A Door Into Ocean

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A Door Into Ocean Page 45

by Joan Slonczewski


  He caught sight of the captain of the perimeter guard, amid a group of blanketed troopers. The familiar face brought him somewhat to his senses. He got up and walked over, wrapping his blanket tighter, swallowing embarrassment. “Captain. Anyone manage to keep a radio?”

  The captain pulled her arm out from a fold of seasilk to salute. “Yes, sir, we did.” A noncom was fiddling with a waterlogged instrument, which produced nothing but static.

  As the others crowded and swore at the radio, a webbed hand fluttered among them, a youngster of Merwen’s household. “I’ll send a clickfly for you.” The girl had a clickfly perched on her head which rubbed its lopsided mandibles and clucked with maddening cheeriness.

  A man turned to her hopefully. “Sure, kid, why don’t you—”

  “Shut up,” said the captain. “You know the rule.”

  The man’s face turned pale. The rule was still to burn on sight any native who acted “forward,” without exception. He looked at his empty hands as if expecting an order to strangle the girl.

  The captain grabbed the girl by the arm, twisting it behind her back, and the startled clickfly flitted up to escape. “Where are our weapons? Bring them back, or it’s lights out for you.”

  “The death-sticks are on their way to the sea floor,” the girl replied without blinking. “Those toys are too dangerous, even for me.”

  The captain shoved the girl away. She seated herself at a distance, with the watchful look of a nanny at a playground.

  Realgar tensed with fury, every tendon stretched to breaking. He would rather face torture, interrogation, even a shot in the back—anything rather than the appalling sight of that girl. He hated every inch of her and her web-fingered kind who dared to fish his troops from the sea. Even if he were to strangle them, their faces would show only pity as they died.

  Then his hatred subsided, leaving a headache and a weariness that would not vanish even when a helicopter appeared at last in the sky, and he snapped out commands to gather the survivors into some semblance of order. The campaign would be won despite this setback, but Realgar sensed an indefinable loss of spirit that would take him a long while to recover.

  Out of the helicopter stepped Jade, smart and trim as ever, with a brisk salute as if it were all in a day’s work.

  “Jade, you made it! I should have known. You’d live through the flooding of hell itself. What’s left of Headquarters?”

  “The framework is intact, though it needs a big cleanout. Casualties are uncertain, since we’re still picking survivors off the sea. Though by the looks of it, most of them ended up here.” Her gaze took in the scene, the troopers wrapped in ludicrous seasilk, the natives wandering around. “Imagine, those catfish still hope to capture our sympathy. I can’t wait to turn on the satellites.”

  “Since nothing else worked?”

  Jade’s mouth snapped shut; then she turned and started spouting orders at the helicopter crew.

  Realgar’s temper had flared because Jade had no business taking over and telling him what to do next, and also because she had stated his own thought aloud, in front of all the natives, where the mockery of it was obvious. What a hollow triumph it would be to destroy all the rafts just because Sharers could not be ruled.

  15

  WHILE HIS TROOPS worked feverishly to rebuild damaged bases in the wake of the swallowers, Realgar faced a grilling by the High Protector.

  Talion’s lightshape glimmered above the viewing stage behind his monument of a desk. “General, by the Nine Legions I want to know just what in hell is going on out there.”

  Realgar cleared his throat. “My lord, it’s just bad luck with the season—”

  But Talion already was speaking again, not deigning to wait for the general’s reply to reach Valedon. “Didn’t I give you everything you asked? A corps of your own compatriots, twenty divisions’ worth, and what happened? They melted away, as far as I can tell. They’re a disgrace, even a laughingstock. Everywhere, citizens are clamoring to know why a whole Sardish army can’t control a few women and children without resorting to brutalities that would shock the Patriarch.” Talion leaned forward across the desk. “To top it off, your own officers mutinied—and you actually tried to keep it from the palace. It’s beyond belief, Ral.” He paused, his wrath spent for the moment.

