Stoneskin Page 4

  One of the chaperones asked, “How does that work? If it’s sentient, where does it keep its brain? Does…does it have a brain?”

  If a brain can be an entire galaxy, Tembi thought, and knew the Deep was laughing just beyond the range of her senses.

  “Some scientists think the Witches are its brain,” the Spacer said.

  Tembi couldn’t hear the Deep huff its annoyance, but when she looked at Matindi, her teacher was hiding her smile in the folds of her headscarf.

  The Deep.

  It wasn’t human—it wasn’t anything close to human. Tembi had figured that out for herself years ago. And Matindi said that most fully trained Witches didn’t spend time with the Deep in their dreams. Instead, the Deep and the Witch shared space in the Witch’s mind, which (Matindi said) made the Deep seem more human.

  More manageable.

  Yes, the Spacer might think of the Deep as part of a Witch. That made sense. He could talk to a Witch—he couldn’t talk to energy.

  (He couldn’t tickle it until it turned itself into bubbles and drowned you in laughter.)

  (He couldn’t see its ideas of planets yet unknown, or unborn.)

  (He couldn’t sing along with it until the sun came up.)

  Tembi felt very sad for this man who thought he knew how things worked.

  “The Deep has always been there,” the Spacer said. “A long time ago, scientists from Earth discovered patterns in deep-space waveforms. They thought this might be a signal from an alien civilization, but it turned out to be a part of space itself. They started talking to it, and they learned it could be used to transport people and ships all over the galaxy.”

  “Why?” asked one of the students.

  “Once an object goes into the Deep, it no longer exists in normal space-time. It can enter at one point in the galaxy and exit at another.”

  That’s not what she asked, Tembi thought to herself. She asked why, not how.

  (Not that the Spacer would have had an answer. It was a question which Tembi had asked the Deep herself in a dream—Why do you do this for us?—after Matindi had described how an entire process of galactic colonization had sprung up around its generosity. The Deep hadn’t used Matindi to answer in words Tembi could hear. Instead, it wrapped itself around Tembi in soft emotions and sang to her in feelings of endless lonely time and space, and she had pressed her face against its colors and wept.)

  “Where are the Witches?” Isaac asked.

  This time, the Spacer answered him. “Around,” he said, as he led them into a hallway. It was quieter here; Tembi and her classmates let their ears return to normal. “They’re busy and don’t have time to talk to us. This building is built like a wheel, with seven more docks like the one you just saw. Every ship that comes through here needs to be coordinated by a Witch.

  “This facility is small, like I said,” the Spacer continued. “So we only have five Witches working here at all times. Some of the larger facilities on this planet need up to twenty.”

  Five Witches! Tembi’s head whipped around, as if hoping a strange Witch might appear in the hallway with them. Five!

  The Spacer took them to a large lift. “This is the center of the wheel,” he said. “All of the control operations happen here.”

  The lift started at the docks with walls of metal, but these turned to clear plass as they went up. As they rose through the complex, each floor seemed more brightly painted than the one below. When the lift stopped, the Spacer pressed another button on his tab, and a gray cloud of nanobots dropped from the ceiling and descended on the lift’s occupants.

  “Cleaners,” he said. “Not the prettiest ’bots, but they’re efficient. The folks on this level don’t like visitors who smell of fish.”

  The students squealed; some started to thrash. Tembi stared at the gray film made from mote-sized robots crawling across her body and reminded herself they weren’t insects, that everyone outside the Stripes used cleaner ’bots, that it was just part of normal life and not creepy at all—

  And then the cloud lifted back into the ceiling and was gone, just like that.

  The students looked at each other and started to giggle.

  Tembi’s skin was slightly sore, as if she had scratched herself a little too hard. She checked her robes; the dust that always collected around the hem was gone, although the tiny stain left over from a tomato sandwich was still there.

  “Don’t worry about your makeup,” the Spacer said to one of the chaperones. “They’re murder on hair products and cosmetics, so they’ve been set to ignore those.

  “Ready?” he asked the students, and then opened the doors to the lift.

  They stepped out onto another platform. Beneath them was a room filled with people on comkits, all of them talking (or shouting), and interacting with various displays and holo-projections.

  Tembi had never seen an office before. It looked like a wildlife documentary straight out of one of the nature channels: she was sure someone was about to die, probably while being eaten.

  Her classmates started to mutter and point. There were offworlders in that mix, some of them as far from Earth-normal as Matindi. One of them, a man easily nine feet tall, stood in the middle of the chaos, his holos clustered around his upper body. Two women with bald heads and too-thin bodies were sitting on a wire ledge suspended from the ceiling: as Tembi watched, one of the women unfolded a set of bony skin-thin wings and glided down to the floor.

  In her dreams, the Deep had shown Tembi people like these. But to see—really see!—that woman with wings…

  She looked at Matindi for confirmation, and found her teacher smiling. Not at Tembi or the other students, but at the madness playing out before her. It was a sad smile, the kind her mother got when she talked about Tembi’s father, and Tembi realized she had never asked what Matindi had done before she had come to Adhama. Or what she had given up to take on her new life as Tembi’s teacher.

