Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  Roy’s brows rose as he listened, nodded. “They’ve been discussing what’s to become of them,” he said a last. “They’re leaving with a number of the older Resalq, into the Mare Aenestra. Leaving behind humans and the Resalq who seem, at least to their eyes, to be some kind of hybrid between human and Resalq. They feel alien here, and they want to make their own place. Simple as that.”

  It was a fair decision. “They’re taking the Freyana,” Mark said quietly, “with science and engineering teams aboard. The engineers will be working constantly on the ship to bring her back up to acceptable levels. The science teams will research new worlds in great detail before a daughter colony is established, and when it is, the Freyana will be returned to the larger Resalq community. Either it will go back to Saraine, where it has been all along, or if Lai’a fails in its mission to identify and neutralize the Zunshu threat, then the Freyana will serve we hybrids, we modern-day mongrel Resalq who, nonetheless, will need a safe place to call home and begin again.”

  Mongrel? Marin shot a sidelong glance at Travers, and then turned toward Mark. “Do I detect a note of animosity?”

  “Perhaps.” Mark brushed the issue aside. “They’re quite within their rights to feel as they do.”

  Three places down the table, Tor leaned forward and said too loudly, “You think there’s any place in any society for prejudice? I’m never going to agree with that, Mark. And not just because there’s only two members in their elitist club. It’s just wrong.”

  “And perfectly understandable, in the context,” Leon sighed. “Look at it from their perspective, kid. They come from a generation where people like them fought and died by the thousands to preserve their species. These two were left behind when the Raishenne bugged out. They were fighting a rearguard action, drawing the Zunshu automata.” He looked across at Marin and Travers. “This is why there’s only two of them. They fought the automata to a standstill, got access to the stasis chamber. Then they wake up and they discover everything Resalq has been diluted. Hybridized. That’s what the word ‘mongrel’ means. It’s not an insult, just an adjective.”

  “Depends how it’s used,” Tor snorted.

  “Oh, for godsakes,” Dario remonstrated, “drop it, Tor. Let’s not have this argument again!”

  “You think prejudice is excusable?” Tor demanded of his partner. “Because I don’t. The next thing will be, people are going to be looked down on for being Pakrani or Kuchini, and that’s exactly the bullshit you get out of Earthers!”

  “Not all Earthers,” Travers argued.

  “Most of them,” Tor said hotly. “Are you telling me, Mark, our exalted ancestors were this bigoted?”

  All eyes turned to Mark now, and he set down his fork, toyed with a napkin, for some moments. “Not in the senses the word has come to mean today. We were never gendered, and we were one race, so our sexuality and genetics never gave us cause for friction. Ask Curtis and Neil. Humans have a history of prejudice which will shock you! But there were elitist factions among the ancestral Resalq.”

  “There were?” Travers was surprised. “I thought you guys were above that sort of thing.”

  Mark chuckled softly. “Hardly. There were rich Resalq and poor ones, and the social climbers in between. Also people who ridiculed the rich for their excesses, others who derided the poor for the fancied idleness that plunged them into poverty and kept them there, and still others who scorned the social climbers both for their bloody-minded ambition and also the underhand tactics one must employ to get up any social ladder! There was also the artistic caste, the philosophers, poets, painters, who were scorned by the new warrior caste which developed as a result of the Zunshu. The warriors liked to refer to the artists as daydreamers and parasites, and of course, the philosophers and poets called the warriors mind-numbed soldiers, which was a reference to various meditational techniques used by our warriors to calm and clear the mind prior to battle.” He shook his head slowly. “Oh, we had our elitists.”

  And from the looks of Emil and Midani Kulich, they were from a wealthy family whose younger offspring had become warriors, Marin thought. In their minds, they had sacrificed everything to defend and preserve the pure Resalq culture, only to learn that the Resalq themselves had betrayed it. Diluted – hybridized it.

