PELAGO 

by Judith Berman

 

At the moment, Judith Berman is living in the thoroughly science-fictional emirate of Dubai, where foreign laborers raise the gleaming new cities of the future for six dollars per day. Her last story for Asimov’s was the July 2004 alien-invasion adventure “The Fear Gun,” a Sturgeon Award finalist. “Pelago” is a deep-space novella that comes from a novel-in-progress, Invisible House. In the novel, Ari, the story’s main character, will journey ever deeper into the forgotten past of the Riftside, until she finally collides with her own family’s secrets.

 

Right Perspective 

 

Five days into the Hajo-aa’s passage through its door, Ari still could not discover where among the stars the door would spit out Nuna’s ship. She still didn’t know how she was going to escape Nuna before he learned who she was.

 

She had spent the time huddled in the Hajo-aa’s dim and overheated control room, trying to parse the door math. There had been moments when she emerged from Angel-song thinking she was back in her mother’s lost seedship, that the shadows around her were still inhabited by her mother, father, little brother. Then she would realize that the sounds stroking her synaesthetic hearing like soft brushes—of limbs shifting, loose hair rustling—had been made instead by Nuna’s chair.

 

She would again have to crush her nausea and terror, again shove the bone-deep shock of her loss to a remote distance. On this ship, she could not afford anything but perfect clarity of mind.

 

Nuna and his monsters had so far paid her scant attention. The soldiers were whiling away the door passage with exotic pleasure organs purchased from some meatshaper’s lab, and Nuna himself had disappeared into locked areas of the ship before the Hajo-aa had even entered its door. With only the ship to keep track of her, Ari’s mother would have expected her to have at least ascertained their destination. But Ari hadn’t been able to identify the Angels governing the door, and although the Hajo-aa allowed her to view the door math, the ship would not respond to her direct queries. Its tiny watchers might swarm through her flesh, but without the ship’s blood in her, she was a foreign object, granted scarcely more agency than an empty suit of clothes.

 

Finally she abandoned her search and let the door math scroll up the wall unhindered. Still sleepless, she stared at the other display she had found in the Hajo-aa’s neglected door station, which translated a few dimensions of their current locality into color, contour, and texture. Nubbly flowers raveled into cities of slick translucent rock, which in turn melted into a vista of far-off floating clouds, a sheen of rainbowed moires like a slowly rippling sea. This, too, told her nothing about the Angel-star to which they were bound.

 

She supposed the rendering had been created to monitor divergence between the actual topology of truespace and their plotted route. If Nuna’s door did prove flawed, if the Hajo-aa failed to squeeze out of its door back onto the skin of time, the ship’s tiny cocoon of spacetime would shatter in a burst of actinic radiance. Then she could belatedly share the fate of her family, who were now just a spray of particles a-shiver on the seething foam of the Great Reality. It would be one way to rectify not having been with them when they died.

 

It would be one way to avenge their murders.

 

But the display showed nothing untoward, and that disaster was, anyway, an unlikely one. Nuna’s door was no frayed commodity already sold a dozen times from ship to ship. It had come fresh from Nuna’s boss, and wherever it was taking her, it would be good math.

 

Ari had reached a dead end. She had arrived late to the disaster Nuna had arranged for her family; Ari’s mother had left her behind that day as a lesson, Ari was sure, in the importance of good timing. All she could do now was wait for an opportunity to flee, afraid of once more missing the advantageous moment.

 

* * * *

 

The control room door clicked open, a sound shaped to her hearing like a small brass rod. Boot soles peeled from the sticky floor, pads of bristles scratching her ears. Ari, though, seemed to have forgotten where she had left her body. By the time she had uncurled her legs and swiveled her chair, Nuna himself stood beside her, hands on hips.

 

“Chiyela,” he said in his mocking, glass-edged voice, “what do you at I wall?”

 

Beautiful Nuna-captain, with his long black hair, his sharp cheekbones and full mouth, his golden skin dusted with glass flecks: today he wore only a pair of low-cut green trousers, silky and loose, and a light sheen of sweat. He was so beautiful she could hardly look away from him, even though she knew he had remade himself for precisely that effect.

 

Ari’s mother had liked to lecture her about her supposed predilection for coupling with good-looking, unsuitable men. In Nuna’s case, his beauty only made her more afraid of him.

 

“I just,” Ari began, and then remembered that she must not speak the pure language of the People of Heaven, but what her mother had called that debased Riftside creole. “I just scrub off shipmoss. No do Ship clean door-station longtime.”

 

Nuna bent to speak into her ear, enveloping her in the musky perfume that he had selected for his body odor. He was so close that she could see the minute light-tracks of shipsight crawling across his left eye.

 

“Chiyela-lovey,” he said, “I ask what you put on I wall that you look at so much. What do it-writing?”

 

“Door math,” she managed.

 

“Indeed,” said Nuna, “and all they pretty color?”

 

“Etheric energy. Mass-shape, like. Just tiny bit of door passage.”

 

Why was he asking? Nuna was the Hajo-aa’s master, its will and intention. He had only to inquire of his ship to know everything she did.

 

“Do it so, lovey? Do you know so much?”

 

“I tell you beforetime,” said Ari. “I can run you door station, true-true. I make good soldier for you.”

 

“Sure, lovey, I remember all you talk,” said Nuna. “But why spy you at we?”

 

Ari’s heart skipped several beats before she could calm it. “No spy I at nobody. I just look at math. No do there nothing else go work at, inside door.”

 

“Could you skinplay with I soldier.” Nuna favored her with a lovely smile. “So much would they like go meet I new recruit.”

 

He straightened and scritched to his chair. When he stroked its golden-skinned shoulder, it stirred, shifted, and extended a graceful human hand. Nuna clasped this and pressed spots that Ari, unwilling to examine the chair closely, had taken for freckles.

 

Then he offered the hand to Ari. “Or maybe would you like I chair better? He still do pretty.”

 

She shuddered involuntarily. Nuna, still smiling, released the hand and scritch-scratched from the room, leaving perfume in his wake. The arm retracted to float just above the chair’s lap.

 

Her heart was beating too fast. Breathe, Ari’s mother would have reminded her. On the wall, golden ribbons looped, merged, lengthened into red-gold tunnels that dissipated into mist the color of blood.

 

Whatever instructions Nuna had just given the Hajo-aa through his chair, he hadn’t locked away her view of the ship’s door passage. Nor had he ordered her from his control room.

 

But he was watching her closely after all. The danger came not just from the Hajo-aa’s endocytes inside her, which could tell Nuna when she was lying, or afraid. The Hajo-aa had surely sampled her geneprint first of all. Ari could abandon her mother’s tongue, she could cobble a new history for herself out of fragments of truth, but her flesh still carried her mother’s genes, naked, in every cell. Nuna just hadn’t yet thought to look for them.

 

* * * *

 

Again the control room opened. This time two of Nuna’s soldiers stepped in. Ari turned to face them right away, but the monsters did not deign to notice her.

 

“Better call repairman soon as we come out door,” Shayeen, huge and blue-skinned, was saying to Powi. “Nuna hate Pelago, and he hate when Boss give he dirtworm pickup job. Do repairman make he wait, go he sharp-sharp at we.”

 

Powi grinned, red-lacquer cheeks creasing, yellow-glass eyes and teeth glowing. His two supernumerary pairs of arms swayed and clacked in the microgravity. Nuna’s soldiers, unlike their captain, had not shaped themselves to be beautiful.

 

“Repairman stay at Pelago longtime—two year now?” Powi said. “Maybe go bighead eat he.”

 

“No can they bighead loose theyself,” said Shayeen crossly. “Maybe do you think it so big haha, but better hope you, no happen nothing at Boss repairman, or Boss make we-all wish bighead eat we.”

 

She slapped the doors shut with a blue, taloned hand. Ari was cautiously relieved to hear that the Hajo-aa was at last arriving at its destination. She had never heard of a place called Pelago, though.

 

Shayeen and Powi scritched across the sticky floor toward their duty stations, giving Nuna’s chair as wide a berth as Ari had. Both soldiers were sweating in the oppressive heat despite being stripped to little more than their boots. At least they had shed their more noticeable recreational accessories, although Powi’s outsized chrome sockets on groin, chest and lower lip showed all too clearly where he plugged them in.

 

Suddenly Powi stopped, pointing with several red snake-arms. “Pretty, pretty! Shayeen, look what we chiyela make!”

 

Shayeen looked. She frowned deeply. Stepping toward Ari, she demanded, “What do you at we wall, chiyela?”

 

A little jolt of adrenaline jumped through Ari. Shayeen, unlike Nuna, seemed both surprised and angry—although it was hard to tell what Nuna was really thinking.

 

But right then Ari also noticed ominous clusters emerging over the horizon of the truespace rendering, clots of intense color in the fractal foam. They looked like knots of dark and baryonic matter perturbing the ship’s locality. Could something be wrong with Nuna’s door after all?

 

Shayeen ignored the display. Grabbing a chair to brace herself, she whacked Ari on the cheek hard enough that Ari saw flashes of purple light. “Shitsmear girlie,” Shayeen shouted in a voice shaped like iron wedges, “go answer I! What muck you?”

 

“I just clean I station,” Ari said. “Why do you want dirty ship-wall?”

 

Shayeen backhanded Ari again. “Dirty, no dirty, no matter it! Go Nuna say you touch anything?”

 

“He say I run he door station,” Ari said, sounding even more sullen than she intended. She swallowed blood, and the pain with it. Shayeen could shatter her skull with a single blow, but the display was competing for her attention. The ship’s proximate topology had warped further, the clots evolving into filaments like brilliant tangles of rainbowed hair.

 

“Shayeen, go leave it,” said Powi. “She screen do so pretty, look it like happy toy. What do it hurt?”

 

“Go rub you own happy toy, Powi,” Shayeen snapped. “We Ship door do mess enough without she muck it further. Now answer I, chiyela! What go you make? What do all it Skeenhay writing?”

 

Ari looked at the wall, at both the rainbow tangles and the scrolling columns of ideographic math, and realized only then that neither Nuna nor his soldiers could read. She ought to have guessed. She had earlier examined the room and discovered that, except for the moss-grown door station, they had relabeled every control surface with crude pictographs.

 

Stupid! Ari’s survival depended, among other things, on not looking like a child of the People of Heaven. On not reminding them of the Shkiinhe exile whose geneline they had recently been hired to eradicate. Ari had stumbled on Nuna and his employer two weeks ago, at a place called Toomee on the very brink of the Rift, and Nuna’s seedship had at first seemed her only chance of departing Toomee before her family’s killers caught up with her. Only when it was too late had she realized they were the very assassins she was fleeing. In face and body type, Ari took after her gangling Poli father, and as far as she could tell, the soldiers thought her just another Riftside mongrel. Nuna didn’t expect to find Maane’s daughter so close to him; he wasn’t viewing Ari from the right distance, the right perspective, to find the true pattern of meaning in what he saw. She had to keep it that way.

 

But ... what did Shayeen mean, We door do mess?

 

Opposing urges fought inside Ari. “No could I never muck you door,” she said finally. “No do Nuna give shipblood to I, and no do I have power of touch on you ship. It-here do just—” She cast about for a way to explain in creole. “Just way go show about door passage. It do inside door station already. I just put it on wall. No do it change nothing inside shipbody.”

 

“Why look you at it?” Shayeen demanded.

 

“Nuna say I run he door station,” Ari said, “and no do no other soldier watch you door.”

 

At this point in her earlier exchange, Nuna had departed, apparently satisfied. But Shayeen loomed closer, blocking Ari’s view of the displays, until Ari could feel the heat of her flesh on the stifling air, could smell its burnt-sugar odor.

 

“Go listen, chiyela,” Shayeen said. “Nuna-captain joke at you. Why do he need any soldier go watch he door? Boss take care all we door. He put new door in we doorbox, pull old one out. Think you, Nuna do sorry for you because you mamom enemy chase you, or whatever story you moan at he? Nuna take you for soldier only because Boss tell he to, and Boss tell Nuna, take this silly chiyela, so he can remind Nuna that he still do Boss. Better no do you put Nuna more angry. Or maybe Nuna slack you some sly way, hm? Just so can he show that no do Boss own all of he.”

 

Shayeen turned away to swing herself into the chair next to Ari’s. The foam restraints closed over her. Ari was about to ask why, if the doors kept going bad, Nuna did not need anyone to attend to them, but then Shayeen spoke again.

 

“Of course no can you read it-door for true. But better for you, no pretend that you know. Boss slack any person he think even guess at where do Pelago. Better stop you touch anything, stop you look at anything, on Pelago door.”

 

Dismayed, Ari said, “No do you know where door open?”

 

Shayeen began to jab at the grids of pictographs that decorated her console. “It do Pelago, girlie,” she said. “Boss door take we there, tomorrow he other door go take we away.”

 

Ari thumbed her console to put away her displays: first the useless math, then, much more reluctantly, the ominous tangles of light.

 

A location unknown to any but Nuna’s employer? A nasty lump curdled in her stomach. If she couldn’t escape at Pelago, could she survive to reach Nuna’s next destination? If the Hajo-aa couldn’t shape its doors properly, would she even reach Pelago?

 

A series of pebble-shaped chimes dropped into the control room. Banks of wall displays blinked online as the ship at last crossed back over the boundary of time.

 

But at the same instant, an alarm ripped the air, a shrill buzz with the texture of razored cilia. Yellow glare exploded into the control room, and the Hajo-aa’s walls emitted a terrifying chorus of creaks and groans.

 

Powi yelled; Shayeen swore and burst into frantic motion. On one newly activated section of wall, an Angel now blazed, way too large and bright. But even closer—appallingly close, blotting out most of that display—hung the shadowed orb of an Angel-child, swelling larger by the second. The Hajo-aa had conserved the momentum with which it had entered its door, and the ship now careened toward planetary mass at thousands of kilometers per second.

 

Commands in the Shkiinhe language of things jumped into Ari’s mouth, the ones she would have given her mother’s ship, but she bit down on them; the Hajo-aa would never obey her. The planet, still expanding on the wall, eclipsed its sun and plunged the control room back into dimness. Powi kept yelling at Shayeen, who pounded at her console; the alarm shrilled on, now two oscillating saw blades. Then massive thrust slammed Ari deep into her chair. The planet slewed across the screen.

 

“Chiyela,” said Shayeen between clenched teeth, “go you muck we door, Nuna shape you into worse than he chair. But first I-self pound you to blood spot.”

 

“No could I mess it!” Ari gasped. Unlike the augmented soldiers, she had to struggle against the acceleration just to breathe. “And why would I try kill I-self ?”

 

Shayeen did not answer, grimly jabbing away. An arc of hazy blue glowed along the planetary limb, swelled to a growing crescent. Then the Hajo-aa broke into brilliant Angel-light once more. Blue ocean turned below them, and swaths and swirls of white.

 

Clouds, blue air, blue ocean; that might be a living world down there. Ari had never seen one. A living world should have what she needed—a busy port, or a ship headed out to one.

 

Except that this place, Shayeen had said, was their boss’s secret.

 

The vise of acceleration kept her from turning her head to take in all the new displays, but she could spot no traffic of ships or drones, and no orbital facilities of any kind, not even a machine guardian to hail Nuna’s intruding ship. The Hajo-aa did seem to be the only thing moving above the blue world.

 

The razored alarm finally stopped, leaving an echoing silence in Ari’s ears. The weight on her chest evaporated. Shayeen’s talons clicked on her console as she spun the Hajo-aa for deceleration. The blue planet swung on the screen, and pressure grew again, but more moderately.

 

Powi said, “We door do mess longtime before chiyela come on board.”

 

Shayeen growled, “Go squeeze you gashole shut, Powi, and call up repairman.”

 

* * * *

 

The sight of Powi tapping with his snake-arms made Ari queasy. Slowing her still-rapid pulse, she unlocked her chair and rotated it a notch for a better look at the half-circle of wall displays.

 

Nuna’s faulty door seemed at least to have opened near the right Angel. The emptiness of the blue world was odd, though. There ought to be some relics of Shkiinhe occupation, even if abandoned hundreds of years ago.

 

One section of wall modeled the Angel’s demesne, depicting the Angel itself together with a double handful of its children. The second child, shown as a blue-and-white ball, was the only possible match for the world below. The display gave it a pair of rocky moonlets, and a third satellite in low orbit that the Hajo-aa represented as a red hexagon: a made thing, not a heavenly object.

 

The People of Heaven had once visited here, then. But where was here?

 

Another display mapped the surrounding volume of stars, flattening it into a rectangular projection. Although this showed visible light only, Ari could locate the Rift easily enough: the dark void lying between the scattered local stars and the cloudy smear of the outer galactic arm.

 

But the Rift was a big place, stretching hundreds of light-years from its sparse upstream head to the crowding fields of its downstream termination. The great swarm of Angels the People of Heaven called Iigmrien, which had dazzled the skies of her childhood, here lay in a compact bunch on the left side of the display—except for giant Kaenub-Angel and its siblings, unmistakable in their brilliance. These stood separate from the main body of the swarm.

 

As her mother had said so often: the stars are always in motion; light is bound to time. To find yourself in heaven, you must be able to envision the Long Dance of Angels from all perspectives in space and time.

 

With dismay growing heavier in her gut, Ari placed herself:

 

She was on the far side of Kaenub, gazing back along the Rift toward Iigmrien. Nuna’s door had brought them a very long jump indeed. The light of this moment would not reach the downstream end of the Rift, where she had lived all her life until now, for another forty or fifty years.

 

Her mother had made her memorize the names of every one of the so-called Hundred Angels of the Shkiinhe homeland, as well as of the stars on Iigmrien’s downstream margins that Maane had learned during her Riftside exile. That meant not just the Angels’ word-names, mere print on a flat page, but the long ideographic names into which, as into the genes of a zygote, was packed the mathematical description of the radiance of their bodies and the shape of their song, the figures of their dance through time and through what lay beyond time—the currents of the Great Reality in which all their chorus was but a whisper.

 

So the music of Iigmrien Ari knew. This piece of the Riftside was another matter. No wonder she hadn’t recognized the Angels in Nuna’s door.

 

“Shayeen,” said Powi. “No do repairman answer.”

 

“Go you try again,” Shayeen said.

 

“I do, so many time. No answer he.”

 

Shayeen was silent a moment. “Should repairman know better than go poke at Nuna joyhole. Keep you try.”

 

* * * *

 

The Hajo-aa spent many hours in orbit braking and steering, aiming for a rendezvous with the red hexagon in a slow and steady fashion very different, in Ari’s brief experience, from Nuna’s usual extravagant mode of travel. The hexagon was evidently the place the soldiers called Pelago.

