The Galaxy Game (29 page)

He spun and hastened away to the main entrance, off to warn people to make preparations for the newcomers.

*

After a few more days, the sight of new refugees arriving from Punartam was no longer remarkable. The hostel’s resources became strained. Rafi was put to work with other semi-permanent residents to erect quick-build shelters of rock and textile, and some of the pilots began to take the unusual step of regular sublight travel by sea, to bring in supplies with greater frequency and speed than could be managed via overground routes. The population in and around the Masuf Lagoon and Hostel, human and mindship, increased sharply and yet without incident. There was no challenge from the authorities. The Cygnian government appeared to be continuing its policy of turning a blind eye to mindship movements as long as they could gain benefit in the long term.

Rafi’s abused tech had been successfully repaired, but instead of rushing to use his comm to call his aunt, he put a cautious and non-revealing message of reassurance onto a fresh datacharm and asked one of the pilots bound for Grand Bay to deliver it to the Dllenahkh homestead.

He still went walking when he had time. It was a good excuse to be nearby when new people came up from the lagoon to take the path to the hostel’s main reception. He looked for familiar faces and found a few – old coaches and semi-pro players he had met at training or during a clandestine exchange of credit; research assistants, curators and technicians reluctantly and sorrowfully deserting their exhibits and projects; and several unaccompanied children sent by nervous parents to a safer environment.

It made him nervous as well. He had been caught up in Teruyai’s sudden flight, following without questioning, and only afterwards, when the mindship toxins had worn off, did he question whether it had been worth it. Now, looking at the faces of those who had waited to leave, he felt a strange chill. Perhaps, as a pilot and one already made rootless, Teruyai found it easy to cut losses and run; perhaps her experience with refugees from New Sadira had warned her how insidiously bonds could be tightened while a hopeful population waited to ride out a temporary crisis. Perhaps it was both, because when he asked her, she said, ‘Coming back is easy. Getting out is hard. Always do the hard thing as quickly as possible.’

There was nothing, however, to match the pang that struck him when weeks later he saw an unusually large group of pilots, senior coaches and academics escorting a familiar figure along the broadened path to the hostel.

‘Revered Patrona!’ he cried out.

She looked around immediately. Her face was tired, but she could not suppress a smile at the incorrect but sincerely meant address. ‘Rafidelarua, have you come to welcome me to your planet?’

‘Welcome, Patrona. I’m glad you’re safe. Who else is with you?’

‘Ixiaral and the Dean of Maenevastraya accompanied me. The Controller and Hanekivaryai have chosen to remain on Punartam to do what they can. Credit must not fail and commerce continues always! But I fear the Dean may return to try to mitigate Hanekitshalo’s nonsense.’

The Patrona moved on, pulled aside by one of the senior pilots for a conversation. Rafi remained where he was, momentarily bewildered by her final words. Oesten appeared at his side.

‘Didn’t you know?’ he said quietly to Rafi. ‘Tshalo’s in deep with the cartels. Anything for recognition and credit. He calls it “adjusting to the new realities of our galactic structures”. I could call it something shorter. I could call
him
something shorter, but how do you dishonour a name that never had much honour to begin with?’

Rafi listened and nodded, but then he saw a very distracting sight on the lower path. ‘Ixiaral! And Ntenman!’

Ntenman laughed and took a couple of running steps past Ixiaral. He slung a heavy bag over Rafi’s half-unwilling shoulder. ‘
And
Ntenman. I like your order of importance.
And
Ntenman indeed. Do you even care to let your friends know you’re still alive? Lazy, lazy Moo. Always waiting for the world to come to you. Well, here we are.’

‘Who is “we”?’ Rafi said, grimacing under the weight of the bag. ‘Welcome, Ixiaral!’

‘Thank you, Rafi. Come, walk along with us.’ She looked more than distracted; her gaze often flitted to the Patrona and her forehead was creased in a semi-permanent frown.

Rafi staggered along and looked meaningfully at Ntenman to get his explanations. ‘When did you get here? I was in the dining hall; I saw when it fell. Teruyai and Oestengeryok were with me and we got out immediately.’

