Shaman

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Rhys grinned at Javar, who emitted a tuneful whistle through his slit lip and afforded the boulder he leaned against a resounding slap. They turned back downslope.

  “There’s a cave!” Rhys shouted. “A cave! Come on up!”

  Yoshi, and Brasn’s apprentice, Malin, were already moving, but Rhys could tell by the expressions of face and body that his announcement was not what they were responding to.

  Now what? he thought, and waited impatiently for them to reach the cliff.

  o0o

  “Holograms! We’ve been held at bay by a damned picture show!”

  “What?” Joseph Bekwe sagged against a wall, his face flaccid with bemusement.

  Sanchez gritted his teeth audibly. “At least a portion of the OROB fleet is a sham. They collided with each other—without effect. No damage. One of my more enterprising commanders then proceeded to fire across the bows of the ship leading the formation and, lo and behold, when their force fields went up, one whole wing winked right out of existence. Holograms, Governor.”

  Bekwe sat heavily in a hospital lounge chair. Holograms. He wondered how many ships there really were. Just the ones that had fired on Haifa? Or were those also mere shades?

  “How many?”

  “Four. Four ships. And evidently, the closest thing they have to weaponry is a tractor web.” He shook his head. “That’s a new twist on the Emperor’s clothes: The invaders have no fleet.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Bekwe asked.

  “I’m going order down some troops—try to restore order. Then I’m going to grab a floater and pay a personal visit to the White Shrine.”

  o0o

  “What have you instructed them to do?” Rhys asked Brasn as he secured a small light-emitting disk to the front of his sporran. They stood in what amounted to the ante-room to a much larger cavern, preparing to take their search into the darkness beyond.

  The archaeologists were gathered in an out-of-the-way corner—discussing what to dig up first, Rhys supposed—while Yoshi murmured to Danetta in hushed tones and Malin communicated instructions to the Tsong Zee vessels.

  “Whatever is necessary to preserve life,” Brasn replied. “There are two hundred people up there in those ships. I will not take chances with those lives. So many of them are young—volunteers who came because they were eager to see their homeworld. It was a dangerous and clumsy ploy, having them pretend to a size and ferocity they did not have. Armed conflict is not something we readily understand. And this was not,” he added, “the way I envisioned our homecoming.”

  “You’ve no warrior class? No... armed forces?”

  “None. Well, there are the Arbitrators. They are sometimes armed with small pellet weapons which inject a mild paralytic, or with a scaled-down version of the web. That is used as a personal force field. There are some dangerous animals on Kamorg.”

  “And dangerous people?”

  Brasn tilted his head. “A few. But they are not organized into fleets.”

  “Then how did you arrive at that concept?”

  “History. We do understand the concept of an armada. Our seas were once populated by vessels of war. It was an easy enough jump to a fleet of space vessels. We had four operating already, plus four in reserve, and we knew how to... multiply their apparent strength. But, as for tactics...” He gave his shoulders an artless twitch.

  “Sir?”

  Rhys turned to find Yoshi at his shoulder. “What is it, dear?”

  “Before you get started on the next sequence, I just thought you should know that a couple of the diggers are getting scared. They’re starting to say things I don’t like.” Her expressive face stated unequivocally that she would like to rivet a few sets of lips together. “They’re trying to convince Gedde that the odds of them taking the Tsong Zee hostage are pretty good.” She glanced over her shoulder and shifted from one foot to the other. “And there’s something else, sir. I think maybe we’re being followed.”

  Rhys lifted his head and glanced back toward the cave entrance. “What makes you say that?”

  “Rockfall. Behind us in the canyon. And I thought I saw something moving way back down the trail. I suppose it could have been an animal, sir, but... Well, watch your back, sir.” Her brow puckered ferociously, she adjusted her headset and her light-disk, and rejoined Malin.

  Followed. Rhys found himself hoping Sanchez’s men had caught up with them. He turned to the Tsong Zee Speakers.

  “We heard,” Javar informed him. “But since we cannot ‘watch our backs’ and Trade simultaneously, we shall have to hope that Malin and Yoshi can watch them for us.”

