5

Dragon

Accepting the assignment did not mean I relished the prospect of leaving my Alnese summer haven, especially given the low likelihood of a return before the summer month and briefest autumn faded back into the planet’s damnable longest season, winter. I can’t imagine what this place must have been like before the climate shift! My poor predecessors must have suffered abominably!

With this perfectly useless sympathy for past O’bonne scholars on my mind, I made my way to Zyss, the closest thing the Alnese have to a capital. Originally, their traditions prescribed that court functions were hosted by the place of origin of each lady or lord of the planet, and since each regent had to be selected from a different clan, the court, along with all high dignitaries, officials, and the Council of Eight, moved every sixty-four years. But despite various near-fanatical efforts to diffuse and decentralize power, my hosts found that some administrative needs just naturally gravitate towards a permanent center. It is certainly not every new regent’s ardent desire to bother with daily administrative trivia like running the sanitation system so everyone’s trash gets picked up. Faced with the necessity for stability in such matters, all the clans had voted on one permanent administrative center a few centuries back, and they had chosen Zyss, the “City of Learning” founded by their great scientist Lann, a move I cannot but find inspired.

At the time, the City of Learning must have been a barely tolerable collection of igloos, sitting as it does in the midst of the northern Alnese “Highlands.” A fairly vast high plateau extends between two continental mountain ranges in the middle of the northern equatorial zone, the only livable area on the planet for the first fifteen hundred years of Alnese residence. The altitude only reinforces the deleterious effects of winter ice-storms that sweep over the high plain and surrounding mountains with great regularity. I can only surmise Lann must have been serious about Zyss being a place for study, as there is little else to do there more than half the year.

Now that the planet is reaching the apex of its new, warmer climate, the plain is turning into a lovely spot from late spring to early autumn. The cold weeks dwindle steadily in both duration and intensity, and like the lower-lying tropical region around Eden Hamlet, Zyss’s plain is becoming resplendent in both plant and animal life. Everyone anticipates that it will soon be covered by the new forests ringing the planet.

After striking up my agreement with Judge Pallas Thor Eden, I had spent the better part of the past winter and spring conducting field work with his “Order,” as the Alnese called their guild-like professional associations. By observing his routine activities and his less frequent investigations and negotiations of various conflicts, I had made much progress in my studies. However, in all this time, I had learned relatively little about the man’s personal history and background despite the fact that I lived with his primary clan. My practically unlimited access to the Pallas clan’s family records hadn’t helped much. All I had been able to make out was that the former Thor Nambo Eden had agreed to an alliance with the Pallas House that had been formalized with the birth of his daughter Pallas Thor Goal, and that his Pallas wife, Leila, had then thrown him over.

Her leaving had been rather dramatic—she had gone all the way to Earth and taken their daughter with her, and he had barely seen the child for eight years. Since Alnese alliances fundamentally aren’t personal relationships, but ways to formalize clan ties, there was nothing unusual about an Alnese husband and wife going their separate way once their alliance child was born. The separation of a father and child, on the other hand, was very unusual, and Eden’s personal circumstances had sparked my curiosity even though they were not the main focus of my studies.

I landed in Zyss just as the sun was setting, always a splendid sight in the mountainous landscape surrounding Alnos’ City of Learning. I had reluctantly agreed to use a glider, an infernal contraption that can be likened to a low-flying box with thrusters—unfortunately the only reasonable means of longer-rage transport. Having succumbed to violent motion sickness the first time I had been treated to a little fly-around, I avoided the damn things as much as possible. Everyone, including my present pilot, assured me it was the flying itself and not the glider that provoked my unpleasant first experience. The trip to Zyss could serve as further proof that the piloting did matter, since it went extremely well, but I did not have the time to contemplate the matter. As soon as we landed on the roof of the Pallas clan compound, my host Pallas Eden stepped out to greet me.

“You are kind to respond to our request so soon,” he told me, bowing a little stiffly in my direction.

A little out of breath, still not quite sure of my footing, I replied, “I am only happy to be of service to my hosts.”

Eden made a small gesture and two of the compound’s younger members jumped to my rescue. With me out of the infernal glider, they lunged in and took care of my luggage, a small courtesy for which I was most grateful. I motioned to my waiting host and we both walked towards the stairs.

Eden led me straight to my own quarters, a suite of two rooms with a kitchen wall and a bathroom in the warmest and most sunlit southwestern corner of the compound. The kitchen wall had been well stocked in anticipation of my arrival, and a meal had been readied for me. I noticed that someone had gone to great pains to cook some O’bonne dishes.

“How delightful!” I exclaimed, turning back to my host with some surprise, “But why all the fuss? What’s wrong with this Earthling?”

“Many things!” answered a woman’s voice.

Eden warned quietly, “Leila!”

I turned to face the famous traveler and was quite taken aback by her youth. She had to be under thirty, with short-cropped sepia hair framing very white skin and huge yellow eyes. She didn’t carry the store of winter fat protecting most Alnese, looking quite anorexic in comparison, probably the result of her recent residency on Earth. The androgyny of her straight, shapeless night cloak clashed with her soft voice, and with make-up and tinkling silver bracelets clearly designed to accentuate the feminine.

“So I meet you at last,” I said with a nod in her direction, and I put on my warmest smile. “Did you prepare this feast?”

Leila smiled back and nodded, then threw a sideway glance in her husband’s direction. He turned from her to me, “Now that the introductions have been made, I best leave you. I would like to have a word with you, Ashewe Dragon, but it can and will wait.” That said, he bowed again and left the room.