 

Shayeen did not banish Ari from the Hajo-aa’s control room, for which Ari was thankful; she thought she was more likely to glean useful information here than anywhere else in the ship. Perhaps Shayeen preferred Ari where she could watch her, although the ship could perform that task more efficiently. Or perhaps, having delivered her warning, Shayeen had returned to ignoring her employer’s newest recruit.

 

Two hours on, Powi said to Shayeen, “No answer repairman, and no can Ship find he.”

 

Shayeen sighed. “Better we tell Nuna. But no do he happy.” She thumbed the link band on her wrist and returned to gloomy surveillance of her displays.

 

And indeed, when Nuna stalked in a few moments later, deep furrows creased his perfect brow, broken glass edged his voice. “Why no do we reach Pelago yet? Why plod we so slow?”

 

Shayeen and Powi gazed at their consoles. Shayeen said carefully, “We have juice enough only for go brake, Nuna-ba. Otherwise we overshoot Pelago, and no way back.”

 

“You burn too hard when Ship come out door. And why door go shitsmack again? What muck you?”

 

“No muck I nothing!” protested Shayeen. “Maybe she-chiyela do it. She fiddle at door station ever since we leave Toomee.”

 

“No could she change nothing,” Nuna said with contempt. “Would Ship tell I, go she even try!” He turned on Powi. “And what do wrong with you, turd-brain? How can you lose Boss repairman inside Pelago?”

 

“I so much work at it, Nuna-captain,” Powi said. “Think I, no can he hear Ship.”

 

“Of course he hear,” Nuna said. “Can Ship find he link?”

 

“Sure, Nuna-ba. Ship just say, no do repairman there. Maybe he turn off link, or rip it out.”

 

“He link do sew right to he ear-nerve, shit-dribble. No can he turn it off, and no could he rip it out from he brain, no way by heself. And never would Pelago let he leave! Try you ask Pelago direct where he do?”

 

“Nuna-ba, no can I talk with Pelago.”

 

“Boss give we key for Pelago from he wayfinder, muckbrain. You station have it.”

 

“I already use Boss key, Nuna-ba. Mean I, when Pelago talk, no understand I much-much.” Powi grimaced. “It all Skeenhay, like. All one shitsmear garble.”

 

“Why keep I such stupid soldier? Go make Ship turn Pelago talk to picture, and show repairman on Pelago map! Now, no bother I again till we reach there. Much must I finish before we meet with Boss again.”

 

Powi sighed. “Sure, Nuna-ba.”

 

* * * *

 

Powi worked at his console; Shayeen began to brake the ship in earnest. Tension chewed at Ari’s gut. She wondered, repressing a shudder, why the repairman would choose to graft a transceiver directly into his nervous system—although it did sound typical of Nuna’s crew.

 

“Shayeen,” Powi said, “another ship do at Pelago!”

 

“What!” Shayeen jerked upright. Ari sat straighter, too.

 

Shayeen jabbed at her console. On the display of local stars, one of the points of light swelled in size so rapidly that Ari caught nothing but the final view, a mottled gray and black sphere joined on one side to an agglomeration of much smaller and clearly artificial shapes: blocks, fat cylinders, paired swellings resembling rocket nacelles. The artifice reflected blinding glare on its Angel-side, while the night-side hulked black against the stars. Ari could not judge its scale.

 

“No see I no other ship,” said Shayeen.

 

“It do hard, go understand Pelago!” Powi’s snake-arms tapped over pictographs. “Ship do at refinery dock, think I.”

 

“They steal we ship-juice?” said Shayeen, outraged.

 

“Here it do.” A gray and black slope blinked onto the wall above Powi, the artifice viewed from a vantage near its surface. At this distance, a paler geodesic tracery showed like bones under the gray portions of the sphere. In the foreground hung the obovate swell of an old Shkiinhe seedship, a distant cousin of Ari’s mother’s ship but so like the Hajo-aa that those two seeds must have originated in the same nursery. The pearly backdrop of Kaenub’s nebulae, the angle of shadow lying across the ship’s glinting sandpaper hull, told Ari that the other vessel must be docked on Pelago’s far side.

 

Who crewed that ship—a family? Or monsters like Nuna’s soldiers? Maybe, maybe, it was her escape route.

 

“Look ship like Hajo-aa,” Powi said.

 

“How do Pelago name it?” Shayeen asked.

 

“No can I read like we chiyela here,” sneered Powi. His snake-arms tapped away.

 

“Maybe do it belong at Glass Knife posse. Boss shit heself, go Glass soldier find Pelago.”

 

“Wait!” said Powi. “Now Hajo-aa give I sound-name. Other ship call itself Chresun.”

 

“Chresun!” Shayeen slammed her blue fist against her console so hard that Ari thought it might split. “I know they freelance trashpicker! Where go they ever buy door to Pelago? Boss slack we, go we let they leave here.”

 

“Must we bust Chresun now, before they run!”

 

“No have we enough ship-juice!” After a moment Shayeen said, in a calmer tone, “No could Chresun talk much with Pelago, not without some wayfinder like Boss have. And likely no do Chresun launch spy drone, or already would they see we and speed away. They do at dead stop. Do we sneak, and keep Pelago between we and they, go we jump on they easy.”

 

Tendrils of fear curled in Ari’s stomach. Were they serious about crippling the Chresun?

 

Of course they were. They had thought nothing of obliterating her family’s ship.

 

Shayeen poked at her wristband. After a moment Powi asked, “What say Nuna-captain?”

 

“No answer he. He still do busy with he cargo.” Shayeen rubbed at the swirls of black and silver tattooed on her bald scalp. “But we know what would Boss want, hm? Go you arm up holebuster.”

 

Powi hauled himself out of his chair and scritched to a new station. Anguish boiled up in Ari then, unexpected and overwhelming. Terrible pictures flashed into her mind’s eye: missiles shattering the Chresun’s hull, people flying into vacuum, decompressing. It would be messier than the annihilation of her family, because it would leave behind the frozen and disfigured corpses of the dead. And unlike her family, the crew of the Chresun would have time to know they were dying. They would feel the breath ripped from their lungs.

 

“How can you crack they ship just for they come here?” Her voice trembled, her throat had thickened. For a moment she feared she would lose control entirely.

 

Shayeen turned as if she had forgotten Ari’s existence. “Go shut you gashole, girlie. Or I toss you out airlock, no matter what Boss say. It-here do Boss business.”

 

“But how could you kill—”

 

“I mean it, chiyela.”

 

Ari clenched her fists. Her mother would have said, Your job is to survive. Exercise dispassion.

 

Ari could not prevent the Chresun’s destruction, not when she lacked agency on this ship. She shouldn’t spend her energy on what she couldn’t change.

 

She ought instead to consider what she might find at Pelago to help her. Squeezing her anguish down again into a hard and painful lump, she tore her attention from the poachers’ ship.

 

The secret Nuna’s boss guarded so zealously had to be more than the fuel refinery Powi had mentioned. The People of Heaven had sown clouds of refinery seeds wherever they visited and, centuries after the People themselves had withdrawn back into Iigmrien, working refineries and fuel depots still littered metal-bearing rock all over the Riftside.

 

The size of the poachers’ seedship, in relation to the curvature of the gray slope behind it, suggested that the sphere might be over a hundred kilometers in diameter. That was too large even for an orbital shipyard. And Ari could spot only a single pair of mooring sockets, one being where the Chresun had affixed itself. Perhaps Pelago had once owned an outer ring where people had lived and worked; perhaps the ring had been destroyed, or never completed.

 

The sphere bore no visible impact scars. The black patches mottling it, which covered less than a third of its surface, looked matte-smooth and featureless, reflecting neither sunlight nor starshine.

 

* * * *

 

Pressure grew as the Hajo-aa started another deceleration burn. Their rendezvous with Pelago approached with agonizing slowness. Ari willed the poachers to notice them and flee, but in the image relayed from Pelago, the Chresun remained motionless. Even the sharp-cut shadows on its hull hardly budged.

 

She attempted the disciplines of tranquility. There were many things you could not control in the universe, and this ship, this moment, was not hers. Yes, how wonderful if she could take control of the Hajo-aa to stop them blowing up the Chresun. If she could punish Nuna and his soldiers horribly for her family’s deaths! Not by killing them. She wanted to, but her mother would not have approved. Rendering them impotent forever, yes, seizing their ship and stranding them on a forgotten rock deep in the Rift where no one would visit in a thousand years...

 

At last the Hajo-aa began its final deceleration, and the sphere rose up beneath them like the surface of a moon. As the dock came into sight, the Chresun did launch from its mooring socket, scattering red fire across Pelago’s surface. Hope rose in Ari that the other ship would escape; the Hajo-aa had no more fuel with which to maneuver. The Chresun burned past them, all red exhaust slits and swells of dark sandpaper glitter.

 

Then the Hajo-aa fired two missiles.

 

The slits flashed white and burst into an expanding cloud of shards. The Chresun’s upper pair of rockets, still firing, slammed the other ship down onto the sphere. Powi whooped.

 

Anguish scalding her throat, Ari clenched her fists and tried to exercise dispassion.

 

The debris cloud enveloped the Hajo-aa, causing Shayeen to mutter and tweak her controls, and then a larger and denser cloud of grey-white murk rushed up from the impact site, plastering long black strings against the Hajo-aa. Powi yelled, “Shit on it, what do it? It stick all over we!”

 

“Mucky water,” said Shayeen. “It freeze on we quicker than hull eat it.”

 

The Chresun, lying on its injured side, fired its steering thrusters one after the other, trying to rock free of the wound it had made in the gray sphere. Said Powi, “Go I bang out they other budger.”

 

Shayeen, hand at her ear, said, “No, wait,” and in the same moment, Nuna rushed in yelling, “Go stop, stop, ass-wipe, stop!”

 

But Powi had already lobbed another pair of missiles into the Chresun’s remaining exhaust slits. This time, the exploding missiles, in combination with the Chresun’s efforts to free itself, jolted the poachers’ ship out of the impact wound. The Chresun tumbled over the gray horizon, while another flood of dirty water and black snaking strings gushed from the sphere.

 

“What do you, spray of runny shit!” Nuna shouted at Powi. “Go Pelago tell you where do repairman? Think you ever, you steamy squish-squish shit-puddle, maybe no can you find repairman because they freelancer steal he? What muck go you mamom poo in you skull when you born?”

 

Shayeen and Powi stared at their consoles, but now this display of subservience only made Nuna madder. “Why sit we here? Go grab they trashpicker!”

 

“We do clean-ass empty, Nuna-ba,” Shayeen said. “No juice. But—” she went on, as Nuna seemed about to burst into another flood of scatology, “no do we crack they hull. Most like, they-all still live. And no burn they nowhere. Chresun just drift around Pelago now.”

 

The Hajo-aa’s deceleration cut out entirely. Nuna pulled himself down into his chair, whose arms clasped him like a lover’s. He re-knotted his floating hair. For a moment the room was silent except for the rasp of his feet as, jittering, they peeled and unpeeled from the floor.

 

“Nuna-captain,” Powi said, obsequiously, “no do Pelago see repairman, but Pelago also say, no go repairman leave. He vanish on Pelago.”

 

“How could he vanish?” said Nuna, with contempt. “Where do he headlink?”

 

“Link do inside Pelago, Nuna-ba, inside portal. But not repairman. No do he nowhere.”

 

Nuna stilled. “Repairman do dead, then?” And, when Powi just shrugged, “Come any other ship here, beside they poacher? Go you ask!”

 

“I already go. Pelago say, since Boss drop off repairman, Chresun do only ship that come visit. And not one trashpicker pass beyond dockside, not one cross Pelago portal. Pelago just say, repairman do here beforetime, no do repairman here now, no go he leave Pelago.”

 

Nuna said, sharp as glass, “Do it another of he trick, so much go I make he sorry. And then Boss make he sorrier.”

 

He fell silent, gaze resting on the Hajo-aa’s view of Pelago, where the mooring socket now loomed through a fog of ice and debris. The ship chimed a warning. Magnetic fields embraced them; the Hajo-aa and Pelago touched without so much as a bump; but no angular momentum transferred to the ship to give them weight. Pelago, oddly, had no spin.

 

“Go juice we up, Shayeen,” Nuna said. “And whiletime search dockside for repairman. Then go you grab Chresun and rip out it doorbox, make they tell you where they buy they door to Pelago. Search it-ship and every person on it, head hair to toe muck. They shitsmear poacher alltime sniff around for Skeenhay trash, thief it away for go sell. Maybe they find repairman and steal he somehow. But no slack you not one-one single trashpicker till we clap hand on repairman. And mind you how he shape heself different way, beforetime he try run away from Boss.”

 

Ari took a deep breath and released it, trying to force her adrenaline out with the air. The Chresun’s crew had a reprieve, if a short one.

 

“Quick-quick, Shayeen!” Nuna said, and as Shayeen departed and he rose from his own chair, “You, Powi-turd, go strip off you snakies and fetch you fat link. Send to Ekka, too. We do trip inside Pelago.”

 

“Inside—?” From the grimace on Powi’s red-lacquer face, Nuna might have gut-punched him. “But, Nuna-ba—”

 

“Shut it, stupid. Go we see, can Pelago even stand you sick-shit taste inside it finicky mouth!” Then Nuna’s voice turned smooth as skin. “You come, too, chiyela.”

 

Ari jerked around and found herself staring right into Nuna’s dark and lovely eyes.

 

“Sure, go stir you skinny sitbone, lovey,” he said, now full of mocking charm. “Come help you captain find Boss precious repairman.”

 

* * * *

 

Purity of the Body 

 

Ari climbed stiffly out of her chair and followed Nuna from the control room. The narrow corridor outside was even hotter and dimmer, the ship’s air-purifying moss growing rampant on walls and light panels alike.

 

“Do you carry inware, chiyela?” Nuna called as he strode along.

 

A sweaty, mostly naked soldier squeezed against the wall to make room for Nuna. He smirked at Ari, and whatever was inside his hand-shaped codpiece wriggled fingers at her.

 

She slid past sideways. “You know already,” she said. “No do I.”

 

“Not even plugin port? No kind meatshape?”

 

“No kind at all.”

 

“Virgin meat!” Nuna marveled. “And how much do you Skeenhay? Do you own Skeenhay shipkey in you genestuff ?”

 

Ari’s heartbeat jumped; she calmed it. “You know already. You ship taste I geneprint soon as I come on board.”

 

“No ruff you up, lovey,” said Nuna. “Hajo-aa can only tell I that you own gene enough for go run seedship. I ask about whole Skeenhay shipkey, gene for top kind of Skeenhay machine, like high house or wayfinder. Ship tell I, you gut and airway keep all clean-clean like pure Skeenhay person. No shed you even you own scalp-flake. You say you mamom come from Eeg Mareyan—” (so, in Riftside fashion, he pronounced Iigmrien) “—maybe do you have whole Skeenhay genekey.”

 

“I mamom have whole key,” Ari said. She chose her words with care, since Nuna would know if she veered from the truth. “And all they work, she tell I. But I dadad do dirtworm. No own he no Skeenhay gene at all. Sure, I have enough of genekey for go run seedship. But no know I, do I own gene for they top-top Skeenhay machine. Maybe all I have, or only part. Or maybe all I have and no do they turn on. No learn I never.”

 

Nuna stopped and swung toward her, frowning. “What mean you, lovey, ‘turn on’?”

 

Ari stopped too, again smoothing a ragged rhythm in her pulse. “Must you turn on all-all shipkey gene inside mamom and dadad, even before they make babychild, or no work they for wayfinder, or other top machine.” And, as Nuna continued to stare at her, “Skeenhay have secret way for go turn on shipkey in they child. No born I among Skeenhay, no could I mamom make sure they all turn on.”

 

“Indeed,” said Nuna, “do it so, lovey?”

 

He gazed at her another discomfiting moment before striding onward. Ari followed, angry at herself. She had said nothing untruthful, so what attracted Nuna’s attention must be the Shkiinhe knowledge that she had, once again, emitted by accident, like an unfortunate smell. She and her brother had always stood out in the little Riftside dometown where they had grown up, the children with the strange and scary foreign mother, who were compelled to devote their days and nights to her harsh training. There was no way Ari couldn’t stand out in this company, too, but her survival depended on making her differences uninteresting.

 

They reached the portal antechamber. Nuna flung open a cupboard and yanked out a garish orange shirt. The rustling as he pulled it on slid against her ears like resin sheets.

 

A soldier entered carrying a stubby rifle. Nuna asked, “Go say I bring weapon, shit-pellet?”

 

The soldier was Powi, transformed. He had detached his snake-arms and donned a tight coverall that displayed flashing real-time images of his red lacquer face.

 

Powi protested, “This do flash-and-burn, not holebuster.” But Nuna yanked the rifle from his grasp and slapped it on a sticky shelf. “No go I into Pelago without weapon!” Powi said, almost wailing. On his coverall, dozens of nightmare faces gaped and grimaced.

 

“No do Pelago allow it,” said Nuna.

 

He fished a bright pink leech from a canister and poked it up one nostril. The leech squirmed out of sight. Another soldier arrived—Ekka, also newly dressed, but in more sedate clothing the shade of her slick bronze scales.

 

They proceeded into the Hajo-aa’s portal. When the outer gate opened, Nuna stepped into Pelago’s airlock as quickly as if his ship had spit him out, and Ari and the soldiers followed. Pelago’s air was wonderfully cool.

 

The lock closed and dusted them. While they waited for Pelago’s endocytes to sample, clean, and mark their bodies to its satisfaction, Ari brought her metabolism up to its normal level and looked around her. The tiny room was entirely bare. Beside her, the folds of Nuna’s clothing and the stray locks of his hair had settled downwards. Pelago might not have spin, but it was massive enough to impart a bit of weight to them—hardly enough to notice without such cues.

 

Nuna started to jitter; perhaps his leech had begun to release its fresh burden of stimulants. Then he fastened his shirt and said to her, as if he had only just noticed, “You alltime stay dress on Ship. Why no sweat you?”

 

Sneezing endocytic powder, Ari shrugged. “No do I move around, no do I sweat.”

 

She wished he would not keep staring at her. She hoped it wasn’t because he had once laid eyes on her mother and now recognized a trace of her in Ari’s face. He had all the evidence, really, to identify Ari. If he was starting to focus on her at this distance, if he was finding the right perspective, she would have to move closer. But how would she bear it? Just standing next to him made her skin crawl, her gut churn.

 

Minutes passed. The lock remained sealed. Pelago dusted them a second time, and Nuna’s jitter grew more pronounced.

 

“What do wrong?” Powi asked.

 

“I already tell you, muckbrain,” Nuna said. “Pelago do finicky.”

 

More finicky than his seedship, in other words. The Shkiinhe had built their notions about purity of the body into everything they made: purity of the Shkiinhe genome, which had been perfected by the Elders; and purity of the flesh, which should remain unsullied by implants or disfigurement. Some lower intelligences like seedships could be manipulated to tolerate mongrels and monsters, but Pelago was evidently not among those.

