“You all right?”
“Can’t see out of the thing, if that’s what you mean! Watch your face!”
The Catarkhans swarmed even more thickly now, clogging the tunnel up ahead, forming a wall of their own bodies. There was no question of ever being able to get past them now — not without smashing their fragile forms to pieces. It was still more comical than frightening; Cort couldn’t look at the way their funnels craned toward the two humans without picturing an orchestra filled with angry trumpets. She had the crazy thought that if all those musical instruments blared at once, they’d all play a single note with perfect pitch — one so distinguished by its absolute clarity that it would explain everything all the exolinguists assigned to the world had never been able to understand. But the thought died, replaced by another: that if the silent Catarkhans had been able to make any noise at all, they would have been screeching with rage.
These Catarkhans hated them. As intruders.
Or as invisible demons.
She shouted: “Fall back! Get to the Sick Ward!”
“We’ll be trapped in there!”
“That’s the point! Do it!”
Whalekiller would have argued, but the wall of bodies the Catarkhans had built to prevent him from moving further down the tunnel had transformed from a wall to a tidal wave, breaking down on top of him. It was still like being pelted with creatures made of paper, but he was being buried in them, and their sheer persistence was driving him back anyway. He cursed, reached for Cort, found her hand, and allowed her to pull him out of the densest part of the Catarkhan mob, and back toward the Sick Ward. The Catarkhans who had driven them back followed, but not in the manner of creatures who wanted to overtake them; rather, they were more like shepherds herding a wayward flock back into a pen. Whalekiller and Cort outdistanced them with ease.
Whalekiller, still holding his eye, grunted in fresh dismay.
“What?” Cort asked.
“I think the little fuck blinded me.”
“That can be fixed.” Even with the eye a complete loss, the Embassy clinic could grow a new one overnight.
“But it still hurts like hell,” he said. It didn’t need to be said; his walk had become an agonized lurch, dependent on Cort’s support.
They descended closer to the side-tunnel that housed the Sick Ward. Their pursuers fell back, giving them room, leaving them alone as long as they continued their retreat. At one point Whalekiller’s knees buckled; Catarkhan shadows loomed on all sides; Cort forced him back to his feet and pulled him further along the tunnel; the shadows retreated. It was hard to tell, when Catarkhan fury was so hard to discern, but what there was calmed to something like casual interest.
Just outside the Sick Ward, only a few meters from the site where dying Catarkhans fought to bury themselves in the bodies of other dying Catarkhans, she and Whalekiller sank to the tunnel floor, their breaths reduced to ragged gasps.
“Just…my luck,” he managed. “Hundreds…of diplomats…running all…over this…mudball…without ever…getting noticed…and I happen…to be the bastard…who…finally…makes contact…”
Cort lurched to her feet, wobbled, held her head, and faced the threshold, where dozens of ailing Catarkhans warred to fit themselves into a space too small to accommodate them. Their bodies, illuminated by her helmet lights, glistened with the blood pouring from their wounds they had inflicted upon each other fighting in that pointless war. The ground beneath them was sodden with it. She focused on that blood now, forcing herself to remember a similar sea of spilled blood; it would have been just another pointless way to upset herself, had she not wanted to be upset, had she not needed the strength that came from being angry. “Have you been able to call for a rescue team?”
Whalekiller tapped his throat mike. “Doing it now.” Two minutes of anguished subvocalization later, he reported: “ETA three hours, if Lowrey…can scramble his team quickly. Maybe less than that…if one of the alien field teams intercept. We’ll be okay if the bugs don’t swarm us again.”
“They won’t,” she said. “Tell them to bring isolation suits and we’ll be okay getting out, too.”
He froze then, regarding her for long minutes through his one intact eye. The look was cold, appraising, and a churning cauldron of emotions ranging from pity to disgust; the kind of look one gives other human beings only after deciding that they are not human beings after all, but representatives of an older and more predatory species that should have died out before the first human beings carved the first club out of bone.
