The Very Best of Kate Elliott (33 page)

Both sides stopped.

After a moment of polite silence, Caraglio began again.“Please, your excellencies, be assured that the tragedy that has happened here today is a complete mystery to us. I must beg your pardon for this terrible disruption. We hope you will forgive us and allow us a suitable time to—ah—recover and explain.”

They hooted. The translation crackled through the screen. “It was a wise and well-thought play. Please do not think we did not appreciate it, or think that it failed in any way although there was this slight mishap. One has only to hear the words to understand their meaning.”

The middle one shifted forward—somewhat rashly, I thought, given what I’d seen of them—and pressed its turnip nose up against the cloudy lock wall as if to make sure we understood how important the next remark was. As if to make sure that we understood that it understood.“My voice is in my sword.”

There was a pause while the three jockeyed for position, and the rash one was shouldered to the back as if the other two were aghast at its rudeness.

“We hope,” continued one of the other two—I couldn’t be sure which—“that in this small way we have spared you the distress of failing to complete your work of art.”

“Oh, my God,” said Caraglio, an eerie echo of Bax’s last words. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“I don’t understand,” said El Directore. But
I
did.

Caraglio made polite farewells, and we exited the lock. We wound our way back through the protected corridor. Caraglio left at once. I went back to the stage.

Bax was still lying there, dead. Through the tiring house doors, thrown open, I could hear shrieking and wailing from the back: the lamias were objecting to being thrown out of the dressing room—I couldn’t tell if they were also mourning for their lost patron, or only their privileges—and Yu-Sun and Octavian didn’t want to touch the body until they had somewhere to take it.

“But what happened?” demanded Cheri. Emmi wiped tears—not, I think, for Bax personally, but for the shock of it all—from her cheeks. Peng-Hsin stood with regal dignity. The others crowded together for comfort.

“The Squats did it,” I said. “I’d guess that they sort of used their empathic powers to make his heart seize up, or something.”

“But why?” asked Peng-Hsin quietly.

“Isn’t it obvious what the outcome of the play is? Isn’t it almost a ritualistic act, the entire thing? And they wouldn’t have built this—” I waved at the theater, “—if they didn’t care about us doing well. If they didn’t want us to succeed. And they read, from us, the object of the play was for Macbeth to die. How embarrassing for us if we failed to accomplish that act, in our first performance for them.”

Mercenary Cheri suddenly stifled a giggle behind a hand.

I shrugged. What else was there to say? The real cleanup would be left for the diplomats. And it was funny, in a black kind of way.

I looked over at Bax. The rest of them did, too. It’s hard not to look at a corpse, especially when he’s the one person in the room that everyone was wishing dead just half an hour before.

“They were just trying to be helpful.”

S
UNSEEKER

A
J
ARAN
S
TORY

THEY GAVE HER A berth on the
Ra
because her father was famous, not because he was rich. Wealth was no guarantor of admittance to the ranks of the fabled Sunseekers; their sponsors didn’t need the money. But there was always a price to be paid, due at unforeseen intervals decided upon by the caprice of the self-appointed leaders of their intrepid little band of a dozen or so sunseeking souls.

Right now, they had started in on Eleanor, an elegant girl of Bantu ancestry whose great-grands had made their fortune gunrunning along the Horn of Africa (so it was rumored) and parlayed that wealth into a multisystem import/export business.

“Sweetkins, I’m not sure I can stand to look at much more of that vegetable fiber. Cotton!”
“
Algodón!
”
Akvir mimicked Zenobia’s horrified tone. “I thought we’d agreed to wear only animal products.” “If we don’t hold to standards,” continued Zenobia, “it’ll be soybric next. Or, Goddess forbid, nylon.”

Eleanor met this sally with her usual dignified silence. She did not even smooth a hand over her gold and brown robe and trousers, as any of the others would have, self-conscious under scrutiny. Rose suspected her of having designs both on Akvir—self-styled priest of the Sunseekers—and on the coveted position of priestess. Of course it went without saying that the priestess and the priest had their own intimate rites, so after all, if one was priestess, one got Akvir—at least for as long as his sway over the group held.

“That a tattoo?” Eun-soo plopped down beside Rose. The seat cushion exhaled sharply under the pressure of his rump. He was new on board, and already bored.

“What?” Self-consciously, remembering—how could she ever, ever forget?—she touched the blemish on her cheek.

“Brillianté, mon,” he said, although the slang sounded forced. He was too clean-cut to look comfortable in the leather trousers and vest he sported. He looked made up, a rich-kid doll sold in the marketplace for poor kids to play pretend with. “Makes a nice statement, cutting up the facial lines with a big blotch like that. It’s not even an image tattoo, like a tigre or something, just a—” He paused, searching for words.

She already knew the words.

Blot. Eyesore. Flaw. Birth defect.

She was irrevocably marred. Disfigured. Stained.

These words proclaimed by that famous voice which most every soul on this planet and in most of the other human systems would recognize. Golden-tongued and golden-haired. Chrysostom. Sun-struck. El Sol. There were many epithets for him, almost all of them flattering.

“Ya se ve!” Eun-soo clapped himself on the head with an open hand, a theatrical display of sudden insight. “You’re the actor’s kid, no? You look like him—”

“If never so handsome,” said Akvir, who had bored of his pursuit of Eleanor.

“No one is as handsome as my father,” snapped Rose, for that was both her pride and her shame.

“I thought there were operations, lasers, that kind of thing.” Eun-soo stared at her with intense curiosity.

To see a blemished person was rare. To see one anywhere outside the ranks of the great lost, the poor who are always with us in their shacks and hovels and rags even in this day of medical clinics in every piss-poor village and education for every forlorn or unwanted child, was unheard of.

