What We Are Seeking

by Cameron Reed

Genres: Space Exploration

Synopsis

From Cameron Reed, the acclaimed author of The Fortunate Fall, comes a soaring novel of queer hope and transformation, perfect for readers of Ann Leckie and Amal El-Mohtar.

On the planet Scythia, plants give birth to insects and trees can drag you to your death. Artificial monsters stalk the desert, and alien basket-men have wandered into town.

John Maraintha has been abandoned here, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves.

The desert is harsh and the people in thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage.

He must find some way to make a life here.

But on Scythia, survival means transformation—and not everyone is willing to change.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 7, 2026

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter One

On the Free Ship Edgar’s Folly, traveling away from Essius at ninety-­nine one hundredths of the speed of light, it was the last day of summer.

Tomorrow the ship’s engines would begin to sing, and everything that floated now would fall. The aft walls would become floors. Corridors would be converted back to elevator shafts, and where now the ship-­ folk glided freely back and forward through the air, they would be carried down and up in closed chambers. The informality of summer would give way to rank and hierarchy, bright clothes would be exchanged for uniforms; and on the old bridge, after the harvest feast, the summer captain would be laid to rest beneath the stars.

Winter was coming early, and it would be a hard one: brief days at the gravity of lost Earth, long nights at twice as much. A message had come in, that was what everyone said; the ship would slow down just enough to send rescue. It was, they said, unprecedented. But if the sudden change of seasons had unsettled them, they were too busy to let it show. In one day the life of the ship, which had expanded into three dimensions in the summer, had to be compressed back into two. The toolbox fastened by a thin strip of elastic to a wall, the winter cookware webbed into a forward corner, the fish tank held by magnets to what soon would be a ceiling, each had to find a place where winter’s gravity would let it rest. And, from all the hidden spaces of the ship where they were kept, the parts of beds were being brought out: beams of metal and planks of wood, and what the ship called mattresses—which did not mean cloth made fat with moss or windweed silk, but great deflated bladders to

be filled with water as a cushion against gravity. The comfort of beds was an intense preoccupation with them, for those who stayed awake in summer felt the winter in their bones.

John Maraintha, who had been summoned to attend the captain and did not know why, kept to the edges and moved slowly. He had thought the ship’s ventral corridor, being widest, would be his easiest way to the old bridge, but now he realized his mistake: this was tomorrow’s cargo elevator, and everything unwieldy had to come through here. Up and down the shaft as far as he could see, ship-­folk guiding or towing their burdens launched themselves on long diagonals, missing each other by instinct and the imperceptible communication of the space-born. They could all see each other’s next move in the set of a hand on a guide track, the tension in a leg or shoulder. John, not fluent in that language, could only try to make his path predictable. He clutched his bag tight, wondering if he should have left it behind. Nothing could make it practical in summer—­it would not hang from his shoulder properly, and he had to bind it to him with a piece of borrowed netting, making a cumbersome mass above his hip. But he might need the medicines contained in it, and anyway he liked to keep it with him, the only thing he had from home that mattered. The bag’s body was only waxed canvas, but the strap was a length of his great-­uncle’s soul.

At the corridor’s end the traffic thinned, and through the fore-most door he came into the last mess—­which meant, the dining hall where everybody either ate or wished to eat. This level was not subdivided into rooms, so he could see how the outer wall curved in a full circle, as if the whole ship were a series of hollows carved into the trunk of some ancient tree. A ring of dim lights picked out tables and chairs snapped

together in stacks and bolted to the floor, and the glass cases in which plants were reared, piled up in staggered courses like a brick wall.

A round hole in tomorrow’s ceiling opened onto the old bridge: another undivided level, slightly smaller, capped by a glass dome that had once been full of stars. Over the winter the star field had contracted to a crowded circle at the center, and in summer it remained that way; this was a custom, but the purpose of it was obscure. Before the disc, like a long dark shadow, the captain floated. He was facing the dome, looking outward.

“Captain, you wanted to see me? Is it your knees again, sir?”

“Dr. Maraintha, you made it in one piece. No, this isn’t a medical appointment. Come join me.”

The captain turned, still hanging unconnected in the air, without needing to touch the dome behind him. John could reorient himself without a handhold if he had to, awkwardly, bending his legs and throwing out his arms, but he could never have turned like that—­as neatly as a bird-­ worm, hanging from a single thread of silk, twists to wrap itself up in another. The captain in his native season had a perfect grace. He had been conceived at the beginning of a long summer, carried and borne in weightlessness. Such infants made their landfall into air looking the same as any, but

their hearts could not bear winter and their bones would break in it.

