“Did you consider waiting to receive recent directives?”
“Of course,” Qad said. “But the danger was rising. I offered mercy if they destroyed their weapons and submitted to me. They refused. They attacked. Glory and I responded.”
“We understand your destroying the weapons. We understand your destroying the intelligences. We question destroying the second level of evolution.”
“The danger was rising,” Qad said again. “Several species stood in the second rank to take over from the intelligences, though they had nearly been exterminated. In thousand time, in million time...” He paused, expecting the Executives to understand and accept.
“In million time,” said the Chief Executive, “they might have become fit to succumb to our will, as subordinate populations.”
“Or to become enemies,” Qad said, forcing himself to keep his tone mild.
“We will confer,” the Chief Executive said.
Leaving Qad to stand silent and obedient, his hand clenched around the grip of his sword, the Executives sat still while a privacy shield formed around them. Qad wondered what they would decide, who might speak for him, who might decline his argument.
By the time they reappeared, his feet hurt and his legs trembled with fatigue. He would have to recalibrate Glory’s sleep therapy, and perhaps even punish his ship’s intelligence for causing him discomfort bordering on embarrassment.
The Chief Executive rose. His legs were as thin and insectoid as his arms. His belly sagged beneath his modesty apron.
“Here is the decision.”
One of the other Executives looked pleased, the other annoyed. Qad had hoped for a unanimous decision in his favor. Whatever the decision, unanimous was beyond his reach.
“You are awarded the discovery medal.”
An Artificial Normal moved forward and attached the medal in first place above the row of previous medals. The pin scratched Qad’s chest. This error could only be deliberate. He slowed his anxious, angry heartbeat, hoping to prevent blood from showing behind the medal’s gleam. He kept himself from glaring at the Normal, for the Executive would take it, properly, as a sign of discontent toward authority. A glare at a Normal meant nothing, left the Artificial unaffected, and opened Qad to criticism.
Qad waited for his reward, which was standard for discovering a world suitable for unopposed colonization. They should give him at the very least license for another little sister.
But the Chief Executive continued.
“The second claim is declined.”
Qad paled. He locked his knees to keep from falling.
I’ll appeal, he thought. Appeal was allowed if the decision failed to be unanimous. Expensive, but allowed.
“Had you eliminated the first level of evolution,” the Chief Executive said, “your claim would have been approved. Had you waited for most recent instructions, your claim will have been approved.”
In a millennium, or many, Qad thought resentfully. He had made the decision to act rather than wait, and he still believed his decision correct. The intelligence he had destroyed was dangerous – at least the Executives agreed – and the upcoming intelligence held the potential to be even more of a threat, refined and honed by the enmity of its predecessors. He thought them well gone. He also thought the Executives desperately short-sighted, but they would deny any such accusation.
“You are fined the reward of your first discovery,” the Chief said.
The Artificial Normal pulled the medal from Qad’s shirt, ripping the shipsilk. The blotch of blood spread.
“You are dismissed,” said the Chief.
Qad stared at him, amazed, appalled. The leader light appeared at his feet, oscillating from before him to behind him, sensing the tension, anxious for him to follow.
He tried to turn on his heel, as insulted characters did in novels. The unnatural action nearly pitched him to the floor. He caught himself and departed without another word.
As he passed through the doorway, another Artificial Normal hurried after him and handed over an official paper. Supposing it was a report of the meeting, he stuffed it into his pocket.
In the comforting center of Glory, Qad dropped his sword belt with a clatter, then pulled off his new coat, popping most of the buttons, and threw it to the floor. He let the Artificial Stupids serve him porridge and wine, usually a comforting combination, though this time rather tasteless. The wine took the edge off the pain in his legs. He ripped the stained shipsilk shirt from beneath his apron. Ignoring the hungry complaints of the little sisters, he flung the shirt to the floor, then flung himself with equal ferocity into his transit pod. He slept.
