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Authors: Joan Slonczewski

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BOOK: A Door Into Ocean
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“If it happens, Spinel, I'll go with you.”
He was amazed. “You would? You mean the two of us would go off alone just because Lystra—” He shook his head. “You're weird. How can you call Valans ‘sick' when you do such crazy things?”
“I never called you sick.”
Spinel sighed and rubbed his aching temples. “I have to go back. I've got to find out if my folks are alive or dead.”
“Oh, that's another matter, troublesharer. You'll go, then. And when you return to us, you will share a selfname.”
Spinel sucked his breath in, then very slowly let it out again. “How do you know I'll return?”
“Because there is no other hope for us.”
Merwen had sought him out, perhaps even from the day that their eyes first met in the market square. Spinel was just beginning to grasp the scope of what she expected of him, from scraps of words dropped by Lystra and Lady Nisi. The more he saw, the greater a burden it seemed. And yet it is a precious gift in any universe to be needed for something.
STAR OF STONE
 
 
HALF A YEAR had passed since Berenice and her Sharer companions had limped out to the Ocean Moon on Dak's rickety moonferry. Today Berenice was headed back to Valedon, and this time she had booked passage for herself and Spinel on the sleek Hyalite liner
Cristobel,
named after her mother.
At the water's edge she waited for a shuttle boat to the traders' raft. Her gray travel suit blew about her in the wind, which tugged also at the brush of hair that started from her scalp, and self-consciously she reached for the opal pinned to her collar. Beside her stood Spinel, obviously luxuriating in the silken white tunic she had ordered up from Iridis for him, with its border of nested squares in gold thread that sparkled in the sun. She had chosen the outfit deliberately to pique Merwen and to set off Spinel's striking figure, now coal black but for violet palms and lips.
Spinel stretched his limbs through the gorgeous cloth, which was actually seasilk, bleached and machine-finished. “Mm, this stuff slides like—like water.”
Berenice pursed her lips. “Well, don't get carried away.” Inwardly she was gleeful to see his delight in the richness she bestowed. He was not immune to the high life that Berenice craved and fought with every breath.
The sky darkened as stormclouds crossed the sun. When would that shuttle boat arrive as ordered? Berenice tapped her heels and clucked to a passing clickfly before she recalled that she had a watch to check, after all.
Then through the clouds broke a great shaft of light, sprinkling the waves, as if the Patriarch Himself had parted the troubled skies to extend His benediction. Berenice smiled with great contentment. This had always been her vision of the Patriarch of Torr: a hand of calm light, reaching down out of darkness. Talion feared His wrath, and even Merwen feared His Envoy. But Berenice knew that once the All-wise had spoken, the just had nothing to fear.
Recalling Talion's last interview, she pitied the High Protector now. How ashamed he must have been to see his will for Shora so overridden
by the Envoy. Now he would need Berenice all the more, to keep the peace with Sharers. He had not called her of late, but, to set Merwen at ease, she would call on him at the Palace. She would see to it that events flowed smoothly in their new path, in the wake of the Patriarch's hand.
Merwen and Usha came out to see them off. Weia followed, although a glance at their trappings sent her scooting to hide behind her mother. Lystra was absent, of course. Merwen was still Unspeaking, but she would come round eventually, once she saw how things turned out. She needed Berenice's help as much as Talion did. Berenice went to Usha and hugged her without speaking. A sadness hit her; it did hurt, after all, this break with Merwen. Would the Impatient One really let her go without a word?
“Share warm currents,” Merwen told Spinel. She added something else, but a hornblast covered her words, a ship's horn, from just beyond the channels. The shuttle boat had arrived.
 
Spinel's excitement at this new adventure largely overtook his immediate regrets at leaving Merwen and Raia-el raft. And Lystra—but why think of that, now?
Before him reared the
Cristobel
, a mountain of spotless “coldstone.” Even the moving steps that lifted him up into it were a heady thrill. Once inside, Lady Nisi—Berenice, he reminded himself—led him to a lounge built of monstrous cushions from floor to ceiling. He wondered how he was supposed to seat himself.
