House of Reeds

no Nem, no hatchlings, no short-horns, nothing – only wind keening through endless ruins.'

'Hurrrr…' Malakar slumped despondently and Anderssen pushed the creature away. The Jehanan swayed, clawed fingers scratching at the floor. 'No, no, you are lying. A sly asuchau human, making stories, shadows dancing on a wall – deceiving me. You cannot have seen the lost world. You cannot!'

Gretchen felt her arm, and clucked worriedly when her fingers came away damp with blood.

'Say you did not see…' The gardener's voice trailed away into a dismal fluting.

'Ahh…that hurts.' Anderssen pulled one arm out ofher jacket and winced to see three deep gashes shining red against her pale skin. Her medband had dispensed a coagulant, but Gretchen snaked out a bandage and slapped the self-disinfecting pad onto the injury. 'I have not seen Mokuil with my own eyes. A vision on a distant world let me look with a Jehanan's eyes, walk with their steps. In that moment, I felt the warmth of that hot, young star on my shoulders.' One arm done, she turned and bandaged the shallow gash on the other as well.

'Do you exist solely to torment?' the Jehanan groaned, huddling against the floor. 'You question and pry and sneak, you offer to separate shell from sac, truth from legend – and everything you say is a needle-sharp claw digging into my heart. Hooo… I did not believe in demons ere now! I scoffed – I raised my voice against the short-sighted Masters – argued – connived – stole to keep the old tales alive…'

Gretchen shrugged her jacket back on and began picking up her fallen tools.

'I should have listened to them!' Malakar wailed, inching away. 'They knew better than this old one! They knew…' The whistling voice faded into unintelligible hooting and fluting.

Rising, Anderssen walked quietly over to the gardener's side, then knelt, putting both arms around her shoulders. 'Come, rise up. Do you have a room of your own? A place to sleep? You need to rest, to eat.'

'No…I have no khus.' The old Jehanan tried to rise, failed, and then – with Gretchen's help – managed to come to her knees. 'I will not work at the tasks they set me – so they let me lie by the fire in the common hall with the other vagrants. I am' – a deep hur-hur boomed in the broad chest – 'not to be trusted with the minds of the hatchlings or short-horns. Too many tales do I tell, of kingdoms lost and days gone by.' Claws folded over the Jehanan's snout. 'Ahhh… Our losthome, our paradise, a tomb…all gone… gone…'

Anderssen heaved the gardener up to her feet. 'You will be in worse trouble if I'm found here. Can you show me the way back to the terrace? I can get out from there.'

A clawed hand folded around Gretchen's wrist and the Jehanan's deep-set eyes fixed upon her. 'Why did you come here, human? What were you looking for when I found you?'

Anderssen's lips twitched into a wry smile. 'What was I looking for? I was looking for a scrap of legendary shell. A memory out of the past. One of your stories. Something so old it would be new to human eyes. Even older than the Jehanan or the Haraphan. As old as Jagan itself.'

'Hoooo…' Malakar whistled, nostrils flaring. 'You are seeking the heart of the Garden! The false idol, the holy of holies which the blind worship, crawling before a dead god. You are looking for the kalpataru.'

Anderssen nodded, one hand sliding inside her jacket and taking hold of the chisel. 'I am.'

'Worthless,' the Jehanan said, puffing air dismissively. 'Old accounts say the tree once gave every desire, revealed all secrets, elevated the mind as the gods might…but I know no Master of the Garden has been graced with its power for three hundred generations! This I know, though my old hide would be laid bare with barbed whips to say such a thing aloud.'

'Have you seen it?' Gretchen said eagerly, before she could restrain herself. 'Is it far away?'

'Hoooo! Your eyes are very bright, human! Your voice is quick, your little claws scratching at the wrapper of a sweet – very much like a short-horn, you are, very much.'

'Your pardon,' Anderssen said, bowing in apology. 'Just show me the way to the terrace.'

'Hurrr… A curiosity to confound the foolish…' The Jehanan paused, long snout lifting in thought, eyes glittering in the gipu-light. 'Your machines…You wish to pry and snoop and listen and measure the tree-of-deceit, don't you? Yes, you do, all those hungry thoughts picking and chipping and breaking open shells to see what savory treats lie inside.' A delicate trill escaped the creature's throat.

Gretchen watched the Jehanan with growing unease. There was a malicious tone creeping into the gardener's voice. 'What happened to you?' she said after a moment. 'You believed in the Masters ofthe Garden once, but now…now you think I'll prove the kalpataru is false. Will that give you back what you lost? You didn't seem pleased about the school-room…'

'I will never tend the Garden again,' Malakar said, head dipping mournfully. 'None of the others would allow such a thing. The short-horns and hatchlings are not interested in my dusty old stories. But this new Master…his snout is crooked and filled with lies! He says…he says the tree is still alive – but that only he can hear, that only he is blessed.'

A frenetic energy welled up in the old Jehanan's frame.

'I think he lies,' Malakar snorted, 'but you can tell me the truth of the matter, can't you?'

Swallowing, her throat unaccountably dry, Gretchen nodded.

'Yes,' she said. 'If you take me to the device, I can see what can be seen.'

The Cornuelle

In Orbit Over Jagan

Two message-waiting glyphs – one from Engineering and one from Sho-i Smith – winked to life on Chu-sa Hadeishi's command display. As the communications officer had been ordered off the bridge, Hadeishi pointedly ignored the call from Engineering and thumbed open a comm pane to the junior officer's quarters.

The v-pane unfolded, revealing Smith – still in uniform, sweat-stained collar undone – sitting in the cramped workspace created by folding a JOQ rack into the bulkhead. Hadeishi could see Three-Jaguar lying on the bunk overhead, eyes half-lidded as she listened to a signal feed on a set of old-style headphones. A command-class comp was jammed in with her – a feat only possible because the Tlaxcalan woman was petite enough to fit sideways into a Fleet sleeping rack – and the display was alive with analysis diagrams and data flow patterns.

'Yes, Smith-tzin?' The Chu-sa kept his voice level, though he was irritated with the boy. Junior officers are supposed to sleep whenever they can, Hadeishi thought very piously, not stay up working late.

'Kyo, we've managed to trace most of this off-band encrypted traffic through the local comm networks. There is a locus and it's in orbit.'

'Coordinates?' Hadeishi raised an eyebrow in interest. 'A ship or a satellite?'

Smith punched the descriptors directly to the threatwell on the bridge of the Cornuelle. One of the heavy merchant ship icons shown on orbital path flared amber and acquired a targeting outline. The Chu-sa considered the shipping registry data on his sidepane.

'The Tepoztecatl…Six months outbound from Old Mars. Interesting…registration is up to date, port taxes paid, customs seals intact. Logs show daily shuttle traffic to the surface – expensive.' Hadeishi brought up the secondary comm traffic data the two junior officers had collected and his face stiffened into impassive, glacial surprise. 'This is an enormous volume of traffic… What arethey doing?'

'Video feeds, kyo.' Smith glanced up. Jaguar nodded in agreement, eyes now open and following the conversation. She'd pulled the headphone away from one ear. 'We haven't been able to crack their encryption, but the volume of data is so large they can only be passing realtime video from some kind of surveillance array on the planet back to the ship.'

'Video? You mean they're processing intercepts from a fleet of spyeyes?'

Smith and Jaguar nodded. 'There are hundreds of active comm channels in the traffic volume, and we think each one is a discrete camera. And, kyo, look at the source