The Quiet Skies of Thetis (Conclusion) *** The scent of chilly mud and strange, sweet vegetation stood heavy in the air. There was a particular indolence to the night: the absence of a breeze, and a silence unlike anything Courtlan had ever felt. Azôrô, for its size, was quiet and utterly inhuman in the way it struck the senses. At first, Courtlan found the dominant architecture to be strange and inscrutable: industrial as he recognized such formations of brick and mortar or wood, glass, and metal, but alien in the manner in which decoration found expression in the shapes of cogs and fly-wheels and brutal, angular gargoyles, grotesques, and mythic creatures with serpentine bodies, bat-wings, and fish tails. The cluster-house—so rambling a complex of stonework and open gardens, enclosed courtyards and canals—was as alien as the city. It was a maze, a gardener’s intricate folly and a mad architect’s puzzle-box of shapes and sizes. It was a city within a city with foundries and factories, the place—Courland imagined—where the first colony of Thetis stood. Here, beneath vast umbrella-trees with faintly luminescent leaves, Courtlan stood with Leôš, muddy loam squeezing chilled and sticky moisture between his bare toes. Leôš, for his part, seemed not to notice the ground underfoot, seemed unconcerned with the possibility of small, biting things drawn to the intrusion of human flesh so flagrantly exposed, and so glaringly pale. Like Courtlan, he stood as pale as a ghost in vague, arboreal luminescence and the harder, yellower glow of lanterns adrift on silent, anti-gravity cushions. Thetis was a quiet and rustic world in many ways. Thetis was far from primitive. “This is one of the most important places on Thetis,” Leôš said. “You will speak to Halryn, and when you do, I think you will decide if you take his offer and become an oracle. I want to help you make this decision, and I hope that I can show you why you must say yes to his offer.” “It seems important to you that I say yes. How come?” “Because I love Halrys. I remember how he loved you. It is different between you now, but I know that each of you still loves the other; you are more than brothers, but not exactly husbands. This is how it should be. I also know that you are alone on Earth. You have family, yes…and this is good, but you are alone. Everyone is alone when they are far from the world that has room for them.” “There are people like me on Earth.” “But Halrys is here. There is a place for you here.” “And you want to…what…share me with him?” Leôš grinned. Low, rolling laughter shook from his throat. “You are very modern in the way you think! It is funny. But in truth, I already share him with you; I remember how you kissed him behind the ear on the night you first met by that lake. I remember how you looked when he left Spaceport-12. This haunts him, and it always will…but things are different now and things are good. I know these things, and I remember them as Halrys remembers them, because I am an oracle, and I remember everything else also.” “Everything else? About Halrys and me?” “Everything else,” Leôš said. “About everything else.” Confusion sparked through Courtlan and fluttered, moth-like through the corridors of his brain. Leôš spoke in strangely circular riddles, following—Courtlan thought—a straightforward line of logic as a Thetis-native might recognize it. “Here,” Leôš said, leading Courtlan—by the hand—through a gate and to the crest of a wall-encircled pond. He stooped low, bare toes digging into the mud. Courtlan stooped beside him. A gesture from Leôš, drew a floating lantern, and it hovered a bare meter overhead, obedient to the command flashed by Leôš’s harp-player’s fingers. Courtlan’s focus wasn’t on the lamp, however; it was on the ground, the muddy loam. Things lived at the edge of the pond: small armored creatures as large—Courtlan judged—as mice. There were a dozen or more that he could see, and doubtless thousands more surrounding the muddy, loamy cusp of still and murky water. He’d seen similar creatures on Earth—crustaceans and entertainment for children who touched them and made them roll into neat little armadillo spheres. It was odd, and oddly disturbing, to see alien things that recalled those mundane, garden-dwelling bugs. Was there a relation? Courtlan wondered. Were these the Thetis-adapted descendants of crustacean passengers on whatever Magellan ship dropped the first colonists here? “They are