Princess of the Void
3.26. The Music

The ventilated Eqtoran cruiser is too large and haphazard to bring into the hangar. They leash it to the outside of the post instead, where it hangs derelict in space, leaking its primitive fuel in slick rainbow ribbons that a hose sucks away into the depths of the station’s disposal tanks.

The wounded woman is floated in on a hovering gurney, eyes closed, breath shallow. “Hypovolemic shock,” Pentine reports. The private is one of the Pike’s most promising combat medics, to hear Ajax tell it. “Could tell you more if I knew Eqtoran physiology. But we got to her quickly enough, and their field medicine isn’t bad. I give her… okay odds. Two out of three.”

The Eqtoran crewmates are pallid and whispering as they watch their third being carted away. The little keeper engineer’s face is damp with tears.

Ajax’s inexpressive visor pivots across the shaken prisoners to Grant. “I wish I could have delivered them to you unscathed, Majesty. Forgive my failure.”

“You told me the risks,” Grant says. “No forgiveness required. You are some kind of intergalactic badass, sergeant. You know that?”

“Uh huh.” He can hear the smirk behind Ajax’s helmet. “Not so bad yourself, Majesty.”

“I couldn’t ask for a better valet.”

“Don’t push it, Majesty.“

A growling burst of Eqtorish comes from the hulking male as his attempts to follow the wounded woman are checked by listening post marines.

“Let them through,” Grant says.

“We mustn’t, Majesty,” Oorta says. “We’re employing Tektnal in the operating room and we can’t afford to let them in contact with the Yuvik general population. For a while, at least, until we have an understanding of who they are. It was hard to win the trust and obedience of the Yuvik villagers. Integrating captive enemy combatants into their number threatens that.”

Grant sucks air through his teeth. He wants to argue, but Oorta has a point, here. “As long as the quarters are acceptable. Is there a way they can observe remotely?”

She ducks a quick bow. “We’ll try to set something up, Majesty.”

“Havnai. Can you tell the captain here we’re going to do all we can to get his crewmate back on her feet?”

“Of course, Majesty.” She relays the message. His gruff reply makes her purse her lips and glance uncertainly at her Prince. “He’s asking who shot her.”

Before Grant can speak, Ajax steps forward. He points a thumb at his chest. “I did.”

Tennek draws himself up to his full height and drops a furious string of syllables. Ajax looks dispassionately up at him, rifle slung across his arm.

“He says you shot a great woman,” Havnai says. “That she’s a true warrior.”

“So am I,” Ajax says. “So are most of the people I’ve put under. That’s what true warriors are for.”

“Don’t translate that,” Grant says. “Come on, Sergeant. Let’s let these people do what they need to do. Administrator.”

Oorta looks up from a huddled conversation with a med tech. “Yes, Majesty?”

“Once we’ve gotten the captain there calmed down and adjusted, let’s work out a way to get their vessel’s radio transmitting and have him record a message to the armada. They traced the signal and it was a dead end. Their sweep engine is—damaged, somehow. Maybe the engineers can work out a more specific lie. And they need to take the long way home.”

Oorta bows. “Wisely calculated, Majesty.”

The cold and furious captain and the broken little keeper are ferried away under guard. Grant watches the marines shepherd them forth and remembers how it feels to live in that private apocalypse, to watch the life you lived before the Taiikari fall away into the inaccessible past.

***

“Heya, fellas.” Ipqen pokes her head into the conference room. She observes Ajax’s carefully-constructed paper interceptor flutter a spiral into the air and swish past Tymar, who’s squinting through his loupe and transposing the middle chapters of the Book of Renewal longhand into a spiral-bound notebook. The cleric gives the Eqtoran an absentminded affirming wave.

“You all having a good time doing heresy in here?” Ipqen asks.

“The best,” Grant says. He stands from his writing desk covered in scrawled guitar tablature. “Is Yuvik getting that evening bonfire started?”

“Uh huh,” Ipqen says. “We got a little promise out to the administrator that we’ll only communicate in gestures and singing. So I’ve got my permission slip signed. Wondering if you’d like one, too.”

“Can Tymar come?”

“Hm.” Ipqen puts her hands in her duster pockets and gives an apologetic shrug. “Beg your pardon, Brother. I don’t reckon they’re sure about bringing in Taiikari yet.”

“Absolutely no offense taken, Lady Ipqen.” Tymar looks up fully from his translation and smiles at Grant. “Go on, Majesty.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. I’ve gotten to the fireworks on the Book of Renewal. Lots of flooding and destruction. Very gripping stuff. Go have a good time. Play some music. I think I’ll have this canto translated by the time you’re back.”

“All right.” Grant extends a fist. He turns it into a high-five as Tymar reaches out and the monk’s hands trip over themselves.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Tymar says. “I quit; go die.”

