Rift (43 page)
Authors: Kay Kenyon
Salidifor’s eyes gleamed emerald green.
He sat back in his chair, and the hood retracted slightly, as though he might need more breathing room on this one.
She asked if he understood her sentence, and he raised his chin: Yes. Still, he said nothing.
Nerys ate in silence for a while, afraid she had gone too far.
Then he said,
A claw slipped out on his right hand, and slid back. She quickly picked up her fork, but to her surprise he answered,
Talking with Salidifor had become a battle of silences. Whoever remained silent longest could force the other to answer—or to eat. This time, Nerys won. Salidifor answered:
They had no shared vocabulary here. Eventually, they settled on molecules. That, then, was what orthong ate. Chemicals, at the molecular level. But Salidifor corrected her each time she said
Eat
, looking to the side, his gesture for
No
. It was knowing, not eating. It was deep knowing.
This, then, was a glimpse of how the orthong saw their world. When Salidifor said the females
knew
the outfold, Nerys caught a glimmer of meaning. They knew it at the level of the very small. Chemically. Her heart raced as she considered what she might be guessing about the orthong, what Salidifor might be allowing her to learn. She found herself thinking, in the way of the freewomen, that Salidifor in some small way was coming around, skirting the edge of a friendly regard.
She watched his face for clues. The folded ridges of his skin, which at first had seemed to immobilize his face, in fact moved in subtle permutations as he watched her or signed. It might be surface twitches, or emotion, or habits of concentration. But she was beginning to deduce that his expressions did convey things like surprise and displeasure and thoughtfulness—if she was not projecting her expectations upon him.
Her barley stew was now utterly cold, but still she picked at it to prolong their conversation. The light dimmed in the translucent ceiling as night came on, prompting the wall sconces to glow, though from what energy source, she didn’t know.
To her surprise, Salidifor took the initiative to say something.
Nerys considered this.
to visit her at her berm, although he had once, at the beginning. He could have seen Pila then.
Among all the questions Salidifor had ever asked her, this one was different. It was the only one that he had initiated out of his own curiosity. But now she was afraid she couldn’t understand the question.
They sat in silence, with Salidifor apparently unable to describe the sound. Then Nerys had it. Pila sometimes sang songs to her fetus.
Nerys hummed, mimicking Pila.
He raised his chin.
It was Nerys’ turn to sit wordlessly now. How to explain a song to someone without a mouth? Finally she said,
Salidifor sat unmoving for a long while. Then he made a sign that always brought an attendant to remove Nerys’ tray. As Nerys turned to watch the orthong depart, she saw an orthong child peeking in from the room’s perimeter. It was about four feet high, one of Salidifor’s older—or at least taller—children. It was, like all children, purest white. The child saw her observe it, and moved behind a protuberance in the wall.
When she turned back to the table she stared at the spot where her food had been. she said. It was nothing she planned to say, nothing she ever thought she
would
say, not to an orthong. He held her gaze a very long time, until a lump arose in her throat.
He was signing something. It took her a moment to look up.
<… important children,> he was saying.
After a moment she repeated,
But of course they would not be her children. Not only would they not be of her own body, she would never see them or have any relation to them whatsoever. And this great hulking beast assumed that the role of breeder was meaningful to her, more meaningful in fact than her actual child. This insight seeped into her like oil into sand. She considered whether he had deliberately humiliated her, or only casually disregarded her.
Coming around
, indeed!
She didn’t dare to lift her hands from her lap. Clenching them hard, she waited wordlessly until he at last excused her, then managed to walk in a self-contained manner through the lumpy progression of compartments into the outer room and down the steps. From the corner of her eyes she caught the movement of several orthong pups as they skittered into the shadows to avoid her.
As she stumbled in a fury back through the outfold, a deep knowing clicked into place.
They despise us
. Never mind the phony suitor crap.
They despise us
.
3Three Somaformers the size of buffalo shuffled up the stairs behind Reeve and Gregor. One, with an impenetrable mass of brown curls covering his face and neck, looked like he
was
a buffalo, or a Somaform version of one. The other two sported the Somaformers’ usual close-cropped heads.
They passed another landing on the staircase, trudging ever upward, their way illumined by the glowing walls themselves. Reeve stopped to catch his breath a moment.
“You’re out of shape, Stationer.” Gregor had stopped to wait for him. In his spotless white lab coat, his fuzz of red hair gave his scalp a neon cast.
“Where are we going?” Taking a deep breath, Reeve started up again.
