Beyond the Waters of the World Read online

  Toni put weight on the injured foot gingerly. "Better. I still can't walk on it, but zhamnanomedar have been working fast."

  Suddenly Kislan had enough of ignoring the unknown and unexplained that was going on around him. " Nanomed? What is this, please?" Sam and Toni looked at him, silent for a moment.

  Toni turned to her colleague. "We owe it to him, Sam. He's going to see a lot more before the day is over."

  The other man nodded --using the gestures that came most naturally to him, not the gestures of his host world. "You're right."

  And then Toni explained medicine stranger than legend to Kislan --but no stranger than people who flew in the air to travel between the stars.

  In the distance, the rhaysh began to bark again.

  #

  With Kislan and Sam alternately assisting Toni in her limping progress, they made it to a tumble of rocks and outcropping of stone at the edge of the valley, nearly hidden by layan and joshaba trees that had begun to unfold their red leaves for spring. A wide, flat valley like this outside of Edaru would have been a thriving farming community, providing food for the city, but Belraash was a village in comparison with Kislan's home, and the fertile fields directly in and around the port city of the Tusalis were sufficient for its needs. Besides, Belraash had precious domrhene and could probably trade for anything it didn't produce itself.

  The belling of the rhaysh was growing nearer, but now that they had reached this part of the valley, the people from the stars seemed to shed any worries they had felt. He waited with Toni just down the hill from the rock formations, as Sam scurried behind the outcropping and the morning bled back into the sky. Then something resembling a large, gray, pointy crate with rounded edges emerged, purring softly, moving without being pulled or pushed. What was it Toni had said? Kislan would be seeing much more before the day was over. Such as a crate big enough for several people which moved without sails or renjai. Toni squeezed his waist with the arm wrapped behind his back. " Playned. Now it is time for you to move in the air."

  Kislan took a deep breath. He should have known --how were they to flee this place else, now that they had come so far from the sea? Nothing on Kailazh moved in the air --the term had not even been coined until the people from the stars arrived and changed their world in the course of a few days.

  A door in the playn opened, and Sam stepped out. "It will be a tight fit, but we didn't bring many supplies with us. Toni thought we might have to bring you back." She had intended to bring him back? After the moons had traded places in the sky so many times? It didn't make any sense.

  But she had come. He kept returning to that fact, that comfort. He didn't know what it would mean, for him or his future, but she was here, now.

  "We have to move fast," Toni said. "The dogs, they're almost here." Sam nodded shortly. "Kislan, you will have to get in first and take Toni on your lap. There are only two seats."

  Kislan did as he was instructed, and the woman from the stars settled down on his thighs. While Sam took his place in front, Toni pulled a wide belt out of the back of the seat behind them and tightened it around their bodies, connecting it somewhere on the right side with a click. The she nestled into his chest, which seemed to expand unnaturally, like for a long underwater dive.

  "Sorry about this," she said, turning her head to look at him, her eyes large and concerned. "I know it can't be comfortable."

  No, comfortable was not the way he would describe his state now, but he saw no reason for apologies.

  And then the rounded crate was moving down the hill between the trees, the purr growing louder. Kislan put his arms around Toni, keeping her safe.

  They came out of the trees, and on all sides of them, surfaces on the gray crate began to unfold, the front and the sides lengthening so that the thing transporting them no longer looked like a crate at all. Kislan had seen a flying vehicle before, of course, when one of the Ayaissee first contact team had been returned to the sky, but it had looked nothing like this

  --and Kislan had not been in it.

  Just as they began to move away from the ground, the search party burst out onto the valley in front of them.

  Toni gripped Kislan's forearm. "Careful, Sam!"

  There was a dizzying jolt, and the world was receding before his eyes, along with the open-mouthed Tusalis and the barking rhaysh. Not that Kislan could hear their barks through the windows and the rumble of the flying crate, but he could see their jaws opening and closing and their heads bouncing.

  And then he closed his eyes so he would no longer have to see the way the land disappeared, with no water to carry him, only air and faith.

  #

  Sam tried to explain the technology of the playn to Kislan, how it got its energy from the sun as well as from the wind, as a ship did, besides some magical source he called fyulsel. The lecture was obviously meant to set Kislan at his ease, but he still felt as if he were sailing on faith. He found more comfort from the feel and weight of Toni curled in his lap, although as the cold, white interior of the world passed below them, she grew heavy, and his legs grew numb.

