Learning the World

18 — Sabreur

The legend went that the Queen of Heaven had given Her children the green gift, the gift of life; but that it was the Sun Himself who had given the red gift, of fire and intellect. Darvin and Kwarive now sought hidden sparks of that gift in the streets and markets, with a radio receiver. The apparatus was one Orro had cobbled together during the great shittle hunt. It was less bulky than the ones most people had in their houses. It had earpieces instead of a loudspeaker. None of this made it inconspicuous, and as he lugged it around, Darvin found himself pestered by kits and glowered at by stallkeepers.

“What is their problem?” he muttered as a piece of rotten rind skittered past his foot.

Kwarive fiddled with the loop antenna. “They think it’s some new kind of health inspection.”

“Well, that makes sense.” Darvin aimed a halfhearted kick at his other tormentors. “Flap off, you little imps!”

“Great,” said Kwarive. “Now they’ll go screeching to their mothers.”

“Yes, it’s their mothers I’d like to speak to. These kits should be in school and not skulking around the — wait a minute.” Something had buzzed in his ears. “Back a step. Hold it there. Rotate.”

The buzz came back. One side of the antenna faced a blank wall, the other an alleyway.

“Down there.”

The buzz grew stronger as they hastened down the alley. Around the corner of the far end stood a small cart, laden with bricks. The trudge who stood between its handles looked at them with a brighter gaze than most of his kind. When his master returned from a nearby refreshment stall, the trudge bent his back to haul without demur. As the cart moved off, Kwarive turned the antenna. The trudge was the source all right.

“Follow it?” Kwarive asked.

“Not this one,” said Darvin.

“Why not?”

Darvin wasn’t sure why not. “Too risky. We’re not trying to intervene. Not until we know more.”

Kwarive shrugged. “You’re the one carrying the wireless.”

They walked on down the street. Lined on one side with stalls, it was a narrow shelf along the bank of a rivulet at the bottom of the Second Ravine. Lichens and fungal growths splashed garish scarlet and cyan circles on the cliffs and the wet ground. The stream, normally sluggish, was spring-spate swollen, sediment-brown, lapping the banks. As they followed it upstream the goods became ever shoddier: trappings in cracked leather, malformed pots with glazes in colours Darvin didn’t have names for, electrical implements with rusty components and dusty handles, cages of listless flitters. At least here the wireless apparatus drew no attention. It looked like something they might have come here to sell.

The earphones buzzed, but faintly. Darvin glanced at Kwarive and raised a finger. They stood facing the torrent for a moment, mud under their heels, vile suds hissing and popping around their toe-claws. Kwarive pointed a diagonal finger across her midriff.

“That way.”

They turned and walked a few eights of paces on, looking at every stall and trestle, until they came upon a table stacked with barred boxes. At first glance it looked like another stall of flitters, live prey for small children. Then Darvin noticed their thick fur, sturdy limbs and odd, baby-like faces.

“Trudge kits,” breathed Kwarive.

The old woman behind the stall rattled her bony wings. “That they are,” she said. “Healthy and uncut. Train them from small, it’s always the best. Nice young couple like you, any of these’ll be well tamed by the time your own kits come along, just don’t feed it live meat, that’s what I always say, you hear some terrible stories sometimes, that Queen forbid may happen to you, but don’t you worry, it won’t, because…”

Kwarive let her prattle on while moving the antenna about in front of the wooden cages. Darvin waited until he was sure from which the buzz originated, then nodded. Kwarive pointed. “I’ll have that one, please.”

As the old woman shifted boxes she noticed the looped wire and the radio.

“What’s that you’ve got there, dears?”

“The very latest thing,” said Kwarive. “An etheric dowsing box. To pick up good-luck vibrations.”

“Don’t hold with that there etheric dowsing, dear, that’s Southern superstition, that is. But if it works for you, who am I to say, young people these days…”

As she spoke the woman deftly knotted a string handle around the box. “Fifty selors,” she said.

Darvin fumbled out the money.

“Thanks,” said the vendor, counting the scrip and tucking it in her belt. “Well, best of luck with that one. I’ve found him a bit of a handful myself.”

They walked back down the path, each with their own load.

“Etheric dowsing?” Darvin asked, as soon as they were out of earshot.

“It was something I made up,” said Kwarive.

“It’ll be all the rage,” said Darvin.

