"Stop, Shringil!" We had donned the regular filters, plus a body sheath just for him, before we left the hospital. He grasped my arm above my gloves and I did not feel it. "I was never yours, and I am not yours now. Stop pursuing me."
"It is not you alone I want but your undead match," he said. He pawed at my arm, as if to break through the sheath of filter I wore.
"Stop," she cried, and then she called out in high Shurixit, and three strange Shurixit broke off their conversations with others nearby and came running. Each had only one caste jewel on his or her forehead, and their fur matched the color of their jewels: lilac, lavender, poppy, colors of flowers from a planet to which I had never been.
"I here denounce and abjure this one who was once my brother," my rider said, "and cast him into the third death. Witness it for me. Hear me and see me and swear me."
"We hear and see and swear," they said, and some strange current of air moved over us, so cold it raised gooseb.u.mps on my arms. I couldn"t think how weather like that could happen in the corridors, which were maintained at a constant temperature just this side of comfortable for all Known Races. "Shringil Eftsolan, you have pa.s.sed the third gate," they said, and he shrieked and fell to the ground and lay still.
I couldn"t tell whether a First Dead had actually died again. It wasn"t something they taught in med school, at least not the one I"d gone to on Frillium. I looked at the still form on the corridor floor and was only glad that his eyes were closed. I remembered the hopeless, overwhelming love he had forced on me with touch, and almost, I longed for that to happen again. In those few moments, I had had a purpose. I had had a home.
Itana spat on him, using my lips and my saliva. She stepped over him and walked on. I made us look. He did not move behind us.
We strode past the revelers, and she accepted a few sips of ria wine from some, a savor of scents from others, a cupcake here and a candystick there. She walked us into the center of the Shurixit Quadrant. Light came in nets and slices from above, fretted by narrow sword-shaped leaves of purple plants. A dank metallic taste rode the air. Slim rivers ran down the centers of their corridors, and cropfruit grew from niches in the walls, dangling orange and purple globes above the ground. She reached for one and raised it to my mouth. I managed to stop the gesture before it reached its end. I held out my other hand in front of us and shook it.
"Oh! I am sorry, Body," she said. "I forgot." She set the fruit on a nearby ledge.
Several Shurixit challenged us as we traveled. The rider spoke to them, and they looked to the ground and waved us on.
At last we came to an entrance in a rough, rocky wall that had a single blue gem above it. Itana stood in front of the entrance and sang.
Lost.
We have lost.
We are lost.
We were reft.
Cut like thread.
Sliced in two.
Death moved between us.
Splice the rope.
Reweave the thread.
Bind the wound.
Find me.
Find me.
Find.
Several gray-striped Shurixit drifted from the entrance and listened as Itana sang. They looked at each other and then at me. One with two blue caste jewels in his forehead came to me and knelt. "Oh, my beloved, are you there? Are you there?" he sang, with a melody that echoed her song.
"Oh my beloved, I am here, I am here."
"Can we now be as one, be as one?"
"Be as one," she sang. She put my hand under his chin and tilted his face up. His eyes were pale green beneath the blue of his jewels.
"Will you be with me? Will you accept me?" she sang, and he responded, "It is my dream. I will be with you."
She knelt, too, and brought my face toward his. I tried to pull back. Skin to skin, Human to Shurixit, I"d already tried that once and look where it got me! But she didn"t stop. She pressed my forehead against the stranger"s.
His caste jewels burned with more than color. They pulsed and pierced into my forehead just while I was thinking, Hey, I don"t love this guy, even though he touched my unprotected skin.
"Ow!" I cried, and then, "Oh!" A wind blew through my brain, picked up my rider, and carried her away.
I woke cradled in soft, furry gra.s.s, cupped in a depression in some rock inside a cave in the Shurixit Quadrant. "h.e.l.lo?" I said.
My mouth. It worked again. I could speak my own language. I touched my cheeks, then pressed my forehead, where I felt a small hard b.u.mp.
"h.e.l.lo." A male Shurixit came to stand over me. "How do you feel?"
I tapped the ear with the translator. I couldn"t tell whether he was speaking Standard or Shurixit. I guessed it didn"t matter. "Better," I said, for the second time that day.
I sat up and looked around. The rock that held me had several depressions cushioned with gra.s.s in it, and the cavern we were in opened up, with a higher ceiling, just past the edge of it. A clear pool of water lay to one side of the cavern, and a pit with a fire ring sat in the other. The ceiling was sooted with smoke. It was hard to remember I was still on Kata Station.
I looked at the stranger and realized I knew him. He was the one my rider had sung to, only now he had a third caste jewel in his forehead, half green and half purple. I poked my forehead again and wished I had a mirror. I suspected the b.u.mp in my skin that itched so much was one of those jewels.
"Itana is gone, isn"t she?" I asked.
"I am here now," he said, and patted his stomach, or where a stomach would be if he were a human.
"Good," I said. "I"m going home. You don"t need me anymore, do you?" I checked the timeblock on the back of my hand. It was almost station midnight, and still the same day. Gateway Night.
"I"ll show you the way," he said.
"Thank you."
We walked without touching through a maze of rocky corridors. "Memorize this pathway," he told me as we went. "You will always be welcome here."
"No offense, but I"m not sure I want to come back," I said.