Berenice simply lay back and sank in. “Two moon's-breath tonics,” she ordered.
A long white snake twisted from the ceiling, with drinks in a hand at the end. Startled, Spinel tripped and sank knee-deep into yellow velvet.
“Do relax.” Berenice laughed delicately.
Once he had achieved some sort of balance in his cushion, Spinel accepted his drink and sipped at it. The sweet warmth in his throat was heavenly. “This is the life, all right. Why'd we ever bother with Dak's old junkheap?”
“Sharers are not allowed. Were not, that is.”
“But we're Sharers.” He scratched his head; the hair just growing back prickled.
“We are when we choose to be. Here: you'll want some Apurpure.” At the word, another arm shot down, proffering a bottle of white pills.
Puzzled, he stared. Then his nightmare ordeal flooded back. His drink slipped; a white hand snatched it up with barely a splash.
“Oh, how could I—” Berenice slapped at the pill bottle and the arm retreated. She bounced forward in her cushion and sat up, contrite. “I'd forgotten, I'm so sorry. I always take them so I'll look ‘normal,' in Iridis.”
“Never mind.” The first servo arm was hovering solicitously with his drink. Spinel's eyebrows knitted pensively. “This all must cost a troll's hoard.”
Her fingers waved it off. “You're family, now. Better than my own, in fact.”
The remark shocked Spinel. What a thing to say of your own folks. They were all you ever had, in the end. Yet what had Berenice said of her mother; tried to kidnap her; was it? What an odd lot were Iridians. Ahn and Melas would laugh and say, We told you so.
Out in space, he remembered just in time to go out to the observation bay for a last look at Shora before it shrank to a moon. The mottled blue gem looked even closer than the last time, a starstone that he could cup in the palm of his hand.
“You are still a Sharer,” Merwen had told him, just when the boat had come to fetch him. “Remember that, even as a shaper of stone.” The words had settled about him, almost a lullaby. Perhaps he could yet be a Sharer and himself, too. If only Lystra would understand—but that was altogether too painful to think of.
When the moving stairs set them down in Iridis, Spinel sighed; the fun was over. “How do I get to the coast steamer?” He had traded some amber weed for cash, enough for the steamer to Chrysoport that his father often used.
Berenice looked doubtful. “The steamer? That's rather slow, is it not?”
“Well, how else? Time to ‘share parting.'”
“Share this, first.” She held out to him an engraved ring. “A line of credit, up to two thousand a month.”
His mind leaped. Cyan could retire on that, twice over. Yet something rebelled inside. “Uh, I don't know.”
“It's all right, really.”
How could he explain the distaste he felt? “Look, it's like this: Thanks, ‘sister,' but when do I earn a beggar's stonesign?” He winced, knowing as usual it had not come out right.
Her face turned to crystal again, the glacial Lady of Hyalite whom he had first met on the landing of Dak's moonferry. “You're worse than Merwen.” With that cruel compliment she left him, stepping briskly into the heart of the Valan capital.
 
Once Spinel went aboard the steamer, every familiar landmark on the coast made his heart beat faster. Trollbone Point with its jagged cliffs thrilled him so much that he could barely contain himself. At Chrysoport, he bounded down the plank so fast that a seam snapped in his tunic.
“Whoa, you there!” From behind, Spinel's arm was seized and twisted. He cried out and turned his head, to find himself staring into the shaggy beard of a Dolomite guard. “Where's your pass, boy?” A neuralprobe swung from the man's chain belt.
“Pass? What the devil—” Pain streaked up his arm.
“You can't get into town without a pass.”
“But—but I'm Spinel, son of Cyan the stonecutter. I
live
here.”
The Dolomite pinched Spinel's lip. “You look like no Chrysolite I ever saw.
Spinel burned all over but swallowed his hatred.
“I know the stonecutter,” said a different Dolomite, a short burly fellow who combed his beard through his fingers. “I'll take the boy there. The fine is twenty
solidi
, without a pass,” he told Spinel.
“Got none left but five.” Spinel forced the words through his teeth.
His captor muttered, “Chrysolite scum,” and spat on the dock.
