did you ever garden, back in court?” he asked curiously. He used an empty hand to nudge a knife toward her and pointed his chin at another pile of roots awaiting their transformation.
She sighed and picked it up. At a look from Dabry, Gio stirred himself to action and began stacking plates. “Dug in dirt and planted things?” she said. “Does working with hydroponics count?”
“That is considerably cleaner than the labor I had in mind,” he said. “But it’s not an opportunity you will have there. Beings come from across the Known Universe to learn in the gardens of Coralind, and many pay all they possess for that chance and consider the price well worth it.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want to, anyway.”
“Do you think it beneath a paladin?” he asked.
Her cheeks flushed. “I didn’t say that.”
“Roxana was a gardener,” he said. “We spoke of it one time.”
She wanted to say something angry, but could not when Roxana’s name had been invoked. “She never spoke of it to me,” she muttered after thinking and rethinking her response several times.
“You didn’t have the time with her that you should have,” he said gently. “My understanding is that paladins become what they are over a very long time of training with their mentor, guided as well as getting a chance to see what it is that a paladin does. She thrust it on you because she had no other choice, but if she had been able, she would have taught you what it means to be a paladin.”
“Instead, I must rely on guesswork,” she said. Her blade chopped down on the roots with unnecessary violence before she confessed her greatest fear. “What if I get it wrong?”
Finally, she had found a role other than the one she had always thought of as hers, and from which she had been removed so suddenly: that of Imperial heir. She had been drifting and uncertain of her path when she met Roxana. Now she had a definite road before her. What would happen if she went awry and stepped off it? Where would she be then?
Dabry watched her, guessing accurately at many of her thoughts. He had been training soldiers long enough to understand what happened at transition points, and this was such a moment—or series of moments, rather—for her.
He was fonder of her than he should be, and yet sometimes he could barely tolerate being around her. She reminded him so sharply, so painfully, of his daughter Keirera. She was also lost, and how could one’s heart not go out to her plight? Searching for her place in the universe, as they all were, and for the moment, finding it here with the Thing and its crew.
“If you get it wrong, that shows you are trying,” he said. “You cannot learn without making mistakes. If you never try, you will never do.”
“I know,” she said unhappily. “But that doesn’t make me any less anxious about getting it wrong and destroying something in the process.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Responsibility.” The teasing note in his voice incensed her at first, then made her laugh despite her indignation. The actions of her knife grew less emphatic.
“Roxana would say I am taking it too seriously,” she said. “Is that what you are trying to tell me?”
“Close enough,” he said. They exchanged smiles.
“Do you really think Biboban will be able to help you?” Dabry asked Niko when he caught her alone, late, in the kitchen, fixing herself a mug of tea.
“Back before it … became what it is, it dealt with Tubal Last, I think,” Niko said. “I don’t know the particulars. It was only a hint, one drunken conversation.”
“That’s not a lot to be going on, sir,” Dabry said gently.
“When you have nothing, spider silk looks thick enough to lead you,” she said. She stirred nut milk into her tea and took a sip.
“There were rumors about Biboban,” Dabry said uneasily, folding his arms.
“I heard them too. A little too eager to lean into training hallucinogenics, and a taste for them afterward that it never lost. But it runs a station now, Dabry. I can’t imagine that it still indulges. Once it found a role that really fit it, once it was happily engaged…”
“You have a great deal of faith in the power of happiness.”
“Every bad person I have met is, at their core, deeply unhappy.”
“Even Last?”
“Imagine how unhappy he must have been to amass so much in his attempt to fight against it. Always trying to get more, to fill an unfillable void.”
He shook his head without replying and left.
After he had gone, she leaned her head against the coolness of the nearest cabinet, thinking about Biboban.
“May I ask questions?” the ship said.
“For now.” Niko knew what it was about to ask. “You want to know about the person we’re going to visit.”
“From the way you and Sergeant Dabry spoke, there is something unusual about Biboban. You said it is the leader of Coralind.”
“No,” Niko said. “Not the leader. The heart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Holy Hive Mind employs Jadoogar blobbships. Those are ships driven by living brains.”
“Like me!” the ship said with a surge of curiosity and joy.
Niko shook her head. “Not like you,” she explained. “They take an already living brain, one suited to the task, and use that as their starting point before installing it in a blobbship. The brain is modified and augmented, a thousand things are done, but in the end, it is still a creature’s brain. When the ship is decommissioned, usually they are killed. But Biboban somehow managed to escape that, and now its brain is installed in Coralind. It is not the leader, certainly, but it makes sure everyone has air and water and that things run smoothly. To say it is the heart of Coralind is not a metaphor—all of it depends on Biboban to drive it.”
The ship turned this over in its own thoughts. After a while, it said, “But maybe it is a little like me. A little.”
Niko felt a surge of affection and pity. She laid her hand on the interior wall beside her, its surface faintly ridged and textured like skin, a warmth beneath it that said it was a living thing rather than just glass and metal. “A little,” she reassured, taking a last swallow from her mug. “But we are all a little like you, Thing.”
“How so?”
“We are alive, and we want to be happy.” She patted the wall. “For the moment, we are.” She paused. “I just want to check that there are no more manifestations of hourisigah coming up.”
Hourisigah was the art form Thing had taken up, the art of creating dramatic situations, and the hobby was directly responsible for Jezli’s presence on the ship in the first place.
