Across a Star-Swept Sea

Twenty-four

THE VISITORS HAD BEEN in Scintillans for an entire day with very little fanfare about their arrival. Though the Scintillans’ servants were known for their discretion, it seemed impossible that no one would leak such a juicy story. After all, unlike word of Heloise Blake’s condition, there was no one to hurt. Therefore, the fact that the presence of people from elsewhere remained a secret was a testament to Isla’s ability to shut down conversation before it started. However, her quest might have been helped along just a tad by the rather shocking stories sweeping through court that Lady Blocking planned to divorce her husband, that Dwyer Shift had had a row with his councilman uncle over some unmentionable situation with a pair of fishermen from Sunrise Village, and that Persis Blake was considering cutting her hair.

It was rumored that she said long locks were so last winter.

And yet, no matter how long the visitors might stay, or how many conversations Justen Helo might have with them, he thought he’d never grow used to their very existence. Every time he saw them he was struck with a sense of wonder that left him unsettled—he should not feel the same about seeing a human being as he did upon seeing a sea pony or a mini-orca or a hogfish. They were not otherworldly creatures; they were fellow human beings. No matter what the strange genetics of these people—and almost without exception, they were very strange indeed—there was more to them than their scientific potential.

But without real patients to observe, it was hard to resist. He’d yet to hear back from Noemi, and Persis claimed not to know exactly where the refugees had been moved. Isla, of course, said she was too busy to concern herself with his scientific whims.

Justen had started out frustrated, but now he was just scared. Noemi wouldn’t go to the trouble of moving an entire ward of patients without a good reason. What if Vania’s visit the other day hadn’t had anything to do with tracking down the Wild Poppy? What if it had been about finding the refugees? She’d left in such a hurry, and right after that was when Persis had told him about Noemi’s plan to move the Galatean refugees.

If the revolutionaries tried anything on Albian soil—what would that mean for both nations?

And he hadn’t heard anything from Remy since he’d left. In the first few days, he’d figured she was just angry with him, but her continued silence boded ill, especially since his fight with Vania. Then again, if she had turned against him completely, then maybe she’d be safe in Galatea.

Today he and the male visitor, Kai, were sitting in the shade of the terrace, overlooking the cliffs while the Reduced woman played on the lawn with Slipstream. She squealed with laughter as she chased the sea mink and it wove skillfully around her legs, chattering and dragging along the ground a faded green scarf Ro—whose real name, apparently, was Tomorrow—had been wearing around her hair. Neither sea mink nor girl seemed the least bit hampered by her heavy, long skirt. Justen had wondered why she’d wear such a thing in the equatorial heat of New Pacifica, but the other visitors had all shrugged and said that fighting with Tomorrow would not have been worth it. “She’s a creature of habit,” Chancellor Boatwright—or Elliot—had said at the time. “If she’s hot enough, she’ll ask for different clothes.”

“Everyone here stares at her,” Kai said now. “Is it so easy to forget, in two generations, what Reduction looks like?”

“Yes,” said Justen. “Apparently it is.” Now that he saw real Reduction, born Reduction, he regretted even more the name he’d offhandedly suggested to his uncle Damos of the effects he suspected his experimental drug would have on healthy patients. What was happening to the victims in Galatea—that was not Reduction. This girl had grown into and beyond her limitations. Her nature breathed in her and through her like a tree that springs from a rock. It might grow stunted because of the poor soil around its roots, but there was beauty and majesty in the way it clung to life and thrived in its own way.

By contrast, the drug was merely an artificial shade, smothering its victims. Tomorrow was beautiful, whole, human. People under the influence of the Reduction drug were broken. Broken by him.

“Everything all right?” asked the stranger.

“I wonder what my countrymen would think to see her. If they’d be reminded to honor our past, not exploit it.”

“You’re talking about the civil war.” Kai nodded. “I have friends back home who wonder if that’s where we’re headed, too. In so many ways, your society is far advanced. But I guess some things don’t change.”

Justen turned to his companion with a knowing look. “Actually, about that. Most here won’t recognize it, but I have medic training and couldn’t help but notice. Your eyes . . . your reflexes. Your people still practice ERV?”

Kai started, a subtle movement, and his crystalline eyes widened. “No. Not usually. Our people don’t practice much of anything.”

They must not, if they were still using such quaint and clumsy gengineering. Extreme endogenous retroviral enhancement had been designed to push human capacity to its limits. It had caused the Reduction when it was first invented, and was better consigned to the waste bin of medical procedures, like trepanning, leeches, and systemic chemotherapy. The gengineering on Kai and the other captain, Andromeda Phoenix, was like looking at something out of an ancient history text.

Or a project that would flunk even an intro gengineering class.

“We don’t do much in the way of science back home,” the visitor added. “The things you have here are like something out of a dream. Those palmports look like magic.”

