The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  Norio twitched his head, dispelling the image. Desrien was long ago and far away. Perhaps, when Dol’jhar triumphed, he could persuade Hreem to take him back and let him fire the skipmissile that would put an end to the world that had rejected him.

  In the engine room, Hreem stood for a time in front of the Urian relay, a slouching hulk whose vaguely organic form was contradicted by the strange visible texture that suggested the inorganic orders of existence. Norio had only touched it once. The experience had shaken his conviction that it was just a machine, despite its lack of any affect. It was a sensory contradiction, and Norio hated it, especially since there always hung about it an aura of concealed emotions that might steal into his mind at any moment.

  Hreem, too, looked as though he expected something to reach out of the ancient machine and grab him. His emotional level rose, a queer melange of fear, unease, and lust that made Norio almost nauseous. Then he hefted the case in his hand, and abruptly strode out.

  Norio followed hurriedly, curiosity so intense it bordered on anxiety. When Hreem reached the captain’s suite, he locked the case in his safe.

  Norio said, “Did you meet another tempath down there?” He hated the rise in his voice.

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” Hreem smirked, briefly his old self. Then his face blanked out again in that uncharacteristic way that Norio already loathed. “No tempaths on Barca.” Hreem’s eyes unfocused, his emotional spectrum subsiding into a curious placidity. “I don’t think there could be,” he said, his tone utterly unlike him—enigmatic.

  Hreem then returned to the bridge to hear the primary crew’s reports. Even the vid of Neyvla-khan in agony failed to arouse Hreem; he gave a perfunctory laugh, turned over command of the ship to the secondary crew and left the bridge again, heading straight to his cabin.

  Norio lagged behind, waiting for a summons—an explanation. Even a growled “Where are you, you lazy mindsnake!” would do, because it would prove that Hreem saw him.

  But no summons came, and Norio resisted the temptation to follow Hreem into the cabin. Hreem must notice his absence on his own.

  Restless and furious and worried by turns, he began to prowl Deck 3 in crew quarters, currently in Z-watch.

  Another bright lance of emotion arrested him, no, two, rising in mutual passion; but his own jealousy spoiled it and Norio hurried back toward Hreem’s cabin.

  He was almost there when the ship exploded.

  Norio lay on the deck and struggled to comprehend. The deckplates beneath his head and hands felt cool. Unchanged. Where was that light coming from, as though he peered into the center of a sun? Then he recognized, powerful beyond previous experience, his lover’s emotional signature, swollen to terrible proportions. Norio writhed on the deck outside their cabin as wave after wave of hideously distorted lust and other emotions he could hardly put a name to bored through his nerves and mounted to his brain, triggering an answering reflex that was the flare of a match to the nova of emotional plasma pouring from Hreem.

  Finally it ended, ebbing away in waves of intensity very much like pain. Norio had to try four or five times to get up. His pride forgotten, he leaned against the hatchway and with a trembling hand pawed the annunciator. A flicker-scan recognized him and he staggered in.

  Stopping in the doorway to the inner room, he stood staring. Hreem sprawled naked and unconscious on his back across the platform of the dormaivu. But a quick glance at the shelves and attachments showed the appliances—every sex toy conceivable—in their places and untouched.

  Instead, leeched firmly to his now-hairless groin, an utterly enormous dilenja sprawled across one thick, hairy leg. Noting the curious inorganic texture of the appliance, Norio realized why Hreem had stared at the Urian engine as he had.

  Then horror seized him, rendering him unable to speak or even breathe, as the thing sprouted palps and raised its head to look at him eyelessly. He fell senseless to the deck.

  When Norio came to, Hreem was sitting on the edge of the dormaivu, looking at him. He was still naked, but the thing—Norio’s mind shied away from recalling it in any wise—was gone.

  “Now you know.” That was all Hreem said.

  Norio could read the rest. He looked emptily at Hreem, who turned away and stepped into the bain. Water hissed.

  Norio was alone.

  He picked himself up and limped out of the cabin to see the quartermaster. He needed a new cabin.

