Paula E. Downing - A Whisper of Time.pdf - Paula E. Downing - widez2

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FALLWAY

FLARE STAR

MAD ROY'S LIGHT

RINN'S STAR

To Tom.

The Hand of God

Stirs the hushed and drifting void

Scatters the suns

Begins time...

Be still and listen

for Her whisper comes

and the whisper tells you

Who you are

Where you go

Why it is

In the silence

A thousand shades breathe their story

A thousand empires build their monuments

A thousand children are born to sorrow

Listen...

Listen for the whisper

Of time.

CONTENTS:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Prologue

The city lay barren, emptied of movement and life, with a subtle dust sifting over sculptured stone and

slowly crumbling walls. Above, a few stars gleamed dimly in a sky rapidly darkening to deepest purple

and black. In a street near an ancient plaza, near the Stones of the Conquered, near the Temple of the

Resurgent, a childish figure stumbled wearily over the pavestones, her steps hesitant. She no longer

thought of a destination, but wandered blindly in a waking dream, numbed by loss and confusion. Though

still a child, she sensed that stopping would mean the end, an end she only dimly understood but

instinctively feared.

The cool air of the evening sighed against her sensitive skin, bringing its messages from this strange place.

Her alien vision lay deep into the infrared, her heritage from a distant world of deep shadows: in this

place, the buildings still glowed with the warmth of the faded day, with sounds preternaturally loud in the

echoing spaces of the city. The first day, after she had lost everyone, she had listened fearfully to every

echo, caught motionless for a heart-stopping instant, then propelled to run, her heart thumping frantically.

She had run often during that first day and night, run from the service robots that prowled mindlessly

through the city, run from a fall of stone, from the wind keening through corroded metal in a narrow alley.

But she had grown used to the sounds and now plodded onward, her small boots scuffing on the

street-stones.

She lifted her head dully as she heard a faint noise from a shadowed alcove and slowed, then watched

until the service robot trundled into the street ahead. The machine creaked along its well-worn path,

oblivious to her as it inspected for debris, fallen stone, cracked paving. She stopped as it passed in front

of her: a small machine with faded panels and winking lights. She gestured greeting; it ignored her. She

took a step toward it, but it did not slow nor speed its steady clanking. It could not see her, as nothing

saw her in this empty city. Defeated, she watched it move off.

I could sit down, the child thought, her mind suffused with hopeless grief. If I wanted to. She watched as

the robot turned into a low doorway across the street; its sound faded into silence, like all the other

sounds of this place.

Three mornings before, she had seen a shimmering multiwinged insect on the edge of the Ship clearing

and had impulsively chased it into a nearby street, leaving the game that occupied the other children. The

adults had not seen her leave, still occupied with adult things in nearby buildings that little interested her.

As she chased the shiny creature, she had laughed and shouted, inviting it to play. When it spun away out

of sight over a tall building, she made her own game of bobbing and spinning, entranced by the room to

run and leap in this wide place, so different than the narrow corridors of the black-hulled Ship, her home.

The sunlight was intoxicating, warm and all-surrounding; the breeze had teased her relentlessly, blowing in

cool and salt-scented from the distant beach beyond the city, tossing her feathery hair into her eyes as

she jumped and ran.

Each street led to another street and then into a wide plaza larger than any she had seen, a hundred times

longer than the Ship, a hundred times wider: never had she seen such space in one place and with all the

sky above. She had played in the plaza for hours, running up and down stairs, racing around the stone

bases of massive statues that towered over her head, bathed by the warmth of the air and bright sunlight.

Then, tired to happy satiety, she had slept in the shadows of a tall serpentine statue that watched vigilantly

over the plaza with the others, its stone fronds stretched out protectively, its fangs bared in threat against

anyone who would disturb its charge's sleep.

Later, as reddish shadows spread into every street and the first stars emerged, she had found her way

back to the Ship clearing—only the Ship was gone. She saw the charred ground where it had stood,

found the depressions from its metal feet, but it was gone. Frantically she looked in other streets,

widening her circle far into the night, but she could not find the Ship anywhere.

She had looked and looked for it since, wandering aimlessly through the deserted city, numb with the

shock of her loss. Now she was weakening, her legs shaking so hard she could barely stand, and a terror

of that weakness had begun in her mind and spread steadily, darkening memory, ending need. She wiped

her eyes with her sleeve, then pushed her fine hair back from her dusty face. If I wanted to sit down, I

could, she thought. Her eyes roamed over the reds of the evening, searching. If I wanted to.

It was then, as she stood still in the deep evening, that she heard the music, a delicate chiming aloft on the

breeze, a beckoning sound, a different sound than those that had pursued her from every dark corner and

turn of stone. The sound jangled her senses, an odd jangling, and she waited, holding her breath for it to

stop like all the other sounds had stopped. But the singing continued, calling to her. She took a step

forward and swayed off balance in her weakness, then took another step.

Where?

She stumbled down the street and paused at the intersection, her head turning from side to side as she

sought the direction of the sound. To the left, she thought: through a carved gate at the end of the long

street, shadowed by the deepening night. She stumbled forward down the street and rushed into the

garden, crushing the first flowers in her haste, then took greater care, moving deep into the frostflower

glade and its shimmering light.

The frostflowers glittered in fantastic colonnades, a faerie's city touched by the breeze, swaying in

intricate, shimmering patterns. And they sang, their ethereal melody bending and dipping in improbable

arpeggios at the very edges of her hearing. She tipped her head to listen, a smile on her face, forgetting

her terror, forgetting the loss, as they sang to her in glad welcome. She walked from flower to flower,

talking back to them in a lisping melodic speech, touching each new crystalline blossom to hear its

answer. Her grief eased still more in their fascination: their spell grew, binding her round and round in

memories not her own, but memories that did not hurt, did not remind her of her loss ... and replaced.

