Beside his desk, Jade still stood, rigid as an epileptic. Her face and hands were deep violet, almost indigo; it seemed to bloom worse in women. “I know what I’d like to do,” Jade said. “Line up those little ones and snuff them out before their mothers’ eyes. That would get results.”
“Cool down, Jade,” he warned.
“The Patriarch’s Law wasn’t made for catfish, I tell you. Not for their Protectors, not for their daughters. All those little brats will spit in your eye as sure as that old cat you just threw out.”
15
AROUND THE GLOBE, all the native children that could be found were hauled in to the Valan company bases. At Headquarters, that meant over a hundred youngsters were herded into the infirmary under Doctor Nathan’s supervision. The age range eliminated troublesome infants and adolescents, but still they did not settle in easily. Unless sedated, they would not stay in their beds; instead, they huddled in corners underneath, as if seeking a tunnel-like shelter. Finally Nathan had the beds wheeled out and spread mattresses across the floor. That seemed to work better.
Food was another problem, until Spinel was called in to advise the staff. Spinel turned out to be helpful in other ways; he was known and trusted by the Raia-el children, and he knew all their games and stories. Soon he was indispensable to Nathan, as he kept the girls entertained and in reasonable health. The doctor was relieved to keep some respect for Patriarchal Law, and Realgar was convinced he could keep the little ones until their mothers gave in.
Spinel was kept too busy to think, in the mattress-lined infirmary, with the girls who clamored for a story or the others who had to be coaxed to eat. He felt a warm glow inside. For the first time in months, he thought, he was really doing something to help his Sharer sisters.
Some of the girls still huddled alone, withdrawn, with hollow stares. Spinel winced to see them, the ones who would not respond. But others had recovered their wits quickly, and the older ones tried to arrange some kind of order in their strange surroundings. Wellen mimicked Usha’s brisk mannerisms, urging others to sweep off their mattresses and finish the food on their plates, even if it did not taste like the squid steamed at home.
As they recovered courage, the girls began to clamor for their mothers again, more boldly now. Wellen decided to call a “Gathering” to address the problem, since everyone knew that the Gathering had the last word on everything. No one there had a selfname yet, but they could choose them easily enough—the Teasing One, the One Who Won’t Go to Sleep, the One Who Spits Up Her Food. Wellen was simply the Screamer, since everyone agreed she screamed louder and more piercingly than anyone else could. Spinel called himself the Impulsive One, and some girls complained they did not know what that meant, but he stuck with it.
They crowded closely into one of the wards; an elbow knocked Spinel’s eye when he tried to rearrange his cramped legs. The room was full of wriggling arms and translucent webbed hands, and voices chattering excitedly all at once.
The door to the corridor swung out and a staff nurse poked his head in.
“It’s okay,” Spinel called out. “Just another game.”
The white coat vanished.
“Quiet!” Wellen shrieked. She had no idea how to start a Gathering, but this way seemed effective. The girls settled down to a hum of whispering and giggles as they shoved into each other. “All right,” said Wellen, “the reason we’re making a Gathering is to figure out how to get home.”
“Home, I want to go ho-ome,” whined Malsha, and she began to cry. Others joined the chorus. Spinel’s throat stuck and he thought, Another minute of this and I’ll be crying, too. He hugged Malsha and tried to soothe her as she pressed her head to his chest.
“We all want to go home. But how?” Wellen’s eyebrows furrowed like Usha’s.
“Swim home!” piped Weia Who Spits Up Her Food.
“Yes, swim home,” others joined, and their mattresses squeaked as they bounced.
Spinel called above their bobbing heads, “The guards will stop you. The guardbeam will reach you and bring death.”
“We won’t reach for any guardbeam,” Wellen said.
“But the beam will reach you anyhow.” From the top of the garrison, a directed-energy unit aimed constantly at the sea around the perimeter. There could be no escape by sea.
Someone said, “Let’s float away on airblossoms.”
“Good idea,” said Wellen. “Where do we get airblossoms?”
