The Dalari Accord
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without the author's written permission)
Maaren had believed her dead. She’d seen the wreckage of the
fighter ship many long cycles ago, before old age had begun to afflict
her. Now, every joint creaked as she lowered her body into the chair.
The stars shone brightly before her. As instructed, the navigator was
keeping the entire view from the workspace away from the planet Arak
and its twin suns. The great wall of plaxite curving behind the desk
replacing a section of the hull, allowed her to sit with no seeming
connection to the flagship and the responsibilities behind her.
She squared her shoulders and tapped a command to the control room. The
view changed as the ship slowly rotated on its long axis. She could
feel a bit of pleasure sneak up her spine. Alaine was supposed to be
dead, dead and mourned, yet this day Maaren had seen her down on the
planet’s surface. Any sense of pleasure failed on its journey
toward a smile when the government building of the Council of United
Worlds slid into her field of vision. Even from this orbit, the mighty
central city, nestled at the base of Arak’s great mountain
range, shown like a hard jewel in the light of the red and blue suns.
She would give half her remaining cycles, few though they might be, to
know how Alaine had come to be the Council’s High Wizard.
Maaren’s agenda as the Clans’ Leader hinged
entirely upon the death of their Wizard. Any other being she would have
assassinated out of hand, but to have Alaine sitting as their
negotiator shocked Maaren into indecision, not a feeling with which she
was familiar.
Maaren had mourned Alaine’s death each night for many long
cycles when sleep eluded her. But today Alaine was introduced as
the Council’s Voice of Reason. The Council of United Worlds.
Maaren had dedicated every waking moment since her own
parents’ death to the Council’s destruction. Was
her daughter now to be her own death as she had been her
mother’s?
She held her hand so that she could not see the glittering city. The
bent hand that blocked her view belonged to a much older woman. It
couldn’t be hers. She must destroy the Council before she
died, and time was running short. Conventional methods of wiping their
planetary forces off each world, removing the governorships and setting
up fair trade took time. Far too many worlds remained in the stagnant
grasp of the Council. Her plan had been simple, if the Council
didn’t abdicate out of hand as she insisted, she would
precipitate a true war for which they were wholly unprepared.
All she need do was murder their Wizard. Not an impossible task. But
today her daughter Alaine, the Council of United World’s High
Wizard, had stared unblinking at her throughout the first meeting for
supposed peace.
Memories battered at her like a storm on a planet’s surface.
Everything had gone wrong since the moment of Alaine’s birth.
Pain jolted her arthritis-racked hands where they clenched the chair
arms. She’d had the child because it was important to her
partner, but gotten no joy of it herself. Every time she tried to
handle the infant, it cried, or threw up or wet itself. Maaren had
finally abandoned the child, giving her to a wet nurse because she
could not think amidst the constant demand for her attention.
Many eights of days later, when the fits of birth were past, her
daughter still cried each time Maaren tried to hold her. She had not
the time nor energy to learn the care-giving that so many others
already knew and could perform much more effectively. It was easier to
let them do it.
She closed her eyes. If only she’d had more time. Or tried
harder. If . . . . Maaren’s laugh echoed harshly about the
room. “If” was such a useless word when applied to
the past, but she could not shake it off. Over three eighties of
cycles, an entire lifetime, of dealing with facts and now, at the end,
she was dealing in wishes.
She pulled herself out of the chair and turned away from the city. This
workspace that had bounded the last third of her life did not fit
today. She stepped over to the richly veined kraalwood conference
table. A quick tap on the keypad, with hands that had not been so bent
and twisted when Alaine was young, and the tabletop dissolved into a
view of the infinite depths of space.
She nodded as the vision that greeted her eyes matched the one in her
head. The star projection extended from well above the table down into
the surface’s depths. The blue worlds of her Clans of Dalar
covered over a third of known space. The balance, except for a few
neutrals and the eight and three dark-centered white circles of dead
worlds, glowed dull red. They still suffered beneath the
Council’s benevolent guidance. Complete stagnation was more
accurate. The races and their creativity now had to fit the polished
mediocrity of the Council’s status quo. If not, they were
either repressed into conformity or nonexistence. Planning her next
move failed to distract her. Alaine’s face floated once again
before her mind’s eye.
