Stoneskin Page 6

  Tembi didn’t scream—she didn’t even gasp! Not even with the sides of the shell sloping away in long tumbling lengths of white and cream, and nothing between her and thin air but—

  Oh, never mind. There was a railing right in front of her.

  “The Deep won’t let Witches fall,” Leps said. “But we like to bring visitors up here, and I hear our insurance premiums are already just ridiculous.”

  Tembi barely heard her. She was overwriting her hastily formed opinions of Lancaster and its grounds. She had assumed Lancaster was a small city itself, or at least a town straight from a program on the storybook channels, with great green pastures all around and a single road winding through to connect it to the outside world. Not so. The road was there, yes, and so were the great green fields. Beyond those were thick groves of trees, evergreens with huge woody trunks, each of them growing almost as tall as the Tower.

  Beyond that…

  A city. Yes, a massive city, all around Lancaster! She had thought the school was set in the woods, but it was merely a giant stretch of green within a city!

  Tembi’s heart leapt. Grass or not, forest or not, she was still inside a city.

  “That’s Hub,” Leps said. “Biggest city on Found.

  “That’s where we are, by the way,” she added. “The planet’s name is Found. That word means the same thing in about eight languages beside Basic, so Lancaster’s founders decided to use it.”

  “Can—” Tembi wasn’t sure how to ask. “Are we allowed to go to the city?”

  “Yup,” Leps replied. “As long as you keep your grades up, there’s no curfew. There’s a hopper service that runs every twenty minutes. It’s free for all untrained Witches.

  “And Hub’s very safe,” she continued. “The Deep makes sure you’re never in any danger, and the folks out there treat Witches like their lives depend on it.” Leps must have seen the expression on Tembi’s face, because she quickly added, “Wait, no—I should have said their livelihoods depend on it. Everything in Hub exists because of Lancaster, so we get the royal treatment when we’re in the city.”

  Tembi found she was able to swallow again. Respecting someone because they controlled your credit? That was fine. That happened all of the time. And it was much better than learning the Deep would murder anyone who wasn’t nice to her.

  “Wanna go check it out?”

  Yes, of course Tembi did! Her feet itched to be on solid ground again. Instead, she asked: “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  Leps chuckled as she laid a hand on Tembi’s shoulder, and she jumped them into the city.

  _________________________________

  talk

  Lancaster

  talk

  talk talk talk

  talk talk talk talk talk

  talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk

  talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 24 July 3490 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Seven

  That was the end of Tembi Moon, but it took Tembi Stoneskin several years to realize she had left her old self behind in that classroom on Adhama.

  Those years should have been an easy time for her. For Matindi, too—her old teacher had walked back into her old life at Lancaster as simply as singing. Tembi thought Matindi had moved from Lancaster to Adhama to become her teacher, but no, Matindi had left the Witches a long time before. A very long time before. Decades? Definitely. Centuries? Maybe. Some Witches did not age. To them, time had as little meaning as space. Matindi’s return meant she took on the duties of the senior Witches, joining Matthew on the Tower Council as one of the oldest and most respected voices of the Deep. Tembi met these Council Witches with her chin and ears held high at a formal dinner with inedible food served on tiny golden plates. She was poked and prodded, and, once they had decided she was an entirely ordinary child, ignored. Lancaster was a busy place, and even the immortal Witches had no time to spare for her.

  Tembi was introduced to everyone else at Lancaster as Matindi’s ward, a stray she had taken in while touring the galaxy on sabbatical. She stayed in a spare room in Matindi’s quarters (the room was larger than her family’s entire unit, and had carpets!). Each morning, she wiped the golden birds from her face and went to school with the Witches’ children.

  She fooled no one: every single soul at Lancaster knew about the too-young Witch.

  Matindi told her that some things had changed in the years she had been gone. Young Witches, for example, were now allowed to return home and see their families, even spend their breakdays with them! Not like before, when a new Witch was swept away to Lancaster and locked away for her own good… The green-skinned Witch shook her head as she told this to Tembi, her eyes fixed on a long-gone past that Tembi couldn’t see.

  But Tembi could go home! She could visit Adhama, and see her mother and her sisters, and spend awkward meals pretending everything was normal until enough time had gone by that life finally became normal again. It helped, a little.

  When she was on Found, she learned the history of the Witches.

  It was odd and distorted, as all histories are, made more complicated through the presence of the Deep. Lancaster was not just a school and a business but also a home: Witches lived there, behind its high walls. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, Tembi couldn’t keep track. Each Witch was different, made from strange bodies and stranger words. Some Witches married; some did not. Some raised a family within the walls of the school; some did not. Some rode the Rails at whim; others stayed, their roots running deep within the soil of this, their adopted planet.

  When Tembi asked questions about why Lancaster was the way it was, Matthew took her to a little museum next to the hopper platform, and took her on a guided tour of Lancaster’s history.

  She learned that Found was a second choice, as the first Witches had wanted to build their school on Earth.

  No. Even after the Deep and its Witches had changed the shape of the galaxy, the good people of Earth were having none of their nonsense. Build your school somewhere else, they said. We’ll help you finance its construction. Just not here.

