Stolen Sky

My first night on Earth-Vega was also my first sunset show. The viewing was held on the Sunset Mezzanine, which jutted out from the third floor of the hotel. My human guide, Ruya, gently escorted me through the press of humans to the front railing so that I could see, since we yelvani are no larger than human adolescents.

From the balcony, the hills seemed to tumble over each other down the gentle grade from the hotel to the edge of the forest, which then climbed gradually up toward the horizon until it terminated at the feet of the distant mountains. The breeze was bracing but not so cool that I had to turn up the temperature of my garment. It was perfect. Everything the humans made was perfect.

For that first night, they chose the sunset of a world called Arrinae in the Alpha Carinae system. I knew nothing about this world, but I watched in amazement as the sun of Earth-Vega became the sun of Arrinae. When the sun touched the distant peaks, it changed from white to a smoldering orange and shrunk by at least a third. It painted the sky vivid greens and purples. There was no gradient to the shades—no violets, light greens, or near-blues. The sky was either emerald or amethyst. The clouds swirled into the shifting colors as the shades swam but never mixed.

It was so beautiful that it startled me. I still had so much left to see, not only on Earth-Vega but throughout the galaxy, and I feared nothing would ever measure up to the sunset show—to the first time I saw the humans change the stars.

“How do you do this?” I asked Ruya.

He was an attractive man, the kind I and the other yelvani women would have whispered about when I’d worked at Paradise Yelva, the human resort on my home planet. He had an easy smile that pushed the light from his eyes and warmed whomever he was speaking to. He seemed kind and spoke gently even when I asked him the most useless questions.

He tried to explain the sunset show, but there were too many words I didn’t know and too many things of which I was ignorant. I hadn’t been smart enough for the human university on Yelva and was lucky my nurma, mother of my father, had taught me to windwrite. The humans loved native art. Though some on Yelva said humans loved our native things too much.

“Why did they choose Arrinae?” I asked.

“There’s a native singer here from Arrinae,” Ruya said. “I think his name is Ackchat. It’s his last night, so the show is for him.”

I’d never seen any beings besides humans or yelvani, so I asked Ruya to point out Ackchat. The singer was toward the back. He stood as much above the humans as I did below, and his head, as white as a sun-bleached bone, had a prominent ridge that ran from front to back. Ackchat’s mouth opened into a perfect circle when he spoke, and he stood slumped as if perpetually in the act of being dragged to the ground by his arms. His cheeks seemed heavy too, and his face rested in a frown. It was difficult to tell if he enjoyed the show.

After dinner, I attended Ackchat’s last performance. Ruya and I sat in a private balcony with a perfect view of the stage and the tables of humans below. I was surprised when Ackchat sang in his native language, but when I asked why this was, Ruya said it was expected because humans loved the authenticity. I still wished I could understand the words, but I wanted to learn to appreciate authenticity as well. I had so much to learn from the humans.

I also found that, even though I couldn’t understand the words, Ackchat’s voice was show enough. The lower tones crouched in the air and rumbled in my body while the higher notes filled the room to the lofty ceiling and shook the light as it clattered and tinkled through the crystalline fixtures.

Some parts of the song seemed silent, but Ruya said those notes were simply beyond human or yelvani hearing. I wondered if he and I missed the same parts or if we experienced different sections of the song, but I didn’t ask. Once the show was over, however, I did ask Ruya if it were possible for me to meet Ackchat.

“Of course,” he said through his warm smile. He stood and extended his hand. “Let’s find his guide and we’ll introduce you right now.”

Ackchat stood at the edge of the stage below shaking hands with some of the humans from the audience. Handshaking was their formal greeting as well as their formal farewell, which I still found confusing, but this was not what I meant when I asked to meet Ackchat. I did not want only to have him see my face and hear my name, which seemed to be the purpose of human handshakes. I wanted to meet him as yelvani do. I wanted to speak to him—to learn about him.

“Could I meet him privately?” I said. “I have only ever met humans and yelvani. I am worried I will act wrongly.”

Ruya seemed confused and a little worried—he was a kind man. “I’ll find his guide and see what I can arrange. Stay here.”

Ruya patted my shoulder as he passed and sealed the clear door of our balcony behind him.

The line to meet Ackchat dwindled over the next few minutes, and the auditorium was nearly empty by the time he left the stage. Ruya still had not returned, and I stared at that lonely stage for several more minutes after the last human left, cursing myself for not accepting Ruya’s initial offer.

