A Conspiracy of Stars

“Names?” she says. She has a thin, almost-transparent slate in her hands. It’s a formality: she knows who we are. My father is a member of the Council—the twelve-person congress that makes decisions about N’Terra. My mother is on the Council as well, which makes for some interesting debates when we eat our evening meal. Or at least it used to, before my grandmother’s absence filled all our mouths with an ash of silence too thick to talk around.

I lean back as my father stretches across the steering column.

“Dr. English, Octavius. Mammalian Compound. Daughter: English, Octavia.”

“Dr. English,” she says after a moment, nodding in confirmation.

The guard passes the slate to my father, who applies his thumb to the screen, then passes it to me to do the same. I take the slate, center my thumb in the red square beside a picture of my face and profile, and the slate’s screen goes blank. I pass it back to her.

The solid white gates ahead of us slide apart and the woman with the buzzgun nods us through. Under my hand, the chariot whispers forward toward a cluster of other vehicles, where a small group of whitecoats stands conversing. One of them wears a strange article of clothing that I’ve never seen: a red cloak with a tall collar that extends well above his head, which then curves forward and outward like the palm of a hand. It covers his face in shade: I can’t make out his features until I’ve parked alongside another chariot and the red-cloaked man moves toward us.

“English,” the man says, raising a hand gloved in the same red, scaled material as his cloak.

“Dr. Albatur,” my father says, nodding. He’s removed his traveling gloves and his hands look comfortingly human in comparison to the other man’s red fingers. “A pleasure to see you.”

So this is Dr. Albatur. I’ve heard his name a lot in the last year—he’s the recently elected Council Head of N’Terra. Somehow I’d pictured him differently. Younger. Stronger.

“Looking forward to hearing your proposals,” Dr. Albatur says. My parents have debated Albatur’s policies many a time at evening meal, but they’ve never mentioned his garb. I study it, trying to guess its purpose. He seems to see me for the first time and forces what could be interpreted as a smile onto his narrow mouth. “Ah, your daughter.”

“Hello, sir,” I say, nodding respectfully, but my eyes still wander to his covering.

“I see you’re curious about my hood,” he says. His tone is unpleasant to my ears, the sound of someone drawing a line and daring you to cross it.

“Yes, sir,” I say without hesitating.

He squints at me.

“So. Ask.”

I consider his expression, wondering if he means it. I almost look at my father for confirmation, but the idea of needing permission to ask a simple question irks me.

“What animal did we learn this technology from?” I finally say.

Dr. Albatur smirks.

“So very N’Terra of you, Miss English,” he says. “To assume everything we know is from this hot little globe. No, what I wear isn’t an innovation of Faloiv. This technology is of the Origin Planet: the material is from the hull of the Vagantur.”

My forehead wrinkles involuntarily.

“I wasn’t aware we dismantled the ship for personal items,” I say.

Dr. Albatur’s expression clouds and he fixes me with a sharp look.

“The Vagantur has not been dismantled,” he says quickly. “Nor will it ever be. And this is not merely a personal item. My skin and the sun of Faloiv are . . . incompatible, you see. This material acts as an effective barrier in order to keep me alive. A scrap of the hull that was damaged in the landing was salvaged when my condition became apparent.”

“Oh. But why will the Vagantur never be dismantled?” I go on. “Faloiv is our home. We’re not going anywhere.”

Dr. Albatur’s eyelids seem to thicken and droop: suddenly they too seem to be wearing a hood like the one over his head. He stares at me hard, the corner of his mouth twitching ever so slightly.

And then he turns his eyes to my father, transferring his gaze without moving his face. He addresses him now as if I’d never said a word.

“Dr. English,” he says. “How goes the progress on our other project?”

I look at my father to hear his response and note a change in his eyes. Normally round and wide like mine, they’ve narrowed slightly.

“It continues. We are still attempting to locate a specimen,” my father says. “I will alert you the moment we find one.”

“Good,” says Dr. Albatur, nodding from deep inside the hood. “Good.”

He turns abruptly, the bulky redness of him moving away from us and toward the doorway to the Beak, which guards with buzzguns are now opening—Albatur’s posture suggests that he’s bending slightly, bowing his head away from the sun. The whitecoats that accompany him scurry at his heels, staying close. I expect my father to follow him directly, but instead he’s rubbing the material of his gloves between two fingers, staring after Albatur with an expression of preoccupation.

“I guess I shouldn’t have asked,” I say when Albatur is out of earshot. “It just seems strange that he was so adamant about not dismantling the Vagantur. It just sits over there in the jungle, growing moss.”

“Dr. Albatur has many ideas as the Council Head,” my father says, and I’m surprised that he’s not angry with me. “The Vagantur is just part of them.”

“What else?” I ask. This is one of the longest conversations we’ve had in some time.

“The Solossius,” he says.

“The what?”

He looks at me then, quickly, his eyes refocusing.

“Dr. Adibuah will be waiting for us.”

My father has prepared me for what awaited in the main dome of the Beak—an absence of cages, with the herbivorous birds allowed to fly freely in the wide expanse of the dome. I duck immediately upon entering, two flurried pairs of wings darting just above my head in a flash of gold and crimson. From outside, the large dome appears to be solid white, but inside, sunshine pours in through slow-traveling clouds at the highest point of a transparent ceiling. The clouds are both real and not, my father has told me: made of moisture like real clouds but engineered indoors to provide the birds with a lifelike habitat. With the birds all around me, and the clouds above, it’s almost like being outside, beyond the borders of N’Terra.

Dr. Adibuah is approaching, and my enjoyment of the dome fades momentarily. His usually sunny disposition seems dimmer today, the tension in his jaw turning his face somber.

“Octavius,” he says. He shakes my father’s hand firmly. “I didn’t know Albatur was coming.”

I catch a glint of something like regret flit across my father’s face before he buries it again.

“Apologies. I assumed you knew.”

“I didn’t.” Dr. Adibuah looks at me, his eyes losing some of their gloom. “And here’s O, on my turf for the first time.”

I like when people call me O. Sometimes Octavia is unbearably close to Octavius: my father had claimed my name like a scientific discovery, a new species; something he thinks he owns. My mother had at least insisted on me having my own middle name, Afua.

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