The Changeling Game, Chapter 50

50.
A Trickster God for a Call Sign

“We’ll leave to choose the plants right after dinner,” Tafrara said as they walked down to the dining room, “and then we can plant them together after the overnoon sleep, before it’s time to get ready for Zdan’s send-off party.”

“And Tizzy,” Izil added, “can tell us the rest of the story while we’re planting.”

Jack had advanced that story to partway through the canyon run, describing how everyone had let go of everything that wasn’t absolutely essential to their escape offworld and how Riddick had rigged up a rope harness to drag the precious fuel cells himself. Jack’s own backpack, along with the boomerang Paris had lent her, had been discarded along with most of the sled’s contents. The plan had been simple enough: run like hell with all the light they could carry and nothing else to weigh them down.

Imam had insisted on praying with each of them ahead of the run, something that had left Jack feeling awkward and bewildered. Her family hadn’t been especially religious, observing major holidays with a more secular zeal than anything else. The idea of closing her eyes and reaching out to an unseen and powerful entity had seemed weird to her…

…at least, it had until recently, when the Apeiros had reached out to her.

They weren’t gods. She knew that much already. They were powerful, but it wasn’t that kind of power, and she had a sense that they would eschew any such labels.

But she had been left feeling off-kilter after Imam’s prayers until he’d walked off to find Riddick, and Fry had muttered “whatever” under her breath… and then she’d overheard Riddick mocking the cleric’s beliefs. It had been a relief to know that she wasn’t the only one struggling to connect with his attempts at bonding through prayer.

It came as an even bigger relief when Ewan, chuckling, admitted that while his family was nominally Christian, they were every bit as secular as she’d been raised. She was very glad that she hadn’t given him—or any of his family, really—offense with her admission.

The start of the run itself had been frenetic and crazed, little to narrate beyond impressions and Riddick’s periodic roars of “Move!” when they faltered. But then, above them, the monsters had begun battling in the air, blue blood raining down on them and bodies—and body parts—falling from the sky.

Takama came to the guest room door to summon them to dinner, and deliver Sebby’s cricket box, right as Jack described reaching the collapsed pile of massive bones that Shazza had driven through. It was as good a place to break off as any.

Tafrara and Kyra were talking about gardening plans as they walked down the stairs together. Jack felt a sad pang move through her; in Kyra’s dream, that was one of the only chores she’d enjoyed doing in the New Christy Enclave. It struck Jack yet again what a perfect fit her sister was with this family, and how terribly unfair it was that she couldn’t just stay with them. She wouldn’t even be able to circle back to them until she’d broken her trail, something that could take years to be sure of.

And what about her? Could she find a way back here as Audrey MacNamera?

Tangiers Prime, she thought, had several excellent universities. She could apply to one of them, maybe. Return as a college student with a completely plausible and unconnected reason for traveling to New Marrakesh and “meeting” the ait Meziane tribe for the “first time…”

It might work. She’d have to look into which schools had programs that interested her. She couldn’t do it if she couldn’t make the choice to apply feel completely in character…

“You seem suspiciously deep in thought,” Ewan said beside her. “Should I be worried?”

She glanced up at him, catching a hint of a teasing smile… but also concern. “I was thinking about when we might be able to break our trails and come back. What kinds of covers we might need to come up with, to make us showing up for a second time seem plausibly like a first arrival.”

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something good,” he said, his smile widening. “We will be standing by to meet you, for the very first time ever, when you do.”

If she picked a university in New Marrakesh to attend, she thought, she might even be able to visit with the family frequently. She wondered where Ewan would end up based out of once his flight training was over, and how often he might be back at the house.

It was tempting to ask, to try to make plans, but she didn’t dare. It would be at least five years before she would be able to return. He might be married by then, or living on a base in another part of the system. General Toal had warned her that any long-term plans or promises would be red flags to people like Toombs, or to Operatives seeking her or Kyra. As much as she wanted to ask Ewan to wait for her—a hazardous thing to articulate anyway—she couldn’t. Even if it didn’t have the potential to draw dangerous attention to them… it would be cruel to him when she had no idea what might actually happen between that moment and an uncertain future that was years away.

