Ashiban considered tackling the girl and taking back her handheld. But the Sovereign was young, and while Ashiban was in fairly good shape considering her age, she had never been an athlete, even in her youth. And that was without considering the head injury.
She stood. Carefully, still dizzy, joints stiff. Where the flier had been was only black water, strips and chunks of moss floating on its surface, all of it surrounded by a flat carpet of yet more moss. She remembered the Sovereign saying We’re standing on water! Remembered the swell and roll of the ground that had made her drop to her hands and knees.
She closed her eyes. She thought she vaguely remembered sitting in her seat on the flier, the Sovereign crying out, her interpreter getting out of his seat to rush forward to where the pilot slumped over the controls.
Shot down. If that was true, the Sovereign was right. Calling for help – if she could find some way to do that without her handheld – might well be fatal. Whoever it was had considered both Ashiban and the Sovereign of Iss acceptable losses. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted both of them dead. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted the war that had threatened for the past two years to become deadly real.
But nobody wanted that. Not even the Gidanta who had never been happy with Ashiban’s people’s presence in the system wanted that, Ashiban was sure.
She opened her eyes. Saw the girl’s back as she picked her way through the mire. Saw far off on the northern horizon the trees the girl had mentioned. “Ancestors!” cried Ashiban. “I’m too old for this.” And she shouldered her bag and followed the Sovereign of Iss.
Eventually Ashiban caught up, though the Sovereign didn’t acknowledge her in any way. They trudged through the hip-high scrub in silence for some time, only making the occasional hiss of annoyance at particularly troublesome branches. The clear blue sky clouded over, and a damp-smelling wind rose. A relief – the bright sun had hurt Ashiban’s eyes. As the trees on the horizon became more definitely a band of trees – still dismayingly far off – Ashiban’s thoughts, which had this whole time been slippery and tenuous, began to settle into something like a comprehensible pattern.
Shot down. Ashiban was sure none of her people wanted war. Though offplanet the Raksamat weren’t quite so vulnerable – were, in fact, much better armed. The ultimate outcome of an actual war would probably not favor the Gidanta. Or Ashiban didn’t think so. It was possible some Raksamat faction actually wanted such a war. And Ashiban wasn’t really anyone of any significance to her own people.
Her mother had been. Her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, had negotiated the Treaty of Eatu with the then-Sovereign of Iss, ensuring the right of the Raksamat to live peacefully in the system, and on the planet. Ciwril had been widely admired among both Raksamat and Gidanta. As her daughter, Ashiban was only a sign, an admonition to remember her mother. If her side could think it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of their own people on the planet, they would certainly not blink at sacrificing Ashiban herself. She didn’t want to believe that, though, that her own people would do such a thing.
Would the Gidanta be willing to kill their own Sovereign for the sake of a war? An hour ago – or however long they had been trudging across the mire, Ashiban wasn’t sure – she’d have said certainly not. The Sovereign of Iss was a sacred figure. She was the conduit between the Gidanta and the spirit of the world of Iss, which spoke to them with the Sovereign’s voice. Surely they wouldn’t kill her just to forward a war that would be disastrous for both sides?
“Sovereign.”
A meter ahead of Ashiban, the girl kept trudging. Looked briefly over her shoulder. “What?”
“Where are you going?”
The Sovereign didn’t even turn her head this time. “There’s a monitoring station on the North Udran Plain.”
That had to be hundreds of kilometers away, and that wasn’t counting the fact that if this was indeed the High Mires, they were on the high side of the Scarp and would certainly have to detour to get down to the plains.
“On foot? That could take weeks, if we even ever get there. We have no food, no water.” Well, Ashiban had about a third of a liter in a bottle in her bag, but that hardly counted. “No camping equipment.”
The Sovereign just scoffed and kept walking.
“Young lady,” began Ashiban, but then remembered herself at that age. Her own children and grandchildren. Adolescence was trying enough without the fate of your people resting on your shoulders, and being shot down and stranded in a bog. “I thought the current Sovereign was fifty or sixty. The daughter of the woman who was Sovereign when my mother was here last.”
“You’re not supposed to talk like we’re all different people,” said the girl. “We’re all the voice of the world spirit. And you mean my aunt. She abdicated last week.”
“Abdicated!” Mortified by her mistake – Ashiban had been warned over and over about the nature of the Sovereign of Iss, that she was not an individual, that referring to her as such would be an offense. “I didn’t know that was possible.” And surely at a time like this, the Sovereign wouldn’t want to drop so much responsibility on a teenager.
“Of course it’s possible. It’s just a regular priesthood. It never was particularly special. It was you Raksamat who insisted on translating Sovereign as Sovereign. And it’s you Raksamat whose priests are always trancing out and speaking for your ancestors. Voice of Iss doesn’t mean that at all.”