Justen made a face. “They’re an appalling perversion of science. Wasteful. Dangerous.” No one yet knew the long-term effects that their nutrient leeching could have on the system. You couldn’t fix everything with a supplement or two. Then again, who was he to talk? He regularly railed against palmports and genetemps, but it was his own achievements that had caused the most damage.

Kai chuckled. “Where I come from, it’s the . . . well, I guess you’d call them the aristos who disdain science. It’s strange to hear it from a Post’s mouth.”

“A Post?”

“A . . . what do you call yourself? Regular? Reg?” Kai shrugged. “Same thing. We say Post-Reductionist, or Post. The ERV was . . . a desperate move. My friends and I—we had very little choice. We needed to escape, and we needed enhancements to do it. Elliot is still terrified that we’ve single-handedly brought back the Reduction.” He shook his head, frowning. “She’s—you’d call her an aristo, I guess? Except not like the aristos here. They don’t seem to have anything against technology.”

Justen frowned. It was he who’d brought back the Reduction, not a bunch of primitive gengineers. “You mean she’s afraid for your children?”

Kai looked away. “Not in so many words. Elliot . . . doesn’t like to use so many words. But I know her, and I know she must be.”

Justen smiled, the medic to the patient. “Well, you can tell her not to worry. You’re a natural reg, right? That means your neurostructure has already bypassed the architecture of Reduction. ERV shouldn’t undo that. But if you like, I can do some tests. If you’re vulnerable, you can just take the Helo Cure and your offspring should be fine.” There were no supplies of the cure lying around anymore, of course, but it was simple enough to compound a dose. The formula was universally known. If he were in Galatea, he could probably find some stock in the storage rooms of the royal labs along with the rest of Persistence Helo’s belongings.

Except for the oblets he’d stolen, of course.

Kai laughed again, incredulous. “The things you say—I can’t believe you’re so casual about it. Where I come from, they hardly believe in surgery, let alone biotechnology.”

“You sound like you lived in the Dark Ages.”

“I did.” Kai pointed at Tomorrow. “Back home, there are hundreds of thousands just like her. They’re born and live and die in slavery, and there’s no other choice for them.”

Choice. What an interesting thought. Justen wondered if Tomorrow, offered the choice of the cure, would choose to take it. There was nothing in the histories of Reduced refusing the cure. Of even being given the option. He did recall reading about debates among natural regs with Reduced siblings about waiting, worrying that the cure was a second-rate solution to the regularity they were sure was going to come to their family within the next generation. Worrying that it might even set them back. He also recalled reading in the histories protests on estates where aristos forced even the natural-born regs to take the cure.

At any rate, it had no known effect on those who weren’t Reduced. Persistence Helo took the cure herself as a publicity stunt to show it was harmless to regs.

“Here on . . .” Kai faltered.

“New Pacifica,” Justen offered.

“On New Pacifica,” Kai said, amused, “you’ve cured everyone and ended the Reduction. But if we took your cure back to our homeland, it would be a battle to get it to the Reduced.”

“It was a battle here, too,” said Justen. “And it was only the first of many.”

Kai looked around him. “This place seems like paradise.”

Justen nodded. “Yes. Seems.”

PERSIS HAD SPENT THE last few months as a spy and the last week as the admirer of Galatea’s most celebrated mad scientist. But today, she played tour guide, taking the single aristo among the visitors for a trip around her estate. Apparently back in her homeland, Chancellor Boatwright—whose name was actually Elliot North—owned one estate and managed another, despite being an unmarried teenage girl. From Elliot’s descriptions, Persis gathered the visitor’s holdings were almost half as large as Albion.

It shouldn’t be Persis this young woman was talking to. It should be Isla.

“Now, Chancellor, if you look down there, you’ll see the fleet of fishing boats. This should be especially interesting to you given your family’s traditions.”

Elliot said nothing, but peered politely over the side of the skimmer and down the pali. “Is your diet mostly fish?”

These days, Persis’s diet was mostly palmport supplements. “We’re islanders, Chancellor. Of course we eat a lot of seafood.”

All day long, Elliot had seemed very concerned with how the people of Scintillans—and of New Pacifica in general—ate. Persis had never thought as much about food production in her life as she had today. No one starved in New Pacifica. She had a difficult time imagining anyone living the way these visitors claimed to, with coal stoves and gas lanterns and hardly enough food to sustain the fields of Reduced slaves that labored in rags and died in their thirties. Practically all the visitors were wearing rags, especially this Elliot, who was supposed to be the highest born of all of them. Persis had offered them new clothes, but Elliot in particular had seemed scandalized by what Persis had considered very conservative garments.

“It’ll be high summer back home,” Elliot said wistfully, looking out over the fishing village and the fields that lay beyond. “My lands lie along the sea as well, but our islands are not quite so . . . lush.”

