by Robert Reed
The giant room was filled with scared people doing nothing. The dead corona was strewn across the floor, its heat and its stench thickening the pressurized air. The Archon was standing close, and Meeker too. Sometimes the men spoke on call-lines, sometimes to one another. But mostly they did nothing except watch Quest help with the work. They wouldn’t dare touch her. Not in these circumstances, not with their lives and every bigger thing at stake. That was the shell of her confidence.
“No,” she said, looking at the big piece of paper. “That line bends here.”
“You’re certain?”
She said, “Yes.”
The old teacher was preparing a large accurate copy of the message. Quest’s eyes were best, and she copied what she saw with a sharpened pencil while he made notes between and beside the lines. Not one mark on the globe duplicated an existing letter, but there were passing resemblances that gave the game hope. And sometimes Nissim would go back and look hard at one word or two, muttering when he breathed, repeating a string of possible translations that gave their audience reason to bend at the hips, waiting for enlightenment. But so far, his best attempts only brought more questions.
Quest had never written with any implement. Now she was finishing the final line from a text that was as old as the Creation, or older.
Such an odd thought, and welcome. Her new hand slowed, trying to render the final symbols perfectly.
“And that’s it,” said Nissim.
It was. Yes.
King set the globe on the floor.
Meeker came forward, for the first time. He had unremarkable exterior, nothing to separate him from a million other soldiers, but he carried himself as if no one was half so important. Even List gave the man a careful gap in space and in noise.
“How close is the translation?” asked the general.
He only spoke to the human.
“This is an ancient language,” Nissim said. “Ancestral, probably. Hopefully. But I don’t have any of the books that I need.”
“People have been sent to the library,” Meeker said.
There was an excellent library below them. Quest had sneaked inside on several occasions, always at night, reading random volumes in the dark.
“If they survive the mission, you’ll have everything from your shopping list,” Meeker promised.
Nissim looked at the writing and then looked up. His eyes avoided every face. “All right,” he said to nobody.
No one else spoke.
Then the old woman cried out, and Diamond ran up alone. A dozen soldiers were chasing him, losing the chase, and another dozen were accompanying the boy’s human friends. Until that moment, Quest hadn’t realized how worried she was. Then the unsuspected weight was gone, and she felt even more confident than before.
“But that is the full message, yes?” Meeker asked.
The Archon came forward, alone. He meant to examine the paper, but Meeker stopped him with the touch of a finger.
“Give our scholar some room,” said the voice in charge.
The Archon put on a smile. “Of course.”
Master Nissim stared at the carefully transcribed words. His own pencil was busy in his hand, spinning between fingers. But his face was calm and thoughtful, red-rimmed eyes dancing back and forth without any trace of order. Quest watched for order. The man wasn’t reading what he could understand, and he didn’t seem to be lingering over any piece of the text either. For a thousand days, Nissim had been growing older. Each time Quest saw that face, it wore more wrinkles and white hairs and broken, unhealing veins. But not this time. Under these awful circumstances, the man’s exterior appeared peculiarly youthful, the blood behind the old skin helping smooth features by hundreds of days.
Quest didn’t like human faces, but she liked his face.
She couldn’t read human thoughts, much as she tried. But she had a clear sense of his mind when Meeker asked, “How close are you?”
“Not close,” the old teacher said. “Not yet.”
Nissim was lying.
“Well, we don’t need to remind you about the urgency of this.” Then with a general’s sense for drama, Meeker tipped his head, giving everyone good reason to listen to the carnage outside.
Haddi was hugging her son.
King and Karlan approached the boy from opposite directions. The alien stomped twice at the floor, greeting his brother, while the giant human clamped his hand on top of the bare head, saying, “Stop being an idiot.”
The irony was rich. Two souls that tried to kill Diamond were now rejoicing at his rescue.
Irony wanted Quest to laugh.
She didn’t laugh.
Seldom arrived, and his brother slugged him in the chest, saying, “Stop being brave.”
Haddi gave Elata a suffocating hug.
The girl bit her bottom lip, saying nothing as she stared at the floor.
Nissim’s pencil had stopped moving. The youth in his face had suddenly drained away. He looked weary and then angry. The mysterious words needed one more long stare, and then he looked at the gray globe that was waiting patiently to the side, no longer needed and indifferent to the lack of attention. The object needed a long stare, and Quest tried to pull the insights out of the man’s mind. And then, as if sensing the interest, Nissim turned towards her face, taking a moment to clear his thoughts. He meant to whisper something. Something very important needed to be shared. Great events and little ones had led to this moment, and Quest felt ready and lucky, even though she sensed that she wouldn’t relish what she would hear . . . and that’s when Meeker took one long step forward, pulling a compact pistol from under his bright green general’s shirt.
The first round exploded on impact, throwing her across the floor.
She was lying alone on the butcher floor as the next nine bombs left her battered, unable to resist as the soldiers that came running at her from every direction, like cockroaches.