“None,” the ship said. “But you did say to get a hobby, and that is all I was doing.”
“There is some rationale behind your words,” she admitted, and patted the wall again, savoring the heat and solidity of it. “But not that hobby. And check the next one with me first, and that way we can pluck any potential thorns from the beautiful blossom.”
“I have been thinking about it,” the ship began.
“And?” Niko prayed the results of such thoughts would not need to be negotiated.
“And I am thinking still.”
“Very well, keep me posted.” She patted the wall again. “Are you happy, Thing?”
“Yes, as I understand it.”
“What makes you happy?”
“All of you talk to me. All of you like me.”
“That’s all it takes, huh?” The wall’s corrugations felt soft under her fingers, a pleasure to touch, evoking a faint honey and cardamom scent. She stroked along them and felt the wall move, like a cat being petted.
“What else could there be?” the ship said, puzzled.
Niko met Lassite in the hallway. He came to attention. “Permission to speak of portentous and weighty things, Captain?”
“How weighty?”
“Most weighty.”
She sighed. “What is it?”
“The Festival. There will be someone there who wishes you ill.”
“I was taking it as a given that there would be multiple beings there who wished me ill,” she said.
“That is true,” he said. “But this will be one you do not expect.”
“Can you tell me who?”
He shook his head.
“So basically, you are saying expect the unexpected. That is not very helpful, and permission is denied.” She paused. “You said ‘things,’ plural. What else is there?”
“Atlanta matters soon,” he said. “You need to take care of her.”
“That is a given. Anything else I can deny you permission to speak of?”
He shook his head, and she went down the hallway whistling, although she could not help but wonder who wished her so much ill that Lassite could see it.
For his part, Lassite sighed. He could only say so much, and if Niko chose not to listen, the path they took next would be a difficult one. Though not impossible.
The ship wanted to come out of Q-space without problems or complications, a smooth exit that would dazzle everyone with its grace and skill, so they would be forced to say all sorts of compliments in praise and acknowledgment.
Instead, they came out of space less smoothly than usual, with a bump and grumble that made Niko say, “What’s happening, Thing?”
Between the stars, so much is black void and white stars that sometimes you forget color. When colors do come, they are the cold stellar blues of retreating light or the implacable red hue of light washing toward one.
Coralind was blue, certainly, and red, and it was green beyond that, and all the colors mixed together in the shield bubble that circled its enormous form.
It was vast; it housed over a million different entities, the majority of them physical, and only a few of them human. Once an asteroid, its outer surface was now corrugated with clear plastic tunnels and pocked with life-bubbles, some temporary, others gone silver and grown complicated with permanence.
“There are objects in the way!” the ship protested. It had never seen such a cluttered space, full of tiny ships, and tubes, and constructions ranging from smaller than the Thing to much, much larger, all clustered in the lee of the enormous asteroid. The docking station protruded like a silver shelf low on the side, a webbing of light and lines all around it. It was not that complicated to maneuver through everything, but it seemed unnecessary and irritating to the ship.
Niko laughed. “Arpat took you to better-regulated places, I suspect. Free Traders founded Coralind, and it reflects its origin most thoroughly.”
“You said your friend runs it,” the ship commented. “This is not an orderly or well-run place.” It couldn’t explain why the disorder bothered it so; the feeling itched like radiation, but decentralized, so you couldn’t tell the point of origin.
“You are thinking of a different form of running,” Niko said. “You are thinking of someone who makes decisions and says build this and do that. That was never Biboban’s way. Instead, it makes sure everyone has what they need, such as air, and water, and no one goes hungry, or has no place to sleep. The gardens provide enough wealth for the station that it is no matter. If we wanted to stay, it would charge us a hefty price for the citizenship.”
The ship said nothing more for the moment, picking its way through sprays of radio signals and construction clusters and old machinery whose purpose was not evident to the eye. Perhaps, it thought, it would have a chance to speak with this Biboban and begin to understand it. The captain admired the person, that was clear, and the ship wanted to achieve the same status, somehow.
It felt it had failed in many ways to impress Niko, and it thought perhaps achieving that would be its new hobby, but it was not sure that telling Niko would not completely annul all its efforts.
Instead, it contemplated the vista before it.
“There is the docking station,” Niko said unnecessarily. The ship chose to believe she was speaking to the others watching its descent, and out of pique, it glided slowly, majestically, downward.
Niko stared at the blue-and-silver outline. “Such a gaudy thing.”
“It’s beautiful!” Atlanta protested. “Look at it!”
“It was constructed to be looked at and impress those who do, and that makes it gaudy to my way of thinking,” Niko said. “And look how they have used the outer sphere for advertisements! It is a coin-pinching way to run a station.”
“Biboban was always good at that,” Dabry said. “Remember when it got the Holy Hive Mind to subsidize the rations by imprinting improving messages on the wrappers?”
She chuckled. They all stood as they neared the station. To Atlanta, it seemed that the station was approaching slowly, swimming toward them in the blackness of space.
“Are you providing atmospheric music again?” Niko asked suspiciously. “I told you, no more hourisigah!”
“Atmospheric music is not confined to hourisigah,” the Thing declared loftily. “I am attempting to provide the optimal landing experience for my passengers.” The music grew slightly louder.
Niko decided not to object. The accompaniment actually sounded nice, the music swelling as the station loomed in all its unkempt, ragged, crazy quilt–glory before them.