A Darkling Sea (7 page)

“The Ilmatarans descend—according to human scientists— from smaller species which live as scavengers and predators around energetic vents. At some point the Ilmatarans became intelligent enough to cultivate chemosynthetic organisms, and eventually developed a sophisticated analog of agriculture, using stone pipes and channels to conserve and distribute energyrich vent water.”

“What sort of communities do they form?”

“Again, the information I have only includes archaeological data and some images taken from a distance. It appears that the Ilmatarans live in small communities, each centered on an active vent. They have some sort of division of labor, as the humans have observed individuals performing distinct tasks consistently.”

“How much they sound like Sholen,” said Gishora. “Small communities, careful stewardship of their resources, mutual assistance.”

“I only wish we could learn more about them,” ventured Tizhos.

“We will have the human rec ords to examine,” said Gishora. “I feel certain you look forward to that with great anticipation, as I do.”

“In all honesty, yes.”

“Tizhos—this elevator ride may represent our last chance to speak in complete privacy. Tell me if you pay much attention to the politics of consensus back home.”

“Only somewhat. I attend my community and workinggroup meetings.” She did not add that she had long ago stopped paying the slightest attention to anything discussed at those meetings.

“I assume you know that our world has not yet achieved consensus about the Terran problem.”

“Yes.” Tizhos hesitated for just a moment. “I myself adhere to the Noninterference tendency on that issue.”

“As do I,” said Gishora. “But I find it highly frustrating that most other members of our tendency support a complete withdrawal from space altogether.”

“It frustrates me, as well. I suspect most in the space working groups agree.”

“Some, but not most. Irona came on this voyage because he takes a prominent part in the Interventionist tendency regarding the Terrans. He wishes to restrict them to their own world, possibly even compel them to adopt planetary-management policies like our own.”

“I know. He spoke to me about it several times during the voyage. I can’t understand why you brought him.”

“I had no choice. The Interventionists support space travel— after all, one cannot meddle in the affairs of other species across interstellar distances without spacecraft.”

“So you needed Irona’s support to get consensus for the mission, but at the price of including him.”

“Exactly. Which means that our conclusions here must support Irona.”

“You know your conclusions before gathering data?”

“I fear we must use bad science to accomplish good politics. Our only hope for more space exploration lies with the Interventionists. I know for a fact that Irona has risked a great deal of his own prestige for this mission. If we return to Shalina and announce no need for any form of intervention, Irona loses much influence and the anti- space tendency can point to the enormous waste of resources our mission represents.”

“You sound like an Interventionist yourself,” said Tizhos.

“Not at all! I loathe the idea of imposing our consensus on the humans—and I don’t feel at all certain we would win a violent conflict with the humans. Their world holds ten of them for every one of us on Shalina.”

“But surely our technology gives us the advantage!”

“I have seen estimates of capabilities,” said Gishora. “They do not reassure me. We have
knowledge
far beyond anything the humans possess, but we have spent generations reducing our ability to use it effectively. Shalina has a single facility building spaceships; we know of at least eight on Earth. Right now we possess twelve starships, each superior to anything the humans can build—but they have thirty that we know of.”

“Then I fear I don’t understand what you mean to accomplish,” said Tizhos. “You fear intervention but support it at the same time.”

“We must produce a report which supports Irona’s beliefs, but which won’t tip the consensus at home in favor of the Interventionist faction.”

“That sounds difficult. Especially with aliens involved.”

“Very difficult. But consider what it means for the future: Irona and the Interventionists will owe their prestige to us. That gives us a way to control them.”

“Tell me if you would like some food,” Tizhos asked.

“Please,” said Gishora.

She operated the foodmaker, feeling herself settle into the role of a subordinate. A comfortable feeling—especially if she didn’t have to make the kind of terrifying decisions Gishora did.

As they began the meal she asked one final question. “You wish to maintain a balance between factions—but so much depends on the actions of the humans. Tell me how you can predict the behavior of alien creatures.”

