by R. Lee Smith
She blinked and looked at her hand, which was still pink and stinging a little. “Are you going to tell me it hurt?” she asked incredulously.
His red eyes narrowed. “I did not mark that. And before you repeat yourself, know this: It is the law of all the city-states under Sheul that no man may lay naked hands upon a Sheulek, save at invitation, for his is the flesh of the Father and the punishment for such presumption is death. So. What did you say?”
“I’m not a man. I’m a woman.”
His head cocked. “I did not mark that either. What did you say?”
“Uh, I said I’m sorry and I won’t do it again?”
Meoraq straightened up with a grunt and resumed walking.
As she followed, Amber studied his raised spines, his black throat, and what few other minutia existed to help her gauge his mood, decided it was safe to be a little catty, and added, “I also said you were being kind of a baby for making a big deal out of it.”
He coughed up a dry laugh. “Did you indeed? You ought to know that it is as much a crime to insult one of God’s Swords as it is to lay naked hands upon one. If we were at home, you would be publically whipped for what you have just ‘said’, and I don’t believe I could stop it.”
Her feet rooted at once. “You’re not going to…I mean…Nicci…?”
He shrugged his spines. “I suppose I could make the effort to feel offense, but you would only insist on bearing her punishment.”
Would she? The doubt pricked at her just once before she crushed it in a kind of horror. Of course she would. They were family. They were all each other had. Amber would always stand up for Nicci, and Nicci…would always stand up for her.
“Have you ever seen it happen?” Amber asked. Blurted, really. Anything to keep from thinking.
“Eh? Of course.”
“I mean to you. Or over you, I guess I should say. Have you ever got someone hurt because they called you a…a scaly son of a bitch or gave you one of these?” She slapped lightly at his bicep.
He glanced at his arm where her hand had struck, smiling with his mouth even as his head cocked—not quite enough to really be a threat. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“Many times. I wasn’t always offended, to say truth,” he said in his careless I-have-people-whipped-every-day way. “But law is law. When I am at home in Xeqor, I have the authority to forgive, but when I travel, such forgiveness reflects poorly upon the leaders of that city. They must show mastery, especially in conquest.”
“Even if they were just kidding?” Images from old movies spun through her head—pilgrim ladies set in stocks in the town square, sailor guys tied to the mast while the bosun whipped his back bloody—but it wasn’t all the movies, was it? There were always stories in the news about some rich jackass partying a little too hard in some foreign country getting his ass caned and turning it into an international incident. She’d never had much sympathy for those people before, and yet the idea that she personally could be dragged away and beaten in front of a jeering crowd just because she’d called Meoraq a baby and swatted him on the arm boggled her mind.
“Intent is of no consequence to the law. Sheul’s Swords may suffer no abuse from lesser men. Only another Sheulek or a Sheulteb has the right to confront me. All others, even if born under the Blade, can be severely punished for a thoughtless word or an idle blow.” His spines twitched. His gaze grew distant. “Even…if they are kin.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
No answer, not even a grunt. They walked half a block in silence.
“I’m not trying to be rude,” said Amber finally.
He roused himself from wherever he had gone to give her a friendly nudge. “No one is here to see us, Soft-Skin. Say what you like. I’ll let you know if I’m offended. You won’t stop,” he added with a wry tilt to his head. “But I’ll let you know.”
Another half-block passed, with crippled bots making the only conversation. This time, the silence was Amber’s.
“I’m a bitch, aren’t I?” she said. It just fell out, landing heavily and dragging along behind her like one of those iron balls you saw chained to a prisoner’s ankle in the old-time cartoons.
“I don’t know what that means.”
She didn’t know how to explain and didn’t entirely want to, knowing that she’d called his mother one just last night. Instead, she nerved herself up for an honest answer and asked, “Do you think I’m hard to live with?”
“Eh.” He flicked his spines in a careless manner, not even bothering to shrug them all the way. “I’m the wrong man to ask. I’ve never had to live with anyone so long as I’ve lived with you humans. Even the Prophet himself would likely be in under my scales by now.”
