Resurrection (30 page)

Mission Officer Adaiz-Ari should have been lost. His brother and mission leader was dead. Enon-Amet’s body had been carted off to be dissected, he supposed, by Earth authorities. Pruit had removed her second tracer, and he had no idea where she was. He should have been defeated. He was not. He walked through Cairo two days after the melee in the bazaar with a clear destination in mind.

Despite his present circumstances, he felt a lingering sense of pride at his ability to enter the egani-tah during an actual battle. The state had not been fully under his control, for if it had, he would have been able to direct Pruit’s motions as well as his own. Still, he had achieved it, forcing the joined awareness upon his enemy. Most masters of the egani-tah were not able to do this until a much older age.

For those brief moments, he had become Pruit. Her mind had been his. He now found his consciousness populated with people he had never known and filled with experiences he had not imagined. He had memories of training in the Sentinel, of great sheets of poisonous glass stretching away on every side of domed cities. He had memories of a young man named Niks and experiences of physical love. He could recall Pruit’s journey to Earth and the crippling loss of Niks’s death. He could feel the hatred she bore his people.

In a way, it was almost as though Pruit lived inside him. Though many of these memories had begun to fade, he was holding onto the few that were important. He would soon take time to write these down. They would provide much useful information to the Lucien.

Though it was difficult, he did not allow himself to be affected by the contents of Pruit’s mind. No matter how strange and potentially unbalancing the visions in her head, he forced himself to categorize the information he had received only in terms of his own objectives.

There was one face in his mind that now mattered. It was a man called the Engineer. Pruit thought of this man as a broken repository of knowledge, but the knowledge she credited him with was great.

Another half an hour of walking—difficult with the stiffness of his muscles—and Adaiz had made his way through the commercial section of Cairo to a tall business hotel. He took an express elevator up and, in a few moments, had arrived at the Engineer’s door. He knocked.

“Who’s there?” came a woman’s voice.

Adaiz recognized the voice from Pruit’s memories. She was the Doctor.

“I am a friend of Pruit’s,” he said in English.

The woman’s eye came to the peekhole. Adaiz stood with a pleasant smile on his face. He looked so much like Pruit he had no doubt he could gain entry.

After a moment, the chain was drawn, and the Doctor opened the door several inches. It was a shock to see her face and features match so perfectly the image in his mind.

“Hello,” he said. She was wearing a jawline translator and could understand him. “My name is Niks. I am from the second Kinley mission. Pruit has asked me to see if I may be of assistance to your husband.”

“You don’t speak Haight?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Adaiz said, using his recent observations of humans to make himself appear friendly and open. He had spent many hours practicing body motions that looked human. “I was not trained in that language. I have other…specialties.”

It took several more minutes of convincing, but soon the Doctor stepped aside and invited him into the room. The Engineer stood leaning against the wall, looking at Adaiz as he entered. The Doctor explained Adaiz’s presence, but the Engineer continued to wear an expression of pained confusion.

Adaiz approached him and felt honest sympathy for the man’s condition. “I’m here for you,” he said softly.

“He may not understand you,” the Doctor said.

Adaiz smiled and took both of the Engineer’s hands in his own. He was still surprised at the feel of other humans’ flesh. It had a much different quality than Lucien flesh, slightly warmer and less resilient, and he had not grown accustomed to it yet. “It doesn’t matter. Words are one of the lowest forms of communication. Come.”

He lead the Engineer to the center of the room, then helped him into a cross-legged position on the floor. Adaiz assumed the same position across from him. The Doctor watched this, surprised at her husband’s willingness to follow the commands of a stranger.

“Now, you must relax,” Adaiz said. Then, remembering the Engineer would not understand, he reached out his arms and gently shut the Engineer’s eyes.

Adaiz began his breathing, following the steps of an Opening. After ten minutes, he had bridged the space between himself and the Engineer. He reached out to the spark he saw before him, then leapt inside, entering the man’s mind.

