Stoneskin Read online

  “I’ve been to Sagittarius,” Tembi said, as she dropped her eyes to her cup.

  “In a dream, I hope.”

  Tembi nodded. There were small, almost unnoticeable flecks of brown within the green tea, very much like the colors of Matindi’s eyes.

  “Good,” Matindi said. “And I’m not saying that because you aren’t strong enough to handle the reality of that situation—I’m saying that I don’t want anybody I love to put themselves in that much physical danger.”

  Love.

  Tembi looked up and smiled at Matindi for the first time in…oh.

  Too long.

  Matindi smiled back. “I love you,” she said. “I want you to be happy. But I also want you to be safe. And Domino is—”

  “—not safe.” Tembi finished for her. “I think I knew that.”

  Matindi nodded. “I know she’s from your homeworld, and that you share a kinship because of that. But the reason I left Lancaster? It was because of something she did, a long time ago.”

  “What happened?” Tembi felt her own ears perk up in interest.

  “I’ll never be drunk enough to tell you the details,” Matindi said. “Let’s just say that there was a choice that could minimize damage, and another choice that would meet certain goals, and Domino chose the path which met those goals.

  “There were costs.” Matindi continued. “Lives were ruined. She had her reasons, and if I’m being honest with myself? I’ll admit they were very good reasons. Sometimes I think Lancaster has only survived as long as it has because of people like her. But survival has a steep price, and I…I wasn’t willing to pay it. So I left.”

  “But you’re back now,” Tembi said. “And Domino told me that she wants things to be fair. So what does that mean? Lancaster has gotten better?”

  “Tembi? Honey?” Matindi said gently. “Domino has always wanted things to be fair, but fair doesn’t always mean ethical. The only thing that’s changed about Lancaster is that you’re a part of it.

  Tembi’s heart dropped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re trapped here because of me, but—”

  “No, that’s what gives me hope!” Matindi reached over and clasped Tembi’s hands. “The Deep chose you, and brought you to me instead of to Lancaster. It wants something different than what is at Lancaster now. It wants change.”

  The book in the library…

  “The Deep brought me a book by a Witch named Rowland,” Tembi said. “Williamson said it was about how the Deep might be changing its mind about how it sees humanity. And then the Deep told me it wants the war in Sagittarius to stop.”

  The older Witch nodded. “I know,” she replied. “I’ve had the same conversations with it. So have Matthew and the others on the Tower Council.”

  “Really?” Tembi was astonished. Matthew never mentioned the war, and dropped the subject whenever she brought it up. She had never imagined that he had spoken to the Deep about it. “What do they think?”

  For the first time, Matindi couldn’t meet her eyes. She looked away, out the window to the view of a tiny pond with silver fish swimming just beneath the surface. “What’s happening in Sagittarius? They say it’s terrible, but that it’s an extreme, and if we get involved in this one war, we will have established precedent for the Deep to become involved in them all.”

  “Gods! If one more person tells me there have always been wars,” Tembi said, her fingers tight around the mug, “I’m going to have to start a new one.”

  “Excellent,” Matindi turned back to Tembi, her green eyes fierce. “When the time is right, I hope you do.”

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  translator

  translator translator

  translator translator translator

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  warrior

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 22 May 3734 CE

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  Chapter Eighteen

  “I tried something last night,” Tembi said, as she and the Deep spun a sphere made from fifteen foam balls around Bayle.

  “Oh?” Bayle was watching the balls with a cautious eye. Tembi had excellent control, but Leps had decided to combine mobility practice with the previous day’s astronomy lesson. When she shouted out the name of a solar system, the balls stopped moving in their predictable orbits and would shoot up to form planetary charts.

  “The Deep can read, right? It knows every book in the Library. So it understands the written word, no problem.”

  “Right—oh!” Bayle caught on. “So instead of talking to it, we write to it?”

  Leps was prowling the front of the classroom. She slammed her stick across a desk, and shouted: “Stross Cluster!”

  Tembi sent eight of the fifteen foam balls up into the air. These hung over Bayle’s head until Leps nodded her approval, and then dropped back into their steady orbit.

  “Exactly. We write to it,” Tembi continued. “I left it a note on my tablet.”

  “Did it write back?”

  Tembi shook her head. “I asked it to leave a reply, but it didn’t.”

  “That makes sense,” Bayle said. “If the Deep could write, Witches would communicate with it that way.”

  “But it can read,” Tembi said. “So, tell me—what’s the difference between reading and writing?”

  “Iolanthe System!” Leps shouted.

  Tembi launched the balls again: there were six this time, and she pulled in a smaller foam ball from a nearby desktop to simulate the path of the erratic comet that would someday plow into a dense-mass planet and gradually send the rest of the system into chaos.

  “Stoneskin! That comet better be in its proper location or I’m docking points for showing off!”

  Tembi had the Deep freeze the mock solar system and consulted her tablet. The comet jumped eighteen degrees to her left.

  “Excellent,” Leps said. “Resume.”

