Jaydium (26 page)

Brianna drew herself up, still inches shorter than him. Her lips tightened into a thin line and her brows drew together. She looked like she was about to spit in his face. Kithri's shoulders tensed in anticipation, but Eril stepped smoothly between them.

“All right, you two,” he commanded. “The best thing either of you could say right now is nothing. Got that?”

“I — ” Brianna began, her chin still at an ominous angle.

“Nothing.”
Eril repeated.

Lennart nodded and headed for the farthest corner, covering the distance in a stride and a half. He took a wide stance, facing the wall, and raised his hands to chest height. Slowly he began circling his hands, as if on an invisible table, his eyes half-closed, breathing deep and even. Brianna, watching him, wrung her hands and looked as if she were going to speak again, but managed not to.

Kithri shook her shoulders, trying to loosen them, but it was no good. Her heart pounded as if she'd been on the brink of a fight herself, her veins flooded with adrenalin and muscles battle-ready. She threw herself into the nearest empty corner to think.

Brianna had really gotten her hackles up, more thoroughly than Kithri would have imagined, and that disturbed her. Skies, she didn't even
like
the other woman, why should she care
what
she said?

Kithri's thoughts stumbled on. She'd always felt war was morally objectionable, but was she really any different from Brianna, who didn't care who got dumped on as long as
she
didn't? Since Kithri had been, through no fault of her own, at the bottom of the Federation social pile, she was also the first to be exploited, the first forgotten. By sheer fortune she was not also the first bombed, although that was only because of the Fed's need to protect its precious jaydium supply.

If she could have stayed, or done something, and Albion had been spared...

But I couldn't! I had no choice, I was only a child! If Father hadn't taken us away, we'd be cinders now, too.

If Father hadn't left...

Why had he left Albion, and gone to Stayman — bleak, heavily guarded, and out of the war zone? He was a scientist, intelligent and well-educated — he must have seen the war coming. What he'd done about it was run for the safest corner he could find, taking his only child. Kithri trembled inside, thinking,
Did he really want to fight, but was forced to run because of me?
She searched her memory for words like,
Maybe some day you'll understand...
but could find nothing clear, only his voice as he taught her to survive on Stayman. Only the pain and loneliness afterwards. But had he really had a choice? Could he have stayed on Albion and worked for peace? Would anything he did have made a difference?

Would anything I do now make a difference?

Kithri ran her hands over her face, feeling her cheeks hot and dry, as if they burned with a sudden fever. Her mouth dried up like the Cerrano dust.

Without thinking what she was doing, she got to her feet. Her knees felt like powder and her stomach knotted into a lump. She took a step towards the center of the platform. Eril, leaning against the far corner, met her eyes, and she remembered how she'd locked on to his face in the pirates' courtyard. She looked away, for a moment terrified that her resolve would shatter and she'd go running to him.

Brianna was sitting along the opposite wall, playing with something in her lap. She'd teased loose a few strands of her gold-wire hair and was knotting them in an intricate pattern. She didn't look up at Kithri's approach. Lennart did, mildly interested, without Eril's sharp focus.

“I think — ” Kithri's voice wavered. “ — I think we should do what we can to help Raerquel.
Whatever we can.
Even if it means throwing in our lot with a bunch of losers.”

Brianna tossed her head, puffing her hair into a golden froth. “That won't do us any good. Raerquel's a powerless dissident, an eccentric — ”

“We're going to die anyway, all of us. You think your little studies of alien architecture are going to save this planet?”

Brianna offered no reply. Kithri looked at the woman and two men who had, in a few days, gone from strangers to people she'd die for. She had no strength to argue with them. She barely had enough for herself. All her instincts, all her experience urged her to keep silent, to stay out of it. There might be nothing she could do, or she might die anyway. She thought again of her father, wrestling alone with his own choices, his own unknown future. How much more difficult it must have been for him with a child, perhaps already knowing he was dying. All these years she'd blamed him for being a coward because he'd run away.

