According to his implant, he waited nearly an hour before the doctor, a gray-haired woman, arrived with a Farhkan in tow. This Farhkan—as had the first one he had met—wore shimmering gray fatigues. Red eyes were set in the iron-gray hair of the square face, with longer and darker hair covering the top of the skull. Was this one the same, or did they all look alike?
“Lieutenant Desoll? We apologize, but Dr. Ghere was delayed. Oh, I’m Isabel Kynkara.”
“I understand.” Trystin nodded, inhaling slowly and taking in the vaguely familiar odor, the mixed scents of an unfamiliar flower, a muskiness, and cleanliness. “I believe I have met Dr. Ghere once before.”
“That is correct.”
Again, Trystin was surprised by the feeling of the words scrolling through his mental screen.
Isabel Kynkara fiddled with the entry plate on her door, then stood back. “I’m just here to facilitate things. I’ll be in the next office, the one that says ‘Staff,’ waiting for Major Gresham and Lieutenant Ohiri.”
“Thank you.” Trystin wondered why he was thanking her, but gestured for the Farhkan to enter the office.
Ghere entered without speaking, and Trystin flicked on the interior lights, although the window—overlooking the med center gardens—really supplied enough light.
As Trystin closed the door, he had the feeling of the same silence as the last time he had met with the Farhkan, but with his enhanced implant he could sense more clearly the total block on communications that settled upon the room. How did the Farhkans manage it? And why did it matter, if they only wished to talk philosophy?
Ghere settled into the chair behind the desk; Trystin took the plastic seat before it.
“You thanked the doctor because you would like to make her comfortable, even if it was a form of a lie.”
“Don’t you engage in such niceties?”
“Not if the niceties involve untruths. I admit to being a thief, but not a liar.” A hint of amusement followed the words.
Trystin nodded, not exactly surprised that the conversation had gone back to theft. The Farhkan appeared persistent, and that bothered Trystin.
“Have you thought about theft recently, Lieutenant?”
“Not until I realized I would be speaking to you. At least, not recently. I did think about it after our last conversation.”
“What did you conclude?”
Trystin pursed his lips. “I suspect theft, in the broadest sense, must occur in all intelligent species, at least if the species is to survive.”
“An interesting speculation. Perhaps … I would have to consider that at greater length. What about you? Are you a thief?”
Trystin did not answer. Ghere bothered him. In some ways, the doctor felt alien, in others, all too human.
“I have upset you. Why is this so?”
“You’re both alien and too familiar.”
“That is true. You do not like to lie, do you?”
“No,” Trystin admitted.
“Do you know why you dislike lying?”
“Not really, except it feels wrong.”
“So … you live in a society that requires theft, and you refuse to admit you are a thief. You live in a society that encourages lying and avoid it. Is not living in a society where theft is necessary but refusing to admit it not a lie? Are you not a liar?”
“I try not to be.”
“Are you a thief?”
“I thought we had agreed that intelligence, by nature, requires a form of theft.”
“I do not recall agreeing exactly to that concept. Are you a thief?”
“In your terms, I’m not sure what you mean by theft,” Trystin said slowly.
“Let us lay that aside for a moment. There is an old saying. Force creates good.”
“I don’t recall that.” Trystin paused, licked his lips. “Might makes right?”
“Is there a difference between good and right?”
“I’m not convinced that what people think is good is always right.”
“Would you explain?”
“Many people feel that what they believe in is good. A poor man would say that all people should be rich, but the Great Die-off showed that any world has a limit. It is right not to destroy a world’s ecology—” Trystin stopped, realizing that he was uncomfortable talking about destroying ecologies when, in effect, planoforming was destroying one ecology to replace it with another—and even in his terms, that was theft.
“You are upset again.”
Trystin said nothing. Anything he said would get him in deeper.
“I think that is enough, Lieutenant. I would request you think some more about theft. And about whether any good is absolute.” Ghere stood.
“Of course it’s not.”
“Then why do you humans persist in trying to impose such absolutes on others, even using force to do so? And why do you persist in refusing to identify yourself in terms of absolutes while trying to persuade others to accept those absolutes?”
“We’re human.”
“Is that good?” Ghere stood.
Trystin could feel the comm screen—or whatever it was—vanish.
Ghere nodded.
Finally, Trystin turned to open the door and to get Dr. Kynkara, wanting to leave, but knowing that the questions the Farhkan raised wouldn’t vanish, not for a time, if ever, and that bothered him, too.
Later, as he walked out of the medical center, he tried not to shake his head. He still didn’t understand what the Farhkans wanted. Maybe he never would. They might be roughly human-looking, but that didn’t mean that they thought like human beings.
They clearly wanted something. The question was what, and Trystin didn’t even know where to begin to seek the answer—or whether he should, or would have the time. He had the feeling that before long surviving was going to become difficult again.
Ulteena had said something about living in the present, and perhaps he should, at least while Salya and his parents and he were all together.
He kept walking toward the surtrans station, his thoughts swirling together.
