Part 20 (1/2)

There was a door in the cable.

Hama kept Ca-si in custody.

The boy paced back and forth in the small cell Hama had created for him, his muscles sliding beneath his skin. He would mutter sometimes, agitated, clearly troubled by whatever had become of his lost love.

But when Ca-si inspected the Commissary's silvered epidermis and the fish that swam in his chest, a different look dawned on his fleshy, soft face. It was a look of awe, incomprehension, and-admit it, Hama!- disgust.

He knew Arles disapproved of his obsession with this boy.

”The result of your a.s.signment of them to the Cull was satisfactory. Two went out; one came back. What does it matter?”

But Hama pointed to evidence of flaws-the lack of trophies from the body being the most obvious. ”All these disgusting drones take trophies from their kills. There's something wrong here.”

”There is more than one way of manifesting weakness, Hama. If the other let herself die it is better she is deleted from the gene pool anyhow.”

”That is not the strict Doctrine.”

Arles had sighed and pa.s.sed a glimmering hand over the silver planes of his cheek. ”But even our longevity is a violation of the Doctrine-if a necessary one. It is a hundred thousand years since Druz, Hama. His Doctrine has become-mature. You will learn.”

But Hama had not been satisfied.

At last the translation suites cut in, rendering the drones' linguistically impoverished jabber into reasonably acceptable Standard.

Hama faced the boy. He forced his silvered face into a smile. ”You have been isolated here a long time.””A thousand births,” the boy said sullenly.

That was about right: ten thousand years since the last Commission visit, a thousand of these drones' brief generations. ”Yes. A thousand births. And, in enough time, languages change. Did you know that? After just a few thousand years of separation two identical languages will diverge so much that they would share no common features except basic grammatical constructs-like the way a language indicates possession, or uses more subtle features like ergativity, which ...”

The boy was just staring at him, dull, not even resentful.

Hama felt foolish, and then angry to be made to feel that way. He said sternly, ”To rectify language drift is part of our duty. The Commission for Historical Truth, I mean. We will reteach you Standard. Just as we will leave you the Memory, with the story of mankind since you were last visited, and we will take away your story to tell it to others. We bind up mankind on all our scattered islands. Just as it is your duty-”

”To death.”

”Yes. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have watched for sixty thousand years, and they may watch for sixty thousand years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and the Post, and yourself.”

The boy watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists.

Ca-si was no more than a backup mechanism, Hama thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station's brooding automated defenses failed. For this sole purpose, six thousand generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in the intergalactic waste.

As he gazed at the planes of the boy's stomach, Hama felt an uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.

On impulse he snapped, ”Who do we fight? Do you know?”

”We fight the Xeelee.”

”Why do we fight?”

The boy stared at him.

Hama ordered, ”Look at me.” He pulled open his robe. ”This silver skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm them for their skin. The fish in my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered man, occupied Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to speak to my colleagues across the galactic Supercl.u.s.ter. These are triumphs for mankind.”

The look on Ca-si's face made Hama think he didn't regard his condition as a triumph.

Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, ”I know you didn't kill the girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is she?”

But the boy wouldn't reply.

It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he longed to.

La-ba had been raised into strangeness.

The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.

When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a burning, glaring light.The Old Man tried to make her understand. ”The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world.”

She couldn't stop staring at his face. It was a ma.s.s of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was the strangest thing of all, much stranger than the sun and the churning world.

The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in s.p.a.ce, not the air.

Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.

”No people live here,” she said.

He smiled. ”One person does.”

He showed her his home. It wasn't a dorm. It was just a shack made of bits of s.h.i.+ning plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little.

She looked around. ”There is no supply dispenser.”

”People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations.”

She tried to understand. ”Why?”

He shrugged. ”Because life is short. People want-”

”What?”

”Something more than the war.”

She thought about that. ”There is the dance.”

He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. ”I never could dance. Come.”

He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above and the glower of the overheated planet below.

Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.

”No,” the Old Man said gently. ”Not blackness. Look.”

They waited there for long heartbeats.