by Paula Guran
The Voice smiled. “I will not die, nor will it want destruction when the song is through.” She tipped her massive head, hair rippling, black-and-gray, across her proud shoulders. “Those who travel between the stars see many wonders. I am the last Voice of Naratha. I exact a price, star-stranger.”
Balance, clear enough. Montet bowed her head. “Say on.”
“You will stand with me while I sing this monster down. You will watch and you will remember. Perhaps you have devices that record sight and sound. If you do, use them. When it is done, first bring the news to Lietta, First Novice, she who would have been Voice. Say to her that you are under geas to study in our library. When you have studied, I require you to return to the stars to discover what has happened . . . to the rest of us.” She paused.
“You will bring what you find to this outpost. You will also initiate your fellow star-travelers into the mysteries of Naratha’s Discord.” The wonderful voice faltered and Montet bent her head.
“In the event,” she said, softly, “that the equation is not entirely precise.” She straightened. “I accept your Balance.”
“So.” said the Voice. “Take me now to that which is mine.”
The Voice stood, humming, while Montet dragged the stasis box out, unsealed it and flipped open the lid. At a sign from the other woman, she tipped the box sideways, and the thing, whatever it was, rolled out onto the grass, buzzing angrily.
“I hear you, Discord,” the Voice murmured, and raised her hand to sign.
Montet dropped back, triggering the three recorders with a touch to her utility belt.
The Voice began to sing. A phrase only, though the beauty of it pierced Montet, heart and soul.
The phrase ended and the space where it had hung was filled with the familiar malice of the black thing’s song.
Serene, the Voice heard the answer out, then sang again, passion flowing forth like flame.
Again the thing answered, snarling in the space between Montet’s ears. She gasped and looked to the Voice, but her face was as smooth and untroubled as glass.
Once more, the woman raised her voice, and it seemed to Montet that the air was richer, the grassland breeze fresher, than it had been a moment before.
This time, the thing did not allow her to finish but vibrated in earnest. Montet shrieked at the agony in her joints and fell to her knees, staring up at the Voice who sang on, weaving around and through the malice: stretching, reshaping, reprogramming, Montet thought just before her vision grayed and she could see no longer.
She could hear, though, even after the pain had flattened her face down in the grass. The song went on, never faltering, never heeding the heat that Montet felt rising from the brittling grass. Never straining, despite the taint in the once clean air.
The Voice hit a note—high, true, and sweet. Montet’s vision cleared. The Voice stood, legs braced, face turned toward the sky, her mighty throat corded with effort. The note continued, impossibly pure, soaring, passionate, irrefutable. There was only that note, that truth, and nothing more in all the galaxy.
Montet took a breath and discovered that her lungs no longer burned. She moved an arm and discovered that she could rise.
The Voice sang on, and the day was brilliant, perfect, beyond perfect, into godlike, and the Voice herself was beauty incarnate, singing, singing, fading, becoming one with the sunlight, the grassland and the breeze.
Abruptly, there was silence, and Montet stood alone in the grasslands near her ship, hard by an empty stasis box.
Of the Voice of Naratha—of Naratha’s Shadow—there was no sign at all.
— Part Five —
Will No War End All War?
Corporal Josie Two Ribbons is a soldier in the Space Force, but her mission on Janus 4—a planet being terraformed for human settlement—is a personal one. Nancy Kress shows the personal, however, often reveals more universally applicable truths.
Eaters
Nancy Kress
The girl is two days early.
Ellen first sees Josie Two Ribbons crossing the staff mess trailer, several moments before Josie sees her. Ellen’s belly goes cold. This is going to be even worse than she has dreaded. Josie wears military fatigues; she scowls so hard that her eyebrows nearly meet. She looks far too much like her father: short, with wide shoulders, spreading nose, glossy black hair cropped into bristles.
Jim Herndon, seated beside Ellen, touches her arm. “Do you want me to—”
“No. No.” Ellen has to do this herself. She rises and holds out her hand as the girl stops beside the table. “Corporal Two Ribbons?”
