"The Manq. We call them Traders. Aristo Traders." They had red eyes instead of copper, but everything else he had said fit. "Their hair glistens like water." I sifted through my language modes for a Shay word. "Manq hair glitters."
His face became more drawn. "Yes."
I did a search for words that resembled
manq
and came up with
maana.
That didn't help much, given that it meant "with one's nose cut off." Then I found
mankatuul,
for "trades pain." It derived from the ancient Iotic word
ma'tuul,
meaning "base" or "vile."
"Mankatuul," I said.
Gazing at the fire, he repeated it in his own dialect. "Manqatile."
"They took my husband." Pain saturated that realization.
"I don't believe." He fixed me with a hostile stare. "You are they."
"I am their enemy." I understood him now. Dying was a better fate than capture by Aristos.
But my husband? Eldrin?
What had happened?
The memory crashed in like mental thunder. Eldrin had pushed me and Taquinil through a "door" from our universe into Kyle space. My last sight had been of Eldrin standing unprotected, in his sleep trousers and robe, his arms outstretched from shoving his wife and son. Our bodyguards lay dead around him. They had striven until the very end to protect us. A Trader warrior had reached Eldrin, eight feet tall in its mirrored body armor. It loomed behind him, its massive arm clamping around his waist.
Nausea swept over me. "They
took
him."
"Say again?" the treeman asked.
My voice shook. "My husband. The Manq took him." And our son? Both Taquinil and I had fallen out of our universe. But he had never come back.
I struggled to stay calm, though I wanted to shout. "Untie me. I must find help."
He lifted the line of beetles into his lap. "You are lying."
"No! Is truth."
He drew a knife out of its sheath on his belt, a blade sharp and modern, with a cyber-nexus trademark on its hilt. It glittered in the red light. Did he intend to cut me free? Or kill me?
"Let me go," I said. "Please." I wasn't used to asking. Usually people asked me to do for them.
"You tell this story to make me feel sorry." He cut open the red beetle and shook its liquid innards into a clay pot. "It will not work."
Despite his unyielding pose, I felt his doubts. "Is truth." I labored with the language. "Much is at stake. Thousands of colonies. Do you want the Manq to control it all?"
"I understand you not." He opened the green beetle as if he were cracking an egg, then emptied it into the pot and dropped its carapace on the ground. "You talk too fast." He picked up the blue beetle. "And you say words oddly."
"Try, I do. But my Shay is small."
He gave me a startled glance. "Hai! You speak Shay. Not Hajune Shay."
"What is Hajune Shay?"
"My speak."
Hajune. It might derive from
Ha'te june,
which in ancient Iotic meant "the other." "Hajune is another form of Shay?"
"Shay, city language. Hajune, forest language."
My hope jumped. "A city is here?"
"Thirty klicks west, in the land under the full coal."
Klicks. Nowadays that terminology was mostly used by spacers, another indication the treeman didn't live in isolation. "What is the full coal?"
He motioned upward with the blue beetle. "Slowcoal. The planet."
I spoke carefully, drawing on language routines that continually updated as we conversed. "If we go to where Slowcoal fills more of the sky, will we find this city?"
"Of course. You know this not? You talk like them." He studied me. "City Shay are not Manq. City Shay hate Manq."
"As do I." We were finally getting somewhere.
"Then you are from the city?"
"Even farther."
"The starport." He made it a statement.
My hope jumped. "Yes. The port." It was true in the sense I thought he meant, that I came from beyond Opalite.
He showed me his knife, a diamond-edged steel blade. "At the docks, I traded for this. That docker, he wanted nothing more than a shirt I made. For that nothing shirt, he gave me this."
"A fine knife," I agreed. As long as he used it on beetles and not me.
"Where is your home?" he asked.
I started to say I didn't know. Then I realized I did. It was on a space habitat called the Orbiter. Eldrin and I lived there together. I served as liaison between the Skolian government and psiberweb. Eldrin was a singer, a glorious baritone. He wrote folk ballads. I had always loved his music, fascinated by the mathematical intricacies within its melodies. Our son Taquinil was an economics professor at Imperial University on the planet Parthonia. He had been visiting us when the Traders attacked.
"I live in a space station," I said.
He gutted the last beetle, dumping its insides into the pot. "A strange place, without trees."
"Many trees are there."
"It is hard to imagine." He set the pot in a tripod of wet green sticks and placed it over the fire.
"Treeman, have you a name?"
He glanced at me. "What say?"
"Your name, I know it not."
"Why call me 'treeman'?"
"The first time I saw you, it looked like you came out of a tree."
His expression lightened, gentling his face. "Tripodman is better, then. I am like that." Although it was the first time I had seen him smile, he obviously did it often; it creased well-worn lines around his eyes.
Curious now, I asked, "Other names have you, Tripodman?"
"Hajune Tailor."
"Tailor? You sew clothes?"
Hajune reddened. "The city Shay trade many fine goods for these nothing clothes I make." He stirred the liquid in the pot, and an aroma filled the cavity, tangy and rich, like exotic spices mixed with bittersweet fruit. "But I prefer Hajune. It means 'the Other Man.' Forest man, not city man."