  The Spacer answered questions, and then moved them back into the lift. Tembi thought the tour was over, but instead they kept going up.

  At the top of the lift was sunlight. Sunlight all around; the top level of the docks was clear plass, with a view of the ocean, and the moving ships both above and below. A weather cage protected a balcony adjacent to the lift, and the Spacer moved them onto this.

  The children (and the chaperones) stared at the ocean below, then at the circular room, eyes wide. There were five desks stationed around the room, four of which were empty. The fifth had a heavyset man sitting at it. His ears perked up first, before he took notice of the class and gave them a little wave.

  “I was wrong,” the Spacer said. “You do get to see a Witch today.”

  Tembi stared, her soundkit forgotten. That was okay; all of her classmates were staring. The Witch was roundish and buried in a mountain of paperwork and holo-projections. His ears were long and tapered to points, and there was a band of fish painted against the left side of his face.

  Those are shaa fish, Tembi realized. The Witch was from Adhama.

  Her heart fell a little. Paperwork and…and fish?

  She found herself at the edge of the balcony, pretending to look down.

  Somehow…

  …somehow, when she had thought about her future as a Witch, paperwork and fish hadn’t been on her mind at all.

  Or sharing an office with four other people just like her.

  Or staying on this planet on the edge of nowhere, forever.

  Or…

  …or…

  …below, a flicker of silver—two ships, moving straight at each other, about to collide.

  Tembi gasped and panicked; the Deep heard her. The two ships blurred and reappeared several meters apart.

  She realized her mistake a moment too late: the ships had been nowhere near each other. It had been a trick of perspective; the larger ship was nearly on top of the ocean, with the smaller ship flying safely above it. If she had been paying attention—if she hadn’t been worried about
fish!—she would have known that!

  Stupid stupid stupid!

  She slunk away from the edge of the balcony and rejoined her classmates. Matindi hadn’t seemed to notice.

  Let’s not tell her, Tembi thought at the Deep. Not even in dreams, okay?

  The lift went down with Tembi and the others aboard, and no one saw how the round Witch with the painted fish watched them leave.

  _________________________________

  choice run

  choice fight

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 14 July 3828 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Five

  On the day when Tembi’s life broke into a million pieces, the Deep had surprised her with a creature made almost entirely of eyes, bones, and teeth. This was nothing new. Matindi had told Tembi that since the Deep had a personality, they should think of it as a person. Which was all fine and good, except the Deep most certainly did not have a human personality.

  For example, it found nightmares to be hilarious.

  It was especially fond of putting monsters in Tembi’s head right before she awoke. Matindi would end the night’s lessons a few hours before dawn so the two of them could get some real sleep; Tembi would tip from the teaching dream into her own natural sleep cycle, and would usually awake refreshed and ready to take on the day.

  Except, of course, when the Deep was in the mood to play its version of a practical joke. Tembi had learned early on that the Deep might not have much in the way of an imagination, but that meant nothing when it had an entire galaxy of horrors at its disposal. She woke up screaming at least two or three days a month, hands flailing at the image of whatever multi-mouthed spider demon the Deep had found on a remote planet to slide into her subconscious.

  She would go to school, furious, and Matindi would notice and give the class a pop quiz to keep them busy while she told the Deep—again—that Monsters Are Not Playthings.

  At the edges of Tembi’s mind, the Deep laughed and laughed and laughed!

  Tembi had decided the problem was that the Deep had no body. It witnessed the birth and death of humans and knew what a monster could do to the flesh, so it treated bodies as if they were made of spun sugar.

  But dreams? Dreams were of the mind and spirit, both of which the Deep had in abundance. And dreams were still the only place where it could interact with Tembi.

  “Just you wait until you’ve been trained and can carry this ulol beast in your own mind,” Matindi had told her one night, as the Deep spun around them in a chiming-colored laugh. “It’ll stop playing jokes in your dreams and start messing with you in reality. Like hiding the notes you needed for a class presentation on…where was it? One of the moons of Ellis-3?”

  Tembi was not quite looking forward to that.

  The creature of eyes, bones, and teeth had been one of the Deep’s better monsters. The image of it racing towards her, mouths wide open, was still seared into her brain as she trudged towards the schoolhouse. The air was heavy, and sand was beginning to kick up into clouds along the road.

  A storm was coming—a bad one. Everyone on the roads had their heads down and their ears flattened back. Some had pulled scarves over their hair. Tembi had, of course, forgotten her scarf in her haste to get to school before the storm hit. There would be dust in her hair the whole day, maybe longer if the storm lasted into the evening.

  The school would be open, there was no doubt of that. It was a designated shelter; on storm days, the door was kept open and the building shielded by a weather cage. If you needed shelter, you were welcome. Tembi loved storm days, as Matindi would ask those seeking shelter to tell the best story they knew, and everyone had at least one good story.

  (The school had become something of a community event during storms. For the stories, yes, but also because the supply closet was always full of the kinds of rib-sticking foods the human body craved during times of stress. Tembi was sure that Matindi was using the Deep to do grocery runs.)

