by Alex Oliver
"Thank you, Sumon," Priya said, stepping away from her to regard the guard with a poise Morwen found foreign in her, "for telling me and not the soldiers."
He cracked a small smile that barely lifted the end of his moustache. "They don't pay me, ma'am. But I will have to tell the master."
Priya took an unconscious step that set her between the guard and Morwen. It made Morwen's heart ache. "I know," Priya admitted. "But tell him that I said he must come home, because I have something that needs to be discussed in private. Then I will tell him all about this when he's here. I don't want our private business to be shared over the open infonet"
Morwen could see the man debating with himself over where his duty lay. Exactly how far was Priya a prisoner here? How far did her authority stretch?
And then the man said "Yes, ma'am," and she didn't know if it was better or worse that it was considerable.
Inside, they walked in awkward silence through a library and two reception rooms and an office, where three elderly women in peacock blue saris sat watching the feeds from the security cameras in every room.
"Do they watch you everywhere?" Morwen whispered as they left the chaperones behind, coming into an inner parlor whose glass wall showed a view of the unhealthy trees. Unhealthy shrubs beneath them sheltered a variety of brightly colored birds. The room itself had been done out in pale lavender silk, against which Priya's mint green salwar khameez contrasted like a jewel in its setting.
"Only in the public rooms."
Morwen reached out to try to take Priya's hand, but Priya pulled it away, looking troubled.
"We should go somewhere private then." Morwen insisted, with a shrill scream building in the back of her throat and silently spreading to every bone. Priya was right here. She was not lost forever. She was just here, out of touch.
"No, I don't think so," Priya said, again with that new ring of authority in her voice. "When Jai gets home, I don't want him to think - I want to be able to prove I have not betrayed him."
And now Morwen was furious. Without any warning, she was a thing made of fire and rage. "What about me? What about betraying me? We said we would always be together! I came because I found a world where we could do that, where we could build an honest life together. Where I could call you my wife out loud, and have everyone accept that.”
Priya flinched away, raising a flat hand like a shield to conceal her eyes from the distant camera. “Don't! Don't say that! How could I be your wife? It's not possible. It was never possible, really. They... they made me see that.”
“Who made you?” Morwen demanded, ready to go out and blow those people up in their smug little heterosexual houses. “Why did you listen to them, Priya? We were together, we were married in God's eyes, why didn't you listen to me?”
“Don't!” Priya raised the other hand and bent further away. With a shock of outrage, Morwen recognized that she was afraid, that she thought she was going to be hit.
“Who taught you to cower?” She moved in and grabbed Priya's wrists, tried to pull the sheltering hands away, got a brief glimpse of screwed up eyes and tears before revulsion at her own instinctive use of force made her drop the grip and wheel away. “Priya, what did they do?”
Priya swallowed, folded herself down onto a nearby couch, her head still bent away from the cameras, preserving what dignity she could. “Last year, after you had been gone a long time, my brothers came and took me home. I didn't want to go, but they made me. And then my family--”
She choked, bent forward into a ball of misery, with her hands pushed beneath the pearls in her hair. “They said I brought them disgrace, and that I would marry a man they chose for me and think myself lucky. They didn't let me sleep. They didn't let me eat. They left me alone in the room for days. Days. Weeks. They said it hurt them too but they had to do it. For the family's honor and the sake of my own soul. That one day I would be grateful.”
She uncurled slightly, meeting Morwen's eyes in a flare of defiant anger. “And you didn't care! I smuggled out three letters and you never replied. If you had replied I might have held on, but you didn't care! You left me alone and you didn't come back when I called you. You didn't care!”
“I didn't know.” The flame of Morwen's anger had consumed all the oxygen in her spirit. It imploded and left a hollowness in which she could not breathe. Priya wasn't lying about this - if she had been, she would not have been yelling it in Morwen's face. She would have whispered. "But I did write to you. I sent mail packages from the remand center, and pinholenet messages from Froward and from Cygnus 5. You were the one who never answered me."
