Halfling Moon (9 page)

"Mr. Shaper, had I personal designs on being
a farmer I'd have thought no better place exists on Surebleak. You
have the lands that were prepared with excellent soil by the
company to sell stock, the equipment meant to hold food for ten
thousand workers, and likely active grow sheds and prep rooms… and
I come to you and request you sell access because building other
access routes would be difficult, and unpopular. Personally, I have
no designs on being a farmer, and farming has never been a family
business. You might inquire of Boss Sherton, who is assured I have
no interest in holding farms given the many I might have owned by
now all in the hands of those who know what to do with them."

The man settled, nodding. The cat settled,
too.

Pat Rin sipped at the surprisingly good tea,
no doubt due to those stasis bins he'd mentioned. Yulie Shaper
sipped at his fragrant coffee.

"Your world will change somewhat, when the house is ….
installed. For some measure of traffic, there will be traffic, but
it will be passing traffic. The clan is not large, and historically
we spend much time in travel. But the location of
that
empt
y
is perfect for us, and I think for you. "

"Suppose I want to sleep on it?"

Pat Rin declined to put on his card-player's
face; and kept Boss Conrad as tightly controlled as he might.

"That would be unfortunate from my
viewpoint, as my kin are in transit, along with the house. The
clan's ships are arriving even now…"

"Saw that," Yulie nodded. "Big ship
orbiting. Did you use that to figure out the spot?"

Pat Rin sighed lightly.

"We used that to bring the clan and
possessions. We used it to leave our home world and come here. Mr.
Shaper, the only practical place for the clan house to go is
someplace very close to the road, yet not in someone else's
territory. Boss Gabriel tells me he has no plans for the place you
call World's End. Boss Sherton says the same. Your claim here is
perhaps the strongest claim on a piece of land on all of Surebleak,
the Port notwithstanding. It is impractical for us to move the
Port, as you must know. We tried to reach you sooner, but you were
not speaking with visitors."

"This is sudden --"

He stood up, did Yulie, jerkily, pushing
away from the table with a clatter. Pat Rin wished he'd brought
Anthora or Shan, or Priscilla, all of whom were Healers. Clearly,
there was need here for calm --

Yulie spun around, touched the cat. There
was a pause, and Pat Rin wondered if the gun on the wall could
actually be loaded, since the man looked at it, touched the cat
again, before he sat down heavily in the chair, pulled it to table,
eyes staring into the distance, troubled.

The fist that hit the table was firm, and
not impudent.

"Didn't answer," Yulie said.

Pat Rin bowed. Boss Conrad sighed.

"Mr. Shaper, my kin
will
be taking over that location. They
will
put the clan house and all that comes with it there. And
they will do it soon. What we ask is for an access road. The
contract is clear: ten cantra now and one per Standard Year in the
future to lease access as long as the clan uses it."

He paused, suppressed the pilot's
clear-the-board hand motion, continued.

"If you say no, the clan will put the house
there and take away a hill or hills and do whatever else is
necessary to reach the city over on the farside, through
wastelands."

"Why don't you just take it?"

Pat Rin sighed, then.

"Mr. Shaper, I have done many things to make Surebleak
workable. I
have
taken things. What I wish to do is to make things work
well, and to deal honorably with the world. I wish not to take it.
I wish to trade for it, just as you wished to trade your cabbages
for what you need."

Yulie was holding on to his coffee cup now
as if he was afraid it would jump from his hands, a lucky thing
that he'd had so much of it already.

Pat Rin stood up, bowing.

"
I will not just take it,
" he said so quietly that it might have
been for his ears rather than Yulie's, and reached for the pile of
cantra on the table.

Now it was Yulie's turn to show placating
hands. Pat Rin saw them, left the coins where they were while
Yulie's unschooled face showed decision crossed with doubt before
finally giving way to words.

"Promise me -- write it in the contract --
that your people won't shoot my cats. And I want you here when they
put the house in, and you'll tell them so there won't be any --
accidents. Write it and sign that, and I'll sign it."

Pat Rin glanced up at the cat on the
counter, thought about Silk, thought about Jonni, who some called
his son . . . and nodded.

"I can do that, Mr. Shaper. I may need a
moment or two in order to compose it, of course."

"Take your time. But when do you think
you'll be back?"

Pat Rin lifted an eyebrow.

"Be back?"

"Yes. When will they put the house in?"

Pat Rin lifted a hand to stay the query as
he wrote, and then signed with a flourish, which became an offer of
the stylus.

"Here, Mr. Shaper, do you agree as well, if
you would."

Yulie read the words several times and
mumbled "Good cats," or something like, after reading "welfare of
cats shall not be imperiled" and nodded, and signed a scrawling
hand that nearly filled the bottom of the sheet.

"Good, here." Yulie handed the sheets back
as if they were precious, then asked "When will they be here -- I
should move some of the rocks on the edge and . . . "

"When? I expect just before dusk."

"But
when
? What day?"

"Oh, I expect before dusk today, Mr. Shaper,
today."

* * *

The rock, the moon, was almost down now;
they'd followed it bright in the day, and then seen it shine
through from behind light clouds. Now it was half enveloped as the
light faded, and so close that it seemed it might crush them all
were one wrong move made by the pilot.

Sounds came randomly: booms of lightnings
from planet to moon, echoes of the winds, crackling noises as small
portions of the moonlet were shed in puffs of dust. Surebleak had
few birds, but they all appeared to have gathered in welcome, the
preternatural light of a setting star bounced off a descending moon
giving the birds' shadows the length of an avenue.

