by Alex Oliver
Is he right? The Destroyer murmured at the base of Nori's skull. How much would you do for that dream? We could cull the humans until they were no threat. We could simply kill them all. How much would you allow?
The dream? It's everything I ever wanted. Nori managed not to think of Felix, glad the soldier was not patched into this conversation, but feeling almost as guilty as if he was. I'd give a hell of a lot.
It wasn't a smile, this feeling of warmth rising up from the earth to surround him, like the water of a hot bath, but it was close.
The bargain is sealed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Felix works through his pain
After an hour sitting shakily on the slick tile floor, feeling the cold sweat of fear and pain gradually permeate every inch of his clothes, Felix accepted that Nori was not going to talk to him again. Not now, maybe not ever.
Feeling moldy and grimy and cold, the memory of a non-existent burn still shaking the fibers of his body, he forced himself to his feet. A mask of white tendrils had already begun to spin itself over Nori's face, but when they began creeping between his lips and up his nose, Felix had to clap a hand over his own mouth and stagger away, trying not to sob.
The walk back up into the dwelling level of the city settled his body, but couldn't touch the black hole that seemed to have opened in his chest. Still, he knew how to deal with loss. He collected fresh clothes from his room and made his way to the complex of heated pools at sector 7 to wash off the fear sweat and make himself look presentable once more.
What one did with heartbreak was work through it. So after he emerged, warm again, heavy with the weight of worlds, he made his way to Aurora's office, prioritized the requests and complaints that had come in since he last left, and addressed them one by one.
The refugees from InfiniTech Utopia were still arriving. Their pontoth covered spaceships were recognized by the planet as belonging to itself, but after several early tragedies, their crews were being confined on board until they could assimilate enough native pontoth in their systems to be able to touch the surface of the planet without immediately being consumed.
“I've got fifteen hundred people here who are watching the food run out while they can't go outside without immediate death,” Captain Bors of the Profit Margin complained on video hook up, all the other captains nodding along as though they expected Felix to do something about it at once. “The longer this continues, the more I risk threats to the smooth running of the ship - riots, carnage. I was promised a refuge, not a prison.”
“This is not a prison,” Felix agreed, though the weight in his belly said otherwise. He doubted if he'd ever be able to leave again, after all. “We've tamed the feral pontoth your people introduced to the galaxy. There must be many other planets infected by ours now, you could go there. Or you could wait for another day or so until we are sure it's safe for you to emerge.”
“And then what? We submit ourselves to you?” Bors perhaps didn't mean to sneer so obviously. He had at some point modified his skin so that it was purple, and reshaped his ears to a length that reminded Felix of donkey ears. Presumably he found them attractive, but Felix--
The walls of his office shook, as a visitor rapped on the door-frame, and a tiny jolt of pleasure went through him to see Sergeant Ademola limp in, leaning heavily on his cane. Ademola’s silver hair was neatly cut. He was beautifully shaven and turned out in his Kingdom uniform to a perfection that made Felix proud.
“Please, Sergeant,” he said, leaping to his feet, “take the chair. It's so good to see you up again.”
Ademola and Bors caught sight of one another on the monitors and shared the same eye-widening look of men confronted with their natural enemies. “I'll… just wait here until you're done,” Ademola said, backing out of shot, but he did allow Felix to pull his chair over and accepted it gratefully while Felix returned to his screens.
“I'll say it again, because you didn't answer me,” Bors's tone had frozen to the point it was surprising his jaw didn't shatter. “You expect us to submit ourselves to you? You are superstitious savages still kowtowing to your made up sky gods. We are genetically engineered to be faster, stronger and more intelligent than you. If this is to be our planet now, why should we not rule it?”
It was funny – and by funny, he meant scouringly painful – to know that Nori was right, and that Nori was needed where he was, giving them an edge to survive. Felix supposed he should be diplomatic, imagined that Callow, governmental idealist, would have been appalled at him. But Callow was dead, and idealism was in increasingly short supply as a result.