Ntenman lowered his voice. ‘Then we left a Standard day after you did. I think Ixiaral wanted to leave earlier, but Syanrimwenil needed a bit of extra time to prepare for taking the Patrona and the Dean through transit.’ His expression grew sombre. ‘I had no idea. Is that the kind of training you go through?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He—
She
carried all four of us. She’s resting now at my padr’s estate. It was very hard on her.’

Rafi opened and shut his mouth, briefly speechless with worry. He tried to explain. ‘I’ve never done it. I’ve learned to be part of collective movement, like with a team on a Wall, but that’s with others who have some ability to either be a nexus or respond to a nexus. I can’t imagine doing it with people who don’t have that.’

A flash of self-loathing crossed Ntenman’s face. ‘I thought as much.
I
was the dead weight. Well, that’s yet another person I owe.’

Rafi frowned, recalling Syanri’s insights about his mother and his sister. ‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’

‘It isn’t,’ Ixiaral confirmed, focusing on them at last as they entered the main building. ‘It rests on the level of knowledge the nexus has of the passengers, and that made you no more dead weight than the Patrona.’

‘Thanks,’ Ntenman muttered, relieved but still sarcastic.

‘That was the purpose of the research at Maenevastraya, to simplify that knowledge for the nexus, or remove the need for it. Mindships carry most of the passenger information so that the pilots are free to navigate.’ Ixiaral looked around the crowded entrance hallway. ‘I did not realise there were so many people here.’

Rafi let the bag drop to the ground. ‘More and more every day. Are you all staying, or returning to Ntenman’s place?’

‘We’re going to Tlaxce City,’ Ntenman declared. ‘That’s where all the key players are assembling, Rafi. You should come with us.’

Rafi would willingly have gone anywhere, but – Tlaxce City? He badly wanted to see his mother and Gracie again, but going near the headquarters of the government that had caused him so much grief felt stupidly risky.

‘Or will you stay
here
,’ Ntenman asked, giving a slightly contemptuous stress to the final word.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Rafi decided.

Ixiaral’s frown vanished in one quick, magical second and she grinned at him. ‘Good. We have plans, and you can be part of them.’

*

The following day there was an open-air rally. The Patrona and the Dean had arrived with a purpose, and the Patrona gave detailed, passionate, eloquent speeches to a gathering that grew as the day wore on. The Transit Project – backers, consultants, researchers and guinea pigs – was set to regroup and relocate.

Rafi was quite sure the crowd included taSadiri from the neighbouring areas, some of whom were transmitting the Patrona’s words via their comms to other unseen audiences. Within a day or two, it would probably be included in the local network’s filtered content to the rest of Cygnus Beta. At the end of four hours, Rafi was exhausted and there was a definite ebb-and-flow of focus-challenged Cygnians at the fringes, but the Punarthai refugees and Sadiri pilots kept keen attention on the discussion, constantly asking questions and querying the answers given down to the smallest details of schedule and logistics.

The Patrona was cagey about one thing – the new location. ‘That remains to be seen,’ was all she would say even while requiring pledges of absolute loyalty and commitment from all who would participate. Yet no one pressed her. She was a powerful nexus and she had the charisma to draw in even the doubters with nothing more than a ‘perhaps’. Rafi watched her in fascination. He was no stranger to detecting compulsion, but this was something more refined. She seduced using blunt invitation and inspired with unpalatable facts. So much honesty should have gained her no followers, but by the end she had converted almost the entire hostel, turning refugees into volunteers.

‘If their guardians will allow, let the children come as well,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘We will need young, flexible minds for early training in these new modes of operation.’

At sundown, the Patrona and many other Punarthai appeared startled by the sudden onset of twilight, but it was decided to take it as a good time to stop talking and start preparing. Rafi went to the dormitories to pack up the few things he had acquired – clothes, utensils, a basic datareader – not to take with him, but to return to the communal pool of belongings. He could borrow something simple to wear from Ntenman, but everything else was non-essential. Teruyai came up to him as he was putting together a neat, small pile on his cot.