“I can imagine the buzzing voices raised by my name,” Leila said almost absent-mindedly, motioning me to help myself to some of the fare, “So I’ll clarify a few points now.” Then she picked up a small silver pot and poured a dark-brown liquid I recognized with pleasure, “Earth coffee!”

“How do you take it?”

“In a bowl with too much sugar, like a good East African!”

That made her laugh, “So you too picked up Earth habits! How long were you there?”

“The usual five years. For an O’bonne scholar, that is.” I accepted the cup she offered me and took a first tentative sip. The coffee tasted like an exotic candy to my tongue, and I savored it, bracing myself for the buzz I expected after such a long period of abstinence. Then I turned to my hostess and encouraged her, “Tell me about your guest.”

“I met him almost eight years ago, right after I landed in Berlin.” She paused. “It was like a meeting of two lost souls, in a city of lost souls. He was in a band—a musical group—based in Germany, without a place to stay. I took him home.”

“Why Berlin?”

She didn’t answer that immediately, looking past me blindly for a minute. Her eventual reply surprised me, “I wanted . . . the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“Of Alnos. Chaos, urbanity, and especially anonymity. I wanted anonymity above all. And of all the places Eden had taken me to, Berlin was the most anonymous, and it offered the most extreme sense of the abyss.”

“And Ray did, too?” I offered.

“I suppose so.” Another pause followed, and she served herself some coffee. “Of course first impressions are always wrong. They have this totality about them. There is a part of him that’s the abyss, but there’s another that’s extremely grounded. I would never have thought …” she struggled on silently and then gave up.

I distracted her with, “Is he European?”

“No,” came the immediate answer. She followed that with, “Well, one of his great-grandmothers was German, but he never knew her. You know about their World Wars, don’t you? One great-grandfather was an Allied soldier and I don’t know if it was an affair or a marriage but he had a child. The German woman stayed behind when the man returned home, but he took the child.”

“That’s unusual for Earth. Home was?”

“Texas.”

“Is that where Ray is from, then?”

“His family is from there. His father was also a soldier, so they kept moving and he doesn’t really feel that he is from anywhere.”

Another gypsy, flashed through my mind. It might explain the relationship better than anything else. “What did you want to tell me before I hear it from others?” I continued.

“He thought … well,” she broke off, took an audible breath, and started over, “I let him think that our daughter Socorro had died when I left Earth. That’s why…” she trailed off again, shrugged. “He surprised me. I never thought he’d actually do anything like that.”

I decided to learn more about my Alnese assignment, and asked, “Did he know about you?”

“Some things he knew.” Her next shrug radiated the bafflement she must have felt about what to say and how to say it. I understood, even though I had stuck to my resolve not to get involved with the natives on Earth and had never been in her shoes—not there, anyhow.

“You know what’s really funny?” Her lips smiled, but her face flashed unmistakable anger, “He started to use heavily after I conceived Socorro, and he really dove into it when she got sick. There hasn’t been much passion for a damn long time, not much of anything, really. Why would he suddently come back to life when he thought she was dead?”

I didn’t have an answer for her question, and got the impression that she didn’t really expect any. After a moment of silence to let her regain her calm, I informed her, “Doctor Tzalque led me to understand that your kinspeople are very interested in the child.”

“Of course they are.” If anything, her face flashed even more anger.

Smoothing my voice into the most neutral tone I could muster, I continued with, “They wonder whether the child belongs to Thor or whether she will have another lineage.”

Leila practically snapped, “That hasn’t been negotiated yet.”

“I see.” My gaze turned probing despite my best efforts, “But she was not an alliance child, was she?”

She shook her head, and I sensed just a trace of amusement in her when she reflected, “No, not an alliance child, but a child of passion. That’s your point, isn’t it?”

I assumed an apologetic expression and continued, “I truly don’t mean to intrude, Pallas Leila. It’s just that now that I’ve been asked to help your human friend, I prefer to know as much as I can about him, and, well, about your relationship.” As I spoke my observations I realized that the Pallases weren’t about to let the child slip through their fingers, and I had an almost prescient insight as to what that meant for the three involved parents. No wonder everybody had agreed to Ray’s rescue! As the clan’s actions fell into place, I felt an inner tremor about the implications of the case for me, and promptly set it aside. I couldn’t think about my problems just now. Instead, I turned back to Leila and changed the topic, “I am glad Socorro made it. I know Earth medicine. It must have been torture.”

“You know, when she was born, I had readied myself for anything because I knew about the potential incompatibility, and I knew our meditations didn’t always work. Then she was born healthy and . . .” She clasped her hand over her mouth for a second and I could hear her regulate her breath once more before she concluded with a throaty voice, “I let my guard down.”

I made an unconscious sympathetic gesture: Don’t we all in this business! But of course she isn’t in the planetologist business, just an Alnese traveler keeping up the gypsy tradition of her ancestors.

“So what’s next?” I asked after she had regained an outward calm.

“Peg tells me that Ray has resigned himself to living. Those are her exact words.”

“She suggested not telling him the truth,” I concluded from that rather opaque statement. I was disappointed in Peg. “That is not right.”

“You see, you are the perfect person.”

“For what?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she looked at me, got up, moved to the window and looked outside for at least a minute. When she turned around her face had set into a determined expression, “I have come to a decision about where I want to be, where I want my children to grow up. Eden is part of the package, but so is Ray. Help me with Ray, please.”

I sensed that I would have the easier part of her project. I rose and put a hand on her arm. “All right.”

The determined look on her face softened somewhat, and with a formal timbre she intoned, “I am in your debt.”

I nodded, then told her as I was turning back to our evening meal, “You do not know it yet, but we will help each other.”