As a boy the captain had rebelled against the painful therapies and poisons that might have let him walk on worlds. As a man he was exceptionally slender of both leg and arm, since his muscles never had to fight against the pull of gravity, only to nudge and guide and to adjust his course. He had the kind of skin so pale the blood shows through and gives a pinkish cast, and that too seemed a kind of frailty—­though one would never have thought such a thing of his sister, in whom the same complexion suggested instead the endurance of bone. Nothing else distinguished him. He wore plain clothing in the clear bright dyes that everybody wore in summer, kept his hair in the usual short summer cut; he spoke as they did. And when he came into a room where ship-­folk hung at every angle, all of them aligned to point their heads the same direction as his—­like sleepwell flowers rising up to greet the sun.

John hung back, holding the edge of the aperture. He knew he shouldn’t keep the captain waiting, but the dome of night deterred him. It was only an illusion, like a television screen; he couldn’t really break through and be lost among the stars. But the smooth glass afforded no handholds. If he launched himself toward it he would undoubtedly bounce off.

The captain looked impatient for a moment; then understanding the problem, he beckoned. “Sail on over. I’ll catch you.”

John thought he should arrive in parallel with the captain, not hurtle headfirst toward him, so he lined himself up carefully and pushed off with both hands. The captain watched his slow approach and then moved with unhurried precision. One hand pressed flat against John’s center—­just below the navel and a little to the right, because the bag made his mass asymmetrical. The other touched the dome behind the captain’s back to cancel his momentum. A brush of fingertips against his thigh and then his collarbone corrected a barely perceptible spin. John was left becalmed a little closer to the captain than he would have put himself, assuming the conversation to be only about daytime matters. Maybe, he thought, the captain just wanted to ask for a visit before his long sleep. He had thought he saw an interest on the captain’s face before—­ when he first came to the ship, in that hybrid season when winter went down to the world and summer reigned above. His clumsiness in free fall at that time could not have been appealing, especially to one as delicate as the captain, and awe had rendered him too shy to make an approach himself. The moment had passed and nothing had come of it. But maybe the captain had only been throwing back the little fish till it had grown. Suspended at this intimate distance, and still aware of all the places that the captain’s hand had touched, John would certainly not have refused.

“Have you been here before?” the captain asked.

“A few times, yes. In winter.”

“Oh, well you’ll excuse me if I don’t remember.”

He had first come up with several of the younger crew from Medical, who invited him

, he thought, because to him their stories were new and the exaggerations in them undetectable. In that season the floor had been filled in with soil and carpeted with little hairlike leaves, pleasant to sit on; the stars above were still flung wide. Matthew Bray, who had lured them out in nighttime gravity by brandishing two bottles of a ship-­ made liquor known as reflux, led them to the dorsal side, where the summer captain lay in a long vat of steel. This device, essential to cold-­ sleep, was known as a coffin, in reference to the custom of putting the dead in close prisons and hiding them under the ground; thankfully, having no soil deep enough for a burial, the ship-folk themselves did not practice this horror. As the others settled in a ragged ring nearby, Bray poured a little of the reflux out into a cup and set it on top of the coffin. Nothing was said about this. When the drink and the stories were used up, and one by one they were all levering themselves up off the ground to go, he took back the glass and drained it with a quick apologetic shrug.

Now, in summer, the captain glanced down at the floor where his body would soon lie again. “My great-­ great-­grandfather thought captains would like to hold a kind of court up here all day. Receive petitions, give commands . . . tell everyone their jobs, as if they don’t already know them. Sounds tedious, don’t you think? It’s better as a park. But I still use it for its original purpose now and then.”

John began to be seriously alarmed. Since he lacked a shipboard education and was not one of the crew, his responsibilities were limited. The captain had once hoped that Essian medicine might hold an answer to his chronic aches—­the legacy of the attempt to make him able to stand gravity—­and that had put them in each other’s company for a time. Now John treated routine injuries and illnesses among the crew, helped with awakenings from cold-­sleep when the seasons turned, sometimes advised the Folly’s scientists on the uses of Essian herbs they were testing for possible ship use. None of that should come to the attention of the captain unless something had gone very wrong. John tried to think of what he might have done. But the captain was speaking again.

“You’ve probably heard, we’ve unfrozen a translator.”

“The Dharanendran? I heard of the awakening. I hadn’t realized his profession.”

“What, is the rumor mill out of service? You must at least know why I’ve called down winter—­ that colonists on Scythia have found some animal they’re afraid may be intelligent.”

“That much, yes. Though I had not heard of that world.”

