The Sisterhood

by Juanita Coulson

  “Ah, my dear! You are awake!” Lady Esher pounced, taking Renee’s limp hand. She exuded motherly concern, something Renee hadn’t enjoyed since she was a teenager. That touch and gentle voice were very lulling. They almost, but not quite, banished the Arbiter’s nausea and headache. She was grateful for the kind attention.

  Somehow, she was on her feet. More or less. As wobbly as a newborn kitten. Lady Esher tucked a plump arm through Renee’s and led her into another room. To Renee’s relief, the lighting in here was normal. The place was crowded with Niandians, all of them eager to greet the Esteemed Arbiter. Men knelt and kissed her hem. Women embraced her, gushing.

  “We were so afraid …”

  “There were rumors that the Arbiters would be alien males, and be cold, unfeeling brutes, ignoring our suffering and our rights. But you, Esteemed Lady, you will have the beloved gentleness common to all your sex. You will not be cruel. We can trust you.”

  “So kind, as you were kind to the wounded children …”

  “Yes, of one heart with her Eminence. It was shown on the newscasts. Both of them, ministering to the injured, not afraid to dirty their lovely hands …”

  “Sisters of one soul …”

  “Tender …”

  “Nurturing …”

  “She will know the right thing to do, yes, yes …!” Renee was having trouble focusing and remaining on her feet. A sea of faces circled her. Not only ivory-skinned Niandians, now. This was a cosmopolitan gathering. Butterscotch-colored people, those with burnt-caramel complexions, and some of the mauve-hued sub-race. All of them fawning on her, complimenting her endlessly. Lady Esher was leading the chorus, as doting as if Renee were her protégée.

  “I — I don’t understand what it is you expect of me …” Renee said, her words a feeble croak.

  Lady Esher hugged her. “Only your womanly duty, my dear. We know you will be fair. When you speak to our premiers in assembly, you will tell them the truth, won’t you?”

  “Truth … sure … nothing but the truth …”

  A Niandian punched a control panel nearby, and holograms took shape. The herd of well-wishers edged back so that Renee could have a clear view. She blinked and leaned unashamedly on Lady Esher, trying to pay attention to the sharpening three-dimensional figures.

  She’d seen better holograms somewhere else recently. But she couldn’t pinpoint the occasion and place.

  These weren’t bad, though. Close-ups of refugees. Niandians. Being ordered about. Forbidden to get on board a spaceship. They weren’t being permitted to escape from disaster.

  “But … but those are Niandian soldiers, preventing Niandian citizens from getting to safety, leaving the war zone,” Renee said thickly.

  “Those are traitors, an appeasement faction within our own military forces,” Lady Esher explained. “Look at them! They told those colonists that they had no need to fear the Green Union!”

  “Motherless collaborators,” an onlooker growled.

  “May they rot in whatever hell the Great Nurturer consigns them to for all eternity!”

  New holograms formed, and the Green Union was now on the scene. Tall, green-furred, shape-shifting creatures. Another close-up, as something was exchanged between the invading Green Union forces and the traitorous Niandian troops. Not money. The exchange medium gleamed, like precious gems.

  And then the refugees were shown again as the Niandian soldiers and the Green Union ones forced the hapless civilians into a dark cavity. A spacecraft’s maw. An alien equivalent of those terrible World War II newsreels — captive peoples, thrust into cattle cars, to be carried away to concentration camps, and worse. The dark cavity sealed itself, and the hologram shrank so that Renee could see the entire picture. The ship was launching, leaping up into space, nearing hyperdrive status. Then it winked, entering light-year-spanning speed ranges, stars blurring as the interstellar ship rushed toward its destination.

  Renee put a hand to her throbbing temples. Why didn’t someone at least offer her some aspirin? If Tae were here, he’d know that …

  Tae?

  But he was a Haukiet, a Green Union species type. Once he had been one of those green furred shape-shifting monsters. The beings who herded helpless Niandians into a slave spaceship — after buying them from Niandian traitors.

  Voices, underlining her sudden wariness of what Tae represented. “Those slimy abominations! Our prisoners of war will never escape from them.”