“You do whatever you want,” she said, closing the door on everything that had gone before in her life. “Me, I'm going to go out fighting for something besides my own skin.”

Dawn came and the crystalline walls glowed with a faint iridescent sheen. Eril couldn't remember falling asleep, just lying there, staring at the expanse of featureless luminescent gray. Wishing he could see the stars. Feeling the emptiness inside him. The not-caring that made his promises empty syllables and turned his life into one long bid for escape. He was human, he told himself, not hollow. He cared — about the Fed, about Raerquel and the future of its world. Yet something had gone out of him even before he jetted down to Port Ludlow in search of the brushie
duo
pilot who was his only hope. Maybe in the bars and alleys of New Paris, one crazy scrape after another. Maybe as far back as Albion.

Albion.

Eril winced at the memory. Compared to Kithri, he'd lost nothing there.

He sat up, his hip and shoulder bones aching. When he reached his arms above his head and stretched, his spine popped. Next to him, close enough so she could easily have touched him in her sleep, Kithri lay on curled on one side. In the far corner, Brianna had tucked up in a fetal ball, her back to the others. Lennart sat and stared blankly ahead, his legs folded in a complicated and uncomfortable-looking arrangement. His hands open lay, palms up, on his knees.

Eril clambered to his feet and continued his stretching. Even making allowances for the unforgiving sleeping surface, he felt stiff. He didn't like the thought of getting old. But at the rate they were going, they would none of them live that long.

None of us,
he repeated to himself.
Not just me, none of us.

A door opened in the wall and one of their unnamed captors sat outside, ready to escort them singly to a newly sculpted sanitary facility in an adjacent portion of the holding platform. When they'd all made the requisite trip and an attempt at morning greetings to one another, the door opened again and Raerquel slithered in.

“Come, my human friends,” it said with its usual graceful gestures. “We must return to the laboratory to prepare my defense.”

“I thought we were just laboratory specimens, impounded ones at that,” Eril said. “And now they're just going to let us go? What's happened, have they dropped the charges?”

“Make no mistake, the charges are very serious and in no fashion dismissed,” Raerquel replied. “It is for this purpose that I am allowed to utilize all my resources. You are the crux of my argument of alien personness.”

“Wait a second!” Eril held up both hands. “You've been charged with mental contamination for just associating with us. And now you say you're going to use us as part of your defense?”

“Of course.” The alien paused. “How else would its validity be evaluated?”

“What a fascinating cultural — ” Brianna began before Eril cut her off.

“Run first and talk later — before the Council changes its collective mind,” he said, and shoved Brianna out the doorway after Kithri.

o0o

The whole trip back, Eril expected something to go wrong. In the city, he waited for silvery bodies to surround them, spewing forth liquid chains. Over the ocean, he watched for signs of pursuit. Maybe letting them go was all a ruse, so they could be killed “accidentally” while being recaptured.

Despite the empty expanse of sky, the gentle sunlight and breezes, Eril couldn't stop worrying. If something went wrong, he didn't know if he could pilot the platform. And if he, with his experience and training couldn't do it, he didn't trust any of the others to, not even Kithri. The only good escape route was one he found for himself...wasn't it?

Raerquel, on the other hand, had been expansive, almost ebullient, from the moment they moved out of range of the mass-communication panels. As they flew westward, it pointed out the various divisions of the city — the shallow living areas, the vertical food-growing corridors and deep-water nurseries, divided into areas for each clan.

Gastropoid fertilization, Raerquel told them, took place in the deepest trenches of the ocean, since the ciliated trochophore larvae required the high pressures of the depths. Comparatively few survived the larval stage. Some fell prey to genetic or developmental defects, others were eaten by predators or couldn't compete for the limited supplies of food and oxygen. All lived and suffered in the same anonymous preconsciousness. Only when the metamorphosis was complete and they made their way to the shallows were their nervous systems capable of self-awareness, let alone thought.