“We’ll send for them by clickfly. My mom will send them.”
“Mine, too…”
Spinel sighed. The idea was less than practical, but it would keep their hopes up.
A girl started to moan, drowning out the discussion. “Ssh,” said the others, hugging and patting her. But her sister shook her head. “She’s tired of gathering. She always does that when she’s had enough.”
Wellen’s eyes opened wide. “We’ve all had enough. We’ll all scream. We’ll all scream, until they let us go home.” She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and screamed at the top of her lungs.
Within minutes, every girl in the room had joined in. Spinel clapped his ears against the din; then he picked himself up and stepped awkwardly over squirming bodies to reach the door. As he pushed the door open, a nurse and Doctor Nathan came running down the corridor. “What’s going on?” shouted Nathan, his voice barely audible.
“It’s just a game—” The screams drowned him out; it was hopeless.
Nathan pulled Spinel down the corridor until they could hear each other. “What set them off?”
“They want to go home,” Spinel admitted.
The doctor wiped his sleeve across his forehead. His eyes closed, then opened to gaze balefully at Spinel. “What’s keeping their mothers, anyway? Why don’t they give in and get their daughters back?”
Spinel shrugged and looked at his feet. “Maybe they don’t know how.” He tried to squelch any thought of what Merwen and the rest must be going through.
“Can’t you calm the girls again?” The doctor rubbed his hands anxiously.
Curious, Spinel wondered what would happen if the girls could not be calmed. “I don’t think so,” he said reflectively. “Once they get started, they’ll scream for hours.”
Nathan rolled his eyes and sighed. “Torr’s name, I’ll have to sedate the whole lot of them.”
“Oh, no, don’t do that.” The thought of all those children lying doped sickened him. Already several nurses were at the door with their needles poised. “Wait. Let them outside for a while, that will do it. They need more swimming time.”
Nathan looked relieved. “Sure, they can spend the rest of the day in the swim cage.”
So the nurses hustled them out to the swim cage, a giant colander with a fence around the edge, set in the water off the deck. Gleefully the girls plunged in, while guards collected at the edge and ran boats around the fence of the cage. Spinel joined the children for a while, diving and splashing and chasing one another.
By suppertime, the girls had to be coaxed back out of the water for their meal in the detested infirmary. In fact, they came more easily than usual, since the exercise had whetted their appetites. Spinel urged them out, promising plates full of fresh fish for dinner, with a long song-story about Shora to share afterward. When the last pair of webbed feet had padded off to the infirmary, he leaned exhausted in the outer doorway, where a wet trail remained as if a caravan of frogs had marched in.
Nathan laid a hand on Spinel’s bare back. “I don’t know how we’d manage without you. I would have given up long ago.”
“Thank you, sir,” Spinel began, but something in the doctor’s praise gave him pause. “What do you mean, given up?”
“If those girls wasted away to nothing, I couldn’t very well keep them here. I’d lose my license.”
Spinel was chilled. Did his comfort for the children only prolong their captivity?
“Come in for your supper,” Nathan added. “You’ve more than earned it.”
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“In a minute, sir.”
The door clicked shut. Alone, Spinel watched the twilit sky. A rush of suppressed thoughts welled up in his skull. There were Merwen and Usha and all the families of Raia-el, ground to pieces by the Valan machine. Lystra, he knew, was locked away beyond sight or sound, subject to horrors of which only rumors trickled out on the tongues of Jade’s guards. In the midst of it all, Spinel himself had become nothing more than a gear in that machine, making the wheels turn while he enjoyed a false freedom. He was worse than useless here; he would be better off dead.
Spinel found himself walking aimlessly across the windswept deck, toward the perimeter fence. As he reached a gate, his feet dragged to a halt.
The sentry grinned and lunged forward. “Haven’t had enough ocean?” Her voice was a gruff contralto.
“I guess not.” Spinel forced a careless tone and twirled the starstone on his bare chest.
The gate creaked and clanged. “You come back when my shift’s up, and I’ll show you a good time.”