 

The door did unseal at last, however, opening on a hallway. This led to a larger room where Shayeen and three other soldiers clustered at a row of wall stations. A second wall displayed a view of the sphere identical to the one they had watched on the approach to Pelago, except that the seedship in the foreground was now the Hajo-aa. The room was built of the same pale beige ceramic as the lock and hallway, and it was just as devoid of clues to Pelago’s origins or intended function.

 

Nuna strode toward Shayeen. “Go you find repairman?”

 

“No, and no sign of he, either,” Shayeen said. “But we just peek here and in hangar.”

 

“Go he at least pack up Boss cargo?”

 

“Hangar do empty,” she said. “Bare as rock.”

 

“Shit on he! Must we root up repairman and cargo?” He stalked toward an arched opening in the far wall, Powi and Ekka hurrying in his wake.

 

As Ari turned to follow, Shayeen said sourly, “Why do you take chiyela, Nuna-ba?”

 

“Oh,” said Nuna. He stopped, gaze swinging to Ari again. “She do so clean. Pelago like she taste better than any of we, I promise.”

 

* * * *

 

Beyond the arch lay the hangar Shayeen had mentioned. This space, perhaps two hundred meters long and with a ship-sized airlock at one end, could have accommodated several seedships like the Hajo-aa with room to spare. Conveyor lanes for ships and cargo, now silent and still, crisscrossed the floor in broad gray stripes. Although ice coated much of the clear roof, Ari could nevertheless make out a sunlit cliff-wall of cylinders looming above them and, beyond it, one of the vast nacelle-like structures.

 

As Shayeen had said, the hangar was as bare as if it had never been used.

 

“He move all Pelago flyer, too!” Nuna burst out. “Now must we muck it long way to portal!”

 

He stalked across the hangar floor, a flurry of garish clothes and flapping hair. The grain of Pelago’s adhesive floor was finer than the Hajo-aa’s, and his footsteps rustled like paper.

 

The soldiers followed Nuna, and Ari trailed the soldiers. It was a profound relief to move her body in this wide, chilly space, to gaze at something beside the grotesqueries of Nuna’s ship. So far, though, she hadn’t spotted a single mark indicating the identity of Pelago’s first owners: not a name, not a crest, not so much as a discreet symbolic pattern embedded in floors or walls. Not even color. The Shkiinhe rarely used beige and gray as geneline insignia, as those were, according to her mother, colors of earth, not heaven.

 

It was contrary to all Maane had taught her about Shkiinhe artifices, and also to Ari’s limited experience of them. In the dometown on Boivo where she had grown up, the best efforts of residents to alter the wall colors could not stop the town’s indwelling intelligence from returning every surface to a sickly yellow, emblem of the geneline that had built it.

 

“What do you lag about for, lovey?” Nuna called from the far side of the hangar. “Stay close to I!” He had reached a door and was slapping at the hand plate to no effect. “How go you muck it, pile of poo?” he snarled at Powi.

 

“No muck I nothing, Nuna-ba,” said Powi in an injured tone, jabbing first at his wrist link and then a patch of link paper he had affixed to his glossy red palm. “Just, no do Pelago see we. No know I why.”

 

“No do it see you, shit-puddle,” said Nuna, “because no have you Pelago blood inside you. But Ekka and I drink it blood beforetime. I pass through all Pelago door, slip-slap, when I do here last!”

 

“Boss do with we, it-time,” said Ekka.

 

A line appeared between Nuna’s eyebrows. “Go I ask you talk, sticky ass-smear? No do Boss here now, but Boss go master Pelago and still he do it master. Boss key open Pelago for we.”

 

The door remained stubbornly shut, however. As Powi kept prodding at his palm, Nuna rubbed the nostril with the leech inside it, jittered on the balls of his feet, began to pace in tight circles.

 

Said Ekka nervously, “Maybe, since no do Boss here, go Pelago change it mind and scrub it blood from we.”

 

“Then we all do mucksmear,” Nuna said, “since must we still find Boss repairman, or go Boss shape we all into shithole wipe.” He slammed his fist against the recalcitrant door. “Powi, turd-brain! Have Hajo-aa ask Pelago!”

 

Powi nodded, red-lacquer grimaces flashing up and down his coverall, and he bent his head over his link again.

 

After two or three more seconds, Nuna asked, “Could you take more longtime, shit-drip?”

 

“It do hard, so much must Ship and Pelago talk each other!” said Powi, aggrieved, jabbing away.

 

But at last the seal popped, the door slid open. Nuna stalked through it and down the long, dim corridor beyond. Ari and the soldiers followed him. Overhead, light panels blinked on and off to keep pace with them, casting multilayered shadows on the floor. The shush-slap of their footsteps scurried beside them like dry leaves. The soldiers tried to imitate Nuna’s swaggering lope, but their hunched shoulders and skittish glances ruined the effect. They knew, of course, that contrary to what Powi had said, Pelago certainly saw them; the very dust Pelago dropped on their skin watched them. It had simply decided not to acknowledge Nuna and Ekka any longer.

 

Now Nuna and his soldiers had been brought down nearly to Ari’s level, mute and foreign objects. One difference still remained: because of the key Boss had given the Hajo-aa, Pelago would talk with their ship, even if not directly to them.

 

Ari lacked even that tenuous link. Unlike the soldiers, though, she was not afraid of Pelago, even if perhaps she should be. This mysterious Shkiinhe artifice aroused longing in her instead. She had never been to the Shkiinhe homeland, but through her mother, Iigmrien had pervaded every part of her life, a realm of wonders almost tangible if forever out of reach.

 

Pelago was a lost piece of Maane’s country. And it was, Ari thought with grim satisfaction, resisting Nuna as Maane herself had not been able to.

 

As she could not yet see how to do.

 

The corridor became a glass-enclosed catwalk that dove into a black space so immense that Ari wondered if they had returned to Pelago’s outer skin. Then, several hundred meters further, a mass of rock loomed up beneath them, webbed in the nearly invisible scaffolding that also cradled the catwalk. Glimmering worm-trails of track snaked across the rock, and here and there slept strings of ore carts and diamond-jawed diggers.

 

It required another half hour of low-gravity hiking before Pelago’s refinery asteroid sank once more into blackness, and the tracks, braiding together, dove into a tubular maw that must lead to the refinery proper. The catwalk became opaque ceramic corridor again, with an occasional door or a fork leading away.

 

The papery echoes of their footsteps skittered beside them, ran ahead, returned to pursue them in the shadows behind. Nuna navigated without hesitation. Of course he had been here before, and maybe the Hajo-aa relayed a map into his shipsight. Lacking such an aid, Ari tried to construct her own model of Pelago’s layout, but with the way the corridors curved, and seemed to ramp irregularly up and down according to variations in local gravity, she lost all sense of direction.

 

At length Nuna stopped at a featureless door just like the others. This one, too, at first refused to open. While Powi worked at his link, Nuna paced, Ekka’s gaze flitted uneasily. Ari wondered what pictographs Powi used: a sketch of a doorway, a person walking?

 

The door gaped to reveal a wall of stacked crates. Nuna pushed down a cold and shadowed crevasse, through an icy breeze smelling of ozone. After a hundred meters they reached open space. The crates filled only half the warehouse.

 

Nuna stalked out onto the empty floor. “‘I repairman will have it ready to take away,’” he mimicked his employer, half in i-shkiinhe, half in creole, swinging in a circle to take in the entire warehouse. “But look: no do repairman touch one-one crate! And where go he hide all Pelago shitsmear machine? Without they, must we bring Hajo-aa right here, weself hump crate on board!”

 

“We load all they crate?” Ekka said. “How go we make room?”

 

“Not all, muckbrain,” said Nuna, with contempt. “Ten or twelve, maybe. We just more-more squeeze.”

 

He thumbed his link and, black hair and orange shirt rippling behind him, strode toward the airlock at the far end of the warehouse.

 

Out here, at the edge of the open floor, light from overhead fell brightly enough that Ari could make out the hexagonal layers packing the crates. Each was about a meter thick and perhaps three meters across, and absorbed light so completely that she could form no impression of its texture. Where a layer had not been perfectly positioned over the one beneath, the overhang had sagged slightly under its own weight. It was the first evidence Ari had seen of the passage of time on Pelago, of change or decay.

 

She extended a hand toward a crate but, when the cold sharpened, snatched it back.

 

For a moment she still could not guess what the crates held. Then she remembered the black patches mottling Pelago’s gray sphere. Long ago, someone had been coating Pelago with these black hexagons. Or removing them.

 

Giant nacelles, tens of kilometers long; a refinery asteroid as large; the rows of huge cylinders—those must be for fuel storage, but, if full, could service a hundred seedships—

 

This black stuff was hull glass. Long ago, Pelago had been intended to travel, and not just within this Angel’s demesne. Long ago, someone had given Pelago a starship’s hull so that it could cross the boundary of time.

 

The ship hulls Ari had seen before had all been seed-grown, stratified into visible layers and larded with tiny color-coded organelles. This stuff looked to be more sophisticated. It had been rendered dormant, she supposed, so that it did not absorb the matter and energy that touched it, although (she shivered in the cold breeze) it was not completely asleep.

 

The quantity of glass crated here was only a fraction of what would be needed to cover the sphere’s exposed gray surface. But perhaps there were other, full warehouses on Pelago, or perhaps the rest had never been brought, or had long ago been carried away.

 

These crates might well be the reason for the fierce secrecy demanded by Nuna’s boss. Ari could not begin to estimate their value. Still, freighting already-filled crates from one part of Pelago to another could not have been the task for which Nuna’s boss had been prepared to maroon his “repairman,” clearly a prized employee, for two years.

 

The repairman’s task seemed unlikely to be repair, either. Almost everything on Pelago looked as if its builders had abandoned it yesterday. Maybe she had misunderstood repairman; even creole forms entirely i-shkiinhe in their elements didn’t always retain their expected meaning.

 

Nuna stalked back toward them, re-knotting his hair. “Shayeen go fetch Boss cargo from here,” he said shortly. “We keep search.”

 

He led them back to the corridor. More hiking, a long, ramping climb; another door, where Powi again had to jab away at his palm. In due time this door, too, opened.

 

Beyond waited a vast, triangular, glass-roofed space, formed in the acute intersection of a row of storage tanks and what must be a wall of the refinery. Nuna strode across the floor, Powi and Ekka dogging his heels. Ari followed more slowly, passing in and out of the rays of golden Angel light that spilled over the cliff-wall of tanks. High overhead, a small bright shape toppled past: the ruined Chresun, or the Hajo-aa in pursuit of it.

 

How had the repairman vanished, if he had indeed left Pelago? She had seen nothing so far to aid her own escape.

 

Her mother said, the remembered shape of her voice still as clear and bright as Angel-rays: There are always resources around you. Use what you have. Use what you are.

 

What she was? She and the soldiers were all mongrels together, all of them imperfect and impure.

 

My geneline is very pure, very dominant, Maane said. That assertion had always sounded wishful to Ari; Maane’s miscegenation with a son of dirt humanity was more likely to have crippled her children, rendering them unable to master their Shkiinhe patrimony if ever the exile from Iigmrien ended.

 

Pelago was the first artifice Ari had encountered that could tell her how pure her genes really were.

 

“Chiyela!” Nuna called across the sunlit floor, with more sharpness in his voice now than sugar. “Stay with I!”

 

She reluctantly hurried to catch up to them. “What do danger here?”

 

Powi and Ekka started at the sound of her voice. “Danger?” Ekka said.

 

“Pelago,” Ari said. “Why do you scare?”

 

“Boss lose many soldier when first we find it-place,” said Ekka. “They die even though we drink Pelago blood, and should Pelago protect we. But now Pelago scrub it blood from we. No care Pelago now, go we live or die.”

 

Nuna said, without breaking stride, “Boss lose he soldier inside tank, shit-puddle. Bighead kill they. Boss go mistake. Think he, no would Skeenhay place ever let animal kill person. And think he, no could animal kill he so-hard and ugly soldier.”

 

“You say Boss master Pelago,” Ari said.

 

Nuna glanced over his shoulder, brow furrowing. “No do Pelago let they hurt Boss.”

 

Observe, think, said her mother’s lost voice, in the very shape of the Angel light. Understand, so you are ready to act.

 

Ari’s brief encounter with Nuna’s employer, at which she had begged to join his soldiers in the mistaken hope that he would laugh and send her away, had concluded with a glimpse of Boss’s wayfinder, a shadow sliding across the stars. While she had never heard anyone speak Boss’s name, he was, surely, an exile like Maane—perhaps the reason Maane’s enemies had hired him to kill her. Boss had apparently brought his ship with him out of Iigmrien. Wayfinders were the crowning glory of the Shkiinhe shipwrights’ artifice: intelligences that fed on the song of Angels, that slipped in and out of time as soft as an eye blink, that spun doors from their own tomography of truespace. They floated at the pinnacle of the Shkiinhe hierarchy of made intelligences, and they were unheard-of on the Riftside. Boss’s was the first Ari had ever laid eyes on.

 

If Pelago could resist being mastered by a wayfinder, it must be as powerful as a wayfinder.

 

And what does that tell you? Ari’s mother would have asked.

 

To transit truespace, even once, Pelago would need a shipmind. Pelago’s shipmind could only be a wayfinder’s—an intelligence that could generate any door at all, for any ship at all.

 

Now that was a bit of Shkiinhe artifice worth scavenging, worth any number of soldiers’ lives. Those who owned the doors, as the Shkiinhe said, owned heaven.

 

But the repairman couldn’t have vanished through one of Pelago’s doors, not without a working starship to carry him.

 

And, according to Powi, the repairman had not left Pelago.

 

They reached an inconspicuous exit at the far side, which unsealed after Powi’s usual manipulations. Lights blinked on inside to reveal a bare chamber even smaller than the dockside airlock.

 

Nuna and his soldiers crowded in. “Go come, chiyela,” Nuna called. “It do Pelago true portal. No trip we further into Pelago save through it.”

 

Ari squeezed in, trying not to brush Powi’s glossy red flesh or Ekka’s bronze scales even through the barrier of their clothing. If she turned away from the monsters, though, there was Nuna, face to face: the clean line of his cheekbone and jaw, the curve of his lips, the perfume of his skin. Loose strands of his hair, thick and glossy, clung to her shirt. His arm and flank pushed against hers, warm, lean, and strong, as he fished the leech from his nose and flicked it into the wall receptacle.

 

Ari, swallowing bile, breathed slowly and forced herself not to flinch. The chamber puffed dust over them. A long moment followed while motile powder trawled their skin, gut, and airways, in which nothing happened but a pair of sneezes that wracked Ari. Nuna began to jitter again.

 

Trays slid out from the wall, each proffering a single gray sipsucker.

 

“Pelago give we blood!” said Powi.

 

“It give we drink,” said Nuna, sharp as glass. “Soon do we learn what kind.”

 

He grabbed a sipsucker for himself, pulled out another and thrust it at Ari, urging, “Go on, go you sup!”

 

She began to swallow the sweet, salty endocytic cocktail it contained, keeping her heartbeat steady. Now Pelago would embody in their flesh the judgements it had made about their purity.

 

“Boss,” said Ekka nervously. “No give Pelago drink for I.” She was reaching for a sipsucker, but the tray kept retracting into the wall.

 

“It-drink belong to Powi, muckbrain.”

 

“But—” Ekka began.

 

Nuna said, “You spend too much time at meatshaper lab, Ekka. Pelago like only clean Skeenhay meat. Powi look fright-ugly on he skin, but he gene do much-much Skeenhay, and he dig out most of he inware. No would I use so-stupid soldier except Hajo-aa grant he all power of touch.”

 

“Pelago give I blood last time,” Ekka protested.

 

“Like you say,” said Nuna, “Boss do here then. He make Pelago give it.”

 

Powi poked at his link, and even Nuna undertook a session with his wristband, but the Hajo-aa could not persuade Pelago to yield a drink for Ekka. In the end Nuna lost patience. “Go you wait by warehouse for Shayeen. Help she load Boss cargo.”

 

“Pelago go kill I,” Ekka said, and she actually began to tremble.

 

Nuna laughed, flashing his perfect teeth. “Only do bighead hungry,” he said, and he shoved Ekka through the door in the direction they had come.

 

At last Nuna, Powi, and Ari stepped through the inner door, and the portal sealed behind them with a sigh.

 

A bare corridor, pierced by occasional doors, curved away into darkness in both directions. Powi’s quick breathing and the rustle of Nuna’s silks were the only noises to roughen the surface of the deep silence.

 

“Powi-turd,” Nuna said. Faint disk-shaped reverberations of his voice dropped from the walls. “Go you ask Pelago where repairman stay, before he vanish.”

 

Powi worked at his link. After a moment, he pointed unsteadily to the left. “It-way.”

 

They set off in that direction. The curving walls threw back dry-leaf echoes of their footsteps that rustled disconcertingly loud and close.

 

How could she test the nature of the drink Pelago had given her—the degree of purity it had discerned in her?

 

“I tell Boss,” Nuna said bitterly, “no should he leave repairman here, with no eye do watch he. Boss say, ‘Can Pelago watch repairman better than any person eye.’”

 

Said Powi, “Boss save heself so much trouble, go he just copy repairman brain.”

 

“Copy do more stupid than you,” Nuna said. “It do easy, teach machine all repairman know. But it so much-much hard, go make copy that can fix all repairman fix. He know feel and want in the shape of he meatbrain, and he need feel and want for go act. No would copy know neither.”

 

A tiny clatter jangled behind them, a spill of metal beads in Ari’s ears. Powi and Nuna spun around. Ari glanced that direction, but recalling how sound ricocheted in these corridors, she looked ahead as well, just in time to catch a shadow slipping beyond the curve of the wall.

 

A drone under Pelago’s guidance, surely, or a machine that had assisted the repairman, carrying out its assigned tasks after its master was gone.

 

If the repairman was gone.

 

The three of them set out again, Nuna breathing faster now. Then, he burst out, waving his arm in front of him, “Shit-splat! What go muck it here?”

 

Ari, too, had collided with the eddying droplets.

 

“Bighead!” said Powi, trembling. He backed away, fearful grimaces flashing over his clothes.

 

“Better go pimp up you meatbrain, Powi, before you stupid kill you,” said Nuna. “Think you true-true, go Pelago let any bighead climb out of they tank?”

 

“But you say to Ekka that Pelago—”

 

“I joke at she, shit-dribble! Go ask Pelago what bring it-mucky water here. Then see you, no do it bighead.”