She shut down the table and turned to her one true vice, Vlarian art.
The Council’s most feared contraband decorated her walls. Her
collection was the finest still in existence. She lifted a small
figurine from its niche on the wall. A woman cavorted and danced in
joy; her heart’s emotions shone from her face. It was only on
close inspection that one noted she was dancing on a grave. At first
Maaren had been appalled, she’d put it away for
many cycles. But the piece had never wholly left her mind. She had
finally taken it out again to look for the cause of the joy. Was it
celebrating the ending of a life as she’d thought at first,
or the life that had been? She now favored the later.
She tried to lose herself in contemplation of the crystal figurine
shaped by the mental power of the extinct Vlarians. Another Council
triumph, the breaking of an entire race for their ability to evoke
emotions. But even that simple escape wasn’t available to
her. Today all she could see was a little crystal woman on a little
crystal hill. She put it back on its shelf and sought some other
distraction. The only other furnishings were the grouping of blue
amakal hide chairs by the door. How many times had she and the man who
was Alaine’s father sat here long into the night? At first
she and Yarkesh, one of the finest fighters she’d ever met,
despite his youth, planned the next phase of her drive to eradicate the
Council. Later she had come to love him, despite his being an octade
her junior, and missed his company to this day.
She closed her eyes to block out the final memories of him. Many times
before he’d gone, Yarkesh had stood there, in that same spot,
and berated her for her treatment of Alaine. He never understood.
Perhaps, if she had not envied his relationship with their daughter,
she might have told him that his abuse was not nearly as painful as
being unable to tolerate the infant’s presence. He was the
one who had wanted the child anyway. She’d always known what
to do in every situation but this one. Trapped between his anger and
her daughter’s tears, she had thrown herself into the
challenges awaiting the Clans, and, almost unnoticed and definitely
unremarked, a part of her had shriveled away.
She focused once again on the Vlarian art. Yarkesh told her often that
she was as cold as the space beyond her plaxite wall. She had finally
refused to see him. She had given birth to the child he had wanted and
lost the only man she’d ever loved in the bargain. He still
fought for the Clans, but they only spoke once more; a few words two
days before the accident that killed him. Now, she had nothing but an
aching vacuum where her heart should be.
She turned from the room, this cage she had fashioned, back to the
view. Maaren tried to look at the wall itself, to somehow once again
see her child standing and staring out into space. But the builders had
made it invisible to the eye exactly as she’d required.
Ignoring the complaints from her legs and hip, she sat on the floor and
rested her forehead against the plaxite where her daughter’s
had been. Arak City had rotated out of view taking Alaine the High
Wizard with it. The red and purple foliage and the dark ocean of the
planet glared at her. And the vast sea of stars.
For a brief moment, vertigo took Maaren’s stomach and twisted
it viciously. It had to be some manifestation of her weak, aging body.
When she could finally refocus her eyes on the planet below, her brow
was damp with sweat.
Alaine grew up without her. A few brief glimpses were all that remained
in Maaren’s memory of the cycles until Alaine was no longer a
teenager. Almost three octades, fully two-eights and six cycles of Arak
after her child’s birth, she’d been observing a
training session and noted one of the attack fighters was piloted by a
natural. Its movement was by far the cleanest and most creative in the
whole battle formation as its image wound through the spatial tanks.
When she’d glanced at the pilot’s id, a curious
mixture of relief and terror collided within her. Her daughter pushed
the edges of danger with each maneuver showing exactly who was the best.
Maaren massaged one aching hand with the other. Even then, in that
moment so long ago, she knew her daughter hadn’t lost the
desire for her mother’s attention. It was as clear as the
track across the display tank. Maaren was chagrined, now as then, not
only that Alaine had found it necessary, but also that it had worked.