31
Trystin stood at the chest-high barrier, leaning forward, his arms resting on the golden logs polished smooth by craft, time, weather, and other arms. The wind whipped through his regulation-short hair, swooping up off the water and past the lookout on the edge of the Cliffs. Behind Trystin the Cliffs rose even higher, to nearly three thousand meters, but the jagged tops were lost in the clouds created by the moist air coming off the dark green waters of the Palien Sea.
Five hundred meters below the sheer drop-off, the waves crashed against the basalt walls, sending fine spray halfway up the Cliffs. In regular lines, the waves marched in and shattered themselves against the jagged rocks.
While cultivation and home-building and gardens had softened much of the land over more than eight centuries, nearly a thousand years of young and rough waters had not blunted the sharp edges of the Cliffs, although trees did poke from odd crevasses above the reach of the slightly salty sea.
“I never get tired of watching the sea.” Trystin’s words barely carried over the rushing of the wind and the crashing of the waves below. “It’s always relaxing.”
“It must be something in the blood.” Salya brushed her hair, not that much longer than Trystin’s, off her forehead.
“Not from Mother.”
They both laughed.
“Does Shinji like the ocean?” Trystin paused. “He must, if he’s from Kaneohe.”
“He does talk about the time when there will be oceans on Helconya.”
“That’s going to be a long time.”
“You have to have dreams.”
Trystin nodded. “I suppose so. You’re lucky to have the same ones.”
“They’re not quite the same,” she said wryly.
“Oh. That’s why he’s still mostly a friend?”
“Something like that.” Salya straightened. “If you want to have time before dinner to stop by the market
and see if they have carnot nuts, we’d better get back to the car.”
“All right.” Trystin watched one more line of waves crest, white running along the tips, then break over the jagged needles at the base of the Cliffs. He straightened and turned, almost running into a Park officer, who stood in the middle of the stone walkway that led back up to the parking area. The dark-eyed officer’s right hand rested on the butt of the bolstered shocker.
“I see you were enjoying the view. It is rather spectacular, not something that someone sees on just any planet.” The Park officer paused before continuing. “Might I ask where you are from?”
“Cambria,” Trystin answered.
Salya’s face blanked.
“Cambria is a rather large place these days. Almost anyone could claim to have come from there.”
“Cedar Gardens, Cedar Lane, on Sundance Boulevard off Horodyski Lane. I grew up there, and my parents still live there.”
“Cedar Gardens does not sound like a real address, although that would only be my humble perception.”
“I’m sorry, Officer. That is the address.” Trystin slowly took out his wallet and offered both his Service identification and his vehicle license to the Park officer.
“Hmmm … I would be most curious as to where you got these.” The words of the black-haired and dark-skinned officer remained even and polite.
Trystin stared at the man, then nodded politely. “I received my first vehicle license at the constabulary on Hyroki Avenue eight years ago. The service identification was just issued on Chevel Beta last month when I got my pilot’s wings. I’m on home leave.”
“Your … friend … is also rather tall.”
“My sister? Yes, she is. Siblings do tend to resemble each other.”
The Park officer handed Trystin’s license and Service ID back to him, turning to Salya. “If I might trouble you …”
Salya, still blank-faced, dug her Service ID from the pocket of her shorts and handed it to the officer.
“Desoll—even the same name. Well, I suppose you would have the same name if you were brother and sister.” After studying the ID for a time, and comparing the holo to Salya, he handed it back. “Thank you.”
“You’re so welcome, Officer,” Trystin said politely.
The Park officer stared at him. Trystin met the gaze, refusing to waver. Finally, the officer looked away and stepped back.
Trystin nodded again, even as he stepped up his system into high-reflex, unarmed-combat mode, his ears intent on any sound as he and Salya walked up the steps and along the walk to the parking area. There, Trystin turned back, but the Park officer stood at the top of the steps, still looking toward them.
“Your sarcasm probably wasn’t such a good idea.” Salya opened the door on her side of the electrocar.
“Probably not, but his whole attitude bothered me. His job is to protect the ecology, not to run around harassing people.”
“You looked about ready to kill him.”
“I should have gone into combat mode.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Salya pointed out. “He’s the type who’s convinced that anyone who is tall, blond, and blue-eyed must be a rev. Besides, then he would have tried to use the shocker, and you would have hurt him or made him lose face. Where would that have gotten you?”
“In restraints, no doubt, and out of the Service.” Trystin shook his head. “But it bothers me.” He shifted his weight in the small car, and checked the safety harness before pulling out of the lot.
“It bothers me too, but what can you do with people like that? You can’t kill them, and nothing less will change their minds.”
How was the Park service officer any different from the rev officer he’d questioned years before? Trystin was halfsurprised that the thought crossed his mind. They both had fixed perceptions independent of contrary reality. His eyes checked the mirror. “They’re following us, two of them in an official car,” Trystin observed. “I think we’d better head straight home.”
“This is really absurd. Why are they after us? You can’t counterfeit a Service ID.”
