The Gate of the Dawn Queen

Prologue:

Somewhere, off in a discretely shadowed corner, a Tai’Isi transceiver signaled its ignorance of natural law and the absurdity of trans-light communications.

The figure of a pudgy little man in a pale turban flickered on the machine’s traffic stage—the centerpiece of a crescent-shaped council table.

"My Lord Ta’Su, he is lost to us," the apparition spluttered.

The relative difference in size of the figures was forcing the little specter to look up in its address of the lone occupant of the chamber—a huge burly man dressed in a white chiton.

The image wiggled in and out of existence, but not all of its tremors came from the weak signal. The speaker himself was clearly terrified.

Lord Ta’Su grimaced in the way of a man who is forced to build grand things with only the labor of orangutans. At the moment he would have greatly preferred their gracious reserve—and perhaps, even their intelligence.

With a sigh of resignation, he swiveled his massive throne-like chair to face the apparition now compelling his attentions. "Oh, Kitash, what are you gibbering about now?"

The black and white projection wobbled crazily on the stage. It flickered off and then back on. The transmission stabilized as it was finally locked up and reprocessed automatically by the local receiver.

Theoretically that prevented anyone else from tapping into the signal.

"Where are you, anyway.... No, no...never mind," he groaned. "Don’t say anymore. You know better than to transmit to this location...." He threw up his hands in exasperation. "And get that beam tightened up! You’re sending to half the planet."

It wasn’t quite that bad but Ta’Su had little confidence in the reliability of minions who were immune to the sureties of torture and terror.

The figure on the stage paused briefly then signaled frantically to someone out of view. The features began to sharpen and finally, colors bloomed. The turban turned out to be a powdery blue but all of that did little to improve the quality of the scene.

The sender was a fairly young light-skinned man but the fleshy face looked entirely too unhealthy to be called piggish. A pig would take better care of itself. The features belonged to someone who spent his days being humored and catered to: one who took his dissipation seriously. And as Ta’Su knew well enough, they were not those of a man who gets things done.

"Now then, calm yourself, cousin, and let us consider the situation rationally. I am assuming that you mean...?" He paused significantly, trying to avoid the use of code words. No matter how tight and deeply ciphered the transmission might be the science of espionage was truly arcane. Assassination was still the most expedient method of forestalling security breaks. As attractive as that idea might seem to him in reference to this idiot, it would not be a convenient answer here. The creature was entirely too well connected. And then there were others who were far more treacherous standing in line to take his place.

"Yes...The...Fox.... It.... The Fox...has slipped through the trap." The last few words were barely audible and the turbaned figure’s face was visibly twitching. Kitash was having a very hard time keeping still.

Ta’Su sighed and thoughtfully leaned back in his chair. "Oh my my, well...and just how did you let that happen little nephew? The net was set for you. The only thing you had to do was pull the strings tight."

He looked meaningfully at the figure trembling in front of him. "Well, no then! Yes, well never mind," he said mildly. "I have misjudged apparently. It is as much my fault I suppose." He sighed again more deeply. "You will explain all of this to me though...and very personally. I am sure we will find your accounting most...stimulating. I should think you yourself will find it even more so." He smiled in a benignly paternal fashion. "I shall have my personal staff schedule an especially generous block of time for you...in the Little Chapel of Protracted Redemption."

The figure of Kitash swayed visibly and seemed to have difficulty standing as his uncle continued. "And on to other business. I am assuming that the harvest of that new colony...the one on Na Shad has been taken care of...?"

"Ye...ye...ss My Lord Uncle...we...we took in more than five-thousand, about twenty-two percent were preadolescent female."

"More than five-thousand...? That is not a particularly desirable figure, nephew. The breeding population was more than seven-thousand."

"The others were chaff, Lord," Kitash said.

"Chaff...Oh they were chaff? Oh yes. And in translation that would mean that they fought you and were killed beyond economic revival?"

The image of Kitash on the table seemed pallid and shocky. He shifted his feet around as though they were freezing. "They...there were...they were supposed to be unarmed," he squeaked out frantically. "Our intelligence sources had all told us the same thing...that they had nothing beyond light hunting weapons."

"Oh yes...I see. These dirt farmers, then...with no military training.... So, they fought your teams with razor guns and mag slug throwers. And so now...I am supposed to accept that such an occurrence should really be someone else’s fault...rather than the Executive who commanded the harvest? That would be yourself...that is?"

He closed his eyes, briefly covering them with his hands. "How pathetic this sounds to me. Do you know...? Or no...no, perhaps I have misheard. Perhaps so...let us just make sure. Perhaps I have not understood you rightly. You let a few head of common herd stock resist you...with small-game hunting arms...and apparently, they were more than just a little successful."