The box stood on a shelf in Kwarive’s museum annexe room. Among all the bones and stones, skins and pickled scraps, it didn’t look out of place. The small black animal inside it clutched the bars with tiny fingers and peered out with big eyes. It stank somewhat. It didn’t scratch itself much, and it licked its fur a lot. This seemed reassuring about its health. Every so often Darvin waved the aerial in front of it, while holding one earpiece to his ear. It always buzzed. He still found it hard to believe. This belonged with the weird tales in the Anomalies Room.

“So what are you going to do?” asked Kwarive. “Dissect out the transmitter?”

“Gods above!” said Darvin. “Don’t say things like that. Not where it can hear them, anyway.” He leaned toward the cage and crooned: “Don’t you listen to the naughty lady, she won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you, will I? No, no, no — ow!”

He rubbed his nose where a tiny claw had scratched it. “Oh, you nasty little beast!”

“Iodine,” said Kwarive. “Now.” She unstoppered a bottle and dabbed Darvin’s nose with a rag. “There.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Well, what are your plans for this bit of a handful?”

Darvin eyed the cage. “Treat it with kindness,” he said. “Talk to it. See if it talks back.”

Kwarive snorted. “Men!”

“You have better ideas?”

Kwarive passed him a pair of thick leather gloves. “You wash him in the sink,” she said. “Use the rock-oil tar soap. I’ll clean out the cage.”

A few minutes later she added, without having to look around: “With warm water.”

Sitting wrapped and restrained in a hand towel, its ear fur still bedraggled, the trudge kit looked almost cute. Darvin considered the appearance deceptive. Kwarive pointed proudly at the box, now scrubbed down inside and lined with fresh straw. The whole room reeked of disinfectant soap.

“Well, Handful, what are we to do with you now?” said Darvin. “Oh, I know. Back in the cage with you.”

He stroked the top of its head with a gloved finger. To his surprise the kit rubbed back, rolling its head so that the stiff fingertip seam scratched behind its ear.

“Mmmm…” it said in a small throaty voice.

“I suppose that’s a response,” said Kwarive. She picked up the still wrapped animal. “It’s disturbing how much he looks like a human kit.”

“How old is it anyway?” asked Darvin.

“About a year, I’d guess. About the age human kits start talking.”

“I remember,” said Darvin.

Kwarive sat the kit down on the straw in the box and tugged to remove the towel. The kit mewled and clung hard to the rough cloth.

“Oh, all right,” said Kwarive. “Hang on to it if you want.” She closed and locked the cage door.

“Maybe it’s cold,” said Darvin.

“Or maybe he just wants to feel held,” said Kwarive.

“You think it misses its mother?”

“Maybe.”

“Just don’t ask me to cuddle him.”

“He must be lonely.”

“Hungry, too,” said Darvin.

“Well, don’t stand there,” said Kwarive.

When he’d come back with a scrap of raw meat and a small slice of fruit, the infant trudge had fallen asleep. Darvin slid the food through the bars. The trudge’s nose twitched but it didn’t waken.

“Let him rest,” said Kwarive.

They went out. As they walked through the museum Kwarive laughed.

“What?”

“We’re padding about like a couple with a newborn litter.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Darvin. “One handful’s enough.”

“What’s the point of all this, anyway?”

“We have to prove it,” said Darvin. “Strange tales are one thing. Right in front of your eyes is something else. We have to show a talking trudge kit to the project high-ups.”

“You know what they’ll say?” said Kwarive.

“Yes,” said Darvin. “They’ll say: ‘What an ugly child!’ ”

“This is hopeless,” said Kwarive, the third morning after they’d bought the trudge. “He’s just not talking.” Handful sat on now grubbier straw, grooming his wings. He’d taken to rattling the cage door whenever Darvin or Kwarive entered the room, but other than that treated them with wary disdain. Every so often he would clutch the towel and chew the corner of it.

“Three days isn’t long,” said Darvin. “In astronomy.”

“I think we should let him out,” said Kwarive. She closed the slatted screen over the window space and moved to open the cage door.

“Hang on,” said Darvin. “He’ll crash into things and crap all over the place.”

“You know what?” said Kwarive. “I don’t care.”

“On your head be it.”