He awoke baffled and sluggish, expecting the glow of stars beyond the sweeping port, but seeing only darkness. Silence surrounded him.
Was it all a dream? he asked himself. A nightmare? One nightmare to another? Is Glory drifting, wounded, in space?
“Glory?”
For the first time in his life, Glory remained silent in response to his question. Artificials failed to respond to his voice.
A thunderous pounding brought him to his feet in a rush of fear and pain. His legs nearly went out from under him. Space was vast and empty, with only a few tales of ships hit by drifting matter in all the millennia of civilization.
“Qad! Open!”
Having someone demand entry into his ship was even more startling. It was unique to his experience.
He left Glory’s center, feeling his way in the darkness. Desperate, he scratched Glory’s bulkheads, releasing lines of luminescent ship’s fluid on the walls. In the faint light he found his way to the access tube. He slid his hands across the slick bulkhead until he found the entrance. Leaving a scrabble of shining fingerprints, he pulled the sphincter open.
Light poured in from the shipyard.
“About time,” said the Chief Executive, pushing his way into Glory. Qad backed up, manners taught but seldom used drawing him away from touching the Executive’s protruding stomach. Without meaning to, Qad gazed at the moving bulges beneath the Executive’s modesty apron, imagining he could see the made-up eyes and orifices of the little sisters beneath it. No – not his imagination. Fashions had changed, and not, in Qad’s opinion, for the better. The apron’s elaborate embroidery cunningly concealed small holes through which the little sisters could stare, or blink, or offer a kiss.
He lost count at a dozen. There were more.
“I am here,” the Executive said.
Qad thought he meant he had come into Glory, then realized the Executive meant he had noticed that Qad’s gaze focused on the partly-concealed little sisters.
Qad raised his head to make eye contact with the Executive. His face blazed with embarrassment.
“Have you made a decision?” The Chief Executive’s gaze raked Qad. “Given your improper dress, perhaps not.”
Stupefied by lack of sleep, hangover, and pain, set off-balance by being half-clothed and unarmed, Qad blinked. “About an appeal? Not yet.”
“Fool. Did you receive my proposal?” He snatched at Qad’s trousers. Qad jumped, startled, offended, but the Executive had grabbed the crumpled report rather than Qad’s person.
The paper rattled as the Executive shook it in Qad’s face. He broke the seal – Is it a rudeness, Qad wondered, to break the seal of another man’s letter, if the seal is one’s own? I should have looked at it.
Qad took back the paper and read it, lips moving, sounding out the words that in an ordinary communication Glory’s voice would have spoken to him.
Before he reached the proposal, the bill from the shipyard astonished him.
“You agreed to it,” the Executive said.
“Did I have a choice?” Qad said. “I expected...” He stopped, aghast at what he had nearly said to the Chief Executive.
“To be treated more generously by the council?” The Chief Executive laughed. “Things have changed, young adventurer, since the last time you came proffering a handful of amateur medals.”
Qad flushed with anger. “Medals honored. Conquests approved. Rewards conveyed.”
“Your lack of judgment wiped out your resources. How do you intend to pay the shipyard bill? It increases every day. With interest.”
Glory had been cut off from power, for non-payment, and lay within a berth that kept the ship from drawing on starlight. Lacking power, wounded nearly to death, Glory would deteriorate, physically and intellectually, depleting its own resources to maintain Qad and the little sisters. If it survived, the ship would return to its childhood, begging information from other ships, who complied in response to offerings that Qad never questioned or understood. That was ship’s business.
Qad might return to his own childhood, absorbing the little sisters that he no longer could maintain.
He glanced again at the paper, forcing his attention past the bill, which he could never pay. Shaky with hunger and exhaustion and disbelief, he reached the end.
“But I planned to create my own lineage,” Qad said.
“Who’s stopping you? You have three little sisters –”
“Four!” Qad glanced down. Indeed the youngest had already begun to withdraw into his body, stunted by his lack of attention. If he had been alone, he would have slipped his hand beneath the apron to stroke her brow, perhaps even to touch her orifice with his finger to let her suck his blood for sustenance. But with the Chief Executive in his presence, that was impossible. Unthinkable.