Instantly, there was a maelstrom. Adaiz felt himself swept up in a hurricane of disjointed thoughts, which were pouring into each other, whirling around each other, forming eddies of nearly lucid logic, then falling away, back into randomness.

For a moment, Adaiz lost all sense of himself. He was caught in the motion and thrown, dizzily chasing after thoughts. With effort, he pulled himself back to objectivity and studied what he saw.

There had been a terrible, near-death trauma to the Engineer’s body, and its ability to relay thoughts and commands had been damaged, almost destroyed. The thoughts and knowledge were still there, but any attempt to communicate them or study them rationally produced the hurricane.

Adaiz sent a feeling of calm to the Engineer.
I see you
, he thought.
I see you, and I do not mistake you for the damaged functions you are living with.

In response to this thought, he felt an outpouring of gratitude.

I am sorry for your troubles. Let me be the conduit to communicate for you
.

Again there was gratitude, then eagerness to say something. This eagerness brought on another deluge of disconnected images.

Relax
, Adaiz thought.
Let me look.

The maelstrom quieted somewhat. Adaiz moved himself deeper into the man’s mind. He moved through images of pain, waking from a great sleep, choking, and the first onrush of confusion. He moved to earlier images and saw the construction of a cave, sleepboxes lined in a row. There was the Mechanic, and attached to that image was a feeling of distrust. There was another man, with gold hair down to his shoulders. And there were a man and woman who were somehow gods and somehow simply human.

Adaiz could feel the Engineer’s attention growing stronger and more urgent. There was an image of his wife, packing her belongings, and the golden-haired man giving a warning. Adaiz was close to something important. He could feel the Engineer urging him on, and as he did, the images began to slip out of order, become confused.

Calm…
Adaiz thought.

The Engineer relaxed again, and Adaiz continued to work his way back. Beneath all the other images, which now seemed to move about each other in slow and random circles, Adaiz sensed something else, a central image. He reached for it. Attached to it was a gleeful sensation of outsmarting someone. He pulled it closer. At last, he saw the image clearly and understood it. With his eyes closed, he smiled. It was the first time the human expression had been drawn from him naturally.

He opened his eyes. So did the Engineer.

Very good
, Adaiz thought.
I understand.

The Engineer felt his words. His own mind was no more clear, but he knew that this man had found the thought that was important. He smiled at Adaiz.

Adaiz gently severed the link between them and allowed himself a moment of exultation. He would steal the Eschless Funnel from under Pruit’s nose! He would steal it, and he would bring it home, and the Lucien would become masters of space and all that was in it. They would put an end to the Plaguer threat and expand uninhibited throughout the galaxy. He would kill the questions Pruit had stirred up in his own mind. He would redeem the death of his brother by making the mission far more successful than anyone could have hoped. Enon-Amet would be honored as a hero.

He jumped to his feet. The Doctor was staring at him.

“Your husband has been trying to tell you something, Doctor,” he said slowly. “There is something important we must do. And we must do it now.”

She looked from him to the Engineer, who seemed calmer now and almost happy. She looked back at Adaiz. “What is it?”

“I will get my car,” he said. “We will be driving.”

Adaiz was in the driver’s seat of his green Jeep, maneuvering through Cairo traffic. They were on a street bordering the Nile, bracketed by city buses and taxis that pumped exhaust into the air. The Doctor sat in the passenger’s seat, and the Engineer was in the back, along with the supplies Adaiz had hurriedly loaded into the car.

“Are you sure Pruit will know where we are?” the Doctor asked.

“She will meet us there,” Adaiz said, his tone pleasant and reassuring.

The Doctor seemed satisfied with this. She was inclined to trust Adaiz, because of his resemblance to Pruit, but more importantly because the Engineer appeared to like him. It was the first time she had seen her husband happy, or nearly happy, since waking. She held a map and was navigating for Adaiz. This was a slow job at the moment. The cars on the streets of Cairo were moving at a crawl in lunch-hour congestion.