 

Powi prodded his palm with a shaky finger. Ari wiped her face and stared at the spots of moisture on her sleeve, telling herself that Pelago would not allow anything impure into its body, or hers. In these clean, empty corridors, though, the strength of the sulfur-and-iodine stink was shocking, and even more shocking was its familiarity. Her father used to consume a rank substance called benbi that smelled like that, microbially cultured from a variety of Poli seaweed and imported from the blue world of Polu itself. He claimed it was a much-prized delicacy. Her mother claimed it stank up their apartment for days.

 

Ari shoved down the memory. Exercise dispassion, Maane said. Seek understanding.

 

Light from overhead showed tiny droplets drifting downward in Pelago’s light gravity, swirling in the turbulence their breath and movement imparted to the air. About five meters up the corridor, a pair of cleaning drones, the first Ari had seen on Pelago, sucked the water from air and floor. Because of the drones, it was now impossible to tell how far down the corridor the trail of liquid had extended. The drones could not have made the clattery noise she had heard; they worked in complete silence except for an occasional sputter of indrawn liquid.

 

Nuna had already started onwards. Then Powi blurted, “Nuna-ba, Nuna-ba, I shipsight grow dark!”

 

Nuna stopped and blinked. He jabbed at his wrist link. After a long moment he said, grimly, “Pelago scrub not just it own blood. It clean Hajo-aa from we, too.”

 

“No trip we further,” Powi implored, and then, with a note of panic, “Go Pelago even let we leave?”

 

For an instant, fear surged through Ari, too. Was this the repairman’s fate, Pelago first erasing its markers of agency in him, then purging its body of unclean things?

 

“We still do link to Hajo-aa, muckbrain, through Pelago,” Nuna said, “just like other side of portal.” With shaking hands Powi poked at his palm, nodded. Nuna went on, “Can we step along without shipsight or shipvoice. Just go show I where repairman busy heself.”

 

“I lose I map, Nuna-ba,” said Powi.

 

“And where do you lead I, fart spray, just one-one second before you sight fade?” Powi pointed to a door just beyond the waist-high cleaners. “Then go open it!”

 

But that door slid open as soon as the three of them drew near.

 

Faces all over Powi’s coverall gawked in surprise. “Pelago give we blood after all!”

 

“You do so stupid,” said Nuna, pushing through the doorway.

 

Beyond lay a maze of rooms furnished as living apartments, eating lounges, and laboratories, but containing no trace of recent occupation. Even the walls were clean of moss, as if the repairman had breathed too little air to compel Pelago to grow any. Each door slid wide as they approached it, but Ari had no opportunity to determine which of them Pelago opened it for.

 

Then, through one doorway, she again heard the sound like polished metal beads. It was fainter this time, hardly more than a brush of tactile-topological synaesthesia along the outermost skin of her hearing. On the other hand, the sulfur-and-iodine stink that wafted from that room was very strong.

 

Perhaps the others didn’t notice, because they continued through the doorway with no more than the usual swagger (on Nuna’s part) or (on Powi’s) a nervous shuffle.

 

“It do Pelago control room!” Nuna said. “But repairman muck it.”

 

Ari stopped on the threshold. This chamber was much larger than the Hajo-aa’s cramped control room, perhaps twenty meters across. Some of the duty stations, display tables, and acceleration chairs still sat in neat parallel arcs; others had been ripped out and shoved aside to make space for a clutter of cupboards and tables dragged in from elsewhere.

 

Nuna stalked through the room, slapping consoles and displays to no effect. “Go trip in, lovey,” he ordered her. “Stay next to I, and no touch you nothing.” To Powi he said, “Go on, shit-drip, turn all they on!”

 

Ari stepped toward Nuna, watching for more dirty water, checking beneath chairs and behind tables for what could have shed it. The floor was springier here and more porous; the ceiling shone brighter, too. One section was dimmed—the first thing she had seen on Pelago not in perfect repair.

 

When she absent-mindedly braced a hand against a console to peer behind it, light, color, and shape flashed into displays all across the room.

 

Heart pounding, she snatched her hands back and tucked them into her armpits. Nuna, luckily, was not looking in her direction. “Here it do!” he exclaimed, stopping beside a table where a model of Pelago had begun to blossom into translucent solidity. He slapped the blank work surface at the base of the display column, but the table still did not respond to him. “Now have Ship go show I Pelago doorbox, Powi-turd. Hurry!”

 

Powi blinked. “Doorbox?”

 

“Pelago do starship once, muckbrain. Go find it! We go fetch it away with we.”

 

“But, Nuna-captain,” Powi said obsequiously, “Pelago doorbox belong to Boss.”

 

“And go remove it do repairman big job here.”

 

“But no have Hajo-aa room—” Powi began.

 

“Just look you, pebble poo!”

 

It would be a fruitless search, Ari was sure. Whatever instructions Nuna’s employer had given the repairman, Boss must have kept Nuna in ignorance of Pelago’s true nature. A wayfinder had no need for a block of memory dedicated to the storage of door equations fed to it by other intelligences.

 

Still, hands in her armpits, Ari edged closer to the exquisitely detailed model. It confirmed the general notion she had formed of Pelago’s layout: dock, refinery, warehouses, and asteroid haphazardly accreted to the orderly geometry of the four nacelles and the sphere. On the last, Pelago had overlaid an elaborate three-dimensional grid, and Ari could also see how the disk-like module where they now stood was affixed to its north and leading pole.

 

Then, still careful to examine possible hiding places, she drifted away through the room. Pelago’s makers had possessed the luxury of space to install more display tables than she had ever seen in her life before. Some of the labels were hard to parse, however. Fuel Supplies seemed clear enough (all tanks full). But what about Disengagement Sequence; was she reading that correctly? And Engine Status; could all four engines really be on line?

 

That last caused her to stop, unease prickling up her spine. By now Ari had gathered that the repairman served Boss with less than complete enthusiasm, and he had had two years, after all, in which to lay plans against the return of Boss’ soldiers.

 

But what could he accomplish, where could he go, by firing those huge engines? Massive Pelago couldn’t accelerate fast enough to escape the Hajo-aa inside spacetime, and it couldn’t depart through truespace with only scraps of a proper hull.

 

Beyond Engine Status another display caught her gaze: a sphere a-glitter with stars and dust.

 

It contained half the swarm of Iigmrien.

 

Ari walked to it, put her hand against the display column as if she could thereby slip inside Angel-song. Of course she could not feel the shape of heaven; the gel medium was hardly more palpable than a breath of air.

 

But a glowing yellow pointer blinked into existence inside the gel. Moved when she moved her finger.

 

She closed her fist and the pointer vanished; tucked her hands in her armpits and took two steps back.

 

Nuna and Powi’s search still absorbed them. She fixed her gaze on the fragment of heaven so that Pelago would know where to answer her. Quieter than a whisper, she mouthed words, not in i-shkiinhe—the language given by the Elders to the People which, despite its perfection, was mutable like every human tongue—but in i-naat, the language of things, which never changed, lest the millennia erode the capacity of the People to command their machines.

 

“Show me the map for the Angel of this demesne,” she told Pelago. “Show me thirty years of heaven.”

 

And Pelago showed her.

 

She was part of Pelago’s body, she was the one the rooms had opened for.

 

And Nuna would have guessed this already, because the displays hadn’t responded to him or, evidently, Powi.

 

The command map altered the glory of light to a less beautiful but wonderfully tidy stellar chart. Colored beads modeled stellar type, size, mass, and luminosity; dust showed as silvery clouds; apparent folds and twists of the display medium hinted at etheric gradients.

 

The map told her Angel-names, too, but not the familiar ones. Giant Kaenub was labeled Kbe; red Shriar was Shra. Pelago’s Angel, the small yellow bead at the center of the map, bore the poetic but mathematically meaningless title Ani Chrenash Nege, Angel-Mother-Father-of-Blue-Water.

 

On impulse, Ari mouthed to Pelago, “Run the map backward in time, to when your makers brought you to this demesne.”

 

And then she watched while Mother-Father-of-Blue-Water slipped back along the Riftside. It was being pushed toward the Rift, tossed out of Iigmrien, by massive Kaenub and its siblings. The date in the display was running backward by hundreds of years, thousands of years, heavenly not planetary years, the Elders’ years—

 

Cold awe scurried up Ari’s spine. No wonder she had trouble reading Pelago’s graphs; Pelago had been brought here before the Shkiinhe had even left the Elders’ service. The Elders themselves must have dispatched Pelago. But for what purpose?

 

No, no; she had to focus on the here-and-now. “Show me the full name of this Angel,” she mouthed to Pelago, “its mathematical name.”

 

The display dissolved back to starry darkness.

 

Pelago didn’t know that command. Or would not respond to it. Maybe she needed to be Pelago’s master.

 

Ari glanced again at Nuna, who was pacing while Powi worked at his link. She stepped quickly forward to place her palm on the base of the display. Pelago responded by throwing column after column of ideographs onto the work surface. It was not math, though.

 

“What do it?” Nuna roared. “Chiyela, go I tell you touch anything?”

 

Belatedly Ari saw that the same columns of graphs had flashed onto every work surface in the room.

 

Powi gaped. “She make it?”

 

Nuna stalked toward her. Ari stepped away from the table so he could not trap her against it, but she didn’t dare attempt one of her mother’s techniques of transformation that could redirect the material vector of Nuna’s rage. She could not afford to resemble an exile’s daughter to any degree.

 

So she let Nuna seize her wrist and crush nerve against bone, until electric bolts seared up her arm.

 

He brandished a glass knife in his other hand. “Go you touch nothing, perfume-ass girlie!” he yelled. “Or think you, because Pelago like you meat better than I, it go stop I clip off you lovey finger, one by one?”

 

He sharpened the pressure on her radial nerve until white light sheeted across her vision. Then a piece of ceiling flew down at the two of them. A ropy black mass and a spray of stinking water burst after it.

 

“Bighead! Bighead!” Powi screamed.

 

The impact shoved Nuna to his knees even as, roaring, he sliced upward with his knife across the monster’s writhing appendages. A sticky-sharp rope clutched at Ari’s neck; Nuna severed it, freeing her to stumble backward. He slashed and slashed, scattering pieces of tentacle, until the creature at last fell still.

 

Breathing hard, he climbed to his feet. Water drenched his torn shirt, and bleeding gashes crisscrossed his chest. For a moment, though, the tension had fled from him, and he was all grace and beauty, exhilarated.

 

With an effort Ari calmed her wildly spiking pulse. She took a step toward the thing again, then stopped to avoid the slow rain of water and blood.

 

The monster’s head bulked larger than a human torso. Five scissoring bony plates rimmed its mouth, and palm-sized lidless yellow eyes circled the monster’s head—ten of them, she guessed, to match the radial symmetry of the legs. The tentacles, each longer than she was tall, appeared smooth to the touch, but the raw scrape on her neck, Nuna’s bleeding cuts, testified to hidden edges.

 

“No can they bighead get out, you say.” Powi’s voice shook. “No would you let I bring weapon.”

 

The furrow between Nuna’s eyebrows reappeared. “Pelago let I bring knife, squishy turd, because never can knife hurt it precious body. But no do it-thing bighead. It do puppet.” He showed his knife to Powi, the transparent blade of which was entirely clean of body fluids, and then he kicked a nearly-severed piece of the monster’s head to expose, not alien flesh and organ tissue, but pale rubbery foam that contained finger-sized slots for memory sticks and other bits of hardware Ari did not recognize.

 

A puppet indeed. Beads of water nevertheless clung to the thing, and it stank of iodine and sulfur. As did she now. Her shirt was soaked.

 

Powi took a shuddering breath and craned his neck to peer into the dark cavity exposed in the ceiling. “How do puppet happen there?”

 

“Maybe they bighead send it for go grab I,” Nuna mocked him. Then he turned to Ari, his voice so sharp it could have cut her. “Chiyela, Pelago like you pure Skeenhay meat so much, it give you blood and leave we blind. But no forget, you own one-one single way go leave Pelago, and it do Hajo-aa. And I do Hajo-aa master. Stay close and no touch you nothing, and make very sweet for I, or I go, I go knife off you hand and leave you behind.”

 

He pointed with his knife at the nearest display. “You so much boast you can read. Go tell I what it-writing say.”

 

Nuna had surely not dismissed from his mind the question of how the puppet had gotten into the ceiling. But, as he ordered, Ari turned to look at the text.

 

The celestial dates accompanying it were clear enough, and so recent that they must refer to the repairman’s tenure here. Scrolls and dots and slashes elaborated the graphs themselves, however, into such complex shades of meaning that she could barely decipher them. Maane had told her that the writing the Elders had given to the People was like i-naat and never changed. The ideographs signified, not ephemeral sounds or mutable grammar, but eternal meanings, so that you could read records a millennium old as easily as last year’s. Now Ari had to wonder if it was true.

 

Many occurrences of cephalosoma, head-body beings: she could guess those were the creatures the soldiers called bigheads. Sonolexicon, kinosemy, neuroanatomy, histolysis, enzymology ... It was technical vocabulary. She understood the elements, but her Shkiinhe education had been in what her mother called matters of heaven, not of earth. Her rudimentary knowledge of comparative biology came mostly from the Poli side of her schooling—which had been in her father’s language.

 

“No can chiyela read so much, then?” said Powi. Smirks flashed across his coverall.

 

“It all do what repairman study,” Ari said, “all about bighead and how it live, like.” She pointed to the black puppet sprawled on the floor.

 

But Nuna had lost interest already. He shoved Ari toward the jumble of cupboards and tables crowding one side of the control room. “Go tell I what repairman work at here. But first, chiyela, put you two gropy hand where I can see they.”

 

Ari tucked her hands in her armpits, the crushed nerve still twinging in her forearm, and let Nuna propel her through the clutter.

 

Then he jerked to a stop, breathing hard. His hand fell from Ari’s shoulder. His fingers began to twitch.

 

At the epicenter of the chaos sat a medical couch. The diagnostic and healing apparatus had been retracted, and a partially disassembled maintenance machine—a dozen neatly folded tool-tipped limbs atop a segmented, extensible body—was strapped to the padded gray surface. Curved plates of resin, in which conduits of various sizes and colors had been grown, lay alongside. A faint aroma of solvents hung over the couch, mixed with the stink of sulfur and iodine.

 

With his knife Nuna hooked a tangle of nearly invisible filament from the pile. “How go he pull it out?” His voice began to rise. “Boss say, go repairman try touch he link, he body seize up like rock! Boss say, no do Pelago let drone touch repairman, and never do it let repairman teach machine go do it! Boss say: ‘I do master of Pelago, I think of everything!’”

 

He flung himself away and began to stalk in circles, slamming tables and equipment cupboards, his hair flying, garish clothes flapping, bleeding skin a-glitter, bright and violent as an Angel tangling truespace.

 

How, Ari thought suddenly, could any Riftside bigman who made so many miscalculations, renegade Shkiinhe or not, keep Nuna leashed?

 

The answer was, of course, Boss’ wayfinder. Those who owned the doors owned heaven.

 

As if sensing that her thoughts had turned to him, Nuna slowed and came up beside her. “Now come you big-big moment, lovey,” he said, his sugar-syrup voice laced with diamond shards. “Now can you show you captain do you useful, do you for true read Skeenhay writing.”

 

“I can read,” said Ari. “Just no do I know all they animal word.”

 

“Then help I find out, chiyela, how repairman move he brain from here.”

 

“Move he brain?” she said.

 

“Do you any more smart than Powi? From here! From it!” He stabbed his knife at the couch.

 

She looked, but could make out nothing she hadn’t seen before. “It do machine.”

 

Nuna laughed in her ear. “It do repairman. He run away from Boss too many time. He move he brain beforetime, once-twice, when he try hide heself. Last time Boss punish he, and no go he give repairman back he meat. Boss lock repairman brain in he own tool-drone.”

 

Ragged shock rushing over her skin, Ari stared at the disassembled equipment. Who would even imagine creating such an abomination, much less carry out the thought?

 

But why did she keep being surprised? Look at Nuna’s once-human chair. She already knew about the repairman’s head-link. They were ready to kill every person on the Chresun. They’d murdered her family.

 

Boss must have supplied motor connections so that the repairman could operate those tool-tipped limbs. Must have allowed some perceptual input to replace the senses ripped from the repairman’s awareness.

 

But Boss had intended punishment, imprisonment, amputation. Ari could not suppose but that it had been as quick and brutal a job as any meatshaper could make it. Gone would be the symphony of skin talking to self about the world: sharpness, heat, cold, pressure, wetness, roughness. Gone would be the trickle of moisture on tongue, the rustle of hair on scalp, the crack of joints unfolding, the swell of breath and the rhythm of heartbeat, the resonance of sound in muscle and bone.

 

Gone, too, the lightness of joy in your chest. The knot of anxiety in your throat, the squirm in your foot soles from fear, the swelling heat of arousal, the sick chill when you have yet again caused disappointment, the searing coals of smothered anger.

 

Boss would have had to leave the repairman feel and want, as Nuna said. But what were either of those without a body to know them?

 

Ari heard her own voice ask, hoarse and unsteady, “Why no do Boss let he leave?”

 

“What,” said Nuna, “think you they repairman just float around like so many rock? Boss repairman do almost like shipwright, he so good.”

 

He touched her nape and she flinched, which made him laugh and press against her side. Then she felt another caress: Nuna’s glass blade, cool and smooth, on her cheek.

 

“Chiyela,” he said, as soft as she had ever heard him, “chiyela, I know you play tricky, tell I just bitty-bit of all you know. Go tell I now how repairman cut Boss link out of he brain, and what he turn heself into this time. Show I, do you have some use beyond you pure lovey meat. Most-most time, no own I no use for plain meat. Hajo-aa carry too much already, and it just drop shit and breathe up air, and make too much moss grow on I wall. Do I just as happy go toss you into tank-water for bighead snackies. I know they go eat you quick. Longtime I do soldier-captain and many time I see even purest Skeenhay meat die, as easy as any mongrel.”

 

The knife blade slid against her cheek. It was so sharp that at first she did not feel the cut itself, only an ache somewhere under her skin, and a faint tickle as blood welled out.

 

Then fire raked her face.

 

That cut; the heat and scent of Nuna’s body; his breath in her hair; the grief and the hatred that would shatter her if she did not keep pressing them down, down, down: maybe the repairman was after all lucky to lose his flesh. Feel and want was a terrible landscape to be trapped in.

 

Exercise dispassion, Maane warned.

 

She should help the repairman escape his unspeakable bondage.

 

Her mother would have said: her own survival was far more important than a stranger’s.

 

Ari had always wanted to scoff at her mother’s obsessions, to defy her strict rules, to resent her impossible demands. But Maane had proved right. Maane’s enemies had found her at last, as she had always predicted. Ari should have been with her family then. She wanted to be with them now. The only atonement she could make for all her petty rebellions, up to and including her tardiness on the day of her family’s murders, was to follow Maane’s instructions to the letter now. Survive.

