Quiet Invasion

by Sarah Zettel

  “Am I right?”

  Mother clacked her teeth loud and hard, shaking with her amusement. “You could have gone straight to the marriage broker, Daughter T’sha, and saved your breath to choose your spouses.”

  T’sha deflated to her normal size. “Mother, Father.” She thrust her muzzle toward them, pleading. “I promise, when my business on the candidate world is done, I will graft myself onto the marriage broker until I have found someone to be madly in love with, someone to sire my children, and someone to keep my home. Will that satisfy you?”

  “Deeply,” said Mother Pa’and. “You will never be in a better position to make those promises than you are now.”

  T’sha’s crest ruffled. “And if we’re done predicting my imminent political death?”

  “Daughter T’sha.” Father Ta’ved sank just a little. “You know that is not what we’re doing here.”

  “I know, Father Ta’ved, I know.” T’sha brushed her muzzle against his. “But I have been given so much, both in responsibility and authority, that to spend time seeking after a household of my own before I’ve done my duty by the People and my city…It feels greedy.”

  Father Ta’ved swelled proudly. “Such a feeling does you great credit, Daughter T’sha. But children for your family and your city is not a greedy wish.”

  T’sha clacked her teeth, both in mirth and utter exasperation. “Enough! Mother, Father, you have my promises and I have an important appointment. Can we wish each other luck with full souls and leave all this for when I return?”

  Mother Pa’and rubbed T’sha’s muzzle with her own. “Of course, Daughter. Good luck in all you do.”

  “Stand by your feelings, Daughter,” Father Ta’ved murmured as he caressed her. “They are sound and alive.”

  “Thank you, and good luck to you both.” T’sha drifted away toward the portal. “And if, when I return, you have word of someone from a good family who is interested in perhaps two years of mutual promise to help us both learn how to set up a house and work within a marriage, I will not be sorry to hear of them.”

  Her parents’ approval all but radiated off her back as T’sha flew out the door.

  The remainder of her time passed quietly. She met with her newly selected deputy and found him much as Ca’aed described. The district speakers were content with his credentials and competence. He would do well as soon as he had something to do. She checked in with the indentures working on Gaith and found all there going smoothly, if slowly, and the quarantines being rigorously maintained.

  Back at home, she played with her sisters and chatted about innocuous things with her brother and his father, pretending nothing much was happening in any of their lives.

  Finally, she soaked herself long and thoroughly in the refresher, eating until her stomach groaned and her headset reminded her it was time to leave for the World Portals.

  T’sha loaded herself and her tiny caretaker bundle aboard her kite. It felt her weight and let Ca’aed guide it out into the open air.

  “Good luck, Ambassador,” said Ca’aed as its portal closed. “I will miss you.”

  Sorrow deflated T’sha, although she struggled against it. In the past few hours, she had been able to forget about Z’eth’s words and about D’seun’s formidable support. Now, it all flooded back. “I’ll be back soon, Ca’aed, with only good news.”

  “I believe you, T’sha,” said her city. “I believe in you.”

  T’sha let those last words warm her all the way to the World Portals.

  The portals themselves were not alive. Too much metal was required in their construction to allow them life and awareness such as the cities possessed. Instead, the great cagelike complex was maintained by a veneer of life—scuttling, twiglike constructors, flat stately securitors, and busy recorders that were all eye and wing.

  T’sha reached the gate and was touched briefly by the welcomers, which identified her and opened the portals. T’sha sent her kite back to Ca’aed and hesitated, looking through at the tools swarming over the lifeless struts and conduits. She shivered. At the best of times, T’sha did not like the World Portals. They made her uneasy, gliding through a huge cage that was insensible to her presence, unable to care who she was or what she needed.

  “Ambassador T’sha?” A recorder swooped into her line of sight. “Technician Pe’sen has asked this one to direct you to your portal.”

  “Proceed.”

  T’sha followed the recorder along the approved path, staying well away from the engineers, technicians, and their tools. All around her, she heard the low, strange hum of mindless machinery. The air tasted of metal and electricity. Two of T’sha’s stomachs turned over, and she wished she had eaten more lightly.

  The cage opened before her, and T’sha saw the seventh portal stretching out parallel with the canopy. It was a ragged starburst, like a huge silver neuron. T’sha picked Pe’sen out from among his colleagues circling the big, blocky monitor station.

  “Technician Pe’sen.” T’sha flew past the recorder and touched her friend’s hands. “Good luck. I promise my passage will not damage any of your children.” Pe’sen would go on at length about the difficulty of growing and training cortices that could adequately translate the condition of a nonliving entity.

  “That’s what you say now.” He shook his head mournfully. “But I know you ambassadors. If it can’t vote, you don’t care for it.”

  T’sha whistled with mock despair. “I repent, I repent I have learned better.” Pe’sen clacked his teeth at her. “Are you ready for me, my friend?”

  “Always, Ambassador.” Pe’sen glided back diffidently, leaving her path clear. “If you’ll enter the ring, we will send you to New Home.”