“No lung capacity.” He shook his head at Reeve. “We’ve made lungs our specialty,” he said, rendering it as a five-syllable word. “Most of us could run up and down this flight several times without collapsing.” Gregor continued the climb. “And we’re going to the Contact Place.”
“Tells me a lot.” Of all the Somaformers he’d met, Gregor was the most annoying. He had a calm, superior attitude that needed serious correcting. But the presence of the three buffalo encouraged a certain deference.
“Even a generation ago,” Gregor said, “the elevators still worked, or one bank of them did. But the elevators have been discredited. It’s a waste of technology, to expend effort on creature comforts that tend to weaken the form.”
The soft, plodding voice reminded Reeve of some of his Station teachers, who spoke only to hear their own ideas. For such types, communication was beside the point.
“But I notice you have the comfort of filtered air,” Reeve said.
The sounds of their steps rang on the grated treads. Here in this shaft of a thousand stairs were no doors or vents, no visible means of escape. But Reeve scanned everything, as he had been doing for days, struggling to make sense of the layout of the place. It had clearly been built with defense in mind.
“We have teams that volunteer to live in the caves—
without air filtration. One group had subjects that lived to be forty.”
“Imagine that.”
Gregor turned around to address his buffalo. “You see how he mocks us? Tell me, Stationer, how long were your lives on the space station?”
“One hundred years. Then people made room for others.”
“So you lived roughly three times as long as the average enclaver. And perhaps twenty percent longer than we do, in the Pool. All that technology used for your own benefit. Did you ever pity those you abandoned?”
“Of course we did. Did
you
ever think that someone had to occupy the Station, and it couldn’t be nineteen million colonists?”
Gregor paused to regard his prisoner. His eyes were burnished silver in the hall light, and in them, Reeve saw his own image, so tiny he couldn’t swear it was really him and not just some bearded stranger. “You mistake me, Calder, if you think I resent Station for that. I’m just wondering how you justified cutting yourself off from humanity.”
“We always meant to come back.”
Gregor’s eyes flicked in the direction of the guards, then peered intently at Reeve. “Did you now?”
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you’ve come back. Exactly my point.” Gregor looked with satisfaction at the guards, then turned and resumed the climb.
They came to the last landing, where padded jackets of various sizes hung on pegs.
“Access outside. Protein scaffolding,” Gregor said, apparently using a password. A section of the wall scraped aside, revealing a small door with a simple bar across it. Sliding the bar off, one of the guards opened the door, ushering in a cold, briny wind. They donned
the jackets and walked out onto a narrow ridge of stone set into a sheer wall of rock.
It was snowing. Or raining ash. Looking up, Reeve saw that ash from the eruption still hung in the upper atmosphere after a week. A wan sun bleached out a section of the shadowed sky. On the ledge where they stood, a black slurry of mud made for slippery footing, and Reeve hugged the hillside lest he slip down the fifteen-foot embankment. A depression in the surrounding rock formed a semicircle, in the middle of which stood a man possessing a normal-looking form. He wore thickly padded clothes, and by his feet lay a satchel and several large stones.
When he heard the others above him, he turned in alarm. Where his mouth should have been was an elongated proboscis. His forehead bulged outward in two mounds of flesh or bone.
“We have high hopes for this one,” Gregor said. “Notice the trunklike nose? Without a mouth, he uses that to ingest liquids.”
Great, soft flakes of dirty snow blew against Reeve’s face, crusting his eyelashes.
Gregor noticed him looking at the sky. “That’s from Mount Kosai. Olympus Archipelago. A fairly large eruption, even for Kosai. Thousands will die from the particulates, those with advanced indigo, mostly. Those that don’t come here for help.”
“You help them like you helped this fellow?” Reeve looked down at the waiting Somaformer.
“If they’re lucky. Jamey volunteered to test himself at the Contact Place. He has a chance to find acceptance. By the orthong.”
Reeve turned a startled look on the man. “You interact with the orthong?”
“Surprised?”
“I thought the orthong only took females.”
Gregor’s face was bone white in the light of day—a function of living underground, or a function of genetic
choice, perhaps. “Well, yes. That’s why all the emissaries are male. So we know that if the orthong take one of them, it’s not because they’re female.”
“So he’s some kind of sacrifice to the orthong?”
“Don’t be lurid. We hope the orthong will adopt him. If they do, we’ll know we’re on the right track, that one of us has found acceptance.” He gazed serenely at Reeve and nodded once, as though Reeve had finally grasped the essence of the thing.