  “Inhuman! To them, we are no more than animals, mere living tools to labor for them …”

  “I have heard it whispered that they eat us, too …!”

  “And the Niandian appeasers are no better …”

  “Sellers of their own kind! They want the war to end …”

  “Yes! Want it to end now, before we are able to press home our recent victories and perhaps reach some of those prison camps before it is too late …”

  “Why should the appeasers, the traitors fear a peace that favors the Green Union? They will have everything to gain …”

  “The invader has already dealt with them …”

  “Perhaps they even plan in secret to continue their loathsome slave trade …”

  “And the appeasers have guarded their tracks well. They hope to strengthen trade bonds with those alien monsters …”

  “Oh, yes, their future will be rich, while Niand as a whole suffers, groaning under crippling reparations the traitors and the Green Union will exact upon us …”

  “Our only prayer is the Arbiter Renamos. If she is fair …”

  More holograms. Green Union forces moving through masses of kneeling Niandians, picking and choosing. Separating the sheep from the goats, the healthy from the sick or injured. Every so often, a weapon was pointed at a captive, and that Niandian became a pitiful heap of ashes.

  Renee clenched her fists, swept with hate. No wonder Lady Esher and the rest were so angry. They had a right to be! Look what their people had been through at the ruthless hands — shape-shifting limbs, rather — of the Green Union.

  “And those who are spared … oh, it is worse,” Lady Esher said, her eyes brimming. She and Renee cried on each other’s shoulders for a moment. The Niandian went on, “Our poor females, in particular. Those — those terrible creatures, our enemy, can assume an almost human form, you know. And they … they … they have a sexual strength far beyond our species’ males. They can — oh! I cannot utter such filth!”

  No need for her to do so. Renee got the idea, all too clearly, and shuddered.

  “Disgusting! Awful!” Renee murmured, swallowing a hiccup. She felt like a wreck, and not just a physical one. She agonized for the Niandians, empathizing deeply.

  An unseen finger poked through the cotton candy clogging her thoughts. A memory. Difficult to get ahold of.

  Someone else has suffered, too. Suffered just as badly as the Niandians have. I’ve seen it, in other holograms. Somewhere …

  “We know how this upsets you, my dear, but we had to make the situation plain. The Arbiters’ fairness is famous. We know we can trust you. You will not betray us as the others have.”

  The nagging memory wouldn’t leave Renee alone, but couldn’t quite be brought into focus. It lingered, prodding her subliminally, stirring suspicions.

  And then her attempt to recall was swept away.

  A figure was plowing through the mass of Niandians. Not a hologram, this. Solid. Real. Huge and hulking. An amorphous upright shape with shimmering green fur and enormous blue eyes.

  Niandians screaming, running in panic …

  The Haukiet approached Renee and produced appendages — fingers, of a sort. Those closed about her throat, bearing down. Those blue alien eyes peered directly into hers and a gash of a mouth opened, displaying oddly beautiful pink fangs.

  She beat frantically at the hands encircling her throat. The room was spinning, her vision darkening as air got scarce.

  Someone had to help her! And fast!

  Suddenly, those hug
e hands fell away. Renee squirmed back a pace and fought to clear the dancing colored lights from her sight.

  The Haukiet was still standing almost on top of her, his pink mouth agape. The skinny Niandian man was next to the alien, pressing one of those billy-club guns against the Haukiet’s side. After an interminable moment, the Haukiet started to crumple. Pink liquid spumed down his side and onto the floor. Blood. Haukiet blood.

  The alien toppled forward onto Renee, and as she wriggled out from under his collapsing weight, the sensations were shockingly familiar. Another, similar collision. A Haukiet — though not looking at all like a Haukiet — falling on her. But that member of the Green Union species had been protecting her, shielding her with his own big body. And he had ended up with a back full of shrapnel gouges, as a result. His blood, too, was pink and foamy.

  A great tree of green-furred flesh, the Haukiet’s form crashed to the floor.

  Renee massaged her aching throat while the Lady Esher petted and caressed her, sobbing. “Oh, my poor, poor dear! Here!” and she handed Renee another glass of something. The liquid felt wonderful going down — icy and soothing. “He might have killed you!”