“In other words, yes.” She tried to smile like it was a joke, but it wasn’t and she couldn’t, quite.
“No one speaks for a Sheulek. My words are my own. There are no others. You should—” But just then, they rounded the corner and saw the others, and whatever else Meoraq had been about to say ended seamlessly with, “Fuck Gann.”
It got a laugh out of her, the first real laugh since they’d stumbled into this god-awful place, the first laugh in what felt like lifetimes. “I should what?”
He glanced at her, still scowling over Scott, but a little sheepish, she thought. “That isn’t what I meant to say.”
“I thought God’s feet only told the truth. Your words are your own. There are no others.”
“Insufferable human,” he said. “Come. I need to see what this cattle’s ass is about now, and if God be merciful to me, it will end badly.”
The wind, which had been blowing more or less non-stop since Amber first crawled out of the wreck of the Pioneer and which had long ago become a kind of white-noise sensation she scarcely noticed, suddenly threw an extra-cold breeze their way, sending an honest-to-God chill up Amber’s spine. At the same time, the lit window they were standing beside flickered and died. She tried to laugh over that (sheesh all we need is some ominous music duh-duh-duh-DUMMMM the omen is officially here) but it wasn’t really funny. It was Scott. Of course it was going to end badly.
Scott and the others were standing in the middle of the street two blocks down, but even from here, Amber could see what they were looking at. It was another kiosk, but one of enormous size, planted in the middle of the intersection so that each side faced out into traffic. Centered in each wall of the kiosk was a video screen, and judging from the way everyone had ringed around it, all of them were working. Bands of static cut across the image, but the lizardman speaking there was still perfectly discernible, if muted. Amber had to be right up next to the group before she could hear anything at all. Only one of the speakers seemed to be working and the audio feed was in terrible condition, but a few words had survived.
“…won’t help anymore,” was the first phrase to fall out of hissing static into recognition. “It’s everywhere. It’s in everything. You can’t…” And back to static.
“What is this?” Amber asked, and was violently hushed by a dozen people.
The audio came back with “…still alive. I have to believe that,” the lizardman said, and no amount of static could dampen the feverish intensity with which he said it. “I have to. I do.”
Static.
“Just wait. It’s coming up next,” said Nicci, slipping into the small space between Amber and Meoraq. Amber thought she heard a hiss, but when she glanced over, Meoraq was walking away, looking down empty streets in his usual restless way.
Amber waited, and after a long stretch of damaged tape and gibberish without any context to draw from, a single word leapt out: “Matezh.”
She jumped a little, but there wasn’t time to look for reactions in anyone else. The lizardman on the feed was still talking, but the sound was terrible, requiring all her concentration and a lot of guesswork to translate.
“…look for lights…careful, because the roads are…locked, but I…”
And then s
omething else, something Amber couldn’t begin to figure out, but which made Meoraq stop and look sharply around—two words: “Nuu Sukaga.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, once the feed had collapsed again into static.
“I don’t know,” Meoraq told her, but the kiosk had all his attention now.
“It will ask for your mnabed—”
Amber touched Meoraq’s arm and he said, frowning, “A key…I think. The base of the word is the same, but I’ve never heard this variation.”
“—but just say it again. Nuu Suk—” A sudden storm of static obscured the rest of it. The lizardman on the screen kept talking, just a ghost behind waves of distortion and TV snow. The sound was nothing but electronic pops and scratches for several minutes, but there had to be more coming because several people were fidgety, anxious.
