Starfire Saga, page 30
“Did you love her?”
“In a way, yes, but not the way I love you. Enough?”
I almost said yes, and I almost said no, but I felt I had no right to say anything, because I had never been able to say I loved him. I knew—or thought I knew—what love was; it was what I had felt in the hospital room on Werd when Lanya and her parents had been totally engulfed by it. I didn’t feel that depth of devotion, of desperation, for him, and I couldn’t test if he really felt it for me, so I couldn’t say I loved him. Love was alien to my nature. Anger, petulance, selfishness, arrogance—those I knew very well. But love had always been what others felt for me, not what I felt. The night before had been difficult for me, and I hadn’t a notion of how well I had succeeded. I wondered if Shantiah had been better at it than I was.
And then I realized that it was possible for me to feel insecure, and I put the brush down with a snap that startled me. “Is it because I look like the High Lady?” I demanded.
“There may come a time when I agree to answer that question,” Jemeret said carefully, “but I won’t answer it now. Get dressed, and I’ll show you around the valley.”
He went out.
I thought about his hands on me in the dark, thought about the fact that I had nowhere else to go, no other life than this one, trembled, shook off all the feelings, and searched in the trunk for a heavy tunic and leggings.
A few months before graduation, I was introduced to a handsome young Com counselor-assistant named Lamar Acifica. He was breathtakingly good-looking, his features regular and even a little delicate, his body well made, if a little on the soft side. I thought he was gorgeous, and I made no secret of it to Coney or Kray.
“He’s a puffball,” Kray said dismissively, but he glowered at me when I laughed at that.
Coney looked more concerned, and I read him quickly, to learn that he was feeling apprehensive. At that time it seemed to me the height of bad taste on his part—I thought Coney was wondering if I would seduce Lamar the way I had seduced him two years earlier. It was clear to me, of course, that Lamar desired me, and the sting would not have been needed if I had chosen to take him to my bed. I didn’t want to remember about Coney and me, and therefore I didn’t want Coney to remind me of it.
“If I want to have sex with him, I will,” I said to Coney. Out of the corner of my eye, without having to read him, I felt Kray’s anger start rising up, and I instantly stung him for it.
“Ronica, we all know you’ll sleep with anyone you damn well please,” Coney said mildly, ignoring the fact that I had never slept with anyone but him.
“Anyone but me,” Kray said hotly, and Coney, always uncomfortable in the presence of Kray’s anger, turned away.
“You,” I said to Kray, “have never deserved it.” The provocation was very deliberate, very childish. I had never forgotten the fight Kray and I had had as youngsters, and I knew from the rage that flooded him that he hadn’t either. “You broke my arm,” I reminded him insufferably. “You don’t love me or admire me, you don’t want to be my friend anymore, you just want to tell me what to do! Well, soon—”
He came at me, with a suddenness I didn’t expect, but I was nevertheless ready. In our first fight I had not been fully trained, and my physical capabilities were more highly developed than the mental ones. But now I was at the peak of my mental powers. Instead of even trying to defend myself physically, I lashed at him with the sting.
Coney had started forward to get between us, but as Kray staggered back, he halted in his place. I got hold of the pain and fear receptors in Kray’s brain as he reeled from the first lash in confusion, and I made him go back across the room away from me until he was sitting on a couch, shaking his head.
I withdrew, soothing the neural pathways as I left, because I really didn’t want to hurt him—just show him that I was the master. “I’m sorry, Kray,” I said lightly, “but I can’t let you hurt me anymore. I can’t ever let anyone hurt me anymore.”
Kray was looking at me without anger now, but with something I read quickly as discouragement. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said. “You always push me until I just react.”
“I should have thought you’d have learned better control by now,” I said, not meaning to be cruel, but I saw Coney stifle a wince and look away.
I was somehow upset that Coney was disturbed by all this. From my point of view, it had been going on for a long time, and the latest incident was just one in a familiar sequence. I made a face at him, turned and started away, only to be stopped by his unexpectedly sharp words. “We grew up together, Ronica. Somehow I thought you’d have learned to care about us.”
I spun back to the two men, but the expressions on their faces were such that I couldn’t bear it. Kray could never admit hurt openly, but I felt it behind the discouragement he was radiating. Coney was always able to be openly hurt, and I refused to read him past the expression on his face.
I said, more to him than to Kray, “You don’t understand that I always have to protect myself.”
Coney nodded, sad now. “I do understand,” he contradicted. “What I question is why protecting yourself always means attacking us.”
“Leave it,” Kray said to him, the edge of futility still on his voice. “It’s too late, and we’ve come too far.”
It was a very long time before I knew how right he was.
* * *
My tour of the valley took most of the morning and involved a stop at the house of women, where Shenefta greeted me with a hug and Jemeret introduced me to a beautiful older woman named Alissa. She was embroidering a set of talma borders. The work was exquisite, and I thought I recognized it.
“Did you make the borders for the talma I wore on the Day of the Fire?” I asked her curiously, admiring the red and gold patterns she formed with her nimble fingers.
