The Mandala Maneuver

by Christine Pope

  But such self-abnegation must come at a cost. He’d begun to see the smallest change in her, the tiniest hint that the edges of her flinty exterior were beginning to chip away. With all that, though, he feared that the second they were back in civilization, had returned to their duties and routines, all the walls would be back up again, and their chance together would be forever lost.

  It was not normally his way to accept defeat before it had even occurred, but he had never met a woman like Alexa Craig before. There were no stunted childhoods, no bleak emotional landscapes, among his people, for such things were nigh impossible when every intimate relationship was based on such deep compatibility, such harmony on every level of body and mind and soul. Once he had ventured out into the galaxy, he saw that his people were an anomaly, and that there was much conflict he could not even begin to understand. He could only hope that whatever might lie in Alexa Craig’s past, it hadn’t scarred her irrevocably.

  Another morning, another stiff neck. She pushed herself away from Lirzhan with care, feeling several vertebrae crack as she did so.

  Hope there’s a good chiropractor on Targus Station, she thought, and looked over to see Lirzhan gazing out at the bright morning beyond the cave opening.

  “All well with the world this morning?” she asked.

  “As far as I can tell,” he replied quietly. “I have been listening to the birds, or whatever they are, and I believe I hear the buzzing of insects in the trees, but other than that, things seem peaceful enough.”

  “Good.” Yes, a nice quiet walk through the woods would be a welcome change of pace. True, those mountains didn’t look all that promising, but maybe there was some sort of pass they weren’t seeing because of all the trees clustering on the mountainsides.

  They both lapsed into silence then, sharing the ritual of eating their protein bars and drinking enough water to wash them down sufficiently. One good thing about that dunk in the underground lake yesterday — Alexa felt a lot cleaner, although she still longed for the bathrooms at the science station. Most of the time they were equipped with solar water heaters, so there might even be a hot shower in the offing if she were really lucky.

  Afterward, they packed up their empty wrappers and set out again. The walk down the hillside below the cave mouth was steep but not impossibly so. And of course going down was easier than going up.

  All around them clustered trees in various shades of gray-green and green-blue, actually quite lovely with their lacy, almost feather-like foliage. The forest floor was coated with more leaves in various states of decay, muffling the sound of their footsteps. From time to time she could hear odd little rustling sounds in the undergrowth, as if small creatures were fleeing from the clumsy two-legged creatures blundering through the woods, but she saw no sign of them.

  “This is quite a beautiful world,” Lirzhan said after some time had passed. “I am surprised the Consortium has not begun colonizing here.”

  “They probably will, if they get desperate enough,” Alexa replied. “The GEC actually prefers barren worlds that it can terraform. Trying to coexist with native flora and fauna has proved deadly too many times, so even if they eventually decide to come back here, they’ll just scorch-earth the place and start over.”

  He turned and sent her a disbelieving look. “You mean to tell me that your people would actually rather destroy all this rather than attempt to live peacefully with the plants and animals that have evolved on this world?”

  She found she didn’t much like being on the receiving end of his narrow, green-eyed stare. It wasn’t a policy she particularly liked, or approved of, but she wasn’t in the GEC and had no control over that organization’s actions. “Well, the Gaian Exploration Commission will. There are actually people who’ve been protesting such policies for years, but it hasn’t done much good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, well — ” She floundered for a second. “It’s complicated.”

  “I believe that is what your people would refer to as an excuse.”

  He had her there. “Look, Lirzhan, you’re a diplomat, so I know you must’ve done some serious study of Gaian culture and politics. The corporations have a stranglehold on the government, so even if there are well-meaning people who don’t agree with some of the Consortium’s more destructive policies, they don’t have enough of a voice to effect any real change.” She paused, noting the disapproval that seemed to fairly pulse from him. “Don’t try to tell me that any of this is a real surprise to you.”

  “It isn’t. I suppose I had hoped — ” He broke off, and appeared to be deciding exactly what he wanted to say next. “That is, I suppose I find it surprising that one of the Consortium’s representatives would be so frank on the topic.”

  She met his gaze, trying to focus on the condemnation on his face, and not the beauty of its particular features. “You know a lot more about us than we do about you,” she said, not bothering to hide the weariness in her tone. “I’m pretty sure I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.”

  He did not blink. “True enough. But what do you think about it?”

  “I hate it,” she told him shortly, then turned away and kept trudging ahead, her boots making soft rustling sounds on the bed of dead leaves beneath her feet. “But it doesn’t really matter what I think.”

  “I think it matters very much. You have a powerful position in your government. Surely if someone at that level were to speak up, to decry such policies — ”

  A wry bark of a laugh escaped her throat before she could hold it back. “I take back what I said. Obviously you don’t know as much about Gaian politics as I thought you must.”

  Reaching out, he caught her by the arm, pulling her to a stop. She glared at him, and stared pointedly down at the black-scaled hand wrapped around her sleeve. The nails were cut short, not talons at all…although they did have an odd iridescent gleam similar to the one she’d seen on his fine-scaled skin.

