by Liz Williams
“This only confirms that you are right—we cannot stay here.”
“Start working on it. You know where we can go. And the aliens are coming with us.” Rakh looked at her out of night-dark eyes, not needing to reply. That was the advantage of a shared history. Rakh knew exactly where she was talking about. Yamunotri: the mountain fortress. The site of our last stand.
As Rakh returned to his office, Jaya strode across the courtyard, fighting the urge to remain against the wall and bask in the heat of the sun. Whatever lay ahead, it was good to be back, away from the dim, green half-world of the ship. The colors of the temple seemed to glow: blood red walls against the Shiva blue of the sky. The light lay thick and slow, sending slanted shadows into the shrine, and the hot air spun with dust. Somewhere, she could smell frying sarnosas, and the oily odor made her stomach contract. She was suddenly ravenous. Maybe Rakh could send the runner to the café across the street. But there was little time to think about that now.
She squinted up into the limitless heavens. Would the ship crash as its orbit decayed? Or would it simply wither like a plant that had seeded? Jaya glanced back at the pod, now decomposing in the sun. Ir Yth stood, watching, her four stumpy arms folded uncomfortably about herself. Sirru was exploring the courtyard.
What are they going to do, if they’re stranded here? What are we going to do with them? Jaya thought she’d understood the first lesson of power—Keep it close to your chest—but now she was not so sure. She only knew that she did not want the aliens to be whisked away to some American laboratory. They belonged to Bharat now. And what was happening in the rest of the world? What were the Americans doing now that Singh had admitted to the presence of an alien? That was another thing she had to find out, as soon as possible. Shiv Sakai would surely know.
The thought of power, of a cure for Selenge, kept pounding in her head like the beat of her own heart. So much for her dreams of being ordinary.
Sirru was standing by the wall, whispering to himself. He cocked his head as if expecting the wall to reply. Jaya gave him a doubtful glance. By now, the pod had decomposed to a tracery of wiry veins. Was this what the ship looked like now, a vast and delicate skeleton drifting on the winds from the sun? The thought was deeply troubling. She said abruptly to Ir Yth, “I need to talk to you.”
It is hot here, the raksasa said, irrelevantly. I did not think it would be so hot.
Jaya remembered that this was Ir Yth’s first actual visit in the flesh. She forbore from asking what the raksasa had thought it would be like.
“Please come inside.”
The raksasa fluted across to Sirru and they followed Jaya up into one of the little rooms on the second tier. Sirru still seemed to be talking to himself, a murmured litany echoing from blood red walls. Jaya sat on a bench by a window and gazed out over a tumble of roofs, and then at the river, molten in the sunlight. It all looked so normal. Sirru peered past her shoulder with interest. A skein of crows flew up into the day and he blinked, momentarily startled.
“Ir Yth,” Jaya said. “I need to know. What will happen to the ship?”
The raksasa began to sway from side to side like a child’s spinning top, a disconcertingly uncontrolled gesture.
It is dying. It will fade to dust and fall.
“And you knew it was dying?” Jaya asked. The answer was obvious, but she wanted to see what Ir Yth would say.
A long, mournful pause ensued, then a jangling discord of emotions, stronger than any Jaya had felt before from Ir Yth. A black line of old blood still marked the raksasa’s face like a fissure in the earth. At last Ir Yth replied, No.
Jaya knew that she was lying, but let the matter drop. “Well, what happens now? Are you stuck here? Will your people send another ship?”
Eventually.
How long is “eventually”? Jaya wondered. Aloud, she said, “I don’t know what my people will do when they find you’re stranded here. They may want to imprison you, experiment upon you…” She was trying to frighten the raksasa, but Ir Yth merely stared at Jaya with detached interest. “I think it is better if you and the mediator stay here with me and my—my team, here in my temenos.”
Very well, said the raksasa with unexpected compliance. We will stay here. And you will serve us.
We’ll see about that, Jaya thought, but she bowed her head and said, “Of course.”
