Skeen's Leap (14 page)

They stepped back, moving together, identical expressions on faces that were somewhat alike, though it was a kinship of kind rather than blood. Min-fliers. Together they shifted into bird shapes and powered into the air. The horses snorted and sidled nervously as they were released from the thrall of the Min. The birds circled overhead. She heard two screeches, then felt two wet gooey splotches landing on her hair and forehead. She gasped and scraped most of the glop off her.

Still cursing, she turned the horses toward the river, climbed down the bank, and used handfuls of sand to scrub her hair and face. She stopped cursing because it was wholly inadequate. Skinning would be inadequate. After she was reasonably clean, though, slogging up the bank toward the horses, a giggle tickled the back of her throat. Godlost little twerps. If I had wings … hah! Once again she felt a pang of jealousy. It'd be marvelous to fly like that. She swung into the saddle and started on, humming a droning tune, musing over memories of soar-bubbles in assorted Pit Stops.

She began to pass camps. Individuals with dung fires. A packtrain, maybe even the one she followed into Spalit. She rode on into the dark until a voice came from a few dark figures silhouetted against a small fire. “Skeen, Skeen, come join us.” She rode closer. The Aggitj boys from the Spitting Split. She turned the horses off the road and rode to the grove where they had their camp.

“How did you four get so far ahead of me?”

“We didn't waste time sleeping.”

“We couldn't afford Nossik's prices.”

“Either beer or bed. Who'd ever pick bed over beer?”

“We can sleep anywhere anyhow, but Nossik's ale is only in Nossik's kegs.”

“We hauled the Ferryman out of bed.”

“Oh he was mad, oh mad.”

“Got a real educated tongue, never repeated himself, not once.”

“Once we got over, well, it was a nice night, a little fog settling in, but that'd keep the roadlice off us.”

“So we just kept going.”

“But the horses needed to rest and graze.”

“So we made a camp, caught some fish, they cooking now. And broached a keg of Nossik's ale.”

“And we saw you riding by and we said hey there's a one who knows a story to two to pass the time. And we thought that one she might like a taste of fish and a touch of ale and maybe would tell us maybe huh a story or two about what it's like now on the other side of the Gate.”

Four pairs of hazel eyes watched her from under four thatches of moonsilver not-hair that stirred restlessly in the warm thick air.

Skeen chuckled. “Feed me and water me, and yes I'll tell you a tale or two.”

A TALE OF TIBO'S YOUTH.

or

THE FIRST TIME I SAW THAT SNAKE.

“A story about the other side. Hm. When you're a traveler, after a while you begin learning to slide into new folkways like a frog sliding into a new pond. It's all around you and you take part of it into you but only that part nearest you and when you leave again, that part slides away and is mostly forgotten, though it leaves its mark on you one way or another. Dip, splash, move on, adding a few words and sounds to the store of languages in your head and after a few more dips you forget where you got them and what was the larger context where they took their meaning. There are many kinds of travelers. Company folk whose home is not the ship but the corporation in whose mothering arms they are born and live until they lose their usefulness and are discarded. Free trader families living in the belly of a world ship that sails between the stars and never ever touches earth. To touch down for them is to die. Travelers, yes—mercenaries, gamblers, smugglers, thieves, assassins working or looking for work, players of all kind, dancers, singers, entertainers who do things it would take a month to describe and still you wouldn't understand. I've seen them and I don't understand. Pilgrims and missionaries from a thousand and one religions, going where they're going, doing what they're doing for reasons only they comprehend and sometimes even they don't really know why they are where they are. Colonists, explorers, marginals who drift because that's the way they're made; if there's a place to go they have to go there, if there isn't a place they haven't seen, they'll find one. I suppose you know fairly well what I'm talking about—you're travelers, too. You have your reasons for moving along just as I do. And like Nossik's Inn, there are places that most travelers know, places where they can stop a while, rest, meet their kind, buy and sell according to their needs and desires, get high or drunk or absent to this plane, chat with friends they haven't seen for a handful of years and won't see again for as many more years, pass on things they've heard and seen … rumor and fact, speculation and explanation. We call these places Pit Stops. Don't ask why, I don't know.