Ta’Su glanced at the image on the stage, his expression giving the mocking impression of hope that he would be told he had it wrong. "No?" He paused, and then nodded sadly. "Ah...well."

He uncovered his eyes, considering the silently quivering figure on the comm stage. A long moment later he sighed once more, this time in resignation, and the hands slid down to cradle his face.

"So then, just how many of our apprentices did you manage to throw away on this little fiasco?" he asked with far too much restraint.

"No Blood-Sworn Clan of the Staff were lost, My Lord Uncle. We lost thirty-seven of the apprentices, lord. Twenty of the first year and seventeen were in their second year." He paused to catch his breath, which was coming in short gasps. "Two of those had made their Blood-consecration."

He lost his voice for a moment. His mouth had gone too dry to talk. His face worked hard as he tried to swallow enough to keep his vocal chords wet. Finally, he got things working again.

Ta’Su glared at him warily.

"And then there were the two..." His voice broke then, and he couldn’t go on.

"Two...," Ta’Su asked. "Two what...?

"The instructors," Kitash squeaked out at last. "There were two instructors.... They didn’t make it."

"Instructors!?" Lord Ta’Su came up out of his chair at that.

"What disgrace have you brought us to now! Instructors.... Instructors were actually killed by slave stock! Now you make us a pathetic comedy with such sleazy workmanship. The incompetent instructors—you had the bodies publicly drawn and whipped I would hope."

He sighed in resignation, "Oh, never mind...just never mind. It is a small matter...now. Their names are doubtless a joke by this time. Every Trader bar in the Arm will know them by this time."

He leaned back wearily in his chair. "I gave this thing to you, kinsman," he said shaking his head in disgust. "And now the fox is out of his lair. Your pitifully incompetent efforts have left him free to run where he will."

"He is not in these stars, Lord," Kitash quavered. "His drive signature has disappeared from our space. He has most likely moved into the Rift, and his ship broken up. I will find his body for you, Lord. I will bring you his brain..." he stammered. "...for you to torment at your leisure."

"Yes, yes," he said, waving his hand impatiently in dismissal. "You, Kitash, have much to redeem here." The projection winked out as he slammed a key on the arm of his chair.

"Much indeed," he echoed quietly to himself, or so he thought.

There had been another watcher. An amused voice said, "your little pig-boy has much to learn if he will bring that one back–-intending no disrespect to the pigs, of course."

The other man jumped, visibly shaken. "Oh..., Eminence...I had not expected you to call so soon."

"So I see...so I see." The voice chuckled from another projection forming in the room––a black menacing shadow loomed, blanking out the intelligence monitors set against the wall. "Never mind, Councilor. I had anticipated your failure sometime ago. I have already loosed the dog, who will bring him back to us...at another time. But then, that is a commodity we have much of."

The shadow voice began to laugh. There was some joke here that doubtless no-one else on this edge of the Galaxy would ever understand. A shiver ran through Lord Ta’Su’s body, from scalp to the soles of his feet.

It was always worst when his Eminence was laughing.

____________________________

Icy starlight glared at him from the sable void above.

Actually, there was no "above" out here. Nothing allowed for that kind of reference. "Down", was only the rocky surface of the little planetoid floating precariously at his back.

There was no mercy out here either. Foolishness was answered with indifference and generally a brief and messy death.

The man who watched the lights wasn’t sure that he would not soon be included in that category.

That’s the hard part about adventure, he thought. You never know if the story has a happy ending. You can’t even be sure that you’re the hero.

He had suited up in the armor of one of his ship’s ancient cyborg units to come "upstairs" just this one more time. Shortly he would hand everything over to the crystalline neural nets of the Ista'Abn'Ha Navigator. Then there would be the long transit across the Rift.

He wanted to say good-bye to the blaze of stars where he had been born. It was unlikely he would ever see them again––not in this life.

Out here he was just a bag of protoplasm squirming in its little cocoon of safe warm gases. This floating ice chip was all that separated him from the empty darkness between the stars.

Well, they were hardly floating. At the moment the asteroid was moving fast enough to have relativistic implications. The Enani star-drive would cut in shortly and tear a brand new hole in the fabric of space-time, or whatever it was the thing did.

He was alone. Lost utterly to the rest of the human race. It was a glorious thing in its own ghastly fashion.

He had never really minded being alone. Loneliness, though, is a very different matter. He was running out of music and had actually managed to beat the Navigator at chess a couple of times. He was beginning to learn about loneliness and he knew it would get him eventually.

The ship was equipped to carry a large cargo of soldiers peaceably—for soldiers, anyway. He had come across the sign some Hadri’Aqa marine had scribbled over one of the atonia units: "Power Napper." There were some other signs—most were less socially acceptable.

