Daize treated the training of an Other in Faulfenzair Dance as a bizarre experiment, but was willing to participate; Qora was glad, because days passed while they waited for the remaining captains. Laniis kept everyone busy, teaching Chatcaavan and insisting on learning both spoken and Danced Faulfenzair. Even the Liaison attended: “Because there is only so much flying I can do before my wings feel like they’re icing over. It is cold here.”
But the remaining crew of the Willseeker did return, one by one: thoughtful Pefaun, Noloon the WisdomDancer, clever-fingered Dolainii, Belan the quiet, grown quieter, Jiidiin, Nedone, Pauwelii, Dauzon, Jezaq, Raunaiq, all into the embraces of their fellows, to reunions they had ceased to hope for. Not all of them had been left untouched, and these were remanded into medical care on the Silhouette. The Worldlord would not meet the Liaison’s eyes, and what the latter said to him behind closed doors Qora wondered but could not discover for all his poking of the snoot. What was obvious was that the grand meeting conducted by the Liaison once all the officers had gathered in the Worldlord’s hall left them chastened and several mutinous… but not, Qora judged, likely to attempt active rebellion. This Emperor would destroy them, one way or the other, and they feared the destruction that would reshape them less than they feared his more immediate martial powers.
Everything Laniis told him when she relayed her history added to a picture of the Chatcaavan Emperor that lingered in Qora’s mind because he was apparently one of Faulza’s chosen prophets. Even through the distorted lens of that female’s experiences, Qora could see how such an individual might come into divine attention: more divine attention, because what else could he think of the Emperor’s experiences?
What did it all mean?
He was glad to knot the cords on this particular scroll, however, and quit Stronghold and its Worldlord. Osgood contacted Qufiil and arranged transport for the Willseeker’s recovered crew, and Qora spent the days until that rendezvous in glad communion with the people he thought he’d lost forever. It grieved him to see them damaged by their experiences, but with life and freedom came hope of healing, and he was able to see them transfer onto the Faulfenzair vessel with a glad heart. Maybe also a resigned one, because it would have been good to go home with them.
“Well, that’s that,” Shanelle said as the Faulfenzair ship vanished into the Silence.
“But a job well done,” Osgood said. “I’m grateful we had the chance to do it. The question is… now where?” She turned to Qora. “Do you have any ideas?”
“I don’t, no,” Qora admitted.
Osgood’s reply was interrupted by Patrick’s oath. Everyone glanced at the bicolor Karaka’An, who was at the communications station. “You won’t believe this, but… I just receipted a message for us… from Earth.” He met Qora’s eyes. “You’ve been asked for by the Dar Allen family.”
From the shocked silence spreading from Pelted Other to Other, this had meaning beyond the words. It was the Liaison who asked. “This is significant?”
“Dar Allen negotiated the Rapprochement,” Laniis said, sounding awed. At the dragon’s puzzled look, she explained, “That was the agreement between the Alliance and humanity when humans were rediscovered by the Pelted in 140 BA. The one that ushered humans into the Alliance.”
“Is this Dar Allen still alive?” the dragon asked.
“No! That was 340ish years ago! But his family still lives on Earth and I guess… the invitation is from them?” Laniis glanced at Patrick, who nodded.
“For Qora-alet,” Osgood said, to be sure.
Patrick quoted: “‘To the Faulfenzair envoy seeking news of the Slipstream, we extend an invitation to visit and converse with us in the mother seas of Terra. Yours in tranquil service, the Allens.’”
That struck all the Others speechless. Again. This Dar Allen figure must have been a significant one in their history. Qora did not fully understand the relationship between Pelted Other and human Other, save that the humans had created the Pelted and this had led—unavoidably—to acrimony, for what else when the role of creator had been appropriated? He was more interested in why this family wanted to meet him, and what they knew of the vessel the Voice had used to leave Qufiil. How had they known that someone was asking for it?
“Well,” Osgood said. “I guess we’re heading for Earth.”
