Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

  Ruric Hexenmeister stood with bare feet slightly apart, on that hot metal deck; standing with the old crook-shouldered balance. She looked at the Anzhadi, at Kethalu; and her smile remained. She said, ‘It isn’t over until it’s over. And that hasn’t happened yet.’

  34

  Waiting for the Morning

  ‘It doesn’t happen that easily,’ Corazon Mendez said.

  She made a shuttle-to-shuttle transfer on the morning of the following day, letting her F90 go on to Kumiel Island to repower. I’d had my YV9 repowered twice now by air-to-air contact. Thirty hours is about the limit for how often that can be done, and the crew were exhausted.

  ‘There’s still fighting at the Freeport,’ she added.

  ‘I know. There’s fighting here. We’ve been fired on twice.’ I didn’t look up from the holotank. ‘Out of a possible seventeen contacts, we’ve made six successfully – ah, there; see?’

  She leaned over my shoulder. Her black coveralls were crumpled, rank with sweat, as mine were; and there was an unhealthy whiteness to the skin round her eyes. She squinted at the visual image. A multitude of jath and jathrai, their shadows cast long on the shifting waters by the rising sun, and here a pinprick of light, and there another, answering: the dot-signals of heliograph messages passing from ship to ship of the fleet.

  ‘And I know it doesn’t happen that easily,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s happened yet. Pramila and the Hexenmeister and I have spoken to, what, a dozen people directly, and maybe ten times that many indirectly. Nothing’s happened yet. But it still may.’

  ‘Jamison said you had to threaten force to get off one jath ship.’

  Jamison has no damn business to be monitoring our transmissions, I thought. My temper was short; I’d only managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep. The time when I could do that and still remain sunnily enthusiastic is long gone.

  Cory pinched the bridge of her nose, blinked, and refocused on the holotank images. ‘You’ve split up, then?’

  ‘It’s safe enough, I think; we’re each going in with an armed officer from here. Pramila’s on that jath-rai –’ I keyed an insert that showed the broad-built ship wallowing in a deep swell, some three-quarters of a mile to our rear. ‘The Hexenmeister is on the larger jath, with a group of the Harantish Witchbreed.’

  Cory shrugged. ‘Gets to the point where it’s all names to me, Lynne. All I want to know is, what preparations are you making for when these ships get to the Melkathi coast? I estimate we’ve got about sixty hours before we’re forced into a decision – do we let these natives fight a hi-tech war without interference?’

  ‘It may not come to that.’

  She paused, and I looked across at her. Whatever she had been going to say, she visibly changed her mind. ‘I’d advise you to go back to Kumiel for a few hours, Lynne, you look half dead. You have to be in a condition to make decisions.’

  That green-shadowed cabin had begun to make me feel nausea. From shuttle to jath, and from jath-rai to shuttle – just how disorientated am I? And Cory’s right. I can’t be at less than peak efficiency. Not now that we have this final chance …

  ‘Doug Clifford will travel out to meet you,’ I said, ‘if you’ve no objection to working with the government envoy? I’ve already spoken to him about this.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have left me much choice.’

  ‘Molly Rachel used to tell me I could never trust people to do things as well as I can do them myself – even when I can’t do them at all! Cory, we’ve known each other for six years, I’ve never approved of what you do – do you wonder that I’m concerned, now, after Reshebet?’

  The white-haired woman tapped her finger twice on my shoulder: a peremptory gesture.

  ‘Lynne, I’ll take that from you when you come up with a better idea of how to handle this.’

  ‘Right now this is thistledown, a breath could send it either way.’

  She frowned. It wasn’t disapproval but consideration. I could see the figures and positions ticking up behind her eyes: so many ships on Kumiel, so many at the Freeport, so many in reserve at the orbital station. This many personnel here, that many in the northern continent, that many on the southern continent …

  ‘Lynne, I’ve been on worlds where the Company’s failed. I don’t mean a short conflict, deaths, I mean a real failure: the kind of bloody war that drags on for years, for generations, that keeps going by the momentum of its own atrocities, long after all involved have forgotten the original cause. I’ve always been afraid that I would be responsible, somehow, for one of those catastrophes. The only way I know to avoid it is to stop it before it starts.’