‘You are not coming with us?’ she asked, sitting down and making the thin pallet slope towards her, disturbing the structure of his pile.

‘I think I am,’ Rafi said, grabbing a mug that was trying to roll off the cot. ‘Just not the same route.’

She looked at him for a while as if hoping he had some inside information to share, but he remained focused on centring the pile on the cot’s thin blanket and tying the corners together into a rough bundle. When that was done, he met her gaze with a rueful expression.

‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve realised that I don’t plan my life very well. I dodge things and end up on a different path. I hop on passing cars. I follow my friends until I make other friends and follow them instead.’ He recognised it was starting to sound like an apology and stopped talking.

Teruyai took his admission of weakness in stride, probably expecting no less of a Cygnian. ‘Make good choices, Rafi, even if –
especially
if they are last-minute. We thought Sadira would always be there to come home to. We thought we had found a place on Punartam. Things happen, but if you still have friends to follow, that is a good thing.’

He should have thanked her then for dragging him out of that dining room and across several light-years of galaxy to safety, but there were too many things to do and too much to think about, and Ntenman had just appeared in the doorway waving his hands frantically. He excused himself quickly and ran to his friend.

‘The shuttle’s ready,’ Ntenman said. ‘If we leave now, we can get the next sub-orbital flight to Tlaxce City.’

*

We had returned! Not a Year – barely eight months of actually being on Punartam and almost three months’ thumb-twiddling in quarantine or comatose in transit. Speaking of which, interstellar transportation with proper passenger modules could not compare to small-group jaunts by naked mindship or remarkably gifted nexus for speed and sheer terror. I have so, so much respect for Revered Syanrimwenil. I should never have listened to those who labelled her a failed nexus. Punartam’s society had hardly been kind to me, so I should have had more sympathy.

She told me that in theory a perfect transit should be instantaneous, something which I cannot understand, far less explain, but it has something to do with living, conscious matter being able to access certain dimensions and bypass certain others in a way that purely inanimate matter cannot. Of course, it’s not as straightforward as that. A single person can’t stroll through a transit. There’s something about having a critical mass of sentience, which is how the mindships and their pilots do as well as they do. And the Wallrunning Brotherhoods, they were armies, trained to go through transits awake and alert by becoming a kind of temporary collective organism, and then carrying that shared consciousness into battle. They couldn’t bring much beyond themselves, but what weaponry they did bear was disruptive enough to cause galactic war and shut down all the transits for good . . . almost all . . . except for a few, rediscovered and used secretly by those of us who knew enough to coax through a few grams of rare cargo.

Bringing the four of us through the Haneki–Mwenil transit alive, intact and sane was a feat. I bow to Revered Syanrimwenil. I gushed about her to my padr before I left and made sure she was treated like the queen she is. She was tired – more than tired, slightly unanchored from this world, perhaps, sleeping often, dreaming with eyes open and slowly regaining control over her own body instead of, for example, trying to flex my fingers, turn Ixiaral’s head, blink the Patrona’s eyelids and twiddle the Dean’s toes.

Not that it was easy for us. We spent a day or two out of it ourselves, but at least when we were ready and able to stand unaided, the rest of the cargo had come in and the duplications were proceeding perfectly. I was impressed. The Academes had prepared for the worst, and that meant a swift transit of everything important in the only way that mattered – as information. We received duplication templates for several experimental transit systems, datachips galore, seeds and other things I could not recognise and they refused to identify. Ixiaral guided me in packing a bag with particular templates and datachips and then made me carry it as the junior of the group.

It took a lot of resources. We called in favours, made some unexpected alliances and became ridiculously busy at a time when all other galactic commerce to Cygnus Beta was grinding to a halt. My padr was torn between debilitating anxiety and equally paralysing pride when he realised that his cooperation would mean an immense drain on his financial credit but a skyrocketing of his social credit. But old habits remained and I heard him chuckle and mutter something about getting ahead of my mother and her present husbands . . . ahead by Punarthai reckoning, of course. I sighed and let him gloat. I had no ground to stand on. Wasn’t I the one who not too long ago had been desperate for a successful Year and recognition as an adult?