She remembered piping a dinner invitation out to Alaine over the
command circuit. When her daughter’s fighter spun briefly off
course, she’d taken that as a yes and left the control room
without awaiting a reply.
It was a magnificent, full-grown woman in her third octade who stood
outside her office door later that evening. She was like Yarkesh around
the eyes, though Alaine’s were blue and his a dark brown. She
wore a clean shipsuit. No insignia showing the various battle honors
that a quick inquiry had revealed. She’d even trained with
the AcTyn warriors; a rare honor indeed, granted only one other time in
their entire history. Alaine had much of her father in her bearing, but
her daughter’s beauty hearkened back to some gene she did not
recognize. Neither her father’s ruggedness nor her own
diminutive form were reflected in the woman before her. Her long hair,
unusual in a fighter pilot, flowed in a dark cascade over her shoulders
and half-way down her back. It nicely framed her young, rigid face.
Maaren was sure her daughter believed her feelings were well hidden.
The very wideness of her sky-blue eyes gave away her extreme
discomfort. Alaine had reached into her mother’s world by
becoming the best fighter in the fleet. At long last, in this situation
Maaren had known what to do.
She’d started to wave her tall daughter in and realized that
to Alaine this was the home of the commander. Here she would be the
leader of the Clans, not a mother desperately thankful for another
chance. She took Alaine’s elbow and turned her about before
she was even through the door. Alaine’s skin was warm to the
touch, but her daughter pulled away quickly, leaving an empty feeling
in her palm. Maaren could still recall the effort she’d
needed to keep her face passive in that moment as she’d tried
to remember if she had ever touched her daughter after the first few
days. She’d led them to a pair of seats on the viewway, which
was blanked because the stardrive was engaged, and tapped in a request
for some grilan and cheese from a nearby service unit.
Maaren remembered that as the evening progressed, the meetings she had
cancelled bothered her less and less. She stopped worrying about the
commander’s egos she must placate or the next day’s
battle which was predicted to be an easy one anyway.
The watch changed, the plates and bottles piled up, and Maaren had
become aware of the smile on her face; she rather liked this woman who
had grown from her own body. Her dry humor and her laser-sharp insights
were very engaging. Alaine had identified several group leaders in need
of repositioning, and her views of how some of the crew had chosen sex
partners made Maaren laugh. By Alaine’s smile, slow though it
had been at first, Maaren knew the feeling had been reciprocated, both
the joy and the surprise at finding each other across the bridge of
such an expanse of silence.
Here was a person who might someday command the tightly bound races
that made up the Clans of Dalar with respect and fairness. She would
think more of that tomorrow, but that one night she simply sat and
enjoyed the woman who was her daughter.
The next day, Alaine was killed in battle. Or so Maaren had thought
until today’s meeting. She covered her face with her aching
hands. She was surprised when they came away damp. Maaren had never
cancelled a strategy session since, nor allowed anyone close to her
again.
Yet, something had happened to Alaine in the five eights of cycles
she’d been missing. She still had the intelligence, and the
flush of youth remained. Maaren hoped the humor had as well. But she
looked frightened. Perhaps the Council held some power or threat over
her head to make her sit as High Wizard. Alaine acted as if
even Maaren herself had never existed. Finally unable to stand the
pain, she had abandoned the meeting.
Her joints ached as she stood and returned to her desk. Maaren held
onto the edge of it and forced herself to think through the swimming
nausea. She hadn’t felt it since the day her parents had died
when she was a child. Maaren finally shook off the vertigo. She had
come to Council space to murder the Council’s Wizard and
precipitate a final war.
# # #
Alaine sat in the small lounge facing the surreal landscape. Impossibly
thin trees climbed hundreds upon hundreds of feet upward into the green
and yellow sunset sky. The blue sun, which had been setting with
agonizing slowness throughout the earlier meeting, was finally down.
The larger, red one was close behind. Last week, she’d been a
college professor in upstate Maine, teaching astronomy and living in
constant paranoia and fear. When she’d fallen asleep, it had
been dreading another awful day on twenty-first century Earth. She woke
this morning on a different planet. She hadn’t felt relief
this intense in the last four decades.