"I know you," he said, and then he hugged me, stroked his hand over my head. Still, I didn"t fall into hopeless love with him. I kind of liked him, though. "You might never come back," he murmured, "but know you can."
"Okay," I said.
We came to the edge of the Shurixit Quadrant, and he stood in the corridor, watching as I headed toward the entrance to downunder, where my compartment was. He watched me until the corridor turned and we no longer had a line of sight.
Sleeping people lined the corridor, some wearing wreaths of b.u.t.terflies, some entwined with others, some muttering to themselves. I ducked down into my compartment and studied my image in the mirror there. Sure enough, I had a blue-green jewel in my forehead now. I guessed I could scratch it out or remove it surgically. But I liked it.
THE WOMEN WHO ATE STONE SQUID.
Jay Lake.
I studied the virteo screen. The lander"s sensors jibed with what we"d probed from orbit these last weeks. Partial pressure of O2 a hair below 1.3 bars-perfectly breathable and not quite concentrated enough to induce oxygen toxicity. CO2 just about absent, with about 79% inert gases. At least that last bit was Earth-normal, though the nitrogen component was slightly reduced in favor of helium, wherever that was coming from, and some NO2. The air was maybe not so good for human tissue over extended exposures, with humidity like an old bone stored in high orbit. This planet"s seabeds were as dry as Joan Carter"s Mars, but local conditions had held stable since I"d grounded, oh, fourteen hours ago.
Carter was on my mind a lot. The rest of the crew-monkeys back up there in orbit had always said I was crazy, reading stuff from the Years Before. Even my sweetie, Dr. Sheldon, thought it was a bit much. But when we got here-Malick"s World-even though I was a mere enlisted-grade locals.p.a.ce pilot, I was the only woman on the ship who had the least idea about alien ruins.
Everything I knew about lost civilizations I learned from Edgra Rice Burroughs, but that was still far more than the rest of my shipmates.
The comm squawked. I had it routed to the boards instead of my mastoid implant for the feel of the thing, like one of those old time astronauts-Hanna Reitsch or Laika the Sovcomm. "You all checked out yet, Ari?"
It was Captain Pellas, of course. On board the Correct Thought Makes Correct Deed her word was most literally law. As it should be. But procedure said that the commander of a vessel exploring an unsecured environment had final authority over her ship and crew, as officer on scene. Detached command, it was called. Well, though I didn"t hold a commission in this sailor"s navy-just a rating, me-I was commander and the entire crew of the Sixth Virtue, Correct Thought"s number two lander. And the only thing in s.p.a.ce that trumped a captain"s word-of-law was procedure.
Which meant that until I made orbit again my course of action was my own decision. What a strange feeling, in this woman"s navy.
"Yes ma"am," I said. Obedience was an old habit, that and the fact she was my ride home. "All checked out, Captain."
"Then I suggest you get on with it."
"Yes ma"am."
Pellas had budgeted three ship-days to a.s.sess the first indisputable evidence of nonhuman intelligence ever encountered. I"d already used up most of one descending and doing environmental a.s.says on my immediate surroundings. Time to step outside and play Joan Carter. "Maintaining comm silence during my first recondo, ma"am."
"We"ll track you."
With three-centimeter software-adjusted optical resolution on Correct Thought"s main sensor suite, they certainly would track me. Combining that with my suit sensors, Pellas would know if I farted when I bent over.
I"d had the choice on descent of landing in the old seabed west of the developed sh.o.r.eline, or atop the big pavers of the plaza that extended behind the docks into the middle of the city. There was no way to trust the stones of the plaza to take the lander"s eighty-odd tons of ma.s.s, even accounting for the slightly sub-Terran gravity and the soft-load plates engineering had refitted on footpads to reduce ground pressure. On the other hand, the seabed was no more reliable . . . what showed up on sensors as solid ground could easily be a heavy clay crust over a slurry or a dust bowl.
I chose the plaza. For one, it captured my imagination. Even better, touching down in the city proper spared me the two-kilometer hike from the nearest sufficiently large and level bit of seabed, along with a three hundred-meter climb.
Now I was stepping out to a place where feet-perhaps-had once stepped that belonged to no human being at all.
First, I sealed my helmet and toggled the mike and the cams. Then I locked Sixth Virtue"s boards to Correct Thought"s nav-comm signal in case I didn"t make it back to the lander, recoded the hatch access pa.s.sword in case someone else made it back instead of me, and slapped the open key.
A line of shadow slipped by me with the raising of the hatch, and the light of a new world flooded my face.
Orange. Maybe orange-maroon. Appropriate, somehow.
Still framed by the thick coaming of the hatch, I looked across the plaza. My breath caught hard in my throat. A new world.
New, but older than time itself.
Late afternoon flooded the scene with that oddly-colored light, shadows falling at lazy angles. I could see an enormous building almost directly in front of me. Too-tall pillars rose from a curved row of bases to support a high roofed portico. The front facing of the portico was carved with a dense frieze of figures, crowding in their dozens along each meter. Wide, shallow steps swept from porch to plaza, while the building extended wings to each side. Instead of windows, there were sort of vertical slits, almost the inverse of the pillars, every few meters in the facing. Large buildings of varying but similar architecture loomed to each side.