“Scorpio…” Valensin said.
“Doc, I haven’t hit a man in twenty-three years. Don’t give me a reason to make an exception. Sit down, all right?”
“Better do as he says,” Clavain told him.
Khouri turned her head to face them. She held up a palm to shade the bloodshot slits of her eyes, blinking through the gaps between her fingers.
Then she stood, still facing them. Scorpio watched with polite indifference. Some pigs would have been stimulated by the presence of a naked human woman, just as there were some humans who were attracted to pigs. But although the points of physiological difference between a female pig and a female human were hardly extreme, it was precisely those differences that mattered to Scorpio.
Khouri steadied herself by holding on to the capsule with one hand. She stood with her knees slightly together, as if at any moment she might collapse. Yet she was able to tolerate the glare now, if only by squinting at them.
She spoke. Her voice was hoarse but firm. “Where am I?”
“You’re on Ararat,” Scorpio said.
“Where.” It was not phrased as a question.
“On Ararat will do for now.”
“Near your main settlement, I’m guessing.”
“As I said…”
“How long has it been?”
“That depends,” Scorpio said. “A couple of days since we picked up the beacon from your capsule. How long you were under the sea, we don’t know. Or how long it took you to reach the planet.”
“A couple of days?” The way she looked at him, it was as if he had said weeks or months. “What exactly took you so long?”
“You’re lucky we got to you as quickly as we did,” Blood said. “And the wakeup schedule wasn’t in our control.”
“Two days… Where’s Clavain? I want to see him. Please don’t anyone tell me you let him die before I got here.”
“You needn’t worry about that,” Clavain said mildly. “As you can see, I’m still very much alive.”
She stared at him for a few seconds with the sneering expression of someone who thought they might be the victim of a poorly executed hoax. “You?”
“Yes.” He offered his palms. “Sorry to be such a disappointment.”
She looked at him for a moment longer, then said, “I’m sorry. It’s just not… quite what I was expecting.”
“I believe I can still make myself useful.” He turned to Blood. “Fetch her a blanket, will you? We don’t want her catching her death of cold. Then I think we’d better let Doctor Valensin perform a comprehensive medical examination.”
“No time for that,” Khouri said, ripping away a few adhesive patches she had missed. “I want you to get me something that can cross water. And some weapons.” She paused, then added, “And some food and water. And some clothes.”
“You seem in a bit of a hurry,” Clavain said. “Can’t it wait until morning? It’s been twenty-three years, after all. There must be a great deal to talk about.”
“You have no fucking idea,” she said.
Blood handed Clavain a blanket. He stepped forward and offered it to Khouri. She wrapped it around herself without any real enthusiasm.
“We can do boats,” Clavain said, “and guns. But I think it might help if we had some idea just why you need them right this moment.”
“Because of my baby,” Khouri said.
Clavain nodded politely. “Your baby.”
“My daughter. Her name’s Aura. She’s here, on… what did you say this place was called?”
“Ararat,” Clavain said.
“OK, she’s here on Ararat. And I’ve come to rescue her.”
Clavain glanced at his companions. “And where would your daughter be, exactly?”
“About eight hundred kilometres away,” Khouri said. “Now get me those weps. And an incubator. And someone who knows field surgery.”
“Why field surgery?” Clavain asked.
“Because,” Khouri replied, “you’re going to have to get her out of Skade first.”
ELEVEN
Mela, 2727
Rashmika looked up at the scuttler fossil. A symbol of conspicuous wealth, it hung from the ceiling in a large atrium area of the caravan vehicle. Even if it was a fake, or a semi-fake botched together from incompatible parts, it was still the first apparently complete scuttler she had ever seen. She wanted to find a way to climb up there and examine it properly, taking note of the abrasion patterns where the hard carapacial sections slid against each other. Rashmika had only ever read about such things, but she was certain that with an hour of careful study she would be able to tell whether it was authentic, or at the very least exclude the possibility of its being a cheap fake.
Somehow she didn’t think it was very likely to be either cheap or fake.
Mentally, she classified the scuttler body morphology. DK4V8M, she thought. Maybe a DK4V8M, if she was being confused by the play of dust and shadows around the trailing tail-shell. At least it was possible to apply the usual morphological classification scheme. The cheap fakes sometimes threw body parts together in anatomically impossible formations, but mis was definitely a plausible assemblage of components, even if they hadn’t necessarily come from the same burial site.
The scuttlers were a taxonomist’s nightmare. The first time one had been unearthed, it had appeared to be a simple case of reassembling the scattered body parts to make something that looked like a large insect or lobster. The scuttler exhibited a complexity of body sections, with many different highly spe-cialised limbs and sensory organs, but they had all snapped back together in a more or Jess logical fashion, leaving only the soft interior organs to be conjectured.
But the second scuttler hadn’t matched the first. There were a different number of body sections, a different number of limbs. The head and mouth parts looked very dissimilar. Yet—again—all the pieces snapped together to make a complete specimen, with no embarrassing bits left over.