Gishora popped a food ball into his mouth and stretched lazily. “The Terrans have an obsession with rules and pride themselves on behaving rationally. Predicting their behavior seems like analyzing a computer’s output—as long as you know the relevant rules and inputs, determining the result poses no difficulty. Of all the elements, I worry least of all about them. They seem entirely predictable.”

STRONGPINCER learns of the attack when a bolt glances off his headshield, waking him from a sound sleep. He pings and is shocked to hear a throng of armed adults converging on the rocks where his followers are camped. Half the attackers are on the sea bottom, arranged in a crescent around the rocks and moving inward. The rest float above, ready to intercept anyone trying to escape. There must be two dozen in all.

“Wake up!” Strongpincer thwacks Hardshell’s headshield and pings the others as loudly as he can. “Militia!”

The militia must be from Three Domes; many of the adults there are merchants and don’t like bandits, even if they don’t prey on Three Domes convoys. For them to come out in force like this is a surprise, but not impossible. It’s just Strongpincer’s bad luck that they’re out looking for bandits here.

Where is Tailcutter? Strongpincer remembers leaving him on watch. The coward is probably swimming away as fast as he can go. Of course, that isn’t a bad idea, but how to get away without being cut off and shot full of bolts?

“Onefeeler!” Strongpincer calls out. “Take Headcracker and Hardshell—try to get free. We hold them here.”

He’s lying, of course. In battle, sacrifices are sometimes necessary. As soon as Onefeeler’s group go half a cable, Strongpincer and the rest scatter, each swimming as hard as he can in a different direction. That makes poor Onefeeler and his companions the biggest target, and Strongpincer can hear them getting swarmed by militia.

The squad hovering up above are launching bolts at the fleeing bandits, and a couple pass near Strongpincer as he zigzags desperately. Halftail gets snared in a net, struggling to free himself until half a dozen bolts send him sinking gently to the bottom.

There’s one soldier moving to intercept Strongpincer. He knows that he can’t afford to get tied up fighting, so he tries to brush past and keep on going. It doesn’t work. The soldier jabs with a spear, and Strongpincer has to do a sudden roll to avoid getting an obsidian point in his head. He’s not called Strongpincer for nothing: he gets one pincer onto the shaft of the spear and snaps it.

Now the soldier’s grappling with him, trying to hold one of his limbs and slow him down. Strongpincer gives the fellow a powerful blow to the head, deafening him for a moment. He loses his grip on Strongpincer’s leg. That’s all Strongpincer needs—he dives for the bottom, where the rocks and rubble make confusing echoes. The soldier tries a few pings, but evidently he doesn’t want to fight Strongpincer alone, and his comrades are busy chasing down Headcracker and Onefeeler. Strongpincer swims away, slowly at first as he weaves among the rocks, then rising above them and picking up speed. The soldier doesn’t follow.

Strongpincer swims until he’s ready to pass out, then listens. Nobody’s following him. The sounds of fighting are dying down. He lets himself sink to the bottom and finds a sheltered spot to rest. The bottom here is silty, and Strongpincer digs in until only his feelers stick out of the dirt. He wonders if any of the others are safe. There’s a big rock slab a few cables away where he remembers agreeing to meet, but nobody’s meeting anywhere until the militia leave.

VOLUNTEERING to guide the Sholen around didn’t get Rob out of his share of the cleanup work before their arrival. Since he was the imaging and video specialist, Dr. Sen gave him the task of going through all the visual data stored in the station network and removing all the frames that showed living or dead Ilmatarans.

The Sholen weren’t as far ahead of humans in computer technology as in other areas, but they weren’t behind either, and Rob had to assume whoever they were sending would be familiar with Terran systems. So he couldn’t just delete the images, he had to replace them. He dug up some of his early files, from when he’d first arrived on Ilmatar and was still learning the ropes. There were plenty of shots of silt, lens covers, his fingers, and black water to use as filler.

Of course, the researchers didn’t want to lose their images, so he had to store everything he cut out on a disk, heavily encrypted and labeled A
NIME
P
ORN
. For verisimilitude he copied in a few videos from his private collection.

