by Don Sakers
Why am I doing this thing? Brothers, sisters, what is the fate of one Human child to me? Some of you ask me that question, and I cannot but wonder with you. Yet others—the voice of the dead Traveller among them, he who knew Humans better than any of us—others sing to me that a Little One is in pain, and the Hlutr must answer. If only to still the pain with a merciful stroke. This is our way, our purpose, our duty since the first Hlut raised itself above the soil of forgotten Paka Tel.
Yee Bair describes the area of the sky, and Saburo relates it to galactic charts in his computer terminal. When he is done, he looks at me, his face filled with questions.
“Take us there, Saburo."
“Why?"
I ask myself the same thing, brethren, and receive no answer save that which I know already: a Little One is crying. “It is in the Universal Song,” I tell Saburo, hoping that will content him. And it does.
We share tea with Yee Bair, then return to the ship. Saburo must be desperate, his last chance flown away in the empty halls of the Temple; he gives orders quickly, and soon we are climbing from green Eironea into the black of endless space.
On the way, Saburo coughs a few times, then turns away from me.
* * * *
“Tell me of the Death. How does it come upon your people, and what do they feel when it strikes?"
Eironea is far behind, the crying Human child still lost in the stars ahead of us. Saburo looks up from his computer and frowns.
“Sometimes it comes quickly, and death follows in a few days. In other cases it can take months to develop. The symptoms vary: coughing, headaches, difficulty breathing, swelling in the joints—then pneumonia, vitamin deficiency, nerve disfunction—if the patient lives long enough, total disruption of the immune system and advanced mal-nutrition."
“None escape?"
“Some who caught it nearly two years ago, at the beginning, are still alive ... but still infected and still showing symptoms. We've never had a case of someone exposed to the disease who didn't catch it, or anyone who recovered from it once infected."
“And your science cannot prevent the spread?"
“That fool Melus was right about one thing—it's a prion-based disease. No DNA. We haven't even been able to isolate the infectious agent, much less counter it.” His hands twist hopelessly in his lap. “As long as our doctors continue to play with computer programs left over from the ancients, we'll never make any progress."
I look out at the swiftly-moving stars, and I listen to the eddies of the Inner Voice as it moves between the worlds. And I wonder. Where did this plague come from?
Some say that it is a natural outgrowth of evolutionary systems that contain Humans. A variant of diseases known to Mankind even before he ventured off his home planet. This is indeed possible; Life's ingenuity knows no bounds, and other such diseases have developed in the long course of Galactic history.
Others say that the Death was artificially engineered as a weapon against these people—either by Humans them-selves, or by one of the malevolent races of the Galactic Core. This theory, too, has its antecedents; this will not be first time a promising race has died in biological suicide ... or been victim of the Gathered Worlds.
Some even say—although not in words—that the Death was started by the Hlutr. I have sung the question in the Inner Voice, casting suspicions out into the starry night, but I have received no answer. No one admits, and yet....
One cannot but have suspicions. The Death is said to have started on Laxus, a planet not too far from the very Earth upon which these Humans sprang. The very Earth on which the last descendants of their own Hlutr choked to death on Human poisons. Often I have contemplated the infinitely sad story of the Redwoods, often I have wondered at their stunted lives: only a shadow of what they could be, what their distant ancestors had been; blind, dumb, all but deaf; hearing only the barest echoes of the Inner Voice, while all around them ranged the awesome and beautiful symphony of the Hlutr singing each to the others. The Redwoods were not Hlutr, at best they were only a kind of degenerate Hlutr kin, leftovers from a damaged line that had never been able to sing the Inner Voice. Their minds, what minds they had, must have been twisted beyond all recognition; their pitiful short lives must have been an agony.
And the Traveller within me whispers at these times: although they did not know it, did Humans do a merciful thing when they allowed the Redwoods to die?
And we Hlutr—what is the course of mercy for us? To allow death, or to deny it? Even if it is a death that some of us might have caused...?
The ship shudders, and comes out of tachyon phase in the shadow of a huge banded gas giant.