The girl ignores the outstretched hand. Her eyes, as dark as Tom’s, sweep away from Ellen, over the other scientists, back again. Ellen drops her hand.
“You bastards,” Josie Two Ribbons says.
“She wants to go out alone,” Carlos Sanchez says, “but of course I can’t let her do that. Corporate would have my head if she damaged one of our copters. Or herself.”
“I know,” Ellen says.
“For her to even get permits to come here—just how did she do that?”
“I don’t know.” Although Ellen has her suspicions.
Carlos has called her into his office, which is just as makeshift as everything else human on the base. The office had, a decade ago, been a fuel tank on the ship that brought the first team from Earth. The fuel tank had been flown downstairs, fitted with electronics and with foamcast furniture newly sprayed into existence, and now serves as command station for the Second Terraforming Team of SettlerHome Corporation on Janus 4. The rest of the base, housed in other bits of the ship or in pre-dropped trailers, consists of twenty-four of Ellen’s fellow scientists and a great number of very large, very expensive machines, some stationary and some mobile. Twenty-four people to remake a planet for the hordes of colonists to follow.
Not that Janus 4 needs very much remaking. Unlike some other worlds, the profit margin on this one would be large. The atmosphere is already breathable, there is enough fresh water, the small planetary tilt means a fairly stable climate. The gravity is .93 Terran, just enough difference to put a spring in one’s step. Janus 4 could be a very popular settlement world. The team’s only real problem has been the soil—at least, until Tom Two Ribbons, the junior xenobiologist, had gone out into the bush. And gone, and gone, and gone.
Carlos runs his hand through his hair, which immediately flops back over his forehead. “Ellen, there’s no reason for you to be the one to go with her to look for him. In fact, anybody else would be better.”
“No, it has to be me.”
“So you said. Why?”
Carlos looks straight at her, his no-nonsense-give-me-a-real-answer look. Ellen has always liked Carlos. Whoever said that a team leader needs either charisma or an iron hand was dead wrong. What a team leader needs is a nose for truth, and Carlos—quiet, skinny, occasionally dithering Carlos—has it.
Ellen says quietly, “Because I didn’t love Tom. If I had, I’d have tried harder to find out what was driving him, and I didn’t. It was all just good-time light-hearted fucking for me. I treated him with the same carelessness that—”
She breaks off, knowing that Carlos knows the rest of the sentence: with the same carelessness that we treated the Eaters.
Carlos says, “I really wish you wouldn’t go, Ellen.”
“I have to.”
“I don’t think she’s dangerous—no history of that, although Chang will run a psych check—but she’s completely unedited. Primal.”
“I know.”
“Also, she’s mad as hell.”
“Well,” Ellen says, shifting her gaze to the window, where two Eaters have wandered too close to the force fence, “she has reason to be. He’s her father, he’s out there someplace alone, and he’s crazy.”
“But not,” Carlos says, with an emphasis unusual for him, “because of us.”
Ellen doesn’t answer.
It takes two days for Josie to pass Chang
’s mandatory health exam, psych check, and gene scan. After the two days, Chang tells Ellen that Josie is a remarkable physical specimen, that Josie psych-tests as sane, and that none of the medical team can stand her. “I’ve never seen an angrier human being,” Chang says, “and she absolutely refuses editing. It’s a good thing that she only has a ten-day planetary permit. Still, it’s going to be unpleasant for you.” Ellen agrees, thinking it’s also good that Josie was not allowed to bring any weapons to a Corporate planet. A second later she’s ashamed of this thought; Josie is not a threat, merely “unpleasant.”
They leave at dawn of Josie’s third day planetside. As the two-seater copter lifts off from the base with Ellen piloting, a herd of Eaters wanders across the ground below, just outside the fence. The alien creatures are spherical, bulky, slow-moving, covered with masses of coarse orange fur.
From this angle Ellen cannot see their legs, which are thin and scaly as a chicken’s although they end in broad, hard hooves. She can barely see the Eaters’ arms, thin and short and held close to their silly-looking bodies. Furry beach balls bobbing along. Those beach balls are delaying a multitrillion-credit project by at least a decade.