Spinel’s heart pounded as he skipped along the open edge, an arm’s-length away from the waves and death from the guardbeam. But there were rafts beyond the horizon, where he belonged. Maybe the land beyond death was like that, a living raft on the infinite sea.
In the watchtower atop the headquarters complex, an alarm buzzed. The guard on duty leaped from his chair where he had slept for the past half hour.
Outside the southeast window, the beam stretched down to the sea, where it ended in a cloud of steam.
The monitor droned that a man without an identity tag had dived off the deck a few seconds before. Place of impact had sustained direct fire; estimated chance of hit, eighty-two percent.
The guard yawned and watched the steam roll over the raft seedlings. Ten to one it was just another legfish plopped over the deck. Unless some poor bloke forgot his tag.
Five minutes passed, then ten. Still the monitor scanned blank. Satisfied, the guard turned away. Even if somebody had dived deep enough to avoid boiling, he would have had to come up for air by now.
In the infirmary ward, Wellen tugged at the white rags of the malefreak that was clearing plates away. “Spinel promised to share a story,” Wellen croaked, her voice still hoarse from the screaming. “Where is Spinel?”
“Don’t know.” The malefreak went on stooping to collect plates, some of which Wellen had stacked neatly, while others had landed face down, spreading greenish sauce over the mattress. No matter how hard she and Spinel tried, they could not get every little sister to share cleaning up. Wellen wished her own mother could share this job once; then she would never complain about her own daughters anymore.
Wellen gasped; for a moment she wanted home so badly that everything went black in front of her eyes. Slowly it ebbed away. It had been worst the first day, when she had waked up to this nightmare of malefreaks in vulturous plumage, flat walls with sharp creases whose length tricked the eyes, nauseating smells and jarring sounds. She had held onto Weia and kept her eyes shut, hoping it would all go away. But it had not.
Then Spinel had come—Spinel, the funny creature who was a malefreak yet was different, somehow. Spinel was the one whom Mama and Mamasister had brought home for a pet, a souvenir of their long journey. Spinel brought good luck, she felt, since Mama had come home safe with him. This time, now, Spinel had not brought Mama back, but he always promised that Mama would come soon, if only the girls stayed brave.
Where was Spinel? Gone to fetch Mama?
In the far corner, Malsha was arranging leftover seaweed on her scalp like Valan headfur. “See,” she called to the malefreak, “I’m a Valan now. Can I go home?”
Irritated, the malefreak wiped Malsha’s head with a cloth. Wellen giggled loudly to bother him some more. But he just dumped the plates onto a cart and pushed it down the tunnel outside.
Wellen wrinkled her nose at the departing white coat. It was no use; Lystra had always said that you could not get the truth out of someone who hid herself in rags.
As evening wore on, she fretted more. Something was wrong for Spinel to be away this long. The other girls sensed it too, and some started whining for Spinel and his story. Malsha would probably cry all night without a story.
When the malefreak came back to put out lights, the girls chorused, “Where is Spinel?”
“Don’t know.” He looked away.
Malsha said, “I won’t go to sleep, then.”
“Me neither, me neither.”
“We’ll scream again,” Wellen warned.
The malefreak turned to her, eyes like pinheads. “Spinel won’t come back anymore. He went home. He tells you to stay and be good.”
Wellen sucked in her breath. “That can’t be. Spinel couldn’t share parting like that. I know—he’s in the stone-place with Lystra!”
“Stone-place!” Malsha gasped and began to cry.
“Is he there, is he?” Wellen sprang at the malefreak and tore at the white cloth. If only she could get rid of those rags, maybe the malefreak could share truth.
The malefreak slammed her back onto the mattress and uttered Valan gibberish. “Spinel is dead, do you hear? He tried to escape. Let that share a lesson with you. You share any more trouble, you’ll die too.”
With that, the lights went out.
Dazedly Wellen groped across the mattress. “Weia?” Her sister clung to her, and Malsha crept close also for comfort. Dead…Spinel…dead.