“Yeah, there are,” she said, standing to walk over to Eleanor’s seat. She stared out the tinted window of the ship. The Surbrent-Xia solar array that powered the engines made the stubby wings shimmer as light played across them. Here, above the cloud cover that shrouded the western Caribbean, the sun blazed in all its glory. Ever bright. Up here, following the sunside of the Earth, it was always day.

“You going to see the big head?” asked Eleanor in her lean, cultured voice.“The archaeological site is called after a saint. San Lorenzo.”

“Yah.” She put on the bored, supercilious tone used by the others. “Sounds very slummy, a little Meshko village and all.”

“Quaint,” said Eleanor. “The right word is
quaint.
It’s gauche and rude to say slummy. Saint Lorenzo was one of the seven deacons of the Church of Rome, this would be back, oh, way back during the actual Roman Empire when the old Christian—” She said it like a girl’s name, Kristie-Anne. “—Church was just getting a toehold in the world. Like all of them, he was made a martyr, but in this case he was roasted over a gridiron.”

“Over a football field?”

“No.” Eleanor laughed but not in a mocking way. She never used her knowledge to mock people. “No, it’s like a thing with bars you grill fish on. But the thing is, that he was burned, roasted, so you see perhaps he was in a prior incarnation related to some form of sun worship. The fire is a metaphor for the sun.”

“Oh. I guess it could be.”

Eleanor shrugged. Rose could never understand why someone like
her
ran with the Sunseekers. Only except they were, so everyone said, the jettest black of all social sets, the crème de la crème, the egg in the basket, the two unobtainable birds in the bush. That was why her father never came running after her after she ran away to them.

Wasn’t it?

She had seen a clip about two months ago as the night-bound told time, for up here in the constant glare of the sun there was only one long long day. He had referred to her in passing, with that charmingly deprecatory smile.

“Ah, yes, my daughter Rosie, she’s on a bit of a vacation with that Sunseeker crowd. That’s true, most of them are older, finished with their A-levels or gymnasium or high school. But. Well. She’s a high-spirited girl. Fifteen-year-olds always know just what they want, don’t they? She wanted the Sunseekers.” The rest went without saying: The very most exclusive social set, don’t you know. Of
course
my child would be admitted into their august ranks.

He had only to quirk his lips and shift his elbow on the settee to reveal these confidences without any additional words passing his lips. His gift consisted, as so many, many, many people had assured her as she grew up and old enough to understand what their praise meant, of the ability to suggest much with very little.

But her elder siblings—long since estranged from the family—called it something else: The ability to blind.

The engines thrummed. Rose set a hand against the pane that separated them from the air and felt the shudder and shift that meant they were descending. In the lounge, Eun-soo flipped through the music files. The mournful cadences of an old Lennon-McCartney aria, “I’ll Follow the Sun,” filled the cabin. Eleanor uncoiled herself from her seat and walked, not without a few jerks to keep her balance as the pitch of the
Ra
steepened, back to the dressing and shower room, shared indiscriminately by the almost two dozen inhabitants of the ship. She did dress, stubbornly, in fabrics woven from vegetable forebears. Rose admired her intransigence but more than that the drape of the cloth itself, something leather cured in the sun or
spinsil
extruded and spun and woven in the airless vaults of space stations could not duplicate. Style, her father always said, sets apart those who are watchable from those fated only to watch. It puzzled and irritated him that his daughter had no sense of style, but she had only ever seen him actually lose his temper once in her entire life: that day in the hospital when her mother had finally backed her up after she stubbornly refused, once again and for all, to undergo the simple laser operation that would remove the port-wine stain.

He wanted to be surrounded by handsome things.

The ship turned as it always did before landing, going down rump first, as some of the Sunseekers liked to say. Her hand on the pane warmed as the rising sun’s rays melted into her palm. They cut down through the clouds and the sun vanished. She shivered. Gray boiled up past her, receded into the sky as they came down below the clouds and could see the ground at last.

Rugged mountains rose close beside the shore of the sea, receding behind them. The lowlands were cut by ribbons of muddy water beside which sprawled the brown and white scars of human habitation, a village. The old ruined Zona Arqueológica lay on higher ground, the centerpiece of a significant plateau.

It had been a week since they’d last landed. The texture of the earth, the lush green carpet of vegetation, amazed her anew. She blinked on her computer implant to get an identification of the river. A map of the region came up on the screen, not a real screen, of course, but the simulation of a screen that according to her tekhnē class was necessary for the human eye to register information in this medium. Sim-screens for primates, they would shout when they were younger, but it was only funny when you were young enough to find the parallel between simulation and simian amusing, like being six years old and getting your first pun. But like a bad pun or a particularly obnoxious advert balloon, the phrase had stuck with her.

The lacy mat of tributaries and rivers floated in front of her eyes on the sim-screen, spidery lines that thickened and took on weight and texture, finally moving and melding into the landscape until they seemed to become one. Disoriented, she blinked the screen off and staggered back to find a couch for the final deceleration. The couch snaked a pressure net across her, calibrated to her weight, and she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and waited for landing. Aria segued into gospel hymn,“Where the Sun Will Never Go Down.” Eun-soo hummed along in a tuneless tenor until Zenobia told him to shut up. Finally, they came to rest; the altosphere shades lightened away and everything went quiet. She felt giddy. When she stood up, her feet hummed with the memory of engines and she swayed as she walked, following the others to the ’lock and out onto the plank that led down to the variegated earth of the night-bound, the lost souls—all fourteen billion of them—who must suffer the sad cyclic subjugation to the endless and cruel celestial reminder of our human mortality, night following day following night. Or so Akvir put it. He had not seen night for nine months.