He himself had done brave things in the past. He hadn’t been defenseless—he’d learned how to use handguns and beam-rifles. And he certainly hadn’t been an academic lightweight as a young xenobiologist. He truly did not know why after all that, he’d come back to Tellus to be a bureaucrat.
The ecosystem was somewhat lush around the capital city, where he worked now. He hiked when he could find the time, which was too seldom. The life of a Tellan government bureaucrat was a busy one and mostly spent indoors.
How had an interstellar Traveler settled for a life like that?
The shadows on the floor of the top deck dwindled as the sun neared its zenith. He stared at his own contracted shadow with a frown. Ever since Strata, he hated noontime. He hadn’t realized that until now, either, but his days always—always—found him indoors, preferably underground, at noon in the capital city in the temperate latitudes.
Here, his shadow was smaller than there. The equatorial sun was directly overhead.
And that filled him with dread.
As they ducked into the Site, Tai asked, “Did he have flashbacks last night?”
Mercury answered, “He had bad dreams. He said he dreamed about the creature, too, but in the dream it had the form of the dog he had as a child. It led him to safety.”
“As though the creature responded to Haze’s mental distress and came to calm him, first in a dream, then in reality?”
That was one of the most improbable scenarios Mercury had ever heard anyone propose. But it matched the facts. She nodded.
“I think I know what it is. It’s a robotic alien trauma service animal that’s telepathic.”
Robot. Alien. Trauma service animal. Telepathic. That was a truly a stack of improbably unrelated terms!
“War psychologists have proposed making such things. That line of research was long since abandoned in favor of drugs on the one hand, living service animals on the other hand. But Tellus had a thin ecosystem, without a lot of serviceable animals. How the Old Tellans made a civilization out of few animals to eat and even fewer to pull a wheeled cart, we gaudy well don’t know. The Old Tellans may not have evolved here in the first place, they may have arrived here like we did, across the stars. That’s the Askalen Hypothesis, and credible. That they subsequently warred themselves out of existence seems incontrovertible. That along the way they created service animals for traumatized warriors follows, logically enough. It was bonding with Haze as a service animal would.”
Mercury remembered how Haze mirrored its cocked-head gesture. Bonding. Where did Haze bonding with Rusty leave her? That question made her heart ache.
“Which does not begin to explain how it could connect to Haze in a dream. Unless it’s telepathic.” Tai looked hard at Mercury. They were alone in the Anteroom again. “I think your people know more than you tell about psychic talents. I want to know what you can add to this hypothesis of mine.”
It went against a lifetime of conditioning to tell an outsider any of her people’s secrets. But the god knew there was no good alternative. “Our gift is psychic alchemy, to change the probabilities near us. We don’t have telepaths, clairvoyants or teleporters. Some of our legends say that our gift makes all such manifestations stronger if they happen around us. We don’t seek them out.” The unwritten but indelible rules said Chancers were safer far away from involvement in spilled secrets, mysterious appearances or disappearances, or inconvenient futures being made known. It caused enough trouble for Chancers to invisibly influence inanimate matter.
Tai chewed her lower lip, thinking hard. “Old histories say that telepathy works between alien species, in the form of a dreamtime especially, that it’s the only way to communicate across the gulf between mutually alien species. In science there have been research projects to create artificial telepathy, but it was always easier to implant linguistic chips in humans and evolve animals to have the brain and the vocal chords to talk. The creature telepathically responded to Haze in his distress and emerged from where it’s been for the last ten thousand years. Where that was, I gaudy well intend to find out!”
Mercury recognized Tai hot on the trail of discovery.
A clatter louder and longer than the sounds already coming out of Room One made Tai go alert. She ducked through that door.
Under the anxious supervision of Ria, Gerro and Mikal were sliding the bridge they’d sketched out, welded together, and tested enough to decide it was probably sturdy, over the chasm in the stairs. The bridge still looked like something to stay off of if you weren’t sure-footed. It definitely hadn’t been there last night for Rusty to cross the chasm on. Mercury asked Quit, “Could a robot really jump that far?”
“Sure, depending on the robot, of course. The best robot jumpers are modeled after the way insects are built.”
“Haze’s creature doesn’t look like an insect,” she pointed out.
“It looks like a griffin,” Gerro said unexpectedly. “That’s a mythical creature composed of parts of lion and eagle. Such creatures were conceived by cultures all across Old Earth and depicted on ancient buildings and in art. I have a cousin in Wendis named Griffin Yang. When we were young, he found out all he could about griffins. That’s how I know.”
Tai said, “What I want to know is what else may be down there. Here we have a gaudy great opportunity, with a flood coming, flutter it all!”
“Maybe we’ve had as much luck as we can stand,” said Quit, looking meaningfully at Mercury.
She took the hint and left. She found Haze on the deck, amid an impressive pile of things that had already been moved. He looked wrapped in grim thought. But when he saw her, he smiled. “How is it going? Don’t tell me what they don’t want me to know.”
His smile pleased and reassured her. “They’ve put a bridge over the chasm and there’s a drone almost ready to send down, and they don’t really want any of my luck around.”
“I do.” His shirt was sweat-stained but he his face looked calm. “I’ve been thinking while I moved boxes. In Strata I was lucky.”
“Yes,” she said emphatically. Chancer luck was small and specific. Haze had been saved by a grander kind of luck. Chancers didn’t have luck like that, but revered it.
“Ever since then, I’ve avoided situations where the outcome depends on luck. Until here. The scaffold, the sounds, the door, and Rusty.” He half-smiled. “Maybe life is telling me to stop avoiding luck.”
In the courtyard below, Silk rang a bell. “Time off for lunch!” she called in a clear, carrying voice. Pastfinders trailed out of the Site and off the observation deck, Hopper effortlessly putting down one more huge box before he skipped down the stairs as lightly as though he’d hardly lifted a finger all morning.
Mercury asked Haze, “Will you do that? Stop avoiding luck?”
“I think I will.”
Startled, she wondered if her own luck might be telling her something. Something about finding a man right enough for her to be a life partner. But he was too deeply committed to his work to leave Tellus for long. And being a Traveler was the shape of her life, her home among the stars. She could never give that up even for Haze—could she? Yes, yes, yes, insisted her sex drive. She tried to think clearly. This felt like an unbalanced moment, when her life might tilt in a direction she’d never expected—and might not like in the end.