I nearly jumped from my seat when someone knocked on the door. Ackchat towered in the doorway and gestured toward the lock panel for me to let him in. I rushed from my chair to pass my chip over the scanner, but after the door receded into the floor, I had no clue what to do next. I panicked and stuck out my hand.

“That is for humans,” he said and left my hand unshaken. Instead, he gently touched the ridge on his head with both of his thick fingers then turned the open palm of that hand toward me. “That is how we greet one another on my world.”

Ackchat waited patiently as I stood dumb for a moment, but I eventually understood and extended my nervous fingers toward his face, which I could not reach. I took his hand and placed it on my cheek, and he lowered his head to rest in my palm. His eyes were much smaller than I’d noticed before, and they had large, black pupils that went almost corner to corner. He had two small orifices that seemed to do his breathing tucked in behind the rear undercorners of his jaw, and his skin quivered at my touch, bristling against my flesh like a stone-polishing brush. It must have been covered in billions of short, invisible hairs.

“That is a wonderful greeting,” Ackchat said. “I hope you haven’t shown it to a human. May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, confused and still numb to what was happening. I felt as if I was floating through a scene in a human simulator—as if reality could crush the moment in an unforeseeable instant.

He pulled a small cube from a crease of his jacket and tossed it onto the floor, where it quickly unfolded and expanded into a chair, the seat of which came to my waist rather than the middle of my legs. “An interstellar resort, and all the chairs are made as though only humans will fill them,” he said. “It makes quite a statement, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know …” I felt adrift. With humans, I was at least familiar. I could read their expressions and understand what was meant or expected, but I couldn’t even tell if Ackchat was smiling or frowning.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m babbling. I hear you wanted to meet me.”

His expression still told me nothing, but his voice was softer.

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to tell you your song was beautiful.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” Ackchat sounded rehearsed but pleasant, as if some germ of earnestness remained from when he’d used to mean it. We sat in silence for a moment before he said, “I don’t mean to rush you, but was that all you wanted to say? I’m not sure how much time we have.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your schedule. Ruya said he would check with your guide—”

“You’re not interrupting, and your guide did no such thing. Neither he nor my own handler know I’m here.”

“Then how—”

“I heard you. To sing in the full range of sound, one must hear the full range. Not even the best human technology is as sensitive to sound as a fully trained Clachen singer.”

He seemed to swell in his seat, which made me smile because it was the first time I felt I understood him. Pride in one’s people—in one’s art—was apparently universal.

“Clachen? I thought your world was called Arrinae.”

“Humans like to name things before they know whether they already have names or not.”

I walked over and took the seat opposite Ackchat. “I’ve heard humans call Yelva Trappist-G.”

“They do like to make it seem as though they created everything, don’t they?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d heard elders grumble such things, but hadn’t expected it from a traveled performer like Ackchat—one who had been lifted, as I had, up into the stars by the grace of human generosity. They’d lit our homes, cleaned our water, and taught us about the universe. I did not understand how ones who gave so much could ever be called thieves.

“What was your song about?” I said, trying to change the subject.

He looked over the edge of the balcony toward the stage. It was as if he were watching himself—as if his voice still filled the room. “It was a very old song about a battle of perfections—the humans call them gods. They fight in the sky for control of the light.”

“That sounds fascinating.”

“Most beings have myths about eclipses.” Ackchat shrugged, but the motion was exaggerated—clearly something he’d picked up.

I was about to ask him how long he’d been performing when his eyes jumped from me to the clear door and traced a path down the unseeable corridor beyond the opaque walls.

“I’m sorry, but we will have to cut our talk short. Your guide just got on the lift. He’s heading this way.” Ackchat stood and grabbed the back of his chair, which collapsed upward into his palm like magic.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. We were supposed to sit and laugh and discuss our home worlds. He was supposed to tell me how amazing his life had been, performing all over the galaxy—seeing unimaginable worlds and people—how he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“Wait!” I said, not sure what I wanted him to wait for—grasping for that one question I needed him to answer.

“I’m sorry, I really need to—”

“What is your favorite place?” I said. “Of all the places you’ve been, which was the most wonderful?”

At first, Ackchat seemed surprised. His mouth sat open in that perfect circle and his eyes locked on mine. Then he closed his mouth and took one sweeping stride back from the door toward me. He placed his living, rasping palm on my cheek and lifted my hand to rest on his. “Home,” he said. “They take you everywhere but home.” Then he left.