  T’sha tried to keep her posthands from clutching her bundle, even as she tried to keep her bones relaxed. She was partially successful. She flew across the vast, open expanse of the ring until she reached the center. She hovered there, waiting, while Pe’sen and his colleagues worked their magic.

  T’sha didn’t understand how the World Portals worked. Pe’sen’s patient explanations of the function of waves and particles, actions at a distance, and the flux-fold model of nonliving spaces brushed past her skin and left no impression. In the end, all she really knew was that Pe’sen understood it and had made it work flawlessly hundreds of times.

  Then why am I ready to bolt from fear?

  Through her headset, she heard Pe’sen give the activation command. The ring sang, a high, keening note. The metallic-electric taste of the air grew overwhelming. The air below her rippled with pure white light. T’sha clutched her bundle and drew tightly in on herself. The air around her bent, brightened, and pulled her down. And then she was not falling down into brightness but rising up from darkness. Clear air supported her wings, and T’sha could breathe again and look around herself.

  All she saw was desert. The candidate world was gold and gray in its twilight. The wind felt firm and familiar under her wings. It was strong with the scent of acid, gritty with dust, and dense with the swirling clouds and smoke from the living mountains. For all that, the wind was sterile. She could smell no life anywhere.

  The sterility, though, was not distressing, as it was on Home. Here, the wind felt clean. They could do anything here, plant anything, breed anything, spread all the life they needed. New Home, new life, new hope. Her bones quivered with an excitement that was the last thing she expected to feel.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” D’seun flew from his perch on the edge of the ring and hovered next to her.

  “Yes,” she answered, all animosity lost in wonder. T’sha tilted her wings to rise higher. Below all the winds spread a naked crust laced with cracks and ravines and double-walled ring valleys. Twilight dulled its colors underneath her. But ahead, she could see the deepening darkness of the nightside, and there, the crust glowed more brightly than she had ever seen on Home. “It truly is amazing.”

  She banked back to D’seun. He was speaking to the moorin
g cortex next to the clamp that held the portal’s kite. He turned his muzzle toward her. “I am getting a signal from the base. They are not far and are moving slower than windspeed. Shall we go on our own wings?”

  “I’d like that.” T’sha felt herself swell at the prospect of traveling through the fresh winds.

  “Let us, then.” D’seun launched himself onto the wind, sailing toward the nightside with its blackened air and brightly shining crust. The twilight they flew through turned the wind a smoky gray.

  “When I first came here, I never thought to find anything without life beautiful,” said D’seun. T’sha started at the brush of his words. “I keep dreaming that because this world in itself is so beautiful, so balanced, the life we spread will be the same.”

  A fine sentiment, one T’sha could easily agree with. The wonder of the place seeped through her skin and settled into her bones, carried by the willing wind. But she could not afford to let the feelings sink so deep that she stopped thinking. That was something D’seun might be counting on.

  “The balance will depend on us,” she said.

  D’seun said nothing in reply. They coasted together in silence. T’sha tried not to believe that D’seun was plotting strategies in his own mind, but she did not have much success.

  “There is our home.” D’seun pointed his muzzle over his right wing. T’sha followed the angle of his flight.

  The base drifted steadily through the thickening twilight, heading toward the darkness. They were almost fully into night now. The swirling clouds glowed orange and gold with reflected light, their wrinkles and grooves turning into black patches of shadow.

  “Base One,” D’seun spoke into his headset, “this is Ambassador D’seun, approaching with Ambassador T’sha.”

  “We are open for you both, Ambassadors” came a vaguely familiar voice. “Approach as you are ready.”

  They were now close enough that T’sha could see between the sails. The outside of the base’s shells bristled with antennae and sensors. Their roots and ligaments created a net around ten or twelve bubble chambers that reflected the crust’s light even more intensely than the clouds. T’sha had stayed in similar outposts on many of her engineering journeys when she was part of the teams trying to repair the canopy.

  A windward door stood open for them. T’sha and D’seun let themselves be swept inside. The door snapped promptly shut, cutting off the wind and allowing them plenty of time to slow and bank into the main work chamber.

  The company inside that room also felt familiar. Researchers and engineer clung to their perches or draped across boxes of supplies and tools, watching their instruments, inscribing their reports, or talking earnestly. She had worked with such people for most of her life, before she had decided to make her opinions public.

  One engineer, a dark-gold male with a deep-purple crest, climbed from perch to perch until he stood beside them.

  “Welcome back, Ambassador D’seun,” he said, and T’sha realized his was the familiar voice she’d heard on her headset. She scanned his tattoos quickly. “Welcome, Ambassador T’sha,” he said. “I don’t suppose—”

  “Actually, I do, Engineer Br’sei.” T’sha touched his forehands. “We worked together on the D’siash survey.”

  Br’sei whistled agreement. “And I’m glad to be working with you again. Let me introduce you to the rest of our team….” He hesitated, his gaze sliding sideways to D’seun. “If that is acceptable, Ambassador.”

  “As you see fit, Engineer.” D’seun settled onto a pair of perches, letting his wings furl and his body deflate.