  So they were leaving on the Freyana, with some of the very old Resalq who shared their opinions of these last generations, while on the other side of the table Tor Sereccio was steaming with indignation. He had grown up in Sark, speaking the slang of a military town, dancing with conscript boys in clubs like Carousel and Jocasta’s. He thought of himself as Resalq, not human – he wanted children, and though Dario would be the equero, he was going to bear them himself. The original meaning of the word equero, Marin remembered, was ‘the individual with whom I share generic material and might conceive offspring.’ It translated as parent, which was good enough to serve.

  “Enough, already,” Dario was saying. “We’ve been there, Tor. It’s an argument without a solution.”

  “Bull,” Tor growled. “You want the bottom line? Prejudice is a fast-track to hell. You start down that road, you’re screwed. Don’t believe me? Go ask Neil and Curtis. Shit, ask Rick Vaurien why he got the hell out of the homeworlds!”

  He was right, but Marin had no doubt the Kulichs would have made very different arguments, just as strong, from their own perspective. “I should imagine they want to see if they can find the Raishenne,” he guessed. “If it were me, I’d want to know what became of it, and the rest of the community. Damn, think about this. There could be a Resalq colony out there, cut off the way Ulrand was isolated. Find the Raishenne, and you find the lost tribe of real, genuine ancestral Resalq.”

  The mention of the lost ship neatly diverted the conversation. The Kulichs looked along at Arlott as he translated what Marin had said, and at last Emil’s bare head nodded in acknowledgment. “So it will be,” he said in his thick accent. “We will hunt, seek, maybe find.”

  “You know where the Raishenne was headed?” Leon wondered.

  “Yes.” Midani licked his lips, wrestling with the language. “We had ship, hid in canyon, Kjorin. We kill Zunshu machine, we get ship, we go, follow Raishenne. Then … different. Waking here.”

  “It’s been centuries,” Travers mused.

  “It’s been too long,” Mark agreed. “The Raishenne would have moved on, and on, a hundred times.”

  “And maybe,” Dario mused, “left signposts behind them, which only a Resalq could read. To outrun the Zunshu, they could be so far on the other side of the Shackleton Void … and then all it would take is a hardware failure. Drive problems they couldn’t fix, and the high band arrays go down. Suddenly they’re not going anywhere else, and they can’t send or receive – like Ulverson Yves Randell’s people, the original Ulrish who dropped so far off the sensor net, they had to be invited to join the Confederation.”

  “Possible?” Travers glanced from Dario to Mark and back.

  “Perfectly possible,” Mark said slowly.

  “Wild bloody goose chase,” Tor snorted.

  “You’re just never going to meet them halfway,” Leon observed, “because you don’t like them. Emil got right up your nose with his opinions about racial and cultural dilution, and after that you wouldn’t agree with a word he said, supposing they were on the brink of wrangling an end to these damned Colonial Wars.”

  “Not true,” Tor objected. “I’d agree with them that far … I’ll just give Emil a punch in the bloody nose if he doesn’t stop looking down it at me, as if I’m some kind of fungus!”

  “Please!” Mark remonstrated. “If you people are going to argue every time we sit down to dinner, I for one am going to eat in the lab!”

  “I’ll eat with you,” Dario muttered.

  It was Roy Arlott who said, “I’ll keep you company – see how far the rest of them get without someone to translate. And you have no idea how many stand-up fights I’ve stopped by mistranslating, and retr
anslating some of the dumb-ass stuff that’s been said – on both sides of this table!”

  “You did what?” Tor demanded.

  “I said, I stopped a lot of fights,” Roy said loudly. “Look, big boy, you have the moral, ethical high ground, and you’re dead right. And they have the cultural, genetic high ground, and they’re dead right. It all depends where you’re standing, who’s righter.”

  “That’s a word? Righter?” Travers smothered a chuckle.

  “You know what I mean, goddamn it,” Roy growled.

  “I know what you mean.” Neil reached for the noodle bowl and added a second serve to his plate.

  “See it this way,” Leon offered. “They sacrificed everything they ever had to preserve Resalq culture. And what they see sitting around this table is anything but Resalq.”

  “To preserve Resalq purity,” Tor argued. “The purity of the bloodline, or the lack of it, is what’s pissing them off.” He gestured dramatically with his fork. “We’re impure. We should all be wearing placards around our necks saying, ‘I am contaminated, shag me at the peril of your offspring.’ Then the next thing is, it’ll be made illegal to shag one of us poor, modified souls. Then we’ll be second class citizens, and start losing a lot of our civil liberties. Tell him, Neil.”