And then it came. The tape clearly hit the end of its recording, blipped to black, and then came back, relatively clear. The lizardman tapped at something at a console out of sight, looked directly up into whatever camera was recording this, and said, “If you can hear this, you’re not alone. But if you’re still in the cities, you have to leave. I know the emergency channels are still transmitting orders to stay in your homes, but that isn’t safe. And as far as I can see, the aid stations have all been overrun. But listen, I’m sending this from my base in Matezh. It’s got plenty of food, plenty of water, and it’s absolutely impenetrable. It’s also got probably the best communications system in the world,” he added with a shaky smile. Or maybe it was just the recording that shook; it was getting hard to tell. “So I know you can hear me. And you need to know—” The tape blipped and rolled back a bit, the color skewed. “—need to know that as long as any one of us is left alive, there’s still hope. But we have to come together. We have to—” Static and squeals filled the speakers for a few seconds and came back at deafening volume with, “—come to Matezh,” before snapping back into normal range. “This is no world to be in alone,” the lizardman said on the monitors. “It’s not too late. I know it seems that way, but it’s really not. I’m still here and so are you. We can still—”
He kept talking, but the audio was gone, and the next thing that came in clearly was, “…won’t help anymore,” so she knew it had gone the full loop.
“So,” said Meoraq. He looked around, not as if hunting out dangers this time, but just looking. Seeing the ruins, perhaps for the first time. “This is what he heard.”
“Huh?”
“Master Tsazr. The man I knew who entered Xi’Matezh.” His eyes finished their slow crawl over the dead city and came back to her. “He was here.”
“Maybe.” Amber spared the kiosk a distracted glance. “He says he’s transmitting across every bandwidth, or at least, I’m guessing that’s what he’s saying. So your teacher might not have been here, exactly—”
“You’ve always got to poke holes, don’t you?” interrupted Scott.
“—but this is probably something he heard if spent any time in one of these cities where the TV was on,” Amber finished, ignoring him. “I’m a little surprised you’d never heard it before. I guess you’ve never been in any ruins, huh?”
“Many times.” Meoraq tapped at the kiosk wall—the monitor nearest to his hand flickered—and shrugged his spines. “I’ve never listened to the things I’ve heard there before. Ha. I might have heard this a hundred times.” He paused and looked back over his shoulder at Scott. “I admit, you make me curious,” he said, and cocked his head (not, Amber recalled, a gesture of curiosity). “Why did you stop to listen? What is it that you believe it means?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” Scott waited until Meoraq deliberately flattened his spines before declaring, “It’s proof.”
Amber gave the lizard a few torturous seconds to jump on that, but he seemed content to just stand there and study Scott, so in the end, she broke. “Of what?”
Scott looked at her, smiling. “It’s a transmission, Miss Bierce. It’s coming from Matezh. And since you appear to be incapable or unwilling to add two and two, I’ll do it for you: There is a transmission tower at Matezh and,” he went on, raising his voice and one finger as Amber opened her mouth. “And it’s still working!”
Again Amber tried to talk, but this time it was Nicci who stopped her. Her color was high, but the shine in her eyes was too bright and brittle to be only excitement. It was a Bo Peep look, when the high was gone and she was trying to cozy just one more hit out of someone until tomorrow, just one more hit and everything was golden, just one more and it was all love.
“Listen,” Nicci pleaded in their mother’s voice, wearing their mother’s face. “Just listen to him, okay? He makes sense!”
Sense? Amber shook her head, looking back and forth from her baby sister/dead mother to the lunatic in a damned usher’s uniform, but it was Meoraq she kept coming back to. Meoraq, who merely watched it all play out with his head tipped up like that and his arms calmly folded.
“I’m aware of our situation here and I’m aware that we may all be living it with different goals,” Scott was saying, addressing all of them now. He talked fast and loud, making eye contact with everyone as he paced in front of the kiosk, and the choir was already clapping and swaying along. “I want to find a transmission tower at the end of this road. Hell, I want to find a skyport! Is that fantastic? Yes! But how fantastic, really? Meoraq—” He swung to point and Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. “—wants to find a temple where he can talk to God,” finished Scott, backing away. “And Amber Bierce wants us to find this!”
His voice bounced off the walls and down the lifeless street, making people look uneasily around them, reminded of the emptiness all over again.