“No one has, it’s new. Making new colonies has become a popular hobby for some of the Free Ships lately—­ which is to say, in the last ninety years or so. And for most of that time, Dharanendra has been sending out translators, frozen in storage on any ship that would allow them coffin-­space. They’re friendly with the aliens on their world, and it’s given them a mania for finding more species to talk to. Ours might be the first to have a chance at it. But to the point: these Dharanendrans have developed an unusual technique for learning languages. It’s arduous and can be fatal if something goes wrong. So Mr. Jain needs assurance of medical support when he arrives. And, it happens, Scythia tells us in their message that they’re dangerously short of doctors: down to one, in fact.”

“One? For how many people?”

“Around four hundred, when they called to us. No doubt it’s more by now.”

It was disquieting. If life was safe on Scythia and the soil bore nothing poisonous, then possibly one doctor could maintain the health of hundreds, but the colonists’ security would be balanced on a knife’s edge: all practical knowledge of medicine could be ended by the silence of a single heart.

“So naturally,” the captain said, “I thought of you.”

“Of me? But any other doctor on the ship would be more qualified.”

“For maladies of summer and of winter, sure. None of them has been a doctor on the ground.”

That was true but it could hardly help him, on a new world, to know that chainflower counteracted the effects of post-­ hole gnarl, or that the root of fretting marisol was sovereign for hepatitis. He supposed that to the captain, whose infirmities made him unable to descend to them, planets were no more than hazily imagined wells from which resources were drawn up in buckets. They must merge in his mind into one floating raft of world-­stuff, all conjoined at the equators, likely to share the same cuisine and a single flora.

In any case, it was impossible. When the captain offered him the chance to travel with the ship, he had accepted knowing he would not return home for a century or more. That was a small price to pay for the solution to an otherwise inexorable problem: that a man without sisters or ancestors could hope for little out of life. He had expected to come back only twenty or thirty years older—­because the engines, through their labors, compressed time; a week at home could slip past in a single summer day. If he used cold-sleep, he might age as little as a decade. And then it wouldn’t matter anymore that his family was gone, his name burned and his ancestors lost. As one of the few Essians to go to space, he would be eagerly adopted by some venerable house. Everyone that he had ever known would then be dead. And yet stonebirds would still dive for fish, springbacks leap for flies. Fringe-flower would still shiver in the spring. The Umber River and the Boy would laugh their different laughs, and all the proper ways would be observed. He could endure the strangeness of the ship and its sterility because he knew he would someday return to a world that made sense. But if he let the captain send him down to Scythia, then there would be no coming back.

None of this was speakable. To the captain his insistence on returning home, if rooted only in the longing of his heart, would seem both petulant and trivial. The ship-­ folk thought in terms of loyalties and duties, which were never to a family but to something larger, if not altogether abstract. In order to refuse politely he would have to cite a countervailing loyalty of his own. And so he said, choosing his words carefully:

“I am honored that you thought of me. But I came here to benefit Essius as well as the ship. My people expect me to return to share the knowledge that I gain here—”

“We will make good their losses.”

John understood that he was no more to the captain than an entry on a balance sheet. The ship-­ folk had been friendly to him for the most part; he liked many of them casually and cared for some quite tenderly. Yet he saw in them, at times, this cold and animal calculation—­as if the stalked eyes of a lock-­spider flicked back and forth at you out of the mouth of its burrow.

“The people are Ischnuran and Zandahean,” the captain said. “They won’t understand each other, so the official language is ships’ English—you’ll have no trouble there.”

A chill spread out along his spine. “But—­those are marrying people.”

“Well, yes.” The captain’s voice was gentle and amused. “Every world has marriage except yours. We have it too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

He knew that, of course; it disturbed him and he tried not to think about it. But there was no comparison. “You keep some of the forms of marriage, yes, but many of you never marry. You divorce easily and often. Even those who are in marriages often don’t consider themselves bound to strict monogamy—­at least that is my experience.”

“From anybody else I’d take that as an insult.” John wanted to protest that it was meant as praise, but the captain’s raised hand stopped him. “Yes, all right, I see your point, they’re more intense about it on the ground. But—­look—­you can’t take what people claim they do or what is in some holy book too seriously. On every world there is, a man has opportunities. I don’t think you’ll be left shooting it into a drink bag.”

That was not the point at all. But ship-­folk never understood.

The captain frowned, struck by a thought. “Homophobic, the Zandaheans. Ischnurans too in their way, I suppose. But you’re adaptable, you’ll be all right.—­You know, when I give someone an assignment, this isn’t how the conversation usually goes.”

John understood that he was not being given a choice.