  The cavern provided its own unique blanket of sensory input. Along with the characteristic musk of cave earth, the arrhythmic music of water trickle and drip underscored by hollow wind-sough, it yielded a chill that seemed to cling to the skin with conscious tenacity. The stripe of sweat down Rhys’s back felt like an icy saddle blanket.

  But that was not a byproduct of the Tsong Zee physiology, nor did it figure in their key sequences. Before Rhys had taken two steps toward the far end of the cavern’s first chamber, those bursts had overwhelmed his physical discomfort, crowding out sensations of clinging fabric and cold knees. His fingertips tingled, telling him he was looking for something smooth, cold, wet and solid. Something so sleek it certainly must gleam like Tsong Zee flesh.

  Something like... that stalagmite.

  He moved quickly to it—a sentinel near a cramped-looking doorway to darkness—set his palms to it and felt the image click into place like the puzzle piece it was. He peered into the portal. Sightlessness; close, pressing walls; slick, moist stone—the ghost sensations flew at him out of the black opening.

  “This way,” he said and, not even glancing back over his shoulder, bent and pushed into the narrow way. It was a low-ceilinged corridor, its walls wearing an eternal sheer curtain of water that oozed downward, leaving greenish streaks. It was somehow longer than he’d expected, boring for over fifteen meters through the rock. He touched the walls. Smooth as glass. Might it have been literally bored by Tsong Zee hands and machines?

  Half crouched, the explorers continued on through the tunnel, the sense of anticipation borne back and forth between those joined in the machine-assisted Trade—bursts of it swept along on the same waves that carried the keys.

  Rhys halted suddenly at a low point in the tunnel. “Javar, your melody changed again. Is that significant?”

  “I can only imagine we must have passed from the Second Sister and are now within the Third. Does this make sense?”

  “Yes. Does it also make sense to hope we’re near the end of this trail?” He looked at Javar over his shoulder.

  The Tsong Zee’s eyes were huge blue mirrors, reflecting back the light from Rhys’s disk. “It does make sense to hope. I, too, feel as if we are close to unlocking the door to our past.”

  Rhys only vaguely heard the murmur of human voices that rippled along the corridor behind them. He turned his face toward the goal and continued onward, the new variation on the Three Sisters theme playing continually in his head.

  Ahead now, the light-disks failed to illumine the way before them, as if they approached a black, light-sucking archway. It took Rhys a moment to realize what that meant. There was a chamber ahead.

  He increased his pace, aware only that Javar’s melody had taken on yet another permutation, that Keere’s cave-musk was now warring with a sweet, spicy fragrance, that Brasn made his face tingle with anticipated warmth, that Parsa tasted a spiced beverage.

  Heart pounding, he stepped out of the tunnel and came upright, gaze reaching into the large chamber, borne on the tide of light from a dozen disks and hand torches. An uncontrollable sigh escaped his lips.

  This was it; this was the White Shrine.

  Its far end was dominated by a large, apparently natural platform upon which sat a group of five seats. They might have been alabaster thrones, but they were not the least bit throne-like. Austere in
their simplicity, each bore a symbol which Rhys assumed must correlate to the Tribal Speaker expected to sit in it. To the right and left of the platform were what first appeared to be giant chalices carved from the pale cave rock, but which Rhys quickly recognized as braziers. And along the walls of the Shrine...

  “The history of our race, preserved for us against time,” whispered Parsa and moved past Rhys into the chamber.

  Sense-tiles decorated a significant portion of the free wall space at roughly shoulder height and, within row upon row of carved-out niches in those walls, were globes and cubes and stacks of tiles—the archives of the Tsong Zee.

  There was no doubt, Rhys thought as the Tsong Zee all brushed by him to view their heritage, that they were the rightful heirs, for there was also a mural for those merely sighted. It scrolled across the back of the dais in a colorful tableau peopled by individuals who were doubtlessly the ancestors of those whose encoded sense memories had led the way here.

  “Sir, I don’t like this.” Yoshi’s voice was the merest whisper, almost lost in the articulations of Tsong Zee and Human alike as they surveyed the room. “Three of the diggers have gone back into the corridor. I think they’re plotting something. I can feel it.”