The word from the city was that all was
quiet; which was good -- the news that Boss Conrad was in charge
was unreasonably accepted as evidence that there would be no
problem, no matter the appearance of a moon falling ever so slowly
on the upcountry tilt of land that supplied the city with food.

Boss Conrad himself stood in a crowd of cats -- several
dozen by his estimate. He'd been warned that the proximity of the
Clutch drive might have unexpected effects, and certainly the
sudden appearance of so
many
cats, streaming from the fields, from the sheds,
from the rocks -- was unexpected.

Also unexpected was the absolute calm Yulie
Shaper exhibited, as if whatever demons he usually had to deal with
were exorcised by the drive's beneficent fields.

Pat Rin, for his part, was well-traveled; as
passenger and pilot he'd been shipboard many times when approaching
foreign worlds, satellites, and stations, and he found the
experience just barely containable: there were no walls, no
comforting calls of station managers, nothing ordinary whatsoever
about this vision. He knew more than most what the size of things
were and the size and expanse of this was beyond his knowledge.
Something that size should not move, that was what he knew. The
moon nearly touched the planet's surface, the wind rushed and
carried odors of space and time and strangeness with it.

Whatever downward progress had been made, it
all paused at once, though stones and ice, dust and clouds
continued to fall. Something very strange was happening now, as the
bottom surface of the moon appeared to vibrate and -- but there was
no human word for the process, which occurred within their sight
over the yawning chasm of the place they both now called World's
End.

An earthquake's worth of sound beat at them,
the ground shook, trembled, bellowed, vibrated -- and was calm.

For a moment or two the only sound was that
of cats, huddled now near the people in as much awe as they were,
and then a hiss, and more wind, and the surprisingly familiar odor
of wood and leaf.

Almost imperceptibly, the moon-thing that
filled their vision and covered the land rotated, spinning very,
very slowly on an axis and then it was rising . . . rising, rising,
the sounds of falling dust and noisy birds and earth trembles
giving way to a rush and almost a thunderclap as the moon,
disgorging the impossible thing within it, lifted, and spinning
more strongly, wafted away.

Amid the haze and winds stood a massive new
tower of green, the upper fronds of the tree catching the failing
light as the base was in shadow, the whole seeming now to have been
too big to have landed within the moon, far too alive to have come
through space. The birds, still alight from the rising of the moon,
swirled toward it, their calls echoing from the land and sky.

Pat Rin yos'Phelium, Clan Korval, bowed to
the clan's still astounded new neighbor.

"The tree's roots grew with the bounds of
the house, you see, and so we brought both. Necessity, sir,
necessity."

Using his chin, Pat Rin indicated the low
structure beneath the branches . . . "The house is there, where the
dust settles even now."

Pat Rin sighed, waved his hand toward the
lip of World's End, now full to within paces of Shaper's land.

"I believe that, if we start walking now, we
can explain the rules of the contract to my kin very soon. As a
clan, we're somewhat familiar with contracts."

About the Authors

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are the celebrated co-authors
of the best-selling Liaden Universe® series and have been writing
together since the first "Kinzel" stories hit
Fantasy
Book
in
the early 1980s. They started the first Liaden story in 1984 and
have published a dozen novels and several dozen short works in that
series alone.

Along the way they've become fan favorites
at SF conventions from California, USA to Fredericton, Canada, with
Guest of Honor and Special Guest appearances at PenguiCon, COSine,
AlbaCon, Trinoc*con, ConDuit, MarsCon, ShevaCon, BaltiCon,
PortConMaine, SiliCon, Second Life Library, and elsewhere. Upcoming
Guest of Honor apperances include Oasis 23 in Orlando, Florida in
May 2010 and DucKon 19 in Napierville, Illinois in June 2010.

They count Baen, Del Rey, Meisha Merlin, Ace Books, Phobos,
and Buzzy Multimedia among their English language publishers and
have several foreign language publishers as well. Their short
fiction, written both jointly and singly, has appeared in
Absolute
Magnitude, Catfantastic, Dreams of Decadence, Fantasy Book, Such a
Pretty Face, 3SF,
and several incarnations of
Amazing
.

Their work has enjoyed a number of award nominations,
with
Scout's Progress
being selected for the Prism Award for Best
Futuristic Romance of 2001 and
Local Custom
finishing second for the same
award.
Local Custom
was published by Buzzy Multimedia as an audio book
read by Michael Shanks --Stargate's Daniel.
Balance of
Trade
,
appeared in hardcover in February 2004 and hit Amazon.com genre
bestseller lists before going on to win the Hal Clement Award as
Best YA Science fiction for the year.

Their most recent Liaden novel is
Fledgling,
published in
September of 2009, with
Saltation
(sequel to
Fledgling
) and
Mouse and Dragon
(sequel to Scout's
Progress) due in 2010. Baen will also be reprinting the original
ten Liaden novels in four omnibus editions starting in 2010. The
authors have several other works in progress.

Steve was Founding Curator of Science
Fiction for the University of Maryland's SF Research Collection as
well as Vice Chair of the Baltimore in 80 WorldCon bid, while
Sharon has been Executive Director, Vice President, and President
of the Science Fiction Writers of America; together they were BPLAN
Virtuals, an ebook publisher in the late 1980s. These backgrounds
give them a unique perspective on the science fiction field.