  And then, after the stories (and the food), they would sing. Songs from across Adhama. Sometimes, songs from across the galaxy, or Earth songs that were simple but were as old as time.

  …twinkle twinkle little star…

  Tembi had her soundkit on and the volume as high as it could go. She had finally gotten so fed up with the ill-fitting earcuffs that she had asked one of her sisters to ice and pierce her ears, and she had threaded a wire between her new piercing and the cuffs to hold them in place. It wasn’t a perfect solution: when she had first modified them, the wires pinched enough to break the skin when she folded her ears back. But her skin was starting to harden as it adjusted, and the cuffs were much less likely to fall off of her ears and bounce across the floor.

  She was tired. She was distracted.

  She was not expecting the man with black hair and boxy blocks of yellow paint on the left side of his face to appear in front of her.

  Tembi, like everyone else on the streets, had her head down, and she plowed straight into him. The man staggered backwards, but not too far; Tembi didn’t have enough mass to knock him down.

  “I’m sorry!” she shouted.

  The man pulled himself tall and said something which got lost within her soundkit.

  “Very sorry!” Tembi said again, and sidestepped him with the dexterity of a street urchin used to evading the law. “You better get home before the storm hits!”

  She kept walking.

  He appeared in front of her again, and this time, she realized he was a Witch.

  Matindi had made her practice what she should do if she was ever caught alone with a Witch. Head down. Pretend to be lost in her music. Walk away.

  Tembi did all of this again, but this time it was intentional; a cold sweat was starting to catch against her back.

  He appeared in front of her a third time.

  She made a production of turning down the volume on her soundkit, and then began shouting at him. “I said I was sorry! What is your problem?!”

  The school was just a block away.

  Matindi was just a block away.

  He knelt in the street before her. “Tembi,” he said in a two-toned voice. “It’s time to leave this world.”

  The Deep was talking through him.

  —the Deep!—

  If the Deep was in on this, then the Witch was going to take her away—

  No.

  No!

  She might not be a Witch yet, but she had been born and bred in the Stripes, and she had handled men like this before. This was her home, and no Witch was going to come into her home and yank her offworld!

  “Why are you doing this?” she yelled. “Help! This man is not my father!”

  The man with the boxy yellow paint blinked.

  “Stranger!” Tembi shouted. “Stranger! Help! Stranger!”

  He stood and took a step away. “Wait,” he said, hands up, pleading, looking around as if the residents of the Stripes were about to descend upon him.

  A quick rush of air, and Tembi turned up to see a bald woman in a Spacers’ uniform step into the street. Her skin was almost pure white, and she had black paint in five-spotted patterns running across her head. “What’s the delay?” the bald woman asked the man.

  “Strangers!” Tembi shouted again. “Help!”

  Storm or no storm, they had managed to attract a crowd. The male Witch didn’t look too different from the locals, but the bald woman had appeared out of thin air and she had pale skin and ice-blue eyes. The residents of the Stripes were starting to get loud.

  “Just grab the kid and jump,” the woman said.

  The man started moving again. He was bigger and faster than she was; if he managed to get his hands on her…

  Tembi hauled back and hit the male Witch as hard as she could in his genitals.

  (She would have gone for his feet; there was nothing as satisfying as the feeling of a pervert’s toe breaking beneath her heel. But Witches seemed to have a strange fondne
ss for shoes.)

  The male Witch’s eyes went wide, and he slowly lowered himself to the ground, saying, very quietly, “.......ohhhh.”

  The bald woman gasped, then started laughing!

  Tembi took a step away from the Witches, and then another, and she was running before she knew it, racing down the street as fast as she could. The storm was almost upon them; sand and dirt and stray pieces of trash were flying through the air. If she didn’t find cover soon, the Witches would be the least of her—

  And then the man with the boxy paint was in front of her again, still sitting on the ground but able to move. He grabbed at her; she was moving too fast to turn, so she jumped over him, one foot hitting him in his face as she went.

  This time, Tembi felt something break.

  He shouted after her, but it sounded muffled and she couldn’t make out the words.

  She didn’t look back. The school was right ahead of her, door wide open.

  “Matindi!” she shouted, and hoped her voice wasn’t torn apart by the wind. “Matindi!”

  Something seized her arm; Tembi’s feet shot out from under her and she hit the ground. The bald woman had grabbed a handful of her robes, and she was still laughing. “Oh, kid,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes with her free hand. “Thanks. That was a good one.”

  “Tembi!” Matindi was there, blue robes crackling with static as she appeared in the air above the bald woman. She landed on the woman with her full weight, and brought the bald woman to the ground. Matindi spun around, robes flying, and used one of her enormous feet to kick the bald woman in her face.

  As the bald woman fell, Matindi grabbed Tembi around her waist. “Hold on!”

  Tembi shut her eyes, waiting for the rush of the Deep—

  Nothing.

  Tembi opened her eyes. The expression on her teacher’s face had gone cold with anger, the corners of her mouth twitching ever so slightly as she argued with the Deep in her mind.