Chương 46: The White Parasol

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum November 6, 2847 Saturday dawned a clear, hot day without rain. After a jog, a shower, and breakfast in the dining hall, Arc and Pika walked downhill on the sidewalk of the Camino del Soldado, just as he'd done with Cassie a bit over a month before. They were both dressed in their cadet uniforms, caps and gray tunics included, and Arc found himself lengthening his stride and hurrying to keep up with his friend's long legs.

Halfway down the hill to The Valley, Pika realized what was happening and deliberately slowed his pace.

"I am happy to spend the day with you," Arc's big friend said.

"But I am not entirely certain what help I can be. Human religious traditions –""The Church of Christ the Universal Redeemer isn't entirely human, anymore," Arc pointed out. It felt a bit strange, to defend a religion that wasn't even his, but he still felt the obligation. Of the thousands of religions which had begun on humanity's common homeworld, only two had truly adapted during the successive waves of colonization, and found a new life among the stars.

"Mmmm," Pika rumbled.

"Perhaps so; but it is rooted on Terra. I cannot think of anyone I know back on Stellar Abyss who follows this faith. I do not think I had ever seen a cathedral in person, until I left the ringworld." He considered for a moment.

"I had a friend whose family worshipped at the Church of the Progenitors, but that is not considered so odd among my people."

"Alright, so putting that aside for a moment," Arc said, in an attempt to regain control of the conversation—or, at least, to focus it once again on what they'd left campus for.

"You know the imperial family is Christian, right? I mean, I don't really pay attention to the tabloids, and even I know that." Pika nodded.

"Yes. Our ringnets spend more time on their visits to the sacred terrace-pools of Alu, however. The matriarchs say it is a sign of great respect that they honor the progenitors in this way." Their steps carried them past the street where Arc and Cassie had seen three gangers beating a cadet, and Arc couldn't help but keep his eyes about him. There was no reason to think that he'd have any trouble, especially with Pika at his side.

All the same, he didn't relax until they'd left the intersection behind and gotten into the Valley proper, with its streetside cafes, small shops, and family restaurants bustling to either side of the road. Arc made a shrugging motion with his hand.

"I'm sure. But the point is, she's been raised Christian, which means she's going to expect a present over the winter break. Which means I need to find something."

"And this is because you wish to mate with her," Pika declared, just a bit too loudly for Arc's comfort. He couldn't help but flinch, and look around to see whether any of the other groups of people on the sidewalk had overheard. Arc didn't think his friend was purposefully trying to embarrass him, but with a booming voice like that it wouldn't take much for Pika to make a spectacle of things entirely by accident.

"We're still a ways off from… mating…" Arc said, lowering his own voice.

"Humans don't usually have children until after they're married, Pika."

"You make this all very complicated," Pika said, with a shake of his head.

"I feel bad for you, Arc. My mother will choose a fine woman for me."

"And you just trust her to do that?" Arc asked, scanning the nearby shops. He'd visited many of them with Cassie already, when she was shopping for a dress, for shoes, for jewelry. He knew some of the things she had paused over, so he led his friend into one storefront, which specialized in using indigenous shells and pearls to make bracelets, rings, and necklaces. The moment he stepped inside, he felt out of place. Was it his imagination, or were the clerks staring at him as if he was a piece of dirt?

"Of course," Pika answered.

"She is my mother. If anyone knows what I need, it is her."

"And you don't –" Arc hesitated.

"Humans usually kind of try out a few different people, while we're young. To get an idea of what we're looking for." He approached a glass-topped counter where he recalled Cassie lingering, and looked down. The black pearls would match her hair, once it had grown back. But the prices!

"Ah, I see what you mean," Pika said, nodding sagely.

"Usually, while the young men are waiting to be mated, we experiment sexually with each other. That ring is nice. I think that Cassie would like it." The store employees were definitely staring at them, now. Arc was absolutely certain of it.

"No rings," he told Pika.

"If a girl opens up a box that has a ring in it, that's the kind of thing that could be really misunderstood. Come on, let's look somewhere else." Somewhere less expensive, he hoped, as he led his friend back out the door and onto the street.

"But you do like girls," he asked, once they were in the open air again.

"Of course!" Pika assured him.

"Come in this shop for a moment." Arc followed him into a beach-shop, and toward racks of men's swimwear. He watched as Pika lifted a truly immense pair of swimming shorts off a rack, and checked the size.

"But you don't have a problem just waiting for your mother to choose someone? You never meet an Alu'kan girl, and want to get to know her better?" Pika hesitated. It was a small thing, but living in the same room as the other cadet had taught Arc what to look for.

"Sometimes," he admitted. His thick fingers patted the swimsuit absently, and he looked away from Arc, toward the far wall of the store, where portable umbrellas hung, wrapped in plastic.