Kwarive opened the barred door of the box. Handful watched, still sitting. He crawled forward and looked out over the edge of the shelf. His head recoiled. Then he stood upright, spread arms and wings, and leaned into the drop, eyes closed. He tipped forward and fluttered to the floor, where he sat down with a bump and peered around. “Ow,” he said.

He stood up, rubbed his skinny buttocks, and opened his wings again and flapped hard. After getting nowhere for a bit he walked over to Kwarive and stretched his arms upward. “Up,” he said. “Up.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Yes, I did,” said Kwarive. “No need to yell.”

She stooped and held out her fists, thumbs extended. The trudge kit grabbed on and she swung him up above her head. Handful made a harsh cackling noise and let go. Suddenly he was flying. Around the room once, not hitting anything, and back to the box.

The telephone rang. Darvin picked it up.

“Museum annexe,” he said.

“Hah!” said Bahron’s voice. “They said I’d find you there. I told you to watch the skies, astronomer.”

“What’s happened?”

“Come to your office and I’ll tell you.”

“No,” said Darvin. “You come down here. Kwarive and I have something to show you.”

“Hah!” snorted Bahron. “All right.”

Bahron arrived a few minutes later. He had company: Orro and a stranger.

“Orro!” Darvin said. “How good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” said Orro. He looked more than pleased. He looked like a different man. “Darvin, Kwarive — allow me to introduce my good friend Holder, from the Regnal Air Force of Gevork.”

The stranger, tall with uniform brown fur over which he wore a complex leather harness with a long sabre at each hip, spread his wings and hands. “Delighted to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard much of you both.” His diction was clear, his accent stronger than Orro’s.

“I’ve heard much of you,” said Darvin. He looked around. “Please, everyone, take, uh, a perch or whatever…”

Bahron, as was his wont, made for the windowsill. As he rattled open the slatted shutter, Kwarive latched the cage. Darvin saw Bahron take notice, and glance from the cage to the wireless receiver on the table, and the hint of a self-satisfied smile. The Eye missed nothing, and knew it.

“Consider the sabreur one of us,” said Bahron.

“I… see,” said Darvin, hating the awkwardness in his voice.

Bahron laughed. “Nothing like you think. Signal is a joint project now — between Seloh, Gevork, and the Southern Rule.”

“I’m not going to fall for that,” said Darvin. He looked sidelong at Kwarive. “This is a test, yes?”

“Stop acting the amateur,” said Bahron. “The Sight does not indulge in petty intrigues, or set little traps. The word from the Height will come down later today. The situation is far too serious for flapping about. Tell them, Holder.”

The Gevorkian frowned into the distance, as if inspecting a complex display flight.

“As Bahron mentioned,” he said, “we shall hear officially later today. I arrived in Kraighor five days ago by airship as a guard on a diplomatic mission. The instructions of our plenipotentiary were not divulged, but I was given to understand that the moment was fraught. Suspicion had been evinced that Seloh’s Reach had entered into direct relations with the aliens. I admit that some wild talk was indulged regarding our military advantage in the field of rocketry. The impression among the air force personnel was that we were in a position to negotiate from strength, as the phrase goes. When our mission was met and escorted down by four flying machines, such talk was heard no more. Within a day of landing at the Height, I was summoned to the embassy to be told that I had been assigned the post of scientific-military liaison to your Project Signal, on behalf of our own Project Portent, of whose existence I had been unaware until that moment. I can only speculate that I was chosen on the basis of my position of, ah, personal trust with Orro.” He smiled. “Be that as it may, my instructions are simply to share all that we have learned. Portent and Signal are to be merged without delay or reservation. A treaty of mutual assistance between the three great powers has been signed and will be proclaimed. We face a situation where our previous differences are of no account.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Darvin.

“Oh, you could,” said Bahron. “You’ll agree a lot more when you see this.”

The paper was of poor quality, the picture poorer. It was all dots. Narrowing his eyes, Darvin could just about make out a rectangle and two triangles. “It’s the Object!” said Kwarive, over his shoulder. “And it’s broken up!”

“Well done,” said Bahron. “The two conical bits are moving very fast. Not our way, thank the gods. To the little rubbish planets — the Camp-Followers.”

Darvin held up the sheet of paper. “Where did this come from?”

“It’s a wireless photograph from our embassy in the Southern Rule. The Gevorkians also have a copy. The original was handed in by one of the court astrologers. I understand it’s a lot more detailed. Like I said, you should have watched the skies.”

