He could not get over the fact that nothing was real. Everything had been translated here by the Buonarotti Torus, as pure data. This habitat, this shipboard jumper he wore; this body. All made over again, out of local elements, as if in a 3D printer… The scarred Ki woman fascinated him, he hardly knew why. The portent he felt in their meeting (had he really met her, or just been in the same room?) was what they call a ‘transit hangover’.
He must sleep it off.
The Ki-anna was rated Chief of Police, but she walked the beat most days. All her officers above nightstick grade were seconded from the Ruling An’s Household Guard: she didn’t like to impose on them. The Ki – natural street-dwellers, if ever life was natural again – melted indoors as she approached. Her uniform, backed by Speranza, should have made the refugees feel safe: but not one of them trusted her. The only people she could talk to were the habitual criminals. They appreciated the Ruling An’s strange appointment. She made her rounds, visiting nests where law-abiding people better stay away.
The gangsters knew a human had ‘joined the station’. They were very curious. She sniffed the wind and lounged with the idlers, giving up Patrice Ferringhi in scraps, a resource to be conserved. The pressure of the human’s strange eyes was still with her—
No one ought to look at her scars like that, it was indecent.
But he was an alien, he didn’t know how to behave.
She didn’t remember being chosen – for the treatment that would render her flesh delectable, while ensuring that what happened wouldn’t kill her. She only knew she’d been sold (tradition called it an honour) so that her littermates could eat. She would always wonder, why me? What was wrong with me? We were very poor, I understand that, but why me?
It had all been for nothing, anyway. Her parents and her littermates were dead, along with everyone else. So few survivors! A handful of die-hards on the surface. A token few Ki taken to live in Speranza, in the staggeringly distant Blue System. Would they ever return? The Ki-anna thought not… Six Refuge Habitats in orbit. And of course some of the Heaven-born, who’d seen what was coming, had escaped to Balas or to Shet before the war broke out.
At curfew she filed a routine report and retired to her quarters in the Curtain Wall. Roaaat, who was sharing her living space, was already at home. It was lucky that Shet didn’t normally like to sit in Speranza-style ‘chairs’: he’d have broken a hole in her ceiling. His bulk, as he lay at ease, dwarfed her largest room. They compared notes.
“All the Refuges have problems,” said the Ki-anna. “But I get the feeling I have more than my share. Extortion, intimidation, theft and violence—”
“We can grease the wheels,’ said Roaat. ‘Strictly off the record, we can pay your villains off. It’s distasteful, not the way to do police work.”
‘But expedient.’
“Aaap… He seemed very taken with you,” said Roaaat.
“The human…? I didn’t notice.”
“Thap handsome Blue, yaaas. I could smell pheromones.”
“He isn’t a ‘Blue’’ said the Ki-anna. “The almighty Blues rule Speranza. The humans left behind on Earth, or on ‘Mars’ – What is ‘Mars’? Is it a moon?’
“Noope. A smaller planet in the Blue system.”
“Well, they aren’t Blues, they’re just ordinary aliens.”
“I shall give up matchmaking. You don’t appreciate my help… Let’s hope the An-he finds your ordinary alien more attractive.”
The Ki-anna shivered. “I think he will. He’s a simple soul.”
Roaaat was an undemanding guest, despite his size. They shared a meal, based on ‘culturally neutral’ Speranza Food Aid. The Shet spread his bedding. The Ki-anna groomed herself, crouched by a screen that showed views of the Warrens. Nothing untoward stirred, in the simulated night. She pressed knuckle-fur to her mouth. Sometimes the pain of living, haunted by the uncounted dead, became very hard to bear. Waking from every sleep to remember afresh that there was nothing left.
“I might yet back out of this, Officer Bhvaaan. What if we only succeed in arousing the monsters, and make bad worse?”
She unfolded her nest, and settled behind him. He patted her side with his clubbed fist – it felt like being clobbered by a kindly rock. “See how it goes. You can back out later.”
The Ki-anna lay sleepless, the bulk of her unacknowledged bodyguard between her and the teeth of the An; wondering about Patrice Ferringhi.