Janek, who was busy at a console in the corner, described Arak as seven
eighties of lights from Earth. It had taken them a while to straighten
that out. Lights were close enough to light-years for her. And
everything here was base eight, neat powers of two. He spoke of eights
of days, octades of cycles, two days longer than Earth years, eighties,
which were actually eight squared and not eight times ten, and
octennia, eight cubed or half a millennia. Minums were longish minutes,
but that was as much as she could remember. So here she sat in a
comfortable chair, looking out at a wild landscape that was over four
hundred light-years from home. Faster than light travel, too. It must
be actually happening; no dream could be this real.
Memory. That was still the problem. Everything about her life prior to
her mid-twenties was lost to her. She had finally attributed it to some
forgotten 1960’s drug episode. Her first memory was a voice
in the dark, “Your name is Alaine.” Next thing she
recalled was wandering the dry California hills with no idea of who she
was. That had been hard enough to overcome, but with
Jonathon’s help, once he’d found her,
she’d managed.
But recreational drugs certainly couldn’t explain the fact
that she did not appear to age. She’d been forced to move on
three times in the last forty years. Now perhaps she had a new answer,
maybe she wasn’t from Earth to begin with.
The present, that’s what she must focus on. Janek had told
her they had kept her sedated for the last eight to pump a whole new
language into her brain. She swallowed hard. More drugs.
She’d lost another week and a day. Now these aliens wanted
her to be a Wizard, whatever that was, on some planet that was
definitely not Earth. Her tight chest made it hard to breathe, a
feeling she’d had through much of the reception that just
ended.
Janek hummed briefly. Even in the few hours since she had awakened,
she’d learned that meant he was about to speak. He stood
deferentially beside the chair he had guided her to. It was the only
one by the window that she could have sat in anyway. The other two
contraptions were something she couldn’t figure out at all.
One she might have perched on but it would be painful, the other just
didn’t make sense.
“Pardon this servant, Wizard?” His high, squeaky
voice was at odds with his frame, which was far too tall, just like the
trees. “Might you . . . .”
“What’s with this Wizard nonsense?” She
needed to understand something, anything. “You want me to be
a magician in the middle of your war. Do you want card tricks or
something fancier?”
“War is such a harsh word. The Council finds conflict to be a
more palatable description.” His brow scrunched into furrows
and she realized that he didn’t have eyebrows, or even a real
eye-ridge. “What is a magician?”
“An entertainer who plucks rabbits from unlikely places while
a scantily clad assistant does her best to distract the
audience.”
Janek tilted his head one way and then the other, ever so much like a
bird. “That is not what you must be. Not magician;
Wizard.”
“So you expect me to use real magic. Who’s in
charge here? Is there someone else I can talk to?” She looked
around the empty room for emphasis. A large, steel table with several
types of sitting contrivances filled much of the room. The blue walls
were a little nauseating. The paint tended to swirl and shift in her
peripheral vision, but it was always steady when she focused on it.
Janek hummed. “There is one coming, but this servant of the
Council can answer many questions. The Wizard must learn quickly. The
Dalari’s killing arc can destroy this planet in
moments.”
“What’s that?”
He reached down and tapped a keypad in the arm of her chair. A section
of the view disappeared and was replaced by a greenish sky above yellow
trees. A sheet of lightning seemed to grow from the horizon and sweep
across the sky. In the eerie silence it started white, but shifted
through blue and violet as flashes burst forth within it. The camera
tracked it as it covered the entire sky and then, with only a brief
burst of static, the window area went dark. A moment later the view of
the trees again swept from wall-to-wall.
“We were unable to reestablish contact with that world ever
again. The Clans’ killing arc destroyed it
completely.”
“I’m not a big fan of danger. You’d best
start explaining yourself, and my name is Alaine. Cut out this Wizard
crap.”
“What is ‘crap’? This word is also not
known in Universal.”
“Just answer the damned question.”
He scowled at her for a long moment. “Wizard is a great honor
and a very powerful position. Even the Dalari would not dare harm one.