“What are you doing, Scott?” Amber asked. She didn’t like the sound of her voice following those echoes. “How can you stand there and talk about skyports like it represents some sort of real chance?”
“Why not? Look around! All their stuff is still here! It still works!”
“Yeah, right. We don’t know what it’s doing, but it works. At least, the stuff that hasn’t crumbled literally to dust still works.”
“That was just the synthetic stuff.”
“And God knows there won’t be any of that on a starship!” Amber flung out her hands in a kind of furious surrender. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Let’s go to the magical land of Make Believe and pretend there is a ship somewhere in Xi’Matezh. What makes you think you could actually fly it? Piloting a starship isn’t something you just hope to figure out on the way. Do I seriously even have to point out that it’ll be an alien ship? With alien technology?”
“Technology follows logical rules, no matter who makes it,” Scott declared. “Look around you, Miss Bierce. The lights look like lights. The doors open like doors. Heck, even the bathrooms look like bathrooms.”
“And the giant fucking spiderweb in back of the building last night? What did that look like, genius?”
“I’m not going to continue this discussion if you can’t be reasonable.”
“I’m the only reasonable one in this discussion! We will not be able to fly an alien ship! Even if we found a manual, we couldn’t read it! This is craziness!”
They booed her. They actually booed her. She thought Crandall started it, maybe as a joke, but there couldn’t have been less than a dozen others who joined in. In the echoing street, it sounded like more. A lot more.
“See, that’s the difference between you and me,” Scott told her in his lofty Commander-on-Deck voice. “I don’t need to scare people to feel better about myself. I’m not afraid to give people hope.”
Amber stared at him, at all of them, speechless. Then, the explosion. She never felt it coming. One second, she was fine, if dumbstruck; the next, she was shouting up the whole world. “There is no fucking ship, you lying son of a bitch! We are never going home! This is it! This is what’s real! There is no fucking hope!”
Meoraq’s hand closed over her shoulder. Hard.
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“You see? This is her reality,” Scott told the rest of the crowd while Amber tried unsuccessfully to shrug herself free. “The one where everything is pointless and we might as well give up and jump off the first cliff we come to.”
“No, Everly, it’s the reality where we’re starving to death on a fucking alien planet instead of making people think we don’t have to try anymore because we’ll all be saved by a magic ship! That’s giving up, jackass! That’s—Get your goddamn hand off me, Meoraq!”
“Hush,” he said.
“But—”
He looked down at her, his head cocked and red eyes burning.
She shut her mouth, breathing hard, fighting not to cry.
“Thank you, Meoraq,” Scott said, turning back to his Manifestors. “I never said we don’t have to try, now have I? The difference is, what I think we need to try to do is survive until we can find our way home, while Miss Bierce seems to think we need to survive until we die. She says there’s no future. She says there’s no hope.” He paused to send her a scornful glance. “I think we’re all pretty lucky you’re not in charge.”
“This isn’t about who’s in charge!” she insisted, and just as suddenly realized that, where that was concerned at least, she was dead wrong. Flustered, she looked around and saw a hundred accusing, angry eyes aimed back at her. Even Nicci’s. And she guessed that shouldn’t really surprise her, since Nicci had better reasons than anyone else here to think Amber was a bitch and a bully, but it still hurt. “You can’t…Come on,” she said, not shouting anymore but only trying to make them understand, to make Nicci understand at least. “Think what you want about me, but just…be sensible. Nothing we find out there could possibly be in better condition than this place, and just look at this place! It’s falling apart!”
“Stuff still works,” said Eric after a moment. “The doors open. Some of the lights come on. The bots look okay.”
“Okay?” Amber pointed accusingly at the straggling commercial units that had followed them—all spitting out damaged audio feed and error messages, their dented hulls and cracked face-plates showing countless years of erosion no matter how well they’d tried to maintain themselves. “That’s what you call okay? That’s what you’re using to prove we can power a ship up? Launch it? Navigate our way back to Earth?”