“What now?” Saburo says.
The Commander answers, his face appearing ghostly over the magnificent view. “Refueling stop, sir. Settlement called Kef. Hope you don't mind—it's the only place on our charts that has a treaty with the Imperium."
“Carry on.” Saburo turns to me. “I hope you don't mind."
“No.” I reach out, calling for Hlutr—there are none in this planetary system, none for sevens of parsecs. We move, and a shrunken sun rises over the orange limb of the gas giant; light glitters briefly from a narrow ring of ice particles.
No brothers, no sisters—only the pulse of nearby Human life, a distant echo that might be some form of developing plant life on a rocky worldlet close to the sun ... and the slow, incomprehensible hum that comes from the crystalline Talebba, a race whose existence Humans do not even suspect. The Talebba go their own way, living out their geological lifespans in planetary rings, asteroid belts and the clouds of primordial stuff that hide from stellar heat out where space is nearly flat and their own sun but another bright star. Now and again one of them dies, flaming, as it topples toward the inner system; occasionally one of these survives long enough to impact on a planet, and possibly create a new race of rocklike intelligences to succeed it.
I do not greet the Talebba of this system. To do so, I would have to live nearly as slowly as they do, and to them Galactic Years are like the days and nights to other creatures.
Saburo is consulting his computer; he grins. “Kef is a settlement in orbit around this gas giant, and something of a leader in local trade. I'm hoping they'll have charts that might help you locate whatever you're on the track of."
“I do not know.” The Inner Voice is, for the moment, undisturbed. The song of the Hlutr sounds in lonely splendor, untouched by the cry of Humanity. The child is sleeping ... or dead.
“There,” he points, and Kef swings into view,
It is an untidy thing, a construct of glass, metal and light that resembles a bird's nest as much as it does a spaceship or Human city. Around the whole assembly is a ring of violent red, so bright that it hurts my Human eyes. Suddenly a loud klaxon rings, making both Saburo and me start.
“What is it?” Saburo says.
The Commander replies, “We're getting a transmission on the emergency band. I'll put it on your screen."
The Human face that greets us is gaunt and wild-eyed. “Turn back,” the man croaks through dry lips. “Docking permission is denied."
“We are a ship of the Credixian Navy, on a refueling stop."
“For your own sake, keep away. Do not pass our circle of quarantine. Don't you understand? We've all caught the Death."
Saburo shakes his head. “We've already been exposed. We just need fuel, and a look at your charts."
“No.” The face is sad, but hard with unbending determination as strong as Hlutr bark. “There's hydrogen enough in the atmosphere of the gas giant—you're a military ship, you can refuel with ramscoops. You can tie your navicomp into our central computer if you think our charts will be of any use to you. Just stay away."
“I don't understand. If you're already infected, how do you think we can make it worse?"
The man shakes his head. “By carrying this thing elsewhere. We all took a vow, destroyed our ships, set up the circle to warn others off.” His eyes plead with Sa
buro as his hollow voice cannot. “We're ready to die ... but we're not going to take the rest of the Galaxy with us. Go away, please—before you tempt us too far."
Saburo nods, touches the intercom. “Take us into a dive, Commander. We'll skim the atmosphere and then get on our way.” He turns back to the man from Kef. “I understand. We're leaving. G-gods be with you."
“Gods be with us all.” The image fades, and red-ringed Kef falls behind us until it is lost in the stars.
“The poor fools,” the Commander says.
Tight-lipped, Saburo shakes his head, but says nothing. Soon we are in tachyon phase again.
Certain of my brethren sing the courage of Kef in the Inner Voice, determined that such heroism should not be lost to the Universal Song. And who am I to deny them? More and more Hlutr join this song, more and more regard me and the progress of my journey; not just saplings and adults, but Elders as well. And now, for the first time, I feel the chill touch of the attention of the Eldest of all, from Her vast island in the Secluded Realm. As yet, She pays only the slightest heed, just a hint of scrutiny.