* * *
“It’s good to have you back,” Shanelle said when he reappeared in the engineering compartment. “Na’er spent days in here bellyaching about everything. All the things. He hates being cooped up in the back of the ship, and he hates not being assigned to the field.”
What an extraordinary series of images that was. “Why wasn’t he?”
“Meryl didn’t want to risk making the thing look like an Alliance mission to chastise a Chatcaavan warlord. You know? The Liaison had to be the one in charge, so no overwhelming him with mouthy alien attachments. You had to be there as the representative of the species with skin in the game, and Laniis was our contribution. More than that would have been prejudicial.”
By now, Qora knew Osgood well enough to hear the echo of her words in Shanelle’s recitation. “And Na’er does not like the dragons.”
“That too. But Laniis is his girl, so he was grinding every tooth, I swear. He’s not comfortable company when he’s grumpy. Absolutely brilliant field ops agent, but you can’t kennel him.”
“Many brilliant people seem to share this trait….”
Shanelle laughed. “I guess. Us team players don’t get as much attention. But listen to me. I love Na’er, but not when he’s in my face with his problems every day. And he’s not as good at maintenance as you are.” She grinned. “Any chance we might scoop you up permanently?”
Qora laughed. “No.”
“Ha! That’s straight enough. Well, settle in, my friend, we’re going to be interval running it to Earth to cut down on travel time, and you have more experience with that than I do.”
“Dare I ask how long?”
She headed down a ladder into one of the maintenance tubes. “Usually? Almost two months. We’re going to shave some of that down once we hit the border, though. We don’t want to blow a gasket in neutral space, but in friendly territory where we can pull over for a tune-up we should make up a little time.”
“I had no idea Earth was so far from everything.”
“Yeah, well… the Pelted wanted to get away from us back then.” Shanelle’s voice echoed up to him, and he padded to the opening and sat on its edge, flaring his ears to catch the sound. “The direction of all their exploration was away from us and they grew really fast once they discovered Wellspace, so the Alliance is now a huge area, all pointed away from Earth.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Does it... what, that the Pelted fled Earth?” She clambered back up and rested her elbows on the deck. “That’s ancient history. Maybe not by alien standards, but by mine. There’s some angst and prejudice here and there, I guess, but it doesn’t matter to me. But maybe I can think that because I wasn’t born on Earth. My parents were spacers.”
“Mine too,” Qora said, and was surprised that he’d wanted to volunteer anything personal. He was half afraid of having too much made of it, but Shanelle only nodded.
“You get it, then. When you think of space as home, then you might feel an attachment to your people, but… sort of from a distance. You see that you don’t have to be defined by all the bad stuff when you’re not surrounded by it all the time. At least, that’s how it worked for me.” She waved toward her tablet. “Could you toss that—ah, thanks.” Disappearing back into the tube, she said, “I’ve actually never been to Earth. Should be interesting.”
* * *
The rest of the crew was less sanguine. Patrick was the one who eventually explained when the Liaison asked in the mess hall. “It’s not just Earth. Well, it’s a lot Earth. When people talk about Terra, they make it sound like Terra’s the human homeworld alone, but it was our homeworld too. They made us there. The first Pelted that ever opened her eyes, Joy, was made on Earth. And Holly, who led the exodus, she was born on Earth too. Lots of our first heroes were Earth natives. Jothan, the engineer who helped maintain the Exodus ships… he was born there. Merit AlltheStars, who kept us organized on the flight… the stories from that time are epic. And that belongs to us.” He toyed with his fork. “So this is a place out of legend for us. The birthworld of all the future Pelted. But it’s also humanity’s birthworld, so it’s complicated by that history.”
“Because you do not like the people who made you,” the Liaison said. “I do not understand this. Would you prefer they have not made you?”
“No! It’s that they made us for the wrong reasons. Most of them. Shandlin didn’t… that’s Joseph Shandlin, the lead engineer on the project that created the Pelted. He made us out of love of the challenge, and because he wanted to create life…. But they took the people he made and did terrible things to them.”
“All of them?” the Liaison said.
“Not all of them, but—” Patrick grimaced. “It’s complicated.”