 

She would bury her guilt, she would crush both her revulsion for Nuna and her horrible attraction to him. She would master herself.

 

Surviving meant, though, that she had to step out of Maane’s world of purity and into Nuna’s corruption forever.

 

Maybe Nuna’s demand would be easier to resist if the puzzle of the repairman’s disappearance was not a seduction all its own. Inside Ari, thought-shapes were tiling together without effort, burgeoning into brilliant geometries of meaning: the ancient past of Pelago, the near past of the repairman.

 

“Must you let I touch Pelago,” she said finally, in despair. “Do it take longtime go find repairman, otherwise.”

 

Nuna laughed, letting his knife fall away. Another ticklish drop of blood welled from the cut, and he smeared it with a lingering thumb. “So much you do haha, lovey! Now go stop you joke. Tell I what must Hajo-aa turn on.”

 

With a hand that felt controlled by some other intelligence, Ari pointed into the clutter, where a crescent of now-dormant display tables, some toppled by Nuna in his rage, formed a ragged arc around the medical couch. “Go show what repairman run on they, right before he vanish.”

 

Nuna nodded to Powi, who jabbed at his link until an ear-shattering scream split the air. “Stop it noise!” Nuna bellowed. Before Powi managed to shut it off, Ari glimpsed intricate swirls, slides, and knobs of high-frequency sound, all too tiny to view properly.

 

In the renewed silence, Nuna frowned at the images that had begun to flicker in the display columns. “What do all it bighead?”

 

Most of the columns showed a bighead pulsing in water, its tentacles splayed, or curling, or winding about its body. There were also models, flicking into progressively finer scales, showing the repairman’s machine body along with the resin case that had contained his brain, and then the brain itself implanted with the net of Boss’ inhibiting transceiver, and the connections that in an ordinary human would link to cranial nerves, spinal cord, circulatory system—

 

“They talk,” Ari said. “Repairman explain to bighead, how they go remove he brain.”

 

“Bighead talk?” Powi scoffed. “They do animal!”

 

“Pelago call that ... ‘movement-meaning,’” Ari said. “Bighead talk with sound and also with they arm, like.”

 

Nuna frowned deeply at the curveting monsters. “Boss say they animal, this just Skeenhay water garden!” He shook his head. “But talk or no talk, it do longway from they go cut Boss link out of repairman. How go bighead ever come into Pelago, use Pelago machine? No do Pelago like meatshape human soldier. Why go it let in alien, person or animal?”

 

“Boss give repairman all power of touch at Pelago, no?” Ari said. “Except for do work in he own brain. Maybe, go repairman make special shipblood for bighead.”

 

“Can he?” Nuna asked.

 

“Sure-sure,” Ari said. “Do he know enough about bighead body, so no grow they sick from it.”

 

“So what happen at repairman? Go bighead stick he brain into bighead body?”

 

“They meat do so much different,” Ari said, “Easier, think I, go repairman fix up special puppet for he brain, then hide with real bighead.”

 

“But why do Pelago say he vanish?” said Nuna.

 

Ari looked down at the disassembled tool-drone. The solution to that mystery lay right in front of them.

 

“Pelago do Skeenhay-make,” she said. “It see big gap between person and machine, and no like it go think about any in-between, impure thing.” She turned to Powi. “When Hajo-aa ask Pelago go search for repairman, do it say, ‘Go look for person?’ Or ‘Look for machine?’”

 

Faces all over Powi’s body stared at her. Said Nuna, “Answer she, muck-drip!”

 

“Hajo-aa just ask Pelago, go look for repairman,” Powi said. “And also for it-link repairman have.”

 

“But,” said Ari, “how do Hajo-aa think about he? Do repairman ever work on Hajo-aa when he in human meat? Go he ever drink Hajo-aa blood?”

 

Powi still looked bewildered. “Sure he do,” Nuna said impatiently.

 

“But repairman always live in he machine body when he do at Pelago, no? And what go Boss tell Pelago about repairman: ‘It do I machine?’ Or, ‘He do human?’ Go you ship ask Pelago about person with link in he, and Pelago think repairman do Boss machine, no talk ship and Pelago about same thing. Pelago tell Hajo-aa, ‘No do person here, no do Boss link in no person at all.’ So Hajo-aa tell you repairman vanish.”

 

Nuna was shaking his head. “Do you so smart, chiyela, go you tell how I find repairman in whole moon of shit-fill water?”

 

“Bighead have all sphere for they live in?” Ari asked, dismayed. “You say, ‘tank.’”

 

Nuna laughed. “It do big-big tank, girlie.”

 

Ari glanced away. She was betraying every law of heaven and earth, and complicity would coat her like slime forever. But she had already made her decision. “Must you look at all machine inside Pelago.”

 

Nuna hurried them across the room to the model of Pelago. “Go on, go on,” he urged Powi. “No, chiyela, touch you nothing.”

 

Powi sent the new message to the Hajo-aa. Meanwhile Nuna paced, and Ari tried not to think about the desperate repairman.

 

A hundred blinking dots lit up, scattered throughout Pelago’s body. “Ask Pelago next,” Ari made herself say, “do it show only machine that have they own intelligence. Not Pelago drone.”

 

Powi hesitated. “Go on!” Nuna said.

 

Powi stabbed at his palm, but to no effect. “No can I, Nuna-captain,” he said. “No have I picture for it.”

 

Nuna’s hands twitched. “Then, shit-log, go show I machine and drone that move right now!”

 

Another long delay followed. Nuna stalked in agitated circles. “Every command do take you so longtime, worm of poo, could repairman build whole starship!”

 

At last the majority of lights disappeared. The dozen remaining all blinked inside the gridded, moon-sized sphere.

 

“Which one do repairman?” Nuna demanded.

 

“No know I, Nuna-ba,” Powi said. “No know I how go ask.”

 

Nuna’s teeth ground audibly. His gaze came to rest once more on Ari. “How longtime, chiyela, take you go find repairman?”

 

“Not much.”

 

“Go!” he said, pointing with his chin. “Go, go!”

 

She was not going to speak i-naat, a skill Nuna clearly did not share. Instead she touched her finger to the display column. A pointer blinked into existence. Scooting it to the dockside, she indicated the Hajo-aa to Pelago, then, on the work surface, drew the graph for pertaining to. Pelago responded by showing all those beings and things in its body that carried the Hajo-aa’s endocytes: she, Nuna, and Powi in the control room; and not far from them, just inside the sphere, a single blinking light, the machine-person-puppet that was the repairman.

 

Ari marked that light for Pelago, then traced the graphs repair and machine. Pelago thus labeled the light.

 

“Go send map to Powi,” ordered Nuna. “Now call closest diver to we—”

 

“Diver?” she asked.

 

“Machine for water we go ride in. Call it, then tell Pelago no do it help repairman, or he bighead friend, go track we. And then stick both hand deep in you girlie crack, chiyela, and no take they out till we once more trip onto Hajo-aa.”

 

* * * *

 

Ocean Inside 

 

Powi’s new map showed them a lift that would take them down to the entrance of the sphere. “When go diver reach we?” Nuna demanded as he strode along.

 

Powi poked after the answer to this query. “Two hour, maybe.”

 

“Shit on it! Why so long? They diver move fast beforetime.”

 

They entered the lift. Nuna rocked, retied the loosening knot of his hair, began to jitter in earnest. On the door, the names of levels brightened, darkened. Pelago had labeled the sphere itself with a pair of ideographs, the first of which read clearly enough as shuren, large tank. The second graph Ari had read in the control room, in Pelago’s Angel’s name, as ordinary chren, water, despite its modifier strokes for expansiveness and formlessness. Now the ghosts of other, matching shapes jogged from memory: in shataan dhiar, a living but entirely pelagic world; and in dhi se shu, archipelago.

 

Words she had never heard spoken, characters memorized and never used, notions until now intangible for Ari, who had never walked on anything but artifice or airless rock.

 

Dhine shuren, Pelago called the sphere, pelagic receptacle. That was a strange topology under her tongue: vast inchoate liquidity; hard, bounded container. But the soldiers’ creole versions—naming it a “pelago” or a “tank”—stripped away the shape of grammar itself. Better, maybe, just to term it a pelagikon, a sample of ocean.

 

But what an effort to shift that water between the stars! Pelago must have required decades to move Angelward from conditions where a door could squeeze that much mass over the boundary of time.

 

The lift opened onto a brightly lit staging area lined with cabinets and equipment racks. Here the sulfur-and-iodine stink was very strong. Nuna stalked across the sticky floor, then stopped abruptly and with much scatology waved his arm in front of his face. “Mucky spray drift here! Go you watch, repairman leave more trick for we.”

 

He did not follow his own advice, though, but strode from cupboard to cabinet, flinging open doors, yanking out trays. Some were empty, some held neatly stowed assortments of gear. Ari edged toward the far wall, where transparent panels, alternating with a line of airlocks, looked out into green-lit murky water. That illumination had to be artificial. The pelagikon’s surface here would lie directly beneath the control module.

 

A row of carts had been parked at one end of the airlocks. Each had been modified to carry a transparent, two-meter-long tank just large enough for a cramped bighead, along with various tool-tipped arms that the repairman’s helpers must have operated from inside.

 

Most of the tanks stood empty, but the last, parked askew, remained half-full of turbid water. On that one a grappling arm hung loose as if damaged. The fine droplets still drifting toward the floor showed that its last occupant had climbed out only a few minutes ago.

 

Nuna stalked over to the carts. “Bighead ride in they?” He jiggled the damaged arm, then shoved at its cart. As it rolled on sticky treads, the arm vibrated against the side to produce the clattering Ari had heard earlier. It also knocked a cloud of drops into the air. She backed up hastily.

 

Swearing, sweeping an arm in front of him, Nuna crossed to another bank of cabinets. He flung open a door to reveal ranks of long, flat, transparent cases.

 

Inside each floated what looked like a limp pressure suit. He stared at them with uncharacteristic stillness. “Repairman leave they.”

 

Then he said, “He try slow we ever since we step onto Pelago. He block Pelago door, he hide puppet, maybe do he even make Pelago eat it old blood from we. He send all they diver deep inside, and now he try hold diver back somehow, I know it. But move we fast, go we mess he plan. Do we use watersuit and scooter, can we meet it-diver near halfway.”

 

“Go into tank without diver?” Powi cried out, from the other side of the room. “Bighead kill we!”

 

The notion horrified Ari as well. “How Boss soldier die beforetime?”

 

“Sure, chiyela, you do right,” Nuna said. “Boss send we outside diver go look for trashpick. All do lovey-lovey until some muckbrain soldier shoot at bighead, and then they all come at we. But look you, with scooter we speed quick as diver, and you already keep repairman from go track we.”

 

Ari groped desperately after arguments that Nuna could not ignore. “Do they suit range so far?”

 

“Scooter power last longtime. Can we swim with we own body, too. Suit use we lung for go suck air from water, so breath last while we live.”

 

“Could bighead track we.”

 

“How, without Pelago help?” Nuna scoffed.

 

“With scout, like. Repairman could give link to they. Maybe weapon, too.”

 

That silenced him for a moment. Then he said, “Then must we speed to diver quick-quick, and surprise they.”

 

Ari stared at him, appalled. Venturing into a tank a hundred kilometers across, populated by clever, carnivorous, technophilic monsters, with only these suits which she, at least, had never before operated; it was reckless beyond belief ! Had Nuna’s leech overwhelmed his judgement utterly? Or was this just his standard mode of operation? The repairman couldn’t leave Pelago. Would Nuna’s employer really punish him for losing the repairman into the tank when the fault lay with Boss’s own misjudgements?

 

Or was Nuna desperate for reasons of his own? Could they pertain to the Hajo-aa’s failing doors?

 

Repairman do almost like shipwright, he so good.

 

“But, Nuna-captain,” Powi pleaded, “why do repairman leave suit for we, unless he plan some trick, muck they suit?”

 

“Maybe do it last-last thing repairman expect, we wear only watersuit into Pelago,” said Nuna. “No matter it. Can chiyela stop all repairman plan. Always would person with shipblood in she own more power of touch than machine.”

 

Which still left, Ari thought grimly, the bigheads with ship’s blood in them. What power of touch had Pelago granted them?

 

If the Elders judged bigheads to be persons, they might well have regarded them as the equals of ordinary humanity.

 

But the Elders had put Pelago into the hands of their chosen human servants, the People of Heaven, whose flesh they had purified for travel between worlds. Ari was not wholly Shkiinhe, but that the divers moved at all was evidence Pelago thought her purer than the repairman or his friends.

 

She had another dozen or hundred objections to Nuna’s plan, but he had pulled open a drawer and yanked a suit through the gasket. He thrust the suit at her, soaking her shirt with sharp-smelling liquid. “Stroke at it, lovey, go stroke at it!”

 

She turned it over. At her touch, indicator lights blinked to life on wristbands, chest, eyeplate. The fabric was spongy, supple, and terrifyingly thin compared to a vacuum suit. The very thought of entering the tank with so little protection dizzied her.

 

“Should we send in many-many puppet instead,” she urged Nuna. “Could they search for repairman and grab he. Could Pelago run they like drone.”

 

“You do so clever, chiyela,” he said. “No do you clever enough. So many hour pass for go fix up puppet, whiletime repairman boost all he clever plan into action. Just switch on we suit! Repairman speed away.”

 

“Bighead go kill we!” Powi wailed again.

 

“Maybe,” Nuna said bitterly. He tossed the suit Ari had activated at Powi and shoved another wet bundle into her arms. “But sure-sure Boss slack we, do we lose repairman.”

 

How, so close on the heels of Nuna’s threats, had she become the indispensable member of this suicidally reckless expedition? If she really were clever, she would be quitting the sphere, and Pelago, as fast as possible.

 

But she couldn’t leave except on the Hajo-aa.

 

So clever, but not clever enough.

 

It took time to transfer the soldiers’ link to the suits, time for Nuna to show Powi and Ari the barest minimum of the suit’s functions, time for Nuna to explain to Shayeen what they were doing. Ari could not hear Shayeen’s side of the conversation, but she gathered that Nuna’s second took as dim a view of the venture as did she and Powi.

 

It was but a moment’s work to make Pelago track for Powi the eight bigheads carrying ship’s blood (all deep inside the sphere now). Ari, certain that Pelago must maintain a census of all the bigheads, wanted to learn how to track every individual, but Nuna had grown too impatient to allow it, and he ordered them to strip and don the suits.

 

He and Powi began pulling off their clothes where they stood. Ari ducked behind a cart, blinking against the light that scattered oddly from her suit’s shiny fabric. It was really just a pressure suit, she told herself, one made for too much pressure rather than too little. Both circumstances could kill you, the one boiling toxic gases out of your blood, the other squeezing them in. But the fabric seemed so fragile. Could she rely on a suit thousands of years old? The soldiers seemed to think anything made by the Shkiinhe would keep working forever.

 

Until it broke and needed a repairman.

 

She bent to pull off her boots. Her mother had often drilled her and Temmek: twenty seconds to seal themselves into vacuum suits, donning headgear and air supply first of all. Temmek still hadn’t been able to finish quickly enough to satisfy Maane. The awkward flippers and handfins, the slippery, spongy fabric, made this suit difficult to handle. Ari had to massage the fabric to stretch it over her mongrel frame, a hand and a half taller than her mother’s.

 

She strapped on or plugged in the accessories that Nuna had distributed from the cabinets: guns that could fire gummy nets or sleep darts; and the fatal option, explosive harpoons to rip a bighead apart from inside. She had never carried a deadly weapon before, felt queasy just touching the harpoon packs. She had been raised to revere the wisdom of the Elders. Yes, the bigheads were hostile, hideous, and terrifying, but the Elders had judged them to be persons, not animals. The Elders had sent the bigheads here. Perhaps the Elders had saved them from stellar catastrophe, as they had once rescued dirt humanity.

 

When Nuna had distributed the weapons he had warned, “No forget you, repairman look like bighead now. No shoot you at he no matter what.”

 

Powi said, “How go we catch repairman, then?”

 

“Net he, muckbrain. No would sleep dart work in puppet.”

 

Ari pressed her chest seals closed, picked up the scooter and helmet Nuna had dispensed to her, and slapped on her fan-shaped footgear to the row of airlocks. While she waited for Nuna and Powi to finish dressing, she stared into the murk, blinking against rays of light scattering from the glass. On the far side schooled flecks of slime that she queasily decided must be alive.

 

Blue ocean was certainly a euphemism here. Her father had often told her about his boyhood on the blue earth of Polu, where rich and poor alike took water baths for pleasure and cleanliness. (It had always sounded like an ineffective substitute for powder.) People even swam in Polu’s warm and creature-filled seas—a pastime he had always recalled with happiness.

 

Ari, however, had grown up far from any living world, and although like anyone else she occasionally spilled a drink on herself, she was no more used to splashing in biotic water than in a vat of spoiled food.

 

Pelago’s suit would keep her clean ... as long as nothing breached it.

 

Calm yourself, her mother reminded her. Breathe.

 

Nuna and Powi entered one of the locks and, with extreme reluctance, she followed them. The outer door sealed. Water gushed suddenly from three sides, forcing her to don her helmet in a hurry. As Nuna had warned, the face mask plastered itself against nose and mouth as if trying to suffocate her. Breathe. Yes, her lungs did pull air through the mask, although with noticeable effort.

 

Faint noises the shape of tiny resin spikes ticked at her ear, perhaps from the suit’s audio link. Readouts appeared on her eyeplate: external temperature and pressure, the integrity of the seals, her blood-gas levels and body temperature. The lighted figures blurred, doubled; maybe the suit wasn’t in perfect repair after all?

 

Water poured over her, and she closed her eyes to quell a surging fear of suffocation. The suit’s readouts persisted in her vision, but only on the right side. Ari blinked, opened her right eye, shifted her gaze ... the lights shifted with it.

 

They were in her own eye.

 

“Know I, chiyela, you can link direct to Pelago through you suit,” Nuna said. “But no trick now, do you want go leave here.”

 

Nuna’s voice came from the suit’s fabric, while the faint tick-tick sounded inside her ear.

 

Pelago had granted her even more intimate access than she had thought. Its endocytes had just required time to grow into colonies that her sense organs could perceive.

 

Ari’s heart began to pound all over again. Shipsight from a wayfinder? She must have been born with almost the entire Shkiinhe genekey! And all of it activated. How that would have gratified her mother!

 

But Ari would never be able to tell her.

 

Ari wished she dared clear her eyeplate to eliminate the double image, but she did not want Nuna to wonder why she had done so. Instead she toggled her fingertip controls to voice one last objection. “Nuna-ba, dare we leave lock-side without guard?”

 

“No have I no other soldier do Pelago let inside, chiyela. Except Shayeen, and I need she on Hajo-aa. Must we depend on you clean meat.”