  No lightweight, the woman from the stars.

  But when he had laid his arms around her waist, she had not pushed them away, snuggling in closer to his chest instead. How could it matter that they were far from the ground, moving on insubstantial air?

  #

  They moved with the sun across the frozen land, and by the time it was peeking between the lace of the sky in front of them, the white of the snow and ice had begun to give way to the red of earth and trees.

  Kislan shifted, trying to distribute Toni's weight more comfortably. "Sorry," she murmured, half-asleep against his shoulder.

  "I think zhamnanomedar are causing her to sleep so much," Sam said over his shoulder. "It helps the healing."

  And then Kislan could see the green of the ocean on the horizon. Soon they would be home again, in Edaru, completing a journey in a day that it had taken him more than a complete exchange of the moons by ship, south and then north again, rounding the tip of the continent.

  Home. It was no home to him now, dead as he was to those who had once loved him. Zhoran and others --men --would acknowledge him if they had a choice, but it would mean their own banishment.

  He tightened his arms around Toni as the playn began to dip and the ground came closer. She squirmed a little and began to stretch, one arm creeping up around his neck as she made little waking sounds --sounds Kislan had heard many times before, from many different women, but that had never sounded sweeter to him.

  Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused and full of sleep. The hand around his neck had laced itself through his hair. She blinked and smiled, and Kislan smiled back. Suddenly she realized where she was and what she was doing.

  "Oh." She straightened and took her hand back.

  Kislan couldn't help it --his own hand went up without volition, and he smoothed the short dark hair back from her brow. "Good evening, Star-woman. Or perhaps I should say good morning?"

  The smile returned slowly to her exotic, pale face.

  It was strange how much more intimate it felt to have her wake up in his arms than the kisses they had exchanged in another life. But did it mean the same thing to her?

  He traced the line of her cheek and jaw with one finger, and Toni's eyes went wide.

  "Almost back to the base," Sam said in front of them. "I already contacted Moshofski and Gates, and they should be there when we arrive."

  Toni leaned as far forward as the belts restraining them would allow. "Thanks, Sam. Did you tell them what happened?"

  Sam shook his head. "I'm leaving that to you."

  #

  As the land came closer and closer, Kislan had to close his eyes again --it was too unsettling, like falling slowly, from a higher distance than he ever would have thought possible. He heaved a sigh of relief when he felt the jolt of the earth beneath the playn. They drew up in front of the largest building of the Ayaissee sky port, where the o
ther two members of the first contact team waited. Despite the physical relief when Toni got off of his lap, Kislan felt the wrench of something essential missing. Like leaving home. When the three of them all had their feet back on the ground, Toni turned to him, an odd expression he couldn't interpret on her face.

  "There is a room here in baysed where you can rest," she said. "I must speak with the rest of the Ayra team."

  Kislan shook his head assent while his hand found her cheek. She leaned into the gesture, and he held there, not wanting to change the touch, the connection. Finally, she took his hand in her own. "Come." She led him to Moshofski and Gates, and after brief greetings, continued with him to a building bare of decorations. In a room more starkly white then the landscape they had just passed over in the playn, she stopped. Toni indicated a narrow couch in one corner. "You can rest here while I speak with Moshofski and Gates. After our flight from Belraash, you must need it." And then it occurred to him that she was walking on her own again, when a day ago, merely touching her injured foot to the ground had brought tears to her eyes. Almost, it didn't surprise him any more. But only almost.

  Life was obviously too strange to comprehend. On the other hand, now that he had the leisure to think about it, he realized he'd had next to no sleep for over a day, and what was he doing trying to think anyway?

  He stretched out on the couch Toni had indicated and was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.

  #

  Toni stopped in the door of the break room. Kislan lay stretched out on the long couch pushed up against one wall, his eyelids twitching over those smokey green eyes, eyes the color of the Kailazh sea.

  Why did she have to ask him to leave again, just when this tenderness closed her throat at the sight of his sleeping form? But she couldn't ask him to stay --she had taken not one life but two away from him now. She had to offer him something in their place. And if there were ever to be any future for the two of them, they had to achieve some kind of status resembling equal social standing.

  Which meant AIRA.

