Part 61 (2/2)

”Contract scientists with EEC? Easy enough to send an all too special s.h.i.+p to collect them to attend the a.s.sizes. It should not be hard for those with adequate resources to be sure they arrive late. Or not at all.”

Lunzie s.h.i.+vered. How could she warn Kai and Varian?

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Why hadn't she thought of them before? She had a.s.sumed that, as civilians, they would be allowed to go about their new responsibilities on Ireta. She should have known better.

”It is not just heavyworlders,” Zebara murmured, as if he'd read her mind. ”You know there are others?” Lunzie nodded.

Any of the commercial ent.i.ties would find greater profit in resource development without regulation. Humans and aliens both. She had heard of no society so idealistic that it had no criminals among it. Perhaps the Ssli, she amended: once sessile, how could they do anything wrong, in anyone's terms? But here and now?

”Seti!” came Zebara's murmur. ”They've used us, pretended sympathy for our fate, for having been genetically altered. But they despise us for it, as well.”

She nodded against his chest, trying to think. The Seti predated human members.h.i.+p in the FSP, though not by much. They were difficult, far more alien-seeming, and less amusing, than the Ryxi or Wefts. They had destroyed a Weft planet and later claimed to have done so accidentally, not knowing of the Wefts they killed. And the Thekl ”It's three-cornered, really.” Zebara nuzzled her hair a long moment and she felt the draft of someone's movement past them again. ”Our Governor's worked for the Pralungan Combine for over twenty years. He's been paid off in money, shares, and positions for his relatives. The Combine gets strong backs for its internal security forces, industrial enforcers. Even private troops. Crew for illegally armed vessels to fight Fleet interference. Your Sa.s.sinak's been a major problem for us, by the way. She gets along too well with her heavyworlder marines. That word's spread and we have too many * youngsters thinking of Fleet as a future. Not to mention the number of s.h.i.+ps she's blown up in her career. Also, the Seti have some gain of their own we haven't quite figured out. They want some of the planets we've taken: mostly those unsuitable for human settlement. They're fanneling money into the Combine and the Combine funnels some, as little as they can, to us.”

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It was almost too much to take in. ”What do you want me to do?” asked Lunzie.

”Get the real data out. Not the faked stuff you're supposed to be caught with. You'll have to leave before your team. It's supposed to look as if you're fleeing with stolen information. And if you don't, they'll know I didn't convince you. But you can leave before even they expect it. I can say you double-crossed me, used the pa.s.s you were given too soon.”

It sounded most unlikely. No lightweight could get oflplanet unnoticed. Surely they would be watching her. If she tried to bolt, they would simply call Zebara to check. And then find on her the real data, dooming both of them. She said this, very fast and very softly, into his ear. He held her close, a steady grip that would have been calming if her mind had not gone on ahead to the obvious conclusion.

He did not mean her to escape as a lightweight: as someone walking up the ramp, opening her papers for inspection at the port, climbing into her seat in the shuttle. He had something else in mind, something that would not be so obvious. The possibilities scrolled through her mind as if on a screen. As cargo? But an infrared scan would find her. As- She stiffened, p.u.b.ed her head back, and tried to see his face in the darkened hall.

”Not in coldsleep.” She meant it to be non-negotiable.

”I'm sorry,” he said, into her hair.

”No.” Quietly, but firmly, and with no intention of being talked into it. ”Not again.”

At that very inopportune moment, the softly pa.s.sionate music stopped, leaving the hall in sudden silence interspersed with rustling clothing. The silence lengthened. A single drumbeat, slow, inexorable, signalled a dire event, and the back of her seat shoved her up, away from Zebara. The armrest slid upward between them. The footrest dropped. Another drum joined the first, heavy, sodden with grief. Muted bra.s.s, one grave note after another followed the drums. Onstage, lights showed the barest outline of a heap of bodies, of sufferers still alive and starving. The sacrifice had not been enough. They would all die after all. A child's soprano.

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piercing as a needle, cried out for food, and Lunzie flinched. The alto's voice replying held all history's bitterness.

Surely it had not really been this bad! It could not have been! The rigid arm of the man beside her insisted it was, it had been. He believed it so, at least, and he believed the future might be as bleak. Lunzie swallowed, fighting nausea. If they actually showed cannibalism onstage . . . but they did not. A chorus of grieving women, of hungry children. One suggested, the others cried out in protest, and this went on (as so often in operas) somewhat longer than. was necessary to convince everyone that both sides were sincere.

