Beholder's Eye

by Julie E. Czerneda

  I went to the doorway. Snap. The sound made me look over my shoulder as I was about to open the door.

  Ragem sat looking at the broken stem of the glass in his hand; blood, not wine, dripped from the cut end. I'd seen that bleak despair on his face only once before, when we'd been prisoners of the Queeb and he'd been forced to watch my torture.

  Now what? I wondered, close to losing track of which emotion I was supposed to feel next. "Now what?" I asked him.

  The Human's face, while not classically handsome, possessed a pleasing symmetry of bone structure I thought would age well. The proof was before me now, as his expression added years. "I lied to you, Esen."

  When he pressed his lips tightly together, as if to hold in some further outburst, I decided to give Ragem time to gather himself, since this was definitely the beginning of some confession I wasn't sure I wanted to hear, but I was about to regardless. So I left the door, despite the urgency of contacting Skalet, and returned to the table where I calmly poured us both sombay, spicing mine with a spoonful of leftover sauce from the noodles, careful not to put the spoon into his cup and thereby end his confession before it started. As I fussed over this process, Ragem silently wrapped a napkin around his hand and watched the red stain slowly stop spreading across its white surface.

  "Drink," I insisted, taking a large swallow of the hot stuff myself. "Now. What lie, Paul-Human?"

  "Kearn doesn't care about the Confederacy. He doesn't care about distress calls and regulations."

  "So…" I prompted, able to guess where this was leading, but also guessing it was part of Human friendship to let him bare it all.

  "The only thing he cares about is tracking down Esen-alit-Quar. You were right. Nothing will convince him you aren't responsible for the murders and disappearances. Nothing is likely to stop him hunting you either." He stared glumly into his cup. "I gave up trying to talk him out of it. We all did."

  "I know about Kearn. You are not surprising me, Paul-Human," I said very quietly, as if he were some feral creature I could scare away with a louder or harsher voice. "There are always those who fear the unknown. And what am I but all of the unknowns rolled into one?"

  "Don't try to justify him." Ragem flung up his head and glared at me as if I were the enemy. "He doesn't represent my kind. Believe that, Esen."

  "Of course," I made a soothing gesture. "But you are distressed by more than Kearn."

  He took a deep breath, one that shuddered near its end. "After we spoke on the Rigus that last time, when you refused to help me come with you on the Trium Set, Sas came to my quarters. He'd found the hidden messages I'd sent for you. The ones to Skalet and Ansky. Turns out Kearn had him doing a random check on com traffic, and our security officer pursued the job like a cat after—well, you get the picture. It was my terminal, my shift. I couldn't deny the logs."

  Ersh. "Did he read them?"

  "No. I'd erased the content right after sending. He couldn't even be sure of the final destination, but it wasn't hard to figure out when we started getting the refugee calls from Kraal."

  "So Skalet didn't fool Kearn at all," despite the seriousness of the moment, I waggled my fingers. A blow to an immense ego.

  Ragem didn't appear to find this as amusing. "While you finished packing, Sas took me to see Kearn. We had a—conversation. One in which my options were made very clear."

  "Poor Paul-Human," I said with true sympathy, able to imagine every detail of that one-way shouting match. "What happened next?"

  "I said you convinced me you'd had enough of chasing his monster and had begged me to send a secret message to an old client in the Kraal Confederacy. The message was to take you off the Rigus."

  "And he fell for that?" I asked, astonished. I knew Kearn's weaknesses better than I wanted to, but it was a stretch even for him to believe a Ket would feel safer in a war zone.

  "No."

  Ersh, save me from Humans. "You thought of something better, I take it."

  "I didn't have to," he confessed. "Kearn had figured out everything."

  "What!?" I rose to my feet, knees knocking the table, feeling as though Kearn would burst through the door of the room at any minute and ready to run the other way. Illogical, but that was the way of any instinctive fight/flight response. In this form, as in the Acepan, the response was predominantly flight, the Ket species having matured into a sensible preference to avoid danger whenever possible. I had to start choosing braver forms.

