Read Online A Passage of Stars by Kate Elliott - Free Book Online Page A

finger bent just so, the wrist, the angle of the knee here, the window made by the hands: “to look at the sky.”
    Die Kunst der Fuge. Countersubject. B-A-C-H. Ah. So it is finished.
    The universe patterns. Energy without end. We dance, each from birth. Each dance patterns uniquely. Each pattern so marks its subject/owner/object/worshipper. The colors move on the body as the body moves. The pattern defies stillness. Such do we pattern you, child, so you may understand. Learn your pattern. Wear it proudly.
    And came out.
    First, the silence of reorientation. Lily still stood, centered, and her hands began to move, rising together. She sighed and dropped them. Paisley, flung onto the floor, gasped and pushed herself up to sit again. Bach had righted himself; now he sang quietly, Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her!
    “Where are we?” said Paisley in a very small voice.
    Lily crouched beside the girl, laying a hand on her shoulder. “If we go over again, we’ll be coming into Remote. But if we’re coming into system now, it’s Dairy. I don’t care how much power these spooks have, it’s got to be one or the other.”
    “Spooks?” ventured Paisley.
    Lily sat back on her heels. “You’ve never been downside, on planet?”
    “Never.”
    “Hoy.” Lily stood and paced back to the seal.
    “See,” said Paisley, “we can’t go much of anywhere.”
    “We?”
    Paisley lifted her arms. The tattoos twined in their vivid pattern down flesh, lost themselves under her tunic.
    Lily sighed and turned her head toward the opposite wall.
    “Spooks? Funny word.” Paisley waited.
    “It’s a thing, a creature; we also call it Boo, the ghost. It lived down there on Unruli before ever we came. So we call anything funny or weird that, people sometimes, but mostly just—well, those things, they’re nothing like us. Folk say they capture the souls of dead people. Who knows if they have any awareness at all.”
    Paisley sighed, an unconscious mimic, and dropped her chin to rest on one fist. Lily walked to the door.
    When they came out of the berth, it was you they recognized. She turned to gaze at Bach. You they stopped for. They knew you. But no one here knows you. With one hand she drew her hair back, let it fall forward. What did you mean, another sector of space?
    Bach sang a gentle end to his piece, paused. His lights winked, and a spray of bright points of light scattered around him, spreading on the floor as he rose higher above it. Thou, my patroness, didst commission me in this district. A light blinked red. Paisley slipped back as the pattern spread, staring at it in awe. My calculations indicate we have appeared here. (A blue light.) Or here. (A second blue light.)
    Where is Central?
    “It be ya star map!” cried Paisley.
    Data incomplete. My investigations indicate thy sphere of trade encompasseth limited regional boundaries. Navigation links nonexistent beyond such sphere.
    “You been telling me,” said Paisley, “’bout growing up. Where be you born?”
    At first neither Lily nor Paisley saw the two green lights flash. But when the section of stars they were looking at made no change, their eyes roved further afield.
    “Impossible,” said Lily.
    “Sure,” said Paisley in a breath, “and glory.”
    Where do you think this ship came from? asked Lily. You said before, the common —she hesitated over the unusual pattern of notes—Terran usage.
    A new light, yellow, winked on closer to the green ones than the blues and red, but still far—almost the cell’s width—from either. Bach had risen high enough now that the scattered points filled the floor, dappling Lily and Paisley.
    “Paradise,” breathed Paisley.
    “Who?” Lily turned to the girl.
    Paisley began to sing in a high, slightly nasal voice:
    Ya Dancer hae, he come, he come,
    Tae lead us far, tae home, tae home.
    Lost we are, belly down day,
    Through ya mountains winds ya way.
    She paused, regarded for a long, silent moment some aspect of the