  Cory eased herself down into the bucket seat, motioning the crew to continue their duties, with a kind of unconscious arrogance. She added thoughtfully, ‘Having said that, I can’t know all the factors involved here. Nor can you, nor can the government envoy. We take decisions blindly and that scares the shit out of me.’

  Not what she said so much as the weariness in her voice; I thought how Ruric said, Does your Corazon Mendez think as she did? I don’t have the right to judge.

  ‘I must know what hi-tech fire power these people have. Lynne, Security must have the Ishida girl for debriefing now.’

  ‘All right,’ I conceded. Could I do it if I had her in front of me now, dirty and exhausted and still punishing herself for Sethri’s death? Well, if she’s after suffering, Security will cure her of that. And no need to wonder what I’d do, when really I have no choice. It isn’t the hiyeks that are important now, I thought, it’s Calil’s Witchbreed, and Pramila isn’t a factor there … ‘When the pod picks her up from the jath-rai, have a couple of your officers take her up to the orbiter. And keep me informed, Cory, okay?’

  Cory leaned over to the comlink: ‘I’ll have one of the F90s pick you up here, en route to Kumiel.’

  Early morning, and it would still be early when I got to Kumiel. Flight-time between the hiyek fleet and the island diminished each time I made the journey. Now it was close on ninety minutes.

  ‘Data-processing facilities are there, Representative,’ the F90’s lieutenant said as she left my cabin, indicating a small data-tank set into the wall. I nodded; and after she’d gone, stood for a moment rubbing my forehead. The vibration of the F90’s power-hum found a correspondence in the tremor of my hands; eyes and head ached. Metal warrens, these shuttles, and they bring out all my claustrophobic tendencies.

  I sat, and keyed in the data that Mehmet Lutaya had passed on to me. WEBcasts from Orthe didn’t much interest me – but I want to know how they’re reacting at home, I thought.

  When I tell the Company home office that Carrick V needs Protected Status, I want some idea of what public response on Earth will be.

  ‘– Ariadne WEB news update, sixteen hundred hours Pacific Standard Time. This is Evan Kodôly on ’cast from the main chamber of the House of Delegates in Tokyo –’

  The image in the wall-tank was small, not well-focused. Twelve days, I thought. To get an FTL-drone from Earth to Carrick V. A lot can happen in twelve days …

  ‘– interview with NuAsia Company’s Commercial Delegate, and I asked him his reaction to the escalating sequence of events on Carrick V.

  ‘Delegate Chen, you’ve been making strong protests to the PanOceania delegation here.’

  Squinting into the small ’tank, I made out the overly-familiar features of Wu Chen; a round, baggy face rarely out of the WEBcasts.

  ‘You have only to look at the evidence of commercial exploitation! The PanOceania multicorporate has caused cultural disruption on Carrock V to the degree that a major war is now in progress – a war that their Company has done nothing either to prevent or to stop –’

  ‘Isn’t it also true that on Carrick V –’ Kodôly’s slight stress corrected Chen, and I smiled to myself. ‘– on Carrick V, PanOceania has also invested in a substantial Aid Programme?’

  ‘That’s merely camouflage, to disguise thinly the blatant exploitation of an a
lien culture. In the NuAsia multicorporate, our policy has always been to involve the local population at all levels, to provide a guiding hand, as it were –’

  I skipped forward, knowing Wu Chen’s ‘guiding hand’ far too well to want to hear the routine again.

  ‘– news on Trismegistus WEB, Eurotime twelve-midday. Reports are still coming in of casualties in the fighting on the Heart Stars sector world, Carrick V. Nominally, the world is under the authority of the British government, and I spoke to a representative of that government about the actions of the PanOceania multicorporate there.’

  ‘– I cannot stress too strongly our condemnation of the use of active military force –’

  Jesus! I thought, and sat up, and keyed back the image. Blond, bearded, and standing against a backdrop of the Department’s offices – Stephen Perrault. What the hell are you doing as WEBcast representative for the government, I wondered. I’d have to go through his reports when I got back to Kumiel.

  ‘– condemnation of the use of active military force; however, reports have confirmed that the local population has access to hi-tech military equipment themselves. PanOceania have therefore been forced into taking action.’