  “Ah, but what can they do?” Rhys asked absently, his eyes on Gedde Kuskov, who was making it his personal business to record the find on holoscan.

  “Sir! One of them is the demolitions expert. They have explosives!”

  He gaped at her blankly for a moment. Of course, they had explosives. They were prepared to dig, to remove impediments. Rhys launched himself back toward the tunnel, not even thinking what he might hope to accomplish alone if the men were dangerously inclined. Of course, he was not alone, Yoshi was right beside him. He almost paused to tell her to stay, but one glance at her face was enough to save him the futility of that exercise.

  The diggers hadn’t gone very far down the tunnel; he found them a few meters along it, huddled over the work of the demolition expert, Quozel. They blinked guiltily in the white light of their collective torches, but offered no apology for the small, but potentially dangerous device at the center of their scrutiny.

  “What are you doing?” Rhys asked, as if it wasn’t perfectly obvious.

  “You know what we’re doing, Dr. Llewellyn,” said one of the men. He stood, straightening as much as he could, his back pressed into the wet curve of the wall. “You know what we have to do. This Shrine has to be destroyed.”

  Rhys felt sweat bead on his upper lip and tasted fear, acrid, on the back of his tongue. His kilt itched abominably. “And will you destroy the Tsong Zee with it? Destroy us? Destroy your own colleagues? Dr. Kuskov?”

  “We’ll convince them to support our story—that there was no White Shrine, that it was just a hoax. Then it’ll be our word against theirs.” He jerked his head toward the Shrine.

  “And mine. And Yoshi’s. And you can’t be sure that all of your colleagues are going to see this the same way. You ought to see them in there. They’ve discovered something profoundly important. Something they’ll not be easily convinced to destroy, I think. As for me, I’ve no inclination to let you cast me as the Wolf of Badenoch. I’ll torch no cathedrals, gentlemen.”

  The digger’s glistening face flushed and he snapped at Quozel, who had stopped his work to listen. “Get that finished!”

  The tech didn’t move. The device cradled in his hands, he glanced from his fellow to Rhys to Yoshi. “He’s right, Troy. We can’t count on support from the whole team. You know that. They didn’t want anything to do with this. What makes you think they’ll keep their mouths shut? And Dr. Llewellyn —”

  “Then maybe we have to force their mouths shut.”

  Quozel waved his little bomb in the air. “You mean kill them? Holy Moses, Troy—you’re crazy! I’ll blow up the whole damn mountain, but not if they’re still in it.”

  Troy dropped to his knees beside the technician. “Would you rather lose this planet to them?” His head jerked toward the cavern. “Would you rather have to pack up your life, your family, everything you’ve worked for the last—what—ten years? Have you thought about where you’d go? What you’d do?”

  “Have you thought about where you’d go or do with a dozen murders on your conscience? Good Lord, Troy, think of it!”

  Indecision. It was there for a split second in Troy’s face, then buried in a slide of anger.

  No, not anger, strictly, Rhys realized—there was an unhealthy amount of fear.

  “There’s no guarantee you’ll have to leave Velvet,” he said quickly. “The negotiations aren’t finished yet. Not by a long shot. But if we earn their distrust, it will all be over.”

  “It’s all over, anyway, if we negotiate. We could end up a slave race, our businesses, our lives owned by the Orcas.”

  Orcas? A frisson of recognition scurried up Rhys’s back.

  “Is that what Beneton told you, Troy? That the Tsong Zee meant to enslave us? Are you doing this as a favor to him, or did he pay you something as well?”

  The digger’s face blanched, sweating like the pale stone walls. “How did you —? It’s not the money. I’m just protecting what’s mine. What’s ours.” He jerked his head at his companions.

  “But there is money, isn’t there, Troy? Destroy the Tsong Zee’s chance of ever proving they lived on Velvet and what? What did Beneton’s people offer you?”

  Troy would have had to have been senseless not to feel the eyes of his cohorts burring into his skin.

  “Yeah,” murmured Quozel. “Yeah, Troy, what are you going to get out of this?”