“It’s a beautiful world,” the captain said, and now his voice was kind. “A little eccentric in its flora and fauna, otherwise it’s the most Earthlike ever found. Green like Earth, too . . . Earth as it was. That’s the color our eyes were made for, so they say.”

John thought if he refused outright the captain would insist. His only hope was to get out of this room without agreeing and then find somebody who could intercede for him. The captain liked to have control, but disliked being seen to use it; he wanted to be everybody’s friend. He would probably accept delay if he thought it would lead to consent. And he listened to his favorites. Elodie perhaps—­she was still smiled on as far as John knew. He could not like the idea of asking a lover for help; it would damage a connection that he valued and taint some pleasant memories with the odor of an exchange. But she was his best chance, so he would do it.

“This is so sudden, I hardly know what to say. May I take some time?”

“Yes, of course.” The captain sounded surprised, and for a moment John hoped he had misunderstood and could, after all, simply say no. But the captain continued: “Just because I’ll go into cold-­sleep as soon as I can doesn’t mean you have to. Take a few days, or a month if you want, build up some winter muscle first—­that’s wise.” He cupped John’s shoulder briefly. “Good! Then you’ll dine at my table tomorrow night. That’s tradition, when someone is leaving us. I’m giving a speech, but it’s short, and the food is worth it.”

“Yes, I will be there.” John didn’t trust himself to say more. He could still try to find help. There might still be a chance.

The captain studied his face, looking disappointed. He had not quite gotten what he wanted from the conversation, John thought; but no matter, it hardly troubled him. “Tomorrow, then.” He laid his hand against John’s center and pushed.

As John fell slowly toward the last mess, the captain moved again. His elegance was still breathtaking. He was turning back to the stars.

 

Chapter Two

The dome of the old bridge was blue and bright, and clouds moved through it swiftly, suggesting a wind that was not felt below. Long tables in rows filled the round floor, each one garnished with a centerpiece of living plants. The ship-­folk liked to surround themselves with flowers at the beginning and the end of winter, but there had been no time to bring valerian or aster into bloom. They were making do with a display of greenery, alleviated by the sweet yellow of squash blossoms and the sharp yellow of mustard flowers.

One table stood alone, raised on a dais. The way up was eight shallow steps, provided with a handrail that John leaned on heavily. He found his name marked on a little card that had been folded down the middle so it stood up on its edges, and settled into his chair with relief. Ships’ medicine could help his body readapt to winter, but no pill existed that could make his brain remember how to set his foot down in the right place on the floor. Then, too, he had overtired his weakened muscles by going about the ship, trying in vain to find help, even when winter had settled down onto his shoulders. He would have saved himself considerable trouble if he had listened to Elodie, who had gently made it clear that neither she nor anybody else could intercede for him. The summer captain had made his decision, he would never change his mind, and not being a member of the crew, John had no right to refuse. She had been sad, but not outraged. It was just how the ship worked.

Stately and pale, the captain ascended the stairs to the dais. There was winter in her step and in the straightness of her spine and in her gaze too, the deep blue of a winter sky. She wore a long black dress, embroidered with silver at neckline and shoulders and wrists. The vine-­and-­moons motif showed that the work was Essian and of an earlier era, though surely no Essian foremother had chosen a color and cut so severe: it had been made for her. Her iron-­gray hair was down and she was smiling.

“Dr. Maraintha,” she said as she sat at the head of the table. “How is your packing coming along?”

Her tone was warm and bright, as if she thought that he was leaving on some long-­awaited trip and must be counting down the days. There was no use in contradicting this unspoken lie. So he answered her, honestly, that he would do it all the night before he went into his coffin; he had little to pack, just his bag and a few clothes. She told him he should get a winter coat out of the landing supply room; also a pair of good boots, since a new world might not have a cobbler yet; and he must tell the clerk she said he could choose what he wanted, so that they wouldn’t try to give him the worst they had. She continued at some length about what supplies he ought to take, where on the ship he could obtain them, which items would weather the trip best if frozen in the coffin with him and which ones should be kept out of it—­all useful knowledge that deserved his full attention and did not receive it. He was too exhausted, and he didn’t see that it would make much difference to his future to be exiled with one warm coat more or less.

As she was speaking, the lieutenants who were chiefs of the two watches of her night arrived and took their places at her sides. As befitted their positions, both were strong and solid women, but Lieutenant Noor was also very tall, a striking figure even by the standards of winter-­ night. In his first months on the ship he had been taken by the way her muscles filled out her black uniform, by the bare nape of her neck and the curve of her skull under shorn hair, and had wondered if she might welcome a visit, but been warned off on the grounds that “both of the chiefs only like their own kind.” It was not clear whether this meant women or night-­watchers, but since neither answer held out any hope for him, he had not pursued the question.