“It’s because we look like revs, but the Service ID should have stopped that. You can’t be an officer and be a rev. The screens are too deep.”
“Prejudice isn’t always rational.”
“Great.”
Trystin continued to watch the Park officers all the way into Cambria. He drove the electrocar straight into the garage, triggering the door while he was still on Cedar Lane.
After they left the garage, he stepped up to the wrought-iron railing atop the stone wall and executed a stiff parashinto bow—twice—in the direction of the dark green official car, before turning toward the house.
“That was childish,” said Salya.
“I feel childish. I’ve spent the last three years doing the bidding of the Service. I’ve been attacked, shot, wounded, and damned near lost my leg, and some silly little Park officer is convinced that I’m a rev spy—as if the revs would ever be stupid enough to send a spy who looked like I do.”
“There’s a lot of hatred growing.”
They walked silently along the path and up toward the house.
Elsin opened the door before they reached it. “We didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“We were sort of chased back. Some throwback pseudosamurai decided we had to be revs. He wasn’t impressed with my vehicle license or my Service ID. So they followed us home.”
Elsin frowned. “That does seem odd.” He stepped back, and the two walked into the foyer.
“It didn’t happen when I was with Shinji the other day, and he’s almost as tall as you are.” Salya pursed her lips.
“I suspect Shinji is somewhat darker than I am,” Trystin said wryly.
“You think it’s coming to that? I hope not.” Salya looked across the gardens toward Cedar Lane, but the green electrocar had disappeared.
“So do I,” answered Elsin, but he frowned.
32
A juvenile heliobird whirred across the darkening garden, his wings a blur as he swooped for the nest in the corner pine. The faint whirring of insects almost drowned out the underlying static of Trystin’s implant. Although he had damped down the receptivity to nil, somehow he was still aware of the background noise, even away from the Service and its systems and nets.
“Do you really understand what being a pilot means?” asked Salya.
“Probably not,” Trystin answered.
“Why did you accept the offer?”
“I’ve always wanted to be one.”
“I know.” Salya’s voice was low, and she leaned back on the bench. “You made models. You read books. You even bought the pilot simulator for your console and installed it in a secret drive.”
“How did you know that?” Trystin looked at his sister in surprise.
“Who helped you with basic console programming? Besides, I was testing some ideas Father taught me about cracking systems.”
Trystin spread his hands. “Between the two of you no system would be safe.”
“Not from Father, except he’s so ethical he’d never look.”
“As opposed to nosy older sisters?”
Salya offered a faint grin before asking, “Is being a pilot what you thought it would be?”
“Better. I feel like I’m doing something. When I was on the line on Mara, we just waited and took what the revs handed us. I was lucky, and I made it through. A lot of perimeter officers didn’t. The official line is that things are improving—some commander told me that. But things still keep getting worse. No one seems to want to act. I asked about that, and the commander who was debriefing me nearly took off my head.” He paused. “It wasn’t that bad, but I felt like it was. She said that a planet was a damned big place, and that we didn’t have the resources.”
“We don’t.”
“If we don’t have the resources … we lost almost all the plains stations. Only two of us survived their minitanks.”
Salya moistened her lips. “You didn’t tell us about that.”
“So I got a commendation. I survived, and most didn’t.”
“There’s nothing on the news about those kinds of losses.”
“I’m not surprised. Before that, when the revs wiped out five stations on the western line, I was called down for using a data pulse to find out.”
Salya sighed.
Trystin turned on the bench to face her. “That doesn’t surprise you, does it? Not much, anyway.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, Trystin. It doesn’t surprise me much at all after that incident at the Cliffs. But it bothers me. What sort of people are we becoming?”
“We’ve always been thieves. Now, we’re becoming liars as well?”
“You’ve done some thinking, haven’t you?”
Trystin offered a short laugh. “I’ve had my thinking prodded.”
“You still want to be a pilot?”
Trystin shrugged. “You still want to be a xenobiologist?”
“Fair enough.” Salya stretched, then added, “You know … anytime you translate could be the last time you see Mother and Father.”
“I know. That’s true every time you travel between here and Helconya, and it would be true even if I stayed a perimeter officer.”
“But the probability goes up with each translation, and pilots make a lot more translations.”
“I’ve thought about it. That part wasn’t easy. Father and I talked about it. He even helped me set up a trust.”
“He would.”
“Yeah.”
“Dad was right. You do have a restless spirit.”
“I still like to come home,” Trystin reminded her. “And I miss the gardens.”
“Not enough. Someday, you’ll come home, still young, and we’ll all be gone.” After a moment, she added, “We’ll make sure it’s here for you. We all would want that.”
Trystin swallowed.
“I’ll miss you.” Her hand touched his gently.
“I’ll miss you.”
They sat side by side in the growing twilight, the insects twittering, the evening coming down like a purple shade, while the heliobirds settled into the pines for the night. The heavy scent of roses dropped into the twilit garden and almost made Trystin forget the faint static of the implant—almost.
The Parafaith War Page 22