A pause there that none of them was willing to break, until Patrick sucked in a breath and continued.
“And then there’s the Naysha.”
Qora exchanged speaking glances with the Liaison.
“Those are the aquatic Pelted,” Patrick said, with an undulating motion of a hand, as if to remind them what water was like. He must have realized how ridiculous it looked because his ears flushed pink. “The Naysha were also created by Shandlin, on Earth. But some of them stayed behind with him, because they wanted to. So there’s an entire population of Naysha that are Earth natives, and have been for hundreds of years, compared to the Naysha we took with us on the Exodus and transplanted onto the world we found for them.”
“You must find them very strange,” Qora guessed, because by now he could see the trajectory of the Pelted’s contradictory relationship with anything to do with their makers.
“Incredibly strange. When we first met back up with Earth, during the Rapprochement, and those Naysha talked to us again, they thought we were wrong to go!” He paused. “At least, some of them did.”
“And this Dar Allen was one of them?” the Liaison said. “Was he alive then?”
“No, no. He was born in the Alliance. We didn’t even know those Earth Naysha were still around until after Dar Allen negotiated the treaty….”
“Then why are we going to Earth?” the dragon asked, voicing the confusion that was also afflicting Qora.
“Because after the Rapprochement, the Allen family moved to Earth.” Patrick nodded. “That was high diplomacy there, by anyone’s standards. He made the bed and chose to lie in it. Except that he said he did it because he wanted to, not for any more high-minded reason.”
After Patrick’s departure, Qora said to the Liaison, “These are deep waters, and I am no swimmer.”
“Neither am I,” the Liaison said. “Despite the claims of the Chatcaava of che zuchek. It is a useful metaphor. I cannot see to the bottom of this issue, and I do not feel competent to navigate it.”
“I think even our Pelted compatriots would share that feeling.”
The dragon huffed. “I expect great things of this Earth, to put such fear into the hearts of the Alliance.”
“They ran far to escape it,” Qora agreed. “It must be something to see.”
* * *
But what there was in Terra to inspire such unease in the Pelted Others, neither Qora nor the Liaison could understand when they reached orbit. He and Qora convened in the observation deck for the best view of the birthworld of both humanity and the Pelted and found it… uninspiring. The dragon frowned as he painstakingly manipulated the smartfilm on the window to bring various installations into view. His talons made this an exercise in patience, and Qora thought the tableau appropriate: the scowl, the multiple attempts to make something unworthy of the effort visible, the hissing irritation in the dragon’s voice. “For the species responsible for the creation of the Alliance, this home system is primitive.”
“The Pelted would tell you humans are not responsible for the creation of the Alliance,” Qora said. “Only for the creation of the Pelted.”
“That makes this planet the source of the future that includes a civilization that can make war with mine,” the Liaison said. “It does not look it.”
“Appearances are often deceptive, I’m told.”
“Are appearances not deceptive for your people?”
Qora snorted. “I think we see what we wish to see and any evidence to the contrary is ignored. Does that make the appearance deceptive? Or is that an attempt to place responsibility for not seeing clearly on other shoulders?”
The dragon thrummed in his throat, a contemplative noise, and tapped his taloned fingertips on the glass. “Harsh, but not wrongly observed.”
“It is what I do,” Qora said. “I am an Eye.” He watched the dragon bring forth installation after outpost after station and added, “It does not look primitive to me. More like an old system which has not upgraded its infrastructure because it has too much infrastructure to upgrade.”
“Then they should have reduced those old installations to scrap and built better ones. This system looks impoverished. It makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense from a logical perspective,” Qora said. “But I do not think the Pelted treat their makers rationally.”
“Do you treat your maker rationally?”
“Of course. By loving Him.”
The dragon was silent, pulling another piece of orbital debris up for examination, then flicking it away before examining the next, a small science outpost. “If you are correct, then the Pelted know their makers, and the Faulfenza knows theirs. I wonder if the Chatcaava will ever meet their creators.”
“And will you treat them rationally?”
“We are not a rational species,” the Liaison said. “But I begin to think no species is.”