  Realgar knew he was finished; but Talion must want something from him still, or he would have simply replaced him, without this harangue. “The insurrection was put down, my lord, before it posed a real threat.”

  Talion’s palms slammed down. “No real threat! When your entire force is essentially out of control?” He sat back, lacing his fingers, and his eyes narrowed. “You aren’t that incompetent, Ral. The truth is, you share the sentiment of your treasonous officers. You dare question my authority to order what must be done to Shora.”

  Realgar hid his alarm and disgust. Of course he detested Iridians, but that was a personal matter. “My lord, I swear to you, in the name of whatever honor I possess, that I never have and never will intend anything but full obedience to the High Protector of Valedon.”

  With a businesslike air Talion sat up, saying, “In that case, I’ll give you one more chance. You shall activate the satellites to burn out the entire native population of the Ocean Moon. To the last mother and child—do I make myself clear?”

  The turnabout wrenched him off balance. “Every last one?” he said guardedly. “Not even a handful left, to satisfy the Envoy of Torr?”

  “Unnecessary. Their knowledge will remain, encoded in those rafts. That will have to do. Even one native left behind could unleash all sorts of plagues in revenge.” Talion shook his head. “You had your chance to get them under control, as you swore you would. Now you must wipe them out—and take full personal responsibility.”

  There was a trap, his instinct warned. “Since I clearly have lost my lord’s confidence, I offer to resign.”

  “As you wish.”

  Realgar tensed, and his chin jerked up. He saw it now; the order would still go out, under his own name. Valan citizens, already aroused against his campaign, would be shown a release of the Sardish Commander explaining why the people of the Ocean Moon had been extinguished—whether or not Realgar himself was actually responsible. Whether or not he resigned, there would be such an outcry that his banishment was assured, his life worth nothing.

  It made cold sense, for the High Protector. Talion needed someone to take the blame for a slaughter of innocents—preferably someone not Iridian. Realgar’s officers had been right; he himself was the perfect scapegoat. When Malachite returned, nine years hence, Sardis would fall before his wrath, just as Pyrrhopolis had. And Iridis would be left with one less rival.

  There had to be a way out.

  For some reason he thought of Siderite. Talion had not quite heard the last word on that. “Are you aware that your scientist’s mission was useless from the start? That the natives never intended to reveal the extent of their powers?”

  “I thought as much. But we had to humor the Envoy.”

  “Did you think Malachite such a fool?” He saw Talion’s eyes flash open, and his breath came faster. “Didn’t you ever wonder what Malachite really had in mind? He was playing with us; he set us up, just to provoke those creatures into striking back, to test their power.”

  “General, do you realize what you’re saying?” Talion’s voice lowered, became smooth and deadly.

  Realgar felt the sweat on his palms. He had to go on, there was no turning back, and what was another treachery on top of so many? “Siderite was convinced of it. In fact, he believes we are all hostage to lifeshaped pathogens, already ‘living dead,’ contaminated with the seeds of our own destruction—which only they can cure.”

  “And if they die, we die, is that it?” Talion clenched his fists. “I saw no such report. You’d damn well better back this up.”

  “Of course, my lord; Siderite was mindprobed. Surely you heard from your spies.”

  “By To
rr, you Sardish bastard, you’ve been holding out on me!” After the outburst, Talion cooled down somewhat, running a hand through his thinning hair as he shook his head. “How could even a Sard hold back a thing like that, a threat to the entire planet? Ral, do you really think I follow Torr like a servo, or that I even give fool’s gold for the Envoy and his grand designs? We’re men of Valedon, live men on a planet with some life to it, not just a machine world like Torr. Valan survival is what counts.”

  Realgar was amazed, and by the end of Talion’s speech his hands were shaking. “Then why do we have to bow and scrape to the Patriarch’s servo every decade? And allow it to snuff out a city at its own calculated whim? If every planet in the Patriarchy refused to be ruled, we all would be free.” Even as he spoke, alarms screamed inside his head. He was finished for certain.