“We took you in because of our humanitarian principles,” Felix answered grimly. “To save your lives. But don't let that fool you into thinking I won't disassemble you on a cellular level if I feel you're getting out of line. This is Aurora Campos's world by right of conquest, and I'm her second in command. We may figure out something more equitable down the line, but right now you do what I say, or I get the planet to destroy you. Understand?”
Bors's ears twitched and then lay down along the back of his head, where they touched his shoulders. Maybe not a donkey then, maybe more of a rabbit. Either way it was a resentful submission, but he would take it.
“I understand.”
“Good,” Felix flipped through to a report from the hospital. “Since we've established you can eat food that originated on Cygnus 5, I'm going to start sending you batches of the photosynthesizing nano. That'll accelerate the process of getting the planet to recognize you and mean your people can get some nutrients from just lying in a sunny window. It's projected your people should have naturalized enough to start setting foot on the planet in a week. If you can't keep your people in order until then, I'm going to deal with whatever leader who arises in your absence and can.”
“Freaks,” Ademola shook his head regretfully once the communication snapped off. “I didn't think we would have to live beside arrogant, long-eared purple freaks. I'm glad you put your foot down. They think too well of themselves as it is.”
It was unsettling to hear someone he had thought of as a kindly paternal figure speak so harshly. Unsettling to remember that he had believed the same thing himself once, before he fell in love with another man, and watched that man turn himself into a world. “What about me, uncle?” he said, reminding Ademola that they were no longer in the army, that those ranks and certainties were past. “With my green skin? Am I your enemy now?”
Ademola grimaced, linking his hands on the knob of his cane and looking at his fingers. “I don't think so,” he said slowly. “We all sin. And you did it so the rest of us could live, not out of vanity or a desire to correct the Lord. And I expect that when we are farming for ourselves, you and the others will want to put it back as it was – the beautiful brown color that the Lord said was good.”
If he let himself, Felix would feel the same way. His own hands and the shadows of his own face that he could see out of the corner of his eye felt strange to him now, uglier than he once had been. But he had been off-world during the famine. He had not needed to take the enhancement. He had taken it when he returned, entirely because it represented a kind of freedom that he was glad of, and he would not be putting it right. He liked that he was now more difficult to starve.
“Would you kill me for it if I kept it?”
Ademola's whiskey brown eyes flicked up to catch his, surprisingly full of humor. “You know I've given up killing people for my beliefs. I might shout at you, a little.”
Felix laughed. “That, I can live with. What can I do for you?”
“I came to tell you that we've cleared the fallen-in drainage channels in sector two. Which means basic accommodation is now available for a third of the refugees. Also several of the mag-lev tracks became active a couple of hours ago, and the one we're numbering as East 2-5 leads to another dwelling cave, about the size of a small town. We can put the rest of them there. There are two sets of closing blast doors in the passage between her
e and there, in case they get any ideas.”
“That's good,” Felix's mouth smiled. He felt it like pressure on a bruise in the bags around his eyes. “At least we'll be ready for them when they can leave their ships. How's the hospital?”
“Coping. They're sterilizing needles and reusing them, which is not ideal.” He waved a hand at Felix's left-hand screen. “They've sent you a requisition list, which they asked me to ask you to prioritize. I know we're in quarantine, but Sekh Heongu promised us help. She can surely manage an automated supply drop even if she won't send people.”
Felix penciled in time for a meeting with Sekh Heongu's representative on Snow City. Just talking to the woman felt dangerous, despite, or perhaps because of, the ease with which she'd rescued him before. On second thoughts, perhaps he would ask Dr. Atallah to take that meeting for him. Sekh Heongu wouldn't think of her as someone who was already in her debt. “Got it.”
“Also, Selena Campos is down by the lake. She wants to talk to you about setting things up for farming, if we're going to be ready for the spring. She wants the right to draft in any of the newcomers who aren't desperately needed elsewhere.”