  “All right, I’ll bite,” Bayle said, once Leps had passed to yell at another group of students. “What’s the difference between reading and writing?”

  “I don’t know,” Tembi said. “We have to go to the Library.”

  Bayle sighed. “I hate the Library,” she said. Three foam balls broke their orbits and beaned her in the back of the head.

  “Stoneskin!”

  “That was me!” Tembi shouted to their teacher. “Not the Deep.” To Bayle, she mouthed: “That wasn’t me.”

  “I know,” Bayle whispered back. “I still hate the Library. Don’t—” she said, holding up a finger as another ball sped towards her, “—do that again.”

  The ball stopped, then sulked its way back into formation.

  After classes, they walked across Lancaster to the stone maze. The Deep took a few minutes to play its usual round of tricks with the boulders, but Tembi had gotten good enough at levitating herself that she could simply leap over the top of these and not get bogged down in the ever-changing maze.

  “Coming?” she shouted to Bayle.

  “You go ahead!” her friend shouted back. “I’m—ow!—taking the long way.”

  Good enough. Tembi knocked on the Library’s wooden door and barged inside.

  “Hey, Williamson!” she said, flopping her arms and head down on the ancient desk.

  “Ah.” The Martian slipped a long red string into the pages of the book he was reading, closed the cover, and set it down beside him. “Good evening, young Stoneskin. What do you need today?”

  “Answers.”

  “This is the place for it,” Williamson said. He removed his glasses and set them atop the book. “How can I help?”

  “Why can the Deep read but not write? That doesn’t make sense.”

  He smiled as Tembi tried on his glasses. “You’re assuming that reading and writing are the same. They’re not. They’re part of the whole of literacy, and share many of the same processes, yes, but reading is consuming information while writing is communicating it. And the Deep…?”


  “…is scheisse at communicating,” she finished for him as she glanced around the small room. The world was very slightly blurry; she removed the glasses and dropped them onto the book.

  “Indeed.” The Librarian reclaimed his glasses and made a show of cleaning them. “Now, I’ll save you some additional effort—why can’t I let the Deep talk through me, and have it answer your questions that way?”

  “We studied this in class,” Tembi said. “Leps says when the Deep speaks through a Witch, it’s because the Deep and the Witch want to talk about the same topic. If they’re thinking about different things, the Deep can’t speak through the Witch.”

  “Exactly,” Williamson said, nodding. “It is excellent at taking information in, but it is extremely limited in how it can get information out.”

  “I understand how that works with speaking through a Witch, but how does that work with books?” Bayle said from the doorway. “I’d think that if it can read, then it could write.”

  “Good evening, Princess,” Williamson said. “And yes, most humans who have at least partial literacy are able to both read and write to some degree. But the Deep is an energy field, not a human being. What goes into an energy field doesn’t always come out, and if it does come out, it can come out changed.”

  “Scheisse,” Tembi muttered as she banged her forehead against the wooden desk.

  “Had the brainstorm that you could talk to the Deep through text?” Williamson said. He held up the plass tablet he always kept beside him. “Good luck—I’ve been trying for several millennia.”

  “Does it ever answer?” Bayle asked.

  “Single words, sometimes, or small groups of them. Never coherent ones.” Williamson looked thoughtful. “I believe it gets frustrated at not knowing how to write, so I don’t push it.

  “Also…” He paused, as if not entirely sure he should say what was on his mind.

  “What?” Tembi asked.

  Williamson’s head rose, as if he had decided something. “It’s not the best at understanding emotional intent,” he said. “Especially if it’s in writing.”

  “Sir?” Bayle turned away from the third doorway.

  “Shipping,” he said, pointing at the first door.

  “Ethics and Law,” he said, pointing at the second.

  He pointed at the third—the door Bayle was now leaning against—and looked at Tembi.

  “Miscellaneous?” she replied. She had been in that room twice before, and found it too disorganized to be of any real use. The Deep seemed to avoid most of the books in there.

  “I recommend a certain volume of poetry,” Williamson said, as he put on his glasses and returned to his reading. “The author’s name is Daughter Pihikan.”

  “Okay,” Tembi said, waiting for the Deep to pluck the volume out of the stacks and deliver it, as it usually did.

  Nothing happened.

  “Discovery is a critical part of the learning process,” Williamson said.

  Tembi and Bayle glanced at the third door, which opened with the ominous creak of rusty hinges.

  “Ignore that,” the Librarian said without looking up. “I keep meaning to fix it.”

  The girls moved into the third room. The Deep’s usual tricks of playing with the limits of physical space were at work, with shelves stretching far beyond the natural confines of the Library.

  “What is this place?” Bayle asked, as she moved her finger across a series of cookbooks. “Culinary Practices for Witches…Chopping and Paring with the Deep…” She pulled one out, and flipped to a page at random. “Simmer oil. Do not bring to a boil. Jump oil to fish when skin is beginning to crisp… Tembi? This is a guide to cooking by using the Deep.”

