1 A Shower of Ice Stars

Book Two: (From a Warbird’s Saddle)

I'm sitting in a tiny balcony, just under the Sun Crystal, actually over the Great Hive.  The bees had showed me how to get up here, since they seem to have decided they like me.

The walls around me are made of stone and gold and wax.  Not really wax but it looks it and the bees can manipulate it like wax.

My brother by marriage..or my lover... or my friend... oh its complicated... Kyrus, and his da – my stepapa -- and my pa were all below in the big throne-room.  It’s been transformed since his greatgrand-da went into his grave mound.  It’s full of desks now, with wax models of cities, and machines of all kinds.  Some have just been finished and zardukar are testing them, trying to see if all their designs work.  From the exclamations I can hear, some are and some are not.  The centre of the room has been cleared so that the patterns on the floor can be adjusted.  There are lights now shining up through gems and coloured glass like lamps under waterfalls or mistfalls. 

There are images moving on the mist curtains now, instructing people.  In fact everyone that has a mist curtain in their home now has an instruction screen, tied to the L.I.N., the Lainz Information Network that everyone just calls the 'lin' now.

That’s the lin that has been providing pages of news and stories and reading instruction to the Empire and since stepapa and pa are a couple and stepapa has become His Radiance to Lainz, there are lin boxes spreading into our country as fast as they can grow.

That means that my pa, who happens to be the surdeniliarch, is going to be able to stay here... and me too, because it doesn’t look likely that Milar is going to need a warmaster and his oldest girl anytime soon.  Da said he was sending for Miks and Ilia from home.  Just what I need, little siblings underfoot. Everything has changed.

I look down at the jewel-like array of bees on my hands, shimmering and glistening in the light of the candle lantern.  Flower bees that look like petals.  Leaf bees that are a hot green if that is possible.  Yellow and black honey bees.  Some glitter like amber and obsidian with gold legs and antenna.  Glass wings with lines too fine for any human hand to lay down.  I peer at that particular bee so closely she buzzes her wings in my nose and flies up and away.  I laugh.  “I’m sorry to blow you away!  If you and your sisters could find me more friends... more help, I’d appreciate it.”

The hot evening wind blows through this cubby under the crystal without any mist curtains at all, full of toxic micro particles and the bees hum all around me, all over me with tickling feet where I can feel them, mostly my hands and my cheeks.  Most of them are natural bees, but then what is natural when someone can go into code and mander up a new kind of bee and then get a cliner to help them get things working properly? From the information now being remembered, we had it wrong.  It's all mandery in the code.  But the made bees look the same. They’re bees, natural, unnatural and mechanical.

If it weren’t for the bees, we – the Lainz for certain, and perhaps us too – would not have survived. The Milari, the Nadumon, the Rumon, and the Hippifrey.  It is looking like we Milari don’t have as much legitimate claim to our home as we thought.  The others around us were all rebel groups or forgotten research facilities.  The Lainz were the only ones that were direct descendents of the first planetary owners that Prime thought he’d killed.  No wonder they use the word ‘owner’ as a curse.

At home, this kind of wind is cut by all the water and terran green that we Milari have seeded around us.  Our valleys and mountains, all the deep tsingy cracks, hold every Terran thing carefully isolate one from another.  But that is home not this.  I’m not use to this salt white, burnt red, bitter orange desert.

The wind-borne grit is beginning to build up on the outside of my veil, reacting to my human breath, my moisture filled breath.  My mama came from here.  Closer to Milar though.  She and her family farmed in the karst... in the cracks under the ground and in the open ceiling’d caves all over that latitude.  My bubi still lives in their farmhouse there.

The stars are out. There's the Honeycomb and the Skep, the Bushdragon and the Lolipapera. My breath puffs the heavy veil up away from my lips and then it falls limply back against my skin.  Will I ever get used to that?  I needed to get away up here.  Up here I can be alone.

I can’t talk to pa... and certainly not to Kyrus... or Werfas.  Those boys.  I could just strangle them sometimes.  I haven’t made a close friend yet though I like Dag, Kyrus’s mama. She’s not married to stepapa.  They still haven’t worked that all out yet.

Almost all the women I'm meeting here are a lot older than I am. I might like some of the other girls... maybe Kurazon, maybe the girls at the schools. Not yet though.   

Most of the women aren't someone I can complain to, or giggle with.  I’m not a giggler normally but I had my girlfriends before we came from Milar to Lainz.  It was only going to be a short while, I thought.  I could go home.  Or I could stay. But I had to think, and since I don’t have anybody human to talk to, I could at least talk to the bees.  It’s like they are my little sisters in a strange way.

The moon is up, glittering in the sky, the trails of ice stars falling from it.  It’s so pretty it’s hard to believe that it’s something so prosaic.  Like an ice tap, dripping on us, where all our water comes from.  The prime owner of the planet is still mining and dropping ice from the moon down so that humans will be able to live here one day without veils and mist curtains and bleached window coverings.

The ice pieces look like a silver shower, against Petra’s Eye - the bright blue star in the Skep, hung over the black dark crack of the canyon like a veil itself.  It’s a good thing I’m not frightened of heights.  Lainz the city is drawn out of the top of this butte like a gigantic spindle flower and...

That’s when the shower of stars from the moon slows.  Then it stops.