His hunters were all left behind—and well behind by now. The little planetoid drifted on deeper into the rift between the arms.

There was no sign of gravity wave fronts warping starlight around. The Enani Drives were hardly ecologically friendly to the fabric of space—not that there would be many complaints out here.

He had found this particular asteroid purely by chance. It was coasting outbound on a cometary orbit away from a very dense blue dwarf. He used the star’s gravity to cover his deceleration into normal space. Effectively the wave front of the drive simply vanished from space—smearing its signature into the gravity well of the star. It was not an event that contributed to the long-term health of the star.

The strategy was certainly not original to him. He had run across it in an obscure text on military history. Any good combat pilot would figure it out easily.

He had tried the maneuver because there was nobody looking at the time. There had been no ships in the vicinity for several parsecs. Any tracker coming after him later would have to sift through the gravity maps of a hundred suns in this region to find the signature of the few odd light waves he had bent during deceleration.

The asteroid itself was immense––large enough that it was almost spheroid. It was composed mainly of an unlikely conglomerate of heavy metals and sedimentary rocks dense enough to have a significant gravity of its own. Most of the high mass was due to heavy deposits of noble metals. The core was mainly water ice. There was even a slight halo of gases that followed it around––mostly a very thin water ice fog. Still, it was an atmosphere of sorts.

He had carefully carved a pocket large enough to accommodate his ship. Ista'Abn'Ha now lay nestling its deadly self deep within the icy core of the rock he lay on.

The immense flying fortress that was his new home was now safely hidden inside. It was a good piece of camouflage, just not perfect. The sensors he carried aboard could have found such a simple gimmick anywhere within a ship standard light week. At any rate, for the time being those same sensors told him there was nothing sentient, or representative of it, anywhere now within that range.

And then too, Ista'Abn'Ha was the last of its line. There was nothing like her left in any space his civilization knew about. He could have bought another starship with some of its spare parts.

He had been making the same routine scan almost every ship-day for more than a hundred of those days.

Now it was time to wait––to let time and space change or whatever it is that they do.

It was naptime.

____________________________

Across the Rift, on its third world, a small boy watched the yellow star set in the Great Salt Sea of the Tucson Archipelago. He guarded a herd of alpaca and emu from attacks by the local lion prides.

Born of transplanted Inca parents, he spent his off hours studying the ancient works of Lincoln, Che, and Funakoshi while learning Meriq from the Sisters of Saint Clare.

Nicknamed "Chinche," the thumbtack, as a child, he would rise to seize political ascendance of all the Continent of the New World.

Disease and war covered the planet. The land needed heroes and they seemed to come out of the earth. They came to Chinche’s hand like bouquets of meadow flowers. In his lifetime, Emperor Chinche would rule all of his own world and fulfill the dream of Alexander.

His reign would begin the Pichu Imperial Dynasty, which would eventually unite the halo of worlds surrounding the yellow star.

Before the Ista'Abn'Ha had crossed to the three-quarter point, the fourth emperor of the Pichu would preside over the fragmentation of that empire in the religious firestorms of the Grand Enlightenment.

And then came the first waves of the Terran Diaspora.

Ista’Abn’Ha was braking as the first of the Homestead ships crossed the orbit of Pluto.

One of them found a surprise.

Chapter One

Tang Wu paced the floor impatiently. Beside him an unlikely looking machine squatted placidly. Two hours before it had begun unfolding itself from a packing case the size of a large personal holo-slate.

"Ander, what’s to do around here right now?" Tang asked the little red-headed loadmaster beside him. She was staring in fascination at the huge contraption, trying to comprehend how it had managed to do that.

Ander seemed not to have heard him as she pulled out from under a recently incarnated control panel. She shook her head in frustration. "How does this little bubble work? You were a flat box when we started all this. You just keep unfolding like an origami bird."

At a little over one and a half meters, the slim little contortionist was the only one compact enough to work in the smaller compartments of his little survey ship.

She smiled over at Tang and waved her hand impatiently. "Oh, I know what you said, Tang. Brand new technology—hasn’t made the journals yet...stuff. I’m an engineer, Wu, Syanshang! My name’s in those journals"

"Look honey," she continued. "I need to get into this. You’ve got a little jewelry box down in this compartment that’s telling me it doesn’t want any of the ship’s navigation server gels trying to brainwash its celestial interpreters, whatever those are. It’s a none too polite little gadget either...called me an ‘inept dabbler’."

She tucked a tool pack inside the sleek jade green of her coverall. The tough slippery fabric allowed her to slide through tight compartment floors like an eel. The designer’s intent had, no doubt, been entirely utilitarian, but on her the effect was more than a little unnerving for an intact male.