  She walked softly across the room, but even quiet as she was, he turned and opened his eyes. "Toni."

  She smiled at the Mejan faux pas --he had spoken to her without waiting to be addressed first. He truly was ruined for life in the Thirteen Cities now.

  "Sha bo foda, Kislan," she said, in the intimate form of address he had once forbidden her to use.

  He blinked and sat up, rubbing his eyes with webbed hands. "You are walking again," he said, using the intimate form as well. At the simple change of words, a little thrill went through her.

  "Yes."

  "The star-magic works like a thing of legend."

  "But I may never have had the opportunity to let it work if you had not helped us get away."

  "I had no choice."

  "Certainly you had a choice." She sat down next to him. "Tell me, Kislan, would you have wanted to stay in Belraash if Sam and I had not made it impossible?"

  "Wanted?" He gazed at her a moment, as if not knowing how to answer, and her heart sank. Outside, the sky was beginning to change. Kislan rose and stretched out his hand to her. "Let us go watch the lace of the sky tow in the night," he said with a smile. Toni put her hand in his and stood. Tied around his wrist was still the length of lace Anash had thrown after him when he had been returned to the sea, the record of his life that hid the tracer allowing her to find him.

  The barren plain AIRA had chosen for their base was not the most romantic place to view the way the day's end lit up the rings of Kailazh, but sunset on this planet hardly needed a backdrop --or a foreground for that matter. Toni wondered if she could ever grow tired of it, and suspected the answer was "no."

  They strolled to the end of the landing strip, away from the scattering of prefab buildings which qualified as a base on this restricted planet.

  "I did not want to stay in Belraash, no," Kislan said, and Toni felt a flood of relief. "But I did want to make a life for myself there. I cannot return to Edaru."

  "I know."

  "This happiness to see you again, to know that you did come for me after all, it makes no sense. There is nothing for me here."

  Suddenly the lacy arc of the rings was blurring against the reddish-orange sky behind it, and Toni's cheeks were damp.

  After everything she hadn't done for him, he was still happy to be with her again, no matter what the cost.

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and Kislan laid his arm around her shoulders and drew her close.

  She had to do it. It was the only future she could offer him, the only future they might have together.

  "There may not be a place for you here, in Edaru, but there may be a place for you yet on Kailazh. AIRA will need more personnel once a treaty is in place, and we will need natives, from the planet, especially if they know multiple languages. But you would have to go away for a time, for training."

  Kislan dropped his arm again and turned to stare at her.

  "Away? To the stars?"

  Toni remembered the way he had closed his eyes when they had simply been taking off in the small two-seater skycar in the valley west of Belraash. "Not right away," she hurried to reassure him. "We would have to teach you a smattering of the official languages of the AIC, as well as basic knowledge of politics and sciences and technologies of the star worlds. And it would be best if you could work as a consultant first, perhaps visit the Kishudiu for us, to gain experience as a researcher. AIRA doesn't take everyone, but they give preference to those from new worlds ..."

  She realized she was rambling and stopped.

  Kislan was still staring at her. "To the stars?" he repeated, taking her hand in his own. "To the world you come from?"

  Toni thought of Mars and its cold, dusty, red plains with a burst of homesickness. "No, not to Mars," she murmured. "But you would go to places I have been and see sights I have seen." And travel in jumps that will change the relative ages between us. But it would be a while yet before she could explain that particular detail to him.

  "While you stay here," Kislan said, his webbed hand tightening around her webless one.

  "Yes."

  "But --" He paused for a moment, and for the life of her, Toni couldn't help him in this. Kislan drew a deep breath. "But would you be with me, before, and perhaps after, you and I, as the sister and the lover desire in the legend of the three moons?" Toni returned the pressure of his hand as the decadent colors of the sky faded. "I can promise nothing for later, but I will be with you now, until you are ready to go." The sky grew dark, and the shepherd moons appeared against the dark band of what the lace of the planet's rings had become.

  "To the stars," Kislan murmured, a smile in his voice. "And before the stars, Toni." He leaned over and gave her the first kiss that they had exchanged in nearly a standard year in their strange, convoluted relationship. But as opposed to the other occasions, this time Toni was sure there would be more to come.

  Past Kislan's shoulder, the first star of night winked in the sky above them.

  © Ruth Nestvold