A few moments later, Ruya came in and told me that he’d spoken to Ackchat’s guide and that he was, unfortunately, unavailable. I stormed past him without a word and went up to my room. I was angry and disappointed and nothing was right. I thought that maybe if I slept, it would all be better tomorrow.

By the next day, Ackchat was gone and another performer from another world was on the schedule. My shows were late afternoon, before dinner and sunset, and the veteran performers headlined the evenings. I knew I could be a headliner if my matinee shows went well. So, I tried to think about my conversation with Ackchat as little as possible because the more I replayed it in my head, the more confused and angry it made me.

Ruya told me the new entertainer was a poet named Sadiq from Tajawuz in the Antares system. Sadiq was serpentine and seemed to swim through the air on a wave of brilliance caught under her translucent frills and spans of thin tissue that shimmered like the pink crystals of the yelvani mountainsides. I wanted to speak with her, but I feared I could not do so without bowing to my gnawing desire to touch her. There was also the risk of another disappointment.

The headliners tended to stay for only one or two nights, and Sadiq was of the single-show variety. So that night the sunset show was of Tajawuz. The white sun took on a deep red shade and grew to three or four times its normal size as it approached the horizon. Radial splashes of yellow, orange, red, pink, blue, and deep purple filled the sky like so many layers of colored sand.

The sun was so large that the colors wound all the way across the sky to the rear horizon. When I looked straight above, all I saw was pink and purple. It seemed a sunset befitting a being as beautiful as Sadiq.

When I looked over, however, Sadiq seemed different. She no longer flowed with the air but writhed against it. For the first time, her levitation looked like defiance, as if she warred with the air and ground, resolved to be untouched.

I worried that the humans had gotten her sunset wrong, but when she came on stage later that night, she seemed as radiant and joyous as she had throughout the day. I was glad Ruya had agreed to sit at one of the tables down by the stage rather than on a balcony. She was so beautiful up close.

“I call this piece, ‘Stolen,’ and I have written it especially for you all this evening,” she said in Standard rather than her native tongue. Then she read:

My boy, he is mine no more.

My son was taken in the fire

with my red and my orange,

atop the sea of blue and green.

My son now lies far from me,

though his face fills the sky.

I thought I did remember him,

but this visage says I lie.

His captors make him theirs.

They love his beauty and his strength.

But while they marvel at his size

and call themselves his masters,

they forget the laws of sea and sky:

What sinks does later rise.

The audience clapped a mixture of polite nervousness and disappointment.

“She should have spoken Tajai,” Ruya whispered. “It’s much prettier than Standard.”

“Do humans speak Tajai?” I said. “Would they have understood?”

He was polite, like a mature speaking to young, as he said, “Understanding isn’t the point. Beauty is.”

That didn’t seem right to me, but Ruya knew more about such things, so I said nothing. It seemed to me that Sadiq’s sadness was beautiful because I could understand it, and that pretty words without meaning would’ve been like so much wind.

The humans near the back got up from their seats and filed toward the door. None came forward. No line formed to meet Sadiq even though she stood as ready to receive them as Ackchat had.

“Where are they going?” I asked. “Is it because she doesn’t have hands to shake?”

“No, no,” Ruya said. “When hands are lacking, you bow, like so.” He stood, tucked his arms gently to his sides, and bent at the waist with his eyes closed.

“So why aren’t they going to congratulate her on her poem?”

“I—” Ruya glanced toward the stage as if to gauge the distance. “She should have spoken Tajai,” he said, as if repeating that phrase would somehow make me understand.

It did, and understanding made me furious. I looked up at the stage again, where Sadiq floated, confident as ever even in the face of the quietly emptying theater.

I stood. “I would like to meet her,” I said, already two steps toward the stage ramp.

Ruya calmly followed, to the edge of the stage and no farther, but I could tell by the hard set of his jaw behind his close-lipped smile that he would have stopped me if he could have done so without causing a scene.

I considered reaching out to greet Sadiq as I had Ackchat, but it didn’t feel right with Ruya and the few other humans there, so I bowed. Sadiq did the same, but the absence of arms and legs made it little different than a nod.

Up close, Sadiq was even more incredible. She was somewhat transparent, except for her head, but I couldn’t see any organs or bones inside her graceful, floating frame. It was as if she were made completely of pink and purple light—a beautiful spirit in worldly form. She had two pupils at the center of each electric orange iris, and these pairs of pupils twirled and danced in a celebration of sight itself. What did the world look like through those?