  ‘Representative Perrault, may I ask whether it’s known how the natives of Carrick V got their military equipment?’

  ‘I regret to say that there is evidence that it was illegally supplied to them, by members of the PanOceania multicorporate themselves. I need hardly add that this was not sanctioned by PanOceania’s governing board, and I have no doubt that steps have been taken to remedy this. However, my government feels that the damage has already been done.’

  ‘Is your government raising the matter of compensation?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. We also must respond to the public demand for some kind of protected or isolated status for alien cultures, like Carrick V’s, that are so susceptible to outside interference.’

  ‘Nice one, Stephen,’ I muttered. ‘When it comes to PanOceania, sink ’em with a smile …’

  Few of the ’casts added anything to that. I was on the point of skimming through to the end, when one caught my attention. I keyed back and ran it in real-time:

  ‘– WEB-Taliessin. Public scandal continues to grow in the matter of PanOceania’s involvement on the Heart Stars world, Carrick V. This evening, we bring you comment on the multicorporate’s military strike on the harbours of the southern continent of that world –’

  Faces flicked past in rapid succession. Public-access hour on the WEBs is usually crowded; but now I sat up and stared at the sheer number of calls coming in. And this is only Taliessin, I thought; Taliessin’s not the most extensive WEB – I must have a rerun of WEB-Marduk and WEB-Tz’u-his …

  ‘It’s terrible. Just terrible. I don’t know how we’re supposed to accept this –’ A middle-aged man, with flat brown features that for a heart-stopping moment brought back Molly Rachel; he stared bewildered into the imager, “– there are people dead on that world, and we killed them; I don’t know how the Company expect us to support them now –”

  Background images stayed the same: some street in a southern-hemisphere city. A group of young men and women crowded round the imager:

  ‘We want to protest –’

  ‘What right do we have to do this?’

  ‘– nothing more than a private army! No Company has the right to that. First it’s some little world out in the Heart Stars; next it’ll be us, you’ll see, it’ll be us, here –’

  All of them wore multicorporate insignia on their coveralls; I judged them part of some Zealand Company. Looking at those young sallow faces, I felt something that might have been regret: for outrage and indignation that I can’t feel that strongly now.

  ‘– I saw the live ’casts, there were bodies lying in the rubble. What are our people doing there? Why didn’t somebody stop them? And it’s just going to go on getting worse, more killing –’

  Frozen image: a shabbily-dressed man on some Pacifican city street. For a second I stared at him with hatred, this nameless man; thought, Suppose you try it, before you criticize? and then keyed out the recorded WEBcast.

  The F90 thrummed, jolted with air turbulence, and I sat back in the bucket seat; aware of the small cabin, of the empty space outside, of the orbiter miles above the surface of the world, of the vast distance between here and Thierry’s World; of the light years between me and home – a distance incomprehensible. If Orthe’s sun were visible now in Earth’s sky, it would shine with the light that shone upon the Golden Empire in the height of its power, five thousand years ago …

  Things can be different. The last thing I said to her, before we split up to contact jath separately, was, ‘Is it wise to tell the hiyeks they haven’t been slaves to Kel Harantish? It’s all very well you talking about “locked into a pattern of survival”, but there was nothing involuntary about the Harantish Witchbreed’s grip on the canal system.’

  She grinned, membrane veiling those yellow eyes in amusement.

  ‘Lie in a good cause,’ she advised. ‘If I’ve learned one thing as Hexenmeister, it’s that history is what you remember it to be. Right now I’d like Calil’s people to remember the peaceful days of the Golden Empire – and if I had a choice,’ Ruric Hexenmeister said, ‘I’d wish them to forget Calil bel-Rioch. But we may manage that yet.’

  The F90 shuttle began its descent to Kumiel Island.

  Doug Clifford met me on the makeshift landing field. We walked briskly across the island, on tracks that had not existed until the Company began to use this land; and Carrick’s Star rose higher in the east, a white and silver glare. Already hot: the day promised a heatwave.

  ‘You’ve left the estimable Corazon Mendez overflying the hiyek fleet? Isn’t that a trifle … how shall I put it? Rash?’