“Translating Sovereign as Sovereign?” asked Ashiban. “What is that supposed to mean?” The girl snorted. “And how can the Voice of Iss not mean exactly that?” The Sovereign didn’t answer, just kept walking.
After a long silence, Ashiban said, “Then why do any of the Gidanta listen to you? And who is it my mother was negotiating with?”
The Sovereign looked back at Ashiban and rolled her eyes. “With the interpreter, of course. And if your mother didn’t know that, she was completely stupid. And nobody listens to me.” The voice of the translating handheld was utterly calm and neutral, but the girl’s tone was contemptuous. “That’s why I’m stuck here. And it wasn’t about us listening to the voice of the planet. It was about you listening to us. You wouldn’t talk to the Terraforming Council because you wouldn’t accept they were an authority, and besides, you didn’t like what they were saying.”
“An industrial association is not a government!” Seeing the girl roll her eyes again, Ashiban wondered fleetingly what her words sounded like in Gidantan – if the handheld was making industrial association and government into the same words, the way it obviously had when it had said for the girl, moments ago, translating Sovereign as Sovereign. But that was ridiculous. The two weren’t the same thing at all.
The Sovereign stopped. Turned to face Ashiban. “We have been here for two thousand years. For all that time, we have been working on this planet, to make it a place we could live without interference. We came here, to this place without an intersystem gate, so that no one would bother us and we could live in peace. You turned up less than two centuries ago, now most of the hard work is done, and you want to tell us what to do with our planet, and who is or isn’t an authority!”
“We were refugees. We came here by accident, and we can’t very well leave. And we brought benefits. You’ve been cut off from the outside for so long, you didn’t have medical correctives. Those have saved lives, Sovereign. And we’ve brought other things.” Including weapons the Gidanta didn’t have. “Including our own knowledge of terraforming, and how to best manage a planet.”
“And you agreed, your own mother, the great Ciwril Xidyla agreed, that no one would settle on the planet without authorization from the Terraforming Council! And yet there are dozens of Raksamat farmsteads just in the Saunn foothills, and more elsewhere.”
“That wasn’t the agreement. The treaty explicitly states that we have a right to be here, and a right to share in the benefits of living on this planet. Your own grandmother agreed to that! And small farmsteads are much better for the planet than t
he cities the Terraforming Council is intending.” Wind gusted, and a few fat drops of rain fell.”
“My grandmother agreed to nothing! It was the gods-cursed interpreter who made the agreement. And he was appointed by the Terraforming Council, just like all of them! And how dare you turn up here after we’ve done all the hard work and think because you brought us some technology you can tell us what to do with our planet!”
“How can you own a planet? You can’t, it’s ridiculous! There’s more than enough room for all of us.”
“I’ve memorized it, you know,” said the Sovereign. “The entire agreement. It’s not that long. Settlement will only proceed according to the current consensus regarding the good of the planet. That’s what it says, right there in the second paragraph.”
Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable – and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But – also like most offplanet Raksamat – she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.
The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”
Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.
“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes – plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes – had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”
The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.
“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.
Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.
A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.
And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.
Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.
Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.
Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.
She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.
A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible – it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half-ran, half-stumbled forward into the trees.
Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.
The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.
One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.
THE RAIN LESSENED not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.
She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag – which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything – and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.
“Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”
Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.
The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground – something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree – and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.
As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.
Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and good-bye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother Ciwril had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.
No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.
Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours
later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.
The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most of their energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.
That attitude had continued when they had moved down to the planet. There were police, and some of the Terraforming Council had bodyguards, and Ashiban didn’t doubt there were people who specialized in fighting, including firing guns, but there was no Gidanta military, no army, standing or otherwise. Fliers for cargo or for personal transport, but not for warfare. Guns for hunting, not designed to kill people efficiently.
The Raksamat, Ashiban’s own people, had come into the system armed. But none of those weapons were on the planet. Or Ashiban didn’t think they were. So, a hunting gun and a personal flier. She wanted to ask the Sovereign, standing staring at Ashiban, still shivering, if the girl had seen the other flier. But she couldn’t, not without that handheld.
But it didn’t matter, this moment, why it had happened the way it had. There was no way to tell who had tried to kill them. No way to know what or who they would find if they returned to the mire, to where their own flier had sunk under the black water and the moss.
Her thoughts were going in circles. Whether it was the night spent in the cold, and the hunger and the fear, or whether it was the remnants of her concussion – and what had the Sovereign of Iss said, that the corrective hadn’t been the right sort and she should get to a doctor as soon as possible?
– or maybe all of those, Ashiban didn’t know.
Yesterday the Sovereign had said there was a monitoring station on the Udran Plains, which lay to the north of the Scarp. There would be people at a monitoring station – likely all of them Gidanta. Very possibly not favorably disposed toward Ashiban, no matter whose daughter she was.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 66