"Good idea there," she said. "Go explore something. Yeah get your tail out of here. You’re going to take her away from me...and I’m not ever going to get her figured out. Out...away...and let me say ‘goodbye’ to her in my own way."

Tang laughed as she pantomimed something anatomically unlikely. Besides being a brilliant engineer, Ander was a professional clown.

Most members of the crew were proficient in the performing arts and she was one of the most accomplished standup comediennes he had ever seen anywhere. He still didn’t understand all the humor of these people but when she featured on the club marquee you got there early. All of the oxygen-breathers were at the Apollo Village Comedy Control. The place was always "standing room only". when she played. But then again, she loved her day job.

"Stay close to the transit tubes, babe. You haven’t got all that much time...couple of hours, I’d say."

She picked up a compact short-spectrum scanner and dived into a compartment.

"You know though," she said over her shoulder. "The Biomes are just above the village deck. I run up there on meal breaks sometimes. It’s quiet, but man, they have got some very weird stuff up there. Go on. I’ll get this little beast tightened up. Get...go! You’re entirely too cute and you mess up my concentration."

He grinned over at the bare feet disappearing into the guidance system’s console. Like most deep space crew, she had prehensile toes, and disliked footwear. She was absolutely at home in microgravity.

"Just query the directory if you get lost," she said impishly out of the dark compartment. "You’re so easily distracted."

He took his cue and ambled out of the maintenance bay.

Apollo village was an unlikely complex of glowing towers, lakes and corridors, and it was not little. It took up several kilometers on multiple levels of its own. No one really lived there, at least not usually. It was hard to tell the difference though. With a six-shift labor force it never really slept.

The village served as a recreation and leisure, as well as a sports center––the concepts being thought of differently by different sorts of creatures.

The main library and museum were there, as well as an impressive public observatory. Tang had been spending quite a bit of time in the observatory recently.

Something was always going on in the village and the party zone was only for the strong.

He didn’t have all that much time—a Terran hour or so. He wasn’t quite sure how much time that actually was. Tang had dealt with a number of schemes for the measurement of time during his travels. The calendar of his birth world bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one used by these people.

At the moment he wore an antique wristwatch he had found at a pawnshop in Old Houston. He glanced at the unfamiliar dial. It was based on the twenty-four hour day of Terra but there were no numbers on the face. There were two uneven arrows that rotated around the dial. The wearer had to guess the correct position of the twelve-hour designators; that much had been explained to him by the store clerk. It didn’t seem like a particularly practical item for daily life but it was sort of elegant.

Tang was a regular visitor in the village but he had never gone into the Biomes. These were a system of biologically separated, but communicating, ecological parks. The concept was originally inspired by legends of the gardens of a mythical Terran king.

The flora and fauna of several worlds were represented here. The meadowlands park integrated several compatible venues.

Not all of the plants were bound to the earth. Several "flowers" moved about the area as Tang walked through. One of them left him with the distinct impression that it was scrolling through a news slate. Complex scents shifted in the air, some of them not particularly pleasant to a human.

A floating docent informed him that the bouquet of aromas wasn’t for the benefit of the tourists. The fragrance schemes were elements of an olfactory language. The "flowers" were enthusiastically engaged in some kind of debate.

The docent kept pace floating beside him and said that the discussion had to do with the Solar Commonwealth commodities market in nitrogen fixed exotic pabulum sapidities. All of which turned out to be fancy flavored fertilizers, from what the docent told him––apparently, something of a "bull" market this season.

It was just breaking dawn in this venue and only a handful of people were around––a few insomniacs walked with pets of various phyla, as well as a couple of biological kingdoms he hadn’t been aware of.

The park system was set up as an adventure. And it was supposed to be reasonably safe so long as everyone stayed on the walk––"the management assumes no responsibility," etc. and so forth.

Tang was off the walk. He had lived in more than one wilderness and this one was much less hazardous than some municipal parks he had walked through.

There were a few large carnivores, and some stinging insects, but the main "peril" lay in the fact that a team of master gardeners and architects had designed the park. It was very effectively screened which made it a very easy place to get turned around in.

That arrangement made it less stressful for the entities living there, but for the intrepid armchair daredevil who usually challenged its barren wilds—oh well. A word to the wise: an extra flagon of daiquiris might be advised.

Tang made a mental note of the landmarks and climbed the grassy hill beside it. From ten meters away the pathway had completely vanished. This particular biome involved a forested meadow. The plants were unfamiliar, though he supposed they were Terran in their origins. He had not seen as much of that planet as he would have liked. The Terran authorities had been fairly unappreciative of some of his research topics, never mind his methods.