  "Relax, Esen," Ragem ordered, rubbing a hand over his face wearily as he gazed up at me. "This is Kearn, remember? He hadn't figured out the truth. He'd come up with some convoluted plot in which you were a spy for Esen's people, sent to keep tabs on him. You were leaving the Rigus to rendezvous with her or another of her kind." Ragem's voice slipped into his mockery of Kearn's whine again: "She played on your sympathy and used you to send the coded message. Ragem, you really should pick your friends more carefully."

  "Sound advice, Paul-Human. I've tried to give it to you in the past," I said primly, settling down in my chair again with only a residual trembling.

  Ragem's lips twitched, almost a smile. I supposed he'd been certain I'd react badly. In truth, I wasn't sure how I felt about it, beyond a fatalistic conviction I wouldn't be appearing as Ket on the Rigus anytime soon, and so would certainly miss my chance to find out more about Willify's tangled family. With the Lanivarian, that made two of my favorite forms under Kearn's wild-eyed scrutiny. A tally Ersh didn't need to know, I concluded.

  "Why didn't he assume I was, well, me?"

  Ragem drained the last of his sombay from his cup. "Kearn wants to believe you—the real you—are the monster we've chased from Hixtar. Once we found Portula already destroyed, with you safely on the Rigus, he couldn't very well have you in both places at once." He raised one brow. "You can't do that, can you?"

  "No. I can get into enough trouble in one place at a time, thanks. So Kearn doesn't suspect I'm who I am." I was beginning to wonder who was who in all this myself.

  "Right. Luckily for us both, he sees you as someone hired to do a job, likely not even aware of the details. And he wants a lead in this chase of his—any lead. He needs it sooner than later, too, or the Deputy Minister is going to yank him off the bridge of the Rigus and put the ship back on the frontier where it belongs."

  "So—"

  "Set a spy on a spy. Kearn thinks you trust me. He expected you to believe that I was to ferret out some anti-Commonwealth conspiracy among the Kraal."

  "With the implant. And your story about the signal device on the shuttle—"

  "Too true."

  The Quartos Ank's engines kept their noise to themselves, but I knew from Skalet's sharing the engine enhancements of the Rigus were familiar stuff to the Kraal. We should reach Artos in another day. The Rigus might be haunting the Trium Set, or might be who knows where. A Commonwealth ship dedicated to hunting down my kind, not just after a mysterious killer. Life had been simpler on Kraos.

  "That's why I decided to lie to you, Esen," Ragem said softly, reading my distress too accurately. He reached for my hand. "I didn't want to tell you, not so soon anyway, how the situation was on the Rigus, with Kearn. But I couldn't stick to it. It didn't feel right to keep secrets from you."

  You stink of secrets, echoed Skalet's accusation in my memory. "I value your honesty, Paul-Human," I said, while reserving to myself the obligation to keep my own honesty flexible for his sake and mine. "And while your news distresses me, it could be worse."

  I stood, tired of the room, the rich food, and secrets. "Let's send our message to Skalet and then get some rest. Captain Hubbar-ro is nothing if not dedicated to seeing us break some records getting to Artos."

  Ragem looked grim. "I can't wait."

  * * *

  37: Spaceport Afternoon; Shrine Sunset

  « ^ »

  WHEN I'd first starting learning about other species, an education begun by my first bite of Ansky—an interesting memory in itself—I'd rapidl
y concluded that biology dictated the tendency of certain species to remain planet-bound. The inability of Lanivarians, my birth-form, to keep their food down even in orbital shuttles seemed to support this conclusion.

  After I'd experienced another hundred years of life or so, Ersh introduced me to the other great glue holding species to their worlds: belief. For every five species casting their eyes, or whatever organs suited them, out there, there was at least one whose beliefs either kept those eyes or whatevers downward or eventually drew them back to an ancestral home to stay.

  It was not our way to believe we belonged on any one hunk of orbital rock over another, so I'd found this concept particularly hard to grasp. Ersh-memory of space, coupled with my own experiences, now explained my difficulty. The Web had not evolved at the base of a gravity well. We had never needed to commit resources and time to leave a mother world. This was a fundamental difference between Web and any other species I thought could prove even more profound than our lifespans.