“Omnidivine’s blessings, Tyme.”

Tymar shoots him the horns. “Have fun, Majesty and milady.”

Ipqen shoots the horns back experimentally and looks quizzically at Grant's crack-up in response.

They move through the listening post. The look on Ipqen’s face every time they pass a genuflecting Taiikari must be the same one that Sykora noted on Grant’s. He’s started not to notice it, the bowing. Or not being bothered by it, at any rate.

“The village is looking forward to meeting you again,” Ipqen says. “Word got around to them about what happened out there in the deep sky.”

“Deep sky?”

“Uh, firmament, I guess is the Taiikari word. Weird word. We all knew you could have handled it a lot harsher. You’ve got some grateful Eqtorans down there.”

“We don’t know if that woman is out of the fire just yet,” Grant says. “She looked pretty torn up.”

“Yeah. Well, could have blown them all to pieces.” Ipqen steps to one side and lets him pass through a tall archway into Yuvik’s model-village powder-snow. “And you didn’t. That got you in. That and the fact that you play a mean kitar.”

“Guitar.”

“That’s what I said.”

The villagers of Yuvik have set their bonfire up outside the meetinghouse today, in a circular clearing ringed by carved benches. Conversation dies away as Ipqen and Grant approach. The villagers hold up that same ring-around-the-eye gesture as last time. Grant returns it as best he can then finds a seat next to Ruaq and Ipqen.

Curiosity and cooked fish are directed his way in equal measure. That old scarred coot Uqan is seated across the fire, as diametrically far as he can, and is looking stubbornly into the flames rather than at Grant. The murmur of interest as Grant pulls his guitar from his case seizes his gaze only briefly before he returns to his stolid silence.

“Told ‘em you’d been working on a lament out of the Book of Journeying,” Ipqen says. “And I reckon we could all use a good cry about being far from home. You wanna give that one a play?”

“Sure.” Grant limbers up with a quick pentatonic run and then launches into the first canto. He still doesn’t know the words well enough to try them—and his accent, he’s sure, would be godawful—but Ipqen picks them up along with his guitar, her voice melding seamlessly into his middle strings.

Tektnal joins in, tracking along Grant’s bass notes. The rest of them enter in singles or pairs or threes, until the whole village is joined in plaintive musical lamentation.

They are a very receptive audience, Grant realizes. It’s as if the sound’s waveform were physicalized in his audience, in their breath and their body language and their rapt attention.

Here and there one of them will be too overcome and break out of the chorus to weep, either furtively into their hands or in full-throated cries of grief. Grant finds himself getting misty-eyed. Whatever chords or notes he misses, the group covers for him, and they make it to the rise and tender fall of the ending.

“God damn.” Ipqen blows her nose on her sleeve. The circle around the bonfire is likewise coming up out of their sorrow. “That hits hard.”

He even got to Uqan, who’s stood up and paced away, his face shining with stoic tears. Grant watches Tektnal limber his instrument up with hands that still shake from sorrow. “Maybe something happier next?”

“That’s the plan, I think. Tnal’s got some good joining songs up his sleeve.” Ipqen undoes a pouch’s drawstrings and pulls a sacheted wad of leaves from it.

Grant squints at the herb between her thick fingers. “Is that—it’s xhurr, right? That’s what it’s called?”

“Mmhmm.” Ipqen passes the pouch to Ruaq, who pops a sachet into her jaws. “You want some?”

Grant’s about to demur. He pauses. “Is it an upper or a downer or what?”

“Not sure,” Ipqen says. “An enhancer, I guess.”

“Does it make you hallucinate or anything?”

“Nah. Not much. I mean, when I was a kid, sorta. Mostly it just makes music sound better.” Ipqen pokes around the base of the bonfire with a long stick. “Not that Tektnal needs it, of course.”

“One second.”

Grant pulls out his communicator and highlights Administrator Oorta. The harried Taiikari picks up on the second ring. He thinks he can see her silhouette up in the conference room that overlooks their fake taiga.

“Majesty. Hello. How much longer will they be burning that fire? Do you have an idea?”

“Not sure,” Grant says, “Have any of your people tried this chewing leaf drug thing that the Eqtorans do? The xhurr?”

“Uh, no. No, we haven’t. And it’s I think somewhat inadvisable to just—”

“Have you done any analysis on it?”

“Some.”

“Will it kill me?”

“It’s, uh, it’s unlikely, but—”

“I’m about to chew some,” Grant says. “If I go into cardiac arrest or something, you can fix me, right?”

“Uh uh uh Majesty that is not a, uh, please do not do the alien drugs, we—”

Grant hangs up. “Pass that shit,” he says.