When his appointment with alien royalty came around, Patrice was glad he’d had some breathing space. The world was solid again; he felt in control of himself. He donned his new transaid, settling the pickup against his skull, and set out for the high-security gate that led to the Refugee Habitat itself. Armoured guards, intimidatingly tall, were waiting on the other side. They bent their heads, exhaled breath loudly – and indicated that he was to get into a kind of floating palanquin. Probably they knew no English.
His guards jogged around him in a hollow square; between their bodies he glimpsed the approach to an actual castle, like something in a fantasy game. Like a recreation of Mediaeval Europe or Japan, rising from a mass of basic living modules. It was amazing. He’d never been inside a big space-station before, not counting a few hours in Speranza Transit Port. The false horizon, the lilac sky, arcing far above the castle’s bannered towers, would have fooled him completely, if he hadn’t known.
He met the An-he in a windowless, antique chamber hung with tapestries (at least, tapestries seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches were scattered over the floor. The guard (different uniform from his palanquin escort), who’d escorted him here backed out, snorting. Patrice looked around, vaguely bothered by a too-warm, indoor breeze. He saw someone almost human, loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch, large, wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity, and realised he was alone with the king.
“Excuse my steward,’ said the An, ‘he doesn’t speak English well, and doesn’t like to embarrass himself by trying. Please, be at home.”
“Thank you for seeing me,’ said Patrice. ‘Your, er Majesty—?”
The An-he grinned. “You are Patrice. I am the An, let’s just talk.”
The young co-ruler was charming and direct. He asked about the police. Patrice noted, disappointed, that Ki-anna was a title, the Ki-she, or something. He wondered how you learned their personal names.
“It was a brief interview,” he admitted, ruefully. “I got the impression they weren’t very interested.”
“Well, I am interested. Lione was a friend to my people. To both my peoples. I’m not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?”
“We were twins, that means litter-mates, but partners’ too, though our careers took different directions.”
He needed to get the word partner into the conversation. The An partnership wasn’t sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond they knew. A lost partner justified his appeal. The An-he touched his discreet headset (he was using a transaid, too); reflexively.
“A double loss, poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously if you are completely frank—”
In this pairing, the An-she was the senior. She made the decisions, but Patrice couldn’t meet her, she was too important. He could only work on the An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his cause. He had the eerie thought that he was doing exactly what Lione had done – trying to make a good impression on this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very room. The tapestries (if that was the word) swam and rippled in the moving air, drawing his attention to scenes he really didn’t want to examine. Brightly dressed lords and ladies gathered for the hunt. The game was driven onto the guns. The butchery, the bustling kitchen scenes, the banquet—
He realised, horrified, that his host had asked him something about his work on Mars, and he hadn’t heard the question.
“Oh,” said the An-he, easily. “I see what you’re looking at. Don’t be offended, it’s all
in the past, and priceless, marvellous art. Recreated, sadly. The originals were destroyed, along with the original of this castle. But still, our heritage! Don’t you Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of painted slaughter? And by the way, aren’t you closely related, limb for limb and bone for bone, to the beings that you traditionally kill and eat?”
“Not on Mars.”
“There, you are sundered from your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural humans do it all the time, I assure you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Notoriously, the Ki and the An had both been affronted when they were identified, by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew that: but what an indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of the whole ‘KiAn issue’ was not a genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen up savagely against the oppressors. It was the fact that some respected Ki leaders defended ‘the traditional diet of the An’.
The An-he showed his bright white teeth. “Then you have an open mind, my dear Patrice! It gives me hope that you’ll come to understand us.” He stretched, and exhaled noisily. “Enough. All I can tell you today is that your request is being considered. You’re a valuable person, and it’s dangerous down there! We don’t want to lose you. Now, I suppose you’d like to see your sister’s rooms? She stayed with us, you know: here in the castle.”
“Would that be possible?”
“Certainly! I’ll get some people to take you.”
More guards, or servants in military-looking uniform, led him along winding, irregular corridors, all plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round plug of a doorway. The An-he’s face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned on a guard’s tunic.
“Take as long as you like, dear Patrice. Don’t be afraid of disturbing the evidence! The police took anything they thought was useful, ages ago.”
