The Red King - Michael A. Martin [5]
“What do you think you’re doing out here, Frane?” Gherran said, struggling to keep his son from seeing how angry he was. He doubted he was succeeding even a little.
“Perhaps I should ask you the same question, Father.”
Gherran sighed, shaking his head. “You know perfectly well that the Hegemony Navy can’t permit interlopers to approach the…phenomenon.”
“Why, Father? Are you afraid we’re going to rouse the Sleeper further?”
Gherran snorted, his tail switching involuntarily behind him. “Nonsense. There’s no Sleeper, Frane. Only ridiculous native legends, kept alive by the fantasy-prone offspring of slaves. And enabled by gullible, bleeding-heart Neyel trash like you.”
“How can you be so certain that the Sleeper’s dreams aren’t really all that keeps M’jallanish space intact, Father? Do you have a better explanation for what happened to Newaerth?”
Gherran decided he wasn’t going to let himself be baited. “Why are you traveling with those smelly cattle, and the rest of those alien kaffir, Frane?”
Frane was finally beginning to look rattled, which Gherran found gratifying. “We Neyel are the aliens here, Father. And those ‘kaffir’ are my friends.”
“Then you have made a very poor choice of friends,” Gherran said with a long-suffering sigh. Certainly, he wasn’t proud of the excesses of the earliest generations of Neyel. Their tradition of treating native species roughly—a habit developed during the years immediately following their accidental exile from Auld Aerth, when their day-today survival had been uncertain in the extreme—hadn’t really begun to soften until the days of Ambassador Burgess, more than eighty Oghencycles ago.
“What are you planning to do with my friends, Father?”
Gherran offered his son what he hoped was a beneficent smile. “Once our patrol is done, they will be turned over to the civilian authorities on Oghen. The vessel in which we found you all has been reported stolen. If your friends were involved in the theft, they will be punished accordingly.”
Now Frane looked truly distraught; piracy, after all, was punished in the most severe and irrevocable fashion possible. “Let them go. I’m the one at fault. I’m the one who stole that ship.”
“We shall see in due course, my son,” Gherran said, his eyes once again straying to the bracelet wrapped around his left wrist. The bracelet had been in the family for eight generations prior to his own, handed down from Gran Vil’ja, who had received it directly from Federation Ambassador Burgess herself. Every tiny stone and shell and bone and gem and fiber woven into the bracelet’s cloth-and-metal frame represented a story added by each successive generation that had held it. The bracelet itself was an unbroken tapestry that reached all the way back to the far distant Great Pinwheel of Milkyway—and the unreachable orb of Auld Aerth itself.
Gherran saw that his son, too, was eyeing the bracelet. “I must be a great disappointment to you, Father,” Frane said quietly. “Who will you appoint to carry the story bracelet forward into future generations?”
Gherran felt righteous indignation rising within him. “I thought that your bizarre death cult didn’t believe in future generations.”
Frane shrugged. “Look beyond the hull of this vessel. Whether or not there will be a future doesn’t appear to be up to us at the moment.” He looked significantly at the bracelet. “Perhaps you should send our family heirloom somewhere safer than this place.”
Gherran raised his wrist, brandishing the bracelet as though it were a weapon. “Do not mock tradition, Frane. Someone in our lineage must eventually get the bracelet back to Auld Aerth, as Gran Vil’ja and Burgess Herself intended. You know that, at least as well as you know the silly precepts of your sleeping kaffir god.”
“I suppose we each have always embraced myths of our own choosing, Father,” Frane said, smiling. “Mother always said that you and I were very much alike in that regard.”
Gherran felt his teeth bare themselves involuntarily.