Chương 52: What will it take

Within a planet, language is no barrier - the interface translates continuously, so seamlessly that most people forget it is happening at all. Between planets, the translation activates only once you have entered a settlement with registered inhabitants. In the open space between, you are on your own. This is considered, by most linguists, either a design flaw or a philosophical statement. The engineers who built the system have never clarified which."

- From "The Interface and Its Limits," a second-year IT elective, University 11 By the time the afternoon had settled into the quiet that followed a community's arrival - the initial energy of unpacking and orienting giving way to the slower rhythm of people finding their place - the settlement had taken on a different character. Smoke from the communal building's kitchen.

The sound of children somewhere in the upper terraces, their voices carrying down the slope in the bright directionless way of children who had found space to run. The macaques distributed across the settlement's rooflines, entirely at home, having been here before and considering the place theirs. Hana told him the afternoon was his. He took the northern path again, Waggy moving easily at his side, one afternoon having been enough to file the whole forest under known territory.

The cedar light was different at this hour - lower, the shadows longer, the quality of it closer to amber than the clean white of midday. The mushroom beds at the forest fringe were in shade now, the ferns along the path edge catching what light remained and making the most of it. He heard the umbrella before he saw Ren. A clean, precise sound, the kind produced by controlled movement, the air displaced with intention.

He followed it off the main path, through a stand of younger cedars whose trunks were narrow enough to let more light through, and into a small clearing where the ground was level and the trees stood back far enough to allow movement in every direction. Ren was working through a sequence. Kara stopped at the clearing's edge and watched. The umbrella was open, which changed it entirely. Closed, it had looked like little more than something to keep off heavy rain.

Open, it was something more complicated - the canopy a wide dark circle that moved with Ren's body as an extension of it, used for deflection in one motion and for cover in the next, the weighted ferrule at the base completing arcs that were clearly offensive when they needed to be. The form was unlike anything Instructor Ken had taught.

The footwork was different, the weight distribution lower, the transitions between positions refined over centuries by people who had thought hard about what worked and discarded what did not. Ren moved through the sequence smoothly. Three repetitions of the same combination, each one slightly adjusted, something being tested and corrected and tested again. The dragon was in the cedar tree at the clearing's edge, watching from a branch, the red-gold fur catching the late light in layers.

Waggy had gone still beside Kara's leg the moment he registered her. He held his position, which was progress from earlier in the morning, while maintaining what he clearly considered an appropriate strategic distance. Ren completed the sequence, lowered the umbrella, and turned. He found Kara at the clearing's edge without apparent surprise.

"You can come in," he said.

"I'm done with that set." Kara walked into the clearing and Waggy followed, his path tracing a careful arc that put the maximum available distance between himself and the dragon's tree. The dragon watched this without comment.

"How long were you watching?" Ren asked. He was closing the umbrella, the mechanism smooth and practiced.

"A few minutes," Kara said.

"The form is different from what I've been learning." Ren looked at him with the direct attention that appeared to be his default mode.

"You practice?"

"Just started this year. I'm trying to figure out the umbrella and chain dart - the chain dart stayed at the University. The umbrella came with me." Something shifted in Ren's expression.

"University," he said.

"Which one?"

"Eleven." Ren sat down on the root of the nearest cedar, the information apparently requiring him to be seated for it.

"You're a student. At an actual University."

"Well, yeah. First year. Just finished. I'm here for my internship with PfP." Ren was quiet for a moment.

"My grandfather was the last person from our community to attend one," he said.

"Area 10, decades ago. Since then, nobody from our community has been selected." He paused.

"I tried. Two years ago. Thought I had a reasonable chance." He said this without self-pity, as a plain account of something that had happened.

"I didn't make it. Now I'm about to start my final year at one of the better virtual colleges in the Area."

"Were you close?" Kara asked.

"Very. Close enough to hurt." He looked at Kara with frank curiosity, having long ago concluded that asking directly was faster than manoeuvring.

"Can I scan you? Grade and tier only."

"Yes. You too?" Ren nodded. They both pulled up the interface simultaneously - the brief mutual acknowledgment of two people exchanging the minimum relevant information. G-grade, Tier 3. Both of them. Ren looked at the result and then at Kara with an expression that was somewhere between reassured and amused.

"Same," he said.

"Same," Kara agreed. Ren leaned back against the cedar root. Conversation came easily to him and silence did not, and he preferred the former.

"What's it like?" he asked.

"The University. I've heard things but most of what I've heard comes from my grandfather's time." So Kara told him. He told it the way you tell things to someone who actually wants to know - the texture of it rather than the summary. The underwater city and the way the light came through the water above it. The subjects and the professors, Scal's terrifying warmth outside class, Peaches ending sessions early with the cheerful energy of someone who considered twelve minutes a gift.

The SDC and the demonstrations and the ongoing saga of the chain dart. The sports festival and Gridfall and the way the stadium had filled in a way the football pitch had not. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Ren listened with the full attention of someone receiving something they had wanted for a while.

"And the mask system?" he asked, when Kara described it.

"You design it. It's yours for your time there." Kara paused.

"Like mine has stripes and tusks and wings. I can show you later if you want." Ren looked at him for a moment.

"That's a combination."

"It made sense at the time." Ren laughed, easy and unguarded. Then he looked at the umbrella across his knees and the laugh settled into something more considered.

"I think about it sometimes," he said.

"What it would have been like. But this," he gestured at the clearing, the forest, the settlement somewhere behind them through the trees "- this is also something. Our history with umbrellas goes back millennia. There are forms in the Tanaka lineage that exist nowhere else." He ran his thumb along the umbrella's shaft in the way of someone who had been doing this since before he could remember.

