Spherical Harmonic by Catherine Asaro Read Free Book Online

"But I prefer Hajune. It means 'the Other Man.' Forest man, not city man."
     
     
I felt his love for the forest. And he enjoyed his profession. If the clothes he wore were any indication, he undervalued his abilities a great deal. Few people even knew how to tailor any more, let alone with such finesse. Rich offworlders would pay a fortune for his work. He needed an agent. He could get a lot more for those clothes than a knife, even one as expensive as his diamond-steel blade.
     
     
"Impressive they are, your tailor-things," I said.
     
     
"I use only dead plants. Never living." He swept out his arm. "This forest is home. Here we loved—" He stopped, his animation vanishing like a doused light. He lowered his arm. "Here I prefer to live."
     
     
His loneliness filled the cavity. Tears gathered in my eyes, from both his grief and my response to his pain. His anguish didn't show on his face, but I absorbed it from his mind. He had cherished his wife, wanting nothing more than to live with her among the trees and lakes.
     
     
This time when his memory came, I saw the assault in gruesome detail. The images shattered. His wife's copper-eyed attackers weren't Aristos. These were Razers, the secret police created by the Aristos. Half Aristo and half slave, Razers occupied the top level of the Trader slave hierarchies, which meant they had considerable wealth and authority themselves.
     
     
Aristo genes dominated their makeup.
     
     
Two of them held a woman on the ground, a female version of Hajune, tall and lovely. Hajune's memory didn't include a full image of himself, only as much as he could see with his own vision. He fought like a madman, crazed with desperation, while two other Razers bound him to the leg of a giant tripod. His wife's screams filled the universe. Her terror infused my mind, as it had filled Hajune's; I experienced it as he had felt it, through her mind.
     
     
Here in the cavity, Hajune gave a strangled cry. Leaning over, he wrapped his arms around his body. Then he lurched to his feet and left the cavity. He strode off into the forest.
     
     
Gods. How did he live with that emotional earthquake of a memory? Nor could I understand how such an atrocity could have happened here. This was a Skolian world. Razers couldn't brutalize our citizens. Trader secret police became war criminals the moment they entered Skolian space.
     
     
I had to do something. For Hajune. For Eldrin. I couldn't stay on this far-placed moon while Aristos imprisoned my husband, who had given up his freedom, possibly his life, to prevent my suffering a fate similar to Hajune's wife's. This much I knew, at an instinctual level: if the Traders caught Eldrin, Taquinil, or me, they would never let us escape, not even through death.
     
     
Outside the shadows had switched direction and evening was falling. The fire continued to smolder. It made me uneasy. A forest fire was unlikely in this wet, low-oxygen climate, but not impossible. Bound as I was, I could do nothing if a spark ignited the moss that carpeted this cavity.
     
     
Closing my eyes, I tried to settle my mind. It didn't work. My thoughts contracted into knots and my concentration broke every time a beetle clacked.
     
     
It took a long time to reach a meditative state. But finally I spread into a sea of thoughts, calm and serene. Opening my eyes, I saw the cavity ripple like a viscous sea. It wasn't truly bending; it took immense energies to curve spacetime, enough to destroy this moon. I was seeing another reality superimposed on this one, as I transformed…
     
     

Gradually I became aware again. A tiny pink flower gleamed in the moss near my eyes, a drop of water on one petal. The aroma of bubbling soup filled the air. Heat from the fire warmed the front of my torso, and my limbs ached with returning circulation. Bizarrely, I had on the blue shift again; I must have gathered more of it in psiberspace. It had a hazy translucence, though. Ghost shift.
     
     
I