The third hadn’t matched the first or second. Nor the fourth or fifth.
By the time the remains of a hundred scuttlers had been unearthed and reassembled, there were a hundred different versions of the scuttler body-plan.
The theorists groped for an explanation. The implication was that no two scuttlers were born alike. But two simultaneous discoveries shattered that idea overnight. The first was the unearthing of an intact clutch of infant scuttlers. Though there were some differences in body-plan, there were identical infants. Based on their frequency of occurrence, statistics argued that at least three identical adults should already have been discovered. The second discovery—which happened to explain the first—was the unearthing of a pair of adult scuttlers in the same area. They had been found in separated but connected chambers of an underground tunnel system. Their body parts were reassembled, providing another two unique morphologies. But upon closer examination something unexpected was discovered. A young researcher named Kimura had begun to take a particular interest in the patterns caused by the body sections scraping against each other. Something struck her as not quite right about the two new specimens. The scratch marks were inconsistent: a scrape on the edge of one carapace had no matching counterpart on the adjoining one.
At first, Kimura assumed the two clusters of body parts were hoaxes; there was already a small market for that kind of thing. But something made her dig a little deeper. She worried at the problem for weeks, convinced that she was missing something obvious. Then one night, after a particularly busy day examining the scratches at higher and higher magnifications, she slept on it. She dreamed feverish dreams, and when she woke she dashed back to her lab and confirmed her nagging suspicion.
There was a precise match for every scratch—but it was always to be found on the other scuttler. The scuttlers interchanged body parts with each other. That was why no two scuttlers were ever alike. They made themselves dissimilar: swapping components in ritualised ceremonies, then crawling away to their own little hollows to recupe
rate. As more scuttler pairs were unearthed, so the near-infinite possibilities of the arrangement became apparent. The exchange of body parts had pragmatic value, allowing scuttlers to adapt themselves for particular duties and environments. But there was also an aesthetic purpose to the ritualised swapping: a desire to be as atypical as possible. Scuttlers that had deviated far from the average body plan were socially successful creatures, for they must have participated in many exchanges. The ultimate stigma—so far as Kimura and her colleagues could tell—was for one scuttler to be identical to another. It meant that at least one of the pair was an outcast, unable to find a swap-partner.
Bitter arguments ensued among the human researchers. The majority view was that this behaviour could not have evolved naturally; that it must stem from an earlier phase of conscious bioengineering, when the scuttlers tinkered with their own anatomies to allow whole body parts to be swapped from creature to creature without the benefit of microsurgery and antirejection drugs.
But a minority of researchers held that the swapping was too deeply ingrained in scuttler culture to have arisen in their recent evolutionary history. They suggested that, billions of years earlier, the scuttlers had been forced to evolve in an intensely hostile environment—the evolutionary equivalent of a crowded lobster pot. So hostile, in fact, that there had been a survival value not just in being able to regrow a severed limb, but also in actually being able to reattach a severed limb there and then, before it was eaten. The limbs—and later, major body parts—had evolved in turn, developing the resilience to survive being ripped from the rest of the body. As the survival pressure increased, the scuttlers had evolved intercompatibility, able to make use not just of their own discarded parts but those of their kin.
Perhaps even the scuttlers themselves had no memory of when the swapping had begun. Certainly, there was no obvious allusion to it in the few symbolic records that had ever been found on Hela. It was too much a part of them, too fundamentally a part of the way they viewed reality, for them to have remarked upon it.
Looking up at the fantastic creature, Rashmika wondered what the scuttlers would have made of humanity. Very probably they would have found the human race just as bizarre, regarding its very immutability horrific, like a kind of death.
Rashmika knelt down and propped the family compad on the slope of her legs. She flipped it open and pulled the stylus from its slot in the side. It wasn’t comfortable, but she would only be sitting like that for a few minutes.
She began to draw. The stylus scratched against the compad with each fluid, confident stroke of her hand. An alien animal took shape on the screen.
Linxe had been right about the caravan: no matter how frosty the reception had been, it still afforded them all the chance to get out of the icejammer for the first time in three days.
Rashmika was surprised at the difference it made to her general mood. It wasn’t just that she had stopped worrying about the attention of the Vigrid constabulary, although the question of why they had come after her continued to nag at her. The air was fresher in the caravan, with interesting breezes and varying smells, none of which were as unpleasant as those aboard the icejammer.
There was room to stretch her legs, as well: the interior of just this one caravan vehicle was generously laid out, with wide, tall gangways, comfortable rooms and bright lights. Everything was spick-and-span and—compared at least to the welcome—the amenities were more than adequate. Food and drink were provided, clothes could be washed, and for once it was possible to reach a state of reasonable cleanliness. There were even various kinds of entertainment, even though it was all rather bland compared to what she was used to. And there were new people, faces she hadn’t seen before.
She realised, after some reflection, that she had been wrong in her initial judgement of the relationship between the quaestor and Crozet. While there did not appear to be much love lost between them, it was obvious now that both parties had been of some use to each other in the past. The mutual rudeness had been a charade, concealing an icy core of mutual respect. The quaestor was fishing for titbits, aware that Crozet might still have something he could use. Crozet, meanwhile, needed to leave with mechanical spares or other barterable goods.