She'd thought it hard hearted but sensible. Priya after all had been left in their old home, among people who would have heard the rumors. She would have been wise not to feed the gossip by spending huge amounts of money on interplanetary calls. Better, Morwen had thought, for her just to receive the allotment of messages that came as part of a Kingdom Warrior's salary, and to know that Morwen was still thinking of her.
Priya looked up at her, bringing her tear-stained face into clear view for the first time in the conversation. "I didn't get any messages."
Morwen's anger managed a slow smolder back into life, as some residue of innocence in her protested that this could not be true, that the people she had served could not have been so thoughtlessly malicious towards her. They could not have betrayed her love as they had betrayed her life. But they would have done, wouldn't they? And they'd have thought they were righteous for it. "Those bastards at the department of purity must have censored them. Why didn't we go and live in the Caliphate? It would have been better there."
Priya got up to reach for a box of tissues, dried her face, sniffing. Her voice was dull when she replied. Dull and beaten. "For men maybe. Not for us. Nowhere is better for us." She composed herself into a pulled in, straight-backed, dignified statue and sat back down, legs pressed tightly together, arms wound around herself and her hands on her shoulders. The polite smile she raised to Morwen was machine-like in its lack of emotion. "There's nowhere to run, is there? They have all the power, and you can't win. You can say 'I'd rather die' but then they just kill you and you're dead. That's not winning. I wanted to live, so I said yes. In the end."
"But there is a place to run to now," Morwen hated this quiet poise more than she had hated the tears. Priya had at least been there, in the tears. Now she was far away, pulled somewhere so far inside Morwen was afraid she might not be able to reach her at all. She went to her knees on the carpet beside Priya's seat, put her hands on Priya's knee in supplication. "Cygnus 5. The captain, our captain, she said that I could bring you, that we could have a place there and be wives. Everyone gets a second chance there - it doesn't matter what came before. You could come with me. Please come with me! You must know that I care now? I always have."
Priya didn't shift away from her touch, but she barely acknowledged it either. "They say on the news that it is a place of rebellion and evil, and it's going to be wiped out."
"Wouldn't you rather die fighting, with me at your side?" Morwen's rare imagination supplied it as a scene of glory, a fitting end to a doomed love story, far more romantic than this enforced separation. "If I could have you with me, I wouldn't be afraid to die."
Priya's spirit came back in a rush of miserable anger. She reached down and pushed Morwen's hands away from her. Morwen brought them to her chest, curled, as though they had been burned. Burned by the cold of space. Its infinite nothing seeped up her arms and into her chest, where it shriveled her heart. It hurt. It hurt to breathe and she could not think for it.
"I've already fought that battle," said Priya, with a return of the sternness that was so new to her. "I lost. I think when the moment arrives, you will also feel differently."
"But I love you!" Morwen protested, laying it down like a trump card. The thing that should make all the difference.
"I love... loved you too." The anger seemed to have made a pact with Priya's desolation, turned itself in
to this hard thing in her that spoke like the voice of authority. "But that isn't enough, is it? You don't marry just to please yourself. Living your life with no thought of other people - that's the kind of selfishness that you grow out of. I don't want to break my family’s hearts any more. I want to do my duty, and give my parents grandchildren. I have put away childish things. You should too."
It wasn't until the tears fell on the backs of her cold hands that Morwen realized she was weeping - that some of her constriction and breathlessness was because her throat had closed, her nose and eyes were streaming. This was not how it was supposed to go. This was not fair. This could not be happening. "Please Priya!" she choked. "Please don't do this. Don't leave me!"
There was a silence like abandonment. Priya huffed, as if she was driven to this against her will, and then she slid off the sofa, knelt next to Morwen and hugged her. For a lightning quick blaze of relief Morwen thought she had relented. She buried her face in Priya's neck and squeezed her tight as though she could weld her into her own ribs, literally make them one.
