“Transformation?” Jan asked. This was starting to sound familiar; he vaguely remembered many of the Church’s informational packets making similar assertions.
“Actually, recognition would be a better way of putting it.”
“Recognition of what?”
“The unity of consciousness.” The Father put a hand over his heart. “We all have a soul, Jan: you, me, every human and alien being who comes into this world. It’s what creates consciousness. The Universal Church teaches that the first step toward paradise is for every sentient being to recognize this truth. The second is to realize that consciousness is not divisible. All sentient beings are linked, unified by an essential soul that surpasses our biological differences. The Church calls it the Mystery. We believe that when every intelligent mind has come to realize the Mystery, the barriers between human and alien will dissolve. When every conscious being has come to a recognition of our universal oneness, that’s when we’ll create the Kingdom of God.”
Jan let out a long breath. “I’d like to believe that.”
“I believe,” the Father said slowly, “that it’s been done before.”
When Jan said nothing, the Father smiled conspiratorially. “By the Rosettans. Consider it, Doctor: we’ve discovered hyperstream gates that are billions of years old—scattered over a sphere millions of light-years in diameter. Judging by their capabilities, none of the galactic civilizations around us have had ’stream travel for more than a few hundred years. They couldn’t have emplaced those gates. So, who put them there?”
A chill crawled up Jan’s spine. Ancient ’stream gates and extinct civilizations were things he tried not to think about very much. Everyday life was baffling enough.
“Okay, I’ll play,” he replied. “Let’s assume it was the Rosettans going around building hyperstream gates. You say the Universal Church believes Rosetta was some kind of fully enlightened society—”
“A consciousness-unified society,” his guest interrupted softly. “We believe the ancient gates are proof. Think of the kinds of resources and cooperation that must have been brought to bear to orchestrate a cosmic project like that. It must have taken eons traveling at sublight speeds to haul those gates into place. Only a fully unified society could have survived long enough to do it.”
Jan nodded automatically. Then he drew a deep breath and asked the question. “So . . . what went wrong? What happened to them?”
The Father sighed and looked out over the New Pacific Ocean. “That’s one of the great mysteries of our Church. One we’ll probably never know the answer to, but which I believe has touched many of our ministers deeply. I founded the Universal Church in the ruins of Rosetta because I believe we’re meant to complete the mission they began. Regain what we have lost.”
Well, I’m sorry Olios 3 won’t be a part of it, Jan thought but did not say. I base my decisions on things I can see and touch. He gazed out on the darkening ocean: far out over the water, golden rays of sunlight glimmered off a cluster of round shapes floating a few feet above the waves. Jan watched the native cetaceans rise and fall on top of the water, filter-feeding in Olios 3’s soupy air, their blimplike bodies rippling in the ocean breeze.
“Cloudwhales,” the Father remarked beside him in a neutral tone. He seemed oddly diminished somehow, as though the effort of expressing the tenets of his faith had wrung him out.
“You’ve seen them before?”
“Only holophotos. My son used to send me pictures. He always was fond of animals, but he said the cloudwhales were his favorite.”
“Him and a lot of people,” Jan said with a chuckle. He was partial to the big gasbags himself. “You’d be surprised how many questions we get per day about our terraforming plans. People want to make sure Nheris isn’t going to do anything drastic. I tell them we’re required by Core Worlds law to make only the minimal changes and do an impact assessment every ten years, but a lot of people are still skittish.”
“Understandably so,” replied the Father. “The Expansion’s made some mistakes in the past.”
“Yeah.” Jan toyed with his wine glass, looking out at the frolicking cloudwhales without actually seeing them. “I’m really hoping we haven’t made another one.”
The Father glanced at Jan, then away. “I don’t know what they’ll say about the Gray Wars a thousand years from now,” the older man sighed. “I think at this point in time most people agree that using the Fate’s Shears virus against Za was a measure of last resort. A necessary evil to stop a war that would have caused far greater harm if it had been allowed to continue.”
“The old United States said the same thing about Hiroshima,” said Jan. The Father shrugged, but said nothing more.
Jan wondered if maybe he should leave it there; what he was thinking would be almost heretical if he said it in a Nheris council meeting. Then again, this wasn’t a formal meeting anymore: only a casual (if somewhat philosophy-heavy) conversation. He decided to say what was on his mind.
“You know, sometimes I wonder if the Osk would have done any better or worse if they’d been the winners.”
In a dainty gesture, the Father grasped the stem of his glass between thumb and forefinger and returned it to the table. “How would they have changed Olios 3, you mean?”
Jan nodded. “There was a lot of environmentalist rhetoric thrown around about how we had to protect Olios 3’s native ecology: that the Osk were going to wreck it by changing the planet’s atmosphere to meet their own requirements and so on. I never bought it then, and I don’t now. As far as I can tell, the Osk don’t think that way. They changed themselves to fit Olios 3, not the other way around.”
“Hmmm.” This time the Father’s tone was definitely appreciative. As he stood by the table, surprise crossed his face like a sudden break in clouds. “You know, I just realized I’ve kept you talking when you probably have important work to do. I should probably take my leave before you have me thrown out,” he added, half-joking.
