Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Never, ever volunteer
I knew where this was going. I knew, but went ahead with it anyway. The Runams had won me over. I considered myself content with being defeated by their friendliness and by their view that I was now their friend.
Pasek had mentioned in passing that lights were dimming in a section of the village.
It was impacting Micher’s treatment space at inconvenient moments.
I’d filed it and forgotten it until now.
It wasn’t a complicated fix. An hour, maybe less, and a basic knowledge of electrical systems. For whatever reason, their people couldn’t figure it out.
They were planning on pulling out the system and replacing it with something from the Durbok’s.
I told Maive I’d fix it. While I was at it, I’d put in a short-range transmission setup so they could reach me without sending someone on foot.
So, yes. I knew. And, fleck it, I considered them my friends, too.
So, on a morning five weeks past the festival, I walked north to the village with my tools in a satchel and a plan to fix their power issue.
Micher met me at the entrance to the communal hall and took me down to the relay room beneath it.
I felt for him. I really did. He was a proud healer, reluctant to need outside help and fearful that his position in this little society was in jeopardy.
It wasn’t. There were many ailments a portable field medic device didn’t fix.
We didn’t speak much while I worked. He stood with his arms crossed and watched, which was fine.
I didn’t need conversation to work. The problem turned out to be a failing connector at the main junction—straightforward to find once you knew where to look, straightforward to replace with parts from the Andromeda’s stores.
When the lights came up steady above us, Micher went to the doorway of his treatment space and stood looking at them.
“My space needs consistent power,” he said, without looking at me. “Patients are often anxious enough when they see me, and random dimming lights don’t help.”
“Well, they’re fixed now,” I said.
He turned. His expression wasn’t warm, but it was less condemning than it had been. “Thank you,” he said. Precise, but genuine. He returned to his instruments.
I gathered my tools. That was that. I wouldn’t complain about the lack of chatter.
Maive stopped me on my way out. I wasn’t expecting to see her, but hearing her softly call my name was a pleasant sound.
Seeing her cross the room toward me was also a pleasant sight.
She wore a long, flowing dress today with no sleeves.
It was a hot day. This attire looked cooling, but it made me feel the opposite.
“Hello, Maive.” I hooked a thumb toward the door that had led to the power connector. “Fixed the light problem. I’m on my way home.”
“Thank you.” She folded her hands in front of her. “The communal meal is held at midday. Why don’t you stay for it?”
I hesitated. Because I couldn’t produce a reasonable objection on short notice, I said, “Okay.”
It was a decision I’d come to regret, sort of.
An awful lot of people sat around tables set up near the docks.
There were benches at odd angles, people standing at the ends, conversation running in four directions at once.
Laughter, the sounds of serving, children at a smaller table nearby making their own noise.
I sat down. I ate what was put in front of me, which was very good—Braija’s work, I suspected, or someone trained by her.
I kept my eyes on my plate. Every time I looked up, I caught eyes looking back at me, which generated a question or a comment or an introduction to a person I’d already met twice.
Pasek was to my left. He was talking simultaneously to three people, eating everything within reach, and kept checking on me to see how I was managing.
“You’re doing fine,” he said, without turning.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said around a mouthful of food.
“Exactly.” He took more bread. “Relax.”
This was not useful advice. “You know, I have been to one of your people’s social gatherings before.”
“Sure,” he replied, reaching for more bread. “But you could escape that one. Here, you’re stuck in a chair.”
“I can leave anytime I want,” I muttered.
But we both knew better. Across the table and down a ways sat the woman I struggled to keep my eyes off of.
She smiled as she chatted with the man sitting beside her and I was able to observe her mostly without her noticing.
Except when her gaze shifted and found mine.
We’d share a little moment, then return to our meals and conversations.
That dress she wore was very pretty, and lower cut than anything I’d seen her in previously.
And it didn’t even reveal anything but a little more skin than I’d seen previously. I was just that smitten with her.
Aila found me just after the meal.