A man came up to the table and walked around it, looking for his designated seat. He was young—­no older than John, perhaps not even quite as old. His movements were graceful and gave an impression of great calm. His skin was of a brown as rich as finished camberwood, as golden in its highlights; his hair and eyebrows were deep black and full. Undoubtedly this was the translator. He couldn’t be one of the crew; John would not have failed to notice a man who looked like that aboard the ship.

John had scarcely known what to imagine a Dharanendran translator doing with his time—­whether pushing through pathless forests to discover uncontacted cities, poring over ancient documents in curious scripts, or conveying offers and demands in some interminable meeting. This man’s appearance suggested the scholar more than the adventurer; though there was some promise of strength in his shoulders and arms, his face and his hands were not weathered, but looked very soft. Perhaps his clothes favored the diplomat: they were close-­ fitting and had a carefully tailored look, and the fabric was fine and smooth, in the color of a milk-nut lightly toasted. The standing collar, high but deeply cleft, revealed the perfect hollow of his throat.

He found his place, at John’s right. He sat down and his eyes—­deep brown and large—­met John’s, just for a moment. He might have been about to speak. Then the winter captain greeted him, and so he had to look at her. John stole a glance at the card in front of him to see his name: Sudharma Jain.

“Maybe you can explain something I’ve often wondered about,” the captain said. “Half the planets we visit speak languages that were once English, but some of them are mostly comprehensible, and some might as well be Mandarin. Why would English deteriorate faster on some worlds than others?”

“That is a very complicated question, and if there were two linguists here instead of one, you might have started a fight by asking it. In some places innovation simply runs faster than others, for no reason we can work out. One of the factors we do know about is relativity: time moves slower on the ships, and so from our perspective on the ground, your language changes more slowly too. But language is always changing, even on the Folly. The silent n in words like ‘dance’ and ‘intense’ used to be pronounced, and on Essius, for example, it still is.”

“Now that you mention it, I remember my grandfather saying ‘sense’ that way when I was a child. I believe I thought his mouth was too old to work properly.”

The captain looked down toward the middle of the room, and John followed her gaze. The round platform by which people came to the old bridge in winter was rising up into the floor, and the summer captain was rising with it, seated in a wooden chair borne by a man of winter-­night. It was no wonder that the captain was no burden for a man who worked in double gravity: he looked painfully thin, as if winter had withered him. His fingers curled around the ends of the armrests, his spine hunched forward, his legs and feet hung limply. He must have been in pain, but his face revealed it only slightly; he was either medicated, or else by sheer determination refusing to let anguish show.

The night-­ watcher climbed up the steps to the dais and set him down, chair and all, in the last empty place at the foot of the table. He said a collective good-­evening to all those assembled, giving no special regard to his sister. She looked only at him, and there was a vast disapproval in her eyes.

A girl in winter uniform came to stand at his side, holding a metal capsule on a stalk—­a microphone. “Are we ready?” he asked. The girl nodded, so he put his palms on the edge of the table and pushed himself up from his chair. John held his breath. He had listened to a speech like this from a lower mess when the ship left Essius, and he had heard the strain in summer’s voice, but he had never imagined him standing. It was by no means advisable, and he must have fortified himself with powerful drugs to make it even possible. He was leaning heavily on one hand; his back was still painfully curved, and the blood-­ tint was gone from his face. With a sharp intake of breath, he managed to turn toward the crowd. When the girl holding the microphone had moved it near his mouth, he began.

“We meet under the sky our ancestors saw—­and in the gravity that they endured—­to mark another change of seasons….”

John didn’t listen, just waited and hoped the ordeal would be over quickly. This custom of the speech was sordid; it had an air of ritual humiliation, as if, to justify the change in government, winter had to prove that summer was unable to survive her season. The cruelty of it bothered him, even now that he had every reason to wish the man harm. It was strange, he thought, how empathy continued even when the need for it had passed. His heart flinched from the spectacle of pain by a mechanical reflex, as the mouth of a bud-­corer still tries to chew when its head has been pulled off.

“Now once I have digested this feast, I am going to the comfort of my coffin and you are all going to become my little sister’s problem. If I can leave you fat and sleepy you’ll be easier to manage. So my last order to you is to eat well—­drink deep—­and take heart: this winter will be short, and we will have three years of summer when I see you all again.”

The room rang with applause as he sat down. Then young men and women in night’s uniform, who had been standing at the edges of the dome bearing lidded vessels, approached the tables. One leaned forward at winter’s elbow and uncovered his dish. She served herself from it, then took it in her hands and passed it down the table; in this way the feast flowed from her.