“Some years back I nosed in at a place called the Nymph's Navel. I'd been rambling about doing this and that for over a year, alone most of the time because my last Companion had turned out to be a macho jerk, so I was wanting company pretty bad. Nymph's Navel is a place you can relax and not worry about your back or who's got his hand in your credit belt. I don't say there aren't fights and folk getting killed and plundered there; stupidity is its own reward, if you know what I mean. But if you took reasonable care, you didn't have to worry about phluxes jumping you to feed their habit, or Noses landing on you for something they think you might have done. Even blood feuds are parked outside a Pit Stop.

“I got in about midday local time, spent most of the afternoon unloading my cargo. Already had buyers waiting for the biggest part of the load; the rest I passed on to the local jobbers on consignment, so by nightfall I was awash with gelt and ready to celebrate. Picarefy was wanting to redecorate, so I arranged a credit line for her, Picarefy is my ship. She's technically not alive, eh, how do I explain it, say it's like a sailing ship that could talk to you, never mind how it's done. I stashed most of the gelt with Picarefy so I'd have going away money; Picarefy would scold me sober before she let me get my hands on that stash. I caught the syncline to the Juwell bubble and proceeded to have myself a fine time in the Glass Madonna's house of varied pleasures. I won't sully your innocent young ears with what I did. Huh? You want to be sullied? Forget it, kid, that's another story. Anyway, round the fifth cycle I was feeling a bit tired and about ready to take off again. I was sitting in a fingerbowl, getting some of the kinks out of my spine and other assorted parts when a really odd match-up came strolling in.

“I've led what you might call a varied life, which by the way is a lot more entertaining to look back on then to live through. And I've seen a thing or two, but that was just about the funniest pair I've ever chanced across. You expect weirdness when the pair or set or whatever is a cross-species mix. I mean, once you've seen a Kombui eight-legs with a Yoka-poe no-legs and a Pavchid all-mother all three dancing a tango, mixes don't surprise you much. But same-species weirdness is something else, makes you go ukk! and huh? and how do they manage and I'll leave it at that. This pair. Male and female. She was … tall. Yes. Tall. The essence of tall. Two and a half meters. Say you set Hal on Hart's shoulders, about that tall. And thin! You could fold her up and pass her twice through the eye of a needle. She wore this red thing that fit like it was painted on her. You could count every rib and dive in her navel. Her breasts were like oranges cut in half, her nipples were cherries perched atop the orange halves. She had a long thin face with a long thin nose and a tiny pink mouth and huge, really huge no-colored eyes. Though it doesn't sound like it, she was pretty in an austere way. Marvelous skin—even from as far off as I was, I could tell it was velvet soft and flawless. She had a shock of butter yellow hair. It stood out from her face like dandelion fluff. Looking at it you'd think you could put your hand on it and your hand would sink and sink through its softness. That was the woman. Her name was Alelo. One other thing. Her voice. It was deep and warm and honey on the ears, fit to enchant even an argebost than which there are few things nastier not human.

“The man was short. Next to Alelo he looked a dwarf. Ders, if he stood looking at you, his eyes would maybe clear your navel. A meter and a half, if he stood toe-tip. Bald. No eyebrows. He was the color of Nossik's dark ale, eyes the bluest of any blue you ever saw, the blue of the sky on a summer day when you lie flat on your back and stare up and up into the bluest part. He had small hands and feet, was well-muscled in his upper half though he was wiry rather than a little bull. Limber and neat. Pointed ears. Handsome. A grin to charm the rings off a matriarch. A tongue hinged in the middle and oiled with glamour-glow, able to charm you even when you knew very well he was a scheming little prick who hadn't meant a word he said since he popped from his mother's womb. Tibo he was. Tibo whose name was anathema on so many worlds he couldn't count them, not having learned numbers that high, or so he always claimed. He wore a gold lamé shirt and gold shimmersilk pants with Barunda leather boots, the dark crimson leather that cost a fortune and a half for a single skin. And diamond and ruby earrings and firestones on four fingers. On the hoof that first time I saw him he was worth a ship's ransom and then some. Tibo the Slide, master of his trade, riding a streak of luck a lightyear wide.

“I crawled out of the fingerbowl into a party to end all parties and forgot I was tired.

