The Stars Are Legion(23)

We continue down the corridors. I expect to travel through the umbilicus between levels, the way we do on Katazyrna, but we descend on staircases instead, each carved into the fleshy guts of the world. Above us, in the narrow passages, I see the shriveled brown skin of the former umbilicus. I wonder when it stopped working for them.

On the second level, Rasida asks a member of her security team to take Neith and Gavatra to their quarters.

“They aren’t staying with me?” I say.

“You’ll see them again at the joining tomorrow,” Rasida says.

When Gavatra protests, Rasida says, “Jayd is Bhavaja now. Only Bhavajas may enter these parts of the world. I’m sorry, but you must stay in the guest quarters.”

“They are my family,” I say. “Doesn’t that make them your family?”

“This is not my rule,” Rasida says. “It is my mother’s.” I look around for her mother, Nashatra, but she has been swallowed by the crowd.

“We’ll be at the joining,” Neith says. “All I ask is that we get real food. Do you have real food?”

“Of course,” Rasida says. “Samdi, take our esteemed guests to the eating hall.”

Samdi makes a gesture of obeisance and peels away from us. Gavatra is still clearly not happy, and she signs something at me, fingers held low against her thigh. “Be careful,” her fingers say, and I sign back, “I am always careful.”

That makes Gavatra grimace. She has known me since I was a child.

Rasida’s people line the halls eight and ten deep, the smaller ones sitting on the shoulders of the larger, back and back and back, so many that I find it a wonder she can care for them all here on the first level. Where is she getting the resources to care for them up here? From that dead worldship they are scavenging? How functional is the heart of her world? I stare at the spongy floor at my feet. As I walk, my footprints do not fill with a thin film of water the way they do on Katazyrna before the fleshy floor springs back up behind me. Bhavaja is dying.

I glance at Rasida beside me as we continue on, and consider the rumors I have heard about her. If she has the ability to do what Zan and I believe she can do, why has she let her world deteriorate like this? I have to understand her, and to do that, I must get close to her.

Rasida parts a shimmering curtain, and suddenly we are alone in a broad room with sweeping high ceilings. There are no patterns of light here; instead, there are fanciful geometric shapes carved into the walls, all painted in reds and blues and golds. I caress the nearest wall, running my fingers into the rivulets, and find that the walls are not porous here but hard and calcified. I snatch my fingers away.

“Your rooms are here,” Rasida says, and she rolls open a great slab to reveal a long series of rooms. “I’m farther away,” she says, “but you’ll have access to this whole area.” She waves at the great room I’m still standing in, and I see that all seven of the round slabs that ring the room like great eyes are doors like this one.

Two young girls appear from the interior of my rooms, their eyes big and black, hair bound back from identical round faces. They are painfully thin. They wear no shoes, and their feet are callused and dirty.

“These are your attendants,” Rasida says.

“What are your names?” I ask, leaning over, because they look to be several rotations from menarche as yet.

“They don’t speak,” Rasida says.

A chill crawls up my spine, but I straighten and smile. “I see,” I say.

“I don’t want them to bother you with needless chatter,” Rasida says. She runs her fingers down my arm, takes my hand, and opens my fingers. Her lips press against my palm. “I don’t like chatter,” she says.

“I see,” I say again, because for all the preparation Zan and I have done these many turns, I find that I am not at all ready to be here in this place with a woman with such power and so many unknown whims. What do I know about her, really? I have seen her at negotiations and across skirmish lines. But I know nothing of her world but what I have seen, and nothing of the woman who rules it, not really.

It’s not until I see her crinkling up the edges of her mouth into a smile that does not touch her eyes that I realize I have dealt with a woman just like this my whole life.

She is like Anat. She is my mother.

I smile back at her and press my fingers to her cheek.

“When will we be joined, love?” I say. “I look forward to the binding.”

“Soon,” Rasida says, and I cannot help but shiver.

*

The nameless girls comb out my hair and clean my clothes and fetch food. I feared the food would be as miserable as the rest of the world, but it’s fresh tubers and broth, not some twice-baked gelatin made from the dead. That eases my concern somewhat.

Time here is strange, as the ship does not seem to regulate it anymore. It’s the girls who wake the lights, rubbing their hands over the walls of the room after they have deemed my sleeping period has gone on long enough. Whatever is in the walls brightens for the length of the waking period, and then it is time to sleep, and we do it all over again.

When I wake, Rasida comes to me bearing wine and sweet treats, and sends the girls off into the main room.

“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” I say lightly. “I missed your company.” When I came up with this bit of fluff, I didn’t think I’d mean it, but I realize on seeing her sit down at the end of my bed that it’s true. The girls make for poor company. They won’t look at me, and they will not speak. I found a loom in one of the far rooms, and I’ve been re-teaching myself how to use it. Making textiles was always a bottom-world pastime. I prefer my numbers and reports. But there’s little of that here.