"I want to be as good as my grandfather. Better, maybe, if that's possible." He said the last part carefully, fully aware of the size of what he was describing.

"He says I have the movement but not the understanding yet. That the understanding takes time and cannot be hurried."

"What's the difference?" Kara asked. Ren considered this seriously.

"He says movement is what the body does. Understanding is knowing why the body does it - the history of each position, the situation it was designed for, what it defeats and what it does not. You can copy the form without knowing any of that. It looks the same from the outside." He paused.

"It is not the same thing." Kara thought about Instructor Ken. The umbrella work is coming along. There's still real distance. He thought about what Ken had not said, which was what the distance actually consisted of. The light in the clearing had shifted while they talked, the amber deepening toward the flat gold of late afternoon.

The dragon had descended from her branch at some point - Kara had registered the movement without tracking its completion - and was on the ground perhaps three metres from Waggy, who had adopted the posture of a creature aware of this development and committed to absolute stillness as the appropriate response.

"How old is she?" Kara asked, nodding toward the dragon.

"Year and a half," Ren said.

"Doesn't feel like it. She was difficult at the beginning. Very particular about food - there is a preparation involved, it has to be done a certain way or she will not eat. She needs real flight time every day, the clearing does not count. And she runs warm, so in summer she needs water more than you would expect." He said all of this with the fond exasperation of someone who had learned these things through experience.

"You get used to it. But it is work." Kara looked at Waggy, who ate whatever was available and slept wherever was comfortable and whose primary requirements now were outdoors time and not being confined.

"Waggy is fairly straightforward," he said.

"Kohaku is many things," Ren said, with the warmth of someone who had made his peace with all of them. Then he caught himself.

"That is her name. Kohaku." Kara filed it.

"It suits her." Ren looked at Waggy.

"What does he eat?" They talked about the animals the way people talk about things they care about and cannot always explain - openly and in detail, trading facts that would have meant little to anyone who had never kept a creature that fit no standard category. Kara learned that Kohaku would only eat river fish prepared one exact way, which Ren had spent three weeks perfecting, that she slept in a position requiring far more space than her size suggested, and that she had strong opinions about rain.

Ren learned that Waggy had survived on cow's milk for his first weeks, that the stubs on his shoulder blades were growing at a rate that surprised the one person Kara trusted to know about these things, and that he had tracked a weasel to its den yesterday and then apparently decided the weasel had won on a technicality. Neither asked where the animals had come from. Kohaku made a low sound. Waggy's ear rotated toward it involuntarily, then rotated back, information received and deliberately not acted upon.

"Your umbrella," Ren said, after a while.

"You said you started this year and you are already thinking about it seriously."

"Yeah, I have developed interest in it as a weapon," Kara confirmed.

"My instructor at University was honest about the limits of what he could teach me. He told me directly that I would need a specialist at some point." Ren looked at him, fitting the pieces together.

"And then you ended up here."

"And then I ended up here." Ren was quiet for a moment, turning the umbrella in his hands.

"My grandfather is difficult to approach about teaching," he said finally.

"He has a clear sense of what is worth his time and he arrived at it over a long time." A pause.

"But let me ask him. I know how to ask him."

"I would appreciate that," Kara said, dipping his head slightly. The last of the direct light left the clearing and the cedar shadow came in fully, the temperature dropping with the immediacy that forests at an altitude produced when the light went. Ren stood, closed the umbrella, and looked toward the settlement.

"Come on," he said.

"Evening is better with him. Let's go now." Isamu was sitting outside his residence with Yuki, a cup of something warm in both their hands, watching the square with the sedate attention of people who had arrived somewhere and were allowing themselves to have arrived. The square was lit by the settlement's evening lights - low, warm, the kind of lighting that understood the natural rhythm of the day. Ren approached easily, a grandchild long past being intimidated by his grandfather's presence.

He spoke first in his own language, which the interface carried smoothly into meaning for Kara, telling his grandfather that Kara was a first-year student at University Eleven, that he had been practicing with an umbrella seriously for a few months under University instruction, that his instructor had told him directly he needed a specialist, and that in Ren's view he had the kind of attention and seriousness that made teaching him worth the time. He did not say Kara had asked him to intervene.

He presented it as something he had noticed and thought worth raising. Isamu listened without expression. Yuki sipped her drink, having watched this exact process play out many times before. There was a long pause.

"There is a valley two hours northeast," Isamu finally spoke, in the tone of someone describing a reasonable errand.

"Past the second ridge. A bamboo grove grows there. One variety only, dense-walled, the internodes long and even. We use it for the best frames." He looked at Kara steadily.

"Bring me two stalks. No shorter than my height. Cut cleanly at the base node." He picked up his cup.

"By tomorrow evening."

"I will," Kara said. Ren glanced at Kara, then at his grandfather.

"I will go with him," he said. Isamu considered this for a moment.

"Fine," he said, and returned to his conversation with Yuki, the matter finished and gone from his mind. Kara found Hana in the communal building, going over the maintenance schedule.

"Northeast, past the second ridge," he said.

"Is there anything I should know?" She looked up. A pause that had information in it.

"The valley floods from snowmelt without much warning this time of year," she said.

"The runoff from the upper ridge comes fast when that happens. And the gorge walls are limestone - there are things that den in the crevices." She looked at him steadily.

"Nothing that should be a serious problem for someone paying attention."

"And someone who is not?"

"Then it would be a different conversation." She held his gaze for a moment.

"Come back before the light goes." He nodded and found Ren waiting at the communal building's entrance, Kohaku on his shoulder and the umbrella across his back, packed and ready, having expected exactly this.

"Dawn?" Ren asked.

"Dawn," Kara agreed.