He recovered his stride. Navigating the stairs, he asked, “Why do you want Diamond?”
“Because you don’t deserve him,” said the papio.
The cabin door was locked, and the captain spent moments patting his pockets, hunting for a key left behind on the bridge.
Sensing duplicity, the papio reached past him, punched the lock and forced the door inwards.
Brutish faces stared out at the two of them. Royal jazzings were the miniature, half-domesticated versions of the murderous wild jazzings. They had short jaws wrapped inside muscle, their green eyes furious and terrified, each trying to yank loose from the ropes that kept them helpless.
“Where’s the boy?” asked the soldier.
“Where Happenstance wants him to be,” the captain said.
The papio thought of shooting everything, but he wasn’t a fool. So he carefully set down his rifle and used his hands, breaking the monkey’s neck, making no sparks at all as he reached down for the gun again.
What caused the fire would never be known.
The boarding party burned, and the crew burned, and five more jazzings were sacrificed, each with a charm reading “Diamond” fixed to its blazing chest.
SEVEN
Father spoke about finding sleep. He led them to the cabins and one at a time put them inside, closing doors while instructing them to rest. Every cabin had its rubber floor and one tiny window set high, black shades drawn. The spaces were narrow with single narrow cots claiming one of the long walls. Diamond’s cabin was last. The linen was stiff and white, crackling as Diamond sat on the edge of the cot. Father looked at him from the hallway. Then Father looked at the floor, attempting to smile. “Rest,” he said. “You need to,” he said. Perhaps he was talking to himself when he pushed the door closed.
Diamond promised himself dreams. Mother was dead or she was alive. Either way, the boy was certain that she would find his sleeping mind and tell him important somethings with her own voice. That would be a tiny, much wanted happiness. But Diamond couldn’t sleep. He could barely close his eyes, lying on his back in the darkness, his right hand open on his stomach while his left hand made a fist that wasn’t happy anywhere. The fist dug into the sheets and into his hip and sometimes it reached down, banging against the cool rubber floor.
The big ship was trying to be quiet. No engine was running. The crew spoke rarely, never louder than a whisper. But there was a tiny metronome living inside the cabin, flywheels and gears counting the recitations. Diamond listened to that busy machine and to the outside air blowing through the cooling darkness. Tied to heavy branches, the ship continued to move, its frame creaking in a few reliable places. Sometimes rumblings and roaring engines came from distant places, but most of the world was resting. Good was asleep in the safest part of the cabin, under the built-in desk and chair. Seldom was inside the adjacent cabin and Elata was down the hall. His friends cried in their sleep, and they cried while awake, and the crew did some quiet work in the shop and up on the bridge, and Diamond listened to everything before shutting his eyes as an experiment.
A hundred recitations were misplaced.
Some tiny sound woke him. His body and hands hadn’t moved. Diamond slowly opened his eyes, but the perfect darkness left him blind. Where were the dreams? None offered themselves. Maybe he forgot them. Real people usually misplaced their dreams, and that might be the same for Diamond. His relentless brain might be living another fifty lives while asleep, but if he forgot those dreams, there was no way to know about them, and that odd notion made him more hopeful than sorry.
The urge to sleep was lost. Diamond made his left hand stop being a fist, and he reached over his head for a lamp remembered well enough to be turned on with the first blind attempt.
The metronome had measured his sleep. Diamond studied its numbers until he believed them, and then he sat up.
Yesterday there had been talk about fresh clothes, but Diamond was still dressed in the brown school uniform. That might not change for days and days. When they were sitting in the Archon’s office, Father used the call-lines and his name, building a new plan, and then he hurriedly took a select few people up to the highest berth at the Station. Secrecy was everything. The Archon wasn’t told about the new scheme. Tar`ro left the other guards sitting outside the wrong room, and nobody wasted time finding clothes that would fit children. The big hunter-ship was already fueled and inflated, but only so that it could get out of the way of the warships that were coming from across the District. Their ship escaped long before the papio attacked, slipping into the wilderness once night was done taking charge.
Bountiful was an honorable old name, attached to a big corona hunter so new that Father had never even flown inside it. But he knew the crew, by name and by story, thousands of days shared in the air with these people.
Diamond slid to the end of the cot, feet finding the waiting boots.
The monkey lifted his head, eyes open but seeing very little. Then he settled again, and Diamond slipped away.
Sitting on the hallway floor, Tar`ro was letting his chin rest between his knees. But he shook himself when the cabin door opened, telling the boy, “Stay put.”
Saying nothing, Diamond stepped over the man’s feet.
“Wait for me,” Tar`ro said grudgingly.
Diamond waited.
They walked together, the boy leading them past the empty galley. The hallway ended with a wide door propped open, a great volume of darkness waiting along with the abrupt silence of a conversation interrupted.
Diamond paused at the edge of a room.
From the darkness, Father said, “Here, son. Come over here.”
But the boy didn’t steer toward the voice. This was the machine shop and flying dock where the smaller hunter-ships could be refueled and repaired. Every light had been extinguished—affording a little more security—but one of the three service doors had been lifted high, the soft glimmers and luminescence of wilderness life drifting inside.
Diamond stopped three steps back from the empty air, standing high on his toes while peering out.
The world’s ceiling wasn’t far above them. Wilderness trees were shorter and much thinner than blackwoods, each adorned with twisting branches that usually battled with their neighbors for light and for rain. The wilderness was a tangle. Bountiful was floating inside a confused, ever-changing maze. This realm was shared by multitudes of creatures using colored light to proclaim their assorted majesties. Other animals screamed with their legs or sang with their mouths. The dry night air carried odors that meant nothing to a human nose or to Diamond’s, but each scent belonged to its own language, intense and presumably ancient. Night-flying leatherwings were already heavy with insect meats and bird meats and sips of nectar given by night-blooming flowers. One more step forward and Diamond peered over the floor’s lip, at the living maze, marveling at how Bountiful had burrowed deep into the canopy, hiding where even sharp papio eyes would have trouble spying it.
Two steps and a leap, and he could fall out of this world.
The idea didn’t surprise Diamond. It came to him so clearly and suddenly that he had to wonder if it was a thought that had been dwelling inside him for a long time.
Is that what his forgotten dreams were about?
A half-step more, and he squatted.
Father came up behind, each knee cracking with its distinct voice as he knelt, the cool legs on both sides of his son.
“Are you done sleeping?” Father asked.
Diamond assumed so. Yet now, surrounded by the familiar body, he felt ready to close his eyes to everything.
Master Nissim approached, sitting on their right.
Tar`ro claimed a portion of the floor to the left.
Several recitations passed.
Reluctantly, Father asked, “Did you hear us talking?”