"But lo, when the three days had passed, the Adjuster returned with a baby in his arms, and the child was newborn, and in fine health, and was in every way the exact image of the poor dead boy that lay behind the house, with hair and eyes and features just the same.
"'A clown,’ the Adjuster said. ‘This is a clown of the one that died.’ He handed the baby to the dead boy's mother, and then he vanished again.
"But the odd thing is that the Power's prophecy was wrong, and when the boy grew up he became a fine blacksmith, and not a clown at all."
– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller
Crystal shimmered white in the air above the terrace, and Lady Sunlight stepped down onto the pavement. A polychrome torrent of flying sparkles poured after her, glittering in the sun, and a golden-furred creature the size of her hand leapt out beside her, nose up and alert.
“Hello!” she called. “I'm here!"
“Hello, Sunlight,” a hoarse voice replied.
She turned, startled, and found a short man dressed in black standing at one corner of the terrace, where he had been admiring the view to the west. A thick black disk perhaps a dozen centimeters in diameter hovered above one of his shoulders, and a black-furred and bat-winged creature glared at her from the other. A small feelie vine was wrapped around his wrist.
“Oh, hello, Rawl,” she said. “I didn't know you were here."
“I'm here,” he replied.
“I can see that,” she said, annoyed. She shifted her shoulders, drawing her flowing polychrome gown more closely about her and sending her insectile aerial circus into an uproar. “Is Sheila here yet?"
“She's inside,” Rawl said, jerking his head toward the gleaming windows.
As he spoke one of the transparent panels vanished, and a tall, handsome woman in a brown body-suit leaned out, brown hair stirring in the breeze. Music spilled out around her, the mellow droning of an ancient Fomalhautian mood piece, and the accompanying images swirled behind her.
“Hello, Sunlight!” she called. “I'm glad you could come!"
“Hello, Sheila!” Sunlight answered, waving gaily. “I wouldn't miss it! I brought some flutterbugs to brighten up the place!"
“Well, then, don't just stand there, come on in, and bring them with you! You, too, Rawl; Autumn House is now officially open."
“It isn't autumn yet,” Rawl said, as he turned away from the panoramic view of the western foothills and the desert beyond. The floating disk spun slowly, and faded from sight; his creature blinked slowly and curled itself up to his neck. The feelie vine stroked his wrist soothingly.
“Oh, I know that,” Sheila said. “But I felt like coming up here a little early this year. It's just another hundred hours or so, anyway; that's close enough. Come on in!"
When his inhuman passenger was secure on his shoulder Rawl strode across the terrace with calm assurance. Lady Sunlight hesitated.
“Sheila, who else is here?” she asked, reaching down to scoop up her golden-furred companion.
“No one, yet,” Sheila replied, momentarily puzzled. Then her expression cleared. “Oh, you mean Geste. I haven't gotten hold of him yet; they tell me he's out bothering the natives again. I don't think he knows I came early, so you should have a couple of days-local days, at the very least-before he gets here."
“Good!” Lady Sunlight said.
Rawl passed her on his way to the house. “They aren't natives,” he said, almost to himself.
“Oh, certainly they are,” Sheila retorted. “They were born here, weren't they? They've been here for thousands of years, so they're natives now, and it doesn't matter where their ancestors came from."
“Yes, it matters,” Rawl insisted, as he stepped into the lounge.
“Well, yes, it matters,” Sheila admitted, annoyed, “because they're human and not extraterrestrials or artificials, but damn it, Rawl, they're natives now, and we need some term to distinguish them from our own little expedition."
Rawl just shrugged at that, and gestured for a drink. A silver dish-actually a small, self-aware machine, akin to his own disk-shaped device-that floated in mid-air appeared, a ball of crystalline fluid held in a field above it.
Sheila helped Lady Sunlight into the house-not that she needed it, but simply as a gesture of welcome. The glittering flutterbugs scattered across the lounge, transforming the seething Fomalhautian imagery to something much quicker, more cheerful and more scattered. The music changed to match, improvised by the household machines, and an odor of cinnamon and new grass wafted through the room. “I wish you and Geste got along better,” Sheila said.
“Oh, sometimes I wish we did, too,” Lady Sunlight replied, sighing as she settled into a floating red chair. A feelie vine offered itself to her ankle, but with a gentle twitch she sent it away. “We did once, you know-we were lovers for about a decade once. But he's just so childish and immature with his stupid pranks! Do you know what he did? He…"
Sheila, sinking into her own seat, cut her off. “Yes, I do know, dear, because he came and told me about it himself, and you shouldn't hash it over again."
“I suppose he was bragging about it."
“No, he was apologizing, explaining why he wouldn't be able to visit at the same time you did for awhile."
Rawl sipped his drink through a pseudopod of force, and asked, “What did he do? I hadn't heard."
“Oh, this isn't anything new,” Sheila said before Lady Sunlight could speak. “I told you about it. It was almost three years ago, now."
“Oh, that,” Rawl said, shrugging. “Nothing."
“Nothing!” Lady Sunlight exclaimed.
“Nothing important,” Rawl amended.
“Maybe not to you, Rawl, with your damned high ideals, but it's important to me when some young idiot ruins a party for some stupid joke that he should have outgrown before they ever let him leave Terra!” She settled back, stroking her tiny pet. The creature chirrupped softly.
“Is Geste Terran?” Rawl asked with mild curiosity.
Lady Sunlight hesitated. “Is he?” she asked Sheila.
Sheila shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “I never worried about it."
“Housekeeper, is Geste Terran?” Lady Sunlight demanded of the ceiling.
“I'm sorry, my lady, but that information is not in any of the household records. Shall I ask the mother ship?"
“No, don't bother, it doesn't matter,” she said.
Rawl, his curiosity piqued and disappointed in his companion's disinterest, closed his eyes and put through his own call internally. He learned that Geste had been born in Three Rivers, on Achernar IV, which seemed very appropriate for a prankster; that said, he declined the automatic tell-me-more before it went any further. He was not particularly interested in any of the details of Geste's past just now. He opened his eyes again without having missed a word of the conversation.
“The housekeeper should have asked Mother without waiting for orders,” Sheila was saying. “I think the programming must have deteriorated pretty badly. I've been putting off re-doing it for sixty or seventy years now, but I think it's about due."
“Sometimes I hate roughing it here, with these inadequate machines Aulden brought along-I mean, they work, but they aren't exactly state of the art, are they?” She waved at the flutterbugs, the light show, the stone-floored, wooden-beamed room. “But then I remember what it was like back home and decide that it's worth a little inconvenience to have the elbow room,” Sunlight said. She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what the poor machine does with itself when you're not here, don't you?” she asked. “Do you leave it awake?"
“I let it decide for itself, of course, and I honestly don't know what it did this year."
Rawl already knew that the housekeeper had remained awake, fussily removing every fleck of dust or trace of wear, shooing away every form of wildlife from the larger bacteria up to fair-sized goats, always without harming them. He knew because he had stopped by to visit with the machine once or twice. He suspected that Sheila knew as much, but neither of them mentioned it. Sunlight, he knew, already considered the wanderers, especially Geste and himself, to be crazy, and would be even more firmly convinced of it if she knew he took pleasure in visiting a mere machine. She thought it was quite bad enough that he spent so much time with the first-wave colonists-the natives, as Sheila insisted on calling them, a name that was at least preferable to “primitives” or “savages,” terms some of the other recent arrivals used.