“A lot of cycles later, I lost count in the middle somewhere, Tibo, Alelo, me, a gyoser named udJian, a mixed pair of dancers from Kemur named Beeba and Beeka, and a yumrick Gefurn named Squeeze, we landed finally in a slumbabounce, half-asleep half-awake, and altogether out of touch with whatever passed for reality round there. I don't know who started, but after a while, one by one, we were telling stories, things that happened to us when we were children. You want a story from beyond the Stranger's Gate, here's Tibo tale. I do not guarantee the truth in it.

“Tibo was a naked little man, drifting from pouf to pouf. His voice came to us here there, rambling on until we forgot the teller in the telling.”

We were contract players on a Gancha worldship, a wide-bind family, my bodyfather and bodymother, my teaching mothers and training fathers, my sisters and half-sisters and line sisters, my brothers and half-brothers and line brothers, the cross cousins and parallel cousins, the adopted affiliates and so on. We were one of the oldest and largest wide-bind families living in the ships. I was born and suckled on ship Samal Haran, learned the family trade in ship Eyasta Hus, and left the world ships forever after what happened in ship Chiar Frawa. Let me tell you about world ships. The travelers buying transport, the traders buying space, they know the upper levels, those around the garden of shipheart where even the poorest of passengers could roam where he pleased for an endless round of delights, among them the Player families dancing, tumbling, performing in playlets, juggling, jesting, all the things Player families do. That passenger might even have got a little deeper out, into the outer edge of crew quarters. But he'd never make it all the way to us. We would not permit that. Though we had little clout with the Family that owned the Ship or the Captains in their aeries, that they granted us, treating us Contract Families like their own people. If a passenger visited crew, it was outsider crew—hire-meat, the pursers and stewards, the clerks in shops when they weren't part of a Family, waitresses, cleaners, scut workers—not the real Crew that ran the Ship and had shares in her.

My bodyfather was a tumbler and an acrobat and that was what I was taught. We had actors and seers of all kinds, read anything for you, dancers, singers, gamers, and others. We were a family rich in talent and passions, a noisy brawling close—ah close—family.

When I was fourteen I fell desperately in love with an affiliate, a girl we adopted in not long after we changed ships, she came from hire-crew, the bodydaughter of a food designer who doubled in a pleasure house, the daughter being destined to follow her in both, something she hated the thought of. She auditioned for us and we adopted her. She was a little older than me, a dark small creature, agile as a newt on a hot wall, and she had more courage and spirit than a dozen ordinary folk. From the time she came into the family, she was thirteen then and I was seven, I was her slave, followed her everywhere. She was good-natured about it. She liked to talk and I was a willing audience. She liked to do crazy things and she needed an audience for that, too. I adored her like a sistermother when I was seven and when I was fourteen I wanted her for lovemate.

A worldship's skin isn't solid or smooth, even on the outside. Costs being what they are, the ships grew as the Family could afford to build on more space. Chiar Frawa was a hundred generations old and immense. And the rind was so complicated even shipmind didn't know all the ins and outs. Works like this. There's the outshell, the sealerskin, then a space filled with metal sponge, then layers of air, then more sponge alternating with air filled with crawlways and springbeams. Then the meddashell, then the serviceways in a very wide airspace filled with beams and braces, ducts and boards—every three steps off the catwalks you're in a hole with a whole new shape. An endlessly permuting mazeway. The walkways were kept cleared because the crew used them just about every day, and even if they didn't the children of the Worao Crew Families spent part of each day in there keeping the fungus off them. In the off-spaces though, the fungus grew thick and strange. Other things grew in there, too. They are damp places, warm. There are orchids and other epiphytes, even small trees in catch-pockets, vines, exotics from a hundred worlds, passengers bringing in spores on their clothing, sometimes even seed. Rats, birds, lizards, worms of all sorts. Other things, dangerous things. The cleaning children were generally under guard by an armed adult in some sections, specially where the ways were narrow and seldom used. The light didn't go far from the walks, but there were clusters of luminescent fungi that produced almost as much light as a glowstrip, so there were a lot of temptations for imaginative children. The guard was there as much to keep them herded on the ways as to protect them from rat swarms and other things.