You must act the Wizard. Only there lies safety from these enemies of
the Council. The Wizard is the impartial witness, the balancing hand.
You are to be the primary negotiator with the Clans of Dalar. It is
your mission to create a great accord of peace such as none have been
able to strike heretofore.”
She did not know what to say. It all sounded crazy. She must go out and
create a galactic peace. There had been Oslo Accords and Camp David
Accords. No problem. One Alaine Accord coming up.
“Janek, this is certainly a vast improvement over the living
hell I survived on Earth. I’ve never been able to afford the
luxury of thinking on a global, or rather a galactic, scale.
It’s been a long time since I could even trust
anyone.”
“The opportunities before us are vast and the Council is glad
they are satisfactory.” He hummed again. “Might the
Wizard enjoy a brief repast?”
Her stomach growled. She hadn’t had anything since waking in
the midst of a war, or conflict, or whatever.
“A double-espresso, then a beer and a pizza.”
Janek was silent for long enough that she turned to look at him. He
seemed to be frozen in place by her request. She still wasn’t
used to his height and had to look up from the expanse of blue robe to
see her reflection in his silvered sunglasses. They were huge and
overwhelmed his gaunt face. He was not a pretty man.
“You do have coffee, don’t you?”
He didn’t move.
“A hot, refreshing beverage with a mild stimulant in
it?”
A careful nod.
“And pizza?”
No nod.
“Something to munch on?”
“Munch?”
“Light food. Not a full meal, but tasty things to . . .
.” she searched for a word in Universal, “eat
on.” It was as close as she could get.
“Eflar.”
“I know that word, why couldn’t I think of
it?” Her brain was telling her eflar meant
light-meal-between-meals.
Janek nodded. “Universal is a conceptual translation at many
levels. If you do not have the precise concept, the desired word may
remain elusive. It is not so much a language as a translator we have
trained you in while you slept.” He turned his attention to a
small kitchenette she hadn’t noticed in one corner of the
room.
“Did you enjoy the reception, Wizard?”
“As much as I might enjoy a quick trip to Hell.”
The sound of liquid pouring ceased. “That would be a
resounding no.”
The pouring resumed. This language stuff alone could make a person
crazy.
The stars started to show in the evening sky, even before the dull red
sun was fully set. This afternoon’s meeting had been a
terrifying blur. Janek had advised that she must hide her lack of
knowledge from the Dalari. He promised her training, but first they
must survive the introductions. His stress on that particular verb had
kept her on edge through the bewildering afternoon.
She’d met dozens of people in the clear rooftop dome. Most
were dressed in rusty red, a stark contrast to her black shipsuit and
Janek’s long blue cloak. Small talk had been tricky. The only
safe topics available were the weather, which was clear outside the
dome, or her trip here for which she’d been sedated. When
she’d tried to tell an anecdote of Earth, Janek had cut her
off abruptly claiming an urgent message awaited her attention. The
message was clear even before he’d spoken;
“Don’t talk about Earth.”
The only thing she’d really remembered the whole time was
Janek’s statement that there was someone present, a leader of
the Clans named Maaren, who could have them killed on a whim. Could
destroy the whole planet.
Janek was standing by her chair when she managed to shake off the
memory. “I had no idea what was happening. They nearly caught
me red-handed a dozen times.”
Janek looked down at her hands as he placed a mug on the low glass
table next to her along with something that looked very cheese and
crackerish. She took a bite and sighed. The cheesy stuff would have put
a good Brie to shame.
“Okay, we’ve played this game your way. The first
meeting is over and we’re still alive. Now it’s my
turn. Start from the beginning. Where is here?”
“This planet is named Arak. It is the center of the
government of the Council of United Worlds.”
Arak wasn’t the center of anywhere she’d ever heard
of before. “And you said it took us seven days to get here
from Earth?”
He nodded. “The Council deems the continued existence of the
Clans as undesirable. They are now far too widespread for electronic
reeducation of the necessary individuals. They are an infestation that
must be eradicated before they can spread to yet more worlds.”