  But Talion only grew very calm, even reflective, as the general’s words reached him across space. The pause lengthened beyond time-lag. “And then would Sardis and Dolomoth, too, refuse to be ruled?” he mused, half to himself. “Would children cease to obey their fathers; would hands no longer follow the brain?” He shook his head slowly. “How little keeps our world intact, safe from the law of the jungle. Always, in every age, a few strong men bear the burden of civilization. I had thought, Ral, that you were one. But you disappointed me.” A hint of contempt entered his voice. “Or perhaps you were, once, but you listened to them for too long.”

  So Realgar was relieved of his command. But one piece of unfinished business could not be left to his successor: Berenice.

  Though still alive, Berenice had not uttered a syllable since the night of her capture, a scene almost too painful to recall. He had left her alive, but now, what the devil was he to do with her?

  At Satellite Amber, he found her alone in her sparse quarters, where she sat crosslegged on her bed, her back to the door. Her pose was so unnervingly Sharer that he nearly turned and left; but she was clothed, after all, in a demure white talar with the blue and gold nested-squares border stretched out around her knees.

  “Berenice. I’m leaving. I’ve been recalled; my successor will be here within the hour.” Realgar paused, then hurried on. “Talion wanted the Sharers wiped out—completely. I refused. Does that mean nothing to you?”

  Berenice did not even turn her head. It was hopeless, but still Realgar could not bring himself to leave her in the hands of his Iridian overlords. There was one alternative: to leave her to those whom he hated more. “Berenice, you’ll be sent to Iridis soon, and you know what that means. Unless…I set you down on Shora.” He added, “You’ll be taking your chances there. Talion still hopes to—”

  She wheeled, leaning her arms on the bed, her face stricken. “Shora?” she whispered hoarsely. “You’ll leave me…there? After what I’ve done?”

  It was actually Sharers that she feared, more than Talion, for by their standards she had betrayed them far worse. How would they punish her?

  But she had melted at last, that was all that mattered. Realgar took her by the shoulders, saying, “I won’t leave you. I’ll take you back to Sardis in secret, and we’ll retire in the backlands. We’ll have Cassiter and Elmvar, and every luxury you need. I’ll protect you—”

  Pulling free of him, Berenice swung her legs over the bed and stood, her face turned to crystal again. “I don’t want your protection, Ral,” she said distinctly. “Only forgiveness, though I deserve it even less from you than from them.”

  In her own hard way she was asking him to forgive, but she refused his protection, and in that she rejected him. Berenice must have known that, if she knew him at all. His heart congealed; he could never say he forgave her.

  At the observation dome of the transport ship, Realgar stood with his children, who watched with wide eyes as the Ocean Moon curved and shrank away to a fine sickle against the stars. Cassiter squeezed his hand. “Papa, can’t we stay long enough even to go for a swim? You promised to take us, sometime.”

  “It’s too late, Cassi. The ship has left orbit.”

  “Then order it to turn back.”

  Realgar could not bring himself to tell her he could not. He was alone: no monitors to break in with a call, no emergencies, not even paperwork to command the attention of a deposed commander. It had been years since he had felt so powerless, so insignificant.

  “You’ll take us back someday, won’t you, Papa? I never did get my whorlshell.” His children would share his exile; they had yet to learn what that meant.

  His past flooded back over him: the battlefields strewn with corpses, the control rooms, the promotions, all to dissolve here on a slippery bit of ocean between seaweed and seafoam. How had it happened? Those webfingered creatures were fiendish tacticians. So many times they nearly drove him out, with their bloodless “invasions,” the Purple Plague, the uncanny bewitchment of his troops, no matter how many of their own deaths it cost.

  But was it more than tactics? In the end, Sharers actually forced him to set their world free—but why? Why had he done so, when he did not believe Siderite’s warning, any more than Siderite himself? He had learned too well what Merwen really meant by the living dead.

  And Merwen had said, You will not betray me. How could she have known? Had he played out the lie just to spite his superiors, or was he in awe of something else, a mystery beyond the dread of lifeshaping?

