Fallen From Stars - KYMASSI (Part Three)
(Chapter 28, Part 3)
I had no weight, but I had mass. I flew across the stones like he’d flown down the corridors of Yi So-eon.
He and I became one, he stepping into my rush, my collision with him a silent burst.
I held him, hard, my face in his linen tunic, and he closed his arms around me, tightly.
“You’re alive,” I said. Redundant. I could feel the heat of him, smell him. I raised my head. He was as tall as I remembered, his hair yellow, eyes too-round, wide and blue. The beard of dreams was gone, shaved away, cheek pale.
“You’re alive!” I said again, suddenly awkward.
He did not let me go. He touched my shoulder, my face. “I thought you were dead. All of you.” He looked beyond me. “And there’s Psamathe. And that contract from the ship—or one of them.”
“Rhodope,” I said.
They approached from behind, Psamathe hastening to curtsey, Rhodope shyly after, almost kneeling, a deep obeisance. She remembered the shattering deck, ship assuming form of wave and wreck.
“We need to get out of the market,” Miss Trevion said. “Now.”
“You, I don’t know.” I had let go of him, but he pressed his arm around me. “Mist’—ah, Miss—?”
She smiled thinly. “Better eye than some. I am Gnoza Trevion. I’ve been your—friend’s swordmaster for the past few weeks.”
“Miss Trevion. You’ve had some adventures.” He squeezed my shoulder, his chin on my head. “I have a room in a house near here.” He tousled my hair. “What happened to you?”
“A long story.” I looked back at the little ship. The captain had his hands on his hips. No doubt, he wondered why the catamite was so unfaithful to his gray-haired lover. Or whatever he was thinking. Did he hate it? Or was he mildly disapproving but indifferent? Or did he admire it?
Their culture was still a blind wall to me.
The house looked into the lane winding east out of the tiny town, and the double window’s shutters were open. There was a bed and a table, a satchel on the table, an apple by it.
“How long have you been here?” Trevion asked.
“A week.” He stood close to me, as if I would vanish, but not touching now. He looked at me as if he thought I was made of glass. “I dreamed about you,” he said. “When I was awake, but I saw you. A vision. You told me you would meet me in Kymassi. So I stopped here.”
“That was the night before last,” Trevion said, looking out the window, then walking back to the door and checking down the stair.
“What?”
“Ask her.”
His eyes said Tell me. I drew a breath. “There’s a device from my ship. The aenseobeul. It affected my mind. I can…see things. Memories from long ago, as if they are recorded video… Sometimes, they are false, though, and I’m never sure. I can see things from now in the same way. I don’t always trust them. Maybe things in the future, too, who knows. I think it killed the rest of my crew. Your government’s brought it to the surface.”
He took this in. “Could anyone use this…this ansible?”
“They might have trouble understanding what it was useful for, but if they did, maybe. I don’t really know what it would do to them, and I’m not sure I understand what it does to me.”
Like glass? I sounded like I was made of paper. My hand shook. I sat on the bed. His bed.
I was babbling. “You have to be tough. You must be. When your parents are dead, and your grandparents raise you, the only orphan in school stands out in the classes. When you help Uncle Min-soo fish all weekend, you never get to do things with what friends you have. At night, you read manhwa under the covers with a flashlight or sit on the roof under a blanket, watching the orbital docks and the space stations pass in the sky. So all you want to do is go there. Get away. Never come back. I imagined myself in the stars so many times. I imagined myself standing on this planet so many times. Dreamed it. Things out of books. Your past, I guess.” I smiled, crooked. “People making farms and terraforming. Hard-working settlers. I never imagined…this.”
I looked at them. The hardened swordswoman. The cloned servants. The deserter. Was I speaking my language? Theirs? Did I make sense in either?
“I left a hundred and fifteen years ago, yes? No! Not to me. I last stood on my world only four, five months ago.” Now I felt water on my face, hot on my cheek. “I looked at a red sun, and there was fresh snow on the ground, and we went drinking together, all of us, and our friends, and we drank and ate and laughed and cried, and in the middle of the night, I cried myself to sleep because I would never see them again.
“Well, I have seen them, over and over, not in memory, but in very being there. Or things that might have happened. Sometimes I can’t tell. Just like I saw you, Constans. I was with you on that boat, even if the crew could not see me. Even though it happened before the dream. Time means nothing to the aenseobeul.”
“Have I tied my fate to a madwoman?” Gnoza said. “Then I shall go back to Kandiers. You don’t need me, it’s plain.”
“Miss, she is not mad,” Psamathe said. “I dreamed of her, began dreaming of her not but a few months gone. I knew that I would meet her. I knew my life would change marvelously when I did.”
She sat by me and took my hand and kissed it. “I lay on my mat in the dark on the Station, tired to my bones. I wept for the pain in my hands and back. When I closed my eyes, I saw her in a dark place, flying in space, coming in a ship to us. I saw,” she smiled, “many things that I knew would happen. She is my true Miss.”
“A tank-girl’s words are worthless,” Trevion scoffed. “A magistrate puts her to the question because she only tells what her contract-owner would have her say.”
Sarkis coughed. “And my word?”
“You’d make her feel better. Calm her down.” She folded her arms. “Get the madwoman in bed.”
“I can’t prove otherwise. But I saw what I saw and here I am And I…I have seen her also, a long time ago in my dreams.”
She looked at Constans. “What do you mean?”
“When I was a child,” he said. “I was just a few years old. In Calypso. I saw her in a vision. She came out of light, out of the wall, when I was in my bed. A powerful, cool light, smiling like a gold and blue fire. I asked her…I asked her, Are you a dream? Are you a goddess?”
I looked at him, waiting for the words.
“Miss Trevion, I remember this as clearly as if it happened yesterday. She said, ‘These are the numbers that will bring me to you.’ These are the numbers,” he repeated. “The numbers that will bring me to you. I thought she was a goddess.” He smiled crookedly at me. “I’m still afraid of you.”
“I’m not anyone, Constans. I’m just a woman who came twelve light years for nothing—someone they want dead or enslaved.”
“The Ephor trusted you enough to send you to the Fortress to get this—ansible out. Must I keep trusting you, young woman?”
“Young!” I laughed. “Oh, I am the oldest of anyone you have ever met.”
“But the loveliest,” Psamathe squeezed my hand.
“O, yes, Miss!” Rhodope agreed, kneeling at my feet and taking my other hand. “Miss, I would die for you. You would have given your life for mine and my sisters.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what I can do except die, what you can do but die with me. I don’t know why I am here. I truly do not understand why I was sent. I feel that no one knows why they sent me. If I could get it, the device, maybe I could contact NABI, I could contact home, I could…figure out what to do. None of this,” I waved a hand, “none of you. None of this was expected. I have no mission at all. Nothing.”
I looked at Constans. “One thing I am sure of is that enemies are at the Fortress, and enemies were going to come here. May be here yet.”
“Then, Hijong,” he said, “we must be careful.”