“Pay what you got now,” said the other one.
In a daze Spinel followed the man through the market square, its stalls full of cabbage heads and reeking of overripe fruit, and then the cobblestoned streets beyond. Little was new except for the appallingly inescapable Dolomite troops, all bearded and woolen-clad with chain belts clanging at their waists, some striding in groups, others posted at corners.
Spinel's guard finally reached the stoneshop. It looked much smaller than Spinel remembered, and dingier. For a moment he felt an utter stranger; but the old wooden door after all had its same weathered scratches, and it creaked as badly as ever when it opened.
“Cyan?” the Dolomite called. From within came mingled smells of lime dust and earthnut stew.
Beryl came first, from the storefront. She looked
tiny
, and the house
felt like a dollhouse. She peered at him, her eyes wary under deeply lined lids, then her face lit up. “Is that—you? Spinny!” She flung her arms around him, clinging, tears streaming. At a loss, Spinel patted her dark hair.
His father's tread thumped up the basement stairs. “What's this? By Torr, my son is back.” Cyan clapped his shoulder and tugged his fine tunic. “Look at you. You've made good, or I'm a troll's cousin.”
Then Galena's hoarse scream rose above everything as she waddled over, shorter and rounder than ever, and Oolite bawled just to join the commotion.
Cyan pulled some coins from his pocket and started to count them out.
“Forget it,” muttered the Dolomite.
“He had no pass—”
“
Forget it.
” The man's bark stilled the tumult. He turned sharply and left.
“That's Sergeant Rhyol,” Cyan said. “He's billeted with us, along with Ceric, a private.”
Galena nodded. “How would they eat, if we spent food money on fines?”
“Lodgers?” Spinel asked, “But where do you put them? And why those filthy Dolomites, of all—”
“Spinel.” His father's sharp word caught him.
“They're
good
boys,” his mother insisted. “Just remember that.” But for an instant an ugly look crossed her face.
Spinel shook himself. “Oh, all right. Say, how's the new kid? What is it, anyhow?”
Beryl smiled just a little. “Oh, Chrysoprase; he's sleeping in the shop. I'd better—”
“A son? Wow, Harran must be pleased to pieces. Say, where is Harran? Still up at the crack of dawn with his ropes and nets?”
Beryl's lips worked in and out in a funny way. She burst into tears again and fled.
“Son, Harran joined the Militia.” Cyan's voice was very tired. “They tried to throw out the occupation, a few months back but—”
“But what happened to Harran?”
“He was brave,” said Cyan. Galena wiped a tear from her cheek.
A numbness settled to his toes. Harran was dead, and Chrysoport was in chains. Spinel and his parents stared at their feet, united once
more, yet each almost unbearably alone. For that, at least, Spinel glimpsed a reason. “‘Death can be hastened but never shared,'” he murmured.
His mother frowned quizzically at the sound of a foreign tongue.
THE DOLOMITE “LODGERS” were sharing Spinel's old bed, so that night he slept on the couch in Galena's study, where Merwen and Usha had sat when they came to claim him. All night he kept waking, convinced that the couch was rocking, rocking steeply enough to roll him off; but in fact the house was frozen still, and there was nothing but dry land and bedrock underneath.
In town, Spinel soon learned the new rules. Anything better than a pocket-knife was forbidden to the villagers. A town pass must be carried at all times; to get one, Spinel stood in line outside the garrison, which had taken over the Three Eyes Inn. A pass was an oval slip of metal stamped with a number and thumb print—“goat's tongues,” people called them, on the sly. But it paid to weigh one's words. One evening outside a taproom, just before curfew, a regular who'd had a bit too much leered at a corner guard and said, “Know what the Sards call you? ‘Hollow Horns,' that's what.” The butt of a probe slapped him to the sidewalk. The Dolomite proceeded to beat the man's face in, with a cold, grisly thoroughness that left him unrecognizable. Every detail etched in Spinel's memory, from the broken sprawled legs of the victim to the blood that mingled with oily streams in the gutter.