3.
Khaikurriyë
Anarres sat in her house, looking out over the endless expanse of Khaikurryë, and trying not to cry. She should never have listened to EsRavesh and his promises. Oh, he’d honored them, all right, revising her status upward to the promised level, and her temenos had benefited as a result. That was the one good thing to come out of all this. But for herself, the increase in status was hollow. Her suppressant levels had been slightly reduced, and with that reduction had come the realization that the increase in status didn’t matter anyway, was nothing more than a part of the endless hierarchical shifts within írRas society.
Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Anarres commanded herself sternly. She got up from the mat and collected a handful of rainwater, splashing it over the vine, which emitted a plangent chord in gratitude. Methodically, Anarres watered all the plants and made sure that the feeding system of the house was correctly timed. Then she went into the sleeping chamber and searched for her plainest, most comfortable robe. She put it on, waxed her face, and bound her quills back into their mesh. It was mid-afternoon now, and at sunset she was supposed to go down to the Marginals. There was some sort of official function tonight, and EsRavesh wanted her to attend. Afterward, he told her, she’d be expected to entertain some of the guests.
Maybe it was just her imagination, but his instructions made her uneasy; she felt a premonition of disaster. The deep sunlight suddenly seemed to darken. Anarres blinked, wondering what would happen if she simply ignored EsRavesh’s request and didn’t show up. She had never contemplated disobeying the khaithoi before, so this was not an option that she normally considered—though then again, among her own caste she enjoyed her work. Perhaps her touch of defiance had to do with the change in suppressant prescription.
The house chimed with a sudden, demanding note. Someone was waiting to come in. Anarres glanced up. Who is it, house?
The house informed her that the visitor was her clade-sister, Shurris. Her spirits rising, Anarres hastened to the door. Then she stopped. The leaves of the singing vine were bristling in the direction of the door. She sensed nothing from the house, but the vine was alarmed, and normally the vine loved Shurris, who brought it different waters. Anarres stared uncertainly at the vine and brushed a hand along its furred stem. The vine was bristling with static, sending prickles along her skin. The chime sounded again.
House?
The house replied with a jangling discord of pheromones. The sense was blurred, as though the message was somehow distorted. Anarres stood dithering in the hall for a moment, then made a decision. Quietly, activating her scale to its fullest extent, Anarres slipped around to the back of the house. From her own terrace she had access to others, and there was a route down through the ferns that she often took as a shortcut on her way to the nearest gardens. Pretending that this was nothing more than a quick jaunt, Anarres slipped between the ferns. She knew that if she thought about what she was doing, she’d lose courage, so she concentrated instead on the thought of seeing Sirru again. That thought hurt, quite a lot. She hadn’t expected to miss him so much…
Never mind, Anarres told herself with sudden determination. You made a mistake, and now you’re going to put it right. Somehow.
The question now was who might be after her, and where to go. She had no intention of heading for her family’s temenos, or to Sirru’s. If someone was pursuing her, it didn’t make any sense to go somewhere that she was known, and besides, she didn’t want to place anyone else in danger. The house chimed behind her with an insistent, warning chord. Anarres glanced over her shoulder. She could see nothing t
hrough the heavy blanket of ebony ferns, but if the khaithoi had sent someone after her, he or she might be able to track her by scent; it depended on the person. The scale would provide some protection, but not much.
Above her, something was moving along the terrace. Through the ferns, Anarres glimpsed a long jointed arm, ending in a bulbous claw. An armored head, mottled in crimson and mauve, swung slowly from side to side. Its eyes glinted in the shadows of the fronds. One of the Enforcer castes. Anarres did not wait to see more. She bolted down through the ferns and then, aided by the clarity of panic, she finally had an idea of where to hide. She would go to the Naturals’ enclave, and ask for their help. She’d never before had the desire to go anywhere near the Naturals—an unruly, inelegant lot who always seemed to smell a bit strange—but she had heard that they hated the khaithoi, and so perhaps they might hide her. Anarres fled down through the labyrinth of the city, heading for the enclave.