symbionts, and they bite,” Leôš said, nudging one of the mouse-big crustaceans with a finger. “But everyone on Thetis allows it, our oracles understand it, and use it for remembering. Only the females with young will ever bite, but they must be convinced to do so. It is important, Courtlan, that you learn what they are. These are what makes an oracle and you must not let them scare you. If you scare them, they will go away, and if they go away, you’ll be like everyone else…this is terrible. A man must have his own identity and his own role in life, and the Little Helpers make this possible.” Silence as Courtlan tried to understand the importance of this moment and the half-cryptic words Leôš felt compelled to speak. “I need time,” Courtlan said. “I need to understand what’s going on here.” Leôš rose to his feet. “Yes,” he said. “We can walk here if you want to, and then we can go back to the Grand Courtyard and find a table…we should drink something that is good for a night like this. Both moons are out, and they will shine into the Grand Coutyard; there are many good drinks for such an occasion, and I think you will enjoy a wine that you can only drink on Thetis. This is a good idea, yes?” Get good and drunk, eh? Courtlan thought, and then he shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a good idea.” *** “He likes you,” Halryn said, moments after a breakfast of some peppery fish-variant, fruit, and yogurt. It was, as Halryn called it, a fisherman’s meal and Leôš described how his mother made it, and how his father and his older brother favored the meal with sharp, astringent tea. The strange, purplish fruit, as Courtlan ate it, greeted his tongue and teeth with the succulence of a pear and a taste like something tinged with cinnamon and dill. He’d seen it, during his first tour of the city, growing bladder-like from floating fronds of something like kelp. Leôš had duties now—recitations as he’d called today’s professional burden, and Courtlan felt the slippery nature of the word. There was more to it than the ritual speaking that the word itself implied. He saw those hidden meanings embedded in the expression Leôš wore, mask-like, and in the small affections he shared with Halryn before departing. “He’s nice,” Courtlan said. “Most Thetis-natives are; they’re private to the point of being secretive, until you get to know them, and then, once you’ve become something more than an off-world tourist, they open up and show you a wealth of emotions that just don’t exist on the other Worlds. Thetis is a World, but not like the others…not like the Sol-System planets…not like Barnard-4, Centaura, or Sagittaria. If anything, Thetis has something more in common with 37.LMi-C, only it has a name rather than a catalogue number.” 37-LMi-C: one of the worlds near the constellation of Leo. A world, but not a World. It was a rim-planet: way out in the most hard-core region of the Frontier. Courtlan flinched at the thought, and the memory of staring at the constellation of Leo, as Halryn named the far-flung stars. 37-LMi, all but invisible on that night by the lake, belonged to the Lesser Lion…Leo Minor but it was a part of Halryn’s spoken dream. “Are you okay?” Halryn asked, snatching Courtlan’s mind back to the present and into the deep sunset colors of the Thetis sunrise. “I was just thinking.” “Good thoughts, I hope.” Courtlan smiled. “Us. By the lake, and us whenever you went to some job you didn’t really like. I used to look at you the same way that you looked at Leôš before he left today.” “Those were nice days,” Halryn said. “But you’ve got somebody else now—you have a whole new world.” Halryn smiled. “Yeah, but that doesn’t change anything about the past; there are things worth remembering, and even missing, even if there’s no need to have them back.” He reached forward and touched Courtlan’s fingers across the expanse of table-space and the debris of breakfast. He smiled. “You’re still beautiful. That’s good.” Remembering. The word struck Courtlan like a hammer-blow. He flinched, even as Halryn touched his fingers, warmly, and with the familiar sensual intimacy. “Remembering,” he said. “Leôš talked about remembering things you and I did.” Halryn smiled. “He’s an oracle. He has a Little Helper.” A twinge of fear danced the length of Courtlan’s spine; he’d seen the Little Helpers with their multitudes of legs and neat, overlapping plates of pearlescent armor. They were little loam-dwelling