Secrets

Chapter Ninteen First Mothers

“…down the stairs, deeper and deeper.” Eva Robinson was speaking to her in some distant place, but it didn’t matter.

She stood in the curve of the stairwell, one hand on the rough hewn stones, looking out the narrow window. Below, the waves beat against the cliffs, white spray flying and leaping, the booming sound of the sea echoing through all, while the cold wind sang around the tower, pale sea birds soaring and turning on its currents.

It was like some other place she had known, Osprey thought in some small part of herself that was not this, some part left behind. The view from a tower of storm-tossed sea…

But it was not.

“I am Osprey,” she said aloud clearly. Someone had asked, and she answered.

She was Osprey and her child quickened within her, hers and Wind’s, her choice of them though all the men protected her as though she were their own wife. Nine and her, eleven when her daughter was born at the turning of the year. She had seen her in dreams, a white haired miniature of her, long limbed like Wind.

“Three years,” she said.

Someone asked her how long she had lived there, but that was only this world, the first haven they had found. She had lost track how many it had been before that, running from one world to another, hunting through the Ring and disappearing like mist, always a step ahead of the hunters who sought them. Sometimes they came upon another band, sometimes Gryphon or Night or Cloud. Cloud had two sons now, the eldest walking and speaking well. Perhaps he would make a mate for her daughter in time, perhaps if they dared to plan so far. Life does not wait for death, even among the Returned.

This world was nothing, like so many seeded and forgotten. Car Leonid, the Ancestors had called it in their machines, but there were no lions, just the seals that harvested the rich oceans, and the men who lived on them. The land was poor, but the oceans were rich. People lived here, hunting the mammals who hunted the fish, hunted in turn by the Returned. They spoke of the tower on the cliff as a haunted place, the dwelling of soul-renders, and they did not come near.

The Lanteans had no reason to come here, and the humans had no way to call them. The Ring was in orbit. The Returned could reach it with the ships they had stolen, but the humans were poor. They called the Lanteans gods and prayed to them as though they heard, and the Lanteans had not made themselves felt in many lives of men. As a home it was safe enough.

For the moment.

After the birth, when she was strong again, they would move on.

Osprey descended the stairs carefully, one hand on the stones. She could no longer see her feet beneath her belly. Outside the wind was rising. Another storm was coming in off the sea. The sound of the waves echoed through the base of the tower, a deep thrumming that was never still.

It disturbed the cochlea, and Osprey reached for them with her mind, quieting them. It is only a storm, little ones, she said. You have seen many before. She felt them move, felt them still under the touch of her mind. The length of her hand or smaller, they were some sort of mollusk with a spiraled shell, living in vast colonies, taking their sustenance from the sea. They were not intelligent animals, but they did have some residual psychic ability. Osprey and some of the others could touch them with their minds, which was proving very useful.

Ashes had named them cochlea, and like some other mollusks they secreted their shells, building a tough bone framework around their soft bodies. They also secreted shell anchors on stone to which they attached their egg sacs, and this was what Ashes had found a use for. When it dried, their shells made an almost impenetrable mortar, securing rough hewn stones together as tightly as the concrete of the Lanteans. This tower was built with their aid, Osprey and the others egging the small creatures on. The Returned set the stones in place and then the cochlea cemented them, snug and tight against the winds that blew and the waves that flowed.

Some distant part of her, some part that was not Osprey, found it fascinating. Such tiny creatures, and yet they could build something so strong…

Where is the power device you took from the Lanteans, it asked her. Where is it now?

Another day, a spring day, her daughter an infant that dozed in a cradle of shell… The sun struck sparks of light from the water and the white birds were hunting out to sea in a vast shoal of birds, mirroring the unseen shoals of fish beneath the surface.

“Another day,” Wind said, climbing the first steps of the tower to where she waited. “Ashes says we’re almost done with the repairs.” The sea breeze tugged at his long white hair, blowing strands of it about his face. He wore dark leathers against the chill, even in the summertime, battered and stained with salt.

“There is one more thing,” Ashes said at his elbow. He squinted looking up into the sun, photosensitive as so many were.

There were none besides themselves close at hand, and yet Osprey spoke mind to mind, as though she feared to be overheard. *Hyperion’s weapon,* she said.

Ashes nodded. “It is dangerous to carry it around with us. It’s not impossible that we will be captured or that we will lose our ship or be forced to abandon it. And you know if that happens…”

“I don’t see why we don’t just throw it in the ocean,” Wind said.

Ashes snarled. “How many times have I told this great brawler that throwing it in the ocean will not destroy it? It is made of the Lanteans’ most sturdy materials, metal that even our brightest flames will not scar. Even when, if you remember, I exposed it to the vacuum of space it did not crack or show any damage at all, no more so than the orbital Rings do. I do not know any way to unmake this thing.” He shook his head, and his eyes were on Osprey’s. “It is only our ignorance. I cannot make things as the Lanteans did. I do not know how. I was a student of sciences biological, and none of us, not in any band, understood the physical sciences at the level which would be applicable. Another more clever man another time might solve this problem, but I can tell you now, Osprey, that I cannot.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?” Wind demanded, his hand on his hip.

“We must hide it,” Osprey said. “Hide it and the source that powered it. It is dangerous as you say to carry it with us, and we cannot destroy it.” She glanced about at tower and cliffs, at windswept sea. “The cochlea give us an opportunity. Let us carry it down to one of the sea caves and have the cochlea seal it in. Beneath layers of bone and stone it will be impossible for anyone to stumble over who does not know that it is there. And none shall know where it is cached except the three of us.”

Wind nodded slowly. “That is well thought.”

“And perhaps the time will come when we may return and destroy it,” Ashes said. “That day yet may come.”

Sea caves, dark and damp and cool, comfortable and quiet… They did not need torches, not they whose eyes saw in the dark. They did not need anything to light their way to its resting place. The sounding sea called around them. The dark shielded them. The metal cases lay side by side on the floor of stone, and the cochlea came at her command, crawling back and forth leaving their pale trails, stone and bone, sealing the cave for all eternity…

For ten thousand years, till Osprey’s distant daughter should remember.

“I know where the ZPM is,” said Teyla Emmagan. She lifted her head, blinking, while outside the towers of Atlantis the snow swirled. “I can find it.”