  The Deep had shown the first Witches a rocky planet in the base of the Cygnus arm which it thought might be suitable. It was in a great location and the environment was very close to Earth-normal, it told them, but there was one problem: the planet had four moons in fixed orbit and a minor axial tilt so there was almost no weather to speak of. It rained at nights but the days were clear, and the average daily temperature was approximately 24 °C year-round, except near the shorelines where it was a degree or two cooler. But with minor investment in terraforming—

  Thank you, the first Witches had told it. We will try and make do.

  They named the planet Found, designated its moons as shipping docks, and began construction on the finest school in the galaxy. Lancaster, they called it, as the names some of the first Witches had suggested were too hard for others to pronounce.

  They built Lancaster as a pastoral fortress. Large, beautiful, set within a city that would boast it was the home of the Deep. Ships came from across the galaxy to meet with the Witches; if you had Lancaster’s blessing, the worlds would open to you.

  Except…

  …except that wasn’t what Tembi saw.

  Matthew and the rest of Lancaster told her one thing; her own eyes told her another. She knew what she saw as she stood at the hopper pad, waiting for a lift into Hub. Each hopper flight was full of off-worlders who had come to Lancaster to plead their case before the Witches. After a time, she could read their expressions and know which ones had to go home and explain why they wouldn’t have a new shipping port in their community, or tell their employers that the Witches wouldn’t move their cargo, or any one of a hundred reasons the Tower Council might reject a petition.

  She supposed there was sense in it. In the museum, there were great, brilliant paintings which sh
owcased the Witches as guardians of the Deep. The Witches served as its stewards, Matthew had explained, and Witches made sure the Deep was only used for peaceful purposes. Education. Trade. Tourism. Diplomacy.

  Never for war.

  At the time, it had sounded lovely—it had sounded pure. Like magic.

  (And she had finally understood why they insisted on calling themselves Witches, even though the term still sounded ridiculous to her.)

  But Tembi decided she wanted nothing to do with the Deep.

  It wasn’t a conscious decision. Not at first. At first, she watched daily life at Lancaster unfold around her, and saw how the Deep was involved in everything they did.

  It was…

  …it had begun that first day in the Tower bathroom, when she had learned the Deep was used to whisk the dirty linens away.

  It wasn’t just dirty laundry, oh no. When the Witches had a mess to be cleaned up, the Deep did it for them, vanishing the filth through its own sorcery. Witches never went shopping unless they wanted to, or waited in line to mail their post, or any of the hundreds of tasks that Tembi had heard her mother complain about on a daily basis.

  There was nothing in that museum about how the Witches made the Deep do their chores for them.

  The more Tembi saw, the less she liked Lancaster. During her first few weeks at the school, she didn’t understand why she never saw Witches around campus. There were gardens, and a lake, and places to rest and play and eat, but she never saw Witches moving from one location to another. Then, she realized that most of the Witches didn’t even walk! They used the Deep to move across Lancaster, across the whole campus, yes, but even for journeys as short as moving from room to room.

  At eleven, Tembi lacked the words to describe the nature of Lancaster’s relationship with the Deep. If the docks on Adhama had been overrich with its presence, Lancaster was a thousand times more so. The Deep was always there, nudging her at her mind, begging for her attention. It would gladly do anything for her, or for any of the other Witches. All they had to do was ask.

  And they did. They asked for everything!

  They asked over and over again, until the Deep was…

  …was…

  …Tembi couldn’t describe it.

  All she knew was that she couldn’t bear it, and after several months of watching this…thing…she couldn’t put into words, she turned away from the Deep.

  For the first few years, Matindi kept the Deep away from her. Tembi needed to adjust to her new life, she told it, and pushing too hard right now might drive her away forever. The Deep seemed to accept that, and kept its distance.

  But while Tembi no longer spoke to the Deep, or allowed it to enter her dreams, she couldn’t help but notice how the Witches treated it.

  Her skin began to harden.

  While Tembi climbed trees and crashlanded on pavement like the other children, she didn’t come home with skinned knees. The fighting? Well, Tembi was only caught once, and given enough chores to make sure that getting caught would never happen again, but the Deep told Matindi tales about sneaking into Hub and brawling with the locals. (Once, it had jumped Tembi back to her own bed when she went into Hub, needing the heat of a good fight to burn off some stress, but she had shouted at the air for hours and it never did that again.) And when she began taking martial arts, she was never bruised or broken.

  Matindi tried to help. Long holidays with Tembi’s family on Adhama, or shopping excursions across the galaxy. Even concerts, which caused the other Witches to wonder aloud at whether Matindi should be permitted to raise the Deep’s favorite child.

  Matindi pushed back; Tembi got to keep her music.

  The music was important. If Tembi had music, she didn’t have to feel the presence of the Deep, and, for reasons she still couldn’t put into words, that was what Tembi wanted most of all. She hid from it during the day, and at nights she slept with her soundkit on, and woke with the song of another human being in her head so it could no longer come to her in dreams.

  Two years.

  Three.

  Four.

