“Let’s go inside,” said Lamia, her words almost lost in the wind sound. “It’s getting cold.”
They had turned off the single lamp and the interior of the room was lighted only by the heat-lightning pulses of color from the sky outside. Shadows sprang into being, vanished, and appeared again as the room was painted in many colors. Sometimes the darkness would last several seconds before the next barrage.
The Consul reached into his traveling bag and took out a strange device, larger than a comlog, oddly ornamented, and fronted with a liquid crystal diskey like something out of a history holo.
“Secret fatline transmitter?” Brawne Lamia asked dryly.
The Consul’s smile showed no humor. “It’s an ancient comlog. It came out during the Hegira.” He removed a standard micro-disk from a pouch on his belt and inserted it. “Like Father Hoyt, I have someone else’s tale to tell before you can understand my own.”
“Christ on a stick,” sneered Martin Silenus, “am I the only one who can tell a straightforward story in this fucking herd? How long do I have to …”
The Consul’s movement surprised even himself. He rose, spun, caught the smaller man by the cape and shirtfront, slammed him against the wall, draped him over a packing crate with a knee in Silenus’s belly and a forearm against his throat, and hissed, “One more word from you, poet, and I’ll kill you.”
Silenus began to struggle but a tightening on his windpipe and a glance at the Consul’s eyes made him cease. His face was very white.
Colonel Kassad silently, almost gently, separated the two. “There will be no more comments,” he said. He touched the deathwand in his belt.
Martin Silenus went to the far side of the circle, still rubbing his throat, and slumped against a crate without a word. The Consul strode to the door, took several deep breaths, and walked back to the group. He spoke to everyone but the poet. “I’m sorry. It is just that … I never expected to share this.”
The light from outside surged red and then white, followed by a blue glow which faded to near darkness.
“We know,” Brawne Lamia said softly. “We all felt that way.”
The Consul touched his lower lip, nodded, roughly cleared his throat, and came to sit by the ancient comlog. “The recording is not as old as the instrument,” he said. “It was made about fifty standard years ago. I’ll have some more to say when it’s over.” He paused as if there were more to be said, shook his head, and thumbed the antique diskey.
There were no visuals. The voice was that of a young man. In the background one could hear a breeze blowing through grass or soft branches and, more distantly, the roll of surf.
Outside, the light pulsed madly as the tempo of the distant space battle quickened. The Consul tensed as he waited for the crash and concussion. There was none. He closed his eyes and listened with the others.
THE CONSUL’S TALE:
REMEMBERING SIRI
I climb the steep hill to Siri’s tomb on the day the islands return to the shallow seas of the Equatorial Archipelago. The day is perfect and I hate it for being so. The sky is as tranquil as tales of Old Earth’s seas, the shallows are dappled with ultramarine tints, and a warm breeze blows in from the sea to ripple the russet willowgrass on the hillside near me.
Better low clouds and gray gloom on such a day. Better mist or a shrouding fog which sets the masts in Firstsite Harbor dripping and raises the lighthouse horn from its slumbers. Better one of the great sea-simoons blowing up out of the cold belly of the south, lashing before it the motile isles and their dolphin herders until they seek refuge in the lee of our atolls and stony peaks.
Anything would be better than this warm spring day when the sun moves through a vault of sky so blue that it makes me want to run, to jump in great loping arcs, and to roll in the soft grass as Siri and I have done at just this spot.
Just this spot. I pause to look around. The willowgrass bends and ripples like the fur of some great beast as the salt-tinged breeze gusts up out of the south. I shield my eyes and search the horizon but nothing moves there. Out beyond the lava reef, the sea begins to chop and lift itself in nervous strokes.
“Siri,” I whisper. I say her name without meaning to do so. A hundred meters down the slope, the crowd pauses to watch me and to catch its collective breath. The procession of mourners and celebrants stretches for more than a kilometer to where the white buildings of the city begin. I can make out the gray and balding head of my younger son in the vanguard. He is wearing the blue and gold robes of the Hegemony. I know that I should wait for him, walk with him, but he and the other aging Council members cannot keep up with my young, ship-trained muscles and steady stride. But decorum dictates that I should walk with him and my granddaughter Lira and my nine-year-old grandson.
To hell with it. And to hell with them.
I turn and jog up the steep hillside. Sweat begins to soak my loose cotton shirt before I reach the curving summit of the ridge and catch sight of the tomb.
Siri’s tomb.
I stop. The wind chills me although the sunlight is warm enough as it glints off the flawless white stone of the silent mausoleum. The grass is high near the sealed entrance to the crypt. Rows of faded festival pennants on ebony staffs line the narrow gravel path.
Hesitating, I circle the tomb and approach the steep cliff edge a few meters beyond. The willowgrass is bent and trampled here where irreverent picnickers have laid their blankets. There are several fire rings formed from the perfectly round, perfectly white stones purloined from the border of the gravel path.
I cannot stop a smile. I know the view from here: the great curve of the outer harbor with its natural seawall, the low, white buildings of Firstsite, and the colorful hulls and masts of the catamarans bobbing at anchorage. Near the pebble beach beyond Common Hall, a young woman in a white skirt moves toward the water. For a second I think that it is Siri and my heart pounds. I half prepare to throw up my arms in response to her wave but she does not wave. I watch in silence as the distant figure turns away and is lost in the shadows of the old boat building.
Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas Hawk circles above the lagoon on rising thermals and scans the shifting bluekelp beds with its infrared vision, seeking out harp seals or torpids. Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass. Nature sets the stage all wrong for such a day and then it is insensitive enough to throw in a bird searching for prey which have long since fled the polluted waters near the growing city.
I remember another Thomas Hawk on that first night when Siri and I came to this hilltop. I remember the moonlight on its wings and the strange, haunting cry which echoed off the cliff and seemed to pierce the dark air above the gaslights of the village below.
Siri was sixteen … no, not quite sixteen … and the moonlight that touched the hawk’s wings above us also painted her bare skin with milky light and cast shadows beneath the soft circles of her breasts. We looked up guiltily when the bird’s cry cut the night and Siri said, “ ‘It was the nightingale and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.’ ”
“Huh?” I said. Siri was almost sixteen. I was nineteen. But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.
“Relax, young Shipman,” she whispered and pulled me down beside her then. “It’s only an old Tom’s Hawk hunting. Stupid bird. Come back, Shipman. Come back, Merin.”
The Los Angeles had chosen that moment to rise above the horizon and to float like a wind-borne ember west across the strange constellations of Maui-Covenant, Siri’s world. I lay next to her and described the workings of the great Hawking-drive spinship which was catching the high sunlight against the drop of night above us, and all the while my hand was sliding lower along her smooth side, her skin seemed all velvet and electricity, and her breath came more quickly against my shoulder. I lowered my face to the hollow of her neck, to the sweat and perfume essence of her tousled hair.