by Ian Douglas
But here was proof positive that the Qesh could do it.
“Sir, they dialed down the ambient gravity for us?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Alvarez said. “We’d really like to know how they manage to do that, too.”
Doorways large enough to admit a frigate dialed open for us, and we entered a hall large enough that it could have had its own weather systems. The air was moist, but . . . yeah. That was puzzling too. I didn’t have a sampler, but it tasted fresh, like Earth after a rainstorm. The EG suggested that the Qesh breathe something that starts off like Earth’s atmosphere, but there’s other stuff like extra CO2 and sulfur dioxide added.
Well, we knew already they could breathe Earth-standard atmosphere. We’d watched them doing so through our spy-cam in Salvation. But apparently they’d gone and special-created an atmosphere that we would find comfortable on board their ship, at least in this hall, and along the passageways through which we’d come.
Was the trick so inconsequential for them? Or were they telling us we were special?
There must have been around a thousand armored Qesh inside that hall, lining the walls, on the deck or standing on floating platforms. There were at least as many Qesh there as there’d been people at the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall when they gave me that medal, but Qesh are a lot bulkier than humans.
There were others there as well: beings like enormous caterpillars on eight legs, striped green, black, and yellow, two meters long and low to the ground. When I saw one rear up on its four hind legs, though, I realized that these were Qesh as well, but with eight limbs, not seven, and no massive head claw. They had the independently mobile, turreted eyes, but all four were the small variety, adapted for high levels of light.
Okay, that might give us a little more insight into their biology. We knew from the EG that the Qesh have three sexes, but had never seen anything indicating how sex worked for them. Apparently there were considerable differences between at least two of those sexes; I wondered what the third one looked like.
“You are Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle,” a deep-rumble of a voice boomed at me. The speaker, astride a long, narrow bench on a raised dais before us, was one of the familiar seven-limbed Qesh, wearing the ornately chased ceremonial armor I’d noticed on the one individual in Salvation. For all I knew, it was the same being.
I couldn’t tell if it was inflected as a question or as a statement, but I decided not to take chances. “I am,” I said.
“In the recent conflict on the surface of the planet you call Bloodworld,” the voice went on, “during the blood-tide of hot battle, you came across Veddah Fall-of-Lightning in the wreckage of her warflier. Though engaged in a withdrawal, you stopped, pulled her clear of her burning craft, and gave her medical assistance.”
Veddah, I assumed, was a rank or title, untranslatable by the software they were using. The her surprised me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. We’ve long been fuzzy about Qesh sexes and pronouns, and most people use both he and it more or less indiscriminately when they’re talking about them.
Did the sexual differences extend to role differences in Jacker society? Were the females warriors? What were the human-sized eight-limbed individuals?
“Veddah Fall-of-Lightning,” the speaker went on, “is my clan-sibling-daughter, and precious to me. I have asked that combat be honorably suspended, that I might reward your gallantry.”
There was more. Lots more. Other warriors—again, females, I thought—took turns speaking, reciting lists of battles and of generations of warriors. Much was in the rumbling booms and rattles of the Qesh language—untranslatable, perhaps. Or maybe they were words too special to be put into another language.
The entire ceremony struck me as intensely religious, though not, perhaps, in a way the Salvationists would have understood. Sacred, perhaps, was a better word. For perhaps an hour, we listened to what I swear was Qesh opera, with six or eight Qesh bellowing and thundering at one another on a low stage opposite Fall-of-Lightning’s dais, accompanied by creaking, groaning, and rumbling noises that just might have been an alien equivalent of music.
Captain Reichert, the others, and I stood through the entire performance, and I was enormously glad that they’d dialed the gravity down to levels comfortable for humans, because if it had been up to 2.6 Gs we would not have been able to remain standing. The Qesh rarely seemed to bother with furniture; they didn’t need to, with that arrangement of massive legs, though the narrow benches did seem to serve as functional acceleration couches.
At last, the painful sounds died away, and Fall-of-Lightning was addressing me again.
“Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle,” she said, “by your will, you chose to save the life of my sibling-daughter. By your will, you have bound her and her clan to you. Do you, in turn, accept the binding?”
“Say ‘yes,’ ” Lieutenant Kemmerer whispered, her voice close by my ear. “And make it flowery.”
“Did she just ask me to marry her?” I whispered back.
“No, but damned close. She wants you, and your clan, to be her clan siblings.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but had to assume that Intelligence had been studying Qesh and Qesh culture nonstop since the fighting had begun, certainly since the beginning of the truce.
“Thunder-in-the-Valley,” I said, “I would be deeply honored to be your clan-sibling. I accept this binding, and thank you for the honor.”
I hoped I’d sorted it all out straight, and that this was Thunder-in-the-Valley. Lieutenant Kemmerer had said I’d saved Thunder-in-the-Valley’s relative, and it all seemed to fit.
“And are these humans with you of your clan, Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle?”
“They are . . . as are all of the Marines of Deep Recon 7, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Division.”
There was a long pause, and I heard an undercurrent of drumming. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown in that last, made the whole of Marine Force Recon my clan . . . but damn it, they were. My family, more than family.
“Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle, we accept you and your clan as our siblings and daughters. Welcome to the Passage of Night!”
I felt Captain Reichert and the others sag with relief behind me, felt Reichert’s hand pat my shoulder. “Well done.”
Thunder-in-the-Valley came down off her throne and bumped my head with her massive claw. I had the feeling that, had I been a Qesh female, we would have exchanged clunks of our head ornamentation, the way humans might shake hands or give one another a high-five. Hell, she could have brained me with that double-claw horn, but her movement was astonishingly precise for so massive a being, the touch of her horn a delicate kiss.
I saw other Qesh in the room butt heads as well, and the clashes sounded like colliding e-cars.
Eventually, we were escorted back to the ship’s boat, and we returned to the Consolation. I wanted to go back to the Clymer. I wanted to see Doob and the others. But I was told that I’d been transferred to the hospital ship for the duration.
Exactly what that duration might be, I had no idea.
So, was I a zombie, or wasn’t I? I still didn’t know, not for sure. It all hinged, I thought, on whether or not there was such a thing as a soul.
I still remembered looking down on my own body, with Dubois lying beside me. The memory had lost some of its crisp, clean edge, so much so that I now wondered if I had, in fact, dreamed the whole thing. My brain had been starving for oxygen, my circulatory system was on the point of collapse. I could easily believe, now, that I’d hallucinated it.
I also remember the thunderclap when Doob triggered the CAPTR mechanism. I’d gone back into my body. I was certain of that. Surely, if that had been my soul floating outside my dead body, there wouldn’t be that continuity of linkage with my corpse.
And, so far as I was c
oncerned now, here on board the Consolation, it didn’t matter, not a bit. My memories went back in unbroken succession, from now, past the lost days and nights of unconsciousness, and on back into my past. Dad, telling me he was counting on me for General Nanodynamics’ future success. Me, raising my hand and repeating the oath as I was inducted into the Navy. Paula Barton’s eyes sparkling in the Texan sun. And, yes, her eyes growing glassy as our boat pitched and yawed in the glacier-stinging winds.
The cold and barren surface of Niffelheim, the terror as the Rocs passed overhead.
The landing on Bloodworld, the first one, with volcanoes glowing sullen on the horizon. Faces and names. Doob. Lewis. Michael. Joy. Especially Joy.
Howell. What had ever happened to him?
All there. It was me.
So even if my brain had died, me, the essential me, had survived, had returned, was still here.
Lieutenant Baumgartner came over to the Consolation a few days later. Chief Garner and Dr. Francis were with him. I was in one of the hospital ship’s open rec areas, up in the spin section. The compartment was pulling about half a G. I was up there as often as I could manage, breaking in the new leg. The surgery had gone well, everything seemed to be working well, but the leg was weak. Pale white and achingly weak. It would take a while to bring it up to match the other one.
“How are you doing, Carlyle?” Baumgartner seemed affable, even relaxed. “How’s the leg?”
“Good, sir.” I flexed it for him. “Almost good as new.”
“We brought you a little present.”
They attached it with its strip of nanoadhesive to my utilities—a yellow-bordered purple ribbon with a heart-shaped medal beneath, bearing the profile of George Washington. It was the Purple Heart, the medal awarded to service personnel who are wounded in the line of duty.
“Congratulations, son,” Garner said.
“Thank you, Chief. Usually I’m the one writing up reports to give other guys this thing.”
“We’d prefer you kept it that way, actually,” Dr. Francis said.
“So would I.”
“They’ve put you in for the Medal of Honor, too,” Baumgartner said. “Don’t know if that will fly yet. I suppose it depends on the success of the negotiations.”
“Yes, sir? How is that going, anyway?”
“Surprisingly well, actually. Our xenosophontologists are telling us that the Qesh put enormous importance on family, on clan bonds. They don’t think they’re going to want to attack us again, not if it means attacking the Marines. You did good.”
“What’s more important,” Dr. Francis said, “is that we may be able to open trade relations with them. They know a lot of things we’d like to know.”
“Antigravity,” I said. “I know.”
The fiction downloads like to paint glamorous pictures of interstellar trade, of trading empires, of costly cargoes shipped between far-flung worlds. I don’t know where they get that crap from. One solar system is much like another in terms of the distribution of elements. If tellurium is rare on Earth, it’s rare on Alpha Centauri A II as well . . . and on Bloodworld, and on just about any other world you might be able to name. That’s not an absolute, certainly. We haven’t gone very far out into the Galaxy yet. But from what we’ve seen so far, rare minerals and treasures valuable enough to make finding them and shipping them across the light years worthwhile just don’t exist. Same for alien life forms.
In fact, the one commodity worth shipping from one star to another is knowledge—and data can be transmitted quite cheaply indeed. Alien biosystems? Alien art or artifacts? If it can be encoded as data, it can be transmitted by interstellar laser. It might take one year per light year crossed, so you have to be patient, but it’ll get there eventually. That’s how the EG works, after all, a far-flung web of laser light carrying quadrillions upon quadrillions of bits of data, much of it information about worlds and species extinct for a billion years.