  Ansky came closest to understanding the emotional attachment of species to their homes and to one another. She was the romantic of us; the heart, a Human might say. Her experiences, filtered through Ersh for me save for that initial nip and my penalty after Kraos, carried flavors of passion, of underlying forces owing nothing to rational thought. Sharing with Ansky had a bit in common with receiving a mild electric shock.

  Ansky's present home, Artos, offered much the same combination of pleasure, discomfort, and outright peril. Ragem and I stepped out of the air lock of the Quartos Ank with her captain, our faces immediately warmed by the afternoon blush of rosy sunlight, and as quickly surrounded by the requisite armed escort of Articans prepared to safeguard their lovely world from unbelievers.

  Captain Hubbar-ro and Ragem were at more of a disadvantage than I, as Ket. Articans were strangely Human-similar, beautiful in their way, though I knew their biology was thoroughly unhuman. The resemblance had made the Articans uneasy from the day of first contact between the species; the Church of Bones routinely argued that Humans were Articans who had offended the God of Bones and been exiled from the blessed homeworld. They had much less trouble with visitors who were obviously not Artican, such as myself, believing—if Ansky's latest memories were sufficiently up to date on the constantly pliable orthodoxy—aliens were pre-Articans striving to be worthy of reincarnation as true Articans on the blessed homeworld. This vast improvement over the previous canon that aliens were demons had, Ansky concluded, a great deal to do with the increasing value of interstellar trade.

  We marched among six-plus-one guards, the six armed and the odd one unarmed for some reason I didn't know. They were all female, and definitely pregnant judging by the bulges around each waist; another change in procedure from my last information. Keeping up with Articans was a headache; of course; not keeping up was foolhardy.

  I could see Ragem was itching to talk, but kept his comments to himself. Offworlders speaking before being introduced to the Keeper of the Spaceport Shrine was Number Fifty-one on the list of current taboos the Quartos Ank had received while in orbit.

  A considerable number and variety of starships had braved the taboos and strictures to do business on Artos. I could see other sets of Artican guards waiting or moving near several of the parked vessels. I refused to speculate how the Articans arranged for so many female guards in the same condition, though I would ask Ansky when I had the opportunity.

  The Kraal captain, in full dress uniform with the exception of an empty sword scabbard and vacant blaster holster, was having trouble keeping his eyes straight ahead. I didn't blame him; the Kraal had a pronounced love of aesthetics and our guards were all exceptionally attractive individuals. I doubted he could tell their condition, but I knew Ragem was aware of it and would want to discuss the oddity later. If we succeeded in not offending the Keeper. No point worrying about that, I decided, focusing instead on the pleasure of walking barefoot on the prickly golden turf the Articans felt pleased their God more than pavement.

  It was a short walk from the Quartos Ank to the Spaceport Shrine, but our destination was light-years distant from the Kraal shuttle in form and purpose. A pile of broken rubble, stuck through with scorched timbers, marked the previous shrine I had in Ansky-memory. It looked to have met a violent end. A purge of ideology, no doubt. Such events were not uncommon here.

  The new Shrine stood close enough to the ruin of the old to share one wall. The new construction had been thrown together from woven animal hides and smelled as though several of those hides had not been properly cured beforehand. Thankfully, we were third in line and our escort herded us into a position more-or-less downwind of the worst of it.

  The clear menace of the place enforced the silence taboo more effectively than the attentive guards and their bristling collection of sharp objects and incongruously modern hand weapons. Denebian biodisrupters, I observed in an idle moment, taking comfort in cataloguing the cultural detail as opposed to imagining the efficient handarms used on our flesh. Trade wasn't always in food or luxuries. I found myself wondering how the Ganthor Matriarch and her mercenary herd had fared on Ultari. I couldn't say I wished them a profitable war.

  We shuffled ahead as another cluster of guards and off-world traders entered the Shrine, ducking under a raised tent flap that dripped something truly repulsive-looking on their heads. No curses or complaints. The taboo held. I actually found myself fighting an urge to chuckle; the Articans had found a way to turn bureaucracy literally into a horrific experience.