She wished she could close her eyes and skip forward in time, but then she’d still be just as young.

“Are you all right with telling us your story like this?” Ewan asked. “I really should have asked this sooner, but after the way the last sections affected you—”

“No, it’s good,” Jack told him. “It’s, uh… it’s the first time I’ve been able to tell anybody other than Dihya about it. And it’s the last chance I’ll get to tell anyone, too.”

Ewan, pulling out a chair for her, blinked and then nodded. “Because after you leave here, you won’t be able to admit to anyone that you were the girl who survived the Hunter-Gratzner crash.”

Jack nodded back as he pushed in her seat and took the one beside her. “Gotta speak now or forever hold my peace, I guess.”

Ewan’s expression was sad. “You have so much pain attached to it. I worry it’s going to be left unresolved.”

He and Kyra, and Tafrara and Izil, had tried so hard this morning-day to help her with it, but while they’d given her a lot of things to think about, most of it hadn’t really sunk in yet and she knew it. She understood what he was saying—one conversation wasn’t going to do it and yet that might be all she’d ever get—and she could feel his wish that he could sit with her, over time, as she worked through it all. It was another If-Only on the large pile that had formed, part of a life and future she desperately wished could be hers but could never claim without going far away from it first.

“Maybe one day,” she told him once she was sure she could keep the wobble out of her voice.

He nodded, looking as morose as she felt.

“Tell me about piloting,” she asked him, wanting something brighter to talk about for a while. It was the right move.

Ewan’s eyes lit up as he described flying, both in air and in space, and the thrilling terror of launches and re-entries. A part of him came alive that she’d never seen before, and she found herself falling for him all over again. He had completed almost all of his primary training, but the most demanding part—advanced combat flight, both in atmosphere and in space—was ahead of him and would begin a week after he returned to Qamar, once he was recertified as flight-ready and took a final test that had originally been scheduled for a few days after he received the news of his brother’s death.

“I’m behind the rest of my class right now,” he said with a rueful smile. “But hopefully I won’t stay that way. Fortunately, I won’t have two weeks of catch-up to do. Just one. Everyone got a few days off after that test. I had originally been planning to meet up with my brother then.”

The shadow of his grief flickered over him for a moment before he seemed to put it aside and focused on her again.

“Are you ready for the test?” Jack asked, feeling concern. As far as she knew, he hadn’t been getting many opportunities to study and review things.

He grinned and nodded. “You’re not the only eidetic at this table,” he told her, winking.

“Really?” Was that part of why the two of them had bonded so quickly? Within her own family, only one of her uncles had displayed that same kind of recall. Well, and maybe her dad, given how the only things he’d claimed to have forgotten were always suspiciously convenient for him— “Wait, how’d you know I am?”

“The way you narrated your story, especially if it’s your first time telling a lot of it. Your wording and delivery is exact.” He leaned closer, murmuring. “I got the feeling that when Kyra was repeating some of ‘your’ lines, she wasn’t being nearly as precise, and it was bothering you a little.”

“Wow,” she whispered back to him. “You can read me like a book.”

“What are you two whispering about over there?” Takama asked. Although her tone was mild and playful, there was something under it that—

Oh. Oh. They were still being chaperoned, and had gotten a little too close to each other for anybody’s liking. Ewan gave her a rueful smile as he pulled back to a more acceptable distance.

“Tizzy has been telling us the story of the crash of the Hunter-Gratzner,” he answered his aunt. “One of the other survivors was planning on going to Earth to try to liberate artworks from the Louvre. I was saying that some of the things she’s been doing here in the last week would have been great practice for that job.” He winked at Jack from the eye his aunt couldn’t see.

“You see?” Tafrara said, laughing. “My baby brother is pure trouble.”

At least, Jack thought, everybody had stopped worrying—for the moment, anyway—that they were somehow going to do something scandalous at the dinner table.