The hill turned out to be a rocky plateau with a forested pool on top. It would have been a great place for lovers to get acquainted, and Tang doubted the thought was original to him.

The light was approaching dusk and he was not alone up here. A shadowed figure was sitting on a rock deep inside one of the glades.

She was watching the pool––the slight figure was definitely that of a young woman––and she was somewhere far off in a time and space of her own creation. Floating above the pool, several human figures were in motion.

Intrigued now, Tang moved in closer. It was a little like watching an old fashioned laser holo in a smoke filled room. He had never seen anything quite like this one, but of course, considering his origins, that didn’t mean it didn’t exist for these people.

The figures were in a dark action––a little obscured, as though it were something viewed through an old-fashioned glass window.

The scene wasn’t illuminated like he would have expected from a projected image. The woman didn’t even seem to be paying attention to the images––wasn’t even looking in the same direction.

He got closer, and then found that the figure was actually that of a little girl—a preadolescent. She was probably around nine or ten in standard Terran years. He had thought she was an adult woman at first, because of her height, but she was just very tall for her age—almost as tall as he was. She was rather raggedly dressed, but she was clearly going to be an exceptionally beautiful adult by all of the standards he knew of.

He watched uneasily as the figures above the water moved through their grotesque pantomime. And it was grotesque. Several men tied a young dark skinned woman to a flowering tree, then he watched in revulsion as flames and smoke rose around her.

The action kept replaying. The details would change slightly but the main account was always the same. The body convulsed in anguish, visibly charring in the flames.

He couldn’t think what else this vision might be, but he had a very bad feeling that it wasn’t an entertainment holo. He had heard far too many tales of what was left of Ancient Terra’s people.

He had found from bitter experience himself that not all had been just stories. Superstition was rampant and insane violence was frequently done to people too far down on the food chain to fight back successfully.

Then there were the "Crucibles of the witches." Old Terra had seen a great deal of human pain in its history; much of it had come down in the last few hundred years.

The religious Wars of their Grand Enlightenment had marked the death rattle of the Terran Pichu Dynasty. It wasn’t quite over even yet. The Emperor still held court in the bay city of Tusson. In the whole of the Sol/Centauri neighborhood it was still the only city left where a single woman could walk unarmed at midnight with only the moonlight for escort.

The Terran Diaspora had followed in its bloody wake. In the next hundred years more than three billion people fled their birth-world for a new life under other suns. Only two billion remained on the planet and many of those left now lived by very savage rules.

The little girl on the rock was dressed as a Terran. She was pale-skinned, a champagne blond, pretty much one of their standard Caucasians. Earth’s races had stayed pretty distinct, due to their somewhat bewildering array of miscegenation laws.

Usually Caucasian meant well dressed and fed, if not actually wealthy. Caucasians generally seemed to do all right for themselves.

However this little girl didn’t look rich. She wore a simple white raw silk shift, and none of the make-up forms that all females wore here. Her hair could have belonged to a newborn. It was short and ragged, as though it had been clipped with a knife. It looked wet, and finger combed. He wondered if she might have been in the pool before he saw her.

Tang backed away from his vantage point as discretely as possible. As curious as he might be, it would be a boorish breach of courtesy to invade her privacy without invitation. It was a code of courtesy his own people shared with Chinche’s.

That moment vanished when he stepped on a dry branch. It snapped and the girl looked up. There was only an instant and then she recovered her mask, but for a moment he saw more pain and anger in her eyes than any one person should ever own by themselves.

He turned back to face her. "M’apologia Terranan damia," he said in the Old High Court Terran. "Ts’ wanderer destines n’intercalation of musing...egression m’damia."

She looked back across the pool at him. "Non, t’contrair m’sir", she said, "T’s one recasts n’puerile algolog. Tis a difang ts’one craves desuetude."

She held up her hand to hold him and smiled impishly. "You know, this is going to take a long time, and get real boring, too, if we have to keep up with this old High Court Terran stuff. You are not being impolite as far as I am concerned. I was just daydreaming...just some old memories...time wasting things I should just forget about."

She smiled off into the trees. "What language would you like? Will it be this Meriq...? That’s my best. Le Français peut etre...you look, maybe like you’re ethnic Chinese...a little, but my Mandarin is pretty awful."

"Tang Wu," he bowed in introduction, looking thoughtfully back over the water. "I picked up street Meriq in the Colombian Sodality...back on Terra. It’s my best too."

"Ah, yes...I can’t quite place the accent. You are Chinese then?"

Tang smiled thoughtfully. She was trying to hide an elephant, and she knew it wasn’t working very well. Whatever it was he had seen, she was wishing that he hadn’t. Now she was trying to hold on to him until she could decide what to do about it.