Cort had no trouble facing that expression, mostly because she’d been encountering it, off and on, for most of her life. She’d first seen it in a rescue worker’s eyes when she was eight years old. She couldn’t pretend it didn’t bother her. But it was what she had to work with.
Whalekiller’s voice was hurt, betrayed. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? You expected it.”
“I expected something like it. It solves a lot of problems.”
“And you didn’t let me in on it?”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “And I didn’t want to be wrong.”
He grimaced, more out of revulsion than pain, but relayed the message.
She sat down again, her back to the tunnel wall, descending into a silence disturbed only by the sound of Catarkhans, mobbing each other for the right to die in splendid quarantine.
14
The Catarkhans didn’t bother them again. As long as the two humans stayed within a certain distance of the Sick Ward, they were left alone, to stew in their separate flavors of misery.
Whalekiller was silent at first, but when he injected himself with an anesthetic to dull the pain, it made hash of his prior decision to ostracize her. It didn’t put him out, or render him any less rational, but it did unleash a flow of words, and gave them a distracted, otherworldly quality, like dispatches from another country so distant that its nature was of interest to serious scholars only. He talked a little about his homeworld, Greeve, a place so dominated by ocean that only a few speckled islands emerged above the usually placid surface; and about his name, a reference to the massive ocean-dwelling beasts who occasionally entered the shallows long enough to provide the colonists there with the one source of food they didn’t have to synthesize, grow themselves, or import from somewhere offworld. Perhaps because his tongue had been loosened by the neural block, or perhaps because he couldn’t forget that he was in the presence of a Dip Corps advocate, he told her about twenty times that these whales had been named for their extinct terrestrial counterpart only because of their physical resemblance. They were not sentient. They were not even possibly sentient. They were not endangered. They were not even close to endangered. Harvesting them was not a crime. They were mobile meat. They were nothing more.
He was innocent. He was. They all were. Greeve was a good place: a paradise. Really.
But then the non-sentient classification had been challenged in the light of new evidence — and it now seemed clear that the whale hunting on Greeve had been another in a long line of Hom.Sap crimes against thinking beings.
“I didn’t know,” Whalekiller murmured. And then, “It was my home.”
She didn’t point out that he had sold himself into the Dip Corps to escape it. She had no business criticizing; in a sense, it had been what she had done, too. She may have been a freewoman, but she had been fleeing her guilt too long to believe that anybody ever truly enjoyed that condition.
At one point during the wait of several hours, Whalekiller said that his injured eye was showing a lot of sensitivity to light. He asked if she had any problems with sitting in the dark a while. She said she had none, and they turned off their lamps. Darkness descended. The sounds of sick and dying Catarkhans mobbing each other at the entrance to the Sick Ward continued; they were moist sounds, violent sounds; sickening sounds. Cort, who was sitting cross-legged against the tunnel wall, immediately found herself covering her ears with both hands, blocking out
not the sound of Catarkhan fighting but the even more immediate sound of humans and Bocai tearing each other to pieces in another place, worlds and lifetimes ago.
Whalekiller had been wrong about how much she remembered. She remembered hating them, that’s all. She had been eight years old, and a living symbol of interspecies harmony, and she played with the Bocai young, and she ate at the Bocai feasts, and she amused her human parents with how well she had learned the Bocai songs. She even had a Bocai name, emblem of her honorary adoption into a Bocai family, a name she had impossibly even learned how to speak perfectly, despite the harsh differences between the human and Bocai vocal apparatus, which had always rendered their interspecies parley such a comic-opera litany of malaprops and mispronunciations. She had loved them as much as she had loved her own family and she had been loved as much by them in return, but then she’d hated them. and they had hated her, and she had been too small to participate in the fighting, the killing, the burning, the two-way war of annihilation erupting for no conceivable reason one day like any other. Her father’s head had been smashed to jelly beneath Bocai farming implements suddenly transformed to clubs, her mother had been torn to pieces beneath Bocai hands suddenly transformed into claws. Andrea, too small to participate, and too afraid of the monsters overpowering and destroying her, had hid in a dark alcove, watching, listening, hating, waiting for her moment, emerging only as her Bocai second father crawled away from the fighting, lay there helpless, bleeding, sobbing, helpless. And she had emerged from her little dark place and looked down at the being who had called her his daughter and she had hated him, hated the very idea of him, wanting to expunge him, to erase him, to free the universe of the very idea of his existence. He had pleaded with her, that being, in his last moments. Perhaps the madness that had rocked his people and hers had already passed from him. But it had not passed from her.
