Lost In Translation (18 page)

Jarrikk stepped forward to meet her, spreading his wings, as she climbed onto the dais. She opened her arms in the best approximation of the S'sinn greeting she could manage, being one set of limbs short, then extended her hand in the human greeting, trusting Jarrikk to remember the custom from her memories. He hesitated, then held out his clawed right hand. She shook it firmly, his leathery palm warm against hers, his claws pressing lightly against the back of her hand and the fur on the back of his hand tickling her fingers.

Today neither of them hesitated to Link. In fact, she eagerly took her syringe and stabbed it into her arm. Jarrikk's was the only friendly presence she could sense in the entire room, and that included the three humans behind her.

After a brief rush of fresh memories from their respective evenings, Jarrikk/Kathryn faced their delegates again. “Begin.”

If anything, this second session was worse. Neither side offered any compromise on Fairholm/Kisradikk; the entire four hours passed in useless reiteration of claims already made and demands already rejected. The S'sinn demanded humans withdraw from the planet; humans demanded the same of the S'sinn. Stalemate.

Except that, unlike a stalemate in chess, this stalemate would end nothing; it would only precipitate a far nastier game. And when Kathryn severed the Link at the end of the session, her stomach churned as the realization hit home that the next morning there would be only one thing to Translate: the human declaration of war on the S'sinn—war, which had slain her parents and so many others on both sides; war, which had crippled Jarrikk. She felt his own dismay, but aside from a faint echo of that dismay in Akkanndikk, any other peace-loving feelings were lost in the tidal wave of avid hatred from all sides.

It seemed that only she and Jarrikk truly wanted the negotiations to succeed, but though they were right in the middle of those negotiations, crucial to them, in fact, they were in the worst position of all to influence them. Neither carried any weight with their respective delegates; had effectively denied the possibility by emphasizing so strongly that Translators served the Guild and the Commonwealth, and could not Translate falsely. They could do nothing; nothing but Translate the end of the . . .

Kathryn froze, the silvery cord of the Link dangling in her hand, her mouth suddenly bone-dry. The idea that had just come to her, unbidden, would violate her Oath. It could mean expulsion from the Guild, loss of a second family . . .

. . . but it might just stop a war.

She touched Jarrikk's wing before he could leave the dais. He turned his ruby eyes on her, and she sensed his puzzlement. “We need to talk in private,” she murmured in Guildtalk. “Where . . . ?”

For a moment he regarded her, puzzlement growing; then he flicked his ears forward and back, and said, “My quarters. This way.”

As they crossed the floor together the hostility of the gathered S'sinn increased tenfold, and buried faintly within it, like a hint of vinegar in a spicy food, she felt the humans' hostility as well. In fact, she felt like a mouse at an owl convention, but she kept her even pace. Jarrikk couldn't move any faster anyway.

He led her through a ten-meter-high arch into a long hall with smaller arches leading off at three levels. They passed through the third ground-floor portal on the right into a high-ceilinged, airy room with enormous, glassless windows opening onto the gardens outside the Hall of the Flock. Rough-woven tapestries hung from the other three walls above padded shikks of polished, multicolored woods, and a sweet-smelling bluish vapor rose from a censer over the Guild-standard computer terminal.

“It's beautiful,” Kathryn said.

“Thank you.”

As she moved around the room, afraid to speak her thoughts, now that the moment had come, Jarrikk watched her with the natural stillness of a waiting predator. What if he reported her to the Guild, had her removed?

Then war would come, and she would have lost nothing. The Guild would die with the Commonwealth.

Hesitantly, she began.

 

Despite all he now knew about Kathryn Bircher, despite all he had shared with her, the sight of a human in his quarters, among his familiar objects, troubled Jarrikk deeply. Echoes of the hate he'd thought he'd buried, at least where Kathryn was concerned, rang in distant corners of his mind. He clamped down on his emotions forcefully: he couldn't have Kathryn sensing those ghosts from his past. He didn't want to wake the ghosts from her own.