monsters, alien. *** “Memory is a different thing on Thetis,” Halryn said, after lunch at a small dock-side café. Lunch was fresh: caught by the wiry, sun-browned fishermen who unloaded catch after catch at the docks across the street. He walked—in his dark, oracle’s robes—beside Courtlan. He’d found a park and led Courtlan along meandering foot-paths carved through whole, lush swaths of blue and violet growth. Azôrô City was loud with traffic and dopplar-shifting conversations: snipes and snatches of random talk and laugher in a language Courtlan could scarcely understand. Even here, in the quiet park, he could hear hints and whispers of what had once been English, or maybe Spanish, Russian, German, or Yiddish. His ears rankled at the sounds of local words and local meanings as alien and as specific as the two large moons he’d seen last night…as local and as specific as the double-tides inspired by two massive orbital bodies. Mars had two moons, as did Sagittaria-Prime, but those worlds were different. The moons of Mars were tiny: little more than bloated, hazy dots in the night. Sagittaria-Prime held a single, massive moon and a dusty speck no more significant than a punctuation mark at the end of an unimportant sentence. They spoke Anglo-Standard on Mars and on Sagittaria-Prime. They spoke a different language here, with different meanings. “The sky,” Halryn said, glancing up. “It’s always so quiet at this time of year.” Outsiders aren’t allowed on Thetis during a particular span of the local year. Everyone knew that…and yet, Courtlan was here, as the guest of an oracle. “A home is always quiet when no one comes to visit.” Courtlan thought of his own small apartment, back there, on Earth, on the long, grimy stretch of Inner Sheridan Road. It was always quiet—more-so than the skies of Thetis today. Halryn paused, frozen in place and eyes locked forward. A local family approached, a husband, a wife, two children: a boy and a girl. They were lean people, as elfin in physical shape as Leôš; they wore bright, loose-fitting garments: long tunics, baggy pants, and sandals. They paused in their own forward journey, eyes locked on Halryn—and with some apparent alarm—on Courtlan at his side. Halryn nodded, and something passed between them: speech without words. Courtlan saw them relax, saw the father’s hand slip from the daughter’s shoulder. Walking resumed after nods and smiles of acknowledgement. Halryn laughed as the local family passed. “Normally the children would beg to touch my neck, or maybe ask for a remembrance.” Halryn laughed again. “Kids always ask if you know an uncle or a cousin…little boys always ask if you remember what kinds of carriages they drive on Earth. They all know I’m from Earth—the man from another planet. They always want to know what I drove or what I ate on my favorite holiday. They always want to know if they’ll remember that too, if they take a Little Helper. It doesn’t really work like that though. Helpers only give you what they’ve been exposed to.” And it was there again: that strange logic with gaps of assumption in it. “What happens when you take a Little Helper?” Courtlan asked. “You become a composite being. It attaches itself to your spine, but once a year it goes reproductive and sticks its genitals out of your neck. Your neck gets all itchy for a day and you have to call your boss at work and take a sick day, because your Little Helper is busy looking for a mate. The males of the species are one of those examples of coincidental biology that shouldn’t exist; they’re compatible with human beings, as well as various breeds of local, aquatic creatures. We help them by widening their reproductive range, and giving them a nice, cozy home, free of predators that find them tasty; they derive nutrients from our blood, just as any of our native internal organs might…and in return, they give us an unexpected sort of neurological enhancement.” Courtlan flinched. “Yeah, it sounds a bit creepy…having an occasionally-horny alien guy stuck to the top of your spine, but it’s not so bad; you get something from it. The little critter grows a kind of nerve-fiber network through your brain and has access to your memories. That same nerve network starts to grow through your entire nervous system, and if you touch someone with a Little Helper in his or her neck, your Little Helpers react…they interact and those fibers they’ve grown through your entire body start to fill with fluid. It breaks