Quiet Invasion(16)
No, Ca’aed would not fall.
Ca’aed spread like a person fully inflated with their wings flung wide. Its walls were deeply creviced, making a thousand harbors into which to guide its people or their vehicles. It drew people in and exuded them again, as if people were what it breathed. Its lens eyes sparkled silver in the daylight. It watched the people come and go so it could advise them as to their routes and their loads or simply to wish them good luck. Lacy fronds of sensors stretched between the sails, constantly testing the winds, looking for riches to steer into and disease to steer away from. Ca’aed was careful. Ca’aed was well advised. Ca’aed might act quickly but never rashly.
“No wonder you have no husbands yet,” her younger sister T’kel had teased her once. “Your love is all for the city.”
“That is no bad thing,” her birth father had replied. “If someone in the position to make promises does not love the city as well as she loves the people in it, she may grow careless with her promises and perhaps overtax its capacities. This can force growth where growth is not ready or even advisable.” He’d been answering T’kel, but his attention had been on T’sha. That had been while she was being debated in the general polls as a speaker, but already her father was trying to convince her to start building a base to become ambassador.
“Welcome home, Ambassador,” came Ca’aed’s familiar voice from her headset. “Have you answers from Gaith? Is there a name for its illness?”
“We don’t know yet.” All T’sha’s hands clutched the perches uneasily.
“But you are confident it will be found?”
“Not as confident as I was.” T’sha deflated just a little. “I have to send the kite back to Gaith. Open your gates for me?”
“Always, T’sha. Give me your kite.”
T’sha spoke the words to transfer command and Ca’aed took over, pulling the little kite unerringly into one of its harbors. As the rich brown walls surrounded them, Ca’aed’s welcomers fluttered out of their cubbyhole and surrounded T’sha in a swarm of reds and greens. They lighted here and there on her back and wings, tasting the emissions of her pores and flitting away again for Ca’aed to be sure there were no dangerous tastes, that she carried nothing hidden with her from Gaith.
But nothing was found, and the pebbled gates at the end of the harbor, which constantly strained and tested the winds for the beneficial elements as well as for the harmful ones, opened a portal for her to dart through. One of Ca’aed’s fronds brushed her as she passed, a touch of reassurance and welcome.
“An old city,” her birth father had often said, “becomes as full, rich, and complex as the canopy underneath, and its life becomes as tightly intertwined.”
T’sha sometimes thought “tangled” would be a better word. The inside of Ca’aed was decidedly a tangle. Bones braced it, corals defined its spaces, and ligaments bound its elements together. Plants and animals gave its walls color, and its air weight and life.
Between them, Ca’aed was a shell full of shells. Small dwellings and family compounds were tethered to each other and to the city, but were not part of its essential substance.
Ca’aed’s free citizens flew through its chambers, intent on their various businesses, or merely enjoying the tastes and textures of their world. Its indentured worked down in the veins and chasms of its corals, growing, researching, comparing, because the city could not be wholly aware of the workings of every symbiont and parasite, any more than a person could be aware of the workings of every pore.
Music, perfumes, voices, flavors filled the air, vying for attention, pressing against T’sha’s skin, filling her up with the vigor of life. The memory of Gaith made the miasma all the more precious. The people of Gaith had lost all of this when they lost their village. But, with care, T’sha might still be able to help them get it back.
T’sha flew into the tangle of life, angling herself vaguely toward her family’s district. “Ca’aed, I need my brother T’deu. Where is he?”
“Your brother is in the promise trees.”
Of course. T’sha beat her wings, turning her flight up toward the city’s sculpted and vented ceiling. The promise trees were in this finger of the city. She would not have to snag a passing kite.
A solid turquoise and cream carapace encapsulated the promise trees and kept out not only the winds but all that the winds might carry. The ligaments that twined around its oval walls and anchored it to Ca’aed’s living bones did not themselves live. They carried neither information nor nutrition and so could not be used to tamper with anything within the carapace.