I felt his love for the forest. And he enjoyed his profession. If the clothes he wore were any indication, he undervalued his abilities a great deal. Few people even knew how to tailor any more, let alone with such finesse. Rich offworlders would pay a fortune for his work. He needed an agent. He could get a lot more for those clothes than a knife, even one as expensive as his diamond-steel blade.
"Impressive they are, your tailor-things," I said.
"I use only dead plants. Never living." He swept out his arm. "This forest is home. Here we loved—" He stopped, his animation vanishing like a doused light. He lowered his arm. "Here I prefer to live."
His loneliness filled the cavity. Tears gathered in my eyes, from both his grief and my response to his pain. His anguish didn't show on his face, but I absorbed it from his mind. He had cherished his wife, wanting nothing more than to live with her among the trees and lakes.
This time when his memory came, I saw the assault in gruesome detail. The images shattered. His wife's copper-eyed attackers weren't Aristos. These were Razers, the secret police created by the Aristos. Half Aristo and half slave, Razers occupied the top level of the Trader slave hierarchies, which meant they had considerable wealth and authority themselves.
Aristo genes dominated their makeup.
Two of them held a woman on the ground, a female version of Hajune, tall and lovely. Hajune's memory didn't include a full image of himself, only as much as he could see with his own vision. He fought like a madman, crazed with desperation, while two other Razers bound him to the leg of a giant tripod. His wife's screams filled the universe. Her terror infused my mind, as it had filled Hajune's; I experienced it as he had felt it, through her mind.
Here in the cavity, Hajune gave a strangled cry. Leaning over, he wrapped his arms around his body. Then he lurched to his feet and left the cavity. He strode off into the forest.
Gods.
How did he live with that emotional earthquake of a memory? Nor could I understand how such an atrocity could have happened here. This was a Skolian world. Razers couldn't brutalize our citizens. Trader secret police became war criminals the moment they entered Skolian space.
I had to do something. For Hajune.
For Eldrin.
I couldn't stay on this far-placed moon while Aristos imprisoned my husband, who had given up his freedom, possibly his life, to prevent my suffering a fate similar to Hajune's wife's. This much I knew, at an instinctual level: if the Traders caught Eldrin, Taquinil, or me, they would never let us escape, not even through death.
Outside the shadows had switched direction and evening was falling. The fire continued to smolder. It made me uneasy. A forest fire was unlikely in this wet, low-oxygen climate, but not impossible. Bound as I was, I could do nothing if a spark ignited the moss that carpeted this cavity.
Closing my eyes, I tried to settle my mind. It didn't work. My thoughts contracted into knots and my concentration broke every time a beetle clacked.
It took a long time to reach a meditative state. But finally I spread into a sea of thoughts, calm and serene. Opening my eyes, I saw the cavity ripple like a viscous sea. It wasn't truly bending; it took immense energies to curve spacetime, enough to destroy this moon. I was seeing another reality superimposed on this one, as I transformed…
Gradually I became aware again. A tiny pink flower gleamed in the moss near my eyes, a drop of water on one petal. The aroma of bubbling soup filled the air. Heat from the fire warmed the front of my torso, and my limbs ached with returning circulation. Bizarrely, I had on the blue shift again; I must have gathered more of it in psiberspace. It had a hazy translucence, though. Ghost shift.
I sat up stiffly. Gazing across the fire, I saw the tangle of roots where I had been bound. My chronometer said only seconds had passed since Hajune left. Before I made my own escape, I needed food, lest hunger stop me where roots had failed. I used the carapace of a gutted beetle to spoon down half the soup. It was tangy and bitter, with a sweet aftertaste, more palatable than I expected. If I hadn't seen Hajune make it, I would have never dreamed it came from over-sized-bug innards. After I ate, I doused the flames with the last of the water in the pitcher.
Then I left.
Outside, tripod trees loomed in a red night. I smelled water in one direction. The lake? I headed that way. The purported city was only thirty kilometers away, "under" Slowcoal. Normally, I could easily walk that far, but here it would be harder. I paused to fashion rough shoes out of plant flags. They weren't the most comfortable footwear, but they made it easier to hike.
Then I set off again. As I pushed through the underbrush, I pondered this last time I had faded. An odd sense tugged my mind. What? The memory hovered at the edges of my thoughts. Frustrated, I finally gave up trying to catch it and let my mind wander.
Suddenly the memory jumped into focus. Taquinil! I had sensed him in psiberspace. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I felt certain he had been real. A mother's joy flowed over me, tempered by the knowledge that it had only been a trace, nothing more concrete.
As hope buoyed my thoughts, spherical harmonic wavefunctions evolved in my mind. I saw them as shimmering orbs in lavender, rose, and blue. Some resembled symmetrical flowers; others were rings and teardrops. They rotated against a silver atmosphere.
It had always been this way, my mind forming vivid mathematical images to accompany intense emotions. When I was ten, even before I had any neural augmentation, the doctors told my parents that my intellectual potential was beyond what their tests could measure with accuracy. That didn't stop them from doing test after test, though. I seemed to fascinate them. They ascribed my increased intellect to the extra neural structures that made me a telepath, as well as to genetic and environmental factors. Over the decades, as neural surgeons augmented my brain, its capacity increased.
