Killdeer

Killdeer

A star-set sonata

in four movements,

with coda

Anne B. Walsh

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Anne B. Walsh

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Foreword

First Movement: Music Hath Charms

Second Movement: Defer Not Till Tomorrow

Third Movement: Miseries and Credulities

Fourth Movement: Diamond Cut Diamond

Coda: A Sure Reward

Glossary

Also by Anne B. Walsh

About the Author

Dedication

To Antonia, who couldn’t wait.

Foreword

Like most of my works, Killdeer is strongly informed by my musical experience, so much so that in this case I’ve decided to use the language of classical composition, rather than literature, to describe its structure. Accordingly, the four parts are known as movements, and what would elsewhere be an epilogue is called a coda.

The titles of the movements are slightly scrambled quotations from playwright William Congreve, whose best known lines are so often misquoted that I decided to deliberately alter the words I chose, partly for fun and partly to echo my linguistic theme within the story.

The language known as Aelur is also deliberately altered from its source tongue, due to in-story passage of time.

Thank you, as always, for reading, and please enjoy my first-ever science fiction novel.

– Anne B. Walsh

First Movement: Music Hath Charms

…loosely related kin group of farmers, augmented, most unusually, in harvesting and planting seasons by a substantial transient population who spend most of the year in a transhumant herding lifestyle. This aberration, among others, made closer study imperative, to discover the origins of the cultural shift it indicates. Accordingly, the central societal unit was secured, its component parts neutralized, and the whole was moved to a controlled environment, in which proper studies can be run without fear of contamination…

With a quiet sigh, Elspeth plugged her earbuds into the panel by which she sat and danced her fingers across the touchscreen, accessing her music files. Surely, in a collection she’d spent most of her life building, she could find something better to listen to than her brother dictating another of his pompously worded journal articles on his ongoing cultural studies of the quasi-human creatures of the galaxy.

Maybe it’s not polite to consider one’s guardian and last living relative an unbearable bore, but it’s only tit for tat. I know what he considers me, he’s said so more than once, either in my hearing or to my face—a nuisance, a burden, a waste of his time, his money, and his precious air. Absently, her left hand moved to the next screen over, calling up reports on the state of the Cicatrix, reports with which she had become mind-numbingly familiar in the past five years. Never mind that I do most of his shipboard repairs by now, saving him that same time, money, and air. He doesn’t notice it, any more than he notices me bringing him food and drink, taking away the empty containers, keeping track of comestibles and ordering more when we run low. That’s just part of his well-organized world, things as they should be, and he’ll no more think of thanking me for doing it than he would thank the sun for shining.

Anton’s voice droned on behind her. …transient portion of the population was unfortunately not in residence at the time the unit was secured, but automated alerts have been left in place at its original location, allowing for their addition to the experiment at a later date. With proper care, their arrival should seem nothing more than the usual seasonal migration, maintaining the subjects’ belief that they continue their lives undisturbed…

Nothing on the music list appealed. Elspeth shut it down with an impatient slap of her right hand, pulled her earbuds out and tucked them back into their pouch at her waist, and glanced across the ship’s reports before shutting them down as well. No new leaks, all supplies nominal, life is good. Or rather, existence has marginally more to recommend it at the moment than the alternative.

She rose from her chair, popped open a small hatch on the wall beside the panels she’d been accessing, and swung herself into the service tunnel behind it. Had her brother looked around at this moment, she probably would have earned a lecture on crawling around the innards of the ship like an animal instead of using the doors like a civilized human being. Shipboard doors, though, made a distinctive noise when they opened and closed, and the hatch did so soundlessly, thanks to Elspeth’s punctual maintenance. A bit of crawling was a small price to pay for getting out of her brother’s earshot without his knowing.

Not to mention, without breaking his concentration on his research and the inflated language in which he presents it to his fellow scientists.

