Of course that was long ago, back when mathematics also had its great age of discovery on Earth. Is that a common thread? Did I choose math for the same reason Melina loved this instrument? Because it lends predictability amid life’s chaos?
A shadow fell across the wall. Sara drew back, half rising to meet the brown eyes of Foruni, aged leader of the horse-riding clan.
“Sorry to disturb you, dear.” The gray-headed matriarch motioned for Sara to sit. “But watching you, I could almost believe it was Melina back home with us, playing as she did, with such intensity.”
“I’m afraid I don’t look much like my mother. Nor do I play half as well.”
The old woman smiled. “A good parent wants her offspring to excel — to do what she could not. But a wise parent lets the child select which excellence. You chose realms of deep thought. I know she was very proud.”
Sara acknowledged the kindness with a nod, but took small comfort from aphorisms. If the choice really were mine, don’t you think I’d have been beautiful, like Melina? A dark woman of mystery, who amazed people with many graceful talents?
Mathematics chose me … it seized me with cool infinities and hints at universal truth. Yet whom do I touch with my equations? Who looks at my face and form with unreserved delight?
Melina died young, but surrounded by those who loved her. Who will weep over me, when I am gone?
The Illias leader must have misunderstood Sara’s frown.
“Do my words disturb you?” Foruni asked. “Do I sound like a heretic, for believing that generations can improve? Does it seem an odd belief for a secret tribe that hides itself even from a civilization of exiled refugees?”
Sara found it hard to answer.
Why were Melina’s children so odd, by Jijoan standards? Although Lark’s heresy seems opposite to mine, we share one thread — rejecting the Path of Redemption.
The books Mother read to us often spoke of hope, drawn from some act of rebellion.
To the Illias leader, she replied, “You and your urrish friends rescued horses, back when they seemed doomed. Your alliance foreshadowed that of Drake and Ur-Chown. You are a society of dedicated women, who carefully choose your male companions from the best Jijo has to offer. Living in splendid isolation, you see humanity at its best — seldom its more nasty side.
“No, it does not surprise me that the Illias are optimists at heart.”
Foruni nodded. “I am told that you, in your investigations of language theory, reached similar conclusions.”
Sara shrugged. “I’m no optimist. Not personally. But for a while, it seemed that I could see a pattern in the evolution of Jijo’s dialects, and in all the new literary activity taking place across the Slope. Not that it matters anymore, now that aliens have come to—”
The old woman cut in. “You don’t think we are destined to be like glavers, winning our second chance by passing through oblivion?”
“You mean what might have happened, if starships never came? I argued with Dedinger about this. If Jijo had been left alone, I felt there was the possibility of …”
Sara shook her head and changed the subject.
“Speaking of Dedinger, have you had any luck finding him?”
Foruni winced unhappily. “It’s been just a short while since he broke out of the pen where he was kept. We never imagined he would prove so resourceful, knowing how to saddle and steal a horse.”
“He had time to learn by observing.”
“I see that we were naive. It’s a long time since we kept prisoners in Xi.
“Unfortunately, the tracks do not lead back to the tunnel, where we might have trapped him in the narrow darkness. Instead, the wily ligger spawn struck out across the Spectral Flow.”
Sara tried picturing a man alone on horseback, crossing a vast desert of poison stone and cutting light. “Do you think he can make it?”
“You mean can we catch him before he dies out there?”
It was Foruni’s turn to shrug. “Fallon is not as spry as he was, but he departed a midura ago with some of our most able young riders. The fanatic should be back in care soon, and we’ll watch him more closely—”
Foruni stopped, midsentence, glancing down at her hand. An insect had landed, and was sniffing at a vein. Sara recognized a skeeter—a blood-sucking irritant familiar across the Slope. Skeeters were slow and easily smacked, but for some reason Foruni refrained. Instead, she let the vampire wasp leisurely insert a narrow tube and take its meal. When finished, it proceeded to perform a little dance, one filled with jerky, beckoning motions.
Sara stared, fascinated. Skeeters seldom survived landing on a human long enough to do this.
Come with me, it seemed to say with each swing of its tiny abdomen and tail. Come with me now.
Sara realized, it must be another remnant servant beast of the vanished Buyur. A useful messenger, if you knew how to use it.
Foruni sighed. “Alas, dear cousin, it’s time for you to go. You and Kurt and the others must hurry to where you’re needed most.”
Needed? Sara wondered. In times like these, what could a person like me possibly be needed for?
The journey south resumed, this time on horseback. They used the ancient Buyur transit tunnel at first, where the failed deconstructor left its demolition unfinished. But soon it lay cracked open for stretches, like the spent larval casing of a newly fledged qheuen, leaving a dusty cavity or else a pit filled with water. Thereafter they had to ride in the open, awash in the luminous tides of the Spectral Flow. The Illias provided hooded cloaks. Still, it felt as if the colors were probing the reflective garments for some gap to worm their way inside.
Kurt and Jomah rode ahead with Kepha, their guide. The elderly exploser leaned forward in his saddle, as if that might get them to their goal quicker. Then came Prity, on a donkey more suited for her small form.
Emerson seemed strangely subdued, though he smiled at Sara from time to time. He wore the rewq constantly, though from his ever-turning head, Sara gathered the filmy symbiont was doing more than just softening the colors. It must be adjusting, translating them. Sometimes, the starman stiffened in the saddle … though whether from pain, surprise, or exaltation, Sara could never be quite sure.
Taking up the rear was Ulgor, the urrish traitor. Wisely, she had not tried to break across the poison plain with her erstwhile ally, Dedinger. Guarded by two of her own kind from the Xi colony, Ulgor swung her head in growing eagerness as the party neared Mount Guenn. Urrish nostrils flared at scents of smoke and molten rock, as the volcano loomed to fill the southern sky.
Sara felt surprisingly good. The saddle was a tool her body had mastered. When the going grew steep and riders dismounted to lead the horses by hand, her legs were suffused with waves of comfortable warmth, with strength still in reserve.
So, a hermit math potato can manage to keep up, after all. Or is this euphoria an early sign of altitude sickness?
They were mounting one of countless knee hills along the sloping volcano, when suddenly all three urs bolted forward, hissing excitement and trailing clouds of pumice, forgetting their separate roles as they jostled toward the next outlook. Outlined against the sky, their long heads swept in unison, from left to right and back again.
Finally, winded from the climb, she and Emerson arrived to find a mighty caldera spread before them … one of many studding the immense volcano, which kept rising to the southeast for many more leagues.
Yet this crater had the urs transfixed. Steamy exhalations rose from vents that rimmed the craggy circle. Cautiously, Sara removed her sunglasses. The basalt here was of a coarser, less gemlike variety. They had entered a different realm.
“This was the site of the first forge,” Ulgor announced, her voice tinged with awe. She tilted her muzzle to the right, and Sara made out a tumble of stone blocks, too poorly shaped to have been laser-cut by the Buyur, and now long-abandoned. Such tumbled shelters were hand-hewn by the earliest urrish seeker smiths who dared to leave the plains pursuing lava-borne heat, hoping to learn how to cast the fiery substance of Jijoan bronze and steel. In its day, the venture was fiercely opposed by the Gray Queens, who portrayed it as sacrilege — as when humans much later performed the Great Printing.
In time, what had been profane became tradition.
“They must’ve found conditions better, on high,” Jomah commented, for the trail continued steadily upslope.