John could smell that the dish was of rat. He would have guessed that, even if his nose had not informed him; the crew considered rat the greatest consolation of the season. You needed meat for strength in winter, that was their opinion, so they sectioned up a disused elevator shaft into long cages and let the rats breed to fill them all summer long. When the season changed they ate their way through the increase, starting with those that were injured or killed by the first shock of gravity. They called this the fall harvest, and had forgotten that it was a joke.

When the meat reached him he could see that it was cooked with mushrooms in a sauce of its own juices, and smell that it had mustard as the chief spice. John considered it with unease. He had seen living rats—­even held one in his hand; they were so manifestly relatives of humankind that to eat them seemed the nearest thing to cannibalism. They were soft to the touch, and covered in fur like the hair on an old man’s head. Their faces were not rigid masks, but flexible enough to form expressions. Their blood, like his, was warm. Yet this also was the food that humans had been made for. Throughout its history on Earth, the human species had fed on creatures that were near kin to itself. Though the tradition had been interrupted for his ancestors on Essius—­who had no meat but the flesh of alien insects and of fish spawned from a very different sea—­his body still remembered, and responded as nature had taught it to. Thus the aroma was an unanswerable argument. He spooned a moderate amount onto his plate and passed the rest along to the translator. Then without misgivings, but equally without enthusiasm, he took of brussels sprouts roasted together with potatoes; though they might look promising, he knew that any vegetable served on the ship would be underseasoned and lacking in complexity.

“These rats have been with us from the beginning,” the winter captain said. “Not as food, at first. On our very first voyage, when our mission was to found a colony rather than to help those that have already been founded, they were brought along for experiments—­testing native foods to find out which are edible, that sort of thing. But they’ve proven themselves the space-worthiest of animals. You remember, don’t you, brother, when our father thought we might have chickens? What a fiasco that turned out to be. They couldn’t even swallow water without gravity. Some things ought to be left down on the worlds where they belong, no matter how tasty they might seem to us.”

Summer said nothing to this, and if his face showed a reaction, John didn’t see; he was busy serving himself from a vessel of cabbage and carrots. Then he passed it and, in doing so, saw that the translator’s plate was empty. He had taken no food at all. John froze in shock, but the translator only took the dish from him and held it in his hands until the woman next to him was ready to receive it, as if this were the most ordinary behavior in the world.

What could be the meaning of it? If there was poison in the food, then everybody at the table was at risk. Yet the translator sat there with every appearance of calm, warning no one and accusing no one. The ship-­folk kept filling their plates, taking no notice of the insult. If a guest had behaved this way on Essius, knives would have been drawn by now. No doubt on the ship poison was less common—­ people here couldn’t just harvest death from the weeds on the roadside as they walked home from a lover’s cabin—­so they would be less on their guard. Still, John could not imagine that a guest’s refusal of all hospitality would be a matter of indifference anywhere.

There was something here he didn’t understand. But the next dish had come to him, and so he had to make a choice. It was small slices of wheat bread topped with oil and garlic, which would have to be picked up with the fingers. He disliked the thought of touching it until he knew exactly what the translator was up to, but the man’s equanimity still said that there was no danger. Reluctantly, he took a slice, then passed the platter, trying to signify by his expression that he was alarmed.

“Dr. Maraintha,” the translator said. “I’m told you are Essian. What part of the world are you from?”

The man’s speech was more baffling than his silence. He spoke casually, as if nothing unusual was happening, and the purpose of his question was obscure. At least it didn’t seem to be a question you would ask of somebody about to die of poisoning.

“From Faivai,” he said. “That’s in Ryvet, it’s the city where the ship-­folk come.”

“And somewhere else, before that?”

“Yes, in fact—­I’m inland born. My home village was called Riadstryn, but no one has heard of it even on Essius.”

“When they say ‘quite’ in Riadstryn, do they pronounce it like ‘bait’ or like ‘bay’?”

John had to shape his mouth to an almost forgotten habit of speech to be sure. “Like ‘bay.’”

“The Clear Lakes region, then—­unless my information is too out-­of-date.”

“That’s right. It’s just south of Croh Lake. How did you know that?”

“Wia ir auyar ersians du aunohm,” he said—­ ‘Your radio plays are heard even on my homeworld.’ Which must mean that some ship, leaving Essius before the introduction of television, had carried recordings to scatter among the stars, and some had come to Dharanendra, where the translator had listened to them for what must have been innumerable hours. The sentence he had spoken was idiomatic, pronounced accurately and even in a reasonable imitation of a Clear Lakes accent, though there was some tinge of the southern coast about his vowels. He had pronounced Maraintha, too, as in Essian, with the soft th of ‘than,’ not the sharp one of ‘thin.’

