Star Song

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Tevera Annacrosta Evangeline di’Thaylia stepped off the dark-blue non-skid surface of the personnel disembarkation ramp, which extended like a rude tongue from between the landing struts of the starship that gave her her surname, and walked out onto the sun-baked expanse of blackened duracrete that passed for a spaceport on the backwater planet known as Farr’s World. Of all Thaylia’s regular stops, it was the least prepossessing. Even the cargo they would take on here was boring: a type of grain prized on a far wealthier world for the making of gourmet pasta.

The snow-capped peaks in the distance looked far more interesting than the “city” of Cascata. Tevera knew, because she’d looked it up, that they were called the Featherwood Mountains, but she had no idea why they had such an intriguing name and knew she would never visit them to find out. She wondered how they compared to the ones on Feldenspar, the only world she’d ever lived on, and wished she could find out . . . but Family members did not stray far from the ports where they landed. Her life lay in the ship behind her, not at the bottom of a gravity well. Planets, the Family taught, were traps for the unwary, full of dangers, and how could she argue with that when her own parents had . . .?

Her mind shied away from the memory, as it usually did. She had only been six, in the standard Earth years the ship used, when they had been killed, and yet every day, though ten years had passed, she felt their absence like a hole in her heart.

You’re being maudlin, she told herself.

And anyway, Cascata wasn’t completely without merit: tonight, she and her brother, Rigel, would pay a visit to Andru’s, where there was good food and drink to be had, and the opportunity to talk with crewmembers of other ships. Bethelda, which had just launched, had been the only other Family ship in port, but the crew of the Union ships with which they still shared the field would have news and gossip to share, even if they would have to be more guarded with them about their own ship’s travel plans and cargo.

Two beige-clad Union crewmen were even then crossing the field in the distance, heading to one of the gates into the city. Beyond them, she glimpsed, outside the fence, another figure, a boy, she thought. She heard distant laughter from the Union men, and the boy suddenly turned and left the fence. She frowned. Spacefarers all made fun of worldhuggers, Family as well as Union, but she’d found their jokes less funny since their forced sojourn on Feldenspar. She’d gotten to know quite a few worldhuggers then, wandering farther afield than would ever have been allowed if they had not been grounded for repairs. Their lives were different, but they were people, all the same. She hoped the boy at the fence hadn’t been too offended by whatever the Union men had said.

“Hello, little sister,” said a voice behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to see Rigel descending the ramp. Like her, he wore a pale-blue one-piece crewsuit with the scarlet image of a ringed planet embroidered over the left breast, the sigil of Thaylia. Unlike her, he wore two silver pips on his collar, indicative of his rank . . . nothing exalted, but considerably more exalted than her, since she would not formally receive rank until her eighteenth birthday.

He grinned at her, and she smiled back, but his expression soured as he joined her and looked out across the blackened pavement. “Stars, what a depressing place.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Tevera said.

“Nice of you to keep me company while I arrange for the loading of the cargo,” Rigel said. “It won’t be very exciting.”

“Better than staying cooped up in my cabin.”

Rigel glanced at her, mouth quirking. “A planet, better than Thaylia?”

She flushed. “You know what I mean.” Rigel had some sense of her un-Family-like attraction to planets. She’d talked about her infatuation with Feldenspar a bit too openly right afterward, and he’d expressed some concern that she might have picked up romantic notions of worldhugger life. She’d laughed it off and quit talking to him—or anyone else—about her enjoyment of the planet, but he’d never forgotten, and occasionally, like now, reminded her of it.

There’s nothing wrong with liking planets, Tevera thought. We all came from Earth originally. We still use its days and years. It doesn’t mean I’m planning to leave the Family, or I don’t like the Family, or I don’t love Thaylia. It just means I don’t hate planets.

She gave her brother a friendly punch in the arm. “You like getting away from the ship when we’re in port, too,” she said. “Remember Shepardalia? I caught you staggering back on board in the middle of the night, smelling like a distillery. And cheap perfume.”

Rigel winced. “Don’t remind me.” He looked up at the sun. “The afternoon’s getting on. Let’s get moving.”

He set off across the hot duracrete. Tevera followed him, but not without one more glance at those distant, inviting mountains.

Kriss stepped into a huge, austere vestibule, with towering white walls and a floor of black stone. A thin, middle-aged woman in a grey uniform sat at a long white counter, behind which were six black doors. She looked up from a datascreen as he approached, and her lips pursed in disapproval. “What do you want?”

“I . . .” He cleared his throat. “I have to report a . . . a murder.”

Her expression soured even further, if that were possible. “Second door, third office on the right. Lieutenant Carlo Elcar.” She looked back down at her screen, dismissing him.

“Thank you,” Kriss said to the top of her head. He walked toward the unmarked door she had indicated. Lieutenant Elcar would be different. He would care.

The door slid silently open as he approached, revealing a long, utterly straight corridor, with the same antiseptically white walls, punctuated by closely spaced black doors. The third on the right bore Lieutenant Elcar’s name in neat white letters. Kriss raised his hand to knock, but the door slid open before he touched it and, feeling foolish, he stepped through.