  Time. Sharers had lasted for millennia before the Patriarch arose, and something whispered to him that they might endure even after Torr had blown to dust.

  With a shudder he turned impatiently away from the empty stars. The glass door of the observation deck did not open at first, and his own shadowed reflection faced him.

  Whose eyes do you see in mine, and whose in—

  His fist swung out and crashed; a white spiderweb leaped into the glass. Behind him his children gasped at the shattered door. Shaking all over, he clasped his knuckles to stop the blood and breathed deeply to get a grip on himself. Somehow, he would never see a glass again, or look into the eyes of a cornered bear, without knowing that the wildest thing he ever hunted still swam beyond his grasp.

  16

  SEASWALLOWERS PASSED AS they always did, leaving the waters clean and clear but for white tongues of foam. This time Per-elion did not lose a raft, Shora be thanked, but clickflies brought word of distant rafts to be sung for.

  In a few days waterfire bloomed again, a lovely bioluminescence that etched the waves for seven nights and kept everyone awake dancing in its brilliance. Another strand of the living web was rejoined.

  At the soldier-places, Valans kept to themselves, and many disappeared to the sky. And with their departure, a remarkable thing happened: the song of the starworm began to penetrate the far ocean again. Soon the deep rumbling tones could be heard from one end of the globe to the other, more clearly than they had since the first sky-crossing traders came to settle. Once more, all the Gatherings of Shora could share will together within the period of a sun’s flight across the sky.

  Merwen thought of all these things as she sat at her spindle, touching strands of yellow to the head as it whirled, and the yellow strands grew like the beams of the sun just edging above the ocean. The smell of night things still clung, and Weia and Wellen had not yet uncurled from their sleeping holes to swim out chasing through the branch channels. But for Merwen, the day was already long and old. Sleep was coming hard to her, and she found herself rising earlier and earlier, to listen to the roar of the sea and to calm her troubled hands with silk-spinning by the light of the Stone Moon.

  Shadows were still long when Spinel came out to sit beside her work stool. A helicopter had returned him to Raia-el, the week after the rescue of the soldiers from their flooded base.

  Spinel cleared his throat and said, “Merwen—don’t you think we have enough spun silk for a while? Especially the yellow stuff, it’s only used in thin lines…”

  Her eyes turned toward him, while her hand still fed the spindle. Though he sat flat on the raft with hi
s feet tucked under, his eyes were nearly level with hers; he was as big as Lystra now, big and black, not like the timid brown child who first approached her and Usha on the Valan shore, so long ago. And except for Usha, she realized, he was the only one who ever approached her nowadays, when she was like this.

  “It’s been a long time,” Merwen said, “since I could afford the luxury of useless work.”

  Taken aback, Spinel looked away a moment. But then he looked up again, his eyes bright with eagerness. “Did you hear they’re all leaving for good? Death-hasteners, traders, all of them; I heard it from the trawler deckhands, lined up at Dak’s moonferry. The High Protector says they can’t come back, ever. So we’re rid of them, Merwen.”

  “Yes. That is why I spin yellow silk.”

  “What makes you so sad? No one else is.”

  No, only Usha understood, and no one could tell when Usha was sad. “And what are you glad for, stoneshaper?”

  Then his face crumpled, and Merwen was sorry, though at least he never brooded for long. “You knew I didn’t, didn’t you?” he asked. “You didn’t really think I did what they said, in the soldier-place.”

  Merwen paused to finish off the spindle. “I thought at first I had betrayed you, that I had asked you to be something you never could be.”

  “Oh, no, never.”

  “Not even when your palms first turned color? I ask too much of everyone, even of my own daughter.”

  “No. When you ask, we simply find we had more to share than we thought.” Spinel swallowed. “You only ask too much of yourself, Merwen.”

  “Shora asks,” she whispered.

  “You did the best you could. I always wondered why the death-hasteners in Chrysoport left you alone at the tree, and I sure found out.”

  “So did I. I thought they showed respect for whitetrance; but it was only fear.”

  “Fear of your fearlessness.”

 

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