48: This Again

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Tyk had forgotten how strange an experience it was to see a sky person for the first time. The soft being swathed in silks and looking like the front half of an enormous baby raises its mandibles tipped with fleshy tentacles and speaks in the disjointed voices of multiple strangers, and the nedorm stare.

“I am Smon,” she repeats. “I mean no harm.”

The nedorm stare some more.

“I am trying to get to Glittergem Hive. I don’t want any trouble on the way.”

Kedorm gathers himself and moves forward again. Samaska refuses to move, so he has to fly. He moves past Saima to hover in front of Smon, just out of her reach (wise, Tyk thinks, remembering Smon’s first encounter with men). “An honour to meet you,” he says, in a clipped, rote sort of way. “Samon?”

Smon shrugs. Tyk takes this to mean ‘close enough’, under the circumstances; Kedorm, of course, has no context for what it means, and after an awkward moment of silence, says, “Not to be rude, honoured stranger, but… what are… how is… who are… why…”

“I came from the sky,” she says. “In the falling star storm not too long ago.”

This revelation has about the expected effect. Some of the nedorm scramble back further; some come closer, staring. The neima stand by to prevent any of the women from getting too close (the men, they don’t seem to consider a threat to somebody as large as smon).

“A star,” someone whispers in awe.

“No, no, no!” Smon laughs, waving her hands in denial, a gesture that none of the nedorm have the context to understand. “Person, from another Earth out past the stars.”

“She’s a star sailor,” Saima explains. “She came here in a boat that sails across the sky.”

“And you just weren’t going to tell us?!” one of the nedorm asks furiously.

“Pretty much,” Sabin admits. “We were hoping to just sneak her past.”

“She had agreed to hide,” Saima says pointedly, glaring at Smon.

Smon shrugs. “They have a right to know. My people being here will affect them as much as you. If I had encountered them and not you, and you remained ignorant of our presence, would it be fair for nobody to tell you?”

Tyk notes the phrasing of the question, designed to hide the presence of the sky people at the reservoir. It seems that she doesn’t trust the nedorm with everything.

“That’s a fair point,” Saima concedes, and Tyk knows her well enough by now to see that she noticed the phrasing, too.

“Your people?” Kedorm asks. “There are more of you?”

“We come in peace,” Smon assures him.

“How?” one of the nedorm girls asks. “What? Where?”

So Smon explains. She tells them of her people getting into a big boat, a javlyn, and sailing off into the sky, towards a new earth to settle on like a new continent. She tells them about the brakes and the steering breaking, of them travelling a very long way very fast only to learn that they will not be able to slow down enough to land, and so they look for somewhere, anywhere, safe to land that’s far enough away that they can slow down in time. She explains how the crew of the javlyn did this, and they found a third Earth, and set what steering they had towards it, and as they got closer they woke Smon and other hibernating hivemates and explained what they had to do. She explains how even then, there were small mistakes; the javlyn was going too fast to moor in the sky above the earth, too fast to set everyone down together, and they had to take the ones they thought were most likely to be able to build a survivable hive and pack them into little landing boats and send as many down as they could as they floated past, hoping that they would be able to find each other and keep each other safe. She explains how they landed too far apart for their rayjos to hear each other, and she is on a mission to the Starspire to build the Rayjo Tau, the sky person equivalent of a wingsong communication tower, to call her people safely together.

Apart from the occasional clarifying question, the nedorm listen to this story mostly in silence. When she’s finished, they stare for a bit. In silence.

Then one of the men speaks up. “Okay, so… how many Earths are there?”

“Many, many Earths. Every satellite star – a satellite star and what we stand on now are the same thing.”

They stare some more.

“There aren’t that many satellite stars,” one of the girls ventures eventually. “Which one are you from?”

“None that you can see. Many, many stationary stars have satellite stars around them, not just your sun; mine is from far away.”

“And all of these earths have people on them?”

Tyk shakes her head. “Only mine, and yours, that we know. We have found life nowhere else. We knew that there would be life when we were coming here – we could see what the sky was made of, and only life can make your kind of sky. But we did not know that there would be people.”

“Hang on, wait,” one of the men says. “What’s that you said about the sun?”

Tyk herself hadn’t learned this information all that long ago, but she’d forgotten how revolutionary it was. She watched Smon calmly overturn the nedorm’s cosmology. None of them publically challenge her explanations, but Tyk wonders if they’ll dismiss them later on. They hadn’t witnessed Smon falling from the sky. They hadn’t heard about all the other sky people on the wingsong stream. But then, somebody looking like Smon was probably all the evidence they needed – where else could she have come from, but the sky? And if she did come from the sky, surely she knows what is up there?