A few last words followed her into the tunnel: …single male of a higher level of development, which seems to spend much of its time with the transients and was therefore not secured in the neutralization effort. Research is ongoing to determine its whereabouts, its ultimate origin, and the possibility that its arrival was the starting point for the societal aberrations which have been observed…

Elspeth pulled the hatch shut and twisted the lock, casting her brown eyes heavenward in the age-old plea for the stars to give her patience. At least he never takes me to any of the conferences where he presents these papers. I’d die of boredom within a day.

She took a moment before she set out to scoop her dark hair out of her face, clipping it back with an old-fashioned barrette at the nape of her neck. One or two strands, the shorter ones near her face, escaped, but these could be tucked behind her ears and ignored. After adjusting the fingerless gloves she habitually wore and making sure the sturdy patches she had sewn to the knees of her shipboard coverall were in place, she started moving, letting her mind rove free as her body took her down the well-worn path towards her own quarters, with its thirteen distinct turns.

Thirteen. I was thirteen the last time I walked on a planet, smelled air that wasn’t recirculated, ate food that didn’t grow in a hydro tank or a yeast vat. I was thirteen when Mama and Daddy…

Her mind shied away, even after so long, from the images of her beloved parents, there one day, gone the next. Cultural scientists like their older child, though for some reason they hadn’t explained to Elspeth, Anton’s name was seldom so much as mentioned in their household, Doctors Zachary and Olga Kolesar had discovered too late that not all the artifacts of the ancient space-going society they were currently investigating were as inert as they had supposed.

Elspeth herself had been asleep, unaware that anything was wrong until the thrust of the emergency capsule in which she always slept pinned her to her bunk as it lifted off. The First Responders had arrived a day later in response to the auto-launched distress beacon to discover her capsule orbiting the planet, a fresh and perfectly circular crater on the planet’s surface, and DNA traces of both her parents along the crater’s walls. After bringing her aboard their ship, treating the bruises and lacerations she had incurred while trying to get at her capsule’s controls to force it to land, and chemically calming her rising hysteria, they had sent out word through the greater galaxy that Doctor Anton Kolesar, M.D., PhD, and probably QED, was required to present himself at Responder Headquarters within thirty days of receiving their message, to take custody of his minor-child sister until such time as she should cease to have that status.

And since Anton considers planets fit habitats only for the quasi-humans he studies, I’ve never seen a planet’s surface since.

The endless gray, gray, gray of her last five years rose up and threatened momentarily to overwhelm her, forcing her to pause while she pulled her reactions under control, holding her useless tears in check, breathing evenly rather than letting it catch in her chest, relaxing her throat from its tight and painful clench. It was stupid, she told herself sternly, stupid to whine about what couldn’t be changed, and life aboard the Cicatrix was her reality now. The round of ship chores to monitor, school lessons to complete by vid (or rather by vid recording most of the time, since Anton’s work was necessarily out in the backwaters of the greater galaxy), and planning for their very occasional stopovers at spaceports for repair or refurbishment took up the majority of her time, but with at least three hours every day in which to do as she pleased, she really couldn’t complain that she was overworked.

Just very, very alone. And bored. And totally unsure of what I’ll be doing with the rest of my life, now that I’ve finished all my base-eds. With an impatient shrug, she started moving again. I know what I’d like to do, but it’s not the sort of thing you can study long-distance. It requires face-to-face, or at least a shove link—short-distance vid, real-time stuff—so I’d have to leave the Cicatrix, enroll in a planetside university somewhere, and I don’t know that Anton would allow it. As much of a pest as he considers me, I’m useful to him where I am, and perhaps more important from his perspective, I’d be costing him money if I went off and did anything, let alone what I really want to do. Though maybe if I could get my hands on a merit scholarship of some sort…

Her hands reached out of their own accord to pop the lock on the hatch which led to her own quarters, and she sighed with pleasure, as she always did, sliding out of the tunnel and into the one place aboard the Cicatrix where she truly felt at home.

Real sky and trees and flowers would be awfully nice, but this will do for the time being.