At least it was the youngest, not the oldest, his favorite.
“– And you are young. You have plenty of time.”
“And you have plenty of little sisters,” Qad said. “For your own lineage.”
The Chief Executive glowered at him, but stroked his hand across his modesty apron, proudly. “Do you understand the advantages – the honors! – I’m offering you? Your shipyard bill paid, your ship restored, my support if you appeal the council’s decision –”
“You –”
Qad stopped. Do I expect him to support me if I refuse his proposal? he thought. Why am I arguing with him? Is he correct, and I’m a fool? His hand mimicked the Chief Executive’s, passing over the four bulges, one increasingly faint, beneath his own modesty apron.
“Why?”
“Your audacity appeals to me.”
“For an interbreed?”
“Of course! What do you imagine I’m talking about? Writing about?”
Qad had met a few interbreeds. He had to admit they had a certain... audacity.
He had dreamed of his own lineage, created by him and his little sisters, spreading out amongst the stars, conquering worlds. And yet everything the Chief Executive had said was true. This was an honor, a compliment.
“Audacity must be tamed, of course,” Qad’s suitor said. His heavy lids lowered over his pale eyes. “I am up to the challenge.”
Qad froze his expression. Is that what the council did to me, with its decision? he wondered. Tamed my audacity? It’s true I won’t soon again eliminate a second order of evolution, no matter what the danger.
“Your ship has a few more hours of its own resources to draw on,” the Executive said. “After that...” A warning, not quite a threat. “I’ll come back in time for you to make your decision without too much risk to your... lineage.”
He turned. Qad had to scuttle past him to open the sphincter. It clenched behind the Executive, leaving the unreadable scrabbles of Qad’s fingers shining on Glory’s inner wall.
Following the fast-fading glow of his rush to the access tube, Qad returned to Glory’s center and crawled into his pod. Ordinarily the bedding would have been resorbed and remade, but now it smelled of his sleep. He stretched out his hand to where he had thrown his shipsilk shirt, and found an amorphous, dissolving mass littered with his medals, and his sword and scabbard. He pulled away.
Qad reviewed the proposal in his mind’s eye, wishing for light so he might read the paper a second time. He wished for the Executive to put a deposit on his shipyard bill and allow Glory a few minutes’ power for light and maintenance, but of course the Executive’s interests were better served by leaving him in darkness and silence, his ship dying around him.
Qad would be relieved of debt, Piercing Glory repaired and upgraded to current standards. Glory would like that, Qad thought. They might even win an appeal, gaining two worlds’ worth of acclaim instead of a zero balance.
He would sleep, and then make a decision, but his choice was unavoidable. He could only make it irrevocable.
The little sisters woke him again and again, begging for food. By the time he gave up and rose, he was ravenously hungry. His fingertips were pierced and sore from the little sisters’ sucking. The youngest had revived and rebounded. The oldest purred with satisfaction, eyelids heavy.
As desperate as the little sisters, Qad begged Glory for food, a bath, a new shirt. The call went unanswered.
Hoping the Artificials had some residual power, he called for one to bring cosmetics. Again, he received no reply. He searched the chambers and corridors until he found an Artificial Stupid with a store of face paint. Scratching Glory’s wall desperately to obtain a glimmer of light, he did his best to make up the little sisters. When he painted their orifices, they snapped at him with hungry little teeth. When the youngest bit him a third time, he snapped his fingernail against her face. She screeched and withdrew as far as she could. He snarled at her, not bothering to calm her.
He worked particularly diligently on the eldest, then thought again and smeared away the paint on her eyes. He gripped the youngest’s face in one hand and decorated her as formally and elaborately as he could.
She tried to bite him again.