"I worry about Rain," he said, after a moment.

"You do?" Arc asked.

"I actually feel like she's been getting a lot better since the beginning of the term. She talks more, she doesn't flinch away from men she knows…"

"Did you know that she has never been to a single one of the ringworlds?" Pika asked, turning back to Arc and meeting his eyes.

"I asked her. I understand not Alu. It is difficult for many of us to visit the homeworld. But she has never really lived among her own people at all. I worry that –" he sighed.

"She should not even be at the academy. She should be with the matriarchs, learning from them. Her mother should be finding a mate for her, fine and strong, someone who will protect her –" The big man's fists clenched, bunching up the swim shorts he was holding, and in that moment Arc understood.

"You like her," he said. It wasn't a question. With a heavy sigh, Pika nodded his head.

"Some of the things she says about her past," he muttered.

"She will not tell me the story. But here and there, she lets pieces slip."

"The marines from the Nerva," Arc recalled.

"They took her away from the— the place –" Pika made the words sound like a curse.

"—where she was born. If I could find those men, I would embrace each in turn and tell them of the debt my people owe. Every time I think of it, it makes me want to take her away to someplace where no one will ever hurt her again. And I think that I would rip to pieces anyone who tried." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Yeah, you've got it bad, buddy," Arc said, reaching up to pat his friend on one shoulder. Pika looked down at him, eyes wide and vulnerable.

"This is how you feel about Cassie?" Arc thought of the crowd of reporters who had waited for them in New Toledo, and the pain in her voice, the bitterness, when Cassie admitted how she'd been fooled by Radecki. How she'd thought, just once, that someone might just respect her as a pilot, and not simply be looking for political advantage.

"Yeah," he admitted.

"Yeah it is." Pika straightened.

"Then we will find you a good gift to show her how you feel," he promised.

"I already have an idea. But first, find yourself swimming clothes. Shopping will not take us the entire day, and I have yet to taste the water of Vidako's oceans." His friend's idea, it turned out, took Arc and Pika to a corner store that was quite clearly marketed to tourists—and specifically, Arc discovered, to the families of the cadets who attended the academy. There were academy shirts, hats, mugs, and anything else you could think of. There was also the utter horror that Pika pushed into his hands.

"This is your idea?" Arc asked. He held the monstrosity up to his own eye level, and watched its pale-pink, plastic head bob up and down on a spring, complete with dark, beady little eyes, four enormous front teeth, and carefully carved wrinkles. Just in case there was any doubt, the body to which the spring was attached wore a molded facsimile of a gray academy tunic.

"It is a terran mole rat!" Pika exclaimed happily.

"Every time she looks at it, she will remember where she met you!" Arc did not purchase the mole rat. Instead, he and Pika bounced from shop to shop, as Arc's desperation grew. He quickly gave up on the idea of buying her clothes or shoes—not because he didn't have her size; while he might not have thought to take notes at the time, Iceni had recorded anything he might need while she rode along in his head during that day off-campus.

No, what Arc quickly realized was that he didn't have enough money to afford most of the things which had caught Cassie's eye while they were shopping together. It shouldn't have been a surprise that she could afford to casually drop thousands of credits on a new pair of shoes, but it meant that anything he bought for her would be—well, it would be sort of junk compared to whatever she might purchase for herself. He'd never felt more poor than he did right then, trying to find a present for her.

"I can't afford any of this," Arc complained, as they left yet another shop.

"What exactly am I supposed to get a princess that she doesn't already have, anyway? She could probably buy every shop on this street if she wanted to!"

"Enough butting your nose against a reef for now," Pika decided.

"We will get lunch, and then we will go down to the sea and swim."

"I can't do any of that until I have a gift for Cassie," Arc protested, as Pika steered him toward a fried seafood stand within sight of the beach.

"That's the whole reason I came down here today in the first place." Was he going to have to come down here on Sunday, as well? The prospect of two days of fruitless shopping nearly filled him with despair.

"You must clear your head," Pika insisted.

"Then you will find that an idea comes to you." For once, I agree with him, Iceni spoke up. Your thoughts are spiralling. Perhaps raising your blood sugar and cooling off in the ocean will help. Stranger things happen to humans all the time—biologically speaking. Feeling a bit outnumbered, Arc got himself a bowl of local chowder, which he found thick, creamy, and full of chunks of vegetables and indigenous fish. He and Pika found seats inside Valley Beach Park, at one of the public tables beneath a great awning.

There, he watched his friend casually demolish three of the native crustaceans: immense, purple-shelled monstrosities with eye-stalks, rear-stingers as long and straight as a sword, and at least a dozen scuttling legs. Their food disposed of, they used the public changing rooms, rented a locker to share, and then walked down over the hot sand to the dark water of San Teodoro Bay under the gaze of three life guards.