Wellen barely slept that night. Someone was always whimpering or sobbing. All she could think of was Spinel, who must be dead, like the old grandmother she had seen once, all shriveled up, her arms crossed in calm before the coral deadweights at her wrists pulled her down through the ocean, with the songs floating after. Sing for those who dwell on land. What if Lystra were dead too, by now? What if Mama and Mamasister were dead?
In the morning Wellen stared listlessly at the bowl of breakfast mush.
Weia wrinkled her nose at it. “I won’t eat that.”
“Me neither,” Wellen decided.
The nurse took no notice.
Wellen cleared her throat. “I won’t eat, at all, anymore. Not a thing, until I go home.”
16
BY THE SECOND week of the hostage operation, Realgar was losing patience. He had not expected the children to fill his infirmary for more than a day or two. Was there not a native mother on this planet who would cure the Plague to get her own daughters back?
At other bases, his troops were a headache. Dolomites seemed to follow orders, but the Iridians who had been up here the longest tended to have trouble “finding” native children on the rafts. Or else the kids would “escape” after a few days. One captain even had the cheek to claim that without birth certificates she could not verify the age range according to orders.
The general issued reprimands, but with resistance so widespread he could not press too far, lest word reach the Palace that his command was ineffective. To replace the troops was better; but how could he do that with the planet under quarantine?
Troop morale plummeted as the Purple Plague spread. Only Siderite seemed to take some hope, even a perverse satisfaction, out of the present stalemate. The day he turned purple, Siderite packed off to Raia-el, put up a tent, and stayed there, having promised that he would get his studies going again, one way or another. Realgar had let him go and detailed a helicopter to drop off supplies and spy on him. Anything was worth a try, at this point.
Today a boatload of natives were detected, approaching Headquarters. This, Realgar hoped at last, was a delegation to sue for terms.
As soon as they landed, however, the natives simply sat before the fence and turned white. Realgar’s hopes fell, and his anger kindled. He went out to the perimeter to view this astounding sight: five pallid Sharers facing soldiers awash in dreadful violet, as if the color had seeped directly from one side to the other. No one spoke, except the inescapable voice of the sea.
Realgar strode stiffly past them as if
reviewing troops. They were the same five who had come to him for the first prisoners: the Protector, the long-nosed one, the one who had been pregnant, the quiet one, and the guerrilla. All had turned to statues of ice, their lips frozen shut.
They’re inhuman, he thought. They are wild things. I would not begin to understand them, even if I cared to.
Realgar barked at the captain, “Get rid of them.”
“Sir?”
“Fifty kilometers out. And set the guardbeam on automatic.”
“Yes, sir.” If the captain recognized the significance of this move, she showed no sign. Any native who came within ten meters of the deck would be incinerated.
Realgar returned to his office. Jade had left a message, and he called her on the monitor.
“General, those clickflies are a gold mine of information, and we just hit pay dirt. Natives have lifeshaped a virus—a Valan-killing virus.”
“A what?”
“It says, essentially, ‘We here at Sriri-el have lifeshaped a virus to make an end of Valans, and what do you sisters out there think of using it?’”
For a moment his throat tightened. Realgar had suspected this all along, that something might have slipped past even Malachite the Infallible. Still, he reminded himself that the lifeshaping places of the most intractable rafts had been smashed open, and nothing worse than mutant breathmicrobes had emerged.
“It’s a bluff,” Realgar decided. “They know you’ve cracked their code, Jade, and they’re trying to scare us.”
“Possibly,” she admitted. “There’s another good one, about hostages released. I checked and confirmed it: a Dolomite company let all their native hostages go.”
“Indeed,” said Realgar icily. “There’s an explanation, I suppose?”
“‘Whereas,’” she quoted, “‘the native witch-women bewitched our encampment in the manner detailed below, and whereas Dolomite regulations forbid battle with witches, the offspring of said witches have been released and all further contact is to be kept to a minimum.’”
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