Under the new laws, the Naturals had been suppressed, herded into the dead temeni at the very edge of the desqusai quarter. Before her status update, Anarres had been convinced that this was a good thing, but now an element of doubt entered her mind. She had no conception of what it was like to be a Natural. The thought of being able to think whatever one pleased was a frightening one, and difficult even to entertain. It violated social order; it was heresy. Anarres was momentarily dizzied by the twinge of pain that snapped through her cerebral cortex as the suppressants kicked into the concept and dispelled it. She shook her head to clear it, wondering what it was she had been thinking about. Then memory returned and the cycle began again.
Anarres hurried on, thinking hard about innocuous matters to dispel her growing migraine. She could hear the enforcer coming down the row of terraces behind her, moving fast and hard through the ferns. Anarres began to run, ignoring the discomfort of earth beneath her bare feet. She came out on the bank of a nearby canal. The dark water gleamed in the afternoon sunlight; it was a place of sudden harsh angles and sharp shadows. There was nowhere to hide.
Frantically, Anarres looked left and right, and saw that there was a barge gliding down the canal. A figure was hunched over, unmoving, in its prow. Standing on the bank, Anarres sent allure out across the water, hoping that the pilot was of a sexually compatible caste. His head snapped up, and she saw the sudden glow of interest in his yellow eyes. He turned the tiller toward the bank, and Anarres sprang over the short distance and onto the deck. Without trying to explain, she bolted for cover beneath the long black roof of the barge. The pilot looked hopefully through the hatch.
Go, go. Anything will be yours! Anarres promised rashly. The pilot’s head disappeared, and she felt the vessel shift as he took it out into midstream. Making her way to the stern, she peered out between the cracks. The enforcer was standing bemused on the edge of the wharf, twitching a spiny tail. Anarres sank back into a crouch and took a shaky breath. A shadow fell across the doorway: the pilot, returning. With a sigh, Anarres realized that it was time to honor her promises.
THREE hours later, the barge had traveled through a series of locks into the farther reaches of the canal network, and Anarres put her head cautiously through the hatch. She could tell that they were approaching the area in which the Naturals were confined. There was a curious smell in the air, like the moments just before a storm. This area of the city was unkempt and untended; no one wanted to get too close to the Naturals because of the danger of picking up some unhealthy clinging notion. Thanking the pilot, Anarres stepped out onto an ancient wharf. Its sides were carved with eroded faces of long-abolished castes; she wondered what kind of people had lived here, thousands of years ago. Reaching out, she touched the wall and felt the material of ancient seeds crumbling beneath her fingers. There was a pungent waft of spice as a cloud of unfamiliar pollen drifted down on a current of air. Anarres watched for a moment as the barge glided away, then started walking swiftly along the edge of the canal.
4.
Varanasi, Temple of Durga
Sirru had been trying to speak to Jaya’s temenos, but could not get a word out of it. He cajoled, snapped, and praised, but the temenos remained perfectly and stubbornly mute.
“It doesn’t seem to like me,” he mused sadly.
Ir Yth sent: exasperationa spike of contempt/.
That is because it is not alive
Sirru’s response was immediate: sympathy, loss, a wave of affection for Jaya. “Her temenos is dead? She should have told me. I would never had intruded. I should not have pressed her so hard—”
Ir Yth said impatiently, It was never alive in the first place. These of your kindred do not grow their temeni. They build, from earth.
Once again, Sirru was bewildered. He had never met so baffling a desqusai caste. They couldn’t speak properly; they lived in dead buildings and did not notice the difference. And from what he had found out about their reproductive habits, they were only just beginning to Make. There is so much to sort out and set right.