“We need to turn right at the next large street.” She pointed up ahead. “That will take us to the highway.”

Adaiz inched the car forward. Pedestrians walked freely in front of cars. The traffic lights seemed to have no relation at all to the motion of traffic. The Jeep was small and very hot with the noon sunlight beating down upon it.

At last, there was motion in the line of cars in front of them. The whole lane moved forward at the green light. Adaiz pushed down the accelerator.

When he reached the intersection, however, the light had already turned red. Cars on the cross street were beginning to move. Adaiz still had his foot on the gas.

“Stop!” the Doctor said.

Adaiz did, just in time. He was sticking out into the intersection and had nearly driven them into cross traffic. The car lurched with the abrupt halt. “Sorry,” he said. He had been distracted by thoughts of that cave. “I’m still new to this.”

She smiled. “So am I.”

Pedestrians were walking in front of them and behind them, threading their way to the other side of the street. There was a group of young schoolgirls in matching uniforms, all with long dark hair and dark eyes. They were lead by two women in long dresses and shawls. There were men in gallibiyas and skullcaps, carrying crates. There were teenage girls in Western clothing. Adaiz watched them without really seeing.
They are not my kind
, he told himself several times.
They are not my concern.

The light turned yellow in preparation for turning green. A small boy on the sidewalk let go of his mother’s hand and ran into the intersection wildly, chasing a small finch that hopped in the crosswalk. A moment too late, the boy’s mother saw that he was gone. The boy was running around cars. He was so small he was difficult for the drivers to see. The bird he chased did not fly away. Instead, it continued to hop, picking at small bits of discarded food, careless of cars and humans.

The light turned green. Adaiz stepped on the accelerator. The boy leaped in front of the Jeep just then, mimicking the motions of the bird. When his feet hit the ground, the boy realized his mistake and turned his head, startled and scared. For an instant, Adaiz and the boy looked at each other. The car jumped forward. Then Adaiz stomped on the brake with both feet. The car bucked, sending the passengers forward, then back, but the vehicle, blessedly, had stopped. Behind them, a car screeched and narrowly avoided plowing into the back of them.

The boy stood completely still, looking in at Adaiz, paralyzed by his mistake. The grill of the Jeep was inches from his body. His mother ran at him, sweeping him up into her arms. She hugged him to her chest, burying her face in his neck as she carried him back to the sidewalk. The boy hugged her back and burst into tears.

Around the Jeep, traffic began to move. Adaiz did not take his feet from the brake. His eyes followed the mother and son back to the sidewalk, and they lingered there, watching the way the woman set the boy down, then crouched to look him in the face. She smoothed back his hair and kissed him on the cheek. He was precious to her, and she had realized this anew. And the boy had been precious to Adaiz as well. In that instant, nothing had been more important to him than saving him.

“Niks,” the Doctor said. “We can go.”

Cars behind them were honking. Adaiz tried to come back to himself. He was sitting in the Jeep; the Engineer and the Doctor were with him. He was on Earth, a human planet, eighteen years from his home. As he located himself, he knew that something had changed. He was now experiencing, long after the fact, the fruition of his egani-tah with Pruit. He had tried to reject the images he received from her, keep them separate from himself, keep them from inspiring emotion or feeling. Suddenly, he could no longer do this. That little boy had breached a wall within him, and Pruit’s experiences and every feeling she had provoked in him since he had first seen her now stood out in a new light. Humans were not his kind. He was Lucien. This was still true. But it did not matter. They were the same. Human, Lucien, or some other race not yet discovered, all were alike. He could no longer pretend it was otherwise. Each race trying to survive. Children, like that boy, like any Lucien child, were precious. Each race hoped to make existence better for future generations. The ways of humans were imperfect much of the time. They, like Lucien, often made decisions that were incorrect. It did not matter. Each wanted the same thing: life.

“Niks,” the Doctor said again. “We must go.”

Adaiz turned to her. He was gripping the steering wheel, and his face wore a new expression. “My name is not Niks,” he said.