  Troy’s eyes flicked to Quozel’s face, then back to Rhys. “A life, that’s what they offered me. A life. Which is more than I’d have if we let them lord it over us. I don’t want to leave here and I don’t want to live like a serf or a sharecropper. This is the only way out.” He pointed at Quozel’s little bomb.

  Rhys unclenched his jaw. “So you’re willing to start a war? What kind of a life are you going to have in the middle of a war, Troy?”

  The digger blinked.

  “Ah! Hadn’t thought of that, had you? What did Beneton tell you—that the nasty aliens would just slink off without a fight? Tell me, Troy, have you ever been in a war?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “It’s not pleasant. People die. Lots of people. People you know. People you love. You know what this planet was like after what they did to it. It was virtually dead.”

  Troy snorted. “One more reason not to hand it back to them.”

  “They’re a different people now. They’ve learned their lesson about war. What have we learned?” He felt his temper fraying. “Come on, man! Didn’t you learn anything from their example? Didn’t you shake your head over what they’d done to this world?”

  The digger stepped toward him, meeting him nose to nose. “I have lived here since I was five years old. I fell in love with this place the moment I floated down the chute and set my feet on that black soil. My wife was born here—one of the first. This place has been my career, my life. All my memories are here. All her memories. We can’t throw that on a ship and transport it to another world. Can you understand that, Dr. Llewellyn?”

  Rhys felt a wave of empathy engulf him. Pa-Loana had been the closest thing to a homeworld he had known since he’d left his academic post on Newscot to work for Tanaka Corp. The Pa-Kai had become his kinfolk, the anchor to his wanderings. He hadn’t lived somewhere since he was five years old, but he knew the feeling.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can understand.”

  “The way I see it,” said Troy, “there are a handful of choices. Either the Tsong Zee go and we stay, the Tsong Zee stay and we go, or we share the land. Do you think the Tsong Zee will go?”

  “Not if they can help it.”

  “Can you guarantee they’ll let us stay here with them—free, independent? Can you guarantee this won’t erupt into a war if we refuse to leave?”

  “I can’t guarant
ee they’ll let us stay. But I can guarantee that if we do stay, we’ll be free. They’re not in the business of over-lordship. As to war, well, that seems to be in your hands, at the moment.”

  “No guarantees—no discussion. We have nothing to talk about, Doctor.” Troy turned back to his group of co-conspirators and plucked the explosive from Quozel’s hands. “Is this ready?”

  “It—it doesn’t have a timed detonator. Look, Troy, this is —”

  “What does it have? Will it explode on impact?”

  The tech’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “Uh, yeah, but —”

  Troy moved with amazing speed, considering the tight quarters they hunkered in. He lunged at Rhys, nearly throwing him off balance and scaring a dainty shriek out of Yoshi.

  Rhys, never one for physical skirmishes, desperately tried to block his path, throwing a counter-lunge into his rib cage and praying he wouldn’t drop the explosive. It was a small thing—just a little ball of innocent-looking metal and plastic—but Rhys had no doubt whatever that it could bring the cavern roof down or, barring that, blow the group in the tunnel to kingdom come.

  His shoulder pressed into the digger’s gut, he begged superior traction from his brogues. “Don’t make yourself a hired assassin!” he grunted, digging in. “Talk to the Tsong Zee! Know them!”

  “Get-out-of-my-way! I have to do this. I have to! I won’t leave, dammit! I won’t leave! I’ll get that Shrine if I have to go up with it!”

  Rhys flailed with his left arm, his questing hand at last laying hold of Troy’s wrist. He gripped tightly—but not enough, he hoped, to make the hand drop its lethal burden. He heard the group behind Troy gasp. Someone scurried away down the corridor toward the cave entrance.

  “Will you die, then?” Rhys asked, his voice muffled, strained. “Is Beneton worth dying for? I notice he’s not here. He’s not prepared to die. Why should you die for him?”

  “Not Beneton—Velvet! Velvet’s worth dying for!”

  Rhys twisted his upper torso, raising his head. He could just look Troy in the eye. “Will your wife think so, Troy? Will she? Which would she rather have—exile with you or a home without you?”