She smiled, then laughed aloud, and the melody swelled in response.

I am Medoret, she told them all. What is your name? And they sang to her of a distant world, a home

remembered and lost, but ever remembered.

She sighed and walked onward, brushing her palms against the glowing blooms. Deep in the glade,

surrounded by a thousand singing flowers, she tripped on a clod of soil and sat down with a thump,

chortling to herself with a child's amusement. The frostflowers nodded gravely and entwined her with their

chiming and shimmering light, lulling her to sleep with their whispers. Dream, child.... dream of us....

It was there in the alien garden that the humans found her, asleep in the ancient city of the Targethi, and

took her home with them into captivity.

Chapter One

Medoret leaned her arm on the ledge of her open apartment window and looked out over the city and

the glittering expanse of dark ice beyond the city dome. She sniffed at the warm overcirculated air that

sighed gently against her face. The humans had built their small domed city on a wide shelf of volcanic

rock overlooking the great southern ice plain of Epsilon Eridani III, a planet they had named Ariadan

after a Sumerian word meaning “river”—though Ariadan had no flowing rivers, only ice. But the old name

had pleased the chief archaeologists, as all their naming of things pleased them—as if naming captured a

thing and made it human-owned. Humans liked owning things. She felt especially owned today; it was not

a feeling that pleased her.

The air brought a murmur of traffic from the street ten stories below and an array of alien scents that had

become long familiar—a clinging dust, the acidic smell of human flesh, a pleasant touch of roses and

columbine from the gardens several blocks away, the faint metallic burning odor from the humans’ mobile

machines and the deep-buried ventilators that had sustained the city's enclosed environment. During her

ten years among the humans, she had lived on Ariadan in the care of her keepers, safe in the control of

the Targethi Project, far away from the crowded cities of Earth and the possible terrorists who might

seek political or religious catharsis by killing Earth's only alien child.

There are worse forms of captivity, she told herself, knowing she had limited options even if the humans

allowed her to choose, which they had not.

Her sensitive pupils expanded as she looked away from the brightness of the street below. Beyond the

roofs of the other residential buildings, Ariadan's dark ice plains glittered under a blue-black sky, faintly

obscured by the fabric of the dome. The ice plain reminded her of something she could not quite

remember, a problem that she knew from recent experience would not resolve with hard thought. The

memory teased at her mind, refusing to move beyond a vague knowing . She had been too young when

the humans had taken her, and had lost something that was important.

Lost what? she wondered. I don't even know what the right questions are. How can I find the answers?

She sighed and looked at her pale hand resting on the windowsill, its nails more slender talons than

fingernails, its fingers more jointed and slender than human fingers, mobile and graceful with a language of

their own she no longer remembered. A human male might find her face beautiful, and overlook the

differences in digits and length of her limbs, the odd fineness of her feathery hair, even overlook her lack

of breasts—though other applicable literature implied that could be a potential problem. What lay

beneath her pale skin, organs and structures and fluids, differed even more markedly from the human

norm, a difference that extended deep into the biochemistry of her cells.

Recently Dr. Sieyes, her psychiatrist, had traded pointed articles with an Earth academic about

Medoret's obvious failure to achieve puberty, reacting scornfully to his rival's theories of an undiagnosed

dietary insufficiency, tri-sex drones as a sexual alien variant, even psychological repression. She looked

down at her flat chest and scowled. Tri-sex drone? she thought irritably. Where had that come from?

Label: female. Am I? In the beginning, the Project had decided she was female from their anatomical

studies, with explicit pictures of her sexual physical structures in early articles she had read once and now

avoided. She had an apparent womb, genitals that vaguely resembled human female genitals in structure

and apparent function, apparent nipples displaced several inches downward from human positioning,

which had caused frowns but ... a girl, they decided. And likely she was female: she had dreamed of her

mother and felt a definite link of gender, but how gender arranged itself among her people, how children

were engendered and born—she had been a child, uninterested in adult things.

She could name the two proteins that Earth biochemistry did not share with her body, could even sketch

a reliable diagram of their structure. During those first few weeks, as the Earth survey ship raced

frantically back to Ariadan and its sophisticated labs, she had nearly died of starvation and fever, then

had attempted a deliberate death as her young mind retreated into months of catatonia. The humans had

overcome that death, too, wanting both mind and body of the child, not one without the other.

She could recite the formula of the enzyme that had cured the cyclic fevers that later had recurred and

nearly killed her twice, though not even the clever biochemists were quite sure why their miracle drug had

worked. The humans were clever with their chemicals, clever with many things. Now her dietary

supplements ruled her life, a fact she tried to not remember. If the humans withdrew the supplements, she

would die. Sometimes she wondered if she cared.

Stop this, she told herself.

She had nearly escaped, in the early months, fleeing from her terror into her own dream world, safe from

terror and lostness and pain she pushed away, but they had cajoled and pressured, touched and

wheedled, punished, rewarded, medicated, caressed, embraced, stripping her of the safe blackness and

its comforting images, imposing their version of reality. A cause for gratitude, she supposed: as much as

she rued it, her survival had depended on accepting their world eventually—though a child could not

understand such things. Her psychological growth since that time was fully documented in the literature,

the ups and downs, the rebellions, the depressions, the appearance of joy, the increasing social

behavior—all matched against human children, the only analogue they knew. She supposed she should

be grateful.

But they still watched for the madness, while so oblivious to their own kinds of insanity, the mind chemists

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