The Attaché issued counter terms, Timend counter-proposed, and they settled with Timend gaining a few concessions Kyllikki hadn’t expected, including the Baron’s demand to have Prosperity’s refugees picked up immediately and brought down for medical treatment.
Not long after that, the fleet dropped a swarm of smaller ships, tenders, Captain’s launches, and scouts, that shot on ahead of the fleet, querying the pods about their problems with a severe military efficiency. Then they assigned a pickup schedule. It would be another two days until Pod Fifteen could be met.
What surprised Kyllikki through all this was the way Idom sat and counted the Teleod fleet over and over as it came closer. The more ships he could distinguish on the poor resolution screen, the happier he seemed.
Kyllikki didn’t argue. The random happenings of the universe, the relationships of numbers and probabilities were Idom’s field, not hers. He had once tried to explain how he could trace probability waves by observing the manifestation of numbers. It only seemed like foretelling the future, he’d said, while actually it was just understanding the present, but she didn’t see what difference it made if the approaching fleet consisted of two hundred or two hundred seventy-three ships. It was the people on the ships that mattered.
“I agree completely,” Idom said when she put it to him. “I’d love to know how many people there are on those ships.”
“And I’d like to know who they are,” she countered.
That got his full attention. “Anyone high ranking enough to recognize you won’t be dealing with passenger ship refugees. We’ll keep a low profile and see what happens.”
“They may not recognize me personally, but few Teleod citizens are unable to recognize the Eight Families!”
“Humans are humans the galaxy over,” replied Idom serenely. “Speak, move, and dress like a working woman of the Metaji, and who could take you for an aristocrat of the Teleod? Even if you look somewhat like them?”
“The Teleod doesn’t have aristocrats. The Metaji is an Empire, the Teleod elects its leaders.”
“Politics! We both know what side you’re on.”
“I’m sorry. I guess the waiting is getting to me.” It was only a question of time, and she’d be back on a Teleod ship, under Teleod law. “I’m going to check on Zuchmul.”
She left Idom to his ship counting, and went aft to the bunks. Elias was lying in his bunk, curtain open. With one hand he tapped out a slow rhythm on the bulkhead while he whistled softly between his teeth. So far, he’d never offered to sing for them, but there was always music inside him, and sometimes it soaked through her barriers.
As she approached the stasis unit, he propped himself on his elbows. “Does it really need checking that often?”
“Probably not. There’s not much we could do if it fails, and nothing we can do to prevent it from failing. But somehow it makes me feel better.”
“I know what you mean. I feel guilty about what happened to him. If I’d stayed in the bunk, he’d be alive.”
“There’s no point to looking at it that way.” She turned to examine him, wondering again about where he was from. His accent certainly wasn’t Teleod, and his cultural assumptions didn’t seem to form a pattern either. But then she didn’t know much about the Metaji cultures. “If it would make you feel any better, talk to Idom about it. He could probably count the tools in that drawer that got loose, and the number of links in Zuchmul’s radiation suit, and explain why the accident was inevitable.” She gave a shrug and smiled.
He laughed. It was tense and a little rusty. None of them had laughed at all in days. But it was a real laugh.
She joined in with a chuckle. “All right, so I tease Idom. But what he really does do seems just that absurd to me. After all, numerical harmonics and probability resonances—accidents—aren’t my field. Astrogation, Guild style, is the creation and control of accidents; telepathy occurs on a level where the concept ‘number’ is not defined. Elias, Zuchmul wouldn’t hold you responsible, but Idom could tell you why you’re not.”
She bent over the stasis indicators. She leaned on the bubble that enclosed her luren friend, wondering if there was any hope for his revival. What would the occupation force do with a luren in stasis? She had to hold her breath against the tears. There was no time now for pain. Their lives were still in danger.
She didn’t hear Elias move, but his hands came onto her shoulders and he pulled her back against him...the only way he knew how to offer comfort. And for the first time since she had threatened him with mental invasion for his trouble, there was no tension in him, just warmth. She firmed up her barriers and tried not to resist, remembering how the Paitsmun crewman had criticized her for her unconscious mannerisms. They could give her away both as a telepath and as Eight Families. If she was going to be Kyllikki Abtrel, Metaji paramedic, she had to practice.
“That’s better,” said Elias, and his voice was a caress. “It won’t be too bad. If they catch you, they’ll just ship you home. Surely, that’s not so terrible a fate.”
She whirled in his arms. “I’d be better off dead!”
“You can’t really mean that?”
“I can, and I do. Doesn’t this war mean anything to you?”
“It does. Oh, it does. But,” he said, glancing at Zuchmul’s shadowy form, “you have friends here, you must have had friends at home. They’d be glad to see you. They’d help you. It must have been terrible, to leave all that.”
She studied his expression, wanting to thin her barriers and read the emotions that always whirled about him in glowing spirals. But it hardly took a telepath to feel the wistful yearning of an exile who lacked hope, nor the solid trust he had in her Metaji Communicator’s principles.
She put one hand on the stasis case. “I had friends, yes, and a lot of them might side with me now...if they saw any political advantage in it. But Zuchmul wouldn’t care what anybody else thought or did. He’d defend me anytime, anywhere, against anything. And I’d do the same for him. Elias, that couldn’t happen in the Teleod. Zuchmul is luren. Do you understand what that means?”
“But luren are human.”
“Here, yes. There, no, not quite human enough.”
“I see.”
“Do you? This war isn’t about enfranchising nonhumans or about protecting the firmament from permanent damage. It’s about power, and the abuse of power. In the Teleod, the reins of power are in the hands of the Eight Families, and right now that’s mostly just one person, my cousin Zimor, Lady of Laila. The Lady of Laila.”
“I thought you said the Teleod elects its rulers.”
“It does, but only members of the Families are eligible to be elected, and only wealth buys the right to vote. The Families control the great fortunes, which rest on the ebb and flow of trade. And all of their power rests on their control of the Pools, on control of ship movements. Destroy the Pool Operators, put the Pools into the hands of the proven impartiality of the Guides’ Guild, and even the Families’ telepathy couldn’t keep them in power. Anyone, even a Paitsmun, could amass great wealth, or even political power. And the nonhumans outnumber humans.”
His