After that day, she had wanted no family. Not anymore. She wanted no world. Not anymore. She had wanted no friends. Not anymore. She had harbored no trust for sentients, of any species, not even her own. Not anymore.
She just wanted to fight the monsters.
It was the only way to atone for having been one of them.
She closed her eyes, and pressed her hands harder against her ears, and retreated into a private place where there was no such thing as time or blood until, lifetimes later, she felt something or somebody shaking her by the shoulders. For one terrible instant her heart spasmed in her chest, as she half-expected it to be a Catarkhan, fully aware of her presence, wanting her awake so it could make her pay for the crimes of Emil Sandburg. Or worse, a Bocai, arriving here from across the years, to hold her accountable for the crimes she’d committed once upon a time. But then she opened her eyes and saw that it was neither. It was a Tchi: not one of the ones she’d met so far, but a younger, shorter individual, whose gray eyes had narrowed in frank confusion.
“Are you injured, Counselor?”
She looked past him: saw a petite human woman tending to Whalekiller, a grave Riirgaan staring open-mouthed at the perpetual riot that raged at the mouth of the Sick Ward, and a flatscreen from the AIsource hovering between them, flashing its symbols for fascination and dismay.
The Tchi asked her again: “Are you injured?”
She felt herself twitch at the corners of her mouth. “Not…recently.” Allowing the Tchi to help her to her feet, she said: “And Whalekiller?”
He has sustained an injury to the eye. “Painful, but not as bad as it looks; it will probably not require replacement. He suffers from shock, nothing more.”
“That’s good,” she said, oddly surprised to find that she meant it. “Did they give you any trouble getting this far? The Catarkhans, I mean?”
“The Catarkhans were Catarkhans. They didn’t even notice us. I will be interested in learning why they provided such an impediment to you.”
She said, “They’ll be an impediment again unless you brought isolation suits.”
“Your call for help specified you’d needing them. They’re here.”
“Good,” she said.
The Tchi said, “It will be interesting to see if you’re right.”
“I am,” she said.
She was referring to more than the suits, but she didn’t let him know that.
15
The meeting of the local interspecies council was held five days later.
It was not a trial. Nobody here could have gotten away with calling it a trial. Trials imply the right to hold them. Nobody wanted to call it a hearing either, as even that term seemed to impart official weight to any conclusions it happened to draw. It was a meeting, nothing more.
The Bursteeni, who had discovered and named Catarkhus, as well as the first to suggest that its inhabitants might be sentient, hosted the inquiry in their own Embassy, which they’d constructed in a salt desert. It was a graceless, windowless block with a flat roof and an interior empty enough to qualify as cavernous. There was nothing about it that seemed to reflect the Bursteeni character; they were traditionally lovers of luxury at home and in the field. But here, in their planetary base of operations, they behaved differently; they kept almost no equipment and absolutely no furnishings here, but instead stored the things they really needed at various drop points around the planet, and conducted the day-to-day business of their Embassy at this hall so large it would have seemed almost as empty if it could house everything they possessed. Nobody had been able to explain this to Andrea Cort, who in the end just wrote it off as one of those maddening alien-psychology quirks that, like the mysteries of the Catarkhans themselves, seemed to exist only to twist the brain of human observers into Gordian knots.
Regardless: the site’s nondescript flavor made it infinitely adaptable to any purpose, and therefore perfect for those rare occasions where the various first-contact teams on Catarkhus all needed to meet in one place. Each of the various alien races on-world brought their own native version of furniture to accommodate themselves — the Hom.Saps their functional tables and chairs, the Tchi their imposing portable stages, the Riirgaans their ornately-carved reclining benches, the various other races odder artifacts ranging from hammocks to poles with protrusions to dangle from. The Bursteeni sat on the floor and a flatscreen representative from the AI hovered two meters above it all, its usually-colorful surface now projecting a studiedly neutral black. They were all gathered in an approximate circle, creating an empty stage at the center where the various presentations would be made.
