“Perivar, if she’s up for grabs, we’ll take her here.”
“What would the gardens’ director have to say to that?” When she didn’t answer, Perivar felt his heart freeze up. “Oh gods, Iyal, you didn’t.”
“Perivar, there are maybe fifty completely engineered people alive in the Quarter Galaxy and none of them, I mean none of them, are this fully realized. Additions and enhancements are one thing. Anybody can throw a switch. Some places can even rewire the system. But this one…whoever built her started with some proteins in a sterile dish and went from there. If we knew even half of what went into it, we could give the Vitae a run for their market, and not just on Kethran either.
“And by the way"—her voice and face hardened together—"I’m not crazy about the fact you think I’d just get her in here and run her through a processor.”
“Iyal, at this point I don’t know what you’d do.” Which just adds another name to that list. “You’re not talking like yourself.”
That took her back. “All right, all right.” She waved her hands aimlessly. “Yes, I showed my results to Director Id Shomat. I thought we had a calibration problem. I thought the chain could not be this short.
“He went over the whole thing again. We got the same results five times in a row and I told him… well, I told him. He told me to try to get… her… we were saying ‘it’ because what the hell did we know…here. What’s she need to be comfortable?”
Perivar felt his fingers curling up again and forced them to straighten out. “The usual things, Iyal. A place to stay, food, something she can do to keep from getting bored…Oh yeah, she needs some language lessons and she doesn’t know an input terminal from a hunk of brick.”
Iyal scratched her chin. “All right. The necessities we can fix her up with, and we could always use another field assistant that doesn’t need reprogramming. We could even pay her. What’s the going contract length for contraband where it’s legal?”
“Six years, supposedly. But I never saw a contraband really finish a contract. Permanent extensions are more the way it works. They can’t exactly protest to the labor authority.”
“Six years should do it, and then some. Will you release her to us?”
Perivar sat still for a while, listening to the hum of the utilities and the silence that was coming from behind the membrane housing.
“Perivar, what is with you?”
“Nothing. Plenty. Never mind, Iyal. I’ve just been hanging around Kiv too long, that’s all. Can you give me an hour? There are some things I need to clear up.”
“An hour I can give you, but not much more. Cousin Director is about ready to start eating the carpet over here.”
“All right. I’ll get things… straightened out on this end as soon as I can, Iyal.”
“I’ll be waiting. And, Perivar…” she hesitated. “I may end up owing you the favor for this. Hope to see you soon.”
“Yeah.” He shut the channel down.
“All right, Kiv. You win.” Perivar hoisted himself to his feet and knocked on his living room door.
No answer came, so Perivar pushed the door aside. Aria sat on the sofa with her face to the door, but she did not look up. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were cupped around a small white sphere that gleamed in the light that shone through the windows.
“Aria Stone?” Perivar approached her carefully. Now he could see two more spheres resting on a bright green swath of fabric next to her.
She didn’t move. Perivar laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Aria?”
Aria blinked once and lifted her eyes. She searched his face without any sign of comprehension. Her pupils had dilated until her brown irises were nothing but a narrow band around two black holes.
“Are you all right?” He lifted his hand away.
She licked her lips and slowly, slowly focused on his face. “Yes. I am.” She shook her shoulders and dropped the stone onto the fabric on the sofa. It made a sharp click as it hit the others. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you…I…” She started wrapping the cloth around her spheres.
“You were meditating?” Perivar suggested uncertainly. Even from where he stood, he could see her hands shaking, and she moved with deliberate overcaution, as if she were exhausted, or drunk.
“I don’t understand that word,” she said. “I was…thinking. Putting all the things I have seen into place.” She fumbled with the cloth and, after several tries, managed to knot the ends together. Her eyes, he noticed, had returned to normal, but the expectant trust she had shown before was buried.
“If I interrupted something personal, I’m sorry,” said Perivar. “Eric never told me much about the religious customs in the Realm.”
“It’s all right.” Aria leaned her arm against the sofa’s back and stared out the window. “I should have waited until I was more settled.” She laid one hand on the windowpane and fixed her gaze on the street. Her discarded headcloth still lay on the couch, and an untidy braid of black hair hung down between slumped shoulders.
Perivar looked past her to the scene outside. There wasn’t much to see. Because it was a terraformed world, most of Kethran’s cities were the result of meticulous planning. The process made for the efficient use of space but did not necessarily produce splendid views. The stone and polymer walls of the warehouses blocked out the horizon in one direction and the park in the other. To Perivar, the view looked more like a canyon than a street. Which was, he realized, why Aria was staring at it so hungrily.
“Just got an answer for you,” he said. “Let me know if I say something you don’t understand…”
“Just tell me,” she said wearily. “I will understand.” She added something under her breath that he didn’t catch.
Perivar felt his eyebrows arch, but he said, “All right.”
He told her about Iyal’s offer. She let him keep talking until he was done and not once did she take her gaze from his face.
“What do you think?” Perivar asked finally.
“I think"—Aria toyed with the end of her headcloth—"that my decision to go over the World’s Wall was beyond reckless. It was, in fact, stupid.”
“I can arrange for you to go home easily enough.” With one twenty-word call to the labor authorities, in fact.
Aria wound the black cloth between her scarred fingers. “If I return now, I, at the very least, am dead. I should not have left, I should have found some way…” She looked at the backs of her hands. “But this is less than useless. Do we leave for this ‘Amaiar Gardens’ place now?”
“Only if you want to go.”
She gave him a crooked, half smile. “I want the skills it will buy me. If I have to surrender a few drops of blood every so often for that, then"—she shrugged—"it will be worth it. Tell me, though, are you Skymen all so interested in each others’ blood?”
Perivar began to wonder what she was hearing through the translator. “Not usually,” he admitted. “Listen, Sar Stone, I want you to be clear on one thing. Once you leave here, you leave here. I don’t ever want to have to hear your name again, all right?”
For a moment, he thought she was going to ask him why, but she didn’t. She said, “I don’t care to risk anyone’s skin but my own.”
“Glad to hear it,” Perivar said: “We should go now.” He stood aside to let her pass.
It’s a decent beginning, he told himself. The beginning of an end, Kiv. And this time, I’ll make it stick. Perivar laid two ringers over his heart and watched Aria’s straight back as she walked unafraid through his door. I swear it.
Kelat was not the first to exit the shuttle, or even the twenty-first. He did not care. The hard-packed dirt that pressed unevenly against the soles of his boots belonged to the Home Ground. The ruins that stood out knife-edged in the sunlight, despite the filters on his faceplate, had been inhabited by the Ancestors. And if they were broken and sagging, and pitted by thirty centuries of dust and radiation, they still waited for the descendants of their makers. Those descendants who now walked under a black sky and tried to come to grips with the fact that they were home.