Star Song

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Eight days later, Kriss toiled up a hill in the hot sun along a narrow path he’d thought was a shortcut when he’d left the main road a few kilometres back, a path offering no shade since it wound through the stumps of a recently logged native forest. There were Earth-tree saplings among the stumps, but it would twenty years before they’d provide any shelter from the sun.

His slingpack was almost empty, other than his change of clothes (not exactly clean anymore, since he’d been alternating the clothes in the pack with the ones he’d been wearing), and the touchlyre wasn’t particularly heavy, but all the same, he was ready to wish them both to the bottom of the ocean.

Actually, the bottom of the ocean was beginning to sound good to him, too: at least it would be cool.

Something stabbed his foot, and he groaned. And now, he had something in his shoe.

He limped over to a stump and sat down on it. He pulled the boot off and turned it upside down. Nothing fell out. He thumped the heel against the stump. No luck. He thumped it again, harder, this time swearing for good measure. Whatever it was still refused to come out.

Frustrated beyond measure, he threw the boot into the grass on the other side of the footpath—and then forgot all about it as the stump and the ground began to shake.

The rumbling vibration quickly swelled to a full-throated, crackling roar. Kriss twisted around to look up the slope. His heart leaped into his throat and pulled him to his feet as a tiny, glittering needle, riding a pillar of white fire, soared into view. He craned his neck to follow its ascent, watching it dwindle to a white-hot speck and vanish. Then, without bothering to put his boot back on, he ran up the hill.

Sweat stinging his eyes, heart pounding, stockinged foot bruised, Kriss crested the ridge and stared down, at long last, at Cascata.

The descending slope was also covered with stumps, so there were no trees to block his view of the capital of Farr’s World, which sprawled across a vast plain, huge, smoky, and more daunting than he had ever imagined.

At its centre, beyond the rough wooden buildings of the city’s verge, the jumbled structures of brick and stone farther in, and a handful of glittering glass towers, four silvery, slender spires shimmered like mirages in the middle of a vast, fenced-in duracrete rectangle—the spaceport. Smoke blowing across the pavement and trailing into the sky bore mute, fading testimony to the thunderous departure of the starship he had seen streaking into the sky moments before.

Kriss took a deep breath, suddenly feeling very young and alone. His food was gone. All he had left was his canteen, his clothes, a paltry sum of money, and the touchlyre. It didn’t seem like much with which to challenge the universe.

Challenging the universe half-shod didn’t seem like a good idea, either, so he went back down the hill, retrieved his boot, and with several more solid thumps against the boulder (and some more swearing) managed, at last, to loosen and dump out the foot-plaguing pebble. Then he turned the boot right-side-up again prior to slipping it back on—and paused, blindsided by the memory of Mella’s wrinkled hands patiently working a heavy needle through the thick leather, while she jokingly complained about the way he seemed to outgrow each pair of boots almost before she could make them.

He ran a finger over the boot’s fine stitching. Then he took a deep breath, roughly shoved the boot back onto his foot, and stamped on the heel. Mella, and his childhood, lay dead and buried eight days behind him, beneath the fresh black mound of earth beside the trampled garden and now-cold embers of the burned-out farmhouse.

He could not change the past, and the future he had mapped out for himself would not happen unless he made it happen. Sitting by the side of the road wasn’t going to do it.

But before anything else, he had to report Mella’s death to the police. The villagers, he thought for the thousandth or ten-thousandth time. The villagers who attacked the cottage have to pay.

He tried to brush some of the dust from his faded blue shirt and black pants—the “clean” change of clothes when he’d set out—with little success. Then he wiped grimy sweat from his forehead, took a deep breath, and climbed up the ridge once more.

Once he was down the slope, the footpath took him between split-rail fences, corn to his left, wheat to his right, and then joined a much wider road that swept in from the north—re-joined it, really, since if he hadn’t taken his “shortcut”, he would have ended up in this exact same place. It had changed, though: when he’d left it, it had been gravel. Here, it was paved.

He looked left and right as he stepped onto the road. He saw a handful of people on foot in both directions, though nobody was very close. A horse-drawn wagon trundled along the road to his right, approaching the outskirts of the city . . .