“Do you miss your estate?” Persis asked politely. It was the most she’d heard Elliot speak in one go since they’d started out that morning, and she didn’t want to scare the other girl.

“Yes,” Elliot said. “I miss it desperately, but”—the older girl took a breath—“I spent four years missing Kai, and wishing I’d gone with him the last time he left us. So this time I made the other decision.” She looked at Persis and her eyes shone. “And it was the right one. For four years, I’d hoped I could do something for the people who live on my estate. And now I can do so much more than I ever would have even with the changes I’d made on my farm. Now we know there is a cure. It’s all Kai could have hoped.”

“Captain Wentforth,” Persis said. So far, their nonverbal communication and instant alliance on every issue had been the dominant personality traits she’d noticed in Kai and Elliot. Even the other captain, Andromeda, seemed powerless to argue against their combined force. “He chose that name himself, I hear?”

Elliot chuckled. “Yes. That’s what Posts do, where I’m from.”

Persis nodded. “It was a bit of a trend here among the regs before the cure as well. I’m named for one who did that. Persistence Helo, who invented the cure.”

“Justen’s grandmother, right?” Elliot looked impressed. “And he’s a medic, too, just like her.”

“Not entirely,” was all Persis could trust herself to say.

They rode in silence for a few moments. “So . . .” Elliot began, “you don’t do much farming on this estate?”

“Not this one, no,” said Persis, “but I can arrange for you to tour others if agriculture is what interests you.”

Elliot nodded. “And what do you do? Are you in school?”

“Not anymore.” She didn’t need to get into details with this foreigner.

“So you help your father with the fisheries?”

Persis laughed. “Not really. My father does serve an advisory position in the village, of course, but fishing isn’t his interest, either.” Her father had an excellent staff of biologists, gengineers, and aquaculturists working in the village and had always argued that the best landowners surrounded themselves with experts who were passionate about their pursuits. Torin himself was a scholar and had worked tirelessly in educational reform for as long as Persis could remember. More regs than ever were getting the chance to pursue the education and careers they desired, thanks to his and Heloise’s efforts, though their duties were curtailed somewhat by her mother’s illness at the moment.

“Oh.” Elliot was quiet again. What an odd girl. She seemed so attached to her strange way of life, the customs and habits of her homeland. She was almost painfully shy, clearly homesick, and utterly without pretense. A less likely candidate for sailing off into nothingness on the whim of a teenage boy Persis could hardly imagine. Then again, Persis wasn’t exactly what she appeared to be, either. Maybe this Elliot North had hidden depths. After all, there had to be something the dashing Captain Wentforth saw in her.

Unlike Persis and Justen, there seemed little reason for them to fake an affection for each other.

“I’m sorry if this all seems strange to you,” Persis said at last.

“No,” the visitor said. “It actually doesn’t seem that strange at all, in the end.”

THE LITTLE SKIFF THAT pulled up to the base of the Scintillans cliffs did not go unnoticed by the denizens of the fishing village. There was a guard posted at the main lift to the estate, and when Vania applied for admittance as “a friend of Justen Helo’s” she was swiftly turned away. She eyed the switchback road with curiosity, but there didn’t seem to be any entrance that wasn’t being watched.

Fine. She’d approach the estate from the land side. There were plenty of ways into Scintillans, she was sure. Strange that they’d have increased the security so much since her last visit. Had they been plagued with spies and nanocams since the lovebirds’ infamous little cove kiss? Figured. These Albians didn’t have anything serious to employ their minds, like she did.

Returning to her skiff, she piloted it away from the docks and toward the west coast of the island, looking for an alternate entrance. The cliffs fell away on the convex coast of Albion, so perhaps she’d find an easier approach. She was rewarded about twenty minutes later when she reached the very farthest point of the peninsula and saw a tiny semicircular cove that looked dug from the cliff wall. A dark line zigzagged up the cliff face, and as she drew closer, she could see it was a staircase leading to the village beyond. Endlessly long ropes of vines fell down all around the staircase, tiny yellow flower heads looking ready to bloom any moment. When they did, the whole place would turn into some sort of enchanted bower. For a moment, Vania was struck dumb by its beauty. How long had it been since she’d stopped to consider how pretty anything was? Day after day, she’d traveled all over her own splendid island and seen nothing but whether or not the places she went were under her father’s control or still resisting the revolution. Night after night, she went to sleep in a palace once infamous for its opulent beauty, but considered nothing but her own ambition.

She shook her head. Perhaps it took leisure to appreciate beauty. This Persis Blake had all the time in the world to look at flowers and wear pretty dresses. She had nothing else going on. And now Justen was following in his little girlfriend’s useless footsteps. He’d probably forgotten all about his research in favor of . . . well, whatever it was he found to do with Persis Blake.