In five years, nobody would care if they invaded each other’s space that way, whether innocently or less so. What a moment to have to put the two of them on the spot, though, forcing Ewan to lie to avoid possibly hurting Kyra’s feelings, just out of a worry that the two of them might be… what, exactly? Plotting an overnoon fling in the broad daylight?

They kept a more seemly distance from each other for the rest of the meal. Kyra and Tafrara were deep in a discussion about adapting Earth plants to the growing cycle of a world with 44-hour days and 32-month-long years. Jack could feel her sister’s fascination, her desire to soak up all the information and personally explore it.

Damn you, Alexander Toombs, she thought. Kyra, at least, might have been able to stay if he hadn’t spent so much time and effort painting a bullseye on her. Maybe to become a soldier, or maybe to finally get to rekindle the love of learning that had been brutally quelled by her father and New Christy, and get a degree in something like xenobotany…

“What’s wrong?” Ewan murmured.

Jack looked over at him, glancing Kyra’s way again. “She’s so happy here,” she murmured back. “And I don’t know if she even has somewhere else to go…”

Understanding and empathy sparked in his eyes… and worry. “But you do, yes? You’re not just… throwing yourself out into the darkness?”

She nodded. Of course he’d have the same concern about her. “I have relatives waiting for me. I just have to reach them in a way that makes it look like I never tried to take the Hunter-Gratzner as part of my itinerary.”

Some tension left his body when she said that. “And you’ll be able to?”

“Yeah,” she told him, feeling her lips quirk up into a smile that would have stirred an uh oh or an I know that look from Kyra. “I have a plan.”

It might take most of the resources she would earn from flying the Nephrite Undine to Deckard’s World. Possibly even all of them… but she knew how to get more if she needed to. General Toal had put the idea in her head.

Many years ago, I heard the story of a young woman who had been a witness to a terrible crime and was placed in protective custody until she could testify against its perpetrators. She was hidden away, and only allowed periodic, controlled contact with her family, through elaborate channels designed to keep anyone from tracing her whereabouts…

What if the witness had been a kid, and her handlers had been far too worried about her being indiscreet to let her have contact with her family at all? What if any sign that her family even knew she was safe somewhere could have tipped off the people she was hiding from? And what if, even after she had given her testimony and she was allowed to return home, the threat of potential reprisals was so great that she still wasn’t permitted to tell anyone where she had been or why? Deckard’s World’s law enforcement community used enough of her father’s security protocols that she was pretty sure she could make it look like that was what had happened to her, and like only someone with a much higher level of clearance—Federacy level, maybe someone of a similar rank to General Toal himself—could access information about where she had been.

It was a project she planned to work on while she was traveling back to Deckard’s World: creating the scenario, making sure there were no holes in the public side of it, and building a hidden side that would allow her to maintain and defend the story against any and all scrutiny…

“I can see you do have a plan. One day, I hope you can tell me all about it.” Now Ewan’s voice was wistful.

She wanted to promise him that she would, but she knew she couldn’t. General Toal had been clear. No plans, no promises. Nothing that could be used against them or turned into a lie.

“How’d you switch from being pre-med to being a military officer in the flight academy?” she asked instead, genuinely curious. She knew the story of her father’s path into the Corps of Engineers already, and couldn’t figure out where Ewan would have found the time to fit in both and still only be twenty-two.

“Ah!” He smiled, his expression clearing. “Yes. Things work a little differently from one part of the Federacy to another. While we do have ‘Military Academies’ here, the founders of this world were concerned about… well, back on Earth, there had been so many military coups at different points in history. They feared the development of a culture, within the armed forces, that was too disconnected from the rest of the populace to understand and prioritize its needs. So while yes, I did get shipped off to a Military Academy when I was sixteen—”

“To keep you out of trouble,” Tafrara interjected from across the table.

