Now:
Commisioner’s Bunten’s new Gertan aide has long forgotten she was taking notes.
“So… Tír na nÓg is out there somewhere?”
Clere shrugs. “How would I know? Some say, is all.”
“And Commissioner Duvane actually knew what happened to the Old Ones?”
Clere suddenly feels very old and tired. “Does it really matter? This was, what, hundreds of years ago? If she told anyone, we’d all know by now, wouldn’t we?”
The Gertan’s excitement deflates. “Right, of course.” She peers over her glasses at Clere. “This is a very interesting story.”
“I’m only telling it to you for one reason, you know. Because it’s your first day.”
“Oh, do you work here too?”
Clere laughs. “No, I… do fieldwork.”
“For Special Projects?”
I sort of am a special project, Clere thought to herself. “Yes, you could say that.”
A hunter-killer Servitor floated past them down the hallway, headed to a new assignment, and both their eyes tracked its progress past the frieze and marble walls.
*
Then:
Bram came back three Rendezvous after Rosmerta was fed into a recycling bucket. Shae had inherited her wooden cane, and kept it by her bed.
Bram strode right up to her as she was distributing a chicken and vegetable dinner with a side of goop to four elders, two more young children, and the eternal brownie-fella who lived in the hidey-hole. She saved a pinch for the spirits, even though she didn’t believe in them.
“Hello, sis,” came the voice from behind her, and as she whirled around he grabbed her by the waist as he used to, and lifted her up so that they were eye to eye, her feet dangling down in mid air. She shrieked, because it was part of the game, and then hugged him, and for a moment the twins were one again.
“It’s so good to see you back, Bram,” she murmured into his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she lifted her head to look into his face. “You are back, aren’t you?”
Bram looked at her, and she saw that he was older, inside. Well, so was she.
“Put me down, then, and let’s talk.”
They retreated to a quiet corner.
“I brought fresh food,” Bram said, gesturing at his sack. “Fruit. Grains. Real meat, salted.”
“Mmm,” Shae said. “Strawberries?”
“You know about strawberries?” Bram said, surprised.
“A lot has happened here, Bram.”
“I heard you joined the House of Magic,” Bram said, fingering the wooden cane. Its carvings and intricate knots were soft and blurred with handling.
“More like it took me,” Shae said shortly. “I still think it’s a pile of nonsense.”
Bram looked around. “Word has spread. Your group thrives.” And indeed, the small community on Shae’s ship was no longer sleeping on pallets. There were beds. Enclosed rooms. Kitchens. Chicken and vegetable dinners. Machinery hummed around them. It was like Shae and her Fae lived in harmony with the machines. Still goop though. “Rumor is that you have mastered the spells.”
“Bullshit,” Shae said. “There are no spells. There’s just science.” She wouldn’t share all the secrets, but she also didn’t feel comfortable lying about them. “Rosmerta – remember her? – taught me how to talk to the Servitors. Did you know they talk?”
Bram nodded. “Ground Fae talk to them often. We spy for them, on the other humans.”
Shae noted the “we.” “Are you a ground Fae now, Bram? You aren’t coming back, are you.”
Bram was silent for a long time. His face was drawn. “I… made friends down there,” he said, with some difficulty. “They are people, like us. But they look like cŵn, or the legends of cŵn, anyway… you know, snouts and fur and…” He waved his hands helplessly. “But they’re in trouble. They’re dying. Their planet, there’s a food crisis, and famine, and…”
Shae tried to parse this. “You’re here to ask me for help?”
He looked at her, face open in appeal.
“I don’t know how to help that!”
He was as stubborn as ever. “They aren’t the only ones, Shae. It’s all the humans. On all the planets.”
“Running out of food?”
“No… war, for some. Climate, for others. Plagues.”
She sighed. “We’re all only human after all, I suppose.”
“Can you help?”
By Goedwig, he still affected her silly cloth wrapped around his broken antler. Perhaps the girls found it dashing. “I… maybe.”
He smiled, and it was like seeing sky. Her big hulking brother smiling. And seeing sky gave her an idea.
“I can’t believe I’m going to do this because some dog people ate the last dish of food on their planet,” she said.
Bram grinned, like he did when they were kids. “It’s what dogs do!” And they burst out laughing.
She didn’t take him with her. She respected the traditions of the House of Magic just enough for that. Instead, she edged her way along the walkway above the vast abyss where drones zipped in endless lines. She crept through the circuitry boards that blinked and shone and glowed and made her skin defy perception and become a color out of space. She nimbly leapt across the river that folded her soul like origami and unfolded her back into just a really short Fae in her early twenties who was about to do something really stupid.
She marched into what she thought of as the Space Chamber, and hefted the wooden walking stick. There was still a bit of a carbonized spot on the floor. She avoided standing in it, as usual.
Shae had been here many times by now. She had spent hours talking to the Servitors. Different ones – her favorite was the rusty one. Rosmerta was with her at first, but it wasn’t long until Shae had far outstripped her teacher. Rosmerta taught her the arguments to use to get the Servitors to ReLife the dead. But it was Shae who deduced how to get them to heal. To chronophase. To molecularly compress. And now her small community had refrigeration, and medicines, and building materials.