through your skin, like sweat, and is absorbed by anyone you touch. If they have a Little Helper, their own pseudo-nerve network absorbs the fluid, siphons it into the Little Helper, and eventually into their own brain—there’s all kinds of complicated biochemistry going on in the process, and in god’s honest truth, I only know the functional basics of it, but it’s an intense experience to suddenly remember something you’ve never experienced.” Courtlan flinched again. “There’s a bug in your neck?” Halryn smiled. “Just under the skin…pretty deep actually. Not a wild one like you’d find anywhere on the islands, but a specially-bred little guy. His mom lives in the pond Leôš took you to. The whole population of that pond—and a few others—carry the chemical-analog memories of nearly every person on this planet, and the memories of at least ten people from the other Worlds. I’m one of them. Leôš is another, though he was born here. We’re oracles because we know how to manipulate our own memories…we can select which ones get siphoned into others, and we can give advice by simply remembering what we did in a situation or another.” “And this is what you want me to do? You want me to put an alien bug in the back of my neck?” “I want you to know what it’s like to fit in somewhere…to know what it’s like to have a whole planetary society that wants you around, that wants what you have to offer. I think a little, sometime-rude symbiont is a fine price to pay for that.” “Rude?” “When he’s ready to mate, he’s gonna be a persistent little bugger…and he’s going to want to mate just as you’ve decided that you want to do something other than let a receptive female wander around on your shoulders and back until she’s found your companion’s mating appendage…and the thing is, she’s gonna take her own sweet time while both you and your own little symbiont scream for her to hurry up!” “Charming.” “It’s laughable. You should hear Leôš…he’s got quite a mouth on him…makes you cringe just knowing that he’s kissed his mom with it.” Silence. Bird things chattered in the ornamental shrubbery and in the indigo things that might have been trees for their size. They were strange and gnarled shapes, their foliage like the unfurled caps of shaggy, patchwork mushrooms. Their trunks, Courtlan saw, were gnarled, intertwined vines in the colors of ash and rusted lichen. “Look,” Halryn said. “I know this is a lot to deal with, but just consider it. Honestly. Just think about it.” Curtlan nodded. “I will, but it’s scary.” Halryn nodded in turn. “I know. But you’ve somebody by your side. You’ve got me. You’ve got Leôš…and who knows, if you do this, you might find a nice fisherman’s son and decide to set up a love nest in a nice little houseboat off the eastern edge of Pahur.” “I could do that on Earth.” “Earth’s old and worn out; Thetis has Pahur, and all of the good looking guys there run around in nothing but skimpy shorts. “Is Leôš from Pahur?” Halryn laughed. “Have you seen Leôš with his shirt off? He couldn’t even hold a tan if you carbon-bonded it to him. No, he’s from Uralsk, up north of the glacier line; his idea of a nice summer home is an igloo on an ice floe.” “They have Little Helpers up there?” “Cold adapted ones, yeah…fuzzy little buggers with antifreeze for blood. Honestly. The males still attach themselves to a host, but not to the spine. They go for the warm spots: armpits and crotches, stomachs…places like that. They’re just hitchhikers, really…decent enough as pets, and—in a pinch—as boosters, but that’s about it.” “Boosters?” “Yeah. They sting and pump you full of venom; it’s poisonous to native life forms, kills ‘em in minutes flat. In humans it’s pretty much like a jolt of caffeine with a little bit of adrenaline thrown in to make things interesting. Leôš swears by the stuff, says it’s why northern fishermen work so hard. It’s funny, he totally ignores the fact that it’s frikkin’ cold up there and hard work’s the only way to stay warm when you’re not all snuggled up indoors.” Courtlan shook his head. “Strange world,” he said. “Yeah,” Halryn agreed. “It is. But you’ll like it, if you agree to stay.” *** He dreamed of alien bugs for four nights straight. He’d spent three days with Leôš and with Halryn: going to a concert, an informal dance, and to the birthday celebration for one of Leôš’ cousins. At the celebration, he watched as alpine-pale cousins and family friends insisted on drinking clear, fiery liquor with Leôš