A short, pudgy man in a grey uniform like that of the woman at the counter, except with silver braid on the collar and cuffs, sat behind a glass-topped black desk. It, the chair where he sat, and a backless stool of silvery metal on Kriss’s side of the desk were the only furnishings in the small office. Not so much as a family photo marred the pristine white walls.

“Lieutenant Elcar?” Kriss said.

“That’s what it says on the door,” Elcar said, his broad, brown Farrsian face impassive. “Have a seat.”

Kriss sat down on the cold, hard stool.

“Name?”

“Kriss Lemarc. My—”

“Age?”

“Sixteen, standard. Look, I’m here because—”

“Local units, please.”

Kriss felt a flash of irritation. “Fourteen. But why does that—”

“Address?”

“Listen to me!” Kriss snapped. “My—”

“I will listen to you in due course,” Elcar said. “But there are procedures that must be followed. Address, please?”

Kriss clenched his fist, down where the policeman couldn’t see it. “Black Rock. It’s a village near—”

“I know the place. Parents’ names?”

“I don’t know.” He felt a pang. Something else Mella had said she’d tell him when he was older, always refusing to answer his questions, no matter how much he pleaded or, sometimes, yelled. Something else he hoped to learn, if he ever escaped Farr’s World. “They died when I was a baby.”

“Legal guardian, then.”

“Mella Thalos.”

“And where is she?”

“Dead. Murdered. That’s why I’m here!”

“I see.” Elcar tapped the glossy black surface of his desk with a fingertip. Lights chased across it. “When and where did she die?”

“Eight days ago. In Black Rock.”

The lieutenant looked up. “Eight days? Why didn’t you report it sooner?”

“I couldn’t walk any faster.”

“Black Rock has a constable. Why didn’t you tell him about this supposed murder?”

Supposed? “Because I think the villagers killed Mella! And he might have been in on it!” Kriss glared at the policeman. “You sound like you think I did it!”

“I’m not accusing anyone. I don’t have enough information.” Elcar tapped his desk again. Something blinked at him. Looking at it instead of Kriss, the lieutenant said, “Why do you think the villagers killed your guardian?”

Kriss took a deep breath, trying to tamp down his anger. Mella had been murdered, and nobody seemed to give a damn, except him. “Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.”

“Maybe you’d better,” Elcar agreed. He tapped the desk again, and it went blank. He looked up at Kriss. “There’s something very strange here.”

“I know. Me.” Kriss ran a hand through his hair. Blond hair, he thought. Like no one else’s in Black Rock. “Look, I don’t know anything about my parents except they died when I was a baby. Mella was a friend of theirs, so she looked after me. She never told me anything more about them. She told me she would when I was older, but . . .” He paused. The lieutenant sat quietly, hands folded. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

“Everything is being recorded. Go on.”

Kriss glanced at the blank desk. “All right. Eight days ago. I hiked out to a lake not far from the farm and spent the day swimming, fishing, just being lazy.” He didn’t say anything about playing the touchlyre, Mella’s warning about letting anyone else know about it still nestled uncomfortably in the back of his mind, a warning clearly tied to the mysterious identity of his parents. “I . . . lost track of time. Before I knew it, the sun was going down. I’d promised to be home by sunset, so I ran . . .”

He told the rest of the story: running home, carefree, through the forest, smelling smoke, discovering the ruins of the cottage, finding Mella dead in front of it near her trampled garden, the marks of booted feet all around. He described how he had buried her.

By the time he finished, he could barely squeeze out the words through the fresh grief squeezing his throat. His voice choked off. If only I had been there. If only . . . if only . . . He looked down at his hands. They trembled. He clenched them into fists.

After a pause, Elcar cleared his throat. “Would you like a drink of water?”

Kriss let his hands fall limp. He nodded mutely. The lieutenant leaned down behind the right side of his desk. He straightened a moment later and handed a small plastic glass full of icy water to Kriss, who drank from it gratefully.

He hadn’t mentioned the touchylre, but thinking of that terrible night had made him think anew of the strange music the touchlyre had produced that night—and every night since, because he had played it every night on his journey to the city, and every night, it had been the same. He could still play tunes the old way, focusing on a specific song he already knew or improvising melodies and chords in his mind, but if he simply let his thoughts and feelings flow into the instrument, it gave them back as complex wash of sound that perfectly matched his mental and emotional state.

Something had changed, in it, or in him, he didn’t know. But he was more certain than ever that the touchlyre did not come from Farr’s World—and that it could lead him to his true home, somewhere out among the stars, and maybe, just maybe, a new family.

He told Elcar none of that, of course. “The next morning, I packed what I could salvage and headed here,” he concluded.

“And you think the people of Black Rock were responsible?”

“Who else? They hated me for being an offworlder. They mistrusted Mella because, even though she was a Farrsian, she came from somewhere else, and she’d brought me with her. And some of them thought she was money my parents had given her. I think that’s what whoever attacked the cottage was looking for.”

“Do you know why so many Farrsians dislike offworlders?” Elcar said.