  “Me?” Travers looked up from his plate. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the human,” Dario said dryly.

  “So are Curtis and Roy!”

  “All right, tell him, Curtis,” Tor challenged.

  Marin was done eating, and sat back with his wine. “I can’t tell you much more than you ought to already know. I was bred and born in the Deep Sky. I’m human, but not an Earther. There isn’t an Earther at this table! But Jagrethean schools do teach a nice line in human history. It was interesting. Also appalling.” He looked from face to face, uncomfortably aware that he had the complete attention of the entire group. “Humans have a history of elitism. It’s been traced back to the reptiles from which we descended, billions of years ago. First it was about tribalism, and the bigger, more powerful, richer the tribe, the more they looked down on everyone else. Blow this out to its most ridiculous extremes, you get Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, and I realize these names mean nothing to you!

  “Then, later, it was about what color you were, your skin, hair and eyes, because only the people of one’s own tribe were good enough. Everyone else was either too dark or too pale, which made them the enemy, to be conquered and enslaved. Then it was about what gender you were, because men were big and strong, and women were easy prey – easily battered into submission and kept pregnant. Later on, when tribes turned into nations, it was about your sexual orientation, because the king-generals wanted to breed soldiers by the regiments, and it did no one any good if they allowed same-sex marriages. So they wrote the law regarding sexuality into their scriptures and went on a jihad against people like Neil and myself.” He looked around the Resalq faces, which were appalled, and smiled faintly. “You’re all single-gender, you have no such militaristic history … you’re clueless about what I’m talking about.”

  But Leon Sherratt’s head was shaking. One arm draped artfully over Roy’s shoulders. “I could wish you were right, but I lived on Omaru for a long time, among humans, as a human. I know more about human culture than I ever wanted to. There’s situation dramas on the threedee. Historicals. You get bored enough, you watch anything to pass the time.” He gave an animated shudder. “And I take Tor’s point. You open the gate to prejudice, and you’re teetering at the top end of a slippery slope.”

  Tor raised his glass in salute. “My point exactly.”

  “But you have to forgive Emil and Midani,” Leon added, “because they look at Dario, you, me, even Mark, and they don’t see Resalq. They see human males.”

  “And what,” Travers asked abruptly, “do they see when they set eyes on a human female? I mean, Barb Jazinsky’s been here, and she’s about as male as Emil Kulich is human!”

  Now Roy guffawed. “They asked me what species she was.”

  “They what?” Marin paused, glass halfway to his lips.

  “You heard,” Dario snorted. “Fact one, they knew she wasn’t Resalq. She’s almost tall enough, but she has hair, and boobs, and hips. To that point, the only humans they’d seen were Harrison Shapiro and Roy himself. In walks Barb, and –”

  “And Midani says to me,” Roy snorted, “words along the lines of, ‘Holy crap, what is it?’ And I say to him, ‘This is Doctor Jazinsky. She’s a woman.’ And he thinks Woman is a third species. Then I have to explain to him the concept of gender. It was … interesting.”

  “Embarrassing,” Leon guessed.

  “Interesting,” Roy insisted. “I just pulled a sixth grade human biology lesson out of CityNet, ran in, and translated the soundtrack.”

  “Sex and all?” Travers’s eyes were glittering with amusement.

  “We were all big kids, last time I looked,” Arlott intoned. “There’s a lot Emil and Midani have had to learn. They’re still shocked, if you want my opinion. They’ve caught up on the history of how the Resalq almost vanished out of the Deep Sky and how our people arrived, and folks of Mark’s generation were reengineered to pass. But those are the facts, and it’s not the same when you have to live it, feel it.”

  The scrape of Mark’s chair as he pushed it back stopped Roy, but Mark produced a smile which was not too sham, and gestured him to go on. “Don’t let me stop you. I’ve a lot to finish, and I want to get it done tonight.”

