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forgetting what it was i came to find
It's a little after sunset, and the spaceport lights are beginning to show bright against the sky, when Melian sets foot on his homeworld.
Things have changed, in sixteen years. The landing field is evenly paved, weathered to a neutral gray; what he remembers as a cluster of little prefab offices, their doors stenciled with the red Dragon emblem, is now a single smooth-curved façade of tawny brick. Above it, in the distance, he can see the distinctive rounded roof of the Menw, but it no longer dominates the skyline, as the only building in Camallate standing more than three stories high. In any case he's no longer the child, not quite eight years old and small for his age, from whose vantage the whole port was huge and strange, charged with mystery.
And yet - the indefinable earth-and-bronze smell of the air, the dry warm twilight all around him, the direction of the wind, all these things pierce him at once and let in a flood of memories he'd have sworn he lost. He grew up on Arden, sultry heat and drenching downpours, cities soaring like towers of spun glass, blinding whites and brilliant colors, and never once felt nostalgia for New Britain. Now it hits him in the throat.
He doesn't notice that he's shaking until he almost drops his ident disc.
The woman behind the desk says, "Easy does it," and presses his hand for a moment as she takes the ID from him. "Long flight, huh?"
Her voice is a cool contralto, but she speaks exactly like his mother. She's older than Melian but not old, in her mid-thirties, maybe. She would have been eighteen or twenty when he left. So would his cousins, if they'd lived.
"Yeah, I guess," he says, and tries to smile, but it feels stiff, as his own voice after hers sounds foreign in his ears, affected. A tourist, a city kid with an Ardenian accent, fumbling, clueless.
He's so rattled by the encounter that he leaves the spaceport and walks three blocks before he realizes he's going in the wrong direction. He did his research, he knows where the overnight hotel is, in one of the big new buildings near the hospital; instead, without thinking, he's heading towards the Hall.
Things have changed, in sixteen years. The landing field is evenly paved, weathered to a neutral gray; what he remembers as a cluster of little prefab offices, their doors stenciled with the red Dragon emblem, is now a single smooth-curved façade of tawny brick. Above it, in the distance, he can see the distinctive rounded roof of the Menw, but it no longer dominates the skyline, as the only building in Camallate standing more than three stories high. In any case he's no longer the child, not quite eight years old and small for his age, from whose vantage the whole port was huge and strange, charged with mystery.
And yet - the indefinable earth-and-bronze smell of the air, the dry warm twilight all around him, the direction of the wind, all these things pierce him at once and let in a flood of memories he'd have sworn he lost. He grew up on Arden, sultry heat and drenching downpours, cities soaring like towers of spun glass, blinding whites and brilliant colors, and never once felt nostalgia for New Britain. Now it hits him in the throat.
He doesn't notice that he's shaking until he almost drops his ident disc.
The woman behind the desk says, "Easy does it," and presses his hand for a moment as she takes the ID from him. "Long flight, huh?"
Her voice is a cool contralto, but she speaks exactly like his mother. She's older than Melian but not old, in her mid-thirties, maybe. She would have been eighteen or twenty when he left. So would his cousins, if they'd lived.
"Yeah, I guess," he says, and tries to smile, but it feels stiff, as his own voice after hers sounds foreign in his ears, affected. A tourist, a city kid with an Ardenian accent, fumbling, clueless.
He's so rattled by the encounter that he leaves the spaceport and walks three blocks before he realizes he's going in the wrong direction. He did his research, he knows where the overnight hotel is, in one of the big new buildings near the hospital; instead, without thinking, he's heading towards the Hall.