Not all Witches were equal. Tembi had learned this at a very early age: tradition held that the Deep called each Witch to its service when they were adults, and yet it had yanked Tembi from her home planet of Adhama when she was barely eight.
She knew she should have gone straight to Lancaster to check in, to tell them about the bomb and the moon, about everything except the childish shouting match. Kalais knew his duty; she knew hers. Except procedure stated that Tembi needed to report in with a senior Witch, and nothing about going to Lancaster itself, which she did not want to do until she was sure she wouldn’t unload on those useless old walnuts and shout them into oblivion. Besides, of the two senior Witches she’d trust with her life, only one of them lived at Lancaster.
The other…
Well, after a bad day at work and a nasty fight with your ex, sometimes you needed your mother.
Halfway across the galaxy from the Stross system was a planet that would eat you alive if you stood in the same place for too long. Terraforming gone wrong (or poorly planned and executed) had resulted in fast-growing plants that were slightly too eager to break a body down into their component molecules. Woe to the fool who chose to stand in one place while they were still using theirs.
Tembi’s second mother loved it. She said it reminded her of home.
Matindi was a short woman who carried herself with the no-nonsense grace of a busy queen. She had the ageless face and body of a mature Witch, and the painted markings the Deep had chosen for her were the branch of a tree, fresh in springtime, its leaves only a few shades darker than the pale green of her own skin.
She was quite possibly the most pragmatic creature in the known galaxy.
“You’re sure he went straight to Earth to warn them?”
“Giant gods, yes. Yes, Matindi, I’m sure,” snarled Tembi. “Let’s be sure to focus on my ex-boyfriend and his overinflated sense of duty, and not on how the war has moved to the sector beside my home planet!”
Matindi smiled and went back to potting a rosebush. As roses went, it wasn’t much to look at, with pink petals and green leaves that resembled old leather, and thorns wicked enough to sever a finger. It was one of those rare Earth varieties bred to be vicious enough to survive on Matindi’s homeworld, and she had brought it with her to this backwards planet when she had retired.
Her house was in the center of a clearing, at the edge of a village filled with people as tenacious as she was. They were homesteaders and farmers, bound to live as far away from civilization as possible. They had claimed this abandoned disaster of a planet as their own, cloaked their buildings in stasis fields, and kept the native vegetation from their own crops with salted and stoned earth, followed by hearty applications of good old-fashioned fire. Matindi’s cottage was small and clean, with vines from her homeworld staking claim to its white-painted walls. The structure itself was heavy-duty plass, and had probably rolled off a production line a thousand at a time, but she had nailed enough handmade pieces to its walls to give it character. Matindi had even made the doors herself from wood taken from trees which grew on a dozen different planets. She wasn’t much of a carpenter: the doors shut fairly well, but could only be opened with a good, solid kicking.
“Help me with the chores, and then we’ll go inside and talk,” Matindi said, as she forgot herself and dusted her hands off on her blue robes. She wrinkled her nose at the dark handprints. “Ah, mildest hells.”
The stains vanished.
She frowned. “Leave them, dear. Gardening is all about consequences, and it does me good to remember that.”
The handprints reappeared.
::SORRY::
The Deep only spoke aloud when it felt safe, and it often spoke in whole sentences around Matindi. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere; the earth shook, and some of the less tenacious plants stopped their forward advance on Tembi’s ankles.
Matindi reached out, as if giving a reassuring hug to a young child. “There’s no need to apologize. Want to help us feed the animals?”
At that, a bevy of round birds plucked up their heads from the nearby garden. Tembi and the Deep busied themselves scattering handfuls of seeds. Chickens were strange, alien creatures, somewhat reminiscent of ducks but with misplaced self-confidence. As the plants seemed to leave them alone, Tembi assumed they had come from Matindi’s home planet, too.
The goat? There was no doubt that the goat came from old Earth stock. The creature was pure stubbornness from its curly horns to its stubby tail. Whenever a green tendril snaked its way across the rocks which separated the nearby forest from Matindi’s gardens, the goat would snap it up.
“Aren’t you worried it’ll eat the plants you want to keep?” Tembi called to Matindi.
Across the yard, Matindi laughed. “Mine don’t move as much,” she said. “She’s learned to appreciate a challenge.”