She smiled at me, and there was something familiar about the smile. “Very likely,” she said. “I’m responsible for a great deal of the embroidery here. They sell some of my work, even to the Elden, but they keep more. If you show me the talma, I could tell you if I did the borders.”
Jemeret watched us speaking to one another with a curious expression on his face. She looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “So. I heard she brought a klawit with her. Do I get to meet it, as well?”
His eyes twinkled. “He’s Ronica’s klawit. Perhaps you’d like to come join us for dinner, and you can meet him then.”
“And see my talma,” I said, uncertain why I was feeling a little uneasy at the interaction.
“My time is largely uncommitted,” Alissa said with a smile, her hands flying unerringly over colors, threads, and cloth.
“Tomorrow night, then?” Jemeret’s voice was rich with warmth.
She agreed, and Jemeret led me back outside into the crisp, clear day. I looked at him curiously, and he said, “That was my mare.” I stared at him, mouth open, until he said with a laugh, “Did you think I didn’t have one?”
“You said your parents were lost to you,” I reminded him.
“My sire and na-sire are gone,” he said. “My mother moved back to the house of women, and after I took the office of chief, she refused to give me any more guidance or advice.” He looked away from me. “I consider that lost, in a way.” And before I could say anything else, he went on. “Come with me. We’re going to the temple, and then I need to leave you with Venacrona while I make certain that we’re ready to face our first Severance Storm.”
We strode together through the snow toward the temple building. I slid my hands into the slits in my cloak, thinking that it had been years since I’d been in deep snow.
Coney and Kray and I had once been permitted to play in a field of snow. We couldn’t have been older than nine or ten, and I remember snow fights, gales of laughter, the building and subsequent destruction of a snow fort, and a great deal more which fell into the category of utter nonsense. I thought of it now as a truly golden day, when we were permitted to be ordinary children. If only we could have held on to that feeling. If only—
The temple was the only elaborately decorated building in Stronghome, if smaller than the wagon sheds were. It had three levels, the lowest being an assembly hall that could hold about half the tribe. Jemeret left me at the doorway with a fast kiss on my nose, and I climbed the steps to the second level, where there were five separate worship chambers, one decorated in each of the four star colors and one in all four. I stepped into that one for a moment, seriously tempted to linger, before I continued up to the third level, which contained what was called the observatory and Venacrona’s rooms. The assistant priest and priestess lived in the house of men and the house of women.
No one was in the temple as I went through, so I guessed they were all out helping with the work. I almost went back to the starfire chamber. I wanted to reach out to the starfire again, and I wanted it to answer me. I glanced down the third-floor corridor and saw that Venacrona’s sitting-room door was open and he had seen me, so I put my head in.
He looked up from the scrolls spread across the desk in front of him. “Come in, Ronica.” As I did, he fished among the scrolls, looking for one in particular. “Sit.” He indicated the armless chair across from him, and I sat, watching him unroll and toss aside scrolls until he finally found the one he was looking for. “Here,” he said with satisfaction, and showed it to me.
It was a star chart, drawn with this nameless world at the center, for I recognized the pattern on the paper. “We need to start gathering records on you, for you are our lady now. Can you show me which star you came from?” And he looked at me expectantly.
I was completely nonplussed, because of course a two-dimensional starmap looks totally different from widely separated vantage points, and I had never seen this angle before I crashed here. I took the most expeditious way out. I pointed at the table about a handsbreadth off the scroll and said, “Somewhere out here.” It was easy to read his disbelief, but he was not about to call his lady a liar. He took a pen and made a note.
“What were the names of your sire and mare?” he asked next.
I decided to be honest about this. “I never knew their names,” I said. “I was raised by strangers.”
He thought about that for a second or two, then wrote, Parented by the stars.
I seized the opportunity. “The starfire—where is it when you’re not doing services?”
“Offworld. It enters the receiving bowls when we call to it.”
“It’s alive, you know.”
“Of course.” But the casualness of his affirmation made me aware that he meant it in a different way. He looked up at me. “The next major ritual will be Midwinter Song,” he said, “and as the lady, you will have certain duties. Mardalita has done them in the absence of a lady, but she will be glad to relinquish the responsibility to its rightful possessor.”
“Will the starfire be present?” I asked.
He seemed surprised at the eagerness in my voice, and sat back in his chair to study me. “You did have an unusual experience with the starfire,” he said thoughtfully. “If you had not been the bracelet of my Lord Jemeret, I would have chosen you to be a priestess.”
On the trip to Stronghome he had told me their legend of the onset of the starfire worship. It had begun, it was said, very long ago, when there were no tribes and the land was still wild, when there was no such thing as a person of power. In that time, fire fell from the heavens, and many people were harmed. The stars fell in fireballs, always in the night, never in the daytime, and so the people began to try to placate them, that they might stop the fiery rain.
