by Robert Reed
“A lost bullet could kill me,” said the boy.
“It won’t. We promise.”
Support crews and soldiers were working in the depths of the hanger, loud, brash voices suddenly rising. Their noise drew the boy’s gaze.
Divers pulled his attentions back where they belonged, which was outside. “You’re from the City of Round Roads, we think.”
“Yes,” said Zakk.
“Your parents belong to the League, and one of them, probably your father, is a member in high standing with the government there.”
Zakk blinked. “You must have read about me.”
“No, we’re just guessing,” Divers confessed.
“But I’m not here because of my father. I’m qualified on my own.” The boy’s feet squirmed against the rubberized floor, and he stared at the giant papio body—at the long hair and the child’s face and the brown flesh that was entirely one color and one flavor. And in particular, the boy watched those long, quick-moving telescopes.
“Ask questions, Zakk.”
The boy nodded. “I think it’s interesting. You can see in two directions at once.”
“It’s easy, if you have multiple minds.”
“Those are huge telescopes,” said Zakk.
“We don’t hear a question.”
“Are you Divers?”
There was no point denying it. “You’ll never talk to anyone else. Other voices lead to confusion.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Is it, Zakk?”
The boy said, “I’ve read about all of you.”
“Wonderful.”
He began to name each important name.
“They gave you the standard briefing,” Divers said, interrupting.
“And Tritian,” Zakk said. “I read all I could about him.”
There were reasons to avoid this subject, but Divers decided on straightforward questions. “Did somebody steer you toward that subject?”
“No.”
“Studying my brother was your idea?”
“His blood is orange,” the boy said, as if that was ample reason. Then he added, “I saw a sample inside the doctor’s book. It was just a little dried spot, but I thought it looked very pretty. And then I read about Tritian, and he seems wonderfully strange.”
“Stranger than Divers?”
Happy with the subject, the boy grinned. “I only meant that he’s very different from the rest of you.”
“In some ways,” she allowed.
“In many ways,” the boy said.
The crews and soldiers had finished their work, and when they fell silent, Divers looked back at them. The creatures were resting on their haunches while staring at the Eight. Several smiled until Divers looked directly at them, and then they stood tall and silent for a moment, making themselves feel brave before they retreated into the darkness.
Others emerged from a doorway—a few high officers and government people had come out to greet the morning, gathering beyond the hanger’s iron door. They were conversing with mouths and long arms. Divers found the subject interesting. This would be a fine moment to approach, offering to help with their difficult day.
Zakk followed closely, chattering about Tritian’s blistering hot acidic blood and the orange muscles that also worked like hearts and the other organs—muscles that could live outside the body for days. One silent brother absorbed to the unexpected praise. The other six ignored that half-informed noise. Their voices were what mattered, and they spoke to one another—one busy shared murmur discussing possibilities and practicalities about important matters that this boy would never understand.
The officers were still angry about yesterday’s disasters. Government people saw nothing but ugly ramifications. Both sides agreed that war wasn’t their goal or anyone’s policy. The policy seemed to be rage, every papio face betraying a combustive mood.
The ranking general gestured at the two vast telescopes, asking, “Have you seen anything new?”
“Nothing,” said Divers, walking out from under the hanger’s roof.
“Stay inside,” said the general.
“But I can’t see as much that way,” she said.
She had better eyes than anyone else, and she had the telescopes and endless practice watching the world from here. But the world could see her when she was in the open—another difficult-to-measure risk resting on a great pile of hazards. The important people were no doubt asking themselves if they should try to coax the Eight into the dark. But odds were that Divers would ignore them, which was disagreeable enough when you were standing alone. They weren’t alone. The other important people would see the brave one fail, and that’s why nobody tried to argue with her, every face nervous, lips curling while the hands built anxious fists.
The Eight walked out into the open, and Zakk followed. The safest position for the boy was inside their shadow, letting the enormous invulnerable body absorb any lost bullets. Yet without warning, the newcomer suddenly turned fearless, hurrying far out onto the rubber tarmac. Without a worry in his world, he dropped down on his haunches, a tiny pair of what looked like toy binoculars coming out of his deepest pocket.
Divers laughed gently, gazing up at the sprawling wilderness.
Talk among the officers fell back to the usual obsessions. Who had orchestrated that first attack? Was it the tree-walkers, some element in the papio ranks, or a marriage that straddled the reef and forest? Counts had been made. No weapons or fuel were missing from the local stocks, which was wonderful news. But you didn’t become important by trusting the first report, and the ranking general demanded fresh counts. Then a government woman asked for the latest target assessments, which meant Diamond. The intelligence officer claimed that the boy had survived the onslaught. But was that believable? Everyone was talking at once. Nobody held real evidence. Diamond could be anywhere in the Creation, including beneath the demon floor. Beneath the floor meant that he could be lost for the next million days. And even if he was alive and still somewhere the Corona District, how much were the papio willing to do, trying to gather up this prize before the tree-fools succeeded in destroying that half-grown gift?