“Indeed I should,” said Darvin. “When did this breakup happen?”

“Four days ago, I gather.”

“Then there may be photographs from the observatory in my office—”

“Yes,” said Bahron. “I was kind of hoping there would. What have you been doing lately, if I may ask?”

Darvin gestured at Kwarive. “We’ve been investigating the trudges.”

“Brilliant,” said Bahron. “And what have you found?”

Kwarive held up an earpiece in one hand and the loop antenna in the other. “Listen,” she said.

Bahron came over and put his ear to the buzz.

“Is this some kind of trick?” asked Bahron.

“Trick,” said Handful. “Trudge trick. Bad trudge!”

In the moments that followed, the midge kit heard some new words, which Darvin rather hoped it wouldn’t learn.

They walked between the towers to the Faculty of Impractical Sciences. They walked as a courtesy to Kwarive, for whom Handful was now an armful. When they’d made to leave the annexe the little beast had set up such a pathetic wail that nobody could bear to leave him behind. Kwarive walked beside Bahron, in earnest conversation. Behind them Darvin walked with Orro and Holder. Darvin observed on the faces of people walking the other way a predictable shift of expression. As they approached their faces tended to bestow the standard vague indulgent smile of noticing a young woman and small kit. As they came closer and passed, the faces of those who noticed what Handful was froze, intrigued or shocked or outright disgusted. Darvin maintained a strut and glare that defied remark. It seemed to work, though he allowed on reflection that Holder’s swords and Orro’s martial bearing helped.

“Make yourselves at home,” he said when they crowded into his office, and left them to sort themselves out while he made tea. The stacks of unopened envelopes of celestial exposures, still sent every eight-days from the observatory, nagged at his conscience. He’d kept the order up for the sake of some future student who wanted to take up the search for the outer planet, and had never bothered to examine them himself. A packet had been in his basket as they came in. He thumb-clawed it open as the pot heated up. There was no room to spread them out. He flicked through them pair by pair. Orro’s arm reached over his shoulder.

“That one,” he said.

“How do you know?”

Orro gave him a puzzled look. “We solved the equations last year.”

“So we did, Orro, so we did.” He sighed. “Could you take care of the tea, old chap, and I’ll fire up the blink comparator.”

He positioned the plates and adjusted the focus and started scanning, faster and with less care than usual. By luck or intuition, he found the three adjacent moving dots within a minute. He spent longer staring at them.

He wondered how much difference there was between his mind and Orro’s. Where did any normal person stand in relation to someone who could visualise orbits from equations and recognise small patches of sky from memory and place the orbiting body in the right patch after half a year? Orro wasn’t doing mathematics quickly; he found calculation as laborious as the next fellow; but once he’d done it, he saw. Was the working of Orro’s mind as different from Darvin’s as his was from that of a trudge? It wasn’t a superiority in reasoning. It was like having another faculty, as alien to the normal human as language to the brute.

He looked up. “It’s confirmed,” he said. “I’ll have the photographs sent daily, so we can track what’s going on.”

“That would be good,” said Bahron, from the windowsill. “Going to the observatory would be better.”

Orro handed Darvin the tea.

“Thanks. What next?”

Bahron jerked his head at Holder. “Ask the sabreur.”

Holder, standing by the door holding a mug as if not quite sure whether to drink from it or piss in it, glanced around all the expectant faces.

“As a Gevorkian I feel somewhat awkward giving directions to—”

“Don’t,” said Orro.

“Thank you,” said Holder. “Forgive me. This is all very new. Once the treaty is proclaimed, the whole security aspect changes. The new project will be public. Much more work will be done openly. Our etheric calculators and systems of rocket guidance may prove invaluable, when combined with Seloh’s advances in aviation and etheric telekinematography. The secret sites will still be used, but it will be possible to ship in far more personnel and equipment now that there is nothing to hide—”

“Excuse me,” said Kwarive. She looked up from giving drops of tea on her fingertip to Handful.

“Yes?” Holder didn’t sound like a man used to being interrupted.