Her smile turned thoughtful, and then she nodded and made a decision. "Okay, I am play-acting. I wish you hadn’t seen all that, but of course you did. It’s a little hard to explain. Sometimes...I forget and... I guess you could call it, ‘daydreaming’. That’s what I call it anyway."

He nodded absently, studying her eyes––a tawny gold. It was an unusual color for a Terran human.

"There was some kind of fire...?" He waved a hand, gesturing his dismissal of the thought, and interrupted himself. "I apologize again...and in spite of your own courtesy, I am surely imposing on your privacy. You had already said that it was a painful memory, and that you wanted to stop. I will trouble you no further."

The girl’s face belonged to a preadolescent, he decided, one with very sensitive baby pink skin. The voice and the way she carried herself, however, those belonged to a very much older woman. She was just a child, though, and he wondered where her parents could be.

He had turned and taken a step back from the pond when her voice halted him.

"T’s one Hight, Ariel Lang," she said in Old High Court.

He smiled, turning back. "Now, I thought we were going to drop the ‘Ancient High stuff’, and which part comes first?"

She grinned. "Sure, it’s just that I haven’t had much of anyone to talk to up here. Oh, and the, ‘Ariel’, that comes first. It’s my given name. It’s an Old Welsh name, or maybe it’s Greek. I don’t know. It’s from some old story...a play, I think."

He bowed again and shook her right hand in both of his. She brought her other hand up in answer, which surprised him. This was the greeting courtesy of a fully franchised Terran adult woman, not a child—very definitely not a child.

"Yes," he said. "I remember. It’s the name of a magical character in an ancient play. I actually got to view a recording of the play once."

Tang was treating her like a child, or at least trying to, and she kept coming back as an adult woman. He knew that she was finding this irritating. He was sorry about that but he was also remembering meeting people on Terra who had some particularly unfunny ideas about the raising of very young children. He hoped that she had never met any them herself.

She was standing now, and seemed ready to leave the pool. She started walking slowly, maneuvering her left arm around his right. She was claiming him as her escort—another action by an adult woman. Actually he wasn’t sure who was doing the piloting, but it seemed he was going to be taking a walk with her.

They picked their way through the rocks and bushes towards the pathway and then she said, "Um, Tang Wu, I wonder if I could ask you a small favor. Actually, it might be more of a big favor...considering."

Tang looked sidelong to his young companion, and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

She sighed, and said, "well, could you please sort of forget what you saw back there?" He stopped and turned to face her. "Actually, could you just forget that you saw me at all?"

He shook his head, smiling up at the treetops. "Ander, you really underestimated the level of weirdness up here." Then he looked back over at the girl, shaking his head again and still smiling. She looked back at him, just a little unsure of herself. He was pretty sure that this was not how she usually handled things.

"Sure," he said. "But you know, this might go easier if you filled me in a little. You don’t look like the kind of kid who just runs off from her parents."

"What...parents...?" She seemed surprised at the idea that she was expected to have parents somewhere. "Oh, yeah, parents...well yeah sure. That would be more convenient, I suppose. I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess there should be some parents around here somewhere, shouldn’t there...."

She looked absently around and then changed the subject as she looked for the pathway. "I can’t remember where this went. You can wander for days in here if you don’t know what you’re doing."

Tang led the way without hesitation. He knew exactly where they were.

When they stepped onto the walk she turned back to him and said, "Okay now, Tang Wu, can I trust you not to talk about this? This is going to seem a little weird...maybe a little harder to take than the last one. But I can’t go out there dressed like this."

He nodded, a little confused at the question. This was definitely not your standard little girl. The day was beginning to look much more interesting.

"Okay, you’ve already seen enough to get me caught. I don’t know why, but I think you’re going to be okay."

Her image flickered momentarily and then shifted to that of a fashionably dressed young Terranan woman. It was even this season’s craze of face paint, cheek tattoo, bright crimson peaked cap, and deep blue shoulder cape––the whole rig. She even wore the currently fashionably useless gold-filigree fencer’s forearm guard.

"Okay?" she asked.

Tang stepped back and thoughtfully crossed his arms to get a better look at this new creature. "I have met women who would kill in cold blood to know how you do that."

He chuckled and shook his head as he uncrossed his arms. "And no, you don’t have to worry. I am not going to give you away. He offered her his left arm again to continue their walk. "I think you would probably be pretty safe anyway." He grinned at her. "Anyone crazy enough to believe the story would likely be too crazy to do much about it."

The design of the garden had been set up to conceal all of the amenities jaded tourists might find indispensable. A turn of the walk brought a commissary into view. Thirty meters away and it was virtually invisible.