The Eight settled on their haunches, eyes watching the wilderness.
Divers didn’t miss any word or the smallest breath.
A lesser general described the enemy’s overnight attacks. Two distant Districts, working together, had attacked fortifications of the reef’s lip, as many as one hundred dead and dying.
At that point, a government voice mentioned retribution.
The ranking general gave an unhappy sigh. “Our assault killed hundreds of our cousins yesterday,” he said.
“Cousins” was the most polite word for tree-walkers.
“But they didn’t have to fight us,” the woman said. “We were carrying out a rescue mission. We haven’t declared war. We were trying to extract our consulate personnel, and without provocation—”
“They’d endured one attack already,” the general said contemptuously. “Do you really think they wouldn’t try to slaughter the lot of us?”
Once again, various voices dismissed every blame, government people being the loudest and least secure.
“Anyone can build that kind of bomb,” said the ranking civilian.
“And what reason would we have to attack?” her aide asked, trying to support a superior.
“None,” said the woman, with feeling. “And besides, if war was our policy, then our first strike would have been fifty times more savage.”
No general would argue with that blunt opinion. Divers put down the telescopes and glanced over a shoulder, finding looks that were uncomfortable and slippery, ready for any excuse to change subjects.
Every voice inside the Eight had fallen silent.
Then Zakk put down his tiny binoculars. He said, “The wilderness is prettier here than at home.”
Divers lifted just one telescope, pressing it to the left eye. “Why does it seem prettier?”
&n
bsp; “Because it’s different,” Zakk said.
Then inside the Eight, a voice said, “Watch this one. I don’t like him.”
Tritian.
The others told him to be quiet.
Divers didn’t need to reprimand her brother. She rarely had to police her siblings. The great accomplishment of her brief life was to convince the Seven to obey her directions. They were free to offer opinions, and didn’t she often bow to their shared will? But they understood what Divers had always known: each of them was tiny—a speck of flotsam riding the same Time together, hundreds of days and millions of little voices bringing them to this very dangerous brink.
Foresters sold wood for money. Foresters were better climbers than most tree-walkers, although many had papio blood in their deep past. But appearances didn’t matter; they regarded both of their civilized cousins as being separate from them. Papio coins were the same as District coins, which made every species equally contemptible in any forester’s eyes.
A colossal burr-tree had been recently carved into lucrative planks, leaving behind a void filled with quiet empty air. The void was where the hunter-ship had taken refuge. To hide from the coronas, its skin was painted a mottled green, and that’s why the ship was hard to see against the trees. But once noticed, it looked out of place, preposterous, probably misplaced. Hunter-ships wanted the open air. Only skilled or drunken pilots dared punch their way through gaps and unbroken walls of foliage, reaching such a remote location. But there it was: corona bladders and bones, human machines and human bodies and human mind—all of that wrapped inside a carefully balanced entity, ten strong mooring lines holding it in place.
If not for its smell and her eyes, and also the endless tiny sounds raining out of it, Quest might well have flown past Bountiful, missing it entirely.
Quest was considerably harder to see than the airship. No unnatural scent leaked from her body, and every sound that she made belonged to the wilderness. Her shrunken form was transparent in places, richly green in others. She was breath and a dream, and maybe a flick of motion in the corner of the most observant, inadequate eye. Three times she had changed positions, gazing into windows and that one open doorway. She once even straddled a mooring line, contemplating making the short climb before slipping inside a space where hiding would be next to impossible.
The urge was resisted, and she retreated.
And then in the next moment, she imagined seven new ways to see what she wanted to see.
The decision was made. The adjacent burr-tree was a scrawnier, light-starved child of the original giant. She spread out along one of its branches and changed her flesh again. Sugar was a treasure to all kinds of mouths, and she made herself look like the sweetest plant in the forest—a rare epiphyte known as the sweetheart. The trickery took time, but she didn’t need perfection. Long before she was finished, ten species of birds and swarms of insects were arriving, greedily feasting on the easy nectars.
The birds celebrated the prize, and people noticed their singing.
A tall man looked down from his cabin’s window. His face was tired and forlorn, but when he stared at the sudden garden, he wiped his mouth and eyes and then his mouth once more.
Then he vanished.
A huge room claimed much of the ship’s belly. That was where the one wide door was propped open, letting motor sounds and voices escape. Suddenly two men came out of the room. They were straddling a small airship, and the airship growled and climbed towards Quest and then slipped past her.
One of the men was the old slayer, Merit.
She watched Merit until he was gone, and then she watched him again in her memory. Meanwhile the large man had returned to the cabin window, opening its glass, talking with a voice that was both soft and loud.
“I want to tell you something,” he said.
Diamond approached the window. He was crying without crying. His face was dry, those pale eyes free of tears, but everything about the boy looked miserable, worn and sorry and weak.
That pain shook Quest.
“What, Master?” asked Diamond.