When he had finished, he pulled on his rumpled, stained apron and swordbelt, and went to the access hatch to wait, unshirted and grubby. Even the sword-belt carried stains, none, he regretted, from duels, and the sword’s edge remained dull.
Hardly a scene from a romance, he thought. But it was the best he could do with his – and Glory’s – resources fast declining.
A scratch at the access hatch. Qad pulled open the sphincter and followed the energetic leader light into the shipyard.
The Executive’s quarters surrounded Qad with opulence, everything clean and new, sharp-edged and glittering. The lights blazed. Artificial Stupids surrounded him, herded him to a bathing room, and scrubbed him and the little sisters clean. He cupped his hand over the eldest little sister, to shield her. The Artificial Stupids did not notice.
They shaved him, pomaded his hair, dressed him in silk trousers and open-fronted shirt, and made up three of the little sisters’ faces. The eldest remained concealed and unnoticed beneath his hand.
One of the Artificial Stupids handed him an elaborate modesty apron. The Artificials departed so he could arrange it himself, which puzzled him since they had already seen him, and the little sisters, naked.
He was surprised that the apron followed his own, old-fashioned customs, concealing the eyes and orifices of the little sisters.
The Artificials returned and herded him again, to an even more elaborate receiving room. The Chief Executive, dressed in vivid white with silver apron embroidery, sprawled on a black couch, his great stomach bulging into his lap. A bottle of wine stood near, with a single glass half full.
He gestured to Qad, then held up his hand to stop him at the formal five paces distant.
“I want to see what I’m getting for my patronage. I might decline, if I’m displeased.”
If that stipulation was in the proposal, Qad had forgotten it. But he could hardly object; it would do him no good.
“Show me,” the Executive said.
“May I know your name, first?”
“No. Don’t be too audacious in my presence, young adventurer.”
He knew Qad’s name, from the council meeting, but had never used it. This interbreeding would belong to the Executive’s lineage alone.
“Show me,” he said again.
Reluctan
tly, Qad loosed the bow of his modesty apron. He had never revealed himself to another person. He had expected – intended – for the little sisters to reproduce their lineage with him alone, to keep him pure.
Face and neck flushing hot, he pulled the apron aside, leaving its edge to conceal his eldest. Agitated by Qad’s reaction, the little sisters writhed and stretched, showing their teeth.
The Executive grabbed the apron and yanked it from Qad’s body. The frill of its neckpiece parted with a sharp rip, and the apron fluttered to the floor. Qad’s eldest little sister craned outward, fluttering smudged eyelids, snapping sharp teeth.
The Executive looked from one little sister to the next, beginning with the youngest, passing uninterested over the middle two, and fastening on the eldest.
“Names?”
Qad had never named the little sisters. It never occurred to him to do so. They were part of him; why would he name his own parts? This must be another fashion, like the modesty apron eye-slits, that he had never heard of. He turned the situation to his own advantage.
“No,” he said. “As you decreed, we aren’t exchanging names.”
The Executive laughed. “Well played, young adventurer. So. You neglect this one, which I will take and you will not miss.”
He nodded at the eldest little sister, whose teeth – smeared with misplaced red paint – snapped in a vertical line, who was most robust, most fit for the taking.
“This one –” Qad did his best to keep his expression neutral, failed, and gestured to the youngest. “This one is younger. Fresher.”
The Executive smiled. “One I will leave for you to raise.” He looked closer, inspecting the bruise Qad had left when he corrected his youngest. “And train to your will. The eldest has a longer benefit of absorbing your audacity, and perhaps your discipline in curbing it.”
Another new-fangled idea, that a little sister would learn from example, would learn from anything. Qad knew better than to argue, for the Executive had made his decision.
He had come close enough to rip off Qad’s modesty apron. Now he was even closer, pressing his belly against Qad’s stomach. He reached behind himself and loosened his trousers, allowing them to fall away from his skinny thighs, his boots, his skinny ankles and delicate feet. He kicked the silken clothing away, leaving only boots and sword-belt.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 49