Ellen knows what will happen next, and it does. The left flank of the herd brushes the force-field fence, and half a dozen Eaters crumple to the ground. The rest move on a little more quickly. The copter makes so little noise and flies so low that Ellen can hear their hoofs on the hard ground. How do creatures that are basically sacks of protoplasm on ungulated sticks manage to make so much noise? She braces herself for Josie’s rant about the fence deaths, but instead the girl directs her hostility in another direction.
“You’re very pretty.”
It sounds like a curse. Ellen, not knowing how to respond, says nothing.
“You’re exactly the type my father always favored. Soft, feminine. Weak. In fact, you look like a blond version of my mother.”
Ellen says dryly, “One can’t be all that weak and still belong to a terraforming team.”
“I meant emotionally weak. Yielding.”
Ellen puts the copter on autopilot and turns to face Josie. “Look, I know you don’t like me, or any of us. You resent that we edited your father’s memories of what happened. And you resent that until he told us different, we did think the Eaters were non-sentient and we did try to exterminate them so they would stop eating the nitrogen-fixing plants. I realize that with your ethnic heritage—”
“Fuck my ethnic heritage.”
Ellen stares at her.
“Do you think I give a shit that two hundred years ago your ancestors tried to exterminate the Sioux? Give me a break. Chances are your particular ancestors hadn’t even yet emigrated to North America—right, Ellen Jenssen? That whole anguish-of-the-Indians thing was my father’s bag, not mine. I got off the res as soon as I could and joined the Space Force. The white man won over the Sioux because he had all that advanced tech and so deserved to win. You think I’m going to cry for the losers, just because I carry around some of their genes? It’s nothing to do with me. I’m not my great-great-grandparents, and I’m not that sentimental.”
Certainly Josie Two Ribbons doesn’t look sentimental. She looks hard as the granite boulders forty feet below. The girl still wears military fatigues, boots, and her habitual scowl. Even her bristly dark hair looks aggressive. Ellen feels confused and—yes, admit it!—a little afraid of this ferocious young woman fifteen years her junior.
She says haltingly, “So . . . why . . . why are you here?”
Josie turns the scowl full force on Ellen. “He’s my father. In the same circumstances wouldn’t you go out after your father?”
No. Ellen would not go across town, let alone half a galaxy away, to search for the man who calls himself her father. But she doesn’t say it aloud.
“Christ, you people,” Josie says, turns her back, and scans the ground.
The base is now out of sight. The copter flies around it in widening spirals, so Josie can look for—what? Ellen doesn’t know. But the terrain below is varied and beautiful. Treeanalogs, never more than twenty feet high but full and bushy, purple with the rhodopsin-like photosynthesizer the plants use instead of chlorophyll. Wide slow rivers, which will grow narrower and swifter when they near the mountains, blue among the purple. Outcroppings of pale rock. The tiny, barely visible blue flowers of the native plants, almost lost among the larger white and pink blooms of the bushes introduced by humans. Flora 1 and Flora 2.
Josie says, “So which ones are hallucinogenic?”
“The white ones.”
“Those are the ones you guys put here originally? That the Eaters ate?”
“Yes.” The Eaters, and Tom. Ellen doesn’t want to talk about this. We didn’t know. But Josie has the right to information—doesn’t she? Or is Ellen just doing what she always does, giving in to the stronger personality? She has always felt more comfortable with genes than with their carriers.
“And you’re the geneticist who designed the plants, right?”
“Yes.”
“What were the plants supposed to do?”
“They do it. They fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. Without more fixed nitrogen than is native to Janus 4, agriculture would be impossible here.”
“And the Eaters lunched on your precious plants, so you guys decided to wipe out the aliens.”