Anton never came here—Elspeth wasn’t entirely sure he could have found her quarters at all without querying the central computer—so she had let her imagination have free rein, hiding any expenses she incurred in the materialization of her dreams within the general reordering of shipboard supplies she’d found necessary when she first came aboard. Her brother, though not deliberately neglectful of his personal hygiene, tended to ignore any needs which were not so pressing as to draw him away from his studies.

Great stars, he’s rubbing off on me—I’m forgetting how to talk like a normal person! With a little laugh, Elspeth toed off her ship shoes and flopped down on the soft, lush green carpet she’d ordered to mask the stiff recycled-plastic matting which covered the deck throughout most of the ship. What I mean is, she said aloud, pulling the barrette out of her hair and clipping it to the shoulder of her coverall instead, he barely noticed what he was eating, and he certainly never noticed what he was wearing or sleeping on. If there was a sheet or a coverall aboard this ship less than three years old, I never saw it. And as for his commissary… She shuddered. "He prefers emergency rations. Because they’re ‘economical, nutritionally balanced, and calorically calibrated to satisfy needs while reducing waste’. Never mind that they taste like…"

Well, Mama always taught me that proper young ladies don’t use that kind of language. Not even when they’re alone.

Letting her eyes unfocus, she stared up dreamily at the mural of blue sky and fluffy white clouds she’d had the ceiling’s smart paint conjure for her within a week of moving in, mimicking the style of decoration she’d always had in her quarters, wherever she and her parents had gone.

Because we may have lived shipside a lot of the time, or in prefab planetside quarters, but it was never gray, gray, gray the way Anton keeps the Cicatrix. Mama and Daddy made sure to always have plenty of color around, to have warmth and interest. To have life. Daddy said it was to remind them of what they were meant to be studying, to keep them in the mindset that their subjects were really people, not just artifacts or recordings or words on a page.

The mock sky stretched down along the walls to touch the horizon everywhere Elspeth hadn’t programmed groves of trees, far-off mountains, or the two pavilions which hid her bed and her desk with its built-in comp panels. The door to the head, in keeping with her whimsical outdoor theme, was marked by a clump of bushes, the sort she would have sought out in the field had her parents taken her along on one of their daily expeditions.

And the hatch looks like a hollow in an old snag, the sort owls might nest in. While the door…

She giggled again. Her mother had loved the ancient stories of whimsy-driven beings with supernatural powers, equally unsafe to anger or befriend, who had borne many names over the centuries. When Elspeth had emerged enough from her stunned grief to take the measure of her unknown brother, those beings were the first thing to her mind. On a whim of her own, she had hidden the lines of the door which led from her world into his in the side of a grass-covered hill.

Even if he did see it, he wouldn’t understand the reference. He’s so buried in his quasi-humans’ culture that he’s never studied his own!

Thoughts of culture led her back to music, and to the lack of her collection to supply anything either in keeping with or soothing to her restless, unsettled mood. Technically, she could have sent off a probe to the nearest info-center and ordered any music she pleased, as long as her personal account held enough credit to afford it, but an outgoing probe off the usual schedule would catch Anton’s attention, and she’d have to sit through a lecture on the proper use of time.

As if I were too young to get my homework done on time and still finish all my chores. If I still had homework, which I don’t. But knowing that would require Anton to pay attention to me, which he doesn’t. Elspeth rolled her eyes theatrically. Besides, even if I could mask the probe leaving and coming back—which I probably could, I have just about full access to the ship’s systems, except for Anton’s personal areas and that one cargo bay he’s insisted on handling himself for the past six months or so—even a short skip would take a full day to complete, and I want something new right now. She laughed a little. I suppose I am still young enough to be impatient!

Clapping her hands twice to get her computer’s attention, she waited for the ready chime, then spoke. Search all shipboard files. Parameters, either audio alone or audio with video, longer than thirty seconds, not currently included in list ‘Elspeth’s music’. Begin search.

Searching, responded the eternally calm, quasi-mechanical voice of the computer. Do you wish results as textual list by file name, audio list by file name, or samples of contents?

Why not live dangerously. Find out what kind of music Anton listens to, assuming he listens to any and I won’t be saddling myself with several years’ back issues of audio journals! Samples of contents.