“But why would you go to the trouble to learn that? The chance of meeting an Essian in space must be incredibly remote.”

“Learning Essian was a pleasure, not a trouble. Also, once you know a ships’ language and one or two of its descendants, the rest go very quickly. But yes, meeting you is a great stroke of luck.”

A risotto, fragrant with onions, had come down the table and John received it with irritation. Having the captain pass every dish was an inefficient way of getting food to plates, and the rat was bound to be ice-cold before anyone could eat. He could see no point to the custom except to illustrate by tedious allegory that food springs from women, a fact every infant already knew. He still wasn’t quite sure if the food was safe to eat, but not knowing what else to do, he spooned out a dab.

Once the risotto had finished its circuit, the uniformed youths returned with trays supporting glasses of some urine-­ colored beverage, no doubt alcoholic. One was allotted to each person; the ship would not be helping summer crew get drunk enough to kill themselves trying to walk in gravity, though in light of the captain’s command to “drink deep” it was likely some would do it on their own.

The arrival of drink was a signal to eat; everyone took up forks and began. John looked at the translator to see how he would react, but his face gave no sign that the moment held any significance. He only smiled and asked, “Will you indulge me in trying out my Essian on you at greater length?”

“Certainly, yes.”

“Good,” he said in English, and then in soft and rapid Essian: “I think if we spoke in a thick accent, and didn’t use too many words that are the same in flying-­boat talk, no one here would understand us—­do you agree?”

John thought this over carefully before he nodded. Some of the winter crew might speak a little Essian, but he had never heard of any ship-­folk being fluent, certainly not in Clear Lakes dialect. He would just have to watch his vocabulary when he touched upon sensitive matters. Besides those terms borrowed from ships’ English, such as ‘English’ itself, he had often noticed words and even phrases that had come down through the centuries unchanged—­as you might find a scrap, brittle and black at the edges, of a letter burned in a fire.

“Then, be at peace. I don’t suspect any poison. There are a number of foodstuffs Dharanendrans avoid, especially meat. If I can help it, I don’t eat anything at all from a kitchen where meat has been cooked. You might say it is a matter of leaving a good soul.”

You left a good soul by right conduct in visiting; by being kind, especially to your own family; by avoiding burns and injuries; by anointing the body with oil. None of those seemed relevant, so probably Sudharma was replacing the ships’-­English word ‘religious’: he meant his diet was prescribed for him by some belief. This sort of self-­ denial was to be expected. Marrying peoples sought to bind desire of all varieties, not only sexual; on their worlds no human impulse could flow in the channels it carved for itself. But if he only meant he was observing a restriction that the human mind had placed on its own nature, why didn’t he say so in English, and reassure the ship-folk at the table? John replayed the man’s words in his mind and came up with no answer—­but he did realize, with a tingle of amusement, that the translator was not speaking a slightly flawed version of Clear Lakes dialect; he was doing a perfect imitation of Clear Lakes dialect as pronounced by actors from the coast. Once, the falseness of this brackish accent would have irritated him, but at this distance even a muddied reflection of home felt like comfort.

There was no poison, and so he could eat. The rat was not as cold as he had feared. It was tasty, though he thought the richness of the meat ought to be lightened with some sweet and fragrant leaf like catch-­my-­ribbons. But all Essian herbs were lost to him forever, swept away by the wind of the ship’s passage; he would never again have a meal that tasted like home. At this thought his appetite for the feast left him, yet he persevered in eating. No human problem was ever improved by an empty stomach; regardless of emotion, the body must be fed.

“Forgive me if the observation is intrusive, but you have the look of a man mourning a death,” the translator said, still in Essian. “Do you regret agreeing to go to a new land?”

John considered saying he was happy to be sent to Scythia. But he knew he couldn’t hide the way he felt forever. However he tried, it would come out, if only as a tone of voice or an arrangement of the face in some unguarded moment. It was better to admit the reason for these leaks of feeling than to let them be put down to natural surliness.

“I can’t regret that,” he said. “I never agreed.”

“Then how does it come about that you are leaving?”

“On the ship if you’re not crew you’re cargo. The—­” John hesitated, realizing that Essian sumar was pronounced the same as ‘summer,’ and that kaptan, borrowed from ships’ English to describe a starship captain and used only for that purpose, was recognizable even when Clear Lakes dialect shortened it to kapta’. “The man at the foot of the table can send me anywhere he likes.”