Resentment smoldered in hidden ways. There were codes and secret signs to spread uncensored news and ways to escape town without a pass. Local pride flourished, and it seemed that every child that was born had to be named Chrysoberyl, Chrysotile, or Chrysoprase.
At Spinel's home, the Dolomite “lodgers” were tolerable. Rhyol was
gruff but quiet, contemptuous of regulations, staying out till all hours but never unmanageably drunk. Ceric was a thin-haired reed of a youth, younger than Spinel, who bit his nails and lived in constant terror of Spinel's mother. At dinner, Galena would glower at him across the table. “Eat, you stringbean! Don't let your officer complain I starve you.”
The first time that happened, Spinel froze with shock, his eyes fixed on Ceric's neuralprobe. But the private only blinked, his Adam's apple bobbed a bit, and then he ate a little faster, while Rhyol stuffed himself in bored silence. Both men drank glass after glass of water as if to drain the ocean dry.
Now that he was home, Spinel wondered what to do with himself. Most of his old friends, even the women, were signed into trades or out in the fields. The deaths of several in the uprising appalled and depressed him. He escaped by hanging around the house and reliving his adventures on the Ocean Moon for anyone who cared to listen. He pestered his mother while she hunched over her account books, trying to cheat on the Dolomite taxes.
“You mustn't sell any stone to moontraders,” Spinel told her. “It makes Sharers sick. Besides, traders charge five times what they pay us.”
“Hm. Transport must cost something.”
“Why, they even put starstones up for ordinary sale.”
“Scandalous. Well, they haven't sent us any orders lately. Perhaps you can tell me why Sharer medicines cost ten times what they used to.”
“We did stop trading awhile,” he admitted. “That was because—it's kind of complicated.” Where to begin?
“Strange,” said Galena. “Zircon the peddler says that Sharers have flouted Patriarchal laws. They face the same fate as Pyrrhopolis, he says.”
“What nonsense. You know how traders talk, Mother. A nasty lot—why, they even dumped me into the sea, once.”
“My poor boy.” Galena poked at a silver box that spewed out digits flashing like minnows.
“That's new,” Spinel remarked. “How did you afford it?”
She turned her head slightly, as far as her neck could manage. “Do you really want to know?”
“I asked, didn't I?”
“Your father was in the habit of leaving a coin on the dresser, after a good night. I saved them.”
“Mother, really!” Spinel squirmed in embarrassment.
“You're a man now. Who else will tell you how the world turns, if not your mother? The Patriarch Himself must have had one.”
Spinel fled downstairs.
In town, Spinel soon found that the unmarried shop girls chased after him. With his ocean-honed muscles, purple-black all over with sea-green eyes, his leg ostentatiously scarred, he came off as exotic, to say the least. For his part, the way the girls dressed unnerved him now. Their tight waists and packed bodices could only exaggerate the curves underneath. Compared to Lystra, they seemed fragile and frivolous, flowers to be plucked and tossed aside. So he made the most of their curiosity, tickling them with outrageous tales of the Ocean Moon, even to the point of embroidering a bit the way the moontraders did. But he stopped when Merwen's image rose in his mind: Merwen, who shared only the truth that she knew.
When the winter rains let up, he coaxed Catlin the drover's daughter to hike out with him to Trollbone Point. They chased and scared each other among the dusty bleached bones, then they settled down to more serious fun. Spinel fumbled impatiently at her dress—so many buttons and underthings. Then she pulled him on top of her, and the rest came very fast.
Spinel looked up, satisfied but uncertain. The girl was silent. Breakers thundered on the cliffs below, their salt scent blown over by fitful winds.
“Oh, well.” Catlin sat up, flounced her hair, and began to reassemble her clothes.
“Hey, what's the rush?”
“Well, it's over, right? I'll catch it, if I don't get back. Besides, you popped two buttons.”
“I'm not used to all them things to pull off.”
“Sure you're not,” she snapped as she brushed out her curls. “Carrying on with naked women all day.”
“I did no such thing!”
“Well, what else did you do on the Ocean Moon? I should think at least you'd be better at it.” She gathered her skirts and left.