Well, Sirru thought grimly, he’d have plenty of time to learn. Ir Yth had informed him that it could be a long time before the next depth ship arrived to find out what had gone wrong. Sirru was trying not to think about Anarres or his home; it was just too depressing. But the wider implications of some hideous khaithoi plan were vastly worse. Moreover, there was the question of how long he and Ir Yth could survive on this new colony. He was not too concerned about his own physical demise—his First Body rested in translation storage around Rasasatra, after all. He did not, however, want to lose this Second Body. If his Second Body died, the reconstruction team would have to hang around until Sirru 3 or someone else from the temenos got the communication network on-line. And who knew what havoc Ir Yth might wreak here in his absence? Who knew what impact it might have on the desqusai caste as a whole? He thought uneasily of Arakrahali.
At least they now knew that Ir Yth was an enemy. She has been too long from her own kind, Sirru thought, and that is lucky for me. She is forgetting how to lie. No further mention had been made of what had befallen Ir Yth. Sirru had confirmed only that the translation plate had malfunctioned, due to the unstable state of the ship. It was fortunate, he said after a pause, that he and Jaya had been nearby to terminate the attempted connection and rescue Ir Yth from the damaged apparatus before she was too badly hurt.
He was certain that the raksasa did not believe him, and equally sure that she would pose no immediate challenge to his dubious explanation. Both of them grudgingly recognized that the other’s talents might be needed until rescue arrived. It had, Sirru thought now, been extremely fortunate that Jaya had acted as she did. Another few moments and Ir Yth would have been whisked away to Rasasatra, there to report on the project’s failure and secure the doom of the world of Tekhei. They had achieved a reprieve, but for how long?
Sirru could not help but wonder what would happen if he continued to forge ahead with the project. If Ir Yth was desperate enough to sabotage a depth ship in order to discredit desqusai development, who knew what she might try here on the ground? He had not yet told Ir Yth about the ship’s seed, carefully carried down with them in the pod and now resting in its own armored shell within his robes. The seed would start presenting serious problems soon; he needed to find somewhere cold to store it, and if this were a typical temperature, a cold place would be hard to find unless he could somehow gain access to a refrigeration unit.
What do you intend to do? Ir Yth asked after a pause.
“We will consider the viability of the project,” Sirru informed her, stalling for time. “My first priority will be to examine the current state of communications. Are you conversant with this?”
It takes place through electronic media. Ir Yth gave a delicate shudder. Unspeakably primitive.
“I feel,” Sirru said, with something close to sympathy. “Well, I suppose that’s adequate for now, but we’ll need to get more sophisticated structures in place as soon as we can. Otherwise contacting the rescue team might be a little com
plicated.”
Acquiescence.
“Before we proceed with that, though, I should like to see more of this new world,” Sirru said. “I need to get a feel for it, for how people conduct themselves. What they eat, and what they drink.” He suppressed a smile at Ir Yth’s look of unconcealed revulsion; khaithoi, of course, had long since abandoned such indelicate behavior, at least in the presence of their social inferiors. “Will you ask Jaya to accompany us?”
I will ask, the raksasa said, glumly.
It seemed, however, that Jaya did not think it was a good idea for Sirru to start wandering about the place. It could be dangerous, she said. People didn’t know anything about the aliens. Some fanatic might try to kill them. Here she glanced at Ir Yth, who confirmed that a previous attempt had already taken place. It would be necessary, Jaya said, for them to leave the temenos, and soon. She had already decided where to go, and was organizing travel arrangements. But in the meantime, Sirru must stay here.
“I thought you said you’d explained all this in terms of the dominant metaphor?” Sirru asked Ir Yth, who replied, mystified, I thought I had.
“We are analogous to the entities which correspond to the Primary Makers, I thought.” Sirru’s quills rattled briefly. “‘Gods,’ as they call them here. What a strange, brave people, to challenge their Makers.” He was not particularly afraid, confident of his ability to handle this relatively small group of desqusai; he had proper speech, for instance, where they did not, and he was fairly well defended. Better that he remain safe. But still, he did want to see the city. If it was inadvisable to go out in plain view, therefore, he would go out unseen.