After half an hour of chores, Tembi felt much better. Work for work’s sake had little appeal, but completing it lifted the spirits. She looked at the compost bucket full of native weeds that had, somehow, found their way into the garden, and told herself they weren’t squirming towards her in revenge. She went to the dehydration bin on the far side of the yard, chucked the wriggling things inside, and pressed the button to suck all traces of water from the tiny monsters.
“Done?” Matindi was holding the front of her robes to form a small pocket, a handful of eggs nestled within its folds.
“I think so,” Tembi said. “Deep?”
A pile of weeds appeared inside the dehydration bin, squashed themselves down, and crumbled into dust.
“Good job, Deep,” Matindi said. “I’m thinking about making cookies. Would you like that?”
::YES!:: The disembodied voice was eager.
Tembi grinned. As best as she could tell, the Deep didn’t eat. Cookies might as well have had hooves or claws for all it cared. Its eagerness came from the happy ritual of baking, with Matindi sifting and measuring and mixing and complaining in her peaceful way, and Tembi watching from her usual chair at the kitchen table.
Into the house (with one well-placed hip against the door to force it open), where the floors looked like stone and the walls looked like old plaster, and were neither. There was more greenery inside, with hanging plants looped around the windows and bundles of herbs drying from the rafters. It smelled of tamed living things, and very slightly of cinnamon.
Tembi took her usual seat at the table. Across from her, one of the other chairs pulled itself out, then shuffled forward, as if an invisible human was making themselves comfortable.
“Matindi—”
“If I had to guess, I’d say the Deep brought you to that moon as a warning,” Matindi said, as she began to bustle around the tiny kitchen, pulling pans and plates out of their cupboards, and ingredients from the stasis box. “It didn’t know about the bomb until it went off, and it brought you there to learn about this new threat.
“Where’s the threat coming from?” she added. “Who knows? But it’s obvious why it chose to drag Kalais into this.”
“Really.” Tembi’s tone put her arid homeworld to shame. “How?”
“You have no idea what to do about that boy. He has no idea what to do about you. In a situation where the Deep doesn’t know what to do, it’s going to try to match up a Witch’s skills with their emotions.” Matindi began cracking eggs with a little more force than necessary. “It chose correctly, by the way. When it comes to its Witches, you and Kalais are as close as it can come to demolition experts. Except you couldn’t put your problems aside and stop shouting about how the Deep is a person.”
“But it is a—”
“Yes, honey, I know. I’ve known since before your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother was born.” The eggs were set aside in their own separate bowl, a generous scoop of butter on a small dish beside it. “The Deep is a vulnerable person, one we’ve been exploiting for the better part of three thousand years. You can’t say that because nobody wants to hear it.”
The empty chair across the table began to wiggle, as if a small child was swinging its legs back and forth.
“Anything to add, dear?” Matindi asked the Deep.
A hesitant ::NO:: rattled the crockery.
“Are you sure?” asked Tembi.
::YES:: This was said with equal hesitation.
Matindi set the mixing bowl on the counter and slowly asked, “Do you want to say something but you’re not sure how to say it?”
::YES::
Two questions asked back-to-back, but there was no hesitation this time. Poor Deep, Tembi thought. Smarter than all of us put together, and unable to tell us what we need to hear.
“Would you like to speak through me?” Matindi asked. “It might help you organize your thoughts.”
When Tembi was younger, she had been unable to hear the Deep. It had spoken to her through Matindi, using her second mother’s voice as its own. When the Deep spoke through a Witch, it spoke more clearly, as if the process of filtering its thoughts through a human mind distilled them down to a point where it could communicate them to others. Matindi had warned her that it was not a pleasant experience. “Aggressively sobering” was the phrase she had used, and if you weren’t used to it, you blacked out and awoke with your mind almost offensively clear. She also said the Deep didn’t enjoy it much, either, except at parties when its Witches were too drunk for their own thoughts to get in its way.
There was a long pause where Matindi appeared to brace herself for whatever was to come. Finally, the Deep answered. ::NO::
“It’s all right, honey,” Matindi said, as she picked up the bowl. “When you can think of a way to tell us, we’re ready to listen.”
The empty chair stopped moving. The air in the kitchen shifted, as if the weight of a great and binding thunderstorm had passed.