  “Williamson says this is the room where he keeps anything written by a Witch that isn’t about shipping, ethics, or law.” Tembi glanced at a shelf which seemed to be full of books on naturalism and animal husbandry. “He says some Witches have hobbies, and others don’t take to life at Lancaster.”

  “Y’know, surgery got so much more effective when we invented anti-grav,” Bayle said. “I bet a doctor could think of a million different ways to use the Deep in medicine.”

  Tembi nodded. “Like setting broken bones before the ‘bots are used?”

  “Or purging infection, or poison, or—” Bayle broke off. “Advanced Ceramics with Deep-Controlled Glazing Techniques. Good gods, people have too much free time.”

  “And this is just the text that’s been bound into books,” Tembi said, searching the spines to find the poetry section. “There’s probably a thousand times this amount of content in the digital archives.”

  “Maybe,” Bayle said. “Or maybe all of the Witches who write this scraping stuff want to see it turned into books.”

  They separated after that, checking different sections of shelves, calling out interesting titles to each other as they went.

  “Bayle? Tembi?” Steven’s voice, shouted but small, as if he were calling to them over a great distance.

  Tembi turned to see his silhouette in the doorway. He was much further away than she knew she had walked. “Over here!” she shouted.

  Footsteps. A little more light began to shine in the gloomy room as Steven came near. He was holding a glowing plass ball in one hand. The light from the small ball bounced off of his scales and made him glow in a deep golden bronze.

  “Pretty!” Tembi said.

  “My people look amazing in the dark,” he said, grinning. He liked to wear shirts and trousers, and by the end of each day these were woefully stained and wrinkled. These looked out of place with the rest of him glowing as if he had been dipped in gold.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Searching for this.” Bayle came around the corner of the stacks, a thin book with a light blue cover in one hand. “Beast of Burden, by Daughter Pihikan.”

  Tembi took the book from her, and she and Steven flipped through the pages. “They’re just short poems,” Steven said. “Why did you want this?”

  “You know how we want a better way to communicate with the Deep?” Tembi said. “The Librarian said this book might help.”

  “Uh-huh.” Steven didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “Poetry.”

  “Emotional poetry,” Bayle clarified.

  “Yes, well.” Steven pushed a lock of hair behind an ear. “Can we at least eat dinner while we read emotional poetry? Keep our strength up, and all that.”

  Matindi was attending yet another fancy dinner with Matthew and the rest of Lancaster’s Tower Council, so the three of them ordered takeout and went back to Tembi’s place. They crashed in the common room, Tembi on the couch, her friends on the floor, with Taabu begging for scraps.

  “Don’t give him human food,” Tembi pleaded. “He gets the worst gas!”

  Steven was pure innocence as he tossed the cat a chunk of seasoned tofu.

  “I don’t get any of this,” Bayle said, paging through the slim book of poetry. “These are just weird poems about the Deep.”

  “Is it in code?” Steven asked, rolling onto his back. “A secret Deep code?”

  “I hope so,” Bayle said. She tossed the book to him. “If it isn’t, we’ve been tricked into reading tragically bad poetry.”

  “It can’t be that bad,” he said, skimming with a finger beneath the words. “Beast of Burden… Okay, this is the title poem.”

  “Read it aloud,” Tembi said. She was full of delicious tofu, and so many things that normally seemed important, didn’t.

  “Oh, I’m wrong,” he said. “So very wrong! This is that bad! Here we go…”

  Speak, infinite colors.

  Say, rainbow which bridges space…

  …maybe time…

  What do you want from us?

  You, who give so much, yet ask for nothing.

  Steven stood, book in one hand, cat in the other. He paced, gesturing dramatically with the book.

  Speak, sharp as knives!

  Say, brilliant one…
>
  What do you want from us?

  We, who take all from you, yet give you nothing.

  By this point, Tembi and Bayle were laughing. A blanket floated up from where it lay on the couch by Tembi’s feet, and draped itself in the open air, like a person wearing a cape. The cape twisted towards Steven.

  “Deep! Hey, Deep!” Tembi cheered, and Bayle began to clap.

  Steven turned to face the cape. He bowed and began to circle it, as if it were his partner on the dance floor. The Deep didn’t bow in turn, but it did join in the circle.

  Listen, friend.

  Hear me, I beg of you…

  …you, who are our friend…

  We are not yours.

  True friends would never treat you so.

  Now Steven was shouting, and the girls were laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. Taabu leapt from the crook of Steven’s arm and took shelter beneath the couch. The Deep’s cape kept floating higher and higher, and Tembi felt the joy of soaring wings beating against her mind.

  Speak, please!

  Say, now…

  …why you allow us…

  …why would you ever allow us…

  To treat you as our beast of burden.

  It was a short poem, and by the end of it, even Steven was rolling on the floor, laughing along with them. The Deep swirled its cape around and around—

  Pops of air, one louder than the other. Two Witches, arms full of leftovers, appearing in the kitchen, full and sudden witnesses to the scene in the common room—

  Matindi, laughing.

  Matthew, horrified, shouting: “What are you doing?!”

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  Lancaster

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