  “Alexa,” he said, a note of quiet intensity to his voice that for some reason made her hold her tongue, wait to hear what he had to say next. Or perhaps it was simply because he hadn’t called her by her first name before. “If not you, who? If not now, when? The worst thing well-meaning people can do is simply let things remain as they are.”

  “And when they try to change them, they find themselves without jobs, without friends, with their entire support structure taken away. Idealism is wonderful in theory, Lirzhan, but in practice? Not so much.”

  She pulled her arm away, and he let her go, his eyes sorrowful. Without looking at him, she began striding forward. No wonder the Zhore were so difficult to deal with — they had no frame of reference for how the galaxy actually worked. Oh, she knew that the Gaians’ mercenary ways generally met with varying levels of scorn from the other humanoid races, but their censure had never really bothered her before this. There was something about seeing it in those clear jade-green eyes, seeing the downward droop to Lirzhan’s finely sculpted mouth, that made her begin to question the things she’d been taught her entire life.

  And she certainly didn’t want to do that, because if she challenged those ideas, then the shaky framework she’d built her entire existence upon would begin to fall apart, and she’d be left with even less than she had now.

  “I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I did not mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset.” Keep walking, keep looking forward.

  “Yes, you are.”

  At that she found herself stopping, despite her earlier admonition to herself to keep going no matter what. “You want to know what really upsets me, Lirzhan?”

  “What?” he inquired, in tones of real interest.

  “People telling me I’m upset when I’m not.”

  And she stomped off, blindly winding her way through the trees, not paying much attention to where she was going. This was ridiculous. Bad enough that they should be stranded here, bad enough that she hadn’t had a shower in three day
s or a decent meal or a chance to brush her teeth…but to have this alien trying to psychoanalyze her, or turn her into some sort of proselytizer for the “no footprint” tree-huggers? No, thank you.

  “Alexa — ”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I would suggest that you stop exactly where you are.”

  Something in his voice, some warning note, told her that she should listen to him. She came to an abrupt halt, then really focused on the path in front of her and almost screamed. Stretched between two trees was an enormous — well, spiders were Gaian creatures, so she didn’t know for sure what had spun the pale-green web-like structure. What she did know was that she really, really didn’t want to go blundering into it.

  “Okay,” she said shakily, and began to back toward him.

  Almost at once a dark blur shot down from the canopy above, skittering over the web and heading straight for her. This time she did let out a little shriek, propelling herself backward so quickly she almost tripped over a tree root. Even as she fought for her balance, a pair of bright green pulse bolts went flying past her head and connected with the blur, which resolved itself into a dark bluish shell with ten legs and huge blobby black eyes and mandibles dripping some sort of dark fluid she guessed must be a poison of some kind.

  She glanced back at Lirzhan, saw him standing there with the pulse pistol in his left hand and a grim expression on his face. For a second or two, neither of them said anything. Then he glanced upward.

  “I believe from now on we should walk with care.”

  Swallowing the acid taste of bile, Alexa could only nod.

  After that they continued, warily watching the openings between the trees for more of those webs, and often glancing upward to make sure no dark insectoid forms were scuttling down to finish what their compatriot had attempted earlier. Lirzhan saw nothing except the wind in the trees, and the high, circling shapes of more avian creatures, but he could not blame Alexa for being a little jumpy. She was still quite pale.

  He had not meant to make her angry earlier, but he knew anything else he might say on that former topic would only raise her ire once again. Odd that she could find it within her to serve a government whose policies she clearly disagreed with, but he had read multiple texts on human psychology in preparation for his post in the diplomatic service, and so he did understand that the human mind could be a very complex thing.

  …and the human female mind even more so.

  So he held his tongue for the most part, only offering brief comments when they needed to shift their route slightly, or to warn her about depressions he’d noticed in the ground, so she would not be taken by surprise and possibly twist an ankle, or worse. At least she seemed to accept these mild overtures without any outward signs of hostility, and even thanked him when he pointed out a particularly nasty-looking clump of thorny bushes.

  Some hours later they stopped to eat their midday meal and check their location. Again they had covered a good deal of ground, more than Lirzhan had expected. Perhaps there was something to be said for marching along in silence and concentrating only on the path in front of you, even with the steady upward climb they’d been experiencing for the past hour or so.

  “Only twenty kilometers more to go,” he said, after analyzing the map on her tablet. They obviously had a much better connection to the beacon at the station from here, as it pulsed a clear, bright green.

  “That’s not too bad,” Alexa replied, the note of relief clear in her voice. She drank some water, then asked, “Do you think we’ll be able to make it by nightfall?”

  “At our current pace…perhaps.” He looked past her to the trees crowding the skyline, then back down the way they had come. Truly, they had ascended more than he had first thought. Perhaps another kilometer or so more before they reached the top of this pass, which had turned out to be a gentler summit than he had expected. And then they would be walking downhill, and the way should be much easier.