It was only after Sadiq blinked a few times in quick succession that I realized how long I’d been staring.

“I loved your poem,” I said too quickly.

“I am glad it spoke to you.” Sadiq’s voice and body glowed with a brief, aural radiance that made her response seem so much more genuine than Ackchat’s I’m glad you enjoyed it.

“Yes,” I said, excited, bold. “It made me think of my mother and how much I miss her, as I’m sure your son misses you.”

There was no glow this time, and her smile tried but failed to cover it up. “How long have you been touring?” she said.

“This is my first location.”

“Ah, a fresh stellification.”

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know the word, and therefore didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t worry, young one,” Sadiq said. “It’s just a term some humans use for us—it means they’ve made us into stars.”

“Oh, I see. I understand.”

Sadiq’s eyes whirled and stormed—a defiant strength, twisted by sadness all the same—as she said, “No, but you will.” The heavy moment passed in an instant though, and Sadiq brightened. “Would it be all right if I gave you a gift?”

“I would be honored.”

Sadiq’s honest glee radiated from her spinning pupils and traveled slowly down her length until a twinkle, like a tiny star, rested on the tip of her tail.

“How would you like my poem to keep with you forever? It will be always available in your mind, so you can never forget it. Think of it as a signed copy.”

“That sounds incredible.”

Illustration by Anh Le

Sadiq’s smile was light itself. “Focus on my eyes,” she said. “This will feel strange.”

I focused on the ocular dance of her pupil pairs within those liquid-fire irises as the sparkle of her tail passed briefly through the edge of my vision. I felt a shiver touch the side of my head. Sadiq’s skin was a static tingle—like touching a piece of metal so hot or cold that it’s hard to tell which it is. Then the sensation went deeper, and I knew it was warmth.

For a second, I feared Sadiq’s tail was swimming into my skull, but her eyes told me to stay calm. I smelled the spulerendle seeds of my childhood—spicy and cloying—and heard my nurma telling me that the wind of Yelva herself is the writer and that we are only the colors of the breeze. Then those things were gone and I heard, saw, and felt nothing but the gravity of Sadiq’s eyes. It was in this place—this ready and waiting space of my mind—where she put her poem. She made it a part of me. I think I fell in love with her before I passed out, but I don’t fully remember.

The next day was my last, and I was scheduled as the headliner. After my fainting episode, Ruya doted on me all morning. He really was such a kind, helpful man. Throughout the day, I rubbed the spot where Sadiq’s tail had touched. I thought of her poem often. It was magical because her voice read it in my head, so it was as if she was there with me.

As the day wore on, I became less nervous for my performance and more anxious about my yelvani sunset show. Part of me was happy, but another part worried all day, will they think my sunset is beautiful?

Finally, the moment came. As the sun entered the final quarter of its descent, it went from whitish to deep blue. Then it fractured in the sky—a fiery ball made of innumerable glass beads. The more it sank, the more kaleidoscoping patterns of sparkles surrounded by radial rainbows were spawned, and these flowed into more sparkles and rainbows in a seemingly endless cycle that undulated away from and toward the sinking star like a tide.

“What does that?” Ruya asked, as if he’d forgotten to breathe.

I was going to tell him of the Oldest Ones—all yelvani who had lived and died—who slept in the sky and danced the fire below the water to give the living rest, but then I looked again.

The Oldest Ones could not have been there. They were on Yelva, always. So I could not tell him how this sunset was made. In my silence, a nearby human said something about methane crystals and the thermosphere, but I was too confused to follow.

All I could do was stare at the way the light flowed between sparkles and rainbows and wonder at it like any other visitor. All I could do was look at this beautiful thing that was mine but also not mine. It was theirs. It was every bit as wondrous as the sunset that was mine, but there was nothing of it to understand—nothing to tether me to it.

I wept then as I remembered the elders’ words about the fruit from our trees and stones from our ground that the humans loved so much. I thought of Ackchat, Sadiq, myself, and others like us—other stellifications. Were we just another kind of sunset show?

I gave thanks that none of my village would see this. It was better that they never know they had been right—that the humans hadn’t even left us our sky.

Ruya only smiled at me and nodded. He probably thought I wept for joy or gratitude. He probably thought that my tears were beautiful, but that was only because he did not understand—could not understand even if he tried—because all skies were his.