Vania was quite pleased she’d blocked Remy from sending or receiving messages from him on her oblet. The last thing she needed right now was to watch her little foster sister follow Justen’s dangerous, worthless path. He could have his communication privileges back when he stopped being so infuriating.

As she pulled into the cove, she saw two figures splashing around in the shallows. Like all Albians, they had brilliantly colored hair, but even that seemed somehow off as she drew closer. One of the young women, a few years older than her, had hair like sand, and the other, younger one’s was a dull, burnished red. Their skin was impossibly pale, and the red-haired one had a face full of freckles. They looked up at the sound of her engine, and kept staring as she ran her boat aground and tied a line to a rock.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m trying to get to Scintillans.”

“This is Scintillans,” the sandy-haired one said, though her pronunciation was truly bizarre. “But I don’t think you’re supposed to bring boats into the bathing area.”

The clear water lapping her toes was warmer than it ought to be, and Vania bit her lip. “My mistake.” She studied the two women. Neither had palmports in their pale, pinkish hands, and their clothes were certainly not the high fashions she’d seen Persis wearing. Their hair, too, was not the eye-melting shades so popular among the northern elite. They must be reg peasants, possibly with some sort of speech impediment. And the one had said “don’t think you’re supposed to” as if she didn’t know for sure.

“Does that staircase go up to the estate?”

The sandy-haired one looked at her companion as if weighing her answer. “I believe they’re looking for privacy now. If you want to visit, it’s best to apply at the lift.”

“I tried that,” Vania said. The other woman’s use of the word “they” had clinched it. Whoever these two were, they had no authority to stop her. “I’m here to visit my friend Justen Helo, but the last time I came, we had a bit of a fight. I’ve come to apologize, but I can’t if he won’t let me see him.”

“What’s your name?” the blonde asked.

“Vania. I’m an old friend of his from Galatea.”

“The southern island?”

Vania’s eyes narrowed. Where else?

“I’m Andromeda,” the light-haired one said. “And this is Tomorrow.” Bizarre names, for even stranger women. “I can give your message to Justen if you want.”

The red-haired one, Tomorrow, still hadn’t spoken, and as Vania watched, she wandered off without a word. Andromeda took no notice. Vania had never seen such odd behavior in a grown woman. Never seen it in anyone but a Reduced prisoner.

“Actually,” Vania said, “I want to see him. So I can take these stairs?”

Quick as a flash, Andromeda stood between Vania and the staircase. “I don’t think I’m supposed to let anyone up without permission. I understand we’re already a big imposition on the Blakes.”

Who were these two? Vania blinked at the other woman in shock. What kind of enhancements were they doing here in Albion? Andromeda’s skin, her speed, her shallow sea-colored eyes? She’d never seen anything like it. She knew Albians colored their hair—were skin and eyes the new trend? Was she going to find Justen up on the pali with a lavender face and bright pink irises?

But no matter who this Andromeda was, she wouldn’t distract Vania from her mission. “I’m afraid I was a little unfair to him the other day,” she lied smoothly. “Ever since the revolution, I’ve been a tiny bit prejudiced against aristos, so when I heard he was involved with one . . .”

“You’re one of those revolutionaries,” Andromeda said.

Vania straightened. “Yes. But I’m here on personal business, so—”

“Tell me more.” Andromeda leaned in. “The princess has been very forthcoming but also very uninterested in letting us see or talk to anyone else. And unlike a few other members of my party, I’m not the type to just blindly trust a lord, Luddite or otherwise.”

Vania blinked at her. “Pardon?”

“No one will tell me anything about Galatea but that it’s dangerous and we should steer clear.”

Typical aristo propaganda. Vania had no doubt the princess was using quite a lot of it. It was the only possible explanation for why the revolution hadn’t inspired their northern neighbors yet.

“No, indeed,” Vania explained. “The revolution is a beautiful and cleansing thing. We regs have never been given a proper chance before. Finally, we’re exerting our human rights. Honestly, do you think you’ve been given all the chances you ought, growing up here in Scintillans?”

Andromeda snorted. “I’m not from around here, but I agree with everything you say.”

“Oh, well then wherever you are from in Albion.”

“We’re not from Albion, either.” And then, as Vania’s eyes got wide and her mouth dropped open, the woman told her the craziest story she’d ever heard. “We didn’t even know these islands existed until a few days ago. We’re explorers on a mission to find other survivors from the wars. A few days ago, we landed here, and that Princess Isla and her guards have us holed up so we don’t cause a riot or something.” She leaned in and dropped her voice. “But if they don’t figure things out in a few more days, they’re going to have another revolution to deal with, if you know what I mean.”

Vania suppressed her look of shock and replaced it with a smile. “Oh, I so do. Please, tell me more.”