  A group of Denebians—know what you're here to sell—exited at the same time. Not their first visit, I concluded from the hoods they'd chosen to wear despite the clear sky overhead.

  Our turn came after a tedious amount of waiting. The well-disciplined guards had stood perfectly still, beyond eyeing me as I rocked from foot to foot; I wasn't worried, not having seen any prohibitions in the list against that. My Human companions might have fallen into a doze for all I could tell. The Artican sun was well down on the horizon by the time we were allowed in to meet the Keeper, casting a charming pink glow over the sides of the starships and a somewhat nasty red stain on the Shrine walls.

  I shuffled under the dripping tent flap as quickly as I could, successfully missing the oozing liquid by a hairs-breadth. Hubbar-ro was less adroit; I hoped the dark stain would come out of his light green cape. From his hunched shoulders and rolling eyes, he likely assumed the worst about the source of the liquid. I would reassure him back at the ship. I suspected the Articans kept a bucket of stale beer at the tent peak. Their deity was of bone, not blood.

  A distinction which strongly influenced the decoration within the Shrine. The Keeper sat behind a desklike altar made entirely of bone, mostly hips and thighs from a large domesticated meat animal but the offworlders were doubtless encouraged to believe otherwise. The Keeper himself wore an animal hide around his shoulders, the head, or rather skull, attached in some manner to appear to be whispering secrets into the Keeper's right ear. As the Keeper was himself gaunt to the point of parody, the combination was doubtless intended to be unnerving.

  And was to some, I realized. Captain Hubbar-ro was supposed to step up to that intimidating display to insert his clearance disk into the reader in front of the Keeper's folded, beringed hands. That device, the guards' weapons, and the lighting within the odorous tent were the only off-world tech items in evidence. The Kraal hesitated, however, the delay growing a frown on the Keeper's stern features. I calculated various possibilities then used my toes to pinch Hubbar-ro's ankle. He hastily shoved in the disk, at the same time depositing the bag of currency gems required for processing our docking clearance. His step backward put the Kraal military officer slightly behind me. I certainly wasn't broad enough to hide him. Hope you're braver in battle, I thought, but didn't plan to offer him one to find out.

  "You are here to see an Artican?" This utterance, in comspeak, came from one of the Keeper's attendants, a healthier-looking individual standing
to the skull-free side of the Keeper. I didn't mistake the question as any less a warning than the weapons close enough to touch with either hand, despite its friendly tone.

  Since he looked directly at Ragem, purple eyes wide and guileless, no one else could answer. I settled my fingers around my hoobit and tried to see if there were any exits besides the one behind us. The well-guarded one behind us.

  "Yes, Keeper," Ragem replied in the same language, correctly addressing his attention to the silent Keeper and not his mouthpiece; I also approved his avoiding the trap of using the Artican tongue with its multiple levels of potential insult or praise depending on the ever-present and ever-changing taboos.

  "This Artican is?"

  Ragem's answer was firm and again correct. I hoped. "My mouth is too impure to hold a blessed name. It has been inscribed within our disk." He nodded at the reader in front of the Keeper. If this was no longer the right protocol, we were all likely to feed the God of Bones. Ragem would just be first.

  The Keeper's face tilted, the skull wagging with the motion as if in agreement, its prominent teeth and ridged forehead sinister without flesh and feather. I recognized it as that of a sweet-natured pet animal favored by young Articans. "You have the Keeper's leave to dock your starship for three days," the attendant said in his warm voice. "You have the Keeper's leave to seek this Artican." The effect was spoiled when he added, in the same friendly tone: "By accepting the Keeper's authority in this Blessed Place, you accept the righteous wrath of the God of Bones, should you transgress against our people."

  "You're both crazy."

  The young captain of the Quartos Ank had expressed this opinion with varying degrees of emphasis throughout our preparations, sipping on a seemingly endless flagon of beer. Ragem flipped closed the top of his carrysack and nodded. "Oh, I agree, Captain. Which doesn't change anything."