 

Yes, her pure unmodified flesh, her purer-than-expected but still mongrel genes. Resources, her mother would have called them, but they were only such if Ari could figure out how to use them.

 

Clean meat: suddenly she realized what chiyela meant. Creole stripped grammatical inflections, or froze them instead, lexicon crumbling out of the patterned armature of grammar. Chiyela must be truncated from chiilhejun, proper ritual cleanliness. Chii, purity; lhe, the instrumental clitic; jun, proper acts. Goody-goody, the soldiers were calling her. It seemed to have become her name, like “Boss” and “Repairman.”

 

But in i-shkiinhe, the form chiilhe was, without its instrument, grammatically amputated, semantically incomplete. A question perhaps: goodness accomplished how, or, purity through what? Lacking context, you couldn’t know even the kind of answer to search for.

 

* * * *

 

Pressurized water filled the lock. Ari thrust away panic. Air in, air out. The lock’s outer door slid open. Calm yourself.

 

Nuna switched on his head lamp. Shoving his scooter ahead of him, he scissored his legs to propel him out of the lock and along the adjacent wall. Powi followed with such agility that he, too, must have swum before.

 

Ari waved her feet in clumsy imitation. She had half-expected that swimming would be like locomoting in microgravity without sticky floors, but water was dense and heavy, more like mud than air. Dhi, ocean: formless and yet not bodiless.

 

Right away she blundered into a cloud of slime-flecks. She flapped wildly at them but they schooled over and around her anyway, tiny bodies beating with an almost imperceptible flutter against her suit.

 

Ahead, the current pulled a slow river of bubbles from Nuna and Powi. The suits erased their strangeness, transforming them to plain human shapes hardly distinguishable from each other. She kicked harder to keep them in sight, telling herself the water was actually safer than vacuum. It was under pressure, full of dissolved oxygen, and relatively warm. In case of a breach she would be dead in tens of minutes rather than mere seconds.

 

Without warning Nuna turned on his scooter and sped off in a turmoil of green-lit bubbles. Powi followed his example. Ari switched on her own scooter and chased after them, fervently hoping she would not crash into anything large, disgusting, or dangerous. The burred triple rumble of the cavitating propellers, a complex rhythm of out-of-sync periods, tickled her ears like hoops of tangled wire.

 

Another difference from vacuum: water was thick with sound.

 

The airlocks vanished into the murk behind them, and up ahead Nuna and Powi were entering a forest of plants that resembled large upright banners. Ari slowed to navigate the maze. Bright diffractions rolled along those swaying, bluish, meter-wide blades, which were hairy with slime, rough with toothy encrustations. Light also glittered through more schooling flecks, turning tiny translucent organs to gems of red and gold.

 

Container of formlessness: Pelago’s label was in no way accurate. There was too much form here, too much life, too much intensely convoluted topology in which danger could lie hidden.

 

Nuna and Powi disappeared. Then the rumble of their scooters cut out. Heart racing, she sped faster. On the far side of a banner-leaf, she spotted them: Powi’s scooter had stalled in a clump of billowing strings. As soon as she came abreast of them, Nuna raced away.

 

Determined not to lose them a second time, she zoomed after, banking turns as sharply as she dared. The memory knifed up, cutting her to the bone, of the day scarcely two months ago when she had hijacked a pair of maintenance sleds, and she and Temmek had played war zipping through the struts of Boivo Station. How full of glee he had still been afterward—laughing, eyes shining—when she had pulled off his helmet and smoothed down the disordered spikes of his black hair. It had been worth the blistering lecture Maane had delivered when she found out.

 

Temm-cha would have loved these scooters, and this strange slimy world would have fascinated him, too. Her little brother had a native calm and happiness she had always envied. She had vowed when he was born, and she just twelve years old, that she would never let him learn the anxiety that had oppressed her since her earliest memories. She would stand between her brother and their mother’s obsessions, and when or if the time came, she would stand between him and Maane’s enemies, too.

 

Temmek never had been frightened, not when she was with him. But she had broken the other half of her promise. She hadn’t been with him when danger threatened. She could tell herself he hadn’t had time to be scared, that the sabotage Nuna had arranged would have transmuted him to radiance the instant Maane’s ship crossed the boundary of time. But her failure remained, and it would cling to her the rest of her life.

 

Which seemed unlikely to be long.

 

Nuna banked sharply downward along one of the banner-leaves, and she and Powi followed. A pimpled platter bigger than Nuna’s head undulated past; jointed blue crawlers scampered away over ... rocks? Pelago had supplied the banner-weeds a floor on which to anchor their knobby holdfasts. Beyond those, spine-furred gravel bordered a pool of darkness.

 

Nuna stopped his scooter to push at the darkness. He pounded at it, yelled for Powi to open it, changed his mind and summoned Ari. He watched closely as she drew the command open this passageway on her wrist link.

 

They waited. Ari brushed away the bubbles of exhalation that, lacking buoyancy, clustered on her face mask. After a minute, the floor softened so that Nuna could crawl into it. Wishing she could see what waited on the far side, Ari burrowed after him, into black mush. No, it was cold magma that would solidify and bury her forever, she could no longer breathe—but then her hand poked through the lower side. The passageway was less than a meter thick.

 

Here, Ari’s suit informed her, pressure was greater, the temperature lower. The light Pelago supplied to this section of ocean was far dimmer. Nuna and Powi consulted the map. The bigheads—the ones Pelago tracked, anyway—remained many kilometers away. They turned on the scooters and burrowed onward.

 

Don’t think, she told herself, about how far into this organic, viscid, cloudy mess they were traveling, about how limited their resources were. Don’t obsess over what lurked beyond the range of their impotent headlamps. Breathe. Pay attention to the here-and-now.

 

Here, Ari decided, Nuna and Powi were her allies. And they couldn’t afford to be delayed at each passageway as they had been on the way into Pelago. She toggled her fingertip controls so she could command Pelago without them hearing: “Open all passages for me, and for these two with me.”

 

They burred down a cliff wall erupting in hairy pustules, crossed a sandy bottom where leathery lips gaped and pinched tight. “Warn me if any dangerous living thing approaches,” she told Pelago.

 

That command ought to include the bigheads, but it might not apply to the repairman. Cold fingers pinched her spine, tension stitched her shoulders and knotted her gut. If only Nuna had given her a chance to prepare! She ought to be using Pelago’s gift of shipsight to study the pelagikon, but she was afraid to clutter her vision more, to shift even a fraction of her attention from her surroundings.

 

Use your advantage, Maane chided her.

 

Her advantage was not just the access Pelago had granted her, but her current freedom from Nuna’s surveillance.

 

At the moment, the most crucial unknown was not Pelago’s Angel’s name, but the location of the bigheads. “Show me the cephalosoma on your map,” she said. But Pelago answered every variation of this command by marking only those few monsters with its blood in them.

 

She moved reluctantly to a new topic. “Show me how to talk to the cephalosoma.” To this Pelago responded with a column of graphs, an array of choices. Ari quickly discovered that Nuna hadn’t equipped her with the hardware to synthesize bighead sounds. Thinking that Pelago could at least translate their speech for her, she said, “Turn on listen and watch.”

 

Into her new endocytic organs of hearing flooded a gurgling, rumbling, swishing, the shape of the water turned suddenly so rich and deep she could taste it in her mouth, fold it in her palms. Her scooter paddled the water like knives smoothing butter; behind them, cavitation bubbles snapped like stones cracking, the slipstream edge whorled like fingerprints, rippled like silk.

 

Then a handful of palm-sized creatures resembling tiny bigheads jetted by. Pelago down-shifted their frequencies into human range: shrill bursts like flying microblades flashed out, hurled back. The returning blades kindled an image on her shipsight that was as bold as if the creatures had splashed glowing paint into the murk: rocks, schools of wrigglers, a starburst of billowing tendrils.

 

A sudden urge possessed her to follow the creatures into the brilliant world their voices made, but then she collided with a crowd of sucking slime-globs. Nuna laughed while she flapped and scraped at her faceplate, gagging in disgust.

 

They rotored onward. Ari, now keeping a tense watch for both slime-globs and bigheads, found it hard to focus on choosing her next question. She settled on, “Show me the whole map of dhi es nai, the ocean inside.”

 

The command map brought up the model of the pelagikon as Pelago had displayed it in the control room, sphere overlaid by a three-dimensional grid. With one eye on her surroundings, Ari expanded the model by orders of magnitude, thereby confirming her suspicion that the grid was not just conceptual. The sphere was chambered like pith. Compartment walls reinforcing the structure also contained layers of derma that regulated oxygen, pressure, temperature; arteries that pumped water and cytochines delivering minerals, nutrients, and messages; assembly nodes that waited to remodel or reabsorb the physical substrate as necessary. The pelagikon was not unbounded ocean in a bottle, but ocean permeated by a matrix, a maze always and everywhere inhabited by Pelago’s controlling intelligence.

 

Pelago had to know the location of every bighead. But when Ari once again asked it to show more than the same eight monsters, her commands failed.

 

An outburst of scatology informed her that Nuna had reached another hardened passageway. Uneasy, Ari stopped her scooter beside him. It should have opened.

 

“Repairman muck they,” Nuna said. “When I do here with Boss, they hardly more thick than gel. Hurry! Go open it, Chiyela!”

 

Gel membranes thickened to nearly solid walls? Alarm punched Ari in the chest. “But I already go open—” she began.

 

“Nuna-ba,” Powi said, “Nuna-ba! Diver stop!”

 

“Chiyela, go make it move!” Nuna roared.

 

At that instant turbulence roiled the water behind her, a shadow winged out of the corner of her vision. She twisted her scooter downward. A hard current pulsed against her shoulder as the wing swept by, slick and flat as a plate—

 

—a spiked bludgeon of noise shattered her ears. Scraps of wing whirled outward.

 

Pelago had not identified the creature as dangerous.

 

“Sack of sloppy shit!” Nuna screamed at Powi—faintly, as Pelago had knocked down the volume to protect her hearing. “Do I say it, ass-smear? Do I say it so many time? No shoot you! Go knock it rock-hard shitplug out from you earhole and listen now, because next time, I slack you, I go, or you get we-all dead!”

 

“No do it bighead,” Powi said sullenly, but with a tremor in his voice.

 

“No look you whether it do or no!” said Nuna. “Now tell Pelago, Chiyela, go it soften all-all they squeeze-hole for we and for it-diver.”

 

Calming her racing pulse, Ari again drew the graphs on her wrist, again ordered Pelago in i-naat to open the passages. She also asked whether anyone, or anything, had countermanded her previous instructions.

 

Pelago told her no.

 

The passageway softened. The three of them crawled through and burred onward, across that compartment and the next ones beyond. Sometimes they traveled laterally, sometimes they headed downward, into ever colder, darker, denser habitats. Through the feeble cones of their head lamps passed slimy, spiny, tentacled creatures in shapes more grotesque than Ari could heretofore have imagined. Some flung blade-squeaks, some shone deep, slow rays of sound into the darkness that vibrated her bones, most rippled past in silence.

 

No matter what Ari told Pelago, she still had to open the passageways one by one, for them and for the approaching diver. Nuna grew ever more impatient and angry.

 

What was wrong? If neither the repairman nor the bigheads had overruled her commands, Pelago itself now had to be the source of the difficulty. Their venture must violate some higher-order domain in Pelago’s mind—Boss’ commands, for instance, or Pelago’s own safety protocols.

 

Ari asked the question she should have broached right away. “Why have the passages hardened?”

 

And Pelago flashed graphs onto her shipsight: disengagement underway.

 

Ari’s heartbeat leaped. “Show me disengagement. Show it on your self-map.”

 

Pelago in its entirety appeared again, now overlaid with glowing lines in rainbow shades from bright red to deep purple. There were shockingly more such junctures than she had expected. Disengagement of the asteroid and refinery complex from the rest of Pelago, yes—obviously Pelago would throw those off as reaction mass if it started to move anywhere. But separation of the sphere from the control module, the engines from the sphere, sections of the sphere from each other, the sections themselves disintegrating into the individual compartments—

 

She expanded the map: in preparation for disengagement, the compartments had pulled apart and grown separate shells, hardening the once-permeable membranes that had divided them.

 

Was the repairman destroying the pelagikon just to slow their pursuit of him? Where would he hide then?

 

They rotored past thrashing knots of hair, past a pod of translucent spheres illumined by radial spines of light.

 

Light inside; ocean inside.

 

She had been looking at it from the outside in. She needed to shift her view to the inside, to the repairman’s perspective.

 

What would a repairman do who wanted to escape a boundlessly cruel employer, a really smart repairman almost as good as a shipwright, with all the materials at hand to build a working starship?

 

Boss would have inhibited Pelago and the repairman’s drone body from undertaking such a task.

 

But Boss had not foreseen that the repairman could teach bigheads to work for him.

 

Still, the repairman would have used a good portion of his two years’ marooning first to train his assistants, then to transfer himself to his puppet body.

 

No, no, of course! The repairman need only take his pieces of starship to a place where he could hide long enough to finish assembling them. A place the bigheads would also want to go. A place prepared for them long ago, which they perhaps knew of from legends passed down—

 

At that moment a strange deep note vibrated into her extravagantly enhanced hearing, as if someone had played the walls around them as a sounding board.

 

And then another note, even deeper, less heard than felt. Pelago did not translate either sound into her shipsight.

 

“Go you hear it?” she asked Nuna.

 

“Hear what?”

 

Then Ari noticed something else. They were at that moment stopped to open a passageway. The bubbles that had collected on Nuna’s face mask were breaking loose to float away into darkness.

 

Panic spiked through Ari. “Nuna-ba,” she said, “must repairman fire engine. Go look how they bubble move now.”

 

Nuna turned to stare at the quickening stream. “Go stop it!” he yelled. “Why no kill you all he command beforetime? Do you want go get we dead?”

 

What she had wanted was to leave the repairman a chance of escape. Yes, she did also want to destroy Nuna and his soldiers, but not here, not down in this terrifying murk filthy with life and its excrements. She was afraid that, without Nuna, she would never leave it.

 

“No think I, could repairman take Pelago anywhere,” she said.

 

“Where do he move it?”

 

“Most like, go he crash it into blue planet. Where else could he take it?”

 

Nuna swore viciously. Meanwhile Ari toggled her controls and told Pelago to stop disengagement, stop its engines, halt every process the repairman had set in motion, ignore all further commands from him, above all to open the membranes for them.

 

Nuna hurried them through that passage. When they emerged into the next compartment, he told them, “Diver do only two box away now. Must we grab diver and repairman quick-quick—”

 

A bolt of high-pitched sound flashed over them.

 

Behind it purled a new rush of turbulence. A warning flashed on Ari’s readout, but she already knew. “Bighead!” she shouted to Nuna and Powi. And to Pelago, “Close all passages!”

 

Her companions twisted, and into the wildly swinging illumination from their headlamps shot a bighead, tentacles streaming, flat reflective eyes glowing. Adrenaline raced into Ari’s limbs until she could barely raise her shaking hand to fire.

 

But even as her net-pellet bloomed outward, the onrushing monster erupted in a spiked sphere of noise. Clouds of inky blood and severed tentacles blew in all directions, battering her—

 

When the ringing in her ears subsided, she could hear Nuna shouting at Powi, “Go I tell you, no slack you not one-one single bighead unless it attack!”

 

“It go attack!” Powi yelled back. “It aim straight at Chiyela! How do we escape it-tank of shit without she work diver for we?”

 

Ari’s limbs trembled. Control your body. Breathe.

 

“Kill all you see now,” Nuna said grimly. “Chiyela, go you tell Pelago close they passage?”

 

“Already,” Ari said. She hoped that Pelago would comply now that she had stopped disengagement.

 

Silence fell. No more bigheads loomed out of the darkness. Scraps of hide and tentacles swirled past them, drifted away. To unclutter her vision, Ari blanked her shipsight and all readouts on her eyeplate except the bighead warning.

 

The minutes stretched out. “Maybe it-bighead do only one in box with we,” said Nuna. “But we stay beside wall until diver go reach we.”

 

“Nuna-captain,” Ari urged, “go we return to it-box we just leave, could we escape, swim back to entrance. After I close passage behind we, can only bighead with Pelago blood pass through, and all they still do deep inside.”

 

“I want diver,” Nuna said. “Then do we safe, and can we snatch repairman no matter what trick he play!”

 

If only Nuna hadn’t rushed them into the water! If only she’d puzzled out how to track all the bigheads. If only she had equipped herself with the means to flood the compartment with her own lightning-flash of sound.

 

Breathe. Ari stared into the murk and listened hard. Nuna and Powi looped slowly around. The burr of their scooters would conceal the sounds of approaching bigheads as surely as it would reveal their own position.

 

“Nuna-ba! Nuna-ba! They come though passage!” Powi yelled.

 

Ari glanced over her shoulder. A bighead popped out of the membrane they had just exited. Another was wriggling through. “Close all the passageways!” she ordered Pelago yet again, but without confidence it would obey.

 

Powi exploded the first bighead, Nuna harpooned the second one, but a third had already squeezed out. “Close it! Go close it!” Nuna yelled. “Shitsmear Chiyela, you tell I you close it!”

 

“No go it close!” Ari yelled back. The awful realization struck her that the membranes must never have been intended to work like gates, but had hardened for the disengagement process, and otherwise operated solely to manage the pelagikon’s biota. And maybe that function—which would include tracking bigheads—belonged to an entirely separate domain of Pelago’s mind.

 

She had no time to consider how to access it, because bigheads were still squeezing through the passage, and now a maimed bighead slipped past Nuna and Powi and jetted straight at her, eyes shining—

 

Ari raised her shaking arm and fired at it again and again. Each time, the scraps billowing through the water prematurely tangled the net.

 

Then it exploded into another cloud of ink and whirling chunks of flesh. “Go put away you shitsmear net and just bust they, Chiyela!” Nuna yelled. Then he said, “Powi go right. They do aim at you. They know how we need you. Now, come to I, lovey, stay close so can we guard you!”

 

Nuna and Powi needed her, and she needed them. In this battle, Powi was quick and capable, nearly Nuna’s equal. She thought she was so clever, but all the training to which Maane had subjected her couldn’t match the soldiers’ augmented strength and reflexes, especially not in the water. And she had been conditioned from childhood against so much as touching deadly handarms. Nuna and Powi knew how to kill as easily as they breathed.

 

Maane would never have landed herself in this predicament. But she would have expected Ari to get out of it, one way or the other.

 

She loaded a harpoon and pointed her scooter toward Nuna. Then a swirl of turbulence stirred the water behind her, barely audible to her explosion-shocked hearing. As she twisted around to aim, a weight slammed into her, tentacles roped her, pain seared her leg as mouth plates clacked.