“Poor Deep,” Tembi said, mostly to herself.
“Poor you,” Matindi replied, as she scraped the wet mix into the dry, and told the bowl to stir them together. “I’ve never been able to figure out if it has the same sense of ethics as humans. Maybe it comprehends that the human race treats it as an all-purpose slave, and it doesn’t care one whit.”
“That doesn’t matter to me,” Tembi said. “I can’t live with that.” She paused…considering. If she was going to tell Matindi, it should be here, now, in the safety of this little house a million klicks from nowhere. Matindi kept saying she wanted to be kept out of Lancaster’s politics, but—
In that pause, Matindi said, “I know.”
“Really?” Tembi looked up, startled, wondering what she had done to give her small rebellion away. “How?”
“I struggle with it, too,” Matindi sighed. She set the bowl down, took six quick steps across her small house, and kicked the front door open. “Oy! Hooligans!” she shouted. “Cookies!
“Set those to baking,” she said to Tembi, as she disappeared into a back room.
Tembi ladled out the dough onto the bakepans as small children began to flood into the kitchen, racing inside almost as fast as if they had been dropped off by the Deep. Almost all of them were Earth-normal, but they had been around Matindi long enough to be used to strange people who came and went, and they didn’t give Tembi’s ears more than a glance. Some had met Tembi before, and begged her to do the trick with the knife, the one where she stabbed it into the meat of her own arm and the knife’s blade bent!
“Shhh,” Tembi said, as she picked up a knife.
“Don’t you dare!” came Matindi’s voice from the back room.
The kids groaned in despair as Tembi went to set down the knife, and then, as she whipped it around and thrust the blade at her arm with all of her might, they cheered!
“Tembi!”
“Dropped it!” Tembi called out, as she held up the bent knife and her unmarked arm, and winked at children.
“How did you do that?!” one of them whispered.
“My skin is different than yours,” Tembi said, as she rubbed her fingertips together. The sound was that of two small, rough-faced stones grating against each other. “My home planet has violent storms, and they blow around a lot of sand,” she explained. “If you’re caught outside in those storms, they can strip your skin right off your body. My ancestors chose to mod themselves up for protection.” She showed them her second eyelids, the semi-transparent ones which let in enough light and details to allow for a careful stumble towards shelter, and how she could fold back her high-pointed ears to keep out airborne detritus. “We did it to keep ourselves safe.”
“My da says people get modded to look pretty,” one of the kids said, with an emphasis on “pretty” which made it sound more like a curse than a compliment.
“That does happen,” Tembi admitted. “There are a lot of planets out there, and some of them are safe for humans without genetic mods. If you buy a planet, you can decide to live on it however you want.” A bit of a dire lie, but she wasn’t about to get into intergalactic policymaking with a pack of kids. “If you choose to mod yourself and your own children, what’s the harm?”
“My da says it’s wrong,” said the same child.
Tembi looked at him, at his Earth-normal hair and eyes and skin and everything, his head-to-toes bog-standard Earth-normal body, and her heart twisted a little. Even here, she thought. Here, where we’re half a galaxy away from everything. “I know that when I was your age, I was caught outside in a couple of storms,” she said. “I wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for the decisions my ancestors made. I’m grateful for my mods.”
The child ignored her, his attention firmly transferred to the cookies slowly turning golden brown on the bakepans.
Matindi emerged from her bedroom. She had changed into white robes with silver trim, a matching scarf to cover her head. The painted leaves on her cheek had taken on a slight silver cast, as if they were filtering moonlight. Tembi thought she should have a sword in one hand and a shield in the other.
“Gather ’round, children,” Matindi said, as she pulled one of the bakepans to her. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
General protests followed, entwined with specific complaints about the promise versus the availability of cookies.
“They’re not ready yet,” Matindi said, as she poked a doughy cookie with a green fingernail. “So while we wait, let me tell you about how I was called to become a Witch.”
Oh, well, this was exciting! The children knocked about the kitchen like small rolling balls until they found places to rest.
“Once upon a time, there was a little green girl with big feet,” Matindi began, as she stood on one leg to wiggle the toes on her oversized foot at the children. There was an appropriate amount of giggling. “She lived on an entire planet of green people with big feet, as they were all born before the bioengineers had figured out some critical gene alignments. But it was fine, because she didn’t know there were other places where the people looked different.”