“Before we knew they were sentient, yes.” The neural pellets falling from the sky—how many drops had Ellen herself made? Although they possess high-phylum nervous systems, the Eaters have no blood. What they have instead is a kind of lymph fluid that permeates every tissue. It transmits nourishment osmotically throughout those beach-ball bodies, as in Terran low-phylum amoebae or sponges. This evolutionary path had made extermination particularly easy. Within an hour of ingestion, the poison had reached all sections of an Eater’s body. Then came a rapid breakdown of cellular matter as the lymph-like fluid became an acid bath. The Eater literally fell apart molecule by molecule. Flesh and cartilaginous bones dissolved. In two hours, there was a puddle on the ground. In four hours, nothing left at all.
We didn’t know.
Josie smiles. Her smile is just as angry as her scowl. “I guess my father screwed up your big plan, huh? What did he discover about aliens that convinced you all that they’re sentient?”
“They communicate through pheromone analogs. They—maybe—pray to some sort of sun god, or at least have rituals that look like prayer. They dance.”
“Bees can dance. And so you stopped exterminating the Eaters and instead changed the plant’s genes so that the Eaters don’t like the taste?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”
“It’s not as easy as you make it sound.” Josie probably knows all these answers already, or she wouldn’t know what questions to ask. Ellen jabs at the copter’s controls.
“You hate this conversation, don’t you, Ellen? Just like you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
Josie snorts. “The hell you don’t. You hate me for coming here and stirring up your big mistake all over again, all that white-man guilt. Well, I don’t give a fuck for your guilt or your big mistake. You moved into the Eaters’ ecological niche, and if you can take it over, more power to you. Law of the jungle.”
“That’s a pretty simplistic view. The moral—”
“Yeah, right. Your guilt is dumb but your hypocrisy is criminal. The weaker culture always goes under, that’s just evolution in action. If you’re going to participate in evolution, you don’t get to also cry about it. Didn’t expect philosophy from a dumb Indian soldier, did you? You think—”
“Don’t tell me what I think. And don’t tell me that your heritage doesn’t matter to you.”
“It doesn’t. I’m an individual, not a defunct tribe.”
“Really? How did you get permission to visit a planet in Stage II terraforming? You went to the authorities and played
the race card, didn’t you?”
Josie doesn’t reply, and all at once Ellen is afraid she’s gone too far. What does she know about the ethnic feelings of a Native American? Even if Josie is caught in some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with the victors who destroyed the Sioux, she’s still a daughter searching for her lost father. Ellen is contemplating an apology when Josie points to the ground below. “Land there.”
It’s an oxbow in a river, a U-shaped bend so sharp that only a narrow neck of land protrudes into the river. Eventually the neck will become an island, when the river cuts it off entirely. Dense purple tree-analogs cover the future island. Ellen lands the copter in the closest clearing, and Josie jumps lightly out and disappears into the trees.
An hour later she is back. “Nope. Fly.”
Seething, Ellen lifts the copter. She can’t think what to say to Josie Two Ribbons: not about her peremptory tone, her rudeness, her astonishingly cold view of what humans on Janus 4 had almost done to the Eaters. Stockholm Syndrome or not, is that callous indifference normal . . . especially coming from a Native American? Or is the girl only pretending indifference, putting on a protective see-if-I-care shell to hide what must be complicated identification with the Eaters’ near fate?
Ellen has never been comfortable with tense silence. Despite herself, she tries again. “Growing up on the reservation must have been tough, especially after your parents divorced and—”
“You don’t know anything about the res,” Josie says, scanning the ground, “or about me. So don’t pretend you do. Land there.”
“Look, Josie, while we’re on this expedition together I insist that at least you treat me with minimal courtesy. Or else don’t say anything at all.”
Josie says nothing at all.
Ellen lands there.
They investigate four more oxbows before nightfall. When Josie wants to land, she flips her wrist in a gesture both indicative and insulting. Ellen swallows her anger and concentrates on the terrain below. The base uses satellite mapping, of course, but as they leave Sector A she is surprised to see how widely both Flora 1 and Flora 2 have spread. The white flowers and the pink both flourish beneath treeanalog canopies and in the shade of boulders. They must have adapted, even mutated, more quickly than she’d counted on. The Eaters are still devouring Flora 1—Ellen sees them doing it—but the hardy plant is flourishing anyway, seeding itself faster than its predator can consume it.