The guards shut the door and stayed outside: giving him privacy, which he had not expected. He was alone, in his sister’s space. The aeons he’d crossed, the ungraspable interstellar distance, vanished. Lione was here. He could feel her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images: glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind—
‘Recreation’ was skin-deep here. The room was essentially identical to his cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, and a closet bathroom, stripped of fittings. Her effects had been returned to Mars, couriered as data. The police had been and gone ‘ages ago’. What could this empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to try.
Was he under surveillance? He decided he didn’t care.
He searched swiftly and carefully: studying the floor, running his hands over walls and closet space; checking the seals on the mattress. The screen above the desk was set in an ornate decorative frame. He probed around it, and his fingertips brushed something that had slipped behind. Patiently, he teased out a corner of the object, and drew it from hiding.
Lione, he whispered. He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard jumper, and knocked on the round door. It opened; the guards were waiting outside.
“I’m ready to leave now.”
The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. “By all means! But don’t be a stranger. Come and see me again, come often!”
That evening he searched the little tablet’s drive for his own name; for any message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely noted the actual content. Next day, to his great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police were making difficulties.
“Speranza doesn’t mind having a touching tragedy associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king wryly. “A scandal would be far worse, so they don’t want to risk you finding anything inconvenient. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we’re meeting resistance.”
There was nothing Patrice could do, and at least it wasn’t a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, hopefully the police would have to give in. Back in his cabin, he examined the tablet again… Lione had been making a private, unofficial record of her thoughts on ‘the KiAn issue’.
KiAn isn’t like other worlds of the Diaspora. They didn’t have a Conventional Space Age before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when ‘we’ found them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are what remains of a planetary superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were their subjects, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or ‘Heaven Born’ first began to hunt and eat the ‘Earth Born’ Ki. They don’t do that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging—
Cannibalism happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called ‘atavists’ are not really ‘atavist’. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of an ancient, preconscious symbiosis. The An and the Ki were not animals, when this ‘stable genocide’ began. They were people, who could think and feel. People, like us.
The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister’s voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next entry was video: Lione talking to him, living and breathing. Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers, it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips, painfully happy.
Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet ‘below’. Patrice shuttled between the Station’s visitors quarters, where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t dare refuse a summons, but he declined all dinner invitations: which made the An laugh. The odd couple, the Shet and the Kianna, meanwhile showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls.
He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione’s journal. He didn’t want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.
Once, as they walked in the castle’s galleries, the hot breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. “That was the An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice’s ear. “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her… I tell her all about you.”
“I didn’t really see anything,” said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about.”
“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with air circulation, in this crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who don’t smell very nice.”
“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”
“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet.”
Lione’s entries weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. He started to be afraid he’d find her actually defending industrial cannibalism. But that never happened. Instead, as he immersed himself, he knew his twin was asking him not to accept, but to understand—
Consider chattel slavery. We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that? Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this relationship go too? The An and the Ki know their way of life must change. But there is a deep equality in their ‘exchange of being’, which we individualists can’t recognise—
Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s scars.
The ‘deep equality’ entry was almost the last. The journal ended abruptly, with no sense of closure.
Lione’s incense (he’d decided the ‘lichen’ was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he) filled his cabin with its subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuri
ng words he knew by heart a deep equality in their exchange of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who had left him so far behind—
The journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet know, didn’t dare to guess, where his passionate journey would end.
When he learned that he had a permit to visit the surface, but the Ki-anna and the Shet were coming with him, he understood that the Ruling An had been forced to make this concession – and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice to discover the truth? Or to prevent him?
He didn’t find out because he didn’t meet the odd couple until they embarked together, in full protective gear: quarantine-film coated bodies under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it in an escape capsule, breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the seared rubble of a landing field. The landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of grey and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.
“The An-he offered me a military escort,” said Patrice, when his freedom of speech was restored by helmet radio. “What was wrong with that?”
“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t be allowed.”
The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered the way he’d felt at their meeting. There had been a connection on her side too: he was sure of it. Now she was just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she’d read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine… but not with Bhvaaan around.
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 14