“Didn’t you watch the channels?” shouted one of the children.
Matindi raised an authoritative eyebrow, and the dissident fell silent. “No, the little girl didn’t watch any of the channels,” she continued. “The channels that you know of weren’t invented yet. People on different planets couldn’t talk to each other at all.”
Gasps all around.
“She listened to songs her parents approved of, and met people her parents approved of, and had very little knowledge of the great big galaxy out there, because she was a very spoiled little girl with very wealthy parents who gave her everything she wanted, and the idea that there was more to life than what existed in front of her own face never occurred to her.” Matindi paused to check the bakepans, and then continued. “One day, when she was twenty, she was going to marry a man her parents approved of, and have children they approved of, and nobody would ever be a terrible disappointment to anybody.
“But on the day of her wedding, the man didn’t show up.”
“Was he dead?!”
Matindi shut her eyes; Tembi had the sneaking suspicion she was slowly counting backwards, Five, four, three, two, one… When she opened her eyes again, Matindi said, “No, Kyle. It would have been easier for the girl if he had died. He decided he didn’t want to marry a spoiled, selfish woman, and he chose to run away instead.
“The girl was very sad. No one had ever hurt her like that. She thought her heart was breaking. And then she heard a voice in her head, a voice as big as the world. It didn’t speak in words but nevertheless she understood it, and it promised the girl that if she came with it and became a Witch, she would never be hurt again.
“The girl agreed.” The first bakepan chimed, and converted itself into racks so the cookies could cool. Matindi swatted greedy hands away as she continued: “She became one of the first true Witches, people to whom the Deep gave the choice to leave their past lives and join with a singular power that was remaking the shape of the galaxy.”
Matindi paused, turning to look through a small windows. “Nobody knows why the Deep started choosing Witches to serve as its representatives. Nobody knows why it comes to people who have suffered heartache. Nobody knows why it came to our galaxy in the first place! But it was the best thing that ever happened to that spoiled little girl, because once she saw what was truly out there, she finally started to grow up.” She turned back to the baketrays. A spatula was found, and the first cookies were removed from the cooling racks and shuffled into greedy, grasping hands. As she passed them around, Matindi asked the children, “Could you imagine what life would be like without the Deep?”
Most of the children shook their heads, along with a small chorus of, “No!”
“Neither could that girl. But as time went on, the girl saw that things weren’t fair. Not for the Deep, and not for the people who used the Deep to get around the galaxy. It made her very sad, and she tried to stop being a Witch.”
Tembi, who had been watching the cookies cool on the second bakepan, looked up in surprise. This part of the story was new to her. Matindi noticed, and nodded. “Yes,” she told the children, and Tembi, too. “The girl tried to stop being a Witch altogether. But that made the Deep sad. The girl didn’t want to hurt her wonderful friend, so she spent many, many years trying to find a way that would make things fair, and then everybody would be happy. She never could.” There was a single long pause, and then: “So, here we are. Nothing is fair and nobody is happy, but at least we have cookies, and we can take minor comfort from that.” She loaded the remaining cookies onto the second rack, and placed them in the arms of the oldest child. “Hanif, dear, give these pans to your mother, and tell your father he’s to look after my goat. I’m taking the chickens with me.”
The children were herded to the door. There was some kicking, followed by some complaining, and then they were gone, with only Tembi and Matindi standing in the suddenly quiet house.
“I didn’t know,” Tembi said.
“That I tried to quit, instead of taking a sabbatical? Oh, yes, many times. I’ve honestly lost count.” Matindi closed the door and made sure it was firmly shut. “Now, Deep.” Beyond the windows, the colors of the bright day shifted from the usual green to a rainbow hue, and then settled on blue and gold. “One day, I’ll finally stop being a spoiled little girl who keeps trying to run from her responsibilities. Until then, the two of you will just have to keep dragging me out of retirement,” Matindi said, as she kicked open the door again.
In front of them stood a gleaming white-and-gold spire, its tallest floors punching up against a cloudless blue sky, rising high beyond the rooftops of the ancient village which lay at its feet.
The Deep had brought them home to Lancaster.