This matter is becoming far more important, my brothers and sisters, than I ever intended.
Now, as if aware of the presence of so many Hlutr minds, the Human child shrieks again, splintering the mass concentration of the Inner Voice. For all that this cry tears at my soul, I welcome it: I am not too late to help.
If I can help at all....
* * * *
In the end, I enlist the aid of the Hlutr of Telorbat and a dozen other worlds within a kiloparsec. That the Human child is somewhere within this volume of space there can be no doubt; no Hlut can mistake its anguished wail. At my direction, the Hlutr listen closely, then each tells me the direction from which the cry comes. I mark these on Saburo's master charts; we wait for a few hours, then we try again.
This is exactly the sort of work at which animal intelligences excel: the splitting of time and space into tiny bits, the measurement of direction and duration. With computers to do his calculation and Kef's starcharts as a basis, Saburo manages to pinpoint the source to within a few billion cubic kilometers. The size of a planetary system, and in an empty volume far from any planet! Are we mad to think we can locate the child?
No.
The emotion is unmistakable as the echo on a radar screen, and in Human hours we have located the center of the disturbance that called me from Amny seven thousand parsecs away. A lone Human starship floats powerless in starry space. Saburo is taken by a coughing fit, then gains control of himself. “Commander, take us in. Dock with that ship."
“They don't answer our challenges, sir. I think it's a ghost ship."
I shake my head. Something is alive aboard that dark hulk.
“Just follow my orders,” Saburo says evenly. The Commander shrugs, and turns to his control board.
Soon the ships are mated together, and Saburo and I stand before a closed hatch that leads to the mystery vessel. I do not know what to expect; seventy thousand times seventy Hlutr, and more, watch with me as the door slides back.
The sight, the smell, the sound we experience is something that no living being should ever face. Saburo, retching, falls back; even some of the Elders turn away from that terrible scene.
The ship, a cargo vessel, is crammed with dead, decaying Human bodies. Most of them show the ravages of the Death: flat, empty stomachs, the agony of death, the trace of fluids on faces and chests. It is indeed a ghost ship, one inhabited by victims of the Death. Or so we think. Only when we blast into the sealed control room, only when we inspect the destroyed panels and recover the damaged log, do we find the truth. And when we find that horrible truth, it is my cry that echoes in the heavens and disturbs the Hlutr at their meditation.
We may never know the home planet of that charnel ship, for all references were carefully edited out of the log. Only the record of their deeds remained, as if they were actually proud of what they had done.
Over seventy times seventy times seventy Humans were put aboard that ship: more than four hundred thousand bodies. And more than half of them were still alive. The unknown rulers of that unknown world herded all the victims of the Death, along with their families and friends, along with the doctors who tried to treat them, along with the ministers who tried to comfort them—herded all into that vast cargo hold, then sealed them off and set them on a journey to nowhere. The controls were set to destroy themselves after a certain time in tachyon phase; after which, the ship dropped back into normal space and floated aimlessly, a macabre prison that offered no hope of escape.
There the tragedy did not end ... for somewhere in this ship, a Human child still cries.
It is Saburo who finds him, huddled in a curve of the hull with corpses pressed tight around him. The boy is naked, filthy and starved; he draws back with a scream when Saburo reaches for him.
“Let me.” I step forward, and call on all the Hlutr to help me. All Human children are sensitive to the Inner Voice, this one more than most: we join in a song of reassurance, of peace, and the boy falls silent. I lift him, and Saburo leads the way back to our own ship.
* * * *
His name is Ved, and he does not know where he comes from. As I probe his mind, I sense a good deal of damage; he builds walls against the terror he has experienced, and I am loath to disturb those walls. Later, in the care of Hlutr specialists on Amny, perhaps Ved can be brought back to full mental health; for now I am content to let him fall asleep to the Hlutr lullaby.
When I am sure that the boy will not wake, I face Saburo. For once, I feel something akin to animal rage ... and I know that you, my brothers and sisters, feel this anger with me.