Though perhaps they were already awake. He sensed unease from her; unease and distress, but also strange exhilaration, determination, and maybe even fear. Intrigued, he listened closely as she finally began to speak. “We work well together.”

No argument there. Surprise that it should be so, maybe, but no argument. “Agreed.”

“Our negotiators do not.”

No argument there, either. He'd seen more amicable negotiations between mating-frenzied jarrbukks. Whatever Akkanndikk's true feelings about the possibility of war were, she had set them aside to play directly to public opinion. He didn't know why that disappointed him; he'd thought he was past looking for heroes, except among the constellations. “True.”

“They do not want peace.”

He agreed, of course he agreed, but that simple statement took them winging into unstable air. Guild rules strictly forbade Translators to discuss ongoing negotiations between themselves. But he had to know where she was going . . . “Also true,” he said after a moment.

“So—we need new negotiators.”

What?
“We have no say. The human and S'sinn governments chose—”

“Perhaps they chose badly.”

He clamped down on his outrage and turmoil, blocking her completely, as he had blocked so successfully most of his young life, until Ukkaddikk discovered his talent. She flew them straight into a hurricane with such a statement!

But she rushed on. “We serve the Guild. The Guild serves the Commonwealth. War will destroy the Commonwealth and the Guild. Our loyalty to the Guild demands we prevent that.”

All the warnings he had heard about Translators who did not Translate honestly, who somehow worked for one side or another, came rushing back—but no, that didn't fit; Kathryn challenged the Oath to preserve the Guild and Commonwealth, not to shatter it.

He wondered if such a challenge might not be the most insidious of all.

She waited, staring up at him with those odd, white-rimmed blue eyes. “We can do nothing,” he said emphatically. “Nothing!”

“We can,” she insisted. But then she hesitated. He could still read her clearly, and he felt her determination suddenly run headlong into some final, almost insurmountable barrier. Almost as though she were in pain, she grated out, “We can fake the Link.”

Jarrikk's blocks crashed down, and he stumbled back from her, his denial and outrage flowing out of him full-force. “No! No, no, no!” This was worse, far worse, then, than just Translating for illicit negotiations. This was heresy!

“We must!” Her determination roared up in response to his denial. “We must negotiate for them! We must find the compromise they will not! We must—”

“Lie! Break our Oaths! Dishonor the Guild! Dishonor ourselves! Ruin everything!”

“War will destroy the Guild, destroy honor, destroy everything!” Kathryn moved after him, and he backed away until he found himself trapped in the corner by the windows, wings half-spread against the walls. “War killed my parents!” She pointed at his scars. “War made you
walk!
”

Jarrikk turned his head away, looked out the window, frightened not by Kathryn but by the echo of support her words found in himself. He thought of his dead flightmates, and of that day in the gorge. How many other young S'sinn would face terror and pain if war came? What good was honor to the dead?

He could almost see a priest rearing back, wings extended, clawing the sky, howling, “Heresy! Heresy!” at such a thought. Those who died with honor received more honor yet as a flightmate of the Hunter of Worlds in the next life, and the most honorable death of all was death in war.

But the honor the priests touted sprang from the tales of the ancient Hunters after whom the stars were named, Hunters who knew only one world and one race and who fought their battles with spears and clubs and claws and teeth, not firelances and neutron bombs and planet-cracking asteroids and city-slagging satellites and brain-rotting viruses and all the other terrible weapons invented by the military minds of the Seven Races. Death came from such weapons to both the brave fighter and the helpless youngling, to both the Huntership and the broodhall. Surely the greatest honor of all would be to prevent such horrors. Surely even the priests would agree: weren't the most honored of all the ancient Hunters those who fought to protect the innocent?