“You say there’s nothing to hide. That’s true — between us humans. We have nothing to hide from each other. What about hiding from the aliens?” She stroked Handful’s back. “This little creature, for example, is transmitting etheric waves as we speak. I don’t know if it’s getting back to the third moon, but it could be. Other trudges are doing the same, on a scale we don’t yet know. It’s going to be bad enough dealing with intelligent trudges, without worrying about trudge… intelligence, if you see what I mean! If we’re going to keep what we’re doing secret from the aliens, we have to do it out of the sight and hearing of trudges.”

“What do you mean, hearing?” asked Holder.

Darvin recalled Lenoen the Southerner’s comment about what it took to surprise him.

“Well,” said Kwarive, “if this little one is learning our language, and transmitting to the aliens, who’s to say the aliens aren’t learning it too?”

“That is a good point,” said Holder. “I have seen etheric calculators, and I am not inclined to set limits to what a more advanced science may do. However, it changes little, because we have no intention of concealing our activities from the aliens.”

“What?” cried Darvin.

Holder made a helpless gesture. “Bahron? You can explain it better.”

“Don’t know about that,” said Bahron. “But I’ll try. See, I and the science boss, Markhan, and smarter folks than me, like Arrell, we’ve talked a lot about this. Especially after the shittle affair. Other parts of the project have looked long and hard at what that germ-plasm fiddling tells us about what our friends up there can do. We never forget that they’re up there, looking down, seeing us as sharp as a hunter fixing on a skitter. We never forget that their eyes are down here — maybe in the trudges, maybe shittles again, maybe things we can’t see at all. When I was a little kit, and even a big kit, we knew there was ether, right, it’s self-evident, but we had no idea there was such a thing as etherics. Invisible waves passing right through us and all that. We know the aliens use etherics, but don’t know what else they may use. In other invisible realms, so to speak. So we could be hiding away in caves and under roofs and screening for all the things we know about, and the wingless could be just watching us and smiling behind their big hands.”

He slid off the windowsill and laughed. “You ever get that creepy feeling of being watched from above? Like, when you were little? Kwarive tells me it’s nature’s way of overprotecting us, if I understand her right. You’re safer to be wrong that way lots of times than wrong the other way once. Well. There’s no point trying to hide from the aliens. We’re not going to try. We’re going to do everything right out in the open. It’s our only chance.”

“For what?” asked Kwarive. “Scaring them off?”

“In a word,” said Bahron, “yes.”

Darvin and Kwarive laughed. None of the others did.

“It’s not as mad as it sounds,” said Bahron. “The wingless may be driven by population pressure, like anyone else, but there’s no reason to think Orro was wrong about their being peaceful — at least in their past experience. That big world-ship of theirs doesn’t look like it was expecting trouble. Markhan and Nollam have had a chance to go through the pictures and do some calculations, and it looks like a big tin drum full of their women and children. It’s not the sort of thing you’d send first into an unknown system if you had any idea there might be somebody shooting back. So regardless of what their capabilities are, they might not have much stomach for a fight. If they see us tooling up, building rockets and aeroplanes and such, they might just back off.”

Kwarive laughed again. “That’s quite a supposition!”

“Like I said,” Bahron replied, “it’s our only chance. And anyway, what have we got to lose?”

“Lose!” echoed Handful. “Lose!”

Bahron fixed a glare on the kit. “There is that, of course. I don’t see how turning trudges into men is anything but hostile. But now we know what’s going on, we can deal with it.”

“How?” Kwarive asked. She held the kit closer as she said so, wrapping a wing around it, Darvin noticed.

“The Sight is on the case,” Bahron said. “What the Height intends to do has to be kept secret from the public until the last minute. That’s all I can say for now. I would advise you all very strongly to say nothing on the subject.”

With that ominous admonition he left.

Darvin had last spent time at the observatory when he was a student. The popular image of the astronomer as nightly stargazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less. Observation was still the basis, but the long-exposure camera had become a much more fruitful source of observation than the telescope alone. Much observation could be done by poring over photographs and spectroscope readings, and besides, it was in the application of mathematics to the results that such progress as occurred was being made. The science was in one of its difficult periods, when new observations didn’t so much solve problems as raise them. What fuelled the stars? Why did they show such a regular sequence of colours? What was the nature of the nebulae? What subtle property of the ether made the light of distant stars and nebulae shift toward the red end of the spectrum? Compared with such questions as these, Darvin’s search for the outermost planet had been trivial: a postgraduate project carried too far into the early part of his professional career, more out of a certain stubbornness — and the lure of knowing that, if he did find the planet, it would forever be associated with his name — than any true scientific urgency.