The entire point of establishing contact with alien species directly is to trade information.
New star drives. New and better power taps, drawing unlimited energy from the quantum sea. A means of controlling gravity, of bending it to our will. New ways of growing, programming, and disseminating nanobots. Methods for engaging in planetary engineering, reworking entire worlds to our will.
Or—think bigger still. There are species listed in the EG that are so far beyond our ken we may never understand them, or their technology, or their artifacts. There’s someone in toward the core of our own Galaxy, reshaping suns, and drawing energy from the supermassive black hole at the galactic heart.
There’s someone out there reshaping an entire Galaxy. We know it as NGC 4650A and it’s 165 million light years away. For a long time we thought it was a pair of colliding galaxies. Only recently have we learned the truth from the EG—or a very small part of the truth, anyway. As much, perhaps, as we’re currently able to understand.
Trouble is, we can learn only so much from the Encylopedia Galactica. We can learn much more when we actually meet these other starfaring species, learn to communicate with them, learn what they know.
And perhaps the biggest payoff of all is learning more about ourselves.
I must have looked worried. “Problem, Carlyle?” Baumgartner asked.
“Sir . . . you’ve seen my records, right? You know I was . . . captured.”
He nodded.
“Am I going to be transferred to another unit?”
He looked surprised. “Depends. Do you want to be?”
“No, sir!” I was surprised by the strength of my own voice. “I’d like to stay with the Black Wizards, if I can.”
Garner made a face. “You do know what they’ll call you.”
“I know.” Zombie. “It’s just a name.”
“Marines can be damned superstitious, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “Especially about anything connected with death and dying.”
“Sure, but there are always at least two ways of seeing things. There are zombies. And there’s resurrection.”
They laughed.
“Good attitude.” Dr. Francis looked at Baumgartner. “I don’t see a problem.”
“Tell you what, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “For the Hero of Second Bloodstar? Sure. You can stay aboard, at least for now. If you decide later that you want to put in for a transfer, see me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wouldn’t like to lose you, Carlyle,” Dr. Francis added. “It’s a pain in the butt to train new Corpsmen.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I’d heard that zombies didn’t always get transferred out to other units—that they generally had a choice or, at the least, could state their preference one way or another.
I wondered if Kilgore had been transferred, or if he was still on board the Clymer. If he was, I would have to look him up when I got back on board.
“Okay, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “You’ve got more visitors out there, so we’re going to head back to the ship. You take it easy, okay? Get better. That’s an order.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Good man, Doc.”
Dubois had been waiting in the compartment outside.
“How’s my man?”
“Excellent,” I told him. “Thanks to you.”
“Aw, shucks and gee whiz.” He weaved a careless hand. “Just doing my part to save the Galaxy.”
“Well, you saved me. And I appreciate it.”
His eyes narrowed. “You, ah . . . you do know . . . uh . . .”
“I know you ran a CAPTR on me, yeah.” I grinned. “I watched you do it.”
“How the hell did you do that?”
I told him about my hallucination, or whatever it was. “So I was watching over your shoulder the whole time.”
“Huh. I’ve heard of weird shit like
that. Never believed it, though.”
“Well, if I’m a zombie, I don’t think it shows.”
“That’s good. Because there’s someone else out there who wants to see you. Although I don’t really think she cares whether you’re a zombie or not.”
My heart quickened a bit. “You mean . . .”
“And, as an extra special one-time-only service, I bribed the ward Corpsman next door. He’s promised to let me stand watch here. Cost me a bottle of my best, but I trust it’ll be worth it.”
“But—”
He pointed toward a pressure door in the bulkhead. “That is the duty room. Complete with rec unit, full sim connections, and a sleep tube. As long as you’re out of there by 2200 so the guy on duty can rack out, you’re golden.”
I was no longer listening to him. Joy had just walked into the compartment, and I wasn’t aware of much at all, save for her smile.
“Well, hey,” Doob said. “Don’t thank me. Just enjoy yourselves.”
I took her hand.
“We intend to,” I said.
The glaciers of Maine, at that point, were very, very far away—more than twenty light years.
They seemed a lot farther.
Epilogue
Six weeks later I was on the space elevator, heading down-El to Earthport after the Clymer docked at Geosynch. The deck was configured as a viewall to show Earth, stretching almost bulkhead to bulkhead in ocean blues and white streaks and streamers of cloud and the dazzling glare of ice over Canada and the Northeast. Doob was with me, and Chief Garner, and a few others from Clymer’s med staff. My new leg felt fine, I’d been given two weeks’ leave, and all was right with the worlds.
Well, mostly.
No, I never got the Medal of Honor and I didn’t come back to Earth with the xenotechnological insights that would put General Nanodynamics on the map and make us all rich. The medal had been downgraded to a cluster on my Silver Star in lieu of a second award. Turns out Congress wanted to award Admiral Talbot the MOH for his role in the Second Battle of Bloodstar, and they certainly didn’t want to detract from that by spreading the glory around to a bunch of mere mortals.