  Norio had accepted the fact years ago that Hreen had a roving eye. Until now, he had always been successful in getting rid of any man or woman who snagged Hreem’s wayward attention for longer than a few days. But he had no weaponry, either physical or psychic, against a thing.

  Norio drifted back to Deck 3, still in Z-watch. The hatches to the cabins were as varied as the occupants, some bright with paint or surrounded by dyplast bas-relief, others sterile, anonymous—except to him. He knew where every crewmember dossed, and with whom. Under normal circumstances, he took pleasure from the way occasional crew passed him with lowered eyes or turned aside into a side passage to avoid him.

  Bright slivers of emotions impossible to a waking mind reached his awareness from the cabin ahead. Norio stopped and shivered, drawing his hand lightly down the bulkhead as though contact could heighten his perceptions. This was Metije’s cabin. He came this way often: her animus was grossly swollen, and her unconscious moved through strange waters. He wished he dared tap the tianqi controls again, to steer her dreaming into tastier regions of affect. But Hreem had beaten him severely when he found out that Norio was doing that. My crew are off limits to you. You brain-chatz who I tell you, and save the fun and games for us.

  Norio shook his head and moved on as Metije passed into deeper sleep and ceased to dream. He wasn’t sure Hreem would care anymore.

  As he walked, his mind poked at the oozing sore of Hreem’s indifference, then returned to the strange construct of the Urian relay in the engine room. Perhaps the aura that teased at his psi could be exploited; the way back to dominance could be at the Suneater.

  He licked his lips then smiled, mentally composing his message to Barrodagh.

  SIX

  ARES

  The man in Ivard’s dream was tall, taller even than Vi’ya, and stronger in build. Straight blue-black hair fell in waves from either side of his high brow, beneath which an uncompromising bone structure framed a pair of black eyes narrowed with sardonic humor, and below them a long merciless mouth.

  Terrified, Ivard tried to break the dream but couldn’t. He knew what was coming. The man stood in a room the color of blood, whose walls pulsed like the rhythm of a heart. Across his palm lay a black-hafted knife.

  With a deliberate movement the man shifted his grip on the knife, then slashed with swift, deliberate efficiency across his other wrist. Blood welled, and dropped down to the reddish, glowing ground.

  The man looked up, and Ivard had to as well. A patch of the ceiling drooped, as if filling with liquid, until a great bladder hung like a giant teardrop.

  Then it burst, and a great wash of blood splashed down, foaming around the man’s boots, rising to his waist and higher. The man threw back his head and laughed, the sound echoing as a sea of foaming red swept him away.

  Nooo! Ivard screamed voicelessly.

  The dream released him at last, and Ivard sat up in bed, gasping for breath. His tongue moved dryly in his mouth, and he tasted the iron tang of blood. His gorge rose, but he controlled it. It wasn’t the dream, he told himself, looking down at the wreck of his bed, and the red drops on his pillow. Cautiously his tongue probed at his cheek, where he’d bitten it in his struggle against the dream.

  The fourth, and strongest, in a week.

  Despite the fact he’d only slept a couple of hours, he rose, dressed, and slipped out—finding the suite empty.

  He poked his head into all the rooms, last trying the chilly chamber the Eya’a lived in. They were both there, twiggy fingers moving in a mesmerizing pattern as t
hey wove thin threads of metal and crystal together.

  Ordinarily he would have liked to watch, for they rarely permitted anyone to see them actually at the creation of their weird hangings, but now he just wanted Vi’ya.

  “We see you,” the Eya’a semaphored.

  Ivard signed the same back and then covered his eyes with his hands. Reaching toward them with his thoughts, he said: Where is Vi’ya?

  A flicker in his mind, and their twinned voices said: We hear her with the moth-one.

  “Lokri,” Ivard breathed. Maybe he could get a thought to her if the Kelly were around, but not on his own. He looked at the small white-furred beings, wishing he could ask them to send her a message. But they’re not like a boswell, he thought, grinning to himself. Vi’ya had already explained that, because they could listen to anyone anywhere, they still could not understand that humans couldn’t do the same thing. They’d never understand the concept of a message.

