"I might yet back out, Officer Bhvaaan. What if we only succeed in feeding the monsters, and make bad worse?"
She unfolded her nest, and settled behind him.
He patted her side with his clubbed fist - it felt like being clobbered by a kindly rock. "See how it goes. You can back out later."
The Ki-anna lay sleepless, wondering about Patrice Ferringhi; the bulk of her unacknowledged bodyguard between her and the teeth of the An.
When his appointment with alien royalty came around, Patrice was glad he'd had a breathing space. The world was solid again, he felt in control of himself. He donned his new transaid, settling the pickup against his skull, and set out for the high-security bulkhead gate that led to the Refuge Habitat itself.
Armoured guards, intimidatingly tall, were waiting on the other side. They bent their heads, exhaled breath loudly - and indicated that he was to get into a kind of floating palanquin. Probably they knew no English.
The guards jogged around him in a hollow square: between their bodies he glimpsed the approach to an actual castle, like something in a fantasy game. Like a recreation of Mediaeval Europe or Japan, rising from a mass of basic living modules. It was amazing. He'd never been inside a big space-station before, not counting a few hours in Speranza Transit Port. The false horizon, the lilac sky, arcing far above the castle's bannered towers, would have fooled him completely, if he hadn't known.
He met the An-he in a windowless, antique chamber hung with tapestries (at least, tapestries seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches were scattered over the floor. The guard who'd escorted him backed out, snorting. Patrice looked around, vaguely bothered by an overly-warm indoor breeze. He saw someone almost human, loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch - large, wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity - and realised he was alone with the king.
"Excuse my steward," said the An. "He doesn't speak English well, and doesn't like to embarrass himself by trying. Please, be at home."
"Thank you for seeing me," said Patrice. "Your, er, Majesty - ?"
The An-he grinned. "You are Patrice. I am the An, let's just talk."
The young co-ruler was charming and direct. He asked about the police: Patrice noted, disappointed, that Ki-anna was a title, the Ki-she, or something. He wondered what you had to do to learn their personal names.
"It was a brief interview," he admitted, ruefully. "I got the impression they weren't very interested."
"Well, I am interested. Lione was a great friend to my people. To both my peoples. I'm not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?"
"We were twins, that means litter-mates, but 'partners' too, though our careers took different directions."
He needed to get partner into the conversation. The An partnership wasn't sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond they knew. A lost partner justified his appeal.
The An-he touched the clip on the side of his head (he was using a transaid, too), reflexively. "A double loss, poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously if you are completely frank -"
In this pairing, the An-she was the senior. She made the decisions, but Patrice couldn't meet her, she was too important. He could only work on the An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his cause... He had the eerie thought that he was doing exactly what Lione had done - trying to make a good impression on this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very room. The tapestries (if that was the word) swam and rippled in the moving air, drawing his attention to scenes he really didn't want to examine. Brightly dressed lords and ladies gathered for the hunt. The game was driven onto the guns. The butchery, the bustling kitchen scenes, the banquet -
He realised, horrified, that his host had asked him something about his work on Mars, and he hadn't heard the question.
"Oh," said the An-he, easily. "I see what you're looking at. Don't be offended, it's all in the past, and priceless, marvellous art. Recreated, sadly. The originals were destroyed, along with the original of this castle. But still, our heritage! Don't you Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of painted slaughter? And by the way, aren't you closely related, limb for limb and bone for bone, to the beings that you traditionally kill and eat?"
"Not on Mars."
"There, you are sundered from your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural humans do it all the time, I assure you."
"I don't know what to say."
Notoriously, the Ki and the An had both been affronted when they were identified, by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew, but an indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of "the KiAn issue" was not the genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen up, savagely, against the oppressors. It was the fact that some highly respected Ki leaders actually defended "the traditional diet of the An."
The An-he showed his bright white teeth. "Then you have an open mind, my dear Patrice! It gives me hope that you'll come to understand us." He stretched, and exhaled noisily. "Enough. All I can tell you today is that your request is under consideration. You're a valuable person, and it's dangerous down there! We don't want to lose you. Now, I suppose you'd like to see your sister's rooms? She stayed with us, you know: here in the castle."
"Would that be possible?"
"Certainly! I'll get some people to take you."
More guards - or servants in military-looking uniform - led him along winding, irregular corridors, all plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round plug of a doorway. The An-he's face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned on a guard's tunic.
"Take as long as you like, dear Patrice. Don't be afraid of disturbing the evidence! The police took anything they thought was useful, ages ago."
The guards gave him privacy, which he had not expected: they shut the door and stayed outside. He was alone, in his sister's space. The aeons he'd crossed, the unthinkable interstellar distance, vanished. Lione was here. He could feel her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images: glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind -
"Recreation" was skin-deep here. Essentially the room was identical to his cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, a closet bathroom, stripped of fittings. Her effects had been returned to Mars, couriered as data. The police had been and gone "ages ago." What could this empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to try.
Was he under surveillance? He decided he didn't care.
He searched swiftly, efficiently, studying the floor, running his hands over the walls and closet space, checking the seals on the mattress. The screen above the desk was set in an ornate decorative frame. He probed around it, and his fingertips brushed something that had slipped behind. Carefully, patiently, he teased out a corner of the object, and drew it from hiding.
Lione, he whispered.
He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard jumper, and went to knock on the round door. It opened, and the guards were there.
"I'm ready to leave now."
The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. "By all means! But don't be a stranger. Come and see me again, come often!"
That evening he searched the little tablet's drive for his own name, for a message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely noted the contents, except that it wasn't about her work. Next day, to his great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police were making difficulties.
