Quiet Invasion(31)

“Good luck, Ambassador T’sha,” the Law Meet hailed her through her headset. “You are much anticipated.”

“Is it a pleased anticipation or otherwise?” asked T’sha wryly as the Law Meet took over her kite guidance, bringing it smoothly toward the empty mooring clamps.

“That is not for me to know or tell,” said the Meet primly. Amusement swelled through T’sha.

T’sha had always found the Meet beautiful. Its shell walls were delicately curved, and their colors blended from a pure white to rich purple. Portraits and stories had been painted all across their surfaces in both hot and cold paints. When the Law Meet was in dayside, the hot paints glowed red. On nightside, the cold paints made dark etchings against the shining walls. The coral struts were whorled and carved so that the winds sang as they blew past. More shell and dyed stiff skins tunneled and gentled the winds through the corridors between the chambers. The interior chambers themselves were bubbles of still air where anyone could move freely without being guided or prodded by the world outside.

T’sha sometimes wondered if this was a good idea.

As ever, the High Law Meet was alive with swarms of people. The air around it tasted heavy with life and constant movement. T’sha counted nine separate villages floating past the Meet with their sails furled so the citizens who flew beside their homes could keep up easily. All the noise, all the activity of daily life blew past with them.

Below, the canopy was being tended by the Meet’s own conservators. It was symbolically important, said many senior ambassadors, that the canopy around the High Law Meet remain vital, solid, and productive. But as T’sha watched, a quartet of reapers from one of the villages, identifiable by the straining nets they carried between them, as well as by the zigzagging tattoos on their wings, descended to the canopy. A conservator flew at them, sending them all winging away, back to their village with empty nets, no food, seeds, or clippings to enhance their diet, their gardens, or their engineers’ inventories.

T’sha felt her bones loosen with weariness. It must be kept productive. Certainly. But if not for our families, then for what?

T’sha inflated, trying to let her mood roll off her skin. There was important work to be done, and she had to be tightly focused. Her kite dropped its tethers toward the Law Meet’s mooring clamps. T’sha leaned back on her posthands so she could collect her belongings: an offering for the temple, the congratulatory banner for Ambassador Pr’sef’s latest wedding, and the bulging satchel of promissory agreements which she had negotiated in return for the votes she needed. She had promised away a great deal of work from her city and her families for this vote. She had to keep telling herself that they all gave freely and that she was doing this for the entirety of the people, not just for herself. This was necessary. It was not greed.

The clamps took hold of the tethers and reeled the kite in to a resting height. T’sha launched herself into the wind, her parcels dangling from three of her hands.

A temple surmounted the High Law Meet. It was a maze of ligaments and colored skins, covered in a complex blanket of life. In the corners and catches, puffs, birds, flies, algae bubbles, smoke growers, and a hundred other plants and animals collected. Funguses and danglers grew from the walls and fed the creatures who lived there, until the winds that blew them in blew them away again.

As she let those winds carry her toward the temple’s center, T’sha tried to relax and immerse herself in the messages of life present in every plant, every insect and bird. She had only marginal success. There was too much waiting on the vote in the Meet below to allow her to give in to her meditations.

The temple’s center was ablaze with tapestries, each illustrating a history, parable, or lesson. Congregants were supposed to let the random winds blow them toward a tapestry and consider its moral. This time, however, T’sha steered herself toward a small tapestry that fluttered alone in a deep curve of the wall. It was ancient, woven entirely from colored fibers taken from the canopy. It depicted a lone male, his hands bony, his skin sagging, and his muzzle open in muttered speech. His rose and violet crest draped flat against his back as if he lacked the strength to raise it. All around him stretched the crust, naked to the sky.

As T’sha drank in the tapestry’s details, a teacher drifted to her side. “Tell me this story,” he said.

The words spread the warmth of familiarity through T’sha. Her youth had seemed dominated by those words. Her birth mother, Pa’and, had brought T’sha teacher after teacher, each more taxing than the last. Whether the lesson was maths, sciences, history, or even the geographies of the wind currents, they all seemed to start their quizzing by saying “Tell me this story.”