“You dare?” I challenge him. “You dare to crawl to the Hlutr and ask us to spare your race? To spare that?” With one gesture, I indicate the charnel ship, the world that launched it, the people who committed this atrocity and all their brothers, sisters and cousins throughout the Galaxy. “Beg rather that we do not increase the virulence of the Death seventy-times-seventy-fold, to give your people the agony they deserve."
Saburo coughs, falls into his chair, then raises defiant eyes. “Is this Hlutr compassion?"
“The Hlutr do not waste compassion on beasts who have proven unworthy of it. We do not grant compassion to creatures who are incapable of showing it."
“Do you think I'm not sickened by what I saw today? Do you think I don't want revenge on those who did it? By what right do you condemn all of us on the basis of some who commit atrocity?” He turns to the intercom. “Take us to Telorbat. I need a planet with medical facilities."
“Our right comes from our nature. Our place in the Universal Song. The power that we alone possess.” He bends over Ved's sleeping form, and I catch his arm. “What are you doing?"
“In dwelling on his tragedy, you obviously haven't noticed the most important thing about this child. The fact that he's alive."
“He lives—which is the core of his tragedy."
“You still don't get it. Look at him. He hasn't caught the Death."
My Human body shivers. “After days ... weeks ... of exposure...."
Saburo nods. “He's immune. And if I can figure out why, we might have a chance to end the Death yet."
And if you do, Saburo ... will the Hlutr permit it?
In confusion, I withdraw to Amny and the song of the Hlutr, while our ship races toward Telorbat.
* * * *
I think too much like a Human; my sojourn with them has affected me. For Galactic Revolutions have I stood faithfully in my grove, while the patterns of stars and the very face of Amny changed around me, and I have sung the will of the Universal Song. I have earned the title of Elder and the name of Teacher. I have sung in the councils of the Hlutr, and have even advised the Eldest of all. Yet these Humans make of me but a newborn seedling, a foolish sapling facing his first Winter snows.
My brothers and sisters, tell me what I should do.
You sing, and I listen.
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You will counsel me, you will give me reasons and opinions ... but you will not decide for me. Some of you think the Humans should be saved, others believe they should perish—and still more of you think that we ought to ignore these children of Terra. Brethren, what am I to do?
Saburo, Ved and my operative arrive on Telorbat, and I am drawn to them once again.
It is the season of cold in the higher latitudes where the major Human city sits. You are there already, my fellows, rising snow-clad only a few kilometers from the city—for Ciudad Telorba rises like a vast pyramid from the midst of a great forest, and since Humans arrived on this world you have kept watch on them. I wonder, have you ever seen events like today's?
Saburo coughs, and even my operative is not spared the curse of the Death: my borrowed body is wracked with a choking fit, and when it is over I still find it hard to breathe. I begin to ease my awareness out of that fleshy prison, leaving the body to manage itself. I want nothing more than to return to Amny and be done with this sordid matter ... yet I must see it through to a conclusion.
We are met by a robot on whose shoulders floats the image of a woman's head. She nods. “I am Gingiber Maur, Undersecretary of State. We received your message, Doctor Saburo, and our foremost medical laboratory is yours. You will forgive me for not meeting you in person...?” She seems a little embarrassed, yet Saburo pays her no mind.
“Yes, yes,” he says, suppressing a cough. “Show me to the lab. I must examine the boy with proper instruments."
“We have few visitors from space,” she tells us as we board an empty train and are whisked forth. “Have you come from far?"
“From the Credixian Imperium ultimately. Immediately, from a ship a few parsecs out from your sun."
She glances at Ved and my operative. “Tell me, you are escaping from the Death? This ship, was it infected?"
Ved quivers at this talk of the Death, and I broaden my awareness to sing him calm melodies of the Inner Voice. He is not yet sure who I am, but he responds to the song of the Hlutr.
Saburo nods, foaming with impatience. “We rescued the boy from a charnel ship—he was the only survivor. The sooner I get to your medical equipment, the sooner I'll be able to start figuring out why he lived."