  He rubbed his tired eyes, wondering if he should dial up some caf. He wished Portus-Dartinus-Atos were there to talk to, but he knew where they were: communing with the newly arrived Kelly up in the Cap. Why didn’t he talk to threm there?

  He thought about the long transtube journey to the Cap and looked back at his room, wishing he could fall back into bed and sleep. He shook his head, fearing that he would dream again.

  Military people crammed the tube. Ivard practiced his scent-sorting until they reached the terminal for the bay set aside for the Kelly ships. He stepped off, then hesitated when he saw the two Marines standing on either side of the lock. One tabbed a console; behind him the transtube doors reversed and opened again. A soft buzzer began pulsing.

  “Sorry,” one of the Marines on duty said, his demeanor humorously apologetic, but his stance quite ready for action. “No one gets off here, not even Nyberg. Sovereign territory of the Kelly.”

  Feeling the impatience of the people in the stalled pod behind him, Ivard controlled the urge to argue and plead. Drawing in a deep breath, he said, “The interdict is placed by them, not by us. Isn’t it? For protection of humans?” His heart hammering, he waited for the Marine to check what he already knew was true. The prospect of his being forbidden trespass as well accelerated his pulse, making him wonder if the Kelly saw him as some kind of pet.

  The other Marine said, “Better check the system. The tube shouldn’t even have stopped here.”

  Ivard held up his arm, now a deep brown with the emerald ribbon of the Kelly Archon embedded in his flesh. “You’ve heard, maybe, about this?”

  The Marine narrowed his eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Ivard Firehead . . . Il-Kavic.”

  The man flexed his wrist slightly; then his demeanor changed and he glanced at the boswell, his brows lifting. “Hmm. You’re permitted.”

  Both Marines looked at him oddly, their scents changing as well. The transtube doors hissed shut, cutting off the sound of the buzzer, and the pod whooshed away. But Ivard did not stop to assess. He ran to the lock and waited impatiently as the hatch locked behind him. His nose twitched at the rush of rich scents. So the lock was pressure-biased toward the Kelly side to prevent any of their atmosphere from leaking into Ares. Then the hatch ahead of him clicked and opened.

  Ahead lay three large, strangely shaped warships, more resembling streamlined Kelly than the thorny sea creatures that modern human ships evoked. Smaller ships clustered around them. There should have been nine of these; he perceived the incomplete pattern in which they lay. The blue flicker in his mind darkened and condensed.

  Ivard inhaled, rapidly sorting the complexity of scents until a Kelly appeared from behind a storage pod, and Ivard stared. It was a singleton, something he’d seen only once before, during their escape from Rifthaven. The Kelly slapped its head-stalk against the storage pod as it came around the corner; an oily stain on the pod carried its pungent odor to Ivard across four meters.

  The singleton honked a greeting, and Ivard hissed in shock. He couldn’t understand what it said. The blue flicker bounced with laughter as the Kelly bent its head-stalk into an expression of apology and motioned him to follow.

  Its gestures at least were familiar, and Ivard understood that he’d been silly to assume the Kelly all spoke the same language. Humans didn’t. He’d heard that a lot of Downsiders didn’t know Uni, and only spoke one language. No Rifter spoke fewer than two, and usually more. He wondered if the Kelly language he knew was their equivalent of Uni.

  The Kelly led him to the closest of the larger ships and then briefly caressed the ribbon on his wrist, two of the blue eyes under its lip-folds gazing up his arm into his eyes as it did so. It left him and waltzed away as the lock dilated silently.

  The inner hatch stood open, and Ivard stepped into the ship. Then he stopped, trying to make sense of what he saw. The corridor was wide and straight, but the walls looked like polychrome cheese, porous and fissured in a pattern that slipped away from his understanding at the same time his eyes tried to follow it. A faint pulse of Kelly music drifted down the corridor from a distant source.

  The blue flicker of the Archon’s presence whirled about in agitation; never before had Ivard been so aware of its opacity, the conviction that it enclosed more than he could sense. He tried to trace the pattern with his fingers, in response to a sudden surge of almost-meaning from the Archon, but a warning tingle made him pull away. He controlled the nascent blister and moved on.