 

“I go come, Chiyela!” Powi shouted, swooping out of the murk, firing a harpoon that blew the bighead apart. The scissoring mouth tore away and into its place rushed bone-chilling water. Panicked, Ari tried to stick the suit back over itself with her free hand. A current of blood trailed her. “Nuna-ba! Chiyela go hurt!” Powi shouted, looping back toward her, but then his scooter hit bighead scraps and stalled.

 

Another ferocious rush of water boiled behind Ari. This time she jinked downward without glancing back.

 

The bighead struck Powi instead. She knew by his screams of agony. He must have fired a harpoon as well, because the bighead exploded behind her. When she circled around she saw that he had lost his scooter and most of his legs, and clouds of his blood poured into the water. Ari kicked her scooter after him, reaching for his arm.

 

“Chiyela, go leave he,” Nuna shouted. “Come to I or go we all die!”

 

She had almost closed her awkward finned fingers around Powi’s wrist when a harpoon slammed into his chest, yanking him away.

 

It detonated. For a few moments the water was so thick that she could see only his head with its lamp, tumbling end over end. “You killed him!” she screamed at Nuna.

 

“No go we never get he back alive—watch, watch, Chiyela, go shoot!”

 

The shape of the water bent behind her, the arch of a bow-wave pressing on her ears. She zigged and looped through the water, but another monster jetted out of the darkness, and then, as she banked steeply to slip round it, a third swept in to cast sticky tentacles around her. A weight seized her head and yanked her hard through the water.

 

She struggled in vain. She could hear detonating harpoons, Nuna yelling, but in her faceplate was only darkness. The bighead tugged her through a half-congealed membrane, and all the while terrible pressure on her skull grew as mouthplates scissored, clacking and grinding. She twisted and thrashed against the elastic tentacles, she tried to wrest her arm free to aim a harpoon over her head. But the grip was too strong.

 

What are you doing, Ari? her mother yelled. Never use force against force!

 

Ari awkwardly grabbed a tentacle and lunged in the direction it was pulling her, toward the bighead’s mouth. At the same time she flipped her legs and body over her head and, her arm now pointing into the enormous head, fired her harpoon.

 

She heard Nuna call faintly, “Chiyela, where are you?”

 

Then a moon-sized blast of iron spikes exploded in her ears. The bighead blew away, its mouth still locked on her helmet. Chunks battered her chest. Icy, putrid liquid gushed over her eyes, mouth, nose. Spears of pressure lanced her ears. Through the scrap-filled water she glimpsed her lamp and face mask tumbling away into darkness. Her air, her light, her only link to Pelago—

 

Her air.

 

Powi’s headgear—it was on the other side of the compartment wall, and the passage was lost in blackness.

 

She groped for her wrist link to signal Nuna, but the bighead’s tentacles had stripped that from her, too.

 

She already desperately needed to take a breath. Should she try to swim after her own ruined mask, still spinning away, its light growing ever fainter? With her wounded leg, she’d never make it that far.

 

Scalding terror roared through her. She didn’t want to die like this, on the wrong side of the boundary of time, never to return to radiance. Never to rejoin her family. Better to harpoon herself than die breathing bighead viscera.

 

Stupid girl! Maane yelled at her. You will die if you don’t calm down! Slow your respiration!

 

Ari quit thrashing. With a ferocious effort of will she clamped down on her heartbeat and pulled her body to the very bottom of trance. Better to die calmly than in a panic.

 

She still needed oxygen, and soon.

 

Calm yourself. Observe your environment. 

 

Utter blackness squeezed her. She’d banished her shipsight and had no means to get it back.

 

Now that the explosions had fallen silent, though, the ripples and gurgles in the water were resuming their former full, rich shape. She listened as hard as she could, heard only the slow beat of her pulse and a few soft rolling beads of sound as the slackening turbulence rubbed the last bubbles of air from her depressurizing suit.

 

The bubbles rolled up something—a torn patch of fabric—to tickle her chin. No, the patch was crawling onto her skin. Some slimy parasite of the deep—

 

Calm yoursel f ! She made herself reach for the thing with the drifting movements of deep trance and touched a gel-like surface. When she tried to rip it off, she discovered that a short umbilical attached it to her suit.

 

An emergency breather? Her finned gauntlets were so clumsy. She poked at her cheeks, her eyes, before she managed to mash the thing against her face again.

 

The gel crawled into her nose and mouth, thrust against the back of her throat. She tried to inhale, choked, gagged, nearly vomited. All her airways were stoppered, no air, no air, she was suffocating—

 

She snorted and sucked as hard as she could, and air began to fill her lungs.

 

For a few moments, dizzy with relief and hypoxia, fighting not to gag, she hauled in one heaving breath after another.

 

Now what? She couldn’t just drift blind, waiting for bigheads to find her. But she had lost faceplate, shipsight, wrist link. At her command, Pelago had stopped the engines firing; that clue to directionality was gone as well.

 

If Nuna was still alive, he would help. But he had no way to find her.

 

Don’t panic. Breathe. Stay still, so the bigheads will have a harder time hearing you.

 

It was so hard to think clearly.

 

She had lost her scooter, too, and her leg was injured. She still had: arms, body, one fully functioning leg. Her hearing. Her suit kept her body fairly warm—even her wounded leg, which meant the suit had repaired the rips. But heat spilled from her head into the frigid water. That, and her wound, would overcome her eventually. Were doing so already.

 

There must be a way to locate herself. But her thoughts were so foggy. Maybe bighead venom had poisoned her, or some constituent of the ocean itself.

 

All she could think of was to swim in one direction until she found a wall or floor. She began to burrow through the cold, foul blackness, gritting her teeth against the fierce pain in her thigh. The nearest wall might be hundreds of meters away or ten. She could hear only the intricately whorled swish of her own movements, the rasp of air in her throat. But none of the compartments were empty. Some monster must be out there. It would be watching, drifting silently, stalking her...

 

Ari stopped swimming. She would never see the stars again.

 

A familiar voice said, “Ari, come on!”

 

It was Temmek bright as day, bouncing away from her, unburdened by weight or water. She tried to call his name, but the gel blocked her throat.

 

He couldn’t hear, anyway, because he wore no helmet.

 

He was going to die again, right in front of her. Sick with terror, she swam after him as fast as she could, ignoring the pain, and grabbed his bare hand, and then she yanked the gel from her throat by its umbilical. “Take it!” she tried to shout. Her words emerged as a mumble. “We’ll share! Temm-cha, we’ll share, stay with me, we’ll get out of this together!” Though she would have given him all her air.

 

He slipped his hand free and, grinning happily, bounded on. She redoubled her efforts. Temmek had grown so much—he reached to her shoulder now—and he didn’t have to swim the way she did. He was easily outdistancing her.

 

“Ari, what are you doing!” Maane yelled, solidly blocking Ari’s path.

 

Ari knew Maane would have wanted both her children to survive. “I need to help Temm-cha,” she tried to say, but the pain of swimming overwhelmed her, foul water choked her.

 

Temmek had reached their father, who glanced over his shoulder and waved smiling at Ari. She wanted to call to them, “Come back, wait for me, don’t go!” But she had no air left.

 

“Your job is to survive!” Maane yelled, “Breathe!”

 

“Mama,” Ari mumbled, choking on water. It wasn’t fair that now of all times she couldn’t argue. She jammed the gel back in her throat.

 

But Maane had vanished.

 

They were all gone.

 

Just herself and the crushing blindness, the tiny opulent gurgles in her ears. They had left her behind. Again.

 

Ari breathed, though it was hard to see why she should when she had been so utterly abandoned. After a while she remembered that—stupid!—the breach in her suit had not brought depressurization, but a jump in pressure. Her murdered family had not visited her. Only a bit of blood-gas poisoning.

 

She drifted in her cold tomb, hoping and fearing she would hallucinate again. Nothing came but more darkness, more crawling terror of what might lie inside it, more unbearable loneliness.

 

Then a burst of distant blade-squeaks stabbed at her ears. Tiny echoes ricocheted a half-instant after.

 

The little cousins. Without shipsight, her clumsy senses could not read the topology illuminated by those echoes. Still, all that mattered was the direction of the shape throwing back sound.

 

Another burst of flying microblades.

 

Wearily Ari pulled herself toward their echoes. Eventually—much too far but perhaps only a dozen meters—the ambient noise of the water became flat and hard, and even without the knife-squeaks she could hear the shape of a wall approaching. She put out her hand ... and there it was, a large, sloping face of the pelagikon’s substrate.

 

She clung to it. Her breath shushed in and out, her pulse pounded in her skull.

 

Suddenly she realized she should still be able to talk to Pelago, because she had Pelago’s endocytic organs inside her ears. Pelago ought to hear her through her bones.

 

She pulled out her breather and, enunciating as clearly as she could, first into the water, and then with her mouth closed, she ordered, “Restore my shipsight.” On the fourth try the map returned to her eye. With herself on the map.

 

Hope seeped into her. But where could she go from here?

 

Forget the diver Nuna had been heading for; bigheads would be waiting in ambush. Another diver, then. No, they would guess she had called it, would use it to find her. She told Pelago to send each diver in a different direction, bringing only one to her. At least that would divide the monsters.

 

Next problem: Nuna. Pelago showed his icon to be several levels above her. He must have abandoned his plan and headed straight for the surface. She ordered Pelago—so hard to speak clearly—not to allow him to contact the Hajo-aa, or depart the sphere, until she reached him.

 

She wanted much more information. But she had to move before the cold incapacitated her. Unable to crush her terror of the blind dark, she launched herself into it anyway, and with aching slowness she began to crawl toward the far wall.

 

The cuts on her thigh throbbed hot and cold. Her arms burned with exhaustion, her body grew heavy as lead. Once her hand-fin struck a bundle of sticky fibers. Once cylindrical shapes buffeted her. She kicked and flapped, and they went away—she hoped. Occasional bursts by the little cousins echoed from another wall like tiny spotlights flicking on and off, reassuring her that the darkness was finite.

 

At last she reached the opposite membrane, at last the diver entered the adjoining compartment. Shivering spasmodically now, she checked her armaments and with the dregs of her strength hauled herself through the tunnel of gelatin.

 

Into her ears whirled the low, burred thrum of propellers. The oncoming diver’s lights glowed through the murk: no bigheads visible. Relief surged in her.

 

The propellers reversed; the diver drifted to her. Its hatch opened and Ari crawled into the airlock, to safety, at last.

 

But the inner lock door stood open. And murky water flooded the cabin inside. The interior lighting showed worms wriggling above the control panels.

 

Stupid, stupid, stupid! Of course the repairman would give divers to the bigheads! What a lovely return for their services—

 

Black tentacles uncoiled in the shadows. Ari turned toward them, fumbling. No, a harpoon might damage the diver. No room for nets to open—

 

She fired an indiscriminate hail of sleep darts. The huge shapes kept coming, tentacles writhing, mouth plates scissoring. She had no strength to do more than shield her bare head with her arms as they smacked past her to crash against the cabin walls ... with suddenly flaccid bodies.

 

She knew she did not possess the strength to clear them from the diver. Instead, limbs shaking, adrenaline pounding, Ari started to crawl toward the diver’s controls. A new swish of water made her glance back. Tentacles writhed. A bighead jetted toward her, bristling with sleep darts—

 

Oh, you stupidest girl!

 

She had never asked Pelago to put the repairman on her version of the map.

 

She loaded a harpoon to aim at him and ripped out her breather. “Close this airlock,” she commanded Pelago. “Take the diver to the surface.”

 

The repairman’s tentacles thrashed but, as the propellers thrummed to life again, fell slack. They faced each other. Not that the radial symmetry of a bighead allowed it a face.

 

That thing was a true monster, neither alien nor machine. The reflective disks, huge and inscrutable, only mimicked living eyes. The puppet’s true sensing instruments might be somewhere else entirely.

 

But Boss had left the repairman feel and want.

 

Ari knew, suddenly, what the repairman felt: despair, the night-side of desire. She had locked Pelago against him. Even if he killed her, he couldn’t regain control on his own, not in that form.

 

He had labored so hard, he had risked so much to escape his tormentors. The extremes to which desire had driven him showed how human he still was.

 

Ari instructed Pelago to return the repairman’s agency as soon as she safely departed. Then she asked after a replacement for her missing headpiece. As she hoped, the diver contained a locker-full. She knew the repairman was monitoring her commands and understood her intentions, because he moved aside to let her wriggle through the tangle of unconscious bigheads.

 

She sealed her new helmet and waited, impatient, unable to think anything but up, out. When her map showed that the diver had reached the level below Nuna, with only one passage remaining to traverse, she stopped it and crawled out the airlock.

 

The repairman floated in the lock to watch her leave. A voice spoke in her ear, bodiless and uninflected. “Why are you helping me?”

 

“I wish I could get free of them,” she told him.

 

“You’d better figure out how, soon,” he said, “before they discover that you let me go.” And he vanished back into the diver.

 

He was right. Maybe she should flee with him to the refuge he had planned.

 

But even if she lived through the disintegration of the sphere, she would be castaway on a pelagic world with no food and no preparations, perhaps no more equipment than her damaged suit. How could she survive in the depths of a world-ocean?

 

It was still possible she could escape outward, into the song of Angels.

 

She squeezed through the membrane into the topmost level of the pelagikon and swam painfully, laboriously, the last few yards through a maze of banner-weeds. This compartment was drowned in darkness except for the roving rays of Nuna’s headlamp.

 

“Oh, Chiyela,” he said with genuine relief, when his light fell on her.

 

* * * *

 

Song of Angels 

 

“I think you do dead,” Nuna said.

 

“So I too,” Ari said. “But I get away and crawl up here—”

 

He interrupted. “Chiyela, help I! Pelago block I from go talk to Hajo-aa.”

 

She would much rather have explained her escape here than on the Hajo-aa, where he would know when she deviated from the truth. But she gave him back access to his ship, and then, drifting in exhaustion, closed her eyes to listen to his agitated exchange with Shayeen.

 

Shayeen said, “Nuna-ba, must you hurry out quick-quick. Pelago go smack air in just five minute!”

 

“Five minute?” Nuna roared. “Chiyela, stop Pelago! Get we into orbit again!”

 

“No have you time. Save youself !” Shayeen said.

 

“And leave repairman? Forget all it-cargo Boss send we for?”

 

“We load they crate,” Shayeen said. “And Chresun shipbrain. They freelancer do still onboard Chresun, but it go shitsmack when Pelago hit planetside.”

 

“But repairman and Pelago doorbox do most-most important!”

 

“Do repairman tricky enough go survive, then do he stuck planetside till we fetch he. Now tell I quick, Nuna-ba, how we niggle you through Pelago hull.”

 

“Lock tube, of course,” he said impatiently.

 

“You tell Hajo-aa go eat it, for do make space,” Shayeen said, “back before Toomee. And same for we flyer and lifeboat. No have we time for Hajo-aa grow new one.”

 

Nuna began to swear. Ari opened her eyes, cold terror jolting her once more. What leech-induced recklessness had led him to rid his ship of its most basic safety equipment? To make space?

 

“Shit-fill ship,” he said, gripping his head with both hands. “Tank of runny shit-drip.”

 

“Do any boat, tube, inside at you?” Shayeen asked.

 

“Chiyela! Do it?”

 

“Not here,” Ari said. Pelago could doubtless manufacture such a thing, or Nuna’s soldiers could ferry over vacuum suits, but not in the time remaining. That left only one choice, a very imperfect one. “Must we blow hole and jump.”

 

“Do Pelago fill you skull with muck?” Nuna yelled. “No wear we nothing but we watersuit and we barenaked ass!”

 

“Watersuit do keep pressure, heat,” Ari said.

 

“No last they in vacuum.”

 

“Go Shayeen bring Hajo-aa close enough, do we outside less than one second. And you leg do so meatshape-strong. Go you jump hard, you spring right into Hajo-aa.”

 

And surely Nuna could make that jump. She, with her wounded leg, with her damaged suit, might not be able to follow.

 

Shayeen said, “Nuna-ba, Chiyela do right. It do only way.”

 

“Sure-sure,” Nuna said at last, angrily. But then he surprised Ari by telling her, “Must you grab onto I, Chiyela. You leg do mess. Better we jump together.”

 

So that was how they did it. Nuna boosted Ari up to the underside of the hull. Meanwhile Shayeen brought the Hajo-aa alongside, matching Pelago’s speed and course, and Ari (with a whispered explanation to Pelago) fired harpoons to breach the pelagikon’s outer hull.

 

Water gushed past them, at first no colder than it had been, but tugging hard enough that in her weariness she could no longer hold on. Nuna steadied her as she wrapped arms and legs around him, forcing herself not to think about whom she was embracing so closely. A too-long moment stretched out while he worked his way into position at the opening, and she exhaled hard to protect her lungs from the trauma of depressurization. Ice crackled on the hardening skin of their suits. Ari could not see the Hajo-aa, which hung above and behind her; she had to trust Nuna’s aim.

 

He jumped.

 

They flew through the outrushing flood, battered by clumps of ice. For a fraction of an instant, over Nuna’s shoulder, she glimpsed the pelagikon’s curving gray hull. The blue world beyond was all ocean and clouds now, its limb hidden from view.

 

Then they shot into the Hajo-aa’s airlock, the Hajo-aa slapped a net over them, and the outer lock gate slammed shut.

 

The impact crunched Nuna against her wound. Ari’s nerves belatedly brought her news of knife-edged cold. But the lock sucked away the water, jets of heated air blasted at them, and already she could draw breath. The Hajo-aa accelerated slowly away, flattening the two of them to the floor.

 

Nuna flung off the restraints in a shower of ice. “Shayeen!” he yelled into a ship’s ear. “Go make picture for I! Pelago eat I shipsight, and longtime do we stuck here while Hajo-aa scour we of water-muck.”

 

The inner gate opened. Ari crawled after Nuna into the more spacious portal antechamber, where she sagged against the wall, stripping off her headgear. Immense relief was bubbling up, exploding into exhausted giddiness: heat, air, a ship; she had found her way out. She would not be buried forever.

 

Even her decompression pains were hardly noticeable. The Hajo-aa must be packing the room with pure oxygen for them.

 

Or rather: for Nuna. She was once more a foreign and disregarded object.

 

Nuna stripped off his cracking suit and began to towel water from his face, shoulders, back. His long hair fell from its knot. She could not see where his plugins attached.

 

The sight of him struck her like a blow. Naked, he had lost the anonymity of his watersuit. The force of it wasn’t just in the perfect shape of his flesh, math of muscle over bone, of pulse beating under glitter-dust skin. It was all of Nuna—wincingly coarse, dangerously tight-wound, carelessly violent, mocking, clever, cruel as glass.

 

“Go come, lovey, let I patch you,” he said, extracting rolls of tape from a cupboard. He came toward her, smiling.