Almost all the human beings on Catarkhus attended, but most of those at the outer fringes of the audience. There were only three people seated at the table provided for the Hom.Sap contingent — Ambassador Lowrey, the fully-healed Roman Whalekiller, and, confined to a paralysis chair for security reasons, the cause of all this bother, Emil Sandburg himself. He managed to look chipper despite his temporary, artificially-induced state of quadriplegia; he was cheerful enough to catch Cortís eye, and smile at her. At that, he was friendlier than Whalekiller, who had refused to accept her visit during his stay at the Embassy Clinic, and had been nothing but chilly and professional to her since his return to duty, eliminating all the affability that had previously made him such a trial for somebody with Cortís reserve.
Cort, who had as per her usual habit rejected a seat of her own, stood by herself until Sandburg winked at her. Then she crossed the stage to stand before him. “Still enjoying yourself, I see.”
Sandburg beamed. It was the look of a man in control, who expected to remain in control. “Why shouldn’t I be? I love theatre.”
“And that’s all this is to you?”
“I’ll be more specific. It’s not just theatre; it’s farce. It’s just a bunch of sentients who wish they could take me out back and shoot me, but are too hamstrung by their own rules to do anything but cluck.”
“You’re not worried, then. You’re that certain the Catarkhans can’t judge you?”
He sneered. “The Catarkhans can’t judge anything
.”
She nodded, not because it might have been literally true, but because she recognized the nature of Sandburg’s anger. It crystallized something she’d come to realize about his crimes, something that rendered the most basic assumptions about them a lie.
Whalekiller, who was seated beside Sandburg, grimaced: “There’s that smile again.”
A few days earlier, during her investigation, the words would have reeked of wry affection; now, nothing informed them but resentment.
She confronted it head on. “I’ve got to watch that. I wouldn’t want to get obvious. How’s the eye?”
“Fine. You got this handled?”
“It’s handled,” said Cort.
Lowrey lowered his head and spoke with soft urgency. “It’s not going to be that easy, you know; I’ve been told that Rhaig’s lying in wait for you.”
“We already knew that.”
“We knew his agenda. We also knew that he’s been wanting to politicize this since day one. We suspected, but didn’t know for sure, until now, that he was going to aim much of his attack against you.”
“And how do you know that?”
Wringing his hands so tightly that he might have been trying to remove them at the wrists, Lowrey said, “Rhaig went to the Riirgaans to try to recruit supporters for his side. He figured they’d want to support him; they were after all key in cleaning up the ambassador’s screw-ups during the Vlhani mess. But we still have a supporter or two over there, and one of those called to let us know that he’s ready to cut you off at the knees.”
“So he’s making this about me,” Cort said.
“What else did you expect, when you insulted him to his face?”
And she smiled again, without any warmth at all, making sure it was clearly visible to everybody in sight.
“I expected him to make this about me,” she said.
At precisely the moment the schedule dictated, Mekile Nom of the Bursteeni called the meeting to order by praising every race represented there at excessive length. He was, he assured everybody in turn, a longtime admirer of all their cultures, all their accomplishments, and all their efforts in the allied fields of Exosociology, Exolinguistics, and Exodiplomacy. He praised them further for the spirit of cooperation that occasioned this hearing, expressed his extreme gratification that so many distinguished sentients had chosen to participate, and conveyed his approval of the conclusions that were about to be reached, whatever they were going to turn out to be. He seemed so pleased by the sheer wonderfulness of everything that the hearing might as well have been a party with himself as the guest of honor. That was the Bursteeni; they tended to get carried away with their enthusiasm. By the time Nom relinquished the floor to Cort, so she could give her report, she felt like she’d won half the battle just by curbing the tidal wave of superlatives.
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