The waves lapped about Arc's legs as he followed Pika in, and he found that the water was pleasantly cool—a relief after hiking back and forth along the neighborhood streets all morning long, from shop to shop. All across the sand, humans and a smattering of Alu'kans, including a few older cadets that Arc recognized, lounged in the orange sunlight. Pika slid right into the ocean, and gave an audible sigh of relief.

He dipped beneath the surface momentarily, then stood upright perhaps ten meters out from where Arc was still wading in. The sandy-bottom must have fallen off quickly, for Pika was already up to his chest.

"Come in!" he shouted, face split with a broad grin.

"Come, come, it isn't too cold!"

"I don't have five centimeters of subcutaneous fat like you do," Arc pointed out, but he followed his friend in anyway, until he was deep enough that he had to bounce up and down, pushing off the sand with the tips of his toes in between the crest of each wave. By that point, Pika had rolled onto his back, and he floated there, arms and legs spread wide, face turned up to the Vidakan sky, where two suns tracked their path from one horizon to the other.

"Let me ask you a question," Pika said, after a moment.

"You are getting Cassie a gift in keeping with the religion she follows, yes?" Arc nodded, and then realized his friend couldn't see him.

"Yeah."

"What about your religion?" Pika asked.

"From the way you speak, it is not the same as hers." Arc sighed, and jumped up to keep his head above a particularly high swell.

"I don't really have one," he admitted. Pika lifted his head, somehow, without managing to dunk himself.

"No? Do you not believe in the progenitors?"

"I don't know that I believe in much of anything," Arc admitted.

"Is it suspicious just how much DNA every sentient race we find shares? Sure. Have we found ruins on dead worlds?" He moved his arms through the water in wide, slow circles.

"Of course. I'd be more surprised if we hadn't. Does that mean some ancient race messed around with all our ancestors? Maybe. I haven't seen any real proof, yet. But even if so, that doesn't make them gods."

"Don't let the matriarchs hear you say that," Pike said, with a laugh.

"But truly? Nothing? None of the human religions?"

"I just don't see how people simply decide one day to believe something about the universe, with no proof," Arc said.

"Maybe it would be different if they found the corpse of a progenitor or something."

"Faith does not require proof," Pika pointed out.

"I guess I don't have any, then," Arc said.

"If I was going to be anything, I'd probably go with Taara Buddhism. We have a temple back home on Zurah, and I used to go to services sometimes with my friends. But I don't –" He paused for a moment, struck by a thought, and was so distracted that the next way sloshed right over his head, leaving him sputtering.

"Are you alright?" Pika asked.

"Perfect," Arc said.

"I know what I'm going to get her." They found the little shop on one of the side streets, two blocks away from Camino del Soldado itself. Without Iceni to help find it in the first place, and then navigate, Arc was certain they'd have wandered around for the rest of the afternoon without success. It was small, tucked in between a laundry service and a take-out restaurant that didn't even have tables to sit at. Beneath a simple awning, a sign read: The Ashvattha Tree. When Arc pushed the door open, bells chimed.

He held it for Pika, stepped inside, and inhaled the scent of sandalwood incense. Not quite what the temple at Avataran Shahar used, he was certain by the second breath. That wasn't any surprise—sandalwood trees were infamously fussy about worlds other than Terra itself. Arc knew that most temples had to use artificially scented incense, rather than the real wood.

Pika loomed behind him, head ducked and arms pulled in close, as Arc nodded to the clerk and made his way past incense burners, sticks of incense, and books, until he came to a case of statues and figurines at the back of the store.

"Religious icons?" Pika asked. He must have felt something, because he kept his voice low, almost a whisper.

"Different incarnations of the Buddha, or bodhisattvas," Arc explained, as he walked along the shelves, scanning over what was available.

"This one is Alu'kan!" Pika exclaimed, reaching out to touch one of the statues and nearly knocking half a dozen more over. He stepped back gingerly, leaving the shelves rattling.

"I recognize her. Mea the singer! The progenitors heard her songs from beyond the stars…"

"Taara Buddhism recognizes bodhisattvas whatever world they were born on," Arc said, only half paying attention to the explanation he was giving.

"Enlightenment is enlightenment. Here." He lifted one of the smallest statues, that of a seated woman holding a parasol over her shoulder.

"Sitātapatrā. She's a protector. I was thinking we could get it put onto a base that she can mount in her cockpit, someplace out of the way." He looked over to Pika, suddenly no longer as certain as he had been. It was only something small, after all—surely if Cassie wanted a statue, she could have had one of real gold.

"Do you think she'll like it?" Pika smiled and put a hand on Arc's shoulder.

"I am certain she will, my friend."