Acknowledged. The computer beeped and burbled to itself for a moment. Search concluded. Four thousand, six hundred seventy-eight files found.

Four thousand what? Elspeth sat up in shock. How could even Anton have that many—

Playing sample of first file, the computer continued, and a delicate series of instrumental notes filled the air.

So my brother does listen to music. Beautiful music, at that. Elspeth smiled despite herself at the lovely, longing melody. I never would have thought it of him…

A flicker of light caught her eye from within her computer pavilion as a man’s full, silky tenor began to sing words in an unknown language, the introduction modulating to accommodate. It must be a music vid, not just an audio file. I wonder if I’ve finally found Anton’s weakness? Maybe even, stars forbid, something we have in common?

Hooking back the entrance flaps of the pavilion and sitting down in her cushioned chair, Elspeth studied the surprisingly blurry video displayed on her panel’s monitor area. The vid, she decided, had been made either by amateurs with substandard technology or by professionals thoroughly dedicated to reproducing the look of the world from which the song had come. Everyone listening to the brown-haired, strong-chinned singer was dressed in ancient planetside clothing, not a coverall in sight, and was that an actual fire they were sitting around?

It must be. No reproduction flickers that erratically. She grinned. Good thing Mama and Daddy liked to rough it sometimes, so I know what a campfire looks like. And I know grass and trees, too, and those are real. Even those houses—wood and stone, with those funny roofs made of straw. Thatch, I think they call it. This must have been recorded planetside, there’s no way you could get all of this aboard any ship, not without some truly massive refurbs and reroutes on the safety mechs—

So what is a confirmed ship dweller like Anton doing with a vid like this in his library?

A second voice took over the melody, this one deeper but just as smooth as the first, and richer than the dark, nut-filled sweets in which Elspeth secretly indulged from time to time. She took a moment to sigh in appreciation, then followed the shifting attention of the people within the vid to locate the new singer.

Her eyes widened as they found their mark.

He sat on a small section of log near the firepit, hands clasped on his knees, staring into the flames while he sang. The gray shirt and trousers he wore only accentuated the wiry strength visible in his frame, the straightness of his back and shoulders. His eyes, set deep in a sharply triangular face, were the color of the late evening light around him or the hearts of the flames he watched so steadily, while his softly curling hair held the hue which would result when that light had vanished completely and those flames were banked for the night.

Oh. Oh my. Oh my stars. Elspeth winced at the babbling which was all her mind seemed able to produce—even when no one else would ever know about it, it was still embarrassing—and swallowed twice before she managed to squeak out Pause file! in a voice sufficiently like her own for the computer to obey.

Who is he? I have to find out. With a face and a voice like that, not to mention actually golden eyes, how can I have missed him? Or is he only starting to be famous? He doesn’t look much older than me, he might just have been discovered, he might even be sticking with period pieces like this to appeal to a smaller and more devoted audience, but someone has to know who he is or how could Anton have the recording?

Obscurely proud of her hand’s steadiness, Elspeth planted a finger on the image of the young man. Identify this individual, she commanded. Most common name and vital statistics.

Acknowledged, the computer responded. Designated individual is most commonly known as Subject M-One-Eight-Four-One-Three. Development, equivalent to eighteen standard years, health, good, socialization, variable, anger levels, high—

Stop, Elspeth cut off the dispassionate recital, swallowing against a different emotion this time. She couldn’t quite name it, but suspected sick disbelief came closest, followed by horror. This can’t mean—not even Anton would— Subject?

Query not understood.

Throttling back her temper, Elspeth forced herself to speak calmly. Anger would only choke her voice and delay her finding the answer she wanted—or rather, the answer I don’t want, but the one I’m now sure I’m going to find.

Confirm or deny the following statement. The file now paused on my screen is a portion of the research into the culture of quasi-human beings currently performed by Doctor Anton Kolesar.

Statement confirmed. The computer sounded almost pleased to say it. Are further details desired?