Spinel was crushed. He had tried his best, but it all came so fast, and
she just lay there the whole time—and now she blamed him. Lystra, though, had always made it last a long time. Even if it wasn't the “normal” way. Strange how certain things could set off Lystra's fury, yet for himself, alone with her, she had endless patience. She would find someone else soon enough, he thought bitterly, someone not a “malefreak.”
He returned to the market square, where late-afternoon shoppers pawed through Ahn's vegetables. Ahn's good eye peered at him above the shrunken beak of her nose. “If it isn't the stonecutter's son! Tell the truth, Spinel; are they really all witches up there, those moonwomen?”
“I think one bewitched me.” He sighed.
Ahn clucked her tongue. “You look bewitched. Here, try a papaya. Surest cure for a broken heart.” She held out the sweet yellow fruit.
“How would you know?”
“Nasty thing, you! Ask the Patriarch himself. You, there, almsman,” she called, a disrespectful summons for a Spirit Caller.
Uriel turned slowly in his faded robe.
“Come, almsman,” said Ahn. “Call and ask the Patriarch: do papayas cure a broken heart?” She flipped a coin into his bowl. Her coarseness embarrassed Spinel. Home seemed a perpetual embarrassment, since he came back.
Uriel said, “Does a broken heart need curing, so much as clearer sight?”
“Fie, that's no answer.”
“That's what Merwen does!” Spinel exclaimed. “A question for every answer.”
“And who is he?” Uriel asked.
“She's a Sharer lady. She spun and wove seasilk under Rhodochron's tree.” That shady spot stood vacant now.
“Ah, yes.” Uriel shook his robe, and interest flickered in his eyes. “We spoke at length, before you left.”
“So you did,” Spinel remembered.
“Curious things they said, about faith.”
“And about ruling. ‘Who rules without being ruled?' The Dolomites, that's who.” Spinel sullenly scraped his toe on a cobblestone.
“Are you sure?” Uriel asked.
“What? Just look around you. Does the Patriarch's justice rule them?” The guards were everywhere, watching the vendors hurriedly
packing their goods in time for the six o'clock curfew. “Not a man would dare stay here tonight.”
“Why not?”
The question took him aback. “They'd get beaten up, that's why.” Yet Merwen and Usha had kept their spot under the firemerchant's tree. How had they managed that, anyhow?
On impulse, Spinel walked up to a Dolomite guard. “Please, sir, couldn't I stay late in the square, just once? You see I'm up to no harm—”
The stick of a firewhip slapped him to the ground. Stunned, Spinel felt someone lift up his arm. His elbows were bruised, and blood dripped from his chin. Uriel helped him away, beyond the wharf to the beach, where he could rinse his face off. Spinel winced as his arms burned in the salt water.
Uriel said, “Some things you can't just ask for. Freedom is one.”
“I hate them.” Spinel's hoarse whisper swelled with an anger he had never known before. “I want them
dead
,
every one.”
“What use is hatred, except as a step toward love?”
Spinel shivered as the evening wind chilled his damp skin. Uriel, he thought, was still a bit touched. You had to watch for that in Spirit Callers.
“You there!” came a strident voice from the street. “Get on home, Chrysolite scum.” The guard made an obscene gesture, then jabbed a sixpoint star because of Uriel.
“I hate them,” Spinel whispered again, nursing his swollen chin as he walked with Uriel to the street. Without weapons, hatred was indeed useless.
Yet Lystra had hated stonetraders, and she had gotten the better of them. For weeks she had barred the shop doors, been dumped in the sea, and come back for more, and all the while shamed her sisters into keeping the boycott. Lystra knew no fear, except for stone. Spinel's throat ached with longing.
What was the matter, here? Did death select all the brave ones, like Harran, so that only the sheep survived?
Spinel looked again at Uriel. Of all the villagers, this old fellow at least showed no fear. Was that just his craziness? “Uriel, you got a place to stay tonight? You can sleep on our floor.”
So the pair of them sat in Galena's study and talked late into the
night, sharing lore of the rafts and of Valan backroads. And a plan emerged, a plan that Spinel thought might just be crazy enough to work.
BOOK: A Door Into Ocean
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