“Does she really need me to come out to her?” Felix asked, checking his time-stamp as the dragging footsteps of Bousaid finally approached his door. “Or can I just give her free rein? I trust her expertise.”
He flicked up the lists of refugees' previous occupations and hobbies which had begun to come in from the still-locked-down ships. “I don't think they went in for farming on their planet, but there's some hobby gardeners here, and a few small animal vets… Some hobby seamstresses and knitters too. Have we got anyone who can take over production of clothes? I want to phase out wearing Kingdom uniforms as fast as possible. It's divisive, and it's not who we are anymore. There's a...” he scrolled back in the list a couple of pages. “There's a fashion designer and her staff here. Perhaps she could be tasked with creating a Cygnus 5 'look' with the resources on hand. The sooner we all appear to be in this together the better.”
Ademola grinned, broad and surprisingly happy. “I'll ask Ignatious to oversee that from our end,” he said, “that boy spends so much time in front of anything shiny, checking his hair and the cut of his jacket. I think it will appeal.”
“Practical though,” Felix warned as Ademola got slowly but smoothly to his feet. “It needs to be practical.”
“Trust me,” Ademola waggled a departing hand. “I've got it.”
“What has he got?” Bousaid asked, as he edged around the door and tripped inside. He no longer looked so much like a dangerous criminal – since the opening of the baths he had washed his ragged clothes and mended them, scrubbed his face and trimmed the brown from his hair and beard. It was all dark green now. There had always been something thoughtful about his eyes, but now the rest of him matched. He seemed an impoverished philosopher, or perhaps he had embraced his internal politician, in the short time he had spent, nursing Callow through his final days.
“Ademola is in charge of our new fashion line,” Felix flexed his stiff smile again, already exhausted. It was nice to see people actually flourishing here, but it was going to make this more difficult. “I need you to stop work on the new form of representative government.”
“Captain Campos said it was going to be rolled out next year,” Bousaid appropriated Felix's chair before he could snatch it back. “It's an important part of why she has the ex-con's support – the knowledge that in a year we can vote her in or out if we choose.”
The guy had a point, and Felix knew it, but this was the worst time. “I know she agree to that, but that was before three thousand refugees turned up on our doorstep all from a single world. You know, if we open the leadership to votes right now, they'll outvote us all. They'll take over, like that. There are more of them than of us. This is our world, yours and mine. We suffered for it, and we should share it on our own terms, not have it snatched away by a bunch of people who destroyed their own. I mean, I'm fully behind democracy as a concept, but this is not a great time.”
“It never is a great time, though is it?” Bousaid narrowed furious eyes at him, scrambling back to his feet. It was like reaching out to stroke a ferret only to have it sink its piercing teeth in your finger, and Felix actually recoiled, aware that he had miscalculated.
“I don't mean put it off forever,” he insisted. “Just until the refugees are settled and have had time to naturalize – to fit in with the rest of us. I'm not saying we don't do it at all. We just delay it until the crisis is past.”
Bousaid laughed with a clear scorn that made Felix re-think how pragmatic he had thought the man. Perhaps Callow’s idealism had been contagious. Much though Felix approved of people being principled, the fact that principles were breaking out all over the colony was beginning to get dangerous.
“We've heard that before. 'Just until this crisis is passed.' That’s what McKillip said at first. Until he had his men in place, and then you could die for questioning him. Aurora promised us a vote, a say, and we trusted her to hold to that, but I don’t know that I trust you. You want to be king? That's not what we signed up for. I can have half the colony up in arms by this evening. There are still more of us than there are of you, and Aurora isn't here to save you this time!”
“Wait!” Felix lunged forward to grab Bousaid by the elbow. His arm was thin beneath the scratchy wool, but the man's eyes held a burning determination that could not be called anything other than strength. Felix swallowed his pride and his concerns, though they strained his throat. “You're right.”