  “Tampering!” someone shouted. “That is how he got in here …!”

  “An agent! A spy within our ranks …!”

  “We must guard the Esteemed Arbiter from …”

  “She was his target. He wanted to slay her …”

  “He certainly tried hard enough,” Renee whispered huskily. “In another second he … he would have mashed my windpipe. But why? And where did he come from?” Pasyi, the gray-and-white striper, pointed to a tile-walled cubicle, one of the stomach-looping Niandian matter-relay units. “I — I don’t understand. How …”

  “An assassin,” the skinny man said quickly. “A suicide mission. It has happened previously. I cannot tell you of the critical losses we have suffered, and in very high echelons of our military and our matriarch’s trusted advisors. The traitors and the Green Union manage to penetrate, every so often.”

  “They will risk all, even their lives, to cripple us,” Esher told Renee. “They strike at our leaders, our heart, to leave us helpless. They want to slant any truce negotiations before they begin. And you, my dear, are such an influential person, they had to attack …”

  “Me?” Renee said, incredulous. Her head hurt all the way down to her neck and shoulders now.

  “Again and again! They fear you will influence the assembly of premiers in Niand’s favor.”

  “That’s — that’s not how the Arbiters work!”

  Esher hadn’t heard Renee’s weak protest. “That is why they tried to kill you at the spaceport, why they still try to kill you, using this suicide agent. Oh, we must save you!”

  “I hope somebody does.” Renee’s knees sagged, and suddenly people were supporting her, helping her over to a sofa, urging her to lie down, to sleep.

  But this is ridiculous, her mind seemed to say to her. I just woke up. Just in time to be nearly strangled by a Haukiet. Everything is so damned mixed up!

  Voices. Soft. Insistent. Worming their ways into her brain.

  The Green Union, butchers, killers of children, despoilers of women not of their race, slavers! They must be destroyed. You are the only one who can do it. Tip the balance of the assembly, rid the universe of this inhuman menace …

  Other voices, not so soft, but equally insistent.

  “Do you think it’s been enough?”

  “That’s four now, plus the radiation. That will heighten the effect of the ingested distortants. It is working.”

  “But she is ill.”

  “That will pass soon. It is mere alien weakness.”

  The voices died away to an incoherent muttering. Real muttering, not like the dreamy sounds Renee had been hearing earlier.

  Or had she heard them?

  She couldn’t be sure. Not of anything. Sick and exhausted, she let herself sink into nothing.

  And eventually had to swim back to the surface once more, up through the maple syrup and sticky tape. She rolled onto her side and peered at the world through bleary eyes. A knot of Niandians was in the corner of the room. They were bent over a machine with lots of twinkling lights. A Niandian supercomputer? Whatever it was, they were unhappy about the readings they were getting. One of them spat a graphic obscenity.

  Lady Esher was helping Renee to sit up, against Renee’s mumbling objections. “My dear, for your safety’s sake, we must leave.”

  The Niandians towed an unwilling Arbiter toward a matter-relay cubicle. Pasyi and the skinny man crowded close, pushing Renee along. She wanted to put her foot down and shout, “No!” Those tile-walled things were bad news. They shouldn’t use them. Among their other drawbacks, they tended to make one as sick as a dog.

  “Wait a minute!” she finally got out. The Niandians did, though they fidgeted with impatience. Renee struggled to compose her thoughts, grabbing at them as they floated by, like brass rings on a carousel. “The — the Gevari have sabotaged these matter-relay systems. Monkeyed with them. Dangerous. Shouldn’t travel that route …”

  Lady Esher laughed, a jolly, breast-jiggling chortle. She took Renee’s face between her plump hands and patted the younger woman’s cheeks gently. Very much like a Jewish mother. “Oh, my dear. My dear! Don’t you see? We are the Gevari. You have been so misguided by our enemies’ accusations. They lied to you, about that, about everything. Come now, and you will understand.”

  Reluctantly, Renee got into the cubicle with the others. Her stomach lurched again, and again they were somewhere else.

  “You see?” Esher crowed. “Nothing happened.” She led Renee out into that particular terminal’s adjacent room.

  “Aah, they have …” The skinny man was flinging up his hands in alarm, squeaking.