 

Ari struggled to her feet.

 

She understood the moment precisely. Their mission had ended in disaster, but she had proved herself. He was offering a reward. An initiation into his company of soldiers.

 

A terrible, rage-filled arousal flashed over her, scorching all discretion to cinders, accelerating her toward a catastrophic impact. Fuck Nuna? Oh yes, how she wanted to touch him—with her fist, with his knife, with the harpoons she still carried. She knew how to kill now. She would blast him to bloody shards of bone. She would purge her family’s murderer from the face of time.

 

Such a consummation would be worth her own death. Oh, how it would be worth it!

 

And she would die, too, on a ship full of his soldiers where she had no agency.

 

She didn’t care, not any more. But—

 

Neither Nuna nor Boss were the ones who had conceived of her family’s destruction. They had merely been the weapon wielded by Maane’s Shkiinhe enemies, who had been searching for her since before Ari was born.

 

Trading her life for Nuna’s death would only transform their so-far failed project, the erasure of Maane’s geneline, into a complete success.

 

If vengeance was her object, Nuna was only the start. And no matter what she did, she was too late to follow her family.

 

Her job was, somehow, to live.

 

If there was one thing Ari’s mother had succeeded in teaching her, it was control—of breath, body, blood. “I do it,” she growled in her most sullen and childish voice, and she snatched the tape from Nuna.

 

He just watched, still smiling, as she stripped off her suit defiantly—let him look!—and wiped the fresh blood from the gashes in her thigh. His attention skipped to the wall as soon as Shayeen began relaying views of Pelago to him. But after Ari finished smoothing strips of heal-all over her wounds, he did hand her a set of red and blue clothes from his cupboard, garish as blow, silken as a caress, that smelled of his perfume. She understood that gesture, too, but she put them on anyway, until she could find something else to wear.

 

* * * *

 

They had to wait while the Hajo-aa undertook their purification. Nuna still did not ask what had happened in the pelagikon. He was preoccupied by the images sent back by the ship’s drones. Pelago had begun to turn ponderously for deceleration as soon as they jumped from its surface, and now it roared down through the outer atmosphere of the ocean planet on an immense cloud of fire. Flames poured off the sphere’s hull as well. Ari wondered if her action, halting the disengagement process at a crucial moment, had doomed the repairman anyway, along with the Elders’ age-old effort to rescue the life of an endangered world. Was her individual life worth that?

 

Then the ablating sphere began to disintegrate along its trailing surface. Flaming sheets of hull flew off. Little pods crumbled behind it like a smoke plume in the wind—the pelagikon’s compartments, surely, each of them bigger than a seedship.

 

“Go look how slow they pip of fart poo fall!” Nuna said bitterly. “Must every one have it own motive power. And most like, go repairman harden everything he need for crash.”

 

Ari sat a little straighter. Nuna was right. The attenuating plume drifted downward like a rain of feathers.

 

Pelago’s builders had designed the sphere well. Maybe some compartments would strike too hard, but most would survive the impact, would sink into the ocean and seek the proper depth and pressure to release their cargo. The repairman, the bigheads, and the other slimy, hideous inhabitants of the pelagikon would swim out safely into their new world.

 

As the plume stretched out ever further, other pieces of Pelago fell in tumbling white trails of smoke and flame: fragments of the dockside with the Chresun; the four vast engines, one after the other; the control module last of all. The first of the compartments shattered the ocean into great bursts of water and steam. Thickening haze obscured the horizon.

 

“Shit go rain on I now, Chiyela,” Nuna said, his gaze still fixed on the wall. “Boss cause it, but still he go say it-mess do I fault.” He rocked his boot heels up and down, scritch-scratch. “So tell I, how go I find repairman on whole planetfull of mucky ocean fifteen kilometer deep?”

 

“One million drone,” Ari said, “and go each drone send out ten trillion cytochine. One-two year, maybe, for they search.”

 

“No do we have ten drone, nor no way go make more. Must we come back for it, do Boss let we live so long.” The knife-edge glinted once more in his voice. “Repairman take Pelago shipbrain into ocean, and so much hull-glass, and maybe do he now have Chresun shipbody too. But no own he not one-one single door. He trap here with no way out. We or Boss go find he, sooner or later.”

 

But doors, Ari thought, were exactly what the repairman did own. Inside Pelago’s drowned shipmind were all the doors in heaven.

 

If he worked fast enough, he was free.

 

While she was back on the Hajo-aa, doomed as soon as Nuna asked her the right question.

 

Could she have survived in that world-ocean? It was too late to change her mind.

 

* * * *

 

Since Nuna’s suit hadn’t ruptured, he had suffered far less contamination than Ari, and the Hajo-aa soon released him into its body. With his departure, the images on the wall blanked.

 

Eventually the Hajo-aa allowed her to limp out as well. On the way to her allotted sleeping shelf, the ship’s alarm shrilled and its acceleration cut out. She stuck Nuna’s boots firmly to the floor and, while the Hajo-aa swung to a new course, clutched straps nearly swallowed in wall-moss. Then acceleration swelled with a vengeance as the Hajo-aa tore away from the ocean planet. Nuna, always in a hurry.

 

Ari hauled the leaden weight of her body onward. In the narrow aisle that ran along the outer bank of sleeping shelves, she found soldiers and ship drones shoving rectangles of mossy partition this way and that. Of course the acceleration did not bother them.

 

“What do it?” she protested.

 

To her surprise, a soldier answered her, a woman with a spiked metallic carapace. “Nuna fill ship with so much trashpick, no room do left for he own soldier.”

 

They let Ari through to the already remodeled section where her shelf was located. She climbed up and slid the cover shut behind her. Her meager belongings, still strapped in place, did not appear to have been disturbed, but the shelf itself had been shortened so that she could no longer stretch out her legs. They had also lowered the ceiling. Lying down, it wasn’t hard to pull off Nuna’s loose trousers, but worming into her own closer-fitting clothes was a painful job.

 

Walls and ceiling pressed on her. She netted herself in and closed her eyes, longing to lose herself in sleep. Her mind jumped: Nuna; her terror in the pelagikon’s filthy depths; Temmek swimming away into darkness forever.

 

Then the partition on the left side of her shelf rattled. A drone claw stabbed through it and yanked away that wall in a shower of moss, exposing her to the next aisle.

 

Ari slid down past the drone, which recognized her presence no more than did the Hajo-aa. As she limped away from the construction zone, a rubbish cart overtook her, heaped with clothing and on top of it, Powi’s discarded snake-arms.

 

* * * *

 

She trudged to the control room. Powi’s station sat empty, while Ekka occupied Shayeen’s spot and, to her dismay, Nuna slouched, silent and brooding, in his once-human chair. A single active section of wall showed the blue planet against the smudgy blackness of the Rift.

 

Sorry she had come, not knowing where else to go, Ari edged past Nuna and sank down at the door station. With him and his chair in it, the tiny room felt unbearably crowded, but even so, she had almost toppled over the edge of sleep when he spoke. “You want go live here, Chiyela, just like I chair?”

 

Her eyelids jerked apart. She said, sullenly, “They busy too much at I shelf.”

 

“Many other shelf do on shipboard,” said Nuna. “Must you shape some happy toy into you meat, Chiyela, then go you like skinplay better. No do plain meat have much-much feel in it.”

 

Was that truly what he believed? Ari did not know how she could bear more feel than her flesh already had.

 

With an abrupt change of tone, Nuna addressed Ekka. “Why laze you about, shit-rock? Long-longtime go pass before we reach door-open. Go help Hajo-aa move itself around.”

 

“Where go door take we, Nuna-ba?” Ekka ventured, as she rose.

 

“Where Boss send we, muck-puddle.”

 

Ekka departed. Ari braced herself for further discussion of her need for neural augmentation, that stigmata of soldierhood, or worse, an interrogation into exactly what had happened in the depths of the pelagikon. But Nuna returned to his brooding and, annoyingly, her tide of sleep receded. A new-old worry began to twist her stomach like a rope.

 

The door, the door, the door.

 

Poor Nuna, clever, beautiful, and strong, but no matter how many years the master of a starship he was still not his own master. He could travel only by means of the doors Boss gave him, only to where those doors opened.

 

But something kept going wrong with them.

 

And whatever the cause of that problem, Nuna would have exacerbated it by loading the Hajo-aa with the Chresun’s heavy chunk of crystal shipbrain. Boss had planned the door for Pelago’s etheric wayfinder mind.

 

A bad door might do worse than spit you out in an insalubrious location; it might not spit you out at all.

 

Ari half-turned to point out to Nuna the catastrophe he risked with their extra cargo. Then she stopped, remembering:

 

Nuna in Pelago’s control room, afire to locate Pelago’s nonexistent doorbox.

 

Nuna’s soldiers, complaining even before they loaded the hull glass at Pelago that the Hajo-aa was crammed too full. Nuna ordering the Hajo-aa to consume its lock tube and lifeboat to save space. Nuna, vanishing into the Hajo-aa’s depths to tend to his “cargo” as soon as they had boarded at Toomee.

 

Doors that kept going bad. New doors, created afresh by Boss’s wayfinder for each of Nuna’s journeys.

 

Suppose the Chresun’s doorbox wasn’t the first one. Suppose Nuna collected them whenever he could cripple a seedship and rip out its memory. By stockpiling doorboxes, and thereby the doors they carried, he could gain his freedom.

 

A clever plan, except that it required he hide the extra mass from the wayfinder that generated his own ship’s doors.

 

“Nuna-ba,” Ari said, “how much do Hajo-aa haul cargo that no do Boss know about?”

 

Nuna focused his gaze upon her. “Now, go you tell I, Chiyela, how much do it any of you business what I talk about with he?”

 

“I talk about you door, Nuna-ba,” Ari said, shifting her gaze to the floor with what she hoped was the proper display of deference. “Hajo-aa door turn bad beforetime. Maybe go next door all-all shitsmack. You haul Chresun doorbox, and no go Boss map it into you door. Seed-grown crystal do so much dense and massy.”

 

“Must I haul it to Boss,” Nuna said, “so can he find where they trashpicker buy door to Pelago.”

 

“Think I, already Hajo-aa carry mass that no do Boss map, and already it-cargo mess you door.”

 

Nuna regarded her. Finally he said, “You know so much, Chiyela, maybe you child up in Skeenhay shipyard. But no do they shipwright school you. No matter it how much cargo you ship haul.”

 

It seemed impossible to underestimate their ignorance. Just because Nuna was master of a starship, just because he and his soldiers could press a few keys with pictures on them, did not mean they understood how their ship worked.

 

“Mass,” said Ari, “knot up spacetime, and truespace, too. When Boss make you door, he write in it—” She groped after creole. “Must he write Hajo-aa shape all through, how much Hajo-aa have mass and where. Go you give Boss wrong mass you carry, and wrong shape of it, he make bad door for you.”

 

Nuna kept frowning at her. “Alltime, freelancer buy-sell door.”

 

“Alltime, they door turn bad,” said Ari. “Alltime, shape of Riftside change, and then no do old door match no longer. Can Riftside folk only trade each-other door at all because each seedship do so much like next one, and Riftside space do some bit flat.”

 

She groped after an analogy. “When ship come back through door into spacetime, do it like person drop heavy rock into bag. Must rock squeeze itself into bag-surface, turn itself into flat speck on bag, like. But ship-door do slot made for one-one single shape rock. Do door-shape too different, maybe no open hole for ship into right place on bag. Or no open it at all, no can ship make itself flat again. Go it rip hole through bag, and rip itself apart, too.”

 

Now a smile crooked Nuna’s mouth, a most appealing expression. It had probably been designed by a meatshaper to seduce.

 

“Can you fix I door, lovey?” he asked. “Because no do Boss like it, go I throw away Chresun shipbrain.”

 

“I can fix it,” Ari said, “can I handle door math.”

 

A silence stretched out. She kept her gaze on the floor, and her heartbeat and her thoughts firmly under control. At last Nuna said, “Go come with I then, lovey.”

 

He took her hullward to the ship’s portal once again. There he decanted for her a sipsucker of ship’s-blood, which he or a previous captain had caused to be a gold-flecked, luminescent white. The blood tasted as bitter as wine and was no thicker. You could not feel a seedship’s endocytes swarming into your blood, and these cytochines were after all no different in essence from the blood she had received from Pelago or, too early in her childhood to remember, from her mother’s ship. The drink nevertheless made her skin crawl. The Hajo-aa was the instrument of Nuna’s will, and now its body was truly inside her flesh, now it had fully incorporated her flesh into its body.

 

This intimacy, though, could serve a good purpose.

 

“Now go you work for I, Chiyela,” said Nuna. “Show I how you fix I door.”

 

“Sure, Nuna-ba,” she said, and she limped after him back to the control room.

 

She sat again at the door station. Now the console responded to her touch, allowing her to rebuild its shape. While Nuna watched, stroking the restless hands of his chair, she wiped away the pictographs and in their place raised a rainbow city.

 

In one corner she pushed up a golden-domed temple where she would store the topology of the anchoring Angel’s demesne. In another, she built a blue dome to house the still-unknown demesne that was their destination. Around each temple she molded lower edifices—turrets, spheres, and polyhedrons of all colors—and roads and bridges to link them. Here she would chart the perturbations from surrounding stars and dust clouds, their radiance and etheric energy, and the twists and turns of dozens of other dimensions of truespace; the door was also the route between its entrance and exit.

 

Amongst these she kneaded into existence a hall—striped orange and lurid pink for Nuna—where she would store the inner and outer shape of the Hajo-aa.

 

When she finished that, she asked the ship to etch the first block of door math in the sky above her still-empty city. In this looming stela of ideographs she found the relational markers indicating the nearer Angel, and she began parceling out the chunks of graphs that described cislocative space, chivvying them into her golden temple.

 

Nuna watched through half-hooded eyes. He was doubtless tracking her actions in shipsight, because when Ari asked the Hajo-aa for its self-map, he said, “Go tell I, lovey, what you do now.”

 

She explained how she had made the city to help her order the constituents of the door. What she had asked for, she told him, was the ship’s mathematical description of its current densities and etheric potentials, which this image—she threw it onto the wall—which this image represented visually.

 

The display showed tiny blue shapes of people drifting through the narrow corridors and cramped chambers of the ship. “They look ghost,” Nuna said, leaning forward.

 

The image also showed the crates of hull glass from Pelago, and several dense black clots of crystal. Some of those would be the Hajo-aa’s own mind-stuff; Ari counted two or maybe three other chunks of shipbrain.

 

With the Hajo-aa’s blood in her, fixing Nuna’s door was a matter of substituting a few handfuls of graphs. She showed him what she was doing. “It all finish. I tell you, I can run you door station.”

 

“Sure, lovey,” Nuna said, favoring her with his most mocking, seductive smile. “I think you can.”

 

Now, however, Ari had something more compelling than Nuna to command her attention: the graphs above her city that spelled the Hajo-aa’s destination.

 

She had expected that it would lie, as Pelago’s Angel did, in fields of heaven beyond her knowledge. That just to translate its math to the map of ordinary spacetime would require days or weeks of labor.

 

But she at once recognized the name. The word-values of the first ideographs were kan, boot; dne, velvet; gan, waiting to be filled: Kandnegan, an Angel whose full name her mother had taught her, an Angel dancing on the margins of Iigmrien itself.

 

Ari scooped its math into her blue-domed temple and then consulted the ship. Local conditions would not converge on those of the door for days. Even in that time, even if the Hajo-aa were not tracking her every action for Nuna, she could not construct a new door opening from this unfamiliar demesne.

 

From Kandnegan, though, she could build a door to any star in Iigmrien.

 

When the first light-tracks of shipsight began to crawl across her vision, when the first murmurs of shipvoice hummed and ticked in her ear, Ari folded away her city to teach the Hajo-aa music.

 

The Elders, who had meddled gently if implacably with the human genome to create the People of Heaven, had not, according to Ari’s mother, enhanced their abilities to comprehend the immensely complex topologies of truespace. The Elders had not wanted their servants to steal the secrets of travel beyond the edge of time.

 

But, Maane had also said, the earthbound past of the People had already provided them with the means to track myriad other dimensions: color, texture, shape, smell, taste, hot and cold, the trajectory and rhythm of movement, all the qualities of sound. Through these, the realm beyond the senses could be rendered as a place in which the senses were at home.

 

After all, human perceptions of ordinary spacetime—of the solidity of matter, for example, or the wholeness of mind—were themselves no more than display tools through which consciousness could grasp the universe, and itself.

 

Ari began to teach the Hajo-aa correspondences between the cardinal dimensions of truespace and qualities of sound: pitch, duration, tempo, volume, harmony, modality. Even an untrained ear could extract a world of information from a single word spoken by a loved one, as witness all the ways she had heard her mother speak her name. And Ari’s ear was not untrained; from childhood her mother had taught her to chart the shape of heaven through music. To this project Ari brought her native synaesthesia, which added a palpable texture and topology to every sound. Every tone was a warty shell, a spill of silk, a needled brush you could hold in your palm or feel in your mouth. Every phrase of music sculpted a vista or held, beneath its skin, a chambered labyrinth.

 

“What go you do?” Nuna demanded.

 

“I just teach Ship how should it show I math,” she answered, and he did not pursue it, perhaps because the Hajo-aa assured him that she altered only the way it represented information, and not the information itself.

 

Nuna might have left and returned. Days might have passed. From time to time, Ari napped, or sucked food paste from a packet. At last the Hajo-aa was ready to play the song of Kandnegan-Angel. The first hollow, sliding notes of creation lofted inside her ears, harmonies of unbearable purity, the lullaby her mother had sung in her earliest memories.

 

The blue planet shrank. All around it shone the stars of the Riftside, the light and dust of Kaenub’s nebulae, and in her ears, inside her skin, burgeoning mansions of radiance.

 

It was the curse of the body that desire turned so easily to its night-side, despair. How quickly flesh and bone could learn that topology, which felt like an emptiness beyond anything found in heaven. Despair was in fact intolerably full, a realm of crushing darkness and razor-limbed monsters, with no blue ocean into which they could be released.

 

Still, imprisonment in the body meant that you always had the music, too. You always could climb out of darkness and draw up your consciousness with you like a ladder, into the incorruptible realm. There you could purify your desires—for freedom, for bloody revenge—and plan your timing with impeccable dispassion.

 

Nuna was speaking from the other side of the universe. “Do you know so much, but never should you forget, Chiyela, I do master of Hajo-aa, and I know everything you work at. Go you play tricky, I make you into slave—maybe trash hole, maybe toilet. And I leave you do feel all and know all, like I chair.”

 

“Sure-sure, Nuna-ba,” Ari said. But she thought, I control your doors now.

 

I can take you anywhere I want.

 

And she walked away from him across the fields of heaven, where she was master.