Despite their consternation at her words, by the time Smon has finished explaining, all of the nedorm men are expecting her curiously and the women are getting as close as the neima will allow.

“Okay,” Saima says eventually, “we need to get moving again if we want to reach the next burrow by sundown.”

“We’ll come with you,” Kedorm says. “It’s on our wa – ”

“Like rot it is,” Sakeya snaps. “Turn around and get off our land.”

Samet flicks a mandible in agreement. “You want to completely strip the land of forage moving a group this big through? Not happening.”

“Both of our groups are quite small,” Kedorm points out. “For many people, this would be a normal – ”

“Many people have a longer range period,” Sakeya snaps. “You’ve pushed too many borders already. The presence of Smon does not mean everything’s forgiven. Get your people off our land before we start thinning them for you.”

“Well, Smon, I’m sure you would like a bigger escor – ”

“It’s not her decision!” Saima snaps. “You’ve gotten your explanations. Leave before I tire of holding my women back.”

It takes almost coming to blows for the nedorm to turn off the road and leave. Kekeya and Kebin take to the air to scout as the neima start moving once again, listing West to make sure that the nedorm keep moving away.

“You probably think we were unnecessarily harsh there,” Sabin says conversationally to Tyk as they walk. “The direction of the road isn’t too far off heir direction home, and it surely couldn’t be a problem to let them come along, right? That it’s kind of cruel to introduce them to a star sailor and then just send them away?”

“It would’ve been easier not to introduce them,” Saima grumbles, to which Smon just shrugs unapologetically.

“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Tyk says cautiously.

“We did.”

“My reason was that if I had to spend multiple days walking with Sanet and Kenet, me and Kekeya would’ve killed them both and probably half of the rest of the nedorm,” Sakeya says. “And Saima would’ve torn Kedorm’s wings off on day two.”

“I would do no such thing! I would merely silently watch the men tear Kedorm’s wings off in my honour.”

“Us all swarming an old man for being annoying,” Kemet observes with amusement. “So much more honourable.”

“This isn’t the first time the kedorm have pulled something like this,” Sabin explains, “and they always have some excuse. They’ll push and push until you push back with full force. Polite deflections don’t work.”

“They’re your enemies?”

“It’d be a lot easier if they were,” Sakeya grumbles. “No, they’re our close friendly neighbours.”

“Kedorm seemed to like you,” Tyk says to Saima. “Was he trying to court you?”

“Ugh, no. Worse.”

“He’s been trying to adopt her as a truesister since barely a season after Sadorm died. Utterly tasteless.”

“What? But you’re adults!”

“I’m very aware of that,” Saima says.

“You can’t bond adults like that! I mean, sure, if you’ve got a lone girl and a lone boy who’s still just a little baby, you can pair them up and they can bond, but you guys wouldn’t be able to grow up together. It wouldn’t work.”

“You’d be surprised at how much adults can still grow up,” Saima says. “And the question isn’t whether the bond is as strong as one from hatching would be, it’s whether it’s better than being alone. For many people, it is; lonemen and lonewomen will often find each other and make it work. Personally, I’ve never been interested in replacing Keima, and if I was, it certainly wouldn’t be with him.”

“He had no interest in a friendship with Saima until after Sadorm died,” Sabin explains. “He doesn’t care about her or about us. For him, it’s about prestige; we’re a very small group, but Saima has a lot of influence and a lot of respect. His group is bigger, but nobody takes them seriously because for some reason they always have the most obnoxious leaders. He thinks he can get Saima’s respect if he becomes Keima, and merge our groups together with his oh-so-fantastic diplomatic skills, and have real power in the region.”

“He’s blind if he thinks that,” Sakeya says. “We’d all kill each other.”

“You and Sanet would kill each other,” Tama corrects her. “Everyone would probably calm down after that.”

“I wouldn’t,” Saima says. “Age has never stopped that man from being a presumptuous brat; I don’t think anything short of death would. Good to see that the two girls are doing well, though. Did you see Jin questioning Smon? Barely afraid of her at all!”

“Admirable, since her father’s as cowardly as ever,” Kemet notes. “Did you notice how he wouldn’t even take his sister’s horns while she was up front? Lurked in the back and gave them fully to Kedorm.”

“Probably why he chose Samaska,” Samet observes. “Someone who doesn’t talk, and whose truebrother would love and excuse not to be up front. The nedorm really do suit him.”

Tyk tunes out the gossip. She doesn’t know these people, or what is or isn’t significant about anything they might have said or done. Her job is getting Smon and Ketyk to Glittergem.

That’s the politics that will matter to her.

How Glittergem feel about Smon.

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