Ewan nodded, wincing and smiling simultaneously. “I was quite the bad seed back then, yes. Even so, I was expected to attend a normal four-year university, with civilians, and to complete much of my combat training with a mixture of both officer candidates and normal enlistees. To ensure that I would always be connected to and bonded with more people than just other officers. I wasn’t sure, for a long time, whether I wanted to be a combat medic or a fighter pilot. And until I turned twenty-one, there was a restraining order keeping me from flying—”

“A what?” Jack stared at him in amazement.

“On his sixteenth birthday,” Cedric chuckled from further down the table, “he and some friends sneaked onto an airfield that was hosting a large air show. He’d somehow memorized the controls for the replica F-14 Tomcats that were flying in the show, and took one on a two-hour joyride. Enrolling him in the Military Academy was part of the plea deal that would let him ever fly again.”

“Fortunately, the Tomcat was undamaged when he landed,” Safiyya sighed. “I had the feeling that half of the visiting brass wanted an excuse to confiscate him from us and keep him.”

Kyra looked like she was ready to burst with repressed laughter. You two really are perfect for each other.

It sure as hell explained why he hadn’t hesitated, even for a second, when she’d dragooned him into the morgue heist. Some of the stories people had told about his older brother at the memorial had been fairly similar, if a little less felonious.

Ewan was blushing. “Yes, I… really was a lot of trouble back then.”

“Back then?” Tafrara laughed.

“I wasn’t allowed within a half-kilometer of any aircraft or spacecraft,” Ewan continued, still blushing and shaking his head. “For five years, I had to watch all of the airshows from the roof here. I couldn’t enter the spaceport, or travel anywhere that required boarding a plane, shuttle, or starship. Which meant a lot of vacations in the New Atlas range.”

“Or biking around with that crazy health inspector friend of yours,” Izil snickered.

Ewan’s blush had, improbably, deepened. “But it also meant that I couldn’t study more than the theoretical classroom aspects of being a pilot until last year. So I focused on a pre-med track for a while, which both Usadden and my ‘crazy health inspector friend’ were thrilled about… and worked for the UMA as a paramedic, for field experience.”

“Which is how you met Robie in the first place,” Usadden laughed.

Jack had a feeling she’d better not ask how wild the rides they’d gone on had gotten.

“On Ewan’s twenty-first birthday,” Cedric picked up the tale, “Gavin had recovered enough from ’Enza that his civilian pilot’s license had been reinstated, so the first thing he did that day was take his baby brother flying. They were gone most of the morning-day, and when they got back, we could all tell that Ewan was never going to become a doctor.”

“I resigned from the UMA and spent every waking minute playing catch-up so I could qualify for the flight academy when I graduated. I just barely squeezed my way in, too.” Ewan said.

“Proving that you have plenty of discipline when you wish to,” Takama teased him in her dryest voice, but her eyes were sparkling with amusement and pride.

“It did help that Gavin had been top of his class when he passed through the flight academy,” Cedric said. “And that Ewan’s joyride in the Tomcat had been talked about for years among the staff. They threatened to give him the call sign ‘Maverick.’”

“Fortunately, that one was already taken,” Ewan said, smiling.

“What is your call sign?” Jack asked.

His smile widened into a grin. “Loki.”

“The Norse trickster god?” She found herself grinning back at him. He actually resembled one of the first actors to play the character in centuries-old movies, if darker-complected. “I like it. It suits you.”

“A little too well at times,” Tafrara laughed. “Come, we should wash up and go to the plant nursery.”

It ended up being a family excursion, almost everyone accompanying them. The plans for the following morning-day were evolving in unexpected ways: Tafrara and Izil both wanted to accompany them to Elsewhere when they tried to return Sebby, and had already expressed that wish. Now Usadden, who had that morning-day off, wanted to join them as well. Takama, Cedric, and Safiyya were discussing whether they should come, too. It might be, Jack realized, everyone’s first and last chance to see what New Marrakesh looked like in an alternate universe.

“Plus, you’ll need extra hands to help with the olive trees and the planting equipment,” Tafrara told them. “Especially if you’re traveling uphill.”