  But from Br’sei’s hesitation, T’sha knew that this was not always D’seun’s sentiment.

  She said nothing about it. She followed in Br’sei’s wake as he introduced her to the ten other members of the Seventh Team. She greeted those she knew by name and skimmed their reports. Wind acidity, speed, current direction, how the world was layered, the location of the living mountains and how frequently they erupted. Maps of seeding plans. Diagrams for new bases, equipment lists, and promises. All the concerns of a preliminary research base, but the scale was staggering.

  To spread life to a whole world. To turn this desert into a vibrant garden and watch the People take possession, raise that life, and use it to spread their own life, all their lives, even further. A myriad of ideas sang inside her, swelling her up as surely as an indrawn breath.

  In that moment, floating there in the still air of the analysis chamber with all the possibilities of this empty world swirling inside her, T’sha had to fight to remember there were other issues here.

  “What kind of attention are we currently paying to the New People?”

  D’seun looked disappointed, as if he expected the marvel of this new world to overwhelm her strange obsession with the other people. “We have mapped and timed their satellite flyovers. We arrange not to be where they are looking.” A standard tactic. Stealth was important during a race to claim a resource. “If they’ve seen the portal, they have not made any change in routine to investigate it.”

  “At the moment, they are spending most of their time on one area of the crust,” Br’sei volunteered. “They seem to have found something of great interest down there.”

  T’sha cocked her muzzle toward Br’sei. “Something they can use to spread their life?”

  “We don’t know…” said D’seun irritably, “yet.”

  “They are beginning to spread their machines further out across the crust,” Br’sei went on, sending a disapproving ripple across D’seun’s wings. “Our speculation is they are looking for more of whatever it is they’ve found.”

  T’sha gripped a perch with one of her posthands so she could keep facing Br’sei. “But have you determined whether or not they’ve started to make legitimate use of any resource?”

  Br’sei’s gaze slid uneasily over her shoulder toward D’seun. She felt the tension in the air around her and heard the small rustle of skin and bone as the other engineers shrank or swelled nervously. “They aren’t mining, if that’s what you mean. Unless you’ve determined there’s another legitimate use of the crust.”

  T’sha’s wings rippled. What had passed between Br’sei and D’seun? She felt a kind of urgency flowing from the engineer, but without words she could make no sense of it. “They might be planting. They might be building homes.”

  “Homes?” repeated D’seun sharply. “Don’t be ridiculous. They live in the clouds.”

  Slowly, T’sha turned to face him where he swelled on his perches. “My point is this,” she said deliberately as she pulled herself tight. “We don’t know what they’re doing. If it is legitimate use, we might have to change our working plan for seeding New Home.”

  “You could go and ask them, I suppose,” said D’seun, his voice full of bland sarcasm.

  “I wish that I could,” said T’sha smoothly. “But the High Law Meet authorized me only to observe, and I have no doubt you will be all too happy to report me should I overfly my commission.”

  They eyed each other, swelling and deflating minutely in their uneasiness, very aware that they were arguing in front of subordinates in defiance of good manners and good sense. T’sha mourned for that one fleeting moment when they were joined in admiration of this new place. It had been a false promise of easier times.

  Finally, D’seun settled on one size. Some of the belligerence vented from his body. “I’ll be most interested to see your plan for a more thorough observation and study.”

  Perhaps he just hopes to keep me out of the way, thought T’sha and then she realized that was unworthy. D’seun wanted what she wanted, the birth of New Home. At the moment she was obstructing that.

  She swallowed her bitter thought. “I would be willing,” she said. “May I make a call for two or three volunteers?” She looked at Br’sei. He dipped his muzzle minutely in answer. He’d be willing to help.

  “Certainly,” said D’seun. “We will grow a chamber for you.”

&n
bsp; And perhaps this will give me a way to calm my own fears. Perhaps the New People are doing nothing legitimate. Perhaps we may take this world without taint of greed. I would like that. I would very much like that.

  But the memory of the tension surrounding the engineers touched her again. No, the question was not whether something was wrong here, but what that wrong was and how far it had gone.

  T’sha deflated and looked longingly at the silent walls. Already, she missed Ca’aed.

  Chapter Seven

  I AM ACTUALLY DOING this. I am going to touch evidence of other life, of another world.

  Raw excitement had stretched Josh Kenyon’s mouth into a smile that felt like it was going to become permanent. He lay in the swaddling cradle that would serve as his crash-couch for Scarab Five’s drop to the Discovery. It would also be his bed for the next two weeks. All around him, he heard soft rustles and mutters as his fellow passengers wriggled in their straps trying to get comfortable. All of them were from the U.N. team—Julia Lott, the archeologist, Terry Wray, the media rep, Troy Peachman, who called himself a “comparative culturalist” and was apparently there to look for any sociological insights and implications, and, of course, Veronica Hatch.

  They were all nervous and fussy, very much a bunch of impatient tourists. But that was all right. Seeing the Discovery was worth anything—working his way up as a junior grade maintenance man, begging Vee for a slot on the team, even getting into Grandma Helen’s bad books, which he had, quite thoroughly.