Since he spent the whole day on the station network, he was one of the first to see the new feed go up, entitled: “Ways the Sholen Can Go Fuck Themselves.” He watched the list grow as the day went on.

DGraves: Immediately.

JPalashnik: Far from here.

GWeiss: Sideways.

Fouchard: With an
Aenocampus.

PAdler: Sideways, with an
Aenocampus.

Sergei: Senseless.

HIshikawa: Is that a comment, or a suggestion for the Sholen? Sergei: Suggestion.

APonti: Responsibly.

SamIam: In a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, in a car, in a tree, on a train, in the dark, with a goat, on a boat . . .

RaduZ: In accordance with all interstellar treaty agreements. APonti: That rules out Fouchard’s idea, then.

Anonymous: Any way they like, if I get to watch! NKyle: If you ask nicely, they might let you do that anyway. Anon: Or let you join in.

PAdler: From what I understand, the problem is likely to be keeping them from doing it right in front of everybody.

APonti: Unless they’re both male, or both female.

GWeiss: That doesn’t stop some of us.

PAdler: That wouldn’t be a problem for Sholen. Their sex roles are based more on status than on physical gender. And yes, public display is apparently an important element.

GGdG: Six ways to Sunday!

MadameX: With whoever started this stupid stream.

DGraves: That would be me. If you don’t like it, don’t play.

Ilmatar: Having consulted several journal articles on Sholen reproduction, I would like to suggest 1: The “Missionary” position; 2: The “Lotus” position; or 3: The “Screaming Wombat” position.

Anonymous: Your Screaming Wombat Kung Fu is no match for the Drunken Monkey!

VSen: I certainly hope this discussion is closed and completely erased by the time our guests arrive, which by my clock is in only 26 hours from now.

ROB took a break from his work and ate dinner; it was weird but kind of pleasant to be eating with everyone else. He glimpsed Alicia, but she was hurrying off to the dive room for another shift outside and could spare him only a smile and a wave.

By the time the eve ning shift was coming to an end, Rob realized he felt gritty and tired. He had been awake for more than thirty hours without a rest, so he decided to go to bed at 1600 along with everyone else.

“I was wondering if you were going to sleep at all,” she said.

“If there was more coffee, I could probably keep going.”

“I am all sore and tired from moving things outside, and I

“Um, sure. Wait. I’m not very good at the subtle social cues thing—”

“I have noticed.”

“—so before we start, I want to know: by massage do you mean actually rubbing each other’s sore muscles, or do you mean having sex?”

There was a long pause, during which Rob wondered if he had just done the equivalent of shoving his head into a wood chipper. But then she smiled. “Muscle rubbing first, then sex.”

Rob’s massage technique was based on brute force and what he could remember from being on the swim team in high school, but evidently that was what Alicia needed because her groans and grunts had a contented sound. He worked his way from her calves to her forearms, kneading and rubbing until his own arms ached. Her bare skin was still slightly chilly to the touch from being out in the cold water, but under his hands she turned pink and warm again. Like just about everyone at Hitode, she was in terrific shape, with muscles as hard as wood and less body fat than the average famine victim.

When he couldn’t make his fingers work anymore, he tapped her shoulder. “My turn.”

She made a disappointed sound, but dutifully perched on the back of his thighs and began working on his stiff neck and shoulders. If they did have sex together, he never noticed it because he promptly fell asleep.

LONGPINCER’S apprentice shows no surprise when Broadtail arrives at the boundaries of Bitterwater and pings to signal the house. Apparently everyone at Bitterwater is accustomed to half-starved outlaw scholars showing up without warning.

The apprentice takes Broadtail to Longpincer straight away. The master is at work on his pipes, commanding a group of tenants and apprentices who are installing a curious gadget in one of the main channels. It seems like a circulator turbine, but the axle is linked to a bundle of twisted ropevine, which is in turn anchored solidly to a heavy stone.

But you are welcome all the same,” says Longpincer. “I am an outlaw, Longpincer,” says Broadtail. “I am exiled from Continuous Abundance for killing a landowner on common ground.”