Free A Passage of Stars by Kate Elliott

looked up at Lily. “So ya people be waiting,” she said in her normal voice. “Till Jehane come to dance us down to ya place where we can live without being hated and poor.”
    Lily raised a hand to brush at her eyes. “It’s a very sad story, Paisley.”
    “Sad?” Paisley looked confused, glancing at Bach, who still hovered silently above, as if for corroboration. “It ain’t sad. You only grow patience by waiting for ya ship what may only come for ya great-grandchildren. That be ya way it be.”
    “I suppose it made me think of my parent’s House, in a way,” Lily said, almost to herself. “I never belonged there. Maybe some people can’t ever find their true homes. Or don’t recognize them when they find them.” She studied the winking spread of lights across the floor.
    “Sometimes you got to lose it first,” said Paisley. “To know what it were.”
    But Lily was now staring at the lights. “It fits!” she exclaimed. She whistled to Bach. The robot flashed a series of lights on his surface, singing, and the projection vanished.
    “What’d you say?”
    “I said I knew he was old, but I didn’t know he was as old as all that.”
    “As all what?”
    “Well.” Bach drifted down to the level of Lily’s head, a soft melody accompanying her explanation. “You know yourself from your story that we all came here—except the sta, of course—from a place a long ways away, a long time ago.”
    “Tirra-li,” said Paisley. “But no one knows ya way back no more.”
    “That’s right. Terra. And no one does know, any more, how to get back.” Lily frowned. “Could you get back there, Bach, given a ship?”
    Negative. Data incomplete.
    “No one kin get back,” repeated Paisley stubbornly. “Ya first highroaders, they tried. But ya way be haunted now, with ya old ghost ship, lost forever. And it be sure horrible torment if ya ghost ship find you looking on ya old way.”
    Lily smiled. “I don’t know if I think it’s haunted, but it’s sure lost. At least to us.”
    “And who not to? Central’d be happy as ifkin to be rid of us.” Paisley paused and with a mutinous expression lifted one patterned hand to touch a patterned face. “Us tattoos.”
    “Then where did these aliens come from? If what Bach says is true.”
    Paisley, much struck by this point, lowered her hand and said nothing.
    Lily resumed her pacing. “Hoy. Bach must have been sitting in that garage for ages.”
    “Don’t min Bach know?”
    “He was deactivated. It’s all a—ah—blank. It was pure chance I activated him at all, anyway.”
    Paisley rose and went over to where Bach hovered, laying a hand on his cool, hard surface. “Sure,” she said. “You tingle.” She looked at Lily. “Min Bach, he ain’t like other ’bots. He be smart. I mean, real smart, not fake smart.”
    Several of Bach’s lights winked. “Thank you, Miss Paisley,” he replied in Lily’s voice. Paisley giggled and patted him.
    Stop that, Bach, Lily whistled. Use a different voice, please.
    Forgive me, patroness. Thy voice and the child’s are the only voices I have had leisure to study at enough length to reproduce.
    Forgiven, whistled Lily, and she came over and touched him. He began, softly, a sweet hymn. “We’ll have to find him someone else’s voice to study,” Lily said to Paisley.
    “Ah,” said Paisley wisely. “What about ya spooks?”
    “Ya spooks,” said Lily. She began pacing out the circumference of the cell, as if she were a moving wall around the girl and the robot. “I’ve never heard or seen anything like them before. They have enough energy to waste on non-premium windows. They have—by the Void—aircars. And Bach says they shouldn’t be here. If that map—” She halted. “If they came over the highroad, to here—maybe, back there, the navigation routes weren’t lost. Maybe them, or our old people, from the places we must have come from, maybe they just didn’t care, to come here. Too far and too