Jan found himself shaking the Father’s hand again, his guest all smiles and jocularity as he made for the door at the same brisk pace at which he’d entered.
At the threshold, he paused; a smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “At least there’s one point on which the Church and the Osk agree.”
“What’s that?” Jan asked.
“The future lies in transformation.”
It was hours after the Father had left when Jan thought to check up on something the man had said. With a gesture he slid the digital drafts he’d been working on out of his field of view and brought up a simple phone program.
After the ringtone, a male voice answered, “Nheris Administration, Intelligence Division.” No name given; the people who used this line didn’t bother with names.
“This is Brigadier General Jan Shanazkowitz, military liaison to the colony. I need Intelligence to check up on something.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I need to know if there’s a Universal Church special envoy running a research project out of the New Great Plains.”
A pause of several seconds. Then, “Sir. Special envoy Tor Berkyavik is currently registered to a repurposed research base on the Plains as of five months ago.”
“Repurposed for what?”
“The status of the project is classified.”
Jan raised his eyebrows. Classified, hell. You didn’t tell a top-tier military liaison that a project in his jurisdiction was classified. “Listen son,” he spoke into the phone program. “Until we make the handover to Nheris, the Plains are my back yard.”
“Yessir.”
“Get me a line to this Berkyavik ASAP. I want to know what he’s doing down there.”
11
She was in the final days. Shomoro felt it in the knife blade of hunger that sawed continuously between the cages of her ribs. She suspected soon even the pathetic a
mount they were feeding her now would dwindle to nothing. Anguish, hunger, and pain had become her existence, no longer separate conditions but fused into a shifting background ache—a curtain with a pale flame dancing before it: glimpsed from the corner of her eye, extinguished in the blazing, unmerciful light of the sessions, but always returning to a corner of her mind in the darkness that enfolded the rest of her.
It was an emotion of some kind; of that she was sure. She thought it might be frustration, but a hidden sense she did not yet dare to forsake told her it was much stronger than that.
Whenever the drugs she was being forced to take wore off, the emotion surfaced, leaving her with the brittle clarity of the starving. The feeling was as subtle as a faraway scent, agonizingly slow but coming faster with each passing day, gaining in strength as the rest of her withered. As her despair deepened, the bright unknown flame grew, feeding itself on everything that Shomoro was, until she had burned almost to nothing—a hollow shell in which the other made its home. In the end, it fed only on itself, until it had filled her utterly, blooming in the recesses of her mind like a secret pair of eyes, waiting for the time it would be allowed to come forward.
“Hungry?” Berkyavik sounded more cheerful than usual. Shomoro stayed where she was, curled on the floor in a pantomime of sleep, one eye open to a slit to watch him. He stood in the doorway flanked by his two Urd, all three of them reduced to stark silhouettes by the white light spilling from beyond. Her internal clock told her the hour was late; the base was probably shutting down for the night.
She tilted her head to face him and attempted to rise—but she was so weak that it was a futile gesture. She slipped back to the slick floor slowly, unresistingly.
“Is it . . . time?” she groaned, peering unfocusedly at him.
He nodded. “Time to eat, Shomoro. That makes you happy, doesn’t it?” To the Urd he said, “Wait outside.” Spoken curtly. “This will only take a moment, I should think.”
The saurian aliens exchanged an unreadable look before Grelshk stepped forward.
“Berkyavik-leader . . . I do not understand what you hope to accomplish—”
“No,” he interrupted her coldly. “You don’t. So I suggest you not interfere in something it is beyond your nature to understand. I said wait outside.”
Grelshk flinched at his sudden coldness—but she complied. The two Urd backed out of the cell, swinging the metal door shut after them. He turned back with a warm smile, knelt before Shomoro, and set down a tray covered with a white cloth. A rich, savory aroma wafted from underneath the sheet.
“Half now,” he said slowly, whipping the cloth partly away from the hand-sized slab of raw fish beneath. “Half when you’ve given me the right words. I have something very important to ask you, Shomoro. After I know the answer, after you tell me this last thing, there will be no more questions. You can rest. I promise.”
Shomoro stared at the fish, intoxicated by the salty-sweet smell, her mouth flooding with saliva. As she reached out, her gaze traveled upward to the man who had brought it to her. The face of her benefactor crinkled in a smile she knew well, filled with love and pride in her. Such a good provider he was . . .
“Tell me, Shomoro: from Olios 3, which stream route would you take if you were to return to your home world? Where is Oskaran, from here?”
She stayed her hand. Something had changed in his expression; a minute shift that came over it as he asked the question. A question she somehow knew she could not afford to answer.
Hunger tore at her, but the other presence inside Shomoro forced her to be still. Forced her to think. This was the first time questions had come without pain. Without drugs. The first time she’d been allowed to answer as herself, not after being compressed into a delirious, alien state by chemicals and exhaustion and pain.
She realized the shift was not in him but in her: the expression on Berkyavik’s face was the same as it always was when he asked a question, confident of her obedient answer. The only difference was that now, her mind clear, her veins free of any drug except her own lucidity, Shomoro could finally read that expression. And she saw it was neither love nor pride in her.
