Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [153]
But the wentals would not allow him to focus on a feud among humans. It had been difficult enough to convince them to come here. Jess had finally made the wentals understand about heartstrings and family and obligations.
When his ship rested like a teardrop on the ground, Jess pressed against the curved membrane. The impenetrable film puckered around him like a kiss, and he passed through. Standing out on the frozen surface, Jess wore only the tight white singlesuit that left his hands and feet bare. His body crackled with power from the wentals within his cells, protecting him. He turned his face to the shatteringly cold vacuum, able to gaze upon the open majesty of space in a way that no other human had ever done.
Home.
Through the soles of his feet, he could sense the thrumming industry beneath the kilometer-thick ceiling of ice. He smiled as he recalled his irascible old dad. Bram Tamblyn had been a stern leader, demanding hard work and absolute diligence from his family and his employees. Jess called to mind one of his father’s favorite sayings: A true member of our family, a true water miner, needs to have ice water in his veins.
Faint vapors lifted into the air: carbon dioxide and water molecules volatilizing into the vacuum and hovering near the crater bottom like fog. Plumas’s low gravity could not hold on to the gases for long before they evaporated into space.
He walked to a sheet of smooth black ice that had been melted and refrozen from tidal stresses. He spread his feet and closed his eyes, calling upon the wentals, water to water in an elemental synchronicity. Raising his hands overhead like a diver, he sank through the ice without a ripple. He descended, like a spirit on an intangible elevator, through layer after layer, until finally he plunged through the curved ceiling to the vault far below and dropped into the ancient, cold sea. The water enfolded him.
The leaden sea around him contained life of its own, and the wentals held themselves inside his body. They did not flow out of him to infiltrate Plumas as they had done on the comet, adhering to their agreement not to taint an inhabited world. They could have possessed all this water, sweeping through the subcrustal ocean. But they did not, leaving the ice moon to the Tamblyns.
Jess allowed his entire body to rise to the surface, then made his way toward the icy shore where domes, huts, and storage shacks formed his clan’s main settlement. Home.
The workforce here ranged from fifty to a hundred Roamers, most of them related in one way or another to the Tamblyn clan. The well-rounded staff members were trained in numerous skills beyond their specific assigned duties as mechanics, administrators, architects, handymen, transport pilots, ice drillers, cleaners, and cooks.
He smiled as he walked to solid land, an ice shelf bordering the cold underground sea. Jess had grown up here in an enclosed world with a ceiling of artificial sunlight. When at the age of twelve he had finally traveled with his father to see Rendezvous, he had never imagined anything so vast and crowded. He had seen Cesca, just a glimpse, when she was beginning her schooling under the old Speaker Okiah.
Now he spread his hands, drinking in the atmosphere, the water, the environment of Plumas. Droplets of the prehistoric ocean dripped off him and froze in puddles on the ground. Steam rose from his hair and shoulders as his body’s own power dried him.
Three of his uncles came out of their huts in the business complex of the mining settlement. His uncle Caleb wasn’t with them. Wynn, Torin, and Andrew couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “Jess! Jess, is that you?”
The twins looked at each other. Andrew, the quietest uncle, sighed happily. “Ah, boy, it’s good to have you back—even if we heard you’re not quite human anymore.”
Jess smiled reassuringly, accustomed to that reaction by now. “I’m still the same person inside.” His voice carried as if artificially amplified.
Wynn scratched gray stubble on his chin. “Shizz, Jess, you fly in here in a giant water