Eventually the correct way to please the stars was found. It involved worshiping them, and permitting them to select the couples who would be most likely to breed a strong future generation. After this approval process had been operating for some time, there began to be born people of power, and they became the Samothen. Those who never developed any power became the Honish, and they lived apart from one another. A caste of priests and priestesses—people with the ability to hear and speak to the starfire—arose to make certain the rain of flames never again devastated the world. The origins of some of the rituals had been lost, but the Samothen were cautious—the rituals would not be varied unless the starfire let them know they could do it without risking the rain of fire again. Sometimes the starfire came when it was called, and sometimes it did not. “Even those of us who are worthy are not always judged so, I think,” the priest had told me.
“Venacrona, the starfire is alive,” I repeated now.
“Yes, I know,” he said again, as if it were nothing.
“No,” I said carefully. “I don’t think you understand. The starfire is sentient. There were only five known sentient species in the Com, and two are human, us, or closely humanoid. The other three were created by human intervention—the protocanines, the protodolphins, and the protosimians, who have died out. The starfire is unknown sentience. That is information of vital interest to a great many people.”
Venacrona looked at me indulgently during that speech. “Ronica, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “As for creating other species—you could say the starfire created us. But we don’t feel it necessary to tell anyone.”
I couldn’t convey to him that it was vitally important because, when I thought about it, what good would it do? Who could I ever tell? I was stuck here for the rest of my life. But perhaps I could learn more about the starfire anyway. That way, if the Com did come looking for me, I would have something of great value to give to them, even if my sting never came back. I made myself stop thinking about that.
“What am I expected to do in the Midwinter Song?” I asked him.
“You will need to sing these three prayers to the starfire on behalf of and with the Boru.” He gave me three separate sheets of parchment, weathered enough to show me that they were very old. “You can return them to me when you’ve memorized them.”
“Is that all?”
“It is more than you think. The starfire may respond.”
“I look forward to that. Is there any way to speak with the starfire except during the rituals?” I barely looked at the prayers as I put them into the pocket of my cloak.
He nodded. “Anyone at any time may go to one of the temple star chambers and call to the starfire. It answers at its own whim.”
“How do I call it?”
“When it’s not a ritual celebration, each Boru finds his own way.”
I rose, then realized he might have more questions or more to tell me. “I’m sorry. Are we done?”
Venacrona set all of the scrolls aside. “I will go with you,” he said, and rose also.
Something occurred to me. “Does the starfire come when you call?”
He nodded. “Almost always. That’s why I’m High Priest. But I never call irresponsibly.”
I barely heard that. “If you are High Priest, why are you also priest of the Boru?” We moved through the building at a slow pace, and I quelled my eagerness to get the process under way. I wanted to feel again as I had on the bowl floor at Convalee.
“Because the Boru have the most power, and the starfire always goes where the power lies strongest,” he answered.
I was certain that the starfire, having honored me so outstandingly on the Day of the Fire, would answer me now. We reached the lower floor and I went without hesitation into the central chamber for all four star colors.
Meeting another sentient species was vastly different from meeting the MIs. As a Class A, I was given the opportunity to encounter all the other thinking animals, but not the humanoids. The humanoid species was much like us, and its mutation had been caused by a periodic radiation that washed the world of Nailat. The planet had been surveyed during a time when the radiation wasn’t present, and the settlers who had been dropped there to bring it to Com standards were unexpectedly exposed and mutated. The mutation affected the genes for maturation, lengthening its cycle until their childhoods lasted almost their entire lives, and they reached sexual maturity in time to mate, reproduce, and die. The world was proscribed immediately upon discovery of this.
At the outset of the experiments to create other intelligent species—years before I was born—arguments had raged over how intelligent a species needed to be, and if the protosimians were always going to be a good deal smarter than the protocanines, why develop a protocanine stock at all? But the upholders of diversity prevailed, and the species were created. The protosimians were very much like we were, and they might have done well as a species, but after two generations their colony was wiped out by a virus, and we were afraid enough of contracting it not to force their re-creation.
I met a protocanine female named Jessif when I was fifteen. It was one of the training assignments I went on without Kray and Coney. Mortel John did go along, and seemed slightly more uneasy than I was used to, for he was usually unshakable. And yet the protocanines were the friendlier of the created species.
I had seen pictures of the true canines—the eocanines, as they were called now—and when Jessif trotted into the room, her shiny black nose and lovely caramel-colored fur made her look very like the pictures I’d seen. Intelligence sparkled from her brown eyes, and as she tapped the voice simulator—artificial larynxes and palates could be implanted, but they did not breed true, despite numerous efforts—she winked at me.
“Welcome, Ronica McBride,” the simulator said. “I have been nominated to greet you on behalf of my people.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said formally. “I have always wanted to speak with one of you.”
“It’s not the speaking,” the simulator said, and it was very strange to have a speaking machine tell me that speaking wasn’t important.
I smiled. “All right,” I said, and reached out to read her, projecting friendliness and curiosity simultaneously. I had only just been taught the techniques of the probe, and my use of it was still rather crude—one of my subjects had described it as “bashing my way in,” which humiliated and angered me to the point where I almost showed him what a bash from me was truly like.
