“What does that mean?”
“On Sintorus, folkparents are friends or relatives who agree to help guide a child through their journey to adulthood, look after them if their biological parents die.”
“He never said.”
“He couldn't, of course.”
“How did it happen?”
Ondo smiled to himself at some memory only he could see. “The irony is, Marita was always the agitator, and I was the one holding her back, telling her she was seeing conspiracies where there were none, telling her to stop causing trouble and live a normal, quiet life. She was active in the Sintorian rebellion, a cell leader, goading the planet's governments and security forces. In the end they came for her, a special forces team from the local military, and shot her where she slept in our bed. Juma, asleep beside her, was hit, too. I was away, some unimportant meeting, and I returned to find them there.”
“Concordance did that to you but you still joined them?”
He nodded. “It seems incredible, I know. At the time, I still didn't believe that Concordance were using the local security forces as their front. Marita told me it often, made me try to see, but I wouldn't believe her. She was right, of course, I understand that now.”
“Why did they let you join, given your partner was a known rebel?”
“I think I was something of a coup in the war for people's hearts and minds. If they could recruit me, it meant I was turning my back on everything Marita stood for. They could use me, speak words through me, while at the same time keeping an eye on what I did. For a time, also, I was utterly devoted to the Concordance cause, the idea of bringing peace, imposing it if need be. I think I desperately wanted to believe there was a reason for what had happened to Marita and Juma. A higher reason, I mean, some great design that made some sense of their deaths.”
“But you didn't find it.”
“No, it took me a while to see it, but I got there. I like to think Marita would be proud of what I finally became, but, even so, if I hadn't encountered Aefrid Sen it's entirely possible I'd still be there, a devoted member of Concordance, watching over Sintorus, nursing my losses, confused and angry.”
“Sen was on your planet?”
“We didn't know it was her at the time, but we heard rumours of someone digging around in the ruins of an Omnian War crash site high up in the Snowtops. I was sent to investigate. The thinking was that my knowledge of local custom and my accent – not that I'd ever been within a thousand kilometres of the place – would convince people I was just a normal planet-dweller. I found Sen and she saw right through my subterfuge. She knew I was Concordance. But the odd thing was that she didn't kill me. Maybe she saw something in me, or she knew my story, or she was playing for time, but she decided to talk to me instead. Over a period of four days and nights, she explained much of what she'd learned and what she suspected. It's fair to say those few days utterly changed the course of my life.”
“You left with her?”
“Nothing so dramatic. I let her escape, but I stayed with Concordance for nearly another year, thinking over what she'd said and what Marita had said, coming to my own conclusions. Aefrid had given me the means to communicate with her, and eventually I did. She was wary, inevitably, but she made an FTL ship available to me, and I escaped the system. Eventually, we met up, and we talked, and we worked together, and I ended up here. It was a remarkable act of trust on her part.”
“You said she was old, fearful that no one would carry on her work.”
“Perhaps that was it.”
“And what about my father? Was he an acolyte too?”
“No, he stayed on the planet. If it helps, he tried very hard to dissuade me from going to the Cathedral ship. We had a lot of angry arguments when I told him I was planning to join Concordance. He was sympathetic to what had happened, kept telling me it was a misguided reaction to my grief. He was right, of course. I didn't communicate with him at all when I was with Concordance; it would have been too dangerous for both of us. Besides, he'd pretty much disowned me. But then, when I'd decided to make my escape, I got back in touch with him.”
“How did he react to that?”
“Something like your reaction now.” The memory of that seemed to amuse Ondo. “He didn't trust me, thought I was working for Concordance, suspected a trap. We'd expressed many doubts to each other as young men. It took me three months to finally persuade him. The sight of Aefrid's ship brought him round in the end, the prospect of escaping Sintorus and starting a new life, of getting some answers.”
“Can you show me your memories of that time?”
“They're old now, and inevitably degraded. My mind may have romanticised some of them, conflated actual events with later retellings, missed out details, but yes, if that would help.”
“It would.”
“Very well.”
She sat back and watched as Ondo's recollections of those long-ago days played themselves out in her mind. Sights and conversations, smells of the planet Sintorus and those of the Concordance vessel. The faces of people she would never know: a woman that had to be Marita, a light shining on her smiling face; the baby Juma gurgling, kicking her legs; Selene's own father as a young man, little more than a boy, his face full of excitement and fear, both at once.
As she observed, another part of her consciousness monitored metaspace surrounding the ship. Each tiny fluctuation in the Singh Field was the projection into that reality of the mass of a star in normal space. There were countless
