Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [21]
Overhead, lightning and long neon storm clouds skated the biohaze. When he slid down the dome into the sea of warm ash, Braxan came quickly to him.
“By saving them, you’ve gone against random order,” she told him.
“If you stay here, you must learn to accept these decisions.”
“These aren’t decisions,” he countered. “And I’m not staying here. And neither are you.”
His words disturbed the people around them. Braxan noticed, even more than Keller did, or a least cared more.
“Get your Grid mats,” she said. “Spread the word for all hunters to meet at the Feast plain.”
The people broke up and hurried back into the city to prepare for the hunt. Ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring their chain-mail moccasins were like jinglebells anyway. Vibrations couldn’t be muffled here.
Braxan was uneasy giving the order to hunt, or any order. It wasn’t in her nature. She reminded Keller some of himself when he had been suddenly spun into charge of a ship in crisis and a colony in trouble, without the people he had come to depend upon. She was alone too, without family. Braxan had lost all her relatives in the last few hunts, a group of people who hadn’t been blessed with many children. Most women Braxan’s age had a half-dozen children. Braxan had none. Apparently the luck of the draw.
So Braxan was alone, except for the injured traveler she had nursed back to health.
This would be the fifth hunt since Keller came through the gateway and crashed the spinner out on the plain. Through weeks of Keller’s recovery, Braxan had provided both nursing and information. She had wanted to go through the gateway more than either Riutta or Luntee, and for that reason she had stayed one of those old-order quirks of caution. “When you appeared in one of our spinners,” she said, “we didn’t know what kind of being you were or why you came. You told us we must use our stored energy to power more ships, to cross over before the gateway closes… that it is still time to go. Still, there are many fears to this.”
“Braxan, you have to keep believing.” He clasped her arms and bothered to look deeply into her eyes, hoping she would find the truth in there. “This side doesn’t want people. It never did. On the big scale of time, eleven thousand years isn’t that long. The time of the Living is running out on this big ball bearing. Lightning, rain, ice on the other side of the gateway you can do more than just survive. You can grow. You won’t have to give up thousands of people to the hunts. It’s better there. It wants life.”
“I believe it’s wonderful,” she said. “I believe you. We’ll keep storing energy, and keep trying to convince Kymelis. If her voice is with us, then we’ll all go.”
He smiled at her, but not because she was telling him what he wanted to hear. She wasn’t the youngest nymph on the planet or the prettiest, but he liked looking at her. Her harsh features a sharp nose, thin eyebrows, high cheekbones, thin lips, and a chin that came to a dimpled point were offset by worshipful eyes like two balls of hematite in a setting of platinum skin. She was a very simple person, content with small comforts and controlled hopes, yet she had warmed to Keller’s tales of life on the other side in a way that made him feel valuable.
Though she had no unique talents or wisdom or skills, she was special because she had survived more hunts than all but two others of her people. That made her the third Elder, the one Riutta and Luntee had left behind. After so long with no word from Riutta and Luntee, the Living had accepted two new elders. Braxan was now in a new triumvirate of leaders for the Living.
There were Braxan, a one-eyed woman named Kymelis, and a man named Issull, in that order of seniority. Braxan wanted to go through the gateway. Issull intended to go through, but didn’t think this was the time. Since there was trouble in space on the other side, perhaps another ten thousand years of preparation was needed. The middle Elder, one-eyed Cyclops, hadn’t made up her mind about what random order “wanted.”