Rashmika had only intended to sit in on a few of the negotiation sessions, but she quickly realised that she could, in a small way, be of practical use to Crozet. To facilitate this she sat at one end of the table, a sheet of paper and a pen before her. She was not allowed to bring the compad into the room, in case it contained voice-stress-analysis software or some other prohibited system.
Rashmika noted down observations about the items Crozet was selling, writing and sketching with the neatness she had always taken pride in. Her interest was genuine, but her presence also served another purpose.
In the first negotiation session, there had been two buyers. Later, there was sometimes a third or fourth, and the quaestor or one of his deputies would always attend as an observer. Each session would begin with one of the buyers asking Crozet what he had to offer them.
“We aren’t looking for scuttler relics,” they said the first time. “We’re simply not interested. What we want are artefacts of indigenous human origin. Things left on Hela in the last hundred years, not million-year-old rubbish. There’s a declining market for useless alien junk, what with all the rich solar systems being evacuated. Who wants to add to their collection, when they’re busy selling their assets to buy a single freezer slot?”
“What sort of human artefacts?”
“Useful ones. These are dark times: people don’t want art and ephemera, not unless they think it’s going to bring them luck. Mainly what they want are weapons and survival systems, things they think might give them an edge when whatever they’re running from catches up with them. Contraband Conjoiner weapons. Demarchist armour. Anything with plague-tolerance, that’s always an easy sell.”
“As a rule,” Crozet said, “I don’t do weapons.”
‘Then you need to adapt to a changing market,“ one of the men replied with a smirk.
“The churches moving into the arms trade? Isn’t that a tiny bit inconsistent with scripture?”
“If people want protection, who are we to deny them?”
Crozet shrugged. “Well, I’m all out of guns and ammo. If anyone’s still digging up human weapons on Hela, it isn’t me.”
“You must have something else.”
“Not a hell of a lot.” He made as if to leave at that point, as he did in every subsequent session. “Best be on my way, I think—wouldn’t want to be wasting anyone’s time, would I?”
“You’ve absolutely nothing else?”
“Nothing that you’d be interested in. Of course, I have some scuttler relics, but like you said…” Crozet’s voice accurately parodied the dismissive tones of the buyer. “No market for alien junk these days.”
The buyers sighed and exchanged glances; the quaestor leaned in and whispered something to them.
“You may as well show us what you have,” one of the buyers said, reluctantly, “but don’t raise your hopes. More than likely we won’t be interested. In fact, you can more or less guarantee it.”
But this was a game and Crozet knew he had to abide by its rules, no matter how pointless or childish they were. He reached under his chair and emerged with something wrapped in protective film, like a small mummified animal.
The buyers’ faces wrinkled in distaste.
He placed the package on the table and unwrapped it solemnly, taking a maddening time to remove all the layers. All the while he maintained a spiel about the extreme rarity of the object, how it had been excavated under exceptional circumstances, weaving a dubious human-interest story into the vague chain of provenance.
“Get on with it, Crozet.”
“Just setting the scene,” he said.
Inevitably he came to the final layer of wrapping. He spread this layer wide on the table, revealing the scuttler relic cocooned within.
Rashmika had seen this one before: it was one of the objects she had used to buy her passage aboard the icejammer.
They were never very much to look at. Rashmika had seen thousands of relies unearthed from the Vigrid digs, had even been allowed to examine them before they passed into the hands of the trading families, but in all that time she had never seen anything that made her gasp in admiration or delight. For while the relics were undoubtedly artificial, they were in general fashioned from dull, tarnished metals or grubby unglazed ceramics. There was seldom any hint of surface ornamentation—no trace of paint, plating or inscription. Once in a thousand finds they uncovered something with a string of symbols on it, and there were even researchers who believed they understood what some of those symbols meant. But most scuttler relics were blank, dull, crude-looking. They resembled the dug-up leftovers of an inept bronze-age culture rather than the gleaming products of a starfaring civilisation—one that had certainly not evolved in the 107 Piscium system.
Yet for much of the last century there had been a market for the relics. Partly this was because none of the other extinct cultures—the Amarantin, for instance—had left behind a comparable haul of day-to-day objects. Those cultures had been so thoroughly exterminated that almost nothing had survived, and the objects that had were so valuable that they remained in the care of large scientific organisations like the Sylveste Institute. Only the scuttlers had left behind enough objects to permit private collectors to acquire artefacts of genuine alien origin. It didn’t matter that they were small and unglamorous: they were still very old, and still very alien. And they were still tainted by the tragedy of extinction.
No two relics were ever quite alike, either. Scuttler furniture, even scuttler dwellings, exhibited the same horror of similarity as their makers. What had begun with their anatomies had now spread into their material environment. They had mass production, but it was a necessary end-stage of that process that every object be worked on by a scuttler artisan, until it was unique.
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