They found a table, and seats slid out for them. The table service sprang into action. "Hey folks, I’ll be taking care of your wishes this afternoon. Our special today is brontosaurus steak marinated in a Vega Alpha Three ruby cabernet, and smothered in peppered mushrooms. So, that said...you look a little thirsty there. What’ll it be while you’re thinking it over?"

Tang looked over at his companion thoughtfully, "Ever had ginger beer?"

"No, but Wu, I can’t drink alcohol. I really can’t. It’s nothing religious or anything. I just get real sick."

Tang was startled for a moment. He had only met one other person here with such a violent reaction to ethanol and he was it.

"No no, this is something different. It’s not alcoholic at all. It’s a really ancient drink––carbonated."

He turned to the table console and asked, "Do you even have it, waiter?"

The table didn’t even pause, "You bet...two cold ones coming up?"

Ariel nodded, and two frosted mugs of bubbling amber came up from the center of the table. The hot scent of ginger drifted in the air.

Ariel took a cautious sip, "Whoa, this stuff bites back."

"Something from your part of the universe," he said. "If I remember right, it’s from a little island near the European Ecumen. I think your playwright came from there."

She smiled again. He wasn’t sure that this was defensive so much as just the way she was. He found that he didn’t want her to stop—not just because it might be defensive anyway.

The smile dimmed and she looked at him from somewhere farther away. "I don’t know...what you saw over by the pond.... I don’t know how I do it."

He shook his head and lifted an open hand to tell her that she didn’t need to say anymore.

She smiled momentarily and nodded, and then went on. "I was about seven when it all started. I can make things appear...things that I’m thinking about. I can see them, and so can other people. Sometimes it’s hard to control."

"It seemed like you were daydreaming," he said. "You were way off somewhere else."

She nodded absently. She seemed to be headed back into her private dream world. It didn’t seem to be a particularly fun place.

"Seven," he said. "That’s not so long ago. You’re not too much older than that now."

She shivered, closed her eyes, and said, "That fire...is not any dream."

Tang sighed gently. "No. I was afraid that it wasn’t. So...this thing...it really happened then, didn’t it? Someone was really killed...the dark-skinned girl...murdered, it looked like." It hadn’t been a real question.

He paused for a second and then asked, "Did you know the girl?" He knew the answer to this one too.

"Yeah...." Her voice was low and hoarse. "I know the girl."

The air above the table had begun to acquire a distinct shimmer, and he touched her arm with what he hoped was a fatherly touch. Her eyes refocused, looking at him, and then the air cleared.

"You said you needed to stop." He leaned back in his chair. "Look, Ariel, your world has been a killing ground of its most gifted. I was down there for long enough to see. They’ve been at it a long time from what I could see."

He grinned a little wickedly, trying to set a lighter mood, and then lifted his mug. "That’s how I found out about your ginger beer."

She smiled at him. The bleak phantom was still with her, but it was a little bit of an improvement.

"I know you," she said. "I’ve seen you in the city before. You spend a lot of time in the library."

"I don’t remember seeing you." He shrugged

She chuckled a little at that.

"Oh yeah, you were…." His fingers made a circle in the air by his face.

"...Just about anyone you like," she said, nodding. "No, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I don’t think I was ever the same person twice, unless I just forgot."

"Okay," she paused suddenly. She was set to appraise his next reaction. "I’m a little curious too. What are you doing here, Tang Wu? You’re dressed pretty well. And obviously if you’re here, it involves your needing to be someplace else."

"Um, yeah...I see we are having a subject change." He smiled and nodded thoughtfully, "well," he said. "It’s a little difficult to just lay out in a few words. In terms of profession, I suppose I’d be closest to what the old Terrans used to call a planetary archaeologist. That’s roughly it, anyway. Though that is pretty rough. It’s a little more complicated than that. I could probably bore you for hours with all the details, but that’s basically kind of it...basically."

"Archaeologist...basically? Oh, of course and I’m sure you are. You are an archaeologist...and even basically too." She chuckled, lifting an eyebrow and nodding wisely. "And you’re going somewhere to dig up other people’s old cars."

No one actually did that sort of thing anymore––archaeology. Every one who lived in the real world knew that everything had already been found that was of any importance. The science of archaeology was mentioned only in old dictionaries found in the antique attics of grand-ancestral mansions. Using the word in any part of a grant application could be a fatal error for the entire venture. It was a dead field.

So, she didn’t believe his story. She was right of course—at least partly right. It wasn’t exactly a lie––quite. It was just that, for the moment, it was the closest he could get to anything that would sound like the truth.

And that would have very little meaning to her. Sometimes, it didn’t make a great deal of sense to him either. Anyway, she was not following this line out of any real interest. She had something else on her mind.

"Uh, Tang...you will sort of forget you’ve seen me here won’t you? It’s kind of important."