Eril, listening to Raerquel's crisply scientific description of the process, contrasted the whole arrangement to his own family. Raerquel would have dozens of siblings instead of a single bossy sister. A large part of its family loyalty would come from what was loosely called “survivor solidarity.” Eril had seen this bonding in battle, the intense comradeship that pulled him and his crew through more than one hopeless situation during the war. But eventually they'd be reassigned to different missions, die or retire or get promoted. Eril never let himself get too dependent on the others, not when they might be blown to bits or off to Hyades when he really needed them. Your best ally in a jam was always yourself.

Not so with these gastropoids. Their earliest consciousness would have been of their unity as they burst upward into the light. Having survived the same brutal beginnings, it was no wonder they regarded everyone else as potentially hostile. As rational beings, they could extend that concept of “us” to the other generations of their clan, and with trepidation to other clans that had shared their birthplace. But to other creatures, no matter how phylogenically related, which didn't even come from the same water...

In his musings, Eril had missed a beat of the conversation. Raerquel had left the subject of reproduction for a description of its peace faction. Eril had heard self-styled “peacemakers” before, but usually what they wanted was really a tactical advantage,”Don't bash us before we get so far ahead that we can bash you harder” or some version of, “Peace only on our terms.”

But Raerquel didn't care what it gave up — its scientific career, the status of its clan, its adult alliances — everything but the truth, the basic unity of the gastropoid race. It spoke of compassion being the true test of self worth, that any injury done to another sensible creature was an irreparable loss to the offender.

If the Fed leaders had such single-mindedness and dedication,
Eril wondered,
would we have ended up in splinters, held together by luck and hope?

“All that sounds great,” Lennart said when there was a pause in the oration. “But we humans had the same ideals, and look what happened to us.”

“Your time remained peaceful,” replied Raerquel.

“Yeah, but
theirs
didn't.” He nodded at Eril. “They forgot everything we'd learned about peace.”

Raerquel, with one of its characteristically fluid tentacle gestures, said, “Every day in which the bombs are not loosed is another day in which we can learn to avoid that catastrophe. Are you asserting that just because a thing has never been done that it is impossible? I cannot believe that of beings like yourselves, who have journeyed through the interdimensional nothingness of our possible future. Are we such hopelessly backward creatures that we cannot be learning from your example to dare something new? Are not your years of peace an accomplishment worthy of emulation?”

“You're right,” Kithri said passionately. “We want to help, to do whatever we can to stop this war.”

“Are you all crazy?” Brianna asked. Her voice was thin and reedy, strained to the edge. She held on the low railing with white-knuckled hands. “Or is this some new melodrama-entertainment I've stumbled into? There's nothing we
can
do except get ourselves killed first.”

“Is that what you believe in your Dominion?” Lennart said. “Then you're even more primitive than we were.”

“What would our dying accomplish?” she retorted. “Even if we could act effectively, we'd be interfering with a culture we don't even understand yet. Callous as it sounds, we
must
allow the gastropoids to solve their own problems. It's the only ethical position available to us.”

By this time they'd left the city proper and were now flying over the pleasantly warm ocean. The blue-gray water slipped along beneath the speeding platform. Eril took his eyes from the first shadowy lines of the coast and turned back to Raerquel.

During the first days of their captivity, Raerquel and its team had refused to answer even the simplest questions. They'd been almost paranoid about avoiding ‘cultural contamination' — or even its outward appearance. Yet now the gastropoid was talking freely, almost eagerly. It had gone out of its way to show them the nurseries, surely the most sensitive and vulnerable areas of the city. The description of the gastropoids' life there explained much about their psychology, their inbred xenophobia. But why was Raerquel telling them all this now? What was behind this change of heart? Had it decided that since the humans were expendable, it could perform any sort of bizarre sociological experiment on them?