and with Halryn and with him as well. He endured endless questions about Earth and about himself, and watched—amazed—as Leôš told jokes by jumbling memories, sweating them out of the palms of his hands, and rubbing those nonsense-jumbled memories across the back of one neck or another. It was a disquieting thing to see, at first: nightmarish and alien. Utterly inhuman: but there was a kind of poignant beauty to it as well, something to tug at Courtlan’s own submerged desires. He felt something stirring inside of him: envy, he realized, at the ease with which these alien-humans knew so much about one another and found humor in a language he couldn’t begin to understand. “We’re like insects”—Halryn said—“talking with chemicals that ooze out of our skin.” “We?” Courtlan asked. Halryn nodded. “I don’t belong on Earth. I was born there, and my blood family is there, but Thetis is my home. Leôš is my husband, and these are my people.” “Because of a bug in your neck?” Halryn nodded. “Yeah. But it’s more than that, Courtlan—way more than that. For nearly three centuries, these people were cut off from the rest of humanity. Leôš’ still-living grandparents were children when the first FTL ships stumbled across this little mote of human culture. They knew where they originally came from, and for nearly three centuries, had no way to even talk to other human beings if they weren’t born on Thetis. The very name of their planet speaks of a history they couldn’t touch, or see for themselves, and so they know deep down in their cultural soul what it means to be isolated and lonely; they know how important it is to fit in, and have a common language of experience, of memory, of caring. For the longest time, they cared for themselves, but had no one else to care for them…and look what it’s done, Courtlan…look what it’s done for them and to them…it’s made them more human than anyone else on any of the Worlds…it’s made them appreciate outsider humans like me.” He smiled and brushed a caress across Courtlan’s cheek, and then followed it with a friendly, chaste kiss. “And like you.” Now, after three nights of bug-infested dreams, Courtlan listened to the echo of Halryn’s words, and climbed from bed. He left the confines of the guest room and stepped into the suite separating his room from Halryn’s and Leôš’ dark and private place. He heard them, as he padded to the balcony overlooking the Grand Courtyard, and he recognized the sounds of amorous exertion—something utterly noisless from out here, but unmistakable in the brief, ardent cry of entreaty and offering that must have come from Leôš. He knew the pitch of Halryn’s voice and remembered the muffled whispers that were Halryn’s own language of impassioned intimacy. The night’s single, errant sound of rapture was in a different language all together. He laughed, quietly and to himself. He’d spent nights and more nights on Earth, in a tiny, cheap apartment, remembering the past and feeling lonely in the present. Now, in the present and on another planet, he heard a sound that would have thrown him into a jealous rage on Earth. But Thetis was a different planet: far, far away, and by Leôš’s own words and by Halryn’s he belonged here…if not in this room, then at least on this world. The courtyard was silent and dark. The sky was clear and splattered with starlight, and the light of both moons. He saw them. They were large moons, the size of Earth’s Luna, and larger. He didn’t recognize their mountains and their dusty, waterless seas, but he knew that there were people on both of them: small, underground cities filled with people who spoke like insects, because of bugs in their necks. Stay on Thetis. Become an oracle. The echo of Halry’s voice meandered through Courtlan’s thoughts. We will help you, Leôš said, nights after Halrys made his proposition. Stay on Thetis. Stay. This time—at this exact instant—it was not Halrys telling him to stay, nor was it Leôš; the voice—more a feeling than anything else—was his own. He closed his eyes and thought of the possibility. Stay. Stay here. On Thetis. Courtlan opened his eyes, drew a deep breath, let it out quietly, and stood motionless on the balcony—his hands on the ornate iron railing—and listened to the silence of the sky. THE END As always, thank you for reading and commenting. I hope you've enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing it, and yeah, there will be future visits to Thetis and the other Worlds.