  “You are not the only ones who can interrupt the matter-relay procedures.”

  General Vunj awaited the new arrivals. Vunj and five soldiers. All of them had billy-club guns and were pointing those straight at Lady Esher’s group.

  Fear was a net, wrapping itself around Renee. They had been caught. Someone had made a mistake, and they had been caught.

  Had she suspected General Vunj of being a secret Gevari? Nothing so helpful. Actually, he was the enemy.

  “What a pleasure to behold your treasonous face in these circumstances, Hij,” the general said. He moved toward the group and seized the skinny man’s jumpsuit, shaking Hij like a rat. “You have tricked yourselves, finally.”

  “Don’t hit him,” Renee pleaded.

  “You ask for their lives, Esteemed Arbiter, after what they have done to you?”

  “They haven’t done anything to me except show me the truth. You’re the one that’s the traitor,” Renee said, outraged. “You and all those who wanted to tilt the peace process toward the Green Union.”

  General Vunj gawked, momentarily speechless. Then he studied her escorts with narrowed eyes. “So that is what they told you? It is as the matriarch feared. You fools!” he yelled, venting his wrath on Lady Esher and the others. “You dare do this to an Arbiter? To a guest of Niand? A guest who put her life in our hands? Fanatics! Idiots! Don’t you realize that the Arbiters can destroy us all if any harm comes to one of their representatives?”

  Nagging reminders were poking their way through Renee’s headache. Scratching fingernails along her gray matter. That increased the pounding in her temples and hurt her raw throat. Nor was her stomach behaving at all well.

  “I guessed what they were up to when my operatives informed me of your abduction, Esteemed Lady Renamos,” the general said. “But I thought even the Gevari would have the sense to avoid such an intolerable act.” Vunj’s fist was still locked in the skinny man’s jumpsuit lapels, and the general shoved Hij this way and that as he spoke, like a living swagger stick. “Things had gotten so confused that the matriarch was wary of me. Of me! Well, this will set her mind to rest on that score. You are all under arrest.”

 
There were more people in the room, loping past Renee. Vunj’s soldiers fired their weapons, and the new comers fired back. Men shrieked and fell, writhing. Renee stared in dismayed astonishment. She recognized some of the newcomers. They included the Gevari who had been bent over the computer machine back in — the other place she’d recently come from.

  A Gevari shoved a white billy-club gun tight against General Vunj’s neck, preparing to fire. Lady Esher threw up a hand. “No. We need him alive. He will be very useful.” Vunj rolled his eyes at her, furious, struggling futilely. Esher said, “You know a great deal that can hurt us, but far more that will help us. Yes, I think you will make a most valuable tool.”

  Lady Esher didn’t sound a bit motherly now. Appearances had been deceiving. Renee began to have reservations about her. Esher. Wasn’t that name familiar, somehow?

  So damned many things were. And all of them kept whirling around dizzyingly, not quite within reach.

  She was being hustled into the matter-relay unit once more. Everyone crowding in. General Vunj, too. Where were his soldiers? Renee had a shivery feeling that they were dead.

  Lurch!

  They were somewhere else.

  Renee moaned. The lighting here was red. Lady Esher and the other Niandians looked magenta-skinned, and their clothes were garish hues of burgundy and scarlet. Just like the inside of Renee’s gut.

  “You will never succeed!” Vunj blustered as they forced him across the room. “My people are efficient, and I am not a willing subject for your devious tactics.”

  “Ah! But we can be very thorough,” Esher retorted. She smiled at Renee. “Are we not, my dear?”

  “Excuse me. I’m going to be sick.”

  She was. Very. Something resembling a super-ashtray sat on a nearby table. Renee lunged for it, retching, feeling worse than she could ever remember. Friendly hands patted her on the back, fetched a tissue to wipe her mouth, soothed her. It didn’t help much. Her stomach was a tortured lump, and everything got very, very dim.

  Darkness. Nightmares. And then …

  Waking up. Not by choice. She was half sitting, half lying in a hammocky chair. The headache still pounded at her, Renee longed for something sharp; with that, she could poke a hole in her forehead and maybe let some of the pain out.