Ewan, shoulder to shoulder with Jack in the back seat of the same rugged all-terrain vehicle Jack had dreamed about overnight, sounded wistful again. “I wish I could come with you.”

“I wish you could, too,” Jack told him back, leaning her head against his shoulder. She suddenly wondered if he meant another trip into Elsewhere, or her trip home… and which one she meant.

Of course, she could no more take home a 22-year-old fighter pilot with a trickster god for a call sign than she could take home the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain…

Proof, she thought, that the universe had a bent toward the cruel.

By the time they reached the nursery, though, it had been decided: “Tizzy” and “Dihya” would be accompanied into Elsewhere by almost the whole family, who would help them plant olive trees for Sebby if he could be successfully released. They would take at least a pair of young trees that were already capable of fruiting, so that the little crustacean wouldn’t have to wait long for treats. While Takama took charge of discussing the trees with the nursery owner, Kyra and Tafrara split off to find a suitable courtyard plant… and Jack found herself walking with Ewan through another part of its gardens, looking at flowering shrubs. They still weren’t alone, but for the moment, it almost felt like they were.

“Do you have anything specific in mind for your plant?” Ewan asked her as she looked over a selection of bushes that she knew had come from other parts of old Earth than Morocco.

“I’m not sure yet,” she told him. “Something that smells nice, I think. And… I don’t know, something that, if we’d all been born in actual Marrakesh back on Earth, might have been native.”

“A desert or steppe plant, then,” Ewan told her. He grinned at her look of surprise. “Old Marrakesh was much further inland than New Marrakesh is. In fact, our latitude and longitude correspond more with old Casablanca on Earth… but ‘New Casablanca’ was already taken by the first settlement here, even though it’s much further north and east. The original Marrakesh, though, was hot and dry. It was closer to the old Atlas Mountains than Casablanca, and the New Atlas Mountains are practically on top of us, so maybe that’s why they chose the name. Let’s see…”

He looked around the nursery, and then nodded.

“I see some of the plants that came from arid parts of Morocco on Earth. Shall we?”

Jack let him lead her to another part of the nursery, where the plants were… well…

A little disappointing. They weren’t at all lush, looking scrubby and spindly instead.

“In the dry climate of the desert,” Ewan told her, in response to the crestfallen expression she hadn’t been able to keep off her face, “a large, broad leaf is a bad idea most of the time. It would dry out too quickly, and with as much sun as deserts tend to get, light collection is easy enough with a small leaf or even just a stem. But if you’d like, we could look at something else.”

But that was when the sweet scent of …something… reached Jack’s nose and captivated her. She’d never smelled a perfume quite like it.

It took her a moment to locate the scent and discover the tiny white blossoms scattered throughout a bush that looked like a living, green broom. Each flower was smaller than her fingernail. She bent closer to get a better look. Tiny, five-petaled, white with a broad green stripe running down the center of each petal, each miniscule anther and stamen tipped with fuchsia, they smelled heavenly.

“What is this?” she asked, looking to see if it had a label.

“Calligonum comosum,” Tafrara said as she and Kyra approached. “The fire bush.”

Kyra was carrying a small potted tree—a fig tree, with a little fruit already growing on it—in the crook of one arm.

“The fire bush?” Jack asked. “Why’s it called that? Does it start fires?”

Tafrara chuckled. “No, it’s named after these,” she said, gesturing to another bush beside the one Jack was examining. It had the same physical structure, but instead of white blossoms, it had clusters of branching, brilliant scarlet tendrils, each cluster bristling around a small fruit. They almost looked like tiny coral reefs. “The white flowers give way to fruits that mature to look like these. Once the fruits appear, a dune covered in these bushes can almost look like it’s on fire.”

Jack realized that there were several fire bushes surrounding the one she’d been looking at, all apparently further into their “seasons” than the one she’d spotted. The tiny white flowers were only present on the one bush. “They’re beautiful.”