  With that he was gone, pausing only briefly at the far end of the table to refill his glass and pick up a couple of green pears. Marin frowned after him, wondering if even Dario and Leon were sensitive enough to Mark’s moods to know that many a raw nerve had been touched tonight.

  He patted his lips, drained his own glass, and leaned closer to Travers’s ear to say, “He’s … not good. It’s company he needs. More than likely a shoulder to cry on, and he’s not going to get it from these buggers! Give us ten minutes, Neil, all right?”

  “And then I’ll bring coffee.” Travers twisted in his chair. “You want me, yell.”

  “I will.” Marin gave him a grateful look, and stepped quietly away from the gathering.

  The house sprawled away, north-south with wings headed east-west from both ends. The second level was all bedrooms and studios, where the light was best; the labs were recessed into the rock beneath the house, along with the garages. Marin knew exactly where Mark had gone, and followed him unerringly.

  The sound of very old music issued from the last of the labs. The instruments were original, the melodies lilting and ancient, in the strange quartertones and sliding cadences. The lab was half-lit; a whir of machinery and cooling fans whispered behind the music. Mark had pulled a stool up to the bench where a bevy of fist-sized drones waited to be tasked, but he had set his face into the palm of his right hand and was ignoring them all.

  With just enough deliberate noise of boots on floor to announce his presence, Marin moved into the lab. Mark lifted his head, perhaps trying to give the impression nothing troubled him, but Curtis knew him too well, and had already seen.

  “They’d test the patience of a saint,” he said softly.

  “And I’m no saint,” Mark admitted. “They’re all right – the Kulichs, Tor. We did what we had to do, to survive. We couldn’t run any longer, and even if we did, we were running into the human colonies, not away from them. It would have meant turning battered, ailing old ships like the Freyana into unknown space and trying to find somewhere to survive.” He had swiveled the stool around, leaned his back against the bench. His eyes closed as Marin’s hands fell on his shoulders. “In the end, it was easier to hide among you, and we used you.”

  “Used us?” Marin’s fingers clenched and massaged, working over the hard, tense muscles.

  “We let humans terraform worlds, build cities, establish trade routes, and we slithered in by the back door, pretending to be from just
a couple of colonies away, resettling. We grabbed a free ride on everything your people ever did, Curtis.” The dark gold eyes opened, and he looked up into Marin’s face with an expression of regret. “Is it any wonder Emil Kulich regards us with utter scorn?”

  “He has no right,” Marin began.

  “He has every right,” Sherratt said with ironic humor. “He sees with the clear eyes of one who was there before I was born. He’s old, like me. The Ebrezjim was launched into the Vast when he was very young – he and Midani are just about old enough to remember those days. The deaths of worlds, Curtis. Not just of outlying colonies like the ones we’re losing right now, but worlds like Borushek and Velcastra. He remembers the Resalq at the height of their civilization. And I say their, not our, because he’s right. We’ve changed. We did it to ourselves, and many, even most, of the Resalq as you know them wouldn’t want to change back.”

  Marin’s hands stilled. He leaned his head on Mark’s and spoke in a murmur. “Emil Kulich is hardly going to inspire anyone to emulate him. He’s …”

  “He’s a snob,” Mark said as if it amused him as much as confounding him. “He’s an elitist, superior, prejudiced bastard … also a scholar who became a warrior of necessity, who pledged his life to defend everything he believed in.”

  “Meaning, the Resalq as he knew them in the hour when the Raishenne bugged out, leaving him and Midani to divert the automata and let the rest of their people get away.”

  “Exactly. It took a courage nothing can diminish.” Mark looked up at him soberly. “He believes we should have hung onto our individuality, safeguarded our culture at all costs.”

  For some time Marin weighed and measured this while his thumbs rubbed Mark’s tight neck muscles. At last he shook his head slowly. “It’s easy for a warrior to say this. Not so easy when you’re speaking for a community of tired, worn out old folks and frightened children. When your ships are battered past fixing and there’s nowhere else to go, nothing left to use. The Kulichs were there at the beginning, when the Zunshu struck first and the Resalq heroes became legends in their own lifetimes. He didn’t see the end of it. You did.”