“What?”
“I'm sorry,” he didn't like to backpedal, but that was better than going full-engines ahead in the wrong direction. “You're right. I shouldn't be suggesting such a thing to you without Aurora's say so – it wasn't her idea. It's just… She left me in charge and it seemed like a necessary step. I hadn't thought about how it would look.”
He waved Bousaid back into the seat. The man took it gingerly. Partially to appeal to human sympathy and partially because he was just so tired – so heavy – Felix pressed his fingertips into his aching eyes and slumped. He was exhausted, but the thought of sleep without Nori's body wrapped around his, the warmth and rhythm of his breath, was like pressing on a wound.
“I've asked Ignatious and some of the new people to work on clothing us, so we don't have to carry around reminders of our differences on our backs,” he offered. “I thought that might help the newcomers to feel that this was their home now, that this was where their loyalty lay. But… Do you want to give control over C5 to these people? You know they chemically castrate children so they can wire up children's brains for their computers? You know they've destroyed their own world once already.”
“It's not a question of what I want,” Bousaid shrugged but had the grace to look a little uneasy. “Everyone deserves to have a say.”
“Even if it's stupid?”
Abruptly, Bousaid quirked a crooked smile. “I have been learning about the role of journalism in society. Mr. Callow would talk of nothing else. ‘Where we cannot force,’ he said, ‘we can persuade.’”
“Excuse me?” Felix made a mental note to download a couple of books about rulership. It obviously wasn't quite the same thing as officership.
“In fact, I agree with you,” Bousaid had been carrying his scarf all this time, rolled up as though around a parcel. He unwrapped it and revealed a piece of the reddish-brown slate that littered the surface of the meadow outside. In chalk, drawn on one side was an elaborate title surrounded by flourishes; “The Morning Glory.” On the other side was a list of five objectives.
1.To explain galactic news with special relevance to how it impacts on the people of Cygnus 5.
2.To encourage the sharing of ideas pertinent to the economy and well-being of the people of Cygnus 5.
3. To encourage the nascent industries of C5 by sharing existing techniques and knowledge.
4. To begin the work of accepting and b
lending all cultures resident on C5 with the aim of delighting in diversity while creating pride in unity.
5. To create a new society better than those we left behind.
“What is this?” Felix asked, turning the lump of rock between his hands as if to get at the workings. “Can you do all this?”
Bousaid's grin was a little manic, but without a hint of doubt. “Now we have the computers networked into the planet, the floors of the public meeting places can be used as view screens. I want to create an entertainment channel. Discussion panels. Interviews with the people in power. 'How to' shows to teach people skills they didn't have and suddenly need. Dancing and sport contests, to keep people fit and give them something to de-stress with. And here's the key - soap operas and dramas with a focus on what's good about this place, tolerance, acceptance, forgiveness. You get the idea.”
Felix felt he was missing something important. “Isn't that a waste of time and resources at this point in the colony's history? We need heavy laborers, not storytellers and celebrities.”
“Do you think your people put Callow in jail because they didn't like being laughed at?” Bousaid demanded, sharp and pointed, and Felix had the unsettling feeling of having just trodden on a caltrop he had left in place because he thought it wasn't important.
“Yes?”
“No. They put him in jail because his newspaper changed people's minds.” Bousaid chewed his lip, bringing khaki colored blood to the surface. “Call it propaganda, if that helps you understand. He shaped the way people look at the world. I can do that too. You wanted to know what we could do to stop the InfiniTech people from taking over? Give me my channel, and in a year's time I'll have us all convinced we're all sibs together. There'll be no 'us' and 'them' anymore, we'll all be proud to be here.”
“Sounds like a miracle, if you can pull it off,” Felix acknowledged. A propaganda ministry. He wouldn't have thought of it himself, but he could see the uses, now it had been pointed out. And at least Bousaid was offering to do something for the planet, rather than sitting in his spaceship and making demands, like Bors.