Kriss shook his head. “No.”

“Because fifty years ago, the Commonwealth . . . offworlders . . . betrayed us,” the lieutenant said, his voice thin and bitter. “We were supposed to be the administrative centre for this sector. That’s why we have such magnificent government buildings, why the spaceport is large enough to accommodate twenty ships.” He slapped his hands palms-down on the desk and leaned forward. “But then someone found another world, not that far away, not as beautiful but just as habitable, and with one thing Farr’s World lacks—an abundant supply of metals, rare earth elements, and other valuable natural resources. And just like that, our beautiful garden world became a backwater. The Commonwealth turned its back on us, and the colonists who had come here with high hopes—many of them still alive, some of them living in Black Rock—found themselves on a primitive world out of the mainstream of galactic society.” Elcar pointed at the ceiling. “That’s why there are fourteen empty floors in this building. That’s why some of the other government towers are nothing but hollow shells. That’s why only four starships stand out there on that vast landing apron, and why it’s nothing but a sheet of duracrete that only the smallest ships can land on, with no cradles for the big freighters or cruise ships and only the most basic repair and servicing facilities. That’s why some Farrsians feel anger every time an offworlder walks by.”

“Ancient history is no excuse for theft and murder!”

“No,” Elcar said. “It’s not. And that’s why I don’t think the villagers did it.”

“But you just said . . .”

“Any rumours of Mella having a hidden pile of cash would have begun the moment she moved to Black Rock. If anyone were going to act on the rumours, it would have happened long ago. And it would be out of character. Almost all the violent crime—even robbery, let alone assault or murder—we investigate is committed by offworlders.” His eyes bore into Kriss’s. “There is some mystery in your past, some mystery involving your parents’ identity, some secret your guardian was guarding even as she guarded you. Perhaps that mystery, that secret, caught up with her.”

Kriss was suddenly acutely aware of the touchylre in its red-leather case on his back. Mella had always been so adamant he keep it a secret . . . what if it was the treasure someone had come to the cottage looking for?

“And as for murder,” Elcar continued, “you said yourself Mella didn’t have a mark on her, that she might have died of a stroke or heart attack, brought on by the stress of the attack. So, murder? Almost certainly not. Involuntary manslaughter, at most.” Kriss felt hot anger welling up in him, and some of it must have shown on his face, because the lieutenant raised placating hands. “I’m not trying to downplay the crime, just establish what happened.” He tapped his desk. Lights blinked beneath the surface once more. “Eight days won’t have left many clues, but we’ll send out an investigator first thing in the morning. She’ll talk to the local constable, take a look at the ruins of the cottage. Maybe she can turn up something.”

Kriss glared across the glass-topped desk at the lieutenant. He doesn’t really care. He sympathizes more with the villagers than with me.

Suddenly, he couldn’t stand to be there anymore. He stood abruptly. “May I go?”

Surprised, Elcar also rose. “Of course. You’re not my prisoner. Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any money. I suppose I’ll look for a job.”

“They’re hard to find. You’d be better off going back to the villages—not Black Rock, of course, but another, closer to the city. You look strong and healthy. Some farmer would hire you.”

“No.” The only way I’m leaving this city is straight up. The sooner, the better. “I won’t go back out there.”

“The city can be a rough place for a boy on his own,” Elcar warned.

“You just said Farrsians aren’t violent.”

Elcar’s lips tightened. “Suit yourself. But contact us when you find a place to stay. We may need to get in touch with you.”

Kriss nodded once. “Anything else?”

“No.” The lieutenant sat down again and swiped a hand across the surface of the desk, as though shoving everything they’d just talked about—shoving the death of Mella—to one side. “You can go.”

The door slid open. Kriss spun and strode out, down the hallway, through the vestibule, and out into the early night. Only a little light remained in the western sky, visible over the vast flat expanse of the spaceport, and black clouds were rising to block it out.

Lightning flickered in those clouds and dust danced in tiny whirlwinds around Kriss’s feet as he crossed the road, now almost deserted. He gripped the mesh of the spaceport fence and leaned against it, his last tears for Mella dimming his view of the floodlit spaceships. At that moment, the dream they represented seemed just as blurred and indistinct.

He didn’t know how long he had been standing there, lost in memories and grief, when lightning split the sky, thunder cracked, and tiny drops of ice-cold rain spattered his cheek and the dusty pavement. In seconds the sprinkle became a downpour, and Kriss wrapped his arms around himself and dashed across the road and into an alley, pressing his body against the still-warm stone of a low building next to the police tower. Its bulk gave him some protection from the wind, but the cold drops still found him, as if to remind him he couldn’t sleep in the streets.

He shivered. However bleak Elcar said the prospects for a job were, it was either work for a living or not live. He looked down the alley, away from the spaceport. From somewhere down there, the wind carried shouts, raucous laughter, and a wild strain of music.

An inn, he thought. Only inns are open this time of night. And inns always need dishwashers, right?

At that moment, the thought of plunging his freezing hands into hot dishwater seemed downright seductive. He stepped away from the wall and let the icy wind at his back propel him into the heart of Cascata.