Now he had his fame, for what that was worth.

In the observatory, what it was worth was that he had had complete control over the telescope for four outer-months. All other work had been set aside for the project’s priorities. Night after night Darvin and his colleagues scanned the skies and took photographs. Day after day they inspected the plates in a blink comparator. The diminished Object — the cylinder, according to the Southern data — remained close to the orbit of the Warrior. Of the two cones that had broken away, no trace could be found. None of Orro’s calculations — and there had been many — had successfully predicted their new location. There had been moments of excitement, whenever a new body was found among the Camp-Followers. But when its location was sent by radio to the Southern Rule, to be viewed through the superior telescopes of the antipodean astrologers, it was always resolved as yet another natural asteroid.

While Darvin cursed his luck, every other aspect of the project raced ahead. The treaty proclamation had been greeted more with relief about the prospect of a lasting peace with Gevork than anxiety about the aliens. People still, Darvin suspected, didn’t quite believe in the aliens. Not even the publication of pictures from the aliens’ indecipherable message had shaken the popular complacency. The existence of aliens had for so long been the subject of a lax assent — or article of faith, for cults and pulps alike — that its confirmation unsettled no prejudice and provoked no panic. It was quite possible that what people thought they saw in their everyday lives was progress stimulated, perhaps inspired, by the aliens, rather than the massive, coordinated military mobilization that it was. Taxes had gone up, prices risen, but the great manufactories and their penumbra of backstreet workshops had full order books. The sight of an aeroplane over a town no longer brought all activity to a halt. The most visible sign of great change was the sight of the tethered balloons that had sprung up on every horizon as TK relay stations. All the larger towns now had at least one huge public screen, upon which every night telekinematographic pictures were projected. They showed the work at the desert camps and proving grounds: the rockets rising and crashing, the vast arrays of etheric aerials, the test flights of experimental airframes; they gave nightly glimpses of the day’s debates in Seloh’s Roost; they had begun to carry lighter, more trivial news items and even theatrical performances later in the evening.

Whatever was going on among the trudges had stirred no unrest. The question was never raised in the Roost, nor discussed in the papers. The Sight was no doubt kept busy. What it was busy doing, Darvin did not want to think about. He felt himself a coward for that. In the cluster of buildings around the observatory, there seemed no grounds for worry. Handful had become something of a mascot. Kwarive’s instructions for her part of the project had simply been to go on studying the infant trudge’s language acquisition, and she had moved to the same accommodation block as Darvin in order to study it discreetly. Handful flew around freely indoors and out, picked up new words and formed short sentences, and thrived. The only danger he faced, and that was slight, was of being attacked by one of the long-winged, long-necked flitters — carrion-eaters and opportunistic predators — that circled the thermals of the high desert.

It was a hot evening, after a hotter day, near the turning of the outer-month. The sun had set, and the pylons of the cable-car system clicked and rang as their metal cooled. Nocturnal animals stirred and chittered in the scrub and sand. Soon the sky would be dark, the air chill. Darvin looked forward to it as he prepared the night’s observations. His eyelids were gritty with lack of sleep, his fur damp with sweat. The technician working beside him was equally exhausted.

Handful flew in through the open window and perched on the telescope’s circular railing.

“Darvin! Darvin!”

“Hello, Handful.”

“New moon! New moon!”

Darvin smiled, the technician laughed. “That’s a smart trudge all right.”

“Clever Handful,” said Darvin. He reached over and scratched the trudge’s ear. “Clever boy, Handful.”

“No,” said Handful, grabbing the hair on Darvin’s wrist and tugging. “New moon. See new moon.”

“I’ve seen them lots of times, Handful. Please go away. Be a good boy.”

“New moon!” The tugging became painful.

“Give me a minute,” said Darvin to the technician. “I’ll just take the little pest back to his — back to Kwarive.”

He scooped the trudge into the crook of his elbow and stalked out. Handful pointed to the blue-black sky, in which the first stars pricked into visibility and, just above the last glow of sunset, the Fiery Jester burned bright. Darvin’s exasperated glance followed the pointing finger to the south. The inner and outer moons hung like sections of white rind. Close to them and a little above, a tiny but distinct triangle glinted like a faceted gem brighter than the Queen.

“New moon,” said Handful.