Slayer tools were slicing apart his sister’s body, power saws and the finest knives in the world helping separate the unessential away from what seemed to be her mind. Impressive planning was on show. The soldiers worked quickly, some of them smiling to hide their fears. They wouldn’t touch her body without rubber gloves or the heel of a boot. The bravest pair volunteered to drop the soulless meat into glass buckets filled with acid. Even the blood was worrisome. A woman soldier walked about the slaughter, cooking the dark blue spills with a handheld torch.
King barely watched his sister being eviscerated.
These circumstances needed a good polish, and that’s why Meeker went to Diamond before anyone else. Not even pretending to smile, he said, “I didn’t want this. I hate this. But the creature has been running free too long, and we know about a hundred incidents where she’s done harm, by choice or chance.”
Diamond was listening to the human, but his face was empty.
“I know the creature tried to help you before,” the general said. “And I don’t want you to believe that I would want it hurt in any lasting way. ‘Her,’ I mean. I don’t want ‘her’ to be in pain, much less crippled. But she had to be contained. Do you understand me?”
Diamond seemed to nod, although the motion was very slight.
“Quarters have been built,” Meeker continued. “There is a home waiting for a reduced, much safer version of her. No witness has seen the creature absorbing or manipulating glass, and so there’s a glass room near the palace—”
“Glass,” Diamond said.
“Everyone needs to be safe, including her.”
“Quest,” said the boy.
“Yes. Quest. Of course I know her name.”
The conversation was just one set of noises that King absorbed and mostly ignored. He also heard the wailing of coronas and the dull concussive booms of guns, and there were several conversations and dozens of important faces nearby, not one of them mattering. What drew his hard focus was one man standing alone, standing motionless, one foot in front of the other as if he was
planning to take a walk but still wasn’t quite certain where he wanted to be.
King stared at his father, and he listened to the little man’s breathing and the quick sorry racing of his heart. War had eviscerated the Archon’s office. But instead of being dumped into buckets, the old powers were now worn by men in bright uniforms—warriors who had never killed another man with their own hands. The creature who once ruled the world had been sidelined by endless war. Civilian tasks were few, and List had no clear authority or even the right to speak. He was just another piece of the audience. He was almost pitiful, although what mattered to his son wasn’t pity and it wasn’t sorrow, much less any desire for greater, deeper understandings. All the miseries in the world, and what transfixed and saddened King was the cavernous gap between himself and that defeated creature.
The teacher was another important, disregarded face. Carrying the paper and its unknown words, Nissim approached the Archon.
“What?” Father asked, anticipating some demand.
The Master used a rough whisper, the intact hand hiding his mouth and the fur around his mouth. “I need to go below, sir. There’s no time.”
Something about the request amused Father, at least enough to draw out a wary smile. “I just spoke to a caretaker at the Antiquities Library. Those volumes are on their way now.”
“No.” Nissim had distracted eyes. “You don’t understand.”
Even weakened—particularly because of his lack of power—List retained a clear sense of people, what their sounds and various silences meant.
“You found something inside that text,” Father said plainly, and not quietly.
The Master was careful to look only at the Archon’s eyes. “The spotter’s station,” he said.
“At the bottom of this tree?”
“Yes.”
The smile turned suspicious. “You want to use its telescopes.”
“Yes.”
“And a nearby window and binoculars won’t do.”
“They won’t,” the man said.
“You want to see if the sun is really gone.”
“I know it’s lost. What I need to see is what remains below us, and if I can, judge what’s between us and there.”
Their conversation was fascinating, but Meeker wanted words with Quest’s other brother. Showing only the thinnest caution, the general said, “You were eavesdropping on me. I know you heard every word that I said to Diamond.”
King said, “Yes.”
“But I want you to appreciate something, young man. A lesson that your father undoubtedly knows: patience always has to surrender to wisdom. And that includes my patience with you.”
The unexpected had arrived, and King’s attentions had to split. He lifted one foot and dropped it again. “What do you mean?”
“The Quest creature has been visiting you at the palace,” Meeker said. “I know this. For a long while, I’ve known how you and your brother dangle the bell and then slip away to meet with your sister.”
“And you did nothing.”
“Nothing to either of you, or to her. I thought it was best to bide my time, waiting until the hard decision had to be made.”
King was rigid as a coral statue.
“And this had to be the time,” said the world’s ruler. “I took action, I take responsibility, and my only apology is that I couldn’t give you either one of you children fair warning.”
King had too many mouths to follow, too many shifting conversations. He was the largest beast in the room—the largest living beast—yet for the first time in his life, he felt like a whisper about to be swallowed by the echoes.
“Crush me or let me walk away,” said Meeker.
King stared down at him.
“But be quick, please. There’s a platoon of aides waiting to share their disastrous reports.”
“Walk away,” said King.
“Thank you,” said his enemy, that tiny skeleton and the papery skin strolling past him, revealing little trace of fear.