Yes—wait, cancel that. Route audio output to Interface Device One. Elspeth pulled her earbuds out of their pouch again and jacked them into the panel. And switch this location to keyboard and trackpad input only. No voice, no remote, and warn me, audio and visual, if someone else tries remote access.

The last thing I need is Anton catching me snooping through his files, now that I know what he’s really doing…

I’m sorry, she murmured under her breath, staring at the face of the young man whose pensive, guarded expression she now understood. I’m so sorry for what he’s done to you. I’m going to find it out, and I’m going to make it right if it’s within my power. I promise.

Keyboarding in a request for all Anton’s notes on this particular group of quasi-humans, Elspeth sat back while the computer hummed to itself, thinking over the few bits of information she’d heard so far, and what those bits added up to.

"Development, equivalent to eighteen standard years—I was right, we are about the same age. Socialization, variable—he’s a teenage boy, what do you expect? But anger levels, high"—yes, mine would be, too, if I’d been snatched away from my home to be somebody’s social experiment!

And now that she was thinking about her brother’s words rather than trying to drown them out, she was grimly certain she had heard Anton mention a transient population that he was planning to add. One mass kidnapping, it seemed, wasn’t enough for him. He was getting ready, might even now be on his way, to use the name of science to destroy more people’s lives.

Because they are people. She let her hand rest against the edge of the screen, drumming her fingers against it. There are a few minor differences between us, now that I look more closely, but they have language and they have music and that makes them more than enough of people for me.

Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to help them…

* * * * *

Nightsinger poured the final bucket of water into his mother’s cistern, swung himself down from the tree that grew beside their cottage, and tossed the empty bucket to his sister Heartbud. I need to go rambling, he told her. I’ll be back for supper.

Please, be careful, Heartbud said anxiously, holding the bucket close to her chest. It could be dangerous—we don’t know what’s out there—

I’d welcome a bit of honest danger, wouldn’t you? Nightsinger snorted without humor. Instead of—

Mindful of orders, he stopped before he mentioned the items which had appeared around the village some months before, on the night when everything had changed. Tiny, metallic things, attached to trees, houses, barns, or anything else both large and nonliving, they emitted a high-pitched, irritating whine, felt in the chest and the bones more than it was heard with the ears. From their small size and the way with which they blended into their surroundings, it was clear they were not meant to be noticed, and Nightsinger agreed with the adults he’d heard theorizing that the sound they made was not audible…to their makers.

Whoever that might be.

Heartbud bowed her head, signaling assent. I just don’t want to lose you, she murmured, her voice wavering around the edges. Not you, too. Not so soon.

Don’t cry, sister-love. Nightsinger put an arm around Heartbud’s shoulders and squeezed, and she sniffled once and looked up at him with her green eyes so full of trust that he was hard put to it to finish his sentence in the way he had intended. I’m sure we’ll find him again. We’ll find all of them, or they’ll find us.

Do you really think so?

I know so. Behind his back, Nightsinger crossed his fingers and prayed he would be forgiven for the lie. They’re bound to be looking for us by now. It’s almost the time of year they’d be coming back, and when we aren’t where they expect us…

They’ll start looking, Heartbud finished, starting to smile. "And they’re clever, the rovers are. They know all the ways of the unseen worlds, all the paths to walk, all the tricks of seeking. Besides, they have Suncrest with them, and he knows everything about science. She pronounced the word carefully, beaming at her success. Even after six years of practice, some of Suncrest’s words could be a challenge to say. Whoever’s taken us away, wherever they’ve put us, our friends will find us, and we’ll fight for our freedom together. And then we’ll all go home again."

From your mouth to the Sisters’ ears. Nightsinger bent and kissed his own sister on the side of the head, then strode off into the forest before the confident grin he had plastered across his face began to wobble.

If only it were so easy.

But everything he had seen and heard since a night filled with terrifying dreams of being frozen, unable to move or breathe, buried alive in a tomb made of ice, turned into a morning when the sun rose at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and shed the wrong color of light, all of it pointed to one