But then Priya said "I already did. Nearly a year ago. And you didn't even notice."
Footsteps, running in the hall. They didn't mean anything to her. Someone outside, talking. A man and three women - the chaperones, maybe, and someone new.
Priya stiffened, then smoothed the hair back from Morwen's face, tried to urge her to sit up. "Morwen? Morwen. I think it's Jai. He's home. You should go."
Shouting now, and leather soles on marble floors, echoing in the high vaulted ceilings. It meant something that Priya was trying to protect her, didn't it? But what? Morwen couldn't think, couldn't find it in herself to care. She had been eviscerated, and inside there was nothing any more. Maybe a scattered dust-cloud barren as the starless void. How could she be a person around the enormity of that?
Her nose was streaming when her wife's husband burst through the door to confront her, gun in his hand. "You? You are the woman who gave my wife a bad name? Get away from her or I shoot you!"
She was going to meet her maker with snot all over her face. Well, why not? She'd never been allowed any dignity in life, why break the habit now? Closing her eyes to make it easier for him to pull the trigger, she turned her face away and waited.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Temptation of Bryant Jones
Aurora had been gone a day and there still had been no invasion. Bryant told himself that must be good news. He told himself this every five minutes, and the reminder eased the weight in his stomach just enough to let him go back to work. Then the anxiety built again until he was forced to stop and repeat it, breathing the worry out like a black cloud. Why had he ever got involved with a woman whose middle name seemed to be 'danger'? Oh yes - he hadn't. He'd tried to get away. She had simply hunted him down until he'd learned to like it.
At times like this, it would have been nice to have a god to pray to - someone into whose hands he could place her, someone he could trust to look after her. But the closest he could come was to try to have faith that she could take care of herself.
And to turn the rest of his mind to solving the Lice's locked door problem. Whatever it was in there, they thought it needed a killer to operate it. That didn't ease his worries any. It was fucking unimaginative, wasn't it? It was as much as an admission that you couldn't solve your problems some other way. Well, he intended to be better than that.
He swallowed more pain-killers and struggled to get his shaking hands to cinch closed his bag of equipment. Sleep - except for the drugged trance in which he must have walked his way back to his workshop after 'dying' - had begun to elude him. He would begin to drift off and suddenly he would be back in the flames, watching his fingers char, and then he would recoil and be awake again.
His fine motor control was shot. If any of this had been real, he would not be in the best state for an operation. But it was not real, and he did not intend to dignify it by allowing it to bleed into his prime-level life. He would show them, those ancient Louse designers. He would show them what a human being was made of.
Wrapping insulating material around his feet and hands, he prepared for one more try.
It was hard to go into the temple of the Louse god, and worrying to notice that he could now read its posture and the angle of its antennae as stern encouragement. One read the body language of an alien race one had never met with caution - unless one's DNA was being increasingly compromised by theirs, unless race memories and trace perceptions were being built into the structure of one's body.
Still, it was knowledge, and knowledge was good.
It was harder still to lower himself into the darkness of the tunnel beneath the model city, here at the epicenter of the world, the very hub of the universe. The voices that sang in the tiles around him were becoming closer, sharper, more aware of him. It was as if he crouched over a great ocean, and the things that swam in the deeps were rising to the surface to look at him.
Yeah, he thought, as he pushed open the first set of doors with his elbow because he could not force himself to set even his swaddled hand on it, Fuck you anyway. I'm cleverer than all of you.
The same set of six hatches again. It was almost a jolt to find the room had not changed. He wondered what was in the other five, but did not fancy going through five more deaths to find out. Shrugging his bag onto the floor by the console, he took out a roll of the fabric insulation they had used to wrap Aurora for her slingshot ride into space, and smoothed it over the floor.