  Glancing at him, I thought his urbane manner was a mask over exhaustion. ‘I’d have said it was unavoidable. If it worries you, console yourself with the thought that you’ll be on the spot – I’ve committed you without asking you, Douggie, but I couldn’t contact you.’

  He shot me a sour look. As we were walking, he pointed to the white hull of a government shuttle, grounded near the comlink-centre.

  ‘I’ve been in Melkathi, and having a problem of contact myself – I know there are upwards of two thousand hiyek-Ortheans in Rimnith and Keverilde, but can I speak with any of them? No. I know that there are Harantish in the area, and the same applies. Ride into the burnt area, and it appears deserted.’

  ‘And Calil?’

  He halted at a crossroads in the trodden earth tracks. Wind from the mainland hardly ruffled that grizzled red hair, silver over the ears; and he paused and surveyed the blue-grey mossgrass and the granite rock, so different from one foggy morning on a heathland telestre … One hand strayed up to touch his bandaged eye.

  ‘Who knows where the Harantish Witchbreed go? There are ships moving along the coast all the time. And there’s been sporadic fighting between them and ships of the Hundred Thousand.’ Doug pursed his mouth. ‘I had hoped to cool that situation down, but it seems unlikely now.’

  The exhaustion that had attacked me on the F90 was stronger now; I could have fallen asleep standing up. Carrick’s Star shone warm on my face. Distantly I heard the sea on the rocks round Kumiel, and the metallic cries of rashaku-bazur.

  ‘Will you go out to the fleet? You ought to talk to Ruric, Douggie.’

  ‘Seven hundred ships,’ he said. ‘Thirty thousand people. Much as I admire Ruric Hexenmeister, I can hardly conceive of her having an effect on them at this late date. Those people are committed. Having said that, of course, I would find it repugnant in the extreme to contemplate leaving any avenue of action unexplored.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re going?’

  To my surprise, he chuckled. ‘Yes.’ And then, more soberly. ‘The government shuttle is powered-up for approximately six hours. I’ll do what I can in that time. When can we expect your return?’

  Stephen Perrault’s
reports want looking at; I’ve had no reports from Thierry about David Osaka and Rashid Akida; I must speak with the telestre-Ortheans and find out what they plan to do when the hiyek fleet reaches Melkathi … Merrum Firstweek Nineday: we have no more than three days before they do.

  And if I continue to rely on stimulants, I’ll sleep for six days, not six hours.

  ‘I’ll be out with you before noon,’ I promised; and he nodded curtly, and began to walk towards the government shuttle. I blinked against the white light of that alien sun, and called after him, ‘Douggie, be careful. I hate to say it, but – go armed.’

  The next few hours passed in an eyeblink: sleep, a session with the data-tank, and a snatched meal. I conferred with Chandra about evacuating the remaining Commercial personnel up to the orbiter. And I ordered notification, every thirty minutes, of the position of the hiyek fleet, and of any change in the local or continental weather patterns.

  There were no changes in the hours before noon: the daystarred sky remaining clear, and the wind blowing strongly and steadily out of the south-western quarter of the compass. As Haltern n’ri n’suth Beth’ru-elen said, one summer tempest could end all our problems …

  I’ve been in storms at sea. Less sanguinary than Hal, I can’t wish that terror on anyone. But (I thought) I could wish for a force of nature to take this decision out of our hands.

  The Desert Coast Ortheans have hi-tech weapons, they have at least one GHD4 beampulser. When they reach the coast of Rimnith and Keverilde, are Cory’s ships to fire on them? Or are we to watch telestre-Ortheans fight hi-tech with harur-blades? Christ! I thought, it’s ridiculous, the very idea is both ludicrous and tragic. What can we do?

  Noon came: I found a pilot for a repowered YV9, and flew westwards across the Inner Sea.

  ‘There,’ Ruric Hexenmeister said. She indicated the image of the Rimon and Ymirian coastline, bright in the holotank. ‘To come to Melkathi anywhere north of the Melkathi Sandflats, they must either change course and sail round the Sisters Islands, or else they must risk sailing in amongst them – Ahrentine and Valerah and Perniesse and the rest. Those are dangerous waters, if not known.’