And then, suddenly, as he looked that direction, something bright-red roared past, so close Kriss jumped back, tripped, and fell hard on to his rear end. He barely noticed, almost bouncing back to his feet so he could stare after the disappearing vehicle. A groundcar! He’d heard of them from Mella, but he’d never seen one. When he’d asked why there weren’t any around Black Rock, she’d explained that complex machinery, electronics, and other high-tech devices were enormously expensive on metal-poor Farr’s World. Those that existed did not make their way to the hinterland.

Making sure to stay well away from the middle of the road, Kriss hurried in the groundcar’s wake. What other wonders might await in Cascata?

He soon found out. As he entered the city, the road became more and more crowded, with more wagons, more groundcars (though moving at more sedate speeds), massive automated transports, and, most of all, more people—more people than he had ever seen. Fortunately, there were now sidewalks, so the risk of getting run over lessened—or, at least, it did after he almost stepped off the curb in front of a transport, jumping back at the last second. After that, he made a point of looking both ways at every intersection.

Between his offworld colouring and height and his rumpled, dusty clothes, he felt painfully conspicuous, but no one spared him a second glance. Within a few blocks, he began to relax and enjoy a sensation new to him: anonymity.

At its outer edges, apart from the vehicles, Cascata seemed just a larger, dirtier, and much more crowded version of Black Rock. But after he had walked long enough to have passed through Black Rock a dozen times, the buildings changed from wood and plaster to brick and stone, the homes and shops and warehouses far grander than anything in Black Rock. And always, in the distance, gleamed the glass towers of the city’s centre—and beyond them, he knew, lay the starships.

The road he had followed into the city eventually dumped him into a flagstone-paved courtyard with a bustling produce market. Aware of the suspicious gazes of the shoppers and sellers, he hurried across it to a new, smooth-surfaced road that arrowed straight downtown between warehouses whose blank walls, punctuated by loading docks, plunged him into shadow, a relief from the unremitting heat of the sun. Also a relief: no one else was on the sidewalks to stare at him. The road seemed devoted to automated transports, blank, silver, box-shaped drive units pulling multi-wheeled flatbed trailers. One of them hummed toward him and past him as he started down the road; he heard clanging noises behind him, and turned to see that it had pulled up in front of one of the loading docks, where men were now stacking bright-yellow metal boxes onto the trailer.

He turned and continued toward the spaceport. The transport soon passed him going the other way, stopping again at another loading dock a little farther on. He crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it. Ahead, the road ended in a T-intersection with a much broader road, along which traffic passed in both directions. Beyond that stood a tall fence, and beyond that, a vast expanse of duracrete, baking in the sun . . .

Sore feet forgotten, he broke into a run, burst out onto the busy road, dodged traffic to cross it, clung to the wire-mesh fence on the far side of it—and drank in his first close-up view of starships.

Curved, mirrored flanks cast back sharp reflections of the city and narrowed to needle-sharp, glittering prows pointing at the sky.

At the stars.

At his future.

Kriss drank in the sight, silently vowing he would be aboard one of those vessels when it launched. He saw someone come around a landing strut of the nearest ship, a slender figure, a young boy or girl—he couldn’t tell at that distance—and his heart ached with the desire to be that youth, to stand there, at the base of a starship, to gaze out at a strange new world he had never visited before . . .

Then something much closer drew his attention: two men, just crossing the field, dressed alike in beige uniforms. Very tall and very pale, they walked with a strange, fluid grace.

Offworlders!

One of them looked up and saw him staring, and elbowed the other, who glanced Kriss’s way and laughed. Kriss flushed and turned away, the assurance he had felt a moment before gone like a pricked puffplant, the young figure standing at the base of the distant starship forgotten. He looked up at the impersonal government towers. He had yet to talk to the police, and the afternoon was half over. It would soon be night, a night he would spend alone and without shelter in a strange city.

One thing at a time. Maybe the police could help.

When at last he found the police tower, halfway around the spaceport, he ran up the imposing flight of steps—and stopped, staring at his dusty, dishevelled reflection in the mirrored surface of the door. He couldn’t blame them if they just locked him up.

Then at least I’ll have a place to spend the night, he thought.

He stepped forward, and the door slid aside, taking his reflection with it.