Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(96)

These last few weeks spending time—invisibly, yes, but actual time—with his old friends had reminded him how much he’d enjoyed being with them. He acknowledged how his bitterness had poisoned his mind, like mold on a painting, ruining the true details. He’d been uncharitable in his descriptions to Yumi. Painfully so.

The truth was, these were wonderful people. He appreciated the way Akane kept them all together, like the glue of a collage. So careful never to let anyone feel left behind. He found it endearing, the way Tojin was so enthusiastic about his bodybuilding but also shy about it. Painter even liked how he could never figure out if Masaka was genuinely interested in the macabre, or somehow just oblivious.

He even appreciated Izzy and her…Izzy-ness. They might not be his friends anymore. But he could be their friend. In secret. If he let go of that awful bitterness.

Design came bustling over, hands on her hips. “I’m going to find out,” she said to them, “what you’re hiding from me.”

“Sorry, Design,” Akane said sweetly. “Painter business. It’s the rules.”

“Rules don’t apply to me,” Design said. “I’m not a person. Or truly alive.” She shook her head. “Well, sorry about the crowd. Though it is to be expected.”

“Expected?” Tojin asked.

“Because of the broadcast?” Design said, cocking her head. “The landing? The spaceship? Have you forgotten that your people are about to make first contact? Officially at least. Noodle shop owners with nice butts don’t count, apparently.”

The landing.

That was tonight?

Painter turned, seeing the crowd with new eyes. People chattered with an air of excitement, waiting for Design to turn on the restaurant’s hion viewer—which she did shortly after leaving their table. Painter rose and stared at the lines of light behind the glass—hung high on the wall so everyone could see. The hion began to shake, then formed into the shape of the lead explorer in his command chair—broadcast all the way from the space bus near the star.

“We’ve completed our orbit of the planet,” the lead explorer said. “It matches the visual inspections via telescope. We get no radio signals, even this close, but our surveys indicate settlements. There are very few land masses though. It seems like these people might spend most of their lives sailing the oceans, for we see many boats.”

Boats?

Yumi stepped up to Painter, her eyes wide as they watched.

“Extending our hion lines now toward the surface,” the explorer said. That was what had carried them all this way—a pair of mobile hion lines connected back to their planet, capable of letting a space vessel travel like a train, constantly powered, pushed by the lines. How they strengthened the lines enough to stretch all that way was beyond Painter.

“Have you,” he whispered to Yumi, “ever visited the oceans on your planet?”

“The what?” she said. “I don’t know that word.”

“Water,” he said. “Enormous bodies of water, like the cold spring, but huge. We have a few of them here—our cities run to the edges of them.” One of those oceans could take an entire day to cross, he’d heard, using a hion-line boat.

“Water like that would boil away,” she said. “There aren’t enough high grounds for more than the occasional cool spring. Unless…maybe it’s out beyond the searing stones? In the cold wastes, up high?”

He felt a mounting worry as they watched the explorers in the cockpit guide their vessel. He listened to their observations, heard the rattling of the ship as it rode the hion lines all the way to the ground and finally touched down.

The door opened. And the camera turned, in the hands of an explorer, to show the view outside. There, curious beings were coming up to inspect the vessel. Limber, tall, with four arms, the explorers described them as having chalk-white skin. They most certainly weren’t human.

Though you might have guessed this, Painter was stunned. Yumi wasn’t from the star.

She never had been.





“Maybe it’s time travel,” Yumi said, half walking, half floating as she paced in the cold spring. Strange how she’d begun finding the cool water refreshing instead of shocking.

“Time travel?” Painter said, skeptical where he sat in the cold spring with arms out along the stones, resting back, toes peeking from the water.

“You have an advanced level of technology,” she said, ticking things off on her fingers. “While we are just beginning to build machines, you have ones that can travel to the stars. Our languages are close. Even without the strange gift of the spirits that lets us understand one another, I can see it in the familiar way your writing looks. We are both human. Maybe we’re from the same planet during different times.”

“Yumi,” he said, beads of water glistening on his bare chest, “this is not my planet. The ground is scalding, the sky is too high, and there’s no shroud. Your plants float. I think I’d know if plants floated on my world.”

“It could be the distant past,” she said. “A lot can change over time, Painter. We should at least consider the possibility.”

He frowned, but nodded. She paced back the other direction, water chill as it washed across her thighs and waist with each too-light step. Her theory frightened her. If she was right, the distance between her and Painter would change from incredible to impossible. Another world was daunting. Another time…