It was triumph over her.
Inside, she felt the other break its bindings and surge forward like hot mud, swift and silent and inexorable, long oppressed and hungrier even than her growling belly. She dwindled to nothing before it, fought it at first in confused panic and then—as the other settled comfortably behind her eyes, into the place it had always been—Shomoro simply stepped aside.
She reached upward and stroked the curve of Berkyavik’s face. He tensed for a moment that made something inside her wriggle deliciously. Shomoro spoke in a low voice.
“You always ask for words. I know other things.” She peeled the rest of the cloth away from the fish, its red length glimmering wetly. “Things . . . I would trade.”
She placed her hand on the Terran’s chest and pulled his shirt open to the waist.
“Well?” she asked.
Looking back into her round black eyes, Berkyavik felt himself teetering on the edge of a precipice. This is a test, his rational mind warned. Make the wrong choice, falter in a single move, and you will fail. Yet underneath, something like a very hot, very bright coal was smoldering just below his stomach, demanding his immediate attention in a way more visceral and pleasurable than anything he’d felt in years.
And he didn’t have the luxury of slow deliberation. A call had come the night before, a terse interrogation from an official high up in Nheris’ military hierarchy demanding to know the precise nature of his base’s activities. A discrepancy in a database file somewhere, a missing entry . . . it didn’t matter what had tipped him off. Berkyavik’s most carefully worded efforts to explain his mission had only sent the man further into anger and unreason. He would get CoG involved, send Berkyavik up on charges of unlawful confinement and mistreatment of a prisoner of war. And he would remove Shomoro from Berkyavik’s custody.
His back was to a wall. Besides, who was to say what was the wrong choice? Shomoro had already given them more information than they’d been able to discover through espionage in the entire six years of the Gray Wars. She had done so much for them; wasn’t it time, perhaps, that he do something for her?
And what else could her unexpected overture—her sudden reaching out for that most basic of human contacts—be, except confirmation that Shomoro was opening up to the White Arrows’ and Berkyavik’s own mission of love? Maybe they wouldn’t have to kill her. Maybe, with just a little more encouragement, she would even be ready for conversion. He could bring it to the Father as a fait accompli, irrevocable proof that the Osk could and should be saved.
At the pragmatic level, there was no risk in trying: she was completely under his control, and her blades had been removed a long time ago.
Berkyavik smiled. “Yes.”
Things proceeded quickly from there. He let Shomoro devour the entire piece of fish: she would need her strength for what came next. Her touch as she undressed him was soft, even gentle. He helped her bundle up his clothes and toss them to one corner of the room. Together, they spread out the white expanse of his robe on the floor as a blanket. Then she pulled the dark gray curve of her lower body toward him, and it began.
Watching from a corner of herself, she was surprised at Berkyavik’s eagerness; even the other inside her was intrigued by the lack of revulsion with which he’d met her impetuous advance. Didn’t he know what she was?
But Shomoro gave as good as she got, clutching at his shoulders as she coiled her body around his, squeezing with a pressure just below the point of pain. As Terran and Osk rolled over and over on the floor, both could feel something building to a head within them, something spectacular and terrifying at the same time.
And beneath it all, the other that had broken free inside her sensed it was nearly time.
Wh
en it came she was on her back, pressed down by his weight. The surging wave crested and broke; both of them let loose gasping screams as a savage pleasure ripped through them . . . and in that instant, Shomoro locked her teeth in Berkyavik’s throat and ripped it out as well.
The sounds coming from him ceased as his life drained from him in a gush of red, his ecstatic cry dissolving into a choked gurgle. Shomoro gasped as his full weight fell on her, crushing her body against the hard floor.
She got her hands under the warm corpse and tried to wriggle out from under it. Suffocating smells engulfed her: the sharpness of saliva laced with hot, coppery blood, a sourness under that. On the third try, she managed to carefully disengage herself and roll out from under the dead man.
For long moments, all she could do was pant and shiver in the open air. Her gaze wandered the room, not really registering anything until it fell on Berkyavik’s face. His head rested in a pool of red. The eyes looked nearly the way they always had, blank and shallow, looking at nothing: the eyes of a man who hadn’t been very alive even when he was still breathing.
Shomoro felt nothing. Neither regret nor satisfaction rippled across the silent pool of her mind. Perhaps those emotions would come later, but right now she had no room for them. Only for survival, and those actions crucial to ensuring it.
And right now, she was hungry.
Shomoro pressed one hand against the grime-slick wall as she rose at last to her feet. In the other she clasped Berkyavik’s silver pistol—the first real weapon she’d had since the loss of her blades. The Terran’s gold-trimmed white robe draped her shoulders and back. She’d tied it loosely around her upper body to warm herself after ripping it to fit her frame. The robe stank of the collective effluvium of the past ten minutes: semen, blood, saliva—and vomit. Shomoro rubbed her swollen stomach tenderly. She’d eaten too fast and too greedily the first time, and most of the meat had come up in a sour rush. That was all right. Berkyavik had been a good-sized man; there was still plenty of him left for a second try. Mercifully, that had stayed down so far.
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