The soldiers kept working. Quest’s mind was a slick gray body, which was exactly like King’s mind. That and a shattered skull and a sloppy length of what wasn’t a spine were being laid inside a long and heavy glass trough—a reservoir used by slayers to catch the acidic milks from certain corona glands. Despite the intense damage, those bits of tissue began to move, flinching and crawling until one soldier was alarmed enough to smack the skull with a big iron mallet, and then ten big men carried a second trough over and nested on top of the first, leaving a gap barely thicker than a human hand. Once their safety was assured, the soldiers gathered around the prisoner, everybody looking through the thick glass, a few making the kinds of jokes that caused grown men to giggle.
Father was still explaining the world to Nissim.
“You don’t understand,” he said for the third or fourth time. “We assumed . . . we had to hope . . . that the coronas had been trying to reclaim their father or grandfather, whatever this is. But no, they’re everywhere in the District of District. Thousands have come. And I’ve gotten reports that they’re attacking the reef, and blessing of blessings, they’re slaughtering the papio fleet too. But about the spotter’s post, it went silent early on. The call-lines might be broken, but most likely, the facility has been destroyed. The monsters are murdering and wreaking havoc. And so even if I could give you permission, I wouldn’t.”
King walked away from the two humans.
Diamond saw him. What wasn’t a smile revealed his icy white teeth, but King strode past, conspicuously ignoring him, and Diamond whispered to him, the same two words repeated again and again.
“Great day, great day, great day.”
King walked on.
Standing apart from everyone else, still wearing the filthy coveralls, Karlan looked ready for any order or for no orders. He wasn’t relaxed, but watching King step up to him, his nervousness showed only in the slow shifting of his feet and a lack of color in his voice. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Your ship,” said King.
The man looked up at Tomorrow’s Girl. “Yeah, and what do you want it for?”
“We need to escape.”
Karlan tilted his head, inviting his companion to listen to the roaring coronas and the gunfire. Except there were few guns left with ammunition and crews. And in the same breath, one of the colonels was warning Meeker that the fully grown coronas had arrived—bigger than these babies that had already killed uncountable thousands.
“You want my ship,” Karlan said.
“Yes.”
“Tethered and too damaged to fly, and all of these big doors locked tight. You want to use that wreck to escape.”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” said Karlan. “I never imagined you were stupid.”
A wicked sound slipped out of his bottom mouth. Then King said, “You haven’t begun to imagine my plan.”
That earned a quiet nod, and silence.
“I’ve injured humans but never killed any,” King continued.
“What’s that?”
One giant to the other, he said, “I understand the mechanics. I don’t need any help. But what I need from you is your expert opinion. When my enemies die, do I look at their faces or not?”
The final cannons stopped firing, out of shells or destroyed, and for an instant it felt as though the world would turn quiet again. But that illusion ended with a thundering that was heard and felt. A giant corona had jetted into the most distant door—meat and momentum driving into the steel plates, bending most of them and shattering a few before the bloodied carcass fell away, leaving gaps where the next three corona could shove their heads into the brightly lit interior.
Soldiers had to be given orders and encouragement and an officer to lead them.
Diamond walked toward the glass coffin, but one remaining soldier waved his hammer. “No, no. Go stand with the others.”
The others were miserable, each in his or her own way. Seldom was sitting on a spare
stool and Elata was standing behind him, each with arms wrapped around their own chest and both of them crying. Haddi needed to hug her son. Diamond let her cling, smelling her sweat and her breath. But the biggest smell came from the corona. The Archon decided to ignore Master Nissim, turning to a nearby aide just to ask some distracting question. Nodding wearily, the Master glanced at the copied text before trying to roll it up. But the cylinder was sloppy, so he opened it again and rerolled it two more times before he felt satisfied.
“This is awful,” Mother said.
Diamond nodded, but that didn’t feel like enough, so he said, “It is awful.”
No words matched the mood.
King and Karlan were standing close together, talking quietly when the hammer-man approached them. Using rank and his confidence, the hammer-man told the human to get to work.
A curse was ready in Karlan’s mouth. But what he did was hold his mouth closed while nodding, and then he look up at the ceiling once before walking away, apparently obeying that command.
And that’s when Diamond understood.
There was no plan inside his mind, nothing so clean and neat as that, and if forced to explain, he couldn’t have defined his own wants. But what he felt was the sudden warm lift that always came before the conscious idea—more instinct than language, simpler and truer. He saw what was important while everything else turned to vapor, drifting away. His mother asked him one question, and he answered it immediately and honestly but couldn’t remember in another moment what she said or he said, and he couldn’t even guess why she had to tip his head over so that she could kiss his eyes. But she gave him those two kisses, and then her hands released him, and as Diamond stepped away, he realized that Master Nissim had found someone else to talk to.
There was a second prisoner here, but she had been forgotten. Nobody would stop Prima if she tried to flee now. But where would she go? Looking up at the teacher, she found enough focus to listen to his careful pleads, but then as Diamond arrived, she reached up, waving her hand like a student might.