“I am sorry. When I mentioned a need for medical support I never expected this to happen.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Even so, I feel responsible. If you like, I will go to the ashen siblings and object to their treatment of you. Either of them, or both if you think it will help.”

“I think they would tell you it’s their business how they dispose of their passengers.”

“In that case . . . excuse me, I don’t mean to give offense, but I could say I object to the practice of visiting, and on searching my conscience I find I can’t work with someone from your world.”

“Is that true? That you object to it.”

“No. I look after my own soul and take others as I find them. I must do that even more now that I am going to live among offworlders, who, I’m sure you’ve noticed, never know how to behave right.”

John thought this meant he did object to Essian ways for some religious reason, and merely refrained from applying his own standards to others. In all likelihood, then, he would never want to be visited. If the problem was ideological then there might be hope, but it would never do for John to act as if he hoped.

“In fact,” Sudharma added, “lying to the captains would not be good care of my soul, but in this case that is the lesser harm, so I will do it if you like.”

“It won’t make any difference. I’m not being sent to Scythia because I’m needed there. It’s—­” He stopped himself from saying ‘politics,’ because he thought the word’s Essian disguise was too thin, and anyone hearing it would listen more closely. ‘Corruption,’ too, might be recognizable. And rather than search further for a euphemism, he found himself telling the translator what he had found out in his useless search for help. “This flying boat only supports so many people waking. There are long waiting lists to have a child. By announcing my departure in his own season, the . . . the man of a warm time gained control of it. They say he’s given it to some man who is visiting him.”

John took a bite of bread as an excuse not to look at the translator’s face, and waited for Sudharma to reply. He didn’t know what he was afraid to see. He had time to finish the bread and a remnant of cabbage and carrots. At the head of the table the winter captain was saying something about table manners on Vraha.

“I am appalled to have gained your help in this way,” the translator said—and ‘appalled’ was ships’ English, so maybe he had stopped caring whether anybody understood. “But I will be grateful for your help, if you do give it. I hope we can be friends despite the evil that brings us together.”

“I see no reason we should not be,” John said. What he really felt was much less tentative—­a greater fondness than could possibly be justified by a brief conversation. Surely he would not have taken such a rapid liking to the translator if the man had not been quite so beautiful. It was foolish, no doubt, to be influenced by appearance when the chances of a visit were so poor. Yet the fact remained that he did like him. In this matter too, nature would have its say.

“We will discover a new world together, then.”

John found the thought was not altogether unpleasant.

“But how am I to help you?”

The translator hesitated; there was a reserve in his eyes that had not been there before. “I may need some assistance in changing my mind.”

John shivered, because the word the translator had used for ‘mind’ was sheek, which meant the soul when it has been extracted from the body after death. He didn’t know what to make of that, except that it might be the only word for ‘mind’ or ‘brain’ Sudharma knew.

The winter captain was describing something called a shadow temple she had visited on Vraha. From the outside it looked like a tangle of steel, as if rods of metal had been planted in a circle, and grown up into a hedge, and curved together as they grew so that they closed into a dome. The only way in was a little square hole you could barely get through on all fours. You squeezed inside and sat against the tangled wall—­ your back breaking because of the curve of it—­ and waited for the maze of shadows on the floor to resolve into a god, a human, an entire battle, all rendered in such detail that you thought these things must really be there, though if you looked up you would see nothing but a maze of steel against the sky. Then they distorted and dissolved, and you waited again for the next image—­or, if you weren’t getting any younger and your joints were unused to the discipline, probably you fled before it became clear. The oldest of these wonders had been made before the ships came to that world, without computers, often by a single craftsman working his whole life to build a temple that might tell its story perfectly only on one day a year, and only if that day was fair, and that would gradually rust out of focus until it collapsed.

It was remarkable, she said, taking a forkful of rat. Still one couldn’t help wondering what the builders would have achieved if they’d applied their skills to something more productive.

John thought that after all it would be worth being sent to Scythia, just to get away from this place and these people. He needed to be elsewhere, needed it with his whole body, as in a burning heat he would need to plunge into cool water. He might drown, but he needed it just the same.

“When will you be frozen?” he asked.

“At once after the feast.” The vowels of y’ and fias’ no longer had that echo of the seacoast; the translator had perfected his accent. “It’s an advantage of not having eaten.”

John couldn’t sleep as soon as that. He would have to wait eight hours after eating before he let the anesthetic take hold of him. Also he needed to pack, and to pick up his boots and coat. And a month or so of exercise in gravity would make him more functional when he arrived. But after that he would go to the long silver pod that would take him to Scythia. He would lie in his coffin and sleep, to wake on a strange world and learn what his new life would be. ...

*