"Speranza doesn't mind having a tragedy associated with their showcase Project," said the young king. "A scandal would be much worse, so they want to bury this. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we have met with resistance."
There was nothing Patrice could do... and it wasn't a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, the police would probably be helpless in the end. Back in his cabin he examined the tablet
again and realised that Lione had been keeping a private record of her encounter with "the KiAn issue."
KiAn isn't like other worlds of the Diaspora; they didn't have a Conventional Space Age before First Contact. But they weren't primitives when "we" found them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are the remnant of a planetary superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were treated as inferior, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or "Heaven Born" first began to hunt and eat the "Earth Born" Ki. They don't do that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging -
Cannibalism happens. It's known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called "atavists" are not really atavist. This isn't the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of an ancient prehistoric symbiosis. The An weren't animals, when this "stable genocide" began. They were people, who could think and feel. People, like us.
The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister's voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next was video. Lione, talking to him. Living and breathing.
Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he'd found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers; it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips and turned pages, painfully happy.
Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet "below." Patrice shuttled between the "station visitors' quarters," where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn't dare refuse a summons, although he politely declined all dinner invitations, which made the An laugh.
The odd couple showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls. He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione's journal. He didn't want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.
Once, as they walked in the castle's galleries, the insistent breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. "That was the An-she," murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice's ear. "She likes you, or she wouldn't have let you glimpse her... I tell her all about you."
"I didn't really see anything," said Patrice, wary of causing offence. "The breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about."
"I'm afraid we're obsessed with air circulation, due to the crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who don't always smell very nice."
"I'm very sorry! I had no idea!"
"Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet."
The entries in Lione's journal weren't dated, but they charted a progress. At first he was afraid he'd find Lione actually defending industrial cannibalism. That never happened. But as he immersed himself, reviewing every entry over and over, he knew Lione was asking him to understand. Not to accept, but to understand the unthinkable -
Compare chattel slavery. We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that? Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this go too? The An and the Ki accept that their way of life must change. But there is a deep equality in that exchange of being, which we "democratic individualists" can't recognise -
Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna's scars.
The "deep equality" entry was almost the last.
The journal ended abruptly, with no sense of closure.
Lione's incense - he'd decided the "lichen" was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he - filled his cabin with a subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuring the words he knew by heart, a deep equality in that exchange of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious young woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who had left him so far behind -
The whole journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn't yet know where his passionate journey would end.
When he learned that permission to visit the surface was granted, but the Ki-anna and the Interplanetary Affairs officer were coming too, he knew that the Ruling An had been forced to make this concession - and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice discover the truth? Or to prevent him?
He didn't meet the odd couple until they embarked together. They were all in full protective gear: skin sealed with quarantine film, under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it encased in an escape capsule and breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the seared rubble of their landing field.
The landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of grey and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.
"The An-he offered me a military escort," said Patrice, freedom of speech restored by helmet radio. "What was wrong with that?"
"Sorry," grunted Bhvaaan. "Couldn't be allowed."
The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered, vividly, the way he'd felt at their meeting. There had been a connection, on her side too: he knew it. Now she was just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she'd read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine... but not with Bhvaaan around.
"You've been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi."
"I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan."
"Aap. But you made friends with the An-he."
"The Ruling An were very willing to help me."
"We've been working in your interest too," said the Ki-anna. She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship's flank. "Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital. Were fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. The 'roof of Heaven' was never beautiful. It's strange, this part hardly seems much changed -"
"Except that one dare not breathe," she added, sadly.
On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.
Everything was livid mist.
"We're going under An-lalhar Lake alone?"
"The Green Belts'll be on call. It's not their jurisdiction down there. It's a precious enclave where the Ki and the An are stubbornly dying together." Bhvaaan peered at him. "It's not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence we can protect you, but that's after the event and it might not save your life. The people under the Lake don't have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear that in mind."
"I could have had an escort they'd respect."
"You're better off with us."
They descended the tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary, it grew brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow refractions. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a glowing, spiderweb pattern of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.
"Don't do it, child. Look at your rads."
"A moment won't kill me. I want to feel KiAn -"
The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.
"Maybe la
ter," said the Ki-anna, soothingly. "It's safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed."
"How do we get there?"
"We walk," rumbled Bhvaaan. "No vehicles. There's not much growing but it's still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work; keep up your fluids."
"Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell."
They walked in file. The desolation, the ruined beauty that had been revered by both 'races,' caught at Patrice's heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heart rate: counted down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place where Lione had last been seen alive.
"Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?"
"To our knowledge? Nobody did, child."
It was a question he'd asked over and over, long ago when he thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn't care. He followed the Shet, the Ki-anna behind him. His pace was steady, yet the display said his body was pumping adrenalin; not from fear, he knew, but in the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose and tried to calm himself.
As the radiance above them dimmed, they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars seemed to hold up the roof of ice, widely spaced at first, clustering towards a centre that could not be seen. There was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna went inside. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening blighted landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.
"We can't go on without guides, and we can't have guides until tomorrow. At the earliest. They have to think it over."
"They weren't expecting us?"
"They were. They know all about it, but they may have had fresh instructions. They're in full communication with the castle: there's some sophisticated kit in there. We'll just have to wait."
"Do they remember Lione?" demanded Patrice. "I have transaid, I want to talk to someone."
"Not now. I'll ask tomorrow."
"Can we sleep indoors?" asked the Shet.
"No."
The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp in the ruins of the former village, using their suits to clear ground and construct a shelter. Patrice moved over to a heap of boulders where he'd noticed patches of lichen. He had fragments of Lione's incense in the sleeve pocket of his inner, in a First Aid pouch. The police were fully occupied: furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. He was right, it was the same -
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