Alaine picked up her drink. It was bright green and smelled too sweet,
but she needed something against the sudden chill that had entered the
room. On Earth she was ostracized for not aging but here she had to
deal with planet killers and electronic reeducation, which smacked of
science fiction brainwashing. She blew across the surface and tried the
hot liquid. It tasted like boiled cantaloupe, but at least it warmed
her insides.
“Tell me why are the Dalari so bad? I certainly
don’t like that arc thing, but I presume there is more
evidence,” she held up a hand before he could show another
video, “for later.”
Janek nodded as he carried a tall, slender glass of something yellow
toward the strange contrivance next to her. It didn’t look
anything like a chair, but his knees folded over a bar and he settled
into the sling sort of arrangement.
She realized something was severely wrong with his anatomy. The only
way he could possibly fold into such a seat was if his knees bent
backwards. She swallowed hard; they had done just that. Her dual
reflection was shining back from his glasses.
No. He was close enough for her to finally see, they weren’t
glasses. He had mirrors where his eyes should be. She waved a hand and
they tracked it. But it made his expression seem blank.
“What are you?” she managed to gasp out.
“This servant of the Council is an Arthran.”
As if that answered the question.
“Why me?” The job title of Chief Negotiator in an
interstellar conflict had a nice ring to it, but she was an astronomy
professor, not a diplomat. She took another sip of her drink. The
chance to work for something beyond personal survival, for universal
peace no less, was very intriguing.
Janek hummed. “Many have been the Wizards of the Council.
Each one approached this problem with preconceived notions of how our
peaceful order exists. None have been able to face down the Dalari.
Ineffective negotiations have reached not a single accord to date. Many
Wizards have left their duties after having complete mental and
sometimes physical collapses.”
“Oh great. Why should I want a job that does that to
me?”
“You are the chosen High Wizard.”
“What if you just send me back to Maine?” She set
her mug down on the small table.
Janek continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “There are
reasons you were chosen. It was hoped that by finding someone who had
his or her memory removed and lived on a more emotionally charged
planet . . . .”
“Memory removed?” The phrase brought her around
quickly. “What do you mean?”
Janek’s eyes reflected her shocked face. “You were
chosen partly due to having no childhood memories existent to interfere
with clear reasoning when in . . . .”
The room spun. She stared at the tall alien and gasped for air.
“My memory was removed? How?” So it
hadn’t been a self-induced drug overdose.
“It is a simple process by which all engrams prior to a
moment can be completely and neatly removed.”
“A brain scrape to most people.” The deep voice
came from the doorway. She glanced toward the speaker. A large man
stood framed by the panel as it changed from open to opaque behind him.
She still wasn’t used to the strange doors they used here.
Janek stood quickly and bowed low. “Third Advisor.”
“Who are you?” The innocuous title could hide
anything. Alaine needed to understand the players if she wanted to have
any hope of survival. Too often those who had turned against her on
Earth had hidden behind the title of friend.
“Sit, my good Arthran. Sit.” He didn’t
return the bow, but rather made patting gestures with his large hands,
which seemed to bother Janek.
Alaine stood to get a better look at the newcomer. He was a few inches
taller than she and his face was lined with age. He had whiskey-brown
eyes and long, gray hair that was straight like hers. It hung past his
broad shoulders.
His smile was quick and easy as he moved to lean against the window
near her. “I am the Third Advisor to the Council. And it is I
who chose you as Wizard, my dear Alaine. It . . . .”
“How did you know my name?”
“You mean other than your appointment as the High Wizard
being the number one news item throughout the Council Worlds?”
Alaine could feel her jaw drop, but wasn’t able to do a thing
about it. On Earth she’d worried every day if she was keeping
a low enough profile and now she was of international, no,
interplanetary note. She couldn’t even comprehend it.
He continued blithely without even bothering to answer his own
question. “Though it did take some doing to convince old
Janek here and a few others that you are the best. And you are. Always
remember that.”