She was no longer the girl who once stole goop from the gods. Now she stole somewhat more powerful things.
Before starting the conversation, she stood in her favorite spot, at the window. The ship was in active motion, approaching the whirlpool in space that signified a wormhole gate to elsewhere. As usual, she shivered on seeing the abyss, and the way the abyss saw her back. She saw the steady lights of a thousand thousand stars, and thought of all the life that lived on all the spinning whirling balls of mud and rock. All those people, under thin blankets of air, with the endless void above them.
For a brief moment, she felt a dream stir inside her, and she pictured all those people flying free. Like birds. Into the sky.
She put her hands against the glass, reaching for the stars. She felt the stars reach back.
Shae Duvane took up her wooden walking stick, marched up to the rusty Servitor, and hauled off like that stick was a bat, smacking the head of the robot so hard it actually spun.
Lights lit up on the rusty Hunter-Killer, and alarums rose from the others. A hundred weapons turned on her in an instant.
“Organic,” the rusty Servitor said.
“Hi, Rusty. I brought you a strawberry,” Shae said, and held it out to him.
“Query: What does one do with this organic seed structure?”
“One tastes it,” Shae said.
“Fascinating,” the Servitor said. It opened a chemical analysis lab in its chest and fed the berry in. “Your gift is appreciated. Did you have further business?”
“Yes,” Shae said. She took a deep deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “I am here to update the Bargain.”
*
Now:
“What Duvane did was persuade the Servitors that it was their obligation to keep all the types of humanity alive. And that it would require freeing them from their worlds, and allowing them to spread out and live. She even talked them into letting us have some of the technology from which they were built,” Clare says.
“And so, we got the TPL?” the Gertan says.
Clere nods. “And so we got the TPL.”
“And what happened with her brother Bram?”
“Once the TPL was established, he went back to find the planet where he had been living. But… it was empty.”
The Gertan looks horrified. “They were all gone? The famine drove them extinct?”
Clere shakes her head. “Unless some Servitors maybe preserved a population and moved them. We just don’t know.”
The Gertan gazes up at the frieze. Then she looks back at Clere. The hallway is quite full now, as people are returning from lunch breaks. “I suppose Commissioner Bunten is back by now?”
“Probably,” Clere says, and stands, dusting herself off. “I know that my friends are here, they’ve been waiting for me.”
“Oh!” The Gertan stands quickly as well, flustered. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to keep you…?”
“It’s fine,” Clere says. She looks through the crowd at the two figures approaching. One of them is big and the crowd is parting for him. She begins to whistle a tune, but as usual, can’t hit the high note.
“Oh,” says the Gertan. “Was that that Old Earth song ‘Take On Me?’ I’ll be so glad when this stupid galactic fad for 20th and 21st century Old Earth popular culture ends?”
“Not your thing?” Clere says, chuckling.
“No,” the aide says. “I… well, you’ll think this is silly, but I like Skwatchi slam poetry?”
“Don’t worry,” Clere says as her two friends get there. “Everything comes and goes if you wait long enough. Hey there, Timurr. Check it out, Bunten’s got a new aide.”
The portly Elioni bows to the young Gertan. “Greetings.” She nods back, a bit distracted. The Elioni is accompanied by the largest Fae that she has ever seen, as big as a Skwatchi just about. His wings look completely ridiculous on him.
He nods at her impassively, then goes to stand next to Clere and says “Cap’n,” and they both look at the frieze together. “Bugs me, they didn’t get the wings right,” he rumbles.
“Well, my dear,” Timurr says, “I suppose I should introduce you to your new boss. Commissioner Bunten was just dining with us, and should be arriving at any moment.”
“Oh!” she squeaks, and adjusts her glasses. She gathers her box under one arm, and Timurr takes her by the elbow ready to guide her away.
“Wait!” she says. She runs over to Clere, and says, “Thank you? It really was so very interesting… and we owe her so much? Even though I recognize it must have been fictionalized?”
Clere cocks an eyebrow at her. “I’m not in the habit of lying.”
“Well, of course not? But it happened so so long ago, and you can’t have known her, even with ReLifing, people age and die…”
“True!” Clere says. “People do.” She reaches up to a pocket on her shirt, then lowers her hand. “So, is the Peril ready?” she says to the giant Fae.
“Aye Captain.”
“Then we should go. There are dog people to find. Timurr, good to see you again! Make sure she finds Bunten.”
“Of course, Captain Scansion!”
And the Gertan aide is swept away into the crowd, head already spinning with the constant chatter of the Elioni beside her. She never gets to ask Clere what the lesson was, that reason why Clere was telling her the story, but she feels emboldened to take on the day and her new job. My goodness, she thinks, I am now an aide-de-camp to the Commissioner for Special Projects for the whole TransPlanetary League! I can’t let my nervousness get the best of me! Not when I have Duvane’s example before me!
She didn’t get to see the huge Fae pull a tattered old bit of cloth from a pocket, and rub it between his fingers. And she didn’t get to see him brush his hand against the bronze sculpture, right there where hands had touched it into brilliance over hundreds of years, or hear him whisper “Hello, sis.”
Because sometimes when legends walk among us, we don’t really notice.