Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

IV.i Inyanga's Star Finale

Constellations Glossary

Boludo: Argentinian Spanish for Idiot

Bengalia: Feminine, Romany for Idiot

Vlamenos: Greek for Idiot 

Bundun: Mandarin for Idiot 

Maudit san-dessein: Quebecois for [Expletive] Idiot

Pendeho: Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole language spoken in the Philippines, for Idiot

Inyanga's Star Act IV scene i

At the end of crepesculum, a queue of Secondae formed around the link portal into al-Maysan.

It felt strange to everyone to be entering the hall at night. The dark of vespera felt different from the dark of early morning. The quiet felt different, forced. Now the students hushed. Whispering spread as they lined up to pass through the link. Now no one felt sleepy but amped up, alert, curious, frightened. Now the high energy of their social hour was tamped down by caution.

The energy passed between every student, forming a bubble of solidarity.

"Are we in trouble?" one girl whispered, and like a connected hive mind-melded, a hundred minds wondered, "Are we in trouble?"

"Did something bad happen?" whispered another, and a hundred minds asked, "Did something happen?"

"Are we safe?" echoed from mouths and through minds.

"Why just Secondae?" everyone asked.

"Did we do something?"

"Is it an emergency?"

The passage of ideas swirling from mouth to mind swept them together like debris in a whirlwind until they were surrounded by their united concern. That protective bubble around them. And the queue through the link became a march. Defiant. All Secondae marched, then swam into the zero gravity library, as if chained in a procession from mind to mind, and within the protective bubble.

Propelling themselves with steering and propulsion spells out into the air above the towers of bookshelves — and below millions more books that clung to the inner curves of the entire sphere — they did not form a circle around their maestras like last time. Instead, the students massed together, entering far enough in for everyone to get through the link, then forming row after row into an echelon formation, like soldiers.

Some indescribable instinct brought hands to gnomons, though none were drawn.

Fear of the unknown, for most. For Inyanga, Storm, and Amafu, fingers brushed their gnomons out of hope for a last second message from the stars.

Out front of the echelon, Maestra Alondra faced them and hovered, flanked by backup of her own — a dozen librarians in maroon uniforms. Not all had undergone an eternal youth spell to turn back the effects of aging, and their appearances ranged across various stages of maturity. Various stages of graying, winkles, and aging skin that allowed them to show the experience and authority that they had earned on their visages. There were also several more maestras in attendance, hovering around Alondra, who also appeared not to be the sort to waste solidae on a frivolity like a youthful face, instead taking pride in the age they had acquired, marking them as having been alive and elder at the inception of immortality over a millennium and a half ago.

The cohort of Secondae, of course, would never age a day, and hadn't since they were sixteen or so. No one would ever see them as wise or experienced, even if they lived to be a thousand.