  Tembi at fifteen, her skin nearly as hard as the stones of Marumaru. Taller now, with gold rings in the holes her sister had pierced in her ears, and a scarf wrapped around her head to hold her curly hair out of her way.

  Tembi at fifteen, and the Deep was tired of waiting.

  It began to bring her gifts. Little tokens at first; exotic flowers, mostly. Especially pretty beetles. The odd brightly colored bird, or serpent. A piece of wood, cut and polished to show its gleaming heart.

  Matindi had a rule—No using the Deep as a garbage disposal in her home!—but Tembi opened that sealed cupboard to return these items to its sender.

  The Deep started to get pushy. It started leaving its gifts where she couldn’t simply throw them away. At the table while she was eating breakfast with Matindi (and Matthew, if he had spent the night). In class, in front of the teacher and the other students. Tembi yelled at the air; this would buy her a few days of peace, but the gifts would soon start up again.

  Sometimes, she would catch Matindi quarreling with the Deep. This was usually in Matindi’s native language—Tembi would understand her own name and nothing more—but once, just once, Matindi had said: “Of course she’s not talking to you! You took her away from her home before she was ready! How would you feel if she took you away from me?!”

  That seemed to make an impression: the next morning, Tembi found a mother cat and a litter of newborn kittens sleeping beside her. The mother awoke and fled in terror; she never returned. Tembi bottle-fed the kittens until they could live on their own, then found them new homes in Hub. One of them, a white male with gray stripes running across him like a saddle, kept returning to Tembi’s room. She thought the Deep was bringing the kitten back, until she saw the kitten walking by itself in the direction of Matindi’s quarters, and realized it was too stubborn to accept it had a new home. After that, Tembi had a pet. She named it Taabu and drew little eyebrows on his face with a cosmetics pencil twice a week, and allowed it to prowl around Lancaster.

  Emboldened with the success of the kitten, the Deep began to bring her other things. Artwork, gemstones, large quantities of credit chips from all over the galaxy, and so on. Items of value, at least to most people. Tembi began to schedule time into her day to track down their rightful owners so Matindi could return them.

  The last straw was when Tembi and Matindi returned from their shift in the gardens to find an ancient Earth vehicle in their common room. The Deep had been courteous enough to move the furniture to make enough space for it, but it had stacked wooden shelves on top of old-fashioned glass ornaments, and the wreckage was profound.

  Matindi shook her head, very slowly, and then started shouting. “We’re not dealing with this!” She waved her fists in the air. “Do you hear me? This is officially a managerial issue! You now need to speak with our manager!”

  Tembi went to put the vegetables away. When she returned to the common room, Matindi was gone and Matthew was sitting on the couch.

  “Hello, Tembi,” he said, and gestured to the chair across from him. “Please take a seat.”

  Oh. This Matthew. The version who brought papers over for Matindi to sign, not the one who made them excellent griddle cakes on breakday mornings. She didn’t like this Matthew nearly as much.

  Tembi sat. She was still wearing her gardening clothes: under normal circumstances, Matindi would throw a fit for tracking dirt around the common room, but as most of her house was groaning under the weight of the vehicle…

  “Do you know what this is?” Matthew said. “It’s a Frazer Nash-BMW 328. There were only six of these to have survived an old Earth war. We traced this one to a museum on Caulda. They’re eager to get it back.

  “This can’t go on,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t want it to,” Tembi said. “I’ve been trying to get the Deep to stop.”

  “We all have,” Matthew said. “But it’s escalating
, and sometimes we can’t get the Deep to understand that what it does can hurt us.

  “It doesn’t understand larceny,” he said, pointing at the car. “It doesn’t understand that there’s a director at a museum on Caulda who wants to press charges against you.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Why not?” Matthew shrugged. “Everyone knows the Deep does what it’s told. So you obviously told it you wanted this car.”

  “I didn’t!” Tembi was outraged. “I don’t even know what a car is!”

  “You know that and I know that,” he said. “But the Deep is how the galaxy functions. It has to be dependable. Nobody wants to hear that it’s breaking its patterns and stealing items to get a young woman to like it again. So—”

  Tembi stood, furious. “I will not take the blame for this!”

  “If you don’t, then someone else will,” Matthew said, deeply serious. “It’s not fair to you—it is in no way fair to you!—but what happens if the galaxy loses faith in the Deep? Or in its Witches? This is a balance we’ve maintained for thousands of years, Tembi. Trust is built over time. Routines and tradition are built over time!

  “But here you are,” he said. “You shouldn’t be. Not for another few years, at least. Matindi and I don’t know why it chose you so young, nor do we know if you’ll be unique. That’s a big part of why we’re worried.”

  The little lines around his eyes that appeared when he thought Matindi was mad at him were there; worry lines, standing out as if cut by razors from centuries of use. Matthew was worried—maybe even scared.

  Tembi took a deep breath and sat back down. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “The Deep has picked others since you,” Matthew said. “It’s gone back to its old ways—all of the new Witches-in-training are young adults. But what happens if it chooses someone younger than you were? A toddler, perhaps, or a baby?”