“Dead useful, too,” Ewan commented. “They’re popular for sand dune stabilization, feeding livestock, and in medicine. They’re used a lot in folk medicine, and compounds from several parts of the plant are in prescription meds.”

“Wow.” Jack touched the plant carefully. “Is this something we can plant in the courtyard?”

“Yes,” Tafrara said, “but an even better location for it might be on the rooftop.”

“What about the taproot?” Ewan asked her. “I’ve read that it’s very long.”

“I have a spot in mind for that,” Tafrara said with a smile. “Remember the chimney opening we had to cover when you were Tizzy’s age? After the incident?”

Ewan’s own smile had gotten huge. “You want to fill it with sand? We’re going to need a lot of sand.”

“Not so much as all that,” Tafrara said. “But it’s also right by the place where you loved to sit and watch the air shows. A perfect location.”

“What was the incident?” Jack asked, once she was sure neither of them had anything more to add.

“Remember when you asked what happened when a burglar gained access to the house via the roof?” Ewan asked her.

Uh oh. “Yes…?”

“He tried to enter through a large chimney that hadn’t been used in years. The fireplace it led to had been bricked up before I was even born.” Ewan was trying to tell the story with a straight face, but his lips kept twitching toward a smile. “He survived, but just barely. I think he spent two days trapped inside before we realized he was there and broke open the fireplace to get him out. And then had it rebricked immediately, and made sure the news reports included how close he’d come to dying from his burglary attempt.”

“The chimney had been capped, of course, to keep birds from entering,” Tafrara added. “He had removed the caps. So we covered it… but it would be perfect for a long taproot, and could be the centerpiece for an area featuring desert plants.”

“And filling it with sand would definitely ensure that no one ever tries the same stupid stunt once everyone’s forgotten about that last attempt,” Cedric said, joining them. “I’ll go order the sand now. I think we can have it ready for us, and waiting on the roof, before we wake up from the overnoon sleep.”

“Wow,” Jack said, impressed. “That fast?”

“I know a bloke.” Cedric winked and walked away, taking his comm out of his pocket.

Picking up the bush that still had the white flowers, Jack closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and smiled. This scent, she thought, would always remind her of New Marrakesh. She wondered if anyone made a perfume with it.

Once everything had been paid for, Jack and Kyra loaded their plants into the back of the large vehicle they’d come in. Four olive trees already sat in the bed.

“Four?” she asked.

“One from you, one from Dihya, and two from us,” Safiyya explained. “Sebby’s quite captured our hearts, too, after all. Now, I’m up almost past my bedtime, so we should head home.”

The heat was getting intense, and Jack realized that she was feeling sleepy as well. The roads were almost deserted as they drove back to the ait Meziane house. Once they were back in the garage, Cedric instructed them to leave the plants where they were for the moment, as it was time for everyone to get ready for bed.

Ewan walked by her side as they went upstairs.

“It occurs to me that you and Dihya both chose plants that are reflections of yourselves,” he commented.

“Really?”

“Yes. Do you know how fig trees fruit?”

Jack shook her head.

“They never appear to flower. Instead, they produce a round structure called a syconium. All of the flowers are hidden inside. A small wasp crawls inside the syconium to lay her eggs and pollinates the hidden flowers. Her children are born inside the fig and help it ripen, and then they depart, carrying its pollen to other syconia, while their former home matures into the ‘fruit’ we eat.” He quirked one eyebrow at her. “There is no fruit without the wasp.”

It was Jack thought, a good, if complicated, metaphor for Kyra.

She was at her door; Kyra was already moving around inside their room. Ewan kept walking toward his own room. Tafrara, ahead of him, had turned to look back, still acting as a chaperone.

“Ewan?”

He had reached his door and turned to look at her, for an instant seeming surprised that she was no longer beside him. “Yes?”

“What about me? What does the fire bush symbolize?” Aside from being spindly and the youngest in its group…

He hesitated for a moment before answering. “Easily underestimated… but a treasure beyond all reckoning.”

Jack couldn’t find a single thing to say in response to that.

“Sleep well, Tizzy.”