  She appeared to follow his gaze. “Looks like we don’t have that much more climbing to do, so ten kilometers shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  The hope in her voice was so clear that he didn’t have the heart to quash it completely. “I don’t think so, but we will have to see how it goes.”

  A nod as she once again followed the ritual of folding up the wrapper for the protein bar she’d eaten and stowing it in the emergency bag. Indeed, the thing fairly crackled with all the spent wrappings they’d stored in there. It did prove one thing, however — as much as she might want to appear nonchalant about her race’s impact on other worlds, she had never once suggested that they leave their trash behind.

  By an unspoken signal, they turned northward once again, following the lure of the elusive beacon, that glowing green dot on the map display of her tablet. Lirzhan could only hope that the station would be more or less intact by the time they got there. After all, he didn’t know how long it had been since the science team had done its survey and departed Mandala, and the place could have been overtaken by the native flora, or plundered by smugglers, or any of a number of different scenarios that would have rendered the data incorrect.

  From time to time he allowed himself a surreptitious glance at Alexa, to make sure she was still faring well enough, that she hadn’t begun to limp again because of the blister on her heel. But she appeared to be soldiering on, chin up, eyes fixed forward, scanning the landscape for any possible threats.

  They crested the mountain pass — or rather, the hillside pass, for he was not sure whether these ranges really would qualify as mountains, rather than very tall foothills — and began their descent. Here the trees were also thick, but even as the landscape became gentler, he began to see open patches with some sort of wildflowers growing in shades of palest aquamarine and lavender, the ground underfoot rolling rather than studded with sudden outcroppings of rocks.

  “You were right,” Alexa said after a prolonged silence.

  “I was?” Lirzhan responded, not sure what she meant, although all he sensed from her was, oddly enough, a feeling of contentment, of relaxation.

  “It is beautiful here. I hope — I guess I hope the Consortium decides this world really isn’t worth terraforming. Maybe it has really poor mineral wealth. I don’t know.”

  He looked down at her then, shocked at her words, but at the same time trying not to show his surprise at her comment. Quietly, he said, “Well, perhaps it is far enough from the most-traveled space lanes that it’s of little use.”

  “One can hope,” she replied. They walked a little further in silence, through air thick with the scent of sweet pollen and filled with the low humming of some insect he couldn’t identify. Then, her tone diffident, “Sorry I almost bit your head off back there. Automated defense systems kicking in and all that.”

  “It’s fine.” He didn’t dare trust himself to say more.

  “No, it’s not fine.” She paused then and gazed up at him, and that was a miracle in itself, that she should look up into his face without flinching, without subjecting him to the sort of needle-sharp stare that was a medical examination unto itself. “You hit on some truths there, and I really didn’t want to acknowledge them.”

  “I suppose it is natural that we should all want to defend our home worlds.”

  “Yes…if they’re worth defending in the first place.”

  He felt his eyebrows shoot up, and she grinned. It was the first wholly unguarded expression he had yet seen from her.

  “Does that shock you?” She shook her head. “I guess being thrown into this kind of situation gives a person a chance for some reflection.”

  “And what have you been reflecting on?”

  “Gaia. Me. Why I was here in the first place.” She stopped. “All right, not here here, but why I was going to the Targus system at all.”

  “And why were you?” He purposely kept his tone soft, sensing that she was on the brink of some sort of revelation and not wanting to do anything that might prevent her f
rom proceeding.

  “Because it’s what I was trained to think I wanted. Greater good of Gaia and all that.” A low chuckle, and those beautiful sky-colored eyes turned up toward him.

  “And you don’t believe in the greater good of Gaia?” He knew the question was disingenuous, but he wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “I would, if it were for the Gaian people, or the rehabilitation of sectors of the planet itself. But the more time I spend out here, the less I actually believe that.”

  Although he knew they should keep pressing on, that their longed-for destination was still some kilometers ahead, he found his footsteps slowing. “And it’s not?”

  Her mouth tightened. “Not really. You know — everyone knows — that the corporations have had a stranglehold on our planetary government for centuries.”

  “I will allow that that is somewhat common knowledge.”

  “So the problem is, nothing we can do is purely altruistic because behind it is always that old chestnut: ‘What’s in it for me?’ Or, more to the point, what’s in it for corporations like MonAg or Hallbrecht or BlackSky?” She made a sound of disgust. “We got started down that path hundreds of years ago, and somehow we never managed to reverse our course.”

  There seemed to be little he could say, except, “I am sorry you have been put in such a position.”

  She scowled, and began walking forward again, hastening her stride as if to indicate that she thought she had already wasted enough time. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Tell me.”

  A quick glance upward. “I’m not sure I should be telling you all my deep dark secrets, Lirzhan.”

  “I doubt they could really be that deep or dark.”