A fight of S'sinn soared overhead in perfect diamond formation, and Jarrikk's wings twitched. Even if it were heresy, this new definition of honor, it could be no more heretical than his very existence: a living, breathing Flightless One. He looked back at Kathryn and said, very slowly, “It's dangerous. You cannot know what will happen. Without Programming . . .” He could not imagine what it might be like, but the thought terrified him: the Link would open their minds to each other without the interface of the symbiote, flood their brains with alien neural impulses. It could kill them—or drive them mad.

“I know what will happen if war comes,” Kathryn said. “And so do you.”

Jarrikk looked at his crippled left wing. “Yes.” He met her eyes. “Yes.”

But with his capitulation, he felt her determination dissolve into renewed uncertainty and fear that she tried unsuccessfully to hide from him. It didn't matter; he knew she felt his own.

“I'll prepare a proposal and send it to you before the morning session,” Kathryn said hastily, and hurried out.

Jarrikk watched her leave, and despite his recent thoughts of heresy, said a prayer to the Hunter of Worlds.

The crowd in the Great Hall of the Flock had lessened somewhat; the hostility had not. Kathryn hurried to her own quarters, relieved to find Matthews and his aides in conference, sequestered in Matthews' room. She didn't particularly fancy trying to explain to Matthews just what she had been doing in the S'sinn Translator's private apartment . . .

She sat at her computer terminal, trying to compose her thoughts, to recall all she had learned of Commonwealth Law, former treaties, and the current dispute. They would need a truly workable compromise to pull this off, and she only had a few hours . . .

. . . only a few hours to come up with the solution that had escaped every diplomatic mind in the Commonwealth until now? Who was she kidding?

She wrenched her mind away from that train of thought. She would not give in to defeatism; she couldn't afford it. A solution had not been found because no one really wanted a solution: no one, at least, who had been in a position to implement one. The politicians and generals had their own reasons for wanting war, which had nothing to do with the reasons people like her and Jarrikk and the millions of others who would suffer had for not wanting one.

But despite the importance of beginning work, or maybe because of it, her mind kept going back to that moment with Jim, before she left on the assignment that had been aborted to bring her here, when she'd been so shocked to hear him talk about “species ties.” She'd been so determined to uphold her Oath—yet now that same determination to treat aliens as her kin was leading her to
break
that Oath.

She wondered what Jim would have said, and was glad he wasn't there to read her confusion.

She turned to the computer. At least she was doing
something
to try to stop a war, she thought fiercely. Even if she'd failed, at least she would have
tried.
That was more than Jim would be able to say. Or Matthews.

The key to a compromise, she felt sure, lay in Commonwealth history. There must have been similar disputes between other races. What had
they
done?

An hour later, the beep of her terminal brought her out of the depths of research. She had an incoming message; she punched “receive.”

Words scrolled by in Guildtalk. “Researched matter. Found following: ‘Attempts to Link without Programming produce severe pain; one Orrisian volunteer suffered respiratory and circulatory arrest and narrowly escaped death. In all cases, the Translator symbiote died, and volunteers required long periods of convalescence due to immune-system rejection of the symbiote's dead tissue. All recovered, but were no longer able to function as Translators; their bodies rejected all attempts to introduce a new symbiote. Native empathic abilities survived, but augmentation became impossible.' Jarrikk.”

Kathryn read the message, read it again, read it a third time, then blanked the screen and stared blindly at the gray, windowless wall. Pain she could face—
had
faced, over and over—but the rest . . . “No longer able to function as Translators . . .”

It would be like bondcut all over again. A part of her would die.

But millions of others would die—fully—if she
didn't
take the risk. And Jarrikk didn't say where he'd gotten the information. Maybe he was having second thoughts, and was just trying to frighten her out of her scheme.

Well, he'd frightened her, all right—but not enough to make her quit. To prove to herself she meant that, she got up, took an empty Programming vial, filled it with water, then colored the liquid pale pink with a drop of blood from her finger, drawn with the point of a syringe. She placed the vial in her Translator's case, but stared at it a long time before slowly closing and latching the case and returning to her terminal.