“Best at what? I’ve never been called
that.” She found it easy to return his comfortable grin
despite not being his dear anybody. “And what on
Earth,” she waved a hand toward the sky, “or among
the stars, made you do something so foolish as to choose me?”
He stepped over to tap the control on her chair arm. When she
looked, she could see no change at first. The Advisor was silent for so
long, she turned to Janek. But he too was studying the sky. Finally,
she noticed the stars were no longer partially blocked by trees. She
could have been looking out some sort of a spaceship portal; stars
filled her entire field of vision.
They were so much denser than in Earth’s night sky. Great
waves of speckled light washed her field of view. A few formations
caught her eye, yet they looked ordinary enough when she focused on
them. A group of three, blue globular clusters kept drawing her
attention, mainly because she’d never seen anything so
magnificent.
“How do you like the stars of your youth? I taught you to fly
and navigate by these.”
“To fly? I grew up with those?” Alaine leaned
forward and bumped her forehead on the glass. She rested it there and
stared out. They scattered off in a realistic depth she’d
never seen captured in any planetarium. A warm thrill raced
up her spine. She tried to recognize some of the constellations and
half thought she could.
As the implications finally fell into place, she turned to face him
where he leaned with his shoulder against the window. She rested her
hand on his arm. It was strong, solid and very real. “You
know me. That’s how you knew my name. Who am I? Who are you?
Are we related? Do . . .”
He raised his hands to halt her questions and backed away. Crossing to
the service counter, he drew two glasses of something foamy and bright
purple. When he handed it to her, she looked at it askance. His laugh
filled the room.
“You liked this when you were much younger. It’s
called kerlash and I am called Maknal. Though I would not be telling
that to the Dalari. They have little liking of me, I fear.” A
frown briefly darkened his eyes, but disappeared so quickly Alaine was
unsure it had ever existed.
She watched him closely as she took a sip of the cool liquid. It had
the richness of milk and the taste, mostly, of lemonade. He smiled
broadly as she took a larger swallow. She returned the smile.
“When I was younger. You knew me before this brain . . .
.” She tried to say the word, but couldn’t bring
herself to do so.
“Scrape. Yes, I did. Though there is very little I can tell
you of those times.”
“Who am I? Who were my parents? Are they still
alive?”
He did not look away as he raised his free hand in front of him again.
“Hold onto those questions.” She could see the
sadness in his eyes. “They are among the ones I am
regrettably unable to answer.”
Alaine walked over and dropped into her chair. She’d gotten
so used to not knowing that the brief hope, now dashed, left a cold
knot in her stomach. It untwisted a bit when she realized another
implication of his knowing her. She’d never belonged on Earth
but she did here.
“You took to stellar navigation like a qanalr of Elnar Five
takes to cloud sitting. I am pleased you still recognize the
stars.”
“I don’t.” The smile disappeared from the
Third Advisor’s face. “But they feel familiar.
Where am I from?”
He smiled, an expression his lined face seemed familiar with.
“Well, you certainly weren’t born on that little
planet you have so recently resided on.”
She opened her mouth several times, but no words would come.
Maknal smiled at her. “You never thought you might be from
another world?”
Alaine shook her head. “So many of the people at Davidson
Homestead were convinced they had descended out of the astral plane or
been grown from a crystal or been impregnated while being vivisected by
aliens that I decided I was human, just different.”
She turned to Janek and could see tiny reflections of herself in his
silvered eyes. “If I’m not human, what am
I?” She looked back to Maknal. “And who are you,
other than the Third Advisor?”
“You, my good Wizard, are human. As am I. Not like
Janek.”
The barb clearly hit its target as Janek hummed loudly.
She cut him off before whatever their old conflict was could surface.
“But we live so much longer.” Alaine realized she
was including herself with this man. “Don’t
we?”
