E. P. Beaumont

The winter evening had grown blue, and the threatened snow-squall now wrapped the island in its embrace. Veils of snow caught the faint illumination from the banquet-room as the Saiph patronage, from Martisset the Elder and Tethys down to Naime-Yasmin’s fat little twin brothers who had just learned to walk, seated themselves around the banquet tables, each of the six branches like a snowflake. 

The faces, lit in rows of candles, glowed like the figures of the Gate of Hours. 

Martisset was still thinking about the Ship’s Trees. Yes, the game was paused (as real life did not) but she was worried about their health. Three times she’d warned Naime-Yasmin about the gas-exchange, and three times been told that the Captain knew best. 

One of Yasmin’s little brothers reached across Martisset’s lap to the faceted wine-flute, candlelight glimmering in its depths. She arrested the chubby little hand, and moved the vessel out of his reach, as Yuki-Iskri passed behind her, decanting watered wine from the traditional vase.

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Martisset knew the story, as did every child on Karis. One journey-ship among many had found the Original Jump; no one knew what had happened to the others. One of all the ships that set out from the Original World, after journeying for several generations across trackless interstellar space, found the Jump that brought them to the edge of the Karis system. 

Her people were born, or re-born, out of a singularity. No one alive knew why the journey-ships had set out; the ancestors had carried that tale to their graves. Nor had they spoken of the other ships, though the records of the journey-ship attested to them. The Gate of Hours and the Ships’ Chronometers honored the Original World’s time keeping system, which matched neither the days nor the years of Karis. 

No one knew.

The empty valley stretched around them, filling up with light, until the blue shadows narrowed and vanished, and she could no longer see the plan of Landfall. 

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Martisset’s ninth name-day was observed in the dark of the moon following the Feast of Landfall. She and her namesake did the devotions in the enclosure of Martis-Mortis.

He instructed her parents to take her to the Shipwrights’ Chapel in Karisalay-Prime, where the most famous statue of the deity resided, commissioned, it was said, by the Great Shipwright herself. “Tethys will bring her there after the Feast of Settlement, while you’re busy with the Ship construction.”

“A pledge,” Martisset the Elder said to Martisset. “If you make Captain, you’ll be expected to offer libation there before you formally accept your commission.”

If you make Captain, he said, but Martisset understood when you make Captain, as we all trust you will. But not without work, not planet-sider as you are.

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“Low angled light,” Tethys said, “and the aerial view. Yuki-Iskri found more than one Lost Colony that way. The first few times our terraformers saw one, it was the chance of surveying near sunrise or sunset.” 

Ghosts appeared at dawn and dusk, the borders of the night, and vanished on either side; Midnight and Noonday were both silent on the question of the past. Only as the tide of Night receded, or flowed in, could you sight backward along the shaft of Time’s Arrow. Martisset leaned forward to squint through the canopy, but the ghosts of Landfall had vanished in the rising day.

“What are the people from Lost Colonies like?”

“They’re the same stuff as us, the bones anyway.”

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In the cult of the Goddess of the Ancient Sea, and the shadow cult of Martis-Mortis, one meditated on the divine twins, Midnight and Noonday, shadow and sun. Shadow vanished at Noonday, without having gone away, and Midnight was all shadow.

Martisset opened the Gate of Hours between her palms, and its colors lit the mirrored walls, reflected faintly in the night-darkened glass, as she took measured breaths, matching the Ship’s Chronometer on the wall, feeling the beats of her heart. Sixty beats a Minute, that was normal and healthy.

There were black lines between the bands of color marking the five-Minute and five-Hour intervals, hair-fine, to adjust for individual differences in color perception. Martisset’s own vision reached into the near ultraviolet, her father had told her. 

Not so far that she could see the colors of the stars as Ships saw them, or Captains who shared vision with the Ships. Those more-than-human eyes saw the spectrum unfolding in its full glory, from the frequencies of earthquakes up to those of high-energy sources in the utmost heavens.

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The last light had faded in the west, behind the barely visible shoreline of the Inland Sea. 

Martisset walked down the path to the apartments of Martisset the Elder, her mother holding her left hand, and her father holding her right. The sky in the east was dark; somewhere up there was the faint obscurity of the Greater Moon, entirely in the shadow of Karis, but she could not make it out. The foliage stirred overhead in the night breeze, and the small lights marking the path woke to blue-white glow with the light they had stored from the sun.

The gate to the inner courtyard stood open, and they passed through it. Martisset’s father turned to close it behind him. The garden was fragrant with night-blooming flowers, and the scent of the ones that had just closed. Ahead, the lights of the gated house threw squares of warm light on the stone pathway. 

Luckily, she no longer had the sword-knot and empty scabbard to worry about; the ceremonial knife hung in its scabbard, in the inner pocket of her full-length vest.

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