One after another came over to the side of horror, for the children's sake, but it was, in the end, a child who raised a shaking arm to point at the new element in the crisis. The new element, presented onstage as a fur-coated robot of sorts, was the native grazer of the tundra. s.h.a.ggy, uncouth, and providentially stupid, it had been drawn by the warmth of the colonists' huts from its usual path of migration. The same woman who had been ready to put the dead into a synthesizer now wrestled the s.h.a.ggy beast and killed it: not without being gored by two of its six horns. Whereupon the survival of the colony was a.s.sured so long as they were willing to kill and eat the animals.

One alone stood fast by the Federation's prohibition, and threatened to reveal what they'd done. She was prevented from sending any message and died by her own hand after a lengthy aria explaining why she was willing to kill not only herself but her unborn child.

”That none of my blood shed sentient blood, so precious is to me ...”

Lunzie found herself more moved by this than she had expected. Whether it was true or not, whether it had happened at all, or for these reasons, the story itself commanded respect and pity. And it explained a lot about the heavyworlders. If you believed this, if you had grown up seeing this, hearing this gorgeous music put to the purpose of explaining that the lightweights would let forty thousand people die of cold and starva- 118.

tion because it was inconvenient to rescue them, because it would lower the profit margin, then you would naturally distrust the lightweights, and despise their dietary whims.

Would I have eaten meat even after it had been through the synthesizer? she asked herself. She let herself remember being pregnant, and the years when Fiona had been a round-faced toddler. She would not have let Fiona starve.

In a grand cras.h.i.+ng conclusion, the lightweights returned in a warm season to remonstrate with the colonists about their birthrate and their eating habits. The lead soprano, now white-haired and many times a grandmother, the children cl.u.s.tered around her as she sang, told them off in ringing phrases, dizzying swoops of melody that seemed impossible to bring from one throat. The colonists repudiated the lightweights' claims, refused to submit to their rules, their laws, demanded justice in the courts or they would seek it in their own way.

The lightweights flourished weapons and two heavyweights lifted them contemptuously overhead, tossing them-the smallest cast members Lunzie had yet seen- until they tumbled shaken to the ground. Then the two picked up the ”s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p,” stuffed the lightweight emissaries inside, and threw the whole a.s.semblage into s.p.a.ce. Or so it appeared. Actually, Lunzie was sure, some stage mechanism pulled it up out of sight. Curtain down! Lights up! Zebara turned to her. ”Well? What do you think of Zilmach?” Then his blunt finger touched her cheek. ”You cried.”

”Of course I did.” Her voice was still rough with emotion. To her own ears she sounded peevish. ”If that's true . . .” She shook her head, started again. ”It's magnificent, it's terrible, and tears are the only proper response.” What she wanted to say would either start a riot or make no sense. She said, ”What voices! And to think I've never heard of this. Why isn't it known?”

”We don't export this. It's just our judgment that your people would have no interest in it.” ”Music is music.” ”And politics is politics. Come! Would you like to

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meet Ertrid, the one who brought those tears to your eyes?”

Clearly the only answer was yes, so she said yes. Zebara's rank got them backstage quickly, where Ertrid proved to have a speaking voice as lovely as her singing. Lunzie had had little experience with performers. She hardly knew what to expect. Ertrid smiled, if coolly, and thanked Lunzie for her compliments, with an air of needing nothing from a lightweight. But she purred for Zebara, almost sleeking herself against him. Lunzie felt a stab of wholly unreasonable jealousy. Ertrid's smile widened.

”You must not mind, Lunzie. He has so many friends!”

She fingered the necklace she wore, which Lunzie had admired without considering its origins. Zebara gave the singer a quick hug and guided Lunzie away. When they were out of earshot, he leaned to speak in her ear.

”I could have said, so does she, but I would not embarra.s.s such a great artist on a night like this. She does not like to see me with another woman, and particularly not a lightweight.”

”And particularly not after that role,” said Lunzie, trying to stifle her jealousy and be reasonable. She didn't want Zebara now, if she ever had. The emotion was ridiculous.

”And I didn't buy her that necklace,” Zebara went on, as if proving himself to her. ”That was the former Lieutenant Governor's son, the one I spoke of.”

”It's all right.”

Lunzie wished he would quit talking about it. She did not care, she told herself firmly, what Zebara had done with the singer, or who had bought what jewelry seen and unseen, or what the Lieutenant Governor's son had done. All that mattered was her mission, and his mission, and finding some other way to accomplish it than enduring another bout of coldsleep.

m.

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