He nodded. “When compared with those on Earth. But that
doesn’t mean you aren’t human. Even the Saranthi,
who often live for an entire octennia, could pass for human on your
Earth. Well, mostly. The races have varied since they were first
deposited upon the many worlds by whoever the progenitors were, but we
are all human for lack of a better word. You and I, the AcTyn, the
Dalari, and, yes, even the Arthrans along with several hundred others
all have common ancestors. The difference is that we humans, including
old Janek there, have drifted apart in one way and another and most
cannot even interbreed any more. Many of the races have grown so far
apart they can’t be recognized as having the same origins.
You and I and the Earthlings still look alike, but our peoples now have
separate paths upon the great cosmic wheel.”
Different races. Maybe he knew her birthdate. “How old am
I?”
Maknal grinned. “Young enough to not have to worry for a long
time, my Wizard.”
“Will you stop calling me that?” He raised his
eyebrows in question. “I have a name.”
“As you wish,” he winked at her, “my good
Wizard Alaine.”
She laughed. This was definitely better than Earth; running from those
who wanted to know why she aged so slowly. For the first time in her
life, at least the life she could remember, she truly, finally belonged.
“And we’re related?”
He nodded his head. “Although how closely is another thing I
am regrettably unable to say. There is one thing I can tell
you.” His expression became quite serious. “Though
our contacts were few and brief, I am prouder of you than any man could
ever be of even his favorite daughter.”
Alaine sat back in her chair unable to breathe. There was no mistaking
his tone of voice, she had been loved in her stolen past. There was
some reason he must hide the truth, but he couldn’t do so
from her. This powerful, dynamic man had loved her as a daughter and he
was all she had dreamed of in a father and more.
“But enough of this.” He slapped his hands on his
thighs with a loud thwack and stood away from the glass, once again
animated. “Our problem is the Dalari and getting you up to
speed. Their methods are vicious and, however they justify the fight,
the cost is far too high.”
“One more question.” She finally had her voice back.
Maknal looked down at her with an unfamiliar kindness that warmed many
places in her heart she hadn’t even known were cold.
“You always did have another. What is it?”
She felt herself blush at the look he gave her. It was the look she had
seen parents reserve for their children.
“Who removed you from my memory?”
Maknal glanced at Janek who hummed his throat abruptly. “That
is something many would wish to know. The Dalari have . . .”
“The Dalari? They did this to me?” She looked from
Janek’s smile to Maknal’s scowl and decided she
didn’t care about their power struggle.
She nodded to herself. “Okay, Maknal. Tell me how to stop
these bastards. If I can nail the people who stole my past at the same
time we rid ourselves of these planet killers, all the
better.”
Maknal remained with his back to her. His voice was quiet when he
spoke. “Janek shall handle your training.”
Alaine bit back her disappointment. This business was clearly far too
serious for personal preferences. If Janek was the best trainer,
he’d have to do.
“But Third Advisor . . .” It was the first time
she’d heard Janek speak with no prior hum. As if his voice
had been startled awake.
Maknal faced the Arthran. “There are some changes even you
cannot be told, Janek. You must trust me. Both of you. “ He
glanced at Alaine. “Please?”
The last was almost begging. Janek revealed his displeasure in his
widened eye mirrors. It was obviously important to this man who could
be her father that she help. The Arthran had implied she had no out,
and, she realized, she didn’t want one.
She stood and held out a hand which Maknal grasped firmly. “I
will do all that I can to aid you. Based on what we were in the past,
you have my trust in the present. But you must also prove to me that my
trust is not misplaced. It is not something I give lightly.”
His smile shone forth at her words. He pulled her toward him and took
her by the shoulders. He placed a kiss on her forehead before looking
into her eyes.
“You will have the help of Janek, no minor thing, and the
full weight of the Council behind you. Won’t she,
Janek?”
A long hum preceded his answer. “As you recommend, Third
Advisor.”
Maknal’s gaze did not drift from hers. He shook her slightly
as if to be sure he had her attention.
“With our help, you shall be the finest Wizard the Council
has seen in all its octennia.” His expression became grim as
all of his laugh lines turned into a dark frown. “And the
worst nightmare Maaren Dalari has ever had. We shall teach her a much
needed lesson.”
A quick hug and he strode out of the room.