She appeared at my elbow with a bearing that would have been at home on a battlefield commander. “Gilrox. My mother has things to do. You’re available.”
I looked down at her. “For what?”
“For minding us. We’re not supposed to go too far into the forest without a grown person.”
“Who is ‘we’?” But she had already turned and started for the forest path, entirely confident that I would follow.
I looked at Pasek. He spread his hands in a gesture of total innocence.
Of course, I followed her.
The “we” soon became evident. They were Aila’s entourage.
Six children materialized from various points along the path—two from behind a storage building, three who had apparently been waiting just inside the tree line, and one very small boy who appeared from nowhere and immediately attached himself to my left side.
They were all staring at me.
I had faced worse odds in worse conditions. I told myself this.
They wore varying expressions of wariness. The children had heard I was acceptable but were conducting their own assessment. I decided the best approach was to treat them directly, without making a performance of it. “All right,” I said, loudly enough for Aila to stop and turn. “What are we doing?”
Aila straightened. “I’m showing you the Junu trees that make junver syrup,” she said. “And where I saw the metal bird.”
She had me there. I wanted to see both of those things. We traveled into the forest, which grew darker and cooler as the trees became thicker and taller, shielding the understory from the rays of hot summer sun.
I already knew what the Junu trees looked like.
They had bark nearly black in the shade—dark green in full light, rough and ridged at the base where the roots broke the soil surface and spread.
Aila and her friends led me to a stand of them deep enough into the forest that the village sounds faded.
The children spread out around us in a loose ring, still watching.
The small boy had not released his grip on my sleeve.
“The Wint-ti birds nest up there.” Aila pointed to the high branches, where I could make out the dense, woven shapes of nests settled into the forks. “They’ve always nested in Junu trees. Nobody knows exactly why.”
“What do they look like?” I asked.
“Small. Blue-gray.” She considered. “Loud.”
“Very loud,” confirmed one of the other children, a girl with a serious face and big brown eyes.
“Their droppings fall into the soil around the roots,” Aila continued. She crouched and pointed at the ground beneath us. Dense clusters of small white mushrooms grew in the dark soil nearest the root bases, hugging the ground. “The droppings make the conditions right for these.”
“What are they?”
“We don’t have a name for them in quadrant dialect.
Gra’ma calls them root-flowers, but they’re not flowers.
” She reached out and touched the edge of one, lightly, with one finger.
“They attach to the roots. Right here.” She showed me where the white growth had spread across an exposed section of root, matted and close to the surface.
“And when they do, they change the sap.”
“Change it how?”
“I don’t know. They make it junver.” She said it with the confidence of a child who had never had reason to question it.
“Gra’ma says it’s just how nature works sometimes.
” She stood up, satisfied with the explanation.
“We tap the trees…” She showed me a small healed scar in the bark, circular, where a tap had once been.
“And the sap runs out. Then we boil it down.”
“That’s junver syrup,” finished the serious-eyed girl.
I looked at the trees. The nests above, the birds responsible for the soil, the mushrooms that required that exact soil, the roots they attached to, the sap they altered.
One species requiring another, requiring another, in a chain that had likely taken eons to develop and was producing something the quadrant apparently needed badly enough to trade across systems. You couldn’t manufacture this.
You couldn’t pack it up and relocate it.
You couldn’t force more of it by increasing pressure on the people who tended it, because the people weren’t the limiting factor.
The birds were. The mushrooms were. The trees were. Nature was.
I stood in the forest and was very quietly alarmed, and said nothing about it.
“And I saw the metal bird right over there.” She pointed toward a section of trees that was slightly thinned. “I followed it through there and got lost.”
My gaze followed the path she pointed to and the likely route the probe went after that. It didn’t make me any less alarmed to see that the probe was here, in the thick of the Junu trees.
“Can you show us something?” the little boy at my side asked. He had a slight lisp, so his “something” came out as “somefing.”
“Like what?”
He pointed to the thick device on my wrist. “Like that.”
Six pairs of eyes dropped immediately to my wristband. Children were predictable, at least in that.