Read Spherical Harmonic for Free Online Page A

Then he set about remaking the fire, using plant flags for fuel. To start the flame, he used a flint— and that one object spoke volumes.
     
     
I recognized the markings on that flint. Its design came from a well-known interstellar merchant who sold through the web market-place, often called the cyber-nexus. Someone here had access to an off-planet network. It was the only way the treeman could have that flint. Its purchase order had to have gone through the psiberweb. I had often seen such orders flitting along its conduits. Relief trickled over me. Perhaps a safer escape existed than dispersing back into limbo.
     
     
The treeman worked on gutting his beetles, never glancing up. But I felt his awareness of my presence. He wanted sex. Why he held back I wasn't sure, but from his mind I sensed that a gentle person hid behind that implacable exterior. The Manq's destruction of the forest had scarred his emotions.
     
     
It came to me then, crashing like a wave heavy with storm foam.
     
     
I spoke softly. "Was she your wife?"
     
     
He jerked as if I had hit him, and froze in the process of setting a flag-leaf on the fire. Then he looked at me. "They made me watch." Even more than the grate of his voice, his grammar told of his agony. My translation nodes didn't have to alter it. Shay sentence structure changed when the speaker was upset, becoming akin to more widely spoken Skolian languages. It was why many of us sounded distraught to the Shay even when we were perfectly calm.
     
     
"They tied me to a tripod," he said. "Then they made me watch."
     
     
"I'm sorry." Gods, what had I stumbled into? Had the people he called Manq forced him to watch while they murdered his wife? No wonder rage drove him.
     
     
He dropped the flag into the fire. Sparks jumped into the air and floated down, turning into tiny embers. One hit the wet moss and sizzled.
     
     
"They were Traders," I told him. Just saying the name made me queasy. Sweat trickled down my neck.
     
     
He poked the flames with a green stick. "Who trades?" Strain crackled in his voice.
     
     
"The Manq. We call them Traders. Aristo Traders." They had red eyes instead of copper, but everything else he had said fit. "Their hair glistens like water." I sifted through my language modes for a Shay word. "Manq hair glitters."
     
     
His face became more drawn. "Yes."
     
     
I did a search for words that resembled manq and came up with maana. That didn't help much, given that it meant "with one's nose cut off." Then I found mankatuul, for "trades pain." It derived from the ancient Iotic word ma'tuul, meaning "base" or "vile."
     
     
"Mankatuul," I said.
     
     
Gazing at the fire, he repeated it in his own dialect. "Manqatile."
     
     
"They took my husband." Pain saturated that realization.
     
     
"I don't believe." He fixed me with a hostile stare. "You are they."
     
     
"I am their enemy." I understood him now. Dying was a better fate than capture by Aristos.
     
     
But my husband? Eldrin? What had happened?
     
     
The memory crashed in like mental thunder. Eldrin had pushed me and Taquinil through a "door" from our universe into Kyle space. My last sight had been of Eldrin standing unprotected, in his sleep trousers and robe, his arms outstretched from shoving his wife and son. Our bodyguards lay dead around him. They had striven until the very end to protect us. A Trader warrior had reached Eldrin, eight feet tall in its mirrored body armor. It loomed behind him, its massive arm clamping around his waist.
     
     
Nausea swept over me. "They took him."
     
     
"Say again?" the treeman asked.
     
     
My voice shook. "My husband. The Manq took him." And our son? Both Taquinil and I had fallen out of our universe. But he had never come back.
     
     
I struggled to stay calm, though I wanted to shout. "Untie me. I must find help."
     
     
He lifted the line of beetles into his lap. "You are lying."
     
     
"No! Is truth."
     
     
He drew a knife out of its