Quest had seen the tall man long ago, riding with the boy inside the Happenstance. She found that memory and subsequent mentions of the boy’s teacher, which meant that this must be Master Nissim.
“What do you want to tell me?”
“That I’m sorry, for you and for your family,” said Nissim.
Diamond leaned against the cabin wall. His curly hair felt the breeze, lifting and twisting.
“For everyone, this is brutal,” said Nissim.
The boy gave a slight nod, starting to agree with his teacher. But he said nothing, and wanting to be anywhere else, he looked outside. And that’s when he suddenly found himself staring at the newborn sweetheart.
“Look,” he said.
“What’s that?” Nissim asked.
“Out there. Do you see it, on the branch?”
The man stood behind, following Diamond’s gaze.
Lying, the man said, “Now that you point it out to me, yes.”
“What is it?”
“A blooming sweetheart.”
Diamond was miserable, but his face was changing.
“Anyway,” said the Master. “What I wanted was to apologize.”
“For what?”
“I was slow yesterday. I should have seen Bits for what he was.”
Diamond watched the garden, the gathering birds. Fifty gold-throats made the air sing with their intense wing beats, and then from a high perch, a wild orange-headed monkey proclaimed his dominion over the distant prize.
The boy’s monkey appeared at the window, shouting a competing claim.
Diamond said, “Quiet.”
Perched on the windowsill, his monkey contemplated routes along mooring lines and the zigzagging branches. He didn’t want to be quiet, but there was no easy route to his goal, and the trees were filled with strange monkeys. That’s why the animal curled his upper lip, glowering in silence.
Quest quenched the flow of fake nectars.
“And things might be better now if I’d shot that man as soon as I knew. But I kept forgetting who you are, and I couldn’t shoot.”
The boy was listening, but he was watching the flowers too.
“So I am sorry,” the Master continued. “I am and always will be. But as one of my Masters warned me when I was young, ‘All of us are doing our best and our worst, and it happens at the same time.’ ”
Diamond turned and looked at his teacher, waiting.
Nissim’s face began to cry.
“ ‘Our best and our worst,’ ” the boy said.
“In the face of evil, we can only do so much.”
Diamond nodded solemnly, and then with a quiet, steady voice, he said, “There is no evil, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“Evil doesn’t exist,” he said.
“No,” Nissim muttered. “What are saying? No.”
“But that’s how it is,” the boy said emphatically.
His teacher was puzzled, dubious. Moving toward anger.
“All of us are good,” Diamond said, his words washing across the dying garden. “Everything and everywhere is good too.”
Nissim didn’t like what he just heard. “After yesterday, why do you believe there’s no such thing as evil?”
“I have to think that.”
“Why?”
“A voice told me,” he said.
“Whose voice?”
An odd smile tried to break the boy’s face in two.
“I don’t know,” Diamond said. “But I’ve heard the voice several times, and it only finds me when I’m alone.”
Until two hundred days ago, foresters filled the sprawling camp, but then the trees began to complain. At least that was the public legend: the brave men and women who harvested the wood could also hear the wood, and after so much cutting and carving, the wood had begged for rest. That’s why the foresters packed up their power saws and their shrines, movin
g to a different portion of the wilderness. One camp was pushed into hibernation while another was brought back into service. Merit knew some of these people. Peculiar, independent souls living between the two human realms, they traded with both species and smuggled for all when the payoff was rich enough. Some of these people were nothing but admirable. But Merit had always suspected that the wood didn’t talk to anyone. Money was what made these communities leap from camp to camp. If easy trees grew scarce, if it took too much work to cut another crop, one region was abandoned in place of another, more profitable site. And the foresters’ spiritual noise was just another way that those who held the saws proved to the world they were special.
Yet that skepticism was easily forgotten. Moving through the empty camp, Merit felt the presence of its vanished owners, and listening to the silences, he accepted that at any moment the first voice from a tree would find him.
His companion held a less superstitious attitude.
“I found the room,” Fret shouted from the far side of the lodge. “The copper river’s here.”
Startled birds broke into flight.
“Wait for help,” Merit shouted, and not for the first time.
But then came the cold clank of iron, rusting hinges squeaking. “Too late,” the youngster replied. And then, “All clear.”
Barely three thousand days old, Fret was an idiot about many matters, including the need for caution. But there was no telling the state of this machinery, and Bountiful’s captain had nobody better suited to bring an old call-line back to life.
Moving carefully along the walkway, Merit watched for booby-traps left to ward off copper thieves. But there were no trip-wires, and the small room seemed safe enough. Fret was lucky, or he was blessed with sharp instincts. Either way, not so much as a dirty needle was ready to hurt them.
The prudent old slayer was in no mood to dress down anybody.
“It doesn’t look too awful,” Fret said, bare hands tugging at rubber-clad wires.
“The owners haven’t been gone long,” said Merit.
“But idiots left the service hatch open.” There was a gap in the floor that allowed the rain to jump inside. “Another hundred dawns, and rust will start eating out the housings back here.”