  A come-along flickered ahead of him, a human artifact out of place among the strangenesses. As he followed it, he frantically sorted the scents that rolled in on him, ever stronger and more complex. A hatch opened for him and he entered a large chamber occupied by several Kelly trinities. Portus-Dartinus-Atos was the only one he himself recognized, but the blue flicker swelled and gyrated violently as he perceived an aura around one of the trinities. The Portus trinity gestured and honked at him, but before he could reply, his lips tingled, the membranes in his nose swelled, and his eyes itched as the scents began to overwhelm him.

  He controlled the physical reaction, but the mental overload was too much. He could not sort fast enough; he intuited that scent-sorting, a task easy enough in the scent-poor human biosphere, was just an analogy for what he only thought he had learned to do. The meaning began to leach out of the scene before him. He tried to reach Vi’ya for help, but that avenue was blocked by the tall, smooth columns of red and blue that sprouted up from the deck to spread his fingers apart with their icy coolness while gray boxes tasting of sandpaper kneaded rubbery spikes against his legs and a complex mesh of minutely articulated musical notes wrapped itself around his skull and blew hollowly through his eyes into his head.

  The blue flicker whirled about imploringly and dove off in a direction even more difficult to follow than the first time, when Portus-Dartinus-Atos had twinned the Archon’s genome and completed his healing.

  Ivard remembered the one time he’d taken brain-suck, on a dare from Jakarr—Greywing had finally bunked the old scug out for that. This was similar, and the tag end of Markham’s explanation, while he’d talked him down, came back to him. “They call it synesthesia. Everybody does it without knowing. It’s the basis of language. Brain-suck just pulls it up out of the limbic system where your conscious mind can see it and use it.”

  The blue memory surfaced again, and this time Ivard saw where it went. He followed and found himself in a huge space where all his senses formed a rich unity, untrammeled by the walls that conscious experience throws up between them. He would never be able to describe this experience to anyone—language was too coarse a sieve to catch it.

  After a time he rose back to the intellectual levels of his mind, and now his awareness was clear and sharp. The confusion of his senses yielded to a complex but meaningful fusion that Ivard found he could only sustain by a process analogous to unfocusing his eyes. The imposition of logic and reason destroyed the meaning rising from the deep levels that made him human.

  “Nor can the foun
tain describe the water,” said the central trinity, whom he now knew to be the Elder of the Race. But threy did not only speak. Threy danced, and sang, and scented the air in triple complexity, and the meaning was far more than the words his conscious mind insisted on.

  Ivard fathomed how limited he, and every human, must seem to them. For intelligence has limits, which all sophonts reach early in their rise to knowledge, but emotion, the wisdom arising from the unity of sensation which is the fount of language, does not. And the Kelly had a million years of emotional evolution beyond humanity. They were a synesthetic race, communicating in a way that made human language seem like the babbling of a small child by comparison. And Ivard realized he was wrong, that he did not know the Kelly equivalent of Uni, but that the language he spoke, better than any other human could, was but the crèche talk of his alien friends, used by Kelly in their long infancy before they were coordinated enough to truly communicate.

  Ashamed, he felt tears burn his eyes. But then the Kelly swarmed about him, and he found himself enwrapped by a three of threes, their love inflowing all his senses. Within, the blue unfolded, and he gazed in awe down the long paths of triune genetics to the dawn of the Kelly race, and knew himself, transformed by the mystery of New Glastonbury, a real part of the Anamnesis.

  He was not a pet, nor an object of pity. He was Ivard Firehead, now truly of the phratry of the Eldest.

  o0o

  Vi’ya sat down opposite Lokri. Unhindered by the dyplast wall between them, his emotions battered at her, like a badly tuned harp played much too loud.

  His light gray eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them bruised-looking. “Vi’ya.”

  Gone was the drawl, the ironic amusement that had shaded his tone before. The word came out harshly, midway between an accusation and a plea.

  She had no progress to report, despite hours of patient noderunning. Rather than speak those words so baldly, she said, “Did Marim give you an appropriate description of our mission to Omilov’s Urian mystery, or was it merely a long and colorful exercise in opprobrium?”