Ipqen chuckles and hands him a sachet. “Just pop it in and start chewing,” she says. “The bag’ll dissolve quick.” She slides the basin over with her boot. “When they lose their flavor and start to taste and feel like wet paper, spit ‘em in there.”

“Okay.” Grant takes the offered leaves and gives them an uncertain sniff. They have an herbal, black-tea smell to them. He tucks the sachet into his cheek. Whatever starchy material the bag is made of is already starting to fall apart.

“These leaves are kinda tough,” he says.

“Mmhmm.” She pats his arm. “Gotta be kinda tricky without the sharp teeth. Keep it up. You’ll get ‘em juicing.”

Grant keeps chewing. He listens to Tektnal’s playing and the humming of the Eqtorans around him. One of them, Theuqa the linguist, he thinks, starts to say something to the man she’s sharing a bench with, and the village at large shushes her. She falls into chastened humming again.

He wonders if it’s going to work. Is it supposed to be working by now? He tastes something on his tongue, something earthy, that thickens his saliva.

Grant finds himself humming, too. It’s like Ipqen said—the tune is immediately catchy, easy to pick up and find your place inside. As the people around him start to open their toothy mouths in song he drift into the warm tidal swell of it. The Eqtorans have such pretty voices.

Such beautiful voices.

Ipqen has joined the song. A light in her eyes and a lightness to her being. Grant grins to see her so untrammeled. Ruaq’s head is on her shoulder. Their fingers lace around each other.

He wishes Sykora were here. He wishes she could hear this. At this imagining he very nearly feels her, the substance of her, in his lap. She isn’t so far away, he realizes. She can see the same stars he can.

Okay; that’s not the kind of thought a sober person thinks. He’s feeling it now. The lift. The ground beneath his feet is lighter now and more insubstantial than the world into which the music is carrying him. The singers around him—he isn’t sure where his voice begins anymore and theirs ends. And when they move, it’s as though he’s making them move, or as though they’re making him make them move.

Spit, someone tells him. His mind or Ipqen’s voice, he isn’t sure. He spits the chewed-up wad into the basin and makes a bleck noise that causes the entire world to rumble with good-natured laughter. He laughs with it. The lines he defined every one of his boundaries with, boundaries of culture and language of self—they’re bending, curling into endless recursive spirals. Everyone is spiraling now. They bind and weave but never tangle. And he’s smiling so hard it aches his face.

The crescendo finds him and boosts him through a dizzying mandala. The faces fall away and there is nothing between him and the universe anymore. The space that separates him from his wife, the distance, the egos, the skin. None of it is real. Only this is real.

And then—

The music falls away but for a single low drone that becomes a freezing ocean on a cold and forbidding planet whose sun is a bare speck in the unmoving sky. Grant’s breath is punched from his lungs as he plunges into frozen dark.

The end of all things. He’s cold. No heat, no light. No sound. No joy or fear or anything. Not anything at all. Only himself, shivering. Only knowing something is wrong because of the fading memory of reality. The memory of what joy sounds like. No, he says, but there is nothing to say no with. Nothing remains. No, no no.

A deep mumph mumph noise (talking? is that talking?) discordant and awry. What used to be his hands reach and he can barely see them dim in the dark and then a silvery ping, a beautiful cascade of lighter-than-air tones that swirl round him like a constellation of fireflies and lift him from the dark, that light his way to a swirling kaleidoscope of sound and heat and it’s as though he’s sweeping, as though he’s laying in bed with his wife watching reality fold and refold until its scintillating insides are outside but there is no vessel, there’s only him, but he is everything, plummeting through the great grand beauty of the song. Of its harmony. And he sings with it, merges with it, and once again he feels himself drift apart, but it’s beautiful, this time, it’s warm, it’s home, it’s belonging.

At the center of the mandala, wearing the weave of the universe like a binding, billowing, beautiful scarf, turning and turning and singing, and beautiful, is—

He sits up. When did he fall over?

“Fuckin’ hell.” Ipqen’s sprung to her feet. She helps him back onto the bench. “You good, Grant?”

“I get it,” he says. “Holy mother of god. I get it.”

The light and color trails the movement of his head as he seizes the edge of Ipqen’s duster. “Ipqen. I need more. More of that stuff.”

“Uh. Majesty.” Ipqen grins nervously. “I think you might’ve had enough.”

“No, no.” He staggers to his unsteady feet. His stomach foments rebellion. “Not to chew it. I need this shit analyzed. I need Oorta. I—” He trips over the bench and turns it into a mad caper of a few feet, to keep from falling on his face. “I get it now, Ipqen. I get what you meant. It’s so—holy shit.” He cackles breathlessly. “It’s real.”

He cups his hands and yells it to the conference room that overlooks the village.

“I know what to do,” he cries. “I know how to fix it! It’s real!”

He pukes on the floor.

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