He half expected the fire to start as he was assembling the set of rods he'd made from the tough reeds that grew in the nearby lake, but perhaps the Louse programmers did not recognize a tent. He got the insulating material over it in peace, laid out a scalpel, bone saw, grips and threaded needles, and swabs of an antiseptic Dr. Atallah had made from the blue bear grass.
Okay, he was ready. His hands had gone past shaking now, into a stillness that was the other side of panic. Good. He threw the tent flap open, took a syringe of anesthetic mixed with rapid-healing nano, and holding it between his teeth, he twisted Honey's hatch open.
"What?" she managed to get out, barely opening her eyes before he had reached in and emptied the syringe into her arm. When she slumped, limp and unconscious, he had the first taste in his life of what it was to hate yourself. But there was no time for remorse or regret. Something in the test had finally decided he was outside its parameters again. A fire was licking up the wall beneath him, and in a new twist, the wheels on the hatches of the other stasis tubes began to turn by themselves.
He looked for a moment, and then recalled himself. Probably a distraction. Almost certainly something he didn't want or need to see. He hauled Honey's unresisting body out of the wall and carried her into the insulated tent, sealing it behind him.
The test had remembered her burns from last time, he noticed, queasy at the sight of the oozing nubs of her blackened feet. It made it hard to remember that this wasn't real, as he swabbed her heartbreakingly tiny chest and cut before he had time to think twice.
Heat and red light filtered through the cracks in the tent. The air thinned and became choking, but Bryant worked fast, having rehearsed the movements over the course of a sleepless night. Cut down to the ribs, clamping blood vessels. Break a rib and retract. Into the lung, the nano fighting him, repairing the damage almost as fast as he could deal it. He made the mistake of a moment's glance at Honey's little face, innocent and betrayed, and then at the mess of blood and tissue around his fingers. But there! There was the key. The breath gargled in her throat as though she was drowning in her own blood, but he pulled the key out, and lowered the two halves of her ribcage back together. The nano was already knitting everything into place by the time he put in a few stitches to hold it all closed.
"Ha!" he panted, looking down on her, still peaceful, asleep and breathing. The key vibrated in his hand as though it carried an electrical charge. "See!"
That was when the screaming started - the shrill, unbeara
ble wailing of children in agony. Even though he'd half expected something like this, his gut lurched, and his half-human hair seemed to crawl. Cradling Honey in one arm, the other hand still tight around the key, he stood up. He wrapped his tent material around them and risked a quick glance out, so that he could see which wall to aim for.
The hatches were fully open now, and the children inside were burning, calling out for him. He almost stepped back, went for the console in an effort to find a way of saving them all, but he was so tired of this. He was so tired of the test's ever increasing levels of cruelty. "Okay, okay," he said, and at that point if he could have wiped the Lice out himself he would have done so. "I get the point. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I get it."
Curiously a memory of the boy dying on his operating table returned - the thing that had started him on this path. It gave him a measure of comfort. That boy had thought the risk worth taking if it gave him a chance to seize a future he'd always hoped for. And these weren't even real children anyway. Bryant put a foot in each corner of his insulation and slid himself and Honey toward the final door.
As if his acceptance of the casualties had been the only thing necessary, the flames died down as he shuffled across the soot-blackened room. The screams choked off one by one. When it was cool enough, Bryant set Honey down. She was still limp and unconscious but even her feet were showing improvement. Ignoring the corpses smoking behind the other five hatches, he reached out and pushed the key into its hole.
It turned, and the whole wall slid up into the ceiling, leaving only a raised lip, about an inch high to mark the threshold.
Light did not seem to penetrate past that sill. The darkness beyond was as flat and absolute as if he were looking at another wall.
He pushed it with his hand. There was nothing here, his hand simply passed through into somewhere else, and he could not see it any more. A foot, raised and set down past the threshold, encountered a floor. Forward, he could see nothing. When he looked back, the dead things in the hatches and even Honey on the floor had a translucent cast, as if they were melting away.