Tang cocked his head quizzically. "Yeah.... Now, I thought we already had that one negotiated. There’s something more to this?"

She paused and bit down on her lower lip. The simulacrum shifted some, and Tang could sometimes see the little girl face past the elegance of the sophisticated beauty masking her.

"You’re pretty nice...I mean, you seem like a good guy. I think you’re alright, but if you talked about this...mentioned me to anyone...if other people found out I was here...particularly ship’s crew.... Well, it’s just that I’m not here legally. I mean I don’t have...."

"You mean you really are a runaway." He had crossed his arms and was looking at her like a patient father. Well, he was trying to anyway. He didn’t have much experience as a father––actually, it was more like, not any. "Your parents aren’t here at all, are they?"

She sat back looking perplexed. "Well...no. Uh look, this isn’t...I mean, I’m not..." Then she just stopped talking and looked at him. "Look, if they find me, I won’t be going back to any parents...for sure, not mine."

"So, what did you do? No, never mind." Tang nodded, holding up a hand. "Ariel...it’s okay kid. I’ve seen enough of what passes for justice on that planet of yours. You seem like a nice kid...whatever you did. I hope you didn’t kill anyone, but I’m not going to pull the plug on you."

She jumped slightly at that last, but Tang had been looking off in another direction, so he just let her think he hadn’t noticed.

She relaxed some after that, and switched the subject. "So where will you be doing all this digging?"

He shifted and uncrossed his arms at the abruptness of the change. "Oh, new subject again. Well, I’m not completely sure at this point. I think the starting point in this system is going to be Serendipity. There are some old...."

The commissary server chimed and said, "Peregrine Tang, we have completed insertion to a low parking orbit for Serendipity. Planetfall is imminent. Please proceed to the loading dock elevator."

"That’s my call, Ariel."

Ariel looked at him with a mix of expressions, shifting from fascination to disappointment. She stopped finally, settling for simple disbelief.

"Wait, you’re going down to this planet now...to Serendipity...right now? You’re going to do this...right now?"

"Well, yeah...I am." He nodded, a little baffled at her reaction. "I found a Survey report in the library. The team reported a couple of colony landings here during the first wave of the Diaspora ships. The last supplemental is a hundred years ago, and they only made a run through the system––didn’t touch down. There were still artifacts of a technological culture. It’s a long shot I’ll even find a clue to what I’m looking for way out here. We’re pretty far off the main tracks of the Diaspora."

He looked over at her uncertainly. She seemed upset and he wasn’t sure why. "I’ve been at this for a long time. It’s sort of a long boring tale and you’d just fall asleep on me."

She was not listening to a word he said.

"You just have to do this," she said. "It’s got to be right now."

Nodding, he said, "come on down to the docks with me. The loadmaster and a couple of pilots are the only people I’ve met since they woke me up who aren’t smoking something funny. And you should be keeping track of me, anyway. I’m carrying around the story of your secret life."

He grabbed her hand, and again like a little child, he hauled her almost bodily towards an inter-deck slideway.

The objective here was to get as gracefully as possible out of an entanglement that he had not planned for. He had quite a few questions about this little girl. He had seen enough of Terran culture to know that he probably wouldn’t like a lot of the answers. Now he wasn’t going to have to know about them. The complicating part of this strategy was that he really liked this moxie kid. So, maybe life isn’t always so clear-cut.

The transit lifter to the docks was a very large room, with huge doors. It was intended to handle a hundred passengers with their hand luggage and could move at more than 100 k.p.h. It had a long way to go.

The warning light was already on and the security agent was waiting for him. "Peregrine Tang, I think you are the only one this drop," The agent knew exactly who Tang was. But then he was sober this time.

Tang turned to face his companion. "Ariel, I hope everything goes well for you."

"Terran style goodbye?" she asked. "It’s quick. Ready?"

She reached around him in a full bear hug, and then pulled her head back enough to kiss him on the ear.

"Be seeing you," she whispered huskily.

"Oh yeah sure." He shook his head. He’d heard it often enough on Terra, but he still thought it was a silly phrase. He gave her a wry little smile. Her little-girl face was on a level with his. And then, with no warning whatsoever, she kissed him––deftly and with a great deal of adult level expertise, precisely on the lips.

Tang was too surprised to pull away. Besides all that, she was very good at it. Some ten year-old. He hoped she was going to have a chance at childhood, wherever she ended up.

She was smiling enigmatically as he turned to go. He didn’t turn back until he was in the lifter and the doors were almost closed.

Evidently Ariel didn’t do long goodbye parties. She must have bolted off the platform at a dead run. She had vanished completely. There was just a confused crowd of tourists and crew milling around like they had just lost something.

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